52% of Moms use their smartphone within 5 minutes of waking in the morning, and 28% of Moms say they would not give up their smart phone in exchange for pay — even for a day. Moms use Android phones more than 3 times as often as iPhones, (although the survey provides no insight across different demographics). More interesting insights from Life360 in the infographic below:
Archive for the ‘Product Development’ Category
How Moms Use Smart Phones
Saturday, December 24th, 2011Publishers Finding Success With Facebook Open Graph Integration
Friday, December 2nd, 2011Facebook reports that publishers using new Open Graph features announced at f8 in September are seeing significant traffic increases, impression growth, and app installs that are reaching new audiences for the publishers. A few data points:
- More Traffic: 600% increase in traffic coming from Facebook after 10 million people turned on the social news experience at Yahoo! News
- More users: 1 million users connecting to the social news experience each month at The Independent
- More impressions: 1 million extra impressions per day from 4 million installs of the Guardian app.
- New Audiences: 83% of 3.5 million app users are under the age of 35 for the Washington Post
View the source data on Facebook
ShareTwitter Posts to Your Stream When Responding to DMs via SMS
Monday, September 26th, 2011Today, a teammate of mine DMed me on Twitter. I received it as a text message on my iPhone, and did not realize it was a DM through Twitter. When I replied to what I thought was a simple SMS message, Twitter posted it into my public tweet stream.
My colleague saw the public tweet, told me about it, and then I deleted it from Twitter.
Be very careful when replying to text messages. You may inadvertently publicize information that you think you are keeping private.
ShareNew Analysis of Common Causes for Start-up Failure
Friday, September 9th, 2011Startups that scale properly grow 20 times faster than startups that scaled prematurely, according to research by Blackbox. The findings are part of The Startup Genome Report, an ongoing, collaborative R&D project designed to take a comprehensive dive into what makes Silicon Valley startups successful — and not — and the Startup Genome Compass, a benchmarking tool for startups that helps founders monitor their progress in different growth categories. As of this week, more than 6,000 startups registered to use the Compass.
Blackbox says that the major cause of startup failure is premature scaling, which they define as: when a startup’s core dimensions (product, customer, team, finances and business model) are out of sync. As Blackbox Co-founder Bjoern Herrmann pointed out, “in some cases dysfunctional scaling may be a better description”.
In order to help folks understad the root causes, and how they can be better anticipated, Visual.ly created the graphic below:
Why People Share: The 50-Year-Old Answer
Wednesday, August 17th, 2011In 1966, Harvard Business Review published a study by Ernest Dichter that identified four motivations for a person to communicate about brands, as follows:
- In 33% of the cases, people shared because of product-involvement. The experience was so novel and pleasurable that it had to be shared.
- In a quarter of cases, people shared because of self-involvement. Sharing knowledge or opinions was a way to gain attention, show connoisseurship, feel like a pioneer, have inside information, seek confirmation of a person’s own judgment, or assert superiority.
- One-fifth of sharing occurred from other-involvement: the speaker wanted to reach out and help to express neighborliness, caring, and friendship.
- In another 20% of cases, message-involvement drove sharing. The message was so humorous or informative that it deserved sharing.
Implications for Brands
If we assume those trends to be valid and normal expectations for online sharing today, we can use that distribution as a benchmark to assess the health of the conversation about any brand, based upon the extent to which the conversation about the brand deviates from this average distribution.
For example, we might expect 33% of conversation about a brand to focus on people describing their experience with the brand. And when we see more than 33% of a brand’s conversation being generated by customers based on product or service experience, we might guess that the brand is doing something exceptional — either within the customer experience, or within their social media marketing.
When we see a brand whose customers create significantly less than 33% of the conversation about the brand, we are likely to discover flaws in either the customer experience or the brand’s social media capabilities.
Category Benchmarks from Converseon
Apparel
In the apparel category, we have seen brands with more than 90% of their conversation generated by consumers talking about their experience with the product. On the other hand, we have also seen apparel brands with less than one-third of their conversation occurring based on customer experiences with the product.
Automotive
For one automotive client, we found that 28% of consumer messages about the brand described their involvement with the product. That’s slightly below the 33% general benchmark.
B2B Technology
On the other hand, for one of our B2B technology clients, 32% of online customer messages describe the customer’s involvement with the product.
The difference, we found, is that the technology company receives a greater share of mentions within online forums, where customers are trying to solve problems. And any brand that receives a lot of mentions in forums should expect that more of their mentions describe customer experience with the product.
Consumer Packaged Goods
On the other end of the spectrum, for one of our shampoo clients, 73% of online consumer messages described the consumer’s experience with the product. Most of the shampoo brand mentions existed within product reviews, recommendations and anecdotal messages such as status updates.
Thanks to Will Bottinick and his team at Converseon and his research team for pulling together these numbers.
Chris Boudreaux leads the Business Integration practice at Converseon, where he helps leading brands achieve business objectives through social media by transforming business processes, data integration, and governance. Chris can be reached at via email at cboudreaux@converseon.com or via Twitter.
ShareConsumers More Trusting, But Less Loyal on the Web, Versus 2007
Tuesday, August 16th, 2011Dr. Brent Coker of the University of Melbourne recently published findings indicating that web users tend to trust web sites 20% more today versus 2007, but are 30% less loyal to ecommerce sites versus 2007.
1. Why He Believes Trust Increased
Dr. Coker said the increase in online consumer trust is largely linked to the visual appeal of websites. “As aesthetically orientated humans, we’re psychologically hardwired to trust beautiful people, and the same goes for websites. With websites becoming increasingly attractive and including more trimmings, this creates a greater feeling of trustworthiness and professionalism in online consumers.”
Anyone interested in web credibility should also visit the Web Credibility Project at Stanford University.
2. Why He Believes Loyalty Decreased
“The biggest source of frustration is the inability to find relevant information on a website. The best way to stop defection to other websites, and increase loyalty, is to be interesting. Being pretty, but with nothing to say, is not enough.”
The research found that if a website has poor navigation or access to information, or is slow (i.e. more than two seconds to download), web surfers are more likely to opt against purchasing and navigate to an alternate website. (No surprises there.)
“Shopping offline is very different to shopping online. Offline we shop in a large room, with clear signage, and often a sales assistant. Online, however, what we want to buy is buried somewhere, and we’re left to find it on our own.”
3. Sharing Drives Us to Trust More and Share More
In the last five years, the frequency of referring others to websites has increased by 32%. Largely due to social utilities, such as Facebook and Twitter.
Overall, “… we are more trusting of attractive websites, less tolerant of websites that have irrelevant information, and more likely to introduce ourselves to websites that are new.” Dr. Coker says.
A Few Thoughts
First, consumer trust is harmed where brands blur advertising with authentic conversation. On the other hand, when brands engage in helpful and sincere dialog with consumers, trust and engagement grow.
Second, with more brands spending more money on social media, many brands simply fail to achieve meaningful engagement within their targeted communities due to poorly conceived and executed social campaigns that don’t respect the norms of social platforms and conversations they seek to engage.
For many brands, the poor conception and execution results from inadequate and inconsistent performance metrics — where performance feedback in inadequate, or teams are allowed to spend without accountability for business outcomes.
Dr. Coker’s Methodology
Dr. Coker developed a formula to track patterns and trends in online behaviors and purchasing, called Webreep (shown in the image below, which you can click to enlarge). The formula, called ‘Webreep’, creates a score for 130 industries based on seven dimensions of quality: visual appeal, trustworthiness, ease of use, search quality, information quality, information relevancy and load speed. Webreep started mapping the internet in 2007.
He will present his paper at the 2011 World Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Applied Computing in Las Vegas.
Dear, CIO: Please Come Out of Your Foxhole
Monday, August 15th, 2011Michael Maoz of Gartner recently wrote that CIOs can only shake their heads when marketing, sales and services leaders are able to obtain funding for social media projects without a business case, instead of being held accountable for the same level of quantitative rigor as other IT-enabled investments. While it is true that most social media investments still travel with no business case, anyone who wants to change that fact needs to undertand a bit of history:
One challenge is that most communications professionals and social media consultants don’t have much experience in organizational change. They’ve never led cross-functional change programs. They’ve never built a business case that had to stand up to the CFO’s rigor. So they just don’t know how to do those things.
And, in the corporate communications arena, they never had to measure business impact from their efforts. Clippings were all they ever counted.
But that is all changing as marketing, sales and customer service leaders begin to ask for real dollars for social media.
However, the one critical factor that is changing the slowest is that CIOs are simply not getting in the game. CIOs and their teams are simply not at the table when cross-functional social media efforts are launched. And, ultimately, the CIO has to change that. CIOs need to start reaching out to their VPs of Communications and Marketing, and start figuring out how enterprise IT will enable the business goals that social media supports.
The bottom line is that CIO can not sit back and wait for other functional leaders to bring them a business case or a well-defined social application architecture. CIOs need to get out of their foxholes, and go be the smartest person in the room about how the organization should use technology to solve challenges in marketing, communications, sales and service.
And if you want some help developing your technology strategy for social in your organization, I’d be happy to help. Send me a note any time.
ShareFacebook Ads Cost Less When They Keep Users on Facebook
Friday, August 5th, 2011According to TBG Digital, Facebook ads that keep users on Facebook cost less per click than ads that send traffic away from Facebook. Data collected on a sample of 2.8bn impressions by TBG Digital revealed that Facebook’s algorithm charges a 29% lower cost per click (CPC) for ads that keep traffic within the site, by directing users to a brand’s Facebook page, for example. TBG said Facebook uses approximately 140 factors to set an ad’s price.
The Impacts?
First, advertisers will feel motivated to increase the portion of their customers’ experience that lives on Facebook. That means potentially fewer assets on brand-owned properties, and a greater reliance on Facebook-focused execution partners.
Second, The Center for Digital Democracy says that, “… regulators need to pry open how Facebook uses its clout to favor its own interests–and its impact on competition and consumer protection.” So, Facebook might soon find itself facing charges of anti-competitive practices, a la Microsoft just a few years ago.
TBG Digital is a Facebook advertising platform that competes against providers such as Context Optional and BuddyMedia. Share
Social Media Can Look Silly in the Real World
Monday, June 20th, 2011Two Boys Opera published a short video showing how silly our online habits appear when we use them in the physical world, to promote their opera at the London Coliseum, running this month and next.
ShareAffluent Americans More Likely to Follow When Brand Mentioned in Article or Ad
Friday, May 20th, 2011Affluence Collaborative recently released data comparing the reasons that afffluent Americans follow brands on social networks, compared to the general population. I indexed the data to create the chart below, and it looks like:
- Affluent Americans are more prone to following a brand when the brand’s social account is mentioned in an article or ad.
- Affluent Americans are far less likely than the general population to follow a brand for discounts or deals, or for entertainment value. Affluence Collaborative found that the general population tends to follow brands to get deals or discounts.
- Affluent Americans are far more more likely to follow a brand based on professional interests, compared to the general population — which means that anyone hiring senior executives should consider opportunities for using the brand’s social accounts to support recruiting
You can review Affluent Collaborative’s raw data.
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