Astoria Scum River Bridge from Jason Eppink on Vimeo.

To read the story, just follow this link http://vimeo.com/10680837

I had been writing a post about how tone of voice can be integrated into the user experience to differentiate online this week. I was citing mailchimp.com as a great example simply because my team and I love using it.

The post was OK, but not great, and then i saw a post on carsonified.com that said everything that I wanted, only so much better. At least we had the same examples in mind. It’s a fantastic article;

http://carsonified.com/blog/design/emotional-interface-design-the-gateway-to-passionate-users/

I took a couple of picture’s before I walked to Smithfield – if I was smart I would have just jumped into a cab.

** update **

According to the Irish Independent;

“The blaze started in New York Dry Cleaners on the ground floor of a four-storey building on Middle Abbey Street near O’Connell Street about 9pm and quickly took hold.

Firefighters were still tackling the outbreak hours after it began.”

“The ground floor of the cleaners collapsed into the basement. The blaze shot up through the building into the roof. The fire then spread to three storage buildings at the back of the launderette.”

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/firefighters-battle-blaze-for-hours-as-five-buildings-are-hit-2116836.html

One of the coolest things about my job is that I get to play with new kit before it’s released onto the network. Last week, I got a 24 hour test drive of the awesome Sony Ericsson Xperia X-10 so that I could present it to the consumer sales team. I thought it would be nice to share my thoughts.

The headlines

The Xperia X10 is the first Sony Ericsson device to run the Android operating system, it’s running version 1.6 and I’m told will upgrade to 2.2 in Q3. At the heart of the machine is a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor which is clocked at 1GHZ and makes it, well, nice and snappy.

It’s fairly feature packed and comes loaded with;

• A 4-inch 480×854 scratch-resistant HD touchscreen display
• 8.1 Megapixel camera
• Bluetooth
• WiFi
• A-GPS support
• 3.5mm audio jack.
• 1GB internal memory
• microSD card slot – up to 16GB with an 8GB card supplied

All media is saved to the SD card which means that you can knock yourself out with media downloads and swap them when you fill up one of your cards – although I have never got close to 16GB.

Media downloads are available from the SonyEricsson Playnow music store, O2 Music Store  and the device also supports O2TV which looks particularly good on the HD screen.

The Google services associated with Android are also supported. Maps, Android market, Gmail, Chrome web browser.

The touchscreen was a little over-sensitive and clumsy, I’ve found this on all Android devices so far and benchmarking against the iPhone it really isn’t as good in this department. The lack of multi-touch is also frustrating if you are used to using it on the iPhone, If you haven’t used an iPhone  then you won’t miss it.

So, what makes this different?

The Sony Ericsson Xperia X-10 stands head and shoulders above the other Android devices that I have seen thanks to some customisations that have been made to the UI. Sony Ericsson have focussed on connectivity and entertainment and have introduced the Timescape, Mediascape and Infinity button features to make the most of the processing power, location awareness and 3G Networks that the device will run on.

Timescape

Timescape helps you to organise the barrage of information that you have with friends, family and co-workers. Calls, SMS messages, e-mails,Facebook status updates, shared photo’s, music and tweets. All of this is neatly bundled into a timeline and the contact data is mashed-up so that there is coherent stream for each of your contacts.

This also looks amazing and is genuinely useful. It’s fairly difficult to explain how it all works so have a look for yourself on the UI demo found on youtube below, the timescape features are shown after about 25 seconds;

Media Scape

Mediascape is another feature that allows you to organise and access music, video and photo’s. Mediascape will also search for relevant online content related to each media type. Hitting the infinite view icon will allow you to view all related local and online content for a particular artist or item of media. This is pretty cool.

Apart from iTunes, this is probably the best media storage library I have ever seen on a mobile phone. It’s well thought through and terribly easy to use. Sorting through tracks, photos and videos makes the most of horizontal and vertical scrolls.

Mediascape will also allow you to access to PlayNow music store which will let you download tracks with a couple of touches. Tracks are billed at €1.50 and over a decent 3G network (like O2′s – yes, that’s a shameless plug) download takes less than a minute. I managed to spend about €15 on music during one commute into the office, that’s 11 tram stops and typically 20 minutes.

Fr your own Photo’s, mediascape lets you browse in a catalogue view and also lets you flick through photo’s in full screen view which makes the most of the HD screen. You can tag people in photo’s which will then also appear in your Timescape stream.

To see Mediascape in action, have a look at the demo I found on youtube below;

Infinity Button

The infinity button appears on all media and all of your interactions with various contacts.

In the case of Timescape, hitting the infinite content button on a particular contact will bring up all of the interactions with that person in one screen. It’s laid out like a conversation but is packed full of the different types of content rather than just one. If you want to view one type of contact, SMS for example, that’s possible by sliding the view to SMS.

This is a really cool feature as it combines the best components of Timescape and Mediascape.

Hitting the infinity button in Mediascape searches online for all available content for a particular artist. The online search looks for Youtube and playNow content specifically and is very cool. I’m sure it does more but was unable to get any further in my short test drive of the device.

How does it compare to iPhone?

The smartphone benchmark is really the iPhone 3GS, whilst undoubtedly the king, The X10 does have some advantages over iPhone;

• The screen is larger and the quality is higher
• The memory is expandable and swappable
• You can replace the battery yourself (and carry a spare)
• All social contacts can be viewed in one place and it multitasks
• Camera quality is superior
• The sound quality is better through headphones (this is my opinion rather than anything i have read)

That said, the iPhone interface is smoother than android and overall it’s just nicer to use – multitouch is probably the best example of this.

iPhone also retains 2 key advantages over the X10 product – iTunes and Safari.

All of my music is stored on iTunes and the interoperability between my home computers, phone and media is a key advantage. The iTunes store has a broader range of content and is accessible from multiple machines. Because I’m so tightly locked into the iTunes eco-system, a new device would need to pretty spectacular to break this and whilst it would be nice to be able to view all of my contact info in one stream I wouldn’t be prepared to swap this for iTunes.

Secondly, the web browser on the iPhone beats the browser on the X10 hands down. There is no competition on the quality of the browse experience on the two devices. iPhone renders pages more quickly, smoothly and allows you to interact with them using multi-touch and double taps in a way that just feels more intuitive and enjoyable than the X10 or any other android device that I have used for that matter. The browse experience on every Android device I have used has lacked this, the pages render in a sharp and clunky way, the touchscreen keypad isn’t as accurate and the screen often confuses scrolls with taps. The lack of multitouch is also a huge problem for me.

In Summary

The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 is undoubtedly the best Android phone I have ever seen, by a long, long way.

It’s packed with genuinely useful, cool features and has some real, tangible advantages over iPhone. If you want to focus on your social media contacts, take great pictures and knock yourself out on content this is a fantastic alternative to the iPhone.

I would also argue that aesthetically the device is much nicer than iPhone, which is beginning to look a little tired now.

If you haven’t got an iPhone or you aren’t as addicted to iTunes as I am then the Xperia X-10 should be your first choice.

And the final, completely shameless, self-interested plug is that the X10 is available exclusively on O2 in Ireland in April on the O2 Advance price plans.  You can find out more at www.o2.ie/x10 where your will be able to pre-register now and buy from April onwards.

On Friday afternoon, I sat at my desk drinking a Kiwi & Apple Innocent smoothie. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary, but this was a freebie that had been handed out by Kevin Dunne – one of our marketing team.

Kevin is probably the single most switched on web bloke at the company, he’s all over the internet spotting the latest trends, apps and the like. He gets genuinely excited about marketing and blogs furiously about it at http://kevindunne.blogspot.com/

One of the brands he’s followed and really likes is Innocent. He’s name-checked them a few times in his Blog.Now, I’ve always liked their style, tone of voice and original quirkiness, but I thought their move with Kevin was pure genius.

Obviously being fairly switched people, they monitor the internet for blog-posts, mentions on twitter etc. When they spotted Kevin’s blog they decided that it would be a good idea to get in-touch, so they sent him a couple of bags of smoothies. Apart from being a nice thing to do, they realised a couple of really important things;

1. That kevin is probably a nice bloke (which he is)
2. That even if he loved drinking smoothies (which he does) he couldn’t drink everything they sent
3. That he probably works in a fairly big office, full of 20 and 30-somethings (which he does)
4. That he will probably hand out the smoothies along with the story about how came to have so many on his desk (which he did)

The net result for innocent, was me (and a good number of people), sitting at my desk, drinking a smoothie and thinking “actually, this tastes pretty good and those people at innocent are pretty nice, I’ll probably buy this” and true enough, hand in pocket yesterday I picked up a kiwi and apple smoothie and handed over my hard earned euro’s.

For a little bit of effort, innocent were able to gain their selves a brand advocate, who had both a virtual network through their blog, a real world network through their work/friends, get their product sampled, get a nice story attached to every one who sampled it and gained some customers as a result.

This is a fantastic example of how the web and the real world meet to deliver great marketing results. Whilst undoubtedly the right thing to do – If I put my analytical hat on, I’m left with 2 questions;

1. I wonder how on earth this type of thing can be measured?

2. € for €, I wonder if the ROI is greater than a press or TV?

I’ll think about it whilst I’m on the way to the shop to pick up a couple of smoothies….

My initial thoughts – it’s actually really nice to use, but not as nice as Snow Leopard… We’ll see as time passes.

Search is a mechanism of choice for pretty much every digital marketer on the planet, and rightly so, connecting people to content they are looking for at the point when they are most interested in finding it. Recent studies have also found that large amounts of web search traffic may be navigational in nature, establishing Google as a primary location mechanism for many people beyond the URL and the user interfaces of websites themselves.

The inherently accountable nature of the activity allows marketers to demonstrate better ROI than other activities such as due to it’s position immediately prior to the visit/registration/purchase or whatever else the marketer is trying to achieve. The risk is that search spend is prioritised within the ever tightening budget over other activities that are important in building the required momentum to generate the search in the first place.

With this in mind, the questions I’ve been considering over the last week have been around what actually prompts the search to take place in the first place, how to measure this and most importantly what to do with the information once you have it.

Getting & Tracking the data

This is becoming increasingly less of a challenge, with a number of tools available to help make sense of the masses of digital data generated from on-site interaction, social media, digital display campaigns, search and whatever else can be pulled out of the toolkit. A recent and notable solution being the Atlas Engagement mapping product that, at a very basic level, helps marketers understand and interpret the on and off-site digital interaction trail in the weeks before a conversion takes place.

Whilst this is a great leap forward, it isolates only the variables that can be controlled, if we lived in a world where all influence was digital, it would be the ultimate answer.

Unfortunately, Customers don’t live in an all digital, all trackable world where opinions are formed and decisions are prompted by messaging exposure alone. Some of the most powerful influences are not advertising based at all. Perception of a brand or product may have been formed over a number of years or even decades, with direct experiences across multiple touch points or feedback from friends, family and opinion leaders creating an immovable perception of a brand within a customers mind. There will always be a place for those qualitative metrics – awareness, consideration and likelihood to recommend.

Working on an assumption that qualitative metrics are healthy and that we have a broad understanding of a baseline position without any digital stimulus, an engagement map can enable us to start wrestling with the digital campaign components and getting them into a format that will allow interpretation.

An engagement map will help you measure at every digital contact, rather than at the final point, and this may provide you with some surprising stuff, according to one of the downloads on the atlas website, over a 90-day period prior to conversion, the median average of advertising exposures was 18.5, perhaps unsurprisingly they also found that the exposure increased in the 48-hours prior to conversion, with an average of 5.5 advertising events coming in to play during this period and that affiliates networks and search played a major role in these final few steps.

A cautionary thought I had here is that Atlas are mainly about display advertising solutions and that they have a vested interest in pushing this concept, but the thinking that they are encouraging does make sense in traditional marketing theory, considering the awareness, interest, desire, action model, the action happening prior to the final search would indicate end user stimulation in the awareness and interest phases or as I like to think about it – the very top of the funnel. Having the ability to track these steps would, in the long term, prove or disprove the validity of the theory that the last advertising event is not the only factor in an end user conversion.

Using the data to make good decisions

There is very little point in the collection of data for the sake of it, it only becomes useful if we are able to understand it and able to use the information in a meaningful way, by this I mean change the things that we do to get a better result. Whilst on paper the idea of engagement mapped campaigns is interesting, the reality is that practical change is going to be difficult, particularly in budgetary terms.

At first, I thought that this meant diversion of cash spent on search into display, rich media and social networks, but the reality of the engagement mapped campaign is that it is search, both SEM and SEO, is more important than ever. My realisation here is that engagement mapping would prove that these events taking place closer to the bottom of the AIDA funnel are less efficient in CPA or CPO terms than perceived in the past.

Here’s a simplified worked example for a fictional business that illustrates my thinking;

Big Shoes PLC has been running search and display campaigns for the last year and has hit the following results based on attributing the conversion to the final advertising event;

The company sells 100 pairs of shoes a day.
The company spends a total of €1,200 every day, of which €800 is spent on search and €400 is spent on display
80% of the sales are directly attributed to search and 20% to display
Display Campaign Average CPO is €20
Search Campaign Average CPO is €10
The current blended CPO for all spend is therefore €12

Faced with this information, the marketing director would see that search is obviously the most cost-efficient way to generate sales and given that budgets are under pressure, diverting money to this comms channel is the obvious route. So he goes ahead and does it.

The subsequent effect of doing this is that the search CPO remains at €10 but volume of sales drops to 40 pairs of shoes per day, despite having €1,200 available to spend they can only spend €400 of the cash because not enough searches for big shoes are being performed because customers are not aware.

In an engagement mapped model, the Marketing Director might have seen things a little bit differently before making the decision to move the spend, because it would have been apparent that exposure to display advertising was driving customers to look for big shoes on the search engines and the headlines may have looked something like this -

The company sells 100 pairs of shoes a day.
The company spends a total of €1,200 every day, of which €800 is spent on search and €400 is spent on display
40 of the sales are directly attributed to search alone
10 of the sales are directly attributed to display alone
50 of the sales are attributed to Display & Search
Search Only Average CPO is €10 and total spend is €400
Display Only Average CPO is €20 and total spend is €200
Search & Display engagement mapped CPO is €12 and total spend is €600 (€200 on display and €400 on search)
The current blended CPO for all spend is still €12

Given the added dimensions of the data, the marketing director can see that whilst the headline costs are the same, for search and display engagement mapped attributed sales, every €1 spent on display was followed by a €2 spend on search was able to generate a sale at €12.

Given this information, the Marketing Director decides to increase the spend on display and search to generate sales more efficiently and use the additional sales revenue to fund the additional campaign costs, the outcome was as follows;

The company now sells 200 pairs of shoes per day
The company spends a total €2,000 every day
40 sales are attributed to search alone with a spend of €400 and a CPO of €10
20 sales are attributed to display alone with a spend of €400 and a CPO of €20
120 sales are attributed to search and display with a spend split of €800 n display and €400 on search generating a CPO of €10.

In this example, The total spend was increased by €800, but the new blended CPO of all sales together reduced by €2 per unit and sales increased by 100 units per day, this demonstrated an increase overall efficiency or simply put, The Marketing Director was able to make a good decision that allowed him to increase sales and reduce the advertising spend required to generate each order.

Whilst this model is certainly over-simplified and excludes other factors such as site conversion and underlying sales, it simply illustrates the point that input at the top of the AIDA funnel drives output at the bottom, which is the central theory behind engagement mapping based advertising tracking.

Conclusion

I concluded my own thinking that attribution at the top of the funnel has some validity, but there is only one way to find out if it really can be used to generate actual sales in the manner generated by the simple example shown above, it’s unlikely that the results would be as quick or as dramatic.

Engagement mapping our campaign activity could provide a first step in understanding the relationships between display exposure, search activity and ultimately conversion.

In perfect world, there would be a tool that tells us at which point the activities at the top of the funnel actually start to have an effect on a prospect’s purchase cycle, allow us to be present when that starts to happen and sequence messaging in the right order. Whilst this is pretty much impossible to do without having a one to one relationship every prospect. That isn’t going to happen anytime soon, but it’s a nice thought.

The best place to find out more about how engagement mapping works is with the folks from Microsoft Advertising themselves, here’s a link; http://www.atlassolutions.com/institute_engagementmapping.aspx

Like just about everyone involved with the internet, I have been following the various stories about Twitter with interest and have even had a dalliance, albeit short lived, with a Twitter account myself.

As with the first internet bubble in the 90’s, Boom 2.0, has actually produced some solid businesses that are well on their way to being, if not already, profitable. Google has successfully monetised YouTube thanks to the might of it’s adwords platform, linkedin.com has a solid underlying advertising/subscription hybrid business model and Facebook recently announced that it’s advertising sales efforts are helping it through to operational profitability thanks to the vast levels of traffic to the site. Twitter, however, has yet to generate any revenue and perhaps more importantly has yet to announce it’s revenue generation model, Twitter have said that there are no immediate plans to add advertising to the service so the investment really is a gamble on the unknown which reminds me of some of the early dot coms that subsequently crashed and burned.

With the current lack of revenue generating activity in mind, I have given some thought to Twitter’s estimated valuation and whether or not I think Twitter will be a success or a horror story.

I started my thought process with the basis of the $1 Billion valuation, which is approximately twice that of Domino’s Pizza. Twitter currently has about 54 Million visitors each month according to various reports from Hitwise and Nielsen. The same companies also report a retention rate of approximately 40% and that the stratospheric growth has naturally started to slow. It is also reported that many users access the service through 3^rd party applications and devices which makes the actual figure somewhat difficult to accurately measure, but rather than apply a multiplier I have decided to take the 54 Million user figure as the baseline, because the valuation should stack up at this level if it is realistic.

Based on 54 Million users, The $1 Billion valuation put’s the current Twitter user base at a value of $18.51 per user, assuming twitter opt for an advertising based model at $2 CPM, they would need to serve 9,255 paid ads to each user to generate it’s purported value in revenues. Assuming 80% sell through, they would need to serve 11,568 ads to every user, if there were two ad’s on every page, each user would need to view 16 pages each and every day of the year.

To add demographic targeting may be a challenge, due to limited data requirements at sign-up. However, given the nature of the content being produced and consumed by it’s user base, there is an opportunity to develop much more exciting contextual relevance tools that would surface advertising based on the nature of the content being read or written, much in the same way as Google does with it’s adwords for blogger software, this would prove more attractive and more efficient for advertisers, subsequently generating improved CPM’s or CPC’s, a partnership with Google or Microsoft could provide some of the enabling technologies and the client-side reach to facilitate this if Twitter decided not to go it alone. Doubling the CPM’s I estimated in this way would halve the requirement to 4,628 paid ads served to each user and the number of page views required to 8 a day.

Whilst the rough numbers I calculated above aren’t huge, the various studies I have read from Harvard University combined with reports from the new breed of Social Media Analysts and Consultants that have sprung up across the globe, point towards a small number of users actually being active contributors to the Twitter site. Apparently 90% of the content is contributed by 10% of the users and the median number of tweets per user is just 1.  The reality here is that only Twitter and possibly the Google Analytics team will know the actual statistics, but if this is true, it would place it’s core user base at just 5.4 Million, which multiplies the required advertising for each active user by a factor of 10 and if this were the basis of the valuation, the $1Billion would value each of these active contributors at $181.50.  This changes the game significantly.

Another challenge with the standard advertising models for Twitter is that many brands have already adopted the tool to talk about their offers, discounts and product launches, with users opting in to a brand’s Twitter feed. Dell have well publicised their use of Twitter as a direct marketing channel in this way, although the $1 Million of sales they tracked back to Twitter represented just 0.0017% of their total revenue. However, To capitalise on the rising trend of brands adopting the tool in this way, Twitter are well positioned to provide   value added services to those brands and to do this from a more authoritative position than the hoards of Social Media Analysts I described above. I wouldn’t like to try to value the provision of consultancy services, but I doubt that this would cover it’s Billion dollar price tag.

All of this is happening at a time when Facebook is hot on Twitter’s heels with it’s Facebook Lite product, Google have the reach and capability to deliver a competitive product, AOL are busy with Bebo and Yahoo! is about to embark upon £100 Million worth of branding activity for whom short message style status updates are a staple of it’s leading Messenger product. Thinking about the other possible routes for Twitter, it may continue to grow it’s user base, it may find a way to monetise the trend data and content that it generates and most importantly it may find an appropriate suitor who has the existing reach and capability to make profit a reality for the business.

Twitter is a great service for those who use it, It’s a powerful communication tool for businesses, it’s provided wonderful stories, excitement and hype from elections to conflicts and now in funding, but in my view, attempting to monetise the site in it’s current state via advertising means that Twitter will be an over-hyped horror story for the investors involved, I just hope that they have something up their sleeves that I have missed, but if it was my money, I wouldn’t be investing.

]]> http://gordonnewman.wordpress.com/2009/09/27/billion-dollar-birdy-18-51-per-user/feed/ 0 gordonnewman http://gordonnewman.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/bing/ http://gordonnewman.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/bing/#comments Sun, 31 May 2009 11:23:46 +0000 gordonnewman http://gordonnewman.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/bing/ ]]> Microsoft have taken the wraps off Bing this week, and the vapournet is giving off it’s usual gas. There are positive reviews, negative reviews and the general will it / won’t it be a Google-beater.

I quite like the look of it, from what I have seen the presentation and usability looks good. Most importantly, if Microsoft can woo users it will create the much needed competition that the search space is unfortunately lacking. I read an article a few years ago, I don’t remember where exactly, but I do remember that it said, if only microsoft’s live search was a little bit less rubbish, then it could be a contender. I think this still holds true.

I have been a customer of Google for a good number of years now, not just a search user but someone who actually buys sponsored listings for either myself or companies that I have worked with. The thing that always struck me about my dealings with them is the attitude they seem to have that, whether correct or not, gives the impression that – we’re the big guys here and you need us a great deal more than we need you. I couldn’t ever imagine taking this stance with any of my customers, this is because they will quite happily switch their business to another provider in the blink of an eye, however, Google’s dominance in their field means that this is not an option for it’s customers. Competition is good, it improves standards, and this is where I think the real opportunity lies for Bing.

Google have great products, but their account management is lacking at best. It will be good to see some competition and I hope it gets Google to raise there game.