Two Kinds of Social Media – ‘Media’ and ‘Personal’

Steve Rubel, is quoted in MediaPost providing some great insights on the convergence of social and traditional media:

“We are amazed at the number of people who view social media and traditional media as two different things. But 75% of newspaper sites now let people comment, and 100% have blogs. The elephants and zebras have mated, and it’s all one species.”

This gives me a chance to reiterate the distinction between the two kinds of social media. One is social media as a new, evolved form of traditional media: professionally produced content – the few speaking to the masses, just with a better mechanism for the masses to speak back. The other is social media as a medium for people’s self expression. The first kind is what Rubel is referring to – a new medium for businesses to reach out and talk to their customers, and finally a chance to listen to customers talk back. Steve is absolutely right that businesses should jump in and take advantage of this wonderful new medium.

Let’s not forget however that “social media” wasn’t born as media in the traditional sense. Social media is primarily a tool that people use for self expression and communication. It has nothing to do with business and everything to do with personal creativity, needs and wants. It’s akin to chatting with friends over the phone or writing to the personal diary that you keep in your bedside drawer. The vast majority of social media content is just that – for every one person from Comcast responding to people’s complaints on Twitter, there are 99 (999?) others reporting that they hate monday mornings, and for every official, branded page on Facebook there are 999 people sharing photos from their recent trip to Thailand.

What makes all of this personal content different from what went before, and relevant for business after all, is that it is public and measurable. Privacy aside for the moment (because privacy is a big issue and deserves separate treatment), it promisses to give business an unprecendented level of understanding of their customers.

What would you give, as a marketer, to be able to peek over a customer’s shoulder as she writes to her personal diary, or to (legally) listen in on her phone calls with friends? What would you say if you could do that with millions of conversations simultaneously, and get just the relevant insights, quickly and easily? Well, that future is here, and in my opinion it’s the really exciting aspect of social media (from a business perspective…). It’s discussed far less often on the media – perhaps because it isn’t a direct outgrowth of traditional media, and thus not as simple to understand. Given the implications though, I believe that it’ll prove to be even more revolutionary for marketing.

From Speed to Instantaneity – The Transformation of Marketing

An advertisement from 1888 of the first Kodak camera

We are used to constant technological change improving our lives. Many changes have to do with increased speed – railroads and then cars taking over from horses and human feet is the classic example. Many have to do with increased efficiency and thus reduced cost as well, such as movable type and then the printing press taking over from monks with quill pens, or photography taking over from portrait painting in the mid 19th century, then Eastman Kodak’s camera and film letting anyone make pictures.

But only in the late 20th century have we seen the birth of an entirely new category of change – that of making things instantaneous. The telephone, enabling instant communication at a distance, transformed society above and beyond gradual improvements that had made mail faster and more reliable. Polaroid, cutting out to nothing the time lag between shooting and viewing, then digital photography cutting the cost down to nothing, cellphone cameras making it all ubiquitous and flickr and YouTube allowing for instant sharing combine to transform society far beyond the way that photography originally did. So do wikis, blogs and activity streams change the meaning of publishing beyond recognition (a change that the news print industry is feeling now, and the book industry does not yet realize is coming its way).

In short, the relatively recent (in historic terms) development of instantaneity, makes it hard for us to look at it with the required perspective and fully appreciate its qualitative effects. We don’t recognize it easily as it invades yet another aspect of our lives, and most of us fail to grasp the opportunities that arrive in its wake, as old practices are transformed beyond recognition.

It is time I got to the point and connected all of this to marketing, research and HiveSight, so allow me one more example that will get us there. Think of Google as a research tool, compared with a library. Google is instantaneous, both in that it’s always available – just a click away, and in the speed in which it serves you results. You can’t do everything with Google – for some things you still need to go to the library (literally go – drive, park, walk, then back again), but how often do you find yourself doing that, and how does that compare with your frequency of Google queries? For querying Google for information is a form of research just as searching for books in a library is. It’s just that it’s immediacy makes you not give it a second thought – just like the teenager snapping a photo on her mobile, the new cadre of addicts sharing their lives on twitter, or, well, picking up the phone and calling someone (vs. sending a letter). Note that not all of these transformative technological changes are immediately evident to everyone. Phones and Google may be, but using your phone’s camera or twitter are not ubiquitous practices. The latter in particular is something that most people still don’t get.

Now we finally come to another market that I believe is on the verge of being transformed (indeed I have put my carear and life savings behind that belief) – consumer market research. With HiveSight, we set out two years ago to transform that market by making consumer insights instantaneous in the same way that Google search results are. We set out with the realization that traditional methods don’t work very well any longer, but social media allows for a way to read the public consumer mind like never before. We set out to make learning something new about your target market, something that could help you build the products they want and figure out how to reach them, a matter of just a few clicks followed by instant results. We set out to disintermediate market research – placing it right in the hands of its users in marketing departments and ad agencies.

When all of this is true, and to a large extent HiveSight delivers on that promise today, marketing itself is transformed.

What are you measuring – the Social or the Media?

Photo: hoyasmeg

Right now, if you’re among the vanguard involved in social media measurement, you’re probably measuring the media – the channel. It’s time to consider measuring the social – the audience. Let me exaplain…

Social media really is different from “old” media, in that the vast majority of it isn’t media at all but parts of it are, which make it all confusing.
By media I mean something like the New York Times or ABC – professionals creating content, content being collected into some outlet (usually but not necessarily any longer) with some editorial oversight, outlet distributing content to audience. Blogs on NY Times are still media even though you can comment and “share”, and NBC shows on hulu are still media even though they have user reviews and discussions. The only difference (“only” not making it any less significant) is that now the audience gets to participate more than they ever could in the past.
The point is – it’s still a channel, and marketers realized pretty quickly that they can use it as just another channel – a way to deliver their message to an audience. Here’s a good example – Audi delivering an R8 to a high profile blogger to drive for a week, with the expectation (which he didn’t fail to meet), that he’ll write a positive authentic (buzzword du-jour) review. Don’t get me wrong now – I think it’s good marketing – I read Guy Kawasaki regularly, but not any car magazines, and his authentic enthusiasm and great photos resonate with me, probably better than a professional review would have. I had an Audi years ago, and this blog sure managed to re-kindle a certain yearning.
Back to measurement. The sort of results you’d want to measure after this publicity stunt is just what you’d measure for “old” media – something like what you can find here:

“Dunkin’s SMI rose five points or 20% — from 42.6 to 47.6 – between the day before the Inauguration (Jan. 19) and Jan. 26.”

In other words, there are 20% more mentions of Dunkin on social media. Clearly their promotional activities had an effect.

Now finally my point: By measuring social media this way you’re missing all the really important stuff:

1. Is it the same people mentioning Dunkin 20% more, or 20% more people mentioning Dunkin?
2. Who are these people? Do they belong in the market segment that Dunkin targeted with its promotional activities? Did they manage to reach out (maybe inadvertently) to a new segment?

Both cases – looking at “lift” alone, and not segmenting – are classic old-media bias – where you had a few news sources and only cared about how many times you’re mentioned. That’s because you see media not as your customers, but as a channel through which to reach those customers. But that’s just not true with social media! A better name for it is consumer generated content. Once you realize that what you’re measuring is not the channel but rather the target audience itself, it becomes clear that buzz measurement alone isn’t what you’re looking for.

I’ll repeat this last message again: 99.9% of the people you find on social networks, blogs, message boards etc. aren’t high-profile bloggers like Guy Kawasaki. They’re read by only a handful of friends and thus are hardly worth the expense of giving them a sports car for a week – you ain’t gonna get much publicity that way. But they’re worth measuring, and in a way that’s different from media measurement.

Social media isn’t the media speaking at your customers.
It’s the customers speaking at one another.

So the takeouts are:

1. You shouldn’t count mentions. You should count people.
2. People are different. Learn about them. Segment.

HiveSight – How it Works

So how does HiveSight work? What’s happening behind the scenes?

We get asked this question a lot, so we created this presentation to offer a simple explanation, without getting too technical:

Is Obama to McCain as Nokia is to Diet Coke?

"If Obama Is Nokia, Then McCain Is Diet Coke" writes Aaron Baar in MediaPosts' Marketing Daily.

I'm going to stretch the metaphor a bit, but the title just begged a quick comparison.
So, does a comparison of consumers who like Obama on social media with those who like McCain look anything like a comparison of Nokia and Diet Coke?
Here's the Obama vs. McCain comparison, and here's Nokia vs Diet Coke. Go ahead and find out…

Troubled Project Playlist is NO. 1 Widget Provider

TechCrunch wrote yesterday on trouble at Project Playlist, a service that lets users create music playlists and embed them on their social network profiles.

What amazes me is that people don't realize that playlist.com the No. 1 widget provider right now.

A look at data from compete.com, comparing playlist.com with two other top widget makers – slide.com and rockyou.com show the tremendous growth that they've experienced over the past year:

HiveSight data agrees – out of our total sample of roughly 30 million online profiles, 1.2 million have a playlist.com widget, 786,000 have a slide.com widget, and only 454,000 have a widget from rockyou.com.
The chart below shows how all widgets makers are enjoying an explosive growth lately, but playlist.com is growing even faster.
(Note: unlike compete.com data, which estimates the number of unique visitors to websites, HiveSight data below shows the percentage of social media profiles in our sample that have a widget from one of these providers installed).

 
Moreover, Project Playlist (in green below) enjoys a unique demographic – more male and younger than the other two (slide.com is in purple and rockyou.com is in orange).

 

Use this link to explore further on HiveSight.

Let Me See (the marketer’s version)

Seth Godin is disucssing data again today, but mostly from a consumer’s point of view. It’s unfortunate that as a consumer I don’t have access to that kind of data yet (although I’m sure that this kind of services are just around the corner). The good news is, that marketers now have access to wonderful data. Let’s see how HiveSight can add some points to Seth’s list, with marketers in mind:

1. Let me see my customers’ favorite TV shows, sorted by their popularity (popularity with my customers, not the overall population). Let’s say that I work for McDonald’s, here’s the list – click the genres to see the actual shows.
2. Now let me see the same list, but compare my customers with those of my biggest two competitors, in this example we’ll have McDonalds compared with Burger King and Wendy’s – here it is (apparently, Grey’s Anatomy isn’t Burger King fans’ kind of show).
3. Repeat that exercise with favorite movies ( turns out that Wendy’s customers are 2.7 times more likely to be Fight Club fans, in comparison to McDoanld’s), musicians (did you know that McDonald’s customers are the biggest hip hop fans, whereas Buger King’s are much more likely than the rest to like country music?), video games (Wendy’s customers have the highest affinity with those, versus the other brands).
4. Now let’s flip sides. Say I’m a one of my favorite musicians, the Red Hot Chili Peppers; Let me see my fans’ favorite favorite fast food chain. Here’s the list, and numero uno is a fellow native of Seattle, Starbucks (yeah, I know, it’s debatable whether Starbucks should be considered fast food).
   Now let’s compare with another northwestern band, but from across the border – Nickelback. Turns out that Starbucks is their fans’ favorite too. But check out Pizza Hut – huge difference there.
5. Let’s get wild now – let me see my fans’ favorite fashion brands. It looks like Nickelback fans leave RHCP’s behind when it comes to brands like Holister, American Eagle or Abercrombie and Fitch. On the other hand, Nickelback, it turns out, have slightly more female fans. It’s the other way around for the Chili Peppers.

Other ideas? Questions? Please share them in the comments.

HiveSight a TWS 2008 Winner!

We’ve great news today – HiveSight was selected as one of ten most promising start-ups in Israel in the TWS 2008 conference. TWS08 is Israel’s official dot com.petition. We were selected out of 100 submissions by a very impressive panel of judges.

The event today was really exciting, especially since we had a chance to present HiveSight to many smart entrepreneurs, investors, start-up enthusiasts, and many other members of the tech community in Israel. Feedback is an essential resource for a start-up, and all the intelligent comments and suggestions that we got today will surely help us improve our product in the near future.
We were asked many questions on how we do what we do, which I’ll try to address in this blog in the coming weeks.

I encourage you to visit the sites of the other 9 winners – there are links in the Mashable article covering the event.

My personal favorite is Nuconomy – their website analytics product is truly amazing.

Lamppost-driven Exploration

Today, a joke:

A drunk loses the keys to his house and is looking for them under a lamppost. A policeman comes over and asks what he’s doing.
“I’m looking for my keys” he says. “I lost them over there”.
The policeman looks puzzled. “Then why are you looking for them all the way over here?”
“Because the light is so much better”.

(I copied the text from here).

The allegory in our case is (surprise, surprise) consumer market research. Surveys specifically. The problem there is that you can only ask the questions you know about – you only look under the proverbial lamppost. Is that wise?

To quote Claude Levi-Strauss:

"The wise man doesn’t give the right answers, he poses the right questions."

But how can you discover the right questions? Let’s look to another wise man, Marcel Proust:

"The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is."

This is exactly what we built HiveSight for: you don’t ask questions and get answers. Instead, you explore the world of human interests through the eyes of hundreds, thousands, even millions at a time.

Back to our lamppost allegory, what you may cal lamppost-driven exploration clearly won’t yield much in way of new discoveries. I like to think of HiveSight as a new kind of lamppost – a very tall one, that sheds light on areas that weren’t previously illuminated so you can explore and make new discoveries.

Go ahead and try it out. What will you discover?

Data First, Theories Later

My favorite gurus are talking about data this week.

In a great post today, Seth Godin discusses his five elements of marketing (and only one of them starts with a "P"). He begins with data and makes the following statement:

"Data is powerful, overlooked and sometimes mistaken for boring. You don’t have to understand the why, you merely need to know the what."

On Monday, Chris Anderson published a wonderful piece in Wired, titled "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete".
Anderson is making a bold claim, that the scientific method – "hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete":

"This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves."

And later in the article:

"There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show."

It’s as if he’s talking about HiveSight!

Take the current model of market research, modeled on the scientific method – come up with a theory of your product and its place in the market and in consumer minds, formulate the questions to test that, build the panel or focus group, then finally test your hypotheses.
Now contrast that with the HiveSight model of consumer exploration – query for your brand, your competitors’ brands or your product category, and discover who your consumers are and what else they like. No need to hypothesize – let the data speak for itself (we are there to help you listen).

Go ahead, try some of our examples, then build your own and start exploring. What will you discover today?