Archive for the ‘Insights’ Category

Blog, Co-Creation, Communities, Insights, SMinR, Trends

2012 Resolutions for MR Agencies

Date January 12 2012
Posted by Job
Tagged with

1. Learn how to tell better stories

We all know a good and engaging story when we hear it and our clients are no different! 2012 should be the year in which we take the art of MR storytelling seriously. Let’s ban the 100 slide reportage debrief and develop the skills of our teams to communicate findings in more engaging ways. Spend 10% more time on thinking about how we tell the story using imagery; video, graphics and customer voices will make a huge difference to the reputation of the MRX industry.

2. Ask less questions and listen more

As researchers we like asking questions. If we are totally honest, most of us think we know the answers before we run our surveys and are simply testing our hypotheses. Today, we live in the age of social media data – consumers globally are talking about every aspect of their lives 24/7. We no longer need to second guess and ask as many questions about what consumers think and feel with so much data available. We just need to develop the skills of our teams to listen and interpret more.

3. Stop using the word respondent

We have all done this. But is it not time to stop using this word to describe people who we work with in research projects. In 2012 we must encourage our teams to develop collaborative skills so that we can see consumers as people who we can co-create value with rather than as lab rats to carry out tests on.

4. Have more fun

The MRX industry has a pretty dull image and we need to ask ourselves why. A large part is because we need to try harder to be creative and have fun with our clients. We should be encouraging our teams to spend time experimenting, by piloting new ideas with clients. In a world where things are changing so fast, this is not only essential but fun.

5. Don’t just embrace change – drive change

Above all in 2012 I think there should be an acceptance amongst researchers that the pace of change we are seeing in technology is just going to speed up and that the old certainties of Quant and Qual research are over. It is only then that we can help shape the skills of our teams to adapt to the challenges of a world where so much data is available and where consumers expect to collaborate with brands.

Blog, Co-Creation, Communities, Insights, Social Media

2012 through the lens of client needs

Date January 11 2012
Posted by Andrew
Tagged with

Technology is changing faster than consumers. Consumers are changing faster than organizations. Therefore, organizations need to change faster if they are to keep up. Many are finding this difficult to achieve.

A recent IBM Global CEO Study that covers 1,130 CEOs across 45 countries and 32 industries showed that organizations not only felt bombarded by change but many are struggling to deal with it. 8 out of 10 CEOs saw significant change ahead and yet the gap between the expected level of change and the ability to manage it had almost tripled since the previous study in 2006.

There are many different manifestations of this change (too many to cover here) from faster product life cycles and globalization (the shift of budgets to emerging markets), to changing demographics and the challenge of ageing populations on Western economies. But one of the biggest is the impact of the social web on everything we do. EMarketer predicts that the tipping point will happen in 2012 when 60% of all marketing budgets will become social. Linked to this is the arrival of Big Data. In 2010 the human race created 800 exabytes of information. To put this into context between the dawn of civilisation and 2003 we only created 5 exabytes; now we’re creating that amount every two days. By 2020 that figure is predicted to sit at 53 zettabytes (53 trillion gigabytes) – an increase of 50 times. As Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist said “We used to be data poor, now the problem is data obesity”.

This presents us with a number of new challenges that I have set out below as hardening client needs. I have concentrated on just a few with some suggestions on what research companies need to do to make sure they’re in a position to meet them.

1. Moving from Big Data to Big Insight

Making sense of all the data out there and simplifying it so that we can derive valuable meaning and insight will be one of 2012′s client mantras. Social listening will give way to social media insight. Having researchers in your team that are also technologists e.g. digital anthropologists that can help to analyse real time social data will become a required skill. Being able to augment different data sets from the virtual and real worlds so that we can help to create one closer view of our customer will depend on our ability to mix different on-line and offline methodologies in a coherent and credible way.

2. Quality without speed is not enough

One of the greatest demands from clients is how to deliver fresh, robust and relevant insight more quickly and cost effectively than we have ever done (or needed to do) before. Qualitative research companies need to lead in the use of technology so that we can become quicker, faster and more responsive in the ways in which we gather insight about our clients’ consumers. We also need to develop research and planning tools that are less generic and more focused on the CMI client needs of today and tomorrow. This does not mean replacing human analysis – to the contrary the role of the researcher has become even more important than before because of the need to find real quality from the huge quantities of data that is out there. It must also mean we can do better than relying on tools such as the TGI Index.

3. Logic needs to give way to more magic

We are going to see more emphasis on qualitative research as a robust exploratory tool to understand better consumers’ emotional drivers as well as to help improve the quality and shaping of social ideas and social content before things go too far and way before the quantitative testing stage. Too much blind reliance on testing things to death has seen some of the “magic” and “creativity” in marketing lose out to the “logic”. Creating magic today means creating social brand stories that are contagious and can be propagated effortlessly by key consumer cohorts. Co-creating with these consumers, involving them much earlier in the marketing process, leveraging their content and creativity as part of the marketing process will have an increasingly important role to play here. If what goes in is rubbish then testing what comes out will be rubbish. The Coca-Cola Company is leading the way and I am sure other FMCG clients will follow.

4. Creating content excellence

There is a new marketing ecosystem where content is more important than channel, where audience passions/interests are becoming more important than demographics and where the media model has changed – placing more emphasis on created and earned media as opposed to bought and owned. Understanding which “big ideas” have enough social currency (it’s not what consumers are doing with your brand but what they are doing with each other that counts) and can work effectively across all platforms will attract much more focus. Understanding the different consumer cohorts within a brand audience and their influence will also be key to understanding what content areas will have the most impact when it comes to propagating ideas. Researchers need to come up with a new model here: one based on rational, emotional and social metrics that is continuous and adaptive.

5. New measurement models

With the increasing socialisation of brands and the importance “connected” brands are placing on new metrics such as social brand value and influence (see below), helping clients to understand, validate and measure what ideas work best in the earned and created media space as well as why it works will be increasingly important. Finding ways of proving that the more customers of a brand are interconnected the more they are willing to pay for the product and the more loyal they will be is vital. Working out a more real time model for measuring which big ideas have the best potential for success; are the most likely to be propagated and can work across all media is another area that needs close attention.

Understanding influence in social media

View more presentations from Face

Blog, Insights, Interesting Stuff

Data driven insight, decisions and actions

Date December 08 2011
Posted by Andrew
Tagged with

I attended WARC’s Datacentric Conference last week where Fran D’Orazio was presenting with O2 on Mining Big Social Data In Real Time. The overriding central theme of the day was how to move from being data driven to becoming more data decision and data action orientated. Some of the key points are worth summarising here.

1. Measure people, not channels

Dan Hagan, Head of Planning at Carat, talked about the importance of getting closer to individuals and measuring people rather than channels to help “Manage data to gain insights into brand strategy”. One of the new ways to achieve this was to use agent-based modeling that required the creation of fake digital personas with basic rules & behaviours. These digital robots, if used in large numbers, provide rich qualitative data on potential customer profiles in a social context. The model allows researchers to compare the fake ecosystem with real life.

2. Doing it right versus doing the right “it”

The real power of insight does not come from measuring every piece of data but understanding the most important pieces of information to drive action. Gavin Meggs, Sky IQ’s Strategic Insight Director talked about moving from Big Data to Big Insight. His advice was simple:

- Understanding what’s possible is about understanding the customer attributes and behaviours; interactions at each touch point, attitudes and preferences, getting a single customer view and having a memory

- Put the customer at the centre of your organization not just at the centre of your model

- Optimization of Data sources and the importance of data matching

- Connecting insight to business objectives so one can prioritize what’s important

- Scope – the problem of size. The cost of doing too much can sometimes be more than doing too little

3. Social Attribution Modelling- combining social data, with on-line and off-line models

One of the Conference inspirations came from Louisa Middleton at Google in her presentation “On-line data analytics: From the Customer decision to the bigger picture”. Here was the opportunity to combine social data with click stream data and off-line methodologies to deliver a new attribution model – one that can help put the customer purchasing journey in a social and brand context.

4. Separate data planning from data execution

In terms of making data part of every conversation, Lee Feinberg from Nokia argued that it is important to separate data planning from the execution with his DRAW ON approach. This was essential to help companies move from being data driven to decision driven.

Planning Phase

· Decisions you need to consider – make sure that you cover all of them at the outset

· Results that drive the decision – write them down but also sketch them out as visualizations as this helps to get key points across

· Analysis of achieving the results. Build a list of all of the questions that might be asked about the key measures so you can make sure you have all the data available to answer them

· What else to complete the analysis. Bring information from outside into the conversation

Execution Phase

· Make important information Obvious – otherwise can camouflage data

· Neatness counts

Blog, Brand Graph, Conferences, Insights, Meet Us At, Planning, Pulsar, SMinR, Social Media, The Future

Mapping the Brand Graph: a study of the O2 audience on Twitter (FACE and O2 @ Warc #Datacentric 2011, London)

Date December 06 2011
Posted by Francesco
Tagged with

Back in March we presented at WARC’s Online Research Now & Next Conference, introducing what we then called Augmented Research.

The idea is simple: powering traditional qualitative and quantitative research with real-time data.

When we were invited to speak at Warc’s Datacentric Conference, we thought it would be interesting to discuss one of the latest research pilots we have been running in the area of augmented research.

The objective of the O2 Brand Graph pilot was to mine social media data in a way that would allow us to connect it to audience studies.

What follows is an initial exploration of how we can you use social media to augment a segmentation model with real-time data.

***

Many companies are learning to listen to conversations related to their brands and competitors.

However, there’s more to social media intelligence than tracking conversations by keywords.

Current social media research focuses on opinion mining and declares itself unable to map audiences. But I think we are giving up too soon.

This inability appears to be born from an assumption in the research industry that you can’t use social media to map audiences because you don’t have access to demographics.

Far from being reality, this assumption is mostly due to three reasons:

The architects of social media mining platforms are often not led by a research agenda, but by a tech agenda – this leads to a tendency to productise and mass sell platforms, which can run in counterpoint to an openness to experimentation;
Researchers are often not makers or technologists – therefore, they are often lazily happy with what they are given in terms of tools;
Researchers do not always know what can be done with existing social media data streams, such as basic machine learning to figure out gender and age groups.

However, mapping audiences through social media IS possible. It’s just not in the way we used to research audiences before.

It’s all in the way you screen your audience and sample it, and in social media sampling via demographics doesn’t work. But there are many other ways of defining and screening an audience. In this study we explored one way.

Instead of tracking contents by keywords (“horizontal” tracking – any content mentioning specific keywords and keyphrases), we looked into mining social media contents and behaviours by audiences (“vertical” tracking – any content generated from a set of sources, regardless of the features of the content).

Whilst tracking social media by keywords allows us to get an understanding of how a specific topic is discussed online, tracking social media by users allows us to build a map of an audience, its hubs, its behaviours and its interests.

We called it the Brand Graph: the conjunction of the Social Graph (defined here as the network of people who are within 2 degrees of separation from the brand through social media channels) and the Interest Graph (the network of interests, topics, activities and behaviours associated with the nodes of the social graph).

***

What can you do with it?

Dynamically understand who your audience is and how is it changing, in real-time;
Dynamically understand what your audience is about, what makes an interesting topic and how broader cultural conversations affect it;
Segment your audience in clusters based on topics of interest, passions, life stages, professions, online behaviours etc.;
Plan and fine tune the content of your social media strategy;
Engage with your audience in the right way (channels, mechanics, times of the day, tone of voice etc.);
Assess the impact of your strategies in real-time.

Going forward, we see the brand graph becoming one of the key tools to build a seamless connection between your brand and its audience, networking it with its passions and synching it with its behaviours to maximize relevance and impact.

***

So, how did we go about building the O2 Brand Graph?

First of all we had to identify a specific pool of social media users and then analyse their public activity.

For the purpose of this pilot we limited the online audience to one channel – Twitter. We focussed on Twitter because of the granularity of the data publicly available around contents and behaviours.

Sample: We defined our sample as the entire audience of O2 on Twitter, i.e. 58.339+ Twitter users who were following @O2 (as of November 2011).

Methodologies: Statistical analysis, Semantic analysis, Network analysis, Netnography and Content analysis.

By looking at the profiles and the activity of this audience we were able to map the O2 Brand Graph on Twitter.

***

We grouped the findings in three areas:

Mapping the Social Graph

We wanted to identify sub-communities within the O2 audience on Twitter.

Because Twitter is an interest graph, we assumed that following someone implied sharing the interest of the followed user.

Therefore, a subcommunity would be identified by a high concentration of horizontal connections within the graph.

To get this information we had to map:

58,339 users following @O2;
Who was following each of the 58.339 users;
Who else in the graph any of the users was following other than O2 or the primary O2 follower.

For the sake of this exercise we looked at a sample of 1000 users. We then selected the top users with less than 2000 followers. We then mapped their connection to O2. And finally mapped who was following them.

Finally we mapped how the primary and secondary followers were connected to each other user in the graph.

We ended up plotting a graph of 1 million nodes, 1 million primary connections and 574,278 horizontal connections within the graph.

The blue links represent how primary and secondary followers are connected to each other within the graph.

By looking at the density of the connections we could identify hubs within the audience and points of high concentration of similar interests.

Once we knew where the hubs were we than isolated then and looked into the clusters.

We spotted 10 clusters and profiled them, identifying sub communities around topics such as fashion, music, rugby, technology and marketing.

Mining the interest graph / profiles and behaviours

We then analysed the static data of 58,339 profiles on Twitter gathering insights around 10 key dimensions:

- Who are they (life stage, profession, passions that define them etc.)?

- When did they join Twitter?

- Where are they based?

- Where do they tweet from?

- How often do they Tweet?

- When do they Tweet during the day?

- How many people are following them?

- How many people are they following?

- How often are they engaging in conversation with fellow users?

- How influential are they?

Mining the interest graph / interests and passions.

Finally, we analysed 3,120,371 public tweets, 122,220 tweets/day (avg), generated by the @O2 followers over one month (November 2011).

Based on this corpus we were able to gather real-time insights around a series of questions such as:

- What does the audience talk about?

- How and why do the topics change over time?

- Which contents are the most engaging (i.e. generate the highest number of reactions)?

- Which contents get shared the most?

- Which social media channels are the most popular amongst the audience?

- Which news sites are referred to more often?

- Which brands and products do they talk about?

- Which adverts do they mention?

- What movies are they into?

- Where does the brand fit in this landscape?

- How do they talk about the brand’s main competitors?

All this information is constantly updated to the second and can be sliced according to any timeframe, audience segment, audience location and basically any dimension of the audience profile or of the audience social graph.

***

Mapping the Brand Graph: a study of the O2 audience on Twitter

View more presentations from Face.

The deck above outlines some of the initial data gathered and the insights uncovered. But as you can imagine this is only a glimpse of what we could learn with this kind of study. An example? Slice the topics of conversation of your audience by time of the day and you will know who would you be talking to and what you should be talking about at what time of the day.

As the last image in the deck – “The Measurers” – alludes to, with social media data we are at the very beginning of a new era of audience understanding powered by a new science of measurement.

Pilots like the Brand Graph are initial attempts at defining the boundaries of what can be measured, what could and SHOULD be measured and what we can learn from it to do a better job.

Feedback and questions welcome, belligerent challenges even more so.

Blog, Insights, Pulsar, Social Media

A is for Android: Tech and Kids in the Back to School Market

Date October 06 2011
Posted by Kate
Tagged with

When did you get your first computer? I think I got mine when I was in middle school, and that was considered early. Most of my friends started getting one in their rooms in high school. They were not laptops, either, but old-fashioned desktops with towers. Compare that with the current trends. Computers are getting purchased for younger and younger children. According to this MSNBC article proclaiming mobile tech is in for kids going back to school, you may need to get your elementary school grader a new Droid Sonic!

In honor of the back-to-school season, we set up a Pulsar search for mentions of technologybrands looking for how people talk about tech in terms of kids and school. We wanted to see how this trend of youngsters with cool tech is perceived. Turns out there are two answers to this question: the physical technology that people think is weird in the hands of kids and the applications and program technology that can help us raise and teach our children better. And these two answers are dominated by two different brands: Apple and Android.

Children with Technology Is Ridiculous!

One of the first things we found was that people like to joke about children and technology, usually at the parents’ expense. Below you can see a graph of Retweets over time. The two spikes were caused by the jokes in quotes above them. These comments were passed along 50 times each, a pretty good shelf-life for a joke. People find the idea of children and this technology, particularly Apple technology, humorous.

Part of this may be the assumption that children with technology are rich. Several comments referred to how expensive these products are. There was even a small viral protest on Facebook about how spoilt modern children are. The protest called for people to repost varieties of this message to their own Facebook walls if they agreed with it: “When I was a kid, I didn’t have a laptop, iPod, Blackberry, PS3 or iPad. I played outside with friends, bruised my knees, made up adventurous fantasies and played hide and seek. I ate what my mom made and Jollibee was a treat. I would think twice before I said “no” to my parents. Life wasn’t hard, it was great and I survived. Kids these days are spoiled. Kids these days lost something – Appreciation. Re-post this if you appreciate the way you were raised. I think we were happier kids ”

Society just thinks that these high tech gizmos should not be juxtaposed with children. When people view a child with an Apple iPad, for example, the tendency is to either make a joke about it or deride it. It’s just that ridiculous.

But Applications Where It’s At

Phones were only mentioned a little over 5,000 times in this search and laptops and tablets were only mentioned a little over 8,000 times. Meanwhile, applications were mentioned over 9,000 times.

Applications sure have got people talking.

And they are talking in a good way. Many of the applications mentioned in the context of this search either factored in to children’s education or security. Examples include applications to help parents track their children or that allow children to mimic their parents’ driving. Of course school-focused applications are also available in abundance for the tech-savy student. I like this interactive periodic table for the iPad.

The difference between the discussion about applications and the general discussion covered in this study is where the discussion is occurring: news. Blogs and news were the leading channels in our general search, but only for applications did news surpass blogs.

And these mentions were on tech news sites, more so than in the general search which was dominated by local news. Technology news sites cover the up and coming, which includes apps. A quick search on Mashable.com showed 12,900 hits for “phones” while there were 17,700 hits for “applications.” Most people don’t go to their local news station for the latest technology happenings. They do turn to Mashable. Could the market be moving away from the technology itself and more towards what we can accomplish with it?

Apple Dances Center Stage with Android in the Wings

I’ve already hinted at this in this blog post, but yes, Apple reigns supreme. Apple has been involved with the education industry for a long time now. I will date myself by remembering when my school got the large and colorful iMac computers for our computer lab. This link with education has remained.

Or could it possibly be that Apple products are really cool and everyone seems to want one? Apple and Apple products were mentioned over 16,000 times in the search results, indicating how strong the brand image is. But we knew that.

What’s more interesting is that not only are Apple products fun to talk about, they are also considered necessary. Almost 400 mentions, out of a total of 600, of “necessary” and “must” and purchasing words mentioned Apple products. It is apparent that Apple products are more than just fun. They carry more weight than that. No other brand in our search had such a high level of need associated with it. Even generic items, such as “laptops” and “phones” only received around half the mentions of the Apple brand products.

And yet, when it comes to applications, Android is more prevalent, particularly in news discussions. Android was the only other brand besides Apple mentioned in any considerable volume, though considerably less than Apple with only around 2,500 mentions. Android was mentioned most frequently in the news, unlike Apple for which blogs were the leading channel. Considering that applications are apparently the current direction everything is going towards, Android seems to be well positioned.

Could attention be shifting from Apple products to Android applications? We’ll have to wait and see. Meanwhile, it is clear that Apple is benefiting from the back-to-school season.

Do Your Children Have iPhones?

What do you think? Do children need technology in order to benefit from their educations, or is it just something for rich parents to buy for their kids? Is it useful or hazardous? General opinion seems to lean towards it being unnecessary, though news and bloggers tend to think it useful. People certainly like talking about it.