Boomers are not bloggers, but they still participate in social media

This morning a colleague passed along this MediaPost research brief, with the sexy but deceptive title: Boomers Are Not Bloggers. It stated what most will find obvious, that Baby Boomers have not “embraced social networking or blogs, despite being heavy users of other online services.”

Does this mean you should not focus on a social network strategy to reach this group? The answer is you definitely should have a strategy for them. But to echo the advice in Groundswell, you need to look at this group as observers and “passers-along” of social content — not active participants.

I humbly present a fairly strong case for targeting this group through social media accessed via search engines (i.e., open site such as TripAdvisor, as opposed to closed ones like Facebook. It’s called Boomers Aren’t Immune to the Branding Power of User-generated Content.

Can you provide other examples?

Nick Hornby on why no one is flocking to buy ebooks

A few weeks ago I faced the daunting task of buying a friend a book for his birthday. The challenge: By his own confession, this friend is not a book fan. Most years he’s one of the third of American adults who never picks up a book. But this year he wanted to start reading again.

So imagine how thrilled I was when in a flash of inspiration I realized I could convert my friend — a 36-year-old mechanic — into a rabid reader. I could hook him on one author’s books as surely as I could if he were an eighth grader and had never picked up Rowling’s Harry Potter series. The book I was thinking of was High Fidelity by Nick Horny. Although it’s not my favorite of this author’s (that’s reserved for How To Be Good), it is perfect for any man who has ever loved and lost and realized he’s done it in a most boneheaded fashion. And who is willing to laugh about it. Hard and often.

Hornby wins readers over by being brutally honest and extremely bright. Maybe it’s just me, but he strikes me as someone I could picture having a pint with down at the pub. (Yes, he’s British, but the film based on High Fidelity shifted in setting from a London record store to one set in Chicago, and stars John Cusack and a then-unknown Jack Black — it travels across the pond surprisingly well).

I reveal all his because Nick Hornby has a blog, and in it he recently listed all the reasons why book publishers should neither look at e-books as a threat or a salvation. In his view, the latests ebook reading devices, Amazon’s Kindle and the iRex Illiad, are non-starters. Here’s a demo video of the latter product:

Here is an excerpt of Hornby’s explanation of why ebooks won’t fly off their virtual shelves any time soon:

  1. Book readers like books, whereas music fans never had much affection for CDs. Vinyl yes, CDs no … For readers, a wall lined with books is as attractive as any art we could afford to put up there.
  2. E-book readers have a couple of disadvantages, when compared to mp3 players: When we bought our iPods, we already owned the music to put on it; none of us own e-books … [And] so far, Apple is uninterested in designing an e-book reader, which means that they don’t look very cool.
  3. We don’t buy many books – seven per person per year, a couple of which, we must assume, are presents for other people … The advantages of the Iliad and the Kindle –- that you can take vast numbers of books away with you – are of no interest to the average book-buyer.
  4. Book-lovers are always late adaptors [sic], and generally suspicious of new technology.
  5. The new capabilities of the iPod will make it harder to sell books anyway. How much reading has been done historically, simply because there is no television available on a bus or a train or a sun-lounger? But that’s no longer true.

Sadly, I think Hornby is again spot-on. Except for one category, I don’t see ebooks immediately selling in any sort of numbers. That exception is business books, which can be far more useful as searchable reference sources than as comforting fireside yarns — or in Hornby’s case, exhilaratingly and often hilarious ones.

“Declining toward extinction,” opera tears a page from Newspaper’s playbook

What do you do when your newspaper readership is aging and not being replaced with new readers? You publish online, for one, and hope to recoup some of your lost print revenue by selling ads there.

Now how do you reach a younger audience if you’re the New York Metropolitan Opera? You go digital as well. As this Economist piece reports, The Met is having some impressive success by bringing their opera to other cities throughout the world. The operas are being presented in movie theaters, for special events, using high-tech projection and sound equipment.

Here are some details from the publication.

These “simulcasts” made a big splash. During the 2007-08 season over 600 cinemas in America, Australia, Europe and Japan showed the Met’s live broadcasts. More than 920,000 people in 23 countries watched eight operas, roughly a threefold increase over the previous season, and about 70,000 more than the total audience of the Met proper during that season. For the next season 11 operas will be televised at an even greater number of cinemas.

The cost of admission is roughly $30, and formal attire is optional. It’s a cool idea.

Would you go to one of these?

Facebook direct response ads prove how little has changed

It’s a common theme among direct marketers: There is little that actually changes as new media spring up and ads adapt to them. Take Facebook. As David Berkowitz discussed in his post today (and also in his MediaPost piece), an ad series that targets people based on their gender and age is making the rounds. And getting a lot of scrutiny. I had seen another version of it last week, and had mentioned it to him via Twitter. (Thanks for the mention, David.)

Significantly, this ad series wasn’t showing when I just visited a few moment ago, nor could I find in on the More Ads page of Facebook. Coincidence?

Here is the ad in context -- circa April, 2008Way back on April 9 this ad series first captured my attention, although at the time it wasn’t testing headlines customized to age and gender, as this newest batch does. At the time I made a number of screen captures, and took some notes, but didn’t blog about it then.

Now this latest twist (featuring headlines such as, “29 Yr Male Overweight?“) is a great chance to share my research into the advertisement — especially for those readers who first caught David’s post and wondered how the subsequent user experience plays out.

The answer is it’s very old school, with some shrewd modern touches.

Like the best print ads of the direct response print ad “Golden Age” (somewhere between the 1960’s and the 1980’s, I’d venture to guess), it is a carefully tuned conversion engine, as well as a massive blight on the advertising landscape.

The ad itself had the headline “Get Ripped.” The photo is smaller than the new versions, but the copy is written with the same economy and obvious care. When you click though to it, you see a page that is incredibly busy, with three different fonts and primary colors, and a ton going on. (Click to open it full size in a new window).

An AJAX layer offers a clever YouTube video player (I don’t recall checking to see if it was truly pulling from YouTube, or was residing on the advertiser’s server — but I’m guessing the advertisers were not counting on YouTube’s cooperation, and this was indeed locally streamed).

Folks who wouldn’t know better would assume this ad is a loser. “Who could possibly respond to something this schlocky?,” they might ask. My answer would be that, like the pattern on the carpeting of a Las Vegas casino floor, everything about it is there for a reason. And it’s all there because it’s effective, as proven over time, with much testing.

But Wait!

The best part for me is shown below. When I tried to close the window, I got a fake system message saying, “Hey Wait!” It goes on to say a live agent would like to give me a “last-minute saving,” Okay then. Points for persistence.

A clever way to stop people from leaving

What do you think of this surprisingly old-fashioned approach? Do you think it will work — with, or even without — the age / gender personalized headlines?

Summize helps marketers peer into the attitudes of a million+ Twitter fans

How is this for stating the obvious? Data mining is helping marketers better understand and cater to consumer behavior. Examples abound — even here, in Digital Solid. But this fact is worth repeating considering this latest example.

As reported and discussed in this GigaOm post, Twitter is likely to purchase Summize, which is a popular third-party application that searches and reports on keywords embedded in these 140-character packets of text. Om Malik of GigaOm conjectures that the reason for the purchase is less about search, which can be interesting, but about understanding consumer behavior, which can be useful to marketers.

This is an understatement.

The biggest question surrounding Twitter has been, How can this seeming toy ever break through and become a profitable business? This week’s news suggests a research product that, in its beta phase, is already quite good. Go to its Sentiment Analyzer and type in a phrase. Malik typed in keywords related to the acquisition of Summize by Twitter. Here was his result:

Analyzing what Twitter fans think of the Summize purchase

Sentiment is “Bad.” Obviously the majority of people Tweeting about the buy-out aren’t Summize’s soon-to-be-wealthier founders! If you want to see really bad, however, type in “Gas Prices,” as I did here:

Twitter Sentiment surrounding \'gas prices\'

It’s a fun toy. But the real time market research implications are huge.