I've just joined Social Media Committee from the Web Analytics Association. and Marianina Chaplin threw out a great question to the group today on whether Facebook has become the most influential social media network. I have such conflicting feelings about my personal use of social networks that I thought I would post them as my blog today.
I have been travelling so it took me a little while to write about Google Custom Search Business Edition. The name is a mouthful (sounds like the name of one of IBM's products) but the price won't give you indigestion—just $100 annually for up to 5,000 pages. So what should a Web site owner think about this offering?
You may have heard the term "semantic search," but do you really know what it is? Some people have very big ideas of how computers will understand the meaning of text, but today's semantic search falls far short of that. Regardless, what's possible today is still very useful.
To understand how hard it is for computers to really understand the meaning of text, let's not look at understanding entire documents or even paragraphs. Let's not even look at sentences. No, let's start with something extremely simple: noun phrases.
It seems like you get a new study each month that shows that people who search are people that buy. They may buy online or they may buy offline, but they buy. And the newest research shows that they spend more than people who don't search—10% more in the case of home electronics buyers. So what does that mean to you?
A while back, I wrote about online panels, a kind of focus group on steroids that companies are using to both lower their research costs and to scale survey data to be more quantitative than typical focus groups. These online panels allow more participants than focus groups, offer better representation of your target market, and scale as easily as surveys, usually at lower cost. What's not to like? Nothing, if you use online panels properly.
How many of you sell products that require salespeople to visit customers to provide a demonstration? If that sounds like your company, you've probably written off the Internet for that. Perhaps you use the Web to explain your product and to have prospects contact you, but you still need to to send that sales rep to the demo. Until now. Check out how some companies are doing Product Demo 2.0.
After speaking in Chicago on Friday, I spent a delightful couple of hours waiting out flight delays. (Yeah, I don't think I've written that sentence before, either.) I was hanging out with fellow speaker Chris Silver Smith, with whom I swapped life stories. When I mention that I've worked for IBM for over 28 years, Chris said something insightful—"Wow, that's a lot of change."
And it has been a lot of change.
Last week, I posted about how big-company marketers must influence other employees within their company to make the most of the new Internet marketing opportunities. But someone commented to me, "Well, not everyone must be influenced, right? I mean, not everyone is customer-facing." So it made me wonder just who is "customer-facing" in Web marketing?
I was talking to the Web team for a large multinational company today, emphasizing the importance of setting up governance to make sure that the entire company mobilizes around their marketing efforts.
At one point, they stopped me and said, "No, we don't have to do that because we have the whole team here."
Unfortunately, unless it's the CEO talking, that's never true.
Gord Hotchkiss put into words what I have been feeling: search marketers are paying far too little attention to personalized search. If you've looked at the baby steps that search engines have taken towards personalization and told yourself, "Well, no need to worry about that yet," think again. This may be your last chance to take action before the tidal wave.
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