This past year I have been working with a small team at Hallmark to understand if social media is a good tool to understand people.  This was a very interesting project that had a lot of ups and downs along the way. It is time to start sharing what we have learned.

As you are probably aware, social media is having a dramatic impact on just about everything and market research is in the thick of those changes.  At Hallmark, the goal of our market research group, which we call Consumer Understanding and Insights, is to help the company gain an understanding of and empathy for our consumers.  We pour a lot of time and money into this effort because it is at the core of our company, our products, and our services.  It is also something we have been doing since the inception of the company when JC Hall (our founder) used to watch consumers in his stores and then intersect them after they were finished shopping.  He would ask them why they purchased what they did and why they didn’t purchase other things.  From those very early days in Hallmark, understanding the consumer has been ingrained in our culture.

Along the way we have built a solid toolbox of traditional techniques to accomplish the goal of understanding the consumer.  One thing we noticed early on in this project is that the idea of using social media to understand consumers challenged a lot of the paradigms of those traditional techniques which caused it to be a very polarizing subject.  We felt like the best way to address this was through education and a clear articulation of those paradigm shifts.  That is why this white paper was created.

To cut to the chase the main paradigms that we wanted to address through the paper are:

Data Transparency – Social media data is, in general, public and accessible to anybody. This includes being visible to all divisions within a company, and other businesses.

Data Ownership – Traditionally, there has been a clear understanding of who owns particular consumer data. For example: sales data is owned by the retail department, focus group data is owned by research, email open rates are owned by the marketing group, etc. This is different for social media data due to the data transparency described above. As of now, No department or  group really “owns” social media data.

Blurring Boundaries between Research and Other Divisions – As a result of the transparency of  the data and lack of clear ownership, what remains “in-bounds” or “out-of-bounds” for a division is blurred. Even more importantly, roles that used to be reserved for each division have now  blurred as well. Within social media, any of the divisions can utilize the same data. When it comes to engagement, the consumer often does not clearly distinguish between whom they are talking to when they talk to somebody from a brand or company. Everybody is speaking on behalf of the brand. This can create new challenges for traditional research personnel.

Control of the Environment – The researcher previously controlled as many aspects of the listening environment as possible (e.g. recruiting based on specific screening criteria). Social media data generally comes uncontrolled, unedited, and unsolicited.

Blurring of Qualitative and Quantitative – The once separate worlds of qualitative and quantitative research are further blurred by the influx of social media data. The potential and possibility for both qualitative and quantitative researchers to utilize social media data is evident, and a valuable benefit.

Shrinking Space between Brands and People – Social media has “leveled” the playing field for both consumers and brands. Individuals creating compelling or “sticky” content, have the ability to equally-compete for attention with any other media sources. Share of voice is no longer solely a function of size and budget expenditures.

Re-thinking Sampling – Social media data may not always accurately reflect the targeted consumer. In addition, for given topic or source, a disproportionate amount of content may be generated from a subset of contributors. This goes against the traditional researcher paradigm to find a representative sample of the target market.

Influence – Because of the disproportionate contributions of some authors, the notion of influence becomes an added dimension for researchers to consider.  This idea is expanded upon in the Peer Influence Model in Empowered by Josh Bernoff.  Social media data will be more beneficial to exploration and learning applications instead of projections because of this notion of influence.

Relationships are the Ultimate Sources of Insights within Social Media – As response rates continue to decline for research efforts, the ways of encouraging respondent participation are evolving.  The Market Research Executive Board suggests the way to gain participation is now based upon how you can add value to the consumer.  This is more than just reimbursing them for their time via incentives.  Social media research ventures into the realm of building a relationship with consumers and adding value to their lives.

Take a look at the rest of the white paper and let us know what you think.

This was a good fit for this conference because it was full of digital entrepreneurs around the Detroit area coming together to get inspired in these five areas.

• Integrated marketing: How to integrate digital platforms into a well-rounded marketing mix
• User experience: How to create an engaging experience across a variety of digital media
• Mobile: How it’s impacting information exchange and user access and how to utilize it
• Business Intelligence/Analytics: How to define metrics that matter most and apply them
• Regional growth: How the Midwest is participating in the Information Age

Courtesy of Noah Stephens at Noah Stephens Photography

This is a great video that Future Midwest showed last year highlighting why there is a great reason to be excited about what is happening in their city.

Overall I thought that the event was fantastic. The folks that put it on did a great job of bringing together top notch speakers, a diverse group of attendees, and tons of fun along the way. It gave me a lot of energy and desire to keep tabs on Detroit and what is happening there. I only wish I lived closer so that I could be more a part of the effort. My goal is to spread to word around to folks that probably aren’t thinking about Detroit in this way right now. Be ready… good things are coming.

The event took place in this really cool refurbished farmers market called the eastern market. Very cool venue (But really cold these two days)!

It was details like this that truly gave the event that “cool” vibe

Of all the people that I got to spend time with I was especially intrigued by the artists that I found trying to expose more of Detroit than what the media tends to show. Here are 3 guys Noah, Chris, and Erik that I found especially inspiring.

Noah Stephens took this photo of Ben and I speaking as well as these from the event is doing an inspiring project called The People of Detroit that is aimed at putting a face to the real people behind Detroit that are building it back up. You can read more about his story here but Noah was motivated to show the world that not everybody eats Raccoon in Detroit. Great guy, great story, great talent.

As you can tell by the name Curating Pixels I am very interested in the future of the web and the part that curating will play. This was a big theme in the event and it came up multiple times on top of what I said in my talk about it. One cool application was from Oliver Starr of Pearltrees.

The Keynote of the first night was from Dan Gilbert the Chairman of Quicken Loans as well as many other things (e.g. owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers). I was impressed with the risks and investments that Dan and Quicken are making in the city by moving their people back downtown. They want to turn the main street called Woodward and turn it into Webward. A great idea I think.

I will be honest and admit that when I first heard about this opportunity I was not that excited about going to Detroit. I had bought into all of the negative coverage from the news. But my opinion totally changed after this experience and I have a new found appreciation and admiration for what the people of Detroit are doing to try to bring this city back from the dead.

It was still very alarming to drive all over the city and see just complete destruction and emptiness like what I captured in these photographs

(Little blurry because we were driving)

But even though there was all this destruction I was still very excited to see some really cool details around the city.

I am rooting for you Detroit!

Thank you for having me Adrian, Dave, and the Future Midwest Gang!

#FMW11

~Josh

I help out my local Chick-fil-A restaurant in Kansas City with their social media effort. One of the main things we are working on is our Facebook page. We were in the early stages of it but had about 500 fans going and were starting to get some momentum.

Last week I got a panicked call from the store owner telling me that the page was gone. Apparently one of the other admins for the site had a hacker get into his site and take it down. In the process it actually took down the CFA site we had been working on together. This was surprising to me because we were both admins. I thought because of my connection with the site it would not have been pulled down with his site.

I was wrong!

The page was nowhere to be found. Through numerous attempts to get help from Facebook we were out of luck. Very frustrating and scary seeing how quickly all that effort could be gone.

Since I have kick started another site and built it up to the 25 fans required to reserve a URL. I thought that I would have been able to recover the URL from the previous site.

I was wrong again!

Nope I had to come up with another URL for the new site. This was also really frustrating because as you can imagine we used the best one originally and had to drum up the best next fit. And now we have to set out and correct link after link that we attached to the old URL. Get new flyers and other printed marketing with the URL on it. It is amazing how much this little hack job messed up.

The bottom line of this all is to be careful and to know the power of one admin over a site. Make sure that all the admins know the potential for harm they have for the joint site.

.

~Josh

I have been getting a lot of questions lately about Twitter.  What it is, How to use it, and Why do I even care.  So I decided that it would be a good idea to start at the beginning and make an attempt at explaining Twitter.

I always recommend starting with this great video that sums up the essence of twitter.

“What’s happening?”

Twitter in its simplest form is ability for anybody to publicly answer the question “What’s happening?” (used to be “What are you doing?”) in 140 characters or less.  By itself this capability is rather unimpressive, but with 71 Million daily visitors (as of 12.07.09 | thanks WolframAlpha) there obviously must be more to it.  Answering this question is called a “Tweet” or more generically a Microblog.

Layered on top of the microblogging capability in Twitter is the ability to follow, or opt-in to the posts from people that you are interested in.  For me, the people I like to follow are my friends, thought leaders, musicians, and other people/companies that I care what they are saying/thinking about.

Below is an example of my stream on twitter.  A stream is the chronological display (newest on top) of all the tweets from the people that you are following.  As you can see, threaded together I have tweets from me (@joshgunkel), Friends (@jgoldsborough, @kevindeshazo), Social Media Experts (@mashable, @briansolis), leaders from my church in Atlanta (@kpstanfill, @jeffhenderson), and companies (@hilcocreative, @marketingprofs) who are all twitter users that I follow.

Each little chunk of text is the tweet, the bold text that starts the tweet is the author.  Also note in some of the tweets there are words that start with the @ symbol (@feeband or @adventusokc).  These are called mentions and are identified by the @ symbol before someones twitter name.  When your name is mentioned, twitter notifies you with the tweet.  This is one of the main ways that twitter users have a conversation.  In addition to the mention technique you can also use a “Hashtag” which is identified by the # symbol (#fb or #okcevents).  When the # is used the hashtag becomes a link to a search on that same term.  Hashtags are then used to draw a common thread between tweet comments.

One of the key components of Twitter is the ability to ReTweet.  ReTweeting is simply forwarding tweets that you find interesting or worth sharing with your followers.  A retweet is denoted with an “RT” or “via” followed by the twitter name of the original tweet.  This adds to the viral nature of Twitter.

There is a way to communicate privately on Twitter.  It is called a Direct Message.  Direct messages can only be seen by the sender and the recipient.  The way to send direct messages differs depending on what platform you use for Twitter.

The final component I wanted to draw your attention to are the URL’s that look like gibberish  (http://bit.ly/13s3Oh).   Because of the 140 character limit a group of companies popped up that allow for the shortening of URL’s so that you don’t have to paste the entire URL in if you want to share a link in a tweet.  Of those companies I have found Bit.ly to be the most useful because of the browser add-ons and analytics that come with it.

For more Twitter words check out this blog post Tweet, Hashtag, Twittosphere, WHAT?!?

Another reason that Twitter has taken off is that you can interact with it in almost endless ways.  The basic way is through the website at www.twitter.com.  On top of that you can use a desktop program like TweetDeck or Seesmic.  But probably the number one reason for Twitter growth is the ability to use it via cell phone.  Originally this was done through text message, but with the growth of the iPhone and other smart phones, mobile twitter programs have been popping up like crazy.  A couple of the leading ones are Twitteriffic (What I use), Tweetie, and Tweetdeck Mobile.  Using Twitter through your cell phone lets you capture your thoughts as they happen and share them with all of your followers.  Including pictures through companies like TwitPic, YFrog, and Posterous

71 Million Daily Visitors & 490 Million Daily Page Views

Where it starts to get even more interesting is when you think about the millions and millions of people that are using Twitter and the vast amount of content “Tweets” being generated on a constant real time basis.  We have the capability to know what is going on at all times from millions of little reporters around the globe.

From Twitter we found out about a plain landing in the Hudson

and about the riots in Iran, (Mashable Article)

and even about earthquakes in LA as it happened.

“But why should I be interested in using Twitter?”

So now what do you think about twitter?  Does it look like something that you could find useful or even fun?  It is definitely not for everybody but there are a lot of people out there that made fun of it before they gave it a chance.  But once they dove in and really tried it they were hooked.

One of my favorite descriptions of the Twitter environment is from the Twitter book by Tim OReilly (@timoreilly) and Sarah Milstein (@sarahm)

Although status updates may sound mundane, people on Twitter have found that becoming aware of what your friends, family and colleagues are doing (without having to respond) leads to a lightweight but meaningful connection, sometimes called “ambient awareness” or “ambient intimacy“, a term coined by Leisa Reichelt (@leisa)

Tim and Sarah go on to explain other things that Twitter is good for like sharing news and commentary, breaking news and shared experiences, and business conversations.  It is something that is hard to describe but once you get into the groove with Twitter it is hard to stay away.

There are many different ways that people are using Twitter.  Think of it like a telephone and all of the different ways that people use their phone.  For catching up with old friends, for business deals, for sharing news, for quick updates about what you are doing, etc. etc.  The same is true for Twitter.

Does Twitter have a use in the Business World?

One of the biggest reasons that Twitter has exploded like it has is because of the ways that it is impacting companies around the world.  As a result of the Millions of people adding their thoughts and ideas to the Twittosphere all the time companies and brands are often times the subject of those tweets.  Do you know what they are saying about you and your brand?

Where do I go from here?

If you are at the point where you would like to dive further into the twittosphere I wrote a couple additional blog posts that should help you do that.

This first post should help you get started in Twitter.  In it I step through how to start your account, find people, and other starter lessons in the new technology.

• How to get started

In these next two posts I explain in more detail the many different ways that people have used Twitter in both personal and business ways.

• Personal Uses for Twitter

• Business Uses for Twitter

There are tons of great examples of companies and people using Twitter.  Each finding a need in their business or personal life and then using Twitter to meet that need.

• Examples of Twitter in Use

One of the newest features of Twitter is the addition of Twitter Lists.  In this post I explain what they are and give some ideas about how to leverage them for your goals.

• Twitter Lists

There are many ways to tap into this huge network of content being created around the world.  The basic and most useful is through Twitter search.  Twitter search gives us the ability to search the entire twittosphere for a particular word or string of words and see all of the things people of said about it.

• Search

I would love your feedback on this post.

• Did it help you understand this phenomenon called Twitter?
• Did it make you excited to try it?
• What are other questions that you have about Twitter?

Via: The Steel Method

It was created by Kate Ray (currently working on kommons.com – a news organization built on top of Twitter”) titled, Web 3.0. (Thanks for bringing it to my attention Mitch Joel: Six Pixels of Separation)

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

(Thanks for bringing it to my attention Mitch Joel: Six Pixels of Separation)

The next video is an update to the already hugely popular video Socialnomics – Social Media Revolution. These are stats that will blow your mind.

(Thanks for bringing it to my attention Mari Smith)

My new job is to help Hallmark look 3-5 years out into the future and identify mega trends that will have an impact on our business.  We are called the Foresight Team.  I don’t know if this sounds interesting to you or not but I am totally stoked about this new position.  It is going to be very challenging but at the same time very exciting.  It is a role that has never existed at Hallmark before.  And to top it all off I get to work for one of my favorite people at Hallmark Tom B.

It is still really early in my job but my mind is already focused in on these trends.

• The collision of social media and industries (e.g. News, Politics, Medical, Law, etc.)
• The Splinternet
• Hyper Relevant Data
• Semantic Web
• Location based applications (Gowalla and Foursquare)
• Social Commerce
• Going from a web of sites to a web of streams ~Steve Rubel
• Social and Real Time Search

What are the trends that you are excited about?  Who do you look to for thought leadership in this arena?

Thankfully we have a girl name that we love (a secret) but are struggling to choose the perfect boy name. We have narrowed it down to these 5 names:

• Xavier
• Landon
• Gabriel
• Landrey
• Xander (Pronounced Zander)

So we decided to go with a little crowdsourcing on this one and ask our social circle of friends. Please join in the fun and help us name our next child!

~Josh

(polls)