In this post:
Full Chart of Results, Why We Focused On Facebook Fan Volume vs. Twitter, But Twitter Isn’t Bad Either, Forecasts Are Only Going To Get Better
Can we have a do-over? Our theory was right, our sample was wrong. If we did it again, we’d hit it out of the park. And if we did it in 2012, our results would be even better. Gallup and all the other pollsters should be afraid, very afraid.
Since the September primaries, we’ve been toying with the theory that the size and growth of candidates’ Facebook and Twitter followings could predict election winners. To lightly indulge our curiosity, we started tracking the social network size of the top two candidates in eight key races—and then we made some predictions.
(Facebook fans and Twitter followers tracked between September 21, 2010 to October 26, 2010.)
Fortunately, we’re not the gambling type. Of the eight races, we only got four right—view full chart. But, all cards on the table, it’s probably because we didn’t track enough of the races.
Read more
Filed Under: Social Media
Tagged otherposts
|
Do social networks have the power to tell the future? Since the September primaries, we’ve tracked the social networks of key congressional and gubernatorial candidates to explore just how accurately social network size and growth predict success.
Here’s a chart of the candidate’s we’ve tracked and our crystal-ball bets. (If you think we’re on to something, use it to your advantage on HuffPost’s “Predict the News” Challenge.)
View the full chart to see all 8 races we tracked.
(Facebook fans and Twitter followers tracked between September 21, 2010 to October 26, 2010.)
Filed Under: Social Media
Tagged otherposts
|
Here are a few of the notable articles Notes On Digital has in its browser’s history.
Facebook vs. FourSquare GroupOn The social local shopping war is heating up—and it’ll boil down to the size of the armies. Facebook’s about to launch a Deal feature for Places—this gives retailers access to approximately 30 million users. While Yahoo is extending GroupOn’s net with a global distribution deal. On the sidelines, FourSquare is still raking in the check-ins.
Don’t Care How, I Want It Now Last week the chatter centered on all-you-can-eat video on demand. Would the networks give Google TV access to their shows? How much would Hulu charge for its premium service? This week it’s all about all-you-can-eat music on demand. Is Apple buying Spotify, the music streaming venture? Will Spotify be able to break into the U.S.? Is Steve Jobs trying to stop it from moving stateside?
Data Debate The Wall Street Journal produces a giant package on consumer privacy in the digital world (that includes a stellar interactive chart). And Mint, the online personal finance service, attempts to attract new users by offering them the opportunity to compare their personal finances to the aggregate spending trends of existing users, which are all online for anyone to see. Our guess: these brands are going after the loyalty of two very different demographics.
Slideshows are incredibly easy to create. Once the back-end structure is in place, editors, with no designer resource, can upload a series of images, slap on a title that gives them some context and flavor, and BAM: you have a slideshow.
We know people click on them. They increase engagement, page views and ultimately opportunities for advertising. As a result, slideshows have become a central figure in the canon of design patterns.
But not all content is good for a slideshow. There are times a slideshow is the perfect style of communication and times that it undermines the user’s positive experience.
The medium is certainly part of the message. To prevent slideshow overuse and abuse, consider its strengths and weaknesses as a communication tool.
Situations where slideshows rock: Slideshows are perfect for linear storytelling and step-by-step processes.
News sites rightly use slideshows to complement feature articles. Carousels of photos are great for providing supplemental content. They can also be strong vehicles for illustrating a news story exclusively through photojournalism.
Another content situation perfectly suited for the “next button” is the how-to. Step by step instructions—from makeup application, cooking recipe steps to home improvement—fit naturally into the slideshow structure.
Situations where slideshows don’t rock: Slideshows are a terrible solution for repurposing a large collection of assets…
Read more
Filed Under: Content, Design
Tagged otherposts
|
Here are a few of the notable articles Notes On Digital has in its browser’s history.
Cheap Thrills Lindsay Lohan and Mel Gibson may be fantastic traffic drivers, but they don’t bring the big money to news sites. A report in Ad Age this week by Perfect Market says traffic from topics like unemployment benefits and the egg recall brought newsmakers more moola. By extension, if an algorithm optimized for revenue generation replaced every editor, every headline wouldn’t cite bad celebrity behavior.
Techies Heart Google TV, But The Networks Don’t October 16, the day Google TVs started shipping, could have been the moment consumers have long been waiting for, the ultimately convergence of the web and the TV. But it wasn’t. NBC, CBS and ABC are restricting full-length episodes of some of their most valuable programs.
Hulu Questions Its Value Hulu has done a fabulous job of attracting ad revenue, but it’s faltering on its strategy of paid content. Rumor has it, it’s thinking of cutting its premium subscription service price from $9.95 to $4.95 per month. And no, Hulu is not available on Google TV. Just more evidence the new web TV market is forming, but not without growing pains.
Ad Blocker 2.0: Facebook Disconnect Google Chrome users can now download a plug-in that erases the omnipresent Facebook “Like” button from sites all across the web. The developer also says the extension prevents Facebook from tracking user behavior on third-party sites—but of course, it doesn’t stop Google from tracking users.
Zuckerberg Reminds Us Of The Value Of User Experience In The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg and frenemy Eduardo Saverin are at odds about monetizing Facebook via advertising. Saverin wants to see returns on his investment. Zuckerberg wants a product that millions of people enjoy using everyday. And then on October 16, in real life, Zuckerberg tells an audience at Y Combinator’s Startup School, “There’s no point right now in having a massive profit.” For most business owners, this extreme level of patience isn’t a possibility, but it does go to show what can be built when the long term is valued over the short term.
You can change your clothes faster than you can change your figure. The same goes for websites.
Major website redesigns take between 9 and 16 months. They require everything from research and strategy work to interaction design, visual design, content development, user testing, engineering and deployment.
But a marketer burdened by a stale, outdated site and the pressure to perform understandably wants improvement faster than that.
The solution is to preface the overhaul with a comprehensive reskin—a less invasive procedure promising to quickly improve the site experience. With a reskin, the focus is on comprehensively redesigning the home page without changing any global navigational elements: if the original site has five links on the navigation bar, the new home page may look completely different, but it will still have the same five links. This type of change functions to improve user experience, while avoiding the laborious work involved in changing the organization of the rest of the site.
Read more
Photograph used under Creative Commons license
by Flickr user library_mistress.
Google products are constantly evolving. Gmail, for instance, during the 5 years it was in beta, was updated several times, adding services like chat, SMS messaging, Google Buzz, offline access and other innovations. Facebook, too, evolves through incremental updates (particularly to their privacy settings). Neither of these incredibly popular sites has gone through a complete redesign or overhaul.
Websites are like living things. They are networks of interconnected systems that interact with ever-changing external stimuli. Content changes affect traffic; traffic trends can influence the content of a well-maintained site. Design impacts user flow; user flow, in a well-maintained site, affects design. The most successful sites consistently, incrementally evolve to best meet the company and the user’s needs—they don’t do infrequent overhauls.
Read more
Brands pay big money for their display ads. It makes sense that they want them to get as much as attention as possible. But not all attention is positive attention.
Marketers should think very carefully before producing interruptive ads, such as pop-ups or large overlays. While consumers do find these ads memorable, it’s likely for the wrong reasons.
In a HUGE research study, 60 participants were asked to complete various tasks that demonstrated their daily Internet routines over a 45-minute period. These routines included perusing news headlines, finding the latest sports results, booking a flight and selecting a restaurant. Basically all normal, everyday Internet uses.
The recall rate for interruptive ads significantly outperformed that of standard display ads. Forty-one percent of our sample could recall at least one aspect of an interruptive ad, while 11% remembered specific ad messaging. Display ads didn’t perform nearly as well with a recall rate of 2.2%.
Read more
Filed Under: Display Ads
Tagged otherposts
|
Photograph used under Creative Commons license by Flickr user Tony the Misfit.
For most people, Google Instant makes life a little easier. Not only are search terms suggested, but previews of the search results are provided. In short, it gets rid of a lot of the guesswork. But for marketers, Google Instant isn’t likely to be such a hit. It dissuades users from accessing the long tail by volunteering popular search words and results before the user stops typing. This causes fewer people to visit the long tail of search. This growing disparity between most popular search terms and least popular search terms could undermine the value of SEO and SEM for marketers.
For many companies, the long tail is the foundation of their organic search (SEO) and paid search (SEM) strategies. A standard report from any web analytics provider will likely show that there are a few search terms that drive more traffic to the site than any other individual search terms. In the long tail, analogy, this is the head. But in many cases those terms are not as important as the remaining search terms, which can drive more traffic in aggregate. It’s best explained in the Netflix vs. Blockbuster analogy: Blockbuster, which recently filed for bankruptcy, had limited storage space for movies in each of their stores. As a result, they only offered consumers the blockbuster movies, the “head” if you will. But Netflix’s warehouses and website could provide consumers with almost every movie available on DVD, the “tail.” While many of these movies only appeal to niche audiences, the total demand for niche movies is actually pretty high. Netflix was able to steal a large part of Blockbuster’s market share in part by catering to and aggregating the long tail of movie viewers. The point is, the long tail is a very big category. And for marketers it’s a key tool for reaching specific audiences at lower prices, as less popular search terms cost less to bid on. If Google Instant does end up cutting off the long tail, the repercussions on SEO and SEM will be immense:
Read more
The warm welcome of a messy kitchen. Photograph used under Creative Commons license by Flickr user betsyjean79.
Patina is the surface appearance of something grown beautiful especially with age or use. A lived-in kitchen, a Leica camera, a leather jacket—they were all once brand spanking new but they all get better with time. Scratches and stains symbolize memories and experiences, and they build up on a durable, perpetually relevant item to create character, or patina.
In the digital world, patina is a key hurdle to product success. Unlike the lifecycle of a physical object, Internet users don’t want to buy into something when it’s new. New online services come and go at hyper-speed, and simultaneously, millions of users are sifting through these products deciding whether or not to use them. If a user lands on a blog with no comments, a social network with no users, a store with no user reviews, they’re apt to move on to places already deemed valuable by mass participation such as Amazon, Facebook and Twitter. In the digital space, it’s essential for products to develop patina as fast as possible, as early as possible in their lifecycles. Without patina, no one would pick a digital product up from the shelf. It’s the barrier to success in an environment where there’s almost no barrier to entry.
Read more
