Beyond the universe of social listening is Earth.ai in orbit providing bias free views on behaviour

As a marketer, what you actually want to be doing is you want to grab hold or become a valued part of a narrative that already exists, because nobody's got the time or the money to go and create a whole new narrative anymore.

And that is Dr. John Ricketts, the CEO and founder of the Earth.ai Significant Systems. It's a machine learning platform that helps you to understand all the narratives taking place Out there around a particular issue or topic. And I'm talking with Dr. John Ricketts today, who's based in Tokyo, to share with us about how his platform enables us to look over the walls from the content that we normally get fed and see really the trends so we can see what's going on and make plans and make a better decision about the content that we share and the places that we share it. Let's listen to John.

Yeah, we have a platform, as they're called these days, and what we're able to do is to look at the whole of the internet and really able to take the look at narratives in a very, very deep way. So we're able to look at emotions around the narratives, we're able to look at how the narratives change and evolve over time. We're able to find which are the strongest stories in a particular sector or a category, or what's the strongest brands, and then we apply that in lots of different fields.

Tell us then, John, when you say lots of different fields, who's using this kind of— is it social listening? Would you classify it as a social listening tool?

No, so social's part of what we look at, but Social is really a function of of the particular narrative, right? So in some narratives, social is important, and another narrative, social isn't important. What's more important is that part of the reason the world has turned to shit is is the fact that everybody's living in media bubbles these days. Okay, now even. a few years ago, that was still a little bit of a nuanced conversation, and you still have people saying, well, I don't. Everybody else does, but I don't. But it's pretty clear now we're living in these media bubbles, and these are pretty much by design, right? Google, Facebook, your newspaper, or the TV channels— they're all media bubbles. So it's very, very hard to actually know what reality looks like. Now, anybody who's a business owner or a CEO or been in a managerial position, they'll know how difficult it is to know what's actually going on because— just because of the reporting mechanism, right? People tell you what they want you to hear. Well, this is happening about everything, right? Because what you hear is what you're going to click on, and that's the business model. These media bubbles are really, really important now. Because we're disconnected from reality, we start to make poorer and poorer quality decisions. It doesn't matter if those quality decisions are around elections, or what's your investment strategy going to be for growth, or what alpha is going to look like in the capital market, or whether you have a crisis or you don't have a crisis, or whether your market research is telling you anything useful. It's a problem everywhere. And that's what we look at. We're able to look past the media bubbles, find out what emotions look like around that narrative. Emotions describe future behavior. And we're able to look at the narrative and understand the equity around it.

So when you say the narrative, you're talking about stories or you're talking about particular brands? Because when I was looking at Significance Systems and the reporting that you could do, I could put in a company brand, for example. And see the conversations, the language, and the terminology used about that brand and displayed graphically. So can you just take us through, for example, a case study?

Yeah, so it should be— it could be a brand, or it could be a positioning opportunity, or it could be an issue, or it could be an asset, it could be a need, whether met or unmet. Narratives describe the world. Anybody who's been involved in communications knows full well that narratives really, really are a very important part of what makes the world go round. They generate tremendous value, they steer the directions and the decisions that we make as societies and as people. And this is This is intuitively understood, but poorly measured historically. Whereas if you go to the world of where things are really well measured, let's take capital markets as an example. I mean, tremendous amount of detail in terms of how things around assets and balance sheets and technical measures, how they're measured. But the whole notion that emotion or narratives could impact value is quite a novel idea still, and one that isn't fully believed. But the last few years, I mean, it's nonsense to say that narratives don't impact markets, right? Trump, Elon Musk. I mean, there's been an interesting book quite recently, Nobel laureate in economics, actually called Narrative Economics. And what he's doing is a very longhand version of what we're doing at the machine level. So looking at the stories around particular things like subprime or particular assets, et cetera, et cetera.

And when you say narratives, are these driven by individuals or by policies and communications? Or are they kind of just happening and trending kind of irrespective? Because that's an interesting— That's right.

Depends on the narrative. I think as a marketer, what you actually want to be doing is you want to grab hold or become a valued part of a narrative that already exists. Because nobody's got the time or the money to go and create a whole new narrative anymore. So there is nothing new under the sun. And you find a narrative that is close to the positioning that you want. And you become a valued part of that. And that's how you— and so if you look at the brands that are starting to become successful in the world, they're obviously the brands that understand that they have to be a relevant part of culture. And if you fail to be a relevant part of culture in today's world, you fail to be relevant other than at a purely transactional level.

And I was interested in your latest newsletter and your report. You talk about resiliency and about the link now between sort of COVID Resiliency and family.

That's right. So that's what we've been doing here with the University of Tokyo. So we've established a virtual living lab with them. And so we're looking at aspects of culture in Japan and in the UK and how they change. And I was going to say, fortuitously, COVID came along. But obviously, that hasn't been fortuitous at all. But from a pure sociological perspective, it has been very interesting. So we've been able to look at the way values have changed in these 2 cultures. So one aspect is about looking at the notion of resiliency. Prior to COVID hitting, in Japan, resiliency was absolutely about your work and your career. That was the absolute center of gravity there. So if I wanted to become better at being resilient, that would mean I would invest time and energy around my career. Right? So I would take additional courses. I would do more time at work. I'd go for the evening drink session with my— because that was all about building my resiliency. And I would be more resilient. And then as soon as COVID hit, what we saw was a very market change away from work and a return to the family. And now if we look at resiliency, it's absolutely built around the family. So how do I become more resilient? Well, I invest time and effort with my family. So return to family values. So you're absolutely right. If you're in the business of trying to connect your brand to an attribute like resiliency, then your executions have completely changed. Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, business suit, Monday morning cup of coffee, go get them. It's sitting on the sofa cuddling the kids.

Tell us, is this multilingual? And are you able then to plug in, for example, a brand term, or let's say COVID, and see that in Mandarin and in Hangul and Japanese and English, Spanish?

So we're able to look across all the major languages. And that's something we regularly do. And of course, that's really, really useful when we can do that very, very quickly. So clients are able, through access to the platform, to get the answers next day. So those multiple country, multiple market studies are pretty useful. I mean, you're taking something which is, you know, a simple use case will be about global positioning. I mean, Historically, that's been a very complex, time-consuming, and expensive exercise, but working with different companies, we've shown that to be far more straightforward.

And is this lots and lots of researchers beavering away and filling out forms for you, or is it machine learning? Is it AI? John, what's the engine that's making this possible?

So it's machine learning, it's AI. So what we will do is go out and pull in as much topical content around the particular query as we possibly can. We will look at a lot of data and then we will boil it down into what really matters. That involves seeing through that media bubble and then we'll start to look at what are the core pieces of content, what are the core locations on the web, what are the core emotions that are really driving that narrative forward. That all happens without human intervention. That's all machines. It's very scalable. It's very fast. It's very cost-effective.

Well, let's talk about that. So if a company or a government or a non-government organization wanted to track, for example, trends around, let's say, the vaccines, how would a company do that, John? And what would it cost them to do that?

So it's very straightforward. So I was actually looking at this just the tail end of last week. was talking to the South China Morning Post, and part of their thinking was to say, okay, well, we have anti-vax in the world, but what if it was a Chinese-developed vaccine? How would the rest of the world take to that? So we were able to look at that pretty much real time. I could look at that, and a couple of hours later, we could have a conversation around it. The findings, though, were pretty interesting. Yes, There's been a significant hardening, which is something we've been measuring over time. There's been a significant hardening of Western attitudes towards China. Vaccine hesitancy is a very real thing in the world. It's really characterized by the depth of feeling. So don't expect to have a rational conversation with somebody who's anti-vax. This will be fight or flight for them, that type of conversation. But people haven't put China and the vaccine together yet. So it's not become— if people want a vaccine, they're hopeful of the vaccine, they don't really care where it comes from. If people are anti-vaccine, they are simply anti-vaccine, they don't really care where it comes from. It's not come together yet. The China vaccine already has equity in the world, but we haven't got that polarization around it yet. It hasn't gone tribal. So watch this space with that. So that's a pretty simple exercise. They can engage with our business partners. They can get engaged directly with the site, sign up. And for a few hundred dollars, they'll have a view.

If someone wants to, let's say, zero in on a particular sector, a particular country, and a particular market sector, can they go that granular? Or are you really dealing with large amounts of data needing to produce these large data sets, John?

So people can go very granular. So, um, it's, um, what people who've tried things like social listening might find is that very quickly it drops off a cliff. There's nothing there. There's, there's very little engagement. But we will go very, very deep on B2B, uh, issues because yes, people aren't talking about it on Facebook, but there's still very real engagement around it. But it'll be a very technical conversation, so they're having it on, on more technical forums. So yes, we can go very granular. We will look at pretty small brands, pretty small niche issues, so we're able to service a large number of industries.

John, what about compliance? Are there any issues? Because if you talk about, presumably, if you're talking about going deeper than social listening, you're going into bulletin boards, Are you going into LinkedIn? Are you going into forums? Are there any issues there with compliance?

So we only look at open data. So that was our very clear policy stance from the very early days of what we started to do. It's very clear there'd be 2 types of companies: companies that worked in open data and companies that were happy to go past that line in the sand. But it's been very, very clear for us from day one, it's all about open data. So we only look at— ever look at open data. So compliance is fine.

And I noticed that on your website, you know, part of the sort of Journalism Without Borders initiative, that you've also got an opportunity for journalists to use the platform for free.

Yeah, we'd be delighted for journalists to start using the platform more. As I said, last week we were talking with the South China Morning Post, and yeah, they're very happy to do those runs, and we could start to start to form a view. But I mean, I think there's tremendous opportunity for not simply data journalism, and we've seen the growth of data journalism recently, but it's the media of media. So it's slightly meta, but I think we've come of age with that meta-ness. I mean, if I look at the newspaper you know, let's say I, I pick up something like The Guardian and look through that, the first few pages are really— a lot of it are stories about the stories, the narratives about the narratives. So I, I, I think a lot of media has gone, um, full meta, um, and a lot of the stories are around, uh, we, um, but not articulated pretty well. I mean, It is a— it is something we think quite a lot around. Again, it's related to the media bubbles in that a lot of the world's got very good at me, but we haven't got very good at we, and we seem to be getting a lot worse at we. But we— understanding we, how we feel as a culture around certain issues. and be able to do that, to understand the emotions around it as well, and to have that view that isn't tainted by particular media bubbles is, I feel, increasingly important to have that. A smarter man than me once said that consensus reality is everybody having the same encyclopedia. So there is something to that a little bit, is to have a more common framework where we can take the emotion out of things and just look at issues much more clearly.

Yeah, and I can see you— and you called the platform Earth.ai, and it sounds as though you've got this vision of sort of global information accessible where people can, if you like, look across the walls in their own walled gardens which is kind of what we're all living in now, right?

That's right. Wouldn't it be nice if we could actually understand ourselves better? Very simple thing to do. So Earth AI is very much the vision, and I'm delighted you noticed. I'm delighted you noticed that. Yes.

And John, just tell us where people can find you and Significant Systems.

So very straightforward. You can find us at significantsystems.com. The website, if you put earth.ai, you will find us, or you can find us on LinkedIn. That was great, thank you very much, good to talk.

So thanks there to Dr. John Ricketts, the CEO of Significance Systems, which you can find at significancesystems.com and earth.ai. Now I've used their tool sets for helping clients to define the positioning of their brand, and also to look at key topics that are taking place that my clients want to participate in. It's very, very powerful for aligning your messaging and your future messaging with the global and prevailing trends that are taking place, not just on social media, but in deeper channels as well. So I can really commend this platform to you. So thanks for listening to this episode of Speak PR. And I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on listening and learning about what people are saying about your topics, but also the broader topics. And you can do that with Significance Systems. You can also do that by checking out our Mastermind course, which is at speakpr.co, where we're helping companies and individuals to learn how to get noticed, by using some of these tools and techniques that we've developed for over 25 years running the East West PR public relations network. Thank you so much for listening. My name is Jim James, wishing you all the best until we meet again.