Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

BlackBerry for President: Obama, BlackBerry Vie for Search Popularity

After reading yet another story about President-Elect Obama's love for his BlackBerry, I had to check how the search trends fared. While Mr. Obama still remains in control of the news cycle (see the news mentions in the bottom part of the chart), his search popularity is less consistent than the mobile device. Looking at only the US for the past 30 days in Google Trends, searchers in New York and New Jersey have been more partial to the BlackBerry, and Washington, DC skews the results toward Obama overall with what are undoubtedly inauguration-related queries.

Mobile Advertising for Newbies White Paper from Peggy Salz

Peggy Salz, a blogger friend who writes MSearch Groove, hands down the best blog about mobile search, just released a new white paper that's a great guide to mobile marketing.

It's called Mobile Advertising for Newbies, and while marketers new to the channel may gain the most out of it, I've been paying attention to mobile for a long time and focusing on it in a concentrated manner all year (running several campaigns for big brands along the way) and I learned a few things. You probably will too - just a hunch.

In the process, Peggy has also launched the Mobislim blog with additional resources.

Read about the white paper here, and or go directly to the download page at Bango.com.

And Peggy, I'll say this publicly so you can hold me to it - let's reconnect on that interview for the Search Insider.

Seven Buzz Monitoring Sites to Watch

Here's today's column, originally at MediaPost. I'll admit that this was an evergreen, one where I've been keeping tabs on these sites for awhile and wrote it up when I wasn't sure what else to cover this week. Fortunately it's also one of the more useful columns in terms of sharing tools marketers and others may want to use, so I hope at least one or two of the links here are useful for you. Share other favorites in the comments or email me at marketersstudio (at) gmail . com.

Seven Buzz Monitoring Sites to Watch
Posted June 3rd, 2008 by David Berkowitz       

       

What's the buzz on the latest and most improved buzz monitoring sites? Here's a guide to seven of the best, along with some of their peers and competitors.

In March, I reviewed eight search sites spanning a range of specialized subjects, including local, social, and mobile. Since then, I've been keeping tabs on dozens of innovators, many of which will be featured in future roundups. This week, we'll review some of the most useful and interesting tools that you can search for brand monitoring, competitive intelligence, and campaign planning, to name just a few ways you can use them.

Facebook

Facebook Lexicon: Lexicon is simply Google Trends for Facebook. Enter up to five terms separated by commas and find out the relative frequency of how often those terms appear on Facebook Walls, the public message boards on users' profiles. It doesn't work perfectly; try a search on "clinton" and then "hillary clinton" and you'll see that the two-word phrase returns a lot of missing spots. Still, Lexicon marks a first step to gauge some of the buzz on Facebook. For example, it shows that Yahoo closely trails Google and they spike at similar times, but there's not a lot of love for Microsoft. What you can't do is gauge the context of those mentions.

Twitter

Summize: In a column about searching Twitter several weeks ago, I mentioned Tweet Scan. Summize is another Twitter search engine with more functionality. Neither engine catches every post; routinely some will only show up on one or the other, so if you don't want to miss anything, check both. I'm generally more impressed with Summize, and Summize Labs offers even more potential. You can also use the "near:" modifier to narrow results to people writing from a certain zip code, like in this example for a search on Starbucks. One advantage for Tweet Scan is that it works better on a mobile browser, which comes in handy when you're at events trying to search for fellow tweeters.

Flaptor is another Twitter search engine, and given how it's hard to find one perfectly comprehensive resource, it helps to have options. The best part is that you can easily graph each search term, or you can go directly to its Twist trend tool. You can compare about as many terms as you can think of, though as you can see in this example of comparing ten terms, after a handful it gets hard to read all the lines on the graph.

Keyword Demographics

Quantcast: This measurement service isn't new, and I'm not sure how long this feature's been around, but you can track the demographics of searchers for a particular keyword. It's not readily accessible as a search option, so the easiest way to do it is to visit this link for the demographics of "weather" searchers and then replace "weather" with your keyword of choice. You'll see the estimated monthly unique searchers, and then U.S. demographic information for gender, age, household income, ethnicity, head of household education, and children 6-17 in the household.

Message Boards

BoardTracker: Much of this social media craze isn't all that new; people have been posting on online message boards for decades. BoardTracker offers a new way to search all those posts across thousands of niche message boards you've probably never heard of. You can also set up email alerts and other ways to track posts. New features appear regularly.

Twing: Yes, there's even competition among new forum search engines, and while I haven't used either extensively, I'm partial to Twing for its design and how easy it is to refine searches. It also has similar features to BoardTracker for saving searches and alerts.

Blogs

Trendpedia: Hardly the first blog search engine (see Technorati) or even the first one with comparative charts for blog buzz (see BlogPulse and IceRocket), it's the newest entry, and one that's been making rapid improvements. One convenient feature is that when you enter two or three terms to compare, it instantly shows a pie chart with the percentage of blog posts mentioning each term. Additionally, clicking anywhere on the graph opens up a new tab on the screen to see posts by date.

It's hard to say if any of those sites are better than the other, though BlogPulse has been the most neglected recently. There's still an opportunity for others to establish themselves with more intelligent tools, such as accurately gauging sentiment and noting how influential the blogs are that are doing the buzzing. Technorati has offered a filter of blogs by authority level, and Summize Labs offers Twitter sentiment analysis, but these just scratch the surface.

Of course, I'm greedy and want access to the most sophisticated, public-facing tools I can imagine, and these companies can't give away everything for free. Then again, if you check out Forrester's social technographics profile tool, you can get a sense of how much can be given away in support of the core business. In the future, we'll see more of what buzz monitoring innovators are doing to build buzz for themselves.

8 Ways Job Hunters Can Use LinkedIn's Company Profiles

One of the best job hunting resources just launched on LinkedIn: company profiles (thanks to the LinkedIn blog and Jeremiah for the heads up). It tells you so much information about potential employers that it can make your job research so much more productive. Here are seven ways to do it.

1. Check out the parent or subsidiary company, if applicable. Understand where a company fits in within the corporate hierarchy. Research them, and pay attention to similarities and differences. Consider applying to one of the other companies if it's a better fit, if you know someone better at another, or for any other reason.


2. See where people go before and after. It's not a perfect sample, as this only represents what people declare in LinkedIn, but the sample size is tremendous for many industries now. You can also see if you have friends at one of these other companies to see if they have any thoughts on why people are going to or from there, and you can also try to understand why there's a connection (eg an agency may be feeding lots of talent to a major publisher they do business with, or many of the people who came from another agency actually arrived via an acquisition).


3. Research the top locations. Would you be willing to relocate? If so, they may have different needs in different offices, or they may be trying to relocate some of their existing staff already. Use your flexibility as another asset.


4. View the popular profiles and Google them. They may be influential in the company or the industry, so whether or not you interview with them, you'll gain points dropping names that you saw them quoted, speaking at an event, or doing a drunken holiday party dance on YouTube.


5. View the common job titles. If you're open to such a position, whether or not they're hiring, it means there are more likely to be openings in that area.


6. Did you go to any of the top schools they hire from? Run an advanced search to see which people went there just in case you can meet them, name drop, or make a reference to a college sports team rivalry.
   
7. Consider employees' ages, median tenure, and common job titles, but the LinkedIn sample size, age of the company, and industry can all be major factors influencing this. Other suggestions on this list are more universal.


8. For singles, check out the gender split and median age. If they're young and disproportionately your preferred gender for dating, consider the job perks. If you're into younger women, consider a career in PR where you can choose from Burson-Marsteller (65% female, average age 29), Weber Shandwick (64%, 29), Porter Novelli (67%, 31), Edelman (65%, 29), Fleishman-Hillard (65%, 30), Hill & Knowlton (63%, 30), or Ogilvy PR (65%, 30).

Two postscripts:

1. If you're considering new opportunities, send your resume my way at dberkowitz [at] 360i [dot] com as 360i (my employer, albeit unaffiliated with this blog) is always looking for the best folks in the business to join in a number of roles. The fact that you're reading this blog means you must be brilliant, or you have brilliant friends who forwarded this to you. See our openings in New York and Atlanta.


2. Now that all of 360i's senior management will see this post in the news alerts, I'll note publicly I'm not using LinkedIn in any of the ways described above, though the company pages do fascinate me for corporate stalking.

Take SEMPO's Definitive Survey on Search Engine Marketing

SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, wants people involved with SEM to take its 4th annual State of the Market survey. Marketers have come to eagerly await this, as it's the single most thorough resource on SEM trends that any firm puts out, and the past few years it has kept getting better in regards to the depth and breadth.

From SEMPO:

Why should you take the survey?
 

• Taking the survey will actually stimulate you to think about the    resources you devote to SEO and paid search - which is a valuable exercise    in itself.
• First dibs - you will receive the preliminary survey results before    they are released to SEMPO's membership.
• Support the SEM industry - this survey is highly regarded as a valuable    resource for the industry.
• 10% discount to Sprinkles Cupcakes with every five entries

Okay, the last bullet's mine, not SEMPO's, so don't hold them to it. The other three reasons are good enough.

 

Retail Research - 2 Great Releases from Compete and comScore

Today's a fun one for retail research.

First, I received an update from Compete's blog deconstructing the myth of Cyber Monday:

There is a significant ramp up in both Attention and Reach from the period of November 15th through the 23rd, before both begin to trail off. On Thanksgiving, nearly 30% of every U.S internet browser visited one of the top 50 online retailers.

There are lots of great nuggets, so read the full post. I heavily recommend subscribing to it too. (I just added it to the Best Blogs Ever blogroll to the right.)

Minutes later came a press update from comScore which, in partnership with The Kelsey Group, showed how consumers will pay more for service for businesses that are highly rated by others.

Consumers Willing to Pay at Least 20 Percent More for 5-Star Service than 4-Star Service

comScore asked the study participants how much they would be willing to pay for a particular service based on the quality of the service. The results showed that consumers were willing to pay between 20 percent and 99 percent more for an Excellent (5 star) rating than for a Good (4 star rating), depending on the product category.

Legal services had that highest 99% lift. Medical services were much lower at 26%, but such services had a much lower price point than I'd expect, so I'd have to see specifically what types of services were involved in these scenarios.

Two-Fifths of Teens Would Rather Watch TV Than Go on Dates

MediaPost reports on an OTXresearch study that says 58% of teens sacrifice watching TV for dating. I know there's a lot of great stuff on the air (well, except during the summer), but come on, 42% of teens would rather watch South Park than date? When I was a teenager, the only thing I wouldn't sacrifice to go on a date would have been a member of my immediate family, and even that would have been negotiable.

Other findings from the study show that 99% of teens routinely lie, if you'll allow my interpretation. Only 37% of teens reportedly sacrifice homework for dating, 34% sacrifice sleep, and 20% sacrifice going to religious services.

Relevance in Aggregate: Dogpile

Dogpile came out with an update of its study about how there's very little overlap among search top search results for the major engines. Here are the highlighted stats:

• Only 0.6% of 776,435 first-page search results were the same across the top four Web search engines
  
  
• Between 38% and 46% of all searches fail to elicit a click on a first-page search result, don’t meet users needs and drive users to try additional engines.
  
  
• Web searchers on average use three search engines a month
  
• Search result rankings differ significantly across major search engines; only 3.6 percent of the number-one ranked, non-sponsored search results were the same across all search engines in a given query

This is all interesting research, but I'm not sold on their analysis. Consider this quote from the release:

"This study reinforces what we at InfoSpace have long known – often users do not find the results they need with any single search engine.  Metasearch offers the most robust and efficient search solution to meet their needs," said Rod Diefendorf, vice president of online and local search at InfoSpace.  "With less than one percent overlap in first page results, there is great value to using a metasearch engine like Dogpile.com to quickly comb through multiple search engines at once for the most relevant results."

What Dogpile has yet to convince me of is that it offers the most relevant results simply by aggregating everything. Let’s say Engine 1 is extremely relevant, while Engines 2 and 3 are moderately relevant and Engine 4 is practically irrelevant in terms of the quality of their results. Then Dogpile, by culling results from all four engines, actually dilutes the relevance of Engine 1. It's probably about as good as Engines 2 and 3, and presumably far superior to Engine 4. If it only has those engines' results to work with, it's not going to be any better than Engine 1.

If Engine 1 is Google, then Dogpile would be a step down for most searchers given Google's roughly 60% share of search queries. If Engine 1 is Ask.com, Dogpile would be a step up for the roughly 95% of searches conducted on other engines.

Here's what I'd like to find out from Dogpile: If "between 38% and 46% of all searches fail to elicit a click on a first-page search result," do Dogpile searches perform any better?

MySpace More Addictive Than Facebook - Quantcast

I keep turning to Quantcast more and more for web research, as it offers metrics on traffic, demographics, keywords visitors use to find a site, related sites, and other good data. On a whim I decided to check out MySpace vs. Facebook. (The links go right to Quantcast's pages for them.) MySpace is ranked 6th of all sites, and Facebook comes in at 15.

What I found really interesting is that MySpace attracts a higher share of addicts (heavy site users), which surprises me. Facebook, with its easy way to keep tabs on what all your friends are doing, seems much more addictive. Both of their numbers are impressive though: MySpace has only 22% of its audience listed as Passers-By compared to Facebook's 29%, while MySpace gets 75% of visits from Addicts and 99% from the combined Addicts and Regulars compared to 63% and 98% for Facebook. I'll be curious to see how those numbers trend over time.

Where Do You Fit in the Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users?

Okay, so it isn't the easiest quiz name to pronounce, but from a research group, it's still a first attempt at 'fun' from this group, so it's worth covering here. Pew Internet and American Life Project's quiz begins, "The questions below allow you to place yourself in one of the categories in the Pew Internet Project's Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users." Okay, so it's not Glamour mag, or even Time.

Still, even for what it is, I found myself stumped at the first question:

	Some people say they feel overloaded with information these days, considering all the TV news shows, magazines, newspapers, and computer information services. Others say they like having so much information to choose from. How about you... do you feel overloaded, or do you like having so much information available?
		Feel overloaded
		Like having so much information available

Why is this an either/or? I'd prefer "all of the above" (or "both of the above," if you want to be precise).

As for my results, I did the best I could with the quiz (other questions were better, but some were still ambiguous), and it turns out I'm an Omnivore, along with 8% of Americans. For what that means, see the extended entry.