Archive for the ‘Industry’ Category

The 8th wonder of the world – The hanging parliaments of Westminster

Could a political party, or more specifically, one man and his charismatic words3, hand the Lib Dems, a party that has never been in power before, the keys to Number 10? It could be so and it could be thanks to Twitter and Facebook. Nick Clegg has also thrived due to his ability to win over crowds in the first ever live televised debates in UK election history.

As can be seen from the graph above, Mr Clegg is leading the way in online buzz on Twitter with regards to the TV debates and with two very noticeable peaks around the time of the debates themselves. With the last one having taken place last night, it will be very interesting to see how this will play out.

If nothing else, Mr Clegg is causing an unsettling stir (at least for David Cameron and Gordon Brown) since he may actually cause a hung Parliament. This does, unfortunately, not involve the hanging of MP’s (in my opinion the only way to truly change politics in the UK) but would mean Gordon Brown staying in office a little longer because no party has won a clear majority. History shows that a hung Parliament can cause uncertainty in the upper echelons of Government which then trickles down to the masses and can lead to ‘unsettling’ times.

Also, what can be observed from the pie charts below is that Mr Clegg is clearly the winner when it comes to the buzz around TV debates across social media sites Facebook and Twitter.

In addition to the increase in Twitter and Facebook chatter, Mr Clegg also has the TV debates working in his favour since it has launched an almost unknown political figure into the stratosphere of political life. As can be seen from the Attentio BrandMaps picture, he is being talked about much more with regards to TV debates and hung Parliaments than the unimportant things like the economy, and spending cuts.

Oddly enough, very few people are talking about tax which probably serves all three leaders politically since it is widely speculated that a tax increase is on the way whoever is in charge.

In the next blog post, I will be talking about the parties in relation to social media and whether or not they are using it to their advantage.

YouTube homepage is down…

Oh my! It has finally happened. Forget the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse! YOUTUBE ISN’T WORKING!

Or is it?

Amid mass hysteria about the video sharing site going down, it does not seemed to have occured to anyone to try clicking a link in YouTube. If they did, they would realise that it appears that only the homepage is not working.

My Tweetdeck nearly exploded when I added the search term ‘YouTube’. It took over 15 minutes before people realised the truth and started tweeting about.

I will follow up with blog talking about the impact of this within the next few days…

The Bizarre Barclays Bank Blog

Wow. I am truly stunned. Whilst sitting here and trying to figure out what to blog about, I was thinking about my bank. It then dawned on me that perhaps this would be a great topic to cover in a blog. I thought ‘I will write about the banking industry and their trends in social media’.

My intentions were good but I got side tracked. And no, not in the way that a twenty-something year old male would usually be distracted by the Internet but by the fact that, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how many tweets I sifted through, I could not find one person, not ONE who had anything positive to say about Barclays. That has to be some kind of record!!

“How do I get hold of Barclays UK CEO am being ripped off and fobbed off”

“Getting seriously peed off with Barclays. A DD went out yesterday, there was plenty of money in for it & all was fine. Now they are saying..”

“This is because it took Barclays 6 months to give me access to the account and then they forgot to give me all info I needed to quote!”

“Tried ringing Barclays Local Business Manager mobile for York and am now talking to Darlington! Second lot of millions of security checks”

“Dear Barclays, when I ring the local business manager in York please could you put the call through to York and not via India,”

This is just a few of the posts that I looked at and they all fall within a half hour window. Now, I can understand that banks are not the most popular institutions at the moment but this is a worrying trend. How is it that in every other industry, if people feel that companies are not listening or reacting to them, they go elsewhere but with banks, this doesn’t seem to be happening? There doesn’t seem to be an upsurge of people keeping their money under their mattresses or going to ‘Dave the happy smiley money lenderer guy.

I also decided to check the Barclays website to see if they advertise any of their social media strategies (do they have a Twitter account, Facebook etc..) and there is nothing. I also did a search for Barclays on Facebook and could only find one group, which is private.

Don’t believe me? Try it yourselves. Go to http://search.twitter.com/ and type in any bank name. You will get similar results for NatWest and Lloyds to name but a couple.

Why is there such a divide between banks and their customers? Why are customers accepting it? Why are most banks ignoring it?

Whilst pondering this, I will phone my local bank manager and ask…. Oh, wait!

* In my next post, I will try and uncover what banks are actually doing about it if anything. In the meantime, if you have any news regarding this, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below.

I refuse to grow up

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been paying rent and making budgets and studying stuff and thinking “career” for years now, but there are some things I simply won’t let go of.
 
I laugh giddily for no reason. I pull pranks on my colleagues here at the Attentio Brussels office regularly. I store snow balls in the freezer. I keep a ping pong ball and racket in my desk at all times just in case, and I religiously read Calvin and Hobbes. Those two give me great ideas as to what I should do on the weekend.
 
I also play video games. A lot. If I manage to stay away from the sauce on Friday nights, I’ll get up nice and early with my lady on Saturday morning, make her breakfast in bed. Then I’ll send her off to her weekend course and saunter on into my game room, complete with Wii, PC, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Über flatscreen TV and telephone. The phone is there to call my for pizza.On these days I will be joined by thousands of gamers around the world – albeit most of them are a decade or more younger than me – ready to sit prone on the couch for the next 10 hours and do ostensibly nothing else then wiggle my fingers around and stare attentively at a screen. Of course Nina will come home after her course and expect the same man that brought her coffee, boiled eggs and toast in bed, but instead she’ll find Sgt. Paul Jackson of the USMC shooting Al-Asad soldier after Al-Asad soldier, while quite possibly having used the tomato sauce from the half-mauled pizza as face paint.

Truth be told, I couldn’t be the only grown-up playing video games. The video gaming industry is booming at such an alarming rate, it’s actually surpassed the film industry. According to recent NPD insights, North Americans now spend 29% of their entertainment Dollars, compared to 24% on movies and TV shows combined. To this end, I thought it would be interesting to monitor some of the online buzz revolving around these video game developers’ upcoming titles:

• Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
• Electronic Arts’s Army of Two, 40th Day
• Ubisoft’s Avatar: The Game
• Bungie’s Halo: Reach
• Capcom’s Lost Planet 2
• LucasArts’s Star Wars Force Unleashed 2
• Sega’s Vancouver 2010
• Sony’s Bioshock 2
• Rockstar Games’s Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City
• BioWare’s Mass Effect 2

Now the beauty of the Attentio Brand Dashboard is how we can collect and categorise the data. The Dashboard is designed with a three-tier approach. First, we collect the bulk of your data about your product or brand (or whatever, it’s completely open-ended and restricts your choices in no way). Then we create vertical categories based on your needs (these can be topics, products over brands, product ranges, even cities). After that we tell you what language the data is coming in, or what country.

Now that we have the games we’re going to track, maybe you’d like to suggest relevant topics you’d like to find out about with regards to these games? Just let me know below or mail me at marc@attentio.com, and we’ll see the results next week :)

NikePlus, Social Media and a herd of elephants…

I am, for my sins, a ‘technoholic’. I love gadgets. I love iPhones, computers, TVs, HiFi and Wifi. And the first thing I do when I get home with my latest purchase (after the window shattering argument with my girlfriend of course) is throw the instructions in the bin!!! I don’t like being told what to do especially by some ink and a piece of paper. I will go out of my way to use technology to make my life easier (or complicated as is usually the case) and fun (or frustrating as is, again, usually the case).

It is for this reason that I find myself contemplating going for a run. Let me be clear; I HATE running. I find it monotonous, boring and on the few occasions that I have taken part in this punishing past-time, I come home feeling like I have been attacked by a herd of stampeding elephants. Don’t get me wrong, I have enormous respect for people who go running. Especially people (men in particular) who have the courage to walk out the door in spandex, put enormous energy into placing one foot in front of the other for an hour and a half only to end up back where they started.

Why then would I contemplate such drastic action? One word; technology. I had heard of Nike+ a while ago but only recently took time to research it and can safely admit that you can slap me silly and call me Mr Impressed! I want to be part of this. I really do!

If you want to know how it works, you simply place a small electronic sensory perceptive coagulating transcendiducer (note, may not be actual name of device) into your shoe and it communicates information about your run to your iPod/iPhone or Nike+ wrist band. Things like your speed, distance, calories burned, weight lost etc are then uploaded to the Internet for online humiliation (in my case anyway).

I went to the website and was shocked to learn that Nike+ runners have circled the globe a staggering 8,148 times, burned 2,756,587 kilos and have run a total of 325,995,368 no, 369, no, 370, no, 371 kilometres. WOW! Here, I could look at clear and funky looking charts telling me that I ran x number of kilometres (and still ended up back where I started), I can input the type of terrain I ran in and select the kind of weather I experienced (although, living in Belgium, it only needs 1 setting).

It can give me challenges, coach me to get up to the optimum fitness level and even prepare me for a marathon (an unlikely scenario but nice to know I can). Finally, and here’s the really interesting bit, I can share all of this with my fellow spandex wearing compatriots around the world. (“Take that Rupert Murdoch. You may have all my money but I ran 300 metres further than you today!!!”). Therein lies the beauty of social media mixed with technology.

Doing a search using Attentio’s Trenpedia, I can see that there are roughly 15 to 20 posts on average every day mentioning Nike Plus. I also turned on my Tweetdeck to search for NikePlus and the thing was bleeping at me more than the SS Enterprise.

Do a search for NikePlus on http://search.twitter.com and you will be inundated with times and distances that people foolishly ran in what is obstensibly a large circle.

Will I be taking part in this ingenious use of social media to get fit? I might… but that’s not the point. The point is that I’m THINKING about doing it and for every lazy, pub-going, techno freak like me, there will be at least one other person out there who will don skin tight shorts and almost see-through top in order to leave the house only to end up back there an hour later having accomplished little other than painful kneecaps and a loss of dignity. I just hope that it’s the 19 year old Brazilian supermodel I have in my imagination. All of this because of technology and social media. As for me, insanity subsided, I’m off to the pub!

FDA tweets too

The FDA is a very well known office for all Americans. As the Food and Drug Administration, it controls the safety of food, medications and cosmetics. The FDA is known for its rigorous rules regarding drugs’ approval. The rules force the pharma producers to apply very specific procedures and inform their customers about the risks of taking the drugs.

Healthcare marketers complain that the FDA does not provide them with clear guidance regarding drugs-related communication in social media. One might then be surprised by how much this regulatory agency is using social media! The first campaign in social media, the peanut-product recall list, reached the public via blogs, You Tube and Twitter. The @FDArecalls started in the end of March and has posted already over 600 tweets notifying its followers about the Food and Drug Administration’s recalls, market withdrawals and safety alerts.  The number of FDA followers is growing every day. Other social media tools in use by FDA include a blog, You Tube videos, podcasts, social networks, second life and widgets. It seems like FDA is doing more in social media then pharma companies themselves! European Medicines Agency on the other hand, a corresponding body to FDA in Europe, does not have a Twitter profile neither a blog. One may expect that official tweets about the swine flu would be of big interest at the moment.

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New features: Attentio ‘Brand Maps’

This week we’re announcing version 3.0 of the dashboard and every day we’ll post here a little more detail about what the new features do.

The feature we’re most excited about is the new Attentio ‘Brand Maps’ which we believe has the potential to disrupt the Market Research industry. How so? Well first let’s start with:

What is it?

Read the rest of this entry »

Marketing and Money

Was it Milton Friedman that said that there are four types of spending?

1. Spend your money on you.

This makes the spender cautious–interested in acheiving an individual ratio of cost versus value. You want a nice car that you like to drive but that doesn’t break your budget in gas bills. This is where the consumer gets the best ROI, return on investment, because the consumer dictates the value of a purchased good or service.

2. Spend other people’s money on you.

Now the spender can be a bit less concerned with price and more concerned with quality (or status). You can blow a bit more cash on a nice car if your parents promise to cover the insurance. Not such great ROI for the spender, but a lot of fun (or at least less cost anxiety) for the person that ultimately consumes the purchase.

3. Spend your money on other people.

Do you buy Grandma a piece of jewelry or a nice sweater? What if it’s for your girlfriend? For Valentine’s Day? After a fight? The logistics involved in this question merit a certain amount of cost/value math modified for the person on whom you’re spending the money as well as the reason why. ROI can be hard to judge here. As a consumer, Grandma may get a lot more satisfaction out of a sweater than a diamond ring, but the ROI on a ring for your girlfriend may make you, the spender, happier.

4. Spend other people’s money on other people.

This is where a spender generally wastes the most money and gets the worst returns. This is why a lot of government spending is notorious-there is too much cash with not enough accountability or consumer satisfaction. If, as some studies suggest, the United States economy spends close to 11.3 billion dollars on health care yet some 47 million Americans, 16 percent of the population and growing, are uninsured and unable to access satisfactory, much less appropriate care, one has to wonder where the money is going.

Number 4 is also where marketers get stuck. They spend corporate cash on campaigns geared towards nebulous customer niches. Measuring the returns on some of this marketing can be difficult. Are consumers happier because they are consuming more? Or is a brand better off because consumers are more appreciative of the corporation’s reputation and sense of civic sponsorship? How to tell?

Measure online buzz.

Most online communities attract like-minded individuals. These communities congregate around topics, ideas, events and even brands that interest them. They talk about these initial community interests, but they also discuss other issues of importance to them.

For example, an online community built on interests in individual health and lifestyle will inevitably discuss favoured lifestyle trends and diets. Measuring and monitoring the buzz produced by these communities allows producers to anticipate the needs and desires of their customer niches. It lets them measure the possible returns on marketing before launching a campaign, identify where to launch the campaign and attract the most relevant and most reactive consumer audience. Lastly, after launching a campaign, monitoring and measuring online buzz can demonstrate how the buzz picks up and reacts to the campaign.

Listening to buzz lets a marketer know whether Grandma would buy herself a sweater if she had the cash or a diamond ring. It lets a marketer know not only whenand why the girlfriend wants the ring, but how big, how many carats, and with what setting. Online buzz puts a marketer as close to the market as s/he can be by letting the consumer dictate the best way to spend corporate cash and get real, measurable reactions (and returns) from consumers.

Health Care Consumers and online conversation create communities

An Economist article explored the trend of medical tourism in Europe and the United States. Consumers of medical services are going abroad to escape high prices and long lines at home. Hannaford, a grocery chain, and a few intrepid insurance programmes, are exploring the possibility of lowering total employee heathcare costs through incentivising traveling abroad for health care needs.

Physical travel, however, is the tip of a rapidly decentralising (disintegrating?) health care consumer paradigm. HCPs (Health care consumers) also go online rather than travel abroad to find products and services that they couldn’t otherwise access. In doing so, they frequently discover new and innovative products and services that pique consumer interest and fuel further individual (as well as corporate) research.

HCPs find communities of like-minded patients and caregivers and exchange information, ideas and opinions about health care goods, services, even specific providers. They research medications and treatments through forums and health care social networking sites like Trusera and PatientsLikeMe.

HCPs that share languages compare and critique public health systems. They let each other know what’s available where and who or which insurance is willing to fund what. Even institutionally-based medications, once limited to the institution that provided them, can now limit the institution. If a patient can’t access the med that s/he thinks s/he needs locally, s/he goes online and finds a provider that is willing to access the HCP–through the mail, through a network, through travel.

Health used to be geographic. What the next-door neighbor perceived as “health” could be considered standard for the neighbourhood. Now, the community of patients or HCPs determines what is “health” for their community. A patient suffering from dysthymia, a mood disorder, can go online and ask fellow patients across the globe how they best deal with depression. Then that community can advise, support, sympathise and even supply a patient with the products and services that patient wants.

Complement your consumers

We often see things the way we’ve seen things. And we talk about things the way we’ve talked about things.

Conversations are a reflection of reality. People go online to converse. They reconstruct and share their opinions of real world concepts, products, brands, and services. More and more, the online world is an evolving reflection of the offline world’s perceptions.

Traditional marketing generates surveys and sponsors “opinion polls”. Traditional marketing depends upon samples of consumers willing to dedicate time and thought to questions and ideas carefully presented to them by corporate mouthpieces with an obvious agenda.

This isn’t a bad way to go about collecting opinion, but it is limited. First, marketers must find individuals willing to respond, and then craft polls in such a way as to bypass predictable answers. Ultimately, the marketer risks pursuing topics chosen by the corporation or its representatives and not the consumer.

How to address this limitation? Complement the offline research with online engagement: social media. Online conversations are a marketer’s every desire. Online conversations are real opinions, spontaneous discussions, and individually initiated networks and communities of clients, customers and potential customers. These netizens share information, opinions, and recommendations. And all this is recorded and stored forever on the Internet. The only issue then becomes finding it, measuring it, and monitoring the buzz for trends. Trends online can initiate offline surveys or validate a virtual or real world marketing campaign.

Take, for example, a viral video initiated by Carlsberg beer. A clever “whistle” ad with a universally recognized tune, it’s attracting a lot of views on You Tube. Not only has this ad attracted viewers, its generating copy-cat fan ads that compete for attention online. And below each video are comments that admire critique and encourage a growing fan base for the ad as well as the product.

Carlsberg is already a something of a house name for You Tube ad fanatics. Fans self-select based on favoured ads. Perhaps surprisingly, a football ad by Carlsberg attracted not masculine ballers but a number of feminine trawlers. Girls scanning You Tube in search of the celebrity sports star rather than the beer, left a number of comments about the ad’s…aesthetic qualities. The whistling video earned attention from guys and gals looking for a nice tune and a laugh, and the football ad sported a girl-groupie appeal. Both audiences left their comments and criticisms below the videos and no doubt surfed some additional related videos suggested by the You Tube platform.

Social media is more than a target consumer base. In social media, the consumers target the market and let the marketers hear who they are and what they like. Traditional marketers can use this information in framing their own off and on-line research.