Echelon Insights

Posts from our team on the new science of measuring politics, sports, and entertainment.

[echeloninsights]

Get Predictive

Today, we’re excited to make one of our biggest announcements yet:the relaunch of Insights On Air, our competitive TV tracking platform, just in time for 2016.

Since last year, we’ve tracked more than $1.4 billion in broadcast TV spending and over 2.7 million spots from more than 2,000 sponsors. We’ve been able to see who’s getting the best rates on TV — and who’s not. And because our tracking doesn’t stop at the top of the ticket, we give clients the complete picture of what’s going on in a media market, including the other races on the ballot that are saturating the airwaves and driving up costs.

Now, Insights On Air includes Predictive Spot-Level Intelligence.This new data product tracks which programs and placements your competitors are buying before the spots even air, letting you shape your response accordingly.

Ready to go beyond a backward look and get predictive with your competitive? Sign up right here.

Insights On Air is perfect for:

Political campaigns, organizations, and consultants looking to get complete situational awareness of what’s happening on the airwaves in their race and TV markets.

Media buyers and planners looking to reverse engineer their allies’ and competitors’ buy strategies and dramatically streamline the cumbersome process of mining data from the FCC public file.

Media companies and publishers looking to understand who’s in the market right now for paid media, from the statehouse to the White House.

Media outlets who want to go deeper in their reporting of how billions of dollars of TV inventory are bought and sold, including predictive insights on placements and buy efficiency.

Here’s a sneak peek at what’s new:

Understand an ally or competitor’s buy strategy before the fact. Starting with the early primary and caucus states, we’ve broken down tens of millions of dollars in reserved Presidential buys spot by spot so far. We deliver it to you as raw data or in rich immersive dashboards that shorten the time from analysis to action. Predictive Spot-Level Intelligence not only lets you understand what your competitors are buying, but who they may be trying to reach.

Flexible and customizable dashboards give you a birds eye view of all activity in a market, state, or contest.

See who’s getting which rates with our TV Station Breakdown. Here, we chart pricing trends over time, broken down by TV station, helping you spot anomalies or new buying opportunities.

At Echelon Insights, we’re building analytics technology infrastructure to empower our clients to become smarter and more efficient. Let us help you understand what’s coming and optimize your next move — not just within a given medium, but across mediums. From measuring traditional media to a fresh approach to measuring audiences on social media, our integrated analytics and reporting platforms bring instant value to your organization on day one.

Want to see more? Drop us a line and let us show you how the new Insights on Air can make you smarter this primary season and beyond.

[echeloninsights]

What Matters to Voters Minute-by-Minute

Last Thursday, Echelon Insights teamed up with NATIONAL PR, a leading Canadian public affairs firm, to help answer the question: What did Canadian voters really care about when they were watching the Leaders’ Debate?

Using Echelon Insights’ Optimized Listening platform, a social listening and data analytics dashboard, we analyzed conversation surrounding the candidates in a minute-by-minute view of Twitter conversation among Canadian political influencers.

The top three moments that generated the most mentions of the party leaders surrounded New Democratic Party leader Tom Mulcair and Prime Minister Stephen Harper of the Conservative Party, and occurred at 8:25, 8:56 and 9:03 PM.

MINUTE-BY-MINUTE INFLUENCER TWEETS SURROUNDING THE DEBATE The top debate moments with the highest audience engagement, measured in number of Influencers tweeting by the minute.

Mulcair generated the most mentions of any candidate in a single minute throughout the debate, when he said that child care needs to be a priority, the cost of housing is out of control, and that more money needed to be put in people’s pockets with a living wage. In that minute, at 9:03 PM, Mulcair garnered 23% more tweets among influencers than Harper in his top moment.

Harper had the other two biggest moments, generating the second and third most mentions among influencers in a single minute at 8:56 and 8:25, respectively. The biggest moment for Harper was spurred by his comment surrounding refugees, when he said that healthcare was not taken away from refugees, and that Canada would bring in more refugees, but would also need to do security. The second big moment for Harper surrounded his comment about the economy, when he explained that he never said “things are great,” and that the global economy is unstable, and despite that Canada has done better than anyone else.

Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau’s top moment, which generated the fifth highest spike of mentions in a single minute, occurred when during the debate he said that the Canadian economy needs to grow at the same pace as home values, and that the long-form census should be reinstated.

Examining specific issues that generated buzz among Twitter audiences, we found that the top three issues on Twitter among top Canadian political influencers were: the economy, Syria/refugees, and infrastructure. However, among all Canadian Twitter users, the priorities were slightly different, discussing energy and seniors more than the political influencers.

Ultimately, the economy dominated among issue-specific mentions accounting for 66% of the total share of voice. Syria had the second highest share of voice with 10%, followed by energy at 6%.

Examining the minute-by-minute mentions of issues by Canadian political influencers, we saw three large spikes around the economy, housing and infrastructure.

For more key takeaways from the debate, visit NATIONAL PR’s blog, here.

To check out Optimized Listening or request a demo, click here.

[echeloninsights]

DC’s Fastest Rising on Twitter

With insight into what DC’s elites have been saying on Twitter going back over a year, we thought it would be interesting to look at which media and political figures are on the rise, at least as defined by their Twitter following. 

For Optimized Listening, we built a network analysis of DC’s top political and media elites. Here, we look at the top 100 who’ve seen the most growth on Twitter in the last 3 months, including political reporters, operatives, media properties, and other influencers. 

We also break down each of their Twitter conversation by the more than 150 issues we’re tracking. 

Not on the list, and wondering where you rank? Sign up here to learn more about Optimized Listening. 

[echeloninsights]

The Most Popular Dashboard

This week we rolled out the latest version of Optimized Listening with multiple new, powerful dashboards. Today we’re excited to introduce the Most Popular dashboard.

Optimized Listening’s new Most Popular dashboard displays in real-time the most popular content driving conversations online. Distilling the most discussed stories of the day, the dashboard charts the most popular tweets by number of retweets and potential reach, displays the individual tweets that are generating engagement, and lists the most popular Twitter authors.

This dashboard is ideal for users who need to monitor and draw upon what’s happening in broader culture, or for those who want to monitor content relevant to their issue or organization through the lens of what reached the most people.

Above is a view of the top of the Most Popular dashboard. In this part of the dashboard the top tweets are plotted in relation to other pieces of popular content, so that users can compare reach and influence of the individual top tweets that are driving discussions among their target audiences, in addition to seeing the content of the individual tweets.

Unlike many other social listening dashboards, the Most Popular dashboard empowers users by providing the ability to search for mentions of specific words among popular tweets, as well as the ability to view historical data. With the Most Popular dashboard’s flexible filters and robust database, users can view the most popular content within a specific hour or over the course of an entire year. 

The image above is a view of the second half of the Most Popular Dashboard, which displays a grid of all of the top tweets and a list of popular authors. By clicking on any of the boxes within the tweet grid users are able to view the individual tweets. Or, if a user wants to see what a popular individual Twitter influencer is sharing, users can locate these authors by viewing the popular author list and clicking on the author.

Whether you’re trying to craft relevant and engaging content, monitor a specific issue, or just get a view of what’s happening online in general, the Most Popular dashboard is an amazing tool for any organization.

Want to learn how you can use the Most Popular dashboard for your company or organization? Let’s chat. Sign up for a demo today.

[echeloninsights]

New & Powerful: Optimized Listening’s Search Dashboard

This week we rolled out the newest version of Optimized Listening with multiple new, powerful dashboards. Today we’re excited to introduce our new Search dashboard.

Optimized Listening’s new Search dashboard is a highly flexible dashboard that provides a 360 degree view of online conversations around any issue as they happen. This dashboard is ideal for users who are monitoring an issue or who are just curious about what influencers are saying about a breaking news event.

Above is an example of the Search dashboard in action. In this example, we can see exactly how Trade Promotion Authority shifted from a conversation dominated by the left to one dominated by the right in the final days before a key House vote.

Within the dashboard users are able to query in real-time against influencer conversation on Twitter or use our filters to discover discussions about any issue. For any query or issue users select, Search delivers the related key metrics at the top of the dashboard, as well as a dynamic chart displaying the volume of conversation across multiple audiences, top influencers driving the conversation and top tweets that are mentioning the issue. This is an amazing way to understand the underlying dynamics of an issue and how it changes over time, showing you whether the conversation is aligned with your policy objectives or not.

Want to see if a word is being associated with your brand or organization? Or if your audience is noticing a story related to your brand? Our Search dashboard provides answers to these questions and many more. Unlike many other standard social listening platforms, our Search dashboard gives you a way to target your outreach efforts proactively at both a group and individual level.

Want to learn how you can use the Search dashboard for your company or organization? Let’s chat. Sign up for a demo today.

[echeloninsights]

Optimized Listening - Now Featuring Trendlines

At Echelon Insights, we’re passionate at coming up with the most insightful analytics to help our clients form their strategy and achieve their goals. That’s why we’re excited to announce that we’re rolling out a new version of Optimized Listening with upgraded capabilities and new highly-flexible dashboards. This week in honor of the new version of Optimized Listening, we’re going to be showing off the newest dashboards and all of their features. One of our newest and most powerful dashboards is our Trendlines dashboard.

Optimized Listening’s new Trendlines dashboard captures millions of online conversations as they happen and distills emerging conversational trends with vivid insight. With the Trendlines dashboard, users are able to zero in on conversations as they happen down to the hour, and see which issue dominated conversations and who drove those discussions giving you a granular view of the issue landscape at any given moment in time.

Looking at the Optimized Listening Trendline’s dashboard above, the dashboard is set to examine the Beltway Elite audience (a group of Washington, D.C. political influencers on Twitter). At a glance, the Trendlines dashboard reveals that the most discussed issues in the past day among Beltway Elites have been: Greece, Scott Walker and Iran.

Part of what makes Optimized Listening’s Trendlines' dashboard so powerful is the dashboard’s unique ratings system. This ratings system goes goes beyond just counting the raw mentions of issues, by calculating ratings for any given story to show you the percentage of key influencers engaging with you issue within that hour. These ratings are visible and updated in a live-feed at the top of the dashboard and include:

The #1 Issue Right Now is a minute-to-minute update of what topic is engaging your audience at any given time.

The % Talking About This tells you the percent of your total audience that is engaging in the discussion.

The % Difference in Last Hour shows you the direction of the conversation - is the issue heating up or cooling down?

With Trendlines’ flexible dashboard displaying hundreds of issues and their ratings within the influential audience you are tracking, it's easy to see which issues were the most discussed in a given period, but it’s also important to see what was being said about those popular issues. That’s why we have the Top Tweets feature. By simply hovering your mouse over any issue or point in the Trendlines dashboard or scrolling down, you can view the top tweets that drove the conversation within that hour both within your audience, and across all of Twitter.

Want to learn how you can use Trendlines for your company or organization? Let’s chat. Reach out to us at [email protected] or sign up for a demo here: here.

[echeloninsights]

The Selfie Vote

The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (And How Republicans Can Keep Up) hits stores today!

Candidates out on the campaign trail are constantly stopping to take selfies with voters these days, and the battle for “the selfie vote” is on in 2016. Written by Echelon Insights’ co-founder Kristen Soltis Anderson, The Selfie Vote explores the way that millennials are reshaping American culture, technology and politics, and what this means for the future of politics, media and more.

You can get your copy here!

For those who want to win young voters and young customers, the lessons in The Selfie Vote have something to offer those in politics, business, and beyond.

At Echelon, we’re always on the forefront of research and marketing to emerging audiences, and The Selfie Vote is just another example of how we’re focused on understanding what the future looks like.

Get your copy HERE: http://www.theselfievote.com/buy

[echeloninsights]

Echelon Is Proud To Announce Optimized Messaging

How you talk about your ideas, products, and brands has a huge impact on how people feel about them. Whether in Washington, in Hollywood, or on Madison Avenue, messages are constantly being “test engineered” in hopes of winning over voters, customers, and influencers.

Today, we’re excited to announce Echelon Insights’ latest tool for test engineering: Optimized Messaging.

So often, our clients come to us with messaging they’d like to test, and wonder… “should I do a survey or focus groups?” Both provide value, of course, and surveys and focus groups each tell us different things.

Surveys give us hard data, and the ability to segment demographics and audiences in a statistically meaningful way. Focus groups, on the other hand, help us understand the words and phrases that resonate, and let us dig deep on the underlying values and beliefs that drive opinion.

Now, with Optimized Messaging, our clients can get the scale and certainty of survey data with the texture and detail of a focus group.

How do we do it?

Using online survey technology, we present your message. We let our respondents rate your message on any number of metrics we develop with you: believability, agreement, level of interest, and more.

Then, our respondents give us their take on the individual words and phrases that stick out to them that most strongly influence their views on the message. What piece of your message do they like? Is there a word that confuses them? Something that rubs them the wrong way? We can break out responses just like any other survey crosstab to see if there are words or phrases that work well with one group but not another.

The result looks a bit like what you might find with a dial test, but with hundreds and hundreds of respondents and the ability to do word-by-word analysis.

Finally, we let respondents tell us what they think in their own words. This helps us understand what worked and what didn’t, to see what we might have missed and what opportunities are out there. We can tease out the major themes and figure out how to best optimize the messaging.

We’ve already put Optimized Messaging in practice for many of our clients and can’t wait to conduct this kind of research for you. Click here to learn how you can use it for your next project, today.

[echeloninsights]

One Year Ago Today

One year ago today, Echelon Insights launched with a mission to bring polling, predictive analytics, and digital intelligence under one roof. We wanted to create powerful insights our clients could learn from and act on. We wanted to expand the definition of opinion research. We wanted to find new ways to listen to what people are thinking and saying, and to get better at “test engineering” messaging and strategy with the power of that insight.

Since last June, we’ve launched both Insights on Air and Optimized Listening, two of our subscription-based insights dashboards. We’ve tracked $1.3 billion in political ad buys and distilled hundreds of millions of pieces of online content about political and policy issues, all to help our clients understand what really is moving the needle across media channels.

It’s a privilege to work everyday for innovative and impactful clients who are helping change the world, and along the way, changing the ways the world can gain knowledge and insight from the vast amount of data now at our fingertips.

To celebrate the occasion, we thought we should share some highlights from our first year.

The Washington Post reported on Echelon's Optimized Listening Twitter study, which found that political Twitter is very different from real world Twitter.

Opportunity Lives covered the launch of Empowered Women, an organization whose launch was informed by Echelon Insights opinion research.

Echelon Insights conducted a pre-Oscar network analysis identifying which pictures were most likely to receive awards based on Twitter statistics.

Echelon visually quantified the news cycle of 2014 using Optimized Listening's dashboard.

The Washington Post reported on Echelon's findings using its tool, Insights on Air - a dashboard displaying TV buys, buyers and pricing.

We’re grateful for your support of Echelon over the last year, and can’t wait to show you what’s next.

[echeloninsights]

Campaigns & Elections: Echelon Offers Rules Of Engagement For Twitter Trolls

By Sean J. Miller

Campaigns often face a dilemma whether to fire back at someone bashing their candidate on social media or to ignore the increasingly toxic posts taking over their feeds.

Engage the trolls and you’ve created local or national news headlines. Ignore what you think are meaningless comments and the campaign may seem out of touch or worse, timid.

Now, there are a myriad companies offering social media monitoring, but Echelon Insights has unveiled a service it believes will do more to empower campaigns and issue organizations’ digital activism. The GOP polling firm is billing its new service, dubbed Optimized Listening, as a way to let organizations know the repercussions of Twitter troll bashing.

“It gives people confidence,” said Patrick Ruffini, the firm’s co-founder, “if this is only an issue permeating inside the Beltway, or an issue permeating only among the trolls.”

He pointed to the donnybrook over Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R) recent open letter to the leadership of Iran regarding the country’s ongoing nuclear talks.

“This issue was entirely being driven by the Left,” said Ruffini. “If people just looked at their Twitter feeds, they’d see a lot of angry mentions there. [Lawmakers] are wondering, ‘should I back off on this because I’m getting all this negative feedback?’ This [service] can help tell them where that negative feedback is coming from. Who are these people in the aggregate?”

To read the full article, click here.

[echeloninsights]

The New Issue Matrix

At Echelon Insights, delivering smarter data analytics means constantly working to build powerful tools that allow our clients to make intelligent, strategic decisions to reach their goals -- that's why we're proud to announce our newest Optimized Listening Dashboard: the Issue Matrix.

Optimized Listening's Issue Matrix is a new way to see the entire issue landscape -- from right to left, and from inside the Beltway to outside the Beltway. The Issue Matrix answers which side of the political spectrum is most energized across dozens of current political issues, and at the same time, whether these issues resonate outside the Beltway and the normal political circles. By measuring conversation across numerous audiences and types of Twitter users, the Issue Matrix can help you answer the strategic and targeting questions conventional monitoring platforms can’t. Want to check it out? Click here for a demo.

With the 2016 Presidential campaigns heating up, The New York Times recently featured Optimized Listening data to help answer the question where the conversation around Presidential candidates is really coming from.

Using Optimized Listening, The New York Times found that on Twitter: “those who identify themselves as conservatives and liberals spend far more time on Twitter paying attention to their opponents than they do talking about themselves. As election enthusiasm picked up in the last three months, conservatives accounted for 65 percent of the conversations about Mrs. Clinton.”  Read the rest of their findings here.

When it comes to knowing which issues your audience cares about and reaching those groups with powerful messaging, Optimized Listening (now with the Issue Matrix) is an indispensable tool. Learn more here.

Or sign up to try it out, today.

[echeloninsights]

Using Optimized Listening to Rank Past #NerdProm Hosts and Their DC Doppelgangers

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner, or #NerdProm, is the place when the worlds of entertainment and politics collide. At Echelon, we thought it would be interesting to take a look at past dinner performers and rank them by their degree of influence inside the Beltway, as measured by their following amongst Twitter’s most powerful in DC. Using our Optimized Listening platform, we’ve ranked nearly 25,000 Twitter personalities based on their degree of influence within the Beltway. From that list, we pulled out the 10 past hosts of the Correspondents Dinner with the biggest “pull” inside the political media world.

And to give you an even better sense of their influence, we’ve paired each host what we’re terming their “DC Doppelganger” -- the DC or media people whose influence-level most closely theirs in our scoring.

Are you on the list? Take a look below:

Stephen Colbert Doppelgangers: Todd Harris, Maureen Dowd, Matt Yglesias

Seth Meyers Doppelgangers: Brian Williams, John Sides, Hugh Hewitt

Jon Stewart Doppelgangers: Cory Booker, Russ Schriefer, Teddy Goff

Conan O’Brien Doppelgangers: Reihan Salam, Jeremy Bird, the CIA

Bill Maher Doppelgangers: Joe Biden, David Gergen, Anne-Marie Slaughter

Jimmy Kimmel Doppelgangers: Juleanna Glover, Gavin Newsom, the NRCC

Joel McHale Doppelgangers: Dick Morris, Sandra Fluke, Jack Abramoff

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) Doppelgangers: Ellen DeGeneres, Jenna Bush Hager, Gregg Keller

Craig Ferguson Doppelgangers: Paul Wolfowitz, George Allen, Noah Chestnut

Jay Leno Doppelgangers: Matt DeLuca, Jenn Agiesta, Tom DeLay

[echeloninsights]

The 20 Most Influential TV News Personalities Inside the Beltway

Social media analysis is an amazing way to find who’s influential in any given community, and a list published in Politico this afternoon maps the 20 most influential journalists inside the Beltway based on their Twitter connections. We love lists like this, but this one missed TV anchors and reporters. We were curious about what such a list might look like, so we pulled the data from our audience of Beltway Elites in Optimized Listening, which measures issue conversations among influential audiences inside the Beltway and beyond. 

Here’s the list of the most influential TV anchors and reporters inside the Beltway, followed by their Twitter account and Optimized Listening influence score  

1. Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) - 96.0% 2. Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) - 96.0% 3. Norah O’Donnell (@NorahODonnell) - 92.3% 4. Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) - 88.3% 5. Major Garrett (@MajorCBS) - 87.9% 6. Andrea Mitchell (@mitchellreports) - 87.9% 7. John Dickerson (@jdickerson) - 87.6% 8. Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) - 87.6% 9. Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) - 87.4% 10. Luke Russert (@LukeRussert) - 84.3% 11. George Stephanopoulos (@GStephanopoulos) - 83.4% 12. Sam Feist (@SamFeistCNN) - 80.0% 13. Willie Geist (@WillieGeist) - 79.8% 14. Peter Hamby (@PeterHambyCNN) - 79.5% 15. Savannah Guthrie (@SavannahGuthrie) - 79.3% 16. Mika Brzezinski (@morningmika) - 78.8% 17. Howard Kurtz (@HowardKurtz) - 78.1% 18. Gwen Ifill (@gwenifill) - 75.1% 19. Jan Crawford (@JanCBS) - 70.5% 20. Wolf Blitzer (@wolfblitzer) - 70.5%

Optimized Listening measures the issue landscape by telling you exactly what these journalists (and hundreds of others, ranked by their influence) are talking about -- and how that’s different from what people outside the Beltway are talking about. Sign up here to learn more.

[echeloninsights]

Mapping Reaction by Audience to Indiana’s RFRA

In a crisis, who’s talking can matter just as much as what’s being said. With this in mind, we decided to take a look at the data around Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act using our Optimized Listening platform to better understand how different political audiences engaged with the issue and when, and how this tracked with the eventual outcome -- the Indiana legislature’s move to quickly revise the law.

What’s striking about the fallout from the RFRA was how each group differed in when they reacted to the issue. First, we can look at overall reaction on Twitter, with more than 100,000 U.S.-based reactions in the first day after the bill was signed, and peaking on March 31st, the date of Governor Pence’s press conference:

In situations like this, we always want to know where reactions are coming from, not just their overall volume. Was the conversation being driven by the national political elite, or outside the Beltway? We developed a score to classify conversation along this axis, measuring the extent to which a conversation is being driven within our audience of political elites and the media (mostly inside the Beltway) or from sources elsewhere. We see stark differences in this Insider Score over time, with early reaction strongest among non-elite audiences, and the political elite catching on to the issue on Monday, March 30th, when presidential candidates began to weigh in and Indiana lawmakers began considering revisions to the law. Interest in the RFRA clearly followed an “outside-in” pattern of influence.

In fact, if one looks at all news cycles since the beginning of the year, defined in Optimized Listening as news conversations about a single topic on a single day, RFRA broke into the top 20 on six times for all U.S. Twitter users and liberals, two times for conservatives, and zero times for Beltway Elites (topping out at #22).

Indeed, it’s not very surprising that the political left generated the majority of conversation about the RFRA, just over 70% according to our sampling of conservative and liberal activists on Twitter. But this pattern shifted over time, with liberals generating more than 85% of the ideological conversation in the first two days of the controversy, and conservatives steadily increasing in engagement until they generated more conversation on April 3, the date the revision was signed into law.

The pattern is even more striking when one looks at the percentage of ideological conversation by day, with the right steadily gaining in share.

Activity on the right was centered on the story of Memories Pizza and their comments about catering gay weddings. In response, an online fundraiser which spread through social media raised $842,000 for the business. While this part of the story reached full force on April 1st, conservative reaction was building even before then.

We can also see this when we visualize individual tweets, with liberals reacting very strongly within the first few hours of the controversy and coalescing around tweets by Hillary Clinton, Marc Benioff, and George Takei. Conservative retweets caught up a few days later, but no individual conservative tweet reached the level of these early messages on the left.  

It is relatively rare to see a law revised so quickly after passage. News coverage alone can tell us what happened, but looking at social data allows us to tease out patterns that might be applicable to other situations moving forward. What are the signals that we can measure through social data as events are unfolding that can signal whether a crisis like the RFRA will result in an about-face by decisionmakers -- or fade away?  

A seeming disconnect between elites and the rest of the country. An immediate spike in volume around a political controversy that’s more concentrated outside media and elite circles than inside will add fuel to the fire, as participants will have the added motivation of trying to force the media to cover the issue. For perspective, most 2016 Presidential candidates are being discussed 3 or 4 times more heavily inside the Beltway than outside, as far as political issues go. The inverse was true of Indiana.

Immediate action by critics accompanied by virtual silence by natural defenders. At first, liberals were extremely vocal about the law and conservatives, who might be expected to defend the law, were virtually silent. Only when a local business was targeted did conservatives reach the same levels of engagement as the left, but this had little bearing on the revisions to the law itself. We see this pattern again and again when one side feels stronger and has the momentum, while another ideological camp may be conflicted and not as willing to weigh in publicly.

This only works when interest is high and events are changing rapidly. We see a number of issues where one side is more active than the other, or where there’s seemingly a disconnect between political elites and the rest of the country. This does not mean a law will change, only that critics are persistent. We can apply this framework mainly when conversation volume is increasing rapidly, and the outcome is uncertain.

[echeloninsights]

Listen to the Right People With Optimized Listening and Echelon Network Analysis

Knowing your audience is crucial to reaching them. We’re helping make that process easier than ever before with Optimized Listening, a powerful and targeted social analytics platform that lets you listen to those most likely to influence whether your bill gets passed, your candidate gets elected, or your new product offering succeeds.

To do this, we’ve changed the model for how you measure opinion on social media. While sentiment analysis can offer value in the aggregate, it remains extremely limited in the policy arena, where points of view are often more nuanced than simple positives or negatives.

Instead, we measure conversation by finding the right people first. Who supports you? Who opposes you? Who’s persuadable? We then build models that can project where tens of thousands of people stand based on their relationship to those whose position you’ve already identified, and we use Optimized Listening to monitor what they’re saying and how much they care about your issue.

Echelon Network Analysis is the process we use to build influencer audiences for Optimized Listening. We start with the core influencers your intuition and experience tell you matter most, and then we find the people who look the most like them. Through this process, we find core influencers you didn’t already know, and those who are most likely to influence your key targets.

We believe this knowledge is essential to steering the online conversation on your issue in the right direction, and we’re excited to be able to offer it to you as a custom research study or as part of Optimized Listening.

Here’s how Echelon Network Analysis works:

In consultation with you, we identify the right list of “super-influencers.”

We then map their relationships on social media, with a focus on the people they pay attention to.

We build and refine our model, with a topic-specific influence score for key social accounts, including likelihood to support a particular position on an issue.

We deliver you a full list with influence scores for everyone in the universe. Through Optimized Listening’s custom audiences feature or an in-depth, customized listening study, we can help you understand the issues and trends that matter to these top influencers to help you target them most effectively.

A full influencer network, visualized

Use interactive visualizations to explore key influencers

Optimized Listening, now enhanced with Echelon Network Analysis, is an indispensable tool for winning issue campaigns, political candidates, or anyone looking to measure social media activity within well-defined, make-or-break audiences.

Don’t fly blind when it comes to social analytics. Get deep, refined insights on the issues shaping the debate, targeted to the specific audiences who actually matter.

Ready to get started?

[echeloninsights]

Welcoming Digital Veteran Christy Lewis as Manager, Insights Products

Echelon Insights is thrilled to announce that Christy Lewis, a digital media strategist with extensive corporate and political experience, is joining the team as Manager, Insights Products. Christy joins us from DigitasLbi, a global PR agency, where she managed and developed media systems and technology strategies for North America, focusing on media buying and planning across various channels of communications, including television, radio, internet, out-of-home and print. Christy has also been at the forefront of digital politics, serving as Digital Director for two of the highest-profile statewide campaigns in recent years: Scott Brown for U.S. Senate in 2012 and Ken Cuccinelli for Governor in 2013. At Echelon, Christy will manage the development of data platforms and products for associations, corporate clients, and campaigns. These include Optimized Listening, a social media analytics platform that specializes in quantifying what influential audiences are saying about the issues that matter, and Insights On Air, a comprehensive analytics platform for political TV ad spend, including broadcast, cable, satellite and radio for the 2016 cycle. 

We asked Christy to share a few of her thoughts upon joining the Echelon team:

Five days ago, on February 25th, Forbes published an article called “Forget Big Data – Small Data is Driving the Internet of Things.” The article makes the point that while big data has become an obsession of the business world, small data is the stuff that makes big data make sense. Small data is comprised of smaller data samples that provide a specific piece of information about something or someone. The beauty of small data is its simplicity – we can look at the dataset, analyze it quickly and draw conclusions. This is “actionable” data. It is clear, informative and allows us to make decisions based upon what we are seeing.

Actionable data is the key to making sense of the consumer and constituent climate. When I worked as the Digital Director on the Scott Brown for U.S. Senate campaign and the Ken Cuccinelli for Virginia Governor campaign small data was integral to the success of my digital operation. For example, when I ran email campaigns targeting voters and asking for donations, I varied the email campaign’s content. This was a way for me to test the efficacy of messages that engaged and motivated voters to donate to the campaign. By running multiple email campaigns with varied content, I was running iterations to test my content to see if the conclusions I was drawing were sound. Running these tests, I discovered that the Affordable Care Act drove voters to donate. This piece of knowledge enabled me to run many more fundraising campaigns using messaging about the Affordable Care Act, and resulted in us raising hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a few weeks.

I just recently left DigitasLbi, a global corporate PR firm. At DigitasLbi, as a manger of media systems and technology, I witnessed first-hand how big data could oversaturate clients with information. What made clients and media buyers make sense of the marketplace? Again, like on campaigns, it was actionable data in the form of small data – smaller datasets pulled from big data. Fusing small data like demographic information with buying habits made the most sense in situations where the company was looking to make quick, intelligent decisions for marketing campaigns.

Knowing where to find and how to use big and small data is makes Echelon Insights’ services invaluable to organizations. Echelon Insights provides this sort of actionable data to campaigns and corporations, and empowers these groups to move the needle engaging constituents where they live and persuading them in a powerful way. Echelon’s founding partners, Patrick Ruffini and Kristen Soltis Anderson have a reputation as leaders and innovators in the political and public affairs arena. It is for these reasons that I am overwhelmingly excited to join Echelon as Manager of Insights Products.

[echeloninsights]

Know Your Audience with Optimized Listening

We’ve been busy at Echelon Insights over the last few months, and today, we’re proud to announce Optimized Listening, the first social analytics platform that lets candidates, causes, and companies see who's really doing the talking on the issues and trends driving the conversation.

Recent elections have shown us that we can no longer rely on polling alone to understand what the public really thinks. But many approaches to digital listening, focusing only on counting raw mentions or imperfect sentiment scores, have been a less than convincing alternative. So we decided to build something better.

As a decision maker, you care about what specific audiences think - that can be policy elites, the media, activists, people within Congressional districts, or key voter groups. You also care about tracking whether your issue has broken through with the public at large. Knowing that there were a million tweets about your issue doesn’t tell you very much when you don’t know who was saying it.

Optimized Listening provides a unified platform to quantify issues and the news cycle like never before and answer the basic question: who’s talking about me, and do they matter?

You got a taste of Optimized Listening if you caught The Year In News, where we analyzed nearly 200 million U.S. tweets about every major news event in 2014, breaking down what mattered most by key audiences like media elites and political activists.

Optimized Listening analyzes every tweet about news events and issues, public figures, and key corporations - nearly 100 in the basic version. We then create custom audiences representative of key groups that matter to success or failure in a political or brand campaign, or a policy fight. And then it answers questions like:

What share of news conversation is my issue capturing today and over time, both overall and within key audiences, and how does this stack up with potential competitors?

Does my issue matter more to elites or the general public? Are there trends that might be concerning - for example, is the Beltway ignoring a potentially negative conversation about my issue brewing outside the Beltway?

Which issues are partisan activists on the Right or the Left - the ones who matter in the Presidential primary process - talking about the most?

Demographic insights like gender breakdowns on every issue and the types of communities - rich or poor, urban or rural, or ethnically diverse - where an issue is being talked about the most.

Optimized Listening offers a unique approach to social analytics that combines the benefits of large scale conversational data with the statistical rigor and subgroup analysis that are essential to traditional market research. And it’s endlessly customizable. It can include custom issues you define and using advanced network analysis, we can identify the most influential people on your issue or in your network and track exactly what they’re saying - not just on your issue, but every other issue out there too.

Let us know if you’re interested in getting more information or a demo of Optimized Listening. We’re eager to share the incredible data we’re analyzing and can’t wait for you to see it too.