Internet

Are “News Hound” Behaviors Changing?

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News Hound Behaviors are ChangingMost of the people I know who are eager consumers of news tend to spend far more time on the Internet than they do offline with their nose in the newspaper.

So I was surprised to read the results of a new study published by Gather, Inc., a Boston-based online media company, which found that self-described “news junkies” are more likely to rely on traditional media sources like television, newspapers and radio than online ones.

In fact, the survey, which was fielded in March 2010 and queried the news consumption habits of some 1,450 respondents representing a cross-section of age and income demographics, found that more than half of the “news hounds” cited newspapers as their primary source of news.

By comparison, younger respondents (below age 25) are far more likely to utilize the Internet for reading news (~70% do so).

Another interesting finding in the Gather study – though not terribly surprising – is that younger respondents describe themselves as “interest-based,” meaning that apart from breaking news, they focus only on stories of interest to them. This pick-and-choose “cafeteria-style” approach to news consumption may partially explain the great gaps in knowledge that the “over 40” population segment perceives in the younger generations (those observations being reported with accompanying grunts of displeasure, no doubt).

As for sharing news online, there are distinct differences in the behavior of older versus younger respondents. Two findings are telling:

 More than two-thirds of respondents age 45 and older share news items with other primarily through e-mail communiqués.

 ~55% of respondents under age 45 share news primarily through social networking.

Also, more than 80% of the respondents in Gather’s study revealed that they have personally posted online comments about news stories. This suggests that people have now become more “active” in the news by weighing in with their own opinions, rather than just passively reading the stories. This is an interesting development that may be rendering the 90-9-1 principle moot.

[For those who are unfamiliar with the 90-9-1 rule, it contends that for every 100 people interacting with online content, one creates the content … nine edit, modify or comment on that content … and the remaining 90 passively read/review the content without undertaking any further action. It’s long been a tenet in discussions about online behavior.]

What types of news stories are most likely to generate reader comments? Well, politics and world events are right up there, but local news stories are also a pretty important source for comments:

 Political stories: 28%
 National/international news stories: 27%
 Local news stories: 22%
 Celebrity news: 13%
 Sports stories: 5%
 Business and financial news: 5%

And what about the propensity for news seekers to use search engines to find multiple perspectives on a news story? More than one-third of respondents report that they “click on multiple [search engine] results to get a variety of perspectives,” while less than half of that number click on just the first one or two search result entries.

And why wouldn’t people hunt around more? In today’s world, it’s possible to find all sorts of perspectives and “slants” on a news story, whereas just a few years ago, you’d have to be content with the same AP or UPI wire story that you’d find republished in dozens of papers — often word-for-word.

An About-Face on Facebook?

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Facebook logoThis past week, social networking site Facebook trumpeted the fact that is signed up its 500 millionth member. That’s an impressive statistic — and all the more so when you realize that Facebook had only about 100 million registrants just two short years ago.

And the site is truly international these days, with ~70% of Facebook users living someplace other than the USA.

But there are some interesting rumblings in cyberspace these days that suggest the bloom may be off the rose for Facebook. After having climbed to the #1 perch in terms of registrations and site traffic, there are some intriguing new signs that all is not well in Farmville – or elsewhere in the land of Facebook.

Inside Facebook, an independent research entity that tracks the Facebook platform for developers and marketers, is reporting new Facebook registrations dropped in June to ~250,000. That may still seem like a lot of people, but it’s a far cry from the ~7.7 million new registrants in May.

Furthermore, looking at age demographics, Inside Facebook has concluded that in the critical 26-34 age group, the total number of U.S. users active on Facebook actually declined during the month of June.

Are these people being swayed by the privacy debate that’s happening concerning how much visibility Facebook postings are being given on Google and other search engines?

That may be one explanation for the decline, but there could be other forces at work as well. The latest American Customer Satisfaction Index report from ForeSee Results, a web research and consulting firm, places Facebook’s ranking near dead-last on a list of 30 major online web sites in terms of customer satisfaction with site design and utility.

Who scored highest? Dowdy old Wikipedia. Even boring government sites like the IRS scored better.

It’s evident the issue goes far beyond privacy concerns. There’s also confusion or irritation with Facebook’s ever-changing user interface. As Aaron Shapiro wrote recently in Media Post’s Online Media Daily:

“The truth is, Facebook isn’t fun to use anymore. It’s become a chore, just one more place that busy people have to log in to stay up-to-date. And Facebook is making the goal of staying up-to-date harder and harder to achieve. There are so many apps like Farmville producing status updates, as well as people using Facebook as their repository for passing thoughts and private/public conversations, I have to sort through tons of what I don’t want to read before I get to something I want or need to know.”

Back in its early days, the beauty of Facebook was that it provided such an easy framework to stay connected with family and friends. It was a way to share photos and other personal information quickly – and almost effortlessly – with far-flung contacts all over the world.

Those attributes seem to have gotten buried in all of the “spammy” hi-jinks and gimmicks that characterize so much of today’s Facebook.

Considering the growing dissatisfaction with Facebook, ranging from things like privacy (mis)management and ubiquitous advertising to confusion with the site’s ever-changing design and irritating lack of utility, some industry watchers are predicting that users will begin seriously looking at alternatives. Despite Facebook’s huge presence and large pool of registrants, they may find simpler, purer sites out there that are more to their liking. Several that could be beneficiaries of the “Facebook fall-off” are Diaspora and Collegiate Nation.

Your life online: You can run, but you can’t hide.

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Vetting Job Candidates OnlineRecently, a Microsoft-commmissioned survey conducted by Cross-Tab Marketing Services discovered that fewer than 10% of U.S. consumers believe information found online about them would have a negative impact on their ability to get a job.

How clueless. That same survey also queried ~1,200 recruiters and human resources personnel. It found that these professionals are highly likely to research the online profile and online activities of job candidates as part of their vetting and winnowing process.

Fully 70% of them reported that they’ve rejected candidates based on what they found.

Going further, the HR survey found that the majority of companies have made online screening a formal part of the hiring process, and the expectation is that online vetting will become even more important in the years ahead.

Fortunately, it’s not just negative information that counts, because ~85% of the HR respondents reported that discovering a positive online presence influences their hiring decisions at least to some degree … and the stronger and more relevant to the candidate’s prospective job responsibilities, the better.

When asked to comment on what types of online information was “appropriate” for companies to assess, consumer respondents’ views were at sharp odds with the HR professionals:

Viewing photo and video sharing sites: ~44% of consumers feel these are inappropriate to consider … yet ~60% of recruiters and HR professionals are busy checking them.

Looking at social networking sites like Facebook: ~43% of consumers (and ~56% of younger consumers under the age of 25) feel that these should be off-limits … but ~63% of the HR folks review them.

 Consumers are even more critical of HR personnel reviewing sites such as online gaming, classified ad sites like Craigslist, and “virtual worlds” … yet more than 25% of HR professionals are snooping around those types of sites as well.

And let’s not forget the search engines. Not only do many individuals “Google” their name to see what’s out there on them in Cyberspace, HR personnel do it as well. In fact, that’s the most prevalent online investigative tool – done by nearly 80% of the HR professionals who participated in the Microsoft survey.

Why are job candidates rejected? It’s for the expected reasons, including:

 Concerns about a candidate’s lifestyle (~58%)
 Inappropriate comments and text written by the candidate (~56%)
 Unsuitable photos, video and information (~55%)
 Inappropriate comments or text written by friends and relatives (~43%)
 Comments criticizing previous employers, co-workers or clients (~40%)

There’s nothing really new about this list – people have been passed over for jobs for reasons like these since way back before computers and the Internet. But today, it’s all out there – in plain view and just a few quick keystrokes away. That’s a huge difference.

And there’s one other important thing to remember: the stuff tends to live out there in cyberspace for a long, long time, and attempts to squelch unflattering information are usually fruitless.

Internet privacy legislation: What are the implications?

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Internet privacyThe issue of online privacy – the degree to which publishers are allowed to capture and use information derived from consumer online behavior – has been an undercurrent of concern since the very early days of the Internet. What is the right balance that allows the web to be used for marketing and commerce … but that also allows for an acceptable degree of consumer privacy?

The privacy issue has gathered steam in recent years. Today, proposed legislation affecting EU countries would dictate that web cookies (snippets of computer code) cannot be placed on a user’s computer unless it is strictly necessary for the purposes of enabling the use of a service explicitly requested by the user.

If such legislation is enacted, the implications for web publishers would be far-reaching. After all, cookies are currently used for many purposes, including web analytics, session management, content management, personalization, managing preferences, and calculating advertising revenues.

Cookies are the means by which all of these functions give the web its commercial foundation and functionality. Without them, the web would be little more than another broadcast medium for viewing non-customized information on a computer screen instead of on paper or on a TV screen.

And now those same privacy discussions are beginning to happen among U.S. lawmakers. Legislation is being crafted in Congress that may restrict the use of cookies along with other forms of “personally identifiable” information.

Is this a good development, or not?

It’s certainly true that some unscrupulous web sites and publishers have used cookies as a means to engage in nefarious behavior. But in an attempt to eliminate those exceptions, is it wise for legislation to wipe away all of the very real benefits web users derive from services that utilize cookies as the means to deliver them?

It’s pretty clear that one of the obvious impacts privacy legislation would have is on publishers who earn revenues from advertising. The inability to utilize cookies when serving online ads would affect the way the ads perform. Without cookies, ad servers are unable to perform the most basic functions such as fraud analysis and frequency capping (limiting the number of ads shown to a viewer).

In addition, publishers would lose the ability to measure “conversion” rates – tracking specific actions tied to ad revenue calculation such as downloading a white paper or to make a purchase – that is the foundation for many ad compensation packages. Or to serve a specific ad to someone who has expressed prior interest in a topic or product.

The data that these and other cookie-enabled actions provide is the basis of most online advertising programs. Without cookies, advertisers would have to purchase far more impressions served to swaths of people who may or may not be interested. Web analytics would also become more challenging; third-party services such as Web Trends and Google Analytics tap into cookies as a way to provide information and answers.

The claim that without legislation, people don’t have ways to limit the proliferation of cookies on their computers is just not accurate. Not only do many publishers provide ways for consumers to opt out of targeting techniques, surveys show that a significant proportion of Internet users — perhaps one third — routinely delete cookies from their computers. And ~10% have them permanently blocked.

It’s good for lawmakers to be looking at the privacy implications of the Internet. After all, the web continues to evolve at a quick pace, with new functionalities coming to the fore every day that may have implications on consumer privacy. But at the same time, it’s important to really think through the full ramifications of laws that, while well intentioned, would have negative consequences on everyone if enacted.

Social Media: The Newest Addiction?

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Social media: The latest addiction?With the burgeoning popularity of social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter, some observers are beginning to wonder if a new type of addiction is now in our midst.

So-called “Internet addiction disorder” came to the fore in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with social scientists contending that some people were neglecting their interpersonal relationships, and instead were spending hours of time online every day.

Of course, since social media is about interrelationships, perhaps likening it to the solitary pursuit of web surfing might not be an apt comparison. But a recent study demonstrates that social media, too, appears to have addictive aspects.

The online consumer electronics shopping and review site Retrevo commissioned an independent study of more than 1,000 U.S. consumers distributed across age, income, gender and geography. Guess what? The study revealed that many people appear to be obsessed with their social media circles all throughout the day … and also checking in throughout night.

About half of the respondents reported that they check Facebook or Twitter feeds just before going to bed, during the night, or as soon as they wake up. Nearly one in five admitted checking in with these sites “any time I wake up” during the night.

It’s not a huge surprise to learn that owners of iPhones are more involved with social media; they use Facebook and Twitter more often and in more places.

Moreover, nearly one in five respondents actually view these two social sites as their most important sources for the news they consume, rather than Internet news sites, TV/cable programming, the radio or the daily newspaper.

As a truer measure of “addiction,” the study’s respondents were asked to estimate how long they could go without checking in on Facebook and Twitter. While about four in ten reported they could avoid checking in over “a long time,” a similar percentage indicated they could not make it any longer than five or six hours at a stretch without checking in on these sites. (The balance felt they would need to check in at least once a day.)

And how about tolerating electronic messages that interrupt their activities? Half of respondents under the age of 25 in the Retrevo study didn’t mind being interrupted during a meal. One-fourth don’t mind the interruption happening on the job or during a meeting. And a die-hard 10% don’t even mind an interruption during – you guessed it – lovemaking.

As for how respondents over age 25 answered these same questions, they’re only about half as tolerant, so it’s easy to see how the propensity for social media addiction might manifest itself more with the younger set.

Since the online social media revolution is a relatively new phenomenon, one might wonder if the attraction of social media bordering on addiction is just a passing fad in part because of its novelty.

That might be true. But it’s difficult to see exactly how behaviors and attitudes will change dramatically over time. After all, television viewing was extremely high when TVs first came out … and those numbers stayed high for decades thereafter. Social scientists started making rumbles about the phenomenon of TV addiction early on … leading some people to refer to television sets as the “idiot box” or “boob tube.”

And actually, with social media the temptation for “total immersion” is even stronger. After all, the TV viewing public was forced to watch whatever programming went out over the airwaves. But in social media, the content is whatever the participants choose it to be – and it’s interactive to boot.

Craigslist riding high … but clouds on the horizon?

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Craigslist logoNow here’s an interesting statistic about Craigslist, the online classified advertising phenomenon and bane of newspaper publishers across the country. Online publishing consulting firm AIM Group is forecasting that Craigslist will generate nearly $125 million in revenues this year.

But here’s the real kicker: Craigslist is on track to earn somewhere between $90 million and $100 million in profits on that revenue. That kind of profit margin is basically unheard of – in any industry. And the fact that it’s happening in the publishing industry is even more amazing.

What’s contributing to these stratospheric results? After all, Craigslist bills itself as a “free classified” site. That may be, but the publisher derives a huge portion of revenue – more than 50% – from paid recruitment advertising, much of it coming straight out of the pockets of the newspaper industry.

And the rest? Chalk up most of that to advertising let’s euphemistically label “adult services.” (AIM Group calls it something else: “Thinly disguised advertising for prostitutes.”)

Of course, these lucrative revenues and profits have come at a price. Craigslist has developed a reputation – not wholly undeserved – of being a virtual clearinghouse for anonymous hook-ups and other forms of vice. Complaints of Craigslist becoming a haven for scam artists, thieves – even the occasional murderer – have become more common as the site has expanded its reach into more cities and regions — now in excess of 500 communities.

And here’s another interesting finding from AIM Group. It reports that Craigslist’s traffic peaked in August of last year (~56 million unique visitors that month), but has fallen since then. In fact, monthly traffic has dropped and now plateaued at ~48 million since February.

Why? AIM speculates it’s the result of an “antiquated” user interface, along with a proliferation of “spam & scam” advertising. You start getting a lot of that … and you’re bound to start driving some people away.

Still, it’s pretty hard to argue with profit margins hovering around 75%.

Computer security measures: A whole lot of heat … and very little light?

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Cyber-security ... how effective is it in relation to the all the effort?If you’re like me, you have upwards of two dozen sets of user names and passwords associated with the various business, banking, shopping and social media sites with which you interact on a regular or occasional basis.

Trying to keep all of this information safe and secure – yet close at hand – is easier said than done. More often than not, passwords and other information end up on bits of paper floating around the office, in a wallet … or in (and out of) your head.

And to make things even more difficult, if you paid attention to conventional advice, you’d be changing those passwords every 30 or 60 days, making sure you’re following the guidelines regarding creating indecipherable permutations of numbers, letters and symbols so as to throw the “bad guys” off your password’s scent.

Now, here comes a paper written by Dr. Cormac Herley, principal research analyst at Microsoft Corporation, that calls into question how much all of this focus on password protection and cyber-security is really benefiting anyone.

Dr. Herley’s paper is titled So Long, and No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users. In it, the author contends that the collective time and effort involved in complying with all of the directives and admonitions regarding computer security add up to far more cost than the cost of what is actually caused by cyber-security breaches.

[For the record, he estimates if the time spent by American adults on these tasks averages a minute a day, it adds up to ~$16 billion worth of time every year.]

Here’s a quote from Herley’s paper:

“We argue that users’ rejection of the security advice they receive is entirely rational from an economic perspective. The advice offers to shield them from the direct costs of attacks, but burdens them with far greater indirect costs in the form of effort. Looking at various examples of security advice, we find that the advice is complex and growing, but the benefit is largely speculative or moot.”

It would be one thing if this screed was written by some outré blogger operating on the fringes of the discipline. But it’s coming from a senior researcher at Microsoft.

To illustrate his point, Herley summarizes the whole area of password rules, which he contends places the entire burden of password management on the user. To wit:

 Length of password
 Password composition (e.g., letters, numbers, special characters)
 Non-dictionary words (in any language, not just English)
 Don’t write the password down
 Don’t share the password with anyone
 Change it often
 Don’t re-use the same passwords across sites

How much value each of these guidelines possesses is a matter of debate. For instance, the first three factors listed above are not consequential, as most applications and web sites lock out access after three or four incorrect tries.

Changing passwords often – whether that’s quarterly, monthly or weekly – is never often enough, as any attack using a purloined password will likely happen within a few seconds, minutes or hours of its acquisition, rather than waiting days. On the other hand, for users to change their passwords regularly requires time and attention … and often leads to frustration and lost productivity as people hunt around for the “last, best” misplaced password they assigned to their account.

And as for those irritating certificate error warnings that pop up on the computer screen with regularity, Herley contends that most users do not understand their significance. And even if they did, what options do people have when confronted with one of these warnings, other than exiting the program?

As it turns out, there’s not much to fear, as virtually all certificate errors are “false positives.” With certificates as well as so many other issues of cyber-security, Herley maintains that the dangers are often not evidenced-based. As for the computer users, “The effort we ask of them is real, while the harm we warn them of is theoretical,” he writes.

Herley’s main beef is that all of the energy surrounding cyber-security and what is asked of consumers is a cost borne by the entire population … but that the cost of security directives should actually be in proportion to the victimization rate, which he characterizes as miniscule.

An interesting prognosis … and a rather surprising one considering the source.

Newspapers crash … Online news soars.

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The latest annual News Users report by Outsell, Inc. predicts additional declines in print newspaper circulation as consumers continue to gravitate to online news. It is the third annual report issued by this marketing and communications research firm, which is developed from findings gathered in consumer surveys.

Outsell projects that Sunday newspaper readers will drop to ~43 million by 2012. That would represent a decline of some 20 million readers from Sunday papers’ circulation heights in the 1990s.

But what’s even more noteworthy is the continuing evolution in online activities. Today, nearly 60% of consumers report that they go online for “news right now.” That’s up from 33% just a few years ago.

And where are people going for their online news? By a large margin, it’s to aggregator sites like Google News, Yahoo and Drudge Report rather than to newspaper sites. As an example, 44% of the people who go to Google News scan the headlines there, without clicking through or accessing the newspapers’ individual sites.

Other key findings from the Outsell survey:

• One in five consumers now go to online news aggregators for their “first in the day” news, up from 10% three years ago. TV/cable still leads with 30%, but that margin has been shrinking dramatically.

• Paid online content is not a picking up the slack for newspapers, with participation rates of no more than 10% of consumers.

• Newspapers retain strengths in reporting local topics (e.g., local news, sports and entertainment), even as national topics have gone pretty much all-digital.

That being stated, if a valued local online news site were to put up a pay wall – or require a paid subscription to the print paper in order to gain free online access – three out of four respondents claimed they would go somewhere else to find the news free of charge. (That’s despite the fact that good alternative news sources at the local level are usually not so numerous.)

The Outsell study found that consumers continue to believe printed news is worth paying for … but they expect the news they get online to be free of charge.

The big problem: It looks like it’s too late for publishers to “transition” reader willingness to pay for print news over to now paying for that same content online.

Nope, that train’s already left the station.

Stanford Weighs In on Web Credibility

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Web credibility.With more than 200 million web sites in cyberspace these days, what makes the difference between the good ones and bad ones? That’s what Stanford University has sought to find out through a multi-year research project.

The Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab conducted research with a cross-section of more than 4,500 web consumers over a three-year period. Distilling the mountain of information gleaned from this sample, the Lab issued its Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility. It boils the research findings down to ten basic guidelines that, if followed, mean that a web site will be viewed as credible and authoritative.

In reviewing the Stanford guidelines, some of them stand out to me as ones that are too often missed by web developers. In particular:

Show there’s a “legitimate” organization behind the web site. Listing a physical address – not a P.O. Box – is one way to do this.

Make it easy to verify the accuracy of information. Third-party citations and data references, along with links to other respected web sites, are ways to accomplish this.

Make sure the site is “intuitive” and easy to navigate. People’s tolerance level for a web site that doesn’t follow a clear, logical thought path is low.

Update site content often. People put less credibility in sites that look like they’re informationally static or stale.

And especially important: Stanford’s research found that content errors should be fixed, no matter how inconsequential they might seem. It turns out that broken links, bad spelling, poor punctuation and other typos negatively affect the credibility of web sites more strongly than many other factors — and yet they’re among the easiest items to fix.

When you look at the overall web credibility guidelines from Stanford, they aren’t particularly challenging – and they shouldn’t be hard to put into practice.

But when you consider how lame many web sites actually are, it’s another reminder of how – in web design as in so much else in business and government – “best practices” too often fall victim to expediency or just plain slipshod execution.

Online Customer Review Sites: Who’s Yelping Now?

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The news this week that social networking and user review web site Yelp® will now de-couple the presentation of reviews from advertising programs comes as a rare victory for businesses that have been feeling more than a little pressured (blackmailed?) by the company’s strong-arm revenue-raising tactics.

The web has long had something of a “Wild West” atmosphere when it comes to reviews of businesses helping or (more likely) hurting the reputation of merchants.

Yelp is arguably the most significant of these sites. Since its inception in 2004 as a local site search resource covering businesses in the San Francisco metro area, Yelp has expanded to include local search and reviews of establishments in nearly 20 major urban markets. With its branding tagline “Real people. Real reviews®,” Yelp is visited by ~25 million people each month, making it one of the most heavily trafficked Internet sites in America.

Yelp solicits and publishes user ratings and reviews of local stores, restaurants, hotels and other merchants (even churches and doctor offices are rated), along with providing basic information on each entry’s location, hours of operation, and so forth – with nearly 3 million reviews submitted at last count.

Predictably, user ratings can have a great deal of influence over the relative popularity of the businesses in question. While most reviews are positive (ratings are on a 5-point scale), Yelp also employs a proprietary algorithm – some would say “secret formula” – to rank reviews based on a selection of factors ostensibly designed to give greater credence to “authentic” user reviews as opposed to “ringers” or “put-up jobs.”

Not surprisingly, Yelp hasn’t disclosed this formula to anyone.

So far, so good. But Yelp began to raise the ire of companies when its eager and aggressive advertising sales team began pitching paid promotional (sponsorship) programs to listed businesses that looked suspiciously like tying advertising expenditures to favorable treatment on reviews as a sort of quid quo pro.

Purchase advertising space on Yelp … and positive reviews miraculously start appearing at the top of the page. Decide against advertising … and watch the tables turn as they drop to the bottom or out of site altogether.

Concerns are so strong that three separate lawsuits have been filed this year already, culminating in a class-action lawsuit filed in February that accuses Yelp of “extortion,” including the claim that Yelp ad sales reps have offered to hide or bury a merchant’s negative customer reviews in exchange for signing them up as Yelp sponsors.

“The conduct is an offer to manipulate content in exchange for payment,” Jared Beck, an attorney for one of the plaintiffs, states bluntly.

As for whether Yelp’s announcement of new standards will now curb the rash of lawsuits, it seems clear that this is the intent. But so long as Yelp offers to do any sort of manipulation or reshuffling of reviews in exchange for advertising, the lawsuits will probably continue – even if there’s only the appearance of impropriety.

Oh, and don’t look for Yelp to provide any additional revelations regarding how reviews are sequenced to appear on the page. Too much transparency, and it’ll only make it easier for people to figure out how to “game” the ratings.