Archive for November, 2009
November 2009
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I Love Me, I Really Really Love Me
posted by in
Mon 30th
Personal brands have proliferated in the conversational marketing era. It’s the self-referential, self-promoting quality of the personal brand that I hate so much. Things like a radical imbalance between followed and followers (flock?) on twitter. It’s as if their corpus of knowledge is so vast that they don’t need to absord any new information from anyone else, while at the same time, they expect their fawning coterie of digital groupies to hang on every word they sputter out.
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Black Friday makes for preliminary validation of holiday growth forecasts
posted by in
Thu 26th
On the web, the initial prognostications for Holiday 2009 are rosy. comScore pegs online growth at 3% for the upcoming season. While not spectacular relative to pre-Recession year-over-year growth rates, +3% is certainly far more palatable that the 3% decline that online retailers witnessed last year. Others are even more bullish: Forrester analysts project online retail sales to reach $44.7 billion during November and December, a very healthy year-over-year increase of 8%.
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Corporate trolling on employees’ Facebook pages
posted by in
Tue 24th
I challenge companies to think more creatively about the way in which they surveil their employees’ Facebook pages. Not all of the stuff that goes up there is scandalous; there are those who use their profiles to broadcast more wholesome things—fundraisers, food drives, art gallery openings, humanitarian causes. If companies are going to censure shameful self-expression on Facebook, then they should equally affirm and promote the more altruistic forms of self-expression that also exist in the social media realm. Linking to, promoting, or retweeting causes espoused by their employees—any of these actions would be a healthy exercise in balance, and would also help erase the fear that your boss is lurking on your Facebook page, waiting for you to slip up.
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The Soul Problem: Does your Company have one?
posted by in
Fri 20th
It’s easy to know a soulful company when you walk into one. I’m not talking about post-industrial chic or foosball tables or pets running freely through the boardroom. I’m talking about the collective demeanor of the people you pass in the halls. There’s an easy yet authentic confidence that starts at the top, an unarticulated yet palpable sense of freedom and possibility. You wonder at how they can be so blunt, so revealing in the way they blog and tweet. They don’t keep anything under wraps. Why should they? They have nothing to hide. The sky is literally the limit, and you walk out their offices dreaming of ways through which you can latch onto a part of their inexorable upward momentum.
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Metrics Move from Website to Consumer
posted by in
Wed 18th
Website metrics have been slotted in alongside social media metrics in the category of new measurements that would phase out offline surveys and focus groups. I disagree. I think website metrics are increasingly in the rearview of the digital marketing ecosystem, cruising along sluggishly while social media metrics blow by them in the passing lane.
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We all Sense the Ghost Tweeters
posted by in
Mon 16th
As twitter gained mainstream recognition, it became de rigeur to be on there. Politicians, artists, sports agents–each segment saw in twitter a conversation stream in which they HAD to have a voice. But if twitter had not achieved such rapid growth, would the glitterati have flocked to it?
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The Social Exchange Theory: What’s Your Net Worth?
posted by in
Sat 14th
Twitter has no memory. Memes flare up, get to scale, and then peter out completely within days, sometimes hours. One of the criticisms levelled at twitter as a cogent communication medium is its stunning immediacy—an immediacy that doesn’t really care about what preceded it or what will follow it. These hyper-now flare-ups— ripples in the stream, as Nick Carr calls them—might seem dangerous at face value, but stick around for three more hours and they will have faded from the jet stream of collective human consciousness.
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Edelman builds the twitter influence formula to end all twitter influence formulas
posted by in
Wed 11th
meaningful and accurate measures of influence are those that correlate twitter activity with real world activity. We need to establish an objective, external basis for influence; we can’t simply compute twitter influence as some amalgam of its own constituent parts (followers, lists, retweets, etc.). Real influence is about so much more than that. I think that’s what Brian Solis is talking about when he says that trust agents or influencers are ”omnipresent.” Their authority transcends the narrow confines of any particular medium. Their influence carries a universal scope; it goes beyond 140 character spurts and seeps into the real actions and attitudes that people undertake and adopt.
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Remember the great website engagement debate?
posted by in
Tue 10th
Remember the great website engagement debate? Remember all the hand-wringing and byte-spilling about formulas that were supposed to represent the holy grail of web analytics? Mercifully, the echoes of those debates have subsided. But now something new, and equally fatuous, has emerged: the concept of twitter influence.
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When it comes to research, proximity is critical
posted by in
Sat 7th
When it comes to online research (or any research for that matter), proximity to an event is critical to establishing accurate, precise, and reliable recollections and descriptions of an event or experience. Confounded recall is the bane of much post-purchase market research; as a person’s memory gets fuzzier, the quality of the data they provide gets more and more specious. That’s why I’ve always advocated measurement approaches that capture data in close proximity to the actual (buying or non-buying) experience.
I Love Me, I Really Really Love Me
posted by in
Personal brands have proliferated in the conversational marketing era. It’s the self-referential, self-promoting quality of the personal brand that I hate so much. Things like a radical imbalance between followed and followers (flock?) on twitter. It’s as if their corpus of knowledge is so vast that they don’t need to absord any new information from anyone else, while at the same time, they expect their fawning coterie of digital groupies to hang on every word they sputter out.
Black Friday makes for preliminary validation of holiday growth forecasts
posted by in
On the web, the initial prognostications for Holiday 2009 are rosy. comScore pegs online growth at 3% for the upcoming season. While not spectacular relative to pre-Recession year-over-year growth rates, +3% is certainly far more palatable that the 3% decline that online retailers witnessed last year. Others are even more bullish: Forrester analysts project online retail sales to reach $44.7 billion during November and December, a very healthy year-over-year increase of 8%.
Corporate trolling on employees’ Facebook pages
posted by in
I challenge companies to think more creatively about the way in which they surveil their employees’ Facebook pages. Not all of the stuff that goes up there is scandalous; there are those who use their profiles to broadcast more wholesome things—fundraisers, food drives, art gallery openings, humanitarian causes. If companies are going to censure shameful self-expression on Facebook, then they should equally affirm and promote the more altruistic forms of self-expression that also exist in the social media realm. Linking to, promoting, or retweeting causes espoused by their employees—any of these actions would be a healthy exercise in balance, and would also help erase the fear that your boss is lurking on your Facebook page, waiting for you to slip up.
The Soul Problem: Does your Company have one?
posted by in
It’s easy to know a soulful company when you walk into one. I’m not talking about post-industrial chic or foosball tables or pets running freely through the boardroom. I’m talking about the collective demeanor of the people you pass in the halls. There’s an easy yet authentic confidence that starts at the top, an unarticulated yet palpable sense of freedom and possibility. You wonder at how they can be so blunt, so revealing in the way they blog and tweet. They don’t keep anything under wraps. Why should they? They have nothing to hide. The sky is literally the limit, and you walk out their offices dreaming of ways through which you can latch onto a part of their inexorable upward momentum.
Metrics Move from Website to Consumer
posted by in
Website metrics have been slotted in alongside social media metrics in the category of new measurements that would phase out offline surveys and focus groups. I disagree. I think website metrics are increasingly in the rearview of the digital marketing ecosystem, cruising along sluggishly while social media metrics blow by them in the passing lane.
We all Sense the Ghost Tweeters
posted by in
As twitter gained mainstream recognition, it became de rigeur to be on there. Politicians, artists, sports agents–each segment saw in twitter a conversation stream in which they HAD to have a voice. But if twitter had not achieved such rapid growth, would the glitterati have flocked to it?
The Social Exchange Theory: What’s Your Net Worth?
posted by in
Twitter has no memory. Memes flare up, get to scale, and then peter out completely within days, sometimes hours. One of the criticisms levelled at twitter as a cogent communication medium is its stunning immediacy—an immediacy that doesn’t really care about what preceded it or what will follow it. These hyper-now flare-ups— ripples in the stream, as Nick Carr calls them—might seem dangerous at face value, but stick around for three more hours and they will have faded from the jet stream of collective human consciousness.
Edelman builds the twitter influence formula to end all twitter influence formulas
posted by in
meaningful and accurate measures of influence are those that correlate twitter activity with real world activity. We need to establish an objective, external basis for influence; we can’t simply compute twitter influence as some amalgam of its own constituent parts (followers, lists, retweets, etc.). Real influence is about so much more than that. I think that’s what Brian Solis is talking about when he says that trust agents or influencers are ”omnipresent.” Their authority transcends the narrow confines of any particular medium. Their influence carries a universal scope; it goes beyond 140 character spurts and seeps into the real actions and attitudes that people undertake and adopt.
Remember the great website engagement debate?
posted by in
Remember the great website engagement debate? Remember all the hand-wringing and byte-spilling about formulas that were supposed to represent the holy grail of web analytics? Mercifully, the echoes of those debates have subsided. But now something new, and equally fatuous, has emerged: the concept of twitter influence.
When it comes to research, proximity is critical
posted by in
When it comes to online research (or any research for that matter), proximity to an event is critical to establishing accurate, precise, and reliable recollections and descriptions of an event or experience. Confounded recall is the bane of much post-purchase market research; as a person’s memory gets fuzzier, the quality of the data they provide gets more and more specious. That’s why I’ve always advocated measurement approaches that capture data in close proximity to the actual (buying or non-buying) experience.
