Click by Bill Tancer |Book Brief

The Book Click explores what millions of people are doing online and why it matters.  Author Bill tancer explains why analyzing internet behavior and online trends helps businesses understand their customers better.

Bill Tancer: There was a time when we only shared our deepest thoughts with our therapist or the local bartender, but today those same thoughts appear in our searches on Yahoo and Google.  We query search engines on what we re curious about, what we like, don t like, what we fear, what we fantasize about and what we re apt to buy.  Why does all this data matter?  Well, because major advertisers, marketers, television networks, newspapers, and retailers, to name a few, are constantly hungry for new insight about consumer habits and nowhere can they get it more accurately than the web. 

Let s take a look at how online behavior reflects what we re really thinking about and doing, which sometimes is different from what you d expect.

When is prom dress season?  Well, if you re like the majority of retailers, you would reason that because most proms are in May, March through April would be the best time to put prom dresses out in retail stores or online.  Unfortunately, if you follow that reasoning, you would miss the biggest opportunity to capitalize on the flood of prom dress interest that occurs every year   in January!  This finding was equally surprising to me.  It didn t make sense. I realized that to unravel the mystery, I had to understand the typical teenager in the market for a prom dress.  I did my own search for prom dress and then proceeded to analyze the first web site that came up   which at the time was promgirl.net .  As it turns out, there are two different sets of prom dress buyers   those more affluent and fashion oriented start looking in January, and those looking for prom dress bargains mainly begin searching in March or April.  This knowledge, of course, is like gold to the fashion retail industry.

In 2005, Lenovo bought the personal computing division from IBM, which included the ThinkPad.  But the ThinkPad by then had had a history of being associated with the IBM brand.  In a marketing summit, I heard the Chief Marketing Officer of Lenovo talk about their efforts to boost the association of ThinkPad with their brand.  He said at the time they were fielding a brand study and planned to have results in several months.  But I didn t need several months to figure out whether ThinkPad was closer associated with IBM or Lenovo.  All I had to do was to research how people were searching for the ThinkPad to get the answer   and indeed the marketing campaign was working   people were associating ThinkPad and Lenovo to a greater degree as time progressed. 

So, how can we predict the next big thing?  Well, the landscape has shifted since Malcolm Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point.  The advent of online social networks that live and die on MySpace, YouTube and FaceBook (and their countless imitators) has created a new breed of connectors.  Before these social networking sites popped up, studies had shown that the average person has about 150 meaningful contacts and the super connectors were those individuals that exceeded that number.  Now, this new category of connectors count their  friends  in the thousands and even higher.  The best example of this is a foul-mouthed e-vixen who goes by the online moniker of Tila Tequila.  Love her or hate her, as of the writing of my book, Ms. Tequila is the most popular personality on MySpace, counting 1,645,873 friends within her network and over a quarter billion visitors to her personal profile. As Gladwell pointed out, connectors are one of the key ingredients in the start of social epidemics and trends.  Today s super connectors, like Tila Tequila, can play the same role but with a far greater reach.  In short, we   businesses and trackers of zeitgeist   can predict what will happen in the offline world by looking at what is going on under our very noses   online!

Hope you enjoy Click and find the research and data useful in your business.