Web

The European Union Versus Marketers

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

EU e-Privacy Initiative attacks ad tracking via cookiesI wonder how many marketers are focused on what’s happening in Europe on the digital marketing front? While companies here are busily engaged in making sure ad tracking is being done to the nth degree, in the UK and Continental Europe, new legal restrictions on advertising tracking threaten to upend a lot of these efforts, particularly for multinational brands.

In short, the EU’s e-Privacy Directive restricts the use of “cookies” and virtually all other digital ad tracking methods. And the legal frameworks set up around this directive would require any marketer with users in any EU country to be subject to EU-wide and country-specific privacy legislation.

The new privacy initiatives are far more restrictive than the present US-EU “safe harbor” agreement, which merely requires American companies to notify users when cookies are used on a website. The new regs covering web pages, web apps and mobile apps would require giving notice each time a cookie is used, thereby setting up a flurry of endless notifications that promises to seriously degrade the online browsing experience.

The seemingly reasonable compromise of adding information to a “terms of use” agreement isn’t acceptable to the EU either, unless all users are issued the new agreement and they certify their acceptance.

And just to make sure everyone knows how serious all of this is, the new regs call for the imposition of financial and/or criminal penalties for the non-compliant use of cookies. But for the moment at least, only two relatively small countries besides the UK – Estonia and Denmark – have implemented controls to enforce the EU directives.

Here in the United States, privacy legislation slowly wends its way around Congress, with many legislators understanding that the key to successful commerce online is the ability for marketers to match marketing messages to interested consumers. It’s in Europe where governments appear more than willing to cripple the ability of marketers to do the job they’ve sought to do for decades: Target their audiences with as much precision as possible.

As a result, some European businesses are making noises about abandoning Europe for the United States. The problem is, in the digital age with so much of the branding and commerce blurred between countries, it’s impossible for restrictive moves in one region not to cause negative repercussions somewhere else.

The Information Tsunami Shows No Sign of Letting Up

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

If you feel you’re being overwhelmed by information overload in the digital realm, you have lots of company.

A survey conducted last month of ~200 adults who are online “content consumers” found that the largest proportion reports being online essentially their entire waking day. The survey, conducted by content publishing platform company Magnify, was made up of executives, professionals, entrepreneurs and technologists.

It’s a small survey sample to be sure … but who could really argue with the results it uncovered? When asked to what degree they were connected to the Internet, here’s how these respondents answered:

 From the moment I wake up until the moment I go to bed: ~50%
 Most of the workday: ~28%
 9 am to 9 p.m.: ~17%

But here’s the even bigger kicker: A large majority of the respondents reported that the quantity of information being received today had grown by 50% or more compared to last year:

 Information flow has doubled or more since last year: ~26%
 … Has increased by ~75%: ~10%
 … Has increased by ~50%: ~28%
 … Has increased by ~20%: ~25%
 … Has stayed essentially the same: ~11%

How are people dealing with processing the additional information? See how many of these “coping mechanisms” reflect your own actions or behaviors:

 Reading/responding to e-mail on evenings and weekends: ~77%
 Never turning off the mobile phone: ~57%
 Unable to answer all e-mails: ~47%
 Missing important news: ~41%
 Ignoring family and friends: ~40%
 Answering e-mails even while with children: ~35%
 Checking e-mails in the middle of the night: ~33%

The question is: Have we finally reached a critical-mass state where the law of diminishing returns kicks in?

Well, we might have thought that one year ago … before the latest torrential increase in volume happened!

The Huge Challenge of Litigating Content Posted Online

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Barbra Streisand House -- the "Streisand Effect"
The "Streisand Effect": Barbra Streisand's Malibu compound.
The “brave new world” of the Internet and social media is having interesting side effects. One of these is the heartburn that some companies are feeling as unflattering portraits of their inside operations are painted, or other types of gossip are published for all the world to see.

In a recent example of this, we’ve had a chance to see how it’s playing out with Mechanical Dynamics & Analysis, an engineering services firm that repairs turbine generators. In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in St. Louis a few weeks back, it alleges that the Sound Off blog defamed current and former officers of the company. It also alleges that the blog revealed confidential company information.

The Sound Off blog doesn’t shy away from its mission. At the top of its masthead, it trumpets: “What we cannot say at the office, we can say here.” The postings in question pinpoint certain MD&A executives and reveal salary levels (that may or may not be accurate).

Another blog post reports that a former executive of the firm made a cool $4 million from the sale of the company.

Other posts just sound snippy. For example, there’s one that opines that one of the company’s officers “has two faces” – one “charming and cordial” … the other that of “a low-life crooked bastard.”

MD&A is asking the court to order Google to disclose the identity of the author(s) of the posts, after having unsuccessfully requested that Google remove the blog.

What are the chances of success of this legal action? Probably not very good.

For one thing, the U.S. District Court may lack jurisdiction because defamation cases can only be brought in federal court when the plaintiffs and defendants live in different states. As this point, there’s no way of knowing where the people who authored the anonymous blog posts reside … so it’s impossible to determine whether the suit should be brought at the federal or state level.

Also, the dates on the blog posts are all in the year 2006, which means that the statute of limitations in Missouri would come into play. But is it possible that the posts were backdated? That might be the case, because the creator of the blog has supposedly been on Blogger, the Google-owned blogging service platform, just since 2008.

The bottom line on all this: It’s quite murky.

And then there’s the issue of confidential data. The company alleges that the blog posts contain confidential information about its executives. But that information is then repeated in the court papers filed in the case. That makes it part of the public record – hence blunting the charge that publishing this confidential information was so horrible or damaging in the first place.

I have a feeling that this lawsuit isn’t going to get very far. That’s kind of a shame, really, because it’s pretty stinky when supposed corporate “dirty laundry” is aired in this fashion. Often, the allegations are hyped way beyond the reality of the situation. In almost every instance, there are two sides to the story – one of which gets short shrift (or no shift at all) in the online postings.

Alas, companies had better get used to the “transparent everything world” in which we live today. And it’s good to heed the warning of TechDirt’s technology blogger Mike Masnick not to become a victim of the “Streisand Effect.”

What’s that? It stems from a multi-million dollar lawsuit brought by Barbra Streisand to remove a photo of her house from the Internet. Not only did her suit fail … it brought far more attention to the photo than if she had ignored the whole thing in the first place.

Marshall McLuhan: The Great Prognosticator

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Marshall McLuhan, scholar, writer and social theorist
Marshall McLuhan: The Great Prognosticator
I’ve been reading a new biography on Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian educator, scholar and social theorist who is notable for having predicted the rise of the Internet years before Al Gore or anyone else took credit for inventing it.

The succinct biography, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! by Douglas Coupland [ISBN-10: 1935633163 … also available in a Kindle edition], is quite interesting and I definitely recommend it for anyone interested in mass communications and popular culture.

Reading this biography, one gets the impression that McLuhan was a man who correctly predicted a good deal of the world of communications in which we live today. Not only did he forecast the rise of the web 30 years before it came about, he was the one who coined the expression “the medium is the message” … and who spoke about the “global village” long before Hilary Clinton came on the scene.

It turns out that this extraordinary thinker led a pretty conventional life, actually. Born in Edmonton, AB, he spent the better part of his career in Canada, although it was as a visiting professor at St. Louis University where he met his future wife, with whom he would have six children. (Born an Anglican, McLuhan was influenced by the writings of G. K. Chesterton and had converted to Roman Catholicism by his late 20s.)

Although trained as an academician in Canada and at Cambridge – and being on the faculty at prestigious educational institutions like the University of Toronto where he eventually had his own research center – the demands of raising a large family drove McLuhan to more financially lucrative work in the advertising field as well. He also had consulting stints at large corporations like AT&T and IBM.

Although passionate about and partial to his teaching and academic work, it was as an ad industry personality that McLuhan probably made his biggest mark.

As early as 1951, McLuhan published a book of essays called The Mechanical Bride, which analyzed various examples of “persuasion” in contemporary popular culture.

In his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message” as he wrote of the influence of communications media independent of their content. He contended that media affect society in which they play a role not by the content they deliver, but by the characteristics of the media themselves. True enough.

And how did McLuhan come to predict the rise of the Internet? It was right there in his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy, which attempted to reveal how communications technology – alphabetic writing, printing presses, electronic media — affects cognitive organization and, in turn, social organization. Here’s what he had to say:

“The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its environment, and it will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.”

Remember, this was written in 1962!

McLuhan also used the term “surfing” in a way that seems uncannily similar to its meaning today – in his case, using the word “surfing” to refer to rapid, irregular and multidimensional movement through a body of knowledge.

More books would come from McLuhan’s pen in subsequent years, including:

 The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (McLuhan’s best seller)
War and Peace in the Global Village
From Cliché to Archetype

All of these volumes sound pretty fascinating – definitely ones to explore in the future, although the biography provides good synopses of their contents.

It is difficult to think of someone that has had more influence over the world of media and advertising than Marshall McLuhan. Sure, there are people like David Ogilvy, but his influence has been confined almost exclusively to the advertising industry alone.

By contrast, the McLuhan’s biographer contends that McLuhan influenced scads of writers and critical thinkers – I was pleased to see Camille Paglia among them – along with politicians like Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Jerry Brown. McLuhan was even named a “patron saint” of Wired Magazine, and a quote of his appeared on the publication’s masthead during the first decade of its publication.

And finally, it’s nice to discover that McLuhan’s years in academia have been given their due as well: The University of Toronto has continued his work by running a center at the school named, appropriately, the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology.

Facebook’s Hidden Bombshells

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Facebook's hidden bombshellsAs Facebook has been busily turning itself into a web powerhouse – challenging even the likes of Google for dominance – some people are beginning to question the fundamental aspects of how Facebook treats users and the content they post.

Last week I came across an interesting article by Douglas Karr, a social media consultant and author, who has spent thousands of dollars advertising on Facebook for himself and his clients. Karr summarized recent experiences he’s had with Facebook accounts that now make him extremely leery of using it as a central rather than an ancillary platform for promoting companies and their brands.

Facebook somehow became suspicious of entries posted by one of Karr’s clients. Facebook then proceeded to disable every administrator’s account that was associated with this client’s Facebook page. Because Karr was one of the administrators, this action disabled all of his Facebook pages and applications as well.

It then took a Herculean effort to repair the damage, during which time Karr learned quite a bit more about the customer service side of Facebook – if you could even call it “customer service.” Here’s how he summarizes it:

Facebook lacks a meaningful customer service process. There’s no phone number to call … or dedicated e-mail address specifically for support. So good luck trying to get any sort of satisfaction. Karr was asked to submit a form in order for his account to be turned back on. But that communication only resulted in an automated reply message to verify his identity.

In the meantime, with his accounts disabled, there was no way for Karr to log in and retrieve any of the now-hidden content.

What Karr learned is when all of what makes a Facebook presence so valuable – postings, photos, video and other content, fans, applications, etc. – goes by the boards, there’s essentially no recourse for a business.

Luckily for Karr, his account was re-enabled after a few days – with no notification from Facebook. But then he still had to republish all of the pages.

[It turns out that Karr’s client had a “friend of a friend of a friend” at Facebook who was able to pull a few strings to set things right … but how many of us should be so fortunate?]

This experience revealed another distasteful reality: The content you post on Facebook may be yours, but Facebook owns the access to it.

Yep. If you look closely at Facebook’s fine print, this is what you’ll find: “You grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook.”

So much for keeping proprietary control over anything that may go viral and ends up on Facebook.

Karr’s word of advice for companies considering employing Facebook as their primary means of generating online traffic and revenue: “Don’t.”

Instead, he suggests adopting other tactics such as developing a blog, investing in search engine optimization and search engine marketing, using Twitter … and owning all of your content on your own domain.

That’s pretty smart advice from someone who speaks from experience.

A Game-Changer for Charitable Organizations and Causes?

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jumo, a social network focused on charities.Chris Hughes
Jumo, the newest social network focused on charities and social activism.
There’s a new international social media resource being launched. Jumo, which was unveiled this past week in a beta test version, aims to connect people with not-for-profit causes and charitable organizations.

Established in February 2010, Jumo describes itself as “a social network connecting individuals and organizations who want to change the world.”

The founder of Jumo is Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook who more recently served as director of online organizing for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008. He sees Jumo as a way for people to find and evaluate organizations that focus on the causes that interest them. Such organizations can range all the way from health and educational initiatives to ones dealing with advocacy issues such as gay rights.

News articles, YouTube videos, Twitter posts and other content will be added to Jumo pages, and users can also add their own comments and feedback.

What’s the inspiration behind Jumo? It’s to establish a social platform focusing on issues, advocacy and not-for-profit organizations rather than on personalities or branded products. “The more connected [an] individual is to an issue they care about, the higher probability there is they will stay involved over a longer period of time,” Hughes has stated.

As part of establishing its mission, Jumo has outlined the following three key factors:

 Millions of people are working to improve the lives of others, many of whom lack the resources to have major impact.

 There are millions of other people who would want to help, but don’t know how.

 Despite where we are with technology, it’s still difficult to find meaningful opportunities to get involved.

Jumo provides a platform wherein people can discover the type of causes and organizations they care about, follow the latest news and updates in those fields, and support the work of these organizations through the donation of skills, time or financial support.

In Hughes’ view, this is what differentiates Jumo from social media platforms such as Facebook, which also allows the creation of pages for non-profit groups. Facebook’s groups tend to be passive, with many an individual’s interaction going little beyond “following” or “liking” them.

Hughes believes there will be significantly more volunteering and giving associated with the people who interact with organizations on Jumo. And if that happens, it may finally fulfill the promise of online platforms enabling not-for-profits to raise money more efficiently and less expensively than via traditional means.

That’s a goal that has been stubbornly elusive to date, as only about 5% of all U.S. donations come from online giving, according to the Blackbaud Index of Online Giving.

How does Jumo intend to grow and thrive in the online world? As a not-for-profit initiative itself, it plans to rely on payments from users and sponsorships from groups that would like to receive more highly visible promotion on the site.

Jumo already contains ~3,000 charitable organizations and issues-oriented groups which have been “seeded” on the site. But any organization that is certified as “tax exempt” is eligible to set up a page on Jumo.

Is Jumo destined to transform social activism? Only time will tell … but it will be interesting to see how this interesting new venture evolves and grows in the coming months.

More Insights on Online Display Ad Effectiveness

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Ad clickthrough rates
Clickthrough rates are only part of the story in online display advertising.
Last week, I blogged about the low level of clickthroughs on online display ads – basically a cipher at 0.09%.

In a conversation with a business colleague of mine who is with one of our healthcare client accounts, she mentioned that it’s also important to consider the branding aspects of online display advertising. The idea that people may not click through at that precise moment in time, but are favorably disposed to pay a visit later on.

This got me to looking for additional research into the matter. What I found from several advertising digital media marketing and data reporting companies – MediaMind (Eyeblaster) and comScore – confirms this impression.

An analysis by comScore of consumer clickthrough behavior covering ~140 online display ad campaigns found that only about 20% of the conversions came after clicking on a banner ad. The remaining 80% of conversions happened among those who had seen the ad but not clicked through at the time. Instead, they converted at a later date.

Other interesting points from comScore’s analysis include:

 Online display ad campaigns yielded nearly 50% improvement in advertiser website visits as measured over a 30-day period.

 Users who were exposed to the online advertising were ~38% more likely to conduct an advertiser-related “branded” keyword search in the subsequent 30-day period.

 Users who were exposed to the online advertising were ~17% more likely to make a purchase at the advertiser’s retail store.

Similarly, MediaMind’s analysis of ~100 million conversions from thousands of online ad campaigns has found concurring results – namely, that only ~20% of conversions are the result of a clickthrough, while the vast majority of the conversions happen at some point after viewing the banner ad without clicking on it at that moment.

The takeaway from all this: It’s a mistake to consider online advertising clickthrough rates in a vacuum. Because at best, it’s only a partial measure of the effectiveness of an online ad program.

Online Display Ad Clickthrough Rates Finally Bottom Out … Near the Bottom

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Online Display Ad Clickthrough Rates Bottoming Out
Online display ad clickthrough rates have stopped declining ... bottoming out at 0.09%.
The latest news in online display advertising is that ad clickthrough rates have now leveled off after an extended period of decline – one that was exacerbated by the economic downturn.

So reports digital media marketing firm MediaMind (Eyeblaster). According to a report released this past week, one key reason for the decline being arrested is the greater sophistication of advertisers in targeting online advertising to audiences and groups that are more likely to be interested in them.

That being said, the overall clickthrough rate has leveled off at an abysmal 0.09%.

That is correct: less than one tenth of one percent. In any other business, this would be a rounding error.

If that statistic seems difficult to believe, consider this factoid: The average Internet user in America is delivered more than 2,000 display ads over the course of a single month. We might think that users would be inclined to click on more than just two or three of these ads during a month’s time.

But it’s important to realize that when users are in the mood to shop and buy, they’re typically going straight to the sites they like … or they’re using Google, Bing or some other search engine to find their way.

And it turns out there’s really no such thing as an “average” Internet user, anyway. Research conducted by digital marketing auditing and intelligence firm comScore, Inc. has found that around two-thirds of people on the Internet never click on any display ads during the course of a month. Moreover, only 16% of Internet users are responsible for around 80% of all clicks on display ads.

All the more reason why search marketing continues to be the online advertising powerhouse that it is. And why not? It’s putting your business in front of the customer when s/he is in “search-and-buy” mode … not when s/he’s doing something else.

Search Goes Global

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

SEO in Different LanguagesMost companies hitched their wagon to search engine optimization long ago. That’s not surprising, because high search rankings are one of the most effective ways to get in front of customers and prospects when they’re in the mood to research and buy.

But up until recently, SEO has generally existed in the world of English. By contrast, SEO campaigns in Spanish and other languages haven’t worked so well. Despite the fact that Spanish is among the most widely spoken of languages, many Spanish-language countries have been behind the curve in Internet connectivity. And you could say the same of other languages.

But that’s not the case today. As more people overseas have become connected, the amount of content in Spanish and other foreign languages has risen dramatically.

Looking back at a bit of history, in the early-1990s essentially all of the search engines were in English only; if you wanted to conduct a web search, you had no other choice. That started to change by the mid-1990s when ~75% of all Internet searches were being conducted in English.

Fast-forward to today. According to Internet World Stats, an information resource that chronicles web usage in more than 230 countries and world regions, searches in English now account for only ~25% of all searches conducted.

Time was … search spoke English only. But the dramatic growth of Hispanic and other non-English digital markets means that companies that take the time to invest in foreign-language content and SEO initiatives will find themselves in the strongest position going forward.

It’s yet another item for the marketing department’s to-do list. Fortunately, help is available … with companies like MSEO.com and SEO Matador providing turnkey programs for implementing SEO campaigns in multiple different languages.

Bing, Blekko, and more new developments in search.

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Facebook + BingWhen it comes to the evolution of online search, as one wag put it, “If you drop your pencil, you miss a week.”

It does seem that significant new developments in search crop up almost monthly – each one having the potential to up-end the tactics and techniques that harried companies attempt to put in place to keep up with the latest methods to target and influence customers. It’s simply not possible to bury your head in the sand, even if you wanted to.

Two of the newest developments in search include the introduction of a beta version of the new Blekko search engine with its built-in focus on SEO analytics — I’ll save that topic for a future blog post — along with a joint press conference held last week by Facebook and Microsoft where they announced new functionalities to the Bing search engine. More specifically, Bing will now be displaying search results based on the experiences and preferences of people’s Facebook friends.

What makes the Bing/Facebook development particularly intriguing is that it adds a dimension to search that is genuinely new and different. Up until now, every consumer had his or her “search engine of choice” based on any number of reasons or preferences. But generally speaking, that preference wouldn’t be based on the content of the search results. That’s because the ability for search engines to deliver truly unique search results has been very difficult because they’ve all been based on essentially the same search algorithms.

[To prove the point, run the same search term on Yahoo and Google, and you’ll likely see natural search results are pretty similar one to another. There might be a different mix of image and video results, but generally speaking, the results are based on the same “crawling” capabilities of search bots.]

The Bing/Facebook deal changes the paradigm in that new information heretofore residing behind Facebook’s wall will now be visible to selected searchers.

The implications of this are pretty interesting to contemplate. It’s one thing for people to read reviews or ratings written by total strangers about a restaurant or store on a site like Yelp. But now, if someone sees “likes,” ratings or comments from their Facebook friends, those will presumably carry more weight. With this new font of information, as time goes on the number of products, brands and services that people will be rating will surely rise.

The implications are potentially enormous. Brands like Zappos have grown in popularity, and in consumer loyalty, because of their “authenticity.” The new Bing/Facebook module will provide ways for smaller brands to engender similar fierce loyalty on a smaller scale … without having to make the same huge brand-building commitment.

Of course, there’s a flip side to this. A company’s product had better be good … or else all of those hoped-for positive ratings and reviews could turn out to be the exact opposite!