Iron Man 3 rocks, Facebook Home sort of flops - latest research

Iron Man 3 gets a massive thumbs up from respondents in new research conducted.

On the other hand, Facebook Home is found to be more of a damp squib.

All this is contained in the May Harris Buzz report. The full report is available to download here for free.



As usual it's a national poll of GB respondents where we ask their awareness and excitement of the latest releases in entertainment and technology.

Iron Man 3 and the release of Facebook Home, the skin for smartphones, were among the news stories we covered in the May report.

Here's a full list of what we covered in the May report:

·         Daft Punk’s new song breaks Spotify record and charts at Number 1

·         Defiance TV series and video game

·         Evil Dead movie (2013 re-make)

·         Facebook Home platform launched for smartphones

·         HP Slate 7 launched (Android tablet device)

·         Iron Man 3 movie

·         LOVEFiLM set to pilot TV series online based on public vote

·         Oblivion movie

·         Olympus Has Fallen movie

·         Psy releases ‘Gentleman’ single, follow up to ‘Gangnam style’

·         Reddit issues apology over Boston bombings “witch-hunt”

·         Star Trek video game

·         Twitter launch #Music service

Iron Man 3 did exceptionally well. We've tested 250 news stories, film releases, games and device launches over the last few years.

For our Excitement Buzz measure, Iron Man 3 ranks in 5th place in our all-time list.

This is really good.

You can see where Iron Man 3 ranks in our all time top 10 for Excitement Buzz on the left.



It's not surprising to see Iron Man 3 doing so well given it was reported recently that it became the fifth top-grossing film of all time, according to online movie tracker Box Office Mojo.

And what about Facebook Home. There's been mixed reviews for it since Mark Zuckerberg launched it April. It's been downloaded for Android over half a million times. But an average user rating of 2.3 out of 5 on Google Play tells its own story.

And we see equally disappointing results in our May Buzz report. Only 10% of the GB public tell us they were excited by the launch of Facebook Home. It's early days for Facebook Home. There is a dire need for Facebook to capitalise on the shift to mobile so it should be seen as the start of an evolution for them.

The full PDF report can be found here. And links to all prior monthly Buzz reports can be found here.

Our next Buzz report will include the reaction to the Xbox One reveal, Star Trek Into Darkness, Daft Punk's Random Access Memories and Grid 2.

Brand Buzz - BBC, ITV, Sky, Facebook, Google & Twitter

A brand new report from Harris Interactive for you. It's our very first report in our new series of "Brand Buzz" reports. It's like our normal Buzz report, but instead we focus squarely on brands. 

Click here to view or download the full free report.

For this new report, we look at six media and tech giants: BBC, ITV, Sky, Facebook, Twitter and Google.

Using the Harris Poll platform, we ask a nationally representative sample of the GB public three simple questions:

1. Awareness, familiarity and usage
2. Their emotional connection to each brand
3. The degree to think they think the brand is on the way up/unchanged/in decline

We plan to do this monthly, taking six new brands each time. Over time we'll build some powerful benchmarks. I'll post a link to next month's edition on this blog when it's ready. Next month we'll be looking at mobile brands including iPhone and Android.

Here's a few snippets of the results from the first edition:

What do we see from the data above?

• While BBC is among the country's most loved brands, it isn't really seen as very innovative by the general public or among its users (which is just about everyone)
• Sky, Facebook and Twitter attract a lot of negative opinions from the general public, but this is almost exclusively coming from non-users
• Facebook, Twitter and Google are the three brands with the highest "buzz", that they're perceived as ahead and really going places

When we do this monthly, we'll add more and more brands, building up a great store of information of what the general public thinks of brands in the entertainment, media, technology and telecoms space.

Click here to view or download the full, free report.

Buzz report bonanza - two new reports available

It's been a while since I've updated and there are two new free Harris Buzz reports available to download.

Buzz#10 - the November 2011 report is available here
Buzz#9 - the October 2011 reports is available here

Here's a summary of all the news stories and the brands we've measured in these two reports:

As always, get in touch if you want to know more. My contact details are on the right-hand pane.

Illustrating the power of social media - iPhone 4 antenna issues and Jay-Z spoof "Newport"

In the latest edition of Harris Interactive's Buzz report, we looked at the awareness and buzz of two recent social media phenomena - the hoo-hah about antennae and reception problems for the iPhone 4 and the viral YouTube and Jay-Z New York music video spoof, "Newport". The original video has since been taken down due to copyright infringement, but whilst it was up it generated hundreds of thousands of views and various versions are can be found online.

Both of these are perfect illustrations of the power of social media. Would the iPhone 4 issues have made headline news across the world if it weren't for the power of blogging, YouTube and Twitter?




Speaking of spoof music videos, the iPhone 4 antenna issue has produced its own tune. This video lamenting the reception has, at the time of writing, been viewed over a million times. And this is just one video on YouTube. Add together all the tweets, the blogs, the complaining Facebook updates and coverage in the mainstream media and, all of a sudden, a technological flaw becomes a social media phenomenon.

But is all of this really just confined to the geekosphere? What about the general public? It's this sort of thing we like to find out at Harris Interactive.

Harris Interactive's latest Buzz report via the Harris Poll looked at how many consumers in the Great Britain aged 16-54 were aware of these two news stories. We interviewed over a 1,000 people online, representative of the national demographic.









So how many GB consumers were aware of these two stories at the end of August 2010?

• 62% of GB consumers had heard something about iPhone 4 antenna issues - with 21% saying they were extremely or very familiar with the issue

• 32% of GB consumers had heard something about the Newport music video spook - with 9% saying they were extremely or very familiar with it

That's a lot of people.

That's the power of social media.

The Buzz report not only looks at awareness of issues, we also investigate the degree to which it stimulates people to discuss a given issue. Of those who were at least somewhat familiar with the iPhone 4 antenna issue, a remarkable 55% said they had or will discuss it with their friends and peers. And the figure is 45% for Newport. No wonder news spreads so quickly and with SMS, email, IM, Twitter, blogs, YouTube and Facebook at our collective disposal, we now have the means of spreading the news - quickly and to anyone who cares to listen.

This makes the need for brands to monitor their social media all the more important. Harris Interactive can help. Get in touch with us if you want to know more. 

Download the free Buzz report here.