Challenges facing mobile analytics

Great article on measurement challenges for mobile:

• Data collection
• Unique visitor identification due to lack of cookie support and the changing of IP addresses
• Handset capability detection
  
• Phone and manufacture identification
  
• Screen resolution detection
  
• Traffic source detection
  
• Geographic identification

Read the entire article here.

Also, check out the Mobile Marketing Association's website.

Presentation on Online Audience Development

Here's a presentation that I gave last week.

Online Audience Development

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: marketing onlineaudiencedevelopment)

Twitter woes are FriendFeed's Gains

TechCrunch showcases 13 tools for FriendFeed as Twitter continues to have problems. Want to learn some new funky, named web apps like these?

1. gridjit
2. Alert Thingy
3. twhirl
4. MySocial
5. NoiseRiver
6. FriendFeed Machine
7. Feedalizr

Learn about all 13 here.

From Folio Magazine: What A Blue Chip Advertiser Wants from You

IBM outlines 8 steps for publisher success in the June 2008 issue of Folio Magazine. I was unable to find the article on FolioMag.com, but here are the eight tips:

Edward Abrams, VP for Marketing at IBM, "highlights eight key points publishers should focus on as they look for more progressive, multimedia solutions for advertisers:"

1. User generated content
2. Trust in the ability of the audience to be self-policing
3. Peer-to-Peer interaction
4. Transparency and openness
5. Low barriers to entry
6. Collaboration
7. Connecting
8. Investment

I'll post a link to the article when I come across it.

Behavioral Marketing for Audience Development

I was in Chicago yesterday speaking at a Circulation Management conference. Here's the deck:

| View | Upload your own

Twitter e-Book by Geekprenuer

Neil Patel turned me on to this eBook tonight by mentioning it on Twitter. Thanks, Neil.


Read it here.

Viewthrough...

Chen Wang writes about the challenges with viewthrough and clickthrough metrics. In his Online Metrics Insider article today: Viewthrough and Beyond.

For those of you who may not know already, viewthrough conversions are associated with people who saw your online ad, but didn't actually click on it, and who later order your product or take the desired action.

I haven't been able to get my head around viewthroughs as an effective metric to what's going on with an online media campaign. They're kind of fuzzy in my mind.

Chen talks about a new way of measuring viewthroughs. Using something called ad decay:

Empirically, the decay can be represented through a downward trending curve.

When we are focusing upon viewthrough conversions, the curve is constructed by bucketing all the viewthrough conversions by day(s) of latency on each frequency level. Latency measures the lag effect of advertising on conversion. A latency of 1 day includes all the conversions that happen within 1 day after the last time the user is served the ad. Since we normally track it for 30 days, we are looking at 30 different latency buckets If the ad has any effect, we should see a downward trend as latency days extend. In other words, more conversions happen at the beginning than at the end of the latency scale for the frequency level that the curve is built upon. The decay curve, in and by itself, demonstrates that there exists some impact from the ad campaign upon conversions. As a matter of fact, if there were no ad campaign, consumers would “convert” at a fairly constant pace on the latency scale. In other words, we should be looking at a flat line instead of an ad decay curve.

To take this line of thought one step further, we can actually calculate the elusive viewthrough attribution percentage from the decay curve. If the curve decays at a certain frequency level, there will be a point on the decay curve at which the curve starts to look more like a flat line than a curve.

Read more here.

Viral Expansion Loops

I may be a bit behind on this, but I was catching up on my blog fare tonight and came across this article on FastCompany.com: "Ning's Infinite Ambition."

In it, the author talks about viral expansion loops -- something that I've never heard of until tonight:

Here's something you probably don't know about the Internet: Simply by designing your product the right way, you can build a billion-dollar business from scratch. No advertising or marketing budget, no need for a sales force, and venture capitalists will kill for the chance to throw money at you.

The secret is what's called a "viral expansion loop," a concept little known outside of Silicon Valley (go ahead, Google it -- you won't find much). It's a type of engineering alchemy that, done right, almost guarantees a self-replicating, borglike growth: One user becomes two, then four, eight, to a million and beyond. It's not unlike taking a penny and doubling it daily for 30 days. By the end of a week, you'd have 64 cents; within two weeks, $81.92; by day 30, about $5.4 million.

Viral loops have emerged as perhaps the most significant business accelerant to hit Silicon Valley since the search engine. They power many of the icons of Web 2.0, including Google, PayPal, YouTube, eBay, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Flickr. But don't confuse a viral loop with viral advertising or videos such as Saturday Night Live's "Lazy Sunday" or the Mentos-Diet Coke Bellagio fountain. Viral advertising can't be replicated; by definition, a viral loop must be.

Need to learn more about it. What do you know?

Filtrbox Fun...

I just learned about Filtrbox from Brad Feld's post at AlwaysOn: Filter Box Gets Better Everyweek.




The vision for Filtrbox when they started at TechStars last summer was to create an integrated single dashboard of all this keyword alert information.

Learn more about Filtrbox at Seth Levin's VC Adventure blog: Know what you don't know.

An excerpt:

Filtrbox was one of last year's TechStars companies and the the one with which I worked most closely (after the summer TechStars program I participated in their angel financing round). They've developed a system that if you had to describe it in a single sentence is "Google Alerts on steroids". That said, it's almost unfair to compare the two as Google Alerts just isn't designed to provide users with the accuracy, level of coverage, ability to tune and provide feedback to alert terms and the overall representation of data that Filtrbox provides - even now in the relatively early version of the Filtrbox platform. Filtrbox allows me to set up a series of "filtrs" that contain various keywords so that I can organize the things I'm looking to track. Every morning I get a "daily briefing" email that lists all the hits from the last 24 hours and online I can use their dashboard to see up-to-date hits in list and graphical form, manipulate the data, adjust the sensitivity of the report (so I see fewer, but more directly relevant hits) and tune the system by providing it feedback on the information it provides me. Below is a snapshot of their dashboard to give you a sense of what I see every day (in true Web 2.0 fashion, everything in the image below will give me more information as I mouse over it and I can adjust the data I'm seeing on the fly by checking and unchecking keywords or entire filtr groups or adjusting the sensitivity (the slider in the top center of the page).

Let me know if you'd like an invite to the private beta.

Video from Micro Persuasion on Managing Information Overload

I watched the video from Steve Rubel's blog and had to post it. Enjoy.


Marketing Guru Steve Rubel Talks with Brian About Info Overload from Brian Lehrer Live on Vimeo.

Readings from around the web...

WSJ.com: Agencies Know The Score on Web Tracking

A discrepancy between Google click data and comScore's estimates of those data before they were released caused the Web-measurement firm's share price to plunge last week. But on Madison Avenue, the difference wasn't much of a shock. Rather, it was another reminder that the science of tracking Internet usage is still far from perfect.

Digital-advertising executives say they have long taken comScore numbers with a grain of salt and don't plan on curtailing their use of the Reston, Va., research firm because of the Google flap. "We have not expected the numbers to be 100% accurate," says Sarah Fay, chief executive of both Carat and Isobar US, ad companies owned by Aegis Group. "I think that comScore has been as good as anything we've had previously."

MediaPost's SearchInsider: More on The SEM People Problem

People are just as important as automation in today's PPC search environment, and I wanted to take this opportunity to discuss additional characteristics that mark ideal SEM candidates. I hope this article is of value to those staffing in-house or agency search teams, as well as prospective candidates seeking to enter this very exciting field. So what other characteristics make for a successful SEM professional?

Digital Natives: Letting the Internet Explain Itself -- A Video Roundup


I love this blog: Since we first started blogging here in November, we’ve generated a lot of text…but that’s all rather analog, very not digital at all. In the spirit of a more digital post, I’d like to share a few of the best videos I’ve found explaining the Internet. These videos showcase — with the added benefit of graphics and sounds — many of the same ideas we’ve been discussing on this blog and why we find Digital Natives so fascinating.

Micro Persuasion: A Few Tips on Managing Information Overload

Are you a Scuppie?

I was just going through my email and found this Letter to the Editor at MediaPost:

The Scuttle On Scuppies
From: Charles L. Failla
RE: Gen Y Demands It: Green Fashion That's Chic

I just came across your article [on green fashion.] I had to share with you a buzzword that's quickly evolving on the Internet as the moniker for this green consumer: The Scuppie (Socially Conscious Upwardly-mobile Person). If you Google "scuppie," you'll see thousands of hit -- most from just the past few weeks. You can see a short list of press clippingsb... at: http://www.scuppie.com/pressclippings.html I think your readers would like hearing about this emerging and extremely powerful demographic group.

Read all the letters from today here.

Visit The Scuppie Handbook to learn more. And, read Sarah Mahoney's article that spawned the letter: Gen Y Demands It: Green Fashion That's Chic.

Modernista! and a modern social media website

A few weeks ago, Modernista got written up on AdAge.com, and bloggers have been blogging about it for about a month. I love it. They basically redesigned their website by powering it with Wikipedia, Flicker, YouTube, Twitter, Google News, Del.icio.us and Facebook.

The site uses an inline frame to load the URLs while keeping it's navigation on top of the frame as you work through the different sites.

Check out the site yourself: Moderista.com.

Read the buzz:

OnlineSpin: Ad Agency Gets Web 2.0! Can It Be True?
Technorati: Modernista
GoogleNews: Modernista

"Content Wants to Be Free"

This was the starting line of the New Media Expo Newsletter for today. It seemed appropriate to me personally since I now work for WSJ.com and Barrons.com. The idea of free content on the web is as old as the web, but recently there have been a number of folks rethinking this idea. Today it was Tim over at New Media Expo:

"Content wants to be free" and other scary phrases seem to rear their ugly head every so often. This week, the discussion focused around whether content is becoming so easy to get and make that it is becoming worthless.

The bottled water analogy fits perfect here. Tap or drinking fountain water is free and available everywhere. Yet bottled water sales continue to soar because of:

a) Convenience
b) Higher Quality

Read the entire article here.

I definitely believe in paying for higher quality content, whether it be at WSJ.com (I've been a paying customer since 2003), MarketingSherpa.com, Forrester, eMarketer or others.

What do you think?

Forrester's Marketing Forum 2008

I'm waiting at LAX for my flight back to Newark and the drive back to Princeton. I've spent the last few days at the latest marketing forum put on by Forrester -- Marketing's New Imperative For Success: Engagement.

I have to say that this has been one of the top forums, summits or conferences that I've attended during my entire career. The Forrester analysts are top notch, and I'm excited to take some of the frameworks and ideas that came out of the sessions and put them to work with our online strategies at Dow Jones.

Brian Haven's discussion on engagement was terrific. He talked about the 4 I's of engagement:

1. Involvement
2. Interaction
3. Intimacy
4. Influence

He then proceeded to build out a quadrant and sorted relevant metrics within these 4 I's. I'll have a deeper discussion in the coming days and weeks around this presentation and others from the forum. But now, I'm reeling and very ready to get home.

Seven steps to remarkable customer service

Great article by Joel Spolsky:

1. Fix everything two ways
2. Suggest blowing out the dust
3. Make customers into fans
4. Take the blame
5. Memorize awkward phrases
6. Practice puppetry
7. Greed will get you nowhere

Read more about all seven.

From Around the Web

Future Of TV Ad Market: A Lot Like Online's -- Ad Networks, Behavioral Targeting, Etc.
THE FUTURE OF TV ADVERTISING will probably be a lot like current state of the online advertising: aggregated advertising networks, behavioral targeting, and automated buying systems enabling small, "long-tail" advertisers to compete alongside the TV industry's biggest marketers and agencies.

Advertising spending goes into the pocket
Remember back in the day when people had pagers? If the thing kept beeping every two minutes, friends would say, "You're blowing up." Maybe that went out with bottle service and Paris Hilton's chastity, but, in the parlance of those times, mobile is about to blow up. Spending is projected to reach $3.6 billion by 2011, up from $277.3 million in 2007

Marketers Struggling With Acceptance Of Software Apps
MARKETING SOFTWARE PLATFORMS ARE IMPROVING, but makers continue to struggle with delivering marketers complete collaborative packages with easy-to-use tools.

Print Inserts Pass TV Ads As Important Influence in Purchase Decisions
Based on research findings released by Vertis Communications, twenty-seven percent of adults indicated they look for information in advertising inserts as part of making a purchase decision. That's up from 19% ten years ago. Television advertising is no longer the main influencer in purchasing decisions, according to Vertis. TV ads are now the main influencer for 8% of consumers, compared to 22% in 1998.

CPMs Headed Up?
Are online media CPMs headed up or down? The question is on a lot of people’s minds these days. JPMorgan analysts, in their “2008 Internet Investment Guide, Nothing but Net” which was released last month, expects the CPMs of graphical online ads to grow 3.9% and the number of ads per page view to increase 8.3%. Overall, they expect revenue per page (RPM) to grow 12.6% in 2008.

Will Marketing Change After Star's Death?
For nearly nine months, Internet-savvy movie fans have been tantalized by a Web marketing campaign to slowly unveil the new look for one of Hollywood's most popular characters: the Joker, nemesis to Batman and a central figure in the next installment of the Warner Bros. film franchise based on the Caped Crusader.Tuesday, however, Warner Bros.' careful online campaign, which still has months left to run, took an unexpected turn when Heath Ledger...

The last interaction
Marketers (and high school kids) focus a lot on the first date. After all, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

I recently had some waterproofing done in the basement. The first date was great. The company was professional and had every single element down, from their AdWords to the web site to the way they interacted on the phone and in person.

A new era for ad agencies... The Un-Agency?

Great article by Dave Morgan at MediaPost. Discusses the new competencies, supply chain changes, talent needs, business models, capital structures and mindsets needed to succeed in the shifting marketing environment.

Cory Treffiletti continues the discussion with "Is this The Year of the Un-Agency?" which digs into the shift to strategy and project management from media planning and buying.

These are must-reads and must-thinks for any service provider, client or media outlet. The landscape continues to change very quickly.