Archive for the ‘Research’ Category
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
Assuming you’ve got your product sorted out and implementing a social media programme won’t be a one way ticket to exposing all your product’s weaknesses, the next thing you need to worry about is the people who will be engaging in the social space.
Early this month there was an article in the Straits Times titled “Social networking at the workplace” where 2,008 employees were interviewed. Here’s a scan of the paper (click for larger image, pardon the poor quality, newspaper doesn’t keep very well).
Dangers of Social Media Marketing: Social Network Research
A quick glance at the statistics shows a few alarming statistics:
22% of companies have formal policies that dictate how social networking can be used – This means about 3 in 4 companies will invariably have an employee saying something inappropriate online because there are no guidelines to guard against it.
Only 40% of people “always” considers what their bosses might think when posting something online – So about 1 in 2 employees will run their mouth on channels like Facebook and Twitter to other members of your staff, your clients and maybe even your competition.
And to round it all off, only 17% of companies have a monitoring programme to manage social networking risks – 4 in 5 companies are letting these conversations go on unnoticed, and more importantly, unchecked. By the time they realise this, it will be too late.
The social space is not the place for untrained staff to “play” in. If no one is monitoring internal chatter about your brand and no one is actively educating staff how to behave on social channels, your biggest threats may ironically come from within – your own staff.
What measures would you put in place to prevent something nasty from happening?
Tags: biggest threats, engaging in social space, formal social media policies, guidelines, implementing social media programme, manage social networking risks, monitoring program, monitoring programme, product, product weakness, product weaknesses, social channels, social media policy, social media program, social networking, social networking at the workdplace, social networking risks, straits times
Posted in Research, Social Networks, online identity, social media | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
Awhile ago, the Singapore Management University Students Association (SMUSA) did a large scale electronic survey to SMU students, asking them about satisfaction/dissatisfaction with various aspects of the school ranging from facilities, grading, professors and so on. The premise of this survey was so that they could know what the general population is feeling, and act on it.
Post-survey, I saw this pasted to one of the pillars in SMU:
SA Research
Here’s the thing though. I walked past this and immediately thought: This means 43% (or almost half) of SMU students don’t feel a sense of belonging to SMU. Wouldn’t that be a more grabbing or immediate statistic to display and act on?
Also, the poster asks those are in that 57%, who do feel a sense of belonging, if they have something to say about it. Wouldn’t it be more productive to ask those in the 43% to ask them if they have something to say about it?
That said, I’m not a research major. Would anyone who is like to chime in?
Tags: asking the right question, dissatisfaction, electronic survey, facilities, grading, professors, Research, research major, satisfaction, sense of belonging, singapore management university, smu students, smu students association, smusa
Posted in Research, SMU | 9 Comments »
Thursday, February 12th, 2009
Yesterday I gave some qualitative reasons to supplement quantitative numbers by Hitwise to suggest that Plurk has had more traffic than Twitter in Singapore since July, 2008.
One thing that I’m wondering, from what I’m gathering from the data, is how the visits are measured. Plurk is automatically updated, Twitter isn’t. Twitter can also be accessed from desktop applications like Twhirl, Tweetdeck and many others. Are these factored in? How about mobile apps for Twitter like Twinkle and Twitterific? Similarly, how about mobile access for Plurk? The Plurk app for iPhones and iPod Touches?
In other words, are there “hidden” traffic sources that we should be looking at?
Secondly, looking at Prof. Michael’s blog post that points to Hubspot releasing a report that lists Singapore as one of the top 30 Twitter cities worldwide, I’m wondering this: If Plurk has more traffic in Singapore than Twitter, and Twitter is in the top 30 Twitter cities, what does that say about any city that is not in the top 30? Are they by default, even less than Singapore’s Plurk traffic?
What are the implications of these statistics on people looking to use microblogging as a communications tool? Is it far from being mainstream if a top 30 city is a small one like Singapore?
Granted, neither of these data points are concrete and conclusive. The Hubspot data uses about 500,000 Twitter users as a sample size. This seems to be the problem most of us are dealing with. It’s not a complete lack of information, but imperfect information. Should we just take what is available and work from there because it’s better than nothing? What are the alternatives? Would love to hear from those struggling to answer these questions just as much as I am.
Tags: hitwise, hubspot, microblogging, microblogging mainstream, plurk traffic, Singapore, tweetdeck, twhiel, twinkle, twitter cities, twitter traffic, twitterific
Posted in Plurk, Research, Singapore, case studies, twitter | 3 Comments »
Monday, July 14th, 2008
This is part four (of four) of an analysis of a blogger survey conducted by Text 100. You can find out more from the previous parts:
Fig 1: 67% of bloggers spend less than 4hrs a week on blogging
Okay personally I’m not sure what this particular piece of data is supposed to show, but I think it says this: what other medium do you know that engages people for four hours a week? Television? Print? Radio? I don’t think so. Also note that this figure is purely spent on blogging. In other words there are many other hours spent chatting, on Lively, reading blogs, on YouTube, on Facebook. Are you still spending 90% of your adspend on mainstream media when we’re spending 10% of our time on mainstream media? (if even that).
Finally, I wanted to post some quotes from the survey in the form of advice from bloggers to companies. Maybe a traditional company will read this and find the quotes bordering on arrogant, but the truth is, these are your new consumers. They want personalisation, proper treatment, good service, and their loyalty only lasts as long as the next better deal comes along. So what’re you doing to continually be that better deal?
Fig 2: Blogger advice to companies
I think it’s easy for many of us in the “fishbowl” to look at this and say “so what’s new?”. But we have to keep in mind that companies by and large do not know this, or are skeptical. Solid, empirical research by a firm like Text 100 definitely helps bring some credibility to the discussion (especially in Asia), and I personally applaud the time, effort and I’m sure money put in to make this happen.
Tags: advice to companies, blogger advice, blogger survey analysis, company contact, social media release, text 100 blogger survey, time spent blogging
Posted in Research | 2 Comments »
Sunday, July 13th, 2008
Bloggers seem to know what the social media release is about. Or at least 60% of them do (Fig 1), and 72% of those who do, find it an effective communications tool.
Fig 1 – The social media release
The social media release results I take with a little pinch of salt purely because of the small sample size. It’s easy to look at it and say “Wow Singapore understands the social media release!” but remember we’re talking only 14 bloggers in Singapore.
Let’s add on a second bit of information, that 88% of bloggers aware of the social media release would use the related material in blog posts (Fig 2).
Fig 2 – Using social media release material in blog posts
This makes the picture a little bit clearer. Bloggers don’t have a lot of time to write lots of original stuff about you. Providing them with the right quotes, videos, pictures, etc can make their life easier. Think of it as how you submit a ready-to-print press release to a journalist, compared to the bare minimum and expecting the journalist to write the rest himself. Not gonna work right?
Here’s where it’s easy to put two and two together. Bloggers are receptive to using your material, and bloggers like using video.
Need I connect the dots for you to say what you should include in your social media release? One thing though, if you’re not confident of your video standing up to scrutiny, you should just skip on it, because the focus can very quickly turn to “look what a joke this video is” instead of focusing on your message.
Fig 3 – Sources of information about companies
Finally Fig 3 tells us that more than one in two bloggers talk about companies. Also, the accompanying caption in this slide points out that social bookmarking sites are the lowest ranked for bloggers to find out more information about a company. I’d like to point out that “other bloggers” is ranked first. So bloggers turn to other bloggers for information about your company, and generally speaking, one in two bloggers talk about companies (maybe yours). Does that scare you?
Before I end, I’d just like to drop off a couple of quotes that I saw in the survey about what bloggers feel the contact person should be saying/doing.
“Keep it short and to the point – lay off the extreme glorification of companies”
“Information in advance is crucial so the blogger has time to consider, research and develop the content into meaningful posts”
“Few corporates and almost no PR companies have websites that provide regularly updated, easily searchable press release archives”
How’s that for some Sunday afternoon reading? Tomorrow I’ll close up this topic with a few more quotes and a ball park figure for how much time bloggers spend blogging.
This is part three of an analysis of a blogger survey conducted by Text 100. Here are links to part one and part two, as well as the social media release template.
Tags: bloggers and the social media release, blogging about companies, is social media release relevant, social media release, social media release template, sources of information about companies, text 100 blogger survey, where bloggers find information about companies
Posted in Research | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
Yesterday I tackled how bloggers are open to company contact, and knowing that, today I’ll explore what the research says about who should contact the bloggers, and with what content.
Fig 5: Who should contact the blogger?
There seems to be a preference for the PR person, though the score for the company executive scores just over 50% which isn’t bad in my books. I personally have no explanation for this difference. I’m not entirely sure bloggers can tell between a PR rep, comms rep and company executive in the first place. What I like about the findings here is the verbatim quotes on the right, particularly “what they talk about should be relevant to my blog” (sounds like something I would say), “Prefer to talk with active bloggers or those prominent in the blogger community“.
This tells me three things:
1) Please be relevant
2) For people looking to be hired by a PR firm or in-house communications department, your network can be a huge asset. If you’re a well-known, well-liked person in the blogger community, people are going to listen.
3) Companies who don’t have this well-known, well-liked blogger in their office, it’s time to start a blog and become one
Fig 2: Should there be prior contact?
From Fig 2, we see that 78% of the respondents prefer initial contact to be made before shoving a press release down their throats. 78% across all respondents and countries suggest it to be pretty significant, so I’d pay attention to this. What should the initial contact comprise of? Show us you read our blog with responses to our blog posts (Fig 3)
Fig 3: What content appeals?
I find for me, if someone sends me a message demonstrating he/she has read what I’ve blogged about, even if he/she disagrees, I’m more likely to be receptive to the message. Research is not Googling “social media” and emailing the top 10 searches, it’s reading their blogs too.
Note that “corporate news announcements” scores the lowest by quite a wide margin. Simply put? Bloggers don’t want to hear about your quarterly earnings or the usual stuff we can read in the papers. Give us something with a story, something to be excited about, like a new product.
If you’ve made it that far, knowing bloggers invite company contact, and you’ve sent the right representative and made contact in the right way, what should you send them that’s related to you? The response seems to be overwhelmingly video (Fig 4)
Fig 4: What content appeals to bloggers
It’s no coincidence that in my first post, I chose to upload the four videos supplied to me as a primer to the research results. Video is fairly painless to upload (unless you’re using Wordpress) and very easy to view. A word of caution: if you are going to use video, please use one that doesn’t insult the intelligence of the blogger and his readers.
Tomorrow: Should you bother with a social media release and some blogger comments
Tags: bloggers open to company contact, relevant materials for bloggers, what content to contact bloggers with, who should contact bloggers
Posted in Blogs, Research | 5 Comments »
Monday, July 7th, 2008
Yesterday I posted up four videos (which didn’t work), but I promised to get into the Text 100 survey results further in detail today, so don’t worry, you’re not missing much without the videos.
Before I start, I want to say that while the absolute number of bloggers surveyed is actually pretty substantial (n=125), the numbers per region are actually pretty small (Fig 1), so I would advise caution in saying this applies to everyone (the survey says this too). However, I do find the aggregated results to be quite interesting. The first one that comes up that I’ll deal with today is that bloggers are generally open to contact by companies (Fig 2)
Fig 1: Respondent breakdown by country
Fig 2: 84% of bloggers welcome contact from companies
Not terribly surprising if you ask me. At least locally with the bloggers I know, you can’t throw a stone and not hit someone who has been in contact with a company.
Bloggers like to be contacted via email, or a comment on their blog (Fig 3), with those coming out with the highest 2 mean scores.
Fig 3: Preferred method of contact
What I find interesting is that “face to face meeting” scored 30% on “third ranked method of contact”. That means 30% of the respondents chose face to face as their third preferred communication method. At first glance that might tell us that we maybe should initiate a personal meet up with bloggers, but then another piece of data comes in
Fig 4: Face to face preference
On the importance of face to face meetings (Fig 4) you can see the mean score is almost right in the middle at 5.4. First thing that jumps to mind? The data tends towards the extremes, which is why the average falls in the middle. Interesting stuff (and kudos to them for picking this out). What I’d like to see is whether the importance scores particularly higher in certain countries and maybe lower in certain countries. That might help us understand culturally, where the differences are.
My conclusions from this so far: bloggers in Asia are open to contact, digital means should probably come first, with the invitation/option to meet face to face if the blogger desires. So far, very much in line with how I view company contact.
Tomorrow: who should initiate contact, what you should do before contact and what kind of content bloggers probably want.
Edit: By the way, research is not really my field of study in school. So if I’m interpreting some results wrongly or there is another way of viewing the data, I’d really appreciate if you point it out! Thanks!
Tags: asian blogger surveys, asian bloggers open to company contact, asian bloggers open to PR contact, contact bloggers digitally, establishing a connection with bloggers, how to contact bloggers, meeting bloggers face to face, personal preference, text 100 blogger survey results
Posted in Blogs, Research | 4 Comments »
Thursday, May 8th, 2008
Listening to Marketing Over Coffee on the way home, there was a very small section talking about GoogleDocs and how you can activate a form to collect data for you. It also made me think further on the question about how much we’re collaborating (or not collaborating) online.
We had to create a wiki for our social media class, and of course, wikis tell you how much (or little) someone edited the final output. It was noted that a handful of people contributed the majority of the content, which made our Professor, Michael Netzley, less than thrilled. I brought up the point that though a few people may have been the actual ones to enter the text, doesn’t mean the whole team did not collaborate together. Both sides are debatable, but that’s not the point.
I’m an assistant scout leader for my alma mater’s scout troop and every year around this time we have a camp. As with previous years, the emails pile up, meeting minutes get distributed, camp schedules get sent and changed and re-sent and re-changed until eventually, no one knows what in the world is going on anymore.
To solve this, I set up a wiki for the leaders. It’s a private wiki so I’m sorry I can’t share the link. I will however say that we’re using PBwiki, which I find to be superior to Wetpaint in terms of editing as well as help. But that aside, so far it’s been helping us keep track of personnel and manpower, topics of discussion, a couple of things to be noted, schedules, equipment lists and so on.
No more losing of minutes on paper, no more “can you send me the latest schedule? I can’t find it”. Everything is up there and updated. To the minute.
So why aren’t more of us doing this? Is it the challenge of working alone as Michael brings up? Or an unwillingness to change our styles of working?
Does it make sense for us to share our items on Google Reader (my shared items are here)? Or on del.icio.us? How about collaborating on Google Docs in the classroom? In the office?
To me the biggest problem is convincing the people you’re working with that it’s worth their while. In my scout case study, I knew the people who were primarily going to enter the data would be the younger adult leaders, while the older leaders would keep and eye on it from time to time. To both of these groups, you gotta speak their language.
To my peers, it was the idea of collaboration. To see everything in one place, to have links and for easy reading. To the senior leaders, it was the idea of streamlining information. Not losing paper, not having to distinguish whether schedule(final).doc is the true schedule or schedule(final)THISISTHEREALFINAL.doc is the true schedule.
So how’s collaboration working (or not working) for you? Are you using wikis regularly? Online document processors or software based? Is it a challenge convincing your classmates/colleagues to use it as well?
Tags: collaborating with google docs, collaboration, collaboration on google docs, communicate asia, google docs, googledocs, marketing over coffee, meeting minutes, michael netzley, pbwiki vs wetpaint, schedules, scout wiki, scouts, sharing google reader items, social bookmarking, social media class, wiki
Posted in Google, Icio, Research, collaboration, social media | 4 Comments »
Sunday, May 4th, 2008
A few more thoughts on the influence issue, part one is here. Once again, I’m exploring this from the consumer’s point of view based on how I surf and am affected (or not) by what the blogs I read say.
Case Study 4: Podfire Soft Launch
The Podfire soft launch got pretty good coverage on ping.sg. I think that night and the day following, easily 3-4 of the top then most read posts were on blog coverage of the Podfire launch. One thing about influence and popularity is network effects.
One person talking about it positively on ping.sg is very different from five people talking positively about it. Again pulling in the “people like me vs bloggers” debate into the picture, I’m thinking someone who knows some or all of the five people talking about it (or any other topic) will probably feel a compelling reason to at least check it out.
Will it lead to the complete viewing of a video? Will they be repeat viewers? I don’t know, but by that stage, the product has to speak for itself. But leading them to click is the first step.
It’s Not About Reach Or Circulation
I read a comment somewhere ridiculing the buzz of the Podfire launch saying some people didn’t hear about it. Completely missing the point. I’m always asked in school whether I saw an article in the newspapers, or a good/bad advertisement on tv last night, and the answer is usually no. So…. people didn’t hear about it via print or tv either and therefore it’s useless?
The important thing for Podfire (and how blogs should be approached), is to try to reach the immediate community (small as they may be) and work from there. It’s targeted as opposed to the shotgun approach.
Get Help!
Su Yuen has a Facebook application called Get Help. It allows users to post out a question and get replies back from friends, acquaintances or maybe strangers. Again, the idea of influence seems relative. Anyone can help on the app, to varying degrees of influence. Would you discount a brilliant idea via Get Help just because a person who replied is a stranger?
Even “Weak” Links/Influencers Play A part
Case Study 1: Camera Buying
When I was deciding which dslr to get, Ingrid recommended a friend to of hers to help me out. I didn’t have any idea who that friend was prior to this, but I did continually go back and ask her what she thought of product A over product B, and bought the final camera based on that advice. Could I have made my decision by reading a professional photographer’s review? Sure. But the fact that I could interact with this person and listen to firsthand experiences made a difference to me. It just happens in this case she isn’t a blogger. But… what if she was?
Case Study 2: Iron Man
Twitter has been alight with raving, positive Iron Man reviews. I’m reading about people from all over the world (majority of whom I’ve never even met) saying how good it is. The Straits Times gave it three stars. After watching the show, I’m glad I didn’t listen to an “expert” reviewer, because anyone who’s watched the show will know it’s not deserving of three stars. Would you like to listen to an “expert” reviewer and forgo the show? (Assuming three stars is your threshold for “not watching”)
Ultimately this issue is still a tough one to tackle. My point here is not to say bloggers are the influencers, but that pointing to the various research without considering the intricacies of it is probably a bad idea. We know about the Long Tail (The ants have megaphones) and about the Wisdom of Crowds and crowdsourcing, and blogging fits squarely into the realm of these phenomena.
Tags: ants have megaphones, bloggers, crowdsourcing, expert reviewer, facebook application, get help, influence, influencers, iron man reviews, network effects, people like me, ping.sg, podfire, podfire soft launch, straits times, the long tail, twitter, weak links, wisdom of crowds
Posted in Blogs, Media, Research, Singapore, social media | 5 Comments »
Sunday, May 4th, 2008
The topic of “influence” has appeared a number of times, generated out of the “Why social media struggles in Singapore” post. I was writing that post from the corporation’s point of view, and questioning whether a certain factor (size) may be a factor that has hindered social media’s growth.
But let’s look at this from the point of view of the consumers: Are we really influenced by bloggers?
What The Research Says
Result summary: People trust “people like themselves” the most, an “bloggers” the least. Okay wait, before you stop reading this right now and say “Okay, let’s cancel our blogger relations initiative”, read on.
Are Bloggers Really Trusted The Least?
When I saw the findings, my first thought was “But, what if a blogger is someone like me?”. This is something lacking in the research, and is brought up by Jason Mical and Jeremiah in the comments:
[By Jason]I believe about marketing and the direction it’s going in the digital space, and you have a proven record of posting insightful things that I find useful in thinking about this as well. So I would classify you as ’someone with my interests’ before I would classify you as a blogger in this regard.
[By Jeremiah]I agree, I wish I had more insight to how the questions about “do you trust blogs” were done. We need to see the context, as it could be broken down to:
“do you trust bloggers with similar opinions, that you read frequently”
or
“do you trust random blogs you stumble across”
Perhaps the questions could even be posed a different way: “do you trust the opinions of bloggers?”
I don’t think the lines between “people like me” and bloggers are as far apart as the research shows. And I definitely do not think the results are as disparate as the research claims.
I have a couple of case studies I thought of off the top of my head, tell me if they make sense to you, and keep in mind this is written from the point of view of a consumer.
Case Study 1: Xiaxue
I don’t read her, definitely don’t identify with her, to me she’s a “blogger”. But how about the 20 thousand people who read her blog daily? Does she have no influence over them? From the amount of comments generated in her defense whenever someone slams her, I’d say she has considerable influence over them.
Case Study 2: Kenny Sia
I had the privilege of meeting Kenny at the IDC Conference and he blogged about it, linking me. That one post generated almost 1,500 traffic to my blog, the next closest being tomorrow.sg with about 500. I’m not sure how you want to classify tomorrow.sg, but looking at the data, clearly 1,500 people think Kenny is not “just a blogger” but someone who influences them and makes them think “I identify with Kenny, he thinks Daryl is worth putting a link to, so that might probably be interesting to me too”, and hence the clicks. I can’t speak for everyone, but that’s definitely my personal thought process when browsing blogs.
Case Study 3: FriendFeed
FriendFeed is growing in popularity in North America. The level of activity after it opened from beta is exponentially higher than the level of activity before. Let’s look at the other categories from the research. Review on tv? Review on retailer site? I don’t think so.
Friendfeed was spread via word of mouth online from people who follow the early adopters and advocates like Louis Gray. Certainly I don’t know Louis personally (though we’re mutual readers of each others’ blog), but neither is he some anonymous blogger online. He’s someone I know covers a great niche in the social media space on rss aggregation, and I’m interested in all things social media, hence I definitely trust and believe his opinions. In fact I also signed up for LinkRiver, AssetBar and Yokway based on his recommendations. Admittedly I only use LinkRiver with any frequency, but I think that’s attributed to the product rather than the medium (Louis).
This post has gone on a little longer than I thought it would and I have a few more thoughts on reach as well as “weak” links or influences which I’ll try to post this evening. In the meantime, what do you think? As clear cut as the research suggests? Or are there intricacies at work that are unexplored? Do you classify bloggers in the same category as “people like me”? Or are they clear and distinctly separated?
Tags: are bloggers influencers, edelman research, forrester research, friendfeed, influence, influence research, jason mical, jeremiah owyang, kenny sia, people like me, social media, social media research, social media singapore, xiaxue
Posted in Blogs, Research, social media | 15 Comments »
