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How the San Francisco Giants Hit a Home Run with Social Media

It wasn’t too long ago when sport industries were confounded by the openness of social media and the ability for fans and players to share experiences in real time. Now of course, times have changed and teams in every sporting league imaginable are experimenting with social media to improve relationships and experiences with fans. The San Francisco Giants are among the sports teams that are leading the way for a new genre of engagement and community building.

2010 was a whimsical year for the San Francisco Giants. Not only did the team win its first World Series in 54 years, it was the year that a new Giants story started to unfold. Pablo Sandoval, Brian Wilson and the beard, Tim Lincecum, and the rest of the team started to win together and social media emerged as a digital stadium where fans around the world could not only watch how the story unfolded, but also become part of the story.

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Are Your Customers Lying to You? How Can You REALLY Tell What They’re Thinking?

In John Nosta’sThinkology blog post, “The Fundamental Marketing Dilemma: Language is a Lie,” he discusses books like Malcom Gladwell’sBlink and Tor Norretranders’s The User Illusion, which explore the ideas of how we perceive things. These authors assert that our first impressions are processed not by conscious thought and language, but by much faster processes that are rooted in our reptilian and mammalian brains.

Nosta’s take is that language is really “a corrupted surrogate for what’s REALLY happening.” He says that maybe we shouldn’t be asking our customers what they’re thinking. Maybe we would get more and/or better information by trying to measure direct neural function such as eye tracking, facial coding and other biometrics.

What about surveys and focus groups? Bunk! According to Nosta, people’s thought processes pollute their first impressions about a product or service to the point that the language expression we get in response to asking a question isn’t reliable—and yet 90% of market research focuses on verbal communication, while verbal accounts for only 23% of most communication.

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