Posts filed under 'sharing'
Is Your Facebook Personality Genuine?
Sean Kilpatrick/Associated Press
Defining yourself on Facebook.
Anyone who has ever spent time on a dating Web site like Match.com knows that the online profile often doesn’t match the person in real life.
So when University of Texas researchers began studying Facebook friends, they expected that users also would exaggerate accomplishments and offer an enhanced version of themselves. To their surprise, they discovered that Facebook profiles typically gave an accurate and realistic impression of the user’s real-life personality.
The scientists, led by a psychology professor, Sam Gosling, collected 236 profiles of young adults on Facebook as well as a similar social networking site in Germany. The researchers used personality questionnaires and interviewed friends to determine the profile owners’ actual personalities, assessing traits like extroversion, agreeableness, openness, neuroticism and conscientiousness. The survey also measured how they wished to be, assessing their ideal personality traits. Using the same rating system, the researchers also assessed each user’s personality based on the information provided in the online profile.
The researchers expected the Facebook profiles to match an idealized version of the user’s personality. But to their surprise, the online Facebook profile matched the real-world personality test.
Dr. Gosling said the findings suggested that online social networks could provide users with an opportunity for genuine social interactions.
“Is Facebook an opportunity to promote ourselves, a P.R. exercise? Or is it just another medium of social communication, like the telephone?” Dr. Gosling said. “This research suggests the latter. Young adults are using it as a way to communicate and leaving lots of clues about what they’re really like.”
The Facebook pages were particularly well suited for identifying extroverts. The personality assessment based on the online profile was least accurate for identifying traits of neuroticism, common in those who are anxious, uptight or worry a lot. Dr. Gosling said that finding was consistent with other studies showing that neuroticism was difficult to identify without a face-to-face encounter.
“This online social world is an important environment,” Dr. Gosling said. “If you look at the time people spend on it and the hours people devote to it, it’s not just a fad. It’s meeting some important social needs.”
Add comment December 4, 2009
Does Technology Reduce Social Isolation?
Hundreds of daily updates come from friends on Facebook and Twitter, but do people actually feel closer to each other?
It turns out the size of the average American’s social circle is smaller today than 20 years ago, as measured by the number of self-reported confidants in a person’s life. Yet contrary to popular opinion, use of cellphones and the Internet is not to blame, according to a new study released Wednesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
In fact, people who regularly use digital technologies are more social than the average American and more likely to visit parks and cafes, or volunteer for local organizations, according to the study, which was based on telephone interviews with a national sample of 2,512 adults living in the continental United States.
The study found some less-than-social behavior, however. People who use social networks like Facebook or Linkedin are 30 percent less likely to know their neighbors and 26 percent less likely to provide them companionship.
Pew asked questions that would get at the heart of the link between social isolation in America and use of digital technologies, with an eye toward debunking earlier thinking that suggested technology caused people to hole up in their pajamas or lose some friendships.
Two years ago, a General Social Survey hypothesized that the average American was feeling more socially isolated because of the rise of the Internet and cellphones. That study found that from 1985 to 2004, the number of intimate friendships people reported dropped from three to two.
The Pew report confirmed those findings. But it also deflated other data in the previous study that indicated the number of people saying they had no one to confide in had nearly tripled from 1985 to 2004. Pew reported that only 6 percent of the American population fell into that category of isolation — with no significant change over the last 25 years.
The circle of close friends for mobile phone users tends to be 12 percent larger than for nonusers. People who share online photos or instant messages have 9 percent larger social circles than nonusers.
Pew also confirmed that Americans’ social networks were becoming less diverse, defined as relationships with people from different backgrounds. But on average, the social circles of cellphone and instant-message users were more diverse than those of nonusers.
“We identified Internet use, and especially using social networks, contributes to having more diverse social networks,” said Keith Hampton, lead researcher for the report and an assistant professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
The study also found that people still prefer face-to-face communication as the primary means to stay in touch with friends and family (people see loved ones in person an average of 210 days a year). Respondents said that they were in touch via mobile phone an average of 195 days a year.
Add comment November 12, 2009
The Last Campaign: How Experiences Are Becoming the New Advertising
Red Bull, Virgin America, Uniqlo and Mattel Lead the Way
By Garrick Schmitt
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Is advertising dying? It’s certainly fashionable to say so. Conventional wisdom holds that traditional media’s grip on consumers continues to slip as they increasingly turn to the internet and their peers for entertainment and purchasing recommendations.
In fact, any planner worth his or her salt can reel off a stream of statistics pointing to advertising’s demise — or lack of effectiveness, at least: Prime-time continues to erode as all the major networks saw significant declines for last year’s season; 77% of U.S. consumers trust businesses less than they did a year ago; consumers trust their peers’ opinions online more than any other source and a whopping 83% of Mad Men’s supposedly ad-friendly time-shifted audience fast forwards through commercials according to Tivo. The list goes on and on.
But perhaps it’s not that advertising is failing but that brand experiences (both on and offline) are really what are capturing the imagination of today’s consumer. In FEED, a new report that I authored with my colleagues at Razorfish, we found that digital brand experiences are having an inordinate sway on consumer purchasing habits and brand affinity.
For example, 65% of U.S. consumers report a digital experience changing their perception about a brand (either positively or negatively) and 97% of that group report that the same experience ultimately influenced whether or not they went on to purchase a product from that brand. In a nutshell, experience matters. A lot.
Of course, brands that were “born digital” intuitively know this. Google and Amazon are pioneering experiential brands. That’s why Amazon continues to pour money into improving its customer service rather than run traditional advertising or marketing campaigns. As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said, “We are not great advertisers. So we start with customers, figure out what they want, and figure out how to get it to them.” Zappos (which recently hired Mullen) built its brand the same way, as has Facebook.
But what about more traditionally-minded marketers who weren’t born digital? Can they succeed in an experience-driven world? The answer is “yes” and here are some of the best:
Red Bull: Red Bull basically pioneered the experiential category. Not only did the brand rise to prominence by sponsoring alternative athletes and lifestyles, it went further by creating its own events, like Red Bull’s Flugtag and even its own sports like Red Bull’s Crashed Ice, which takes over old Quebec with a mix of hockey and motorcross. Even the brand’s website has morphed into a blog, much like today’s most popular publishers.
Camper: Most of us in the U.S. think of Camper as purely a comfortable yet stylish shoe brand. But the Spanish company is much more and pursues a brand ethos that’s both traditional, cultural and fashion forward simultaneously. Proof: Casa Camper, stylish (but laid back) hotels in Barcelona and Berlin that embodies the brand’s essence. Ditto for Camper Together which taps up and coming artists to create one-of-a-kind boutiques.
Guinness: Guinness may be 250 years old, but it’s acting like a much, much younger marketer. The company has embraced experiential branding both literally and figuratively with its “It’s Alive Inside” positioning. For its anniversary, Guinness offered up Remarkable Experiences, including a trip into space. It also released a pub-finder iPhone application with a social media twist. More impressively, the brand created the Guinness Storehouse, a seven-story building that functions as both museum and pub, that has now become one of Ireland’s top tourist attractions. And, more recently, Guinness even wired up its rugby team with RFID tags (including balls and players) to capture a whole range of statistics about how fast, powerfully and effectively the game is played.
UNIQLO: Few companies have so used digital like Uniqlo to both build a brand and breakthrough to new consumers — and on a truly global scale.The Japanese retailer surprises and delights consumers at every turn, whether through innovative iPhone applications, calendars, e-commerce, stylebooks and microsites. Uniqlo’s experiential efforts not only express the brand, but reach new consumers who may live thousands of miles away from the nearest retail location.
Virgin America: Virgin America has gone further than most, ensuring that the experience is the marketing — and advertising in many cases. The brand targeted tech-savvy consumers early on with its Red system entertainment console and in-flight WiFi. It showed off its dramatic interiors in promotions with Diggnation and YouTube celebrities; became an early adopter of Twitter for customer service; and reinforced its brand values through its simple booking engine on VirginAmerica.com. And now, for the holidays, Virgin America is partnering with Google to offer free WiFi for travelers.
Nike: Nike, of course, has been moving in this experiential direction for a few years. ‘We’re not in the business of keeping the media companies alive,” Nike’s Trevor Edwards told the New York Times in 2007. ”We’re in the business of connecting with consumers.” And so they have. The company continually earns kudos for consumer experience breakthroughs like Nike+, its online running community; the Human Race, a global running event; and more recently the Livestrong Chalkbot which enabled users to submit a text message that would be painted (digitally) on the route of the Tour de France.
Experiences, it would seem, are the new advertising. Experiences reach and engage customers in new and more meaningful ways, they promote “trial” over simply messaging and — quite frankly — experiences are much more suited to our digital era when everything is just a click away. Our challenge now, as marketers, is to make sure that our products and brands can actually live up to the experiences that we advertise.
Add comment November 10, 2009
Purdue University Adds Twitter and Facebook to Class Participation
By Barb Dybwad
Students at Purdue University are experimenting with a new application developed at the school called Hotseat that integrates Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging to help students “backchannel” during class.
People who have attended technology conferences in the past several years are already familiar with this phenomenon, where social media is leveraged to allow the participants in a session or panel to comment and exchange questions and ideas in real-time. At Purdue, Hotseat is used to allow students to comment on the class as it proceeds, with everyone in the class including the professor able to see the messaging as it happens.
The Hotseat software allows students to use either Facebook, Twitter, Myspace (
), or SMS to post messages during classes, or they can simply log in to the web site to post to and view the ongoing backchannel. Right now it’s only being pilot tested in two courses, but has already become a fast favorite for both teachers and students. Professor Sugato Chakravarty, whose personal finance course is one of the pilot tests, said, “I’m seeing students interact more with the course and ask relevant questions.”
And although it’s been optional for students to participate, so far 73% of the 600 or so in the pilot classes have used the software. We’ve seen Twitter become mandatory for journalism students at Australia’s Griffith University to some negative reaction, but this is a less structured implementation which may perhaps account for its more favorable reception.
As Chakravarty goes on to note, though, the application is called “Hotseat” for a reason — and professors will have to be resilient enough to take any potential criticism or even corrections from students in real-time. Nevertheless, he cites it as a “valuable tool for enhancing learning. The students are engaged in the discussions and, for the most part, they are asking relevant questions.”
Check out a video introduction to the Hotseat application below, and let us know what you think. Does social media have a natural place in the classroom? What role should Facebook (
) and Twitter (
) play in education?
Add comment November 4, 2009
How I Got My Interaction On
At Razorfish we used to say: “Everything that can be digital, will be!” We built a Web site for Charles Schwab that could execute stock transactions faster and better than your broker–and unlike selling physical widgets, adding customers didn’t cost Schwab anything! We predicted that digital technology would do almost anything faster, cheaper and better–an unbeatable combination–especially if “better” meant the user experience is better.
Bill Moggridge is attributed with coining the name “interaction design,” because, as he says, “designers of digital technology products no longer regard their job as designing a physical object–beautiful or utilitarian–but as designing our interactions with it.” Interaction design is also a lot nicer than what the engineers call it: “computer human interface.”
Digital technology makes inanimate things smarter and more intelligent when it’s interactive. Instead of only watching and embedding interactive media, the audience becomes an active player in its own experience. Video games are more compelling than plain passive movies–and are becoming a bigger industry! The NPA group reported that in September 2009 video-game hardware and software sales were almost $1.3 billion.
There are at least three levels of interactivity: 1) reactive, 2) interactive, and 3) co-active. Reactive is where the content reacts to the user–like those video projects in the subway that ripple when you walk by. It’s a simple level of two-way communication. Interactive refers to a more complex relationship with more subtle tracking and programming. Co-active is where the user becomes one of the authors, as in interactions among organisms within a biological community. Flash mobs and open source programming are interesting examples, but the ultimate is where the technology is invisible.
We want to bring the qualities of digital technology into our real life experience to make the real world better. The ideal is when the digital software and hardware become seamless components of the broader multimedia experience, using various kinds of sensors and programming blur the boundary between the real and the virtual into a new “realer” world. Working on an architectural scale, the edge is easier to disguise.
When we are successful the products act like our friends or pets and we have wondrous adventures in places that help us live better lives. But the ultimate is co-active experience, the kind that jumps out of the screen and runs across the room and plays with us in the street.
Read Tucker Viemeister’s blog What’s Cookin’?
Browse blogs by our other Expert Designers
Tucker Viemeister leads the Lab at Rockwell Group, an interactive technology design group combining digital interaction design, modeling, and prototyping for hotels and restaurants, casinos, packaging, and products. The LAB seeks to blur the line between the physical and virtual, exploring and experimenting with interactive digital technology in objects, environments, and stories. Tucker also co-founded the collaborative Studio Red with David Rockwell that was dedicated to innovation for Coca-Cola. Since joining Rockwell Group in 2004, Tucker has been instrumental in the design and development of JetBlue’s Marketplace at the JFK International Airport, “Hall of Fragments,” an installation that opened the Corderie dell’Arsenale at the 2008 Venice Biennale, a “living wall” for the lobby of the Sheraton Toronto, the traveling Red Lounge for Coca-Cola, and MGM City Centre in Las Vegas.
Add comment November 2, 2009
Why It’s Time to Do Away With the Brand Manager
P&G, Unilever Among Those Embracing New Roles in Social Media Age
By Jack Neff
BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) — Managing a brand has always been a slightly odd concept, given that consumers are the real arbiters of brand meaning, and it’s become increasingly outmoded in today’s two-way world. That’s why a new report is going to recommend changing the name “brand manager” to “brand advocate,” and fundamentally changing marketer organizations in response to the onset of the digital age.
The report, due out next week from Forrester, finally puts the onus on marketers to change their structures — a welcome conclusion for media owners and agencies who keep hearing how they should change, but often complain that their clients have done little to shift their organizations to cope with an increasingly complex world of media fragmentation and rising retailer and consumer power.
The new “brand advocates,” as Forrester suggests renaming the role, will be seemingly more powerful and consumer-centric, much nimbler, and more real-time-oriented than the brand manager of today — and they will be a lot more opportunistic in creating media partnerships, and a lot less loyal to their agencies.
Among the specific recommendations in its report, “Adaptive Brand Marketing: Rethinking Your Approach to Branding in the Digital Age,” Forrester suggests “brand advocates” be responsible for rapid adaptations of global brand platforms and programs, charging centralized global brand strategists with ensuring what local managers do conforms with the brand equity and strategy. It also advocates ditching the formal annual budgeting process and upfront media-specific allocations in favor of frequently updated, on-the-fly plans that adapt quickly as conditions change and money earmarked upfront for initiatives, not specific media.
Forrester recommends giving market research and analytics, dubbed “consumer intelligence” in the report, a much more prominent and central role, while focusing more on newer “predictive modeling” providers than on historical marketing-mix models to target spending.
Moving in-house
The report also finds that “brand advocates” should shift emphasis from long-term external “partnerships” with agencies to rapidly shifting alliances with media and other content creators, and it says companies need to bring in-house some of the planning, research and creative functions they’ve outsourced in the past.
It also advocates recognizing the brand isn’t the only organizational structure that’s important for multibrand companies, but that structures aimed at marketing to demographic or other segment cohorts are equally important. And it also maintains that marketing executives should think less about anchoring annual plans around one or two big hits and more about doing many smaller things quickly and adapting based on real-time consumer feedback and other data.
Executives of big marketers Procter & Gamble and Unilever note that they’re already doing much of what Forrester recommends. The global brand strategist/local brand advocate breakdown, for instance, resembles how they and other big household and personal-care marketers already organize.
P&G recently started organizing its beauty business along male and female lines rather than product groupings and is preparing to organize other divisions around different customer cohorts, too. And Global Brand-Building Officer Marc Pritchard pointed to such multibrand programs as My Black Is Beautiful for African-American women and BeingGirl for teen girls as examples of marketing to consumer groups rather than individual brand consumers.
Likewise, Mr. Pritchard said budget flux has become something of a way of life, too. “The volatility of the marketplace,” he said, “has really caused us to have to look at things on a monthly minimum, sometimes [on a] weekly and daily basis. Digital gives you even more flexibility in your spending, but even TV is now being much more flexible on when you can spend.”
Complexities
In an e-mail, Unilever CEO Paul Polman compared his company’s global brand directors more to orchestra directors than traditional managers, who are, in turn, more open to different types of partnerships. “Maybe the most extreme example of this is to be found in consumer-generated content, where we have invited consumers to develop communications for Omo and Vaseline as a complement to those generated by the company, and in the case of Peperami, we have even dispensed with the agency in favor of exclusively ‘crowdsourced’ content.
“However well traditional advertising agencies read the signals and recognize the need for radical change in their capabilities,” he said, “few agencies can address all the communications needs of a brand. … This is making the management of agencies increasingly complex, and raises challenging questions on how best to measure the value added by the respective partners and consequently how to manage remuneration.”
Web-enabled consumer intelligence may be one of the biggest benefits of social media for marketers, Mr. Polman said. It’s not clear that means a stronger role for research, he said, but “harnessing the power of the net can often render new forms of traditional research (such as advertising pretesting) that are faster and cheaper. And, again [as with ad agencies], it is not always the traditional research agencies that are first to pioneer new methodologies.”
Forrester analyst Lisa Bradner, principal author of the report, hopes for marketers to move away from what she calls the “magic eight ball” approach of keeping research staff out of the loop except to periodically answer questions.
Many researchers and analysts would no doubt welcome such a move, but Rex Briggs, CEO of research firm Marketing Evolution, isn’t sure changing structures or roles is the answer, as opposed to changing the people, specifically marketers who lead the effort.
Number-crunching skills
He believes marketers in the digital age need to be more “numerate,” with more training in research and analytics even if they still rely on staff for help. Marketers today need to balance art and science, he believes, not unlike architects, musicians or cinematographers.
It’s not yet clear that digital media in itself is important enough to marketers in many businesses to justify tearing up their organizational charts, he said. But even though no marketer gets paid today for what’s going to happen in the fourth quarter of 2014, big marketers need to start changing now to be ready for then, Denuo CEO Rishad Tobaccowala said, simply because it takes at least two to three years for them to implement a structural change. Organizing around specific media makes less sense than organizing for rapid change, he said, since the future media landscape is in such flux.
Organizational behavior is still holding back change at many marketers, said Bob Gilbreath, chief marketing strategist at WPP’s Bridge Worldwide and author of the new book “Marketing With Meaning.”
Some of the organizations that have changed most have also changed their marketing the most, he said, pointing to Nike in its move from a heavy emphasis on TV to a much heavier reliance on digital and services and experiences for athletes. Unfortunately, he said, Nike has been mum on exactly how it’s rearranged the organization.
Key to any change, the former Tide brand manager said, is a return to marketing as the focus of brand management, “rather than one of six things a brand manager does.”
“So much of [brand managers'] time is subsumed by internal management, and so much of the creative process and planning is outsourced to agencies and other parties,” Forrester’s Ms. Bradner said. Brand advocates, she said, “really need to be in charge of the heart and soul of what the brand stands for. It does move you off the generalist track to be more of a pure marketer.”
What will the new model be?
Denuo CEO Rishad Tobaccowala, a longtime thought leader on digital marketing, believes the brand-manager model of the future may be adapted from venture-funded startups or political campaigns than established marketers.
The growing complexities of digital marketing, social media, fragmentation and tracking all those things in real-time require bigger marketing departments, he said. Yet the reality is that big marketers generally are trimming marketing staffs or looking to squeeze more productivity from them at what he believes is the worst possible time.
“You have this tsunami of challenges and opportunities at the same time you have a low water mark for staffing and resources,” Mr. Tobaccowala said.
Venture-backed startups lack that big-company imperative to grow earnings twice as fast as sales, so are more likely to staff and organize as the job requires. But he also believes political campaigns — which run on rapid iterations, real-time data monitoring and full recognition of the interplay between public relations, social media and advertising — may provide another model for the future of marketing organizations.
Add comment October 12, 2009
