From Bloggers and Navel Gazers to Conversations and Analytics

Blogging has waned along with much of the navel gazing that typified the web and many web gurus. Or rather, it hasn’t so much waned as been sorted. Navel gazing and me-formation has moved to Facebook and Linked in, leaving the real writers blogging happily as they always did. Facebook and Linked in are blogs too, of a type, but social. True blogs are more likely to be anti-social if anything – couched in comfortable near anonymity and lacking the self censorship that comes with not expecting a blog post to be read by old friends and close family.

The blogs and bloggers that have remained have been sorted themselves becoming less self-obsessed and diary-ish and more informative and brochure like in character. (Apart from the set who are collecting each post for a future real world publication.) WordPress knows this I think and facilitate enough blog plug ins to make a blog and brochure site nearly indistinguishable.

Perhaps the genius of Facebook and latterly Google + arose from discovering, by accident or by design, that most people love nothing more than to talk about themselves – each status update offering a symbolic stroke in the form of a ‘like’, a ‘share’, a ‘+1’ or a supportive comment from friends and family, rather than a dispassionate readership in any literary sense.

Now that the blogsmoke has cleared, clients who dipped their toe into social media in the past few years are discovering that maintaining online conversations with ‘users’ or ‘customers’ is difficult. This isn’t a brochure, or an engagement… it’s a full blown conversation with a mob or loyal fan-base, if you are lucky, but more likely a peacekeeping operation with a few grumpy customers who’ve gained confidence from not hearing your voice or looking you in the eye…

Rarely, are such pages and communications popular in the true sense of the word. Because a post uses a word that’s trending on Twitter and gets shared does not make the sender popular, no more than shouting ‘up the Dubs’ would at a football match make the fan an instigator of public opinion. The fact is, the people who are famous online were famous already, or about to be. They’d be famous if there was no Internet.

These conversations, however few or many are all important, because other customers may be listening in. The Internet never forgets, so how you handle these chats and encounters is critical to how the all important search algorithms views your popularity, search engine relevance and quality in terms of site and conversational sentiment.

Each point of contact with your marketplace is a gold mine for the savvy marketer. For the first time you can hone your brand, your advertising, your market research and your product in a central holistic sense – a single database to explore what’s working, how well and why. This is the realm of analysis and analytics.

It is not only for mareting tweaks that analytics is of value. How many times in the past year have I looked at client data and realized they were sitting on a considerable opportunity for turning their data into money, in terms of saved resources, automatic market research, effective internal communication and powerful external public relations.

Data can become a product in its own right – saleable and valuable. Especially when it’s combined with easily gathered demographics, mapping one to the other to give a rich real-time overview of product sales and company performance.

Some companies are doing this well, and ‘get’ the concept that their business is becoming all about data, reporting, performance mapping and tweaking, where effective stats combine with sales figures bringing the CFO and the CTO to the centre of the marketing process. But many others are running around like headless chickens, terrified of the numbers, afraid of being found out.

They needn’t be. We’re all doing this for the first time and there is no need to feel under pressure, or bullied into performing tasks that were not in anyones job description, because these tasks and systems didn’t exist. The data wasn’t there, because the market wasn’t talking to you and purchasing through a digital interface.

In the recent past we had some pieces of the puzzle, but now we have the whole thing. The pieces are jumbled up, but they are all there on the table in front of you. You need help to recognize how to stitch them together but that’s what the stats and analytics guy is for – to guide you in the right direction, empower you with the tools to pick up the pieces and give you a map to show you which bit goes where, and why – bringing the whole picture into sharp focus.

It’s a new digital world of marketing, but we can do more with more confidence and less risk than ever before. That might make you insecure because you are accountable, but it should also make you excited about the potential to prove what worked beyond any doubt as well as spot and fix what didn’t before too much money has been spent. Bringing efficiencies to a business is always appreciated. It saves money and makes a business reactive, lean, intelligent and healthy. That’s what every business owner and shareholder wants, because these things facilitate one important thing above all else. Maximising profits. You can turn data into money – and prove it.

The Immediacy of Blogsite Build and Reach

I’ve been experimenting with blogs. Within an hour I can build a site, and I mean website, not blog. Well, it’s a mix really, so I’m calling it a blogsite. This ‘blogsite’ fulfils all the requirements of a basic business. These include
• Logo
• Pages
• Contact details
• Product descriptions
• Integration with social media
• Search Engine Visibility

OK. I’m a late developer. Bloggers have always known this. Contractory, I know, but though I’ve been a blogger myself since blogs began, I always looked down on the templates they used. (Some were pretty bad in the early days in fairness.) Then I started to question that logic when WordPress started to get impressive. I quickly imported my blog – TheTannoy.com from Blogger into WordPress (so simple) and I really got into the machine behind the text. I’ll port the .com URL over soon but its currently at thetannoy.wordpress.com. It’s all got so simple all of a sudden.

If you have a good logo and a basic template, the job is done. The logo communicates the seriousness of brand adequately IMHO. The rest is down to giving people what they want when they come to a site. Not an arrogant tour of the egos of your marketing department, of your good self, but rather a brief who, what, where, why, how much, contacts and a bit of relevant news.

The news is the hook. The best way to get people in contact with your business is not to fall into the trap of thinking that your business is that interesting. News is interesting. Developments, wow, market shifts, numbers and measures… news. You might indeed service a bit of the sector better than others, but that will all come out in the wash, won’t it. Being up to date in the digital world is by far the most important thing. Having a service that is relevant for today. Not tomorrow, or yesterday, but today. Then it’s down to pricing and the golden mean of digital marketing, and the point of this post, reach.

Every communication via your new website needs to hit the other locations where people hang out. No-one is going to seek your little shop in your new fresh corner of the Interweb. They hang out to be social in a business context, a family and friend one, or a news and views one. Just like in the real world. So, these hangouts are linkedin, facebook and twitter. So, every relevant utterance has to be share with the relevant audience. There are loads of cool widgets to help you do this on WordPress. Use them, and no site updates, or news, or views are wasted. They all have some audience. Maybe not huge, but a much bigger one than would exist if you’re waiting for that audience to wander by your website.

In truth, the vast majority of traffic to a B2B website does not come from customers, unless you are in the news, classifieds and entertainment business. A good proportion of your daily visits will come from competitors. Only rocking businesses will break this rule, but these are few and far between.

So, the best way to know that your messages are reaching your customers is to make sure that your blogsite is pushing messages to twitter followers, Facebook likers and Linkedin luddites (sorry, it rhymes and is often true). Then, let the competitors wander by. In a single push of the button ‘update’ you have updated your site and hit the relevant audience for your business… Simples.
Another good thing to note. It’s free. No harm in that is there.

To my surprise then, when I Googled my new websites, there they were. First page. Position 1 to 3. Sweet. Now that’s clever.

By the way, the sites I built are: www.monitrackresearch.com, www.paviliondigitalwebsite@wordpress.com (soon to be paviliondigital.com).

Addendum: I just mapped TheTannoy.com to wordpress. It took all of 30 seconds – instead of at least 30 minutes and 2 days for it to register before.

Fukushima and the Feedback Loop of Fear

A post from my friend Jamie Stanton worth quoting in full. Enjoy.

Let me preface this by saying I am not an expert in nuclear reactors or nuclear physics. However, I do know a thing or two about the media. The situation in Japan is serious. Very serious. And it could get worse still. But it is not the doomsday scenario being peddled by the media.

A concerned friend recently sent me a new story from Business Insider about the recent developments at the Fukushima nuclear plant. The long, rambling article, which highlighted particularly scary phrases in red text, began by reporting that “The state of panic around the world is palpable”. It occurs to me that when you are repeatedly publishing news stories that cause panic, reporting that there is consequently a state of panic seems somewhat poor journalism. This is exactly the feedback loop of fear that is characterising this incident.

Today the media narrative shifted today to say that radiation is now “harmful to human health”. A cursory look at the headlines would seem to bear this out. However, scratching the surface we get a more nuanced scenario. Dr Paddy Reagan, a nuclear physicist at Surrey University said a few hours ago on BBC News that while it was true that levels were now harmful to human health, you’d have to be deep inside the exclusion zone, in fact he said you’d need to be standing next to the reactor for an hour to even get radiation sickness.

The media feeds on public ignorance of radiation levels and what they mean. What if I said that there had been a permanent increase in background of radiation of 36 µSv (microsieverts). Pretty scary yeah? Not when you consider that’s the equivalent of eating a Banana a day for a year (The deadly Yellow Fruit often triggers airport radiation detectors because of high potassium 40 content.)

That the Japanese authorities are telling to people to say indoors is equal parts caution and public reassurance, both to make them feel like they can do something and also to reduce the risk of a mass panic or be accused of a cover-up. And perhaps I am trapped in Groundhog Day, but for the past four day news outlets are reporting that Japanese officials have admitted “for the first time” there could be a partial meltdown. Partial meltdown was always a risk, hence the prolonged campaign to cool the reactor by any means necessary. The media reports this “for the first time” line as a way of making the situation seem as if it has escalated more than it has.

The word “meltdown” is another terror trigger as it is equated with the horror-story of Chernobyl. However, as re-iterated in a number of dry, technical, physics blogs in the past few days, such a meltdown is not possible at Fukushima. A partial meltdown is not exactly great news, and every precaution should, and is, being taken to prevent it, but it is not utterly cataclysmic either. It will certainly not be as devastating for the environment as the Deep-water Horizon incident, for instance.

I’d love to blame the (boo hiss) mainstream media for perpetuating this panic, but the alternative media from across the political spectrum is just as culpable in perpetuating lazy rumours, half-truths and hysteria. The anti-nuclear movement has whipped itself into a distasteful “told you so” frenzy and are doing their best to make things seem worse than they are. Of course, they claim there is a cover-up, because some of them desperately want this to be worse than it actually is because it would suit their political agenda.

The new-right, as characterised by Glenn Beck style conspiracy theories, are mirroring the left in claiming there is a massive cover up by the Japanese Government, despite the fact that covering up a huge nuclear incident is not possible (see Chernobyl) because of, you know, massive clouds of radiation and stuff. Conspiracy theory High Ayatollah Alex Jones, who is no stranger to fear-mongering (last week, he reported that the New World Order could kill you via the Television) – is claiming that this is “by far the worst” nuclear disaster ever, and that they hydrogen explosions at Fukushima were in fact some kind of other, unspecified, but somehow more terrifying type of explosion.

Human perception of risk is warped. Nuclear power is much like flying by plane. By and large, it is the safest option, but when it goes wrong, it does so spectacularly, and because of this, public perception of its dangers are heightened. The long term consequences risks of coal power is much worse than nuclear (a devastated planet is worse than a devastated square mile or two) but it is harder to grasp as its risks are not “event” based.

To summarise, Japan has some serious problems on its plate. It just got hit by one of the biggest earthquakes in recorded history, followed by a tsunami and at least one volcano. Aftershocks are still to come. The nuclear reactor problems it has on top of this – there is no other word – “clusterfuck” – are serious and should not be understated, but equally, they should not be overstated.

We do ourselves no favours by giving in to sensationalism.

Vulnerability

I really enjoyed this TED talk.  It reminded me of some qualitative research I did some years back on the feelings as expressed by people of different age groups online.   Having seen this talk, I can now clearly see that vulnerability underpinned so many of the comments to do with feelings in my research, from before pregnancy, to after death…

Enjoy

 

 

How Egyptians Used Twitter during the January Crisis

I had to post this from Mashable. Very interesting stuff: http://on.mash.to/guupMB

Over the past several days, Twitter and other social media platforms have been flooded with links, images and information about the current political crisis in Egypt.

Social media intelligence firm Sysomos has analyzed a lot of the Egypt-related tweets and mined them for important cues, such as keywords and location data, that might show us just how news and information about Egypt are being disseminated via social media.

Twitter has been framed — by its founders, no less — as an important news-bearing medium in this any many other situations of global portent. Even while the service, and in fact, all Internet access, has been intermittently blocked in Egypt during the crisis, news, video clips and images continue to spread around Twitter with the greatest urgency. In fact, Google today launched a voice-to-Twitter service specifically to assist Egyptian Twitter users wishing to act as citizen journalists.

“Given how social media is being increasing leveraged as a real-time reporting tool,” said Sysomos strategist Mark Evans, “we wanted to look at how many people are using Twitter in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen — places in which there is active political protest.

“We analyzed 52 million Twitter users, and discovered that only 14,642, or 0.027%, identified their location as Egypt, Yemen or Tunisia… It is important to note this number probably doesn’t reflect the number of Twitter users since many users in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen likely do not provide their location information to protect their identities.”

Still, with all the tweets containing keywords like “Egypt” and “Yemen,” Sysomos had a lot of data to work with. Using the company’s Media Analysis Platform (MAP), Sysomos analysts created the following visual overview of Twitter users’ response to the Egyptian crisis:

FB and the Net Help Free the Arab World

From the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/29/egypt-mubarak-tunisia-palestine?intcmp=239

We’ve waited for this revolution for years. Other despots should quail

Change is sweeping though the Middle East and it’s the Facebook generation that has kickstarted it

My birth at the end of July 1967 makes me a child of the naksa, or setback, as the Arab defeat during the June 1967 war with Israel is euphemistically known in Arabic. My parents’ generation grew up high on the Arab nationalism that Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser brandished in the 1950s. But we “Children of the Naksa”, hemmed in by humiliation, have spent so much of our lives uncomfortably stepping into pride’s large, empty shoes.

But here now finally are our children – Generation Facebook – kicking aside the burden of history, determined to show us just how easy it is to tell the dictator it’s time to go.

To understand the importance of what’s going in Egypt, take the barricades of 1968 (for a good youthful zing), throw them into a mixer with 1989 and blend to produce the potent brew that the popular uprising in Egypt is preparing to offer the entire region. It’s the most exciting time of my life.

How did they do it? Why now? What took so long? These are the questions I face on news shows scrambling to understand. I struggle with the magnitude of my feelings of watching as my country revolts and I give into tears when I hear my father’s Arabic-inflected accent in the English of Egyptian men screaming at television cameras through tear gas: “I’m doing this for my children. What life is this?”
And Arabs from the Mashreq to the Maghreb are watching, egging on those protesters to topple Hosni Mubarak who has ruled Egypt for 30 years, because they know if he goes, all the other old men will follow, those who have smothered their countries with one hand and robbed them blind with the other. Mubarak is the Berlin Wall. “Down, down with Hosni Mubarak,” resonates through the whole region.
In Yemen, tens and thousands have demanded the ousting of Ali Abdullah Saleh who has ruled them for 33 years. Algeria, Libya and Jordan have had their protests. “I’m in Damascus, but my heart is in Cairo,” a Syrian dissident wrote to me.

My Twitter feed explodes with messages of support and congratulations from Saudis, Palestinians, Moroccans and Sudanese. The real Arab League; not those men who have ruled and claimed to speak in our names and who now claim to feel our pain but only because they know the rage that emerged in Tunisia will soon be felt across the region.

Brave little Tunisia, resuscitator of the Arab imagination. Tunisia, homeland of the father of Arab revolution: Mohammed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old who set himself on fire to protest at a desperation at unemployment and repression that covers the region. He set on fire the Arab world’s body politic and snapped us all to attention. His self-immolation set into motion Tunisian protests that in just 29 days toppled Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s 23-year dictatorship. We watched, we said wow and we thought: that’s it? Ben Ali ran away that quickly? It’s that easy?
Ben Ali called his armed forces for help 27 days into the popular uprising. It took Mubarak just four days into Egypt’s revolt to call the army. He had unleashed the brutality of his security forces and their riot police, but they couldn’t stem the determination of the thousands who continued to demand his ousting. He put Egypt under information lock-down by shutting down the internet, Burmese-junta style, but still they came.

Ben Ali’s fall killed the fear in Egypt. So imagine what Mubarak’s fall could do to liberate the region. Too many have rushed in to explain the Arab world to itself. “You like your strongman leader,” we’re told. “You’re passive, and apathetic.”

But a group of young online dissidents dissolved those myths. For at least five years now, they’ve been nimbly moving from the “real” to the “virtual” world where their blogs and Facebook updates and notes and, more recently, tweets offered a self-expression that may have at times been narcissistic but for many Arab youths signalled the triumph of “I”. I count, they said again and again.

Most of the people in the Arab world are aged 25 or are younger. They have known no other leaders than those dictators who grew older and richer as the young saw their opportunities – political and economic – dwindle. The internet didn’t invent courage; activists in Egypt have exposed Mubarak’s police state of torture and jailings for years. And we’ve seen that even when the dictator shuts the internet down protesters can still organise. Along with making “I” count, social media allowed activists to connect with ordinary people and form the kind of alliances that we’re seeing on the streets of Egypt where protesters come from every age and background. Youth kickstarted the revolt, but they’ve been joined by old and young.

Call me biased, but I know that each Arab watching the Egyptian protesters take on Mubarak’s regime does so with the hope that Egypt will mean something again. Thirty years of Mubarak rule have shrivelled the country that once led the Arab world. But those youthful protesters, leapfrogging our dead-in-the-water opposition figures to confront the dictator, are liberating all Egyptians from the burden of history. Or reclaiming the good bits.

Think back to Suez to appreciate the historic amnesia of a regime that cares only for its survival. In cracking down on protesters, Mubarak immediately inspired resistance reminiscent of the Arab collective response to the tripartite aggression of the 1956 Suez crisis. Suez, this time, was resisting the aggression of the dictator; not the former colonial powers but this time Mubarak, the dictator, as occupier.
Meanwhile, the uprisings are curing the Arab world of an opiate, the obsession with Israel. For years, successive Arab dictators have tried to keep discontent at bay by distracting people with the Israeli-Arab conflict. Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in 2009 increased global sympathy for Palestinians. Mubarak faced the issue of both guarding the border of Gaza, helping Israel enforce its siege, and continuing to use the conflict as a distraction. Enough with dictators hijacking sympathy for Palestinians and enough with putting our lives on hold for that conflict.

Arabs are watching as tens of thousands of Egyptians turn Tahrir Square into the symbol of their revolt. Every revolution has its square and Tahrir (liberation in Arabic) is earning its name. This is the square Egypt uses to remember the ending of the monarchy in 1952, as well as of British occupation.

The group of young army officers who staged that coup in 1952 claimed it as a revolution, heralding an era of rule by military men who turned Egypt into a police state. Today, the army is out in Tahrir Square again, this time facing down a mass of youthful protesters determined to pull of Egypt’s first real post-colonial revolution.

This week I’ve mostly been discussing:

• Linkedin developments
• Facebook data outputs
• Integrating company consumer data with social media
• Social media app design and creation
• Wedding apps
• Digital radio research
• DAB
• Onlilne multi-platform buzz measurement
• Digitally mediated Public Relations
• Facebook addiction
• IPv6
• Page popularity measurement
• Multi-lingual digital message measurement
• Translations of legal docs to Irish
• German translations
• Slovak translations
• Online private investigation
• Cyber lobbyists

• Digital Asset Management

• Anonymous
• 4chan
• Facebook hacks
• Business app popularity
• Cyber philosophy
• Short stories
• Analogue radio measurement
• Online business sector monitoring
• The Buy and Sell Index

• Organiser
• Data merging
• Chart porn (with an ‘r’)
• Asus Eee Slate

• Project Gutenberg
• Irish economic sector market sizing and trending
• What happened to Foursquare?
• What happened to Pixelpipe?
• Kindle
• Google books
• Data output re-balancing
• Digitally mediated word of mouth
• Postgraduation education for the Law faculty
• Supermax prisons and the panopticon
• The persistent power of email
• NGrams

• Diaspora
• iPod II
• Darkroom
• QR codes
• Blog privacy
• Scan apps

• Digital Flowers
• Mobile loyalty program mechanics
• Virtual cash

• Mind Maps
• Market Research in 2015

• East African Broadband
• Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 2
• Self publishing

• The end the Foghorns in Ireland

Mostly. Amongst other things.

So, apart from almost every aspect of the world rapidly becoming digitally mediated there’s perhaps little wonder I can’t think of anything specific to blog about. Sorry about that.

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An Awesome Resource for Marketers and Researchers… The Buy and Sell Index

We at Pavilion have been doing some really interesting work with Buy and Sell. So interesting in fact that we’ve created the Buy and Sell Index to share the insights in their data. It really is an amazing resource of information on almost every product or service you can imagine… from Tractors to Tonka Toys, and from Pets to Pyjamas.

The reason we were invited to do this was partially due to the sheer scale of the turnover of goods on the platform. It’s truly amazing. In 2009 there was €948 million traded on the Buy and Sell platform i.e., – through the newspaper and on the website. That is almost 1 Billion worth of goods bought and sold by Irish people that has kind of slipped beneath the news and information radar! Already this year there’s been over €800 million in trades with B&S.

Apart from these big numbers involved, there are a few things about this work that really blow my hair back about the data. These include:

• Goods traded are tax free…
• This ‘grey economy’ has never really been examined before – outside of programs like ‘Cash in the Attic’ or ‘the Antiques Road Show’. At least, never is such a macro sense.
• The Buy and Sell Index gives insight into an invisible economy that is set to rocket in the coming years
• Ireland doesn’t have one economy, is has several. For example, average prices asked for goods in Leinster are down 27%, while in Connaught they are up 7%. Those in Ulster aren’t as affected by the recession (public service workers?) but those that are are rushing to their gardens, and to their hobbies and collectables. Culturally and economically quite different.
• For researchers, economists, marketers, academics, policy makers and politicians… there’s now an invaluable factual pool of information on goods and services, and with regional differences. Starting a business, launching a new product or service? Research it all with the Buy and Sell Index.
• Because people can’t afford new things, they’re trading and swapping their second hand goods. And why not. With Christmas coming… (5 weeks! Ugh!)
• It’s a tremendously empowering space for people who want to make the most of what they already have, rather than going out to get something new that they can’t afford. Why not sell something you don’t need, buy something you do!
• Using the index is a great way of re-calibrating ones view on one’s wealth and worth
• The business services sector is growing in terms of total value, though the average price of services has dropped by a third. People are getting busy marketing themselves, but charging less, to gain more!
• I was thinking, if you’re losing your house, remember it always belonged to the bank. It’s the stuff that’s in it that you actually own, and you still do!
• Some of the swaps are for goods worth as much as €200, 000. Investment property in negative equity? Swap it for something closer to home. If they are both in negative equity, no capital gains tax… (No gain, no tax.)
• It’s a great time to buy a boat

One other thing I’d like to add is that, as a statistics guy, this is a very, very, very valid sample. 4 million or so pieces of data, 140,000 ad posts… Sure it’s almost a census. So, what is true of this Buy and Sell Index, will definitely be true for the population at large. From my point of view, its like the best random sample one can imagine, and it just keeps growing, month on month. Sweet!

For more information see our first launch report. It’s at http://www.buyandsell.ie/buyandsellindex.

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Media Measurement is Broken

No matter what method is currently being used, media measurement is broken.

Personally, I’m a big fan of primary research methods… the old way of doing it. Sample, validity, probability, regression, trend, cluster, segmentation… and the miracle of the normal curve – but these are far too slow in the modern digital world, with expectations for real-time data being the norm. And why not! Quite right too! And you know… one self selecting random sample is much like another statistically speaking.

The difficulty is the lack of mixed method. It takes a bit more nous to handle these, but, with the derth of valid digital interpretations of the real world at present, it seems no matter how good the single method approaches for media measurement, they’re just not working.

It’s hard to have this chat without naming names, and I absolutely concede that providers are doing their best within the limits of their methods, but things are being missed. Huge chunks of behaviour are knowingly omitted for want of a mixed methodological mechanic.

In the US, for example, Sandvine figures show that 20% of all downstream internet traffic from fixed access (non-mobile) locations during peak periods is from Netflix.

But Comscore’s recent figures miss this. That’s a huge chunk of an audience – missing. (We used to cry about losing one record!)

The reason for the disparity is simple. Different methodologies. Sandvine looks at data networks and so captures mobile access points, as well as fixed ones. It’s network centric. So, they capture iPhones, PS3s, as well as desktop PCs and Macs. Comscore has a panel that monitors web use on specific machines – so its panel centric. And I’m told, it doesn’t count Macs (have to check this though as it seems incredible).

With the growth of iPhones, iPads, WiFi connectivity, Web over TV and a TV over Web, this gap really matters. I’m not thinking into the future here either. The old methods are missing usage today, and the impact of these problems for advertisers and media in general is huge.

Let’s take Irish radio as a local example. It’s collected with a very large and rolling sample with four releases of data per year (second only to the CSO). Those who represent the medium like this because a rolling sample gives no huge peaks and troughs. No rich-today poor-tomorrow stuff. No surprises. Not very webby though and it plasters over important changes and truths. But here today, gone tomorrow does happen. We who know the web are aware that traffic is in fact capricious. Look at Bebo! Why should it be any different for radio programs, or stations? Well, it isn’t. It’s just that the measurement is slower and uses 75% of the last wave, with the new wave. This softens the curve considerably. The findings when presented as the facts for today are in fact only 25% of the facts for the recent past, and 25% from a while ago, another 25% from age’s ago, and a final 25% from when God was a child. It’s like saying our economy is fine… when averaged out with the height of the Celtic Tiger. Dangerously misleading, and if presented as today’s news – wrong!

It means, for example, that despite the death of the very popular Gerry Ryan a long time back, the audience he won is in fact still being counted and attributed to someone else in his spot. So, many thousands of advertising euros have been spent for an audience that just isn’t there anymore. That’s just not right. Is it! It’s wrong.

And… what really bothers me, is the lack of digital. Digital radio is omitted as the current method is not reaching the at-work mobile radio user. Why? They aren’t home on a door-to-door sample. Are they! The tremendous popularity of digital audio consumption – and I don’t mean DAB, is being largely ignored, and in doing so ever valuable advertising euros are being lost.

Video is another problem. It is measured almost wholly for TV sets in Ireland, though it includes Web based TV in other countries. How often have you or someone you know viewed video over the net, on YouTube, RTE player or another TV over Web format. A smartphone for example. Once? Twice? Well, that isn’t being counted. It could be you, or maybe some people you know very well. 1 out of 10 maybe you know? Do a count… That could be a considerable percentage of all adults, and it’s not being counted. 10% of people are probably being lost, and what they are doing via their smart device is also being lost.

There was an item in The Times on analogue switch off for TV only the other day. Digital media communication is becoming pervasive, like it or not. But, more importantly, digital is multi-platform. It is not like TV, or Radio, or Print. With digital, it doesn’t matter, while with current research methods – it does. And these methods will not and are not coping with the modern digital media world. They were not designed to do so.

And bigifying the sample won’t help either. It’s the method that’s the problem. Recently, for example, Nielsen in the US increased their TV sample from 8700 to 25000. Big numbers. But, even with this huge count they did not detect any activity from non-network TV sources. That is… no iTunes, no Amazon, no YouTube… etc, etc. I read that as – no up-to-date media consumption. Old school. Stone age. Rubbish. We know its rubbish! And if it’s professing to be true, or right, or definitive which it is – it’s just wrong.

They are viewing a digital world through analogue glasses.

Needless to say, I’ve thought about this a good bit. And, it really annoys me that these issues aren’t being addressed, as not doing so is costing practically every medium consumed by Irish people a fortune in lost revenue. The audience… the true audience, for almost every medium I can think of is in fact much, much bigger… and the audience doesn’t give a damn about the device being used. Do they? Nope.

An interesting bit.ly link hits me via twitter. I click blind to a newspaper article. Wow! That’s interesting. Did I buy a newspaper? No. Did I read one? Yes. Did I see the ad at the top of the page? Yes! Am I up to date? Yes. How often does this happen every day… on twitter alone. 20,000 times? So, perhaps 20,000 newspaper reads – per day, missing. Across all sorts of titles I’d never buy. Thats 600,000 reads a month. 7.2 million reads a year. What’s that worth in Ad-land? Anyone? I dread to think.

And also, needless to say, there are solutions. Lots of good, doable, realistic, affordable solutions. What cannot be fixed on the other hand is the terrified and protective research ideology that pervades most media committees and organisations.

But there is a need to try some new things… And soon, so that little by little we can deploy new mixed method research approaches which I know will work sufficiently well to increase media consumption counts massively.

These will achieve:
• • Real time reporting
• • Platform and operating system agnostic audience measurement
• • Fixed and wireless (mobile and stationary) measures
• • Aggregated audience counts

And these steps need to be taken now, before mega-corps like Google, Apple and Microsoft become too dominant and become the de-facto auditors of measurement and message truth, in pretty much the same way Google is the de facto truth for search engine visibility. That took about three years. The impact of waiting for that to happen is that ad euros will leave the country… moving into other networks, with bidding platforms and prices commanded by the audience, not the publisher.

It also needs to happen before too much advertising money is lost by lost audience. While more real time measures may be jumpy, they can be averaged over time. But ignoring the digital for fear of its capricious nature ignores huge tranches of the audience of today, and any independent view on the audience of tomorrow.

In Pavilion Digital, we recently trialled some new methods, addressing a diverse set of data sources. Facebook outputs, iPhone app outputs, primary research, website posts, newspaper sales and classified ads, mobile research datasets… funky stuff! And I have to say, it was fun. Real Rubix cube territory, but what it brought home, from the outset, is that traffic, eyeballs and commerce leaves a digital footprint, and once you get your head around that, bringing all that data together is a challenge, but a hugely beneficial and rewarding one. And, with a single medium for example – you only have to get your data modelling right once… maybe tweak it a little, and if you’re good to go, you’re good for good… until another channel for audience consumption opens up. This is a good problem to have if you have it. Good for us and for the medium being reached.

Currently TV, Print and Radio are treated as silos of data which cannot, or are not counted together because they represented different industry interests and their respective ommittees. But nowadays, with it all being digital, they can represent the same interest, regardless of the platform of delivery. In the end of the day, data is just data. It doesn’t care where it’s from, or what it represents, or where it is delivered.

Take RTE. What is their media interest would you say? Well, perhaps TV, analogue Radio, DAB radio (RTE Choice is brilliant!), digital Radio (Grab Radio streams), Web Radio, Print (on website), iPhone apps (4 or 5?), TV over Web (streamed), RTE player (recent TV re-broadcasts), Website traffic, Blog reads and postings… etc, etc, etc. I’m sure I’ve forgotten plenty… (forgot Aertel). So, one interest – RTE, requires platform agnostic, OS agnostic, fixed and mobile digital delivery and consumption, and digital interaction. What are they counting? TV set viewers and mostly analogue radio listeners… and maybe website traffic. Oh, and the information is out of date.

This is a ridiculous state of affairs and as a licence fee payer funding our national public service broadcaster – I find it objectionably incompetent at best and a regrettable lost opportunity.

Really and in real time it is time for media measurement and the interests it represents to wake up. There’s an audience shift alarm clock going off loud and clear. And no, it’s not a windup clock – it’s digital.

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5 Top Tips re: Mobiles, Apps, Facebook and Blogs

I must blog, I must blog, I must blog. It’s been there on my list for an age and I’ve made a few stabs, but never posted. It’s an ongoing problem. What’s wrong with me? Is it that I’m using the web less? Eh… no! Not a chance. I’ve become a 24/7er netwise. Maybe it’s the iPhone usage? Well… there’s the thing. The iPhone is so snappy for lookups and sign-ins for social nets there’s not ‘surfing’ per se. But I’m on the net. Amen’t I? Technically, but often appways rather than browsered.

I’m on the social net anyway – and my lookups are constant – never letting a link go un-clicked, or a reference go un-referenced, a fact go un-Googled or a vid go un-viewed (‘sept the flash ones of course which is annoying, but they seem rapidly less prevalent which is concerning). I’m also well podded with Digital planet and buzz out loud and my own penchant for Thinking Allowed.
The faithful (old) Toshiba portégé accompanies me for sit-down work. Hours slip by on comfy seats over lattés or hunched at the office delving my way through big documents before zipping them here and there.

But why not blogging – and this is the point of this blog.

If the web is always with you, as it is with me, you now have to make an active choice to do browser and document work via the bigger laptop screen. This is perhaps where the iPad style device fits in nicely. The trend towards increased access for mid-sized super-light mobile devices with longer battery lives means the capricious nature of much previous net use can now be taken away from work and the office (not the same always) and into the home, the street, the back-room or the coffee bar (I’m in Starbucks right now). The personal and connection work can now stay personal and be dealt with right now, rather than peppered throughout the day when one gets behind a screen.

The other related trend is toward app delivered content. Is it a good thing to have all this content tied up in apps? Well, for some software apps that is definitely true but for other apps I don’t really think so. Many companies really should consider browser delivered services before jumping on the app bandwagon. There are many advantages, such as, you don’t have to keep updating the app, and you can always encourage the ‘add to my home screen’ button to be employed. If the service in question is needed they can find it and return to your site simply with this method. And very quickly, between free and paid for apps, there will be simply too many on the phone – something that iPhone 4 folders addresses nicely. I mysteriously seem to be heading toward my 300th app, having deleted many I don’t use and can do without. Obviously I’m an-typical nerd – but the simplicity and benefits of the app store I, as an early adopter, have found I think will be found by others giving a trend towards more and more apps. Some are really cool. Seriously! But tellingly – several of those on my homescreen are shortcuts to webpages and cloud services. So, the companies in question didn’t have an app, and actually don’t need one for my purposes.

Other apps need to be appified and benefit from being apps. It is the only way that a particular service can be delivered – benefitting from the mobile nature of the service or the iPhone gyroscope thingy. Fair enough. So, an open mind is the best way to go I’d say. Not wishing to dis the client but many want an app without really knowing why – like they want clients to put them in their bookmarks list on a funky new phone. It is always good to have a cost benefit analysis running in the background when you go down this thought cul-de-sac. Functionality and links may be more important to your business than having an app.

Mobile Internet and smartphones mean – to all intents and purposes – that the net itself is disappearing from view. This was always going to happen and has happened with all previous communication technology. The net is now the taken for granted bit that no longer distracts from the content it delivers. Half a billion Facebook users? How did that happen? Quickly and without much effort or worry that it was on the Internet – and now the FB app is so good, it’ll be 1 billion before you know it. If you remove the very young, old or very poor from the world’s population – that starts to look very like 1 in every two people communicates via Facebook – and much of that use will be mobile. Why? Because it’s better.

What this means is that social interaction is now the most powerful driver toward net use and should be the preferred location for engagements of all sorts. The Facebook platform is now most important in the world for social software. If it’s sitting on a MC or PC or iPHone OS… well, it doesn’t really matter.

To close the circle of this conversation and bring it back to blogs isn’t easy. I’m in a funny situation because my work is also my interest and hobby. I was just chatting with another business guy who blogs and we agreed that blogging is important for taking care of the various brands that exist in any business. The CEO is as much a brand as the business brand and that’s important, but also the blog is an important mechanic for extracting insights from the day-to-day experience and bringing them into focus. It’s a process and though it takes a little time (not much), the benefits are tremendous. So, I just have to blog more. It’s as simple as that.

So – time for some top tips:
• Take account of the new way digital media is being consumed in a mobile context
• Take note that the consumption of online content is now often via an app. There are big implications here
• Make sure if you are developing an app – that a browser isn’t be a better way to go – even for mobile devices. The quality of mobile (and iPad browsers) is so brilliant now, and it’s easier to update a website than an app for several devices and OSs
• Use Facebook, and build for it
• Blog for your business and yourself

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