Digital Hive

Great online word association and laddering tool

A writer I work with on several clients recently passed on this great wiki that allows anyone to engage in some old fashioned association and laddering exercises. I have played around with this a bit and it is awesome. Simply type in a word and you are fed a tag cloud of words or phrases others most often associate with your entry. Definitely check out the video and the wiki when you have a chance; it’s a great way to expand your thoughts on any subject and (possibly) find an answer or idea you may have otherwise overlooked.

Come use your media skills in a new way!

We're expanding our connections planning capability - so we're looking for people who have a media background and a passion for applying media insights to the big idea development process.

As you know from Laura's post a few weeks ago, we're taking a unique approach to CP here at DTAS:

While many agencies are using Connection Planning as a means to advanced, creative media planning, at Digitas, we've brought Connection Planning upstream as a means to inspire big creative marketing ideas. We mine for insights about reaching our consumers, integrating into their lives, leveraging influencers and creating brand evangelism and combine them with traditional Account Planning insights. In doing so we're fueling creative marketing ideas from the beginning with insights around both context and content. In the digital space this is a key distinction, since every client deliverable could come to life in infinite ways based on the unique context of the space.

If this sounds like something you'd like to do, check out the job description below, and email Jeff Flemings for more info.

Download cp_job_descrip.doc

More wisdom from the WOM gurus at Church of the Customer

Check out the latest post from Ben McConnell of Church of the Customer. Digitasians will remember a visit earlier this year from Ben's compadre Jackie Huba.

Entitled "your marketing budget is too big when," I love this post (and the comments it's provoked) because it debunks many of the "marketing must have's" that distract clients and agencies from their real work: giving consumers help and value.

My favorite: your organization writes more press releases than blog posts.

A close runner up: your CMO's definition of engagement is: "Turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context." (This definition comes courtesy of The Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) and the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF).)

I also love this add from a comment: you decide you need a "community strategy" even though your brand is ignored or loathed by your customers. And: you hire people to improve your online reputation instead of fixing what's wrong with your company.

Why is this important to us? It's a gentle (if pointed) reminder that understanding and tapping into what consumers think and do should always be the marketer's first priority - not pointing the latest marketing technology at them or launching a cool shiny object just because we're bored. Also, don't expect marketing to solve a product or reputation problem. Finally, we must enable "citizen marketers" (as Ben & Jackie have coined them) to get involved with the brand and do some of the marketing for us.

What planners can learn from criminal profilers

On a recent transcontinental flight I was catching up on recent issues of the New Yorker and discovered a very interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell in the November 12th issue.

We've all heard about criminal profiling - the process of using factoids about an unknown criminal to get into the offender's mind and motivation in order to capture him or her. I'm interested in profiling because it's so often been likened to account planning (interestingly, an APG conference about 10 years ago had a leading criminal profiler as a guest presenter).

Gladwell's article is a fascinating read for anyone who likes puzzles and problem solving. It was particularly interesting to me because it debunks the credibility of the long-worshiped craft of profiling - and therefore raises some issues about how we planners pursue our craft.

He reveals: "In the mid-nineties, the British Home Office analyzed a hundred and eighty-four crimes, to see how many times profiles led to the arrest of a criminal. The profile worked in five of those cases. That's just 2.7 per cent." Clearly profiling has gotten more credit than it's due.

He cites a number of specific failings of profilers' typical techniques. First off - vagueness which masks a lack of logic and rigor. He writes about a number of investigations where the profile - compiled by an "expert" - was ill-defined, and outright wrong, in part because the profiler relied too heavily upon intuition rather than facts.

A key driver for error: incorrectly ascribing motivation to action. He quotes Brent Turvey, a forensic scientist who has been highly critical of the FBI's approach: "The fact is that different offenders can exhibit the same behaviors for completely different reasons. You've got a rapist who attacks a woman in the park and pulls her shirt up over her face. Why? What does that mean? There are ten different things it could mean. It could mean he doesn't want to see her. It could mean he doesn't want her to see him. It could mean he wants to see her breasts, he wants to imagine someone else, he wants to incapacitate her arms—all of those are possibilities. You can't just look at one behavior in isolation."

Unlike criminal profilers, we planners aren't solving crimes, and our role is seldom a matter of life and death. And it doesn't inspire Big Ideas to quote facts - using our imaginations and being playful help us to inspire the team. But we need to strike the right balance of inspiration and information. So we have something to learn here.

First off, rigor is critical. We can't just pontificate and make stuff up, we must study consumers to truly understand why they do what they do. Second, we need to be careful when assuming what rationale is driving a behavior; that's why we blended behavior and attitude in our recent WebDotDigitas work. Finally, we need to constantly track how successfully our impressions of consumer motivation translate into in-market results - and continually improve our approaches. This means paying attention to measurement results and thinking about how we can use them to improve the work.

You can download a PDF of the article here: Download malcolm_gladwell_dangerous_minds.pdf

Learn new words while feeding the world

Check out this interesting site (particularly appropriate for Thanksgiving) which is a sister site of the world poverty site, Poverty.com.

Here's how it works: you are asked to select a definition for a word, and for every word you correctly identify 10 grains of rice are donated to people in need.

It's interesting to me because it couples helping others with helping yourself; even if you don't think about expanding your vocabulary as a "service" to yourself, it can still feel like a game. They demonstrate a degree of online marketing savvy by offering promotional items to embed in your content, e.g., the banner below.

It seems like there's an interesting insight here (help/develop/challenge yourself as a way to help the world) but they've focused exclusively on the individual nature of charity, and neglected the whole group aspect.

They've missed the boat on at least one important front: social networking. What if they had a FaceBook application that let other FaceBook users know you're participating and challenged them to do the same? Or sent me a grain of rice when they learned a new word? (think fishtank application). Also, why can't we play against each other? Play as teams? Rivalries could really accelerate the use of this utility, it seems to me.

Thoughts?

ad:tech NY - some interesting tidbits

I attended part of ad:tech NY last week and learned some great stuff.

Marc Landsberg, President of Arc Worldwide, shared an interesting case about how to engage consumers online with a high consideration purchase. 500 days before the launch of the new Fiat 500, the marketing for the vehicle began, with the creation of a social community, members of which could vote on colors of the vehicles, develop their own customized designs, etc. This consumer engagement translated into major business impact, specifically an increase in pre-orders and desire to visit a dealer. I found an interesting NYT article with more details about this interesting case.

Social networks mean different things in different cultures (kind of a no brainer, but a helpful reminder). In Spain, for example, people don't disclose as much about themselves, which makes "friending" a different experience. If you violate the local norms, you can't build a successful social network. Another interesting cultural nuance - in Africa, the most popular digital download is love poems.

Mobile was another hot topic. Panelists agreed the future of mobile content is digital and local. And it will continue to evolve as an expression of identity and way to transact.

Across mobile technologies, the biggest human challenge we are helping consumers with is overcoming loneliness. Kind of a profound human insight, if you stop and think about it. It's always good to keep in mind the human need we are addressing.

I discovered a new phrase - "brand browsing" - a catchier way of talking about the consideration phase of the purchase funnel.

NY's Jonathan Adams spoke on a great panel (moderated by TNS/Cymfony's Jim Nail) about social media and consumer generated content (a few days ago I posted the MySpace research "NeverEnding Friending" that several of the panelists discussed). Really exciting to learn about how the use of WOM is super-charging the performance of campaigns, and how measurement has finally developed a way to isolate the performance of the WOM element.

Finally, as always it was a pleasure to see Arianna Huffington speak. And interesting to note how she consistently focuses any question onto Huffington Post's key points - this is the second time I saw her this month, and she's a remarkable spokesperson for her brand. The 3-way joke also killed - again.

Introducing WebDotDigitas - a proprietary take on how people use the internet

Earlier this year we undertook our first ever proprietary research about internet consumers: WebDotDigitas.

There's a lot of great research out there about how folks behave online. But the approaches we reviewed all either took a behavioral approach, or an attitudinal one. The two approaches were never combined.

We had a strong hypothesis that online users with similar behaviors may well have very different motivations. And that people with the same attitudes might behave very differently. At minimum, we thought we could generate deeper, actionable insights about online consumers if we considered the 2 together. So we took a unique approach with WebDotDigitas - we evaluated internet users with a combination of attitude and behavior, for the first time ever (we believe).

We partnered with Compete to get detailed online behavioral data on 3,000 online consumers - the top 700 sites they visit, along with page views and session length. We then surveyed those consumers to better understand their expectations, attitudes and desires. We assessed the data in aggregate, and also developed 6 segments of internet users.

You can download the white paper Tina Bronkhorst wrote about the study here: Download WebDotDigitas.pdf

Some of the key findings:

• Online behavior significantly impacts overall brand experience and attitude; it's not a separate experience for the consumer
• Nearly 40% of online users would prefer to sample a product before buying it
• 8 out of 10 people forward emails on, to an average of 10 people; the most forwarded emails aren't about sales/coupons, they're about humor and inspiration
• About half of internet users say they've never read a blog - but their behavioral data reveals they've been regularly visiting sites like TypePad
• About half of internet users still have a very functional relationship with the internet - they don't surf, they don't do social networking, they use the internet for tasks like banking and travel planning, and some of them don't even like the 'net very much

By examining behavior and attitude together, we truly deepened our understanding of how and why people use the internet. We now know that users' online time and tenure (time online) tell only part of the story - users' attitudes and expectations also provide important insight into their motivations, and help us segment users into actionable segments.

As consumers increasingly use digital channels to learn about and interact with brands, it is critical that brands understand more about their audiences than just where they go online, and how much time they spend there. To be successful, they need to understand and deliver upon online users' expectations, and enable their behaviors and preferences - for example, the expectations to be able to sample a product before buying, and their desire to share humorous and inspirational content with their friends.

We are now preparing wave II of WebDotDigitas - let us know if you have hypotheses you'd like to test.

Social networking - must-read research

Jonathan Adams in NY (hi, Jonathan!) shared some interesting research (qual./quant.), sponsored by Fox Interactive Media/Isobar/Carat USA, about the 70% of 15-34 year olds who are currently social network users. The research was conducted by TNS, TRU and Marketing Evolution. I saw excerpts of this work presented at an ad:tech panel Jonathan presented on last week in NYC.

The study has many interesting findings; the global theme is "never ending friending"- because social networking is a world where frictionless attraction makes forging relationships easier - and more rewarding - than ever before.

One interesting finding - while users do reach out to new people online, most social networking activity is deepening relationships that already exist in the real world. Also, users claim they are looking for the "authentic" people and seek to reveal things about themselves not usually visible to others (it's always interesting to me how this generation's definition of "authentic" encompasses virtual).

Perhaps most interesting - the assertion that "friending is the new advertising" - because (as we all know) personal endorsement is more credible than push marketing (and as one respondent stated, "I don't want companies to advertise to me, I want them to be my friend.").

The study also details the "momentum effect" - a way to quantify the lift in impact attributable to WOM passalong.

It's a must read for anyone seeking to understand the mania with social networking - which one respondent called the greatest advance in people-watching since to the local shopping mall. Download a PDF of the study via link below.

Download myspace_neverendingfriending_0707.pdf

There's a physiological reason for optimisim - but use in moderation

Check out this great WSJ article about the optimistic brain (reg. req'd. until Rupert Murdoch decides to give it away for free, but that's an entirely different story for now).

The article reports: "Two research teams exploring the anatomy of expectations offer a new perspective on the power of a positive outlook. For the first time, scientists at New York University have mapped the upbeat brain -- finding in a cluster of neurons the size of a martini olive the seed of a sunny outlook on life. At its core, the brain is built for optimism, their work suggests.

"Mapping brain behavior with an fMRI medical imaging scanner, NYU neuroscientists Talia Sharot and Elizabeth Phelps identified the neural networks underlying this optimistic outlook. Their work, published in Nature, was presented earlier this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego.

"By studying neural activity in 15 healthy U.S. volunteers, they learned that our brains imagine positive future events about our own well-being more intensely and vividly than negative possibilities.

"These rosy thoughts triggered one key brain region most strongly. Called the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, this neural nub is active whenever we think of hopes and aspirations. "This region of the cortex may actually be taking information and transforming it in a way that creates this optimism bias," Dr. Phelps said.

"Optimists, the Duke finance scholars discovered, worked longer hours every week, expected to retire later in life, were less likely to smoke and, when they divorced, were more likely to remarry. They also saved more, had more of their wealth in liquid assets, invested more in individual stocks and paid credit-card bills more promptly."

Sounds good, right? But don't take it too far. "Those who saw the future too brightly -- people who in the survey overestimated their own likely lifespan by 20 years or more -- behaved in just the opposite way, the researchers discovered. Rather than save, they squandered. They postponed bill-paying. Instead of taking the long view, they barely looked past tomorrow. Statistically, they were more likely to be day traders. "Optimism is a little like red wine," said Duke finance professor and study co-author Manju Puri. "In moderation, it is good for you; but no one would suggest you drink two bottles a day."

Download the science_journal_wsj.com.pdf by clicking here

Handmade is back! Check out Etsy

I'm a huge fan of Etsy, an ecommerce site where everything is handmade. From their about page (which also has a super cool video with the founder explaining his inspiration):

Etsy is an online marketplace for buying & selling all things handmade. Our mission is to enable people to make a living making things, and to reconnect makers with buyers. Our vision is to build a new economy and present a better choice: Buy, Sell, and Live Handmade.

I have a hypothesis about why Etsy is so successful (93,000+ sellers at this point) - people are tired of cookie cutter choices (even at the high end), and want something a little unique. Also, most of the products we have to choose from in stores these days are fairly generic, designed by "professionals" for large faceless audiences and made somewhere off shore. It's kind of refreshing to buy and use a one off made by an actual person. It's also cool to be able to connect with a creative person who does something completely different from what I do.

All the sellers I've dealt with have been enthusiastic and grateful for my business (has that happened to you buying anything lately?), many including special extras with purchase. For me, it's re-introduced a sense of exploration and delight into online shopping, which frankly had become a bit mundane for me of late.

Etsy's UI is renowned for simplicity and engagement. The homepage regularly refreshes with a curated set of items (drawn from the vast number on offer), all coordinated in some way - by theme, color, pattern, etc. Every time I visit the site I'm welcomed in a refreshing new way.

Etsy has recently launched a feature which enables you to dynamically "publish" the items you are considering buying (if you're a buyer) or the items in your online store (if you're a seller) to a personal website, blog, MySpace page, etc.. Here's what's on my shopping list these days (bear in mind the holidays are approaching, people):

Etsy: Your place to buy & sell all things handmade jflemings.etsy.com

What I like about this is - it's a great way to let buyers integrate other people into their buying (or consideration) process - by showing off and getting feedback to their discerning taste or good shopping luck (hey look what I found!), and integrating their potential purchases into their online "identity." Your friends can comment on what you're shopping for, encourage you to purchase something, etc. Shopping goes from a solitary experience to a shared, community one.

Check out Etsy, I think you'll be a convert.

PS - I learned about a cool "movement" from Etsy, called Buy Handmade. To join you just have to pledge to buy handmade this holiday season and request that others do the same; there are 5,000+ pledges so far. More info also here.