To really understand how huge these changes are I had to get away from Silicon Valley and come and hang out with the geeks in Kinneret, Israel where famous VC Yossi Vardi is throwing an exclusive camp for geeks and successful business innovators.

To be sure, there is some fear and even a bit of hatred here of Facebook. Let’s detail that fear and hate:

1. Facebook has broken an invisible privacy contract with its users. Most of the geeks here say they expected Facebook to be about sharing photos, videos, and thoughts with friends and family. But now their previously private data is showing up on Yelp, Pandora, and Spotify. That wasn’t expected by the users, so has generated quite a bit of discussion here.
2. Facebook is very quickly painting the web with little like buttons and other social widgets. One CEO I talked with, who asked me to keep his name and company name out of this article but who runs one of the top 50 websites according to Comscore and Compete.com, told me his company will add Facebook’s likes next week. He’s not the only one saying that. My prediction that 30 of the top 100 Websites would incorporate Facebook’s likes in the first few months might turn out to be very low, based on what I’m hearing in Israel. But that does worry geeks here who are seeing that Facebook is very quickly getting their fingers (and branding) into a very large chunk of the web.
3. I’m sharing a room with one of Yahoo’s search strategists here at Kinnernet and, while he wasn’t able to tell me what direction Yahoo is going in, it’s clear that Facebook has disrupted his thinking of where the world is going. If Yahoo is feeling the disruption imagine what it must be like over at Google! Facebook is studying metadata from all these likes and other behavior of ours and I believe is preparing new kinds of search and discovery services. Facebook doesn’t need to “kill” Google to have quite an effect, either. They just need to put a box around Google which would keep Google from growing. What happens when Google can’t grow the way it wants to? Flat stock prices and loss of ability to hire the best employees that comes with it. Google is the new Microsoft, the geeks here say.
4. The geeks here say that it is clear that Facebook is becoming a dramatically more important, and larger, company than they expected. So, now, new business plans are being changed to account for Facebook’s new power and stance in the world.

So, why is it too late to regulate Facebook?

Well, first of all, what can government do?

1. They can force Facebook to switch its defaults on its new Instant Personalization program, which is already being used by Yelp and Pandora (you can see which music I listen to, for instance, on Pandora, and that feature got turned on automatically. The government could force Facebook to turn that feature off by default and make me “opt in” for you to see my Pandora music.
2. They could fine Facebook for its behavior.
3. They could call Mark Zuckerberg in front of Congress and call him nasty names.

But what else could the government do? I don’t see too many options. Do you?

So, why is it too late to regulate Facebook?

1. The damage is done. Well, let’s assume they made them switch Instant Personalization to opt in. Who cares? The damage is done. My Pandora already has all your music shared with me. Most Facebook members won’t change their privacy settings from what they already are. So, old users will keep sharing their music and only new members will be asked to opt in to these new privacy-sharing features.
2. The regulation will come too slowly. Government never moves fast. Even when it’s motivated. So Zuckerberg has at least a few months to aggregate his power before Government slaps him on the hand. Government is not going to be able to prevent that top 50 website from putting Facebook’s new features into its service. Government will not keep me from using Pandora.
3. The regulation will come after we get used to new privacy landscape. Already I’m finding I’m getting used to the fact that you all can see my data and that I can see yours. So, if Government comes along and tries to regulate that it will get pushback from me. Why? Well, I actually like the new Pandora features. I’m finding a ton of cool music because Zuckerberg forced you to give up some of your privacy. So what that I can see that you like Kenny G? Users will get addicted to these new features and they won’t take kindly to some government jerk taking away these new features.
4. Giving Zuckerberg a fine will not change Facebook’s behavior. If anything it will just push him to monetize these features more aggressively in order to pay the fine. Just wait until Cocacola icons show up next to all those Facebook like buttons. Government taxation, which really is what fines are, might have a negative effect long term.

So, what can be done about Facebook? I don’t see what we can do about Facebook. Not enough people have changed their behaviors due to these changes. I’m watching and these features are VERY popular. Even here in Israel, far from the hype bubble of Silicon Valley, all the geeks I talked with are impressed with the new features and many are already implementing them. No one sees Facebook as less powerful or less interesting today than two weeks ago. Even with a few of my geeky friends saying they deleted their accounts from Facebook my feed there is actually moving faster lately and my items are getting more engagement, which shows that not many geeks changed their behavior away from Facebook.

Zuckerberg just played chicken with our privacy and it sure looks like he won based on what I’m hearing here in Israel.

What do you think?

Comments

Ah, conundrums.  

We’ll chalk up this New York Times piece (oh look, it’s on Fox, too) to timely scholarly research reporting and not conspiracy theory—that’d make us crazy. John Tierney passes on warnings from a pair of Ivy League business scholars that being too financially prudent can be bad for your mental health. Borrowing a medical term, “hyperopia,” which means far-sighted, Ran Kivetz of Columbia and Anat Keinan of Harvard warn that too much frugality can lead to more regret down the road, and you don’t want that do you?

Have fun, spend money, pamper yourself. You’ll feel better about it in the long run. Students who spend their Spring Break studying instead of doing body shots in Panama City look back years later and regret they didn’t drop the books and pick up a package of beads. If you spend all your time saving money and planning for the future, you’ll not enjoy the wonders of the present, and when you get too old to swim in your pile of money, you’ll wish you’d eaten more steak when you still had teeth.

Dr. Kivetz notes that Puritan guilt over your lost battle with hedonism will pass much quicker than the decades of I-shoulda-bet-it-all-on-black regret. A couple of novel concepts emerge: people would rather not be responsible if they can avoid it; and potential regret may be more powerful than guilt. Give the consumer a choice between $85 cash and an $80 voucher for a massage, they’ll pick the voucher because it will force them to be frivolous rather than sensibly take the higher cash value, which they’ll have to spend on something stupid like rent. 

Well, if I must get a massage…

And yes, for the record, you should get a massage every so often. It’s good for you. Have a milkshake that day too.

As a marketer, what you need to know, then, is that if you offer a promotion on your website or store, cash is trash, man. Offer some indulgence. You’ll save money and the customer will “force” himself to take the luxury. Take the advice and succeed. It’s not your fault the majority of humans are fairly stupid.

As a human I hope you’re smarter than most other humans and that, at least in principle, understand that moderation, as preached throughout the centuries by the sane, is your best bet. As an adult you’ll also understand the concept of future consequences. You’ll be old one day, and medicine isn’t getting any cheaper. If you’re dying tomorrow, by all means start smoking and buy yourself a giant canon to shoot your ashes from.

As a crazy conspiracy theorist you’ll have no problem thinking the timing of these academic “discoveries” is curious. Previously, we considered those speaking from Ivy League business schools collectively “the Man,” “the System,” “the Machine.” And now the Machine, right in the midst of a credit crisis grinding its gears in systemic illiquidity caused first by hedonic indulgence and worsened by the Great Frugality Freakout, just suggested to millions of people-cogs they supply their own, and by default its, own lube.

Look, the government’s leading by example; spend, spend, spend and feel better about yourself today, worry about it briefly tomorrow, the kids can get student loans, and we all can live happily indebted paycheck-to-paycheck until our smiling demise. After all, as Tierney says, “there are no pockets in shrouds,” all hail the gods of consumption. Do it for yourself, do it for America. While you’re happy and broke, let somebody else sit on all that troublesome money.

While you’re reconsidering, for your own psychological well being, owing Citigroup for a plasma TV and paying for it in perpetuity—they don’t mention the stress brought on by debt because this fantasy relies on the happy-happy-joy-joy of the now and the pride of the pictures to prove it later—also consider Keinan’s thesis on the power of narrative (that’d be good storytelling) in business and its sister paper, the perils of the Robin Hood mentality.

Consider that and remember this pair probably pulls in a lot of cash instructing the powers that be on the best ways of separating people from their money. Happy Friday. Have a milk shake, but leave the fur coat, and try to pay off your house instead. And for the record, I’m not in the slightest saying capitalism is bad, just suggesting people use the bootstrap common sense our grandparents tried and failed to beat into everybody.
 

This report was coupled with another blogger who claimed something similar happened on Sunday afternoon. Christer Edwards, the author of the blog, then went on an elegant tear about how his torrent difficulties were another step toward the dreaded "tiered Internet":

The way I see it this is the first step toward a Tiered Internet, whether or not any such thing is approved in Legislation or by the consumers. Comcast doesn’t care. They are simply cutting off access to part of the Internet, plain and simple.

I would not be surprised at all to soon hear that Comcast will allow bittorrent traffic, for an additional fee. If you *really* want to use that protocol you can pay us more, but otherwise we don’t deem it as part of “normal internet usage”. Once that starts what is to stop the avalanche that will happen next?

“You want access to YouTube? It really uses a lot of bandwidth and we weren’t expecting most people to use more than casual browsing and email. That’ll be $5/mo additional.”

Indeed, and that is what AT&T has made clear they want in the past, while denying there was any problem at the same time.

Speaking of denial, a Comcast representative denied that his company was filtering or shaping traffic on his network, an assertion that lit another fire under TorrentFreak’s Ernesto, who begs to differ, with a little technical support from a commentator at Silicon Alley:

With Wireshark in the background run your BitTorrent application. Wait until completed and watch Wireshark, notice when it finishes seeding Comcast servers send out a reset command every second to your computer noted by the highlighted red line in Wireshark. It is 8:30 pm Monday pst and Comcast is still resting my BitTorrent connections. Maybe the PR guy didn’t get the email from the VP of Networking.

TorrentFreak also has video.

While Comcast’s PR guy (Charlie Douglas) is talking to the VP of Networking, he should also look for ways to distance the company from AT&T rock band censorship and their latest packet-sniffing developments as well.

He should also talk Christer Edwards into not switching to a slower DSL connection, as that furthers arguments that there is a competition crisis in the broadband space.

And he should also get all the PR reps from the other broadband companies together (shouldn’t be hard, there’s only a handful of them) so they can get their technical staffs on the same page as the spin-staffs.

After all, too much proof of concept stuff out there means a straight path to some nasty legislation they won’t like, so they need to be on their best behavior.

Here is a summary of the coverage by the TopRank blogging team for day one of Search Engine Strategies, San Jose 2007:

• SES San Jose Day Minus One
• The Search Landscape
• SES Videos: Dan Perry Cars.com
• SES Videos: Conversation with Michael Gray and Bryan Eisenberg
• Universal & Blended Search
• Public Relations Train Wrecks in the Interactive Biz
• SES Video Tim Mayer of Yahoo Interview
• Ads in A Quality Score World
• Winning the Search Engine Lottery
• What is a Brand Vehicle? Integrated Marketing Together Forever
• Search Term Research & Targeting Searcher Behavior Research Update SES 2007
• Personalization, User Data & Search
• Women in Search Luncheon

Be sure to watch the TopRank Online Marketing Blog Channel on YouTube as well as our stream of photos from SES on Flickr.Additional coverage of SES is being deftly handled by the many talents at Search Engine Roundtable, WebProNews, Bruce Clay Blog, Search Engine Journal and many others.

Comments

Tag:

SES: Searcher? Oh, Behave!

(Our on-scene WebProNews staff has passed along this latest news from SES San Jose 2007. If you can’t be there, you need to be here with WebProNews this week, for videos and reports.)

Pavan Lee of Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions has a lot of respect for soccer moms. Microsoft has measured and explored their Net usage to determine the role of search in their buying habits.

It’s fertile ground for exploration. Lee said their findings showed their soccer moms possessed considerable Net and search savvy. They also have tremendous influence on household purchases.

Nine out of ten of them use the Net a couple of times a day, and when they surf they are looking for deals. Lee noted that 80 percent of the moms look for something in the consumer-packaged goods category at least once a day.

ComScore senior VP James Lamberti said these packaged goods searches bode well as a preview of the “digital shelf,” where Net users can browse just as they do in a brick and mortar marketplace.

As e-commerce entrepreneurs reach for customers, Lamberti suggested they market to the consumer

While at ad:Tech Chicago I heard Phillip Suchet of Kefta provide some excellent reasons why behavioral targeting is becoming absolutely essential:

• Acquisition costs are rising and conversion rates are decreasing
• The power switch from Push to Pull Marketing
• The change from mass marketing to personalized marketing

There are so many factors to consider when behaviorally targeting users – so which ones should you consider? The factors and metrics are completely site specific, however below are a few factors that you should consider when developing profiles for your various visitor segments:

• Referring Sites
• Referring Keywords
• Internal Search Queries
• Pages Viewed (type/category of content)
• Preferred method of communication: Email vs. Phone vs. Webinar
• Purchase Patterns based on seasonality
• Demographics: Age, Sex, Education, House Hold Income, Marital Status
• Recency
• Frequency
• Products added to cart
• Time Zone
• Time of Day on website
• Offline Influencers: TV/Radio/Magazines

Resources for Behavioral/On Site Targeting:

- Omniture TouchClarity

- WebTrends Marketing Lab 2

- BlueLithium

- Anil Batra: Behavioral Targeting 101

- Kefta

- Clickz: Target Behavior on the Site Level

- Avinash Kaushik: The Promise & Challenge of Behavior Targeting (& Two Prerequisites)

- Offermatica

Comments

ClickZ first reported the testing, back in September and Will Critchlow of Distilled today spoke to an AdWords rep, after seeing some interesting behavior with AdWords, who confirmed they had made the change a few days ago.

When I spoke to the account manager at AdWords, she told us that there has been a change to the algorithm to take into account your history with respect to the particular ad. Apparently this change has only come in the last few days – and I haven’t seen any mention of it (have I missed something?).

There’s been no official announcement, so this may be just a continued test, but it sounds like it’s something that we might all start seeing soon.

Comments

Tag:

Some People Will Click On Anything

Didier Stevens, who works for European IT services firm Contraste Group, conducted a six-month AdWords experiment to see if people would click on an ad with the text "Get infected here!"

And people did, 409 of them to be exact, excluding the bots.

On his blog, Stevens remarked on the inexpensive ease of which an ad can be set up on Google. Sinister minds require the crime fighters to have sinister minds as well. Stevens’ first thought was that AdWords could easily be used to push malicious content to the first page of the search results.

One of the more interesting facets of the experiment is that Stevens wasn’t the least bit sneaky in setting it up. He bought the domain drive-by-download.info (.info is a notorious hub for malware). Google approved the ad.

The website itself has a simple message: Thank you for your visit.

(Though, honestly, it would have been much funnier if Stevens had employed the famous Douglas Adams message from God: Sorry for the inconvenience.)

Over a six-month period, the ad was displayed over 259,000 times, clicked 409 times (click-through rate of 0.16%), and cost Stevens about $23 (6 cents per click). Only seven clicks were suspected to come from bots, which Google successfully filtered out before billing.

Malware crooks are definitely targeting the right browser; 98% of the clicks came via Internet Explorer.

Stevens’ experiment echoes findings of other studies conducted by industry experts. At the Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York, a panel on searcher behavior noted: "You could run an ad that said ‘bad prices, bad products’ and people would keep clicking."

The results also seem to echo his own previous, more intensive study following AOL’s Data Valdez data leak. Upon examining that data, Stevens found that for every 2800 click-throughs, one landed on a "spamdexing" site.

Though the need, effectiveness, and benefits of cost-per-action models have been hotly debated, proponents of CPA billing will no doubt cite information like this, adding to click-fraud numbers for justification.

Indeed, the bottom line seems to be that the lowest common denominator (i.e., unskilled or unaware searchers) will be as present in the CPC world as the ever-hated clickbot. Chalk up the click-happy searcher as a cost of doing business, then, just as grocery stores put up with grape-grazers and hotels write off towel thefts.

• 1 in 3 Internet users state that social networks have influenced their purchase decisions.
• 1 in 4 Internet users visit the most popular social networking sites at least once a month.
• About 20% of visitors to social networking sites don’t search once they’ve reached the site.
• Search engines still reach a broader audience than social networking sites, thus SEM is still a very important aspect of Internet marketing. (Of course iProspect found that!)
• The social networking sites featured in the study included:

  • MySpace
  • Facebook
  • YouTube
  • iVillage
  • TripAdvisor
  • Yahoo! Answers
  • del.icio.us
  • LinkedIn
  • Craigslist
  • Amazon

Yep, that’s right, Amazon.com. Their reasoning was:

because of its use of user-generated content. . . . [V]isitors to Amazon have the ability to post ‘customer reviews’ of products, allowing potential buyers to read the reviews prior to making a purchase decision. It should also be noted that among all the sites examined by this study, Amazon is the only one on which you can directly buy a product.

So exactly how much of the “1 in 3″ purchase decisions were influenced by social networking sites other than Amazon? According to the graph, less than 13% were influenced by a site other than Amazon. Amazon influenced 28% percent.

That’s completely understandable; I weigh very heavily upon the opinions and reviews posted on Amazon before buying a book for myself or for others, especially when I haven’t read that book and/or am not familiar with the genre.

However, I haven’t been able to convince myself that Amazon should have been included. To me, it’s primarily an eCommerce site with some very handy social features. Without Amazon, the impressive “1 in 3″ stat (which, by the way, is actually closer to 4 in 10) sinks to more like 1 in 8—still not too shabby, but probably not worth refocusing your efforts on quite yet.

(Interesting aside: Of the 2200+ adults surveyed, more had posted a comment on Facebook than on any other site studied!)

Comments

Tag:

According to the study, more people visit the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) much more frequently than the most popular social networking sites. With that being said, marketers shouldn’t be looking to abandon their ranking efforts in paid and organic search anytime soon.

Still, social networking users are growing at an accelerated rate. One in four Internet users visits a social site at least once a month, and that figure only looks to increase over the next several years. The Internet is shifting from a medium of information to one of participation, and iProspect suggests that marketers follow that trend and encourage consumer participation in their marketing efforts.

One of the more interesting points in the findings, however, is the notion of vertical marketing. Sure, MySpace has the sheer numbers, but chances are that you will actually be more successful by placing your product into a smaller group of users that are actually passionate about the particular niche.

Here’s what iProspect had to say about the vertical aspect of social networking:

Though sites such as YouTube and MySpace were designed to appeal to a high percentage of the online user population, many social search engines have been built to serve, and attract, a community that is defined by their affinity to a vertical industry, a business model, or an interactive activity type.

Sites such as del.icio.us (bookmarking), LinkedIn (BtoB), and TripAdvisor (travel and hospitality), though visited by less than 10% of Internet users, nonetheless can serve as highly targeted, extremely effective means to reach very specific profiles of potential customers. Marketers should research their industry’s/niche’s universe of social networking sites, and explore those offering this special targeting.

Going back to search for a moment, iProspect notes that most visits to social networking sites come from search engine referrals. Again, this reinforces the notion that social marketing isn’t a separate beast from search, but rather is designed to work in concert with an effective search marketing campaign.

The study also looks at how social networks have changed how consumers respond to marketing messages:

It’s still early in the history of social networking, yet one out of three Internet users is already taking advantage of a site containing user-generated content to help make a decision to buy, or not to buy something. This bodes well for the future of these sites that take advantage of our human nature to trust the recommendations (and warnings) of fellow consumers more than we do the claims and “marketing-speak” of professional marketers.

So if you’re looking to reach that ever-elusive 18-24 demographic, you might want to examine your search and social marketing strategies for synergy, while taking advantage of any verticals that are relevant to your particular product or service.