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What Google Learned in 2010

Google tends to be ahead of the curve on a number of fronts. Behavioral Analysis is one that holds strategic thinking for many Marketers, for things like User Consumption Behaviors. Knowing the Personas of the audiences and customers you have visiting and interacting with your web properties is crucial. One reason why we look at this for direction to provide critical thinking for clients. Have you looked at your audience recently?

Amplify’d from blog.compete.com

What Google Learned in 2010

Google Recently released a video which includes some interesting facts about what they learned by analyzing search behaviors in 2010. The data was compiled from over 60 research studies with the help of many partners, including Compete and OTX to better understand how consumers are utilizing the web.

The research produced some pretty cool facts like:

Google provides the most dating site search referrals

25% of new vehicle buyers utilize the mobile web during their research process

Portable PC shoppers do an average of 14 searches before deciding what to buy

75% of patients research their symptoms before going to a doctor for diagnosis

Watch the video to learn more:

Read more at blog.compete.com

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/egPvFi

#2010 #google learned #google recently #research #search

Social media influencers 2010 – download the final report

Following on from the success of our social media monitoring tools review earlier this year, we’ve been testing nine of the leading social media monitoring tools in order to assess how effective they are at identifying influencers.

Download our social media influencers report 2010 to find out

We’d like to thank all the tool providers for enabling us to carry out this report. We’d also like to give a special mention the following people for their comments and opinions about influencers, which have been included in the report: Chris Brogan, Jay Baer, Murray Newlands, Louise Parker and Kelly Pennock.

Social media influencers 2010 – download the final report | Social media agency London | FreshNetworks blog

Young Adult Males are the Biggest Users of Location-Based Services

If Geo-location Marketing stumps you, your in good company. Mainly big brands are using this platform to drive testing. Your not far behind here. Let's look at some ways your brand can use the Geo-Platforms, like my friend Wayne Sutton (http://twitter.com/waynesutton) who launched TriOut2 App for iPhone. - Opening of a new retail store, testing out friend/follower propensity to check-in with a special offer only on each platform - Think Groupon, without the costs of giving up 75% of revenues to drive traffic that is pushed from the social outposts like Facebook, Twitter - Use your database of customers with a share-only check-in only offer to get the word out to their friends Mobile is big, Geo-location brings it to your brand locally. What you say?

Amplify’d from www.pamorama.net

Even though only 4% of U.S. online adults have ever used a location-based service, like the popular Foursquare, Loopt, Neer, and Yelp for Mobile, new data from Forrester Research shows that the main user group is a highly-sought-after demographic — young, affluent adult males with college degrees. Location-based app users are much younger and more affluent than the average online user:

Around 86% of those checking in are under the age of 43.

More than 70% of users have earned a college degree or higher.

The average annual income of users is $105,000 — at least 30% more than the average Internet user.

In addition to being the main users of location-based apps, young adult males may also be heavy online influencers and mobile researchers. Looking at the profile of location-based app users, Forrester’s metrics show that they are:

Influential. Geolocation users are 38% more likely than the average U.S. online adult to say that friends and family ask their opinions before making a purchase decision.

An interesting target group. They are typically young adult males with college degrees.

Heavy mobile researchers. They are far more likely to search for information about businesses and products, as well as read customer ratings/reviews of products and services

If geolocation is part of your marketing mix, it’s important to realize that your efforts won’t reach a large, diverse audience. But male-targeted companies, like gaming and consumer electronics sellers, can test these platforms now — the size of this market may be smaller, but the ability to communicate with an influential group can give your company a competitive advantage.

Here are some more specifics about how location-based service users compare to to U.S. online adult users:

See more at www.pamorama.net

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/gwZR01

#biggest users #college #location-based #location-based services #young adult males

Research 'must take charge of business data in 2011'

In my work with clients, we often hear the same thing over and over - "why do we need to do all of this research stuff". Not surprising. Here's the deal... Research provides a baseline for all of our activities and strategies that need to be developed. How else can you possibly start "driving" with no starting point or reason why you are even in the car? Think Roadmap here. This benchmarking process allows Marketers to begin the crucial process of laying out a Workflow Process and answer the all important "WHY" we are even doing this in the first place. Begin a Social Media Marketing program without a baseline and watch your budgets shrink in this channel. Senior Execs need to know one thing. Impact. They need to know where they were and where your efforts resulted in a business goal impact. By understanding where you are or have been and where your efforts took the business means that you get to keep your job and get a bigger budget next year. Without this, guess what... start updating the resume quickly because you will become a statistic like the rest of the 50+% Heads of Marketing looking for their next gig. Why you ask? Because they approached marketing strategies based on the new hot thing and not on Research. Action steps for you? Hire someone to do your dirty research work. You may be surprised at how inexpensive this can be when you deal with someone who knows what they are doing. Do this internally if you have the resources. Otherwise - call me to discuss what needs to be done. We do this all the time. Oh, by the way... our clients find that after all the "research crap" is complete and we implement the strategies based on that research, their results are superior to their current practices.

Amplify’d from www.research-live.com

Research 'must take charge of business data in 2011'

2011 will be the year when business data ‘starts to converge on market research departments’, according to analyst firm Forrester.

“Using technology for data integration and knowledge management will be critical for market research professionals,” says the report, which gives predictions for the year ahead. “If [the industry] does not integrate this treasure trove of data to which it has access and the knowledge housed in siloed departments within the organisation, it will risk developing and leveraging insights from an incomplete view of the customer.”

Forrester’s research director Reineke Reitsma (pictured) told Research: “This is the year where we have to decide where market research will end up in 2015 or 2020. I hope that we’ll have come to a consensus at the end of 2011 – it will be damaging if we don’t, because there are other roles in the organisation using customer data, and if we don’t come to a conclusion they’ll take over some of our responsibilities.”

“This is the year where we have to decide where market research will end up in 2015 or 2020”

Technology will help research teams “to build a central knowledge house”, integrating and analysing data from across the business, including results of ‘DIY’ research. Enterprise feedback management and knowledge management systems “will be essential in the future to fully develop a rich and cohesive 360-degree view of the customer”, says the report.

But this sort of change will not happen without people taking the initiative, warns Reitsma, and research professionals need to have an internal marketing plan ready to state their case for becoming the central clearing house for data, ensuring checks on sample, methodology, and data analysis for DIY studies done by other departments.

Although there will inevitably be struggles on the way, Reitsma points to client companies such as Best Buy and Philips as examples of firms that are already taking steps to integrate and manage data from various sources more effectively.

Despite seeing growing efforts to tie research more closely to business value, Forrester is sceptical about prospects for a ‘pay for performance’ model in research in 2011. “This initiative will get people talking, but we don’t see much coming from it,” the report says. Reitsma says she sees pay for performance as “a PR thing”, only likely to be applicable to the more mundane, less strategic end of research.

As for emerging technologies and methodologies, Forrester sees these factors influencing the management and communication of research as much as the collection and analysis. Reitsma says it will be up to industry bodies to push new methodologies forward, as clients and budgets still aren’t ready. Innovation remains a vendor-dominated conversation, she said, and getting clients to buy in is currently “where the chain breaks”.

The report also predicts continued growth for social media listening techniques, the use of social networks for research, and innovative new offerings in DIY research.

Forrester’s report Predictions 2011: What Will Happen in Market Research, by Reineke Reitsma with Jacqueline Anderson, Tamara Barber and Roxana Strohmenger, can be ordered online here.

Read more at www.research-live.com

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/ezMhHp

#2011 #business #charge #data #research

6 Social Media Success Metrics You Need to Track

Great post here for those who want to have a good basis of Success Metrics that you can track. I use or have reviewed all of them previously and can state that if used alongside a solid Strategy, you can certainly see an impact. PostRank is one of my favorites as well.

Amplify’d from www.socialmediaexaminer.com

6 Social Media Success Metrics You Need to Track

People who say social media isn’t measurable aren’t looking very hard.

The truth is there are dozens of viable metrics you can use to gauge the success of your social media efforts. The challenge isn’t measurability; it’s knowing which measures are meaningful.

Here are the 6 undervalued social media success metrics you should be tracking:

#1: Daily Story Feedback

Instead of just counting the number of Facebook “likes” you accrue, which signifies nothing more than digital bumper-stickering, track how often your fans click “like” and comment on the status updates you post.

The more fans who click “like” and comment, the more likely your future updates will be seen in their news feed, dramatically increasing your actual Facebook audience.

If you’re an administrator of a Facebook fan page, you can find the Daily Story Feedback chart at http://facebook.com/insights (look in the Interactions category).

#2: Look at Klout

Rather than paying rapt attention to the number of Twitter followers you’ve corralled, instead look closely at your Klout score.

Klout is an online influence gauge that combines several data points (followers, retweets, clicks on links, etc.) and then applies some fancy algorithmic voodoo to arrive at a unified metric.

The data used to calculate Klout continues to change (they recently added Facebook information), but I’ve found it to be the most reliable influence-tracking metric, because it’s nearly impossible to “game” using automated follow-back programs and other Twitter nefariousness.

Klout’s scoreboard for Social Media Examiner founder Mike Stelzner is 73 (on a 1-100 scale).

#3: PostRank

One of the challenges of writing a blog is knowing how to value the wide variety of reader engagements and behaviors. Should you care more about Digg submission than about comments? Are tweets more important than Facebook shares?

PostRank Analytics solves this problem.

It’s free if you connect with their “influencers” outreach program or $15/month if you don’t. PostRank provides a useful, detailed blogging scoreboard, especially if you connect it with your Google Analytics account.

The best part of PostRank Analytics is the engagement score, which is sort of your Klout score for each blog post. The system looks at total comments, tweets, shares, etc. for each post and applies behavior points and an algorithm to determine the total score. This is a fantastic way to look at your last 25 blog posts to see which type of content you’re publishing generates the most engagement. The image below is a recent post on Convince & Convert .

See more at www.socialmediaexaminer.com

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/gbvss6

#daily story feedback #Facebook #metrics #postrank analytics #track

Beth Harte's view on Customer-Centric vs. Company-Centric

I look forward to a few things to read over the weekend during my recharge time. Beth's Blog is one of them. She has put out the Saturday Morning Reads Posts that contain compiled intelligence from the week (or maybe from what she has pondered for some time - probably the latter). What I like about this particular post is the view of companies to start looking at their interactions from the "Consumer Lens". I wrote about that last week http://deanholmes.me/social-computing/hope-and-fear-the-consumer-lens/ where the shift needs to take place. Hope for Deeper Understanding As we struggle to obtain a balance of profit while crafting better lives for our employees and customers, most would fall toward profits as a business driver. Some economists would argue that this is the measurement of a healthy organization. While profits are important financially, Consumers (Consider them as your Neighbors) and Employees (Consider them as your Family) view this distinction very differently. I wrote: As more organizations balance this concept, in Board Rooms, Shareholder meetings and Executive Management gatherings, your customers and employees are asking for and demanding something far simpler – for you to do the right things, them simple things first. One thing to add to Beth's take is the Employee-centric use of internal Marketing. Their are so many missed opportunities to learn and ideate from our employees it's scary. Even from the depths of the mail room come great ideas. Why? Because most of the time these folks are the closest to the customers. They hear, read and feel what the pains of your business processes are. They hear the rants from bad experiences. They often times have a fix (idea). Problem is most of the people making the decisions don;t listen. Point here... listen to both the consumer (customer) and your other customer (Employees) yes Mr. C Level you now have 2 customers to concern yourselves with. Beth - great stuff as usual.

Amplify’d from www.theharteofmarketing.com

To be clear, customer-centric doesn’t always mean customer service. But that doesn’t mean that having customer-centric data can’t lead to experiences that include customer service activities. When it comes to customer service, even customer-centric companies will trip up and falter. Why? Because it’s a human-to-human touch point that even the most detailed and modeled data can’t always predict the outcome of. So the next time you claim that a company isn’t customer-centric because you had a bad customer service experience, think about that and also think about how your behavior affected the situation as well.

s: Carnival Cruises Along with the Power of Customer Analytics

SAS.Com Events: Carnival Cruises Along with the Power of Customer Analytics

Forrester (Shar VanBoskirk’s Blog): Intercontinental Hotels: A Case Study In Customer-Centric Marketing

Read more at www.theharteofmarketing.com

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/geu4Bk

#carnival cruises along #customer analytics #customer-centric #saturday morning reads #travel industry

Easy OPML Files to build a Listening Dashboard

It's true... I am simply a nut when it comes to finding tools that help people get to better information. This website has put down a easy way to create OPML files (these files are used to import into platforms like Netvibes, Google Reader). The neat thing is that once you know the core keywords, short tail (1-2 core terms), you simply put them into the box, and wallah - OPML file. Use this to upload to NetVibes and see how insightful the output is for finding new Influencers. If you have not built out a Listening Dashboard, send me a note via Twitter http://twitter.com/deanholmes and I will send you the one I created for Jigsaw's audience. Finding great information is easier than you think. Creating these files has been difficult at best. Now it's simply a plug-n-play. Don't forget to add in Widgets, such as Google RSS Feeds to pull in all of your information. I find that Netvibes is like home base for sharing great information. The one key area it helps me daily in is the ability to look at the previous posts. This allows me to play "catch-up" when I have no time during the week while working on projects or traveling to share great content with my audience. Let me know your thoughts, and if you need any help.

Amplify’d from www.everythingability.com

Google is great for finding pages with a good repuation but not so good at finding your potential customers. There are an increasing number of search engines that let you search exclusively in forums and blogs and then subscribe to that search using RSS.

This handy tool gives you an OPML file (which is just a list of subscriptions too RSS feeds). The file can be imported into an RSS reader such as Google Reader, Newsgator, Bloglines or NetNewsWire. You can very quickly create a mini Engagement Engine where you can easily monitor tweets,blogs and forums for those discussions where you can really be of assistance to potential customers.

1. Select Your Sources...

espresso blue mountain dark roast coffee gagia espresso tips

Read more at adage.com

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/h9wkc1

#customers #dangerous lure #jonathan salem baskin #sell better product #social web

PeekYou-a-Boo A Look at Social Profiling

As this is a big part of what I do for clients today, it makes sense to bring light to some of the tools that exist to do this work of finding "Influencers". Influencers can be tricky to find. The SplinterNet has caused a feathering of the Digital Profiles that exist among these Influencers. Partly due to fuzzy data, partly due to openness of the information provided by the folks like Google who covet the data and partly due to the technologies that exist. We look at Influence within 3 key areas. Behavioral, SEO and Conversational Data. This gives us an ability to drive the identification of Influencers based on a Communities Value as a whole. If your objective is to drive awareness, this will be critical to identify the sites that have Page Rank Trust, high traffic from a relevant audience that matches the Digital Profiles, This is a good start, as Marshal discusses ways that the tool can be used. My hope is that technology catches up with my thinking to help identify the Influencers from a high confidence ranking. For now, we are Indexing and Weighting the Influencers, based upon many areas of interests. Have a look, let me know your thoughts.

Amplify’d from www.webmetricsguru.com

PeekYou is like a massive DNS server (Domain Name Service) but for people, identities, that is. PeekData is a enterprise service that takes all the information in just about every important social media platform and organizes it into their own database that is then made available to third party applications (like Social Media Monitoring Platforms – think of the possibilities by considering platforms like Sysomos, Radian6, Brandtology, Alterian, ScoutLabs and many more as suitable third part apps for this kind of information) some of which are probably underway now (my guess).

PeekYou also uses an additional service in this case study called SpatialKey that takes data they have assembled and quickly maps it (with a few minutes). I’m not sure if PeekYou created SpatialKey or if they license it, but it’s part of PeekYou’s mapping features and functionality. You can get mappings based on demographics, lifestyles, school affiliations, occupation, Social Profiles, Market Schema and more.

The Starbucks PeekYou Study

There’s a lot of information to share and I can’ t put it all in this post – I will share what attracts my attention now, though. I’m not sure where all the Starbucks data came from (was it all from Twitter or is it a mixture of a number of sources)?

PeekYou aggregates a lot of data, not all of it that can be resolved to an identity or a set of interests, but a sizable amount (30%-40%) can be positively identified while another 30% can provide information as well, just not as much; the rest can’t be identified.

The numbers above aren’t that surprising – of the entire data related to Starbucks PeekYou managed to identify positively 14,356 individuals via their social profiles, almost half of them are struggling on between 30K-60K a year income, split between 4 age groups, etc.

What can we learn from the PeekData pulled from Starbucks profiles?

Depending on what you want to do the insights can be very helpful for marketing intelligence – defining what to market to whom and when in this case.

PeekYou managed to find 583 people who are Starbucks fans who live in Manhattan, and where they live by neighborhood. I can see all kinds of possibilities where sites that have large twitter followings could use the data – even celebrities could use it to determine where their fans are and therefore schedule appearances there.

The same thing can be done with sentiment (mapping); I like the idea but with all the known problems scoring sentiment analysis, as it is, I’m not too trusting of these results.

On the other hand, if this worked and if the sentiment was accurate enough, the information could extremely helpful (ie: for a political candidate, etc).

The Temporal Heat Grid is my favorite chart in the Starbucks case study and reminds me of some of my own visualizations, but this one is better than mine.

So, people who are Starbucks fans tend to like Tuesday and Wednesday mornings to come in, drink coffee, etc.

Finally, PeekYou can take it’s “PeekScore” of Social Media activity per individual and chart it against the Starbucks group. I’m going to say something about PeekScore – I think it’s more interesting when comparing different groups and finding out how active members are in one group compared to another. Otherwise I think PeekScore is a useful, if flawed used to identify influencers but the problem with this score is there are many people in the world who are influential but not active on Social Networks.

At any rate, if PeekYou were to turn their engine on a site like Comscore, used the same categories, then compared interest and influence across each segment, I’d like it – hint hint.

To take away a summary from all of this – Social Media Monitoring platforms are bound to get better soon - a few that I know of are playing with PeekYou’s data right now and it’ s likely we’ll see several integrations next year. When that happens the influencer aspect of platforms will improve drastically (think Radian6 and Sysomos, to name a few) and while you will not see everyone’s profile who talks about a subject, you’ll be able to identify enough of them.

A even more powerful use case of PeekYou/PeekData Reverse Keyword Lookup API

But the more I think about it, the more I think most powerful use case is back link analysis of a website or web page. As it stands now, anyone that has a list of urls and wants to know the identity of those urls (the people behind the website/page) will benefit for PeekYou’s Reverse Keyword Lookup API – but the issue with Social Media Monitoring Platforms selection of urls that is culled by Radian6, Sysomos, BrandWatch, Crimson Hexagon are all keyword based.

Never mind PeekYou – the urls you get are going to be more or less useful based on how good the keywords you used to construct the query – or how well you have targeted the tools to extract the urls/pages your interested in seeing.

I’m suggesting that PeekYou attack this problem by using Backlink analysis to query popular pages and tell us who the audience is for that page. The same thing could be done for newspaper articles and they can be done for membership sites and any site or page that essentially has a lot of links.

On the other hand, a website or page is a fairly static affair – using PeekYou to resolve the identities of people who have linked to a page is actually more useful. In theory you would think that Google has all that information already via it’s Google Accounts database – but the truth is, they don’t have all the data you think they might have. For as much data as Google has, I think it’s in the dark about the identity of many of the urls in their search index.

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