Brands can expect new ad models to emerge from the redesign of Bing. Microsoft introduced a new version of the search engine with a three-column design combining traditional Web search and social. The product will soon roll out in the U.S., but during the Bing Search Summit on Thursday executives did not announce a definitive date. The combination of search and social signals will produce a clear and clean vision of user intent. Derrick Connell, corporate VP of search program management, said the right rail paid-search ads will remain in place and should perform slightly better. In the future, Microsoft will "start to experiment with new ad formats and models." The company can see the potential for new ad models that might include sharing revenue, but it had nothing to announce. Qi Lu, president of the Online Services Division, said a better way to serve the intent is not necessarily by crawling the Web, but rather building a spot market for merchants offering goods and services. The engineering and business team are working on innovations that over time can leverage the new design and more closely serve ads based on a combination of signals. The plan to create the same experience on Bing across many designs means mobile will take advantage of "swipe based" features that create the ability to span columns from left to right, according to Harry Shum, Microsoft VP of core search development. Search pages must evolve or become obsolete, Connell said. Microsoft's investment in Facebook no doubt will help. And whatever privacy setting you have in Facebook, we will act on fully," he said. While the left rail will continue to serve up search results, the middle column will give users a snapshot or relevant information and services related to the search, including maps, restaurant reservations and reviews. The aim is to provide the information before the searcher asks. A sidebar titled "Friends Who Might Know" connects searchers to friends on social sites who may have insight into specific search queries. If a friend "liked" an Italian restaurant and posted photos from a recent trip to Los Angeles, they will serve up in related searches. The feature, which Microsoft likely took from insight gained from so.cl, moves the industry into the next generation -- the social-search engine. At the bottom of the column users will see "Activity," with the latest updates to Facebook News Feed. For now, Bing will tap into as much publicly available data as possible from Facebook -- and soon Twitter and other networks. Microsoft had to make a move to compete with Google+. Microsoft reported operating losses from its online services division of $2.6 billion during its last fiscal year. The redesign should not have an influence on Yahoo search results. Microsoft provides algorithmic results for all Web, image and video searches on Yahoo Search in the U.S. and Canada. While Yahoo continues to oversee the user experience for Yahoo Search, these updates are focused on the user experience on Bing and will not have a "material impact on the algorithmic search results we provide to Yahoo Search."
In what is likely the most significant change in the methods Nielsen uses to measure TV -- and potentially all forms of video content -- the ratings company this week quietly began informing clients of a major initiative to develop a suite of new audience meters and digital tracking codes that could begin replacing its current meters as soon as 2014. Dubbed “GTAM,” which stands for Global Television Audience Metering, the initiative includes the development of four new audience metering technologies designed to deal with all of the conceivable challenges involved in measuring the viewing behavior of contemporary consumer households. The initiative is significant for several reasons beyond the technologies being developed, including the fact that it is a major reaffirmation of Nielsen’s strategy for basing audience measurement around in-home viewing, which has been the foundation of its audience measurement systems, although some components of the GTAM initiative will make it easier for Nielsen to incorporate mobile, wireless and Internet-based video audience exposure as well. The other major reason the plan is significant is that as its name might imply, it will be a global effort -- and the technologies being developed would likely be deployed as part of a standardized methodology across the 16 international markets Nielsen currently measures media audiences in. The four new metering solutions include the so-called “GTAM meter,” which will be the primary device Nielsen plans to use for audience measurement. The GTAM meter is said to be smaller, more ergonometric, easier for consumers to interact with, and far less “invasive” than Nielsen’s current industry standard “A/P meters.” Like the A/P meters, which stand for active/passive metering components, the new GTAM meter is expected to utilize a combination of active and passive measurement technologies, but unlike Nielsen’s current meters it will not require it to be physically connected to any household media devices, such as a TV set, set-top tuner, DVR, etc., to function. The second technology in development is a lighter, somewhat less sophisticated meter, aptly named the “GTAM Lite Meter,” which is capable of measuring TV audiences in households that have fewer electronic devices in them and are less complicated to measure. A third device, code-named the “Code Reader,” is an even smaller device that relies entirely on its ability to monitor the digital codes associated with TV and video programming. All the new metering technologies are being designed to work with a new, bulletproof digital watermarking technology Nielsen has developed that is capable of surviving any conceivable compression technologies that would otherwise strip away current versions of digital codes and watermarks. Dubbed “Watermark,” the new code is said to be integral to Nielsen’s plans to accelerate cross-platform video measurement and integration, because it is also a solution to measuring video exposure across wired and wireless Internet platforms. The fourth metering technology in the initiative potentially may be the most controversial in the mix, because it is designed to explicitly replace its current people meters, now the state-of-the-art in Nielsen’s TV metering portfolio. Unlike Nielsen’s current generation of people meters, which utilize blinking lights to remind viewers to push buttons to indicate they are actively watching TV programming, the new meters will feature an LED screen that will give respondents written instructions and prompts for complying with the measurement process. That meter is dubbed the “Scrolling Text People Meter,” and it could be controversial, because it is designed to improve the cooperation and compliance of people watching TV in a sample household, which could potentially influence the way they watch TV. Nielsen is expected to vet the new approaches and technologies among its various client groups, and industry bodies before deploying anything, and the likely time frame is that the first versions of the new meters would not be installed in sample households until early 2014, following a year of evaluation during 2013.
If moms weren’t already the focus of many an online marketing campaign, new data from Nielsen provides fresh evidence that they are right in the middle of key Internet trends. The influence moms wield as household decision makers stretches across social media, e-commerce and mobile. When using social networking sites, for example, moms are 38% more likely to become a fan or follow a brand online, and those who blog are more than twice as likely to follow brands and celebrities compared to the online average. Three out of four moms visited Facebook in March, and almost 5 million headed to new social media darling Pinterest. That total represented more than a third of the site’s unique visitors on the desktop Web in March. Product-focused Pinterest overall has proven especially popular with women, who make up about 60% of its audience, according to findings earlier this year from Web measurement firm Compete. Part of Pinterest’s appeal may be its link to online shopping. Nielsen found that moms are at least 23% more likely to buy or shop for things like toys, clothing, e-books and music in the last 30 days than average. Moms are also holding their ground in the mobile sphere. Overall, 54% own smartphones, and at least half use social media on mobile devices versus 37% of the broader online population. And since “mommy bloggers” have become an online demographic unto themselves, it’s not surprising that moms are about 25% more likely to visit blogging software sites like Blogger and WordPress.com. The Nielsen findings about the online habits of moms did not extend to Web video. But the lineup of shows introduced by Yahoo last year aimed specifically at women 25-54 clearly reflects a desire to reach the mom audience in that realm as well. The same goes for AOL. Among its new slate of shows debuting May 13 is “Little Women, Big Cars,” revolving around “four soccer moms struggling to balance their busy schedules, family lives and sanity.” With a little help from the Web.
Using Yahoo’s IntoNow system, ABC will allow viewers to enter a sweepstakes while watching freshman drama “Revenge” live. An IntoNow app allows users to “tag” content by pointing a mobile device at the screen, which kick-starts a version of interactive TV. For this season’s final two “Revenge” episodes, viewers can enter to win a week-long trip to the Hamptons -- where the show is set -- in a promotion backed by Lexus. IntoNow, which is available on tablets, was acquired by Yahoo last year and could benefit from the emerging second-screen viewing trend. The companion use will also allow “Revenge” viewers to interact with others via Facebook and Twitter as the show airs, answer trivia questions, and watch related videos ABC and Yahoo used IntoNow functionality earlier this year during a Republican presidential debate. The IntoNow functionality can also be deployed to allow viewers to point a device at the screen to identify programming, including particular episodes. The company’s database is compiling an index from over 160 channels. On the marketing front, last year Pepsi ran a program where IntoNow users could point an Apple device at the screen during a Major League Baseball-themed spot and have a digital coupon -- via a barcode -- sent to the device. The user could then take the barcode to a store, where it would be scanned to redeem a free bottle of Pepsi Max. Pepsi was the first advertiser to take advantage of IntoNow.
SocialCode, The Washington Post Co.’s social media ad firm, has confirmed hiring away 15 top engineers from social news site Digg. Joining SocialCode’s developer team in leadership roles will be Alan Lippman -- formerly Digg’s VP of ad products -- as chief scientist, and Will Larson as director of engineering. “This agreement marks the first of many planned moves,” Laura O’Shaughnessy, CEO of SocialCode, said Thursday. SocialCode helps brands and agencies understand and exploit social media platforms -- expertise that The Washington Post Co. itself needs. Indeed, recent findings from AppData.com revealed that the Washington Post’s Social Reader -- an app that encourages Facebook users to read and recommend stories from the Post’s Web site -- is losing steam. Over the past month, the app’s monthly average users (MAU) fell from 17.4 million to 9.2 million. Officially, WaPo’s Social Reader app is operated by the Washington Post Co.’s WaPo Labs, and is separate from SocialCode and its advertising capabilities. To complicate matters, The Washington Post Co. is coming off a bad first quarter, during which its new media division failed to offset its old media losses First-quarter revenue generated by the company’s newspaper online publishing activities -- primarily WashingtonPost.com and Slate -- decreased 7% annually to $24.2 million. In particular, display-advertising revenue declined 11% year-over-year, while online classified ad revenue on washingtonpost.com fell by a single percentage point. Last week, an independent source told Online Media Daily that SocialCode was close to hiring Digg’s tech team. It was interested in Digg’s talent -- not the site’s technology -- because its tech group knows how to program custom graphs, and it has the knowledge to analyze the data. The Washington Post Co.’s interest in Facebook is already well documented. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Washington Post CEO Donald Graham have reportedly formed an unlikely relationship. Since 2009, Graham has served on Facebook's board. For Digg, the loss is just the latest setback for the once high-flying social news reader. In 2010, Digg downsized its staff from 67 employees to 42, and in March 2011, founder Kevin Rose left the company. By contrast, Digg rival Reddit is doing better than ever. Earlier this year, the Condé Nast-owned social media service broke the billion monthly page-view barrier -- up 300% since early 2011.
In a new gambit to keep a privacy lawsuit in federal court, two Web users have withdrawn a host of claims against Wide Open West, which partnered with defunct behavioral targeting company NebuAd. WOW subscribers Dan Valentine and W. Brand Bobosky, who filed new court papers on Wednesday, now allege only that the Internet service provider violated federal wiretap laws by working with NebuAd. They withdrew all of their other claims without prejudice -- meaning that they could potentially refile them in the future. The move comes one month after U.S. District Court Judge Edmond Chang in the Northern District of Illinois granted WOW's request to send all claims to arbitration, except for those relating to federal wiretap law. Chang ruled that the ISP was entitled to enforce its terms of service, which require subscribers to take most disputes to arbitration. But the terms of service made an exception for potential violations of the federal wiretap law. Valentine and Bobosky don't say in their latest proposed class-action complaint why they wish to proceed in federal court rather than arbitration. In general, however, consumers prefer bringing cases in court, largely because juries are seen as more likely than arbitrators to issue large damage awards. Wide Open Web was one of six Internet service providers to test NebuAd's ad-serving platform in 2007 and 2008. The company, now defunct, worked with ISPs to gather data about Web users' activity in order to serve them targeted ads. The behavioral targeting platform drew objections from privacy advocates as well as lawmakers. One of the major criticisms was that ISPs were able to provide data about everything consumers did online -- including their searches and activity at noncommercial sites. NebuAd said its data collection was anonymous, and that consumers could opt out of the program. But in 2008, after news of the tests came to light, consumers sued NebuAd and the six ISPs, arguing that the companies unlawfully installed "spyware." The complaint against Wide Open West initially alleged violations of the federal computer fraud law and wiretap law, as well as invasion of privacy, unjust enrichment and violations of Illinois state law. The latest proposed complaint, filed on Wednesday, alleges only that Wide Open West violated the federal wiretap law by "intercepting" Web users' communications and disclosing them to NebuAd. "WOW captured customers' communications in their entirety, including content such as search terms and page requests for health and financial information, family matters, political interests, religious matters, and travel plans, as well as voice-over-Internet-protocol communications such as Skype," the newest complaint alleges. "As WOW continuously funneled customer communications to its collection point ... NebuAd continuously accessed and analyzed the communications." NebuAd shuttered in late 2008, shortly after news of the tests came to light. Last year, the company agreed to a $2.4 million settlement (to be paid by its insurance carriers). Privacy groups will split two-thirds of the money, while the lawyers who brought the case will receive $800,000. But the ISPs have been fighting the cases. So far, lawsuits have been dismissed against CenturyTel and Embarq. A case against Knology was sent to arbitration. Litigation is still pending against Bresnan and Cable One. The consumers who sued Embarq appealed the dismissal to the 10 Circuit Court of Appeals, where it's currently pending.
In a bid to attract more content deals with big media companies, YouTube is considering implementing a paywall around certain content, The New York Post reported on Friday morning. Citing insiders close to the discussions, the paper reported that this does not mean YouTube will begin charging for content that is already available for free, but might add premium offerings that are not already on the video-sharing site. In adding a new subscription service, the idea is to entice owners of high-demand programming in categories such as live sports, music and entertainment to put their content on YouTube. Much of this content is owned by big media companies, which receive the bulk of their revenues from TV advertising and subscription TV carriage fees. Many of these companies have been unwilling to put their content on YouTube, because of its predominantly advertising-only business model. As The Post report points out, the paywall idea is not necessarily a new one for the Google company. At an industry event in January, CEO Salar Kamangar mentioned that YouTube might implement a new subscription service: “We’re a media platform and we want to [have] a business model that media partners demand,” Kamangar said. YouTube already sells movie rentals through its YouTube Movies channel. It also has one sports subscription venture: a partnership with WillowTV that gives customers access to cricket events around the world for $45.99 for the season. Parent Google also has a separate pay-as-you-go platform called Google Play that gives customers access to certain movies, music and books. “We have long maintained that different content requires different types of payment models,” a YouTube spokesperson said. “The important thing is that regardless of the model, our creators succeed on the platform and viewers find more content to watch.” He added: “There are a lot of our content creators that believe they would benefit from subscriptions.” YouTube has a global unique audience of 800 million users, who watch some three billion hours of content per month. Google does not disclose YouTube’s financial information, but analysts project its revenues at between $2 billion and $3 billion per year.
“Gamification” is a hot, hip term right now, conjuring up images of Facebook games that may be a valuable tool for monetizing the social Web. However, for B2B marketers or customer relationship professionals, the badge concept -- of rewarding loyalty, community contribution and then recognizing it and promoting it within a group or across the wider Web -- is something we can apply directly to many of our organizations and customer engagement strategies. Recently, in an article on CFO.com, David Rosenbaum used the phrase “Gamification. Sounds silly. Isn't.” -- which neatly sums up where gamification sits in the consciousness of the C-suite right now. Badges are everywhere Like many of the good practices and techniques that are being embraced in the social Web, gamification is nothing new. This kind of audience engagement has been with us for decades and is proven to have a serious positive business impact on a brand’s relationships with its customers. As a platform, the social Web elevates these practices to a much broader audience. For example, Rosenbaum refers to a 50's salesman hitting targets and making it to the 'millionaires club' that entitled him to a gold watch, which in his community (of fellow sales guys) was a badge that recognized his contribution and displayed his expertise. The benefit for the organization is obviously more sales, and a sales force eager to touch new customers. Engage any business traveler in conversation on the subject of airline loyalty and you'll find another business that has been "gamifying" its business for decades. The timing of flights, the hubs they use, the tags on their luggage that allow them early privileged access to the airplane are all part of the game. The benefit to the airline is loyalty. Feeding social Web content A great contemporary Web example that takes us closer to the subject of providing customer service is online discussion boards. Standard functionality of these platforms rank contributors, granting them a title or badges as they contribute by posting questions and answers, establishing and promoting the credibility of the contributor. The benefit to the organization hosting the discussion is that it encourages contribution, feeding the discussion group the lifeblood of content -- and the more credible the contributors appear to be, the more incentivized the audience feels to come back, to listen to the advice and to join the community. Finding expertise outside the organization chart This feeds into our professional relationships, as our businesses interactions -- both internally and externally -- are increasingly knowledge-centere. The value of people in solving our request or problem is not always described by their position on an organization chart. Badges can help us find our organizations’ knowledge workers. People have always bestowed informal badges of expertise onto their colleagues. For example, fixing the coffee machine may be a badge that has been given to a particular colleague through his actions, as recognized by a social group. Professional accreditation Our business cards and resumes have their badges, from letters after your name to professional groups of which we are members. LinkedIn as the social resume has its own badges. People aspire to reach the "500+" tag of contacts and join groups, to collect professional association credibility to their online resume. It's subtle, but you can describe this collection of badges as gamification. Badges enable us to find our audience With the backdrop of increasing privacy concerns and legislation, this self-selection of badges provides communicators and marketers with a fantastic opportunity to understand the interests and aspirations of their audience and then to segment them. Facebook and Foursquare do this in an overt way as people check in or "like" products, places and services. In a sense, Twitter also has a badge system, in that people are encouraged to use hashtags to add metadata to their tweets (like #cms for content management systems). Analysis of these hashtags combined with other keywords and profile information are enabling services like Klout -- and we follow to identify people with subjects, or badges. Klout also enables community members to recommend people as having Klout in these subjects through a currency called K’s. These services encourage people to ensure that their public profile accurately reflects their interests and expertise –- or the interests and expertise they want the social Web to know them for. Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter (through Klout) are therefore creating orderly directories of people grouped around these badges -- an interest, product, brand, place, business or subject matter expertise. Filtering out the noise One of the difficulties with social media and including it into a customer service, engagement or marketing strategy is its sheer amount. Badges enable us to pinpoint the valuable voices out there and lend credibility to the feedback we learn through listening to social media. If a well-known, senior member of this community (who has a badge) has a strong opinion of a product or service, this will be valuable to the manufacturer or the vendor that sells it. An incentive to segment In the context of gamification we may say badges, but in a marketing sense we can say segments -- segments of our audience that have told us what they like, where they like to go, what they are interested in and what they are good at. These become segments of our audience that we can address. Setting goals, providing currency (like Klout/Empire Avenue) and adding badges to profiles are all incentives we provide for the audience to self-select, to tell us about the segment of our audience they want to be associated with. Enabling relevant customer engagement How does gamification help us engage with our customers? It gives us another dimension to being relevant. If we are finding or talking to a new customer, we can look to the segments as a place to start the conversation. If we are addressing an existing customer, it helps us sharpen our services and products by providing a credibility metric to the feedback we get.
Since I launched my own business more than 25 years ago, one of the many joys has been not having to keep a resume handy in case I get fired or decide to move to the next corporate job. Even when I did have a resume, it was utterly factual. But clearly that is not the cool thing these days. Let's see where I can make some improvements: 1986 - Present - President of George H. Simpson Communications, a PR firm that focuses on advertising, marketing and Internet trade media relations. Every one of his more than 200 clients saw improvements in their businesses -- nearly all of them to the point they were acquired for zillions of dollars, making their owners wealthy beyond their dreams, some of whom still walk the beaches of the world while their Maybach Landaulet's wait in parking lots for their return. Others rework plans for their 45,000-foot, 25-bedroom homes on a bluff overlooking Puget Sound and/or East Hampton (if on an island near Richard Branson's, don't forget the sprinkler system). Those few who did not succeed, have thrown themselves off bridges and/or tall buildings leaving behind notes absolving Mr. Simpson of any culpability in their failure to get press. Their brains have been donated to medical science to determine if there is a definitive link between the buffeting from VC presentations and such disorders as depression, dementia and Alzheimer's. 1985 - 1986 - Vice President of Corporate Communications with leading global book publisher Simon & Schuster. Mr. Simpson worked a miserable six months for Dick Snyder, one of the most notoriously difficult individuals ever to occupy a CEO chair. Snyder in turn worked for Marty Davis, then Chairman of Gulf & Western and perennially ranked among the top 10 worst bosses in America. It was in their presence that Mr. Simpson, in his infinite wisdom, casually suggested that "Gulf & Western is a stupid name for a company that was fundamentally now in the entertainment and publishing businesses." After which Mr. Simpson was promptly shown the door. Not too much later, the company changed its name to Paramount Communications (just too good a story to embellish) 1972 - 1985 - marketing and corporate communications at Newsweek. The global publicity orchestrated by Mr. Simpson's department is largely credited with buying the venerable newsweekly a few extra years of profitability before being disposed of by The Washington Post in a fire sale to a guy in, what else, the audio electronics equipment business, who then merged it with InterActiveCorp's The Daily Beast. It was during Mr. Simpson's proud tenure that Newsweek was scammed into announcing it had discovered the long-lost "Hitler diaries," and ad money from the tobacco industry kept the magazine from aggressively covering the growing evidence of the health risks of smoking. During Newsweek's 1983 multi-city 50th anniversary dinners, the also notoriously difficult Katharine Graham decided that Mr. Simpson was incapably of picking appropriate flower arrangements, asking Hollywood superagent Swifty Lazar's wife to pick them for the dinner in Los Angeles. What showed up were nightmarish centerpieces, the worst of any FDT Florist's catalogue. For which Mr. Simpson took great glee (after offering up to $10k to any florist who could provide 50 better centerpieces at the last minute). The president of Newsweek later showed Mr. Simpson an internal WP memo laying the blame for the flowers on Mr. Simpson (also just too good a story to embellish). Freelance Writer - Mr. Simpson wrote "The War Room at Bellevue" for New York magazine, which was later adopted by a dozen college textbooks as a sterling example of narrative style. He has also been published by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Glamour, Cosmopolitan and numerous online publications. For Glamour, Mr. Simpson gave a couple of year's of relationship advice to the magazine's multimillion young women under the "Jake: A Man's Opinion" nom de plume. The vast majority of them are now divorced or in abusive relationships. Education - University of North Carolina, where, when he wasn't chasing sorority girls or taking hallucinogenic drugs, Mr. Simpson took up space on the football team and went to enough journalism classes to keep his parents off his case. One of his coaches called him a "hippie" for writing passages from Marat/Sade on the locker room blackboard. It was the start of a long career annoying those in authority.