WebProNews » John Battelle

Branding Sometimes Means Being Human

Chris Crum — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 19:27:20 +0000

For years now, online marketing professionals have stressed the importance of the human element, particularly in social media. The point was elaborated on in a keynote at the Online Marketing Summit in San Diego today, where an audience of B2B and B2C marketers listened to Federated Media CEO John Battelle and special guest Anne Holland, who runs Which Test Won, discuss how to apply this concept to branding.

Note: If you’re not familiar with the Online Marketing Summit, WebProNews discussed it with founder Aaron Kahlow (who was also present at the keynote) recently at SES:

As the audience waited for Battelle to arrive, they engaged in some time-killing chit chat with Kahlow, revealing some specific goals for strategies they’d like to learn more about. These included social search, baselines and benchmarks, linking power and strategies, trends in social media, international SEO, and conversion optimization.

This keynote dealt with principle foundations of online success. Holland said its about finding and identifying the "pain point" of the business, and how you position your product to fill that pain point. This includes looking at the existing marketing, seeing what is strong and what isn’t, and looking at conversion points and landing pages. Holland says to find the obvious problems, and look at how you’re measuring conversions that add up to money…not metrics like page views and opening rates.

Battelle says to engage in a conversation with the advertisers, and look for points for engagement with the company. Make sure you understand the framework of the product, because not all things work for all clients.

Holland says that if you’re a known brand, it’s been proven over and over that your search result will get a higher click rate and your landing pages will get higher conversion rates. That is the value of brand awareness, but marketing online isn’t all about hard conversions and numbers of clicks. Brand marketing is very valuable, she says. The big brand wins, and becoming the big brand is immensely important. "Branding matters!" she declares.

Battelle says that large brands get to be large brands by projecting themselves. They run their business in an extremely mechanized fashion, and they forget sometimes that a brand is only what one person says to another person about the brand. He says the tools around now allow more and more people to join the conversation, and encouraging people to join the conversation about the brand is key. The most important thing to a brand, he says, is using the tools and leveraging opportunities for more people and employees to create and grow a conversation about the brand.

Holland stressed the importance of going and looking for customers. This means finding out where they are, whether that be Facebook, LinkedIn, or anywhere else. Look at what they’re doing there, and figure out how you can be where they are.

Battelle made it a point to mention that advertisers are people too, and that sometimes marketers forget that.

Was Microsoft’s Bingathon a Success?

Jeremy Muncy — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 03:57:21 +0000

Last night Hulu ran the live telethon style infomercial for Bing called the "Bingathon".

So how did it perform?

Well, it appears nothing "official" has been released yet. So let’s see what some Twitter users (a co-host, industry professionals and everyday users) are saying about the Bingathon.

Did any of you watch the Bingathon? If so, what did you think about it? Tell us.

Olivia Munn, co-host of the live event with Jason Sudeikis, tweeted the following…

This shouldn’t come as any shock that Microsoft is claiming an early victory. Think about it, what is the real measurement for success here? What other live telethon launch of a search engine is there for comparison?

Some of the search industries biggest names threw in their two cents about the Bingathon via Twitter…

So we’ve heard what a co-host had to say as well as people in the industry, but what does the everyday user have to say about the Bingathon?

Some Tweeters loathed the event…

…while some Twitterers were just happy for the 24 hour commercial free Hulu, provided by Bing.

Scanning through my #Bingathon search on Twitter I did notice that the overall feeling of the Bingathon wasn’t very positive. With that said I was able to find a few Tweets of people who seemed to enjoy the event…

It’s really hard to say for sure if the Bingathon was a success, but it did manage to get people talking… even though the talk wasn’t 100% positive. So was this one of those "any press is good press" moments?

Microsoft and Federated Media Launch ExecTweets

Chris Crum — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:24:36 +0000

Update: ExecTweets is not the only thing Twitter is advertising. You can also see other ads for things like TwitterVision, Tweetie, etc. in the little box that previously only advertised Twitter services. Everything still looks to be at least Twitter-related at this point. And from the sound of it, they’re not making a money off of it.

Original Article: John Battelle and Federated Media has partnered with Microsoft to launch ExecTweets, a conversational marketing tool for businesses looking to sponsor a "topic-focused social media experience" with Twitter.

ExecTweets describes itself as a resource to help users find and follow the top business executives on Twitter. It’ll help you find people like Mark Zuckerberg, Jad Adelson, Craig Newmark, Don Dodge, Jonathan Schwartz, etc.

It’s not just people from the tech industry though. "In this case, we’re filtering for business-related content from senior execs in various industries, like retail, healthcare, government, and more, and we’ve created a platform for community conversation, voting, input, and recommendations," explains Battelle.

The service comes recommended from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone himself (though that might be because Twitter is ~~getting some revenue out of it~~ featuring it on their home page). "Twitter is contacted regularly by brands interested in sponsoring innovative experiences based on topics of interest," he says. "However, our focused commitment to Twitter itself means we don’t have much time or resources to build these interesting topical experiences. It turns out the folks over at Federated Media have both the resources and the expertise."

Battelle says that ExecTweets in its current state is only a first effort. They are already working on the next version.

Naturally, I’m going to have to mention that there’s another great tool for finding Twitterer’s of interest – Twellow from WebProNews. If you’re interested in more than just what top executives have to say, but other people in your industry as well, Twellow would be a great place to find people.

Twitter Measured Against Google, Facebook Yardsticks

Doug Caverly — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 16:06:07 +0000

Twitter turned three years old this weekend, and to hear some people tell it, the service is on a path that’ll have it taking over the world in no time. But comparisons to a sort of kinder, less articulate Stewie Griffin may be a little premature, since it turns out Twitter hasn’t measured up to two other companies.

A couple of notes before we get started: a site can definitely qualify as a success even if it doesn’t attract as many visitors as Facebook or Google. Also, since the habits of cell phone-using individuals aren’t covered by the average comScore, Hitwise, or Nielsen report, it’s possible there’s an army of mobile Twitter users that’s just gone unnoticed.

Anyway, John Battelle tried to put Twitter’s growth into perspective by noting, "Google (officially) launched in Sept 1998. Three years later it had nearly 18mm US uniques (comscore). Facebook launched in mid 2004. Three years later it had nearly 27mm US unique users (comscore). Twitter launched in March 2006. Three years later it has (roughly) 8 million US uniques users (compete)."

And a Compete graph showing the sites’ current standings also makes it clear that Twitter has a ways to go, of course.

So, although the company’s made some remarkable progress, Twitter may not represent quite the revolution some people portray it as.

Is Microsoft Going to Make Waves in Search This Year?

Chris Crum — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:37:58 +0000

In a story we covered earlier this month, John Battelle accidentally typed livesearch.com into his address bar only to find a domain squatter. This of course led to speculation that Microsoft was close to rebranding its Live Search. They clearly were not too concerned about getting that domain (it’s still the same a couple weeks later).

This was not the first we had heard about Live Search’s possible rebranding. Back in November, it was discovered that Kumo.com was moved from the registrar to Microsoft and began pointing to an internal Microsoft test site. Kumo means "cloud" or "spider" in Japanese.

Battelle recently made a bold prediction in an exclusive interview with WebProNews (below) that "Microsoft will gain at least five points of search share in 2009, perhaps as much as 10."

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There has been a lot of chatter about Microsoft and Yahoo making a deal. This would certainly help such a prediction. Microsoft saw its share rise 1.4% between December and January, boosting it from 9.8% to 11.2% according to Nielsen Online’s January search share rankings for the U.S. It also climbed 0.12 points in a report from France-based AT Internet Institute.

It’s a bit premature to visualize Google shaking in its boots, but things look a bit brighter for Microsoft’s search efforts than they have in a while. All we can do is sit back and watch what happens.

Update: Nathan Buggia of Microsoft Live Search also talks about some new things going on with the search engine (as well as some tips for marketers and developers to work better together) in a recent interview with Abby Johnson:

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Battelle Talks Future Of Search At SMX West

Doug Caverly — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 19:41:40 +0000

It’s not easy to predict changes in the search industry on even a month-to-month basis; divisions get closed, new products are launched, and market shares waver constantly. But at SMX West, John Battelle discussed the much more distant future and made some interesting forecasts.

(Coverage of SMX West continues at WebProNews Videos. Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

John Battelle

Battelle is, of course, a well-known tech journalist and author of The Search. He’s the founder, chairman, and CEO of Federated Media, too. Short of people like Eric Schmidt and Steve Ballmer – who would be rather less objective – Battelle’s probably about as qualified as anybody to make predictions. So with introductions out of the way, we’ll move on to the meat of his keynote.

Battelle started by talking about some Google-related issues. He does, for example, believe the search giant has benefited from all the content newspapers put online, but doesn’t see the for-profit corporation buying any paper companies. Instead, if a transaction occurs at all, its Google.org arm might instead be the one to step in and make an acquisition.

Then there’s the matter of market dominance. Battelle doesn’t think Google will lose its lead any time in the near future. He made the interesting prediction that Microsoft will "buy" search just as it bought distribution for Windows, though, which could result in an exchange of five or ten percentage points.

As for a more general industry outlook, Battelle said, "We’re still really early in the search game." He compared the average searcher’s current situation to being stuck in a foreign country where they have to communicate by pointing and poking. Leaps in natural language processing should fix this.

Finally, for the marketers out there, Battelle added, "If you’re making media online, you need to be making that kind [engaging] of media that’s called conversational marketing." He pointed to the presence of Dell and Comcast on Twitter as examples, and has a book called The Conversation Economy on the way with more details.

WebProNews anchor Abby Johnson contributed to this report.

SES New York: Will Google Sell Itself Out?

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:43:05 +0000

John Battelle, who literally wrote the book on Search, believes Google’s apparent media-company aspirations will one day come in conflict with its purist algorithmic history.

Mike McDonald and the WebProNews Video crew are in New York for the Search Engine Strategies Conference. Stay tuned all week for the latest developments in online marketing.

John Battelle, Battelle Media
(Credit: Wikipedia)

Battelle was on the "Orion Panel," focusing on Universal Search, alongside James Lamberti, senior vice president of Search and Media for comScore, Lyndsay Menzies, managing director for Big Mouth Media, and Jack Menzel, project manager for Google’s Universal Search. The session was moderated by Search Engine Watch’s Kevin Ryan.

The discussion began by centering on Universal Search statistics and branding concepts. Lamberti reported that in comScore’s most recent look at search, 87 million people (assumedly US) had searched in a week, and 58 percent of them received some sort of Universal Search result. The conclusion presented then, was that as search real estate becomes more valuable, organic SEO focus, especially with image and video, will be critical, especially as click rates go up.

The conversation turned, though, when Battelle challenged Menzel on the top-result presence of Google properties like YouTube and Google Finance. The now old-school algorithmically determined search results were easy for machines to process, he argued, but now that other types of media like images and video are more commonplace, Google has to look to other methods.

"When you have images and video," he said, "you are changing the game in a really big way….That’s why Google bought You Tube, and is focusing on You Tube."

Menzel countered that YouTube videos appear so often in the search results because YouTube contains so much video content. He denied Google was changing its model.

Battelle also noted that results from Google Finance appear for stock queries above Yahoo Finance, which used to be at the top. Menzel noted that other non-Google properties are linked to as well.

Battelle doubted, though, that Google would maintain its algorithmic objectivity forever. He cited a panel discussion he participated in alongside actor and comedian Damon Wayans, who detailed a YouTube partnership for his online video site WayOutTV. Battelle quoted Wayans as saying he was guaranteed 16 million impressions on his homepage.

"Does that guarantee Google results? I’m curious because they give him guaranteed attention and anyone who has been in the industry for a long time knows about such deals. I worry about how that might get into the search stream."

Menzel reiterated that Google was fair, relevant, and unbiased in its search results.

Battelle seemed unconvinced and pushed for an admission that Google was becoming a media company and more like Yahoo. But with all the media properties Google now owns, it was hard for Battelle to believe there wouldn’t at some point be a conflict between the need to promote Google properties and the need to remain true to its algorithmic objectivity.

Menzel stayed on point, though. "Let me reiterate. We are trying to rank only the most relevant stuff and if it happens to be on You Tube it will be on the list. There is nothing in the algorithms that are inherently biasing the results to Google."

The Improved Reality of Parked Domain Traffic

Andrew Goodman — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 01:51:03 +0000

For years many of us in the advertiser camp have yelled about the fact that vendors like Google AdWords lump domain traffic in with "search" traffic without giving you much control over the situation.

A lot of this was justifiable yelling – but as with much about the content networks (and stuff that should be in the content network but was in the past classified as search), today’s reality seems to have improved.

Commenters at John Battelle’s SearchBlog (he’s soliciting info on the domain field because of an upcoming talk he’s giving at a gathering called DomainFest) are offering the usual analysis of the domainers cabal, but they haven’t brought you up to date about this, Google’s newly transparent (in beta) classification of contextual traffic types. Not only will they be allowing advertisers to exclude domain traffic, but maybe more importantly, they’re exposing conversion rates on various traffic types at the campaign level.

On anything I’ve seen so far (again, in beta), the conversion rates on things like parked domains and error pages were not as bad as expected; sometimes, they were better than the account performance as a whole. Why? It must have something to do with aggressive filtering as part of Google’s "proactive" stance against fraudulent and suspicious clicks. Whatever — if the number fits, wear it. The new era of transparency should continue to distance the major online ad providers from the "bad old days."

Comments

Google Mentioned As Dow Jones Suitor

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 02 May 2007 23:24:48 +0000

News Corp’s hostile $5 billion offer for publisher Dow Jones may spur a bidding war, and Google’s name has been invoked alongside other potential bidders.

Google Mentioned As Dow Jones Suitor

If it’s a matter of who can afford a ten-figure price tag for Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, why not mention Microsoft as well? Steve Ballmer could put Dow Jones on his corporate AmEx card and have plenty of Microsoft’s cash left over for other deals, like the rumored billion-dollar 24/7 Real Media purchase that Microsoft spokespeople are no-commenting about today?

The ultra-reliable Bloomberg reports the magical name of Google has been invoked in the Dow Jones conversation, along with several other financial heavyweights:

News Corp. may have opened the door for other bidders, including General Electric Co., owner of the CNBC news network, Haverty said. Washington Post Co., Gannett Co. and even Google Inc. may be interested, said Michael Chren, managing director of Allegiant Asset Management Co. in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.

If Google were to have an interest, and right now it’s just one analyst suggesting it, John Battelle thinks he knows how they would handle its ownership:

They only way this makes any sense (see my rant on buying NBC for more) is for Google to take a public service stance and put the Wall St. Journal in a non profit trust. Now that would be ballsy. It’s been done before (The Guardian is in a trust).

Such a trust would ideally insulate the paper from outside influences on its editors and reporters. To see an example of a scenario of interference, the satirical Fake Steve Jobs blog has a very uncomfortable (for the WSJ) depiction of Carl Icahn’s possible manipulation of the Journal regarding Motorola.

Battelle’s FM Tunes Into VC Funding

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 22:24:02 +0000

Author of “The Search” and BoingBoing.net “band manager” John Battelle’s Federated Media scooped up its first round of venture capital funding.

JP Morgan Partners led Federated Media’s (FM) first round of financing for a currently undisclosed amount. The firm joins such initial investors as The New York Times Company, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Network, and techie book publisher Tim O’Reilly in backing Battelle’s venture.

A statement from FM described what the endeavor hopes to accomplish (besides making Hefty bags full of cash, natch):

Federated Media represents “best of breed” independent publishing sites, with a focus on high quality authors catering to influential and highly engaged audiences. Through its advertising, technology, publishing, and business development services, FM connects independent weblog authors, marketers and influential audiences in an ongoing conversation that feeds everyone involved. The sites in FM’s network include BoingBoing.net, Buzzmachine.com, Digg.com, Dooce.com, Fark.com, GigaOm.com and more than 25 others.

The inclusion of Digg is notable, as the site has supported itself through placement of Google AdSense blocks throughout its pages. Those Google ads are still appearing on Digg, so their switchover to FM has not happened yet.

People can get a feel for the type of stories and writers in the new FM network by visiting its authors page and reading some of their work collected on a “best of” page.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.