netactr

i.m.table amazes Kvitnu attendees, goes beyond Surface

Sergei — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:27:42 +0000

Yuri Kostenko, the owner of Front Pictures studio, enjoys what he does. And what he does is amazing. I’ve seen and played with Microsoft’s Surface a few times, but Front Picture’s i.m.table (interactive multimedia table) goes beyond it and then some. I met the team at the Kvitnu Fest where they presented the i.m.table to a captivated audience, and then at their offices in Kyiv. My first impression? I felt I were in Menlo Park / Pioneer Square / Insert your favorite valley wannabe - large open-space area, lots of macs/audio/video equipment, devs and artists working late. Besides the i.m.table Front Pictures also offers motion-e-motion (an interactive wall), Touch-Bar and Screenberry.

How do you know if you are the next Facebook?

Sergei — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:22:56 +0000

You don’t. You try, you make your product the best it can be and you let users judge it. All the talk about meeting customer needs is too simplistic - there are dormant, hidden needs which people are just not aware of and that only surface when there is a product / service that awakens them. Someone had to build the first PC to start a revolution. Record the first dnb set. Paint the first Cubist painting. PC Word Canada wrote about Web 2.0’s Most Ridiculous Sites today. I disagree.

ROI of online car retailing

Sergei — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 21:00:03 +0000

Selling your car? Can’t decide between the $55 Premium Package from cars.com and the $69 Deluxe Package from autotrader.com? Web analytics can help you making the right investment.

Autotrader gets more uniques than Cars.com: 6.5M vs 5.2M in February 2008.

On that basis you are paying exactly the same amount of $10.6 per 1M uniques.

However, Autotrader users make more visits on average: or 2.5 visits/unique (16.1M total) vs. 2.0 visits/unique (10.1M total)

Moreover, user engagement is higher on autotrader: 16.5 min/visit vs 12.2 min/visit.

I think the business case is clear.

Not so delicious anymore?

Sergei — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 23:26:59 +0000

Can someone tell me what is going on at delicious? Monthly unique visitors in US have declined to around 1M according to comScore. For social bookmarking apps unique visitors are simultaneously a proxy for the active user base.

Worldwide trend is the same - after 6M uniques in September only 2.5M in February.

Compete.com confirms the US trend, albeit they estimate February active user base at 1.3M.

Would our friends at Yahoo do something?

Please?

Man vs Machine

Sergei — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 04:09:40 +0000

Jason Calacanis, the beleaguered founder of Mahalo, gave the best keynote at the SES New York. Mahalo is a start-up search engine which tries to reinvent what Yahoo pioneered in the 90’s – a directory for internet maintained by humans. Mahalo pays $15+ to anyone who is willing to build a wiki-like page with links relevant to a specific keyword. An automated project management system allows students or bored professionals pick up work items and deliver the equivalent of Search Engine Result Pages. Apparently 400 people are already part of this distributed work force.
Calacanis talked about many things in his speech, but one particular comment stroke me the most. Answering the existential question whether his business model will survive in the long-term, Mahalo’s founder submitted that frequency of searches aligns with the best search technology for compiling search results. For some fundamental and high-frequency search terms (e.g. Spain or Cars) pages created by experts (e.g. Wikipedia or Mahalo) deliver better user experience; recommendations from friends are good for medium-volume terms; automated machine results are great for infrequently conducted queries or text search.

I get his point that an Encyclopedia Britannica-style answer to a query is the ideal presentation of a result page. However, Yahoo already tried to use humans to classify the internet, and the shier volume of new web content made their directory non-scalable. Besides, Mahalo is soon going to face smarter machine technology (termed Universal or Blended Search) which creates SERPs that combine images, links, definitions, domain-specific information etc. Moreover, many search engines already list Wikipedia result pages as their top results for high-frequency encyclopedia-style searches. I do wish Mahalo good traction with users, but they won’t have it easy, I am afraid.

Evolving from hunter-gatherers to gardeners

Sergei — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:27:54 +0000

Mohan Sawhney, Kellogg marketing professor, keynoted the Microsoft Marketing Symposium in Seattle. Mohan’s submission was that marketing has remained marketing even if new digital and interactive technologies expanded our toolbox. He referred to the 1998 buzzword of the year – e-commerce – and compared it to today’s trends of paid search, social marketing etc.

Mohan’s making a good point in that the fundamental ways we marketers achieve our results have not changed. The tactics did change though. From hunters-gatherers using shotguns to targets our victims … oops, customers, we are evolving to gardeners tending relationships (all analogies are Mohan’s).

One of the good suggestions he made was to get your customers to do product concept and testing work. Netflix for example ran the Netflix prize, hoping to improve the quality of their movie recommendation algorithm. Three rocket scientists from Bell Labs won the “progress prize” of $100K for improving recommendations by “8.8%” (how do you measure this?). I wonder if they did this during their off-work time? Here’s a list of things you need to do:
1. Select the right customers (you don’t want a random Joe to define your products)
2. Provide tools for feedback (like forums, feedback button sending an email etc.)
3. Think of good incentives (Netflix will pay $1M for a 10% improvement)
4. Actually use customer input
5. Acquire the intellectual property

Shortening the trial lag

Sergei — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:20:35 +0000

Mich Mathews, Microsoft marketing SVP, spoke at the Microsoft Marketing Symposium to a crowd of some thousands. One of her comments was a bit personal (keep reading). She spoke of the traditional marketing funnel of awareness going to trial going to repeat purchases and how there used to be a long lag between the time people became knowledgeable of a brand (awareness), actually tried a physical tube of tooth paste in the store (trial) or even came back for more purchases (repeat). Today the first lag has been in some cases reduced to 5-10 seconds. People see a WaMu display ad and click on it, initiating a trial right away. This begs the question if the ACTR framework is still relevant. We are entering difficult times, I say. The good news is that with all this new technology the barriers for experimentation with new marketing approaches are becoming lower and lower. We will always have Paris.

Citizen Carr

Sergei — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 20:49:02 +0000

Nicholas Carr gave the opening keynote at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York. I have my disagreements with Mr. Carr. For starters, he has a Wall Street approach to technology, any technology. His favorite comparison is that of computing power and electrical power. Carr likes to use such terms as “raw computing power”, “efficiency”, “data manipulation”, “economies of scale” and other industrial-scale, steel-smelter and stamp-factory-style prose. He is just too cold-blooded for me; I actually thought about Big Brother when he listening to him.

If it was up to Carr, there would be one big data center with exactly five applications and everyone would be working hard on the “economies”. Now, I do have a business degree, but at least I enjoy what I am doing. I am not yet ready to become part of a commodity industry and earn my living by driving down the costs.

Carr apparently is.

Semantic Web or the Search for Meaning

Sergei — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 17:16:11 +0000

Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web inventor, threw his weight behind the semantic web and “mega-mash-ups”. “In the semantic web, it’s like every piece of data is given a longitude and latitude on a map, and anyone can ‘mash’ them together and use them for different things”, Bernes-Lee said in an interview with Times Online. I agree with the general direction of his thinking, but some works remains to be done before this becomes a reality. In such a semantic web people and data have to be efficiently identifiable and accessible while still providing for privacy. This presumes a sophisticated data key management technology. URLs have long been used to link to web-based data, and the Open Social standard is the first step towards a person identity solution. Marketing applications for semantic webs could range from syndicating content across sites to more narrowly targeting visitors based on their social networks.

Battle for Web UI

Sergei — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:53:06 +0000

More and more service providers and technology vendors develop javascript codelets or server-side technology enriching web pages by automatically adding icons or underlining links or keywords. Examples: Yahoo Shortcuts, Snap, Surfcanyon, Kontera … the list goes on and on. Why care? My prediction is that this technology will be used more and more for marketing purposes, but the tech and ad industries have to agree on standards to avoid a push-back from web surfers.

Left vs Right targets Yuppie fun-seekers

Sergei — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 21:27:53 +0000

If you are looking for ways to better engage your audience, check out Microsoft’s Left vs Right. This site hosts two fictional characters representing the spectrum of political opinions. Visitors use the chat metaphor to initiate searches on Live Search and watch short skits that are loosely based on submitted queries. Left vs Right builds on the success of Ms. Dewey and Live Search Club.

Snap adds site screenshots, shares ad real estate

Sergei — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:46:54 +0000

Snap is an interesting gadget for spicing up your web content and earning ad revenue in the process. After you integrate a 3-line java script into your home page - I just created a title-less text widget on my WordPress blog and copied the code over there - all your links will be “snappable”. Snap will insert an icon right after the link to indicate the availability of a “snapshot”. When a visitor hovers over the link (or clicks on the Snap icon), a popup magically appears showing the snapshot of the target site and an ad.

I like Snap’s business model for they basically share the ad real estate with you. Enter your AdSense pub id (more ad networks to come) and Snap will start serving ads alternating between their own account and yours. Instead of establishing a new business relationship (and sharing your SSN or Employer Id with yet another ad network), you stay with your existing ad provider and just use Snap’s technology to present ads in novel ways.

Summary: It took me the whole of 15 minutes to sign-up for a Snap account, configure my AdSense settings, and set up my blog with the Snap code. Kudos for ease-of-use. The relevance of ads is low though. I don’t believe Snap matches ads to content yet. This is something I’d look forward to in future versions. I would also ask for a more favorable ratio of my ads versus Snap’s – right now it looks like I am getting less than 20% of all Snap popup views.

Dr. ROI or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the r-word

Sergei — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 21:42:15 +0000

We’ve all heard it, that terrifying R-word. Recession that is. Besides the monthly pain from looking at one’s brokerage statement, recession also means a changing landscape for marketing professionals. Marketing budgets will be under review, impacting general awareness vehicles such as marketing swag, PR, print and TV ads disproportionally. Anything that can’t be directly associated with sales is threatened. You know how it is … folks will be searching for that elusive half of advertising budgets which is universally acknowledged as being a waste. But you can fight one R-word with another. I mean ROI, Return On Investment.
Marketing managers can reduce their CFOs’ anxiety by shifting budgets from views to clicks. Anything that can be tracked to a prospect or, better, a sale will prosper. Paid Search, Cost-Per-Action-based display ads, referrals from social connections should do well. Technology and marketing vendors can do their part too. Sharing the risk, generating incremental revenue and splitting the proceeds are better than prepaid fixed cost campaigns.

Openads aggregates ad inventory, provides cost-effective Publisher solution

Sergei — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 02:00:48 +0000

I just stumbled upon Openads.org – a publisher (as in “ad publisher”) solution available both as software and hosted service. If you own a few websites and are considering allocating some of your web real estate to revenue-generating ads, you should definitely check these folks out. I like the fact that Openads aggregates ad inventory from multiple ad networks: adSense, Yahoo, Valueclick, Casale, you name it. For publishers without IT departments Openads just launched a hosted version, and for more technologically-invested sites there is an open source server software, free to run and customize. Feature-wise they seem to be quite complete. I especially like the “direct selection” feature which basically provides an ad query language (may I suggest ‘AQL’, or ‘akl’, as the new name) based on keywords, campaigns, ad sizes etc. Oh, last but not least, they just received another round of financing. Openads is here to stay.

Zaaz means pizzazz

Sergei — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 04:53:56 +0000

If you have a few free minutes, check out zaaz.com. Zaaz is an interactive marketing agency and their site concept is truly refreshing as it is built around a combination of search and chat metaphors. First, the Flash-based site recognized my wide aspect ratio display and printed a quirky message. I was hooked. On my typing “SEM” in the search box Zaaz showed the definition of the term. Ok, not very helpful, but acceptable.

I then typed “web site design” and that’s when I had the second WOW. Zaaz showed further query suggestions such as “Tell me more about your Creative Director” and “Who do you design sites for?”.

Relevant? Yes. Mind-boggling. Hell, Yes! You can’t help but appreciate this site’s distinctive personality. Can you imagine your own web presense following the same concept? I definitely can!

The Big Four of Web Analysis

Sergei — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 22:29:46 +0000

The supply side of the Web Analytics Data market is dominated by comScore, Nielsen//NetRatings, compete, and hitwise. The first two (comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings) provide the most accurate and stable data sets and are quoted throughout the industry. Compete and hitwise are good info sources for triangulating or researching trends but sometimes have wide swings month to month. The Big Four charge Big Bucks for their data streams, but you can get free but still useful bits from their PR departments: comScore, Nielsen//NetRatings, and hitwise.

For example, the favorite ad format in the first week of January 2008 was Leaderboard (728×90) at 30% of all unique ads tracked by NNR, followed by Medium Rectangle (300×250) at 22%, and Wide Skyskraper (160×600) at 15% (source NNR).

compete has a Site Analytics tool that works well with larger sites and, most importantly, is free. Compare the Unique Visitors trend from compete with the (paid) data from comScore for my favorite blog techcrunch.com. They are close but I will let the TechCrunch folks choose which numbers they want to believe in.

compete Techcrunch UV Trend

comScore Techcrunch UV Trend

Search Statistic of the day #3: Every Fourth Web Site Visit is to Search

Sergei — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 23:10:01 +0000

According to comScore, 28.3% of all web site visits in December 2007 were to Search/Navigation sites such as Google Search or Microsoft Live Search. Compare this to 24.3% in January 2007. One of the fundamental activities at work or school is researching for information and people are relying more and more on Internet to accomplish this task. Makes sense. But it’s still amazing.

Search Statistic of the day #2: US and WW Query Volume Growth

Sergei — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 19:20:31 +0000

US search query volume is predicted to grow at 12-13% CAGR rates through 2010, the Worldwide volume - at almost double these rates (23% CAGR). Interestingly, Paid Search revenue is expected to grow faster than volume, driven by increases in RPM (revenue per 1000 queries) due to increases in ad inventory (e.g. better ad coverage). Here’s a compilation of volume growth research from a number of sources.

(click on the thumbnail image)

Assumptions
(1) Morgan: Morgan uses SRPV (Search Related Page Views) for forecasts which is different from Distinct Searches. In 2005 the ratio of search result pages viewed per distinct search query was approximately 1.8. I converted Morgan’s SRPVs into DSs using that ratio.
(2) Piper Jeffrey: U.S. and International search query volume CAGR of 12% and 23% (2006-2011) respectively

Notes

Morgan: Searches are driven by increased user base, broadband penetration, improvements in relevancy, and search becoming a primary means of accessing information.
Morgan: US Internet user base grows at 2-5% five-year CAGR for 2005 - 1010, broadband penetration to reach 60-70% during this time.
Piper Jeffrey: Globally there are more than 550 MM searches performed daily on the Web = 200.750B/Y = 16.729B/M (End of 2006)
Piper Jeffrey: Internet users in the United States perform about 245 million searches per day = 89.425B/Y = 7.452B/M (End of 2006)
Piper Jeffrey: In the next five years Europe and Japan will increasingly gain significance for the Internet companies, while China and India may well dominate the markets in the next decade or so.

Search Statistic of the day #1

Sergei — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:15:38 +0000

Here’s a random statistic: Search volume (measured in distinct search queries) on weekends and holidays is about 60% of workday volume (in US, Major Search Engine). This ratio has been pretty constant over a longish period of time.

I-Bankers on Marketing Technology

Sergei — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 23:24:20 +0000

I just stumbled upon this collection of internet-related research and forecasts by Morgan Stanley, your friendly neighborhood i-banker. The Internet Advertising Outlook report by Mary Meeker is very good, especially because it spells out various assumptions and drivers like Coverage, Click-Through-Rates etc. Not surprisingly, Paid Search leads the pack at least until 2010. Marketers like performance-based tools. It’s all about improving Marketing ROI, isn’t it?

Innovations in sourcing digital creative

Sergei — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 01:48:51 +0000

If you work on marketing campaigns you probably source your creative from either Getty Images or Corbis. I recently attended a small event where Corbis’ CEO Gary Shenk was speaking about the media industry. Traditional suppliers of creative are facing a new threat in the form of cheaper online exchanges such as Veer, iStockPhoto.com and others. These sites usually offer royalty-free imagery for less than $50 and sometimes as low as a few dollars, much cheaper that the rights-managed variety you get from Getty or Corbis. They can do that because they are simply a marketplace where independent photographers supply the stock and grateful customers pick up their creative imagery. Responding to this threat Corbis launched their own discount site snapvillage. We will see some significant innovation in this space in the coming years and, if you think about it, personal photo-sharing sites like flickr could become players too. But one thing is clear. There will always be a need for vendors like Getty and Corbis, for they supply two very important services to marketing professionals that their cheaper rivals simply can’t match. First, they provide editorial services and quality control, making it possible to find that perfect shot among the millions of images available. And second, they offer advanced copyright clearing services and rights-managed purchases necessary for any self-respecting marketing campaign.

Google to launch OpenSocial, builds platform for social marketing

Sergei — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:03:48 +0000

So far Google’s foray into social networking has ben largely limited to Orkut, a Brazilian social network. Details are emerging of Google’s grander ambitions - if you read Forrester’s report, you’d know that social marketing is the next big thing. Read about OpenSocial here.

Crossing the river

Sergei — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 04:41:57 +0000

Quebec’s Gatineau is right across Ottawa, Ontario, on the northern bank of Ottawa River. Incidentally it is also the codename of Microsoft’s web analytics competitor to Google’s Analytics. Don’t know if that was a consideration when choosing the name, but here’s an interesting post from Ian Thomas about Gatineau beta launch.

The sign-up link is here.

New Live Meeting Professional Edition targets marketers and sales pros

Sergei — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 22:03:04 +0000

Last week Bill Gates launched a new generation of Microsoft’s unified communications software and services. As a former product manager for Live Meeting I am proud to join the crowds in celebrating this major release (the little torchlight in front of Gates is called RoundTable – it’s a novel 360-degree video camera used together with Live Meeting).

One of the less publicized facts about the new 2007 release of Live Meeting is the amazing value to online marketers and salespeople offered by the new Professional Edition. Consider this: maximum meeting size of 1,250 attendees, VoIP and live video, a registration web site, free storage for recordings for a full year, and free phone support for your attendees. The best feature is the price - $185 / year with no setup fees and only a 5-license minimum. Compare this to offerings like Citrix GoToWebinar where you’d pay $600-800 per license after all discounts and get significantly less features (no Voip, no online storage, no PowerPoint-mode).

All marketers should seriously consider conducting their webinars, lead generation seminars, and sales product demos using web conferencing tools and the new Professional Edition fits the bill.

Forrester updates forecast for interactive marketing

Sergei — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 03:18:43 +0000

Forrester Research published their forecast for interactive marketing (US Interactive Marketing Forecast 2007 to 2012, by Shar VanBoskirk, Forrester Research, October 10, 2007). Interactive marketing includes display ads, email marketing, paid search, and emerging marketing technologies such as online video, social media, and mobile.

Interactive advertising comprises 8% of today’s total ad expenditures, while audiences spend 29% of their media time online. One is tempted to conclude that eventually these ratios have to catch up with each other … but they don’t need to. If interactive ads were more effective in engaging the audiences and generating sales, advertisers wouldn’t have to spend proportionately more when they shifted their budgets from offline to online. But it is fair to assume that interactive advertising will continue increasing its share of the overall advertising pie (reaching 18% in 2012 according to Forrester).

Forrester expects Paid Search to continue dominating the interactive marketing category in terms of revenue, showing the second-largest CAGR of 26%. Paid search is an effective awareness vehicle because it allows advertising at a point in time when the prospect is looking for information. Compared to display ads search is more precise - the offer is presented only to those people who are actually looking for information.

Social media, bucketed under emerging channels, is projected to grow at 59% CAGR. Forrester does not show any ground-breaking uses for social networks beyond advertising on MySpace and blogging, but even with such humble goals they project an almost 12x increase in social media ad spend by 2012, making it one of the fastest-growing ad spend category (Mobile marketing comes in first with a 14x increase, but starts with just 1/3 of social media revenue base).

An interesting point is made about the early adopters of emerging marketing technologies (social media and video) coming from the ranks of aggressive director-level marketing professionals taking executive ownership of select marketing technology implementation projects to expedite their path into the CMO seat.