Posts Tagged: behaviour

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1
Sep 09

Link roundup: read & recommended between August 31st and September 1st

Added to my Delicious bookmarks between August 31st through September 1st:

  • HOW TO: Answer Tough Kid Questions – Whether you have children of your own, or simply look after or spend time with them, you’re very likely to find yourself in a situation where you’re stumped by the questions that they throw at you at any given time, and on any given subject matter. You probably know the answer, but do you know a child-appropriate answer for those extra tough questions? Whyzz does, and they can help quell those inquisitive minds with suitable answers for children whether you’re at home or on the go.
  • apophenia: Teens Don't Tweet… Or Do They? – The most salient visceral reaction that I got when looking at the teens' Twitter streams was that teens on Twitter seemed to fit into three categories: 1) geeky teens, tech teens, fandom teens, machinema teens; 2) teens who are in love with the Jonas Brothers/Miley Cyrus, musicians, or another category of celebs; 3) multi-lingual foreign teens with friends/followers around the world who seemed to participate in lots of online communities.

    While I can't make any meaningful conclusions until I spend more time with the data, it seems to me that the teens on Twitter – or at least the teens responding to the trending topic – are not representative of teens as a whole. That's not a bad thing. They're geeks and passionate creators and trendsetters and pop culture addicts. I don't get the sense that they're dragging their friends into Twitter, but rather, focusing on using Twitter to engage with other people who share their interests or people that they admire.

  • Seth's Blog: On becoming a household name – Being a familiar name takes you miles closer to closing a sale. People like to buy from companies they've heard of.

    It turns out that this is an overlooked benefit of banner ads. Banner ads are fairly worthless in terms of generating clickthroughs… you have to trick too much and manipulate too much to get clicks worth much of anything. But, if you build ads with no intent of clicks, no hope for clicks… then you can focus on ads that drill your name or picture or phrase into my head. 100 impressions and you're almost famous.

    A household name. Not for everyone, but for people who matter.

  • Neuromarketing » Collecting Visitor Info: Reward vs. Reciprocity – Most users confronted with a form won’t complete it. If they arrived at the site looking for some specific information, they will likely hit the back button and see if they can access it without the aggravation of form completion and without the risk of getting spammed later.

    It turns out that a reciprocity strategy works better – give them the info they want, and then ask for their information. In the impressively titled Embedded Persuasive Strategies to Obtain Visitors’ Data: Comparing Reward and Reciprocity in an Amateur, Knowledge-Based Website, Gamberini et al found that twice as many visitors gave up their information if they were able to access the information first. It’s counterintuitive, perhaps, but even though these visitors were under no obligation to complete the form, they converted at double the rate of visitors seeing the “mandatory” form.

  • Official Google Docs Blog: Use Google Docs & Google Checkout to Sell Online – The Google Checkout store gadget — a new offering just released to Google Labs — allows anyone to create an online store using a Google spreadsheet.
  • Social Network Marketing Expands Sphere – eMarketer – according to Anderson Analytics’ May 2009 survey—52% of social network users had become a fan or follower of a company or brand, while 46% had said something good about a brand or company on a social networking Website—double the percentage who had said something negative (23%).
marketing / research — Comments Off
15
Jun 09

You can lead a customer to the soapbox, but you can’t make him Tweet

This post began its life as a comment on Jonathan Salem Baskin’s blog Dimbulb, where he staked a challenge to those who would have us believe that social media represents the death of advertising.

Based on recent research that shows that only a minority of people are actively creating content on Twitter and on blogs, Baskin writes:

“The perception that social media usage is today’s cultural and communications phenomena has led many companies to invest in experimental programs, then struggle to invent ways to measure them …. Now consider the possibility that the reason why the numbers don’t add up is because people aren’t using social media as much as we were led to believe?”

When you spend all your time living & breathing social media, and hanging out with friends & colleagues who do the same, you can lose your perspective.

Social media has been oversold as an immediate *replacement* for traditional modes of communication. In my opinion, it has emerged as a complimentary channel and a disruptive force, but it’s clear to me that advertising & more traditional marketing & communications will be around for a long time yet. Save for a few exceptions, mass numbers still require mass media.

Social media has enabled more people to share their thoughts online, but I think it’s a basic fact of human nature that not everyone wants to step up on the soapbox. More does not equal ‘all’.

This doesn’t mean social media is not important. Take the Twitter data on dropoff: it’s not who joins that matters, it’s who remains. I think too much focus has been put on the raw numbers (which naturally include people testing out the various tools) and not enough effort looking at behaviour in these spaces online. If the people who remain are the people you most want to reach, that’s where you need to be. Period.

This is where I start to agree with the ‘death of advertising people’: it sounds impressive that you’ve “reached” millions through your mass-media spend, but how many of them are tuned into your message? It takes more than a media buy to break through the clutter. Social media is one way to differentiate, but it doesn’t work like traditional advertising. Reach is not guaranteed, it rarely delivers immediate results and contrary to popular belief it is neither free nor ‘easy’ (defined as being achieved without effort).

As for the blogosphere, I think it’s natural that the numbers shrank. It doesn’t mean that those people aren’t still communicating online, just that they’re not using blogging platforms to do it. When blogging was booming, it was the best tool around for the purpose. Then social networking sites got better, and for many online diarists, Facebook or other socnets became a better venue for this kind of expression. Once Twitter came along, many one-time bloggers who used it primarily for link-sharing discovered that Twitter was a better medium for them, and a number of them either ceased updating their blogs or reduced post frequency.

At this stage, social media spectatorship is mainstream (i.e. awareness of it, reading blogs, etc.) but the act of creating content and other more active contribution (even commenting on blogs) is still a niche activity. If the strategy is built around content creation, it is zeroing in on a niche  audience. That’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s a mistake to assume that usage numbers are equivalent to the number of active creators on any platform. Forrester’s research also backs this up, and demonstrates an encouraging trend of an increasing number of content creators as more folks become comfortable with stepping up on the soapbox, and also as younger folks (who have fewer barriers to doing this) transition from communicating primarily to peers online to addressing a broader public.

The fundamentals of enabling self-expression, creating a sense of community and speeding up the transmission of ideas & information remain the same regardless of which platform is “hot.” Whether it’s blogging, Facebook, Twitter or another tool is a strategic decision based on personal preference, audience analysis and the technological environment of the time.