PR propulsion

iPad through the eyes of social media

info@voxuspr.com — 2010-04-15T16:14:14-07:00

With the recent availability of the iPad, I thought it might be interesting to jump into the social stream and see just how much buzz is really flying around in regard to the new device... and how that buzz relates to different key words. First, the buzz is massive. 1.45 million posts in the last 14 days reference the iPad. This is across blogs, video, micromedia, forums and more. I wondered of these 1.45 million posts how many mentioned important key words (to a marketer) like good, bad and buy. Simon says: Only 127,000 made reference to those three key words -- only 127k, ha. I also thought it might be interesting to see over the last 14 days how many posts mentioned iPad, Nook and Kindle, in relation to a secondary search term, eReader. iPad killed it! - iPad = 117,227 - Kindle = 4,198 - Nook = 1,767 Finally, I took the 1.45 million iPad posts and did a cross reference search for reference to Nook and Kindle. It resulted in 121k results, with the Kindle being mentioned quite a bit more than the Nook. Hmmm, does this hint to the death of Nook? Okay, really, finally.... You might ask, who and what were the top posters for these 1.45M iPad posters? Well, you're in luck, I can answer that for you. How about we look at blogs, video and forums: BLOGS VIDEO FORUMS Consider your death by stats and graphs for this week complete! -posted by Justin

Tiger's tale, robotic or real?

info@voxuspr.com — 2010-02-23T14:59:26-08:00

It's been like a train wreck that no one can keep their eyes off of and recently Tiger Woods made a speech to address his string of affairs. Unless you were living under a rock, you probably saw or heard it. Former White House Communications Director and current ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos called it "One of the most remarkable public apologies by a public figure ever," but I had a different point of view as a former broadcast journalist and current communications specialist. To me, today's press briefing by Tiger Woods was clearly calculated, methodical and at times robotic. What he needed to be was sincere, apologetic and most importantly real with himself and the whole world. Let us in Tiger... just this one time. In true Tiger fashion, the golfer never really gave us his true emotions and feelings. One minute he was apologizing, the other he was telling the media to stay away from his family -- showing little if any emotion. Bill Simons of ESPN.com came out with a great article right after the briefing. In addition to analyzing the speech, he took a look at just how controlling Woods has been during the entire period following his Thanksgiving car crash. Simmons writes, "Let's look at the facts. Tiger cheats on his wife relentlessly and brazenly. She finds out somehow. This leads to him crashing his car in the wee hours of Thanksgiving night. Scandal. Cover-up. More women come out. And more. And more. Tiger disappears like Jimmy Hoffa. Elin stops wearing her ring. Tiger stays hidden. Rumors swirl. By hiding, by not saying anything, Tiger enables every rumor and negative story to gain steam. When he sneaks away to a sex rehab clinic for 45 days, neither Tiger or his representatives acknowledges rumors that he's there. He emerges with a staged jogging photo op; one day later, three other photos of Tiger hitting golf balls, even seeming jovial in one of them, hit the wires. And then, today's prepared remarks. That came from the heart. Just as long as you didn't ask a follow-up question." Great observation, but my favorite take from the article is the following which pretty much painted Tiger as he appeared during the speech... as a robot. "He spoke for the next 13 and a half minutes. He spoke … like this. There was … no emotion … in his words. His face … was blank … and empty. Part of me … felt bad … for him. There were … a couple of moments … when it seemed … like … he was trying … to shed a tear … or have his voice catch … just for effect. You get … the idea." Bottom line is the speech, calculated (I think it is) or not, had the outward appearance of a control freak not changing his ways. If journalists ever double-crossed Tiger Woods PA (pre affairs) he essentially black-listed them. Well, how was the speech any different? He hand-picked the audience and didn't allow any questions. From a public relations perspective, I UNDERSTAND what Tiger and his entourage was trying to do, but I DON"T UNDERSTAND why they'd do it. This event immediately had me thinking of what a great SNL skit it would make, so staged and contrived it seemed almost unreal. Come to think of it, this may be one of the most remarkable public apologies by a public figure... just not in a good way. -posted by Andrew

The science of viral content

info@voxuspr.com — 2010-02-10T12:17:42-08:00

The NY TIMES published an article today on the findings of a scientific study of the "viral-ness" of various content. Researchers used the paper's most-emailed article list, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months. And the results were surprising: But it turns out that readers have more exalted tastes, according to the Penn researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman. People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics. Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles... In regard to the "awesomeness" of a story: The motivation for mailing these awe-inspiring articles is not as immediately obvious as with other kinds of articles, Dr. Berger said. Sharing recipes or financial tips or medical advice makes sense according to classic economic utility theory: I give you something of practical value in the hope that you’ll someday return the favor... They used two criteria for an awe-inspiring story: Its scale is large, and it requires “mental accommodation” by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way... “Emotion in general leads to transmission, and awe is quite a strong emotion,” [Berger] said. “If I’ve just read this story that changes the way I understand the world and myself, I want to talk to others about what it means. I want to proselytize and share the feeling of awe..." So what does that mean for the marketer? Perhaps this: make your content positive (avoid scare tactics), ensure that it provides insight that shakes a person's way of looking at the topic, and don't worry about the length needed to make your point. Then you too can be viral. And awesome. -posted by Paul

The future of display advertising

info@voxuspr.com — 2010-02-09T16:39:57-08:00

A great post from Aaron Finn, chairman and Chief Strategy Officer at AdReady. What will it take for display to be as big as—or bigger than—search? I recently had the privilege of speaking at the Kelsey Group ILM 2009 Conference. During my presentation, I said that I thought online display advertising had the potential to eclipse search in the next five years. Yes, you read that right. Sure, search advertising is a $10 billion industry, with nearly 1.5 million advertisers. Display advertising is only a $6 billion dollar industry, with about 50,000 advertisers. But I didn't say that because the conference had an open bar. I want to follow up on my assertion here, and outline for you why I see that potential—and I welcome any responses. Feel free to tell me if I'm in left field, or on the right track. So how has search advertising (PPC) become a $10 billion industry anyway? It's simple: search offers predictable results, straight-forward targeting, and clear metrics that demonstrate return on advertising spend (ROAS). As a result, search ads have become an advertising mainstay. But thanks to advances in technology—like our platform here at AdReady—display can offer those exact same benefits. Even for small- and medium-sized business previously priced out of display advertising. What's more, display can do things that search can't, like scale well and build a brand. Most analyst firms believe that search will remain a marketing juggernaut for years to come. For example, Forrester says that U.S. interactive marketing spend is projected to reach $55 billion by 2014, making up 21 percent of all marketing spending. Search marketing will lead the growth, totaling $31.5 billion by 2014, followed by display advertising, which will total $16.9 billion. So how could display advertising launch a coup d'état and overtake search? Four key areas pique my interest: 1. Cost/Scale: Search can get expensive. Especially if you want a hot keyword. And often, search lacks scale. Search marketing is getting saturated, driving up costs, and driving down overall effectiveness for the mass market. Most search marketers have unspent search budget. They simply can't spend everything they would like to. Display offers a great opportunity to spend that budget. And believe it or not, the best display advertisers are spending more on display than on search, to the tune of 2x to 10x. 2. Market Size: There are nearly 1.5 million search advertisers as compared to approximately 50,000 display advertisers, according to Google. Simply stated: what would the display market look like if it had 500,000 more advertisers? 3. Offline vs. Online: Offline advertising costs still dramatically eclipse both search and display, even as consumers spend more time online and less time with offline media. We're already seeing the transfer of marketing budgets from offline to online (some $144 billion offline according to Interpublic Group media agency Magna), and that will only increase. Search just doesn’t have the scale to accept those budgets. 4. Search/Display Combination: The Atlas Institute reports a 22 percent increase in click-through rate (CTR) when companies run search and display campaigns together. When search and display are combined, they provide a significant lift in onsite engagement, and an increase in online and offline purchasing by consumers exposed to integrated campaigns. None of the above is a slam dunk for knocking search off its dominant position—but taken together, they highlight some serious potential for making display a much more formidable competitor. Even Eric Schmidt said recently that display and mobile are Google’s two key areas of growth. No matter what else happens, the market is going to grow dramatically as platforms such as AdReady's continue to evolve—and demonstrate the ability to deliver successful ROAS. A couple years down the road, I believe that a lot of people will be surprised when they see how big a piece of the pie display ends up getting. What do you think?

More on the death of newspapers

info@voxuspr.com — 2010-01-08T10:40:00-08:00

Continuing a theme -- here's yet another piece on the "death of newspapers" by Richard Rodriguez in Harper's Magazine. It approaches the topic from an interesting angle: while the rise of the web may be the tool used to kill the newspaper, it is actually us, and our distaste for anything local as merely provincial, that is the proximate cause of death. To wit... In the nineteenth-century newspaper, the relationship between observer and observed was reciprocal: the newspaper described the city; the newspaper, in turn, was sustained by readers who were curious about the strangers that circumstance had placed proximate to them ... We no longer imagine the newspaper as a city or the city as a newspaper. Whatever I may say in the rant that follows, I do not believe the decline of newspapers has been the result solely of computer technology or of the Internet. The forces working against newspapers are probably as varied and foregone as the Model-T Ford and the birth-control pill. We like to say that the invention of the internal-combustion engine changed us, changed the way we live. In truth, we built the Model-T Ford because we had changed; we wanted to remake the world to accommodate our restlessness. We might now say: Newspapers will be lost because technology will force us to acquire information in new ways. In that case, who will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with “I.” Careening down Geary Boulevard on the 38 bus, I can talk to my my dear Auntie in Delhi or I can view snapshots of my cousin’s wedding in Recife or I can listen to girl punk from Glasgow. The cost of my cyber-urban experience is disconnection from body, from presence, from city. and... We will end up with one and a half cities in America—Washington, D.C., and American Idol. We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between “conservatives” and “liberals.” We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is “not a really good piece of fiction”—Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill.—two stars out of five). We are without obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia entry. -posted by Paul

The future of e-readers

info@voxuspr.com — 2009-12-18T09:00:14-08:00

Assuming you're not living under a rock, you've probably heard about Apple's rumored tablet device. Now, while this product does not yet exist, there's certainly been a lot of speculation on its form factor, software, interface, and more. One of the most interesting questions, at least to me, is: what would this rumored tablet do? Why would it exist? Apple doesn't – ever – develop products without the mass consumer in mind. And since Jobs returned, the expectation is that every product will be a unique experience. So niche consumers or specific vertical business applications are out. A scaled up iPhone is out. A simple e-reader (like the Kindle or Nook) is out. A Macbook without a keyboard is out. A re-baked Newton is out. So what will this thing do? Well, two groups have put together compelling design briefs on what a "next generation digital magazine" might be like. And interestingly, one of these, Time Inc., is rumored to be in talks with Apple. My guess? From a user experience standpoint, these are starting to get fairly close to what we'll soon see. Think of the iTablet, or whatever it's called, as a combination of an iPhone, with access to a similar (the same?) app store, and a dramatically improved e-reader. For the iPhone-esque portion, this tablet will do everything an iPhone does, except make phone calls, and will provide a significantly larger screen and more computing power, which should open up even more exciting applications, games, and more. For the e-reader, think of something completely new. Something that is not designed to put static content on a page, but rather will present a unique and immersive experience for the reader. And here's the key: a unique experience that the reader will pay for. Want to read basic web copy for Sports Illustrated? That's free. Want the physical magazine? Just subscribe. Would you like to get all our premium content, immersive experience and behind the scenes insight? That will cost you $0.99 and is available only through iTunes on Apple's Tablet. And maybe it will look something like this:

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

-posted by Paul

Facebook not so private

info@voxuspr.com — 2009-12-16T11:09:27-08:00

If you're on Facebook, you've most certainly had to sort through your privacy settings over the past week, as the company changed up the way it manages user content, contact lists, personal data, etc. Frankly, it was a bit of a pain. But why did you have to do it? Wall Street Journal reporter Julia Angwin explains in a recent article: This fall, Twitter turned its popularity into dollars, inking lucrative deals to allow its users' tweets to be broadcast via search algorithms on Google and Bing. Soon, Facebook followed suit with deals to distribute certain real-time data to Google and Bing. (Recall that despite being the fifth most popular Web site in the world, Facebook is barely profitable.) ... Just one catch: Facebook had just "exchanged" to Google and Microsoft something that didn't exist. The vast majority of Facebook users restrict updates to their friends, and do not expect those updates to appear in public search results. (In fact, many people restrict their Facebook profile from appearing at all in search results.) So Facebook had little content to provide to Google's and Bing's real-time search results. When Google's real-time search launched earlier this month, its results were primarily filled with Twitter updates. Ah, it all becomes clear. The old privacy settings were interfering with their ability to make money off your content. I think I'll stick with the old settings, thanks. (And more than 50% of users are following suit.) One final warning from Julia... But those who want a private experience on Facebook will have to work harder at it: if you inadvertently post a comment on a friend's profile page that has been opened to the public, your comment will be public too. Sigh. -posted by Paul

For the font geeks

info@voxuspr.com — 2009-12-02T09:36:28-08:00

This video is all sorts of awesome. -posted by Paul

What email says about you

info@voxuspr.com — 2009-12-02T09:25:30-08:00

Sometimes it’s a bit alarming when you realize what a particular brand says about you. For instance, if you're a Yahoo or AOL email user, you're also likely a deadbeat. At least, that's the finding from a research report correlating email addresses to credit scores. I'm feeling pretty good about my Gmail account right now. -posted by Paul

Keeping it in the family at Eggsprout

info@voxuspr.com — 2009-11-16T14:27:16-08:00

Many entrepreneurs not only bootstrap young companies; they rely on friends and family to supply manpower as well. Bellevue, WA-based Eggsprout is a good example of this. The company began last year as a site that enables and manages customizable networking (such as for conferences and alumni associations), but it has grown to encompass other endeavors such as the newly-launched Ripplely to help jobseekers better utilize personal networks on Facebook, and Price Yeti to track the best retail deals. As part of our continuing series of interviews with VCs, entrepreneurs, marketers and other influential businesspeople, VOXUS asked Eggsprout co-founder Brian Ma to discuss the startup and the benefits/pitfalls of being in business with family and close friends. 1) We understand that you started Eggsprout with your brother, and while they aren't related to you, your other two partners are siblings as well. What are the pros and cons for going into business with such a close-knit group? How do you manage to keep personal boundaries? Haha, I didn't plan for it to go this way. I was just looking for really bright, really motivated, and just awesome people in general to start our business with. In hindsight, I'm actually glad it turned out this way. Working with siblings adds an interesting dynamic. It actually makes our discussions very productive because we can cut through all the "don't hurt feelings" crap and get straight to the point. If you're wrong, people will tell you and that's how I think a startup needs to operate. I've been told I'm wrong so many times I can't even keep count. And I really appreciate that kind of brutal, yet honest feedback. ... When you have four really bright people arguing about the future of a product, some discussions can get really heated. I feel really blessed being able to work with these guys though, because at the end of the day, it's just business. Our secret to resolving these conflicts: we end every meeting with a game of super smash bros brawl. The winner is right and the loser is wrong. :) 2) Eggsprout faces some stiff competition in the professional networking site market. You've said that your long term goal is to grow the company; what are your primary targets? You've started to carve a niche in the job postings arena, but where else are you focusing? And since you're bootstrapping Eggsprout, how do you plan to reach out without spending a lot of money? Is social or viral marketing your vehicle of choice? ...I'm assuming you're referring to LinkedIn, and if that's the case, we're completely different. We help professional groups build and manage a community around their members which in reality is very different from LinkedIn. LinkedIn is focused on you as the professional, and we're focused on the groups and you being a valuable contributor to those groups. We're much more like Ning, but we think there's a niche there in the DIY site for just professionals. Right now, we're focused on growing our community of network creators. It actually takes a lot of commitment and energy to use a new platform and manage a group, so we're focused on making everything extremely easy from the technical standpoint. Our revenues come from sharing the revenues network owners generate from job postings and events so we're not successful until our network creators are - it makes it a very good partner relationship. The basic platform will always remain free and as we grow, we'll continue to innovate to add innovative services that creators may decide to pay for. I'm no expert in marketing, so my answer to your last question is probably: yes. We'll do all those things, but at the end of the day, we put a whole lot more priority in making the experience awesome for our current loyal users then spending money to acquire more. We believe an awesome product and loyal customers who love it is the best marketing tool out there. 3) You've got a secondary project in the social networking market. How do you juggle two initiatives, even though they might be compatible? Did you plan to have a number of projects under the Eggsprout name when you launched the company, or did it just happen? If the latter, do you think you'll keep future projects under the Eggsprout name, or establish another company that becomes the development umbrella? Actually, there are two labs projects. One is Ripplely.com (a Facebook app that allows you to tap your network and your friend's network for jobs) and the other one is PriceYeti.com (track any product and get instant notifications when the price drops). Both are public so feel free to check it out. We decided to explore these lab projects because Eggsprout was at a stage where it really wasn't the technology that needed work, it was the handholding, marketing, and growing of the user base. The platform itself is actually really powerful. So what do you do with a bunch of awesome people that can churn code like there's no tomorrow? Solve more world problems. We're actually not sure where this'll go, but that's the point of labs projects. Twitter came out of a labs project. So did Gmail and Google Maps and a whole bunch of other successful stuff. It's a great way to relieve our creative entrepreneurial energies and have fun while doing it. :)