Over the last several weeks I have been looking at The 6Dgree’s platform, for which you can take a real look at the platform, here (the demo may take a few minutes to fully load, so be patient).   There’s also a video that explains some of what you can do with 6Dgree, below.

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Introduction to Persona Dashboard from 6dgree on Vimeo.

6Dgree has a few images that help explain the platform, and there is a freemium version of the platform anyone can sign up for, see the pricing page.  Was meaning to write about 6Dgree for a while, as I had small a role by helping to inspire it, according to the platform developers, who read my book, in particular Chapter 2 and Chapter 10, which sharpened their interest in Persona Analytics.

While I found the demos interesting, I was more interested in using 6Dgree for a real situation, as that’s the best way, I have found, to test out a new platform.   Since I’m visited Rhode Island frequently, I have done some exploratory pitches to look at Politics and the possibility of applying what I have learned, with local political campaigns (as Social Media Analytics and Politics is going to be hot this year, no doubt, especially for the Presidential Election in the United States).  And what better place to do that exploratory work but in the smallest state of the union.

Besides, I’m thinking that what is really needed is a proof of concept, that the technology stacks that have been developed in the last two years, or so, make Social Media and Politics, even more attractive in 2012 than it was in 2008 or 2010 (particularly in Geo-Location, which wasn’t a big factor, even in 2010, but will certainly figure into 2012).

Certainly Facebook’s ad serving by ZipCode, figure into political campaigns this year, but wasn’t technically possible to run till later, last year.  When you add voter registration lists and data enrichment services (thinking of PeekYou.com, I’m on their Advisory Board), there is the possibility of doing micro-targeting and micro-listening  at a level virtually unseen of, as yet.

While most of the pieces already exist – I haven’t seen anyone put them together in a convincing, seamless set of applications and workflows that would give politicians the precise set of tools and visualizations needed to effectively micro-target into voting districts, micro-listen in those districts (think Venuelabs.com) and build online panels to listen to what those people, in the districts are actually saying, and the issues they care about.

To some extent, Dachis Group is already tackling the online panel idea, but mostly applying it to big brands, which I personally don’t find as interesting an application (but of course – that’s where the money is, I suppose). According to the post in GigaOM on how Social Media is making Polling Obsolete…….

….. Essentially, Huddleston explained, Dachis Group will isolate a particular subset of social media users and monitor their interactions over an extended period. By doing this, it can look for specific mentions of the product, video or whatever in question, but can also use semantics to identify greater cultural influences or other trends that might be driving a particular behavior.

What Dachis group has done is interesting, no doubt, its  not so easy to replicate, because it’s build on a heavy Data Analytics, programming and Cloud infrastructure that must of cost quite a bundle assemble.  For the most part, that’s out of reach of most businesses, though I can see how it might be a streamlined offering from Dachis, perhaps even this year, even for local politics, but certainly to National Political Campaigns, no doubt.

… As one might expect, all this analysis requires a serious big data architecture. Huddleston said Dachis Group runs hundreds of virtual servers across the world on Amazon Web Services, as well as a who’s-who list of next-generation data technologies. That includes Cassandra as a backend NoSQL data store, as well as lots of Hadoop — including the Apache Mahout machine-learning project — and custom algorithms around natural-language processing and sentiment analysis. In order to ensure it got everything right, Huddleston said Dachis Group hired contributors from the various Apache projects it uses.

To be honest, I’ve never been impressed with marketing fluff, and I’m not so sure the information in the SBI is as interesting, or even as good, as it sounds (or they make it sound), but on the other hand, the potential is there for the data to be really good.

Weather Dachis Group got it right or not, weather they just bought a bunch of talented programmers together, threw them in a room, without too much supervision, and let them create SBI, or had something more fundamental, at heart, isn’t really clear to me (nor would it be that easy to prove, one way or the other).   But … what is clear to me … is the smart money is developing platforms to analyze and act on real time data, and that part, Dachis Group, in fact, did pick up on, and rightfully invested in.

No doubt, Obama’s team in Chicago is doing something along the same lines .. I’m almost certain of it.   But how many others can follow suit?  Who can possibly afford to build something like what Obama’s team probably already has built?

Not many.   And, predictably, your not hearing much about what’s going on with that project, I suspect, because of the hyper-targeting ability that has been developed (which I bet, no one wants to talk about – predictably – after all, why would they? … I mean, why would successful implementations of a cutting edge be all the free, talking about it? – no, they will not talk that much about it till after the election is ….. won).  Yes, won.

I’m not sure that most people need that much infrastructure and planning – I suspect all that would be needed for most campaigns are a few pieces of software and the right workflow, all of the platforms already exist, such as:

• A monitoring solution that can hyper-target (6Dgree.com)
• A Data Enrichment Platform, PeekAnalytics.com (to fill out voter registration records with social handles)
• A geo-location platform that can collect panel data by specific location – think Check-ins – platforms to look at are Venuelabs.com, so-dash, etc.
• A platform to pick up the most engaging content and influencers as well as trending affinities - Infinigraph.com  (see a presentation of Infinigraph capabilities here)
• A Social Engagement Platform (SMMS) such as Sprinklr, Awareness Networks, Shoutlet, etc.
• A Prediction Platform (to let candidates know what is upcoming), the best Prediction Platform I know of is The Recorded Future, and it’s not been fully tapped for the purposes I think it could be used for, here.
• A Financial Data platform that ties into a social listening platforms – WealthEngine /Salesforce  – this can interface with most listening platforms, esp Radian6, which is owned by Salesforce.com, now (see slides 16 and 17, in particular).  WealthEngine can tell a candidate who to target for donations among their email list and in the social listening it is doing via Venuelabs/PeekAnalytics/Radian6/6Dgree).
• A dashboard and reporting package – perhaps, to pull it all together, perhaps, Cyfe.

The cost of putting this all together isn’t outlandish – but integration, segmentation and workflow will be the key to how well it will work,  and I bet this chain of tools would actually be more successful at charting a campaign than Dachis group, with all their infrastructure, had they tried to do the same thing.

But, lets talk about 6Dgree today – since their platform just launched and most of my readers are totally unfamiliar with it.

There’s two parts of 6Dgree I have worked with, so far, the competitor module and the community module.

Here’s a real world example of the community/competitor module of 6Dgree.com which is looking at Rhode Island US Congress and some possible overlaps with the Twitter Accounts detected in Rhode Island (with a 50 mile radius from Providence, RI).

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I find the breakdowns for the Rhode Island Segmentation, fascinating – and I envision the use of 6Dgree for building real time platforms, along with Venuelabs – though the algorithms need to listen to and analyze online chatter may need to be run in a separate platform, as well (since we want to look for very unusual patterns) – so it’s not just want these platforms do, but how they combined, for therein is the ART.

6Dgree.com Analysis of Rhode Island population by city for Anthony Gemma and Congressman David Cicilline.   Rep. Cicilline is more strongly represented in Providence, but not as much in the rest of Rhode Island (Twitter followers only).  All of the following charts can be broken down further by Candidate, and by other sub-dimensions, but I won’t go into that in this post, as the post would be way, way too long and graphic heavy.

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I could go into much more depth into how Cecilline and Gemma compare to each other in various dimensions that 6Dgree has created around Twitter and Facebook – but right now, I’ll stear away from that and share with my readers the rich data 6Dgree picked up on the Twitter accounts in Rhode Island that both need to address to hold office, next time there is an election (by George, that’s this year – ha)!

Gender of Twitter accounts in Rhode Island

Marital Status of Twitter accounts picked up in Rhode Island

Religion of Twitter Accounts picked up in Rhode Island

Occupation of Twitter accounts in Rhode Island

Employment Type by Twitter accounts – this is clearly not representative of the actual population of Rhode Island, which has a lot more people unemployed than what this chart would suggest. Perhaps Twitter users are more affluent to begin with.

Interests by Twitter accounts in Rhode Island

Sports liked by Twitter accounts in Rhode Island

Cities in Rhode Island where Twitter accounts are located in concentrations

In Summary – you can get a lot of strategy advice from these charts and readouts from 6Dgree – but what is missing is the campaign intelligence to inform them – the actual application of all this stuff, to the race, itself – and a compelling set of questions to answer and provide readouts about.