We Are Q Inc.

Online advertising is great. It built the Internet. Online advertising mimed the TV broadcast model. We can thank online ads for the freemium model.

The problem is, online advertising’s best before date is immanent. Even Google thinks so! On January 19th, 2012 Google announced a search algorithm change that will affect page ranking. By placing too many ads “above the fold” publishers risk downgrading their page rank. It’s worth adding that according to Google, “This algorithmic change noticeably affects less than 1% of searches globally.” Despite the small number,  I believe it’s time for brands to start thinking about moving away from online banner ads to more compelling engagement models.

What’s the future you ask? I believe it’s “Brand Editorial” that can be mashed, shared, interacted with, modified, and talked about by fans and audiences. Let’s discuss.

Google is now down-ranking websites that dedicate, “a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads.” How much real estate is too much? Google won’t tell us and is not providing any analytical tools to provide the answer either. There are a few clues on Google’s Inside Search blog posting.

This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page. This new algorithmic improvement tends to impact sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads. This algorithmic change noticeably affects less than 1% of searches globally.

If you get it wrong, it may take weeks for any corrections you make to be reflected in your rankings: If you decide to update your page layout, the page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as we re-crawl and process enough pages from your site to assess the changes. How long that takes will depend on several factors, including the number of pages on your site and how efficiently Googlebot can crawl the content. On a typical website, it can take several weeks for Googlebot to crawl and process enough pages to reflect layout changes on the site.

The bottom line with this update is, as so many times before, for publishers to focus on creating content-rich, compelling websites if they want to use natural SEM. Anything risks a randomly-timed ranking downgrade.- Chris Trayhorn, mTHINK

Merry holiday everyone and wishing you a wonderful upcoming calendar year. Best and most warmest wishes!

I’m excited to be moderating the Social Commerce panel at nextMEDIA conference in Toronto, December 6th, 2011.

Post your questions to @marinamann

We have a superb panel line up and what promises to be a heated discussion on social commerce including a few case studies, insights and strong opinions.

Social Commerce, The New Normal Influence Economy 
Most customer interactions with your brand and the customer buying decisions that goes along with that – won’t happen on your brand’s website. In 2010, U.S. e-commerce sales totalled $165.4 billion, up 14.8%. Opportunities are burgeoning as the cost of eCommerce operations drops and customers procure more goods & services online. In this session see case studies of how innovation in social media can drive the overall commerce model and enable brands to connect with customers and their friends to create value in earned media.

The panelists included:

Rochelle Grayson, CEO of BookRiff Media Inc., and Program Advisor, Industry Chair for the University of British Columbia’s Social Media Program @RochelleGrayson

Rochelle Grayson is CEO of BookRiff.com. BookRiff let’s consumers creates and publish their own books by mixing and matching content from published books, BookRiff creators and the Internet. Anyone can create a book compiled of riffs from start to finish in 48 hours and make it available for sale as an ebook or in print through bookriff.com. Along the way every content creator get’s paid for their used piece of mirco-content. Rochelle is a serial entrepreneur. She’s also Industry Chair for the University of British Columbia’s Social Media Program and instructor of Social Media monetization at UBC. Welcome to you.

Harley Finkelstein, Chief Platform Officer at Shopify; Harley explains his role in Fast Company

Harley Finkelstein, is chief platform officer at Shopify.com. Shopify is an Ottawa based eCommerce DIY platform used world wide. Sopify lets anyone set up an eCommerce store in 15 minutes. In the last 5 years, the startup has grown to power 16,000 stores in 70 countries and generates over 100 million in annual sales and growing. Harley is also a busy entrepreneur, MBA and lawyer.

Matthew Bertulli, CEO and Founder at Demac Media and Co-founder, Socialgift.com

Matt Bertulli was one of the first angel investors in Socialgift.com – Socialgift is a group buying startup that makes is easy for your friends to decide on a group gift and chip in and buy you something they agreed you’d love from a participating retailer or allows friends to contribute whatever amount they’d like to your gift. Matt is also co-founder and CEO of Demac Media, an e-commerce professional services solution agency in Toronto.

SocialGift from Mango Studios on Vimeo.

Daniel Patricio, Founder and Product Manager at Pinpoint Social @danielpatricio

Daniel Patricio is founder and product manager of Poinpointsocial.com, Pinpoint Social, is a self service platform that makes marketing on Facebook simpler and more effective. Pinpoint Social enables you to create dynamic Facebook fan pages and allows you to create customized campaigns, promotions or contests without the need to write a line of code. Pinpoint Social also provides detailed customer analytics.

See you there!

-Marina Mann  LinkedIn or Twitter @marinamann

Marcel LeBrun from Radian6 describes his perspective on the consumer-ization of everything and the brand conversations that are happening.

A few key principals from the video worth noting include the notion that Social Media has moved from a crisis tool to an amazing media to where brands can have real conversations with customers. Marketers have reached a common understanding that audiences have moved from broadcast media to web and social spaces where two-way convos are happening. LeBrun also notes that “it’s understood now that brands are participants in the conversations taking place about their brands” and that the customer is exercising more power in shaping and influencing those brand than they do. Well, I’m not sure it’s well-understood just yet. Regardless, the new questions enterprise should be asking in the context of Social Media:

• How do I operationalize social media within the enterprise?
• What roles do I need?
• What departements do I need? What departments are affected?
• What tools do I need?
• What level of engagement do I need? Should I be listening?
• Should I be participating? When level of response and participation should I have?
• Who within the enterprise should be participating and how?
• Should every person in the organization be participating in the conversation?
• What level of thought leadership can I provide and how can I engage customers by leading the conversations and adapting?
• What business function within the enterprise should be listening and responding with customers in social spaces?
• Should Product Management, Tech Support, PR, Marketing, Research & Development teams be listening and responding?
• How much should I invest in Social Media?

Radian6 is a listening tool used to measure Social Media activity and sentiment made by customers for brands. The company is somewhat of a Canadian success story nascent in New Brunswick. In March of 2011 the company was acquired by Salesforce.com for $326 million, netting The New Brunswick Innovation Foundation $9.25 million after selling its stake.

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Marina Mann, Strategy for Digital, Social Media and Mobile

Recently I’ve been speaking and attending presentations on innovation and risks to innovation. Most likely because as the global economy shifts into a slower growth stretch, market incumbents face the fact that branding is not a guarantee and innovation is akin to survival.

Of course idea generation is not easy, especially for corporations. Some corporations I’ve worked with not only struggle with innovation, but have a difficult time creating room for collaboration which is the building block for ideas and innovation. Generating ideas is no easy task and often a job bestowed on a few senior people within a company. That is to say, organizations forget that good ideas can grow from anyone and be cultivated consistently by inculcating a culture and a process where people can actually build on ideas that came before. An interesting book on the subject is Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson

Here’s a short video that sums it up well in an animated infograph. Enjoy!

Marina Mann

Every generation sees a few companies that create the new normal. For us it’s easy to argue Apple has made it’s mark on our generation. Here’s a previously lost video from 1984 where young Steve Jobs intros the Macintosh. I love the drama and the floppy disk!

Thanks for all the fish Mr. Jobs!
 

Add your thoughts and comments.

Marina Mann

Getting small businesses to spend money on advertising is hard work. Since it’s launch in 2008, Groupon has built a multi-billion dollar business doing it. However, despite the media and business success-stories, many small businesses and customer have surfaced detailed horror stories. Victims of their own group-selling success, some small business owners are no longer interested in daily deals.

Bad Groupon stories can go something like this:  A local pizzaria posts a daily deal, happy to take a reduced margin to bring in new customers. No guarantees if they will ever come back, but they’ll come once.  The up-side? Landing a Groupon deal, even at a loss, can put a small business on the map. (These days 98% of Groupon deals tip.) In this case, hundreds of customers stream in for pizza, wielding their Groupon vouchers, complaining about slow service and demanding exceptions to the small print. The restaurant management finds itself overwhelmed and understaffed. No one is happy, least of which is the local restauranteur nor the regulars who happen to pop in to their local during a daily deal.

Today, Groupon boasts over 80 million subscribers and despite a loss of over $400 million last year and a continued onslaut of Groupons turned ‘bad-ons’ for local merchants and service providers, we can all expect an exciting IPO coming soon.

What is Groupon Now? Groupon copy cats and established statup like Foursquare as well as big brands like AmEx are getting in the daily deal game. Every major newspaper or owner of a mailing list is working daily deals.  To stave off the unwashed latecomers the company recently launched Groupon Now: hourly local deals in about 25 cities. Perfect for leveraging the mobile customer experience.

How does Groupon Now work for Mobile?  Unlike regular daily deals, purchased for future use, ‘Groupon Now’ deals are redeemed immediately via web or mobile. Customers only pay if they use the deal and merchants can manage their business in real time. On days when business is slow, a merchant can create a deal to be redeemed by a customer immediately. Local businesses may be less afraid of it because they can shut it off quickly if they need to.

The mobile model seems to resolve a list of problems with the Groupon daily deal model for both small business owners and service providers. In the scenario below, Jodi missed her regular yoga class, but still feels like a workout. She’s already out and about with her gear so she uses her mobile phone to find a workout deal in her postal code. Jodi finds 7 fitness deals, each for a particular class time. She selects the one that works best for her and buys it up via mobile. Voila. If Jodi’s not able to use the deal, no need to sell it to friends or login to a deal swap site to unload it. It’s automatically refunded.

Pretty compelling but what does this model do for loyalty if traffic is not necessarily profitable traffic? Will people come back at regular price or simply wait for another deal? In essence, the lack of loyalty is baked-in to the Groupon model. Because if you were loyal, you’re not going to buy another deal are you?

However for big corporations getting into the mobile moment-by-moment deal game, like The Gap and AmEx it’s a different story which I’ll attempt to cover in my next post. Until then, add your thoughts and comments.

Marina Mann

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Read more? Here are a few articles to discover…

Why Groupon Is Poised For Collapse, An in-depth series looking at the daily deal industry written by Rocky Agrawal, an entrepreneur who has worked on local products since 1995; TechCrunch dated June 13th, 2011  http://tcrn.ch/riXi3n

Meet The Fastest Growing Company Ever, written by Christopher Steiner, Forbes Magazine dated August 30, 2010, http://onforb.es/qjU2tp

A look at how daily deal sites work, The Associated Press, published Jul. 20, 201 http://bit.ly/mUAA3A

American Express flexes its muscles in local deals market, Ryan Kim, GigaOm, June 20, 2011 http://reut.rs/og32qt

Last year KLM Airlines conducted a social media experiment in Schiphol airport. They put together a team of 6 people to “surprise” passengers. Passengers who checked in to their KLM flight through Foursquare or tweeted about their KLM travel plans and flight itineraries were researched. The KLM social swat team searched the passengers social media profiles “to get to know them in a discrete manner” in an effort to find the perfect gift for the commuter. Next, the passengers were “hunted” down to be gifted their small gifts.

Linda Bomhof, is a sporty person who’d going to Rome for the weekend. She got a Nike Plus strap. Pim is traveling to Washington DC for a technology conference; he got an app for his iPad. Ame de Bok is going to build houses in Mexico… The result 100,000,000 impressions on Twitter and 100+ videos on YouTube.

Innovation = (calculated) Risk. What do you think?