Small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have become the jewel for search engines and social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter, which earlier this year launched a self-service ad platform. Now Yahoo and Microsoft have added SMB services, each launching their own version and rebranding tools. Yahoo Small Business will introduce the Marketing Dashboard for SMBs, filled with free features and premium paid services to analyze metrics and competitive analysis, as well as monitor online reputations and site performance. A new tool will allow SMBs to maintain business listings across the Web, so consumers searching for company names can find consistent information. Supporting SMBs has become a "highly profitable and attractive business," according to Tom Byun, GM at Yahoo Small Business. He estimates that Yahoo supports about 1.5 million SMB customers, along with about $3 billion in ecommerce sales from its merchant product line. BIA Kelsey estimates that 45.7% of SMBs will make similar budget investments in advertising this year compared with last, while 43% plan to increase the amount. SMBs on average spent $3,100 in Q4 2011 on advertising -- slightly down from $3,200 in the year-ago quarter, according to the research firm. As part of a dashboard toolkit, Yahoo will support a new directory service, similar to the one offered by Localeze. The feature allows SMBs to monitor directory information about their company across the Web. It relies on the Yahoo directory as a template for information. A tab in the dashboard monitors local business listings based on the description. When directory sites across the Web do not contain the same information as the main directory, the information becomes highlighted in the color red. An upgrade subscription for the directory service allows owners to upload the company's business profile to more than 100 sites, such as Yahoo Local and Yelp. Some include mapping services. For now, text remains the information that SMBs can push out to search engine directories, but Shannon Parker Hane, director of product marketing at Yahoo Small Business, expects that the service will eventually add fields for pictures and videos. The strategy follows a promise made by Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson to capitalize on data that Yahoo collects. The dashboard pulls in information about site traffic, enabling SMB marketers to understand key Web site performance metrics from a variety of tools, including Google Analytics. It offers analysis on page views, average time spent on the site, bounce rates, unique visitors and percentage of new visitors. A deal between Yahoo and two digital marketing agencies -- Constant Contact, and Orange Soda -- will support premium paid services through the dashboard. Constant Contact will maintain email marketing campaigns, while Orange Soda manages search engine marketing campaigns and SEM optimization. Aside from tracking stats, the dashboard allows marketers to subscribe to services that allow them to see the time and the email addresses of others who subscribers forward campaigns. Yahoo's partnerships with Constant Contact and Orange Soda do not violate service agreements with Microsoft. The Microsoft Bing team will continue to support Yahoo SMB advertisers for paid-search engine marketing. Microsoft Advertising will rebrand its service for SMBs to "Bing, powered by Bing and Yahoo! Search," as well as simplify the way that small business search advertisers sign up with Microsoft. The idea is to make the process more intuitive, according to Matt Lydon, GM of SMB Advertising for Microsoft Advertising. Microsoft wants SBMs to know they are buying paid-search ads on Bing and Yahoo search engines. "The better the service, the longer the lifetime of the customer," he said. Microsoft's agreement to sign up for ads on Bing was 14 pages, and on average took up to 25 minutes to complete, Lydon said. "Imagine that being your first experience with Bing as a small business owner. Now the process is a couple of pages and takes five minutes." When asked the percentage of revenue that comes from SMBs, Lydon said 98% of companies advertising on Bing are small businesses.
Just get on with it already. You’ve thought about it. You’ve made excuses. You know it’s time. As a search marketer, you need to get off last-click attribution. Ahh… last-click attribution. Like any addictive drug, it gets you hooked and is hard to give up. But, like any addictive drug, the fun days are over, and now, if you don’t quit, you will only see the negative consequences. Let’s define terms: attribution, as I refer to it in this piece, means two things. First, it means multi-click for search terms, knowing top-of-the-funnel clicks that lead to the highly profitable brand clicks further down the funnel. Second, it means multi-touch beyond paid search, including clicks and views from SEO, performance display, brand display, Facebook, affiliates, and even email. But you know this already -- we've all been talking about attribution for a long time now. The benefits are clear. Marketers should understand how different advertising touch points are affecting conversions and activities, and clearly see the interplay of channels up and down the funnel. With this knowledge, marketers can accurately value their media investments, enabling them to invest at the top of the funnel in their media. The Attribution Boogeyman So everyone should be using attribution, right? As it turns out, we, as an industry, are still largely on last-click attribution. If you are one of the many still using last click, you have chosen the easiest form of attribution to implement and explain -- but the worst (by far) in helping your company achieve its marketing goals. There are a few obstacles keeping many marketing organizations from moving away from the hold of last-click, but search marketers -- I hate to say it -- are one of the biggest roadblocks. Search marketers are invested in the status quo. We have budget and respect within the marketing department. We are comfortable and worry about disruptive change. Will attribution take focus away from search? Will other tactics get “my” credit? What will changing my attribution model do to my optimization and spend? How to stop worrying and learn to love attribution Proper media attribution is an integrated part of the process. Marketers need to stop thinking about attribution as a product or an add-on to media management. On the contrary, it is a central part of your media activity. If you don’t know how your advertising works together to drive your results, you are in the dark. And if you aren’t leading the charge to figure this out, then someone else will. Like everything else regarding search, testing is critical here. If you don’t test different models, you will never know if you can improve your results. By running different models at the same time, you can see how a new innovative model can help your entire marketing team. Spread the word Once you understand how a more sophisticated model can help you and your organization, then you need to educate your team, your boss, your peers, and your management. Maybe you need to better align goals across marketing teams so that together you can achieve greater heights. Attribution, when done right, will show how arbitrary the divisions between teams can be and how sometimes their individual goals can work against each other. Drive the change It's time to kick your old habit. Sure, you had good times with last-click, but there are better days ahead. Go on, you can do this. Start leading the attribution charge within your company. You will be amazed at what good a little change will bring.
What if you didn’t need a mobile phone to share content? What if you could share your literal point of view? What if “always on” didn’t just mean an Internet connection that was constantly active, but referred to a device you wore that was always on you, ready to share your thoughts practically as soon as they came to mind? That’s the idea behind Project Glass, Google’s latest foray into hardware. It’s a different twist for Google. Instead of competing with Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, Google will soon be competing with LensCrafters. Its new product is a form of wearable computer, with a tiny camera and transparent screen mounted on the front rim of glasses; the lenses themselves aren't needed. As of now, it’s a curiosity. It’s not yet on the market, and it’s not clear if anyone will want it. I’m sure I’m not the only person who watched the demo video and thought, “If I wanted to wear headgear, I wouldn’t have gotten Lasik.” Then came the Charlie Rose interview with Sebastian Thrun, a Google Fellow and former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It was the first public interview with anyone at Google wearing the prototype, and I was mesmerized. It was a sneak peek into a future that’s both beautiful and horrifying. I can’t remember ever thinking simultaneously, “I want that now” and “I hope to never go anywhere near that.” I’m neither a fan nor detractor of Charlie Rose, but I give him credit for staying focused on the interview. It must have been hard taking Thrun seriously, despite his credentials. Thrun’s discussion with Rose about Project Glass was brief; most of it focused on the demo video itself. It shows someone using the hardware to check the weather, save reminders about events, get transportation updates, check into a coffee truck, and use video chat, among other activities. With so many possibilities, what will be the proverbial killer app? Thrun told Rose, “The compelling use case for us is the sharing experience. Other people can now see through my eyes.” It was a beautiful moment. Thrun downplayed a lot of the more sophisticated features like using augmented reality for image recognition. The feature that excites me the most is being able to recognize faces, even though I have a wonderful accessory to handle that already: my wife. Thrun’s take was simple and elegant. Project Glass is a hands-free way to share your actual perspective. Used well, it’s bound to trigger waves of empathy from those seeing that perspective. How much more powerful will it be to share your point of view when you’re doing so literally? And then, what happens when you can always share your point of view? Will you blink and share whatever you see? Will you be even more inclined to tweet that you’re checking into the food truck you just instagrammed on Tumblr? Will you ever see the world around you? These are concerns already, but Project Glass raises the possibility that we’ll always be looking at the world through glass and not through our eyes. Project Glass could thus further diminish our ability to be mindful, where we process the sensory information in our immediate surroundings instead of thinking about anything else. It’s vividly described in the book “Your Brain at Work” by David Rock. He writes, “When you sit on that jetty and stop to pay attention to the warmth of the sun on your skin, you soon notice the breeze, too. Activating the direct-experience network increases the richness of other incoming data, which helps you perceive more information around you. Noticing more information lets you see more options, which helps you make better choices, which makes you more effective at work.” Rock describes how to be mindful and urges the reader to try it for ten seconds. The first time I tried it, I could feel the mental strain. Then I attempted it while walking to the subway one morning, and I was amazed how I could hear the footsteps of everyone walking by me and the phone conversations of people on the street. I understood Rock’s quote from mindfulness researcher John Teasdale: “Mindfulness isn’t difficult. What’s difficult is to remember to be mindful.” With a screen constantly hovering over your face, is mindfulness even possible? Project Glass shows the liberation of a hands-free device, but such liberation is misleading. When we bought cordless phones and then cellphones and then smartphones, we were liberated from physical wires only to find ourselves more tethered to the handsets. If Project Glass is successful, we’ll free up our hands at the risk of losing our minds.
When the Federal Communications Commission fined Google for impeding a probe of the Wi-Spy debacle, the agency blacked out large sections of its 25-page report. Google has now released a more complete version of that report -- and it shows that the Street Car snooping shouldn't have been a surprise to company executives. As is now widely known, Google's Street View cars collected payload data -- URLs, passwords, etc. -- from unsecured WiFi networks. Google initially said the data collection was a mistake; the full report makes clear that the engineer who developed the software that collected the data told at least one other person at the company about his plans, and also divulged them in a written document. The complete FCC report reveals that Google employees hadn't read the document. "A senior manager of Street View said he 'pre-approved' the design document before it was written," the FCC says. One bit of key information missing from the report Google made available was the name of the engineer responsible for the code. The New York Timesreported today that the engineer is Marius Milner, known for creating NetStumbler -- which finds WiFi networks. While there's no question that the complete report doesn't present the company in a good light, the information in it probably won't affect its liability in a pending class-action lawsuit about the snooping. The key issue in that case isn't whether Google collected data, but whether doing so was illegal. Google argues that material sent through open WiFi neworks is publicly accessible. Therefore, the company says, it didn't violate any laws by gathering that information. U.S. District Court Judge James Ware -- who is presiding over the class-action lawsuit -- disagreed. He ruled that the transmissions weren't publicly accessible because they couldn't be read without "sophisticated technology." But Ware also granted Google's request to send that question to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which hasn't yet issued a decision. Meanwhile, the new details to surface about the Street Car snooping have spurred Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) to renew calls for a congressional hearing on the data collection. "Google needs to fully explain to Congress and the public what it knew about the collection of data through its Street View program, why it impeded the FCC investigation, and what it is doing to ensure appropriate privacy safeguards are in place to protect consumer’s personal information," he said in a statement.
Last week was the 13th running of the Search Insider Summit, AKA -- as I once made the mistake of referring to it and and am still reminded by my wife every time I leave her and my three kids to go -- summer camp for search geeks. As I had done for each of the last 11 outings, I tracked the official SIS buzz-o-meter to capture the focus of the content and jargon of the campers, er… attendees. This go-round proved to be quite buzz-worthy, even by SIS standards. Let’s just say it was DataPoppin’! The tone was set by MC Chris Copeland, who used his unique blend of insightful sarcasm to call out hypocrisy in speakers and pick on the size -- as in market share! -- of sponsors. Fortunately, said sponsors fought back and Rob Wilk from Yahoo did a great stand-up -- yes, he was standing up! -- comedy sketch at the Day 1 dinner. As Jon Whitfield -- the man who needs no acknowledgement -- from MediaPost put it, “I went to a roast and a Search Insider Summit broke out!” For my part, I also tried to keep the atmosphere light. Between my Search Insider Feud session and pop-a-shot schooling in the arcade, it was, indeed, all fun and games. I even made a new friend. Before I share the top 10 buzzwords from SIS Captiva 2012, let’s flip through the yearbook and revisit the buzziest topics of previous summits. November 2006 1. Branding 2. Integration 3. Engagement 4. Assists 5. Mobile, Local (tie) 6. Long Tail 7. E-mail 8. Click Fraud 9. Truthiness 10. Relevance May 2007 1. Transparency 2. User-centricity 3. Content 4. Analytics 5. Community, Connection (tie) 6. Integration 7. Discovery, Personalization (tie) 8. Social, Mobile, Video (tie) 9. Funnel 10. Intent - December 2007 1. Consumers 2. Universal 3. Big Agencies 4. Query 5. Facebook 6. Analytics 7. Recession 8. Mobile 9. Widgets 10. Transparency May 2008 - Part 1 and Part 2 1. Google 2. Clicks 3. Social, Facebook (tie) 4. Integration 5. Conversation 6. Branding 7. Data, Analytics (tie) 8. Strategy 9. Twitter 10. Mobile, Local (tie) December 2008 1. Google 2. Economy, Recession (tie) 3. Data, Analytics, Attribution (tie) 4. iPhone, Mobile (tie) 5. Microsoft 6. Relationship, Transparency (tie) 7. Strategy, Tactics (tie) 8. Bid Management, Quality Score (tie) 9. Omniture 10. Social May 2009 1. Twitter 2. Attribution 3. Exchanges 4. Last-Click 5. Bless You, Gesundheit (tie) 6. Economy, Recession (tie) 7. Free, SEO (tie) 8. Affiliates 9. Social, Mobile (tie) 10. Osprey December 2009 1. Google 2. Crap, Suck, Puke (tie) 3. Attribution 4. Social 5. Agencies 6. SEO 7. Twitter 8. Metrics 9. Bing 10. Yahoo, AOL (tie) April 2010 1. Intent, Targeting (tie) 2. Apple, iPad, iPhone, iAds (tie) 3. Mobile 4. Audience 5. Apps 6. Facebook, Social Media (tie) 7. Content 8. Attribution 9. Bark! 10. Digital Natives, Gen Next (tie) December 2010 1. Google 2. Facebook 3. Like 4. Data 5. Bing 6. Mobile 7. Attribution 7. Display, Yahoo (tie) 9. Groupon 10. Funicular May 2011 1. Marketing 2. Google 3. Facebook 4. Twitter 5. Brand, Branding (tie) 6. Minority Report - 7. Bing, Yahoo (tie) 8. Love 9. SEO Rapper 10. Search December 2011 1. Google 2. Yahoo, Bing (tie) 3. Mobile 4. Apps 5. Siri 6. Social, Facebook (tie) 7. KITT, USS Enterprise, Watson (tie) 8. Global 9. Value 10. Bourye April 20121. Google - the Big G has officially been the hottest topic at 50% of the SIS events to date. It seems there’s never a dull moment in Mountain View, and even Google’s dullest moments still rock the world of search insiders. Last week, much of the chatter about Google was around the “Penguin Update,” new ratings for Quality Score, and the launch of Google Drive. 2. Big Data - despite being a “boring” topic, Big Data was cast as king at SIS. Many sessions included so-called first- and third-party data players, and debate ranged from data attribution to data ownership. As David Rodnitzy of PPC Associates pointed out, “There’s a difference between data, data, data, and sharing, sharing, sharing.” D-Rod followed up with a blog post recapping his roundtable that underscored the challenges with data collection and analysis. Meanwhile, George Michie of Rimm-Kaufman kicked off his panel with a reenactment of Steve Kerr’s game-winning shot in the NBA finals to make a point about flawed attribution methodology. Go Bulls! 3. Yahoo - despite being a frequent Copeland target -- or perhaps because of it -- Yahoo made a fair amount of noise at SIS. It seems Yahoo’s “We try harder” approach to search is resonating with search marketers, if not with actual searchers. 4. Bing - for those keeping score, the Search Alliance has been good to Bing. Facebook has also been good to Bing. ”Whoa” -- not that good. So it should come as no surprise that SIS was good to Bing, too. In fact, one of the highlights of the show was Lili Cheng from Microsoft FUSE Labs showing off So.cl -- a social search engine built from “scratch.” 5. Facebook - to understand the impact Facebook is having on the search space, we needed to look no further than the third round of Search Insider Feud, where 100 search marketers predicted Facebook would be the second most popular search engine in five years. And, if that weren’t enough, on the Day 3 Prieb panel, we learned that college students think Facebook ads are targeted based on search queries, which earned the hashtag #ifwecouldwewould.6. Mobile - speaking of Feudal predictions, 69% of survey respondents said that, in five years, they will search from their mobile phones more than any other device. FWIW, 5% said they’d be searching from a chip in their brains. 7. Integration - multiple screens + multiple channels = multiple hurdles to true integration. But that didn’t stop us from talking about it until we were blue in the face. Make that blue in the tongue. 8. Voice - as we listened to William Tunstall-Pedoe of TrueKnowledge -- maker of the voice app, Evi -- and then asked Siri to find Evi for us, it became clear that the future of search literally had a voice. As for what that voice will be… 19 search marketers preferred Morgan Freeman, while 18 went with James Earl Jones, and 6 voted for Dennis Haysbert. 9. SEO - SEO and its grown-up name, Content Marketing, got a lot of play at SIS. Between the BrightEdge-sponsored lunch and the Rio SEO-sponsored sunset, there was plenty of “illumination” around the value of SEO. 10. Lady Chatwick - the vessel we boarded for the Day 1 sunset cruise was, as Copeland pointed out, similar to most women in Florida in that she’s old but still floats. And, boy, did the buzz swell around her! Now here I thought Chicago was the windy city. Between the 30 MPH gusts and fast-talking guests, the Lady C. sure left us breathless and buzzed.