Source: Monitor Institute Graphic on Flickr

Relationships are the heart of many successful social media outreach efforts. They help fuel viral success (second only to exceptional content) and serve as a catalyst for self-organizing online swarms. You need to be able to visualize connections and influence, however, before you can strategically leverage relationships to reach and inspire target audiences. That’s where network mapping comes in.

Depending on your objectives, you can map social media conversations or you can map networks of individuals and organizations to identify hubs, clusters, and links you can leverage to bridge networks or strategically connect people for mutual benefit. You can visualize your connections low-tech or with free or paid digital network mapping tools:

• Low-tech: Networked nonprofit guru Beth Kanter has written multiple blog posts about network mapping (both low and high tech), including ones on the use of sticky notes to map networks at an innovation lab conference and a National Wildlife Federation event. Management Sciences for Health has also developed a five-step, low-tech, low-cost, intuitive, and inter-culturally applicable methodology for mapping networks (see slides 30-32). Although intended for  knowledge management baseline and post-intervention evaluation network mapping, the methodology could easily be applied to social media campaign planning and evaluation.
• Free digital tools: NodeXL is a free, open-source template for Microsoft® Excel® 2007, 2010 and 2013 that can easily be paired with the low-tech methods above and others to graph networks and determine the best way to leverage them. For Twitter network analysis, Mentionmap is a free tool that not only allows you to see the people that you have the most conversations with but also the way that other influencial Twitter users connect to you and others. This is particularly valuable for identifying people with small networks with strong ties (i.e., more easily leveraged) or who bridge hubs. Also for Twitter, Hashtagify.me allows you to find the best hashtags and influencers to reach your audience. For Facebook, a free app called Netviz can analyze how your friends connect and you can pull the data into a free open source network analysis software called Gephi. Journalist Andy Carvin produced an interesting Slideshare presentation showing how he used Netviz and Gephi to explore his network connections (hats off to Beth Kanter’s blog where I found this gem). For the tech savvy, Gephi can also be used for a multitude of other social network analysis uses and beyond.
• Paid digital tools: There are many paid social media analytics tools out there, but three stand out for their network mapping abilities. Crimson Hexagon combines network visualization with real-time sentiment analysis to provide accurate and actionable insights about target audiences and their conversations. UberVU provides a real-time view of social activity via a number of informative graphs. These include geographic analysis, spikes and bursts, trending stories, and influencer analysis. Sysomos provides real-time visualizations and in-depth metrics, including geo-demographics and sentiment and influencer analysis.

What is your organization’s strategy for network mapping? What are your takeaways?

But in developing countries, “missed calls” are becoming an extremely cost-effective cue for transmitting and obtaining information—without incurring fees for voice calls or text messages. In India, for example, small businesses call vendors and hang up to indicate they need deliveries, fishermen use a “missed call” to inform buyers they are on the way back to the shore, and cricket fans use “missed calls” to get an SMS back with free score updates.

Now development professionals are increasingly pairing radio and “missed calls” to create interactive strategic/behavioral communications campaigns. These campaigns combine mobile—a disruptive and relatively expensive new technology—with an older free technology that reaches most of a target audience in many places. This synchronization keeps cost downs and, more importantly, prevents old and new technologies from competing with one another and creating useless noise. Two great examples are Radio Farm International’s use of radio programs to advertise a “missed call” service for agriculture and weather tips in Tanzania and SMS polling about farmers’ crop choices in Uganda.

Other ways mobile plays well with radio include call-ins, call-outs, voice messages, and interactive voice response. All of them turn traditional radio’s one-way flow of information from broadcaster to listener into a powerful two-way distribution channel. When a high percentage of a target audience has web-enabled feature phones, mobile chat platforms (such as WhatsApp and Mxit) also present opportunities to combine radio and mobile to fuel listener-to-listener interaction.

Internews’ Gaza Humanitarian Information Service, combining radio, SMS, and social media for humanitarian relief outreach in the Gaza Strip, provides an excellent example of what is possible. The efforts’ expected results are:

• “Communities access timely, accurate, well-targeted humanitarian information through radio and SMS and social media
• Communities engage in 2-way communication with aid agencies through provision of high quality radio content, radio call-ins/talk-back programs, SMS channels and contemporaneous audience research
• Key media outlets improve their capacity to broadcast quality humanitarian reporting by better understanding relief operations, effectively liaising with aid agencies and managing/sharing audience feedback
• Effectiveness and accountability of the humanitarian response increase, as communities improve their understanding of how to access relief services and understand aid operations, including constraints and challenges, as well as how to best communicate with aid agencies”

I love the way the Internews and other examples above avoid the pitfall common in too many communications projects involving social media and mobile: cookie-cuttered tactics creating multiple, competing ways to spam audiences with identical content they just ignore. Tailoring your communications to fit a channel and audience needs makes it more likely your audience will see or hear your messages, remember them, and perceive them as relevant enough to prompt action. It also makes it more likely you will achieve your outcome (versus output) communications objectives even in an era of rapid technological change.

Who is your target audience?

The first question you need to ask before starting a communications project can come down to analyzing one key motivator for your target audience.

Values.

Before you can unite an idea with an emotion to inspire action, you have to understand why your target audience might not do or think what you think they should. But figuring out why otherwise intelligent and caring people might not think like you is often easier said than done.

The TED talk in the video below provides an excellent starting point for understanding and appealing to people’s moral intuitions. Drawing on ethnography, evolutionary theory, and experimental psychology, the speaker, psychologist and professor Jonathan Haidt, explains how five fundamental ideas commonly undergird moral systems around the world: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. He further explains how people’s minds are designed to unite us into teams according to these fundamental ideas, divide us against other teams, and blind us to what’s happening.

Haidt’s research shows liberals worldwide value justice, change, and freedom from oppression—even at the risk of chaos. Conservatives, meanwhile, value preserving tradition and legitimate fidelity to rules that have stood the test of time—even at the cost to those at the bottom. Because these are often opposing moral visions, Haidt’s talk is a reminder that messages framed without audience research and an understanding of communications theory could inadvertently repel half your audience.

I predict Dr. Haidt’s theory will become a communications theory classic like professor Geert Hofstede’s national cultural dimensions theory, anthropologist Edward T. Hall’s high- and low-context culture theory, SRI International’s VALS (“Values, Attitudes And Lifestyles”) framework, and professor Everett Rogers’s diffusion of innovations theory among others. These theories show how complex human behavior and decision-making is, and reading them reminds you the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.

That leads you back to a common theme of this blog: the need for audience research (perhaps combined with a knowledge management approach) when your objective is behavior change.

• Positive emotion: Many people make decisions emotionally, so even the best logic-based arguments often fail to motivate people. When stories trigger a positive emotion, they stimulate good will, right-brain decision-making, and action.
• Dramatic narrative: An effective story “shows” your readers (without “telling” them) in a personal and memorable way. The best ones have a suspenseful beginning, middle, and end; establish heroes, victims, and villains; grab attention in an unexpected way; and go light on details, letting your audience draw their own conclusions.
• Visuals: Studies show that people pay more attention to visuals than text. They remember their messages longer, connect with them more emotionally, and digest them more quickly and easily. Particularly importantly in the Web 2.0 context, visuals stand out in social media streams and are more likely to get shared.

Of course, facts are facts, and you have to have data to back up your stories. But how you tell your stories—according to your objectives and your audiences’ interests—is perfectly malleable per the above formula for success.

I hope it goes without saying “of course not!” Why?

Due to POST, which I’ve written about before briefly. POST is a useful acronym coined by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, the authors of Groundswell. It stands for People, Objectives, Strategy, and Technologies.

The acronym is a reminder to always start information and communications technology (ICT) communications planning by considering the capabilities, interests, and needs of your audience—not the hot technological tool of the day. If you are targeting social media influencers who own handhelds and live in the United States, that does enable leveraging their connections to get your message out in real time. If your audience is rural cell phone users in India, however, consider using speech, graphics, and touch interaction apps that work on old fashioned “feature phones.” If you’re reaching out to business travelers, focus on the ratings and review websites they frequent.

Once you have defined what makes the most sense for your audience, then set your objectives based on what you are trying to do. Inform? Energize? Resolve customer complaints? Foster collaboration? Crowdsource? Connect?

Your objectives will then determine your strategy. Imagine you succeed. How will things be different afterwards? Imagine the endpoint to determine what audience behaviors you harnessed, influenced, or changed. As I explained in my recent xPotomac post and an earlier post on encouraging social media engagement, this typically means much more than merely raising awareness.

The last step is picking specific appropriate technologies, the opposite approach of attempting to replicate xPotomac’s innovations with a reluctant audience or client and different objectives. That’s because ignoring POST, falling victim to shiny object syndrome (otherwise known as fondling the hammer), and mindlessly copying tactics is often the recipe for activity without accomplishment—not innovation and ICT success.

Its organization you ask?

What I found interesting was the fact that none of the speakers used extemporaneous PowerPoints. Instead, they used handhelds with colorful mind maps to remind them where they were in their talk (kudos to Kathryn Garrett for first pointing this out via Twitter). The result was more eye contact and audience interaction than you typically get when speakers are stuck in a pre-personal computer = overhead transparencies paradigm.

The conference room did, however, have a big screen. It was filled with the top tweets and Twitter influencers using the #xPotomac14 hashtag. The result was crowdsourced speaker notes not only perfectly calibrated to audience interests in real time, but also short and sweet enough (due to Twitter’s 140-character limit) to be able to be read quickly without tuning out the speaker. If you have ever developed a PowerPoint, you know it’s hard and time consuming to get buy-in for appropriately concise and readable slides.

This brings me back to a frequent topic, the need to focus many public outreach efforts on mitigating or encouraging specific and pre-determined behaviors appropriate for your audience—not simply raising awareness.

Think about it.

Spreading the word about how great xPotomac’s crowdsourced speaker notes worked is unlikely to result in its replication at conferences outside of tech circles. Touting the benefits of mind maps would be similarly ineffective at invoking change.

Why?

Because sitting at a conference tweeting on your computer, tablet, or phone is not considered socially acceptable in most venues. Further, most people still are not on Twitter, so the crowdsourced speaker notes would be a flop in most places. Most importantly, the majority of people simply expect to see overhead slides and for audience members to keep their eyes on the speaker or overheads—not their computer, tablet, or phone.

The only way an organization could replicate xPotomac’s success is by encouraging Twitter adoption and demonstrating influencers (i.e., bosses and clients in a professional setting) are on board—for both behavior changes.

In other words, to position ourselves and our organizations to compete in the future, it’s not enough to have a few innovators see the potential of the next big thing. It’s a question of reimagining how and why we do things and then ensuring the requisite behaviors are in place, have social support, and are culturally acceptable enough to harness and benefit from the efficiencies of technological change.

That is my main take-away from xPotomac, at least from my strategic communications perspective.

I recently connected with David Bailey of The Military Social Media Blog after writing my recent series of posts about the lack of sound communications strategy plaguing the U.S. military in the very places sound strategy is needed most to curb Islamist extremism. David, a former officer in the British Army, is a “digital whisperer” who has been involved in British military influence activities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Afghanistan.

In the video below, David is interviewing me for a vlog post about how knowledge management could help the military, particularly in the United States, overcome many of the obstacles it faces and adapt to a war of ideas in the Web 2.0 age. In another recent video, David interviewed his associate Nicole Matejic, the #SocialFirefighter out of Australia, on how newsjacking can do the same.

I’m honored to be asked to contribute to military learning and be a part of David’s effort to tap “Crowd Accelerated Innovation” to fuel understanding and learning and win the war of ideas.  As the 2010 TED video shows, amazing things are possible when people around the world connect to share and innovate. Fingers crossed David’s efforts make a difference! Thanks David!

The potential cure? Combining  behavioral/strategic communications with “knowledge management” to force/empower behavioral/strategic communications contractors and personnel to capture, develop, share, and effectively use knowledge.  I use the term force/empower because another possible reason for a lack of sound strategy can be government officials hesitant to approve spending time or money on research, especially in the face of budget cuts, sequestration, etc.

When contracts merge behavioral/strategic communications and “knowledge management,” the result is:

• A literature review of lessons learned and best practices from previous attempts to change a behavior
• Stakeholder mapping to identify the networks and organizations influencing the behavior as well as their “influenceability”
• An inventory of information sources and influencers target audiences turn to for information and social norms for the behavior
• A target audience needs assessment covering information flow, use, storage, and sharing; appropriate technologies; and triggers that will effectively and measurably change the audience’s behavior
• Facilitation techniques, such as Open Space, World Café, Peer Assist, and After Action Reviews, that encourage people with expertise in the behavior to work together and share their experiential knowledge for the purposes of peer-to-peer learning, problem-solving, and strategic planning

Knowledge management, done right, also can result in outcome vs. output performance measures and improved processes, policies, and procedures organization-wide. More importantly, done right, it facilitates swift learning from mistakes and swift adjustments to disruptive technological change.

To visualize more fully the possibilities, skim the Global Health eLearning Center’s free Knowledge Management course, particularly the Malawi Case Study, and imagine Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan collaborating to apply the model to opium poppy cultivation. For example, the target audience needs assessment might have revealed farmers prefer working with opium traffickers because they provide advance credit and quick and lucrative payment. Such an assessment would not have resulted in billboards claiming opium damages the Pashtun’s house, country, community, and future generations. Rather, it would have resulted in harnessing appropriate information and communications technologies (ICTs), such as mobile payments for alternative crops, to reduce the economic incentive to grow poppy combined with other social marketing methods (e.g., barriers elimination, influencer messaging, prompts, norm appeals, financial incentives and disincentives, commitments, etc.).

While the sound communications strategy case study I blogged about from Colombia does not appear to have had a knowledge management component, the kind of excellence it illustrates would certainly more likely stem from such a combined approach than one likening the complex fight against Islamist extremism or poppy cultivation to convincing people who already brush their teeth to switch to a different brand of tooth paste. Just starting out the gate, it changes the requisite qualifications of the contractors brought on board.

Billboard in Afghanistan extolling the virtue and loyalty of the Afghan National Security Forces.

Sadness. Shock. Disbelief.

These are the emotions I felt reading a recent report by the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College indicating the U.S. military’s information operations (IO) and strategic communication efforts were bungled in the very places they were needed most to curb Islamist extremism. As I’ve blogged about before, it’s mindboggling that the suggested reason is large contractors hoping to make an easy buck pushing sales/marketing/attitudinal communications to enact change versus the more effective behavioral/strategic communications approach.

In this post, I am detailing three examples of what appear to be extremely counterproductive communications efforts in Afghanistan that upset and shocked me. Two are from the U.S. Army War College report, written by Dr. Steve Tatham, Great Britain’s leading military expert on strategic communication and IO, and a third is from media reports:

• Doublethink Billboard: As shown in the photo above, billboards were put up across Afghanistan extoling the virtue and loyalty of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). The problem is corruption is widespread in Afghanistan and the ANSF is hardly immune. In the words of Dr. Tatham:

 “[I]n a society where corruption is endemic, where successful passage through a checkpoint will almost certainly require the giving of some money, such attitudinal communication does not stack up against the pragmatic reality of life on the ground.”

The billboards remind me of George Orwell’s book 1984 and its 2 + 2 = 5 and doublethink (i.e., sometimes they are five, sometimes they are three, and sometimes they are all of them at once). While such an approach might work in a dystopian novel, it is not a fit with building a trust-based democracy in real life.

• Corruption-Covering Campaigns? Afghans citizens intensely resent the corrupt political patronage networks that replaced the Taliban. According to the Brookings Institution:

“Murder, extortion, and land theft have gone unpunished, often perpetrated by those in the government. At the same time, access to jobs, promotions, and economic rents has depended on being on good terms with the local strongman, instead of merit and hard work.”

What was done about the scourge of corruption from a communications perspective? USA Today reports IO campaigns were used to bolster corrupt Afghan officials:

“A Feb. 10, 2010, cable from then-ambassador [Karl] Eikenberry recounted a meeting between State Department and military officials with Abdul Raziq, an Afghan border police official.

Raziq, Eikenberry wrote, said he wanted to improve conditions on the Afghan-Pakistani border in Kandahar province and fight corruption. Coalition officials proposed a campaign including local radio spots, billboards and ‘if credible, the longer-term encouragement of stories in the international media on the reform of Raziq, the so-called Master of Spin.'”

A year earlier Harper’s Magazine had published an investigative piece about Raziq’s drug trafficking. While use of the term “if credible” in the excerpt above comforts me a little, the possibility of communications being used to fake reforms and prop up a drug trafficker is depressing (corruption = bad governance = fueling support for “honest” extremist governance alternatives). This example too is a bit Orwellian.

Billboard in Afghanistan reading: “Poppy. Poppy is damaging the Pashtun’s house, country, community and future generations. What do you think? Contact us on this number.”

• Doublethink Billboard II: Per the photo to the right, billboards were put up in Afghanistan reading: “Poppy. Poppy is damaging the Pashtun’s house, country, community, and future generations. What do you think? Contact us on this number.” Surely, the question toward the end was not designed with Orwellian doublethink in mind? In the words of Dr. Tatham:

“[I]t might be argued that far from ‘damaging the Pashtun’s house,’ poppy shores it up by being extremely profitable, providing a source of income to farmers that they would not be able to derive from vegetables, fruit, and wheat. Indeed, Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) John L. Cook believes that in Helmand and Kandahar: ‘The poppy is king providing, either directly or indirectly, nearly 80% of all jobs in these provinces.'”

I could write pages on how these examples are likely to harm Afghanistan’s fledging democracy and fuel extremism. I’m limiting myself, however, to five communications blunders not fully developed in my previous post on Dr. Tatham’s report (but I could go on and on about communications blunders too):

• Framed as Lies: As I have written about before, not only do you need to communicate truth (which should go without saying), you need to be very careful to avoid framing your message in a way that contradicts widespread perceptions, even if these perceptions are wrong. Perceptions lag reality, and fighting perceptions will only trick the brain into perceiving you as the liar, even when you are the one telling the truth. (Of course, using deception to trick military adversaries into surrendering, panicking, etc. are obvious life-saving exceptions, but that is another subject…).
• Create Unrealistic Expectations: Audience members who give you the benefit of the doubt will expect messages that appear to be lies to become reality at some point soon. In the examples above, many Afghan citizens would expect a virtuous ANSF and local government to be delivered in the near term along with livelihoods as lucrative as the drug trade. When something more or less promised is not delivered, disillusionment and mistrust intensify (disillusionment + mistrust = potential support for governance alternatives).
• Aimed at a Mass Homogenous Audience: A tenant of behavioral/strategic communications is targeting audience segments who are accessible, amenable to persuasion, and closely related to the survival of undesirable behaviors. The Colombia case study I recently blogged about is a great example. The examples above are unsophisticated and target a mass homogeneous audience.
• Divert Money from Potentially Powerful Policy Tweaks: A tenant of effective social marketing is changing bureaucratic processes along with public outreach to nudge adoption of desired behaviors. This approach recently became more mainstream after the best-selling book Nudge came out in 2008, but it has been being fine-tuned for decades in social marketing circles in the health and environment sectors. Getting back to the ANSF example above, if audience research revealed Afghan citizens have a low opinion of the ANSF, and, as a result, potential recruits do not join or quickly quit, implementing, enforcing, and advertising policy tweaks that make ANSF service more culturally acceptable would be a better use of limited funds. As one of my communications professors once said: “If you have a restaurant owner as a client and your client wants you to use public outreach to counter customer complaints about dirty bathrooms, strongly recommend hiring more janitors first.”
• Divert Money from Potentially More Effective Communications Channels: Billboards are not an ideal communications channel in Afghanistan for two reasons. First of all, only 28 percent of the population is literate (43 percent of men and 13 percent of women), so most Afghan citizens cannot read them. Secondly, advertising is not accepted as an everyday part of life in Afghanistan. Unlike in the heavily consumer-based societies of the West where ads are taken for granted, Afghan citizens are not as used to seeing them (or at least until not after foreign troops arrived), and an unwritten contract between marketer and potential customer does not really exist. Mobile and radio, for example, would likely be more effective and, done right, would come across less Orwellian.

Most sadly, some of these types of blunders have been known for centuries. Sun Tzu, the renowned Chinese military strategist, wrote sometime around 500 BC the following in the Art of War:

“Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections.”

Tzu recognized hearts and minds as key to military victory. Over and over, he states forms of the following:

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

Just imagine what could have been possible if the U.S. military and its contractors in Afghanistan had been channeling Sun Tzu vs. Orwell’s 1984?

Editor’s note: In the interests of full disclosure, some of my past and present clients and employers do anti-corruption, anti-fraud, and good governance programming on behalf of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and domestic federal agencies, so I do not see the above issues through a military lens.

News coming out of Colombia during the holiday season warmed your heart. The end of Latin America’s longest insurgency may be in reach, and the government’s heart-warming Christmas campaigns targeting Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia guerrilla fighters (better known as the FARC) are a case study in how to do behavioral communications right.

The award-winning Christmas campaigns, taking place the last four years, are strategically designed to motivate guerrilla fighters to sneak out of the jungle and surrender their weapons at the time of year they are the most homesick and vulnerable. Colombia’s Ministry of Defense, in conjunction with the Lowe SSP3 ad agency, runs the annual campaign, which mixes advertising with social marketing’s prompts, barriers elimination, and influencer messaging. Moreover, the positively framed ads and holiday light references elicit feelings of happiness around the prospect of defections and remembrance of religious values.

The campaigns get better and better every year:

• In 2010, when the campaign was first launched, government commandos put Christmas lights on giant trees deep in the heart of guerrilla territory with the message: “If Christmas can make it into the jungle, you can make it home.”
• In 2011, the family and friends of guerilla fighters were enlisted to put Christmas messages and small gifts in 7,000 LED-illuminated capsules sent floating down rivers guerrilla fighters frequent.
• In 2012—amid intelligence reports the FARC was moving troops around at Christmas to keep them disoriented and discourage defections—five powerful beacons of light were put up in town plazas near where the FARC operate and thousands of tiny lights were dropped along paths guerrilla fighters travel.  Glow-in-the-dark billboards reading, “Guerrillas, Follow the Light,” were then put up along FARC river routes and glow-in-the-dark stickers were put on vehicles believed to be carrying them food.
• This year—with a cease fire in place giving guerrilla fighters more time to spend in town with access to TV and radio—posters and TV and radio ads were produced telling the real-life stories of about 30 mothers whose children are FARC members. The posters and TV ads show a real family picture of one of today’s guerilla fighters as an innocent child, with the mother’s message: “Before you were a guerrilla, you were my son.” Ads end with the line, “This Christmas, we’re waiting for you at home. Demobilize. At Christmas everything is possible.”

Here’s a YouTube video from this year’s campaign. You don’t even have to speak Spanish to be moved:

I could go on and on about how strategically sound the annual campaigns are in terms of conceptualization, design, implementation, and evaluation, but others, such as the World Economic Forum, have already done this.  I love the way the World Economic Forum ended its evaluation piece last year:

“Wider societal impact was achieved: In addition to the direct effect on guerrillas, the campaigns also had a broader impact: to some degree they changed the context for the conflict, and improved international perceptions of the country.

Conclusions and Recommendations

The campaigns, and all of the accompanying press and social media coverage, have had a unique ‘humanizing’ effect which led to wider shifts in perception and behavior:

1. The campaigns made guerrillas increasingly feel they are still part of society, even though they have chosen to stay on the fringes. They made them feel wanted and nostalgic;
2. Crucially, the campaigns changed the military’s disposition to welcome the demobilized “enemy” by reminding them that these combatants are as human as they are after all; and,
3. By touching the hearts of ordinary Colombians, the three operations helped smooth the reinsertion into society process by destroying some barriers that existed against accepting demobilized guerrillas in their workplaces or in their neighbourhoods.

The over-riding message is that even in the most challenging of circumstances, communication can be a powerful tool of behavior change.”

Surely, there had to be a way to design similarly effective behavioral campaigns in Afghanistan or Iraq respectfully eliciting the warm fuzzies via moderate Muslim traditions to achieve key objectives?

Apparently, hiring people without the necessary expertise because they have no background in the area.

According to a fascinating report by the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College (tip of the hat to the Public Diplomacy, Networks and Influence blog), the IO and strategic communication efforts the U.S. military funded in places like Afghanistan were bungled for this very reason:

“Concurrently, there appears to be an absence of intelligent customers. While staff colleges and military academies prepare military officers and diplomats for career service, experience shows that corporate understanding of even the most basic principles of influence are exceptionally weak. This is not a criticism of individuals, more a statement of fact…. Unfortunately, the operating environment has now changed radically from that which prevailed during [commanding officers’] formative years. This unfortunately makes them highly susceptible to very persuasive and convincing sales talk from communication contractors. Why would you NOT buy an IO program from a company that, say, boosted sales of a particular car by 30 percent? Superficially, it seems logical, but the nuance of the type of communication, and the precise effect sought, is lost on busy military people who have no background in this area,” writes the author, Dr. Steve Tatham, Great Britain’s leading military expert on strategic communication and IO.

Assuming everything he writes is true, and I have no reason to suspect otherwise, I hope the report becomes required reading for U.S. military commands involved in strategic communication and IO. Besides the revelation frighteningly parallel to the Mandela signer fiasco, the report does an excellent job explaining must-know information about the differences between various disciplines within the science of communication. Dr. Tatham breaks them into three models:

• Informational communication: For the military, these are “no spin zone” public affairs officers charged with being first with the truth while balancing the need to constantly and promptly keep target audiences informed of current events. In U.S. federal government contracting circles, this is also a must-have skillset for people charged with communicating to the U.S. Congress and senior policymakers to avoid crossing the lobbying, “self-aggrandizement,” or “puffery” line.
• Attitudinal communication: Dr. Tatham categorizes commercial marketing and advertising as attitudinal communication—focused on reinforcing positive attitudes or dislodging negative attitudes rather than behavioral outcomes. He cites frighteningly wasteful examples of U.S. military contractors using an attitudinal communication model to influence foreign audiences while paying little attention to measures of effectiveness or target audience analysis (in my personal observations, crossing the lobbying, “self-aggrandizement,” or “puffery” line is another major pitfall when contractors targeting U.S. audiences only understand this model). He also notes U.S. and NATO doctrines are based on an attitudinal communication model and, as a result, are entirely top down (quite scary considering information and communication technologies power bottom-up communication and organizing). The problem, Dr. Tatham says, is selling something like toothpaste is simplistic next to selling U.S. military objectives, such as reducing the number of insurgent recruits or opium poppy growers in Afghanistan, and the impact required to make a difference is vastly greater:

“[I]t is important to remember that the consumer, by their presence in the toothpaste aisle of the supermarket, has already made a decision in their mind to make a purchase; their behavior has already been set. Indeed, that behavior would have been pre-determined by their upbringing (always clean your teeth before bed), their education (not cleaning your teeth will cause you painful medical problems), and other social or cultural factors (for example, guys with bad breath don’t get girls!). All the advertiser has to do is switch the consumer’s behavior from one brand to another—the key is that the consumer was already going to buy toothpaste…. A conversion rate of 10 percent (i.e., 1 in 10 buying a different brand of car or toothpaste) would be considered outstanding and for a large company may well prove highly profitable. But in military operations achieving a 10 percent change in the behavior of, say, an insurgent group or a hostile community is highly unlikely to be game changing in the context of the wider conflict,” he writes.

• Behavioral communication: Dr. Tatham terms communication focused on mitigating or encouraging specific and pre-determined behaviors as behavior communication. The U.S. military’s IO (at least when practiced without user error) and social marketers from the health and environment sectors fit within this model. He notes, without referencing cognitive dissonance theory, that “behavioral communication can also be surprisingly effective in changing attitudes.” He also notes, unlike the attitudinal communication model, this model necessitates solid target audience analysis and attention to behavioral measures of effectiveness. For this reason, he recommends the U.S. military refocus on behavioral communication and rethink the commercial marketing contractors it employs:

“Commercial marketing is not the kind of discipline that is equipped to deal with behavioral outcomes or scenarios that are more complex or require more nuanced definitions. It is this author’s view that marketing principles are simply not effective enough to drive U.S. military capabilities and development; and that the end of that road will only be failure. Further, it is this author’s view that only a scientific approach will do. This approach must be based on the sciences pertaining to human behavior, in all its myriad manifestations and with all its bewildering complexities, and not the limited perspective of consumer behavior, or the misguided assumptions of attitudinal psychology,” he says.

Fingers crossed any new revelations about U.S. military communication contractors do not have any additional parallels with the fake Mandela signer. That story has gone from bad to worse.

P.S. Don’t have time to read Dr. Tatham’s report? Then view the 6-minute YouTube video below with a take similar to his on the three models.

The graphic’s four cells show how ICTs represent a disruptive technological shift to public communications:

• Cell 1: Until recently, most traditional advertising and public communications campaigns used the approach shown in Cell 1. Because stakeholder groups were too large to engage efficiently or cost effectively, you set objectives and defined solutions with minimal or no input from stakeholder groups. This often proved ineffective, especially when behaviors being addressed were high risk or high cost.
• Cell 2: Many funders of public communications campaigns focus on harnessing influencers to affect desired change from within the systems of stakeholder groups. This is the second most effective way to bring about change. Until ICTs’ recent user-customization and responsive designs, however, a debilitating obstacle was mass producing campaign materials at a reasonable cost responsive to stakeholder groups’ diverse solutions and needs.
• Cell 3: Some funders of public communications campaigns focus on responding to the needs of stakeholder groups with solutions that have worked elsewhere. The major problem with this approach is stakeholder groups often feel little ownership over—and motivation to carry out—solutions you dictate, especially in the absence of influencer champions within the system. Like with Cell 2, a debilitating obstacle in the absence of ICTs was mass producing campaign materials at a reasonable cost that were useful and appropriate.
• Cell 4: The approach for Cell 4, the opposite of many traditional advertising and public communications campaigns, allows stakeholder groups, not funding organizations, to set their own objectives, define their own solutions, and customize their own ICT-based campaign materials. Involving those who would benefit most from a good outcome is always a strong motivator, representing the optimal strategy to affect lasting change. Alcoholics Anonymous and Neighborhood Watch organizations are good examples of this approach in action. Only with ICTs, however, is this approach possible without infinite funding.

Of course, Cell 4 also means understanding and rethinking why and how you do things (especially if you are still stuck, even partially, in Cell 1) to create a web of engagement fueling lasting change with many hands.

We certainly live and work in an exciting time.

Editor’s note: The graphic is adapted from a similar one I recall seeing at some point on why affecting large-scale change via communications is nearly possible without grass-roots support.  It’s basically an after thought from last week’s post on 3 Ways ICTs Remove ‘Classic’ Barriers to Action.

Here are three ways ICTs make affecting change a little easier:

• Precise notifications and reminders. According to the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), every single instance of behavior involves four specific elements: (1) a specific action (2) performed with respect to a given target (3) in a given context (4) at a given point in time. An example would be a mother in a developing country taking her child to a health clinic when vaccination stocks are available and the child needs a vaccination. Without ICTs, it would be impossible to notify the mother about her child’s opportunity to get a needed vaccination at the ideal time, and a mother’s promise to a healthcare provider to get her child vaccinated would be easily forgotten if made weeks or months before the vaccination was necessary. With SMS text messages and/or email, notifications and reminders can more easily be delivered with ideal real time precision in terms of action, target, context, and time.
• Community support. Both TRA and Diffusions of Innovations Theory stress people are likely to act if they perceive community support/social pressure to do something. Online communities—whether ad hoc like Occupy Wall Street or organized like professional communities of practice—can boost the perception “I am not in this alone,” “people I respect want me to do it,” and people like me are doing it” necessary to invoke action. Further, online communities can point people to ways to (1) overcome perceived barriers to action and (2) enhance their sense of self-efficacy—two crucial elements for invoking action according to the Health Belief Model and Social Cognitive Theory.
• Bridging opportunity and motivation. ICTs not only can empower people with precision in terms of action, target, context, and time (see bullet one above), designed correctly, they also can reward people’s intrinsic motivations—both personal (e.g., autonomy and competence) and social (e.g., membership and generosity). Without ICTs, it is harder to bridge opportunity and motivation, decreasing the odds of eliciting the behavior you want (it probably goes without saying that all kinds of theories, not just ones related to communications, recognize the importance of rewards in invoking desired behavior). As Clay Shirky writes in Cognitive Surplus:

“Users will only take advantage of opportunities they understand and that seem interesting or valuable… It doesn’t matter how much you want users to behave a certain way. What matters is how they react to the opportunities you give them. If you want different behavior, you have to provide different opportunities.”

Bottom line? Realizing the full potential of ICTs means understanding the value-added they bring—built on the basics of timeless communications principles.

They rated Facebook dead last.

In an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg published on the Forrester blog, Forrester analyst Nate Elliot explained the two main reasons behind dissatisfaction with Facebook:

• The lack of engagement brands see via their Facebook pages
• The fact Facebook’s is not “good enough” at pure advertising, even though Facebook is trying to shift its business in this direction

Based on my knowledge of big data and data mining, I have to wonder how the marketers surveyed measure digital marketing success. Unfortunately, we do not know which companies the 395 marketers represent. So we can only assume Forrester’s research expertise would lead it to select subjects with opinions based on objective quantitative data versus subjective guesses and opinions. Without knowing the basis of their assessments, I am unsure what to make of the Forrester report and the resulting controversy (I did not pay $499 for the full report).

What I do know is that many social media experts seem to measure Facebook marketing success using vanity metrics such as likes, fans, or views. But they do not seem to know much about their clients’ fans and followers. Are they customers or donors? Are they potential customers or donors? Or are they bots? Many avoid answering whether digital marketing activity results in sales, donations, or other measurable actions. While you hear a little about the importance of measurement (often using spreadsheets) or data mapping, rarely do you hear any discussion about data mapping in the context that matters for data analytics (no, I am not talking about data visualization mapping, such as Ushahidi).

Data mapping, the step before data mining, involves identifying all possible structured and unstructured data elements collected or available on potential customers, donors, or other study subjects (e.g., digital information from web sites, mobile devices, software logs; verbal conversations; hard copy records, etc.). Then you find ways to link different data sets to find classes, clusters, associations, outliers, sequential patterns, etc. Just as successful social media implementation requires the attention of senior leadership across “silos,” successful data analytics requires the collection, analysis, and sharing of relevant data across “silos.”

Many firms analyze big data with propriety software, such as SAS, and some do this with free open source software, such as Hadoop, MATLAB, or the R programming language. Data analytics is how Amazon knows to recommend items that would make perfect presents for your relatives. Due to Amazon’s obvious data analytics expertise, I am positive an Amazon marketer could analyze quantitatively why or why not Facebook and other digital marketing opportunities are working for Amazon and its commercial customers.

Take a look at all the big data offerings available on Amazon Web Services. In comparison, Facebook Page Insights analytics can accurately, to quote  Forrester, be labeled “simplistic.” You don’t have to understand how the marketers Forrester surveyed measure digital marketing success—or even agree with their opinions—to see that.

According to the article, after coalition forces withdraw from Afghanistan next year, only 20 percent of U.S.-funded reconstruction projects worth billions of dollars will be in areas safe enough for U.S. officials to visit and directly inspect. For this reason, USAID “intends to use satellite photos and ‘crowdsourcing’ experiments that will solicit feedback on progress from Afghans who are supposed to benefit from U.S.-financed work.” These experiments are to supplement the work of Afghans with engineering and program-monitoring skills, who will be tapped for the majority of onsite M&E activities.

My first thought was “Wow! Fascinating!” My second thought was why limit the satellite photos and “crowdsourcing” experiments to Afghans? It’s easy to imagine scenarios, for example, combining the best of the South Sudan Satellite Sentinel Project, USAID’s crowdsourcing initiative to geocode and standardize its Development Credit Authority (DCA) loan guarantee data, and the U.S. Civil Air Patrol’s crowdsourced aerial imagery assessment following Super Storm Sandy. Crowds worldwide could easily view online photos of, for example, USAID-supported construction or agriculture/irrigation projects. In the latter example, digital volunteers could view a photo and select (a) for pink/red poppy flowers, (b) for violet/light purple saffron flowers, (c) for light green or tan wheat, or (d) for other.

Click on figure to enlarge.

Due to the high levels of corruption in Afghanistan and the critical levels of insecurity, such an approach would likely be more accurate and safer than sending in potentially bribable and frightened Afghans with GPS- and timestamp-enabled digital cameras and smart phones to monitor and evaluate corruption-prone USAID-supported projects. Such an approach also could possibly improve accountability (or at least keep it from plummeting after coalition forces withdraw) and help make a dent in the recent rise in opium production in Afghanistan (yes, despite USAID assistance and the U.S. military presence). Online transparency often breeds self-correcting behavior since government officials, businesses, and individuals (including USAID-funded monitors) do not want to be publicly caught doing (or be associated with) something embarrassing or illegal.

After reading the draft USAID Remote Monitoring Project Indefinite Quantity Contracts (IQCs) Request for Proposals, however, I could see involving non-Afghans in crowdsourcing M&E is not currently envisioned or was at least not mentioned in the draft (the final solicitation has yet to be released). Any global crowdsourcing scenario would have to fly with the Government of Afghanistan, who might perceive online satellite and aerial imagery provided by the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency differently than something like the South Sudan Satellite Sentinel Project and its Harvard University-provided satellite and aerial imagery.

The draft solicitation did offer other interesting tidbits:

• Information about construction projects, training event attendance, etc. would be relayed using GPS-enabled and time-stamped smartphone applications and cameras, similar to what International Relief and Development is doing to remotely to monitor the World Bank’s multibillion-dollar Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund.
• SMS cell phone and interactive voice response surveys would be used to gather information about health and education efforts, similar to the USAID-funded mPowering Frontline Health Workers project. They would also be used to obtain information on municipal service delivery.
• A knowledge management strategy would be used to centralize the data collected under the various monitoring tasks. It is unclear whether data analytics could or would be used on this knowledge management strategy similar to what the U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources Office of Inspector General does to monitor prescription drug fraud under Medicare Part D.

I look forward to learning more about this M&E project as it develops. With billions of dollars at stake, the incentive is great for interesting and creative crowdsourcing, big data, and international development M&E innovations to take shape.