2009 – Off to a Shaky Start?

       Happy New Year!  At least, I hope so. 

Last year I considered buying a Zune music player, but chose an iPod instead.  I’ve never been a fan of paying the premium price that Apple products command, but this time I had a rebate from Audible.com, so I opted for the 80GB iPod Classic.  Today I was happy to have avoided Microsoft’s “Zune2k.”  Zunes all over the world experienced a mini Y2k of their own when their internal clocks made endless attempts to process the 366^th day of a leap year.  Read the details here on cnet news.

Since I was one of the only people in the whole world whose computer wouldn’t boot up on January 1, 2000, I was relieved to have avoided this meltdown.  It took me about 4 hours to resuscitate my computer on that fateful day eight years ago.

I the meantime, the business that I manage was without electricity this morning for three hours.  This led to disrupted registers that didn’t want to properly reboot when the power returned.  The retail registers finally came back up, but we never did recover the registers for food service.  Every now and then we get a kick in the head that reminds us how dependent we are on our technology and the energy that powers it. 

Today’s events remind me of an old boyfriend and a New Year’s Day that set the tone for the entire year.  He said he woke up and poked himself in the eye with his thumb before getting out of bed.  He swore that was a sign that it would be a terrible year, and if I recall correctly, it was.  At least, I don’t own a Zune.

Future of the Internet III

One of my favorite go-to resources is the collection of data from the Pew Research Center.  For those who aren’t already familiar with the Pew Research Center, it is a collection of seven non-partisan projects that form a “fact tank,” providing information on issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world.  On December 14, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released its biennial report, the Future of the Internet III.  Every two years since 2004, scenarios have been devised and participants asked to evaluate how likely each might be in the future.  The 2008 study, conducted with Elon University, surveyed 578 leading Internet activists, builders, and commentators to weigh in on the effect of the Internet on social, political, and economic life in the year 2020.  These aren’t just your average bloggers prognosticating in a willy-nilly sort of way about things to come. These are individuals who are experts and carry some pretty weighty credentials.  Also included in a separate overall tally are an additional 618 stakeholders. 

Not too surprisingly, the majority of those surveyed (77%) expect the mobile device to be the primary connection tool to the Internet for most people in 2020. The device will be relatively inexpensive, portable and powerful. But, when the surveyors postulated that social tolerance will have advanced significantly due in great part to the Internet, only 32% of the experts thought this was a true statement.  While social networks may have the ability to foster understanding between diverse peoples, it has equal capacity to promote hate, bigotry, and terrorism through communication networks.   In other words, the Internet will continue to allow trolls to be trolls.

The report suggests that voice recognition and touch user-interfaces will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.  I was totally clueless about “air typing,” but apparently the technology has already been developed to project a keyboard onto a flat surface, especially useful for smaller devices.  Some respondents postulate neural networks providing mind-controlled human-computer interaction.  At least ten years ago, my imagination took me to a place where we would decide to have the technology directly implanted to our brains to improve our memories and the ability to directly access and process information more quickly.  Thus, when my Alzheimer years come around, I will be able to have vivid memories of the past – even if they aren’t my own. I guess I couldn’t refrain from making my own willy-nilly prediction even though I’m not qualified to make one.

Those who are qualified say that reality as we know it will be passé.  The virtual world will blur with “real life” as will work and leisure.  For  me, these seem like some scary ideas, but perhaps they will come about so gradually that we won’t even have noticed until we are will immersed.  Read the entire Pew report on the Future of the Internet III here.

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Is Blogging Dead? – Part Deux

Back in October, I naively began my blog, Streaming Thoughts, with questions about the life expectancy of blogging.  In my second post, I was prompted to ask the question, “Is blogging dead?”  After reading an article by Paul Boutin from Wired Magazine, I was nearly persuaded.  Concerns about the corporate takeover of the blogosphere were top in my mind and I wondered if blogging were a passing fad whose time was passing.  Boutin made a case that Twitter, Flickr and Facebook would replace blogging.  And, after all, we keep hearing about the very short attention spans of today’s audience.  Also, Technorati’s statistics show that the number of blog posts appear to have declined significantly in 2008. 

Year	Blog Posts Per Day
2004	400,000
2005	1.2 million
2006	1.3 million
2007	1.5 million
2008	900,000

The number of blogs updated in the last 120 days is still an impressive 7.4 million posts.

 

Technorati also stated that the lines between what is a blog and what is a mainstream media site have become less clear. Despite the arguments for the “death of blogging,” the supporting evidence just isn’t there.  Here are my humble observations:

1. Although it may seem that blogs are moving away from being amateur in nature to becoming professional, the perception is  skewed by the representation of the professional bloggers in  “top 100” lists.
2. The success of professional bloggers may be draining readership from the amateurs, but both continue to coexist.
3. Blogs exist in macro and micro environments.  Some have thousands of readers; some are read by a few friends or devotees; some are personal and not meant to be read by anyone other than the blogger.  This became apparent to me after reading requests from some bloggers to have their blogs removed from inclusion in alphainventions.com.  Some blogger state that they never intended their posts to be widely read.
4. The drop in the number of itinerant, amateur bloggers may actually improve the quality of blogs as a whole.
5. Twitter represents bursts of thought; blogs are contextual.  There is a place for both forms of communication.
6. Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites are often used to promote blogs.
7. The argument that professionals are drowning out the amateurs means that there is lots of noise – hardly an argument for the death of the medium.
8. Media are becoming more integrated across the board.  Blogs contain images, video, music, widgets and other enhancements to the written word.

Blogging is far from taking its last gasp for breath. Blogs that are interesting and provocative will undoubtedly be more widely read, presuming they can reach audiences, but corporations are likely to continue to dominate the field. Technorati’s 2008 report holds that more than eight in ten bloggers post product or brand reviews in their blogs.  Marketers are learning that the blogosphere is a critical place to be and one in three bloggers say that they’ve been approached to be a brand advocate.  I’ve read a few of these blogs that have left me wondering if the blogger has a relationship with the company that they favor so strongly.

But, that’s a question of ethics and a topic for another post…

Creating a Real Buzz

 I can’t decide what I think of alphainventions.com.   A few days ago I started receiving dozens of visits to my blog from this source.  Since I’d been blogging about scams, this was the first thing to come to mind – that I was the victim of some sort of nefarious activity. 

I plugged alphainventions into WordPress’ site search to see what I could find.  The search immediately brought me to the WordPress support forum and a thread entitled “alphainventions – scam?”   The forum has 69 posts with comments filling three pages.  Aha!  Just as I had thought!  I read on, though.  The first post was from a blogger who was suddenly getting significant traffic from alphainventions just like me.  He questioned the legitimacy of the hits.  Was it a something malicious or a scam? The next post was from another blogger wanting to know the same thing.  A few days later WordPress staff responded saying, “not sure what to make of that site yet, but if we find evidence it’s spam or a scam then we’ll do something about it.”

The following day the owner of alphainventions.com popped up with his explanation of what he is doing. It turns out he is “a regular working guy” named Cheru Jackson.  (I guess you could call him Cheru the Coder.)  Anyway, his intention is to show blogs in real time as they are updated.  The idea is that, if people read a blog promptly, the blogger is likely to receive comments sooner.  You can visit Cheru’s blog here.  He’s receiving lots of positive comments.

It seems like a cool idea.  I’m not sure how my blog got noticed, nor am I sure how the stats are determined.  I used to have a handful of readers and now WordPress is showing dozens (up to 115 yesterday).  I suspect they didn’t all really read my blog, but at least I’ve had some exposure that I didn’t have before.

One thing that I do know for certain – Cheru has managed to create a big buzz about alphainventions.  Alphainventions is being talked about in blogs right and left.  It remains to be seen if  alphainventions creates any substantial impact for bloggers which will translate to real readers.  I for one hope that it does.

Please add a comment about your experience with alphainventions.  Has anyone been able to evaluate the quality of the hits?

Web 3.0 – A Matter of Semantics

I was just getting up to speed with Web 2.0 and patting myself on the back for grasping its meaning.  That is, if we can even all agree on a meaning for Web 2.0.  Now, I learn that the conversation about Web 3.0 has been underway for at least two years already.  Gracious!  How am I ever going to keep up with all this new information?

Jonathan Strickland has a good explanation that helps me comprehend the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0:

Think of Web 1.0 as a library. You can use it as a source of information, but you can’t contribute to or change the information in any way. Web 2.0 is more like a big group of friends and acquaintances. You can still use it to receive information, but you also contribute to the conversation and make it a richer experience.

Web 2.0 is about customizing content and sharing information through social networking, blogging, YouTube and other sites that allow users to exchange information.  Customer reviews like the ones mentioned in yesterday’s blog are a perfect example.

Web 3.0 is the next conceivable evolutionary stage of the Web although it is highly speculative.  Wikipedia points out that it “refers to aspects of the Internet which, though potentially possible, are not technically or practically feasible at this time.”  One way Web 3.0 has been described is as aggregating silos of information from the Internet and, for practical purposes, creating a seamless interface in retrieving that information from various locations.  Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, calls it the “semantic” Web.  Right now search engines can scan for keywords, but they are unable to actually understand a Web page in the context of its meaning.  That’s why Google doesn’t have the technical capability of understanding that some of its paid advertisers are scammers.  Here’s a video that explains the semantic Web:

Web 3.0 will change this.  For the everyday user, Web 3.0 will have the ability to answer multi-part questions, putting pertinent information together in a logical way.  An example given Strickland in How Stuff Works is getting help finding a good Mexican restaurant for dinner and with a funny movie playing close by.  Web 3.0 becomes a personal assistant as your browser learns your likes and dislikes from your repeated searches.  In an ideal world, it will bring you the information that is most likely to be of interest to you.  Everything will be able to be mashed up to meet personal preferences.  Read more about how Berners-Lee envisions the semantic Web here.

I’m not sure that I like the idea of Web 3.0.  I have to wonder if privacy doesn’t become even more vulnerable in a Web 3.0 world.  Will my browser be reminding me that I want to lose weight and tell me that I can’t eat Mexican for dinner tonight?  Will it decide that I can’t afford a new car, or that I don’t have enough free time in my calendar to own a dog?  I’m not sure that we will like what we learn about ourselves through our Web 3.0 browsers.

Of course, the major implication for marketers is that the world will be even friendlier toward an integrated marketing strategy that has the customer-centric focus.  Since IMC is about building a relationship with the customer, this kind of personalization is perfect for the marketer.  IMC strategists want to know their customers, and it seems most customers don’t mind if they do.

Top Pay Per Click Results Link to Mixed Ethics

Yesterday, I defended the practice of paid placement or pay per click (PPC) with Internet search engines.  As I mentioned, paid placement allows the highest bidder to appear at the top of a search engine’s sponsored links.  There are people who feel that this practice is unethical, but I don’t.  I do have a concern, however, with some of the advertisers that rise to the top of the sponsored sites. This is a problem if the general public doesn’t understand that these are ads.  They may believe that these are the best results or, worse still, that the results are rated the highest.

 I did an experiment by Googling “Nikon d300.” 

Having just shopped for a Nikon d300 for my husband, I am familiar with the current prices and the scams that are out there.  I was pretty shocked that the top paid listing was a company called DidUPrice.com.  

DidUPrice’s actual store front is shown in this photo.  They purport to be a price finder like NexTag or PriceGrabber, but in reality they are a front for ShopDigitalDirect.com, which is listed as “featured store” and as a “trusted seller.”  DidUPrice has been associated with other known scammers in the past. ShopDigital shows an unrealistically low price, lower than any of the companies listed, some of which are legitimate (Amazon, Tiger Direct, & US1Camera).  Everyone gets a five star rating, except Tiger Direct which gets only four stars.  Ironically, Tiger Direct is one of the more highly rated companies selling on the Internet.  Check out ResellerRatings.com.  ShopDigitalDirect is one of the lowest rated companies I’ve seen there.  They have a rating of 0.64 out of 10.  That’s not even 1 out of 10!  The comments are scathing.

Another, poorly rated company that shows near the top of the list in Google’s sponsored links is Sonic Camera.  They earn a whopping 0.71 of 10 at Reseller Ratings. 

Sonic’s ads entice buyers with a price of $649 for a camera that should be more than twice the price.  What people learn when they order the camera with any of these “bait and switch” companies is that the cameras don’t come with normal accessories. They may not even have all their parts. Sadly, these scammers appear in paid search listings along with legitimate companies like Best Buy, BuyDig, B&H, Amazon and others.

This leads me back to the point about paid placement.  By itself, PPC isn’t a bad thing.  There are many reputable businesses paying for preferential placement on search engines.  Google and other search engines only check their advertisers for relevance, not reputation.  If there is a fault, it is that Google and the others seem to do no homework on their advertisers.  I was able to dig up a lot of dirt on ShopDigitalDirect and Sonic in a very short time.  Of course, caveat emptor should be the policy when buying on the Web.  But Google and the rest should care more about the ethics of their advertisers than they do before they ruin the pay per click market.  Buyers will be cautious clicking on legitimate links, because of a few bad apples.  In the meantime Reseller Ratings is indispensable for sorting out the good from the bad and ugly.

 I know this is a problem for cameras and electronics.  Are there similar examples of bait and switch businesses that are highly ranked with Google or other search engines that aren’t electronics?

Search Engine Sponsored Links: Are They a Big Deal?

I was surprised to learn that 62% of Internet users are unaware of a distinction between paid and unpaid (organic) search engine results.  This information is a few years old; released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project in January of 2005, one can safely conclude that the data is about four years old now.  In terms of the Internet, that’s a pretty long time.  I would love to know if there has been any improvement in awareness since then.

Paid placement allows the highest bidder to appear at the top of a search engine’s sponsored links.  There is a question about the ethics of this practice. If there is an issue, it is really about transparency.  Are the results properly identified as advertising?  I made a survey of a dozen of the most popular search engines.  It showed that nearly all do indeed mark their paid advertising in some way.  Usually, the search engines use the words “sponsored link” or “sponsored results” or something similar.  While the disclaimer isn’t particularly large or bold, it is there.  Some have shaded background that help defined which links are part of the grouping.  My vision isn’t all that great, but it is clear enough to me.  I have included an Ask.com screen shot of a search result for “pet supplies.”  I have drawn a red box around the disclaimer.   

Personally, I don’t see the issue.  It is pretty obvious to me. Is it possible that people don’t know the meaning of the word “sponsor?”  Do they think it has one of the first four meanings?

1.   One who assumes responsibility for another person or a group during a period of instruction, apprenticeship,or probation.

2.   One who vouches for the suitability of a candidate for admission.

3.   A legislator who proposes and urges adoption of a bill.

4.   One who presents a candidate for baptism or confirmation; a godparent.

5.   One that finances a project or an event carried out by another person or group, especially a business enterprise that pays for radio or television programming in return for advertising time.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language

 I believe that anyone who thinks about it knows that in this context “sponsor” correlates to meaning 5.  In this sense, the sponsors are paying to bring us a free search engine with powerful capabilities.  Why would anyone be surprised that there is a business model attached to the equation?  Here is a copy of Google’s screen shot for the same search:

I have drawn red boxes around the text for sponsored links.  Again, they seem pretty clear considering the shaded background and the text that says “sponsored links.”

I find myself defending the search engines and the marketing model.  So far I don’t know of any of the major ones that aren’t being reasonably straightforward in disclosing paid placement.  If I were going to bring up a concern, it would be whether or not paying for placement enhances the chance that a Web site will score higher in organic rankings because the high visibility has increased the number of visitors to the site.  If popularity is a factor in ranking, then that could be an outcome. That is yet another topic to ponder.  Still, if we look at the examples above, we see that PetCo isn’t paying for a sponsored link, but scores at the top of both organic searches.  While this is anecdotal in nature, it is proably true that a site can do well with proper optimization.

Is It Harmless Buzz or Stealth Marketing?

Word of mouth advertising (WOMA) or buzz marketing is a great way to get information out about your product. It’s such a good idea that you may be tempted to market through social networking sites, blogs, online video, or other forms of new media without disclosing your relationship with the company or product.  In a word, don’t!  This is a form of stealth marketing and has been declared an unfair marketing practice by the Federal Trade Commission in December 2006.  While the FTC decided not to issue specific rules about WOMA, they made it very clear that this practice is already covered under their regulations on paid endorsements and testimonials.   The FTC has spelled this out:

“When there exists a connection between the endorser and the seller of the advertised product which might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement (i.e., the connection is not reasonably expected by the audience) such connection must be fully disclosed.”

 The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) concurred with the decision.  They contend there is a difference between buzz marketing and stealth marketing.   According to their definition, “buzz marketing ultimately can be identified by a consumer, stealth marketing cannot.”  WOMMA has been in the process of developing a code of ethics in the form of a “practical toolkit” for word of mouth advertising.   It has been under peer review since February of 2005.  I know these things take time but, really, does that seem a little long to anyone?  Although there are a number of specifics the basic rules are:

• Honesty of Relationship: You say who you’re speaking for.
• Honesty of Opinion: You say what you believe.
• Honesty of Identity: You never obscure your identity.

Despite the FTC pronouncement, stealth marketing seems to be fairly commonplace offline.  When someone is planted by a company and paid to talk about or bring attention to a product, it is sometimes derogatorily referred to as “roach baiting.”   When the target takes the bait, they carry it to their friends and family, hence the term roach baiting.  When corporations blog anonymously, the act is called “flogging” for fake blogging.  Hidden identities that mask a corporate agenda are sometimes referred to as “astroturfing,”  the counterfeit version of  something that appears to be grass roots in origin.

Each of the following is an example of a company that was “outed” for stealth marketing:

Scarlet  – a movie trailer for a new TV Series in April 2008 turned out to be a marketing campaign for a new television from LG Electronics. I’m not sure how effective it was as a marketing piece – no one could figure out what it was advertising.

Sony: All I want for Xmas is a PSP  -  this was a corporate blog (or flog) that was supposed to be a kid. It was a huge embarrassment to Sony.  Bloggers keep restoring the orgnal blog and Sony keeps taking it down.

Whole Foods blog  – Whole Foods CEO, John Mackey, was busted for hiding his identity in chat rooms where he extolled the virtues of Whole Foods and knocked the competition.

Each of these company’s executive must now be thinking, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”  What is unfortunate, though, is the broken trust with the customer.  No one wants to feel like they have been taken for a fool.  Transparency needs to be the order of the day.

It’s Just Common Sense

At the end of November, when I wrote about Common Sense Media as one of the essential resources to help parents evaluate the media that their children are exposed to, I didn’t know that they were on the verge of releasing significant findings on the impact of the media on children’s health.  The National Institutes of Health and Commonsense Media partnered for a meta-analysis of 173 studies about the effects of media use on today’s children.  This groundbreaking compilation of data identified seven negative outcomes from excessive media consumption by children. Obesity, smoking, drug and alcohol use, and early sexual activity are all associated with too heavy media exposure and at too young an age. There is a less compelling argument that media use may also a contribute to attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

If you are interested in hearing more about the findings of the study listen to Julie Chen interview Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, NIH bioethicist (and coincidentally the brother of both Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff, and Ari Emanuel, prominent talent agent) about the findings. 

 As parents learn more about the negative effects of media exposure, there may be a backlash against advertisers who promote heavily to youth.  Too many parents already see the disruptive influence of brand messages on the harmony within families.  Most parents of small children have experienced nagging over some toy, food item or other product that is sold with smiling spokes-cartoon.  Some corporations, like Kellogg, have already experienced the wrath of watchdog groups like the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.  They have been forced to go on the defensive and have drastically changed their marketing tactics to avoid a lawsuit.  IMC practitioners should take heed.  Many parents are “mad as hell and not ging to take it anymore.”

The majority of the studies looked at television, but some involved video games, films, music. Although there was some consideration of computer and online related activities, Emanuel admits that there is very little data on social networking and mobile phones. For a different perspective on the effects of new media and social networking, take a look at this blog from You and Me Media.

Dr. Emanuel, by the way, has children and allows no television in his home.  He did not comment about the Internet, though.