6% are Natural Born Clickers

An interesting study crossed my screen recently.  According to this press release, media agency Starcom USA, behavioral targeting network Tacoda, and digital consumer insight company comScore collaborated on a research study whose results call into question how well click rates on ads measure a consumer base.

The study states that only 6% of the total Internet population represents 50% of the clicks on ads.  Online media companies may use click rates as points of negotiation with their clients, but if this study is accurate, that measurement is not a clear view of how many people are seeing these ads.  Further measurements from the study show no correlation between display ad clicks and brand metrics, and show no connection between measured attitude towards a brand and the number of times an ad for that brand was clicked.

So who are these clickers?  Reading some forums concerning the topic led to some interesting, and occasionally probably ideas:

• Young children that may click more than they should
• Overly frugal consumers fiendishly looking for a great deal
• First time Internet users
• Employees who click on their own ads to raise metrics
• Professional ‘ad clickers' who are hired to click to raise metrics

The ‘Heavy Clicker' is profiled in the study.  These users are typically between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40000.  They also spend four times more time online than the typical Internet user and are more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites.  Clearly, these are not typical Internet users, nor are they the type of people that many of the above suggestions implied.

As I mentioned in a past blog post, measuring click rates is archaic and unnecessary.  Ads on the Internet are not what they were promised to be-noninvasive and simple.

I think that it's actually sad that what could have been a great aspect of the Internet (essentially, selectable commercials) has been destroyed thanks to pop-up ads, spam, scams, and the need for online metrics.  It's time to move on to a new form of online advertising.

Facebook in the Real World

One of my friends sent me a link to a clip from a BBC comedy show named The Wall this morning.  This Facebook in the real world clip, which is found on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog on The Atlantic‘s site, shows a man knocking on an old acquaintance’s door. 

The visitor then proceeds to poke the bewildered bloke, tells him that they used to know each other but didn’t get along, requests that he be his friend, etc. while someone else posts embarrassing pictures on the wall of this bloke’s house for the rest of his friends to see.

As weird as this sounds, I think it is important for us to remember what you actually do on a social networking site.  While social networks are very useful, we must remember that sometimes we behave in ways that we would not do in real life.  That’s why this video is particularly funny and helpful for use to remember what exactly we’re doing on Facebook, MySpace, and similar sites.

Is UserVoice New or Recycled?

Fledging company UserVoice is attempting to provide focus groups to those companies that cannot afford focus groups.  The site's general idea is to moderate user ideas and complaints by means of formal comment boxes, polls, and ranking systems.  The three-person ‘Team UserVoice' is quoted as saying, "UserVoice adds structure to feedback and reduces the overhead of an honest dialog with our users – It creates a market around good ideas so we get more quality than quantity."

The interface is currently in its public beta stage, allowing (free of charge) access to its platform.  Those who sign up can create a page for their company, product, project, or even blog.  UserVoice just recently released the ability to add custom CSS to a company's page as well as c-name inclusion for a completely transparent user experience.  This means that the customer never perceives that they are on another site.  The idea is to put the UserVoice widget on the company's official site and allow users to comment on their company or specific products.  The company can then do several things:

1. Track user ideas as other users vote on them
2. Provide official responses to comments
3. Mark an idea as ‘planned'
4. Push out new features that users want
5. Collect fan mail

The new site has gained a lot of attention, but I question whether this new company can do things that are not already being done.  Sites like FeVote, Get Satisfaction, and Sales Force are already doing many of the things with which UserVoice claims to be able to help.  The only unique feature that I can discern is that UserVoice allows companies to create a specific page for themselves.  The effort seems to be made in keeping the comments more regulated and organized than the previously mentioned sites, but will that cause users to be less free with their suggestions and comments?  I applaud the company for creating a way for small to medium-sized businesses to have their own ‘focus groups' but it is going to be a couple of months before we will be able to decide if UserVoice shouts or gets silenced.

Newspapers and Google News: An Analysis

At the New Communications Forum conference last week, Chris O’Brien from the San Jose Mercury News mentioned during a presentation that 2/3rds of the traffic to the paper’s website comes from news aggregators (like Google News) and search engines.  This figure was higher than I expected, so I mentally filed away the tidbit to write about at some point.

Then today I came across a site called Newsknife, which breaks down which newspaper websites have the most articles appear in Google News.  I found this fascinating, so I quickly compared the twenty five newspapers that appeared most often in Google News with a list of the twenty five largest newspapers in terms of print circulation.  A couple of quick things jumped out at me:

• The Mercury News, Washington Times and Akron Beacon Journal were the papers that performed the best in Google News as compared to their print circulation.  For the Mercury News and Washington Times, I’d guess they do well because both papers have a lot of content niche news topics (silicon valley and politics) that are very popular on time.  So it makes sense that Google News might have a lot of their stories.  I have no idea why the Akron Beacon Journal is in Google News so much.
• The Wall Street Journal and Rocky Mountain News were the largest newspapers that did not appear on the list of top newspapers sites in Google News.  I suspect the Journal will start showing up soon given their recent deal with Google.  I don’t know what is going on with the Rocky Mountain News.

However, I was mostly left slightly baffled as to what to make of the data and why certain sites performed better than others.  How important is optimizing for Google News?  What is the impact of registration walls?  How important is the topics that are covered?  I think these questions are important to answers, as, based on the figures from the Mercury News, performance in search engines and news aggregators plays a huge role in the success or failure of a newspapers online program.  I’ll try to write more on this later after the data has a chance to sink in.

Anyway, below is the raw data.  Please share any thoughts you have in the comments.

We’re on Twitter

Around a year ago, I registered the username “bivings” on the micro-blogging platform Twitter on behalf of our firm, The Bivings Group. Our original intent in creating the account was to squat the username and protect our brand. We didn’t really intend to do anything with it.

This week, we decided to start actively using our account for a couple of reasons:

1. More and more, we’ve been counseling our clients to experiment with Twitter. It feels strange to give this advice when we aren’t using our own account effectively. “Doctor, heal thyself” as the saying goes.
2. Twitter doesn’t cost anything to use and the time investment required for us to update our account isn’t that great. So why not?
3. In the last few months, we’ve come across some great examples of companies using Twitter to further their brand. We were inspired by these success stories. Look for a blog post showing some examples later today.
4. Twitter isn’t mainstream yet, but it is on the cusp. It seemed like we should get in while the getting is good.
5. Lots of us here are already using Twitter and we like it. We thought thought it would be fun to launch a Bivings account we update collectively.

In terms of content, here is what you can expect from our Twitter account.

1. We’ll be automatically publishing all our blog posts to the account using Twitterfeed. If this is all we did on Twitter, it would be worthwhile. As I’ve started using Twitter more heavily the last few months, the time I spend reading RSS feeds has dropped dramatically. I discover stuff to read on Twitter instead. I think others are doing the same. Twitter is becoming an important distribution channel for content.
2. We’ll post links to sites we launch and updates on things we are working on.
3. We’ll post short, quick thoughts that we don’t want to try to stretch out into full blog posts.
4. We’ll enter into discussions with people we follow on Twitter.

Anyway, you can access our account here. Please follow us! We’ll do our best to be interesting.

And if you have any suggestions as to people we should be following, leave them in the comments.