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The AP recently commissioned a study to analyze news consuption patterns of 18-34 year olds.  No surprise, but the study found that participants were almost always in engaged in multiple activities when reading the news, and although they were interested in receiving high quality, detailed news, they instead felt bombarded by headlines and snippets.

The research presents detailed guidance on ways to deliver news stories that are more easily consumable for this audience.

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2008/06/02/study_shows_young_adults_hit_by_news_fatigue/?p1=email_to_a_friend

The June 2 issue of Business Week has some interesting data on the impact that social media is having on organizations.

Some highlights:

• IBM's social network for employees, Beehive, with 30,000 employees using it.
• British Telecom's use of a corporate wiki for virtually every project, from writing new software to launching branding campaigns.
• Dell's service on Twitter purportedly grossing $500K in new orders in the past year.
• Best Buy's in-house social network, Blue Shirt Nation, with 20,000 participants and an 8.5% churn, compared with a 60% annual turnover rate for the entire company.

"Mountain Update - [unnamed] Mountain received 2 - 3 inches of snow on Wednesday night, bringing our total snowfall for the season to 100 inches! And with more snow in the forecast tonight and Friday - it's shaping up to be another great weekend of skiing and riding!"

Today I received this email from a ski area that I occasionally visit, and coincidentally plan on going up to this weekend.  Unfortunately, the real story is that there is a major ice storm moving in to the region.  It is not safe to drive up Friday night, and the skiing on Saturday will be marginal at best.  The mountain might even be forced to close lifts if there's significant icing on the cables or downed power lines.

Some marketers still think they can control the information their customers receive.  I already knew what the conditions were going to be like before I got the email.

And what of the few that didn't have the time to check the forecast from other, more reliable sources?  What if they pile their family into their Honda Accord with all season tires, and risk their safety to come up for a sketchy weekend based on that email?  Will that help the ski area build loyalty and customer satisfaction?
 
I think the honest approach works far better.  For example, this ski area might have issued an email warning their customers what they might expect, instead of hyping great conditions that in reality are about to disappear.  Advise their customers to get on the road early Friday or early Saturday, but not to make the drive on Friday night unless they're prepared to drive in an ice storm. 

An angry customer this weekend may never return.  A loyal customer pays dividends for a long time.

**2/5/08 UPDATE**  I did go up last weekend, but not until Saturday afternoon.  They mountain was closed all day Saturday from high winds and ice!  Closed!  And the skiing on Sunday was pretty poor.

Ski season is here, and I've been hitting the various ski sites to get ready. 

Consider these two different ski merchandisers' approaches to moving distressed inventory that I have just seen:

One is Reliable Racing.  This company sells great race gear.  Every Wednesday I get an email from them with their "Wacky Wednesday Special," which is one item they're discounting.

The other is www.steepandcheap.com.    I subscribed to their "alert" and I see, in their words, "one killer gear deal, one at a time until it's gone."  I get a pop up window on my desktop for each new item as it comes on sale, then they show me a fuel gauge indicator that goes from full to empty.  When it gets to "E", it's gone, and I get another pop up for the next item.

Guess which approach works better?

My first reaction when I found steepandcheap.com?  "Oh, man, this is gonna cost me alot of money!"

(I am in no way affiliated with steepandcheap.com, although I acknowledge that I have a problem with skiing, and with buying more ski gear than one skier could ever possibly need).

The folks at the FTMA invited me to speak about Web 2.0 at their Fall conference in Miami last week (thanks folks for that!). The audience was mostly marketing folks, with a few IT folks in the mix.

My prediction was that Web 2.0 is here to stay (whether they like it or not), and my observation was that Web 2.0 and travel are a match made in heaven.  Some supporting proof points included:

TripAdvisor has 30M monthly unique visitors, and

Forrester Research found that 62% of people aged 18-26 used online peer reviews to make travel decisions in 2006, 83% of people 50-61, and 90% (!!) of people over 62 did.

I issued my usual plea for marketers not to ignore Web 2.0, since the conversations are happening online and everyone knows how to find them, so why not provide the environment to host them, and reap some of the benefits, like increased loyalty, better SEO, better conversions, and improved customer research?

As usual, some in the audience said that although they agreed in principle, travel as an industry might be different, because there are so many people that have poor travel experiences (sigh).  It was actually one of the IT guys that suggested that perhaps if they're so afraid that the tone will be negative, that the answer might not be to think they can prevent the feedback, but to look deeper at the root causes of the sentiment.

(FWIW I offered my suggestion for increasing loyalty, which was to equip every plane with high speed satellite internet access, add A/C outlets under every seat, continue to block cell phone access, and charge us whatever they want).

He (the IT guy) also thanked me for making it clear what was motivating the marketing guys to ask them for some of the projects that that they're working on, like desktop applications.  So perhaps some feedback to marketers that are tasking IT with projects:  give them the ROI and the business reasons for the projects.  They'll understand it, appreciate it, and it will probably result in better implementations.

It turns out that Wikipedia so well reflects the wisdom of the crowd, that even when those with a vested interest try to pull a fast one, the crowd steps up and takes action.

Suspecting self-serving manipulation of entries by corporations and other organizations, a CalTech grad student wrote a system that "offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses," according to an article in Wired. 

According to Wired, "The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made.  Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material. Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the latter, with someone at the company's IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry's concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company's CEO's fund-raising for President Bush.   The text, deleted in November 2005, was quickly restored by another Wikipedia contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, ‘Please stop removing content from Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism.'"

And in true "crowdsourcing" fashion, the developer of the system is putting the whole thing online so that anyone who wants to can search the edits. 

This is Web 2.0 at its finest. 

The overwhelming message to organizations that aren't sure how to work with the read/write web:  just remember that the world is a lot savvier than you might think.  If for no other, higher reasons, don't try to game the system.  Or at the very least, if you do, don't do it from your computer at work.

notes Chris Shipley, executive producer and host of DEMO, and cofounder and chairman of market intelligence firm Guidewire Group, June 25, 2007.  http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=3313692&page=1

Just starting to get your head around how to deal with Web 2.0?  Look out, because now social search is gaining momentum (see the recent NY Times article).  Just as Web 2.0 spawned the democratization of the web, social search has now extended the same phenomenon to search.  And as a result, marketers have a lot more to consider than just SEO as they plan their search engine strategies.

Although not a replacement for the algorithmic search engines like Google, social search is certainly an important complement, for a number of reasons.  Two big ones that immediately come to mind...

 (1)    Social search can't be gamed by marketers.  Marketers have become experts at SEO.  Is the first Google search result there because it's really the best, or because the company behind that URL has really good search engine marketers?!  With social search, by contrast, the most valuable results naturally rise to the top. 

(2)    Google, et. al., is not sufficient.  It's unusual to find a complete, comprehensive set of data on a particular topic from any one Google search result, or even from an entire results page in Google.  Compare this with social search, where the best results combine relevant, meaningful information from a variety of sources that provide a full perspective on the topic.

Social search is definitely here to stay, in much the same way that Web 2.0 is here to stay. 

So what's the impact on marketers?  Just as Web 2.0 created a new set of challenges and opportunities for marketers, the same is true for social search.  That's not to suggest that you should give up on your SEO investments, but do think about which social search networks you want to participate in, and find ways to add real value on the topics that are relevant to your brand.  Because in the world of social search, you can't rise to the top via clever SEO.  But you can by building interesting, useful collections of information that provide real value to searchers.

That's according to the fifth annual PRWeek/Manning Selvage & Lee Marketing Management Survey... 

According to Advertising Age's article on the report, "one reason may be hesitation to give the consumer more control. Only 22% said they were ‘very willing' to allow consumers more control. Others said it could harm their businesses and there is no clear return on investment."

My personal plea to the 88% of marketers that don't see the value in web 2.0 and consumer-generated content: Please don't ignore it.

Read the entire AdAge article, and my comments on the article here.

I just got back from the OMMA conference, where everyone spent a lot of time focusing on the consumer generated video movement.  Sessions included the Doritos Superbowl commercial contest, YouTube, and firms offering "YouTube in a box."  What I thought was missing was some hard data on the business value of the various new media and social media platforms.  My guess is that six months from now, most folks in this group will be done with consumer generated video, and they'll all be off on the "next big thing."

A few standouts from the conference: 

First was the keynote from Arianna Huffington.  The Huffington Post is proof that in the Web 2.0 world you can build a brand in the fraction of the time it used to take.  In a nod to being the new kid on the block, their tagline is "Delivering News and Opinion Since May 9^th, 2005."  According to Ms. Huffington, she has 800 bloggers that are working for her for free!  How did she pull that off?  It's the draw of people wanting to be associated with that organization's community. 

Another was Jordan Rohan, a very smart Managing Director from RBC Capital Markets.  When asked whether Viacom was serious about suing Google, he observed that Sumner Redstone is partnering with YouTube at CBS for March Madness clips, while simultaneously suing them at Viacom.  It's portfolio theory in action.  Try a variety of business models in his various companies, see which ones are successful, then quickly follow suit in his other companies.

The last was a presentation from Nick Grouf who started a company called Spot Runner.  They're doing for TV advertising what Google has done for web advertising:  making it affordable for the little guys.  The folks at Spot Runner have discovered that TV airtime in local markets is cheap, really cheap (like $100 for a 30 second spot).  So they produced template commercials for a variety of industries (like sporting good stores and realtors) that they customize for you for $499, then let you buy airtime in just the local geos you want, airing at times that reach the just the target demographic you want.  Very cool stuff.

Last week I spoke at the Electronic Retailing Association's annual Mid-Winter Conference about Web 2.0. From the conversations I had there, a few things were pretty clear...  

One is that retailers are getting absolutely hammered on price, and it's mainly because of the transparency of the web.  In response to increased competition on price, they're cutting prices even futher. Can anyone say "death spiral?"

The other is that there's this interest/fear dynamic that's prevalent among online retailers around social networking and Web 2.0. My session was packed with marketers that wanted to hear how they might leverage some of the new Web 2.0 tools in their marketing plans.

The topic of my talk was that while Web 2.0 is making it more challenging for marketers to maintain control in all verticals, not just retail, it also can hold the key to building brand loyalty and finding ways to compete that don't involve perpetuating the "sale mentality." I was absolutely blown away by the interest in this topic among the retailers.

The talk was chock full of examples. To wit:

Circuit City implemented customer reviews on their website, resulting in thousands of new site visits due to Google indexing these pages and ranking them highly in their search results (i.e. good SEO). The visitors that hit their site through these pages had 94% more site visits, 60% higher buyer/visitor conversion rate, purchased 43% higher priced items, and had 50% higher average order sizes.

I saw a lot of note-taking going on!

The net of my talk was that for any of the Web 2.0 initiatives to work, retailers have to let go of control, and let visitors have their say, whether they agree with them or not. This scares marketers to death. But in 2007, all of your customers know how to find customer reviews, forums, product reviews, etc. You can choose to host them or not. But if you don't, your customers will just go someplace else. Since it's happening anyway, you might as well do it and reap the benefits, including increased customer loyalty and decreased reliance on price as a differentiator.

Could this signal the tipping point, when retailers decide that the benefits to implementing Web 2.0 far outweigh their concerns?

Time will tell.