Research
Study: Brand Erosion Caused By E-Commerce Friction
The new “Ouch Point” survey from the Opinion Research Corporation suggests that U.S. e-commerce websites are still — believe it or not — frustrating shoppers.
As first reported by Direct Magazine, the survey found that…
- 19% dislike learning an item was back-ordered or out of stock after said item was placed in a shopping cart
- 14% are frustrated by Web sites that malfunction as payment is being processed
- 8% are confounded by unclear return policies
- 6% don’t like unclear shipping information
- 6% dislike not getting an acknowledgment after an order has been placed
Adding another dimension to these numbers, Jack Loechner at MediaPost explains that:
. . . iCongo, Inc., released the results of a consumer survey conducted by Harris Interactive that reveals [that] 33 percent of online U.S. adults indicated they are more likely to shop online rather than in-person at a store due to the high price of gasoline.
If there were ever a time to optimize your e-commerce website, it’s now.
What else causes friction? Read FutureNow’s 2007 Retail Customer Experience Survey for answers.
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Join FutureNow’s Bryan Eisenberg on June 3rd in New York City for the Call to Action seminar. Based on his bestselling book of the same title, Bryan will show you how to improve conversion and brand affinity by reducing friction for the customer.
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Conversion Rates, Eat Your Heart Out
Quick question for anyone with a lead-generation or e-commerce site…
Which is easier: Getting people to trust your website and complete its web form or checkout process, or getting them to literally donate their hearts and eyeballs?
Take your time.
Apparently, the answer depends on where they live. While 99.98% of Austrians agree to donate their organs upon death, only 12% of Germans do the same. Virtually all French citizens will donate a kidney to save a life, but the Brits? Only 17% of them seem willing. Meanwhile, your chances of having a heart (transplant) are nearly four times better if you’re having a triple bock in Antwerp than they are if you’ve already had a triple bypass in Amsterdam.
Seems odd, doesn’t it? Take a look at this graph from a recent Freakonomics article:
Here’s how Dan Ariely — Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, principal investigator of the MIT Media Lab’s eRationality group, and author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions — explains this bit of research (from colleagues Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein) in the Freakonomics post mentioned above:
…It turns out that it is the design of the form at the D.M.V. In countries where the form is set as “opt-in” (check this box if you want to participate in the organ donation program) people do not check the box and as a consequence they do not become a part of the program. In countries where the form is set as “opt-out” (check this box if you don’t want to participate in the organ donation program) people also do not check the box and are automatically enrolled in the program. In both cases large proportions of people simply adopt the default option.
You might think that people do this because they don’t care — that the decision about donating their organs is so trivial that they can’t be bothered to lift up the pencil and check the box. But in fact the opposite is true.
This is a hard emotional decision about what will happen to our bodies after we die and what effect it will have on those close to us. It is because of the difficulty and the emotionality of these decisions that they just don’t know what to do, so they adopt the default option (by the way this also happens to physicians making medical decisions, and also to people making investment and retirement decisions).
[…] The moment you realize that your intuition about your own behavior might be wrong it is clear that you need another, more objective input.
This is what experiments are all about. We could have never intuited the opt-in, opt-out effect, nor could we have intuited the magnitude of this effect, and this is why empiricism is so important.
If you know anyone who’s skeptical about testing content from the visitor’s perspective, please take a moment to share this with them.
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[Image credit: Kistyn E]
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Are Friends More Influential Than “Influencers”?
This may not come as a shock, but new research suggests that, yes, our friends are more influential than so-called “influencers” like bloggers.
According to MediaPost,
…a new study from Canadian research firm Pollara, self-described social media users put far more trust in friends and family online than in popular bloggers, or strangers with 10,000 MySpace “friends.”
Of more than 1,100 adults polled in December, nearly 80% said they were very or somewhat more likely to consider buying products recommended by real-world friends and family, while only 23% reported being very or somewhat likely to consider a product pushed by “well-known bloggers.”
But what if your friend happens to be a “well-known blogger”?
When Bryan swings by the office between conferences — as he did this morning, after speaking at eMetrics Summit last week in Toronto — there’s always some new website, product, blog or book he’s recommending. This time around, he had a stack of books. “Pick one,” he said. So I grabbed a copy of Evgenii “Geno” Prussakov’s Online Shopping Through Consumers’ Eyes.
“It’s a quick read,” Bryan insisted. “Lots of great research in there.”
I haven’t read it yet, but the first page I flipped to had a chart, illustrating that “86.6% of online users would actually follow recommendation links/advice sent to them by their friends and peers.”
Before I had a chance to share that with Bryan, he was already onto the next thing.
“Have you seen TripIt.com yet,” he asked. “It’s brilliant. You can upload your entire trip itinerary — not just flights, but everything — and email it or text it out to friends and family in one step.”
Sure enough, I put down the book and went to TripIt.com to check it out. (Sorry, Bryan, but I researched it because you’re a friend, not because you’re a “well-known blogger.” 
)
UPDATE: More interesting stuff on this topic from MediaPost.
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Net Gain: Latinos Are Going Online More Than Ever
Admen dream about Silvia Medina.
She’s part of a highly coveted demographic group, 18-34 year olds, that companies from Coca-Cola to Apple just can’t get enough of. Though her parents came from the Dominican Republic, she was born and grew up in the United States. She’s a fully bilingual, fully bicultural Latina, just about to finish her MBA. If you want to find her, you’ve got to go online.
Silvia has been on the internet since 1996, and uses it constantly for school, work, and at home. She communicates by e-mail, pays bills online, and prefers to shop at Amazon than go to the mall. Silvia catches up with friends on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. She follows the news on AOL Latino and keeps up with chisme on Terra. When she misses an episode of a telenovela, she downloads it on Univision.com.
But her favorite spot in cyberspace is the Miami-based portal Batanga. Last year, the company received a shot with a $30 million dollar investment. It’s paid off, since that’s where Silvia spends about 80% of her online time.
That comes as no surprise to Batanga’s CEO Rafael Urbina: “It makes her feel good that her music is being played there, that her language is spoken there,” he says.
Critical Mass
Silvia is not alone. In fact, she’s part of a growing trend among Latinos of growing internet usage. According to November 2007 figures from comScore’s Media Metrix, 18.1 million or 41% of Hispanics are online. These numbers make marketers salivate, though there may be even more. According to Dr. Felipe Korzenny, Professor and Director of the Center for Hispanic Marketing Communication at Florida State University, who has been researching Latinos online since 2000, usage may be significantly greater. He would raise the ante to 28.8 million, or 65% of the Hispanic population.
Anyway you look at it, the number of Latinos going online has reached critical mass. But to understand these numbers, you need to segment the market. The first to go online were acculturated Latinos with a higher socio-economic level, according to Danny Allen from Admixture, an online ad network with about 75% to 80% of websites in Spanish. This is echoed by David Morse of New American Dimensions, one of the top multicultural market research firms. He explains that online Latinos are better educated and have a higher household income. The longer that they are in the United States and especially when they have school-age children, the more time they spend online. But this isn’t necessarily the case for all Latinos.
“We need to keep in mind,” says Morse, “that there is still a digital divide among the less acculturated immigrants that tend to be poor.”
Many recent immigrants lack the education to realize the importance of the internet. When you go to their houses you are more likely to find a huge stereo system or a big screen TV before a computer. But as penetration in the Hispanic market gets deeper, the lower socio-economic levels and the less acculturated Hispanics will start to get online in larger numbers. This segmentation is demonstrated by a 2007 eMarketer report which reveals 78% of English-dominant adult Hispanics are using the internet, compared to 71% of non-Hispanic whites. At the same time, only 32% of Spanish-dominant adult Hispanics were online.
Allen notes that the broad availability of cheap broadband and cheap computers has helped getting Latinos online. The ability to get online through mobile phones has also has been an influence, since Latinos generally over-index in the use of mobile phone’s advanced features. One theory is that this is because they don’t have a computer at home so they do most of their interacting through cellular phones. With the advent of the iPhone and its ability to cruise the “real internet” it’s becoming less of an issue that websites have to be mobile-friendly.
Viva Batanga
Where are all these Latino internauts going? When analyzing the top 10 sites visited by Latinos in comScore’s Media Metrix, one notices that the most popular are those from Yahoo and Google, followed a bit down the list by Amazon and Ebay. The most popular Latino-themed site, Univision.com, gets a lot of traffic but is barely within the top 30 properties.
Yet there are several very successful sites that have caught the attention of the Latino consumer, garnering loyalty as well as eyeballs. Todobebé.com has been around since 1999, evolving into a full-fledged multimedia company serving Spanish-speaking mothers not just online but via television, radio, print, and event marketing. Terra is the portal of Spanish telephone giant Telefonica. Its CEO, Fernando Rodriguez, shares that one of the most visited areas in Terra is music, and there the most popular are the artists’ own pages, in both Spanish and English. He emphasizes that what is most important is content, not language.
Then there is also Silvia Medina’s favorite, Batanga. She certainly is not alone regarding her preferences. Rick Marroquin, Batanga’s chief marketing officer, joyfully shared that in comScore’s, November 2007 Media Metrix, Batanga was at 3.5 million unique visitors a month inside the U.S., 1.1 million of those identified as Latinos.
Batanga was born in 1999 in Greensboro, North Carolina as a Hispanic online radio station. Around the same time, Venezuelan native Rafael Urbina started a company by the name of Planeta Networks, offering internet video on demand. In 2005, both companies merged, with headquarters in Miami, and Urbina now serves as CEO. In August 2007, Batanga raised $30 million for the expansion of its marketing efforts and online content. The lead investors, Tudor Ventures and H.I.G. Ventures, both manage multi-billion dollar manage large portfolios, and have funded a wide variety of enterprises. What’s the secret of Batanga’s success?
“In the past, the value proposition offered by Hispanic media companies was primarily the language,” says Urbina. “We believe that Batanga is one of the first media companies to break this barrier. From the start, it began with a bilingual interface, giving visitors the option of accessing our content in their language of choice. We focus in offering culturally relevant content for users. That is why music was the logical first step. Independent of your heritage, or where were you born, or your language preference, there will be one Latino music genre that will touch your heart.”
Urbina emphasizes that Batanga is living proof that Hispanics are online. The fact that most of them are late adopters compared to the general market has resulted in them connecting to the web directly through broadband, rather than a dialup connection. This creates an interesting situation given that Latinos basically leapfrogged an entire technology. Currently, less than 50% of the entire Latino market is online and the Batanga team believes this number will continue to grow in a much faster pace than the general market for many years to come.
English or Spanish?
Despite the success of Batanga and its rivals, the debate continues. Yet marketers agree that the important thing is to define who you are trying to reach and then devise strategies that are meaningful and relevant to them.
Matias Perel, the founder of Latin3, a Hispanic interactive agency, catering to Hispanic divisions of global corporations, takes a step further on the segmentation of the Latino online market. According to the 2006 AOL Roper Study, he sees the Hispanic online market divided into three: Mostly Acculturated 15%; Partially Acculturated 66%; and Relatively Unacculturated 19%.
The mostly acculturated Hispanics are achievement oriented. 74% of them prefer to read online content mostly in English, 4% in both languages, and 22% don’t have any preference. Partially acculturated are more into social and fan oriented. 34% of them prefer to read online content mostly in English, 12% in Spanish , 27% in both languages, and 22% don’t have any preference. The relatively unacculturated are mostly oriented to family and home. 9% of them prefer to read online content mostly in English, 31% in Spanish, 41% in both languages, and 19% don’t have any preference.
Curiously, research has shown that English-dominant Hispanics have more blogs than any other group in the U.S. while Spanish-dominant Hispanics have more websites than any other. The latter is due to the cultural tendency of trying to be connected, to try to have relationships and connections. Dr. Korzenny has heard reports that many immigrants build their personal websites to show loved ones back in their home countries how they live.
But by far the greatest controversy is which language to use.
Fernando Espuelas, CEO of Voy, a leading Latino social entertainment network, quoted a recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center showing that 75% of the growth among Hispanic consumers will come from U.S. born persons as opposed to immigrants. The vast majority of the market place is American-born and the future of the growth will come from them. Also, Espuelas says, referencing another Pew study, English language adoption among Latinos is happening at a much faster rate. Therefore, he says, we can see that the U.S. Latino population is becoming predominantly English-dominant. Yet he is aware that Spanish language, culturally, is very important for the Hispanic community.
Some argue that English language sites should develop content in Spanish, since many users prefer reading in that language. But exactly the opposite has been happening with traditionally Spanish language websites. To reach a larger percentage of the Latino market, they have been producing bilingual content. Terra has been producing bilingual content, particularly to cover specific events like soccer’s Gold Cup and World Cup, as well as The Oscars. Terra executives have noticed that more and more bilingual and even English-dominant users are coming to their site looking for relevant content. Their conclusion is that language is secondary to the content’s appeal.
Keeping Pace
Have advertisers kept up with this growth?
Hispanic advertising agencies are starting to develop more and more interactive advertising capabilities and as they do they are looking for quality websites, declares Allen. In the last 18 months he has seen the agencies’ attitudes evolve from believing that Latinos weren’t online and they were going to reach them through print, television, and radio to now starting to realize that indeed they need to reach them on the internet. They are realizing that they are far behind the general market agencies regarding their online capabilities and are working really hard to catch up. Of course, there are some exceptions — several Hispanic shops have been doing interactive for a while.
Espuelas predicts that there will be a very rapid evolution of advertisers; those who never advertised in English to Latinos starting to do so and those who traditionally only used television will now broaden their buys to include digital. He foresees a very significant growth in the overall marketing and communications investment pie, and happening disproportionately in digital media as opposed to traditional media.
Media Economics Group tracks advertising activity targeted to multicultural markets. They have been tracking online Hispanic advertising for more than 5 years. Their president, Carlos Pelay, has seen a notable increase in activity in terms of the number of active brands advertising to Latinos online. The major advertisers are present on the major portals. In terms of campaigns, Univision.com ranks number one, then AOL Latino, MSN Latino, Que Pasa, Batanga,Yahoo Telemundo, and StarMedia. For major campaigns the big advertisers are buying several portals at once.
For example, Batanga currently has over 100 advertisers, and Marroquin believes there are still a lot more advertisers that should be opening their eyes to Latinos online. There is a lot of economic action amongst Latino consumers that is making the cost barrier to enter the web significantly lower than what it was even two or three years ago. The numbers don’t lie. When asked about advertising success stories on Batanga’s site, Marroquin said, “At the risk of sounding very arrogant, there are too many to count. Our advertisers have been doing unbelievably well.”
That’s good news for Silvia Medina, and for all Latinos online.
[Editor’s Note: Each month, Juan Tornoe joins us on GrokDotCom to share his insights on Hispanic marketing trends. This article is the debut cover story for LATINO magazine, now available in limited edition print format. To learn more about how to receive LATINO magazine, contact Juan at Hispanic Trending.]
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Written by:Juan Tornoe
Do Men and Women Laugh at the Same Ads?
It was one of those eye-opening moments. I was watching Bryan Eisenberg teach Call to Action — the seminar, not the book. (Even though I’ve seen him teach it several times, I still learn something new every time I attend.)
He showed the “Bra Scientist” video clip by Zafu that I blogged about last year.
As the audience was watching the clip, I noticed something interesting: There were certain points when the men were laughing and the women weren’t. And there were other points when the women were guffawing but the men weren’t even smiling.
The guys laughed when the scientist asked the woman in the parking lot if she would talk about her “um, well… you know, uh… breasts.” It’s a funny line, well delivered. (The guys found it funny, anyway.) She responds “Sure” and the scientist is quite pleased the interview can continue. But then she kicks his head off. Literally.
Some of the women looked a little shocked, but for other women, it garnered full-on belly laughs.
Why is this important? Because humor is one of the most pervasive devices advertisers use to try to sell products. Is that humor hitting the mark with target audiences? A recent Advertising Age article claims that “Snide Advertising is Bad for Business and Society” (subscription required but it’s available here).
In the article, Richard Rapaport discusses “the nasty tone that seems to dominate advertising” and “commercials built on sadism, on derision, on one-upsmanship — in a word, ’snide.’” He gives this example:
Another building block of snide advertising is physical aggression. Consider the quite literally shocking ad for Priceline.com in which William Shatner enters the house of a frustrated online vacation shopper and stuns him with a Taser before sitting down at the man’s computer. “Did I zap your daddy?” Shatner coos at the man’s disquieted child. “Yes, I did,” he admits, “but I saved him lots of money.”
I’m not sure what percentage of Priceline’s audience is women, but women book more online travel than men do. I wonder how they feel about that ad.
While I do believe some humor is universal, I think there are certain types of jokes and subject matter that men find funny that women don’t, and vice-versa. Part of what makes something funny is that it rings true to you (”Oh my God, I’ve so been there!”). Different content may speak more to one gender than the other.
Eric Berger at the Sci Guy blog asked if women have a better sense of humor. One comment grabbed my attention. A reader named Scott has this to say:
The women in my office say that the reason they have less expectation of a reward is that most guys tell such bad jokes, and repeat them over and over. Women don’t tend to be entertained by jokes about bodily functions, sexual performance, or many of the other common topics of guy jokes. I’ve never heard a woman tell a Christa Macaullife/Space Shuttle Challenger joke, yet there are guys who still crack up over them. So perhaps women have a more “refined” sense of humor, not necessarily a “better” sense of humor.
Interesting. There’s a fascinating study done by Professor Hugo Carretero Dios at the University of Granada that finds that humor depends on the person. Or, as the press release claims, “Scientific research on sense of humor sheds light on psychological profiles.”
Carretero Dios observed a generational change in the women’s preferences to the different types of humour. “There has been change in women’s values and roles in our society,” says Carretero Dios. “In people over 45-50, we observed that both men and women laughed more at jokes degrading to women than those degrading to men”. At the same time, both men and women showed more rejection to jokes degrading to men.
However, among the participants between 18-25 years old, the trend was different and men and women had different reactions. Men laugh more at jokes degrading to women and reject those degrading to men. By contrast, women laugh more at jokes degrading to men and reject those degrading to women. Indeed, this trend is more pronounced in women.
“Could these findings show a change in educational values or even a new pattern in the roles played by women”
I think the whole subject deserves more analysis, but it underscores the importance of understanding who your audience is and how gender could affect whether that audience thinks your ads are funny.
What ads have you seen recently that you found funny — or unfunny — and why?
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About the Author: Holly Buchanan is a Persuasion Architect at FutureNow and co-author of The Soccer Mom Myth — Today’s Female Consumer: Who She Really Is, Why She Really Buys.
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Written by:Holly Buchanan
70% of Online Shoppers Read Multiple Product Reviews
An e-tailing group study commissioned by PowerReviews has further revealed the necessity for customer-generated product reviews on e-commerce sites.
It seems the majority of online shoppers want to hear what people like them have to say about the product they’re researching. Almost 70% of customers looked at more than 4 reviews before making a purchase.
The study also gives a sense of how long visitors spend reading reviews before their purchase (50% spend over 10 minutes) and found that most people read reviews once they’ve narrowed down their search to 2 or 3 products.
Just having reviews isn’t going to cut it, though. E-tailers must give the would-be customer something more if they want them to come back to their sites — not just to research, but to buy. If more than 50% of customers spend over ten minutes looking at reviews, that shows they’re looking for more than just an overall “star rating.” For instance, one way of boosting your reviews’ credibility is having a “pros and a cons” field for visitors to fill out. This will show visitors that you welcome criticism and are confident in your products, while making the reviews that much more valuable to other visitors.
Here are some tips and a screencast from Bryan to help plan and optimize your review system.
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Written by:Daniel McGuigan
Why “Harmless” Stereotypes Kill Marketing Campaigns
We all use stereotypes. They’re a shortcut to understanding people who are not like us.
Occasionally — perhaps more often than we’d like to admit — there’s at least some grain of truth in stereotypes. There are a few attributes that may be accurate about each of the groups others lump us in. So why are they so harmful?
In an article for MSNBC (”Science Gets the Last Laugh on Ethnic Jokes”), Kathleen Wren discusses a recent study showing that real personalities don’t match stereotypes. It seems there’s further proof our prejudices may be misleading…
A possibility is that some very specific components of a stereotype may be accurate — for example, Italians may gesture with their hands a lot — but that they don’t necessarily tell us anything more generally about personality.
Stereotypes keep us from digging deep enough to truly understand people (e.g., your customers). We see one or two traits and assume several others must also be true. Very dangerous.
But here’s the really scary part:
We may be “hard-wired,” to some extent, to maintain inaccurate stereotypes, since we are less likely to notice and remember information that violates our stereotypes.
When analyzing data, surveys, focus groups, and other information we gather about customers, we may be more likely to focus on information that reinforces our stereotypes since, well, it just “feels right.”
Think this can’t happen to you? Think again.
When I create male personas, I check in with the men on our team to make sure they’re accurate. (I’m not trying to brag here, but… ) I’ve been helping clients create customer personas for a long time, and my results confirm that I know what I’m doing. Still, there have been several times where the research information I was getting just sounded dead wrong. I simply could not believe it. But after extensive checking, it appeared it was indeed true.
I’ve done enough research on the difference between men’s buying processes and the ways women buy to know there are indeed some BIG differences. So when I see something that goes against my gut, I don’t just write it off. I investigate and try to keep an open mind. But this is why it’s so dangerous when marketers (even yours truly) claim to know something’s true in their so-called “gut”:
Generally, according to Robins, when we encounter people who contradict prevailing generalizations, we perceive them as unique individuals rather than representatives of their national or cultural groups.
How true. But stereotyping doesn’t end there. When ethnic stereotypes don’t fit, it’s gender stereotypes to the rescue!
I see this all too often: “Oh, the research says this woman is happy with her weight. She even thinks she looks good, even though she’s obviously overweight. That can’t possibly be true. All women want to be skinny.”
Guess what. There are many women whom the beauty industry would consider overweight who are perfectly happy with their bodies and do think they look good. (Look at the success of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, or Jenny Craig “plus size” spokeswomen Kirstie Alley, Valerie Bertinelli, and Queen Latifah.)
How can you break through stereotypes and really understand your customers? First, consider that stereotypes are the single biggest reason why so many marketing-to-women efforts fail, then read my post on Copyblogger (”Surprise! Not All Women Think Alike”).
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[Editor’s Shameless Plug: Holly is co-instructor of our Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar on March 28th in San Francisco, and co-author of The Soccer Mom Myth — Today’s Female Consumer: Who She Really Is, Why She Really Buys.]
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Written by:Holly Buchanan
The UK’s Top 50 Ecommerce Sites
Recently, Hitwise published their 2007 list of the top 50 e-commerce websites in the UK.
While many of the usual suspects are represented, it’s worth noting how consumer demand compares with the huge differences in the quality of customer experiences offered by these sites.
Of course, it’s one thing to know who the top retailers are, but it’s quite another to have qualitative data that shows how certain e-commerce sites actually engage customers. That’s why we spent months reviewing hundreds of American retailers for Future Now’s 2007 Retail Customer Experience Survey — and why we’re expanding our research to include EU retailers.
In just two weeks, I’ll be at the Search Engine Strategies conference in London, where we’ll discuss web analytics, boosting conversions, and most of all, redefining the customer (experience). In the meantime, I’d love to hear from our European friends, colleagues and readers, about whether you think this list is a good place to start:
1. Amazon UK
2. Play.com
3. Argos
4. Tesco.com
5. Apple Computer
6. Dell EMEA
7. Amazon.com
8. Marks & Spencer
9. Tesco Direct
10. Next
11. HMV.co.uk
12. Expedia.co.uk
13. Thomson Holidays
14. LastMinute.com
15. Currys
16. Ticketmaster UK
17. John Lewis
18. RyanAir
19. easyJet
20. British Airways[See the rest of The IMRG-Hitwise Hot Shops List.]
Any other European retailers you’d like us to evaluate? Let’s hear it in the comments!
P.S. If you are going to be at Search Engine Strategies in London and then a few weeks later in NY, let me know. I’d love to connect with some of our readers.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Wasting Money Targeting Influentials? Another Tip…
I’ve never been a huge fan of Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point, because it oversimplifies how ideas spread. I intuitively knew that idea spreading was more complicated than that. In the February 2008 issue of Fast Company there’s an interesting article that I think provides additional context for understanding viral marketing: “Is the Tipping Point Toast? — Marketers spend a billion dollars a year targeting influentials. Duncan Watts says they’re wasting their money.”
Here’s just a small excerpt:
In the past few years, Watts–a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) –has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.
“It just doesn’t work,” Watts says, when I meet him at his gray cubicle at Yahoo Research in midtown Manhattan, which is unadorned except for a whiteboard crammed with equations. “A rare bunch of cool people just don’t have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There’s no there there.”
And this is not, he argues, mere academic whimsy. He has developed a new technique for propagating ads virally, which can double or even quadruple the reach of an ordinary online campaign by harnessing the pass-around power of everyday people–and ignoring Influentials altogether.
Not everyone appreciates the mind bomb Watts has tossed into their midst. He says one music executive pronounced his work “bullshit” on the spot. But a growing group of marketers believes Watts is radically altering the way companies attempt to produce trends. “He is changing the way people think about the way we communicate,” raves Robert Barocci, president of the Advertising Research Foundation. “He’s one of the best thinkers in the industry today.” But is Watts right?
Whether you agree or not, the article is worthwhile reading for every marketer. Sneeze all over us and let us know what you think about Watts’ ideas.
Does it change your mind at all about how viral marketing works?
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Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
Google Reveals What People Are Buying Online
Wouldn’t it be great if we could get insights as to which products people preferred. We could get research into which products we should merchandise more prominently. Google just released a new trending tool for those of us curious what people are buying and selling online. From the official Google Checkout Blog:
Many of you are aware of Google Trends, the handy tool that enables you to track and compare what Google users are searching for. Now imagine a similar tool that can give you some insight into what people are buying and selling online. That’s exactly what we’ve built: Google Checkout Trends aggregates the sales data of Google Checkout merchants and charts it in a matter of seconds. (Of course, all the data is anonymized first.) So if you’re interested in how sales of Batman or Spider Man paraphernalia compare, or are wondering just how popular Ugg boots are these days, visit Checkout Trends for a glimpse into online shopping. Go ahead and try it out — and get creative with the searches. You may be surprised at what you find.
I was having problems this morning getting any results from my searches, even from their six suggested searches. Every time I searched, I received a message that said:
Your terms - ipod, zune do not have enough search volume to show graphs.
If you want to see what the graph of results looks like you can find people discussing it here, here, and here.
Regardless, I think once these issues are resolved, like Google Trends this will provide some interesting data. One thing to keep in mind though is that in our analysis for our 2007 Customer Experience Retail study we found only 10% of the 300+ top retailers offered Google Checkout as an option.
How meaningful will the results really be?
Have you had better luck with Google Checkout Trends? Your impressions?
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
