ImpactWatch Blog

Since 2004 – the year web 2.0 truly took the limelight – I have stood witness to the rapid evolution of the internet. An ever increasing portion of web content has come from end-users and consumers in various forms of text and digital media. This information is nothing that you, a user that navigated their way to this blog (blogs being of the first trends in user generated content), didn’t already know.

It is likely that you have probably been aware of this trend for a while – and heard about it repeatedly on blogs, in articles, and at conferences. It has taken shape into a vast, universally accessible archive of raw consumer feedback and profiling information, so it comes as no surprise that lots and lots of people are highly interested in finding ways to use this repository of dialogue in effective ways.

Competent analysis of a widely anonymous medium is not an easy agenda; there are many complications that arise when trying to arrange the clutter of user-generated web 2.0 content into coherent information that has real-world application. As Bill Tancer wrote in an article for TIME magazine last April about the demographics of web 2.0, it takes a little more than some tricky guesswork to put the content into a meaningful perspective.

In summary of his article, Tancer writes about how certain classical business principles are exhibited, and even highly exaggerated, in user-generated web content. The Pareto principle illustrates how 80 percent of results can be attributed to 20 percent of the causation. As a result, this trend adds to the distortion when trying to interpret web 2.0 data and attribute it to specific groups of consumers. He goes on to talk about other disproportionate and not-so-apparent trends in user generated sites such as YouTube and Flickr. In my research, other analytic sources support Tancer’s conclusions.

Tools like Tweet Scan are quick, inexpensive (can you say ad-supported?) and effective; lots of people are using them to find specific, raw feedback that was not possible before this wave of web technologies. It is thus important to be mindful of the limitations of said resources, and to frame their results within what is known. That’s when I think these tools become truly powerful.

Here at ImpactWatch, we have recently been conducting some closer examinations of social media. Through specific case studies, we have been conducting market research and developing new ways to aggregate and interpret social media. It was obvious to our team that social media – a medium based on actual human relationships (read: consumers) – would be invaluable to our clients who already rely on us to track their reputation in more traditional mediums.

There are countless variables and trends that I could speculate about that I’m sure, in time, some scholar of new media will base his or her dissertation and life teachings upon. Edward Bernays started a whole field of public relations and the scientific study of mass media psychology and consumer profiling, paving the way for audience identification and strategic policies. Since his time, these fields have come very far. Just as I’m sure that the current digital toolsets and comprehension therein are just a taste of things to come.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Blogs. 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.