Web ushers in age of ambient intimacy - International Herald Tribune

"A single page that like a social gazette from the 18th century delivered a long list of up-to-the-minute gossip about their friends, around the clock, all in one place. A stream of everything that's going on in their lives," as Zuckerberg [Facebook] put it.
In essence, Facebook users didn't think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it "ambient awareness."

Each so-called tweet [Twitter] was so brief as to be virtually meaningless. But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends' lives in a way he never had before. The ambient information becomes like "a type of ESP," as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

"Merely looking at a stranger's Twitter or Facebook feed isn't interesting, because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day, though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it's a novel." - Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley

Facebook and Twitter may have pushed things into overdrive, but the idea of using communication tools as a form of "co-presence" has been around for a while.

"I outsource my entire life, I can solve any problem on Twitter in six minutes."

Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they're trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary.
In an age of awareness, perhaps the person you see most clearly is yourself.

WSJ : Business Technology 

Many businesses have launched corporate blogs in an effort to better communicate with customers and capture a little Web-2.0 mojo. But Huffington Post they ain’t: Not only are these corporate blogs boring as paint, but the businesses behind admit they don’t have much value.

The number of business-to-business (B2B) firms that started blogging in 2007 plummeted compared with 2006 as corporate bloggers ran into roadblocks stemming from a misalignment between invested effort and expected returns. Rather than cross blogging off of the marketing communication list, B2B marketers would do better to embrace one of the four strategies prominently used by bloggers to attract readers:

• Build conversations
• Engage community members in sharing their experiences with their online peers.

They’re not handling that challenge well: a Forrester study found that most B2B blogs are “dull, drab, and don’t stimulate discussion.” Seventy percent stuck to business or technical topics, 74% rarely get comments, and 56% simply regurgitated press releases or other already-public news. Not surprisingly, 53% of B2B marketers say that blogging has marginal significance or is irrelevant to their strategies—the rest call it somewhat or highly significant–and the number of new corporate blogs among the companies Forrester tracks has dropped from 36 in 2006 to just three in 2008.

Forrester doesn’t recommend that businesses give up on blogging, however. Instead, it suggests that they spice the blogs up. Most B2B bloggers publish irregularly, don’t stick to it for very long, and rarely inject personality into their posts. That’s a formula for failure. In order to make a blog lively, a business has to offer visitors something more – musings from an executive, insight into how a product decision was made, something funny.

A NoahBrier.com project

TNS > Published research > Digital Media study

A new study jointly published by TNS and Digital Media magazine reveals the brands whose digital presence is strongest in the minds of consumers across Asia.

Top 5 digital advertisers ranked in order of awareness:

The study also reveals:

• Websites, banner ads and pop-ups still recalled most commonly though consumers are sceptical of pop-ups and banners
• Recommendations from friends and family are still considered most trustworthy
• Emerging digital formats such as in-game and ads via mobile handsets have some way to go before establishing consumer credibility

 Download the electronic version of Full Report free of charge. 

Universal McCan Research - How the internet turned us all into influencers

Today the web is driven by its’ users and peoples’ thoughts on everything are found across the web, personal blogs, to reviews on price comparison sites and wish lists on Amazon are just some examples. It is now incredibly easy to share opinions and cultivate influence, often without even trying.
The result has been the democratisation of influence to the masses. Today opinions and experiences are shared worldwide.

The result is an influence economy that is forcing everyone in the public realm including the owners of products and brands to become more transparent, open, conversational and honest. They have to rethink the way that influence is distributed and the role of marketing communications in an information landscape dictated by consumers.

 Download the electronic version of Research Report free of charge. 

CNN.com

The Emotiv EPOC headset - the first Brain Computer Interface (BCI) device for the gaming market is the technology behind the revolution -- and the company claims to have already mastered thought control.

The EPOC detects and processes real time brain activity patterns (small voltage changes in the brain caused by the firing of neurons) using a device that measures electric activity in the brain. In total, it picks up over 30 different expressions, emotions and actions.

Efficient Frontier - Resources

The highly complex search marketing industry presents challenges to the marketer that demand sophisticated solutions. The search engine marketplace can adopt solutions similar to those that revolutionized financial markets. Just as the algorithmic approach of modern portfolio theory revolutionized financial investing, PageRank and the search engines’ subsequent algorithms revolutionized the searcher experience and search engine marketplaces. Thus, applying portfolio algorithms to keyword marketplaces is the only logical effective approach that can fully navigate the search space to ensure maximum return.

Figure 3: Portfolio Theory Applied to Search Engine Marketing
 
The triangles on the chart represent possible portfolio allocations.

Treemaps
Treemaps can be applied to your search campaign. In the fictitious example used here, the smallest rectangles represent individual keywords, and the size of the rectangles indicates spend. The keywords are grouped by campaign, and finally by search engine. The color indicates ROI, with red representing poor ROI, and purple representing positive ROI. The shade of the color indicates how negative or positive the ROI is, with white representing average ROI. You could also use revenue, CPA, impressions, CTR, CPC, or any other metric to size or color your rectangles.

  Download the electronic version of Algorithmic Solution for SEA free of charge. 

Official Google Blog

Modes
In the next 10 years, we will see radical advances in modes of search: mobile devices offering us easier search, Internet capabilities deployed in more devices, and different ways of entering and expressing your queries by voice, natural language, picture, or song, just to name a few.

Media
We’ve barely scratched the surface with universal search, but it’s an important first step to exploring the full range of what we can do with rich media.

Personalization
Search engines of the future will be better in part because they will understand more about you, the individual user.
Location
Since location is relevant to a lot of searches, incorporating user location and context will be pivotal in increasing the relevance and ease of search in the future.
Social
There’s a lot of expertise, knowledge, and context in users’ social graphs, so putting tools in place to make “friend-augmented" search easy could make search more efficient and more relevant.

Language
The basic concept is – if the answer exists online anywhere in any language, we’ll go get it for you, translate it and bring it back in your native tongue.

Conclusion
We’re all familiar with 80-20 problems, where the last 20% of the solution is 80% of the work. Search is a 90-10 problem. Today, we have a 90% solution: I could answer all of my unanswered Saturday questions, not ideally or easily, but I could get it done with today’s search tool. (If you’re curious, the answers are below.) However, that remaining 10% of the problem really represents 90% (in fact, more than 90%) of the work.
Coming up with elegant, fitting and relevant solutions to meet the challenges of mobility, modes, media, personalization, location, socialization, and language will take decades.

The ideal search engine
Your best friend with instant access to all the world’s facts and a photographic memory of everything you’ve seen and know.

How Companies Use Twitter to Bolster Their Brands

A growing number of companies are keeping track of what's said about their brands on Twitter. Comcast (CMCSA), Dell (DELL), General Motors (GM), H&R Block (HRB), Kodak (EK), and Whole Foods Market (WFMI) are among a handful of companies haunting Twitter to do everything from burnish brands to provide customer service. The attention to Twitter reflects the power of new social media tools in letting consumers shape public discussion over brands. "The real control of the brand has moved into the customer's hands, and technology has enabled that," says Lane Becker, president of Get Satisfaction, a Web site that draws together customers and companies to answer each other's questions and give feedback on products and services.

Begun in 2006, Twitter is a pioneer of microblogging, a way for users to keep others informed of their current status by way of text messaging, instant messaging, e-mail, or the Web. Other services that have followed suit include Jaiku, Pownce, FriendFeed, and Plurk. At this stage, many brands are sticking to Twitter, which has amassed a larger number of users. While Twitter doesn't release exact numbers, estimates range from 1 million to 3 million users.

GM Shifts Gears With Consolidated Global Search Plan - Advertising Age - Digital

General Motors Corp. started to centralize its global search strategy late last year, and the auto giant expects to roll it out in 42 countries by the end of 2008. All the regions now share knowledge and metrics.
That hasn't just brought cost efficiencies. Early results show GM has increased click-through rates by more than 20% in some countries. The marketer cited better packaging of search terms and building more areas of consumer relevance on improved GM sites that move visitors quicker to the information they seek.

GM spends between $50 million and $70 million on search annually in the U.S. alone. The automaker has moved almost 20% of its U.S. media spending into digital in the past three years. GM used $197 million of its total U.S. measured media spending of $2 billion for online ads (excluding search) last year.

Buyology - The Truth & Lies, about why we buy

Subliminal messaging is considered one of the great evils of the marketing industry, but it's a thing of the past now, isn't it? We're all too transparent, too touchy feely, too too 2.0 to even think about doing something that insidious. Right? Right? Wrong....According to the results revealed in Martin Lindstrom's new book, Buyology, subliminal messaging is alive and well.

Until now, most marketing, advertising and branding strategies have been built on qualitative and quantitative market research. The fact is, roughly 90% of our consumer buying behavior is unconscious, and we can’t actually explain our preferences, or likely buying decisions, with any accuracy. So market surveys and customer questionnaires are of dubious value. As brands pour millions of dollars into advertising that may or may not hit the mark, we realize that the time has come for a paradigm shift.
Advertisers need to know what directs our buying decisions. NeuroMarketing will help us make the transition towards understanding the truth and lies about why we buy. It circumvents the question and answer approach of conventional research. A non-verbal research method, NeuroMarketing bypasses a subject’s claims by going straight to the source and examining the consumer’s brain responses.

Buyology unveils the results of marketing guru Martin Lindstrom’s pioneering three-year, $7 million dollar study that used the latest in brain scan technology to peer into the minds of over 2,000 people from around the world.

you want to examine some of the ethical concerns about the technique, a good place to start is www.commercialalert.org.

 Download the electronic version of Table of Contents free of charge. 

Avenue A | Razorfish: Slant

The explosive growth of social networks across all age demographics is largely because of our social graphs. It’s the mapping of who is connected to whom within a network of peers. And as a result, people are increasingly surfing the social networks and the broader web through the context of their friends and acquaintances—what those friends talk about, what they recommend, and what they consider to be relevant.

According to a Fast Company magazine article, the affect of the social graph on marketing is going to be even greater than that of radio, the telegraph, or television. "Community should be at the core of all media sites. From now on, we'll see that social media doesn't need to be separate from traditional media. The Media is Social."

 Download the electronic version of Insight Report free of charge. 

Efficient Frontier - Research

A global macro economic slowdown has begun to affect advertisers, although online advertising is expected to grow by 6% from 2007 to 2008, according to the US Online Advertising Forecast, 2008-2013 from Jupiter Research.
Search advertising, which is predicted to grow more rapidly than online advertising as a whole (by 14% from 2007 to 2008) according to the same study.

Efficient Frontier analyzed data from a fixed sample of large U.S. search engine advertisers across multiple verticals, including financial services, travel, retail and automotive to shed light on trends in search engine performance and economic activity.

The Efficient Frontier U.S. Search Engine Performance Report: Q2 2008 analyzes trends in search engine spend, vertical performance, click-through rates (CTRs), cost per click (CPC), and return on investment (ROI).

 Download the electronic version of Search Engine Performance Report: Q2 2008 free of charge. 

Digital Branding

Download the electronic version of Digital Branding Presentation free of charge.