Modern Metrix

And now Time Inc. wants to launch its own e-reader...

These guys just don't get it. Instead of continuing sitting in your own silos and rolling out your own platforms, just make your content available across as many platforms as possible.

Wake up, people!!! The new formula is Media = Content + Platform + Brand, where Content and Platform are not necessarily functions of Brand, Platform is not limited to just one or two, and Content is personalized and controlled by your audience.

Quantitative Methods Most Used in Market Research?

Ray Pointer of "The Future Place" blog is surveying market research professionals about the quantitative methods and procedures that they most often use in their line of work. Cast your vote, and don't forget to check the results - you will be suprised!

Based on the responses to surveys from about 70 people so far:

• Among the methods that are almost never used: Logit analysis (!!!), structural equation modeling, multidimensional scaling (!!!), and ANOVA (!!!)
• The most commonly used methods: simple correlational analysis, factor analysis, regression, and t- and z-tests.

Blogs to Read When You are not Reading Modern Metrix

To my faithful readers (all seven of you): I completely understand your fascination with this blog, and glad to see you come and read it again and again. To my new readers: welcome and please feel free to poke around and check out links to older posts (you are more than welcome to click on the same link more than once, it helps to increase the Google rank) It is also great to see that my audience is growing: according to Typepad stats, a number of peope reading us via Google Reader increased 200% since last December(there are now 6 of them). Our authoritiy index on Technorati DOUBLED (going from 1 to 2). And it looks like our annoying self-promoting narcissistic tweets do not hurt either, luring on average 2-3 gullible tweeps a day. So, yep, we are growing and occasionally even getting noticed by bigger fish (reminder to myself: keep spamming in comments on Techcrunch, NYTimes and Slashdot).

But you should also know that this is not the only data- and research- oriented blog out there. Nathan Yau from FlowingData recently compiled this great list of data, visualization and statistics blogs, and Tom Ewings of Blackbeard Blog shares links to some awesome blogs on market and social research . So you should totally check them out! Just make sure you come back here again..

Consumer Segmentation and Personalization are among the Top Marketing Trends in 2009

Segmentation is one of the marketing trends/priorities in 2009:

"Customer satisfaction and customer retention remained the top two marketing concepts followed by marketing ROI, brand loyalty and segmentation, which represents a "Back to Core Principles" approach to marketing."

Add to that personalization and customization:

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid7012076001/bctid7025748001

Segmentation Webinar from SPSS

For those who are familiar with SPSS, SPSS Institute regularly offers free webinars on various topics with focus on SPSS applications in marketing and social research. Today's webinar topic is "Faster, More Effective Customer Segmentation in Just a Few Clicks", and you can register for it here .

Topical Bibliography of Research on Blogging in LiveJournal

Those who are interested in conducting scholarly research on blogging, may find very useful this topical bibliography of reserch on LiveJournal . Alice E. Marwick from NYU has categorized numerous articles and presentations, published and unpublished, according to the focus of research, such as genre, identity, communities, language, emotions, privacy, and many other topics.

(Via Danah Boyd at Marketing and Strategy Innovations Blog)

"Many Eyes" visualization site from IBM researchers

Check out the Many Eyes, web site created by scientists at the IBM Watson Research Center (Cambridge, Massachussets) that helps people visualize data using different tools, and share and discuss their visualizations with other people.

BSU to Launch Media Behavior Institute

MediaPost:

"In what may be an industry first, a leading research and consulting group has teamed up with a renowned American university to launch a new privately-held media research company that will utilize state-of-the-art methods to track consumer media behavior. The Media Behavior Institute (MBI), was unveiled by Mike Bloxham, director of insight and research at the Center of Media Design at Ball State University during an opening keynote at Wednesday's session of the Advertising Research Foundation's audience measurement conference in New York."

Audience Measurement 3.0

Just returned from the ARF's  "Audience Measurement 3.0" conference. As always, a lot of interesting sessions, ideas, people.. Much anticipated Google's presentations of their new AdPlanner and TV Ads tools drew a lot of attention. At the luncheon, tables were organized by topics, and my table had a discussion on "Audience Measurement at Google", moderated by Google representative. It is so happened that representatives from Comscore and Quantcast also shared table with us, and boy, what a lovely (read: intense and full of arguments) conversation we all had!!!

A lot of sessions this time were dedicated to hot topics like social media and word of mouth, mobile media, measurement of audiences across platform, multi-platform advertising.. I especially enjoyed presentation by Mike Bloxham from the Center for Media Design, State University. One of their studies examined effects of digital media on consumer's behavior, in particular, consumption of traditional media and attention to advertising. The main problem with studies that involve emerging media is that most of such devices have low penetration rates. The research team from CMU solved this problem by giving a sample of respondents considerable discounts to purchase DVRs, ipods, video-enabled mobile phones, PSPs, wireless routers, Xboxes, etc., and then following these people for 96 full days. Study concluded that providing consumers with control over their media experiences led to decrease in time spent with media, and increase in quality of engagement with device and content. Some interesting results: introduction of DVR had no effect on total time spent watching TV, but most of content was viewed after recording. Ipods had negative effect on radio, but resulted in increase in consumption of print media..

Other interesting presentations: "Finding and Measuring the Audience that Matters" by MTV Network (main message: it is content that matters; content drives consumers to multiple platforms) and "Blending Digital + Broadcast Works" by Dr. Passikoff of Brand Keys, Inc. (message: advertising across multiple platforms results in increase in emotional connection with brands).

Psychographic Segmentation of Chinese Bloggers

Just stumbled upon these notes from the 6th Annual Chinese Internet Research Conference: "A Psychographic Segmentation of Chinese Bloggers" study by Dr. Roland Soong (this is a link to conference blog). More notes from author here .

I am trying to get in touch with Dr. Soong, would love to see the original paper!