Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

10 Comebacks I'd Like to See

Second Life's new motto: "They're not real, but they're spectacular!"

Ten Comebacks I'd Like to See
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider 

It could be the Olympics, or the fear of another early ending to the Mets’ season, or Ben Folds reuniting with the other two guys as they ironically tour again as Ben Folds Five. Whatever the reason, I’ve got comeback fever. While I try to find the cure, I keep thinking about social media. Here are 10 social media comebacks that I’d love to see:

1) Facebook’s stock: As a marketer, I don’t care what Facebook’s share price is. But the price indicates that Facebook is struggling to properly value its assets and communicate that value to marketers and investors. As a public company, Facebook is more accountable to marketers. With ads now appearing in the News Feed and on mobile devices, Facebook is delivering more of what brands want without sacrificing the user experience. It will have to keep moving faster, though.

2) Yahoo’s relevance: Yahoo’s still great for display media buyers, but there was a time when Yahoo was a pioneer in search (well before Google), an innovator in mobile (well before Google), and a scrappy social disruptor (Google’s working on it). Yahoo brought together acquisitions like Flickr (alive, but in need of resuscitation), Delicious (which it sold), and Upcoming (which somehow still exists as a Yahoo brand). OK, its homegrown network, Yahoo 360 ,was a Google Buzz-esque flop, but now its one big social idea is to connect all its pages to Facebook and get people to automatically share everything they read. There better be more. This week’s updates to IntoNow are a start.

3) Hashable’s idea: Hashable had a vision of replacing business cards and making introductions easier. It relied too much on game mechanics, and the company took itself so seriously that it inspired the memorable post “Hashable is Worthless” during SXSW 2011. Someone will come up with a better way to digitally connect people professionally, and when it happens, we’ll probably see just how close Hashable was.

4) Foursquare’s mojo. Yes, Foursquare is growing, and it just released Promoted Updates. The company matters less for what it is than what it was. Foursquare was a catalyst for marketers to expand their thinking around mobile marketing, location-based services, and game mechanics. Now, when I encounter someone using Foursquare, it’s often to get $5 back on their AmEx statement. That’s a great reason to love American Express, but it turns Foursquare into a coupon pusher. I still like and regularly use it, but I want to get back to loving Foursquare again.

5) Groupon’s original approach: Groupon’s etymology derives from its origins as a group buying platform. It was exciting, in the way that winning your first eBay was exciting ten or fifteen years ago. If deals didn’t get enough subscribers, they wouldn’t materialize, much like Kickstarter projects today. If you loved it, you’d need to tell your friends. Who’s bragging to their friends they bought a Groupon now? 

6) Barcode Hero and Stickybits: There was a brief time when barcodes were wonderfully weird marketing vehicles. Barcode Hero added a gaming layer to barcode scans. After scanning relevant products, I was the king of Kraft, and even the king of shoes after killing time waiting for my wife to finish up at DSW. Stickybits treated barcodes as a content gateway, so you could scan a code and leave comments, photos, and videos. While neither company was destined to be a mass market hit, it was fun looking at black and white lines and boxes in entirely new ways.

7) Chat bots: Before there was Siri, there was SmarterChild, an instant messaging bot that was a fun alternative to search engines. Before instant messaging, there was Dr. Sbaitso, a DOS program that was the world’s first mass market virtual therapist. They didn’t catch on in time for brands to take part, but Siri will have a longer shelf life.

8) Color’s concept: If Instagram was the “Blair Witch Project” of mobile apps, Color was the “Waterworld.” It had a creative premise but couldn’t live up to the expectations set by its funding. The idea of an app that displays content shared from your immediate location sounds like a great social experiment, and perhaps even an important technology underlying the future of how content will be shared. Color pivoted and is now a video-sharing app. Yawn.

9) Second Life: I have fond memories of hanging out on H&R Block’s virtual island, where the avatars of real tax advisors would answer consumers’ avatars’ tax questions. I also recall another time tagging along with some clique of avatars (this may or may not have been when I met my first virtual furry), and one of them kindly offered me some digital genitalia to make my avatar look less like a Ken doll. Second Life is still around, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it in a marketing plan.

10) Digg: Digg introduced millions of people to social discovery, crowdsourcing, and creating content that’s designed to spread through social networks rather than search engines. Now there are new owners that want to make Digg a verb again. I’m especially excited for two reasons. First, Buzzfeed is on the verge of a monopoly for publicizing stories like, “Gotye’s 50 Funniest Kittens at the 2012 Lego Olympics.” Buzzfeed needs more competition. Secondly, as much as I couldn’t stand Digg’s fanboys with their hero worship of the site’s founders, Reddit’s insular crowd of contributors is even worse, voting up photos about – what else? – what it’s like introducing people to Reddit. Digg, you can do better.

I may often get nostalgic, but not everything needs an encore. I’m perfectly happy to say farewell to MySpace, Google Buzz, the hype around widgets, and every game that resembles FarmVille. Yet the Internet is the best comeback generator the world has ever known. It rebooted Betty White’s career, brought “Arrested Development” back from oblivion, and made Nikola Tesla a scientific folk hero. Some of these social media comebacks are destined to happen. When they do, you’ll hear about it – on Digg, from friends sharing a Yahoo story, via SmarterChild, or by scanning a barcode sticker in Second Life.

 

Startup Outlook Issue 3 Now Live with Adly, Livefyre, Media Armor, Pulse, and uSamp

I'm excited to share the latest edition of 360i's Startup Outlook, which you can visit directly at www.startupoutlook.com. It includes a guide for how brands can evaluate startups, with five companies featured each month. This edition includes: Adly, Livefyre, Media Armor, Pulse and uSamp , all part of Greycroft Partners.

If you read anything here, skip to the end for the interview with Greycroft's Ian Sigalow. He's got fantastic perspective on the startup space, so it was a treat for me to read. 

360i - Startup Outlook - Issue 3

Is This the Murderer's Motive?

The face of a murderer - distorted from the original and yet all too recognizable 

Is This the Murderer's Motive?
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider 

I woke up yesterday morning to a report from NY1 that it could take months before we learn the motive of the Aurora, Colo. murderer. Then I arrived at the office, logged into Facebook, and saw that youthful face with the shock of flaming red hair all over my feed. Could that be his motive?

Reports said that the killer wasn’t an avid social media user, with the exception of Adult Friend Finder. We need to redefine what it means to use social media. One doesn’t need to actively participate in social networking services in order to effectively use them. To manipulate social media is to use it.

The Colorado killer, whose name I can’t even bring myself to write, must be thriving on his social media notoriety. Ten years ago, if I didn’t want to hear more about the murderer, I could choose to tune out the media. I could turn off the TV, stick to FM radio stations, skip newspapers and magazines, and avoid CNN.com and Drudge Report for a few days or weeks. That might have taken more effort than it was worth, and I would have lost something in the process, but I could manage it.

Now, I can’t. My most important media sources are my friends and peers, the ones I choose to friend and follow. I can’t turn them off. I can’t say, “No more photos of the mass murderer, please.” I can’t say, “I’m over posts about the presidential candidates until the debates happen and we can try to find one shred of substance hidden amongst the partisan attacks.” I can’t say, “Why do I need to hear about what sports team you’re rooting for right now?” The reason I can’t say that is that I care. I learn more about people that way. I get closer to them. It’s the only news source I can’t turn off because I don’t want to turn it off.

That’s where the manipulators come in. Manipulators aren’t always evil. Look at the most-funded projects from Kickstarter. These aren’t getting funds through massive ad budgets and brand building. These are brands being built from scratch. The companies don’t own much owned media at all. They propose what they hope is a great project or product, create a compelling story, and milk the press where they can. Practically the only way these projects get funded is if they wind up spreading through social media.

Brands do their part to manipulate social media as well. When Taco Bell airlifted a truck full of tacos to a remote Alaska town, it wasn’t targeting the town’s 6,200 residents. Neither was TNT when it staged a seemingly spontaneous action epic in a quiet Belgian town. Both were YouTube bait. TNT racked up 36 million views and a Cannes Gold Lion. Yes, these brands may be participants in social media as well, but they created events that only matter if people share the footage. It hardly matters if the original event even happened; the live witnesses were not the target audience at all.

And now we have the killer. He crafted a story. He carried out his plot. Hundreds of millions of people are talking about him, and he may ensure his story continues for months, or perhaps years. His motives are currently unknown, but how could he not relish the attention? Just the idea of it -- that his manipulation may be happening right now -- makes it all the more tempting to turn it all off.

Then, I keep reading. There are the victims’ memorials, and the testimonials to life. There are links to the essay by Jason Alexander, who offered the most eloquent analysis of the Second Amendment that I have ever read. There’s Slate exploring the phenomenon of men giving their lives so that their girlfriends could live. There’s context. There’s insight. There’s meaning.

I can’t shut it off. I don’t want to shut it off. I know what I must do instead: accept it, embrace it, and be a part of it.

Getting Lost In Social Discovery

Getting Lost In Social Discovery
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

“Social discovery” is one of the hotter buzzwords these days, referring to how people can tap friends’ implicit and explicit recommendations to experience something new. At first, it sounds like more jargon, but when you experience it firsthand, you can get a sense of what it really means.

Consider a recent Sunday afternoon. I had been cooped up more than usual, a self-imposed internment following an ironic summer cold, and took advantage of the extra time indoors to watch every episode of the most recent “Battlestar Galactica” series during a five-day stretch. Forcing myself to leave home on a day with heat that was only stifling and not paralyzing, I ventured to the New Amsterdam Market at New York’s South Street Seaport. After snacking on lobster rolls and Dutch pancakes, I was ready for a detour – or a quest, courtesy of Traveler’s Quest.

Traveler’s Quest is a mobile game that epitomizes social discovery. Players hunt for virtual treasures and earn points reburying them as far as possible from the point of discovery. For the especially aggressive hunters, players can buy maps to reveal the locations of treasures hidden further away. Yes, it all sounds pretty silly if not pointless, but as opposed to most mobile games, Traveler’s Quest creates relationships between the players and their physical surroundings. Often, treasures are just out of reach, so players are motivated to go out of their way to nab them. This gets back to social discovery – discovering a place one didn’t intend to go to, in search of something shared by another person.

Now let’s return to that stifling Sunday. A few treasures were buried downtown past the market, with the furthest a good 10 blocks out of the way of where I planned to go. In Manhattan, 10 blocks is a short walk when you’re going from point A to point B, but a hike when it’s out of your way. Still, I was in need of fresh air, and I had to clear my head, after nights of dreaming that everyone I knew was a Cylon. Traveler’s Quest fulfilled my need to pursue an unplanned course.

Walking further south, I stumbled upon Stone Street, a vibrant alley crammed with outdoor seating, and an old favorite spot when I worked near Wall Street back in my eMarketer days. It was just out of the way of the treasure, but I took this detour. Not only did I discover the street, but I discovered two friends, Noah Brier and Faris Yakob, wrapping up their brunch over beer, and they invited me to join them. It was, at that moment, surreal. I was on a street I hadn’t visited in years, having wandered in that direction thanks to a relatively obscure mobile application for the sole purpose of collecting a worthless virtual good.

Logically, it made no sense. It’s not like Traveler’s Quest is designed to connect people with long-lost friends and nostalgia-inducing side streets. Yet I’ve also discovered that the most unexpected social interactions come from taking a route I didn’t intend to take at a time I wasn’t supposed to take it. It’s like when I was driving up to Lake George and pulled off a random exit to drive two miles to a McDonald’s all because a “30 Rock” episode had my wife and I hankering for a McFlurry, and I ran into a former coworker. That happened without any digital technology beyond GPS, but Traveler’s Quest creates far more occasions for something like that to happen. As you hunt for virtual treasure, it encourages you to get lost. Getting lost is the most reliable route to social discovery online, offline, and where the digital and physical worlds meet.

 

Is Experimentation Innovation?

uhh, thanks, Bob Garfield, but this isn't the experimentation I had in mind...

Is Experimentation Innovation?
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

Are experimentation and innovation one and the same? The two words were initially used interchangeably during MediaPost’s recent Brand Marketers Summit, until some panelists sorted it out.

Consider the description of the panel “Budgeting for Experimentation: How Much Money Does It Take to Not Be Left Behind?” It notes, “Many marketers probably wish they had spent just a little more money a few years ago to get in on the ground floor of something that became the next big thing.” This clearly implies that the discussion should focus on innovation. Yet it then says, “How do you make experimentation an ongoing part of your marketing efforts?” Are experimentation and innovation really synonymous?

For many marketers, one isn’t innovating until they’re trying something new. Trying something new is the essence of experimentation. Innovating and experimenting feel like they have a lot in common.

Yet experimenting doesn’t just mean doing something new. First, it means having a point of view. The hypothesis could be that when dropping a 10-pound ball and a 1-pound ball from a rooftop, both will reach the ground at the same time. Or it could be that adding paid media to a socially fueled earned media program will increase the entire program’s effectiveness. The experiment then provides results, which can of course be measured.

Innovation doesn’t have any of these requirements. It’s not always clear what’s innovative anyway. Something that’s never been done before isn’t necessarily better, nor is it necessarily significant. I could advise a client to post all their Facebook messages to Englis- speaking audiences in a Cyrillic font. It’s quite probable no brand targeting English speakers has done that before, as it’s a terrible idea. But the brand could say that it was the first to try to teach Americans how to read Russian against their will and get a bored reporter to write a feature story about it. Bad ideas are easy to come by, as any great brainstorming meeting will produce dozens of them. Nearly all of the rejected ideas are probably innovative in some way.

Experiments don’t need to be innovative. Target and Chase, for instance, both ran programs on Facebook where fans could choose which nonprofit organizations received donations. I don’t recall which did it first; both did it, and garnered much of their exposure from participating nonprofits promoting the programs. Each one had its own twists, but one had to have been at least somewhat derivative from the other. The second one, even if derivative, was still most likely an experiment for the marketer, with the success of the program far from assured.

Innovation is clearly more popular. A quick search of Google News yields 77,000 results for “experiment” and “experimentation” combined (a tally inflated by the Higgs Boson discovery), and 2.2 million results just for “innovation.” Innovation is largely a construct of marketing -- not that there’s anything wrong with that. More importantly, innovation is a construct of perception, so as long as there’s some alignment between a marketer and its audience, then it’s possible to pass off just about anything as innovation. The word “new” remains as powerful as ever.

Experiments can’t be sold so easily. There needs to be the hypothesis, the comparison of a variable to a control, and demonstrable results. Experiments can be done constantly by people at all levels of an organization. Experimentation is what really generates better and more effective marketing. On occasion, it even leads to innovation. As Encyclopedia Brown likes to say, “No case is too small.”

Thanks go to MediaPost’s panel of innovative experimenters who illustrated the differences between the two concepts. Keep an eye out for  Gizmo Beverages President Walter Apodaca, Something Massive Chief Creative Strategist Adam Broitman, Tremor Video CRO Randy Kilgore, Big Fuel Communications Director of Platform & Product Strategy Michoel Ogince, and Bulbstorm President & CEO Bart Steiner. There will be plenty of innovation coming from them, and more experimentation than any of us may realize.

 

The Interest Graph Vs. The Knowledge Graph

Above: Robert Scoble's Interest Graph, via Gravity.com

The Interest Graph vs The Knowledge Graph
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider 

What’s more valuable: your interests or what you want to know? The difference between the Interest Graph and the Knowledge Graph will shape the direction of two major technology companies in the years ahead, and this will in turn impact billions of dollars of marketing spending.

Google just wrapped its annual I/O conference, and a key theme this year was the Knowledge Graph. Google initially introduced the concept in May with a fairly popular video. At the time, I was underwhelmed, starting with the opening lines from Product Management Director Jack Menzel: “Wouldn’t it be amazing if Google could understand the words that you use when you’re doing a search? Well, they aren’t just words. They refer to real things in the world.” You mean this isn’t the case already? Google better understand that when I’m searching for “Oreo cookie balls,” I’m not just entering a series of letters like a proverbial monkey on a typewriter, but I’m looking to either make or buy some real (and delicious) things made of cream cheese, melted chocolate, and Oreos.

Even if  the Knowledge Graph is just a fancy word for making search results relevant, Google’s new version of its Android operating system will tap the Knowledge Graph for answers to “questions about traffic, sports scores, and general information,” according to Silicon Alley Insider’s I/O roundup. The Knowledge Graph, featuring a database of more than 500 million entries with more than 3.5 billion attributes collectively, may well be important for Google’s future. The I/O updates that should stick around the longest and have the greatest impact for Google tend to be the more technical updates, such as mass transit routes built into Android and the Compute Engine to run cloud computing for applications. It will have a harder time winning over users for its consumer products like Nexus Q (an Apple TV competitor), Nexus 7 (an iPad and Kindle Fire competitor), Google+ events (a Facebook competitor) and Chrome for iPhone and iPad (competing with the native Safari browser).

Now take a look at Twitter. It’s finally making headway in tapping into its Interest Graph. While the term seems to first appear in an academic blog post by Joel Foner in December 2009, the next references appear in April 2010. As John Battelle noted on his blog that month, “To me the most interesting concept Twitter introduced last week was how they planned on tuning their ad platform to something Twitter COO Dick Costolo, in an interview with me on stage, called ‘the public interest graph.’ More likely than not Dick’s been talking about this for some time, but so far not many folks have picked it up. The first mentions of ‘public interest graph’ (as related to Twitter) first appear on Google April 15th – the day Dick mentions it. On stage, I was taken aback, because the concept struck me as pretty powerful.” Google doesn’t list any references to the “public interest graph” before 2010, and any broader “interest graph” references beyond Foner’s seem to discuss compound interest rather than social media. I first encountered the concept at an event at Twitter headquarters in June 2010, and when Costolo described it, I couldn’t wait for it to come to life.

The vision, as Costolo expressed it back in 2010, was that the Interest Graph would look at everyone a user follows and create a map of their interests. If you follow Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade, it would assume you’re not just interested in basketball but the Miami Heat. It would pay attention to the content shared in tweets rather than brief descriptors in one’s biography. For instance, if you follow me at @dberkowitz, Twitter’s Interest Graph will (I hope) skip the snark and assume you’re more interested in marketing than serial killing.

Tapping the Interest Graph allows ads to become more relevant over time. If you never tweeted about the Heat but your Interest Graph indicated you were likely a fan, Twitter could in time allow Nike to advertise its new LeBron James sneakers to you and other probable Heat fans. Then – if you’re using a mobile device – Twitter could show you the store nearest you with them in stock. For some advertisers, this is what they’ve been dreaming of, especially if Twitter can reliably prove its relevance.

Google has one project in the works that could be as powerful in terms of predicting demand: Google Now. It will proactively deliver personalized results to Android users’ home screens based on their calendars, locations, searches, and other specific interests like sports teams and transportation schedules. Considered Google’s personal assistant, it’s designed to reduce the need for some searches entirely. It has a built-in ad model, but it faces several challenges: Users must opt in to the service, then must opt in to specific modules (or “cards”), it’s only for Android, and it will create the biggest digital privacy scare yet if it runs ads so relevant that users feel like they are being stalked. Other than that, it’s perfect.

Google should fare better with its Knowledge Graph -- but again, that’s a way of saying its search results will stay relevant. Less exciting still for marketers is that Knowledge Graph results tend to occupy digital real estate previously reserved for ads. Twitter’s Interest Graph, meanwhile, was designed with advertisers in mind. The more targeted it gets, the more marketers will be interested.

 

 

Flying Too Close to the Sun

Flying Too Close to the Sun
originally puiblished in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

Remember Highlight? Sure, it’s still around, and it’s premature to write it off. Yet the new app that received the most buzz at South by Southwest (SXSW) this year just gained a new competitor: Facebook.

There have been many instances recently of the rich getting richer, with the best functionality and features getting incorporated into the most dominant platforms. Facebook, Google, Apple, and Twitter are among those especially adept at making dreams come true while simultaneously unleashing nightmares.

Here are four ways this has been happening lately:

1) Proximity Networks

Tracx reported that Highlight, Glancee, and Sonar respectively received the most buzz at SXSW in March. All three offer twists on a similar theme: find friends near you, and potentially your friends’ friends as well. To most people, the idea of constantly sharing one’s location to strangers sounds creepy, so it doesn’t have mainstream potential in its current form. That’s presumably why Foursquare, which was all about finding friends before it relaunched to focus on discovering local businesses, has been cautious here. Meanwhile, Apple’s Find My Friends mobile service is entirely focused on locating select people, and generally only for brief intervals.

It’s Facebook that will now likely determine to what extent any of this catches on. Not only did Facebook acquire Glancee, but it is testing out a feature dubbed Find Friends Nearby (initially codenamed Friendshake) that emerged from a hackathon. There are bugs; tech legend Robert Scoble commented on TechCrunch how it didn’t live up to what Highlight did so well. But this is version 0.1 of a feature that Facebook barely publicized. Version 0.1 of a feature from Facebook with its nearly 1 billion users is a heck of a lot more meaningful than version 10.0 of a service that reaches 10,000 or even 1 million users.

2) Facial Recognition

As discussed in this series last week, Facebook recently acquired Face.com. Days later, I received an email from Google+ with the subject line, “Is this you in Daniel Berkowitz’s album?” Daniel’s my father. He uploaded a number of photos, and didn’t tag anyone. But Google recognized me because I enabled a feature called Find My Face. Google’s documentation notes, “After you turn on Find my Face, Google+ uses the photos you're tagged in to create a model of your face. The model updates as tags of you are added or removed, and you can delete the entire face model at any time by turning off Find my Face.”

Few people probably know this setting even exists, so it won’t have much of an immediate impact, and many will prefer it stays off. Heck, the Daily Mail reported that Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, said the company “was ‘unlikely’ to employ facial recognition programs.” Yet vain as I am, I love the idea that Google can find photos of me. I then have the option of tagging myself. Really, who wouldn’t want to know what photos of them are online? This hints at what Facebook can do with Face.com, following Google acquiring related technology PittPatt last year to create its own offering.

I’ve used facial recognition software for years, and nothing prepared me for receiving that email from Google. As a bonus, it found seven photos, and all of them were of me. It’s all the more impressive given that in many photos, it’s hard to tell me apart from my oldest brother. How long will it be before facial recognition software can tell the difference between identical twins? We can’t be that far off.

3) Check-Ins

Checking in has proven to be a fad, for the most part. Even Foursquare minimized the prominence of the check-in feature in the latest version of its app. Yet location-sharing remains all the more important, especially when considering how common it is now for people to append their location to posts in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other services. Now Apple may be dabbling with check-ins. Bloomberg reported that Apple will incorporate Yelp’s check-in functionality within its new mobile mapping software coming this fall. Yelp was always an also-ran with check-ins, and most other check-in-themed services have long since died through acquisition or disinterest. It’s questionable how core Yelp check-ins will be for Apple’s maps, but once the upgrade is live, Foursquare could be further marginalized.

4) Curation

There once was an amazing service called Summify that aggregated the links shared by anyone you followed on Twitter and then delivered them as email digests. Then Twitter acquired it, and Summify started winding down operations. That made room for other services, such as News.me -- one not quite as good, but an acceptable alternative. Then Twitter came out with its daily email digest, which also isn’t as great a product as what Summify offered, but it’s very good and will likely obviate the need for any others. Summify and then News.me made Twitter far more useful for me. It turns out Twitter’s now doing that on its own thanks to its new addition.

The Sun

Glancee, Face.com, Yelp, and Summify all won by creating products that have the potential to become core parts of major companies’ value propositions. Yet that’s a dangerous game, like Icarus playing chicken with the sun. Facebook probably didn’t even need Glancee, as its rival prototype came out of a hackathon. Apple will hurt a slew of local services by focusing on Yelp.

Yet as a character once noted on “30 Rock,” “When a big one falls, four little ones move up.” Google and Facebook may inspire others like Microsoft and Apple to invest more in facial recognition. Or others may look for the next generation, whether it’s voice recognition, retina scanning, or DNA-based friend finding. Even when a few get burned, plenty others still want their shot at getting close to the sun. A few will even overpower it.