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 »

Social Media Club Rotterdam invited me to take part in a Google “Hangout” session with Kevin Kelly to discuss “What Technology Wants”.  ”What Technology Wants” is not only an interesting thing to ask oneself, but also the title of the book by Kevin Kelly that has just been released in Dutch. If you pay close attention, you can see my cat co-star in the video near the end…

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.

I’ve been discussing the possibilities for location based surveys already. As especially reviews are tied to a certain place it’s only natural to at least offer surveys with a location component. The new company Qriously is now offering such a thing: short location based surveys. With this offer they hope to set up a new mobile revenue model and ride the ‘quick insights’ hype on mobile devices.

The question to why people would even go to take a survey is solved by them in to ways. First and foremost they offer their questions as inapp advertisements on mobile devices.

Funding

The location based public opinion tool has recently raised 1.6 million US dollars in a funding round and the seem keen on offering app developers a new way to make money on free mobile apps. As the questions will be displayed as in-app advertisements, much like is already custom on for example Android or Apple’s iOS, they’ve got the question how potential respondents would even get to the survey covered. The actual ‘survey’ consists of a question that can be answered on a slider scale. When answering, they naturally don’t have the leave the application, so this shouldn’t be too much of an extra step in answering questions. As an extra incentive to answer a question Qriously also offers an insight in how others have answered compared to yourself.

the Qriously in-app content

If the questions that people get to answer will remain fairly location based this would give answering some extra relevance to the respondent. We could say that this is the second solution Qriously has found to the engagement problem. Offering relevant surveys to people does good things for the response rate and if they manage to keep questions not only location-dependent but also really relevant to that location this could seriously help completion rates and deliver quick insights. Perhaps the only remaining question is how many people will really want to answer a question while they are in the midst of playing a game or checking their email. The short, easy, format of the questions could be the right way to go at this problem, though especially if they would integrate ways of interacting with the actual game or other type of application, for example in the form of credits. This is both to the benefit of the respondent, who gains an extra reward as well as to the developer who makes his revenue model more usable. Of course Qriously would gain from more integration as well, as completion rates could rise, they would have to weigh this against downside: the extra efforts such an extended app would take.

(image taken from the Qriously website)

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)

Now that ‘location based’ is becoming more and more of a big thing, the question what we can actually do with it still remains. Just ‘checking in’ to certain places is not much of a business model, as TechCrunch pointed out a while ago. There may just not be enough to it to keep it entertaining enough even though since then offers that go with a check in have increased, also outside the United States. An answer may lie in offering additional services that seem to come to mind naturally when thinking of topics that are relevant to know when at a certain location, such as reviews.

Content is still king in the sense that tying data to certain place (and time) would require the content you’re actually offering to be relevant to that place. Being a mayor in Foursquare is another thing, but there could be much more, that could be way more interesting. Yelp is one of those services that combines reviews with locational data, not a very strange move, since they actually started out as a review service instead of the other way around.

Gaming and promotions

When discussing new possibilities for location based services with some friends we came across the option to do promotions tied to a certain spot. These are of course already available in simple forms, getting a discount for checking in to a location is on of the most ‘pure’ forms of this idea. Going beyond this there is the notion that, coming back to reviews, location based data would be ideal to offer location based surveys or polls to people. This would be an intuitive way to ask for customer experience, to see how and when the atmosphere around a landmark changes to the crowd, and things like that.

As a way to reward people for certain actions, such as taking such a survey a thing that comes to mind is a gaming element tied to points. Whether or not this should be tied to a real life currency is not all that important for the description of this idea. Because I went on to think that maybe a neat crossover of Foursquare or another service like it with Layar would be really cool. Layar offers an extra dimension to reality, where people can load certain ‘layars’ over the camera view on their mobile phone.This way they get an augmented reality to view where the nearest landmarks, possible dates or Twitter users are, for example.

Wouldn’t it be something to tie this in to our idea of location based reviews here? Implementing a layar of our own for this purpose, so people can spot the places where they can do a review survey. A virtual layer over the real world so you can spot your (survey)opportunities through Layars augmented Reality… Of course this this is just a very rough idea, and probably it would be better if this game would offer different opportunities to move up in the game than just posting reviews at locations, but it does give a good view of the amount of possibilities all these new ‘social’ tools give us.