DigiMinded

Cross-Post: How Google Instant Previews for Ads Can Improve Your Owned and Paid Media

Last week I posted an overview and tips for Google's new Instant Preview for Ads feature over at Great Finds, the official iCrossing blog.

Google Instant Previews has made its way to ads – a logical next step for Google. This new feature will help marketers improve the effectiveness of your owned and paid media by qualifying people who click on ads to visit your site, evaluating your landing page, and even performing competitive analysis.  This blog post tells you how and why.

As in the natural search version, Instant Previews provided a magnifying glass icon that appears next to each ad and page listing. Once a person clicks on the icon, he or she is able to quickly preview the landing page for every ad and evaluate the content.

Head over to Great Finds to continue reading.

'Tis the Season for...Break-Ups?

Ahh, it’s nearly that time of year again. The smells of pine-scented candles and holiday feasts, the sights of lit-up Christmas trees and elaborate Santa decorations, the sounds of mall store cash registers ka-chinging and – sobbing from those were just broken up with because their significant other didn’t want to buy them a Christmas gift? Hmm.

A fascinating little graph from David McCandless’TED Talk has been floating around the internet recently:

This graph indicates the timing of break-ups throughout the year and was calculated by scraping 10,000 Facebook status updates for words like “break up” and “broken up.” A few time periods are immediately obvious:

• Spring Break: The classic breaking up with your significant other prior to a potentially rowdy spring break trip.
• Mondays: There are a number of spikes on Mondays compared to other days – however, this could also mean that break-ups occur over weekends but people are not likely to update their Facebook status until they get online on Monday.
• Christmas: Naturally, the cost of a Christmas gift serves as a good motivator to end a relationship that wasn’t going all that well – with a possible contribution from the family-oriented nature of the holidays and the pressure that induces. It is worth noting that Christmas Day itself has the lowest number of breakups because, thankfully, most people just aren’t that cruel.

All interesting facts, but this data is far from perfect. One of the biggest flaws is that this sample is composed only of users who are willing to broadcast the end of their relationship via Facebook status – which is certainly not everyone. To help round out the picture, I decided to take a look at the internet population’s ultimate confidante, the place we all can go to unload our fears and seek advice: Google.

First off, what do break-up-conscious users search for? The top related queries fall into one of three categories: (1) making the break-up itself as least painful as possible (“how to break up with your boyfriend”), (2) recovering from a broken heart (“how to get over a break up”) and –the most volume of all – (3) getting back with an ex (“how to get your ex boyfriend back”). Far more of the top queries included “girlfriend” than “boyfriend – indicating that women are generally more likely to turn to Google for break-up advice than men.

Is the search pattern different from Facebook? Let’s take a look at 2009:

 

• Like the Facebook data, both the how to break up (blue) and how to get over a break up keywords (red) see a peak 2 weeks prior to Christmas. The volume goes down during Christmas and then experiences another peak around New Year’s.
• None of the queries see the same spring break spike as in Facebook – which could be partly due to demographics. Conceivably users who announce their break-up on Facebook could be more likely to be in high-school or college (with a spring break) than the general search population. The “how to break up with your boyfriend” query does see significant volume throughout the summer and fall, but this same trend is not reflected in the “how to get over a break up” line.
• The trends for “how to get your ex boyfriend back” (orange) differ from the other two queries. In fact, this term sees the greatest search volume during the weeks of Thanksgiving and Christmas, when the holidays are likely to have you feeling a bit lonely.

While the Google data is not quite as dramatic as Facebook’s, graphs like these indicate the many roles played by the internet in the world of dating – not limited to confidante, relationship wrecker and provider of first date awkwardness.

I’m Having (Lots of) Words with Friends

And judging by the app’s 300K iTunes ratings, I’m not the only one.

Words with Friends is essentially a social version of Scrabble for the iPhone – by no means an original concept. Pre-lawsuit Scrabulous (now Lexulous) did this via Facebook in 2007, and the official Scrabble app has a Facebook Connect play option (for a pricetag of $4.99, though it’s currently on sale). Why, then, is Words with Friends so darn addicting?

• It’s free. Yep, can’t discount this one. While Words with Friends does have a pay version, the ad-supported free version is far more popular. Free means easily accessible, and Words with Friends (true to its name) is an app that’s a waste of memory unless you have friends to play it with.
• It’s simple. There’s no fuss with this app. There aren’t a million options, no bells and whistles. It’s a classic game, and you play when it’s your turn. Then you go back to your life until you receive a notification that the play is back to you. 
• It’s a connection. We live in a world of endless connections – which is stating the obvious. Facebook and Twitter aside, there’s something oddly comforting about receiving a push notification that it’s my turn to play in the middle of the night. In a way that’s more subtle than a text or wall posting, it shows that my friends are out there. In this day and age it seems like one can never go wrong with creating an additional form of connection.

Enough talk, though. It’s my turn and I feel a 60-point play coming on.

Since When Do Trademark Disputes = Privacy Violation?

I’m currently in the midst of a multi-part series on the online dating industry, but I couldn’t resist pointing out this one.

Apparently, we’ve taken search-related trademark lawsuits to a whole new level. According to one Wisconsin law firm, a competing firm’s act of bidding on keywords related to their names constitutes a violation of privacy. That’s a new one.

The plaintiff’s argument is centered on a piece of Wisconsin law that “protects individuals from the inappropriate use by others of their names.” According to the law, this includes use for advertising or trade purposes. The firm, Habush Habush & Rottier, insists that the Internet provides no exception to this law. By advertising on the keywords “habush” and “rottier,” the defendant is allegedly violating their privacy.

Without delving into legalese, the defendant fights this absurd claim with some fairly good arguments:

• The law protects a “living person,” not a corporation. This is a big one.
• The appearance of a link to the defendant’s site next to an organic link to the plaintiff’s site is no different legally than the type of advertising placement one would see on a page of the Yellow Pages.
• There is no suggestion in the sponsored link to the defendant’s website or anywhere on the website that the Habush, Habush & Rottier is promoting or endorsing their services.
• The link itself is not stifling legitimate competition or limiting consumer choice; it is simply giving the user an opportunity and choice as to review the defendant’s site in addition to the plaintiff’s.
• The search results for “Habush” and “Rottier” contain a large amount of content unrelated to the law firm, not the least of which is an urban dictionary definition for “to habush” (umm, don’t look that one up at work).

Amusingly, the defendant also pulled a Perry Mason and pointed out a YellowPages.com page where the plaintiff’s ad appeared next to the defendant’s information. Whoops. Now there’s a courtroom circus.

I find this fairly ridiculous in the midst of a number of legitimate personal privacy debates.  Trademark disputes are one thing, but privacy has nothing to do with it. Unfortunately, I’m fairly certain we’ll continue to see more of these creative spins on the same lawsuit type in the future.

Why, How and What’s Next: Thoughts on the Database of Intentions

On Friday John Batelle posted one of those articles that makes me excited to work in the online marketing industry. John came up with the concept of the Database of Intentions many years ago:

The Database of Intentions is simply this: The aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result.

This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind - a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, supoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends. Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward. This artifact can tell us extraordinary things about who we are and what we want as a culture. And it has the potential to be abused in equally extraordinary fashion.

His recent update of this model (see image below) has expanded the fields from only search queries to incorporate concepts from social media (social networks, status updates and location-based platforms such as Foursquare) and e-commerce. The argument is that all of these things must be looked at in a holistic manner; a purchase may originate from search, for example. It makes perfect sense that this model should be updated as the Internet continues to undergo evolution; undoubtedly there will be many new additions in another 5 years.

When thinking about the current and future state of this concept, two things in particular came to mind.

What About What I Know?

Many additions to this model have been made by Batelle’s commenters, such as What I Play (music sites). However, I believe that the key missing signal is “What I Know.”

Information is omnipresent and inherently social. It can be found in many places – not just in search queries and status updates, but also in other sources such as an endless array of content websites. People have many motivations for seeking information such as news; the Pew Internet & American Life’s recent study reported that 72% of American news consumers follow the news because they enjoy talking to others about what is happening in the world (thus leading to status updates), while 69% feel that keeping up with the news is a social or civic obligation.

News also comes from many sources, with nearly two-thirds of respondents reporting that they get news from a combination of both online and offline sources in a given day. The majority of online news consumers receive their news from 2-5 websites (but don’t have a favorite). Over half of respondents share links to news via email or posts on social networking sites, and three quarters have received news from those social sources.

The bottom line is that people care about what they know, and they receive that knowledge from a number of sources. This seems separate enough to be an additional signal within the Database of Intentions, and should be looked at alongside the others in a holistic manner.

What’s Next?

When I first glanced at the Database of Intentions Chart I was struck by its similarity to the classic “Five Ws” journalism teaching. “Who,” “What” and “Where” appear to be covered thoroughly. “When” is inherent in each of the signals; there are timestamps attached to purchases, status updates, check-ins, and searches.  The missing pieces appear to be “Why” and “How.” Why are consumers doing what they’re doing? How are they making decisions?

This is where online marketing is heading. Traditional marketing is focused very deeply on the why and the how; hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on focus groups, surveys and ethnographic research designed to get into the heads of the consumers and find out what motivates them and how they make decisions and use products.

Online marketing, on the other hand, is still focused very much on the “What” and the “Where.” There is so much data available that we haven’t even figured out what to do with most of it; we’ve barely only scraped the service. The missing piece, I believe, is connecting all of the dots. The enormous amount of data we have access to offers many clues about consumers; we know what sites they visit, what they search for, and what they ultimately buy. This changes the game for consumer behavior, and marketers are only beginning to figure out what the new rules are. The million dollar question is: what does it mean when you put it all together?

I will be excited to see John Batelle’s 2015 version of the Database of Intentions. Only one thing is certain: it won’t look the same as today’s.

Loopt Takes a Crack at Foursquare and Gowalla with Digital Scavenger Hunt

While thousands of Americans were quietly nursing their two-day New Year’s hangover, I was racing through the streets of downtown San Francisco with one eye on my iPhone and the other frantically searching for people in colorful holiday-themed costumes.

Which, if you replace the words “searching for” with “avoiding” doesn’t sound all that far from my morning commute.

But, this was not rush hour. I was participating in the Loopt Holiday Scavenger Crawl – supposedly part scavenger hunt and part pub crawl, though during the activity itself there was certainly more hunting than drinking. The premise was similar to the website SCVNGR.com (also covered by TechCrunch a few months back) in that it was – you guessed it – a scavenger hunt with mobile phones.

Participants were given game instructions and the phone number of a “Loopt Agent” to serve as the starting point for their journey. After adding the Agent as a Loopt friend, they used clues from their journal to determine where in downtown the Agent was currently located. After finding the Agent (the holiday costumes helped) they would be required to fulfill some kind of task (some examples were making a stranger laugh, reciting something Irish and calling your mother), which would earn Loopt buttons, drink tickets for the after-party and/or nothing, depending on whether the Agent had any supplies left. (By the second hour, inventory was quite low.) Answering a riddle based on the location would then get you the remaining digits of the next Agent’s phone number, and the cycle would repeat itself until the time was up.

The game itself would have benefited from working out a few kinks and simplifying the rules, but it was engaging and fun. Prior to the event I had downloaded Loopt once when I first purchased my iPhone and never touched it again, but by the end of the scavenger hunt I felt that I had a strong understanding of its features and interface. I’m not sure whether I’ll use it or not – despite my love of technology I’m not much for apps that broadcast my actual location – but there are certainly participants who may increase their usage after the event (a couple of my friends already have). A few events alone aren’t going to cause Loopt to overtake Foursquare, but it was refreshing to see some creative marketing. I’ll be interested to see what they do with the website LooptGames.com in the future.

Above everything, though, there was one previous lesson that came back to me with a smack in the face that day: iPhone batteries die damn fast when you’re using them non-stop. Ouch.

Dorthy.com: The Advent of Goal-Based Search?

The time of New Year’s resolutions is upon us. Come January 1, millions of Americans will vow to shrink their waistlines, and my gym will become a haven for the masses of fair-weather gym-goers. Spin classes will start filling up several minutes before start, crowded locker rooms will ensure the intrusion of personal space bubbles, and I will have to start fighting with passion and fury for my elliptical.

Not that I’m bitter or anything.

My personal feelings towards New Year’s resolutions aside, a personal goals startup called Dorthy.com just relaunched its site with an interesting concept that could prove useful to 2010 goal-setters.  The site allows you to create “dreampages” for each of your goals, whether it’s “to lose weight”  (Dorthy’s recent New Year’s resolution study reported that 63% of respondents were vowing to shred pounds in 2010) or “Sail around the world.” The dreampage serves as a central location for the planning, sharing and tracking of the goal.

Dorthy (which I forever want to keep spelling as Dorothy – perhaps I watched the Wizard of Oz one time many times as a child) certainly isn’t the first goal-setting website in existence.  However, its primary differentiator is that in addition to providing a place where users can articulate their goals and discuss them with like-minded users, it also provides frequently updated content from search engines around that topic – articles, blog entries, videos, etc. Dorthy claims that 50% of searches on the web are repeated by the same people day-after-day, and they can eliminate the need to keep re-Googling by providing a central location where users can return to find new resources regarding their goal.

Let’s briefly put aside the fact that it’s significantly easier to type a search in my browser toolbar than to go to Dorthy’s site, log in, and navigate to the dreampage in question. Let’s also dismiss that the website is rather clunky in its current alpha version, and that the content on my dreampage for “find a pair of skinny jeans” (screenshot below) wasn’t altogether relevant to my goal (note the video about a guy who puts on a cursed pair of ugly jeans that turn him into a mega-sketchy guy).

What I found most interesting is that Dorthy relies on three fundamental assumptions about search and human behavior:

        1) Goals are fundamentally social. This one comes as no particular surprise – it doesn’t take a psychology degree to understand that talking about one’s goals makes one more likely to achieve them by adding a layer of accountability. Additionally, there’s a classic “gym buddy” concept – when others share in your goal, supporting and motivating each other, the goal becomes easier to accomplish. Dorthy simply takes this community aspect of goals and gives it a home on the web (which, granted, 43 Things and others have been doing for years).

        2) Goals are linked to search. It makes sense the search engines service as a primary starting ground for researching and achieving goals. If I decided I were to run a marathon, I would start by researching training schedules and other aspects on Google. If my goal was to visit Peru, I would also begin my search for travel information, flights and activities on search engines. But the question is – how far in the goal process does this relationship last? Once I’ve already determined my training timeline and found the perfect running gear and my goal race, I’m less likely to be constantly searching for new marathon information

        3) Search behavior can be changed. Ahha, the concept that the good people of Microsoft bet their piggy bank on (a fraction of it, at least). Dorthy relies on the concept that it’s possible to retrain people to stop searching for things on Google and instead log into their website for updated content. Never say never, of course, but this one seems the most far-fetched. The problem is that Google is just too darn easy, and search behavior is too deeply ingrained. Breaking habits is always the marketer’s greatest challenge – not an impossible one, but nothing to sneeze at.

Regardless of whether Dorthy.com succeeds are not, it serves as another example of the growing connectivity of the internet. Search and social are being more greatly intertwined – there are countless examples of this, from sharing resources on Facebook to real-time Twitter results on Google’s search results page. Whatever developments come next, 2010 is almost certain to be a fascinating year.

It’s a great time to be in the digital world, folks.

The Fattest Guidebook You've Ever Seen

Ladies and gentleman, this post is special. Not because it's long overdue (which yes, okay, it is), but because I am writing it from my hotel in the Old Quarter of Hanoi, Vietnam.

There are a million things I could say about this crazy, hot and wonderful place (not the least of which is the fact that the food hasn't made me sick yet - yay!). However, in this post I'd prefer to focus on how I got here.

I state in my "About Me" section that I'm an information addict. I love taking masses of information and researching, categorizing and compiling all of it into something that makes sense and is meaningful. A trip like this is my favorite kind of informational challenge. From flights to hotels to sights to culture shock, there are a lot of variables. And with my love of planning (plus this being my first time in Asia), this meant research, research and more research.

It also gave me the opportunity to test run two tools I've been intrigued by. TripIt enabled me to easily compile my 8 flights and 4 hotels into an easily readable format. Allowing users to simply forward their itineraries is honestly brilliant - it makes itinerary creation a breeze. Nothing beats convenience, especially for the busy traveler. The second big win with TripIt is the community aspect. I could easily share my itinerary with the friends I was traveling with as well as other people with a vested interest in my whereabouts (i.e. Mom and Dad).

Gliider is a much newer tool, and currently is in invite-only beta status. It's a Firefox add-in that helps you compile and organize the travel information you find while surfing the web - which definitely appealed to my needs. The add-in requires you to create trips for each destination, each of which will contain folders for categories such as Flights, Hotels and Shopping. As you find useful information on a destination's topic, you can simply drag and drop the text into the appropriate folder. You can then revisit each folder at a later time. I found this particularly useful while researching and comparing hotels.

While both tools played a helpful role in my trip planning, both left me with a minor feeling of "now what?" They aren't perfect, and there many other features that could  be added to these and other tools. However, they continue to cement the essential role that the Internet plays in travel. Beyond booking flights and hotels, it allows members of the travel community to share their experiences, and for other members to research and make decisions based on this pool of experience. The Internet (and TripAdvisor) is the reason we found the Hanoi Astoria Hotel, with it's charming staff and central location. It's the world's largest guidebook, on steroids.

Now, I'm off the computer and back to the humidity - after researching a couple of sights, of course. Xin chào!

The Post-Napsterization Era: What Will Music Look Like in Another 10 Years?

 Last week the Pew Internet & American Life Project released a fascinating overview of the history and current state of the online music industry, 10 years after the birth of Napster. The full report is well worth a read, but here are some of the highlights:

• Consumers have demonstrated that they’ll generally get what they want when it comes to the digital music world, and they want their music to be free (or almost free), portable, mobile, varied (access to any song ever recorded), and remixable

• While digital sales have grown, they still make up only about a fifth of total album sales. However, 15% of adults admit to using P2P applications to download files – and the number of computers with P2P software installed keeps increasing.

• The recording industry failed miserably in their approach to digitalization. They should have turned a threat into an opportunity by buying Napster, but instead they tried to battle with lawsuits that didn’t work. Clearly people are still illegally downloading music.

• The demographics of music buyers were shifting before Napster’s launch. There was a noted decrease in music-buying by the 20-24 year old set noted in early 1999.  Research showed that music was still important to this demo, but at the time there was a disconnect between the importance of music in their lives and their need to own it.

• Most artists did not see P2P applications as a true threat to the industry. In fact, many of them choose to capitalize on it and were quite successful, such as Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead.

• DRM is dying, as indicated by the fact that Apple stopped using it with iTunes downloads at the end of 2008.

The point that I found most interesting, however, was the last paragraph:

“Looking ahead, as users’ engagement with cloud computing activities becomes more pervasive and seamless, there may come a time when the difference between downloading and streaming music files becomes moot….As more and more internet users acquire smart phones and high-speed wireless connectivity improves, music consumers get ever closer to the “celestial jukebox” dream of any song at any time that started during the days of Napster…Ultimately, whether you’re storing a library of music files on your home computer or streaming songs through your iPhone, it all becomes the same: instant access to the music you want.”

The concept of ownership is changing in our digital world. Historically, the definition of possession was rooted in tangibility. I knew that I owned a book because the paper copy resided in my bookcase, and I knew that a CD belonged to me because I could hold it in my hand. However, the content itself was not inherently tangible – only the medium in which it was packaged. If I don’t have a physical copy of a song, what defines my ownership of it? There are a few aspects, but the primary one is that I can listen to it whenever I want, in whatever form I want. I can play a song on my computer, on my iPhone, or on a burned CD in my stereo. I control when and how the content is delivered to me. That is the fundamental difference between downloaded and streaming music today.

However, as the report states, it is a logical conclusion that as technology continues to improve that divide may no longer need to exist. There will come a time when technology will be a virtual jukebox: I can listen to any song I want, as many times as I want, with only a click of a button. I won’t be limited to a library of songs that I’ve individually downloaded, or a streaming service with limited playbacks. Music discovery applications (such as Pandora today) will allow me to be as hands-on or hands-off as I wish in my listening choices. The concept of music ownership will cease to exist because I will have access to every song ever recorded, in whatever form I wanted.

Music has been heading in that direction for some time, and many subscription model services like Rhapsody and the current incarnation of Napster already look like an early form of this vision. However, there is still quite a distance to go, particularly impeded by legal issues with the record companies. Therefore a clear distinction between streamed and downloaded music still exists today.

The music industry may change in a completely different way by 2019. It will certainly require a business model that consumers, music services and record companies all agree upon. But regardless of what form it takes, music will contain to be an integral part of our culture, and the users control the game. The technology will adapt itself however we see fit.

Enough about Twitter: Let’s Talk ChaCha (Not the Dance)

Once upon a time, I briefly moonlighted as a ChaCha Guide. Not for the money, mind you – ChaCha pays a mere $0.10 to $0.20 per question answered. At the time I was an avid ChaCha user, and simply wanted to gain insight into the types of questions others were asking.

For those of you who don’t know, ChaCha is a free mobile answers service that allows people to ask questions in conversational English and receive answers via text message within 5 minutes. Users ask a question either by phone (1-800-2CHACHA) or text message (242242), which is then routed to a Guide with “expertise” on that subject. The Guide uses search engines and other resources to find the answer to the question, and then the answer is returned to the user in the form of a text. Prior to buying my iPhone I found it quite useful for getting answers to a host of questions.

As a ChaCha Guide, I saw a wide variety of questions come in. (The most recent questions are now published on their homepage, so you can check them out for yourself.) The majority seemed to be general factoids, often linked to current events – e.g. “Who won the Laker’s game last night?” Many were also utilitarian in nature, such as “Which bus do I take to get to North Beach from downtown?” or “What do you use to clean flat screen televisions?” Another type of question seemed to be geared towards settling bets with friends – if you’re debating when the first episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air aired, you can determine the winner without having to go home and Google it.

However, the queries I found most interesting were the ones that were conversational in nature. It seemed like many of the queries weren’t just about getting the answer to a question – they were also aimed at generating a human connection, something that Google, Bing or any other traditional search engine cannot provide. It may sound odd, but for many users there’s something almost comforting about the knowledge that they can send a text at any time and a human being somewhere will respond within minutes.

What could be next for ChaCha?

• ChaCha has a lot of data on its users. ChaCha collects the string of questions from its users, and pieces the information together to draw conclusions about each mobile number’s owner. ChaCha even has a “genderizer” function that can determine the gender based on the kinds of questions that are asked. Combining algorithmic functions like this and user-inputted values (they can submit their zip code, for example, to receive answers targeted to their location) ChaCha can make solid evaluations of a person’s age, gender, location, interests, and other attributes.
• If done right, ChaCha’s advertising program could be a goldmine. Following from the first point, ChaCha’s user data gives them the potential for serving extremely targeted ads. The key to successful text advertising is that they need to be relevant, conversational and non-obtrusive – and preferably promotional. The thing I like about ChaCha’s advertising platform is that the initial ad only takes up a small amount of characters, and if the user wants to see more info on the ad they can text a code back – it’s entirely in their control. ChaCha can also target by keywords, which seems like the best fit for much of its advertising. If a user asked which restaurant they should go to for dinner, ChaCha could serve them an ad for a local sushi spot with a coupon code. It is important to note that approximately 80% of ChaCha’s users are under the age of 25, so this certainly won’t be a fit for every advertiser, but it could work well for some.
• ChaCha has potential for real-time search. Everyone and their mother has been talking about Twitter and its application to real-time search. With the right tools ChaCha could potentially have a similar function. The main difference is that Twitter is based on broadcast, while ChaCha is based on queries. However, ChaCha still has a measure of what matters to people at a given moment. It knows that 793 people have asked how old Lebron James is and 226 people asked when the next Lakers game is. Sound a little similar to Twitter trends? Furthermore, ChaCha knows the basic attributes of a lot of these people, so instead of just saying what matters to people it could go as far as what matters to what type of people. Clearly the demographic is limited (also much like Twitter), but there could be some serious potential there.

Only time will tell the future success or failure of ChaCha. Its primary criticism is that many of the answers are not accurate, due to the human nature of the responses. And smartphones and their apps, particularly ones like Google Voice Search for the iPhone, could make ChaCha obsolete eventually. But it certainly has a solid user base, and a premise with potential for expansion. I’ll definitely be keeping tabs on this company.