Almost a year ago, Brian Kress wrote about the importance of capturing conversations online and the options for measurement out there, from DIY solutions to robust buzz monitoring partners.
Since then, the demand for capturing conversations has only grown. Our agency has invited many of the best services in the industry to walk us through their capabilities in the space and how partnering with them would provide real value to our clients. And our clients themselves are increasingly curious about what’s being said about them in the marketplace by consumers.
Through all this activity, the one question that we’ve been hearing over and over is “so what do I do with this?” Sure, it’s great that we now have the capability to capture, in real-time, what people on Twitter, in the blogs and on forums are saying about our brand. But more than just the volume of conversation, whether it’s positive or negative and some links to actual conversations, what action can we take as marketers with this new source of data about our brand and consumers?
From a PR perspective, it’s fairly easy. The ability to track relevant conversations as they arise in real-time gives you the opportunity to address them, whether it be calming and addressing negative sentiment or encouraging and reinforcing positive sentiment. But from a research perspective, it gets tougher. How do you wade through the sometimes enormous amount of data (in the case of large brands that are frequently talked about) to find interesting insights of truth or give credence to the few mentions that appear (in the case of smaller, less talked about brands), hoping that it’s not just the vocal minority?
As a brand steward, buzz monitoring tools are incredibly useful to keep a real-time pulse on the brand, but it isn’t the research tool that will single-handedly make you rich with insights. It’s one tool in an arsenal of research tools and one particularly suited to partner with other forms of research. Here are a few ways you can use buzz monitoring with other research tools to make insights much more actionable:
1) Use secondary resources like Iconoculture or Mintel to support or dismiss insights we’re seeing in buzz monitoring. I’ll demonstrate this with a silly scenario to get the point across. Say you have a used clothing retailer brand who notices in their buzz monitoring tool that there’s an increase in volume of people using their product in games of “capture the flag.” Rather than dismiss this as simply a vocal minority, you could see if this trend was appearing in secondary research reports, where you might see that “capture the flag” is experiencing a resurgence in popularity or that flag making companies have been going out of business, leaving these consumers nowhere else to turn. In this case, secondary research could help put some weight (or dismiss) a discovery in the buzz monitoring tool.
2) Conduct primary research using insights discovered in buzz monitoring to see if those ideas have legs. If the tool leads to an insight that a brand has already considered or is much closer to their core business model, it may be worth conducting primary research or adding on to an existing piece of research to see how well that idea plays out in a group setting.
3) Deploy a quick quantitative online survey to get a sense of if a certain mindset scales across the demographic you’re targeting. One aspect of buzz monitoring that is often difficult to gauge is the demographics of the people talking about your brand. In this case, buzz monitoring would pair beautifully with a piece of quantitative research. Recruit respondents who fit your target market and then share the ideas that you’ve seen in buzz monitoring to see how well they do with your best customers (or potential customers).
The key is to use the tools we have at our disposal to come up with a more complete analysis, not looking at buzz monitoring in a vacuum.
At the end of the day, we have to remember that buzz monitoring is a much more passive form of research than traditional qualitative or quantitative, where we have much more control. Unless our clients have a robust social media response team, we typically can’t probe when consumers bring up an interesting insights on a blog. We can’t write the discussion guide and require our Facebook fans to fill out all the questions. And we don’t even know if MrBigMan83 is even a man. We’re here to listen. And by listening, we might get a nugget of insight that we could use as we look at our client’s business using all the tools we have at our disposal – buzz monitoring being just one of them.
What Do People Ask Their Social Networks?
John Keehler
A new study from MIT and Microsoft Research looks at what kinds of questions people ask their online network of friends. The most popular types of questions are recommendations… And the most popular topics are technology and entertainment, followed by home and family.
Facebook Drives More Traffic than Google?
Brian Kress
Recent Compete data says yes. Steve Rubel builds an argument that if the 2000s were the Google decade, then the 2010s might be the Facebook decade. Facebook wants to be the beginning and end of its users web experience, and it’s well on its way.
Walmart Prepares for the Era of Internet TVs
Jeff Whang
Already seeing the decline of the DVD/network/cable/satellite TV, Walmart has agreed to purchase Vudu, a Silicon Valley start-up whose online movie service is being built into Internet-ready HDTVs and Blu-ray players. With the marketing power of Walmart, brace yourselves for the next must-have entertainment setup – the Internet-connected TV.
The Real Future of 3D is Printing
Jill Krumsick
Virtual 3D is all the rage – we’re seeing a trend of film, online and TV applications and are about to experience a 3D boom. But what about real 3D applications? 3D printers have been around a few years but are quickly coming to a place of mass commercialization with HP announcing interest this week. From printing everyday objects to biological matter to food, the opportunities are vast. If you think Avatar blew your mind, wait until you can print a kidney.
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Bringing Personalization to the :30 Spot
Brian Kress
I skip ads. So do around 70% of people with DVRs. As DVR penetration grows, networks and cable companies are desperate for a strategy to make people like me watch commercials. One approach is taking a page from the digital side of the business: personalized TV advertising. With behaviorally targeted ads that know what programs I watch and what cereal I buy, TV advertising might start to skip me.
Follow the 2010 Winter Games…on Twitter
Jeff Whang
Are you an Olympics geek? If you can’t dedicate time every night to watch the latest (often recorded) coverage, you might want to check out this link that compiles all the standard “best places to watch online” as well as a few ones you probably haven’t heard of…like the Twitter handles of tweeting athletes, Olympic iPhone apps and more.
The Google Zoo Adds an Aardvark
Jill Krumsick
In its seemingly social growth strategy, Google announced its acquisition of Aardvark last Friday. Aardvark is a social search engine that relies on its network of users for answers. Here’s how it works – users register, denote their areas of expertise, input a query and in about 5 minutes, receive an organic response from another user. It will be interesting to see how this model gets incorporated into Google’s search engine or if it simply remains independent as Aardvark.
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This week, Google introduced a new feature that represents its latest venture into social media, called Google Buzz. It’s essentially status updating directly through your Gmail account, and it’s Google’s attempt to embrace social media and the “real-time” web. It hasn’t rolled out to everyone one yet, but you might see it when you log into Gmail, or you can visit Google.com/buzz.
Here’s how it works…
Following People on Google Buzz
Log into your Gmail account, and you’ll now see a link on the left-hand side just below your inbox that says “Buzz.” Click on this link to get started. You’ll essentially see a very Twitter-like interface directly in Gmail that displays recent “activity” from people you follow. This “activity” is a mish-mash of activity from people directly posting into Google Buzz or activity on other Google-owned social platforms, like Picasa, YouTube and Google Reader. The view of my account is pictured below:
Posting to Google Buzz
When you post on Google Buzz, it’s essentially just like you would post to Twitter or as you’d update your Facebook status. Google Buzz allows you to post links and photos as well. In addition, Google allows you to connect other accounts, such as your YouTube, Flickr or Twitter account.
Google Buzz Profiles
One of the interesting features Google has released is what they’re calling “Buzz Profiles.” These are actually pretty interesting profile pages that Google wants to be a hub to all of your social activity. It will be indexed in Google’s search results, and I’m sure Google would like this to serve as the “bio” page when people Google individuals. You can see my Buzz profile below:
Google Buzz Mobile
Google has also taken the mobile version of Google Buzz seriously, and it can be accessed via mobile web browser. The mobile version of Google Buzz takes advantage of understanding your location, and can geotag your posts. In addition, it can utilize voice recognition to post to your buzz.
Sink or Swim?
There are a few challenges this new product faces that don’t bode well for its future success:
1. Baked into Gmail
Other forms of digital communication are slowly replacing email. Google seems to have aligned this product with Gmail purely to leverage existing connections and Gmail’s traffic. Long-term, however, it will need to be able to exist on its own beyond the walls of Gmail. Buzz profiles are an attempt at this, but they may not be enough.
2. Incomplete Integration with Twitter
Despite the fact that many are touting Buzz as a “Twitter Killer”, Google was smart to integrate Twitter updates. However, it’s an incomplete integration. Buzz can only pull in Twitter activity, you can’t push updates from Buzz to your Twitter account. This may limit the amount of usage the new service gets from Twitter users, who can more easily update multiple social accounts in one location.
3. No Facebook?
With Google Buzz, you can’t pull in your Facebook updates or updates from your friends, and you can’t post from Google Buzz directly into Facebook. With a Facebook connect integration, Google Buzz has a chance to become a social communication hub. Without a Facebook integration, the best shot it has is at a niche audience. Even a niche audience like Twitter has is unlikely, as Gmail had only around 36 million monthly unique visitors, according to the folks at Mashable.
…What About Brands?
It doesn’t appear that Google is taking any steps to clearly separate brands from people as a part of Google Buzz. If your company has a Gmail address, you could set up a Buzz Profile for it, but the structure is clearly geared towards people, not brands.
I’d recommend creating a profile for your brand simply for the search engine inclusion and link benefits. But for now, focus your updating energy on other platforms that have embraced brand presence in social media. We’d hope that in the near future, Google realizes that brands can be just as active as people.
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Of all of the different tools we have to evaluate the effectiveness of a website, eyetracking is probably the most misunderstood and underutilized.
Eyetracking is the mechanism we use to observe and measure what people actually look at on a page. For individual users, they show what the order in which various elements caught their attention and how long they looked at a specific area.
Figure 1: This example from the Universtity of Minnesota shows in what order and for how long a single user looked at different objects on this page.
Typically they also produce heat maps that demonstrate what everyone in the test looked at while they were on the page.
Figure 2: This example shows the areas where a group of users fixated their gaze most often (shown in red).
What people look at and consequently do is directly tied to what they came to the page to do in the first place. However, people don’t keep seeking until they are 100% certain they found the right answer. They typically stop at the first reasonably plausible one.
In general, the better your design is able to both 1) draw peoples’ attention to the area of the page that will enable them to complete their task and 2) enable them to recognize it as the solution to their problem, the better the page will perform at helping them accomplish their goals and make them happy customers.
So how do you know for certain that that they’re looking where you want them to look so that you can improve your design?
You could ask them what they look at. User interviews, focus groups and properly constructed surveys will help discover what people think. But for more reasons than can be discussed here, they are inadequate measures of behavior.
Site analytics measure behavior, but they don’t explain why that behavior occurred.
Professional usability lab studies explains the “why” question to a great degree – and I recommend at least a quick, inexpensive informal study (often several) for most projects – but it still requires interpretation. Eyetracking can help the design team understand, contextualize, visualize and interpret these problems.
How to Get Started
There are 3 general approaches to getting started with eye-tracking studies. Which one you choose depends on your goals, expertise, capacity, deadlines, margin for error and budget.
- Outsource
Outsourcing is the ideal option for organizations looking to manage the performance of a high-value project that eyetracking can measurably help improve, if your team does not have equipment, time or expertise to conduct them. - Bring it In-House
Organizations that regularly build and refine websites should consider whether training and hiring in-house experts makes sense. The equipment and software can be obtained at a fixed cost (systems sell for over $20k), and in many cases incremental costs can be relatively low. - Simulate
If it could be shown that the human eye is typically drawn to certain objects with defined characteristics in specific contexts, accurately predicting what people would look at on a page is a matter of putting the right algorithm in a screen interpretation engine. Eyetracking simulation engine AttentionWizard is said to be able to do just that for static images. Its creators claim 75% correlation with actual eyetracking studies. This is partially because it cannot interpret the context of a specific task, but with prices for testing each image far lower than traditional studies, accuracy at that level may be worthwhile.
Limitations
Eyetracking doesn’t measure peripheral vision. Just because someone’s eyes did not fixate on an area, it doesn’t mean they didn’t see it or weren’t affected by it. Nor do they read minds. Just because it appears as though someone looked at something, it doesn’t mean they comprehended it.
Figure 3: This example from useit.com shows that users looking for the current U.S. population looked and fixated directly at the number that answered their question. However, as Jakob Nielsen reports, only 14% of users successfully identified it for what it was. A closer look shows that users fixated on only the left part of the number, implying that they did not really comprehend what they had seen.
To answer questions you have about a Web product (be it a site, application, or some hybrid of both), make sure that the test actually measures what it is you need to study. Just as you would not use a stopwatch to measure the temperature in Hawaii, nor should you ask analytics, surveys and usability lab studies to measure what areas of a page draw peoples’ gaze.
No single research method measures everything, but in many circumstances eyetracking can be a good supplemental tool in your design arsenal.
Related Links
Eyetracking: Is it Worth It?
First 2 Words: A Signal for the Scanning Eye
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What Do We Share?
Jeff Whang
Researchers at UPenn take the New York Times’ most emailed articles over the last 6 months (checking every 15 minutes) and categorized, controlled for how prominent the stories were on the site and came up with a conclusion as to what kind of information travels fastest – the good news or the bad news. Take a guess and read on.
How We Watch Online Television
John Keehler
In a recent survey, Nielsen found some marked differences between online television viewing and traditional viewing. Most notably, online television is used to catch-up on programming, becoming more of a DVR replacement than a traditional viewing replacement.
Presidency 2.0
Jill Krumsick
The Official White House iPhone app debuted a few weeks ago, connecting news, blog posts, photos and live streaming video from 1600 Pennsylvania straight to your mobile device. Seeking to provide transparency, the Obama administration is pursuing a multi-platform digital strategy including live stream YouTube chats, stimulus funding for increased broadband infrastructure and now the iPhone app.
Who Says the Future Needs an Advertising Agency?
Brian Kress
Bud Caddell continues a discussion on what the future model of “the advertising agency” looks like, if the future needs one at all. The provoking statement is this: Advertising agency of the future sounds a bit like horse drawn carriage of the future.
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Mock as you will Apple’s new “magical” device, but the iPad – and soon-to-be derivative products – presents several new opportunities for brands as the mobile tablet space takes shape.
Even though it may not be the perfect device some critics expected, the iPad takes a new perspective on the tablet. Yes, it looks and feels like a hormone-injected iPod Touch, after all it has those exact same application icons, but this is a major change for the tablet space for several reasons:
- It’s not a laptop, it’s a tablet – Rather than cutting the keyboard from a regular OS, as most tablets are wont to do, the iPad instead uses the iPod Touch functionality proven to work for touch-screen users’ big, ugly fingers.
- A real display, and real speed to match – Most tablets have big, ugly, slow processors to match low resolution screens. With a full HD display, an efficient processor and a touch screen that feels organic, the iPad has the hardware advantage.
- A pre-loaded App Store – As with most Apple products, the magic of the iPad is in the software. It will leverage the 130,000-app App Store built for iPhone and iPod Touch users, and made it simple for app developers to upgrade their apps to the tablet space.
The iPad’s main benefit, particularly for marketers, is that it has laid ground for a new world of mobile applications, ads and websites that can display large, intricate brand experiences.
As we’ve seen happen with iPhone and other slate smartphones, on-the-go will become the primary surfing space for iPad users. These users will need much deeper, more functional websites than those we tend to think about for on-the-go users; they’ll be built for extended web usage, while still needing to live in the touch-screen world.
All this isn’t to say that iPad users should be treated exactly like normal desktop users. With the lack of file storage, Flash, and propensity to be on the go, we still need to consider use cases specific to users of the iPad and other tablets that are surely to emerge upon Apple’s success.
A few rules on how brands might ease into this space:
Be location aware
With devices connected to cell towers, we have the ability to target any mobile users’ location within a reasonably tight range. Marketers should build location-specific messaging into their content to improve the iPad users’ experience.
Include long-form content
Without the limitations of the small screen, iPad users will be more likely to engage and stay engaged with an experience on the web.
Remember, it’s touch screen
Lists of small links, long text fields on websites that work with a mouse and normal keyboard won’t work here. Consider new and innovative ways to cater your features and functionality to touch-screen users.
While it’s still in its early stages, most of the influence of the iPad is still yet to be seen. What else do you think the iPad means for mobile?
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And The Grammy Goes To…. Interactive Media!!!
Jill Krumsick
Digital and social media were used to breath new, interactive life into the old age award show format. This year the Grammy’s live streamed red carpet and backstage events through YouTube, used the website to measure social interaction, crowd sourced part of Bon Jovi’s performance and introduced a Grammy trivia iPhone app.
Who’s Going to Be Buying the New iPad?
Jeff Whang
Despite all the general distaste being directed at Apple’s new tablet, the iPad, one blogger thinks he has an idea of who’s in the crosshairs as the target for this new device and why they might put the Geek Squad out of business.
Mobile Ads You Can’t Escape
Karen Sznajder
Crisp Wireless has introduced “Adhesion ads” for mobile, being the first company to offer the new technology. Adhesion ads stay on the mobile screen as the user scrolls through a page with features such as expandable, location-aware, tap-to-video, tap-to-call, data collection and link to social media.
8 Key Factors Behind Online Video Consumption
John Keehler
Part 3 in a great series of posts on TechCrunch about the future of advertising in online video. From media fragmentation to “deportalization”, to questioning if content is really still king, spend some time with this series of blog posts to get a firm idea of where online video is at right now, and where it’s headed.
Product Reviews Accepted on Mobile
Brian Kress
A survey by ChoiceStream found that two thirds of mobile shoppers say they’d buy more if they had easy access to reviews. As smart phones grow in market share, consumers are beginning to see them as a legitimate shopping channel, a finding which brings major implications for how we build mobile ads and websites.
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