I recently came across an interesting post on Springwise.com titled “Portals for brand conversations, led by brands“.  Launched by Seth Godin, Brands in Public is a new site that aggregates all those diverse conversations on the web and presents them through a unified public-facing dashboard that gives any brand the chance to lead the discussion….for a price ($400/month). 

At first this seemed like an interesting idea to me.  However, when you look beyond the “Seth Godin Hype Machine” and actually spend some time looking at the brand dashboards, there is nothing that exists that brands could not easily execute themselves on their own domains (where I believe the conversation really needs to take place).

The site is powered by Squidoo, and brand pages are nothing more than a collection of  feeds that are pulled from Twitter, Google News, Google Trends,  Google Blog Search,  Yahoo! News, Quantcast, and Bzzscapes.  There is some embedded functionality like threaded conversations and twitter sentiment analysis. Each brand page also has embedded feeds from the brands own blogs.

So my question….why here?   I just can’t get past the reason why a brand would spend $400/month to post messages here as opposed to engaging in the conversation via their branded web assets or directly where the conversation is taking place.   What do you think?

While this is smart technology, it caused some difficulties for agencies that wanted to confirm their ads were running correctly.

Luckily, last week Bing introduced an Ad Preview Tool. It is available within the adCenter UI and complete instructions are available at the adCenter blog. The tool still requires some updates, as it does not currently support geo-targeting. The ads are also currently not clickable, and only available to users signed into the accounts within adCenter.

Google has an Ad Preview Tool, which has been out for a while and does include geo-targeting capabilities. It is also available to anyone, even outside of an account.

Based on the adCenter blog, it sounds like they are continuing to enhance the tool to include geo-targeting. This is a great example of search engines incorporating advertiser feedback, and we look forward to seeing refinements in future editions.

Boston, Mass. and Reno, Nev. (Sept. 14, 2009) – One to One Interactive (OTO), a Boston-based digital marketing firm recently ranked by Inc. Magazine as one of the fastest growing private companies in America, announced today a definitive agreement to merge Twelve Horses, with operations in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Reno-Tahoe, Nevada, into its OTOi and OTOlabs divisions.

The merger expands One to One Interactive’s comprehensive suite of digital marketing services, technology and media offerings by incorporating Twelve Horses’ agency practice and innovative marketing products.

The move represents the fourth time OTO has grown through a merger or acquisition, a strategy the company embarked on beginning in 2005. The addition of Twelve Horses gives OTO a significant presence in the West and Twelve Horses’ many East Coast based clients will welcome the OTO East Coast footprint. Both OTO and Twelve Horses service accounts in Europe and Asia. Twelve Horses, frequently recognized for its innovative work in the travel-tourism industry, also services such global clients as J.P. Morgan Chase, Deloitte and Bill Me Later, a PayPal company.

The western-based Twelve Horses will integrate its trademarked and patented technology platforms, including MessageMaker™, which delivers multi-channel direct digital communications to customers via email, web, mobile, voice and fax messaging, into current One to One Interactive offerings. As a result, OTO clients, which currently include Comcast, Rite-Aid, McGraw-Hill and Partners Healthcare, will be able to leverage the company’s expanded portfolio of services and tools in executing their one-to-one digital marketing strategies.

“Our merger with Twelve Horses enhances and extends OTO into the type of unique firm brands seek in today’s digital marketing landscape, one that can come to the table with leading marketing services strategy and execution capabilities as well as a full suite of proven technology products to integrate and deploy quickly and efficiently,” said Ian Karnell, chief executive officer of One to One Interactive. “By leveraging the platform capabilities and innovative intellectual property we’ve acquired through our expansion efforts, our clients can expect greater efficiency in strategy execution and in speed to market, which is essential for remaining at the forefront of the marketing evolution.”

With its newly expanded product and service lines, nearly 30 percent of revenues will be driven from the firm’s unique portfolio of permission based digital messaging  technologies, which include multi-channel messaging platforms for email and mobile marketing, content management systems, ticketing and event management, desktop widgets and plug-ins for improved workflow. A large portion of the remaining revenue stream will continue to be generated from services such as branding, web site development, customer relationship management, search engine marketing and social web strategies.

“At a time where every marketing services firm is being asked to bring more to the table, our clients benefit from this merger by having immediate access to a broader organization with incredible experience and depth in quality, customizable technology products and solutions,” explained Twelve Horses CEO David LaPlante, who will serve as OTO’s Senior Vice-President of Sales & Marketing. “Our newly combined company significantly enhances our ability to accommodate our client’s broad and often unique set of marketing services and technology dependent requests, as opposed to simply providing a one-size fits-all-solution.”

The merger is designed to accelerate growth and innovation, including a new management structure to help achieve that vision. One to One Interactive Chief Executive Officer Ian Karnell and President Jeremi Karnell will remain in their roles, while Twelve Horses executives Steve Spencer and Martin Gastanaga will serve as senior executives for its OTOlabs division. The company will remain headquartered in Charlestown, Mass., with additional offices in Baltimore, Reno-Tahoe, Salt Lake City and London.

About One to One Interactive
Complete One-To-One Solutions for Brands, Agencies, and Publishers

Established in 1997, One to One Interactive is the first enterprise to assemble a complete solution for brands, agencies, and publishers executing one-to-one marketing strategies. By bringing together one of the nation’s leading digital marketing agencies, the worlds most comprehensive portfolio of permission marketing platforms, performance marketing solutions, and cutting edge neuromarketing research techniques, the companies of One to One Interactive build informed and creative customer/constituent strategies on the belief that digital media’s ability to enable engaging one-to-one dialogues is the future of marketing.

One to One Interactive has recently been ranked by Inc. Magazine as one of the fastest growing private companies in America, one of the Top Interactive firms in the United States according to B2B Magazine, and one of the world’s 20 hottest independent digital marketing firms by Ad Age.

Please visit one of One to One Interactive’s web sites for more information:

    * One to One Interactive: www.onetooneinteractive.com

    * OTOi: www.otoi.com

    * OTOlabs: www.otolabs.com

    * OTOnetworks: www.otonetworks.com

    * OTOinsights: www.otoinsights.com

About Twelve Horses
Twelve Horses has historically been a global provider of Web site design and development, multi-channel marketing, business process automation, customer relationship management (CRM), search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Operating as an online brand marketing and messaging technology agency, Twelve Horses assisted businesses in translating and transforming their brands online.

Twelve Horses provides One to One Interactive with operations in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Reno-Tahoe, Nevada.

Twelve Horses has been recognized for being a “Top 30 Innovative Company” by Utah Business, and “Technology Company of the Year” by the Technology Business Alliance of Nevada.

Please visit Twelve Horses web site for more information: www.twelvehorses.com

For more information call 1-617-425-7369 or visit www.onetooneinteractive.com

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So it is official, our once beloved Yahoo! has cried uncle and submitted to the looming M&A noogie we have faithfully followed for the past few months.  It is truly a day of reflection for those of us who have been around long enough to remember setting GoToast to ‘Jam’ competitors through Bid Rules created specifically for Overture.  Ah, those were the days – when budget size meant more than quality.  We will miss you a lot and I will cherish my piles of purple swag and keep it in my garage to visit at times when I grow weary of my blossoming Google relationship.

So what does this mean to advertisers with insatiable appetites for search clicks? Well, here are the questions I can answer now:

1. Who is zoomin’ who?

Microsoft Bing will replace the Yahoo! Search technology for both PPC and Organic (Natural) Search results. Yahoo! will now be the sales force across both properties.

2. What advertising platform will we be using?

The AdCenter platform will become the core platform for paid search campaign management. This should all be complete within the next 18 months (pending regulatory approval of course). So expect minimal changes to the Yahoo! Advertising platform, while we can be sure MSN will be adding in significant enhancements.

3. Is this also the demise of Paid Inclusion (SSP)?

Unfortunately, there is no information on this currently.  But we do know that no changes will occur until Q2 2010 so you can count on it being around at least through the Q4 shopping season.  My take is that this is a huge revenue opportunity for Bing/Yahoo! and they will likely find a place for it. We will just have to see.

4. When will this all happen?

The plan is for regulatory approval in early 2010 with no changes until this occurs.  Following approval, Yahoo! will begin to display Bing results through organic search within 3 – 6 months, while Paid Search is expected within 12 (United States).  The complete Global roll-out may take up to 24 months.

How this impacts the advertising landscape remains to be seen, but despite the world view that less competition equals less innovation – I do not expect Google to rest on its heels and let things fall where they may, that is just not how they work.

For more information on this deal:

* It’s Finally Official, Microsoft & Yahoo Make A Deal, Yahoo Gives Up On Search
* MicroHoo Seals the Deal Everyone Expected

Social media is a broadly used term that includes a wide range of techniques and tools for leveraging and supporting the sharing of information among people. Internet enabled tools are the locus for social media activity as they provide low-cost access to many people allowing for a new wave of targeted advertising to develop. As social media continues to grow at a near exponential rate, marketers and researchers alike are becoming increasingly interested in the practices of the users who help shape the content at highly participatory social media sites. Digg.com is an exemplar site for user participation in social media and is the focus of this report. Understanding the behavior of Digg.com users will help marketers to better represent and promote their material on Digg.com as well as provide insights into the practices of social media users in general.

In this report, we present an analysis of user engagement with social media via Digg.com. Viewer engagement was measured with OTOinsight’s Quantemo™ neuro-marketing research system. Quantemo™ utilizes a multi-modal approach that combines self-report, physiological and neurological data to holistically and reliably measure user engagement with digital media. Analyzing the results from the Quantemo™ sources, we present a set of four insights concerning how users engage with social media and how the cues in social media systems positively inform user behavior.

Our research uncovered four significant insights:

1. Users Seek Tailored News Experience and Not “Mass Media” Stories
2. Story Headlines Are the Chief Determinant of Digg Behavior
3. Short, Direct, and Branded Headlines Dominate Digg.com
4. Positive Engagement Scores Associated with Desirable Digg Behavior

Many colleagues ask “Should my company be using Twitter?”  Last week, Marketing Profs published survey results showing that 41% of professionals using Twitter today think it can provide real value to their businesses.   The respondents, mostly small business employees, rated Twitter’s value lower than corporate blogs (52%) but higher than LinkedIn (25%) and Facebook (17%).  You can see the study here:

http://tinyurl.com/marketingprofsstudy

While surveys are great, examples of successful business use of Twitter seem to be popping up more and more frequently.  The short, immediate nature of the platform lends itself well to building ongoing relationships with customers, without requiring a major investment.  Communications can take the form of promotions, customer service, news updates, time-based offer alerts and more.  Check out how some major corporations like Southwest Airlines and the NBA have integrated Twitter into their marketing and support efforts:

http://adage.com/digitalalist09/article.php?article_id=135576

 And how some small businesses are tweeting to drive revenue with local audiences:

http://adage.com/digitalalist09/article.php?article_id=135576

Today, most online campaigns are evaluated by calculating metrics such as media cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and return on advertising spend (ROAS) at the tactic, placement or keyword level based on a single click that drives a desired outcome.  However, this method used by some analysts and many campaign tracking tools disregards the user experience and multiple touchpoints involved in achieving the actual conversion. 

For example, prospect #1 sees a display ad for an online retailer on ESPN but does not click.  The next day, she hears a radio ad and decides to search for a new laptop online.  She clicks on a natural search ad and spends some time on a manufacturer’s website researching the product features.  Two days later, she searches a shopping site to read customer reviews and asks for feedback on her decision on her blog.  Then, having finally decided, she searches on Google for the name of the online retailer, clicks on a paid search ad, goes to the site and purchases the product.  Which channel gets the “credit” for the acquisition?  Is it the original display ad, the radio ad, the ratings site, the final search click?  Could that channel have produced the same result on its own?   

There are a number of ways to gauge the impact of multiple channels.  One approach is to conduct a cross-channel study, looking at lifts associated with brand messaging and purchase activity per individual channel and then in combination.  This research includes analyses of both online and offline media to provide a more integrated picture of advertising effectiveness.  When completed, results will show changes in key metrics tied to specific channels and offer insights such as “prospects exposed to a magazine ad and an online display ad were more likely to purchase than those who were exposed to a TV commercial and a search ad.” 

 Another method that is becoming more of a standard, particularly in the digital space, is attribution analysis (sometimes called “engagement mapping”).  In this study, analysts look at the path to conversion for a particular customer or segment and attribute partial credit to all of the touchpoints that led to the desired action, reflecting the fact that each played an integral role in the eventual outcome.  While the credit can be assigned evenly, the ideal scenario is to identify those interactions that consistently lead to a conversion and weight their contribution more heavily.  So in the situation above, the ESPN display ad and the paid search listing may prove to be the most influential in driving success.  Therefore, these tactics will be allocated more credit, affecting their CPA and ROAS values in a positive manner.  The result of this analysis is a more accurate representation of ROI for each of the media channels and a better understanding of critical elements for future campaigns.    

To read more about attribution analysis, check out: 

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=99693 

A very informative Marketing Sherpa case study on a B2B sales agent desktop application OTOlabs developed for Oppenheimer Funds.

SUMMARY: Ever have trouble determining whether a sales team was using the marketing collateral and other sales enablement materials you’ve created for them?

Read how a mutual funds company reinvented the way they delivered sales support and business development content to its team of independent financial advisors. They scrapped their outdated practice of mailing CD-ROMs of important documents in exchange for a desktop application that provided an interactive channel for important documents, sales support materials, and ongoing training. Savings topped 80%, and they can see which types of content are most popular with advisors.

One to One Interactive’s OTOinsights research division is happy to announce its latest research white paper titled “Implications of User Engagement with Search Result Pages“. 

It is well established that rankings on a Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) have much to do with whether a user is likely to click on a given result and higher rankings can actually have a positive effect on a brand’s perception and ‘likeability’ (MarketingSherpa, 2009). With the onset of Universal Search, this study sought to measure the user impact of this new generation of search engine result pages that include multimedia elements such as images and videos.  Specifically, we wanted to understand if there was a difference in emotional engagement with the results and if that would impact click propensity in Paid and Natural Search.  The study compared user engagement with Universal search results vs. traditional text-only results by recording the users’ eye tracking, physiological & emotional reactions, and click tracking behavior. 

Our research uncovered two significant insights.

Insight 1:

SERPs which include Universal Search results reinforce eyeballs to stay focused on the first page’s top paid and natural search results

Implications:

• The advent of Universal Search demands that companies optimize not only their text, but also their media (images, videos, etc)
• Image and video results may anchor users to stay at the top of the SERP
• Images and videos will begin to impact what users will click on first in a SERP

Insight 2:

The inclusion of Universal Search results increase emotional engagement during interactions with a SERP

Implications:

• Users will get an ‘instant gratification’ from images – perhaps more so from branded images
• Higher engagement with Universal results may stop users from exploring the rest of the SERP

OTOinsight’s “Implications of User Engagement with Search Result Pages” white paper is free and available to download here. 

Below is a PowerPoint presentation of the research findings that Dan Berlin and I shared earlier this week at the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) Boston’s Annual Conference at Bentley University.

We welcome your comments, feedback, and suggestions.

Today Microsoft announced the launch of Bing, the new name for its search engine. The engine is being rolled out starting today with the goal of being fully deployed on June 3rd.

With this launch, Microsoft is moving towards semantic search and what they are calling a “Decision Engine.” The idea is to answer the user’s question directly in the search engine, rather than provide a list of links and make the user do the work to disseminate the information. Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) stated, “When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the web. Bing is an important first step…[to] enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions.”

The plan is to start to build a better experience than what Google provides specifically in the areas of travel, health and local business. The results for “hotel in Boston” will return a list of the hotels available, along with ratings, pricing and pictures. Another example is a search for a UPS tracking number directly in the engine and it will respond with the status, instead of clicking through to UPS.com.

They will also re-brand 3 of their current products into Bing Maps (previously Virtual Earth), Bing Travel (built from an acquisition of Farecast) and Bing Shopping (an expanded version of Cashback).

Look for a large marketing push out of JWT to launch June 3rd, according to Ad Age. The campaign is expected to be $80-100 million fully integrated across tv, radio and online.

Previously, this new engine had been code named “Kumo” and a few screenshots had been leaked into the media.

Check out the video Microsoft released that shows some sample queries and helps explain the concept.

Implications for Marketers

Be prepared for the potential of increased traffic from Microsoft while there is news coverage. You may want to increase any caps within Microsoft to capture the increased traffic, but also pay close attention to conversion rates. There is a strong likelihood of new searchers who may just be browsing to test the new engine.