marketing

What is Web 3.0? Characteristics of Web 3.0

2009 06 16 What Is Web 3.0

2009 06 16 What Is Web 3.0 – Presentation Transcript

  1. What is Web 3.0? Dr. Augustine Fou June 16, 2009. June 16, 2009.
  2. Evolution of the Internet microprocessor 40 yrs 10 yrs 20 yrs 5 yrs present web internet 2.5 yrs social networks e-commerce 1.5 yrs Web 1.0 Web 2.0 Web 3.0? June 16, 2009.
  3. Evolution of the “Web” content commerce search social networks social content social search social commerce As each stage reaches critical mass, the next stage is tipped into present June 16, 2009.
  4. Key Characteristics present web 1.0 web 2.0 web 3.0
    • Speedy
    • more timely information and more efficient tools to find information
    • Collaborative
    • actions of users amass, police, and prioritize content
    • Trust-worthy
    • users establish trust networks and hone trust radars
    • Content
    • content destination sites and personal portals
    • Search
    • critical mass of content drives need for search engines
    • Commerce
    • commerce goes mainstream; digital goods rise
    • Ubiquitous
    • available at any time, anywhere, through any channel or device
    • Individualized
    • filtered and shared by friends or trust networks
    • Efficient
    • relevant and contextual information findable instantly

June 16, 2009.

  1. Illustrative Examples – retail/shopping present web 1.0 web 2.0 web 3.0
    • what friends bought or want to buy
    • drag-to-share items which friends know friends are looking for
    • item collections
    • value in the aggregation

overstock.com amazon.com FB app: MyFaveThings

    • contextual reviews
    • reviews of reviews
    • what others bought
    • individualized recommendations

June 16, 2009.

  1. Illustrative Examples – social networks present web 1.0 web 2.0 web 3.0
    • aggregates all your online identities
    • syndicates all your updates to all social networks
    • social actions visible to friends
    • trust networks across geography, time, and interests
    • collection of personal homepages

geocities.com facebook.com peoplebrowsr.com June 16, 2009.

  1. Illustrative Examples – restaurant reviews present web 1.0 web 2.0 web 3.0
    • Yelp content vetted through a user’s trust network and individual recommendations made based on situation and need, in real-time
    • user submitted reviews
    • related items based on similarity of user preferences
    • infrequent publication
    • centralized editorial control

zagat‘s yelp need reco for great Italian + GPS + Yelp 5-star Babbo, been there, love it June 16, 2009.

  1. Illustrative Examples – photos present web 1.0 web 2.0 web 3.0
    • real-time, contextual “do you like this knit shirt?”
    • friends give immediate feedback
    • share photos with friends and strangers
    • enable visitors to tag and comment
    • individual albums

kodakgallery.com flickr.com ? June 16, 2009.

  1. Illustrative Examples – real estate present web 1.0 web 2.0 web 3.0
    • information vetted by fellow users, recommended directly an in context
    • listings plus relevant information like school zones, comparable sales, alerts
    • listings based on parameters

corcoran.com streeteasy.com trulia iphone app June 16, 2009.

  1. Illustrative Examples – encyclopedia present web 1.0 web 2.0 web 3.0
    • content is ubiquitous and available through any channel or device
    • trust network proactively forwards relevant info to user who needs it
    • created, updated, and edited (policed) by user actions
    • digitized version of printed encyclopedia

britannica.com wikipedia.com chacha.com June 16, 2009.

  1. Illustrative Examples – online coupons present web 1.0 web 2.0 web 3.0
    • coupons delivered contextually and proactively when user needs it (without the user even asking for it)
    • instant feedback
    • community action makes it more accurate and useful for others
    • collection of online coupons – value in the aggregation

dealcatcher.com retailmenot.com June 16, 2009.

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Facebook advertising metrics and benchmarks

Summary

Facebook click-through rates of 0.01 – 0.05% (Facebook CTRs)

Facebook effective CPMs turned out to be $0.01 – $0.19 (Facebook eCPMs)

Facebook average CPCs ranged from $0.05 – $0.25 (Facebook CPCs)

Other social media benchmarks from my experiments (Adwords, StumbleUpon, PayPerPost / Izea) can be found here.


As a scientist, I like to run experiments. And I like to make stuff. So my team and I made a few Facebook apps  that solved needs that we had (a few samples listed below) and shared them publicly on Facebook to see if they were also useful to other people too.

I beta tested some apps with a few friends by inviting them directly. Then to get it out to a larger number of people, we decided to try Facebook advertising, the much-hyped, holy grail of display advertising on one of the largest and most active social networks.

http://apps.facebook.com/netflixr/

- visual discovery, share, and queue management interface for Netflix

http://apps.facebook.com/musicsamplr/

- visual discovery and sampling interface for music (Amazon backend)

http://apps.facebook.com/phreetings/

- create and send photo or video e-cards by drag and drop (Flickr and YouTube backend)

http://apps.facebook.com/visualfriends/

- visual display of your friends (closest ones have the most recent status updates)

http://apps.facebook.com/myfavethings/

- social commerce – I’ll buy what he bought; things I have, things I want

But what I found was eye-opening to say the least. Despite the potential of social ads where the social actions of your circle of friends could make the ads more targeted, none of the anticipated positive effects were observed. Despite the promise of mass reach, there was not the corresponding attention or clicks. And despite the use of demographics-based targeting, there was no statistically significant difference between different targets nor the control sample, running during the same time period.

What we saw were click-through rates of 0.01 – 0.05% — and the 0.01% often seemed like rounding because they did not report more than 2 decimal places. As a result of these click rates the effective CPMs turned out to be $0.01 – $0.19 and average CPCs ranged from $0.05 – $0.25. I’ve been running these Facebook ads for more than 12 months; and millions of impresisons later, there is no observable improvements to CTRs and thus CPMs and CPCs. But since I set up the campaigns to only pay when there is a click (CPC basis), I can let these run indefinitely because I am getting so few clicks, it’s not even making a dent on my credit card (which I use to pay for the ads).


Ideas for Facebook

In the spirit of openness, as an advertiser who wants to continue using Facebook advertising, perhaps there are a few things they can do to improve the effectiveness of Facebook display ads.

1. reduce the number of ads per page to 1 – displaying multiple ads artificially depresses click-through rates because users can only click on 1 thing at a time, even if they liked more than one of them. Displaying 3 on a page simply increases the denominator while the numerator does not increase — in the click-through rate equation: clicks / impressions.

2. make ads sharable – in the rare instance a user views an ad, it may or may not be relevant to her, but she may know that it is relevant and timely for a friend. By making ads sharable, she can click and send to a friend, who is very likely to find it useful and valuable, especially having been sent by a friend.

3. let users opt-in to ads in specific topic categories - when users are in the market for specific things, they are more likely to subscribe to pertinent news feeds, offers, etc. related to that topic or category. By giving users more power over what they want to see, it will also give advertisers more targeted and engaged prospects to target.

4. expand search-based advertising – when users search they are looking for something and are open to discovering something they didn’t know to ask for. So ads served up in response to a search is usually a lot more effective than ads served up simply when a page is loaded (display advertising). Facebook can serve display ads based on pertinent search queries.

Earth to Facebook…  anyone listening?

By Dr. Augustine Fou. Dr. Fou is Group Chief Digital Officer at Healthcare Consultancy Group a group of agencies within the Omnicom family specializing in pharma and healthcare.  He helps clients develop digital marketing programs or improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness existing campaigns via advanced analytics, social marketing, and digital strategy. You can read more of his writing on digital marketing on this blog and follow him on twitter @acfou.

Revision 6/30/2009: Facebook Click Fraud

Excerpt from TechCrunch: “Click fraud is serious business on the big search engine advertising networks because the bad guys can make serious money. Sign up for an Adsense account and put those ads on parked domain names or wherever. Then all you have to do is start clicking those ads like crazy, using bots or cheap labor.” On Facebook, “advertisers are clicking on competitor ads to drive up their costs and drive down their ROI.”

“So the bad guys just create thousands of fake Facebook accounts with a wide variety of demographic information. This sounds like a lot of work, but it’s highly automated. the going rate was just $10 per 100 accounts if you supply the unique email accounts. Once the accounts are created, they use software to fill out the varied demographic information, and that software also manages all these accounts. The fraudster then logs in to Facebook via these accounts and views the ads that are displayed. The right competitive ads come up and Bingo, the software then clicks them. Facebook rules allow an account to click any advertisement up to six times in a 24 hour period, and all those clicks are charged. All you need is a few accounts to view the ads and then click to the max.”

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/26/facebook-click-fraud-101/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/21/facebook-admit-click-fraud-problem-says-fix-coming-today/

Despite click fraud, the click through rates are still incredibly low. So if you subtract all the click fraud, is ANY advertiser making ANY money from facebook advertising?

Others have found similarly dismal click through rates from Facebook advertising

Source: http://www.friendswithbenefitsbook.com/2008/04/07/facebook-ad-click-through-rates-are-really-pitiful/

Facebook Ad Click-Through Rates Are Really Pitiful

April 7, 2008 – 5:03 pm

Quite by coincidence, I’ve encountered a few statistics on Facebook’s advertising platform. I thought I’d post links to the results I’ve uncovered, in case anybody is wondering about average CTR rates for Facebook.

First up, Rod Boothby got a click-through rate of 0.01%:

This week, I ran $105 worth of Facebook Fliers. That bought me 52,500 impressions. It looks like the flier bought me about an extra 500 site visits. That’s about $0.21 per hit.

Michael Ferguson ran a bunch of Facebook ads for Kinzin:

Click-through rates are abysmal. I was running the identical ad in about 15 different regions (you need to run them as separate ads to get the stats broken out), getting just over 10M views. Our average clickthrough rate was 0.06% (that’s 1 in 1513, for those counting at home). The best we did anywhere was 0.14%.

He later reports that the conversion rate was “at a pretty reasonable clip” at about 5%. By ‘conversion’, I think he’s meaning people who actually signed up for Kinzin’s free service. All of this stuff is contextual, but if visitors had to lay down money, the conversion rate would be considerably lower.

The folks at Valleywag report similarly dismal numbers:

Media buyers — the agency people who book campaigns — report that the college social network is a truly terrible target. They’re mainly students, with low disposable income, of course; but, beyond that, the users appear to be too busy leaving messages for eachother to show much interest in advertising. Facebook’s members appear indifferent even to movie advertising aimed at their demographic. Clickthrough rates, the percentage of time users click on an ad, average 0.04% — just 400 clicks in every 1m views — according to one report seen by Valleywag.

From AllFacebook:

Fred Wilson has been updating the world about his venture in Facebook advertising over the past week. Today, Fred posted and updated screenshot of his ad campaign’s performance and it doesn’t appear to be too stellar. For one of his campaigns, out of 10,080 impressions there were only 8 clicks. The average cost-per-click for Fred was $0.08 and the average CPM was $0.06. This is a less than stellar performance. This is nothing new though.

And lastly, from a digital student marketing blog in the UK. This would seem like a natural fit for Facebook’s audience:

Our most recent campaign saw 1.4 million page impressions delivered at specific universities – and only a 0.04% clickthrough rate. Ouch.

Click-through rates seem to sit around 0.04%, which is profoundly lame if you ask me. I’m no online advertising expert–it’s not really our thing–but I’ve run a bunch of Google AdWords and other contextual advertising campaigns. We regularly get click-through rates of 3%, and I gather that’s nothing special.

Here’s my theory on Facebook: it’s a silo. People visit the Fun House of Facebook, and conceptually treat it slightly different than the rest of the web. They’re in Facebook, interacting with friends, playing games, sending messages and now chatting on IM. As such, they’re really unmotivated to leave. Who wants to leave the Fun House?

We’ve seen similar results across Facebook. It’s really difficult to drive visitors out of the app and to your own website.


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Reaching Half a Million Customers Daily, with NO Media Cost

Updated: Aug 30, 2009 – JetBlue has 1,139,682 followers as of today.

In days of old, advertisers had to buy TV airtime, magazine placements, or radio spots to send their ads out to reach customers. Usually one of the largest chunks of cost is the media placement, followed by “creative” development and content creation.

What if there was a way to cut out most or all of the media cost?  And what if we could also substantially reduce the cost of “creative development” and “content creation?”  Look at the JetBlue example below.  On Twitter, JetBlue has nearly 600,000 followers.  Each of these followers has basically “opted in” to receive their updates, often multiple times a day (”costless media”). There is no “media cost” for getting these messages out. Compare this to what it would cost to air a TV ad that reaches 600,000 viewers (assuming all the viewers wanted to receive the ad, and were sitting there in front of the TV watching the ad when it was aired).

Also, the cost of content is nearly zero too. JetBlue has their customer service people (and fans) help create content by tweeting. These tweets range from customer service (”twitter customer service”) , to service notices (e.g. dense fog in NYC area airports causing delays, etc.), to tips from frequent travelers. This type of content is more “real,” valuable, and trusted than an advertisement. And there is no cost of “creative development” because the content does not need to be dressed up into a glossy ad for TV or print — it’s just 140 characters of text at a time. It’s more effective AND lower cost?!  Imagine that!

Finally, notice in the “bio” area on the upper right of the screen shot that it reports who is currently on duty — “Morgan and Lindsey” — this gives the normally faceless customer service system a name and a face and perhaps even a personality.  JetBlue’s twitter is a great example of social marketing done awesome!

jetblue-twitter

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Thursday, May 28th, 2009 integrated marketing, marketing No Comments

Microsoft Kumo vs Wolfram Alpha – FIGHT!

Microsoft should take a page from the launch of Wolfram’s Alpha using social channels.

Wolfram Alpha – 1.6 million google search results

Microsoft Kumo – 624k google search results

wolfram-alpha-search-resultskumo-search-results

www.WolframAlpha.com is launched, but Microsoft Kumo.com is not even launched. So there is NO benefit from all the news coverage.

wolfram-compete

wolfram-referrals

wolfram-links

Search intensity and volume indicates interest of users — Wolfram Alpha is kicking Microsoft butt.

search-intensity

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/wolfram-alpha-veil-lifted/

http://gizmodo.com/5240514/wolfram-alpha-and-google-tested-head+to+head

http://gizmodo.com/5236115/wolfram-alpha-search-engine-on-video

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trends – coupon sites, network TV sites

coupon sites: definitely headed upward with a spike in Dec 08.

coupon-sites

network TV sites are seeing healthy increases, likely due to “view full episodes” on their websites – but even this increase in traffic will not replace the advertising revenues lost on network television

tv-network-sites

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Monday, April 27th, 2009 integrated marketing, marketing, metrics No Comments

the overall advertising pie will shrink

the greater efficiencies of “digital” mean that the same amount of “advertising” can be achieved with fewer dollars because more waste can be eliminated. The decreases in ad spending in traditional media channels like newspapers will only be partially replaced by ad spending online.

For example, the dollars that used to fund newspaper classified advertising has been replaced by free online classifieds through Craigslist. While newspapers had incremental costs due to materials, printing, labor, and distribution, online classifieds have virtually no incremental cost.

Similarly print advertising, which was based on targeting ads to specific demographics of readerships are being replaced by online ads which can be more finely targeted to even more niche readerships — e.g. contextual advertising. And the revenue models based around cost per click are inherently more efficient (and thus lower cost) than the impression-based revenue models of magazines. Again for every dollar taken out of print advertising, only a few cents are needed to replace it in “digital.”

100544-ad-spending-by-media

Agree with me or tell me I’m stupid @acfou

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so, you think you’re viral? here’s how to find out…

1. post your “viral” video, banner ad, etc.
2. tweet about it
3. see if any one of your followers re-tweets it
4. check twitt(url)y to see “twitter intensity” around you asset

this is a quick way to tell if what you think is viral is viral. If even your own circle of followers don’t retweet it, it probably isn’t viral.  What you think is cool may actually not be that cool.  And sticking it on YouTube and supporting it with a lot of paid media, doesn’t make it viral!

Agree with me?  Or tell me I’m stupid @acfou

using twitter intensity to determine if something is viral (or not).

twitturly2

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Friday, March 20th, 2009 Uncategorized, digital, marketing, metrics No Comments

small company kicking big brands’ butt with SEO and SEM

almost 10X the search keywords driving traffic; 52,200 pages indexed by Google, and nearly 13X the monthly unique visitors.  And they started in Mar 2007. 

Top Keywords Driving Traffic to:
• dailymakeover.com
 
see all 1,335 keywords
• covergirl.com
 
see all 230 keywords
• maybelline.com
 
see all 189 keywords

 

Use This Data: Embed Graph | Export CSV | Show Permalink
Date: 01/2009 People Month Δ   Year Δ   What is this?
 dailymakeover.com 3,888,546 1.9% N/A The number of people visiting a site.
See Full Description
 covergirl.com 303,846 27.2% 34.2%
 maybelline.com 70,669 -27.1% -37.8%
 makeoversolutions.com 9,717 -49.7% -99.3%

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Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 SEM, SEO, integrated marketing, marketing No Comments

modern users are impatient

Comparing the 2008 and 2005 Google Heat Map Studies:

Source: Think Eyetracking, September 2008

In 2005, they would look down the page at the results. By 2008, users glance at the first 3 – 4 results and then refine their search. They’d sooner type in a “long tail” search than go to page 2 of the results.

Monday, February 23rd, 2009 SEO, digital, marketing No Comments

the powerful long tail of SEO

Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/long-tail-page-one-rankings/

Excerpt

 

The Powerful Long Tail of SEO: By Glenn Gabe

I think many people in Search understand the importance of ranking highly in Google, but I think too many people outside of Search are hung up on ranking for just a few target keywords. As mentioned earlier, I’ve written about the long tail of SEO on my blog, and it’s hard to overlook the power of the long tail when heavily analyzing search traffic across websites and verticals. I’m constantly talking about the long tail during client meetings, internal brainstorms, and to random people on the subway. Don’t worry, I’m in New York, so most people are used to this type of strange behavior. :)

To quickly review, the long tail of SEO includes longer queries, typically including three or more keywords. These longer queries derive from your target keywords (or your head terms). For example, a head term might be Nintendo Wii, but a long tail keyword might be what are the best Nintendo Wii games. Although many people focus on head terms, the long tail might generate more quality visitors in aggregate (taking into account all long tail keywords versus just head terms). Anyone tracking SEO for a living has probably seen the impact of the long tail.

continue reading about long tail SEO by Glenn Gabe  ….

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Monday, February 23rd, 2009 digital, integrated marketing, marketing No Comments