Disruption Tour --- Run To Survive

Social media users – who are they, and what do they do?

from Shop.org

Many of us in the online retail space have discussed at length the many strategic and tactical aspects of designing, developing, and managing social media for our businesses (no less so right here within the Shop.org team!).  We wanted to step back and understand better who social media users at this point are (surely social media has evolved far beyond something just for teens or young singles, right?), and what they are doing (is it just connecting with friends, or – further to business purposes – are we also connecting more between retailers and consumers?). 

As part of our ongoing consumer research series, this month we asked consumers quite simply, “What do you do on social media sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Kaboodle, or others)?”  A total of 4,034 adults over the age of 18 in the U.S. told us just that in a survey conducted in June 2009 by BIGresearch on behalf of NRF and Shop.org. 

Judging from the results, social media appears to be on the path to becoming increasingly mainstream media.  While there is much growth ahead yet, social media is by now woven into the lives of adults across age, sex, household income, marital and parental status, and region.  And while much of that activity to date centers on connecting with friends (both old and new), chatting, and sharing photos, consumers do recognize that social media is helpful for a number of shopping related activities as well. 

BIGresearch broke out the responses to this question into the overall respondent group (adults over the age of 18), as well as a second group, dubbed “social media users”.  A “social media user” is defined as any respondent who indicated that they did two or more things on the list of answer options provided.   

What did we learn about social media users?  Social media users skew somewhat more female than male.  Close to half are married, and another quarter describe themselves as “single, never married.”  They range in age, with a heavier concentration between 18 and 54 years, and heaviest use among 35 to 44 year olds specifically.  If one couples this data point with the knowledge that social media users skew female and that quite a few are married, one could surmise that social media users include a fair number of moms, as well.  Social media users are found in every household income bracket, although with somewhat fewer represented in the $100,000+ bracket. 

How do these social media users specifically spend their time when using social media sites? (Shop.org members may download the full set of data results from the Shop.org Web site.)  A sampling of answers:   

• Connect with friends – 64.5%
• Share photos – 39.5%
• Reconnect with old classmates / friends – 39.1%
• Look for sales / promotions / coupons – 17.9%
• Look for product advice / recommendations – 13.3%
• I like to follow my favorite retailers – 8.4%
• Post ratings or reviews of shopping and dining experiences – 7.0%

So if you – or perhaps your senior management – have been wondering just who wants to engage with you and is looking for your product information via social media, it appears it’s just about everyone one would pass walking down Main Street.  The absolute numbers of course are still growing – but for retailers it’s increasingly an opportunity to connect with both existing and new customers, many of whom have real purchasing power and actively want to engage with you.  As a retailer, it’s up to you to show them that you really want to engage with them as well.  

As always, looking forward to your thoughts and comments on this subject. 

»According to a June 2008 Razorfish-authored digital consumer survey (1,006 individuals in the U.S. surveyed):

+“… 64% of connected consumers have customized the home page of their choice with content feeds…”

+Connected consumers are continuing to adopt Web 2.0 features … with 52% using RSS feeds with some regularity

+“All signs point to the continuing disintegration of “one-stop” digital destinations … we’ve found that they (consumers) … prefer using multiple destinations, and then aggregating media and services, via simple tools like RSS, into a highly personalized view of their digital world.”

»According to a March 2008 Universal McCann-authored digital consumer survey (17,000 active internet users in 29 countries):

+When asked “Thinking about using the Internet, which of the following have you ever done?”, 18.6% of U.S. users acknowledged subscribing to an RSS feed

When these individuals were asked how frequently they accessed an RSS feed , 25% responded “daily” while an additional 35% responded “weekly”

TransactionalRSS – From News to Commerce

 

• About ShoppeSimple

---

Ever have a radio you couldn’t turn off?  That’s advertising in our world today.  Sometimes it’s relevant, sometimes it’s not.  Sometimes, someone’s shouts cut through the din and make you pay attention.  Most of the time, it’s just there — in signs and logos and banner ads and email blasts and TV spots and hyper-contextual social links and alerts from friends about their favorite brands.

The consumer doesn’t choose.  It’s simply there.

What would the model look like if you gave consumers back their rights to choose what they see?

First, you’d want to know when the best deals were happening.  And you’d want to check them out on your schedule, when you are interested in, say, a new summer dress or a nephew’s birthday present.

Ideally, you wouldn’t want to give up your name, address and email to get the deal — you shouldn’t have to — when you’re ready to buy, you’ll buy.  And you’ll get those offers  where and how you want them — in a browser, on the web, by email, in a mobile device, or through a social network.

That’s what ShoppeSimple has done with TransactionalRSS(tm). TransactionalRSS uses RSS technology in a consumer-friendly way to drive more on-line business. ShoppeSimple uses TransactionalRSS to take the user control, anonymity and platform independence of RSS to create a seamless, superior consumer shopping experience.

And when the consumer gets to choose when they’re paying attention, they’re more likely to buy.

Check out the first iteration of the ShoppeSimple experience at sites like Peruvian Connection and Botanic Choice. Look for the ShoppeSimple logo and click to visit the hub to see TransactionalRSS at work.

And watch for the new ShoppeSimple.com in the next few days.

Add comment June 26, 2009

There’s Something Happening Here

ShoppeSimple(tm) started with the simple idea that advertising works best when customers are paying attention. And they pay attention when they can choose when and how they connect with merchants, whether it’s on the web, in a browser, on social media sites or on a mobile phone.

Transactional RSS(tm) (TRSS) makes it possible.  ShoppeSimple opens the TRSS opportunity in ways that are really simple for consumers and that can really work for merchants.

The company is moving fast — expanding features and adding new clients coming into the ShoppeSimple community (check out RSSCheck.com for even more information about the company).  This blog will track that growth, and in the process, we’ll share news, stories and insights into marketing and TRSS from the ShoppeSimple team.

Check out www.ShoppeSimple.com.  Let us know what you think. Put us in your reader and watch this space.

50% Of Google's Self-Serve Advertisers Don't Come Back The Following Year

Siliconalleyinsider.com

Around 50% of all search advertisers that buy their ads directly from the search engine companies, including Google (GOOG), don't do it again the next year, according to a new study. Businesses like Yodel, ReachLocal and LookSmart lose 60% of their local advertisers each year.

The news could mean greatly diminished growth prospects for Google and its competitors.

In 2006, Google (GOOG) said local advertisers would spend $10 billion on Google search ads by 2010. But this new study, commissioned by Clickable and carried out by Borrell Associates, reports that local businesses won't spend more than $5.3 billion online until after 2013.

Until now, the explanation for such slow adoption from local advertisers -- the kind that made local newspapers cash cows for years -- has been that local businesses are slow to adopt new technologies.

In 2006, Google exec Sheryl Sandberg explained the challenge:

We think the [local] market is widely under penetrated. It sounds surprising to a lot of us, but even in the United States, arguably the most developed market in the world for ecommerce less than 50% of businesses even have a Web site, or let alone advertisers, so we think there is tremendous opportunity to bring those people online and bring them into our advertising product.

Clickable's study suggests a new -- and for Google, alarming -- possibility. When we learned the bit about how 50% of all self-serve search advertisers don't do it again the next year, we wondered: Maybe these local advertisers have tried to get on board -- advertising their businesses on search engines Google and Yahoo -- but decided their marketing money was better spent elsewhere.

Clickable, which paid for the study in hopes of turning up new new sales leads, sees the results differently and says the problem is that without a handy service like Clickable, local advertisers have a difficult time measuring the return on their search ad-buying investment. So they should become Clickable customers.

But Borrell CEO Gordon Borrell sees it more our way. He told the WSJ that the problem is that for local businesses, search advertising is more expensive than it should be. “Search advertising has been over-hyped and over-sold to local businesses,” he said. He also noted that over-charging middlemen, known as affiliate marketers, are part of the problem.

If it's true that the multi-billion dollar local advertising market is not "under-penetrated" as Google has always argued, and that local businesses are simply uninterested in search advertising because it doesn't generate enough return on investment, the growth prospects for search engines companies like Google must be considered greatly diminished.

op-google-advertisers-april-2009

http://seekingalpha.com/article/141369-top-google-advertisers-april-2009?source=email

10 things you didn't know about Google's (GOOG) search business:

businessinsider.com

We cover Google for a living, so we thought we'd read Steven Levy's feature about Google's search business in this month's Wired and learn nothing, absolutely nothing. We were wrong.

10 things you didn't know about Google's (GOOG) search business:

The people Larry Page and Sergey Brin tasked with figuring out how Google should make money in 1998 were a pair of know-nothings in their early 20s. Salar Kamanger, Google's ninth employee, had been a biology major at Stanford. His partner, Eric Veach studied computer science. Together they implemented Google's now $21 billion business, AdWords. Neat.

The first company to buy and run an ad through Google's automated auction business was a live mail-order lobster store.

The ads above the results on Google search results pages used to be sold by impression, not per click like they are now. Then, only the ads on the side were sold by cost-per-click (CPC) auctions

Many of the big advertising customers that bought these ads sold by impression were pissed when Google decided to switch and sell them based on CPC. Former Googler, now AOLer, Jeff Levick says one "threw us out of his office and told us to fuck ourselves." Yow!

In order to reassure bidders that they wouldn't be way over-bidding their competition for a keyword, Google used to guarantee the winning bidder it would charge them just a penny more than the next highest bidder. This immediately encouraged higher bids.

Now the price advertisers pay is determined by the formula P = (B2 X Q2)/Q1, with P = price paid by the advertiser, Q2 = Quality score of the next highest-placing ad, Q1 = Advertiser's quality score, and B2 = the next-higheset-placing ad's bid.

Obsessed with auctions, Google even makes its own divisions bid for servers by auction.

The order of ads on a Google search results page isn't determined by simply putting the highest bidder at the top.  Something called a "Quality Score" also comes into play.  Steve reports an ads Quality Score is composed of "relevance of the ad to the specific keyword or keywords, the quality of the landing page the ad is linked to, and, above all, the percentage of times users actually click on a given ad when it appears on a results page."

Google tries to forecast which ads will get clicked on based on the day's temperature. This makes sense when you start to think about queries like "ski boots" and "bikinis."

Berkeley professor Hal Varian, Google's "chief economist," keeps an apartment on campus -- the ranch house where Google got its start. Since Google HQ is called the Googleplex, Steven calls the apartment Hal's "pied-a-Plex." We hope Hal calls it that too.

5 major hurdles for email marketing

Find out how TransactionalRSS can help you solve each of these 5 hurdles by contacting a RSSCheck/ShoppeSimple respresentative at RSSCheck.com

thegies

By Susan Kuchinskas

 

Hurdle 1

1. Deliverability keeps getting worse

I emailed Forrester analyst Julie Katz to ask her about challenges to email marketing -- and her company's servers bounced back my email. At least the bounce let me know she hadn't received it, so I knew I should call her.

"Deliverability, especially to business addresses, is a challenge," Katz says. "Consumers aren't necessarily checking their spam folders. It requires marketers' constant attention."

That's because the volume of spam continues to break previous records. According to Google's Postini data, in the first quarter of 2009, spam volume grew approximately 1.2 percent per day.

The financial motivation for spammers to outwit ISPs may be greater than the incentive for ISPs to keep up with them, according to George Schlossnagle, president and CEO of Message Systems, a vendor of message management services for email service providers. "A fundamental problem is that email, for most service providers, is a cost center. As the economy gets hard, it's difficult for people to justify putting more money into making those systems aggressively better," he says.

The result is more false positives -- more marketers' emails stuck in spam folders -- and more consumer reluctance to open branded emails. "For email to feel useful, people need for it to be reliable and relatively noise-free," Schlossnagle says.

He advises email marketers to jump through all the hoops to get on ISPs' white lists. "Make sure your DNS works correctly, and they know the mail is coming from you." Email marketers should understand every ISP's both published and unpublished criteria, in order to set up appropriate throttles and rate limits. In this spam-strangled environment, Schlossnagle says, "View email as a living process. It's not set up once, go away, and forget it."

 

Hurdle 2

2. Email is for old people

Those early adopters who were so cool because they used email are now in their 40s -- or 50s, or 60s, or even 80s! As every parent knows, if you want to reach your kid, email is not the answer.

Yes, the population of email users is aging. But the situation isn't quite as bad as it seems, according to Forrester Research. Forrester data from Q3 2008 shows that 92 percent of online adults (those 18 or older) in the U.S. use email daily. In the 12- to 17-year-old set, however, less than 50 percent check their inboxes at least once a day.

"As young people age, their email habits start to look a little more like those of adults," says Forrester analyst Julie Katz. She thinks this is partly because email is so entrenched in workplace culture.

OK, but even if office workers learn to "live in Outlook," are they opting in to marketers' messages on the work email? Probably not -- or, at least, only for B2B offers. As today's teenagers enter the workforce in a few years, Katz warns, "We'll see a shift to social media -- and marketers will need to find a different way to reach this population."

Hurdle 3

3. Social media want to eat email's lunch

Already, there's plenty of trash-talking from the social media side of the industry. "I think it's kind of a dying business," says Chris Cunningham, CEO of Appssavvy. "People are getting information, content, leads, and offers through widgets, applications, and desktops, while email is being used more as a communications platform."

Cunningham may be biased: Appssavvy's business is to connect social media applications with brands and agencies. But social media platforms do represent a break with the traditional communication channels. For example, Appssavvy brings advertisers to Circle of Moms, a community of 2 million-plus users that is accessible through its website or Facebook. "There's not an email marketing opportunity there because the women there are so satisfied with the community boards and chat rooms," Cunningham says. "They have no need to get these offers anywhere else."

Social media usage has taken off -- even among the tragically unhip. In fact, women over 55 are the fastest-growing segment of Facebook users. But as fast as its growth is, social media is just halfway there in terms of penetration.

The Harris Poll found that 51 percent of Americans are without a social media presence. The survey showed that 48 percent of adults have either a MySpace or Facebook page, but only 16 percent update their pages at least once a day. And a paltry 5 percent use Twitter -- the vast majority of them probably being marketers or the media.

In fact, email may get a boost from social media, says Sarah Benner, senior marketing manager for self-service email marketing provider VerticalResponse. "You can link to specific newsletters or post stuff on your Facebook page that ties back to your email marketing," she says. For example, Tablet Hotels, a boutique hotel-finder, posts last-minute deals to its Twitter feed, along with a link to its opt-in newsletter.

Maureen Streett, search and social media strategist for What's Up Interactive, an agency that provides web, email, and social media marketing, points out that smart email marketers include ways to share messages via social media with one click. "It's a hybrid model that makes email part of a multi-touch campaign," she says.

Sure, advertisers should dabble in social media -- but email is a proven performer, says interactive marketing consultant Jeanne S. Jennings. "We have a history and knowledge about what works," she notes. "If you're looking for ROI and bang for the buck, email should be getting the bulk of the online marketing budget."

4. Moving targets are hard to reach

Reading email on mobile phones is cumbersome enough. Add in the images and links so prevalent in email marketing, and they can become unreadable. Even on smartphones, a single link can take up several lines, causing people to hit the delete key.

However, Forrester's Katz thinks that mobile email usage will actually increase as smartphones become standard. Email marketers need to work with service providers to understand how their messages will look on different devices, she says.

Benner of VerticalResponse advises email marketers to use alternative text whenever possible, in case mobile recipients have images turned off. "Make sure the important links go at the top, and include a link to view the message on the website," she says.

5. Email is too complicated and not snazzy enough

Consumers respond strongly to rich media, and online video came into its own in 2008. Zenith OptiMedia's global ad spend forecast, released in April, predicts 29.8 percent growth in internet video and rich media spending in the U.S. The pressure for email marketers to up the glitz collides with the deliverability and mobility issues we've already examined.

Of course, email service providers are constantly adding new bells and whistles. In April, Goodmail Systems released CertifiedVideo, a service that lets marketers embed streaming video in their emails. In the press release, the company promised, "Consumers can now watch videos within their email inbox without having to click to an external website."

Jennings points out that video in email has been around since 2000. "The problem back then was bandwidth. You had to do as many as eight different versions, depending on how fast the computer was, etc." With the profusion of email devices and clients, the challenge is just as great. Nevertheless, she thinks video emails will come sooner rather than later -- at least, it won't take another nine years.

That said, she advises marketers to remember that it's all about effectiveness, not glamour. "You have to have a good reason to use this technology."

Susan Kuchinskas is a freelance writer who has written for Adweek, Business 2.0, M-Business and internetnews.com.

thegies has an equity interest in RSSCheck/ShoppeSimple

Media Deals Announced Today

Personalization company MyBuys receives $7 million in funding

 

MyBuys Inc., a provider of personalized product recommendation technology, has raised $7 million in venture capital funding, completing its series B round with Lightspeed Venture Partners and Palomar Ventures, the company announced today.

 

The company says it will use the funds to invest in product development, client services and market expansion.

 

MyBuys also announced today that so far this year it has signed 30 e-retailers to its web and e-mail personalization services including Delia*s, No. 145 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, and Peruvian Connection, No. 382.

 

"The sheer number of customers that MyBuys launched in Q1 is evidence that personalization is a hot space. It was an easy decision to increase our investment in MyBuys," says Amanda Reed, partner at Palomar Ventures.

 

Peruvian Connection’s director of e-commerce Erik Martinez and MyBuys CEO Robert Cell are speaking at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition in a session June 16 entitled Making product recommendations work for maximum conversion.

 

beeTV Raises $8 Million For Stunning Personal TV Recommendation System

on June 3, 2009

The TV guide doesn’t know who you are, what your favorite movie genre is, what you’ve watched in the past, what your mood is, and so on. Because of that, it is incapable of providing you with any recommendations about what to watch on your TV, or which videos you’re likely going to enjoy consuming right now on your PC or even your mobile phone. With the sheer volume of available channels and VOD content out there, that’s becoming quite a problem for many people. But if beeTV has its way, that problem could soon become a nuisance from past times.

The Milan, Italy-based startup founded in 2006 by an international team of experienced technology and media experts, has just raised $8 million in Series B funding from Italian VC firm Innogest, the largest investment this fund has ever made. BeeTV aims to use the capital to ‘change the way we watch TV’ by pioneering what it calls a Personal Content Channel (PPC), a personal TV suggestion engine that helps you find your way in the ocean of VOD titles and channels out there by surfacing the best choice for you based on your profile and even the mood you’re in.

Here’s how they pitch it:

“beeTV offers the platform operator’s subscribers their own Personal Content Channel (PCC), which resides in their set top box (whether IPTV, cable, satellite, mobile or DTT), their mobile phones and their PC. This unique Personal Content Channel identifies the subscriber, searches all the content sources, including broadcast TV, subscription TV, VOD, SVOD, PPV, and PVR/Catch-up and pushes the relevant content to that subscriber.”

The company’s recommendation engine comes in three flavors: beeSTBox is its flagship product which was launched at the recent DEMOfall 08 conference in San Diego (see video below). It’s a solution designed for multicast distribution platforms including cable, satellite and IPTV. To manage, control and share your online TV viewing experience, the company created a product called beeWeb, and it’s also bringing the PCC to mobile devices to enable always-on connectivity and the ability to interact with set-top boxes on the go. It currently has an iPhone application in the works that will allow TV viewers to control their STBs, get recommendations for shows & movies that are relevant to them and available in their specific TV subscription, and also enable them to watch trailers and set their STBs to record or create notifications for the shows they would like to watch.

BeeTV is currently focusing on finalizing its 1.5 version and claims to be engaged with some of the leading TV providers in the world for trials that are expected to roll into their commercial phase by the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was actually a lot of interest for this type of technology coming from content owners, publishers and media companies.

This one looks like a winner, and that was even before I knew who is spearheading the algorithm team that’s responsible for the powerful recommendation technology behind the platform: Gavin Potter, an experimental psychologist formerly responsible for IBM’s Centre for Business Optimization in Europe, who you might know as “Just a Guy in a garage” from the Netflix Prize competition. See this Wired profile for more background on the man.

I’m just hoping beeTV and their investors are in it for the long run and don’t get acquired by one of the majors before they have the chance to expand their platform on a worldwide scale through partnerships and white-label distribution deals. Because everyone deserves the right to stop wasting time looking for content they want to consume thanks to sophisticated technology that relieves us from the need to make choices for ourselves.