I’m always excited to find new concepts for research 2.0 tools. As a market researcher I’m in constant search for ways to follow internet users attitudes and perceptions in natural surroundings. As you well know, Google Trends/ Yahoo Buzz (search trends), Blog Pulse / IceRocket (blog citation trends) Omgili (forum citation trends) are frequent visitors in TrendsSpotting. Moreover, TrendsSpotting has been collecting consumers’ attitudes via forums and Q&A websites.

Tagging as a research tool:
At TrendsSpotting, we have been using tags to follow trends on the social media: We have been predicting future trends through tagging the predictions suggested by web / tech and marketing influencers, and displayed common trends by using cloud tags. We’ve been following top websites to use tags in order to understand the interests of web users.

Having that said, you will probably understand my excitement over Noah Brier’s (one of the leading advertising focused bloggers) experiment with brand tags.
Noah Brier describes the idea behind Brand Tags: “If brands exist as the sum of all thoughts in someone’s head, then if you ask a bunch of people what a brand is and make a tag cloud, you should have a pretty accurate look at what the brand represents”.

What Noah Brier actually accomplished from a market research perspective is to provide the Top of Mind / Front-of-Mind
free association test, regularly used to understand the brand’s hard core values. Using brands’ corporate logos, Noah is now collecting free spontaneous tags associated to few hundreds top global brands.

What do you think about it?

images source: theclones.fr

I would like to draw your attention to an interesting research tracing preferences of fashion clothing, denim in specific. Synovate surveyed around 7,700 people in the United States, Canada, Brazil, France, Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia, Serbia, Russia and South Africa.
I was fascinated to find so many culture differences originating in social norms:

French were the ones to show style differentiations (highly in favor of jeans in the office, while finding it inappropriate to wear in parties).

Americans report not to follow street fashion or celebrities. (I’m sure American might get tired of following celebrities. Still, I think they can’t help it…)

Russians were found highest in money spending on jeans while Americans were the lowest spenders.

Brazilians are the ones to own the most pairs of jeans.

Canadian and American women faced the greatest difficulties with purchasing the right fit.

For full survey report on jeans purchasing behavior – follow the link.

Universal McCann’s survey showed Video Clips are the quickest growing platform, up from 31% penetration in Wave 1 to 83% in Wave 3. 
A recent study carried out by Synovate in behalf of ClipBlast! (March 08) shows that when it comes to finding online video, search takes a backseat to unaided navigation (also known as discovery) and content recommendations.

• 53% found videos through their own exploration
• 52% found through recommendations from others
• 40% searched for specific videos
• Other forms of video findability - 18% following online recommendations from people they didn’t know; 10% via unsolicited email; and 9% via email or RSS feeds.

Online video content is exploding at an incredible rate… but finding what you want is hard. –claims Josh Bernoff -Forrester analyst.

2007 Synovate + Clipblast survey also found Americans were having a tough time locating the video that they want on the Web. 40% reported that the quest for video online is “frustrating” or “inconsistent.”

The video Web is dictating a fundamental break from the traditional search model—a departure that represents a tremendous vote of confidence in Web 2.0,” said Gary Baker, CEO of ClipBlast!.

Analysing video content has always been a challenge. At the moment most video search uses only the title, any tags given by the author or others, and potentially words used in links to the video. To be truly useful, video search needs to index both the words and images in the video in a meaningful way.

Beyond that some interesting technologies are around: 
Blinkx and Nexidia, allows video search using its voice recognition and text indexing capabilities. 
Another is Viewdle which “sees” the person, “remembers” him/her and “recognizes” the person throughout all new videos.

more on players in the field - read here.

In conclusion: Video contents are HOT. At the same time video search is into infancy while users experience a real frustration. In the absence of good search - what seems working is – users recommendation.

World Health Organization describes tobacco as epidemic & announced a new program MPOWER to increase smoking prevention efforts in the developing world. The global stats are mind-blowing.

• There are more than one billion smokers in the world.
• Globally, use of tobacco products is increasing, although it is decreasing in high-income countries. More than 80% of the world’s smokers live in low- and middle-income countries.
• Almost half of the world’s children breathe air polluted by tobacco smoke.
• Tobacco use kills 5.4 million people a year - an average of one person every six seconds - and accounts for one in 10 adult deaths worldwide.

2008 US Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index reveals that 21% of Americans smoke. The likelihood of smoking generally increases as annual incomes decrease (exception occurs among those making less than $6,000 per year).

Gallup 2008: US sample.

Other findings from the survey:

1. Among US 23% of men and 19% of women smoke.
2. Blacks are the most likely to smoke (23%) and Asians are least likely to smoke (12%). Hispanics and whites fall in between, at 17% and 20%, respectively.

Comparative global surveys (2006-7) show that at the higher end - 50% of people in Turkey smoke, whereas at the low end, 6% in Nigeria smoke.

Going by ComScore reports in February 2008 Chantix,Pfizer’s smoking cessation treatment, was the top searched prescription brand generating more than 500,000 search queries in US.

Shire’s Adderall for ADHD and Pfizer’s 10 year old “blue pill” Viagra came in a close second and third on the list, respectively.Most Commonly Searched Prescription Brands US:

Source: comScore, Inc.

Again 5 of the 15 most frequently searched prescription brands were “depression” treatments. Those treatments included Lilly’s Cymbalta and Prozac, Wyeth’s Effexor, Forest’s Lexapro and GlaxoSmithKline’s Paxil.

Interestingly, globally, the search term “depression” & “smoking” shows undulating pattern - it reaches zenith during first quarter of the year , hits a nadir during summer months & again peaks up in the subsequent quarter.

Is our “smoking” habits mostly “depression” related?

If you had a really hard time in checking your smoking habits - cheer up .Summer is approaching & so are less “depressing” months. Its achievable as Quit smoking is 13th most completed goal in 43 things…else you can always have “chantix”.

image source: w3.org

Few days ago Twitter has announced its Japanese version.

Why did twitter choose Japan for its first localized version?
2007 stats show a high tendency in favor of twitter platform among Japanese users:
• In a Japanese online survey – 25% showed an interest in a Japanese version of “Twitter”.
• Tokyo – was found to be the number 1 city in the world with the most twitterers

Japanese, leading the mobile web revolution, are the ultimate group to adopt a mobile based instant platform.
As suggested in the Guardian review, Japanese are known as the “Thumb Tribe” - a tribe who, for the most part, prefer their mobile to the fixed internet. Will Japanese twitter more on the Japanese twitter version, probably yes!. But, as can be learned from the UM study, Japan might lead the way, but its other Eastern and European countries to follow and highly adopt the social media.

Universal McCann has recently published its comparative study following Social Media trends by three waves: September 2006 (Wave 1), June 2007 (Wave 2) March 2008 (Wave 3).

Research highlights:

1. Social media is a global phenomenon happening in all markets regardless of wider economic, social and cultural development.

2. Asian markets (not including Japan) are leading in terms of participation, creating more content than any other region

3. All social media platforms have grown significantly over the three Waves: Video Clips are the quickest growing platform, up from 31% penetration in Wave 1 to 83% in Wave 3

4. Social Networks: 57% have joined a Social Network, making it the number one platform for creating and sharing content: 55% of users have uploaded photos, 22% of users have uploaded videos

5. The widget economy – 23% of social network users have installed an application – 18% of bloggers have installed applications in their blog templates

6. Blogs are a mainstream media world-wide and a collective rival to traditional media (184m bloggers world-wide, China has the largest blogging community in the world with 42m bloggers) – 73% have read a blog, 45% have started a blog

7. Social media has strong impacts over brand’s reputation – 34% post opinions about products and brands on their blog – 36% think more positively about companies that have blogs

Social media by waves: Universal McCann survey:

My remarks:

1. While the trends are known and frequently discussed, the survey presents a clear picture of the successful penetration of social media platforms worldwide, mainly blogs and social networks, including video and music downloads. As those trends are already highly adapted world wide, alternative participatory habits as podcasts and RSS can be predicted (those do show a steady rise, but yet to be adopted by the mainstream users).
2. Interestingly, comments on news websites show almost no increase - new techniques to offer real motivation sets are necessary to bring this important participatory behavior to a rise.
3. Here comes China – participatory rates are high in all social medias (what’s wrong with Japan??)

More stats from the survey? participatory rates by social media platform, countries, time… Read the rest of this entry »

Sphere: Related Content

image source: Interband

Habbo, a leading virtual world youth website, reports its second Global Habbo Youth Survey, examining the interests, values, attitudes, and online habits of their global audiences.

For the study, Habbo surveyed 58,486 teens between the ages 11 and 18 from 31 countries.
While the stats are interesting to follow, we have to notice that they do not represent mobile youth behavior nor online behavior, but only those who are among Habbo users. As I see it, it does provide some interesting indications for what we may consider next to come.

Communication tools:
Instant messaging was found as the most popular communication tool:

• 88% regularly communicate via SMS
• 76% use the internet to Instant Message friends;
• 72% report having active email accounts (probably as a secondary communication tool, for non-personal needs)
• 71% use their mobiles as a portable mp3 player (up from 38% in the 2006 Habbo survey!)
• 70% take photos and videos (up from 11% in 2006).
• 64% play games (up from 51% in 2006)

Online preferences and behavior:

• YouTube and MySpace were reortd as the most popular global Web sites
• 50% reported that they forward humorous links and videos to their friends
• 30% regularly upload content.

(Among U.S. users, the most popular web sites were MySpace and YouTube, followed by AddictingGames, RuneScape and Facebook).

Consumer brands:
According to the survey - brand familiarity clearly affects teens’ choices as consumers. Moreover - yesterday’s leading brands are still hot today:

• 74% reported that familiar brands guide their purchasing decisions.
• Global well-known brands, such as McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Nokia ranked high for both boys and girls.
• Gender differences were found in clothing brands: boys favor Nike, Adidas and Billabong as their top clothing brands, where as girls preferred Hennes and Mauritz, Nike and Roxy.

Methodology:
58,486 teenagers were surveyed in October and November 2007. Habbo states that statistical weighting was employed to give all participating countries an equal weight in the global results. Habbo claims 8.6 million unique users on a monthly basis.

More on youth in TrendsSpotting? see previous reviews.

Pew Internet survey (conducted December 2007*) reveals that 41% of all adult Americans have logged onto the internet on the go (away from home or work either with a wireless laptop connection or a handheld device).
29% of internet users say they do this at least every few weeks, with 21% doing this at least a couple days a week.
comScore also presents a promising picture: The number of people using broadband mobile Internet connections jumped to 2.16 million in the final three months of 2007 as compared to 854,000 in the same period a year earlier.

While the future for mobile web does look promising in all angles, I call for a cautious approach: when we examine only the “pure” internet access activities (sending email, instant messages, getting maps or directions, or accessing the internet for information and news) as gathered on the Pew Internet survey, we see that the stats are still low, even on the most basic internet applications:

Most popular internet activities “on the go” (among those who have a cell phone or personal data assistant, n= 1,704)

Most popular internet activities “on the go”, by age, ever (among those who have a cell phone or personal data assistant, n= 1,704)

Most popular internet activities “on the go”, by age, typical day (among those who have a cell phone or personal data assistant, n= 1,704)

More on mobile / web stats:
US and UK markets – January 2007
US mobile: activities and profits
US versus Europe 2006: Mobile Internet penetration is lower in the U.S. than in many European countries

* The Pew Internet Project’s December 2007 survey interviewed a sample of 2,054 adult Americans, which included 500 respondents contacted on their cell phones.

Google has released a closed beta for a new trend spotting tool, exclusive for TrendsSpotting friends.

cheers!

Some contrasting facts shows the transition phase we are into today -

• Following the lowest-rated Emmys since 1990, 80th Annual academy awards or Oscar experienced all time low viewership (20% dip).
• DVD sales are down by 3% for the first time since the format debuted in 1997.
• NPD reports U.S. Game Industry Growth Up 43% .

Netflix surveys users on Xbox & PS3 to gauge their interest in streaming movies to their gaming consoles.

Connecting the dots the larger picture looks like - our entertainment quota slowly gravitating towards video games from movies. Infact Shrek the Third didnt do as well as Shrek 2. DreamWorks Animation CEO and former Disney honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg speaks out on the same.

Competition at retail from other sources such as video games has had an impact on the overall home video market and on the performance of individual titles including “Shrek the Third.”

In order to have a better understanding take a look at NPD 2007 best seller video games for US market. Comparing this with 2006 & 2005 NPD best sellers reveals an astonishing trend for video games.

Analysis of the time spent on the Top 10 games over the years shows a substantial shift in the duration for which video games are played. A good majority now plays best sellers for relatively shorter duration 10 -20 Hours in contrast to 2005,where majority used play games for more than 100 hours . For a long the gaming industry primary focused on hardcore gamers – a relatively small segment accounting for disproportionate share of revenue. The thought has taken virtually u turn since 2006.

Hottest video platform:

Read the rest of this entry »