Watch Your Eyes - Does Social Media Lower Our Guard Against Ad Overexposure?

Excerpted from 7/16/2009 MediaPost article"Eye Tracking Study Reveals Search Going Social"

Marketers face the constant challenge of keeping up with and understanding consumer search behavior. An eye tracking study conducted by Oneupweb on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube by a digital marketing company reveals trends about the way people interact with paid ads in social media sites.

Oneupweb found that not only do people spend time viewing paid ads on social networks, but they often looked at the ads more quickly once they landed on the search results page. For example:
- 65% of participants engage with sponsored ads within the first 10 seconds of their search.
- survey participants revealed they log into Facebook

• 29% several times daily
• 39% every day
• 17% weekly
• 17% less than 3 times per month.

Contrary to expected behavior, the participants viewed the sponsored ads prior to viewing the second and third results. The Oneupweb study indicates similar behavior was observed throughout the YouTube search.

The study conducted with 25 survey participants was done from late June through early July.

My Take

Users of social media sites exhibit more interest in ads on social sites than non-social sites. Sponsored ads are viewed at a higher than expected rate, demonstrating that social media users are more open to being influenced by advertising they know is paid for.

Although paid-for advertising does not take full advantage of the crowd-wisdom potential of social media, this study indicates that social media users are more ready to be influenced, perhaps as a result of their elevated trust levels for social media content.

Rapid Growth of WOM for National Brands

Word-of-Mouth Marketing On The Upswing

by Mark Walsh, Friday, Nov 16, 2007 7:00 AM ET

WORD-OF-MOUTH MARKETING IS EXPECTED TO surpass $1 billion in 2007, making it one of the fastest-growing alternative media formats. In a new research report, PQ Media also predicts that spending on word-of-mouth marketing will grow at an annual rate of 30.4%, and will hit $3.7 billion by 2011.

Helping drive the growth of WoM marketing are Web 2.0 technologies such as social networks, blogs that allow consumers to share information, and opinions about brands and products. While 90% of WoM activity is estimated to take place offline, marketers are shifting more spending to online vehicles that can provide more measurable results. Findings of the PQ Media study were presented Thursday at the Word-of Mouth Marketing Summit 2007 in Las Vegas.

What exactly is WoM marketing? PQ Media defines it as an alternative marketing strategy that uses online and offline tactics involving peer "influencers," WoM communities and brand advocates to encourage consumer dialogue about products and services.

The category doesn't include what are considered unethical tactics such as spam, "sock puppeting," (assuming a false identity online to promote a product or company online), or paying someone to talk about a brand without disclosing that they work for the company.

Also not counted in WoM estimates were spending on activities like in-store product sampling, coupons and loyalty programs, and advertising on social networks and blogs. So Facebook's new social ads, which let marketers attach messages to the communications of members who have identified themselves as "fans" of a particular brand, would not be included.

Only marketing through fully disclosed brand advocates on blogs or other online outlets would be included. "The brand advocates or agents have to state that 'We are hired by this particular company,' or 'we were given a sample of a product,'" explained Leo Kivijarv, vice president of research for PQ Media.

Wal-Mart and Sony both ran into trouble last year when they used paid writers to create authentic-seeming blogs evangelizing their brands.

Kivijarv says 2006 was a turning point for WoM marketing, when it went from being an experimental media buy to becoming "increasingly included in fully integrated marketing campaigns." Marketers are no longer just monitoring WoM efforts, but expecting to see a return on investment in increased sales or buzz surrounding a product.

That trend is expected to continue in 2007, when WoM will grow an estimated 37.7% to $1.35 billion. Overall, however, WoM remains the smallest marketing segment, capturing less than 1% of industry dollars. Direct marketing, branded entertainment, and business-to-business promotions garner the lion's share of spending.

Kivijarv estimates that there are about 200 agencies and technology companies that either specialize in WoM marketing or have units dedicated to it.

While no specific data is yet available on WoM spending by product category, food and beverage, media and entertainment, and sports and recreation are among the most active in employing WoM strategies.

Mark Walsh can be reached at walsh@mediapost.com

My Take

Mr. Walsh's article covers data and projections for national brands.

But you as a local contractor or professional are part of the Word-of-Mouth Wave already. "Huh? How's that?" Well, you Feel your ears burning?

Your clients, customers, friends and neighbors are talking about you right now in the grocery store, on the sidelines of sporting events, walking their dog and at PTA meetings. They're
registering with more social networks daily to discuss carpooling, child raising, retirement planning - and guess who else they're talking about.

The Web will allow you to engage your satisfied clients using these same social networks to convert more of these discussions into qualified leads for you. And you in turn will be able to reward them and strengthen your relationship - while benefiting the community.

It's the new advertising. There are many benefits to your company including fully variable expenses and improved cash flow.

Stay tuned. The YouGottaCall.com "Connect-gine" is coming.

Judy's Book To Shut Down

Excerpted from: Local Search Site Judy's Book To Shut Down at Search Engine Land (Oct. 24, 2007) by Greg Sterling

TechCrunch first reported (confirmed on CEO Andy Sack's blog) that local search site Judy's Book is shutting down and/or looking for a buyer. After struggling to monetize its traffic, the site shifted its business model to emphasize coupons and local deals. The firm had raised over $10 million in two investment rounds. This follows the sale of Judy's Book competitor InsiderPages to IAC's Citysearch and the failure of Backfence.com.

Some might be inclined see this latest closure of a local site as evidence that local's not working. The truth is that it's quite complicated with little room for error by startups. For online consumers, however, local is growing in importance. Just to put the discussion in larger context, here are some facts and stats about local that I quickly compiled:

Internet ad spending will reach $62 billion and surpass all other media by 2011; local online spending will reach $19.2 billion. Local search is projected to be $4.1 billion. Veronis Suhler Stevenson, August 2007

Local search is the second most popular online activity after e-mail
Piper Jaffray (2007)

60% of all local business searches now happen online (33% happen in print yellow pages) and 82% of the people using local search sites follow up their research with offline action
TMP Directional Marketing-comScore, August 2007

Out of the 130 million monthly unique users of Yahoo last year, 116 million of them came to Yahoo with local intent.

Hilary Schneider, Executive Vice President, Global Partnership Solutions, Yahoo!

The Internet will influence a trillion dollars in offline/local retail spending by 2010/11
JupiterResearch, Forrester Research, 2007

Here's some additional recent data on consumer usage of the Internet to find local information from WebVisible and Nielsen. I've also got some additional discussion of the Judy's Book closure on my personal blog Screenwerk.

My Take

Mr. Sack, a seasoned tech founder, has been a pioneer in the area of energizing local commerce with online tools. Via his blog, he remained very open about the lessons he was learning while leading Judysbook.

The failure of Judybook to be profitable highlights the need for:
1. a model with a new approach to monetization - membership subscriptions and ad revenue fall short
2. achieving an early break-even - minimization of advertising expenses.

A Better Local Ad Model

Excerpted from SearchEngineWatch:

Searching for a Better Local Ad Model
by Michael Boland

Local search is a paradox. At least, its current ad models are. In one sense, online pure plays, such as search engines, have done the best job building local search products with online mapping, social search and Web 2.0 appeal.

Local search products from online pure-plays eventually hit a wall. Ad models rely on self-service. Advertisers sign up and manage search-based ad campaigns on their own. The vast majority of doctors, restaurant owners and bricklayers are simply too busy being doctors, restaurant owners and bricklayers to become search engine marketers.

On the other hand, yellow pages publishers with fleets of eager young sales reps knock on every small business' door in town to sell, launch and optimize their online ad campaigns. If only that were the case.

The truth: yellow pages companies have this capability, but haven't yet fully executed. Why? They're staring at the potential loss of core offline revenues. Undermine a model that brings in 40 percent plus margins? Not the lesson taught in B-school.

More to the point, yellow pages publishers have what online pure plays are missing (physical sales channel), but lack what they do have (better search-based products).

The fact remains: local search players have an edge from a product development standpoint. The natural tendency to cram an offline model into an online product doesn't work.

Worlds Collide

So, local search players lack sales channels, while yellow pages publishers lack the Web 2.0 gene. Can't we breed them to create some kind of mutant super local search monster? (I call him Yattoogle.)

Buy or Build?

As for building from scratch, we're also seeing a lot of action. Citysearch announced the launch of a 150 person Atlanta-based sales center in January. Online marketing firm ReachLocal received a $55 million investment to continue building out its own feet on the street earlier this month, while Weblistic continues to staff local sales reps.

Meanwhile, hyper-local site Smalltown has built up a small but successful local ad sales strategy in the San Francisco Bay area. The company brings local businesses online with low barrier "Webcards," a de facto Web presence that is easier and cheaper than starting a Web site. Webcards also have the portability, functionality and social elements of being easily e-mailed, shared and embedded with pictures and video.

Taking it to the Streets

To put the local ad sales opportunity further into perspective, it comes down to the wide swath of local advertisers -- representing billions in untapped ad dollars -- who aren't advertising in the yellow pages. Local advertising in the print yellow pages is a $16 billion industry, according to The Kelsey Group.

"In the century or so that the yellow pages has been around, the industry only has about a 30 percent penetration of the small-business marketplace," said Marc Barach, CMO of Ingenio. "There is an opportunity to grow this with new products."

Given that many of these businesses don't have Web sites to begin with, low barrier ways to get online such as landing page or microsite offerings (i.e. Smalltown's Webcards), could complement this product bundle.

Throw in hosting and other services, and this could represent the opportunity to be the trusted source that provides the training wheels for SMBs to get online and advertising. Develop this hand-holding relationship early in a company's transition to the Internet, and you could have an advertiser for life.

My Take

A new model is inevitable. In my opinion it will be completely contrarian.

But I do not think the next model will require an army of sales representatives. After all, who sold you on using Google? Or Facebook?

It will grow like Craigslist, involve people like MLM and benefit the community like SETI.

The infrastructure (persistent broadband, mobile messaging, etc.) is in place. Users are already conditioned and ready to accept it. Advertisers would dive in to be the first ones to benefit.

The only thing stopping this is the creativity of marketers.

Tags: localsearch, socialsearch, yellowpages

Friday October 19, 2007 - 11:50am (EDT)

The Missing Metric

Excerpted from: Offline Conversion Tracking: The Missing Metric

"I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted...I just don't know which half." It's not a joke: it's an astute observation from pioneer marketer John Wanamaker. John was a Philadelphia businessman who conceptualized the department store in the early 1900s. Today, 100 years later, we share the same problem Wanamaker faced of identifying which advertising works and which doesn't.

Online search drives offline sales

In March 2006, comScore conducted a study for Google that showed 63% of purchases by consumers who conducted online searches were made offline. This means consumers called or went to their local stores rather than purchasing an item from a web site.

With the holiday season fast approaching, small and local businesses should sit up and take notice. History repeats itself in marketing, just as in life, so there's a good chance this upcoming holiday season will produce similar statistics as previous years.

Local search behavior dictates purchase method

A Neilsen//NetRatings and WebVisible local search study revealed some interesting insights on local search behavior. The study found that consumers using a search engine to find a local service shopped very differently from a searcher on Amazon or eBay where the transaction occurred online.

According to the study, the local searcher would find a local business via search, but then use the phone 68% of the time to make contact with and/or purchase from the business.

The results of this study send two loud and clear messages: if you're a local company that is not advertising online, you should. And secondly, if you are advertising online and your company completes much of its transactions offline, you need to track offline conversions to get a complete picture of your marketing performance. And just which methods are proven to offer accurate offline tracking?

Methods of tracking offline conversions

Here are a few methods used to track conversions offline.

1. Simple Methods for Offline Conversion Tracking

2. Intermediate Methods of Offline Tracking

3. Advanced Offline Conversion Tracking Techniques

4. Graduate level offline conversion tracking

...The preferred method for conversion was the phone. This particular client does over 90% of its business by direct phone calls driven from their web site, but none of that is captured in their online analytics.

Offline conversion tracking gives you the information you need to make better marketing decisions and to better allocate your advertising resources.

Christine Churchill is President of KeyRelevance.com, a full service search engine marketing firm. The Small Is Beautiful column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

My Take


The gist of this article applies to all local businesses - they need a way to track the efficiency of their advertising.

It is revealing that most companies that spend large amounts for online advertising are struggling with monitoring which of their ad campaigns really produce sales.

What if local small business owners had the power to immediately harness and measure their most effective advertising channel - and only pay as much as they want to - and pay it after they have earned their revenue?

Wouldn't that be something?


- - Tim

- .. --  - .. -- - .. --  - .. --  - .. --  

Tags: localsearch, socialsearch

Thursday October 18, 2007 - 02:32pm (EDT)

Local Online Advertising Up for Grabs

Excerpted from: Times Online

Local businesses are still too hard to find on the web, but the big web companies are queueing up to help

For the most part, small businesses have been slower than big businesses in shifting marketing dollars to the internet, and it's not hard to see why: many small business owners don't have the time or expertise to learn about the new medium, and ad purveyors don't have the time or expertise to create the products and services that will work in small local markets.

Both of those things will undoubtedly change over the next decade or so. That's why a start-up company like ReachLocal can raise an incredible $68 million (£33.5 million) to position itself as the ad sales force for local online advertising.

The sleeping giants in the local ad business are the Yellow Pages companies, and they are rushing to build out their online offerings. But it's not obvious that they'll be able to translate their one-time stranglehold over sectors like plumbers and injury lawyers into similar dominance on the internet. In fact, Google and Yahoo!, with their local initiatives, are a big challenge, and lots of new players are rushing to get involved.

A new survey sponsored by a company called Webvisible shows a great deal of variety in how people do "local search." They use search engines, they use local directories, they use local newspapers, they use consumer review sites. There's a whole sector of companies - Yelp is probably the leader – whose premise is that getting a community to post reviews of businesses is the key to effective local search.

Certainly, the current experience when searching for small businesses online is often quite disappointing, with strange aggregations of generic directory listings leading to an unhelpful maze of links. A lot of money is being spent trying to do this better, but the smaller and more local the geography, the more difficult it will be for big national directory platforms to provide a good experience.

This online market, more than most, is still very much up for grabs.

by Jonathan Weber (founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net a regional news service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States; previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard)

My Take

The local ad market is primed for a major upgrade. Social networks will soon alter the way major consumer purchasing decisions are made.

Like Facebook and MySpace changed the social lives of high school and college students; like Craigslist introduced online/offline community shopping; soon the selection by homeowners and families of merchants, contractors and professional services will be influenced by their network of trusted friends and neighbors.

Tags: localsearch, socialsearch

Monday October 15, 2007 - 08:14pm (EDT)

Facebook LinkedIn Face-off

Excerpted from "Facebook Has LinkedIn In Their Crosshairs" by Michael Arrington

Facebook may be used for professional networking (particularly in Silicon Valley), but it sure isn’t set up to be. People’s profiles are all about their dating status, pictures, videos and other very personal information. It’s perfect for college dorm networking, but not so much for job or business development hunting.

LinkedIn, by contrast, is set up perfectly to network. You can see your extended network many levels deep, so you can quickly find out if you are connected to a person even with a few degrees of separation. With Facebook, you can go to your friends’ profiles and see who they are friends with, but you can’t go deeper into the social graph than that.

But that’s changing, fast.

• Facebook is creating friend grouping last month.
• Facebook is quietly making changes to their data structure to allow for the concept of “networking.” ... But networking was recently added as a desired relationship type to the API (note that it is not yet an option on Facebook itself yet).

Once launched, Facebook (or third party developers) could add a lot of functionality around networking. Applications could be developed that show a social graph for users who’ve said they want to network that goes much deeper than one level of friends. You could, for example, use Facebook’s people search (which is now public) to not only find people, but see exactly how you are connected to them. In effect, Facebook could build a LinkedIn-type networking application within the overall Facebook network. And that could be very bad for LinkedIn in the long run.

My Take

Promising development.

Monday October 15, 2007 - 01:08pm (EDT)

We're in business!

We are pleased to announce that YouGottaCall.com, LLC is now incorporated and is officially in business. Our corporate members are Wayne Feigenbaum, Bill Hoff and me (Tim Tracey).

The step of forming a corporation is the result of our combined research, planning and dreaming over the past two years. It is also an expression of our commitment to create an entirely new medium for local business advertising that benefits the consumer, the business owner and the community.

TEAM MEMBERS

Please meet our co-founders:

Wayne Feigenbaum

Wayne has been a business founder and owner for over 20 years. His Fortune 500 background was the foundation for his success in the commercial printing industry.

As President of Preferred Printing Services, Inc, he has in-depth knowledge of managing growth through aggressive sales, strategic planning and acquisitions. Preferred Printing was recognized by Inc Magazine as one of the 500 fastest growing privately held companies in America. Strong client and vendor relationships have been the hallmark of Wayne’s businesses.

Wayne graduated from the University of Maine with a Bachelors degree in Marketing.

Bill Hoff

Bill has over 20 years experience in operations management and business ownership. He has used his rare balance of entrepreneurship and analytical skills to grow consumer products ventures in the bottled water and beverage markets.

As Operations Director at Preferred Printing, Bill has overseen the logistical and financial aspects of the business in its growth and acquisition phase.

After earning his Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from Duke University Bill received his Masters in Business Administration concentrating in operations from Carnegie Mellon University.

Tim Tracey

Tim manages sales and marketing for the Pinnacle Network of Simsbury, CT. He has over 20 years experience in the sales and marketing of software and financial services.

His sales experience highlighted the value of referring relationships which resulted in highly qualified sales leads. Through his management of Internet based, lead generation and database marketing campaigns, Tim conceived of leveraging technological tools to facilitate and incentivize ‘word of mouth’, spurring the concept for a local business-to-consumer and B-to-B lead referral engine - YouGottaCall.com.

Tim earned his Bachelors in Marketing from Boston College, graduating from its School of Management (now the Carroll SOM) and its Honors Program.

Tags: localsearch, socialsearch, wordofmouth, affiliatemarketing, offline/online

Saturday September 8, 2007 - 06:29pm (EDT)

Local search gets profitable for local business

Entry for July 27, 2007

Now local search gets profitable for local business. Announcing Local Leap from Vertical Leap

Release Date: 26 July 2007

Vertical Leap, pioneer of managed search engine marketing, has launched Local Leap, a new search optimisation service specifically for businesses whose market is local, rather than global.

Local Leap gives high street shops, professionals such as solicitors, accountants plus service providers including plumbers, specialists in topiary through to catering the opportunity to realistically compete in the main search engines and to see a profitable return from their website due to increased sales leads.

My Take


This effort aims to place participating local vendors at the top of the search results heap.

If all SEO experts are attempting to win the same limited real estate, then any positive results they achieve can only be temporary. The next local competitor who comes along using the same tool - or a similar one - will knock them off.

Missing elements - social search; viral; economic incentive; differentiation based on consumer experience

Tags: socialsearch, localsearch, wordofmouth, angieslist, judysbook, yellowpages

Friday July 27, 2007 - 07:23am (EDT)

My Take: What is Judy's Book Missing?

My Take: Judy's Book has attracted more venture capital - $8 million more .

But I just don't get it.

What competitive advantage is it counting on in its battle against Yahoo! Local?

I've been a Yahoo fan and user for 10 years. My Yahoo! Yellow Pages stares at me from my tool bar. My Yahoo address book allows me to connect to my friends. Yahoo has an active portal with piles of content.

So ...

- What will drive traffic to this upstart?

- What would compel users to submit reviews (other than free coffee)?

- What will create viral interest and growth?

- How does it connect with any of the natural factors that have been spurring word-of-mouth since the dawn of commerce? Quality products or services? Great customer service? Creative advertising?

- Are they adding proprietary functionality that makes it an attractive acquisition?

- And the really big question - where are these easy VC guys when you need them?

I like your spunk, Judy. But help me to see your unique value.

Good luck.

Friday January 6, 2006 - 03:03pm (EST)