The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

I shared the initial analysis with Alex and he asked me to share it, hence this comment/post/discussion thread.

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We decided on the latter.

You can learn a lot about NextStage's Sentiment Analysis tool by following the links at the bottom of the NSSA About page.

The Analyses

Please go to the analysis of the entire webpage to follow along with this analysis.

Starting at the top with Basic: Author Attitude - The fact that the Positive (green bar) is about 10pts higher than the Negative (red bar) is an indication that the author (Alex, in this case) is doing "heart" writing. They are writing to an audience they both know and believe will respond positively to what is written. Because they (probably) both know and believe the response will be positive, they're sharing more of themselves than they might normally share in a professional piece of writing.

Intermediate: Confidence - This is a very impressive value, 67%, and high enough to be rarely seen in professional pieces that aren't blatant self-promotion or demonstrations of outright arrogance. In a training, I would instruct users to compare the Confidence value to Intermediate: Message Intent: Referral, Active Pleasure and Love values and Advanced: Trust and Advanced: Affinity values found further down in the report. The fact that all these values are also relatively high indicates that the Confidence value is based on the author's core beliefs in what they're offering rather than sarcasm, arrogance or self-promotion. In any case, 67% is a demonstration that the author (Alex) strongly believes the audience will both benefit and act upon the information presented.

Intermediate: Audience Branding - The fact that the "Read Once Then Ignore" value is low and the other values in this section are non-existent indicates that a general audience wouldn't pay much attention to this piece. As with Confidence, I would instruct users to compare these values with Advanced: Sphere of Influence: Real Followers. That value is at 30%, meaning that 30% of the people in the author's immediate circle of associates will respond to it. Thirty percent is a fairly high number in marketing circles and something to be proud of. The fact that Real Followers is 30% but Friends of Followers and Friends of Friends are insignificant indicates that this piece could be audience specific (meaning it's full of jargon only known to a specific audience) and definitely that people outside of the author's sociologic "first circle" won't pay much attention to it, hence will "Read Once Then Ignore".

Intermediate: Message Intent - The high Referral, Active Pleasure and Love values all demonstrate that the author believes the information presented is valuable to the reader, will be acted upon by the reader and that the author believes they are both recognized and honored by their audience. Very nice. This conclusion is verified by the Advanced: Trust and Advanced: Affinity values both being between 15-20%, both good numbers for a western cultural audience/author. Advanced: Trust and Affinity are indications of whether or not the author believes they are a member of their audience, hence that the audience will accept and act upon the information presented. Those values being between 15-20% validate many of the other values in this analysis.

Intermediate: Author Influencer Type - At 90%, the author strongly believes they can influence their audience to act in certain ways. Also note the GateKeeper value is about 10% of the Influencer value. This indicates that the author also believes there may be a need to protect the audience from something. This becomes obvious after a simple read of the material; the material is about trust demonstrations between individuals without social ties. Whenever there is a request for trust there may be a concern about misplaced trust, hence the residual GateKeeper value.

Advanced: Ten Must Marketing Messages - The two leftmost values, We Trust You and You Can Trust Us, form a nice stair and this is good because it demonstrates the trust relationship both extended by the author and received by the audience. The next four values, This Is Important to We Can Help You, don't demonstrate as nice a staircase and this can be a concern. The difference between This Is Important and This Is Important to You equates to someone not proving something's importance but still demanding that people pay attention, likewise the step between We Can Help and We Can Help You equates to someone being a tad obsessive towards an individual than being able to genuinely help that individual. The analysis provides some suggestions for rewriting the material so that these messages aren't lost in the mix.

Advanced: Trust - A value of 16% is on the high side of what English speaking, western educated authors get here and is usually an indication of some relationship pre-existing between the author and their audience.

Advanced: Affinity - The 19% value here indicates (for most English speaking, western educated authors) that the author believes they are part of their audience. This is validated by some of the other values in the report and means the author believes their audience will respond to the provided information as intended. Advanced: Author-Audience Rich Persona - RichPersona is a NextStage metric that a) I've written about quite a bit elsewhere and b) all of our clients use for a variety of purposes. The RichPersona section provides some psychologic factors of the most receptive audience for the material presented.

Advanced: Sphere of Influence - As mentioned previously, this material will work well with an audience familiar with the author and subject but not beyond it.

But Wait! There's More!

What I want to offer next can be thought of as "Comparing Apples with Apples, but Granny Smiths with Golden Delicious". The previous analysis came from analyzing how the entire web page -- how it's typeface, font, colors, images, ... -- affects readership.

All NextStage tools are format recognizing and format sensitive. Format recognizing and format sensitive means they are aware that how people interact with a webpage is different than how they interact with an email, with a brochure, a DOC file, straight text, etc. Being format recognizing and sensitive is important because these different formats influence how people respond to the information presented.

That stated, compare the values presented above with the values revealed from a plain text analysis). What follows is an analysis of Alex's material only (I cut&pasted Alex's material into a text file and analyzed that with NextStage's Sentiment Analysis tool). The differences between the full web page and just Alex's content demonstrate that people should write both for the audience and also for how their information is presented to its audience.

Basic: Author Attitude - The plain content demonstrates more Positive than the web page version and draws that increase from both Neutral and Negative. In other words, if the author were sharing this information with you directly, you'd probably feel better about it.

Intermediate: Confidence - Here is the big news; the web page's formatting, etc., is draining about 20 percentage points from this value. The author, by themself, is much more confident in their material than the web page would lead the reader to nonconsciously believe.

Intermediate: Message Intent - The web page has the same stultifying aspects on the Love metric here.

Intermediate: Author Influencer Type - The pure material has a recognizably higher Hub value meaning the author sans web page formatting also believes the information they're offering is time, person and place specific.

Advanced: Ten Must Marketing Messages - You'll notice that the staircase of This Is Important to We Can Help You is much better in the non-web page version.

Advanced: Trust and Affinity - Here is the big news. The author sans web page formatting is demonstrating amazingly high values of social trust and affinity with their audience. These numbers are recognizably high for an English speaking, western educated author and that author should be congratulated (congrats, Alex!).

Advanced: Sphere of Influence - And here is where marketing in the guise of placement, web page audience versus individual's audience, etc., come into play. While the author's native material has much higher social connectivity and relationship values, its actual audience is much smaller, meaning the author transmitting this material by themself will make less of an impact that by placing that same material on this outlet.

Hope this helps and is useful. Please feel free to contact me directly with questions, comments or concerns.

Joseph

Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.

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• 21 Sept 2010 - Social Media Messaging with Meaning in Concord, NH

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