Programmers are people too, and no online technology is perfect. Especially at the rate that widgets, apps, embedded content tools, etc. are being cranked out right now in hopes of being first to be installed, and first to be acquired by the Big Boys.
But it's one thing to have your embedded Taco Bell game crash on you. Another to have your semi-private information spewed across the internet. Which currently consists of personal photos, fave movies lists, and maybe your address/phone number that you forgot to remove from your resume before uploading it to Linked In.
But as users become more comfortable interacting with the internet via social network pages -- as opposed to using external websites -- the privacy impact will grow.
Why visit your bank's website to pay bills, when you can easily install their banking widget on your iPhone, which accidently notifies others via Twitter of your Girls Gone Wild subscription payments. Or store your personal contacts in a format that accidently gets shared on your Ebay merchant page?
Think of all the online shareware that you've downloaded and discovered is crap. Or online tools from established companies that end up being digitally recalled. Or any new Microsoft launch. Now give those same tools indirect access to your personal information and let the paranoia begin.
Will be interesting to see how they try to get into this market, which is just begging for some type of automated "check your private information in public spaces" service.
A lot of people have a point of view about the state of healthcare in our country. Giving them a place online to voice that view is a natural fit. Having that site sponsored by an insurance company is bound to raise a few skeptics.
Our client, BlueCross BlueShield of Florida, bought into an entire integrated campaign on that premise -- The Power of the Human Voice. And the site to back it up:
It allows anyone to leave a voice message with their point of view, which anyone can listen to.
At first, you would exepect the consumer commments to be pro-BCBS or perhaps neutered negative. But BCBS agreed to allow all posts to go up (except those violating standard decency/privacy terms). Even those criticizing their company. The result is a collection of consumer voices that range from enraged to emotional to positive. It is amazing how many end with the person thanking BCBS for the opportunity to express themselves.
Seems like a gimmick, but listen to a couple and you will be surprised. And maybe motivated to leave your own.
So in the last week I found two long-lost friends via social network sites. I had lost contact with both of them 8-10 years ago, primarily the victim of natural social network erosion. People moved, email addresses changed, phone numbers evolved. Gradually lost touch.
Every so often I would stalk them online to no avail. One of my friends, code name "Ex-coworker Creative Director", has a semi-popular name. So search engine hits would turn up a ton of results, which after 5 minutes of browsing revealed zero direct hits. My other friend, code name "Study Abroad in England Floormate", has a really unique first/last name that turns up zero hits. None. For the last 10 years.
Both friends excelled at existing under the grid. You wouldn't find a resume link, portfolio site, personal homepage, press release, or even online phonebook entry. They didn't exist online, which was fine with them. Until they felt compelled to join a social network site.
Ex-coworker CD is job searching and joined Linked-In. He actually found me first through the "people you might know" recommendation engine. He still doesn't show up in Google (at least not the first 5 pages of results, which is my breaking point). But a Linked-In search delivers 36 people with his name. He is now easy to find based on his city and job title (#4 on the search results list). We are getting together within the next week to catch up.
Study Abroad in England Floormate is also still Google Free. But I found her in about 5 seconds on Facebook. She's the only person with that name. Her Facebook page is literally blank except for her profile photo, which is obviously her. My "be my friend" invite was positively returned within 6 hours. We are now catching up over email and Flickr.
These are two people who really made no effort to establish an online presence, and they easily stayed off the grid. They aren't luddites, live fairly normal lives, and are probably among a large population of internet users without an online homestead. But one profile on one social network instantly opens them up to public eyes.
The social networks themselves are fairly low risk. You choose how much personal information to make public. Potential "friends" need to be acknowledged by you before they establish formal communication. But as social networks become ground zero for your online existence, the natural extension between your online and offline life begins. One or two words can instantly match your Linked In profile to someone else's photo album on Webshots. Which can link you to those relevant web pages results buried in the search engines. And all of the sudden your name drifts up through the search results flotsam, floating through the thermocline to the top of the results pages.
As more offline information becomes enabled online (cue Google Doomsday soundtrack), these connections become stronger. And your private life slowly inches into public. Which is OK with me. I still have a list of old college roommates who I'd love to catch up with, or at least lurk-view to see what they are up to.
A variety of new reports on Social Networking came out this week, all confirming the obvious:
Big generalist sites like MySpace and Facebook still dominate (just like the big content portals of AOL, Yahoo, YouTube, etc.). Niche networking sites are growing (just like their predecessors -- niche blogs, niche content sites, niche video sites).
And mobile is going to be a category killer at some, um, point in the near, maybe far, future. We assume. Look over there! A mobile beta program! With a banner on it!
Hitwise reports that MySpace.com received 73.82% of the market share of U.S. visits in April 2008 among a custom category of 57 of the leading social networking websites. Among the top 10 social networking websites, Facebook ranked second by the market share of visits with 4.8%, followed by MyYearbook, which received 1.33%.
All that debate over Facebook Beacons, and they only get 4.8% of the traffic? Damn hype engines.
Which is too bad, since most marketers know that MySpace is a sink hole for online advertising. Too much clutter, terrible CTRs, limited opportunities for branded content. MySpace TV has more opportunities but even News Corp, MySpace's owner, admitted they have some problems right now attracting advertisers to the largest social network site on the planet.
But despite the dominance of the big social networks sites, here's a recent report about the growing area of niche community sites. Which may be a more accurate place to spend your client's marketing dollars:
Large numbers of US Internet users joined online communities last year, and membership in such groups is now a mainstream activity. Nearly half of US Internet users surveyed for the USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future's "2008 Digital Future Project" report said they belonged to a hobby-oriented online community. A full 41% of respondents belonged to an online social community, and one-third belonged to an online professional community.
If you haven't been to Ning yet, then put that on your list of sites to throw out during buzzword presentations. Especially if you can add that the founder also created the web browser. Not a web browser, the web browser.
And Mobile continues to try to become the new access point, like the baby brother who keeps wanting to tag along on your trip to the mall:
eMarketer forecasts that mobile social networking will grow from 82 million users in 2007 to over 800 million worldwide by 2012.
"This population will comprise current online social networkers who are extending their digital lives to mobile as well as a growing number of mobile-only social networkers," said John du Pre Gauntt, eMarketer senior analyst and co-author of the new report, Mobile Social Networks. "Early reports suggest strong user demand for mobile social networks."
Poor Mobile. Still trying to break away from phrases such as "forecasts" and "early reports suggest" and "maybe kind of sort of we think."
Finally, just for fun, what happens when the virtual world blurs into the real world:
I am still trying to figure out how they got the remote control out of Dad's hands. But that is probably a different study.
Survey: Moms Skip Ads on DVRs Despite redoubling their efforts, TV networks have much to do to entice viewers to stick around and watch commercials, according to new research from MindShare that focused on American moms.
There are many more examples where a marketer's "secret" word of mouth effort became a PR disaster. So it isn't something generally recommended.
But still, it will be enough for the lawyers to stifle any word of mouth effort without a full "brought to you by BRAND NAME" disclosure. Which in turn will stifle the creativity, which will stifle the impact of the program.
Coming Legislation Makes It a Criminal Offense for Brands to Falsely Represent Themselves as Consumers
Word-of-mouth marketing in the U.K. will face radical restrictions starting May 26, when it will become a criminal offense for brands to seed positive messages online without making the origin of the message clear. Brand owners will face fines or even prison sentences if they contravene the consumer-protection regulations. The legislation came into force across Europe on Jan. 1, 2008, and is set to begin in the U.K. next month.
I told you Google Face is coming... From the NY Times:
A Google Prototype for a Precision Image Search Google researchers say they have a software technology intended to do for digital images on the Web what the company’s original PageRank software did for searches of Web pages. On Thursday at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, two Google scientists presented a paper describing what the researchers call VisualRank, an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar.
Not exactly rocket science, but at least they are talking about testing the effectiveness of mobile video in this early stage of consumer adoption. Hopefully the industry skips over clickthrough rates as the primary measurement.
Interactive mobile broadcast TV might be the longest buzzword of the year.
Even with content expanding rapidly on mobile devices, many questions remain about whether consumers will be receptive to advertising. A Silicon Valley company, which believes it has a solution to the retention challenge, is offering mobile TV programmers and service providers what it believes is a unique way to gauge that effectiveness.
GoldSpotMedia believes that targeted and interactive ads have the best chance of resonating on mobile TV. In turn, it has developed a product that allows dynamic ad insertion within the content, hoping to better match marketers with interested consumers. Interactive ads--prompting a consumer to receive a coupon or receive crucial info--can also be staged.
About two months ago, rich media ad network VideoEgg announced they would sell banners on a Cost Per Engagement model (my post regarding that announcement).
Kellogg's is now following the same model for an upcoming campaign. From AdAge:
At a time when marketers are increasingly relying on engagement as a key metric of the success of an online ad campaign, Publicis Groupe media agency Starcom has brokered an online display-media deal based on cost per interaction rather than the more traditional metric of cost per exposure. The deal was made on behalf of the Kellogg Co. with online ad rep firm Gorilla Nation.
The campaign introduces two new Eggo products, French Toast Waffles and Mini Muffin Tops, to the children's market in a series of rich-media banner ads. The banner ads, placed on sites including Kidzworld.com, feature kid-friendly interactive games such as mashing up foods (chocolate and hot dogs, for example) and measuring how delicious they are.
Considering average rich media banner engagement rates are 5% - 10%, it could be a great payment move by the media sites/networks depending on the pricing model.
It also delivers a much larger results number than CTRs (still between 0.10 - 0.15% on average), which will make clients think their program is more effective. But this could quickly move engagement into the lowest-common metric that CTRs have occupied for the last 10 years for online advertising programs.
It is also nothing new. Rich media networks such as Pointroll and Eyeblaster have been reporting engagement metrics for years.
Also note that the type of sites Kellogg's is on are high engagement already, and targeting kids who would be more likely to interact with ads. Might be different results if they are running on information-focused sites targeting moms.
It's still important to determine what the engagement is achieving, and how it gets tracked down to actual business results. And as "engagement" banners increase in number, expect the engagement rates to decrease. Just like CTRs decreased when more and more banners were shoved online. Remember the good old days when 0.5% CTR was the average?
Looks like Google is starting to push forward with semacodes (ClickZ article). Applying technology to the oldest medium of all = newspaper print.
Semacodes are UPC-like codes that you photograph with your camera phone, then automatically sends branded content to your phone, or your phone to a specific mobile site. The official info is at Semacode.com.
Still a relatively new technology, although I've seen it mentioned a couple times in the press recently. So expect it to start getting hyped.
It requires users to download an application to their phone in order to do it, so adoption in the US will be really low for now.
You will hear a lot of marketers and tech companies talk about how great it is in the "theoretical" sense. Which is unfortunately what usually happens with any mobile technology. Right up there with GPS targeting of coupons (I'm still waiting for that SMS coupon from my local Starbucks when I walk past it). Or mobile couponing in general.
At least until Google's Android mobile phone operating system launches, in which I bet the application will be built into.
It has started getting some penetration in Europe (BMW example). I expect Asia will be first mass users due to their reliance on mobile phones/mobile web.
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