Modern Metrix

Assessing People's Personality Based on Their Social Networking Profile

This paper, "What Elements of an Online Social Networking Profile Predict Target-Rater Agreement in Personality Impressions?" (PDF), presented at the 2008 International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media demonstrates how much your social networking profile could tell other people about your personality. Over 5,000 participants were recruited via various sources, including Facebook, and invited to join another social site, YouJustGetMe, created by researchers. Users were asked to complete self-assessment of their personality ("Big Five" traits questionnaire) and create their own profiles, by answering a list of questions that that best reflect their personality. Participants then were invited to "guess" other users' personality based on their profiles. Researchers found that impression agreement (similarity between "guessed" personality assesment and assessment by profile owner) rates were substantial (r = .41) and varied across genders (women's assessment of other people' profiles were on average more accurate). Certain elements of profiles were also found to affect the accuracy of agreement (i.e., provide better or worse clues about owner's personality).

BSU to Launch Media Behavior Institute

MediaPost:

"In what may be an industry first, a leading research and consulting group has teamed up with a renowned American university to launch a new privately-held media research company that will utilize state-of-the-art methods to track consumer media behavior. The Media Behavior Institute (MBI), was unveiled by Mike Bloxham, director of insight and research at the Center of Media Design at Ball State University during an opening keynote at Wednesday's session of the Advertising Research Foundation's audience measurement conference in New York."

Petabyte Age: The End of Scientific Method?

Wired:

"..The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all."

Ah, the clash of two cultures!

Audience Measurement 3.0

Just returned from the ARF's  "Audience Measurement 3.0" conference. As always, a lot of interesting sessions, ideas, people.. Much anticipated Google's presentations of their new AdPlanner and TV Ads tools drew a lot of attention. At the luncheon, tables were organized by topics, and my table had a discussion on "Audience Measurement at Google", moderated by Google representative. It is so happened that representatives from Comscore and Quantcast also shared table with us, and boy, what a lovely (read: intense and full of arguments) conversation we all had!!!

A lot of sessions this time were dedicated to hot topics like social media and word of mouth, mobile media, measurement of audiences across platform, multi-platform advertising.. I especially enjoyed presentation by Mike Bloxham from the Center for Media Design, State University. One of their studies examined effects of digital media on consumer's behavior, in particular, consumption of traditional media and attention to advertising. The main problem with studies that involve emerging media is that most of such devices have low penetration rates. The research team from CMU solved this problem by giving a sample of respondents considerable discounts to purchase DVRs, ipods, video-enabled mobile phones, PSPs, wireless routers, Xboxes, etc., and then following these people for 96 full days. Study concluded that providing consumers with control over their media experiences led to decrease in time spent with media, and increase in quality of engagement with device and content. Some interesting results: introduction of DVR had no effect on total time spent watching TV, but most of content was viewed after recording. Ipods had negative effect on radio, but resulted in increase in consumption of print media..

Other interesting presentations: "Finding and Measuring the Audience that Matters" by MTV Network (main message: it is content that matters; content drives consumers to multiple platforms) and "Blending Digital + Broadcast Works" by Dr. Passikoff of Brand Keys, Inc. (message: advertising across multiple platforms results in increase in emotional connection with brands).

Segmentation of Mobile Users (Samsung)

Samsung introduces a new line of mobile phones and related products, based on their segmentation that identifies six distinct categories of mobile phone users: Multimedia, Infotainment, Business, Connected and Essential. Segments were created as a results of a study of attitudes, lifestyles, and phone design preferences of 20,000 mobile users from 25 countries and five continents.

Moodboards from Getty Images: Personalization at Emotional Level

Check out moodstream feature from Getty Images: their "moodboards" allow users to customize soundtrack and video/image display according to their current mood and emotions. This is a great example of incorporating psychographics into content personalization and delivery!

A Psychographic Segmentation of Chinese Bloggers

Just stumbled upon these notes from the 6th Annual Chinese Internet Research Conference: "A Psychographic Segmentation of Chinese Bloggers" study by Dr. Roland Soong (this is a link to conference blog). More notes from author here .

I am trying to get in touch with Dr. Soong, would love to see the original paper!

Linking TV and Internet

New York Times on another attempt to make TV interactive and personal by linking it to the Internet: "Remote Clicks That Do More Than Just Change Channels"

"AN ambitious effort to take interactive television into American homes is expanding after a test of the system began at a single station last month...

..The test offers viewers programs — and ads — they can respond to by using remote controls to click on icons they see on their screens. Each click sends a signal to the viewer’s personal portal — basically, a site where everything the person has expressed interest in is aggregated. Then, the viewer can look up more information there the next time he or she goes online."

Fleishman-Hillard releases results of Digital Influence Index study

On June 12, Fleishman-Hillard and Harris Interactive released results of their study on Digital Influence Index (DII), a measure of impact of the Internet on consumer behavior and decisions in Europe. Study looked at media consumption, behavior, attitudes and influence of Internet and other media on various decisons of 5,000 Internet users in the UK, Germany and France (white paper can be downloaded here) .

Tracking People's Movement via Cellphones

NYT writes about research study in which cell phones were used to track the location and movement of 100,000 participants:

"New research that makes creative use of sensitive location-tracking data from 100,000 cellphones in Europe suggests that most people can be found in one of just a few locations at any time, and that they do not generally go far from home."

Study results may be especially of interest to those marketers who believe in potential of location-based advertising .