Yahoo! & Their Social Media Integration

Yahoo has recognized that their value offering to the marketplace isn’t search, and it that this has essentially been true for a while now.  Since last fall, Microsoft has been serving Yahoo users Bing results, and Bing has been eating into their share of the search space as well.  Therefore, the decision makers have wisely chosen to focus on their core competency, which is being one of the most visited content hubs on the web.

They recognize that they can’t remain static though, and that social and sharing is the future of the digital space, especially for marketers.  Plain old banner ads will always have their place, but they just aren’t targeted or engaging enough on their own, and they lack the sexiness of more recent ad units to hit the market.  Thus, Yahoo decided that they would team up with Facebook, and create what is actually a pretty interesting experience platform that attempts to blend paid and earned media more seamlessly than any other.

Essentially, by linking your Yahoo login to your Facebook page, what you get is a carousel/toolbar that consists of your friends faces when you are anywhere in Yahoo’s properties.  If you hover over any of those pictures, it will show you what that friend has been reading/sharing (within Yahoo).  It also has a feature that will show you any comments that your friends have made regarding a piece of content, which allows you to essentially combine your content consumption with social dialogue, and will push your comments out to appear on your Facebook page as well.

The advertising part of this comes in the form of new ad units that they are creating.  Essentially these “road block” or “pause sign” ads will be branded banners set at the bottom of an article, which contain a question, or quiz, or other interactive feature based not directly on the products/services of the advertising company, but on the content that the user is looking at, in the form of a “sentiment slider” that the user can move along a continuum to express their level of agreement with a particular statement.  The example shown to us was in a travel article, and the unit asked the reader to choose which option was his/her dream vacation: skiing in Tahoe, laying on a beach in Hawaii, or hiking in [some good hiking place].

The ad featured a small JetBlue logo, but upon clicking a choice the user was given the option of sharing their choice in Facebook, which would link to the poll unit and tell all their friends that they like skiing, or hiking, or what have you.  This would then lead other users back to the content, which is theoretically relevant to them, and another small JetBlue sponsored item in the sidebar, as well as a traditional JetBlue ad at the bottom.  All very cleverly integrated so that the user can interact with the content and their social network without ever feeling like they are having a product pushed at them.

The product seems decent, and the integration itself feels like a well-built technology, in terms of user experience.  The automatic nature of the passive sharing part of this collaboration, the part that automatically tells your friends what you are reading on Yahoo, will probably be very popular, though I will be curious to see how many conversations occur in this space.  As an advertiser though, I have a few issues with the new unit.

First of all, and this is probably just my bias as a search marketer, I don’t really think that it should be a CPM (cost per million impressions) buy.  It is contextually targeted, though only at the vertical level, rather than keyword (this also feels like a missed opportunity for relevance), and Yahoo simply chooses a bundle of articles for the ad to run in.  Given that the entire pitch and idea is built around interaction however, between the brand and the user, the user and the content, the user and their social network, etc., it really feels like this media should be bought on a pricing system that is also based around interaction.  When I brought this up to Patrick Albano, who is Yahoo’s VP of social, mobile, and innovation, he said that that was something they might consider in the future.  I am not holding my breath.

The other thing is that the whole point of not having a regular ad unit that contains product/brand messaging to drive the user to the company’s online assets (either website or social platform), is that this unit is not really supposed to feel like advertising, it is supposed to feel like part of the content.  If that’s the case, and since they themselves used the “pause sign” terminology, I think that interaction rates would be much higher if they moved it to the fold, and plopped it right in the middle of the article, to actually make it feel like part of the content.  If you put something all the way at the bottom of the page, a lot of people aren’t going to take it in or associate it with their consumption.  When I made this suggestion, they were much more receptive and indicated that it could actually be something they change after it has been in the market for a bit, maybe Q2 next year.

The last issue, and this is often a problem with advertising in the social space right now, is measurement.  They seem a little unclear on success metrics, or even anything beyond clicks, but their idea is to build a brand favorability/purchase intent study into the cost of a buy.  Given that it will have to be survey-based, that seems like a rather ham-handed way of tacking “value” onto the offering in order to help justify selling in the cost to clients.  It’s a very non-scientific, ethereal thing to try and measure when onsite interaction seems like the obvious way to go. 

Overall, it’s an interesting new experience for users and advertisers, but it is a product that I will be happy to wait for, and just sit on the sidelines for the initial phase, instead of rushing to get in line for this. 

Google+ : What's Their Angle?

With Google+ finally rolled out to the general public and membership reaching 40 million users, the question becomes not whether it will be successful, but has it already peaked?  We know that brand profiles will be available soon, but beyond that what offerings are on the horizon to make this social network a daily destination, rather than a set-and-forget option in your Gmail account settings?  What is Google really after here?

Their search engine, the bread and butter of the Google empire, still holds around 60% of the market share, with the rest carved up between Yahoo and Bing, and to a lesser degree Ask.com and AOL.  You have to figure that if Google could get their social service to take a similar 30% bite out of Facebook, they would be absolutely thrilled.  Are they likely to do that though?  How many people do you know who have signed up for Google+ and stopped using Facebook?  Right now it seems more like a curiosity than a platform that people are going to move over to full time.

Normally to make a new market entrance like this really successful you want to have some integration in order to take the burden off of the user.  As of now, one of the main complaints that you will hear about Google+ isn’t that the features aren’t attractive, but simply that the initial set-up is work, and more importantly, work that the users have already done on Facebook.  Inertia is a powerful force, and people don’t like having to do the same thing twice.  If you could import your friend list, copy all of your “likes” as ”+1s,” and port your privacy settings over, it might be more attractive, but there is no way that this unholy marriage will ever be consummated.

Which brings us back to the question of, “what is Google’s” long-term strategy here?”  Are they simply looking to get users to spend time on another of their properties so that they will have space for a few display ads? 

In marketing, Facebook ads are certainly something that people are paying for, though the results have been mixed and there is still relatively little information provided in terms of on-site metrics.  Measuring the success of a FB buy is difficult, and the question of whether to direct users to a brand site versus a profile page remains unanswered, depending on the goal of the campaign and whether one platform or the other holds some sort of unique user experience like a contest or a promotional giveaway.  The advantage to Facebook ads is almost entirely in the demographic targeting that is available, which makes sense given how much personal information people include in their profiles.

Still, to make that attractive as a marketing feature, you need a certain critical mass both in terms of the number of users (since for any given company/product you are only targeting a narrow slice of the consumers), as well as the time that they spend on the network per day (since they won’t see many ads if they just log in and log out).  Google+ has nowhere near that volume yet, and won’t soon, as they are still below 10% of the membership that Facebook has.

The “hangout” real-time meeting function offers a bit more interest and utility, and is certainly an offer that is distinct from anything that Facebook does, but it is a very limited engagement option, and it isn’t a hub that people will spend hours logged into every day.  As a multimedia tool it is appealing, but not necessarily a draw to the casual social networking user.

Really, you have to figure that for Google the goal here is just to be able to collect more user data, and be able to connect it to the vast archive of data that they have already.  Imagine if you could marry the personal information that users put in their Facebook profile, to the detailed search logs that are created when those users look things up in Google.  The dossier that Google will be able to produce on 50-100 million users will be so detailed and in-depth that the retargeting (and regular targeting) options will be incredible.  Having not only demographic information to target your consumers with, but also an explicit search history will allow an even greater level of ad relevance than Facebook can offer now (which is why people wonder why they haven’t gotten into the search game yet).

Taking this one step further though, I wonder if what we are seeing won’t lead back to Google TV.  Remember that idea?  When your television was going to become your main point of contact with the internet as well?  I wonder if they are not setting themselves up for an incredible targeted TV buy application in the future. 

Think about it:  The real problem with television advertising has always been a lack of targeting capability.  You can show during certain times or on certain networks when you think your targeting audience will be watching, but other than that you are just blasting your message out into the world and hoping you hit something.  It is the shotgun approach to marketing, and not very efficient.

But imagine if your consumers have Google TV.  They are logged into their profile to see if they have any messages from friends (or maybe they just finished a “hangout” using the built in webcam, or a partnership with Microsoft and their Kinect hardware), then that runs in the background while they watch television. 

Suddenly, Mountain Dew wants to buy an ad, and Google can say to them, “we will show your TV spot only to males, aged 14-32, who have listed an interest in mountain biking, extreme sports, computer games, programming, soda, rock music, Doritos, or whatever else, based on their Google+ profiles.  You pay based on the available impressions that we can give you at whatever time, so if it is 8 pm. on a Thursday and there are 2.4 million people who fit the criteria that you set up, we will deliver you TV spot to all of them, and only them, for $XXXX.”

Think of the revolution in advertising that could take place if Google can just get people to be logged into the device that they watch TV on.  Suddenly, most of the inefficiency of TV buys disappears, and Google has a massive back-door entrance to a marketplace that they have only recently established a toe-hold in.  How this would need to be structured with the networks is another thing, but as more and more media is consumed on YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu even that problem becomes more manageable.

Google doesn’t have to fight Facebook, they just have to play in the space long enough to gather the user data that they need.  How does this not make sense?  If it isn’t Google’s plan, it should be.  More specific targeting is the trend in the advertising world, and this is a way to bring search-level relevance to the massive budget world of TV, with Google in prime position to lead the charge, if they can only put all of the pieces together.

This may only be a wild theory today, but check back in a few years.  I will take wagers.