Cymfony's Influence 2.0

Is Prediction Even the Point of Social Media?

On his personal blog, Forrester's Peter Kim writes, "Many [brand monitoring] vendors say they can predict future events based on chatter levels." Everyone wants a crystal ball to ensure correct decisions, but is that a realistic expectation when we are dealing with fundamentally unpredictable entities like human beings? Or is the point to be able to follow more closely the erratic path they invariably take?

I read Peter's post early this morning, then the question of predictability came up on a Blog Council webinar where I presented with David Rabjohns of Motivequest and Ann Green of Millward Brown. David had shown their Cooper Mini case study, and the work he had done with the Kellog School of Management which statistically correlated levels of advocacy detected in social media to sales of the cute little cars. He mentioned his experience across product categories that predictability is only reliable out to about 1 month in the future.

Why 1 month I wondered....

It is well known that the impact of a marketing event has a short half-life. Recall of TV ads decays quickly, and even the increased awareness from an 8-week flight wanes in a short period of time when the campaign is over. Competitors' messages come to the fore, economic conditions change, the seasons change...all sorts of things crowd the brand out of the consumer's mind.

So the benefit of social media is not so much in its predictive ability -- with this complex environment and consumers' serendipitous reaction to events, predictability is virtually impossible.

Social media's benefit is more in its ability to keep the marketer in tune with consumer moods in real-time, or, as I like to say, "at the speed of the market." 

2007 Prognostications

I've been speculating on what 2007 will hold. Here are links to some of the places I've been quoted. Check them out, plus some bonus thoughts....

Heidi Cohen published my thoughts on how marketers will embrace online video in new ways on ClickZ.

Mickey Alam Khan wrote an excellent recap of a long conversation he and I had at AdTech about what all the changes in the media landscape mean for advertisers and media companies in his recent DM News editorial.

Then, ADOTAS tapped me for an article of crystal-ball gazing, based on the Time Magazine Person of the Year, which should appear soon....

Now, for a couple of other thoughts:

Bubble 2.0 ? -- I don't think so. Earlier this fall David Pogue worried that AOL's switch to a totally free ad-supported service signals the return of the late '90's Internet bubble. I agree, we have some froth in the market, but there is one big difference: online advertising is heading toward $16 billion this year, and it is real money, not VC cash that sloshed through Bubble 1.0. But an even more telling example is YouTube suing TechCrunch to protect their business model. This is the anti-bubble -- content may want to be free (in the popular Bubble 1.0 era phrase), but content owners/creators/distributors are not charitable institutions. For there to be content worth watching, somebody has to make some money somewhere along the line.

Web 2.0 is growing up. Reuters investing in Pluck is a strong signal that the worlds of "traditional" and "social" media continue to converge, bringing blogs to a wider, less tech-happy audience. Moves like this advance the case for Influence 2.0, the intersection and interaction of both mainstream and traditional media. With YouTube safely entrenced in the Google world and striking deals with NBC Universal, Vivendi's Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, the NHL, and others, it is clear that real companies are starting to work Web 2.0 into their business models. Contrary to Steve Rubel's thoughts, there is still a long way to go, but the trend will accelerate in 2007.

The post-TiVo era begins. TiVo taught consumers they could break the control network programming bosses had over scheduling. Then the networks completely gave control over by putting popular shows on iTunes, and consumers learned they could have their video content not only whenever but wherever they wanted it. In 2007 as video-enabled mobile phones become a reality, consumers will have even more freedom to view what they want, when they want, wherever they want. Ads will spread but the real change will come as marketers create more product demonstrations and segments with expert advice. Someone wondering what to make their family for dinner will dial up a 5-minute segment with Rachel Ray sponsored by Kraft.

Beyond MySpace. Marketers will seek sites that are “not your teenager’s social network”. MySpace still grabs all the attention, but social networks have begun to spread, popping up to serve different segments of consumers. Though sites like Gather.com and eons.com don’t have the raw numbers of MySpace, they have the buying power of aging Boomers and the NPR audience. Marketers will discover that novelties like a brand character page on these sites won’t cut it. Instead, brands will engage with consumers on how to fulfill their LifeDreams on eons.com while resurrecting the concept of “cause-related marketing” to support issues the Gather.com audience cares about.

More fake blogs. As a member of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association Board of Directors, it pains me to say this. But we will see more examples where marketers try to take shortcuts to create buzz by pretending to be someone they are not. Sony launched AllIWantforXmasIsAPSP.com, having missed the lessons of the “Walmarting across America” fake blog controversy that gave the retailer and their PR firm, Edelman, such a black eye just a month before. Pardon the slightly commercial message, but there is still time to establish a New Year's Resolution of engaging in ethical marketing practices: join WOMMA, embrace the Honesty ROI principles, and institute the practical ethics steps that will help you engage in authentic, valuable conversation with consumers.

A Blue Christmas for Blu-ray

Consumers are talking about next generation video formats: Blu-ray and HD DVD. This new Cymfony report gives the edge to HD DVD, but not for the reasons you may think.

Here are a few highlights of the study, which you can download here:

• Talk is evenly divided between the two formats, but postive comments about HD DVD are 46% higher than positives about Blu-ray.
• Over twice as many post authors say they are impressed by HD DVD than are impressed with Blu-ray.
• Sony, a leader of the Blu-ray consortium, inspires skepticism and resentment among a significant segment of post authors. They cite a string of Sony-led formats (such as Betamax) that have failed and accuse the company of arrogance.

This was a surprise to me. Much of the mainstsream media coverage of these high-def formats talks about the "format wars", drawing the analogy to the videotape format battle between VHS and Betamax. Our research shows there's more going on with consumers: it's not that consumers are waiting for one format to win before they purchase, but they actively doubt Sony's ability to win the battle. Here's my favorite post:

"Sony, on the other hand, has a track record of starting format wars, and losing them too...but they just don't seem to learn their lesson because they're so greedy."

A key point is that most conversation is still among early adopter videophiles and gamers. So far, both audiences have similar downbeat assessments. This doesn't bode well for the word-of-mouth that is likely to guide mainstream consumers.

One point also came through clearly: people don't see much difference between these two formats, and don't discuss the higher storage capacity or "next generation interactivity" that Sony touts as Blu-ray advantages.

In the report we steered away from making recommendations, but let me make this suggestion to Sony here: issue a movie that really struts Blu-ray's stuff. The few movies out on Blu-ray have the usual extras: added scenes, director interviews, etc. and in some cases post authors note that the Blu-ray version has fewer extras than a standard DVD! This hardly provides a reason to throw out my DVD player that is only 3 years old...

Disclosure: Jon Fortt at Business 2.0 blogged about the report, expressing concern about who was behind it. The answer: nobody. We did this as an independent research project, none of the companies involved in either format paid for it, had any input to it, or even were aware we were doing it. None of the lead companies for either format are clients of Cymfony.

I think this is a good example of the insight companies can and should be tapping into to understand what is truly driving the success or failure of their marketing.

Great Ideas I learned in October -- Part 3

Conversational Marketing

With all this talk of "the consumer in control", the waning effectiveness of traditional advertising, and the new models of Web 2.0, most marketing models haven't really changed, witness the growth of regular banner ads and Google AdWords appearing on blogs.

But social media are about conversations. Putting Web 1.0 banner and search ads in social media is like putting a radio ad on TV and leaving the screen blank. It probably works to some extent, but it doesn't really use the unique qualities of the medium to their fullest.

I've had the good fortune to work closely with Tom Hespos of Underscore Marketing and Tom Troja of Pajamas Media this month, helping them flesh out the implementation of their concept of Conversational Marketing. The insight driving the idea is deceptively simple: if consumers go to blogs to be part of a conversation, the ads should invite them to enter a conversation with the marketer.

Tom Troja conceived of an advertising concept he calls "Can We Talk?" which uses ads not to push messages at the target audience, but invites individuals to begin a dialogue with a brand. To make this a practical program, we've combined Cymfony's tools to monitor and analyze topics discussed in the blogosphere, with the Pajamas Media blog network, and the strategy and creative skills of Underscore. Together, we've created a process to identify relevant topics, pose these topics to consumers on sites where they are in conversation mode, and give them an immediate opportunity to begin a conversation with the company.

Stay tuned for more on this innovative model!

As Social Interactions Move Online, Influence Goes With It

The nature of social interaction is changing, away from the physical and toward the virtual-- the online -- the "social media" sites like MySpace. This further saps the influence traditional media once had as people connect with each about shared interests, not about shared reactions to last night's hit TV show or nightly news item.

Two recent articles got me thinking about this:

1. Bolt Media's study that says one-third of people under age 34 can't name any the four TV networks. Dave Evans' reaction is his ClickZ column was a great summation: "Why would anyone who's grown up with millions of independent channels -- the blogosphere, MySpace profiles, and YouTube -- even care what a network is, much less be able to name some arbitrary subset of them?"
2. This NY Times article about Digital Chocolate, a company that creates games and applications for mobile phones,that are "designed to foster conversation, flirting and...a little friendly trash talking." CEO Trip Hawkins explained further: Because it's when you're mobile, you're the most socially needy and vulnerable and insecure, and that when the one platform you have is the mobile, wireless platform."

Anyone who knew my work at Forrester will know I am a huge skeptic about mobile media and advertising. But mostly because the models have relied on traditional intrusive, interruptive models, the classic walking-down-the-street-and-get-a-Starbucks-coupon-on-your-phone scenario while the idea of doing anything on a 2-inch or smaller screen strikes me as far-fetched (maybe it is just because I'm turning 50 this summer...)

Mr. Hawkins observes, "If you're going to really establish something as a new medium, you can't do that with content that is derivative and a second-class version of another medium." Finally, someone with a vision I can believe in about the mobile platform! I've always said that the phone is and always will be primarily a communication device and it will be an enormous change for consumers to view it as an entertainment device. Mr. Hawkins is saying the social interaction is the entertainment.

What does this have to do with the Bolt Media study? Back in the "old" days, those social interactions were greased by the network TV hit shows. "Did you see (fill in name of hit show) last night?" used to be common water cooler question, giving co-workers with little else in common, safe ground to build the relationships that helped get the work done; with hit shows' Nielsen ratings in the single digits, this rarely happens now. The old saw is "you can't choose your family" and you pretty much can't choose your co-workers. But social networks like MySpace, Gather.com, and the MomNetwork give people the choice not to find common ground with those in physical proximity to them, but with far-flung people who share particular interests.

I believe this is an important dynamic in how marketers need to think about building campaigns that influence their target. Not only has fragmentation made it harder and harder to assemble the target audience you want, but now those social interactions, in which people slip in a question about some purchase they want advice on, don't even occur in those conversations. If a mom wants advice about the right car seat, is she going to ask someone at work when they happen to be chatting at the water cooler or will she ask her MomNetwork virtual friends? The network TV advertising may still get a larger audience, probably even higher TRPs (target rating points) than a social network, sow maybe it will still be effective to raise awareness. But where is the real influence taking place?

social media social networking consumer-generated media mobile advertising

My other technology obsession -- alternative energy

I admit it: I'm a sucker for innovative, energy-saving products even if the savings never pay back the higher cost. But my reasons are more complex than showing off to others my environmental concern. And herein is a lesson for marketers about balancing rational and emotional messages to maximum effect.

Since it is Sunday, I will depart from my usual policy of only posting on topics relevant to marketing to vent about a New York Times article I read this week, "Why Appliances Buck the Trend and Cost More." But stick with me, there are marketing lessons here as well.

The author starts from an interesting premise, that while electronic gear packs more features every year, prices decline rapidly for PCs, flat panel TVs etc. "White goods" (refrigerators, washers/dryers, dishwashers, etc) have been increasing their prices while adding electronic controls, water/energy saving features, etc.

Why can one type of product get away with price increases while the other gets into a death-spiral of decreasing prices? The author comes to the conclusion that consumers are actually buying the styling and the look of the appliances, and justifying it with the savings, even though in many cases the higher price more that offsets any dollar savings from energy efficiency.

I can't argue with any of that. The line that ticks me off is when the author draws a parallel between the success of appliances like the high-style, high-end Whirlpool Duet and the Toyota Prius, he says: "The Prius is a feel-good car that runs on sanctimony as much as battery power." Reporter Damon Darlin gets it wrong on two counts:

1) Ask any automotive marketer and they'll tell you that every car purchase is fueled by some emotional reason, and not by gasoline. Why do we never see car reviews that deride Ford F150  or Nissan Titan purchases as a "feel macho car that runs on male insecurity" or a Volvo purchase as a "feel safe car that runs on family protection paranoia"?

2) As a 2002 Prius owner, there is a deeper message we are trying to tell the auto industry: we, the car-driving public, want to see change. We understand the impact our use of the automobile has on the planet, our national security, and the global geopolitical situation, but in our society a car is a necessity. Car makers must get over their thinking that increasing the cost of the automobile will cut into sales -- that only applies to indistinguishable and undistinguised run-of-the-mill models that make up the bulk of their boring product lines. If they come up with something truly unique, with real benefits, there is a market for it.

Since Prius sales have gone from 20,000 to 200,000, there are now 7 other hybrid models on the market, and even GM is getting into the market this statement is starting to have the desired impact. Not to mention the talk of "plug-in hybrids", flexible fuel vehicles, biodiesel, etc. I'd say the automakers are not hearing the sounds of sanctimony, but of cash registers ringing.

Since the days of the early '90's, environmentally-responsible products have failed to go mainstream based on their earth-saving benefits alone: think recycled content paper towels, organic foods, compact fluorescent light bulbs. If it takes wrapping these features in attractive styling and positioning the whole thing as upscale, cutting edge technology, so be it. Just get more of the products into use.

Enough for the Sunday sermon, back to the marketing lesson.

First, truly new, innovative products have talk value. If I'm excited about the fact my washing machine uses 1/3 the water of a normal machine, I'll tell people. I told Pete Blackshaw about my Prius and he went out and bought a Honda Civic Hybrid (see our WOMMA presentation, "A Tale of Two Hybrids"). In the new world of WOM, consumer-generated media, etc. be sure your marketing plan incorporates strategies and tactics that leverage this talk value to amplify your product's differentiation.

Second, consumers do not make a simple, rational decisions to buy things, even such mundane items as appliances. Emotional needs are the real drivers, but people don't want to feel ruled by their whims; they want to be able to explain a purchase rationally. When you find that combination that drives sales in your product category, you'll have a winner.

PS: I also have solar photovoltaic panels on my house, the Miele front-loading, low-water/low-energy washing machine, and all Energy Star appliances. If you want to thoroughly understand my reasons for being environmentally conscious, read Paul Hawken's "The Ecology of Commerce."

MarketingEnvironmentword of mouth

Marketers Need to Reach Consumers Through New Media

The New York Times published an article today on media convergence providing a strong argument for companies that are not actively listening to online consumer discussions to get started today. It’s already late. Traditional media is falling far behind the wave of innovation in digital media that is driving the growth of consumer created content from blogs to podcasts to videos and online TV programs. Millions of consumers are forgoing traditional media to create and exchange digital content directly with each other – without advertising support. Over 50 million people have created personal pages on MySpace.com over the last two years sharing their likes, dislikes and desires. They are directly influencing their friends’ perception about what to buy, or what not to buy, leaving many advertisers almost completely out of the influence cycle.

"There is this primordial soup brewing of more bandwidth, more storage, more devices and more people creating content which is inherently digital," said Ted Leonsis, the vice chairman of America Online. "The lightning that struck is that the people have rapidly adopted all this even faster than we in the industry conceived, and bypassed the traditional media."

As Gadgets Get It Together, Media Makers Fall Behind

By SAUL HANSELL

Published: January 25, 2006

New York Times

Marketers need to stay on top of this dynamic media universe in order to listen to consumer commentary and understand what mediums are most effective in reaching their target market segments. Even if you are not yet reaching consumers through the new digital media, you can learn a tremendous amount by analyzing consumer discussions and then engaging with people online.

Questions for marketers:

• What do consumers think about your product?
• What do they want? (features, related products, services, information, help…)
• What is the best medium for sharing information about your product?
• What are other innovative companies doing to reach like audiences?
• What new media can you provide to happy customers that will get them to talk about your products and connect people to your website/video/blog/podcast/tv program etc.
• What can you do to satisfy disappointed customers and reverse negativity?

Consumers are providing answers to these questions for free everyday online.

Tools for Searching, Monitoring and Analyzing Blogs

Cymfony's Julie Woods recently spoke at a Boston-based conference called "The Pulse of Technology" for local small to mid-size businesses.  She was asked to talk about how companies of this size were using blogs.  Realizing that more than half of the attendees were not going to be familiar with blogging, Julie and I decided to start with the basics and pulled together a hand out for the attendees entitled "Tools for Searching, Monitoring and Analyzing Blogs."  Based on a number of conversations we've had this year, there still seems to be confusion around the different tools and services used for searching blogs vs. creating blogs vs. monitoring/analyzing blogs (and other types of user created content for that matter) so I thought I share a high level portion of the hand out that includes some of the hundreds of tools now available.

Tools for Searching Blogs

• PubSub - Unlike traditional search engines that store indexed news and blog content, PubSub is an ad-supported matching service that allows users to enter terms to be matched against any new content created on the 16 million+ sources that PubSub watches. PubSub matches your terms against the new content and notifies you when there is a match. PubSub is used by many marketers and product managers to track mentions of their brands and competitors. As a free service, it provides a very useful competitive intelligence tool for anyone who wants to keep a pulse on a diverse range of topics and companies.
• Google Blog Search - is a newer Google search technology that is primarily focused on blogs. Any site that publishes content via an RSS or Atom site feed can be searched by Google Blog Search. That includes news sites as well as blogs in English and many other languages. The search interface is very easy to use but it’s important to use the “Advanced Search” option to limit content to filter searches by language, titles, authors and more. When your results are returned, an additional link is provided that allows you to switch between displaying the results with either the most relevant or the most recent results at the top.
• Yahoo! Blog Search - Yahoo! News now provides access to blogs as well as news. In addition to blog posts, they are providing links to Flickr photos and My Web, which is a large grassroots media network. Another new service from Yahoo! allows users to search podcast, which are self-published audio programs often created by bloggers. You can download podcasts into your computer or MP3 player. You can also subscribe to podcasts to quickly receive new episodes of programs when they are published.
• Podscope, is an online service from TVEyes that searches every word within a podcast using audio indexing technology. TVEyes is a leader in broadcast search. This service is available free today in a beta version.
• Technorati is a real-time blog search engine that determines the relevance of a site by the number of other sites that link to it. Technorati automatically receives notification from weblogs as soon as they are updated, so it can track the thousands of updates per hour that occur in the blogosphere, and monitor the communities (who's linking to whom) underlying these conversations. Technorati currently tracks over 23.9 million sites and over 1.8 billion links. Technorati is one of the oldest blog search engines with a massive archive of historical blog posts. Technorati is very useful for marketers that want to understand how the perception of products and issues has changed over time. While some links may be expired or irrelevant (and now spam blogs have become an issue), the tool provides a very useful starting point for performing blog research.
• IceRocket  - is a search engine providing new ways for to find blog and news content. There are no ads displayed on IceRocket results. IceRocket also provides several tools that help marketer’s track links from site to site, identify quick trends in online discussion and uncover current blog topics.
• Feedster is a search engine and advertising network that indexes over 19 million syndicated feeds per hour. This includes millions of blogs and over 75,000 professionally published news sources such as CNET and The New York Times. Feedster searches for the most recently updated news and information so the service is very useful for finding breaking news from both blogs and news services.

Tools for Creating Blogs

• Blogger is a free blogging service owned by Google. Blogger provides templates to help you quickly set up a blog and share it with others. As one of the first blogging services, there are millions of Blogger sites but many are not updated actively. However, many individual bloggers have started with Blogger as their first blog-hosting platform.
• LiveJournal from SixApart is a free blogging service for creating personal journals. The service hosts over 2 million journals. According to SixApart, LiveJournal's innovations include friend pages -- pages that enable users to easily view the recent journal updates of their LiveJournal friends. Additionally, with LiveJournal, users can have custom control over who can view their journal posts as well as join interest-based communities. LiveJournal is a good service for people who want to start blogging with friends about everyday topics. 
• Typepad is another personal weblogging service from Six Apart that is used by many companies as well. Typepad allows you to create a blog for yourself or to share. Blogs can take on any form from personal journals to corporate blogs with multiple authors. You can easily set up a Typepad account for free. For a small fee, Typepad provides a professional edition that allows you to have more control over design elements of your blog as well as comments and other features. The Typepad website also provides many useful links to resources about blogs and blogging.
• Movable Type - Also from Six Apart is a blog service called Movable Type that provides more advanced site design and development capabilities. For instance, Movable Type has the ability to store entries in a SQL database or create applications to solicit and receive input from visitors. Movable Type is a good option for marketers who have multiple audiences and blogs to support however it requires more advanced technical knowledge for installation and configuration.
• WordPress is a semantic personal publishing platform that has a reputation for being very easy to work with for developers of more sophisticated blogs. In addition, WordPress provides many useful features for customizing your blog as well as managing comment spam that can be a huge problem. WordPress is a free service, however you can donate both money and time to assist with hosting, documentation development and other costs of supporting the service.

Tools for Monitoring/Analyzing Blogs

• Bloglines is a free online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, and blogs. Most people use Bloglines as a blog aggregation tool to track updates from their favorite blog sites. This can reduce the amount of time you need to spend searching blogs to see if there have been any updates. The new posts are listed with links back to the original content. You can set up a Bloglines account for free and start monitoring blogs and news immediately. Bloglines also provides recommendations of top blogs to help you get started.
• NewsGator Online is a free news aggregation service that feeds content from news and blogs into Microsoft Outlook. If you spend a great deal of time using Outlook every day, this service can be very useful for monitoring industry news and key blogs without leaving Outlook.
• BlogSquirrel is a blog searching and clipping service from CyberAlert. BlogSquirrel’s online services reach over 5 million blogs each day. While the service is not free, many people like the idea of having a low-cost service organize and search for a set of mentions of their brands that can be combined into a Digital Clip Book and delivered via email daily.
• BlogPulse is a blog search engine by Intelliseek that also provides quick buzz tracking and trend charting tools. Like Technorati, BlogPulse has access to historical blog mentions for the millions of blog sites they have access to. This tool is useful for a quick glimpse of online discussion trends however it does not filter out duplicate or irrelevant mentions to a level required for marketing research and analysis.
• Memeorandum is a specialized news and blog search aggregator focused on politics and technology. It has a very clean user interface similar to Google News that shows hot topics and related posts grouped together. You can even choose to view related discussions on topics.  This tool can be useful to marketers who need to know what the hot topics are in politics, current affairs and technology at any given moment. It leverages many of the other blog and news search tools to gather content.
• Orchestra - Cymfony has been providing media analysis solutions to Fortune 2000 clients for several years. We started integrating blog content into an automated and custom research solutions in 2004. Because of the tremendous impact of blogs on journalists and traditional media, the firm now offers an integrated media analysis dashboard application that automatically monitors and analyzes mainstream media (MSM) as well as blogs, usenet groups, online forums and other forms of social and consumer-generated media (CGM) under one converged Web-based service platform. Cymfony also provides guidance from experts on the blogosphere to assist companies and agencies with blog analysis strategy, product launches, event analysis, reputation monitoring and customized research. Large corporations and agencies as well as medium-sized companies with highly visible brands are the most common users of Cymfony’s products and services.

NOTE:  There are certainly more tools and services available in each of these catagories.  This is just a general list and resource to help get started.

blog analysis, consumer generated media, blog marketing, blog monitoring

Yahoo! Answers the call for Help

Today Yahoo! launched a new free beta service called Yahoo! Answers. The service allows anyone to ask a question and receive free answers from anyone who feels like sharing information. People can review all answers and vote on the best answer. This service sounds like it could be valuable for doing research on almost any topic but when you scratch a little under the surface there are some big open questions for Yahoo! to answer.

How do people know if the answers are valid? Who will find this service really useful? Will experts on hundreds or thousands of subjects join in to provide help? I have my doubts that the experts that already provide free answers on the message boards and forums will start using this service actively until they see the adoption curve jump. (and their fans move away from the boards and forums) They’ve already established a reputation on other sites with hundreds and thousands of posts already created full of answers. To start from scratch answering the same questions again will be frustrating for many. Making matters worse, can you imagine how frustrating it will be for someone to see other people paid for answers that may have come from a free answer they provided on another site. This is going to be interesting to watch.

So, back to the issue of validity.  Whose answer should you trust? I suppose one option would be an e-bay style rating system for answerers. The Yahoo service does allow people to vote on answers with the idea that the best one will rank higher. There is some scoring for providing 'best answers' to increase a person's credibility though points. I think this process has two significant flaws. 1. the best answer may not be all that helpful as there probably won’t be one answer that addresses the needs of each person. Most likely, many answers will have useful bits of information. 2. using activity points as a key scoring element could quickly swamp 'best answer' points. So the scoring system will be useful for tracking active responders but experts on a single topic who don't answer frequently, might be perceived as less knowledgeable if their point rank is low.

One critical aspect of developing a question answering system is to make sure it’s useful to most people most of the time rather than being perceived as a playground to try once and leave behind. It's very hard to create a solution that provides good answers across a wide variety of domains.. Cymfony developed an award winning question-answering technology in the late 90’s that was intended to do this. The idea was that anyone could enter a question in their favorite search engine-style interface and have Cymfony’s Question Answering engine look for information across the web that would answer the question. Rather than just matching on terms used in the question, Cymfony’s system analyzed the sentence structure and context of the question against the millions of potential matches across the web. The engine could differentiate between a person, place or thing understanding contextual information such as time in order to find applicable answers to questions.

So if you asked a question such as: Where will the next World Cup be held? The answer would be a list of web posts showing snippets of the exact answer highlighted. Sounds pretty cool. It was. Cymfony received many accolades from researchers all over the world and from consumer beta testers who were very forgiving about accuracy for free services. But when we tested the concept with business people who expected highly accurate comprehensive answers to business questions about competitors and potential investments, the value dropped dramatically because the business people still had to sift through multiple snippets to piece together the whole story. That’s why we evolved our engine and integrated it into an application platform called Orchestra to deliver highly valuable business insight and accurate information on companies, people, competitors, industries and trends. We tune Orchestra for each client to achieve deliver accurate intelligence for their market.

I believe that Yahoo! Answers and many other question answering solutions (see Search Engine Watch for more) may run into many of the same problems that Cymfony ran into years ago even though our technology approaches are very different. But the folks at Yahoo! are pretty smart so I’m sure they’ve thought through many of these issues and will have some good enhancements coming out soon. If they can find a way to aggregate information across the answers rather than relying on single ‘best answers’ and develop some kind of accuracy ranking process that would be really cool.

2006 Trends to Watch

As we are nearing the end of 2005, the time for 2006 predictions and overviews of hot trends is upon us. While many trend reports may be focused on the purchasing power of teens and tweens or on the M&A activities in the tech sector, I pulled out a few trends that focus on the adoption of new media & technology by traditional businesses.

• Increased Usage of Social Media for Preventive Healthcare
• Food Market Blogging
• Newspaper Podcasting

Increased Usage of Social Media for Preventive Healthcare?

Gartner released a report and blog on IT trends for 2006. They include the usual predictions of decreased staffing in IT and increased adoption of cellular technology and VoIP in the home. One prediction that I found a little more interesting was that a 50% growth in healthcare software investment could enable preventable deaths to drop in half by 2013. Many healthcare companies are investing in advanced technologies to identify problems early on when they are more easily treated. But another less discussed area of investment is in leveraging technology and media to educate patients and create supportive communities. Even though many traditional healthcare providers still don’t like to admit it, most acknowledge that community support and positive thinking go along way in preventing medical problems and enabling faster recoveries. The tech-knowledgeable boomer generation could really drive adoption of online preventive health services.

Food Market Blogging

Heather Green reported on a new blog site created by Steven Jenkins of Fairway Market, a New York city food store that appeals to the hungry, online whole foods crowd. Jenkins is bored with pessimism and  celebrity chefs and Whole Foods (Market), thrilled with garlic towers and osetra caviar and Catalan toothpicks for tapas. Could this blog be a new trend for attracting affluent buyers and boomers?

http://blogs.businessweek.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/ 2389.1233912850

CEO Jim Mackey of Whole Foods Market has a relatively new blog too. It’s not updated too often but it provides a glimpse into his philosophy on social responsibility and capitalism mainly through interviews posted on the blog. The comments are worth reading as well to see just how much support exists for Mackey’s philosophy among clients and workers of Whole Foods.

Not to be left out, Whole Foods workers have a blog of their own designed to provide a workers unity perspective on everything from social responsibility to ‘not quite as fair as you thought’ fair trade coffee. Like the previous blogs, this one isn’t updated frequently but it’s interesting to read the other side of the story.

Newspaper Podcasting

Last but not least, there seems to be a podcasting trend among newspapers – what a great idea. Steve Rubel pointed out that the Telegraph in the UK is podcasting three articles each day with the hopes that they can reach a younger audience and entice them to read more. They are joining the Boston Globe, Columbus Dispatch, Sacramento Bee and Washington Post among others who have already jumped on the podcasting bandwagon. Sounds like another trend to me, and a good one.

Of Marx, machines, and democracy

In college and beyond I spent some time pondering a very Marxian problem. (Both an ironic and appropriate thing to do at an institution dedicated to the promulgation of capitalism and founded by an oligarch of the industrial revolution.) As technology improves, and manufacturing becomes increasingly automated, the workers no longer control the means of production. Capital thus becomes the only scarce or non-replaceable resource along the production cycle, which means that the suppliers of said capital, i.e. the owners of the machines, will be able to extract most of the "value" in the value chain, depressing wages for low-skilled production jobs to a subsistence level. A small pool of marginally well-paid highly-skilled operators or technicians would be necessary to run these machines, but their wages would be supported only be the effort required to obtain the necessary technical capabilities. Everything else accrues to the capital owners.

Apart from the evident problem of no one being able to buy anything if almost everyone is poorly paid, this trend would lead to an increasingly stratified society, and other such very bad things. We've already seen this occurring, and generally, when I'd think about these issues, I'd become depressed.

Recently, however, I was reading this, and I realized I'd forgotten something. Machines can make machines, which will lower their cost and drive down initial capital requirements, meaning that everyone will have the ability to become a manufacturer. The only missing component then is the knowledge required to design and operate said machinery.

I used to say the Internet was cool, and then it was killed by shopping. And for a time, in the boom years, this was true. The real potential of the Internet isn't coming up with better ways to monetize content, or ever more efficient marketplaces, or even the development of new sales channels. The potential of the Internet is democracy, of which CGM is just a small part of the CGC (Consumer Generated Content) landscape. The boom had to die in order for the Internet to bloom, and blooming it is. CGM is democratizing the media and empowering the consumer. Wikis are democratizing knowledge, VOIP is democratizing telecom, and the open-source movement is democratizing software.

The Internet fills the missing components in the production cycle, information, by making that resource universally available. Add to that a generation increasingly comfortable with the idea that sharing knowledge improves life for all, and one finds a transformative shift in marketplace dynamics taking place. Workers won't just control the means of production, workers will *be* the means of production.

Welcome to the people's republic of technology.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

I guess this means Greasemonkey has gone mainstream, or at least as mainstream as Wired’s print publication. That should put it, in marketing lingo, somewhere between the innovator and early adopter stage.

What is Greasemonkey, you ask? Boiled down, it’s a tool (primarily for Firefox) that allows users to modify the display of web pages. Those of you with long memory may recall that this isn’t the first time that something like this has been tried. A company called Third Voice attempted web overlays in 1999, which allowed people who had installed their software to view others comments at a given web address or add their own.

Except Greasemonkey is different. While both pieces of software function (or functioned) to shift the power structure of the web by giving the end user more control over the content of a webpage, Greasemonkey, unlike Third Voice, is functional. People have written Greasemonkey scripts that overlay competing store’s prices when shopping on Amazon, or rework the layout of Gmail (Google’s mail service).

Being realistic, for the moment Greasemonkey is a bit too esoteric and involved to force any real paradigm change. But the idea is here to stay, and over time, it’s going to become easier to alter, or, to put it in modern parlance, remix, web content (Meta-shopping sites have done this for some time, but I’m referring to another level of alteration, a level of personal, not mass customization). We’ve already seen that start to happen in other spaces, Tivo being a prime example of users taking prepackaged content and breaking apart the bundle.

Wise purveyors of more or less any form of content would do well to embrace this customization. There’s more money to be made embracing change than there is fighting it.

Filtering Spam from Blog Analysis

Today Stephan Baker of Business Week mentioned a major problem that most people don’t realize can corrupt blog analysis. SPAM. Keeping spam out of analytics is one of the most important things we do for our clients. It’s the old maxim of garbage in garbage out. No content provider that we know of using everything from web scraping to RSS feed technologies can delete the majority of spam before they aggregate it and send it to analytics companies like Cymfony.

Instead of relying purely on search and filtering technologies, we rely on our own advanced content analysis technologies to eliminate spam BEFORE it gets into our analytics. I hope someone comes up with a clever way to eliminate the spam at the aggregation point because we’d rather spend our time developing great new analytics. But until that happens, we will continue fighting the battle at the engine level to ensure valid analytics for our clients.

How will marketers dig themselves out of the megapixel hole?

As an amateur photographer and gadget geek, it's been frustrating to see digital camera marketers continue to focus so much attention on megapixels as the primary determiner of a camera's quality or capabilities. Yes, it's the job of technical marketing people to somehow simplify the descriptions of complex gadgets to make them appealing to the masses and by all means, they've been successful as digital has made film obsolete sooner than most expected. However, they've dug themselves into a megahole that will be interesting to see how they get out of.

For the past year or two, as megapixel counts on cameras have become ridiculously large, there's been increasing activity on message boards, blogs and mainstream media about how megapixels don't really matter. For example, the Canon PowerShot SD500, a very compact point-and-shoot camera, has the capability of taking photos with a whopping 7 megapixel resolution. There are only two cases in which people would need that sort of resolution: 1) if they regularly make poster-sized prints of their images and 2) if they regularly take photos of small objects from miles away that need to be cropped. From knowing many casual and hobby photographers, these type of people probably make up only 1% of the population (and that's being generous).

Digital camera marketers are in the same hole that CPU manufacturers have been in for the past two years in facing the megahertz myth. When the criteria you use as your primary selling point doesn't work anymore, how do you get people to buy new products?

Hopefully, they've been monitoring the conversations online about what people want from future generations of digital cameras, but digital camera manufacturers need to do more than just give people what they think they want. They need to determine sustainable criteria for what actually makes a camera "good" and convince people that's what they really want.

As a camera enthusiast, here's my wish list for future generations of digital cameras:

1) Instead of cramming more pixels on the same sized image sensor, figure out a way to put larger sensors in the smaller cameras. This will inherently allow cameras to take photographs in low light conditions without a flash. Yay, less "deer caught in the headlights" shots! This will also inherently give people the capability of taking those nice "professional" looking foreground-in-focus with blurry background pictures which are only currently possible on digital SLRs.
2) Improve auto white balance technology. Do a lot of your photographs tend to come out with a blueish tint or yellowish tint? This is because your camera improperly guessed the white balance settings needed for that shot.
3) Improve metering technology. Less under and overexposed pictures, please.
4) Less zoom, faster lens. What? "Less" zoom? Yes, lenses with longer zoom ranges require more light. Most amateur and pro photographers would agree that, in general, having lenses that require less light (which requires smaller zoom ranges or no zoom at all) is preferable to having 10x lenses. Trust us, zoom is overrated.
5) System for making it trivial to match color settings for your monitor and your printer so that even your grandma can make the photos printed at home look just as good (or even better) than those from the photo lab.

Yes, many of the enhancements on my wish list are less quantifiable than megapixels but that's why I am not a marketing person. :)