The two days of the ‘Market Research in the Mobile World‘ (MRMW) congress – that took place on 18 and 19 April – were filled to the brim with several international experts in the field of (mobile) research sharing their knowledge and insights. Literally from America to Australia and India, researchers have come to show us what the current state-of-play in the field of mobile research field is. One term has been mentioned at least three times during the first day of the conference: the ‘customer journey’. It all comes down to one question: “How does somebody come to buy something?”.

The Customer Journey

The way someone eventually becomes a consumer, meaning they actually buy a product, is the holy grail of the advertising business. Despite the criticism towards online, many advertisers still struggle with similar questions offline: who looks at an ad and what are the effects of that? Others struggle with this problem as well; when does whom experience what? Although steps are being taken in the right direction, questions such as “Why is nobody buying my product while they must have seen my ad?” are still omnipresent.

At present the technology to follow people every day is finally available, there are several apps, employed by different bureaus, to accomplish this. An other development in ‘the industry’ is that ‘tarratives’ are going to play a bigger part in marketing and research. Read the complete article at Greenbookblog »

CC Picture: ‘ALT1040‘

“Taking over the world” might sound overly dramatic, but actually it’s not that far-fetched when you really think about it. Considering the enormous development that ‘social’ has been going through doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to think that technology will really move into this direction. Combine that with the fact that some countries are skipping ‘landlines’ altogether and are moving directly to mobile instead, and you have a very safe bet indeed. The main challenge will be to see how ‘Local’ will take shape. For marketers and market researchers alike the main focus should be both ‘contact’ and ‘conversion’. Both will probably want to take a look at what is required to actually measure these two items as well.

Thus, the developments in the fields of Social, Local and Mobile (SoLoMo) will present us with two main challenges:

1. Contact: Where are the people I want to get in touch with, and how can I get them to talk to
2. Conversion: How do I make sure I don’t bother people endlessly, but start a conversation at exactly the right moment?

This results in the now classic ‘big data’ discussion, being the discussion about analysis: “In what way do I make connections to use in research and in what way should I do research on all the data that I get from measuring the ‘two C’s’?”

At the ‘Market Research in the Mobile World’ event that is supported by a broad variety of international companies next month in Amsterdam, the complications and solutions to questions like these will be discussed. But what is it that we’re really talking about here? Read the complete article at Greenbookblog »

Inside a venue

To promote the launch of IE9 at SXSW, design company Vectorform has built a neat way to visualize Foursquare checkins. In their ‘world’ called Foursquare Playground, you find yourself surrounded by the nearest venues, which enables to to get an overview of what happens around you. With different animations for each type of venue, this should give you an idea of the type of neighbourhood you’re looking at as well as the level of activity in that particular area.

In a very game like layout you can spot new venues around you, each depicted by a building type that would suite the type of location as defined within Foursquare. (Work, home, park, etc.) This whole thing is supposed to be a showoff of the HTML 5 capabilities in IE9 and if you’re not working with this browser Chrome and Safari will do as well. (More support coming up…)

Matrixlike visualization

User information

I would say the downside of this visualisation is twofold: it’s a pure grid-like visualization, while your neighbourhood is probably shaped in a more natural form.

Combine this with the fact that not all blocks in your real life neighbourhood are venues, or that a lot of venues appear twice (or are in the same building) and this makes for a map that doesn’t really represent the place you’re looking at. That aside: it does look really nice and the whole thing might remind you of the Sim City games. Check out the video at the bottom of this article to see the introduction to Foursquare playgrounds by Dominic Espinosa from Vectorform.

# of people present

Aggregated Data

Even though it has it’s shortcomings this is in my opinion a good example of what you can do with aggregated data and yet another sign that data-visualization has a bright future. Hovering over the venues, which vary in size depending on how many checkins it had, will present you with a brief description of the place.

Venues that currently have people checked in will display a number, so you can immediately see where other Foursquare users are around you. Clicking on a building will then display more information, such as an animation of the people that are there. A chest and a painting on the wall are available to see the tips and current mayor of a place, with people that are checked in walking around the place.

Venue information

Bing

Foursquare Playground has, of course, integration with Microsoft’s Bing and could benefit from the rise of Foursquare users and perhaps a way of mapping the rather abstract layout onto Bing maps. This way it could be a friendly and appealing way to view the hotspots around you, although I wonder what the developers are expecting from smartphone users, which seems like the logical platform to do anything location-based.

If this is to be more than an IE9 showcase, there would need to be ‘an app for this’. On Android please, thank you.

I was pondering a reply to some post and thought it would be better to place it here. As it seems that there is more and more talk about what makes social media really social, I wanted to tell you something about some considerations on calling something ‘social media’. As a Sociologist I never really get why people define things as non-social of social in the context of a society or a community. Societies and communities are social constructs, such is commerce. Yes, the rules in the field differ, to refer to Bourdieu somewhat, and yes it’s the problem that ‘old’ commerce often does not get how to act online, but these are all social construct in a social environment.

The biggest mistake about ‘social media’ is to assume there is such a thing as non-social media. One way or the other it’s quite often ‘all or nothing’ for online marketeers: I was discussing this very thing quite recently actually. Either it’s all “let’s crowdsource your SEO via web 2.0″ or “haha, internet that’s all the same, nothing new, new media is a hype”. Both are short term philosophies.

The question “what makes something social” is a valid question, but I feel it is a mistake to define some types of media as “non social” at least for any kind of media that I can think of right now.

Shame on me for coming up with a word-cloud when everyone else has been bugging you with word-clouds for the past year or so. But still it’s quite interesting to see what I’ve been writing about up ’till now. That sharing is a big thing may come as no surprise, although I wasn’t really aware that I’ve been using that word that often. If you want to know what is going to be really hot this year, then it seems like I predict that ‘Location Based’ and Games are the big thing. At least that is true if you assume that I write about things that are still upcoming.

(click to embiggen)

With the new year just started, we can see that many predictions involve location based services, again. After my last post about visualizations I got some mails and other messages, asking what location based services could mean for the future. Most questions referred to which services were actually out there, so to start for 2011 let´s have a quick look at the playing field as it is today. Here is a quick description of the most important services in the, ever changing, field today.

Google Latitude

Google’s service has been around for quite some time already, basically a web application that lets you share your current location with friends. Google quickly introduced a badge to make your location visible to others beyond your usual friends as well, for example by putting it on your blog. While the service works great, I’ve never been really enthusiastic about it, because somehow it feels too unintuitive in its use. Sharing your location is done somewhat on in the background of your current activities, which does make sense in theory but makes you feel disconnected from the service in practice. With the recent introduction of dedicated mobile application Google could get it right this time, if they’re using their muscle to introduce new and better deals than their competitors.

Yelp

Yelp is originally a review service, that added location based features later on to provide extra credibility to reviews people would put up. As such is it perhaps a location based mashup avant la lettre, even though the process with them was the other way around. While others are just coming up with extra services besides just providing location information just now, or are relying more on third parties, Yelp even offered Augmented Reality features quite early on. A weak spot for Yelp could be that they’re not that well known outside the Unites States. Their site is still quite US focused and the service is only fully available in just a few other countries anyway. On the other hand, their hardly seems to be any competition anyway for review-integrated location services, so you might say the rest of the world is still within close reach for Yelp

Facebook Places

Being originally very US focused it is of no surprise that Facebook has started its Places service in just a limited part of our globe. Along with Google Latitude, Places seems to bet on integration with it’s host service, in this case Facebook, though they do offer a separate (iPhone) app and a dedicated Places page that makes it more intuitive to use. With Facebook’s influence spreading more and more, one can only assume that Places will have a bright future. It being part of the larges social network will give Places an advantage in offering deals, both in the partners involved as well as in offering potential rewards to be used within Facebook itself.

Foursquare

Foursquare are they guys to beat in the game, while not having as many users as either Google of Facebook as a whole, they are the leading company in the location based game. Although they offer the possibility to shops and companies to offer their customers deals when checking in to a location, my personal feeling is that this won’t be enough. Foursquare and it’s competitors will have to more actively pursue deals or other services that they can offer their users. And unlike Google or Facebook, Foursquare is a separate service which would need to add extra use for sharing your location besides earning badges if they want to go really mainstream.

Gowalla

Gowalla is the runner up, or are they..? While having less users than Foursquare, Gowalla users are said to be more involved and as for a setup of the service they offer a more solid looking interface. They recently struck a deal with Disney showing that they’re willing to actively pursue new offers for their users. Just like Facebook and Foursquare (’4SQ’) they’re still quite US focused, despite offering their basic service, like 4SQ, basically just everywhere.

SCVNGR

SCVNGR might not be that well known, not even in their ‘homeland’ the US. They do have quite a lot of support from a variety of different organizations, making this a very interesting service to watch in the future indeed.  Slowly but surely expanding their userbase abroad, SCVNGR is especially interesting because they are interesting for they other side of location based services: the venues.

Besides aiming for basic customer loyalty they offer business owners the opportunity to set up challenges for their visitors. Interesting is the additional fact that they offer anyone the opportunity to set up tracks, where you can earn points by following clues and directions from location to location, possibly accompanied by separate challenges.

Out of the game: Brightkite

Brightkite was in on the game quite early on and now they’re out of it again just at what seems to be the real start for location based services. Instead Brightkite is now aiming for grouptext functionalities as their core business. In an interesting move, the founders of the service that might have started it all are now pursueing a new location based offer, Forkly, offering location services around restaurants etcetera.

On Research-Live Annelies Verhaeghe of InSites Consulting is explaining some of the difficulties that come with doing ‘social media research’. First and foremost notion is that when you’re entering such a new territory is to ask yourself certain questions, the first one being ‘what is really new about this?’. It is important to note that there are actually a lot of similarities to traditional research in this case.

As Verhaeghe points out, one of the key differences is the new unit of analysis. When you’re doing this type of research, I’ve often pointed to the idea that similarities with qualitative research will turn up in what is traditionally seen as a quantitative type of research. When doing social media research, ‘netnography’, will change the units of your analysis to conversations. This exactly the point I’ve made before: doing research on the web will focus on the conversations that people have. You can have a quick look about what I’ve said by having a glance at the slideshow here.

Another important notion is that one of the things that will remain the same is the fact that you have to make decisions about which units you’re analyzing. In everyday research we could call this sampling, and in social media research we can see the same need for sampling. Working at a sampling company I’ve stressed this point before; the fact that the population is online now doesn’t change the need to get a decent sample. Yes, one can just grab from the population in order to illustrate other research and enrich it with examples, but real research will require some sort of sampling just the same.

I would like to add another point to all this, which I’ve already mention in the post I linked here previously:

We have to set up Research and show it is not only possible, but that it works. Do not wait for demand, be the unique company that can supply this extra knowledge.

I truly believe this is necessary; otherwise you could end up with a decent idea that just doesn’t get used. As commenter Michael points out here, with already tight budgets, even a forward thinking manager would want to know what he’s going to spend his budget on.

If you wondered about promoted tweets and how well they fare: they’re super effective. Or so says online brokerage firm Zecco. In comparison with tweets posted on their normal account they’re seeing an increase in engagement of 50%. some specific tweets even saw a much larger increase in engagement, up to 300% more.

Obviously this raises the question what the original level of engagement was, and what level of engagement can be expected of tweets ‘just’ posted on a normal twitter account of a firm. On the other hand, it’s a good sign for ‘promoted tweets’ as a services that Zecco views it as an important increase, so Twitter is on to an important new asset here, despite critiques on the new promotional scheme.

Coming back to the specific services Zecco offers, it says it plans to use the Promoted Tweets platform (more) to share investment-focused resources. They also want to send out alerts such as ‘most traded’  to provide real-time intelligence from the Zecco community. More about the success of promoted tweets on Techcrunch here.

And if you want to read more on the what, how and why of promoted tweets you can read the guest article by Silvia Todorova on my own blog. You can find her article ‘Does advertising on social networks have to be at the cost of user experience?’ here.