FREEDOM: Many individuals want to break free from corporate walls, familial boundaries and cultural structures. This, in fact, is the story of progress and also of experiencing depth. There are many systems of thought that offer paths to freedom. If one considers the interior of his/her psyche as akin to a corporate structure, then we can go further with a few metaphors that may be of help in finding freedom. Before getting into this though, it is vital to know that freedom comes from taking 100% responsibility for one’s own actions within a given context. This singular truth is the key to freedom. The intelligence gathering process for business and government provides leadership with clarity, security and power. And the best kind of power emerges from individuals who have taken 100% responsibility for the process of discovery and subsequent strategy.

INTELLIGENCE IS MAINSTREAM NOW: For our current article, we will take the market intelligence community and its function as a means to discovering freedom via responsibility. Market intelligence used to be a rarified action, not frequently discussed amongst co-workers on your average coffee break. In fact, in many traditional settings this is still true. But there are many forward-thinking corporations, communities and individuals who understand the power of deep intelligence on any given topic or interest. The market intelligence (MI) process has actually become more widespread in the corporate world due to the advent of social media monitoring tools like Radian6, BrandWatch, Sysomos and PeopleBrowsr. Even very basic Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Google searches provide the average man and woman a point of view previously unknown. For example, one may type keywords related to a specific interest into the search field at a social network and discover people nearby who share that interest. A new “in-the-flesh” experience becomes possible through such location-based searches related to an interest.

THE FIREFIGHTER AND FUTURIST: The advent of readily available intelligence brings humanity as a whole to an entirely new level of responsibility. Answers to most questions are at everyone’s fingertips. And this experience of responsibility translates into freedom for the corporation, the community and the individual. The process of going from a passive “bored at work” search for one’s passion to standing up from the chair and diving into a completely new life may be described as going from the “Firefighter” to the “Futurist”. To explain: the Firefighter is approaching an interest on an ad hoc basis, reacting to outside stimulus and “sitting at the station” waiting for an emergency. The Futurist is deeply engaged on both a global and local level, using intelligence to drive a process of rewarding, pro-active discovery. The Firefighter has no focus other than the emergency he reacts to…the Futurist is immersed in a broad, deep and future-oriented journey that draws in topics, people and places outside the immediately relevant environment. To be clear yet again on this comparison: the Futurist is creating the reality that the Firefighter often reacts to.

The Futurist has realized that reality may be defined ahead of the curve of fate or karma. While the consequences of an action take place within the boundaries of a specific world, the Futurist has moved on and discovered a completely novel experience, devoid of the content and context wherein the previous consequence was generated. He/she may then transform “the past” via valuable learnings, cultural understandings, and innovative approaches discovered “in the future”. A leading solution helping Futurists do this now is Recorded Future.

RESEARCH LEADS TO FREEDOM: The deepest importance of Market Intelligence has to do with creativity. When one discovers the complexion of an eco-system surrounding a specific interest, then he/she may tweak the elements of that eco-system and create what he/she wants. This is why researchers and business leaders must work hand-in-hand to shape our world. And this is also why it is inexcusable for any individual to say he/she cannot find a path to a dream. Even the simplest location-based search around an interest will place one in the company of others who have thrown themselves with passion into achieving very similar dreams to one’s own. Try this today, using the search fields in the various major social networks. Go deeper with social business intelligence tools.

Recorded Future (http://www.recordedfuture.com) was joined by Nathaniel Hansen, CEO of The Socializers, to discuss how temporal analytic technology supports in-depth social web research. We discussed how identifying key web sources and potentially catalytic future events supports social intelligence research.

The presentation includes an introduction to Recorded Future’s technology from CEO Dr. Christopher Ahlberg, a brief a live demo of our analytic tools, and discussion of how the Socializers map and measure the most influential online figures.

The other night I got into a wicked fast dialogue with friends from various parts of the world. What emerged was quite funny but also truly something to ponder. Could blended entertainment (#transmedia #intermedia) be leveraged to effectively topple oppressive regimes? Could a handful of individuals pull this off with a very minimal budget? Could it be the new modality of adventure travel/Reality TV spread via social networks?

Storytelling is at the core of all social networks. One post and its subsequent threads can turn into a community that evolves humanity.

The Facebook exchange below hints at a new form of reality TV leveraging social networks to produce revolution and truly fascinating television. Check it out:

MORE ABOUT SOCIALTV:

On Intermedia:
http://www.rickliebling.com/2011/09/11/intermedia-the-next-phase-in-consumer-engagement/

On Social TV Analytics:
http://blog.peoplebrowsr.com/blog/?p=1413

MetaData Tagging:
http://www.appmarket.tv/opinion/1347-scene-level-television-metadata-tagging-tv-is-the-new-oil-in-the-industry.html

Streaming Media Comparison
http://mashable.com/2011/02/14/streaming-media-comparison/

The pressure of VOD
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-dreamworks-stacey-snider-feels-the-pressure-of-premium-vod/

Over 1200+ articles curated on Social TV!!
http://www.scoop.it/t/tvappmarket

Other Links from the thread:

Recorded Future

Jillian Lauren

Rolf Potts

Eleftherios Hatziioannou (Peopleizers)

Gary Hayes

StoryLabs

My Love Travels from Krystal Baldwin

Peter Economides of FelixBNI

Hello I Love You Conference Istanbul, Turkey Dec 7-8, 2011

The pressing need in customer intelligence is a solution related to a real-time eco-system. One deeper philosophical issue in this space relates to variable velocity, to quote Lee Bryant. Tools like PeerIndex and Recorded Future do a good job of segmenting and defining the truly staggering flow of data AND audiences interacting with that data. Datasift (http://datasift.net/) is a leader in architecting methodologies for analyzing the complex fabric of the social Internet.

For an important new study on Customer Intelligence Trends 2011, see the following Forrester Report: ‎”At the same time, the demand for insight — not just data — in real time creates a challenge but also a huge opportunity to extend the value of Customer Intelligence throughout the enterprise. Leading CI professionals who evolve and adapt to these trends will quickly find themselves at the nexus of the business.” ~from Customer Intelligence Trends To Watch In 2011 (http://bit.ly/customer_intelligence_trends_2011)

WHAT IS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE: DEFINITIONS
(Some basic info below)

Business intelligence (BI) refers to computer-based techniques used in spotting, digging-out, and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments or associated costs and incomes.

BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of Business Intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics.

Business Intelligence often aims to support better business decision-making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system (DSS). Though the term business intelligence is often used as a synonym for competitive intelligence, because they both support decision making, BI uses technologies, processes, and applications to analyze mostly internal, structured data and business processes while competitive intelligence is done by gathering, analyzing and disseminating information with or without support from technology and applications, and focuses on all-source information and data (unstructured or structured), mostly external, but also internal to a company, to support decision making. (SOURCE)

The global business intelligence (BI) software market is projected to reach $12.4 billion by the year 2015, driven by the growing need to empower all stakeholders of businesses with right information at the appropriate time.

Uncertain economic conditions, intense competition and increasing volumes of organizational information are forcing enterprises to seek efficient means of deriving value from information for improving the overall efficiency of business processes. In this regard, BI technology is emerging as an essential tool for identifying new revenue-generation opportunities as well as to control unproductive expenditures. BI offers tools, processes and applications for facilitating organizations to analyze and consolidate data gathered from various sources for optimizing operational performance and for improving business decision-making. BI and analytics software helps organizations to analyze the information built up over the years, which resides in the enterprise systems. (Source)

What is real-time social business intelligence?

Real-time social business intelligence provides, amongst other things, (a) the right vantage point(s) to observe the “river of news” from; (b) a scuba-suit to dive INTO the river and scour its depths; (c) an informed assessment/report of volume, content AND context over time; and (d) targeted frequent alerts on specific findings for the sake of staff who have other things to do.

A superior social intelligence report includes, amongst other options, the following sections:

1. FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS (Should be accompanied by data-rich infographics that distill findings into a digestible format). Here is a PERFECT example of what the a final product would be: http://jess3.com/go-green-go-public/ Includes the classic 5 W’s of Journalism plus a few more, as outlined here:

• WHO? Who was, is and will be involved? We are able to see a vast amount of material in the social properties based on our current CRM databases.

• WHAT? What happened in the past, present and future? Yes, the future! With tools like Recorded Future, we can refine our knowledge of what is coming up around any vertical or entity.

• WHERE? Where did it take place in the past, Where is it taking place now and where will it take place in the future?

• WHEN? When did it take place in the past, when is taking place NOW, and when will it take place in the future? We can map this very precisely now.

• WHY? Why did it happen? Why is it happening NOW and Why COULD it happen in the future? This has A LOT to do with accurate contextual and sentiment analysis. Temporal Analytics play a part in future analysis. We also get to prove our campaign idea(s) BASED upon both quantitative AND qualitative measures here.

• HOW? How did it happen in the past, how is happening now, and how will it happen in the future?

• Is it WORTHWHILE intelligence? There’s a LOT of junk out there. Filtering out the wheat from the chaff is an essential aspect of our work. Does the content fit in the context we expected or would like to know about.

• What’s the WOW! factor? How much buzz is this keyword or that entity gaining.

• Develop ACTIONABLE items from the intelligence. Single, punchy commands about what, where, when, why and to whom one MUST message.

• GET SOCIAL! Foster AND WEAVE community with the intelligence.

• ON-GOING: Outline a plan for responsible and consistent follow-up and on-going intelligence gathering that dynamically moves WITH the brand, product/service.

2. IDENTIFY YOUR SOURCES AND METHODOLOGYfor the report as a best practice.

3. PROVIDE RANKED KEYWORD DATA SETS Be sure to include data from Google and Alexa here, as well as other important historical and current data from social property insight/analytic panels.

4. IDENTIFY INFLUENCERS WITH REACH + AMBASSADOR ARCHETYPES (These are suggestions of candidates that represent ideal Community Managers or Brand Ambassadors for a brand/product/service).

5. SHOW SEASONALITY OF PRODUCT/SERVICE (When is the BEST time of year for the various messagings about your product/service?).

6. SHOW TIME OF DAY PRODUCT IS DISCUSSED IN GENERAL IN THE SOCIAL PROPERTIES (When is the BEST time of day for the various messagings about your product/service?)

7. ASSEMBLE REAL TIME BUZZ PANELS (Your view into the “river of news”) One format would be like THIS: http://bit.ly/real_time_buzz

8. CREATE A COMPARISON of size of clusters/categories of conversations around specific product/service features.

Combining the following currently yields a powerful SOCIAL ORACLE:

(1) Personalized search engine at ROLLYO +
(2) A search trail at TRAILMEME +
(3) An influencer/authority search/comparison at PEERINDEX +
(4) A series of daily digests from THE FUTURE at RECORDED FUTURE

TRAILMEME is a new kind of web publishing that allows users to create, annotate and walk individually curated trails through web content. These are highly-customized and customizable trails through the internet.

A VIDEO ON TRAILMEME

ROLLYO puts the power of search in your hands, by giving you the tools to create your own personal search engines – with no programming required. This is a TARGETED METHOD for gathering information on what you want and a very effective way to narrow your results to expert resources in any given field OR a unique mash-up of resources.

PEERINDEX helps you discover the authorities and opinion formers on a given topic.

RECORDED FUTURE’S linguistics and statistics algorithms extract time-related information and through temporal reasoning helps users understand relationships between entities and events over time, to form the world’s first temporal analytics engine. Our customers include some of the most advanced financial institutions and leading government agencies in the world. The Recorded Future team includes computer scientists, statisticians, and linguists with deep domain expertise in areas such as intelligence and quantitative finance.

A VIDEO ON RECORDED FUTURE

The game has just begun!

• GoogleTV is going to rock the world—powered by Android.
• AppleTV is going to rocket the impact of micropayments for content.
• Netflix is going to be like Switzerland (sort of)
• Boxee (now powered by the Intel Atom Processor) could be the secret GoogleTV hardware platform.
• Amazon: Great library – slow tech right now, but they’re paying attention.

SOURCE OF ABOVE PREDICTIONS: RecordedFuture finding this article.

LOGITECH’S GoogleTV BOX: (In answer to the Boxee prediction is Logitech’s GoogleTV box

VARIOUS STREAMING BOXES: Various Streaming Boxes here or on the way soon

Now, as Logitech’s selling script at their GoogleTV site says, “If you can think it, you can watch it! Chances are, you have one of the 60 million HDTVs in the US that are ready. To be smarter. To integrate the full Web and your HD cable or satellite content. To do things no TV has ever done before.”

I submit to the reader that there are literal galaxies of video ALREADY PRESENT in the social fabric of the internet, on shelves, in boxes and, most importantly, in the human imagination. To peer into video IS humanity’s method of peering into that which is not seen or spoken in the workaday world.

Video channels could become as numerous as the grains of sand on the shore. And all of these are windows INTO what Carl Jung calls The Unconscious realm. How is this so? A single music video can carry one far away from the chair one sits in, a movie can transform a life and a single ad can empty the wallets of tens of millions.

STARGATES: Accessing the unconscious realm IS the BIG opportunity arriving with The Golden Age of Video. Why is this an opportunity? We are, each one of us, on a journey of discovery every day, every moment. Video is THE biggest and hottest medium at this time in history and it could be argued that video connects the psyche to that vast and un-ending universe of the unconscious realm, populated by countless entities, pathways and vortexes. Videos act like talismans, or symbols, that represent, as Jung puts it, “stargates that point beyond themselves…(and)…mobilize our psychic energy”.

GoogleTV is an aggregator of Stargates leading directly to the limitless Unconscious Realm.

A few days ago,  a friend sent me a link to a YouTube video of teenage boys freaking out on Chatroulette. The video shows various teen boys watching a teen girl tease them. Suddenly she turns into a demon-possessed being. The resulting looks on these boys’ faces is truly priceless.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNSaurw6E_Q

What is interesting from a marketing standpoint is that just a few days ago on YouTube, this video had 1100 videos. Now it has over 1 million views. For internet marketers, I suggest that the study of internet memes is crucial. To quote Lorrie Thomas, M.A., “It is an art AND a science.” One must have a creative AND an analytical mind, OR at least a team with both/and present.

WHAT IS A MEME?
A meme is a unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. (The etymology of the term relates to the Greek word μιμητισμός (/mɪmetɪsmos/) for “something imitated”.) Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures.

Francis Heylighen, of Free University of Brussels, writes that successful memes follow three characterstics, which include:

1) copying-fidelity: the more faithful the copy, the more will remain of the initial pattern after several rounds of copying. If a painting is reproduced by making photocopies from photocopies, the underlying pattern will quickly become unrecognizable. 2) fecundity: the faster the rate of copying, the more the replicator will spread. An industrial printing press can churn out many more copies of a text than an office copying machine. 3) longevity: the longer any instance of the replicating pattern survives, the more copies can be made of it. A drawing made by etching lines in the sand is likely to be erased before anybody could have photographed or otherwise reproduced it.

SUCCESSFUL INTERNET MEMES INCLUDE:
Successful internet memes have been seen by anyone who has email or spends even a little time on the internet. Some of the most famous include: (1) Double Rainbow (2) Nigahiga’s YouTube channel (3) David After Dentist (4) Diet Coke and Mentos (5) the phenomenon of Rickrolling (where user is tricked into clicking a link to a music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up”. (6) Lady GaGa’s Bad Romance (7) Justin Bieber’s Baby.

A Comprehensive List of Internet Phenomena may be found here.

MEMETICS RESEARCH and ACTION:

1. GEEKY RESEARCH: Read about Cluster Analysis (just to see how deep and complicated the science really gets). Study Meme-Tracking. Check out Group Formation in Large Social Networks.

2. KNOW YOUR DEMOGRAPHIC: Pay attention to the MAJOR archetypes within your chosen demographic AND their needs. Lots of market research has been done already by major research groups like Forrester, Nielsen, JD Power, and MRI into the buying habits, content preferences and behaviors of your audience.

3. USE LISTENING TOOLS TO SPOT SENTIMENT TRENDS: Listen to trends in the social fabric of the internet AND press-releases using Recorded Future, Radian6, Monitter and some of the new Facebook listening tools like Booshaka, Facepinch, OpenBook, It’s Trending and Kurrently. These tools could jumpstart your creative process. Any social campaign worth its salt has included some degree of listening to the customer PRIOR to launch.

4. BRAINSTORM using BIG pieces of paper and LOTS of flexibility WITH ALL IDEAS that emerge. Get INSPIRED in the Behance community, a fabulous place for meeting peers in the creative space AND to learn fabulous CREATIVE PROCESS TECHNIQUES.

5. A, B, C test your top ideas using landing pages, images, tweets, FB status updates, and blogposts. Notice AND measure response to these communications using Google Analytics, Facebook Insights and Alexa.

Great content contains effective memes, or word-creatures, the weavers of this living tissue that we call the social fabric of the internet. Viral videos like the one above, inspirational quotes, one-liners and personal news in the form of tweets and status updates are examples of word-creatures that move through individual and communal minds/hearts to what end none of us may ever know. These thought-animals consume the attention of a community, grow larger, and move deeper into the texture of the community.

By Nathaniel Hansen, CEO, The Socializers

If more Marketing Managers at Fortune 500 companies/major media companies truly understood the potential of future media delivery channels like GoogleTV PAIRED WITH “content-informing-intelligence”, there would be a mass re-organization of dinosaur-age ad/marketing agencies whose teams have yet to even train in social monitoring/intelligence tools AND have none of the talent-identification capabilities that a CAA or William Morris has. Those same Marketing Managers would then turn to social business agencies for the following process:

(a) pre-product dev intelligence gathering/listening,
(b) demographic-savvy content/product design RELATED TO what is discovered/analyzed from conversations in the social fabric of the internet,
(c) Relationship Architecting with related Social Strategy to identify ideal Key Influencers (and their content), thus paving the way for seamless and swift introduction of said content into the fabric of communities hungry for it,
(d) on-going listening that creates a virtuous cycle of this process.

The future leaders of transmedia will use the process above as just one of their approaches in expanding possibility for those who interact with media, advertisers, media/content producers AND communications entities. Transmedia and the associated processes that will bring this fabulous new way of interactive relationship to programming IS the future of CONTENT IDENTIFICATION AND PRODUCTION.

Colin Donald of FUTURESCAPE.TV says it best in the following comment on an article entitled Struggling for control: The humble channel-zapper is evolving in ways that will shape television’s futurein a recent edition of The Economist magazine:

“Internet-connected TVs lead to massively increased choice and require next-generation EPGs to help viewers navigate the wealth of content.

Integrating social networks with EPGs is only one manifestation of a profound and permanent change in the television industry, a change through which Facebook and Twitter are positioning themselves as major industry players.”

The teams working on Oprah’s new cable channel and on eBook sales strategy at Bertelsmann’s Random House are contending with issues related to the new possibilities in transmedia and how to make content delivery platforms lucrative for their shareholders WHILE giving users the most flexibility in interacting with their portfolios of content. Those media publishers who acknowledge the value in being customer-centric vs. product-centric in their offering AND develop platforms that allow maximum interactivity WILL win!

To quote Ali Valdez, a senior Microsoft sales leader, “Their customers will be their marketers. Their customers’ social network friends will be their new customers. Full transparency, good and bad, will drive innovation and competitive pricing. The consumer will win. Those brands that enable consumer victory will share in the bounty.”

TO SUM UP: Combining research from tools like Recorded Future, the world’s first temporal analytics engine (a video intro to Recorded Future here), and Radian6, a leading social media/network monitoring solution, media companies now have the opportunity to LISTEN to audiences that have OPTED OUT of traditional marketing channels and are OPTING INTO new, socially chosen/recommended channels. They then are able to match valuable information from conversations within the social fabric of the internet WITH market trends and probable future events to create product/service/content offerings with previously un-paralleled precision. Existing portfolios of content may be re-purposed into countless monetizable and USER-GENERATED interactive communities.

Understanding the future requires observation and listening and it is a Chief Customer Officer who will teach this to marketing staff, brand managers and community managers.