I met up with Tim a few weeks ago and probed him on his views on integrated marketing, data collection and market research. Tim is one of the few CMO’s with very hands on practical knowledge and can talk to you about brand development as well as regression analysis to determine how to hire sales staff.
He had a very interesting story on how he use regression analysis to determine what attributes are needed for sales staff – he knew who his top performers were and he used a quick survey to determine the factors!
Interview embeded below (if you are on RSS or Email – please click on the link to view the Video)
About Vivek Bhaskaran - As head of privately held Survey Analytics, Vivek is responsible for all aspects of strategy and direction.
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Every marketer wants customer loyalty, even brand evangelism, but it seems that one of the key factors in achieving these goals is providing quality customer service. According to the American Express Global Customer Service Barometer, consumers will spend 9% more than the average on companies with excellent customer service.
However, customer service isn’t just knowledgeable staff and employee professionalism. Customer service also means managing bad experiences well. According to this survey, it’s not enough to resolve a customer’s problem. 52% of consumers expect something in return for a flawed customer experience and over 70% of consumers want an apology of some form of reimbursement as compensation. However, if those problems are managed effectively, most customers will return even after a bad brand experience. So no matter how many changes the market has undergone, customer service is still key.
About Vivek Bhaskaran - As head of privately held Survey Analytics, Vivek is responsible for all aspects of strategy and direction.
Tags: amex·compensation·customer loyalty·customer service·customer spending
Trymyui, a new service offering remote usability testing, just hit the scene this spring. TryMyUI is backed by Sani El-Fishawy who started Classifieds2000.com – back in 1997. Classifields2000 was one of the internet startups back in the late 90′s – they powered the classifields section of many major portals of the day – Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, GeoCities and even Hotmail. In 1997 they raised their first round of $2.8M led by Polaris Venture Partners and then sold the company to Excite for $48M in 1998 — Ahah the good old days of the .COM boom!
What is TryMyUI?
Trymyui is a service that allows companies to understand their web users better. Any company that wants to understand not only what a user would do on their website, but also why they would do it should visit Trymyui to set up an account and receive a prompt reply. Trymyui assembles and trains testers who have to go through a rigorous qualification process (less than 10% actually make it). The testers are trained to articulate their thoughts while they browse a company’s website, performing various tasks. Trymyui records the tester’s screen and voice and delivers a video to the company as well as responses to a questionnaire that the company sets up within a matter of hours.
Why is it unique?
The Trymyui website is spiffy, the tone of their content is candid, and their service is incredibly useful. It was easy to find answers to my questions as well as understand those answers once I found them. But what makes me excited about Trymyui is that it encourages companies to go further with their user testing – any user testing firm that encourages deeper interaction with the user understands that traditional market research is no longer enough.
What is the business model – aka is this real?
TryMyUI is currently in beta, so its obviously free. They plan on charging anywhere between $10 to $25 per test. Comparing this to a traditional in-person usability testing model, this is what we call in the business “a disruptive” model. The reason this can be provided at such low a price is that the testers are at their homes – so there are no capital costs involving setup of computers etc. – Anyone with a microphone and a decent ability to verbalize their thoughts as they are clicking through a site can be a tester.
Challenges / Naysayers?
Couple:
- The obvious security and confidentiality issue. If you are developing a super-secret application and you don’t want anyone to run though the app – well – we have a little issue here. I don’t see Microsoft using this to do usability testing on a brand new product line. Maybe a private version of TryMyUI with a controlled group would be an add-on in the future?
- Scale and Pricing – Can you really scale this business to something large at $20/Test – Maybe. I am not sure. Of course time will be the judge. This is very applicable to Web based applications – so thats a fairly large market – but still a finite market size. Furthermore, the mobile application market is growing and in theory taking away from the web-app development market.
About Vivek Bhaskaran - As head of privately held Survey Analytics, Vivek is responsible for all aspects of strategy and direction.
Tags: tester·trymyui·user interaction·user testing
Internet users continue to spend more and more time surfing online video. comScore released the results of their May 2010 U.S. Online Video Rankings which showed that 183 million U.S internet users watched some form of online video over the course of May. It also showed that YouTube (among other Google properties) accounted for 43.5% of the market.
This is good news for YouTube, of course, but it also means that more and more eyeballs are looking to the internet for another video viewing source. In fact, the study also showed that nearly every internet user is now watching some form of online video (85% of the total U.S. internet audience). That’s a good chunk of the digital audience. Hopefully marketers are paying attention to this trend and adding it to their digital strategy.
About Vivek Bhaskaran - As head of privately held Survey Analytics, Vivek is responsible for all aspects of strategy and direction.
Tags: ComScore·Google·media trends·online video·YouTube
After being in the Market Research business for 10 years and leading Greenfield Online public and then overseeing the merger/buyout of Perseus and Websurveyor into Vovici – Dean Wiltse is back in the game – with ThumbSpeak.
As mentioned in my previous post, we’ll be profiling innovative companies that are attempting to change Market Research and data collection and looking beyond traditional models. This is our first post on this.
What is ThumbSpeak?
A mobile panel. Where users _actually_ take surveys using smartphones (iPhone, Android devices etc.) Users download the app – and the App then “pushes” surveys to consumers. Consumers get points/rewards (like with most other panels) for completing surveys. Thumbspeak sells access to these users to market researchers who want to tap into them.
Why is it unique?
Traditional panel providers like eRewards, Toluna, SSI have mobile panels – as in they have users who have (or have used) a smart phone – but the surveys are still conducted over the traditional web interface. Thumbspeak is solely focused on the mobile platform. All their data-collection efforts are going to be in the smartphone — at least for now. They have an iPhone App out – the Android app will come out soon in the next few months.
Next – they are recruiting via developers. There are over 200,000 apps in the App-Store – and most of them are Free. Which means there are approximately 100,000 – 200,000 developers developing for the Apple eco-system alone. If you add in the Android platform and the Symbian/Palm OS platfrom – there are a LOT of developers trying to make money off smartphones. Not all can make money. They need a better monetization model than simply ads. Ad’s in mobile work to some extent, but because of real-estate restrictions – you cannot make a ton of money just on Ads. Thumbspeak has the ability to make these developers some cash – but being the conduit between users who want to pay, who need access to mobile users and want to conduct market research, and the development community.
What’s the business model – aka – is this real?
So far it seems. The typical going rate for an iPhone completed panel member is ~$6/Completed Survey. This revenue can be distributed between the developer and Thumbspeak – and given the fact that Wiltse has a deep background in the panel business from GreenField – I don’t doubt that he can sell panels! Wiltse was the CEO of GreenField with a 400M market cap. He also has a good background in software development when he led Vovici and oversaw the Perseus/Websurveyor merger.
Challenges/NaySayers?
Couple :
- Critical Mass – Any panel company requires critical mass – its the chicken and the egg problem. Wiltse will have to overcome that both from a sales and recruitment standpoint.
- Competition – Toluna, SSI, GMI and eRewards – have a combined market cap of about a 500-800M – So you are talking about the big boys here. If they smell blood – they’ll come after this – I would not say this is that bad – very likely one of them just buys Thumbspeak?
About Vivek Bhaskaran - As head of privately held Survey Analytics, Vivek is responsible for all aspects of strategy and direction.
Tags: mobile surveys·panel management
In Ketchum and myYearbook’s recent survey of 13 to 19 year olds, they found that teenagers are some of the most active online social influencers. How do these teens spend their time? They text, update, hang out on social networking sites for about two hours each day, they make purchases and then they talk about those purchases. In fact, in terms of brand advocates and brand adversaries, the teens may be the best resource for online feedback.
Many people have stated that teens that spend that much time online must remain isolated and antisocial. But this report shows that on Saturday nights, these teens are also the ones most likely to be out and about at a party. Surprisingly, those teens that are most social online are also most social offline.
About Vivek Bhaskaran - As head of privately held Survey Analytics, Vivek is responsible for all aspects of strategy and direction.
Tags: brand advocate·feedback·social influencers·Social Networking·teens
Peter Levin is one of the most down-to-earth CTO’s of a federal agency I’ve ever met – Strike that – he is one of the most straight talking CTO’s I’ve _ever_ met. It’s quite amazing that he is the CTO of a 310,000 (yes – 310K) person organization – the Veterans Administration.
Recently, Peter gave a talk on “Get to Yes” – on Gov 2.0 – To talk about his experience on making Government work and work better. Key points he mentioned:
- The notion of “Getting To Yes” – Only Secy Shinseki can say “No” – Find a way to get to “Yes”
- Transforming from Adversary to Advocacy
- I need to get 300K employees to engage – find a channel – Be present, accessible on the web
- IdeaScale worked well – but there are lots of other tools also out there
- 50K employees participating in this experiment
- 6 Million Unique patients the VA serves
Video embedded below:
About Vivek Bhaskaran - As head of privately held Survey Analytics, Vivek is responsible for all aspects of strategy and direction.
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Kreg Atterberry commented on my last post on Social Media Research – Using Facebook for Survey Invitations and Market Research – He said:
Facebook rewards ads that keep it on the site. Direct the survey takers to a fan page with a special tab for your survey. It will cost you about half as much for running the same Facebook ad and not directing to an outside URL.
He actually brings up a very good point – one from a financial and economic standpoint – Facebook has different rates for ads that go to Facebook pages, than ones that go outside the network – Its obvious from their standpoint – the end-user is still in FB and FB has the potential to monetize the user further (after they’ve given you the click – and billed you for it.)
Another consideration is the user experience. If the users feel, the user experience is uniform they are more likely to continue and take part in the survey.
This brings up the question – How do I set this up? The basics is as follows:
Step 1: Create a Fan Page - If you are a business – then you should already have a Fan Page – if not, this is a good time to create one!
Step 2:
Create a new page or edit an existing page:
Step 3(a):
Add a Tab to the Page (OK This is tricky)
Step 3(b):
Find the FBML App:
Step 3 (c) :
Add it to your page:
Step 4:
Add some content to the newly added Tab: (You can add your survey in an iFrame)
Step 5:
Finally Make your new tab the “Default” tab for your Page.
About Vivek Bhaskaran - As head of privately held Survey Analytics, Vivek is responsible for all aspects of strategy and direction.
Tags: social media research
Today, Sanja Licina, Senior Director – Talent Intelligence for CareerBuilder and I gave a presentation to the the American Marketing Association – as part of the virtual conference – talking about the future of Market Research and beyond. The slides are embedded below (at the bottom of this post.)
One point got a lot of questions was using facebook to recruit participants in a survey. Essentially turning Facebook into a giant panel – and asking Facebook users to come and participate in a survey. If you think through this a little more, Facebook offers a self-service model for displaying ads – and ads can be invitations to come to take a survey (not just playing farmville!)
Facebook also allows you to target your audience very specifically – based on traditional demographic models (age, gender, sex etc.)
So here is a step by step instructions on how to recruit users to come to a survey from facebook:
Step 1: Login to Facebook and Click on “Create an Ad”
Step 2: Change the destination to “I want to advertise a web page”
Step 3: On the URL – enter the URL to your survey
Step 4: Choose targetin
Step 5: Define a budget – and Let it rip!
We’ve used this model successfully on a few campaigns!
Technorati Tags: social media research
About Vivek Bhaskaran - As head of privately held Survey Analytics, Vivek is responsible for all aspects of strategy and direction.
Tags: social media research
We are launching a new column and segment profiling companies and services that are innovating and changing Market Research – ResearchBase. We are specifically looking and targeting companies and services that have the power to rethink and reinvent market research.
We’ll be listing all these services under the tag researchbase :
About Vivek Bhaskaran - As head of privately held Survey Analytics, Vivek is responsible for all aspects of strategy and direction.
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