Phone Apps: Present & Future

I've been thinking this week about the big tech news last week: Hulu Desktop, Bing, & Palm Pre. Patrick Feeney has a summary & well-thought perspective in his blog. I'd like to focus on the Palm Pre/IPhone part of last week's news.

Full disclosure: I don't have an IPhone, or even a Blackberry. In fact, I don't leave my phone on much. So I've only seen others use their IPhones.

I was talking with my wife about the Pre this weekend. She was a *big* fan of the Palm Pilot, which was wonderful for her to use, but a nightmare for me to support as I'm the Help Desk of our household. She was intrigued about the Pre, and our conversation hinged on the number of Apps that the Pre has vs the IPhone.

The idea of thousands of Apps out there for the IPhone is overwhelming for me (even more so when I read that there are currently more than 48,000 of them for the IPhone alone!). I hear of users who spend time checking out apps: they try one out for a few days or a week, then delete them. When I think that the Pre actually has a lot *fewer* apps out there, that actually sounds like a good thing. Do I want to pick from Apps out there that most people have downloaded, then deleted? Doesn't that just waste my time? Sometimes, too many choices can be a bad thing.

Michael Learmonth has a great post in Advertising Age on Apps. Among other things, he mentions that there's a facet of this that I'd never considered: Apps are not easily patched after release. I work at an e-commerce company, and patching code after a build is always challenging.

Given the constraints of limited patching & single release development, I wonder how App technology will change. Will vendors co-brand their products to create their own brand? Will marketers share the press with their development partners? How will Google's Android factor in vs. Pre & IPhone development?

Note: To keep from running afoul of Google, I'm adding this note below:
Portions of this page are reproduced from work created and shared by Google and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution License.

Extending Twitter

I've been thinking about Twitter even more since our class last week. When I get a few minutes this week, I'll have IT install TweetDeck on my laptop (I am not a "developer" so I am being saved from myself by the IT Gods).

My employer is actively using Twitter to address customer service issues, market, and improve our image (I can't get into details on some cool things we are doing). All the noise about Twitter got me thinking about the value of such a tool for corporate espionage.

I'm not advocating this. I'm wondering if Twitter will make it easier for the competition to sniff out new developments at other firms. Internally, what about people using Tweets as an electronic water cooler, chatting about work to whoever will listen?

It seems that efforts such as this will be high cost, low yield. Who to watch? Which tweets matter? Are people really foolish enough to Tweet w/o thought after Ketchum VP James Andrews' mea culpa Tweet in January? I've been hearing more office gossip lately; I don't expect that this stuff will show up online, whether Facebook, Twitter, or somewhere else.

In terms of corporate espionage, here's a recent story that is relatively low tech. What if someone hacks your email/Twitter account? The scenario is the same; the technology is just a little different.

Campaign Success Metrics

I was talking with a friend of mine last week. She told the tale of a project that just wrapped up which allowed placement of a sponsored product on the company's search results page. During the project, there was a debate about measurement from two camps: old school web and what I'll call pragmatists.

The old school web folks argued that knowing clicks & impressions was enough to demonstrate the success of a custome's ad purchase. Afterall, they argued, these are the metrics in the sales contract. The pragmatists argued that those measures are great, but have become nearly irrelevant without a direct link to conversion. They argued that the multivariate analysis needed to demonstrate an ad's success would be much more time-intensive than cost-effective. Moreover, customers wouldn't "buy" such a methodology.

I'm with the pragmatists. I don't find it compelling how many people saw and clicked on my ads. What I really want to know is the whole funnel, down to conversion [read: purchase]. I want my ad dollars tied to as much real data as possible. And if a company, like my friend's, approached me with a pitch for sponsored results, I'd be interested. If they told me that they were not able to measure conversion for previous customers, or for my own campaign, I'd turn them down (unless, of course, they were Google).

I was thinking about this when I read this article in Advertising Age. There are times when I can't/don't expect to measure conversion. Some of my campaigns may be a "success" if we increased brand awareness or improved brand perception. How do you set your goals for campaigns? Is there a component of each one which has a "softer", less measurable component reserved for brand awareness/perception? Is it reasonable to expect more?

Which 50%

My blog subject this week is my team’s work on the Google Online Marketing Challenge. We’re working hard to figure out which 50% of our paid search budget is meaningful, and which 50% is wasted. What I’m finding out through the project is that we’re learning what does *not* work more than what is working.

We know that our click through rates are low. Working for a web company, I know that these rates are low for most advertising, which softens some of the sting. We are seeing good impressions data, so we know we’re getting “looks”. The problem is that we were hoping for much more in the way of clicks. For the purpose of the assignment, clicks are our conversion measure. Given the constraints of time and web development money, this will work as a proxy for this project; if it were our business & these constraints were removed, we’d measure conversion differently.

Most of our keywords have a quality score of 7 or 8; we’ve wracked our brains to come up with additional variety. Is a 9 or a 10 attainable? As I alluded to above, if we could customize our landing pages and make a few other changes, we might earn a higher score. We’ve also pushed out as many different versions of ad copy that we can think of. We know which keywords get the most looks, and which ads have generated clicks. That leaves most of our initial list of keywords sitting “inactive” because they generated neither looks nor clicks. That is the easy part: these don’t work.

What we don’t know is how much we’re missing: what are our potential customers searching for before they find us. This is what everyone struggles with, and it means *at least* that we don’t know our customers as well as we should. Sure, we’ve interviewed some of them, and we know which search terms they use when they are on our site. But we cannot say which things our potential customers are looking for. Yet.

We’re working to read the things our customers read online, to get an idea of what other content and/or search terms they might see. We hope that will provide us with some new keywords and/or ad text in the last week & a half. We might also determine that some of the sites we think prospects view are not showing Google AdWords. If that is the case, it’ll be great information to pass along to our business partner.

We don’t want to tell our business partner about the 50% that doesn’t work. The way things are going, that might be as far as we get. The saving grace is that the money here was Google’s, and they have plenty of that.

Behavioral Exchanges, like BlueKai

There is a lot of talk about monetizing traffic, and smarter/more targeted ads. BlueKai is one of a handful of aggregators doing just that. There are others, like eXelate Media and Datran Media; I'll focus on BlueKai because I saw it first (and I like the logo).



Basically, BlueKai & their competition drop a cookie on your PC when you visit one of their partner sites. No big deal--just about everyone does. What they do with the cookie is leverage it to see what you're searching for. Okay, still not a big deal. We learned about the invisible pixel call that Google Analytics & other Web Analytics vendors use this week in class.

What makes these firms different is that they know you're searching in a narrow vertical or two. Let's say you go to Kayak & search for a trip to Vegas. They drop the BlueKai cookie, which knows you're in the market for a trip to Vegas. You may be shown an ad for Vegas travel on another BlueKai partner site. (Full disclosure: I work for an online travel company which is a competitor of Kayak. You'll note I've not hyperlinked either Kayak, nor my employer.)

How does it work? There is an auction where partners on the network bid on segments of aggregated data. Upon winning the auction, they get the opportunity to display relevant ads to the users in that group for a period of time.

The data expires, so they're not trying to sell you a hotel in Detroit b/c you bought tickets to Super Bowl 40 in 2006. And BlueKai doesn't sell any PII data, so privacy advocates can relax--a little. (personally, I'm more freaked out by what Axciom does than BlueKai, but that is another blog...)

Oh, and another thing. BlueKai has an idea or two about how to get around your reticence about participating.

1. They'll show you the categories of data they collect.
2. They allow you to selectively opt out (or in bulk, of course).
3. They appeal to your altruistic side and offer to donate a portion of the advertising revenue for your "profile" to one of several charities.

I think it is brilliant. The ads know what I'm looking for, and show me relevant content. I can opt out selectively, if I want. If/when they become ubiquitous, I may want to opt out.

And about the altruistic side, the charity beneficiary of my advertising? That was an easy call. I'm participating in the 5 Day Food & Water Challenge this week. Did you know:

• every 5 seconds, a child dies from hunger-related causes
• another child dies every 15 seconds from lack of clean water to drink

I have three kids, so donating the proceeds from my BlueKai profile was a no-brainer: Action Against Hunger. Hell, I might even put them on my charity giving list this year.

P.S. If you're looking for a few articles on the subject, here are a few:
Advertising Age
NY Times
Wikipedia

Corporate Blogging: Real Monetary Value?

Blogging is the new black, the New Media (replacing the old guard, newspapers), and now so mainstream that I've begun to do it. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse must be right around the corner!

Is there more than mere vanity involved here? Is there a value proposition with real *value* in it, other than leveraging this as an electronic soapbox in the village square? Are people other than editorial writers able to use this media to generate earnings? Do editorial writers even make money through this media?

I took a look around to see which companies were using blogs with some fanfare. This article celebrates "great" company blogs. And some of these are pretty slick, from a design perspective. They're visually appealing. But is their content compelling? Does it push a consumer to make an actual purchase? I'm skeptical. Another article touts 9 blogs that are fun to read. Okaayyy. I've never heard of any of these companies; when I check, they're pretty small. Are blogs only for the small-mid sized companies?

Socialtext has a handy list of Fortune 500 companies with blogs here. I don't think that Wal-Mart's primary demographic are big into reading blog postings; maybe they're trying to broaden their customer base. For them, perhaps it is a PR play--they don't *need* the blog to generate sales. Best Buy is working the support angle in their blog; again, the play seems to be customer loyalty. Boeing & GM seem to target people who love the industry, as a way to stay informed about news, new products, etc. That, too, is fine.

But what about providing any of the things John Caples suggested in "How to Make Your Advertising Make Money?"

• These blogs can get attention--to those who know they are there. In that respect, the audience is self-selecting.
  
• Holding attention works along the same lines.
  
• Creating desire? Travel blogs do a good job of this, b/c their pictures reach viewers. Financial blogs? I just can't get excited about checking/savings accounts, or even Roth IRAs. Even if Sheryl Crow wrote a song about them and sang it personally to me. Well, that'd work quite well, actually.
• Making it believeable/a bargain. I can easily research whether it is a bargain, and after a while, build trust (or not) of the blog/blogger. Again, though, it is self-selecting. And I have yet to see a firm's blog discuss a competitor's products.
• Make it easy to buy. Blogs work well here: easy links to merchandise are a sure gig. Here, self-selection is an advantage: these are a pre-qualified group of potential customers.
• Give a reason to buy now. The urgency is hard to put in a blog. Time-sensitive deals are lost if viewers don't see the offer prior to expiry.

I think blogs are fine and well for purposes of competitive parity, PR spin, and some element of "geek appeal". I have not seen compelling evidence that they drive more than occasional purchases. As long as we have that expectation, blogs are fine for what they are. Let's not expect that they're a meaningful part of the business plan for a business not fresh out of someone's garage or basement.