Posted on Feb 21st, 2007

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I just got finished audio-booking pollster Frank Luntz’s new book Words that Work. While I’m very different from Luntz politically (he’s the guy who renamed the estate tax to the death tax, and is anti-”illegal immigration”) I’m absolutely fascinated by his work with language, specifically his testing methods. The book is a great read/listen especially for an online marketing professional who relies on words and images entirely to sell a product or a viewpoint, lots of great stuff in there.
But what really piques my interest in Luntz, and has since I first became aware of him when I watched the documentary “The Persuaders”, is his testing methods and how they overlap with the split and multivariate testing stuff I’ve been doing. Obviously testing wording variations with something like Google’s Website Optimizer is easy enough, but he uses another method that I think is missing from the internet marketing toolbox: dial sessions.
A dial session is shown in the movie and he refers to them in the book, but the idea is that a bunch of people watch a video and turn a knob at the same time. If they agree with the video they turn the knob one way and if they disagree the other way. I’m going to look into implimenting an ajax slider control in conjunction with youtube videos to create an online dial session system. I think the sheer breadth of content and test subjects available makes this a goldmine of useful data.
Obviously there are some challanges to address, like recording second by second data, correlating video content to slider position and interfacing with youtube’s flash widget, but I don’t reckon it’ll be too hard.
Stay tuned, I do plan to share my tool when developed.

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