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.

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.

Realtime Social Search and Web Search Converge

People are speculating about whether or not Twitter, and more specifically their realtime search engine, is a legitimate Google Killer. Will Google acquire Twitter? Will Google begin indexing tweets, social network conversations and release their own realtime search? No one knows for certain, but the day is approaching where realtime social search and general web search converge into a single user experience. This marriage may be contentious for businesses, but it’s heavenly for individuals.

Right now, it’s a less than perfect exercise to dive deep into a topic through web searches and social searches. You need to use several different tools, that scan many different sources of content, information and people to ultimately find all the answers you’re looking for.

Web Search using any of the big engines (Google, Yahoo, etc…) can reveal a lot about a topic; what something is, how something works, but it can’t tell you who is talking about it right NOW. Social search engines like Twitter, SocialMention, or SamePoint excel for this very reason. Realtime Social Search is immensely more helpful after I’ve learned about a particular topic because it can put me directly in touch with other people and/or businesses that are interested in and currently talking about the same thing(s) as I am. This allows me to dive deeper into interactions with others that will provide insights based on their experiences and tacit knowledge that web searches just can’t deliver.

To get a glimpse of what I’m describing, let’s take a look at one of the innovations already out in the wild that allows us to experience one stop shopping when it comes to search. This greasemonkey script developed by Mark Carey provides the type of integrated search experience that I want. It’s bascially a mashup that gives you results from Google’s index, along with results from realtime Twitter search, in a manner comfortable to the user. There is significantly more value in being able to see the resources and people relevant to the topic of interest.

This formula is a dramatic improvement for consumers and professionals. We get relevant information in the desired context, and can identify real people to follow up for more detailed interactions. As an individual, I hope a Twitter acquistion happens sooner rather than later, because we’ll be that much closer to integration like this, and it will change how you utilize Google, for the better.