Archive for the ‘Research’ Category

By: Serena Hillman
SerenaSafeMode.com*

Below is a recap of the SES San Jose 2009 session The Buyersphere Project. For those of you not familiar with The Buyersphere Project it was a major research initiative conducted by Enquiro, with input provided by Google, Covario, Business.com, Demandbase and Marketo focusing on understanding B2B buyer patterns.

Buyersphere Defined

Buyersphere™ is a business-to-business term used to describe the use of the internet for sharing information on purchasing decisions. More specifically, it is defined as “the total universe of online content that influences buyer behaviour.” (http://wikibin.org/articles/buyersphere.html)

The Panelists Included:

Gord Hotchkiss, President & CEO, Enquiro
Mark McMaster, Sr. Planner B2B Markets, Google
Jon Miller, VP Marketing, Marketo
Susan Chenoweth Scarth, VP Marketing, Demandbas
Ben Hanna, VP Marketing, Business.com
Matthias Blume, Chief Analytics Officer, Covario

The panel started by introducing the 5 key areas of the research findings they would be discussing:

1. The Risk Gap and the Myth of the Funnel
2. The Need for Mapping
3. Better Integration Between Online and Offline
4. The Buyer-Doer Gap
5. Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives Continue…

By: Serena Hillman
DrinkTheCoolaid.com*

Thought I would share this nifty Consumer Profile Tool which profiles engagement within the Social Media space. A great starting point when building your Social Media strategy.

Consumer:

Continue…

By: Serena Hillman
DrinkTheCoolaid.com*

Thought I would share this nifty Consumer Profile Tool which profiles engagement within the Social Media space. A great starting point when building your Social Media strategy.

Consumer:

Continue…

By: Serena Hillman
DrinkTheCoolaid.com*

One of my final project ideas for my Artificial Intelligence class was to recreate expensive and cumbersome human eye tracking with Artificial Intelligence, specifically a Neural Network. Much to my chagrin, with a little Googling I find out it has already been done and done quite well:

The eye tracking video’s on YouTube claim that the application uses over 100,000 training samples. Also if you peruse through the developer’s video’s you can see examples of the computer generated results compared to real human eye tracking tests as well as being used in different mediums (ex. tv, web).

In my conversation with Dzmitry, the applications developer, he was understandably a little hesitant to reveal details on how the application works. But I sent him some more questions, namingly if he used a neural network or not. I will update the post if he responds.

Here’s a snippet of our conversation:

Hi Serena,

Thanks for your interest. … Please have a look at selected examples for www (early demos) here http://www.youtube.com/adstapler or retail and ad industry (more mature demos) http://www.youtube.com/shopperlabs. …

Best Regards,
Dzmitry

Below is my favourite example. Alright I might be a little web biaist. The results are great, considering all good PPC marketers know getting the third spot on the right hand for Adsense is ideal.

Note: I also did look at Feng-GUI’s similar application but found it nowhere near the accuracy as Dzmitry’s. For example, another blogger points out some accuracy issues here.

*Serena Hillman is an HCI professional who has worked in the web industry since 2003. Serena currently works as the Director of Marketing for ShowTimeTickets.com and is a graduate student at SFU studying mobile commerce as a part of the Connections Lab Research Group.