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Dr Chris Mackmurdo

Founder


Chris is a former British Diplomat and a strategic intelligence specialist.

Chris was recruited by the UK Foreign Office during his university studies. He established the National Security Research Group to bridge the gap between intelligence, research and policy communities working on international counter-terrorism and cyber issues, and to improve the prioritisation of national security risk overseas. He also served as the Foreign Office’s specialist lead on COBR and Joint Intelligence Committee business, covering terrorism-linked hostage cases and strategic intelligence assessments of global terrorism threats.

During his time in government service, Chris worked with Duncan to develop a full-spectrum approach to counter-terrorism that strengthened co-ordination between overt and covert capabilities to achieve national security effects in both the “real world” and the information space.

Chris left the Foreign Office in 2014 and spent several years working with a diverse set of organisations in the financial services, energy, and HNW sectors across the UK, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Over the course of six years, Chris witnessed the emergence of malign influence and disinformation operations, using new digital assets, infrastructure and tradecraft powered by social media, exposing governments, companies and individuals to risks that were unfamiliar and unconstrained.

Chris founded Elninio in 2020 to build the analytical methodologies and practical capabilities to understand and respond to the changing nature of risk in the social media age.

Duncan Fulton

Managing Director

 
Duncan is a former British Diplomat and an expert in complex risk management.

After a few years in advertising with Ogilvy and Mather, Duncan joined Her Majesty’s Government as a Strategic Communications Adviser before becoming Principal Speechwriter to four Secretaries of State, and a stint as the Prime Minister’s speechwriter for security policy.

He then moved to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as Head of Counter Terrorism Strategy, where he and Chris worked closely together to overhaul the UK’s overseas CT efforts and develop ‘hybrid' responses that better orchestrated the covert and overt capabilities at HMG’s disposal. During this period Duncan spent time deployed in the Middle East, South Asia and North and East Africa. Duncan’s final posting was to the British Embassy in Washington DC, where he helped establish the first US-UK forum on countering extremism online and led the diplomatic response to the Edward Snowden leaks.

On leaving the FCO in 2014 he applied the hybrid response principle to the financial services sector as Head of Government Liaison for the MENA region at HSBC. Duncan broadened his commercial experience as Global Head of Government Relations at De La Rue, the world’s largest bank-note manufacturer, and as a Partner at DRD, a boutique strategic communications consultancy dealing with complex rep risk challenges on behalf of High-Net-Worth Individuals, Governments, and businesses. 

Over a career in communications and risk, Duncan has seen how the explosion of social media has profoundly changed the risk environment. In the digital realm truth is contested, and rapidly evolving networks and narratives influence both opinion on-line and behaviours in the real world. But few businesses are geared up to recognise the signals – let alone have the tools to act on them. That is where Elnin.io comes in.

Duncan holds degrees from Oxford University.

Toby Burnham

Head of Campaigns

 
Toby is a recognised global communications expert.

With specialist expertise in news and stakeholder management gained operating at the highest level over 30 years, Toby’s roster includes C-suite, HNW, governmental, and multilateral clients on every continent.

His communications career began at Freud Communications in the pre-digital age, specialising in planning and running news events. Managing international news became Toby’s particular work focus, running campaigns for two Mayors of London (including Boris Johnson’s 'London House' at the Beijing Olympics), Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaoboa, and several governmental, multilateral and non-governmental organisations operating across Africa and the Middle East.

In 2015, Toby’s global news expertise led him to work with Libya’s National Oil Corporation, where he first met Chris. He built a communications capacity that served as the Chairman’s first line of defence as civil war raged across the country, in which the NOC was targeted by local and foreign forces hellbent on controlling Libya's oil. Proxy electronic armies, a polarized news space, and violent militia and criminal activity provided live lessons in the destructive power of disinformation and the reporting of fake new by mainstream media, which had to be corrected both domestically and globally.

Toby also has extensive experience working in the litigation field, building and running campaigns representing victims of war and terrorism, such as the Iraq War Families Campaign and Hyde Park Victims Justice Campaign, amongst others.

Toby's intimate knowledge of the social media/traditional media nexus gives him a unique insight into how PR and strategic communications capabilities need to evolve to meet changing demands. Through Elnin.io, he aims to create a new industry standard that skilfully blends leading-edge machine learning with expert campaigning tradecraft.

Toby holds a degree from the University of Edinburgh.

Carl Miller

Head of Research


Carl is a pioneer of Social Media Intelligence and an expert investigator of information warfare.

Carl is the Founder of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, the UK’s first think tank institution dedicated to studying the digital world. He coined the term "Social Media Intelligence" (SOCMINT) in 2012 and, since then, has developed the professional framework for its study and practice in civic society and the research community. In 2015, he co-founded CASM Technology.

Working with a team of technologists and researchers, Carl has written over twenty major studies examining issues around disinformation, deception, and illicit influence operations, ranging from online electoral interference, radicalization and digital politics to conspiracy theories, online research ethics, cyber-crime, and Internet governance. He presents programmes on these topics for the BBC’s flagship technology show Click. His debut book, The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab was published in 2018 by Penguin RandomHouse and won the 2019 Transmission Prize. Carl has written for Wired, New Scientist, the Sunday Times, The Economist, The Telegraph, and the Guardian.

Carl is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London, a member of the Society Board of the British Computing Society, an Associate of the Imperial War Museum, a member of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, a member of the advisory board of the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, and a Commissioner of Newham’s Democracy and Civic Participation Commission.

Carl has worked with a wide range of organisations to unpack the challenges posed by social media, disinformation, information warfare, and other facets of the online world. Through Elnin.io, he is looking forward to working on responses to these challenges that are practical, effective, and sustainable.

Carl holds degrees from the University of Cambridge and King's College London.

OUR SOLUTIONS


Hybrid risks require a hybrid response.


Off-line and on-line worlds have become enmeshed and inseparable. Social media has transformed the risk landscape, creating new routes for malicious attacks and a dynamic environment in which ever-evolving opinions and behaviours present hazards to reputational capital. We call this new reality HYBRID risk, which we reveal through a novel fusion of SOCMINT and Open Source Intelligence and our own risk assessment methodology.

Managing risk effectively means understanding both the drivers and manifestations of hybrid risk, and having the capabilities to intervene earlier with a wider range and combination of tools than conventional responses allow. We call this HYBRID response, a new standard for monitoring, predicting and mitigating risk in the social media age.

3D: DYNAMIC DUE DILIGENCE

  • Buy and Sell side
  • M&A
  • ESG
  • Portfolio risk monitoring
  • Investigation support
3D significantly improves the understanding and assessment of risks emanating from the digital realm, providing a new standard in due diligence.
The explosion of social media has made the risk environment ever more fluid. Attitudes towards conduct, a sector or business can shift more rapidly than ever before and to a greater degree. At the same time, with an increasing proportion of our lives lived on-line, it is vital to understand digital dynamics and how they influence behaviours.

Elninio’s industry leading social media intelligence technology allows us to identify issues, narratives, and networks online that remain hidden to traditional moment-in-time checks.

3D monitoring can help clients understand how the risk landscape is evolving in real time, whether that is over the timeframe of a deal or the lifespan of a portfolio.

With ever growing regulatory and reporting requirements on businesses, 3D can enhance existing DD, KYC or support investigations by providing a sophisticated SOCMINT capability that can collect and analyse data from hard-to-reach parts of the web.
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COUNTER DISINFORMATION

  • UK's most advanced Social Media Intelligence tools
  • Detection and monitoring of disinformation, deception, and illicit influence operations
  • Adversary analysis and insight 
  • Hybrid management of digital risk
  • Resilience against narrative cyber-attacks
Companies are now operating in an information battlespace, whether they know it or not. Few businesses are geared to spot or respond to disinformation and other hostile actions, which have the power to cause significant damage to a company's reputation, value, and business interests.
While information has long been part of interstate war, the idea of information as a distinct theatre of war – a space where war takes place – is relatively new.

Today, information warfare techniques such as deception, disinformation, and illicit influence operations have spilled out into the corporate world.

Our counter-disinformation service protects your reputation, brand profile, and authenticity from malicious activity online.

Leveraging the UK's most advanced Social Media Intelligence (SOCMINT) capability, we can detect, monitor, and disrupt malicious activity through a set of hybrid responses, and help clients achieve the information advantage they need to thrive.
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HYBRID RISK MANAGEMENT

  • Risk Radar: Environmental Scanning, Monitoring and Early Warning
  • Risk audit and mapping
  • Issue and Crisis management
  • Hybrid strategy development and implementation
  • Stakeholder and Investor engagement
Elninio can help navigate an ever more volatile risk environment by helping understand, protect and grow reputational capital.
Changing beliefs and expectations have always given rise to reputation risk, but online narratives, networks and actors have greatly accelerated and amplified the speed, extent and impact of these changes.

Few businesses geared up to spot or respond to these fluctuations. Budgets and efforts are usually directed at managing threats to reputation when they have already materialised, when it is often too late to limit the damage.

Elninio can spot the signals in the big data noise and understand the deep currents of opinion online. Our early warning radar means we can deploy responses at a far earlier stage – and manage the risk, not the crisis.

Our tech informs our risk mapping and auditing to illuminate the factors that put value at risk, and reveal what is being said about you, by whom, and why.
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INTELLIGENT CAMPAIGNS

  • Crisis communications
  • Strategic communications
  • Political engagement
  • Media relations
  • Behaviour change
Social Media dynamics have profoundly changed how opinion forms and evolves. The permeability of the digital and ‘real’ world means that effective influence campaigns need to bridge the two.
Our intelligent campaigns approach deploys our cutting-edge Social Media Intelligence technology to target interventions in the digital and real world, blending traditional and digital disciplines.

We fuse data-driven threat analysis with human-driven structured analytical methods to identify the specific actors, networks, and issues affecting our clients.

Our artificial intelligence capability and skills in data science are matched with our expertise in strategic communications, behaviour change, and political and security risk management to help clients build reputational capital, influence, and resilience.

Elninio’s capability is designed to detect, assess, and respond to risks presented by activity and narratives in the fast-moving and ever-evolving information landscape. These risks emanate online but cause real-world damage to clients’ reputations and interests.
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TARGETING AND EVALUATION

  • Targeted Audience Analysis
  • Bursting epistemic bubbles
  • Illicit influence detection
  • Network mapping and analysis
  • Monitoring
  • Campaign evaluation
We believe Elninio delivers a completely new standard in campaign targeting and evaluation, by using SOCMINT to reveal how information is received and opinion is formed online.
In the age of Social Media the gatekeepers who have traditionally filtered information are increasingly marginalised. Epistemic bubbles (information networks which are exposed only to a limited range of sources or argument, often unintentionally), and echo chambers (where voices are actively excluded and discredited), have replaced them.

Conventional campaigns often inflate epistemic bubbles and amplify echo chambers, giving the impression of wide engagement but just expanded the confines of a bubble, never breaking through.

Epistemic bubbles restrict people's ability to acquire knowledge, and they can also indicate illicit influence and manipulation.

Elninio’s tech can identify and map these bubbles, and help you target your campaign, with intelligence-driven insights.

We can monitor and evaluate who is receiving your message, and what impact it has had on online narratives and whether it has cut through epistemic bubbles.

With Elninio you know whether you are truly hitting the target and influencing the debate.
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SEE OUR PEOPLE