4G Is Arriving, Three Ways It Will Effect Social Media Content

From the end of this month mobile phone users in the United Kingdom will finally be able to sign up to 4g through the Everything Everywhere mobile network, with the remaining networks offering competing services from Spring 2013.

This new mobile network standard offers speeds as fast as a wired internet connection with up to 100 Mbps download speeds. How will companies capitalise on the superfast internet soon to be in the hands of consumers?

Live Streaming

The ease at which companies can stream their own live-events to the web will be greatly enhanced. Just a smart-phone and a tripod are all that will be required to stream HD quality video online to be consumed in real time by viewers . This opens up the possibility of live broadcasts from all manner of events with smaller business’s no longer hindered by the requirement for expensive broadcast equipment or a stable Wi-Fi connection.

Expect far greater integration of live streaming in to the news feeds of search engines and social networks as viewing live video over mobile increases in popularity. Will Youtube be as dominant as it has in recorded video or will a new rival take significant market share?

Mobile Apps

Mobile applications will be able to become more data intensive allowing a greater level of interactivity between businesses and consumers. No longer will a reformatted web page be considered sufficient for a company’s mobile application. Games and social interaction between users will become the norm. Expect to see the integration of live feed customer support, an increase in the complexity of social media games and an overall increase in the quality of video and images accessed through mobile applications in the coming years.

With download times greatly reduced users will no longer have to wait until they reach a Wi-Fi connection to download large applications, Live events or attractions can prompt users to download an app as they wait in line or while there is a natural break in proceedings, prompting even greater levels of interactivity between brand and consumer.

Mobile Advertising

Screen real estate is in short supply on mobile devices and so far this has meant key players including Facebook and Google withholding advertising from their mobile optimised websites. 4G could well offer a solution in the form of interactive , high quality adds. With no buffering times to disrupt the experience short videos played before entry to a site or interactive features providing informative content tailored to the users individual likes could become a real option for those companies desperately seeking ways in which to monetise vast sections of their business.

Those brands with better skills in using film and animation to deliver brand messages will gain a competitive advantage and because users won’t be twiddling their thumbs waiting for pages to load, we might expect better click though rates too. Brands that invest now in creating involving high data content are likely to be better prepared for the new opportunities that 4G could offer and gain significant advantage once critical uptake of network is achieved in 2-3 years time.  

Sam Wolf, Digital Account Manager at Liveinsights

The Golden Nugget Chronicles

Golden Nugget and Big Data

 

Golden Nugget had been living quietly in the pond of Insights for many years. He kept himself to himself but was happy when he was occasionally discovered by a well-meaning Market Researcher who would turn him, if only briefly, into an insight for one of the Big-Clients in the Cloud.

For a while he would bask in the glory of being an “insight with business impact”, not many insights got that privilege, but then after a while the glamour would fade and he’d return to his mundane but happy existence.

Up in the Cloud the Big-Clients had been busy however, gorging themselves on data – social media chatter, email, videos, mobile research, GP etc. The Cloud was reaching saturation point. There was no room for Nugget, where would he fit in with this instantaneous malarkey? And how were the Big-Clients even supposed to know Nugget existed? They were just going where the ‘big data’ took them. Whereas before the population of the pond had been measured by megabyte, (something Nugget had tried but failed to comprehend) it was now talked about in terms of zettabytes. This dizzying progress left Nugget sore and he had no idea how he’d ever fit into this. Every second his little friend Dustie the Data came past to inform him on a “newbie”.

Nugget was not impressed.

“Nugget stop whining about it. It’s the brave new world! The Big-Clients just want to use all these insights to engage with their customers. And rather than giving them what they thought they wanted they’ll deliver what they really want - improved product quality, new innovations, better customer service and better delivery. This is good Nugget”

And so Dustie left Nugget to stew.

All Dustie had said seemed irrelevant to Nugget. No benefits would be coming to him, not at all.

The Cloud was brimming now. It had become a sea of information that even the Big-Clients were struggling to comprehend. The Market Researchers couldn’t keep control of it. They were just trying to keep on top of it, let alone make something of it.

They struggled with how fast it came, bombarding them second, by second.

When they did manage to capture and store it they weren’t sure what to do with it. They had to rely on machines to analyse it … machines that constantly misunderstood irony and sarcasm and gave entirely the wrong meaning to the information.  It was all coming from different places as well and they hadn’t been trained in comparing apples and pears.

When the client finally received this information it wasn’t the Holy Grail they had hoped for but a mass of mismatched, out of date and wrongly interpreted data that didn’t help them with their strategy at all.

In the far corner of the Cloud was a group of Market Researchers who knew how to look at “big data”. They had a big tool box of online tools to capture the data and other tools such as video diaries, online focus groups and mobile surveys with which to delve deep into and understand the data. They had the human analytical skills that could turn the information into useful insights. They liked to match make and marry different pieces of information together so that the combination was greater than the sum of the parts. Most importantly, they were trained to mine for the information that would be useful for the Big-Clients in the context of their business strategy, and truly make a difference.

And so little by little the data got captured, organised and turned into truly impactful insights and order was restored to the world. And everyone, including Nugget who married a very attractive YouTube video, started to live happily again……..

 

 

 

Catch me if you can – Researching the Mobile Consumer

As Chris Horton recently reported for Social Media Today ‘The world is going mobile at an exponential rate. In 2011, Apple sold more iOS devices (156M) than the total number of Macs sold in all 28 years of its existence (122M).

Google recently announced that 850,000 new Android devices are activated daily and the total number of Android devices around the globe has surpassed 300 million

It has been estimated that there will be one billion smart mobile devices in-use globally sometime between December 2012 and June 2013.

This rapid proliferation of smartphones and tablets is changing how consumers make purchase decisions and interact with brands’.

Increasingly, purchase decisions are being made with the aid of user-generated content such as online reviews and peer opinions found on social media and this is being accessed at or close to the point of purchase. Indeed 48% of consumers say their mobile is a significant influencing factor when making a purchase decision.

This means that it is now vital for businesses to approach marketing and research through a mobile lens. The future of online is mobile!

Understanding the consumer in the moment

The opportunity this presents to harness the smartphone's ability for instant media consumption and real time customer insights is key.

Mobile devices integrate and change touch points. Mobile is so immersed in our lives we barely notice it. Behaviours will change further, more and more devices will be connected our children won’t know anything other than smart devices. 

This means that mobile research offers a real benefit in generating real time insights. Traditional ‘recall’ surveys can be inaccurate with their reliance on human ‘memory’, but by using mobile to turn recall surveys to immediate point of interest surveys the data can be more reliable.

So, mobile research is actually contextualised research allowing researchers to get a better overall view of respondents’ natural behaviours.

IKEA customers have a higher than usual smart phone penetration. They created the ability to capture customer unique experiences at the time they are interacting with the brand, which was ground breaking for IKEA. It even allowed customer issues and concerns to be addressed before the customer even left the store!

The way consumers feel has a direct impact on how they behave, and mobile also presents an ideal tool to harness this, capturing the contrasts between what consumers say they do and what they actually do!

What are the advantages of mobile research?

It’s not just early adopters that have online access via a phone, the new wave of mobile users means it’s increasingly becoming mainstream.

And mobile research has numerous advantages over traditional methods

• Immediacy - consumers record their interaction with brands as they happen
• Timeliness – research projects can be sent out when it is appropriate to do so with instant access to power reporting and analysis
• Less recall issues – real time feedback
• Shorter surveys – less onerous for the consumer
• Contextual richness – feedback ‘in situ'
• Better engagement with younger target groups
• Convenience - it’s easy for consumers to use and always there
• Better response rates  -  as high as 40-45%

·    The opportunity to get more creative about rewards. e.g. free gaming apps that will encourage them to participate in more research.

Where next?

We are moving into a new era for marketing and research – the era of the ‘Connected Customer ‘ Customers are now connected to their own social networks, have ‘direct access’ to companies and brands on an on-going basis and are living an ‘always online’ lifestyle.

Marketers and researchers must realise that current methods and guidelines may not work to engage the Connected Customer or to understand and report on such engagements.

This connectivity means that the next step from mobile research surveys is mobile research communities that could involve customers, stakeholders, even shareholders!

In the UK mobile is used to alleviate boredom (39% in downtime), which presents an opportunity for researchers to experiment with new ways of incentivising.

InSites Consulting use a gamification system to allocate points to participants that share content to “level-up” and unlock incentives. They also run challenges, asking members why their city is the coolest, sparking a flood of images, video and other content.

The more content they share, the more engaged consumers become with the platform and the more they want to share in response.

So how can research respond to the challenge? The cloud is everywhere and big data is an opportunity not a challenge. The future is bleak for those with blinders on, but extremely bright for those that can help design it!

Why Marketers don’t get Social Media

Seems that we are nowhere as marketers nowadays unless we are ‘getting down and digital ‘and throwing around words like social map, edgerank and hashtag.

But keeping up a social media presence is hard work – right? Creating the company policy, finding the right people to implement it, generating the content, engaging in conversations, checking the stats....phew!  No time for real work!

So how come it’s such a breeze for the millions of individuals on social media to market themselves? No marketing budget, no training, no slick digital agency and yet they still build a good network of people that they influence and who influence them - every day.

Well IMHO, there is one very good reason why marketers don’t ‘get’ social media, we are approaching it with the wrong mindset!

In the old days of media advertising, we were all very clear that as marketers our job was to promote our brands and products to as many customers we could possibly get to by buying time and space and then hoping a small proportion would actually buy

But, in the social space our role is very different because the people in network are the ‘product’, promoting themselves to the many expecting a response from a few.

Let me explain my thinking here. In traditional media, entertainment and advertising is provided for the public - often at great expense - and exists whether the audience is engaged with it or not. Social media, on the other hand, wouldn’t actually exist without the engagement of the public. So when we attempt to reach people on social networks we need to remember that we are connecting with the product itself and not just an existing or prospective customer.

OK so what if we are? I hear you say!

Well this actually makes use of Social Media much more of a strategic alliance than a marketing campaign. For sure some networkers that ‘like’ or ‘follow’ our products and services will buy them,but many are also our partners because they are promoting them through their networks. 

So what does this mean for social media marketing? Well if we are to behave like true strategic partners we need to:

• Change our mindset from ‘promoting’ to ‘partnering’
• Adopt the ground rules of the network
• Focus on the relationship as much as the outcomes
• Align our values with those of our promoters
• Make sure we are ‘at one’ in the eyes of their networks
• Relinquish control and work organically with the members
• Share the risks and the rewards

This is a very different modus operandi for marketers but if we don’t adapt our thinking quickly our new partners will soon jilt us for a more attractive playmate!

REPORT: The 100 Most Engaging Brands On Facebook

REPORT: The 100 Most Engaging Brands On Facebook

"Don't bother wowing your Customers"

The recent HBR Management Tip (“Don’t Bother Wowing Your Customers,” October 20, 2011) and the larger article on which it is based (“Stop trying to Delight Your Customers,” HBR, July/Aug 2010, Dixon, Freeman and Toman) is both eye catching and thought provoking – and totally misleading.

The authors present data illustrating that their Customer Effort Score (CES) outperforms satisfaction and NPS as a predictor of customer loyalty. Responsible researchers and marketers, however, have long recognized that satisfaction is a necessary but not sufficient hurdle for loyalty, and the weaknesses (and strengths) of NPS are well documented. Outperforming these measures is a straw man performance and not much of an accomplishment.

I see two fundamental problems with their line of thinking. First, they fail to differentiate between the customer service experience and customer loyalty and actually seem to flip-flop between the two for their own convenience. Loyalty is a relationship concept (and measure) that is greater than the sum of the experience or contacts. Each and every customer interaction is an opportunity to strengthen the relationship, as well as a risk of undermining or weakening the relationship. But the interaction or experience is not the same as the overall relationship.

Satisfying or “wowing” customers on any one experience is important only insofar as the experience contributes to the larger equation of the customer relationship. Experiences are discreet events, although the customer’s memory is more cumulative. The value and importance of experiences are in their aggregated impact on the relationship.

 

More importantly, their argument is flawed because it sees the world in a linear manner in which it is assumed that improved performance on each and every performance measure (inputs or independent variables) drives ever higher levels of delight or loyalty ( the outcome or dependent variables). Dissatisfaction – the failure to deliver on basic expectations or table stakes – is the flip side of satisfaction and not the inverse of customer loyalty or delight. They present a feeble argument: simply fixing service problems that might disappoint and alienate customers never has been the equivalent of delighting customers any more than removing the proverbial fly from the bowl of soup makes for a delicious meal.
 

We do not live in a linear world. Performance criteria that are dissatisfiers or negative drivers of satisfaction need to be analyzed and managed separately from the enhancers or positive drivers of customer loyalty and delight. (See http://www.gfkinsights4u.com/insights4u.cfm?articleID=425) The dissatisfiers need to be remedied, as these are the basic performance expectations of customers. Dixon et al are right in that “wowing” customers on dissatisfiers is a non-starter without a positive ROI. But this is because these are not criteria that lead to differentiated customer experiences or delight, not because it isn’t worth delighting customers. Companies, in other words, have to wow customers on things that matter to the customer. Dissatisfiers, by their nature, have clear points of diminishing returns, and over-performing against customer expectations on these fundamental must-dos is an investment with little or even negative return (negative because this might pull resources away from more important service dimensions).

 

Dixon and company touch on the distinction between dissatisfiers and enhancers with their “two pies” analogy of drivers of loyalty and disloyalty. They introduce this concept – and then promptly totally ignore the positive drivers or enhancers that REALLY WOW customers and deliver meaningfully differentiated service experiences and drive customer loyalty. Companies DO NEED TO DELIGHT and WOW their customers on the enhancers that build loyal, enduring relationships that maximize customer lifetime value. The fact that every interaction with the contact centers (on which Dixon et al focus) does not necessarily contribute to loyalty is not proof to the contrary. So while companies may not need to “wow” their customers on each and every interaction, they need to deliver operational excellence to plug the leaks on those issues that might dissatisfy or disappoint customers, while truly WOWING their customers on those enhancers or differentiators that drive loyalty. The trick is to differentiate between the two type of drivers and ensure organizations apply the appropriate performance-improvement efforts and align their training/reward systems accordingly.

Young People Think The Internet Is As Important As Breathing

A new study by Cisco Systems reveals that one in three college students and young professionals under 30 believe the Internet is as important as air, water, food, and shelter (via CNNMoney).

The study, which polled 8,000 people in 14 countries, found that more than half of the participants said they could not live without the Internet, citing it as "more important than owning a car, dating, and going to parties."

Here are some more study highlights:

• Many respondents cite a mobile device as “the most important technology” in their lives
• Seven of 10 employees have “friended” their managers and coworkers on Facebook
• Two of five students have not bought a physical book (except textbooks) in two years
• Most respondents have a Facebook account and check it at least once a day
  • Half would rather lose their wallet or purse than their smartphone or mobile device.
  • More than two of five would accept a lower-paying job that had more flexibility with regard to device choice, social media access, and mobility than a higher-paying job with less flexibility.
• At least one in four said the absence of remote access would influence their job decisions, such as leaving companies sooner rather than later, slacking off, or declining job offers outright.
  • Three out of 10 feel that once they begin working, it will be their right — more than a privilege — to be able to work remotely with a flexible schedule.