Digital Influence Mapping Project

5 Steps to Choosing the Right Listening Post Solution

We always start with listening. We listen to what people say in blogs about things that matter to them, when they tweet about the brands in their lives, public discussions in forums and review sites. The social media (r)evolution has eaked along enough that most marketers would say they start with listening. We are presenting today at OMMA Social in NYC alongside our good friend Pepper Roukas at American Express. Our topic is Listening Posts. I wanted to share my experience choosing and creating solutions for ourselves and our clients.

Choose Wisely

How do you select the right listening "solution" for you? I say 'solution' as it isn't as simple as choosing a technology provider - one of the 120 or so who provide some form of cgm monitoring. Thinking it's all about technology will leave you with a technology contract and 2 months of data for which many execs in the company scratch their head and say "so what." To select and implement a program that has a quantifiable impact on your business, I would suggest following these five steps.

1. Define Your Listening Goals Across the Enterprise
CGM Listening can be a powerful additon to marketing, communications, customer service, product development and more. Different groups within the company can benefit. Since the infrastructire of a listening post has significant combined hard and soft costs, it only makes sense to try and leverage a solution across as many needs as possible.

There are really three essential purposes of a Listening Post:

• Guide marketing, communications and product strategy via insights from conversations
• Establish a rapid-response system to what is said across the Social Web
• Create a measurement benchmark and reporting system for word of mouth

Different groups will want a system that does different things. Marketing may want 1 and 3. Communications 2 and 3. Product development may want to learn insights from what customers are saying about the product. Customer Service may want a way to respond quickly to concerns and complaints.

It is possible that you need all of these bases covered. Just as likely is that one of these has become the urgent interest and you need to satisfy it without cutting yourself off from the future.

2. Map Out the Work Flow That Fits Your Organization
Whether your a communications team member, part of marketing or trying to solve cgm listening needs across the enterprise, taking a moment to map out how the information is collected, translated into insight and then applied to action will save you time and frustration later.

I purposely didn't say "document your requirements" - not because you shouldn't but more because its obvious. Starting by mapping data-to-insight-action and how the workflow can actually happen in your organization is a great place to start.

If you are prmarily looking for Marcom insight, who is responsible for that now? Is there a insights and research person in your midst who can shepard this new source? If so, how are their reports and insights recieved now? Are they used to working at a fast, real-time clip? How geeky are they from a lexicon to a technology way?  Can they handle the interface themselves or will they need help?

Who owns the action taken from the Listenin Post goals you determined above? That will tell you a lot about how the path the information must take to convert into first insight and then action.

You may need to outsource or get help from a trusted partner to do some of this. By mapping out the process, you will discover your needs ahead of time.

3. Create a Prototypical Report
It's always helpful to envison the solution. Then you can make decisions and build to get yourself there. Creating a prototypical report with real data is a giant step towards knowing what you want. I suggest that you think of two reports - the voluminous one that you just can't help yourself from making and the 1-pager that will get to the C-suite.

Start by defining the 'conversation criteria.' These are the terms and phrases that will help you find conversations on brand-related topics. It may be brand mentions, competitors but even more important are those topics that intersect between customers and the brand. If you are a bank or financial services firm, it may be discussions parents are having about sending their kids to college or buying a house. 

The conversation is what you put into the listening engine. How well you do this step will determine how useful the output of the engine.

You can actually get data two ways:

• You can ask one of the technology companies to do you a solid and let you test drive the service. This is tricky as many of the them require a significant 'boot-up' phase where they feed the conversatoin criteria in and weed out erroneous or spam data. Still it is possible with some.

• You can also do this by hand. Using many of the available listening programs out there, you can get a pretty good bead on what people are saying

4. Review 3-4 of the Recommended Leaders
Don't look at them all. You'll go blind, become resentful or just plain lose all your time to the task. Find the 2-3 you think fit what you need and then throw a wildcard choice in there.

Depending on your answer to #1 above, you will weight these things differently. Most listening post tasks can be broken down into four steps:

Collecting

• What is the source collection the service is using? Many subscribe to third party sources that are limited in terms of what they have in them (e.g. some may only look at 10m blogs)
• What types of cgm do they collect? Blogs, Twitter, Video, Traditional media, Forums, Review sites....

Rating and Sorting

• Are they keyword-based or is there a more rigorous sentiment process?

• If they claim a machine-driven sentiment rating system, can you see it in action? (this is one of the hardest things to get tech to do well)
• How do they facilitate cleaning up the most likely spam? This is asking how they optimize the collection.
• What is the interface for adding human rating to the results?
• What is their proprietary vocabulary for things like influence? Every technology company comes up with something and often it is quite...let's just say 'special.'
• Do they identify "influencers" or whatever they call them from within conversations and what criteria do they use to determine influence?

Reporting

• What are the top three reports the system can generate?
• What is the most useful visual report they can make? ( I know of whole systems that provide little value beyond a couple of cool visuals. I am not saying that is enough but don't underestimate the value of a great social graph visual to a senior executive)
• Can you create a one-pager, preferably a pdf, to make that C-suite deliverable? How easy does thsi system make that?

Insights into action

Does the technology provide insights and action steps? This is a big, trick question. None can do this and anyone who claims this is likely lying or positioning their staff as expert strategists. This is the big reason why my team only offers Listening POst powered by X(we use three different technologies). Our listening Post is made useful because of the care we put into efficiently distilling data into insights and action (and determining the objective and defining the conversation criteria at the head of the program.)

5. Run a 3-month Pilot Program
Everyone needs results quickly. Many of the platform choices you may make require time to get up and running and refine results. If you plan a 3 month pilot, you give yourself a reasonable amount of time to prove out the choice, refine it and be able to communicate to the rest of the organization the value the solution is providing.

6 Directions on Social Media Measurement: How Will We Come Together?

There are lots of interesting efforts to make sense of Social Media Marketing which I often refer to as Word of Mouth Marketing since that is the outcome of most social media-based efforts. We are somewhere in the second third of our journey towards meaningful, shared measurement. We are in that part where we wrestle with credible yet cimbersome models and pine fo rthe simplicity that came before. Don't we all wish we had "reach and frequency" goals? Doesn't it seem like social media marketing is being held to ahigher standard than the disciplines that came before?

Recently, I have been drawn into or tracking at least 6 different efforts to make sense of soaicl media marketing measurement. It's useful to become aware of them all. Still, the question remains - are we better off with this English-garden growth of discussions, forums, white-paper symposiums, or do we need "one ring to bind them all?"

IAB Social Media Measurement
The IAB recently releasedtheir social media metrics guidelines. These tackle the space from an "advertisers" POV. They are also trying to develop meaningful KPIs that acknowledge what the space does well - foster conversations - and what marketers want - a way to place their brand in the conversation. Here is a snapshot from the Guidelines:

"Ad campaigns can target a single blog or multiple blogs by category using traditional
interactive reach and audience metrics. However, additional targeting value can also be
derived by mapping campaigns to blogs engaged in common “conversations” through the
form of shared links, referencing each-other’s content. The social connection of publisher-to-publisher relationships through these content links aggregates engaged consumers into a
desirable and topic-engaged audience.

The ability to aggregate audiences by topic is dynamic, following the dialogue consumers are having. Following these “conversations”, an advertiser or brand evangelist is able to tailor creative to incorporate the messages, language, and tone audiences are using at the current moment and effectively speak directly to them, rather than building creative which is solely based on statistical reach and audience metrics."

Their general social media  metrics are nothing new. It is the list of KPIs that we have all been tracking: unique visitors, page views, visits, interaction rate, time spent, etc.. The new territory (for IAB) is their method for assessing the conversation space.

• Conversation Size means they are now looking across the social Web for relevant mentions of an advertisers campaign language. This is the equivalent of Ogilvy's Conversation Criteria which I would argue is a more relevant approach than:

"Number of Conversation Relevant Sites: The count of sites in the conversation whose content contains conversation phrases from the client’s Request for Proposal (RFP) or Insertion Order (IO)."

• Site relevance - are their a lot of relevant mentions of topics that intersect with the brand

• Author Credibility - we have been doing this for years in our Influencer Maps and includes metrics from inbound links to earliest and latest relevant posts.

• Content Freshness and relevance - IAB is suggesting that beyond earliest and latest post that the delta in between or "Mean-time Between Posts" on a subject is important.

If your primary goal is to determine which social sites to advertise on, these all seem like useful metrics. The power of social media lies in between the advertising, however. It lies within the conversation itself. It's hard to see how the  IAB approach will account for the power of earned media.

Word of Mouth Marketing Association Metrics Best Practice Guidebook
Last week, WOMMA (discl:board member) released a draft of what hopes to be a very useful book for brand marketers on the fundamental building blocks of word of mouth marketing measurement. The draft will be revised between now and November. Still, it serves as a useful guidebook even now.

The WOMMA Metrics Guidebook covers the fundamentals of Conversation Volume and Share, Influencer Value and offers up examples of some of the ways companies are fashioning measurement models to guide perfomance metrics, advocacy valuation and even the ever-elusive "value of a conversation."

This will help marketers understand and share a vocabulary about what matters in measurement. There remains at least two extra steps to tackle to make this Guidebook all that it can be:

• A closer connection to the real ways marketers want to use social media. If you accept, as I do, that word of mouth marketing is a bigger tent yet inclusive of social media marketing, you must also agree that the main ring in that circus is social media. The Guidebook will be stringer if it ackoedges that marketers want to know now how to measure social media and make more direct mention of how they are doing that.

• Cast a broader net to capture more ways that more marketers are measuring social media. Our model, Conversation Impact, is not covered here and I assume that many others are not as well. Perhaps I am pining for more of a complete index than a "guidebook" but still, there is a lot of good thinking on measurement out there beyond what is currently captured in the Guidebook.  

Social Media Advertising Consortium
The new kid on the block, SMAC has developed in a small corner of the social media "in-crowd" as a non-profit association determined to make sense of the value and impact of paid evertising in social media. What they will accomplish beyond what IAB sets out to do remains unclear. Looking at the membership with nary an ad agency in sight, I am guessing that they will focus on the combined impact for marketers of paid and earned media in this landscape.  Here's what they say about themselves:

"In 2009, social network advertising revenues will hit an estimated $1.825 billion.* Yet the industry is still fuzzy on the details – what they’re selling, what they’re buying, and how to measure success. As a result, players, big and small, are eager to unite to find solutions for social media’s challenges.

SMAC fosters collaboration throughout the entire social media ecosystem, diving deep into critical issues and staying ahead of this constantly evolving industry. By bringing together buy side, sell side, and research professionals to develop relevant standards, comprehensive research and definitive measurement tools, our goal is to grow revenues and increase engagement."

Advertising Research Foundation
The forum for paid media modeling, ARF has been scartching in the dirt trying to find meaning behind the concept of "engagement" for a few years. There efforts led to this slightly etherial gem of a definition for engagement: "Turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context."

They are a good forum for those of us who really care about meaningful masurement. their Audience Measurement 4.0 conference is on June 23 + 24 in NYC.

Most of the tracks in AM4.0 are not about WOM or social media. At least two of the tracks - The World of Social Media & Search Measurement & The Value of Cross-Media, Engagement & Influencer Marketing - deal directly with what we are most concerned with. Of all of the 'too many' social media conferences on the horizon, this is one that I consider essential and is likely to remain so for the next few years.

i-COM
Based in Europe, these folks are trying to bind all of the relevant Web associations internationally to come together via a series of events. They want to drive collaboration on standards and ways to measure. Their field of vision is greater than social media and includes all of what we consider "digital." They are a forum for conversation and debate not a binding body, per se. It is still early yet to know whether this will lead to more generally accepted social media marketing metrics but the intent is good - invite everyone to the table.

Conversation Impact
We have been planning and deploying social media programs for 5 years. we started by simply reporting relevant metrics. Sometimes this was like public relations "output" reporting (how many blog posts, comments, videos-posted, etc...). We graduated to a more menaingful "impact-based" model that we call Conversation Impact. We will discuss this model at the upcoming ARF Audience Measurement 4.0 summit in NYC.

We are jumping ahead to a credible and simple model that makes sense to brand marketers and can be implemented for most campaigns without requiring federal bailout dollars to underwrite the measurement plan. Using a mix of traditoinal Web metrics and new Listening Post methodology, we combine web behavior reporting and social media-based word of mouth to report against three big (and meaningful) categories: Reach, Preference and Action.

We purposely move beyond the trap of trying to quantify or value "engagement" and jump to what matters more to marketers - did we increase product preference?

Our model is open. Anyone can use it. the formulas are all revealed. we shall see how much traction it gains in the marketplace going forward.  

______

Lots going on from across different organizations. That seems as it should be for now. We need as many brains thinking this through as possible. Eventually, we need some 'coming together' around how to measure both the earned and paid side of using social media and, most importantly, the combineed effect of both. Will that be some combination of WOMMA and IAB working together? Will groups like SMAC step up to fill a legitimate void? Too early to tell.

Social Media Marketing Measurement: Are We More Than 33% There Yet?

  Nothing has been more important than developing a credible, workable measurement model for our social media-based programs at Ogilvy. Having participated in many of the forums where masrement geeks come together to test-drive their models, it became clear last year that we were all still in the first third of the process. If you think of the inevitable arc of standards development, the first third is floating meaningful measures - no matter how convluted the model - marketers want to know that there are valuable metrics that even exist to justify spending in word of mouth-based social media.

First Third of the Social Media Marketing Measurement Life Cycle
Everyone starts with KPIs (key perfomance indicators) they find compelling. We have 100,000 video views (over 1 month? 6 months? 1 year?). Our Facebook page has accumulated almost 30,000 fans/friends. Our blog mentions add up to a fat 2m UMVs (unique monthly views). KPIs are often without a lot of context. It is safe to say that we are passing through this phase.

Second Third of the Social Media Marketing Measurement Life Cycle
As critics punch holes - rightly so - in the pure KPI model, academic braniacs develop rigorous models in response. Walter Carl's work at ChatThreads (previously at Northeastern) seem to fit here. An extremely smart guy, all you have to do is spend a half hour with Walter and you will be convinced about the strength of his process for matchbacks and other techniques that really do ratify the spread of WOM. You will of course need to hire his company to actually apply the principles.These methods are persuasive, rigorous yet like the Eniac computer, they may require more effort and shelf space than most marketing programs can afford. So, we simplify. I am certian Walter is doing the same. That is the driving pressure behind our modelling at Ogilvy. Conversation Impact was developed to provide a credible and implementable measurement model that could be applied to most projects without a separate budget allocation. We needed a simple model that made sense to brand marketers. These simpler models are still in the early stages. It will be at least a year before 2-3 of them emerge as "leading" contenders. Ours is open to anyone to use and we will see if it gains velocity (presenting next month at ARF).

Meanwhile, brands that explore the more complex and more meaningful measurement models inevitably backslide into KPIs. You can hear it now from your most senior brand marketers, "Can't we just reduce all this complex modeling to 2-3 numbers we care about most? Numbers that reflect how much reach or how much time people are spending with the brand. What if we just count video views and Tweets?"    

Final Third of the Social Media Marketing Measurement Life Cycle
This remains a glimmer in my eye. Once we have the solid and simple modeling out of the second third, we need to ramp up quickly for the inevitable: complexity. The real power of social media marketing is when it becomes integrated into all sorts of communications and marketing - ALL sorts. What is the impact of social media mentions on the performance of adjacent advertising - does it make the ads perform 3x, 10x, 30x better? When frequency of ad impressions fades away as a lynchpin metric, what is the most effective forumla of organic conversation with a brand and the paid media that drives action? As brands explore beyond their microsite-based online marketing to include their presence in Facebook, Linked In or Orkut, what formula will explain how that online footrpint adds up to meaningful action and/or intent to purchase?

Miles to go before we sleep. Lots going on in measurement of social media right now. Still, I wonder some days if we have even made it through the first third of our journey.  

How Are Brands Handling Social Media in Brazil

People like Michel Lent, Carla Meneghini, and Renata Saraiva at Ogilvy have developed a great integrated approach to social media marketing and digital influence programs. They live and work in Sao Paulo which I can only describe from my naive pov as the New York City of Brazil, if not of the overall region. It is a kick-ass city with more culture, food and commerce than any I have visited in a while. Traffic too, but that's another story.

We met with many brands last week. They are all taking social media very seriously. As in many markets there is a range of brand adoption behaviors including:

• Brands who want to put listening programs in place to understand what consumers are saying about them in blogs, Orkut and Twitter

• Brands fascinated with Twitter and ready to accept that platform as a microcosm of cgm chatter

• Brands looking to a number of partners - small and big - for guidance and not always getting the best recomendations (In my opinion)
• Brands looking to their traditional agencies and to new boutiques (there are a few new social media boutiques using simple cgm listening capabilities to build business)
• Brands embracing the idea of new influencers and inviting them to interact with the brand
• An emphisis on using social media without clear expectations around realistic measurement and impact
• Brand marketers looking at social media as a channel (pitfall)
• Communications execs trying to make the case at the C-suite level for the relevance and impact of social media marketing and communications

It's all good, essentially. Brazil is such a big and fast-growing market. The key to all of this is how fast the market is growing. With 197 million people and 68 million on the internet (35%), there is a critical mass of people and influencers that can drive marketing and communications.

There are always limits on infrastructure - how fast can we grow 35% to 50% by sheer "pipe" alone? How can we go from 6.8 million broadband users to 10 million? Still, just keep an eye on adoption curves - how fast Brazilians grabbed onto Orkut and Twitter - these tell a story of a market that will explode in a blink of an eye. And the marketing and communications professionals at the brands seem to know it. 

Some facts about Brazil (from Globotrends wiki):

• BR - 196,342,587 population - Country Area: 8,544,418 sq km
• 67,510,400 users as of Dec/08, 34.4% penetration, per ITU.
• 6,788,100 Broadband subs as of Nov.26/08, per ITU, 3.5% p.r.

Audience Measurement 4.0: Our Social Media Model

 Come to the Advertising Research Foundation event in NYC - Audience Measurement 4.0 where Irfan Kamal and I will present our new model for measuring the perfomance of social media-based programs - Conversation Impact (tm).

We are thrilled to be on the agenda. ARF is a prestigious forum and we feel strongly about adopting usable measurement criteria for social media. Our  model reports meaningfully and simply on Reach, Preference and Action. The "Preference" section uses formulas that we hope most will find compelling and clear like:

"Share of positive voice in category (=Sentiment index for brand / sentiment index for category), # / % change, consumers reached vs. all, Cost per Increase in Share of Positive Sentiment (CPISP)"

• What: ARF's Audience measurement 4.0

• When: June 23-24

• Where: NYC

How can you get a discount? Follow these steps to get a special discount of $345 off the registration fee from ARF and Ogilvy:

ARF Members: $1,150
Non-Members: $1,650
(Pricing Valid until Friday, May 22nd, 2009)


1. Go to MyARF (http://my.thearf.org/Default.aspx)
2. Log-in or create an account
3. Register for 6/23/09 - 6/24/09 -2009 Audience [ME]asurement 4.0
4. Select ‘Full Conference Registration”
5. Enter code “FRIEND” in the promo code box in the top right-hand corner of the screen

View the program: http://www.thearf.org/assets/am-09-program

3 Compelling Twitter Visualizations

A lot of folks are mashing up Twitter to come up with interesting sub services and some neat visualizations.As more people join and more people are. And as more people spend more time on the service, it's becoming more and more useful for marketers to look for insight in what is said on just Twitter, itself.  You might expect marketers to discount the bias or inside-baseball quality of Twitter but not so. I know one marketer who made a very persuasive argument about revenue missed from just negative mentions on Twitter alone. New visualizations are springing up every day and offering intersting views of what people are talking about. Here's three:

TwitterThoughts is a cool interactive chart that not only plots topics over a period of time but will actually show you an animated timeline of keyword topics.

TweetVolume lets you input about 5 keywords to see overall volume of Tweet mentions. It's not clear over what period of time the data spans but it still is interesting in that simple Blogpulse kinda way.  

TwitterFountain mashes up tweets and Flickr images and is billed as a neat way to add dimension to event coverage. The next time you go to a conference - WOMM U 2009, let's say - participants upload and tag images and tweets are overlaid via hashtags.

The Most Social Brands List Lacks Context

A few weeks ago, Vitrue, a small social media shop, delivered to the world their list of the "top social brands of 2008." It bothered me. The label confused some that this list indicated the brands using social media effectively. That's very much not what they mean. Their list represents the brands with the greatest share of voice across a variety of social media platforms including "social networking, blogging, microblogging, photo and video sharing sites."

Two things missing

There are tow useful pieces of information that would really be interesting and add meaning to marketers. The biggest one is "why" are people talking about them. The context of 'why' is where any true insight can come. Just spot check the list with my hypothesis for "why" and you will see what I mean:

No.	Brand	Why?
1	iPhone	Truly disruptive innovation
2	CNN	Highly referenced news site in an election year
6	Starbucks	Financial trouble; supporters and detractors online
10	Dell	Lots of good social activity + financials
31	GM	Financial trouble

There's nothing wrong about wanting to be amongst the most "talked about" brands in social media. but the reasons why matter more than sheer volume.

Second Reason

The second question that crossed my mind (actually, it was JP Maheu's mind that thought to do this) was how this list compares with brand value. Jennifer Jamieson at Ogilvy was nice enough to compare the Interbrand list of most valuable brands and the "top social brands" list. As you can see below from an excerpt there is no corelations at this point. How should we value the list of "social brands?" What is the true significance of this list? 

Brand	Interbrand Best Global Brands 2008 Ranking	Virtue 100 Social Brand 2008 Ranking
Coca-Cola	1	22
IBM	2	77
Microsoft	3	11
GE	4	33
Nokia	5	-
Toyota	6	48
Intel	7	76
McDonald's	8	32
Disney	9	4
Google	10	-
Mercedes-Benz	11	36
Hewlett-Packard	12	18
BMW	13	37
Gillette	14	-
American Express	15	-
Louis Vuitton	16	-
Cisco	17	80
Marlboro	18	-
Citi	19	-
Honda	20	25

 

Recession Marketing #2: We hunger for marketing and measurement innovation

We are all looking for more efficient marketing solutions. In previous recessions we often dialed back on marketing budgets solely because they were the easiest budgets to cut rather than any knowledge of how that might impact the business. One truth of a recession seems to be that it sparks innovation. I actually think that is true.

Look in Sunday's Washington Post business section covering the book, Buyology from Martin Lindstrom  and you see a scientific detection of one of the extra values that Coke drinkers supposedly get. Using brain mapping technlogy, these marketers see different activity in the brains of subjects when shown materials from Coke versus Pepsi. The additonal brain activity in Coke drinkers they attribute to the 'warm and fuzzy' feeling subjects have internalized over the brand from years of marketing messages like my generation's "I want to buy the world a Coke..." This scientific approach is indicative of a hunger for more meaningful and absolute measures of marketing effectiveness. That extra feeling one may get from a Coke is one way to deliver extra value. In essence, this is what brand value has always been - an inferred value from the brand beyond its simple product performance.

Monitoring our brains is one new direction to go. It will take time and lots of experiementation to refine that into a viable everyday way to gauge impact. We need many new innovations to find a practical few.

For years, we have been planning marketing and communications programs based upon some standard research that tells us how many times we need to see a message before it becomes memorable in some way. Reach and frequency or Gross Ratings Points are based upon this and much of our TV spend is still governed by this model.

Meanwhile, in the online world, measurement seems so much more absolute in the land of Google Analytics and click-to-action. Too often, the promise of the measureable Web devolves into a sea of KPIs that don't seem to really tell a story.

For us, the next innovation in marketing and measurement is in word of mouth marketing (WOMM). This is the year that WOMM will demonstrate how efficient it truly is. Really interesting models of measurement were unvelied and discussed at this year's WOMMA Summit and Research Symposium. You can find chairman, Walter Carl's presentation which summarized four top approaches at Slideshare.

Next Innovation

What if you could tell not only reach and action of a WOMM program - the best of mass media and online metrics - but you could also report preference and intent to purchase? Word of mouth carries a lot of trust - much more than advertising or traditional earned media. That is even truer today when many NA consumers have lost even more faith in corporations and institutions. this new WOMM measurement model will help marketers understand and gauge the value of their programs on terms that are potentially more valuable than how traditional medi is measured.

That's how we are innovating in a recession. What are you up to? 

Wordle's are Addictive

Apparently Change.gov published a Wordle or two last week. If you haven't tried it, you will find it addictive. From inputting text, urls or feeds, you can get a very cool type cloud display that reveals patterns via word size. Sometimes very revealing. here is the Wordle from my blog:

Recession Marketing #1: How social media helps understand consumer attitude and behavior

We've been having many discusisons inside Ogilvy about how to market successfully in a recession. One of the first things that I noticed was how helpful it is to tap into our listening post methodology to "hear" what is going on with other consumers. A brief conversation with Lisa Stone from BlogHer revealed a couple of her own insights from interacting with that community:

1. While everyone is being pinched, squeezed or downright flattened by the economy, many women are not just limiting spending but when they do have to spend, they need to get the most for their money. This "value" may not be a simple price issue. It includes the value that comes with a meaningful brand. Or it could be additonal promotional value like coupons or partner product.

2. Many of the BlogHer women seem focused on playing a part in "fixing the world". They are also ready to stand up and take on a personal leadership position in their household. Both of these attitudes are strengthened by the Obama win. They reflect an optimism and sense of personal responsibility that usually is absent in a recession.

3. Not surprisingly, families are staying in more and cooking more. As we try to save money, that is only natural. True benefits are coming to those who cook at home over many nights not just one night here or there. That way the cook can make use of leftovers in a highly efficient way.

4. People are turned off by overindulgence. There is a certain sense that individuals are culpable in the current economic crisis not an abstract economic force. Our own personal attitudes might make us all a little responsible, too. Certainly many institutions are taking a big credibility hit (i.e. how much do you trust your bank or your investor right now), but they may be softened slightly by the sense that our own appetite for more and better got the best of us. I have to wonder what this means for the upper third of the luxury market. Those products that were supported by upward striving middle-classers may be in for a significant hit. The blog Financial Armageddon not only has the coolest name, they also have some supporting points:

“The overwhelming reaction is to pare down, to simplify”-- an intensification of BrainReserve's “cashing out” cultural trend, says Popcorn. “Price increases have a straight-line impact on spending, and we're treading in lethal waters as the costs of basics jump 10, 15 or 20 percent. There's very little that's safe in commerce today, beyond value channels and value brands in staple categories.”...

...Other findings include: 42 percent gave up some of their favorite brands between last December and this May; 50 percent buy more private-label products, and 24 percent now purchase private-label brands virtually every time they shop (compared to 19 percent in 2007 and 17 percent in 2006)

This type of quick feedback from the Blogher community is priceless. Certianly, big professional surveys and research projects from GFK Roper, Faith Popcorn and others have their place. But social media - specifically communities and social networks like Blogher, Gather, Eons and many more - are great live panels to dip into and get information from immediately. You can do it by posing questions to the community. You can also do it by just listening to blog posts and message board threads.

Our new, "social" world moves too quick for quarterly surveys. Having a listening post or a regular routine of seeing what people are saying in their online universes can help you find insight for a quick and impactful budiness decison today.

Take a look at a few clever and intriguing views of Blogher from Wordle. The first is the pattern formed by their core RSS feed. Without scrutinizing the technology, it seems clear that Blogher continues to bubble with discussions and commentaries around the new President. Compare that with the url Wordle feed from their partner iVillage and you can quickly see that lifetsyle topics dominate today. I can't testify to the "solidness" of Wordle as a topic tool. I am feeding it invisible feeds. Still, I think these two views are probably indicative of those two communities/sources and explains why there is only about 30% overlap in their users (which makes the combo a smart ad buy!)

This next one is the Wordle formed from the blog post segments on the Blogher food and drink page:

This last one is from the core page of iVillage. Interesting comparison with Blogher.