netactr

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.