Archive for the ‘surveys’ Category

I got pointed to an interesting slide deck yesterday from a company called ABLE. ABLE is a NYC based company doing social media marketing for food and wine clients. They did a survey of French and US wineries about how they used social media.

The short version of this? More wineries are active on social media platforms in the US than in France. And the US wineries are reporting that Facebook is a particularly powerful tool to generate sales.

Part of this is boosterism. ABLE quite naturally wants its potential clients to believe that social media is a must for them, and that they need to devote more time, money, and resources to it.

But there are some surprising numbers in here. What do you think of these?

• 4 in 5 French wineries don’t have a dedicated marketing manager creating content on social networks.
• Fewer than 1 in 13 use FB advertising.

Now, the report does suggest that France’s wineries are jumping into the social media vat of grapes with both feet. But there will be challenges ahead for French wine. How will they prioritize markets? What will they do to ensure they’re creating content that matches the culture and languages of their markets? And how will they ensure that they’re doing their social media work strategically, rather than just hopping onto Twitter or Facebook?

I wonder if Vaynermedia has been watching this happen. Would seem a natural place for them to excel.

And I wonder if there were any indications of how wineries are measuring what they do against goals they set for themselves.

A different kind of digital divide

UPDATED, December 21: after some chasing, I heard from Daryl Korell, who was at the Canadian Media Research Centre. While the Canadian Internet Project site is still down, he offered to pass on my coordinates to the project staff. I’ve asked for an interview with them, and if and when I get one you’ll hear about it.

If you’re going to advise people on communications, PR or social media, chances are you’ll spend a lot of time thinking and writing and talking about online life. I know I do. It helps if you’re passionate for understanding how people use media to communicate  Doing that means that I love to read stuff about what people are doing online. But I realized this morning, when I saw a CBC story about internet use among older people, that there’s a big gap here in Canada.

The story quoted something that I consult all the time: The Pew Internet and American Life Project. This project, one of seven that make up the Pew Research Centre, regularly publishes data about … well, the Internet and American Life. Of the Centre’s 117 staff, eight are working on the Pew Internet and American Life.

So far in 2010, the Pew Internet project has issued 19 reports on everything from government online to social media reputation management to “the future of the Internet.” Their reports are really great. I frequently download them, and I use them to write, make presentations, and the like.

But where’s the Canadian equivalent? For the Canadian who’s interested in these issues, there’s really no way to dive deep into this data that I can find.

• Statistics Canada does some work. In May, it released data on Canadians’ Internet use from its Canadian Internet Use Survey, which reported on data from a 2009 survey (the previous one was in 2007); in September, it released information on e-commerce in Canada from the same survey. As far as I know, that’s it.
• Industry Canada’s Digital Economy site has research on e-commerce dating to 2008, as well as a “research and links” page that doesn’t look to have been updated since 2006.
• A site called “Internet World Stats” has a 2007 review, mostly of broadband penetration in Canada.
• Emarketer has a report on Canada from 2008 that would likely cost a couple of hundred bucks.
• The Canadian Media Research Consortium (a group made up of partners from York University, Ryerson University and Université Laval) has the “Canadian Internet Project.” Unfortunately, the project’s site is down. But there are two reports, one from 2008 and one from 2004.
• Services like Comscore do monitor web traffic and offer Canadian statistics. But that’s site based, not user based. And they haven’t issued a release mentioning Canada since August 2009.
• Even the Pew Global Attitudes project surveys 22 countries but excludes Canada.

Am I missing out on sources here? Why is it that we don’t have something like the Pew projects? Tell me where I haven’t looked.

Saw this CBC story yesterday on the RSS feed: Online media second to traditional news outlets, poll finds.

The poll in question was carried out by IDC and apparently paid for by ITAC, the Information Technology Association of Canada.

Among the results:

• 95 per cent of respondents continue to turn to traditional media (newspapers, radio and television) for general news and 82 per cent for breaking news.
• 42 per cent of respondents access some form of online media for general news
• 21 per cent of respondents turn to online sources for breaking news
• Larger families access and trust online more than smaller families
• French respondents trust online media more than their English counterparts
• Almost 50 per cent of Younger Canadians (18 – 24) are likely to get their information online

Sounds pretty interesting, doesn’t it? I wanted to learn more than what CBC had online.

I was able to find their news release, issued via Canada Newswire. It had contacts to their PR firm, which in the interest of sportsmanship I will not yet name, as well as a contact at ITAC. Oddly enough, neither IDC nor ITAC have anything about this on their media rooms.

So I got in touch with the PR firm yesterday. To this point, I’ve got nothing other than an explanation that they “don’t release raw survey data”.

I don’t WANT raw data. I would like to know more about the questions asked, the sample size, the sample method, and the issues of media choice and trust.

I’ve now pinged IDC and ITAC to see if I can learn more. I’ll let you know what I come to know.

Ciao,
Bob.