Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

First Look: Microsoft Bing Video and Image Search – Webcast

Here’s another webcast of Microsoft Bing (see the first Bing webcast). Notice the extent to which Bing keeps users on its own site. It’s evolving the nature of the search engine into a portal further than I think anyone’s tried taking it before. On one hand, a video play’s a video play. On the other hand, think of all the other functionality where videos are hosted – related videos, comments, ad units, etc. Will content owners raise a stink about the defaults in Bing?

 

Update: I uploaded another version with audio, but you hear the audio clips much better than my voiceover. This is a work in progress.

Screencasts and videos online

Technorati Tags: microsoft,msft,bing.com,bing,search engines

First Look: Microsoft Bing Search Engine – Webcast

I’ve got my first webcast of Microsoft Bing, courtesy of Screen Toaster.

Of course, the first search I tried was a vanity search. It was so-so, with some relevant results but no mention of my blog, which has ranked on page one of Google for years.

Searching for my agency 360i performed better, with Twitter and Slideshare joining the homepage in the top results.

The product search worked really well, letting me drill down by price. What’s notable: you stay on Bing for quite a bit of the process, which I think is a big plus rather than going to a bunch of different sites.

And since I’m hungry and I just wrote about it earlier this week, my first local search here was for Sal’s Pizza (specifically the one in Mamaroneck, NY), and that worked well too.

This is still a little rough but you can get a good look here.

Record your screencast online

 

Technorati Tags: bing.com,microsoft,bing,search engine

A Few More Thoughts on Microsoft’s Bing, as Told to the Press

(Image via NYPost.com)

Yesterday I shared some somewhat random thoughts on Microsoft’s new search engine Bing (see the post on The Bing Bang). A lot of these thoughts came up in conversations with the press, some of which were going on while I was still trying to access the latest demos Microsoft was uploading.

Here’s a roundup of a few different thoughts that I shared with the media, in case you’re following this story as well. I’m not sure how well this is going to do for Microsoft’s market share, and the odds are clearly against them as Google’s track record has shown, but everything I’ve seen so far indicates that this is a smart, ambitious effort from Microsoft and they’re putting the consumer experience first.

The press tour:

NY Post: Bing is the Thing

"Even if they really believed this was the Google killer, I think they know enough not to say so," said David Berkowitz, director of emerging media and client strategy for 360i, a digital marketing agency. "That's always the kiss of death for any new search engine."

I just Googled “google killer” (with quotes) and the first page of results includes several mentions of Wolfram Alpha, plus nods to Cuil, Twitter (yes, really), and even Bing. The comparisons are generally overblown, but it’s interesting to see who makes the connection. With Cuil, the founders themselves were guilty of the hype (I blogged about their launch when they made a fuss about having the biggest index). Wolfram Alpha’s founder keeps dismissing it (I covered this previously with some not-so-gratuitous Monty Python references). The Twitter comparison is generally made by journalists latching on to a hot trend (guilty: I wrote about why Google needs Twitter Search). As for Bing, Microsoft’s in a tough place because they’re trying to say how huge this is without setting expectations so high that they’ll eat their hats later.

MediaPost: Microsoft Faces Bing Challenge

Video and image search has been the most impressive improvements. The ability to hover over an image or link to see the content on the connected page will prove valuable. "Microsoft is doing a lot to show improvements in multimedia," says David Berkowitz, director of emerging media and client strategy at 360i. "This is where you will see the most notable changes and clear-cut difference." …

As for the advertising campaign promised to roll out with the new search engine, Berkowitz says, Microsoft will need to do a lot to get consumers excited. The company has seen a couple of hits and misses lately. The Jerry Seinfeld campaign had a lot of people scratching their heads. The price-conscious PC vs. Mac ads demonstrate more finesse.

If you take a close look at the demo reel on decisionengine.com, you’ll see the multimedia results are going in some new directions. Can’t wait to spend some time with that, and video/image search is only getting bigger.

Mediaweek: Microsoft Search Leads to Bing 

David Berkowitz, director of emerging media and client strategy at 360i, is impressed with what he’s seen so far with Bing. “I’m still waiting for the full picture, but this is easily Microsoft’s best search experience to date,” he said. “This is a very serious upgrade.”

Still, Berkowitz injected some caution: “This is what most people have been waiting for from Microsoft for years. But now Google is only more entrenched. For Bing, the presentation is the most obvious change. I’m very curious to see how much more relevant its results are. Relevance is something that you notice only when its not there.”

Microsoft’s marketing plan for Bing -- estimated at $100 million -- may be just as crucial as the product itself, since most Web users don’t seem as dissatisfied with Google’s ability to deliver relevant results as Microsoft might think.

“I’m wondering how much the average consumer is going to be able to tell this is something different,” Berkowitz said. “The ads need to communicate that. If you look at the growth of Google, people only keep relying on it more. If it really stunk, Google wouldn’t be in the position they’re in.”

I’ll let that speak for itself. Microsoft just sent me preview access for Bing, so it’s time to use the real thing. More to come…

 

Technorati Tags: microsoft,bing,decision engine,bing.com

My Google Wave Limerick

After reading VentureBeat’s coverage of Google Wave – its initial coverage, and then a musing on if it means the death of Gmail and Google Docs – I had to sign up for the beta.

When you sign up, you’re encouraged to write a message to the Google Wave team, and it notes “haikus, sonnets, and ASCII art all accepted.” I figured there would be a lot of haiku, so I went with a limerick, shown below, and then in text form if you’re accessing this without images. It’s not my finest poetry, but if it lets me in any sooner than other users, I’ll let you know. (Okay, reading it again, I should never show my face around an Irish pub again – this really won’t help my chances any.)

There was once a Goog tool called Wave
That got many a journalist's rave
It's not yet in beta
But makes the Web greata'
So let me in - Berkowitz, Dave

The Bing Bang: First Thoughts on Microsoft's New Search Engine

This post was originally shared on 360i's blog.

Microsoft's Bing has lots of great features. Recommending where to park at NYC restaurants isn't one of them.

Today, while there have been the requisite conversations about Twitter and Facebook, the day’s been dominated by one word: “Bing.”

Yes, Bing.com is here, almost. Microsoft is launching its new engine next Wednesday, but the demo reel is live at Bing.com.

What does it all mean? Here’s a round-up of first impressions. There’ll be much more to say once this comes out:

• It looks very good. The basic layout of the results page is the same, with the exception of the right-hand ‘guided search’ bar (which only worked so well when Ask.com pioneered it). For some kinds of searches, it may even prove to be better than Google.
• It won’t matter if it’s better than Google. What matters is if consumers use it.
• A huge challenge will be promoting something consumers don’t think they need. 360i’s CEO Bryan Wiener told The New York Times, “There is not a perceived market problem with search that needs fixing.”
• The rumored $100 million ad budget, or hundreds of millions if you count partnerships, will help. But this MUST be an experience consumers will tell their friends about. That’s how all of the biggest digital brands have been built this decade: Google, Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube, Firefox… it’s a long list. We’ll see if it’s that good.
• Microsoft’s advertising platform has been strong for some time now. On that basis, Microsoft has been very competitive with the other engines, and they offer some fantastic tools. But again, if they don’t have the market share, nothing else matters.
• With the focus on helping consumers refine results, Bing’s goal will be to keep consumers interacting with the results as long as it’s required. If it works as planned, that should mean there are fewer false hits - the kinds of clicks that lead consumers to press the back button right away.
• One oddity in the demo video: it mentions searching for a French restaurant in New York and seeing if there’s parking. These people have clearly never eaten in New York. As much as I love Salty’s in West Seattle, they really need to pay a visit here sometime - the food’s quite good. Oh, and why isn’t the video embeddable?
• Microsoft’s billing Bing as a decision engine and even registered decisionengine.com. It makes sense if you watch the whole video. If you don’t though, it reeks of being so overly rational and intellectual that it misses the chance to forge an emotional connection.
• The new name should help. Two of the biggest features of Bing are its design and usability. Those are not attributes one generally associates with Microsoft.
• The Twitter buzz was in full force. I opened a Twitter Search window around 11am ET for ‘bing’ mentions and kept it open. Seven hours later there were nearly 13,000 mentions. While that made it a top 10 trending topic, it was trumped by news of Hulu Desktop (which launched for real) and was trailing far behind a number of other buzzwords and memes. Here’s the top 10 as of 6:15pm ET: #liesboystell, #liesgirlstell, #3wordsaftersex, BGT, #twistory, #thingsmummysaid, #3breakupwords, #jonaswebcast, Hulu Desktop, Bing

10 Steps For Mastering Your Social Domain

Big Ben, Twitter brand theft victim - image by simplistic.designs via Flickr

Here's today's Social Media Insider, originally published in MediaPost:

If you're not in control of your digital identity, the odds are pretty good that someone else is, or will be if you have any brand recognition at all.

Consider the recent example of Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, whose digital doppelganger created false identities spanning a range of social media sites and even claimed he had been diagnosed with skin cancer. ESPN advised in its NFL Rumor Central, "Not real, folks. In fact, if you see an athlete with a Twitter, you should assume -- at least at first -- that it's fake. Assume it's a Twitter twerp."

What happens to celebrities happens to brands too. Identity hijacking is prevalent in social media largely because it's easy to set up accounts and find an audience. The potential for the reach is enough of a lure. When I recently asked Facebook's Chris Pan who Facebook's audience is, he said something to the effect of, "Pretty soon it'll be everyone." He's not that far off.

Major brands have increasing recourses in taking charge of their social identities online. If you're in this elite group, you have a shot at pleading your case to sympathetic ears at various digital properties. MySpace has always restricted brand pages to paying marketers, Facebook is now aggressively cracking down on branded Pages not owned by someone affiliated with the brand, and Twitter will often turn over parked accounts to the rightful tweeter upon request.

Still, this strategy doesn't solve two issues. One is that a reactive approach could occur after squatters have already damaged a marketer or brand. The other is that for the vast majority of businesses and brands, there's no clear rightful owner. For instance, when I think of Sal's Pizza, it's the Sal's Pizza on Mamaroneck Avenue in Mamaroneck, N.Y., with the best Sicilian slices I've ever eaten. But there are Sal's Pizzas in Dallas, Boston, New Holland, Pa., and Little Neck, N.Y.; the last one even owns  myspace.com/salspizza. On Twitter,  @salspizza belongs to a restaurateur in Limerick, Ireland. I know the real Sal's isn't in Ireland - come on! - but it would be hard for Mamaroneck's Sal to make a case, no matter how many of my old high school buddies sign a petition.

So, what's a marketer to do? Here are ten steps to follow:

1) Run an audit of where your brands are. Note the usernames you use. If you have one flagship brand that's also your company name, then it's easy. If you have a stable of brands, this could be a long list.

2) Prioritize the usernames. In the Sal's example, the business may be Sal's Ristorante but it's known as Sal's Pizza, so salspizza (which is also easier to spell and type) would be the preferred name.

3) Use a site such as usernamecheck.com or knowem.com to enter see if your usernames are taken across scores of sites. Also check for other brand terms. Prioritize usernames that are both memorable and widely available -- that's the sweet spot.

4) For any sites that you know are priorities, register your key usernames. If you're not sure which sites to prioritize, start with the ones you've heard of.

5) Eliminate any sites that are only for consumers and are off-limits for marketers or brands. For this and the next steps, call on the most social-media-savvy person you know, ideally someone you work with closely in your company, at an agency, or elsewhere.

6) Now you need to review all the other sites and prioritize further. If you're at a total loss, use Compete or Quantcast's free tools to see how much traffic the sites get, and pick a threshold. 7) For any of these sites, if you don't plan on using them right away, fill in the minimal information required, post a link back to your homepage or the hub of your social marketing program, and adjust the privacy settings (where possible) so that's they're visible to the smallest audience. You don't want to set false expectations for engaging consumers, and you don't want to publicize a brand presence that falls short of your standards.

8) Check where competitors are. One easy way to do so is look for their most obvious usernames and visit those accounts to see if they're really competitors or squatters. If you can't find much, run some basic searches. Consider whether it's worth joining competitors on those sites if you haven't signed up already.

9) Share the list of registered usernames and passwords with a few trusted colleagues so you're not the only one with the information.

10) Don't be a jerk. You'll find opportunities to undermine competitors throughout this process. Be one of the good guys. Try believing in karma.

Ideally, marketers will have clear-cut strategies for where they want to be and how they'll develop their digital and social brand identities. But there are two problems with this approach. First, for many marketers, that's just not the case. Second, if marketers think too hard about their strategy, they may never get around to covering some of the basic steps. If you don't have a Twitter strategy, for instance, go ahead and register the most relevant usernames you can, make the profiles private, and then return to them when you know what you're doing.

People will still impersonate celebrities and brands. It's a price to pay for popularity, or notoriety if that's the case. But if you're in these arenas for real, it takes a lot of the fun off others trying to claim they're you.

360i Uses Google to Predict American Idol's Winner

If you haven't checked out 360i's blog Digital Connections, now's a pretty good time to start. I'll dispel two possible myths before you do:

1. I'm not the 360i blogger. I'm one of them. You can read bios of the ten contributors and see for yourself.
2. It's not all about 360i. There are a lot of industry perspectives shared there that have nothing to do with 360i, even if all of the insight draws from the agency's experience.

Alright, now that all of that's cleared up, you should check out 360i's American Idol's predictions and historical review based on Google data. There's a very detailed piece in Mashable showing how Google data has played out for Idol over the past few years, and the charts are embedded via SlideShare below.

American Idol Search Trends

View more presentations from 360i.

The One Word You Can't Say in Social Media

George Carlin, by sarahinvegas via Flickr

Here's today's Social Media Insider, via MediaPost:

The One Word You Can't Say

There are seven words you can't say on television, according to George Carlin, but there's only one you can't say at social media conferences. As Carlin put it, it's the one word that will "infect your soul, curve your spine, and keep the country from winning the war." This deadly c-word is "campaign"; utter it at your peril.

The aversion to the word has been a common theme at a lot of the events that have focused on social media lately, including the Word of Mouth Marketing Association's WOMM-U and IAB's Marketplace: Social Media. The word "campaign" has become the pariah of social marketing. Preferred alternatives include terms like "program," "initiative," or even "conversation."

At WOMM-U, I  moderated a session between MySpace's SVP of Insight and Planning Heidi Browning, and Facebook's Head of Brand Solutions Chris Pan. The two agreed more often than they disagreed, and at the outset both wanted to stress the importance of long-term social marketing programs. Facebook takes a particularly hard stance on this, actively discouraging brands from hosting Pages (the official branded presence) just for campaigns. Pan noted that one marketer created a Page centered on its tagline, and it bombed with consumers. Then the marketing switched to focusing on the brand rather than the tagline, and interest picked up dramatically. Pan said Facebook will allow marketers to create separate Pages for personas such as mascots and spokespeople, but again, these are designed to be persistent representations of the brand.

MySpace takes a softer stance on the c-word. It's alright to have a presence there focusing on a campaign. MySpace is also a very different experience for marketers, as it requires a significant investment (at least relative to digital media campaigns; it's hardly significant for TV buyers) for marketers to create a presence, and much of that commitment goes to media on the site promoting the page. In that sense, marketers will wind up paying to run campaigns, but MySpace still recommends that it fits in with ongoing social media initiatives.

A few days later at the IAB event, the first speaker, Forrester Research's Josh Bernoff,  started with an assault  on the forbidden word. He said unequivocally that "social media is always an ongoing activity," and marketers should stop thinking about it as a campaign. He discussed how customers are talking to each other and said, "The only way to succeed is to become a part of this conversation in a long-term and permanent way."

My colleague, 360i VP of Emerging Media & Client Strategy Sarah Hofstetter, continued the theme at the IAB, noting, "Covering your ears is not a strategy." She continued, "It's important to get buy-in across the organization, including media, PR, creative, Web development, CRM [customer relationship management], and human resources. Get them more comfortable with the medium, and it becomes less scary. Then it's easier to say you have to be there." She implied that a lot of the disciplines mentioned are ongoing functions. There aren't any flight dates for customer relationship management or human resources.

That can make it daunting to pitch a social marketing program, and it will present challenges for agencies and vendors in the near term. Even if there are no campaigns for social media, there are still contracts. Just try getting into negotiations with a procurement department for a 50-year contract that renews automatically and see how well that goes.

This all highlights one other area where social media has something in common with search engine marketing and optimization. No matter how or where consumers search, people will continue to do so, even if it ebbs some years and surges others. Similarly, while some aspects of social media reek of fads, the act of digitally sharing content has been going on at least since the days of the bulletin board services of the 1980s, and the activity isn't going to fade away.

If you're a marketer, you may only be able to sign short-term contracts and plan for just a year or so ahead. Regardless of what you're doing on paper, you have to have the mindset that your strategy is paving the way for a perpetual commitment, even if the tactics continually change.

Josh Bernoff on Tapping Social Technologies at IAB Marketplace: Social Media

This is coverage from IAB’s Marketplace; Social Media event

Josh Bernoff: Co-author, Groundswell, SVP Idea Development at Forrester Research

Tapping Social Technologies

“Social is always an ongoing activity.” – Stop thinking about it as a campaign

Spending on social marketing will increase

Customers are talking to each other. “The only way to succeed is to become a part of this conversation in a longterm and permanent way.”

Groundswell’s 4-step strategy:

• People: assess customers’ social activities
• Objectives
• Strategy
• Technology

5 Main Objectives

Roles / Groundswell Objectives:

• Research: Listening
• Marketing: Talking
• Sales: Energizing
• Support: Supporting
• Development: Embracing

Measure the right things

• Social networks: number of messages passed along
• Ratings/reviews: sales
• Communities: equivalent research value, impressions, likelihood to buy, referrals, avoided support costs, value of insights generated
• Blogs: leads, awareness, press coverage, search rank
• Videos, podcasts: build in tracking with URL
• Widgets: build in tracking
• Twitter: depends on strategy

Summary:

• Focus on objectives first, not on specific technologies
• Listening, talking, energizing, supporting, embracing – all are possible, pick one
• To maintain budget, measure what matters

As a refresher, here’s Forrester’s spending outlook:

For more on Forrester, check out my roundup of Forrester’s Marketing Forum from

Technorati Tags: forrester,social media,events,josh bernoff

April.

MySpace vs. Facebook – Who Won the WOMMA Smackdown?

  
Images courtesy of WOMMA

This post also appears on 360i’s blog.

At WOMMA’s Word of Mouth Marketing University (WOMM-U), I moderated the ultimate face-off, smackdown, no holds barred slugfest: FACEBOOK vs. MYSPACE. It’s the top billing matchup for the ages.

And it ended in a hug.

I must have done something horribly wrong.

Before the session, 360i CEO Bryan Wiener tweeted, “@dberkowitz moderating panel at WOMMA btwn Facebook and Myspace. Riot may ensue. Tweet him questions #womma”. When it was over, 360i tweeted, “@dberkowitz The MySpace-Facebook panel ended in a hug? You channeling your inner Gandhi today or what? #WOMMA”

Just last week, MediaPost reported on my Frost/Nixon-style moderating where I tried making panelists cry and demanded answers from the search engines on how much they were bidding to buy Twitter. How did plans go awry?

Part of my problem was who was on the panel: Heidi Browning, SVP Insight & Planning at MySpace and Chris Pan, Head of Brand Solutions at Facebook. The two were just too engaging, and I was too busy learning from each of them to try to get them to claw each other’s eyes out.

There were some turf wars behind the scenes, requiring extensive negotiating on which marketers would be the focus, how much PowerPoint would be used, and a few other ground rules. But some haggling aside, both sides brought a lot to the table, from Heidi’s great idea to share live campaigns on both sites to Chris’s determination to make it a bull-free session even if it meant telling marketers some things they didn’t want to hear.

Heidi kicked things off, showing Bruno’s over the top multimedia blitz on “Meinspace” as a foil to the more conversational and much-liked Page on “Facebuch.” (He’s also on “Tvitter.”) That led to my heavy hitting first question for the panelists: “Vassup?” Maybe they couldn’t understand my Austrian accent, but they weren’t up for fielding that one.

Heidi and Chris took a deeper look at Vitamin Water. On MySpace, the brand promotes free MP3 downloads in partnership with Amazon. On Facebook, the focus is the Great Debate on the better player: Kobe Bryant or LeBron James. Chris focused on the Facebook ads driving visits and interactions with the Page, while Heidi said Vitamin Water promoted its MySpace heavily offline, noting that such integration was a big selling point for them.

The first real question I brought up involved the audience. Heidi said while it’s largely 18-34 year olds, they have huge numbers running the gamut and it wasn’t just teens. Hopefully she doesn’t take too much umbrage with my recent quote in The New York Times that MySpace would do well doubling down on the under 34 set. As for Chris, he said he expects EVERYONE to be on Facebook. Each day, he’s getting closer.

A bit of discussion followed on when to use self-service ads (I’ve run campaigns on both, and they are really easy to use), but more options come with spending the big bucks through an account representative. Both Heidi and Chris stressed the deep targeting options, with Heidi adding a bit more on MySpace’s psychographics and behavioral targeting.

The big word both Facebook and MySpace wanted to avoid was the c-word: “campaign.” They wanted to stress longer engagements. Chris said Facebook doesn’t want brands having separate Pages for campaigns; they should be about the brands. Separate Pages for spokesmen, mascots, or other brand components are okay though, like a Page for Frank Perdue and another for Perdue Chicken. MySpace is more accommodating for campaign-based Pages.

The audience Q&A offered a few dramatic moments. One attendee said MySpace charging six figures just to launch a branded page made it prohibitive for a lot of marketers to get started. Heidi took a straw poll and asked if that was the case for the others, and a good percentage of hands went up.

Of course, you can’t get more dramatic than that historic hug.

Read more about the session on WOMMA’s live blog from the show, which also helped refresh my memory.

 

 

Technorati Tags: myspace,facebook,womma,wommu,social networks,social media,events,conferences