Trust in User Generated Content: Youth Say Yes, Adults Say No
Forrester has released a new study that says that although three fourths of on line adults access user generated content their confidence in the content is declining; conversely, the over 90% of on line youth that access user generated content indicate that their trust in the content is increasing.
Forrester’s report on Social Computing concluded that technology had made the top down model obsolete, that value was in experience not ownership, and that power was shifting from institutions to communities. This report spoke of connected buyers with less brand loyalty, less trust in institutions and more reliance on peer-to-peer networks and user generated content.
User generated content is proliferating. Trust is important. Brad Feld in a post called, Its The Trust Stupid says there are three principles for user generated content, trust, attention and relevance.
So if trust in user generated content among adults is declining but increasing among the young what does this mixed message mean?
Here is some of the available data on user generated content among the young and among adults:
Teens Create Content: An earlier study by Intelliseek indicated that Teens lead all segments in the creation of CGM; almost 30% of teens send photos via mobile devices, 45% have created a blog, and almost 10% subside to RSS feeds.
Young consumers rely on friends and families for purchase recommendations:
According to an earlier Forrester study, 50% of youth rely on advice from those they know and 65% report giving recommendations or information regarding products to others.
Social Networking sites are user generated content. YouTube users add 35,000 videos each day and viewers view 30 million videos each day according to Newsweek.
My Space is the 7th most popular English language website. If you need more data, see If You Don’t Get MySpace, You’re a Lametard at Mashable! or The Site That Ate the Blogosphere at Mobile Jones and Blogher.
MMOG (Massive Multi-Player Online Games) are user generated content. Participation is growing dramatically. There are 10 million people playing. They defy any preconceived demos one might have about gamers being young and male. Games such as Second Life The Sims, or The Movies are driven by the creation of user generated content. Included in the content development tools of MMOG is advertising. Players have the ability to put up their own advertising in the games such as promotions of in-game events or businesses.
Forbes reports that Mind Ark, creator of Project Entropia, and the first advertising tool built into a game has announced a collaboration with the distributors of ads from Coca-Cola and Warner Brothers that will appear in over 100 games. Clickable Culture reports that the Coca-Cola "will make its first official appearance at a live music event as part of the corporations sponsorship of the event’s real-world counterpart." OK, I admit…I am a little confused here between the real world and the counterpart; nonetheless, user generated advertising content is part of the real world and part of this virtual world. Something like life imitating art, imitating life imitating art….Coke’s tagline becomes the virtual thing?
Politicians bypass the mainstream media and turn to blogs: According to the Salt Lake Tribune and increasing number of politicians are using blogs to provide information directly with their constituents. However, a trust warning is included, "Of course as blogs spread, readers need to understand what they are seeing and what is behind it…when searching for information on a candidate or a lawmaker, readers should be wary of what site they peruse because some information may be missing our skewed….some of these blogs are controlled by parties or by parties or by political candidates." Yep, just like that other media source that we don’t trust.
User generated advertising seems to be everywhere. It is used by Jet Blue, Sony, MasterCard, Converse, and Tahoe. Results and opinions are mixed.
Consumer generated health and medical content have and important influence on decisions:A study by Cybercitizen Health (r) v5.0 indicates that consumers are increasing
relying on the Internet for health care decisions. They report a market of 99 million US adults. The Pew Internet & American Life Project confirms that direction but indicates that 52 million Americans or 55% of adults with Internet access use the Internet to get health or medical information. Regardless, the numbers are huge.
Importantly, Cybercitizen Health reports that there are a "small group of health
consumers (20 million)" that have tremendous influence on those using the Internet for health information. They speak of a "zone of influence, ranging from spouses, children and elderly parents to extended family and friends. In fact, other health consumers are very
likely to seek out advice from this group of highly influential health consumers, who are more likely than the average consumer to be using interactive media such as the Internet."
An aside, GE Healthcare joins and sponsors the delivery of consumer generated health care content. See also GE Imagination at Work.
So…there are many more data points indicating an increasing reliance on consumer generated content which doesn’t track with the reported decrease in trust among adults…at least as yet. In fact, a increase in reliance on user generated medical advice would indicate that adults are trusting the advice of their peers with something quite valuable….although a decline in trust measurement might precede an actual change in behavior.
The marketers who get the importance that consumers place upon the recommendations and opinions of their peers combined with the extent of the connections are already building new relationships with consumers and revising their marketing to foster collaboration and participation.
Clarence Fischer of Remote Access while drawing some comparisons between MMOG and classroom learning makes an interesting point about what makes these games
successful, "For a game to be successful, the secret is often not to make the game better, but to make the community which surrounds the game better. Empower them. Give them responsiblities and the power to personalize their experience." This might also be applied to marketing within the context of social computing.
Cory Treffiletti says that user generated content is a viable ad medium and makes the point that once a brand is in the public domain it belongs to the consumer, is controled by the consumer, and if they are provided with a sense of ownership for the brand and the ability to provide input that is responded to, will be a successful brand; if not the brand will suffer the consequences. He refers to this as brand democratization and says it is the wave of the future.
Technorati Tags: consumer generated content, consumer generated media, marketing, advertising, media, social computing, trust, MMOG, MySpace, blogs, advertising,
Attention: Giving It and Getting It
Dave Pollard writes in How to Save the World that "What people seek from others more than anything else, is attention and appreciation." He references an earlier post where he wrote, "It’s really all about attention, and paying attention. The attention we pay to others, and that others pay to us, defines us, far more than our appearance or our name. And how can we appreciate what someone (a life partner, a business partner, a customer, an employee, a friend or foe is about and has to offer) unless and until we pay attention to her, really listen and observe with (as much as is humanly possible no judgment, no personal filters or frames impeding. And once we’ve paid enough attention that we really understand that person (or for that matter, that creature of any species), how can we not appreciate her….watch, listen, observe, pay attention and you will know the reason."
I couldn’t agree more and I couldn’t practice it less. Just ask my children.
And of course I have a million excuses and explanations for this but that doesn’t change the outcome which is that the people that I care most about don’t get my full attention and therefore do not feel appreciated. Linda Stone coined the term "continuous partial attention" in 1997 and described it as a way of life for the past two decades in order to keep up with responsibilities and relationships. She says, "With continuous partial attention we keep the top level item in focus and scan the periphery in case something more important emerges." She doesn’t mention the outer edge of continuous partial attention when the top level item is so constantly shifting that there really is no way to distinguish between the top level and the periphery. I think you have to be a single mother with adolescent sons to experience that.
Newsweek covering the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference that had as its theme the Attention Economy says that "carrying a BlackBerry is admitting that your commitment to your current activity is only partial." Linda Stone, Newsweek noted, draws a line between the benefits of perpetual contact through email, IMs, text messages and so on to the overloaded contact that puts us in a place of constant crisis; where continuous partial attention becomes distraction and we can’t make a commitment to any one thing. She describes continuous partial attention as being motivated by our need to be connected which is enabled by the technologies of connection; we meet a friend for lunch and during that hour we talk to others on our cellphone, eat, email, and answer text messages. We are busy, we are scanning. We don’t have a clue. There is no meaning . It is noise not music.
Edward Hallowell, who is the co-author of Driven to Distraction the first book to, if nothing else make us feel okay about attention deficit disorder (ADD) has declared that there is an epidemic of attention deficit disorder. He has written a new book called CrazyBusy Overstretched,Overbooked, and About to Snap - Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD.
He uses the name attention deficit trait (ADT) to describe the condition when we get overloaded with incoming messages and competing tasks that we are unable to prioritize. Hallowell offers some solutions to "multi-tasking mania" such as allowing for 30 minutes a day for thinking or relaxing and to take time to connect to other people without your mobile device or laptop. I think we all know what we should do…what we don’t know is how to do it. Furthermore, we don’t have time to read his book. Note to Hallowell: Please write a blog so I can read that.
Research has shown that mulitasking reduces productivity. Research conducted by Joshua Rubenstein, PhD.indicates that task switching is counter productive and can even be dangerous when we don’t realize the limitations of our attention. As a matter of fact, Seth Greenberg, a professor at union College, says that "current cognitive models suggest that people have a limited amount of attention available at any moment…Attention can be thought of as a fuel that can be dispersed. Thus tasks can be performed simultaneously with efficiency as long as the required attention for both tasks does not exceed the limit." In other words, attention divided cannot stand….do more accomplish less.
So…back to the issue of giving and getting attention. My kids will ask me to, for instance, watch a TV show with them and say and "you have to come in here" which means without my laptop. Kathy Sierra wrote a post called Your Brain on Multitasking and says that the solution is to just give things your undivided attention, to be mindful and do one thing at a time. In a more recent post she states, Multi-tasking Makes Us Stupid. Well, ok then…that is settled. Who wants to be stupid? I’ll turn off the computer, not answer the phone, not read, or otherwise not give you and the TV my undivided attention. Maybe we can even skip the TV part.
Scott Berkun really summed it up in an attention titled post, Attention and Sex. He writes, "Your obituary will not list the hours you fought off boring meetings or ignored your friends by reading forgettable blurbs about forgettable things on your cell phone or laptop. Instead it’s the intimate, deep moments that refuse division that matter." He goes on to set an attention value proposition: "how we spend our attention changes the value of what we spend it on." His analogy, "if you only spend a fast food amount of attention, you will never have a 5 star dining experience" puts it all into perspective. I think this means, be mindful.
Last week we received an email about the death of a student who was a class ahead of my older son. The kids got out of school for spring break on Thursday, March 17th. That night he was the passenger in a SUV that flipped over and he wasn’t wearing his seat belt. I need to give my children much more of my undivided attention. We would all benefit and no doubt be more focused on our tasks knowing that attention was a continuous whole, not a continuous partial. I agree with Dave Pollard, that the attention and the appreciation that we give defines us and my definition right now is lacking.
Technorati Tags: attention, continuous partial attention, ADD, ADHD, multi-tasking
Ready, Xfire, AIM: Axed again!l
There is a lot being written about the increasing use of Instant Messaging especially about teenagers. CNET reports the following from an AOL commissioned poll: "Nearly 66 percent of 13- to 21-year-olds say they send more IMs than e-mails, compared with 49 percent last year…
Overall, 38 percent of users say they send as many or more IMs than e-mails…One-fourth of users would like to see entertainment content within instant messages."
In a separate article about business use of Instant Messaging CNET reports, "It’s official: Instant messaging is the new e-mail for the world’s businesses." They estimate that there are "1 billion IMs sent every day between 28 million enterprise users." Businessweek deemed email "So Five Minutes Ago" and attributed the trend to "the anthropological shift
occurring among tomorrow’s captains of industry, the text-messaging
Netgens (16-to-24-year-olds), for whom e-mail is so "ovr," "dn," "w/e
(over, done, whatever)." Trendwatching elaborates on virtual anthropology in their December issue.
Of course, where there is a consumer behavior as attractive as this one, advertisers are right there. iMEDIA reports "Major advertisers and their agencies are now leveraging the medium of instant messaging as a mainstream interactive vehicle." IMedia says that "major advertisers including Volvo, Daimler Chrysler, Warner Brothers,
United Paramount Network, NBC Universal, Procter & Gamble, Nike, Tysons Chicken,and ING Direct participate eagerly in IM-related ad campaigns."
MIT Advertising Lab reported in November that AOL was using 2 bots, Moviefone and Shopping Buddy in its instant messaging service. The reception among users has been mixed. In December, they report that MAKE magazine is delivering content via instant message.
"The MAKEbot is a AIM/iChat buddy you add to your buddy list. When you
type latest, he will give you the latest news from Makezine.com. You
can type "subscribe 1" and he’ll deliver the latest news each hour. If
you type "photos" you’ll get the latest photos from the MAKE photo
pool, type "bookmarks" you’ll get our latest bookmarks, type
"Instructables" you’ll get the latest how-to projects. Lastly - if you
type keywords like psp, welding, ipod or whatever he’ll search the MAKE
site, the pages from MAKE and give you a link from our search engine to
help you find what you’re looking for.
MAKE is self described "as a hybrid magazine/book (known as a mook in Japan). MAKE comes
from O’Reilly, the Publisher of Record for geeks and tech enthusiasts
everywhere." You can read more about it on the Make Blog.
We can only assume that this is just the beginning. iMEDIA reports a related trend: The relationship between gamers, Instant Messaging, and advertising content delivery. On-line games users have become their own demographic target. There are over 70 million gamers in the US and they are male and between the ages of 14-35. They are affluent, well educated and love to communicate via IM, blogs, text messages, websites and voice chat.
Remember the anthropological shift I just mentioned? Well, the hardcore gamer is the influencer according to iMedia: "Trends,whether gaming related, fashion, soft drink, cars, music or
film, are determined by the hardest of the hardcore gamers who then
influence less avid gamers"….spreading the word through Instant Messaging while playing games.
Apparently, IMs cause problems with other PC software causing computers to crash. This doesn’t make for a very nice gaming experience. Consequently online game developers solved this problem by allowing for IMs within the game.
One such company, Xfire, "has provided other community tools to improve the ease of
gaming and the spread of community information. Xfire lets gamers see
what games their friends are playing, do IM from within a game to
friends outside the game, do voice chat while in-game, download files
over a fast peer-to-peer system, and more. This has led to Xfire
becoming the fastest growing online gaming community in the world with
over 2.5 million registered users, each user running Xfire an average
of 85 hours per month."
OK, so I had never heard of Xfire and neither had my kids who fit right into the demos. That was the good news. The bad news for parents is that Xfire tracks users. The good news for marketers is that Xfire can implement very targeted behavioral marketing campaigns. Now, while at their site, I noticed a little round burst that said, "Its Free No Spyware". So, if they are tracking all this data, isn’t this spyware??
OK, so I have written before about Axe Deodorant before in terms of their targeting of adolescent boys with the premise that if they use Axe they will get girls. I have also admitted that along with disapproving of the message, I have purchased the product for my son on the premise that the end, a clean boy, justifies the means, buying Axe. In late 2005, Axe introduced a new scent, Unlimited, as in, unlimited ways to pick up girls, and used two characters, Evan and Gareth and sent them off on a blog adventure. They also started appearing on Xfire.
In viral marketing mode they started out with downloads of Evan and Garth movies without mentioning the "A" word. This apparently started the Xfire IM buzz going. Later in the campaign paid placements on Xfire along with Videos with Axe products. According to the iMedia article written by Mike Cassidy, CEO of Xfire,
The results of the campaign were spectacular:
- Fifteen of the 34 top downloaded files ever on Xfire were Evan & Garreth movies with a total of 530,747 movies downloaded.
- There was a 99.4 percent increase in awareness of who Evan &
Garreth were with an astounding 222.5 percent increase in awareness of
which products were really being featured. - Over half (51.7 percent) of the Xfire user base stated their intention to buy Axe products at the end of the campaign
- And 38.7 percent stated they thought "Axe would help get the girl"
Stowe Boyd writes about a Forrester Research Study
that affirms the importance of game advertising. The study says that
there are two kinds of game advertising vehicles: in-game advertising
which is like product placement in TV programs and movies and
advergaming which is an on-line game that is promtotion itself. The AXE effort used both methods.
So, from a marketing perspective, the importance of IMs and in-game marketing cannot be overlooked. Also from a marketing perspective, Axe has been a successful word-of-mouth marketing story. I can even attest to that as a parent having heard my own son give a guest lecture to his friends in the back seat of my car about why he preferred Axe to Gillette’s Tag.
However, from a parent’s perspective I remain concerned about this kind of "word of mouth" campaign targeted at adolescent boys with a message that is blatantly disrespectful and exploitive to women. I am also not comfortable with my kids visiting a gaming site that is mining data under the camouflage of a "no spyware" burst. See Google 2084.
Technorati Tags:
IM, Instant Messaging, AXE, Xfire, Viral Marketing, Word of Mouth Marketing Del.icio.us Tags:
IMs, Instant Messaging, on-line gaming, word-of-mouth marketing
-
Subscribe to RPB
-
Marianne's Space
-
Marianne's Profiles
-
Facebook
Myspace
Twitter
delicious
Technorati
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Flickr