WebProNews » Pheedo

Pheedo Reaches Into RSS Analytics

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:41:59 +0000

The consumption of content today regularly happens beyond the website publishing such content in the first place.

Log data may be mined easily for useful details, as it resides under the control of the site publisher. Visitor habits become profiles, and the publisher acts accordingly based on usage trends; certain hot content topics fuel the next targeted ad campaign.

Once the viewership, and the log data, head elsewhere, the site publisher suffers a bit from lack of information. An article receiving little attention on the website could be a phenomenon in the feed readers of many people, shared and shared again throughout the world of social media.

Advertising firm Pheedo said they have a new way to look at this engagement with content distributed via RSS. Their FeedPowered Analytics Dashboard debuted with options that should attract passing interest from publishers, especially the bigger brands online.

Pheedo claimed its new technology will measure content engagement, including interaction rates with valuable destinations like Digg, Reddit, and Facebook. Publishers track where people receive the content, and what they do with it.

This extends to the advertising a publisher places in the RSS feed. Pheedo said the Dashboard provides the expected information on impressions and clicks.

“Brand marketers can no longer expect users to come to their micro-site. Distributed media is the new micro-site,” Pheedo CEO Bill Flitter said in a statement.

We wonder what impact this may have on site design and development on an ongoing basis. If a brand name company expects its content to enjoy consumption outside its .com presence more than on their site, that suggests an impact on content creation and advertising placement.

Consider someone with many feeds in their reader. They probably skim their feeds and only read deeply when engagement takes place. It hints at a need for Dashiell Hammett-like prose in content: short, direct, and informative.

Deeper content provides plenty of value for customers with a brand relationship, and those people probably visit a brand’s site to find product details or service instructions anyway. But maybe there’s an emerging trend here for a copywriting style that’s equal parts Neil French and Sam Spade, for feed-distributed, trackable content.

SIS – Widget Talk

Jordan McCollum — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 20:31:06 +0000

Ever hear of widgets? It’s the buzzword of the year for the Web, but few still appreciate how to best use them. How can you use widgets to increase the inbound links to your site? Are there widget directories you can optimize for? What social media strategies are most effective?

Moderator: Bill Flitter, VP, Marketing, Founder, Pheedo

Steven Marder, CEO, Eurekster
Ben Pashman, VP Business Development, Gigya

Bill Flitter

RSS, new media, blogging, social media. That’s what Pheedo does. We help publishers analyze and use dist content. Thinking re: results

round and round widgets—’widgets’ used to be a generic term, but now it has a meaning

Brainstorming what we, the audience, want to know—we design the session.

What makes a great widget? What makes people want it?
What are popular widgets today?
Is the microsite dead?
Why do I need widgets?
Is it worth creating these? Can we monetize widgets (specifically Facebook)?
Examples of bad widgets—best practices
How can widgets impact search?
Can you measure conversions on widgets?
Challenges in production?
Legal concerns of widgets

Ben Pashman

Simple to complex widgets

Why is there so much attention focused on widgets? Social network advertising will grow a lot. Doesn’t interrupt user experience, not forcefeeding a branded message while they’re trying to talk to their friends. It’s the answer to how to get social media advertising

“If social network marketing delivers on its promise of peer recommendations the flow of ad dollars will turn into a flood”—eMarketer

The definition of widgets: widgets are miniapps that can be deployed on top of existing communities like Facebook. His simpler definition: any little piece of content that can be grabbed and shared, goes from one place to another—the atomized web. Even YouTube, embedding video. Shared, grabbed, personalized, utilized.

3 types of widgets

desktop
start page
social media (the narrower definition)—big opportunity here. Dave Berkowitz broke down differences between these types of widgets in his blog. Goals: entertain friends, identify themselves, engage people, have fun, enable communications. Sets it apart from other categories.

It’s all just starting—we’re in the ca. 1995 era here. We’re seeing a lot of viral players, repackaging of content, and that works to some extent, but it doesn’t leverage the full potential.

Nike—what could they do?

Personal: Johnny, 16 y/o, likes movies and bball. Nike offers widget customizable to fave athlete/team. Highlight footage in widgets, send customized messages, live chats

Widget analytics:

installs by location
impressions
interactions
lifecycle (how long is it living on the page/pageviews over time)
viral distribution patters

You can think of a widget as a mini browser. It’s a 24 hour TV channel that you can put anything in any time.

It’s primarily branding tool. Can drive some traffic to site, but primarily provides exposure for your site away from you site. Provides user-endorsed exposure. Can be viral. If your brand can be part of an individual’s self-expression, that’s a lofty goal.

Steven Marder

What’s great about widgets is the distribution opportunity. We’re about branded, distributed, social search. It’s about brands, distribution, engaging consumers with widgets. Leveraging search as a behavior, users’ desire/comfort with search while they’re on your page. We’ve been around 3+ years. But we’re not about building a destination or attract consumers—working with publishers.

Search + wiki = swickis

Trends in social media/social search

Then: media 1.0 centralized creation, traditional distribution, one-to-many. Search 1.0 algorithmic organization & creation (increasing dissatisfaction of generic search) one-to-many.

Now: media 2.0: navigation and discovery through connection and engagement. Discovery is just a huge element here, huge value prop for widgets and social media in general. Many-to-many

It’s about understanding your consumer, reinforcing brand, driving action. Leveraging social media tools, being part of the conversation, being authentic, being transparent. How do you engage in a conversation? Being fun, useful, authoritative, providing links to other people, providing value.

What do you have that you can leverage?

The power of your brand, the power of community, user participation and engagement, social media tools. Provide useful tools, apps, etc. to let them interact with your brand (content, products, genre). Leveraging social search is one such tactic.

We think social search is the next phase, and Google gets that—personalization to influence SERPs. It’s all about search behavior off general destinations.

Ex: search box with tag cloud widget. It’s a search tool for the site, but also a discovery tool.

Demo of building widget with Eurekster. Now you can build a site-specific search, brand it, skin it, and let people put it on their sites.

Steven: Fantastic opportunity to get in with kids early.

Q&A

Are there affiliate type widgets?

Ben: There are some available—Amazon, eBay, Widget Bucks. Natural extension for sure.

Steven: Be authentic. Build your brand.

Comment: Dell just did a campaign where people could contribute to a campaign to let people contribute to help their friends buy new computers—via widget and Paypal.

Biggest take home tip?

Ben: Keep it simple. Don’t try to cram your whole website on there.

Steven: Get compelling, engaging content on that widget.

Ben: Think about how can you add to the experience of the target display website. Fun, simple, silly are doing great volume.

Ben: Clearly the microsite is dead. Why would someone want to go to the BourneIdentity.com when they could take it with them? Don’t work so hard on creating a site to then create a community—leverage an existing community.

I built a Google Gadget. It got clicks but no sales. Can I reuse it? What do I do?

Ben: That’s a very common experience. You can’t just “build it and they will come.” Distribute it, promote it, but it’s not an easy thing. You can’t just build it and drop it in a widget gallery. (Though that can happen.)

[Note from my discussion with Tameka Kee of MediaPost: Think about why your target audience would want that widget on their site, not what you want to push out onto them.]

Steven: It’s not just a marketing tool. It’s softer. It’s branding.

Ben: It’s not just repurposing an ad.

Comments

Pheedo Takes RSS Feeds to Ads

Andy Beal — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 16:33:57 +0000

Pheedo’s new FeedPowered advertising platform offers to take any RSS feed and turn it into a dynamically updated ad unit (see their site for live examples). Where can you run the ads?

You can run your FeedPowered ad on targeted sites across Pheedo’s network of publishers. Alternatively, you can distribute FeedPowered advertising into just about any ad network or via your preferred ad server.

It’s an interesting idea and one that might be appeal to any blog that has made the leap from personal journal to a monetized site. I like the idea of exposing my RSS feed to other sites, but not sure I’d be willing to pay a whole lot for someone to actually click on my feed. After all, where’s the real conversion? Unless they "stick" or subscribe to my full feed, I’m paying a lot for "drive-by" visitors.

Via ProBlogger.

Comments

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

About the Author

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

Pheedo Debuts RSS Analytics

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 13:46:37 +0000

The blog network will enhance its advertising products by moving its analytics product out of beta testing; one finding of the beta test was the optimum number of words for an ad.

RSS ad networks have become the new hot item, but being able to effectively measure them should broaden their appeal to businesses. Pheedo will match RSS competitor Feedburner today as it makes an analytics product available, MediaPost reported.

As part of the six month beta test, Pheedo experimented with ad length. Company founder Bill Flitter discussed those findings in the article:

One finding to come out of the testing is that RSS ads between 200 and 250 characters appear to be more effective than either shorter or longer ads. When ads are smaller, Flitter said, they don’t provide enough information; more characters, and they detract from the editorial content.

One finding that could find its way into many feeds was the higher click-through rate for stand-alone ads. Advertising is usually part of the content of feeds, and while some publishers may fear a backlash from stand-alone ads, many more will take a chance at the higher click-through rates and try them out.

RSS providers using the Pheedo analytics can see the same sort of measurements long available to email campaigns. Pheedo’s service measures open and click-through rates of articles and ads in RSS feeds.

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

Behind Become.com’s Second Round Of Funding

Jason Dowdell — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 13:59:49 +0000

I’m sure most of you have heard Become has secured their second round of VC funding worth $7.2 million.

But I’m also sure you don’t know where a lot of the money came from or what’s going on at Become [other than what you read in the press releases]. Yesterday I chatted with Michael Yang to get an update on what’s happening over there and to find out how his presentation went yesterday at the Under The Radar conference.

Become’s Series B Round of Funding
So you’ve read everywhere they got a lot more money yesterday. But here’s what you didn’t read… One of the investors in this round is Keith Schorsch, a former VP from Amazon. Several of Michael’s family and friends as well as Yeogirls’ family and friends are also investors. Michael himself put some money in this round and as everyone knows, TransCosmos is also a major investor in this round.

Transcosmos is one of the most interesting investors in this round, not only because they participated in the first round as well but also because they recently invested in Pheedo, an RSS advertising company that’s beginning to go global. TransCosmos has an eye for spotting talent and the fact that they’re putting more money up is a good sign.

Additionally, Become is hiring big time. They have 7 – 8 positions up on their corporate site right now and just hired another researcher, a recent Stanford grad . One of the more interesting positions they’re looking to fill is a “Senior Manager Online Traffic Acquisition”. If you can’t read between the lines then I’ll spell it out for you, someone that can drive lots of traffic at low cost, one of those methods is organic search engine optimization. So if you’re an seo and you think you’ve got what it takes then go ahead and apply.

Michael Presented At Under The Rader
When I spoke with Michael he was at the Under The Radar Conference and had already given his presentation. Under The Radar is…

Under the Radar… is a kind of ‘American Idol’ for startups. Nervous founders get to make a brief pitch in front of an audience of VCs, hoping for cash and access to the vast network of contacts that VCs can provide…
-Mike Langberg
San Jose Mercury News

The truth of the matter is that founders get 5 minutes to present their business plan, product or service and implementation plan and only 3 slides to do it in. Then they have a 5 minute round of rapid fire questions and answers. They’re judged by a VC panel that’s not only experienced but also shrewd. At the end of the day the panel of VC’s announces the winner and yesterday’s winner was not Become. It was a company called FatLens that helps you find tickets for a particular event by allowing you to describe the event. Honestly, I don’t see what makes FatLens all that unique from a technology standpoint but I’ll dig more into that later.

Michael said his presentation went well and he wasn’t hit with any surprise questions he wasn’t prepared for. When he said that I immediately felt tired for him. I’ve seen him give his presentation a few times and I can’t imagine having to give the same presentation, or even a variance of the presentation, over and over again. But that’s where the patience and persistence of a seasoned entrepreneur helps out. You know you’ll have to pitch and pitch and pitch because that’s just part of the game and Michael does a pretty good job at it.

So there you have it, a little behind the scenes action on become’s latest round of funding and what some of it means. Of course there’s more to it than even what I’ve divulged but you’ll have to stay tuned to get more info on that.

Reader Comments…

Jason Dowdell is a technology entrepreneur and operates the Marketing Shift blog.

Pheedo Gets VC Funding

Jason Dowdell — Tue, 31 May 2005 16:13:06 +0000

For those too busy to read the entire post on Become below or who read it too fast to realize all the implications, I’ll make one of them simple for you by breaking it out. Pheedo has received a round of VC funding from the well known TransCosmos group. Not only did they receive funding but they’re also expanding into Japan with the assistance of TransCosmos.

I learned of that last week but hesitated to bring it to light. When I asked Pheedo’s Chief Marketing Officer [Bill Flitter] to confirm the rumor he did. I told him I thought it would make a great blog post on the Pheedo corporate blog and he said I was right but right now they need to focus more on their service than the blog.

Yes, Bill threw me some bait and I bit, I’m not stupid. But, I was glad to hear about the funding through a 3rd party rather than from Bill and I was glad to hear Bill had no intentions of posting about it. That’s a good sign. When a company is focused more on the product than the hype you know they’re headed in the right direction. So we’ll see what happens from here but I’m sure things will just get better for the Pheedo gang.

BTW, if you’re a follower of the search industry but don’t know anything about the Japanese or Chinese search market, you’d better start learning quick. Those markets are growing fast and while they may be trailing the U.S. in the blog market, they’re not far behind. Look for more expansion in the Japanese markets and more investments from VC firms like TransCosmos in that market as well.

Hmmm, wonder if I should touch base with Shin and do a little Q & A action, I think so.

Links: Become
TransCosmos
Japan

Reader Comments…

Jason Dowdell is a technology entrepreneur and operates the Marketing Shift blog.