About Jeff Whang
As a semi-professional cellist, avid runner and tenacious home renovator, planning comes naturally to Jeff Whang. After all, one doesn’t find himself selling his music on iTunes, running the Seattle half-marathon or retiling an entire bathroom without some strategic preparation. In fact, Jeff has a solid strategy for everything he does – one that has always led to success. Jeff’s college strategy was simple. He loved the Braves, so he moved to Atlanta to root for the home team with pride. Of course, the fact that Emory University’s top-ranked Business School and renowned strategic planning program were in Atlanta did weigh into his decision. Upon graduating with a degree in Marketing and Communications, Jeff joined The Richards Group and kicked his strategic skills into high gear as an Account Planner for The Home Depot, Nortel Networks, Red Lobster, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Office Depot and Fruit of the Loom. Yet he couldn’t ignore one very strong strategic insight: the Internet was the place to be. So, Jeff migrated over to Click Here where he now specializes in interactive strategies for brands like Chick-fil-A, Fruit of the Loom, The Salvation Army, Advance Auto Parts and Mayo Clinic. Dissecting how the human mind works, Jeff dedicates himself to uncovering the inherent story in each brand that’s most relevant to consumers’ lives. He then scours the latest new media tools and technologies to tell that story in engaging, strategic ways. At home with his wife, pet shih tzu and the first kid on the way, Jeff spends his downtime up and running – pursuing his lifelong goal of qualifying for the Boston Marathon and passing at least 30 people up Heartbreak Hill. Will he make it? You can plan on it.
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Posts by Jeff Whang
As you all know, the iPhone 4 has been a hit (or a miss, depending on whether this reception design issue continues to blow up or get resolved). What we do know is that the latest smart phone from Apple has sold like hotcakes, with Apple struggling to keep up with demand.
As you may have seen in The Buzz a couple of weeks ago, in three days, the iPhone 4 has sold over 1.7 million units. To put that into perspective, they sold 1 million iPhone 3G units in its opening weekend (the iPhone 3GS also sold a million in its opening weekend and it was a more minor update to the device). And it took the original iPhone 74 days to reach 1 million. Considering you have at least 1.7 million folks with hefty data plans, browsing the mobile Web and actively using apps, it’s no surprise that brands are interested in the opportunities to connect with this desirable target.
From an advertising standpoint, one of the biggest pieces of news has been the iAd functionality of the new operating system on which the iPhone 4 (and some older versions) runs, which allows a much more robust and engaging advertising experience. There’s been a lot of conversation around this, but we haven’t seen truly engaging experiences quite yet. We’ll certainly take a deeper dive into iAd in a future blog post, but what I wanted to share today were some the new features in the iPhone 4 that make for some interesting opportunities for brands to create meaningful connections with customers.
Facetime
This is the technology that Apple touts as groundbreaking: the ability (as long as the other person also has an iPhone 4) to video chat in real time. The first thing I thought of here was the ability for brands that have very close relationships with their top customers to offer live video chat on the go. As far as any opportunity where a brand can provide the ultimate in customer service, except for a physical concierge, Facetime is about as good as it gets right now.
Better Camera and HD Video Recording Capability
Apple has upgraded its onboard camera to 5MP and added a fancy backlit sensor to make pictures taken in low light look decent. What this means is less horrible (and approaching beautiful) photos from the masses. As an advertiser running, say, a photo contest where you challenge your customers to take photos of one of your brand icons in interesting places, this means the ability to potentially use their photos in more places than just the contest. And the same goes with video. Now that they’ve added HD video capability with a better lens, the creative possibilities have increased. iMovie software is now available on the iPhone 4 – which isn’t to say that a huge number of people will be actively editing HD, but you’re going to be able to do some more interesting things with user-submitted videos. The days of jerky, handheld mobile video at a concert aren’t gone yet, but at least it’s in HD now. What we hope for with all these increases in technology is a similar increase in the sophistication of the kinds of content our consumers create. As the iPhone 4 expands its reach, it’s only a matter of time before people are creating some eye-popping content that you wouldn’t have imagined possible.
The photoshoot below actually used an iPhone 3GS, the last-generation iPhone (along with the help of some very professional lighting and software), but still makes the case that the capability for some incredible content exists as the devices get better.
Multitasking
Most of the interest in multitasking has come from people who want their GPS app or Pandora music station to keep playing while they do other things on the phone. That certainly will be the focus of most people’s use of multitasking, but there are some neat things brands can also do with this feature. Think about developing a brand app that can voice-over help or guidance as you explore parts of your mobile site. You could link directly to your mobile site or anywhere else on the Web from your brand app and provide running audio commentary. The same goes with a model similar to Pandora where you can offer a music soundtrack to accompany the customer doing other things on their iPhone 4.
Of course, just the mere possibility of many of these opportunities doesn’t at all mean they should be implemented. But I hope what you’ve discovered today is that as the technology and adoption of smart phones like the iPhone 4 grow, there is parallel growth happening in the ways we can engage with our customers to create deeper and more meaningful connections to our brands.
Six Flags Launches Virtual Loyalty Program with FourSquare
Brian Kress
As Foursquare continues to grow its user base, Six Flags has become the most recent company to associate itself with the location-based social media platform. In the partnership, various prizes and rewards will be given to players who check-in multiple times during their Six Flags visit.
Guide to a Digital World Cup
Jill Krumsick
From 3D viewing to Facebook’s most-passionate-fans-competition to JibJab’s personalized video to Gowalla pub crawls, there is a lot to take in during World Cup season. Here is a comprehensive list of ways to follow and interact with all the World Cup action.
More Adults Than Teens Consume Mobile Video
Colin Hogan
There’s a popular, but apparently unfounded, belief that those who watch videos on their mobile devices are mostly teens. This isn’t the case, according to Nielsen’s latest “Three Screen” quarterly report. In fact, more than half (55%) of the mobile video audience is actually adults, aged 25-49. However, these adults spend less than half the amount of time consuming mobile video as do those aged 12-17.
Facebook Fans Spend More Money
Bryan Spencer
A recent study shows that people who “like” your brand tend to spend more money on it. Although a fairly obvious statement, social media marketing company Syncapse culled through the results of a 4,000 person survey of people that have “Liked” the top 20 brand pages on Facebook to put an exact number on these spending habits. Their findings? Those who “Liked” a brand spent an average of $71.84 more each year on that brand’s products or services than someone who has not.
Twitter Will Add Places to Twitter Posts
Sarah Voges
“Twitter posts already answer who, what, and when. Now they will also tell people exactly where a post was written. On Monday, Twitter announced on its blog that Twitter Places is going live. Twitter users can tag their posts with their precise location, and people can search for all the posts written from a specific location.” This new service provides a new targeting opportunity for marketers and is not meant to duplicate other location based services like Foursquare or Gowalla.
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2009 was the year that advertisers picked up on augmented reality (AR). Now, it isn’t as if AR is anything new – all of us are familiar with the heads-up display on a fighter jet or the night vision displayed on the windshields of high-end luxury vehicles. That’s augmented reality: the bridging of the digital and the real world.
But the prevalence of webcams on new laptops and the mere fact that a tipping point occurred for AR let us see what marketers had up their sleeve to introduce us to new experiences with their brands. Examples include:
• GE: Plug Into the Smart Grid
• USPS: Priority Mail Virtual Box Simulator
• BMW: Z4 launch
• Doritos: Sweet Chili Chips
In fact, we even got into the space with The Home Depot’s AR gift card experience.
The vast majority of these applications were laptop- or desktop-based, meaning that you had to be near a printer that could print a marker and hold it up to your webcam that would then activate a virtual 3-D object that you would see on your computer’s screen along with yourself. Cool, but more of a one-time-use novelty feature that isn’t exactly seamless.
So what does 2010 hold for AR? Naturally, it’s already beginning to go mobile. But instead of us having to wear Robocop- or Terminator-style headgear as we walk around, a few key technologies are taking hold that will make mobile AR the future. Smart phones give us a high-speed connection wherever we are. GPS finds our location, down to just a few feet. Accelerometers figure out how the phone is oriented. A compass figures out which direction the phone is pointing. And the all-important camera on our smart phones is our lens into the AR world. The era of the consumer having to print a marker and hold it up to a webcam is over. In mobile AR, the world is the marker. Take a quick browse of Apple’s App Store and you’ll already find applications like Yelp’s Monocle that overlays restaurant reviews through your iPhone’s camera.
While there are still some limitations to mobile AR that have to be worked out, such as the accuracy of the GPS and compass, before AR apps can deliver extremely accurate geo-targeted content, we’re already seeing companies start to address those issues by making the applications rely on a combination of GPS data and street-view 3-D data.
What doesn’t have to wait for the advances in the location-accuracy of apps (which we expect to happen quickly anyway) are the opportunities for advertisers to begin to play in this space, delivering true value and a branded experience for consumers. Here are a few ways we see this happening:
1. Mapping
We know that GPS and mapping are already key drivers of increasing mobile use. In fact, those functions are some of the most popular on mobile devices and have exploded in the past year.
Any brand that has a retail or physical presence has an opportunity to use AR to help its customers find those locations, ideally through a mobile app. Imagine you’re a customer of a bank, but instead of a list of addresses for ATMs close to you, you are able to see visually that it’s just a quarter of a mile to the right.
2. Gaming
Think scavenger hunts are fun? Imagine how fun they can be if certain landmarks are coded in such a way that when you hold your smart phone’s camera up to it, it reveals a clue to the next step in your journey. Game makers are already starting to play around with mobile AR gaming, and brands should look to take advantage of the incredible engagement opportunities of this platform.
3. Enhancing Traditional Advertising
Traditional advertising vehicles such as print, TV, POP and collateral no longer have a singular purpose. All can have an AR element that enhances the consumer experience. Think of print ads that can come alive as long-form TV spots or give you a 3-D demonstration of the product. Better yet, tie in context such as the user’s location and current weather and give them a demonstration of how that product or service would work in a way that’s tailored to where they live and what they’re doing right then. Imagine outdoor boards in pedestrian areas that let you experience the brand in a way that a quick visual and line of copy can’t. Let the hint of a line develop into an enhanced experience. LEGO® has already experimented with an AR kiosk where a customer can hold a box that holds thousands of pieces up to a kiosk and see the final product, all assembled.
Talk about inspiring! That’s the power of AR in the real world. And think about the ways that users can annotate and share their thoughts on certain products that you create (that you could obviously approve).
Beyond 2010
The last point about sharing is an important one because if there’s one thing that we can bet on with all applications of mobile AR, it’s that users will want to comment, annotate and leave their thoughts on nearly everything. And if brands don’t create channels that make it easy to do so, someone else will figure out a way and start to take that control out of your hands.
What’s exciting is how mobile AR will allow individuals to contribute their own knowledge, experiences and perspective to create a new view of the world, one that aggregates and harnesses this human capital and shares it with the entire world.
In 2010, we’re confident that you’ll see lots of innovative applications of mobile AR (and some bad ones). We hope that you consider how mobile AR could create an engaging experience for your brand. Listen to your customers through your customer service channels or through your social networking presence. Think about how you could provide value to your customers and prospects through helping them augment their reality. And finally, experiment and be creative in your approach with this evolving technology. A lot of folks are going to be playing in this realm – even if it’s simply to present themselves to the press and public as an innovative and forward-thinking company. As augmented reality becomes more widespread and consumers are more used to seeing it, it’s all the more important to push the boundaries that others have set to find something that users truly decide is something with which they want to interact.
The far future? Check out this TED video of what they’re playing around with at MIT. It’s a bit too Terminator-like for me, but does give us a glimpse of what AR might look like not in 2010, but maybe 2018. Let’s hope Sarah and John Connor know what they’re doing.
View all 10 trends here: Ten Digital Trends for 2010… and Beyond.
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TV: Still Watched in Real Time
Brian Kress
In the Economist’s most recent Special Report, we learn about the television’s amazing resilience when dealing with its new media siblings. In fact, even with the hammering threat of DVRs, observers have found that most Americans still do their TV watching the old-fashioned way – live.
Next New iPhone Case Feature: Credit Cards
Jeff Whang
Visa has announced a new case for the iPhone that lets you use the phone as a credit card, using RFID technology. It’s not a great experience yet, since it’s the first generation that will be widely produced here in the states, but if Japan is any indication, where they’ve been doing this for years, it’ll get there. Get ready for the days when you call Visa to tell them you need to cancel your phone.
There’s an App for…Your TV?
Jill Krumsick
As apps continue to enhance engagement with our devices, television is getting into the app game. With Yahoo’s Widget Channel and Vudu as current application platforms for the television, Google’s recently announced Smart TV could help catapult this market. It is predicted that by 2015, 60% of televisions will have a network connection and that TV apps will be a 1.9B industry.
What Men and Women Are Doing on Facebook
Sarah Voges
“Women don’t just visit different sites from men, they use social media differently than men. Experts believe the difference between how men and women operate online mirror their motivations offline. While women often use online social networking tools to make connections and share items from their personal lives, men use them as means to gather information and increase their status.”
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As more and more marketers enter the social media space, whether through Facebook, Twitter or some other network, the first question is often “How do I get started?” it’s really a content question – what can brand X post, tweet or link to that promotes their brand? Once they have an idea of what to share, they get into a rhythm and all seems well in their world of social media marketing. Until someone asks, “so what’s the ROI of all this?” And that’s where conversation has really been evolving recently, trying to tackle of the question of what a fan or follower is worth. I’m not here to tell you that a Facebook “like” is worth $2.36 but what I will do is present to you a few different schools of thought and things to consider as you try to come up with a valuation.
These certainly aren’t the only models out there, but three that captured my eye as I was thinking about ways to help our clients figure out what made most sense to them.
The Media Impressions Method
Social media management company Vitrue uses a tried and true paid-media impression model and tries to apply it to an earned media environment like Facebook. They estimate the number of impressions a fan would be served on their news feed from a brand posting content, and then they calculate a conservative $5 CPM to their earned media. It seems they realize it’s a conservative estimate and realize it’s imperfect. This model was recently featured in a ClickZ article where one of our own strategists (John Keehler) commented on the concerns he had with using a paid media approach to an earned media environment. Others have concerns as well but you get the general sense that people watching the industry are glad that Vitrue’s at least taking a stab at putting some kind of valuation to social media efforts.
The Direct Sales Method
For e-commerce brands like Papa John’s, the task seems a bit easier. This quote from Jim Ensign, VP of Marketing Communications at Papa John’s suggests that they tie fans’ Facebook accounts to the Papa John’s site when they place an order, to see if their frequency of visits and average tickets have increased. Using this method, it’s important to experiment and test the impact of social media – healthy, good-for-you NakedPizza promoted an exclusive-to-Twitter deal, bringing in 15% of that day’s business. Twitter is such an important part of their business that they’ve even included a custom “Twitter” button on their point of sale system to handle the “I’m calling from Twitter” orders that come in, sometimes representing nearly 70% of their sales. This method still gets a little murky unless you have a system that can gauge how many of these sales would have occurred anyway, but it’s at least a bit more quantifiable than other methods.
The Risk Avoidance Method
This model, mentioned here by Forrester but not exclusive to them, introduces the idea that while most brands are thinking about ways in which social media can generate new sales, create new relationships, strengthen brand awareness, they’re not thinking about its power to manage and avoid risks. It generally makes the argument that social media, much like life insurance or buying new tires when your current set is reaching its limit, has a negative ROI, yet it’s still worth doing. Why? Because it’s like corporate reputation insurance, a social media life preserver of sorts. Forrester has a great quote in the article above:
“You pay premiums in the form of building relationships, listening, responding, creating widgets, and building communities. And because you’ve done so, you’ve earned protection that can help should a PR disaster strike—you have an existing group of people who have affinity for your brand and an existing channel in which to reach them.”
Calculating the ROI of social media efforts may not be an exact science right now, but the cost of not doing anything, in Forrester’s opinion is simply too high.
The Engagement Method
The thinking around this model has been around for awhile now (Forrester posted this video back in April of 2008) and it’s different in that it doesn’t try to put a dollar value to social media, but is rather a measurement model, using the four I’s (involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence) to understand the engagement level of people interacting with your brand on social media. It uses a combination of offline and online metrics to score the individual I’s, but again, this isn’t a model for ROI as much as it is categorizing what you can measure into four important buckets. It’s still up to the brand itself to come up with a way to benchmark themselves in these individual areas and tie them to something quantifiable.
What Else to Consider
As I looked at social media ROI models, it struck me that there are an incredible number of variables that might affect the way we value our social media efforts. Here are a few of them, posed as questions, not answers:
What are your goals with social media?
Attract new customers? Retail old ones? Direct sales? Loyalty? Awareness? Engagement? Any one of these will require tweaking of how you’ll be measuring, whether it be through a button on your POS or on your monthly tracking study.
What activity do you (or should you) measure?
This isn’t as simple as it seems. It may not just be the number of “likes” of your brand – if that’s your focus, you may end up with a brand page with thousands of likes yet no conversation. In addition to likes, you have unprompted wall posts, people posting pictures and video, comments to your status updates, sentiment on your page, and retweets. Which metrics are most important to you and your brand?
Is there value of your presence beyond sales, awareness and sentiment?
This speaks a bit to the last method of social media ROI, the Risk Avoidance Model. In addition to social media being something like corporate insurance, do you gain additional insight into your customers and prospects, filling in some of the holes that traditional market research couldn’t get at? By being active, do you hear of potential customer issues with your brand earlier than you could understand otherwise?
The debate is certainly not over and this wasn’t meant to do so. But I hope it’s given you some food for thought as you take steps to understand the value of your presence in social media – and if you’re not there yet, hopefully this gives you a sense of what can be measured in this space.
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A few weeks ago, I participated on a panel discussion for DFWIMA on the topic of “Hispanic Marketing in the Digital Space,” an area that marketers are increasingly beginning to pay attention to as Hispanics continue to grow in population and buying power.
As I prepped for the panel, I wanted to make sure I was on top of the latest insights about the digital lives of Hispanics and came across a white paper by AOL, aggregating eye-opening trends about “the web’s most rapidly growing population.”
What AOL covers in this study is a slew of insights that reinforced much of what we’ve been seeing and experiencing with other clients that have a focus on digital marketing to Hispanics. What it also provides is some hard-to-ignore facts that you can share with your organization, who may not realize the growing presence of Hispanics among your digital audience and what that means to your digital marketing efforts.
Here are a few facts and trends that stood out the most to me, and I think will be the catalyst for changes in the way we think about Hispanics and digital:
Internet Usage Rates Are Nearly At Parity With General Market
I recently got the opportunity to do some digital strategy work for a local hospital that provides medical care to much of the underserved in Dallas. One of the assignments was going out to their satellite clinics and asking patients how they felt about receiving communications from the hospital using various digital touch channels like text messaging and websites.
I assumed with this particular population with lower incomes that their appetite for digital would be low to none, but I was proven wrong interview after interview. The interviews were of course qualitative so just anecdotal, but nevertheless stunning. I kept hearing over and over about their desire for text message alerts or a website that cataloged all the upcoming health fairs, and it’s certainly not what I expected.
Data from the PEW Research Center and AOL Advertising found that the number of Hispanics online has grown significantly and at a faster pace than the total US online population. And now in 2009, the online adoption gap between Hispanics and the General Market has narrowed to just 13 points. And it’s not only online behind a computer, but according to the National Center for Health Statistics, over 7.7 million Hispanics over the age of 18 depend solely on their mobile device for communication, more than any other demographic group. ComScore reports that over 70% of Hispanics consume content on their mobile phones.
Think about what this means for your online audience, particularly in categories where you may have previously assumed that Hispanics weren’t visiting your site or interacting with your brand on their mobile device. And if you don’t know the demographics of your site, consider evaluating it with an exit survey or a third party vendor like Quantcast that can help determine the kinds of visitors to your site.
Hispanics’ Overwhelming Enthusiasm of the Benefits of the Internet
The AOL study cited a good deal of trust and love of the Internet from Hispanics; in fact, much more than the general market. One indication of this trust comes in the fact that 72% of them put their confidence in product rating sites, compared to just 28% in their friends’ opinions. There’s even more compelling data, comparing Hispanics versus the General Market on a number of psychographic metrics, like “always go to the Internet to find deals,” “use the Internet to keep up with pop culture” and “a great place to meet people with similar views.” In each of these instances (and even more that I haven’t mentioned), Hispanics rate higher than the General Market and it starts to paint the picture that they have high regard for the Internet as a place to gather information and socialize with others.
As marketers, how can we leverage their interest to gather information and socialize and provide online assets that speak to and fulfill these desires? Particularly if the Hispanic audience is a core target, we may want to tailor the content and functionality of websites and online advertising to their unique needs.
Throw Out Your Assumptions of Unacculturated Hispanics
Before I address the differences and commonalities of unacculturated versus acculturated Hispanics, it’s important to note that compared to the General Market Internet user, online Hispanics have a higher tendency to be an early adopter and keep up with the latest technology. And that’s not even the shocking part. The truly eye-opening trend is that if you take the digital Hispanic consumer and split them up by acculturation, from Hispanic Dominant (typically Spanish speaking), Bicultural (a mix) and US Dominant (English speaking), it’s in fact the less acculturated Hispanics, the Hispanic Dominants that have the greatest tendency to be an early adopter, evaluating new technologies and spreading the word to others in their communities.
And because Hispanic Dominants tend to be more comfortable with Spanish, when appropriate, we as marketers have to start thinking about how easy content tailored to Hispanic Dominant users is accessible. And this doesn’t just mean to throw your English language site into Google Translate or pay a freelancer to translate your General Market site. In many cases, as you’ve seen above, Hispanics have their own unique needs and they’re not always simply cultural – they mean even be more technologically savvy than your average website visitor.
The Future
Someone at the end of the panel discussion asked me, what do you see as the future in digital marketing to Hispanics? My answer: As technology continues its torrid pace and Hispanics grow in influence in the digital space, I wouldn’t be surprised if marketers really look at Digital Hispanics as the population to test new technologies and applications with, taking those learnings to the General Market.
I hope this gave you some new perspective on this audience – and I’ve just scratched the surface in terms of what makes this demographic so unique. I encourage you to find more resources out there about Digital Hispanics. An easy place to start is with the AOL Hispanic Cyberstudy I’ve been referencing. It’s a free download here.
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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.
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We’re now in Day 6 since the 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti. All of us have seen the coverage, the images and stories of tragedy in the impoverished nation. We’ve also seen the pleas for help, from former Presidents Bush and Clinton to Wyclef Jean. If you’re having a hard time wading through all the options and want to make sure help gets where it’s most needed, here are some digital tools you can utilize to make your decision for the current crisis in Haiti as well as research on any charitable organization.
First, what are the options for online giving? The traditional methods of giving by phone and mail are still widely available, we’re seeing more charitable organizations experimenting with new ways of making it an easier, faster and smoother process. Giving through websites for charities is now a standard that no charity can go without. But one particular method of giving that has received a lot of attention in recent days has been through text messaging. If you haven’t heard, organizations like the Red Cross have partnered with a text message intermediary called mGive. To donate via text message to the Red Cross, you text the word “HAITI” to the number “90999” and you’ll automatically get a $10 line item added to your next cell phone bill. Other charities get other keywords to text to that same number. For the Red Cross alone, this method of giving has raised over $22 million (as of Monday).
One thing to note about donating via text messages is the delay that occurs because the money has to pass through middlemen before actually getting to the charity. This is less of an issue for big charities like the Red Cross which has an emergency fund and can get the financing they need in times of crises, but may be more of an issue for smaller, less-established charities.
For all those who have given via text message, here’s what the Red Cross has to say: “The processing delay doesn’t mean we’re waiting,” said Jonathan Aiken, spokesman for the Red Cross. “Our policy is always to work in good faith and assume people will make the contributions they pledge.”
Another innovative method of giving that is gaining traction is directly through iTunes – again, the Red Cross has taken the lead here and has become the beneficiary of choice for users of Apple’s Tunes software. Here’s the link to donate via iTunes (this will open up iTunes)
How do you decide who to give to? How do you know an organization is legitimate and will have a positive impact in Haiti? Established charities like The Salvation Army, Oxfam, Red Cross, UNICEF and Doctors Without Borders are safe and effective bets here. But if you have a desire to give to one that isn’t as well known, the key is to do your research; the good news is, there are lots of online resources that make it easy to learn about the legitimacy of the organization you are thinking about supporting. One excellent online resource is Charity Navigator, which is an independent evaluator or non-profits and aid organizations. They’ve put together a page on their site on charities providing relief, their overall rating and descriptions of what the organizations are doing on the ground there. To take it a step further, you can even look up the charity group’s most recent tax filing and non-profit status.
So what has the crisis in Haiti taught us about the age of digital donations? First, text message donations have to be taken seriously. With the huge impact it has had on the Haiti relief effort, it should strongly be considered for any future giving campaigns. Another lesson is to explore even more ways in which organizations can make it as easy as possible for people to give their support: consider platforms like social networking and mobile apps that are increasingly being adopted by a wide audience. And finally, if you are a reputable charitable organization, tout your presence on independent, third-party sites that have deemed you a worthy aid organization. In today’s world, being transparent about your ratings by third-parties can go a long way in establishing trust with the audience you’re trying to impact.
I hope this cleared up some of the questions you may have been asking about giving to help the people of Haiti. Remember, there are lots of different ways to give (some as easy as sending a text message or clicking on a link in iTunes), but do your research and make sure the organization is a legitimate one. And go do some good.
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These days, I’ve been spending an awful lot of time helping get my mom on the Internet. I’ve been putting it off for awhile. But now is the time. Her first grandchild lives with me and grandma wants to see some pictures and videos.
(In case you were wondering, this is not my mom)
And what I found out was, she’s not alone.
According to a report from the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing, while fewer Seniors are online than other generation groups, the ones that are online are extremely active.
In fact, Seniors (65+) lead all other generation groups when it comes to shopping online – 77% of them do so regularly. They also regularly use email (94%), look to the Web for health and medical information (71%) and manage their finances and banking (59%).
And Seniors are certainly not far behind in technology adoption. While Gen Y enjoys a 96% adoption rate of cell phones, Seniors aren’t far behind at 80%. And the gap is even closer with things like a digital camera (Gen Y: 85%, Seniors: 77%).
The one area where seniors have been slow to adopt are…you guessed it, social networking. According to SeniorJournal.com, only 7% of Seniors have a profile on a social networking site – well below the average of 35% of all adult Internet users and
My own experience with my mom wasn’t too far from what’s happening in the marketplace. When I asked her what she wanted to do online. Here’s what I got:
1) See pictures and video of baby
2) Email said pictures and video of baby to relatives, mostly back in Korea
3) Watch Korean TV dramas on websites like www.naver.com
Zero interest in social networking (unless it was links to see pictures, which may not be that different from the rest of us), but email was high on the list. I can’t see her managing finances and banking online anytime soon, so maybe she’s part of the 40% who won’t for now.
So knowing these facts about our audience, coupled with our own experiences, keep these things in mind as you consider your digital strategy to connect with Seniors:
How should websites be designed differently for this audience? Particularly if your brand attracts an older audience, consider usability testing to help your developer understand how the site needs to be architected and designed to appeal and be user-friendly to an older audience. My own experience trying to navigate my mom around busy, cluttered sites was extremely difficult – and simple ones like Leica’s site were instrumental in helping her understand how to navigate around sites.
Does the fact that boomers are getting older mean this is a more important issue? While social networking has really only caught on in the last few years, as Boomers get older, they’re going to have much more experience and comfort with social features. They’re also going to be the most online-savvy audience we’ve seen yet (and obviously a trend that will continue on with subsequent generations). Think about ways to learn more about the first wave of Boomers that transition to Senior life and how the online world affects their lives.
What do seniors want online? If you’re really bold, you might look to see when your local community college or recreation center puts on Internet 101 classes for Seniors and see if you can attend one. Observe – see what they gravitate towards and what turns them off. And consider that accordingly to a 2009 study from AARP, 1/3 of people 75 and older live alone. While social networking use is low now, according to comScore, “among older people who went online last year, the number visiting social networks grew almost twice as fast as the overall rate of Internet use among that group.” And according to Antonina Bambina, a sociologist at the University of Southern Indiana, trends point to current Seniors and the next wave of Boomers growing up to see online networks to be a place where they can make new connections, feel empowered and talk to others in similar situations without having to ask friends and family for yet more help.
The future for my mom
So what does the future hold for my mom and the Internet? Well, baby steps. It’s been a bit stressful getting to this point. But I can see her getting into some online shopping, at least to browse different products. It will certainly be difficult with all the complicated navigation structures out there but over time, I’m sure she’ll get the hang of it. And using things like Google Maps/Streetview probably isn’t far off either. As she explores the Web, I’m expecting to be intrigued by having her share what she finds online with me. The Internet, as seen through the eyes of a senior – what will she find compelling? I’m looking forward to finding out.
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My daughter was born about 2 months ago. Between diaper changes and tummy time (I had no clue this was a real thing until I had a kid), I’ve had thoughts of how being immersed in digital every day affects the way I parent. It started before she was born: hours of googling ways to make sure my wife and I were doing the right things to prepare for her arrival. Things like what cribs got the best reviews online, how to prevent stretch marks, what we need to pack for the hospital and the list goes on.
And of course, we’ve had to balance all the things we’ve learned online with the wisdom and experience of our parents. Advice from both sets of parents who happened to grow up in Korea in the 50s and have not only a generational but a cultural gap in terms of the kind of advice they give (did you know that if you have a baby in the sweltering summer of Korea, they will refuse to turn the air conditioning on…some superstition about cold air giving you osteoporosis when you’re 80 years old or something.)
So as I reflect on the past couple months, I’ve noticed a few areas that have really shaped the way I parent that has been impacted by the digital life I lead.
Every (Really Every) Moment Captured
Everyone has baby pictures. And some of your parents may have gone a little trigger happy on those cameras and you just have a ton of photos. Well, I bought a DSLR and flash media camcorder to add to our arsenal of memory-capturing equipment. The result? Just over 1,800 photos taking up about 16GB of space. Add to that a couple hours of HD video and I’m glad I went ahead and bought an external hard drive dedicated to baby (hopefully it will last through the first year.) The great thing about all this? A 8GB SD card will run you just about $15 on amazon. And a 500GB external hard drive, about $80. Having to be conservative about capturing memories due to the cost of developing film or the cost of memory is quickly fading (no pun intended.) And keeping one set of grandparents who live on the west coast up to date on baby’s growth is 3 clicks in iPhoto.
Dr. Parent
While in the recovery room after delivery, our nurse came by and asked us if we’d like baby to receive her Hepatitis B vaccine. We asked her if there were any downsides to getting it at the hospital and she said no, so we said it’d be fine to go prepare the shot for later in the day. Just to be curious, I whipped out my iPhone and googled “hepatitis B vaccine risks” and got a barrage of articles connecting the vaccine to a number of neurological disorders. Now I don’t want to be the “anti-vaccine parent” but it did make me pause – so we called our nurse up and asked her if it’d be okay if we waited on the vaccine until a checkup with our pediatrician later. She had no problem with that, and it gave us time to look into it further. Without mobile Internet, we would’ve had no perspective on this other than the opinions of our nurse.
On another more light-hearted note, we’ve found some fun apps on the iPhone that were more fun to try than anything, but I’m sure there are some power users out there. Here are a couple apps that keeps track of feedings and diaper changes:
Cataloging the consistency of your baby’s stool has to be one of the weirdest things I’ve ever done on my phone. WebMD Mobile has also been a useful app in accessing funky things a baby does in her first two months.
Baby’s Early Digital Identity
A couple week’s after we found out my wife was pregnant, we secured preferred gmail email addresses (with multiple variations using her first and middle name, depending on what she wants to go by) and a Facebook account. None are active right now, but we’re wondering whether to active her Facebook account and manage it for her in these early years. We post all these photos with her in them but we don’t tag her and what’s the fun in Facebook if you don’t do that. And who do we let become friends with baby? Just our friends? If she starts liking a certain brand of diapers or a stuffed animal, should we try to seek out their fan page or Facebook identity? In all seriousness, we did read up on the debate happening online on the line between transparency vs. privacy. When we post pictures of our children, do we only allow certain friends to view the content, do we open it up to all our friends or to the entire world? What is paranoia and what is unsafe? When do children get to manage their own digital identity? Lots of questions in this new world where we feel compelled to share content (embarrassing photos and embarrassing home videos) that 5 years ago we’d keep much closer to us.
This is a bit further away for my wife and I, but I’m sure there will be a day when a site like digitalparents.org (a site that is dedicated to “making sense of how young people use the web”) will be great reading for us.
So What’s the Verdict?
I think technology has enabled a lot of neat things to be possible as a parent but also introduced us to some of the ills of society that we’d probably rather have been ignorant to, but this is the world we live in. It’s highly connected and inter-related. The reason I can find such great advice and content for parenting in 2009 on babycenter.com is because other parents are transparent about their own experiences. But the same technology that makes that sharing possible strikes fear into other parents about posting details about their adorable baby online. As a first-time parent, I’m going to continue to contribute and share, but cautiously. That’s not to say I’m not going to post a gajillion photos of baby on my Facebook, but I’ll definitely be careful about what all I post and who I accept friend requests from.
Lots of things to get excited about and worry about, but at this point, two months in, I’m just focused on smiling a lot at baby, burping and changing blow-out diapers. And of course, taking lots and lots of pictures.
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