digg labs launched “pics” today as a new way to explore images that are submitted or dugg. It’s more of an exploration tool than a visualization, and there are a lot of duplicates for some reason. Still, it’s always fun to see what those guys cook up.
Fred Shapiro,Editor for the Yale Book of Quotations has published his Top 10 Most Memorable Quotes of 2007. Ah, so many good ones. But “Don’t Tase Me, Bro”, a phrase that swept the nation after a U.S. college student used it seeking to stop campus police from throwing him out of a speech by Sen. John Kerry, made the top of the list.
This quote became pop culture in record time this year. Two days later, according to Wired:
The other most memorable quotes of 2007:
2. The tortuous answer by Lauren Upton, the South Carolina contestant in the Miss Teen America contest, responding to the question of why one-fifth of Americans are unable to locate the United States on a map: “I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and Iraq and everywhere like such as and I believe that they should our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for us.”
3. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s October comment at Columbia University in New York, “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.”
4. Shock jock Don Imus comments about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team: “That’s some nappy-headed hos there”.
5. “I don’t recall.” — Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ repeated response to questioning at a congressional hearing about the firing of U.S. attorneys.
6. “There’s only three things he (Republican presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani) mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11.” — Sen. Joseph Biden, speaking at a Democratic presidential debate.
7. “I’m not going to get into a name-calling match with somebody (Vice President Dick Cheney) who has a 9 percent approval rating.” — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat.
8. “(I have) a wide stance when going to the bathroom.” — Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig’s explanation of why his foot touched that of an undercover policeman in a men’s room.
9. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” — Biden describing rival Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.
10. “I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history.” — Former President Jimmy Carter in an interview in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper.
I’ll have to do a 2007 Top Ten most painful moments for companies caused by regular old consumers and their new media, next…
I’ve been a marketer for some time, but the first half of my career was spent mostly in direct sales. Don’t miss the quota, but definitely do miss being in the trenches.
Talking to real customers about their real business issues every day was for me the best part of selling. I loved the authentic nature of it. It sure beat the canned role-playing that often goes on in corporate sales training. Real customers never bring up the objections you overcome expertly in training sessions, but they keep you on your toes and teach you how to continue to get better if you know how to listen. I always loved the listening part of selling, which is perhaps why I eventually morphed into a marketer.
Having recently joined Scout Labs in that capacity, I’m now delightfully back in the trenches gathering my own market intelligence around how people find and use consumer-generated media to become better marketers. Recently, I had the pleasure of talking to several real customers about their real issues in this emerging discipline and it was just as I remembered the trenches to be—totally fun and very inspiring.
Here are a couple of points that I have recently been rightly reminded of about life in the customer trenches:
You still don’t know what you don’t know. No matter how well you approach, define and vet the dozens of brilliant ideas you may have, you still don’t know a thing about the hundreds of other ideas that might be better. Until a real customer tells you about his.
There’s no arrival. Customer research is an ongoing, ever-evolving journey. More than ever as the rate of innovation takes a sharp northward turn, keeping your finger on the pulse of your customers’ wants, needs and wishes should be baked into your work week, if not your daily routine.
The market wants you to succeed. Despite their well-vocalized frustration with intrusive, one-way marketing messages, consumers consistently surprise me with their willingness to talk to marketers who are willing to listen. More often than not, they are honest, gracious, generous with their time and sincerely interested in doing what they can to help companies to deliver better products.
The interesting thing about data is not the “what.” It’s the “so what?”
As a case in point, this graph shows US government spending on document shredding contracts, which amounted to $452,807 in 2000 and ballooned to $2.9 million in 2006.
Now, one could suppose that the cost of shredding has skyrocketed. Maybe the shredding workers unionized for higher salaries and company cars. From the data alone, you couldn’t rule this out.
Of course we know enough about the current political climate to understand what’s really behind the data.
For more, visit usapending.gov, the government’s brand new and utterly fascinating database of federal spending.
One of our favorite muses, Jonathan Harris, just launched a new piece of visual storytelling and infoplay called The Whale Hunt. Here are a couple of snippets from his artist’s statement (hyperlinks his):
In May 2007, I spent nine days living with a family of Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost settlement in the United States…I documented the entire experience with a plodding sequence of 3,214 photographs, beginning with the taxi ride to Newark airport, and ending with the butchering of the second whale, seven days later. The photographs were taken at five-minute intervals, even while sleeping (using a chronometer), establishing a constant “photographic heartbeat”. In moments of high adrenaline, this photographic heartbeat would quicken (to a maximum rate of 37 pictures in five minutes while the first whale was being cut up), mimicking the changing pace of my own heartbeat.
The results are beautiful, and like his other projects, he doesn’t expect you to passively watch. The Whale Hunt lets you experience the photographs as a straight slide show, but he’s also organized the whole experience across a few different dimensions.
You can constrain your experience of the story by any combination of cast member, concept (blood, buildings, prayer, sleep…), context or cadence (measured in photos per five-minute interval).
The photos themselves are rich and gorgeous, and the glimpse into this thousand-year-old Inupiat tradition is simply wonderful.
My conversation this morning with John Jantsch about Scout Labs was especially interesting because we chatted about the application through the lens of his readership—small business marketers.
After he got the elevator pitch, he pointed out that while the analysis and insight we offer might be groundbreaking for the big brands, “the rest of what you describe sounds like what people can already cobble together with free tools ala Google, etc.”
It was nice to have spoken to enough real people who are really sick of their cobbled solutions around CGM to know that there is a very real demand for something cohesive. He did agree that the application sounds like it delivers a lot more than what people can get for free, but that he wasn’t sure that all that extra market intelligence would be valuable to small business marketers.
He thought the idea of a configurable dashboard of ‘insight modules’ - blog volume, sentiment detection, key influencers, etc. was pretty interesting, however, and when we talked more explicitly about the functionality and the specific nuggets of insight delivered, he definitely saw how small businesses would find many of the analysis modules plenty useful.
I think the mention of jump-in functionality piqued his interest the most. He was expressly keen on seeing a tool that could help enable, manage and organize conversation threads and couldn’t believe this wasn’t the first thing out of my mouth in the elevator pitch. (I love finding out what matters to people!)
The fact that users can scout pretty much anything within the same tool for the same price was also a base hit. In any case, he enthusiastically awaits his beta invitation!
There was a nice post about Scout Labs from Michael Arrington on TechCrunch this morning. Here. He and I spent time in the application this weekend, and we Scouted (in real-time) himself, the TC20, and some of the TC20 winners. I guess he liked what he saw!
Nielsen, the television ratings monopolist, finally made its way to my mom. She called me, THRILLED that she had been selected to be a Nielsen family! When I think Nielsen, i think set-top boxes that measure your every channel surf, so I asked if they were going to help her with the installation of the box. She said that she was supposed to just write down what she’s watching every minute of the day. WHAT? I assumed she was embroiled in some mail-in phishing operation, but when I got there and looked at her paperwork — it was legit. Nielsen sent her $15 and a little paper diary so that she could record what she watched, exactly when she changed the channel, when she channel-surfed, where she ended up and for how long, etc. I simply could not believe that that is what was behind the billion-dollar advertising decisions that marketers make.
I’ve since looked into it, and it’s true. Nielsen uses set-top boxes for national prime-time TV ratings, but for the thousands of local markets across the country, TV and radio, these hand-scored diaries have been used for nearly 20 years. (Some images on people’s Diary Packs on Flickr, in case, like me, you find this hard to believe). Recently, Nielsen has tried to move to a more automated collection methodology for local markets as well, but the ratings were SO drastically different from the hand-scored methodology of the past (no surprise, I’d say), that Nielsen has taken major flack from both advertising networks and audience groups (such as minorities) whose favorite shows’ ratings dropped drastically in the conversion. A good overview of the saga is in Wired magazine.
I asked my mom a week later how she did on her little assignment. Of course, she said she kept forgetting to write things down, so she had to back-fill — trying to remember at the end of the week the things that she had watched and when.
So, Nielsen has a few issues.
We at Scout Labs certainly believe in more listening to customer feedback that is already naturally occurring, and less contrived research scenarios and abstract and laborious user tasks. So good job, Nielsen, pushing to automate — better later than never!
Initial findings from a new study presented at the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) symposium over the weekend validate what we already know about the importance of social media to businesses: It’s important…
Fifty-seven percent of respondents said that social media tools are becoming more valuable to their activities as more customers and influencers use them. Twenty-seven percent reported that social media is a core element of their communications strategy.
But the study, funded by the Institute for Public Relations and Wieck media, also sheds some light on some of the ways and reasons companies are adopting strategies to address social media. The respondents talked about proactive and reactive strategies, and the findings suggest some clear priorities for both.
Respondents reported that the most effective tools for their social media initiatives are currently:
- Blogs
- Online video
- Social networks
Surprising to the researchers was the fact that criteria that measured online engagement for blogs and podcasts were among the least important to the respondents. However, for online communities and social networks, the top three criteria for evaluating influence do reflect the importance of online engagement:
- Participation level
- Frequency of posting by the community member
- Name recognition of the individual
Furthermore, 51% of those surveyed are formally measuring the effects of their social media initiatives, with a particular interest in how successfully they are engaging with key audiences. They want to understand and, of course, enhance their brand’s reputation (and product awareness, etc.) with those audiences. They want to know how well their own forays into blogging and social video are faring, and they want to know who is writing or commenting about them, how much they are writing and what they’re saying. It’s also interesting to note that near the bottom of the list was traditional media coverage.
This is why it was important for us from the very beginning that our application focus not only on finding and measuring consumer generated content, but also enable companies to engage with the consumers who are generating it.
Did anyone catch this article about Radiohead’s groundbreaking marketing tactic of offering downloads of their new album online for ‘whatever you think it’s worth’?
I first heard about it a while back and thought it a significant example of major changes in the relationships between producers and consumers. The article spells it out well as it relates to the music business, but I can’t help but see the bigger metaphor for how the Internet and commercial use social media is radically altering our models for commercial exchange.
It used to be that you had a good idea and the first order of business was convince the folks who controlled the distribution in your industry that it was also a good idea. You might retain creative rights over the product, but the mechanics of getting it into the hands of consumers was complex, expensive and controlled by an elite few.
Radiohead astutely observed that 1.) the distribution mechanics of their industry was changing rapidly, and 2.) they were a strong enough band (brand) to take a chance on abandoning the old, slow and expensive model and going direct to the consumer.
What I really liked about this story is the description of what their creative process is like when they work through the old model of distribution with a major label. Their creative output was slow to get to market (albums take much longer to release), the promotional campaign (a tour) for selling the new product (album) was long and boring and kept them from what they really enjoyed the most—product innovation (writing and recording new music).
Getting closer to their fans (customers) allowed them to see what works immediately. A great example of early recording tapes tossed up on YouTube is given in the story. Rather than screaming about copyrights and trying to retain a death grip on brand perception, the band fully embraces the phenomenon of their art (product) being co-opted by the Internet Commons and rightly views it as a highly efficient, low cost feedback loop.
We often talk at Scout Labs about how getting closer to the consumer speeds up innovation. Hats off to Radiohead for progressive marketing innovation that ended up accelerating their product innovation as well in ways they never expected.
I recently re-watched YouTube founders Chad Hurley & Steve Chen interviewed by Chris Anderson from Wired at the Commonwealth Club (5/23/07). Watch the Video. It’s fun to hear about the dinner party where the idea was born (once again, they had a personal need that wasn’t being met — to share home-made videos with friends). They also talk about the early days of the company and how the rapid growth of the site caught them completely off guard. My favorite is a story they tell about an early functionality planning meeting, when they rejected the idea of needing any search functionality on the site. They really could not imagine their little “YouTube” ever hosting more videos than could fit on the first page.
Now this may be just good story-telling. I’m sure if you ask the Sequoia Capital folks who funded YouTube, they certainly expected the site to need search! But I love this story because you can make guesses about how users will use new product, you can even ask them how they will use it, but you never really know until you get it in their hands. Scout Labs has been working with many companies since day one. They’ve told us what they need, they’ve reviewed wire-frames, they’ve prioritized functionality, and told us how they thought they would use it. But now that they have a real live application in their hands, they are using Scout Labs for all sorts of things that we (or they) never imagined. They are loving some things that they were mildly excited aboout before, and of course, now they have a million more feature requests. But this is the fun part of building new products and why it is so important to let your customers be your guide. We’ll be doing just that for the next several months, prior to launch.
