Analysing traditional and social media
Instead of you reading blogs and newspapers and watching TV.

with a flexible blend of human-based methods for nuance and depth
we can replace you with a sweatshop employee in the Third world

with automation for volume and speed;
or a very simple shell script.

delivered through both online dashboard
that produces meaningless graphs

and deeply analytical, custom-written reports.
and incomprehensible jargon-ridden documents.

Talk to us about your traditional & social media monitoring & measurement needs.
You sound like the sort of person who might fall for this.

I remember when all communication was by human-based methods.

"[L]anguage so opaque that I literally can’t tell what they’re offering to do for me."

reminded me of the expatriate living in Sicily who received a letter couched in such flowery language that he had to take it to a neighbor to find out whether he was being honored at a ceremonial dinner or invited to join a fraternal organization. The answer: You are being threatened with kidnapping unless you pay a bribe.

Wow. Human based and custom written.

::boggle::

... I literally can’t tell what they’re offering to do for me.

They’re offering to relieve you - or your employer - of excess cash, of course. From that standpoint, the impossibility of telling what you are supposed to get in exchange for your money is a positive advantage, for them.

"He's fainted! Loosen his clothing and remove the cruel weight of his wallet from his chest."

The Faceless Corporation I work for was recently acquired by a Large German Multinational, and we started getting memos in German. "Cool," I think. "I can brush up on my German and it's work-related."

I can read Der Spiegel, Deutsche Welle, and German-language blogs, but Business German is, if anything, more opaque than Business English, heavily larded with English calques and borrowings from Business French. If Otto Normalverbraucher can't read it, what hope have I?

That's an astounding piece of poetry right there. It's almost as information dense as an Ezra Pound poem or Dutch Shultz' last words. Though I think the signal to noise ratio is closer to the latter than the former.

I'm reminded of the time a few years ago when my employment homework involved reading a book with a title containing three, um, "words," only one of which was not an acronym and only two of which contained vowels.

This sounds disturbingly like something the marketing people at my company would say to each other.

"Analysing traditional and social media with a flexible blend of human-based methods..."

Looks like HBGary's new business direction, after their recent triumphs in IT Security.

I keep thinking that somewhere at this company's offices, there's a document written in normal English that says "our target audience is corporate employees who have spending authority, but have never heard of Google Analytics."

I'm guessing the company has designed Markov-model-based marketing text generators, and wants to sell them.

Background:

An nth-order Markov model of text builds up a table of how likely you are to see each possible letter, given that you've just seen some specific n letters before. So, if n=2, then you'd have one letter probability table for when you'd just seen "ab" and another for when you'd just seen "ee" and so on.

You can use this kind of model to generate text randomly: After generating a starting sequence to get the ball rolling, you keep track of the previous n letters generated, and generate the next letter by following the probability table for those previous n letters. (So if you've just generated "ee", and the table now says that "n" has .3 probability and "d" has .2 probability, then you choose "n" with probability .3, "d" with probability .2, and so on.) You can also do the same thing with words instead of letters--compute the probability of the next word, given that the previous two words were "It was" or something.

Now, the fun thing about this is that when you get up to 3rd or 4th order models, generating outputs from them produces text that looks *almost* like it means something, but it somehow doesn't quite make sense. This page has some fun examples of this. If you're using a model based on letters, then you get real words, and also words that look like they ought to be real words, but kind-of aren't somehow. If you're using words, you get these weird sentences that almost hang together, but you can't quite make sense of them.

Anyway, marketing-speak has always seemed to me like it came out of a high-order Markov model, so this seems like a natural extension.

c'mon, it's obviously a sex thing.

But who can turn the stream of marketing? Or break the Markov chain of insidious spam?

Don't go with these guys; they don't even offer to synergize your paradigms.

OT: More about the South Park / Avenue Q Book of Mormon musical

Previews begin at the Eugene O'Neill theater on 2/24, opens on 3/24.

Avenue Q's Robert Lopez: "I’d taken Harold Bloom at Yale. I really liked the idea of the Bible as literature – a story that can change the world in this very profound and powerful way, but in the end it’s just a story. Nothing demonstrates that as well as the Book of Mormon, because it was written so recently. When you hear the story of it, he so clearly made it up. It’s such a load of baloney. But people believe in it so strongly, and their lives really are demonstrably changed for the good by it. I had thought about doing the Bible Part III, but then I realized, that’s the Book of Mormon. That’s the Bible fan fiction."

Talk to us about your traditional & social media monitoring & measurement needs

This obviously is about your need to be endowed with a bigger penis.

I think what bothers me most about that message is that it almost makes sense...

... which suggests that I'm in dire need of a vacation, a drink, and a good deep steam-and-clean of the cerebral cortex.

This reminds me of the manager that I had who after Sept 11th had me document what exactly I did because it wasn't recorded anywhere and who loaned me a book called "Who Stole My Cheese?" I remember wondering "Why would I care about this badly written thing?" Three days later I found out why...

Alex Hamilton@#15:

That reminds me of a doggerel. Back in the Startup Days, I worked for a nice company with a nice name that wanted a startup name instead. They decided that the way you should make a startup name was to take a few buzwords and glue them together, as in "synertelligence" or "informanalytech".

They gave up sometime around when engineering began to sing,
Info-inform-inter-ana-biz-intelli-gistics!
We'll synergize your bottom-line with patented heuristics!
Our business model's vetted by the top Tibetan mystics:
Infoinforminteranabizintelligistics!
which was a shame, since we never got a chance to write anything but the chorus.

Analysing traditional and social media with a flexible blend of human-based methods for nuance and depth with automation for volume and speed

I can't tell if they're employing cyborgs or uploads.

Either way, it's the end of the world as we know it.

Silly marketingdroid. Corpus linguistics are not a salesman tool.

Sadly, I do understand that, but I suspect it comes from a competitor of my Day Jobbe employer, or at least someone in a closely-related business sector.

a flexible blend of human-based methods for nuance and depth with automation for volume and speed

"...now with less than 2% chance of runaway Focus and mindrot!"

reminded me of the expatriate living in Sicily who received a letter couched in such flowery language that he had to take it to a neighbor to find out whether he was being honored at a ceremonial dinner or invited to join a fraternal organization. The answer: You are being threatened with kidnapping unless you pay a bribe.

This sounds rather like the opening of "The Wallet of Kai Lung". Kai Lung, alone on the road, is held up at gunpoint by the notorious brigand Lin Yi:

"O illustrious person," said Kai Lung very earnestly, "this is evidently an unfortunate mistake. Doubtless you were expecting some exalted Mandarin to come and render you homage, and were preparing to overwhelm him with gratified confusion by escorting him yourself to your well-appointed abode. Indeed, I passed such a one on the road, very richly apparelled, who inquired of me the way to the mansion of the dignified and upright Lin Yi. By this time he is perhaps two or three li towards the east."

"However distinguished a Mandarin may be, it is fitting that I should first attend to one whose manners and accomplishments betray him to be of the Royal House," replied Lin Yi, with extreme affability. "Precede me, therefore, to my mean and uninviting hovel, while I gain more honour than I can reasonably bear by following closely in your elegant footsteps, and guarding your Imperial person with this inadequate but heavily-loaded weapon."

You don't understand this because you haven't spent much time around MBAs, and therefore have less cognitive damage than those of us who have.

But yeah, they're basically offering to have a person ("human-based methods") review what happens when you google ("automation") your company's name and buzzwords (sorry, "brand identity") and show it to you in pretty charts ("online dashboards"), some of which you can pay them to make relevant ("custom-written"). Then they'll tell your marketing/communications department how effectively that department is doing its job.

Theoretically a useful service, if probably better done by someone internal; if it weren't buzzworded into the realm of manifest evil.

I'd translate that into normal English as:

"Dear middle-aged corporate PR person. If you give us lots of your company's money, we will provide some reports in your corporate language. These reports will say that all these web-thingies that you don't understand, on which lots of young people say things that you can't understand, are full of positive stuff about your company. There will also be pretty pie-charts that you can put into your PowerPoint presentations. Because these reports are expensive, they will be very credible with your superiors. This will mean that your corporation will give you large pay rises and bonuses."

#20 ::: Lighthill

Um diddle diddle diddle um diddle ay
Um diddle diddle diddle um diddle ay
When I was a younger man
My father he said, "Son,
You must write a business plan
And tell me when you've done."
I didn't have a clue, of course,
To tell me what he meant
But someone told me, "Just outsource!"
And to these folks I went:

This is perfect marketing communication: it is comprehensible only to the group of people who would be in a position to fall for i-- erm, direct their corporate resources in the direction of the sender.

Just last week my date and I visited a new little bakery in town with vegan cupcakes, which we were enjoying in spite of them having 5x the icing required--at least until a marketing droid come up to the table and begin asking questions about the brand identity and what might improve the customer experience in the store.

I didn't have the presence of mind to suggest that our experience would be improved by not having to talk to marketers while still in the store.

johnofjack @ 30 ...
I didn't have the presence of mind to suggest that our experience would be improved by not having to talk to marketers while still in the store.

"What do you want?"
"I want you to go away!"

The marketing guy didn't look like this, did he?

#28 Mr Macdonald:

What nameless demon from the uttermost pits has put it into my mind - and will not allow me to let it go - that this verse should be sung to the tune of 'Supercalifragelisticexpialidocious"?

This: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-The-HB-Gary-Email-That-Should-Concern-Us-All on what H.B. Gary has been up to is very disturbing.

It sounds like the US military has been contracting with them for software that would allow people to manage dozens of sock-puppet identities each, going through proxies to come from different sets of IP addresses, and help them present a coherent illusion that they're all different people. WHAT THE FUCK?

xeger @31:

Quite literally LOL there.

Clifton @ 33:

NSA et al. already monitor social media for intelligence, so I'd guess that the sockpuppetware is probably for propaganda. It could serve to paint a false picture of public response to an event, justifying whichever senseless crackdown the government wants and the media is currently ignoring. Devious and unethical, of course.

xeger @ 31: No, but he did immediately signal "not human" when I overheard him at the register using the word "synergy."

I think the problem is just their meter.

Analysing media both social and traditional, with
human depth and nuance merged with automatic speed and volume;
We will give you answers both in thorough custom-made reports and
online dashboards that are fast and deeply analytical.

Speak with us today about the social and traditional, and
we will help you measure all the things you need to know.

ObXKCD for analytical online dashboards.

James @ #28:

Gee, thanks!

Dave @ #32:

Well, that is what we sang the chorus to the tune of.

That's just plain evil.

Bruce @19

Years ago I heard a sermon that was supposedly based on "Who moved my cheese"

Not only did the preacher think there was something more profound than a mediocre analogy to be had, he couldn't sum up the gist of the story. He had all the right nouns, but couldn't seem to put them in the right order. I think he ended up saying that the mouse who did nothing got the most cheese.

I think there needs to be a new mouse for this type of alternate reality creator, one that finds an open space in the maze, declares it the goal, and himself the king of the goal.

I'll see you that, #41, and raise you this: I saw a play based on WHO MOVED MY CHEESE? at a megachurch.

The gist was that corporate uncertainly should, of course, lead you to a closer relationship to Christ -- but that the cheese would move no matter what, and that bosses had a right to move it.

'Tis a shame Protestant churches don't burn people at the stake for heresy anymore....

Clifton:

We've been discussing this a bit on the open thread, too. The whole story is really striking, more because this is one of those instances where we get an accidental, surprise view of something hidden. It seems very unlikely that this is the only company doing this stuff, or that Wikileaks is the only target it's been done to so far (actually, the leaked emails suggest that there was at least one other target). Instead, I have to guess that this is an industry, and we are getting a look inside it.

Attempts at "perception management" within the US have been pretty common. Details of a few (like the pentagon military advisors scandal, or the attempt to shut down Joe Wilson by leaking his wife's identity as a CIA agent to the press. I assume there must be a great deal more that hasn't come out. And of course, much of it, should it come out, won't be reported on broadcast TV.

Just as one aside, it's worth noting that, in practice, if these guys had gone forward with the worst of their plans, and had hacked peoples' computers, used pretexting (more-or-less social engineering) to get private data, and had violated a dozen laws in attacking Wikipedia on behalf of Bank of America, they would of course have never been charged with any crimes. Seriously, can you even *imagine* them being charged with crimes for any of that, directed against Wikipedia, Glenn Greenwald, or anyone related to them? No, here in America, we look forward, not backward--at least when powerful people and their servants commit the crimes.

Applause to the joint effort of Lighthill @20 and Jim @28

Mike Dixon @37 I think the problem is just their meter made me think perhaps it should be something like this

I am the very model of a monitor of media
Traditional and social outlets (just not wikipedia)
I've human-based analysis and dashboards full of tedia
I am the very model of a monitor of media

xeger @31: A good chuckle from me too - and I needed it.

thomas @1, a fine translation..

OtterB, thank you,

I've human-based analysis and dashboards full of tedia
I am the very model of a monitor of media

is a beautiful couplet.

'deeply analytical' is what Aaron Barr of HBGary thought to be his core competence. Luckily he is also profoundly incompetent at the actual technicalities of security, so his secret plans and clever tricks came to naught. arstechnica.com has the best coverage I've read of the shenanigans, by Nate Anderson.

albatross @ 43:
No, here in America, we look forwardaway

FTFY

Who cheesed my move?

Since OtterB got in ahead of me with the MMG (and better than I would have done, I suspect), this:

Let me not to the use of dashboard
admit ignorance. Brand is not brand
which rewards not when customers reward,
or records not the eyeball as it land:
O, no! it is an oft re-written graph
that shows the traffic broken down by type,
with custom charts ideal for mark'ting staff
we'll mark the axes with buzzwords and hype.
Web's not Numbers fool, though our analysis
reports provide enough nuance and depth
add automation to prevent paralysis
having no programmer who is adept.
There is no error in our solution,
Buy our product, no substitution.

Albatross at 12:
A friend of mine wrote a program like that, and I like to feed it weird source texts when I get a chance.

I totally want to write a song version of Who Moved the Cheese to the tune of After the Fox.

Who moved the cheese?
I moved the cheese.
etc.

If I didn't have to bake a cake right now....

For a number of years, I was the alphabetically-last member of my group at work, and one of the department clerks was the alphabetically-first member of his, and for bureaucratic reasons best left un-addressed at this juncture, the organization charts could easily be misread in ways that suggested that I was his supervisor.

So every year or two I'd get some email that was written in a language almost but not quite entirely unlike English, and have to go tell him that the HR department was sending out emails probably involving him that indicated that they were up to something involving verbs that had been nounified in ways that obscured any actual references to actual objects (e.g. "there is expected to be a declaration"), but probably indicated that they were about to do Something Bad that required them to notify union members in advance so they could haggle about seniority and decide who it would be done to. Eventually he got himself bumped to a job somewhere else, and eventually my group hired someone whose last name began with T, but I don't remember which happened first.

Lighthill #20
James #28

Um diddle diddle diddle um diddle ay
Um diddle diddle diddle um diddle ay
So when your target audience
Is slipping from your hands,
Just summon up our business sense,
And you'll regain the brand,
But better use us frugally,
Or we may change your taste,
One night we doubted google,
And now we're human-based!

And it's so nice to see products being offered that are buzzword-compliant.

If you wake at midnight, wondering who has read your blog
Don't Google analytics, don't read your server log
Them as answers questions can't be sold a lie
Watch the wall, my darling, while the media go by

A Focused Soliloquy

Why is it that I'm conscious?
There are no cycles free for errant thoughts.
Google search, and google search, and google search,
Hunt for the client's name in blogs and tweets,
To the last terabyte of archived news.
And all our iterations give the fools
is powerpoint nonsense. Fill out that pie chart!
Life is a background daemon, a root process
Grubbing through the feed of input bytes,
To find a corporate brand. It is a chart
Drawn by automata, full of puff and buzzwords,
Signifying nothing.

Doug K @46, thanks.

Bruce Cohen @49, you took the harder form. Nicely done.

Niall McAuley @56, It is a chart
Drawn by automata, full of puff and buzzwords,
Signifying nothing. Oh my. Yes, alas.

One positive thing about the language of the original message: it's inspired some brilliance in this thread.

Lecturing ML about social media is like lecturing Amazon about grid computing.

Alas, I completely understand this despite its inelegant wording. It sounds like a competitor of these guys: http://www.radian6.com/ and they do do more than Google Analytics.

If you're responsible for even a small chunk of social media at a really big company, it's nice to be able to hire somebody to make those nice charts and tables so you can easily share them with executives whose flappers allow you about 30 seconds a month of air time to justify your existence. (Glad I don't do *that* job anymore.)

Valueless service, no. Really bad sales pitch, yes indeedy.

Path Not Taken

My consciousness is spread across the eons
while drooling lips make nonsense sounds into
computer microphones for other peons
whose babbles tell the normals what to do

a fleet of ramscoops leaving for a star
where interlocking failues soon will spread
campaigns of propaganda beamed from so far
prevent the crisis coming to a head

a fallen colony has been discovered
we plan a rescue mission filled with tech
rebellion on another world lies waiting
a fleet is sent to make of them a wreck

In idle instants I am me, consider
the days I watched his hungry face and mind
The spiders sold us to the highest bidder
tas old Pham Nuwen coming from behind

I was a monster's servant, now I dream
to keep a growing order from the dark
with fifty worlds depending on an old scheme
to turn dark wilderness into a park

Two centuries ago, it was decided
When Qiwi, Vinh, and Tomas died to find
A dream to end the cycles, oft derided
found fertile ground inside the Focused mind

35: (rewriting the old joke) Are they going to put out a bulletin if they find any?

In general, I have frequently held up prime examples of Manglementspeak to someone in management, saying "can you please translate this into English for me?" If they say "no, I don't understand it either", it's gibberish. If they can, good. If they understand it, but can't translate it, they've been irrevocably corrupted and are put into the box marked "Suit".

I realize that there are things that are *best*, *fastest*, or *easiest* explained by jargon - after all, I work in computers (and play Bridge). Those who can't unpack it (even if it takes longer and may not be as precise) for those who don't speak the jargon either don't understand it enough; or are no longer human (they are this weird subspecies marked "Engineer", "Management", "Financier", or otherwise). Those who can, but choose not to (because it would take too long, or they don't care about people who aren't part of the same caste), are aiming for the latter.

What a great thread. Please edit this out. I read the initial TBNH entry and thought, "Have you ever tried to decipher Charles M. Blow on the editorial page of NYT on Saturday? This is his weekend job, I'm sure." BND

At least, that's what I think she's asking for.

But then, why post it in the first place?

I had the vague thought that the "n" in both initial sets stood for Nielsen, and that this was a way to communicate with a sister or cousin whose address she didn't have. But she doesn't have, or want, an online presence.

It's possible that I'm over thinking this. :)

Today we have Naming of Parts.
Yesterday we had
Analysing traditional and social media
and tomorrow we will have a flexible blend of human-based methods for nuance and depth
but today we have the Naming of Parts.

This is the use of Common Sense, which in your case you have not got.
This is mass e-mailing. You can do it quite easy if you have any automation for volume and speed; delivered through both online dashboards and deeply analytical, custom-written reports.

Perhaps you will never get the knack of traditional & social media monitoring & measurement needs. I would measure the distance between here and common sense to be about a year and a half.

Barbara Dowell is Teresa's mom, my friends. I understood her post except for "please edit this out." Maybe the part that made that make sense was edited out?

I'm glad to see the comment here, anyway!

Xopher - I was referring to "Please edit this out." I understood it to mean that she wanted the whole post deleted.

Good to know that I was right about everything except the exact familial relationship. (And about what she wanted...)