I had a fantastic time speaking at this year’s Social Slam in Knoxville last weekend. If Mark Schaefer asks you to speak at his event, you go, no questions asked, because this was an accessible, affordable and refreshingly BS-free event that I’ll continue to attend on my own nickel whether I’m speaking or not.

I gave a keynote right before lunch on how to think about data, and I was rolling right along when all of a sudden, exactly halfway through, my MacBook Pro crashed. Hard. Spinning-beach-ball-of-death hard. With 45 slides left to go. I won’t say I was “unfazed” but I hope I was unflappable. I’ve been standing up in front of clients and audiences for over 15 years, and let me tell you–something always happens, especially when you are doing client presentations, where you don’t necessarily have any support or backup.

I was humbled and grateful for all of the positive tweets I received during the speech for how I handled the laptopocalypse (I finished the story from the section I was on and took a few questions while I put a backup laptop online and got my slides off a USB stick) but it certainly wasn’t my natural reserves of cool that got me through it. It was training and practice. Learned behaviors. Since this sort of thing is bound to happen to you if you present in any capacity, I thought it might be useful to share exactly how I prepare and train my mind for these sorts of things.

1. The tech stuff. Yes, I had a USB backup of my presentation, and there was another laptop (the conference computer) already at the lectern. I swapped it out myself because I was right there, and when you do as many client presentations as I do, you learn to be a self-sufficient unit. I will admit to being a little “nonplussed” when I see a speaker have a tech fail and then call for A/V because they are “no good with these things.” I have practiced turning on a computer and starting up an app over 1 BGILLION times. I’m good at that. So are you. But always have a USB backup (NOT a Dropbox backup–a physical backup) of your slides in your pocket. Don’t have a spare laptop? See point 4.

2. Know your story. In the days before I give any presentation, I am relentless about getting one thing down–the story. It’s the story I want you to walk away with, not the slides, or the exact sequence of points. Yes, you can memorize the whole thing, slides and all, but with my workload and travel schedule that is often not possible. If you tie yourself to the order and sequence of the slides, you will always get derailed when you lose them, and when you get the slides back you’ll have a natural tendency to want to go back and “do it right.” But if you focus on the story and not the slides, you won’t suffer from the “shoulds.” When my laptop crapped out, I continued with the story because it’s the story that I want you to walk away with. The slides support the story. The slides aren’t the story.

3. Take some questions! In the few minutes it took me to swap out laptops and get loaded up again, I had a great opportunity to answer a few questions. This, in a sense, lets you, the audience, dictate what you want to happen in these moments that would ordinarily be “dead.” No dead moments! If you have been given the honor of the lectern/pulpit/stage, you are there because the audience sees some value in your presence. Honor that, and make yourself accessible. Often I have seen speakers close down when they have presentation fails, and bury themselves in their notes or laptops. Instead, I look up. Which brings me to…

4. Invite the audience to share your pain. I had my laptop completely fail at Social Slam. If there had not been another spare on stage, you know what I would have done? Asked YOU for one. My A/V failed at the start of my Blogworld keynote last year. I invited the audience into my pain–asked them if it’s ever happened to them, and how they deal with it. This is closely tied to #3 above, but the best thing when you can do when you suffer these bumps in the road is to open up and break down the “fourth wall.” Shared pain is mitigated pain; more than that, it’s often comedy. In the case of my Blogword speech, it set the stage and warmed up the crowd exponentially better than any half-baked joke would have. I’m glad my A/V failed.

5. Think “Clients,” not “Audience.” Finally, I give many, many presentations every year, but more of them are for clients than for conference audiences. Most of my day job is deriving insights from data for Edison’s clients, and then presenting that data in a way that inspires action and change. If my laptop fails, or my file is corrupted, or my mic doesn’t work, guess what? I will be plowing on, because I was paid to do this. I take my job very, very seriously indeed. When presenting for clients in poorly equipped conference rooms, you’ll always have issues. Always. And it’s on you to solve them. You have to be ready to go without slides, without amplification, using transparencies and finger puppets if you have to. YOU HAVE TO. Now, replace “client” with “audience.” That is what I think, each and every time. I take you very seriously, too, even when it looks like I’m having a laugh.

Those five things keep me grounded, sane and humble in any conference situation. I hope, if you attended SoSlam, that you got the value from my talk I intended to deliver. And even if you didn’t, I hope you got value from these tips.

What are your conference FAIL tips? Share them below!

How To Recover From A Speaking FAIL is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

In early June I’ll be presenting a track keynote at Blogworld NY that updates our Social Habit research series, a randomly sampled, representative look at how Americans 12+ use social media. I’ve written a lot in this space about Twitter, and the sizable gap between those Americans who use Twitter, and those who are familiar with the service. This year, that gap continues to be significant: 89% of Americans 12+ are familiar with Twitter, while 10% use the service.

This is the third year we have observed a gap of this relative size. Now, a user base of 10% of Americans 12+ is nothing to sneeze at, and as I’ve commented here before, you’ll never catch me saying “only” 10%. In fact, Twitter does appear to have an importance in American society that would seem to extend beyond the 10% who actually tweet. This year, we were determined to get to the bottom of that seeming disparity between the percentage of Americans who “tweet,” and the percentage of Americans who are exposed to tweets.

Here’s the question with which we struck pay dirt:

Here you can see that 11% of Americans 12+ (the gray slice) have not heard of Twitter, which means that 89% have. That is more than the percentage of Americans with online access (~86%), by the way, which gives you a pretty good yardstick for the ubiquity of Twitter. Now, bearing in mind that 10% of Americans 12+ actually use Twitter, look at the big green slice: 44% of ALL 12+ Americans report seeing tweets in other media (radio, TV, newspaper or other websites) “Almost Every Day,” and 80% of Americans overall claim to have ever seen tweets in other media.

We see tweets all the time in the media–often, it’s the TV reporting of a celebrity’s troublesome tweet that makes the news, even when most Americans haven’t seen the tweet itself in situ. This statistic quantifies that assumption and, if I’m being honest, reveals it to be far bigger than I would have suspected. When the number of Americans who report seeing “tweets” in other media nearly every day approaches almost half the country, then Twitter is punching well above its weight, indeed.

There are several implications to this statistic, but I’ll leave you with three to think about:

1. Regardless of how you use Twitter, most Americans (as in an actual majority of Americans) view Twitter as a purely broadcast network.
2. As such, Broadcasting is far from dead, and social isn’t killing it. Social is changing it, but in terms of how most Americans consume tweets, Twitter is just another cable network.
3. If you are measuring anything based upon unstructured data mined from Twitter (particularly influence), you are missing nearly 80% of the potential impact of Twitter by not taking the cross-media and offline impact of Tweets into account.

Those are my quick takes–and I’ll have a more extended look at this and other data when we debut the new Social Habit data at Blogworld. Want to be sure you don’t miss it when it comes out? Why not subscribe to the Edison Research database and be sure you’re the first on your cyberblock?

What do you make of this chart?

Why Twitter Is Bigger Than You Think is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

My company (Edison Research) will be premiering a brand new research report tomorrow on the “Daily Deals” space–those services from companies like Groupon, Living Social and Gilt–from a national, representative survey of Americans 12+. We’ll examine who is using these services and why, and what the potential ramifications and opportunities are for brands.

You can download the study on Edison’s site on Thursday, April 19th at 3:00 PM (Eastern Time). I’ll also be trying something a little different, and presenting the study live at 2:30 on a Slideshare Zipcast at this link. No signup is necessary–call it “office hours,” rather than a formal webinar–and I’m hoping that it will be an interactive presentation.

So a chance to hear brand new research on the Daily Deals space AND chat about it? Sounds like a win-win. If you have a half hour to kill tomorrow at 2:30 and a high tolerance for pie charts and folksy analogies, pop by and feel free to ask questions. See you there?

NEW Research on “Daily Deals,” and “Office Hours” is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

My brilliant other half, Tamsen, recently brought this article to my attention, which details recent menu changes at Burger King. Do read the article–but the gist of it is this: Burger King has introduced a number of “new” items to their menu that are directly cribbed from the menu of their arch (see what I did there?) rival McDonalds.

Burger King has perennially been the second-largest fast food restaurant in America, but they recently lost that position to Wendy’s, and now occupy the #3 spot. The article reveals that Burger King did some consumer research, and discovered that what consumers wanted was essentially the McDonald’s menu – or, in the King’s own words:

“Consumers wanted more choices,” said Steve Wiborg, president of Burger King’s North America operations. “Not just healthy choices, but choices they could get at the competition.”

Critics of Burger King’s “me, too!” strategy will no doubt point their scolding fingers at market research. “Research only tells you where you’ve been, not where you are going,” or so the proponents of the “golden gut” would have you believe. However, I’d posit an alternative viewpoint here. When Tamsen pointed this out to me, she noted that it sounded like a case of “asking the wrong questions,” and that “of course people are going to say they want to see McDonald’s-like things on Burger King’s menu. But that might not (and likely is not) where Burger King’s real opportunity lies.”

See, this is why she’s my other half. Burger King did, indeed, ask the wrong questions–but it’s an easy trap to fall into. It certainly wasn’t asking questions that got Burger King into trouble, and asking questions is surely the way out. But asking the wrong questions is more dangerous than not asking questions at all. How could Burger King have avoided this trap–and how can you ask the right questions going forward?

Three Types Of Research

I’ve been in the question-asking business for two decades. There are essentially three kinds of research:

1. Comparative research. Categories are set, and you want to see how you measure up.

2. Fire-Fighter research. Your comparative measures didn’t go so well, and you’ve dug yourself a hole.

3. “Blue Sky” research. You want to redefine your market and occupy a brand new positioning ladder.

It is the latter type of research that is most fulfilling from my perspective, and also what Burger King should have done in this instance. No doubt their comparative measures found their offering wanting (demonstrably true from their declining market share) so the powers that be took a conservative approach, and did a little “fire-fighting” research.” I have no doubt that, when asked what kinds of foods they wanted, fast-food consumers spat back answers like “snack wraps” and “caesar salads” and “smoothies.” These are all items on McDonald’s menu, and, given the clear #1 status of McD’s on the fast-food chain, they’ve set the agenda.

But here’s the thing: when you ask customers what menu items they want, and they tell you all the items on your competitor’s menu, this is the sign that you’ve asked the wrong questions. Whatever ladder McDonald’s occupies, they are at the top of that ladder, and merely replicating what they do will doom you to the lower rungs. As soon as Burger King got the results of that research–the research saying, in essence, that when it comes to fast food, McDonald’s has set the agenda–Burger King should have filed that particular study next to the Lost Ark, and gone right to research type #3: Blue Sky research.

Features Vs. People

Comparative research and Fire Fighting research both have something in common–they assume that the playing field has been set, the game selected, and the criteria for success in that game (in this case, the menu items and prices) are set. The game is wide open, in flux, and there is value in trying to out-hamburger the other guy. So you research features. How many chicken strips should be in a box? How large should a milkshake be to not engender guilt but not feel like a rip-off? What combination of side orders will make the best combo meal? And so on. When the game is in play, you research features and benefits, and you win on those.

But when Burger King got their research back, and saw that the fast food market was not in flux, they should have changed the game. The fact that the game is no longer in flux is demonstrably true from their research–when market research tells you that the specific things they want are the specific things your competitor offers, you’ve lost that game. Trying to replicate those specific features and benefits forces you to compete on taste (do fast-food patrons really value this???) or value–which, in this business, is price, pure and simple, which is the last refuge of the marketer.

You compete on features when those features are important to the game, and the outcome of that particular game is in doubt. But when Burger King got the McD’s menu back in response to their “features” research, that should have been a clear sign that they were, as Tamsen noted, asking the wrong questions. When “features” research merely spits back your competitors’ menu, it’s time to stop researching features, and start researching people.

Better Questions

When Lexus launched in this country, they didn’t play the “features” game. Had they done so, they would have tried to out airbag Volvo, or out cylinder Jaguar, or be cheaper than BMW. They didn’t research features (or if they did, they didn’t make that research the crux of their decision-making process). They researched people. They didn’t ask people how fast they wanted their car to go, or whether or not it had anti-lock brakes, they asked people about their lives. They interviewed scores of affluent Americans about their day, and tried to learn how they could solve the problems of their customers, not fill a menu of features on ladders that other car manufacturers already occupied.

If they had merely asked prospective customers what features they wanted, Lexus would have build a Jaguvolvercedes. Their target market was affluent, and what they learned was that affluent market typically had long commutes from exurban mcmansions to urban offices, and that their lives were stressful. They launched not based upon how many cylinders their customers required, but on what would solve their most pressing need: quiet.

So Lexus launched in the US on one word: quiet. This word not only informed the marketing of Lexus, but the engineering of Lexus. They built the car around this insight–they didn’t take an existing pig and apply lipstick. In short, when they couldn’t sit atop the same ladder that BMW and Mercedes occupied, they didn’t optimize rungs. They moved ladders.

They researched people, not features.

The Path To Irrelevance

So, two take-aways from this example. First, if you ask people what they want, and they tell you that they want what your competitor is already giving them, you asked the wrong questions. You researched features, when you should have researched people. But second–and more importantly, from my perspective–it isn’t market research that got Burger King into this predicament. It was asking the wrong questions. When you are the #3 fast food restaurant in the country you might have some issues, but you aren’t going to overcome those issues by not asking questions. Not asking questions is the path to irrelevance.

Ask better questions.

And if you’d like help asking better questions, I know a guy.

How To Know You’re Asking The Wrong Questions is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

On April 10th, Edison and Arbitron will debut the The Infinite Dial 2012: Navigating Digital Platforms, the latest in a research series which has now hit a remarkable milestone. This year’s report is our 20th study of America’s media and technology consumption habits, and represents the richest longitudinal mine of such data in the world. We’ve been tracking things like the usage of Internet radio for well over a decade – which makes this year’s jump in that particular behavior all the more remarkable.

This year, we are reporting that the weekly usage of Internet radio (which includes both the online streams of terrestrial broadcasters and streams from pure-play streamers such as Pandora) has increased from 22% of Americans 12+ in 2011 to 29% in 2012 – a jump of over 30%. This is a number that we are accustomed to seeing grow bit by bit each year, but this is the largest year-over-year increase we’ve seen since we began tracking this stat in 1998. It’s easy to say that this kind of discontinuous jump is due to the increased usage of Pandora or Slacker or iHeartRadio or other individual brands, but I think there is a different dynamic at play here, driven by another discontinuous jump.

We’ll reveal our number on April 10th, but let’s just say that the percentage of Americans – mainstream Americans – who now own smartphones is going to show some growth, to put it mildly. The success of some of today’s popular on-demand and streaming Internet audio services is partially of their own doing, but also partially a trailing variable of the rise in smartphones and mobile media consumption. True, we’ve been able to consume digital media on the go for over a decade, but there has always been some friction involved with this process. I don’t know the hard cap on the number of Americans who would program their own playlists by mood and music type and then upload that content to their phones and iPods, but I’m going to suggest that the number of Americans who now own smartphones has blown right by that hard cap.

The friction involved in mobile digital media consumption has now been removed for vast numbers of mainstream Americans who want someone else to program their content for them–and that’s what the mobile Internet has really enabled. In a sense, the continued penetration of smartphones is encouraging something of a radio renaissance, though it doesn’t look like your father’s Victrola. Mobile phones are increasingly providing the digital soundtrack to people’s lives on the go – just count the white earbuds, Beats, Boses and other headphones the next time you walk down Main Street. Previously those earbuds delivered mostly our own music files, but what our data shows is that there is pent-up demand for frictionless, mobile audio programming to provide that soundtrack for us, and smartphones are opening the floodgates.

Thanks to the myriad online music services available, music as “product’ has become an economic commodity, and the delivery of that commodity akin to trucking wheat. Since “cost” is not a competitive dimension, and everyone has access to the same product, how that product is packaged and delivered is all you have. Smartphones have changed the game here from music as active entertainment choice to music as the quite literal soundtrack to your life. And that’s the dimension many of these services are lacking.

Today, I have thousands of sources to hear a stream of great 80′s hits, or hair bands, or Bon Iver clones, or songs with guest raps by Pit Bull. The smart Internet audio providers of tomorrow will transcend the jukebox, and remember that “soundtrack of your life” concept. This means new opportunities for podcasters, personalities, local content, and most importantly curation.

The ability to pick songs is now an algorithm. The Internet radio services of tomorrow have to show me how that content matters, if they want to matter.

We’ll have much more data and the implications of that data on April 10th, when Edison and Arbitron present The Infinite Dial 2012. Register today!

A Dramatic Rise in Internet Radio Usage originally appeared on the Edison Research blog.

A Dramatic Rise in Internet Radio Usage is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

We are all being scored, all the time–for our credit, our hire-ability, and now our influence. Whether you believe in online influence measures like Klout and Kred or not will ultimately have little effect–VC’s believe in them, and some marketers believe in them, so get used to having a number by your name. That’s the reality, as Mark Schaefer’s fine new book Return On Influence lays out in some detail.

In this space, I’ve always tried to maintain a constructive skepticism about these measures, without descending into “Klout-bashing.” These services are iterating; let’s allow them to iterate.

So, in that spirit…

Yesterday, I saw lots of people promoting this:

…which reminded me of a similar promotion run by Kred last month that Shelly Kramer brought to my attention.

Now, “Agency Insanity” looks like good silly fun. A lot like my Klout topics page, actually, which continues to feature my areas of online expertise, including Groundhog Day, Nausea, Pregnancy, Jersey Shore, NFL, and (thanks to Jason Keath) “Electric Housewares and Fans (Wall and Baseboard Heating Units for Permanent Installation) (Industry).”

It’s good fun. It’s a game. When Klout runs a promotion that specifically instructs us to “Vote to decide the nation’s most influential agency professional,” they are, in essence, telling us it’s a game, and instructing us how to play it.

It’s gamification, however, that ultimately may kill these things dead. Asking us to vote on who is most influential is essentially equating influence and popularity, a dangerous mistake. But it also says something I believe quite damaging about the influence measures themselves.

Consider if Google asked you to “vote on the best search result” for a given keyword. Do you really think you’d get the right one? Is a Twitter popularity contest the best “algorithm” to find “Best NYC Hotel?” Would you trust those search results? (Don’t get me started on “social search.”)

Now, I know that Klout and Kred, et al, have actual activity-based algorithms, and–again –this promotion is just silly fun. But it’s silly fun that dings their brand halo, and reminds us all that yes, this is a game. You are not being scored on your influence; you are being scored on your ability to play that game, and no, that’s not nothing.

The game is what keeps these services alive. They need us to play the game–if we don’t “play along” by giving them access to our online social graph (allowing them to explicitly link our online identities, which they couldn’t do unless we grant them authorization and tie our profiles together) they don’t have any grist for their mills. So the “game” is necessary. We give them our profile information so that we can play along and try to get a better number than the next guy. Without the public game, the ego-driven need to acquire social proof, we don’t authorize them to pull from our social accounts. And if we don’t do that, social scoring falls apart.

So they need to be games, and they need us to play those games. But those games devalue what they are doing. It’s a real catch-22 for these services.

What do you think? Is the “game” damaging to brands like Klout and Kred? Or just part of the new reality of the social web? A shiny +K to everyone who comments, and a copy of Mark Schaefer’s Return On Influence to the comment with the most likes.

See what I did there?

Note: there is some fine “prior art” on this from Sean McGinnis – do read his take as well.

The Influence Game is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

Olivier Blanchard has a piece today detailing five basic rules for calculating the value of a Facebook “Fan.” It’s a practical post, and makes a number of points that I agree with; namely, that the value of a “fan” is elastic, idiosyncratic to brand/product, and not the cost of acquiring that fan (I hope no one is actually confused about that?)

If you need to calculate the value of a Facebook fan, this article is a pretty good start, and you may find more thoughts in Olivier’s book. It’s a question that seems to pop up with increasing regularity, and his answer is as good as anyone’s.

But I think there is a more interesting question.

I suspect Olivier would agree with me, and I’m not constructing a straw man here. The value of a fan, however, is a static snapshot of a consumer who may or may not have already been a valuable customer for your brand or product. The fact that they are a “fan” may simply be a trailing variable; your Facebook page a convenient aggregator of advocates who were already among your top quintile or decile of consumers. Don’t get me wrong–that’s useful in its own right. But it isn’t enough to base strategic financial decisions upon.

Tracking the value of your fans is a useful diagnostic measure. It isn’t, however, a predictive measure. For that, it isn’t the value of a fan that you need to calculate – it’s the value of fandom. In other words, what is the incremental value associated with becoming a fan? This is not a simple static measure, but it isn’t rocket science to figure out. You design a study. You track a cohort of your customers over time. You look at their purchase behavior before, during and after they become a fan, or engage in a Facebook promotion. You calculate their intrinsic value before they become a fan, so that their value after they become a fan actually has meaning.

The static value of a fan is useful, but only in context of your other efforts. If I take a customer who already has a lifetime value (LTV) of, say, $500 and convert them to “fandom,” that effort might cost me $3.00 and yield an additional LTV of $150. Pretty decent return. But I also might send that same customer a fifteen-cent postcard and double their LTV. That doesn’t invalidate your Facebook efforts, but it does allow you to weight them appropriately in your media mix and make better decisions.

Calculating the value of fandom is certainly more complex than calculating the value of a fan. It’s also the key to truly understanding what social media is actually doing for your brand or product. It’s a bit more work. But if you are a regular reader of this blog, you do that work. You stand apart. And you ask better questions.

The ROI of Facebook: It Isn’t Fans; It’s Fandom is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

I recently returned from the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival in Austin, which is America’s ground zero for creative innovation in marketing, branding, technology and breakfast tacos. I saw a lot of promising startups and tech there (particularly in the mobile space) and heard some incredible case studies on social media, community-building and Electronic or “E” Commerce.

Still, when I was asked by a friend to name the best thing I saw at SXSW, there was one clear winner in my book–hands-down, the most effective marketing effort there–and it had nothing to do with an app, geo-targeting, mobile wallets or even Facebook. In fact, while you might have seen some tweets about this company, the impact of their efforts can’t be fully measured online through social monitoring or clickstream behavior. It will require a concerted effort, both online and offline, with server AND survey data, to show the true power of their presence at SXSW, but I’m convinced they got their money’s worth.

That brand? Chevy. While there were a lot of brands doing some cool things with apps, web sites and mobile technology, Chevy was cleaning up offline, in the moment, by being there at the point of need in myriad ways. No, their efforts weren’t exclusively offline, as evidenced by the hours of video content they created at their SXSW – What Drives You? web site, including loads of excellent interviews with influential content creators by Stephanie Wonderlin, so they were certainly covering all the content marketing bases for owned media. They also comped “influencers” with cars to try out (full disclosure: they lent me an Equinox, and I had a ride in a Volt with Jason Falls). So their online/earned media efforts were considerable.

It’s what they did offline, however, that I thought really put on a clinic at SXSW. They were simply everywhere that SXSW attendees needed something, right at the point of need. The most striking and obvious example: you didn’t need to be an influencer to get a ride in a Chevy. There were seemingly scores of “Catch A Chevy” cars driving around town, giving people free rides to and from hotels and events. In a week that essentially broke Austin’s infrastructure, saw two days of torrential rain and a weekend-long crash in the city’s taxi dispatch system, Chevy was there with exactly what you needed, a ride. I rode in these myself at least twice, and got a ride, plain and simple. No sales pitch, no brochures, no “please tweet this!!!” Just a ride. For hundreds of SXSW attendees, they were lifesavers (or, at least, bad-hair-day-savers. Good enough.)

They also managed to tie in these help-at-the-point of need promotions to their core offerings in ways that weren’t forced and just made sense. Certainly, giving stranded people a ride is a transportation solution to a transportation problem, from a transportation company. They also solved another problem at the point of need–dead batteries, the bane of any blogger/content creator–with a free Volt Recharge Lounge, which I also used. Again, just what I needed (electricity) when I needed it, from an electric car brand.

Finally, I’m not going to say that Chevy covered all of my Maslow needs in one event, but they did feed me tacos at All Hat IV, and made me feel all important by taping an interview with me, so that’s pretty much both ends of the hierarchy of needs from sustenance to my sense of self worth. Sponsoring All Hat was certainly an earned media play, as it was an extremely good environment for Chevy to interact with influencers and content creators, but it was also just a great event. Event marketing works, kids–especially when there is a great synergy between the brand and the event. Chevy found those synergies over the entire event, from associating the electric Volt with charging your iPad, to associating their status as a great, iconic American brand with an event like All Hat that celebrates the iconic Texas lifestyle in a great American city.

Yes, I realize this post comes off like an ad for Chevy (with whom I have no relationship save for a couple of free rides, some power and a taco or three.) But bear with me here. My real reason for writing about Chevy’s efforts is not merely to try and get a Volt, it’s to point out a fascinating measurement challenge. Chevy’s efforts at SXSW were integrated, complex, and both online and offline. It’s easy for them to measure things like blog posts, social media mentions, tweets and likes. But so much of what happened at SXSW was offline first, and, ultimately, will end offline with the decision to purchase a car. Measuring how many impressions their videos get, or how many influencers tweet about their brand during SXSW, are important measures, but they are diagnostic measures. Proxies, if you will, for the measures that are most important: the next time you go car shopping, will you consider a Chevy?

Ultimately, the product has to sell itself based upon its intrinsic value proposition – so I’m not going to buy a Chevy because they fed me a delicious taco. But if Chevy now enters my consideration set the next time I buy a car, they at least have a fighting chance to get my car-buying dollars if I mentally put them on that shelf, where they might not have been prior. And how would they know this? By asking me. Asking me before SXSW, and asking me after.

I’m most excited about integrating offline and online marketing with survey and server research. The Chevy experience at SXSW started offline, and it will end offline. There will be important clickstream measures to track in between, but they will never tell the whole story, and they can never be used to measure Chevy’s ultimate goals by themselves. Listening will never replace asking, but it will make asking better. Listen, Ask, Listen, Ask. Integrate those measures. Rinse and repeat.

The Most Effective Marketing I Saw at SXSW is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

Today I am rebooting a blog that I had, frankly, allowed to founder over the years: Datasnob. When I started that blog on Tumblr, it was a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to what I saw as a withering torrent of data of questionable provenance on the social web. I kept it up for a while, but I never really could find my voice. The last thing I wanted to do, frankly, was turn into a scold. Scolding has never really been my style, and maintaining Datasnob was appealing to what I would call my default thinking – and not being the best me I could be. So, Datasnob fell by the wayside.

Still, there is a need there, and an itch to be scratched. Almost every day someone sends me a link to a new study or survey and asks me what to make of it – sometimes on Twitter, sometimes on my contact form, or even email. I’m always humbled by these requests, and flattered that you value my opinion. There is no shortage of things to write about, in other words, but I was not, and am not, comfortable being a “critic.” I’m a skeptic, not a critic.

I was recently challenged by my friends Chris Penn and Chel Wolverton, however, to rise above that default thinking, and to do better. Surely, they told me, there was a way to turn these requests into content that helps people understand all of this information and put it into context, without turning it into a researcher’s version of Failblog.

They were right, of course, and I accept the challenge. So, at least once a week (and more often, as content reveals itself) I’ll examine one new study or survey on the social web and provide context and understanding. My general thesis is this: there is value in almost any piece of data, as long as you understand its context, and ignore the headline. I’ll do just that on Datasnob, and I’ve started things off this week by revisiting a recent study on Pinterest.

I hope you like the tone, and if I’m ever not helpful, kick me. I still like the word “snob” in Datasnob. To me, being a snob about data doesn’t mean I’m snotty, or a scold. It means I’m discriminating. Sometimes a little discrimination – about ideas, not people – is a good thing. It keeps us from being indiscriminate, which simply won’t do.

And if you have studies you’d like me to cover on Datasnob, hit me up on my contact page here, or just ping me on Twitter. And BrandSavant isn’t going away, or changing. In the words of my idol, Fraser Crane: I’m listening.

A New Resource For Social Media Data is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

A couple of days ago someone forwarded a survey to me that made a mildly preposterous claim, but it was backed by a sample size well north of 50,000. “I didn’t believe it,” my friend noted, “but that’s a big sample. Must be true…right?”

Well, not exactly. Sample size plays a role, but what is more important is how representative that sample is. If you sample a population truly randomly (such that every member of that population has an equal, non-zero chance of being sampled), then you don’t need thousands of people to take a pretty credible stab at a number. If you throw up a web poll on Twitter and get 10,000 responses, you’ve got…10,000 responses. It’s not nothing, but size doesn’t save it. Similarly, a sample of 80 sounds small, unless it’s 80 Fortune 500 CEOs. In that case, 80 people is a pretty damn good sample.

Here’s best example I can think of from the airport: Let’s take a question like “Which do you love more, chocolate, or the leader of your country?” Ask 400 3rd graders and you’ll get “chocolate,” guaranteed. One million North Koreans will have a different answer. In this case, as in many others, finding the truth is less about how many you sampled, and a lot more to do with who you asked.

Surely even Beloved Leader knows the right answer to this one.

Size Doesn’t Always Matter is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

Social Media Examiner recently posted a video interview with me from Blogworld on what we can – and can’t – learn from social media. One of the themes that I struck in my keynote speech there was a reminder that social media data can be more than just a real-time fire hose. Indeed, while there is tremendous value in real-time data (especially in customer service), there are other ways to process and analyze social media data that require, and reward, a bit more introspection.

There are strategic uses to properly calibrated social media data, and when one adjusts one’s focus to look at things from 50,000 feet (which, in social, might be six months of data, or even a year’s worth), there are profound insights that can be gleaned about your product, brand and where your customers are going. I think businesses spend too much time in “real-time” and not enough time really examining the relatively glacial shifts in how consumers as a whole are moving over time. After all, in any given moment, a customer might be having an issue with your product, or your brand – but these idiosyncratic episodes may or may not have anything to do with where your product needs to go in the future to address the changing needs, wants and desires of your potential consumers.

So, consider this video interview an introduction to what I would call the “Slow Data” movement. There is enormous value in hopping off the real-time, reactive treadmill and seeing where and how your social customers are moving over time. You might discover that they move more slowly – or in different directions – than a real-time analysis might have suggested. More importantly, though, dipping into “slow data” provides a constant reminder of the true dangers of making strategic decisions from tactical information – when you don’t know what you don’t know.

Enjoy. And a big thanks to Michael Stelzner, who actually made me look smart

The Slow Data Movement is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

Exhaustively researched from my own inbox. You’re welcome.

New Data On What We’re Grouponing Today is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

I loved Mitch Joel’s recent take on the death of the unconference, and share his regret that these types of events appear to be waning. I’ve been to several of these – some good, some bad. Most of the ones I have attended seem to have sputtered and stumbled under their own weight – with too many people in a room, self-organizing can become a wincingly painful exercise.

Mitch is exactly right to call out the various unconferences that are really just poorly organized conferences by another name. I would much rather attend a well-curated conference (like Explore, or Social Slam) than be thrown into a room with 250 random, undirected people and hope for the best. Maybe it’s the term “unconference,” though, that gives pause. Once you use the word “conference,” you enter a mindset, regardless of your intent, and with that mindset comes expectations and assumptions that may work counterproductively to your goals.

There is another model: the Renaissance Weekend. These were popularized by the Clintons, who staged their own Renaissance Weekends before and during their ascent to power, and are meant to be “festivals of ideas,” led by the participants, showcasing private, off-the-record explorations of possibilities. Of course, these are hardly “unconferences” either, as they are typically at least somewhat programmatic.

The actual, “official” Renaissance Weekends are by invitation only, and I’ve yet to find myself on the invitation list. But, I have been fortunate enough to have been invited to similar gatherings, and to me, the best of them suggest an agenda, but rely on a small, carefully curated attendee list, and not a “program,” to drive the discussions.

So, here’s a thought. If you find conferences too generic, and “unconferences” too disjointed, think smaller. Remove the word “conference” and you stop thinking about how many cookies to order, or finding event space. Instead, think about who you’d want to learn from, not what you’d want to learn — the hallmark of serendipitous, undirected knowledge discovery — and plan a weekend. It only takes 6-8 interesting minds to create the experience of a lifetime, and the group need not hang together in any kind of “mastermind” fashion after the event, though they certainly could. Save the money you might spend on conference/event facilities, and use it to fly that incredibly interesting person to your group instead.

The only rule of the official Renaissance Weekends is this: Civility Prevails. I have to say, I vastly prefer this to “the law of two feet,” which I find uncivil. If you aren’t getting value from a Renaissance Weekend, getting up and leaving is the worst thing you can do. Contribute, instead. Ask provocative questions. Prepare to be challenged. And rely on the quality of the people with whom you are sharing the experience to make it worthwhile.

Also, turn off Twitter. You’re welcome.

The Renaissance Weekend is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

A simple concept, simply illustrated. Some small percentage of Internet users create content on the social web – let’s call it 10% for discussion – while the remainder do things like curate, consume, etc. Also, some percentage of your customers represent your core customers – the people who are most passionate and loyal purchasers of your product. Again, for the sake of argument, let’s also call that 10% of your customer base. So, you have a small percentage of content creators, and a small percentage of business drivers. That’s what you know.

Here is what you probably don’t know: where those two types of people intersect, i.e., what percentage of the people talking about your brand on the social web are also your best customers? Ideally, there is some overlap here, as my brilliantly artistic Venn diagram suggests:

The intersection of those two circles – the passionate, core consumers who also talk about your brand online – is gold, right? You want to make these people happy, don’t you? Well, yes and no. You do if and only if you can actually identify them. And you can’t identify them, unless you know what that Venn diagram looks like for your brand.

Not knowing what this diagram looks like can destroy your brand, if you use the social web as an input. Your quickest path to extinction is to make business decisions based upon information mined from social media if you don’t know what your Venn diagram looks like – and if it turns out to look significantly different to the one above.

There are two distinctly different dangers here – one obvious; the other, less so. Here’s the obvious one:

In this instance, the people talking about your brand and the people who actually buy your stuff have very little overlap. Here, mining social media for insight serves not as a proxy for “voice of consumer,” but as a dangerously irrelevant “voice of the noisy.” And if you don’t actually know what this Venn looks like for your business, you run the very real risk of ruining your product, brand or reputation with your actual customers if you derive “actionable” insights from the social web that turn out to be irrelevant banter. In other words, if the folks at Maybach designed their cars based upon mining Twitter data, they’d probably have a jacuzzi in the trunk.

Again, where the values of social content creators align with the values of your core customers, social data is potentially useful, but not always useful. Consider this, very different Venn diagram:

The amateur mind sees this as an optimal situation – after all, your core customers and your social content creators are in near-perfect alignment, right? Yet this Venn could kill your business just as efficiently as the previous example – indeed, it might even happen before you realize it.

This sinister pattern is what I would call the Optimization Trap. Slavishly following clickstream data will get you here quicker than anything. Imagine, if you will, mining your data to discover that Fridays are the best day to send your emails, and farm implements are your most successful topics. So, you send out Friday Farm Implement emails. From there, you mine your Twitter data to discover that most of your audience is athletic, so you tweak your Friday Farm Implement email to talk about combining farming and exercise. Subsequent mining reveals that your Friday Farming Activity emails are most often opened by young men, so you include videos of top models using your farm implements for various activities.

With each optimization, you’ve actually veered further and further away from the dead center of your market. If you over-optimize, you end up continually refocusing on ever-smaller bullseyes, moving closer and closer to irrelevance and away from the needs of the majority of your market. Eventually, you will achieve nearly 100% optimization, making five people really happy. You’ll be like the frog placed in a pot of cold water, slowly heated to boiling. By the time you realize you’re in trouble, you’re being served with garlic butter and a nice green salad. Tastes like chicken!

Two of these Venn diagrams could kill your business – if you make decisions based upon social data and don’t know what your diagram looks like. Luckily for you, it isn’t rocket science to draw your brand’s diagram – if you do the work. This is the kind of work I do for clients every day, but the most important thing you can do to determine these things about your customers is simply to ask them. Only when you calibrate your social data mining with other online or offline research can you know the nature of your two circles. Figuring out the size of these circles – and the extent to which they overlap – is the key to making social media data useful. Not doing the work is negligence at best, and could indeed be fatal.

Sorry about my “art.” I won’t quit my day job.

The Venn Diagram That Could Destroy Your Business is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

I look forward to the yearly release of Edelman’s Trust Barometer – particularly for its global perspective, which helps me provide context for my own international clients. This year’s report is chock full of insights, and some remarkable shifts. Some of the changes from 2011 can be attributed to a bit of a change in the methodology of the research, but (as a researcher myself) I appreciate the transparency in reporting those changes, which I believe make the data richer.

David Armano has a nice piece here on the shift in trust from organizations to individuals which merits a read, but what also struck me was the juxtaposition of two findings in particular:

First, about the only thing that showed an increase in trust was media – and in particular, social media, which showed a rise in trust from 8% to 14%. Again, methodology changes explain some of this, but not all of it, and it is clear from the data that as some of the institutions we have formerly trusted appear to crumble around us, we are, as a society, engaging in a “flight to comfort” by relying more and more on our social networks (online and offline) for our daily inputs.

Second, with the global decline in trust towards most institutions comes an axiomatic rise in skepticism (and, for some, cynicism). Nearly two thirds of those surveyed in the Trust Barometer indicated that they need to hear something at least three times before they believe it – with 28% saying four or five times. Repetition and trust go hand in hand – and, as some other data I have seen corroborates, repetition itself has a hand in creating trust.

These two facts, taken together, illustrate a very powerful concept regarding influence. While the purveyors of online influence measures (Klout, PeerIndex, Kred, et al) focus our attention on top-down measures of influence (the “top 10″ in a given topic is often all you see), we are all influencers, as Tamsen McMahon often says. Identifying “influencers” is merely step one in a more vital process – getting people to do the things you want them to do. Using online influence measures is potentially a useful first step, but it does focus you on “elephant hunting,” and sometimes those elephants net you a little noise, but nothing more.

The Edelman data suggests an alternative approach – the bottom-up approach. Hearing a message from a top-scoring “influencer” might make me read, or retweet a message – but seeing it repeated by five people I actually know, like and/or trust makes it law, regardless of the measured “influence” of those people. And getting the attention of those people, where the noise level is a little lower, is a pretty straightforward process with some time-honored components: sampling, trial, acknowledgement, recognition, reward and testimonial.

I realize I’m not saying anything too earth-shattering here; rather, I am simply suggesting that reframing your thinking about influencer outreach – flipping the funnel, as it were, from top-down elephant hunting to bottom up empowerment – might yield some fresh, new ideas, and get you thinking differently.

Which is my only real goal here at BrandSavant.

Here is the Trust Barometer summary report – well worth your time.

Influence From The Bottom Up is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

I was delighted to be asked recently to contribute a brief video interview to the excellent Social Media Explorer, run by my friend Jason Falls. SME will be hosting a series of five events all over the country under the “Explore” moniker, and he has definitely raised the level of discourse – both by inviting top talent to speak (Aaron Strout, Tim Hayden, DJ Waldow, Zena Weist, Copyblogger’s Brian Clark and many more – all at the top of their game) and by challenging that talent to truly deliver a world-class educational experience. I will also be speaking, and I’ll be giving attendees a four-step process to improve their critical thinking about social media data to become better consumers – and creators – of information.

Jason asked me to talk about the difference between research driven by science, and research driven by the content creation imperative. I also made Jason pee a little. Worth your 12 minutes, I trust.

Oh, the first Explore event is in Dallas on February 17th. Register here today and save a pile.

Exploring Digital Marketing Data and Research With Tom Webster from Jason Falls on Vimeo.

Relying on Data Produced As “Content” – A Video Interview is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

Klout says I am not an expert on headphones. I think I am. But, my social media activity around the topic has not been sufficient to warrant notice by Klout or any other influence service. So here I sit, bereft, betrayed, bewailing and bemoaning — in short, a beloser.

So what’s a poor boy to do? Surely I don’t want to turn my tweets into a withering torrent of headphone-related detritus, in a futile effort to show on the big Klout board. No, that would decrease my influence, if anything, if my social media output turns into a one-note joke. My tweet stream is about me, not an arbitrary list of topics. I’m a person, after all, not a dictionary (unlike my sesquipedalian-word-loving uncle Noah).

This is where I think Pinterest could come in. In a sense, it’s like a combination of Instagram and Squidoo – combining the content curation of the latter with the social aspects and personality of the former. Of course, there is a lot of duplication between Squidoo and Pinterest, but where Squidoo is organized around topics, Pinterest is organized around people. Setting aside the “social shopping” implications for brands, Pinterest is also a great place to curate pretty much anything you consume, including media and, of course, headphones. But for brands, the relative popularity of relevant pages might just be a better way for them to curate people.

If Pinterest takes off, brands combing through their server data might just find that the initial interest in their product early in the clickstream funnel might have come from someone’s Pinterest board. And if the makers of some of the headphone-related products on my “Audiophilia” pinboard happen to see a lot of clicks coming through that particular page, well – guess what? I’m an influencer about headphones, regardless of what an algorithm says, based upon an actual relevant behavior. After all, the best predictive measure of whether or not I might be influential about headphones in the future, is if I have, in fact, influenced people about headphones in the past.

Don’t Like Your Klout Score? Here’s How To Do An End Run is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

Last night, my company conducted the Iowa Caucus Entrance Poll on behalf of the National Election Pool (NBC, CNN, CBS, FOX, ABC, and the Associated Press.) The results, you may already know: Mitt Romney beat Rick Santorum by eight votes. It was clear from the data, and from the actual vote count, that we were in for a long night – it was an insanely close race.

Except, of course, in social media. The “big data” being thrown off by the web told a very different story. Conventional measures of volume showed Ron Paul dominating the social web by as many as five times more mentions than his nearest competitor. A straight-up search for relevant mentions on Topsy shows the race between Romney, Paul and Santorum as…well, not much of a race. If we look at search volume (and even confining it to Iowa, which hardly any of the social measures did) it’s still a one horse race – Paul by a landslide. One sentiment measure I saw quoted calculated the volume of Romney’s positive sentiment as sixth amongst candidates.

To date, I have never seen a repeatable correlation between social media mentions/sentiment and the actual vote. Sure, you could back-test a model that weighted to correct for the Ron Paul phenomenon, but the real test is to apply that exact same scheme the next time and see what you get – after all, most of these social tote-boards also got the relative gap and order wrong for other candidates, as well. I’m not discounting the possibility that it can be done; however, it hasn’t been done and it will be diabolically difficult to do so.

In short, to date I have not been presented with a replicable model which shows, candidate for candidate, that the number of people tweeting about a politician has anything to do with the number of people in Cedar Falls, Iowa who actually got in a car, drove to a high school gymnasium and raised their hand. Can it be done? Maybe. Maybe not. I’m not pessimistic, I’m merely skeptical (in other words, don’t prove me wrong – surprise and delight me.) I do know that raw mention-counting is a long hiding to nothing.

My only point here is that in the case of the Iowa Caucus, there is an enormous gap between what people on social media say, and what people in Iowa actually do.

Now, examine that last sentence. Replace “the Iowa Caucus” with the name of your brand, and replace “people in Iowa” with “your customers.”

Do you know how big that gap is? It is knowable – as I’ve often said in this space, it isn’t a black box mystery, if you do the work. But if you don’t know that gap, you’ll never make sound business decisions from social media data.

What Your Brand Needs To Know About The “Social Media Caucus” is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

Here are my predictions for the coming year:

[...]

I don’t do this sort of thing–never have. The rate of change over the past decade has made the “five-year plan” a punchline, and I’ve never been in the forecasting game. I’m not denigrating it – some of my friends are really pretty good at it. I rely on their judgment.

My business has always been about the reliable discernment of the present. I find this to be rarer than you might think. Expect more of the same here in 2012, at least until Quetzalcoatl engulfs the world in flames, sometime in September. Well, there’s one prediction, anyway.

Happy New Year – and thank you so much for your attention and your valuable contributions and comments here at BrandSavant over the past year. You keep me going.

My Bold Predictions For 2012 is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

Last September, at Social Fresh Charlotte, I had the honor of being asked to speak about social media monitoring, and how to evolve from basic “trolling for mentions” into something that resembles actual decision support for brands and companies. I ended up arriving at the venue seconds before my talk, thanks to a “truck immolation” on I-40, but my passenger (DJ Waldow) kept me calm throughout, and I think it was a great talk. BIG thanks to Jason Keath for allowing me to post this.

The audio is slightly out of sync with the video. Just pretend it’s a foreign film dubbed from the original Websterese. Enjoy.

Turning Social Media Monitoring Into Research is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!