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Social Media Sandwich

July 25, 2010 in Online, Social by Anthony | 1 comment

Salami and salad are an aggregate of different ingredients. Both salami and salad are diverse, mixing a range of different yet similar stuff into the one package, a lot like Twitter and Facebook. Combining so much into one easily consumed package is almost revolutionary in a world where meat offcuts and lettuce had until that time stood alone, solitary and distinct – somewhat similar to what was seen with Web 2.0, where user generated content was spread across sites like Geocities and other free hosts to be replaced with Myspace and Blogger, sites and tools that connected and generated content like never before.

Social Media Sandwich

Social Media Sandwich

Why not go further? Why not move from a boring world of plates, knives and forks, to a place where salami and salad can be enjoyed at the same time between two pieces of bread? The sandwich is a truly revolutionary construct. Taking the best of both foods and making them available in the one easy to consume package through the medium of baked goods.

How do you eat it? Must you use a plate, can you carry it with you, maybe it is only available in a specific restaurant and you can’t take it away? Or is it the übermensch of sandwiches and able to be eaten in whatever way you see fit, and if so, is this the revolutionary development? There are a lot of content aggregation tools available now, from Friendfeed through to Google Buzz, Windows Live Messenger Beta and device specifc tools like MOTOBLUR, Flipboard and Google’s Social Search. They vary greatly in capabilities, sources of media they can access and curation tools, but they perform the same task for the user.

A lot of these services and tools take a few social media activity streams and create a single feed, but a few index or include the content linked to and present it to the user directly. Flipboard delivers this content in the app, and Google Social Search presents the links in a results page of a relevant search query.

Questions of fair use and legality aside, providing socially sourced content from multiple sources in the one place with tools to make this information manageable is a significant development in how the Internet is used. From Google’s personalisation of search to the increasing importance of social networks for filtering content and the shift away from static portals, each user’s experience of the Internet is becoming more unique.

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Your Company’s Fragmented Web Presence

July 21, 2010 in Online, Search, Social by Anthony | No comments

Brands do not just have one touchpoint anymore. There are a lot of sites with different tools, an established audience, and people creating content about about many things, including companies and brands. From a company Facebook page or group to augmented reality brand hacking or conversations on Twitter, content created by Internet users about brands is more visible and varied than ever.

Why the website

Why the Site

Devoting all content creation and administration resources to single site or community is no longer the best strategy. Internet users seek out different content in different formats for different platforms. What meets their needs on their mobile phones will be different to what they want on their desktop computer, or their netbook, web-enabled TV, or tablet device. After all, social media is just people being people online, and what they use and how is a result of this.

The kind of platform and task they want to complete changes how they search for, evaluate and use content. From asking their social network for advice, to searching for product demonstrations on YouTube or store locations on Google Maps.

There is a need for the ‘Big Website’ and campaign or product specific microsites. While there is a need for control over a hub to facilitate list building, acquire links and generate direct navigation traffic, sites and microsites will be a part of the mix. While Facebook is not likely to suffer the same fate as Blogetery, developing content on external platforms also comes with a certain level of risk.

Being visible across multiple, relevant platforms, sites and communities gives brands the chance to manage the user’s experience of the brand. Providing compelling content and engaging with customers, the brand can develop on its campaigns further, ensure that customer service queries can be responded to and clarify information about their products.

Creating brand touchpoints like fan pages is an “as well as”, not an “instead of” developing microsites and promoting the the brand’s main web presence. They are an opportunity to put content in front of the customer in the place that they already are, and in a format tailored for the situation. A YouTube channel, Second Life store and a Facebook page are not a substitute for the spaces online that the brand controls.

Comic from Why the Site

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App Inventor and Curation of Content

July 15, 2010 in Online by Anthony | No comments

App Inventor promises to do to the application ecosystem what Blogger, YouTube, and other Web 2.0 sites did to the Internet. Soon the Android ecosystem will be flooded with the application equivalent of videos of cats falling off things, highly specific tools with a target market of one, and people who see this as a bad thing.

Like the Internet, Google’s App Inventor will follow Sturgeon’s Revelation. Just like Blogger, the Little Big Planet level editor and the Spore creature creation tools, there will be some awesome stuff built with totally original ideas and a huge volume of dross to shovel through to find them.

Tools that simplify creation and distribution of content lower or eradicate barriers of entry. The ability to create at a level equal to that of the new tools is commoditised. The real value at this level of content becomes the idea, its execution, and being able to find what you want. After all, there is a lot of content and some is good enough for most of the market and free. It is only the remarkable that people will pay for.

If the ability to find the relevant stuff had no value, search engines wouldn’t exist. All media distribution channels or nodes have used this editorial power to create value, online and offline.

The ability to find the relevant stuff is valuable, and Google has built their business on this idea. The Android App Marketplace has been criticised for its high number of poor and legally dodgy applications, from potentially malicious apps to those using unlicensed intellectual property. The Android Killswitch was announced, but there is bound to be more to come from Google on providing a better way to sort, classify and deliver relevant apps, because if they don’t, someone else will.

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Search Engine Marketing is PVP

July 11, 2010 in Advertising, Online, Search, Search Engines by Anthony | 2 comments

EVE Online (or Spreadsheets in Space as it is also known) is a MMORPG with strong PVP gameplay. There are a large number of other ways to play EVE Online, from the market through to PVE, but it is PVP that stands out in the game. It has been called a ganking game, which is a fair comment, as there is a real risk of loss of gear and skills (comparable to levels in other games). Loss of gear and skills creates behaviours aimed at minimising this risk while maximising rewards. In other MMORPGs with little or no chance of loss, PVP activity tends to be restricted to the market.

Winning at PVP in EVE Online

Winning at PVP in EVE Online

Wining at Spreadsheets in Space

PVP in EVE Online is not fair. In fact the challenge in PVP in EVE Online is in setting up these unfair encounters. In most MMORPGs, the actual act of combat consists of a few mouse clicks and some waiting. EVE Online is no different. It is the risk of losing stuff that makes players focus on everything before the actual combat a lot more. It is taking the right mix of ships, avoiding being out-numbered and cornered by a superior foe and acting before the opponent even knows they are in a fight where player skill starts to make a real difference.

Why SEM is like EVE Online PVP

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) in very similar to PVP. It is a zero-sum environment where operators compete for a resource through actions governed by a set of rules and environmental factors generated through user behaviour. There are a few principles that carry over from EVE Online PVP to SEM.

  • Situational awareness is king
    • Know how the advertising network works
    • Understand competitive activity
    • Understand how the market behaves
  • Observe, act and assess
    • Analysis without an accompanying action is useless
    • Assess the effectiveness of activity & reassess decision making model
    • And repeat…
  • Know where you can compete and where you can’t
    • Don’t waste time & resources competing directly with advertisers intent on outspending you
    • Find alternative ways of reaching potential customers.

Information is the key. Understanding how the query space works, having good situational awareness, and knowing where in the sales funnel certain terms are is valuable. It won’t save you from the SEM equivalent of a gate camp (high margin and ‘branding’ campaigns with large budgets), but it is essential for remaining competitive without burning through your budget.

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Sitelinks & Ratings in the SERPs

July 5, 2010 in Advertising, Search, Search Engines by Anthony | No comments

Google is incorporating more information into their Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) all the time. Video, product information, image previews, maps, reviews and social media content are a few of the things that Google has brought to their search engine over the years. Adwords has not been too far behind, with the inclusion of ads on their maps, and the introduction of Ad Sitelinks for certain campaigns. Ad Sitelinks was first introduced in November 2009 and was only available for qualified campaigns. Their appearance in the organic SERP looked more disruptive than a normal Adwords Ad, and promised to improve on Click Through Rate (CTR).

Google has just announced that Ad Sitelinks are now available for any campaign and the introduction of seller rating extensions. Getting Ad Sitelinks to display is still dependent on the ad meeting certain criteria, most probably relating to the spot on the page the ad displays in as determined by bid, competition and click through.

Ad Sitelinks provide alternative points of entry to the site aside from the main landing page, allowing the advertiser to offer alternative offers. Links to areas such as “Store Location”, “Quote Calculator” or “Product Reviews” can appeal to viewers who might not have responded to the main offer.

Search can be a powerful indication of intent, but with more generic terms, the action or information sought by the market can vary between individuals. With branded or descriptive terms the visitor might be seeking further information beyond the noun and a price point. Ad Sitelinks makes it possible to provide this at first glance, and generate traffic where the user may otherwise have continued on to the organic listings.

Using the same visual language of the organic results also makes the ad appear more authoritative and trustworthy. The addition of seller ratings can create the same effect. Creating richer content in a format closer to what the user is trained to look for on a SERP gives the advertiser the opportunity to disrupt their normal search and engage with the ad.

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Anticipating Social Gone Wrong

June 22, 2010 in Online, Social by Anthony | No comments

For open, transparent companies with an amazing product and service experience, social media engagement can create huge benefits, but like most things in business there are risks.

Social media is just people being people online, but with better tools. Nothing has changed in their behaviour; it is their ability to be found and heard, and find others who think the same that is new and significant. Social media and the internet amplify the voices of those who publish content online, whether they love you or hate you.

Sometimes people will say things that businesses would prefer them not to. The internet has made it easier than ever to publish and spread this material. Sites like Facebook and WordPress make it easy to tap into an existing audience, or get indexed by Google and appear in brand searches. When a product or service has a branded social media presence or community, it can give them access to a highly relevant audience for their dissatisfaction, ire and angst, which can disrupt the business’ promotional activity and damage the brand.

It is hard to completely avoid this risk without losing the benefits from fostering conversation and building online communities. Here are a few ways a business can prepare to address these problems if or when they arise:

  • Anticipate the negative responses and plan on how and how not to respond
  • Make internal stakeholders aware of what can go wrong
  • Communicate response plans and processes internally with key stakeholders
  • Ensure that those with the authority to respond in negative situations are easily reached
  • Make staff aware of relevant policies

If no thought is given to what might go wrong, there is a greater risk of the company responding badly, and inflaming the situation further. Planning for problems that may arise before the fact ensures that the business’ response will most likely be timely, articulate and appropriate.

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Twitter & Promoting Trends

June 17, 2010 in Advertising, Online, Social by Anthony | No comments

Promoted Trending Topic

Toy Story 3 Promoted Trending Topic

Twitter has already rolled out promoted Tweets, and the first sponsored trending topics also appeared. Toy Story 3 has appeared as a sponsored listing with the site’s trending topics today, as reported here, here, and probably dozens of other places all over the web.

The ad itself drives traffic to a Facebook page, where people can order tickets or enter contact details for a chance to win. The real point of difference offered by Twitter for this campaign is the user’s ability to retweet the ad, and to see other people discuss the subject by hashtag.

Pinning the message to the top of the stream coupled with Twitter’s tools for sharing content means that the Toy Story 3 promoted Tweet will get repeated again and again, and not just in the narrow window around when it was originally posted. The conversation revealed by the hashtag provides social proof of the subject’s interest and encourages participation through exposing other thoughts surrounding the topic which may resonate with the viewer.

Toy Story 3 Promoted Tweet

Toy Story 3 Promoted Tweet

For potential reach to kick-start conversation and begin to generate interest, Twitter advertising looks like it might be very powerful.

Toy Story 3 Landing Page

Toy Story 3 Landing Page

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Making Comparisons in a Competitive Market

June 10, 2010 in Advertising, Online by Anthony | No comments

In my last post, “Too soon for decisions”, I discussed applying a consistent set of rules to campaigns to assess the performance of new ads and targeting. However, in practice, assessment and tracking an AdWords or Facebook campaign can be an interesting exercise.

The data generated by a campaign is not a true representation of the population. The data is a snapshot limited by the markets targeted and the visibility available for the budget spent. Any single campaign can be exposed to direct competition over the whole market or specific subgroups. For example, just because “Campaign A” does not get traffic from Victoria does not mean that no-one in that state is searching for “Keyword B”.

A competitor could simply be focused on that market and value the traffic more. Other factors to consider are the effectiveness of the competition’s creatives and offers, the appeal of their product, efficiency of their site in turning clicks into sales and how much they return per conversion. All of these factors will influence their budget, and how much they are willing to spend per click or impression. Tools provided by the advertising networks that increase the efficiency of campaigns like Remarketing are also worth considering.

According to Wikipedia, a confidence interval is defined as:

…a particular kind of interval estimate of a population parameter. Instead of estimating the parameter by a single value, an interval likely to include the parameter is given. Thus, confidence intervals are used to indicate the reliability of an estimate. How likely the interval is to contain the parameter is determined by the confidence level or confidence coefficient. Increasing the desired confidence level will widen the confidence interval.

In use here, it is assumed that between similar competitors, the average Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) within the group is likely to be within a 95% confidence interval of the known CPA.

Confidence interval and estimated CPA

Confidence interval and estimated CPA

Confidence interval can give you an estimate of what other bidders may be paying for a conversion, assuming they are operating as efficiently as you are. In the graph included above, confidence interval of the CPA is used to estimate the most likely highest possible CPA a campaign can still compete on. In conjunction with Cost Per Click data, it is fair to assume that the competitors in the query space are willing to spend over the highest likely observed CPA. Reasons for their bidding strategy can vary from shutting out competitors by absorbing a short term loss, to a higher sustainable CPA. In a query space where a number of different verticals are competing for the same traffic, this metric is considerably less useful and your mileage may vary. For comparing CPA campaigns, creating a model for understanding the market, or simply to assess which ads are potentially performing a lot better or worse than your target in the face of direct competition, it is a useful tool.

Confidence interval can be a guide to how much your competitors expect to spend per conversion, assuming a lot of similarity in product and business practices. Arbitrage and industries with heavily commodified products are prime candidates for this, as well as campaigns with a very aggressive high cost bidding strategy, such as those competing directly with another member of your industry.

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A whole lot of tubes

May 19, 2010 in Online, Search, Social by Anthony | 2 comments

Most apparent behaviour on the Internet is a result of people attempting to complete a task using a distributed network of connections and tools. Not all of this takes place on the World Wide Web. There are a lot of different tools that use the Internet to locate, collate and move information, such as Kindle, iTunes, Steam and BitTorrent clients.

Even through the web, the methods used to locate and consume information are diverse. From search to portals to socially generated recommendations, there is a huge range of navigational nodes online that shape the user’s experience. Focusing on what information is consumed and where, rather than on what the user is trying to do, can be very myopic.

Find music with only the Internet

Find music with only the Internet, Click for full size.

For example, what if the user wants to listen to music? With access to a computer and a browser they may go to YouTube, or the site of a band recommended in an email from a friend. With P2P software like a BitTorrent client they may use inbuilt search tools and download it via a peer network. They could also use iTunes to find, choose and purchase a song without touching a browser. Ultimately all these methods use the Internet, but only one is dependent on the World Wide Web.  This does not even start to consider devices other than a traditional computer.

Nodes and Friction

Each mode of content location and acquisition uses a different set of nodes and they can range from invisible to obstructive. Each one is another opportunity for the gatekeeper of the node to create friction and shape experience. Search and social sites have contextual advertising, Internet Explorer treats incorrect URLs as search queries, DNS services can redirect mistyped or incorrect URLs and the iPad does not support Flash.

Nodes such as portal sites, search engines, social networks and applications such as Steam control and direct attention in different ways. Each gives the user different tools to discover content, with different levels of friction placed between the user and what they wish to do.

Some sites use a disruptive model and place ads in front of the user, using available data to tailor their ads. Applications like iTunes and Steam operate as shopfronts and work to minimalise frictions between the user and the buy button. They help the user find, acquire and consume the media with the least effort, and generate sales in the process.

Why attention matters more

The internet is an environment where there is almost limitless content and space to display it in. The scarcity is with attention. The limits on the size of the audience and the amount of time they spend online are far more immediate than potential advertising inventory. Unlike traditional media, the Internet does not have a page limit, nor is it restricted by spectrum or the number of hours in a day. The low cost of storing and moving data, the asynchronous nature of most content and the ability to generate more content automatically or through user activity changes its value. There is no value in just existing; there is no ‘only two papers in town’ or ‘only three TV networks’ online. Online, the value of a node is in how much attention it affects. Each one is an opportunity to distribute attention among the next group of nodes in the chain.

Why the Task Model

How most people use and access the Internet has changed over the last few years. The ubiquity of Internet capable devices is as significant a factor as the prevalence of fast and wireless home connections. While the Internet on a phone in some form is not new, large numbers of people with fast and easy access is. A proliferation of applications designed to give access to content independent of the World Wide Web is significant too.

Social networks, both formalised like forums and Facebook, and ad hoc such as email, will remain a factor, as well as portal sites like Yahoo! and search engines. These tools for content distribution and discovery are not being replaced, they are just being supplemented.

The user’s aims and knowledge determine their actions online. The channels they use do have an impact on the kinds of information they access, how they access it and how they locate new material. As the Internet becomes richer in content and tools, it will also continue to fragment and change. We have gone a long way from the Internet being tied to a desktop computer through just a browser or email client, but the user will always have a want or desire that they wish to meet, and they will use whatever tools are available to do it.

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What is the value of your privacy?

May 13, 2010 in Advertising, Online, Social by Anthony | No comments

For value for money it is hard to top Facebook. It costs nothing and in return you can host photos and videos, communicate with people all over the world, consume vast amounts of content, create groups and participate in various communities. To create and host something similar yourself would cost a lot of time and money.

Free sites and services like Facebook, YouTube, and Google Search still have to pay their developers, provide hosting, repay investors and generate revenue to keep it all going. Traffic, registered users and great PR do not pay the bills by themselves; at some point cash needs to be involved. This is where the interests of those providing the services and those using them diverge.

Free at a price

There will always be a cost to the end user, and if it is not cash it will be something else. Lack of technical support, poor documentation, slow bug fixes, compromised privacy and exposure to advertising are a few ways operating costs are managed and paid for. Some paid services suffer some of these issues as well, but they are not the norm.

When the user pays, there is a clear cost in losing them and therefore higher expectations of service. When the service is free and the costs are paid for by advertisers and investors, creating value for them is important for the business. The advertising model is often the first choice for generating revenue and targeted traffic or impressions, and richer forms of display advertising become more important. When the user pays, creating value for them becomes important to the business.

Facebook appears to be going through this process now. A lot of the recent changes seem to create more value for advertisers than for some segments of their community. With Facebook being such a dominating presence, this is generating a lot of discussion. With all this focus on user control over data and experience, Diaspora could not have begun development at a better time.

Will you pay?

Diaspora as a social media platform will be interesting, and potentially very disruptive to this space. It looks easily accessible for many users, either through Turnkey or individually installed and operated servers. As a distributed network of easily installed and managed ‘Seeds’ across a variety of servers, Diaspora can be compared to WordPress. Based on the offers on Kickstart for funding, it seems that while the software will be free, access to Turnkey servers and technical support will cost money.

Diaspora at the very least will place a dollar value on privacy and control over your social media profiles, and it will ask one other question: Will you pay for access to a social media platform, either through hosting or a Turnkey server?

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