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.

The two weeks since the election have been filled with theories about what, precisely, fueled the Obama victory. Technophiles and social media gurus have been quick to connect the dots between the huge gap in the youth vote (Obama led McCain among the under thirty crowd by a 2-to-1 margin) and the Obama campaign’s extensive [...]

The estate of Martin Luther King, Jr. is pondering legal action regarding the sale of unlicensed King imagery in the commemorative items cropping up all over in the wake of Barack Obama’s victory. Whether this legal action strikes you as sensible image protection or overzealous profit-seeking, the real takeaway for me is the power of [...]

Last week, I attended the CMO Summit in San Francisco, and this week my colleague Cesar Brea and I presented at CMO Club in Boston. Our focus was a framework for engagement — defining “structured collaboration” as a sort of a brandprint for identifying and filtering
In both venues, questions arose about the changing role of [...]

We’ve often noticed that people tend toward extremes when assigning online product ratings. For Amazon products with an theoretically average (3 star) rating, more than 65% of all ratings lump into either the best or worst score – a ‘bimodal distribution’ in stats-speak. There are many potential reasons: a lack of clear criteria for different [...]

Election fever is everywhere. Online, you can feed your fixation with an endless stream of polls, pro bloggers, YouTube videos, or Twitter election updates. And whatever the result tomorrow, the punditry has only just begun.
Here at Crimson Hexagon we’ve been monitoring what blog RSS feeds are telling us about people’s perception of the candidates. We’ve [...]

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 [...]

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:

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 [...]

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 [...]