A Better Course

There have been a series of interesting posts on viral marketing recently – advergirl on ElfYourself:

this was not just a random great idea from some creatives loopy on spray glue fumes. It was a the winner of a very well-funded test of over 20 holiday sites – each of which was intended to be viral… it didn’t magically go viral. OfficeMax (and/or Toy) has a strong understanding of how to pounce on an opportunity. They took early adopter posts on Flickr, Digg and Facebook and leveraged them into a PR pitch that landed spokespeople on Letterman, The Today Show and others.

[full post here]

and Brand New on the concept in general:

“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can” […] Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That’s because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments.

[full post here]

I was interested by advergirl’s post, particularly, because I read a lot about ElfYourself from the American blogs, and almost nothing from within the UK – so it makes more sense that its (apparently massive) popularity was at least in part a result of consistent and targeted PR efforts. Given that it didn’t spread that far, it looks like an idea that was ready to spread, but only just.

It’s also an example of when testing works well. Obviously, OfficeMax had a big budget for this project, and that’s not going to be possible for everyone. But as in Gareth’s post, they took the time to find out what people were the most ready to play with – and, given the alternative suggestions, collected a lot of data on what their customer base likes and disliked.

Of course, all of this leaves open the question as to whether engagement with a brand is what’s actually happening with campaigns like OfficeMax’s. I’m far from convinced that it is; but there’s a lot to learn from how they tested their concepts.

• Forget about demographics?: Jackson Blog: Jackson Library: Stanford GSB
  “There is value in audience-based guarantee system for digital media. The guarantees could be based on ratings against behaviorally and contextually defined audiences.” I’m not sure – for some products you could be actively reducing your market.
  (tags: jacksonblog advertising demographics marketing online)
• advergirl: The Myth of ElfYourself.com
  “this was not just a random great idea from some creatives loopy on spray glue fumes. It was a the winner of a very well-funded test of over 20 holiday sites – each of which was intended to be viral.” – an account of successful testing at OfficeMax.
  (tags: advergirl advertising web2.0 testing)
• adliterate: The Advocate – January
  the 9% growth in sales of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk since launch must have done a lot of the heavy lifting for the company’s confectionary business and is all the more impressive given the brand’s recent past which has been somewhat difficult to say the least.
  (tags: adliterate cadburys statistics advertising marketing branding brand)
• Ads Use Logos of Washington Post to Skewer It – New York Times
  The radio, print and billboard advertising campaign running in the metropolitan area for the duration of January is not being paid for by a competitor or an angry interest group but rather by the union that represents about 400 employees of the newspaper.
  (tags: washintonpost nytimes media negativeadvertising advertising publishing)

• Business Interactive Features – Diagrams – Illustrations – Portfolio.com
  What’s a CDO? – An explanation of the subprime mortgage crisis.
  (tags: portfolio.com finance visualization economics cdo subprime)

I’ve just finished Robert Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer‘s Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense. A problem I have with a lot of business books is that they are generally so larded with the message it is okay to be you! that much of the rest is lost. As I’m a data analyst, I was clearly always going to find a book on ‘evidence based management’ more or less on the topic of it being okay to be me.

In a sense, this was true; there was a lot of reassuring statements about how data knows no status and (furthermore) brings in the results. However, there was still a lot that was far from being a cause for self-satisfaction. It’s easy to follow the logic behind why an idea might make sense and, once that idea looks exciting, harder to think about how it might be wrong and how to test if it works.

From Why Every Company Needs Evidence-Based Management:

We once worked with a large computer company that was having trouble selling its computers at retail stores. Senior executives kept blaming their marketing and sales people for doing a lousy job, and dismissed their complaints that it was hard to get customers to buy a lousy product, until one weekend when members of the senior team went out to stores and tried to buy their computers. Every executive encountered salespeople who tried to dissuade them from buying the firm’s computers, citing the excessive price, weak feature set, clunky appearance, and poor feature set.

From How To Practice Evidence-Based Management:

consider a big problem that plagues managers who try to learn from experience as well as many business writers who draw lessons from currently successful companies. What both the managers and the writers don’t seem to realise is that crucial evidence is lost if they ignore the practices and strategies used by failed companies.

We found little if any evidence that courtesy increased [7-11] store sales. Yes, it was possible to increase courtesy. […] But the main finding… was that clerks in stores with more sales were actually less courteous. Apparently, the crowding and long lines in busy stores made clerks and customers grouchy. […] good service meant getting out of the store fast, not fake smiles and insincere social amenities.

From Is Work Fundamentally Different From Life And Should It Be?

just as it is difficult to have total quality management practices and high quality in one part of a factory and not another, it is difficult to encourage some close and effective relationships, for instance with customers, while simultaneously discouraging, denying, or ignoring other relationships.

From Do The Best Organisations Have The Best People?

An insidious consequence of… [fundamental attribution error] is something we have come to call the brain vacuum syndrome… where an organisation hires one apparently brilliant person after another, and them places them in the same badly designed jobs in the same badly designed system.

From Do Financial Incentives Matter To Company Performance?

A survey by Kaplan Educational Centers of almost 500 prospective lawyers preparing to take the Law School Admissions Test revealed that 64 percent of the respondents said they were pursuing a legal career because it was intellectually appealing or because they were interested in the law, but only 12 percent thought their peers were similarly motivated. Instead, 62 percent thought that others were pursuing a legal career for the financial rewards.

The above is especially interesting given something that annoys me in critique of creative or design work; the statement “but that’s not how I’d do that”. Whilst sometimes it can be valid, it’s also useful to remember that there are other use cases than ourselves. If people tend to design for an idea of “themselves”, do they tend to manage for an idea of “other people”?

From Change Or Die?

the fact is that to maintain a favourable reputation while protecting core business from excessive and well-meaning but flawed intrusion, every effective company makes symbolic changes in its structures, training, management practices and language that change more of how it looks than what it does.

This is the first mention of an idea that seems passive agressive (if pleasing to have rubber stamped thus) – if the data suggests an idea is not going to work, don’t bother implementing it.

From Are Great Leaders In Control Of Their Companies?

Study after study shows that companies headed by CEOs who credit favourable financial performance to what they and their people did will perform better down the road than companies that are equally successful by the same financial measures but do not make such claims.

From Profiting From Evidence-Based Management

We are struck by how many companies spend months or even years doing internal research, pilot programs, and experiments to decide whether to adopt some program or practice without first stopping to see if pertinent evidence already exists elsewhere. Ignoring data that isn’t developed locally is just another manifestation of the not-invented-here syndromes.

if you want to take a first step towards practicing evidence-based management… find out: What happens to people who fail in your oroganisation? Do you ever admit your own mistakes? Does your organisation forgive and remember when people make mistakes, and does it use that information to keep making things better?

• Chris Heathcote: anti-mega: blog all dog-eared pages: The Design Of Future Things by Don Norman
  I’d posit that these smug systems may have resulted from use cases, and traditional user-centred design. We’ve been taught to design systems for a purpose – preferably one purpose – collected through use cases and designed against them.
  (tags: antimega bookreview donnorman design)

• Facebook Is No Kingmaker – Bits – Technology – New York Times Blog
  there is little correlation between Facebook support and real-world support. If there was, Mr. Paul would be the front-runner.
  (tags: nytimes america election facebook)
• apophenia: The Economist Debate on Social “Networking”
  Youth prefer in-person (unregulated) encounters. They turn to SNSs when they can’t get together with their friends en masse or when they can’t get together without surveilling adults. There are few free spaces where youth can gather with their friends en
  (tags: education facebook networking zephoria danahboyd theeconomist social online web2.0)
• (theinfo)
  Some of us have spent years scraping news sites. Others have spent them downloading government data. Others have spent them grabbing catalog records for books. And each time, in each community, we reinvent the same things over and over again
  (tags: theinfo statistics useful web2.0 reference research analytics collaboration awesome)

apophenia asks:

I have yet to hear a compelling argument for why social network sites (or networking ones) should be used in the classroom. Those tools are primarily about socializing, with media and information sharing there to prop up the socialization process (much status is gained from knowing about the cool new thing). I haven’t even heard of a good reason why social network site features should be used in the classroom. What is the value of knowing who is friends with who or creating a profile when you already know all of your classmates?

I think that a lot of the answers to this question lie in her other point –

There are innumerable inequalities in terms of educational technology access, just as there are huge inequalities in nearly every aspect of education. How many schools lack pencils, textbooks, teachers? Again, it’s terrible, but it’s not the technology’s fault.

Like danah, I’m unconvinced about the efficacy of social networks as tools for learning. But I think there’s one thing that they might provide – less restrictive access to information.

As I’ve mentioned, I went home at Christmas, and talked with my youngest brother – who is not yet in high school – about how he uses the internet. A big part of this is going to be mediated by his school, because that’s where he spends a lot of time, and (I assumed) it would be an important part of the kind of projects you do at that level of education.

In the manner of a near teen, he described the internet at school as being rubbish. I pushed on this, and he said, “well, everything is blocked. I can’t look at anything“. Again, I assumed that he meant he couldn’t search for Weird Al Yankovic videos on YouTube, and asked another question, and he explained:

“We don’t have enough books to do the research for the projects we do. So we need to use the internet. But at school any reference to gore or anything naughty is blocked, which means that it’s really hard to do research on our projects.”

I asked – because now I was really interested – how he did any learning about, say, Vikings, or the Second World War, online at school. And he told me:

“Well, you can’t. As soon as you find a page that’s useful, the computer learns to block it. Last term our project was on vivisection, and we found a great page with loads of information and pictures. And we took notes and printed until the printer ran out of ink. By the time the ink was replaced, the page was blocked and we couldn’t get back to it.”

I thought that was a fascinating explanation of how (relatively) powerless you are at that age; you can’t change the printer ink, even if you know how, and you can’t use the internet in the manner to which you’ve become accustomed. But there’s one thing you can do, and that’s share information and ask other people what they know.

Social networks broaden the base of people you have to speak to to a massive extent. Even at the age of 12, you have cousins, friends from previous schools, children of parent’s friends, all of whom could be at different schools and who could know different things from you. If you use Twitter or the Facebook status update to ask casual questions, you can get a lot of information from a number of sources as well as ideas to follow up. You might not want to do research for school at home, but you will want to use social networking sites – if you ask one question of twenty people it doesn’t feel like work, and you might find out what you need to know.

This generation are using and will increasingly use tools such as Facebook – and if social networking services are going be used in the service of learning, I believe it will take this form.

• Howard Schultz’s Grande Challenge | Business Week
  “Their business model still appears to be building stores to grow, and if they just [build more slowly and] become more relevant to consumers, everything will work itself out—I think those are all dangerous premises”
  (tags: businessweek starbucks coffee strategy)
• NussbaumOnDesign 10 Worst Innovation Mistakes In A Recession. – BusinessWeek
  “The rise of social networking and consumer power means that companies have to be part of a larger conversation with their customers.” Interesting article, but what (if anything) does the quotes statement mean? Is it true?
  (tags: businessweek innovation brucenussbaum recession)
• Higher wine prices boost drinking pleasure: study | Reuters
  because people expect wines that cost more to be of higher quality, they trick themselves into believing the wines provide a more pleasurable experience than less expensive ones.
  (tags: research reuters neuromarketing marketing wine)
• Restaurateurs Don’t Just Wing It | Business Week
  When asked to describe their concept, failed restaurant owners answered (eg) “vegetarian food”; they couldn’t expand their description beyond food. Successful restaurant owners described an operating philosophy encompassing ambiance, service, and decor
  (tags: businessweek restaurant food research business)
• russell davies: 2008 – the year of peak advertising
  Mostly, this is upside. We’ll be bothered with less stupid advertising. And although there’ll be less people in advertising the people who remain will mostly be tasked with making more intelligent and useful stuff. And there’ll be less pointless media.
  (tags: russelldavies advertising predictions media online publishing television)

• Circle of Time Planner | Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog
  It’s basically a pie chart of your day. There is something about seeing my day presented on a wheel like this that makes me feel I have better control of my time. I like seeing the spacial relationship between projects/tasks.
  (tags: marketingprofs gettingthingsdone timemanagement)
• blog all dog-eared pages: the unfolding of language (tecznotes)
  As long as “going to” retained its independent meaning, it had a stronger resistance; no one says “I’m gonna bed”. But once “going to” lost its independent content, it became much more exposed, because it was now used more often, and with far less stress.
  (tags: tecznotes bookreview linguistics)
• A.P. Says It Wants to Know Everything About Britney Spears – New York Times
  “Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal” On Romenesko, a popular online media site owned by the Poynter Institute, a commenter added, “Not a good day for journalism as a discipline.”
  (tags: nytimes journalism media britneyspears associatedpress)
• How Do You Know When It’s Time to Go? | Business Week
  Lots of people sign on with a company because it’s got a cool reputation, it’s prestigious, or it’s got a great stock price. You quickly realize that “working for” a company is an abstraction. The reality is that you work with the people closest to you
  (tags: businessweek employment)
• Advertising: Think Before You Speak | Business Week
  it doesn’t matter what an advertiser intends to communicate, what matters is how the target audience interprets it. Don’t just put an ad out there because it sounds good to you. You may like what your advertising has to say, but that can be misleading.
  (tags: advertising businessweek communication)
• The Afterlife of Cellphones – Cellular Telephone – Waste Materials – Recycling – New York Times
  Thierry Van Kerckhoven, Umicore’s e-scrap manager, handed me another of the end products from this process: a one-kilogram bar of gold. It was worth about $24,000. “This gold is recycled gold,” Kerckhoven said. “This gold is green gold.”
  (tags: nytimes recycling sustainability mobile waste gold)
• FT.com / World – A banker’s link to ‘real world’
  “When you work in a big organisation and try something new, the culture is to give it a go. They needed confidence and support. […] They’re right at the coalface. We haven’t suggested anything radical, but tried to help them see the wood for the trees.”
  (tags: notforprofit ft corporate)

Seminar at work today by Nader Tavassoli on “mere exposure” versus “mere neglect” in advertising and brand liking.

We are used to blocking things out given the constant competition for attention. Does the act of ignoring something mean that we are biased against what is ignored – in other words, is the statement any exposure is good exposure true?

In various task-based experiments, it seems likely that not all exposure is good exposure. In experiments where the subject had to identify “targets” amongst “distractors”, the targets were rated highly and the distractors were rated negatively compared to both the target and the baseline (typically a hitherto-unseen stimulus). If, for example, a participant had to identify ‡ in the following sequence-
¶¶¶¶¶¶‡¶¶¶
–
‡ and µ would receive a more positive evaluation than ¶.

Furthermore, the closer to the target the distractor was, the less liked it was. There are implications in this for people who think that rollover Flash adverts are a really good idea.

All of these experiments, up to this point, had relied on the target being “selected”. Cognitive dissonance reduction leads us to prefer the things we choose without compulsion; could this have been what was in effect here? In a further experiment, participants had to sort pens from pencils, nickels from quarters, and Wrigley’s from Trident gum. Half of the participants were told they were “rejecting” the target, the other half that they were “selecting”. At the end of the experiment, the participants were told to select a piece of gum as a ‘thank you’ for having taken part. Across both groups (those selecting and those rejecting) 61% chose the target brand over the distractor brand – indicating that this was not cognitive dissonance at work.

Given these results, it looks fairly likely that things that (we feel) distract us from our goals to a significant extent generate more negative than positive feelings. Whilst I’d like to see more results from less experimental circumstances, this is clearly an effect worth considering. There are a few areas that I think might be affected by findings like these ones;

• Saturation; if an ad is a constant and rarely-relevant distraction, is that going to lead to more negative than positive results?
• Conciseness; are online ads that distract by failing to get to the point going to be evaluated more negatively than those that can be discounted immediately?
• Location; if we see an advert where none is expected (and where information we are looking for is expected) does this escalate the effects of “mere neglect?”