Research on meme tracking online, published recently as part of the ACM Knowledge Discovery conference, may interest any marketers who think about using the web to spread a message. Online press and social media outlets provide a technological base for mass diffusion of memes, but setting out to spread one’s message is no easy task, as anyone who’s tried to do so knows. With the complexity of the web of interactions that must take place to spread a message online, how much can we really know about the cycle by which a message is spread?
Read More

At the end of July, Microsoft Research held its 2008 Faculty Summit to survey the state of computing R & D, which this year included a social media summit. A major topic of conversation included the transition of the internet from a network of documents to a network of people.

As participant (host) and Microsoft Scientist Matthew Hurst explains on his blog, “The PageRank era is marked by a very simple link with no explicit meaning and a simple assumption (a positive endorsement).” But this assumption of positive endorsement is becoming unnecessary as more and more direct evidence of people’s opinions and categorizations of content are available online. Research repeatedly reveals that others take notice of human-generated tags and reviews: “consumers report being willing to pay from 20% to 99% more for a 5-star-rated item than a 4-star-rated item (with variance depending on type of item/service)”, is just one example.

Many are excited by how much less processing-intensive the online content tagging process becomes with this trend – clusters of pages and facts seem to grow organically as a result of human tagging. This helps overcome previous problems related to content indexing within info retrieval, such as the gap between the language that the businesses or organizations use to label their content and the terminology preferred by their customers/users.

But there are challenges that arise as well in this transition that are less discussed. Says one scientist, aptly describing the phenomena, “fragmenting media and changing consumer behavior have crippled traditional [media] monitoring methods. Technorati estimates that 75,000 new blogs are created daily, along with 1.2 million new posts each day, many discussing consumer opinions on products and services. Tactics [of the traditional sort] such as clipping services, field agents, and ad hoc research simply can’t keep pace.” Call it what you will: Brand Monitoring, Online Image Tracking, Buzz Monitoring, Online Anthropology, Conversation Mining, Online Consumer Intelligence, Market Influence Analytics … The challenges remain the same. As an example, I think of a project I did here at Pure Visibility last year, which involved analyzing online review content related to a client’s company. After gathering the reviews (in the hundreds), I was faced with the daunting task of mining them for basic information like the overall majority sentiment expressed, and how this correlated with the source. My ultimate method was mostly manual and more than a little tedious.

Hurst’s blog contains a reference to a new book by Pang and Lee that surveys the state of Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis, (basically, data-mining and classification using human generated content). In addition to interesting facts on the power of opinions like those above, this book clearly outlines the process that such analysis requires, and the associated challenges. For example, incorporating user opinions into a search engine typically requires the following steps:

1. determining whether the user is looking for subjective information
2. accurately classifying docs into the opinionated and non-opinionated bins
3. identifying overall sentiments expressed and or/specific opinion regarding particular aspects
4. summarizing information, including aggregating votes via different rating scales, highlighting some opinions, representing disagreement/consensus points, id’ing opinion holders, etc

The challenges are numerous. To summarize some of the excellent points made by Pang and Lee, I sketched out the following table, which compares opinion mining to traditional text mining:

To clarify on this last point, the authors note that this fact alone does not make the task more difficult than traditional topic classification, since data-driven approaches can be applied to the latter to improve accuracy over classification using a human-picked keyword list. The problem is that the accuracy of a data-driven method for opinion analysis is only about 80%, which is still not comparable to the performance expected in traditional topic-based classification.

While these challenges may seem intimidating enough to remain on the horizon for years to come, the fact that this book was written by a Yahoo research scientist, and one of the country’s top CS schools suggests that the right people are thinking about these trends. Significant changes in how we use the web may not be far off.

It’s strange that we’ve started discussing branding, because there’s been a sudden boost in arguments that search results have a brand impact. This article from Search Engine Watch, for example implies that the paid search advertising executed by John McCain, who is currently spending enough to get four times as many paid search impressions as Barack Obama, will have a positive brand effect.

These assertions are a mystery to me, because they seem to intentionally miss the distinction between something that creates brand awareness and something that results in an actual branding effect. The distinction is actually pretty simple:

Brand Awareness is an “I know about” indicator. It is something people know in their heads.

Branding is an “I feel about” indicator. It is something people know in their gut.

So what I want to know is: how exactly is a John McCain for President banner ad going to accomplish the latter?

It can’t. Awareness is not branding. The only effective measure of branding is whether or not a person CHANGES BRANDS. Exposure to new brands is only part of the effort.

It is strange as an analyst to be making this distinction, but I have seen it repeatedly even among my friends. Branding is incredibly powerful, subtle, and pervasive. People who will insist to their last breath that they are unaffected by brand will be heavily influenced by it (to the point of self-parody). Branding–not awareness–is the only real measure of loyalty or purchasing trends.

The reason I am taking this specific stand is because branding is still the consequence of excellent products that have some emotional impact on a user. Search engine results do not provide that. They provide the OPPORTUNITY for that to occur at a fraction of the historical cost, which a key, critical point. But I don’t want to oversell its value. For branding to truly work there still needs to be that traditional marketing and self-identification that is so very hard to replicate or create.

Stacy Williams wrote a very nice blog post about search engines and their influence on branding in a recent post that I wanted to share. I agree with almost everything the post says; I just think she’s using the word “brand” in a way that might not resonate with people who are actively involved in the creation of the things.

Here’s the essence of the article: search engines create two major effects for a company. First, they give validity to any company that ranks highly for that product category. Second, they level the playing field for other brands of the same type by giving search engine uses a chance to immediately and implicitly compare products in a result.

I’m not particularly impressed with first category of findings. But the second are very exciting. The most compelling finding in the post was this one:

People using search engines are more likely to consider multiple brands (77% did so) than Internet users that don’t use search engines (70%) or non-Internet users (46%). On average, searchers considered 2.5 brands before making a purchase (5).

Yow. That is a big, big, BIG deal.

Why does it matter? In product categories with low differentiation such as cleaning products, cereal foods, and other household items, brand preference is by the far the biggest determiner of purchasing decisions. Some studies suggest that people who have a brand preference choose that brand seventy percent of the time over other brands, more so by far than price, promotions, or comparable benefits. So, the opportunity to get them to even consider other brands is a chance to not only break that preference, but create a loyal consumer who is equally hard tempt away in the future.

Yet are the numbers Stacy describes really associated with branding? I would say they’re not; I would, instead, argue that what she describes is awareness, which is necessary step in branding, but really a very different beast at the end of the day.

A brand is organized around how people feel about a product–how its smell, shape, appearance, or image impacts on them emotionally. Right now, at least, a search engine doesn’t really impart those things to a user. Only the product itself, and the vivid image and marketing message around it, can do so. Without an appealing product whose impact resonates psychologically with a user, the only outcome of awareness will be consideration, then rejection.

A good example of this are studies showing that coupons used in isolation from other methods have almost no impact on long-term brand preference. Any spikes that occur through coupon use generally subside shortly thereafter into the previous brand preference patterns. They are a kind of “awareness”, but they don’t cause a change. It’s this reason that the only measure of advertising effectiveness in branding that has ever resonated with me is advertising’s ability to get someone to switch from another preferred brand.

So, a search engine doesn’t really change the core challenge of branding: getting people to switch. What a search engine does do, however, is create more opportunities to switch for companies with smaller budgets. With a search engine, marketers can introduce a new product to people to at price points that were unheard as compared to television, which remains the primary–and most expensive–medium for generating brand awareness in the United States.

THAT is exciting. THAT is new. THAT is worth all kinds of effort and investment.

Thanks for the article, Stacy! It sure got me thinking.

Why does your business exist? Why should your potential customers choose you over anyone else? What differentiates you from the competition? The people coming to your site may not even know who you are. You’ve got to get this all across to the user immediately, before he or she decides to pass your site by.

After all, when users come to your site, they make a snap judgment about it–whether it has what they want, whether it is trustworthy, whether it is pleasing and easy to use. They scan the pictures and the text to figure out whether this is the site they’re looking for. Good design and good web writing helps people find and learn about your product. Have you given the same attention to your brand? Read More

Today was looking like a good day. I had a few fun projects on my docket and the weather in Michigan was breaking records for January, 61 degrees! But my day was going to get even better very soon.

Arriving at the downtown Ann Arbor offices of Pure Visibility, a little sleepy eyed and still nursing my first cup of coffee, I sat down, booted up my mac and went to my iGoogle home page. Looking at my rss feeds I spotted Barack Obama’s name in the Web Creme feed. How odd I thought. I’d been to his site before and found it to be functional at best with well coded CSS and SEO. Overall I thought it was nice but nothing extraordinary. When I saw the feed, curiosity made me click and what a surprise! Barack Obama’s redesign (www.barackobama.com) took my breath away! Excellent composition, a beautiful palette, and calls to action made the designer in me excited. I have built plenty of sites in my years and this one really hit home. Here are some of the highlights.

Read More

Google recently released a video about the value of Branding (you can see it Here) that was very telling. It was, essentially, an education about how different companies perceive branding and its value, followed by compliments they paid Google about branding. The education portion was about 2/3rds of the video, which is not surprising because Google is not, and will not in the foreseeable future, be a good platform for branding products.

Branding is a difficult thing to quantify and market, but the essential nature of it is something that is at once familiar yet exciting. Ze Frank has a brilliant video blog about branding that sums up the essence of this concept using Jon-Benet Ramsey as the “brand” example. Read More