Posts from — February 2008

A large part of the promise of Web 2.0 has been the digital realization of the Wisdom of Crowds. However, it seems that unlike its “power to the people” promise, the Pareto Distribution of the 80/20 fame is alive and well across the icons of Web 2.0.

Thanks to a Stumbleupon link, I found this article on the myth of Web 2.0 democracy from Slate Magazine. In particular, the article calls out Digg and Wikipedia as being less “vox populi”, and more “vox oligarchi”.

Here are a couple of key quotes:

• “1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site’s edits.”
• “Last year, the top 100 Diggers submitted 44 percent of the site’s top stories. In 2006, they were responsible for 56 percent.”

That’s not to say that it’s all bad. Wikipedia is supposedly as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica. As the Slate article concludes:

“Digg and Wikipedia’s elite users aren’t chosen by a corporate board of directors or by divine right. They’re the people who participate the most. Despite the fairy tales about the participatory culture of Web 2.0, direct democracy isn’t feasible at the scale on which these sites operate. Still, it’s curious to note that these sites seem to have the hierarchical structure of the old-guard institutions they’ve sought to supplant.”

While this would seem to be a refutation of the democratic underpinnings of Web 2.0, it also points to a different perspective on the issue. Instead of judging a system based upon a simple on/off voting system, what if it were judged by level of participation.

I found this interesting graphic in a blog post by Gary Hayes at PersonalizedMedia.com that addresses the myth of non-participation in Web 2.0 social networks.

As you can see from the graphic, democracy on the web is measured by degrees of influence, which depends upon your level of participation in the total conversation.

So Web 2.0 is not exactly a simple democracy with one vote/one voice, but with different levels influence coming from individual commitment to participation and creation, it doesn’t have to be the tyranny of the few either.

Are people ready to give up their traditional television viewing habits and spend significant amounts of time with the emerging technology behind online video?

These numbers from eMarketer certainly indicate rapid household penetration growth of online video, with at least 50% of US households expected to watch online video in 2008, up from less than 20% four years ago.

However experimenting and watching a YouTube clip here and there is one thing, but truly replacing significant amounts of television usage is something else entirely.

Michael Estrin at iMedia Connection has done some informal qualitative research to see if online video is ready for primetime, by gathering together a small group of twentysomethings who weren’t heavy online video users, then showing them some examples of different online video services, and then discussing their merits and shortcomings.

Here are some key insights from the discussions:

Expectations for online video are low (the YouTube effect)

With its buffering and the amateurish quality of most of the content, YouTube doesn’t fit with what people are looking for from long time frame entertainment:

“If I want to be entertained, I sit down on the couch,” says one participant, “this other stuff [short clips on YouTube] is just for killing time at work.”

Response is better with more professional sites that feature professional quality content (such as Joost)

While sites such as Joost have better quality content and a more technologically sophisticated interface, the lack of more popular TV shows and videos is disappointing:

“We open the Comedy Central channel and disappointment sets in. ‘It’s got everything you don’t want to watch,’ Todd says.”

The television advertising that was hidden by Tivo is now back

Other sites such as Veoh have some of the more popular shows available, however to people accustomed to using DVRs to skip ads, viewing pre-rolls was a disappointment:

“I could just as easily watch this on TV without the ads because I have TiVo”

In the end, while participation and interest in online video is certainly increasing, its ability to garner significant amounts of viewer’s time is still being constrained by expectations and technology. Michael Estrin summarizes it this way:

“There’s something terribly basic about TV from a user perspective. You watch the show, the ads come on, you go get a snack, and you watch the rest of your show. But while internet video may look a lot like TV (assuming the content and the quality make their way to the computer screen), the advertiser/user relationship is something quite different.”

While this could all change with media providers moving beyond dabbling and getting serious with online video, people probably won’t be getting rid of their television sets any time soon.

In 2002, the US based office products retailer Staples was 2nd in market share behind category leader Office Depot, and just ahead of OfficeMax. In looking for a competitive edge, the Staples marketing team did extensive consumer research with their small and big business clients.

The insight they uncovered was that low prices were secondary to a quick and efficient shopping experience for these business customers. In this article by Michael Myser from Business 2.0 magazine, Shira Goodman, VP of Marketing at Staples tells how they turned this insight into a foundational tagline for their campaign:

“‘They wanted knowledgeable and helpful associates and hassle-free shopping,’ Goodman says. The “That was easy” tagline was the simple - yet inspired - outgrowth of that realization.”

Beyond creating memorable advertising around the “That was easy” idea, Staples created the red plastic Easy Button, which spouts their tagline when pressed. To date Staples has sold over 2 million Easy Buttons, at $4.99 a piece, the proceeds of which go to charity.

Having consumer insights to help create great advertising is always a best practice. However, using these insights to create a viral marketing device like the Easy Button, that consumers will actually pay money for, is to truly drive brand engagement.

I’ve said before “You are what you search for”; now it seems “You are what you search with”.

Heather Hopkins at Hitwise Intelligence has done an interesting analysis by filtering Yahoo! searchers and Google searchers through Mosaic’s cluster distribution groups to find out which type of searchers spend big dollars online. It seems Google searchers had a greater tendency to spend at least $500 online in the past month (larger bubbles further down the X axis).

What is also interesting, if you know a bit about Mosaic cluster definitions, is how Yahoo! has a more rural U.S. and downscale urban concentration, while Google reflects such clusters as Affluent Suburbia and Upscale America.

To my earlier post, my guess is that we would find significantly more “Natural Born Clickers” on Yahoo!, than searching through Google.

Any conversation about digital marketing generally gets around to the fact that companies like Google are making a ton of money from people clicking on online advertising. The invariable next question is “Who clicks on all those ads anyway?”

This study by Starcom sheds a little more light on the issue:

“The study illustrates that heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks.”

Additionally,

“Heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers.”

From another study done by AOL, Dave Morgan, head of advertising strategy, describes heavy clickers the follow way:

“They are predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older. They are predominantly Midwesterners, with some concentrations in Mid-Atlantic States and in New England.”

They also found that:

“They look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.”

This post on SEOmoz.org, uses a point from the Starcom study to distinguish between equity driven display ads that do well in delivering on branding objectives, versus the online call to action ads that want you to “Punch the Monkey” that are the type that attract most of the “Natural Born Clickers” the study cites.

The important thing behind all this research is that the meaning to an advertiser of a click, or even a whole month of clicks, is minimal. Depending on the type of campaign, online conversion rates may be more important, or maybe significant movement in some sort of brand affinity measure.

But unless your target demographic looks like the narrow one above, a simple click is probably not worth very much at all.

Found this neat interactive visualization from Wired Magazine of what happens to a blog post after you hit Publish.

Just click and see where it takes you. Just be careful of the text scrapers!

When paired with the simple steps outlined below, there is no better tool for managing the torrents of blog feeds and news posts on the Web than Google Reader.

I am currently subscribed to over 100 blogs and news services, all centered around digital marketing, marketing research, media and advertising, and general Web 2.0 type stuff.

That means anywhere from 50 articles and posts per day on the weekend, to almost 400 on a busy weekday. And I have a relatively narrow window between work and family (5:00AM to 7:30AM) to both read them and write my own posts.

Which is why Google Reader, paired with some knowledge management techniques I learned from digital photography workflows, has been such a critical asset to me.

Since I can’t really read 400 posts a day, I needed a way to quickly separate what interests me from what doesn’t. In a tool such as Photoshop Lightroom, the point of a digital photography workflow is to quickly eliminate all the out of focus and hopeless images, and identify and sort the ones that really matter for further editing, all through use of flags and keywords.

I follow a similar process with Google Reader by use of tag folders, the J-key shortcut, and the Star function.

1. First I sort RSS feeds into macro topic tag folders (marketing research, advertising, economics, etc.). You can do this by tagging a feed after you subscribe to it by using the Feed Settings drop down menu.
2. I then create a Read First folder of blogs whose postings are ones that I find I always read in detail. I move this folder to the top of my list. The neat thing about Google Reader is that a feed can reside in multiple places, so Seth Godin’s blog is in both my marketing and Read First folders.
3. When I then check my feeds, I go right to the Read First folder, since I generally find myself wanting to read most of what these writers post. If there is something I want to come back to, I then hit the S-key in order to flag it for the Star folder.
4. I then go through the postings in the remaining folders. Blogs like Mashable! and news sources like MarketingVox have tons of posts everyday, some of which hold interest for me and some of which don’t. Which is where the J-key comes in. For everything but the Read First items, I give the post a second or two scan based upon the headline and the first sentence. Then I either hit the J-key or Star it to come back to it later.
5. Which means if you are creating content that is being read through a feed reader, some of these best practices from Copyblogger and Problogger on headline and copy writing are critical. If I’m scanning 100 blog post headlines in less than 5 minutes, it’s the well written and succinct headlines that capture my attention and my S-key.
6. After I’ve gone through all the new items (make sure Google Reader is set to only show you new items), if I have the time, I go back through and read in more detail the starred items.
7. These remaining posts are read and saved, or discarded by use of the S-key again, which toggles off the star.
8. I don’t used the Star folder for permanent storage however. I’ve lately paired the social bookmarking tool De.licio.us with Google Reader, which allows me to store posts I find while I’m surfing the web, as well as stuff from Google Reader.
9. On occasion, I look at the Trends report from Google Reader. This helps me identify upcoming feeds for inclusion in the Read First folder, as well as those that have gone inactive and may be candidates for deletion.
10. And from there: rinse, wash, repeat as necessary.

For a much more intricate system that is designed to handle a much greater volume of feeds, check out this one from Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion.

The key is to develop a Google Reader system that works for you; otherwise, you may end up with the exact opposite.

When you boil it down to its essence, consumer behavior is dictated by needs and wants. Consumers very rarely buy something solely because of their demographics.

In other words, demographics help us form a picture of who a consumer is who buys a product, but almost never do they tell us why.

This post by Jolina at the Online Marketing Blog talks about moving from targeting Demographics to something called “Momentgraphics” in digital marketing. She also provides a good example of what this means:

“Momentgraphics focuses on the periods of time in which we need to target prospects. For example, someone searching for the phrase ‘cold medicine that works in less time’ is the prime target for a company producing cold medicine. The demographics of that person are irrelevant because we know they are in a ‘target moment’ making them the target market. “

While I think “momentgraphics” seems kind of kludgy as a term, the idea behind it is sound, since it brings traditional needs based consumer insights to the digital immediacy of search engine marketing.

While it wasn’t the flashiest or most outrageous Super Bowl ad, the Tide To Go interview spot showed that good consumer insights can still play a role in the high production budget glitz of Super Bowl advertising.

By dramatically and hilariously illustrating how distracting the effect of a stain on your shirt can be to a relative stranger in a stressful social situation like a job interview, this Tide To Go ad takes my best consumer insights award from this year’s Super Bowl.

Beats a herd of Clydesdales any day.

In addition to TouchGraph, another research tool that helps with search visualization is Quintura.

Quintura takes a key word cloud approach to search, which is at first seems mundane, but then becomes much more intriguing as you add more search terms.

Just like I did with TouchGraph, I typed in “Crowdsourcing”. Instead of colored bubbles with links, I had a word cloud.

By just hovering my cursor over another key word, however, I opened a whole new set of links. Clicking on a key word simply added it to my list, and reorganized my word cloud around two key words rather than one.

The nice thing about Quintura is that it is quick. What it lacks in visual fireworks versus TouchGraph, it more than makes up for that in speed and clarity.

By pairing Quintura with Del.icio.us, I was able to assemble several links for a future post on social media in a fraction of the time I would have took with multiple Google searches.

Quintura recently announced a local site embed, with more blogger specific tools to come.

Until then, Quintura remains a very strong way to visualize link knots of different themes or ideas in the pursuit of better online marketing research.