Thursday, December 18, 2008

I do hate lazy conclusions

Especially when they seem drawn simply to discredit social media and its commercial viability. Today's annoyance:

A Marketing Vox article: Older Women More Purposeful Online than Younger Peers

Actually I think the data is pretty good, and maps quite closely to the insights we were able to draw from our own March 2008 Benchmark Study of Women and Blogging [PDF], conducted with Compass Partners. One such example being that younger generations are more interested in each other's lives, older generations more interested in actionable information.

Here's what made me cranky:

Like findings in other studies, the SheSpeaks research also found that advertising on social networking sites is largely ineffective. Among those surveyed, one-quarter (26%) of respondents say they actively ignore such ads and 20% say they are annoyed by the presence of online ads on social networking sites.


My firsy question: Are those two stats additive, and could people choose only one? Meaning: Does that mean 46% were annoyed or ignored the ad? (Which, by the way, indicates that over half over respondents had no such negative reaction>)

If they're not from the same choose-only-one question of the survey, then I'm not sure how 26% ignoring an ad = "largely ineffective". That means that three quarters of the respondents do notice ads. Do we think TV viewers, newspaper readers or magazine readers are drastically different?

"Largely ineffective" is a completely subjective (and I might venture unsupported) conclusion.

Know what I mean?

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