Mainstream Media is 2.5 Hours Ahead of Blogs, and Why We Don’t Want to Know This

Posted on July 13, 2009 | Leave a comment

A recent paper by researchers at Cornell and Stanford confirmed what media watchers have observed over the last few years: the blogosphere tends to pick up topics covered in the mainstream media and keep them in circulation. And the reverse is occasionally true: sometimes topics acquire momentum in blogs before becoming important in mainstream media. The publication of the paper was reported today in the New york Times.

As the paper acknowledges, this general description of the interaction between blogs and mainstream media is nothing new. The authors have brought some rigor to the study of this media phenomenon, though, by building analytical tools that can quantify some characteristics of the news cycle. The researchers found, for example, that the usage of a given phrase tends to peak in mainstream online media some 2.5 hours before it peaks in blogs.

It’s a good study, and it’s backed up by some pretty cool tools that the researchers developed to identify common phrases and their variants, like “lipstick on a pig,” that serve as “signatures” for certain stories, and track and timestamp them as they appear across an giant set of online media. They can even identify which media outlets tend to lead the pack in picking up on stories before they become popular elsewhere. (Top two: hotair.com and talkingpointsmemo.com.)

The study even found a simple formula to describe and predict editorial judgement. The researchers found that “news sources imitate each other’s decisions about what to cover, but subject to recency effects penalizing older content.”

Nice. But I have a problem with all of this. First off, I don’t think that news organizations and blogs can harness the insights that flow from such a tool for any sustained benefit. It’s not obvious that publications that lead the news cycle can aggregate a larger audience or generate more advertising revenue than other sites.

Worse, I fear that a fine-grained understanding the news cycle will do more harm than good. Such tools have always been embraced by spinmeisters seeking to influence the news cycle. As these tools get better they become part of an influence arms race in which no one wins. All sides compete to control the news cycle, and achieve little more than the destruction of news, yielding no benefit to the public or the the civic function the news media is intended to serve.

This reminds me of a recent article by Cornell economist Robert H. Frank. Frank challenges the conventional wisdom, flowing from Adam Smith’s notion of the “invisible hand,” that greed and competition end up producing the greatest good for all. On the contrary, competition can be wasteful and destructive, in economic systems and in the natural world. Frank suggests that the natural selection described by Darwin is a better framework for describing economic behavior than the invisible hand.

The central theme of Darwin’s narrative was that competition favors traits and behavior according to how they affect the success of individuals, not species or other groups. As in Smith’s account, traits that enhance individual fitness sometimes promote group interests. For example, a mutation for keener eyesight in hawks benefits not only any individual hawk that bears it, but also makes hawks more likely to prosper as a species.

In other cases, however, traits that help individuals are harmful to larger groups. For instance, a mutation for larger antlers served the reproductive interests of an individual male elk, because it helped him prevail in battles with other males for access to mates. But as this mutation spread, it started an arms race that made life more hazardous for male elk over all. The antlers of male elk can now span five feet or more. And despite their utility in battle, they often become a fatal handicap when predators pursue males into dense woods.

Frank notes that elk would be better off if they could agree to limit the size of their antlers. They can’t. But humans sometimes can come to such agreements, and would be better off if they did. “Individual and group interests are almost always in conflict when rewards to individuals depend on relative performance, as in the antlers arms race,” Frank writes.

So I see advances such as the study by the folks at Cornell and Stanford in a negative light. If only we could just not go there, I think we’d all be better off.

What do you think?

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Posted in Advertising, Economics, Media

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Walking Everywhere in New York

Posted on June 10, 2009 | Leave a comment

I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I can walk almost everywhere I go. It’s almost a pre-industrial lifestyle. And I love it.

The Upper West Side and Central Park as seen f...
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Here are some of the places I’ve walked to from my home in recent years:

  • A wedding
  • A funeral
  • A bris
  • A bar mitzvah
  • work
  • my kids’ school
  • the opera
  • the movies
  • out to dinner
  • a picnic in the park
  • with 12 kids home from a birthday party three miles away in Union Square, stopping after dark to play in the fountain at Columbus Circle
  • grocery shopping
  • shopping of all kinds
  • music lessons for the kids (both teachers live in our building)
  • dinner parties
  • making the rounds to the homes of a half dozen friends on New Year’s Eve (when we had babysitting and they did not), carrying a jug of homemade punch
  • the river, to go kayaking
  • the park to watch my son’s soccer game
  • the dance studio for ballet classes
  • a Broadway show–or home from one
  • a job interview
  • a TV interview with CNN (mass transit was on strike, but the CNN studios in the TimeWarner building are just  a mile from my home)
  • a doctor’s appointment
  • Shakespeare in the park
  • the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, American Museum of Natural History
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]There is something special about being able to live your life on foot.

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Costly Regulations Welcomed by Business

Posted on June 7, 2009 | Leave a comment

Certainty has value. Sometimes it’s more attractive to have your costs increase by predictable amount than stay the same. It is if you face uncertainty about whether and how much your costs might someday rise. This is the principle behind two recent examples of business leaders welcoming the bad news of higher costs because it was accompanied by certainty.

First came new U.S. federal fuel-efficiency standards.  Automakers have long fought attempts to impose higher fuel efficiency standards. Opponents of these new standards cite the costs of complying as a key reason that they are a terrible idea that will harm car companies and consumers. Yet the automakers have accepted these new rules and seem, publicly at least, downright pleased with them. True, GM and Chrysler make feel indebted to the federal government for its efforts to save them. But the automakers also recognize that a single, certain, national mileage standard is better than the unpredictability and confusion of competing state standards.

“GM is fully committed to this new approach,” said CEO Fritz Henderson in a statement  “GM and the auto industry benefit by having more consistency and certainty to guide our product plans.” (Quoted in CNET.)

Even Ford, which so far has not received government support, has also embraced the standards, according to a recent report:

“We are pleased that President Obama is taking decisive and positive action as we work together toward one national standard for vehicle fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions that will be good for the environment and the economy,” Ford said in a statement.

The certainty/cost dynamic is also in evidence in the run up to the climate change summit planned for this December in Copenhagen. There is no doubt that complying with new emissions regulations will impose costs on applicable industries and companies. But a recent article in the Wall Street Journal emphasized business leaders’ desire for certainty over avoiding the costs of new regulations. According to the article: “Chiefs of some of the world’s largest companies are urging global leaders to cut a strong deal this December to curb pollution, saying they need certainty on emissions targets to be able to make long-term investment decisions.”

While businesses will always want to minimize their costs, they also care about the predictability of their operating environment and the levelness of the playing field. These two examples show how how a political process can change the playing field in a way that is good for business and society.

What do you think?

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Posted in Economics

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Why Review Bing?

Posted on June 3, 2009 | Leave a comment

What’s the point of writing a user review of Bing, Microsoft’s new Internet search engine? It’s free, instantly available to anyone with a Web browser, and user’s own experiences with it are really the only factor determining whether they will use it.

I can see the point of reviewing a product or a Broadway show: it educates consumers so they can decide whether to spend money on the thing or the experience. I can almost even see the point of reviewing one-time concerts the next day, even though it’s too late for consumers to see them: it might spark interest in the artist for the next time. At the high end, also, art criticism can make a profound statement about art, even if that statement doesn’t influence a purchase decision. (Tech criticism, I find, rarely makes profound statements, though.)

Microsoft will spend $100 million promoting Bing. Most consumers will have plenty of opportunity to encounter the brand and enticements to engage with it.

Does today’s a review of Bing in the Wall Street Journal serve any real purpose?

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Posted in Media, Search

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Uncertainty of Audience and Optional Response: the Appeal of Social Media

Posted on May 28, 2009 | Leave a comment

Part of what makes participating in social media so fun is the fact that you never know whether you will get a response to what you post. Indeed, you can’t be sure if what you post is ever really read. A Tweet could yield a flurry of responses or silence. A post on Facebook could elicit comments from friends or not. While we expect or hope to be seen and heard, a response from our network or audience is optional and makes the experience that much more gratifying.

The earliest form of human communication, I would speculate as someone who does not

Mastodon
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run the risk of being mistaken for an anthropologist, was real-time, face-to-face and likely to involve a response from whomever was being communicated to: grunting, gesturing, battering with a mastodon thighbone.

Also very early, though, was communication in which no response was expected. One-sided communication was directed at deities, the departed and possibly future generations, exemplified by practices such as shamanism, ancestor worship, temple sacrifice and prayer. Often there was a hope of a response but not an expectation. And who knew if you were being heard?

1896 Telephone, hand cranked magneto on right ...
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More modern forms of communication, such as letters, telegraph, telephone up to e-mail, whether real-time or delayed, carry with them the expectation of a reader and often a response. (As a user of e-mail back in the early days, I remember when e-mails rarely included a salutation, such as “Dear John”; or a closing, like “Best regards, Floyd”; because the sender and recipient were apparent from the message header, and, in the days of closed networks and limited e-mail adoption, the two parties generally knew each other well.  It was the arrival of newbies who drove the adoption of salutations and closings. It was they too who motivated the use of the term “e-mail” over simply  “mail.” Original e-mail users knew what they meant by “mail.” See this humorous early attempt at codifying e-mail etiquette at the company I worked, which was the first to register a .com domain name.)

Adrian Chan, a “social interaction design specialist” calls this diminished expectation of  response the “improbability of communication.”

The improbability of communication, and even the uncertainty of audience, has catalyzed, in social media, an explosion of activity and creativity, as individuals unleash their inner graffit artist, epigrammatist, pundit, evangelist and prophet, while electrifying media companies and marketers to the risks and opportunities of participating in this probabilistic medium.

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How to Design Survey Questions

Posted on May 20, 2009 | 2 Comments

I learned a lot at JupiterResearch, were I was president until we sold to Forrester Research last year. I think I’m going to share some of what I learned on this blog.

One thing I learned is how to design a good survey.  Surveys can be expensive. Some companies spend millions of dollars a year on survey research. With budgets tightening everywhere, it’ s worth learning how to make the most of your survey budget.

It’s not hard to find good basic information on the best practices of survey design and even the design of specific questions. What I found at Jupiter, though, is knowing how to ask a question is not the same as knowing what and whom to ask.

Business Purpose Determines the Relevant Survey Population

Survey data ultimately serves the needs of business people in a few basic ways. Surveys can help identify market opportunities,  define products and services or shape marketing programs. For these purposes, surveys of customers work best. Surveys can reveal customers’ likes and dislikes, their influences, attitudes, behaviors and level of awareness and adoption of products, services or ideas–the raw material of marketing.

Surveys can also help with general business planning. For business decisions on everything from setting revenue targets to defining IT budgets, companies find it help to know what similar companies are doing.  For these purposes, surveys of executives at those companies work best. How much are companies my size spending on e-business infrastructure and applications? How do companies in my industry allocate their online advertising budget between search and display advertising? These questions can be answered by means of an executive survey.

Three Questioning Tactics

Broadly speaking, a survey question can be used in one of three ways. It’s important to be clear which of these ways each question on your survey will be used:

  1. hypothesis testing
  2. trending and tracking
  3. segmentation

Surveys Are Excellent for Testing Hypotheses

Good research is often mobilized by a hypothesis. A good hypothesis is something that is testable and whose proof or disproof has important implications. Suppose you are trying to determine what factors influence the form of payment consumers choose to use when shopping online. (This information would be useful to online retailers, credit card associations and issuers.)  To ask a revealing question on this topic, you need to

Typical debit card transaction machine, brande...
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start with a good hypothesis. Some hypotheses might be: consumers believe debit cards pose a higher risk of fraud than credit cards; consumers tend to use the same card off line and online; consumers are more likely to use a credit card whose information they’ve already entered and stored at a favorite retailer than some other credit card.

All of those hypotheses can easily be tested with an appropriately worded question. And the answers will have important implications for retailers, card associations and issuers.

Trending and Tracking

Trending and tracking means gathering intrinsically useful information, potentially for the purpose of seeing how that information changes over time. You might survey consumers to measure how widespread concerns about global warming are. If you ask the same question of a similar audience repeatedly over time, you can tell how the sentiment is trending. You can measure the penetration of a consumer product, and how it has trended over time, to deduce how big an opportunity that product presents in the future. Sometimes such data is used as an input into revenue models and forecasts.  Consider how the data will be used, though. Asking consumers how many books they buy in a year could provide data that is useful for building a revenue forecast for a book retailer.  But do consumers prefer to buy books online, at big chain stores, or in specialty stores? That information might be interesting, but probably less useful.

Segmentation Can Make Data More Actionable

Segmentation is used to divide respondents into segments to make it easier to draw actionable implications from the data. Finding that 10 percent of consumers would be interested in pig-leather apparel is one thing. Finding that 30 percent of urban consumers ages 25 to 34 have that interest, is information an apparel marketer can act on more readily. Knowing that online retailers spend about 20 percent of their online revenue on Web site operations is one thing. But knowing that the largest retailers spend just 11 percent of revenues on site operations, while smaller retailers spend 39 percent of revenues on operations, provides a more meaningful basis for benchmarking.

To segment data, you need to have a large enough sample size that you can meaningfully break up the data into groups that are still large enough to be statistically significant. And you need to include segmentation questions. In the pig-leather example, the segmentation questions are age and whether the respondent lives in an urban or suburban area. The online retailer data is segmented by revenues. Designing effective segmentation questions sometimes depends on having good hypothesis about what dimensions will significantly distinguish one segment from another. It may be, for an example, that income level correlates less with interest in pig leather than an urban domicile.

Common Mistakes

It’s not uncommon to get survey data back and find that it’s interesting but not useful. Generally, that’s because the design of the survey did not follow these rules:

  1. Devise clear, testable hypotheses with important implications.
  2. Survey the right audience: customers for marketing; peers for benchmarking
  3. When the sample size permits, include useful segmentation questions.

Some people are tempted to use a survey instrument as a way to learn about a market by gathering a lot of rudimentary data about that market. This is generally a mistake: most of that data will never get used. There are more cost effective ways of getting up to speed on a market than commissioning a survey about it.

Your Thoughts?

Do you have other best practices to share? Would you like to disagree with my on any of the above? I welcome your comments.

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Posted in Marketing, Research

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Barnes & Noble Enforces No-Dog Rule But Closes the Sale

Posted on May 6, 2009 | Leave a comment

Just a word of appreciation for Barnes & Noble here on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I showed up there this afternoon with my dog to pick up a copy of “The Last Olympian,” the lastest by Rick Riordan, for my son.

The security guard met me at the door and told me that no dogs are allowed. (I suppose it’s because because they sell food at the Starbucks upstairs and the New York City health code prohibits it.) I turned and was about to head out the door when the guard asked me if I knew what book I wanted. When I said I did, she directed me to the information booth saying they would get it for me. So happens, they had the book right on the counter. So I picked it up, sailed through checkout, and headed on my way.

I love the fact that the guard asked that question. Great way to meet my need and save a sale while still enforcing the no-dog rule. Bravo B&N.

Your stories of excellent retail experiences like this are welcome!

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Posted in Commerce, New York