3 new social platforms your company should be paying attention to

February 21, 2012 by 4 Comments

Back in 2004 when Facebook first launched, there was no reason for companies to pay any attention. The platform was only open to a select number of American university students and nobody really thought of “poking” as having any real business value. It couldn’t be much better than a big, college chat room…could it?

By the time YouTube and Twitter launched within the next few years, Facebook was already well on its way to becoming the dominant social platform and businesses were beginning to tune in. The company had launched interest “like” pages in 2007 and redesigned them for business purposes in 2009. Nobody dared to question the business value of Facebook as it launched its famous “Like” button on April 22, 2010.

But while businesses undoubtedly grasp the value of Facebook, there is still a lot of reticence to join other social platforms – potentially because none have become as powerful as Facebook with its 800 million users. Even platforms like Twitter – which has managed to topple governments around the world – still struggles to convince companies of its business value.

Still, just because a social platform doesn’t have 800 million users doesn’t mean that it can’t dramatically change the way you do business. Innovative cross-platform social strategies can often result in an increase in user acquisition and retention. So here are 3 new platforms you should be paying attention to, if you haven’t already.

1. Quora

Founded in 2009 by a handful of former Facebook founders, Quora is the social web’s answer to Yahoo Answers. This social Q&A site may not seem that different from the rest – but the company’s original user acquisition strategy encouraged well-known professionals to use the platform as early adopters. Therefore, you can find questions and answer by people like Sun Microsystems co-founder and former CEO Vinod Khosla, amongst others.

But what does this mean for business? This platform can do everything from help you recruit talent to help you establish relationships with potential clients – primarily by demonstrating your expertise. It’s a little less fun than poking and retweeting, but then again, it’s far more professional. By clearly demonstrating your expertise in relevant topics, your answers will begin to make their way to the forefront. This, in turn, should help you (and your business) gain exposure. Don’t believe me? Just read how HelpJuice leveraged Quora for customer acquisition.

It can also be used as a more indirect customer service channel. If you notice that a particular question that is related to your business or sector is accumulating a lot of followers, then it’s probably worth paying attention to. Mashable’s Heather Whaling notes the example of Instagram’s CEO Kevin Systrom, who leveraged the platform do openly answer questions about his company.

To find out more on how building a Quora presence can be beneficial to your business (and how to do it!), check out this article from Inc. Magazine.

2. Instagram

The company crowned as Apple’s best mobile app in 2011 is far more than your average photo sharing app. Tons of brands – from Starbucks to Burberry to MTV – have discovered the beauty of this app, which focuses on providing good quality photo content rather than pushing products and services down people’s throats.

As with many social platforms, experts encourage Instagram users to post consistently, frequently and to engage followers and users. But what makes Instagram different from the other social platforms is the visual element. This means companies can present content in a fun and creative way – and chances are it will look amazing, too. Even if your product is not visual, chances are you can come up with a related theme that will make having an Instagram account worthwhile.

Instagram itself published some resources for brands to see how they could leverage the platform – including my favorite idea: flash mobs! But if you’re curious for more info on why companies like General Electric (check out some of their featured photos here) and Puma are flocking to Instagram and what kind of content they’re creating, read this.

3. Pinterest

The latest social platform to take over digital headlines is Pinterest. This virtual pinboard platform allows people to organize and share their interests from all over the web in a visual way.  And once again, companies haven’t failed to notice the business potential in Pinterest either.

Companies like Birchbox, Whole Foods and Scholastic have developed beautiful display boards that help to visually communicate their domain of expertise. As one article put it, Pinterest is “visual story telling for brands” that helps to create brand awareness. Brands can use it to communicate about their domain of expertise as well as their company culture, corporate social responsibility and more. In addition, “pinning” good content from the right location can help you drive traffic to your site or other social media properties. Check out this article for a few tips on how to use Pinterest for business – and if you’re still not convinced, check out this fabulous presentation by Nurun’s Gregory Pouy.

Obviously there are tons of other noteworthy social platforms out there too. But these are 3 that are really beginning to make their way to the top. In the next few weeks, we’ll be including more in-depth analysis and tips on how to properly leverage these platforms – and a few others.

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PR and SEO 101. Insert Football games keyword here.

October 21, 2011 by 9 Comments

This is how the keyword strategy introductory lesson starts: “if you are already ranking well for some keywords, build on that”.

And, month after month, it never ceases to baffle me when “football games” appears towards the top of the best traffic-driving keywords list in our web analytics software. Sure, the first group and the long tail are dominated by reputation management, public relations, stakeholder engagement but “football games” is always up there with the best of them !

So, hey, what’s a poor blogger to do?

Augure hearts Football games

The culprit is undoubtedly our CEO, Michael Jaïs, and his addiction to football. Olivier, head of QA, Laurent, one of our historic consultants and Fabien, my VP Marketing boss aren’t helping much either. Not a day goes by without heated discussions and, since they all come from different regions of France and support different teams, a fair dose of teasing.

So, when we started this blog, we presented the team of bloggers and interviewed our CEO. His passion for that sport transpired and we’ve been receiving visits from football games ever since.

Coupe de la com de football indoor organisée par Augure

Some of the players in the 2011 edition of Augure's "Coupe de la Com"

Why am I telling you this, exactly? ;)

Two reasons. One is that Augure indeed love football. That’s a large part of the company culture. Quite a few employees, myself included, love and play golf, but football is dominant.

So much so that, every year, Augure organises an indoor football tournament with clients and partners. I’ll skip quickly over the results, enthusiasm apparently being the greatest of our qualities on the field, but I thought I’d share the information with you, so you’d get to know the company better.

SEO is important to manage your online reputation

Secondly, there’s a lesson behind this.

Today, SEO matters. A lot. It determines how people who don’t know you find information about you, your company, your core values. It determines how easily bad news, customer complaints or unpleasant word of mouth will stick to your reputation online.

So, how do you control SEO? Well, there are really three parts to the answer:

  • What you write on your digital properties – content – plays a major role. That’s why our corporate website is all about enterprise reputation management and the industries of our clients, not about football. It is why I mostly write about reputation management on this blog, why its name is reputation in action.
  • Just as important, maybe more, is what others write about you online. If all of Augure’s media coverage and inbound links were about football games, we’d likely stand a better chance of selling shorts and gloves than PR software.
  • Finally, what gets shared on social media about your story plays an increasingly large part in Google’s understanding of what a quality site is for a specific topic. The lesson here is that you shouldn’t forget to share your news on social media.

And the key takeaway is this: the more consistent all three aspects are, the better your ranking will be for the topics that matter to your business and its reputation.

Through this post, I am making sure that future visits to this blog originating from the Football games keyword see the story that Augure is a reputation management software editor that encourages sports, engagement with clients and partners and loves football. And when I publish it on Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter, it will be in the hope that other spread that story about us and that search engines see us in that light as well.

So, are you consistent throughout your PR workflow?

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Public Relations, Stakeholder Engagement and Corporate Reputation

January 7, 2011 by 3 Comments

On this blog, we’ve been talking alternatively about Public Relations, Stakeholder Engagement and Corporate Reputation Management. But comments have shown just how these activities relate.

It is no longer news that reputation has a huge impact on business. Companies with higher reputations have more numerous and more loyal customers, recruit better employees and see a lower turnover, establish more fruitful partnerships, are more easily supported by their stakeholders when controversy strikes …

In fact, it has been established that corporate reputation, as an intangible asset, amounts to over 60% of the market value of a company. In a recent post, I described the financial value of reputation. And, according to Leslie Gaines Ross, nearly one half of a company’s reputation is tied to that of its CEO.

What is less clear is the role of communications and stakeholder engagement in creating, maintaining and recovering a reputation:

  • And yet, the definition of an enterprise’s reputation is the global trust its various stakeholders have in it. So it becomes evident that engaging with these communities of stakeholders to identify their needs and align business practises with the most salient ones is an essential aspect of any business. As a KRC survey of 200 executives of major companies shows, Community action and communications work best together.
  • And, while it is true that “reputation wounds are self-inflicted” and that corporate misconduct, bad products, accidents are the source of reputation failings, their reconstruction is almost the exclusive territory of communication. Immediate, transparent and relentless communication.

The continuous emergence of new channels and forms of communications has made this a daunting process for many but we believe that best practises are to be found in the methodology described in engagement standards such as the AA1000SES and GRI G3. To help understand these matters, we are offering two FREE white papers that can be used as guides:

And these are the beginning of a series. Chief executives are almost unanimous in recognising that corporate reputation plays an important role in the achievement of business objectives, yet few have a formal measurement system in place to evaluate it. Our next two white papers will deal with measuring reputation and the tools that need to be used for this.

We hope you enjoy these two first documents and look forward to your comments.

A Happy, Successful and Engaged New Year to you all !!

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The Tree, the Clique and the Enchanted Forest: a Public Relation Christmas Tale

December 24, 2010 by Leave a comment

A day before Santa’s visit, an elf just told me this important story of the past, present and future of public relations and corporate reputation!

Once upon a time, communicators of all countries told their story in industry jargon to an elite of intermediaries called the media in the hope these would relay it in common terms to the good people of the public. In graph theory terms, this one to few to many message propagation model is represented by a tree.

A tree structure

This situation lasted up to the first half of the noughties and the rise of the Web 2.0 and its citizen-empowering cortege of social media. This publishing revolution brought with it the age of the clique. In graph theory terms, a clique is a structure in which every vertex is connected to every other (to be precise, that’s a maximum clique, but you get my drift) and it corresponds to the widely spread idea that social media, blogs and other forms of user-generated contents make it possible for anyone to reach every one else. Consequently, individuals could potentially make their voice heard by industry experts, members of parliament and other essential stakeholders of business organisations, and vice versa, without the need for an intermediate level. A corollary was the CEO’s bedside horror bestseller The angry customer who destroyed an industrial empire. Another was (still is) that the larger the network in this global clique, the more important it had to be for businesses (what, you still don’t have a Facebook page?)

The clique structure

While certainly possible, the operative word here is potentlially. As Reputation Management master Jedi Leslie Gaines Ross puts it, a great majority of reputation wounds are self-inflicted, and seminal cases such as Jeff Jarvis’ Dell Hell were certainly not the act of an isolated individual (but a tightly wound network of blogs) and mainly revealed existing shortcomings (at the time) in Dell’s customer service.

For the true Force that fuels Reputation Management and Public Relations, the force that ended the perceived age of the clique is Influence. The dark side of the Force lies within the hands of those trading briefcases for the impunity of nefarious bidding. Masters of the bright side are those who understand the true nature of the communication landscape and use it to match business activity to stakeholder expectations.

Which brings us to the present. A present in which groups of like-minded people gather in physical or cyber places under the influence of one or more thought leaders. Each group (a Facebook support group, a patient association, an NGO and its followers, your customers …) is similar to a little tree with its leader(s), its relays and its ordinary members. Together, throughout countries, demographics and media types, these constitute a vast planetary forest.

Creative Commons picture by lrargerich

Your organisation is one of these trees, and the forest is enchanted. Because the trees, or maybe they are Ents, communicate with one another. Not each member of each tree with every other, as suggested by the clique model, but some members with some others. NGOs can influence laws, journalists read blogs, bloggers read newspapers, student associations have bent corporate will and PR campaigns can be used to help PA.

At the end of the story, the elf gave me some glimpses of the future of public relations: he told me that, in 2011 PR professionals would have to deal with more channels than ever before. He added that efficiency and ROI would take center stage and that, in order to be successful, it would be necessary to focus their attention not on the zillion members of the forest, but on the important trees for their organisations. And in those trees, on the members with influence. Not the purely algorithmic influence based on follower counts, but those whose words change outcomes and make others act. Those who lead the trees and those who create bridges between them.

What do you think?

Ho! Ho! Ho!

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7 reasons email still rocks PR and 3 rules to use it well (2)

October 20, 2010 by 1 Comment

In the previous post, I wrote about 7 reasons why email wasn’t being pushed out of the PR scene by social media . As I tweeted about it, the following tweet caught my eye: a French minister addressing the police force via a telegram.

Proof enough that not everyone is using social media to communicate ;o) So, why the big buzz?

One major (unformulated) appeal is the high degree of connection between social media users. The degrees of separation (the number of intermediaries needed to communicate a message from any person to any other) on social media is lower than in the rest of the world: 5.7 on average for Facebook, 4.7 on twitter against 6.6 via email world. However, this somewhat mitigated by the low propagation of messages observed on these networks: on average, only one in 318 tweets are being retweeted. And, thanks to Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm, only one update in 500 is actually seen by a company’s fans.
One real reason social networks see more engagement is because their content is often more … engaging. A tweet is short and sweet, as is a Facebook update. Tweets can be repeated at regular intervals to reach most of your followers. Social updates also feel more fun and personal compared to much more ponderous newsletters having the potential to bore the wits out of most of their subscribers.

Engaging content, engaging strategy

Professional bloggers devote a large part of their time writing good headlines. And maybe as much again writing a compelling first paragraph. Whereas some newsletters make you want to chew your brains in despair. Three simple rules can help you make the best of email in a social media world:

  • Target your audience! Spamming millions doesn’t works. Period. Public Relations and Stakeholder engagement needn’t be complex processes but knowing your audience, their topics of interest and material preoccupations will boost your open/click-through rate tremendously. Use your data.
  • Make your content interesting! Simple and informal aren’t necessarily the exclusive attributes of Facebook updates. Press releases can also benefit from this, as well as most newsletters. Jargon is not read, jargon is not shared. Jargon and self-promotion repulse readers, destroying SEO (and damaging online reputation). When searching online, people are mainly looking for information. Three quarters of journalists are looking for new sources of expertise, mostly browsing websites such as Wikipedia and corporate websites. Provide people with useful information. Write well, follow the inverted pyramid pattern and provide links to more in-depth content. Your traffic will thank you.
  • Use both! Interrelated media work best and getting your fans and followers to subscribe to your newsletter is a very good practice to multiply impressions and angles. The additional step is meaningful as research shows that LIKEs and Follows are not considered by their authors as implicit permission to market (an Opt-In), only an expression of interest in a brand or product. Jeff Bullas suggest 10 ways to integrate social media and email. Integrating the two (mail and social media) requires unified content, strategy and teams.

There are many more reasons to use mail (better tracking, stable platform vs evolving commercial social networks, better edition possibilities in email, one email several for social accounts …) but integration is the way to go. If you’ve started along these lines, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

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7 reasons email still rocks PR and 3 rules to use it well

October 15, 2010 by 3 Comments

With social media adoption rising among marketing, product communications and corporate communications services, should you still rely on good old email to engage stakeholders? Should email still be at the center of your public relations strategy? The answer greatly depends on your sector of activity and goals.

The question is certainly valid when over 80% of journalists hunt for, research and promote their stories online and over 30 percent of people regularly use search engines for news and information. And, inevitably, some companies have abandoned email altogether for their marketing: one such example set the blogosphere alight when the UK subsidiary of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream announced they had dropped email marketing altogether. And when a hotel promotion network recently ran a picture competition, they received as many entries from their 2.2 million newsletter subscribers, as from the 12,000 followers of their twitter accounts!

Alas poor email, I knew him well

Email not dead!
So, it is true that social media have become a great opportunity for some forms of engagement. But that doesn’t mean emailing has become a waste of time, as the new kids on the block would like you to believe. Quite the opposite, in fact, and here’s why:

  1. A 2010 Nielsen study reveals that reading eMail is still a very important online activity occupying over 10% of online time, overtaken only by social media (networking) and gaming.
  2. A well crafted Email + CRM project has very high SEO potential. Good writing skills are essential to create interesting content with links to your owned media. The traffic driven by these will provide a tremendous organic boost to your rankings.
  3. There is data in CRM that social media does not allow you to use as consistently or efficiently. Yes, you can create lists on twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, but these do not allow you to target a message in the same way as a well maintained database. In the above photo contest example, was the 2.2M subscriber list a well qualified and structured one made of opt-in subscribers or simply bought off a third-party? The abysmal response rates of the latter case are notorious and well documented. CRMs and stakeholder databases are all about data and targeting.
  4. A communication strategy built exclusively on social media requires very high expertise in both social media themselves and your sector of activity (a rare mix indeed) in order to identify influencers, material issues, most appropriate channels. It is not a simple matter of setting up a pretty Facebook page and idly watching millions of fans beg to read information posted to it. Behind each leafy tree of successful social media campaigning lies a forest of fruitless and uncoordinated efforts. Or worse, of flaming backfire.
  5. Besides, is your PR limited to people you can engage on social media? Not all audiences are reachable on social media. Social media is big with customer engagement, but if your PR implies dealing with local authorities or inter-government organisations, best ofluck with Facebook ;o)
  6. Even if your target contacts are on social media, they might not respond. Connect2 Communications recently conducted an analysis of journalist and analyst activity on Facebook and LinkedIn, Twitter and Delicious. The results show they use social media sites to hook-up with friends and family on a personal level and do not use these websites for business purposes or professional engagement.
  7. Finally, in spite of the blurring induced by new media, the frontiers between Communications and Marketing still exist. Goals and methods are not the same. Public Relations and Stakeholder Engagement best practices can be found in documents such as the AA1000 SES: all recommend using the appropriate channel for each of your stakehodler groups . Social media are a part of the mix, but so is the very efficient email + CRM tandem. In the case of Ben & Jerry’s UK subsidiary, bear in mind that Facebookers LIKE food and Ice Cream is one of the most favourable terms on Facebook. That company’s savvy and well researched decision would certainly NOT work for other industries such as Travel, Sports, Museums, Fashion, Automotive, Government, Pharma, Food & Beverage (the industry, not the food itself), Retail, Non profits, Education, Health, Beauty, Technology, Banking, Medical Services, Professional Services, Financial services … which all rank among the least LIKEd subjects.

In the next post, I will describe 3 rules to get the best out of your email engagement.
If you are mixing social media and email, tell me how it’s working out in the comments!

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Is your online reputation management sustainable?

September 27, 2010 by 3 Comments

Securing a healthy online reputation and business requires search engine results for your brand and products to be positive. Particularly at a time when most buying processes, both in mainstream consumer products and B2B projects, begin with online research. But approaches to achieving a stellar web record follow very different schools of thought.

Last Friday, a post on a reputation management company’s blog discussed an alleged ethics row about online reputation management. The post and its title referred to a “growing debate over whether the practice of burying bad publicity and minimising the exposure of negative blog and forum comments was ethical”.

The post went on to equate reputation management with the practice of using various technologies to monitor and hide damaging news: “Firms like XXX use their in-depth understanding of search engines and how they work to make sure only the results that clients want are shown when people search for their name, business name or brand”.

While I agree with careful monitoring and striving to have your version of the story told on the Internet, the other half of the proposition is not nearly as engaging (pun intended) and reveals two very different approaches to reputation management.

Burying the bad news

Search Engine Optimisation experts use their understanding of Google, Yahoo and Baidu’s ranking algorithms to create strategies that promote positive company coverage so that any unwanted news shows up much further down the search results list, in pages that no-one ever views. Several techniques allow this mechanism to work, mostly based on the multiplication of inbound links from websites owned, financed or otherwise controlled by the reputation management company or its client, or on paid-for ranking schemes.

Stakeholder Engagement

The alternative, which Augure supports and facilitates, is to leverage your stakeholder engagement process to achieve the same goal. By sending out well targeted email information campaigns or newsletters insuring high open rates, link-rich press releases via wires, posting documents to your virtual newsroom, engaging with bloggers, journalists and industry experts, you insure the propagation of your story and promote an organic SEO that achieves equally high ranking.

So, which should you choose ?

Two arguments appear to favour the first approach. First, organic growth takes time. Most online marketing strategies are hybrid in that they combine fast PPC campaigns with organic SEO growth hormones and phase out the former once the effects of latter are felt. Secondly, a rule of stakeholder engagement is that you do not control your message once it leaves your company’s owned media, which could appear to leave more potential for things to go awry.

However, the arguments in favour of stakeholder engagement far outweigh these. For one thing, highly optimised search-engine savvy strategies exploiting loopholes in ranking algorithms are fragile beasts indeed, constantly at the mercy of a change of parameter in the algorithm itself. Companies such as Google change their ranking methodology frequently to optimise their business and favourable rankings obtained by exploiting the previous version’s specificities are very likely to sink to the bottom of the list the very next day. Secondly, and to return to the initial discussion on ethics, some link schemes are indeed somewhat dodgy. And organisations and agencies actually risk damaging their reputation through these link building practices. Finally, it would take one mighty link farm to counter a severe attack such as Greenpeace’s Orang Utang Sinar Mas video or Kevin Smtih’s twitterant about SouthWest Airlines. I doubt that it’s even possible. Think of the number of accounts needed to counterbalance the NGO’s Facebook fans or Smith’s twiterati followers, particularly given the high credit Google gives to active twitter accounts.

A long term bilateral relationship with your stakeholders means the public and your key constituencies know what you stand for which, at the very least, dampens unexpected blows[i]. Besides, the communication channels put in place during the months and years of stakeholder engagement are there for you to respond quickly and efficiently if/when crisis strikes. And stakeholder engagement well done leaves traces for your reports and gets your story told by more trusted authorities than the company’s marketing team. This alone explains why SEO companies are hiring more and more PR talents to do the job.

So, is your online reputation management sustainable?

[i] For more on this read Once Brand Takes Flight, It’s Hard to Bring it Down:         http://adage.com/columns/article?article_id=143631.

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How American companies manage their reputation in France

September 23, 2010 by Leave a comment

For the first episode of Augure’s new Decideur TV program “Décideurs du Reputation Management[i]”, Michael Jaïs’s guest was Jeff Archambaud, VP Communication at Euro Disney to discuss how American companies manage their reputation on French soil.

Please click the image to access the video

Michael being the host, the first question had to be football oriented and Mr Archambaud’s feelings about the recent French team disaster during the World Cup were that sponsors and advertisers should continue their support to the sport and its values in spite of the disappointing setback for them.

Values were again at the core of the reasoning when the discussion turned to the subject of managing an American company’s reputation in France: how to match global values with local expectations and preconceptions. Mr Archambaud’s recommendations in this area were the following:

  • Walk the talk, starting from the inside: reputation management and stakeholder engagement start with employees and show a commitment to meet and exceed local work regulations and ethics, to reassure about something that can sometimes worry about American employers.
  • Maintain the levels of quality and security expected of American companies.
  • Ensure adequate communication towards employees, customers and local elected representatives about this corporate responsibility and product quality. Public relations tools used include the website, events with organisations and twitter (see below).

An interesting takeaway from the talk is that the Disney HQ consider the French team as pioneers in social and environmental engagement showing how important the Plan Global Engage Local strategy is for large multinationals. In other words, bring with you the values of quality and security that underlie all Disney ventures while taking into account all important material concerns of local stakeholders.

This will be discussed at length in a future post.

[i] Reputation management decision makers

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What the Mona Lisa can teach us about monitoring

September 3, 2010 by 5 Comments

The world’s most elaborate guiding system available today is eye-vision. And the way this operates can tell us a lot about how monitoring should be optimised for any specific project.

Basically, light from the landscape is focused by the pupil onto the retina where receptors transform it into a signal that can be processed. These receptors are very densely packed near the center of gaze and much more spread out in the periphery. So visual acuity is very high over a tiny region and very poor over pretty much all the rest of the field.

Signals are then brought to cells organized to detect colours, edges and progressively higher levels of visual information such as lines, diagonals, surfaces, shadows, shapes … until the brain is able to identify the nature of objects in the field of view and interpret the scene.

Monitoring and vision
“So what?”, you ask. Well, research we conducted with over 90 CCOs in some of the largest companies in Europe showed that the two main objectives in their work are:

  • Design and implement a communication and engagement plan that serves the organisation’s strategic plan
  • Respond to crises or help the C-Suite do so.

Which, described in business words, is very similar to what most animals do during their lives – move about to hunt, drink, mate & prosper while avoiding danger and traps – essentially using vision (and other senses) to guide their steps.

Monitoring follows a very similar process, connectors (human or software) being developed to retrieve data from a number of (offline, broadcast, online, social …) sources constituting the organisation’s landscape. This data is then analysed from a very basic level to a more conceptual one following stages of greater abstraction: source type, size, semantic tagging, sentiment, influence …

Most important in our analogy is that in order to optimize data analysis by the brain, cone receptors (data connectors) are not packed as densely as possible all over the retina (monitoring back office) but very densely in the direction of movement and gaze and very sparsely in the rest. Moreover, the way the signals picked up by these center (foveal) and peripheral cones are analysed is also very different, the former being geared towards complex analysis, the latter towards detection of broad movement.

Optimising information analysis
What does this tell us? If the brain was presented with highly detailed information of every single item in the field of view, it would waste huge amounts of precious time interpreting signals of little relevance (the colour of the caterpillar chewing away at one of the millions of leaves on the tree 20 meters to the right) instead of focusing on the most important data.

This is why we construct tight reading-lists for every monitoring project rather than forcing tens of millions of sources into a single dashboard. The noise drops drastically, semantic analysis is performed in real time (as opposed to hours or days in some platforms) and human analysis is optimised to affordable levels. Peripheral vision is used, in house, to maintain these reading lists and make sure any worthwhile movement in an outside source leads to an update of the list.

Errr, what about Mona Lisa, then?
Right, yes! It seems that Leonardo knew all this over 500 years ago and used this knowledge to trick the mind. By painting a serious looking mouth in high detail overlaid on smiling low detail near surrounding, he apparently made sure viewers saw the serious face when focus their gaze on the mouth but the smile as soon as they looked away.

An effect similar to what happens when newspaper titles tell the opposite of (or, in real life, exaggerate or distort) the article contents.

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