Media

Do You Have Social Media Fatigue?

~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

Are you growing weary in keeping up with your blogs, Facebook and Tweets? I think the key to remember is that technology should help or improve our social and business lives. Blogs were created for an alternative viewpoint outside of the professional press or a place for niche interest communication. It this happening or are we all just reposting what everyone else is saying on his or her blogs? Facebook is supposed to improve or augment your social life, but has it replaced real life with a digital version? Twitter was designed for short spontaneous communication. But sites like Twitip have posted Tweet plans to use with a program that sends out prewritten Tweets “spontaneously” at regular intervals.

Another post talks about the practice of #followfriday. It started out as a good idea. You recommend your favorite Tweets, but in practice people mindlessly flooded long lists of Twitter usernames every Friday – turning a social media into a broadcast media. And NPR recently reported about teens using Twitter to organize flash mobs for illegal activities.

Are we all really meant to generate content? If  we all have blogs and we’re all trying to generate traffic to them, yet there is already too much out there how will that ever work? Maybe some consolidation needs to occur like in any industry when there are to many providers of a product or service. Maybe we need to take a lesson from old media and have fewer blogs but more unique contributors to those blogs. Remember newspapers? They attract or used to attract a large audience for dialing sharing of information, but they have a staff of writers responsible for generating that content.

The author of the blog The Nonist closed his blog after 5 years of publishing. From his experience he generated a satire of a disorder called Blog Depression. You can check it out at the link below if you wish. Here are two of his “facts.”

FACT: Meta-bloggers may experience particularly severe blog depression when they realize everyone is continually posting the same stuff, on every other meta-blog, over and over and over, the realization that meta-content is never “owned” can be painfull.

FACT: Blog readers want to be entertained, the vast majority will do so passively, you are like a tiny television network to them, if you do not blog for your own pleasure you’re in for some serious blog depression.

Why do you blog? Why do you Facebook? Why do you Tweet?

Failed Test? Try An Ethnographic Study

~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

Most marketers run various tests to before making decisions on new products, packaging, media mix, media levels, creative messaging, etc. Testing is good, but we must also remember that you can’t test everything. How many great product ideas have been stripped of originality by testing or have come out years too late to take advantage of the marketplace? New product development can take three years at large corporations. We must also be cautious about the types of research we use and its limitations.

Ingrid Fetell from Landor says that too often marketers treat focus groups as a quick-and-dirty solution to every knowledge they need. But focus groups have their limitations. After all 80% of new products fail within six months, but almost all pass through focus groups on their way to market. The Seinfeld pilot failed in the eyes of focus groups that said it needed a stronger supporting cast. Focus groups have also rejected the Sony Walkman, Baileys Irish Cream, and the ATM, which was considered “too impersonal.” But some scholars like Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman see ethnographic techniques as having a more accurate ability to gauge consumer opinion given the unconscious nature of the decision-making.

What’s a real life example? Cambridge SoundWorks’ used ethnographic research to determine why sales of its new speakers were slow despite enthusiasm from male prospects. The retailer sent researchers out with video cameras to follow prospective customers for two weeks and they discovered the “spousal acceptance factor.” Men were being talked out of their purchase by girlfriends and wives who thought the speakers were ugly – an insight men didn’t offer up in a traditional focus group. They offered a new range of sneakers with a new look and they became the best-selling product line in the company’s history.

Are you using focus groups because they are quicker and cheaper than quantitative studies? Maybe its time you try an ethnographic study.