...that's no excuse for a late blog

Recently remembered that I started a blog a few years back at the behest of my then employers as a means to bring their workforce up to speed with digital consumer behaviour. By forcing us to create avatars, use ebay, start blogs etc in a competitive manner that penalised 'poor performance' they spectacularly missed the oportunity. Far from providing us with insight into how consumers (indeed poeple) are using the internet - be it for entertainment, communication, commerce or research - it left most of us feeling even more alientated from these people who seemed to have so much spare time to dedicate to telling the world what they are doing.

It is only recently as I have become more digitally literate that my mind has wondered back to this thorny marketing issue: what is it that defines a person's use of and interest in the internet? There are various digital profiling models out there which claim to group a person based solely on their job title, age and answer to some generic question such as 'do you like gadgets?' and which allow large sprawling corporations to easily segment their customers and feel like they are delivering a personal experience. One imagines (though they are rarely robustly tested) that they are as accurate as the postcode derived models such as Mosaic which assume that me and my neighbour are the same person even though I'm in my thirties and bought the house after extensive renovation and she is in her eighties and has lived in the house for nearly sixty years. It is likely that she would respond as poorly to a DM pack about diy as I would about Polish needlework. So why would we be so naive to assume that my use of the internet can be so easily classified?

Part of the problem is that consumer digital literacy is constantly changing. For every fifty year old housewife who discovers online poker, another decides that sending e-cards is naff after all and they'd prefer to send a real card (though perhaps this isn't the christmas for that). We are reclassifying ourselves on a regular basis depending on our needs at the time, what our friends or family are doing and the marketing messages that somehow penetrate the automatic filter that we all engage. Is there really a link between digital literacy and my behaviour as a consumer?

A few months back, at the behest of an automotive client, my agency tried to crack the issue of audience types online. For weeks we debated the merits of age-based, cultural, need-state and generational groupings. We ended up using a framework based on very broad needs which seemed to cover off the large majority of online pursuits - entertainment, communication, life management, and research - though there seemed to be many examples which blurred the lines (is looking for porn a need for entertainment, an example of research or an attempt at life management?).

Whilst we were all relatively happy with these definitions, they are completely hopeless when it comes to targeting consumers - not least because within each of them are huge ranges of digital complexity. Whilst it is tempting to group people together based on their digital abilities, this misses the huge advantage of the internet as a tool - ease.

Take research for example - Consumer A may be highly skilled in mining the internet for information, via message-boards, advanced search solutions etc - but that doesn't mean they won't go to GoCompare.com for their car insurance. Similarly just because I loaded my holiday photos to Flickr and linked them to my Facebook page doesn't mean I wouldn't rather book my next holiday after flicking through a brochure rather than viewing a virtual tour of a hotel.

So what am I getting at? Well I guess I'm getting bored of our incessant desire to group people based on spurious unrelated actions. The internet has certainly heightened our awareness that we humans, as Mark Earls would state, are 'social apes' but I am less convinced that it has helped our ability to define which social group someone is in and communicate with them accordingly. Whilst we are not nearly as individual as we would like to think, influenced by everyone and everything we come in contact with, these overlapping experiences surely lead, albeit only in our own heads, into a unique perspective and personality. The internet provides an amazing opportunity to explore these unique social overlaps but only if we resist our instinct to categorise everyone into segments based on unrelatated behaviour. We need a new model that accepts the premise that I am who I am because of what I do, not how I do it. How we go about identifying and measuring that is for another time.

...at least I don't run an international airline

Times are tough for British Airways - of that there is no doubt. If it isn't the environmental lobby pounding on your door screaming 'CONTRAILS' at the top of their voice, it's the bloody chav airlines, namely Ryanair, offering flights to '[somewhere near] Milan' for ten quid and a packet of peanuts. And that's before you even go through the door marked 'DO NOT MENTION' and discover an evil, grinning Richard Branson hatching plans to nick your routes and passengers - not to mention suing you left, right and centre for being bigger than his airline - s'not fair...

Bearing in mind how uniformly disliked BA are, I expected the blog waves to be packed, like Heathrow on a bank holiday weekend, with further reasons to hate them. But actually there was very little - or should I say, no more than other airlines.

Unsuprisingly, considering the green revolution sweeping the nation, all airlines are under the cosh for their contribution to the end of the world. Bloggers are fairly united in condemning them such as this one entitled "How do you reconcile promoting recreational air travel with being green?" though very few of them seem to have actual data to work off (I've yet to read any which compare the impact of recreational travel with freight, for instance). But most of the condemnation is laid at the door of the low-cost airlines and especially Ryanair. One only has to type 'I hate Ryanair' into google search to be inundated with venemous blogs - I have set up a list of links over --> to show the top search returns for this.

Netvibes didn't produce much enlightenment on the blog front with most being about lost luggage - though the BBC newsfeed did supply some interesting insight into the battle for the Transatlantic route and the business traveller's wallet. The Open Skies pact between the USA and Europe has created an opportunity for Virgin Atlantic to pinch the bottom of the great BA once again, with both airlines set to create business-only services to key American and European cities. Not so strangely, there is little mention from the business community of the environmental impact of yet more long haul flights with even fewer passengers per flight - someone somewhere better be planting a LOT of trees!

So what have I learned? That the internet is full of information on brands and businesses but the key is how to filter it. I have set up a Netvibes page including feeds from Boardreader for my clients and started updating them weekly on interesting stories - be it a business development on one of their competitors or an insight from one of their cutomers. It is a thoroughly useful tool and one that benefits both my understanding of my clients' businesses as well as making them think my finger is on the pulse of their industry. Little do they know the other half of my day is spent on Facebook!

...isn't ebay a gift for the touters?

I saw an article in the Mirror the other day about Stella McCartney launching a budget clothing range in Australia as she did for H&M in the UK recently. There were the predictable people queuing over night, the scrummage as the doors were opened and then the grabbing began - all of the range was sold by 10am.

What was almost as predictable was that the items bought that morning would appear on ebay within the hour for twice the price. Ebay is seen by most as a kind of digital yard sale, minus the homemade rose perfume. And this is the side that most of us will have discovered whilst doing this latest assignment - hence the random collection of entirely worthless items that were picked up 'on the cheap' (though how do you put any price on a bag of stick insects!?). But the other side is that many of the items that appear on ebay are not a 'bargain'; in fact they are way over the high street price. There is even a review on ebay written by a customer warning people not to buy Primark clothing at over twice the high street price.

So whilst ebay has certainly made the dream of a global car boot sale a reality, don't believe that everything you find their is a good deal.

...isn't hiding your identity online a bit sad?

If the world wide interweb is meant to be the greatest advancement in communication since - I don't know - the voicebox; it seems a shame that its core users choose to hide their identities behind strange symbols and semi-intelligible names.

Whilst there is certainly a degree of exhilaration and emancipation in being able to adopt a different persona from your own, it can surely never be as satisfying as standing tall (or short) and saying, 'I believe this - judge me for it, I don't care if you agree.' In a world gone mad with PC terms for any identifiable characteristic, feature or belief, wouldn't it be more satisfying, more liberating, to stand visibly for something? To be judged for who you are and what you believe? To be accepted as an individual?

To that end I feel it is only right to tell you that I am not NoChildGenius, my name is Phil, I am 42 years old and run a marketing business; and I wish for a life on the ocean waves. Or am I?

Til next time...