Exploring Marketing Technology

Category: Web Marketing

New ways to create and measure sites so they improve their ability to bring your best customers closer and attact other individuals just like them

  • Are widgets today’s ad specialties?

    In a prior life I worked in direct response. My clients were mostly healthcare organizations — hospitals, physician groups and health plans. They used magnets. Lots of them. Not in their MRI devices, mind you. I worked with healthcare marketing departments.

    No, these were refrigerator magnets. Magnets such as these:

    Not very sexy, huh? Believe me, I tried to break my clients’ addiction to the things. I mean really!

    Keeping Your Brand Top-of-mind

    But I finally conceded that if you are selling a service that on any given day no one wants (no one, that is, except independently wealthy hypochondriacs), you need to have your brand nearby. Should the need suddenly arise, you want your brand to be the one consumers think about.

    It’s not such a bad idea to be somewhere hard to ignore … such as on the door people swing open several times a day.

    I eventually resigned myself to my career as a peddler of refrigerator magnets. My project managers were in frequent contact with our fridge magnet vendor, Magnets, LLC (above are examples pulled from their online catalog). Post cards we bulk mailed to targeted regions around our clients crackled with magnetism and hackneyed slogans.

    Back then I would quip that if the physical law of magnetism was repealed, all of healthcare marketing would grind to a halt.

    Then I joined the online world and mostly forgot all about these give-aways. Until yesterday.

    This week Bob Garfield, in an Ad Age piece, compared online widgets to these lowly trinkets. Here’s an excerpt (emphasis mine):

    For the past half-century (and for about five more minutes) TV advertising has been at the apex of marketing communications. Then, in no particular order, newspapers, magazines, radio, out of home, direct mail, point of purchase, collateral (brochures, for example) and — in the murky, mucky darkness at the very bottom of the deepest abyss of marketing prestige — advertising specialties.

    For example, a ballpoint pen emblazoned with your insurance agent’s logo. Or a wall calendar, fridge magnet, coffee mug, yardstick, foam beer-can sleeve, ashtray, key fob, emery board, pocket diary — any cheap giveaway item meant to remind the consumer of you every single time she measures fabric or swigs a Pabst or files her nails …

    In a digital world, advertising specialties are as analog as you can possibly get. Until they go digital.

    Branded widgets are the refrigerator magnets of the Brave New World.

    Say it ain’t so! Is someone playing a cruel joke?

    Describing widgets, Garfield puts a finer point on his argument: “These compact, portable little software apps — from video players to countdown clocks to makeup simulators — are inexpensive to distribute, free to the user and (often enough) distinctly useful.”

    That’s true. Just like ad specialties. They also remain, often, in front of a consumer until a need for the brand arises. “At a minimum,” Garfield states, “they carry an ad message wherever they go.”

    He said “At a minimum.” There’s my loophole. This is what will restore me to respectability! Although Garfield says they are “distinctly useful,” he neglects to say just how useful. No one can argue that a fridge magnet can hold up a parent permission slip or shopping list, but did one ever report back to the advertiser about consumers’ aggregate kitchen behavior?

    The best widgets, like the ones my team produces (either the freestanding web apps, or the Facebook games and calculators that are deep into our development queue now), do far more than simply justify their existence on a social media profile page or blog entry.

    Because a widget can interact with consumers, and since we can attach precise web metrics to them, widgets can do valuable marketing work such as:

    • Pre-qualify prospects through calculators and configurators
    • Enlist customers in sharing your message with others who may also be prospects
    • Display and play user-generated content appealing to long tail interests
    • Entertain!

    This last one is a biggy. Because, unlike refrigerator magnets, people actually want to pass along widgets. This may seem like a small thing to you, but this morning, it’s causing me to hold my head a little higher. I am no mere peddler of digital chochkees.

  • Social media powers fundraising for an African classroom

    This morning I contributed to TweetsGiving, and I urge you to as well. It’s an excellent cause, and it can give you a first-hand experience in the power of social media. As the name implies, what is propeling this two-day fundraising effort is the micro-blogging platform Twitter.

    As of this post, the total raised is ,182. Here is what the TweetsGiving web site has to say about the effort:

    Tweetsgiving is a project of Epic Change that seeks to demonstrate the power of twitter and the social web by spreading gratitude and raising $10,000 in 48 hours to build a classroom at the school in Tanzania. The project was inspired by the TrickorTweet campaign organized around Halloween by @TheGrok and @ChrisBrogan and by this “thank you” post.

    Giving Thanks

    Follow @TweetsGiving on Twitter. Then, as the site suggests, you can “Tweet thanks. Share something you’re thankful for with all your twitter followers. Your tweets can be touching or silly, poignant or fun. Just tweet from the heart and be sure to include the #TweetsGiving tag and a link to http://tinyurl.com/4thanks.”

    And of course, be sure to give!

  • Cognitive bias and effective interface design

    Joshua Porter recently shared an excellent presentation on leveraging cognitive biases in the design of social networking sites. I’ve followed Joshua’s blog for years, and his thoughts on this subject reinforce my loyalty. You should know that I’ll vehemently defend the time I spend reading his stuff, even if you try to persuade me that I could be reading other, similar blogs. This die-hard loyalty is itself an example of something called a cognitive bias. It shows the Ownership Effect, one of the biases — or heuristics — that secretly influence our decisions and actions.

    Heuristics are mental shortcuts. Unknowingly, our brain processes information through filters. These filters add more weight to some facts and less to others. Should real facts be scarce, heuristics can sometimes fill in the blanks.

    Are cognitive biases good or bad?

    The virtue of gut-based judgments is a subject of heated debate. Some think rational decisions are the best. They point to addiction and racial prejudice as two consequences of unchecked cognitive biases. Others, most famously Malcolm Gladwell, feel that heuristics have more value than they get credit for. His book Blink is full of examples of the gut overruling the brain and proving itself more accurate.

    Regardless of your take on the phenomenon, as marketers we can only benefit by getting to know cognitive biases, especially in good web interface design. Lucky us: In the process we can learn a little more of how our own minds make judgments.

    But be forewarned. It’s not pretty.

    A bias that is particularly interesting is Loss Aversion. If I approached a random sample of people and offered them money based on the outcome of a coin toss, the wagers that they accept and refuse are far from rational. If I said I’d pay $1.25 if they win the coin toss, and the cost of the bet is a dollar, a person’s rational brain would do the math and say “Go for it.” In a fair bet, the win far outweighs the loss.

    However, most pass on this offer. They refuse the likely ROI of 25%.

    In fact, when the stakes are changed and other amounts are tested, it turns out that the majority of participates will hold onto their dollars until the reward increases to $2.00!

    This is not rational. Even when haggling is eliminated (defined as holding out until you get the best possible offer), the majority of people walk away from making a likely profit.

    Why do they do this? Because the value of not losing is twice as great as the value of winning. In a 50-50 wager, the value of losing $1.00 is equal to that of gaining $2.00. An absurd 100% ROI is the usual tipping point.

    Could loss aversion be inherited from our cave-dwelling days?

    Where does this reflex to avoid loss come from? Work by researcher Keith Chen with capuchin monkeys suggests that loss aversion may be innate in humans — and indeed, in other more primitive primates. In his research (purchase of white paper required — otherwise, here’s my blog entry on the topic), he sees exactly the same loss aversion in monkeys that are taught to use tokens in exchange for food as others have observed in humans playing identical games. And I mean exactly, as in: If you just looked at the numbers, you couldn’t tell human response from monkey response.

    It really makes you think.

    Joshua Porter gave the example of using loss aversion to get people to register on a site, with offers of “Never lose another password!” or “Don’t miss out on opportunities to save!” If the cost of loss is presented as half as great as the cost of preventing a loss, you will likely generate a simple conversion.

    Paradoxically, the fear of loss is also seen in gambling. As soon as you sit down at the poker table, your more primal, reptile brain wants to ensure others do not get your chips. Even if you have a weak hand, you might try to bluff your way to victory. Even in the face of almost certain loss. To casinos, the cognitive bias of loss aversion is definitely something good.

    Swoopo goads bidders in a chase for merchandise

    I’ve observed this phenomenon in a truly scary “auction site.” Swoopo.com offers merchandise that you can bid on. But these aren’t true eBay-like auctions, because your bid is lost whether you win the prize or not. Everything from software to flat-screen TVs are presented with starting prices in the teens. Then participants throw their cash at the merchandise, hoping to be the last person to place their money down before the timer ends the contest.

    The site’s designers have cleverly avoid gambling laws through a technicality. Their site is a “game of skill.” It is arguable that it takes skill to be the last to bid, and thus take home a prize.

    But this contest is more like a carnival game of topple-the-milk-bottles. Every bid bumps up the cost of the item, but also adds seconds to the countdown clock. Yes, it’s a game of skill. But like those who have pitted their wits against a carnival game, there are far more who walk away penniless than victorious. And since there are no sweepstakes laws requiring full disclosure, you enter the game unsure of your odds of winning — even with practice.

    So what force brings people back to bid again and again? And what causes bidders to pursue an item so vigorously in the face of disappointing odds?

    One reason certainly has to be the thrill of the chase — the determination not to let others get the item you feel rightly entitled to claim. After all, you’ve already committed real dollars to trying to win the item! This is classic loss aversion.

    Go to the site and see for yourself. Watch the bidding, which has a level of supposed transparency. You can see your opponents bid against you in real time. To watch is both thrilling and deeply chilling.

    Spending time on Swoopo.com is like watching the id in pitched battle with the super ego. On this site, due to excellent interface design, the id is the only sure winner.

  • New Wikipedia crawler provides powerful semantic search

    As recently as May, the online press was calling the technology behind Powerset a possible “Google-killer,” as well as an acquisition shoo-in. In June Microsoft proved the second prediction when they bought Powerset for roughly $100 million.

    Microsoft acquired, at the very least, a fascinating toy. Here’s a video showing the power of this company’s semantic search tool:


    Powerset Demo Video from officialpowerset on Vimeo.

    The next time you need something out of Wikipedia, see if you can find it more quickly using this impressive application.

    “Hearing” and Understanding

    When I call the technology a toy I’m joking, of course. Accounts are that Microsoft is incorporating Powerset’s app gradually into Live Search. There is another use that’s hinted at in the way semantic search renders answers. It’s a far more exciting prospect than another web-based search engine.

    Consider the implications of this technology once voice recognition via cell phones improves.

    As I’ve speculated before, we’ll witness the true power of mobile computing when the voice barrier is broken. This voice barrier is a two-fold problem. As with human cognition, there is the problem of accurately hearing, and even more difficult, the problem of understanding.

    Powerset’s semantic search shows progress in tackling that second half of the equation.

  • Obama to revive fireside chats for a Web 2.0 world

    Today Change.gov announced that President-elect Obama will likely be giving weekly YouTube speeches, similar to the weekly radio White House addresses of the recent past, and, more tellingly, the radio-based fireside chats that FDR used so effectively to inform and comfort Depression Era listeners.



    In the early summer, during Online Community Month, I discussed how Senator Obama’s campaigning style differed significantly from other candidates, including Hillary Clinton. Others have termed this new approach networked leadership.

    Today’s announcement appears to be another example of how our president-elect is leveraging new technology to organize, and, well, lead.

    It gives me hope.