Tom H. C. Anderson - Next Gen Market Research

Anderson Analytics finished an impressive season after a slow start.

After being down 4-1 in the first period, Anderson Analytics regrouped to come back and win 7-6. Rob Northway and Alex Orbanowski both stepped it up and scored their first goals of the season to tie the score in the third. Mike Arcano scored the game winning goal with only 3 minutes left.

Way to finish the season guys!

Standing Offer: If You Don’t Know - Find Out!

OK, RE Yesterday’s Post, I decided that I never want to hear this excuse again. So if you’re in MR at a fortune 1000 co. and don’t know the answer to this question, contact me. We’ll be happy to program and host a survey to 1,000 of your customers pro bono to ask this one question.

(But if between 25%-90% of your best customers say they’ve been on a SNS within the past 30 days you’ll owe me lunch)

Do You Know Where Your Customers Are?

I’m not pointing fingers or ranting today, I’m just sort of perplexed. Three times this week I spoke to marketing research and/or loyalty marketing people at major corporations who said something like “Not sure about social media/social networks. We don’t think our core customers are on there.”

My response was usually, oh I see, well what percentage of your customers are on there? The answer was invariably “Uh, don’t know”.

I’m kind of having a hard time understanding how this simple piece of information is missing from the “Insights” departments of so many companies. Can anyone help me out?

OK, so you have some CIO or CMO who isn’t on social media and hasn’t bought into it yet (not uncommon actually). She/He says, “those facebooks” or “those Tweeps or whatever they’re called”, that’s just for kids. And then what… everyone around the table just nods in agreement?

How easy is it to go out and do a short survey just on social media (especially social networking) among your customers or an online panel? Or for God’s sake at least add 1-2 questions into a survey you’re doing on some other topic.

To me this is like saying my customers aren’t on the internet. It’s simply crazy. It’s proven that people who are connected/know each other, tend to have similar attitudes and opinions and also purchase similar products/brands. If you think even one of your customers are on SNS you can bet there’s more!

[6/28 Update to this Post]

Grant McCracken Q&A with Tom H. C. Anderson

I learned of Grant’s work just before the ESOMAR Annual Congress in Montreal last year where he was the Key Note. It turns out he lives in the next town over and is now a member of the Next Gen Market Research Group (NGMR) which I moderate on LinkedIn.

Grant holds a PhD from the University of Chicago in anthropology. He has been Director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, a senior lecturer, Harvard Business School, a visiting scholar, University of Cambridge and is now a research affiliate at C3 at MIT. He has consulted for many companies, including the Coca-Cola Company, Diageo, IBM, IKEA, and Kimberly Clark. He has served on advisory boards for IBM and the Boston Beer Company.

Some of his recent books include: Flock and Flow: Predicting and Managing Change in a Dynamic Marketplace, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities, Culture and Consumption II: Markets, Meaning, and Brand Management. This fall his newest book Chief Culture Officer will be published.

Tom: You are an Anthropologist interested in contemporary culture. What does that mean?

Grant: I study contemporary culture the way an anthropologist studies any culture. There are important differences, lots of variation at any given time, change over time, dynamism all the time. Contemporary culture is a handful. But anthropologists are good at finding patterns in broad, noisy data sets.

Tom: I believe your most recent book is Transformations and deals with self reinvention. Can you tell me a little about self reinvention, why it’s important now, especially for marketers?

Grant: In culture, individuals have the right to reinvent themselves. This doesn’t happen in other cultures, so the challenge was to figure out why and how this reinvention works.

Tom: How will the current economy affect our culture, especially consumption/consumerism?

Grant: I am working on this very topic at the moment. I think there’s a good chance that consumers will merely scale back their consumption and when prosperity, credit, and confidence return we will party like its 1999. Still, we could see some major changes. I’m in the process of trying to sketch out the possibilities now.

Tom: That sounds good to me! Which are the most important sub/counter cultures currently, and which aspects within them are worth paying extra attention to currently?

Grant: In a way, sub and counter cultures have moved out of the social world into the personal world. Each of us has lots of selves within. This internal diversity is the thing we need to understand more. Marketers have been segmenting markets externally for decades. Now it’s time to segment by the internal distinctions and speak to one or several of the selves within.

Tom: Is it possible/wise for marketers to try to segment customers by culture, or is it too broad to be actionable/useful?

Grant: Well, certainly they can and should segment by culture theme and trend.

Tom: You’ve said our culture is changing at lightning speed and have given examples of the Old Regime, as Martha Stewart, and Oprah Winfrey as the new more influential regime because Oprah doesn’t care about status. Any other good examples of old regime brands and new regime brands?

Grant: There will always be a Martha. She speaks to and for a certain constituency. But I think her cultural trend and theme is being supplanted by the Rachel Rays of the world.

For those of you interested learning more about Grant you can check out his blog here: www.cultureby.com and his website “which is about 2 days from completion” at www.grantmccracken.com

Here is a link to the NGMR group on LinkedIn.

Grant and I are also both on Twitter

@TomHCAnderson

@Grant27

Inside Anderson Analytics - With Gosia Skorek

Today I’d like to introduce you to one of the newer team members of Anderson Analytics, Gosia Skorek. Gosia has a graduate degree in psychology and is currently helping us with our work in the area of psychological content analysis & text analytics. Along with her impressive academic background at Jacobs University in Bremen and University of California Merced, her previous experience includes working at MindShare Worldwide, a Consumer Insights firm in the UK and Deutche Welle in Germany.

I asked her a couple of questions about Social Networks (SNS) and how it relates to psychology:

Tom: Social networking sites (SNSs) such as Facebook, MySpace, CyWorld etc. are becoming increasingly popular among various groups of people, not only college students but also professionals. They are designed towards work-related contexts (e.g. LinkedIn), romantic relationships (e.g. Friendster), college student populations (e.g. Facebook) or shared interests (e.g. MySpace or Summitpost). Each of them has several millions of users, many of them visiting their SNSs daily. From a point of view of psychology, what makes them so attractive to us? What are the benefits of using social network sites?

Gosia: First of all, social networking sites let their users establish and maintain friendships and contacts. This feeling of connectedness and belonging is very important for our self-esteem and life satisfaction. Interacting with large numbers of friends can be very helpful in gaining emotional support or simply attention. Psychology research suggests that SNSs may be particularly attractive to people dissatisfied with themselves and their current relationships (Ellison et al., 2007). Also, following a Social Compensation hypothesis (”poor get richer”) users with lower self-esteem, more introvert and less popular in offline communities may strive more to become popular on SNSs to compensate for their offline experiences (Valkenburg et al. 2005). At the same time, however, psychologists suggest that also those more successful in offline social networks may want to enhance relationships using online tools (Social Enhancement hypothesis, Merton 1968).

But more importantly, the SNSs let us present and promote ourselves almost in an unrestricted way. These sites are great venues for self-improvement, where our fantasies of the self can come true with a click of the mouse. I do not mean here creating fake profiles, but only ones of the ‘better selves’ (with more hobbies, better looks, more confidence and more friends than in reality). Amichai-Hamburger and colleagues (2002) suggested that introvert and neurotic people often claim to find the “real me” on SNSs, while extrovert individuals find it in face-to-face interactions.

Moreover, online networking sites give people the illusion of immortality and immunity to the physical and real world. Several physical and social barriers are removed and inter-personal interaction becomes easier and faster. Users are put in the position of more control over the interaction and their appearance, which makes interaction a ’safer’ experience. Gaining confidence in online communication may in some cases get translated into better communication skills in face-to-face encounters.

Another important aspect of SNSs is that they help us figure out where we belong, which sites and groups we want to join and interact with. Especially for adolescent users SNSs might be a useful tool in self-exploration and identity construction. Psychologists suggest that it is relatively easy to develop and present one’s identity using SNSs due to the fact that people are able to “show rather than tell” (Shanyang et al., 2008).

Tom: Sounds like a wide range of possible advantages of using SNSs. Which one would you say is the most important?

Gosia: It is very difficult to say what matters most as it depends on a variety of factors. Whether an individual finds the use of SNSs beneficial may depend on their personality, gender, current mood, self-esteem, and the quality of an offline social network. In different circumstances and for different individuals there would be different benefits.

Tom: What about the other side of the coin. What about risks or disadvantages of using SNSs?

Gosia: Just like the interaction with people offline, online communication can bring negative outcomes like heavy critique from other users, disputes or end of friendships. This in turn may lead to a depressive mood, dissatisfaction with all social connections and a more prevention-oriented behavior in future online or offline interactions.

Yet, sporadic negative input from other users is not the biggest threat of SNSs. Lack of privacy control on most of the online networking sites means that the risk of stalking and even identity theft is high. Users are not really given any tools to protect themselves from these risks. Finally, in extreme cases a potential outcome of an excessive use of SNSs might be too much reliance on these friendships and interactions. Some heavy users might miss out on the face-to-face experiences that train their social skills and eventually lose their ability to function well in a real world without the Internet.

Tom: I see, like with anything, moderation is needed also with the SNSs.

Gosia: Precisely. Yet, overall it seems quite clear that there are more benefits than threats in using SNSs, which explains their huge popularity.

Short, Sweet and Insightful - The Future of Surveys is Text Analytics
Yesterday there was a post on the Next Gen Market Research Group (NGMR) on LinkedIn asking “What’s the shortest questionnaire you ever wrote?”. I took a look at this blog as I thought I would have posted the survey below previously but apparently it had slipped my mind. I came across it during a recent stay at a Hotel Scandic Hasselbacken in Stockholm.

Unfortunately I can’t take credit for writing the survey below, but I think it’s probably the best one I’ve ever seen, especially for customer/guest satisfaction. This is a post card which was in my hotel room with instructions to leave it at the front desk. The front of the card simply has an image of one thumb up and one thumb down. The back says in English and Swedish “Is there anything we should know?”

This is the best survey I’ve ever come across. Whether it’s distributed via mail, left in the room, or sent digitally, with modern text analytics this should be the only question a hotel needs to ask. From the text we would be able to not only track and understand problem areas, but even predict metrics like overall satisfaction, return to hotel and return to brand to name a few. This is exactly what we did when utilizing text mining on Starwood Hotel open ends.

The beauty here is the simplicity. This is exactly the way customers expect and want to be able to give feedback. A perfect example of what surveys will hopefully look like in the future!

Tom

Social Network Marketing - Just Do It!

I know I’ve been saying that corporations should not over think Social Media Marketing and Just Do It! Still I was a bit surprised today to see how prominent Twitter is on the Danbury Fair Mall’s Website.

The site has a large flash component which is rotating between 4 or so images. The Second image after landing has a “Follow Us On Twitter - Go Now” message that takes up most of the landing page. Wow!

Fun to see that the Danbury Mall is really into Twitter! Currently @DanburyFair only has 169 follower and is following 435. It doesn’t look like they’ve had their Twitter account long though. Tweets include things like:

Be the first to get your hands on the new iPhone 3GS tomorrow, June 19th at the Danbury Fair Apple Store. http://bit.ly/mOnhZ

Yankees, Mets or Red Sox? What’s Dad’s favorite team? Get him some gear for Father’s Day! http://bit.ly/13Q1Qg

Looking for a job? Danbury Fair retailers are hiring!http://bit.ly/14ibct

At first I was thinking, this is a little too much. But I think they may be on to something. The way to really make it work though might be to get their tenants involved. Perhaps allowing each tenant to post up to one tweet per day. I would assume special offers/sales would be most meaningful to shoppers, and actually provide some value.

@TomHCAnderson

Social Media Means Different Things to Different People - Especially True Among Social Media ‘Experts’

I just got back from the Social Media in Market Research panel event. We started out by discussing how we defined social media and then went into more detail about how to use it. My answer to the first question was that regardless of what social media means to me, to consumers social media can mean very different things to different people. These meanings/definitions/strategies can also change rather quickly for some individuals.

Talking about social media is always interesting to me, and we had quite a diverse panel, from PR/Agency side, to qualitative and quantitative researchers and technologists/programmers.

Having conducted a lot of survey research on various social networks the past month to understand attitudes and usage among various consumers who utilize and don’t utilize social networks, I must say I was a little surprised that we social media market research ‘experts’ probably have even more differing opinions than the general population out there using it.

That said, I think we all agreed on a few things. Most importantly, that social media is important for market research, and that it’s probably more challenging to conduct market research on social media than it is to market on social media.

I was just interviewed via Twitter by Dado Van Peteghem of Insites Consulting in Belgium. Sort of weird doing an interview via Twitter (Twinterview), but it does serve the purpose of keeping responses short.

To see my interview questions and answers, as well as those of a few other researchers/technologists who participated as part of the ‘Ultimate Twitter Study’ initiative you can go here:

And of course, feel free to follow me on Twitter if you like @tomhcanderson

Today I’m posting brief interview I conducted with Judit Nagy, Vice President, Consumer Insights MySpace/Fox Interactive Media. Judit is what I consider an SNS MR Guru, having conducted groundbreaking research on social media topics and publishing reports such as “Are You Game?” which covered comprehensive insights about the state of the gaming echo-system, as well as the “Never Ending Friending” study, about MySpace and the Social Networking digital landscape. Judit was recently honored in the innovation category at the ARF Great Minds Awards Ceremony.

Though the interview below is rather short, I’ve also been asked to contribute to the Trends Chapter (New sources and new research methods) section in ESOMAR’s 2009 Research Industry Report. I will be focusing on social media research and will include further discussions with Judit as well as research ideas from experts I know at FaceBook and LinkedIn. I plan to post a brief summary on the blog once the report is published next month.

Tom: Just so we’re on the same page, what is your definition of Social Network Services (SNS)?

Judit: Social Networking Services is all about multi-way communications. While in traditional online or offline media we see one way communication methods, with Social Networking we see multi-level and immediate communication methods. Social networks is all about connecting, and getting immediate feedback on your communication messages, with a touch of human emotions, which will drive most conversations around the brand, or about any particular message. Overall, SNSs are here to progress, where immediacy, content, and emotions are the largest and heaviest drivers.

Tom: Everyone seems to use social networks a bit differently, have a different combination of preferred networks and often a different strategy on how to use each. May I ask which networks you personally use, and how your use of these differ?

Judit: I’m interested in learning about all SNS. My preferred SNS is MySpace, where I connect with friends and family, but I also registered for Twitter, lots of friends on Facebook and Linked-In as well.  We need to note that most SNSs site choices are being driven by others (meaning friends and family, their preferred networks) though surely you have a choice of preference, but, in most cases that might not be the SNS service which you use the most.

Tom: What do you think social network services might look like 1 year, 5 years or even 10 years from now?

Judit: They will get more immediate and more “complicated”. Mobile will play a very important role, and as with the Internet, once Broadband became affordable, engagement and usage sky rocketed, and in most age categories Internet became the leading media, measured based on average time spent with media. MySpace and other SNS will be more “on the go” and more unpredictable, and let’s not forget multi-tasking, heavy multi media usage accompanied with heavy SNS usage, the 360 anytime/anywhere media.

SNS will get more “personal” and the communication flow will be much faster and more immediate.

Tom: Marketers are currently struggling with how best to leverage web2.0 and especially social networks. Do you have any tips for them?

Judit: Marketing and advertising on SNS is a progress, which requires patience and time to understand all mechanisms. However, once there is an  understanding, advertisers can progress greatly about how much they customize their messaging and what importance SNS plays in their media or marketing funnel.

We know that we (SNS) can positively influence most areas of the purchase funnel, let it be awareness, purchase intent or brand recommendation and actual purchase; and we also know that SNS such as MySpace can create positive ROI for brands.

SNS can or could also play a role in CRM and how brands communicate with their consumers, and how they could better influence users’ opinion and what role brands can play in brand management and brand development. Brand communities play pivotal role for brands connecting with its consumers, and as one of our Never Ending Friending focus group respondent notes: “I want brand to be my friends”, which means that consumers would like to have common ideas, conversations and benefits delivered to them on their own terms.

Tom: In what ways do you think utilizing social networks for market research is different than current traditional online research?

Judit: Again, SNS can give immediate/”real-time” feedback to advertisers about their brands, and SNS will be able to give more in-depth, real time research than any other traditional methods.