Privacy, Google, Sex, Lies, ISPs, and Query String Theory

Posted on April 25, 2007 by JoeDuck

Matt’s got a great post and comment section going on the issue of online privacy. His point is well taken – Google stores less information about you than most other players online and your ISP is the place that has a history of *all sites visited* where Google would have somewhat less information.

My take on this is the same as it’s been for some time – the dangers are more likely to come from commercial abuses than governmental ones. Here’s what I wrote over there:

Matt this is an excellent post and comments conversation. Battelle was just talking privacy at his (neat!) online forum today. I’m guilty of “forgetting” that ISPs have more info about users than Google, and that it’s probably via ISPs or Carnivore-style intrusions that people’s privacy will be compromised, not via Google.
However, there are commercial issues that need to be addressed and IMHO are very poorly dealt with by Google and others. As a user I should own my own stuff, not the company making the application I use to produce stuff. This includes reviews, comments, and even search data. This ownership is routinely compromised, and this will piss people off more and more as they come to understand the big picture.

Advertising as Snake Oil. Wanna buy a bottle?

Posted on April 23, 2007 by JoeDuck

Via Aaron Wall an excellent article post by John Andrews suggesting how difficult it is to find legitimate SEO people among the ocean of pretenders and deceivers. There is some irony here though. This point is not lost on many advertisers who now (correctly) view most SEO people like used car salesmen. However a far more important point has been lost in the SEO quality scandals, and that is the fact that in advertising almost all salespeople and agencies are *absolutely* not to be trusted and generally are misinterpreting flimsy research to their own ends. They are not lying to you, they are simply interpreting results to favor their needs rather than yours. You think not? How many times has your agency recommended they be fired in favor of better teams they know about, or made recommendations that cost your agency big money in favor of your success?

Here’s a good advertiser mantra, and it should be repeated with each campaign:

Trust no one.
Independently verify results.
Change spending according to results.

Incredibly, I think 90% of all advertisers don’t use this approach, preferring to treat advertising salespeople and agencies or magazine and TV research reporters as “marketing” experts which of course they are not. Salespeople make money selling their own stuff, not selling success. As long as advertisers fail to follow up with metrics and/or trust the salesperson/ Agency’s claims it’s impossible for them to appropriately adjust the spend and define failure vs success. I used to think this was a problem only in small business, but it’s clear that even the largest corporations often fail to properly test, preferring (I think bureaucratically) to go with comfortable approaches that can be justified to spending committees.

The extreme failures of print and TV advertising (and other forms) to deliver has fueled the PPC revolution, though even PPC often has a negative ROI and testing is needed. Fortunately for those fortunate advertisers who realize how much better PPC will likely be than other forms of advertising it’s easier and cheaper to measure online advertising successes.

I commented over at John’s:
A simply excellent post John, getting to the heart of the challenge facing SEO customers and providers as well as a possible solution – forms of success metrics that are fairly standardized and/or easy to digest.

But good metrics are a gaping void in advertising and have been for decades. I’m often floored by the ignorance of advertisers who think they can count on salespeople to advise them on the effectiveness of the campaigns, which in my sector of travel are often horrible.

I’d suggest that TV and print salespeople are the most conspicuous deceivers, even more than many SEO pretenders. Although I agree that the overwhelming majority of SEO claims are bogus or deceptive, it’s important for advertisers to realize that even a modest PPC campaign, run themselves, will often outperform *their best print or TV efforts*.

Advertising in all forms, for the most part, is a lie. It often fails and people are too mathematically ignorant to discover the problems and realign the spend.

Myspace is better than sex

Posted on April 20, 2007 by JoeDuck

Bob at Tech Consumer is noting the recent article in the Economist suggesting that Social Networks are about to dethrone “sex” as the top item of internet interest. The interesting graph notes that where sex stuff is becoming a smaller fraction of the total internet searches, social networking items are moving higher and higher.

In one sense this is a bit misleading. One of the key drivers of social networking is “dating” and meeting people, so it’s fair to say that what we might call “primal urges” are still the top search theme online. But it’s probably encouraging that the porn economy is growing *less fast* than the social online economy, which continues to explode. (Porn segment is growing but not as fast as the social economy segment of online traffic – and also probably economic – activity).

What’s going on with this? It’s really not surprising at all that socializing online is a very powerful part of the online experience. The internet is about people more than it’s about technology, and people tend to be very interested in …. other people.

Myspace News Launches … almost invisibly.

Posted on April 20, 2007 by JoeDuck

Myspace has become such a dominant player that the launch of Myspace News was a big story in the blogosphere. Ironically you could hardly find it at Myspace and it just took me a few minutes and Pete Cashmore’s Mashable.com links to find the darn thing. I agree with Pete that it currently is not very inspired, but has simply enormous potential to dethrone DIGG as the key hip news site.

Myspace is probably rolling this out slowly so they can manage the new traffic routing and bandwidth issues that will come up. I remember at MIX06 where the Myspace CTO showed some slides indicating CPU usage on their server farm. When they implemented the more efficient (Microsoft?!) architecture the CPU usage dropped dramatically. The key point though was how for a huge site things like power, bandwidth, and CPU use become a big deal with every change.

I remain concerned that most of the news stories that are ranked and generated socially primarily appeal to prurient, adolescent, and technology interests rather than the deep and provocative intellectual stuff you’d get on, say, Charlie Rose. But it’s our free wheeling superficiality that makes America great (or at least makes us more fun than Finland), right?

Governor’s Tourism Conference

Posted on April 18, 2007 by JoeDuck

Oregon’s premier travel event is the Governor’s Tourism Conference. This year it was held in Sunriver, Oregon (about 15 miles south of Bend, Oregon) where the resort did a simply super job with food, accommodations, and hospitality.

My first Oregon Tourism conference was at Sunriver ten years ago and I think I’ve only missed one since then. It was great to catch up with folks I don’t see much since I stopped my internet marketing work with for the Southern Oregon Visitors Association a few years ago.

Although it’s been ten years since the internet became a key travel marketing tool, it’s still remarkable how print advertising remains the key marketing vehicle despite ROI measures that would make any truthful marketeer blush. Print enthusiasts, and even some silly “online marketing experts” have kept alive the myth that print ads lead to more than a trivial amount of web activity. I now attribute this to the fact people simply do not understand how cheap Pay Per Click advertising is as a destination marketing tool. It’s not uncommon for places to spend *several dollars* for a single print ad lead where a similar lead could be obtained online for as little as a nickel. I’d assumed years ago this gap would push people to PPC but as with most human behavior there is a huge level of psychological momentum that prevents them from changing behaviors. This is even true for huge companies like Ford that is *finally* moving to a much bigger online spend after a study showed how cost effective the online advertising has been for Ford.

One of the best presentations was from Golf Digest where even their head of research misconstrued results from a study of print vs online activity in planning golf related travel. He noted comparable numbers for the categories of “used print info” and “used online info” and suggested this meant that print advertising was therefore comparable to online in terms of effectiveness. This is technically true but it seems to me *extremely* misleading in terms of return on investment for advertising which won’t be comparable at all (they did not study this). Online you can target an ad and get *global reach*, all for pennies per click. With magazines you’d have to spend tens of millions *per ad* to get comparable reach on your message. Thus, as a marketer if you are deciding whether to run an ad in Golf Digest or run a comparably prices online campaign it is very likely that in almost all cases the PPC campaign will outperform the print one.

Google barely (corrected from “not”) shading search advertising links!

Posted on April 15, 2007 by JoeDuck

Google is ~~no longer~~ narily, barely shading the advertisements that appear at the top of the organic listings on the left of the search web page. This may be a regional thing or experimental (I’m in Oregon on Charter ISP), but it’s very conspicuous and frankly it makes it very difficult to distinguish between ads and real content.

Although I’ve always held that Google has a right to do this type of thing, I’ve always been frustrated with the pretense that they always take the high road and “don’t do opportunistic things”. This is a huge departure from Google’s previous approach and claims, which suggested how critical it is to separate organic and commercial listings. As this screen shows it is now *impossible* for the user to make that determination. Good for advertisers but bad for users and somewhat misleading.

The FCC actually claims to object to this approach, telling search engines some time ago that they need to make a clear distinction between commercial content and non-commercial.

I’m assuming they are testing the affect on clicks and revenue, and clearly it will be enormously profitable to do things this way as smart users typically look first to organic listings and last to advertising. However, in the long run it challenges the idea that Google’s primary interest is providing “unblemished” results. At the very least Google owes people an explanation here, and if it does not include the fact they’ll make a lot more money this way, and that that was a prime motivation, clear thinkers are going to call foul on this new practice.