Inside the Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Wave Riding over Bing

Google Wave Team celebrates - by niallkennedy via Flickr

Originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

In the future, my dad will be a blogger. He'll create wikis. He'll have his work translated into languages spoken across Europe, Asia, and South America. He'll accomplish it effortlessly with Google Wave. I watched the 80-minute developer preview of Wave, and it's going to make nearly everyone a social media creator.

Seth Godin made the point that "the real next Google" is Google, thanks to what it's doing with Wave. He contrasted that with Microsoft Bing, a search engine with a few features that Google can easily copy.

One of the problems with Bing is that it's anti-social. That's a dangerous proposition for a new digital brand. Microsoft says in its press release, "The explosive growth of online content has continued unabated, and Bing was developed as a tool to help people more easily navigate through the information overload." But that "explosive growth" is largely due to the proliferation of social media, while the tool is still largely standard search functionality.

The release further notes that Bing, the "Decision Engine," is "providing customers with a first step in moving beyond search to help make faster, more informed decisions." First of all, I've spent some time with Bing, and while it offers many new ways to refine searches, it doesn't move beyond search in the slightest. On another note, one obvious way to help consumers make informed decisions would be to build in elements that tap their social networks and user-generated content. One start-up, Hunch, aims to do exactly that, by combining user contributions and personalization to help people make smarter decisions. Whether or not Hunch succeeds, it's a real step beyond search.

Bing is anti-social to the point that it lets you watch Hulu videos within the search results (it feels more like a search portal than a decision engine), but it doesn't let you share the clips. Contrast this with Google Wave, which is all social.

That's the simplest way to understand it: Wave makes everything social. It incorporates some elements of other social applications -- Gmail, Google Talk, Blogger, collaborative functions of Google Docs -- and blends them together to create live and time-shifted social experiences.

The ultimate power of Wave won't be known for a while. Google is opening up the service for developers to build on, so much of the functionality will develop over time, making it comparable to Twitter. Still, there are some general principles of Wave that should hold true and improve. Here are a dozen highlights:

• Everything created in this new service is a Wave.
• A Wave can be private, much like an email string or an instant message conversation, or it can be public, like a blog entry or wiki.
• Waves can be edited in real time, so that everyone who can access the Wave can see the updates appear character by character.
• Any kind of portable content (including some forms that may not have been easily portable previously) can be incorporated into Waves, including photos, videos, and maps.
• All such forms of content can benefit from Waves' collaborative capabilities, such as having multiple people upload photos to a communal album and collectively provide captions.
• Changes to Waves can be played back so it's easy to see the evolution of a Wave over time.
• Games become social, and even competitive.
• Mobile integration is built in, so Waves can be edited from anywhere.
• Waves can instantly translate among dozens of languages on the fly, so that collaborators who natively speak Chinese and Hebrew, for example, can effortlessly communicate with each other.
• Contextual spell-checking happens instantly, with the example shown of "Icland is an icland" turning into "Iceland is an island." This feature isn't that social, but it makes contributors look more intelligent when they share the Waves.
• Comments turn into conversations. Many blog tools do this already, but this applies to every form of commenting, from those made during document edits to comments on photos.
• Waves can integrate with other social services such as Twitter and Orkut, plus many more to come.

Not all of this might make sense to someone like my dad, but I couldn't have explained Gmail to him either in terms of how it groups together email conversations and uses labels instead of folders. I'm pretty confident, however, that once he starts using Wave, he'll wind up creating photo blogs while having seamless conversations with relatives in France, Israel, and Brazil.

Wave will redefine the "lean-forward" experience of the Web. When you need a break and want to lean back, though, you can watch those Hulu videos on Bing.

Microsoft Bing: The World's First Search Portal

Image via CrunchBase

I just shared a post on Ad Age's DigitalNext blog showing how Microsoft's new search engine Bing is really a search portal, even if it calls itself a decision engine:

I've spent the last few days trying out a live preview of Bing, and it's much better categorized as a "search portal." The idea of a search engine is to get you where you want to go fast, based on the queries you enter. The idea of a portal is to give you all the content you need so you don't have to go anywhere else. Bing is a hybrid, a search portal that lets you keep searching and refining your query without ever leaving the site until you absolutely have to.

A couple examples are included:

• Search for "30 Rock" on Bing and the first natural link is for NBC.com, but the link below for "videos of 30 rock" brings up the Bing video guide. Almost all listings on the first page come from Hulu and clicking one lets you watch the Hulu episode right on Bing. You can then further refine the search for factors like content length and resolution.
• Search Bing for "asthma" and the first natural result offers a brief description from the Mayo Clinic, with a link to "full article and more." Click that, and the full article appears on Bing. Click to enlarge the first image beside the lengthy article, and you're still on Bing.

Read the post for the whole thing, including other examples, and let me know what you think.

You can also read and watch more Bing coverage on the blog here:

• Bing's image and video search
• My first Bing webcast
• Roundup of comments to the press
• The Bing Bang - first thoughts on the engine

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

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

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 Future of Search Engines from the Search Insider Summit

One of the toughest things to do as a speaker or moderator is covering your own panel. I have to try though, since my panelists had a few interesting things to share about search, mobile marketing, and social media.

In light of the fact that I was moderating the panel, I’m not going to try fully quote anyone or even attribute everything that came up. With any luck this will capture some of what transpired.

The panel was Search as We See It, “Search Insiders’ view of the Future: Industry Trends, Challenges and things to keep an eye on.” The panelists included:

• Ron Belanger, VP, Worldwide Agency Sales, Omniture
• Daniel Boberg, VP, Advertiser & Agency Professional Services, Yahoo 
• Brian Boland, Director, Media Auctions, Microsoft Advertising
• John Nicoletti, Head of Agency Operations, Google

Q: What was different compared to the Search Insider Summit in May 2008?

Everyone mentioned the economy to some extent, often to the full extent. Ron said profit optimization was big, as was customer retention. Yahoo mentioned that the economy has led to declines in click-through rates for commercial times, and lower order sizes. John noted economic issues, brought up the expanded use of universal search, and plugged Google Flu Trends (the only swine flu reference I recall hearing at the events.

Q: What will we be talking about a year from now that wasn’t well covered here?

Ron noted search will be used even more for campaign planning. Brian expected a greater emphasis on contextual advertising and performance display. John said we’ll hear more about mobile (which was barely touched on at all this event). Dan thought semantic structuring would play a bigger role, and was bullish on Rich Ads in Search (the Yahoo push, also mirrored by Google, to start including images and video in search ads).

Q: Where is mobile search now?

Overall, there was a lot of skepticism for how big this will get how fast. Brian surveyed the audience and fairly few in the room conducted mobile searches on a daily basis, and this was more of an early adopter crowd, especially for search. Ron noted the searches on mobile are far more directional, such as for Facebook and MySpace and news/weather sites, and the commercial searches are more for local listings and services like movies and other spots nearby. Ron said mobile display presents the much bigger opportunity.

As for will it all be Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft in mobile search, panelists from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft collectively said, “Yes.” They all noted the challenges of creating a viable search rival. During the audience Q&A, there was some optimism for voice search, where Google and Microsoft both have live offerings.

Q: Here I channeled my inner James Lipton (better than I expected to) – as covered by Joe Mandese on MediaPost’s blog, and asked, What does social search mean to you?

Panelists didn’t have great answers for this one, and two didn’t answer at all. That’s a sign for a moderator that the question sucked. Ron discussed a bit of how social actions already inform search rankings, but as this wasn’t a favorite topic of the panelists so I wasn’t pressing here. During Q&A, John reiterated the importance of universal search, and Dan noted his

Q: What about Wolfram Alpha, the highly buzzed about search engine? I noted that when Stephen Wolfram sneezes, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington gets him a tissue. Is it a Google killer? The holy grail of search? The next Cuil?

Again, panelists were largely nonplused by this, seeing it more as an academic solution rather than something most consumers will find useful. I asked Brian if he could share anything about what Microsoft was doing with Powerset, the one-time rumored Google killer that Microsoft acquired. Yes, Microsoft was doing something with it. No, he couldn’t talk about it here.

There was one other question I had to cover. I’ll return to MediaPost’s coverage:

“Can I ask how much each of your companies has bid for Twitter,” Berkowitz inquired of the Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Omniture dais. No answer.

“I just watched Frost/Nixon,” Berkowitz explained, adding, “So I’m trying to bring people to tears now.” Mainly, they laughed.

 

 

Technorati Tags: mpsis,search insider summit,conferences,search engines,google,yahoo,microsoft,msn,omniture

Search 224, Social Media 0 - My Last Search Insider Column

A lot has happened since I first started writing the Search Insider. There were two US presidential elections. I met and married my wife. Twitter was invented, as was Sprinkles Cupcakes. It's been a pretty good stretch. Here's the last in the series before a new one begins.

Search 224, Social Media 0

It's time for a short trip five years in the making. This is the 224th Search Insider I've written for MediaPost, and most likely my last. As of next week, I'll be switching over to the Social Media Insider.

My first Search Insider was published Friday, July 2, 2004, which was mercifully right before the holiday weekend so presumably no one read it. It was about Web design, a topic I'm not sure I've ever known anything about, but I had to start somewhere. Over the years, along with analyzing updates from the major search engines, parsing research, and covering events, I've tried to dig up lesser known examples of how consumers search to illustrate the evolution of the field.

The process required taking a broad view of search, and much of that focus turned to social media. It's only fitting that I visited MediaPost.com's search engine to review all of the Search Insider columns I've written to dig up just how much social media came up in my search coverage. Here's a snapshot:

• MySpace: 24 mentions, the first of which was a fleeting reference in a November 2005 column about Google Base. That was followed by six mentions in 2006, nine in 2007, eight in 2008, and none in 2009.

• Facebook: 27 mentions, the first one in January 2007 describing photo search and tagging on the social network. There were a total of 11 in 2007, 13 in 2008, and three so far in 2009. 

• Twitter: 17 mentions, starting in October 2007 with a dedicated column about listening to tweets. Following that one piece in 2007, there were 10 in 2008 and six already this year.

• Social media (exact phrase): 28 mentions, starting in October 2006, nearly a year and a half after the first MySpace mention.

• Social media optimization: four mentions between November 2006 and April 2008.

So yes, social media has come up quite a bit, but it's all relative. I mentioned Microsoft or MSN in 67 columns (30% of the first 223), Yahoo in 118 (53%), and Google in 188 (84%). If I was biased in my coverage, at least it was proportionate with market share.

In wrapping this, I feel that hubristic need to share some words of wisdom with future Search Insider columnists, words that perhaps other writers will also appreciate. If you're in this group, you may wonder how to get a lot of responses to a column. The easiest way is to be a jerk and say things so devoid of substance that you can guarantee dozens of people will comment on what an idiot you are. Even more people will probably say they agree with you, which will undoubtedly feel validating.

While I may not have avoided idiocy, I've yet to try to be a jerk here. Instead, I'll share the three columns that triggered the biggest reader reaction, based on anecdotal experience that includes the volume of email responses:

• "Why Skittles Killed Its Web Site," about the March 2009 branding bombshell (or overhyped redesign, take your pick
• "Braving the New World of Lower Merion," a February 2005 story of visiting a Pennsylvania high school
• "Google Vs. Grandmom," the September 2005 epic saga of my grandmother trying to master the Internet (she has since stopped trying, but she still has an answer for everything, whether or not you have a question)

None of those are about search engine marketing or search engine optimization. Two of them are personal anecdotes, and the other was admittedly a bit of a stretch for Search Insider coverage. Meanwhile, some of the columns that I wrote that I thought were so smart they'd lead to Wall Street Journal stories, book deals, and a motion picture starring Hayden Christensen as me and Kal Penn as Sergey Brin -- well, hardly anyone ever responded to those. I'm still proud of those columns, but the silence can be humbling.

I've made a few mistakes in the process and had a few off weeks, but I've lasted through 224 columns in this series by following one simple rule: respect readers' time and intelligence. I'm grateful for everyone who has perused each edition; I read quite a bit too and appreciate being a part of your reading list.

If the subject interests you at all, I hope you'll look for my contributions to the Social Media Insider starting next Tuesday where I'll join the inimitable Cathy Taylor. What would have seemed like a long journey in 2004 now feels like a logical progression. And after covering Google in 188 columns, expect a regular examination of where search and social media intersect. I'll have plenty to cover there, which should keep me busy until Kal Penn returns to acting -- and returns my calls.

Searchers Don't Pay Retail: A Review of Coupon Searches and Search Engines

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Today's Search Insider column, via MediaPost

It's no secret that Google isn't the best search engine for everything. We saw that in recent explorations of live search and bathroom search engines. Another such area is finding coupons.

Google's a great place to find coupon sites, but then you have to sort through the clutter. I tried a search on "kodak coupons," and it's dizzying trying to figure out if and how you can get 20%, 30%, 35%, or 45%  off at KodakGallery.com, as the headlines of search ads indicate. Some sites we'll look at today make searching for coupons much more manageable.

Google Trends shows that the volume of searches for coupons so far this year is twice as high as in early 2008. The AdWords keyword tool reports that the top 10 coupon terms attracted 46.5 million Google searches in March 2009 alone, with "coupons" and "coupon" accounting for 37 million combined (the others, in order, are: coupon code, printable coupons, coupon codes, free coupons, grocery coupons, coupons.com, online coupons, printable coupon).

Analytics firm Compete's blog reported that visitors to top coupon sites are up an average of 170% from March 2008 to March 2009. The blog distinguishes between two categories, "those primarily offering manufacturer coupons (40¢ off Viva paper towels), and those primarily offering retailer-specific coupons (25% off your Target purchase)." It then notes, "Of all searches containing the word ‘coupon,' the share captured by retailer-coupon sites grew by 30% year-over-year in March, while manufacturer-coupon share shrank by 11%."

Compete singles out some of these retailer coupon sites, including RetailMeNot, the fastest growing coupon site among the top five in the category. It's one of my favorite sites, one I go to before completing most of my online purchases. Please don't ask me why (I swear I'm doing alright during this economic crisis), but I recently ordered prints from Snapfish valued at 72 cents and went on RetailMeNot, where I found a code to save 14 cents off my order. It's addictive. And heck, if I'm going to rank all my habits, this is one of the better ones, right behind calling Grandmom.

What's so brilliant about the site is its perfect role at the end of the purchase funnel. When you have a sense of where you're considering buying something from, you can enter the Web site on RetailMeNot, and it will list all of the coupon codes. The coupons are ranked by how many other people used that code successfully, so the most reliable rise to the top while the duds drop out of view. In that sense, it's a massive time-saver as well as a money-saver.

It hardly works for every site. Amazon rarely has any listings unless it's specifically promoting some service. And for some merchants, there's an error that appears that reads, "Sorry for the inconvenience but this merchant has specifically requested to have all user contributed coupons removed from the RetailMeNot system." From my experience, those retailers don't have coupons publicly available anyway, so it's not just RetailMeNot that's singled out.

Other sites are trying similar approaches. One I like is Tjoos, even if I can't always remember how to spell it. It's meant to be a play on "choose," but I can't tell you how many times I misspelled it when entering it into my browser.  According to Compete, Tjoos had about one-tenth of RetailMeNot's traffic in March, while growing three times as fast (off a much smaller base) over the past year.

The one twist Tjoos offers is that it has its own specialists who confirm that coupon codes work. Other coupon users can also contribute whether the coupons worked. As this column was written, Tjoos claimed to have 133,000 online stores, 20,000 verified coupons out of 165,000, and nearly 1,400 exclusive coupons. By comparison, RetailMeNot claims that over the past few years, its users have shared over 100,000 discounts at over 20,000 stores. The numbers aren't as important as whether the sites have current coupons for stores where consumers are shopping, and from the anecdotal tests I tried, they both perform admirably.

You'll find both Tjoos and RetailMeNot in Google when searching for discounts. Once you have a favorite way to seek a discount, though, Google's importance diminishes.