Portland Social Media

The Messages Are Still Bad

By Tim

ClickZ News is reporting on a study conducted by ROI Research for Bluestreak, a marketing services company. ClickZ summarizes the press release, but you can read Bluestreak’s press release in its entirety on their website. The release hammers through some marketing-speak, but the numbers on new technology (channel) adoption were very interesting.

Among the 1,000-member panel, 100 percent of respondents currently use e-mail, and more than half of those respondents have held onto at least one e-mail address for a significant amount of time. Meanwhile 88 percent use text messaging; 71 percent use message boards; 63 percent use blogs; 36 percent use podcasting and 28 percent use RSS. Just over 32 percent of the panel was 35 or older.

To me those numbers seem very high - 36% of the 1,000 “use” podcasting. So, I dug into the press release and read their small print regarding the survey:

This study was conducted among 1,000 consumers from an eRewards’ panel of over 1.5 million households and includes respondents who use email and at least one of the other five emerging technologies (RSS, Text Messaging, Blogs, Message Boards and Podcasting). At 95% confidence interval, a sample size of 996 has a sampling error of 3.1%.

eRewards conducts marketing research; ok, now we have the specifics out of the way. The respondents seem to feel the trade-off between free content and advertising or sponsorship messages is at a happy equilibrium at this moment in time. That is, as long as the messages are relevant and of high quality - i.e. if you’re listening to an automotive podcast you really don’t want to hear a message about the latest advance in toilet cleaning consumables. Interestingly enough, podcasting scored highest in relevant and personalized messages - as opposed to blogs, email, videos, etc.

And a quick note to those thinking of ways to at least breakeven with their social media efforts:

The proliferation of sponsored channels seems to have little to no impact on consumers’ usage (70 percent would keep reading a blog they know is sponsored, 66 percent would keep reading a sponsored message board)

So, fear little when you make an effort to find a relevant and qualified sponsor for you podcast or video podcast.

Technorati Tags: marketing, advertising, survey, RSS, podcasting

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 3rd, 2006 at 12:57 pm and is filed under Analysis, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.