Veriphix

How does the Claude Shannon view of social media relate to the Doritos-Luxor issue transference that drives influence operations, mis/dis information and basically ALL of advertising? Let me connect two dots for you. If you have not, go back and read “A Friday fun day look at social media through a Claude Shannon lens.”   https://lnkd.in/ecaUVn-u The conclusion was that social media is about uncertainty and “the context for advertising and cognitive warfare.... is uncertainty management.”  Then “What a Doritos on the Luxor can teach you about influence operations, mis/dis information and basically ALL of advertising.”  https://lnkd.in/ewWigX5V In that we looked at Issue Transference and how it can be used to change a group’s belief about your product. What connects those two issues, uncertainty management and issue transference, is the mental process by which your brain slips up and subconsciously ties issues together to create the issue transference. That process is your brain’s intolerance to uncertainty (fear of the unknown). And you can’t do a thing about it.  It is hardwired in as part of your survival instinct.  Your body’s own uncertainty management system is what aligns issues/items/emotions with other events.  It literally takes less brain processing to power to group them and that is the easiest place to hack. Advertising or cognitive warfare (mis/dis information) is nothing more than hijacking the brain’s uncertainty management process. Now that is hard to do.  If you want to know how hard it is, consider how brain’s learn and makes connections.  Read the Spheres and Toroid of Influence post and you can begin to see the sophistication of the hack needed to extract and then process belief to manage and essentially hijack uncertainty. https://lnkd.in/emwbyN6j Veriphix’s Belief3 is ingesting very specific types of data to understand how beliefs are changing and impacting you.  The system extracts the triggers that induce change.  When these triggers get fed back to the population, we effectively reverse the hack and induce a change. Virtually undetectable. Only those inducing the change know.    Sentiment setting, not sentiment analysis. In use. #cognitivewarfare #misinformation #disinformation #advertisingstrategies #advertising #departmentofdefense #nato

What a Doritos on the Luxor can teach you about influence operations, mis/dis information and basically ALL of advertising. Doritos put a giant chip on the Luxor hotel.  Why? Let’s reverse the questions.  Why doesn’t Doritos paint a garbage dump like a big Doritos? Know the answer? Because Doritos does not want you to associate its product with a pile of cr6p. The scientific phenomena is called issue transference.  If you place two things next to each other for long enough,  you unconsciously redirect feelings people have about one thing (or person) onto something (or someone) else.  People understand negative associations but tend to ignore positive associations. Hang out with a bunch of runners after their run and that endorphin rush will get associated with you.  Eventually, those runners will get an endorphin rush just by seeing you.  People understand that process when in therapy.  “Tell me about your mother.”  They understand that process when dealing with negative associations.  “Don’t put my brand near that porn site.”  But what they do NOT appreciate is that the process also works to induce a POSITIVE association because they don’t know what the positive triggers are that induce the purchase or use of the product. The reality is that while 99% of brands understand what potential negative triggers are, 99% do NOT understand what POSITIVE triggers are. In Doritos’ case, they were likely hoping that the feelings associated with seeing the Luxor somehow aligns with the feelings needed to induce increased sales of the Doritos. How many of you really associate Doritos fingers with playing cards, hanging by a Vegas pool or any form of gambling? Do you crave snacks when gambling? Acting without knowing what positive triggers your existing customers and what positive triggers your next new market segment needs means you are gambling.  Acting without knowing the hidden negative triggers are, is just as dumb. That same process of including positive and negative triggers in messaging is what mis/dis information is all about.  It is what influence operation is all about.  It is about inserting triggers with associated issues to induce belief change. Just in the case of an actual influence ops, you KNOW those triggers. In advertising, they tend to play games and gamble. And yes, you can know what people believe about your product / brand / issue.  You can know the positive triggers and know the negative triggers.  You can even test a crazy idea like putting a Doritos on the Luxor before doing it. It is called Belief3 by Veriphix. #misinformation #disinformation #advertising #doritos #luxor #cmos

WHY you should NOT trust that Edelman Trust Barometer: The dirty secret of surveys. I want to increase brand awareness so we’ll run a survey, then try some ads and run a follow up survey. How many people do we need?  We go to the Qualtrics’ calculator and it asks for 3 pieces of information:      Accuracy?  Let’s pick  +/- 2%      Confidence?  Let’s pick 90%      Population size.  We’ll leave it at the default of 10,000. The calculator says we need 1,447 responses.  That appears reasonable.  The Edelman Trust Barometer uses roughly that exact same amount so let’s do it. According to BARD, an 11-15 question survey will cost between $4 and $6 per response so we are looking at $5,788 to $8,682 to collect the data (not analyze it). We send out my survey and find 50% of the people know about my brand. So does that mean between 48% and 52% of people know about my brand (50% +/-2%)?  NO! It means that if we repeat the survey 9 out of 10 times (90% confidence), the results will fall within the range 48% to 52%, which is +/- 2%.  That 10th time, it can be ANYTHING. If you want to know what the range will be all 10 times you need to account for the 10th time. Confidence lets you cherry pick responses to make the error window smaller. For our upper limit, 9 times we should have a response no higher than 52% and then the 10th time it could be 100% or 0%. So ((9 x 52%) + 100%)/ 10 = 56.8% should be the upper limit 10 out of 10 times.  If it is 0%, 46.8% is the potential upper limit. If we do the same thing with the lower limit, we see a range of 43.2% to 53.2%. If we want to know the lower limit 10 out of 10 times using 1,447 people and 50% know about my brand, that window of responses is  between 43.2% and 56.8%.  That is a 10% difference!  If we are going to see if my ad campaign worked, we’ll need to impact the results more than 10%.  That is our fidelity.  Not very good is it? Still trust that Edelman Trust Barometer?  Reputable data science groups will list CONFIDENCE level with ACCURACY in their reports.  Very few do.  Edelman does.  They just ignore the import when telling you the alleged significance of their insignificant data. So why not just say +/-5% instead of +/-2% with 90% confidence?  Because those confusing numbers are not symmetric. The window will always be 10%, but a 75% response has a range of 67.5% to 77.5%  (biased BELOW the response), where as a 25% response has a range of 22.5% to 32.5% (biased ABOVE the response). 99% confidence on the calculator with a +/- 2% accuracy?  We need 2,930 responses. Cost is $11,720 to $17,580 per survey. What if that 10% range is OK, so we’ll take +/- 5%, but we want 99% confidence.  Only 622 responses. Cost is $2,488 to $3,732 per survey. The next time your data team gives you a survey WITHOUT stating the confidence level, fire them. You are being set up to fail. There is a better and cheaper way to learn if our ad campaign worked that uses SCIENCE.

How did DeSantis fall so fast? Let’s look at what that suspected Russian account was doing. DeSantis doesn’t understand what hit him. https://lnkd.in/eRwTdiP9 What happened were deepfakes like this one that passed through and were amplified by the network. https://lnkd.in/e24e5k6s? That deepfake was just one of the tweets that went through the account I flagged below. It came out in September and kept getting played. In a caucus, you don’t need to move that many people. Know what it is doing now? Unloading on Haley. Haley is getting beaten up. Adversaries do not pick political parties. They pick issues. Republicans are learning the hardway. Election interference has never been a Republican vs Democrat issue but a Russia/China/Iran vs the US issue. And the US is blind to stop it unless it changes course. Twitter #dhs #disinformation #misinformation #desantis

Highly recommend signing up for this one. Kelli is just smart. She cuts to the heart of issues. I’m a fan. And David has been around the world and back digging into some amazing tech issues. My bias: David was one of Veriphix ‘s first investors.

Tracking BELIEF is MORE important than tracking EMOTION. This is why your sentiment analysis tools are second rate. At Veriphix, we've know this for years. Belief maps which track changes in 10-15 core beliefs that impact an issue, are MORE accurate at predicting and influencing human acts (e.g. whether to fight, buy a product, etc.) than measuring emotion. So much so, that our beliefs about emotions change the emotions. Beliefs trump emotions! As reported by Scientific America: "Our beliefs about emotions—whether we feel that they’re good or bad, controllable or uncontrollable, or useful or harmful—profoundly affect our life and relationships. Science has only recently committed itself to examining this issue, but it is now doing so with a vengeance." "In just the past few years cutting-edge theorizing has focused more on the link between belief and emotion. And new empirical research has drilled down on the effects of specific beliefs." "Perhaps most crucially, our convictions about emotions [Beliefs]—our own and others’— powerfully influence our closest relationships. " Veriphix's Belief3 is the most powerful tool in understanding and influencing populations. It is why: * We went left-of-bang of the Russian SVR (dis/mis) system; * It is why Russia fears Veriphix Belief3; * How we preserved democracy helping Singapore protect their Presidential election; * How our commercial clients find new market share; and * How our commercial clients INCREASE revenue. If only academia was not biased against major scientific advancements made in the private sector, academia could catch up. But they are still years behind Veriphix. Belief3 is in use. It is available now. https://lnkd.in/gjiZqdTN

What a privilege to be included in that 58 company cohort.