Et Tu Dominic.

Hi and welcome to the Unnoticed Show. And today we're going to talk about how Dominic Cummings got noticed. And the reason I wanted to talk about the Dominic Cummings event yesterday was because it creates an interesting opportunity for us to look at how different media cover the same story and about the impact of what we've done before having a difference to what We are going to do next. Whatever we've done before has created a reputation, and that will create a lens through which our current and future actions are seen. And the Dominic Cummings seven-hour, if you like, tutorial on the incompetence of the British government during lockdown creates an interesting lesson for us all about the way that we might be seen when something happens to us. So let's just have a look because. Most people in the UK will be aware that Dominic Cummings was the special adviser to Boris Johnson, and they'll know that he played a somewhat Machiavellian role, certainly around Brexit.

Now, he has subsequently obviously had a falling out with Boris Johnson and left Number 10. And so it was interesting to hear him come clean on a number of things that have happened over the last 12 months.

Now, different headlines from different media, but also how different channels and different types of media have for us clues of what different audiences are thinking about the same story.

So let's first of all look at some of the headlines, and then I'm going to share with you what I found on a platform called Social Mention, which actually tracks sentiment around a particular keyword, or in this case a particular person, so that we can get a little bit of insight then into how people have reacted on the internet to the Dominic Cummings story. Now I've looked at a few different media, and by and large the media have been fairly factual in their reporting. So the BBC did have a lead with the fairly alarmist Dominic Cummings: Thousands died needlessly after the COVID mistakes. And Then he said, the truth is that senior ministers, senior officials, senior advisers like me fell disastrously short of the standards that the public has a right to expect of its government in a crisis like this. Now, Sky News, which has on its website news that you can trust, it says that Cummings' evidence was just a performance and that he in turn contradicts what has been said by Cummings.

Now, what was interesting for me having watched Cummings was that he had taken this fairly disastrous trip to Barnard Castle, and it was quite a debacle because during lockdown he'd driven hundreds of miles to the northeast of England on a pretense that he was somehow trying to get his son to his parents and checking his eyesight whilst he was driving all this way. So it It, it was completely incoherent. And one of the commentaries that he discussed yesterday was about how inside the government they'd created this narrative, even though it was not a good one.

They felt they should have one about him breaking lockdown. Boris Johnson didn't discipline Cummings at the time, although most of the nation felt that he should have been sacked. So yesterday he talked about how The real reason was because his family had death threats and there was a gang outside his house. Now, what one might initially have is a sense of sympathy or even empathy, but I think most of us luckily have never had that situation.

But what was slightly incongruous was that most people know that in England, if you had a gang of people outside your house and you worked for the government, you'd, you'd have the special services, or you'd at least Call the police.

You wouldn't get into a car with your family and drive 150 miles during lockdown.

There was a real credibility issue for me anyway about why this has happened.

Now, other media have been slightly less friendly. So the Guardian, which is one of our perhaps more libertarian media, has said Dominic Cummings tell-all told us what we already knew about the Tories. And then there's a large number of commentaries from readers on that website talking about really the, the attitude of a certain group of people in the UK towards the government and towards Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings and the whole way that the country has been, if you like, run since the election and the move to Brexit and the lockdown. London Evening Standard leads with Hancock says he's no liar and says nor did any of the Cummings truth bombs land. So the London Evening Standard is a publication obviously that goes out into the capital city, and that was showing, if you like, on one hand we've got The Guardian saying we all knew that, we all knew these people were basically incompetent and they were lying and they're out of control, and another media saying None of that was true, and none of that stuck. Using this as a moment to show how the same event can be interpreted really along the lines of the media outlet and the publishers who are publishing for their audience. Of course, it's always a debate about which comes first. Does the audience dictate what the publisher writes, or does the publisher dictate what the audience reads? There's some degree of symbiosis there, of course.

I had a look then at Social Mention because socialmention.com is a platform where you can plug in some keywords and it'll search for you the strength and the sentiment and the passion and the reach of these terms. You can use it for any number of terms. There's a free version. You can also use the earth.ai Significance Systems platform. That will cost $100 when you want to do a search, which is really worth it if you want to search, for example, your corporate branding. But in the case of having a quick look at what people think about how Dominic Cummings performed and how people view him now, I didn't invest in the full platform. But let's just have a look, because what was also then interesting was when I did a search for Dominic Cummings on the mainstream media. The strength of sentiment was only 14%. Okay, zero passion and not great reach either, interestingly enough. Now what I was interested in was that the sentiment in the mainstream media— because I selected news, the news feeds, The Guardian and the London Evening Standard and the Financial Times and The Independent and Actually, sentiment was a 2 positive, a 3 neutral, and a 2 negative. So really very evenly balanced between the mainstream media, but actually everyone pretty much reserving judgment. So really a pretty even balance there between those that are positive, those that are negative, and and then just a little bit higher when you come to those that are neutral. Now, if I then share with you what I found by going on to the Social Mention platform and putting Dominic Cummings in, but on blogs and microblogs, the strength is 20%, the sentiment is 3 to 1, the passion is 21%, and the reach is 12%. In other words, there's greater rumbling and there's greater, if you like, commentary taking place in the social environment than there is in the mainstream media. Now, interestingly enough, here positive is 6, neutral is 21, and negative is 2. In other words, the positive is 3 to 1 to the mainstream media. Just repeat that. So the positive sentiment is A number 6, and the negative is a number 2. And you'll remember that on the mainstream media, positive was a 2, and negative was a 2, and neutral was a 3. In other words, a lot of people seem to be actually quite unclear, quite unsure which way to go. So we have some headlines. For example, Dominic Cummings wins surprise fans thanks to his unbuttoned shirt and northern accent. Tory MP mocks Dominic Cummings. We've got the deep mind Dominic Cummings turned to as the pandemic hit about Demi Hassabis. There is really a spread of opinion and a spread of articles, the majority of which are neutral, but the next largest outpouring is positive. So it's interesting that on social media The attitude towards Dominic Cummings after his 7-hour speech is more positive at a ratio of 3 to 1 than if you were to read the mainstream media. So why is this important? It's important because if we are working on media relations and public relations and sentiment, if we only measure the official channels, those that maybe have some controls, and certainly in Asian countries where the governments run the media, then we're only going to have a reflection in a very controlled catalog of content.

We need to look at social mentions by using platforms like Social Mention, for example, or significance systems to understand what actually those people that are not paid to write are saying about a particular topic, or in this case, a person or an issue.

So in your own company, if you're thinking about launching something, for example, or you are looking at taking advantage of a certain opportunity, if you just rely on the mainstream media for guidance, you could actually be given the wrong steer.

And as we've seen in the case of the social mention, 3 times as many people were positive about Dominic Cummings Talking openly with his shirt unbuttoned, with the northern accent, saying I'm sorry, saying we were fools, saying that here are some whiteboard photographs of our plan to manage the pandemic. This complete transparency won over some sections of the community in the UK. Now, will it change anything?

Not really, because in fact what Dominic Cummings said and shared. Can't change policy because Boris Johnson has already a fairly unassailable lead in the political world. And in fact, as we know, the Conservative government and Conservative Party are not about to replace the leader that brought Brexit. But if we are managing a campaign for a client, whether it's a political campaign, a social campaign, a commercial campaign, or any other, social listening is really important. But going beyond the traditional media, because the traditional media will have publishers and they'll have advertisers and they'll have revenue streams and they'll create content that, as we've seen in the case of Cummings, it is pretty much 50/50. It is pretty much dependent upon the leaning of the publication that you will get the unvarnished view. But if you really want to know what people are thinking, if you really want to get into the psyche of what potential customers or partners or competitors are thinking, then we really need to look at social listening. A tool like Social Mention or Significance Systems will help with that. Now, I mentioned free social media monitoring tools. I've just used Social Mention. There's also TweetDeck, there's TweetReach, which obviously is tracking Twitter, there's FollowerWonk, that's W-O-N-K, SumAll, Mention, MapLithium, which used to be Klout, which was very good, Hootsuite of course, and then Significance Systems, as I've mentioned, which is really a hugely powerful AI platform. So social monitoring.

Is one element.

Social listening goes deeper. We can look at tools that are free like Google Alerts. That's simple and easy, and that's tracking when people have written or said something. But that's a little bit different to a tool like Social Mention where we can get sentiment analysis and where we can really start to see what trends are taking place. We need those. Because if you were Dominic Cummings and you had political ambitions, you could see whether you're winning or not.

If you're the government, or if you're Matt Hancock, you can see whether you're in trouble or not.

According to the metrics that Social Mention is showing, people are going to give Matt Hancock an opportunity to answer back before they make a decision.

And as far as they're concerned about Boris Johnson, they've already made up their mind, and they're seeing the behavior of Dominic Cummings whilst he was in the cabinet as an advisor as being an indication that he's quite hard to trust when he's out of it. And it could just be he is trying to grind his axe, as we say here.

So coming all the way back to my original comment, which is that our behavior before an event will create a lens through which our new or future behavior will be seen. Now, on a practical day-to-day level, people may or may not be doing a social mention check on you and your company, but they'll certainly be doing a keyword search and seeing what comes up for you, whether it's on Trustpilot or an advisory platform or Google Reviews or another one of these review sites. So do check out what people are saying about you and make sure that everything that you do is in alignment with the kind of reputation that you want to have. Otherwise, as we've seen from Dominic Cummings, our past does come back to haunt us, and it's very hard to create a new future when we're dragging around our digital past.