Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

The Berkies: My 10 Impactful Technologies in 2008 - Technology That Changed My Life

I started to come up with a list of some of the most meaningful technologies for me in 2008. The one thing that they have in common is that they all changed the way I do something. Amazon is starting to change the way I shop and read. Hulu is changing how I watch TV. Zemanta is changing how I blog. It's not usually a complete revolutionary overhaul; I read the same amount with the Kindle, for instance, but what and how I read, and the way I purchase books, is shifting.

I'm curious to hear how technology has changed your life in the comments.

The Ten Technologies That Changed My Life in 2008Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

Amazon's iPhone app: I'm not yet taking full advantage of it, but I love what Amazon's doing in the mobile space. Take a picture of a product and it will try to find the link to it on Amazon, where you may be able to buy it at a better price. This uses the manual lookup via Mechanical Turk, which could wind up being an incredibly valuable 'secret' weapon. Meanwhile, while this app hasn't totally changed things for me yet, Amazon's WAP site is also incredibly useful. I was in Best Buy recently and saw a great deal on a Canon camera for about $150, and I've needed a new point and shoot. I checked Amazon and it sold for about $105. Plus, Amazon had 375 customer reviews, which meant a lot more to me than the opinion of the generally non-existent sales clerks at Best Buy. I went home and ordered the camera from Amazon right away (I'd have done it from my mobile device but needed to dig up a gift certificate code to apply).

Facebook Connect: I love how easily I can now interact with various sites thanks to Connect functionality. We're just starting to see what we can do with it.

FriendFeed: The best thing I do with FriendFeed is scan it before any campaign planning, or when I want to know more about a topic in how it's represented across the web. Its public timeline is probably one of the most underused tools - search for what any FriendFeed user is posting across dozens of services online. It doesn't replace other tools like Twitter Search, but it does make it much easier to get a rich view into online activities.

GPS: I know, this is broad. I'm referring specifically to the $10/month VZ Navigator app I used on my summer road trip. Yet it could have been any other service. It makes one of my favorite activities, travel, so much better and freer, and I'm already starting to enjoy some of the more mundane or entertaining options through iPhone apps and the like.Image via CrunchBase

Hulu: Because of Hulu, I now watch 30 Rock religiously on TV, and I didn't have to watch the full episodes of Saturday Night Live since the election clips made it online after (I always forgot when those Thursday specials were on anyway).

iPod Touch: I've become so much more disappointed with my Samsung i760 since I got this. I'm still not ready to leave Verizon and use the iPhone as a phone, but I love the apps for both utility and gaming. Image via CrunchBase

Kindle: It hasn't yet changed how I read. But it might, and it's already starting. I don't lug as many books around when I travel. I'll buy some books on the Kindle when I think the odds are pretty good I'll just read them once.

Twitterfox: This firefox plugin is what I use most often to write and read tweets. Yet it hasn't been showing me all the replies lately, so I may find alternatives for 2009. Runner up for Twitter: Twitturly, which makes it so easy for anyone, whether or not you use Twitter, to see the most popular links being tweeted. It's how I found this amazing fan trailer for a Thundercats live action movie, for instance.
Image via Wikipedia
Wii Fit: Especially now that it's cold in New York, I'm so happy to have this as a way to push myself to work out. And the passive-aggressive tone it takes gets the guilt flowing every time.

Zemanta: The best thing about Zemanta is the easy embedding of images, which makes for a richer blogging experience both for writing, and, I hope, reading. Its feature set keeps getting better; I'm sure embedding video is coming. Great work to the team here.

Search Trends To Watch In 2009

Image by Getty Images via DaylifeHere's my last column of the year for MediaPost. Thanks for your readership, and I look forward to your feedback on my posts to come in 2009.

Between the economy affecting stock prices and the potential mergers and acquisitions discussed among several of the major search engines, there is a lot of uncertainty as we head into 2009. Yet we can anticipate several shifts in search based on what we've seen over the past decade and other signs in the media ecosystem. Here are some major changes to anticipate:

 Holistic -- In Every Sense

The word "holistic" should play out in a number of ways:

First, any significant media campaign or offline event drives search volume, so marketers must capture that demand by integrating search with other media planning.

Next, paid search and SEO should be planned in tandem for the best results. Several studies show that by integrating search engine marketing with search engine optimization, results are greater than the sum of its parts.

Lastly, expect the major search engines and others to push forward with new ways to infuse paid search listings with display and video media. This will make search also about engagement and not just clicks and conversions. To some degree, these new search engine offerings will be motivated by more concentrated efforts to attract large brand marketers . Additionally, given how effective search engine marketing is, the engines and portals will want to have a steady stream of upsell options. In the coming year, consumers may experience the most dramatic shift in the format of search engine results pages since the basic template was established roughly a decade ago.

Search Fragmentation

While the search engine landscape continues to be dominated by one player, new complexities keep emerging as search migrates far beyond the traditional engines.

This fall, comScore and Ad Age reported that YouTube surpassed Yahoo as the second-largest search engine; within days, YouTube announced its new search advertising platform. What's more, MySpace (563 million U.S. queries in October 2008, according to comScore) is a bigger search engine than both AOL (424 million) and Ask.com (362 million). Queries on eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon combined (980 million) nearly rival MSN.com (1.04 billion).

What does all of this mean for marketers?

It's true that not all queries are created equally. A searcher on a social network or video sharing site often wants something different than what they’re looking for on a standard search engine. But given the volume of consumer search activity (among other interactions) on these nontraditional search sources, it's important for marketers to be positioned the best way possible where those searches are happening.

New Models for SEO

These other search sources don't just operate in a vacuum; they impact the major search engines, too. Search engine optimization is shifting, from a focus of entirely maximizing a site's rank in the engines, to maximizing a site's reach across all the top-ranked listings on a search engine's results page. While many consumers go directly to a marketers' site, which should be positioned as prominently as possible in search engine results pages, many more consumers reach marketers through intermediary properties. These include blogs, social networks, photo sharing sites, Twitter, Wikipedia, and countless other social sites that tend to rank increasingly well in search engines. That means marketers have to shift their mindset from optimizing their Web site to optimizing their Web presence.

Your Car Engine's Your Search Engine

The biggest change in 2009 and beyond is that the device consumers search from will start to matter even more than which engine they use. Image via Wikipedia

The most obvious manifestation of this is mobile consumption. New mobile devices and platforms such as the iPhone and Google Android are focused on improving the search and Web experience. This will fuel searches from mobile devices; iPhone users enter a disproportionate number of mobile search queries, though other devices are catching up.

Marketers need to adapt their strategies to reach their target audiences on these devices, such as by optimizing messaging and landing pages, and providing more consumer value by leveraging the unique features of these devices. For instance, mobile devices support integration with SMS (text messaging), click-to-call, mobile couponing, and location-based services, all of which take advantage of the mobile platform in ways that aren't as natural for PC-based Web advertising.

Over time, this trend of searches shifting beyond the PC will encompass far more than mobile phones. Consider the new set-top boxes and television models that make it easier to search from the TV, while delivering a hybrid TV-Web experience. Then there's vehicle telematics -- anyone who's searched for a restaurant, attraction, or drug store via a GPS device on the road will appreciate how valuable that can be. With all of these examples, and others to come, the device plays a significant role in how and why consumers search.

Jeff Pulver's Social Media Jungle and BRITE Conference 2009 - Two Great Events for Your Calendar

Jeff Pulver image by TheFemGeek via FlickrI'm already really excited about the event lineup for 2009. You can see where I'm speaking (five events in January and February), but I do get to other events where I can shut up and listen (and of course even when I'm speaking, it's only an hour on stage where I have to sound smart).

I want to focus on two coming up that you might find interesting; I'll be at both.

The first is Jeff Pulver's Social Media Jungle at CES (the Consumer Electronics Show). I went to Pulver's first Jungle at his office in Long Island earlier this year, and it was one of the most talked about events I've been to. That's partially because the 40-odd movers and shakers in attendance were so chatty that we literally crashed Twitter - something that's fortunately becoming harder to do. CES should be somewhat bigger (it's Vegas, after all).

The event's somewhat in the unconference mold - few powerpoints, lots of big ideas, people there to really communicate important things about social media with other people.

Read more on Pulver's blog, and register through CES (cheaper before Jan 2).

* * *
The other event is BRITE 09 - with BRITE standing for BRanding, Innovation, and TEchnology. A good fit for those of us in the online marketing biz, eh? It's March 4-5 in NYC at Columbia University.

I went to their 08 event and made a lot of great contacts, from the speakers to the bloggers to the attendees. Some sessions were more relevant for me than others, which is par for the course for anything, but on the whole it brought a good crowd together.

Speakers at the next one include the guru's guru Seth Godin, the adorable and brilliant German professor/author Bernd Schmitt, and senior folks from AmEx, LinkedIn, and Bravo TV. Pretty cool, eh?

For full disclosure, in exchange for blogging this I get a free pass, and I went for free last year too in exchange for covering it. Yet as you know if you've seen my media sponsorship policy, I only plug events that I'm familiar with first-hand, and really, the only way I can justify my time going to such events is if they're great and really worth going to. And I repeat I am going to this one.

In the meantime, enjoy your 15% discount with the code briteblog09.

Let me know if you plan to go to either event.

Ten Reasons To Run Google Ads On The IPhone

Image via Wikipedia

iPhone users love to search almost as much as they love their  i Fart apps. Earlier this year, Google noted the i Phone drives 50 times the search queries of other mobile handsets. One wonders, then, what took Google so long in offering iPhone targeting through AdWords.

Now targeting is live, with a  great overview on the Google Mobile Blog. Can't figure out why you'd try it? There are 10 ideas below.

A few notes before we begin:

1)    Google refers to targeting "full HTML Internet browsers." That's more accurate than referring to this as iPhone targeting, but it's a mouthful. This new targeting will apply to an increasing number of handsets and already includes the G1 powered by Google Android.

2)    Consumers on the iPod Touch will also see these ads. Again, I'm oversimplifying below most of the time when referring to the "iPhone."

3)    The entries below aren't mutually exclusive. There's a good amount of overlap.

Now, let's go to the 10 reasons, maybe even the top 10 reasons, to run ads on full HTML Internet browsers.

1.  You're promoting an iPhone application. If you're developing an app specifically for iPhone users, then relevant queries can be an effective way to get the word out and jumpstart interest. It's not quite the same as targeting iPhone app ad networks, where you're targeting people who definitively use iPhone apps, but it's a potentially effective way to expand reach.

2. You're promoting a Google Android application. Medialets' Rana Sobhany recently noted in VentureBeat that there were fewer than 500 Android apps as of the end of November, well below expectations. This compares to over 10,000 iPhone apps that have been collectively downloaded over 300 million times. Right now, the iPhone's clearly where the app action is. It also makes me wonder if Google will allow ad targeting for specific devices and operating systems in the future, as many mobile ad networks do.

3. You're promoting an iPhone-optimized version of your site. If your site is designed for full-HTML mobile browsers, you can set those versions as landing pages.

4. Your site takes advantage of the phone's GPS. This could be one additional feature or it could be at the heart of the site's purpose. A retailer or quick-service restaurant, for example, could have a one-click store locator, and that might be a helpful differentiator for the search ad copy.

5.  A noticeable percentage of your visitors come from the iPhone. Your site analytics may be motivation enough to test ads targeting iPhone users.

6. You want to drive calls. Here, the creative can tie into the landing pages to make it easy to get consumers to call you rather than click around your site. It's not perfectly efficient; you'll reach some iPod Touch users in the process who can't call, so you don't want to make calling the only option -- but if calling will be better for both you and the consumer, give it a shot.

7. You're targeting early adopters. IPhone users are better-educated, wealthier, and have better hair than regular Web users (with the last one, I'm sure a joint iPhone-Hair Club for Men study will come soon). Want to reach them? Here's your chance to target them with something special.

8. You're a rigorous tester. How do iPhone-targeted ads on Google compare to its other mobile ads and PC Web ads? You could run with any benchmarks you can get your hands on, or you can run some tests to see the results for your own campaigns.

9. You want to impress Alexandra Kenin, Google's product marketing manager on the mobile ads team. She's featured in this how-to video, among others on the GoogleMobileBlog YouTube channel.

10. You want to tell your boss you're running ads on the iPhone. If you're already running AdWords, this is the easiest way to run iPhone ads. Take a screenshot of your ad running on the iPhone, make the boss happy, and then go back to doing whatever moves the needle for your business.

Burger King Branding Booboo: Like It's Branding for the Very First Time

Image by renaissancechambara via FlickrI've got another entry on Ad Age's blog today, so you'll have to check out the full post. I also write about this on 360i's blog.

Today, thanks to a tip from a colleague, I describe how Burger King is intent on promoting its new "Whopper Virgins" campaign (with a massive broadcast TV buy) but doesn't rank at all for searches on "whopper virgin".

Is anyone searching for the singular as opposed to the plural? Google Trends shows that lately the two forms have been running neck and neck.

This is a great campaign overall and I stopped what I was doing to watch the video all the way through, but it is a good lesson for other marketers.

Again, read the full post at Ad Age.

Darren Herman's Tips for Improving Agency Relationships with Vendors and Publishers

Darren Herman via CrunchBase One of the less glamorous parts of my job is scheduling meetings with vendors and publishers. Some of the meetings are really interesting, while others I regret. And meanwhile there's the frequent rescheduling - usually my fault, when I have to make time for a client demand that sprung up five minutes ago and must be done today. Yes, vendors, you come second.

Darren Herman, a fellow agency guy who I've had the pleasure on sitting on panels with at some events, has a great post today on how vendors can do a better job at landing agency meetings and making them productive. He starts from the vantage point of others accusing agencies of 'not getting it' (okay, it's true, some of my peers don't get it, no matter how you define 'it').

He has some great pointers that everyone pitching agencies must read. Really, please. Especially if you're reading this blog just to make nice to me before you go and pitch me something - then you REALLY need to read his post.

Some are issues I've talked about at events. For instance, during the final round of questions at the Social Ad Summit in September, I summed up the one thing vendors can do to help agencies in three words: "Send case studies." That's number eight on Darren's list. His focus on education and persistent but gentle follow-ups is also on the money.

Redefining Christmas with Charitable Giving

Image by Getty Images via DaylifeI just got wind of the microsite Redefine Christmas, which promotes charitable gifts for the holidays rather than the kind that you desperately try to regift to someone else.

The site's a wrapper, not the present. I wish there was more you could do on it. Even the links to share info through social media sites are lacking. There's a Twitter button, but there's no Twitter account from them. There's a digg button, but you then have to enter everything yourself rather than one-click voting to digg up the site yourself.

Yet it is all for a good cause, so I won't be too hard on these do-gooders. The site links to some charitable sites where you can give a gift through donations, namely Changing the Present and JustGive.org.

Below is a little more info from their press release:

Redefine Gifts!

For your Dad who always took the time to read you a special bedtime story and re-enacted "Goodnight Moon" more times than you remember:  How about books for children who don't have any at all?  At www.ChangingThePresent.org you can find a full range of charitable gifts including the opportunity to put five books right into the hands of children in need with First Book.  A book at home is often the biggest factor in learning how to read!

 

Redefine Gift Cards!

For your best friend who loves to shop-- Instead of Gift Card for the mall, how about a Gift Card for the world?  You can send an inspiring GiveNow Card from www.JustGive.org.   She can use it to make a donation to any charity she most wants to support. It's a win for you; a win for her; and a powerful win for charities she cares most about. 

 

.

How Should You 'Connect'?

Connect more than 4. Image: Bill.Roehl via FlickrI also blogged about this at 360i's blog, and I've been meaning to write about this more here, but I just wrote a post for Ad Age's DigitalNext blog about the various third-party registration services from Google, Facebook, and MySpace.

There, I discuss three rules of thumb for how to go about the services. Read the full post for the fully baked ideas, but here's a much abridged summary:

1. Use Google for widest reach, easiest setup
2. Use Facebook if you want to try to drive traffic and have a decent overlap with FB's audience
3. Use MySpace if that's an overwhelming match for your audience.

We'll have broader discussions here about whether to use them at all and when that makes sense, along with best practices. This should be BIG. I also note on 360i's blog that you can try Citysearch beta as one example of Facebook Connect done fairly well (log in up top with your Facebook ID).

Video from MediaPost's Search Insider Summit

I only caught this after reading Aaron Goldman's great roundup today in the Search Insider about the buzz at the Search Insider Summit (or lack thereof).

My video is below; other videos appear to the right on the site. I found that I couldn't scroll to others in Firefox, but Internet Explorer worked fine (didn't try Chrome). Here's the direct link to my session's video. Fortunately, the camera captures a certain question that became a comment - it starts at 27:56 and goes until 29:50 (eons in conference time), and then my response to it.

So Over Google

Image by Ben Oswest via Flickr

Today's column from MediaPost's Sarch Insider

At MediaPost's Search Insider Summit last week in Park City, Utah, some attendees were frustrated over the economy, and most people were frustrated by the lack of snow. Yet the biggest source of frustration seemed to be Google.

It came up during a panel early on Friday specifically about Google. It also came up in the "What's Next" panel that I moderated. And when I facilitated a roundtable on e-commerce following my panel, the participants were most talkative when they started kvetching about Google.

It wasn't the kvetching I sometimes hear during search marketing events. There wasn't the talk about challenges with Google's Quality Score or pages suddenly dropping out of its index. The complaints were mostly from marketers responding like consumers. Below I'll share a number of these complaints, largely from the roundtable. You can share your thoughts or add new gripes in the comments.

I'm not doing this to beat up on Google; the stock market's done that enough lately, forcing Google to consider whether it swaps out its Naked juices for Tropicana. During my panel, SearchIgnite President Roger Barnette noted that Google's stock woes may make it even more aggressive in developing products that appeal to both consumers and marketers, so Google could emerge as an even fiercer competitor. Meanwhile, last I checked, Google's market share has only been increasing. Still, these frustrations shed light on some of the challenges search engines face as they try to innovate while delivering on their core value.

'Badder' Than Michael Jackson

One roundtable participant was tired of Google's results pages changing too frequently. The same search on consecutive days can often lead to different result rankings, making it harder for the consumer to efficiently scan results.

Another participant offered a vivid analogy. She said Google's search engine results are like Michael Jackson's nose. In the beginning, with "Bad," Jackson looked good, but he kept changing it so much that it became hideous.

Mr. Impersonality

Some of the changes people were complaining about stemmed from Google's routine algorithm tweaking, but much of the variability is caused by its personalized search results. If you're logged in, Google customizes your natural results based on how you search and click.

This feature found little love at my table. Some people were concerned that they're only seeing a narrow subset of results deemed to be relevant, while they're missing on what the masses are exposed to. There was also the sense of loss over a shared experience, where everyone at the table might see different results (or differently ordered results) for the same query. I addressed that in a previous column when Google rolled out search personalization, noting that the top 25 results for a given query could be ordered 12 trillion different ways on the first page of listings.

Then there's Google SearchWiki, where users can bump up or bump down search results for a query to manually order the ranking. I asked my panel their thoughts on this and heard crickets chirping, not because the panelists were unfamiliar with it, but because no one thought SearchWiki would make much of an impact. I'm inclined to agree; this is a tool designed for early adopters who crave advanced customization, and it deserves to stay in Google Labs. I'm not a big fan of any engine that makes me work too hard to rank my search results (I noted that point in my summer column on Yahoo SearchMonkey, though Yahoo has since remedied my earlier gripes).

Habit for Humanity

The buzzword of the show that kept coming up was "the Google habit"; we'll see where it ranks in fellow columnist Aaron Goldman's forthcoming show recap. The roundtable participants discussed ways that they've tried to break the habit. One agency strategist described how she set Microsoft's Live Search as her default engine and will give it a shot, but she still isn't getting rid of her Google Toolbar.

Not everyone suffered from the addiction. One participant said she uses different engines for different kinds of searches. This sums up the range of angst over Google. Either it's so good that people become complacent and don't bother going anywhere else, o r it's not good enough so people need to bounce around.

I asked the table if anyone thought any search engine, even a niche site for specific kinds of searches, was better than Google. Emphatically, they all said no. One decried, "Search doesn't work. It's a terrible experience."

Has Google really gotten worse, or is it a sign that Google and the other engines keep raising our expectations? I wonder if Google's like Barack Obama, setting expectations so high that they can't possibly be met (and, yes, that's now two comparisons between Google and a public figure with a mixed racial identity).

In the short term, Google's market share of search volume and advertising budgets indicates it has little to worry about. But as it moves forward, it will need to keep executing in ways that set our expectations higher, even if Google can't possibly meet them.