CopyDiva

I was inspired today to write about social media advertising today after reading two other posts. One tweeted by Peter Kim, commenting that a 7% click through rate for an online ad is really 93% waste for the company that buys it.  The other, from the content and blogger perspective, by Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim. Andy touches on the fact that pricing for display ads sold through ad networks (and, this is typically how bloggers get ad revenue) have dropped again, to below $0.30 on average.

For advertisers, the drop in pricing is certainly good news, because that means they get more ads from their ad budget. Is it really worth the spend though?

The drop in rates can certainly be blamed on the bad economic news, and you bet that lots of folks will blame it on that. But, from the ad networks folks that I’ve talked to, companies have big expectations for click-throughs that are never realized. Click-throughs rates are tiny, and there’s evidence that people who click through are not your target audience anyway. Plus, we know there’s plenty of evidence that people ignore display ads, meaning they don’t even look at them. Behavioral targeting technology just isn’t perfect either and since people ignore ads, is there really a point in better targeting for more ads that people will just ignore?

Then there’s the issue of the click-through being only the last touchpoint, and the only one that gets measured. True, but eyetracking studies for display ads show (sorry to be redundant) that people don’t look at display ads on the web except in search mode. This is why PPC does work.

When will we all just get sick of the entire idea of social media advertising?

How do you use, interact with, and communicate with social computing/social media tools? Lately, I have spent some time thinking about the way I use specific social computing tools and why others bore me, or why I simply have no interest in others. Certainly not a science, as these are my observations about my personal usage, but I do think that perhaps it bears some useful information, particularly about motivations, necessities, distractions, connections, and other words ending in -ion.

Blogging: Writing and Reading

The ol’ stalwart blogging. Yes, I blog, but certainly not an A-lister - more like a D-lister or lower. My blog isn’t bringing in money, nor is it set up to do that. I blog about mostly business topics that interest me. I am not really a personal blogger, except for the occasional anecdote. I blog for this blog, guest blog on occasion, and blog where I work.
As far as reading blogs, I subscribe to a number of blogs via Google Reader, but I have to say I rarely read them. Having worked at a social media measurement company, I am spoiled, and so I don’t like sifting through blog posts I don’t care about. So, I use Filtrbox to streamline my reading. I have a few filters set up, and I sift through those when I have time to peruse posts that are of interest. I am less interested in who is doing the writing, because there are plenty of unknown bloggers that write good, interesting, thought-provoking posts.

Generally speaking, I find a lot of interesting and relevant things to read through people I follow on Twitter and Friendfeed.

Micro-blogging or update services

Twitter: I use Twitter for updates that are both personal and business-oriented as well. I follow friends, business associates and interesting and important people in the social media space, and I am followed by similar folks. I don’t necessarily follow everyone who follows me. Early on, I did, but I found that some people were micro-verbose (meaning, they would tweet 6 or 7 tweets in a row, which is really annoying). So, I have reduced somewhat the number of people I follow, but am always adding new people as well.

How I access Twitter: I never login to Twitter’s web page to tweet, only to read profiles. I use Twirl as my desktop tweeting app (its also my friendfeed app). I don’t like having to visit web pages to update messaging, it takes too long and makes it even more disruptive than it needs to be.

What I hate about Twitter use: It’s bad enough when someone you’re talking to gets a phone call or email, but by far the rudest interrupter is getting tweets delivered to your phone. TURN IT OFF. I can certainly envision a helpful aspect to getting tweets to your phone — getting updates in an emergency, for example, or getting organized with a large group you are traveling with. But, I have to say, the tweets I get seem really not important enough to interrupt me when I am away from a computer.

FriendFeed: This very helpful aggregator of social tools, from Digg and Technorati to Plurk and Twitter to LinkedIn. After plugging in all my accounts, I have no reason to visit the FriendFeed site, except to find people to follow, which makes it very easy to interact with, at a low commitment level, which I prefer.

In part 2, I will discuss many other micro-blogging or update services, plus social networks.

In Gerry McGovern’s most recent edition of his excellent New Thinking e-mail newsletter, he covers a bit of interesting territory regarding web content. Are the words people use to search the same words they want to see when they land on your website? Here’s what Gerry has to say about it: “The words that people search with may not always be the words they would like to read when they arrive at a webpage. Search needs to be understood as a particular type of mental behaviour. Once the customer arrives at a webpage, a whole new set of words may kick in. One set of words to bring customers to your website-another set to get them to complete a task.”

The example he uses is a search for cheap hotels. Now, if you were to do a search for cheap hotels, or even discount hotels, it doesn’t mean you want a crappy hotel. You just don’t want to pay more than you have to. So, searching for a cheap hotel doesn’t mean you want to land on a website that has a headline something like “Here’s a cheap hotel!”

This search vs. web words difference isn’t universal, but it is a good exercise to think about what you want a site visitor to do once you get them to your site:

• make sure they see the keywords or phrases that let them know they are in the right place
• help them complete a task by making it easy to find what they want, whether it’s watch a demo, download a white paper, get customer support, etc
• use the right words to make them comfortable as you guide them to complete a task

These days, you need to run so much protection software on your computer to prevent malicious attacks, viruses, worms, hijacking — your garden variety Internet security problems. So, like any good Internet user, I enlist the help of anti-spyware, anti-virus software and firewall protection. The problem for me comes when I have to make a decision about what I want the product to do. For example, the firewall program I use asks me if I want some program or other to access something through a random port, or some such thing.

Now, certainly, there are times I understand what this firewall program is asking: Do I want Outlook to check for my email at my pop account? Do I want Firefox to access a web site? These things I understand. Unfortunately, it also asks things I don’t get: “The NDIS User mode I/O driver is trying to access [....something...] through remote host [...blah blah blah...]. Do you want to allow this?” Hmm, well, let me think a moment…

It’s a really good question, I am certain of it. The problem is — and I consider myself a reasonally computer-literate person — I don’t know what an NDIS User mode I/O driver is (though I know what a driver is), and I don’t know why it would need to access some remote host.

How helpful is this question, really? Couldn’t this program just let me know — in some semblance of plain English — what it is I am trying to decide? Tell me what this NDIS User mode I/O driver thing is, or maybe what it does, or even perhaps what kind of risk I am taking if I say yes. This is the kind of message that makes some people feel panicky, like other such helpful application questions like:

• “Are you sure?”
• “Abort, cancel, retry”

I can already hear what’s coming — “get a Mac.” Sure, that could be a solution to my problem, but really not my point. Here is my point: If you want people to use your product, and feel like it is truly offering protection, make them feel empowered and confident in their yes or no decisions. So much runs in the background on a PC, I may have no clue what it is, causing me to make a bad decision and not allow access, and then create a problem for myself because an application or service is blocked and won’t operate correctly — or at all.

This is a basic usability problem, with a pretty simple fix. If you want an average user to use your technology product, make sure an average user can understand important messages from your application. The best way to make this happen:

1. have a copywriter or technical writer write alert messages instead of engineers or software programmers
2. build and update a database of basic information about programs, services and other things that require network access, so a user can look up an answer if they don’t understand the alert message
3. provide a rating system (low, medium, high) that helps a user make decisions about network access