While doing my front-end work I’m very keen on using simple markup techniques to solve problems before relying on the likes of Javascript. Don’t get me wrong, I gargle MooTools and jQuery every morning to keep my web breath fresh like most developers, but I find it endlessly attractive when an elegant solution can be flossed out using only pure HTML and CSS.

Finding a solution is never a problem, but choosing a solution is often a challenge. Selecting one technique among the wealth of available methods that strikes a balance between the simplicity and elegance of pure HTML and CSS, the flexibility and mysticality of Javascript, and the raw power of PHP is often a feat in and of itself. When I can’t go with pure HTML and CSS, I do my best to at least heavily rely on their available features before turning to the usual Javascript frameworks for support.

The Good

I was recently working on a GUI that included user avatar pictures. While the platform itself did not require the user to have a photo, the interface design looked significantly better when there was a graphic present. For this reason I decided to use default avatar images. The idea was to apply the user’s provided image URL only if it was valid and alternatively resort to the default image if it wasn’t. I wanted to avoid doing any logic-based code if I could, though most of the pure markup techniques I was already aware of — such as using background images — were problematic in one way or other.

That’s when I reacquainted myself with the HTML DOM objects. Specifically the HTML DOM event onerror. The W3Schools website defines onerror as an event that “is triggered when an error occurs loading a document or an image”. This seemed to be the perfect solution to my problem.

In my code, the avatar element is initially loaded with the appropriate default image. The user is given the chance to add in their own image by inputting a URL into a text field. Once the user has submitted their new image URL, the avatar element’s src attribute would be updated via Javascript. Using the onerror attribute I was able to avoid writing extra logic into the Javascript code itself.

Here’s the final markup:

<img id="avatar" class="avatar" src="avatar.jpg" alt="avatar" onerror="$( this ).attr( 'src', 'avatar.jpg' );" />

This particular project was already using jQuery so it made sense to take advantage of the .attr() method. For those of you not using jQuery, here’s a native Javascript version of the same markup:

<img id="avatar" class="avatar" src="avatar.jpg" alt="avatar" onerror="this.src = 'avatar.jpg';" />

This worked great and helped me to minimize the amount of logic in my Javascript code. It also allowed me to feel confident that the interface design wouldn’t end up looking broken in the case that the user entered an invalid image URL. On the surface, ‘onerror’ seemed to be a clever and useful tool from the HTML DOM events family.

The Bad

Web-standards, semantic markup, security and privacy, and cross-browser-compatibility are very important issues for me to consider in my daily work. When I’ve finally selected and implemented a solution to a given problem the job is typically far from over. I must then address the above issues and make sure the solution I’ve chosen isn’t sleazy, sneaky, or downright evil. I can’t recall the vast number of times the word ‘deprecated’ has stopped a seemingly good solution in its tracks and forced me to start from square one.

I was not as familiar with the onerror event as I am with the many other HTML DOM events and I began researching it to see if it was appropriate for use in a live project. What I found out – via this article – did not deter me from using onerror in this particular context, though it was quite alarming and definitely worth mentioning. It turns out that in a webpage where users are able to post (or otherwise add) their own content the onerror event can be used in a very exploitative way to hijack the webpage by using the following code:

<img src="not-a-valid-image-url" onerror="window.location.href = 'http://hijackers-domain.xxx';" />

The above code illustrates how a hijacker can force the page to redirect to a new location using the onerror event and how the hijacker can be sure this will happen by giving a invalid image URL in the element’s src attribute. Now imagine posting this on someone’s blog as a comment (or somehow otherwise injecting it into their webpage’s markup). It could do some serious damage and may be hard to locate if the webpage owner isn’t aware of what to look for and where. This can be prevented if you are implementing precautinoary security measures such as form validation and input cleansing (ie. the stripping of markup and tags upon submission).

The Ugly

Learning about the potential exploits and malicious uses of code that was originally created with good intent is very important to me, and sometimes the results I find mean ditching the solution and pursuing an alternative technique. While there are exploitative uses of the onerror event, they weren’t going to prevent me from using it in this context. However, I did uncover some more information that made this event a bit trickier to use than I’d initially thought.

I ran a test through the W3C Markup Validation Service and found out that the onerror event was not a valid attribute for an HTML element (nor an XHTML element). So while the code worked, it was not up to par with today’s standards and web practices.

Unfortunately the inelegance of using the onerror attribute doesn’t stop with it’s inability to validate. I’m very strict about keeping structure, style, and functionality as separate as possible. This means no inline CSS, and only using inline Javascript when it’s absolutely necessary. My original solution not only breaks the W3C’s validator and web-standards, but it also breaks my own personal rules about front-end code organization.

The interesting thing here is that on the W3Schools’ page onerror is listed as a valid HTML DOM event, but not an attribute. Which means I should be able to use it as long as it’s not added to an element inline. I did a bit more research and – inspired by this article – opted to use Javascript to add the onerror event to the required elements once the DOM had been fully read. Here’s the code:

$( document ).ready( function () { $( '.avatar' ).error( function () { this.src = '/img/avatar.jpg'; } ); } );

And here is the same code beautified (broken apart) so you can clearly see the logic involved:

$( document ).ready
(
    function ()
    {
        $( '.avatar' ).error
        (
            function ()
            {
                this.src = '/img/avatar.jpg';
            }
        );
    }
);

As you can see, the code waits for the DOM to be ready before binding a function to the onerror event of any element with the ‘avatar’ class. This bound function changes the said element’s src attribute if the onerror event is triggered. Keep in mind that the above example relies on the .ready() and .error() methods from the jQuery framework.

For a Few Solutions More

For any problem there are always alternative solutions to be found, one of which is using pure CSS to apply a background image to the avatar element itself. There are three reasons I prefer not to use this method:

1. Some browsers will automatically show a small icon to symbolize that the image has not been loaded, which will appear above our background image and probably look pretty slimy.
2. Some browsers will automatically display the alt attribute text (which is a required attribute for valid XHTML markup these days) which will similarly appear above our background image and look even more disgruntled.
3. CSS style rules for the avatar element in my project specify only a width value, allowing the height of the image to be variable, based on the actual size of the image. I do this so as not to distort the aspect ratio of the original image, yet allow the user to choose an image that is larger (or smaller) than the allowed avatar space. When a valid src value is not provided and no height is declared there is very good chance most browsers will not show the entire background image.

Given these three reasons, I found it most helpful to go the onerror route and believe I chosen a particularly applicable solution that satisifes my needs as well as my principles.

Working Example

W3Schools Tryit Editor v1.4

Resources

onerror (HTML attribute)
Check if an image is loaded (no errors) in Javascript

Online newspapers struggle to stay afloat

Yesterday The Guardian reported that The Times, which moved to a full-scale paywall system last month, “lost almost 90% of its online readership compared to February since making registration mandatory in June.” Though The Times is making new revenue from the folks who’ve opted to subscribe, that’s still a pretty hefty hit (or rather, loss of hits) for one of the world’s premier newspapers. With such a dive in daily readership, it seems unlikely that The Times would be able to continue charging advertisers the same prices for their ad inventory when these advertisers could easily shift to un-walled sites that can offer more impressions.

In a world where most consumers, especially the so-called digital natives, have been trained to expect free content from even the highest tier publishers, how can newspapers continue to offer their high-value content for free (or at least for prices the public will agree to pay)?

As with print newspapers, the costs that are not covered by online subscriptions are to be made up by (digital) advertising revenues.  But Advertising Age reports that, though newspapers still fetch higher prices for ad space than other online publishers, their share of the web’s overall digital advertising spending is shrinking year after year — and this in spite of the fact that overall spending on digital advertising continues to rise.

So what can newspapers do to help increase ad revenues and compete with the aggregation websites and “content farms” that are threaten to win their audiences?

There are many ways that newspapers are attempting to up the ante to compete with these kinds of sites, sometimes including partnering with them for local news coverage. But are newspapers exercising the right muscles when it comes to getting the right prices for their ad inventory? (FYI: In the ad industry both on- and offline, the price of an ad space is calculated in CPMs, or cost per thousand impressions.) The article from AdAge (linked above) suggests that that competing news sites are winning advertisers by taking advantage of the newest digital ad technologies.

“Advertisers are warming to competing news sites because they’re finding a better combination of scale and ad technologies like targeting,” warns Advertising Age. “When Michael Hayes, a former newspaper pro who’s now a digital-media buyer as executive VP and managing director at Initiative, wants to target an auto dealer group’s ads to local consumers actively shopping for cars, he usually goes to big, technologically advanced players.”

To stay in the game, it seems that in addition to exploring new ways of reporting and distributing news, newspapers will need to step up to the digital advertising plate and begin to match their opponents’ interest in cutting-edge digital marketing technologies. With companies like sociomantic offering the possibility to deliver the most relevant ads to best-matched potential buyers, newspapers and other online publishers can benefit from the higher CPMs they can charge for offering a higher-quality audience, and advertisers can benefit from reaching audience members are are more likely to convert.

Which side of the audience line do you fall on?

Are you willing to pay a subscription fee to access high-quality content, or would you rather that online newspapers start showing you ads that are more specifically tailored to your lifestyle and interests? It may take a combination of the two to save the players in this struggling industry, but only time will tell.

Sarah Joy originally hails from Cowtown, USA (perhaps better known by it’s proper alias, Fort Worth, Texas), where you might have found her digging for old records and books, sampling greasy-food diners in tiny rural towns across the state, collecting stories from strange characters she encountered, or talking on her front porch swing with her awesome brothers and sisters. She graduated with a degree in communication from Boston College in Massachusetts, where she studied journalism, digital media, and cyberlaw. She also studied humanistic informatics for a spell at the University of Bergen in Norway, when she first had the chance to take a few weekend trips to Berlin. Her passion for the ever-changing world of Web 2.0 and her social media marketing experience are sure to bring new shades of color to sociomantic labs’ communications.

“I am excited to work in an intimate start-up environment in such a dynamic industry,” says Sarah Joy of her new position. “The face of digital marketing is changing not only day to day, but moment to moment, so I feel lucky to have the opportunity to represent a company who’s finger is so firmly on the pulse of these changes. I look forward to fielding questions and offering comments within the industry on behalf of sociomantic labs.” You’ll find her tweeting about the company and the beauty of social as @sociomantic.

The Fun Facts:

Outside of the labs, Sarah Joy’s interests lie in post punk and electronic dance music, cyberlaw, creative commons, and consumer technology. Back in Boston she was the host of a weekly radio show called Persuasion on FM station WZBC, where she spun deep house tunes into the night as Thursday turned Friday in New England. She was also a resident DJ for a monthly clubnight called Secrets at Boston’s most popular dance club, Good Life. Outside the office, you’ll find her lolling in the sunshine in one of Berlin’s many tree-strewn parks, bouncing her head to deep beats a local record store, or chuckling at New Yorker cartoons in one of the cities myriad cozy cafes. On the social web, you’ll find her tweeting lots of links about music, Apple, technology, writing, and her love affair with living in Berlin.

Welcome aboard, Sarah Joy!

"Team Play" by Prashant Menon

When we started our company 1.5 years ago, we decided that we wanted to have an impact, not just survive. True, in the very first days, it was impossible not to be taken by the constant pressure of looking for our next income. But after some time, after we had the chance to find our first truly outstanding team member, David – who gave us the right push at the right time — our team began to grow quickly. In our short history, these are a few of the facts we have to be proud of:

• No venture capital or investment money since day one means we’ve run the company “Our Way”
• Positive cash flow from the very beginning
• Team approaching 15 members after 1.5 years of bootstrapping
• Expecting to hit 1million in revenues by the end of year two (according to U.S. GAAP)
• Getting employee stock options program in place by the end of year two

We’re proud of the foundation that we’ve built. We own our own distributed hashtable technology and our own tracking technology – all built from scratch and capable of dealing with billions of requests a day on a single machine. Our advertising technology is capable of handling any sort of targeting methodology on the market, be it contextual, retargeting, behavioral, or network pattern based – just to name a few. We’re also on the way to closing the gap between the classical tracking technologies and the CRM sector via Customer Network Analysis. I know that we will truly make a difference in the coming years, and things are getting even crazier (in a good way) as we’re growing.

While spending the last 1.5 years on building all the stuff from scratch, we’ve realized that there isn’t much difference anymore what all the big guys are up to in tech business. Now we’re on our way to getting the sales business in place, doubling the size of our team, and moving to a bigger office to accommodate our new talent. All of this without any Angel or VC investors, but always inspired by the zanox founders, who did an unbelievable job. (Guys, you truly deserve it!) I think all of this makes it clear that we’re on our way to challenge the market — we can provide unbelievable technology and an unbeatable price. We are prepared to take on all the players in our league, even the big guys like Google.

Yes, we’re trying to make things different. We’re not in it for the gold rush. We believe in our people, and in not burning money on what the zanox guys called “castles in the sky.” Of course we’re willing to “pay back” – but we want the payback to go to our team! Our team is what makes the difference in a market that is challenging and constantly changing.

Most things we do in life are about change and motivation. While the soccer world championships were taking place back in 2006, everyone in Germany came to see how important this fact is. Jurgen Klinsmann (the former German coach) introduced new ways of working with his players on a daily basis. He started to build a new foundation for a different sort of soccer play. You could see this even in the 2010 World Cup, watching the German team beat Argentina and England with soccer that might be the best seen for ages. We’ve seen a new German team: inspiring and multicultural, open minded and respectful. This is what I want  our team to look like, too.

I’ve learned that success in life is never easy, and I know what it means to live on less than €25 a week. You have to fight daily, and in the end you have to pay back what you owe to your team. I know the day will come when we will be pleased to see our people prospering and see the trust they invested in us, the founders, paying off. There is nothing more in life than friendship, especially bonds that are built through hard work together. The people who helped us build up the company are at the heart of it — they make the difference.

Looking at our numbers, I don’t know where we’re heading precisely, but I know that everybody is giving his best. And how can we help them to do it? As a founder, you have to be the guy showing commitment on a daily basis. You have to be the leader in every way – every move, every word, must be an example. But as we expect a lot from every team member, we’re also trying to give them maximum freedom back. For example, we don’t have fixed working hours at our office. Instead, we allow team members to work the hours in which they will do the best work — taking care of the team is taking care of the company. Trust is also an important thing – we try hard to empower our people by keeping all communication lines open and enabling decision making without a complex hierarchy. In the end, trust and motivation will make the team strong and ultimately successful.

Our working culture is still developing, but I hope that sooner than later we will have an outstanding office culture. I’m thinking of the Virgin Group or Google, who changed the world’s landscape so much — I’d like our company to be a part of this wave of change in corporate culture. I truly can say that the vision we’re following is to make the world a little better. There are special challenges associated with working with an international team, but I hope the benefits of this arrangement return as much to everyone in the team as it does to me.

You have to believe, to be trustful, to be thankful, and it will pay off!

Diversity - yum! "Slurpees," a mosaic by Tom Magliery

Many new visitors to our office here in Berlin are a bit surprised when they first walk in and discover such a diverse group tapping away at multilingual keyboards.

Though we’re located in the German capital, we are an English-speaking office with team members from all over the globe. It was not by chance that the folks that stumbled into our interviews happened to be from far-reaching corners — it was our deliberate choice to be an international company from day one.

So why did we decide to do things this way? Why, pray tell, would we subject ourselves to the myriad troubles that can arise from bureaucratic tangle of attaining work and residence visas for our non-EU employees? We thought it might be nice to take a minute to explain what’s so awesome about running a global startup, and why we are committed to keeping our team global.

Fertile ground for innovation

We are a high-tech company operating in a fast-paced market. You have to innovate to stay on top. No surprise there.

So what can founders like us do to build a team that is most likely to think big and innovate cutting edge  technologies? Every management textbook will tell you that high-quality heterogeneity is key to assembling an innovative team, and we took this anthem to heart. People who grow up in different cultures naturally have very different perspectives on life — our cultures help define our ideas about everything from the way beer should taste to the way a country should be run. We believe that by bringing many disparate perspectives together, we enable our company see further and wider than we would otherwise — our diversity helps to broaden our company vision and helps to push our thinking outside of the box.

The benefit of this multifaceted approach is evident in every product planning meeting, when each team member brings new and different ideas to the table. By working together to reconcile the best parts of those ideas, we can consolidate them into something awesome.

International customer base

Generally speaking, cutting edge technologies are currently being adopted faster in the U.S., so America will be a key market for our high-tech services. Needless to say, by starting as an global team, we will be more prepared to send our satellites out across the world, including to the U.S.

By starting international, we are subtlely prepping for the day when we open the first sociomantic labs office in Silicon Valley, or London, or Tokyo. Yes, we’re thinking big.

Now seeking: Adventurers

The willingness and audacity to move to a foreign city in a foreign country on the other side of the world says a lot about the person who chooses to do so. Though we hate to overgeneralize, it’s seems safe to say that someone who’s willing to hop continents is someone who has an innate sense of adventure, and it also seems likely that this sort tend to be open minded, ambitious, cosmopolitan, and highly adaptive. Although there are certainly many people here in Berlin with these very characteristics, by hiring an international team we help ourselves to a pool of applicants who are already advertising these characteristics by their lifestyle choices.

Anyone who’s started a company before can tell you that startup life is fast and furious. To keep up, we need team members who are not only willing to jump on the ride, but excited about it. So far, keeping our team international has helped us to ensure that we’ve got team members that are ready for any sharp turn on the road ahead. (And as we’ve said before, for a bootstrapped startup, those turns can come at any moment!)

Plain & Simple

I think our managing director Tom Nicolai best summed up the final reason why we chose to run a global startup. When I asked him about his perspective on our strategy, his first answer was plain as day:

“Fun!”

Of course. It’s interesting and mind-expanding and inspiring and just plain FUN to get to know people from around the world, much less work with them. And if we’re having fun doing our jobs every day, in part thanks to the people around us, we’ll humbly count ourselves as some of the luckiest folks in the biz and do our jobs even better.

Think you have a one-of-a-kind perspective to bring to our diverse team? Check out our career openings and get in touch if your CV’s a match.

As you may have noticed, we’ve just finished implementing our sassy new website design! While we really hope you like the design (thanks, Frank Müller), more than anything we hope you take some time to look through all the new information we’ve added to the site. These are the biggest changes:

Solutions: Customer network analysis

Customer network analysis is a still-young addition to the field of customer intelligence, so we did our best to give a thorough introduction to the topic. The best place to start is with the presentation, then if you need more info, you can read about how CNA can be applied for:

• sCRM
• Product Marketing
• Market Research, and
• Social Media Marketing.

Solutions: Real-time social targeting

This is a totally new section of our website highlighting an new solution that we offer in the field of online ad targeting that can increase revenues for advertisers, publishers, and ad networks. Take a moment to learn about this cutting edge methodology for digital marketing, and let us know if you have any questions that we could clarify personally or in future blog posts.

and last but not least…

CAREERS

We’re hiring! Four new positions were posted today:

• Software Developer
• Trainee Web Developer — User Interaction
• Trainee Web Services Developer
• Web Developer — User Interaction

Our company is growing fast and we need more hands on deck to help support our development. If you or someone you know is looking to join a fun-loving, hard-working (and totally awesome)  team, our inboxes are waiting! You can get to know our company culture and team spirit a little bit by perusing “The Labs” blog channel. Though we’re situated in the heart of Berlin, we’re an English-speaking team from all over the globe, so if you’re a qualified programmer with a solid knowledge of the English language, send your CV our way.

And even if these positions aren’t a perfect fit for you, we’d love it if you’d share the openings with your personal network to help us spread the word.

In D, a class or struct can provide foreach iteration over its instances by implementing a special method named opApply(). This is an extremely useful feature; however, understanding the semantics of opApply is pretty hard if you are new to it. Unfortunately, the description on the Digital Mars page is too brief to get the point, while the famous book Learn to Tango with D announces it, but then completely lacks the section.

But the use of opApply() can be explained as a recipe, and here it goes. In the examples we will use a struct; however, opApply()ing a class is done exactly the same way.

1. Write a simple class or struct and consider the number and types of the iteration variables. It is possible to iterate over any number — at least one — of variables of arbitrary types. For example, we want to iterate over one int value:

	foreach (x; instance)
	{
		// x is of type int; instance is of the type of our struct
	}

2. Add a method named opApply() to the class/struct and follow these rules:

a. The return type of opApply() is int.

b. opApply() takes exactly one argument. That argument is a delegate and must conform to this:

b1. The return value of the delegate is int.

b2. The argument list of the delegate corresponds to the iteration variables where all arguments must have the ref attribute.

For the foreach iteration example above, the opApply() function declaration would be:

	int opApply ( int delegate ( ref int x ) dg );

Again, the return type of opApply() and the delegate (named dg in the example) is mandatory while the argument list of the delegate — one argument x of type opApply() — corresponds to the iteration variables. Note that the delegate arguments don’t really need identifiers, hence

	int opApply ( int delegate ( ref int ) dg );

is equivalent. The x is merely decoration to make the code more clear.

3. Make opApply() behave as mandated by D. That means:

a. For each foreach iteration cycle invoke the delegate. The arguments passed to it appear as the iteration variables in the foreach loop body.

b. Store the return value of the delegate in a local variable.

b1. DO NOT think about the meaning of that value.

b2. DO NOT change that value. Just memorize it.

c. If the return value of the delegate is equal to 0, you may invoke the delegate again. Otherwise, if the value differs from 0, the delegate must not be invoked any more.

d. opApply() returns the return value of the delegate or 0 if the delegate was not invoked.

That’s it! Completing our example:

	module iterator;

	/*
	 * #1: struct providing iteration
	 */

	struct MyIterator
	{
		int[] arr = [2, 5, 6];

		/*
		 * #2: opApply() method with return type and delegate argument
		 * as mandated
		 */

		int opApply ( int delegate ( ref x ) dg )
		{

			/*
			 * #3b: Local variable "result" to store the return
			 * value of the delegate
			 */

			int result = 0;

			foreach (ref x; this.arr)
			{
				/*
				 * #3a: Invoke delegate, store return value.
				 */

				result = dg(x);

				/*
				 * #3c: Continue only if result == 0, otherwise
				 * break.
				 */

				if (result) break;
			}

			/*
			 * #3d: Return delegate return value or 0 if the
			 * delegate has not been invoked-
			 */

			return result;
		}
	}

	void main ( )
	{
		MyIterator instance;

		foreach (x; instance)
		{
			// x iterates over [2, 5, 6]
		}

		/*
		 * Adding the ref attribute to an iteration variable provides
		 * write access to the actual argument passed to the delegate
		 * on invocation by opApply(). We use that to change the "arr"
		 * array property of "MyIterator".
		 */

		foreach (ref x; instance)
		{

			// x iterates over [2, 5, 6]

			if (x == 5)
			{
				x = 3;
			}
		}

		foreach (x; instance)
		{
			// x now iterates over [2, 3, 6]
		}
	}

The opApply() method does not necessarily have to contain loop, although it will in most cases. A struct or class can iterate over its own instance:

	class MyIteratorClass
	{
		int opApply ( int delegate ( ref int x ) dg )
		{
			// do some iteration
		}

		void iterate ( )
		{
			/*
			 * Iterate using this.opApply().
			 */

			foreach (x; this)
			{
				// ...
			}
		}
	}

	class MyIteratorStruct
	{
		int opApply ( int delegate ( ref int x ) dg )
		{
			// do some iteration
		}

		void iterate ( )
		{
			/*
			 * Iterate using this.opApply(). In contrast to
			 * classes, in structs 'this' is a pointer to this
			 * instance.
			 */

			foreach (x; *this)
			{
				// ...
			}
		}
	}

Iteration can be forwarded by passing through the delegate:

	struct MyIterator
	{
		int opApply ( int delegate ( ref int x ) dg )
		{
			// do some iteration
		}
	}

	struct YourIterator
	{
		MyIterator my_iter;

		int opApply ( int delegate ( ref int x ) dg )
		{
			/*
			 * Forward iteration to my_iter property.
			 */

			return this.my_iter.opApply(dg);
		}
	}

Once per year, more than twenty representatives from the Interactive Advertising Bureau gather from all over Europe to share their views on general market development – quite a sound reason for 300+ players from all parts of the digital marketing industry to jump on a plane to this networking opportunity. And of course it doesn’t hurt that this year’s Interact took place in sunny Barcelona. The stage was set in the beautiful Casa Llotja de Mar, the corporate headquarters of the Official Chamber of Commerce of Barcelona.

What could be clearly identified as the hot topic on everyone’s mind was the big worry about how to maintain high gross profits and growth in the online branding world amidst the “threats” of direct-response-addicted advertisers and game-changing volumes of social media traffic. The question tickling everyone’s brains: how to sell branding when advertisers have been told for years to watch their CTRs (and increasingly tougher online marketing metrics, like CPA)?

Randall Rothenberg (President, IAB U.S.) described this backfire best by speaking of the “tyranny of the click.” Media agencies, sales houses, and inventory owners seem to go round in circles talking about new KPIs and technologies to better their value proposition; meanwhile, advertisers develop a life of their own, bypassing the existing structures.  Not for nothing did Patrick Rona (President, European Operations Tribal DBB) preach caution when pointing to Unilever, who took their board to the Valley looking for new ways to reach out to customers.

Most impressive was Jef Vandercuys (Digital Marketing Head, Anheuser-Busch InBev), who managed to become one of the biggest global budget owners leaving TV with a pitiful 20% of the Anheuser-Busch marketing budget for this year — an enormous plunge from the 70% they spent on TV  in the previous year. You could feel that this guy was already far ahead of most of the people in the room: focusing on customer dialogue in social media, managing conversations via individual high-tech dashboards. His interest in social media was not because he was impressed by the massive traffic in that area, but because of his understanding that he reaches his target group at that exact point of time when they decide on their favorite brand of beer for the rest of their lives. For Vandercuys, large-scale branding campaigns increasingly become the trigger for the Anheuser-Busch social media activities.

This attitude goes hand-in-hand with the absolute shocker presentation of the conference: Darin Brown (President Global Accounts and Innovation, Razorfish) dared to look two steps ahead by proclaiming that the concept of campaigning is going to become increasingly outdated. Apart from individual marketing success stories (e.g., Marmite and Evian, see below), he sees a strategic shift toward customer-centric marketing strategies  in which continuous, bilateral advertiser streams of content and information (called “brand narratives”) play the central role that has previously been played by individual campaigns.

So following that idea, who will be the future money makers in digital marketing? According to Brown, it’s going to be creative content providers and technology companies that provide services in the field of conversation analytics.

You could see the branding guys who paid close attention leaving with dropped jaws, having realized – after Jef and Darin’s decks – that time is not on their side.

We took it easy on them. So easy, in fact, that they beat us by a couple of points. But our sociomantic warriors played valiantly, bumping the ball to new heights as sunset fell over Berlin. All in all, a lovely summer’s eve spent in the company of some of Berlin’s coolest tech geeks. We’re already looking forward to the next battle.

Team sociomantic

New shirts

Tom brings the heat

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Labs FTW!

Thanks to everyone from sociomantic labs and servtag for making it a great night!

Last November, Libai and co-authors Eitan Muller and Renana Peres published “The Social Value of Word-of-Mouth Programs: Acceleration versus Acquisition.” As a company that uses social network analysis to provide businesses with intelligence about their customer influencers and other aspects of their customer networks, we found the implications of this research fascinating, so we wanted to give a brief overview of the research findings and what they imply for the application of customer network analysis.

WOM FTW? (or, ” Word of Mouth For the Win?”)

Word of mouth initiatives have long been a staple of the marketing diet, and in recent years so-called “influencer” targeting has become the go-to extension for the traditional WOM marketing models. Whether they’re labels as influentials, opinion leaders, or hubs, finding these influencers in a vast and complex network of customers is no small task; in light of the costs, managers often struggle to “achieve financial justification,” for this sort of marketing, though many are convinced of its benefits.

Prior to this paper, most of the research measuring the “social value” of influencers used soft metrics like message diffusion, conversation, or brand awareness; the monetary effects of WOM contagion have not been thoroughly defined in research. Libai and his partners are some of the first to attempt to answer the big question of ROI, to define the social value created by WOM in terms of customer equity. They define the impact of these WOM seeding programs based on the interaction of two factors: customer acquisition and customer acceleration (defined below).

Defining the Social Value of a Customer

In order to get the most accurate assessment of a customer’s potential WOM impact, the researchers define an individual’s “social value” based on the absence principle presented in the famous film “It’s a Wonderful Life”:

For those who might not have seen it, this classic story shows the effect on a town if one particular man had never been born (e.g., his wife is a never-married old maid). Libai et al. suggest that measuring a customer’s social value requires a similar method: measure the change in value over the entire customer network if this particular node were removed. To determine that impact, the researchers used “agent based models” (think Sims 3 for scientists) based on real-life social network structures.

So basically, based on this method, if Coca Cola’s marketing guy wants to determine how much social value I have within Coca Cola’s customer network, he’d make an “agent based model” of their customer network, then run a simulated WOM seeding program on the model, first WITH me in the network and then again WITHOUT me in the network. Then he’d determine the difference in how much money they’d make (for a given period of time) in each situation – that difference is my social value. It answers the question: how much are my connections worth to Coca Cola over the course of my time as a soda drinker?

If it isn’t already clear, this method of defining a customer’s social value has huge implications for companies trying to determine the value of their their WOM programs as well as social media marketing programs: finally, a method to determine which nodes (ahem, FOLKS) in their networks can have the biggest impact on their profitability, and just how big that impact can be.

Acquiring new customers, Accelerating adoption from would-be customers

There are two major ways that WOM campaigns can affect a product’s market share: acquisition and acceleration. Acquisition is how many new customers decide to adopt a product who would have otherwise adopted another brand or not adopted such a product at all without the WOM program. In the business world, time = money, so the sooner you a customer adopts your brand, the more time they have to spend money on your products – that’s the “acceleration” aspect. Acceleration is how much sooner people adopt a product due to the WOM program. Why does this matter? Adopting a product sooner gives a customer a higher lifetime value, so the sooner they adopt, the better! (For example, if I start buying Apple products at age 18, I am probably worth more to the company in the long run than if I start buying Apple for the first time at age 45).
The potential social value of a WOM program can then be determined in a similar manner — by comparing the “lifetime value” of the entire customer network with the program to the “lifetime value” of the network without the program (using agent-based models).

Sow your (marketing) seeds in fertile ground – but which ground is most fertile?

The WOM program type used in this study is what is commonly known as a seeding program, in which a company offers some sort of promotion (free product, discounts, service trials, etc.) to a “seed” group of people with the intention that these people will market for them via WOM. (Why? Previous studies have shown that customer loyalty is higher for customers acquired via “recommendation from a friend” than for those acquired via marketing).

One of the key questions surrounding seeding programs over the last decade has been whether or not it’s more effective for companies to seed via influencers or random people their customers networks. (This Fast Company article from 2008 gives a nice overview of the great influencer debate.) To investigate this question as well as the impact of competition on a program’s effectiveness, the researchers measured the (simulated) change in a brand’s customer equity in five different scenarios:

• no seeding program
• “random” seeding program without simultaneous competitor seeding program
• “random” seeding program with simultaneous competitor seeding program
• “influencer” seeding program without simultaneous competitor seeding program
• “influencer” seeding program with simultaneous competitor seeding program

The agent-based models were created based on 12 real-life social graphs from a variety of sources. The size of the seeding program (i.e., what percentage of the total network was chosen as “seeds” for a product) was determined based on industry standards, varying the size from 0.5% to 5% of the potential market. The “influencers” were defined as the top 10% of network with the most connections (highest “degree”), and the set percentage of “seeders” was chosen at random from this group. Conversely, for the “random seeding” program, the “seeders” were chosen at random from the entire network. Each of the five combinations of parameters listed above was run 20 times to combat the probability of an unlikely single run. These results were then averaged for each network to draw the final conclusions.

Research Results

At the end of it all, the research showed that the influencer seeding programs yielded higher customer equity gains in both the single brand and competitive scenarios, but  a competitive seeding program greatly reduced the overall effectiveness of a seeding campaign, whether the seeds were random or influential. Still, the results of the random programs were pretty good, so the decision about which program type to adopt depends on how much the company is willing to invest in discovering their influencers. Because it often requires complex, high-demand computing, customer network analysis can be time consuming and expensive, so some companies opt to let external vendors do their CNA –vendors like us.

One interesting point is that in a competitive scenario (e.g., when Pepsi and Coca Cola are both running simultaneous seeding programs), when the acquisition effect of the companies’ seeding programs is in essence “canceled” by the other program, BOTH companies can still benefit from the acceleration of their product in the market – getting customers sooner gives each of those customers a higher lifetime value, and therefore increases the lifetime value of the network overall.

The research offered in six other major results which we will summarize:

1. “The competitive program effect”: The social value of a seeding program is “considerably higher” when the firm faces a competitor than when they are the “sole player in the market.” This can be explained by the fact that in a market with no competition, everyone in the potential market will eventually adopt the available product/brand, so the gain is only from acceleration instead of a combination of acceleration and acquisition.
2. “The brand strength effect”: “Weaker” brands have more social value to gain from a WOM seeding program than “stronger” brands.
3. There is a threshold “seed size” for both influencer and random programs before the program actually decreases the social value of a company instead of increasing it. So more seeds does not necessarily equal a more effective program!
4. Influencer seeding programs reach that “threshold” much more quickly than random programs, so they reach their “peak” social value potential at a much smaller seed size.
5. While about 75% of a seeding program’s WOM potential can be achieved using a random seeder program, “targeting influentials can increase social value considerably” (p. 31).
6. The role of acceleration in increasing social value is more prominent in influencer seeding programs than in random seeding programs.

Why we care

One things that the research (self-admittedly) does not take into account is the cost of implementing these seeding programs. Each company would have to determine on a case-by-case basis what their social value gain would be less the costs of implementing that program, and “such calculations may demand network-specific analysis” for each company network and product.

Many companies have only just begun to realize the benefits of representing their customer networks for the purposes of customer network analysis. It’s a process that can be both complex and costly. For the companies who might not know where to begin this process, sociomantic labs may be a good place to start. We can take your existing customer names and put them into a network framework. And we can help you identify the influencers and analyze your network to determine the ideal WOM campaigns for your purpose, product, and people.

This fall, our front end customer network analysis SaaS will help companies help themselves to this sort of data and analysis. If you might interested in exploring for the closed beta of this service, please get in touch.

For a nice review, check out this presentation Libai gave at WOM UK conference in April: