Beauty is skin deep, Geekness is to the core…
Posted by Anthony James in All Archive, Technology
April 22, 2008 4:11 am
Designer: Erik De Nijs
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
The Ultimate in Mobile Technology
With a lap keyboard and knee speakers, these jeans are the ultimate in high-tech fashion. Just don’t hit Enter too hard… or fiddle with the joystick in public spaces! Thanks to The Next Great Thing (NGT) for this post.
Beauty is skin deep, Geekness is to the core…
Posted by Anthony James in All Archive, Technology
April 22, 2008 4:11 am
Fashion and technology have been dancing with each other for years now. Sadly, it’s not been the kind of dancing you see in movies where everyone seems to know when to pop-n-lock and bust out the serious Justin Timberlake moves, that eventually ends in a triumphant “tada!” with hands lifted in the air. No, sadly this dance looks more like Paris Hilton biting her toe nails while opening a jar of pickles with her iPhone. It makes no sense and is just wrong! Which brings me to this latest WTF moment by designer Erik De Nijs, Erik has stitched together this eye catching pair of “Beauty and the Geek” jeans. These “modern shaped trousers which is often worn by youngsters..” are the perfect solution for Googling quick exits while running from the fashion police. Ah, but look closely! Now as you jump over fences and dodge barking dogs, you can take your chase music with you. Built into the knees are a pair of crotch rocking speakers that really add that extra level of excitement while sticking it to the man. Around back you have the added convenience of a back pocket for your “mouse”(which will be your only friend at this point). And for you gamers, there is even a joystick controller located just behind the front zipper. Looking at the key arrangement I am oddly compelled to want to write “poop” over and over again.
Designer: Erik De Nijs
Beauty is skin deep, Geekness is to the core…
Posted by Anthony James in All Archive, Technology
April 22, 2008 4:11 am
Designer: Erik De Nijs
Understanding Search 4.0 - the future of Search
[Thanks to Thomson Reuters for this post]
Search 4.0: Putting Humans Back In Search
Previously I’ve covered what I dubbed Search 3.0, how search engines have evolved toward blending vertical or specialized results into “regular” web listings. Today, the step beyond that: Search 4.0, how personal, social and human-edited data can be used to refine search results.
The Search Evolution So Far
Before going ahead, let me summarize what I covered in my past article, in terms of how search engines have changed over time to create and rank the results you get when doing a search:
Search 1.0 (1996): Pages ranked using “on-the-page” criteria
Search 2.0 (1998): Pages ranked using “off-the-page” criteria
Search 3.0 (2007): Vertical search results blended into regular search results
The evolution above is not perfect. For one thing, some “Search 3.0″ blending started to happen years before 2007. It’s just that in 2007, I felt all the major search engines made the leap into Search 3.0 in a significant way.
As for Search 2.0, looking at off-the-page criteria such as links, Google kickstarted that heavily in 1998. However, some link analysis happened before then, and all the major search engines probably didn’t get on board to using it more fully until 1999-2001. But the launch of Google in 1998 remains the benchmark year in my mind, for that particular change.
The evolution is also only applicable to crawler-based search engines, those that use automation to gather web pages, store copies of them and search through the compiled index to create listings for searches. Yahoo was a major player using human power before 1996 and continued this way for years. Indeed in 1999, a majority of major search engines were presenting human-powered results. This quickly changed as Google grew. Yahoo made its human results “secondary” to crawler-based ones (then provided by Google) in October 2002. Today, all the major US-based search engines depend on crawler-based results.
To cap off the caveats, the evolution above is not the only way search engines can evolve. That’s just how things have largely gone with US-based search engines, which in turn tend to also be the major search engines for most countries around the world. There are exceptions. For example, Naver is the dominant search engine in Korea — and there, listings are largely human generated.
Search 4.0: The Human Factor
Onward to Search 4.0! As I said in my opening, to me this is the move for search engines to make use of human data as part of their ranking systems. In particular, it means human data generated by you, by those you know or by human editors.
Search engines already make use of some human data. All the major search engines, for example, monitor what we click on within the search results. This helps them determine if a particular listing is drawing more or less clicks than would be expected for the position it holds. For example, if the number two listing for a particular query is getting less clicks than “normal” for a listing in that spot, perhaps it’s a bad quality listing that should be replaced with another.
Another example: all the major search engines make heavy use of link data — and that link data is largely human data, humans both “voting” with their links and “tagging” pages by the words they use in the links. Google Now Reporting Anchor Text Phrases and Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs provide more about how links are used in this fashion.
When I talk about putting human data into search results as part of Search 4.0, I mean things that are more aggressive or active than what I’ve covered above. I’ll start off with the most refined Search 4.0 implementation out there, Google’s personalized results.
Google: Search 4.0 Gets Personal
With Google Personalized Search, the web pages you visit, bookmark and things you click on within search results at Google are used to custom-tailor search results for you. The personalization is not as dramatic as with a place like Amazon, where if you purchase a book once, Amazon seems to continually push similar books like that at you forever. Shifts are far more subtle, mainly to help elevate results from sites you frequently visit.
To understand more, these articles go into depth about the process:
Of course, fulfilling ego searches can also be an relevancy advancement, not just a marketing ploy. There’s an excellent chance you’d have better searches if sites you visit more often get a bump in the search results. Personalized search can do this. In addition, over time, personalized search can potentially figure out other sites that are similar to those you visit and give them a relevancy boost.
Since Google expanded personalized search last year, there’s been one further major development. Personalized search uses searches over time to refine results. However, Google also has a system it is testing to refine results based on the last query you did, even if you aren’t taking part in the personalized search program.
“Previous Query” Refinement Coming To Hit Google Results explains more about how this works. It’s been used to improve the ads shown on Google for almost a year now, and it’s currently being tested to refine regular results. Google said that previous query refinement has been one of the strongest signals on how to personalized results so far.
Social Search: Promise Or Hype?
Last year, blogger Robert Scoble kicked off a round of “Facebook’s gonna kill Google” with a series of videos suggesting that because Facebook knows who your friends are, they’ll be able to apply that “social graph” data to improving search results.
The Promise & Reality Of Mixing The Social Graph With Search Engines was my response, a bucket of cold water explaining that using social data wasn’t some new idea that had never been tried before. The article went into depth explaining how Eurekster and Yahoo both assumed search could be “socialized” similar to photo sharing or bookmarking, only to find that wasn’t the case.
Yahoo had little take-up of its social search product. I’ve never seen the company explain why. My own suspicion is that take-up was low because search is NOT a social activity. I believe people tend to search when they have an immediate desire that needs fulfilling, and taking time away from the search activity to “share” with others is a distraction. Consider the person who has a broken water pipe. They might search quickly to find a plumber. They aren’t likely thinking at that moment that they want to tag and classify the search they conducted, much less the plumber they called. They just want the pipe fixed!
Eurekster has said that it found social activity worked better when people organized to build what it calls “Swickis,” search engines that hit only a custom collection of web sites related to a particular topic. Earlier this year, Eurekster formally came out of beta. However, the service has been entirely off-line for almost a week now. Practically no one has noticed, which speaks volumes to its usage and that aspect of the social search potential. Twitter, which some still view as a niche service, can hiccup for an hour and produce reams of blog attention. Eurekster goes silent, and the web stays silent about it.
I’m A Facebookholic & I Have 5,000 Friends
Still, couldn’t Facebook have more luck? For the record, when I spoke with Facebook director of engineering Aditya Agarwal about social search ideas last December, he was far more realistic than outsiders who hype what Facebook could do. In particular, he wasn’t certain how useful the social data actually would be for refining web search.
I plan to do a future article with Agarwal to explore this more. As a reminder, Facebook right now has no web search feature at all. And while it does have an ad deal with Microsoft, our previous Microsoft’s Facebook Ad Deal Doesn’t Include Search article covers how a search partner hasn’t been selected.
Let’s assume that Facebook does select a search partner, which it will need, since trying to index billions of pages and serve millions of queries each day is not an easy task (just ask Microsoft what it’s like to build that from scratch). What could it do with social data?
For one thing, it could monitor what people are clicking on in a potentially more “trusted” environment. Anyone can use web search anonymously, even sending in clickbots to make it seem like some particular listing is super hot. Having to register to be in Facebook and search from within there might make the clickstream data less noisy. But then again, it’s still a fairly open door that someone can walk through, if they want.
Facebook could tailor results based on what friends are searching on. If it knows what you and your 25 friends all seem to select from results, it could ensure those sites get ranking boosts for future searches. That’s very similar to personalized search, except it sounds full of extra friend-goodness, right?
The flaw here is plenty of people have friends on Facebook they don’t know. Some people collect friends for fun (and profit). Some people get friended by others just looking to build up their profiles. Some people you might friend not because you like them but because it’s easier to friend them than say no. Any of these instances can cause “pollution” of the social data that supposedly was going to improve your search results.
Consider also the case of someone who might work at some very conservative company but outside of work is a freeliving, devil-take-all person. Do they want coworkers who are friends to flavor their search results or those friends they hang out with when work is over?
Finally, privacy is an overlooked issue when it comes to social search. People often search for intensely private, personal things using search engines. Search engines are almost like confessionals, where people seek solutions to problems they might not tell real people that are close to them. With social search, do they have to remember to turn off a sharing feature that might be activated by default? And if it’s not on by default, will it get any take-up at all?
In the end, I think there is some potential to tapping into a social network and applying it to search. However, I still remains uncertain how that will unfold. It especially remains uncertain that this is somehow the secret sauce for anyone to jump past the current state of search.
Return To Humans: Hello Mahalo!
Earlier, I’d mentioned how Yahoo started off using human beings to create its search listings in the days before Google existed. Over time, the human soul in search was lost to reliance on the supposed scalability of machines. Anyone who wants to see how much we’ve handed over to machines need only search for buy cialis online on Google. At the moment, the results are littered with online discussion forums that have been “borrowed” by affiliates and others hawking deals.
Those pages will sit there for a day or two or three or potentially weeks, as Google usually tries to find an algorithmic solution to getting rid of them. The idea is you might have to suffer a bit in the short term until a long-term cure is found. But then like a virus that mutates, something else gets through, requiring a new long-term cure.
Enter humans. A human editor, reviewing results like that, can immediately spot junk that should get yanked. Even better, a human editor could act as a curator. How hard can it be to find 10 quality sites that should come up for that or other terms?
That exact human solution, of course, is what Mahalo has been banking on. Mahalo, launched last year, uses human editors to hand-pick top results. For background on the service, check out these past articles:
Mahalo Launches With Human-Crafted Search Results
Mahalo Greenhouse: Get Paid For Writing Search Results
Mahalo Follow: Toolbar Gives You Human-Powered Alternatives To Searching, Surfing
Mahalo Adds The Social Graph To Search
As part of a talk I do on Search 3.0 and Search 4.0, I have some screenshots from last year that illustrate well how a human can indeed do better than the machines, for some queries. Remember the fires in Southern California at the end of last year. After a series of wide ranging ones, Malibu was hit with a second one a month later. Here’s what those searching on Google got in response:
The news box at the top is great, but sometimes searchers skip past things like this and go to the first “real” result. That’s a story about the Malibu fire early in 2007, not at the end of the year. Other results were largely about the fire of October 2007, rather than November 2007 (which is what many searchers at the time I snapped this would have been interested in).
Very similar to Yahoo — a news box, the fire department, the Red Cross. What’s not to like? Well, let’s look at Mahalo:
Note at the top that Mahalo’s human editors understand there’s a different fire that happened in the past, in October 2007, and offer a link to a page about that. Then there’s a nice list of news sources, followed by coverage by date. Over to the side, a synopsis of the current situation. If you could see more of the page, there was lots of other categorized information.
It’s nicely done. It’s very helpful. And it was created with a human thinking about what other humans might want to see, rather than machines guessing.
Scaling Humans
So is Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis onto the Google-killer, human crafted results? No. I think human review can be part of the solution, part of the Search 4.0 addition to what we have out there already — but humans can’t craft pages for every possible search. In addition, it’s hard to keep those pages maintained once they’ve been made. It’s also easy to cross over from being a search resource that points to other resources to becoming instead a destination site. I think a good search engine avoids that (and Who’s Ranking For Knol? Hello, Wikipedia! has more on this topic).
Mahalo can also be overwhelming. Try a search for hillary clinton and there’s category after category. Background links. News links. Photos. Videos. Bio links. Blogs and message boards. Plus, there’s even more. I think at some point, you want your search engine to make some key choices for you, not flood you with so many that you don’t know where to begin.
Another issue is that what Mahalo’s human editors do, machines can get close to. Hakia especially stands out here. Search for hillary clinton there, and you’ll see how listings are grouped into categories like Awards and Biography without humans being involved (and see Social Networking Through Search: Hakia Helps You Meet Others for background on how Hakia works).
More Humans
There is another major search project involving humans: Search Wikia. Backed by Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales, the service aims to involve humans in rating pages, annotating them and helping determine the ranking algorithm for choices the machine side of the project makes.
The articles below have more background on the service:
Search Wikia: Not Even A Remote Threat To Google
Search Wikia Adds Alpha 0.2 Features & More
Right now, the quality of the service is poor, as Search Wikia itself readily admits. There’s still lots of work to be done — and even with it, it might never succeed. But allowing humans into the process is, in my view, a good thing.
Indeed, even Google understands this. Last year, Google started doing some education about how human “signals” are already incorporated into its algorithm (see Google’s Human Touch and Google & Human Quality Reviews: Old News Returns). Aside from this, last year it also started testing a way for people to annotate search results — add those they like, remove some, suggest other ones.
Watch Personalized Search
Overall, there’s a role for humans, a way for them to be in the search process to enhance results. Actually, there will be several ways for them to be involved. Exactly how remains to be seen, of course.
Of the things I’ve outlined — personalized search, social search, human editors — I think personalized search is the one that will emerge as the major part of Search 4.0. That’s not to discount other things being tried, and they’ll contribute in some ways. But to me, personalized search has the most potential for another big relevancy leap. We’ll see!
http://futureofsearch.federatedmedia.net/archives/15#more-15
Search 4.0: Putting Humans Back In Search
Previously I’ve covered what I dubbed Search 3.0, how search engines have evolved toward blending vertical or specialized results into “regular” web listings. Today, the step beyond that: Search 4.0, how personal, social and human-edited data can be used to refine search results.
The Search Evolution So Far
Before going ahead, let me summarize what I covered in my past article, in terms of how search engines have changed over time to create and rank the results you get when doing a search:
Search 1.0 (1996): Pages ranked using “on-the-page” criteria
Search 2.0 (1998): Pages ranked using “off-the-page” criteria
Search 3.0 (2007): Vertical search results blended into regular search results
The evolution above is not perfect. For one thing, some “Search 3.0″ blending started to happen years before 2007. It’s just that in 2007, I felt all the major search engines made the leap into Search 3.0 in a significant way.
As for Search 2.0, looking at off-the-page criteria such as links, Google kickstarted that heavily in 1998. However, some link analysis happened before then, and all the major search engines probably didn’t get on board to using it more fully until 1999-2001. But the launch of Google in 1998 remains the benchmark year in my mind, for that particular change.
The evolution is also only applicable to crawler-based search engines, those that use automation to gather web pages, store copies of them and search through the compiled index to create listings for searches. Yahoo was a major player using human power before 1996 and continued this way for years. Indeed in 1999, a majority of major search engines were presenting human-powered results. This quickly changed as Google grew. Yahoo made its human results “secondary” to crawler-based ones (then provided by Google) in October 2002. Today, all the major US-based search engines depend on crawler-based results.
To cap off the caveats, the evolution above is not the only way search engines can evolve. That’s just how things have largely gone with US-based search engines, which in turn tend to also be the major search engines for most countries around the world. There are exceptions. For example, Naver is the dominant search engine in Korea — and there, listings are largely human generated.
Search 4.0: The Human Factor
Onward to Search 4.0! As I said in my opening, to me this is the move for search engines to make use of human data as part of their ranking systems. In particular, it means human data generated by you, by those you know or by human editors.
Search engines already make use of some human data. All the major search engines, for example, monitor what we click on within the search results. This helps them determine if a particular listing is drawing more or less clicks than would be expected for the position it holds. For example, if the number two listing for a particular query is getting less clicks than “normal” for a listing in that spot, perhaps it’s a bad quality listing that should be replaced with another.
Another example: all the major search engines make heavy use of link data — and that link data is largely human data, humans both “voting” with their links and “tagging” pages by the words they use in the links. Google Now Reporting Anchor Text Phrases and Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs provide more about how links are used in this fashion.
When I talk about putting human data into search results as part of Search 4.0, I mean things that are more aggressive or active than what I’ve covered above. I’ll start off with the most refined Search 4.0 implementation out there, Google’s personalized results.
Google: Search 4.0 Gets Personal
With Google Personalized Search, the web pages you visit, bookmark and things you click on within search results at Google are used to custom-tailor search results for you. The personalization is not as dramatic as with a place like Amazon, where if you purchase a book once, Amazon seems to continually push similar books like that at you forever. Shifts are far more subtle, mainly to help elevate results from sites you frequently visit.
To understand more, these articles go into depth about the process:
Google Search History Expands, Becomes Web History
I’m fairly bullish on personalized search as an important addition to other factors (Search 1.0-3.0) in improving results. For one thing — better or worse — people often judge the relevancy of search results based on ego searches. Does a search engine find your home page, blog and related material when you search for yourself? Does it find your company? Personalized search is an ego search reinforcer. Because you go to your own places on the web often, Google senses that you want them to show up higher in search results, and they do. It’s a genius way to ensure anyone reviewing the service comes away pleased!
I’m fairly bullish on personalized search as an important addition to other factors (Search 1.0-3.0) in improving results. For one thing — better or worse — people often judge the relevancy of search results based on ego searches. Does a search engine find your home page, blog and related material when you search for yourself? Does it find your company? Personalized search is an ego search reinforcer. Because you go to your own places on the web often, Google senses that you want them to show up higher in search results, and they do. It’s a genius way to ensure anyone reviewing the service comes away pleased!
Of course, fulfilling ego searches can also be an relevancy advancement, not just a marketing ploy. There’s an excellent chance you’d have better searches if sites you visit more often get a bump in the search results. Personalized search can do this. In addition, over time, personalized search can potentially figure out other sites that are similar to those you visit and give them a relevancy boost.
Since Google expanded personalized search last year, there’s been one further major development. Personalized search uses searches over time to refine results. However, Google also has a system it is testing to refine results based on the last query you did, even if you aren’t taking part in the personalized search program.
“Previous Query” Refinement Coming To Hit Google Results explains more about how this works. It’s been used to improve the ads shown on Google for almost a year now, and it’s currently being tested to refine regular results. Google said that previous query refinement has been one of the strongest signals on how to personalized results so far.
Social Search: Promise Or Hype?
Last year, blogger Robert Scoble kicked off a round of “Facebook’s gonna kill Google” with a series of videos suggesting that because Facebook knows who your friends are, they’ll be able to apply that “social graph” data to improving search results.
The Promise & Reality Of Mixing The Social Graph With Search Engines was my response, a bucket of cold water explaining that using social data wasn’t some new idea that had never been tried before. The article went into depth explaining how Eurekster and Yahoo both assumed search could be “socialized” similar to photo sharing or bookmarking, only to find that wasn’t the case.
Yahoo had little take-up of its social search product. I’ve never seen the company explain why. My own suspicion is that take-up was low because search is NOT a social activity. I believe people tend to search when they have an immediate desire that needs fulfilling, and taking time away from the search activity to “share” with others is a distraction. Consider the person who has a broken water pipe. They might search quickly to find a plumber. They aren’t likely thinking at that moment that they want to tag and classify the search they conducted, much less the plumber they called. They just want the pipe fixed!
Eurekster has said that it found social activity worked better when people organized to build what it calls “Swickis,” search engines that hit only a custom collection of web sites related to a particular topic. Earlier this year, Eurekster formally came out of beta. However, the service has been entirely off-line for almost a week now. Practically no one has noticed, which speaks volumes to its usage and that aspect of the social search potential. Twitter, which some still view as a niche service, can hiccup for an hour and produce reams of blog attention. Eurekster goes silent, and the web stays silent about it.
I’m A Facebookholic & I Have 5,000 Friends
Still, couldn’t Facebook have more luck? For the record, when I spoke with Facebook director of engineering Aditya Agarwal about social search ideas last December, he was far more realistic than outsiders who hype what Facebook could do. In particular, he wasn’t certain how useful the social data actually would be for refining web search.
I plan to do a future article with Agarwal to explore this more. As a reminder, Facebook right now has no web search feature at all. And while it does have an ad deal with Microsoft, our previous Microsoft’s Facebook Ad Deal Doesn’t Include Search article covers how a search partner hasn’t been selected.
Let’s assume that Facebook does select a search partner, which it will need, since trying to index billions of pages and serve millions of queries each day is not an easy task (just ask Microsoft what it’s like to build that from scratch). What could it do with social data?
For one thing, it could monitor what people are clicking on in a potentially more “trusted” environment. Anyone can use web search anonymously, even sending in clickbots to make it seem like some particular listing is super hot. Having to register to be in Facebook and search from within there might make the clickstream data less noisy. But then again, it’s still a fairly open door that someone can walk through, if they want.
Facebook could tailor results based on what friends are searching on. If it knows what you and your 25 friends all seem to select from results, it could ensure those sites get ranking boosts for future searches. That’s very similar to personalized search, except it sounds full of extra friend-goodness, right?
The flaw here is plenty of people have friends on Facebook they don’t know. Some people collect friends for fun (and profit). Some people get friended by others just looking to build up their profiles. Some people you might friend not because you like them but because it’s easier to friend them than say no. Any of these instances can cause “pollution” of the social data that supposedly was going to improve your search results.
Consider also the case of someone who might work at some very conservative company but outside of work is a freeliving, devil-take-all person. Do they want coworkers who are friends to flavor their search results or those friends they hang out with when work is over?
Finally, privacy is an overlooked issue when it comes to social search. People often search for intensely private, personal things using search engines. Search engines are almost like confessionals, where people seek solutions to problems they might not tell real people that are close to them. With social search, do they have to remember to turn off a sharing feature that might be activated by default? And if it’s not on by default, will it get any take-up at all?
In the end, I think there is some potential to tapping into a social network and applying it to search. However, I still remains uncertain how that will unfold. It especially remains uncertain that this is somehow the secret sauce for anyone to jump past the current state of search.
Return To Humans: Hello Mahalo!
Earlier, I’d mentioned how Yahoo started off using human beings to create its search listings in the days before Google existed. Over time, the human soul in search was lost to reliance on the supposed scalability of machines. Anyone who wants to see how much we’ve handed over to machines need only search for buy cialis online on Google. At the moment, the results are littered with online discussion forums that have been “borrowed” by affiliates and others hawking deals.
Those pages will sit there for a day or two or three or potentially weeks, as Google usually tries to find an algorithmic solution to getting rid of them. The idea is you might have to suffer a bit in the short term until a long-term cure is found. But then like a virus that mutates, something else gets through, requiring a new long-term cure.
Enter humans. A human editor, reviewing results like that, can immediately spot junk that should get yanked. Even better, a human editor could act as a curator. How hard can it be to find 10 quality sites that should come up for that or other terms?
That exact human solution, of course, is what Mahalo has been banking on. Mahalo, launched last year, uses human editors to hand-pick top results. For background on the service, check out these past articles:
Mahalo Launches With Human-Crafted Search Results
Mahalo Greenhouse: Get Paid For Writing Search Results
Mahalo Follow: Toolbar Gives You Human-Powered Alternatives To Searching, Surfing
Mahalo Adds The Social Graph To Search
As part of a talk I do on Search 3.0 and Search 4.0, I have some screenshots from last year that illustrate well how a human can indeed do better than the machines, for some queries. Remember the fires in Southern California at the end of last year. After a series of wide ranging ones, Malibu was hit with a second one a month later. Here’s what those searching on Google got in response:
The news box at the top is great, but sometimes searchers skip past things like this and go to the first “real” result. That’s a story about the Malibu fire early in 2007, not at the end of the year. Other results were largely about the fire of October 2007, rather than November 2007 (which is what many searchers at the time I snapped this would have been interested in).
Here’s Yahoo:
Again, news results at the top, then unlike Google, places you’d expect to find news about the fire — the local paper; ironically a map of the fires on Google Maps that Google itself didn’t return; the Malibu city web site, as well as the fire department.
Here’s Microsoft Live Search:
Again, news results at the top, then unlike Google, places you’d expect to find news about the fire — the local paper; ironically a map of the fires on Google Maps that Google itself didn’t return; the Malibu city web site, as well as the fire department.
Here’s Microsoft Live Search:
Very similar to Yahoo — a news box, the fire department, the Red Cross. What’s not to like? Well, let’s look at Mahalo:
Note at the top that Mahalo’s human editors understand there’s a different fire that happened in the past, in October 2007, and offer a link to a page about that. Then there’s a nice list of news sources, followed by coverage by date. Over to the side, a synopsis of the current situation. If you could see more of the page, there was lots of other categorized information.
It’s nicely done. It’s very helpful. And it was created with a human thinking about what other humans might want to see, rather than machines guessing.
Scaling Humans
So is Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis onto the Google-killer, human crafted results? No. I think human review can be part of the solution, part of the Search 4.0 addition to what we have out there already — but humans can’t craft pages for every possible search. In addition, it’s hard to keep those pages maintained once they’ve been made. It’s also easy to cross over from being a search resource that points to other resources to becoming instead a destination site. I think a good search engine avoids that (and Who’s Ranking For Knol? Hello, Wikipedia! has more on this topic).
Mahalo can also be overwhelming. Try a search for hillary clinton and there’s category after category. Background links. News links. Photos. Videos. Bio links. Blogs and message boards. Plus, there’s even more. I think at some point, you want your search engine to make some key choices for you, not flood you with so many that you don’t know where to begin.
Another issue is that what Mahalo’s human editors do, machines can get close to. Hakia especially stands out here. Search for hillary clinton there, and you’ll see how listings are grouped into categories like Awards and Biography without humans being involved (and see Social Networking Through Search: Hakia Helps You Meet Others for background on how Hakia works).
More Humans
There is another major search project involving humans: Search Wikia. Backed by Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales, the service aims to involve humans in rating pages, annotating them and helping determine the ranking algorithm for choices the machine side of the project makes.
The articles below have more background on the service:
Search Wikia: Not Even A Remote Threat To Google
Search Wikia Adds Alpha 0.2 Features & More
Right now, the quality of the service is poor, as Search Wikia itself readily admits. There’s still lots of work to be done — and even with it, it might never succeed. But allowing humans into the process is, in my view, a good thing.
Indeed, even Google understands this. Last year, Google started doing some education about how human “signals” are already incorporated into its algorithm (see Google’s Human Touch and Google & Human Quality Reviews: Old News Returns). Aside from this, last year it also started testing a way for people to annotate search results — add those they like, remove some, suggest other ones.
Watch Personalized Search
Overall, there’s a role for humans, a way for them to be in the search process to enhance results. Actually, there will be several ways for them to be involved. Exactly how remains to be seen, of course.
Of the things I’ve outlined — personalized search, social search, human editors — I think personalized search is the one that will emerge as the major part of Search 4.0. That’s not to discount other things being tried, and they’ll contribute in some ways. But to me, personalized search has the most potential for another big relevancy leap. We’ll see!
http://futureofsearch.federatedmedia.net/archives/15#more-15
When magazines and the Internet collide
This is just a quick post thanks to The Centre for Media Research on the growing rate of visitors to consumer magazines online.
Web Magazine Reach, Users and Minutes Up in 2008
According to Magazine Publishers of America, consumer magazine websites averaged 70.7 million unique monthly visitors during the first quarter of 2008, an 11.9% increase over the same period in 2007. This gain reflects more than three times the rate of growth for the overall U.S. Internet audience, which rose 3.7% in the first quarter.
The analysis also showed that:
The average first quarter monthly reach for magazine websites grew to 43.4% of the total U.S. Internet population, up from 40.2% in 2007
Magazine website users accounted for an average of more than 497.3 million total sessions per month during the first quarter, a 16.3% improvement over the same period last year
Visitors to magazine websites spent an average of 2.3 billion minutes per month during the first quarter, resulting in a 16.7% increase versus the same period in 2007
Nina Link, President and Chief Executive Officer, Magazine Publishers of America, concludes "Magazine brands online are getting ‘stickier' with web audiences... Publishers are increasingly employing the latest digital innovations to broaden their reach and appeal... "
For more about the MPA, please visit the PressRoom here.
Research Brief for Monday, June 2, 2008:
Monday, June 2, 2008
How to connect with teenage girls in cyber space - legally of course!
This is an interesting blog looking at how the fashion industry is using an existing gaming platform to make money, rather then generating content which they hope teenagers will engage with.
How will other retailers embrace social networking and other interactive technologies to help them build their brands?
Thanks to Forbes.com for this post.Teenagers are easy to reach if you know how to play their game.
For the fashion industry, traditionally a late adopter of technology, it has been a particularly steep learning experience even though pre-teens and teens directly and indirectly control billions of dollars in purchasing power. But a small Swedish company called Stardoll seems to have cracked the code on how to hook young girls (see Teen Market Overview).
Stardoll is an online community where girls ages 8 to 18 play with virtual dolls. They can make "MeDolls," dolls that look like themselves, or celebrity look-alike dolls. Girls can also dress themselves and celebrities with merchandise from a virtual shop in its virtual galleria called the "starplaza," and they can also network with other users on the site.
Join the discussion: Will retailers embrace social networking and other interactive technologies to help them build their brands? Tell us what you think in the Readers Comments section below.
Stardoll Chief Executive Mattias Miksche admits he didn't completely understand his market when he began heading the company a few years ago. "When I first saw the initial site I didn't really get it--like most men," he says. "But I showed it to my wife, who was 35, and to my daughter, who was 5--and they both absolutely loved it. So I figured there could be quite an untapped market there."
Today, Stockholm-based Stardoll features more than 330 dolls and tens of thousands of virtual garments and accessories. It is also the No. 1 site worldwide for pre-teen and teen girls, according to comScore. The site has over 7 million unique visitors per month and 16 million registered users from 200 countries.
Compare these numbers to TeenVogue, Conde Nast's magazine that targets the same demographic and has less than 3 million readers. TeenVogue's mission statement says: "Style-conscious girls everywhere know there's only one source for relevant fashion and beauty news communicated in a sophisticated tone with the power of the Vogue brand. In a time of expanding media choices, true authority is irreplaceable--and unmistakable."
Is it?
Stardoll, like Vogue, earns revenues from advertising. Advertisers on Stardoll include major fashion and entertainment brands such as Donna Karan, LVMH, Disney (nyse: DIS - news - people ) and Sephora. Stardoll also earns revenues from products sold in its virtual shop. The site sells between 60,000 to 180,000 items per day.
Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures think Stardoll is building an addictive destination for a prized demographic, and they have invested $10 million in the company.
Despite Stardoll's success, the fashion industry hasn't yet figured out how to take advantage of the company to help it build brands. Here's an example of how this might work.
Zara, a retailer based in Spain, launches a virtual collection on Stardoll, which becomes an instant viral hit among pre-teen and teenage girls. Let's say seven designs in the collection bubble up to the top as the most popular, each with an average following of 1.2 million girls. Knowing this, would Zara need any other focus group or market research to figure out exactly what is striking a chord with its target consumers?
If Zara becomes really disciplined, it can pre-launch each season's designs into Stardoll, collect market feedback and provide that data to its stores around the world. Zara can also do geographically targeted research through Stardoll. For instance, Zara's Florida stores can look at data for Florida consumers, while Los Angeles stores can drill down on what teens in L.A. like.
I spent a year working with the fashion industry during the dot-com heydays, and I was struck by how little science and analysis is applied in the fashion business. As a result, the industry remains a nightmare of surplus inventory, which leads to markdowns and unhealthy profit-and-loss statements that precariously balance companies at the edge of life and death.
But it doesn't need to be this way. Other industries, such as financial services, manufacturing and insurance, have embraced technology and benefited tremendously from its infinite potential. Why not fashion?
http://www.forbes.com/technology/ebusiness/2008/05/29/mitra-stardoll-retail-tech-ebiz-cx_sm_0530stardoll.html
Billboards That Look Back
Putting the eye in EYE Media? This post is with thanks to The New York Times.
Billboards That Look Back
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
Published: May 31, 2008
In advertising these days, the brass ring goes to those who can measure everything — how many people see a particular advertisement, when they see it, who they are. All of that is easy on the Internet, and getting easier in television and print.
Billboards are a different story. For the most part, they are still a relic of old-world media, and the best guesses about viewership numbers come from foot traffic counts or highway reports, neither of which guarantees that the people passing by were really looking at the billboard, or that they were the ones sought out.
Now, some entrepreneurs have introduced technology to solve that problem. They are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by — their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the billboard. These details are transmitted to a central database.
Behind the technology are small start-ups that say they are not storing actual images of the passers-by, so privacy should not be a concern. The cameras, they say, use software to determine that a person is standing in front of a billboard, then analyze facial features (like cheekbone height and the distance between the nose and the chin) to judge the person’s gender and age. So far the companies are not using race as a parameter, but they say that they can and will soon.
Billboards That Look Back
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
Published: May 31, 2008
In advertising these days, the brass ring goes to those who can measure everything — how many people see a particular advertisement, when they see it, who they are. All of that is easy on the Internet, and getting easier in television and print.
Billboards are a different story. For the most part, they are still a relic of old-world media, and the best guesses about viewership numbers come from foot traffic counts or highway reports, neither of which guarantees that the people passing by were really looking at the billboard, or that they were the ones sought out.
Now, some entrepreneurs have introduced technology to solve that problem. They are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by — their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the billboard. These details are transmitted to a central database.
Behind the technology are small start-ups that say they are not storing actual images of the passers-by, so privacy should not be a concern. The cameras, they say, use software to determine that a person is standing in front of a billboard, then analyze facial features (like cheekbone height and the distance between the nose and the chin) to judge the person’s gender and age. So far the companies are not using race as a parameter, but they say that they can and will soon.
The goal, these companies say, is to tailor a digital display to the person standing in front of it — to show one advertisement to a middle-aged white woman, for example, and a different one to a teenage Asian boy.
“Everything we do is completely anonymous,” said Paolo Prandoni, the founder and chief scientific officer of Quividi, a two-year-old company based in Paris that is gearing up billboards in the United States and abroad. Quividi and its competitors use small digital billboards, which tend to play short videos as advertisements, to reach certain audiences.
Over Memorial Day weekend, a Quividi camera was installed on a billboard on Eighth Avenue near Columbus Circle in Manhattan that was playing a trailer for “The Andromeda Strain,” a mini-series on the cable channel A&E.
“I didn’t see that at all, to be honest,” said Sam Cocks, a 26-year-old lawyer, when the camera was pointed out to him by a reporter. “That’s disturbing. I would say it’s arguably an invasion of one’s privacy.”
Organized privacy groups agree, though so far the practice of monitoring billboards is too new and minimal to have drawn much opposition. But the placement of surreptitious cameras in public places has been a flashpoint in London, where cameras are used to look for terrorists, as well as in Lower Manhattan, where there is a similar initiative.
Although surveillance cameras have become commonplace in banks, stores and office buildings, their presence takes on a different meaning when they are meant to sell products rather than fight crime. So while the billboard technology may solve a problem for advertisers, it may also stumble over issues of public acceptance.
“I guess one would expect that if you go into a closed store, it’s very likely you’d be under surveillance, but out here on the street?” Mr. Cocks asked. At the least, he said, there should be a sign alerting people to the camera and its purpose.
Quividi’s technology has been used in Ikea stores in Europe and McDonald’s restaurants in Singapore, but it has just come to the United States. Another Quividi billboard is in a Philadelphia commuter station with an advertisement for the Philadelphia Soul, an indoor football team. Both Quividi-equipped boards were installed by Motomedia, a London-based company that converts retail and street space into advertisements.
“I think a big part of why it’s accepted is that people don’t know about it,” said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group.
“You could make them conspicuous,” he said of video cameras. “But nobody really wants to do that because the more people know about it, the more it may freak them out or they may attempt to avoid it.”
And the issue gets thornier: the companies that make these systems, like Quividi and TruMedia Technologies, say that with a slight technological addition, they could easily store pictures of people who look at their cameras.
The companies say they do not plan to do this, but Mr. Tien said he thought their intentions were beside the point. The companies are not currently storing video images, but they could if compelled by something like a court order, he said.
For now, “there’s nothing you could go back to and look at,” said George E. Murphy, the chief executive of TruMedia who was previously a marketing executive at DaimlerChrysler. “All it needs to do is look at the audience, process what it sees and convert that to digital fields that we upload to our servers.”
TruMedia’s technology is an offshoot of surveillance work for the Israeli government. The company, whose slogan is “Every Face Counts,” is testing the cameras in about 30 locations nationwide. One TruMedia client is Adspace Networks, which runs a network of digital screens in shopping malls and is testing the system at malls in Chesterfield, Mo., Winston-Salem, N.C., and Monroeville, Pa. Adspace’s screens show a mix of content, like the top retail deals at the mall that day, and advertisements for DVDs, movies or consumer products.
Within advertising circles, these camera systems are seen as a welcome answer to the longstanding problem of how to measure the effectiveness of billboards, and how to figure out what audience is seeing them. On television, Nielsen ratings help marketers determine where and when commercials should run, for example. As for signs on highways, marketers tend to use traffic figures from the Transportation Department; for pedestrian billboards, they might hire someone to stand nearby and count people as they walk by.
The Internet, though, where publishers and media agencies can track people’s clicks for advertising purposes, has raised the bar on measurement. Now, it is prodding billboards into the 21st century.
“Digital has really changed the landscape in the sort of accuracy we can get in terms of who’s looking at our creative,” Guy Slattery, senior vice president for marketing for A&E, said of Internet advertising. With Quividi, Mr. Slattery said, he hoped to get similar information from what advertisers refer to as the out-of-home market.
“We’re always interested in getting accurate data on the audience we’re reaching,” he said, “and for out-of-home, this promises to give a level of accuracy we’re not used to seeing in this medium.”
Industry groups are scrambling to provide their own improved ways of measuring out-of-home advertising. An outdoor advertising association, the Traffic Audit Bureau, and a digital billboard and sign association, the Out-of-Home Video Advertising Association, are both devising more specific measurement standards that they plan to release by the fall.
Even without cameras, digital billboards encounter criticism. In cities like Indianapolis and Pittsburgh, outdoor advertising companies face opposition from groups that call their signs unsightly, distracting to drivers and a waste of energy.
There is a dispute over whether digital billboards play a role in highway accidents, and a national study on the subject is expected to be completed this fall by a unit of the Transportation Research Board. The board is part of a private nonprofit institution, the National Research Council.
Meanwhile, privacy concerns about cameras are growing. In Britain, which has an estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit television cameras — one for every 14 people — the matter has become a hot political issue, with some legislators proposing tight restrictions on the use and distribution of the footage.
Reactions to the A&E billboard in Manhattan were mixed. “I don’t want to be in the marketing,” said Antwann Thomas, 17, a high school junior, after being told about the camera. “I guess it’s kind of creepy. I wouldn’t feel safe looking at it.”
But other passers-by shrugged. “Someone down the street can watch you looking at it — why not a camera?” asked Nathan Lichon, 25, a Navy officer.
Walter Peters, 39, a truck driver for a dairy, said: “You could be recorded on the street, you could be recorded in a drugstore, whatever. It doesn’t matter to me. There’s cameras everywhere.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/31/business/media/31billboard.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&th&emc=th
“Everything we do is completely anonymous,” said Paolo Prandoni, the founder and chief scientific officer of Quividi, a two-year-old company based in Paris that is gearing up billboards in the United States and abroad. Quividi and its competitors use small digital billboards, which tend to play short videos as advertisements, to reach certain audiences.
Over Memorial Day weekend, a Quividi camera was installed on a billboard on Eighth Avenue near Columbus Circle in Manhattan that was playing a trailer for “The Andromeda Strain,” a mini-series on the cable channel A&E.
“I didn’t see that at all, to be honest,” said Sam Cocks, a 26-year-old lawyer, when the camera was pointed out to him by a reporter. “That’s disturbing. I would say it’s arguably an invasion of one’s privacy.”
Organized privacy groups agree, though so far the practice of monitoring billboards is too new and minimal to have drawn much opposition. But the placement of surreptitious cameras in public places has been a flashpoint in London, where cameras are used to look for terrorists, as well as in Lower Manhattan, where there is a similar initiative.
Although surveillance cameras have become commonplace in banks, stores and office buildings, their presence takes on a different meaning when they are meant to sell products rather than fight crime. So while the billboard technology may solve a problem for advertisers, it may also stumble over issues of public acceptance.
“I guess one would expect that if you go into a closed store, it’s very likely you’d be under surveillance, but out here on the street?” Mr. Cocks asked. At the least, he said, there should be a sign alerting people to the camera and its purpose.
Quividi’s technology has been used in Ikea stores in Europe and McDonald’s restaurants in Singapore, but it has just come to the United States. Another Quividi billboard is in a Philadelphia commuter station with an advertisement for the Philadelphia Soul, an indoor football team. Both Quividi-equipped boards were installed by Motomedia, a London-based company that converts retail and street space into advertisements.
“I think a big part of why it’s accepted is that people don’t know about it,” said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group.
“You could make them conspicuous,” he said of video cameras. “But nobody really wants to do that because the more people know about it, the more it may freak them out or they may attempt to avoid it.”
And the issue gets thornier: the companies that make these systems, like Quividi and TruMedia Technologies, say that with a slight technological addition, they could easily store pictures of people who look at their cameras.
The companies say they do not plan to do this, but Mr. Tien said he thought their intentions were beside the point. The companies are not currently storing video images, but they could if compelled by something like a court order, he said.
For now, “there’s nothing you could go back to and look at,” said George E. Murphy, the chief executive of TruMedia who was previously a marketing executive at DaimlerChrysler. “All it needs to do is look at the audience, process what it sees and convert that to digital fields that we upload to our servers.”
TruMedia’s technology is an offshoot of surveillance work for the Israeli government. The company, whose slogan is “Every Face Counts,” is testing the cameras in about 30 locations nationwide. One TruMedia client is Adspace Networks, which runs a network of digital screens in shopping malls and is testing the system at malls in Chesterfield, Mo., Winston-Salem, N.C., and Monroeville, Pa. Adspace’s screens show a mix of content, like the top retail deals at the mall that day, and advertisements for DVDs, movies or consumer products.
Within advertising circles, these camera systems are seen as a welcome answer to the longstanding problem of how to measure the effectiveness of billboards, and how to figure out what audience is seeing them. On television, Nielsen ratings help marketers determine where and when commercials should run, for example. As for signs on highways, marketers tend to use traffic figures from the Transportation Department; for pedestrian billboards, they might hire someone to stand nearby and count people as they walk by.
The Internet, though, where publishers and media agencies can track people’s clicks for advertising purposes, has raised the bar on measurement. Now, it is prodding billboards into the 21st century.
“Digital has really changed the landscape in the sort of accuracy we can get in terms of who’s looking at our creative,” Guy Slattery, senior vice president for marketing for A&E, said of Internet advertising. With Quividi, Mr. Slattery said, he hoped to get similar information from what advertisers refer to as the out-of-home market.
“We’re always interested in getting accurate data on the audience we’re reaching,” he said, “and for out-of-home, this promises to give a level of accuracy we’re not used to seeing in this medium.”
Industry groups are scrambling to provide their own improved ways of measuring out-of-home advertising. An outdoor advertising association, the Traffic Audit Bureau, and a digital billboard and sign association, the Out-of-Home Video Advertising Association, are both devising more specific measurement standards that they plan to release by the fall.
Even without cameras, digital billboards encounter criticism. In cities like Indianapolis and Pittsburgh, outdoor advertising companies face opposition from groups that call their signs unsightly, distracting to drivers and a waste of energy.
There is a dispute over whether digital billboards play a role in highway accidents, and a national study on the subject is expected to be completed this fall by a unit of the Transportation Research Board. The board is part of a private nonprofit institution, the National Research Council.
Meanwhile, privacy concerns about cameras are growing. In Britain, which has an estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit television cameras — one for every 14 people — the matter has become a hot political issue, with some legislators proposing tight restrictions on the use and distribution of the footage.
Reactions to the A&E billboard in Manhattan were mixed. “I don’t want to be in the marketing,” said Antwann Thomas, 17, a high school junior, after being told about the camera. “I guess it’s kind of creepy. I wouldn’t feel safe looking at it.”
But other passers-by shrugged. “Someone down the street can watch you looking at it — why not a camera?” asked Nathan Lichon, 25, a Navy officer.
Walter Peters, 39, a truck driver for a dairy, said: “You could be recorded on the street, you could be recorded in a drugstore, whatever. It doesn’t matter to me. There’s cameras everywhere.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/31/business/media/31billboard.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&th&emc=th
Friday, May 30, 2008
Mobile Advertising Key to Reaching Consumers in Economic Downturn
[Thanks to MC Marketing Charts for this interesting post on leveraging mobile advertising]
Despite rising fuel and food prices, over one-third of consumers say the economy will not affect their spending habits - so most say it will - and one way for advertisers to grab consumers’ attention in such times may be via their mobile devices, according to a new study.
For marketers interested in reaching fickle consumers during this economic downturn, there’s hope in that 41% consumer say they have no plans to stop or cut-back on the purchase of cell phones, found a Harris Interactive study on people’s attitudes toward the economy and technology.
Most (60%) of consumers who say they will limit their discretionary spending will curtail going out to restaurants (74%) and purchasing electronics (71%), among other choices like buying fewer clothes and taking fewer vacations.
As the best mobile advertising incentive, cash is king, with 80% of adults and 70% of teens identifying it as the top incentive for responding to mobile advertising:
Entertainment downloads (61%), free music (57%) and complimentary minutes (53%) also are popular incentives among teens.
Despite rising fuel and food prices, over one-third of consumers say the economy will not affect their spending habits - so most say it will - and one way for advertisers to grab consumers’ attention in such times may be via their mobile devices, according to a new study.
For marketers interested in reaching fickle consumers during this economic downturn, there’s hope in that 41% consumer say they have no plans to stop or cut-back on the purchase of cell phones, found a Harris Interactive study on people’s attitudes toward the economy and technology.
Most (60%) of consumers who say they will limit their discretionary spending will curtail going out to restaurants (74%) and purchasing electronics (71%), among other choices like buying fewer clothes and taking fewer vacations.
Meanwhile, the use of mobile phones has become an indispensable part of their lives for many, and many are even severing ties to landlines: 16% of US homes are using wireless phones exclusively - more than double the number from four years ago, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
These trends support the push by marketers to leverage mobile advertising as part of an integrated marketing program to promote their brands and sell products and services, Harris analysts conclude.
Mobile Advertising Findings
Mobile advertising can gain a foothold if it is unobtrusive, targeted toward an individual’s personal tastes and offers something unique, Harris said:
Among teens surveyed, over half (56%) said they would be interested in viewing mobile ads with incentives, while over one-third (37%) of adults noted that they would be receptive to such advertising.
These trends support the push by marketers to leverage mobile advertising as part of an integrated marketing program to promote their brands and sell products and services, Harris analysts conclude.
Mobile Advertising Findings
Mobile advertising can gain a foothold if it is unobtrusive, targeted toward an individual’s personal tastes and offers something unique, Harris said:
Among teens surveyed, over half (56%) said they would be interested in viewing mobile ads with incentives, while over one-third (37%) of adults noted that they would be receptive to such advertising.
As the best mobile advertising incentive, cash is king, with 80% of adults and 70% of teens identifying it as the top incentive for responding to mobile advertising:
Entertainment downloads (61%), free music (57%) and complimentary minutes (53%) also are popular incentives among teens.
Among adults, free minutes (49%) and discount coupons (37%) are appealing incentives. Free entertainment (31%) and music (24%) downloads also captured the attention of adults.
As for types of ads preferred, adults tend to favor dining deals (53%) whereas teens are interested in outdoor activities, travel and entertainment (70%).
Text messaging is the most preferred advertising approach for over two-thirds (69% of adults and 64% of teens) of consumers:
Teens are more willing to accept advertising images on their mobile phones (47%), versus adults (35%).
Teens are more willing to accept advertising images on their mobile phones (47%), versus adults (35%).
The allure of video imagery in mobile advertising is down 10% among adults from last year, but adults are now more open to ads’ being transferred automatically to their email (30%) than in the past.
Providing personal information to marketers to help them target advertising messages and products has always been a sensitive topic, but more than half (54%) of adult respondents say they are comfortable doing so for mobile advertisers, especially if offered for the right incentive.
Others agree, but want to choose who sees this information (21%).
Teens, surprisingly, are guarded about their personal information - only 35% would divulge it, even if an incentive is offered, and 25% say they would never provide personal information.
About the data (pdf): The 2008 Consumer Acceptance of Mobile Advertising study was conducted online within the United States by Harris Interactive in February 2008 among 1,000 US adults age 18 and over and 200 teenagers age 13-17. The 2008 Telecom Report was conducted online within the United States by Harris Interactive in April 2008 among 1,000 US adults age 18 and over. The data were weighted to reflect the US population.
http://www.marketingcharts.com/topics/email/mobile-advertising-key-to-reaching-consumers-in-economic-downturn-4750/?camp=newsletter&src=mc&type=textlink
http://www.marketingcharts.com/topics/email/mobile-advertising-key-to-reaching-consumers-in-economic-downturn-4750/?camp=newsletter&src=mc&type=textlink
How to tap into mobile social networking without pissing off the user
[Thanks to i Media Connection for this post]Published: May 15, 2008
Finding the ad opportunities in mobile
By Tom Hespos
Success in mobile social networking will come for online marketers when they learn to make investments in the user's flow experience.
I often save my social networking tasks for my train ride home. It's a good time to approve friend requests in Facebook, answer questions from my LinkedIn network, and update my Twitter feed with my latest 140-character news nuggets.
All of this can be done from my BlackBerry Pearl, a smartphone that is a couple of years old, but by no means lagging behind the pack from a capabilities standpoint. Facebook has an application built specifically for BlackBerries, which I've been using for several months now. It's great for approving friend requests, sending and getting private messages, poking someone, or maybe writing on someone's wall, but it's definitely not the full Facebook experience that can be had on a PC. Still, I've used it to connect with friends and business associates alike, and the application is valuable enough to me that if I got a new phone today, I'd be looking to make sure whatever phone I bought was compatible with Facebook's mobile experience.
Twitter has a nice mobile site as well, stripping down the interface so that mobile phones can digest it more quickly and easily. Posting a tweet is easy, as is catching up on feeds from followers and folks you follow.
It's not as if Twitter had an ad-supported model to begin with, but when I network over my phone, there's a distinct and very noticeable lack of advertising. The targeted Facebook ads I'm used to seeing, as well as the generally irrelevant skyscrapers down the left-hand side of the website, are not part of the mobile experience. I don't see ads on LinkedIn when I log into my account.
It's obvious that decisions have been made that are favorable toward usability. I'm sure the social networking players have had offers to monetize the mobile channel but have made the decision to stick with keeping their applications easy to use. So the question on my mind is: "Will there ever be an ad opportunity in mobile social networking?"
I've long said that my own firm tends to shoot down many more mobile ad proposals than it approves for client media plans. By and large, this is due to a systematic problem with the ability of mobile ads to deliver. For direct response campaigns, the information-gathering process is often too cumbersome for mobile devices. (Not always, just the majority of the time.) For branding campaigns, we often don't have enough screen real estate to positively impact brand metrics. Couple all this together with the bandwidth restrictions of the typical mobile user and the fact that their mobile consumption tends to reflect a higher degree of immediacy of need for something other than a client's product, and we're stuck in a spot where most mobile proposals don't meet our needs.
Now, let's fold in some of the intricacies of social networking. I've said in this space before that extending utility to the end user and being a part of the flow experience are better approaches to the social space than straight advertising. I think this goes double for mobile social networking.
Think about it for a second. If you're managing your social life online, as many people both young and old do today, and you're on a mobile device that may or may not have a good enough connection in the next five minutes to continue a private message conversation or approve a connection request, how tweaked are you going to be when you find out that the thing holding your connection up is 45K worth of banner ads?
On the other hand, if a brand extended value in the form of a mobile app that supported multi-user mobile chat, would that not be a better position to be in? Instead of mobile users dreading the connection-clogging properties of your ad, they're actually looking forward to it. Seems to me that I'd rather have people welcoming my marketing material than shunning it.
To me, success in mobile social networking will come for online marketers when they learn to avoid straight messaging and make investments in extending utility and becoming an uninterruptive part of the user's flow experience.
Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com.
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/19354.asp
Success in mobile social networking will come for online marketers when they learn to make investments in the user's flow experience.
I often save my social networking tasks for my train ride home. It's a good time to approve friend requests in Facebook, answer questions from my LinkedIn network, and update my Twitter feed with my latest 140-character news nuggets.
All of this can be done from my BlackBerry Pearl, a smartphone that is a couple of years old, but by no means lagging behind the pack from a capabilities standpoint. Facebook has an application built specifically for BlackBerries, which I've been using for several months now. It's great for approving friend requests, sending and getting private messages, poking someone, or maybe writing on someone's wall, but it's definitely not the full Facebook experience that can be had on a PC. Still, I've used it to connect with friends and business associates alike, and the application is valuable enough to me that if I got a new phone today, I'd be looking to make sure whatever phone I bought was compatible with Facebook's mobile experience.
Twitter has a nice mobile site as well, stripping down the interface so that mobile phones can digest it more quickly and easily. Posting a tweet is easy, as is catching up on feeds from followers and folks you follow.
It's not as if Twitter had an ad-supported model to begin with, but when I network over my phone, there's a distinct and very noticeable lack of advertising. The targeted Facebook ads I'm used to seeing, as well as the generally irrelevant skyscrapers down the left-hand side of the website, are not part of the mobile experience. I don't see ads on LinkedIn when I log into my account.
It's obvious that decisions have been made that are favorable toward usability. I'm sure the social networking players have had offers to monetize the mobile channel but have made the decision to stick with keeping their applications easy to use. So the question on my mind is: "Will there ever be an ad opportunity in mobile social networking?"
I've long said that my own firm tends to shoot down many more mobile ad proposals than it approves for client media plans. By and large, this is due to a systematic problem with the ability of mobile ads to deliver. For direct response campaigns, the information-gathering process is often too cumbersome for mobile devices. (Not always, just the majority of the time.) For branding campaigns, we often don't have enough screen real estate to positively impact brand metrics. Couple all this together with the bandwidth restrictions of the typical mobile user and the fact that their mobile consumption tends to reflect a higher degree of immediacy of need for something other than a client's product, and we're stuck in a spot where most mobile proposals don't meet our needs.
Now, let's fold in some of the intricacies of social networking. I've said in this space before that extending utility to the end user and being a part of the flow experience are better approaches to the social space than straight advertising. I think this goes double for mobile social networking.
Think about it for a second. If you're managing your social life online, as many people both young and old do today, and you're on a mobile device that may or may not have a good enough connection in the next five minutes to continue a private message conversation or approve a connection request, how tweaked are you going to be when you find out that the thing holding your connection up is 45K worth of banner ads?
On the other hand, if a brand extended value in the form of a mobile app that supported multi-user mobile chat, would that not be a better position to be in? Instead of mobile users dreading the connection-clogging properties of your ad, they're actually looking forward to it. Seems to me that I'd rather have people welcoming my marketing material than shunning it.
To me, success in mobile social networking will come for online marketers when they learn to avoid straight messaging and make investments in extending utility and becoming an uninterruptive part of the user's flow experience.
Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com.
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/19354.asp
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