Swine Flu Farce: How to Sell a Vaccine

According to WHO reports yesterday there have been 92 deaths worldwide and 12,954 reported cases. This means that ouf of the almost 13 thousand people who contracted H1N1, less than a percentile have actually died from it (0.71% to be exact.) According to other WHO and CDC reports more than 60,000 people per year die from all strains of influenza put together. This means that of the 60,000 people who die, the H1N1 strain only has a 0.15% share of the global deaths.

It goes without saying that we are all overreacting to this strain of influenza. I recently just got back from a trip to morocco. I left on May 4th, only 10 days after the swine flu hit the presses hard. Upon entry to Morocco, when I showed my U.S passport to the border police, they ordered me to see a doctor. The doctor was on-hand at the border, a friendly man, who promptly gave me an influenza test. I made sure to inform him that I had not been back to the U.S in 8 months, but it was required anyway. It boggles my mind that within 14 days of a large surge of articles about this virus that there was a required medical check at the border in morocco already. Not all countries are doing this, as the same test was not required upon re-entry to Spain.

Using my own tools on newsbubbles.org I have been watching the spread of propaganda about this "deadly" virus. My system uses a word filtration and counting system to build a matrix of interconnected words that changes over time. The system features interactive Time-Context graphs and word amplitude graphs that show the media coverage and word based context for any given printed word or phrase. The system pulls from only established newspapers and professional media articles. In my research I have found that the word "swine" became a popular word with over 800 articles per day printed within only a matter of 4 days starting on April 24th, 2009. For the next 4 days, it was the most printed word in all of the news worldwide, beating out "obama", "u.s" and many other mainstay subjects for worldwide news media. The major question I am left with is why did this virus get so much media coverage, and such a pervasive print campaign if less than a percent of the people who get it died? You can see the interactive time-context graph and coverage graph here. The top graph represents how related other words are to the word "swine" over time, the bottom represents the article count per day. The lists in the colored drop down are the most-to-least related words from the entire time period. To see some of the actual articles that are being used for source input, click on the "Go" button in the "Bubble It" search up top.

At this point, the number of articles printed has died down to about 80 per day, only 10% of what it was at the campaign's peak. In an attempt to understand why this campaign took place, I used newsbubbles to look at the words "swine" and "vaccine" together. From this search, the first subject in my trend list was "world health organization." The articles that came out of the search pointed to the fact that the WHO was searching for a vaccine, and that they would probably find one by the end of june. There were also talks of making it mandatory for the vaccine to be taken. There is no doubt that the world news media is not comprised of a collection of small independent news companies, but a worldwide organization that moves on the same front attacking from different angles. The days of the independent news writers has been long gone, and now only money talks. The only logical reason I can come up with for why the swine blitz has taken place is that SA, the WHO, the CDC, and other multinational corporations are looking to make some money off of the swine flu vaccine, of which SA already has orders and is taking more as you are reading this article.

One thing to note is that, it is not the disease itself that has crippled mexico's tourist industry as most articles claim, but the media coverage itself that followed this all-to-normal flu as if it were a harbinger of the armageddon and an international pandemic to be feared. For the entire duration of the peak media coverage of this virus, "mexico" was one of the top 3 most related words in all the articles returned. From the beginning of the "swine flu" media blitz up to today, mexico is in 7th place, preceded only by the words (in this order): official, virus, flu, health, world health organization, and school. Other highly related words to the word "swine" in the media are words like "outbreak", "pandemic", and ofcourse, "h1n1".

The reason I'm writing this is mainly because I believe that the public opinion is highly swayed by media opinion. It has been my goal to map out the context matrix of the media opinion to further understand it's relationship to public opinion. I have found positively that what the media talks about, the people talk about, and the words and concepts the media links together in it's articles, are the same words and concepts that the public links together in conversation about these topics. You can see one of my tests of this theory in relation to another media blitz from the beginning of 2009 here.

New Online Therapy Social Network bridges the gap using Video

A new think-tank out of New Mexico has changed the world of counseling and therapy forever. They have mixed the worlds of social networks and video like many other web sites, but with a focus on counseling, therapy, psychology, and overall mental health. CounselingWorld.com is the name, and online video counseling is their game. They could be the next Facebook of the online mental health world.

NewsBubbles caught up with Roger Aguiar (MA, LLPC,) the owner of CounselingWorld, LLC.; the company which owns the website. We interviewed him in a free video session he offered us from his site. Dr. Aguiar has been providing mental health counseling for over 9 years and says that he got the idea when he "saw the need for a better and easier way to provide his services online." He realized that there was nobody doing this and started the long road to development of a new web application that we got to play with.

The basic features of the system allow a mental health provider or someone who's seeking a provider online to connect and schedule video counseling sessions. The cool part is that it provides a full payment system through PayPal to facilitate the transactions allowing the provider to have full control over how much she makes. Their providers cover a wide range of fields of mental health and there are communities for these fields with chat rooms and message boards so there's a common meeting ground. CounselingWorld also gets into the matching game with a basic and advanced provider matching system that provided us the most qualified counselor to get in contact with based off of what we told them in our signup information.

We were able to contact the counselor through the secure CounselingWorld.com messaging system and although we did not buy a session with him, he responded quite quickly and his profile automatically told us when he was available to do a session with us. Dr. Aguiar mentioned that the system is ready to go big and that the beta testing and idea in general was well received by the mental health community. There was an overall feeling of excitement in the virtual air (cyber air?). He said that one of the greatest innovations this site provides for people seeking counseling is that "they don't have to even leave their homes anymore. This allows providers to reach people, who were until now, unreachable by the mental health community on a face to face level." When we asked him about the social networking features of the site, he had this to say:

"We offer the main features that people like about social networks, provider blogs, profiles, who's online, and the communities. The community chat is also nice because it puts everyone in a meeting place that allows them to get to know the counelors in that community. In the future we plan to also provide Twitter like services."

The venture looks promising and already seems to be getting an upswell of new accounts and more providers signing up. People looking for online video counseling or therapy can get an account for free and get started with a counselor within minutes, and providers are also welcome to join. The company does a full background check and certification verification on all of their providers, and they continue to find new ways to insure that they offer public access to "the best quality and standard of mental health providers." Here at NewsBubbles we're going to keep an eye on the company as it moves forward in it's quest to revolutionize the mental health industry.

follow us on Twitter @newstrends.

The Twitter News Trender Bot

Okay, so I gave in to my twitter addiction and now I've assigned a bot to give information from my news website to people while I'm away... The bot is @newstrends on twitter and you can use it to get trend information about whatever topic in the news you want

For instance, if you wanted the most recent subjects, most popularly associated with Obama, then you'd just @ reply my bot like...

@newstrends obama

...and then the bot will Direct Message you back with the trend information you requested. A list, from most related to least related of the top 10 subjects that show up in the same context or same article as Obama. You can use this with a comma delimited list too... and the bot will send you a message for everything in the list. You can also format it like a sentence and the bot will pull the subject matter out of your message and give you the related topics on the subject matter. For a full list of instructions click here.

All of this is almost real time... NewsBubbles brings in about 800 articles every 20 minutes or so from some of the top news corporations around the world. The newstrends bot pulls it's information from parsing those articles as they are coming in... then messaging you back when you ask it for a specific trend. Try it out.

Open to comments and suggestions for the bot if you want.

On twitter? Follow NewsTrends Bot

Twitter, Guy Kawasaki, Obama, and your mother

What's the difference between Guy Kawasaki, Obama, and your mother? Hint: 2 of them have big ____s.

• Guy Kawasaki: 55,000 something followers on twitter
  
• Obama: 100,000 something followers on twitter
  
• Your Mother: 3 followers on twitter
  

If you were thinking something else from the hint... pull your mind out of that gutter! Even if that was the case, the old "It's not the size of the ship that counts, it's the motion in the ocean" addage would come into play. The real answer is "follower counts" :) Now, the question is, does that really matter?

Over at the blog A Big Victory. There is a serious divide on people who are using twitter. The divide is so strong that I've been literally torn between my original goals of marketing my product on the system and just using it for "fun time" which I have not too much of online at the moment. For me, it seems to be this... You seem to have gotten a LOT of hits to your blog through twitter, but you are not a marketer and you don't have anything to sell. This is simply because you had something worthwhile to say and it seems that you spent the time to actually write this article from your heart. That being said. I'm currently analyzing new trends like this. I'm trying to find some common thread or some path/go-between for marketing and conversation. Here's what I've observed so far:

1. Twitter can be used for traditional marketing techniques, but often that gets you banned, or you only get followers who are also marketers. (in my case this is good since I have a product to give marketers too :))


2. Most marketers do not get this fact, and most of them continue to see it as a numbers game


3. This numbers game is something of a dinosaur when it comes to twitter because there is serious conversation for the more tight-knit groups of actual friends who also have followings of tight-knit friends


4. People tend to follow me more when I'm just being myself and I'm conversing with them.


5. This has been really hard to explain to most marketers and businesspeople who are so trained for numbers as the bottom line that they do not really get it at first


6. Whenever I had something really interesting for people to post in my different blogs, I got more people following my blog, but less hits

So it seems like Twitter is not just a social marketing tool, and maybe people who have been using it for the numbers game can gain influence, and maybe faster, but are they really gaining relationships and real fans of their work?

As far as Guy Kawasaki goes, he had written books before he was on Twitter. I don't think his twitter fame came from the marketing techniques he's using now, but the fame that he already had before he was on twitter... like Obama. He didn't even need to do anything, just have the name Obama, and blam... tens of thousands of followers. However, if your mother joined twitter (assuming your mother is not famous), then she would start out with 0 followers and it probably would grow at a normal pace depending on how much she used it... but let's say without the help of bots, etc. she would maybe have some friends on there for a total of about 50 - 60 followers.

How many of Guy Kawasaki's followers will actually re-tweet his posts and links? I'm sure a lot of them, but they are qualified followers for a different reason, because they were already fans of his book.

People who are just starting out on twitter like myself, are mainly confused at first as to why it's such a good site... but given time and conversation, they usually tell me... wow! I get it now!

One other demographic that I'm looking at for you numbers people is how to really guage your real reach on twitter / blogspot / whatever social media tickles your fancy. The equation should be something like:

for blogger
how many new people follow you or subscribe / number of visits

for twitter
how many people retweet or reply / number of friends you tweeted to

The outcome of this equation will change based off of what you say. If you use this ratio that's created to measure your reach, you can see the real difference between the things that you say and how your following or viewership responds to it. For instance, If I had 735 followers and I tweeted "(some url) please retweet" and maybe two people retweeted it... the reach ratio is somewhere around 0.2%. If I tweeted some joke like "Obama was found tripping on LSD today. Upon questioning he replied 'I beat up James Brown!'", and I got 5 replies and 3 retweets... the reach ratio of that message is 0.95% which is much better.

If your reach ratio is low like mine, then maybe you have too many followers, and a lot of them are not paying any real attention to you. For example: if you had only 55 followers, and you said these things and got responses about the same, your reach ratio would be somewhere around 4% and 12.7% meaning that you have had to do less work yielding better results.

That being said, your reach ratio is just a part of the whole reach equation, because on Retweets, you have to take into account the people who retweeted you, for second-level retweets, etc. The whole algorithm itself is somewhat mind-boggling because of the simplicity of the system in which it is generated.

In the end, I think that twitter can be used for marketing and fun... both at the same time. What we need is a new way to look at indirect social marketing and how that can be measured, controlled, and utilized to give both sides of the twitter divide a better experience.

P.S: I followed your mother because she was hot.

Tweet This!

Trending the Gaza Conversation

How does our conversation about things like Gaza compare to the propaganda that's being spit out constantly by the news media. This is the 14th day straight that "gaza" and "israel" have been in the top 10 most mentioned subjects in the media on NewsBubbles.org which has quite a wide coverage of major news sources from all over the world.

Note for first time bubblers: a "bubble" is a person place or thing, like a subject, but can also be a subject phrase. And sometimes is not a subject at all, but is still a relevant word within the context that you're looking at.

I put together a simple trending tool using my NewsBubbles engine that allows me to see the trend in the #gaza conversation on twitter by grabbing the gaza search information from their server on a regular basis. Found some supremely interesting results.

1. The first 3 bubbles were EXACTLY the same: israel, hamas, israeli - in that order
2. In the twitter trend, the bubble "terror" shows up as 4th most related to the word gaza whereas "terror" does not show up within the top 30 related bubbles in the news media at all.
3. The most talkative "tweeple" about the subject right now (Jan 11, 09 7:00pm GMT) are @rafik, @oronhaus, @wfisrael, and @UnionSt who are not very popular, but quite opinionated and in the middle of a convo about it on different sides of the fence.
4. Spanish people and their media are more supporting the civilians of Gaza, whereas people from the United States are more supporting Israel and their Military + people + decisions. Neither supports Hamas, and neither likes terror. I see this as a result of the difference between what each of the newspapers covers. El Pais (the national newspaper of Spain [btw: created by x director of Washington Post]) is contrary to most popular U.S papers on the subject.
5. The bubble "peace" is higher up on the conversation trend, maybe suggesting the people are more for an end to the conflict, wheras on the Media trend it doesn't show up in the top 30. Instead, the media focuses more on the conflict, and the offensive, rockets and bombs.
6. The media does not refer to israel as jews as a popular trend whereas people discussing the topic do.
   

A couple things to mention. The results may vary because I'm going on the last 100 articles printed about gaza, whereas the conversation on twitter is only for the last hour at the time I ran the trending tool. Here are the raw results from both of the tools, color coded for easy comparison. English speakers are predominant on both sources of information (media and twitter.)

People's Conversation Trend:
israel, hamas, israeli, military, terror, palestinian, idf, sight, militaryspokesman, spokesman, civilian, jews, peace, ignorance, useful, side, children, gaza war, people

The Media Publication Trend:
israel, hamas, israeli, offensive, palestinian, gaza strip, city, gaza city, militant, conflict, tunnel, military, bomb, leaflet, international, medic, call, wider offensive, attack, rocket sites, frantic diplomacy, troops

Both of the two results were taken from the same day this article was printed.

Conclusion

Another interesting thing is that looking at the twitter trend on their search engine, gaza is on the list as most popular at the time, as well as on NewsBubbles trend list for all of the articles printed yesterday, (NewsBubbles gives yesterday's trend on the home page,) and often times really close to the most popular. I am looking more into this, and expanding the conversational tool to cover tweets over more time so that a more solid trend will show up within that search.

It is interesting that the top three show up in the same order. I created newsbubbles to trend the media in such a way as to create a matrix of bubbles that is supposed to simulate the mind of the media. When compared in a simple way to the trend of conversation, it covers almost exactly the same topics in the same importance.

My personal opinion based off of my observations is that the News Media guides most of the conversation of the people. This is something I've seen over my whole life, but now that I'm using mathematics to plot this out, I'm finding it's true for the most part.

What are some other popular subjects you want me to perform trend comparison on?

You can leave a comment without signing up... I welcome them. Also, I'm @softmaestro on twitter.

A New Look for a New Year

We are currently working on building a new site design for NewsBubbles.org. That said, we will also have some great new functionalities. We've been studying up on interfaces to get you all the best interface for our technology we can make. Sit tight, and we will send all the users an e-mail update once it's set up.

Thanks!
Nate