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Angstro Buy, Shopping, Gaming Investments Point To Multi-Pronged Google Social Strategy

Written on August 30, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object

Last week Google acquired Angstro. The site has been described as a way to discover and organize information about individuals across various professional networks. Here’s how Angstro describes itself:
Ångströ represents the ability to hone in on highly focused, relevant news across professional networks. Where search engines such as Google and other news aggregator [...]



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Angstro Buy, Shopping, Gaming Investments Point To Multi-Pronged Google Social Strategy

Real Time Storytelling – SES SF

Written on August 20, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing, seo

For mainstream media to survive, if not thrive, it must integrate with the social web and create engagement surrounding content.  For social media to remain relevant and compelling, it must work in tandem with news organizations to create a symbiotic storytelling relationship.

The future may be a stream with the authenticity of the social web and the reach of mainstream media.

Lead by moderator Khris Loux, CEO & Co-Founder, Echo this panel took a bleeding edge look on real-time story telling through an open discussion and Q&A.

Panel participants:

• Dan Schmidt, Senior Product Manager, CBS Interactive
• Andrew Lyons, Commercial Director, UltraKnowledge
• Dermot Waters, Senior Director of Product Development, CNN.com
• Louis Gray, Managing Director of New Media, Paladin Advisors Group

Moderator:  what is a brief definition of real-time storytelling?

Waters:  Weaving a coherent narrative between disparate conversations.

Lyons:  Real-time story telling is disrupting the idea of an editorial filter.

Waters:  Real-time storytelling isn’t any different than it was 30 years ago; it has just become a participatory conversation as opposed to being broadcast.

Gray:  Real-time storytelling gets to find the most accurate, relevant content and floating that to the top.

Moderator:  how do you as a publisher ride the wave of citizen journalism?

Waters:  At CNN, we encourage everyone to be a part of the news and citizen journalism.  Join iReport and you can be a part of the wave.   What we have discovered is that we were dropping 97% of citizen content sent to us without publishing.  That was the inspiration to create iReport, take that content and reuse it in a number of different ways.  We’ve spread that philosophy throughout our site and to the rest of our properties.  Over time, we’ve built a tremendous network around the web of users reporting the news.

Lyons:  On the citizen journalism thing, you see the debate of “journalist” vs. “citizen journalist.”  Have you seen the “dark side” of things, where people try to fake news for profit?

Waters:  Overwhelming we haven’t seen this, we’ve seen it be mostly real stories, real conversations.  It is a testament to the community.  Further, the iReport community is tightly knit and will react to fake content.

Moderator:  how do you moderate/manage real-time conversation without squashing it?

Waters:  I think the community is who will manage that – you can’t stifle conversations or even allow real-time if you’re manually filtering it.

Moderator:  in a world with untold number of news resources, replies/comments/ReTweets, how can curation help?

Dan Schmidt:  People are using their friends as curators.  This is becoming more and more powerful as sites recognize users identities.  An opportunity for a news organization is to help people build their own network.  Users can bring that filter with them wherever they go.

Gray:  You talk about curation – I think CNN and CBS have grown their brand due to authority as a brand.  The act of aggregation and curation today is the act of finding relevant info from a third party source and sharing it with readers.

Dan Schmidt:  We thought about piping in feeds of content into our site – but we decided to introduce an editor to provide context.  In theory, being clear about the relevance of content is important.

Gray.  We’ve seen a battle between traditional media and new media aggregators.  What is the feeling from a CNN or CNet on other aggregators who are taking readers away or using your content to build your brand.

Waters:  Aggregators are a way to get those eyeballs.  We want to work with them not against them to ensure we are relevant and reach users.

Moderator:  there is no longer an opportunity to research stories and be “accurate,” now there is a push for publishers to be first.

Lyons:  The luxury of the deadline is gone.  You now have to be prepared to embrace the real-time world we’re in or be prepared to fight it.  For example, the journalists out there focusing on a specific be used to be thought of as the expert.  Now everyone has a voice – not just the journalists.  Subject matter experts such as scientists or other vertical-specific experts can be even more authoritative.  There has become a “return on integrity” – where you can build relationships with influencers in order to utilize them for information.

Gray:  You’ll find that some users actually have a fatigue about “breaking news.”  What you’ll find is not all of it is breaking.  You also will find a “half life” of a story – that if a newspaper is dead by the time it gets to someone (24 hours) – at what point does a news items actually become old?

Waters:  When does a story become old?  It depends on the consumer, because it might be new to them (it’s interesting/relevant to them, they just haven’t seen it yet).

Moderator:  The daily newspaper used to be the arbiter of truth, because they were the decision maker.  Now that’s no longer the case.  Who is the arbiter of truth in a real-time news cycle?

Gray:  What’s happening is you now have the ability of citizen journalists to create content.  With this, specific individuals have influence within different sub-sets of technology.  There are many citizen-fed blogs in the tech space, as one example.  And a lot of the smaller blogs cover the same story.  For example, Twitter announces a feature, they put it on their blog and then 500+ other bloggers will write their own spin.  Many reasons people do this is to keep users on their page and position themselves as the arbiter of truth.  Why are you choosing to read Gizmodo over Engadget?  Usually the answer is because they have access to something or a certain editorial perspective compelling to you.  So, based on personal preferences users will read items that reinforce their choices.  Now we have this issue, the truth used to be arbited by big names who had the access to real, verifiable facts.

Moderator:  it seems like the truth is being stressed to infinity and a race to break what is news.  It’s de-valuating investigative news that takes time to create.  What do you think?

Gray:  In terms of truth, the way that we solve that is figure out a way to reward the truth discovering machine.  You need to rely on the bigger organizations who can put reporters out in the field.  Are these individuals rewarded for what they’ve done or not?  What we’re finding is that people will break news ahead of embargos and push the limit on real-time to get on top of aggregators and attain pageviews.

Moderator:  with real-time storytelling, how will content publishers monetizing it?

Waters:  There are many ways you can make revenue from it.  By fostering the conversation and encouraging users to come to the site for real-time comments, you’re encouraging more people to your site and raising your brand awareness.  When talking about conversations offsite, we can re-aggregate it and monetize it in our own spaces.

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TopRank

Answering Hard SEO Questions - Whiteboard Friday

Written on August 19, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, book, marketing, seo

Posted by Danny Dover

Up Close With Facebook Questions

Written on July 28, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, book

Facebook Questions is the latest in a long line of question-and-answer services online but, as Danny Sullivan mentioned in his news article earlier, it’s the only one with a community of 500 million users behind it. For comparison’s sake, Yahoo Answers, the recognized leader in the Q&A space, announced in late 2009 that it had [...]



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Up Close With Facebook Questions

Old Spice Reaps Rewards of Viral Campaign

Written on July 28, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, marketing

Sometimes an ad for a product is so clever that you remember the ad but not the product. Not so with Old Spice’s new “Smell Like a Man, Man,” campaign which went viral earlier this year. According to a Nielsen report which was noted in Brandweek, sales of Old Spice Body Wash have jumped 55% in the past three months and 107% this past month.

“Gary Stibel, CEO and founder of The New England Consulting Group, said his data also shows a lift for Old Spice. “We think that Old Spice is up. We don’t think it’s up in the double digits, but it’s up meaningfully, and we think it’s driven 100 percent by marketing.”

What’s not measurable is how much help the campaign had from the news coverage it received. Type “Old Spice” into Google news and you’ll find more than 2,000 articles have been written by everyone from Business Week to MTV to. . . us. If P&G had bought ad space on all of these publications, the cost would have been astronomical, but now they’re a part of advertising history and that is, to quote another ad genius, priceless.

The “Old Spice Guy”, Isaiah Mustafa, is now on his way to becoming a movie star with a role in Jennifer Aniston’s new movie. Now that’s how you breath new life into an old brand.

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Old Spice Reaps Rewards of Viral Campaign

Yahoo-Bing Mobile Search Transition To Happen At Same Time As Online, Ads To Be Handled By Same Teams

Written on July 28, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, Object

Microsoft and Yahoo have deferred talk of mobile advertising in previous discussions about the search transition. But now it has been made clear that mobile will transition at the same as the PC, and that the account teams will be the same for both segments.
Here are the relevant FAQs from Microsoft Advertising’s discussion of the [...]



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Yahoo-Bing Mobile Search Transition To Happen At Same Time As Online, Ads To Be Handled By Same Teams

SearchCap: The Day In Search, July 28, 2010

Written on July 28, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, book

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
From Search Engine Land:

Facebook Questions Opens To Limited Public Release
Long expected, Facebook’s new Facebook Questions service is now being offered. It allows Facebook users to specifically ask question to and get answers from others in Facebook’s [...]



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SearchCap: The Day In Search, July 28, 2010

Facebook Questions Opens To Limited Public Release

Written on July 28, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, book

Long expected, Facebook’s new Facebook Questions service is now being offered. It allows Facebook users to specifically ask question to and get answers from others in Facebook’s now 500 million strong community.
The service just went live at 1pm Pacific Time today, and we’re working on a detailed look at all the features (this is now [...]



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Facebook Questions Opens To Limited Public Release

Conversion Rate Lessons for Newspaper Paywalls

Written on July 18, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, marketing, seo

Posted by Tom_C

Paywalls are a hot topic online at the moment. In the UK The Times has recently put their whole site behind a pay wall and in early 2011 the New York Times is set to also go behind a pay wall. Both of these sites will join sites such as the Wall Street Journal which has been behind a paywall for some time already. For those who aren’t familiar with how paywalls work this image might clear things up:

(Image credit)

There has been an awful lot written online about paywalls so I’m going to try and cover new ground in this post and focus exclusively on the conversion rate issues which are unique to paywalls and how news sites might seek to overcome them. Although that’s a pretty niche focus for this post hopefully the lessons and techniques can be applied to many different websites. Firstly, I’m going to look at the difficulties:

Objections To Overcome

In my eyes newspapers struggle with 3 unique problems which sets them slightly apart from other conversion funnels:

1. Micropayments - People are unfamiliar with making small payments online. Much as you and I (being internet savvy hopefully!) are comfortable shelling out small payments and going through the hassle of remembering our verified by visa password, the average joe still isn’t familiar with this.
2. Subscriptions - Again, this is related to the above point but there’s an objection which needs to be overcome which is paying for something regularly. We’re all a lot more comfortable paying once for a single product, paying regularly for access to something is a concept we’re a lot less familiar with.
3. News is free right? - The last, but perhaps most obvious of the objections and the one people vocalise a lot is “surely I can just get my news from a free source?”. We’ve been living in a news-free world now for about as long as the internet has been around and certainly the younger generations simply assume news should be free.

So if you’re going to launch a paywall I think you have to consider these 3 factors very carefully. How are you going to overcome them?

Countering These Objections

Since there are 3 objections, I’m going to present 3 solutions!

1. Smooth The Funnel - As one client mentioned to me recently, “we try to smooth the sides of our funnel as much as possible”. This approach to conversion rate optimisation I think overcomes the first objection. The idea being that if you’re going to make a micropayment (and certainly if you’re going to make more than one micropayment) then the process should be very quick and very painless.
2. Educate Your Users - Whenever you try and sell something it’s important to answer the question “Why do I get if I buy this?”. For ecommerce websites this often results in making sure delivery options are very clear, or ensuring it’s clear which version of a product you’re selling. For paywalls I think it’s crucial to educate very strongly about what exactly the product is that you’re offering. Which sections of the site do you get access to, how long for, what’s in those sections etc. Even though it’s a micropayment, it doesn’t mean that you don’t need long sales pages and a lot of persuasion to get people to buy. Long sales copy is useful not only to persuade people to purchase but also to educate people on what exactly it is they’re buying.
3. Sell The Benefits - To overcome the “news is free” objection it’s crucial to sell the benefits of the content you have. Likely this needs to be something above and beyond “just” news. Consider what else you get, opinion, rich media etc.

Pay Walls In Action

Now, let’s look at some real life examples of paywalls in action and see what we can pick out from them considering the above objections and counter objections:

The New Scientist

One thing I hate about paywalls, is the idea that they are in fact a wall. I think there should be a psychological shift to think of them not as walls but instead as desirable products. I feel the New Scientist does this really well - take a look at the below call to action which appears at the top of an article which you can’t read in full online:

This isn’t saying “you can’t read this article unless you pay”, this is saying “look how great it would be if you subscribed to New Scientist!”. There are really nice visual calls to action and there’s even a 20% discount in there! Sweet.

Looking further at the actual conversion funnel we see they’ve greased the sides of the funnel nicely since it only takes a matter of seconds to whiz through the clear and simple checkout process.

The Times

The Times is a fascinating case study for conversion - they’ve been doing some things well, some things not so well but it’s a really interesting case study. Firstly, as above the thing I hate most of all about the times website is that you run into the paywall. It’s a wall. A barrier. There’s no way (no easy way) of signing up to The Times unless you try and click on one of the headlines on the homepage. This doesn’t make any sense to me - the only way into the funnel for a user is to click on a headline that interests them, only to be denied access to that article. I think it would be immensely valuable to have a call to action on the homepage to actually subscribe - this means that people looking to subscribe can do so easily and by clicking on something which has the desired outcome.

Once you’ve clicked a news story you’re presented with a pop-up overlay like this:

Now, what I can’t show you with this screenshot is the painstakingly long time it takes for this pop-up to load. This will likely be their biggest source of lost conversions - the popup is so slow that often the page will re-load and nothing will happen for a few seconds before the popup starts to render and even when it does render it takes at least 7-8 seconds for the “already registered?” box to even appear. For a website trying to persuade me to buy a subscription to an online product slow loading technology like this really matters and will put many people off.

Ok, I don’t mean to be too negative about The Times but there’s another very weird conversion killer. When you actually click to subscribe to the site the first page you’re presented with is this single function page:

I find this page very odd. Talking about greasing the sides of the funnel, this is like sandpaper on the walls coated with glue. Why should I enter my email address? What purpose does it serve? There’s not even any security or trust given that my email address won’t be sold to 3rd parties. There’s a reason that websites give those assurances, it’s because users are worried about it! Once you’ve entered your email address the next step of the funnel prompts you to re-enter your email address anyway so this page is more or less totally redundant for me.

Ok, enough negativity - time for some positives! The first thing I really like about The Times is the development of Times+. This website is an entire micro-site dedicated to educating users about the benefits of signing up, along with example pieces of content including videos and articles. This really plays well into point 2 above.

Another aspect I find really intriguing about The Times is that they have the opportunity here to create a worthwhile online community with intelligent comments on their articles. This would genuinely set them apart from other newspaper sites where the comments quickly descend into madness or idiocy or both! The very fact that you’re within a walled garden and the fact that The Times prides itself on intelligent debate should offer them an opportunity set themselves apart. I can see the beginnings of this as a marketing tactic and I can only assume this will grow as the website matures but this is a perfect example of point 3 - overcoming the “news is free” concept.

The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal gets quite a nice thumbs up for one specific page they have which is this one:

There are two things I love about this page. Firstly, this type of feature comparison table works very well at driving conversions. It’s clear for users and has nice strong calls to action throughout. The second reason I love this is because of the more subtle perceived value proposition that’s included alongside the Print + Online + Mobile option where there is included a free

Woot! The Associated Press Gets a Taste of Its Own Medicine!

Written on July 6, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing

You may already be aware that The Associated Press (AP) has gone down a ludicrous path of insisting you owe them money, if you quote one of their stories.

Now it appears the news organization has been caught indulging in some double-standards, by quoting from Woot’s announcement that it had been acquired by Amazon.com. In light of this, the good-humored folks over at Woot have decided to point out the hypocrisy to AP.

So, The AP, here we are. Just to be fair about this, we’ve used your very own pricing scheme to calculate how much you owe us. By looking through the link above, and comparing your post with our original letter, we’ve figured you owe us roughly $17.50 for the content you borrowed from our blog post, which, by the way, we worked very very hard to create.

LMAO!

The post continues with an offer to waive the money owed, in exchange for the AP buying today’s Woot deal–a pair of Sennheiser in-ear headphones.

Anyway, The AP, please send that proof of receipt to service@woot.com before the end of the day. We’re major digital players now. Don’t force us to pass this matter to a collection agency.

I don’t know about you, but coming back from a long weekend off is always hard. But boy, it’s so much easier when you get to enjoy someone sticking-it to the AP.

(Hat-tip)

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Woot! The Associated Press Gets a Taste of Its Own Medicine!