In Behavioral Research, we love conducting User Experience tests. At times, we don’t even have to ask questions to understand user reactions. Sometimes, facial expressions tell you everything you need to know.

The holidays are upon us and it looks like some folks are getting into the spirit of all things bright and twinkly by adding some of their own twinkle to their emails.

November 19 - AT&T recently sent me an email with a row of phones they were hawking as part of a holiday promotion. Low and behold, an animated .gif for all to see. Twinkle. Suddenly, visions of dancing cell phones in my head.

November 20 - Apple sends me an email announcing their ‘Black Friday’ sale event. For email clients like Outlook that don’t support animated .gifs, the email looked like this. However, in web mail clients like gmail, the animated .gif worked just fine and twinkled like this. (Santa - send me my iPhone)

November 23 - REI sends me this email that speaks to both skiers and snowboarders equally (because really, you’re either one or the other). Double twinkle.

So what does this mean? I’m not sure and would love some feedback on whether the animated .gif is a seasonal special like Starbucks Christmas Blend (my fave) or a new email trend.

If we’re honest about human nature, we gravitate towards ‘blingy’ and ‘blinky’ things, and my eye automatically went after the twinkly things in these emails.

It’s a confusing thing, trying to figure out how to take advantage of the “new web” - social networking, video distribution, Web 2.0, etc.  I recently was speaking with a large group of marketers in the Atlanta area about social networking and the question that always seems to come up at these things is, “Should we create our own social network or should we try to work within some of the more popular ones?”

And my answer typically is “fish where the fish are”.  I first heard this quote in a presentation by a friend of mine, Tom Daly (who also just launched a great travel blog called Traveling Parent), when he was talking about some of Coke’s online initiatives.  What’s interesting is that Coke actually does a great job of knowing when to fish where the fish are and when to create their own pond.  If you have the kind of brand enthusiasts that Coke has, there are certainly times when it makes sense to create something just for them.

In the November issue of OMMA, an article by Mark Walsh entitled, “It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over“, talked about Anheuser-Busch’s inability to cut ties with Bud.tv.  Granted, Bud.tv has been everyone’s favorite whipping-boy since it launched, and I even got into the act in the beginning.

In Walsh’s article he states that, “Perhaps A-B should think of its online business more like its offline one.  It doesn’t sell beer from a central outlet in St. Louis but through a vast distribution network…(online it should) maintain its niche sites but let third-party sites like YouTube act as brand distribution hubs.  Let Hulu, Joost and others figure out online entertainment networks”.

Well done Walsh, I couldn’t have said it better myself.  Case in point, why go to Bud.tv to watch their fantastic ‘Swear Jar’ commercial, when I can do it on YouTube in an environment I already feel comfortable with?

VW celebrates its anniversary in style.

It may be a Dutch website, but they have the same great taste in music (less the awkward skew towards the still popular Journey, Asia and Air Supply). The microsite showcases 5 generations of VWs alongside the music of their era. The gaming portion of the site quizzes the user to pick which VW and era belongs with the song and the results are an engaging advergame that delivers some great music and memories.

So what were my findings?

1. VW sure has changed from the 5os, and still has yet to bring back the Karmann Ghia.
2. Quiz shows and advergames mix very well.
3. I have an odd skew towards 50s and 80s music.

Take the quiz and see how VW has changed over 60 years. Just click on “speel het spel” and enjoy the music. (It takes a while to load, please be patient!)

Whoever said scrolling for content was bad? Maybe our entire User Experience Department…

So why can’t scrolling be part of the experience, part of the concept… well it can be and Orange does a great job with the dreaded “page down” action.

Orange, a mobile provider out of the UK, recently launched the microsite around the concept of unlimited mobile usage. It’s a clever play on unlimited and scrolling lets the user interact with various flash experiences and conveys the feeling of a single page that never ends. The micro-experiences give quick interaction points and continuously drive the user deeper down the page to an abyss of rainbows, birds, bunnies and monkeys.

All said and done, it is a smart site and if it does not crash your browser, I hope you enjoy the lengthy experience.

For those of you starting to feel the pain of the writers strike like I am, there are more and more alternative sources for “TV” popping up every day on the inter-web.

Internet TV comes in many shapes and forms, but the latest player (literally) in the game is Miro. Granted it’s not brand new, but the release of Miro version 1.0 (”bug-free”) is hot-off-the-presses.

“Cross-platform, open source video application Miro is now available in a full-featured, bug-fixed 1.0 version. The program formerly known as Democracy Player plays almost any kind of video file, but its real value lies in its content fetching and organizing features. Miro can subscribe to video podcasts, grab from YouTube channel feeds or BitTorrents (letting you make your own season pass) and keep video libraries organized, amongst other features. Miro is a free download for Windows, Mac and Linux.”

I haven’t used it enough to know how it compares to the competition, but it seems to be hitting all the right spots. If you have (or plan to) download it and use it I would love to know what you think.

I read yesterday’s MediaPost article about Facebook and MySpace’s new ad platforms. A couple of advocacy groups (Center for Digital Democracy and the U.S. Public Interest Research Groups) protested these marketing plans to the FTC yesterday. These groups are actually quite large and influential; the U.S. PIRG has a number of interests, including the environment, transportation and health care, in addition to media and internet reform.

So, for those of you who haven’t heard about Facebook’s new ad plaform, it’s really simple - advertisers will be able to deliver their marketing messages to users based on their activity, and the information that they share with friends.

And, a Business Week article on this topic said “Under the new system, marketers also will be able to create brand pages where users can view related media, review products or services, add items they like to their personal pages, and become friends, or “fans,” of the brand—and even make purchases.” Of course, these activities would show up in the users regular feeds to their friends - which many feel violates privacy.

I think the real controversy in this case is how much personal information marketers are given. The Business Week article suggests that the most vulnerable group are those young members who might not realize how much personal information they’re sharing, or where it will end up.

Personally, I’m torn. At first I thought ”I’ve already learned to cope with the ads in Gmail”, which use my personal conversations to fuel ad selections. How different is this? I suppose I also think that if I use this product for free, I shouldn’t mind being advertised to (as with Gmail). Futhermore, if I’m going to be advertised to, at least this new ad platform has the potential to make those ads relevant to my interests.

To gain some perspective, I asked Dan Dooley what he thought. His impression (in part) was that Facebook might have been wise to put more controls around the free distribution of user behaviors for the profit of advertisers.  I do get what he’s saying. With no restraints it’s easy to see how, for example, men who meet certain criteria could start seeing Viagra ads in their ad feeds, even though they never suggested an interest.

I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts on this.

I recently stumbled across this article on how to protect yourself against SPAM. Get this … a study conducted by a company called Nucleus Research revealed that the average cost of SPAM per employee per year is $1,934 - as a result of lost productivity*. While most of us may know what SPAM is by now, and how to defend ourselves from it (for the most part), some of us might not be familiar with its little brother, BACN. 

BACN is pronounced exactly like how you would say those greasy strips that clog up your arteries. This relatively new term, coined at PodCamp Pittsburgh, basically means emails that you actually want, but not right now. Some examples would be your subscribed-to newsletters and online bills. You can read about how it all got started here. Although BACN may not be as detrimental (or as annoying) as SPAM, it has the potential of robbing us of time spent on filtering our email - sorting the messages we really need from those we might never read.

Many of us battling SPAM have some extra help from anti-spam softwares or we use an ISP that provides SPAM protection. As for BACN, the solution may be as easy as thinking twice before signing up for anything online or offline. For example, do you really need that Facebook update when you are already checking your Facebook account for the fifth time today or the other various daily or weekly updates from your favorite stores (who’s websites you frequent anyway), when you are buried up to your neck with work?

So, with some help from SPAM protection software and a little common sense, we can all keep our inbox, and our bottom line, protected from the likes of SPAM and BACN.

A couple of days ago, I was having a conversation with a buddy of mine about how weird it feels to go on a trip where there is no internet access.  These, of course, are generally trips to see family or friends that put you in a location where getting online is usually not impossible, but a at least a chore, so you wind up doing without for some period of time.  My buddy and I were joking about how it changes the dynamic of conversations, because you can’t just go “Google” something to help resolve a friendly debate, or look up something that you’re trying to figure out.  My friend called it the “third brain” in a conversation.

While most of what we were saying was in jest to some extent, there was obviously some truth to it.  And there was something about that truth that bothered me a bit, and got me to worry a little.  Will the internet affect our ability to critically think for ourselves?

How many times a day/week do you wind up solving a problem by going straight to the internet?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to paint the internet as evil or something harmful.  I’m only curious about what subtle differences in the way I think - or my children think - that it can impose, and what about those differences is healthy or unhealthy.

If more and more problems are solved and those solutions posted online, do I need to find ways to ensure that I maintain my ability to problem solve?  What about my children?

Part of me knows how valuable it is to be able to find a solution online in a matter of seconds instead of taking hours or days to figure it out myself, or even worse taking up several of my peers time and energy as well.  But at the same time, isn’t there usually some intangible benefit to just figuring it for myself?

I can see future households where children are taught to look something up online before they ask their parents.  I can also see a workforce full of people who can’t solve problems without looking up the answers. 

So, I pose the question to readers … is this a problem?

In Behavioral Research, we do a lot of interviews - and virtual worlds are no exception.

“In-world” interviews are an amazing way to uncover avatar needs, preferences, and expectations in virtual worlds. In the last few months, we’ve used this method to produce some really intriguing findings.

Take a quick look at what an in-world interview looks like: