Client Question: What Types Of Projects Can I Do With GutCheck?

Communiting, consumer participation, and will.i.am’s love of ellipsis

Did you all see will.i.am’s op-ed in Ad Age yesterday? It involved a lot of ellipsis and not a lot of full sentences. It also involved a neo-logism and the phrase “the youth market.” In the most interesting and least meandering of the sections, he writes:

there is a whole new concept of brands and businesses that bring community together…

you don’t have to go about the traditional way of marketing and advertising…

today, you need to turn a moment into momentum and momentum into a movement…

that can’t be done with 30-second commercials…

you need to create conversations with your customers…

so I say, MAKE CONVERSATIONS NOT ADS…

And while I wish I could get my fragmented brainstorming published in Ad Age without having to worry about things like sentence or argument structure, and while it’s hard for me to really understand why will.i.am’s thoughts on advertising are relevant, and while no one is holding will.i.am accountable for all of the Black Eyed Peas’ incredibly intelligent messaging (like, how did this song HAPPEN?) I do think at least he brings up a point. Creating a conversation with your consumers is key. Using interactive platforms to engage consumers in a two-way exchange is the difference between showing and telling.

Reimagining where, how and why brands advertise could also mean less boring, banal messaging and more interesting consumer engagement. Throwing around ideas like “the youth are all on twitter and facebook” is ok, but I’m really interested in the evolution of brand management and market research. Take the wii commercials for Just Dance 2:

Those are real people having so much fun! I want to have fun with them. I want to play Just Dance! (for real I do, if you have it invite me over?).

Nintendo encourages user participation with the brand. They just edit user footage together. And while I guess it’s not exactly changing the world, it is giving people the chance to interact around a brand. Which is pretty rad. Right?

Who else do you think does a good job of creating conversation?

Listening to Social Signals

GutCheck CEO Matt Warta recently wrote an Op Ed for Direct Marketing News, urging researchers to double check the findings gleaned from social listening to avoid being taken in by noise. He writes:

Social listening provides a fire hose of data that is used to develop marketing hypotheses around campaigns, pricing, branding and messaging. But knowing how representative the feedback, mentions, reviews and likes are of your target market’s sentiments can be tricky. Is the buzz around your brand cacophony, or is there a signal in all that noise?

…

Whether it’s understanding a vocal minority or helping alleviate the concerns of your target market, digging deeper into the insights and patterns gained by social listening is important to maintaining a good consumer relationship and validating research hypotheses. Giving this kind of attention to a social media crisis shows consumers that a) you’re listening and b) they have a voice. However, discerning what’s noise and what’s losing your brand loyalists will mean the difference between success and expensive missteps.

Check out the rest of the article and let us know what you think — what value have you found in social listening?

n+1 and a brief history of chatting

I love the articles in n+1, but this week they’ve posted an excerpt from an article called  “Chathexis” that REALLY speaks to us, a group of people who make a living providing a way to “chat” with strangers. The article gives a brief history of chatting, spanning from the invention of the couch (it’s being comfortable AND being able to sit with a friend and talk!) to AOL to gchat. They write:

“Previously, we’d decided which screen names to include on our “Buddy Lists” (poor AOL: it came first and had to name the animals, and it named them in a corporate-Midwestern way that couldn’t help but become comically creepy). Gmail made the choices for us, pulling names from our email contacts. It was like standing outside the door of a party that all your friends had been invited to. Maybe they had already arrived!”

The entire article is witty, smart, and true, but we were mainly interested in how our users and readers thought of “chat.” What do we gain from chatting now, almost 20 years after AOL’s IM system began? What does chatting lend us that video or in-person conversations cannnot?

image via http://k8thebounce.blogspot.com

n+1′s take on videochatting is hilarious. They write:

“There is something so literal about video. It reminds you of a world that can’t imagine anything but itself. It’s almost as bad as walking down the street. Our friends are made over into evasive strangers: just try making eye contact in videochat. You can’t. It’s as bad as a first date, or a job interview—you sit there, face to face with another human being, and feel unseen. Videochat’s promise of intimacy—friends on the other side of the world, looking at us in our homes!—makes us forget the conditions in which actual intimacy occurs. Where have we had our best conversations? When we were sharing a booth with someone in the back of a dark bar, or lying in bed, or walking somewhere, or nowhere at all, our faces turned in the same direction: outward, toward the world, into which we moved forward together. We arrive at a shared perspective when we do, actually, share a perspective—when we take, quite literally, the same view of things. Then, turning away from that view—and toward each other—can mark a moment of surpassing agreement or sympathy. There are no such moments in videochat.”

Sometimes, users will ask us at GutCheck if we plan to implement video chatting. And we do — there is a demand for the capability, so we’ll meet that demand because that is what we do. But whenever people bring this up to me, I tend to shy away from the idea. Maybe it’s because, at 25, I am someone who has grown up with all of the computer-based conversational tools touched on in the article. Because I grew up comfortable IM-ing and I still spend all day on gchat (BUT NOT ALWAYS CHATTING, guys! I am a GOOD WORKER!). Something about the video chat seems awkward. You’re hyperaware. You can see your own face staring back at you, in the corner of the screen. You can’t do anything else, it feels cheap. Long distance relationships feel more strained. The distance is palpable. It hurts more.

n+1 suggests that the one-on-one, intimate setting afforded by chatting at home, on the couch, or in bed, is our secret to continual attention and good conversation:

“Gchat’s bright bulbs go out, one by one, until a single circle glows hopefully. Like Gatsby’s green light, it is the promise of happiness. [...] Gchat has at times liberated us from this dialogue of the deaf, and provided us with a template for another way of talking.”

So what do you all think of the video/text chat concept? Has the way you communicate changed — and what do you prefer? How do you talk?

Eavesdropping with Social Media: Opting in and Opting out

Last week, the news that Linkedin would be opting users into social advertising was met with a lot of warnings: “UNCHECK THIS BOX!” and “Linkedin thinks it’s Facebook!” were just a few. And it’s true — Facebook really has set the tone for opting users in to social advertising and third party promotions. In the marketing realm, another question circling around social media is whether or not “social listening” is ethical.

In a paper published by Materials Research Society in the UK, the organization states, “In short, because information can be found it does not mean it should be used for research.” MRS made a list of ethical and legal arguments against the practice, the first on the list being “user expectations and terms of use.” They quote Facebook’s terms of use as follows:

“If you collect information from users, you will: obtain their consent, make it clear you (and not Facebook) are the one collecting their information, and post a privacy policy explaining what information you collect and how you will use it.”

This short hand overview of informed consent is set out to protect users, who have a certain expectation of privacy. In other words, they share their interests because they believe those interests are being shared with friends. Just because the information is out there, they don’t necessarily know how it might be used.

For this reason, many users are against having to use their legal names online. Specifically, danah boyd recently argued against the Google mandate to use real names online, calling it an abuse of power and a way of silencing those who might want to adopt pseudonyms for privacy. Bernie Hogan also articulates the idea of user expectations and online vs. offline behaviors, writing “You are not online when you are in front of a computer – you are online when your actions are being digitized and networked. Online is on-the-record. Offline is off-the-record.”

Aside from the idea of establishing a “safe” sharing space (with privacy) online, MRS quotes the Nuremberg code (as any academic researcher had to memorize and understand thoroughly in order to go through Institutional Review Boards), laying out the principle of voluntary participation. That is,

“…The person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.”

This is why doing academic research with children takes so much time — research participants have to go through many levels of consent in order to safely communicate with their subjects. Going through the IRB is full of red tape, but it’s there to protect participants and to prevent a slide down the slippery slope from “they pretty much understand” to “they don’t even know we’re watching.”

image via https://fittoprintfilm.wordpress.com

The other side of this coin, however, will show that users do volunteer information online, which is considered by many a public space. Digital MR writer Michalis Michael argues that the online space is a realm of performance, and that people use social media in order to be heard by the public. He writes:

“A garden can indeed be private; a public twitter account or a facebook fan-page is not. It is clear to the user, and if it isn’t it should be, that anybody has the right to read their comments and re-tweet (giving credit to the author) their tweets. As a matter of fact the writer in the majority of the cases, if not all, wants people to read their comments.”

Similarly, Ray Poynter argues that if researchers abide by “old” ethical standards, “…they will not be able to compete for business in most areas where market research is growing. This is because there will be no commercial benefits that will accrue to sticking to rules and ideas that nobody else does. To stick to out-dated rules simply provides a worse service for clients. Rules have costs, they only work when they also confer benefits.”

Dr. Annie Petit has also been following this topic and asking for research input on the subject. Through her account we found many arguments for and against setting standards, including a great post from Brian Tarran at Research Live, and also a link to CASRO’s call for comments on its draft for “guidelines that provide an ethical framework for research work performed within the unique formats, behavior systems, terminologies and varied privacy expectations of the social media space.”

So what do you think? Do users online deserve to know if they’re being listened to? Should they opt-in or opt-out of social listening? And what kinds of systematic changes would this mean for social networking sites and marketers alike?