Facebook

The balance between privacy and personalisation has always been a delicate one. When you visit a web site, you want to see things that are relevant to you. However, the methods used to allow this are often controversial or ineffective. On one side sites can allow users to customise their experience by personalising the home page or choosing types of content. On the other side, behavioural profiling can be used to push relevant content.

Each approach has its benefits and its drawbacks. At the end of the day very few people can actually be bothered to personalise a web site, unless they use it extremely frequently. And if they do personalise the contents, they may miss out on other tangential topics. Behavioural profiling relies on tracking an increasing number of interactions that the user has with the site or sites, and as such is controversial.

Behavioural targeting is in use by a number of Ad networks, where behaviour on content specific web sites, determines the type of adverts that a person will see when they visit content generic web sites. There are numerous technical challenges with this, but privacy tends to be the focus. The idea that website ‘B’ know what I did on website ‘A’ can be a bit off putting for many users, particularly if they don’t receive any benefit.

Over the last 12 months, facebook has been in the press regularly for their deployment of behaviourally targeted ads. There has been a significant end user backlash against the monetisation of the social web site, with many against the idea of targeted adverts. But in June of this year facebook has turned the model on its head by allowing users to vote on the adverts that were displayed (link to story). In my opinion this is the first example of a more general trend in online advertising. The ability to vote on ads instantly changes the simple concept of display advertising to a far more semantic engagement. Even if a visitor votes negatively, their engagement with the advert has significantly increased. This increased engagement requires additional thought and will therefore improve awareness and more importantly retention. As the old adage states “all news is good news”.

In addition, eye tracking studies conducted by behavioural targeting company Tacoda have shown that behavioural targeted adverts result in 17% more engagement when compared to contextual targeting (adverts based on the contents of the page). Further more, it was found that following the first exposure the advantage increased to 54%. This was supported by an experiment conducted on the FT.com website, where they found 193% lift in awareness and 178% lift in recall for behavioural targeted adverts when compared to simple run-of-site adverts.

However, it is vital that the relationship is transparent and built on trust. The customer must remain in control or else the company risks alienating the customer. Behavioural profiling companies, such as Phorm and NebuAd have suffered significantly in the press following concerns over public acceptance. NeuAd’s CEO has recently stepped down, with the company looking at alternative strategies. Phorm has seen a significant drop in its share price, and its trials with BT remain extremely controversial as the behavioural profiling is at the ISP level without any customer control.

The technology now exists to allow highly targeted forms of marketing. Companies can effectively merge their marketing and communication strategies, allowing them to selectively contact people about products they might actually be interested in, rather than forcing marketing to everyone via broadcast techniques.

It is clear that behavioural targeting can be extremely successful if deployed correctly. It can be beneficial to both sides: the consumer is exposed to adverts or products that will likely be of interest to them; and the company improves the return on its marketing investment by targeting people that are more likely to respond.

The key to success lies in trust. The consumer is king and their experience is vital. In the current economic climate retention of valuable customer is important, and in the fickle world of the web experience is everything.

By Billie Andersen

The title of this article does not relate to new privacy measures introduced to protect Facebook users. Instead, since this incredibly popular community’s new look appeared a few weeks ago, Facebook has changed into something a lot more complicated and unusable. Read more…

By Mark Gristock

The Daily Telegraph (a UK broadsheet newspaper) reported a story on 16 June 2008 regarding a High Court ruling that required an ex-employee of Hays to hand over business contacts built up on the social networking website LinkedIn.

The story has since been picked up in various publications including Brand Republic and Computer Weekly but none raise the obvious, more expansive question of what the repercussions of this ruling might be for the rest of us? Computer Weekly does make reference to a legal specialist that advises employers to add clauses to employment contracts and to ask employees to set up business-only networks, but I think this misses the point.

Social networks are just that – social. The dictionary definition of ’social’ is: “living or preferring to live in a community rather than alone”. These networks don’t have boundaries and certainly don’t separate colleagues from friends. In many ways if they did, it would defeat their object. For many, however, this level of transparency is unnerving.

I had lunch with a customer recently who talked about her younger sister connecting with her on Facebook. I have a similar scenario where I am connected to my niece and nephew. They have very different interests and circles of friends to me, being as they are, about 25 years younger. But what is my alternative? Deny their existence? Compartmentalise them?

Only five days earlier (11 June) Times Online ran a feature that advised people to keep their social and business networks separate. This is an interesting idea and there were various suggestions made by different people – all in recruitment (or ‘talent management’ if there is a difference). One suggested he used a nickname on Facebook that only his friends know, and then used LinkedIn for business contacts only. I don’t see how this can work. There have to be crossovers. Otherwise, what happens when you conduct business with family members or if your business contacts are among your best friends?

The article concluded with a suggestion that soon software will simply track you down by making connections between you, friends and colleagues, then bingo – your profiles are connected for all to see.

What this really means is we have to get ready for a time when virtually everything we post online will be attributable to us. Potential employers will be able to see our connections with dodgy friends and family members and start judging us across a wider set of values. Is this good or bad? I am certain there will be losers as there always are, but I think this is akin to businesses getting used to corporate blogs – which of course many have yet to do.

There are countless examples of businesses gaining stronger brands as a result of honest information about them going up on blogs. They are measured by how they respond to negative comments about poor performance. People realise that no business is perfect and actually, if you can see them warts and all, you tend to trust them more. The same will surely happen for individuals and I think it will be refreshing.

I predict that the transition will be ugly, but when we get there we may see a levelling of the playing field on a scale never seen before.

On Monday 9th June I attended the EDM08 conference. It was a fairly small affair with perhaps 100 delegates, but they had travelled far and wide to be there and on my table were people from the US, Nordic region and mainland Europe.

EDM stands for European Directories Marketplace and the event is run by Whitaker Associates. I had little idea about how the connection with directories worked before attending, but soon discovered that it was all to do with the delivery of information services, leading to this year’s theme: mobile.

The keynote was delivered by Dr Mike Short, director of R&D at O2 and a man with impressive credentials in the mobile arena. Chair of the mobile data association (MDA) among other things, Dr Short has spent 20 years in the mobile and wider telecoms industries. He shared plenty of industry stats and previews of O2 research to be published in July, both of which I can summarise here for you in a few bullet points.

General statistics:

• There were 2.95 billion mobile subscribers globally by June 2007.
• The forecast for the end of 2008 is 3.3 billion (source: The Mobile World).
• There is 115 percent mobile penetration in the UK, equating to 69 million handsets.
• There were 57 billion SMS and 449m picture messages sent in the UK in 2007.
• The mobile internet was accessed by 17 million UK individuals in 2007.

From O2′s research:

• Most people would rather leave home without their wallet than their mobile.
• Trials which combined mobile SIMs with Oyster and Credit cards (separately and together) using near field communication technology (NFC) resulted in a greater degree of success with Oyster cards than credit cards. It will be interesting to see what conclusions O2 draws from this, as it seems to me that it is a moot point because ultimately they will all surely be combined anyway.
• Mobile development began at phase one with voice and text. Present
  day is phase six which is the ‘content’ phase. He believes that the next stage, phase 7, is the ‘application’ phase.

Following the keynote there was a range of presentations, discussions and some really interesting debates and opinions that I would like to record.

There was plenty of debate around the importance of mobile compared to PC. James Levey of Amdocs suggested that click-through rates online were currently at about two percent on average but predicted mobile would achieve four percent click-through rates in the near future. Mobile search currently represents two to four percent of desktop search globally, with the exception of China where mobile search accounts for 25 percent. Google predicts that the crossover point, where mobile search overtakes desktop, will come within four years, then rapidly grow to double the desktop search share.

To provide a little more context to this, it is worth mentioning stats presented by Russell Buckley of Admob, the world’s largest mobile ad marketplace. Russell currently estimates that Admob sees three billion page views per month on its network, on which they serve ads today. The largest contributors to that number, notably all in the English language, are:

• US = 50 percent
• India and UK = 10 percent each
• South Africa = 5 percent
• Indonesia = 5 percent

Other presentations gave me some interesting nuggets worth noting, such as: “In ten years you will be able to access the knowledge of humankind from a mobile.” Or: “The fastest growing age of penetration of mobile phones in the UK is seven to eight year olds. All exciting stuff, but I was most impressed by Simon Grice of www.ideas.org. He managed to rattle off more concepts and ideas in ten minutes than I have in a decade. The few I managed to grab were:

• Information is the new pollution. In a conference focusing on information services and directories Grice argued that in the future this will be too much and humans won’t be able to deal with the flow of info.
• Search will become useless because the range of results will be too difficult to filter. Grice suggested that when people get bogged down with information they ask people they know for advice and in this way sites like Twitter and Facebook become the information services networks of the future.
• Discovery as opposed to search. Search is fine if you know what you are looking for but what if you don’t? For example your local pub is holding an Italian night. If you don’t search for that you may not find out so you need to be told or have a way to discover it that is not necessarily advertising. Location based services have a role to play but it is not clear what role at this stage.

All of the great new ideas discussed at EDM08 are definitely worth exploring further, which is exactly what I intend to do now.

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, and in business that’s always been true. Most deals result from referrals, recommendations or informal networking. We’ve had LinkedIn for years, a kind of a ‘friend of a friend’ recommendation system, but with the rise of MySpace and Facebook, there are lots of new social networks targeting business users.

In February, the Financial Times announced that it’s setting up an exclusive social network, for which members will be expected to cough up £2,000 per year. They’re vetting applicants and say they’re only interested in members at the level of CIO or board member. There’s a big question around whether people at this level have the time or inclination to take part. I’m sure they’d rather be skirting around a delicate negotiation on the golf course than poking a prospect online. Read more…

 By Clare Mitchell Crow

Last month, Hitwise reported that visits to the top 25 social networking sites now outnumber visits to webmail services like Hotmail and Gmail. It’s too early to pronounce email dead: for a start, that report only covered webmail, and didn’t look at desktop mail. But it does show an interesting trend.

There are several flaws with webmail: most significantly, it’s plagued by spam. The user experience is one of wading through mountains of junk to get to the occasional friendly greeting from a friend. It can also fall foul of viruses and the threading of discussions can be somewhat primitive (depending on which provider you use).

Facebook solves all these problems and makes for a superior user experience. Although you can receive messages from strangers, you tend to only get messages from people you have already identified as your friend. Since the messages are sent through a webform, the risk of a virus being attached to a message is relatively low. The inbox also threads discussions and presents them on a single page, so you can see the whole correspondence. The site also provides fun new ways to communicate with your friends which go beyond email into interactive quizzes and games of tag.

Doubtless there will come a time when spammers and virus authors penetrate Facebook’s defences, but for now Facebook offers a superior user experience to webmail for most of its users. But even this experience is under threat. While Facebook is good at keeping out spam, the site does tend to plaster adverts and other rubbish on the user’s profile page. If they don’t rein in this excess, they risk harming the fragile relationship they have with users. Ultimately, usability wins.

By Mark Gristock

2007: The year we all went social networking crazy. The year that the corporate takeover came back into fashion, and when shoddy research became the accepted norm.

Many of us have struggled with how to turn social networking and the proliferation of rich media into business advantage this year. I’ve consistently wrestled with the blog problem for most of it. The challenge can best be likened to the retirement of Tim Henman – when you are busy, you don’t have time to keep updating a blog and the interesting things you could say are often confidential. Once you’ve got time on your hands, nothing interesting actually happens and nobody cares what you have to say any more.

You can’t have a discussion about Web 2.0 without talking about Facebook and its new advertising system. Personally I don’t have any interest in how anyone rates me, or what products I like, but then I’m not 16. On the other hand, the people at Facebook seem genuinely pleased with themselves, so I’m sure they understand their audience much better than I do.

This year, the iPhone and Skype mobile arrived and promised to change the way we use mobile. I struggle to see how either innovation will help people to look where they’re going when they’re misspelling every third word, but at least the new options are more attractive and cheaper.

I’ve been to a great number of events and conferences this year, and if I could have one wish for 2008 it’s this. If you are invited to be a keynote speaker, it’s not an excuse to not prepare a presentation, or to take a great deal of time revealing how surprisingly dull your company actually is. Many of your audience have travelled a long way to hear your thoughts. The least you could do is actually have some.

Finally, I was listening to Radio 5 at the weekend, and the hot story was the return of Mrs. Canoe. The report went something like this: “Let’s go to the journalist that’s covering the story. David – what’s the latest?” “Well, according to the Daily Mirror Website…” Proof, if proof be needed, that if you hear it on the Internet it must be true.

And on that note, I’m off to buy a kitten in a jamjar for my mother. I’m sure she’ll be pleased.

When I was at school, there were two types of mathematics: pure mathematics was about learning abstract number work by rote; and applied mathematics was about modelling the real world.

Too many companies are locked into ‘pure analytics’, where they gather numbers, and slice and dice them, but don’t put them to work. Companies that average activity across the whole site, or use measures like visit numbers and hits, are probably locked into this mindset.

For some time, we’ve offered visit scoring. This awards points to different activities on the site, so that companies can measure how engaged someone is. Each visit is scored according to the pages visited and activities that take place. A customer that just paws through the bargain bins is probably worth less to you than a customer who searches for an expensive TV and looks at a few results. Visit scoring enables companies to focus on potentially profitable and unprofitable visits and to adapt the user experience to increase customer participation. The next step is visitor scoring, which scores individuals over time, and considers how often they shop, how recently they shopped and their life time value to the business.

Using visitor scoring as a starting point, companies can introduce customers to others with similar tastes. This can drive social networking, so that site members are automatically introduced to others with similar tastes in products or hobbies based on pages viewed and items bought. This could be a good way to increase participation from those members who only pop in when they receive an invitation from a friend. People can be matched according to how they want to engage with the site too, so that you don’t pair up someone who’s online every day with someone who only logs on weekly.

Customers can also be matched on review sites. When I read bad book review posted by another customer on Amazon, I don’t know whether the reviewer has similar tastes to mine, so it’s hard to trust the review. Visitor scoring offers a simple way to benchmark how similar customers are to each other, so that they know how closely their tastes match and how much they can rely on each other’s reviews.

There will be privacy concerns, but Facebook’s plug-ins have shown that if there are benefits there, people are prepared to share their private data with anyone who can enable them to interact with their friends and the internet in new ways.