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Turning to the Human Brain for More Accurate Market Research

Chris Crum — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 13:27:44 +0000

Neuromarketing is a fascinating area of marketing that we don’t discuss very often, but can provide some quite useful information to those willing to pay for the research. WebProNews recently talked with Roger Dooley, President of consultancy firm Dooley Direct and author of the Neuromarketing blog, about some of tactics used, the information they can provide to marketers, and some of the concerns about such practices.

As Dooley points out, neuromarketing research is usually sought out more by larger companies who can afford the bills that come with it, but he does often offer tips to smaller marketers on his blog.

"Neuromarketing is any use of brain science in marketing," explains Dooley. "There’s really two parts to that. There’s the really technical part of neuromarketing that involves brain scans, putting people in fMRI machines or attaching EEG caps to their heads – measuring what’s going on in their brain, and then interpreting that data to see how they respond to advertising and other marketing materials. For instance, you can watch a person’s reaction to a television commercial while monitoring their brain activity, and then conclude that the ad was effective because it seemed to engage their emotions or they tuned out."

"But to me, perhaps the more interesting side, at least from a practical application standpoint for small and medium business, is a behavioral science, and there’s a lot of work that’s ongoing in understanding why people do things that one wouldn’t predict that they would do, and how in fact it’s often irrational," he says. "It seems irrational, the decisions that people make…"

Will Focus Group Become Obsolete?

"I think the focus group is going to be a thing of the past because of neuromarketing," Dooley tells us. "The problem is that a focus group is typically just asking people what they think about a product. Would they buy it? What do they like about it? And it’s not really getting into their subconscious at all, and the results may be misleading. Often times people can’t really describe why they do something, and they may not provide accurate information about what they would do in the future, such as purchase the product."

"I use the comparison to an iceberg, where about 88% of the iceberg’s mass is below the surface, and there are all kinds of estimates for how much of our decision making process is subconscious," he continues. "About the best one is sort of a middle-of-the-road guess at 95%. So basically, the vast majority of of mental processes and our decision-making are not part of our conscious awareness. That’s the area that neuromarketing hopes to tap into, and as a result, give better information than a focus group or questionnaire or an interview."

How it’s Done

"You have the brain scan approach, which is sort of bypassing even asking people anything and just seeing how they react," he adds. "There’s another technique, not widely used, but it’s interesting – called facial coding, and basically an expert in reading facial expressions monitors people’s reactions including a word called microexpressions – these are like fleeting little expression changes that a normal observer wouldn’t even notice, but a trained observer can see, and again, they use this to see if a person is watching a television commercial – how are they reacting emotionally. Maybe they’re showing a social smile – trying to be pleasant – but during one part of the commercial, there’s sort of a fleeting disgust reaction – that’s what they’re trying to see using that technique."

"In the whole field of behavioral research, scientists devise relatively simple experiments to see how people react," explains Dooley. "One very simple example is in a bar, a waiter was actually a grad student doing research, and he offered people free beer samples, and there were four beers, and what they found was that if the people at the table were each given all four choices on a slip of paper, where they could mark it, they would choose the one they wanted, but interestingly in almost every case if they simply went around the table asking, each person would choose a different beer, even the last person would choose the least desirable sounding beer. It’s a trivially simple experiment, but it teaches us something about how people make decisions."

Concerns

Of course anything that deals with marketing and looking at the human brain is bound to draw some concern from some people.

"There are some concerns about privacy and whether this is somehow unethical, but in general, those concerns are misplaced or overblown because the folks who have those concerns don’t really understand the technology," says Dooley. "There is no real mind reading that goes on – not in the conventional sense that you could read somebody’s thoughts."

"And it’s not possible to develop ‘super ads’," he adds. "That’s one of the fears – that somehow using these technologies – that Madison Avenue will suddenly begin cranking out ads that turn consumers into buying drones, and that’s simply not going to happen. We’ve had superb advertising for many decades, and that hasn’t happened yet, even by accident, so it’s very unlikely that even with some better market research data from brain scans that there’s really going to be any more success in that. So ‘super ads’ aren’t a concern."

There are also concerns that marketers will abuse the technologies and even make people buy things they wouldn’t otherwise buy. "The other popular concept is that there is a buy button in the brain that somehow marketers can push, and again, the decision-making process is far more complex than that," says Dooley. "There is no single ‘buy button’. Every decision involves different areas of the brain that are being pulled in different directions by varying factors like cost, health concerns, and many other concerns in the consumer’s mind, so there really isn’t anything to fear."

He also says the neuromarketing companies out there don’t work with child subjects, which may alleviate other concerns.

What are your thoughts on the practices of neuromarketing?

Will Brands and Verticals Become More Dominant in Search?

Chris Crum — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 22:27:12 +0000

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WebProNews recently chatted with Tim Mayer, who left Yahoo back in August after serving as s VP of Search Products, VP of Search Business, and VP of North American Audience.

"I think we’re seeing a much more competitive search environment," he tells us. "We’ve had Bing aggressively enter the marketplace, and Google’s been responding, and we’ve seen a lot of changes to the search experience. First we saw Google Instant launch, and then we’ve seen the local search experience change quite dramatically recently."

"I think those drastic, really prominent changes are going to continue to happen throughout different verticals," he says. "In the future I think we’ll see a lot more interaction with the search engine, especially as we move towards mobile where people don’t want to be typing in a lot into the search engine. There’s going to be a lot more voice interaction, which we’re seeing in some of the services. Bing offers that. Google offers that."

"When you ask a question, the search engine might ask you for more details to accomplish a task," he explains. "It will also infer a lot of information that it understands, such as your location, such as preferences based on some of your history, and who your friends are and taking a lot of the social signals into account to serve for recommendations or narrowing your search in the future."

Of course we’re already seeing Google making movies in this area, particularly with its recently launched Hotpot local, social recommendation engine.

"I think we’ve seen since the beginning of the Internet that there were a lot of brands – offline brands or television brands that did not have a presence on the web, so people got used to going to a place like Yahoo, where they could basically accomplish all their needs," Mayer tells us. "It was more of a convenience play, where people would go to do their mail, and they might use News or Finance or Sports, and I think now people…all the big offline brands and television brands like ESPN and CNN are actually online, and people will go to a different place for news, a different place for sports, a different place for search, so it’s a lot less about convenience in the one-stop shop, and it’s move much more towards a best of breed-type environment."

Users Want Brands

"I think we’re seeing that change in search, where brands are becoming more dominant, because that’s what the users want," he says. "For a particular task…when I’m booking tickets, I use Fandango. So if I search for a movie, I’d like to use that site. If I’m searching for a book, most people associate that with Amazon. They want to be connected to that brand. I find if I’m searching for a book, I get a much better experience on Amazon than I would on a horizontal search engine like Google. And we’re seeing that bear out in the numbers."

"The large vertical search engines are growing at a much faster rate than the horizontal search is, so we’re seeing YouTube grow incredibly fast. We’re seeing Amazon grow as a search engine incredibly fast. And the experience for those types of searches is just far superior to what’s offered via Google or Bing at this point, and that’s why we’re seeing…changes with local trying to compete with those big brands," says Mayer.

"We saw that mobile search by the end of 2012 was going to be one in five searches, which is quite a lot of the search market, and I’m sure in some future state, there will be more searches from mobile and tablet devices, so things will change, and that will have impacts on the query curve," he continues. "But we are seeing a lot of momentum in terms of people using more apps on the phone, and using the browser less as a percentage of time."

"There are a few problems with that, the first of which is how do I discover new apps is through browse, social, or search, and then once you’ve found a lot of apps, the difficulty is, ‘how do I interact with apps from a central location?’ I don’t want to go through a two-step process of figuring out which app to use for a particular query, and then go into that app and start all over again, and then doing another search," he says. "People want to interact very similarly to how they have in the past with Google – type in a query, and if I have an app on my phone that meets that need very well, send the search directly to that app or send it out onto the web to the best site that’s available there."

Are you doing more of your searching from mobile?

Social Media Has Been Around for Centuries. It’s Not About the Tech.

Chris Crum — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 19:13:34 +0000

Connecting with people shouldn’t be about what social networks you’re using. It should be about connecting with people. Yes, you need to look at where your audience is at, but you shouldn’t be using Twitter just for the sake of using Twitter if you’re not using it to communicate to the right people.

In fact, we covered a report today indicating that only 6% of American adults are using Twitter. As Joshua Duncan noted, retweeting the article, "Don’t forget about the 94% that aren’t."

WebProNews recently spoke with Ted Ulle, the Senior Search Analyst for social media consultancy firm Converseon, who had a lot of interesting things to say about information architecture, comparing it to social media. It’s engagement," he said. "It’s actually promoting engagement, and that’s a big deal."

He had some other interesting things to say about social media itself as well. "The technology that allows you to connect to people in your marketplace should become invisible," he said. "It should get out of the way, and that is the evolution I see happening, and that’s one of the reasons that social media is so hot these days – because it’s people connecting with people."

"You can use social media sites without being geeky," he added. "My mother could use social media. She appreciates that kind of thing. She likes to talk to people. That’s what it’s all about."

Ulle’s not the first to suggest that social media’s always been around, but he brought up an interesting tidbit about the history of print. "Many newspapers around the Philadelphia area, even before the independence of the United States, used to print their newspaper with blank pages and blank space in it," he explained. "The idea was that you would buy a newspaper, read an article, write down your comments about the article and pass the newspaper onto somebody else. You had social media. It was print…it didn’t matter. It was exactly the same principle."

An article from Slate.com talks about this in more detail.

"What you have is a return to humanity plus a whole new empowerment of the average person," he added. "There’s no question that any brand who thinks they can just push a message out and fool everybody is going to have to wake up pretty fast, because that’s not happening so much anymore."

"The techniques are evolving, but the principle was always engagement," he concluded. "Always, always, always."

His words echo another recent conversation we had with Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy Network, who suggests simply treating your followers like people.

Crafting an Effective Landing Page – Don’t Go Overboard

Chris Crum — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 13:30:37 +0000

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Having the right landing page is incredibly important in getting conversions. It’s one thing to get traffic, but if it doesn’t convert what’s the point?

WebProNews spoke with Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo at PubCon recently. She shared some thoughts on creating effective landing pages. "I think that there are a lot of great tools out there you can use, but there’s also some creative ways that you can implement what you already know about people," she tells us.

You need to focus on more than just the click. It’s what happens after the click that really matters. "That’s your entire return-on-investment," she says. "It’s your ROI, so what good does it do if people just click and cost you money, and they’re not actually converting for you obviously, so we’re finding that conversion rate optimization as a practice and a discipline is really growing. You’re seeing more and more people discuss it…there’s so many great tools out there…those test really accurately and really get the best information they can, and to make the right decisions about how to design their pages – what kind of information to put on them to get the most conversions."

There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for landing pages. It’s going to differ depending on your goals, and what you’re trying to sell.

"There’s a lot of other challenges with things like…with Google AdWords specifically or any search engine marketing, where you’re trying to target for your particular product, but you might have many different audiences who might search on the same term that need many different types or variations of your product," says Driscoll Miller. "I have a client, as an example, who serves home users as well as business users, but they’re two different products."

"So we use segmentation for that, where you have buttons on a page to try and segment those people down a path to get them to the right product very quickly," she adds. "And those types of things can really help your conversion rate."

"I think a lot of people put things below the fold, which is a mistake, and certainly not putting a form right there on your landing page is a problem," she says. "I’m seeing less people actually land people directly on their home page, which is good, because you know…a home page has a lot of stuff going on…I am seeing people try to create their own landing pages, which is a real positive."

Forms can be critical for landing pages, but you don’t want to go overboard, or you’ll lose the conversion.

"We’ve done some experimentation where we’ve done like tiered forms where you ask for the absolute essential only on that first form, and then once you get to the thank you page, you might ask them for a couple different optional fields, and surprisingly in the tests that we’ve run a lot of our clients see anywhere between 70 and 80 percent of the people who fill out the first form fill out the second form with optional information," Driscoll Miller tells us. "What the beauty of that is, more people fill out the form when it’s shorter, so you get initially more people signing up, but then a lot of the go and fill out the secondary information."

"So the initial form can’t be intimidating," she adds. "It can’t be too many fields – everything but the kitchen sink. Try and make it as small as you can."

The same thing applies to the checkout process.

"Things that e-commerce companies too can be focusing on are things like even the words on the button," says Driscoll Miller. "Sometimes something like ‘buy now’ is a little more intimidating, and seems like something that you have to do versus ‘add to cart’. It’s a little gentler. So experimenting with words and buttons and colors, and all sorts of things. There’s many, many options."

She also had some advice for landing pages on Facebook and Twitter. Read here for that.

Getting Added Twitter Value From Press Releases

Chris Crum — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 16:53:43 +0000

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As you may know, press releases can cater to traffic from search engines and social media, for one thing just getting them out there to be found and shared is huge.

Lisa Buyer, CEO of The Buyer Group shared some other ideas with us in a recent interview. "It used to be with public relations that we were reaching out to the journalists with a press release and trying to get the journalist to do the story, and now with the optimization and the online opportunities with press releases we can actually reach our targets direct by optimizing our press releases and releasing them on the search engines, and then using social media to even get more exposure."

But just having press releases out there to be found and shared isn’t the only way they can be tapped for added value in PR. "You can use Twitter…as part of your PR program, as part of your news feed, so Twitter is like basically…we all know it’s 140 characters so it’s like putting out little nuggets of news via Twitter, so if you take your press release and kind of chop it up into four or five different sound bytes, and then put those out…over the Twitter news feed each day…"

"Statistics are great," she says. "Little factoids are also good, and trying to stay away from kind of being so ‘me, me, me’ and trying to give the end user what they’re looking for, so it’s those little sound byte nuggets of information to put out on Twitter that are coming from your press release, and even going back to old press releases…you go in your newsroom and look back at old press releases and old statistics that are still relevant, and that helps drive traffic back to your website and back to these deeper pages in your website that maybe you haven’t been to in a while."

The PR tweeting certainly doesn’t have to come from the same person, or even jut the PR department. Digital Dads co-founder C.C. Chapman says, "PR and marketing should not be separate departments anymore."

WebProNews also spoke with Victoria Harres, the director of audience development for popular press release distribution service PRNewswire, who said, "Social media (Twitter, Facebook, and whatever else you can do, especially video these days) actually has enhanced whatever you’re doing or were doing in PR before. This is a new channel. A new way to get your message out to a larger audience, so you still need the old tools and the old tactics, etc. but this is something you work in to really help amplify the message you’re trying to get out."

Her strategy for corporate twittering is pretty interesting. It includes dividing up different Twitter tasks. More on that here.

While on the topic of social media and PR, you may also be interested in hearing some of the things Lee Odden shared with us earlier this year about using SEO and Social for actual press coverage.

Is Ranking Number One in Google Losing Its Significance?

Chris Crum — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 17:43:59 +0000

As you may have noticed, Google has been putting a great deal more emphasis on local these days than in years past. That includes everything from the introduction of Google Places and Place Pages to automatically showing more local results for certain searches, as well as various other solutions offered to businesses at the local level, such as product inventory or tag advertising. Google caters much more to location-based search and local business search than ever before, and that trend is likely to continue.

Do you think classic organic search is losing importance? Share your thoughts.

Local Rises to the Top

WebProNews spoke with well-known SEO industry analyst Bruce Clay of Bruce Clay Inc. at PubCon about search trends and where the search industry is headed. Local is only one facet of this, but it’s a big facet. "Certainly the enhancements have been gradual…now, anybody that has a local result, the first organic link is down below the fold," says Clay. "I never expected that to happen…the organic links, they’re gone. For the last four or five months, I’ve been saying that the new page one in the search results is really positions one, two, and three. That is page one. And I think Google agrees."

"If you look at some of the results, our benchmarks have shown that commonly, there will be seven organic results on the first page, and sometimes as few as four results that are organic on the first page of the Google results set – right now," he says. "So does Google owe any loyalty to what is traditional organic? Of course not. Now, the argument I would say for Google, is that if they’re gonna throw up some local results, they’re gonna argue that those are organic, and that they’re more targeted to location, and therefore that they’re more relevant to the normal organic results, in which case they’re carrying forward with organic results. It’s just that they’re not organic like anybody in the SEO space has ever thought of before."

So SEOs, webmasters and businesses really have to consider how the SEO game has changed in this way. You can’t expect people to go past the first page of results. It happens, but I’m guessing it happens less and less as people adjust their queries to find what they’re looking for when the results don’t provide it. The addition of Google Instant has only fueled this.

Cracking the Local Code

"It [local] has its own algorithm," says Clay. "It’s based on certain kinds of voting systems. We’ve been able to effectively get people into the seven-pack almost all the time. The difference is that the placement within the seven pack hasn’t been deciphered yet. It seems to be random. It is to some degree an accuracy of data factor, and to some degree it’s a review factor. So both of those will play."

"I think that 30% (I think is the number right now) of all results show some sort of local flavor," Clay continues. "What we’re seeing is not so much that 30% have maps, but that the actual body of the search results change to have local sites intermixed. So if you look at a set of results and find positions one through ten, they’re all laid out. If I change my location (in the column, you can change where you’re at)…if I change it from California to New York, I get an entirely different set."

"I noticed just going from my office in California to Las Vegas I got different results, even for terms like ‘search engine optimization‘ which is not a shopping term per se, I had a different sequence in the top ten," he explains. "So clearly Google is using geo-location of the searcher to bias the search results. That’s happening in almost everything I see."

The breadth of terms that Google thinks users want local results for seems to be expanding, or at least has expanded from years past. Google has an opportunity to increase its revenue significantly because of this, the way Clay sees it.

"We’re also seeing that local’s showing up more for short terms like one-word phrases like ‘shoes’," Clay points out. "You search for ‘shoes,’ you get a map. That’s just the way it is. And you search for ‘tools’ and you get a map. And things that used to just be ‘what is it?’ are no longer ‘what is it?’. They’re considered to be…if you’re looking for shoes, you’re obviously looking for a shoe store, and they’re sort of assuming that as they go. That kind of a behavior when you see it in search results is really what we’re facing."

Google’s Motivation?

"We’re facing a general shift towards local results, and Google is clearly motivated," he adds. "You would think, using shoes as an example, that there are only so many people that can bid on the word shoes. It’s a national term. If I go local, I have a hundred thousand different opportunities to sell shoes. Every region can have their own bidding on shoes, and people can make money and bid…it’s like local phone books. And it is. And everybody can participate and bid and get on the web."

"And if I do geo-targeted then the return-on-investment’s gonna go up," he continues. "As I make more money, I’m more willing to spend more on my pay-per-click. So on a per-click basis, Google has an opportunity to make 50% more doing nothing more than allowing it to be targeted by location. So Google, perhaps at a greed level or a business level or a democratic level is actually able to make more money the more they promote it."

What’s good for Google is also good for users though. The fact of the matter is that location does matter a lot, when you’re talking about relevancy. It’s one of many factors, much like social (which we’ll no doubt see a great deal of emphasis from Google on as well, going forward) that caters to the individuals searcher, and as location tracking is becoming the norm, these results can get pretty fine-tuned to where the user is at any given time.

Moving Forward

"I think that local is here to stay," says Clay. "I think it’s big, and I think you either play in the local space and either figure out how to get into the seven-pack or you’re not gonna get the clicks, even if you’re number one."

While there is no question that SEOs and marketers are going to have to continue to adapt to this ever-changing landscape, it may actually mean great things for people working on the web including SEOs, but also designers, developers, etc.

"It turns out that 92% of all businesses in the United States – serve a 50 mile radius from where they’re physically located, and that hardly any of these…are on the Internet," says Clay. "That means, especially when you couple it with the emphasis of Google to start doing local kinds of results, that means we’re going to see a massive influx of websites. Brand new websites are going to enter…they’re going to star showing up, they’re going to start ranking, they’re going to start competing. These are sites that have never been here before."

"There’s going to be a multitude of web designers now getting involved, a lot of SEOs or wannabe SEOs are going to be getting involved," he adds. "We’re going to see a lot of people wanting a quick hit – ‘Hi, I built my site, how come nobody’s beating my door down?’ There’s going to be a little bit of a two steps back approach to SEOs – a bunch of people ripping us off. There may be some attempts at spam, although I think Google’s going to be fighting that."

There will likely be new kinds of spam, as he suggests.

Read this for more interesting commentary from Clay regarding the search market in general.

Do you think this shift towards local is a good thing for Google? For users? Tell us what you think.

Who’s Got the Time for All This Technology?

Chris Crum — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 21:09:14 +0000

In a recent article, we asked how business owners and CEOs can keep up with new technologies and strategies in the digital age. It’s a topic we discussed with a few people at Pubcon in Las Vegas.

"The pace of change is frightening," New York Times tech columnist David Pogue told us. "In the last three or four years…it’s becoming overwhelming for me. I mean, it’s my job. I eat and breathe keeping on top of tech, and people will say ‘what do you think of…’ something I’ve never heard of and everyone else has, and it’s like oh my god, now I’m behind. So I don’t have any idea how a CEO is supposed to keep up."

"Obviously there’s people like me and websites, whose job it is to filter stuff for you, and bring to you what’s important," he added. "That would probably be one way to do it, but I think it explains why in general business is always behind the curve."

A similar subject also came up in a conversation with well-known consultant Chris Brogan, who says, "What I look at is, I try to stay with a product or sale solution mindset, and I say, ‘Is there a reason this is gonna add to what I’m working on right now?’ and if I go try this new social network, is that likely to be where my new target audience is gonna be?"

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"Honestly, it’s really interesting," he adds. "Everyone’s always chasing the new thing. I think you go backwards and look at the old things. I’m amazed at who’s not searching inside eBay or who’s not searching inside of Amazon or whatever…who’s not really working their email marketing lists, as opposed to just beating it over the head with automated stuff."

That’s a great point. The rate at which all of this stuff comes out is unreal, and a lot of people try so desperately to stay on top of the latest and emerging trends, that they leave behind proven and established opportunities.

"I think with time management, you just have to keep going with the mindset of what you real goal is, and keep paring away," says Brogan. "It’s like I’m a priest and I give absolution all the time. I’m always like, ‘You don’t have to try Quora just because everyone’s always inviting you to it.’ I haven’t said yes to that invite yet. I’m sure it’s gonna be great. Whatever. You know what? I stopped reading TechCrunch and Mashable because my friends will tell me when something really cool’s coming. I read their sharing of TechCrunch and Mashable, because then I get the story I really care about."

Brogan is certainly not alone, which is why social search is bound to become much more integral to the way people interact with information on the web (good news for Microsoft, given its recent deal with Facebook to integrate social data into its search results).

"So then the other thing with time management is – I keep telling people this – in the Internet space, there’s more work than there is time in a day, and there always will be," Brogan adds. "If you don’t put the gate down and you don’t say, ‘Time is up,’ it’s you. It’s your doing. You know, if you’re missing out on family life, it’s your choice."

Is a Shake-Up Brewing in the Search Market?

Chris Crum — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 21:53:47 +0000

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Google has been dominating the search market for years. Simply put, if you ask most people to search for something on the web, their first instinct is to go to Google. More and more people might be getting reprogrammed to go to Bing, however. The "decision engine" still has a ways to go before it reaches Google-like numbers, but it’s come a long way since its launch last year. The search market has also lost an old player and gained a new one.

Do you think Google is in any danger of losing a significant amount of search market share? Tell us what you think.

A Shift to Bing?

"I think that we’re going to see a shift to Bing," predicts Clay. "Understand that this is a very complex dynamic. The market share, (if you’re going to use that as a measurement) for Google is holding steady. The market share for social is where all the play is. Even YouTube is now the second largest search engine (above Microsoft). We’ve seen the Bing and Yahoo numbers switch pretty aggressively. So now we’re seeing that Bing has a much larger market share than Yahoo."

"Now if the results are substantially similar between Bing and Yahoo…I think that market share comes out to approximately 30%," adds Clay. "At 30%…yeah, it’s a power. I think Google, for many years, was quite happy to allow Bing and Yahoo and Ask and others to fight it out, because it was a divide and conquer kind of a thing. You divide your competition into smaller market segments, they don’t have the power to compete. I think that with a 30% market share going to Yahoo, it think that it has got some power to compete."

Add the new Windows Phone 7 operating system to the mix, and things get quite interesting. Also consider that Windows Phone is already getting things that Android is unable to get at this point – major things like Netflix. Last week, Netflix announced that because a "lack of a generic and complete platform security and content protection mechanism" for Android, it has been unable get its service on the operating system (though it intends to get the service on some models next year). That could be the difference between choosing an Android device or a new "shiny object" like the Windows Phones for a lot of users in the meantime, and with Bing as the default search, that could mean some Bing converts.

Clay compares the evolving search market to the browser market. "In the beginning, there was Netscape, and it was the browser, says Clay. "Then it was IE, and it was the browser. Then there was, ‘what is it? Firefox? A new browser?’ And now there’s Chrome…I think things shift, and I think that the leader is subject to change if they do things that the public doesn’t like."

"Obviously a lot of the things that Google’s been working on and implementing, I think have been confusing to a great extent to the end user," he adds. "There’s way too much now on a page. I think Google’s gotta figure out what is gonna work and what is not gonna work, and take it off or Bing is gonna have an excellent opportunity to come in with the ‘keep it simple’ approach, and they’re going to win the hearts of the novice searcher. And let’s face it: the web is still growing."

I personally wonder how common the "novice searcher" is at this point. Kids are being brought up with search these days. Search isn’t new anymore. That’s not to say there aren’t still some new to the web, but there are far less people just getting into searching the web. It’s become a way of life. And it’s still essentially just typing queries into a box, at least if you’ve gotten as far as going to Google to perform a search.

In some ways, one could argue that Google’s made searching easier by adding visible filtering options to the column, and even giving results before the user is even finished typing. I think people are getting more proficient at searching. How often do you have to go past the first page of search results to find what you’re looking for? It happens, but probably not nearly as much as it used to. You’re probably more apt to refine your query.

Google will always try to improve though. "Google has a lot of engineers and they have a lot of users, and there’s a lot of feedback and interaction, and Google has the ability to figure out what works and what doesn’t work," notes Clay.

Out with the Old

The search market recently lost another "major player" (besides Yahoo serving Bing results). Ask announced that it was pulling out of search to focus on Q&A. That’s one less competitor for Bing.

"A lot of people, including a lot of the people who work for me, really like Ask," says Clay. "Ask had done a lot of very, very creative items. They had changed the format. They had done blended search…actually they were all set to announce blended search, and Google ran up and said, ‘oh hi…Universal.’, the day before blended was supposed to come out."

"The general feeling I have about it is that they didn’t make an impact on the market," he continues. "And over the last three years, their market share has been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. They haven’t been moving forward as a search engine. So, clearly if you keep doing the same thing that’s failing over and over and over again, then you’re going to fail. So they’re obviously having to go in a different direction."

The market has been whittled down gradually over the years, and it’s probably barely been noticed by most people. "Pulling out as a major search engine is nothing unique," notes Clay. "In the beginning, we had our search engine relationship chart. It had like twenty-some bubbles on it. Now there’s like eight. You know, a lot of engines have been consumed or went away, so I think Ask just moving out is not a big deal. It may actually cater more as a supplemental platform than a primary platform…I think it will be around. It just won’t be the same."

The New Kid

While the market may have lost a well-known player, it has also gained some new blood. Rich Skrenta calls his new search engine, Blekko, the "third search engine" behind Google and Bing/Yahoo. "Google and Bing really is the competition," Skrenta told WebProNews. "All the rest are folded or gone away."

"I don’t think it’s necessarily the ‘third search engine’," says Clay. "I think that they’ve done some things rather in a smart way. One of the things that you’re going to have to know is if you want the SEO industry and the webmasters and the people that are able to influence customers by saying ‘Hi, you have to rank in this search engine’, that search engine has to communicate back to that community, and I think a lot of what they’ve done is very smart."

"They’ve provided a lot of statistics, they’ve provided a lot of ways of looking at traffic, of looking at your site…I think a search engine that embraces how to get ranked in that search engine is going to find more people willing to get ranked in that search engine," he says.

Finding a niche audience in SEO might be Blekko’s destiny however – more of a useful tool than a mainstream search engine. Time will tell, but that’s the general feeling I’m getting. Clay seems to have a similar view.

"I think that the kind of tools that they have are great. I think people will use it," says Clay. "I think we’re gonna use it. You’d be foolish to ignore them. I just don’t know that a person that is a novice searcher is going to particularly know to go there…There’s gotta be something that they’re able to do…maybe their approach to keep it simple is gonna work or not. Are they going to have more relevant results? That I haven’t really seen. Is it going to be a player? I think that what we ought to do is just give it six months and see what they’re doing. It certainly could become another Ask – great, great technology, but nobody knows to go there."

We’ll see. I think in the meantime, Google is more worried about Bing (not to mention Facebook and Apple).

Which search engine do you prefer: Google, Yahoo, Bing, or Blekko? Something else? Let us know.

There’s More to Social Media For Small Businesses than ROI

Chris Crum — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 15:18:34 +0000

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WebProNews recently had a conversation with Shirley Tan of ECommerceFastStart.com, who says, "Social media is actually a level playing field for small business owners."

"Small business owners can really take control…[of] all their messaging and their branding, and really just engage their customers in a conversation, without having to hire expensive PR agencies," she says. "I think one of the advantages of being able to be on Facebook and Twitter is you can really actually have this conversation, and cut out the reports and the agencies…"

Research

"You can actually be in the trenches, and be doing real, live, realtime suvreys," she points out. "People say, ‘do online surveys.’ Well you can actually be doing realtime online surveys with your customers, like right now, which is pretty amazing. It cuts the cost down. You can do it yourself or have some people in your company do it."

Some businesses tend to get caught up on the monetization factor of social media, and while it’s not something to ignore, that’s not all there is to it.

"I think one of the misconceptions [is]…the concept that it’s expensive – that you need to have an ROI," says Tan. "I would use social media as a way of doing research – finding out what my customers are talking about – what products do they think are hot in the marketplace, and do I have that? And how can I leverage that hot trend, and make sure that I have it so my customers are speaking…about that product on my site and to their friends, enlisting them to be my soldiers out there, and be my salesforce out there on our behalf. I think that’s something that’s something that small business owners can do and should do."

Customer Service

One of the biggest reasons for a small business to utilize social media channels is just good customer service. If social media is a level playing field for businesses, you don’t want to waste such an opportunity by ignoring customers. If you do, you might as well just tell them to buy from your big competitors or another small business that knows how to deal with their customers. The thing is, you won’t have to tell them to do this. They’ll just do it, and chances are you won’t even know about it, because the conversation is happening in a place where you’re not paying attention.

"First off, you really do have to start with a great product. So assuming that’s the given, and you have a great brand, a great company – all the infrastructure in place, meaning that when you become very public in that way, you have your customer service in line – you have a policy in place," says Tan. "You know how you’re going to be tackling issues when it comes up, and that you can take some of the customer service issues off air…you know, offline, but you need to be able to say, ‘oh yeah, you know that order? We know where it is. Please call us. We’ll follow through. We’ll take care of it.’ And be very public in that way, because once you do go out there in a public forum…you will be encountering those situations, and the key thing is to plan for it. Don’t start something that you cannot sustain, and keep going."

Managing It

Speaking of sustainability, this is something to consider when starting your presences on different social networks. While it’s a good idea to be in as many places where your customers are as possible, you also don’t want to bite off more than you can chew. If you’re going to be there, you need to really be there.

"The key is not to do it all," says Tan. "Because it’s not sustainable. It’s not manageable. I would focus on the two most popular ones – Twitter and Facebook. Maybe just even Facebook, to start with. And really have a game plan going of how you’re going to approach it – how you’re going to tackle it on the front end as well as the back end – meaning how your people are going to work it through their processes in working with it through the public – that public, public forum."

If this is the approach you take, you can get an idea of just how manageable your social media efforts are. Maybe then you can decide if you have the capabilities and resources to expand into other venues. For that matter, it may make more sense to start with other communities even before Facebook or Twitter, depending on who your audience is and what your goals are. You may have greater success engaging with people in a niche forum, for example.

Check-In Apps Add Key Relevancy Factor to Your Marketing

Chris Crum — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 12:41:43 +0000

Are check-in apps just a fad or are they the future of local business marketing? It may still be too early to tell, but I’m starting to lean toward the latter, because this space is only picking up more and more steam, and businesses and marketers are getting excited about it as more apps continue to flood the mobile app markets.

Are check-in apps just a fad? Tell us what you think.

At PubCon this week, WebProNews spoke with Gib Olander, director of biz dev at Localeze, which provides local business listings to all kinds of sites and apps. He certainly seems convinced that location-based services (LBS) are here to stay.

"Geo-location is just an outstanding place, and the way I think about it is, we started with a big search box and we all kind of wanted to find answers to ‘what’ questions and things have evolved pretty quickly to a ‘what’ and a ‘where’, so we did a geo-modifier," he tells us. "We added a state or a zip code or a city. We started to find more information."

Putting the "Where" and the "When" in Marketing

"Nicely, social layers added on top of that where you start to get your Facebook and your friends’ recommendations," he continues. "Yelp did a great job with reviews, and then Foursquare came along, and they’ve added a really neat new component with this check-in feature, and there’s other sites that are doing it as well, like Brightkite and SCVNGR, but one of the things I think is really neat and new for marketers is they’ve added the time of ‘when.’"

That "when" is a key factor in executing a successful campaign, and it’s one that just hasn’t been able to get nearly as precise in marketing channels of the past. The mobile device in customers’ pocket tracking right where they are when they’re there (particularly when they’re sharing this information on purpose) is astonishingly powerful.

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"When someone is there really changes the relevancy of what kind of information you want to share with them – what kind of things you want to talk to them about," says Olander. "So, geo-location has added all those…kind of layers: the who, what, where, why, and when on top of each other, and it’s created new opportunities for businesses to talk to their customers, and for customers to discover new businesses, and I think that’s just really exciting for our space."

"Michael Metcalf from Yahoo talked about this at a conference," he recalls. "Your spatial network is just about as important as your social network. So who’s around you and when they’re around you both from a physical location, and businesses need to be aware of that with other businesses, but also people around you. Because when people congregate in an area, they leave a pyschographic imprint of who they are and what they are, and why they’re there. And marketers can tend to look at that."

"Like so right now at PubCon, if you were tracking this event, you would see that by the profiles people have when they’re here now at this particular time…you know, we’ve got a lot of interesting SEO and SEM and geo-location and marketing and targeting," Olander explains. "So as a marketer or advertiser…and a big feel for tech…so maybe if you’re the Marriott nearby, you could start to target the area during the hours that we’re here with special offers of free wi-fi or that type of thing."

Which Check-In Apps Should I Utilize?

One challenge that marketers face along with these types of opportunities is knowing which services to utilize. There are seemingly new check-in apps coming out just about every day. Foursquare is the one that’s gotten the most attention thus far, but there are plenty of others breathing down that company’s neck to be the "it" check-in app – the Facebook to Foursquare’s MySpace. Of course, Facebook itself is doing more in this space with its Facebook Places product. It will be interesting to see how other apps co-exist with that. Facebook Places is only going to get bigger and bigger. The social network has over half a billion user, let’s not forget.

"I think the real competition from the Facebook ecosystem is gonna come from third-party developers like Zynga that build on top of the Facebook Places API, because you’ll notice with Facebook Places that they haven’t done anything with like virtual goods like badges or points, and these are some of the main attractions of Foursquare and Gowalla," Lawrence Coburn, who runs the geo-location app provider DoubleDutch recently told WebProNews. "So they’ve just left that open, but I know that third-party developers won’t be so shy, and they’ll come in and make games, because there’s a lot of good game developers on Facebook."

That’s certainly another advantage for the social network giant, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to consider the rest of these apps doomed.

Foursquare itself has some pretty big plans, particularly for local businesses. CEO Dennis Crowley talked about this at ad:tech last week. "The harder part is consumer brands…consumer packaged goods," he said, adding that it’s hard to find a practical way to use Foursquare to sell things like batteries or cereal. The local business stuff is much more obvious though, and what may not work with Foursquare or even Facebook Places, may work with another app.

"Across the board, they’re all really important," says Olander. "I think there’s a stat out that there’s more than six thousand LBS apps on the iPhone alone, so fragmentation is a reality of the marketplace. What we think, at Localeze, is that you look at each one of them as an opportunity…what you really have to establish is your business identity online."

"It used to be that you could just have a brick and mortar store, and put a nice awning up or a nice sign up, and people would walk by and find you," he adds. "But today, you really have to own that online presence, and that starts with owning your name/address/phone number. You make sure it’s consistent in multiple applications, and then you’re starting to cover them all. You start to monitor each of those and see where most of the foot traffic, or where your audience or customers are, and then really interact with those and create unique content offers for them."

Are you marketing to customers with location-based services? Tell us about your experiences.