Research and Relationships

Max Kalehoff (Nielsen), Aaron Coldiron (Microsoft), Amy Shenkan (McKinsey), Ellen Konar (Google) are the talking faces of this session at the Supernova 2007 congress.

They start with a Brand Association Map about Nike with concentric zones. First thing that pops into my mind is: is this for the US market? I see Nike being compared to Adidas and Converse. Sure that the European market does not have Converse in this map. How will this then translate to the web, where things are more global? Can a US market study be the model for a worldwide online campaign? I think it is not possible. Think global, act local, still is very true.

10 major disruptions in measurement, by Nielsen/www.attentiontrust.org:

1. Rise of online and digital

2. Attention erosion, research aversion-engagement

3. Speed of measurement increases

4. Data commoditizing and democratizing

5. Passive behavioral and attention measurement

6. Measurement and analysis of unstructured data

7. Consumer centric measurement and planning

8. Qualitative comeback

9. Data integration comes of age

10. Attention-data ownership

Main issue, the breadcrumbs of insight are left everywhere when you go online. Everything is being stored and kept. Brings me back to a talk I just had with Ted of Technorati. He told me that anything you leave at wordpress in your blog will remain forever. I deleted a couple of my blogs. But you can still find them. Interesting point of view if they are allowed to do that. I assume I am the owner of my content. And if I delete it, I want it away. But the system does not recognize me as the owner of my content. They have taken ownership. Bad thing, to speak in judgmental terms.

If you like to read more blogs also go to Sanford Dickert. He is typing like hell and is a social engineer, so will give different points of view.

The Kryptonite rumor. Interesting analysis. It stood for security. And there has always been this rumor about Kryptonite, but because there never was a platform to make this rumor really damaging it was “under control”. With a clip made about this and distributed over the internet, a lot of damage was done to its brand that they still suffer from. This is what the big companies have to live with nowadays. As Deborah Schultz said at the 2.0congress in SF earlier: “In control is out of contol”.

The Zune is a very small competitor to iPod, so said Aaron of Microsoft. He has to change the company to help to inform them how the customer is talking about your product. That is one of the main reasons MS went into blogging and research on that.

At Google people work like in a peer to peer network. There is no structure about how information flows. They do not give presentations and try to reach people at the highest positions possible. The information is available to all, and anybody can find it and work with it. A lot of people are so spending a lot of time finding the relevant information for them, that will help them. McKinsey’s Amy asks how that can work in a company of so many people. The Google rep also doubts it. But data she considers is not likely to travel fast, but true insights do travel quickly. I would say that the discrimination of information is very important. If it is important people will pick it up and promote it themselves. If it is not, it won’t and don’t even bother getting it then either.

Inside Google they have a lot of dashboards, many more than you can imagine. That is not so unusual though. Editing is summarizing fairly important information, or even dumbing them down. Once you start bulletizing the information, you will get closer to stickiness and truly valuable information. It will help you understand the information better.

After listening to all of this, I believe that the real major disruption in measurement is that there simply is too much information.

Other challenge is merging the internal information with external information. Often these do not synch automatically or are not the informations you wanted to hear, so you cannot match it. Let alone, would even consider matching it because it does not correspond with your own (biased) information or desired path.

The question got raised if privacy is not an issue when you consider the amounts of information that companies and institutions are gathering. In fact without completely informing the customers about this. The answer of these big companies is that in fact there are no rules set really. Reminds me of the 9/11 information that I have to provide every time I fly to the States. In fact what they say is: Anything you do on the internet can or may be used against you. It goes as far as applying for jobs and considering what you did when you were young. We are about to see now new people on the job market that have had an active life online. It is going to be a very interesting time for that.

Why would companies not share all this information openly with the audience and keep it away? Would they not profit from that and would customers not trust them more if they did this? In fact, they do cannot do that for legal issues. That is one of the reasons. If Microsoft found a bug they do not like to share that immediately with the audience. They first have to research it and find a band aid or something. This is quite awkward.

Ellen of Google says that she was not happy with some of the researches she did online. People were in fact tired of all the researches that they were asked to join. Then she asked if they had ever informed participants on the outcome of the research. They never did. Once she introduced that, she got much better results. That was a positive not to finish it off with.