November 18, 2006
links for 2006-11-18
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MAKE: Blog: This is not your grandfather's HAM radio...(tags: ham radio grandfather make Magazines)
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November 17, 2006
Hey, Web 2.0 Fans: Social Networks Weren't Born Yesterday!
Here's my latest MediaPost column, examining a social-media and networking technology platform over 100 years old: the ham radio. Check out the MediaPost comment section here.
Hey, Web 2.0 Fans: Social Networks Weren't Born Yesterday!
by Max Kalehoff, November 17, 2006
With all the hype around YouTube, MySpace Facebook and other social-networking Web sites, I thought it would be sobering to go back in time and pay tribute to a once-thriving social-networking platform. Amazingly, it’s over 100 years old and it’s called amateur radio, or “ham radio.” It should be crowned the grandfather of today’s online social networks, and, yes, I’m serious!
In the very early 1900s–even before transistors, let alone the Internet–ham radio emerged to enable a plethora of virtual, real-time social networks that broke down geographic barriers and united like-minded individuals. Strikingly similar to members of social-networking Web sites, amateur radio operators, also known as hams, still participate in the hobby to connect with other hams for public service, recreation and self-training. (See Wikipedia entry for ham radio here.
To see how previous generations have embraced social networks, long before the Internet, I turned to my 92-year old grandfather, who started building radio receivers when he was in middle school and has been a licensed ham-radio operator since 1957. We’ll refer to him by his nickname, Nib. Here are experts from a discussion with him this week:
Max: How do you define ham radio, and what are its benefits?
Nib: It’s a hobby of radio-interested people who are anxious to learn and enjoy the ability to communicate with other people around the world with their own equipment. There are many benefits of ham radio, including making new friends locally in the U.S. and around the world. You can transmit messages to handle emergency communications when telephones or the Internet are not available. You also can hold nets, which are groups of other similarly-interested people, who come together at regularly programmed times. We keep in touch with each other and learn new things of common interest.
Max: How did you get started? How long have you been doing it?
Nib: I got started when I was a boy, in the sixth grade in 1927, when I built my first radio receiver. I got into ham radio to broadcast in 1957. The licensing requirement was to learn Morse code at 13 words a minute, the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
Max: Why do you do it? Why is it important to you?
Nib: I’ve always been interested in electronics, and I studied engineering. I’ve used it for a number of different purposes. For example, I used to communicate with my family who lived far away. For a number of years, I also used it to speak with friends in order to avoid falling asleep during my 70-mile commute everyday. I’ve used it during my travels around the world to communicate with all sorts of people along the way. You meet all these neat people who’ve done a lot.
These days, I get together with a bunch of guys six days a week for Bathrobe net, a group which has been around for about 15 years. I also check into Maritime Mobile, which is the net that monitors maritime traffic in numerous places around the world. I can talk with numerous yachtsmen if I want to, and they can talk to people here. I also participate in Flying Boat net, which is for enthusiasts of flying boats and seaplanes.
Max: How do you compare it to your experience with the Internet?
Nib: I talk to my friends on radio, and if for any reason we have difficulty, I’ll often follow it up with an e-mail. But it’s more fun to have control over your situation completely, with no connection to wires.
Max: How do you search for other people or discover interest groups?
Nib: Searching is easy: we have many radio bands or frequencies which we may use, and each has its own characteristics. You first make the contact, and it goes on from there. You already have a common interest, so each person knows there’s probably something interesting to talk about–it could be anything. The only challenge is changing atmospheric conditions which bar transmission. It’s a competition with mother nature, and that’s what makes it fun. With radio, you don’t know if you’ll get through, so it’s a sport.
Max: Is ham radio a thriving hobby?
Nib: People aren’t very much interested in ham radio any more because they’re computer-oriented, and the operator license is a hindrance to many. Our radio club does outreach with various youth organizations to prolong the hobby, though.
Max: Is it true that social networks–including ham radio–are beneficial for isolated people, which often include the elderly?
Nib: Yes. I can be completely disabled and sit here and have a wonderful time with my friends–I don’t even have to be able to see. There are not even many bills, save for a little electricity–less than is required for a light bulb. I’ll have to renew my license in ten years, when I’m 102.
You can join the MediaPost conversation here.
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Treatment Of Opinion Fatigue Requires Far More Than Knick Knacks
Sanders pointed out what everyone in polling has known since polling was invented: “money and gifts aren't always the most sought-after incentives.” She quotes WPP’s Lightspeed CEO, Anne Hedde, who is experimenting with new incentives like ringtones and iTunes downloads, as well as cellphone data-collection techniques: “The best respondents you'll find are people who like giving their opinion. To them, the payoff is knowing that they've made an impact on new products or advertising. As silly as that may sound, that's a big hook for some people.”
While there’s nothing inherently new in this AdAge story, one can deduce a few key takeaways:
First, market researchers, particularly pollsters, are suffering the same problems of elusive consumers and attention erosion that their clients are suffering when trying to market to them. This is ironic because market research traditionally is supposed to inform and guide the marketer, but it often risks becoming another scenario of the blind leading the blind. Attention scarcity applies to market research, but few address that fact head on. Instead, the market-research industry tends to treat symptoms and reduce speed of panel erosion.
Second, if attention is the scarcity, then market researchers will need to evolve beyond knick-knack incentives. If they want access to finely segmented stakeholders over the long term – let alone solicit valuable insights – they’re going to need to get a lot more sophisticated in demonstrating value and reciprocity. Market researchers may need to rethink themselves as trusted arbiters or agents, who get to know the people they’re studying very well and act on their behalf as life agents. They need to carefully manage the give and take between soliciting insights and returning value. Ringtones, iTunes downloads and entrances to sweepstakes are great incentives to borrow a few seconds of shallow attention from cash-starved teenagers and few others, but value for a huge variety of population segments will increasingly need to come in other forms, such as goods of far greater monetary value, services of convenience, reassurance, esteem, or even the promise not to be solicited to.
Third, if the best respondents are people who like giving their opinion, because payoff is knowing they've made an impact on new products or advertising, then these respondents need to discover blogging and social media, because big marketers are beginning to listen better to these channels – channels which break down otherwise artificial walls between them and their customers. At the same time, market researchers should rediscover the customer-service department and begin reinvesting in relationships among the very people begging to impact not only new products and advertising, but the existing products and services that fail to work as they were promised.
If you haven’t yet, please check out my recent “Ten Trends Transforming Market Research,” to see how panel fatigue fits into the bigger picture of the shifting market-measurement landscape.
Posted by Max Kalehoff at 06:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
November 15, 2006
Warning: Another Light-Blogging Notification
I often cringe at light-blogging-ahead notifications, but I’m now guilty of it and here it goes: There’ll be light blogging on AttentionMax for the rest of November and December. Why? My wife and I are expecting our first kid any second now. We’re in contract to sell our apartment in Brooklyn. We had an offer accepted on a house in the almost-suburbs. We’ll be rooming with parents for several weeks in transition, while our beloved cats will be boarding with Lenny, our vet. And, meanwhile, I have a fulltime day job which is awesome but demanding. It’s an exciting and soon-to-be very joyous time in our life, but there are a lot of balls in the air, compared to our norm. If you’re a regular here, thanks for your patience.
Posted by Max Kalehoff at 11:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
links for 2006-11-15
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New TiVo Feature Lets Families Share Videos On TV Via the Web - WSJ.com(tags: Television Tivo internet video sharing)
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Coming Soon via Your TiVo: Internet Video on Television - New York Times(tags: Television Tivo internet video sharing)
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November 14, 2006
links for 2006-11-14
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Advertising Age - MediaWorks - Why TV Needs Commercial Ratings - Now(tags: David Poltrack CBS nielsen television measurement commercials ratings audience sample methodoloty dvr)
Posted by Max Kalehoff at 02:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Please, No Web 3.0!
Veteran NYTimes Silicon Valley writer John Markoff, with a seemingly insatiable appetite to make something out of last week’s mega Web 2.0 confab, latched onto Web 3.0 in a story tied to artificial intelligence and natural-language processing (stuff my employer does). It does appear that Markoff contributed to Web 3.0's new peak of consciousness, as indicated by BlogPulse’s reporting of mentions in the blogospere over the past six months (click image for larger chart). While I agree with and believe in much of the thinking around the fuzzily-defined Web 2.0 movement, I can’t help but wonder if all the hype will soon send the term on the fast track to cliché status. And I’m not sure Web 3.0 is a good alternative, especially considering most of the initiatives Markoff associates with it have been around for a very long time.
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November 13, 2006
links for 2006-11-13
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ReviewMe | Write reviews for cash!(tags: ReviewMe shill blog reviews for cash)
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BlogPulse Tools: Trend Results(tags: senator harry reid president george w bush speaker nancy pelosi)
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BlogPulse Tools: Trend Results(tags: nintendo wii)
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Gas Price Historical Price Charts - GasBuddy.com(tags: gas buddy price charts)
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BlogPulse Tools: Trend Results(tags: web 2.0 3.0)
Posted by Max Kalehoff at 02:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
November 11, 2006
links for 2006-11-11
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Brands Produce Their Own Shows - New York Times(tags: branded entertainment advertising tv television programming)
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November 10, 2006
Ten Mega Trends Transforming Marketing Measurements
Here's my latest MediaPost column, tackling ten mega trends affecting marketing and media measurements. Here's the link to the MediaPost comment section.
Ten Trends Transforming Marketing Measurements
by Max Kalehoff, November 10, 2006
Last week I presented a primer on consumer-marketing measurements to a diverse group of communications professionals looking to increase their digital and media savvy. Rather than dive into tactical minutiae, I presented 10 recent mega-trends that are collectively transforming media and marketing measurements as we know them.
1. Digital network adoption. Mass adoption of the Internet and digital networks is fundamental, if obvious. Their impact on how we share and manage information is now perhaps the most significant influence on the evolution of metrics, among all that follow.2. Attention erosion. Our networked society has resulted in massive increases in consumer choice and, from a marketer perspective, an erosion of attention. Many economists postulate that we’re undergoing a transition away from an economy based on shelf space to one based on attention scarcity. From a measurements perspective, there are two major implications: first, there is a growing demand by marketers to tap into measurements to embrace this shift. Second, many data collection and measurement methodologies–such as surveys–are susceptible to the very same attention scarcity. In market research circles, this is often referred to as the “continuing drop in panel participation and response rates.”
3. Speed of measurement. The near-real-time intelligence delivery that characterized the Bloomberg terminal is permeating nearly all facets of marketing measurements. Even if measurements are not delivered instantaneously in a slick, colorful dashboard, the expectation of faster data and actionable insights is growing. Speed is a competitive advantage.
4. Democratization of data and analytics. There was once a time when access to vast piles of market-research data and processing power was contingent upon huge budgets. While that’s still true in many cases, digital networks have made more data more accessible–even sometimes to the point of open-source or free. An interesting manifestation is the growth of free metrics services like Alexa, Google Trends and BlogPulse to understand Web behaviors. These services are not heavy-duty market-intelligence tools, but nonetheless are valuable, directionally significant and influencing perceptions and decisions around the things they report. Don’t forget Google Analytics and Salesforce.com, which are offering low-cost marketing and CRM dashboards that any company can implement overnight. (Disclosure: BlogPulse is an R&D platform and demonstration tool from my employer.)
5. Observational measurements. In digital networks, people often passively emit both anonymous and identifiable gestures, whether it’s visiting a Web site, programming a TiVo, commenting in a public discussion forum or a host of other activities. Observational research techniques–sometimes called digital ethnography–are not a replacement for more overt data-collection methods, like face-to-face surveys, but they are an important addition when attempting to obtain natural, unprompted insights into the behavior of customers and prospects.
6. Unstructured data. Included with the arrival of observational measurement is analysis of unstructured data. From news stories to discussion forums to blogs to multimedia-sharing sites, people increasingly publish data abundant with insights and trends. People now have digital megaphones in which to share their facts, opinions and experiences, and this is forcing businesses into a new era of listening.
7. Beyond demographics. Traditional demographics–like gender and age–will always be important, but observational techniques are helping marketers to understand and segment their customers in new ways. For example, based on past behavior, what are their interests, psychographic traits, life stages, passions or emotional depth?
8. Customer-centric measurements and planning. The trends above have one thing in common: customers increasingly are at the center of the universe, versus companies, brands, products or media. This is causing big marketers to base their planning more around those people.
9. Data integration comes of age. With more customer and data touch points come the need for more data integration and better market modeling. In forecasting, planning, adjusting and evaluating, data integration is where myriad measurements will achieve clarity, dimension and action.
10. Reevaluating relationships with whom and what we measure. Finally, as consumers become more empowered, the disciplines of measurement and research will increasingly cater to them (just as marketers are doing in general). Top-down, “people-are-subjects” measurement approaches will need to evolve toward greater propositions of relationship, loyalty, value, trust and reciprocity.
Where do you think measurements are headed?
You can comment on the MediaPost blog here.
(Cross-post with Engagement By Engagement.)
Posted by Max Kalehoff at 02:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)