This post is the first of several (we think) about using NextStage OnSite’s many reports. The audience for this post and series is NextStage’s business clients and prospects. The goal is to provide some “connecting the dots” between reports and actions. We’re starting this series with the TireKickers to Buyers Breakdown. “TireKickers to Buyers Breakdown” is a descriptive but wordy title and we usually refer to it simply as the TireKickers Report.

Background

NextStage’s tools have been in public use for about three years now and all our tools are based on client requests. The tool that’s grown the most in that time is NextStage OnSite. That growth shows up as OnSite’s many reports.

There are currently sixty (60) different reports in the NextStage OnSite Tool. These reports span everything from visitor AgeGroup breakdowns (a 30 day report is shown on the right) to a QuickOptimizer report that provides three and only three suggestions for quickly optimizing a site. For example, QuickOptimizer suggested the following modifications for one of our clients for a recent thirty day period:

1. Important – A blog, podcasts, a link which starts an audio feed or music from a source which matches the mood of your site.
2. Desireable – A single image on the upper to middle left of the screen, at most 1/4 screen width and height, clearly showing your product or your service in use or a satisfied user of your product or service
3. Critical – Having all selling points to your product or service in the center third column of your screen. Anything that does not demonstrate your product’s or service’s features should go to either side

Most clients get 25-30 reports (some they request, some we know they’ll need) and there’s a lot of information in those 25-30. Sometimes we’ll include a custom report or two among those 25-30 for clients who we believe will benefit from them.

NextStage OnSite offers clients a report palette because (we believe) using reports individually is like looking at stars through only one type of telescope — your understanding is based on only one type of light. Different types of telescopes (NextStage OnSite’s 30 or so reports) trained on the same object provide a fuller understanding of what’s happening to and with that object.

TireKickers Report Basics

NextStage OnSite’s TireKickers Report (a one day report is shown on the right. Clicking on some images opens larger images in another window) is named for the proverbial used car shopper who walks around the lot, finds a car they want then kicks the tires to demonstrate that they’re not going to get swindled.

What it reports is described in 2006’s Listening to and Seeing Searches:

What we’ve discovered is that these [report] numbers (which will vary from site to site) remain stable for each site except when something new — such as a product release or updated pages — is placed in the mesh.

• Knowing what percentage of site visitors are serious buyers versus tirekickers is an important tool in keeping your expectations and sales forecasts in check, and for designing entry pages appropriately.

• Visitors who are “grazing,” “tirekicking,” “talking themselves out of it” and “planning to make a decision” are still in the search funnel.
• Visitors who are “planning on how to use it,” “talking it over,” “making a decision” and “buying” are in what most people recognize as a sales funnel.
• The transition from searcher to buyer occurs at “talking themselves into it.”

Notice in the above bullet list “…these [report] numbers (which will vary from site to site) remain stable for each site except when something new — such as a product release or updated pages — is placed in the mesh.”? Compare the 1-day report shown above with the 7-Day TireKickers report on the right. Same site, but this time reporting on the past seven (7) days instead of the last one (1) day. You’ll notice there’s not a lot of variation in pie slice size.

We encourage most clients to run reports for time periods of 30 days or longer unless they’re doing highly targeted or spot campaigns. For example, if you’ve just made an update to your site, introduced a new product or service, made an announcement, et cetera, check for changes over shorter periods of time.

But consider the two figures above. These two figures are similar and not identical. All charts in this post are for the same page. Only the report interval is changed (top to bottom, they are 1 day, 7 days, 14 days, 30 days). What you’re seeing is the normal variation that occurs on sites. Especially when you compare the above one and seven day cycles with the following 14 day cycle and 30 day cycle further down in this post.

Once you get past the 20% that were buying in the one-day cycle (”Making a Decision” and “Buyers” combined. Ninety-nine percent of people who get into “Making a Decision” become “Buyers” before they leave a site or will conclude their purchase offline) you’ll notice that the seven and 14 day cycles have similar “Making a Decision” and “Buying” numbers — 13-14%. The 13% cumulative “Making a Decision” and “Buying” numbers are repeated in the 30 day cycle.

First Take-Away

These numbers haven’t varied in quite a while. This site is going to max out at about 20% total conversions and probably the online numbers will be closer to 13%.

We now have a baseline. The current version of the site is going to do 13-20% business. That’s where we are. Now it’s time to improve.

Large versus Small Populations

Consumer psychology and buying behavior are fascinating subjects to study. One thing that’s very impressive about them is that large populations are the easiest to influence. Knowing that large populations are the easiest to influence comes from social dynamics. NextStage demonstrated this with an audience participation exercise at a SNCR conference several years back during my TS Eliot, Ezekiel, Beehives and Mighty Mouse – Why “Whispering to Be Heard”? presentation.

What we demonstrated was the relative transmission speeds and dispersion rates of the same message in a large and small population, followed up with examples of how to increase transmission and dispersion. In a nutshell, large populations tend to have fewer broad reaching influencers and quorum sensing behavior rules. The large population behaves as a single body but without a lot of discretionary and (dare I suggest) intelligent behavior. Quorum sensing was pretty much the consumer psychology rule in the old media days (as noted in Why Isn’t Marketing a Science, Part II ).

Small populations tend to have much tighter social bonds and interactions. This is necessary for the smaller population to survive. The large population’s quorum sensing becomes the small population’s smart mob behavior, meaning people talk to each other more, rely on each other more, there are more influencers because the population realizes that the person who’s a great cook may not be the best harvester and so on.

TireKicker Reports show small populations as small pie segments. Instead of a small population being a “neighborhood” or “town”, the small population in these TireKicker Reports are (for example) “Tirekicking” at about 2% and “Planning to Make a Decision” at about 2.5% across all reports. Like neighborhoods and small towns, the visitors making up the “Tirekicking” and “Planning to Make a Decision” segments may not be directly talking to each other but they are talking to people who are talking to each other.

Second Take-Away

You want the Tirekickers value to be as small as possible. Small Tirekickers values indicate that all visitors (save the “Grazing” segment) came to your site with the intention of getting something done. They may have wanted to purchase or do research, but your site was their intended target.

“Tirekickers” indicates people who are killing time. They were looking for something to do and your site was what caught their eye. They may convert and it’ll be a long while before they do so the smaller this number is, the better your site is working at bringing you visitors who are actually in the sales funnel.

“Grazing” indicates people who came to your site by accident. You want that number to decrease, either because fewer people get lost on the web or because your marketing is so good only people who want to be on your site arrive there.

On these charts you’ll notice that the largest population segments are “Talking Themselves (Out of/Into) It” and “Talking It Over With (Themselves/Others)”.

What’s most important (from a consumer and behavioral psychology perspective) about these two populations is they describe people engaged in internal dialogue. Most people engage in internal dialogue and do so most often when they’re making decisions. If you’ve ever spoken to yourself out loud or just in your head, debating whether or not to do something, to buy something, to say something, going over pros and cons back and forth, you were engaged in internal dialogue.

We recognize internal dialogue is taking place because both populations are Talking (dialogue) and to or with Themselves (internal). People who are talking themselves out of/into it are the tougher sell so let’s start with people who are talking it over with themselves or others.

These are people who want to act but lack the confidence to act. They are looking for justification to act (convert) and seeking either themselves or others to provide that justification. Some times they’ll ask their peers, some times their friends, some times their parents. Browsing is still a solitary activity — we don’t often encounter masses of people sitting in the same place, facing the same device, agreeing where to navigate and what to click on — so who will these visitors seek justification from?

Readers of Reading Virtual Minds Volume I: Science and History know that the first “person” to be asked is the site itself and at this point it is time to learn what the page being TireKicked is telling them to do (the page’s form and function¹).

The layout sans content (form) of the page being TireKicked is shown on the right. We learn from the client that the function of the page is to describe product/offering/service features. What can we do to nudge the roughly 26% of visitors who are “Taking It Over With Themselves/Others” into either “Making a Decision” or “Buying”?

We start by looking at the page’s TargetAudience. NextStage considers material’s TargetAudience as the audience that will best respond to that material. The best responding audience is the audience that shows up most often, stays and acts. This best responding audience may or may not be the audience the content creators had in mind when they published. The gulf between best responding audience and intended audience can be amazingly wide and we often suggest clients use our AgePersuader, GenderPersuader, PersonaScope and related tools to better target their content before publishing.

In this case, NextStage OnSite’s PageTargetAudience report determined that this TireKicked page is best designed for:

Gender: Male
Age: 35-44yo (±9%)
Education: Post Doc
RichPersona: V9

• These people are moved by what they see
• They are drawn to the negative of things
• These people tend to be process oriented
• They tend to be confused by “what if this happens?” type of questions

Let’s take the above one element at a time:

1. Gender: Male – NextStage has demonstrated an extremely high accuracy determining age and gender online. The accuracy we’re comfortable with is about 83% across all our reports (we’ve tested higher), so we can accept that this specific material is indeed oriented towards a male audience
2. Age: 35-44yo (±9%) – This material is best designed for 35-44 year olds and could serve for 32-48 year olds (the ±9%)
3. Education: Post Doc – NextStage OnSite makes this determination based on how much cognitive effort and life experience would be required to understand the material
4. RichPersona: V9 – “V9″ is a NextStage RichPersona^TM designation. People familiar with our PersonaScope and Sentiment Analysis Tools have seen these designations many times. Other psych-behavioral classification systems would recognize this as “ENTJ”²

Review and Forward

So far we’ve learned the following:

• 26% of the audience is seeking justification to convert
• the material will best influence a mid-30 to mid-40 year old,
• well educated,
• males audience

Holding just that much information we can look at two other NextStage OnSite reports, AgeGroup and Gender. A 30 day visitor AgeGroups analysis for the TireKicked page is shown at the top of this post. The image on the right is a 30 day visitor Gender analysis for the same TireKicked page.

AgeGroups tells us that better than a third are under 25yo and we see on the right that there’s a fairly even male-female gender mix.

Before going any further and in a very few minutes of time (assuming some training on how to use NextStage OnSite) we’ve discovered that the TireKicked page isn’t designed for its actual audience. Remember, we’re not considering intended audience — who the site owner wants as visitors — we’re looking at who’s actually showing up and wanting to do some shopping.

The site owner informs us that the actual audience is the intended audience. Excellent! The question shifts from “How do we get the intended audience on the page?” to “What can be done so that the audience does more buying?”

Suggestions, Suggestions, Suggestions

NextStage OnSite includes a Suggestions report (a 30 day report is shown on the right) that provides three levels of suggestions (General, Levels 1 and 2). The immediacy of each suggestion is indicated by Desireable, Important and Critical. We encourage clients to start with the General suggestions and work their way up through Level 1 suggestions to Level 2 suggestions. I, as a researcher, find the Suggestions report a deep dish of information.

But I as a business person? That’s an awful lot to swallow.

The difference between research and business person is one of constraint. Researchers love knowing all possible suggestions because they usually have the freedom to select what constraints they’ll work under as part of their experiment’s design. Business and online analysts usually are given a list of constraints based on corporate requirements and policies regarding color palette, logo placement, images, text and so on. As one business client said, “Design is finding solutions within constraints.”

The specific business constraints for this TireKicked page are:

1. Adjust the copy within the body area of the page
2. No changes to the design or placement of navigation
3. Adding “nav-looking” links on the right is acceptable
4. Creating a number of “orphan pages” where navigation between the pages is via breadcrumbs is acceptable

Knowing constraints ahead of time is excellent as it allows us to know which Suggestions we’re able to work with. For example, one of NextStage OnSite’s Suggestions for this TireKicked Page is

Desireable – Provide (more) visitor-participatory navigation so that visitors become consciously aware of their navigation decisions.

Not sure what “visitor-participatory navigation” is? Not a problem. NextStage OnSite’s Suggestions report tells you:

Visitor-Participatory Navigation – Menu style navigation is replaced by a single question in place of the standard menu. The question has several answers (that are themselves based on traditional menu options) and one of the answers is the option to return to a traditional menu system. Further, each loaded page includes BreadCrumbs so visitors have a clear understanding of where they’ve been on a site.

Why Training Is Important

Live training on any NextStage Tool goes beyond “click here, click there, now click that and get your report”. Live NextStage trainings cover human behavior, communication, behavioral psychology, consumer psychology and the like in depth. This is obviously true for our listed trainings and is also true for our tool trainings. Tool trainings focus more on how to use tool recommendations and results to cause the desired human behavior, et cetera, and students still learn a great deal about how humans interact with their environment and each other³.

In this case, a little social and behavioral psychology provide some obvious solutions.

Form to Function

The image on the right is the form of our TireKicked page. The area we’re constrained to is bordered in red. Because the actual audience is young we’re going to make use of how youthful minds (under 25 years old) demonstrate social cognition, mirroring and group identity. Remembering that the client has told us this TireKicked page’s purpose is to demonstrate product/service/offering features (and by the numbers):

1. Adjust the copy within the body area of the page
   • Any feature-descriptive text must indicate how this product/service/offering will create or continue connectivity between friends, peers and related others. Write anything about TXTing, sharing video, et cetera, content with friends and family and you’ve scored a success.
   • Include images of groups involved in some activity (walking in a downtown setting, biking, but stopped, et cetera) with two or more group members using the product/service/offering
   • Any banner offer image should show two or three peer group members demonstrating enjoyment due to their use of the product/service/offer.
   • If the audience is too young to make independent purchase decisions (they require parental approval), modify the banner image such that a single peer group member is on the left of the banner, the parent is on the right of the banner and make sure the parent is smiling or otherwise demonstrating acceptance and agreement.
     • The audience is fairly evenly mixed male/female so use a female parent image. Use a male parent image if the audience starts to skew and stay male.
   • Use short, decisive sentences to list features, use images to demonstrate features (two of NextStage OnSite’s suggestions were “Critical – Use language which emphasizes understanding and logic, and demonstrates present capabilities” and “Critical – Use simple, concise language to differentiate items“. Other suggestions were along similar lines)
2. No changes to the design or placement of navigation – The Suggestions Report offered several modifications, none are applied at this point in time
3. Adding “nav-looking” links on the right is acceptable
   • Several NextStage OnSite suggestions apply to where “nav-looking” links should take visitors (remembering that this page’s purpose is to demonstrate or list product/service/offering features)
     • Critical – Include a video demonstrating the endgoal of the visitor specific to the current page. Make the video informative, educational and entertaining. Example: a video of someone in the target audience using the product, good or service specific to the page. The video demonstrates some simple and common operations using the product, good or service.
     • Important -Any “self-help” pages should have an image montage of the any steps involved. The image montage is synched to an audio feed explaining each image, its purpose, et cetera. The visitor must be able to control the image/audio progression.
     • Important – Use images which demonstrate your product or service being used 1-2 seasons ahead to do specific tasks.
4. Creating a number of “orphan pages” where navigation between the pages is via breadcrumbs is acceptable
   • This is one of NextStage OnSite’s suggestions, as noted above. Combine breadcrumbs with the product demonstration and self-help suggestions above and the redesign work is done.

A rough mockup of some suggestions (for starting point purposes only) is shown on the right.

Summary

Any tool is going to require some training in its use and some tools will require users to incorporate new information, new ways of thinking and problem solving methods.

This post has gone through one of NextStage OnSite’s thirty reports — TireKickers — and demonstrated how to use it to increase conversions.

The next post in this series will pick up with the other big visitor population chunk, that 22.5% that are Talking Themselves Into/Out of converting.

Third Take-Away

One NextStage client was boasting about the 35%+ gains they received based on various NextStage tool recommendations at a recent conference.

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1 – Normally, NextStageologists (our consultants who help clients) look at site pages as a last resort because the moment someone looks at something they form an opinion and that opinion changes the observer and what is observed forever. Our own prejudices, likes, dislikes and personal requirements are the last thing clients need when they ask us to help them redesign their pages.

In the case of NextStageologists, we actively guard against our unknown biases and prejudices affecting our understanding of the reports or what they’re reporting on. We may ask about form and function but rarely content.

2 – V9 is one of NextStage’s RichPersonae^TM designations. NextStage’s RichPersonae^TM do not necessarily map one-to-one to other psych-behavioral systems.

3 – NextStage also offers client specific and customized trainings. Contact us for information.

I published What Kind of Lover Are You (And Can You Improve)? on That Think You Do and introduced The NextStage LoveJones Tool (NSLJ)¹ last Friday (2 Dec 2011).

History

There’s a bit of history behind that tool, some of which is documented in How Do You Define ‘Love’?. In a nutshell, several years back a personals site asked if we could produce a tool that would determine if people would fall in lust. They called it “love” and when we talked with them at length their greater interest was lust.

Lust — or Erotic love — is immediate, tends to be satisfying due to its extreme psychosensual and endorphin stimulating nature (sex is good exercise in case you didn’t know) and — the best part as far as personals sites are concerned — lustful relationships tend to be temporary. Participants tend to tire of each other quickly because once you get past the magic whumpa whumpa there’s not much holding the relationship together. I should also point out that there’s lots of studies indicating 17-30yos primarily want this kind of relationship (sometimes called “f’ckbuddies”) and an analysis of TXT traffic in this age group bears this out. This generation’s momentary pairings purely for tension release make my generation’s barhopping look lame.

The goal of most personals sites is to have people return frequently to queue up for their next go-round. Long term relationships don’t generate a lot of income for personals sites. Yes, they advertise successful long term pairings because the majority of people frequenting such sites are in a state of “hope”, hence market to that hope.

The reality is that such sites profit when people fall in and out of lust or like and definitely not love. The personals sites’ goals, in other words, is to have people make long term commitments to the site, not to people they’ve met through the site because such sites don’t profit if you find the love of your life, they only profit if you find the love of your night, week or month at best.

Anyway, determining such things was beyond ET’s² ability at the time. However, developing ET-based tools that determined people’s suitability for each other seemed so doable that we kept returning to it through the years.

aHA! Moments

Eventually we figured it out. We didn’t realize we had figured it out at first. We got our first inkling that the problem was solved when we released our NextStage OnSite³ (NSOS) demo. Normally NextStage OnSite reports on visitor activity en masse. The breakthrough was in isolating and reporting on unique visitors.

Isolating and reporting on unique visitors wasn’t a breakthrough so much as it was a remembering of how ET was originally purposed; to help individual students better understand course material. That form of ET monitored some highly specific aspects of memory and cognition of individual visitors/students. It was while modifying those ET elements for a specific NSOS client that we had our aHA! moment.

We had lots of data (both our own and from a variety of other researchers) on how the brain maps “love” to specific regions, to what degree, at what levels and so on. All that was necessary on our end was to develop the neuromathematics that translated those neural firings to psychomotor behavioral cues (both gross and fine) and then test test test.

Meanwhile, Back at the Barn…

While this was going on, we released our NextStage SampleMatch Tool⁴. Whenever we release a new tool we get lots of emails about how that tool could be used, specifically how it could be used in ways we never thought of.

Case in point,

Can your SampleMatch tool show me where I’ll find people I’ll like, maybe even someone to fall in love with? …

Well…that wasn’t what it was designed for, and…hmm…yes, it could.

More accurately, it could give you an idea where you’ll find like-minded people, people you’re most likely to get along with.

So while we were testing testing testing the NextStage LoveJones tool we also realized some it’s outputs could be used as inputs to our SampleMatch tool and, as they say…

…the Quest Was On!

One of the things NextStage LoveJones determines (although it doesn’t report it) is the user’s RichPersona⁵. RichPersonae are reported by NextStage PersonaScope (NSPS).

Using myself as a test subject, I ran an earlier version of this post through PersonaScope tool to get an idea of how I was thinking, behaving, responding, what was motivating me and so on. NextStage’s PersonaScope tool indicated that I was a V9 RichPersona (Personality Type). This is also known as an ENTJ in some psych profiling systems.

But a V9? I know a lot about V9 RichPersona/Personality Types because PersonaScope tool tells me a great deal about such things. Basically, at that moment in time and based on what I’d been doing at that point in time, I wasn’t a pleasant person to be around⁶. Note: We suggest PersonaScope users prevent one bad piece from dominating an analysis of themselves or others by gathering several pieces together into one file, say some emails or blog posts written over several months, maybe 7-10 total, then put them through PersonaScope.

Moving ever onward, the next step was to take a look at NextStage’s RichPersonae Wheel. Not quite a Wheel of Fortune and perhaps close in this case. (Note that the image on the right is a simplified version of our RichPersonae Wheel)

For the purposes of using SampleMatch to find a soul mate, life partner, significant other, special someone, …, the next question is “Do I believe Likes attract or do I believe Opposites attract?”

This question is significant because Likes versus Opposites indicates where you should look on the wheel to determine the RichPersonae of those significant others.

Let’s say for our example that you learn you’re an A19 Personality Type and you believe Likes attract. You should look for people with A18, A19 and A20 Rich Personae. People with Rich Personae further and further away from A19 are increasingly less likely to make an A19 personality type happy.

Unless, of course, you believe that opposites attract. Opposites attracting allows our A19 personality type to select from a V6, V7 and V8 personality types.

Therefore the next question in the queue is “Is this user a like or opposite type of person?” That’s actually determined in the RichPersonae. My (at that time) V9 RichPersona was very much an opposites attract type of person. Our A19 example is a likes attract type of person.

The Need to KISS

At this point we sat back a bit. “Okay, we need the visitor to first use PersonaScope to determine their RichPersona, then they need to know if the response indicates a Like or Opposite personality type, then how to map the response to either a “Likes” or “Opposites” on the RichPersonae Wheel, then what? Are we going to ask them to breakdance on their tablets while singing the Oratorio from Carmen? Backwards? In Spanglish?”

We realized that yes, requiring users/visitors to navigate such a solution path violated our own rules and observations regarding how people use tools (not just ours, everybodies’). The best way to get the largest number of people to use anything is to KISS, the “Keep It Simple, Smeadley” rule that’s on each of our tools as Use: Pure and simple, you login, [either upload a file or enter an URL], click on submit and get your result. Clean, quick, simple and neat because we like it that way.

Eventually we decided that ET could figure all this out and without asking the user any questions at all, simply report back the most likely geographic locations where the user might find compatible life-partners. No questions, only results.

And the Winner Is…

So we developed The NextStage LoveFinder (NSLF) that automatically performs all the steps outlined above. Literally, all you need to do is login and it determines where on the globe you’re most likely to find compatible life-partners.

So if you notice any mass migrations over the next few years…

And we’re also waiting to see if there are certain places where anyone is most likely to be lucky.

The above, by the way, is how tools evolve here at NextStage; either clients make a request or ask a question and we’re off, or sometimes we just go exploring because we’re researchers and that’s what we like to do.

Currently we’re working on two new tools, one directly requested by a NextStage member and the other hinted at by another NextStage member (although they didn’t know it at the time).

And we continue to improve all our existing tools, too.

Busy us, yes?

True TriQuatro

Beta tests and current use of NextStage LoveJones are indicating that culture plays a great role in how people interact with their partners. Fascinating stuff, this, we thinks!

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1 – The NextStage LoveJones tool measures a bunch of factors and determine what, if anything, the user could do to improve their relationship with their life-partner(s).

2 – If you’re new to this blog or NextStage in general, ET is Evolution Technology, something we designed and developed, now being used in over 70 countries worldwide, and is capable of determining and responding to human thoughts through any human-machine interface.

3 – NextStage OnSite is a site visitor analysis tool that provides qualitative and quantitative information about visitors well beyond traditional analytics. OnSite even evaluates bounces and lets you know why visitors bounced. OnSite requires only that a simple JavaScript tag be inserted between the </BODY> and </HTML> tag on each page you want monitored. The basic version consists of thirty reports that determine various psychological (”{C,B/e,M} matrix” or “cognitive, behavioral/effective and motivational”) factors about visitors, all of which provide suggestions for improving site conversion. You can learn more on the NextStage OnSite About page.

4 – NextStage SampleMatch (NSSM) analyzes NextStage OnSite data collected worldwide and determines the RichPersonae of geographic regions. Clients use this location specific RichPersonae information to insure their marketing material is designed correctly for the available audience.

5 – “RichPersona” is the high level concept of an individual {C,B/e,M} (Cognitive, Behavioral/effective, Motivational) matrix. People are always demonstrating how they think (”Cognitive”), how they act based on how they think (”Behavioral/effective), and how how they think motivates (”Motivational”) them to behave as they do. NextStage currently indices 144 RichPersona for most cultures although that number can be significantly higher for specific audiences (east Asian audiences, for example). NextStage’s PersonaScope (NSPS) tool analyzes material and reports RichPersona in depth.

6 – It’s probably worth knowing that we eat our own dog food here at NextStage, so to speak. I took a moment to determine if I really was demonstrating V9 characteristics and yes, I was. Okay, time to put things down or away and go take care of myself so that I would be a better person to be with for both myself and those around me.

I realized my schedule at the time was somewhat harried and that I was putting demands on myself that were both unnecessary and excessive, nor was it making life much fun for everybody else. I took control back and feel better for it (and I’m told so do those around me).

A while ago I was asked for some advice, specifically “Do people tend to listen more or read more in webinars?”. Responding to them, I discovered I have Geek Cred. This discovery surprised me. Companies and individuals routinely ask for our advice, often on blogging, and we always start with “The audience comes first”. I’m told we have lots of credibility.

Really?

Shortly thereafter a reader wrote “I am new to blogging so ANY advice you can provide will be greatly received. I’ve spent some time looking through your own Stating the Obvious blog and feel a tad worried about my first post…”

I responded and since then have been asked for blogging advice from several people and groups. Here’s my response to that original reader, updated with what I’ve learned since then. Enjoy!

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Hello,
Advice on blogging. Hmm…I don’t consider myself an expert. Companies routinely hire us to advise them on their blogs so I’ll give you the nickel tour of what we advise them.

1. Before you start writing anything
   • Know who your audience is
     • Know their language, their jargon, their dreams, their goals, their travails, …
     • Decide their experience level in your topic
       • Are they novice?
       • Beginner?
       • Intermediate?
       • Journeyman/woman?
       • Expert?
     • Decide what role you want to play for that audience
       • Mentor
       • Leader
       • Influencer
       • Lurker
       • Antagonist
       • Member
       • Observer
       • Commenter
       • Apologist
         
       • …
     • Does that audience want
       • Content types
         • Images?
         • Text?
         • Media?
         • A mix of all?
       • Post length
         • Long posts? (over 500 words)
         • Short posts? (under 200 words)
         • Posts long enough to get your message across?
         • Very long posts should have an introduction, the post body and a summary that take the form of “Here’s what I’m going to be posting about, here’s the post, here’s what I posted about”.
       • Authorial Voice
         • To be amused?
         • To be educated?
         • To get emotionally charged?
         • To be intellectually stimulated?
         • To be challenged?
         • To get gossip/dish?
         • …
   • Decide what’s interesting to that audience
     • Come up with 5-10 things
       • Are you a member of your audience? Will what interests you interest them?
       • Is this something
         • You want to know more about?
         • You want to share with others?
         • You’ve discovered and are letting others in on the secret?
         • That bothers you?
         • That excites you?
         • …
   • The Writing Part
     • Pick one of those 5-10 things and make it into a headline? (see Headlines That Attract Attention)
     • Make a bullet list of 4-5 major points (or as many as you feel are necessary. It’s best to have between 3-5 for short posts, 4-5 for midlength posts, 5-9 for long posts)
     • Write a single, descriptive sentence about each bullet point
       • Write as if the person is right in front of you and you want/expect them to respond. This is called “direct address”.
       • Use active voice whenever possible
     • After you’ve written a single, descriptive sentence for each bullet point go back and write an explanatory paragraph for each descriptive sentence
       • Again, use direct address and active voice to get your points across
       • Save passive voice for when you want to “slow the action” and give your readers a chance to think
     • Check your flow (do things flow logically from one paragraph to the next?)
       • Add connective sentences if necessary
       • Check for things only you or people at your level intuitively know. Explain everything even if it’s obvious (Especially if you think it’s obvious. see What is a Dark Mystery to you is Perfectly Obvious to someone else (and vice versa).).
       • Provide images and graphics for examples only when they a) genuinely clarify the subject (for informational/educational posts) or b) demonstrate a point being made
     • Phrases like “in other words”, “said/let me explain this differently”, “to clarify”, … usually indicate things aren’t clear to the author.
       • Stop writing
       • Clear your mind
       • Imagine as vividly as possible what you want to communicate
       • Write down that vivid imagining
         • The colors
         • The smells
         • The sounds
         • The tastes
         • The emotions
         • The people
         • The tools
         • The places
         • The scenery
         • …
       • Use exact details and descriptions wherever necessary to explain yourself and get your point across. Remove whatever doesn’t explain or get your point across.
     • Use adjectives, adverbs, superlatives and diminutives sparingly if at all in informational/educational posts. Use them intentionally and sparingly otherwise.
     • Starting a sentence with “This”, “That” or “These” usually indicates a reference to something previously stated. Make sure the reference is both obvious and clear, and when not, repeat the previous item by name or some recognizable abbreviation so readers can follow easily.
     • Make sure your posts have a beginning, a middle, and an end. When readers get to the end they should feel their time was well spent and that they were rewarded for their investment.
     • Online readers read differently than offline readers read. Paragraphs may need to be shorter, you may need to use more images, ideas may need to be spread across the post. As before, know your audience and you’ll know how they read.
     • Once you’ve written your post put it away for at least a day (unless it’s extremely timely/topical)
     • Read your post outloud at least once before publishing. And I do mean outloud. I also usually print it and read the printed form. Reading your post outloud reveals grammar, spelling, punctuation, cognitive, emotive, logic, etc., errors that the reading mind overlooks.
     • Fix errors
2. General Rules
   • Posts should be as succinct as necessary to tell a good story. succinctness and good story-telling need to balance.
   • Emotions — I call it Energy in Motion — get more traction than ideas. The best idea is just an idea, a piece of intellectual fluff, but the emotions surrounding an idea give that idea legs. Get readers emotional about something and they’ll pass it on to others. Give readers an idea by itself and there’s usually no reason to propagate it.
     • Opinion pieces generate more emotional energy than fact pieces because readers can agree or disagree with an opinion while they can only accept or reject a fact. Facts may carry a lot of emotional energy and they’re still facts. People emotionally responding to “2+2=4″ are best ignored unless they can be swayed to think logically. People logically responding to “Bradgelina Adopts Bisexual Mixed Race Cocaine Addicted 39 year old” may be amusing and unless they’ll bring traffic, ignore them.
     • Post regularly, if possible. Most audiences like knowing they’ll have something interesting to read on a regular basis.
       • This is true even if you announce your posts via social networks. Several readers tell me they collect the links I send out socially and do their “Joseph Reading” on Saturday mornings, usually before anybody else wakes up and with a cup of coffee beside them. I find that flattering.
     • Admit your mistakes and fix them when you realize them.
       • To that end, do your best to recognize your mistakes before anyone brings them to your attention.
     • Remember, you blog at your audience’s pleasure.
       • Let them know when a post will stray from your usual format, when you’re going to do something new, … .
       • Respond to them when they comment. I like to send an email that I responded to their comment, thank them for reading and commenting, ask them for ideas, feedback, ask if I or my company can help them, direct them to other resources, …
       • Be nice
       • Use different blogs to demonstrate different aspects of your work, your personality, your … Doing so allows your opinion blog to reference your fact blog for validation and vice versa.
       • …
   • Mechanics
     • Search Engines (Remember that audience definition work we did in step 1? Here’s where it pays off)
       1. Come up with a 2-3 word phrase that describes your blog post. This 2-3 word phrase is called a “keyword” phrase. Now determine if that 2-3 word phrase is how your audience would describe your blog post and if not, come up with something they would use. Write both down, even if they’re close to each other.
       2. Can either 2-3 word phrase easily work as part of the post’s title? If not, go back and come up with some other 2-3 word phrases. Come up with the phrases first, then see if they’ll work as part of the post title.
       3. Use at least one of those 2-3 word phrases for every 100 words of the post. As above, work it into the post itself. It can be a subheading, callout, a title, alt-text or name of a media file or part of the text.
       4. Come up with a bunch of alternative 2-3 word phrases. Be creative. These don’t have to be necessarily close.
       5. Use at least one of these alternative phrases for every 200 words of the posts as described above.
       6. Use full names as URLs if your blog engine supports them. This means your blog URL will be a phrase (probably the post’s title) rather than a string of numbers.
       7. Links should be 2-3 word descriptive text that continues the narrative flow of the post.
       8. Image alt-text tags should be descriptive and include at least one 2-3 word phrase.
     • Tags (ditto the audience definition work referenced above)
       • Humans use tags to determine if your post contains what they’re interested in so write your tags carefully. Disappointed readers are not return readers.
       • Search engines also look at tags. The crossing ground is that keyword phrases can be tags although a good tag tends to be both more general and more inclusive. For example, a mansion may have a “Red Room”. Inside that room are red drapes, red upholstery, red wall paper, red carpeting, red everything. “Red Room Furnishings” is the tag and “red drapes”, “red upholstery”, … are the keywords. If your post is about “red drapes” then your tags would be “Red Room Furnishings” and “Red Drapes” along with whatever else fits.
     • Categories are how humans organize information. Make sure you create blog categories that your audience will understand.
     • Being Social
       • Learn the purposes of sites such as del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, etc., and decide if they’ll benefit you before investing time in them. The best way to determine if such sites will benefit you as a blogger is to decide how similar you are to your audience, then consider how often you rely on such sites.
         • Are you a member of your audience and you don’t use these sites? Then don’t put any effort into them.
         • Are you not a member of your audience and you do use them? Then don’t put any effort into them.
         • Are you a member of your audience and you do use these sites? Then put effort into them.
         • Are you not a member of your audience and you don’t use them? Then put effort into them.
       • Technorati is useful whether or not you ever use it or go there.
       • Using RSS, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email and similar social links makes it easier for people to follow you.
       • Tweet what you post when you post it.
       • Trackbacks, Pingbacks and Linkbacks are BlogoSphere kickbacks. They drive traffic from one blog to another. Accept trackbacks and such from people/blogs you know and trust, refuse such from those you don’t.
       • Comments
         • Make sure comments need to be approved before they are posted to your blog.
         • Make sure you read the comment, the commenter’s name, their URL, their site, etc., and all related information carefully. A short comment that indicates your blog and you are doing great work, are god’s gift, etc., is probably spam.
         • Comment on other blogs, etc., only when you a) strongly believe you can further the discussion or b) have a strong reaction to what’s been posted by others. In either case, include a link back to your blog in your comment (usually as the “your site” option).
       • Blogrolls
         • You need to ask people to add your blog to their blogrolls, and is a good reason to comment on someone else’s blog.
         • You need to add blogs to your blog’s blogroll. Add blogs that add value to your blog, even if they often disagree with your posts.
       • Most blogs have a “Preview” option. Use it to make sure paragraphs break correctly, images display correctly, etc.
   • Final thoughts
     • You have to play by the rules before you can stretch the rules.
     • You have to stretch the rules before you can figure out when to break the rules.

I’m sure there’s more and this is what’s obvious to me as I sit here. I hope it helps. You may also find Optimal Blog Post Frequency – NSE Social Media Research Paper #1 and Social Network Mechanics: A Preliminary ToolKit for Creating and Co-Opting Social Networks for Marketing Purposes useful. These are both for-pay papers. There’s also research findings on Forming Strong, Lasting Social Networks (an element of blogging) in our Members area (also for-pay).

Joseph

I’ll be co-presenting “Case Study: Analyze The Mind Using Text” at the 17-18 May 2011 Text Analytics Conference in Boston, MA, and was asked to answer the following questions in preparation. Sharezees! Sharezees!

The questions are in bold italics, my responses bland and neutral, as always…

How can text analytics help you better understand your customers?

There are two main areas; incoming and outgoing messages.

Incoming customer messages – understand the thoughts behind the words. It’s not enough to understand the words themselves, you need to understand the energy, the emotion, … I’m tempted to use the now exhausted term “sentiment” but that word has been so bastardized and misused as to no longer have any real meaning.

If we use ’sentiment’ as psychologists, anthropologists and psycholinguists use the term, then we need to understand the thought patterns that are demonstrated by the incoming messages, the behavioral patterns that these thought patterns manifested hence are being demonstrated by the sending of the message and any else that might occur, and the motivations for same.

Now comes the trick that is so often lost in today’s business world; if we believe we know our customers better than we know ourselves (via any tool or technology) then we tend to grow contemptuous of them. We believe we understand their motivations, their desires, their hopes and dreams, and that’s both foolish and expensive.

So the trick is to understand what’s truly being communicated in our outgoing messages to our customers. Part of this is learned via observing responses in the market. There is an old adage in semantics and semiotics; the meaning of the message is the response it elicits. Early on we were demonstrating that a great deal of creative and designer output is overtly conveying the product’s or service’s value proposition and covertly communicating the thoughts of the creative and design groups themselves, sometimes to the detriment of the company. We’ve demonstrated this in education, in small business and large and while the recent interest in “neuro” has brought it forward in people’s thinkings, there’s still not a lot people are doing about it.

So we need to understand what’s really going on inside people’s hearts and minds — that’s incoming messaging — and we really need to be sure of what we’re putting into their hearts and minds — that’s outgoing messaging.

How important is it to understand consumer sentiment?

There’s the word again, “sentiment”. Tell me what you mean by it and I’ll tell you if it’s important or not. We have custom designed “sentiment” tools, crafted according to client specifications, and we know our tools are being rebranded and sold for 20-100x what our clients pay (which is fine. We don’t have to manage end-customers).

All of our tools started out by asking clients, “Forget what the industry is saying ’sentiment’ is, what do you want to know? If you could create your own ’sentiment analysis’ tool, what would it report? We’ve documented that conversation and the resulting tool in several places. The result is that our clients have the ability to know who’s an influencer, how far their information is going to travel, how long it’ll be out there, who it’ll influence and in what direction, which direction audiences are going to go and when, how something will be accepted and where, what modifications are necessary for a product/service to fly or flop, …

So if those things are important, then understanding consumer sentiment is important to you.

What can text analytics do for the social media world?

See the above.

What industry (or industries) is using text analytics the most, and how do you see that changing over the next 5 years?

National intelligence agencies and their civilian counterparts, marketing intelligence agencies are using it the most. The influence is increasing as more and more businesses are coming to terms with “neuromarketing without the wires”, some of which involves this kind of analysis.

Hello again. Sorry not to have posted here in a bit. We’ve been a little busy.

In any case and as often happens, I was interviewed for the upcoming Technology Driven Research Event in Chicago, 2-3 May 2011. Here’s a transcript for your reading pleasure. The questions are in italics, my responses in plain text.

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Q: NextStage Evolution offers technology that understands human thought through any machine interface; that seems to be almost a Rosetta Stone for market research! Can you tell me a bit more about your approach and how it works?

A: The answer depends on what you mean by “works”. One version of it “works” by putting a little javascript tag on a client’s site (in the case of our visitor analytics tools). A completely different and equally truthful answer is that it “works” by having a very sophisticated understanding how people behave when they’re being themselves, quite similar to how human beings non-consciously understand each other through years of interacting with each other.

For example, you walk through a mall, glance at someone and “intuitively” know their gender, age, and can make some amazingly accurate guesses about their background, lifestyle, education, income, likes and dislikes, so on and so forth. You do this and your “guesses” have an accuracy that would make IBM’s Watson look like a low grade moron because Watson knows facts and can connect them but it doesn’t have experience, specifically human to human experience.

My research into such things started back in 1987. I was listening to some educational psychologists talking about a problem in that field. It triggered something in me, basically that there was a way to model how humans learned about each other, a way for a computer to go through the different stages of social learning that humans go through from birth throughout the rest of their lives. This model eventually became a set of rules similar to the sets of rules humans use when they interact with each other. When two people meet an incredible number of factors go into deciding the level of intimacy they’ll share. The decision to work together, play together, live together, etc., can be thought of as a “sum of the parts”. Different levels of intimacy are determined by the number of parts in the sum, whether the result is positive or negative, how positive, how negative and so on. Humans recognize one individual from another by summing all the available parts and matching that sum to a sum of the person they have in memory. Are the sums relatively equal? Then you know this person. Not so equal? Then either you don’t know this person or this person has changed and if so, do you still want to know them? This storage of sums became our first breakthrough, the identity-relational model. It mimics how people know each other and was scalable.

So you could say I was teaching the computer facts but instead of facts like “Barack Obama is the 44th President of the USA” — essentially an equation, A = B — I was teaching the computer social facts, what makes up human social intuition, things like “Sometimes when a person looks down and sighs heavily it means they’re sad, sometimes it means they’re tired, sometimes it means …”, and all these “sometimes it means” can be thought of as sums of the parts.

I remember telling those edpsych people that they’d never solve the problem from within their own discipline (I love Einstein’s “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”) and true to my word, to make our technology “work” I borrowed from disciplines so far removed from the traditional paths that, when I created the first working model of our technology, a friend counted elements from 120 “unrelated” fields involved.

We created a new data architecture, the identity-relational model, and some new mathematics to work it, and so far have two patents on how our approach “works”. If any of your readers are familiar with Feynman Diagrams, we made Feynman Diagrams of human interaction, human emotion and behavior, of social systems and social dynamics.

The end result is that our technology can read a document, watch a video, listen to a podcast and determine traditional demographics (age, gender, etc) of the best audience for that material. What’s amusing is that there’s usually a lot of difference between the audience marketers are targeting and the audience their creative is actually targeting.

Further, our technology can determine author intent, as in “what did the author really hope to achieve with this material?” Most companies are amazed at how many non-conscious messages marketers and creative plop into their content, or how strongly those non-conscious messages affect audience response.

On a more technical level, our technology can report on both author and audience RichPersona, a fairly complete description of their cognitive, behavioral and motivational psychologies. This is useful for marketers because it reports how the audience will respond to some creative, when they’ll respond (intender status), why, what exactly will cause the response, how to shape the response to the client’s needs, and demographically who. We’re currently betaing a “SampleMatch” tool that uses these aspects to help companies create test communities for their products and services.

Another part of our technology can observe website visitors and determine demographic and psychologic factors without cookies, without forms, without interrogating the visitor or other internet databases in any way, with no other equipment other than a browser session active (no cameras, no harnesses, no scanners, no …) with the visitor interacting in the most normal settings (sitting in their home, on the bus, in the mall, …) doing what they want, and our technology does this in real-time. An independent test determined that our technology was 98% accurate determining visitor age and 99% accurate determining gender simply by observing how visitors navigate a web site.

And that brings us back to someone sitting in a mall and making highly accurate guesses about people they see just by watching them. What NextStage does is recognize that visitors are “walking” through a website and our technology is the person sitting in the mall, watching others walk past and making highly accurate guesses.

This technology has been in use since 2001.

Q: What do you think are the major drivers of change in the market research space right now and how is NextStage Evolution planning to take advantage of those trends?

A: Major drivers of change…One is definitely the market itself. When audiences demand change suppliers must change in order to keep and increase their audience. An interesting example of this “audience-demand/market change” cycle is what’s happening in the Middle East (as I write this). The suppliers are the various governments, the audience is each country’s population and the market is each country’s economy. The audiences are demanding change and the suppliers — the governments — must change in order to serve those changing audiences. In a more traditional marketspace, if suppliers don’t change then the audience finds another supplier. Extreme cases are when a market fails and a new market takes its place. Some countries have been fairly successful at changing their marketspace and many of the former soviet economies are examples of this.

Another driver is the increasing accountability requirement of analytics. I wrote a three part blog (it starts with The Unfulfilled Promise of Online Analytics, Part 1) based on a long study of people’s attitudes towards online analytics and one of the outstanding elements in there dealt with “accountability”, specifically that no one really wants to be held accountable (surprise!). I wrote Why Isn’t Marketing a Science, Part II about how marketing is being forced into an accountable model and that it’s kicking and screaming all the way.

But I do think marketing is going to have to become accountable because executives are demanding more and more of their marketing dollars as audiences — thanks to the ‘net itself — have become increasingly vocal and demonstrative. As I noted above, the audience is changing therefore the market will change.

In a way “marketing” suppliers are always changing. Every time somebody comes out with a “new” way of calculating something they’re offering a change in the market. I love 140Sweets co-founder Anna OBrien’s “Random metric names and symbols is not an equation” statement because it demonstrates a need for accountability in the analytics marketspace.

The latest change attempt is “neuromarketing” and as always the unspoken claim is “now we’re accountable”. Accountable? Great! But now the consumer has to ask the next set of questions; Accountable regarding what? Accountable to whom? With what kind of repeatable accuracy over time?

Shoving someone into a physically restrictive environment such as an EEG or fMRI, or sitting them in a chair with their head locked into an eye-tracking mechanism, etc., definitely provides data and does anybody honestly what to state that such methodology is demonstrative of the consumer’s real-world experience? It’s the difference between “Someday I’d like to learn how to dance” and taking dancing lessons. The latter teaches you what actually has to be done, the former demonstrates how well your brain can mimic (”imagine” or “remember” might be better terms) a concept it has called “dancing”.

The difference is that such methods provides data about (what I consider) extremely synthetic situations. Nobody engaging in commerce — e, intellectual, social, etc — does it strapped in some kind of synthetic environment unless the investigators are willing to accept synthetic results.

This brings us to how NextStage is poised to take advantage of those trends. I suppose the first is some 20 years of research into these things. By “20 years of research” I mean 20 years of studying how people interact with information presented via machine interfaces, about the last 15 or so of those years we’ve been studying how people interact with the web and about the last 6-7 we’ve been studying how people interact with mobiles. So the first thing is that we have direct experience with how people change their habits as their tools (desktop to laptop to netbook to mobile, web to 2.0 to 3.0 to x.0, Genie to AOL to email to Facebook to Twitter to …) change, we’re not talking about taking data from completely different models (Network TV or Print, for example) and saying “This is what happened here so it’s what’s going to happen there”.

So when it comes to accountability, between the patents, the scientific conference presentations, the peer reviewed publications, the kudos we’ve garnered since we started, the ongoing research, …, NextStage is pretty well covered.

NextStage also has a fairly decent lock on adapting to market and audience change because our technology is a basic (I’ve also heard the term “platform”) technology. One of our first investors said, “You’ve created plastic. It doesn’t matter if someone wants a baby bottle or a car dashboard because your technology can be shaped to whatever people require.” This belief is demonstrated by the fact that the majority of our tools came from client requests. We’d be in meetings and someone would say “It would be great if we could figure out…” and one of us would think about it and a few days later a prototype tool would be ready for testing. An example of this “if only we could figure out” attitude is demonstrated in Sentiment Analysis, Anyone? (Part 1). We said, “Forget about what ’sentiment analysis’ tools do, tell us what you want done”, we created the tool along those lines and its been one of our best sellers ever since.

Another way we’re taking advantage of market changes is the price point of our tools. Right now, most senior level execs don’t use our tools because most aren’t willing to risk their jobs on a (relatively) low price point tool. It’s like going to the bank for a loan and not being able to make payments. You borrow 20k$US, can’t make the payments and it’s your problem, you borrow 20m$US can’t make the payments and it’s the bank’s problem. The same rules apply. A 100k$US solution goes wrong and it’s the vendor’s problem, a 499$US solution goes wrong and it’s the exec’s problem. This “who owns the problem” challenge is compounded by our established accuracy. What do you do if you go with a low cost solution that’s documented with a 90%+ accuracy and it doesn’t work? You look for a new job.

Where all of this works for us is that we’re the darling of mid-level management. They have discretionary spending that’s right in line with what our tools cost and they don’t have the responsibility of their management seniors. They can expense 10-499$US, get a result, report it and be done. There’s no budgetary delays, procurement meetings, tactical planning, resource allocation, etc., and it’s up to senior management to act. This is a win-win for us, especially since people who use us take us up the ladder when they move on to a new position.

So there you go and I hope it’s useful. Please let me know if you need more or other.

Joseph

I mentioned in Next Tool Releases from NextStage that we’d be releasing some new tools in the coming months, some of which are being previewed in the NextStage Members area (probably a good reason to become a member, access to tools in the development stage, a chance to shape them before release, discounts on their use thereafter, …)

• NSPM – NextStage PersonaMap works much like NSPS – NextStage PersonaScope in that it determines behavioral, psychological, cognitive and strategy factors of individuals. It is different in that it uses data collected by NSOS – NextStage OnSite rather than having you submit an individual’s material for analysis. NextStage PersonaMap lists some industries ET has knowledge of, you pick one and it reports how web, print and video material should be designed to capture that audience and what traits any personae should have if designed for this audience. It also lists known Myers-Briggs Equivalents.
• NSPE – NextStage Predictive Echo scans web server logs and previous web pages to determine how visitors were thinking, determines how much of your audience was getting your message historically, then makes suggestions for your next design efforts.
• NSSM – NextStage SampleMatch lists psychologic and behavioral traits about visitors to various sites we monitor worldwide. The information is presented in regional, industry, time and gender based formats. This information is useful when designing marketing and creative material for specific audiences. More industries, locations, etc., will be available as we have time and before the tool is launched. The tool updates once every 24 hours.
• NSVG – NextStage Veritas Gauge uses data from NSOS – NextStage OnSite to determine how many visitors to sites are entering truthful information online to blogs, comments, forms, etc.

Enjoy!

NextStage is about to publish some research we find fascinating. In a nutshell, non-conscious positive and negative responses to facial and body images was demonstrated across age groups, genders, income and education levels. These responses are culturally bound and definitely affect marketing, especially integrated marketing. The science of how different cultures respond to face and body images is koinophology.

An Overview and actionable results of the first part of the research will be posted some time today in the NextStage Members’ Area. The full paper is available at NSE Consumer Research Paper – The Selling Face: A Study of Face and Body Biases in Marketing Communications, Part 1

Meanwhile…want to have some fun? Below is Appendix C of the paper, examples of koinophologically modified images. Before you ask, yes, NextStage’s Evolution Technology suggested how the images should be modified to produce the desired results. What was particularly gratifying was doing a “spot test” with some neighbors and getting the same results we got with a large world model in our real test.

Very exciting.

So, take a look and share your responses as comments. This could be fun…

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Which of the two faces below is preferred and for what purpose? Both faces can be used to market to culturally defined audiences, although the face on top (left in the Appendix) will sell one type of product and the face on the bottom (right in the Appendix)  another. Further, each face is gender targeted; one will elicit stronger positive female responses, the other stronger positive male responses.

Which hand communicates more positively that life has been full and rich and well lived to Boomers? Which negatively?

Which face is “smiling for the camera” versus “really smiling”? Which face is communicating “I’m doing a job” versus “I’m really happy”?

Which child is having more fun?

Which child would cause mothers to purchase more milk? Fathers?

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I’ll list which images are koinophologically modified after we get some responses.

Joseph has asked me to explain the differences in the two patents and, at risk of saying something inappropriate (at least in the context of what attorneys would deem appropriate), here goes:

The easiest way to look at this patent is the conclusion of a painfully long process that started back in 2001 when we filed the original application. After battling with the patent examiner, who engaged in much handwringing over the breadth of the claims and his inability to find prior art on point, we ended up appealing our claims to take the patent out of the hands of the patent examiner. That Examiner withdrew his rejection and presented a new rejection that was not all that much more interesting. We appealed again.

The results of the appeal were mixed. Some claims were allowed and others were rejected as they were written a bit too broadly. At that point we had the option of revising the rejected claims in light of what the appeal board indicated was allowable, but to do so we had to go back to the original patent examiner, with whom we never saw eye to eye. Instead, we permitted the allowed claims to issue and revised the rejected claims in a second patent application we filed. The patent that issued Tuesday is that second patent application that contains those revisions of the rejected claims.

Since the first patent, the Supreme Court has looked at the patentability of software (In re Bilski) and made changes to limit the patentability of some software. The Supreme Court has also looked obviousness and, raised the bar for obtaining patents. The second patent was issued despite these changes in the interpretation of patent claims and evidences the durability both patents will have in the changing patent landscape.

Rather than trying to describe the differences between the two patents, I would say that the second patent expands on the breadth and scope of the protection afforded by the claims in the first patent and closes the loop in the protection of NextStage’s Evolution Technology as it was devised nine years ago. We have more patent applications in the pipeline that reflect improvements made by NextStage in the technology as well as more focused applications of the technology and building blocks of the technology. With these two patents, we have completed the foundation from which we will build the rest of the patent structure.

NextStage’s Resume Rater Tool was released to the public late in 3 Sep 10 and in the month and a half we’ve learned a lot from its users.

For one thing, the overwhelming majority of users are hiring people rather than job seekers. We also learned what this majority audience wanted to learn about candidates.

Long story short, we modified the NextStage Resume Rater Tool to better respond to what the bulk of the audience wanted. Specifically:

• New
  • Confidence-BlueSky Meter similar to the one used in the NextStage Political Analyzer Tool
  • Rich Persona Work Type similar to the one used in the NextStage Sentiment Analysis Tool
  • A listing of job categories the candidate would do well in. Note, this is job categories, not job titles or positions.
• Removed
  • 0-100 scale Confidence Gauge
  • Instructions on how to improve a resume
  • How large a response the resume will receive

People who’ve purchased NSRR runs since 1 Oct 10 should be receiving a note indicating they’ve been credited with more runs. Please contact NextStage if you have purchased NSRR runs since 1 Oct 10 and do not receive a credit notification. Remember to have your receipt available when contacting us.

I posted this earlier on LinkedIn and Facebook, now for the general public as well…

NextStage AgePersuader

The next tool out of the gate will be The NextStage AgePersuader (NSAP). NSAP is much like NextStage’s GenderPersuader Tool (NSGP). You give it material to analyze, it indicates what age groups are most likely to respond and in what percentages (NextStage’s GenderPersuader Tool indicates which genders will respond and in what percentages). Like all NextStage tools, NextStage AgePersuader is easy to use (enter your bona fides, enter a file or url to be analyzed, hit [Submit] and get your result) and the results are (we think) easy to understand. NextStage Political Analyzer Tool (NSPA) users are familiar with the NSAP output as age persuasion is part of NSPA’s output.

NextStage GeoScope

NextStage GeoScope (NSGS) – NSGS is different from most of the other tools in that it derives data from NextStage’s OnSite Tool (NSOS). Some group members may remember conferences where, during my presentations, I presented charts of how different geographic locations were thinking and responding to online material, and how to design navigation to make use of their thinking/decision making/motivational styles (ala NextStage’s PersonaScope Tool (NSPS and aka the {C,B/e,M} matrix). NSGS will do much the same and will include both an age and gender breakdown of online traffic for a given geographic region.

The home page will present a list of geographic locations ET has learned about via NSOS. Entries can vary from something as specific as “Washington, DC” to something as broad as “Scotland” and are dependent on how much traffic has been analyzed from what geographic locations in a given time period (we’re thinking we’ll update it weekly). If you see a geographic location you’re interested in, enter your bona fides, select a geographic location from the list (that’s the only input you give it). NSGS returns the age breakdown (as in NSAP), gender breakdown (as in NSGP) and top four RichPersonae (as in NSPS) from that geographic area.

NextStage GeoScope pulls data from the NextStage OnSite tool (so it’s pulling data from what’s really out there) and you don’t have to be a NextStage OnSite subscriber to use it. Also this is a tagless tool, meaning you don’t need to tag anything to use it.

We’ve been thinking about this tool for a while and some work I’ve been doing with an international design&marketing firm has solidified the idea and need for this tool. For those who’ve been following us for a while, it’s basically an extension/upgrade of our InFocus Reports. The image above is from an InFocus Report. NSGS will be similar.

NextStage BlueSky-Confidence Gauge

NextStage BlueSky-Confidence Gauge (NSBC) – NSBC is literally the BlueSky Meter and NSSA’s Confidence Gauge in one tool. We’ve decided to combine these two functions into a separate tool based on the number of people who are using the NextStage Political Analyzer Tool (NSPA) simply to get a combined BS-Confidence result. I was explaining these two elements during a training, that some of the results were indicating “This person is extremely confident what they’re writing is BS”, “This person has absolutely no confidence in what they’re writing, hence they believe it is BS”, … and half the class’s eyes lit up, so a separate tool it’ll be.

NextStage Information Designer

The last tool in this cycle is NextStage Information Designer (NSID). NSID is very similar to NextStage Ad Placement Tool (NSAD) in that it asks some 30 questions regarding the audience, offering, delivery platform, output medium (brochure, webpage, tri-fold, mobile, kiosk, flyer, …) and desired outcome and determines the best outer (”landing” in web terms) and inner information formats (”pages” in web terms) to use to maximize desired results. This is another tool we’ve been thinking about for a while and some recent work has solidified the necessity of it.

On the horizon:
NextStage Advertising Intelligence (NSAI) – The closest online tool to our full desktop TargetTrack tool (an old, out of date brochure can be seen here. TargetTrack will always be available as part of our consulting packages) we’re finishing up some of the equations, at which point Charles, our CTO, will have his folks turn it into working code.

Charles is also busily at work on an “OnSite Lite” that will only have the three most often used reports and be available at a fraction of the cost of our current OnSite tool (or so he tells me) and handle geometrically higher traffic volumes/site.

And that’s the news from Scotsburn and Nashua.

May it be a happy, busy and profitable Autumn for all of us.

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Addendum

During conversations yesterday I was reminded that NextStage had several free online tools that could easily be converted to our new store system. One of these, InFocus, is mentioned above as the precursor to NextStage GeoScope.

Some of these other tools will be rolled out in our store system over the coming months. Most will be pulling data from our OnSite system (currently monitoring visitor traffic in over 50 countries). Only data allowed by OnSite clients will be used in these tools. These tools will be tagless, meaning you won’t need to tag your site to use them.

These tools include:

• NextStage Market Persona (NSMP) – NextStage Market Persona will offer a list of markets (travel, medical, educational, automotive, industrial, legal, … for example). Pick the market area of interest to you and NSMP will report the top RichPersonae (what NextStage PersonaScope reports) for that market. Knowing how the majority of people in a market think, make decisions and what motivates them should be useful when developing creative. We think so, anyway…
• NextStage Predictive Echo (NSPE) – NextStage Predictive Echo is for clients who don’t want OnSite and still want to make use of NextStage’s Evolution Technology in their online efforts. NSPE reads through traffic logs, the web pages the traffic logs involve and determines how to improve site performance regarding messaging, goals, redesign, etc., are concerned.

There are other tools still on our shelves. We’re learning what tools make sense based on how current users are using the existing tool set. Interested folks can also contact us directly should you need a tool you can’t find elsewhere. Chances are we already have it, something quite close or can make it in record time.