Marketing Type

Online Polling Creeps Toward Respectability

Polling, focus groups and the pseudo-science of customer research have been the bread and butter of many, many marketing companies for decades. As with other  industries, the Internet has chipped away at this market in various respects -- not least of which was establishing a culture of permission marketing that has made phone calls to your house during dinner from strangers a socially unacceptable practice (unless it's your local school district calling).

With an unnecessarily cutesy headline, the NYT today reports on the next assault on the consumer research racket in a story that focuses largely on the British company YouGov:

About Online Surveys, Traditional Pollsters Are:
C) Somewhat Disappointed

This is promising arena, I think. Traditional survey companies can charge upwards of $50 per respondent. Don't think for a second that equally sound (or unsound) results can't be had for much cheaper.

See also:

Polimetrix
SurveyMonkey
Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk
SurveyGizmo

 

More Mechanical Turk

Following up on a previous post about Amazon.com's investment in "artificial, artificial intelligence" -- which I skeptically titled "Mechanical Turk Is A Mechanical Dud" -- Jason Pontin of the NYT recently published a terrific piece on MTurk and the general lay of the land in the "crowdsourcing" arena:

Artificial Intelligence, With Help From the Humans

Excerpt:

Harnessing the collective wisdom of crowds isn’t new. It is employed by many of the “Web 2.0” social networks like Digg and Del.icio.us, which rely on human readers to select the most worthwhile items on the Web to read. But creating marketplaces of mercenary intelligences is genuinely novel.

By way of an update on my own experiment with the Turk: 

After the transfer of funds to my Amazon MTurk "Requester" account was FINALLY completed (a transaction that took the e-commerce giant over a week to complete), setting up a series of multiple choice survey questions proved to be quick. I offered $.09 for the completion of each of four questions, and $.10 for the completion of a fifth. Shooting for 1,000 responses to each I discovered that the initial pace of completions proved quite misleading. The longer the questions, or HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), were up, the slower the responses arrived.

After a week or so, however, I did have 1,000 responses to each of the four $.09 questions. Strangely, the fifth (and most remunerative) question, STILL has not reached 1,000 responses 2 weeks later.

The other salient observations I can offer are these:

1) Despite MTurk's ability to allow individual respondent accounts access to each HIT only once (thus presumably preventing duplicate entries), responses submitted for one of my questions make it clear that  there are a fair number of individuals gaming the system by using multiple accounts.

2) The geographic breakdown of respondents to my survey ( self-reported) was as follows:

• 60% - US
• 23% - India
• 2.5% - UK
• 2.9% - Canada
• 11.6% - divided among 19 other countries  (the Philippines highest among them at 1.4%)

I'm not, by the way, discouraged from using the Mechanical Turk again, just a bit wiser about its best application. If you can use Amazon.com's Turk API to design a HIT that calls your own survey form, it does offer -- compared to most of the available methods -- an amazingly cheap way to gather impressions from a large, if unscientific, sample population.

Amateur Writers Make Good: More Blooker News

Following last week's tsunami of Blooker news (...blews?), the Inter Press Service News Agency (IPS) offers a brief but very entertaining interview with Julie Powell, one of the Blooker judges this year, author of Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously,  and last year's Blooker Prize winner:

   "I Was Just So Relieved the Zombie Didn't Keep a Blog" (Interview with Julie Powell)

I like Julie Powell a lot, but it's ironic to me that even someone like Julie --  whose book (blook) came about (and did well!) thanks to the possibilities of blogging -- feels the need to make a snarky aside (as did another judge, Nick Cohen, a couple of weeks ago) about the generally poor quality of writing online. Who cares!

The quality of blog writing doesn't matter in the slightest. The Internet is a perfectly free market. It makes no difference if the market is inundated with bad writing because unlike, say... poisoned dogfood, a lot of bad writing  on the Internet does no one any harm. What people have an interest in reading -- good or bad -- becomes popular. What people don't want to read does not.

And, frankly, when we talk about writing the discussion of what is good and what is bad very quickly becomes a silly argument. Is "Harry Potter" good writing? Let the earnest folks fighting over tenure argue about that sort of thing. The rest of us have better things to do. Like blog.

Blogola: Where the Smart PR Money Is Going

The WSJ reports on TV marketers' experimentation with blogola, or the practice of lavishing gifts and attention on bloggers as a PR strategy: "To Create Buzz: TV Networks Try A Little Blogola."

At the risk of sounding like a slimy PR guy, marketing money spent in the blogosphere is money well spent. As the communications guy for Lulu,  I worked with journalists from all over the world to provide the material for stories. The media-bashers among you may have a hard time believing it, but in my experience the most skeptical group of reporters on the planet -- the most hyper-sensitive about being influenced by PR in any way -- were American journalists. To a person they like to think of themselves as above the filthy fray of commerce.*

Bloggers, despite the widespread self-perception that they are more independent than traditional media, are comparatively easy to flatter and to influence. Having said that -- and probably pissed off quite a few readers in the process -- I don't think there is anything wrong with the kind of blog-directed PR being described in the WSJ story. A few bloggers are allowed to get an inside look at the production of tv shows.... how cool is that?

The value of blogs as a new branch of media arises NOT from their emulation of the values and standards of conventional media, but from the genuine individual perspectives blogs can offer: a powerful, if anecdotal, window into the pool of consciousnesses in which we might otherwise swim oblivious.

If the blogger in the WSJ article who met Julia Louise-Dreyfuss writes something about how cool the actress turned out to be, as a reader I am capable of seeing that sentiment for what it is  but still finding it interesting. A professional journalist can't be transparently starstruck,  but bloggers are free to remain true to their own raw reactions, complete with biases, flaws, and insights.

I don't go to Amazon.com's customer reviews for the same information that I expect from ConsumerReports.org, but as a consumer I want access to both. And as a PR guy, I'd want to have a strategy for each of them.

[Blogging Journalist Munir Umrani expects a controversy, but my guess is that not enough bloggers subscribe to the WSJ to arouse one...]

[* British journalists, on the other hand, were much more likely to reproduce entire sections of our press releases and to take in general a much more collaborative approach to writing stories. At Lulu we also had lots of cases where UK journalists came into interviews fully intending to savage the notion of self-publishing and left with those intentions intact, which is  just as inane as the opposite approach.]

Secrets of Popular Content: Two Articles

Two articles seek to illuminate the mystery of why some content becomes popular.

"The Greatest Mystery: Making a Bestseller" (NYTimes). Excerpt:

The hunt for the key has been much more extensive in other industries, which have made a point of using new technology to gain a better understanding of their customers. Television stations have created online forums for viewers and may use the information there to make programming decisions. Game developers solicit input from users through virtual communities over the Internet. Airlines and hotels have developed increasingly sophisticated databases of customers.

Publishers, by contrast, put up Web sites where, in some cases, readers can sign up for announcements of new titles. But information rarely flows the other way — from readers back to the editors.

“We need much more of a direct relationship with our readers,” said Susan Rabiner, an agent and a former editorial director. Bloggers have a much more interactive relationship with their readers than publishers do, she said. “Before Amazon, we didn’t even know what people thought of the books,” she said.

"How to Be a Star in a YouTube World" (a skeptical take from the WSJ --  unfortunately accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:

Most important, though, is the way Internet stars exploit the power of the Web. They employ all the social-networking tools available on new-media sites like Google Inc.'s YouTube, inviting fans to comment on their work, link to it and even copy it. And they draw on email, subscriptions and other tools to alert fans about new offerings.

"The most popular are the ones who have really tapped into the social fabric" of the Internet, says Jamie Byrne, head of product marketing at YouTube.

[Late addition must-read for those with time on their hands and an interest in the previous links: "Sex, Drugs, and Updating Your Blog" (also from the NYT)]

Mechanical Turk Is A Mechanical Dud

Having fallen in love with its anachronistic moniker, it pains me to report that Amazon.com's "Mechanical Turk"-- a service intended to harness the vast collective processing power of individual human brains around the world --  turns out to be equally anachronistic in its technology.

The Mechanical Turk (Wikipedia entry) ostensibly allows anyone to post tasks that require human intelligence, as opposed to automated computer programs, to complete. An example might consist of an organization trying to analyze satellite photos of mountain ranges looking for evidence of a wreck. There are thousands and thousands of photos to process, but because it is difficult for computers to identify unpredictable patterns in images, it might make sense to upload the images into a series of HIT s (Human Intelligence Tasks) in Amazon's Mechanical Turk system, and to offer to pay $.05 or so per image to have a few thousand of your fellow humans glance over  a dozen photos each.  Similarly, if you work from home and have access to a decent Internet connection you might be willing to do a few dozen $.05 tasks in an hour of your spare time. 

In the same way that businesses and institutions can borrow the huge processing power of Amazon.com's servers for complex computer tasks through its Elastic Compute Cloud, individuals, businesses, and institutions are supposed to be able to borrow the Mechanical Turk for complex human tasks.

Why the Mechanical Turk is a Dud

Last week I decided to try out the Turk on a survey undertaken on behalf of a friend. Even though I have a pretty extensive account with Amazon.com already (seller, buyer, business credit, personal credit, reviewer, etc.), I extended my account to register with Amazon's Web Services and set about creating my first HIT. I needed 1,000 responses to a 5-question survey. To get 1,000 responses to each of the five questions, I planned to offer a generous $.10 per question.

No sooner had I created the first HIT, however, I was informed that in order to make the offer I had to have sufficient funds in my Requester account to fund it. Makes sense, right? To make the system work, requesters need to pre-pay. I expected to have to authorize a credit card, or PayPal [wait, that's owned by  a competitor...] transaction, or something quick. But here's the catch... I discovered that the ONLY way to fund a HIT request is through a bank transfer, which the help text explains takes "up to five days."

Wait a minute! This is Amazon.com, right? The pioneer of e-commerce -- the quickest, most sophisticated shopping site on the Internet. I can buy a $10,000 Plasma TV on Amazon.com in under 15 seconds. They already store my credit cards, bank account information, address, phone, and tax id -- probably more information about me than any other single business entity apart from one of the credit reporting agencies. But I still have to wait five days for a check to pass from my bank to them? For $500? That's really odd. An email to customer service (no phone number, no IM) yielded no explanation, just a repetition of the 5-day warning.

Seven Days Later

The best part is that here I am 7 days later, and the transfer is still pending. It's still pending even though my bank cleared the amount the day after the request. What that means to me is that some clerk in the Amazon accounting department hasn't gotten around yet to putting the little check next to my account that will finally authorize the transaction and allow me to complete the tasks I  NEEDED COMPLETED LAST WEEK.

Which is funny, because that, too, is a human intelligence task -- although it's one that most companies use computers for these days. I guess the folks at Amazon's Mechanical Turk have decided to practice what they preach.

Blooker Prize Winner Announced

Lulu.com announced the 2007 winner of the Blooker Prize today:   Colby Buzzell's "My War: Killing Time In Iraq."

The Blooker also gets a nice round of coverage thanks to the efforts of the folks organizing the PR, one of whom is the contest administrator Jason Adams. Nice work, Jason!

Blooker news from Google [Updating coverage list on 5-15]

Bloggers are crap, declares Blooker Prize judge
Register, UK - 19 minutes ago
The Blooker Prize for books which began life as online ramblings has been won by My War: Killing Time in Iraq, by Colby Buzzell. ...

Popular Web sites now off-limits to troops
San Francisco Chronicle - San Francisco,CA,USA
... obscenity-riddled memoir about his year fighting in Iraq, "My War: Killing Time in Iraq," won the second annual Blooker Prize for the best book based on ...

Curl up with a good blog
Guardian Unlimited - UK
Yesterday's announcement of this year's winners of the award for blogs turned into books, the Lulu Blooker prize, would have us believe that many publishers ...

People: Sheryl Crow, Ewan McGregor,Bob Geldof
International Herald Tribune - France
"My War: Killing Time in Iraq" by Colby Buzzell was to receive the $10000 Blooker prize on Monday, beating out 110 entries from 15 countries. ...

Soldier wins Blooker Prize
 By Minic Rivera
Colby Buzzell’s memoir about his year of fighting in Iraq has won the Blooker Prize for the best book of the year based on a blog. The former US machine gunner’s book “My War: Killing Time in Iraq” was awarded the £5000 ($A12,000) prize ...

Colby won the 2007 Blooker Prize
 By Sean from DocintheBox(Sean from DocintheBox)
I was listening to NPR earlier and heard that Colby Buzzell won the top 2007 Lulu Blooker Prize for My War and the interview they did with him. 10000 dollars is a lot of spare change to most bloggers. Good job man! ...

War Story Wins Blooker Prize
newswire.co.nz - Havelock Nth,Hawkes Bay,New Zealand
An American soldier's violent and darkly comic account of fighting in Iraq has won the Blooker prize for best book that began as a blog. ...

Arts, Briefly
New York Times - New York,NY,USA
An American soldier’s memoir of combat in the Sunni Triangle in Iraq has won the $10000 Lulu Blooker Prize for the best book that originated as a blog. ...

Across The Media Universe: "CBS.com/nobodycomeshere."
CBS News - New York City,NY,USA
Blogging The War: The military might not like soldiers' blogs, but the folks at the Lulu Blooker Prize sure do. Colby Buzzell's "My War: Killing Time In ...

War book wins Blooker blog prize
 By Catherine
“A book written by a US soldier about his experiences in post-war Iraq has won the Blooker prize for books based on blogs. My War: Killing Time in Iraq, by Colby Buzzell, walked off with the $10000 2007 Lulu Blooker Prize.” ...

Ex-Soldier's Iraq Memoir Captures $10000 Lulu Blooker Prize
Bloomberg - USA
... that began as a US machine- gunner's blog, won the $10000 Lulu Blooker Prize, defeating books about Florentine doorbells and teenagers' postcards. ...

Book on Iraq war wins 2007 blogging book prize
Indian Muslims - San Diego,CA,USA
Lulu Blooker Prize is a literary award for "Blooks" (books based on blogs), inaugurated in 2006. The contest was set up for bloggers who have turned their ...

Banned Military Blogger Wins Blooker Prize Book Award
 By disembedded
Killing Time In Iraq by Colby Buzzell has been named the winner of this year’s Lulu Blooker Prize. Buzzell’s book grew out of a blog that which he started in 2004 while serving as a front-line machine-gunner based in Mosul, ...

2007 Blooker Prize Winners!
 By Eli James
I’ve talked about how Blooker prize winners are, in the end, amateurs, but while this year’s selection may not have improved from a literary point of view (don’t expect The God Of Small Things anytime soon) it has certainly presented an ...

War book wins Blooker blog prize
BBC News - UK
A book written by a US solider about his experiences in post-war Iraq has won the Blooker prize for books based on blogs. My War: Killing Time in Iraq, ...

US soldier's Iraq memoir wins blog book prize
Reuters.uk - UK
LONDON (Reuters) - An American soldier's account of fighting in Iraq's Sunni triangle has won the "Blooker prize" for best book that began as a blog on the ...

US soldier's Iraq front line blog wins prize
Middle East Times - Cairo,Egypt
Colby Buzzell's My War: Killing Time In Iraq, the winner of this year's Lulu Blooker Prize, grew out of an online journal which he started in 2004 while ...

Ex-Soldier's Iraq Memoir Wins Blog Prize
A former US machine gunner's irreverent memoir about his year fighting in Iraq has won the second annual prize for the best book based on a blog.
IBTimes.com RSS Feed - http://www.ibtimes.com

Colby Buzzel Wins Prize
 By Kat(Kat)
"My War: Killing Time in Iraq," by Colby Buzzell was to receive the $10000 Blooker prize on Monday, beating out 110 entries from 15 countries. US blogging queen Arianna Huffington, a Blooker judge, called Buzzell's book "an unfiltered,
The Middle Ground - http://themiddleground.blogspot.com/

Ex-soldier's Iraq memoir wins blog prize
... irreverent memoir about his year fighting in Iraq has won the second annual prize for the best book based on a blog. "My War: Killing Time in Iraq," by Colby Buzzell was to receive the $10000 Blooker prize on Monday, beating out 110...

PressOfAtlanticCity.com: World - http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/news/world/

Soldier blogger wins Blooker Prize
The Age - Melbourne,Victoria,Australia
A former US machine gunner's irreverent memoir about his year fighting in Iraq has won the Blooker prize for the best book of the year based on a blog. ... 

Traditional publishers scouring blogs for the first bestselling ...
Sunday Herald - Glasgow,Scotland,UK
Julie Powell's cooking creation was awarded the inaugural Blooker Prize last year and is now being made into a film, referred to - you guessed it - as a ...

Niche Topics: A Survey

I have been brainstorming this week in an attempt to figure out a few niche topics people care about that might be under-represented on the Internet. Rather than relying exclusively on my own very limited brainpower, I've decided to do what any good marketer should and launch a survey.

So please, friends, bloggers, countrymen, take my survey! [Click here]

If you finish the survey (which is mercifully brief), you will have a chance to win something you've always dreamed of... a bendable praying mantis replica.

Feel free to send a survey link to other blog-reading people you know.

Nappy-Headed Ho Movie Planned

From the one-man's-trash-is-another-man's-treasure department:

According to a press release, adult video company KickAss Pictures plans a DVD titled "Nappy Headed Ho's." A portion of the proceeds will be donated to a retirement fund for ousted radio personality Don Imus. Those of you who have been concerned that Imus would die penniless can now rest easy. The full text of the press release follows.
______________________

For Immediate Release:
May 8, 2007

“Nappy Headed Ho’s” Movie May Fund Imus Retirement

$1 From Each DVD to be Donated to Imus

 
Glendale, CA – Adult video company Kick Ass Pictures today announced that it is releasing a movie called "Nappy Headed Ho’s," and that $1 from each DVD sold will be donated to a retirement fund for radio personality Don Imus. Pre-sales and more information about the movie can be found at web site nappydvd.com

“We see this as a free speech issue,” stated Kick Ass president Mark Kulkis. “As an adult media company, we’re especially defensive of free speech. Don Imus is a loudmouth and perhaps a bigot. However, CBS Radio was hypocritical in hiring Imus to be blunt and outspoken, then firing him for the same reason. Fellow broadcast personalities Ann Coulter and Pat Robertson spew anti-gay slurs, yet they are not fired by their networks.”

On April 12, syndicated radio personality Don Imus was fired by CBS Radio for calling the Rutgers University women’s basketball team “nappy headed ho’s.” The incident gained worldwide publicity and is still ongoing. Just last week, it was reported that Imus is suing CBS Radio for money owed on his contract.

“If Imus doesn’t prevail, then there’s a good chance he’ll need some help with his retirement fund,” said Kulkis. “If he doesn’t choose to accept the money we collect, then we’ll donate it to the United Negro College Fund.”

Nappy Headed Ho’s stars girls with closely twisted or curled hair (the dictionary definition of “nappy”), who have sex for money (the dictionary definition of “ho”).

Kick Ass Pictures is headquartered in Glendale, California and is the only porn company in the world to guarantee all natural breasts in all of its movies.

# # #

References

See also:

nappy - definition of nappy by the Free Online Dictionary ...

ho - definition of ho by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and ...

scuzzball, scuzzballs- WordWeb dictionary definition

Obama is Good, Too: Knowing Who To Flatter

By way of an addendum to a post from a couple of months back-- "John Edwards is good, and so is his marketing"--I should note that Barack Obama is also good, as the following snippet from Google News demonstrates:

NBC5.comObama Requests Creative Commons for Presidential Debates
Slashdot - 4 hours ago
Presidential hopeful Barack Obama recently submitted a letter to the DNC asking for the Presidential debates to be licensed under the Creative Commons. ...
Obama gets web-savvy and takes a hit along the way African Path
Obama Hijacks MySpace Page, Mails Howard Dean WebProNews
all 432 news articles »

Apart from representing a genuinely good idea -- albeit a superfluous one since excerpts of the debates will be all over the Internet regardless -- this shows that the Obama camp knows who to flatter in these, the campaign's crucial early days. Creative Commons fans represent the constituency known as early adopters. These folks, a passioante few, hang out on the Internet and are, by and large, publishers--bloggers, forum posters, webmasters and the like. Flattering them is an outstanding idea, but it also reinforces my suspicion that we are entering the smartest, most sophisticated political campaign period in history. This election will reveal some truly brilliant marketing. I'm looking forward to it all. Most of it, anyway.

Common Sense SEO

I know this and so do most of the folks who've tried to wrap their heads around the task of optimizing a site for search engines, but it  always reassures me when a guy like Matt Cutts (a blogger who also happens to be the head of Google's webspam team ) says it, too:

Truthfully, much of the best SEO is common-sense: making sure that a site’s architecture is crawlable, coming up with useful content or services that has the words that people search for, and looking for smart marketing angles so that people find out about your site (without trying to take shortcuts). Google will keep working to make SEO easier and spamming harder. In my ideal world, a site owner wouldn’t need to think about SEO at all: Google would always find your content with no help. However, things as simple as a site map can improve how well search engines can crawl (and rank) your site.

By way of example, a guy I know just started a vendor financing business called ST Capital Corp. [I haven't asked Steve's  permission to use his site as an example, but I'm hoping he'll forgive me in exchange for the free advice and 'link-love' I am sending his way.]

Steve paid a web designer to give him a professional looking site, and as you can see from this screenshot, he got what he needed from an aesthetic and informational standpoint.
Vendor financing, the business of ST Capital Corp, is very competitive from a search engine standpoint, so Steve did not expect to pop up right away in the search results for his key phrase. But Steve is frustrated, he explained to me a few days ago, because he's not even near the top on a Google search for ST Capital Corp does. What's up with that?

This is an astonishingly common problem for small businesses, which is why I'm writing about it here. The problem is not Google's, it arises from an error in the site design that could easily be corrected. Note that the page title is fine, "ST Capital Corp." The designer probably thought that was enough. But there are lots of other problems that would keep a search engine spider from understanding this site. The killer -- the glitches that will keep Google from knowing that this is in fact the home of ST Capital Corp and showing it at the top of the search results for that name -- comes from the conspicuous absence of that phrase on the page.

The logo is used at the top of the page without any text to give it context, the main section links within the page (The Power of Vendor Financing and Leasing With ST Capital) are also graphical rather than text-based, and the name of the company comes up only once on the page with nothing at all to identify it as a title. The links that are text based and thus intelligible to search engines appear at the bottom of the page and lack title tags.  While the designer did add a site map, he failed to include any link to the 'About ST Capital Corp' from the home page (or, for that matter, to title the 'About' page 'About ST Capital Corp'. What's a search engine spider to do?

My guess is that fixing one or two of these things would probably resolve the problem within a week, but it might also be resolved if a few descriptive backlinks show up.  All of which is just to reinforce Matt Cutts' point about the complimentary relationship between Google and SEO consultants. SEO consultants help businesses avoid mistakes and focus on communicating clearly as they build web sites. Google wants people to build intelligible web sites because the effectiveness of their product -- search -- relies upon them.

With apologies to ST Capital Corp, provider of the ST Capital Advantage in Vendor Financing, a little search advice can go a long way.