Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

Some new findings on consumer social media interactions from a study conducted by Cone Business which revealed, almost 60% of Americans interact with companies on a social media Web site, and one in four interact more than once per week. The survey finds that 93% of Americans believe a company should have a presence in social media, while 85% believe a company should not only be present, but should also interact with its consumers via social media.

56% of American consumers feel both a stronger connection with, and better served by, companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment.

When Americans were asked about specific types of interactions:

• 43% say that companies should use social networks to solve my problems
• 41% want companies to solicit feedback on their products and services
• 37%feel that companies should develop new ways for consumers to interact with their brand
• 33% of men and 17% of women interact frequently (one or more times per week) with companies via social media

33% of younger, hard-to-reach consumers (ages 18-34), believe companies should actively market to them via social networks, and the same is true of the wealthiest households (household income of $75,000+). Two-thirds of the wealthiest households and the largest households (3 or more members) feel stronger connections to brands they interact with online.

And eMarketer reports that Generation Y (those born after 1979) online buyers are more immersed in online and mobile activities than any other generation, according to 2008 research from shopping comparison site PriceGrabber. Some 85% of Gen Y respondents said they participated in social networking, and 57% reported involvement with blogs.

Data from an August 2008 survey of Web merchants, sponsored by Internet Retailer, found that, of the 39.3% of retail respondents that use social networks, 32% have a page on Facebook, 27% on MySpace and 26% on YouTube.

I think data like this certainly affirm what we here at Visible Technologies are seeing with brands in the marketplace. Consumers absolutely view social media as channel for interaction and brands need to be actively present and interacting with consumers. If they don’t their competitor will. The challenge for brands is how to orchestrated this with hundreds or perhaps thousands of consumers interactions on a daily or monthly basis. The social media interaction channel/opportunity traverses many of the existing support and customer interaction channels in place at enterprises. Organizations need to rapidly put in place coordinated listening, measurement, engagement, and integration programs to both actively support customer issues and promote word-of-mouth opportunities.

To hear some insightful thoughts and best practices from leading analysts and brands: Jeff Zabin, from Aberdeen Group; Peter Kim, formerly of Forrester; Bob Pearson, from Dell; as well as Marty Collins, from Microsoft that are harnessing this channel have a listen to either of these webcasts - 1 and 2. Enjoy!

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

Changing the Game in Search and Advertising
Bill Gates - Chairman Microsoft

The Future of Search
Satya Nadella - Senior Vice President, Search, Portal & Advertising Platform Group, Microsoft

Processing is now essentially free today - transistors cost $.0000001 today. The actual impact is more qualitative than quantitative. Computers can’t see but in years to come software will be capable of seeing and processing that data. Microsoft Surface is the first step in this direction and being use at retail already. They are calling this Natural Interface. Where we mostly use a keyboard and mouse will be replaced with new interface devices. Computers have been very oriented to single person interaction. These new interfaces will allow for multiple person interaction. Low cost processing is driving this.

Storage is also essentially free. 1997 cost per gig was $78 in 2006 it was down to $.40 per gig. Training programs and media now are online vs old style tape based distribution. Media is now easily portable and distributed widely. The cost of data storage is so negligible that we can drive innovation faster. Korea has a commitment to move away from textbooks. Students will have tablets with content and for note taking. The move to a digital lifestyle is happening at different paces in different countries.

There is a boundary between the pc and tv. You don’t get online media showing up in your TV guide. Soon we’ll be able to sync this data automatically as opposed to today’s very manual process to do that. There is also a boundary between your pc and your phone.

The Digital Revolution is at a very early stage. Microsoft stays abreast of this with their research department that draws on bright minds around the world.

Let’s look at finding information. Start with Search. Search is driven by task and learning requirements. The term Information at Your Fingertips is broad definition of the tasks around research, online shopping and more. Search is everywhere, email, pc, online. SharePoint is an example of organizing information at the business level. Web search is a piece of Information at Your Fingertips. Search should be integrated as you are creating a document not as a separate application where you retype your data.

Bill says it’s kinda fun to be an underdog in search and he is showing a slide of kudos that Microsoft has begun to receive as it grows in search. Maps and specific types of searches are pushing things forward and innovating. Every 6 months something substantial is released from Microsoft. Microsoft has a long term commitment and a talented team to improve on search.

Now Bill is demoing Live Image search and showing how processing has enabled different ways to search and refine and identify images. Next is video search and how Live can identify scene transitions and play specific portions of videos.

Microsoft’s big bets:
- Microsoft assets will enable Information at Your Fingertips
- Search is going to change
- New innovations and business models will both be key

Microsoft Assets:
- Search is about software
- Operations that scale
- Long term investment strategy
- Online audience
- Spanning work and home

The Evolution of Search
Search - phase one was directories and has evolved to keywords
Economic Model - started at CPM and has moved to CPC

There are some disruptive forces to search such as understanding user intention, advertising efficiency and content in context. A pure keyword approach has limits. People want refinement. Travel search is an example of a model that is very limited in user intent and history. The context of user personalization for targeting is going to be a huge driver of value and efficiency. The boundary between search and display will start to be broken down.

The next phase of search is going to be rich semantics and user experience with a business model that consists of consumer reward and paid engagement.

Microsoft Live Search seeks to:
- deliver the best search results
- simplify key tasks
- innovate in the business model
- deliver the best commerce search results
- simplify key commerce tasks
- reward consumers and advertisers for their engagement

Bill is now officially announcing Live Search Cashback.

Cashback gives you a particular reason to use a specific search engine. It creates economic value for consumers and advertisers.

Satya Nadella is coming up now to talk about Delivering on Commercial Search.

Microsoft Live Search seeks to:
- deliver the best search results — selection and relevance
- simplify key tasks — experience, intelligence, multi device access
- innovate in the business model — cashback and paid engagement

Microsoft is continuing to grow the index and improve the quality. There are over 3 billion images in the index now and over 20 billion documents. Live has 14 million local business listings as well. The goal is to make all that data more semantically rich to understand the relationship between all these entities.

Simplifying tasks is bound by getting to the intent of the user. If you are shopping you may want to know what people are saying about a product. Microsoft mines the web for comments and applies sentiment analysis to create the Opinion Index to help simplify your research task.

Satya is now demonstrating the integration of Farecast into Live search. He has typed in a query about flights from SEA to SFO. You get back a Instant Answer from Farecast with pricing and some prediction of if it’s a good time to buy if prices are going up etc. You pick the dates and Live Search Farecast goes out and mines the data from many sources, airlines and aggregators and provides a variety of refinement tools. The tool extends as well to hotel search that has over 100K hotels indexed and growing.

The next demo is product search. The search query being used is “gps system”. The result once again contains and Instant Answer of popular products as well as web results and buying guides. When you are ready to buy you click through to Live Search Products and then refine by price and user opinion. The user opinion refinement is unique to Live Search. They use sentiment analysis to determine what is important to the consumer - features, details, prices etc. The entire product search experience is available at m.live.com as well. Great for comparison shopping while you are in the store. Simplifies your offline shopping tasks as well.

LiveSearch Cashback is up next.

Search is a 20billion dollar marketplace today and there is an opportunity to innovate in this area. Live Search Cashback is the vehicle to drive this and change the flow money to benefit users and advertisers.

Demo time. Search for digital cameras on Live Search. The top ad is flagged as Live Search Cashback vendor. Click on the ad and you go into the Cashback system. Select your camera and you get a list of vendors that are bidding via offering different cash back rates. You choose the best deal that works for you and click through to the vendor’s regular online shopping system. After the transaction you get an email about how to redeem your rebate. You cannot collect your Cashback for 60 days due to return policies at vendors.

How will Microsoft measure progress of Cashback?
- Number of products
- Advertiser ROI
- Commercial query volume growth

Bill has come back to close out the session.

Part of all this innovation is the move to be more measurable.
- Stronger ROI
- Improved customer satisfaction
- Eliminating click fraud

Cashback has launched with good momentum with over 700 merchants and over 10 million product offers and nearly all verticals. Bill says working with ebay has been great as a key partner in Cashback. Last year ebay accounted for nearly 9% of world wide ecommerce volume.

Other key partners include Barnes & Noble who believe Cashback will help them improve there advertising ROI. Sears also believes Cashback will benefit the customer and lower Sears’ CPA. Zappos sees Cashback as taking the risk out of their online advertising spend.

Looking ahead Bill feels we’re at the very beginning of many things and there is so much more that can be done. Microsoft is about having the best search results and the best user experience.

Tony Fernandes - Group CEO, AirAsia

Tony used to work for Time Warner and resigned on the spot when the AOL merger was proposed. Saw a commercial on TV in London for ezjet and decided at that point to start something similar in Asia - he had no experience at all.

AirAsia History

• initially an existing airline that had 2 airlines
• Tony inherited $6million in debt.
• use the name as the logo
• 6 years later they have 75 aircraft and transporting 2million passengers a month and have ordered 175 new aircraft
• SARS, bird flu, tsunami, earthquakes and more - always found a way out of the problems

Oil is $129 - Tony jokes that they’re hoping to find a way to power planes on coconuts. On a more serious note they are now generating about 80% of their sales online.

AirAsia is the most profitable airline in the world today and have won many awards - FastCompany stated AirAsia is one of the innovative companies in the world.

AirAsia has 1-2 routes making it the most dense network in South East Asia. They do 12 flights a day to Macau- previously there were no flights to Macau.

They have used a lot of technology to level the competition - e-coupons and online booking and have set a strategic partnership with Microsoft.

The focus of his talk today is about the people. They have worked hard to give incentives and support their employees. There is a focus on togetherness and community. They make the pilots help clean aircraft and cook breakfast for engineers from time to time. This fosters a team effort. Started AirAsia academy to train and launch new employees en mass. Any excuse to have a party is the way of life at AirAsia. AirAsia allows people with great attitude and multiple talents to thrive. Tony feels his job is to polish his diamonds (people). The hanger is dedicated to AirAsia engineers. Tony asked the guy that built his house to build his airplane hanger. Then they put a giant poster of his engineers that says “AirAsia has the best engineers” on the side of the hanger - that side of the hanger points at Malaysian Airlines - Maylaysian Airlines can’t complain because those engineers were trained by them - funny stuff.

Anybody can live their dreams at AirAsia.

Tony’s presentation today has been absolutely inspiring.

The downside of live blogging is that you can’t really capture the jokes and the personality of the speaker. Tony Fernandes is an exceptional speaker. If you ever get a chance to see him speak don’t pass it up.

Arianna Huffington interviewing Cyrus Krohn (Director, RNC eCampaign Division) and Mark Penn (CEO Worldwide, Burson Marsteller)

Arianna just asked if there were any Hungarians in the audience because she’s not good at ducking eggs - haha. That won’t make sense if you didn’t see the news today.

Branding has moved more increasingly to center on campaigns. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Shock and Awe - worked as a brand. The Republican brand has nowhere to go but up. Arianna says that if the Republican party was dog food it would have been taken of the shelf.

Cyrus Krohn is up first to talk about Winning Elections - Winning Brands.
The RNC has a database called Voter Vault that they use for direct mail and lists. It’s been dormant otherwise. Cyrus wants to take the db and use it for micro-targeting voters that consume data in different ways. They used it to support Bobby Jindal’s run for Governor. Jindal campaign took multi phase approach:
- could they register voters online more easily
- could they manage absentee voting more effectively and efficiently
- 75% of voters they reached out to voted

They set up a Valentines day ecard website that got over 700K users and people averaged 2 cards per session. They then used that data to follow up and solicit funds or tell people about the RNC Facebook page.

The RNC has stepped in to Web 2.0 with www.canweask.com - more data capture. You can submit text or video questions and forward it to friends. 50K unique visitors used the site in the first 24 hours. Cyrus is closing by showing an anti Obama commercial from the CanWeAsk website.

Next up is Mark Penn.
Mark opens by stating that Cyrus’ add is too negative to be effective.

We are becoming a society that is making new choices that are breaking down religion and class that used to divide us. The groups are small but having a large impact. Two groups to mention are:
- The Long Attention Spanners - These folks are opposite of ADD. The internet is dominated by people who read and read and absorb information. The average best seller has grown over 100 pages in length and the most popular movie in American was over 3 hours long.
- The Impressionable Elites - Elites are swayed but personality, while regular voters are focused on health care plans, job and college affordability (election issues). Some news outlets are adding personality reporters to their rosters to capture this new data.

These groups are examples of people that are changing the model. One example is when the Hillary Clinton campaign Mark was working on went to Texas they tried new ads. One ad they ran was all stock footage and was very affordable to produce but it asked a question and brought in lots of search engine traffic. The commercial became spoofed on SNL and received broad coverage and became part of popular culture. A little stock footage, creativity and the web can help you create $50million worth of coverage. Commercials simply asked questions but they asked the right question.

Arinna is trying to make the argument that the commercials simply appealed to fear. Mark says the ads actually stimulate a question and cause people to research and debate.

Robbie is talking about connected entertainment and experience entertainment in a social environment. xbox Live has 12 million members. They are there because their friends are there. xbox live has had up to 1 million users online at once.

Connected entertainment is very personal. How do we deliver a targeted message to these people rather than just a general broadcast message? As a leader in the IPTV space they will be able to allow advertisers to target consumers.

Connected entertainment is interactive. Consumers can connect and interact with advertising and it’s not broadcast advertising anymore.

Looking across the world of where people will experience this entertainment: PC, TV, mobile. MS partnership with aQuantive is allowing them to optimize the reach to these 2 screens.

Let’s talk about television:
Gamers love on screen advertising when it’s done right. When it’s a proper experience. The platform enables people to reach to all levels of gamers. Rockband has had 10 million songs downloaded. That’s an opportunity.

Robbie has handed the stage to Mark Kroese. He is demonstrating the 3 screens for us starting with xbox.

He’s signed in to his xbox and there are some ads integrated to the page. Nissan is integrated through the game Forza 2. You can also download a Nissan car to use in the game. The third way is in the game with Nissan display advertising. This advertising can be dynamically inserted into the game through the network.

McDonald’s is also integrated into the xbox dashboard by offering movie downloads.

Nike Sparq training is intergrated - think of it like a microsite that you navigate with your xbox controller. Lots of streaming video through xbox Live.

Doritos ran a one year campaign that invited the xbox audience to participate in a user generated game concept. The winner of the contest is having his game produced and it will be released on xbox live later this year. The contest also ran on xbox.com and msn.com. Doritos achieved a 15% brand lift over the course of the year from this concept.

Robbie is back and we’re now talking about mobile and people on the go. (Zune, pocket pc, etc).

Zune social - share playlists and what you like or don’t with your friends. Zune Social creates a personalize entertainment space.

Phones - in the next 3 years - up to 500 million phones capable of media and gaming etc.

Mark is back demonstrating the Zune Card and how social connections work within the Zune network as well as how that integrates into Facebook. This is all wrapped up in a Doritos promotion that allows for music to be shared and paid for by Doritos as part of the promotion. This is then all synced to the Zune player and the advertising is getting attribution all the way along and the user is still getting value.

The idea is adding real value to the customer and advertising in an integrated campaign that moves between TV the PC and mobile devices.