Random

    Search

    Journalism anew.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    Yesterday at the Long Island 140 Conference I had lunch with Jason Molinet. Those from Long Island know Mr. Molinet from his insightful bylined stories in Newsday over the years. He now works for Patch.

    I like AOL’s content strategy and often urge the company to invest in big name online properties a la Huff Post and TechCrunch. As for Patch, I haven’t been as warmly disposed.  My first impression was that Patch (AOL’s local news play) was going to be a flop. A big time supporter of the need for more localized news and the internet’s ability to deliver it, in my experience so far Patch has been lacking.  Fact checking, reporting ballast, edge still seem lacking. I wonder if Patch reporters are tired and on second careers. Jaded me?

    Well perhaps I’m wrong.  Tim Armstrong (AOL CEO) is heavily invested in Patch and he wants it to work, so maybe Mr. Molinet is a step in the right direction.

    Earlier in the week I sat in on a talk at the Social Media Club of Long Island with a New York Times stringer reporter who lives locally.  She’s a heavy social media user and when combining her investigative reporting skills with fast twitch social media she has been doing some amazing things. Her sources are a fingertip away. Story backgrounders clicks away. Quotes immediate.  This woman gets the new journalism. And it is very, very exciting.

    Once newspapers break the tether of the paper/paper and traditional reporters will combine their instincts and skills with social and web tools, it will truly reinvent the business. It’s the promise of Patch. Let’s see if they deliver. Peace!

    Google and Mobile Apps

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    Google’s brand strategy used to be “organizing the world’s information” or putting the “world’s information one click away.”  Larry Page, seeing that his market share slipped 1.2% last year has decided to change that. He’s renamed the search division the knowledge division.  This, ironically, is the Microsoft Bing strategy – so eloquently presented in the “information overload” campaign developed by JWT a couple of years ago.  The difference between “information” and “knowledge” being that the latter takes you closer to a decision — closer to a sale.  This is a mistake.  The strategy did not move the market significantly for Bing and won’t for Google.  Google needs to stick to owning search and leave our brains to us.

    cave art

    What has disrupted search on the web is the smart phone. (See cover story in the NYT today for excellent piece on this.) Mobile phones are not built for full screen search, so app developers and VCs have set their sights on specialized, robust search and retrieve mobile experiences that remove the chaff and get us to information right away.  These apps, by specializing and using geo-location, trump Google and search on mobiles. They are hot — but proper monetization still isn’t happening. Ads on mobiles are still cave art.

    Let’s solve the mobile ad thing by 2015.  Any ideas?   Peace.

    Accelerator Pedals and Online Ads

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    There was an article today in the New York Times by Stephanie Clifford about new ad serving technology supported by real-time bidding, allowing ads to be served based on keywords and cookied behavior.  Supposedly everything takes place in milliseconds — before the page even load. (Is it me or are page loads getting slower and slower?  Thanks ads. Thanks beefy Web 2.0 apps.)

    It stands to reason that as this technology matures a good deal of these immediate, personalized ads will be price-based. And how do marketers lower prices?  By cutting margins elsewhere, meaning brand advertising budgets, etc.  Fast forward a year or two and think about all the low-cost, challenger brand/no brand, tailored ads filling up your screens. Likely, you will have bitten on a price ad or two and had a poor experience and now avoid these ads altogether. Your avoidance behavior may be similar to that toward telemarketers.  And it’s too bad because as the behavioral modeling grows it has an opportunity to be an important selling mechanism.

    But initially it will be price, price, price!  A word of caution marketers: Don’t fall into the price war — web ad bidding war.  It will be hard to get out of. And some of your accelerator pedals might stick. Peace!

    Best Buy Oops.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    I say Best Buy, you say what?  “Lot’s or products.” (Good) “Low prices” (A core value.) “Twelpforce and Twitter.” (Oooh, sorry.)  That’s right.  Best Buy and CMO Barry Judge have been in the spotlight and awards show klieg lights for months due to its so-called leadership in social media.   Best Buy used to was (Southernism) all about being the best buy.  Well they took their eye off the brand prize, found technology, and have now lost market share in laptops, TVs and videogame software in the quarter just reported.

    I looove social media, but it’s not a brand strategy. It’s a media strategy and a marketing tactics. Had Mr. Judge focused more of his efforts on ways to provide a more competitively priced product than Walmart, Target and Amazon, the klieg lights would still be shining.

    Alas.  Peace!

    Bing Likes Likes.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    Charlene Li has a great post today about Bing and its product alliance with Facebook — one she feels will help Microsoft cut into Google’s search share.  She is quite right. Bing, number 3 in search, announced it will integrate Facebook’s social graph information (“Likes’) into search results, as an option.  If you use Bing to search a particular topic you will have the ability to check results based upon how your Facebook friends affect those results as determined by their “Likes.”   

    This is smart logic on Microsoft’s part…jumping on the bandwagon of the world’s most populous social network.  It’s smart for Facebook, backing up the truck to the Microsoft bank. And it’s good across-the-board logic, allowing search to be viewed based upon the likes of friends, followers and communities.  

    When Facebook changed “Fan” to “Like” it struck me as a bit odd, though. Call me paranoid, but I now smell the backroom deal. The timing was about right.

    Personally I am not a big “Liker.”  I don’t really click on “Liked” things, yet many do and it has become a popular pastime and app.  As more marketers encourage Facebook users to Like things – and shill for their brands – the behavior will become tired, forced and die down.  As permissions and privacy interests grow Likes will also die down.  Facebook will still be Facebook, finding new ways to grow and monetize, and Bing will have won some serious market share points with this new tactic. That said, Bing will still be innovating OPS (other people’s stuff). Peace!

    The Ascent of Marketing.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    Back in the 1700-1800s (in the U.S.) if you needed stuff you either made it or went to the general store.  The Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogue was the next marketing innovation (1888), showing pictures of products and published prices, allowing customers to purchase by mail. Among the 322 pages in the catalogue published in 1894 must have been products didn’t sell and had to be replaced. The birth of ROI? 

    Television

    The next massive marketing innovation was television. Television commercials which began in earnest in the 1940s became the most popular, effective form of advertising. But can you imaging trying to track sales to media and production back then in the very beginning? “Where’s the ROI? How do you measure this stuff?” Mad men. 

    The Web

    Fast forward to the Inter-nech. Banner ads and ad serving allowed us to count clicks. 2% click thru rates. Whoo hoo. Click to buy. Whoo hoo. But not everything could be bought over the web. (Discussion of that for another day.) CTRs diminished and web display ads became, so said the salespeople, a branding mechanism.

    Social Media

    Enter social media.  And consultants. When consultants out-number practitioners you know the market is in flux. The Altimeter Group, some very smart people let me just say, created a social media presenttion ‘splaining how to measure social media via a marketing analytics framework. Here are some of the measurables: share of voice, audience engagement, conversation reach, active advocates, active influence, advocacy impact, customer problem resolution rate, resolution time, satisfaction score, plus a couple of metrics tied to gathering input for product innovation. What’s not mentioned here, something Messrs. Sear and Roebuck might have added, is sales.  I love consultants ( am one) and the Altimeter Group is growing like a dookie, but until they and all of us tie these type of metrics back to da monies, we’re just making paper.

    A smart client at AT&T once said to me, “we collect all this data now we have to do something smart with it.”  That’s business. That’s return on strategy. Peace!

    Hashtag. A Universal Symbol of Change.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    Those who love social media surely are getting tired of ignorant commentators who publish that social is only used for sharing what one is doing.  Comedians, editorialists, and barflies love to hate on social media, especially Twitter, declaring it a means for sharing self-centered, self-aggrandizing bits of information — “I’m buying shoes on Spring Street.”

    Perhaps Twitter was this way the first month and no doubt people still drivel on a bit about their whereabouts and transactions, but Twitter and the hashtag are a very different animal than the one naysayers see. There was a gentleman in Pakistan, Sohaib Athar (@reallyvirtual), who was tweeting about Osama’s death well before the rumors hit the U.S.  This I learned from a Fashion Institute of Technology student, who wasn’t buying shoes at the time. Mr. Athar, though not thinking about it at the time was a citizen journalist. A global citizen journalist.

    When Syrian president Bashar al-Assad decides to hack the Syrian Revolution 2011 Facebook page and change its content, it was intended to chance the course of history. When videos on YouTube show global atrocities in near real-time, that’s important.

    Marketers and investors are spending a lot to time trying to monetize social media, and that is taking our eyes off the ball.   Commentators are trying to gain contrarian props by telling us how frivolous social media is. But know this, the hashtag will change history. For good and in some cases bad.  It is a cross media, cross language symbol. Perhaps, the first such symbol or character of its time. Peace.

    The Web’s Specialty.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    There’s a cool story in today’s New York Times about single-food restaurants. It stands to reason that enterprises of this type can only thrive if the food is excellent and the stores located in highly populated areas.  In NYC you can take out and, in some cases, eat in at a Mac and Cheese store or a meatball store. There are places that sell only mussels, only rice pudding, and only fried chicken. It’s a growing phenomenon. Specialization suggests focus; a focus on quality, ingredients, product and knowledge.

    In mid-town Manhattan, where there are probably a half million lunches served within walking distance of any high-rise, there are lots of options. So why not go to the best option; the place that specializes? The place that eats, breathe and sleeps its specialty. Forget me not that this type of store can scale well and have a supply chain with amazingly fat margin opportunities. That’s gravy at the gravy store.

    This is a key chapter in the story of the Web — and where the web is going.

    I’ve written before about “worldwide pricing” and the ability to search the world for the best prices.  Well, how about searching the world for the best quality? The ability to do so is a web app. And specialization and focus are the tools of that trade.

    We are bound by product and service mediocrity because of geographic and time limitations. And because of supply and demand.  Well, say buh-bye to these barriers.  Ima stop there and let you entrepreneurs ponder that for a while. Ponder, Ponder.  Peace!

    Mobile. Search. Ads.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    I grew up watching advertising on television. Part of life.  Direct mail pisses me off due to all the wasted paper and atmospheric warming.  Dinnertime telemarketing annoys me but it’s hard to be mean to humans. Spam in the email box irritates. Telemarketing to my mobile though, oh that one drives me insane.

    Google is about to launch a mobile phone handset business, using a Taiwanese manufacturer (“Do no evil” apparently doesn’t extend to domestic job creation) and the exciting, free Android operating system. The phone will not be free and sold “unlocked” — meaning buyers can choose their own compatible (GSM) carriers.  With most cell phones subsidized by carriers in the U.S. it will be hard for Google to make money on the hardware so what’s their play?  The answer is search ads.

     If you think search is big from your chair at work or your couch at home, wait until you see the power of search for those on the go.  People en route are way more likely to want to search for something than people in a chair – and Google knows this, hence the mobile computing effort. Google’s OS is a critical component to mobile search and by owning the phone they keep control. But toes will be stepped on. What sets my hair on fire is the thought that all mobile searches in couple of years will be wrapped in a big fat advertising wrapper. I smell an opportunity.  Peace!

    Social Media For Good.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    When the Flip video camera, now owned by Cisco, first came out I posted it will change the world.  If you thought the video taping of the Rodney King beating changed the world, image how putting video cameras in every pair of pants and pocketbook might alter history.  Hello Iran? 

    Social networking, still in its infancy, is going to change the world in even more powerful ways. Flatten away I say.  Social networking and social media started out as friend finding, simple messaging, and posting of photos and captions — uses which are still going strong. More recently, smart businesses have seen the upside of using it commercially to improve bottom line and topline revenue through a handful of applications: Customer care, promotions and research. We’ve along scratched the surface with Social Media in business…stay tuned. 

    What’s Next?

    The next wave will be the more thoughtful use of social media. More cause related. Ask Nestle about its palm oil/rain forest problems — the result of social media pressure. Ask Nike about its policy of outsourcing production to Honduran companies who demonstrate unfair labor practices…really torking off college students. If you think a Mel Gibson diatribe can go viral quickly, wait until you see what citizen journalists can do with watchful eyes and some motivation. This new wave of social media activism is going to have mad impact.  Cover-ups won’t cover as easily and corporations and governments will need to watch their steps. It’s next. And it’s welcome. Peace it up!

    123...6Page 1 of 6
    © Newsmag WordPress Theme by TagDiv