What are People REally Doing on the Web?

http://2006.sxsw.com/interactive/programming/panels/?action=show&id=IAP060064

At SXSW, you are in special company. Does the rest of the world eat, breath, and live interactive technologies like you do? Does your audience? Find out from the people who ask questions of your audience every day, the pollsters. Join researchers from Harris Interactive, Yahoo!, etc., as they talk about the things people are doing on the web, cell phones, etc.. Learn what you hear to create technologies that better serve your audience.

Moderator: Joel Greenberg Sr Planner, GSD&M

Holland Hofma Brown VP Internet Panel Mgmt, Harris Interactive

Joel Greenberg Sr Planner, GSD&M

Michele Madansky VP Corp & Sales Research, Yahoo! - research document: http://us.yimg.com/i/adv/tmde_05/truly_madly_final_booklet.pdf (pdf yo)

Max Kalehoff VP Mktg, Nielsen BuzzMetrics

Types of market research - quantitative vs qualitative. ask ppl, observe behavior, observe artifacts.

What made Wayne Gretzky great? he went where the puck was going to be not where it was.

Lead User THeory, von Hippel, MIT. book: *democratizing innovation" Lead uerss are solving prolems. look at them. Eg: power bars, camelbak.

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go.hpolsurveys.com/sxsw

Study overview

focused on blogs because they had to pick one for focus. 2/16 to 2/23, 2300 survey completions

• balanced on age sex and region to be representative of 18+ US population
• the internet is just a fact of life now. 3/4 of online users go online every day of the week
• we cannot live without it over 1/3 would rather email than call
• 40% feel outof touch when not connected
• 30% prefer online shopping

• only 25% feel very comfortable transmitting personal info over internet
• television over news over internet for trustworthiness. sxsw attendees, however, trust newspapers, internet, and 3% trust tv most.

over 50% have IMed inthe past 30 edays

1/3 read blog, 1/10 written blog, 20 percent online dating.

Who's reading blogs? men more so than women, 54-56. significant readership even among the elderly. households with kids as likely as without to read blogs

why do people read bogs? passive activity. onl;y 1/3 had posted response, and only half of that 1/3 said commenting was typical

most popular blogs, personal diaries far and away most popular. internet to develop social connections. then politics, current events

3/4 of bloggers are writing about themselves/personal lives.

even though the internet has become an intricate part of our daily lives, general online users are not moving every aspect of their daily life online. However we are using the Internet as a primary way to stay in touch and to connect with individuals.

What aren't consumers doingonline? (yahoo person)

summitseries.yahoo.com in the public domain.

holy shit china is blowing up.

communication is killer app for youth globally. email IM, heavily used.

Text messaging, games, and photos are the key mobile functions. i wish i had a camera to snap these info-dense slides.

search behavior, yahoo internal data. music biggest search terms and evenly balancced across age/gender. then men searching for sex (some women but not as many)

Search terms consisten over time.

yahoo games has a huge female skew.

##Nielsen

rise of consumer generated media = erosion of trust in traditional information sources.

Virtualy every reserach company finds that consumer tryust CGM and wom far more than any other information source...

CGM acts like "media" and is highly targeted and highly visible on the search engines.

natural desire to share war stories and proof points.

Marketing programs amplify natural buzz. washiing machine company in case study noticed a trend of everyone talking about little league uniforms - the company started sponsoring and doing grassroots activites with key youth sports orgs.

go.hpolsurveys.com/sxsw

Brown's company feels that ethnography is a great way to meet ppl's unmet needs, moving away from focus groups.

hbrown@harrisinteractive.com

michelem@yahoo-inc.com

max.kalehoff@buzzmetrics.com