I went out for dinner to Thai Pepper in Santa Clara on Saturday and had a nostalgic moment. I had spent countless hours near this pole working RF issues while at MetroFi. Some career moments are for ever...
What makes professionals tick - purpose, mastery and autonomy. Daniel Pink's inspirational video for one and all
I went out for dinner to Thai Pepper in Santa Clara on Saturday and had a nostalgic moment. I had spent countless hours near this pole working RF issues while at MetroFi. Some career moments are for ever...
I have lately been in many marketing conversations related to search, social and mobile customer acquisition. When it comes to advertising, a diversified strategy is key to long term success, however, all advertising networks are not created equal. With Google recently announcing that 19% of their hotel queries come from mobile devices and Facebook marketers claiming social media ROI of upto 1000%, both mobile and social advertising are making inroads in advertiser value.
So, how does social and mobile advertising compare to search advertising?
With over half a billion users, 250 million of which engage daily, and contributing on average 90 pieces of content a month, it's clearly the platform of choice for multi-billion dollar advertising by mega brands. The companies that have success on Facebook measure ROI through mostly soft metrics such as converting social media members to followers, increasing referral traffic and brand awareness. According to this Forbes article, Facebook claims that it is key and growing driver of online traffic to retailers. Facebook’s referral traffic to Amazon grew 328% year over year in Oct. 2010, while Google’s traffic dropped 2%. Facebook traffic to eBay grew 81% while Google traffic dropped 3%.
On the other hand, there remain a number of areas of performance, that Facebook is still behind compared to search and display advertising. Despite accounting for 20% of online advertising traffic, Facebook cost an average of $.56 per thousand impressions (which is below most search engine averages). However, the click through rate (CTR) for Facebook ads is half of the general web advertising average, which is effectively $1.12 equivalent CPM. Despite being a very cost effective advertising channel, the World Federation of Advertisers says that less than a quarter of companies that advertise with Facebook are happy with their ROI. Also, another study finds that overwhelmingly, consumers were more likely to visit a companies website (and search for it) rather then visiting their Facebook profile. Company direct emails (yes, those spammy ones), were considered a better more trusted form of communication then a company’s Facebook page.
How about Facebook referral traffic? Will Facebook-referred visitors turn into buyers at the same rate as visitors from Google? One would expect it to be a lower rate, since the intent of visitors coming from Facebook isn't as clear or uniform as that of Google-referred visitors. The same analogy also applies to gamers on the social networks. Popular Zynga games such as Farmville, Mafia Wars etc., have a large number of gamers. I haven't heard (caveat my limited exposure) of real success stories yet and it seems that the ROI on these social games is far from optimal at this point.
There's a lot of optimism in the air around mobile advertising in publishing ― but how to measure a successful campaign is still evolving.
Reach is still the most important criterion for advertisers to judge success of a campaign. With mobile we can measure unique users much more accurately than with any other medium. Mobile offers the opportunity for the advertiser to the reach the consumer at the right time and the right place using the right medium with the right message.
However, a wide range of mobile surveys have concluded that a large number ( infact 47%) of mobile app users say they click/tap on mobile ads more often by mistake than they do on purpose. Clicks may not be an accurate metric for mobile advertising.
More recently, a large number game apps have started incorporating a CPA model. I recently downloaded a mobile game called, TapZoo. It had a built in call to action to get ahead and move faster to next levels. To navigate the game faster, you can either pay to get more coins/stars or download apps such as Groupon, LivingSocial etc., I tried downloading a couple of those apps but I find the lack of context, annoying (I guess you can tell that I'm a search person). I do, however, think that mobile networks will be able target better and also offer better metrics for advertisers in no so distant future.
Google with over two thirds of the search market share continues to deliver steady and effective results. Generally speaking, SEM & SEO provide the best 1, 2 punch on customer acquisition. Further, with social playing a big role in SERP's, SEO hones your social customer acquisition skills as well.
As much as paid acquisition is a necessity in the short term, one needs to have organic strategies for mobile, social media and search. Social Media consists of branded social community pages, social sharing, content distribution, publish video & assets to social portals, social display advertising and campaigns embedded within the product that can generate Facebook "Like" campaigns. These social media campaigns also help with SEO which enables you to reach broader mobile cusotmer segment as well.
A week after Facebook announced a slew of new plugins, apis and features at it's annual F8 conference ( see here for my notes), some interesting concepts and use cases have started to come out.
Microsoft Docs.com
Docs.com makes it easy for one to discover, create and share documents on Facebook. The Facepile implementation right below the sign up button removes a lot of hesitation for new signups and enables customers to see friends who have already signed up to use the service. This is a great way for unknown brands or relatively new products to entice customers to move forward.
Levi Social Shopping
Levi's is one of the first major brands to integrate Facebook's social plugin into their online shop, turning it into a social shopping experience. When you click on "Friend's store" you see items sorted by most number of likes, over time these would probably be sorted by your friends' preferences. I also like the interesting experiment with showing birthdays on the page - not sure how that would be my preference but I certainly like their approach to trying out all aspects of the data they can retrieve.
Typepad's "Connect your Blog to Facebook" Integration
Connect your blog with Facebook fan base using the new "Like" widget. You can add Facebook's "Like" widget to your Blog sidebar and connect with your fan base on Facebook. As soon as you complete the connection process, it also creates an automatic admin page so you can manage your fans and publish stories to your fans' News Feeds etc..
There are a slew of other facebook plugin implementations including CNN.com, Yelp, ImDB and others but apps have yet to hit critical mass to offer personalized recommendations - I expect in the next few months we'll see a large number of such implementations.
Over the weekend, I had a chance to pick up Twyla Tharp's Collaborative Habit after reading the book jacket and hearing about her on NPR. The book was an easy read and had some interesting aspects. A good collaborator is easier to find than a good friend. If you've got a true friendship, you want to protect that; To work together is to risk it. Like Creativity, collaboration is a habit and one that takes practice and effort to master.
Despite not being into theater, I found some of her examples and references pretty generic in nature and generally applicable for all walks of life where collaboration is key.
Here are some aspects that I plan to practice for a long time:
And finally, what do you do when the world doesn't validate your vision? - I love Twyla's description of the stages of healing and rebirth because I've gone through those myself during startup years and many other occassions
Recently, we launched a new small business directory at business.intuit.com. It allows small businesses to claim their listing and upload valuable information for their customers to search for. You can search for Spas San Francisco or accountants in Los Angeles and get information about the reviews or certifications or any other type of information to make a decision. As I was checking around, I noticed an interesting post on facebook by one of the small businesses and how they can use reviews information to boost their business. See Byu-ti Salon in Santa Monica post on facebook - Small businesses are definitely figuring out the value of online word of mouth and power of social media.
Last week, I came across an interesting post on Greg Sterling's Screenwerk blog about how online feedback is influencing consumer purchasing decisions. The survey and analysis conducted by Opinion Research Corporation concluded that 84 percent of Americans used online customer evaluations in making decision to purchase a product or service. Here's the breakdown on the types of products and services that were surveyed and reported.
While it is clear that travel and consumer electronic goods have reached some level of saturation, the most interesting aspect is that all "local services" continue to trend up and still lag behind. Contrast this with the fact that, in the pre-online reviews era, local services were the most influenced category through word-of-mouth. I have often believed that information about local services are significantly skewed since they are hard to track. I also believe that numbers would be significantly lower if all the local categories were tallied. However, the following 3 aspects could explain the growth and adoption pattern in local services:
Fragmented Recommendations - There are more than 20 million small businesses and only a small percentage of them have online reviews. It is likely that people would look for different level of trust and authority on recommendations depending on the type of service. One may want a recommendation from a close friend/confidant for a wedding planner while they could easily take a recommendation from an anonymous online reviewer for a dining occasion. Also, if you are traveling for business/leisure and need a good local business recommendation there, you may not get a recommendation from a trusted source. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are definitely helping in eliminating the geography-based limitations but coverage-gap still remains a huge issue. The following picture illustrates the coverage vs. trust conflict in fragmented local business domain.
Review sites such as Yelp, Citysearch have played a huge role in generating reviews that could expand coverage but still their content generation prowess has been limited to major metropolitan areas and is very time & resource consuming. The slow but increasing growth in Opinion Research Corporation's survey may be directly a result of the penetration of such review sources. Review & recommendation aggregators may also be contributing the growth.
Convergence of Opinion (or lack thereof) - Reviews about consumer electronics tend to converge very quickly. For many gadgets, it comes down to product specs and price/performance comparison with others in the category. The early reviewers influence other buyers and ratings quickly reach a settling state. On the other hand, local products & services are very "touchy/feely" and experience tends to differ from person to person. Even a business with 50 reviews may not offer sufficient insight and trust for a prospective buyer to make a decision. This adds to the inability to make a purchasing decision about a local product/service.
Buried Reviews (sort of) - Despite being highly fragmented, local products are services are still the most discussed category amongst consumers. Whether in newsgroups, informal conversations, tweets or blogs, they still dominate the discussion in our daily lives. Many small businesses are rarely online. They may have a website, but between their operational challenges and limited budget, they find it extremely hard to build their real online presence. The online reputation of a small business is essential to influencing and attracting new customers. Small businesses need to work on moving the informal discussions in newsgroups, tweets, blogs and other online forums to formal review mechanisms, so they can be tracked and used as influencers in a consumer decision process.
I'm excited to announce that BooRah is now part of Intuit. Intuit has exceptional products, loyal customers, and, is highly focused on customer experience/satisfaction. I'm thrilled that we’ll be applying our technology to help
local business owners stay on top of and improve their online
reputations!
It has been a very rewarding experience over the past 3 years since I started BooRah and many thanks to all my trusted friends and well-wishers.