Based upon this and some previous charts Dan posted on the Days of the week, you are most likely to get retweeted Wednesday through Friday night and Facebook picks up where Twitter leaves off.

Draw your own conclusions…

Great article, I encourage you to check it out… Dan is the “social scientist” bringing the data to support what works and what doesn’t!

“It’s not marketing if your not measuring!”

We’ve all seen the spotlight or two aimed at drawing attention to some event. I’m sure it works at some level, but personally it’s never been enough that I would drive out of my way to know. I’m sure when it was first done — it worked much more successfully, but we live in an age when things become common fast. So how do you set yourself apart?

This is a great example of “kicking it up a notch” — I would absolutely drive out of my way to find out what the heck is going on… it must be HUGE!

How can you use something like this to capture eyes for your cause?

Can you one up it?

Go forth and do amazing things!
craig

Companies are catching on to the fact that bloggers can provide an effective way to create buzz about their brands. We’ve seen several efforts that explicitly recognise that fact, such as TasteCasting for restaurants and YokmoK’s free travel giveaways. Bringing the notion into the world of new consumer products is Swagapalooza, an invitation-only event that gives influential bloggers free samples of new products.

Created by Bay Area startup Launch Hear, Swagapalooza aims to give entrepreneurs a way to get their producs in front of the most-followed bloggers and tweeters from across the United States. The first event was held in New York in September last year. At it, brands including Surprise Industries, Idea Paint and Switch2Health—which, coincidentally, we just covered—had the chance to make presentations to the select audience of 100 bloggers, 20 Twitterers and 5 Redditors. In exchange for their participation, the audience members were entitled to free samples of any of the products being presented. A detailed review of the event is available on AdAge.

Spotted by: Jody Turner

is your niche more regional or local? we would be willing to facilitate the local bloggers, tweeters and social media evangelists at a localized version. leave a comment or email me craigdcrook [at] gmail.com

favorite linchpin video to date:
listeners, doers, seekers, questioners… sometimes bored – the ones who are satisfied with the status quo… we need to create organizations that question themselves…

Stop listening to your customers

February 11, 2010 | Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte | View comments16 Comments |

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 Nate Bolt is co-founder and chief executive of user research firm Bolt Peters. With  Tony Tulathimutte, he is the author of the book Remote Research, which is out today.

A common assumption among startup entrepreneurs is that listening to potential customers is the best way to find out whether your product or idea will succeed in the market. Honestly — don’t bother. In our nine years of research consulting for startups and big companies alike, one thing we’ve seen time and again is that it’s user behavior, not opinions, that tells you whether people want to use your product.

The main problem with opinions is self-reporting bias: Opinions are often inconsistent with behaviors or other attitudes, especially when discussing hypotheticals. Remember  Clippy, the little character that appeared in Microsoft Word years ago? That little bastard arose, in part, from Microsoft asking users if they wanted help working on their documents — everyone said, “Sure, sounds great.” But once people started actually using it in the real world, they hated it — it might be one of the most hated features in the history of computing. But Microsoft employs hundreds of researchers. So where did they go wrong, and how can you avoid making the same mistake?

It’s simple. Never ask people what they think of your product or idea.

Back in 2004, we worked with a web startup that allowed users to search online for products sold locally. The users we spoke to were unanimously in love with the idea, the look-and-feel received high praise, and most said they would recommend the site to their friends.

Their behavior, however, demonstrated major problems with the main product search, which had critical parsing errors and arcane syntactic rules: For example, searching for “x box” yielded a mess of results containing the letter “x”. It was awful to use. The founders took the research to be just one interesting data point, instead of as a warning sign that their business concept was built on a false premise: that they could eventually tweak the results to work at some later point. That never happened. Now they’re gone.

Here are three things you can do to get a sense of whether people would use your service.

1. Test ideas early by watching behavior. It’s fine if you don’t have a 100 percent functional interface — having eight people interact with a prototype or even wireframes or design mockups can be incredibly useful. Even recruiting strangers from the street to use your prototype is better than nothing. You can still ask all your needy questions about what they think after the session — just don’t take those too seriously. Recently there’s been lots of tools that let you quickly create and test prototypes, mockups, and comps online: Chalkmark, Pidoco, Balsamiq, Loop11, OpenHallway, Usabilla.

Even during design conceptualization, paying attention to existing user experiences can be invaluable. The award-winning finance site  Mint (one of our clients) was born out of frustration with Quicken, which required users to manually log every transaction they made, across multiple accounts. It’s worth noting that Mint doesn’t do much usability research — the emphasis isn’t on whether the service is easy to use, but what needs people really have.

2. Get all stakeholders to watch the research. When more than three people are involved in a tech project, they cease to be normal people and instead become “stakeholders”. Unfortunately, the stake they’re holding is the one that goes right through the heart of user experience — technical and business constraints obscure the basic question of whether the interface is any good.

One way to get everyone’s priorities in order is to force everyone — engineers, designers, executives, sales people, anyone else who’s involved — to watch the user research sessions together. Force them. It helps everyone agree on what needs to be addressed in the design.

3. Use unorthodox methods. Companies like Apple and 37signals make a big deal about never conducting user research. They lie — they just don’t call it user research. Releasing products in generations, like Apple does, provides them with mountains of reviews, task-specific complaints, crash reports, customer support issues, and Genius Bar feedback. It’s audacious, large-scale behavioral research. The same goes for services with long beta testing periods (i.e. Gmail): Their logs and analytics constitute real-world behavioral data. Did you know Flickr started out as an image management tool inside an online game? Once they realized how good it was, they scrapped the game and focused on the good part. That is hardcore user experience insight matched with entrepreneurial insight.

Do whatever you need to do to understand how people use your product. If it’s a device meant to be used in cars, watch people use it cars; if it’s a video game, avoid sterile lab environments. Just don’t ask perfunctory, cookie-cutter survey questions to your potential customers, and expect that to ensure your product’s usefulness.

“Wait a sec Craig, you often talk about listening to the voice of the customer (VOC) — this doesn’t reconcile…” If you are only talking about processing the vibrations of sounds – then yes, but when I explain “listening”, it involves receiving non verbal as well as verbal cues — in fact I would argue “passive observation” will often yield very high insights — as soon as we begin to interact, we generally bring our assumptions and biases into the process — which skews the results. On top of that, people don’t want to be “mean” and tend to go easy on ideas. Behavior is the most accurate reflection — i.e. you want to know what people value – look at their checkbook and calendar.

yet another great post by seth… Sunny shares a “balanced” persepctive

BTW – the annoying part of @thisissethsblog is he’s hard to ignore once you put him on your radar ; )

In Age of Friending, Consumers Trust Their Friends Less

Edelman Study Shows That Only 25% of People Find Peers Credible, Flying in Face of Social-Media Wisdom

By Michael Bush
Published: February 08, 2010

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Whom do we increasingly trust less? Us.

It’s a finding that strikes at the foundation of many a social-media marketing philosophy: Tapping into peer-to-peer networks is a way for marketers to tell authentic, credible stories to consumers whose confidence in corporate CEOs, news outlets, government officials and industry analysts has taken a beating. But according to Edelman’s latest Trust Barometer, the number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company dropped by almost half, from 45% to 25%, since 2008.

WHOM DO YOU TRUST? Edelman’s barometer

Richard Edelman, president and CEO of Edelman, believes it’s a sign of the times — and the lesson for marketers is consumers have to see and hear things in five different places before they believe it.

“The events of the last 18 months have scarred people,” Mr. Edelman said. “People have to see messages in different places and from different people. That means experts as well as peers or company employees. It’s a more-skeptical time. So if companies are looking at peer-to-peer marketing as another arrow in the quiver, that’s good, but they need to understand it’s not a single-source solution. It’s a piece of the solution.”

Consumers are a distrustful bunch in general — the credibility of TV dropped 23 points and radio news and newspapers were down 20 points between 2008 and 2010.

CEOs up
And when asked how credible they deemed the information they get about a company when a “person like yourself” serves as a spokesperson the numbers again dropped. This year 39% of those surveyed felt the messages conveyed by consumer spokespeople was credible compared to 45% in 2009, the biggest drop-off among all categories.

Conversely, CEOs — who have of late been trotted out as public faces of their companies in times of stress, such as General Motors CEO Ed Whitacre — saw the biggest year-over-year increase from 17% in 2009 to 26% this year. Other groups seeing increases in the level of consumer trust were government officials (22% vs. 27%), a financial/industry analyst (46% vs. 52%), NGO representative (42% vs. 44%) and academic experts (61% vs. 64%). The only other group to see the credibility of their word diminish was company employees, which saw a drop of three points (31% vs. 28%).

If consumers stop believing what their friends and the “average Joes” appearing in testimonials say about a product or company, the implications could be significant not just for marketers but for the social networks and word-of-mouth platforms selling themselves as solutions to communicating in a jaded world. The influence of peers has been considered the leading rationale for brands’ shifting marketing dollars to social media.

In some cases, social networks themselves may be contributing to the decline in trust. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have allowed people to maintain larger circles of casual associates, which may be diluting the credibility of peer-to-peer networks. In short, the more acquaintances a person has, the harder it can be to trust him or her. Mr. Edelman believes the Facebook component has “absolutely” played a role in diluting trust levels.

A changed game
“When you’re seeing so much noise, it’s very easy to dismiss a lot of it, and that’s a problem marketing messages have had for a while now,” said David Berkowitz, director-emerging media for 360i. “Facebook really exemplifies this with the live-feed and news-feed options,” he said. “If you use the live feed and have a few hundred friends, some kind of peer recommendation, whether it’s explicit or not, appears every couple of minutes and sometimes they come in a matter of seconds. If you’re seeing all of that come in, it can be overwhelming.”

Not surprisingly, Paul Rand, president-CEO of Omnicom Group’s Zocalo Group and president of the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association, said word-of-mouth is more effective than ever. But he does concede the game has changed.

“The mind-set is no longer ‘I can just trust it because it’s somebody’s opinion,’” he said. “It’s, ‘I can trust that specific opinion because it’s someone I know.’”

Another potential reason? People have caught on to the fact marketers are increasingly behind that influential blog post or tweet. Despite regulations regarding disclosure of marketer-driven efforts, consumers may feel that whatever it is these people are receiving from companies positively influences their endorsements.

Christina Smedley, global head of Edelman’s consumer practice, said there is still a core group of influencers that can change how people trust and influence the actions of others. And consumers, whether they are close to them or not, will follow their lead.

“There are … consumers who still only trust the people they see every day or their 120 friends on Facebook,” Ms. Smedley said. “But there are those that trust all 380 of their friends on Facebook. And there’s opportunity for brands with both groups. If marketers can find those action consumers, they can build campaigns that work through their parameters and get some very good results.”

Trust becomes increasingly “marketable” — are you trustworthy, do you act in the interests of others — consider them more important then your agenda?

what a great thought! focus on what makes you great, it doesn’t have to be big!