Mike MacLeod

Watch New Super Bowl Ads Today. It Will Be A Relief

// January 29th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Do you hold off on any sort of pee breaks during the 6-hour spectacle of the Super Bowl because you want to see all the new ads? Then you and your bladder will thank me.

Adweek is showing previews of many of the new ads that will air on Sunday.  Jump over there now to see.

Who Decides What News Is Important?

// January 22nd, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Not long ago, CNN.com was the first site I’d visit every morning to get my fix of national and international news.  I then started migrating to Google News.   I figured that if one news source was good, then many news sources must be better.  Google aggregates stories from over 4,500 news organizations.

Now I never visit Google News. Or CNN. Or any traditional news organization.

Now I get most of my news from the people I follow on Twitter. Or friendfeed. Or from a ranking site like popurls. Or Alltop. Or Techmeme. Or Twitturly.

These sources aren’t investigating or reporting the news. But they are telling me what I should be paying attention to and where to get more details.

Are my new sources of news better or worse than my old ones? Should editors with journalism degrees tell me what the day’s headlines should be? Or is that decision better left to a much larger group of civilians?

Why Twitter Followers Don’t Matter

// January 19th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Twitter is not a broadcast medium.  So, there is no need to make an effort to gather as many followers as possible.

If you try to broadcast your marketing message via Twitter, a few things happen:

• Only a small percentage of your followers will see an individual message.
• Some of those will be turned off and stop following you.
• To account for the above, you could broadcast more marketing messages and increase the frequency.
• You’ll reach some more followers and some of them will again be turned off.
• You will be seen as a 24/7 commercial. Followers will see less benefit in following you and stop.

Twitter is best used as a conversation agent. As in any conversation, it’s better to listen than to speak. You learn more that way.

Use Twitter to gather information. To do this, you will need to focus on following, not gaining followers.

Use Twitter to share useful information. “Buy my product” is not useful.

If you do this, followers will come on their own (I REALLY wanted to use a “build it and they will come” quote here, but deemed it too cliche) and your ego can be satiated.

Harris Poll Chairman Stands Up to The Economist

// January 19th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Cheers to Humphrey Taylor of Harris Interactive for defending online research in his letter to The Economist:

SIR – Your article about the accuracy of opinion polling in America’s election stated that “online surveys are notoriously biased” (“Poll, baby, poll!”, October 25th). Their track record says otherwise. In the almost 80 elections in the United States and Britain where we can carry out a comparison, the final forecasts of online opinion polls have on average been somewhat more accurate than telephone polls. What’s more, they include most of the “cellphone only” population.

You also wrote that “most experts” consider as “sloppy” the weighting of surveys to compensate for biases in the sample. As the raw samples in all opinion polls contain biases, whether the data are collected in person, by mail, on the phone or online, it would be very sloppy not to weight them. Who are these experts?

Humphrey Taylor
Chairman
The Harris Poll
New York

Rubel v. Scoble: Text v. Video – Which is Better?

// January 14th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Steve Rubel says that text is still the King of the interweb. His reasons:

1. It’s scannable
2. Search engines like text
3. Cubicle-dwellers can surf quietly
4. Mobile video sucks
5. Cut and paste

Scoble says video is godly.

You take 1,000 words to explain to me what the next game from EA looks like. I’ll do it in a minute or two of video. The video will beat your blog every time. Every time!

It’s a silly argument as they are both right.

Video wins out when video is needed. But it is not always needed. Would Rubel have made a stronger case for his argument if he was on video (as absurd as that sounds)?

When both formats are done well, video is often superior for the obvious reasons.

But video is not often done well.

And text is not often done well.

There is more of a commitment on the part of the reader/viewer when watching a video. If I know there is one good article out of 100 blog posts, I can scan them quickly and find what I’m looking for in a couple minutes.  If I start scanning for one good video out of 100, then I’m giving up after the fifth bad one.

So no one wins this one. It’s not even a tie. It’s a no contest.

Twitterize Your Market Research

// January 12th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Best Buy’s CMO, Barry Judge (@BestBuyCMO) has reached out to Twitter users to get a quick assessment of his new ad spots.

Should this replace the formal ad testing that most companies perform? Of course not.

But it will give Barry a pretty good estimate of what’s good and bad.  If a specific ad gets a brutal response from the Twitterverse (ugh, that’s a bad term. I promise to come up with something better) then he could save some research dough by trashing it early.

Use all the information you have available to you – especially if it can be obtained quickly and cheaply.

The Research Industry Needs More Experimentation

// January 11th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Mr. Heretic gets it.

Other people get it too.

So why are few people using everything the internet has to offer the world of market research? Why aren’t you pushing the boundaries? Why aren’t you taking risks?

Don’t tell me that risks are too expensive. Don’t get silly and bet your company or your clients on a single new approach, methodology, or process.

But you can take many smaller risks and compare the results to past experiments. Afterall, we are a research industry, right?

So why do the instruments used in 2009 look almost identical to those used in 1959? Did we get it perfect back then?

How To Organize Your RSS Feed Reader

// January 7th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

I currently have 326 feeds in my reader (I use Google Reader but there are many other good ones). To some, that many feeds is scary huge. To others, it’s not many at all. Whatever.

I’ve talked to others that follow a lot of feeds and many of them have very complex folder schemes that include subject matter, rankings, and the lunar calendar. They also spend way too much time processing them.

I usually review my feeds between 5:00 and 6:00 in the morning. My dad used to read the newspaper. I read my feeds. And I keep it simple.

I only have three folders – Essential, Trial, and Occasional.

My Essential folder is the first one I go through every morning. It contains the feeds I enjoy the most and they are all updated quite regularly.  I have 122 feeds in this folder.

When I first start following  a new feed, I put it in the Trial folder. This is the second folder I read in the morning – if I have time.  If I find myself enjoying the feed on a regular basis, I move it to the Essential folder. If I don’t enjoy it, it gets the boot. I have 95 feeds in this folder.

My Occasional folder contains feeds that are either updated less often or are about subjects that I don’t want to read about every day. This includes Photoshop tutorials, new releases on Netflix, and some guilty pleasures. There are 111 feeds in this folder and I generally read them once or twice a week.

That’s it. Nothing complicated. Sometimes, being too organized slows things down.

Facebook Terminates Their Polling Service

// January 5th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook Polls is no longer available. Facebook Polls enabled anyone to create a paid poll targeting a pre-defined group of users.

The link that used to redirect to the service now forwards to the Facebook homepage and there is no longer any reference of Facebook Polls anywhere in Facebook.

Facebook put Facebook Polls on hold last October when there were internal questions about the priority for the product. They advise users to switch to one of the third-party polling applications that are available.

Facebook’s statement:

“The ability to create Facebook Polls is no longer available on the public site, though users may still receive Facebook Polls created internally by Facebook. Facebook is exploring options for making a polling product publicly available again in the future but has no definite plans to discuss at this point.”

This seems like an odd move, especially as LinkedIn is making a large push towards making their users available for market researchers and other pollsters via LinkedIn Polls.

SocialToo Protects Me From Itself

// January 4th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

SocialToo was one of the first Twitter apps I used.  As a Twitter noob, I wanted to grow my followers as much as possible. Following the advice of Scoble and Kawasaki, I used the service to automatically follow anyone that followed me.

But I ended up following too many spammers. I still follow most people that follow me, but I do so manually to ensure that I don’t fill my signal with offers to make millions in my underwear.

I also used SocialToo to automatically send a direct message to anyone that follows me. I thought it would be nice to tell my new followers that they were my newest, most favorite Twitter friend.

Then I started receiving the same type of messages and realized that they come across as very impersonal and generally offer no value. So, I stopped using that service too.

Now SocialToo offers the ability to refuse auto messages from any other SocialToo user. This is awesome!

Everyone else can send and receive auto-messages if they like – but I’m not going to get any. At least not from SocialToo.

I recommend you join SocialToo even if it is only to block messages from their robots.

Thanks SocialToo!

Twitter Isn’t Growing As Fast As You Think

// January 4th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Everyone is talking about Twitter and how rapidly it is growing. But in the 12 months ending in November ‘08, Ning is growing at a faster clip.

Ning has grown 667% compared to Twitter’s 640%.

Why Put a Limit on Making Money?

// January 3rd, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Seth nails it.

When running digital ads, you should be able to determine their success or lack thereof. You know what you pay for them and you should know what each one generates.

So, if they don’t result in a profit, why are you running them?

If they do result in a profit, why aren’t you running them to infinity?

As Seth says:

How often do year the marketing person say, “that’s a neat idea, but we don’t have the budget this year”?

Shouldn’t she say, “We have an unlimited budget for ads that work”…

Invite Code for Zentact

// January 2nd, 2009 // Comments // Journal

I recently told you how to get your contacts to love you by using Zentact.

Jared just sent me a link to allow you guys to bypass the waiting list and join the private beta.

http://zentact.com/users/new/JRBZEN

Thanks Jared.

How To Be The Coolest Kid in Your Network

// January 2nd, 2009 // Comments // Journal

How would you like your contacts to view you as the guy that always keeps in touch – and the one that also remembers the details of what they are in to?

If you’re like me you have many online contacts and you have every intention to stay in touch with all of them. But before you know it, months (or years) slip by without talking. When you do get around to dropping a line, you’re left to ask some generic, boring question that tells them you don’t remember many details about them.

Zentact offers an idea to solve this problem all while you go about surfing the web. Users load their contacts into Zentact and then tag each one with unique keywords that are of interest to that person. When the user comes to a site that relates to a keyword, the contact pops up with a reminder.

For example, let’s say Eric Trekford is in my address book. I have him tagged with topics that would be of interest to Eric, like web design, Austin, jazz, or market research. Then, while reviewing my feeds, I discover an article on the SXSW festival in Austin, TX. If I have Zentact’s Firefox plugin installed, an alert will pop-up suggesting that I contact Eric. In the pop-up, Zentact tells me the last time I contacted Eric, and lets me know why the site might be interesting to him. I can even send an email directly from Zentact along with the URL and a message from me.

Eric now thinks that I am the greatest, coolest person he knows.

You can also sync Zentact with your Twitter account so you can @reply to someone instead of emailing.

Yet another instance of “why didn’t someone think of this sooner?”

You currently need an invitation to join Zentact. You can get one by signing up here.