Hello, Everyone!
In my class, we are discussing the exciting world of social media. Anyone who pays attention remotely to marketing knows that social media is such a growing and important part of marketing. And yet, it is fascinating seeing as how marketers have seemingly only tapped the surface of the capabilities, uses, and potential that social media has to reach consumers.
My professor gave us the choice between 2 different sorts of assignments to give our input on social media. One of them, the one that I will be doing, asked that we discuss our history of social media research tools, and my professor pointed us in the direction of Google zeitgeist. Now, I had never heard of Google zeitgeist before, which is why I decided to do this suggested assignment. Its website describe Google zeitgeist as a collection of “several tools that give insight into global, regional, past and present search trends. These tools are available for you to play with, explore, and learn from.” That being said, I decided to play with Google zeitgeist on the term “Kinect.” Now, I chose this because it is the newest product from Microsoft’s Xbox team and I recently bought a Kinect. However, I am fascinated to see how this product has been sought out by users. Knowing some about Microsoft and the Kinect, it is apparent that the Kinect is attempting to break the Xbox out of the specifically intense gamer market and branch out into the family-friendly market previously dominated by systems like the Nintendo Wii.
To begin, I should share that I have never done any formal research on social media tools. I am avid user of Facebook, as most college students are, and I recently got a Twitter to start exploring how that tool is used. I once had a MySpace and I’ve been on LinkedIn for a quite a while, having never taken the time to go deep on its capabilities. I consider myself someone who is slightly above average on the knowledge scale of technology and social media, but I certainly do not have all the answers. To tackle this assignment, I decided that I would pick a brand or product that I was interested in (in this case, the Kinect) and sort of do a general search using the Google zeitgeist tools. From there, I thought that I would develop some insights on how social media tools can help inform some marketing for the Kinect.
Now, on the main Google zeitgeist website, there are 4 tools: Google Trends, Trends for Websites, Insights for Search, and Hot Trends. Google Trends, a tool that gives a broad look of search queries, revealed that the #1 hotspot for a Kinect search came from the country of Mexico, followed relatively closely by the UK and then the U.S. The #1 language that the search on the Kinect was performed was English. Although Mexico was the #1 country doing the searches, the top cities performing searches on the Kinect were Poplar in the UK, Seattle, Washington, and Brentford in the UK. Geographically, it provided some interesting insight into the fact that the Kinect was gaining worldwide attention.
When using the Trends for Websites tool that tracks website traffic data, I had to use the Kinect website for the United States (http://www.xbox.com/en-US/kinect), but still found out that most visited websites in conjunction with the Kinect site were www.rememberreach.com (a website dedicated to the new Halo Reach game), www.majornelson.com (a blog dedicated to Xbox games and products), and www.mygamercard.net (an online gaming community). This was interesting because all of these websites have target audiences of people who are involved in gaming, which is not the ideal untapped family market that the Kinect will undoubtedly continue to try to reach.
The Insights for Search tool gives a deeper dive about search query data and revealed that that in the last 90 days, the “interest over time” had a significantly large jump around the launch date of the product (November 4). Rising searches showing that search terms such as “kinect reviews” jumping up +350%, “review kinect” rising by +250%, and “xbox kinect bundle” rising +180% demonstrates that people are indeed interested by the product and are looking into potentially purchasing the product. This gives a huge opportunity for marketers at Microsoft to capitalize on social media in order to reach this market during their peak interest.
The final tool I used from Google zeitgeist was Hot Trends, which shows the daily top 100 search queries in the U.S. The website only displayed the top 20 search queries per day, but when I looked on November 4, the release date of the Kinect, nothing showed up. In fact, nowhere from November 3 until today was there an Xbox, Microsoft, or Kinect search query in the top 20.
Overall, the Google zeitgeist search terms provide a lot of insight for marketers at Microsoft. They need to focus on building an online presence that targets users outside of the niche gamer industry. Where, for instance, do moms spend most of their time on Facebook? Off the top of my head, I know that moms play quite a bit of online games such as Farmville and Café World. Perhaps by targeting where moms spend their time online, they can better reach those who typically don’t know anything about video games. Additionally, I think considering that Facebook is coming out with a completely new messaging system for e-mail (combining e-mail, SMS, live conversation, etc.), Microsoft could cross into a new form of getting the word out in social media.
Overall, I think social media is a great way to reach out to people, but in the specific nature of marketing for the Kinect, they need to reach where their target audiences are present. If they want to continue winning over the gaming industry, they need to keep targeting where they are present. If it’s parents, families, moms, and dads, then some specialized marketing needs to occur. Google zeitgeist shed only surface-level analysis on where Internet users spend their time in relation to the Kinect, but social media tools can enable Microsoft and those marketing the Kinect to reach a new level of awareness and support for their newest product.
In class, we talked about social media and how there are different ways people can use the tools to do things. For instance, blogs like this one are people (in this case, me) creating content. People can collaborate, react to one another, organize content, and unlock the potential of social networking tools. I think Microsoft has a unique opportunity here because they are in a great space for home entertainment. Hopefully the Kinect will connect (sorry, I had to include the pun) the right marketing strategy with they right target audience.
