The Future Place Blog

The Bad Science Column

Following my rant, yesterday, about the decline in the application of rationality, as evidenced by the UK campaign against twin bin refuse collection, Mario (who has a blog here) recommended Dr Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science site.

The Bad Science column has been a regular feature of the Guardian since 2003 and specialises in exposing bad science, faulty thinking, and exposing the sleight of hand of some PR, marketing, and advertising types. I have spent the last hour or so reading back articles on Bad Science, and can warmly recommend it – many thanks Mario.

Rubbish, Myths and Experts

The UK looks set to have a clash between an urban myth and experts. For the last couple of years there has been shift in the patterns of how domestic refuse is collected by local councils. Until recently most councils collected refuse weekly, from a single dustbin (typically from a large wheelie bin). However, waste disposal is an increasing problem in the UK, as in many other countries. Landfill sites are becoming full, nobody wants new holes digging, and incineration raises its own concerns.

Local councils have been pulled by encouragement and pushed by taxes to increase the amount of recycling in their area. The solution that many councils have adopted is to supply each house with two wheelie bins, a recycling bin and a waste bin. For reasons of costs the pattern of collection has been that the recycling is collected once every two weeks, and the waste bin is also collected every two weeks.

There is now a groundswell of opposition to the twin bin system, by people who object to their domestic waste being collected every two weeks. All of the evidence is that the twin bin system leads to more recycling, and that there are no hygiene problems with domestic waste, provided it is properly wrapped before being put in the bin. However, there are growing numbers of urban myths about houses in a ‘neighbouring area’ that have become infested with maggots and even more scarily rats. Quite how people think rats go about opening the hinged lids of the bins to climb in, and why rats can master this art with two weekly collections and not with weekly.

The problem for the Government and the local councils is that their argument rests entirely on science and evidence, but the opponents are basing their views on ‘common sense’ and myths. My suspicion is that myths will win hands down.

It seems to me the balance between science and myth in society has been changing for a few years now. In the US, but also in parts of Europe there is a growth of people believing in Creation, and disbelieving in evolution. There seems to be a growth in alternative medicine, the use of star signs, and a never ending supply of people willing to take part in national lotteries (or stupidity taxes as statisticians call them).

Niche brands need niche marketing, but mass brands still need mass marketing

That is the conclusion in Nigel Hollis’s recent blog. Whilst he accepts that brands like lowermybills.com and even Ben Sherman can profit from niche marketing, he contends that major brands such as P&G, Kraft and HP need to use mass (i.e. TV) advertising. His main point being that new media channels simply do not reach enough people on their own.

One of the interesting factors that Nigel highlights is the different standards of success and failure that different channels are currently being held to. A YouTube upload that is viewed 100,000 times is usually considered a success. By contrast “NBC’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip or [CBS’s]  Smith, which was the first cancellation of the fall TV season, are branded as failures even though they generated nearly 10 million viewers a week and are supported by advertising.” he says.

Nigel is certainly not a refusenik when it comes to new media, and highlights that one of the problems with conventional mass media is its declining value for money, which he considers to be a bigger issue than its declining reach.

Nigel also highlights the slide below from SlideShare which both highlights the current dominance of TV and the extent to which new media have arrived on the scene.

For non-UK readers ITV and C4 are the largest two UK TV channels that carry advertising (the BBC does not carry advertising).

What is Web 2.0?

Today I was helping run an MRS course in London on Online Panels and Online Communities. One of the other speakers was Lee McEwan (of Leo Burnett and the Serendipity Blog) who was talking about what is Web 2.0. Lee’s take was somewhat different to the more traditional view. Rather than focus on specific activities, such as social networks, and wikis, Lee focused on the general change in the software that makes the Web work. His view was that 2.0 can be seen as all the sum of the recent improvements to things like browsers, Ajax, servers, networking, etc.

Whilst I do not fully accept Lee’s view, it did stimulate some additional thoughts on what I mean by Web 2.0. My feeling is that one useful way of thinking about Web 1.0 and 2.0 is that in the old world there was only a face at one end of the pipe. The publisher was known, but the reader was largely unknown. With Web 2.0 we have faces at both ends of most connections; the flow of information is two-way – which nicely oversimplifies to 1way and 2way – which will do for me at the moment.

Millward Brown’s Brandz Report

I am a great believer in keeping abreast of what other agencies are doing and reporting. After all, nobody has a monopoly of wisdom, and there are some very good reasons why large agencies have been successful.

One of my favourites is the Millward Brown Brandz report (something I became addicted to when I briefly worked for MB a few years ago). The Brandz report is based on about 1 million interviews, covering 40,000 brands across 31 countries.

The Millward Brown website has a taster version of the BrandZ report, listing the top 100 brands globally, plus the top few brands by region and category. Useful background reading for any researcher IMHO.

The top ranked brand, globally, was Google, a finding which reflects the importance of the Internet and the growing dominance of Google. Other interesting (in my mind) findings were:
Top Global Mobile/Wireless Brand, China Mobile (not Vodafone, NTT, Verizon, or Orange).
Top Car Brand Toyota, just ahead of BMW and Mercedes.
Top European Brand was Nokia

Great Map Mashups

A Mashup is a web site that combines information from different sources. A map mashup is a site that adds additional information to a map. And these examples all add information to Google Maps. All of these examples are from the April (print) edition of Wired – although I have feeds from Wired to Bloglines, I still enjoy the print copy, spotting articles in the print edition I never would have noticed online.

News Map, select a country and see a news feed from Yahoo News.

PediaX, as you fly over the map, anything with a Wikipedia entry is highlighted.

Flood Maps, shows you how much land disappears as the sea rises by each metre.

Web 2.0 less common than thought in MR!

Today (Tuesday) I was lecturing at an MRS training day on Advanced Quantitative Techniques, my session being on Innovation and Complexity Online. The last few slides were about Web 2.0 and Research 2.0. Just before I sailed into my usual material I checked how many people in the room were familiar with Web 2.0, and about a quarter were not – although they were quickly reminded/brought up to speed with a few examples such as MySpace, Blogs, Wikipedia, and YouTube.

The people in the room were a convenience sample drawn together by their interest in Quantitative Market Research, so perhaps it should not be surprise that they were not all keen followers of Internet matters. It was a good reminder to me to ensure that I do not make too many assumptions, because I do have some previous form on that topic!

Web 2.0 and B2B

Most of the attention being paid to Web 2.0 so far has related to consumers and citizens, rather than the realm of B2B. Hopefully, much of that will change next month (16-18 May) with BIG Conference in Chepstow (UK), the BIG is the Business Interest Group. I have the honour to be the Keynote speaker, and my contribution will be followed by others looking at new media.

Web 2.0 started in the consumer world and most of the visible growth has been amongst individuals rather than organisations. However, this does not mean that there have not been significant and potentially disruptive changes impacting Business-to-Business.

Reuters have announced that they are to launch a social network (its version of MySpace) in 2007. The network is aimed at drawing in the 70,000 fund managers, traders, and analysts who are users of Reuters messaging service. Instead of video clips and links to Arctic Monkeys Reuters envisages that people will post research and trading models. Within B2B sharing is less common than within the likes of FaceBook, Flickr, and YouTube. So it is not surprising that Reuters social network will only be open to Reuters customers. Reuters have already shown themselves to be adept at picking up 2.0 trends, for example they have for some time had a reporter stationed in Second Life.

One of the growth areas in B2B and social networking has been in the area of recruitment, although the term social networking refers entirely to the mechanics of the network, rather than the social content. One such network is LinkedIn.com, which claims over ten million members. LinkedIn offers services such as investing and sales, but it is recruiting where the network is at its strongest. Another network, even more focused on recruitment is Jobster.com.

Another increasing common B2B use of Web 2.0 is blogging, and CEO blogs in particular. Blogs by the CEO are an increasingly effective way of Chief Executives communicating directly with stakeholders. The leaders in this trend have tended to be IT related such as Jonathan Schwartz (CEO of Sun Microsystems) and Craig Newmark (CEO Craig’s List), but the same rules apply for any organisation.

In addition to Reuters, several other organisations have created B2B operations in Second Life. Sun Microsystems has its Sun Pavilion, as part of what they are calling the Participation Age. Sun are viewing the Pavilion as a place for news forms of communication, collaboration, and economic activity.

PA Consulting Group has an office in Second Life which it uses to host conferences, recruitment events, and as a tool for it to show clients new tools and products.

25 years ago the Sinclair Spectrum was launched

Slashdot has a post reminding us that April 23 was the 25th anniversary of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. For a while in the early 1980s the ZX Spectrum was the top selling PC in the UK and in several other countries.

If we think back to how basic and primitive the ZX Spectrum was we get some idea how fast things are changing.

The ZX Spectum had (comparisons with a modern Dell in brackets):
Processor, Z80, 3.5 MHz (Dell 3+ GHz, usually dual processor, thousand times faster)
Ram, 16Kb (Dell 1Gb, million times more)
Graphics, 32 columns by 24 rows, using 15 colours (Dell 1200x800 or much better, millions of colours)

The ZX Spectrum dated back to a time before Microsoft Windows, CDs, DVDs, the World Wide Web, Microsoft Office, and most modern programming techniques. People who came to computers in the ‘old days’ are always likely to view them through a mechanistic prism which recalls how primitive they are. But, people who are under 16, who can’t remember a time before the Web, are likely to view them in very different ways.

Google acquires WebEx like Marratech

Google appears to be spending like a drunk in a brewery at the moment. Its latest purchase, see Techcrunch, is Swedish startup Marratech (the purchase being for the software not the company).

WebEx is an increasingly common aspect of business meetings and presentations and it was recently purchased by Cisco for US$3.2 billion (twice what Google paid for YouTube and similar to what Google paid for DoubleClick.).

For a while there has been a feeling that Google will be the new Microsoft, in the sense that it will be the company we all love to hate, and whose products we can’t live without.