Observing consumers in the wild
There were some great presentations at the ARF Industry Leader Forum in NY this week. One of the themes of interest to me in several ways was one that Joel Rubinson set up in the intro. Social media, he said, allows companies to “observe consumers in the wild”, in their natural habitat for how they use and talk about products.
I believe his point was a good one that free of the Hawthorne effect, you can get a more unbiased view of consumer opinions when they don’t explicitly know that you are observing them. It’s the idea that just by the nature of your asking a question or showing interest in something, you might change how another person acts or responds. I’ve often heard Gary King use an analogy to make a similar point: If I asked you what your opinion is of the National Helium Reserve, you might very well state an opinion, even though prior to being asked you may never have known that such a thing exists (a giant gas station for blimps! My next business plan will clearly be for personal dirigibles). However, online, you aren’t going to express an opinion when you don’t have one (That’s different than expressing an uninformed opinion, which is still an opinion).
That said, the whole reason people write opinions online is so that other people DO read them. They want to be heard, to help, to share. Do peacocks always have their tail feathers fanned? Is that how they naturally look? Do you behave differently if someone might be watching?
I don’t believe this at all discounts the value of listening to online opinion — in fact, I argue that it’s the best possible way (though the Lily Tomlin switchboard operator might disagree) to hear what people really think. Online consumer opinion is far more pervasive, far more representative, and far more influential than any other source of feedback.
My last thought on the analogy is that it seems to reflect an attitude toward consumers that they are another species. It’s Jane Goodall with the gorillas. Yes, we need to listen and watch and understand, and yes, they are in control, and yes, they are using those little stick tools in new ways we never thought possible but in this case, it’s not they. It’s we. The wonderful thing about the web is it’s like a one-way mirror that you can instantly dissolve. You can reach out. Have a conversation, far beyond Koko and her sign language. You can follow up, engage, and make each other better.
Interviews with Candace Fleming at NMS
An interview with Candace Fleming from the New Marketing Summit earlier this month:
and a second interview with Candace and the inimitable (and ubiquitous!) Chris Brogan:
Deep in the heart of #FCF08
My colleague Melyssa and I are listening and learning at the Forrester Consumer Forum down in Dallas. So far we’ve checked out a Tweetup (photos available courtesy of Jeremiah Owyang) and caught up with many former colleagues in marketing on both the client and vendor sides.
The theme is “Keeping Ahead of Tomorrow’s Customer” and I’d argue that there’s an air of: how the heck do we even keep up. While tried and true marketing tactics remain important, understanding how to reach today’s consumer is a developing digital competency. Cameron Death of NBC Universal was compelling on this point — realize the value of branded communities, but be aware and partner to understand all the places consumers are gathering and influencing.
To follow this conference, you can view the keynotes streamed by Forrester. If you’re interested in a Twitterstream of all the <140 character updates from attendees (aka, the firehose), you can follow the #FCF08 hashtag on Twitter search.
Capturing opinion on Caribou Barbie and robocalls
Words come in and out of fashion — and election year headlines provide exceptionally rich fodder. Some words and phrases will work their way into everyday speech while others are slated for the dustbin of history.
When new words emerge suddenly to express an opinion we’re tracking with our technology, we’re able to keep up. How?
Our technology “reads” language with an approach based on how humans are likely to express themselves. For example, if you say that a politician is a jerk, stupid, an idiot, etc. and then come up with a new word to describe him (say, fluborizer) that means the same thing , you’ll surely use that word as well as lots of other words already known to the algorithm. Human expression of opinion is often inefficient and repetitive — that’s what makes it recognizable and authentic. Humans’ predictable language patterns enable our technology to keep up with language shifts as they occur.
Our technology — which amplifies human intelligence and can understand new words — can be contrasted to tools which merely count words chosen ex ante. If you set a fixed lexicon and choose the wrong words, you can end up missing the opinion you’re targeting.
Is sentiment contagious?
Last week I had the chance to hear Bill Gates speak at the Harvard Business School Centennial, and he had some insightful comments about the economy. Granted, he has some pretty good sources … like a phone call the night before with Warren Buffett. 
From Gates’ perspective, we in the US ran an “interesting experiment”, where the economy as a whole was still fairly solid and in some ways separate from the recent credit crisis. What really caused the downward spiral, however (and according to his comments), was the three consecutive weeks of front pages and websites showing graphs of the Depression. In his mind, the downtown in consumer sentiment, inspired by the graphs/voices of a relatively small number of influencers, is where things really went awry.
What would happen if we paid a million workers through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to post more positive graphs all over the internet? It might be less expensive than the bailout, and help avoid creating what the WSJ today called one giant panic-transmission machine.
Filtering out the filth
If you think you get a lot of salacious spam in your email, you should see what turns up when you’re downloading the web. The proliferation of online publishing tools has resulted in pages and pages of sales links, random advertising gibberish, and incoherent babble akin to word salad.
If your company or product brand gets a random mention on one of these computer-generated pages, is that something you really want to know about? Worse, do those mentions make you think your online presence is larger than it is? As humans, we have an uncanny ability to quickly sort the relevant opinions from the splogs, but how do we get a computer do the same?
One possibility is to have the computer filter all web pages containing words that occur frequently in splogs. These words are the usual suspects: the four-letter ones, the ones you might hear in an adult video, and even the kind of pills you might take before starring in one. Unfortunately, people legitimately use some of these words when expressing their opinion. Don’t believe me? Just check out those dirty Twitterers at Cursebird — but don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Our approach is to adopt a keyword filter that removes splogs containing the worst of the worst: words and word combinations you’d probably never even think of, let alone post online. To accommodate the range of human expression, certain kinds of profanity has to make it through this first level of filtering.
We then allow our statistical algorithm to learn what it means to be an irrelevant opinion by providing the algorithm with irrelevant samples, including splogs with some kinds of profanity. This algorithm doesn’t just look for individual words but summarizes each document as numbers. Under this numerical representation, splogs then look vastly different from relevant opinions and can be safely discarded. It’s an effective way to get to the real, human opinion and ditch the mentions that don’t — and shouldn’t — matter.
Relying on the kindness of strangers
According to Universal McCann, we’re all relying a lot more on the kindness and influence of strangers when we make purchase decisions based on information received online. Their September report entitled When did we start trusting strangers? is based on research into 17,000 internet users in 29 countries — and concludes that strangers are trusted:
- almost as much as a face-to-face recommendation
- more than any paid-for communications (presumably infomercials, advertorials and the like)
- more than advertising
- far more than a celebrity endorser
Read the full report for some terrific insights into the rise of social media and democratization of influence — and the resulting impact on your business.
Of tombstones and opportunities
Quite a few people are talking about the tombstone Sequoia showed to their portfolio CEOs last week. We can’t argue with the message (either Halloween or fiscal), and we’re wondering with the rest of the world — just how far will all this go? Or, as another Boston-area CEO put it, “how many other little bomb-lets” are going to go off in the next few years as the repercussions of the liquidity crisis continue to echo?
We’re all about public opinion here, and so it’s with great interest that I’ve been listening to some other high tech CEO’s who say if they weren’t reading the news, they wouldn’t know there was a crisis going on. Despite the general gloom and doom, some companies particularly some hedge funds as well as select mobile/IT/telecoms are thriving. I’ve spoken with companies heading into Q4 with record pipelines and significant deals already closed.
Certainly, there is hard evidence and facts upon which this crisis is based, but what fraction of it is caused by the mere perception of jitters and panic? By the overwhelming majority of stories being heard on the news? What would happen if we gave some voice to the small minority who are actually experiencing a boom? According to some in the know, now is the time to “look out, but take advantage of the openings.”
Reminder: New Marketing Summit
Next week our CEO Candace Fleming is sneaking down to Foxboro to take part in the New Marketing Summit. She’ll be participating in a panel called Listening in a Blizzard: Social Media Monitoring and the Future. Chris Brogan and CrossTech have lined up some terrific speakers, including Don Peppers keynoting on Dancing Shoes for Honeybees — which apparently relates to personal mobile technology, and not entomology.
If you want to get spend some time in Gillette Stadium and away from obsessively clicking refresh on Google Finance, go on and register here.
Big data keeps getting easier
We’re a little data-obsessed over here, mostly because we spend time daily pulling down a bunch of user-generated content to identify and analyze opinion. So we think about how to get data, how to clean data, and just how much more of it there’s likely to be with the growth of online discussion.
You can agree or disagree with some of the conclusions drawn from this interesting series of vignettes in Wired’s The Petabyte Age — death of science! supremacy of data over theory! — but the sheer volume of bytes being generated is indisputable.
Today, TechCrunch commented on Amazon’s new S3 pricing: getting bigger just keeps getting cheaper and easier. There’s enough hype about cloud computing to make everyone tired of the term, but developing reasonable ways to process vast amounts of interesting data is truly revolutionary.