Being a little Twitter obsessed here, we couldn’t help but notice that Seesmic released the brand-new Seesmic Look yesterday. Touted as featuring extensive upgrades to the UI, the product is aimed at making social media adoption easier for consumers. As founder Loic Le Meur put it, “We were challenged to reach out to an untapped market – a mainstream audience not familiar with Twitter – [...] (think “Mom” or “Dad”), that heard of Twitter but were never interested, or never had the opportunity to have a positive and friendly experience.”
So how’d they do? We went to Twitter to find out.
VoxTrot Opinion Breakdown of Twitter Conversation
Overall reaction was fairly positive, with about 60% of Tweets praising the design, although a small portion of these (9% of total) felt that the product still lacked key functionality. This mirrored about the feelings of about another quarter of Tweeters who were generally unimpressed or were sticking with arch-rival Tweetdeck. Some users didn’t have a choice in staying put; Seesmic Look isn’t available on Macs, as about 11% of the conversation pointed out.
Seesmic’s done a great job with the release and we’re looking forward to Tweetdeck’s response over the next few months. In the meantime, we’re battening down the social media hatches for Apple’s tablet mystery product reveal next week.
Inglorious Basterds won at the box office and dominated Twitter conversations this weekend. In addition to grossing nearly $37 million, Quentin Tarantino’s World War II-themed saga has been afixed to Twitter’s trending topics list since Friday.
Word of mouth referrals are nothing new to the movie business. But, as Simon Dumenco (@simondumenco) points out in Friday’s AdAge, Twitter brings an element of speed and reach that is entirely new – and, he argues – potentially threatening to Hollywood. To better understand Twitter content about new releases, Dumenco speculates that “…someday soon, someone’s going to get a PhD in the statistical parsing of Twitter data streams…”
Well, Mr. Dumenco, let us humbly assert that someday is today. Crimson Hexagon turned its algorithm (created by a Harvard PhD professor) loose on this weekend’s Twitter conversation about Inglorious Basterds.
We performed the PhD magic on a sample of over 4500 Tweets from this weekend and found that:
40% of all Tweets on Inglorious praised the film, with an additional 9% hailing it as classic Tarantino
Anticipation was still high, with almost a quarter of all Twitters talking about the movie still eager to see it
The critics? Quiet so far, with only 8% of Tweets expressing disappointment at Tarantino or the film
Finally, 14% want to know others’ opinions about the movie: Glad we could help
Amazon’s announcement this morning of the Kindle DX dominated tech news today. The new version of the web commerce giant’s e-book reader features a larger screen than its predecessor, the Kindle 2, and a host of other improvements including improved support for PDF documents. It also carries a whopping $489 price tag, which may prove an obstacle to Amazon’s plan to supplant physical textbooks in schools.
Reading TechCrunch’s post “What Does Twitter Think About the Kindle DX today?” I was inspired to do an analysis of a sample of 1500 or so of today’s Tweets using our Voxtrot Opinion technology. After reading through a few pages of Tweets, I set the system loose on the remainder with some interesting results:
Although the device itself is gathering huge amounts of attention, more than a third of the non-news Tweets are focused on the implications of the DX for the newspaper and textbook industries. The DX’s 9.7 inch screen may be approaching a tipping point, where e-readers become a credible alternative for a much broader array of printed media than ever before. Seeing the amount of buzz around the improved support for PDF, I am further convinced that technologically at least, the e-reader has arrived.
Practically speaking, although the Kindle DX seems to be on everybody’s wish list, the $500 ask is a major sticking point for Tweeters. Even with the economy showing signs of recovery (bottoming, crumbling at a slower rate, whatever) I wouldn’t be surprised to see retail DX sales struggle for some time.
That said, today’s announcment represents a huge moment for Amazon and another milestone in what looks to be a very bright future for e-readers.
The Kindle series is among the first consumer uses of a revolutionary display technology called ‘E-ink’. E-ink displays are more akin to digital watch style LCDs than the TV variety, featuring low-powered, uncolored displays that are reputed to be easy to read for long stretches in contrast to computer monitors.
The Kindle 2 succeeded the late 2007 original and Amazon says they used the time to improve the layout, increase the responsiveness, and improve the resolution. Until recently, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. TechCrunch reported recently that the Amazon has sold their 300,000th unit of the Kindle 2 in only 50 days post-release, making the series by far the best-selling of its type. Until earlier this month, the public’s verdict on the Kindle’s no-frills display could be summed up with the phrase: “Easy on the eyes.”
Then Wired.com published an article on April 13 titled, “Kindle 2’s Fuzzy Fonts Have Users Seeing Red.” Quoting a “user from the Pennsylvania”, the article asserts that the text-display algorithms of the Kindle 2 “Do not take into account the human psychology of perception.” Although the article spares a paragraph to quote Amazon’s side of the story – users like the display – it continues on to offers home-remedies in advance of the “easy fixes that Amazon can make.”
The widely-linked article certainly had an impact on the online conversation. The proportion of online conversation on the display characterizing it as ‘hard to read’ more than doubled in the following days – from 13% on 4-12 to more than 30% at its peak.
Author Priya Ganapati’s insinuation that the font display is a widely-perceived problem is somewhat curious given that she herself described the Kindle 2 as “easy on the eyes” in an earlier Wired article. Whatever the reason, the post’s impact has waned two weeks on, appearing to spare Amazon’s product from any lasting damage to its reputation. Still, when you’re slinging 6,000 units a day at $360 each, the effects of even a temporary shift in online conversation can be expensive. The lost revenue from even a 1% drop in sales for a fortnight is enough justificatino for an active social media monitoring and engagement program. Amazon, while by no means the kind of PR horror story we’ve delighted in this year, would do well to remember the occasionally high cost of the digital word.
Some advertisers, such as Pedigree, have embraced the multi-channel experience of today’s consumers coordinating campaigns across traditional and digital domains. But even for those that haven’t explicitly gone digital yet, many consumers are taking them there anyway. Thousands of viewers were already blogging and tweeting about the new flock of commercials before the Steelers finished their Dom Perignon. At Crimson Hexagon, we wanted to know who successfully made the leap from mainstream to digital buzz. A look at both beverages and foods shows that results were mixed.
Running with the Clydesdales
Online Buzz for Beverage Brands
Anheuser-Busch once again led the pack in buying eight spots (four for Bud and four for BudLight). Given its long history of Super Bowl advertising, it’s no wonder that the buzz for Bud actually started ahead of the game, and has risen to nearly eight times the pre-game level.
In the standing battle between Coke and Pepsi (each invested in three spots), Pepsi appears to have made the bigger splash. Pepsi more than doubled online buzz, bringing it even (and heading higher) than Coke, which has seen minimal lift over its already strong buzz presence.
But the real winner within the drinks category so far has been Sobe Life Water. In the first two days, Sobe’s one commercial (featuring cameos by NFL players dancing with lizards in a 3D variant on Swan Lake) netted them buzz roughly five times their pre-game level. As if NFL players in tutus weren’t enough, Sobe’s choice to make this ad 3D generated extra anticipatory buzz the entire week leading into the Super Bowl.
Running for the Border
Online Buzz for Food & Snack Brands
Now perhaps it was because Taco Bell ignored the rule about including animals, but I find it pretty surprising that their Speed Date commercial hasn’t noticeably moved the needle. Maybe the offline buzz simply moved too fast to be caught online… Or maybe Draft FCB will be rethinking its approach to digital this week.
In other junk food news… chips appear to be highly bloggable. Cheetos has seen five times more buzz than before the Super Bowl. But Doritos’ two commercials led the pack with a 10 times jump in online chatter. How’d they do it? Well, they tapped into both the traditional Power of Creative Crunch and the wisdom of their chip-eating crowd. Who could have predicted such success would come from actively engaging your customers?
Booth Review
All this leads to some tough questions for agencies and brand managers who participated in this year’s Super Ad Bowl. Brows are furrowed as they digest the results of their commercials and turn their eyes towards managing the ongoing campaigns.
For the majority of brands that saw a big boost in buzz, kudos are warranted. But now that consumers are talking, the questions become:
What are they talking about? (Was it “funny”, “same as last year”, or “better than Apple’s 1984 commercial”?)
Are the topics discussed consistent with our goals for the brand? (Are our brand attributes performing as expected? How’s our positive share of voice vs. our competitors?)
Who was talking and in which channels? (Was it bloggers, or were tweets flying around like paper airplanes in front of a substitute teacher?)
For those left in the dust, the question is “Where’s the buzz”? Perhaps their target audience somehow hasn’t heard about this whole social media thing yet (I give Frosted Flakes a little more leeway on this than Taco Bell). Or perhaps there’s only so much buzz a brand can take – had Coke already reached an optimal amount of ongoing buzz?
For the few standing on the sidelines, the question is whether it was worth saving the $3M per spot. Did you miss a chance to Steel the show?
I was lucky enough to escape yet another New England ice storm for a trip to #CES in Las Vegas. Jeff Pulver’s Social Media Jungle brought in interesting people from around the country, who in turn raised even more interesting questions about whys and hows of social media, including:
How to steer your own pirate ship, and when to interact with those that don’t “get it” (and what does that mean, anyway)? [Chris Brogan]
What are some different lenses for thinking about social media ROI? [Ben Grossman]
How can companies adjust when rules of brand control and traditional tactics no longer apply? [Susan Etlinger]
How can companies avoid common mistakes when starting out with social media? [David Berkowitz]
When people participate in online community, what are the “artifacts” left behind? [Robert Scoble]
The question about the artifacts really intrigued me – what are the traces we leave behind when participating online? On Twitter, if I delete someone from the list of people I follow, their conversations (if they are influential, and if they are connected to my other followees) will continue to break through.
These community artifacts feel like a meaningful, but comparatively hard to quantify, measure of influence. For example, on Twitter, people frequently retweet others’ messages, repeating and spreading valuable content. This type of rebroadcast can be quantified: Dan Zarrella created a terrific tool to track individual Twitter users’ levels of retweets.
But beyond the repetition, how do we measure the way influential people consistently introduce valuable ideas, topics, and memes? For example, if David Armano launches a charitable campaign for a victim of domestic violence, his page views and retweets are easy to capture. But how do we track the far-reaching effect of his content and measure the new ideas he’s responsible for germinating? This may well be an instance where “not everything that matters can be measured”.
Joel Spolsky writes an excellent post on anecdote, pointing out how compelling vignettes are often strung together and used to support conclusions. As a marketer I’m a big believer in the power of the story, but the oft-quoted “the plural of anecdote is not data” (long, indeterminate attribution here) definitely applies to brand and opinion monitoring. The most obvious problem is that anecdotes are not systematically selected; they’re selected as supporting points while other, conflicting anecdotes are inadvertently or deliberately ignored.
For those selling opinion monitoring into the large organizations, it’s a balancing act between providing the core, statistically valid analysis of the data, while “storytelling” with enough of the vivid anecdote for the client to hear the customer’s voice and engage. While opinion percentages are revelatory, an incident like Motrin Moms (summary from AdAge) tends to speed the adoption cycle dramatically.
BusinessWeek Online reports on a move by Google to make social network advertising more relevant by developing an InfluenceRank. This technology would help assess an individual socnet member’s level of influence over a group of peers — sort of a FICO score of your personal profile’s influence.
Joe Marchese at MediaPost’s Online Spin offers an interesting perspective: it’s clear you can’t directly correlate activity with influence, without risking overvaluing the influence of a follow-happy Florida car dealer who’s finagled more reciprocal Twitter relationships than Peter Kim. More importantly, what will marketers do with influence levels; will paying a higher CPM on a higher InfluenceRank personal profile actually achieve influence? This capability might end up a red herring; offering a quick-fix to marketers reluctant to dive deep into developing the social media capabilities that might drive longer term community value.
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I was lucky enough to escape yet another New England ice storm for a trip to #CES in Las Vegas. Jeff Pulver’s 
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