Advertising: Behavioral
Social Media: LinkedIn Proves the Power of Three-Way Action
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 19, 2008 | Share This
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One of the great things about social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace is the ability to see what your old buddies are up to without actually having to talk to them. Hey, that guy who wore a skirt and mascara in college is a corporate lawyer now!
On the other hand, sometimes you want to do more than just accumulate “friends”, you actually want to network and do some online schmoozing. LinkedIn, which has been described back-handedly as “social media for grownups” and has been all over the news this week, is a site that focuses on career connections with a clean low-widget design and a plethora of helpful tools. This has helped them to become the number 4 site for social networking on the net according to Nielsen. Even more phenomenal is their 146% year-over-year growth, making them the fastest growing social network in the U.S…. check da chart:
Universal Search: Clueless! – ISP’s act like AP, Greed for Money Upfront will lead to a Kick in the Rear
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 17, 2008 | Share This
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The recent kerfuffle involving bloggers and the AP fired some interesting connections in my neural net. The attempt to levy a tax on bloggers for the right (nay the privilege!) of linking to the AP’s content smells a lot like the recent attempt of a few internet service providers to charge extra to high-bandwidth users.
The common thread between these two hair-brained schemes is an attempt to force old-school ideas about economics onto the new world of the internet. The irony is that the Internet at its best is probably the closest human beings have come to the perfect marketplace envisioned by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.
In Smith’s ideal marketplace, all buyers and sellers have access to the same information and equal access to the marketplace, allowing prices to find their natural/optimal level. In a broad way that has been mostly true online whether we are talking about the cost of advertising a product or the product itself. In fact, the auction-based search model is about as close as you’re gonna get.
Best Practices: Online Marketing Voyeurs and the Consumer Exhibitionists Who Want to Be Watched
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 9, 2008 | Share This
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Cast your minds back to the primordial past – you know, ten years ago when the ‘net was poised to deliver the most personalized user experience imaginable with targeted, relevant advertising at every new page. What happened?
I’ll admit the teeth thing was close to home but my lips are actually quite large. Lip plumping is a very low priority for me. As for moving and storage, I’m not going anywhere or planning on storing anything.
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SEM: Spying Scientists Stumble on Site Stickiness Standards
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 5, 2008 | Share This
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Traditional Media Companies Lag in Web Tracking
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | March 10, 2008 | Share This
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A story published in the New York Times today uses comScore data to describe how companies track Internet users for the purposes of online behavioral ad targeting. ComScore noted the online data-collection potential of 15 media companies like Yahoo and Conde Nast - namely, looking at searches, display ads, videos, and page views along with the number of ads each company can display on its network.
According to the Times, Yahoo’s huge network of sites means the company collects 110 billion “data events” (a zip code or a search query, for example) each month, or 811 pieces of information for each user. In contrast, older media companies with a web presence have far less data. Conde Nast’s websites, for instance, only collect 34 data events per user each month, and the New York Times website’s number is 45.
Below is a breakdown of some of the companies comScore looked at. Note that MySpace beats eBay and is neck-and-neck with AOL. The Times/comScore data is here, along with a little more background.
Note, also, that the comScore data leaves out a couple of very important points of potential data collection. From the NYT’s Bits blog:
There are other ways these companies obtain data that comScore was unable to capture. The two largest ways left out here are ad-serving data (from the likes of Microsoft’s Atlas and Google’s desired partner DoubleClick) and user-volunteered data. By the latter, I mean the information that users enter when they register for sites or e-mail accounts as well as all the juicy details they post on social networking pages.
It’s certain this information could significantly change the chart above, particularly when it comes to social networks. But perhaps bigger than the struggle to wrangle all this data is making people feel okay about their private information being used this way. In another piece, the Bits blog shows that AOL finds an emissary for ad targeting in… a cute penguin cartoon character.
Facebook Status: Mark Zuckerberg is Sorry About Beacon
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | December 6, 2007 | Share This
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Yesterday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg publicly apologized about the social network’s poorly implemented, privacy-invading Beacon ad program, which broadcast users’ off-Facebook activity in news feeds and caused an ensuing ruckus among geeks and privacy advocates. From Zuckerberg’s blog post statement:
Facebook has succeeded so far in part because it gives people control over what and how they share information. This is what makes Facebook a good utility, and in order to be a good feature, Beacon also needs to do the same. People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don’t want to use it.
This has been the philosophy behind our recent changes. Last week we changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and today we’re releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely. You can find it here. If you select that you don’t want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won’t store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.
Facebook has, as of yesterday, allowed users to turn off Beacon entirely, but what’s fascinating about this apology is that the word “advertising” does not appear once in the entire blog post. By framing Beacon just as an information-sharing feature, Zuckerberg is sidestepping one of the most offensive parts of Beacon - that its sole purpose is actually utilizing Facebook’s massive user base to market to each other via what are implied pseudo-recommendations.
As marketing genius Seth Godin noted on his blog several months ago, “The result of Google and the prevalence of search means that people are far more forgiving of things that need to be sought out, and less patient than ever with selfish marketers that insist on showing up in your face.” Though Facebook isn’t search, I think the same principles of “permission marketing” apply when personal information is involved.
But after all the (justified) kicking and screaming over Beacon, it’s comical and a great example of both the site’s reach/influence and maybe also the blog world’s childishness that a very simple move by Facebook this morning - allowing Facebook messages to be read in users’ regular email inbox, no longer requiring a click-through to the site - has the blogosphere in a great mood again.
Facebook Tones Down Beacon; Gets $60M in Chinese Funding
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | November 30, 2007 | Share This
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Under pressure from users and privacy groups, Facebook’s Beacon ad system, which launched three weeks ago to include off-Facebook purchases in users’ news feeds, just underwent significant changes to make it easier for users to keep their third-party site activities private. The social network was forced this week to save face after MoveOn.org campaigned against Beacon, so they made several rounds of changes until finally settling on an opt-in system instead of an opt-out system, making this statement yesterday (via AllFacebook):
Stories about actions users take on external websites will continue to be presented to users at the top of their News Feed the next time they return to Facebook. These stories will now always be expanded on their home page so they can see and read them clearly.
Users must click on “OK” in a new initial notification on their Facebook home page before the first Beacon story is published to their friends from each participating site. We recognize that users need to clearly understand Beacon before they first have a story published, and we will continue to refine this approach to give users choice.
If a user does nothing with the initial notification on Facebook, it will hide after some duration without a story being published. When a user takes a future action on a Beacon site, it will reappear and display all the potential stories along with the opportunity to click “OK” to publish or click “remove” to not publish.
Users will have clear options in ongoing notifications to either delete or publish. No stories will be published if users navigate away from their home page. If they delay in making this decision, the notification will hide and they can make a decision at a later time.
Clicking the “Help” link next to the story will take users to a full tutorial that explains exactly how Beacon works, with screenshots showing each step in the process.
Instead of launching an opt-out system from the get-go, Facebook should have learned from the uproar caused just over a year ago, when they launched news feeds without any warning and without a way to let users control how their information was being broadcast to their friends. Of course, news feeds are now the cornerstone of Facebook, one being duplicated soon by rival MySpace, but the issue with Beacon was its use of information from third-party sites being used to sell to your friends, and the sheisty set-up that made it hard to avoid sharing stuff. In fact, considering their gaffe, they should have gone a little further with these Beacon changes; Mashable rightly notes that as more outside sites sign on for Beacon, all those notifications are bound to get really annoying. Om Malik also makes a good point about data collection, wondering if anything has really changed except for public perception:
If you decide to opt out completely, you are in the clear, but if you forget to do so, and take no action, then Facebook system will keep collecting data. In other words, Beacon continues to do its job - collect information from partner sites and also fine tune the advertising system. From that perspective, nothing really has changed. Perhaps the public perception that Facebook listens to its community.
Perhaps no coincidence, with the dust of the Beacon storm barely settled, All Things Digital reported late last night that Chinese billionaire Li Ka-shing just invested $60 million in Facebook, with the right to invest $60 million more.
Facebook Announces New Ad Strategy
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | November 6, 2007 | Share This
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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg today announced the social network’s ad strategy. Facebook Ads lets marketers build profile pages similar to those of individual users, which means companies can befriend users and get entry into their news feeds. It will also integrate ads with user actions, creating hybrid “social ads” that will act as instant friend recommendations for brands - and, Facebook is betting, will lead to conversions for marketers. Facebook Ads will also include an element called “Insights,” which basically sounds like an analytics dashboard.
Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester has written an extensive analysis of the implications of this kind of personalized targeting, which will also be happening on MySpace. He argues it’s giving rise to the “fan-sumer,” which is not a particularly new concept except but has just been effectively harnessed by social networks:
Going beyond just profile matching of advertisements, Facebook allows consumers to self-identify with brands and becoming fans. In turn, brands can use these “Fan-Sumers” as endorsers to their own trusted networks, resulting in trusted word-of-mouth. Brands can also self-manage their own campaigns, and there’s some unique opportunities for eCommerce widgets or applications to be part of this formula.
A second, and arguably more interesting, part of the announcement today was that of Beacon, which partners with sites for “social distribution,” allowing users of both Facebook and partner sites to add non-Facebook activity to their news feeds. For instance, users of eBay, which is one of the partners, can include their auction listings. This particular partnership sounds like it may undermine Facebook’s classified listings section, Marketplace, but other companies that have signed on include Fandango and Travelocity, allowing users to share movie and travel plans, respectively.
Because so much user engagement on Facebook begins in news feeds and thus targeted advertising coming from your friends seems far more effective, Beacon is a logical extension of third-party profile widgets. Even better, like adding a widget to Facebook, Beacon will be free (according to TechCrunch liveblogging), not counting development dollars on the marketer’s end. No word yet on what other elements of Facebook Ads cost.
Facebook “SocialAds”: Google AdSense Killer?
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | October 30, 2007 | Share This
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Continuing rumors about the much-anticipated November 6 Facebook/Microsoft ad platform announcement today posit that Facebook will implement “SocialAds”: a system that cookies users and targets them based on their stated profile information in off-Facebook advertising. Nick O’Neill of AllFacebook writes that this is a boon for Microsoft and a direct threat to Google AdSense:
Thanks to their advertising partnership, Microsoft will now be able to provide targeted ads not only based on demographic data (location, age, gender, etc), but they will also know that the person visiting your site is interested in skiing and guitar. So how much money will Facebook make from this? A ton. Higher CPMs and CPCs will create a new competitive landscape between Google and Facebook. Facebook to Google: we are gunning for you.
Ignoring for a moment that information on social networks is not always true, it’s clear that Facebook data is far richer than what online marketers have now. Moving the ad model off Facebook would address the social network’s notorious problem of low click-through rates.
What will users think? In another AllFacebook post, Dan Lester astutely notes that users likely will express initial dismay, then forget all about the implications of their Facebook data following them around the web.
Several blogs note that the $240 million stake in Facebook that Microsoft just purchased would make a great deal of sense if these rumors are true. Still, calling SocialAds a Google Adsense killer is a bit premature, especially considering that Google has its own social network-related announcement coming sometime in the next couple of weeks.
Yahoo! Buys Ad Network BlueLithium for $300M
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | September 6, 2007 | Share This
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Yahoo announced this week its acquisition of BlueLithium, the fifth largest ad network in the United States and second largest in the UK. In addition to beefing up Yahoo’s ad network, BlueLithium’s behavioral targeting and data analytics capabilities are expected to boost Yahoo’s performance in those areas. Todd Teresi, SVP of Yahoo’s Publisher Network, wrote:
With more than 100 employees, including computer scientists and researchers, BlueLithium is known for providing powerful data analytics to help customers get the most out of their campaigns as well as impressive behavioral targeting capabilities. They provide the dashboards and insights our performance customers have been asking for — capabilities that have been a bit of an Achilles heel for us.
BlueLithium’s strong presence in Europe also has great benefits for Yahoo. According to Times Online, “Yahoo said that a combination of its own online reach with BlueLithium’s will reach more than nine of ten UK web users.”
The BlueLithium deal follows Yahoo’s acquisition earlier this year of Right Media, and analysts approve, citing both deals as an indicator that the company is headed in the right direction. Compared to the billions paid recently by Google for DoubleClick and MSN for aQuantive, Yahoo’s purchase looks like a pretty frugal buy. However, AOL bought BlueLithium behavioral-targeting rival Tacoda this summer for between $200 million and $300 million.