Digital Solid: Marketing Technology ROI

The revelation that you risk losing business if prospects don’t find you in search results is just one of the conclusions from a newly-released research study from Enquiro (registration required). This report is packed with valuable insights. Here’s another: When a major brand (Honda) appeared as one of the top paid listings, as well as the top organic search engine result, the lift in brand recall was huge — 220%. As the graphic shows, this was compared to no organic result and a less prominent side ad. In addition, the lift in recall of this dual placement, when compared to a top organic listing alone, was still impressive — roughly 70%.

Clearly, if you can sponsor a pricier ad that runs across the top of the search engine results page, go for it. This ad unit is far more effective than a side unit. Its brand recognition power in this study was equal to the top organic listing alone. That’s huge.

Brand recall is important, but what about intent to consider a purchase?

An ad / organic combination can also boost intent. For the Honda brand, when a non-branded phrase (”fuel efficient cars”) was searched upon, and the pairing of top ad and top organic results was encountered, an average 8% lift in intent was observed. Specifically, what was measured was an intention to include the brand in this person’s consideration set. This is no idle assurance, because all 2,744 participants in the study said they were considering buying a new car within the year.

A corresponding eye tracking study showed that this increased intent was mirrored by a significant bump in the time spent looking at both the sponsored and organic links for the brand.

Advertise On Brand Keywords — Even When You Show Up Organically

Now consider the graphic below. Even those who did a branded search (i.e., included a brand in their search query) were 7% more likely to consider purchasing that brand when an ad for it appeared above the brand’s top organic listing. At least, that’s the case when the brand in question is Honda.

This is valuable validation. Other research, most notably from Nielsen Reelresearch, has shown a similar improvement in actually clicks to a site when an organic result and an ad are paired. But it’s hard to spend money on clicks from a paid ad when you have the top organic result for that keyword phrase.

Say What Counts In Your Text Ad’s Headline and Web Address

A final noteworthy finding is based on eye tracking “heat maps” of how consumers read these paid search ads. As the graphic to the right shows, the descriptive copy that follows the headline and precedes the URL barely gets a glance — at least for the typical results page viewer. (Click on the graphic for a zoomed-in view of the heat map.)

Further research would be helpful. For instance, how do heat maps differ for those who have clicked on the ad versus those who merely looked it over?

Nonetheless, this research is terrific evidence of the power of paid search, and how best to harness it.

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.

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.

This week two emails hit my Inbox within hours of each other. The first was from the site selling Radiohead’s latest CD via download. It was confirming my order, with a specific price tag that was more of a surprise to them than me, since it was I who chose it a few minutes earlier, during the ordering process.

News on the street, and from Radiohead management, is that tens of thousands of others played the same “Name your price for this CD” game, at a level equating to a little more than $8 US. (11/9/07 Update: The real figure appears to be only half of that $8 estimate.) Not too shabby — especially since there was no DRM (anti-pirating protection) on the downloads, and the band was basically doing the digital equivalent of busking: Opening their guitar cases to collect whatever money listeners want to throw their way. (They also sell a fixed-price, $80 “Disk Box” for Radiohead completists.)

The second email was from a small, audacious music store site that announced it was closing shop. FakeScience.com is a source I’ve enjoyed for fun, mostly ambient electronica.

At $5 an album, their DJ artists — with names like Dr Toast — provide perfect musical soundtracks to knowledge working and long drives. Here is what the email from the gang at Fake Science had to say:

It is with a heavy heart that we must inform you that on November 1st, 2007 we will be closing the Fake Science Music Store. Fake Science was originally started as a labor of love by four friends who had an idea to help share music with people like you and has since grown into the online music resource it is today. However, we evaluated the amount of investment that it would take to keep the store running, as well as making necessary upgrades to keep the Fake Science standards high. We came to the realization that none of us could realistically keep the commitment due to the weight other important things in our lives, such as families, day jobs, and even other side projects.

This sounds like the explanation I’ve heard many times from musician friends, when they announce that their garage band is breaking up after graduation. The explanation is always sincere — and quite valid, considering the economics of music.

But doesn’t the long tail mean that everyone with talent has a shot at recording stardom, or at least economic viability?

Aside from “families, day jobs,” etc., what caused Fake Science to sink into the DRM-free equivalent of the prehistoric tar pits, while Radiohead’s experiment has — by all accounts and speculation — flourished? I believe economist and author Tyler Cowen nails it. He provides five reasons in his Marginal Revolution post:

1. Radiohead is an indie cult band with extreme loyalties from its partisans and the possibility of attracting more such partisans by seeming “cool.”
2. Radiohead peaks high on the charts (#3 for their last release, if I recall…) but I believe they sell the product pretty quickly and don’t have a long run at the top. Again, they’d like to widen their fan base.
3. Radiohead’s gambit has reaped enormous publicity, but this won’t be the case next time.
4. Many donors will give to a highly visible “cause of the month” (remember the outpouring of support for the tsunami victims?) but they won’t necessarily give on a regular basis.
5. Radiohead probably has an especially high ratio of touring to CD and iTunes income; see #1. This scheme is a natural for them but not for Kelly Clarkson.

Do read the comments of this blog entry for some interesting clarifications and opposing views. Nonetheless, I think Cowen’s points are all valid.

What’s more, I’d like to add a #6 to the list. Another reason why struggling artists won’t be reaping the benefits of this Radiohead “donor” experiment is what I’ll call The Prius Factor. A recent New York Times article points out that part of the tremendous success of the Toyota Prius hybrid is that it was built to be nothing but a hybid. This is in stark contrast to the major hybrid offerings by Ford, Honda and GM’s Saturn, where they started as traditional internal combustion vehicles. You have to look for a small badge on the trunk or side panel to know that any of these other cars is an environmentally friendly gas/electric hybrid.

That suggests, according to the article, that the Prius has become an “issue bracelet.” It’s a theory supported by research reported in the same Times piece:

… More than half of the Prius buyers surveyed this spring by CNW Marketing Research of Bandon, Ore., said the main reason they purchased their car was that “it makes a statement about me.”

In the weeks to come, people will be hearing songs from Radiohead’s (quite good) In Rainbows. Those who are fans will undoubtedly be asking the person playing this CD: “So what did you pay?” Like the overtly hybrid Prius, it’s an easy conversation-starter. Surely, Radiohead’s CD will be the catalyst for many a new friendship or hook-up.

This is bad news for the relatively unknown Dr Toast, and other Fake Science musicians. But there is hope that this business model could quickly morph to benefit all artists, given the accelerated Darwinian ecosystem of the internet. (And according to a fun NOFX song, dinosaurs will die).

Oh, and there is one final thing Tyler Cowen nails in his assessment: Kid A truly is Radiohead’s best album so far. Which just goes to show that even respected economists can’t resist sounding cool with a little musical name-dropping.

As a marketer I read too many cases about companies who do one of the following:

1. Ignore the power of online social media, in spite of their brand being ideal for its careful use
2. Run headlong at this Web 2.0 phenomenon, throwing caution to the wind, only to do more harm than good to their brand

danah boyd [sic], the well-known anthropologist and “youth and technology” expert, gives a very personal account of the spread of Unilever’s Dove Evolution campaign. It’s a case study for how an exceptional marketing idea can gain legs through sites such as YouTube.

In the post she recounts how she was acting out of what she perceived as the public good, and not as some shill for the brand. Truly inadvertently, she says that she became “a marketer’s dream.”

I agree. But what still amazes me is that similar efforts for less savvy brands would be viewed by their stewards as unacceptable — nothing more than the unauthorized spread of their content.

These folks would look at the Danah Boyds of the world as more of a nightmare than a dream. Go figure.

One thing you have to say about the changing business model for the music industry: It gets people talking! My post a while back about how this change is bringing musicians back to their “roots” as street corner buskers generated a lot of great comments. This post on the Freakonomics blog last month has generated 81 comments and counting! Now Radiohead, the popular alternative (oxymoron?) recording act has upped the ante, and in doing so has kicked discussion into high gear. They’re asking fans to determine the cost of their new downloadable CD.

According to this piece in Music News, Radiohead is releasing their DRM-free CD online and letting fans determine its monetary worth:

Radiohead said its seventh studio album “In Rainbows” would be available from Radiohead.com from October 10 in MP3 format, meaning it can be played on all digital devices. In the latest twist in the move to digital music, fans can choose how much to pay, or can pay nothing if they prefer.

If this scares you, you’re probably a record label, or some other member of the entrenched (many would say hidebound) music industry. Conversely, if you’re smiling, you’re probably like me: A fascinated observer of how technology is shattering pricing constraints and distribution barriers between artists and those who appreciate them. And did I mention I’m also a huge Radiohead fan? My smile just grew into broad grin.

Maybe, as a show of support, I’ll pay more than the cost of their physical CD (which will be distributed through conventional channels).

For instance, I might pay as much as I’ve ever paid for one of those glorified coasters. I’m guessing that was $18, ponied up sometime in the late 1990s. The CD that 18 bucks got me was, I’m sure, packaged in a crack-prone jewel case, and came complete with booklet featuring unreadable mousetype lyrics and liner notes. I’ll certainly miss that royal treatment.

For once I’ll be opening my wallet without feeling fleeced. That sounds pretty terrific.

How often do you come across an account of the same new, breakthrough idea from two different sources within 24 hours? That happened to me this weekend, and even if I had just seen it once I would have found the idea extraordinary. First, I read how Offermatica provides a content management solution that helps with multivariate testing of offers and copy. From what is learned, customized content can be delivered in real-time, based on behaviors. Offermatica CEO Matt Roche describes a novel application of this tool in a MediaPost blog interview:

[With the client site, MusicFriend.com] when someone comes to the home page [from a search engine] we know nothing about them, so they get the home page. What if we repeat the keyword that they searched on to get there, just show similar information? That increased the conversions. We repeat your keyword so you have a connection. Then we install affinity targeting that says when you go to the drums section and come back to the home page it will show you more drum offers. It increased the conversion rate in double digits on all the categories where we did category affinity.

The emphasis was my own. Double digit conversions?!? What a great trick.

Then I read Todd Friesen’s piece describing the same technique, in the July, 2007, print edition of Online Media, Marketing and Advertising (OMMA — and yes, it’s also a MediaPost publication). Phrased a different way, it suggests the same brilliant strategy:

… Did you ever notice how most brand traffic lands on your home page? Even product terms that contain branded verbiage often get a home page ranking ahead of a product page. Most home pages are pretty generic and usually run creative speaking to a straight brand message or weekly deal. How do you refine that on the fly to positively impact conversion? With a good multivariate tool, it’s relatively simple.

Some tools have the ability to recognize a search engine referral and identify the search term to define the creative displayed in the marketing modules on the home page. SEO managers then populate the “hero image” with a product related to the search and then load the complimentary products into the secondary marketing modules.

It is standard practice to do something like this with pay-per-click ads. We create customized landing pages that repeat the keyword phrase used in the search. This idea extends that landing page mentality to organic search results.

There is conjecture that the radio was invented in several places around the world at the same time. I suspect there will be similar arguments as to whom originated this simple and elegant way to improve the user experience for people arriving from search engines. All I can say is, I’ll glad I learned about it at all, so I can begin testing it with some of my clients.

Any readers who are already using this technique?

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, recently posted his reservations about the commercial potential of Linden Lab’s metaverse, Second Life. (Check out the many comments, by the way. I praise him for his willingness to stir a hornet’s nest.) The main reason for Anderson’s pessimism: Lack of traffic to the virtual storefronts and office spaces. Does this mean we should all forget the Second Life “land rush” ever happened? I don’t think so.

Yesterday I heard Steve Ennen, VP, Digital Business Strategies at American Business Media, speak at an online marketing summit. He pointed out that we should look at the potential for marketers in a “Third Life, Fourth Life or even Fifth Life.” I would agree. Especially if the next platform can be one that doesn’t require special plug-ins or players. Online, experiential marketing is here to stay. And a whole generation is growing up having spent a significant portion of their young lives on gaming platforms very similar to Second Life.

In the future, favorite online communities may well become these consumers’ first lives.

You’ll find more information on Second Life in this and associated entries.

There was yet another piece in the New York Times last week about the disintermediation of established businesses as a result of our new, networked world. In this case, it was about how new map mash-ups are growing in popularity, to the chagrin of many professional cartographers. Here’s an excerpt:

With the help of simple tools introduced by Internet companies recently, millions of people are trying their hand at cartography, drawing on digital maps and annotating them with text, images, sound and videos.

In the process, they are reshaping the world of map-making and collectively creating a new kind of atlas that is likely to be both richer and messier than any other.

They are also turning the Web into a medium where maps will play a more central role in how information is organized and found.

Initially, I thought this article was further proof that networks automatically disintermediate. It’s just their nature. They cut out that faceless “middleman,” whether this “man” is a travel agent, a realtor, or — in the case of Wikipedia — a traditional encyclopedia editor. But then I heard a story that showed me how networks can cut both ways.

But first, a word about how place, as defined as our physical world, has always been subjective – that mash-ups are simply expressing this reality in another demonstration of The Long Tail. The above example from Google Earth is the path that a friend’s Travel Bug (lovingly named Tatoo Bug) took as it passed through Midwestern geocaches. This portion was the first leg in a worldwide, 15,951-mile trip that he and other enthusiasts continue to follow on the dedicated Geocaching site.

Just as blogging has shown what happens when you remove the high cost of entry to publishing, these new rich, personalized maps are what you get when you hand mapping tools to the masses. Think about what maps have been in recent history. And I define recent history as the time since researching and printing maps was only available to the chosen few.

When I was a child, living in the hinterlands of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (also known at “The U.P.”), I was surrounded by towns that were too small for most maps to even acknowledge.

To cartographers, they didn’t exist. The commercial effects were devastating. 

Smack in the middle of a breathtakingly beautiful part of the country, with much to offer visitors, these tiny hamlets withered on the vine because tourists drove right past. These towns were achingly close to the tourist dollars they needed to survive. In some cases they were separated from major U.P. roads by nothing more than a stand of pine trees. So close and yet so far away.

That is all changing.

I’m a rock climbing enthusiast. The last time I climbed at Devil’s Lake, a spectacular set of quartzite climbing faces, I and my fellow climbers found the right place to set our gear based on an old, dog-eared book. The book was far from current, but it was the best we had. I’m expecting, within the year, to make my selection based on one or more Google Map mash-ups, enhanced with Flickr.com photos and user-generated raves, rants and warnings. My guide book will stay on the shelf, more a relic than reference.

And who knows? Maybe, armed with more personal — and personalized — knowledge of the area around Devil’s Lake, I’ll discover an ideal place to eat. One that I didn’t even know existed. A new perspective will reveal a physical world I didn’t realize was right there all the time.

Networks Can Intermediate Too

Is it inevitable that a networked world eliminates the middleman, shifting from an objective, imposed experience to a more subjective one? I thought so.

But on the same day that I read that Times article, I heard a wonderful NPR podcast. It was one of a series of programs called RadioLab, and this episode was about time. The program reminded me that there was an era in this county when small communities like my hometown had a very personal — and personalized — view of time. Up until about 200 years ago, these places had no official “time.” Noon was simply when the sun was directly overhead. You set your watch to that moment, and that was good enough.

Back then you could walk into a room and ask for the time, and get as many different answers as there were people answering. Some would even, quite sincerely, answer with something like “It’s nearly time for me to harvest the corn.” Because what was time, after all, but something you experienced subjectively?

One day that all changed, and everyone followed the same timeclock.

And the intermediary that created this change? None other than a network: The railroad.

With much at stake for both the train and the towns along its path, someone had to agree to exactly when the 12:07 train would pull up to the stop. The network wiped away all personal “maps” of time and replaced them with one that was objective and unyielding.

All of this is a reminder to me that two of the most agree-upon truths — Time and Space — which keep us moored to this harbor called Reality, are more open to interpretation that we would care to admit.

We all know that retail’s mantra and battle cry is Location, Location, Location. But the spread of map mash-ups helps us realize that what makes a location good is in the eye of the beholder. Take it from me: If what you want is a really good smelt fry, I know a place in Rapid River, Michigan that is worth seeking out.