Paul M. Banas on Consumer Insights, Marketing Research, and the Digital Media Landscape

What happens when good data is used the wrong way? The data gets all the blame, as seen in the latest round of finger pointing about ComScore and their reporting of Google click growth.

In February, when ComScore, a market research firm that tracks online marketing and advertising, published findings that found growth in Google’s paid click traffic was down significantly versus the prior year, Google’s stock fell into a steady decline, retreating almost 45% from its 52 week high.

However, when Google announced recently that its 1st quarter profits were up 31% versus the prior year, Google’s stock shot up, while ComScore’s own stock was pummeled. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt even made a veiled reference to “third party” data missing the boat when it came to predicting Google’s performance.

The problem was that what ComScore was measuring (Google’s paid click growth in the US) wasn’t matching what Google was reporting (global and third party paid click growth). According to Andrew Lipsman at Comscore:

“The main difference between the paid clicks trends reported by Google and comScore can be traced to the fact that the comScore paid click data cited in financial analysts’ reports (and subsequently reported by the media) are U.S. data only.”

Additionally, when you do an apple to apples comparison, the trends between ComScore and what Google reports itself are directionally the same:

Not surprisingly, the nuance of research data can generally be lost on the investment community.

However, just because data is used in a wrong way, doesn’t make the data wrong itself.

Social Knowledge Networks, as seen in something like Yahoo! Answers, are one of the fastest growing forms of Social Media on the web.

According to Hitwise Intelligence, these type of sites have seen visits growth of 889% since February of 2006. In their most basic form, these are community sites were users post questions and other users provide answers.

The reason for their success, according to Heather Dougherty, research director at Hitwise, is because:

“Online users are increasingly seeking advice from question and answer websites that leverage shared knowledge contributed across a community of experts and enthusiasts. The popularity of user generated media has helped to establish a category for social knowledge where consumers can obtain answers from a single aggregated source developed through others asking similar questions.”

Social Knowledge Networks are all about Reciprocation, which is one of the core principles of Persuasive Social Media Marketing. And levering Social Knowledge as a form of engagement isn’t just being practiced by big portals such as Yahoo!. Other content sites, such as blogs, are also benefiting as well.

Jeff Lash, whose blog provides tips on best practices for product management at Good Product Manager, has recently launched a Q&A site at ask.goodproductmanager.com. He was kind enough to answer a couple of questions about why he launched his new site and how he feels about the initial reaction.

What were your reasons behind launching the Ask page for Good Product Manager?

Many readers of my blog How To Be A Good Product Manager would send emails asking for advice on product management questions and challenges. Ask A Good Product Manager was created as a way to answer more of these questions and share the answers with other product managers who have the same questions.

How has the feedback been on the new site? Is it doing what you planned?

Feedback has been very positive. It is designed to be a resource for the community, and people seem to appreciate that. We’ve been getting a good set of questions, and those who ask the questions appreciate that there is a way to get their problems answered. Those who have answered questions help promote the site, and they’re willing to contribute because they get something by “giving back” … and by getting some traffic to their blogs.

What advice would you give to someone who was considering developing a Q&A page for their own niche?

Leverage others to get the word out and to help contribute answers. Don’t try to make it too commercial. Position it as a genuine service to the community and you’ll reap the benefits. “Seed” the site with some answers before you launch it… don’t launch it if you don’t have any content — and make sure to have some content planned for after you launch, in case the submissions aren’t coming in as quickly (or as good) as you expected. Also have some people queued up to answer questions — don’t expect them to answer themselves!

By giving visitors something of value by providing a forum to answer their specific questions, the host site not only gains the strong engagement benefits of reciprocity, it can also help to establish the site as a strong authority site in its niche by becoming a resource that visitors will come back to again and again.

While Social Media Marketing has seen explosive growth, the tools and metrics necessary to measure the effectiveness of this new medium haven’t seen quite as much innovation.

In fact, the tools I’ve seen discussed are a lot of the same tools that marketers in Search have had success with.

Unfortunately, these tools generally lack the ability to capture the viral nature of programs and campaigns in Social Media.

The chart below is from a study by the Society for New Communications, entitled “New Media, New Influencers, and Implications for the Public Relations Profession” which asked a couple hundred industry professionals a series of questions about Social Media.

This is in response to a question about what Social Media metrics they found most important:

What struck me is that things like search rankings and visitor tracking are the only tools that are seen as being very effective. And I don’t think it is because they truly reflect the nuances of Social Media, it’s just that they are what people are used to measuring when it comes to digital media.

Jeremiah Owyang pointed out a potential measure on his blog that may be more appropriate, something he calls Velocity.

“Velocity, when applied to Social Media, is the measurement of how fast an idea, embed, widget, or other like media spreads over web properties. Benchmarked over time, acceleration and deceleration indicate relevancy.”

He also gives the following example of Velocity in use:

• Week One: A widget was installed on 5,000 Facebook profiles within 7 days, resulting in a weekly velocity of 714.
• Week Two: A widget was installed on 15,000 Facebook profiles within 7 days, resulting in a weekly velocity of 2142.
• You can then look at this over time and benchmark, and then look for accelerations and decelerations, in this case, week two accelerated from week one by 300%.

While the measure itself is very interesting, the challenge for most market researchers trying to work with this new measure will be capturing all the data necessary for analysis in an automated way.

However, at least it is a step towards measuring the concept of relevancy with a measure that is itself relevant.

William S. Burroughs once wrote “Sometimes paranoia’s just having all the facts”. However, in today’s world of social media, networking, and blogging, tracking the facts behind what is being said about you, your company, or your website is not just about being a little paranoid, it can also make good business and personal sense as well.

Using two free services, Google Alerts and Technorati Watchlists, you can develop an automated system to easily manage what’s being said about you, your blog, or your company site with minimal effort.

1.) If you haven’t registered yet with Technorati or claimed a blog, simply navigate to the main page and click on the word “Join” and fill out the brief form.

2.) Once you have an account, navigate to the Watchlist feature on Technorati (it’s hard to find if you don’t search for it) and add the following items to the “Add to Your Watchlist” box.

• The URL of your website
• The name of your website in quotes (e.g., “Insight Buzz”)
• Your name or online nickname in quotes. Add any derivation of your name that you may use online.
• Any company or brand name you want to track as well

3.) Once you have Watchlists that are tracking what you want them to, subscribe to them by clicking the orange RSS buttons.

4.) If you manage your feeds with Google Reader, put all your Watchlist feeds into a single folder. For more tips on managing feeds with Google Reader, you can check out my previous post on 10 Steps To Mastering Google Reader.

5.) Since Technorati is mostly focused on blogs, you will also want to set up some Google Alerts to cover mentions that happen in the broader Internet universe in areas like news or videos. The first step is to access the Google Alerts site.

6.) The nice thing about Google Alerts is that you don’t have to have a Google account. Having an account is useful, though, in managing a large number of alerts.

7.) You can then add the same info as you did for the Technorati Watchlists. If you’re worried about spam blogs scraping your website content, you can even add the following combinations, as suggested by RT Cunningham at Untwisted Vortex.

• link:http://yourwebsite.com
• link:http://www.yourwebsite.com
• Your Website
• YourWebsite
• yourwebsite.com
• www.yourwebsite.com

8.) I’d generally use the comprehensive setting with Google Alerts and set the alert timing to once a day.

9.) Oddly, Google Alerts only sends your alerts to an e-mail address, without an RSS option like Technorati (maybe that’s why it’s still called Beta). You can have all your alerts filtered into a e-mail folder, however, much like you can with Google Reader.

10.) With your online reputation now being automatically monitored, make sure you make adjustments as necessary to ensure you have the right search terms, especially if your terms are bringing in a lot of non-relevant hits.

For those who want to explore an even broader range of available reputation tracking services, Social Media Trader recently provided a wide list of applications that can track everything from keyword trends and comments, as well as conversations that take place on forums that Google doesn’t index.

• Germans tend to comment more on social media than participants in other EU countries, but not half as much as those in urban China.
• People in the UK are not as big on tagging or using RSS feeds as others, but they lead Europe in social network participation.

These were just some of the factoids I uncovered while having some fun over the weekend playing around with this social media segmentation tool from Forrester Research (I’ll be the first one to admit that only someone who works in market research would call playing with social media segmentation tools a form of fun).

Thanks to the blog mentions by Jeremiah Owyang and Charlene Li at Forrester Research, I found the application, along with its corresponding social media segmentation.

The tool looks at broad groups of internet users and classifies them into segments based upon their level of social media participation. This chart shows the different groups and their definitions (click for a larger image):

My only quibble with the segmentation is that I believe there is a lot more granularity out there for Creators (e.g., I’d imagine there could be some significant differences between those who strictly blog versus heavy YouTube or Flickr uploaders).

But the segmentation does do a good job of grouping the population as a whole on something more meaningful than demographics in order to make better sense of them. Maybe, however, there is a micro-segmentation of Creators lurking somewhere under the hood of Forrester’s research.

Here are some other facts that Charlene Li mentions on the Groundswell blog that you can find if you twiddle around with this tool:

• Although social media participation significantly increases the lower on the age range you go, even among the 55+ group in the US, you’ll find that 33% of them are connecting with social applications in some way.
• 41% of Koreans are Joiners — members of social networks — more than anywhere else in the world.
• In Urban China, a full 36% are Creators, which means that this very significant percentage of the population is creating blogs, maintaining content, or uploading videos or music.

I’d like to play around more with this dataset (hint to Forrester!) and maybe later I’ll have some more insight nuggets to share.

Having spent a lot of time recently behind the glass at focus groups, I had a chance to pick up a recent copy of the Qualitative Research Consultants Association magazine, Views.

In it was a very insightful interview of Dr. Robert Cialdini by Sharon Livingston of the Livingston Group for Marketing.

Dr. Cialdini is a professor of Psychology at Arizona State University and is president of Influence at Work.

In the interview, he mentions several Principles of Persuasion that he developed by studying how different companies and organizations approach influencing their consumers or members.

Of these principles, I found four that led me to direct corollaries or implications across different aspects of Social Media Marketing.

1.) Social Proof:
Social Proof is when someone is confronted with something new or uncertain, they tend to look to the behavior and opinions of others, which then plays a strong influence on their own behaviors and attitudes. This behavior tends to snowball, which then can lead to a phenomenon I’ve written about before, crowd cascades.

A simple example from the interview is that when a restaurant flags a particular entree as “This is our most popular dish,” it generally becomes more popular. Another restaurant example I’d add is how the number cars in the parking lot can influence someone’s opinion of the quality of the food or the atmosphere inside, simply by providing Social Proof that the restaurant is popular.

• From an online marketing standpoint, Social Proof is the engine behind the exponential popularity growth of certain posts on social news sites as soon as they manage several thumbs up or votes.
• Receiving a certain amount of votes leads to Social Proof, which then creates even more votes as a post’s popularity cascades.

2.) Authority:
In social environments, most people look to legitimate experts and authorities to provide guidance. The more someone develops themselves as an authority, the more likely they’ll be able to influence behavior and have people follow their lead.

I really like the example Cialdini cites of a sociological experiment that tried to get at the effect of perceived authority:

“They put a man on a street corner and had him cross the street against the light, against the traffic, against the law. Half of the time he was dressed in jeans, an open-neck shirt and running shoes and the other half of the time he was dressed in a business suit, pressed shirt, tie and shiny shoes. Then they counted how many people followed along behind him. An amazing 350 percent more people followed him when he was wearing a suit.”

• Authority in Social Media is both a perceived thing (You look like you know what your talking about, so I’ll listen to you) and a tangible thing (The higher the PageRank and network of friends, the more likely someone can drive traffic to sites or garner votes in social news).
• These are both factors that Robojiannis has covered extensively on his blog and in his master thesis on “Attention and Participation In The Social Web”.
• Tangible social media authority was also the underlying topic of a very interesting blog post by Kimberley Bock about new users and voting patterns on Sphinn. I felt the subsequent comment exchange also added a ton of insight into the concept of authority as well.

3.) Reciprocation:
By providing something to people first, you increase the likelihood that people will want to do something for you as well.

The example of Reciprocation mentioned in the interview is of a direct mail campaign by the Disabled American Veterans association.

“When they send out their direct mail requests for contributions to their organization, they get about an 18 percent hit on their rate. But, if they include a little packet of personalized address labels in the envelope, their hit rate of contributions goes up to 36 percent because people have received something. Now they feel obligated to give back.”

• From an online marketing standpoint, the Social Media best practice of mutual Diggs and Stumbles is an example of the principle of Reciprocation in action.
• Additionally, providing white papers, widget tools, calculators, etc., are all value adds that engage users and bring them back for more.

4.) Liking:
Liking, not surprisingly, is based upon the fact that we are more likely to listen to and follow the actions of people we know and like.

Cialdini breaks Liking down to two key aspects:

“One is similarity; we like the people who are like us, especially in values and attitudes and opinions and so on. Secondly, we like the people who like us and say so by giving us compliments.”

• Social Media, by its very nature, tends to cluster people with similar attitudes and values. I believe what sets effective Social Marketers apart is their ability to respond to others in a group with empathy, to publicly recognize the achievements and good thinking of group members, and to always treat others the way you yourself would want to be treated.
• Flaming social group members and their opinions may generate buzz and controversy, but its long term negative effect will far outweigh its short term bump in interest.

Since this is by no means an exhaustive list, I’d be curious to know what other principles people have when it comes to persuasive Social Media Marketing.

Sometimes the worst thing you can do in market research is to start asking someone questions.

This seems counterintuitive in a profession that seems based upon the asking of questions, but when you ask someone a question, you then get an answer. And once you have an answer, you then start making assumptions and developing hypotheses and asking more questions, all based upon that answer.

But what if that answer is unreliable?

This is exactly the issue that Roger Dooley at Neuromarketing addresses in his post entitled “How ‘The Interpeter’ Screws Up Market Research” . Quoting from a lecture by Michael Gazzaniga, a prominent Neuroscientist:

“The same split-brain research that exposed shocking differences between the two hemispheres also revealed that the human left hemisphere has the interpreter. The left brain interpreter’s job is to interpret our behavior and responses, whether cognitive or emotional, to environmental challenges. The interpreter constantly establishes a running narrative of our actions, emotions, thoughts, and dreams. It is the glue that keeps our story unified and creates our sense of being a coherent, rational agent. It brings to our bag of individual instincts the illusion that we are something other than what we are. It builds our theories about our own life, and these narratives of our past behavior seep into our awareness. “

The problem then for market researchers is that if I ask someone a question, particularly about subjects that they haven’t given much thought to or don’t particularly care about - such as why do they prefer Brand A over Brand B - their interpreter is more than happy to provide some answer from their narrative, rather than giving a “Don’t know” or a “I don’t particularly care”.

The result then of random questioning is that the quality of consumer research starts to slide downhill, as Frank Martin perfectly illustrates in this example of a very muddled use of qualitative research, which shows some poorly recruited consumers being asked poorly constructed questions about a story board advertising clip.

I believe the first step in dealing with “the interpreter” in consumer research is to acknowledge its existence. The second step is to then lead with research that is behaviorally based, in order to establish the context and rational reality of a particular business issue.

It’s when that context is established, then the researcher can then start asking questions. But they always need to be listening for the voice of “the interpreter”.

This is the third and final post in a series on the Mobile Internet, and how the current line up of cell phones and their networks are not delivering on the full potential of this new platform.

As I mentioned in my previous two posts, while the potential of the Mobile Internet is strong, it is being hindered by the current line up of less than optimal phones and data service plans.

I think the problem is that the mobile industry has either been pursuing a one-size-fits-all approach to mobile devices, or limiting their focus to appeal to a single consumer segment (younger users) with all their offerings.

However, by focusing on understanding consumer needs through market research and consumer segmentation, and then tailoring products to match those needs and segments, I think the mobile industry will finally be able to deliver on the enormous potential of the Mobile Internet.

Here are a couple of potential segments that exist, but are currently offered phones whose feature sets either fail to meet their needs, or are clogged with useless features that irrelevant to their lives.

Young Connectors
Typically a primary focus of mobile companies, these are young singles, who are highly social, and live mostly in urban settings. While there are devices out there that can provide the entertainment of a iPod, what’s missing is something that is both an extension of and a catalyst to their intricate social lives, both online and off.

Features Needed:

• Seamless interactivity with all the big name social media sites (Facebook, Flickr, YouTube) they are active in, so they can connect and share with friends in all social environments.
• Camera and video: allows them to capture and share social activities and friends with one device.

Useless Features:

• Data services such as news, stock reports, etc. If they consume this media at all, it is probably during one of those rare times when they are home and can access via their PCs.

Mobile Parents
Parents of school age children with lots of activities. Needs a mobile device to help manage constantly changing work schedules and children events, many times from the front seat of a mini-van.

Features needed:

• A dynamic and easy to use calendar that reflects schedules of both work and family.
• GPS map service for directions to activities and services across town.
• An intuitive, one button contact list to manage both personal addresses and phone numbers, and those for their children.

Useless features:

• Camera: If they want high quality, photo memories of their kids, that’s what their Nikon D40 is for.

Business Travellers
Business executives who are out of their offices more than they are in. Need a device that can manage email, calendars, and provide up to the minute business information. This is the niche that RIM is going after with their Blackberry device and network.

Features Needed:

• Business calendar that coordinates their lives on the road with those of their clients and business associates back at the office.
• Intuitive email that allows them to manage large volumes of communication efficiently and effectively.
• Mobile internet access for business information while in airports or hotels.

Useless Features:

• Entertainment: MP3, video, etc. (who has the time)

While there are certainly signs that the mobile industry is becoming more consumer-centric, there is still a wide gap between rhetoric and reality in delivering an optimal user experience for the Mobile Internet.

By developing products to match actual needs, versus simply chasing the latest techno fad, the Mobile Industry might just deliver on what consumers are looking for, unless of course the iPhone beats them to it.

This is the second post on the potential of the Mobile Internet, and how the current line up of cell phones and their networks are hindering full development of this new platform.

If the data behind the promise of the Mobile Internet is so strong, what is holding back more significant usage? As I mentioned in my previous post, it’s the phones, the service, and the synergy, or lack thereof, of the two.

David Benjamin of the EE Times wrote about an interesting panel discussion at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Spain around the topic “It’s The User Experience, Stupid!” (hat tip to Digital Design Blog) that illustrated some of the core reasons why the Mobile Internet has been so slow in coming and why the mobile industry was caught flat footed by the introduction of the iPhone.

There were two observations that I felt were particularly apt:

• According to Mike Yonker at Texas Instruments, “Searching on a computer is like going to a store, where the customers sees every product displayed, and can make comparisons, touch the products, even try things on for size. Doing the same search on a mobile is like trying to shop in the same store but through a drive-up window.”

• Another panelist, Lucia Predolin, said that one problem is that people are nervous about using the full range of mobile applications — especially the Mobile Internet — because they worry about what kind of bill they’d rack up. With so many telecom companies advertising heavily the cost of their services per minute, users hesitate to explore possibilities that might devour their precious minutes

From a mobile service perspective, I found some additional insights from this article in Cellular News about analyses of actual cell phone usage by Olista, a consultant engaged in monitoring cell phone activity for the mobile industry:

• 70% of users who sign up to content bundles failed to consume any mobile content, indicating that price was not a factor for these users and the barriers to usage were more likely to be associated with ease-of-use or technical problems.
• 85% of mobile TV users abandoned the service after the first viewing and after passing through the advice of notice charge without hesitation, indicating that the user was experiencing navigational difficulties in moving from one TV channel to the next.
• Another worrying statistic for operators and content providers showed that around 50% of all application downloads failed to complete successfully.
• And finally, 30% of mobile users downloaded the same content over and over again such as the same music track, clearly indicating a misunderstanding of how their network works.

So what’s the solution?

Not surprisingly, several of the panelists at the Mobile World Congress cited the iPhone as being the best positioned to bring the Mobile Internet to life. In fact, according to a ChangeWave customer satisfaction study, the iPhone far outclassed the next highest mobile device with 77% of customers being very satisfied with their iPhones, significantly ahead of the runner up Blackberry at 50%.

However, the same could not be said for the iPhone’s service provider, AT&T, which only managed a 31% very satisfied level from a service perspective, which was a distant second to Verizon.

So as long as the iPhone is shackled to AT&T’s painfully slow Edge network, the Mobile Internet will have to wait for the device/service plan bundle that will do what Google did for the Web.

In my final post of this series, I’ll look at a couple of consumer insight based ideas or issues that may need to be levered or addressed before the mobile boom can truly become a reality.

This is the first in a series of posts on the potential of the mobile internet, and how cell phones and their networks need to lever market research and consumer insights to fully develop this new platform.

More than personal computers, cell phones are now the globally ubiquitous electronic device. There are not many inhabited places in the world where you can’t find someone chatting to someone else on a cell phone. As Joel Garreau from the Washington Post illustrates:

“From essentially zero, we’ve passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cellphones on a planet of some 6.6 billion humans in about 26 years. This is the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history — faster even than the polio vaccine.”

And in the US, as people are leaving their land lines behind, cell phone usage sophistication is finally catching up with Europe and the rest of the world.

In addition to having the value of a cell phone to users increasing significantly in the past 5 years, US consumers are finally crossing a tipping point that will lead to widespread adoption of elements from the mobile internet, such as web surfing or using dynamic GPS maps via their cell phones.

A couple of key insights and graphs from John Horrigan, associate director of research for the Pew Internet Project, illustrate this change:

• The number of people who felt that it would be hard to give up their cell phone grew from 38% in 2002 to 51% in 2007.
• “Even in 2006, the landline phone was still the most difficult device for people to do without,” said John Horrigan.

• From the same study, we find that while daily usage is low for mobile data related activities, almost 60% of users have done one of these activities at least once.
• Even mobile internet usage, which is hampered by sluggish networks in the US, has almost 20% penetration, with 7% of users using the mobile internet daily.

So if the interest is there, why are we still waiting for the full promise of the Mobile Internet? In short, there are three answers: the phones, the networks, and the lack of synergy between the two.

My next post will focus on why cell phones and networks aren’t delivering, and how good market research and consumer insights might just show them the way to unlocking the potential of the mobile internet.