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by Bertie

So, now we know the weakness of social media

September 18, 2012 in Media, tablets

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Yes, the social media had it mostly wrong – and then some of the gurus of the traditional media too, such as Wired. Wired called the new iPhone5 very boring.  Yet (click back to the previous blog, please!) Apple has since sold all the pre-orders inside of an hour and within the first 24 hours 2 million of the new phones, 100% more than the iPhone 4S record.

So much for boring!

The public voted for predictability refreshed.  How many of the iPhone users do you think would want to upgrade to something totally new?!  Once again learning to navigate the user interface? Searching for you familiar stuff.  Who would want a spherical phone. Users don’t want something entirely new when they have already gotten used to something. New scares. New is liked by pundits and journalists.  New as in unfamiliar is not liked by users.  Users like familiar with fresh flair – that is what apple delivered.

It’s different when a new category is created, such as when the iPod was first launched or the iPhone for that matter. But knowing how difficult it is to get traction in the market with new, which company in its right mind will go through the riks and pain all over again. No familiar with fresh flair is the marketing recipe for success – and that Apple delivered.

More importantly though is the point i made in the previous blog. There is a humungous disjunct between opinion and action. The media often make the logical mistake to equate the two. But opinion does not necessarily translate into action. Neither favourable or unfavourable opinion. Marketers can’t believe social media anymore than they could focus groups in the old days.

The medium has changed, human nature remained the same!

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by Bertie

Shouldn’t we be more careful

September 14, 2012 in Media

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…of social media? Have we become too much in awe of social media and aren’t we forgetting to take some (a lot? most?) of the comments on social media with a pinch of salt?  Haven’t we become slaves to the opinion of social media, instead of viewing most of it as noise?

I am saying this apropos  response in the social media on the release of the iPhone 5.  Much the same as when iPhone4S was released, ” incremental changes,”   not a ” wow!”  And yet despite the luke warm reception of 4S it then went on to unprecedented blockbuster sales.  Much the same this time around. In a summary of responses this morning I read that bloggers remark, that the company that gave us such remarkable new products as the iPod and the iPhone went on giving more of the same.  I am amazed. Clearly we are in a phase of incremental change. Have these guys never heard of the S-curve in innovation?  If you are covering tech you should of course have now better.

The ordinary ” twitterees”  simply venting under the guise of avatars are not expected to know better.  Is there perhaps a wisdom of the crowds hidden in so much of the inanities? Perhaps it is time that some of us reread the ” WIsdom of crowds.”  (?)   I tend to think that much of it is simply noise with little or no influence in real word behaviour – as witnessed last time around by the sales of the 4S. Let’s see what happens this time.

When I started this blog three and a half years ago in May 2008 my first entry was about the unreliability of focus groups.  Experimental testing revealing that the opinions vented in focus groups are more prone to misleading than to accurate insight. I am beginning to think that our obsession with the opinions expressed in social media may lead us down the garden path of a giant, amorphous, anonymous focus group.

That  research on the value of focus groups revealed that there is a disjunct between expressing an opinion and actually acting predictably on that opinion.  A verity well worth remembering, when next you quote twitters and facebook comments as the gospel truth.

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by Bertie

How do you explain this?

September 13, 2012 in tablets

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Perhaps you can help Tim Cook, Apple CEO. He can’t explain this, most astounding fact, about the iPad from yesterday’s presentation at the launch of the new iPhone, the iPhone5.

iPad in fact upped its market share in the past year from a market share of 62% to a 68% – and this despite the launch of numerous competitors.

Now, here is the astounding fact that TIm Cook finds difficult to explain:  If you look at internet usage, iPad account for 91% of internet traffic.  ” So,”  and this is what Cook is asking, what are users doing with the other tablets?

What is happening,  on iPad, according to Cook,  is that it is increasingly being used for specialised business applications.

Mobility is truly coming to the workplace.

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