Introducing Sector Reports and White Papers

In the coming weeks we will be launching a series of white papers and sector reports.  These look at the active dialogue going on regarding specific types of products. What are teens saying about denim, cars, TV shows and movies?  What do athletes say about sports nutrition, bicycles, shoes, and heart rate monitors?  And so on…

Our blog will cover high-level findings on which brands have the highest mindshare, and which trends or keywords are most important.  Our white papers will go further in depth, including sentiment, trending, conversation and influencer analysis plus a lot of useful insights from the data.

What we think is special about these reports and papers is that the source is so broad.  When we say “athletes” we don’t just mean popular bloggers or small samples intended to represent the broader demographic.  RelevantMind means the whole community, tuning into literally hundreds of thousands of people.  These people don’t just represent a market, they are the market.

Have some Social Media with those Hash Browns

I had the pleasure of attending Jeff Pulver’s  Social Media Breakfast in San Francisco.  It was a great group of social media folk.  The mix of deep thought and greasy hash browns courtesy of Sear’s Fine Food is a tough combo to beat.  There was a lot of discussion about the nature of “community” and the changing ways in which we interact with community.  We are immersed in user/consumer communities for our clients so this is something we think a lot about.  There are a couple of interesting companies I’ll cover in my next posts.

Another prevalent discussion was around how companies can interact with social media.    Not so much the toolbox itself, but the importance of the mindset around it.    Engaging with social media means just that – “engaging”.  Tough concept for a lot of companies because it involves doing a lot of micro activities well.  The antithesis of doing one macro campaign (Super bowl ad anyone?) with a big impact.

Jeff gave everyone a Personal Social Networking Toolkit. It contains a profile (name and tagline), tag cloud and a “wall”.  In the form of Avery labels, post-its and a bic pen.  It worked.  Really well.

 If you want to see more here is Jeff’s video on how to use it – great idea for any networking event:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/-U1TfAJoVlo" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] 

 

Market Intelligence, in any economic condition…

Sarah used the dreaded “R” word (Recession for those that missed the last post) and it brings up for me the importance of companies really connecting with their customers. 

When times are good the rising tide floats all boats.  When times are tough things like really understanding your customers, learning from the dialogue and adding meaningful value responsive to customer needs becomes the difference between merely surviving and thriving.

The RelevantMind team has spent the last year talking about the value of consumer conversations in user communities while focusing our efforts on developing products that connect both consumers and businesses to these valuable conversations.

Through the consumer research sites we launched last fall – cyclists, golf enthusiasts, and aspiring chefs can access a curated collection of relevant conversations about the products and services they are looking for within our road bikes, golf, and cooking verticals.

While working to improve the relevancy of these consumer sites, we recognized that the data we were gathering was a valuable business intelligence resource. So we spent the rest of 2007 and early 2008 building off the underlying technology we use to power the consumer sites to launch our new suite of market intelligence tools.

As Sarah referenced in her last post – The Forrester article recommends that during a recession, advertisers focus their ad dollars on cost-effective programs with clear measurable results that engage these customers during the product purchase funnel. And our suite of tools does just that.

We empower companies with the knowledge they need to better engage with consumers during the product research process and identify and connect with influential users who impact consumer opinions during this process.

We provide quantifiable metrics allowing them to measure the impact of their existing word of mouth and overall marketing efforts and the qualitative data they need to understand the opinions of their customers, advocates, naysayers, loyalists, and competitors.

Finally, our flexible pricing structure provides a cost-effective way for advertisers to build stronger social media marketing strategies that will give them the larger share of wallet from consumers during any economic condition.

Trusting Strangers

In Sarah’s last post she brought up something that I find amazing about the Internet; people trusting strangers when it comes to making big buying decisions. Not only are people asking questions in large forums but they’re taking the advice they’re getting or even better, taking advice given to someone who already asked that question. The interesting thing is, in many cases the question has already been asked and answered.

Outside of the “religious” questions where the “right” thing to buy is more subjective (See: Mac / PC) most of the “what should I buy” questions are answered with remarkable thoughtfulness and maturity. And we’re talking about strangers here. You could assume that in such an anonymous place, people would be surly and call each other idiots for asking questions, but it’s just not the case. For some reason, there is a civility that exists and is closely guarded by the residents of these boards.

But why do people trust these strangers? I believe it comes down to looking at the very natural dynamics of a virtual community. The people that choose to take part in a forum community are often subject matter experts and enthusiasts. They LIKE what they’re talking about and often know more about the products in a real-world sense than the product managers responsible for their existence. While that’s not overtly stated, people quickly understand that these enclaves of enthusiasts are where the experts are and that if someone is going to know the answer, they’re likely to be hanging out there.

It’s similar to heading down to the IT department to ask the guys what computer they should buy (minus the religious arguments), because they’re the ones who know best and they appreciate being recognized as experts. It’s a symbiotic relationship, if there were no questions, there would be too few threads to warrant a forum. Sure, people could talk about their “cool stuff” but the conversations, more often than not, revolve around products.

In the same way someone will wander into the scary IT room and ask for expert (free) advice, people feel that they can ask people in a forum what receiver / helmet / harness / meter is best suited for their needs.

Humans want interaction at something close to parity. We’re so used to being given bad information from phone support / floor sales people / relatives / co-workers and friends, we’re just looking for someone who actually knows this stuff. In return, the responder keeps on top of current technology, and the answer exists in the forum for the others who come after and have the same question.

While the Internet is a very digital place that doesn’t manifest in the physical world, real world social dynamics dictate how these new borderless cultures evolve. Interestingly enough, it’s not a whole lot different from what we’re already used to.

Why Consumers Love Social Shopping

In step two of our social shopping exploration, we took a deeper look into why consumers engaged in social shopping. What we found was that consumers are driven to social shopping features for the same reason they shop offline with a friend or ask a sales associate if those jeans make their butts look big – they need guidance as to what to buy or need to get validation from a trusted source before making a purchase. This really isn’t anything new.

However, what we found interesting was to whom consumers were reaching out for advice and what consumers consider to be a trusted source. At first we took “trusted source” to be a friend, relative, co-worker, or sales associate. But as we began digging deeper (and reviewing some recent research), we realized that trusted sources were friends, relatives, co-workers, sales associates, AND complete strangers on the Internet. In the 2007 Edelman Annual Trust Barometer research we found that 68% of consumers trust “people like me” first for purchase advice. Essentially, social media outlets – especially niche networks and forums – have blurred the lines of “friendship” creating an emerging trust in contacts they encounter within these outlets. It makes sense – since people join niche social networks and participate in forums to connect with more “people like me,” there is no doubt that they would be more trusting of the opinions of those forum members when making purchase decisions.

In fact, each one of us in the group had a story about making a buying decision based on the advice or opinion of a complete stranger that we considered a “virtual friend.” In some cases these virtual friends saved us from making horrible purchases, helped us determine what to buy, and drove us to purchase something we didn’t even know we needed until we read about it from them. (yeah – that story was mine and cost me about $250.)

It was at this point at the process we agreed we needed to shift our focus from implementing social shopping features on the client’s retail site to learning more about these niche communities in order to integrate them into our social shopping strategy. So we spent the next phase of the project looking at how consumers were connecting online – what were they sharing, how were they sharing it, where were they sharing it, etc – instead of looking into what retailers were implementing social shopping on their sites.

This newfound power of the virtual friends’ opinion led us to take a deeper look into where consumers are most often connecting with these virtual friends.

How do you define Social Shopping?

In November, I was helping a client explore the concept of social shopping. Like many retailers, they wanted social shopping on their site, but were unable to clearly define why they wanted to do it, as the desire to implement was driven by buzz in the marketplace – not by a specific business objective. So we took ten steps back and started looking at the overall social shopping landscape while trying to learn:

• How does the retail client define social shopping?
• What drives consumers to use social shopping?
• What retail sites had implemented social shopping capabilities (with an obvious business objective in mind)?
• What non-retail social shopping sites exist and how do those sites impact (help/impede) retailers’ business objectives?

When I first asked my client how they defined social shopping all you could here were crickets. No one answered me because no one knew how to articulate social shopping beyond an application that you download so two people can shop together from separate locations through their own web browsers. True – this is social shopping of an advanced nature – technology’s best attempt at mimicking browsing Soho boutiques with your girlfriend. It’s no wonder they were struggling.

Even Wikipedia defines social shopping pretty narrowly as “a method of e-commerce and of traditional shopping which integrates e-commerce in which consumers shop in a social networking environment similar to MySpace.” But what I wanted my clients to do was define social shopping on a larger scale.

After some time with the whiteboard and an exercise in getting inside the mind of the shopper, they began to envision social shopping beyond the co-browser experience and not only limited to a social network environment like MySpace. Reading/Writing product reviews, consulting blogs, and posing questions to community members on forums are examples of social shopping. Even wish-lists and registries could be defined as social shopping.

Essentially, social shopping occurs when forums exist to foster the sharing of opinions, knowledge and desires of consumers. This exercise really helped to focus how we spent the next five weeks building their social shopping strategy. Once we had our own vision of social shopping, we needed to explore what drives consumers to engage in social shopping. We’ll explore this Big Question next.

Welcome to 2008…

This is our first post of the new year, and rather than look back (or recount resolutions that will by moot by the time you read this) I wanted to make an observation and a promise.

First the observation.   Inspiration comes from many places, some of them pretty unlikely.  Of all the checks we write each month, the QA expense kills me.  I know it is important, but I get pretty uncomfortable with anything that doesn’t add revenue or users. However QA produces some really excellent reports we use to tune our search results.  And it turns out that the data in those reports is really valuable to brand managers and marketing departments.  Want to know how many people are talking about your brand or products?  How that compares to competitors?  Where are the key influencers?  How does all that trend over time? All that can be derived from the reporting QA gives us.

 Who would of thought – QA leads to a major early business line for us.  Pretty cool and just goes to show that you how important it is to look at everything and figure out how to make it work for you.

The promise is to have more fun with this blog.   You’ll see more posts about the things we are interested in, or random observations that strike us. 

NY Times Article and Emerging Tech Awards

My mom was a lifelong NY Times reader (you can take the girl out of the Bronx, but…), a habit that she passed on to both of her kids.  I was on my way to Austin last week, having lunch at the airport and thumbing through the Times I had grabbed off our front drive before I left (sorry Julie).  And there in a special section on Small Business was an article giving us some really nice coverage.  I remembered the interview, but I have to say it was a real treat to just run across it.

 A couple of weeks ago we went to a great awards ceremony for the 2007 Emerging Tech Awards sponsored by the Silicon Valley Business Journal.  RelevantMind was a finalist in the search category.  Powerset won the category, and we were pretty happy to be in such good company. Strangely, the SVBJ doesn’t have an online post of the article they did of us, but here is a pic of the nice chochke we received:

 

thousands of people talk about golf shirts, and that’s great

RelevantMind was built to leverage the collective wisdom of hundreds of thousands of passionate people to help the rest of us figure out what to buy. Conversations in forums hold such valuable insights that when you find the right post, it can be the tipping point in a buying decision, even if it helps you rule out an item.

I’ve been neck-deep in the golf vertical for months now and as our secret sauce to suss out the best discussions gets better each day, I end up browsing things I may not even need just to see what people are saying. In these conversations I’ve found some interesting trends that tell me a bit about the way people are making their own decisions as forum participants.

In golf, people can get very particular about their loyalty to a product until it fails them. Then all bets are off. Golfers consider everything they take with them to the course as “equipment”, even shirts. A discussion thread around shirts and their ability to wick moisture and keep players cool during summer months brought up comments about how a sticky shirt can be so distracting, it can hurt someone’s game significantly. many people brought up Nike, Adidas and Under Armour shirts and praised their ability to fight off even July in Phoenix heat. That thread surely helped many people make informed decisions about how to deal with something simple, yet important like a good golf shirt. I learned a few things too. I’m not the only one who has completely abandoned 100% cotton shirts when playing, regardless of the weather.

While wicking golf shirts can spell relief from the wet-blanket effect, people talk about all aspect of their game. Wedges for example are like putters in that they are so much about feel (not distance) that they are most often bought independent of iron sets and are rarely brand matched to anything else in the bag. The sheer number of great posts on the anatomy of wedges, their uses for different climates / sand types tells us that unless you’re reading what people are saying about wedges, you’re missing out on thousands of club swings of experience.

My wife recently bought a set of wedges from Golfsmith only after we went through this site to see what people were saying about them and others we considered. Considering the local grass, her desire for LOTS of backspin and a need to crank out a high flop shot, the Cleveland CG11 seemed to be a good fit. It cut down on the time we had to spend in the store (although I’m happy to spend lots of time at a golf store) to swing just the 4 we honed in on. In the end we went with the CG11s in a matte finish, regular bounce in a 54 and 58.

Her old Ping G2 sand wedge had too much bounce and soft grooves which made for very little backspin and the bounce was way too much for the local tightly mowed hard fairways (see: skull). The new set did just what people on the forums said they would, when hit well they will impart some serious fly-stop-back up on the ball. She’s now twice as close on shots 75 and in which leads to more pars and birdies. And, of course, a happier golfer.

What helped her out was that the comments were in context of activity rather than a specific, recent, out of the box experience. Out of the box experience is good but in golf, as is the case in many other sports and activities, the real, solid opinions come after months and years of day-in and day-out use by people who have gone through a range of products in their time. Thats the real value translated into shots saved per round.

Aaron’s pick for DEMOfall favorite

It’s been two weeks but seems like yesterday things have been so busy!  The event was everything Lionel and Teresa said it was, so I’ll just add my vote that it was a great event.  Personally I was pretty happy to get through the presentation unscathed, no technical glitches and not forgetting what I was supposed to say!

One thing that struck me was the number of companies trying to make sense of all the content you access.  From visual browsing (SpaceTime) to my favorite, Feedhub, lots of people are trying to figure out how to present you the information you want.  I like Feedhub because I’m buried in RSS feeds, to the point where I hesitate to add any more.  Feedhub is trying to solve that problem by creating a meme that learns what you like.   You can grab everything from a feed, let the meme develop your feeds based on what you do (view, tag, bookmark, etc.), or adjust the meme yourself.  If you’re like me and are afraid to add even one more feed because you just can’t face all that unread “work”, it is a cool thing to try.