33Across and Tynt Team Up to Extend Social Graph Insights (01/27) | SEO Advice
Social graph plotter 33Across has acquired Tynt Multimedia, which provides publisher tools that analyze user intent and interest data for more than 500,000 websites. Terms were not disclosed.
The two companies are complementary, says 33Across CEO Eric Wheeler. Tynt helps publishers understand how users share their content, while 33Across helps advertisers identify prospects by analyzing consumers' social connections.
"What Tynt built and what we have is so synergistic, we realized that we can expand our growth from just servicing premium brand advertisers to also serving premium publishing brands. It's a natural business extension for us," says 33Across CEO Eric Wheeler.
33Across builds customized social networks of consumers who are connected to a marketer's most valuable customers and prospects. It also lets them learn about the social characteristics of customers via its SocialDNA platform. The company says that, on average, it can connect a brand with an audience that is more than 20 times that of its existing brand loyalists. It maintains its own ad sales team and ad delivery system.
Says Wheeler, "We see people who are purchasing or are brand-favorable, and overlay our technology to identify people we know that are connected to that person and share their interest, in order to build a larger pool of people. we can then predict their behavior, and target and deliver ads to them."
In a report analyzing performance for 250 campaigns in Q3 and Q4 2011, 33Across claims 302 percent lift in brand engagement for consumer packaged goods advertisers; an 8.2 times increase in bookings for the travel sector; and over 350 percent incremental ROI for the consumer electronics vertical.
Tynt provides services that let publishers understand what content visitors cut and paste. The most obvious to users is Tynt SEO. When someone pastes content from a website into an email, blog or site, Tynt automatically adds a "read more" URL link back to the content on the originating site.
Says David Mandelbrot, formerly CEO of Tynt, "Publishers could see ways users were interacting with their content and, which content on the page users were copying. It gives publishers an idea of what specific content is important to that user."
"One fascinating piece of information is that more sharing is currently happening through email than through Facebook and Twitter. Publishers use that information to ensure that that email sharing results in more traffic for the publisher," Mandelbrot says.
In addition, Tynt Keywords identifies the words and phrases that users copy and paste into the browser search bar, helping publishers identify content gaps. It identifies words that are cut and pasted most often, and it analyzes links shared via social media. Tynt clients include Smithsonian.com, Seventeen and Sports Illustrated.
Tynt will operate as a unit of 33Across, and Mandelbrot will lead the unit as general manager of publisher solutions.
The companies say that by banding together, they can serve publishers fighting for the 17 percent of display ad revenue not hovered up by the Big five publishers. Tynt's 500,000 publishers will be able to use the 33Across Brand Graph to gain insight into social activity, interests, and loyalty around their brands.
While the industry has been geeking out on the potential of the social graph to provide consumer insight and better ad targeting since Google and partners introduced the OpenSocial concept in 2007, it hasn't gained much traction.
Even Facebook, which is, in essence, a single, immense social graph, has denied it has plans to launch an internal ad network based on users' connections and its Open Graph initiative that lets people like pages and third-party websites.
Last week, Google retired its Social Graph API, which was based on OpenSocial, saying it hadn't achieved the hoped-for level of adoption. The API made information about the public connections between people on the web available for developers.
At the same time, Google made moves to integrate its Google+ social graph into most of its properties.
Wheeler says that his company's performance stats prove that targeting people's connections works. he also points to the combined reach of the two companies: 1.25 billion users, versus Google's 1 billion and Facebook's 800 million users. he says, "We are enabling the capability that, at a high level, is what Facebook is offering, and what Twitter and LinkedIn may at some point offer: the ability to understand real-time data, interest and social connections around a brand and make it actionable. if you're Cheerios, you can find people who are saying, 'I'm eating Cheerios.'"
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DTxiqngGek&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]
LiveIntent takes email, makes ad inventory (12/12) | Email Marketing Advice
"Email has been undervalued by the publishing industry, because the technology never existed to monetize it as effectively as traditional Web display," said Matt Keiser, CEO, LiveIntent. "If you're a publisher with a large and established list of email subscribers, you can take your email from being a cost-center to a profit-center with LFP."
Here is how it works: an advertising tag is placed in a publisher's email newsletter. LiveIntent's LiveTag inventory then requests an ad from LiveIntent's server and contextually targets the ad to the content; it also uses device and location information to target messages and ads. the platform is the first to give publishers management of 'house' ads and third party ads across newsletters.
"Setting up ad campaigns in email used to be an extremely labor intensive process, but LiveIntent for Publishers changes all that," said Charmaine Gonzales of the Denver Post, an early adopter of the platform. "LFP helps me schedule campaigns and target my audience just like I'm used to doing on my website. LFP saves ad ops time and money booking display campaigns in email newsletters."
The platform can also be used to help publishers drive website visits, subscriptions, app downloads or other marketing goals through this type of advertising.
LiveIntent works with publishers, ad agencies and direct with advertisers.
Tags: display ad in email, email ads, email content, email marketing, email trends, LiveIntent
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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrjzOKHk89k&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]
Where next for travel user reviews, fake content and website publishers? (11/24) | SEO Advice
NB: This is the fourth in a series of guest articles by Robert Cole, founder of hospitality and travel marketing strategy and technology consulting company RockCheetah. He also blogs at Views from a Corner Suite.
As publishers, consumers and law enforcement get more sophisticated, so will the bad guys. it is doubtful fake reviews can ever be fully eradicated.
The problem is that even amateur FROs realize that encouraging positive review posts about an establishment only goes so far…
The distance separating competitors can hypothetically be doubled if similar negative efforts can influence a comparable fall in a competitors ranking.
Those electing to go negative on competitors can be problematic. for their targets, FROs have the same impact as griefers found in online gaming communities. in gaming, griefers serve no purpose other than giving others grief. they may join a game, kill off members their own team and get banned as a result.
However, if a new profile is readily available, the griefer is free to join another game, or if hell-bent on retribution, join the same team using that new profile.
Due to the inclusive nature of hotel review and rating sites, FROs, like griefers, are free to behave as digital Rasputins, surviving repeated extermination attempts. and as any B-movie horror fan can confirm, extermination is a lot harder if there is an army of mutant zombies on the rampage.
Gaming platforms found the only way to effectively eliminate griefers was to start mandating registration, assessing participation fees, and/or allowing players to interact solely within a self-defined circle of friends.
While somewhat effective, the result is a reduced community size, with more limited breadth of engagement. the game may be a bit smaller, but it still beats playing FRO “whack-a-mole”.
Casting a net(works)
Proactively inviting guests to post reviews and simplifying the process only goes so far. One can imagine as a hotel successfully builds positive sentiment through white-hat methods, a competitor using black-hat methods can simply turn up the heat by generating proportionally more negative reviews.
To fight against the expansion of fake reviews, the underlying technologies that drive the capture, collation and presentation of product reviews must be enhanced. the first question is if the reviewer is a real person; the second, did they actually experience the hotel.
The groups attempting to legally compel TripAdvisor to validate hotel stays for each reviewer are partially right – validating reviewer identities is a good idea, but they are completely wrong by suggesting that the review site should be solely responsible for confirming author identities or matching a reviewer to a specific hotel stay.
As the number of fake reviews grow and the sophistication of FROs increase, review sites will need to develop enhanced identity validation methods to maintain relevance. Tracking IP addresses and posting patterns is no longer enough. the review sites need to innovate to enable the development of and migration to review platform 2.0 technologies.
A similar challenge faced search engines a decade ago when they targeted the black-hat SEO pioneers. those efforts were later enhanced to combat content farms that sprung up as work-arounds to the first waves of web spam filtering.
Reviewer identity validation involves both internal and external enhancements. Internally, review sites need to enable more comprehensive reviewer profiles.
Currently, TripAdvisor has a relatively weak profile with an old-school advertising/demographic focus on age, gender and metro (airport) location in addition to a name and email address. Some light travel preference information is also collected, but it does not assist in the validation process.
TripAdvisor implemented Facebook Connect in 2010 and later enhanced its integration Facebook’s Open Graph with Instant Personalization to offer maps based on its Cities I’ve Visited content and present lists of friends that have visited various destinations.
TripAdvisor smartly used the Facebook integration to also clean up its email database – it required the email used by TripAdvisor to match the email used by Facebook. This provided the dual benefit of helping clean up the TripAdvisor email database and confirming that the email was shared by a Facebook account.
While the Facebook connected users represent only a subset of TripAdvisor users, TripAdvisor reportedly experienced an opt-out rate below 1%. Yelp is similarly connected with Facebook as are Bing, Rotten Tomatoes and Pandora.
All of these companies are very interested in understanding consumer preferences and behavior – primarily to produce more relevant discoveries via search or more pertinent recommendations.
Advertising driven social networks want to provide marketers with insights into consumer purchase intent. by linking with more major social networks, TripAdvisor can help create a tighter net to help law enforcement track FROs.
Facebook and now Google, through Google+ are adamant to make certain human profiles are isolated from brand or fictional pages. it is those unique human profiles that TripAdvisor needs to tap into in order to create problems for the purveyors of fake reviews.
Apple and Amazon have extensive data repositories of profile and preference information, including credit card data for virtually all their users. Due to their transactional orientations, they would be less inclined to share customer validation data to assist third party review sites validate identities.
Twitter is littered with profiles known only by aliases and LinkedIn, with its business/employment orientation might not be an ideal best fit, but the more validation sources makes available, the more difficult it is for FROs to create and manage phony identities. Specifications such as OpenID 2.0 and OAuth 2.0 help facilitate the process.
Most importantly, each of these externally validated links provides an additional tether that may potentially be linked back to the ultimate author of a review. Triangulating across multiple third party validation sources also helps make concealing the ultimate review source more difficult.
Linking relationships between sockpuppet profiles across social networks to artificially boost authority becomes highly risky if a single profile is revealed to be fictional through the course of an investigation.
The above provides the first line of defense against FROs – similar to putting an alarm system on a house. while accomplished criminals will still be able to strike, it should serve as a deterrent for those less skilled and or motivated.
Traxo has the right idea
Validating stay data makes a FRO’s life truly miserable. the challenge is how to put this in place without infringing reviewer privacy or compromising the integrity of hotel guest history records.
The best solution is for the review sites to develop an opt-in verified reviewer program that allows users to provide third party frequent guest and/or booking site details that can validate hotel stays.
Traxo has already laid the groundwork for such a program and provides perhaps the most elegant process as no action is required on the part of the hotel company or hotel guest once a guest is registered.
Here is how it works: users securely provide frequent guest usernames and passwords to Traxo. then, Traxo periodically interrogates the accounts and synchronizes stay information with its servers.
Traxo automatically sends “Welcome Back” emails following the trip that allows the traveler to grade the travel supplier (it works for airlines, and cars as well) on a 1-5 scale. for a review site, all that is necessary is for a verified reviewer program participant to enters the review.
There is also the opportunity to validate stays by booking source. for a trip taken last month, Traxo saw that I had stayed at a Marriott through my Marriott Rewards account on Marriott as well as Travelocity (the booking source)
Utilizing this approach, the review site benefits significantly by dynamically querying its group of Verified Reviewers immediately following trips. the hoteliers also benefit from having the review site post legitimate, verified reviews.
From the reviewer’s perspective, the review process is greatly simplified. Plus, an opportunity exists for reviewers to maintain their anonymous review site profiles – identities confirmed as part of a back-end process would not need to be exposed to the general public.
Interestingly, Traxo already takes this approach one step further and provides a so-called “Travel Score” – similar to a Klout “Authority” score – that is calculated by an algorithm that considers total miles and days traveled, loyalty program status and the geographic distribution of trips.
Additionally, Traxo weights verified and recent trips higher than manually entered or older trips. One can see these factors logically apply to travel review sites – particularly the extra weighting for validated reviews.
One additional validation enhancement can be seen on Rotten Tomatoes. the movie review site has segregated its reviews between critics and the general audience. Site visitors are able to share and participate in the community, but are also able to contrast the differential between the pros and the amateurs.
Rotten Tomatoes categorizes reviewers further by flagging top critics separately from other critics. Frequent contributors among audience members are identified as “Super Reviewers”, again providing greater credibility for validated profiles.
The site is able to work with the top critics because only a small indicative excerpt from the review is revealed, with a link to the author’s website for the full review. As a result, the site serves as a hub that helps create exposure for critics, as well as a source of site traffic for the reviewer.
A similar approach by a travel review site could potentially leverage travel guides, travel writers and bloggers to accomplish the same objective – while simultaneously reducing the impact of FRO’s intent on gaming the ratings to benefit their clients.
Getting personal
Another way to stymie the FROs is to increase the personalization of the review site.
One of the primary criticisms of TripAdvisor is that it provides a homogenized perspective of the hotels – it provides many filter criteria to trim down the hotel list based on various criteria, but the filters are property-centric and the new result set includes the same list of reviews. Reviews may only be filtered by family/couples /business to reduce the number of reviews to scan.
While the Facebook integration definitely helps provide perspectives of trusted friends, there are opportunities to apply more semantic and collaborative analytical processes to produce more relevant reviews.
Every traveler essentially seeks the same result – the hotel that represents the best experience/price ratio, based on the specific needs for a particular itinerary. but it needs to go further – it’s all about context.
Does a hotel match an individual’s sense of style? Does it match up favorably with other hotels the guest liked when traveling on a similar itinerary? Providing answers to these questions not only provides a much more relevant hotel recommendation, but also introduces sufficient nuance to frustrate even the most accomplished FROs.
The solution is to enable a more semantic and persona-based context into the hotel reviews that may be considered when ranking candidate hotels. Applying semantic search processes should greatly assist travelers by organizing the daunting amount of text provided by an ever growing army of reviewers.
However, fake reviews can wreak havoc on the sentiment-related context. Fortunately, this problem can be remediated by introducing a second contextual dimension – relative context.
If hotel ratings and reviews can be mapped through the lens of people with similar tastes, the resulting rankings should become even more relevant to the guest. Amazon uses its collaborative filtering technology to successfully create recommendations based on people with similar interests and purchase histories.
Logically, if it is made to look like the type of people who love Hotel A hate Hotel B, Hotel A will be less likely to attract business from Hotel B’s prospective guests. Most FROs are fundamentally interested in attracting guests that might be more inclined to patronize a competitive hotel.
Finally, integrating the semantic and collaborative filtering with an individual’s social graph will further help to structurally filter out bogus reviews from consideration as reviews more closely associated with a social graph should be granted stronger signal strength than reviews originating from sockpuppet accounts that are not associated with human social graphs.
The solutions proposed will not eradicate phony reviews, but they will be a deterrent. Ideally, FROs will choose to avoid hotel review sites and direct their attentions toward easier prey.
Social networks including Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and travel specific networks will become increasingly important – not necessarily as the review billboards they now resemble, but as a method to validate decisions based on the experience of legitimate Friends of Friends serving as subject matter experts.
Engaged groups of friends and acquaintances will be using the social web to interact with brands, pundits and those flagged as knowledgeable in travel by on that traveler’s social graph.
As the sophistication of review sites increases, those employed in the fake Review Optimization business will be challenged to demonstrate knowledge or expertise and have a very difficult time penetrating human social graphs in a meaningful way.
As the battle of good versus evil rages in the travel review space, the most important question a hotel guest can ask is “who can I trust?”
In the not so near future, that may turn out to be someone they have not personally met, but somebody trusted in turn by a friend. Or a social networking savvy travel agent.
Perhaps the best advice for travelers relying on user generated reviews and ratings comes from Harry Potter author J K Rowling when she writes:
“Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.”
The concept of Caveat Emptor, translated from Latin, “let the buyer beware” first arose in the early 16th century. despite the amazing technological advancements over the past 500 years, fundamental human nature has not changed. If the next 500 years will be any different is clearly a topic best left open to debate.
If there is money to be made, there will always be parties interested in profiteering from misleading consumers. As a result, the extinction of FROs is unlikely.
Regardless, it seems like a good time to start putting those wearing black hats in the review space on the endangered species list.
NB: This is the fourth in a series of guest articles by Robert Cole, founder of hospitality and travel marketing strategy and technology consulting company RockCheetah. He also blogs at Views from a Corner Suite.
NB2: these are the earlier articles…
- Social media and SEO created a mutant in travel – Introducing fake Review Optimization
- Fake Review Optimization – How black hat masters beat the travel system
- How to combat fake Review Optimization in travel
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKSxJqx0kxo&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]
More Popular Galleries (11/19) | Link Building Advice
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. if you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Name: LiveFyre
Quick Pitch: LiveFyre makes comments real-time and more interactive.
Genius idea: Putting social media conversations surrounding a web page back on the publisher’s site.
Comments, Jordan Kretchmer believes, missed the transition to the social web.
“I looked at the space of how conversations were happening online,” Kretchmer says, “and I saw that the social web had taken interactions between people to a new level, where interactions on publishers hadn’t changed.”
LiveFyre, the company he founded, hopes to help comments catch up. It launched in 2009 with a freemium product that makes comments real-time and integrated with social media. more than 15,000 sites now use it for comments. some are small blogs that use the product free. Others are large publications like The Sun that pay based on their size.
Most, according to LiveFyre, have seen the number of comments on their sites increase. Publishing network BlogHer, for instance, has had its number of average monthly comments shoot from 3,500 to 10,000 in the two months since it started using the product.
With a new update that the site launched Tuesday, that number should increase even more. the update, “SocialSync,” pulls social media conversations surrounding posts and articles back to the comments section. if someone shares a link to an article through a Twitter stream, for instance, the comment that person adds to that tweet will show up in the article’s comments section. when someone replies to that tweet, the reply will also be posted.
“There’s a huge shift from publishers feeling like they should outsource the community to Facebook and Twitter to realizing that there’s a ton of value in building a community yourself,” Kretchmer says. “[People who post comments to social networks that aren't included in a site's own comments] use your site as a jumping-off point, but don’t have a lot of reason to come back to it.”
LiveFyre uses semantic analysis to make sure it’s not reposting the same message over and over again as it’s retweeted, and its algorithms follow links that come directly from the web page to pull in the most relevant comments. SocialSync also allows users to tag friends from Twitter and Facebook in their comments.
From a business perspective, SocialSync’s most important contribution to the product might be to further distinguish it from its largest competitor Disqus, which also allows user to share directly to Facebook and Twitter and offers notifications to commenters when they receive responses.
Ultimately, however, LiveFyre realizes that increasing the quantity of comments isn’t enough. Publishers don’t just want comments, they want comments worth reading. Kretchmer says his startup’s next new feature will create some sort of “moderation automation.” the response to a commenter’s comments, for instance, could be tracked over time to sort out who is likely to provide value to the community.
“It’s more about automatically showing comments of higher quality than minimizing comments that are lower quality,” he says.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, hiob
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. there are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3N-Df6b8b8&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]
Survey: Email marketing underused for lead generation (08/26) | Email Marketing Advice
A new report from Advertise.com suggests marketers may be missing lead generation opportunities by underutilizing email marketing, with only 36 percent of respondents saying they use third-party opt-in email campaigns.Respondents voted the channel the most underused lead generation tool, with 20.3 percent of marketers agreeing they could leverage email more effectively. Display advertising was a close second, with 19.1 percent of participants saying they could use the channel to maximize their leads.“as these professionals test [email marketing campaigns] out and see the results, they'll begin to add this powerful option to their arsenal. since consumers previously opted in to receive updates from our publishers, these email campaigns work extremely well, with an average conversion rate of 9 to 13 percent,” Daniel Yomtobian, founder and CEO of Advertise.com, explained.as for the most effective lead generation tools, respondents favored online channels. Nearly two-thirds of marketers (35.9 percent) said pay-per-click search marketing generated the best results. Online display campaigns and email were also in the top four, while traditional channels, such as direct mail and cold calling, were voted the least effective.Whether marketers are using email, search or any other online channel, engaging and insightful content is key, as it can help brands develop meaningful relationships with prospective leads. However, finding time to create that content can be challenging, with nearly three-quarters of marketers telling HiveFire that creating original content is the hardest part. with this in mind, businesses might turn to qualified content writers to produce the branded blogs, news and other content that will fuel their email marketing campaigns.
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