ShiftedPixels

Labels: attention, behaviour, branding, consumer influencer

Read the story at www.economist.com

Labels: behaviour, communities, consumer, conversations, online blog monitoring, online reputation monitoring, reputation management, reputation monitoring, sydney media monitoring

• 61 billion internet searches carried out around the world in August
• Google managed 37 billion internet searches were made with Google during the month, accounting for 60% of the total,
• 750 million people aged 15 or over, or 95% of the world's internet audience made searches in August, averaging out at 80 searches per user.
• The Asia-Pacific region made the most searches at 20.3 billion
• Europe made 18 billion searches
  
• North America made 16 billion searches
  
• Latin America made 4.7 billion searches
  
• Out of Google's 31 billion searches, five billion occurred through Google-owned YouTube.com
  
• Chinese language search site Baidu.com was the third most popular search engine with 3.2 billion searches or 5.3% of the worldwide total.
• Microsoft sites accounted for 3.5% of worldwide searches at 2.1 billion.

Labels: behaviour, consumer, demographics, search, seo, statistics

1. Markets are conversations.
2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked.

Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about "listening to customers." They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.

While many such people already work for companies today, most companies ignore their ability to deliver genuine knowledge, opting instead to crank out sterile happytalk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it.

However, employees are getting hyperlinked even as markets are. Companies need to listen carefully to both. Mostly, they need to get out of the way so intranetworked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets.

Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It's going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in....

Labels: behaviour, communities, consumer, conversations, Ideas

Labels: advertising, behaviour, communities, consumer, internet, Marketing

Labels: behaviour, communities, Ideas, Marketing, Startups, web 2.0

• Matthew Hodgson - Semantic analysis in IA
• Scott Parsons - Exploring multidimensional tagging frameworks
• Donna Maurer - Ethical issues and information architecture
• James Breeze - Open your mind - map it!
• James Matheson - Information Architecture of Wikis
• Hurol Inan - Landing Page Optimisation
• Patrick Kennedy - "There's no I in team" – a case study in collaborative information architecture
• David Sless - ROI in Information Design: where IA figures in ID
• Faruk Avdi - Rise to Play a Greater Part – Delivering Specs in the Bigger Picture
• Steve Baty - Analysing Quantitative Data
• Iain Barker - Is length still an issue?
• Stephen Collins - Love in an elevator - selling the value of IA to business
• Gary Bunker - User Research in virtual worlds
• Elizabeth Pek - Designing sites people love - balancing emotion with business reality
• Sharon Varley - Get out your pinking shears, it’s time to cut a few patterns
• Rashmi Sinha - Fast, cheap & somewhat in control - 10 lessons from the design of SlideShare

Labels: behaviour, communities, IA, Ideas, Usability

Labels: behaviour, communities, consumer, design, Ideas, Marketing

• Your brand story is consistent and can be measured against consumer-resonant benefits.
• Your brand teaches rather than preaches.
• You enable your consumers to have choices and are sympathetic to "studied cheating."
• You invite your consumers to be part of your brand through ongoing dialog.

Labels: advertising, behaviour, branding, consumer, Marketing

Labels: behaviour, communities, Ideas, technology

• Looking for a new corporate logo? Hire a corporate branding agency OR run a internet "submit your logo" viral/interactive campaign with user voting capabilities to find your new brand. (London 2010 Olympics logo cost GBP400k, and it is quite frankly... shite)
  
• Hire Saatchi to make a 1 million dollar tv advertisement OR create a youtube submit you own video to win 50k viral campaign.
  
• Hire a professional photographer to make images for your marketing material OR use iStockPhoto.com and leverage the leagues of kids with cameras to capture that unique look for your business.
  
• Hire a market research firm to find out how people like your product, OR create an online viral poll/survey with incentives for participants and get real/honest consumer insight
  
• Spend billions on government paid scientific research, OR create million dollar prizes for scientists who create solutions to specificed problems (see Aubrey de Gray's Life Extension project)
  

Labels: behaviour, communities, consumer, Ideas, social networking, web 2.0, websites

• Successful landing pages grab attention quickly by matching the promotional copy in the email's call-to-action that yielded the click. Yet 45 percent of the landing pages evaluated failed to repeat the email's promotional copy in the headline.
• Catapulting a clicker to a Web site's home page generally fails to deliver on the promise inherent in the email's call-to-action. Yet 7 percent of email campaigns dumped recipients there.
• Recipients can be taken aback when they click on a link and end up on a landing page without the same look and feel as the email that captured their attention. But three out of 0 marketers risked confusing customers and prospects by sending them to landing pages not matching the email.
  
• Asking too many questions can lead prospective customers to become wary and frustrated enough that they abandon the process. Nevertheless, 45 percent of landing pages that included forms required more than 0 fields to be completed.
• While the presence of a navigation bar on a landing page can be a distraction that pulls visitors away from the primary conversion goal, nearly seven out of 0 landing pages included them.
  
• Professional writers know it's a lot harder to write short copy than long. Apparently some marketers are taking the easy way out, since 25 percent of the landing pages reviewed by Silverpop required scrolling through more than two screens of text.
  

Labels: advertising, behaviour, Email, Marketing, online, websites

Labels: advertising, behaviour, branding, communities, consumer, design, internet, Marketing, online, pr, reputation, social networking, technology, viral, web 2.0

Labels: advertising, behaviour, consumer, design, Fun, Ideas, Marketing

1. Markets are conversations.
2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

Labels: behaviour, communities, consumer, internet

Anyone who has followed consumer electronics and online services knows that once a product reaches dominance, it becomes very hard for it to be dethroned (hello, iPod, Google, and Windows). Economists have argued for years regarding the costs involved in finding and adopting alternatives, but the psychologists will point out that familiarity and comfort play major roles in keeping consumers loyal to an incumbent. Research that appears in the Journal of Consumer Research delves into how these factors, collectively termed "Cognitive Lock-in," develop and play out.

The authors of the study point out that previous research has shown that cognitive lock-in is not just an abstract concern, but one comes with real-world costs: "the costs associated with thinking about and using a particular product decrease as a function of the amount of experience a consumer has with it. Thus, repeated consumption or use of an incumbent product results in a (cognitive) switching cost that increases the probability that a consumer will continue to choose the incumbent over competing alternatives." This suggests that, even if a product isn't especially easy to use, familiarity with it may overcome that drawback as, ultimately, its users don't have to think about their actions in order to get things done anymore.

Read the Full Article at Ars Technica

Labels: behaviour, consumer, design, Marketing

Labels: behaviour, communities, Marketing, social networking, video