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Pedro Gonçalves

BBC NEWS | Technology | Twitter hype punctured by study - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8089508.stm

Twitter Social Media Nielsen Online Harvard

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 09 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content, a Harvard study of 300,000 users found.
  • Estimates suggest it now has more than 10 million users and is growing faster than any other social network.
  • However, the Harvard team found that more than half of all people using Twitter update their page less than once every 74 days.
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  • On a typical online social network, he said, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. "This implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network," the team wrote in a blog post.
  • Recent figures from research firm Nielsen Online show that visitors to the site increased by 1,382%, from 475,000 to seven million, between February 2008 and February 2009. It is thought to have grown beyond 10 million in the last 4 months.
  • Research by Nielsen also suggests that many people give the service a try, but rarely or never return. Earlier this year, the firm found that more than 60% of US Twitter users fail to return the following month. "The Harvard data says very, very few people tweet and the Nielsen data says very, very few people listen consistently," Mr Heil told BBC News.
  • The Harvard study took a snapshot of 300,542 users in May 2009. As well as usage patterns it looked in detail at gender differences.
  • It also showed that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman, despite the reverse being true on other social networks. "The sort of content that drives men to look at women on other social networks does not exist on Twitter," said Mr Heil. "By that I mean pictures, extended articles and biographical information."
  • However, said Mr Heil, the most striking result was that so few people used the service to publish information, preferring instead to be passive consumers. For example, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. "Twitter is a broadcast medium rather than an intimate conversation with friends," he said. "It looks like a few people are creating content for a few people to read and share." Some "super users" can have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of followers.
  • However, the service bills itself as a way to "communicate and stay connected" with "friends, family and co-workers". "The Twitter management need to decide if this is a problem," said Mr Heil.
Pedro Gonçalves

Trust Me: Here's Why Brands Sell Trust, Subconsciously | Fast Company - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...ands-sell-trust-subconsciously

Branding Memory WOM

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 10 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • In a 2010 study conducted by Harvard professor Bharat Anand, and Alezander Rosinski, they examined how the power of ads are influenced by the magazine or newspaper they appear in. By placing the same ad in the respected Economist and perhaps the less respected Huffington Post, they discovered that the more respected the publication, the more people would trust and recall the ad
  • As part of the experiment we'd asked our test family to adopt an environmentally conscious behavior. To assist them in this endeavor, we brought in experts to advise the family on changing their patterns of consumption. They taught them how to recycle and conserve. We wanted to see if it was possible to effect change amongst hundreds of families' daily routine by introducing new behaviors at the highest levels of trust--from the experts down. In other words, could a single family's environmentally conscious behavior set the standard for their social circle and thus create widespread change? The answer was a clear and resounding "Yes!" Close to 31% of the thousands of people affected by the experimental family changed their recycling and conserving habits.
  • Deep trust is communicated subconsciously. It's rarely expressed explicitly, nor is imparted loudly or didactically. To trust deeply not only can change our minds, but it has the power to alter our most ingrained behaviors. It's a subtle emotion that the average commercial message fails to embody
Pedro Gonçalves

Welcome to the Decade of Games - Seth Priebatsch - The Conversation - Harvard Business ... - 0 views

blogs.hbr.org/...me_to_the_decade_of_games.html

Branding Game Dynamics Trends

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 13 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • the decade of constructing the social layer is complete. The frameworks that we'll use to share socially are built, defined and controlled.
  • What's taking its place? The decade of games.
  • in this decade of games, these game dynamics will move far beyond your computer screen and into decidedly non-game like environments, like the way we court customers, engage with others at work, discover where to hang out on Saturday nights and what, when and how we choose to purchase.
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  • While the last decade was all about connections and integrating a social fabric to every facet of our digital and analog existence, this next decade is all about influence.
  • Game dynamics are fast becoming a critical currency of motivation. Their power lies not in connecting us to our friends, but in directly influencing our individual behavior.
  • Traditional forms of entertainment (movies, television... remember books?) are in a rapid decline. The demand for entertainment hasn't decreased, it's just shifted to a more interactive, pervasive form of entertainment. It's shifting to games.
  • We've seen simple game dynamics increase traffic to locations 4X over a matter of days. We've seen others extend the average amount of engaged time consumers spend at a business by upwards of 40%. This propagation of game dynamics into the real world via the social graph and mobile devices will have powerful business consequences for those who understand how to leverage them.
  • The appointment dynamic is a famous game mechanic in which to succeed a "player" must return at a predefined time to take a predetermined action. It's simple and immensely powerful. The appointment dynamic is powerful enough to alter the behavior of an entire generation — "happy hours" are appointment dynamics, as is the pervasive game "Farmville" by Zynga. But we've barely scratched the surface of what it can do. Imagine companies like Vitality leveraging this dynamic to improve the adherence rate to often less-than-pleasant medicinal regimens, or the government creating a large scale game (with financial incentives as rewards) to alter traffic patterns to decrease highway congestion in the mornings.
  • In the progression dynamic, a "player's" level of success is displayed in real-time and gradually improved through the completion of granular tasks. Somewhere deep-rooted in the human psyche we have this desire to complete any progression dynamic put in front of us as long as the steps to do so are itemized and clear. With this as a known dynamic, it's not hard to envision the ways that this can be leveraged even further in the real-world.
  • Communal discovery is a mechanic which involves an entire community working together to solve a problem. The reason I've saved the communal discovery dynamic for last is that it, perhaps more than all others, presents incredible opportunities to positively influence the world as we enter this decade of games.
  • DARPA launched a challenge late last year. They hid 10 red balloons at different locations all across the continental United States and offered $40,000 to the first team to correctly identify their locations. The winning team (a group from MIT) constructed a strategy that in many ways mirrored a pyramid scheme. It was a cleverly constructed waterfall of incentives that encouraged massive cooperation. Essentially everyone to give them data about any balloon's location won some portion of the prize money based on how many other people also submitted the location of that balloon. This created positive communal incentives across what rapidly became a large and self-propagating network. Their strategy managed to accurately identify all locations in less than 9 hours.
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