Modern
Caterina Fake Launches Pinwheel, Which Lets You Leave Notes Around The World
Caterina Fake, who previously cofounded Flickr and Hunch, has launched a new startup called Pinwheel, which lets you leave vitrtual notes around the world.
She announced the launch on her personal blog earlier today.
Enter the Internet of things, where you can choose to follow people, places or things. The notes you leave can be private, or you can share them with everything and everybody.
The possibilities seem endless.
For instance, Fake shared a note she wrote for her friend Lauren:
Perhaps this would be a more useful note when you’re roaming around town: “Find me a Nearby Toilet NOW.”
That seems to be coming soon: Fake wrote on her blog that she plans on building out a notification system so you can get pinged when someone you follow sends out a note.
We knew last year that True Ventures, SV Angel and her fund, Founder Collective, invested.
As far as making money, Fake is betting on selling sponsored notes.
The site is still in private beta — you can sign up here for an invite to try out the web and mobile app. The iOS version is coming up next.
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See Also:
- How To Marry Your Cofounder And Not Kill Your $200 Million Startup In The Process
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ClickZ articles by Augustine Fou, PhD
Dr. Augustine Fou is Group Chief Digital Officer of Omnicom’s Healthcare Consultancy Group. He has nearly 15 years of digital strategy consulting experience and is an expert in data mining, analytics, and consumer insights research, with specific knowledge in the consumer payments, packaged goods, food/beverage, retail/apparel, and healthcare sectors.
Dr. Fou has provided strategic counsel on the use and integration of online marketing to clients such as AT&T, IBM, Intel, ExxonMobil, MasterCard, Unilever, Pepsi, DrPepper, Frito Lay, Taco Bell. KFC. Atari, Conde Nast, Hachette Filipacchi, Victoria’s Secret, Liz Claiborne, and others. He has served as expert witness on online payments for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and advised government agencies such as the Norwegian Trade Counsel, the Gouvernement du Quebec, Invest in Sweden Agency, and the Canadian Consulate.
Dr. Fou is an Adjunct Professor at New York University in the Integrated Marketing Department of the School for Continuing and Professional Studies. He also writes a monthly column for ClickZ’s Experts Columns on Integrated Marketing and is a frequent speaker and panelist at online and advertising industry conferences.
He started his career with McKinsey & Company and recently served as SVP, Digital Lead at McCann/MRM Worldwide. Dr. Fou completed his PhD at MIT at the age of 23 in the Department of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering.
Recent articles by Augustine Fou
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing No Longer Apply, Part 3
Debunking the laws of singularity, unpredictability, success, failure, hype, acceleration, and resources. Last in a three part (3 comments) Apr 1, 2010
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing No Longer Apply, Part 2
Why the laws of duality, the opposite, and others no longer hold true. Second in a three-part (1 comments) Mar 4, 2010
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing No Longer Apply
The game has changed as the balance of power shifts away from advertisers to the very people they used to target. First in a three part (14 comments) Feb 4, 2010
10 Commandments of Modern Marketing
A list of the 10 rules every marketer should follow to meet consumer needs in (18 comments) Jan 7, 2010
Is Believing in Behavioral Targeting Like Believing in Santa?
Should we have grown out of our naïve belief in behavioral (25 comments) Dec 17, 2009
What’s Wrong With the Net Promoter Score
Three reasons why the Net Promoter score is a waste of (19 comments) Nov 19, 2009
How to Do Social Marketing in Heavily Regulated Industries
Financial services, pharmaceutical, and healthcare are ripe for social marketing. Here’s (11 comments) Oct 22, 2009
A New Definition of ‘Digital’
Defining ‘digital’ as the collection of habits and expectations of today’s consumers — and what that means to (7 comments) Sep 24, 2009
Metrics, Metrics Everywhere
Thanks to social networks and digital tools, metrics can provide relevant marketing research in real time and reveal new business (3 comments) Aug 27, 2009
Branding Today: Why It’s Ineffective, Irrelevant, Irritating, and Impotent
Brands must act on real-time consumer feedback to continuously develop awesome (51 comments) Jul 31, 2009
Advertising Does Not Create Demand, But…
It may help fulfill demand. Understand the (18 comments) Jul 2, 2009
Consumers Have Changed, So Should Advertisers
Five ways that consumers have irreversibly altered their expectations online and (7 comments) Jun 4, 2009
Social Media Benchmarks: Realities and Myths
Benchmarks to avoid and others to embrace. (5 comments) May 7, 2009
The ROI for Social Media Is Zero
If social marketing’s done right, the potential ROI could be infinite. Five tips to get you (51 comments) Apr 9, 2009
How to Use Search to Calculate the ROI of Awareness Advertising
Planning an awareness campaign in TV or other media? Advertisers can now correlate money spent on that campaign to a lift in sales — and estimate the return on (4 comments) Mar 12, 2009
Social Intensity: A New Measure for Campaign Success?
A look at two metrics that online marketers should pay attention to today. And they are not frequency and (4 comments) Feb 11, 2009
Beyond Targeting in the Age of the Modern Consumer
Three tips for using “missing link” marketing to solve targeting’s Jan 15, 2009
Experiential Marketing
Consumers are savvy and informed; they won’t just take your word on a product. Experiencing the product is more important than (1 comments) Dec 18, 2008
Search Improves All Marketing Aspects
Search is much more than just an opportunity for marketers to push out another Nov 20, 2008
Social Commerce: In Friends We Trust
How to integrate social networks into your marketing (1 comments) Nov 6, 2008
How the iPhone Could End Up In Second Place
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5504622/how-the-iphone-could-end-up-in-second-place
Here are the US mobile web traffic figures for iPhone OS and Android, getting ready to collide: Android, on its way up; iPhone, on its way down. So when will Android overtake the iPhone? Try next month.
AdMob’s Mobile Metrics Report sees a predictable continuation of what we’d seen before from the ad tracking firm—specifically, that Android is on a serious tear, thanks in no small part to the massive success of the Droid. But before, the iPhone seemed unassailable. Now, it’s about to get trumped by Google’s OS, on terms it defined. In the US, that is. The rest of the world’s still warming to Android.
Modern smartphones are as much browsing devices as they are phones, so while mobile traffic isn’t the best way to measure total sales for a device, it’s a solid way to measure a device’s success, both in terms of how many people are using it, and how it’s getting used. The iPhone is a browsing device. So is the Pre. So are all the Android phones. But Windows Phones? BlackBerrys? Symbian devices? As popular as some of these are, they’re obviously not being used as smartphones.
The other key piece here, and one that’s not obvious from looking at the chart, is total browsing: It’s up. Way up. 193% up, in just one year. So when I talk about the iPhone falling to second place, I’m not declaring a loser—just a platform that’s winning more slowly. (Note: AdMob was recently, and generously, acquired by Google, though their advertising solutions are still cross-platform.) [Ars Technica]
Billionaire Earnings Fight! [Movies]
Avatar, the soon king of movies, vs Modern Warfare 2, the king of videogames. Here’s a look at how their earnings stack up by the numbers. The biggest surprise? Modern Warfare had a significantly larger ad budget. [Business Management]
lift in search due to paid TV advertising
List of 2009 Superbowl spots on AdAge.com
http://adage.com/superbowl09/article?article_id=134136
Lift in search is a great indicator of interest. Modern consumers may be inspired by TV ads, but they usually go online to do more research for themselves, to inform their own purchase decision. The following examples show the lift in search after Superbowl commercials or for launch of products like Subway Footlongs. The use of unique, made-up words makes it easier to detect lift in search (see related post: made up words are great for tracking buzz and search volume ). There is now a correlation between offline paid advertising and online behaviors of modern consumers that can be tracked and ultimately related to sales.
What is harder to do is track lift in search from smaller TV media buys or from terms which are generic — e.g. American Express OPEN, Proctor & Gamble’s TAG (men’s deoorant), etc. And furthermore, people may or may not remember the brand name itself and may type in a more general search query — e.g. “talking baby” instead of” e-Trade” or “dancing lizards” instead of “SoBe LifeWater.” And most people usually forget to type in special URLs specified in the ads. So the opportunity is to 1) use made-up words which can be used to detect lift in search and 2) search-optimize around other more generic terms that people may search for if they remembered the ad, but did not remember the brand name itself.
key learnings include:
1. only the superbowl TV ads generates enough awareness to drive lift in search volume detectable above the noise or normal levels
2. made up words are useful in correlating paid advertising and subsequent online actions (e.g. search) because most users forget or are too lazy to type special URLs
3. is is always better to have real analytics from the site to see when paid campaigns hit; site analytics will also reveal more information about users including demographic information, what they are looking for, and even whether they “convert” to a sale or a desired action — like print off a coupon, etc.
Notice the January spikes for several of the examples below — these are their Superbowl ads in action. But also notice how sharp the spikes are — most of them go back to prior levels within 1 – 3 days (see related post: the ephemerality of the Superbowl halo )
Source: Google Insights for Search
CCA – cost of customer acquisition
how do we judge the relative merit and effectiveness of different types of advertising? By finding a common parameter that can be used to compare “apples to apples.” We argue that cost of customer acquisition is a great candidate for such a parameter.
For example, if television advertising cost $50 million to produce and air, and 1,000 people came to the acquisition website, and 10 people applied for and received credit cards then the CCA — cost of customer acquisition would be $5 million ($50 million / 10 people who got the credit card). Of course television advertisers would claim that the “impressions” from TV would have “branded” millions more people and they would eventually get a credit card from the company. That’s possible. But for the purposes of this exercise, if there is no absolute end-to-end tracking, we don’t count it. Because, for example, many other possible scenarios can also occur, like the person saw this ad for a credit card but ended up getting a card from a different bank, they saw and remembered the ad but they already had several credit cards from the company, etc.
With “online” we can easily see lift in search activity around the time that brand/awareness advertising is in-flight. This is one of the best indicators of interest — the person saw the TV ad, and was inspired enough to go online to do more research to inform their own purchase decision. Modern consumers will typically search and then click through. In rare instances, they will type the URL, but it is usually the domain name, not the special URL — domain_name.com/special_url — just because of pure laziness or simply because they forgot the /special_url portion.
Now let’s look at a print example: a print ad cost $5 million to produce and traffic in targeted magazines. About 1,000 people came to the website and 10 people ended up purchasing the advertised product. So the CCA is $500,000 per customer acquired. There may be more people who saw the ad and eventually came in to buy a product. But again, there is a problem of attribution.
Now a final example from “online” marketing. Search ads were run using Google Adwords and a $1 CPC (cost per click) was paid. Of those people who clicked through 1 in 20 purchased a product. So it took 20 clicks at $1 each to achieve 1 sale – so the cost of customer acquisition is $20.
OK, so what about prodycts not sold online? We can use a proxy which has a known conversion to sales. For example, once a coupon is printed from the website, from historic data the advertiser knows that 30% end up using the coupon – i.e. redeeming with a purchase. So, again, if we used a $1 CPC and 1 in 20 ended up printing the coupon and 30% of those “converted” to an offline sale, the CCA would be $66.67 ($20/0.30).
So to recap
Television – $5 million CCA
Print – $500,000 CCA
Paid Search – $20 CCA
Paid Search + Offline Sale – $67 CCA
Digital Consigliere
Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.
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