A Holiday Story

I hope you find this little fable to be an amusing seasonal diversion....

Posted by Jim Nail on December 17, 2008 at 09:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

The end of Pownce -- or the beginning of microblogging?

Blog service SixApart has bought Pownce -- and will shut it down. Twitter came this close to being swallowed by Facebook. So why do I think this is the beginning of microblogging?

I know my Twitterholic friends are laughing in scorn at this headline saying, "Nail has really lost it now. Where has he been? Twitter is the biggest thing since instant messaging!" My point exactly: how many instant messaging services are stand alone businesses?

As a proud Twitter-resister, here's my answer: microblogging is a feature, not a service.

Every social network has the "what are you doing now?" feature. What they don't have is the easy updating and subscription features of Twitter. But how hard are those to add? And now how long will it be before Typepad, Moveable Type, et. al. add microblogging to their blogging platforms? (Sure SixApart is shutting Pownce down but you don't think they're keeping Leah and crew just because they now have empty desks from their other layoffs?)

Hook all this up to FriendFeed and would you really miss Twitter? In fact, with more microblogging services available through the blog and social network platforms that have far more than Twitter's 6 million users, won't that be the true beginning of microblogging?

Maybe Catharine Taylor's campaign to find a business model for Twitter will surprise me with a way to make it a viable business. I can't wait to see what people come up with.

But if it doesn't have revenue to support itself, it will be a valuable asset to one of the social network, blog platform, or mobile phone companies.

And then microblogging will really take off.

Posted by Jim Nail on December 2, 2008 at 04:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack

More on Obama and Social Media

In a recent post, speculated that President-elect Obama will not abandon the social network he built during the campaign but use it to mobilize supporters to push the change he envisions. Here's an article with the full scoop....

... in the September/October issue of Technology Review. Note: the article is free but registration is required (it is really worth it.)

My favorite line in the article describes the McCain campaign "blogette" (what is that anyway?) written by Sen. McCain's daughter, with this description:

  • "The bloggette site features a silhouette of a fetching woman in red high-heeled shoes. "It gives a hipper, younger perspective on the campaign and makes both of her parents seem hipper and younger," says Julie Germany, director of the nonpartisan Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet at George Washington University."

If the McCain campaign thought like this think-tank person, no wonder they fumbled the social media opportunity. Trying to present the "image" of being hip and young with some clever graphic design while the McCain social network site is described elsewhere in the article this way: "It was very insular, a walled garden. You don't want to keep people inside your walled garden; you want them to spread the message to new people."

But few of us in marketing can afford to laugh at hapless politicians out of touch with young voters. How many of us are trying to create walled gardens for our brand communities? Or trying to put a hip, young image on a one-way mass marketing communication model? How many of us are really ready to entrust spreading the message about our brands to our consumers, the way Sen. Obama let his supporters spread the word about his candidacy?

I think we will all learn a lot from the Obama administration's social media strategies.

Posted by Jim Nail on December 2, 2008 at 03:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Transforming Research, Step 3: Storytelling -- or tailoring?

  At the October 29 ARF Transforming Research conference, there was a strong theme that market researchers should weave interesting stories about how consumers interact with brands rather than present reams of data to induce a Powerpoint coma. But storytelling risks creating a fiction that loses touch with the carefully gathered facts in our research. Perhaps the better way to think about it is tailoring...

I've been meaning to write this entry for a while then this weekend a program on NPR's "Speaking of Faith", spurred me to do it. A cancer doctor spoke of her evolution from speaking with patients about the facts of their disease to listening to their life stories and how the cancer has affected them. She eventually followed this into a psychotherapy practice.

What does this have to do with the market research industry? One line in the interview really caught my ear when she said that the facts of the disease don't mean anything about the person and their struggle. Their stories held greater truth about the person than what stage the disease was at, how tumors grew or shrank, what the various tests tracked, etc

Isn't this the same with market research, especially when we are trying to understand concepts like brand engagement? The facts - the demos, market share, even time spent with a medium or a web site - don't really say anything about the nature of engagement. For that we need a different level of understanding, one that is more qualitative, one that looks not just at the interaction between the brand and the person, but broadens the view of that interaction in the context of the person's life.

That's the power of ethnography. And that is the kind of story that social media analysis at its best delivers.

The challenge for market researchers is to prevent the "story" from crossing the line into fiction. While stories need to put data in the background and bring the narrative to the fore, they must remain true to that data. To be storytellers, researchers must leave the safety and security of the survey tabulation and create a three dimensional being.

But perhaps storytelling isn't the right way to think about it. After all, Homer was free to create characters like Hector and Achilles, whether they existed or not because his concern was to communicate his ideals of courage, loyalty, patriotism, etc. He could shape his characters to make his point.

Researchers, on the other hand, must first draw the characters, then figure out the "point": the person's motivations, the relationship with the brand, the likely behavior.

150px-TailoringFirstFitFront01[1]So perhaps we should think of the evolution of research more like being a tailor. We have a set of measures -- waist, chest, sleeve length, inseam -- and we must now make a suit that fits the person. If we deviate too far from the measures, the suit won't fit. But if we stick to the measures and carefully stitch them together, the end result is something far more compelling than the numbers alone would suggest!

Posted by Jim Nail on December 1, 2008 at 05:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack