Facebook just made life more challenging for advertisers who want to reach more than 200 million U.S users and more than 2 billion worldwide.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that the social media dominator will privilege content posted and shared by its users’ family and friends over advertising and other commercial content. The reason he gave was that “posts from businesses, brands and media [are] crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect with each other." Consequently, the algorithm governing the Facebook News Feed has been changed to favor posts by friends, along with content that drives commentary and sharing.

Some advertisers may be thinking of leaving Facebook, but its massive audience still presents a huge opportunity for those who can create great content tailored to succeed in the social media ecosystem. Instead of retreating, advertisers can take Facebook’s new policy as a challenge to up their games, and create meaningful, attention-getting messaging that will drive the kinds of engaged interactions Facebook's new algorithm will promote.

That’s easier said than done, but when was effective advertising ever easy? It takes intense effort to get the creative, the placement and the timing right. In the social media ad space, that means putting an ad to the acid test before it's launched. A unique solution called Social Ad Testing lets you see whether your ads will sink or swim in social media users’ actual personal news feeds -- including Facebook's newly-altered environment. Here’s how it works:

– First, select members of a proprietary mobile-research panel who match an ad campaign's audience.

– Then inject your test ad into these targeted consumers' news feeds, whether on Facebook or other platforms, including Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

– Recipients will experience the test ad as part of the regular stream of content flowing through their news feeds. They won’t know it’s a test, so their reactions will not just simulate reality – they’ll be reality.

– In the first phase of the test, advertisers will learn by simply observing a test ad’s recipients. Does the ad do what Facebook now says content should do – that is, drive shares and comments? Further, what's the viewing time, and how likely are viewers to click on the ad or turn on a video ad's audio?

– In the next phase, advertisers get to interact with their test recipients by sending them a survey that asks for both unaided and aided recall and qualitative opinions about the ad. You’ll direct them to see the ad again, and then capture their comments on what they liked or disliked, what they found memorable, forgettable, or completely ignorable, and whether they intend to shop and buy.

– If the test shows your planned ad is well-received and strongly positioned to drive sales, then launch it with confidence and, perhaps, boost its budget on social media.

– If the ad does not test well, then rework it, based on your test respondents’ comments and interactions. Retest until ready for success.

– Test how ads fare across different social platforms. Is the altered Facebook News Feed still a good home for your social campaign? Or does your comparative testing show that awareness and engagement are higher with the target audience on another social platform?

The bottom line is, the better your advertising is, the better experience its recipients will have. And therefore, the more likely it will be to flourish amid social media users' news feeds, including Facebook's changed environment. For a productive conversation on how Social Ad Testing can help you prepare for successful social media campaigns, just get in touch by clicking here.

As it moves into its second decade, there’s a sure sign that the Smartphone Era has reached a milestone in total engagement: a New York Times tech advice column on how to disengage from your phone by making its screen and apps less colorful, and therefore less enticing.

Here’s how writer Nellie Bowles starts her account:

“In an effort to break my smartphone addiction, I’ve joined a small group of people turning their phone screens to grayscale — cutting out the colors and going with a range of shades from white to black....the goal of sticking to shades of gray is to make the glittering screen a little less stimulating.”

Yes, we should all drink responsibly from the mobile fountain. But being human, we have a natural desire to stay on the alert, whether it’s for opportunities to have fun, to get a good buy, to simplify the tasks of daily life, or to get news updates from the New York Times.

One expert quoted in the Times article says that our brains are wired to respond to colors – hence device- and content-providers' interest in making mobile apps and mobile screens stand out with vibrant hues. “Color and shape, these are the icebreakers when it comes to grabbing people’s attention, and attention is the new currency.”

With advances in mobile research, it’s now possible to get a specific understanding of mobile apps' effectiveness in engaging consumers' attention and pushing them along the Path to Purchase. Here’s how:

– Consumers who’ve downloaded a mobile research app to join a proprietary panel agree to allow tracking of the apps on their phone.

– Brands can survey users of their apps, or their competitors’ apps, about their experiences with the apps, and more broadly about their brand and product loyalties and opinions.

For consumers, taking surveys and permitting the capture of phone location and phone usage data is a purposeful, sensible, considered use of their phones, rather than a sign of addiction or compulsion. The data and insights you can expect to flow from that interest and engagement won’t be grayed-out, as long as your surveys reward mobile users' desire for seamless and worthwhile experiences on their phones.  For a productive conversation about how mobile-app research capabilities can help you uncover the colorful, full-spectrum consumer stories you need to tell, just get in touch by clicking here.

Here's your Friday roundup of 3 items from the MFour blog to keep you up to speed on mobile. Just click and read!

New Location Tracking Follows Travelers Where They Lead

Get To Know Your Most (or Least) Loyal Customers

Location Research Wisdom, Straight from the Beatles

And here's a Friday song to kick off your weekend travels.

If a 32-year-old male Hispanic homeowner who’s married with two children and earns $50,000 to $74,000 a year stops at a Starbucks on a Monday morning on the way to work, how likely is he to do it again during the week? If his coffee stop on Tuesday is at a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts rather than the Starbucks, what’s his reason for the switch?

This is the kind of complex consumer algebra you now can solve with Path-2-Purchase™ location studies. The concept is similar to previous GeoLocation studies, but instead of a snapshot of what happens at a single location, it’s a moving picture of a consumer’s journey through the day, every day.

In the case of our young father with the morning coffee habit, the same advanced, smartphone-enabled location tracking that places him at Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts on a given day will track what happens afterward, or on the day after. Is he a Starbucks loyalist – except for the days when it’s his turn to bring in donuts for his team at work? Was he unhappy with the wait-time during his Monday coffee stop, leading him to switch shops the next morning? Or does further tracking indicate he’s brand agnostic when it comes to coffee, and stops at different shops on different days for more complex or more indistinct reasons?

What makes this hypothetical respondent particularly valuable to consumer research is his engagement with the Surveys on the Go® mobile research app. As one of more than 2 million U.S. panel members who have downloaded  the app, he will have agreed to have his movements tracked on his phone, and he’ll be eager to take part in surveys triggered by proprietary GeoNotification® technology after his presence is detected in one of 12.5 million U.S. locations. Meanwhile, when he downloaded the app he provided detailed profile information such as ethnicity, parenthood and income – a profile crucial to meeting your need for reliably accurate, representative panel segmentation.

You can think of Path-2-Purchase™ as a blended brew of always-on Big Data tracking, augmented with targeted surveys fielded to the right people at the right time and place. You can expect insights that have a richer, more nuanced flavor that lets you tie numbers to people as you tell the story of what’s driving consumers’ daily decisions. For more on how Path to Purchase™ targeting, tracking, and survey capabilities can help give you that richer blend of data you need to tell the story, just get in touch by clicking here.

Unlike consumer data, song lyrics don’t have to make sense. Consider “Hey Jude,” a mega-hit by the Beatles that we may be hearing even more of than usual this year, since 2018 marks the 50^th anniversary of the song’s 1968 release. The tune probably has been heard many billions of times since then, if you count each individual impression from airplay, analog and digital media, downloads, renditions in piano bars, and by Baby Boomers singing in the shower. But in all those repetitions, has any listener really understood what Paul McCartney meant when he sang, “the movement you need is on your shoulder?”

It’s not a problem. Song lyrics are made to be puzzled over, misconstrued, or ignored, as the listener sees fit. Good consumer data, on the other hand, is more science than art, so it has to be straightforwardly validated and intelligible. Top quality data may not be on consumers' shoulders, but it's certainly in their hands, thanks to advanced mobile app research technology that lets you reach them via their phones, wherever they happen to be.

The way in which we access “Hey Jude” has gone through many technical iterations – starting with this live TV debut performance that introduced the song to the world. Just as music-delivery technology has evolved over the years, mobile location research technology continues to evolve, too. The latest iteration, Path to Purchase, gives researchers a uniquely powerful and accurate tool for understanding consumers’ movements through space and time as they go about their lives as economic beings. It’s now possible to identify someone who has lunch each workday at a Burger King, but never goes to McDonald’s – or vice versa. What created such loyalty? How can it be sustained? What could open a crack for competitors and put some of that BK loyalist's lunch-wallet in play? The answers begin with finding the right people to ask. 

But that presents a big obstacle: consumers' much-lamented unwillingness to participate in market research. According to anecdotal accounts, response rates for conventional online surveys are typically 3% or less. Somewhere along the line, trust was misplaced, and engagement was lost. But now there's an antidote: mobile-app research technology that’s as instantly accessible and naturally appealing to the consumer as a catchy pop tune, because it's attuned to how today’s consumers live and how they want to be engaged. Experience shows that studies fielded to a large, representative panel of consumers gathered around a mobile app generate response rates of 25% in an hour and 50% in a day. For location-specific Path to Purchase studies, panelists trust the app and the process enough to agree to have their movements tracked, and they're primed to receive and answer surveys at the moments and places most opportune to your research.

If you’ve been settling for those response rates of 3% or under, maybe it’s time to heed the Beatles’ advice in “Hey Jude” to “take a sad song and make it better.”  As for "the movement you need is on your shoulder," although it may never make literal sense, a sympathetic listener still can get a pretty good idea of what that line is driving at. The Beatles are urging us to seize new opportunities, to embrace change without hesitation. Looked at in that light, the movement you need really is on your shoulder. For a productive conversation about how mobile-app technology and panel can meet your projects' specific needs, just get in touch by clicking here. 

Brands competing for the U.S. travel and tourism dollar can tap into a multifaceted new trove of consumer data to gain previously unobtainable detail and specificity as to the “where,” “when,” “why” and “how much” of American travelers’ comings and goings.

Here are some of the questions you can pose to travelers whose movements you can follow from city to city and from place to place within a destination city. The key is  the unprecedented Path 2 Purchase™ Platform, powered by new levels of accuracy in smartphone location-tracking technology, combined with a first-party mobile panel whose members are willing to be tracked along the path to purchase and respond quickly to surveys that reach them in the right places at the right times. 

– When travelers arrive in a city and check into a hotel, but then switch lodgings during the same trip, what’s happened to make them go to the trouble of moving around? Location tracking tells you when they’ve switched and where they’ve gone; survey them immediately while the “why” and its related emotions are fresh in mind.

– Why do leisure travelers who are vacationing in a city pick one of its big attractions over another? And if they experience more than one of a city’s competing attractions, which one did they enjoy more – and why? Field surveys to location-validated tourists who have been to one or more leading attractions during their stay.

– What kinds of incentives will persuade convention-goers to venture beyond an event’s immediate environs to sample restaurants and other attractions elsewhere in the host city? Identify those who venture more deeply into a city through location tracking, and see what they have to say; compare them to those who stay close to the confab.

Answers to questions such as these are obtainable now, thanks to a unique pairing of Big Data and traditional survey methodology. Often portrayed as antagonists, Big Data and survey research have been brought together as complementary partners to deliver insights that neither could provide without the other.

On the Big Data front, smartphones’ location tracking traces pathways taken in real time by members of a proprietary panel of more than 1.3 million active U.S. members.

On the traditional, survey-based research front, effectiveness still depends on the panel’s diversity, representativeness and engagement, as it has since long before “Big Data” became a buzzword.

– Consumers must be willing to opt in to have their locations tracked.

– If properly engaged, they’ll respond readily when they receive surveys at times and places that are relevant to a client’s research.

– An engaging experience is indispensable to building and maintaining a panel whose demographic and ethnographic depth and diversity can support careful segmentation and sophisticated projects.

Unlike traditional online surveys and “mobile-web” surveys housed on the internet, response rates and engagement won't erode when the panel congregates around a trusted survey app. With panel consistency and growth assured, a great research app can be continually refined and developed to give insights professionals decisive new capabilities.

The pairing of timely Big Data location data with traditional consumer insights methodology opens new research doorways into the $836.6 billion or more Americans spend annually on domestic travel for business or pleasure, as estimated by the U.S. Travel Assn. If you’re working to increase your brand’s or client’s share of that pie, the Path 2 Purchase™ Platform gives us a lot to talk about. Just get in touch by clicking here.

Here's your Friday roundup of 3 items from the MFour blog to keep you up to speed on mobile. Just click and read!

Can You Trust Consumer Data If Consumers Don't Trust You?

GreenBook's Welcome Step Toward Relevant Mobile Terminology

Get Your SWAT Training for Brand Emergencies Here

And here's a Friday song about the only flu strain we'd want you to catch. Salud!

Do consumers  trust your brand? If the answer is yes, give yourself a big pat on the back, because Americans aren’t a very trusting bunch.

According to Pew Research Center, which recently published results from a study it conducted in Spring, 2016, of how Americans perceive several leading institutions, only 4% of respondents said they had “a great deal” of trust in business leaders. Of course, “business leaders” doesn’t equate with business as a whole, or with trust in the products and services businesses create and market. But it is an indicator that commerce doesn’t automatically generate votes of confidence, and that trust in the commercial sphere has to be won and perpetually fortified.

If it’s any comfort, business leaders eked out a trust advantage over elected officials, in whom only 3% of Pew’s respondents placed “a great deal” of trust. Just 5% of respondents placed high trust in the news media, while religious leaders and K-12 school principals and superintendents were tied at 13%. The military commanded “a great deal” of trust from 33% of those surveyed, and scientists scored highest marks on the trust-meter from 21% of panelists who responded to the survey. For a chart showing Pew’s key finding about trust in institutions, click here. 

One thing that business leaders, elected officials and members of the news media have in common is that virtually nobody has direct, unmediated, human-to-human experiences with them -- unless people think of their own bosses instead of Fortune 500 CEOs when asked about “business leaders.”

But people experience brands and products intimately, so it’s much more feasible for marketers to forge bonds of trust with them. Even consumers who haven’t tried a product themselves may well have heard opinions from friends and acquaintances they consider trustworthy. In any case, staying on top of how consumers perceive brands is a perpetual necessity and a perpetual challenge.

To that end, using the right mobile methodology is crucial. There’s no question people trust their smartphones – 77% of Americans owned one when Pew last checked about a year ago, and as far back as 2014, 46% of Pew’s respondents reported that they couldn’t live without their phones.

The most important takeaway is no longer that consumer studies, including ones on brand health and product satisfaction, should be mobile because the public is virtually all-in on mobile, virtually all of the time. By now, that’s simply a given. The more nuanced and important conversation for brand researchers is which mobile methodology to choose – mobile web or mobile app. Respondents to mobile web surveys access them online, the same as traditional online surveys designed to be taken on PCs. Surveys fielded to a mobile app are taken offline, by a proprietary panel of users who show higher levels of engagement, having already taken the trouble to download and use the app.

One thing to remember about trust is that when it’s betrayed, it’s extremely hard to win back. In mobile research the trust stakes are high, because the public that loves its phones also has high expectations of them. Failure to meet those expectations can feel more like a betrayal than a mere disappointment. And then you’ve got one more potential research participant who’s tuned out in disgust and joined the multitudes who won’t participate in market research. To learn more about what distinguishes trustworthiness from shoddiness in mobile methodology, check out this recent blog post by clicking here. And for a productive conversation about how mobile-app research can meet your projects’ specific needs, just click here.

Thwack! Someone, somewhere, has just crushed a bed bug, a much-loathed critter that hides in bedclothes and the crevices of worn mattresses, and is responsible for a spate of economic growth that most Americans probably would rather do without.

Citing figures from Pest Control Magazine, Bloomberg reports that America’s pest control industry is raking in increasing revenues from bed bug calls from residences and businesses – with $611.2 million grossed in 2016, up 6.6% from the previous year, and rising. Specialty Consultants, which tracks the pest control industry, estimates that there were 908,000 calls for professional bed bug eradication or prevention in 2016, up more than 11%, and that it won’t be long before Americans are spending $1 billion yearly on bed bug control.

The only thing in dispute is where bed bug infestations are worst: Bloomberg noted that two leading pest control companies give conflicting accounts. Orkin ranks Baltimore as the bed bug capital, based on the number of commercial and residential jobs it handles there, followed by Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles and Columbus, Ohio. A competitor, Terminix, put out its own list of the cities where it’s busiest with bed bugs, and came up with a completely different worst-five of Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, Las Vegas and Denver.

If this adds up to a growing, nationwide opportunity for pest control experts, it’s clearly also a big worry for the hospitality industry. Google the terms “bed bugs hotels” and you’ll find websites that ask travelers to report their own experiences with the bitty biters. Since bed bugs can be brought in by guests themselves, infestations are a tenacious problem that often is not the hotelier’s fault, but requires perpetual vigilance nonetheless.  Bloomberg cites a survey of 100 hotels by Orkin, in which respondents overwhelmingly said they are investing in preventive measures rather than waiting for complaints.

When bad luck does bite a brand, it’s important to have a game plan in place that includes getting an extremely fast but thorough read on how a publicized mishap is impacting brand health. That includes probing consumers’ emotional responses to understand both the good and the bad: fears generated by the bad news, but also underlying goodwill the brand can rely on to maintain consumers’ confidence. And that requires consumer research that’s fast and capable of homing in on consumers’ emotions in real time.

Tylenol, one of the nation’s signature brands, might have become a footnote in the history of pain relief if Johnson & Johnson hadn’t deployed smart, fast consumer research when news broke in 1982 that several Chicago-era residents had been murdered by a sociopath who’d injected poison into Tylenol capsules and put them back on store shelves, where unsuspecting shoppers then bought them. It’s a classic case of crisis management guided by fast consumer insights, and you can read about it here.

The takeaway is that when businesses are bitten by little bugs, or by major malefactors, they need to find and survey their customers and other consumers without delay, and without sacrificing data reliability for speed. Advanced mobile-app research solutions include a DIY survey platform that lets you design and field a project in a matter of minutes. You’ll reach the right consumers at the right moment on the right devices – the same smartphones on which consumers get their news about brands and investigate products. You can count on response rates of 25% in an hour and 50% in a day from research fielded to an engaged, demographically representative U.S. panel. Mobile-app research that combines the most advanced smartphone technology and the most carefully cultivated and validated, proprietary panel is at your disposal – both in the good times when you’re pushing to maximize your most lucrative opportunities, and for the bumpy patches when reality bites. For a productive conversation on how mobile-app solutions can meet your projects’ specific needs, just click here.

Is the market research industry finally coming around to a more meaningful conversation about best-practices for mobile research?

GreenBook’s recent “sneak preview” of the next edition of its biannual GreenBook Research Industry Trends (GRIT) report bodes well for a more useful discussion in the new year. It’s not yet the fully illuminating discussion the industry should be having, but it’s definitely a step forward toward a better-informed community of insights professionals.

The key improvement is GreenBook’s decision to ditch the blanket term, “mobile surveys,” in favor of the somewhat more specific “mobile first surveys.” While not defined in the GRIT preview, “mobile-first” would seem to indicate surveys conceived and designed from the get-go to be taken on smartphones, with the specific needs and experiences of smartphone users foremost in mind. As the article notes, 50% of the insights professionals surveyed for the coming GRIT report said they employ “mobile first surveys.” Previously, when the answer choice was labeled “mobile surveys,” 75% affirmed having used them. The large difference suggests we’re already having a more nuanced conversation that’s beginning to take into account the varying levels of capability and sophistication involved in different approaches to mobile research.

But what’s still largely missing from the industry-wide lexicon is the crucial distinction between “mobile first” and “mobile app” research. They are two fundamentally different approaches, both in technology and research methodology, for understanding consumers via their smartphones. Here’s a brief comparison of how the two processes work:

Mobile First

• Panel Recruitment: Solicitations via emails and natural or invited visits to websites.

• Survey Invitations: Panelists receive emailed links.

• Accepting Invitations: Panelists click on links and are taken to surveys housed online.

• Survey Experience: Inconsistent, because it’s subject to common mobile-web glitches such as slow downloads and uploads of survey questions, weak signals, and slow or dropped connections that lead to dropped surveys, frustrated panelists, and lost completes.

Mobile App

Panel Recruitment: Panelists discover and download a publicly rated and reviewed survey app, establishing engagement and high performance expectations from the start.

• Survey Invitations: Push notifications via the app.

• Accepting Invitations: Tapping the app instantly embeds the survey in the phone itself.

• Survey Experience: Reliable, because it takes place offline, avoiding hazards of weak signals and slow or dropped web connections.

According to eMarketer, mobile consumers in the U.S. use apps 85% of the time for their digital access, compared to 15% of digital-access time devoted to the alternative, connecting to the internet via a phone’s browser. It’s a key indicator of the quality of mobile-app activities, and how much consumers prefer them.

One further thought: the conversation about mobile surveys would be better grounded in the realities of the research process if “mobile web surveys” and “mobile app surveys” were adopted as the discussion’s keywords, rather than “mobile first.” This would align with terminology routinely used by eMarketer and others who track digital access and usage.

So to walk the best walk in our mobile research, let’s talk the most precise talk, and make “mobile app” and “mobile web” the key terms and key distinctions as we pursue our conversations about the opportunities and best practices of smartphone-based consumer research. And, as always, for a productive conversation about how advanced mobile app research can meet your projects’ specific needs, just click here.