Digital Solid: Marketing Technology ROI

When redesigning a site for a client, our team works hard to get sign-off on improving content quality — especially the language used. Getting this level of influence is often a challenge. Large sites usually have many content “owners.” In our experience, few of these domain experts are also experts in optimizing online content, either for readers or search engines. These folks can underestimate the importance of nuance to the success of their content.

Frankly, I don’t blame them.

Until the advent of the Content Interest Index, there really hasn’t been a way for content managers to gauge success. The best they had were more global, site-wide metrics.

NOTE: This Tools + Tips post on GrokDotCom provides an excellent run-down of some existing engagement metrics for overall site performance.

In other words, in the well-worn words of Tom Peters, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” Without measurements showing the effect that content quality has on readers, many domain experts overlook the power they wield.

This is unfortunate. I’ve seen small content changes make impressive differences in response. Here is a quote from the web site of Thom Pharmakis that sums it up well:

I own a decades-old Italian car that is so highly strung, the valve clearances need to be checked every 3,100 miles … just .001 inch out-of-tolerance will cause a discernible lag in performance. Selling copy is that sensitive. Every word, every paragraph space, the placement of every comma or ellipsis or dash is meticulously considered. Little alterations have drastic effects. Which makes the difference between blistering performance … and sitting stranded by the side of the road.

Here, here.

As a side note, it takes more than a phenomenally gifted writer to score a bulls-eye on the web. Thom’s statement is displayed on his site as nothing but a graphic (shown above, and found on his site). That means his wonderful metaphor is impossible for search engines to read and index.

Even when your audience is non-human — and is in this case a search engine robot — it’s not so much what you say but how you say it!

Last week I reported on a fun little social lubricant called Foamee. It is a third party trifle completely reliant (at least as of this writing) on Twitter. The objective: If you’re a member of Twitter, you pledge to buy someone a beer. Foamee keeps tabs on these declarations.

As I pointed out in my post, this application is part of a larger trend. Namely, that of launching a shoestring site that is financially independent of a larger site, but completely dependent on it for survival. It’s an interesting paradox, and all but cries out for a new piece of jargon. You know, something to toss out casually during your next new media PowerPoint presentation.

Enter Joshua Porter of Bokardo Design. In his blog, Joshua dubbed this type of site a barnacle app. I think the term has legs (and the graphic above backs me up on this — at least, a barnacle has “feeding legs”).

Do you agree? Is this a term worthy of surviving past its inevitable 15 minutes of fame in Wired’s Jargon Watch listing (a recent example)?

Also: What is your favorite barnacle app, and why?

We’ve all got far more to read than time to read it, right? So you’re going to hate me for telling you this, but if you care about communication and technology, you should be tracking the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Especially this latest issue, whose “special theme” is social network sites.

Of particular relevance to marketing technologists are these articles:

• Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship
  danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison
  This introduction describes features of social network sites (SNSs), proposes a comprehensive definition, presents a history of their development, reviews existing SNS scholarship, and introduces the articles in this special theme section.
• Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances
  Hugo Liu
  A social network profile’s lists of interests can function as an expressive arena for taste performance. Based on a semiotic approach, different types of taste statements are identified and further investigated through a statistical analysis of 127,477 profiles collected from MySpace.
• Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites
  Eszter Hargittai
  Are there systematic differences between people who use social network sites and those who stay away? Based on data from a survey administered to young adults, this article identifies demographic predictors of SNS usage, with particular focus on Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, and Friendster.
• Mobile Social Networks and Social Practice: A Case Study of Dodgeball
  Lee Humphreys
  Dodgeball is a mobile social network system that seeks to facilitate social coordination among friends in urban public spaces. This study reports on the norms of Dodgeball use, proposing that exchanging messages through Dodgeball can lead to social molecularization, whereby active members experience and move through the city in a collective manner.
• Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube
  Patricia Lange
  Based on a one-year ethnographic project, this article analyzes how YouTube participants developed and maintained social networks by manipulating physical and interpretive access to videos. The analysis identifies varying degrees of “publicness” in video sharing, depending on the nature of the video content and how much personal information is revealed.

Juicy stuff. Enjoy!

The OpenSocial alliance among a variety of consumer social network sites (SNSs) — most notably MySpace — is designed to allow marketers to leverage as never before the word-of-mouth strength of a social graph. This story about the less-known business vertical SNSs (such as those catering to physicians and telecom professionals), reminds me of this exciting reality:

Any b-to-b site with an active community and the flexibility of adopting OpenSocial can reap the same benefits.

Below is Google’s somewhat dorky video explaining the OpenSocial API.

Also, here’s a terrific explanation of what a social graph is, why marketers should care, and what they should do with the sites they manage in light of this information.

Twitter interests me more for what it foreshadows than for what it does. This micro-blogging system is currently little more than an electronic water cooler, where information workers and students can socialize and blow off steam. But it also has aspects of a social network — a very open social network. And that means it has the potential for some exciting innovation.

I look at Twitter as a VisiCalc of this era. VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program for the personal computer. Primitive by modern standards, its greatest feat was setting a new paradigm. Spreadsheet progams look odd to those who have never used one, but for adopters, it is a powerhouse– something that many couldn’t imagine working without.

Of course, that’s the magic of the paradigm, not VisiCalc specifically, which was usurped by competitors within a few years of its release.

Sooner rather than later, a Twitter competitor will take the new behaviors of microblogging and deliver something extraordinary. This will be something we would not want to live without. Similar to Excel, this competitor will arrive with bigger, smarter features and scoop up market share.

Or maybe I’m wrong and Twitter will do the impossible. Perhaps it will be able to hold onto and expand its base of users as it morphs from networked toy to networking tool. Here is one ray of hope for Twitter that they will have a better chance than VisiCalc did: Twitter courts and encourages third party developers.

May I Buy You a Beer?

Which brings me to the latest Twitter-affiliated innovation: Along with Foamee, Twitter users can now publicly proclaim their intentions to buy someone a beer. Foamee then tracks the IOU, and even allows for scores to be settled and ledgers closed. Good work, Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits Design, for this fun Twitter add-on. Here’s a screen cap showing my IOU (middle posting) from this morning:

Twitter continues to innovate by opening up to the creative community at large (another fun example is this mashup: TwitterVision). How incredibly smart. This week at ad:tech New York, Google announced it has organized several major social network sites to back an open source way of building and sharing widgets. It’s called OpenSocial.

The folks behind Google (and its own social network, Orkut), wisely recognize that innovation can only be accelerated through the “network effect.” And innovation is, after all, a key to survival. They might have even been inspired by watching Twitter.

If so, Google owes Twitter a beer.

It’s a silly name but a sound concept: Segment the registered users of your site by industry, company, title, education, seniority and role within the company. For good measure, throw in some traditional demographic items like location and gender. ZoomInfo calls this bizographics, or business demographics. The new ad offering was just announced to the press, and at the ad:tech New York internet marketing conference.

In his most recent blog entry, senior ZoomInfo VP Russell Glass gives the following example of how bizographics can precisely focus an online ad’s viewers: “[a company offering an elite credit card] would have the ability to place advertising in front of users that fall within the “senior executive” bizographic, and focus messages based on this targeting — i.e, ‘CEOs now hear this.’”

Frankly, I don’t see that as being the best example of the power of this new ad platform, because the same ad buy could be made on sites specifically visited by senior executives. But I certainly see the potential. For much of my career I’ve yearned for a way to reach, say, “service industry executives with HR responsibilities.” If ZoomInfo’s system can allow for that type of pinpoint marketing, I see bizographics succeeding in spite of its unfortunate name.

Update 11/06/07: ad:tech is the stage for another, and similar, announcement. Facebook certainly has its share of user information to mine for ad value. Today one of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s big announcements was the launch of an ad platform called Social Ads. This targets ads based on member profile data and “spreads” these ad virally. It appears to be a B-to-C version of Bizographics. One that naturally has far greater reach. Scratch both of those statements. A clarifying article on 11/07/07 talked about what makes Facebook’s offering unique from other ad platforms. It doesn’t necessarily make for far-reaching ads. But their impact could be much greater, due to a word-of-mouth effect.

Apple fan Nick Haley, an 18-year-old “fresher” at University of Leeds, got his first Macintosh computer when he was three. Earlier this year his enthusiasm bubbled over. The new iPod Touch inspired him to create a 30-second TV spot, complete with an infectious musical bed. But this act of creation didn’t earn Mr. Haley his Generation C strips. The “C,” after all, stands for Content, or Co-creation — as I described earlier in this post. No, he truly arrived when he posted the ad on YouTube.

If that were the end of the story, it would be inspiring enough. Here is a young man who acts on the urge to express his love for a brand — and home-grown video production — with like-minded fans and friends.That’s pretty cool.

But as this New York Times piece puts it, “Leave it to Apple to … think differently.” They rung him up, flew him to Los Angeles, and turned his concept into their newest TV spot. Kudos to the production expertise of Apple’s long-time ad agency, TBWA/Chiat/Day, for not distorting Haley’s vision in the final product (it’s a pity they had to ditch the catchy song from the original, by the Brazilian band CSS).

It’s no surprise that Apple gets it when it comes to helping their wired fan base spread the word about their products. I look forward to seeing how many other brands follow suit. For me, at least, user-generated ads will be a major force in slowing down my inclination to zoom past commercials on my DVR.

Recent discussions about email deliverability sound oddly familiar. Before email become a major marketing channel, Standard Presort Mail (known then as Third Class or Bulk) was the exclusive direct response medium. Mailboxes overflowed with catalogs and sales pitches. Back then this would be the case year-round, not just right now — in the protracted post-Halloween holiday season. It was inevitable that direct mailers would begin to seriously strain the postal system, using mail as something for which it was never designed. Weekly DM News reports would outrage readers with fresh tales of huge batches of mail delivered late or not at all. Delivery costs rose and delivery satisfaction fell. And thus emerged other media, following supply and demand (and abetted by Moore’s Law). These media included email. Now the outcry continues, but with this newer channel.

Fellow veteran of direct mail Melinda Krueger (MediaPost’s Email Diva) has a good post in that publication (registration required) about the influence of a dedicated IP address over deliverability. It’s a good primer to the topic of email reputation and how it is measured through the lens of an IP’s suspected spamming track record. More importantly, it helps the “lay audience” — those who think an ESP is a psychic ability and not an Email Service Provider — grasp the unintended consequences of email marketing.

Once again we marketers are using a medium for something no one considered at its birth.