http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast/2010/08/hbrs-idea-watch-strange-but-tr.html

start at 4.25 on the pod cast for  "Defend your research from Harvard Business Review/ Sept 2010 - interview from Leif Nelson Prof @Berkeley"

Research on people watching TV shows - interrupted with commercials and non-interrupted; expected outcome would be that people enjoy more the one that was not interrupted.

However, pretty strongly people enjoyed the TV with commercials more, good news for advertisers.

Reason and rational is adaptation.  What is this.  Consider a 10 minute massage, the massage gets less enjoyable as time goes on. if you cut the session in half and start again, the enjoyment increases.

Why do people like and pay for premium channels without ads - plots are complex and provide natural interruption by stitching story lines. Designed to keep enjoyed high.

Smart take and counter intuitive research

Location should have created substantial new value on a mobile operators’ balance sheet.  In their rush to control and lock down this valuable data set, the operators set the charges to high and put up an impossible API; these actions meant that by-pass and alternatives would flourish and they have. Location is in so many ways unique to mobile, therefore we are right to question how an operator could try to capture some value back.

Here is an idea for you (free)   I would like my operator to control the location that my applications sees, I want someone to become the intermediately and offer me a “trusted service”, as the value has migrated from the knowing location to managing it.

Some example:-

Rich and Famous - you want to tweet your latest update with your location. Would be good but this means the Mr Robber and Mrs Burglar know that you are out or somewhere.  Please can someone allow me to put a false location on my tweets for a period to protect my privacy.

Celebrity – you want to tweet your latest update with your location. Would be good but this means you can be found by the hoards of fans who will mob you.  Please can someone put a 20 minute delay in my location.  Make it available but not in real time, unless I want to party with my fans.

Single female – I want to update Foresquare, but I am worried about …..  Please can my trusted location provider/ manager make my location available later, at some time period I am happy with.

The trusted service is to add a user control layer that adds a time delay to when your location become public.  Mr Operator, you could do it, but I expect that someone will do it before you.   Is this a big money spinner NO, this is about control, trust and loyalty; YES - think branding!

The economic climate means that there is a focus on costs and revenue at the expense of opportunity and innovation.  “In the bank” is winning over even “in the bag”, but it is also true that you cannot cost cut your way out of recession, you need to trade. Balancing future and survival is as much an executive skill today as at any time in corporate history.

Companies who are taking the opportunity to adopt networked technologies, which have been developing over the last 5 years and in our view are starting to become stable enough to show promise, are likely to seriously enhance their ability to offer better services, provide unique customer experience, be more responsive, delivery on service promises and keep costs down, during these difficult times and the upturn.

A key driver for these pioneering companies in the adoption curve is how they handle and analyse customer and social graph data.  To explain this concept, this Viewpoint focuses on “The WHAT principle and the WHO effect”

We hope that our Viewpoint improves awareness, raises questions and promotes deliberation over lunch.

The WHAT principle

The focus of today’s higher value services is personalization – the making of your user experience, creating value from the reduction in churn and incremental service revenue, assuming that any incremental margin is not eroded by competitive pressures.  The focus on personalization is, to AMF Ventures understanding, a focus on WHAT:– what you as a user want to do; what service you want; what is needed now.  The sole benefactor is the individual, but does this create any value?  The assumption is that personalization provides focus, and that this focus leads to the ability to deliver engaging and personalized services including advertising.  This advertising being derived from the same advertising budgets, which is now redirected from other display channels.  Therefore does personalization actually create any new value and will it actually grow the overall spend of the entire market?

Commentators, consultants and media sellers will provide convincing evidence to back their own propositions and the purpose of this Viewpoint is not to debate the personalization opportunity but to introduce the WHO effect.  Whilst personalization will increase value for the provider [more effective marketing and efficient sales]; assuming that there is value for the user, it does not itself create new value for the entire converged industries.   However, personalization could create value, if the focus is on WHO and not WHAT!

The WHO effect

Personalization has been about the WHAT principle. This has focused on a single customer: ‘you’.  The WHO effect is the multiplier. The focus shifts from WHAT, to orientate on WHO you are doing something with.  In simple terms when you go for dinner, who are you with? When you are in a business meeting or seminar, who are you with? When you are at a concert, in school, or on holiday – who are you with?  The opportunity is that these ‘WHO’s’ are gravitating towards and enjoying the same experiences as ‘you’.  The additional profiles of those who you are ‘with’, can combine to create a new and incremental market value, assuming as a company you are able to reach these customer and deliver services that they want.

Consider the advertising issue created through personalization, it reaches you – one person in two billion.  The world is divided into two billion personalized worlds, only relevant to one person at any given time, and each person with an unequal bite of the advertising spend!  The WHO effect would suggest that as you are enjoying something with others, even though it is outside of their personalized preference, it is possible that it would be worth providing information on products and services to the group.  The WHO effect is the electronic ‘word of mouth’.  It assumes and depends on the fact that we adopt at different rates and some not at all. These issues provide the limitation to personalization and the WHAT principle, but opportunity to the WHO effect.

How WHO Works

WHAT based decisions are not using information in a sophisticated enough way. To move to the WHO based system, customer data needs to be understood in a more nuanced way. We think of data on 2 main axes: How ‘active the data is’ (static to dynamic) and ‘type of data’ (factual to behavioural)

Factual vs Behavioural.

Factual Data just is – date of birth, where you live etc.

Behavioural data is what you do, your footprint over time.

Dynamic vs Static

Static data is data that doesn’t change – your date of birth. Highly dynamic data is what is changing every minute – movement, current location etc. Some data is dynamic, but over long time periods – eg place of work, home address etc

Some dynamic data is repeated, ie there are patterns in it (such as the daily commute) that allow one to predict behaviours and events.

Clearly, if a service provider has a grasp of this information, they would be able to make better decisions about the user context and thus serve up better information or services to the user – critical for the limited real estate on even the smartest of mobile devices. 

Creating advantage

This WHO effect is not open to the traditional broadcast, TV and entertainment companies, although they are the traditional home of the display advertising budgets.  This service could be offered by Web companies, however as your profile and personalization has a dependency on your web access time, it could be difficult. The major benefactor of the WHO effect will be mobile companies as the mobile device becomes the platform to collect data, interrupt the connection and deliver the value.

Caveats

First: the opportunity to exploit the WHO effect is not open to companies who want to ‘control’ the user experience and developer environment such as Apple, they can only enjoy the WHAT principle. Open mobile platforms, open access services and developers who services work across all devices will be able to exploit the WHO effect. The multiplier value of mobile is not in knowing WHAT you are doing (location and attention), but WHO you are doing it with. 

Second: user pre-acceptance and buy-in is critical – “Snooping” behaviour has already blown up in a number of companies’ faces. Users need to be certain that data will not be misused, sold on or otherwise exposed.

Third: trust is critical.  Is your Brand value on of trust and what will the user trust you for?

Fourth: regulation and law.  This is a black hole of debate

Fifth: this concept is deeply embedded in “web as a platform concept” This is a change from domains, destinations and portals. A way to understand this is to view that owning a top level domain such as www.news.com is not important.  Users will never visit this site, but rather interact with the data that comes from this source via Twitter, RSS feeds, readers, blogs and social sites.  The stats on your site are not important, but rather where you content is consumed and how? Customer ownership, as per caveat one, is not important – owing the customers data is.

Migrating some original work to here - first posted in May 2009

Soap box ramble - Currently we use motion sensors to switch on lights or set of an alarm (intruder).  What will happen when these sensors knows it is you, and I mean you, you become uniquely identifiable.

Suppose your home sensors detect who is going into the room and set the lighting, TV to what you like.  It sends you a text to say which off the lights, or reminds you that the oven is on.  Will we see this as centralised big brother or that we can negotiate with our power companies to get cheaper bills when we move supplier by showing we are responsible and accountable?

Should the marketing be about reducing the standby energy production amount and therefore reducing pollution and extraction, or should we just be doing it anyway.  Is this technology looking for a problem?

Data, smart grids, identity, user behaviour.  Will you change if you knew your actions could count against you?

Will the cost of implementation be higher than any return?  As I said, mutterings of a mad man thinking out-loud.

After discover there are 4 phases of digital footprint evolution; on the path to understanding the value of your digital data and how Brands have to re-think segmentation in the digital social media age and focus on the “rainbow of trust”

Discovery. As the title suggests this is the phase where you discover Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube and you engage with full throttle in this new and exciting social media experiment.

Ø1  Fear. The first impact of digital footprints occurs on the personal realisation that all your digital data can be gathered and analysed. The fear phase represents the understanding that you must be careful about what you say about yourself and others. This is where the digital immigrants focus, spending a lot of time on the education of the digital natives.

Ø2  Spring clean. The second stage is when you wake up and understand that digital footprints are actually what you say, what you do, how you do it, where you do it and also critically important what your social crowd say about you and your information, data and content. This is the spring clean phase where you choose carefully who your family, friends and associates and what content you will post and link to. This could also be known as the un-link phase where you un-link “friends.”

Ø3 Selective. The third awaking is when you realise you are the product of a barter and that web services companies are actually trading your digital footprint data for services.  If you want free services you need to share more and more data and information. Further the web services companies continually want to cross your personal privacy barrier. This becomes the selective phase where you decide to focus on a few web services rather than leave data everywhere.

Ø4 Value.  The next phase of your digital footprint evolution is now less to do with you and your social crowd but is to do with the analysis of your data.  Few people reach this level of understanding as it is about who influences you and who you influence. This is where value can be realised for Brands. 

and the link between digital footprint and segmentation is…

Demographic segmentation leads to the placement of ads in your Facebook profile.  Depending on your age, sex and location you will have a certain propensity to selective ads. As you share more data and information, which builds your digital footprint, you also reveal preferences.  This helps further focus traditional advertising. 

However the analysis of how you behave online and who you watch and listen too starts a whole new process of discovery of who influences you and who you influence. This allows advertisers to create new value for brands as they shift from traditional placement to influence based on a rainbow of trust. Who do you trust and who trust you.  Think recommendation.

The assumption is that the rainbow of trust is a continuum and shows that people have a different propensity of trust, from untrusting to very trusting, and who they trust: a brand, the government, people, things, friends or relationships. The key to gaining value from this segmentation is the analysis of digital footprint data as this allows a Brand to determine the chain of influence.  Who listens to the first message, who passes it on and who it affects?  The analysis determines influence based on value by trust and risk, and not by product or lifestyle.

Conceptually within a rainbow of trust based segmentation, there is no market aligned to age, lifestyle, income, demographics, early adopters or followers. It moves the ideas from the young who explore, and the old who stay with what they know, even if it is not the best. It will be (is now) possible to determine trust as we now have access to the very data needed to determine it.

more reading …. http://www.mydigitalfootprint.com/footprint-cms/MY_DIGITAL_FOOTPRINT_AND_CONVERGED_SERVICES.html

New data released from analytics service Hitwise today names Facebook the largest website in the U.S. with 7.07% of all U.S. visits. Google is second at 7.03%. Yahoo Mail is third with 3.8% and Yahoo is fourth at 3.67%

This is the first time Hitwise has named Facebook the top site in the U.S. Comscore still ranks Google the top site by reach at 81% of the U.S. population. Facebook, at 53%, is still behind Google, Yahoo and Microsoft sites in the U.S., according to the most recent Comscore data from February 2010. Source: Techcrunch

So what: Facebook is user content about themselves and their own and friends activities. If value accrues to he who has data then Facebook is winning.  If value accrues to analysis of data then where is the Google?