Firefox has unseated IE7 as the top browser in Europe. According to this article in Reuters:
Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox 3 had 35.05 percent of the European Web browser market last week, followed by Internet Explorer 7 with 34.54 percent.
Cumulatively IE has more share because of the many versions in the market. But Firefox 3 is the top individual browser.
Mike Blumenthal wrote something very interesting today:
Google is now showing the Local 10 Pack on broad single phrase searches with obvious local intent (nods to Florist SEO Watch who spotted this on Saturday and Cathy Rhullodafor pointing it out) without geo modifiers. He found it for a range of categories (such as florists, doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc.) that Google has deemed local.
I was able to see it on the search for “doctor” and a number of other searches:
Notice there’s no modifier and yet the 10 pack appears, based on IP targeting presumably. What it indicates is that Google is acknowledging there are many more “local searches” than those that feature geomodifiers. There are a wide range of categories and queries that are “inherently local” (i.e., services where fulfillment must happen offline). I have also argued that the majority of product searches are ultimately local because they are fulfilled by a purchase in a local store.
Though often the query will suggest it, Google isn’t necessarily sure where someone is in the research or purchase process (especially with products) in some of these situations. I suspect that’s why the 10 pack in the example above is somewhat tentatively pushed down the page. Compare “San Francisco Doctor” and the placement of the 10 pack in those results, where Google can be much more confident of the user’s intent:
Regardless, this is a welcome development because it starts to reflect real user intent with a lot of these queries that may not contain a modifier. It should also drive lots more organic traffic into Maps and make that property more important than it already is.
Citysearch has shown new energy and creativity in the recent past, with its redesign, new verticals and integration of Facebook Connect, which makes the site more “social.” Now it has teamed up with MySpace for “MySpace Local,” which puts Citysearch data into a local destination hosted on MySpace . . . that also integrates all the social contacts and features of MySpace.
TechCruch has a preview of the beta product. Beyond MySpace users, the intention is to have MySpace Local to be a destination that can be accessed and discovered through search as well.
As Michael Arrington points out in his post, this creates potentially huge amounts of new geotargeted ad inventory for MySpace, with a rev share to Citysearch one assumes. It also represents more distribution for Citysearch merchants and advertisers as part of the latter’s network strategy. All of this will of course translate into mobile, a big battle ground between MySpace and Facebook.
It’s one facet of a larger “local” strategy for MySpace, which includes SMB advertising. I spoke about all this with former Yahoo! search marketing exec. Warren Kay, who’s now at Fox and spearheadin local and SMB initiatives on the advertiser side.
In a way we could see this as analogous to the Oodle marketplace on MySpace or Facebook. And it will be interesting to see whether and how Facebook responds. Facebook also has a big opportunity in local that hasn’t been developed.
More after I get a “look under the hood.”
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More from PaidContent and Forbes (“MySpace’s Yelp Envy.”)
Long rumored and anticipated, it’s official today. Here’s the press release:
Idearc Inc. announced that the Company and its domestic subsidiaries today filed voluntary petitions for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division. Idearc also announced that it has reached an agreement in principle with the agent bank and a steering group of its secured lenders on certain critical elements of a plan of reorganization. The Company expects to be able to file a plan of reorganization in approximately 30 days, and if implemented as proposed, this plan will enable Idearc to significantly reduce its outstanding debt to a more suitable level upon emergence from the legal proceedings.
Pursuant to the proposed plan, Idearc does not need nor intend to obtain debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing during the reorganization, as the Company maintains substantial cash balances and continues to generate positive cash flow, and has reached an agreement on use of cash collateral.
Idearc’s largest shareholder previously opposed the plan.
The debt burden that Idearc and RHD, which may be next in line, are saddled with obscures the postive cash flow and other assets that these publishers continue to have.
On Wednesday morning I’m moderating a panel at the Web 2.0 event in San Francisco: “Local is the New Global.” It features the CEOs of Zvents, TheFind, NearbyNow and Krillion. Interestingly three out of four of these companies are product-related and have nothing to do with services — the area everyone tends to focus on in discussing “local search.”
Along those lines, there are many studies in the market that show the majority of consumers are doing online product research but mostly buying products offline. One of the earliest of these studies to document the online-offline phenomenon for products was from comScore and Yahoo! in 2004. They found that 92% of Internet/search influenced consumer electronics purchases happen offline in local stores. Here’s the slide from 2004 (the data were collected in Q1 ’04):
But let’s not focus on or debate the precise accuracy of this 92% figure.
There have been plenty of other such studies since 2004 from BIG Research, Yahoo!, Nielsen and others with varying percentages who research online but ultimately buy offline. This “ROBO” number ranges from 70% to the low 90% range depending on the study and product category being examined. The point is that the large majority of Internet users conducting product research then buy offline in local stores.
Source: Compete Inc., 2008 (n=1,257 US adults; context was mobile phone purchase)
Over the past couple years comScore has maintained, using a conservative methodology, that the percentage of search that is “local” is around 12%-13%. Product search is largely ignored in this calculation unless someone explicitly looks for a product with a geo-modifier attached (e.g., laptops, Jersey City).
But if at least 70% of Internet users doing product research are consistently buying offline/locally shouldn’t we consider at least 70% of the product search pie to be local? Perhaps these folks are open to buying online when they begin their research and so their “local intent” may not be completely conscious or “top of mind.” But the numbers are consistent across the studies. And e-commerce isn’t going to change anything in the foreseeable future; its growth curve has flattened.
Making the connection between search query and the store or POS (the “last mile of search”), as do companies like TheFind, NearbyNow and Krillion (among others like ShopLocal), only plays into the local side of the equation. Indeed, the failure to connect those dots represents a huge lost opportunity for marketers across the product spectrum. Retailers, for example, should be buying product keywords for all products they sell in stores and using geotargeting in search and on the ad networks to capture that shopper who’s ultimately going to buy offline. But, alas, few companies are doing that — let alone doing it well.
Back to the data. Just think how radical it is to say — and it’s true as a practical matter — that at least 70% of all product-related searches are local. It turns the whole e-commerce/local equation on its head.
Anyone want to disagree?
I’m with spring-breaking offspring today (my lovely wife has escaped for the weekend) so I’m not going to be able to write much here. But here are a few items that caught my eye:
YouTube is redesigning to make it safer for brand advertising. YouTube is making money on ads but envies Hulu’s success; so it’s making it easier to distinguish between professional and UGC content (what about that which falls in between?). From ClickZ’s story:
The new design will offer four tabs: Movies, Music, Shows, and Videos. The first three tabs will display premium shows, clips, and movies from Google’s network and studio partners, all of which will be monetized with in-stream advertising. Meanwhile the Videos channel will house amateur and semi-pro content of the sort major brand advertisers have shied away from.
“They’re putting up walls between all the UGC stuff, which will live within the video channel,…and the brand safe content,” said one senior agency exec who was briefed on YouTube’s plans.
The redesign also touches YouTube’s video player. The new player interface closely resembles the video experience on Hulu, the News Corp.- and NBCU-owned video portal that’s grown by leaps and bounds since its launch last year. Like Hulu, the new video player displays visual markers in places where ads are scheduled to play. Also like Hulu, the YouTube player allows users to “dim the lights,” reducing the brightness of screen real estate outside the video frame.
“It’s totally a Hulu approach, but that’s best practices right now,” said the exec.
According to another agency source, Google is not selling whole episodes to a single advertiser or brand. In that respect it will differ from NBC and ABC, both of which offer advertisers exclusive presence on any given episode on their own sites. CBS, meanwhile, sells to multiple sponsors within a single episode. Hulu, for its part, offers a blend of single-sponsor and multi-sponsor episodes.
In a related item, Cable Companies are trying to develop ways to charge for their content online so that what’s happened to almost every other traditional medium doesn’t happen to cable. From the NY Times:
In the last couple of years, the television industry has made a big push onto the Web, giving viewers hope that they might one day reach nirvana: every show ever made, available online for immediate free viewing.
But many in the industry are now questioning whether free is a sustainable model. And some are trying to make sure people have a reason to keep paying hefty cable bills.
Time Warner Cable, the second-largest cable operator in the country, is working with customers here to test a subscriber model for online TV viewing. Residents who pay for HBO can watch “Big Love,” “Entourage” and other programs on their computers, using special software and a personal log-in. People who are not HBO subscribers are barred from the service.
They need the online distribution but want to protect revenues. Stay tuned.
Sebastien Provencher blogs about the recent YPA-related comScore data re local search and IYP usage. His headline discusses the 12% of search is local number. Let’s step back; this 12% figure obscures something more basic because it only captures:
If you could see the entire purchase path from query to transaction, we would see that much more than 12% of search is about “local” (offline action/transaction).
RHD formally launches Dex mobile apps. Wrote about them here before I spoke to Dex and will do a follow up shortly. The “Feelin’ Like” area in the iPhone is the most thoughtful part of the app and based on the categories of online content that Dex saw its users on mobile devices accessing. BTW: it’s “Local Mobile Search” 
Some newspapers are reportedly doing well in Europe through diversification of products and heavier reliance on subscriptions than advertising (via NY Times).
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Related: MediaPost reports on how some journalists are joining AOL to create content for its expanding vertical blog network.
Of course it varies by market, but what can we believe about the usage of print directories?
Behind door number one, this very non-scientific online survey at a gadget site (biased against traditional media, given its readership) about phone directory usage:
Do you ever use a phone book?
Then there’s this from comScore-TMP about relative engagement with various media (7/08):
It’s hard to read the chart but print YP/WP directories are the 72% figure at the bottom (“less than once a week”).
But then there’s this from Q3 ’08 from Forrester (not asking about engagement or frequency, just usage):
And this from Knowledge Networks:
I could go on. I continue to see conflicting “empirical” data like this. It’s both strange and somewhat confusing to me. I’m unable to explain these discrepancies.
The Knot, which has always been a local site, is greatly expanding its listings and content in specific markets. According to the WSJ:
The new sites, which range from the Ozarks to Oahu, Orange County to Orlando, are catalogued under weddings.com. The local sites bring the total number of niche Web sites under the Knot umbrella to 85. Mr. Liu says the company plans to have more than 200 such sites by the end of the year.
This may be the best marriage, so to speak, of local + vertical content online. Each of the local sites is like a portal with local vendors:
As an aside, let’s collectively stop using the word “hyper-local.” Let’s use terms like “neighborhood, street, city,” etc. instead.
From a new Nielsen-funded consumer study about media consumption:
In addition to the revelation that consumers in the 45-54 age group average the most daily screen time (just over 9 1/2 hours), the VCM study found the average for all other age groups to be “strikingly similar” at roughly 8 1/2 hours — although the composition and duration of devices used by the respective groups throughout the day varied.
That’s why this blog is called “Screenwerk.” :)
Selected other findings from the study:
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Here’s more from the NY Times on the study
If there’s anyone who knows what’s wrong with Google’s LBC and has ideas on how to fix it it’s Mike Blumenthal. I think Google should fly Mike out from NY for a week (or a group of Mike and others who are similarly “hands on” with the LBC) and get his/their “brain dump.”
Better yet, form a Local Business Center Advisory Group consisting of Mike and others who are marketing professionals as well as a few SMB advertisers. Get direct feedback. Maybe Google has done a version of this already but I’m unaware of it.
Hey . . . Carter Maslan.
Over at LMS (for those not following me on Twitter), here’s what’s been going on:
First we had “flogs,” fake blogs or flack blogs that were inauthentic PR vehicles for companies. Now we may have occasion for a new term (“fake Tweet” — “fweet”) that refers to a similar phenomenon on Twitter: creation of a stream of Tweets by other than the person representing him or herself as the author:
This is happening with celebrities who appear to Tweet, but use ghost writers or subordinates to actually do the writing. According to the NY Times:
[S]omeone has to do all that writing, even if each entry is barely a sentence long. In many cases, celebrities and their handlers have turned to outside writers — ghost Twitterers, if you will — who keep fans updated on the latest twists and turns, often in the star’s own voice.
Because Twitter is seen as an intimate link between celebrities and their fans, many performers are not willing to divulge the help they use to put their thoughts into cyberspace.
Britney Spears recently advertised for someone to help, among other things, create content for Twitter and Facebook. Kanye West recently told New York magazine that he has hired two people to update his blog. “It’s just like how a designer would work,” he said.
Does it matter that the person who owns the Twitter feed is not the author of the Tweets?
I continue to be fascinated by the Local SEM churn issue (50% to 100% annually), why it exists and whether it will be resolved in some way. The Local SEM or local online ad products being sold are generally speaking the right products for the SMB market — conceptually. Execution has been a problem.
On the publisher/sales channel side there are a bunch of issues going to sustainability and margins but that’s a discussion for another time. The central problem from a advertiser churn standpoint appears to be the apparent disconnect between the promises of sales people incentivized to acquire customers (but not retain them) and the actual experiences of SMB advertisers.
I was sent an email by someone, which tells an interesting story about working with a firm in the Local SEM segment. I won’t identify the source or disclose the verbatim contents of the email. The advertiser was not a typical SMB but a more sophisticated PPC marketer with more budget $10K+ to spend online each month. The person eventually cancelled the Local SEM service in question (I don’t know how long they were with it however).
The firm being criticized managed only a portion of the overall PPC spend. Here is my paraphrase of the main complaints conveyed in the email:
Overall the salespeople reportedly created heightened expectations that were largely unfulfilled.
This is a snapshot or microcosm of what’s going on across the industry. The way to deal with this is to be more cautious about ROI claims and expectations, as well as considering tying a meaningful portion of sales compensation to customer retention. In addition, more and better communication and customer service appear to be called for.
If you have any different experiences, feedback, ideas or critiques please let me know.
The Wall Street Journal profiles the new installment of Windows and Microsoft’s efforts to strike back at Apple and its enormously successful John Hodgman and Justin Long “Get a Mac” campaign.
In a new chapter to its ad campaign that will begin airing during the NCAA basketball playoffs on CBS Thursday evening, Microsoft will begin hammering on a theme that could resonate in these times of economic hardship: how much less expensive Windows PCs are than Macs. For the commercials, Microsoft’s advertising agency, Crispin Porter + Boguksy, recruited prospective computer shoppers in the Los Angeles area through Craigslist and other sites, with a tantalizing offer to give them between $700 and $2,000 to purchase a new PC.
According to Brad Brooks, corporate vice president for Windows consumer product marketing at Microsoft, the agency told recruits it was a market research firm and didn’t mention it was working with Microsoft. The recruits were told they could keep whatever money they didn’t spend on a PC so they had incentives to look for good values.
The first installment using Jerry Seinfeld was apparently confusing (though I liked the ads). The next set of commercials “I’m a PC” were bland and disappeared into the background.
As the WSJ excerpt above says, this time the agency is using cost as a hook during the recession. The ad is relatively effective; the message is “you can get a Windows PC for much less than a Mac.” With sarcasm the ad also “disses” Mac owners’ arrogance (as perceived by Microsoft and its agency): “I’m not cool enough to be a Mac person.”
However, there are two potential problems with this “price” campaign as I see it:
The least expensive Windows machines are indeed netbooks, which are trendy, offer utility and even a “cool” dimension (overcoming the “low-quality perception” issue with more conventional laptops). But Microsoft is ambivalent about netbooks and doesn’t really want people buying that many netbooks because they cut into margins.
Still the campaign has a decent chance during this recession to make some gains with consumers, more of whom are shopping price than before. If I were at Microsoft’s agency for the campaign, Crispin Porter + Boguksy, I would emphasize the value one gets for the money rather than focusing largely on “cheaper.” (Could also focus on data like this.)
Following Google Chrome and Firefox (Geode), Opera has announced geolocation API support. Effectively it will allow users to share location with third party sites — very much like the iPhone experience in concept:
The location awareness technology is being provided by Skyhook Wireless, which put out its own press release this morning:
Opera Software and Skyhook Wireless today announced their partnership to bring geolocation to the Web. Users can now simply choose to share their location with any Web site and get a range of information about related products and services around them. Whether it is local searching, social networking, geotagging photos, local advertising or discovering nearby content, geolocation is a key factor in creating a relevant and meaningful experience on the Web.
Traditionally, geolocation was considered as being only a part of a downloadable mobile application; but with Skyhook’s Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS), any computer or mobile phone with a wireless adapter can take advantage of its advanced positioning technology and locate a user, making this service available to any Web site.
Windows 7 also uses a patchwork of strategies to identify user location.
So very soon all the major browsers will have a better or potentially better fix on location (as well as Yahoo!’s Fire Eagle and its developer network). Privacy and the precise user experience around sharing location is something I discussed recently with Matt Womer, of the W3C consortium. And it all remains to be worked out. (The screen above is a Firefox-generated drop-down that enables opt-in location sharing on a case-by-case basis.)
I’ve written several times before about the content and advertising implications of better location awareness at the browser level. Lots of customization and targeting become possible that didn’t work with IP-based systems alone.
These browser-based solutions probably don’t totally eclipse IP targeting because to get location users will have to explicitly opt-in, which won’t work on the fly for ad networks. However, once you’ve opted in at a particular site, and once you return to that site, a cookie could potentially pass your specific location to the ad server for a more locally targeted ad/offer.
Lots of stuff remains to be worked out around the user experience, use of cookies and privacy. But the bold new world of pervasive online location awareness is basically here.
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Related: Skyhook awarded patent in connection with WiFi positioning.
Here’s the Twitter feed and here’s the release that went out this morning:
Consumers who use the popular Twitter micro blogging service can now stay up to date on the latest offers from Coupons.com, the leading network for digital coupons. With Coupons.com via Twitter, followers of http://twitter.com/Coupons will automatically receive new coupon offers as they become available. The tweets will include links to the printable coupons for quick printing.
Not much to say about this except it’s going to be very effective distribution and may further “mainstream” Twitter. In fact, Twitter might become the “coupons destination” (or the place to tap into multiple coupons sources) that I’ve talked about for some time.
Everyone who has deals/coupons/offers better get on Twitter.
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Related: AOL pushes Shortcuts.com coupons into mobile (via MediaPost)
Based on comScore data (from 1M users, 12/07-12/08) the Yellow Pages Association put out data today that show local search growth outpacing the rest of the “industry.” Here are the numbers in the release:
[Local search] grew 58 percent in 2008, reaching an annual total of 15.7 billion searches. By comparison, overall U.S. Web core searches grew at a much smaller rate of 21 percent year-over-year, nearing 137 billion searches by the end of 2008. Local searches stand at 12 percent of core searches on the top 5 portals.
Buoyed by the growth in local search, Internet Yellow Pages and locally-focused online business directories also saw double-digit growth of 23 percent in the same period, totaling 4.6 billion searches in 2008.
Re IYP usage in particular:
As the readers of this blog know, I define “local search” much more expansively than comScore does (search with geomodifiers or happening on a narrow class of sites). My definition goes to user intention and ultimately buying behavior (transactions), which makes it a much bigger part of the query volume pie.
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Related: MediaPost gives very favorable coverage to the data.
I spoke to Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti yesterday, now that the new and improved Citysearch has gone into general availability. We talked about many things, among them how much traffic — and reviews — are coming from mobile. He said that the reviews are surprisingly long and substantive as well. The verbatim quote is “I’m blown away with the number of reviews” coming from the mobile app.
He also spoke about how the site’s participation with Facebook Connect has been a boon to registration and exposure for Citysearch. Herratti told the NY Times:
In the four months the site has been testing Facebook Connect, 94 percent of reviewers have published their reviews to Facebook, where an average of 40 people see them and 70 percent click back to Citysearch. That has translated into new members: daily registrations on Citysearch have tripled.
In addition, we discussed the move from city-level to neighborhood level data and organization and its challenges. But most interesting to me is a new vertical strategy that Citysearch is rolling out (ad-free for the time being). Here are two of perhaps 12 or so templated vertical sites that are rolling out (imagine wine, spas, bars and so on):
They’re curated/written by bloggers who are knowledgeable about the vertical. They offer a heavy helping of community as well:
CTRs on links to local salons or restaurants on these sites go to Citysearch proper:
The whimsical design of these sites is also fun. It’s a way to develop lots of verticals that ultimately drive traffic to Citysearch. It’s a strategy that directory publishers should look at closely in their efforts to develop cheaper sources of qualified traffic or newspapers in their effort to generate broader use cases for their sites.
I was asked on a call yesterday: What’s the most interesting thing that’s going on right now? With that question, my mind typically goes instantly blank. There’s always interesting stuff going on in lots of different arenas. But if I had to name one thing, Twitter is probably it.
In a matter of months, amazingly, the site/service has gone from being a “time waster” in search of a business model to the hottest marketing platform around.
I was on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) this weekend taking my 9-year-old daughter to see Wicked (recommend) and saw a poster to follow BART on Twitter. I was amazed that a public transit agency was using Twitter. To me this symbolized the mainstream arrival of Twitter. Very quickly brands, retailers and marketers of all stripes are adopting Twitter. And all of this has happened in months.
Saleforce announced yesterday it was integrating Twitter for customer support queries. And Federated Media has built a Twitter-powered site called “ExecTweets” featuring theoretically influential individuals. This is the first overt money making effort for Twitter (built by Federated Media and sponsored by Microsoft). We’re also likely to see text advertising appear on Twitter in the not-to-distant future.
The growth and adoption of Twitter may be unprecedented. Google, YouTube, Facebook . . . Twitter. It’s on the cusp of “verb status.” The question now is . . . who will be the lucky buyer? And will it be more or less than $1B?
If I were sitting in Redmond, I would say to myself, “We can pick up Twitter for cash for a fraction of what it would cost to buy Facebook” and it’s arguably a more effective marketing platform.
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