Search results for: “social search”

June 2016 research slides

Here is a copy of the slides that I pull together (when I have the time) of publicly available data that would be of use. This is the June 2016 research slides.

Google search volumes

This month I have some new data around search which came from disclosures at Google I/O in terms of search volumes. We talk about social as if search has gone out of style but its growth is still staggering. This is now driven by mobile device penetration and adoption as computing devices on the go. It also speaks to the wider number of questions that search now answers. It used to be that search answered with ‘facts’ found online. It then became more contextual with shortcuts that gave you the weather forecast or a foreign exchange rate. Mobile moved this on further to items like local recommendations.

Partly through the search box, but also by more meta detail about the device doing the searching and its location to within a few metres due to GPS and cell tower triangulation. Voice interaction has also started to impact search volume. Image driven search still seems to be an area that could drive much more potential search volume, that would be valuable for commerce.

Looking at global search revenue over time, Google’s monopoly position becomes immediately apparent. It is amazing how Bing and Yahoo! haven’t managed to grow market share but just transfer value from one to the other. In the Chinese market, Sohu has been obliterated with Baidu search. But one does have to wonder about the value of web search, when so much internet usage now happens in the WeChat eco-system.

More details about me here.

Full presentation

Full presentation available for download as a PDF on Slideshare and you can find more research related posts here.

June 2016 research slides from Ged Carroll

June 1, 2016
Half of Google searches + more
Worldwide, More Than Half Of Google Searches Happen On Mobile | SearchEngineLand – this is really big. A few thoughts on this:
- Half of Google searches will be about very different things, for instance searching for things like coffee shops in the vicinity of the searcher
- Advertising is likely to see a higher amount of real world performance marketing solutions. This also counteracts Amazon becoming the default product search engine for a lot of web users
- It means a move away from organising all the world’s knowledge. There will be a move to national language search and probably taking away Boolean from power users who make up way less than half of Google searches
- This is a big step in bringing what I call the web of no web into being; where the real world and digital world provide a symbiotic experience. More related content here.
Light’s L16 is a DSLR-quality camera that fits in your pocket — for a stiff price | ExtremeTech – interesting idea

Apple: Semi Advisors Ponders Fallout from any Potential iPhone Battery Issue – Tech Trader Daily – Barrons.com – it’s possible with different tape-out and manufacturing processes I guess?

Sony may consider options for struggling smartphone business | HKEJ Insights – will Qualcomm help them with market access? Interesting example of the commoditisation of Google Android’s eco-system

Amazon launches marketplace for handmade goods | RTE – Amazon wants more of the consumer spend and is going after craft shops and Etsy to get more of the hipster dollar

China launches international payment system | Shanghai Daily – competition with Hong Kong ramps up. By regularising this, it also give the government a chance to regulate and prevent irregular outward capital flow

Twitter’s new Moments spotlights events as they unfold – CNET – its about getting users moving from casual to serious, an ‘on ramp’

“Just Googling it” is bad for your brain | Quartz – Google is killing your memory

Apple Watch releases a new series of short ads, emphasising functionality | Creative Review – these are stylish, looks as if I am not the only person who was wondering what the use case for an Apple watch was

YouTube Goes To War: The Dangers Of ‘Radical Transparency’ « Breaking Defense – it looks like the US military is starting to consider the impact of smartphones in a combat zone

Review: SIG Sauer Introduces The Legion Series & The New Legion P-229 – The Firearm Blog – this almost feels like SIG Sauer is positioning their product (and that of collaborating partners) as a luxury product

Facebook | Atlas Solutions – interesting piece about Facebook’s Atlas model

Apparently Porsche thinks Google’s Android Auto asks for way too much sensitive data | VentureBeat | Business | by Michael de Waal-Montgomery – Google scraping compete data?

Quentin Tarantino: Netflix isn’t for the famed Pulp Fiction director | BGR – artefacts and the peculiar version of serendipity you get in ‘crate digging’

Thin blue likes: Four Facebook lessons Hong Kong cops can learn from police around the world to make friends online | South China Morning Post – Hongkongers are big fans of the social media site – there are more than 4.4 million Facebook users in the city according to the company, one of the 10 largest usages in the world per capita (paywall)
October 10, 2015
The silent majority of social
The silent majority as a concept was introduced to the world by Richard Nixon in a speech about America’s position in Vietnam on November 3, 1969.

The portion of the speech that featured it is below:

Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful nation in the world we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism.

And so tonight-to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans-I ask for your support.

I pledged in my campaign for the Presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace. I have initiated a plan of action which will enable me to keep that pledge.

Nixon’s ‘silent majority’ reference tapped into a tenet of common wisdom, that the majority of the population is generally passive in actions and discussions; a positive spin on Juvenal’s concept of bread and circuses or panem et circenses. He used the phrase to decry the selfishness of ordinary Roman citizens, their neglect of wider concerns and likely lack of civic duty.

There is a similarly silent majority today online, in spite of the democratisation of publication via social channels. A small proportion of us publish. I got the model below from Bradley Horowitz at Yahoo! but I am sure it came from someone earlier and it still holds true today

What this means is essentially two things:
- Whilst the volume of social postings continues to go up, it still represents a small amount of the general population and even the online population. Most of the people, most of the time are passive consumers of social content
- When people do post content, it isn’t generally about brands or important issues, but about being with their friends or family. They look inwardly on their lives
Social conversation is often the province of the highly connected, the verbose and of polarised opinions (complaining about a product that really got under their skin with poor performance or fanboydom).

Ironically search data probably tells us more about the population in general, the problem that search presents marketers with is quality of data. The major search engines (Google, Bing/Yahoo!, Yandex) no longer provide web sites with the details of the search term used to arrive on a given site as they have defaulted to HTTPS.

Google Trends has decided to give ‘real-time’ data rather than the few days delay it previously provided on search terms. Google Trends doesn’t provide search volumes, but search ‘rate of change’ which means that static low or high search volumes won’t register. But its the closest we have online into easily understanding the nature of the silent majority of social; what they are interested in and care about.

More online related content.

More information
Nixon’s ‘Silent Majority’ Speech
Google Trends Now Shows the Web’s Obsessions in Real Time | WIRED
June 21, 2015
Emotion research paper by Facebook

Over the weekend if you went on to quality (not Buzzfeed) news sites you would have probably seen something about a scientific paper that was published by researchers in the pay of Facebook on how emotion spreads through social networks.

Emotion research explainer

There was a lot of copy written already about the experiment, so I recommend that you read The Atlantic‘s piece on it instead. There has been a lot written about whether it is moral, legal or ethical. As far as it being legal, Facebook’s highly paid legal counsel could provide a better steer on it than I could; and I suspect they would tell you it was completely legal.

As for the morals and ethics of it, I rather think that those are a mute point. Consumers emotion states have been tweaked for decades, the question of morality sailed with the rise of the mass market consumer product.

Whilst public relations as it is practiced now is more of a mechanistic craft; its father Edward Bernays viewed propaganda as a ‘modern instrument’ driven by scientific thinking including understanding of audience psychology to move people.

Advertisers utilised motivational research from the early 20th century on to create cognitive dissonance with a consumer and then provide the product as a solution. The Atlantic carried an article on the psychology of advertising back in 1904. You are a better Mum if you wash your kids clothes with Persil, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk will put a smile on your face. All of which mine directly into consumer’s emotion, spreading dissatisfaction.

Political pollsters use voter psychographic profiling to induce a constituency result. We already live in the world of a malleable proletariat envisioned by by George Orwell in his novel 1984.

The people who are outraged by this need to get over it, log-in to Facebook less and realise that they are already sheep with a gallery of multinational shepherds herding them through their consumer lifecycle. What you can do is become more informed and read your environment in a more critical way. More related content here.

More information

Everything We Know About Facebook’s Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment | The Atlantic
Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks by Adam D. I. Kramera, Jamie E. Guillory and Jeffrey T. Hancock
The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies (Oxford Handbooks) the Auerbach and Castronovo edited anthology gives you pretty much everything you need to know from Bernays onwards about psychology and audience manipulation
The Psychology of Advertising by Walter D Scott | The Atlantic (1904) – no that’s not a typo
Frontline: The Persuaders | PBS
Advertising’s Fifteen Basic Appeals | Jib Fowles

June 30, 2014
Social hygiene

Social hygiene – preamble

This post is part of an on-again, off-again series of posts about eight trends that I think are shaping things. In this one I wanted to deal with a concept that I call social hygiene.

Social way of life and social hygiene

Social as a channel has become engrained into our lives just like the mobile phone, the web and the telephone directory before it. From a marketers perspective this means that social media channels go from fearful curio to part of the bread-and-butter work done day-in, day-out by agencies and clients alike.

I remember back in 2006 saying that having a social strategy would be as ridiculous as having a phone or email strategy. Both are valuable marketing channels yet strategy as a discipline is unchanged since the works of Sun Tzu. It looks like this viewpoint may finally be starting to break through

Here is a chart from Google Trends, I picked three terms to compare: social media marketing, social business and digital marketing. What’s interesting is that social business as a term seems to be plateauing and social media marketing seems to be slightly less searched for than in the past. Meanwhile digital marketing carries on with a steady progression which seems to have started growing in 2007, around the same time that interest in social media marketing took off. This suggests to me that social is now a hygiene factor, just when the power is out and we are suddenly aware of electricity, or we don’t think about the phone unless we can’t get a signal or a dial tone.

More information
Eight trends for the future
Digital interruption
Immersive as well as interactive experiences

February 16, 2014

More posts