Over a period spanning from November 2009 to February 2010, our research reveals perceptions that have the online opinion leaders from six countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and China.

Key findings:

- A state of ruptured trust: banks and Corporations are seen as reckless, fraudulent and disconnected from reality whilst Governments around the world are blamed for their inaction or their inability to rein in wrong-doing financial corporations.

- Banks are (still) to blame: in all countries surveyed, banks are chiefly blamed. Their actions and policies are designated as direct causes of the crisis. Moreover, they are criticised for keeping the bad habits (lack of transparency, over-sized bonuses, etc.) that led the world to plunge into its worst crisis since second world war.

- Corporations stand in the shadow of trust: although corporations, with the exception of banks, are not particularly distrusted, they are not particularly trusted either. Moreover, whereas different categories of non-corporate individuals are trusted to help economies and societies move out of the crisis, CEOs are almost never.

- Governments did not & do not act appropriately: when Governments are blamed (in some countries more than corporations, i.e. FR & US), it is mostly for the blind eye they turned on the bank’s actions and for their continued inability to enforce new and efficient regulations.

- Governments standing “between banks and the pitchforks”, for how long? In this context, Governments around the world may end up heeding Barack Obama’s word and siding with public opinion against banks.

- Back to the basics of trust: all in all, it appears opinions leaders are expressing a need for more conservative behaviours and more personal relationships (through individuals such as community managers or stakeholders managers) with corporations or governments.

- Trusting whom? Individuals such as experts, political leaders, peers or civil society actors such as NGOs are more easily trusted than corporate entities (along with their CEOs) or governments. Furthermore, corporations and governments are going to be judged upon their ability to play their roles (e.g. Regulating for governments or Fuelling the economy for banks).

You would like to learn more? Download the research report and contact us

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UPDATE  & DETAILS (21/11/09)

Let’s get to the bottom of things, shall we.

First, what exactly is included in the map of the Eurosphere. Inside each of the spheres included in this preliminary piece of research (which rests on the analysis of 4 European countries, namely France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands and a specific European-affairs sphere), there are communities of political bloggers and portals (i.e. communities whose members are affiliated to a given party or clearly advocating a political platform, represented in shades of blue), communities of journalists and experts (shades of green), communities of political pundits commenting on public issues without a clear or distinctive party line (under the label “opinion”, shades of red), media websites (shades of orange), trade unions (shades of purple), think tanks (light blue), institutions (websites of public bodies or international organisations, brown), NGOs and activists (grey).

Second, how do we explore and segment the social web and build maps of online communities in general, and of the political Eurosphere in particular. According to theories and concepts drawn from sociology and the social graph field (see this research paper we published at ESOMAR for a lot more details), we use proprietary web crawlers and algorithms to reveal clusters of websites (blogs, social networks, forums, etc.) that flock together and form true communities whose members listen to and influence one another, mainly around their shared topics of interest (politics in a broad sense for the Eurosphere). The distance between websites (in a given community) and between communities (on a given map like the Eurosphere) simply reveal the density of their interactions. The closer they are, the more they engage each other (or engage the same websites around them, meaning that two websites or two communities may not engage each other but may interact with pretty much the same websites around them), the further away they are, the less they engage each other in conversations. We base ourselves on these concepts to draw conclusions as to the dynamics of the social web and the Eurosphere in particular.

Finally, we also conduct opinion research by way of monitoring all the public conversations happening inside the communities we have mapped. This is how we are able to measure quantitatively and analyse qualitatively different items of perception, interest or judgement.

All the findings of our preliminary piece of research (which will be updated in the coming months) can be found in the PDF file below. Here’s a summary:

Map & Analysis of the European political web

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Linkfluence is known for its web cartography expertise, but that’s not all we do. Maps are tools, they define a territory, a “playing field”, which we can then mine and analyze. One way of analyzing the context and content of discussions is by creating word clouds: word clouds provide a convenient albeit imperfect overview of the gist of a large volume of content. Unfortunately, word clouds are typically used as ‘snapshots’ of said content at a given time. This is fine when looking at homogeneous content, but becomes counterproductive when trying to analyze trends, rise or decline of certain words, brands or concepts over time, particularly when considering the ebb and flow of online conversations.

We have been working on this issue for some time, with the objective of combining the convenience of word clouds with a chronological dimension to follow semantic trends. And here it is: “timecloud” allows you to manipulate the time line and update the associated word clouds accordingly.

In the following example, which represents a “timecloud” for the brand Apple within the Mac-fans community, one can easily visualize which words, brands, adjectives come and go over the past 90 days. Unsurprisingly, “iphone” and “app store” remain very prominent throughout the entire period, while product launches like “snow leopard” or “tablet” pop up at the time of the launch then recede in the background.

Hence, this “timecloud” not only displays the most frequently-used words over the selected time period, it also shows the evolution of the conversation through the appearance and disappearance of those key words and concepts. It is also possible to toggle the “list mode” (icon in the upper right hand corner, next to the magnifying glass) to display all the words with the same size, including “unused” words (in light grey) for the selected period. When selecting a word on the tag cloud, a graph will appear at the bottom, showing relative volume of mentions over the entire timeline. Using the ctrl key, one can select up to four words and follow their evolution over time.

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News Trends - Content published across a sample of 13 000 sites

What’s newsworthy –or blogworthy- however largely depends on which part of the web you’re looking at, or which community one hails from. By and large, health care reform remains the dominant topic of discussion within the conservative and progressive communities.

Out of a sample of 1202 conservative blogs and 1190 progressive blogs, health care reform accounted for 9.7% and 12.3% of new content respectively during the week of Sept. 21 to Sept. 27. By comparison, discussions about the need for more troops in Afghanistan “only” accounted for 4.8% of content published on the conservative side vs. 3.5 on the liberal side. The same topic however fired up the Defense (23.1%) and International Affairs (15.7%) communities which naturally dedicated more content to this topic than any other this week.

The International Affairs community got even busier by the second half of the week with a series of news coming out of the United Nations General Assembly, environment summit and security council resolution. The environmental community got stirred up as well by the U.N. Climate Summit in the run-up to Copenhagen.

Let’s see next week if the G-20 summit manages to garner as much attention.

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The research concluded that blogs typically trail behind “MSM”, except in rare instances (3.5% of story lines to be precise) where a handful of blogs picked up on the news first. Unsurprisingly, these are not just any blogs but professional and quasi-professional political blogs with the connections, competence and credibility that in effect puts them on par with traditional news organizations.

We recently had the opportunity to look up close at one such instance where an influential political blog “broke the news”, initiating a new news cycle as national media followed suit. The following video is a visualization of the propagation of the story as it moves across the online political landscape.

Blogs breaking news – firedoglake case study from linkfluence on Vimeo.

note: this visualization was created afterwards, based on a sample of articles covering the story, to dynamically represent the speed at which this particular piece of information spread from a well-identified source to many other blogs and media sites. It is not “real-time” propagation and does not represent every article and every site referencing the story. For methodology questions regarding the map itself, please refer to the “Keys” section on this page .

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Peter Corbett with iStrategyLabs posted this great video-demo of our linkscape dashboard (tagline: “social graph insight”).

Mapping Linkfluence – Financial & Swine Flu Example from Peter Corbett on Vimeo.

If you’re looking for “catch-all” social media monitoring, linkscape is probably not the right tool for you. But if you believe like us that “less is more”, that social media analysis at the community level can provide a fuller picture than individual posts, and if you’re desperate to measure trends and share of voice over time without falling victim to the “Google Dance”, you ought to give linkscape a try.

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In his own words [social media monitoring] “is a bit like astronomy in that the key to success is looking at the right parts of the sky. For much of the time, there may be nothing happening in that space – but this in itself is important information. And when information does enter it – it can come from anywhere – an ‘influential blog’ or a random tweet. Both may be equally important. Places only become relevant when they enter your spaces – which is why the space is the place, as it were”.

This is largely counter-intuitive to most speeches (pitches?) about online monitoring (along the lines of “what you don’t know can kill you” [insert kryptonite/Dell Hell/Motrin case study here], yet very commonsensical to most seasoned bloggers and monitoring experts.

Good monitoring starts with defining your online brand territory and mapping the universe of sites and feeds that are actually relevant to your brand. Sure, something may always appear out of left field, but 9.9 times out of ten, it won’t gain any traction unless it is picked up by one or several sites in your universe of reference, which will act as critical Connectors to pass it up the food chain. That sample of the Net is indeed a net through which you can catch or discard relevant information. The network is the radar: know the network and you’ll spend less time stargazing.

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linkfluence has launched, in partnership with the leading fragrance community portal osMoz, the first Fragrance trends research on the social web. The study, already available for the French market (US and German editions are under way), can detect trends that traditional research methods might not unveil, such as the fact that niche brands have a slight edge over classic brands within women communities on the French social web.

Lauranie Nonotte and Anthony Hamelle will present this study’s key insights – some of which can be seen in the presentation below – at ESOMAR Fragrance Conference in Cannes (France) on 23 June 2009. Feel free to contact us to get more information on this study and order your copy of the full report!

0906 Linkpaper Fragrance FR V1 english

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Both brands, for different reasons, have suffered bruising “web-storms”. Fortunately, no one dies in these kinds of storms, but reputations can get blown away in a matter of hours or so it seems. Domino’s will now join the growing list of famous brands who got punk’d on the web, following in the footsteps of the Dells and Jet Blues of this world.

Looking at the graph below, which is based on a qualified sample of web conversations across 41 communities, there was no way for Domino’s to keep this “on the down low”, as seemed to be the preferred strategy in the early stages of the crisis.

Domino's video: buzz trend (tracked by linkfluence)

More importantly, the incident quickly spread across various communities in a matter of a couple of days, as mass media exposure turbo-charged viral propagation of the incident over and across social networks and online communities:

In terms of “buzz volume”, it appears Domino’s even vaulted past AIG on April 16, which is no small feat. (The two pizza employees did not manage however to beat the buzz generated by another Internet sensation this week: Scotland’s new web-celeb’, Susan Boyle).

comparison on of buzz trends: AIG, Domino's, Susan Boyle (tracked by linkfluence)

For all the Sturm und Drang over this most distasteful video, the crisis has probably already peaked. With the arrest of the two pranksters, and a message of apology from Domino’s CEO, Patrick Doyle in a YouTube video, the story appears to have now run its course. This was probably a shrewd move, already tried and tested by JetBlue’s CEO and Starbucks in response to YouTube-powered controversies.

Although Patrick Doyle’s video (orange line in the graph below) has only received a tiny fraction of the total number of views obtained by the initial video (purple line), it was released quickly enough, at the tail end of the story cycle, to benefit from a good amount of exposure in subsequent articles and posts.

number of links to employees' video (Orange line) and CEO apology video (purple line) - measured by linkfluence

Unfortunately for the company however, the fact that attention is already shifting away from the incident does not imply its reputation will not suffer lingering effects.

Clearly, the long term impact of this episode will need to be tracked and measured for some time as part of the recovery process. And as Domino’s rushed to Youtube and Twitter to respond to the groundswell of negative publicity, they will now most likely follow the example of many other brands burned by social media. They were forced to jump into the social media arena in the midst of a crisis and had to sustain their social media presence, long after the immediate ruckus had subsided.

This will undoubtedly be Domino’s’ strategy as well going forward, to progressively regain the confidence of their followers and build up their web presence in each social media channel of the Conversation Prism in order to better respond to the next Big One.

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“On the web today, bloggers and web surfers alike are free to share their opinions and consequently set a tone, thus creating a discussion certainly not lost on brands, specifically those in the beauty industry. This market, already hyper-sensitive to word of mouth, depends on the blogosphere as an indispensable tool to analyze consumer behavior and purchase decisions. As a result of this progression, web analysis needs to be done not by using keywords or socio-demographic criteria, but through the lens of networks and community affinities.” (…)

“Such was the experience of Lancome with online opinion research firm Linkfluence in 2008, when investigating how, based on hypertextual patterns, communities of like-minded opinions tend to develop. For Lancome, Linkfluence identified 3 different communities of bloggers: Lifestyle, Fashion, and Beauty.” (…)

“This research has facilitated the process of reassuring managers about the interest of this kind of social and relational marketing”, stated Georges-Edouard Dias, director of internet and e-business strategies at L’Oreal.”

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