The iPad Impact

"What is unique about the iPad is they are truly the most tactile device, with a larger screen where you are actually moving the content with your hands, not a mouse or keyboard," she said. "This is a more immersive experience than the lean back of TV or the lean forward of the PC. You are part of the content."

Great quote from Catherine Spurway, Pointroll VP Advertising and Marketing.  I've been using an iPad for about a month now and my expectations and early hypotheses have been shattered.  When Apple announced the iPad I felt it would be mostly a media consumption device - a large iTouch.  I believed it would be hard to use for productivity based work apps.  I under valued this revolutionary product and the great opportunity for touch interfaces.

The iPad experience is so superior to the PC or Mac model.  I now refuse to travel with my Sony notebook (which is quite small).  I am typing this blog from my iPad while the person sitting next to me on this AA flight watches a movie on hers.  I brought my notebook on this business trip but haven't booted it up - just thinking about that makes me queasy!  For now on, the Sony will stay in its dock in my office.  I feel so liberated and know my travel life will be better, easier, more productive and more entertaining.  A wise colleague has a great blog called "Death of the Mouse".  Through my recent iPad experience, I now understand the paradigm change to touch interfaces.  As the mouse dies, so will the hardware and software that work with mice and support the PC paradigm.

This is possible due to the beautiful Apple design and user experience plus cloud computing, easy low-cost apps, and improved and pervasive mobile broadband.  This iPad experience will only get better as more apps are released and integration between apps, device and cloud services improves.  There are a slew of new business productivity iPad apps hitting the market including apps for viewing, editing and saving Microsoft office files.  The NY Times reviewed a couple of these new apps today. 

The Puppy Effect
Many of us have experienced the magnet effect of walking a puppy in NYC (free tip for singles out there). Well, my new puppy is my iPad.  Everyone wants to see it, touch it, play with it.  I am having more conversations with strangers (do I really want/need that)?  And once someone tries it, they must have one.  I have seen this with a few friends already with their wives contacting me with questions so they can order the iPad for Fathers Day.

Naturally, being the digital marketing consultant and competitive freak that I am, I need to make a bunch of predictions about the winners and losers from the new iPad paradigm so here goes.

The Winners

• Apple, naturally – the stock broke 270 today…all time high.
• Smart advertisers (and agencies) who will test this platform before it reaches scale – test, measure, refine…
• iPad app developers – the smart ones will develop “universal applications" (iPad, iPhone, etc.)
• iPad accessory makers – the iPad needs a lot of accessories to connect to devices, to enjoy media, etc.
• Desktop makers – much cheaper than laptops.  More will ask “do a really need a laptop and iPad?”.
• Cloud services – as local storage goes away, demand for the cloud increases.
• Digital Content producers – the iPad is the best digital content device ever.

The Losers

• Apple, again - do we really need both iPad and iPhone?  There are better phones and networks.  Plus, there's little app synergy yet.  Time will tell...
• Notebook makers – see above.
• Software incumbents – see above.

So, what do you think?  Please comment below.

The Social Media ROI Framework- a Model for "I"

Challenge: Especially in times of lean budgets, many organizations are reacting to the emergence of Social Media by tacking responsibilities onto resources that are already fully utilized. The results aren’t surprising; these under-resourced social media efforts do not yield desirable outcomes in terms of awareness, revenue, or operational efficiencies.

Solution: Use today’s post to specify core use cases and to build a spreadsheet that provides empirical labor estimates. I recommend that you revisit this exercise periodically to fine tune current and forecasted resource needs, which in turn play a substantial role in defining the "I" of your social media ROI calculations.


Use Case 1- Read Content

• If you haven’t yet invested in a social media monitoring tool, start with Google.
• Count up the quantity of brand mentions that appear in a week. Break this out by major channels/categories like Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, YouTube, Flickr, news, and channels specific to your business model (Amazon product reviews, for example).
• Make a “feels right” estimate for how much time will be needed to read a mention. Hint: It’s somewhere between 15 seconds and three minutes.
• Multiply the time per mention by quantity of mentions.

Use Case 2- Respond to Content

• On average, about what percent of mentions will your brand respond to? Again, try to break out by channel/category. For example, response rates to Flickr photos will be far lower than posts on your Facebook wall.
• Multiply your percentage by the total quantity of mentions estimated in the prior use case to establish an estimated quantity of replies per week.
• Like you did with “Read Content,” estimate time per response and multiply by total estimated responses.

Use Case 3- Create and Publish Reports

• Estimate how much time per week will be needed to record mention and response metrics for your brand in a spreadsheet.
• Another hint: Social media monitoring tools require no time to generate reporting, whereas the operational cost of “free” tools can begin to look daunting once the building spreadsheet reports is considered.

Use Case 4- Analyze Data

• Allocate enough time per week to allow analysis. Analysis should be conducted by resources beyond those who participate in the first three use cases. Think along the lines of a 15 – 30 minute review per week by Marketing, Customer Service, and Sales executives, for example.

Use Case 5- Create and Publish Planned Content

• “Planned Content” tends to skew more towards marketing and awareness than the responsive content mentioned above. This includes executing contests, content that ties in with other channels, and more. 

Use Case 6- Manage Fans and Profiles

• Clicking “yes” to allow friends and fans to follow your brand doesn’t take that much time per week, but record it nonetheless to complete the picture. Over time, these small activities add up.
• Bigger brands might need an hour per week. Smaller businesses should expect something more like 15 minutes a week.

Use Case 7- General Monitoring

• It’s important to earmark time per week for pure browsing of mentions across different channels. Without allocating this time, organizations tend to gain tunnel vision around primary sources of content at the risk of missing out on emerging new blogs, for example, or the long tail of mentions across the internet at large.

Next Steps: After you’ve completed this exercise, you’ll have a first stake in the ground for how many hours per week your brand will need to support core social media efforts. To estimate labor cost, multiply by an estimated hourly rate. If appropriate, different hourly rates can be applied for specific use cases like Analyze Data.

Keep this data relevant: By necessity, most of the inputs (and therefore outputs) of this exercise are estimates. As time goes by, however, you’ll have real data coming in. On a regular basis, fine-tune the numbers for both volume and for time spent per use case. These refinements will bring more clarity to your current state and can support more accurate forecasting, too: Use trends to estimate when fans/followers/mentions will increase by 25%, 50%, and beyond and note how turning these dials affects overall resource demands. Along with other data inputs, your spreadsheet will become a budgeting and resourcing blueprint that justifies shifting resource costs from traditional areas like call centers and Marketing/PR to where the customers are: Social Media.

Are Your Facebook Like Buttons for Sale?

It’s been about a week since the F8 conference, and Facebook’s new Social Plugins, including their Like button, remain the biggest news in social media. One of the most important benefits of the Like button is that it enables brands to grow their fanbases without cannibalizing “traditional” website metrics, especially e-commerce revenue. And Facebook is happy, obviously, to dramatically increase their web presence and their level of profile data per user.

But I see already that the Like button could be doing something more. Here’s an example: I go to TripAdvisor.com and select The London NYC (disclosure: they are a client). I click the “Like” button there, and here’s what appears on my Facebook wall:

“Aaron likes The London NYC on TripAdvisor.”

So what happened? TripAdvisor just got two links back to their website by piggybacking on the brand equity of The London NYC, one to TripAdvisor’s page for this hotel and the other to TripAdvisor.com. Yes, the hotel gets measurable value in directing people to its TripAdvisor page, but that traffic is substantially less valuable than traffic to the hotel’s own site.

And therein lies the opportunity: The Like button could create a new B2B market where Fans are the currency. In addition to driving traffic and/or revenue, could sites like TripAdvisor charge for driving Fans, aka: Likers? Look at your own website, could your Facebook Like buttons be for sale? Help me if I’ve missed this, but I don’t see anything in Facebook’s Terms of Service that forbids it.

We can ask this question across a spectrum of business models/relationships; below are three general categories, to help get the conversation started:

• Keep the target of the Like button at its source: If implemented, would/should Like buttons on Amazon.com point to the Amazon product pages or to the manufacturers’ pages? I would imagine that many manufacturers would prefer Amazon because of the heavy revenue-generating benefits.
• Point the Like button to a third party site: The existing Like buttons on IMDB.com could point to that movie on Netflix, for example, to help drive revenue. Studios might prefer this for movies like “Up in the Air,” which just sort of come and go. For franchises like Star Wars, however, the studios might prefer the long-term value of the fan and potential merchandising opportunities that can be realized by directing to their own website.
• Point the Like button to the manufacturer/provider’s page: This is the TripAdvisor example. I could see many hotels at least considering paying to have that Like button point to their own websites. See below for what they would gain by doing so...

To further highlight the opportunities and threats of the Like button, let’s continue with the TripAdvisor / London NYC example: Replacing TripAdvisor's Facebook “Share This” buttons with the Facebook “Like” buttons might seem like an incremental shift, but it’s not. It’s a power grab; it’s a first (and commendably early) move in a fight for fans and for eyeballs that drive ad revenue. The hotel misses out in at least three ways:

• Missed long-term benefits of having the potential guest in its social graph. When I click that Like button, I have NOT become a fan of the hotel. I am not in that hotel’s social graph, and their marketers are not really any closer to me than if I clicked nothing at all. (Side note: we’ll have to discuss “fan fragmentation” in another post – pretty soon I’ll have many different flavors of becoming a fan of the same hotel, for example, via different review sites)
• Less potential traffic to its own site (bad for a variety of reasons, including diminished upsell opportunities)
• An arguably diminished share of potential revenue

Would hotels be willing to pay to regain these opportunities if TripAdvisor were to point their Like buttons to the hotel sites? Would TripAdvisor be willing/able to price and maintain this service in a way that makes up for their opportunities related to more site traffic?

The possibilities here are big. The big Social Media prize for 2010 is to determine the value per Facebook Fan for a given brand (and Twitter fan, FourSquare fan, etc). The toolset is not fully evolved here, but WebTrends is getting close with Facebook and others are soon to follow. In the meantime, some focused spreadsheet-building and a holistic metrics approach can yield at least an estimated FB fan value. As that number becomes more clearly defined, Fans could become a new B2B currency of the web. The review and reseller sites would have to include in their pricing the overhead cost of maintaining hundreds or thousands of Like button destinations, but the potential is certainly there.

Yet despite the opportunities, I don’t see this transition happening overnight. Here's three reasons why: 1) Depending on the brand, value per fan metrics are fuzzy to non-existent; 2) supporting this market could require large-scale technical and sales efforts; and 3) no turnkey e-commerce model for this like with Google’s AdWords.

Look for small sites –probably bloggers- to take this on first, most likely as an ad-hoc revenue model along with AdWords and banner ads. These small sites can skirt around the above challenges with spreadsheets and a manageable volume of Like buttons.

I focused on hotels today, but keep in mind that this discussion can apply to a large swath of websites – pretty much any site that reviews or enables ecommerce. Where do you think this opportunity will be realized first?

A New Decade Finds Google Under Assault

In an earlier post, I referred to the prior decade as the "Google Decade".  For digital marketers, the big story last decade was paid search and organic SEO.  Google grew search market share every quarter and expanded their AdWords program to many sites and countries.  They also established a culture of innovation that resulted in numerous new products such as Content (display ads), Earth, Print, TV, Gmail, Analytics, Apps, etc.  Despite this new product rollout, Google still derives the vast majority of their revenue from AdWords, leaving them vulnerable to changing user behaviors and other advertising options.  After dominating the last decade and proving a great ability to innovate and execute, Google finds itself being attacked from all sides.  The recent news and announcements from Apple, Facebook and Microsoft tell the story.

Apple:

• iPhone - despite their closed approach, single carrier strategy and Google's aggressive Android push, the iPhone continues to gobble up smartphone market share.  For the quarter ending March 28, Apple sold 8.75 million iPhones, representing 131% unit growth year over year.  Users don't search as much on their iPhones as they do on their desktop or laptop PCs. iPhone customers, instead, depend on Apps to find and enjoy digital information and content. Apple's App ecosystem and superior user experience are key to the success of the iPhone.
  
• iPad - 500,000 units have shipped in the first week or so.  This new device type, which runs on the mobile, iPhone OS, is changing the game in terms of how we consume and interact with digital media.
• iAd - introduced on April 8, this program greatly benefits developers, publishers and advertisers. All iAds will be hosted and served by Apple. More about this can be found here and here.  
• iTravel - on April 21, Apple filed a patent for iTravel - their travel-centric App for the iPhone and iPad. Apple is getting into the travel transaction (full user experience) business according to the filing.  This is consistent with their iAd strategy to allow advertisers to reach iPhone and iPad users without making them leave the App to respond to or buy from the iAd.
• Implication for Google:  For the first time, Apple is now in the digital advertising business and they have the mobile OS and platform to grow their advertising market share at Google's expense.

Facebook:

• 400 million active users - also, it was announced on March 19 that Facebook eclipsed Google and became the largest website in terms of page views.
• Social Plug-ins - last week, Facebook announced their new distributed "Like" program which will significantly grow their rich user data and provide earned media value for commercial websites of all types.  This valuable profile data will yield greater advertising value (ROI) and quickly grow Facebook into a digital advertising powerhouse.
• New Graph API and platform - this simpler platform is designed to add value for developers, users and commercial websites.  This should result in more "social graph" data for advertisers to target.
• Implication for Google: Facebook is innovating quickly and solidifying itself as an extremely large and valuable advertising platform where precise targeting can occur - sounds similar to how we described Google 5 or 6 years ago.

Microsoft:

• Yahoo Search Partnership - this deal will allow the #2 and #3 player to join forces to battle Google.
• Bing launch and share growth - for the first time in memory, a search engine besides Google gained search market share.  Microsoft has shown a great ability to innovate with Bing.
• Facebook Partnership - last week, Facebook and Microsoft announced their social collaboration through the Docs.com launch.  This site, which leverages Office, cloud computing and Facebook,  enables users to create and share Microsoft office documents with their Facebook friends.  
• Implication for Google:  Microsoft has a war chest of cash and is spending it to gain market share in Search and cloud-based Apps - two strategic markets for Google.

Google is firing back:

• Android mobile OS and Nexus One phone - launched on multiple carriers with numerous headset models including Google's Nexus One phone.  Early results suggest these phones are selling and allowing Google to gain smartphone market share, at the expense of RIM and Palm.  Android phones make "searching" the web a lot easier than iPhones.
• Bazaarvoice partnership - Last week, an interesting partnership between Google and Bazaarvoice was announced.  Bazaarvoice provides private label user review technology to many major manufacturers and online retailers.  Google will index these reviews and aggregate user scores and include them in search results and sponsored search ads.  This exciting integration of earned media with paid media and search results will be interesting to watch.
• ITA acquisition - just a rumor, but the strategic thinking behind this potential travel acquisition shows that Google is now willing to risk their AdWords revenue and compete with some of their largest advertisers (Expedia, Orbitz, etc.) in order to dis-intermediate the travel supply chain and bring more efficiency to the travel market.

What's your take on my analysis?  Will Google withstand this attack and continue to grow at the levels we've all become accustomed to?  Please comment below and keep the conversation going.

Apple's iAds - Further Analysis and Predictions

After I wrote my last blog post about Apple's iAd mobile advertising program, I came across a link to Steve Jobs' 10 minute iAd introduction. I have to admit, I was blown away with the presentation and, while it confirmed many of my thoughts expressed in my last post, it also helped me crystallize the following implications and predictions for app developers/publishers, brand marketers and direct-response, transaction-based advertisers.

iAd Value for App Developers & Content Publishers

• New revenue stream for existing their apps through the 60/40 ad media revenue share with Apple.
• New source of business for developers through a new iAd development service.
• A better advertising channel to market their own Apps.
• Development tools that are "very easy" to use, according to Mr. Jobs.
• Simple & easy process - Apple sells and serves all iAds.

iAd Value for Brand Marketers

• Superior digital creative - iAds offer more interactivity than TV ads & more emotion than Display ads.
• Better user experience - according to the presentation, navigating an iAd is "very simple".
• Innovation value - brands can ride the "cool" and "innovative" halo from Apple.

iAd Value for Direct Response & E-commerce Advertisers

• This lies with Apple's growing option value.  I predict Apple will launch iStore which connects to merchant and travel back-ends via APIs and allow the user to transact via iTunes, just as they do currently with songs, movies, books and apps. Jobs mentioned a "shopping list" for Target - what does he mean?  Is this a new form of shopping cart that Apple is working on?
• When will Apple launch iWord - a DR ad solution tied to App Store inquiry targeting?

Net, net...the winners: Apple, developers and publishers, brand marketers.  And, the losers: Google, Microsoft, Adobe.  

Do you agree?  Please share your comments.

Apple's iAds - What it Means for App Developers, Brand and Direct Marketers

Last week, while still basking in the after-glow of Duke's 4th national championship and nail-biting victory over Butler (which I witnessed with a good Duke buddy), Apple gathered developers to discuss iPhone OS 4.0 and iAds.  In this recent NY Times article about the launch of iAds, there were some interesting comments. Steve Jobs said, "People are not searching on a mobile device like they are on the desktop". A Google spokeswoman commented that Google mobile search is 5 times bigger than 2 years ago and that people are searching 30-50 times more often on smartphones than basic mobile phones. While these 3 statements may be true, they don't explain Apple's entry into advertising and their new iAd strategy.  While it's becoming more and more obvious that Apple and Google are locked into a long term battle, the questions this competition stimulates are more intriguing.  Will this battle lead to ever greater innovation that will leave Blackberry, Palm, Microsoft and Nokia in the dust?  What is Apple's strategy and rationale for entering the digital advertising business (this is more than just mobile advertising. think iPad)?  Should performance oriented marketers see value in iAds.  By analyzing iAds, one can conclude that it's all about supporting their app developer ecosystem.

Let's take a look at Apple's iAds strategy.  Apple's mission is to make the iPhone OS the de-facto standard in mobile computing.  In keeping with their past, and in direct contrast to Google, Apple is winning with a closed approach due to their ability to deliver superior user experiences for consumers and, as importantly, developers.  iAds is consistent with these core principles.

·         By focusing the service on developer benefits, Apple will keep the apps flowing.  Combine this with Apples's app approval process and Apple should continue drive comp advantage of their app platform which will keep users migrating to iPhone, iPad, etc.

·         iAds allow app developers to have a revenue model for free apps and to keep paid app pricing down.  Developers/publishers will get 60% of ad revenue, Apple 40%.

·         Jobs believes iAds will deliver "engaging and emotive" experiences to users.  His relentless focus on the iAd user experience fits with their overall design approach and superior user experience.

·         iAds also take aims on Abode by pushing HTML5 over Flash for iAd development.  This is consistent with Apples past decisions to block Flash on the iPod, iPhone and now iPad.  Offering superior ad development tools, Apples hopes to diminish Abode's installed base asset.

·         It's a closed ad system that locks out Google mobile ads delivered through Google's recently acquired mobile network, AdMob.

·         iAds leverages the acquisition of Quattro whose core competency is around mobile display ads (qualitative), not quantitative ads tied to rich search or user data. The iAds announcement could have big implications for existing mobile advertising providers and networks such as AdMob and Millenial Media, which have built businesses on serving ads into iPhone applications.

iAds will not allow click offs to transactional websites.  Clicking through on iAds will launch the advertiser content, which essentially takes the form of mini branded applications in their own right, featuring video, games, and other interactive content.  By leveraging it's core competencies, strategy and Quattro acquisition, Apple appears to be catering primarily to brand marketers.  The focus on emotion is very different than Google's approach which is centered on delivering simple solutions for quantitative focused, direct response advertisers. iAds also won't solve the App proliferation problem for developers or users.  Hopefully Apple will now turn it's focus on building a better App search engine/directory coupled with direct response sponsored ads which would provide value to users, developers and direct response marketers.  I still have many questions about iAds.  Please help me answer the following questions by commenting below.

·         Will iAds be able to host shopping carts and travel booking engines?

·         Will ad serving, management, tracking and optimization tools work with iAds?

·         Will digital marketers be able to “close the loop”?

·         Should direct response advertisers test iAds or just "wait and see"?  

A Post That's Not (really) About the iPad

In choosing “Digital Street Smarts” as the name of our blog, Jack and I wanted to emphasize that we’ll be providing thoughts on social media, mobile, and digital marketing from a practical, “lived it,” point of view. This kind of work ethic led me to unexpected places this week when I took a short vacation to my parents’ house so that they could spend some quality time with the grandkids. It was good to get my head out of my laptop (and phone), and I found myself making note of events that really brought to life all of the stats and trends that we read/write about on a daily basis. Stepping back like this allowed me to focus on real-life social media + mobile experiences for a few days. Here's what I saw...

My 60-ish Year Old Dad: Dad is a champion of traditional media consumption. In addition to going through a new novel and several magazines each week, he reads an actual local newspaper every night while simultaneously watching movies/sitcoms/news on TV. On my first night there, he said to me “If this isn’t a sign of the times, I don’t know what is,” and showed me the local newspaper. It was a thin, flimsy thing. I’ve seen junk mail that’s thicker. We all know that newspapers are going out of business, but to see a newspaper that serves a metro area of over one million people in such a weakened state really hit me. I could almost hear it gasping for breath over the background noise of the TV...

My 22 Year-old Sister: Like most people her age, my “baby” sister silently texts to friends constantly, even as she engages in conversations that are right there in the room with her. No surprises there. The poignant moment came at night however, when she passed out on the family couch (she had generously given up her old room so that my kids would have a quite place to nap and sleep at night). For four nights in a row, my sister literally fell asleep with her phone in her hand. In the same way that she dozed in and out of late night conversations with her siblings who were in the room with her, she also talked to friends via text – that’s how fundamental her phone is to her life experiences.

My Three Year Old Son:  My older son just turned three and has been spending increasing amounts of time online. It has recently evolved from simply watching videos (robots or construction videos on YouTube) to more interactive content related to what he watches on TV (Sesame Street and Sid The Science Kid). At first, he needed more time than I expected to learn how to use the trackpad and mouse. As intuitive as we think these devices are, the truth is that using a mouse is an unnatural and learned behavior. He repeatedly reached out to touch the screen when we first started using my laptop and still occasionally does so. His behavior certainly makes sense and is probably influenced by his use of my Droid phone.

The part where I talk about the iPad: So where's all of this lead? In light of the iPad, I’ve been talking a lot with colleagues about the death of purpose-specific hardware, and you can easily see how a tablet device would serve each of the above users extremely well (and upend a few business models in the process). Today’s post was initially about the iPad device, but instead, I want to make this point: You can’t learn everything from a book. Or even an ebook. Or even from Mashable.com. As our relationships with our technologies become ever more intimate, remember that some of the best learning re: media/social media/mobile/internet can occur right under our noses. Our modern lives play out in a rainforest that is rich with technology; playing Jane Goodall for a few days and getting in the weeds can really bring to life and add context to all of those statistics and numbers.

Starting tomorrow, we'll be hit with another deluge of iPad related announcements and commentary. As you wade through that, remember this: Steve Jobs allegedly delayed development of the iPad for several years because the experiences (via the larger iTunes ecosystem) were not yet in place. Jobs knew that if he couldn't replace Dad's newspaper, the iPad was just another thing.

We can all learn from this. Social Media is not about the thing (the platform or the device) itself. It is about enabling and improving experiences. I encourage you to get in the weeds and make some observations of your own and to think about towards where those signposts are pointing. Share in the comments!