Conversations between consumers build brands, but can also break brands. Up until now however, we had no tool to monitor these conversations, to measure their impact and to pull vital strategic insights out of them. Boondoggle and Insites Consulting partnered to build such a tool.
Starting point was the Conversation Mapping Research, in which we tracked both offline and online conversations for the media, gaming, soda, telecom, cars, small multimedia equipment category, during two weeks with 1000 consumers. In terms of methodology, an online diary method was used.
The press release will give you ample details about the results of the Conversation Mapping Research , but here is already a small grasp :
every week, there are about 25 million conversations on brands
people talk about every brand, and everybody talks about brands
these conversations are not without impact : about 1 out of three conversations brings about a change of opinion on a brand
conversations about the brand and the product or service tend to have much more impact than conversations about the advertising
the impact of a conversation is much higher if the conversation was triggered by a question
superinfluencers exist, but anybody con contribute to this word-of-mouth. Brands telling a engaging story and providing the right tools, are able to engage influencers, spreaders and receivers. Volkswagen succeeded with its UK campaign for Golf in creating a new aspirational territory for Golf, and an engaging experience for influencers, spreaders and receivers. Cadbury handed with its gorilla commercial to everyone a story of highly entertaining value, creating massive views and a significant increase in marketshare.
conversations can be categorized into 4 productcategories : bashing, barking, serenade and bonding.
brands out of the same product category tend to be in the same conversation category.
brands can design conversations and even more important design the answers
The result of the Conversation Mapping Research is a research tool which brands can use to track and gain insight into the conversations happening on their brand. Read more about all this in the press release. And get a chance to win one of our five Conversation Mapping Workshops for your brand on conversationmapping.eu
As strategic planners we love these kinds of info graphics . Not only because they look sexy but also because they often simplify things that already live inside our heads but are blurred by information overload or no time to put things into perspective.
These graphs really offer you a kind of framework for how people interact with their mobile phones. What this graph really makes clear is that context is extremely important if you’re working with your mobile phone. Your phone is a kind of hybrid device that should act differently depending on in which situation the user is. Extremely interesting study terrain.
For mobile computing, context is everything. Freed from the relative homogeneity of the desk-bound personal computer, mobile interactions are deeply situated in customers' everyday lives. In order to design for successful mobile interactions, we must understand the overlapping spheres of context in which they take place. To that end, we have constructed a context model for mobile interaction design (See Figure 1).
Mobile devices accompany their users throughout much if not all of the day. Unlike stationary work or home computers, or even laptops that are taken to specific places such as meetings and airports, mobile phones are with us in all the indoor and outdoor environments we travel. Device usage is shaped by existing cultural norms and by the many activities we are engaged in simultaneously. Usage goals fluctuate as vastly as attention levels, and the number of mobile device tasks continues to grow.
Here's a litte something I made for Adobe Air! While working on a Flash project, I often need a testing video until the final TV-spot is available. This application lets you download a video from YouTube by its video ID. It does just that, nothing more & nothing less :)
What you need to to install the YouTube downloader: 1. Install Adobe Air. You only need to do this once. 2. Install the application : FLVdownloader
FlashMinesweeper:MP is an excellent idea : take an old and established game (I mean, who hasn't killed some work time sweeping mines ?) and add a new, social media twist to it by making it multiplayer. It's also a very interesting experiment : Minesweeper is essentially a single player game, relying heavily on analytical and strategic skills. In the multiplayer version, the player needs to trust his coplayers to finish the increasingly difficult levels. They have to work together by chatting over next moves and strategies, talking about risks and dividing the playing field.
Even though the platform that it's built on awards registration with extra functionalities, the game is more or less anonymous. You can go ahead and spoil as many games as you want, unpunished. However, after half an hour of playing, I noticed that most of the participants actually want the game to be good.
I guess you could make a hyperbolic extrapolation here, that this at least minutely instills some faith in humanity. But you can also just enjoy the game and leave it at that.
Found this interesting Slate article in my inbox upon my return from holiday. An illustrated tour through Donald Gunn's "12 master formats of advertising".
You might think the new advertising landscape—with viral videos and branded Webisodes—would render Donald Gunn's theory obsolete. But in fact, I find the theory still holds strong. The famous BMW films series was just associated user imagery, with some demo elements tossed in. Burger King's "Subservient Chicken"? A symbol of the product's benefit: Your chicken sandwich is made to order, however you like it.
Columbia University sociology professor Duncan Watts profiled himself as a non-believer of viral communication earlier this year with an article in the Harvard Business Review. His paper got finally picked up by Advertising Age last week, read it here.
Watts' research questioned the effectivity of so-called two-tiered (or trickle down) communication strategies, where a campaign to a small group of influencers spreads to a wider audience in a second stage. Watts found out that with every consecutive step the initial message waters down to virtually nil. The solution he suggests is to spread the initial message to a large group of easily persuadable people to reach a critical mass that in its turn will cause a "trickle up"-effect.
Satish of Naked NYC comes up with a different solution : where he doesn't start from "the message" but from different "message units" that are spread at random throughout a given group of influentials, counting on the effect that these influentials will feed from each other. He gives the rapid rise of Firefox as an example where different bits of information quickly built momentum within a large group of influentials, leading them even into co-creating the browser up to its current state.
So does viral marketing work? I think it comes down to your definition of communication. For a very long time viral marketing has been sold as the alternative for traditional marketing. Both definitions however start from the same communication paradigm, being that a brand beams out messages to people (whether they're influential or not). If you're a follower of this paradigm I think viral marketing is just an excuse "to do something without having the budget" and that Duncan Watts conclusions hold true.
If however, like us, you believe that communication is more than top-down messaging, every piece of communication becomes viral. This means that you should never consider your target audience as a passive receiver but as an active participant. The traditional view on viral marketing recommends the use of shocking or absurd humour but there is so much more ; for example by adding a utility factor, by being culturally relevant or by plainly creating a context that stimulates discussion among consumers.
While browsing the web in search of killer applications in the field of online competence development, I came across a whole bunch of sites and blogs about knowledge management, social networking and technology. Two of them I found particularly interesting.
The first blog by Erik Duval, a professor in the research unit on hypermedia and databases at the computer science department of the "Katholieke Universiteit Leuven". If you are interested in knowing what the academic world is doing in the field of learning and education, this is worth a click.. plenty of slide shows and interesting reflexions.
The second blog is from Tommi Ryyppö. Tommi is VP business development at Dicole, a company that provides social software and consultation for organizations adopting digital knowledge working
environments.
In his master thesis (link to pdf) I found an interesting comparison of blogs, wikis and discussion forums.
In discussions with clients there is often the question "Do I need a blog or a forum?" This comparison might be a nice first help.
