Blog Bits - Week of March 20th

Here is an interesting blog to visit:  Customer Listening: Markets are "Conversations"...Brands are you Really Listening?  The description of the blog can help give you an idea of its content:

The world is changing, marketing is changing, today, more than ever, consumers - your   customers are in control. Marketers, brands you need to evolve and listen to the ones that make you alive...the ones that buy your products, recommend them to others, and have ideas to evolve them. STOP TALKING, STOP ASKING, and start LISTENING & CONVERSING. Brands you either listen and adapt or die... Do you really think you have the choice?

The latest post is on how focus groups don’t work as well as marketers think because the discussions are “fake.”  The author, Laurent Flores, compares focus groups to an aquarium, the fish in the aquarium may be real but the way they are featured is not, it is completely artificial – the same way a focus group is set up.  So what should you do instead of use focus groups?  Flores recommends, “Go in the street, talk, and listen to people. They have millions of things to say, be natural and listen..."Netography" or the science of listening to consumers on the Internet is there to help.”

Check out Marsha Gellar’s latest article “Are Newspapers and TV dying?” In this iMedia Connection article Gellar discusses the latest data from the Pew Internet Project on how the growth of online news-gathering is mirroring the growth of broadband adoption, a new study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a survey released at the annual Association of National Advertisers that concludes TV advertising is becoming less and less effective, and more.  Some stats that Gellar points out in this article are:

• 50 million Americans turn to the internet for news on a typical day.
• For broadband internet users, online news is a more regular part of the daily news diet than is the local paper. Not surprisingly, for home dial-up users, online news is not as much an everyday activity.
• Over the last four years, overall internet penetration rose from 58 percent of all adult Americans to 70 percent, and home broadband penetration grew from 20 million people (or 10 percent of adult Americans) to 74 million people (37 percent of adult Americans).
• According to the ANA, 78 percent of respondents to the study think TV advertising is less effective than it was two years ago, mainly due to the proliferation of digital video recorders that allow users to skip commercials.