Can consumers be controlled? Is tapping users to create advertising a fad, or a strategy?
The questions are open for debate, and they were debated, this morning in NYC at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s User-Generated Content & Social Networking Forum, with the participation of:
Cheryl Guerin, VP Promotions & Interactives, MasterCard, International
Tom Lynch, VP Marketing Strategy, Central Region, Avenue A | Razorfish
“What’s your priceless pick?” Mastercard asks consumers at Priceless.com, leveraging its long standing “priceless“ brand development theme strategy:
This is your chance to tell the world what’s “Priceless” to you. Your Priceless Pick can be just about anything–an experience, a place, your favorite charity, a restaurant, a song–anything! You can even submit your own photos, video clips, and audio files, it’s easy. Just, remember, the best priceless picks are the ones that other people can experience for themselves.
For Guerin, the “fill out the blanks model” of the Mastercard consumer-focused initiative represents a good formula for providing users a voice, but a controlled by the brand one.
If consumers want to “submit a pick,” a “priceless” one, they are taken to a well-structured online form. Mastercard then vets the submissions and only showcases those that serve to support the overall branding and marketing objectives of Mastercard.
Guerin underscored that Mastercard’s Priceless.com initiative is viewed as a component of the company’s overall integrated campaign strategy and is therefore supported by traditional (big) media spend and ROI analysis.
The consumer-focused Website had its “coming out” at the Academy Awards to generate awareness and trendy buzz. Mastercard evaluates Website traffic and user engagement at the site to gauge success, as well as the volume of user “picks” submissions.
Guerin proudly noted that with 100,000 submissions, consumers are actively engaging with the brand in a positive way, “only 200 entries were inappropriate.”
Not all user-generated advertising and marketing campaigns can be so finely structured, however.
What happens if something goes wrong? Lynch believes that if brands do not engage consumers in “relevant and meaningful” ways, they will be “called out” by passionate user groups.
There is a “dynamic shift” in the power equation between brands and their audience, according to Lynch.
Because groups can mobilize faster and build momentum, marketers can not hope to just “talk over them,” Lynch said, “there is nothing we can do to “make them go away.”
The genie is out of the bottle, and “the only control we have is to engage a dialogue.”
Did you know “young adults are the primary trend drivers in our society.” So believes Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, and very young trend setter for his own acount!
What is Facebook up to now? Facebook goes commercial, big time.
By using Facebook, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States.
Facebook may use information in your profile without identifying you as an individual to third parties. We do this for purposes such as aggregating how many people in a network like a band or movie and personalizing advertisements and promotions so that we can provide you Facebook. We believe this benefits you. You can know more about the world around you and, where there are advertisements, they’re more likely to be interesting to you. For example, if you put a favorite movie in your profile, we might serve you an advertisement highlighting a screening of a similar one in your town. But we don’t tell the movie company who you are.
How Facebook sells its 24 million Facebookers to advertisers:
Marketing to young adults on their own terms is critical for success. Facebook offers relevant and integrated advertising opportunities to engage the tech-savvy youth audience.
While Facebook allows third party companies to buy targeted access to individual Facebookers, Facebook believes all is “relevant and integrated” advertising good because “we don’t tell the (X) company who you are.”
Perhaps not, but Facebook may very well tell companies everything you do and everything about you!
Do Facebookers really welcome ads served just for them? We may soon find out. Facebook has entered the for-fee, sponsored polling business.
READ REST OF STORY BELOW IMAGE
What is Facebook Polls?
An easy way to get quick answers to your questions. Allows you to ask detailed questions, target them to specific user segments and receive real-time responses. You can target Facebook users based on gender, age, school, location, or profile keyword.
The poll will display in users’ News Feed.
In other words, if any corporation, organization or individual wants to “poll” people who describe themselves as “sex maniac,” Facebook Polls is the direct product for them, all it takes is $5 to start. From there, the Facebook Polling sky is the limit:
Facebook charges you based on the number of responses you indicate that you need, multiplied by the amount that you indicate that you’re willing to pay per response. The more you pat per response, the faster Facebook delivers complete results.
Does Facebook stand behind its “fast” results? NO:
We do not give refunds for any reason. This includes, but is not limited to, polls we removed for any reason, polls we removed at your request, or if the site was down for some or all of the time that your poll was supposed to run.
Facebook will not verify the accuracy nor the statistical significance of response data.
Is the vaunted Facebook “Social Graph” now very business rules anti-social?
Worried yet about Google Big Brother peering into your online business?
Google Analytics: Should Google be minding YOUR Web business? I undercored last month: Is it really prudent for Web sites to open their back office to Google? Should Google really know how its AdWords customers are investing in online advertising with Google competitors?
Google enthuses over its newly Googley Feeburner: “we constantly aim to give AdWords advertisers broader distribution to an even wider audience of users.”
Dick Costolo, Feedburner CEO and estatic new Googler, weighs in on why Google is keen on Feedburner:
Google’s competencies and focus around publisher analytics, distribution, and monetization map perfectly to our suite of services.
Publishers want a single dashboard and single source for the metrics that give them feedback about the value of their content and its impact on their business. By combining our market leading feed metrics with Google’s market leading site and marketing analytics, publishers now get a comprehensive, 360-degree view of their audience. This ‘total perspective’ has long been a goal of ours, and we think our combined analytics offering is going to provide publishers with previously undiscovered insights and opportunities.
The measurement of awareness advertising is evolving from unique impressions to audience engagement. By providing our hundreds of thousands of publishers with Google’s world-class advertising marketplace and metrics, we can provide far more value to publishers and begin to deliver this next step in ROI measurement to advertisers.
Data, data and more business proprietary data, moving over to Google’s worldwide server farms for perpetual “safekeeping.”
What is to become of this latest big batch of confidential information on the businesses of others that Google acquires in acquiring Feedburner?
Feedburner is a website operated by Google Inc., Feedburner states. As such, the Google Privacy Policy rules. NOT a very reassuring state of affairs!
UPDATE: Google users ought not be breathing any sigh of privacy relief, at any time, I warned just two weeks ago (see story below).
European regulators concurr: Google Inc., owner of the world’s most popular search engine, may be violating the European Union’s privacy laws by storing information on customer queries for as long as two years, advisers to EU regulators told the company, according to Bloomberg News reports.
GOOGLE PRIVACY JUNGLE: WHERE IS YOUR DATA? DON’T ASK GOOGLE!
May 12, 2007: “Google CEO wants your personal information” I underscored in reporting Google’s announced claim of “taking steps to further improve our privacy practices” two months ago.
The touted Google privacy “step” at the time was that user search data will be “much more anonymous, so that it can no longer be identified with individual users (after 18-24 months).”
I asked though, “Will Google searchers be breathing collective sighs of privacy relief three years out?” Not exactly, according to Google itself:
Do these changes guarantee anonymization? It is difficult to guarantee complete anonymization.
In fact, Google users ought not be breathing any sigh of privacy relief, at any time.
Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel, in March:
When you search on Google, we collect information about your search, such as the query itself, IP addresses and cookie details. Previously, we kept this data for as long as it was useful. Today we’re pleased to report a change in our privacy policy: Unless we’re legally required to retain log data for longer, we will anonymize our server logs after a limited period of time. When we implement this policy change in the coming months, we will continue to keep server log data (so that we can improve Google’s services and protect them from security and other abuses)—but will make this data much more anonymous, so that it can no longer be identified with individual users, after 18-24 months.
While Google Speak is seductive, it is not meaningful. Here’s why:
Improve Our Services
Every action of every individual taken through any and all Google services, public or private, is tracked, logged, analyzed and archived for seeming perpetuity, for the benefit of Google’s corporate operations and on Google’s servers throughout the world.
Google wraps its user tracking in Googley “quality improvement” rhetoric.
Really? Google targets every single person and every single organization in the world as a Google user and/or customer. Is it really necessary for a company whose name and business is driven by mathematical formulas and algorithms to accumulate Internet activity data for every man, woman and child in the guise of “search quality” and product development?
Why must Google “spy” on all the world’s mouse clicks?
After all, The Pew Internet & American Life Project relies on a few thousand telephone interviews to make definitive pronouncements of the entire U.S. adult population’s online behavior!
Maintain Security and Prevent Fraud Abuse
Does Google have a slam dunk on this one? NO. Google does not rely on a click by click analysis to “maintain security and prevent fraud abuse” in the click fraud detection arena.
Google told me it relies on two principal automated methods of analysis to uncover prohibited click activity:
1) Pattern Recognition Analysis of click sequence for signs of a malicious pattern to drive up an advertiser’s clicks and or a publisher’s earnings.
2) Statistical Anomaly Analysis to detect abnormal network behavior based on historical metrics.
Google can utilize automated flagging methods as well then to “maintain security and prevent fraud abuse” without subjecting every single piece of user data to analysis and retention.
Comply with Legal Obligations to Retain Data
Perhaps, but Google does not need to go “above and beyond the call of duty”!
Google believes it may have an ace in the (privacy) hole:
It’s also worth reiterating that we do not ask our users for their names, address, or phone numbers to use most of our services.
What is THAT Google stance really worth though?
In its “Complaint and Request for Injunction, Request for Investigation and Other Relief” before the Federal Trade Commission, in the matter of Google, Inc. and DoubleClick, Inc., the Electronic Privacy Information Center last month wrote:
1) Courts have recognized a privacy interest in the collection of information that concerns Internet use even where the information may not be personally indentifiable.
2) Privacy laws routinely require that information about consumers be deleted once it is no longer needed.
3) The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data recognize that “the right of individuals to access and challenge personal data is generally regarded as perhaps the most important privacy protection safeguard.”
I have oft pointed out that Google does not offer any absolute guarantee of users’ rights to “access and challenge” personal data. Therefore, Google does not provide the “most important privacy protection safeguard.”
In the Google era, all the world needs to know is that the Google cloud is the only place to be, the world’s safe haven, Fleischer asserts:
Now, if you want to know how your data is being protected, the important question is not “where is my data?”, but rather “who holds my data?”
Perhaps, but users’ data ought only be “held” upon users’ consent and subject to users’ meaningful access to and control of the data, even if Google is the one doing the “holding.”
Despite Zuckerberg’s incredulous insistence that MySpace is not Facebook’s competitive peer, MySpace does indeed reign supreme in the social networking space: MySpace has the friends, and the money.
Tom Anderson counts 175 million friends at MySpace; Rupert Murdoch is to count $500 million in revenues at MySpace this year.
How friendly is Facebook?
Nielsen/NetRatings’ April numbers peg MySpace at 57 million U.S. visitors, compared with Facebook’s 14.4 million. Hitwise says MySpace saw 80% of “social networking visits,” seven times Facebook’s “category visits” traffic.
What’s more, MySpace drives traffic to Facebook!
Hitwise: One in four visits (25% of upstream clicks) to the 19 other top social networking sites came directly from MySpace in April 2007, demonstrating the dominance of MySpace and indicating that many users maintain more than one social network.
At the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City Friday, I heard MySpace Senior Vice President for Public Affairs, Jeff Berman, underscore to MoveOn.org that YouTube was built into a $1.65 billion video company, thanks to MySpace.
How do MySpace and Facebook stack up on the monetization front?
Rupert Murdoch, News Corp. CEO, on Fox Interactive Media/MySpace in the company’s F3Q’07 earnings call earlier this month:
Fox Interactive continues to grow steadily both in traffic and revenue metrics. We are on pace to match or exceed our previously stated revenue goal of $500 million to this fiscal year, and have increased our position as the web’s most viewed online network with nearly 50 billion page views in the United States and approximately 100 million unique users worldwide each month.
Zuckerberg is in no monetization hurry at Facebook, however.
WSJ: It’s unclear how exactly Facebook plans to make money from the (new) platform strategy. Classified advertising; while now free, could eventually become a new revenue stream.
If Facebook has missed its multi billion dollar buyout bonanza opportunity, it ought to double down on its own monetization.
Google has long laid down the Google SERP ranking law in its Webmaster Quality Guidelines, saying it aims to wipe out "deceptive or manipulative behavior."
A core Webmaster Quality Guideline is: "Don't create multiple pages with substantially duplicate content."
Why then is Google encouraging just such duplicate page creation to promote uptake of Google Analytics and Google Base?
The Google Analytics team on disregarding Google Webmaster Guidelines, for the sake of building demand for Google Analytics and Google Base:
Do you know how much traffic you're getting from Google Base? Google Analytics is a free and easy way to monitor all traffic coming to your site, including traffic from your Google Base listings. At first glance, it would seem tracking listings from Google Base would be simple. However, since Base listings often appear within the regular search results on Google, it can be tricky to differentiate traffic from the two sources. One way to differentiate traffic is to create unique landing pages on your website specifically for Base listings. You can do this by simply creating two versions of the same page on your website, but giving one a slightly different name. Here's an example:
Regular landing page: http://example.com/page1.html Unique Base landing page: http://example.com/page2.html
By creating two versions of the same page on your website and submitting the unique landing page URLs to Base, Google Analytics can show you exactly how much traffic is being sent to your website from Base.
Zoran, at the Google Base Group, on Google's new message:
Just trying to translate Google base post to normal English: Google base guys are telling us you can make tons of duplicated content but yeeea you can track users better with Google Analytics.
The pre-Google Analytics Google on duplicate content:
Our users typically want to see a diverse cross-section of unique content when they do searches. In contrast, they're understandably annoyed when they see substantially the same content within a set of search results.
WHY THEN IS GOOGLE RISKING ANNOYING "ITS USERS" IN THE NAME OF "SELLING" MORE GOOGLE ANALYTICS AND GOOGLE BASE USAGE?
Google dimissing duplicate content pages as "unique" landing pages further muddies the murky Google SERP world which sparks fear and intimidation throughout the Web's Webmaster world.
In Google dependency is risky business I discuss the proprietary risk Web properties run by succumbing to Google's demand to patrol their sites with the goal of casting judgement on Google worthiness, or not, via a not-so-innocent "Quality Score" determination.
All is fair in love and war, AND, apparently, in Google's Web world.
Hitwise is aptly named: It creates Internet hits, courtesy of its “Hitwise Intelligence Analyst Weblogs”!
The blog of LeeAnn Prescott, Research Director at Hitwise, solicits prospective clients to use its: “competitive insights to maximize online marketing programs.”
Prescott’s latest “competitive insights” posted at her blog concern Gmail, asserting:
Users of Gmail are a different breed than the average Yahoo Mail and Hotmail users, which closely resemble the online population in terms of age and socioeconomic status.
How so? Prescott’s stated backup:
Gmail users are much more likely to be young, high income, and in the early adopter segments. For the four weeks ending 4/28/07, 54% of visits to Gmail were from users between 18 and 34, compared to 42% for Yahoo! Mail and 44% for Hotmail. 18% of Gmail's visits were from those with average annual household incomes between $100,000 and $149,999, compared to 15% from Hotmail and 13% for Yahoo! Mail.
How can Hitwise be so sure? 1) The stats on their face are not overwhelmingly convincing of any particular Gmail "strengths" and 2) How were they derived?
After all, Internet measurement competitors comScore and Nielsen/NetRatings have been issued a “Audit Challenge” from Interactive Advertising Bureau President Randall Rothenberg, calling for submission to “third-party audits of their measurement processes.”
Hitwise on its “measurement processes”:
Hitwise has developed proprietary software that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use to analyze website usage logs created on their network. The anonymous data sent to Hitwise from the ISPs include a range of industry standard metrics relating to the viewing of websites including page requests, visits and average visit length.Hitwise is also able to combine this rich ISP data with region specific demographic and lifestyle information across thousands of website that are reported on every day.
In Web 2.0: What does Pew really know? last week I dissected the validity of The Pew Internet & American Life Project’s definitive assertions about the online behavior of the totality of the American adult populace.
Commercial Internet data shops—comScore, Hitwise —and self-serve Web traffic tracking applications—Alexa, Google Trends—supply the blogosphere with continuous fodder for tabloid style headline stories, I noted.
The present Hitwise post on Gmail is not itself of overt “tabloid” style, but it nevertheless inspired the likes of Mashable’s “Gmail users are younger, richer, good in bed” headlined post, which concluded “As for performance in the bedroom - well, we kinda lied. In fact, the stats show that solitary Gmail users are far more likely to Google themselves.”
Really? Even if Hitwise’s data is accepted as an accurate reflection of usage of Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail, definitive differentiating characterizations of Gmailers vs. Yahoo Mailers and Hotmailers are not a given.
Precise traffic numbers are not stated; “Market share” as reported by Hitwise:
Yahoo Mail 13 times that of Gmail Hotmail 6 times that of Gmail
Gmail users are much more likely to be young, high income, and in the early adopter segments, is the Hitwise assertion, but derived only from comparisons of widely differing absolute usage, with only minimally differing demographic segmentation.
The Hitwise headline is “Gmail Traffic Up 17% Since Opening Up, Still Early Adopter Appeal.”
Yes, AND in the competitive email scheme of things, Google remains solidly in third-place behind Yahoo and Microsoft, despite its supposedly being a magnet for the young, rich and hip.
Google is doing a full court press for “V2” of Google Analytics.
Occam’s Razor blog by Avinash Kaushik, an “independent consultant” and author of “Web Analytics, an hour a day”:
Version 2 is so radically different and provides such a compelling value proposition to users of web analytics that I am excited to write a blog post about a product (the first time I have done this in 11 months of existence of this blog).
I am also the Analytics Evangelist for Google but you’ll see that I am so excited about GA V2 not because I consult for Google but because I believe that v2 is a leap forward for all of its current users and a new standard for the industry when it comes to interacting complex web analytics data.
Why is Kaushik gushing from his analytics heart for the product he is paid by Google to evangelize?:
Notice the awesome new data interaction model.
Take the enhanced “data discoverability” for a spin.
Context is king! Find your context quickly.
Ahh…. Segmentation is just a step away.
Upgraded goodies: Schedule and email any report or dashboards, Better site overlay, Much nicer page level reporting and more.
Much of the Google Analytics V2 is aimed at presentation and interaction enhancements. Kaushik is effusive:
As you’ll use the tool you’ll see more and more examples of effective communication of data via a very well thought out UI that is perhaps the best one today amongst all web analytics tools. People underestimate the value of being pretty.
Kaushik can not be restrained: “The tool is easier to use, key metrics jump out to you and it is ever more easy to understand what is going one (if only all sexiness in the world was so productive! : ))”.
“It is both a blessing and a curse that there so much data that we have access to,” Kaushik notes. The Google Anlaytics curse he alludes to is hardly a bad one, though:
As you use the tool you’ll find many little and big ways in which the new UI makes it easier for you to drill down, drill up and drill around.
But what about Google’s drilling, “down, up and around” everyone else’s data!
Google solicits:
Track and compare all your ads, email newsletters, affiliate campaigns, referrals, paid links, and keywords on Google and other search engines. Google Analytics tracks all online campaigns, from emails to keywords, regardless of search engine or referral source.
BUT is it really prudent for Web sites to open their back office to Google? Should Google really know how its AdWords customers are investing in online advertising with Google competitors?
Why did we develop this new version? Google asks and answers:
Since Google Analytics launched in November 2005, the demand for website analytics has increased significantly. Today there are hundreds of thousands of Google Analytics customers, and web analytics has moved from being a niche function to becoming a mainstream aspect of the business for companies of all sizes.
In other words, Web analytics is a mission critical function. As such, it should be handled accordingly, in-house or with a neutral third-party.
Google owned Analytics is not an arms length, neutral third party. Google has a vested interest in knowing and understanding Google Analytics data resulting from both AdWords campaigns and advertising campaigns placed with competitors.
What does Google do with the information it creates about other Websites’ customers?
Who really knows? As is typical Google fashion, the Google Analytics Terms of Service, coupled with the Google Privacy Policy, are not clear cut and provide Google with ample discretionary room for exclusions, disclaimers and general “outs” to suit its purposes, whatever they may be.
Google Analytics offers marketing speak assurances about the sanctity of others’ business data:
Google takes the trust people place in us very seriously, and is pledged to safeguard the privacy of your corporate data. We understand that web analytics data is sensitive information, so we accord it the ironclad protection it deserves.
Unfortunately, where it counts, Google is not so iron clad. Below are excerpts of the Google Analytics documentation: How Google defines “Customer Data” that it collects on the customers of the Websites that use Google Analytics and what it says it has the right to do with the data it collects from the Google Analytics tracked Websites.
"Customer Data" means the data concerning the characteristics and activities of visitors to your website that is collected through use of the UTM and then forwarded to the Servers and analyzed by the Processing Software. "Servers" means the servers controlled by Google (or its wholly owned subsidiaries) upon which the Processing Software and Customer Data are stored.
Information Rights. Google and its wholly owned subsidiaries may retain and use, subject to the terms of its Privacy Policy, information collected in Your use of the Service. Google will not share information associated with You or your Site with any third parties unless Google (i) has Your consent; (ii) concludes that it is required by law or has a good faith belief that access, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the public; or (iii) provides such information in certain limited circumstances to third parties to carry out tasks on Google's behalf (e.g., billing or data storage) with strict restrictions that prevent the data from being used or shared except as directed by Google . When this is done, it is subject to agreements that oblige those parties to process such information only on Google's instructions and in compliance with this Agreement and appropriate confidentiality and security measures.
Sounds good? The umbrella privacy policy which governs all Google actions leaves the Google door open for Google Analytics collected data “auditing, research and analysis,” by Google.
Google wants to “organize” all the world’s information for “safekeeping” on its servers throughout the world. Companies’ customer data, however, ought to be treated as mission critical, and therefore as proprietary.
The best place for proprietary safekeeping is in-house, the second best is a secure, disinterested, neutral third-party service provider.
The number one search engine and search advertising engine and contextual advertising engine and soon display advertising engine…is not a neutral third-party service vendor.
Moreover, it competes directly against all of the “search engines and referral sources” that it tracks in Google Analytics.
UPDATE MAY 9, 2007: Mpire launches "Distributor Shopping Network (DSN)," Web service APIs and custom widgets with Mpire's shopping engine to "offer a custom, private-labeled shopping experience on your own site." The DSN offers Mpire's meta-shopping database of new and used products, coupons, reviews and pricing analytics, and represents listings from eBay, Amazon, Shopping.com, Walmart, and "thousands more":
Mpire: "Make money on your site: Are you a fashonista, collector-freak or tech wizard? We have just the widget for you. You choose the category and we deliver dynamic content powered by the world's most powerful pricing index. You'll look super-smart and way-cool."
Can Google AdSense withstand the competitive heat? Stay Tuned!
Below is my recent interview of Mpire CEO.
MARCH 6, 2007: Mpire online shopping mashup for $144 billion eCommerce opportunity: CEO interview
Did you ever wish you could visit all the best shopping sites rolled into one? eBay, Amazon, Overstock, Yahoo, Shopping.com, Craigslist…and more in one place?
Mpire.com metasearch and pricing analytics engine proclaims wish no more. The shopping “mashup” which launched last June debuts today an enhanced “universal shopping experience” and unveils its new Shopwave visual product browsing tool.
How does Mpire aim to make waves in online shopping, a $144 billion projected opportunity by 2010 according to Jupiter Research?
I spoke with Mpire CEO Matt Hulett to get his first hand insight.
Before taking over the reigns at Mpire, Hulett was President of the corporate travel division of Expedia, Inc. He has also served as founding partner of AtomFilms and President of Atom Entertainment.
Hulett’s track record in growing interactive online entertainment and services destinations is leveraged at Mpire, where he leads a lean but focused team of 14 in striving to make shopping “fun” for consumers and lucrative for Mpire.
Hulett told me he joined Mpire last year with a vision to develop a unique shopping service blending new, auction and classifieds marketplaces with historic pricing data to enable informed consumer purchase decisions in a user-friendly and contextual way.
Mpire has raised a total of $10M in Series A and B funding to help it realize its online shopping ambitions. Investors include Ignition Partners and former eBay executive and Pay Pal angel investor Richard Rock
Mpire’s “universal shopping experience” and Shopwave enhancements are aimed at providing “everything people need to find the best deals online,” Hulett told me.
Universal Shopping Experience
Aggregation of new and auction marketplaces, pricing data, reviews, coupons and a social media widget, complementing Mpire’s existing price research data pulled from sites such as eBay, Amazon, Wal-Mart, Gap, Shopping.com…
Reviews, Expanded Social Media: A mashup of Amazon and Epinions consumer product reviews and an expanded widget for exporting shopping information to blogs, wikis and social bookmarking sites.
Coupons & Deals: Special offers are embedded witin search results for instant savings on products from Dell, Apples, Circuit City, Travelocity…
Shopwave Browsing Interface
A “skin for traditional shopping,” Shopwave is an experiment focusing on the use of product images versus text and lists. Instead of rows and rows of data, multiple rows of product images are shown with image scroll over options to display more detail and an average price. Shopwave showcases examples of most popular products by Category, and Search terms.
Technology
I asked Hulett about the development behind Mpire’s search and analytics engine. He told me that instead of utilizing traditional site crawling, Mpire leverages the Web services of online marketplaces to “deliver the broadest selection of both new and used items in real-time to our users”:
Using a meta search philosophy, we sit in front of sites like eBay, Amazon, Shopping.com, Yahoo, Overstock and thousands more retailers offering our users a single place to shop the Web. Mpire combines our results with relevant coupons from thousands of stores for maximum savings, and package up powerful historical data trends enabling our users to see how much they should pay for the items they want. Mpire is built on the LAMP stack and leverage AJAX and Flash on the client side to offer a rich user experience.
Mpire leverages data driven analytics as a key competitive differentiator. Mpire analyzes over 500 million rows of data a month and presents the information in a consumer-friendly way, Hulett told me.
Business Model
Inclusion in the Mpire product database is based on a “Pay Per Click” formula. Mpire is paid on a per click basis for consumer click throughs from Mpire to specified store pages at featured retailers’ own ecommerce sites, Hulett told me.
Mpire currently receives about 700,000 unique visitors monthly.
I asked Hulett about the click through rate of its 700,000 shoppers. Hulett is proud that Mpire shares millions of pieces of shopping information data with consumers, actual consumer click through information, however, is one piece of data Mpire prefers to keep all for itself.
"The latest Pew study into how people use the Interweb. These studies are useful in part because the Pew Internet & American Life Project does such a thorough job with them — you know they weren’t cooked up by marketing types to sell more banner ads."
Perhaps not, but that doesn't mean "these studies" weren't "cooked up" by "types" with their own vested interests, and with potentially more wide ranging impacts than the simple sale of banner ads.
Forty-eight million American adults have posted content to the Internet, was the Pew assertion almost a year ago.
But how could Pew be so sure? Pew obviuosly did not communicate with 48 million American adults. No, Pew relied on telephone interviews of a mere 1931 Internet users done by Princeton Survey Research Associates International between November 29 and December 31, 2005.
Do 1931 telephone interviews really signify what 48 million people did or did not do, even if a "non-profit" organization is behind the assertion and not a "for-profit" corporation?
According to the survey questionnaire accompanying the Pew report last year, 35% of the survey sample of 1931 American adult users of the Internet reported posting content to the Internet. Pew then decided to extrapolate the survey respondents to “all (millions and millions of) Internet users” and to make (jump to) its own conclusions that “overall, 35% of Internet users posted online content, that comes to 48 million American adults.”
Does Pew's modus operandi really support such definitive declarations?
Pew continues to believe so, and many continue to believe in Pew's "generous" extrapolations.
In "A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users," designed to assess "Web 2.0 users and non-users," Pew is now definitively declaring that:
49% of Americans only occasionally use modern gadgetry and many others bristle at electronic connectivity.
Pew is once again making its national assertions about behaviors and mindsets of the totality of the American populace by extrapolating from a very small number of telephone interviews: 4001 this go around, conducted a year ago.
Pew expresses 95% confidence, plus or minus, in its own extrapolations.
Pew says that it "does not engage in advocacy," but also indicates that its mission includes "advancing policy solutions." But is there really a difference between "advocating" and "advancing" in the policy arena?
Pew, in fact, describes its "policy work" as engaging:
The foremost thinkers, leaders, researchers and technical experts to identify pragmatic resolutions to pressing societal concerns.
Should Pew headline assertions about Americans and technology really be taken at face value?
Jakob Nielsen's comment at Ingram's blog suggests not. Neilsen responded to the Ingram commentary below:
And while most seem to be somewhat depressed by the results of the study, I was pleasantly surprised to find how "many" people engage in “Web 2.0″-type activities. The study says that when asked about things that include blogging, posting comments to a blog, uploading photos or video, creating webpages or mixing and mashing content from other sites, 37 per cent of those surveyed said they had done at least one of those things.
What’s not to like about a number like that? I was expecting the proportion to be much smaller — along the lines of the emerging 1-9-90 rule of thumb for social media, where about one per cent of people create content, 9 or 10 per cent consume it and about 90 per cent couldn’t care less about it. I find the fact that almost 40 per cent of people blog, upload photos, post comments and so on cause for considerable optimism.
Nielsen on "what's not to like" about Pew's extrapolated numbers:
It’s overstating this survey to say that “almost 40 per cent of people blog, upload photos, post comments and so on.”What the survey found was that 37% *said* that they had (at least) *once* done *one* of these things.
Remember that this is only a survey, not primary research, so it can only assess what people say, not what they actually do. However, it’s safe to assume that many of these respondents engage in these activities on a highly intermittent basis.
That’s why we experience the 1-9-90 distribution of participation when we look at any given community. There’s 1% who are extremely heavy contributors, and so most of the contributions you see are from this small minority, even though there is a larger number of people who once in a blue moon may make a contribution (but probably not to the community you are looking at).
Should Pew's telephone surveys be taken with a Web 2.0 grain of salt?
Donna Bogatin has been probing the business heart of the Internet for more than ten years. Don't miss a single post. Subscribe via Email or RSS. Got news? Send Donna your pitch. Find out more at Donna's Website: InsiderChatter.com. For disclosures on Donna's industry affiliations, click here.
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