Web Business by Ken Burbary

Back to Digital Reality

We’re often so focused on the next big thing or mesmerized by the daily innovation of new services, tools and technologies that emerge on the web that something goes unnoticed. We slowly lose our stable footing and begin to get out of touch with reality. Some of us talk about it as “living inside the fishbowl”, and there is truth to the metaphor. While social computing, social media, and social business design may be the future for the web, we’re just not there yet. Change can be difficult. Things take time, no matter how much we want others to join us in the social web. Consider these facts a reminder about what’s happening in the Digital Marketing & Advertising world, TODAY.

• Search is still King of Digital - According to comScore, there were 13.6 billion searches last month by online Americans. Google maintains the lion share of that volume, at 65%. Google’s continued dominance in search is why they continue to rake in the cash, generating $5.52 billion in revenue for Q2 2009. Simple math says Google is averaging $20 billion in revenue annually, while social darlings such as Twitter have yet to demonstrate a sound business model let alone any revenue. At the end of the day, the biggest business in Digital remains paid search advertising and display advertising. Companies spend millions on them and will continue to do so until these channels stop performing. Even Facebook, which boasts 250 million active users worldwide, only generates an estimated $300-$350 million in revenue, a mere fraction of Google’s financial success.
• Email Marketing, strong and still growing – Email has been and continues to be one of the workhorses of Digital communications. Despite all the innovation in communications technologies we’ve seen with the emergence of social, email continues to grow in total spend, offers mature measurement and analytics, and can be deployed very cost effectively as a result of falling CPMs and a high ROI.
• Mobile finally emerges as a viable option – Mobile device penetration is sufficiently high enough that it has become a viable option for companies to pursue cost effectively, and on terms consumers prefer. Already we’re seeing mobile economies generate substantial revenues. The Apple app store sells $200 million worth of mobile software applications each month, putting the iPhone app economy at $2.4 billion. Additionally, the Android marketplace brings in $5 million per month in mobile app sales.
• Online brands declared dead still thrive – Facebook and Twitter seem to dominate headlines and consumer attention, or do they? Myspace is still drawing in ~60 million unique visitors per month. While this trails Facebook by a wide margin, that is TRIPLE than number of active monthly unique visitors Twitter brings in. Now, that isn’t to mean I expect Myspace to win the social network arms race, but rather to demonstrate that it is still a thriving destination where millions of consumers spend their time. Looking at the top 50 most visited Web Properties in July 2009 and you can see other online brands that have been written off, Yahoo, AOL, even Microsoft Expedia.

Don’t disregard these destinations as irrelevant until you’ve done due diligence to understand your target audience, and where they spend their time.

The point of all this is to remember that we live in a heavily diversified online landscape. Resist the allure of shiny objects, and don’t buy into a single channel silver bullet theory (especially social!). Work hard to understand your audience, and craft a strategy to engage that is spread across the relevant channels listed above. An integrated, diversified Digital asset allocation will provide the most effective results, and with the least amount of risk.

Five Reasons Companies Should be Integrating Social Media with Facebook Connect

Quick explanation for those not familiar with Facebook Connect. It is a service developed by Facebook that lets Facebook users login into partner sites using their Facebook account and share information with Facebook friends. Basically, a single sign-on authentication solution that websites can use instead of relying on building it for themselves.

Facebook Connect – Current State of the Union

As of this writing, there are more than 15,000 registered implementations (websites, devices and applications) of Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008. According to Nick O’Neil from Allfacebook.com, the most recent statistics show that Facebook Connect is close to 1 million users. Impressive numbers given this initiative isn’t even a year old yet. Implementing this can be trivial, and offers immediate benefits to companies willing to experiment. Already we’re seeing these benefits on Connect enabled sites:

Increased Registration - Data from Facebook states that sites that use Facebook Conect as an alternate to account registration have seen a 30-300% increase in registration on their sites.

• Citysearch.com – Daily site registrations have tripled in the 4 months since Facebook Connect testing began
• Huffingtonpost.com – Since integrating with Facebook Connect, more than 33% of their new commentor registrations come through Facebook
• Cbsinsider.com – Over 85% of all new user registrations are coming from Facebook Connect

Increased Site Traffic - After implementation, Facebook.com immediately begins sending web site traffic your way. Data from Facebook says that for each story published in Facebook, companies see roughly 3 clicks back to the site.  Nearly half the stories in the News Stream get clicked on. This creates opportunities for the site to encourage more user actions – knowing that each one may result in 3 new visits to their site.

• Lollapalooza.com – Pageviews are up 99 percent, page views per visit are up 34 percent, and the average time on the site is up 20 percent since Facebook Connect implementation
• Surfline.com – July referrals increased 57%, and 38% over the 2009 monthly average (Facebook Connect wasn’t even implemented until July 27th – The means they saw the benefits from just 4 days worth of traffic, not the entire month). August is already off to a great start, with trending at an 83% increase month-over-month, and 148% over the 2009 average

Increased Engagement – Facebook users are used to being social. They are an active group, participating, sharing, and generating more content. Sites with Facebook Connect see a 15-100% increase in reviews. Connected users create 15-60% more content than users who have not connected with Facebook Connect.

• Urbanspoon -  43,000 new users have connected using Facebook Connect. Those users have voted 150,000 times on restaurants , left 22,000 reviews, and uploaded 13,000 photos
• CitySearch - 94% of users who write reviews on the site share those reviews back on Facebook, where 70% of their friends who see the review click on it, and travel back to Citysearch.com

Improved User Experience - Facebook Connect offers users qualitative benefits too. No new site registration is required, simply login using your Facebook credentials. It also makes it easy to share with an existing network of friends or family by publishing activities to the Facebook Newsfeed, with only a couple clicks of the mouse. No typing or emailing required. Given the sheer size of Facebook’s active user base, this type of integration with an individual’s personal network could ultimately become the new “email a friend” feature found on websites worldwide.

Access to 250 million Online Consumers – At the end of the day, companies need to fish where the fish are. And right now, the fish are spending their time on Facebook.com (5 billion minutes a day globally). Opening up a direct pathway from your site to Facebook gives you access, albeit indirectly through your user’s activities, to an entirely new set of people. And for practically no out of pocket cost.

Bonus Round:

Facebook Connect Innovation – Companies that are willing to take on some additional time and effort for more advanced implementations of Facebook Connect are moving beyond the basic benefits above. Sites like the HuffingtonPost are innovating and creating new uses, like HuffPost Social News. This initiative goes beyond allowing users to login using Facebook, and instead mashes up HuffPost news content with the conversation surrounding it, attempting to create a digital water cooler like environment and feel. The intent and prevailing logic is that it will increase engagement and social participation. Based on the results from the other examples above, HuffPost stands a good chance at doing just that.

Increase Revenue – Some e-Retailers have taken notice of Facebook Connect and are beginning to formulate plans for implementing it, while other more progressive companies already have it live (retailers like Jansport and Teavana). According to a report from the WSJ, Jay Allen, Teavana’s vice president of e-commerce, says the conversion rate—a measure of how many shoppers make purchases—for people who use the application is 20% higher than the rate for others, and their average orders are slightly more expensive. Other e-Retailers that have announced plans to integrate with Facebook Connect are Dicks Sporting Goods, Drugstore.com and eMusic.com.

Key Takeaway: Facebook Connect offers immediate benefits to both website visitors and the companies that operate them. Tapping into existing social behavior is the next logical step to brand website & social media integration. Companies should take advantage of the benefits Facebook offers, as they are also immediate (see Surfline example above) and substantial.

Resources: Allfacebook.com has a good directory of some Facebook Connect installations. The most recent and up to date data, news, and examples can be found on the official Facebook Connect News page.

And if you want watch it in action before trying it yourself, check out the Video Overview of Facebook Connect courtesy of Powered Inc.

3 New Media Tools You Should Consider

As new tools and services constantly spring up on the web, I’m often evaluating the ones that look promising and incorporating them into my Digital toolbox. I’ve developed some new habits around 3 tools that I want I share with you, and hope you’ll find them as useful as I do.

Posterous - Posterous officially labels itself as “the dead simple place to post everything”. It can be used a lifestreaming platform, like Steve Rubel does, a simple blog, or as I use it, an aggregation and distribution service for the media that I create and share. Like many of you, I participate in a disparate collection of social media outposts (Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Blogs, etc..). I spend a great deal of time reading, commenting and sharing the interesting media I find with others in my network that I think could benefit from it. However, this can become burdensome and time consuming, as I’m forced to constantly copy/paste/edit links, text, and media to get it right way before sharing it on a particular network. Rinse & repeat for each social network. This gets old fast.

Posterous solves this problem, and quite efficiently I might add. My media sharing is now “1 stop shopping”. Posterous supports virtually all of the most popular social platforms, and integration with your accounts is simple and straightforward. Once setup is completed, you can use email or bookmarklets (for advanced users that want to customize the html) to autopost your shared item. Posterous supports a wide range of media types, which allows you to share photos, music, videos documents, and links with your other networks.Instead of manually sharing media & links on each of the networks Iparticipate in, now I send it to Posterous, and they take care of the rest of the distribution. It also has some useful features like custom domains, integration with Google Analytics for tracking, and some native reporting (views, comments, favorites).

Go ahead and see Posterous for yourself. I’ve been using it regularly at http://kenburbary.posterous.com

What the Hashtag – This service is specific to one social network, so if you’re not using Twitter then skip this section. If you are using it, you’ve probably come across hashtags (Read here for a explanation of what hashtags are). “What the Hashtag” aims to do one thing, and does it well. It provides you with the ability to easily group and follow all conversation with a unique tag. For example, I missed blogchat last week. Blogchat is a weekly discussion on Twitter, started by Mack Collier, to discuss blogs and blogging best practices. Using “What the Hashtag” makes it easy to catchup on the conversation. What was said, who was what, and when it occurred. This is useful because there are often very informative, and relevant conversations around events, conferences, webinars, etc.. that I want to follow but may not be able to due to other commitments. “What the Hashtag” solves that problem for me. It’s my own personal Twitter time machine. I get to quickly and easily cycle back to that conversation, follow what was discussed, and identify who I may want to follow up with after the fact or take further action.

View the #blogchat page on “What the Hashtag” and see for yourself:  http://wthashtag.com/Blogchat

Vitrue Social Media Index – This is a social media measurement service. It attempts to provide an easy to understand measurement of a brand’s share of online conversation. It uses a proprietary set of technologies & algorithms to generate an index score for each brand. The index score itself is ok, but the real reason I use the tool is because it provides a quick answer about which channel online conversation is occuring in the most. For example, let’s say I wanted to know how much of the online conversation about Ford Motor Company is on blogs, versus the other channels (social networks, video sites, etc…). Vitrue provides this for you. All you need to do is supply the search term (brand name) and you get immediate results. This information is useful because it can get you started in the right direction. Then you can use other monitoring & analysis tools like Techrigy SM2 to take a deeper dive into the area of interest.

Vitrue provides a free and directionally correct answer to validate a theory or idea you may have for your brand/client’s brand. This is much quicker, not to mention cheaper, than paying for a commercial monitoring tool to get the same answer. To be clear, use the right tool for the job. Vitrue provides quick and dirty snapshots that can be used for research and/or some decision making, but be sure to use other tools if more detailed information is required to make a decision.