Google heeft een patent aangevraagd op een technologie waarmee ze de meest invloedrijke mensen op sociale netwerken willen ranken. Hoewel er nog niet veel details bekend zijn zou het systeem op een vergelijkbare manier werken als Google Pagerank.

Business Week schrijft dat dit idee bij Google is geboren uit de tegenvallende samenwerking met MySpace. In 2006 is Google een deal ter waarde van $900 miljoen aangegaan met MySpace, waarmee ze voor 3 jaar rechten hebben verkregen om advertenties binnen het sociale netwerk te plaatsen. Met de ontwikkeling van de eerder genoemde technologie wil Google meer geld aan sociale netwerken gaan verdienen.

Hoe werkt het? Om te bepalen hoe invloedrijk iemand is binnen sociale netwerken zal de nieuwe technologie naar verschillende zaken kijken. Hoeveel connecties heeft iemand? Hoe vaak post iemand iets op de profiel pagina van een ander en vice versa? Hoe veel mensen hebben de video bekeken die de persoon heeft gepost? “Google search displays Web pages with the highest influence—it makes complete sense for them to extend this to online communities and people,” aldus Jeremiah Owyang, analyst bij Forrester Research.

Wat kan hiermee op het gebied van advertising? Business Week haalt het volgende voorbeeld aan:

Say there’s a group of basketball fans who spend a lot of time checking out each other’s pages. Their profiles probably indicate that they enjoy the sport. In addition, some might sign up for a Kobe Bryant fan group or leave remarks on each others’ pages about recent games they played or watched. Using today’s standard advertising methods, a company such as Nike would pay Google to place a display ad on a fan’s page or show a “sponsored link” when somebody searches for basketball-related news. With influence-tracking, Google could follow this group of fans’ shared interests more closely, see which other fan communities they interact with, and—most important—learn which members get the most attention when they update profiles or post pictures.The added information would let Nike both sharpen and expand its targeting while allowing Google to charge a premium for its ad services. If Nike wanted to advertise a new basketball shoe, for example, it could work with Google to plop an interactive free-throw game only on the profile pages of the community influencers, knowing the game would be likely to draw the most attention in these locations. And because the new technique ranks links among groups, Google could also target the ads to broader communities.

Recently, an interesting article about the future look of the Internet was written by Karen Van Godsenhoven, an all-around girl interested in fashion, cultural and lifestyle trends, but in the first place a researcher with a driving motivation to write hot topic articles. In her latest article Karen asked four experts, i.e. Clo Willaert, Bart Becks, Niels Schillewaert and Alberto Pepe, about their view on the new Internet wave, Web 3.0. Good and bad sides are explored (the thin line between simplicity and stupidity), and wishful thinking abounds: from groceries to wine-tasting, your future PC will do it all for you! You can explore her fascinating article by clicking here!

source:http://www.thewordmagazine.be/

Profacts onderzocht in opdracht van UBA (Unie van Belgische Adverteerders) de impact van de crisis op het communicatiebudget van bedrijven. Zowat 93% van de ondernemingen voelt de impact. Er wordt vooral minder geadverteerd op tv, dagbladen, radio, cinema en affichage. Internet is dan weer de grote winnaar van deze crisis.

Tot 20% minder
Bij meer dan 90 procent van de bedrijven heeft de crisis invloed op de mediakeuze en meer dan 80 procent vermindert het mediabudget met gemiddeld 10 à 20 procent. Dat meldt de Unie van Belgische Adverteerders (UBA) vandaag. De Unie analyseerde samen met het onderzoeksbureau Profacts de impact van de financiële en economische crisis op adverteerders en media. Daartoe werd een uitgebreide enquête opgezet waarbij vooral gepeild werd naar de geplande media-investeringen.

Tv-advertenties onder druk
Bij de massamedia staat vooral televisie zwaar onder druk: netto 55 procent van de adverteerders verklaart in 2009 minder in tv te zullen investeren. Daarnaast zal in dagbladen en magazines, cinema, radio en affichage minder geïnvesteerd worden. “De grote winnaar is het internet, waarin netto 37 procent van de adverteerders zelfs in dit crisisjaar extra zal investeren”, aldus de Unie van Belgische Adverteerders.

Als belangrijkste redenen voor het minder investeren in massamedia wordt de hogere kost aangehaald. “Bizar genoeg staan ook nieuwe media als digitale tv en reclame via de mobiele telefoon onder druk. In de meeste andere gerichte media, zoals e-mail-marketing, communicatie op het winkelpunt (POS) en direct mail zal dan weer fors extra geïnvesteerd worden.”

Hulpmaatregelen
De UBA meent dat er ondersteunende maatregelen van de overheid nodig zullen zijn om de mediabestedingen van de adverteerders weer op peil te brengen. “Geen rechtstreekse subsidies, maar initiatieven die een transparante communicatieomgeving bevorderen en de Europese regelgeving toepassen zonder verdere beperkende maatregelen”, stelt de Unie, die in een brief aan de Vlaamse minister van Media, minister-president Kris Peeters, haar medewerking heeft toegezegd.

The 2009 BAQMaR Conference is an annual event bringing together industry executives in the field of quantitative (i.e. traditional marketing research and data mining) and qualitative marketing research. The conference theme ‘Digging for Gold’ searches innovative marketing applications with a significant impact on business!

Conference Theme
The goal of marketing analysis is in the first place to learn about your customers’ behaviour but the goal of any company at the end of the day is to make money. Those two goals can be consolidated however – effective research techniques (both quantitative and qualitative) can have a significant impact on business performance in terms of ROI. The BAQMaR 2009 conference wants to provide you with some real-life cases where this effect is clearly visible.

This event brings together Belgian marketing analysts, marketeers, academics and marketing students to Ghent to present, hear and discuss a broad range of effective research methodologies. BAQMaR 2009 conference theme is entitled “Digging for Gold” and it searches for euro-driven applications in qualitative and quantitative marketing research. We warmly welcome highly efficient marketing analysis applications with a significant impact on return on investment. Indeed, due to heavy economic conditions, intensive competition and very saturated markets, a lot of companies are exploring the analytical boundaries in search of thé most effective and convincing marketing application! These analysts try to build a strong competitive position through a business-driven approach, while serving their clients a new and challenging way of doing marketing research! We warmly welcome all business or academic cases in quantitative (i.e. traditional marketing research & data mining) or qualitative marketing research. We will favor those cases that (i) succeed in calculating and proving the impact of marketing research on the company’s bottom lineand (ii) offer useful insights and learnings for our mixed audience. Why? Because ‘We Are All Analysts!‘

Submit Abstracts
Submission deadline: September 28, 2009
Notification of acceptance: October 31, 2009
Final presentation due: November 16, 2009

We are now accepting abstracts and warmly welcome your submission. All abstracts must be submitted by sending them to submission@BAQMaR.be.

Please review the instructions before submitting your abstract.

For the past few years Seth Godin has continued to be the top-of-mind business guru among marketing executives. Today I ask him a few questions about what he does, how he does it, and what some of his thoughts are on marketing research.

Tom: Being the top of mind business guru among marketing executives continuously must be hard work. What is your secret? Where do you get your inspiration from? What are your favorite business authors, blogs, and publications?

Seth: It’s not hard work, it’s consistent work, but a joy. I notice things, things that influence me or resonate with me, and then I write about them. Developing this habit isn’t easy, but once you do it, it sticks around for a while. I spend six or eight hours a day reading and watching and interacting… being an omnivore is a key part of the process.

Tom: In a down economy such as this one, where do you think marketers can best invest their time and resources to maintain and grow their businesses?

Seth: In down economies, the only thing that’s going to change things is changing things. This is hard for a lot of marketers who are used to defending the status quo, but it’s truly the best option.

Tom: In one of our recent studies, many executive level marketers said that the buzz words they were most tired of hearing were “Web 2.0″, “Social Networks”, and “New Media”. Yet the relative importance of these marketing concepts did not decline. I believe they are important and part of the frustration lies in not having understood how to leverage them effectively yet. Do you agree? How do you think marketers could better leverage web 2.0/3.0 or whatever we end up calling it in the future?

Seth: I’m sure that people are tired of these phrases, because they’ve become empty buzz words, not useful ways to grow your business. But, and this is the essential but, ignoring it just because a lot of people don’t understand it is self-defeating. I wrote Meatball Sundae to address this very issue. You will not thrive merely because you are the incumbent. You will thrive going forward because you embrace the new forms of communication, not because you turn your nose up at them.

Tom: In market research one of the most important/strategic types of projects we engage in is customer segmentation. Some of these tend to be survey driven, others are done strictly based on CRM data, yet others, the ones we typically run involve a combination of survey research and data mining CRM data. Survey data tends to be better at creating 4-6 customer types and respective treatments while CRM data can technically be used to create a more personal 1-1 segmentation. However the latter is usually more difficult to act on at a strategic level. What is your view on customer segmentation? How should businesses best identify and manage against the needs of various customer groups?

Seth: I think there are two conflicting forces at work here. First: treat different customers differently. Second: if you make your business too complex, your people will be unable to take responsibility for what they do because they don’t understand it. Small is the new big. No matter how big your business gets, you need to give individuals and small teams the ability to make a difference with whatever segment you describe.

Tom: As data availability continues to increase, I believe the importance of identifying/filtering and analyzing relevant data can be a powerful way to gain an information advantage over our competition. On the other hand the importance of the irrational, or emotional component of customer behavior is also increasing in interest. Techniques for better analyzing and understanding emotion are beginning to also become more important in market research. How do you view the importance of these two types of consumer understanding? Is one more important than the other?

Seth: Stories rule. Stories make us vote, or buy an iPod or give money to a charity. Stories trump science very time.

Tom: What is your overall opinion on market research. What do you think we can do better to serve other parts of marketing and ultimately the customer?

Seth: As long as market research is seen as a cost and a staff function, it will never meet its potential. Market research has to deliver practical home runs, insights that pay off far out of proportion of the expense and time invested.

Tom: Thanks for your insights Seth. We’ll continue to practice our swinging.