For Those About to Rock…Saluting RockPeaks.com

I recently checked in with Barnaby Marshall to talk about an exciting venture he’s been working on called RockPeaks.com Barnaby is the CEO and Editor-in-Chief of the freshly launched search vertical that caters to true music fans. The idea of building a vertical search site is part of a growing trend in the online industry. Frustrated searchers are growing tired of the ambiguity and hit or miss content found on networks like YouTube and are turning to boutique engines that provide what I like to call a “mecca factor”.

Barnaby has been an avid music fan for as long as he can remember. For years he scoured indie music shops and record conventions for rare videos, but everything changed when YouTube came along four years ago. Suddenly this somewhat obscure passion became a huge mainstream social pastime, as massive amounts of uncirculated material began flooding the internet. The chaos and disorganization of the early stages of Web 2.0, motivated Barnaby to tame the performance video portion of YouTube by building RockPeaks.

Snapping up the title of “world’s largest database of live rock and roll video”, RockPeaks.com has taken full advantage of the explosion of performance video material circulating the web. In organizing the content and tagging it in such a way that users can quickly access specific content, the site truly fulfills a deepening consumer demand for higher levels of sophistication in search.

The site has launched with 5,000 clips ready to be reviewed, commented on and shared by rock fans across the globe. Almost 3,000 of those clips have live, active streams. Eventually the site will evolve into a community that will provide rich information on the content that has until now, been floating around with little to no context.


Much like Google’s mission statement (to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful), RockPeaks.com’s raison d’être is to tame the unruly world of video sharing. Keeping it simple, RockPeaks.com does not allow members to upload their own videos. This is one factor allowing the business to run lean.

Among the site’s features is a clip tracker that finds content that has been pulled from other sharing sites and provides its users with a petition mechanism to lobby for the authorized release of overlooked material.

Barnaby explained that part of the frustration with YouTube is that things get pulled all the time. Often they will pop up again later, but without all the original comments, number of views, rankings etc. This is incredibly valuable data. From an quantitative perspective, we can divide the number of days a clip has been posted by the number of views it has received to get a sense of what's hot on YouTube and from a qualitative standpoint, the user generated content includes true music fans’ commentary and in some cases, valuable data on the who/what/where of a clip, as well as opinions/critiique)

Barnaby describes the founders’ motivation behind RockPeaks.com as “…preserving history and celebrating those fleeting but wonderful moments where musical magic is made and sharing them with others, perpetually”.

The RockPeaks business model has three components:

Advertising

• They’ve secured a deal with one of Canada’s largest advertising networks to represent the site and they will be using Google AdWords in the short term as the fit for niche contextual messaging certainly exists on the site.

Affiliate Program

• A standard agreement with Amazon allows the site to generate commissions from their sales. Interestingly, the value of a digital download is 6 points higher than a hard CD purchase.

Content Licensing

• Content Licensing is a long-term potential revenue stream that will certainly be explored.

Looking forward to watching RockPeaks paint it black...

When will you know who I am? The Business of Lifestreaming...

Controlling "Who We Are" through User Generated Content

Lifestreaming is becoming mainstream. According to eMarketer 42% of adults online in the US are “content creators”. By 2012, eMarketer projects that 50% of the online population will fall under the same category (I think that’s conservative). As a result, there’s a growing demand for consumer tools that help organize their public profiles.

In the same way that businesses find it critical to keep on top of user reviews and listing accuracy in online directories for their store locations and business profile details, individuals are starting to see the importance of keeping clean and accurate records on themselves.

Catering to this trend is the emergence and rapid growth of aggregator sites that crawl the web to collect all data on individuals and organize it in a rich directory style. While Googling people has always been a popular pastime, there’s a new breed of laser focused people engines popping up that are much deeper in scope than Google, LinkedIn or ZoomInfo.

As an example, 123people.com is a people search tool that acts like a universal search engine. The site gathers data and displays it using categories like web links, images, videos, news etc. The Austrian start-up launched in beta into the US early this year and appears to be seeing significant growth.

Other sites that provide similar services include Profilactic and Naymz but they don't seem to be as comprehensive as 123people.com because they are based on member registration and input rather than aggregated search. The downside to the aggregated search of course, is that the amount of incorrect or irrelevant data increases. This however, leads to consumer participation in correcting the data and even going as far as to hire reputation managers to enhance visible content like ReputationDefender.

With directories like this available to the public, it makes it much easier to see just how much content is generated and shared by each individual. With all the sharing going on, I wonder if this will lead to consumers expecting others to have a greater understanding of who they are. Celebrities are used to having the public know every detail about their lives, but this new breed of fame is starting to filter into the mainstream and transparency is leading to a new kind of perceived “status”.

Tying Lifestreams to CRM

While the thought of behavioral targeting can be a major turn-off to consumers, the volume of information that is volunteered on a daily basis through lifestreaming is staggering. As people start to invest more heavily in their public "status", it makes sense that they will expect some returns. I wonder if marketers will pick up on this desire to be understood publicly and develop their CRM systems (permission based of course) around this rich data.

To date, marketers have been limited to customer data that relates to past business activity and/or basic demographic information through direct marketing strategies. If you view the aggregation of lifestreams as the white pages of tomorrow, imagine the data that would be at the disposal of marketing companies.

I recently had two customer service experiences that were influenced by my past behavior or current profile. A telco waived a service fee because of my past business with them (although I had to hold for 10 minutes while they looked it up on what seemed to be their Commodore 64) and a courier bent over backwards to make good on a mishap when I introduced myself as an average consumer that happened to blog a lot. My point here is that businesses care about these details but they simply haven’t had the luxury of push access to the data.

Maybe it’s flighty in a space shippy, twighlight zoney kind of way, but imagine calling into a business that can read through (in the spirit of white pages) reverse look-up or any other type of login, an aggregated view of my opinions, likes, dislikes and probability to buy. Suddenly, a business with a smart data base could customize a pitch and price that is unique to my profile based on information that I have streamed up to “anyone willing to view it”. If analyzed correctly, a high influencer might be given an incentive to refer business or an apparent introvert might be offered an upgraded privacy product.

Move this to mobile and see highly contextual promotions appear (pushed or pulled) based on location and social data indexed from the consumer. One of my favourite early peeks at what this might look like is L'Oreal's experimentation in Paris with the iPhone application that acts as a customer service rep at the point of sale (more on this when I write up "my favourite things" for OneDegree.ca). Consumers still need to feed the engines and the truth is, they're ok with that. It may be a matter of time before they feel that they've fed enough though and that their contributions to the web ought to be aggregated and organized to represent who they really are.

I wonder how space shippy this concept really is? High level business executives have used Jungian based Myers Briggs and other profiling data to improve their negotiations and business development practices, why wouldn't the same principles apply at the consumer level?

From what I've seen, the technology has a long way to go before it truly captures its potential value. There are annoying caching issues and semantic hurdles that need to be addressed but I do believe that offering aggregated profile content and allowing users to control it is smart. Owning significant market share in profile content organization in the long term is brilliant...

Harnessing User Generated Content...In Review

This month’s Harvard Business Review features an interesting article by Scott Cook, the Cofounder and Chairman of the Executive Committee of Intuit, about how businesses have been and should be leveraging user-generated content.

Cook cited a number of examples where user contribution has literally created businesses like Amazon (user reviews and recommendations), eBay (user generated marketplace) and in some cases outperformed old established players like encyclopedia Britannica (Wikipedia).

Cook has had some experience with implementing user generated platforms. The article references a start up Intuit was playing with in 2005 called Zipingo.

Zipingo was an online local directory product that was easily accessed through Quicken. Users could add local businesses and recommendations.

The site was shut down in 2007 when Intuit realized that the site had been given the wrong kind of attention.

Scott explains the demise of Zipingo:

“We made the mistakes that stemmed from the difference between traditional products and contribution systems. User contribution is first of all about the users and their content. We failed to nurture and encourage early contributors and we got distracted creating our own content – ancillary information like business addresses for the listings”

I think a lot of businesses are making the same mistakes today. Trusting a community of users to generate useful content is difficult. Traditionally, success has come from controlled process driven environments. After all doesn’t control drive quality? Doesn’t the brand rely heavily on the company’s ability to control quality and all the media messages that are associated with that quality?

From a marketing stand point, the user generated content (UGC) phenomenon has challenged many world-class masterminds of branding. Asking these masters to relinquish their brand stewarding responsibilities and allow what was once a heavily PR ready environment to grow cultures of uncontrolled feedback and unpredictable (possibly slanderous) content is in a way, like asking them to give up their jobs.

Over the past year, I’ve had a number of conversations with marketers about the journey from the initial terror of unknown feedback to acceptance of the 2.0 world and finally to a user generating frenzy. Perhaps the most difficult part of the journey is the first step – “letting go”.

Looking back, in the mid 90’s it became popular for brands to ask consumers to “Speak to” them. Then the brands struggled to organize feedback, respond to the feedback and route the feedback to appropriate contacts within the organization. By 2000, the information became organized, routed and responded to but a few years ago brands began to realize the potential value of the aggregated data and as a result, started to focus on harnessing the data that was being collected.

Today social networking has created a macro version of the same cycle. The UGC is scattered across the web and brands are trying to re-organize the information. Software exists to scour the web for references and services will go as far as to delete unpleasant content. The latest twist however, has been in the “listening” department. Somewhere the light bulb went on and businesses started to make the connection between consumer opinion, innovation and increased revenue. This is the first step to “letting go”.

The winning strategies to date have come from companies that have basically said to their consumers “please talk amongst yourselves”.

Enabling consumers to talk about your brand and then entering the conversation appropriately (this area is still in dire need of improvement), is clearly the way to navigate this space. That's why we're seeing the explosion of micro-communities that are discreetly sponsored by Global 5000 brands.

Here’s an example of a brand that is still asking its consumers to "speak to" it:


Here's a shot of a brand encouraging interaction and contribution:

Marketing has always been about halo effects, word of mouth and viral communication. Why not capitalize on users' innate desire to share their information, status (ad nauseam) and opinions?

It'll be interesting to see the next stage develop. Brands will need to reward the content and this will lead to a nice cerebral challenge in valuating media. I can only imagine the semantics of a cost per contribution model.

I'm sure even Ms. Palin would agree to my closing statement (with a big wink) ... "Any media is good media so just let go...".

Mixx Generated Content...IAB MIXX Conference Toronto

The IAB kicked off its MIXX Conference Series today in Toronto with a strong line up of speakers and several hot topics. Over 700 marketing professionals participated in the full-day sessions that covered everything from online video trends to advancements in social media and a cool iPhone case study from Europe.

I’ll be posting some of the highlights in greater detail over the next few days but here’s an overview of today’s content:

Natalie Johnson, the Manager of Social Media at General Motors and Monik Sanghvi, Senior Vice President of Digitas (US) delivered an in-depth presentation of how General Motors has embraced the Social Media channel. One of the great messages of the presentation was the groundbreaking moves the massive organization has taken to simply “listen” and “let go”. While many Fortune 500 companies struggle to control social media content, GM has clearly seen the wisdom in free flowing UGC and its powerful uses for research, branding and innovation.

The Video Five Ways panel stimulated a lot of conversation as representatives from StreamTheWorld, Yahoo!, Brightcove and 750 Industries shared interesting perspectives on the direction of video. Dan Ackerman Greenberg, Founder of 750 Industries insisted that viral metrics were a red herring and that the industry should focus more on “shareable content”. While the argument became somewhat obscured in equations, the golden nugget emerged with the underscoring of the quality of engagement vs. the mass spray of a viral campaign. The idea of creating relevant shareable content vs. hoping that a clever spot would please the masses was subtle but astute. More on this panel tomorrow...

Jacques Hervé Roubert, President and CEO of Nurun gave a presentation on the impact of the iPhone and shared a couple of great European cases studies. I’ll be delving into these over the next few days. The message was clearly that the iPhone is a wonderful marketing tool that goes beyond simple branding and acquisition campaigns. He showed how the iPhone could technically personify a brand and provide true tangible value to the end consumer. The presentation was fascinating.

A mini panel on the “Future of Search” packed a lot of punch for Microsoft as Martin Stoddart, Senior Product Manager of Microsoft Live search declared that the innovation and development of search technology and its business model was not over. Martin talked about Microsoft’s play to reward searchers through cash or rebates on searched product purchases. I have a lot of thoughts about this concept – too many to write in this overview. Again… stay tuned.

Dr. Marc Donner, Engineering Director at Google gave the standard Google mission statement presentation and talked about semantic search and the developments being made in that area. He talked about search being in its infancy and that we are just starting to get to the fun stuff. My head started spinning with the tag-mania he was suggesting (tagging fragments of a larger whole that would normally be unidentifiable and giving them a sub-identity). Stimulating as usual…

Innovation Upstarts Made in Canada! was an animated panel that covered Praized Media, Kneebone, Refresh and Hippopost – all of these are start-ups I will cover in greater depth shortly. I love Hippospost (I have a fetish for the connection of offline/online media these days) so I will cover more of this tomorrow.

David Friedman, President of Avenue A/Razorfish, Central Region gave a wonderful keynote about the client of the future and how agencies must adapt to the shifting demands for integration. David’s view is that marketing disciplines (DM, brand, online etc.) desperately need to come out of their silos. The picture on my blog was courtesy of David’s presentation. It was the slide he used to illustrate the delusional world agencies are living in when they believe that they are “world class, fully integrated, customer centric” – brilliant.

It was a busy day with a lot of content and a lot of interesting ideas discussed.

Contagious Comics...BitStrips at DemoCamp Toronto

It was a busy evening with DemoCamp and the OurFaves party taking place in Toronto last night.

There were some interesting presentations given at DemoCamp 18 ranging from serious programming innovation to fun applications with great potential to develop into solid businesses. I had the opportunity to delve into a bit of detail on BitStrips, one of the businesses that from my perspective, stood out with great direction and fun.

BitStrips was launched launched four months ago at South by Southwest. It’s a platform developed by an animator that allows anyone to create comic strips and share them online. The service is fast, easy and free providing its community of over 20,000 registered users with instant gratification and one day…maybe, its advertisers with a viral communications platform.

Jesse Brown manages the marketing and communications for BitStrips and presented their newly released “Comic Canon” application last night at DemoCamp. The application was designed to further streamline the comic strip building process so that it could be done much easier and virtually on the fly. The next big launch will be a FaceBook application, which will allow users to exchange comic strips within the social network.

I caught up with Jesse later on at the OurFaves event at the Gladstone. On the subject of media, Jesse mentioned that part of the core strategy is to tread carefully on the commercialization of the site. Smart move I believe, as the site is truly designed around the consumer experience and is enjoying a great trajectory as a commercial-free product. “Junking up the environment” would probably be a bad call. The most obvious alternative media revenue generating opportunity for the site would be product placement. Jesse noted that BitStrips is working hard to keep up with the hundreds of requests for new props and above all, clothing items available to construct the millions of strips that are released from the platform each month.

From a potential media perspective, here are some current facts about the site:

• 20,000 registered users
• 60,000 unique users per month
• 4 million page views per month (on-site & distributed content)
• Average of 14 minutes spent per user
• Average 10 page views per user
• 1.5 million page views distributed outside of its platform per month

Aside from the fabulous potential for product placement opportunities in the media world, the potential for BitStrips to bridge the gap between online and offline media is marvelous. The thought of user-generated offline media could provide some much needed comfort to the space and the entertaining vehicle that BitStrips provides, makes the bridge all that much more fun to anticipate.

It was nice to see a start-up with so much potential as a business, have so much fun on its way to inevitable success (one way or another).

Monetization of User Generated Video

I caught up with Kevin Barwin yesterday. Kevin is the Vice President of Business Development at Overlay.tv.

The Ottawa based company is getting ready to launch a technology that I think, will have great impact on enabling individuals and publishers to leverage user generated content and boost affiliate marketing networks.

As suggested by its name, Overlay.tv is a solution that allows users to create hot spots on their videos and photos. The hot spots are visible when users interact with the video or photo content and link back to anything from personal profile pages on Facebook to transactional sites like Amazon, iTunes or Expedia.


The solution is also targeted commercially, allowing larger publishers to hot spot their content and create new revenue streams.

Past attempts to monetize video content fell short in delivering targeted content and in truly integrating with the content. Players like Adap.tv largely use contextual ad serving via tagging as a marker for video content and ads tend to appear at the bottom of the screen. Kevin pointed out that the contextual gaps have led to some disconnects like videos about scuba diving leading to pet foods stores. While Overlay.tv’s technology will ultimately be at the mercy of its users (contextually speaking), it will have far greater potential to put accurately targeted buyers and sellers together.

Overlay.tv will officially launch on February 14 with over 750 affiliates for users to choose from. The company just announced it's completion of a $4.6 million Series A financing round.

Here’s a detailed walk through from a user perspective:

• Avid scuba diver blogs about diving and has hundreds of connections online based on this affinity.
• Scuba diver uploads video from Belize to show off the sea horse spotted in the coral.
• Diver creates an overlay and begins to hotspot items on the video (snorkel, swimsuit, location)
• Diver self selects from a library of affiliates in creating the overlay. Let’s say Expedia for location.
• Viewers scroll over the items and are able to get deeper information or purchase opportunities of the hot spotted items.
• Diver generates revenue from lead to Expedia and shares revenue with Overlay.tv

On the publisher side, Overlay.tv will be white labeling its product and aside from fees generated through customization services, it will be creating revenue sharing opportunities across major media properties.

Thoughts/Challenges/Opportunities

Adoption
Time will tell if consumers will adopt the monetization of their content using this type of solution.

Affiliate Marketing
Its proper execution will have a tremendous impact on boosting affiliate marketing networks through social media.

Saturation/Best Practices
Learning from Facebook’s nutty Vampire scenario, Overlay.tv will have to monitor feedback on user experience and audience reaction. It will definitely need optimizing to insure content is not compromised. Best practices will need to be shared across its network of users.

Offline Lead Generation
Inserting a layer of sophistication for couponing and Voip could give Overlay.tv and other players in this space potential to generate measurable (monetized) leads efficiently offline through video.

Local Search
This could create a whole new aspect to local media and how local retailers might employ the use of video within their local search listings. The flexibility offered by the product creates an opening for businesses that traditionally, may not have found much value in video ads.

Online Video Advertising Stats

• In November 2006 (predating the social networking mania), eMarketer predicted that by 2010, the online video advertising expenditure would become a $3 billion industry.
• Here's a great piece from Mark Hopkins at Mashable covering a Burst Media study on the subject of consumers and their interaction with online video.

In closing... Happy Valentine's Day Amazon!!!

Target Trips...Into User Generated Content

In keeping with today's theme of user generated content, I could not resist sharing this example found in the New York Times today of how some big brands are not embracing user generated content and how it could backfire.

The irony here, is that the very resistance has catapulted the brand into the blogosphere.

PS: I found this through a great French blog (aggregator)

What a PR hornet's nest...

Advertsing in a UGC World

Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres
Spanish Proverb

“Tell me who your friends are and I will tell you who you are”

The social slide of publisher content has had a major impact on the audiences that are being drawn in to well established media properties. Big media brands are no longer attracting the same audiences they used to. While media fragmentation in general has long been discovered and analyzed, publishers need to start concerning themselves with their shifting audiences.

For many years reader loyalty to the publishers was a relationship held between the publication and its subscribers. With limited knowledge of how users interacted with the traditional versions of their publications, publishers were to some degree relegated to hypothesizing their audiences’ opinions and overall relationship with their product.

It’s true that once the publisher migrated to digital formats they were in a much better position to understand their audience. Early web analytics provided much needed data on user frequency, geographic and in some cases demographic information. Publishers could suddenly identify which stories got the most traffic and which ones had viral halos.

It took years for publishers to realize product innovation from the data they had access to. Eventually newspapers started to beef up their technology and automotive sections and classifieds took off according to the statistics that had become available. Most of the advancements were based purely on quantitative data.

Puzzling (often alarmingly low) traffic numbers have alarmed the publishers to the reality that the Internet has leveled their world. In the past, readerships were based on some of the following factors:

• Circulation areas – geo-specific publications were limited to their territories
• Affinity – Entertainment, Economic, News, Politics etc.
• Visual Appeal & Brand – Cover shots, headlines & teasers
• Tone – audience education level and socio-economic background
• Cost per edition

Today, search, RSS feeds and social networking has changed access to content. Users are no longer interested in the source of the content but rather, how relevant the content is to quench their thirst for knowledge.

The result of this shift has caused a disruption in audiences that can be clearly seen from the user generated content that is quickly accumulating across publisher sites. When it comes to attracting fortune 500 advertisers, it’s no longer about the number of readers attracted to a particular publication. It’s about individual pieces of content and the quality of its audience.

This theory applies to all media properties online. Even a local directory with user generated reviews can lose credibility quickly when readers and potential advertisers discover poorly written user content filled with typos or clearly biased opinions (regardless of how trusted the sources might be). User generated content provides a unique insight into the viewers and readers of publications online.

Here are just a few of the many implications and preliminary solutions:

• Advertisers
• Will look for premium content vs. premium publisher brands.
• Planning will have to become more fluid as opposed to static annual allocation
• Media agencies will require savvy, proactive planning tactics and solutions to help align their clients' budgets with appropriate content.
• Automated contextual advertising engines will be scrutinized for inappropriate alignment of sentiments, opinions and general content appeal.
  

• Publishers
• User generated content requires monitoring and mining for intelligence. While it’s easy to give this job to an entry-level employee, publishers need to put marketers in these roles. Individuals that are focused on preserving the overall spirit of the brand are better candidates than clerks simply scanning for obscenities and spam.
• Focus on areas that are driving the most desirable user generated content vs. concentrating on high volume traffic. Scoring matrices will have to be developed.
• Move from using UGC as a listening tool to a talking tool. It’s true that users feel slighted when their comments are not posted. One possible solution would be to create a communicative tool to justify moderations or to dig deeper at the source.
  

While user generated content will sometimes provide an unexpected and in some cases, unpalatable glimpse of readership, it’s important to understand that in this day and age, it’s not necessarily a reflection on the publication’s brand but rather that of a fragmented audience.

Reviews with a LouderVoice

Writing to you live from my reviews and reputation management rabbit hole... I had an interesting exchange with Conor O’Neill today. Conor is the Co-Director of Argolon Solutions' new venture, LouderVoice.

The Irish based company launched in May 2007 with a platform that allows its members to write reviews on their own blogs, so that they can be aggregated and distributed to partners. A secondary part of the business allows blogless reviewers to set up a LouderVoice reviews blog on their network with the option to transfer to alternative servers as desired.

The driving factor behind the platform is to build a trusted community and Conor feels that reviews that are tied back to personal blogs providing deeper background on the person behind the words, is much more transparent.

With its growing collection of detailed, user generated content, LouderVoice is offering a platform for rants, raves and indifferent expressions from consumers. As a result f the content-rich collection, Conor pointed out that more and more of their users' reviews are topping Google in SEO. By building out identities specific to reviewing products and services, the play stays true to its content. As an added feature, the site allows reviewers to push content on the go via SMS.

To date, Conor describes the content as seasonally driven. With a lot of music and movie reviews reflecting the winter habits of hibernating consumers. Restaurant and hotel reviews tend to pop up in the summer. "The main thing we see is long tail content with plenty of completely unique reviews that are not seen anywhere else and a lot of local content" added Conor.

Developed through Microformats, the LouderVoice functionality is a simple add-on to an existing blog.

An API is currently under development to allow LouderVoice partners to provide review writing/reading features on their sites. Their customers send reviews remotely and can view all relevant review summaries/ratings on the partner site. The first partner (to be named) integration will launch in March.

LouderVoice is currently adding features like a very lightweight tagging system for review collection and the addition of video sites, podcasting sites and social networks as new source streams. The goal is to house all reviews written by an individual, no matter where they are generated, so that they can be found via one site, building the individual's reputation.

LouderVoice V2 is planned to launch in February with added Web 2.0 features allowing users to follow their favourite reviewers and an internal reviewing function for those who aren't bloggers. The site will also be re-designed with a sleeker look and feel and more robust navigation.

What I find refreshing about the model is that as opposed to offering cash for specific product reviews like ReviewStream or ReviewsArena (among a growing list of others), the site is offering a reputation building vehicle, blogging tools and blog traffic as an incentive. This allows them to avoid the sketchy “this review is a paid advertisement” disclaimer other review writing networks are tied to on all of their aggregated content.

Conor described three revenue streams for the business. The first is standard contextual advertising on the site which is well suited to review-style content. The second is a partner/white-label model and the third is a partner customer feedback system (more centered on the SMS interface).

Varying approaches to combat trusted reviews are cropping up everywhere. As privacy concerns are surfacing about portable reputation engines, LouderVoice’s model provides a timely and unique alternative. With LouderVoice’s potential for rich content and its focused review writing environment, it looks like they have the right ingredients in place. As usual, it's a numbers game, driving consistent content will be a challenge. Conor appears to be up for it.

The product is currently being rolled out in Ireland and UK with marketing plans to follow for Europe and North America.

More Thoughts on Reviews and Reputations...

I fell down another familiar rabbit hole this week. This time about user generated reviews and the plight of managing their sources. I've got a call this afternoon that might change the perspective I'm about to share but here's the thought as it stands...

It occurs to me that one of the most bustling groups of content generators are activists. As review writers are rarely called upon to disclose their associations or personal interests, it would be hard for say, a golf course operator or an SUV manufacturer to control or accurately source the motivation behind negative reviews written by an environmentalist.

There are currently 500 groups listed under "activists" within Facebook (that's only one applicable search term). A group against animal cruelty has 2,900 members and various global warming groups have well over 2,000 in aggregate.

With all the solutions under development in this space, I have not come across one that can detect personal views on issues relating to religious or ethical belief systems. Although Facebook profiles often disclose semi-accurate user details of this nature, in the main, it will forever be a challenge to determine these influencing factors. Unless of course, the reputation tracking solutions are able to tap into Facebook and other social networks' group level membership details. However, if this becomes a reality, privacy concerns may lead to quick attrition within those groups. Anonymity is a key trait to a true activist.

To date, I believe that reputation management solutions cover fairly one dimensional user statistics like age, sex, social network memberships and some vague activity data. I wonder (out loud) if there are any solutions being developed that have a behavioral component to them?

The promise of reviews are reminding me more and more of one of my favourite movies, "The Gods must Be Crazy". Everyone seems to be exercising their own definitions of their true purpose and potential while ironically, wreaking havoc on community.

Local Surfing and the Problem with Tagging

We all know that local search is still not where it’s destined to be but I’m concerned with the apparent tagging frenzy that is taking place right now. I believe it’s driving irrelevant impressions, interrupting the user experience and creating a massive mess to mop up later. In my own research I’ve been struck by the reality that I’m made to surf for local content rather than find it easily through any given local search property. In a Web 2.0 world, how 1999 is that?

One of the larger issues faced by the publishers in local search is the natural inconsistency in inventory by vertical and geography. Over the past few years the industry has pushed itself to simplifying the buying process through arbitrage models. Small businesses are offered “buckets of clicks”, pay upfront and wait for the clicks to come in.

So, it’s in the publishers’ best interest to deliver the clicks in as little time as possible and are therefore motivated to heighten the ad appearances across the media property in the hopes that consumers will click.

As part of this drive to deliver clicks, the notion of tagging has taken off, with publishers offering advertisers the ability to self select categories or “tag” their businesses with in some cases, unlimited tags. The practice is often positioned as SEO and eager business owners are left to their own creativity to develop copy, categories and tagging. The result is an ever-increasing pile of irrelevant data making it difficult for users to find what they’re looking for and ultimately for advertisers to get the truly qualified leads they're after.

Traditionally, the yellow pages industry was more regulated in categorization. Advertisers would gain presence in 3-5 relevant categories, pay and wait for the calls to come in. Rigidity aside, at least consumers got what they were looking for. Maybe this is why directories have such an attractive model – church and state are so clearly defined that the advertiser value of simple inclusion is transparent. Performance models have disrupted this.

I don't mean to pick on the publishers here but this issue is only going to get worse as advertisers continue to invest in their properties. Cleaning up business profiles and bad tags is not something you want to be saddled with in the future. These misplaced listings are starting to look a lot like invasive spam.

Here’s an example of a search done on CitySearch for Pizza in Tampa - the third listing is for Salon Jack - Beauty & Fitness, Barbers, Spas etc...


The same search using YellowPages.com- my search was for businesses that included pizza in the business information. Mettler Toledo is the world's leading scale manufacturer and currently advertises under pizza in Tampa...



And finally SuperPages.com - the second advertiser is "ShopBrite - fast delivery services"...



Ok, I was almost drawn into SuperPages because I thought the delivery advertiser for pizza in Tampa (maybe a restaurant aggregater of sorts) was relevant but upon clicking I landed on this…a results page for courier services?


The bottom line is that the user experience is being compromised in all cases. Self-procurement needs to be supplemented with publisher quality control and that might mean that pricing strategies need to be revisited. Its been almost 6 years since the advent of performance based models and online directories moving to them. Bucketing clicks is not doing the users any favours and in turn, it's doing nothing for advertisers.

Presence still has a value and publishers need to start looking at putting a price tag on it. A hybrid at the very least??

Conversational Marketing - The Wildfire

There was an excellent keynote presentation last week at Interactive to the Max in Toronto by Sean Moffitt, President of Agent Wildfire.

Sean did a great job of laying out the rationale behind the urgency of harnessing the web to build brands. More specifically, it was about the need to embrace the social aspect (word of mouth) of the web and to promote the conversations between users and brands.

An old favourite video kicked off the argument:



Rather than paraphrasing the presentation, I've jotted down a few important data points from the deck:

Globally there are:

• 850 Social Network users
• 100+ Million Blogs
• Avg. # of Blog Links - 12
• Avg. Facebook Friends - 164
• No. of Per Person Brand-Related Conversations Each Year – 4,65 Source: Agent Wildfire Presentation 2007
• Generation X's Split of User Generated Content Consumed vs. Corporate Generated Content is 35% to 65% and the younger Net Generation's split is 51% (user generated) to 49% (corporate). Source: Harrison Group 2007
• Business & Ad People as a “trusted profession” – ranked 17 & 20th out of 21 professions Source: Gallup
• 76 percent of consumers don’t trust advertising Source: Yankelovich
• 2/3rds of brands have re-branded themselves in the last 3 years Source: BrandChannel

These were only a few of the many statistics throughout the presentation that made an air tight case for the importance of building conversations with consumers.

Sean also pointed out results from a recent survey that showed 70% of companies are currently spending less that 2.5% of their budgets on "conversation marketing". The same survey showed that 81% respondents project that by 2012 they would spend at least as much on conversational marketing as traditional media.

The biggest challenges to getting to that enormous shift in spend were outlined as:

• 51.1% - Manpower restraints
• 46.9% - Fear of loss of control
• 45.4% - Inadequate metrics
• 43.5% - Culture of their organizations
• 35.8% - Difficulty with internal sell-through

"Fear of loss of control" was truly the theme throughout the day (and has also been over the past few weeks in other conversations).

Historically, marketers have relied on the dollar vote from consumers. This is were I argue tirelessly about the obsession these days with clicks and immediate ROI. If you ask me, the idea of letting go and allowing consumers to participate in the growth of a company can't be more logically sound.

Kudos to Sean for laying it all out last week!

Reviewing Reputations - Advertiser Generated Content

I was doing some research on the many Reputation Management companies that exist to help national brands and small businesses quantify and qualify what’s being said about their brands and then counter balance if and where necessary. While this work has traditionally been the job of a PR agency, the blogosphere brings complexity to the issue.

The sheer volume of information that requires tapping, analyzing and monitoring and real time management as a result is the driving challenge. Changing the title from Public Relations to Reputation Management implies a more appropriate sense of urgency.

One of the sketchier departments of the new “Reputation Management” organization is the area that recruits review writers en masse thereby creating a network for national brands to tap into for content generation. Writers can get paid anywhere between $10 to $200 on ReviewMe.com while advertisers are charged double for the luxury of accessing the network with content that for the most part, is quite positive (shocker…).

Most of the other reputation management companies position themselves as PR agents online but 9 times out of 10, their service listings reveal that they are simply SEO specialists that have a team of copy writers that post positive reviews in as many areas online as possible. That means everywhere from Bebo and Buzznet to Grono.net any other site that is viewed as a consumer forum.

Some of the content generating services disclose themselves as such in their writing but others try to be stealth about it. In both cases, brands could be jeopardizing trust with their consumers.

Media savvy consumers are developing intolerance for breeches of trust and advertorial spamming. In some cases, consumers post colorful comments about their feelings towards businesses that have clearly hired copywriters to persuade a purchase or shift an opinion about a brand.

Small businesses should also be concerned about their reputations.

Last year a Kelsey Interactive Local Media report indicated that the traffic on local social search sites built on reviews, such as Yahoo! Local, Judy’s Book and Yelp, collectively grew 44% from August 2005 to August 2006 (compared with flat growth among the top five IYPs) and to at least partially justify this growth, according to Hitwise, a September 2006 Harris Interactive Poll showed that 67% of respondents are “likely to post reviews,” while 79% are “likely to be influenced” by them.

To respond to this trend, publishers are struggling with the concept of launching review functions without well-established content (I thought users were supposed to post them??). The assumption here is that users will break their loyalty to one directory and move to one that offers richer content.

While no content generating service would admit to working in this area, some of the tip off’s that look fishy in newer local search services include:

• Reviewer Profiles that reveal over 500 reviews posted within a short time frame (under two weeks)
• A disproportionate volume of reviews on national brands for a local tool
• Reviewer profiles that are focused on one vertical (like 50 reviews in one food type category)
• Uni-sex reviewer profiles that comment on gender-specific businesses

There are more, but these are some of the more blatant ones that I have come across in my research.

To get around this content issue some directories, including Google’s, are aggregating reviews from outside sources. While this doesn’t eliminate the existence of fraudulent reviews, it helps to dilute their paths.

Business is built on reputation and building a reputation takes time. Consumers know this. So why has the online channel turned this into a race? I guess word of mouth will start to trump anonymous reviewer profiles in any case so this may be a moot question answered through social networks.

In the meantime I’m trying to decide who should be more concerned about their reputation – the national brand or the publisher that may or may not be telling the truth about them.