Cymfony's Influence 2.0

Traditional Media Still Rules!

This article in the NYT yesterday shows that traditional media still leads the blogosphere in breaking news by an average of 2.5 hours.

Since the emergence of blogs, companies have developed paranoia that a blogger can create a crisis faster than you can type "meme". This study states that only 3.5% of the "memes" tracked originated on blogs.

In other words, 96.5% of the time, bloggers are talking about what they read in traditional media. But what is most interesting is how the blogs pick up a meme and propagate it, lengthening the news cycle and keeping attention on a topic well after the traditional media has moved on to the next story.

A couple of caveats about this study: it looks specifically at news (and only online news, not offline publications), and not mentions of brands or companies. The dynamics of how people talk about brands in social media are likely to be different.

That said, it suggests that it may be more important to reach out to bloggers to dampen a meme that is damaging or to give a push to one that is positive, than it is to try to get the bloggers to start the meme in the first place. But with only a 2.5 hour lag, you have to act fast.

The story summarizes a study done at Cornell University -- it's well worth a read!

Social Media's Role in Healthcare Education, and the Implications for the Marketer

Recently, the Pew Internet and American Life Project published a study entitled The Social Life of Health Information. The study is quite informative, but as Cymfony's resident healthcare analyst, I found two of Pew's findings to be especially signicant:

1) Over half of what Pew calls "e-patients" (those who rely on the internet for health information) are turning to social media in the course of their research.

2) While 66% of "e-patients" research specific diseases or medical conditions, 55% research specific medical treatments or procedures. The percentage of "e-patients" who research specific diseases has not increased significantly since 2002, however the percentage who research specific treatments has climbed from 47% in 2002 to 55% in 2008.

Marketing professionals in all areas of healthcare must understand the implications of these two facts. Let's begin with the first fact that over half of all "e-patients" are turning to social media. Whereas "non-user generated" healthcare content is generally based on academic knowledge, clinical results, and marketing spin, social media healthcare content is built on patient opinions and personal accounts. Therefore, over half of "e-patients" are making healthcare decisions based, at least in part, on information provided by other patients. This makes it imperative that the marketer is aware of these online opinions. Rather than speaking to patients and potential patients, healthcare marketers must listen first and then develop communications that not only speak to consumers but also respond to prevailing attitudes and concerns. In this sense, an understanding of social media is similar to the insights gleaned from traditional focus group and survey-based research, though social media provides a platform for unsolicited feedback. Two other advantages of social media are that conversations are peer-to-peer rather than "moderator-to-consumer", and patients are often afforded a greater level of anonymity in social media. The psychological differences between these two scenarios likely lead to the expression of more honest opinions.

The second fact, that 55% of "e-patients" research specific treatments and procedures, serves to emphasize the importance of the implications mentioned above. One of the first thoughts that should cross the marketer's mind when developing communication strategies should be, "the chances are very good that my target market will search the internet for specific information about my product." The natural follow-up question should be, "what will my target market discover about my product in online media?"

Pew's study shows that without a thorough understanding of the attitudes expressed in social media, a marketer can not develop optimal communication strategies.

Bride 2.0

Although I read blogs for a living, the thought of consulting blogs and message boards to plan my wedding was far from my mind. That is, until I read a post that referenced a wedding blog in passing. Now my wedding includes lots of ideas I picked up from other bridal survivors. One example is table numbers. I never knew how creative you could get with labeling the tables. Instead of large numbers or cardboard signs, we will be displaying notebooks at all of the tables. Not only will the notebooks function as table numbers, but they will also provide guests with a place to record notes to the bride and groom (idea credited to oncewed.com).

This led me to contemplate where else social media would be valuable, and why this would be true. I settled on: Any industry where a consumer would become emotionally involved. At Cymfony, we have seen it time and time again, when there is something on the line, whether it be money, a new car, or the perfect tablescape, consumers turn to social media to give or get advice. Additionally, as they become more prolific, blogs and message boards are gaining a more authoritative reputation. These aren’t unintelligible rants, but thoughtful opinion.

What I get from bridal blogs that I don’t get from wedding magazines or official websites is advice without strings attached. I know that when I click through to see how something is done I’m going to get a series of pictures taken in someone’s living room, not an online marketplace. I have a trust in these women, I feel that they are only there to help me and are looking for nothing in return. It’s almost like they are my cousin sharing a wedding planning notebook from her wedding last year.

This changes the media – marketer – consumer landscape. We are no longer a captive audience looking to follow the methods and ways as spelled out by the publishing house. Just as banner ads have lost their efficacy in online marketing, so too have magazines and company websites when dealing with matters of emotional importance.

Notes from OMMA Social Panel: Authentic Conversations

I just finished a great discussion about how marketers can create authentic conversations in social media here at OMMA Social. Here are the highlights....

Alan Wolk, of the Toad Stool, made an interestesting analogy: "DM was to web 1.0 and PR is to Web 2.0".

Ro Choy of Rock You, addressed the common barrier that many companies are afraid of negative comments, "The more authentic, the less negative comments you get."

Michael Sanchez of CafeMom, responded to an audience question about the potential to "frack" your brand with dispersed, short comments and conversations across the spectrum of social media, saying, "Social media gives you more opportunities to get the communication right."

Craig Engler made a parallel comment as a result of his experience dealing with some criticism that popped up in social media when the SciFi Channel launched their new branding as SyFy: "When you explain what you are doing, people understand and often change their tune."

One of the questions we kicked around was "Why is being authentic so hard?" It occurred to me during the conversation that, as marketers, our first instinct is to focus on making the topic and message authentic for the brand image and personality. But this is only 1 of 3 dimensions of authenticity that need to be right:

Be genuine to the medium: social media's unique and compelling differences from other media are self expression and community. Any brand participation in social media must make space for these characteristics.
Get the voice right: corporate speak is definitely out. Having an individual like your CEO is great. Having people across your organization can be better. Just have a conversation and if you can't answer a question because you don't know the answer or for business/legal reasons you can't answer, just say that you can't answer the question.

On Travel: Lower Price vs. Higher Quality

Even in this economy, the cheaper option doesn’t always score high on preference measures.

Hi, I’m Cathy, an Analyst here at Cymfony. I take the lead on technology clients, but with my marketing background in travel, I recently had the opportunity to work on a study for a travel client and came across an interesting angle on consumer sentiment towards price points.

Anyone can tell you that consumers are becoming more price sensitive than ever in these economic times. Across common goods and services, “budget” brands and wholesalers are gaining traction; “premium” brands are struggling. In social media, positive sentiment is stronger for budget brands. “Value” is the most resonant discussion theme in message forums, indicating prioritization of cost over inherent product attributes.

Does this mean all companies should work towards significantly lowering price points to compete in the marketplace? The answer seems to be, “Not necessarily. In social media, “premium” brands equated with high quality AND high price still trump “budget” brands when it comes to measures of consumer preference. Looking closely at what people are saying, customers still strongly prefer a better product or a higher quality experience in spite of tough times compounding the price barrier. While discussion suggest that the pragmatic mind gravitates to cost as a priority, many posts indicate that raw emotions crave goods and services of the highest quality. Clearly, there is opportunity to tap emotions that are not “selling out” to cheaper alternatives.

Consumers are price-watching across the board but have their eagle eyes on premium brands. Furthermore, conversations indicate that they are more keen on opening the wallet if they believe they are getting a sweet-ENED deal on a better product. We see statements like “I’ve tried them. It was more expensive but I had a good experience, so when there was a price drop, I immediately took advantage” or “I heard good things about them, so I’m just waiting for a discount.” An itty bitty savings can potentially multiply desirability for a premium product (more so than a huge discount on a low end product) and push the consumer over the edge to close the sale. Savvy marketers believe this in their gut. Now social media analysis validates this belief in the voice of the consumer.

'Bye, 'bye those big upfront buys...

Check out this hilarious video. Media and marketing industry veterans will especially appreciate this. (Warning: watch at home or close your office door: you'll be laughing so hard your co-workers will think you've gone over the edge!)

Will Google Wave be the Fifth Wave of the Internet?

The Internet has evolved through four waves since it entered everyday usage: communication, content, commerce and community (aka social media). Will Google Wave usher in a fifth wave: Collaboration?

I know this blog has been really quiet for a while. Quite frankly, nothing has inspired me much in the social media space. I guess I spent too much time as a Forrester analyst and while lots is happening in, I can't get all that excited about yet more social networks (sorry, Spoke, Naymz, et al: you're too late and I have too much invested in LinkedIn, Facebook, Plaxo, and even Eons to start up on more networks).

And while social media monitoring is booming, and we have some great new technological capabilities we are introducing, we're finding it isn't the technology driving our success with clients. It is the good old-fashioned application of smart people like Kate and Jessica who understand our clients' businesses and boil down the social media maelstrom into clear insights.

Then I read about Google Wave which The Official Google Blog describes as "equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more."

As I read the post where Lars Rasmussen describes the process of defining what this product would be, I found myself nodding at the questions they were asking and the problems they were trying to address: email and IM designed to mimic non-digital communication tools, eliminate the divides between different modes of communications, and others. This reaction is a stark contrast to my feelings about Twitter or even most mobile phone apps.

But better collaboration tools hit home with me. I find myself working more and more closely with colleagues in different offices, clients across the country, vendors and other resources. In my private life even, I am collaborating more and more with other volunteers at my church and other organizations I am involved with. In all of these cases, keeping track of the email chains, document versions or trying to remember which group or wiki or site any particular project is on is becoming a burden. I can already think of half a dozen projects where a better collaboration platform would make my life much easier.

Past Internet waves have frequently been natural evolutions: going from reading about a product online to being able to buy it eliminated the wait and inconvenience of going to the store. Community has made communications to large groups of friend and associates a whole lot better than ccing endless names on an email.

But beyond keeping the community informed of the minutest details of your life and thoughts, what's the real advantage? Collaboration strikes me as being a great candidate for the answer to this question.

So I can't wait to try Wave. Who knows -- if it makes me more productive I might just have more time to blog....

Social Media: Strategic Tool 2.0

Social media tracking is no longer just for damage control and seeing what the consumers have digested, it is about looking toward the future and discovering what the consumer wants and how they make their decisions.

Recently the Cymfony CPG team has been working on bringing more of our Clients away from the purely tactical uses of social media and into looking at it as a strategic tool. Currently I am working with a Client who has been with us for years. They originally came to us to use our tools to track a negative PR episode and never adjusted the scope of work after things had died down. For the last three years we were able to give them metrics that allowed them to keep a handle on damage control, but last week they came to us and asked, ‘how are some of your other Clients using the data you give?’

As social media evolves, it is becoming a more strategic tool for businesses and brand managers. We have been hearing feedback from Clients in various verticals about using our data and insights to make changes in their customer service relations, or as fuel for long-term campaigns.

So for this Client, instead of reviewing the data on a monthly basis, we looked at the first quarter of 2009. Rather than looking at the same data that we reported on, we looked at everything that was brought into our systems. And finally, instead of looking at our narrow scope, we did a blanket search for "unbranded" key terms in all social media that is available to us at this time. By doing that, I was able to describe consumer motivations in the category and identify alternative services outside of the Client’s definition of ‘direct competitors.’ This gave them data that validated a direction they were considering and helped them move forward to execute it.

There's still time to learn how to Put the Social Web to Work

We've had a great response to our webinar this Wednesday 2/25 at 12 noon eastern time, "Putting the Social Web to Work". But there is still time to sign up -- click here.

Author Dave Evans will take attendees through a straightforward and practical evolutionary process for how to incorporate the Social Web into your marketing plans. He'll begin with listening, then talk about developing a sensible response, and ultimately influencing the markets that are critical to success.

Please join us!

Did Facebook just set the stage for sharing revenue with consumers?

In case there was any doubt before, the backlash against Facebook's change in policy to take more control of consumer-created data and content shows that consumers will militantly protect what they create. Will users next demand a cut of any revenue that Facebook derives from their work?

The various takes on this story hit on many angles, but miss what is potentially the most important implication: yet another barrier to a solid business model for online media.

Ad Age focuses on what happens when companies post things without thinking them through. Old story that we've heard a million times and more interestingly from examples like Motrin Moms.
Consumerist -- who kicked off this flurry -- gets into the weeds of intellectual property ownership. There are some interesting issues here -- if you are an IP lawyer.
Paul Gillin notes this is the second time Facebook has had to reverse a policy related to consumer data usage and hopes that the company will listen to its Bill of Rights and Responsibilities Group. Will Facebook take some of their own medicine and involve their members in creating a solution?
Ben McConnell at SWOM cites how the incident shows how important Facebook has become and doubts that a traditional advertising model will fit with the "social utility" of the site. An ongoing debate but the need to find a revenue model is increasingly urgent.

No, I think the real message here is that online will not obey even the most basic principles of the offline media model. Traditional media relied on the implicit deal that the reader gets free content, but in exchange they have to be exposed to ads. Even this basic assumption of the media model doesn't seem to translate online.

Consumers have total ownership of what they create despite the fact that they do not pay for the service to upload, store, and display it online. Facebook can't rely on an implicit quid-pro-quo to provide this raft of services in exchange for the right to use some of that content in ways that help them pay for all those servers, bandwidth, etc.

No, a consumer can take their content away at any time. So if Facebook comes up with any revenue-generating model that the user doesn't like, the user can take their content away, no penalty, no problem.

The next small step is that the consumer can then take their content away if they don't get a piece of the revenue pie.

I can't wait to see the group "I want my 15% commission of the revenue on my Facebook page". Hey, maybe I'll start that group!

February 25 Webinar: Putting the Social Web to Work

I'm really excited to host a webinar next week with my friend and someone I consider a guru of all things digital: Dave Evans. Read on to learn more or click here to register -- and you may win a free copy of Dave's new book!

IMHO, the question nagging marketers today is not "Should I include social media in my marketing mix?" but "What should I do and how do I do it in a way that is efficient, effective, and manageable?"

I asked Dave to do this webinar with me because he's one of the best guys I know to start to answer this question. In the early days of online advertising, when I was at Forrester and needed a smart, plugged-in guy to kick ideas around with, I called Dave. He has become equally expert in the world of the social web and his book Social Media Marketing In An Hour a Day answers the question posed above with richness, specific actions plans, and helpful tools. It is topping the charts at Amazon and has earned a well-deserved 5 stars.

Speaking of the book, 100 lucky registrants will get a free copy of the book, autographed by Dave! There's still time to get in on the action so register for the webinar today and put February 25 at 12 pm Eastern time on your calendar!

PS. As a kind of preview, here is a comment in Dave's Clickz column today: "Control gives way to influence on the social Web, and influence is built on the fundamental behaviors of participation." Join me and Dave next week to hear how to adapt to the Influence 2.0 world!

Good Rates and Good Neighbors

Hi – My name is Jessica and I’ve worked at TNSCymfony for about a year and half. In that time I’ve had the opportunity to work in a variety of different industries, finally settling in to the insurance industry over the past year. Oh yes, I’m talking about property/casualty, auto, life and homeowners insurance. If you’re thinking this doesn’t apply to you, take a moment to think about how much money you spend on insurance in a month, a year. Or better yet, think about the last time you had to file a claim with your insurance company… So, yes, it’s that important.

Ok, let’s start off with the obvious stuff – Advertising.

Advertising in the insurance industry is all about brand promise. I’m sure you can think of a few tag lines off the top of your head (or maybe I just read too many insurance blogs):

Geico - “Save you 15 % or more on car insurance”

State Farm -“Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there”

Do these phrases resonate with you? Do they make you want to seek out their insurance? If not, maybe their funny, bizarre, perhaps more serious commercials catch your eye... no? If you’re like many other people out there, you’d say you’re just looking for the best rate and that’s it. Well, I’ve got news for you – it’s not all about the rate.

After over a year of reading about the ongoing quests for the “best” care/home/life insurance, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not just about price. Many people post on message boards and blogs about their rates and their experience with specific insurance companies. For the most part, these people have exposure to at least two or three different companies, switching primarily because of poor customer service, or negative experiences when having to file a claim.

Initially, yes, people want the best deal in town (often asking complete strangers possibly on the other side of the country about what they should be paying for car insurance), but then comes the life change (the accident, the baby, the flood, etc.) and all of a sudden these people are wishing they had better customer service or an agent that was more explicit about their coverage and rates go right out the window. I’ve read too many instances of people not getting enough money for the house/car because they didn’t know the fine print of their insurance policy.

Insurance companies are only as good as what they can do for you when things go wrong. It’s a tough business but there’s a unique opportunity here – to listen and respond to the specific needs of their customers.

Companies do not want to compete on rates alone in the market. Progressive and GEICO have pretty explicitly carved out that portion of the space, so move on.
Social Media gives insurance companies the opportunity to respond to the needs of their customers, far beyond straight rate comparisons.
With so many people asking complete strangers for insurance recommendations, a company could establish itself as a trustworthy knowledge base for people to research their overall coverage needs, breaking free of rate only competition.

A recent Cone LLC study confirmed that not only are people looking for company involvement in social media, but 85% of social media users believe a company should be present AND interact with consumers via social media. It’ll be those companies who listen to their customers and evolve to meet their particular needs that end up truly delivering on their brand promise in the end.

The Big Super Bowl Ad Winners: Not Pepsi, Coke or Bud

This Ad Age article cites our respected competitor, Collective Intellect, saying that Pepsico dominated the social media discussion of the Super Bowl ads. Not so fast. Movies outstripped Pepsico's performance, and Transformers beat brand Pepsi in the immediate post-game discussion.

I have to run for a plane so I can't make this pretty. I'm not sure why they didn't mention any of the movies, so let me lay out the numbers that TNS Cymfony has tracked in the first 36 hours following the game:

Advertiser	Volume Index
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen	737
Star Trek	500
Anheuser-Busch	476
GI Joe: Rise of Cobra	455
Doritos	387
Pepsi	309
Land of the Lost	261
Fast and Furious	221
Coca Cola	215
Hulu	198

Five of the ten most talked about advertisers were movies.
In the 36 hours following the game, these five advertisers accounted for 37% of the social media discussion.
Add in 5 other movies that advertised and the movie category accounts for 42% of the immediate post-game discussion.
Transformers had a 13% share compared to brand Pepsi's 5.4%
Pepsico has a 15% share during this immediate post-game period.

If I subtract the movie volume from the total volume we tracked, the Pepsico share becomes 27%, still short of the 40% share they claim, but closer.

If I look across the entire period Cymfony tracked to date -- 12/28/08 - 2/2/09 -- movies maintain a 33% to 19% lead over Pepsico's share.

I've read some posts where consumers have said they don't count the movie advertisers when they decide on their favorite ads. I guess neither does my competitor. But the fact is the movies have siphoned off a signficant amount of the discussion that could have gone to other advertisers.

* Volume index represents the amount of discussion for each advertiser, relative to the median amount of discussion for all Super Bowl advertisers. Eg. Transformers received over seven times the amount of discussion of the average advertiser.

A trend emerges in Social Media

Hello, my name is Kate and I have been working at Cymfony for just over a year. In that time you could say that I have become the go-to person for all of our food clients. It started with a simple project looking at peanuts and now has exploded to bars, crackers, and most recently cereal. Throughout this time spent knee deep in food discussion, Jim Nail has been consistently asking me to blog about some of my findings. Not wanting to bore you with talk about inulin (a particular form of fiber) and high fructose corn syrup, I have been hesitant to put my thoughts on the subject out here until one very dominant trend emerged.

The topic of today’s reading will be on what I call ‘the weight watchers.’ These individuals are not necessarily in the Weight Watchers program, but they are consumers who regularly and learnedly discuss weight management on the web. In every food study that I have worked on, whether it is about the intersection of food, health and wellness, or an investigation on why one cereal brand has been the most popular brand in the last twelve years, the weight watchers emerge as the dominant voice.

This group is made up of two large sub-groups: weight conscious women* and the body-building men. Both of these groups are very conscious of what foods and which ingredients they put into their bodies. Additionally, both groups keep avid food diaries, and in many cases, these are online journals. The weight watchers have all been through tough times and have struggled to get to where they are. They are an online community that is simply there for support and encouragement of the new members.

Discussions on food are quite different than discussions of other products that we analyze. Social media tonality for most of our clients is usually neutral**, but with all of our food clients to date, the tonality breakdown has been 80-90 percent positive. The biggest reason for this is that weight watchers go online to offer advice and to educate, not to complain or ‘bash’ a brand or product. Additionally, most of the discussion drivers*** for our food clients have also been positive. This shows that the weight watchers are online advocating products. This is the group’s most defining characteristic, with all of the things to complain about – high price, high calorie count, etc. weight watchers only comment on what they deem helpful to another blogger. When comparing two similar products, a post will typically only explain why one product is preferred over the other, and not call attention to the lesser product’s flaws.

We also see that discussions about food take place on a variety of sites, including general discussion sites and general health sites such as ivillage.com and answers.yahoo.com, as well as specialty weight loss sites you might expect like calorie-count.com. This shows that food conversations online are diverse in topic and location.

Next time I’ll talk about where health management fits into all of this and what those trends look like!

* With social media it is very difficult to discern age, gender and life stage.

** Meaning that a majority of the documents collected speak neither positively or negatively about a brand being tracked.

***Discussion drivers are the topics with the highest volume. We look at a wide range of discussion drivers, including taste, recommend, price, health, etc.

More kudos for TNS Cymfony!

In November, TNS Cymfony received top honors from the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communications.

Now we have received top ranking from a certain analyst firm that modesty (and their citation policy) prevent me from telling you about. But you can read about it at Ad Age

A Holiday Story

I hope you find this little fable to be an amusing seasonal diversion....

The end of Pownce -- or the beginning of microblogging?

Blog service SixApart has bought Pownce -- and will shut it down. Twitter came this close to being swallowed by Facebook. So why do I think this is the beginning of microblogging?

I know my Twitterholic friends are laughing in scorn at this headline saying, "Nail has really lost it now. Where has he been? Twitter is the biggest thing since instant messaging!" My point exactly: how many instant messaging services are stand alone businesses?

As a proud Twitter-resister, here's my answer: microblogging is a feature, not a service.

Every social network has the "what are you doing now?" feature. What they don't have is the easy updating and subscription features of Twitter. But how hard are those to add? And now how long will it be before Typepad, Moveable Type, et. al. add microblogging to their blogging platforms? (Sure SixApart is shutting Pownce down but you don't think they're keeping Leah and crew just because they now have empty desks from their other layoffs?)

Hook all this up to FriendFeed and would you really miss Twitter? In fact, with more microblogging services available through the blog and social network platforms that have far more than Twitter's 6 million users, won't that be the true beginning of microblogging?

Maybe Catharine Taylor's campaign to find a business model for Twitter will surprise me with a way to make it a viable business. I can't wait to see what people come up with.

But if it doesn't have revenue to support itself, it will be a valuable asset to one of the social network, blog platform, or mobile phone companies.

And then microblogging will really take off.

More on Obama and Social Media

In a recent post, speculated that President-elect Obama will not abandon the social network he built during the campaign but use it to mobilize supporters to push the change he envisions. Here's an article with the full scoop....

... in the September/October issue of Technology Review. Note: the article is free but registration is required (it is really worth it.)

My favorite line in the article describes the McCain campaign "blogette" (what is that anyway?) written by Sen. McCain's daughter, with this description:

"The bloggette site features a silhouette of a fetching woman in red high-heeled shoes. "It gives a hipper, younger perspective on the campaign and makes both of her parents seem hipper and younger," says Julie Germany, director of the nonpartisan Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet at George Washington University."

If the McCain campaign thought like this think-tank person, no wonder they fumbled the social media opportunity. Trying to present the "image" of being hip and young with some clever graphic design while the McCain social network site is described elsewhere in the article this way: "It was very insular, a walled garden. You don't want to keep people inside your walled garden; you want them to spread the message to new people."

But few of us in marketing can afford to laugh at hapless politicians out of touch with young voters. How many of us are trying to create walled gardens for our brand communities? Or trying to put a hip, young image on a one-way mass marketing communication model? How many of us are really ready to entrust spreading the message about our brands to our consumers, the way Sen. Obama let his supporters spread the word about his candidacy?

I think we will all learn a lot from the Obama administration's social media strategies.

Transforming Research, Step 3: Storytelling -- or tailoring?

At the October 29 ARF Transforming Research conference, there was a strong theme that market researchers should weave interesting stories about how consumers interact with brands rather than present reams of data to induce a Powerpoint coma. But storytelling risks creating a fiction that loses touch with the carefully gathered facts in our research. Perhaps the better way to think about it is tailoring...

I've been meaning to write this entry for a while then this weekend a program on NPR's "Speaking of Faith", spurred me to do it. A cancer doctor spoke of her evolution from speaking with patients about the facts of their disease to listening to their life stories and how the cancer has affected them. She eventually followed this into a psychotherapy practice.

What does this have to do with the market research industry? One line in the interview really caught my ear when she said that the facts of the disease don't mean anything about the person and their struggle. Their stories held greater truth about the person than what stage the disease was at, how tumors grew or shrank, what the various tests tracked, etc

Isn't this the same with market research, especially when we are trying to understand concepts like brand engagement? The facts - the demos, market share, even time spent with a medium or a web site - don't really say anything about the nature of engagement. For that we need a different level of understanding, one that is more qualitative, one that looks not just at the interaction between the brand and the person, but broadens the view of that interaction in the context of the person's life.

That's the power of ethnography. And that is the kind of story that social media analysis at its best delivers.

The challenge for market researchers is to prevent the "story" from crossing the line into fiction. While stories need to put data in the background and bring the narrative to the fore, they must remain true to that data. To be storytellers, researchers must leave the safety and security of the survey tabulation and create a three dimensional being.

But perhaps storytelling isn't the right way to think about it. After all, Homer was free to create characters like Hector and Achilles, whether they existed or not because his concern was to communicate his ideals of courage, loyalty, patriotism, etc. He could shape his characters to make his point.

Researchers, on the other hand, must first draw the characters, then figure out the "point": the person's motivations, the relationship with the brand, the likely behavior.

So perhaps we should think of the evolution of research more like being a tailor. We have a set of measures -- waist, chest, sleeve length, inseam -- and we must now make a suit that fits the person. If we deviate too far from the measures, the suit won't fit. But if we stick to the measures and carefully stitch them together, the end result is something far more compelling than the numbers alone would suggest!

Cymfony's Super Bowl Analysis is a Double Award Winner!

Pardon me while I toot our horn and go blatantly hard sell for one post!

I'm pleased to announce that the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communications recognized our Super Bowl Advertising Audience Impact Report with 2 awards!

First, we took the Gold in the category "Best Use of Measurement for a Single Event". The award judges cited our combination of traditional and social media as a "benchmark for the future" and praised it as "an intellectual piece of work" that "had real value for advertisers".

In fact, they liked it so much the judges also awarded it Grand Prix -- Innovation Award. In explaining why we were selected for this award too, the judges said it was a "ground-breaking analysis" and we earned "Top marks for the idea and the execution"

Thanks, AMEC! We are honored!

PS. If you are with a brand that is advertising on the Super Bowl, or an agency for one of those brands, we are offering this service again this year! Come to the Super Bowl page of the Cymfony site to learn more.