Facebook Questions: a friend-powered Google?

What if search results included only answers from experts in a field plus your dearest friends? Would it be cool to get human response from people who know the topic, plus the added personal ideas of your close acquaintances?

Facebook is launching just such a product with its Questions tab, now in beta. As Facebook explains, if you were planning a vacation to Costa Rica and wanted to know the best places to surf, rather than Googling it and parsing out the paid ads and confusing lists of organic findings, you'd simply pose the question inside Facebook. Facebook in turn would serve the question to users who have expressed interest in the topic, plus to your online network of friends. The result is supposedly human, expert and personal.

It's brilliant on several levels. First, Facebook Questions moves beyond the Q&A formats of Answers.com or Aardvark, because rather than drawing on a pool of Wiki-type enthusiasts, the questions can be served to any "expert" in Facebook's 500-million-member database. Second, your personal friends are added to the mix -- unlikely experts, but the real opinions you count on in life. And third, Facebook has unlocked a new potential data set for serving up personalized advertising (because it knows you're about to surf in Costa Rica). The queries will be visible to everyone, so we do have our own questions about privacy. Facebook, who do we ask?

GM shares the social love

If you just got back from Mars, last year candy Skittles and agency Crispin Porter and a host of other corporate entities began sharing social media chatter on their web portals, sort of a glowing, selfless way to brag while not bragging, you see, because other people are talking about us. GM has now stepped into the "why that's so nice" wink-wink game with a Moment of Truth site that aggregates comments on the new Buick Regal from the site itself, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, or other social media sources. GM professed that it would not edit out negative comments, and sure enough, we did find a few hints of consumer dissatisfaction on the site (gas mileage and Obama bailouts were not admired). But it's mostly raves.

Sharing social love is an intriguing idea in breaking through consumer resistance. Statistically it's wildly invalid, of course, because what are 100 positive comments out of the universe of 16 million cars sold in the U.S. annually? But still, those happy people do tug at your mind. We're not going to buy your Buick, GM, but we now kinda like the people who do.

We're hiring marketing analysts. Come out and play.

UPDATE: Mediassociates is now hiring marketing analysts. Job is evaluating ad campaigns and online buys for media mix optimization. Database and SQL expertise a plus. Must be hip and good with clients. Email employment2@mediassociates.com or chase us down in person -- really, try.

If you have vision, if you know how to really get results for clients, and if you want to work with an agency that believes in measuring those results, email us your resume but include a damn good cover message on what sets you apart. Tell us where you think advertising is going. Explain your vision for the Internet. Describe your favorite flavor of coffee.

We want your ideas. We want evidence of the cognitive leaps you can make to delight clients. Prove that case, and we'll want to hire you.

Image: Chris Mar

Ford honesty, or avoiding cognitive dissonance

Today Ford became the first automaker to launch a new vehicle via Facebook -- with 12 updates providing a striptease of the new, more fuel-efficient Ford Explorer. We noted earlier in a guest post at Brandflakes that Ford seeded the campaign with an estimated $200,000-a-day in paid online advertising (thus dissing Mashable's love note that social media works solely on its own). But beyond the integrated advertising-supporting-social synergy, what we really like is Ford's honesty.

Honesty? That's right. This entire bit is overtly promotional -- there's new sheet metal coming to the lots, boys! -- and it's all about selling the SUV. But that's refreshing in a day when many brands resort to paying for tweets or shooting films of guys "walking across America" who really get there by van and hotel.

Sources matter

One cause of cognitive dissonance in modern communications is consumers get confused when they can't determine the source of information. This wasn't always the case; in the past, advertising was obviously paid, so you judged it with your guard up, like evaluating the pitch of a car salesperson. Editorial was supposedly unbiased, the external news collected by an altruistic reporter, and you reviewed it with similar guard against the mind of the writer. But today's paid posts? Sponsored tweets? Quasi viral-truths? That's all so confusing. And the risk is all communications will become less persuasive as consumers wonder which upstream sources are trying to bend their minds.

Ford ignored the temptation to pay people online to manipulate you, and instead paid for ads to invite you to a simple, clear social party. We find such honesty refreshing. We may not buy your truck, Scott Monty, but at least we can see where it's coming from.

A fake walk across America

This is brilliant. And it also distorts the truth. This video professes to show a guy walking across America, strutting handsomely, in changing T-shirts but the same pair of jeans. Except the guy is a model, he didn't really walk all the way across, and the images are a carefully staged compilation of 2,770 still photos shot between van trips -- still a lot of work, but not a yearlong foot journey. The last shot shows him crossing off "walk across America" on his bucket list, with a closeup of the Levi's back pocket. Guess what? Adweek editor Brian Morrissey says it was all sponsored by Levi's.

So, is this cool? It's free, after all. No one is hurt by the implied promise of a true story. Yet if we all know traditional advertising is fake, which is why we're rushing to social media to find fresher, grittier, more realistic content, do we really want to find manipulated material there as well? It's lovely art direction, Levi's. But is seeding the Internet with fake virals about arduous adventures with no disclosure, well, really building brand loyalty?

P.S., if you want to see real truth, Christoph Rehage walked 4,646 kilometers across China. We can almost hear the Levi's agency pitch meeting: Dudes, remember that crazy guy who hiked across Asia? We'll film it in a month, except with your jeans. And our guy will have better hair.

Good-bye editors, hello Flipboard?

Robert Scoble kicked off a hype storm Tuesday with a glowing review of Flipboard, a startup that pulls in content from all your Twitter and Facebook friends and turns it into a polished magazine. The service, which works on iPads, is grabbing buzz because many think it may become the next big portal -- simplifying social media, making your friends your editors, and providing content in a way that is digestable and beautiful for non-techie users like your Aunt Millie who remain uncomfortable with geeky Twitter chat streams.

The system is gorgeous, has reportedly attracted hotshot investors such as Ashton Kutcher, and by yesterday, thanks in part to Scoble's post, had so much demand its servers went down.

The logic behind the hype has some holes, however. First, Flipboard can't replace mass media such as magazines, because all that original content is required for Flipboard to pull your friends' links about it into the glowing interface. Second, it's really a glorified RSS reader -- your online contacts link to stuff, it pulls the links together -- and a pretty layout can be easily duplicated, creating no competitive advantage. And third, there is no "stickiness" or switching costs with this forum; any service could just as easily aggregate your social media connections to make your friends the hub of your news (see: Likebutton.me). Flipboard hints in the video above it is working on a filtering algorithm similar to Facebook's EdgeRank, which could parse the vast content you get from friends into something personal and thus build loyalty, but it appears to be an early concept at this point.

Flipboard does point to a future where your friends replace editors. This new channel, as a category, will also depress publisher advertising revenue, since much of the content consumption will now be disaggregated from individual publisher ad inventory. And that in turn will make getting real advertising results more problematic for marketers.

Apparently, not only does information want to be free, but it also likes a sexy tablet layout.

Google market share slips. Is its redesign backfiring?

Web stats go up and down, but it's noteworthy that Google's share of total U.S. search volume has plummeted since it redesigned its main page back in May. In April, just before adding bells and whistles to its search venue, Google led U.S. search volume with 71.4% share. In June, its share had fallen to 62.6%. Third-place chaser Bing is gaining fast, up from 9.4% to 12.7% of all U.S. searches in the same period.

(Update: Bloomberg tells us this data is based on two monitoring sources, Hitwise and comScore, and the shift may be a function of their different methodologies rather than a decrease in Google share over time. However, we'll continue with this little post to let you see where it could go...)

Google received a lot of press for its redesign, a bold and risky move we believe was meant to make its search functionality "stickier" and thus increase Google's ad inventory, sponsored link clicks, and corresponding revenue. Google is under immense threat from both mobile smart phones (whose users love push-button apps that avoid Google search altogether) and social media (Facebook crossed 500 million users this week and has become an entirely new ecosystem for users to share information, again without Google search). Search remains an incredibly powerful tool for consumers, but it seems the days of Google being the single portal to find information are waning as consumers tap new search engines, apps, and social media recommendations to find what they want.

Image: Massless

Billboards in Japan: Why, hello mister, you look 40

We spent time early in our career working for Don Peppers, the 1to1 marketing guru who touted personalization as a competitive advantage back in the 1990s, so it's cool to see some of those concepts finally emerging. A group of 11 railway companies in Japan is now testing billboards that recognize passers-by gender and age, a bit like that Tom Cruise scene in Minority Report. In the first foray the boards will simply collect data to build profiles of which type of consumers actually look at (and presumably digest) the ad message, but you can see a future in which digital displays begin customizing content.

Personalization has never taken off as a competitive force in the United States, barring a few examples in customer-focused service industries. Peppers used to suggest that the more your customers differ in terms of what they need from you and the financial value they provide to you, the more it makes sense to customize your service -- which is why airlines, hotels, and financial service companies, all industries with huge skews of customer value, remain the leaders in CRM and service customization.

Mainstream marketers in the U.S. interested in such technology might check out the outdoor industry's new "eyes on ratings," a traffic estimation service that moves beyond DEC traffic counts to estimate actual impressions against different audience demos (men, women, Hispanic, Asian, etc.). It's not Minority Report personalization, but may be more practical for fine-tuning how you reach your target outside.

A look inside the social targeting of 33Across

Say you buy a product. And your friends like the same stuff. Wouldn't it make sense for a marketer who has you as a customer to target your friends, too?

This concept of homophily -- that birds of a feather flock together, or more accurately, buy similar stuff together -- has been around for decades, yet it's been difficult for advertisers in the past to really take action on it. Demographic targeting systems such as PRIZM try to group consumers into similar socioeconomic categories, but that's just a rough theoretical cut. In a perfect world, you'd want to measure exactly what people buy, then find their real-life friends most like them, and then push similar offers to those friends.

That future has arrived in the form of 33Across, OwnerIQ and similar services that track individual data online. (If the world of online media buying seems confusing, all you have to know is marketers can either buy space or data; space is the old world of buying banner ads on NYTimes.com assuming NYT had a good audience, while data is the new world of finding ways to serve online ads to your target consumers directly no matter where they pop up online.) 33Across is one of most fascinating new online buying providers we've encountered because it expands your narrow target by adding those consumers' friend connections.

Here's how it works:

1. Tag. Say you're a marketing manager at Nike and want to target people interested in running gear. You can pixel your Nike landing pages online to push cookies onto the computers of everyone who visits. This is a good start -- but will create a small population target vs. the millions of other potential buyers online.

2. Add friends. 33Across can compare that data set to 125 million users it tracks online, or more specifically, the visible "friend" connections between these users (no personally identifiable information is collected). The data is observed via any social media tool with public visibility; Facebook, for example, does not resell data to marketers, but may widgets and applications inside the Facebook ecosystem can be observed.

3. Expand the target. If you assume Nike was able to tag 500,000 consumers who visit its sites, 33Across might expand that target to 3 million "strong ties" (users who communicate to their friends very frequently), 8 million moderate connections, and an extended network of 20 million. Nike has just increased its online target by 6x to 40x ... with the logic being friends of its most loyal consumers are likely to be interested in fitness products as well.

It's a fascinating use of social media to reach people most like your best customers. As 33Across explained to us, "by targeting people socially connected to your customers, you're reaching someone with a propensity to act like and respond like your customer." At a CPM a fraction of those old-school marquee sites, this new expansion of your target audience seems worth testing.

Image: Cliff1066

The false dichotomy of results

"America, love it or leave it" is an example of a false dichotomy -- a statement so black-and-white that it leaves no room for nuance in the middle. Do you not like George Bush? Or Barack Obama? Either way, you'd have to move out of the U.S. Liberals who believe all oil companies are evil, or conservatives who think all government programs are bad, ignore the logical reality that the phone you love is made out of petrochemicals and the interstate highway system is pretty darned useful. To riff on Ralph Waldo Emerson, false dichotomies are the hobgoblin of foolish minds, adored by little debaters to make their own opinions seem more valid.

Marketers often fall into the same trap, however, in the impulse to measure every campaign discretely for results. It is tempting, nay, even necessary to try to measure revenue vs. costs, investment vs. return, from any given expense. We do this for clients (and have published much of our methodology for free here and here). But results are never isolated into black or white response. A radio campaign may have a cost per inquiry of $800, but be driving additional results in through Google search at a fraction of the response cost; measuring integrated long-term media impact is almost impossible. Advertising campaigns build brands and awareness as well as leads and sales; so monitoring ad spend solely on short-term sales results ignores the longer-term lift in consumer inclination. And the most important addition to media in decades, social media, builds platforms in which consumers can interact with each other ... not necessarily leading to sales today, but rather communication forums that can be leveraged for customer service, complaint resolution, market research, competitor evaluation, product innovation, and yes, advertising response.

Forests catch fire because they've been dried out over time, not because one person lit a match.

So here's a simple thought experiment: For each marketing campaign component you're trying to isolate into ROI, draw a bull's-eye, put that component and its key metrics in the middle, and then in the outer rings define all the other factors that program element will influence. Consumer awareness. Competitor position. Product research. Multivariate testing. Future campaign risk avoidance. Are any of them vital to your long-term business strategy? If so, what is the opportunity cost of missing the waves reaching those important peripheral goals?

Image: Toni Blay

$9 footlong? Subway teaches you how to raise your price.

Walk into a Subway sandwich shop in New England and you'll be hard-pressed to find the $5 footlong sandwich ... the marketing sensation of the past few years, invented by a sole Subway franchisee somewhere down south that took the nation by storm. The jingle from the TV spots may still be in your head but most of those five-dolla-foot-longs have been replaced by paninos with higher prices. At a Subway store in Danbury, Conn., a poster sports a $9 sandwich that includes beef and bacon -- truly a marvelous creation, we have no doubt, but nearly twice the price point featured on the Subway web site.

Which is continued pricing brilliance, we suggest. Behavioral economist Richard Thaler noted in the early 1980s that consumers often need an inflated "reference price" -- such as a dress marked down from $150 to $75 -- to help them feel that they are getting a good deal. Many reference prices don't really exist; that dress is not really 50% off, ladies, because no one ever paid $150; yet the artifice in the sky makes things closer to the ground seem more attractive. Most smart marketers work hard to obscure price information to protect their margins; this is why Omaha Steaks come in strange assorted bundles of food, why movie theater candy comes in weird large boxes, and why Toyota minivans are sold with incredibly complex bundled options. Change the shape, boost the add-ons, and damned if a regular Jane or Joe can figure out if the price is a fair shake.

We suspect that Subway, a victim of its runaway $5 success, has had to back away from the cheap enormous sandwich which left little room for profits. Rather than upset customers who might suspect a bait and switch, Subway has thus created a new complex menu filled with distraction: some premium fare that costs much more, a low-cost breakfast line, and small English muffin sandwiches with prices below 5 bucks. It all adds up to make the $7.50 you'll spend on lunch, well, palatable.

NPR hides its radio roots

What's in a media name? Back in the 1990s the company 1-800-FLOWERS -- whose early success hinged on acquiring a killer mnemonic phone number -- changed its name to 1-800-FLOWERS.com. Accent on the dot-com. You know, in case you missed the point, the Internet was the new, big thing.

Media fashion bubbles rise and fall, but now in 2010 we find it curious that radio -- a continued mainstay in consumers' media mix -- appears to be flopping as fast as the web popped as a branding entity. Public Radio International, once nicknamed American Public Radio, a few years back began promoting all of its radio programming under the non-radio rubric American Public Media. Last week, National Public Radio announced it will rebrand itself solely as NPR, meaning henceforth the NPR acronym, like KFC, will only stand for itself. Perhaps it's too much to ask that AT&T still spell out the telegraph in its final "T," but with Americans stuck in traffic 3.7 billion hours each year, we wonder why brands that remain focused on radio fear its name so much.

Image: Onkel Wart