Tag: segmentation

  • Search me..

    I was quoted in a recent Social Samosa post – on Facebook Graph Search. Do check it out on their website, it has useful thoughts from various others as well.

    Given that it is a fairly large move, (third pillar, Facebook calls it) I thought I’ll add to my quote there. As a final goal, both Google and Facebook are trying to organise and display information to users, because contextually relevant information is still a means to revenue, especially in the era of information overload. Google crawls the web, and Facebook uses social connections as a means to gaining this information. Google is also trying to add social as a context, and Facebook has Bing’s support. It’s not a war now, but it’s definitely armament.

    Facebook has tons of data to get this right, and this is dynamic data, thanks to the information we supply, and this is going to get better as Pages (and people) start optimising for Graph Search. Also, once the Open Graph is integrated and actions outside FB also start becoming data, it will become a larger treasure trove of information. Though there’s no advertising product in sight, I will wager that it is an advertising foray in the guise of a consumer tool. As I wrote in the article, Facebook now has the user’s intent broadly divided into 4 categories (people, places, photos and interests), along with his/her ‘influencers’. All of this will allow for some massive segmentation, and thus better targeted ads. And this is not necessarily evil, it can be damn useful because discoverability will be increased.

    In terms of implication for brands, (like I said in the quote) brands with organic signals (eg. for a retail outlet, check in at a physical location) will have a starting advantage. Once the Open Graph kicks in, social actions on websites will become a huge advantage. Content marketing takes on added significance since every action on FB increases the chances of a brand being discovered. Oh yes, Like is a back with a vengeance! On a tangential note, recruiters could use Graph Search as a hiring tool.

    It’s a long shot, but what would happen if Graph Search was thrown open to Pages. Think about it – as a page admin, I already have the ability to target my post to a certain level (about 7 parameters) but that’s really basic demographics. What if I were able to target (organically) (as Myntra) an Angry Birds t-shirt post at people in India who Like Angry Birds. (or even standard apparel brands)

    Meanwhile, there are two immediate concerns. One – privacy. Users will, over a period of time, calibrate the information they supply to Facebook with the advantages of doing so, but it will be a difficult process. The second, I will highlight through a comment made by Romit on Twitter

    But this is just version 1. I’m sure Facebook will have/build more signals inside the hood to filter data. Social just became even more interesting. For that. Facebook gets a thank you.

    until next time, Like I said…

  • Online Segmenting and segregating

    We’ll start the thought from the easiest place. Facebook. 🙂 From industry leaders quitting Facebook to TC stating that media attacks on FB are getting out of hand, to Facebook deciding to launch ‘simplistic’ privacy options, there’s a ton of reading material out there. (I liked Danah Boyd’s ‘rant‘ quite a bit) But let’s get to the scope of the post, before i digress way out.

    I think it might be safe to assume  that we are different persons to different people. To the large set of siblings, friends, relatives, acquaintances and the various people we interact with, we share different aspects and versions of our personality, depending on the nature, time, depth, even expectations of our interactions and relationships. So, in a Facebook context too, we would like to retain different levels of sharing and communicating too, in spite of Mark Zuckerberg thinking that having two identities shows a lack of integrity. I think this might be the core of the current tussle – a failure to understand the need to segregate connections, and therefore the content that gets distributed to them.

    When i read Adam Singer’s take on Chris Brogan’s post, I was completely in agreement, because I think HE has nailed a universal truth about normalisation. The last part of the post also mentions how we write basis the kind of audience we’d like. That is a kind of content segregation too, and it is necessary now more than ever, because of content abundance.

    It’s not just to do with publishing, it is also to do with the kind of communities we become a part of. The net provides tools which allows us to aggregate  people like ourselves – basis interests, attitudes, beliefs, and if everything else fails, even location 😀  My point, there’s segregation all around.

    Which brings me to the usual suspect – brands. I started on this last week, and found myself thinking of it during the recent UTV Bindass scuffle. Now, if we go by UTV’s brand communication, its clearly a youth brand. I’ve realised that ‘Youth’ is a very flexible segmentation, and people my age might argue that its all in the mind etc, but it was interesting to see that the average age of opinion sharers was on the erm, riper side of 30. I wonder if the brand would want this audience segment as its viewers.

    It reminds me of the Facebook user’s need for segregation choices. While the net gives the brand tools to find users in a desired segment/demographic, and the brand can limit itself to engaging them specifically, there really is no way to prevent interactions coming from/happening outside the segment. In an earlier era, it was easy, because it was mostly one way communication. Now, what does a brand do if its dragged into a conversation? The non-open options (protected tweets, invite-only community etc) are not really great. Now some would say that this thought approach is close to advocating control for brands – which is a strict no-no as per the tenets of social media 🙂 – but I can’t help but think of the choice that the brand might want in terms of the discussions they want to be part of.  In a case like Bindass, will “Thank you for the feedback, but we all know that different audience sets have different needs and likes. Hope to have some programming that you’ll like, soon.” really cut it?

    In Facebook’s case, while i can perhaps understand Zuckerberg’s version of how radical transparency will make us all better, I’ll still make a case for it to be a user’s choice, unhindered by beguiling ToS and changes to it. Similarly, in a scenario in which mobs and brand-baiting are rapidly on the rise, I’d say there should be a freedom of choice for brands too. How brands use it is a different discussion altogether.

    until next time, the answer, my friend, is flowin in the stream 🙂

    PS: Noted that Hippo, which is doing some excellent work on Twitter, replied to Tony’s Hippo-crates wordplay, (reply) but ignored the (same) one which i’d tweeted a couple of days earlier. (btw, he usually beats me to most wordplay stuff and more importantly, gives credit to original tweets when he doesn’t) Anyway, smart segmentation, Hippo knows i almost never snack.

    PPS: Its got nothing to do with the fact that Tony is almost a decade younger, okay? 😉

  • Aggregation and Segregation

    The ‘Morgan Stanley report‘, compiled by their 15 year old intern- on how teens (UK ) consume media- released a few days ago, got less than an enthusiastic response on the web, in spite of (or because?) their introduction stating that they don’t ‘claim representation or statistical accuracy’.

    While newspapers and radio find least favour with the teen crowd, with TV interest waning (except for spikes – sports/ specific shows), even the star on the horizon – Twitter is not spared their inattention, but Facebook, YouTube, and even Google are mentioned as regularly used services. Mobiles are used for talking and texting, and sharing files via bluetooth. (via RWW and TechCrunch) The report is based on anecdotal evidence (not statistical), so its no surprise that its been ripped on many sites. As TC mentions, probably the idea was only to spark off a debate, and not to showcase it as conclusive insights. It still shows how there is clearly not much data available on this age group, so anything goes.

    But I do remember a research published by Nielsen sometime back on how teens use media (US). According to that report, TV usage has gone up in this age group, teens spend less than half the time adults do on the internet, a quarter of them read a newspaper and texting is huge. In both reports, the relative unimportance of the internet is a revelation, especially when it is seen by many as THE medium that’s popular in this age group. As per a 16 year old’s post on TC, (this is anecdotal too 🙂 ) the other point to note is that the walled garden nature of Facebook is actually seen in positive light by this group. Twitter’s relative openness means that they have lesser control on who sees their status updates. The other factor is that they don’t want to waste money texting messages to Twitter, when they’d rather text their specific friends.

    So there are similarities within the age group and there are differences too. This is not the first ‘generation’ study out there. I remember reading at least a couple of comparative studies on how different generations use the net, or technology per se, and there again were trends. There were also quite a few articles on Gen Y (those born between 1980 – 95) – their top social networks (take a look, you’ll find very interesting sites, which you might not have heard about before) , how marketers goof up when targeting them, and a favourite post (and video – The Lost Generation. yes i know it is inspired 😐 ) of mine that talks about the motivations of different generations.

    Trendwatching had the concept of Generation G ( G for generosity), with the trend drivers of recession and consumer disgust, longing for institutions that care, and giving being the new taking, and sharing being the new giving. It also gives ways in which corporates can join this generation, and talks about joining being a fundamental requirement if they wanted to stay relevant to this generation.

    The Morgan Stanley report and the backlash that followed made me wonder as to how, even as we admit that there is indeed media fragmentation and user fragmentation, realise that a ‘one size fits all’ approach will not work, and that digital media gives users so much of content that there is choices galore and something for every niche, we still try to figure out broad patterns to carry out segmentation, and create some structure around all the crowds that inhabit all the spaces – real and virtual. We even call it social media so that we can put it under one umbrella and make a single plan for all the sites that come under it. Is it because marketers are afraid that dealing with an unstructured audience means fresher, better ideas all the while, without easy ways of targeting, without ready made templates and without real knowledge of how it will all end up?

    I also wonder whether this is a transition phase when new media are evolving, along with new communication protocols, or is this the way it is going to be from now on – a thoroughly fragmented audience which cannot be fitted into any stereotype – not even as Gen Y Facebook users? As the costs of distribution become lower thanks to multiple platforms/channels with fewer audiences and reversals of content demand-supply chains, will the spend actually be on the creation of multiple kinds of communication that will be designed with a tiny audience in mind, and the content creators could be anyone – a brand manager/ creative agency/ consumer or a combination, and the activities of a brand are as unstructured as the real time arena it operates in? Do you think it would ever come to that, or is this just the chaos in between while we figure out new ways of sorting consumers for new forms of media?

    until next time, agents of chaos 🙂

    PS. While on generations, read yet another great post from Umair Haque – the Generation M manifesto