trendsspotting blog

For a Better (Digital) World

Taly Weiss — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:00:40 +0000

In a beautiful thought-provoking project of Jonathan Harris (creator of We Feel Fine – one of the first social web emotion visualization projects), Harris shares some touching personal insights with artistic inspirations relevant to a digital world. In this “World Building in a Crazy World” – Harris suggests 1-2-3 principals for a world building idea – “a universal idea executed simply, with an element of play, nostalgia or beauty”.

Enjoy.

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Halloween through Location Based Applications

Taly Weiss — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 15:11:46 +0000

Google Latitude or other location based applications working through mobile phones can let you track your kids whereabouts during Halloween. Aside from tracking, many of those applications can be used (note privacy concerns) for sharing the Halloween experience. Locations of retailers selling costumes and decorations can also be found by using applications as Poynt. To improve the Halloween experience, Zillow.com, have created a Trick or Treat Housing Index, which presents the top-five neighborhoods to maximize candy harvesting. The index uses four equally weighted data variables: Zillow Home Value Index, population density, Walk Score, and local crime data. Based on those variables, this Index represents neighborhoods that will provide the most candy, with the least walking, and minimal safety risks. Follow the index for top five neighborhoods in SF, LA, Seattle, Chicago and Boston.

To further improve kids safety, “Offender Locator” (iTunes Link) which works with Blackberry and iPhone, tracks sex offenders on your trick or treating route. The app provides you with a list of offenders based on their proximity to the location given. You can get information as names, pictures, age, height, weight and the specific sexual crime they were charged with.

LBS (Location Based Services) is a market predicted to grow (according to Gartner – LBS subscribers are forecast to grow from 41.0 million in 2008 to 95.7 million in 2009 while revenue is anticipated to increase from $998.3 million in 2008 to $2.2 billion in 2009). Gartner suggests that North America is the largest market due to mobile carriers’ strong efforts in navigation services and family-safety solutions.

I find Halloween as a good example for the conflict introduced by LBS technology systems: The need to share experiences and learn about friends locations comes in contrast to safety measures. The same system that gives you more control, is the one to danger your privacy.

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Google Wave: Invite Led Viral Campaign

Dhivya Subramanian — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:24:28 +0000

Search Engine giant Google, has shown the world how it is reshaping the way communication happens over the internet with the soft launch of Google Wave. And it has done so in a way it knows best – through invite based viral marketing.

The internet witnessed tremors of excitement when 100,000 exclusive invites to Wave were sought after by surfers who were curious, passionate, and addicted to Google.

A sense of Déjà vu is hard to avoid. Google sent out similar invites when it launched Gmail in 2007, to build hype. Privileged invites led marketing has been a potent weapon that Google has learned to wield well, and with Google Wave, it intends to go for a big kill.

Google revels in its buzz creating potential and it only has a colorful launch history backing it. A slew of chatter broke out over Social media networks when Google announced the release of its browser Chrome. While some questioned Chrome’s ability to take on the big browser share held by IE; most conversations, powered by positive industry review, focused on the browser’s speed.

The launch of Google’s Android and Search Wikis did not whip up a buzz to match its earlier success with hype generation. As discussed in our previous article Android’s initial buzz raised a lot of doubt over the web and has cast a feeble spell online. SearchWiki too suffered a similar plight. People were annoyed by a sudden forced change in the way they searched the web and considered it a rather arrogant move on Google’s part to not allow people to turn off the SearchWiki function.

The story so far

Google Wave was first unveiled to 4000 developers at the Google I/O conference back in May (read the Google Blog). Since then the product demo video, doing the rounds on the internet, has had over 5 million hits on Youtube and has set the www abuzz. There are close to 500 videos discussing Wave through product demos and reviews.

Wave is, by far, Google’s most ambitious project and is a work in progress online tool that enables real time communication and collaboration. It works by incorporating a host of commonly used features such as email, IM, rich media sharing, wikis and social networking.

Nature and focus of buzz

The buzz surrounding the ‘by invitation only’ test launch is almost as exciting as the product itself. It has helped build hype for Wave’s commercial launch next year. Within minutes of the announcement, Wave invites were being auctioned on E Bay for a price of $5100 – Google Wave invite hits eBay, price soars. These astronomical bids were however retrenched after the existence of the invite was questioned by eBayers.

Spurring the invite buzz were spurious websites that mushroomed all over the internet luring the frenzied masses with invites to Wave.

The invite has been an object of interest on Twitter. Early reviews discuss the features of the product in great length while there has been a growing concern over the confusing and complex nature of Wave. People on Wave are unable to invite their friends to use the product with them and this has been a subject of grouse for some since it limits their Wave usage.

Stats on Google Wave

A few quick observations

Google Wave has certainly captured interest although long term sustainability is still a question.

source: icerocket.com

Blogs have seen an overwhelming 15,500 posts since May 09 making it one of the much talked about and searched about topic on the Web. The phrase ”Google Wave invites” have had over 1000 posts since September 29^th –

source: Google Insights

India has had the highest search volume for Google Wave followed by Sweden and Singapore.

source: trendistic.com

Twitter saw over 1000 tweets per minute as Wave became the Trending Topic; Invites and the way to get it was the focus of the discussion.

Some of the tweets read

@iRyanS: @wave_info Requested my Google Wave Invite! Get your now at http://www.wave-info.info/ – #googlewave #googlewaveinvite

@mikebros: I finally got a Google Wave invite – a bit like waiting for a bus – I waited for ages then 4 offers came on the same day! #@googlewave

Industry Reviews

Stephen Shankland, Cnet News:

“ I acclimated rapidly, too, but I can see how the multi-edit chaos could be distracting even if you know what’s going on. If you’re the kind of person who can talk on the phone, send a text message, IM, and surf the Web at the same time, you’ll be fine with Wave, but most of us have only so much attention span to go around, and Wave has the potential to overtax”.

MG Siegler, TechCrunch:

“As we’ve noted several times, Google Wave is a service that is fairly hard to explain. And for many people, it’s also hard to understand. That seems somewhat reasonable given that it’s trying to be a new form of communication and that it is still very early in its life span”.

Ben Parr, Mashable:

“And while we’ve received our fair share of questions about Google’s newest product (most of which we answered in our Google Wave guide), one keeps popping up time and time again: how do I get an invite to Google Wave?”

Trendsspotting Insights

Dhivya:

The buzz about the invites has been crucial to the successful soft launch of Wave. But, Google’s foray into the social networking space is yet to undergo the acid test and its success will depend on its ability to address the skepticism that currently surrounds the Wave.

Taly:

Google’s Wave generates successful social waves. That’s a good marketing case study – the buzz surrounding the “wave invites” overcomes the wave itself. Having said that, I also believe that the revolutionary shift from personal email to the social email will impact Google’s brand strength. If only the wave will not be too difficult to adopt.

———————————————

Dhivya Subramanian is a new contributor to The TrendsSpotting blog. Starting with the Wave, we at TrendsSpotting.com wish her success surfing the big waves ahead.
Here is her bio:
Dhivya started her career in Advertising and worked with Agencies like Ogilvy and Mather and Euro RSCG. She serviced clients like Dell, MindTree, Indian Bank and Titan. During her stint at advertising Dhivya has assisted in developing direct marketing campaigns, executed events and helped in launching communication in international markets. In her last job with Millward Brown she worked as a research executive and was involved with Brand and communication research. She evaluated the ‘Jaago Re’ – a social awakening campaign for Tata Tea, designed a celebrity study for Mindshare and formulated market research functions for TVS Motors Ltd.
On the personal front, Dhivya is a foodie, wannabe long distant runner and a passionate blogger.

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New ppt Slides: Consumer & Market Trends during Recession

Taly Weiss — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:11:58 +0000

TrendsSpotting.com has released a slides presentation on its new published report: Consumer and Market Trends during Recession – Cross Industry Research.

Enjoy.

Consumer & Market Trends during Recession – Cross Industry Research Report by TrendsSpotting.com

View more documents from Taly Weiss.

Click here to learn more about the report -

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Is the Recession over? Research Suggests American Consumers aren’t Buying it: Cross–Industry Research Report by TrendsSpotting.com

Taly Weiss — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 00:15:42 +0000

Quoting Bloomberg, (July 26 2009) “The worst U.S. recession in five decades probably eased in the second quarter (2009) as trade and government stimulus mitigated the damage from declines in housing, inventories and consumer and business spending”.
President Obama is similarly optimistic declaring that “the worst may be over in the economic crisis”.

Is it really? Are there signs of consumer recovery?

In this TrendsSpotting report we follow the main consumer markets and consumers’ behavior indications for the year 2009. To better understand how Americans are adjusting their buying habits during the recession we have collected consumers’ spending statistics, data provided by recognized market research companies. TrendsSpotting’s unique consumer insights derive from marketing research expertise along with experienced use of web metrics tools such as Search Trends and Social Media monitoring. Utilizing these tools to “listen” to consumer interactions and follow their search trends provides indications on consumer interests and intentions. TrendsSpotting presents web metrics findings in each industry reviewed.

The fifty page report “Consumer and Market Trends During Recession” offers a comprehensive review of the U.S. market in the following consumer industries: Food and Beverage, Apparel, Media and Electronics, Travel, Health, Automobiles, Education and Pets. It provides a broad perspective on consumers’ changing behavior during the current economic downturn.

update:

In an interview with Guy Kawasaki for the American Express Open Forum- you can find the key findings derived from this report. Here is his take on it:

” Consumer and Market Trends during Recession” is a very interesting and timely report. In addition to a comprehensive review of survey data, TrendsSpotting’s unique use of web metrics reflecting consumers’ online behavior, brings market research into the Web 2.0 era.
I find TrendsSpotting’s business review an important resource for marketers. ”

—- Guy Kawasaki, Co-founder of Alltop.com and Garage Technology Ventures.

Here’s Marian Salzman’s take on it:

“The report is enormously comprehensive and stunningly interesting. TrendsSpotting.com has pulled it all together to make it highly relevant. I am impressed by the breadth and depth, and timeliness of the content. Wow.”

—- Marian Salzman, president Euro RSCG Worldwide PR, North America, and one of the world’s leading trendspotters/ futurists.

American Brands Continue to Dominate in Times of Global Recession: 2006-2009 Global Brands Equity

Taly Weiss — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:57:45 +0000

Interbrand recently published “Best Global Brands 2009“, their annual brand equity report.
TrendsSpotting examined the data and totaled the top American brands for the years 2006-2009.
It seems that neither the recession, nor other economic forces, are affecting American brands’ global influence. As can be seen in the following table, American brands have reached the top 10, 50, and 100 among global brands, in a stable pattern over the years (in fact, in the last two years, eight out of ten global brands were American (up from seven out of ten for the years 2007 and 2006).

Interviewed on the effect of the recession, Andy Bateman, CEO of Interbrand, said “Stock market declines and earnings declines have contributed 10% and 30% to overall decline in brand value among all brands, but for the top 100 brands the overall decline was only 4%”.

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On Google’s new forecasting capabilities and their importance to Market Research

Taly Weiss — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 22:50:50 +0000

Google’s power lies in knowledge. The knowledge of what people search for.
Google shares some of this knowledge as it updates their tool – Google
Insights for Search .
With a posteriori examination of historical trends – it suggests a basic
model for predicting the next search trends.
We can now improve the understanding of consumer behavior in variety of
markets and geographical locations.

How does that work?

On many search trends queries, conducted on the Google insight for Search
website, you receive along with the historical data, a 12 month forecast. For good example search for “iPhone“.

What’s behind Google’s forecasting model?

Google has characterized the predictability of a trends’ series based on its
historical performance. To do so they compared the discrepancy of forecasted trends, applied at some point in the past, to the trends’ actual performance. When the discrepancy between the forecasted trends and the actual trends is smaller than a predefined threshold, Google denotes the trends query as predictable.

Google’s research observations:

- Over half of the most popular Google search queries were found predictable in 12 month ahead forecast, with a mean absolute prediction error of approximately 12% on average. That means that nearly half of the most popular queries are not predictable.

- High predictable categories: Health (74%), Food & Drink (67%) and
Travel (65%).

- Low predictable categories: Entertainment (35%) and Social Networks &
Online Communities (27%).

- To earn more predictable indications – best to search for trends of
aggregated queries (”all categories” option): 88% of the aggregated category
is predictable with a mean absolute prediction error of less than 6% on
average. The larger the aggregation set is, the smaller would be the
variability of the aggregated time series

- There is a clear association between the existence of seasonality
patterns and higher predictability, as well as an association between high
levels of outliers and lower predictability.

For the above summary results of the 10 categories, the correlation between
the Predictability and the Seasonality Ratio is r= 0.80 while the Deviation Ratio has a (negative) correlation of r= -0.94 with the Predictability.

While TrendsSpotting is working on a new research on US Recession Trends
(you are welcome to contact us for more information) – we have
observed such trends, where seasonality seems high and predictability can
be inferred. Take the trend search for “gift” as a good example for the seasonality effect:

In many of the consumer industries we have followed, the recession has
definitely distracted seasonality and made forecasting abilities more difficult: Refer to the search for “flight” for example.

Whats missing in Google Insights for Search?

1. As I have pointed out some years ago – Google Trends Search gives you
relative search volume only (relative to the total number of searches done
on Google over time). It doesn’t represent absolute search volume numbers.
2. While Google does calculate forecast parameters – how about releasing
the data on seasonality and deviation for the specific search?

A Market Research perspective:

I welcome Google for sharing more trends search capabilities.
I personally met a few of the Google Trends team and highly appreciate their work.

Web search trends are very important for the understanding of consumer behavior. In the many years I have worked as a market researcher, I have always preferred direct methods to analyze consumer behavior.
Compare that to surveys – those can tell you mostly about intentions (far future), about previous actions (depending on good memory skills that respondents don’t have..), and perceptions (but not in a natural manner where one freely chooses to express her/his feelings). Surveys can indeed provide some indications and estimations for behaviors but they lack the means to reflect consumers’ real behavior.
In the last years, web metrics as search trends, blog citations
tools, and social media monitoring tools have captured my full attention. As a Social Psychologist – I find them to be valuable tools in examining people’s natural behavior. TrendsSpotting (company and blog) is all about making sense of it all.

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Handbook of Online India: New TrendsSpotting Report

Taly Weiss — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 06:40:17 +0000

Trendsspotting Handbook of Online India

View more documents from Taly Weiss.

TrendsSpotting has released its new research cover: Handbook of Online India.

Globally India is the seventh largest internet market. However, its internet penetration of slightly less than 3% points to tremendous growth potential.

TrendsSpotting’s Handbook of Online India captures the most updated statistics covering modern India markets.

Tap into a wealth of internet and mobile users’ indications to better understand how India is vastly developing as one of the most interesting countries to follow.

This handbook includes 65 Power Point slides with statistical charts based on market research analyses.

The Handbook of Online India by chapters:
1. India Insider: Internet users demographics and habits.

2. Top Players in Online India: most popular websites, share of search, IM market shares.

3. India Online 2.0: global players, web 2.0 adoption (blogs, social networks, online videos).

4. India’s Digital Divide: Language adoption stats.

5. Indian Mobile Market: Penetration, growth, GSM versus CDMA subscribers, price per services, SMS growth, consumer satisfaction and loyalty,mobile music.

6. Business Perceptive – Online India: Advertising market, Online advertising, Online business, mobile ad market.

The Online India research report is second in Trendsspotting’s Online Handbook series.
Read our previous popular cover: TrendsSpotting Handbook of Online China.

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Twitter’s shopping list: most common “must buy” tweets

Taly Weiss — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 18:03:28 +0000

Many of us perceive Twitter as a tool to monitor consumer behavior. As Twitter reflects the live streaming thoughts and needs of consumers – what can be more insightful for marketers than following the “must buy” products Twitter users tweet about.
We have generated a tag cloud for 24 hours cycle of tweets containing the actionable words “must have”. We have worked hard to clean irrelevant words and came up with the following shopping list:

You can see Twitter users tweet about their urge to buy tickets, books and games. On the brands list we see: iPhone, Ikea, Dell, Wii and iTunes. Most common products discussed are black and pink color.

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New York In Fashion Crisis: 2009 Fashion Capital Media Research (#NY #fashion)

Apurba Sen — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 05:04:49 +0000

The Big Apple may be beating Milan in search & blog discussions. However when it comes to fashion, recession forced a shift towards east. Milan, the home of Gucci, Prada, Armani and Versace, has ended New York’s five-year reign as the world’s top fashion city as per the Global Language Monitor’s annual fashion capital research. Other top runner includes Paris, Rome, London, Los Angeles and Hong Kong.

“The parties were not as big, that was enough to knock New York off just a bit. And Milan seems to have had a very strong fashion season, very well praised and a lot of noise about it.” – says Global Language Monitor president Paul JJ Payak.

The GLM list ranks the cities based on the frequency of fashion words and phrases like “haute couture” and “mode” in the media, on the Internet and throughout the blogosphere.

Racked contributor Cynthia Drescher comments

If that’s the case, then how come Paris didn’t win out considering that those are both French words? And obviously they haven’t been tuning in to blogs such as The Sartorialist, who claims New York as his base, or Susie Bubble, whose London frolicks should have swung more favor away from a Milan, generally known as the old guard of fashion.

Interestingly New York is the most populated Twitter city. So will Twitter pave it’s recovery to the top? Here is our initial attempt – a slide deck on 2009 fashion capital survey – brought to you exclusively by Trendsspotting. If you are as hurt as Gawker, tweet on this crisis #NY fashion. Hopefully this would help the Big Apple regaining the crown next year.

2009 Fashion Capital Survey #NY#Fashion

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