Can you describe a future in which you would voluntarily share your personal data online in exchange for truly relevant advertising?

Please go here to register and write a response on the ideas project or Tweet a response with #ideasproject.

Some Background

I’ve spent much of the last year thinking about online advertising and how it’s changing. There is a clear tension between giving consumers information when/where they want it and the need to reach large numbers of consumers. The first approach is in line with what I refer to as Marketing 2.0 and is focused on finding consumers where they self-organize to provide them with useful information that they pass along if they choose to. The latter approach is much more traditional and is focused on reaching as many consumers as possible.

Behavioral targeting sits somewhere between these two approaches and works by planting browser cookies that allow advertisers to follow consumers across the web in the interest of presenting them with more relevant information. Thus, if you have a cookie in your browser that has tracked you from a car website to a baby products site, you’d be likely to be shown an advertisement for a baby car-seat.

Behavioral targeting does improve ad performance but it’s not super effective because cookies capture everything we look at whether it’s related to work or play. And, if you’re not the only user of a computer they are even less effective. There’s also something sneaky about cookies that consumers don’t like. They are squirreled away in our browsers and the process is not fully transparent. On some level we know that there are companies buying and selling this data and we’re not getting any part of it.

By way of digging into this topic more deeply, I’ve included this short video from the Ideas Project by Andreas Weigend, former Chief Scientist for Amazon. He explains that advertisers have the potential to present consumers with highly relevant information based on access to consumers’ personal data. The challenge is that advertisers will have  to prove to consumers that they can return real value while respecting privacy. This is a huge obstacle because advertising as an industry has overwhelmed consumers with irrelevant and interruptive messages.

While behavioral targeting does offer  advertisers -and consumers- value, because it can help them present consumers with more relevant content, it is very limited as a methodology. Therefore, it’s unlikely that this approach will be effective at convincing consumers to voluntarily share their personal data in exchange for truly relevant content. Somehow advertisers need to convince consumer to share more/better personal data and then advertisers have to use this information respectfully/appropriately to return real value. Can you imagine how that might work?

Would it require a third party service where you tell advertisers the kinds of things you’re interested in? An improved “advertiser” setting area inside you Facebook account? Something that you set in your browser? Or, something else? I’d be thrilled to hear your ideas so please visit the Ideas Project and post them to the community or Tweet your response using hash tag #ideasproject.

For these reasons and others, I’ve been gravitating to making short videos that explain my ideas or the ideas of my clients. You may already be familiar with a video that I made to explain what I do. In this post, I’ll share two recent videos I made for Sprout and little information about how they came together. Here’s the first one:

Make an outline

The most recent video I made was for Sprout’s new HTML5 product offering. Due to some rather insane deadlines I was up against, this video came together in about a day and a half of solid work. I started the process by trying to write the story out point by point. I tend to write these stories as bullet points that fit together sequentially into an argument. Sometimes there are sub-bullets that get moved as I rearrange the narrative. On a high-level it’s very similar to an outline.

Say it out loud

From there I use Garage Band on my Mac tell the story conversationally based on the bullet points. It usually takes me 4-5 times through to get something that feels right. In genera, two minutes is about the longest I’ll try and go. Once I have the audio sample in that range, I bring my computer over to the white board.

Sketch to your voice

I like to put the audio recording on repeat while I start capturing ideas of how each frame might progress into the next. Outside the storyboard frames, I capture the visual elements of the story. In this case, I had a designer, a computer, mobile devices, an ad server, and software icons. I also brought in a call out box which is part of the style guide at Sprout. Here’s one of my storyboard sketches for the HTML5 video.

You should keep sketching until you can see the story unfold in your mind. You’ll notice little arrows at the bottom of some of the frames in my sketch, these indicate how the transitions will take place. I also use little call outs to capture other details.

Collect your assets

At this point you should know what you’ll need asset wise to tell your story. I recommend getting as many of your assets up front so that asset procurement won’t slow you down once your in the groove of building the video. This can involve some design time for the icons, elements, etc. Once you’ve got everything you need in place it’s time to get into the tool you’ll use to make the video.

Keynote

I’ve been using Keynote recently to build these videos. I’m not sure if this is the best tool but it was available, fast, and easy to use. The main problem with Keynote is that you have to start the animation from the beginning each time you want to check your timing. That’s annoying, but if you’re only working on a two minute video it shouldn’t be that bad. Alternatively, you could use a more powerful tool that has a broader feature set. If you’ve got one you like, I’d love to hear about it.

Once you’re in your tool, you’ll want to start by dropping in your sample audio so that you can get approximate timing for transitions. With a time-line in place, you’re ready to start building your presentation and bringing your story to life.

Output

Once you’re done building your first draft, I recommend showing it to a bunch of people to get feedback. I usually go through at least three iteration cycles before I have something solid. The final steps involve recording a clean copy of the audio and matching the timing on the transitions precisely to what you’ve built. Here’s the HTML5 video based on the above storyboard:

Thanks for reading and I hope this gets you inspired to make some videos of your own.

Granted, it had some issues that prevented me from fabricating another one out of duct tape, but it was clearly good enough to keep me from making something better until it literally fell apart. It’s amazing how durable duct tape is! One downside of the material is the fact that it can get a little sticky at the edges where the adhesive is exposed. It also tends to stretch out over time which wasn’t ideal. Ok, so on to the next generation!

Before fabricating something usable, I decided to make some prototypes out of paper to determine the best possible fabrication pattern. Now that I was going to use a sheet material (rather than strips) the parts would be quite different. I can up with four potential fabrication plans which put the seams in different places … and one that was made from a tube of fabric. Some required glued, or bonded, seams others did not. Ultimately, I settled on a minimal design that requires only six straight-line sewn edges, or six heat-bonded seams depending on the fabrication material.

The final design uses lass material, requires three pieces of material and includes several other improvements. These include:

1. better business card protection due to a slightly deeper pocket.
2. reduced lint/dirt contamination due to openings at the bottom of the pockets.
3. slimmer, due to less material used.
4. better edge protection for bills due to outside seam placement.
5. easier card access due to shortening of the inside pockets, fabric with less friction, and the removal of triangular cut outs.
6. more durable, due to synthetic fabric.

Now that I’ve got a super solid design that I’m happy with, I’m looking forward to moving away from the white material (which was helpful far marking) and fabricating samples in higher fidelity with the use of a heat cutter and sewing machine. For those interested in seeing some of the process I went through to get to this design, I’m including images of some of the earlier prototypes below.

Earlier Prototypes

When should we be thinking in terms of the final (manufactured) design and when should we be thinking in terms of the design that is required to test and get feedback on the concept? You see, we’re planning on doing a short run of the device (say 100 units) so we can do some testing and it doesn’t make sense to have them cast. Following this, we have to change some elements of the design to accommodate manufacture by other means.

Should we have two separate prototype paths? In reality, the details aren’t THAT different but it can be confusing because we haven’t been good as saying “with respect to the testing prototype, I think we should …” My gut tells me that we just need to add some structure to our process to resolve this issue for now. But, you do have to wonder how to balance your time and effort between the two prototypes.

Is it a marketing issue? Some of the details in question are purely aesthetic or at least partially aesthetic and it’s unclear how much weight to give them. Though clearly, that’s more of an issue with the manufacturing prototype. There’s also the issue of cost of goods sold and how our choices will effect that. Our designs have evolved quite a bit so we haven’t had the chance to speak with potential manufactures about the impact of our choices. My partner is an engineer, but still we don’t really have a sense of if we’re talking about dollars per unit or cents for some of our choices.

When should we think about cost? For me, and with regard to this device,  it boils down to the fact that no matter what we do our device will cost significantly less than other devices in the same category …. so I’m not really worried about cost too much at this point. Maybe that’s wrong, but it seems to me that we should come up with the “best” solution and try to control costs from there. I guess this stems from my belief that people are willing to pay for great products and that pricing is in large part irrational (refer to Predictably Irrational if you want more on why).

I welcome your thoughts!

I also want to put out a big thank you to our presenters and to San Francisco Social Media Week and the San Francisco Chapter of the American Marketing Association for their help getting the word out. And, thanks for Justin.tv who produced the live video feed which is archived below.

My presentation
Building Brands on Social Networks
Note: the video from the event did not start until part way though this preso, so we’ve added the audio to the slide deck on slideshare.

Alexandre Roche’s presentation
Dog Book: Lessons Learned from the Popular Facebook Application
Twitter: @alexroche
Facebook: facebook.com/alexandre

Deborah Schultz’s presentation
It’s the People Stupid

http://www.slideshare.net/debs/its-the-people-stupid-1431852

Twitter: @debs
Website: www.deborahschultz.com

Kaz Brecher’s presentation
Rock The Space Toyota/MySpace from the Schematic Perspective

Archived video from the event at Justin.tv

Jeremiah’s web strategist blog is definitely worth checking out if you find this tool helpful. Here’s a link to his post The Three Spheres of Web Strategy in which he defines what each of the areas signify.

I find this tool most helpful as a validation tool that sits at the end of other strategy practices.

As marketers look for the best ways to build brands on social networks they’ve experimented with a wide range of strategies from friending campaigns to network ad buys, but what efforts are most effective? A recent study by MarketingProfs shows that branded applications top the chart, but are under utilized, with less than a quarter of all respondents having created one. At Sprout, we know from first hand experience that applications are at the heart of the most successful campaigns.

eMarket’s article What’s Working for Social Media Marketers? sums up the research well and identifies branded applications as a rich opportunity area. At Sprout, however, we also understand that getting the most out of a branded applications requires an integrated approach to your overall Facebook experience with fan pages, viral content, and sharing opportunities.

As brands move away from traditional marketing strategies, campaigns are becoming increasingly iterative and conversational in nature, with consumers participating through content generation and sharing. In general, consumers have greater expectations around engagement with brands where they socialize online. At Sprout we work with brands to drive engagement opportunities a key points in the cycle (click to enlarge):

Attract
The first stage of the engagement cycle is focused on attracting consumers. For brands that are establishing a presence on social networks, this often means relying on display ads that sit inside and outside of the social networking platform. Sprout helps brands with engaging interactive display ad solutions that include Twitter feeds, RSS feeds, polls and more. Of course, we can make these ads shareable as well to support viral spread.

Identify
The next step is to get fans to engage with your brand on the social networking platform by identifying themselves as fans. We create engaging fan page solutions that are social, interactive, and rich. Our fan pages include viral hooks and incentives to encourage fans to share your page with their friends and drive new fan acquisition.

Engage
With a fan page in place to serve as the foundation for managing relationships, it’s possible to place rich interactive messages into the stream with our Sprout Publisher tools. For example, some of our clients use this to send out weekly coupons, music releases, or polls. It’s even possible to create applications that are shareable within the news feed, so that your fans can engage and share without leaving their page.

In stream messaging is one tool to drive the initial engagement with branded applications that can include games, quizzes, polls and more. Brands that are still building momentum online may also use ad placements to drive application use. For those brands that have built an extensive fan base, they do not need to rely on ad buys because their fan base is large enough to drive the viral spread of the application experience.

Measure
Throughout all the points in the engagement cycle Sprout provides performance metrics to measure the success of ads, fan pages, and applications. Our technology platform allows us to modify all of the above in real time so we can optimize campaign performance based on real time data and take advantage of time sensitive opportunities.

With this cycle in mind, we agree with eMarketer that apps are at the core of successful brand building on social networks, but that in order to take full advantage of their value they must be incorporated into the larger engagement cycle. We believe that this understanding was part of the reason that we were selected to be a Preferred Facebook Developer.

Thanks for reading and we’d love to hear about your experience using applications as part of an integrated strategy.

Today it’s fun working with small and medium sized businesses, because there are many inexpensive tools available that can be used to make a significant impact. In this post, I’ll share some of the work we did together and how it impacted Mehrdad’s business, Carrott Cloud Backup & Recovery.

INTRO

Carrott was started back in 1994 as an off-site data protection and information storage service for Silicon Valley ventures. Since them, they have explored a variety of opportunities around that industry space including backup recovery, virtualization, data-security consulting and more. In the meantime, the industry itself has evolved, segmented, and grown. In order for Carrott to be competitive moving forward it was clear that they needed to reposition themselves relative to their competitors before starting the process of building an refreshed website.

THE CHALLENGE

Right from the start Mehrdad was clear that he had limited resources to dedicate to this project, so he was looking for a highly efficient and pragmatic approach. He knew that repositioning was going to be important because he’d been watching new competitors spring up in a variety of niches around his business. He also knew that his website needed to include some social hooks to feel contemporary. And finally, he understood that findability online was very important and wanted to make sure that whatever solution we came up with would include an SEM plan.

THE WORK

As with many small and medium sized businesses, Mehrdad had an ambitious set of goals but limited resources. Fortunately, one thing that Mehrdad also had was a deep understanding of the competitive landscape and lots of information that he’d been collecting in advance of the project. It’s a great experience to work with a client who’s able to hand over a bunch of research before you even start.

With his research in hand we started a three day sprint that included  additional competitive landscape research, a positioning exercise, and an elevator pitch exercise. We quickly identified the key market segments and found that Carrott was straddling several niches without coming across as best in class at any of them. Nor was Carrot positioned as a full-service enterprise solution that could afford to back up a truly comprehensive service offering. Part of what we also realized was that Carrott’s messaging needed to be updated to reflect and anticipate new industry terminology.

By working closely with Mehrdad, it quickly became clear that Carrott’s real unique value proposition lay withing the backup and recovery space. Though Carrott had been providing “cloud” solutions before it’s competitors it was not positioning as such. Further, there were few brands trying to own the term “cloud backup and recovery” which was the perfect fit for Carrott. At this point in the project things really started to gel.

To solidify the new positioning, unique value propositions, and messaging we jumped into an information architecture exercise to organize the content of a new site. At the same time, we started thinking about our SEM plan and how a blog might fit into the new site, what kinds of content categories might we offer? How could we use Twitter? What other online channels should we investigate, and how should we manage the social media mix? There was also some planning involved at this point because Mehrdad needed to know what kinds of ongoing costs would be associated with maintaining a blog, AdWords program, or other programs.

Once we plowed through those questions, we were ready to take on the final phase of the project which was wire-framing. I’ve taken many different approaches to wire-framing from rough hand sketches to high-fidelity illustrator decks. In this case, Mehrdad was most comfortable working with PowerPoint, so we developed the wire-frame with that software. It was a first for me, but it ended up working really well. Though the site was mocked up with boxes and lines, it was able to contain interactive links and call-outs which gave Mehrdad what he needed to approve the design.

KEY DECISIONS

There are many turning points and hard choices in any project like this one, here are a few choices of note:

The Platform

Because Mehrdad doesn’t have a huge staff to manage a website, he knew he wanted something that would be easy to use when updating content and easy to keep maintained. After many such projects, I didn’t have to do any research here because I knew that WordPress was the perfect fit. With a large portfolio of third-party plug-ins we had everything from Google Analytics, to Feedburner and Twitter integrated quickly.

We also wanted to make it easy for Carrott to throw up landing pages as needed for their SEM campaigns, events, or other sales initiatives. With WordPress we created templates that make this a snap.

The Home Page

Part of Carrott’s positioning is around high-touch customer service, so we put the contact number right up top. We wanted customers to know that there were real people behind the scenes ready to answer questions and recover their data if necessary. In addition, we wanted to make it super easy and fast to get a quote, so we put a contact form prominently on the home page. We located it just to the right of an animated content frame so we could drive people’s eyes to the contact form as the animation resolved.

The animation frame itself will allow Mehrdad to quickly update the main interactive content of the site as needed. And, below this frame there are three content wells, two of which surface dynamic content. The first highlights the most recent testimonials about his service and links to related case studies. The second surfaces the latest entries from his blog Carrott Talk. In the center well, visitors can find the top ten reasons to choose Carrott.

The Blog

The Carrot Talk blog is an important area of the site because it is designed to be the most active area. We can up with a category scheme that would support the two live content wells on the home page as well as case studies and SEM results. Two key categories are “Jargon Watch” and “Myths Unveiled” that serve to educate anyone looking for the straight story about cloud storage. We also set up a Twitter micro-blog that Mehrdad can use to share links to all the ongoing research he does about the industry.

The Name

Carrott used to be “Carrot Technologies” but with the repositioning we decided to change the name to “Carrott” and drop the word “technologies” in favor of “cloud backup and recovery”. One benefit of this is that people trying to find the site would be more likely to use the domain name that Mehrdad uses for the company, www.carrott.com.

THE RESULTS

Taking a quick look at the old homepage there is a cluttered visual design with both a horizontal and vertical navigation scheme that isa  confusing starting point. The main content area shows a mother and child in front of a computer, but it’s unclear how this relates to the service offering which is positioned as “communication networks.” The logo breaks the rigid visual grid of the page which makes the whole experience feel of balance. Finally, there isn’t anything that feels fresh on the page, no immediate way to get in touch and no clear call to action.

The new Carrott site opens with an animation that shares key positioning points, selling points, and a call to action. From there, visitors can immediately get in touch and indicate what they’re looking for via the input form on the right. The content wells at the bottom of the page contain dynamic content and make the experience feel more engaging. The clean overall design is balanced and light rather than rigid and static.

Finally, the site is fully plugged into Google Analytics so Mehrdad can track how the site performs moving forward. That said, the site itself is really a foundation to support his ongoing efforts to deliver value to his customers and provide them with tools to help spread the word about his service. I’ll write an update to this post when Mehrdad has data to share about his success publishing shareable content through his blog and setting up landing pages for a e-mail campaign or AdWords Campaign. In the meantime, check out his site to learn more.

Oxygen Mask Situations

In the past, I’ve written about how strategy is more about saying “no” than saying “yes”, but it’s rarely easy to explain the complex of reasons that underlie strategic decisions without reviewing the entire process. Richard Jalichandra, who was a participant in the NPR Digital Think In, manages to do so elegantly in his Venture Beat post entitled, Big changes coming at Technorati — the CEO’s perspective. In this article, he writes:

As a start-up with limited resources, we continually have to make difficult decisions about where to focus our efforts for the best return.  It’s like the oxygen mask the flight attendant tells you to put on before helping the person next to you: you can’t help anyone if you pass out first.

I think this metaphor is one of the  simplest I’ve heard for reducing a potentially complex strategic decision into a tangible and emotional experience that almost anyone can relate to.

Scale Boundaries

This topic has been written about at length, but I don’t see organizations thinking enough about where scaling boundaries will impact their business. In general, people in business are thinking about how to scale operations but they’re not necessarily focused on exploring the points are which things break due to scale. This is unfortunate because I think some of the most valuable insights come from understanding where these points are and why they’re there. For example, a certain kind of design firm might find that productivity goes up when they go from 5 to 15 people teams and then it drops off as you exceed 25. If this was the case, they might find ways of breaking projects up into parts that can be run by 10-15 person teams. Of course, you’d also want to ask how many of such teams can work together in a single location? And, what’s happening behaviorally that causing the performance barriers. Etc, etc. The point is that it’s often quickest to focus on where you know scale will break the system when trying to pull apart such problems.

Shark Teams

Different kinds of teams need different stimuli to be productive, this year I ran into Shark Teams. These teams die if they stop moving. Obviously, I’m being literal here, but as a management principle these teams get in trouble if they’re not engaged. This is not to say that they don’t take vacations, or that they always work at the same pace, but they do best with a steady stream of workflow. One could also call these “heart teams” because once they stop they’re pretty hard to get going again. And, the harder they work the more fuel they give themselves.

Management Hypocrisy

“Do unto others as you would have done onto you” doesn’t seem to apply when it comes to management, though not as one you might expect. In my experience, People expect to be managed differently than they expect to manage people below them. Namely, the expectation seems to be less. In other words, people seem to feel more responsibility for managing those below them than they feel expectation for guidance from those above them. As this is based on entirely anecdotal evidence. I’d be interested to know if other people see this.

Don’t Unmotivate People

I believe I originally came across this idea in Jim Collin’s book Good To Great, The basic idea here is that it’s not management’s job to motivate workers, rather it’s management’s job is to remove things that unmotivate them. People are inherently motivated but get unmotivated by a variety of obstacles that they find in their paths. Remove those barriers and you’ve got a big part of management done.

A Sense Of Urgency

When most people think of “stress” it conjures up some painful memories or feelings, but stress isn’t always a bad thing. Most people are not familiar with the concept of eustress but it’s the opposite of distress. That is, eustress is a positive form of stress that actually increases our performance rather than decreasing it. Deadlines can actually be eustress for some people, for example, runners tend to convert the competitive stress of a race into increased performance. It’s possible to do this at work as well. Differentiating these kinds of stress, and monitoring which is being felt, can help teams align their relative stress levels and balance each other effectively.

While the destination-oriented approach to serving ad units has not gone away completely, it has been eroded by the rise of search. Search allows people to view ads through search engine results pages. These ads offer better relevance because they are targeted based on search keywords (intent). In addition, new ad serving technologies have been developed to serve ads with greater relevance based on page content (contextual targeting) and browsing history (behavioral targeting). If you’re interested in learning more about ad targeting, read my post about how online display ads are served.

Today, companies like Sprout are finding ways to improve relevance even more through social targeting. Social targeting will become more prominent as online display advertising evolves away from traditional ad units and towards interactive brand experiences. Social targeting is currently possible within social networks and other online communities where profile data can be incorporated into the targeting schema. The big change, however, is that socially targeted brand experiences can increasingly be shared from one individual to another rather than through ad networks. For this to happen, these brand experiences must become more interactive and engaging while finding ways to deliver value. If successful, this benefits both brands and consumers because brand experiences are much more quantifiable (in terms of interaction), targetable, social, relevant, and engaging.

For example, Sprout created a campaign for Intel called Fan Plan, which is running on Facebook through Cyber Monday (November 30th, 2009). It encourages fans to share the campaign with their friends in exchange for a significant product discount.

The more friends that join Intel’s fan page, the greater the discount. Thus, it’s in all the fans’ interest to share the campaign as broadly as possible if they’re looking to purchase a laptop.

This is a good example of an in-network brand experience where profile data is accessed (friend networks) to make sharing possible. Of course, social data is also used to target interactive ad placements as well. The examples of Facebook ads shown on the right include polls, poll results, and information about friends in the viewer’s network who are fans of the Fan Plan. By combining an engaging brand experience with awareness oriented ad placements, this campaign has driven more than 3,800 news fans to join Intel’s fan page is the first two days alone.

One of the benefits of establishing fan relationships is that Intel can rely more on the viral spread of brand experiences and less on ad placements. Because Intel is starting from scratch with this campaign, they require an ad placement to get the campaign going. However, in the future they’ll be able to use their existing fans to a greater extent.

This is a re-post of an article that was originally posted on Sproutinc.com