Marketers behaving badly (or wisely)!
Author: Gary Wootten interviewing James Patrick linkedin.com/in/james-p-01b12368, https://jjpatrick.com/
Applying ethical intelligence to social intelligence.
Gary Wootten, board secretary of CIM CSM SIG and Managing Director of Hitch Marketing, interviews James Patrick, Director of SocInt, on the practical and moral challenges linked with ethics handling consumer data, whilst tackling social issues marketing.
Q. You're the director of a company providing specialist analytical and intelligence products and services, specifically designed for the digital world. What does it do?
A. We help private individuals, researchers, grass roots campaigners, media organisations, corporations or political parties use social intelligence to navigate safely through life online.
Q. How do you do this?
A. We developed the Social Intelligence Model and it's used in a variety of ways such as to understand the impact of local level campaigning or for international operations to combat disinformation, extremism, or political interference.
For example, if our intelligence process identifies a problem area, a key message will be designed to address the problem. This is then translated into a staged tasking process, preparing the groundwork for a campaign with content, followed by an active social campaign, feeding engagement back towards the content. The performance of the front end and back end campaigns then informs the intelligence cycle as to success or failure and allows real-time adaptation.
Q. What types of organisations or projects use this service?
A. Our initial focus was on NGOs, helping them develop the knowledge and skills necessary to survive in one of the most complex and challenging messaging environments in modern history. This has grown rapidly and now clients range from charitable foundations to political parties. There’s always a vetting process and we won’t work with people who aren’t a good fit – though this does mean we have to adapt to flexible budgets sometimes so we’ve accidentally created a whole Sir Alec Guinness model for clients we really love (he took a speculative cut of profits from Star Wars rather than low pay). Joking aside, this means we are able to bring some really unique advantages to people who otherwise would never be able to access the expertise. The world needs more of that.
Q. Can you give us an example of how have you helped address a social issue with your work?
A. As a general rule, we never discuss client work directly, but we’ve deployed our expertise across a range of scenarios, from the growth of a network of local grassroots campaigns, to training and advising at a pan-European level. We’re currently developing a rapid segmentation product to assist strategic communications teams across Europe with COVID vaccine communications. We're also working on a transformative project which spans a number of social issues from propensity to victimhood and supporting gaps in cross-jurisdictional investigation.
Q. But you weren't always a Strategic Communications/Intelligence Consultant - what led you to this role?
A. A few years ago there was a big national scandal about police crime figures and how they had been manipulated for thirty years in order to meet Home Office crime reduction and detection targets. That was my fault! Well, not the doctored crime stats but how it all came out. I was a police officer working in the Met and had been given a job on a new department overhauling police processes after I basically hounded the Assistant Commissioner about a predictive crime mapping and briefing project I had designed. While I was there I was put on the naughty step for blogging around concerns related to under-recorded crime, badly conceived police reform and the future impact of reduced police numbers. A weird thing happens when you become a problem child in the police - well, it did to me anyway - in that they put me on the analytical team preparing briefings for the top ranks. While doing nothing more than my job I found a statistical anomaly which indicated rape, serious sexual offences, and other crime including robbery was being deliberately reclassified to keep the official figures low and detections high. I raised it through the command team and eventually got called into an office at The Yard and asked why I didn't want people to like me. I did the only logical thing and went to my MP, who happened to be the chair of the Public Administration Selection Committee. As a result, a full inquiry was held, police recorded crime was stripped of its status and credibility and the Home Secretary took steps to change the way police whistle-blowers are dealt with to better protect them. I'm obviously not a police officer anymore - no career can survive that kind of explosion.
Q. So what does your job entail now?
A. I've spent the last few years adapting the skills I learned as an intelligence officer and creating a framework-led solution which allows large amounts of public data to be brought into actionable insight portions which drive tasks and activities. This could be social media data - I currently monitor thousands of public pages and accounts - which is then weighted against real world outcomes to give it a genuine value. I use this to create tactical assessments - the foundation of strategic communications and campaigns - and build the data out or enrich it until I can create demographic or behavioural segments, for campaign design, or turn it into predictive models with operational outputs. For example, I've never modelled a US election before but my rough draft model gave President Elect Joe Biden 302 college seats in forecast and accurately predicted the end result in 51 areas, as well as correctly identify the tossup seats, swing electorate in each, and the contender advantage. I'm quite pleased with it. When I started doing these models in July 2019 and said Boris Johnson would get a majority with 370 seats should an election happen people thought I was mad.
Q. What ethical challenges do you face in your role?
Policing changes you. You live completely apart from the daily life of everyone else, even people you live with. Your standards are up there because they have to be. Because one wrong move or bad ethical choice could put you in prison and the uniform doesn't go down very well in that environment. Over the last couple of years, I've deconstructed every unethical practice which has dogged our international electoral processes and re-engineered all of it to create a framework which can take it on head to head. Doing the right thing is just day to day standard operating procedure. The big question people always ask is about data. I have firm rules there. Never scrape, only get what is made publicly available by API or platform partners. And don't rely on personal data. I don't need to know what someone's nan eats to understand an electorate because if you work with the data and model it properly, all the answers are in public. If you imagine the antithesis of Cambridge Analytica, you're somewhere near it. I'm so focused on maintaining my policing standards that I genuinely turn down work. If I was doing it the easy way, I'd be a millionaire right now. I'm happy not to be.
Q. How do you overcome those challenges?
The way I deal with this is to maintain a mission statement in the form of an oath. A promise. This is what I will and will not do. I keep a really tight leash on my process and product IP too. I recognise this field of work for what it is: weapons design. As a police officer, I used to shoot and remember the simple rules about not keeping weapons loaded or handing them over to people, this is no different. As the company grows, I realise there is going to come a moment of reckoning but the way I see it functioning is segmentation. Breaking the weapon down into individually useless parts so even if I end up training people to my level, they will only ever have a rifle stock or an empty magazine. I know it's cheesy but...the old Spiderman quote about power and responsibility, well, that.
Q. What ethical tips can you give marketers when collecting and using data
Don't scrape. Always operate within the specific guidelines of legitimate data providers. And only ever take what data you need (if you don't know what you need, don't start gathering data until you do). Be specific. It's also genuinely important to understand the way the world is right now: people want to use information to create influence. Not all of them are legitimate and not all of them have good intentions and, honestly, if you are a distributor of information with access to an audience, you are just as likely to be subject to a hostile influence operation as anyone else. Why target a million people when you can target a small marketing office, or another influential figure with access to an audience that size? Every day when I wake up, I ask myself if I am still doing this the right way for the right reasons. The day I stutter on the answer is the day I'll buy a van and become a handyman.
To learn more about Socint: About Us - Socint
Social Intelligence is not a dashboard or a management information report, nor is it a briefing or publication. It is a model. We operate an intelligence framework specifically designed for the digital world which can adapt to any source input and process that information through a sterile corridor, producing a coherent analytical output free from taint or bias.
To learn more about Hitch Marketing: www.hitchmarketing.co.uk/showreel
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