TimesTwoMarketing

Data, Redefined: Who We're Watching

I've spent a lot of time these past few months considering the changing role of data in our everyday lives. Never before have we been such consumers of data, nor have we been the subjects of so much data collection. Every time you pick up your iPhone or Blackberry, log onto Facebook, or email a friend a link to an interesting New York Times story or Sierra Club fundraiser, you're both using and sharing information with the world. As a result, the line between data generation and consumption continues to get blurrier, and with that, the very definition of "user/customer intelligence" is changing.

Much of my research, of course, has been focused on how marketers can make better use of data to tailor and target messaging more effectively. But I'm also fascinated by emerging uses of data to improve lives and infrastructure. As a result, not all of the examples I'm sharing are directly related to marketing -- yet. But each of the groups or people who follow are redefining our experiences with data, and its relevance to the world around us.

MIT's SENSEable City Lab

I was lucky enough to attend the CityCentered Symposium in San Francisco last month, where I heard Assef Biderman, the Lab's Associate Director, talk about four of their recent projects. Their Copenhagen Wheel project uses collected data about the rider plus real-time traffic and weather data to dramatically improve the experience of city bike-riding. Brilliant, right? But get this: as you ride, your data is continuously improving the entire community's experience, too.

Another project I find fascinating is Trash|Track. We all know how wasteful consumerism in America is, and it's no secret that we generate more trash than we have room for. Imagine, though, if you could actually track the progress of a piece of garbage that YOUR household generated during its "deathcycle." This MIT project tags ordinary pieces of trash with a small device using CellID triangulation. Participants in the project are able to see how very far some waste travels, and how long it takes to get where it's going. Now, consider whether you might be more likely to support a business who uses data like this to improve its sustainability scores, whether that means reducing packaging or implementing a recycling program for its last-generation products.

Direct WHAT Association?

This morning, I registered for my 3-Day Exhibit Hall and Keynote pass for the Direct Marketing Association's annual conference, this year being held in San Francisco. 

Of course, in order to complete the registration, I had to answer a battery of questions, including this one:

"What products are you interested in seeing at DMA 2010?"

Let's put aside for a moment the poor wording of the question (which, as a writer, raises the hairs on the back of my neck.) Let's focus instead on the options provided:

 
Now, I'm no survey writer, or focus group moderator. But it doesn't take a trained researcher to figure out what's wrong with the question above. I'm fairly certain that someone at the DMA approved it, and I'm very nearly positive that he or she is NOT a marketer. 

What's got me so flustered? The answer after the jump!

Data Science is the new black. (But where does that leave marketing?)

The better part of my career has been spent analyzing data, working to determine relevance, creating metrics and standards, and executing marketing campaigns against that data. Ask my friends over these years what I do, though, and their answers will vary from "Fatemeh makes catalogs" to "Fatemeh sells names." Direct marketing has never been sexy, obviously.

But suddenly, data's hot. It's the Next Big Thing. Looking for patterns and writing A/B test plans ARE sexy. "Multivariate" is a term most people have heard, even if they don't know what it means.

This, of course, is because data is EVERYWHERE. Data feeds and vastly improves our online lives -- let's be honest, we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves if Amazon's recommendation engine or Google's ability to correct a misspelling suddenly disappeared -- and there's a little bit of magic to how it all works.

While this is all tremendously exciting stuff, and I'm thrilled that data mining, conditioning, and analytics are getting their due, it does leave me wondering whether we marketers are getting the short end of the deal again. After all, while it's an analyst who produces the results, shouldn't it be marketers driving some of the questions?

Google Analytics Opt-Out: Who's It Helping?

A couple months ago, Google announced that it was developing a browser-based plug-in that would enable users (that is, site visitors) to opt out of data collection via Google Analytics. Surprisingly, the announcement never made the kind of marketing splash amongst retailers that our team expected it to. 

Here's why that's surprising: last summer, UC Berkeley published a study showing that Google Analytics is being used on nearly 70% of the Web's top half-million domains. And, if you aggregate GA data with AdSense and DoubleClick, you find that Google has bugs on nearly 90% of those sites. Assuming that even a measly 5% of users opt-out of Analytics, that represents a major reduction in usable data for a majority of the world's websites. 

We know, of course, that few users will actually exercise this option (we tried to find some metrics for how many people are using AdSense's similar plug-in to date... no luck, but we'll keep looking). And generally, we support good "corporate citizenship" and a degree of transparency that lets users control their PII. But that's not what we're talking about here -- we're talking about data that enables us to be better marketers and better information providers WITHOUT COMPROMISING OUR VISITORS' PRIVACY.

There's no question that the Facebook paradigm of continuously riling up the masses with frequent "sharing" and privacy changes is affecting the net trust that users have across the web. And we've recently heard that even basic retargeting feels intrusive to consumers, because they see tangible proof that their data is being collected and repurposed.

Google has an opportunity here to educate the public instead of letting it arbitrarily opt out of providing anonymized data that only helps us, as marketers, provide more relevant messages. In fact, we hope Google will step up and become a "bipartisan" advocate for consumers AND advertisers in the coming days. The recent publication of US House Representatives Boucher & Stearns Privacy legislation (PDF here)makes this kind of advocacy more critical than ever.

Are you worried about the proposed legislation? How about Analytics opt-out? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

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Update 5/17:
We like this article from MediaPost about the growing Facebook backlash 

Transparency & Ghost Writing in Social Media

We've had some interesting discussions lately with peers and clients alike about the challenge of maintaining transparency in your company's Social Web presence.

The whole point of engaging with consumers socially is transparency and availability, right? So how do you work with a service provider to manage your Social Media program without risking your authenticity? How do we, as the agency, ensure that we're delivering the right message with the right voice, and maintaining the integrity of your brand?

We believe that the answer is simple: Immersion. 

A creative agency I once worked for often received the compliment from its clients that "your team knows us and our customers better than we do!" This is what our team at TimesTwo strives for every day. Whether we manage ongoing campaign execution for our clients, or just develop and implement a best-use strategy, we immerse ourselves in their products, their culture, their customers and their brand. We live and breathe their lives during our critical Research phase, and learn how they make decisions, how they choose products, how they manage their operations and more.

Plus, as direct marketers by trade, we spend a lot of time looking at quantitative research about their customers as opposed to the more romantic (but less behaviorally accurate) focus groups and surveys. Of course we want to know what customers' aspirational views of themselves are, but we think it's incredibly important to understand how they're ACTUALLY interacting with our client's brand and the greater retail world around them.

We use the information we gather to identify the right person on our client's team to be the voice of the brand on the Social Web. Sometimes, that's the CEO; more often, it's a head merchant or customer service advocate who's passionate about the product and understands what her customers are looking for. It's a different approach to Social Media Marketing, we know. But we've found that there's a deeper level of engagement when we find the right voice, and when we can connect to customers in a way that's relevant and meaningful to them. 

If you're a retailer or multichannel merchant engaging with your customers socially, how do YOU maintain your authenticity? How about those of you who've retained a firm to help you manage those programs -- how did you choose the right team to ensure your brand is protected? We'd love to hear from you!

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Here are a few articles we like about transparency in Social Media Marketing:

• Ellie Brown, "Is Your Agency Showing?"
• Steve Woodruff, "Who's Behind the Avatar?"
• Beth Harte, "Social Media Ghostwriting: The Great Marketing/PR Debate" (This is a fairly lengthy article, but Beth makes some great points towards the end of the post that support our Immersion strategy.)
• Stuart Bruce, "Ghost Writing Blogs: Right or Wrong?"