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8 Search and Social Takeaways from Covario INFLECTIONPoint 2012
Feb 10th
How to be smart with a strict budget, the importance of timing and levity in social media, retaining value in SEO, content marketing, and the convergance of search and social were among the hot topics, tips, and takeaways at INFLECTIONPoint 2012.
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8 Search and Social Takeaways from Covario INFLECTIONPoint 2012 – Search Engine Watch
Feb 10th
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8 Search and Social Takeaways from Covario INFLECTIONPoint 2012
Search Engine Watch by Miranda Miller, February 10, 2012 Comments SEO agency and software firm Covario welcomed clients, non-profits and media to Huntington Beach for their 6th annual INFLECTIONPoint conference Feb. 6 to 8. The sessions and networking time were … |
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Google Moves Away From Large Navigation Drop Down Menu
Feb 10th
A few months ago, Google introduced a new navigation bar that was black and very large. It was part of the Google+ changes across Google’s properties. Last night, Google announced yet another change to that top bar navigation. The most noticeable change is that most of the main search options…
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Watch Out Netflix: Amazon to Stream Everything From Spongebob to Jersey Shore
Feb 8th
Amazon’s on-demand streaming video offering just got a whole lot more attractive. The company announced today that they signed a deal with Viacom, allowing them to offer thousands of new videos from sources like MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, BET and Nickelodeon, among others.
In total, Amazon Prime will have over 15,000 videos available for streaming, including some very popular television shows. Amazon launched its video streaming service about a year ago with 5,000 videos. With today’s announcement, that number is now tripled.
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The move comes just as Netflix struggles to rebound from a rough 2011. One of the ways it’s hoping to do so is by launching original, Web-only TV content like the new series “Lilyhammer.” That strategy is only in its infancy so it remains to be seen how it will play out. In the meantime, Amazon Prime is slowly emerging as a serious potential competitor to Netflix.
Wired’s Tim Carmody argued recently that Amazon is particularly well-positioned to emerge as a such a competitor, not only to Netflix but to cable television as well.
Amazon Prime still has some growing to do, and for now the service is tied to Amazon’s free shipping service of the same name. GigaOm’s Ryan Lawler argues that unbundling the two and launching a stand-alone streaming service could make the service an even stronger contender for Netflix’s throne as king of this space.
It’s worth keeping in mind that Amazon Prime Instant Video only launched in February of last year. Netflix has been around since 1997 and launched its Watch Instantly streaming feature in 2007. Amazon is rising fast, and its clear that digital content is a growing priority for the company, especially now that its also sells its own media tablet.
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Q&A: Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley on What He’s Learning From Twitter and What’s Next
Feb 8th
Foursquare, about to celebrate its third birthday, is big but not huge. It has signed up 15 million users, hired over 100 employees and now boasts several million check-ins per day. That is impressive work for three years, but it must keep growing.
To do so, Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley says the company is in the process of redesigning its mobile app for a broader audience, disassembling it and trying to put its features back together in a way that’s more useful and interesting. It has also launched new features on its Web site, such as the neat and powerful “Explore” tool, which can help you find cool places to visit in your neighborhood or in an entirely new city.
As Twitter realized a few years ago, Crowley says Foursquare is seeing a big chunk of its growth from people who want to use parts of Foursquare, but not necessarily broadcast to the world. That means building a service that’s useful to more casual users, and not just early Foursquare diehards.
I recently sat down with Crowley at the company’s brand new, roomy headquarters in New York City, for an idea of what’s next. Here’s a lightly edited transcript of our chat.
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ReadWriteWeb: Where is Foursquare right now?
Dennis Crowley: I think we’re starting to get to the point where people are starting to see where the product is going and where the vision is going. The most exciting stuff for me to watch is all these people who have been Foursquare users for a year or so, writing their own blog posts and tweeting their own stuff about “oh, now I get it.”
After we launched Explore on the Web, they’re like, “This isn’t about points and badges anymore. This is about using the data that Foursquare’s getting from check-ins in order to do all this interesting stuff about surfacing things that are nearby, things that I might like, places I should go, experiences that I should have.” That’s been our goal all along.
One of the big tasks that we have this year is getting people to think of the product more as something that’s all about discovery and introducing them to new places, and making their experience in new cities and unfamiliar neighborhoods easier for them. As opposed to just checking in to unlock points and badges. I think we’re still stuck with a little bit of that stereotype, and this year’s about us getting out of that.
Foursquare’s new Web-based “Explore” feature.
How do you get past that stereotype and grow?
The challenge isn’t really that dissimilar than some of the growing pains and hazing that Twitter went through. For a long time, Twitter was “oh, it’s just people tweeting what they had for lunch, or that they’re going to the movies.” That wasn’t interesting for a lot of people.
Then they hit a moment that was a little bit of critical mass and a little bit of clarity, where people started using it to break news and share headlines and spread information. And that’s when it started clicking for a lot of people. For me, I was always interested in it, but when the plane landed in the Hudson and that’s how you were learning stuff faster than CNN was breaking it, or when Michael Jackson died, those were the big moments that I think solidified Twitter’s importance for a lot of people.
For us, we’re starting to get to that point where people see that we’re more than just a standard check-in app. You can go into Foursquare any time of the day and it will recommend interesting things that are nearby. So it’s not analogous – it’s not exactly the same as the Twitter experience. But we have that problem of perception that we’re still working to overcome.
I look at what those guys went through, and if you just keep pushing at the vision long enough, it will eventually turn itself around or make itself clear to people. That’s why, looking at those blog posts, it’s really rewarding for me, because I can see that the change is already happening already.
What will you change?
There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done in the app. We’re in the process of going through a redesign in the app, in a sense. We’re basically taking all the stuff we built over the last two years or so, disassembling it… You put all the pieces on the table, and figure out, “Okay, what is the best way to put these pieces back together so that it tells the story of Foursquare in the way that we want it to be told?” And I think if we can do that properly, then that’s our ticket to really being able to effectively communicate how powerful the data is and how powerful a lot of the tools are.
A peek at Foursquare’s brand-new, sunny headquarters in New York
What about making money? Will we start to see more advertising-based content in streams?
It’s a project for the near term. That’s a lot of what the Amex stuff is. (Foursquare has a broad partnership with American Express.) It’s experimenting with merchants to figure out a way that we can put products that are monetizable into the Foursquare product, in a way that you don’t look at it and say, “I can’t believe Foursquare put advertising in the stream.” You say, “this is great, there’s a $10 discount here.”
Since 2009, we’ve been pushing different ways to get merchants involved in the conversation with users. If users are looking for places to go, put merchants in there to help entice them. We did it initially with mayor specials, we’re starting to do it now with the Amex stuff, and we’ll be continuing to push that.
Our belief has always been, in order to connect people to places, and places to people, there’s a way to insert a dialogue with a merchant that in a way doesn’t feel like advertising, because the users are getting some tangible benefit out of it. It can be just special treatment, like you get to cut the line. It could be that you save a couple bucks. It could be that when you bring your friends, you get something special. There’s a whole wide variety of it. It’s just rewarding the user for things that they’d be doing anyway with Foursquare.
This is a bit out-there, but Netflix has built up a huge advantage for its streaming movie service by getting it installed everywhere, from new TVs to videogame systems. Can you use that concept for Foursquare, in a car perhaps?
Yeah, why not? I think anywhere where you see maps. Any map should have Foursquare dots on them. The dots could be representative of a number of things. It could be where your friends are right now. Or once you put your car in park, these are the five things you should be doing in this neighborhood.
And you could see a world where it’s like, here’s five things that I’m looking at, and I instantly send them to my phone, and then as I’m walking around, Radar (a serendipity-manufacturing Foursquare feature) buzzes me to let me know about them. When you think of all the other places that you’d probably encounter maps, being able to put Foursquare dots on them is a really interesting thing for us.
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5 ‘Moneyball’ Tips for Search Marketers from Billy Beane
Feb 8th
Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane talked baseball, metrics, and people calling him crazy, with an audience of search marketers and corporate executives in a keynote yesterday at Covario’s InflectionPoint 2012 conference in California.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Interesting Quotes From Google’s Search Lead, Amit Singhal
Feb 8th
Amit Singhal is the man who is responsible for Google web search. All the searches done on Google are technically under his watch. So when an interview was posted named The human search engine, where Mark Prigg from the London Evening Standard interviewed Amit Singhal, I got excited. The interview…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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Mobile Carriers and OEMs Get Android App Testing Cloud from Apkudo
Feb 8th
When developers think of application testing, it always centers around how an app will perform on a particular device. This is especially important in the Android ecosystem that has upwards of 300 devices from a variety of original equipment manufacturers worldwide. From the inverse perspective, nobody ever thinks of the testing needs of the carriers and OEMs.
Cloud-based testing platform Apkudo thought about manufacturers and carriers with a new release of device analytics platform. Manufacturers can now test devices against the top Android apps before releasing. The idea is that if a device is tested from the supplier side, fewer handsets will be returned by consumers, potentially saving manufacturers billions of dollars.
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Apkudo tests with what it calls a “device cloud.” The configuration of more than 300 Android devices are set up in the cloud and mobile app developers can run their projects through that cloud to make sure it will work across OEMs and Android system versions.
For Apkudo’s device analytics, the opposite approach is taken. Manufacturers and network operators can test their apps against the contents of the Android Market. Apkudo will run a device against the top 200 apps in the Market to test functionality with the touchscreen, keyboard, audio, device access (accelerometer and GPS, for instance) along with performance characteristics.
This should provide developers, network operators and manufacturers with tools against Android fragmentation. As we noted last week, there is actually less fragmentation of Android devices than many think, with the optimal Android handset running on a 4.3-inch screen on version 2.3 Gingerbread. Yet, with the sheer volume of devices and applications available in the Android ecosystem, testing is still one giant headache.
Apkudo can speed up on the process that OEMs must go through to test devices. According to CEO Josh Matthews the process normally takes 6-8 weeks. Apkudo says it can do it in three days.
Device analytics will break down the results into two categories: characterization and optimization benefits. Characterization benefits help operators target competing devices while expanding their own portfolios. Imagine it as a bench mark against the rest of the ecosystem. Optimization benefits recommends how devices can be made better before release to be truly competitive in the market place.
The first U.S. carrier to sign on with Apkudo is MetroPCS. Apkudo also has agreements with “most major OEMs” in the Android ecosystem.
App developers should be happy with Apkudo’s testing abilities because it means that the OEMs could have a more efficient testing program to make sure apps work on their devices. When it comes to app functionality on Android, developers need to work the manufacturers and carriers to ensure a quality experience. The end of fragmentation, after all, is a two way street.
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WunderMap Shows Weather From the Past & Future
Feb 6th
Weather Underground’s interactive WunderMap now enables users to go back and forth in time. WunderMap overlays a Google map with all kinds of weather information, including temperatures, radar, webcams, ski reports, dedicated services for fires, tornadoes, hurricanes and more.
The map now displays a clock icon that lets users scroll through the past and future to view historical and forecast data. Most data go back to around 2000. It can also display forecasts for several days ahead. It’s amazing to go back to historic storms and watch them happen all over again.
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Google has built casual weather tools for its own Maps service, and we worried about WunderMap when it launched. With so many people already using Google Maps, the ability to check the weather there makes it all the more convenient at WunderMap’s expense.
Even Google Earth has weather, displaying real-time animations of clouds, rain and snow. But Weather Underground offers so much more information. Even for casual weather-watchers, there’s much to learn here.
The layers that include time control features are radar, weather stations, photos, tornadoes, webcams, fire and storm reports. Satellite images can project forecasts but not past data. Check it out at wunderground.com/wundermap.
Lead photo courtesy of Shutterstock
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Analytics From “Most Social Super Bowl” Reveals Chat Wasn’t About Football
Feb 6th
Although predictions last week raised expectations about the role that social media would play in reshaping what has historically been one of the most engaging non-holiday events in the U.S. every year, the first analysis of yesterday’s public social network data by advertising analysis firm Networked Insights makes a compelling revelation: Almost three-fourths of the chat taking place among Twitter and Facebook users Sunday night had nothing to do with the game itself.
In fact, according to Networked Insights’ data, the Super Bowl topic that trended in third place was “Brady,” but when you break that topic down, you realize it may actually have been more about Mrs. Tom Brady – supermodel Gisele Bundchen, who appeared on camera perhaps once during the game, whom Tweeters evidently referred to as “Mrs. Brady” or perhaps “Lady Brady” – than about the New England Patriots quarterback.
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Though it may not be entirely surprising that commercials constitute the bulk of online chatter during the event, it’s astonishing to see that TV commercials make up some 42% of all Super Bowl-related online chatter. Although New York Giants running back Ahmad Bradshaw scored what Super Bowl history may record as the most awkward game winning touchdown – slowly being seated on the goal line after trying to stop himself short at the 1-yard line – his maneuver only elicited a minor wave compared with Mrs. Brady.
A spokesperson for Networked Insights told RWW this afternoon that part of the reason for the lopsided topic mix may have to do partly with the game. It was a low-scoring game with only one interception, whose outcome was only sealed when the clock reached zero. It may have been such a nail-biter, in other words, that true football fans may have been biting their nails rather than tapping their keys.
“It’s not surprising to see viewers’ commentary of Super Bowl advertisements surpass those of the game itself,” Dan Neely, NI’s CEO, tells RWW this afternoon. “Brands can partly attribute this social lift as a by-product of a low-scoring game that allowed viewers to discuss the commercials.”
A word about the volume of tweets: Naturally, NI’s tracking included tweets that included the hashtag #superbowl. NI estimates tweets to that hashtag alone to have numbered around 1.6 million, though it will have updated, hardened data later in the week. That’s as many tweets as are normally archived in a single day, the NI spokesperson tells us.
As an analysis firm for advertisers, NI itself was concerned more with the commercials than the football. Gaining the most overall viewer response among celebrity endorsers was the tattooed, underwear-wearing veteran of what “far’ners” call football, David Beckham. His shorts reached out to 39% of folks talking about just the Super Bowl commercials (as opposed to the game), according to NI’s figures. This is what NI means by “share of value.” Sentiment among chatting consumers was 23% more positive than negative, suggesting the H&M undies went over well. Coming in second was Clint Eastwood, whose two-minute ad that may have been for Chrysler but may really have been for the city of Detroit, had 21% “share of value,” while 9% of the discussion was more positive than negative.
Though NI gives Chrysler kudos for choosing Eastwood, it notes that the resulting chatter was three times more about him than about Chrysler.
By comparison, as much as 28% of folks chatting about Super Bowl topics during halftime were discussing Madonna’s halftime show. Their discussion constituted 32% of Super Bowl-related social traffic by volume. Sentiment for Madonna was generally negative (-21%), with tweets about her staying relatively short, with a particularly negative peak towards the end where the lights converged to reveal the message, “WORLD PEACE.” By contrast, sentiment for her on-stage co-star MIA – whose little birdie expressed exactly the opposite sentiment – ran generally positive at +6%, commanding 3% of the discussion. The star of the halftime show ended up being Nicki Minaj, whom perhaps more viewers recognized than Clint Eastwood. Minaj commanded a 7% share of value, with 26% of it more positive than negative.
Breaking down just the Madonna comments, MI found that as much as 2% of this subgroup were making comments about her age (53). This group was split down the middle as to whether she looked great for her age, with the negative group making snarky comments about such things as her “veiny” arms. Sentiment turned positive when she began singing “Like a Prayer,” which was originally released in 1989, though it tipped downward to -11% after she began her latest single, “Give Me All Your Luvin.’” (NI does not appear to have data regarding consumer sentiment about its spelling.)
“The takeaway for networks, producers, and sports leagues is the need to create multiple engagement points around content that is in sync with the interests of a target audience,” states NI’s Dan Neely. “Going forward, the winners will be the programs that leverage social technology to drive participation.”
What the Twitterers of the world may have missed Sunday night was the terrific sense of community and shared excitement. Just the NFL Experience – the week-long slate of activities in downtown Indianapolis among football fans who love the game and who keep their phones mostly in their pockets except to take pictures – pulled in some 265,000 people over a nine-day period, according to the latest estimates.
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