#Chapter 7 - Ethics

Dec 7, 2018
13 min read

How to create personalised content in an ethical way?

#OBA, #ethics, #privacy, #BigData, #FastData

In the previous chapters, you learned how and why to monitor and track consumers’ online behaviour data. We were talking to you about the art of listening and about monitoring. But in this last chapter, we wanted to explain to you how you can use the collected data from your listening and monitoring to personalize advertisements. We will get deeper into how much data are collecting so we will explain to you a lot about the Big Data. Of course, we will touch hot topics concerning the privacy of people. Therefore, the aim of this chapter would be to make you know how to create personalised content in an ethical way.

"I think that you get we are about to finish this ebook. The team YouPro made its job as they explained to you a lot as to make you create a successful startup. However, this last chapter is necessary: you know now how and why to collect data through listening and monitoring your network, but you still really don’t know how to use this collected data. You might have already guessed, but I think that the team YouPro has still some insights and interesting things to explain to you. Let’s read this last chapter then!"

How to personalise content thanks to the data collected?

What is Online Behavioural Advertising (OBA)?

As a startup, it is important to reach the right audience. We think you get that now. Your marketing budget might not be that much important so it is of extreme importance to reach the right people. This is why OBA becomes so important. OBA means the collection of data from computers and devices over time and the use of this data to predict web user preferences or interests (Alliance; 2016). This gathering of information has been extremely useful for marketers and companies. The usage and gathering of data have also sparked a huge debate about the privacy of consumers. In this part, we are going to discuss how you can use OBA.

“Online Behavioural Advertising means the collection of data from a particular computer or device regarding web viewing behaviours or mobile app use over time and across multiple web domains and/or mobile apps not under common control for the purpose of using such data to predict web user preferences or interests to deliver online advertising to that particular computer, mobile app or device based on the preferences or interests inferred from such web viewing or mobile app use behaviours.” (Alliance, 2016)

During the day people use a lot of applications and media. Thanks to their mobile phones and devices they are always connected to the internet. By doing so they leave a digital footprint. Thanks to the chapter about monitoring (chapter 5), you are aware of the tools you can use to analyse the data but you don’t know anything yet about the tracking tools. For instance, a cookie is a small file or part of a file stored on a World Wide Web user's computer, created and subsequently read by a website server, and containing personal information (such as a user identification code, customized preferences or a record of pages visited) (Merriam-Webmaster dictionary, unknown). A web beacon or web bug is one of the various techniques used on web pages or email, to unobtrusively (usually invisibly) allow checking that a user has accessed some content. (Wikipedia, unknown). Pixel-based tracking is the process of using a 1x1 pixel transparent gif to track a visit or event on a webpage, to track ad impressions or to track opening for an email. (digitalmarketing-glossary, unknown). Thanks to those tracking tools, you can use the gathered online data to determine people’s interests. But what kind of information does OBA gather? How much of this data is collected?

Luckily organisations are not allowed to gather personal detail such as names and addresses thanks to privacy laws that are already in place. So to gather their data and keep some personal data safe, everyone is given an online ID number. Some examples of data that is linked to this number are the age or gender. However, as people are always connected, everywhere and at any time, they are sharing a lot more information which can be collected. It can be from pages you visit, to post your comment or even when you were born. Because even if you've got an ID number, it is still possible to collect a lot of data about your online behaviour and, therefore, to really know you.

In 2016 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to explain how Facebook gathered their information and who it shared this information with. Facebook is a free-to-use application, but it still makes over 80 billion dollars a year (Wagner 2018). Facebook is an interesting example of how advertisers gather your information. During the trial, Zuckerberg explained that outside businesses can only share your information with third-party apps if you grant them permission. Apps like Uber and Spotify require you to use your Facebook account. What you can understand about it is that you need to be aware of what can be collected from you and you don't have to give too much data if you don't want businesses to know everything about you.

What do people think about OBA?

People lack knowledge about what OBA is but start to know that some of their data are collected to personalise ads. But as they are not really aware of what can be collected and how the data collected can be used afterwards, they are becoming afraid. We now talk about the "allergic consumer" who is trying to prevent himself from having is private data collected online. Therefore, people are calling for transparency about the collect, the use and the sharing of these data. That is why nowadays, new laws had been created. For instance, cookies have to be accepted by users. He can manage his cookies preference on each website: he can decide to accept certain types of cookies like the necessary one but not accept the marketing cookies for instance.

However, there is a big paradox because people call for transparency and respect for private life but accept all the cookies without reading what data is collecting from them. As an example: have you already seen a window like it pop up from a website? Because we often did

But did you read it carefully? Did you click on Privacy Policy or User Agreement for details? We think this answer would be in most of the cases “no”.

“It would take a person approximately 201 hours per year to read all the privacy statements for the websites he or she visits” (McDonald and Cranor, 2008).

As a matter of fact, it is a scary thought that we share all this information and we don’t know what it will be used for. There is a growing call for privacy from the consumers. And as a startup, you cannot ignore this call. OBA is completely legal. It is however not 100% ethical. The European association for online advertising has set some guidelines that can be used when using OBA. So if you are considering using OBA make sure to take into account the following:

- Make sure you have a clear agreement with the advertising organisations about any handling of complaints and questions consumers might have.

- Make sure your consumers know that you have used their data and you might sell it through a third party. Transparency is more important than ever.

- Keep measuring the results of your online campaigns. Are you getting the users you wanted? Are they indeed purchasing and using your products and services?

OBA: the future of advertising?

Through OBA, a level of personalization is determined. This level is based on (a) the types of personal data that are used to target the ad (e.g., browsing data or search history) and (b) the amount of information that are used (e.g., just one search term or a combination of browsing data and search history (Boerman, Kruikemeier, Zuiderveen Borgesius; 2017). The following scheme shows the interactions between the advertiser-controlled factors, the consumer-controlled factors and the outcomes.

(Boerman, Kruikemeier, Zuiderveen Borgesius; 2017)

- The advertiser-controlled factors which include (a) the ad characteristics, or the factors which are part of the ad itself and which can differ among different online behavioural ads, and (b) the forms of transparency which advertisers use to communicate that an ad is a base on online behaviour.

- The consumer-controlled factors which include (a) a cognitive aspect, including people's knowledge and abilities with respect to OBA; (b) an affective aspect, including people's perceptions of OBA in general or of a specific ad; and (c) personal characteristics, such as a person's age or desire for privacy.

- The outcomes which include consumers’ responses to OBA with respect to (a) the actual advertising effects, such as purchases and click-through rates, and (b) the degree of which people accept or avoid OBA.

"Several studies demonstrated that the level of personalization in OBA influences click-through intentions and clickthrough rates. Tucker (2014) found that Facebook ads targeting a person’s interests (e.g., a celebrity of whom a person is a fan) led to higher click-through rates than ads targeting background characteristics (i.e., the college a person is attending)” (Boerman, Kruikemeier, Zuiderveen Borgesius; 2017).

To conclude about OBA, we just wanted to compare it to classical advertising to get the benefit you can get from OBA. In 2009 EASA conducted a research into the effects of OBA in comparison to the classical network-run advertising. This research found three key results:

1. Advertising rates are significantly higher for OBA-targeted ads. In 2009 an OBA campaign was about 2.7 times more expensive than classical network advertising.

2. OBA has proven to have a much higher conversion rate.

3. This gathering of information has another benefit. As discussed, the cost of using OBA is higher than the classical networking advertising. A lot of companies, however, decide to sell this data to third-party networks, creating an additional revenue stream. But what about ethics?

OBA is, therefore, a very useful advertisement solution for you as an upcoming startup if you opt for a moderate level of personalization as it is the most successful level. (Boerman, Kruikemeier, Zuiderveen Borgesius; 2017). However, you really need to respect the privacy of people and it is not something really easy. As to have a better grasp of the ethical and privacy outcomes listening, monitoring and OBA can create, we prepared for you a last best practice.

Best practice

Ethic

This last best practice will be completely different from the others in the ebook but it will really be useful for you: you will get some useful insights and tips about the Big Data, privacy and ethics.

”Everyone wants to go, to make the Big Data a success but don't go because they are afraid" (Desbordes, 2018). This shows there is a real question, debate, around Ethic and Big Data. In today's world, big data is the new oil. Every company gather every single data from their user, ultimately to serve it for formulating strategies and also to understand their customer better. As technology grows exponentially, so does the use of big data and hyper-personalization. However, there are still many discussions going on about the ethical considerations in using it, due to the fact that technology has developed faster than the support around it. How can we, as practitioners, deal with the Big Data without intruding people's life, regarding ethics? To answer this question, we interviewed various persons, we collected insights and we made a video. But before watching the video, we prefer you to read what is following as to understand the main terms and issues discussed in the video.

Big Data, Fast Data, Thick Data: what is the difference?

In the video you will see, you will find some important terms you need to understand. That is why we decided to explain to you a little about Big Data, Fast Data and Thick Data.

Thanks to Big Data, we can now do things we couldn’t before. Big data are actually only large amounts of data. A large amount of data is referred to as big data if it is too large or too complex to be processed manually. This is especially true for data that is constantly changing. Big data, that could be harmless data from climate research. But data about people is also collected: Communication behaviour, consumer behaviour or surfing behaviour of Internet users. You can see the effects of big data analysis every day on the Internet. A typical example is personalized advertising.

Fast Data is the application of Big Data Analytics to smaller amounts of data to solve a problem in real time or near real time or to create business value. The goal of Fast Data is to capture and analyse structured and unstructured data as quickly as possible so that appropriate measures can be taken.

While Big Data collects a large amount of a certain type of information on a certain topic, Thick Data describes the ideas, needs and habits of a few people around that topic. Thick Data is generated from human experience, whereas Big Data relies on machine learning and statistical methods. Thick Data shows the social context between the connections of data points, often creating surprising insights, exciting causalities and new connections. (Wang, 2017)

How should be data to be relevant?

Data are merely facts, figures or statistics that are collected. These collected data is stored and it doesn't mean anything without any further interpretation or analysis. So, in order to get data that is relevant, you need to take time to analyse, to confront, to contrast and so on. It is not about speed, but to take time to look after and have the right filters for what you need.

The most important aspect in the component of data quality is data-accuracy, which means data needs to be accurate to enable a good analysis. Next, to that, it is crucial to have a good interpretation skill after you gathered the right data. People need to be able to process the context of data because data will be useless if you misinterpret it, or even worst, it might lead to a bad decision. (Desbordes, 2018) So definitely, data need to be well analysed in order to be productive. Data analysis is considerably more challenging than simply locating, identifying, understanding, and citing data. There is a multiple-step pipeline required to extract value from data. (Labrinidis, Jagadish, 2008)

Therefore, critical thinking is important in analysing your data. It is essential to develop those critical thinking skills first, before starting to do any analysis of big data. Facts need to be analyzed carefully and from different perspectives, because cause-effect is not the only way to reach conclusions, correlations are not so simple to understand. (Etlinger, 2014)

In essence, interpretation is the key because data can mean anything, so educate yourself around big data first before you can use it (Etlinger, 2014). By doing so, you will be able to produce relevant information out of the data that you have gathered.

What is the problem of the Big Data?

We can say that the main problem of the Big Data is that people wanted to go too fast, as always. And nowadays, people are afraid about it: what about privacy? How far we will go? Furthermore, investing in Big Data is easy but using it is hard: over 73% of Big Data projects aren't even profitable (Wang, 2017). There is a real paradox which is: I really want to use the wealth of the Big Data but I'm too afraid. For instance, this paradox is omnipresent in France and it is more and more real. There was a catalyst in the press a year ago which started to create the fear in people's mind: when two artificial bits of intelligence succeeded for the first time to communicate in their own language (thanks to collecting and combining a lot of data), a language their developer could not understand. Important French politicians are even refusing the Big Data and try to make people sign an ethical chart saying: "Be careful. We are going too far, we will lose control" (Desbordes, 2018). We can even observe this in Europe with the GDPR which is the new European reference text concerning the protection of personal data. Its principal goals are to grow the protection of the personal data and to empower the actors which process this data. As practitioners, we need to respect it and to be transparent with our customers, if we want to process data in an ethical way.

However, people have also the right to decide what they want to share or not; people are 24/7 online. They just need to be aware of what personal data can be used from them and that all the steps they are following on the web are monitored. And actually, Big Data raises a lot of suspicions because people are getting more aware of the fact people are using their data. People are also becoming more aware of how much data is being gathered. Our smartphone even records our heartbeat! It is starting to look a lot like an intrusion. But it is also a matter of whether you have given permission to an application to share your information. (Harbers, 2018).

This points out the other problem of the Big Data: the lack of skills around it. We are just at the beginning of the Big Data era and honestly, we are not very good at handling all the data that we can now collect. (Cukier, 2014) It's like the challenge that was faced by primitive men and the fire: this is a tool that unless we are careful, we will burn ourselves (Cukier, 2014). It is essential to develop critical thinking skills first, before attempting to do any analysis of big data. Moreover, we see that a good understanding of data skills is crucial for a well-formed marketing plan. Knowing the data of your users means you can fine tune how you use your tools. Finally, we need to start learning more about the consequences of the usage of Big Data (Harbers, 2018) (Debordes, 2018).

Big data is going to transform how we live, how we work and how we think. It has already started to do so. We need, as practitioners, to have a good grasp of what it is and to know how to use it well before really using it. We hope you now have some keys to better understand the Big Data and what it implies. We let you watch the video we made for you as a complementary part of this chapter. This video contains insights from 3 different persons, from different countries: Nicolas Desbordes, consultant in the French startup Klaxoon; Tricia Wang, a Chinese technology ethnographer and sociologist of data who helps corporations grow by discovering the unknown about their customers; and Susan Etlinger, an American industry analyst and expert in digital strategy who makes independent research on data, ethics and AI. Those 3 personalities are embodied by members of the team as it was not possible for us to film them. That is why Bas and Chandra both embody Nicolas Desbordes, Michelle embodies Tricia Wang and Morgane embodies Susan Etlinger.

→ VIDEO ETHICS - “YouPro Fast & Curious: the Big Data”.

As a conclusion, the insights are really similar. We are not really surprised about that as we already realised that Startups are more a global spirit, a general state of mind, than something which can really change between the countries. However, we are pretty sure that those insights will really help you. If you want to read the entire interviews we have made, you can click here.

Last but not least, we hoped this chapter helped you to understand how to use the data collected regarding ethics and people's privacy. We know that it is not something easy and as you might have seen in the previous part, the solutions are not all found. What you have to do, as a startuper, is to really focus on the data skills of your team: from the listening and monitoring to the use of the data. It is really something you should do. We also hoped you liked this all ebook. Don’t hesitate to give us feedbacks in contacting us on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter or our website. It would be a pleasure for us to have comments from you and to continue to get in touch with our community. Have a good continuation and we wish you all the best.

Team YouPro

#Chapter 6 - Art of listening

Dec 7, 2018
10 min read

How to listen to your target audience

as to make it more engaged?

#listening, #empathy, #cocreation, #UG

In the previous chapters, you learned why to analyse your network as to enhance your social media strategy. You also learned how important your stakeholders are in your community and how relevant it is to get in touch with people. But, to get in touch with people, you need to start a good conversation which is a constant change of listening and telling. And that’s all this chapter will be about: the art of listening.

" To deal with that topic, we will focus on empathy and how you can prove to your audience that you are a good listener. So what does empathy exactly mean? How to increase empathy? And how do you can show your audience that you are listening to them as to make them more engaged with you? Thanks to the team YouPro, you will find answers to this questions in this chapter."

Why is listening so important?

Since the 20th century, there has been a permanent acceleration of communicative processes. Today, thanks to the Social Web, no moment passes in which communication does not take place. Even spatially distant events influence us (like elections in another country), our society and are passed on online in real time. This poses a great challenge for all of us. The pressure to constantly absorb information, to react to it and to put information into the world ourselves is enormous. But still, the role of the listener is constantly being underestimated. Active listening is more important than ever today as we already discussed in the previous chapter, when talking about monitoring. It is the key to successful communication, no matter in which context. Listening is completely linked to empathy. Indeed, you need to show empathy to listen carefully to your target audience and then to show you listened. So first of all, let’s introduce this term.

Why and how to be empathetic?

“Empathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another and feeling with the heart of another” – Alfred Adler (2016)

The term empathy was initially adapted from a German word Einfühlung over a century ago, which originally refers to the tendency of observers to project themselves "into" what they observe, typically some physical object of beauty (Davis, 2018). In today's world, empathy is widely described as understanding another's "state of mind". Empathy enables people to put oneself into another's shoes. Basically, empathy is when you feel what someone else feels or you are aware of other people’s emotion (Ioannidou & Konstantikaki, 2008). It is important for everyone to understand other people emotions, whether he or she is in pain, sad, happy or confused. By doing so you can create a good relationship with others. Moreover, empathy contributes to your well-being, cognitive abilities and social success (Friesem, 2016). In order to be empathetic, you need to think beyond yourself and your own concerns.

Do you have enough empathy?

TEST YOUR EMPATHY SCORE HERE

We strongly believe that showing empathy will lead you, as a young startuper, to create a good relationship with your community. That will helps you to engage better with them. And even more, that will help you to make them engaged with you. Especially in business life, it is really important to understand what your stakeholders want and to make them feel comfortable with you. This will lead to trust and will convince them that you can be reliable. By doing so, you will ultimately create a healthy community.

Now, we think you might want to know how you can make use of empathy with your community. That is what we want to explore with you in the following parts. But first, let's understand what empathy is in the era of the Internet?

Empathy in an online network

You may be wondering “how is empathy working on the internet?” and that is a good question. Empathy can exist through computer-mediated-communication, where people could give emotional support online. This concept is called “virtual empathy”, which refers to the relationship between online communication and the expression of emotions and emotional support (Rosen, 2012). What is really interesting for you to know is that “some research lends support to the hypothesis that people may have an easier time feeling comfortable and less self-conscious about disclosing personal feelings online than via face-to-face communication” (Caplan & Turner; 2007). So, you can be empathetic on the internet and we encourage you to express support and care to your online community, no matter what it is about, as this will improve the relationship with your network.

The effect of social media on empathy

As we are living in an age where almost the entire generation uses social media, there are several studies that examined the effect on the empathy of using social media. One of the studies found that chatting online leads to a better expression of empathy (Rosen, 2012). However, many also report that social media have negative consequences such as deterioration on real-world empathy or loss of self-esteem of the users, due to the fact that technology-based communication has become prevalent. Next to that, displacement of real-world communication by online activities would be expected to negatively impact empathic skills (Small & Vorgan, 2008). On the other hand, Rosen (2012) also found that people who spend more time on social networks and use instant messaging were better at showing what he called virtual empathy.

All of these negative claims were primarily based on the assumption that going online reduces the amount of time spent on real-world communication, hence, reduce the individual’s capacity on empathy. In contrary, the usage of social media could also benefit the users, if being used to foster relationship, which increases the level of empathy. In the latest study of impacts, it is shown that just being online does not reduce empathy among the users (Carrier, Spradlin, Bunce, & Rosen, 2015). And this is quite a good new.

Basically, it is based on your motivations in using social media itself. If your purpose on social media is to share information, listen to other people or to initiate communication with other people, then you are already on the right track. We believe that balance is the key. You should spend time on social media and on real-world communication proportionally as to create a good relationship with your target audience.

How to bring more empathy

Empathy is a skill that you can (and should) learn through practice. The key elements to having more empathy are listening to what other people are saying and acknowledge what has been said, by stating your understanding of what was said and also the feelings that associated with it (Bookbinder). You can practice empathy for your target audience through the following points:

- Actively involved in the community by asking the people some questions, by answering to the comments and so on.

- Showing a positive relationship on social media towards your target audience. We will discuss more of it in the last part of the chapter.

- Engage with your target audience: we will also discuss this in the last part of the chapter.

- Listen deeply to your audience and acknowledge what you understood. You will discover how in the last part of the chapter.

- Keep your opinions to yourself

- Try to feel what is it like from their side

Empathy and affective sharing

Now we can get a little deeper in how empathy is useful for you to connect to your community. There is a correlation with this term and affective sharing. Empathy is about stepping into someone’s shoes, whereas affective sharing is when you experience something that affects you emotionally (Zahavi & Rochat, 2015). Have you ever felt yourself smiling after seeing your friends laughing, or feeling sad after hearing that someone else cries? This emotional “mirroring” phenomenon is called affective sharing (Nicodemo, 2012). In other words, if you listen well to your audience to learn what makes them react, you can easily create affective sharing from your community.

How to show you listened to your audience?

In this chapter and in the previous one you learned how and why to listen to your audience and why showing empathy can be useful for you. Right, it is the first step. Now, you have to understand how you can show your audience that you listened to them. You need to make them contribute, to give them the impression their point of view count. In other words, make them feel they've got a power so they can trust you. But you might want to go do deeper and we totally understand that. That would be the purpose of this part.

Customers & startups: how to make it a “love story”

As an early-stage startup, you really have to keep in mind that your customer is your key to growth. We are even talking about Customer Success (Murphy, 2018) which is the function at a company responsible for managing the relationship between a business and its customer. His goal is to make the customer as successful as possible, which in turn, improve customer lifetime value (CLTV) for the company. So clearly, if you want your startup to be a success, you need to get customer success skills.

To do so, you really need to listen to your target audience to be as specific as possible when publishing content and to be useful for them. You also need to always be asking them questions as to make them engage with you: the more they feel questioned the more they will want to collaborate with you and give you feedbacks (Pienaar, 2017). Those feedbacks are just gold for you because it is from their experience that you can enhance your startup. Furthermore, it permits you to have a closer connection with them.

“70% of companies that deliver outstanding customer experience rely on customer feedback” (Huffington Post, 2016)

So how do you get feedback and how to make them engage with you?

How to show your community’s ideas are valuable?

Co-creation is an intimate form of cooperation with customers (Mulder, 2017) and co-creation is one of the keys. This concept was created and developed by C.K. Prahalad and V. Ramaswamy in 2004. Through co-creation, you give your stakeholders the opportunity to influence part of the production process and involve them by listening to their ideas. Actually, you are working together to produce better ideas, to create value. Also, you can get a better understanding of the wishes and needs of your audience. You create a real dialogue with your audience and that permits you, generally, to create a long-term collaboration or at least relation. However, in order to be fruitful, there must be equivalence, reciprocity, openness and trust (Prahalad, Ramaswamy, 2004). Then, your stakeholders can share their positive experiences with others. Therefore, co-creation is clearly a win-win situation for both parties.

Today’s generation wants to be involved in something bigger than themselves. They seek active participation and want to be heard in a collaborative and interactive space. Co-creation is a real tool to engage your audience, create a personalized and unique experience to drive loyalty, stronger relationships, and even generate word of mouth (see chapter 4).

“Companies spent the 20th-century managing efficiencies. They must spend the 21st-century managing experiences”. (Prahalad, Ramaswamy; 2002)

Co-creation can be very effective for you as a young professional. When you work together with other professionals that have a bigger network, you can see that your network starts rising because you get more people known. It’s a great way for people to get more recognition. But you can also benefit from every people in your network. As to make it easier to understand, we have chosen to give you some good examples of co-creation. It is not an example from startups but you can still be inspired by it:

Customisation or tailoring: you offer a standard product and the consumer is able to customise certain components. Example: During the NIKEiD campaign, Nike started allowing colour and design customisations.

Co-innovation: you ask people to send their ideas or even designs (through a contest for instance). Example: LEGO Ideas is an online community when members can discover cool creations by other fans and submit their own designs for new sets. Fans can vote and if a project gets 100 000 votes, Lego offers to create the idea and sell it worldwide.

With co-creation, we talked a lot about collaboration. Let's see another way to make your audience engaged in a real collaboration and, therefore, show them you listen to them and care for them.

How to show your community its own content is relevant to you?

User Generated Content (UGC) is literally content published by your customers on the social networks about you. It can be different types and formats of posts like videos, blogs, discussion forum posts, digital image, audio files and so on. As a startup, UGC strategy can be really useful as you need less budget and you can get to be known easier. Actually, UGC can nourish your website and your social networks in an original way, with fresh and authentic content. Above all, it permits you to know your stakeholders better as they deliver keys to understanding their behaviour on the internet. It also enables you, of course, to show them how valuable they are for you: they will obviously have the impression to be listened.

“50 per cent of millennials say that peer-created content is more memorable”

(Amerman, 2016)

Of course, the type of UGC content you can use depends on what network you want to post. Let’s see some characteristics, but keep in mind that you always have to think about content that needs to be easily shared (as we already talked about in chapter 4). The content you will take from your users has to create interactions.

Best practice from

the startup Rover

As in the previous chapter, we will not give you best tips from a startup or someone we met but a good example of a startup you can use and learn from Rover.

We want to introduce you to Rover as a best case from a startup which use relevant UGC. This company pairs people in need of pet sitting and in-home kennel services with local sitters. They know, for sure, that their customers love dogs and cats. Their strategy focuses on content producing from individuals who have a connection to the brand.

Instead of asking influencers or ambassadors, they share dogs features photos of the four-legged clients snapped by their sitters. The sitters use the hashtag #roversitterpic as to get referenced and to have a chance to see their pictures on the Rover’s Instagram account. For travelling dog owners who may be worried about leaving their precious pets at home, Rover’s Instagram shows nothing but happy, healthy dogs enjoying their staycation. Not only does Rover give followers what they want—cute photos of dogs—it also encourages potential clients to sign up for the service with the hope that their favourite canine will be featured online.

When you adopt a UGC strategy, you focus on building a sense of community: it brings you the chance to connect with people, to really converse with them. You are actually building credibility and establishing yourself as not just a brand, but also as an authentic place for people with similar interests to connect. But be careful: never take content without asking! As you may have noticed, Rover tagged the persons who took each picture.

The most relevant thing is to always listen to your audience and understand them. Through this chapter, the goal was to make you understand why you can do this and how you can show your community you listened to them. You need to use these new pieces of knowledge to find out what the people in your network feel and make sure you give them what they want and seek. But as we already pointed out in the previous chapter, analysing and listening very carefully to your network can create ethical issues. We will talk about ethics and privacy in the last chapter of our ebook. Let’s read it.

Team YouPro

#Chapter 5 - Network Analysis

Dec 7, 2018
13 min read

How to analyse your network

to enhance your social media strategy?

#algorithm, #visibility, #monitoring, #disseminationofinformation, #listeningplatform

The idea of this chapter is to understand your network and the online environment to enhance your social media strategy. You’ve got a network and that’s good. But you need to know how to make your community grow. To do so, you need to learn how and why to monitor your community in an effective way. It’s not as complicated as it sounds. You will see. We already discussed what are social media but we will get deeper into how it works for you to untangle the functioning and dissemination of information in online social networks.

" On average Facebook censors one out of thirteen stories for their users (Sunstein, 2018). Well, not Facebook, but its algorithm. It determines what will pop up in your news feed. But how does this work? And how can you, as a startup, take advantage of this? That is one of the things the team YouPro will introduce and explain to you in this chapter."

What is the process of social media?

What is an algorithm on social networks?

A social network algorithm enables to optimise the content display on user newsfeeds regarding the presupposed interest this user can have toward this content and also regarding the relational proximity this user has with the issuer of the content. (Définitions Marketing, 2016)

As an upcoming startup, we advise you to be at least on Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook which are for us the most relevant professional networks. We also advise you to have a website, of course. This means that you will have to be ranked on the Google algorithm which gives you a score. This score determines your position in the Google researches. But we will talk about it just later on. Therefore, just read this part to understand how the algorithms work on those various networks.

How does EdgeRank, Facebook's algorithm, work?

EdgeRank is based on the past interactions of the users. It categorizes all posts and adds labels to them (Wiltshire, 2018). Based on your interactions with comparable posts it suggests you content. This is why during the elections of 2016 a lot of people got to see content from just one presidential candidate since they reacted negatively towards the other. This allows social networks to place people in bubbles and target their messages more. This is beneficial for Facebook, also for you even if it is kind of tricky. Because if you want to appeal to as many people as possible, you need to show up in all their feeds. The image shows how your feed is influenced by your previous interactions, on Facebook. (Buffer Blog)

However, you have to be careful and to be aware of all the changes. Indeed, EdgeRank is always evolving and still kind of mysterious for users: Facebook does not communicate about how to get a good EdgeRank. However, we know that it is based on 3 principles (Rousse-Marquet; 2017):

- Affinity enables to know the connexion degree you have with the user who posted the Edge (which is every activity on Facebook which can create a notification on the newsfeed: likes, tags, comments, answers to the event and so on). The more 2 users are connected, the more important would be the infinity.

- Weight take into account two factors:

➔ the publication type: it is still difficult to know what type of publications weight most but usually, rich content like photos or videos as a better score than simple link or text.

➔ the interactions (actions on publication: likes, comments, shares and so on): shares and comments are more important than simple likes (John, Emrich, Gupta, Norton; 2017).

- Decay: the more recent is a publication, the more valuable it is. Generally, according to SocialBakers, a post receives more interactions just some minutes after being published.

How does Twitter’s algorithm, work?

We know less about the Twitter algorithm as it is more recent. What has always been a particularity is that the posts are less related to the decay than on the other social networks. But as on Facebook, it is always changing. With that algorithm, Twitter is not considered as a real social network but more as a timeline of personalised information (Ropars, 2017). When you open Twitter, it collects all the tweets from the people you follow and it gives a level of importance to each. The ranking of the Timeline follows those criteria:

- The engagement of the tweet: retweets, clicks, likes and time spent when reading

- The engagement of the tweet regarding of the engagement on the other tweets of the author

- The age of the tweet: a more recent tweet is better ranked

- The frequency of engagement you have with the author of the tweet

- The time you already spent reading his author tweets, even without ever engaging with them

- The media use in the tweet: images, videos, links

As a matter of fact, Twitter is not neutral anymore but works as a filter bubble: it creates a space of content with content which looks like you. Then, you don’t confront opinions but you have more confidence for them.

How do Linkedin’s algorithms work?

On Linkedin, it is not as developed as on Facebook or Twitter. It uses various algorithms to classify and order the results you obtain when you are looking for people. Therefore, the way your profile appears depends on the research someone has done. Each member has a rank of relevance and it is based on diverse factors. Linkedin advises to add relevant keywords to your profile for instance.

How do Google’s algorithms work?

Google is relying on a lot of various algorithms. We just want you to understand how it works without going too much in details. Google is like an entire library and when you ask it a question, with a keyword, let's say "Startup’, it will look at all its files to know what we are talking about. In the image, you can see that a lot of pages had been found. And Google ranks all of those pages.

To be well ranked on Google's researches, you really need to focus on the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or the art to position your website, webpage or application in the first natural (not paid) results of the research engine (here on Google). More than a hundred criteria are taking into account in Google's algorithm and their nature varied in time regarding the evolutions of the algorithm and the filters of Google.

Visibility and invisibility: how can you subvert the algorithm?

As we saw in the previous part, you should really focus on your SEO: this form of organic growth is the cheapest and most relevant way of advertising. But you might want now to get some tips to be more visible on the social networks (and follow the logic of algorithm):

- Post content promoted by the algorithm and target your post

- Use new images

- Look at your page statistics and use them to know which type of publication receives more engagement and when to post.

- Post regularly

- Post rich content which obtains better visibility in the newsfeeds

- Advice your followers to subscribe to the notifications of your page

Moreover, making contact is also a goal of social networking, make sure you only lay contact with people you have actually met. If you start sending personal messages to everyone on Facebook (via Messenger) there will be a big chance that your account will be flagged as spam. Spam accounts will not show up in the feeds of others.

Also, avoid the so-called “Engagement bait” (Coëffé, 2017) which is when you ask directly the users to engage. Since 2017, Facebook penalised the pages which are doing it for instance. It can be share baiting like “share with your friends to participate” or tag baiting like “tag a friend whose names start with a B” as examples. Therefore, make sure the content you post is the cause for engagement. Although it is tempting to try and make people engage with your posts this way so it is also a cause to marked as spam! If you don’t want to be invisible, just don’t do that.

Why should you analyse your Networks?

A good network will help your business and even your life; however, it will not bring you anywhere if you just sit down and do nothing about it. In essence, we would like to provide you with information on this matter, in order to be on top of the game in using your network. Before the internet emerged, networking took time and effort, even to analyse it, which was complicated. In today’s digital age, you could check your network activity through social media within your laptop or smartphone.

From a theoretical point of view, here is the key point for you to get started and refresh your mind: Social Network Analysis is the act of seeing relationship consists of nodes and ties, to see the links between both factor. The field of Social Network Analysis is the dynamic and highly adaptable group of techniques that let us quantify and understand the complex structures and flows of relationships, thoughts, and things between people around the world. (Mod.U, 2015).

*Nodes: individual actors within your networks *Ties: the relationship between the actors (Politaktiv, 2011).

Analysing network will give you a deeper understanding of attitudes, communication and information flows of your network. Once network implemented, you can evaluate and build your existing network to develop it further. Basically, it enables you to understand how social networks work so you can act accordingly.

The Main Idea of Network Analysis

Before we continue to explain more, it is paramount to understand the logic behind network analysis. Social networks are formed between people or organizations, where both represent communication, attitudes and information flow. Therefore, to analyse it means to examine the relationship between those things, in order to see the patterns that emerged out of the interaction (Poutas,2011).

By understanding your network, you can also decide what to share to your network. For example, you know that most of the people within your network are currently discussing networking events, you could share or give some information about it. In brief, after you analyse your network, you know what to share with whom. It makes your interaction more effective and improves your engagement with your network. Within the business context, analysing your network could be your best strategy to understand the market, consumer preference or your connection. It is actually handy for a startuper to get insights from their network because you could get information that you are interested in. As we mentioned in the first chapter that 'network is your net-worth', it is also crucial to make the best use out of it.

In brief, analysing your network or ‘network analysis' will help you to know your network better and also find out the current trends and topic being discussed within your network. The following points are the benefits that you can get from it (Alienor, 2017):

• Getting to know the 'hot topic' and insights, so you didn't miss a thing.

• Understanding ‘who are the most active entities in your networks’ and ‘who are they following’.

• Information is being shared regularly, day in and day out, which means you get tons of information within your network.

• You can use it to understand your target audience or network better.

• Know your network’s needs and desires.

• Maximise the opportunity to develop better interaction with your network.

How can you analyse your Networks?

What is social media monitoring?

As a young professional who wants to create a startup, social media analytics will help you to understand the environment of your early adopters, but also of your competitors and the overall business trends. So what is very important, now, is to know how to monitor your social media network as to analyse it and have a clear picture of it. Through social media monitoring, you can track, gather and mine the information and data of your target audience as to assess your reputation and discern how you are perceived online. You have first, to define an objective and decide where, when and what to monitor. After that, you can follow the following steps to monitor your social network:

● You need first to capture your data: to collect data, you need to determine which metrics to capture regarding your organizational goals and related KPIs (it can be a number of clicks, engagement rate and so on). It often appears to be the easiest part)

● Then, you have to understand your data: to understand your social media analytics, you have to access the data and explore it using tables and graphics. This enables you to determine the quality of the data collected and describe the results after. It is considered as the hardest part.

● Finally, you need to present the data to your stakeholders: nowadays, organisations often rely on real-time social media analytics to guide day-to-day decisions. To do so, stakeholders need to get good grasps of the results you have and so to read and look at something attractive and simple.

(Batrinca, B., & Treleaven, P. C., 2015)

Tools you can use

To monitor what your target audience is saying across the internet, there are a lot of different tools depending on the social networks you will use. We already advises you to create accounts on Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook as to reach your target audience because they are professional social networks. Depending on the type of startup you want to create, you can also have an Instagram account or even a Youtube one. But don't be trapped by the name, the social media monitoring tools are not just covering social networks. They can also monitor forums, blogs, news site, review sites, RSS feeds and so on.

Usually, the monitoring tools are crawling sites continuously and indexing them in real time (you never miss a thing), every 10 minutes or weekly. You might want to know how does it work? Well, it is very simple.

You write a query to find the mentions you are interested in (“startup” for instance). The tools aim at showing you the most important data for you and the data which are more relevant than a basic google search. In the following part, you will find some useful tools you can use:

Hootsuite covers multiples social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Wordpress or Google+. It is a very simple tool to use and also one of the best free social media listening tools available. It is also useful when you are more than one person handling the social media accounts.

TweetReach can help you to check how far your tweets travel. As an upcoming startuper, it can be very useful as it measures the actual impact and implications of social media discussions. Thanks to that, you can find who your most influential followers are and also who you should be targeting when you want to share and promote online content.

Facebook analytics helps you to measure the engagement of your target audience, the way they interact on your Facebook page and how your ad campaigns work.

Google Alerts is a tool to monitor the research on Google through keywords. The results of the alert are sent to you via e-mail or RSS flux.

And now, what can you do with your data?

It can be complicated to manage and understand all the data you have collected. That’s why you can try to make it more visual to put forward the key points to explain the data in a simple way (data visualisation). For you, upcoming startuper, the data collected will help you in decision making for your social media strategy. Thanks to these data, you can for instance:

• See which words are trending for you: it can be for instance creativity, innovation or even startup as a beginning.

• Track consumer sentiment about a particular topic (sentiment analysis). Indeed, now you know how to create an emotional post for your target audience.

• Observe the engagement trend: when your target audience talks about you and how. It can help you to change or enhance your social media strategy.

• Identify potential influencers talking about you online. Those influencers can help you grow your community. We already talked about it in chapter 4.

We hoped this part and the previous ones helped you to understand the importance to monitor your social network. But if you are not yet convinced, we have chosen a video which resumes this chapter. We thought it would be more pedagogic to finish by a video.

Best practice from

the startup Bloom

For once, we will not give you best tips from a startup or someone we met but a good example of a startup you can use and learn from: Bloom.

Bloom is a French startup which was born in 2016 and created by Bruno Breton, a digital media and marketing specialist and Alexander Polonsky, mathematics researcher. They knew that understand and exploit data on the social networks is nowadays a fundamental stake for brands. But they realised that the monitoring tools available on the market are not sufficient anymore. For them, we can’t just simply do quantitative analyse on the social networks. The new stake is to know what do we do with all this data. Nowadays, qualitative data became the key. That’s why they imagine a new technology to provide a bigger algorithmic level than on the traditional monitoring platforms.

It is an artificial intelligence platform and a leader data consulting agency. It is specialised in the strategic analysis of the discussions and interactions on the most famous social networks for brands. This means that it identifies the opinions on the social networks, but also the needs and the interests of the users through the conversations. Their co-founder had developed a technology to explore and analyse the social networks based on transgressive algorithms which mean without being through constraint. It enables to establish unique correlations between the contents and to follow a conversation spread.

Bloom is on the top 1% of the most promising startup. It has been examined in details by Early Metrics, a startup rating agency. It was grade 84/100 which enables it to be part of the innovative business which is the most promising in the new technologies market (big data and social media). Bloom is also the only business on the market to know how to analyse the emotions of the users. This powerful technology enables to obtain a clear vision of the influences and opinions on the social networks. A lot of big brands trust that startup today like Havas, Samsung or SNCF. Even important media or politicians are interested in this solutions.

We know that this kind of solutions can be really useful for you: thanks to Bloom you can monitor your social networks in a different way, maybe more relevant. This example also shows you how it is possible to have a successful startup when meeting with the needs of the market. However, it shows you also how far can go the process of data and you can wonder if this is really ethical. We will talk about it in the last chapter.

In short, we are sure you know why you need to analyse your network. It will help you in your everyday life as a startup to get a better insight into your market, the consumer and your business. We gave you a variety of social monitoring tools to help you in doing so. In this chapter and the next one, you learned and you will learn how to listen and monitor your target audience, but in the next and final chapter, we will talk to you about the limits of this. We will take a look at what ethical issues listening, monitoring and personalising ads can be created. But for the moment, in the next chapter, it will be time for you to know how to make your community engage with you thanks to the art of listening.

Team YouPro