MENA Social Media content from one single interface

A plethora of Social Media outlets are exploited by users to post comments, reviews, posts, tweets, and the list goes on and on. Those mentions have a direct impact on the reputation of the business or brand - We’ve all heard it before you may say - that’s the reason why I’m not going to underline the listening phase part of the Social Media Intelligence cycle as it was underlined in my previous article: Social Media Seminar. But before trying to engage with your community of users, consumers, detractors or evangelists it is important to know the community before you join and attempt to sell or market because you may end up infuriating everyone and losing credibility. I’m an advocate of the value of researching the users that interact about your business (Social DNA of your community) and this requires to pay attention to where the community congregate and engage with them as an individual and treat them with respect and use intelligence. 

Community surveillance

The best way to know your audience is to use a Social Media Listening solution because there are an endless number of Social Media channels that come in all shapes and flavours (Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Boards, Groups, Youtube, Flikr, Digg, StumbleUpon just to name a few). Undeniably business professionals are willing to monitor the Buzz about their brand health and a Social Media listening tool fits the bill. Those mentions from a multitude of Social Media outlets will be accessible from one single interface. The aggregator of mentions about your brand, products or services will allow to stalk all the conversation happening between users and if you put the right person in front of the solution (yep Social Media done right= right tool box + right mindset) you may translate what consumers say about your business into insights that will help you serve them better. And if you don’t bother to monitor, then this conversation is shaping your brand's image regardless of whether or not you choose to listen and engage with these conversations. Without a doubt the community has a hold over the medium and hence the conversation.

Geosocial

From a geographical standpoint, the Middle East is well-known for its diversity of dialects where people not only use Arabic, English, and French to interact online but also Franco-Arabic which is the use of Latin characters combined with numbers to write Arabic. The Arab League is composed of 22 countries with a minimum of 30 different dialects. The map below emphasizes the range of dialects spoken within the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA).

While I do cringe at the thought of having to monitor all the content related to the brands I monitor on an ongoing basis, I am, on the other end of the spectrum, fascinated by the intricacies of the MENA region. Consequently, in order to avoid bad publicity and an unexpected loss of revenue due to a disgruntled consumer’s negative campaign hostile to your brand, you must, because it’s no longer a luxury, gather all the negative word-of-mouth that could easily proliferate to impair your e-reputation even more.

Actionable Intelligence from the Social web

Once you made up your mind on the right platform to utilize so that you have access to all the content around your business online, you still have to cycle through several pages of results and monitor key metrics around buzz, conduct comparisons between topics and competitors. An important step has been overcome, namely data collection and know is the time to understand the data. Technology at this stage is still critical and the use of text analytics and language processing allow to make sense of the stream of information shared online and detect early warnings in case you need to firefight. The focal element here is to cream off the major topics from the relevant content collected and accessible from a single window and detect the root cause of issues; those golden bits of information are buried and when brought to the surface could provide critical insights. You get out of Social Media what you put into it so as to leverage customer conversations as a business asset. The identification of key communities and influencers is the following stage to harness the power of the consumer’s voice within the social world of media. This stage is vital for future engagement since it permits customer behaviour profiling.

Social Mapping

Visualization of the voice of those passionate and vocal consumers is also what facilitate to connect the dots. A dashboard featuring several key metrics assists the identification of the people leading the conversation, provides a trend regarding the tonality of the discussion, and shares a clear benchmark of the share of voice of your business compared to other players within your industry.

To conclude, Social Media changed the dynamics between companies and consumers and only a continuous and automated listening combined with human analysis can help businesses demystify their buzz online. My best advice will be to set measurable, specific and attainable goals so that all your monitoring is done in the framework of a strategy.

MENA Social Media content from one single interface

A plethora of Social Media outlets are exploited by users to post comments, reviews, posts, tweets, and the list goes on and on. Those mentions have a direct impact on the reputation of the business or brand - We’ve all heard it before you may say - that’s the reason why I’m not going to underline the listening phase part of the Social Media Intelligence cycle as it was underlined in my previous article: Social Media Seminar. But before trying to engage with your community of users, consumers, detractors or evangelists it is important to know the community before you join and attempt to sell or market because you may end up infuriating everyone and losing credibility. I’m an advocate of the value of researching the users that interact about your business (Social DNA of your community) and this requires to pay attention to where the community congregate and engage with them as an individual and treat them with respect and use intelligence. 

Community surveillance

The best way to know your audience is to use a Social Media Listening solution because there are an endless number of Social Media channels that come in all shapes and flavours (Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Boards, Groups, Youtube, Flikr, Digg, StumbleUpon just to name a few). Undeniably business professionals are willing to monitor the Buzz about their brand health and a Social Media listening tool fits the bill. Those mentions from a multitude of Social Media outlets will be accessible from one single interface. The aggregator of mentions about your brand, products or services will allow to stalk all the conversation happening between users and if you put the right person in front of the solution (yep Social Media done right= right tool box + right mindset) you may translate what consumers say about your business into insights that will help you serve them better. And if you don’t bother to monitor, then this conversation is shaping your brand's image regardless of whether or not you choose to listen and engage with these conversations. Without a doubt the community has a hold over the medium and hence the conversation.

Geosocial

From a geographical standpoint, the Middle East is well-known for its diversity of dialects where people not only use Arabic, English, and French to interact online but also Franco-Arabic which is the use of Latin characters combined with numbers to write Arabic. The Arab League is composed of 22 countries with a minimum of 30 different dialects. The map below emphasizes the range of dialects spoken within the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA).

While I do cringe at the thought of having to monitor all the content related to the brands I monitor on an ongoing basis, I am, on the other end of the spectrum, fascinated by the intricacies of the MENA region. Consequently, in order to avoid bad publicity and an unexpected loss of revenue due to a disgruntled consumer’s negative campaign hostile to your brand, you must, because it’s no longer a luxury, gather all the negative word-of-mouth that could easily proliferate to impair your e-reputation even more.

Actionable Intelligence from the Social web

Once you made up your mind on the right platform to utilize so that you have access to all the content around your business online, you still have to cycle through several pages of results and monitor key metrics around buzz, conduct comparisons between topics and competitors. An important step has been overcome, namely data collection and know is the time to understand the data. Technology at this stage is still critical and the use of text analytics and language processing allow to make sense of the stream of information shared online and detect early warnings in case you need to firefight. The focal element here is to cream off the major topics from the relevant content collected and accessible from a single window and detect the root cause of issues; those golden bits of information are buried and when brought to the surface could provide critical insights. You get out of Social Media what you put into it so as to leverage customer conversations as a business asset. The identification of key communities and influencers is the following stage to harness the power of the consumer’s voice within the social world of media. This stage is vital for future engagement since it permits customer behaviour profiling.

Social Mapping

Visualization of the voice of those passionate and vocal consumers is also what facilitate to connect the dots. A dashboard featuring several key metrics assists the identification of the people leading the conversation, provides a trend regarding the tonality of the discussion, and shares a clear benchmark of the share of voice of your business compared to other players within your industry.

To conclude, Social Media changed the dynamics between companies and consumers and only a continuous and automated listening combined with human analysis can help businesses demystify their buzz online. My best advice will be to set measurable, specific and attainable goals so that all your monitoring is done in the framework of a strategy.

SSHA 2011

As always, the Social Science History Association meeting in Boston is brimming with great sessions across a wide range of topic areas. There is evidence of lots of new thinking about the intersections of the social science disciplines and various fields of historical research. Here is the SSHA's description of its mission:

The Social Science History Association is an interdisciplinary group of scholars that shares interests in social life and theory; historiography, and historical and social-scientific methodologies. SSHA might be best seen as a coalition of distinctive scholarly communities. Our substantive intellectual work ranges from everyday life in the medieval world – and sometimes earlier -- to contemporary global politics, but we are united in our historicized approach to understanding human events, explaining social processes, and developing innovative theory.
The term “social science history” has meant different things to different academic generations. In the 1970s, when the SSHA’s first meetings were held, the founding generation of scholars took it to reflect their concern to address pressing questions by combining social-science method and new forms of historical evidence. Quantitative approaches were especially favored by the association’s historical demographers, as well as some of the economic, social and women’s historians of the time. By the 1980s and 1990s, other waves of scholars – including culturally-oriented historians and anthropologists, geographers, political theorists, and comparative-historical social scientists -- had joined the conversation.
New intellectual directions continue to emerge at the outset of the 21st century. Today’s SSHA incorporates a diversity of scholarly styles, with lots of crosstalk among them.

One of the special values of SSHA is the emphasis given to interdisciplinarity. It is a principle of the organization that panels should contain papers by scholars from different disciplines (and different institutions). Why is this valuable? For several reasons. First, every discipline develops a degree of myopia when it comes to the definition of problems and methods. And yet the big questions we would like to address historically do not divide neatly along the domains of the disciplines. Politics, family, culture, environment, markets, warfare -- these all correspond to different disciplines. And yet real historical Burma or France unavoidably involves all of them. So bringing the perspectives of specialists in economics, cultural studies, and population history into productive interaction in connection with a question like "Why and how did France become "France?"" is profoundly creative. It leads us to a significantly broader view of the problem, the processes, and the methods that might illuminate.

The other distinctive feature of SSHA, going back to its establishment in the 1970s, is the conviction that the social sciences are deeply relevant to historical understanding. Sometimes this conviction has led to a cliometric impulse -- an emphasis on quantitative social history. But it has also been very receptive to qualitative and comparative approaches to historical research as well.

Andrew Abbott describes some of the intellectual and institutional currents that led to this emphasis within and around the history profession and historical sociology in Chaos of Disciplines.

Another great benefit that derives from participating in SSHA is the renewing exposure it permits to brilliant, innovative young scholars in a variety of fields of theory and research. It is so encouraging to see many young scholars whose work goes significantly beyond existing standard approaches. Sometimes PhD students seem excessively beholden to the ideas of their teachers. In the past several years I've been very pleased to see confident innovation and creative thinking by the coming generation of scholars in many of the fields of social and historical research. A good example is a couple of papers on the subject of processes and temporality by Tulia Falleti ("Decentralization in Time: A Process-Tracing Approach to Federal Dynamics of Change") and Matthew Norton ("Processual and Situational Temporalities in Sociological Explanations"). Isaac Reed is another good example of an innovative young scholar who is offering fresh ideas into debates about theory and social science. His recent Interpretation and Social Knowledge, on display at the book exhibit, is a rigorous, fresh approach to post positivist philosophy of social science.

SSHA has been a leader in bringing Geographical Information Systems (GIS) into concrete applications in historical research, and there were a number of panels using this technology with great effectiveness. The Interdisciplinary Consortium for Social and Political Research (ICPSR) is a longstanding partner with SSHA, and there were a number of sessions that illustrated the value of the large databases and advanced historical methods that ICPSR has championed for years. The current president of SSHA, George Alter, is a distinguished historical demographer and also serves as director of ICPSR at the University of Michigan. I'm looking forward to his address later today, "Life Course, Family, and Community." Historical demography is a longstanding area of focus for scholars within the SSHA orbit.

Some new concepts and methods that are visible in this year's program include application of social network analytical tools to historical topics; new thinking about temporality and events; steady progress on large studies of population history; new thinking about colonialism and post-colonialism; and new ideas about comparative economic history across Eurasia. The language of causal mechanisms is showing up much more frequently across panels than I've noticed in previous years.

The Association's journal, Social Science History, reflects many of the strengths of the organization.

Who is a mandated reporter in Pennsylvania? Finding out about reporting laws

Child Abuse Reporting Laws - I can't believe a state would not make a teacher, coach, etc. a mandated reporter

The news is chock full of reports on long-term abuse of children and the lack of awareness and action taken by witnesses. Maybe I am naive but I thought teachers and coaches... and, morally, witnesses were mandated reporters. I've worked in several states and have taken the licensing

Social Media seminar, full house in MENA

In the Social world of Media, the Middle East is still gaining momentum. Indeed, during a recent Seminar entitled Social media listening for the Arab World: insights at market speed the space allocated was not big enough to accommodate Social Media professionals, marketers and the like that came to enjoy a presentation made by Diego Semprún, Head of Product Strategy, Europe, Nielsen Watch, & (myself) Khalid Dalil, Research Manager, NM Incite (A Nielsen/McKinsey Company), MENA. One thing is sure, we past the raising awareness phase and now the audience calls for practical insights on:

• how to capture the voice of the consumer as it happens and make sense out of the overwhelming stream of information
• how to use efficiently a Twitter account to interact with their consumers, 
• what type of landing page on a Facebook Fan page will allow users to engage more with their brand. 
• the list definitely goes on and on

The web is turning out to be an amazing tool for companies willing to collect significant thoughts and ideas about the brand, new campaigns, products… you name it, the Internet has it all. But in this sea of constant changes, how can a brand wade his way through unstructured raw data, use the blogosphere as the world largest focus group, monitor its e-reputation, participate in the conversation where people like you and me exchange real world information so as to praise, warn, contribute and learn from the community. 

Allow me to say it one more time Social Media is about respect, passion, consistency, interactivity, transparency because when you cheat (by this I mean creating your own comments or reviews, launching a non branded blog or forum fed by your social media professionals…) you need to bear in mind that what goes around comes around and hit you right in the brand.

Social Media in the Middle East as its own intricacies that people willing to use this discipline at their advantage need to know because, unfortunately, there is no miracle pill to help them define the Social Media strategy, spot the opportunities and restraint themselves when needed. And believe me it is worth getting down in the trenches to find out what are the real benefits of using Social Media in the Arab world.

Let me share with you an interaction that I had during this seminar with a C-level executive of one of the major FMCG companies that will summarize the importance of localizing Social Media concepts and best practices. This individual was willing to integrate Social Media lessons learned as an extension of all the Market Research effort, which I gladly welcomed because Market Research is the prompting, offline phase and the complement is the unprompted, online phase. Those two components allowing the marketers to have a 360 view of their brand health. This CMO briefed me on his current initiatives to weave Social Media in the fabric of the company.  He was currently using a Social Media monitoring tool to collect tweets, wall comments, blog posts, threads and other messages from several Social Media outlets so that he can keep an eye on all the interactions around his products and the brand from one single interface. Two markets were the priority Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Let me stop here for a moment, this initiative is the right one because no steps can be taken, without first listening - Figure out who your customers are and where they go for their information. Realize this as your number one priority part of the Social Media Intelligence cycle, Listening, Analytics and then Engage. So back to the point, the CMO was targeting two major markets within MENA region namely KSA and Egypt to collect the voice of the users and then percolating the data in order to know what the main topics of discussion are. When the CMO was done providing me with the details of its current enterprise In the Social Media space, I asked more details related to the collection process. One thing stroke me since I work in this field for several years and some lessons can only be ascertained with hands-on experience. The CMO shared with me the query used to collect the data at the brand level and the following were my two main comments:

• You do not take into consideration the misspellings of your brand name which will allow you to collect a larger spectrum of messages around your brand.
• You are interested in two major markets within the MENA region where an average of 80% of all interactions online are in Arabic, why the query is only in English?

Imagine a funnel-shaped process where the analysis is done only on 20% of the overall content and you make decisions on a small portion of the buzz made by a non representative portion of your online audience. What you need to take from this is that you can integrate valuable lessons learned and best practices from around the globe but you have to localize the usage, keep an open pair of eyes, a kind of one step back approach. Companies that are not in touch with their customers miss out on small but critical ways to make their Social Media efforts more relevant to the region.

Social Media is an iterative experimentation and as mentioned earlier you have to fail often to succeed faster. You have to embrace change to make it happen, and by this I mean surrounding yourself with the right people and provide them with the means and the environment to work their magic. Social Media is not about tools alone, it is a mindset combined with the right arsenal of tools and the regional ingredients that makes the recipe so successful. If you want your consumers to come back for more you have to put the right content, appropriate contests that respect the local culture and keep them entertained. Do not fool yourself into thinking that you are going to use Social Media as you use the conventional disciplines. 

I would love to have your views on the above and the local or regional challenges you face when using Social Media to monitor your brand health and engage with your online audience.

Social Media seminar, full house in MENA

In the Social world of Media, the Middle East is still gaining momentum. Indeed, during a recent Seminar entitled Social media listening for the Arab World: insights at market speed the space allocated was not big enough to accommodate Social Media professionals, marketers and the like that came to enjoy a presentation made by Diego Semprún, Head of Product Strategy, Europe, Nielsen Watch, & (myself) Khalid Dalil, Research Manager, NM Incite (A Nielsen/McKinsey Company), MENA. One thing is sure, we past the raising awareness phase and now the audience calls for practical insights on:

• how to capture the voice of the consumer as it happens and make sense out of the overwhelming stream of information
• how to use efficiently a Twitter account to interact with their consumers, 
• what type of landing page on a Facebook Fan page will allow users to engage more with their brand. 
• the list definitely goes on and on

The web is turning out to be an amazing tool for companies willing to collect significant thoughts and ideas about the brand, new campaigns, products… you name it, the Internet has it all. But in this sea of constant changes, how can a brand wade his way through unstructured raw data, use the blogosphere as the world largest focus group, monitor its e-reputation, participate in the conversation where people like you and me exchange real world information so as to praise, warn, contribute and learn from the community. 

Allow me to say it one more time Social Media is about respect, passion, consistency, interactivity, transparency because when you cheat (by this I mean creating your own comments or reviews, launching a non branded blog or forum fed by your social media professionals…) you need to bear in mind that what goes around comes around and hit you right in the brand.

Social Media in the Middle East as its own intricacies that people willing to use this discipline at their advantage need to know because, unfortunately, there is no miracle pill to help them define the Social Media strategy, spot the opportunities and restraint themselves when needed. And believe me it is worth getting down in the trenches to find out what are the real benefits of using Social Media in the Arab world.

Let me share with you an interaction that I had during this seminar with a C-level executive of one of the major FMCG companies that will summarize the importance of localizing Social Media concepts and best practices. This individual was willing to integrate Social Media lessons learned as an extension of all the Market Research effort, which I gladly welcomed because Market Research is the prompting, offline phase and the complement is the unprompted, online phase. Those two components allowing the marketers to have a 360 view of their brand health. This CMO briefed me on his current initiatives to weave Social Media in the fabric of the company.  He was currently using a Social Media monitoring tool to collect tweets, wall comments, blog posts, threads and other messages from several Social Media outlets so that he can keep an eye on all the interactions around his products and the brand from one single interface. Two markets were the priority Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Let me stop here for a moment, this initiative is the right one because no steps can be taken, without first listening - Figure out who your customers are and where they go for their information. Realize this as your number one priority part of the Social Media Intelligence cycle, Listening, Analytics and then Engage. So back to the point, the CMO was targeting two major markets within MENA region namely KSA and Egypt to collect the voice of the users and then percolating the data in order to know what the main topics of discussion are. When the CMO was done providing me with the details of its current enterprise In the Social Media space, I asked more details related to the collection process. One thing stroke me since I work in this field for several years and some lessons can only be ascertained with hands-on experience. The CMO shared with me the query used to collect the data at the brand level and the following were my two main comments:

• You do not take into consideration the misspellings of your brand name which will allow you to collect a larger spectrum of messages around your brand.
• You are interested in two major markets within the MENA region where an average of 80% of all interactions online are in Arabic, why the query is only in English?

Imagine a funnel-shaped process where the analysis is done only on 20% of the overall content and you make decisions on a small portion of the buzz made by a non representative portion of your online audience. What you need to take from this is that you can integrate valuable lessons learned and best practices from around the globe but you have to localize the usage, keep an open pair of eyes, a kind of one step back approach. Companies that are not in touch with their customers miss out on small but critical ways to make their Social Media efforts more relevant to the region.

Social Media is an iterative experimentation and as mentioned earlier you have to fail often to succeed faster. You have to embrace change to make it happen, and by this I mean surrounding yourself with the right people and provide them with the means and the environment to work their magic. Social Media is not about tools alone, it is a mindset combined with the right arsenal of tools and the regional ingredients that makes the recipe so successful. If you want your consumers to come back for more you have to put the right content, appropriate contests that respect the local culture and keep them entertained. Do not fool yourself into thinking that you are going to use Social Media as you use the conventional disciplines. 

I would love to have your views on the above and the local or regional challenges you face when using Social Media to monitor your brand health and engage with your online audience.

Four years of UnderstandingSociety

Today marks the fourth anniversary of UnderstandingSociety. This is the 613th posting since I began in November 2007 and the 135th in the past year.  I continue to find this medium a good way of pushing forward my own learning and thinking about a swirl of topics around the central thrust, making sense of the social realm in which we live. I've been drawn into lines of thought in the past year that I wouldn't have encountered without the intellectual effort involved in writing the blog.  And, of course, it is a good way of meeting a reading public all around the world.  

Several topics came in for special focus in the past year.  First, there is a fair amount of new material on the philosophy of history. Since finishing New Contributions to the Philosophy of History last fall (2010) I've continued to think about history and historiography, and I've found some new issues that I need to think about more fully. There is more to come on this.

Second, I've been thinking about John Rawls's work more in the past year. I first read Rawls as an undergraduate in the late sixties. Then I read A Theory of Justice when it appeared in 1971 as I was beginning to take courses from Rawls as a graduate student. Truthfully, I like the work better today than I did then, 40 years ago. And I'm finding that it provides support for a much deeper critique of our society than I thought then. One part of this rethinking is contained in a piece on  "Property-owning democracy". Another is a reflection on Rawls's later thoughts about the deficiencies of an excessively consumerist culture in his correspondence with Philippe van Parijs.

Third, I've written quite a bit in the past twelve months that is directed at issues in analytical sociology. The key premises of the AS approach are very consistent with my own understanding of the social world (microfoundations, methodological localism, causal mechanisms). But the new rash of books and conferences on the issues AS raises have been very stimulating to me, and I'm finding that there are good reasons to support the idea of meso-level social causation.  (See the "analytical sociology" thread for these postings.) I expect to do more on this topic in the coming year, including perhaps some more thinking about the issues raised by agent-based modeling.

And finally, there are more posts than in previous years on the issues of inequality and power that are creating more and more difficulty in our country. I think that is a reflection of real changes our society is experiencing: more inequality, more divisive rhetoric, and more racism.  The number 1 post (in terms of direct visits) reflected this theme, "Inequalities and the ascendant right."  (Interestingly, the number 1 post for subscribers this year was "Rawls on the EU," which represents the more philosophical side of these current issues.)

A fairly general but perhaps unexpected observation is that I've found myself looking back to classics in the social sciences over the past fifty years, and have found new things in these works that didn't catch my attention the first time I read them.  This is true, actually, of the rereading I've done of Rawls. But posts on Chalmers Johnson, Herbert Simon, Steven Lukes, and Fritz Stern led me to think more fully about their ideas, and to see new insights that were probably there all along but not for me.

Readers come to the blog through two channels.  Slightly more than half the visits to the blog are in the form of direct visits to the Blogger site itself, through searches, referrals, and direct links.  And the remainder take the form of readers who use a blog reader or RSS feed to follow or subscribe to the blog.  These views don't show up in the first measure. The first "channel" represents a broad population of occasional readers interested in a particular topic.  The second represents a group of readers who have deliberately chosen to follow the blog.

The readership of UnderstandingSociety has continued to rise.  There were 220,474 visits recorded directly to the site, and another 193,971 views through the RSS feed. About 50% of visits are from the United States, and the other half come from 194 countries and territories. There are about 2,000 readers who follow the blog automatically through an RSS feed, and there are over 1,600 people who follow on Facebook or Twitter.  Thanks everyone!

The top ten posts written during this past year were:

Direct visits to the blog:

1 Inequalities and the ascendant right (2,501)
2 The math of social networks (2,451)
3 A jobless future? (2,051)
4 Diagrams and economic thought (1,992)
5 The history of economic thought and the present (1,850)
6 Rawls on political liberalism (1,788)
7 Quiet politics (1,747)
8 Violent rhetoric and violent behavior (1,734)
9 Income inequalities and social ills (1,417)
10 Bourdieu's field (1,414)

Views and clicks through the RSS feed (subscribers):

1 Rawls on the EU (2,313)
2 The math of social networks (2,170)
3 Democracy and contentious politics (2,152)
4 Hume as historian (2,150)
5 Quiet politics (2,076)
6 Herbert Simon's satisficing life (2,075)
7 Possessive individualism (2,074)
8 Education a leveler? (2,057)
9 Income inequalities and social ills (2,050)
10 Hate as a social demographic (2,041)

Interestingly, there are only three overlaps on the two lists – "The math of social networks," "Quiet politics," and "Income inequalities and social ills".

To the right is a link to a bookmarked PDF of the blog through July 2011. There will be an update after the beginning of January.  I've spent some time on this part of the project because it gives expression to the "virtual book" part of my goal in the blog.  By using the bookmarks organized into threads it is possible for the reader to look at all the postings on a certain general topic at once.

Thanks for reading, following, and sometimes commenting!