Customized Searches: creating a personal web experience — implications for the future
technocrunch and jeff clavier were buzzing a couple of days ago about Yahoo!’s move into personalized web searches–that is, the ablitity to select which sources are searched.
this is awesome news and extremely indicitative of the need-of-the-times.
with new sites and blogs popping up every day on the internet, not really even accounting for the decrease in costs associated with generating web-based content, managing the flow of information is becoming more and more cumbersome. because of the expoential nature of web-content, google’s search engine is quickly becoming somewhat obsolete. beyond being on the first few pages of a google search, there’s almost no value in google’s gazillion returns in .00000001 seconds. i don’t want gazillions of results. i want like five to ten. just the most relevant.
over the next few years, i think there will be a number of new players entering the ‘information managment’ market. just the sheer sizie and speed with which the internet is developing puts a new demand on entreprenuers; or is it simply, creates a window of opportunity for entrepreneurs?
most of the innovation will be along the lines of Yahoo!’s move: creating a personalizable interface for managing which sources are monitored and in what way. beyond the ability to select sources (or ranges of sources), it will also be important to make improvements to the actual word search filtration–that is, the acutal querry tools available.
tags are to some degree a really effective way of managing information. i hate tags. they’re about the uggliest thing to hit the web…ever. i will give tags efficency though. for quickly breaking down information–even complex sets of information such as large databases or video and music–tags provide an extremely streamlined (and RDBMS-friendly) ‘compression’ tool. so, there may be some intergration between tags and source selection.
some interesting side-affects to consider:
(1) will people become more focused in their belief system (thru isolation):
that is, will allowing users to select sources to monitor and others to ignore cause a general focusing of ‘ideologies’. if so, what affect will this have on ‘community relations’? will the community break down further under the stress of ‘de facto alienation’? will this have an inverse affect of tightening ‘ideological communities’?
(2) how will this affect the flow of information:
filtering of information: implications:
any ideas for an index on media streams?
Indexes: creating a standarized rubric for guaging media discussion
in a recent comment on Public Relations: a real value i recieved this comment:
So what are we, as pr professionals, to do? First of all, we should quit talking about the value of publicity to the clients. Instead, we should talk about a SOV (share of voice) parameter of the client with respect to competition. That will give him an idea of where he stands vis-a-vis competition.
what i find partiularly interesting is a ‘SOV parameter’. i was also recently thinking that a standarized index, such as the djia or russel2000, would be great as a marketing intelligence tool.
this would require a lot of discussion, thought and debate in order to establish the boundries of such an index.
suggestions:
- use existing stock, eft, futures, mutual funds as examples
- create initial parameters of wider range searches to pick out underlying ‘movers & shakers’
- create inital parameters for dealing with international pressures
- create a backup search to monitor new possible entrants in media (what are the wild cards?)
Source Activity: what it is, what it implies, how would we know?
what it is:
in an older post, i jotted down a few notes on circulation numbers. i mentioned something called ’source activity’. i left it as vauge at the time figuring it would require a bit of development.
source activity, as i see it, is the growth or diminishing of a media-outlet’s reach. some sources are growing, some are shrinking, some are ’stagnant’. stagnant doesn’t have to imply that there isn’t a huge volume of usage–i’d classify google, yahoo, and myspace as–dare i say it?–stagnant sites.
realistically though, the only true messuring stick is to think of source activity along the same lines as ‘velocity’.
most usages of velocity are straight-line analogies for ’speed’ though this is technicially innacurate. velocity is the change in speed over time.
following this analogy, source acivity would be a change in volume (i.e. circulation/access/publications) over time.
what it implies:
(1) able to guage whether the source is developing, growing, stagnating, diminishing, etc.
(2) able to guage the impact of a source over time (x=vt)
this is of particular interest and importantce when gauging a source’s value (i.e. exposure-value). exposure-value garners adverstising dollars; it is (or should be) the rubric by which we gauge the value of a marketing effort.
how would we know?
this is what i’m still looking into. there are a couple of source(s) available for measuring source-activity though they seem mostly unreliable. i will link these in shortly and fill this last gap in a bit later…
Branding: become a resource
from my last post, i only slightly address the value of becoming a resource.
what do i mean by resource?
specifically, becoming a source of knowledge–this is in addition to whatever product or service one provides.
every organization should aim for becoming a resource of some type. every organization. this does mean all corporations, all ngo’s, all utilities…i.e. everyone.
why? and how?
why:
my answer to this will indicate my age. i am very much an internet user. i cannot think far beyond the confines of the internet. lucky for me, the internet is a vast, vast ocean of information with many currents to follow. this doesn’t mean i don’t value print media, because i am very possessive of my books. however, when it comes to seeking out ‘quick information fixes’, the internet is always my first impulse.
that being said, every organization is wrapped up in some form of ‘issue’. if trends or policy discussions or public opinions are already being researched and monitored internally, why not make that information available to the public?
vauge? okay. try a clothing company such as the Gap. the Gap is uber-famous as a brand though not for just the clothing labels. they also get quite a bit of press on its manufacturing policies. (every large retailer gets ink for this). so, why not monitor the reverse side of the ‘protestors’ (such as ‘living conditions in third world countries, or something like that) and post this to the website (via a newsfeed)?
or a water company: if i were ever going to call or contact or research my water company, i would do it via the website first. and if there was a newsfeed that had press on water issues or water conservation or even community relevant water topics, that would interest me.
another added advantage? google will pick up the site more because, from my understanding, google caches changes in a website. the more changes and updates to a website, the higher on the list of search results an organization will appear.
let’s face it: in order to have a competitive advantage, ‘google placement’ is of huge importance.
i believe i’ve addressed the how (newsfeeds).
by culminating the information into a compact space, and consistently updating the information, an organization can garner more respect as a resource. this will increase the recognition of a brand, increasing sales (or ‘charitable donations as pertains to NGO’s) because of a direct increase in the ‘usefulness’ of a site. if there’s no ‘point’ to a site, it might as well not exist and most companies/organizations seem to have sites ‘just to have them’.
market intelligence is not just about gathering, having and “knowing”. it’s about using. it’s almost more about the applications than about methodology for gathering.
Newsfeeds: simple tools for enhanced marketing and branding
why don’t all sites have newsfeeds?
one of the most powerful assets to the marketing deartment is its responslibity to generate brand recognition:
the basic premise being, ‘if they know about it, they might buy it; if they don’t know about it, they’ll never buy.’
so where do newsfeeds fit into this and how are they good for branding?
the basic idea for a newsfeed is to bring the most pertinent of information to a wide audience. these are very common among corporations’ intranet. i’ve spoken to a number of companies in the last couple of months and about one-in-five have an intranet for disseminating information through out the organization.
some companies do decide to go the newsfeed route for the main public webspace–or somewhere else on the site. my general impression with these examples is far from satsifactory. typically the press is old, or it’s just press releases (these are okay but don’t really work toward building crediblity; it seems to be just as easy–and maybe even a little cleaner–to put press releases on a link somewhere: at least devote the space to design).
my main theory for this–and i really haven’t been brave enough to question people on the matter (stuart claims i’m the guy who’s always pissing people off; i don’t see that though)–
(1) cost, in terms of productivity time, is relativly high for having someone forward links and then have the techie recode the site, etc.
(2) being a waste of time makes the prospect a bit sour tasting and much less appealing as a ‘priority’.
(3) actually having access to favorable press on a frequent basis.
(4) the press that is monitored is in hardcopy and the company can’t/won’t pay royalties for use.
are there any other main barriers?
if these three barriers were overcome, how effective of a tool would a newsfeed be?
a colleague of mine frequently describes newsfeeds as being the best way to display 3rd party (i.e. non-biased) evaluations of a prodcut or company.
anyone in marketing is well aware of the value of testimonies.
in some cases, many sites will have a list of testimonies from overjoyed clients. these rock too! …but are not newsfeeds. 
from my perspective, making oneself into a resource for others to tap into–and so to be known for being a resource–is one of the most valuable aspects of any client-producer relationship. newsfeeds can very be effective for establishing this aspect of a company- or an organization’s brand recoginition. by
one of my main problems with internet related marketing efforts is company efforst are not aimed at long-term ‘we’re a resource for our clients’.
maybe this is too general of a statement.
perhaps a step back from this topic for a few days…
