Smart Web Blog

Inspiration for Entrepreneurs & Leaders

What makes professionals tick - purpose, mastery and autonomy. Daniel Pink's inspirational video for one and all

 

Dinner Encounter - MetroFi Radios

I went out for dinner to Thai Pepper in Santa Clara on Saturday and had a nostalgic moment. I had spent countless hours near this pole working RF issues while at MetroFi. Some career moments are for ever...

What Delivers Advertising Performance - Search, Facebook or Mobile

I have lately been in many marketing conversations related to search, social and mobile customer acquisition.  When it comes to advertising, a diversified strategy is key to long term success, however, all advertising networks are not created equal. With Google recently announcing that 19% of their hotel queries come from mobile devices and Facebook marketers claiming social media ROI of upto 1000%, both mobile and social advertising are making inroads in advertiser value.

So, how does social and mobile advertising compare to search advertising?

Facebook advertising, mixed bag so far...

With over half a billion users, 250 million of which engage daily, and contributing on average 90 pieces of content a month, it's clearly the platform of choice for multi-billion dollar advertising by mega brands. The companies that have success on Facebook measure ROI  through mostly soft metrics such as converting social media members to followers, increasing referral traffic and brand awareness. According to this Forbes article, Facebook claims that it is  key and growing driver of online traffic to retailers. Facebook’s referral traffic to Amazon grew 328% year over year in Oct. 2010, while Google’s traffic dropped 2%. Facebook traffic to eBay grew 81% while Google traffic dropped 3%.

On the other hand, there remain a number of areas of  performance, that Facebook is still behind compared to search and display advertising. Despite accounting for 20% of online advertising traffic, Facebook cost an average of $.56 per thousand impressions (which is below most search engine averages). However, the click through rate (CTR) for Facebook ads is half of the general web advertising average, which is effectively $1.12 equivalent CPM. Despite being a very cost effective advertising channel, the World Federation of Advertisers says that less than a quarter of companies that advertise with Facebook are happy with their ROI. Also, another study finds that overwhelmingly, consumers were more likely to visit a companies website (and search for it) rather then visiting their Facebook profile. Company direct emails (yes, those spammy ones), were considered a better more trusted form of communication then a company’s Facebook page.

How about Facebook referral traffic? Will Facebook-referred visitors turn into buyers at the same rate as visitors from Google? One would expect it to be a lower rate, since the intent of visitors coming from Facebook isn't as clear or uniform as that of Google-referred visitors.  The same analogy also applies to gamers on the social networks. Popular Zynga games such as Farmville, Mafia Wars etc., have a large number of gamers.  I haven't heard (caveat my limited exposure) of real success stories yet and it seems that the ROI on these social games is far from optimal at this point.

 

Mobile CPA model fast evolving...

There's a lot of optimism in the air around mobile advertising in publishing ― but how to measure a successful campaign is still evolving. 

Reach is still the most important criterion for advertisers to judge success of a campaign. With mobile we can measure unique users much more accurately than with any other medium. Mobile offers the opportunity for the advertiser to the reach the consumer at the right time and the right place using the right medium with the right message.

However, a wide range of mobile surveys have concluded that a large number ( infact 47%) of mobile app users say they click/tap on mobile ads more often by mistake than they do on purpose. Clicks may not  be an accurate metric for mobile advertising.

More recently, a large number game apps have started incorporating a CPA model. I recently downloaded a mobile game called, TapZoo. It had a built in call to action to get ahead and move faster to next levels. To navigate the game faster, you can either pay to get more coins/stars or download apps such as Groupon, LivingSocial etc., I tried downloading a couple of those apps but I find the lack of context, annoying (I guess you can tell that I'm a search person). I do, however, think that  mobile networks  will be able target better and also offer better metrics for advertisers in no so distant future.

 

Search -  Steady and Effective...

Google with over two thirds of the search market share continues to deliver steady and effective results. Generally speaking, SEM & SEO provide the best 1, 2 punch on customer acquisition. Further, with social playing a big role in SERP's,  SEO hones your social customer acquisition skills as well.

 

As much as  paid acquisition is a necessity in the short term,  one needs to have organic strategies for mobile, social media and search. Social Media consists of branded social community pages, social sharing, content distribution, publish video & assets to social portals, social display advertising  and campaigns embedded within the product that can generate Facebook "Like" campaigns. These social media campaigns also help with SEO which enables you to reach broader mobile cusotmer segment as well.

Sampling of Facebook Plugin Implementations

A week after Facebook announced a slew of new plugins, apis and features at it's annual F8 conference ( see here for my notes), some interesting concepts and use cases have started to come out.

Microsoft Docs.com

Docs.com makes it easy for one to discover, create and share documents on Facebook. The Facepile implementation right below the sign up button removes a lot of hesitation for new signups and enables customers to see friends who have already signed up to use the service. This is a great way for unknown brands or relatively new products to entice customers to move forward.

Levi Social Shopping

Levi's is one of the first major brands to integrate Facebook's social plugin into their online shop, turning it into a social shopping experience. When you click on "Friend's store" you see items sorted by most number of likes, over time these would probably be sorted by your friends' preferences. I also like the interesting experiment with showing birthdays on the page - not sure how that would be my preference but I certainly like their approach to trying out all aspects of the data they can retrieve.

Typepad's "Connect your Blog to Facebook" Integration

Connect your blog with Facebook fan base using the new "Like" widget. You can add Facebook's "Like" widget to your Blog sidebar and connect with your fan base on Facebook. As soon as you complete the connection process, it also creates an automatic admin page  so you can manage your fans and publish stories to your fans' News Feeds etc..

There are a slew of other facebook plugin implementations including CNN.com, Yelp, ImDB and others but apps have yet to hit critical mass to offer personalized recommendations - I expect in the next few months we'll see a large number of such implementations.

Facebook f8 - Social Graph and Connections API

I attended the Facebook F8 conference yesterday. Here are some takeways from the conference. The platform now offers some very compelling features for small business social engagement. Also, this could very well be the beginning of Facebook entering "Search".

Keynote Summary

• FB now has 400MM monthly unique visitors
• Reached 100MM mobile users in 3 years but has reached the same usage using FBConnect in 1 year – Connect is pretty powerful
• Policy update – They’ve removed the 24 hour limit on storing user data – you can now keep it forever
• Policy update – They are fully oAuth2.0 compliant, this simplifies the entire Single Sign on experience
• New Feature – Launched Graph API provides ability to read and write connections
• New Feature – Launched Social Plugins – like button, recommendations, activity, social bar
• New Feature – Single Currency  for gaming across multiple
• New Feature – Search – powerful search API  - e.g. http://graph.facebook.com/search?q=intuit+business+directory
• New Feature - Graph API – every object, connection and connections between objects can now be retrieved using a simple restful interface, e.g http://graph.facebook.com/nbandaru or http://graph.facebook.com/nbandaru/movies
• Docs.com – New Microsoft launch to coincide with the launch – uses some key features for ‘instant social connections’.

URLs

Open Graph Protocol - http://opengraphprotocol.org/
Facebook Insights/Analytics – http://facebook.com/insights
Keynote - http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/377
Social Plugins - http://developers.facebook.com/plugins

Open Social Plugins details

• For reading and writing
• plugins are like button, friends activity and recommendations
• Like Button – URLs become objects and you can provide meta data such as title, type, image, lat, long, street address etc... to associate with the URL ( see opengraphprotocol.org for details)
• FB thinks it’ll serve 1Billion “Likes” in 24 hours – offers a lot of meta data to search on and enable social recommendations
• Activity Plugin – This should be used to answer questions like “what’s most interesting social activity for this URL” - provides content that from other friends activities
• Recommendation Plugin – This could be used to answer questions like “what are the most interesting URLs on your site?”
• Facepile - shows profile pictures of the user's friends who have already signed up for your site.

Graph API details

• Simplicity is prime, it’s do over of existing API and fully RESTful -  full compliance with oAuth2.0 makes FBConnect very simple to implement
• Objects can be easily accessed in a browser – e.g. https://graph.facebook.com/vernal ( Vernal was the speaker for this session)
• 20+ different types of objects – people, pages, events, groups, photos
• Connections can be retrieved the same way – https://graph.facebook.com/vernal/friends – returns JSON array of all friends
• Connections between objects can be retrieved the same way  - http://graph.facebook.com/121213244/attending – returns all people attending an event ( with object id 121213244)
• Meta Data for a URL can be retrieved similarly – http://graph.facebook.com/121213244?metadata=1
• Search API - http://graph.facebook.com/search?q=intuit+business+directory – returns a JSON array

 

Collaborative Habits - Life Lessons for Working Together

Over the weekend, I had a chance to pick up Twyla Tharp's Collaborative Habit after reading the book jacket and hearing about her on NPR. The book was an easy read and had some interesting aspects. A good collaborator is easier to find than a good friend. If you've got a true friendship, you want to protect that; To work together is to risk it. Like Creativity, collaboration is a habit and one that takes practice and effort to master.

Despite not being into theater, I found some of her examples and references pretty generic in nature and generally applicable for all walks of life where collaboration is key.

Here are some aspects that I plan to practice for a long time:

• In business, "crowdsourcing" - assigning a task that used to be done by a single worker to whole communities - has become a powerful tool in product development process
• Collaboration may be a practice - a way of working in harmony with others - but it begins with a point of view. 
• If you want a successful first meeting, preparation pays. Get everything on your side before you say hello.
• In any collaboration, sub-ordinates & peers are as valuable as you allow them to be. Treat team members with respect and you will gain valuable collaboration
• Collaboration doesn't flourish if people decide to get together "whenever". It's remarkably effective, however when partners set a schedule and establish a routine - when working together becomes a habit. The sooner you establish a routine, the more smoothly your collaboration will advance.
• You need a challenging partner. In a good collaboration, differences between partners mean that one plus one will equal more than two.
• Despite the warmest, most precise email is no substitute for a face-to-face meeting
• Getting involved with your collaborator's problems almost always distracts you from your own. This can be tempting. That can be relief. But it usually leads to a disaster
• Any ceremonial event at the completion of a collaboration - is not about one individual. It's the celebration of a group endeavor. And that means, if you're the team leader, you want to make sure everyone on the team gets acknowledged.
• Unless their survival is at stake, institutions resist change and defend the status quo. Outsides are free agents. With less to defend, they're prone to challenge things as they are.
• Collaboration can be internal - an act of listening to others and then having a silent, private conversation with yourself.
• All artists ( or for that matter any professional) have "signature". Most of them guard closely. Again and again, the really smart and talented people don't hoard the "secrets" of their success - they share them.Excellence is more about so much more than craft.

And finally, what do you do when the world doesn't validate your vision?  - I love Twyla's description of the stages of healing and rebirth because I've gone through those myself during startup years and many other occassions

1. Start by mourning - Twyla suggests a fortnight but in real life you should be able pick yourself up and be back on track with a day or two.
2. We're still here, a little engaged, now looking up and a little optimistic and finally feeling the physical energy return
3. A new idea or concept is in play - what do I need to get this done and how do I build the right skills/tools
4. Yes, me Yes - I'm back in full swing
5. And finally, one last confrontation with oneself, this one internal. Am I eager to attack take this challenge on, Or am I losing my edge, or fooling myself with a rehash of old themes? Because, if that's the reality, is it a setup for another disappointment

All in all, the book is a great read and emphasizes the work habits that lead to success.

Impress your family with a home made vegetarian burrito

A couple months ago, my wife and I came up with the following recipe for a vegetarian burrito that has become very popular amongst our family and friends. It is a sure way to impress your kids and their friends as well. Here's the recipe that serves 4:

Ingredients:

• 1 Pack Rice-a-Roni ( Long grain wild rice original)
• 1 can black beans
• 1 can pinto beans
• 1 zucchini (diced)
• 5 garlic pods (minced)
• 1/2 medium onion chopped
• 3 medium tomatoes diced
• Olive oil
• 2-3 green chillies
• 1/4 green bell pepper
• chopped green cilantro - 1 tablespoon
• 1/2 lime ( squeezed juice)
• salt to taste
• 1/4 head iceberg lettuce chopped
• 1-2 avacados diced
• 1/2 cup grated cheddar cheese
• 2-3 canned jalapenos 
• Mission flour tortillas for burrito

Step1 - Prepare Burrito Rice

Prepare the rice according to the instructions on the box and set it aside

Step2 - Bean mix/stuffing

Fry onions and zucchini in the pan with olive oil for 3 mins - medium flame. Add beans and jalapenos and simmer down. Cook for 3-5 mins and remove from the stove. Add 1/2 of the grated cheese and mix. Let it cool down and set aside.

Step 3 - Salsa

Mix chopped tomatoes, minced garlic, green chillies, bell pepper, salt, cilantro, lime juice together with olive oil and set aside for 5 minutes. After 5 minutes mix the salsa with the cooled down bean mix.
You are now ready to assemble the burrito and serve

Step 4 - Serve and Enjoy

Warm the tortillas on a pan and place on the serving plate

Assemble in layers in the following sequence

Burrito Rice from Step 1

Bean mix/stuffing

lettuce

avacado

taco sauce

jalapeno ( if needed)

Wrap and Enjoy!

Launch of Small Business Information Portal - New Beta

Recently, we launched a new small business directory at business.intuit.com. It allows small businesses to claim their listing and upload valuable information for their customers to search for. You can search for Spas San Francisco or accountants in Los Angeles and get information about the reviews or certifications or any other type of information to make a decision. As I was checking around, I noticed an interesting post on facebook by one of the small businesses and how they can use reviews information to boost their business. See Byu-ti Salon in Santa Monica  post on facebook - Small businesses are definitely figuring out the value of online word of mouth and power of social media.

Why Local Businesses Lag in Benefitting from Online Feedback?

Last week, I came across an interesting post on Greg Sterling's Screenwerk blog about how online feedback is influencing consumer purchasing decisions. The survey and analysis conducted by Opinion Research Corporation concluded that  84 percent of Americans used online customer evaluations in making decision to purchase a product or service. Here's the breakdown on the types of products and services that were surveyed and reported.

While it is clear that travel and consumer electronic goods have reached some level of saturation, the most interesting aspect is that all "local services"  continue to trend up and still lag behind. Contrast this with the fact that, in the pre-online reviews era, local services were the most influenced category through word-of-mouth. I have often believed that information about local services are significantly skewed since they are hard to track. I also believe that numbers would be significantly lower if all the local categories were tallied. However, the following 3 aspects could explain the growth and adoption pattern in local services:

Fragmented Recommendations - There are more than 20 million small businesses and only a small percentage of them have online reviews. It is likely that people would look for different level of trust and authority on recommendations depending on the type of service. One may want a recommendation from a close friend/confidant for a wedding planner while they could easily take a recommendation from an anonymous online reviewer for a dining occasion. Also, if you are traveling for business/leisure and need a good local business recommendation there, you may not get a recommendation from a trusted source. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are definitely helping in eliminating the geography-based limitations but coverage-gap still remains a huge issue. The following picture illustrates the coverage vs. trust conflict in fragmented local business domain.

Review sites such as Yelp, Citysearch have played a huge role in generating reviews that could expand coverage but still their content generation prowess has been limited to major metropolitan areas and is very time & resource consuming. The slow but increasing growth in Opinion Research Corporation's survey may be directly a result of the penetration of such review sources. Review & recommendation aggregators may also be contributing the growth.

Convergence of Opinion (or lack thereof) - Reviews about consumer electronics tend to converge very quickly. For many gadgets, it comes down to product specs and price/performance comparison with others in the category. The early reviewers influence other buyers and ratings quickly reach a settling state. On the other hand, local products & services are very "touchy/feely" and experience tends to differ from person to person. Even a business with 50 reviews may not offer sufficient insight and trust for a prospective buyer to make a decision. This adds to the inability to make a purchasing decision about a local product/service.

Buried Reviews (sort of) - Despite being highly fragmented, local products are services are still the most discussed category amongst consumers. Whether in newsgroups, informal conversations, tweets or blogs, they still dominate the discussion in our daily lives. Many small businesses are rarely online. They may have a website, but between their operational challenges and limited budget, they find it extremely hard to build their real online presence.  The online reputation of a small business is essential to influencing and attracting new customers.  Small businesses need to work on moving the informal discussions in newsgroups, tweets, blogs and other online forums to formal review mechanisms, so they can be tracked and used as influencers in a consumer decision process.

BooRah joins forces with Intuit

I'm excited to announce that BooRah is now part of Intuit. Intuit has exceptional products, loyal customers, and, is highly focused on customer experience/satisfaction.  I'm thrilled that we’ll be applying our technology to help local business owners stay on top of and improve their online reputations!

It has been a very rewarding experience over the past 3 years since I started BooRah and many thanks to all my trusted friends and well-wishers.