Moderation vs Censorship & Helping Brands Safely Navigate Social Media w/ Matthew McGrory

Summary

Right About Now with Ryan Alford: Episode Summary Episode: Moderation vs Censorship & Helping Brands Safely Navigate Social Media w/ Matthew McCrory
Release Date: March 4, 2025

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Introduction In this engaging episode of Right About Now with Ryan Alford, host Ryan Alford delves deep into the intricate dynamics of social media moderation and censorship with guest Matthew McCrory, CEO of Arwen AI. The conversation navigates the delicate balance between ensuring brand safety and upholding free speech on digital platforms, offering valuable insights for business owners and marketers striving to navigate the ever-evolving social media landscape.

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1. The Current Landscape of Social Media Moderation vs. Censorship

Matthew McCrory opens the discussion by reflecting on Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter (now X), likening Musk's vision to China's multifaceted platform Weibo, which integrates payment systems, advertising, and product offerings into a single ecosystem.

"[00:00] Matthew McCrory: If someone was to ask me, why did Elon buy Twitter?... that's the futuristic vision of social media."

Ryan Alford sets the stage by highlighting the importance of social media in modern marketing:

"[01:36] Ryan Alford: ...one of my favorite topics, social media. If you're not into social media, then you're probably not really into marketing because it is the way to market these days."

The conversation touches on the global sentiment towards moderation, with Matthew noting a predominantly left-leaning perspective overseas:

"[03:07] Matthew McCrory: I think generally it's probably more 60, 40, left leaning, I would have said, is the sentiment."

Ryan emphasizes the inevitability of addressing issues like immigration in the context of social media discourse:

"[04:44] Ryan Alford: ...we have to have laws in place and measures. It's been a little bit of the wild, wild west for sure in that regard."

2. Balancing Brand Safety and Free Speech

Matthew introduces Arwen AI's role in providing moderation tools that prioritize brand safety while respecting individual expression:

"[05:35] Matthew McCrory: ...this is about brand safety. We typically our clients are brands like Formula One's, a client, ATP Tennis or a client."

He uses an analogy to illustrate their approach:

"[09:45] Matthew McCrory: ...Patrick Sway's in Roadhouse. So he's the bouncer... creating spaces based on choice."

Ryan complements this by discussing the necessity of moderating harmful content without infringing on free speech:

"[10:02] Ryan Alford: ...Zuckerberg said it in front of Congress under testimony that he was pressured to censor."

Matthew elaborates on the distinction between illegal harmful content and "lawful but awful" content, advocating for user-driven content filtering:

"[08:50] Matthew McCrory: ...We draw a line on what we call illegal stuff... lawful but awful should be absolutely fine."

3. Arwen AI's Technological Advancements and Solutions

Ryan reflects on past social media sentiment tools and highlights Arwen AI's advancements:

"[23:20] Ryan Alford: ...finding nuggets that could be transactional opportunities or brand opportunities... that's what you guys are doing."

Matthew details how Arwen AI leverages large language models and synthetic data sets to enhance brand interactions:

"[24:12] Matthew McCrory: ...we're able to create synthetic data sets... suggesting replies to human agents."

He introduces AskArwen, a user-friendly interface allowing non-technical marketing teams to query their social media data conversationally:

"[27:15] Matthew McCrory: ...we have a development we're doing at the minute. It's called AskArwen... ask a question of their data."

Ryan underscores the transformative potential of AI in making data actionable and interpretable:

"[27:00] Ryan Alford: ...process it can interpret. Right. It's like it's the interpretation probably that's the... that'll blow your mind."

4. Scalability, Data Privacy, and GDPR Considerations

Ryan inquires about the scalability of Arwen AI's solutions for smaller businesses:

"[29:07] Ryan Alford: ...is this attainable or reachable or scalable?"

Matthew explains the partnership-driven model designed to extend Arwen AI's reach to SMEs through marketing agencies and service providers:

"[29:48] Matthew McGrory: ...our model is really to address that part of the market is to do it through partners."

He addresses data privacy concerns, particularly in the European context with GDPR:

"[32:18] Matthew McGrory: ...in Europe, we're beholden to GDPR regulations... demographic overlays are quite important."

Ryan highlights the importance of aggregating publicly available data responsibly:

"[36:29] Ryan Alford: ...aggregated In a way that could tell you things. I'm not saying that's what Arwen does..."

Matthew clarifies Arwen AI's compliance with data privacy agreements:

"[39:07] Matthew McCrory: ...Arwen doesn't do it because we've signed a T's and C's agreement with meta that says we won't do that."

5. Future Directions and Vision for Arwen AI

As the episode wraps up, Matthew shares Arwen AI's vision amidst the shifting tides of social media moderation:

"[40:48] Matthew McCrory: ...social media is headed what we call our kind of insights intelligence. We think that's a little bit more exciting."

He envisions a future where social media platforms offer more personalized and engaging user experiences without overwhelming ads:

"[41:14] Matthew McCrory: ...don’t hammer them with loads of ads... give them exactly what people want."

Ryan echoes this sentiment, recognizing the potential for Arwen AI to empower brands with actionable intelligence:

"[42:18] Ryan Alford: ...tools like this could help you pivot and or adapt target markets that are maybe larger or different than what you anticipated."

Matthew concludes by reaffirming Arwen AI's commitment to enhancing brand engagement and protecting brand integrity in an increasingly toxic online environment:

"[41:16] Matthew McCrory: ...we'll be standing there waiting to help people, to protect people's brands."

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Conclusion This episode of Right About Now with Ryan Alford offers a comprehensive exploration of the balance between moderation and censorship on social media, emphasizing the pivotal role of AI-driven tools like Arwen AI in safeguarding brand reputation while fostering meaningful audience engagement. Through insightful dialogue, Ryan and Matthew underscore the importance of strategic content management and the transformative potential of advanced AI technologies in the marketing domain.

For more information on Arwen AI and to stay updated with their latest developments, visit www.arwenai.com or follow Matthew McCrory on LinkedIn.

Transcript

[Matthew McCrory]

If someone was to ask me, why did Elon buy Twitter? One of the reasons, I think, is because he's got this kind of idea in his head of turning X into this kind of massive platform like they have in China with Weibo, where it's got a payment platform, it's got advertising in it, it's got the products in it, it's linked into Alibaba, all these different things all in one place. That's the futuristic vision of social media.

[Ryan Alford]

This is Right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month, taking the BS out of business for over 6 years in over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping necks and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now.

Hey, guys, what's up? Welcome to Right about now. We're always talking about what's now, and you know it's right, baby. You know it's right because we're talking about it. Hey, at least we think it is in our own heads. To your minds. I'm excited. You know, we get to talk. One of my favorite topics, social media. And, you know, being a marketing guy. If you're not into social media, then you're probably not really into marketing because it is the way to market these days. But there's a lot of talk about what it is, what it isn't, about what flows through social media. So no better person to come on than the CEO of Arwen, AI. He is Matthew McCrory. What's up, Matthew?

[Matthew McCrory]

Hey, nice to. Nice to be on the show. Thanks for having me.

[Ryan Alford]

Yeah, man, I. I was excited to have you guys, reached out and we had to schedule a couple of little blips here and there, but I was pumped. You know, the news has been in your space, which I know, I know marketing well enough with pr. Hey, that's free rising to the top. You want it to be top of mind, right?

[Matthew McCrory]

Yeah, absolutely. There's been lots of news in the social media space. We were kind of. The first inception of Arwen was as a moderation tool. So there's been lots of talk about moderation, free speech, censorship, both in the US since you had your great election in November and your vice president was over in Germany, Germany, last week, talking about free speech, telling the leaders of Europe what they should be doing. So it's. It's a very topical discussion point at the minute. Yeah.

[Ryan Alford]

I'm gonna ask you, Matthew, I'm. Since you brought that up, I'm just Curious, you know, and this is less your opinion, but you can certainly share it more. What is the sentiment overseas? I know you're just south of London. What is the sentiment overseas of what has both transpired with the election and the Vice president? Was there, is there a general sentiment or is it just like us? It's like 50, 50.

[Matthew McCrory]

I think generally it's probably more 60, 40, left leaning, I would have said, is the sentiment. And I think that's partly driven by, you know, one of Trump's targets is kind of the media and the kind of traditional mass media and then they tend to take traditional approaches and if you look at employees in that space, they tend to be slightly left leaning in their opinion. So, yeah, I would say we're definitely leaning left. We've got a Labor government in here which was probably elected more about the ineptitude of the right leaning government that preceded it rather than Labour's. Good points. But a lot of Germany is seeing kind of rise of right leaning parties getting votes very much on the topical points of immigration. Economy still comes out first. Everyone wants a job first and foremost. They want to make money. They want a good platform for that. That's the same, I think, in the US and all across Europe. Yeah, immigration, massive topic here with. It's just kind of the levels we've had over the last 15 years across Europe have meant that it's caused problems and I think you've had your share of those in the US and that's created some of the divide that I think politicians, instead of closing their eyes or putting the blindfold on and running around and pretending it's not there, people need to start addressing it, unfortunately.

[Ryan Alford]

Yeah, yeah, it's unavoidable at some point. It's, I mean, like, I mean, I always tell people, I caution a little bit like, you know, we're, we're a country of immigrants, you know, like, but at a certain, we're at a scale now where you do have to have laws in place and measures. It's been a little bit of the wild, wild west for sure in that regard. But I do want to get down, right down, you know, the pike here. I think with our, you know, audience. We got that treadmill crowd. I hope, whoever's, if you're listening, wherever, whenever you are, I hope, get that heart level up. You know, if we got to be about 85 right now. Okay, then I want to take you to 115 because we're going to, you know, talk about moderation. And look, one of my favorite Quotes Matthew, is everything in moderation? Especially moderation.

[Matthew McCrory]

Yeah, well and there's, and there's a well known blog in the trust and safety sector called Everything in Moderation which talks about everything in the space. And I think for me this is about like brand safety. We typically our clients are brands like Formula One's, a client, ATP Tennis or a client. And this is about individual choices of individuals to protect themselves in cases where they, they, they have to kind of be subjected to things that probably most of us wouldn't really like. I think the, the, the tipping point here is where people are removing content completely off social media channels. You know the way Elon Musk has set up X means that if you want to say your opinion that's fine and if I choose not to listen to your opinion, I can shut you up. You can carry on saying what you you want to say. I just decided that I don't want to listen to it anymore and I don followers to listen to it. So very often where it becomes a bit of a sensitive point is we, we have elite sports clients and them as individuals they have tens of millions of followers that they would say my hard work has brought me these followers. So if I don't want my followers to hear what person, this person over here is going to say I'm, I'm, I don't want them on my channel. Whereas I think where Elon's going is Elon saying but that person still should be allowed to shout out whatever they want to say on their channel. And I think this is where the Facebook the meta U turn that happened just after the election when Zuckerberg kind of realized that to get into good books they were going to have to make some policy changes. There's been some interesting stuff released about what the Biden administration was asking matter to do during the pandemic, which again I haven't seen. I've just seen kind of rumor and speculation. I haven't seen kind of cold hard facts yet. But if that was the case then yeah, I just, that shouldn't be a place where we're going. Things should be allowed to disseminate. We draw a line on what we call illegal stuff which is kind of below the line which is child sexual, sexual exploitation where people are doing death threats, things like that. Things that are at the extreme end of the toxicity scale and then we draw the line at what we call the lawful but awful. So lawful but awful should be absolutely fine. That stuff is allowed but it should be up to individuals in the community whether they want to listen to it. The analogy I generally use on demos with clients is Patrick Sway's in Roadhouse. So he's the bouncer. He's brought in by the owner of the bar to clean it up, because people are smashing the bar up and the owner wants a nice hospitable place. He doesn't want the band to get smashed with beer bottles every night. And we're very much trying to create a world like that, that it's based on choice. There are bars that still exist like that, and that's fine. You can go in and you can throw beer bottles, and the bar's protected with a cage. And there are other bars that are suitable for your family, and you come in and you have a nice, polite conversation, and we welcome everyone. And it's kind of free choice. And I live near the home of the British army. So around me, there are loads of bars that are like what we would call Swati bars, where the army folk will go, and you can go down there on a Friday night and they'll be a bit fruity and they'll be. It'll get a bit exciting. Or you can go the other way and you go to your bar where you have your Sunday race. Now, digital channels are exactly the same. It's like you want to create spaces for your audiences where they want to come and have meaningful conversations. And that's what we're really trying to do. And we're really policing that for the brands themselves. We don't do that for the social media organizations.

[Ryan Alford]

And so I do want to add one point. You know, you mentioned the Biden administration and not, you know, you know, you're overseas. It's not your job to know the everything. But I am going to quote exactly what they did, because Zuckerberg said it in front of Congress under testimony that he was pressured to censor. And they did censor Covid information on Facebook, which is bullshit. And exactly what happened. And Zuckerberg's both, you know, had a coming to Jesus, so to speak, for his own platforms, and also, you know, gotten a little bit of chutzpah behind him because the guy's, like, doing UFC now. I don't know if it's all related. You know, some people would call that toxic masculinity. I would just call it seeing. Seeing the world as it should be, which is, you can do what, look, 100% agree. No hate, threats of violence, nobody. That bullshit needs to be taken out. And so I think we can all align on that stuff. But Political based, you know, pressuring on these platforms that's been taking place in the US And Zuckerberg's just the only one that got up there and admitted it has been happening. And that's the stuff that just drives. And I think part of the reason Trump got elected, you know, people like or love them, hate them. It's just that there's just not room for that kind of political like not only censorship but freaking, you know, they want to call everything disinformation, misinformation. You know, it's all truth is in the eye of the beholder.

[Matthew McCrory]

Yeah, it's a, it's, it's a very convenient catch all disinformation, misinformation. We've been very careful to try and avoid it. We do, we do get rid of a lot of spam, but that's typically around the subject of it might be financial scamming, those types of things or come to my dating site. It's the stuff that like, if you're trying to read an article, you really don't want that in the way it kind of, it's poor form for content.

[Ryan Alford]

I think we can all agree with that.

[Matthew McCrory]

Yeah, yeah, I think there's another 100 miles of this road to travel if I'm honest. And you know, I wouldn't say I admire is probably too strong a word, but I would certainly respect Zuckerberg for doing what he did and almost u turning it and actually shedding, you know, some light on the topic that is of is normally the best tonic for these things. Shed some light on the truth. I think you're going to find that Europe were not particularly well behaved during the pandemic. And I think you're going to find that European governments are going to be held to account over the next five to 10 years as we go through all our kind of our own little post mortems of how people behaved during the pandemic. And yeah, there are a lot of things that should have, shouldn't have happened and there are a lot of views that were pushed on us. Propaganda is what it would have been called sort of 60, 70 years ago in my personal opinion. So no, you're right.

[Ryan Alford]

We as Americans go through what's called audits with our taxes. We get audited. You know, I think there needs to be an accounting and look, I don't really want to drudge up this. I'm kind of, I don't have a, I'm a guy that doesn't have a rear view mirror, you know, like, let's go forward. But I do think we got to make sure we learn from the past so we don't repeat it. The future is the biggest thing that I would take away. And that's, I will say that's what I love about what you're doing is it seems to be you guys are headed down the road of the right moderation with the stuff that we can all universally agree. And as a brand and as a company that you, you don't want in your content and you don't want your customers, you know, get subjected to that. That's why I really like what you guys are doing with our.

[Matthew McCrory]

Yeah, and the, the, the, the flip side of all this is the good stuff, right? So, yeah, the whole point of social media is so that, I mean, it's so that we can all have a conversation, but it's monetized by the brands who want to have a conversation with their clients. With their customers. Right. So what we worked out is, as well as detecting the bad stuff, we call it your sort of golden tickets in your comment mountain. Because most brands have got a comment mountain of what people are saying to them, and most of them aren't listening to it. They're not listening to their customers, they're not listening to buying signals from their clients. And that's where the commercial imperative is. That's where, you know, I use the example, I sort of name and shame brands when I talk to them and say, here are some comments that were on your social media channels in the last two weeks and you haven't replied to. And they will be really obvious things like, where can I buy this? Can I get this in blue instead of red as it's shown on the Instagram channel? So really obvious things that people aren't responding to. So I think we're moving into a monetization phase on social media that isn't just as it is today, which is just kind of billboard advertising, which is kind of where we've been stuck in on this stuff for the last few years. I think it's much more interactive, and I think that's. If someone was to ask me, why did Elon buy Twitter? One of the reasons, I think, is because he's got this kind of idea in his head of turning X into this kind of massive platform like they have in China with Weibo and the other ones where it's got a payment platform, it's got advertising in it, it's got the products in it, it's linked into Alibaba, all these different things. All in one place. That's the futuristic vision of social media, which I think is where Elon wants to take it. He's just. I think he's being held up on the road of that journey at the minute.

[Ryan Alford]

Yeah, he's like any good entrepreneur, distracted sometimes, but he's. It's interesting that you brought up the Weibo thing. And it's funny, I was walking around the mall on Sunday, and I don't go the mall very often here in these states. It's. But I was thinking in terms of, like, social media, and when I think of what you're talking about with building, it's almost. It's like this. There's. There's a place that I'm now seeing more clearly than I did. I kind of panned the whole metaverse bullshit like, four or five years ago, because I thought we were ahead of it, and it was just so, I don't know, ethereal that it wasn't, like, real yet. Hey, I'm gonna get into space. And I'm. Yeah, I know that I care what my skin is and then my shirts are. But I. It wasn't quite there. But now I can sort of see this interplay of transactional merchandise like, that you're talking about meets digital, meets social, like the. The digital mall. Because when you look around the mall, it's a bunch. It is like this combination of social because people are having conversations or walking around in these courts and things. And I almost have this vision now that I see what you're saying with, like, X becoming that digital place of social plus shopping plus interaction. Right. I think that's where you're. What you're kind of painting, right?

[Matthew McCrory]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think there's this, like, meta release, this kind of metaverse world, and kind of this platform concept of everything being in the same place, making it really convenient. I don't have to set up an account to check out. I don't have to put my credit card details because they're all kind of stored somewhere. So the whole pain of selection and transaction and buying, all that pain is very much taken care of. And, yeah, I think. I think we're headed for, you know, kind of these platforms getting even stronger than they are because they're going to eke onto the high street. You know, certainly the high street here in the UK is becoming smaller and smaller. We've got less retail outlets and certainly more like restaurants. We joke in the UK about the proliferation of charity shops. All our kind of market towns are filled with seven or eight charity shops where if we went back 10, 15 years, there might be one or two. Yes, great for the charities. They're getting free retail store, but I think it's a product of the fact that a lot of this stuff is moving online. A lot of the experience of how do I buy things, how do I interact, how to ask questions. It's becoming a little bit more real and certainly the AI revolution is playing into that because I can experience things with AI that I couldn't do before. I can talk to an avatar in a way that I couldn't do before and it will respond in a slightly more human like way. I mean, we're still at base one, but hopefully we're going to get to base two and base three fairly quickly. It would appear.

[Ryan Alford]

Yeah, that train is moving fast. I mean you can see it with machine learning and everything like it. It's both exciting and scary sometimes. Talking with Matthew McCrory, he is the CEO of Arwin AI. Matthew, I mean, it's interesting. I'm hearing you talk, I'm sort of like looking at the R1 platform and it makes me think of this world that we live in where you have all this content being pushed out, words, pictures, type, all that. And like you said, you're helping brands engage because finding this, the nuggets that could be transactional opportunities or brand opportunities, which is what I'm hearing. And it goes to show that like there's so much data and so much, so many micro conversations happening on social media that there's power in the intelligence that those. That can provide when it is rolled up for you and, and gives you these signals and at its core, I feel like that's what you guys are doing with, with Engaged particularly. Right?

[Matthew McCrory]

Yeah, that's exactly it. We've got, we've got a retail, like a hospitality chain here that owns about 2,400 bars across the UK and they want to do things like, can you. We've just launched our new menu in one of our brands that might be 200 bars. How did people feel about that? What was the sentiment? What was the most talked about thing? Did they like the burgers? Did they like the new ribs that we released? Did that, we changed the chips. Did anyone complain about the, the, the, the, the fries? Sorry, they're not chips fries in your world?

[Ryan Alford]

French fries.

[Matthew McCrory]

The French fries?

[Ryan Alford]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. In America.

[Matthew McCrory]

I'm in America, yeah, yeah. So that's really where people want, they want that intelligence of what people are saying so they can react to it. That could Inform product decisions that they're making and help them respond to people in a more informed and grown up way. You've also got, we work with some sports teams in Formula one and one of the teams came to us and said, well, we want to know what people are saying every 15 minutes throughout the race because we want to react to it as the race happens. It's a two hour race, you know, in hour three, the story's dead, but we want to react to it. You know, 30 minutes in, something happens, there's a pit stop, the lead changes, there's a safety flag, that type of stuff. So that's really. People want to, the creators want to react more quickly in a more authentic way to how, what the audience is talking about. Some of Those channels get 200, 250,000 comments over a race weekend. So there's a lot of stuff. So boiling those things to the surface is really important so that they can authentically dive into the right conversations that kind of generate more excitement. They can use it to kind of think about how the press conference is good. They can lead the drivers to say certain things at a press conference that could be both to promote good stuff, it could also be to stop bad things from happening. Yeah. So really interesting, really interesting how people are using the tech, the AI tech in lots of different ways to pick up different signals on social media.

[Ryan Alford]

What Matthew? I mean, I worked on one of the first visualizations of social media for Verizon Wireless in 2010. We did a gigantic Twitter sentiment board. It was live at like the, an NFL game and it would light up and do things. It was based on sentiment, things like that. It was very rudimentary. This is 14 years ago. But I want to just clearly, for our audience though talk about specifically with, you know, the advancements in how you're using AI, of how this isn't just a sentiment type thing, how it is actionable and really like comes to life for people or in brands.

[Matthew McCrory]

Yeah. So. So the way we approach this is, is like you've got to really understand your client, your customer, what they're looking for. So it typically, it might be very often it's kind of a PR related message. Yeah. A good example is I interviewed someone from a very well known Drinks Global Drinks grant and they're very sensitive about people talking about them polluting the oceans with plastic. So you may or may not be able to guess who I'm talking about. Yeah. So. And they spend an awful lot of money cleaning the oceans of hundreds of tons of plastic. They have a whale preservation program and they want to tell people about that. So what we're able to do is we're able to take the messages that they're looking for. And with the advancements in AI, specifically large language models, we're able to create synthetic data sets. So the client gives us 10 source comments. They kind of say, we're looking for stuff that sounds like this. And whenever that gets posted, we want to lean into that conversation and we want to tell them, look, we're not polluting the oceans. We're actually, we're saving the whales, we're saving the dolphins and we remove this. So PR and kind of crisis. People are using these things to get to very specific content in very specific ways. More generalistic people are using those large language models techniques. So we use. It's a bit techy and I'm not going to profess to be an expert on this, but there's a technique called rag, which is developed by Facebook, which takes a customer's own data. So their own voice, their brand guidelines, their brand voice, their kind of the responses that they give to their call center to talk to their clients pulls that all together. They couple that with the large language model to generate authentic on brand voice responses for clients. So they use it inbound. How can we detect specific messages? And they're using it outbound for. We want the suggested replies. Normally it's suggested to a human agent and they kind of have the last call and edit it of how we respond to that. That's really come about in the last, I would say 18 months to two years with where kind of OpenAI and the whole kind of large language model movement has gone. And being able to take that, we can do lots more than we used to.

[Ryan Alford]

Yeah, I mean it could just process so much more data quickly and then not only process it, it can interpret. Right. It's like it's the interpretation probably that's the, you know, the stuff that'll blow your mind. It feels like.

[Matthew McCrory]

Yeah, I mean, it's pick. It's picking up on these, like for brands, it's picking up on specific messages normally that they're looking for, but they're also after the intelligence that they kind of don't know that's there. But I wouldn't say finding it is easy yet, but it's democratizing access to the data because we've got a development we're doing at the minute. I mean, it's a bit cheesily named in its prototype. It's called AskArwen and ask Ourimed at the non technical person within a marketing team or a social media team who wants to ask a question of their data. So it might be what was the most positive 10 comments made on my social media, what was the most talked about, top three talked about topics on my social media. So the idea is you can use like have a conversation with your social media channel and ask it questions. You know on TikTok what was my most talked about event, which channel did the most? So you're pulling all this data, data out in, in the way humans like to do it, which is I want to ask a question and I want to get an answer that isn't deeply technical. So bad news for some of the data analysts who spend their days kind of translating what a marketing director might give them and then turning it into like a SQL query to interrogate data. So this, this will be really game changer because it allows businesses to make quick rapid decisions like in the moment. I think that when we get to that point, yeah we're going to see it's going to make creativity within ad campaigns really, really exciting.

[Ryan Alford]

Is this a product? And you know what the development that goes into this, that's for large brands only. Is this, how scalable is this? I mean obviously I get that, you know a mom and pop coffee shop doesn't need to scan million pieces of data but, but there's, but there's, I don't know, e commerce brands that might be smaller but they serve a large wide audience or they'd like to. And yeah, you know intent data would be very valuable to them. But is this attainable or reachable or scalable? You know where does that start and stop from with Arwen?

[Matthew McCrory]

Yeah, well I mean our model is really to address that part of the market is to do it through partners. So there are a lot of, there are a lot of organizations that are already have partners that are helping them, they're doing these types of things. So we partner with both kind of traditional outsources that providing kind of people services, customer experience type services and also with marketing agencies. So kind of there are two kind of go to markets from partners. Most of those organizations are providing insights, client intelligence, all these types of things. So what we're trying to do is our go to market, we are going direct as well but we're kind of layering that into the services that they're providing so it becomes intrinsic when people are doing campaigns further, further down than that like you say kind of E commerce. Yeah, we're working with Partners that go into the SME marketplace. So we're able to give it to them and they're able to give it to their kind of sector. A lot of these insights are very often sector specific. So once you understand the sector or work with a sector specialist partner, you can drive real good economies of scales and therefore make the products available to lots of people. So we're early stages, but I definitely think we're. We're not far from this being very affordable very quickly. You know, we're not talking five years, we're talking 12 months. Yeah, lots of. And lots of startups are building this into their kind of, you know, their kind of strategy about how they target that mass market of businesses that, you know, there aren't enterprises.

[Ryan Alford]

This strikes. You could really, you could build, essentially, you might have a target market in mind, but tools like this could help you pivot and or adapt target markets that are maybe larger or different than what you anticipated. Like if suddenly your product has a use case or is gaining steam with soccer moms for some reason, you know, like, you could build, you know, niche target markets from this data. That might not have been your first inclination.

[Matthew McCrory]

Yeah, definitely. And the other thing, the other thing that's coming in again, in Europe, we're beholden to GDPR regulations in probably a slightly stricter way than in the US but some of those demographic overlays are quite important and there's lots of businesses now kind of stepping into that fray. So you can get alongside the insights data, you can get a demographic overlay. So we were able to tell a sports governing body that we said 20% of your audience of your followers is women, but they provide 60% of the positive sentiment on your channels. So go and recruit more women because they're good, they send a great message out. So those types of nuggets, they're quite. You have to think through how to write the reports. But yeah, I think the large language model kind of product is really changing that and allowing you to kind of discover exactly as you're talking about different demographics, different target markets within what you're doing. The key is you have to have a conversation to start with. So at the heart is the creativity around the story you're telling. You've got to excite people with your ads or your message or your content. So you kind of got to have a conversation to start with. Otherwise no one's commenting on your socials and you've kind of got nothing to analyze in the first place.

[Ryan Alford]

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, in theory, how does it work, Matthew? I mean, as far as like it's just industry aggregation of data. Like, okay, it's one thing for Coca Cola that wants to know their billion customers, how they're talking about it, it's another for Coca Cola startup that wants to, you know, wants sentiment data for the industry. So I mean, I would, I assume you might work with both. Correct? I mean I know that going straight to brands through an agency or the brand might be. But you can also roll up, I guess categorically, right?

[Matthew McCrory]

Yeah, you could, you can do a bit of that. But a lot of that data is, a lot of that data is tied up certainly on Meta. So the way, because of the, I don't know if it was big news in the U.S. but the Cambridge Analytica scandal over here, which was really the UK company that was targeting individuals as part of the election campaigns were going back 10 years now, meant that Meta had to reapply kind of all its data privacy policies and laws. So now getting any permissions to access data for us to do that, we have to go through a complete app review process. It takes at least two weeks every time we tweak a change. It's a real kind of lengthy process. So a lot of the data is tied up in those data pools, so is actually only accessible to the kind of base companies, some sell it like X. You can, you can sign up to their, their data or you can sign up to one of the kind of big social listening platforms that are kind of, they're listening to the kind of 10% social media sentiment that's going around the Sprinkler brand watch. These are the kind of big players in those sectors. But they're spending a lot of money to get hold of that data and put it in these vast data pools. The only way you can do it affordably is to know exactly where you're looking. So you have to have a kind of use case in order to do that. Doing it generally is quite expensive at the moment.

[Ryan Alford]

Yeah, interesting distinction. And I can understand if you're wanting personalized data. I guess it's actually the roll up of that data and what it tells you. Not necessarily so that I can target, you know, Jane Smith because I know she wants to buy it, but more that the, the aggregation of that knowledge, because you would think, I mean, and I'm not suggesting anything nefarious here, Matthew, but scraping what is public information, you know, for posts that are public and not necessarily made to only specific people or whatever, that that information could be aggregated In a way that could tell you things. I'm not saying that's what Arwen does, but I don't know where the line gets drawn with publicly available data versus, you know, your personal profile and, and then targeting you with, you know, leather shoes because, you know, we know you like that.

[Matthew McCrory]

Yeah, well, I mean you can certainly do that within the, within the ad platforms, within social media. So, so we, we do do kind of retargeting lists for clients. So they run a meta ad, we analyze who looked at it, who responded it within the meta ecosystem and, and then we tell them the next time you run the ad, don't run it against this audience because they don't like you, but run it against this audience because they do like you. So we, yeah, we find that happens in lots of, in lots of different micro communities. So you can definitely do it within your own data set, but kind of aggregating up is more challenging. Yeah, there are, there are definitely businesses out there that will do scraping. They will. And there's nothing illegal to doing that. It's as you say, it's totally publicly available information. Arwen doesn't do it because we've signed a T's and C's agreement with meta that says we won't do that. So we only do it on kind of information that's in the box. But there are businesses that do that and they aggregate data up and yeah, I think that's useful. We can access it and anyone can access it via X, but you have to pay to access the X API. But then you obviously only get an X view of the world. Then you don't get an X Facebook kind of Instagram view of the world and TikTok, which a lot of marketing professionals will want that, that kind of full view of, of what's going on.

[Ryan Alford]

Do you guys enrich, you know, that is that, you know, as Arwen enrich those, you know, again, the data that you have access to within the box of the brand. Are you enriching that data, you know, for targeting on digital channels?

[Matthew McCrory]

Well, we only, only so far as like, like I said before, we'll partner with demographic type organization. We'll take an audience that reacted positively to maybe an ad or to an organic campaign. We'll take all those people and then we'll say, can you find me more people like this? We'll do a demographic analysis exactly as you were saying, they're soccer moms, they're on the east coast, they kind of look like this so that the client could then run Another lookalike campaign to target more people that look like those people. So, yeah, so we can, you can enrich it in that sense of the word, but it's very difficult without doing it manually in this kind of data, you know, data private world to kind of do that in an automated fashion anymore. Yeah. Going back 10 years, you'd have great pools filled with people doing that data enrichment.

[Ryan Alford]

Matthew, as we close out, you know, the episode here, what's the. Where is it all headed for Arwen and you know, what's sort of your, you know, future vision where this world of moderation on social media, you know, is headed like and, and what. And how you see Arwen being a part of it?

[Matthew McCrory]

Well, with everything that's happened in the last sort of six months, we're definitely headed to. And much from our perspective, probably on the main channels, a much more kind of generally toxic environment. I think the pendulum swung one way, it went too far, it's going to swing back the other way. It'll swing past the middle and go to the other side.

[Ryan Alford]

Yeah, we know it will.

[Matthew McCrory]

That's what always happens in these cases. Which, which is, which is unfortunately good for us because we'll be standing there waiting to help people, to protect people's brands. So that's the sort of, the kind of. Me too bit of the job. The moderation side, where we hope things are heading is they're heading what we call our kind of insights intelligence. We think that's a little bit more exciting. It's about creating more engagement. That's where. That's what we think the future is on social media. It's kind of giving people exactly what they want, not hammering them with loads of ads that they don't really want to see getting in the way of their kind of user journey that they want that. Yeah, they're accessing news and leisure and all sorts of their hobbies, etc on these social media channels. So don't give in that, don't get in their way. Give them exactly what, what people want. And I think that giving people that intelligence as to how people behave online and what they respond to and what their interests are, I think that should help brands give people the content they want. So I see that becoming more affordable to more businesses and being able to do it much quicker and you don't need as big a skill set as you used to technically in order to deliver it.

[Ryan Alford]

I love it. Where can everyone keep up with everything that you're doing? Matthew, with Arwen, we are.

[Matthew McCrory]

You can look at our website Arwen AI. We post all our news on there and that's kind of the main channel. I'm a link for the CEO of a social media company. I haven't got the biggest social media preference. LinkedIn is my network of choice that's kind of live and breathe and post stuff. I'm on all the other social medias because I have teenage children and I have to check up on them occasionally.

[Ryan Alford]

Yes, I live in that world myself. And hey, if Arwen can help protect them from some of the bad guys, I'm all for it. I just want it to be done in a world where we're not moderating opinion.

[Matthew McCrory]

I totally agree with you. Totally agree with you, Matthew.

[Ryan Alford]

It's a pleasure having you on. I really appreciate it.

[Matthew McCrory]

I appreciate. Thanks, Ryan, for having me.

[Ryan Alford]

Hey, guys. You're to find us ryanisright.com you'll find highlight clips from today's episode, the full YouTube video and audio, and of course, all the links to social media for Arwen and myself and the show. We appreciate you. We know you have a choice in podcasting. Thank you for making us number one. We'll see you next time.

Right about now, this has been Right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast network production. Visit ryanisright.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.