Location, Location, Location

The old realtors adage of “Location, Location, Location” seems to be applying to social media. Facebook have announced their new places service (http://www.facebook.com/places/). It's available on the iPhone Facebook app or via touch.facebook.com . Of course it's nothing new , sites such as Foursquare.com have been around for a while, offering the same geo-locational social networking. It is important not to dismiss geographic social media (geosocial media). Foursquare is everywhere. I live in Cincinnati, hardly a teeming metropolis, but pretty much everywhere I seem to go has a Foursquare “major”. A major in Foursquare terms is a status given to someone who visits a place the most. Even my neighbors house had a major, which turned out to be someone no one knew. A friend of mine traveled across the USA and he said Foursquare was everywhere he went too. This is not some passing trend. Now that Facebook has go into the scene it will only grow.

There is the privacy paradox of course. On the one side there is a lot of noise about not wanting to tracked by your friends, about how criminals can use the services to work out which houses to burgle. The flip side is that it is everywhere and there seem to be a lot of people using it. So I think the privacy arguments are simply not strong enough, maybe it just means you have to be careful about who your friends are, not bad advice in general.

The potential for businesses of this type of geosocial media are huge. Many types of businesses don't really know their clientele very well, but this is a way to know who comes to your business and more importantly to know when they arrive. It offers all sorts of potential for surveys and rewards. I was struck at a market research conference a couple of months ago how few people there knew about geosocial media. If the geosocial media takes off we have a new way to find out what people are doing, and when they are doing it. It seems it will pay to know where your friends are....

The Problem with Neuromarketing.....

There are several problems really. The first is the name. It should really be called applied cognitive neuroscience (ACN), because that is what it is. Hopefully this would counter all the specious arguments about it being scientific. The New Scientist (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/neurofocus-and-new-scientist-magazine-apply-neuromarketing-to-select-cover-design-100053049.html) test raised some comments about the science of ACN. I have to disclose in what seems like a previous life I studied cognitive neuroscience (we called it neuropsychology back then). Trust me, it is a science, it has been around a *long time*, many decades, and it also uses statistics correctly. This latter fact is a novelty for a lot of MR, I know. At least ACN tries.

There is also the privacy "discussion". ACN is about as invasive as looking at someone who is blushing and deducing they may be embarrassed. ACN measures physiological correlates of mental states or processes. It happens to do them via electrical signals measures from the brain. We do this all the while with body language, speech tones and so on. Just because there is a lot of equipment in ACN and latin words doesn't make it any different.

The biggest problem ACN has is sample size. N = 19, as in the New Scientist test, isn't much. It is barely enough for a single quota cell. Making big decisions based on tiny samples mostly ends in tears. The sample size issue relates to the technology of ACN. The electrodes on the scalp can take time to set up and this limits sample sizes. However several companies have ways round this with either limited electrode placement (not so good - one electrode gets you nothing except muscle noise) and less "invasive" caps that hold the electrodes on the scalp without glue. The latter holds the most promise so far as I can see. Sample size is a solvable problem, scalability may take time, but compared to the rest of the technology used in ACN it is not the most complex problem. Several companies are building normative databases which will be hugely useful.

The problems with ACN are solvable, the potential is huge...