As anticipated, Facebook on Monday unveiled a new e-mail service, but as part of a broader platform that creates a hub for all online communication including SMS, chat, and email and a "social inbox" that automatically prioritizes messages from Facebook friends. Users can also see all the online coversations they have had with friends. At a press conference in San Francisco today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company wanted to provide a modern messaging system that was simple and easy to use, combining email with more informal communication tools like SMS and instant messaging. Yes, Facebook users will be able to get an @Facebook.com email address as part of the initiative, but Zuckerberg stressed that email was only "one part of it." But with 500 million members worldwide, Facebook's new email system instantly becomes a serious threat to the likes of Gmail and Yahoo Mail. Of those half billion users, 350 million use Facebook's existing message service to send 4 billion messages a day, according to Zuckerberg. Until now, the social network has offered a basic internal messaging tool and online chat, but not a competing email offering. The platform is built around three main components: Seamless messaging: People can get messages in their inbox from SMS, chat, email or Facebook's existing message service in one central location via mobile devices as well as the desktop Web. Conversation history: All messages with someone will be archived together in one place, whether sent over chat, email or SMS. The idea is to see everything you've discussed with each friend as a single conversation. Social Inbox: Because Facebook already knows who users' friends are, it can filter messages based on their social graph. So the inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends--all other messages will go into an "Other" folder for separate review. "One result of this is a social inbox where the signal-to-noise ratio is high," said Zuckerberg. The new messaging system will be rolled out over the next few months, beginning with a small group of invitation-only users. Zuckerberg explained that advertising will work in email as it does elsewhere on Facebook. "There's a space on the right with some ads and we try to make them as relevant as possible," he said, adding that ads would not be targeted based on the content of messages. But Charlene Li, founder of digital strategy consulting firm Altimeter Group, pointed out in a blog post that the unified messaging system will give even more data to track. While the company currently has no plans to monetize that information, "privacy advocates are standing at the ready to understand how that data will be used," she wrote in a blog post today. With the volume of messaging already taking place on Facebook, advertising through the expanded communication system could become a significant new revenue stream for the company. A new report from comScore last week showed that Facebook already accounts for a quarter of online display ads viewed in the U.S. Facebook's push into email poses a new problem for Google and Yahoo, the dominant players in the space, which already run text and display ads with their respective email offerings. For his part, Zuckerberg scoffed at press reports last week referring to Facebook's expected email launch as a potential "Gmail killer." "I think they have a great product," he said of Google and Gmail. "Email is still really important to a lot of people, but we just think this simpler kind of messaging is going to be how a lot more people sift a lot of their communication." Leading that trend are younger users in their teens and twenties who shun email in favor of options like SMS and IM. With the launch of email, one question is whether Facebook will continue to block Google from gaining access to its users' contacts data. The two Web giants have been engaged in a very public fight since Google stopped allowing Facebook users to import contacts from Gmail because of Facebook's lack of reciprocation. Meanwhile, other competitors are already upgrading their email services to become more diverse. Yahoo late month launched the latest (beta) version of its 303 million-user email service, touting Facebook and Twitter integration, the ability to view photos and videos right from the inbox and faster email search. And AOL on Sunday began testing a new message service that will aggregate messages from a users' multiple email accounts in one place. Like Facebook's new offering, new features are also intended to make it a central hub for online communication generally, not just email. But Altimeter's Li maintains that Facebook has an advantage over rivals in its filtering system tied to the social graph. "By centering communications on friends -- rather than features and a simple email address -- Facebook is creating a special kind of lock-in unavailable to other portals, your friends," she wrote.
SearchIgnite has been quietly developing demand side platform (DSP) technology that lets brands get a clear view of multiple types of campaigns. On Tuesday the company plans to launch the platform that lets advertisers buy media on real-time bidding and auction-based networks like Google's and Yahoo Right Media's ad exchanges. The platform supports a variety of display ad formats such as segment targeting and retargeting. About a dozen brands have been testing the platform, running full attribution services that encompass display and paid search. The platform allows brands to buy and optimize biddable display media on exchanges, and also buy, track and optimize other forms of display media on third-party ad network and direct-side buys. SearchIgnite began laying the groundwork to build the platform in late 2008. Today, only between 20% and 30% of display media gets bought and sold on exchanges, explains Roger Barnette, SearchIgnite CEO. The focus of traditional DSPs has been on buying and optimizing biddable display media, where ads are bought in real-time or in an auction-based format. If the advertiser only gets to see a fraction of the media buy, then it cannot possibly gain a complete picture of the success or failure of the campaign. SearchIgnite's DSP technology broadens its focus from paid search into display, allowing the company to gain a complete view of how each piece performs for clients. The plan to soon add a channel that supports brands in social marketing will expand the focus even more. Paid search doesn't live in a silo; it's part of a broader digital marketing strategy where consumers who buy products interact with multiple types of media as they make a purchase decision, Barnette says. "So measuring and optimizing paid search in a silo is outdated," he says. "This technology gives us an opportunity to measure, manage and optimize paid search and display on one platform and move the needle for marketers." But some might wonder if the move dilutes the paid-search focus by companies choosing to also support brands in display advertising or social media. Companies like SearchIgnite want to help brands properly allocate budgets to achieve the highest return on investment (ROI) by buying and selling multiple types of ad space all in the name of attribution -- where not all conversions are attributed to the last click. But rather than partner with an expert in display advertising to buy across media channels, companies want to take on the responsibility and broaden their focus. But does this dilute the paid-search company's efforts? Biddable display will increase in importance to make use of the growing amount of ad-space inventory, according to eMarketer Senior Analyst David Hallerman. "Brands see the need for finding the right mix of display and search, so it wouldn't necessarily 'dilute the search company's focus,' as much as expand it," he says. If the platform provides a self-service offering, it would allow for a wider range of businesses to take advantage of buying display ads, and the industry will likely see an uptick in the space, similar to the way paid search took off years ago for small and medium-size businesses, Hallerman says. SearchIgnite's platform supports media-buying optimization with predictive modeling, full campaign management and media trafficking, cross-channel attribution and analysis, and scoring for audience targeting and search optimization.
As anticipated, Facebook on Monday unveiled a new e-mail service, but as part of a broader platform that creates a hub for all online communication including SMS, chat, and email and a "social inbox" that automatically prioritizes messages from Facebook friends. Users can also see all the online coversations they have had with friends. At a press conference in San Francisco today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company wanted to provide a modern messaging system that was simple and easy to use, combining email with more informal communication tools like SMS and instant messaging. Yes, Facebook users will be able to get an @Facebook.com email address as part of the initiative, but Zuckerberg stressed that email was only "one part of it." But with 500 million members worldwide, Facebook's new email system instantly becomes a serious threat to the likes of Gmail and Yahoo Mail. Of those half billion users, 350 million use Facebook's existing message service to send 4 billion messages a day, according to Zuckerberg. Until now, the social network has offered a basic internal messaging tool and online chat, but not a competing email offering. The platform is built around three main components: Seamless messaging: People can get messages in their inbox from SMS, chat, email or Facebook's existing message service in one central location via mobile devices as well as the desktop Web. Conversation history: All messages with someone will be archived together in one place, whether sent over chat, email or SMS. The idea is to see everything you've discussed with each friend as a single conversation. Social Inbox: Because Facebook already knows who users' friends are, it can filter messages based on their social graph. So the inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends--all other messages will go into an "Other" folder for separate review. "One result of this is a social inbox where the signal-to-noise ratio is high," said Zuckerberg. The new messaging system will be rolled out over the next few months, beginning with a small group of invitation-only users. Zuckerberg explained that advertising will work in email as it does elsewhere on Facebook. "There's a space on the right with some ads and we try to make them as relevant as possible," he said, adding that ads would not be targeted based on the content of messages. But Charlene Li, founder of digital strategy consulting firm Altimeter Group, pointed out in a blog post that the unified messaging system will give even more data to track. While the company currently has no plans to monetize that information, "privacy advocates are standing at the ready to understand how that data will be used," she wrote in a blog post today. With the volume of messaging already taking place on Facebook, advertising through the expanded communication system could become a significant new revenue stream for the company. A new report from comScore last week showed that Facebook already accounts for a quarter of online display ads viewed in the U.S. Facebook's push into email poses a new problem for Google and Yahoo, the dominant players in the space, which already run text and display ads with their respective email offerings. For his part, Zuckerberg scoffed at press reports last week referring to Facebook's expected email launch as a potential "Gmail killer." "I think they have a great product," he said of Google and Gmail. "Email is still really important to a lot of people, but we just think this simpler kind of messaging is going to be how a lot more people sift a lot of their communication." Leading that trend are younger users in their teens and twenties who shun email in favor of options like SMS and IM. With the launch of email, one question is whether Facebook will continue to block Google from gaining access to its users' contacts data. The two Web giants have been engaged in a very public fight since Google stopped allowing Facebook users to import contacts from Gmail because of Facebook's lack of reciprocation. Meanwhile, other competitors are already upgrading their email services to become more diverse. Yahoo late month launched the latest (beta) version of its 303 million-user email service, touting Facebook and Twitter integration, the ability to view photos and videos right from the inbox and faster email search. And AOL on Sunday began testing a new message service that will aggregate messages from a users' multiple email accounts in one place. Like Facebook's new offering, new features are also intended to make it a central hub for online communication generally, not just email. But Altimeter's Li maintains that Facebook has an advantage over rivals in its filtering system tied to the social graph. "By centering communications on friends -- rather than features and a simple email address -- Facebook is creating a special kind of lock-in unavailable to other portals, your friends," she wrote.
When Facebook announced its new messaging service yesterday, you had to listen closely if you wanted to hear what social network founder Mark Zuckerberg said about brands. He mentioned that 350 million of Facebook's 500 million members use its messaging system (spanning the site's email, instant messaging, and text messaging) and that there are 4 billion messages sent daily. As a footnote, he said that doesn't include messages brands share, such as through status updates and notifications. That was it. As much as Facebook depends on advertisers, Zuckerberg reinforced the idea that it depends on people, not marketers. This is far different from Google, which has a mission to "organize the world's information" and welcomes advertisements as part of that information. On Google, ads often wind up being the most relevant results for search queries. On Facebook, where the call to action is about sharing, people talk about brands a lot but don't go there specifically to share marketing messages. Inevitably, whenever Facebook comes out with any news at all - it could be that they're pulling up their carpeting and going with hardwood floors - people like me at organizations like mine spend the next couple hours or days ruminating on how the news impacts marketers. I didn't expect the messaging announcement to impact brands at all, but I still spent the better part of my day yesterday listening to, thinking about, discussing, and writing about the news. It turns out, after all of the rumination, that there are two ways Facebook's news could materially impact brands. If consumers, especially younger ones, really are ditching email -- a trend not quantified but well-documented anecdotally -- then email marketing will become less useful for reaching this demographic. Taking this line of thinking further, if predominantly younger audiences are ditching email to communicate through Facebook, brands need to redouble their efforts at building their Facebook page audiences and optimizing every message that they post, as marketers' status updates that appear in consumers' News Feeds are not affected by the new messaging overhaul. Despite Facebook's efforts to make the event all about its members, there was still something in it for marketers, and there always will be. Yet Zuckerberg and his colleagues aren't staying awake at night thinking about how everything affects marketers. We need to remember this. Social media isn't about us. It never was, and it never will be. It will always be about people, or users, or members, or consumers, or whatever you want to call them. Social media is for them; we just get to participate, sometimes, and reap the benefits when we do our jobs right. In case this needs to be hammered home any further, here are five reminders you can tape on your wall: 1) You don't acquire customers. You earn their trust. 2) There's a difference between being liked and being loved. Yes, a consumer may like you on Facebook and follow you on Twitter and subscribe to your YouTube channel or RSS feed. While that gives you a way to continually communicate with such consumers, those consumers aren't thinking about you 24 hours a day. For every consumer, though, there are a handful of brands for which he or she will be an advocate. 3) Social media is about people connecting to people. Brands play just a small part in people's lives. 4) Your competitors in social media are often not your traditional competitors. Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks are competitors online and offline, but when it comes to social media, Dunkin' Donuts must also compete with Coca-Cola, Oreo, Skittles, Victoria's Secret, and other brands that have a knack for staying connected to their audiences. Your biggest competitors, however, are consumers' friends and other people they trust. See the previous reminder. 5) You can't control the conversations. You can listen and participate. You can influence and inspire. You can empower advocates and defuse detractors. That's a lot more than you could do before, but you'll never have control. That's a good thing. How well would you react if someone was trying to control everything you said? If you want to save these reminders or know someone who will need them, I uploaded them as a one-page PDF on Slideshare. Share your own recommended reminders in the comments. I'll read them and might even respond, but I know better than to attempt to control what happens from here.
When Facebook first introduced the text and small image ads down the right rail, those working in media relations for the social network cringed each time someone called them "paid search," a phrase they insist should be reserved for Google and other search engines. But paid search ads continue to evolve, along with social networks. Whether or not Facebook launches its new email service on Monday morning, thoughts of how the tool could influence ad targeting on the site intrigued me. After all, Facebook members have a profile, share status updates, post photos and videos and share thoughts with one another on each other's wall. They also play games, "like" brands, send virtual goods and make purchases. They do this all within the confines of Facebook's walled garden. If launched, Facebook's email service would provide another place where advertisers could market to site members tapping into contact lists, words within the email (similar to Google Gmail), locations, and other social signals with each email exchange. In a research published Monday, Piper Jaffray Analyst Gene Munster explains Facebook email would likely attract younger users and become a threat to Google and other email providers in the long term, not immediately. "One significant barrier to entry for new email services is that a user's existing email address is like a phone number, many contacts already possess it and therefore the user risks missing emails if they change addresses," he writes. "As a result, younger Web users in mature Web markets that are just beginning to form their online identities could find the Facebook email platform attractive as more names will be available and they are not invested in another platform." Munster also believes a Facebook email platform could become popular internationally for a similar reason as new users come online for the first time and eventually get on Facebook. In the long term it could hinder Google's Gmail and Yahoo Mail could have more difficulty attracting new users. It's not difficult to see how search, social networks and email will combine to provide Internet users with a ubiquitous tool. Research firm Gartner believes not just for leisure, but work, too. I'm not convinced with Gartner's estimates that 20% of employees will use social networks as their business communications' hub by 2014. And I'm interested to hear from those working in corporate America on whether work policies would allow them to communicate through Facebook. In a recent report, Pierre Khawand, found and CEO of People-OnTheGo, calls Facebook, LinkedIn and other social sites "The New New Inbox," a box connected to the world that's travels with consumers wherever they go at all times. In survey results from a list of multiple choice questions released with the report, participants were asked to name the inboxes they check regularly?" Personal email led the list at 91.7%, followed by corporate email at 89.6%, and Facebook at 58.5%. In a question intended to measure the amount of time spent on email and social media, 53.2% of survey participants say they spend less than 30 minutes in social media, compared with 5.1% on email. But when it came to longer durations of time, 27.4% note spending up to 1 hour in social media and 20.6% in email, according to the People-OnTheGo study findings. And, of course, this could explain the public argument between Facebook and Google and why the search engine recently blocked the social network from importing Gmail contact. For now it remains speculation. And even if that's not the announcement slated for this morning's press conference, we might see a similar service from Facebook in the future.
SearchIgnite has been quietly developing demand side platform (DSP) technology that lets brands get a clear view of multiple types of campaigns. On Tuesday the company plans to launch the platform that lets advertisers buy media on real-time bidding and auction-based networks like Google's and Yahoo Right Media's ad exchanges. The platform supports a variety of display ad formats such as segment targeting and retargeting. About a dozen brands have been testing the platform, running full attribution services that encompass display and paid search. The platform allows brands to buy and optimize biddable display media on exchanges, and also buy, track and optimize other forms of display media on third-party ad network and direct-side buys. SearchIgnite began laying the groundwork to build the platform in late 2008. Today, only between 20% and 30% of display media gets bought and sold on exchanges, explains Roger Barnette, SearchIgnite CEO. The focus of traditional DSPs has been on buying and optimizing biddable display media, where ads are bought in real-time or in an auction-based format. If the advertiser only gets to see a fraction of the media buy, then it cannot possibly gain a complete picture of the success or failure of the campaign. SearchIgnite's DSP technology broadens its focus from paid search into display, allowing the company to gain a complete view of how each piece performs for clients. The plan to soon add a channel that supports brands in social marketing will expand the focus even more. Paid search doesn't live in a silo; it's part of a broader digital marketing strategy where consumers who buy products interact with multiple types of media as they make a purchase decision, Barnette says. "So measuring and optimizing paid search in a silo is outdated," he says. "This technology gives us an opportunity to measure, manage and optimize paid search and display on one platform and move the needle for marketers." But some might wonder if the move dilutes the paid-search focus by companies choosing to also support brands in display advertising or social media. Companies like SearchIgnite want to help brands properly allocate budgets to achieve the highest return on investment (ROI) by buying and selling multiple types of ad space all in the name of attribution -- where not all conversions are attributed to the last click. But rather than partner with an expert in display advertising to buy across media channels, companies want to take on the responsibility and broaden their focus. But does this dilute the paid-search company's efforts? Biddable display will increase in importance to make use of the growing amount of ad-space inventory, according to eMarketer Senior Analyst David Hallerman. "Brands see the need for finding the right mix of display and search, so it wouldn't necessarily 'dilute the search company's focus,' as much as expand it," he says. If the platform provides a self-service offering, it would allow for a wider range of businesses to take advantage of buying display ads, and the industry will likely see an uptick in the space, similar to the way paid search took off years ago for small and medium-size businesses, Hallerman says. SearchIgnite's platform supports media-buying optimization with predictive modeling, full campaign management and media trafficking, cross-channel attribution and analysis, and scoring for audience targeting and search optimization.