Comment.com: Interesting and Flawed

A new local/UGC site launched today at the TechCrunch event: Comment.com. It seeks to be a kind of CRM middleman between local businesses and consumers, managing the delivery of positive and critical feedback to “17 million local businesses.” The business model is a premium services subscription (for businesses). Unlike conventional review sites, however, the submitted comments aren’t public or distributed online. Here’s how the press release describes the service and the business model:

Consumers who visit comment.com enter the name of a company they’d like to comment to and receive a comment form. The comments they make are sent directly to the company’s decision makers. Comments aren’t posted for public review. Using the free and optional Club Comment feature, a consumer can request a response without revealing his or her identity . . .

On the business side, comment.com is a tool for service and product improvement as well as customer feedback management. Businesses get valuable insight in real time and the feedback goes to the person who can address the issue. Companies can sign up for a free basic membership by registering at the site. Basic membership allows them to receive comments via e-mail.

For $7.95 per month, companies can become Premium members and gain access to a secure, feedback management dashboard where they can save, organize, forward and respond to comments. They can also print graphical reports, track multiple locations and even create a comment widget for their own Web sites.

(emphasis added.)

You search for a specific business and then provide your feedback:

This is an ambitious undertaking. But now for my critical feedback: it’s going to be very, very, very difficult to get consumers to write reviews without context and in a kind of “vacuum” on this site. It’s not clear what gratification, response or “feedback” consumers will receive from the site (beyond acknowledgement of their review/comments). Over time, if this takes off, businesses will potentially respond directly to consumers and that no-doubt is in the VC presentation and would make this a success if it happened.

Generally today consumer-oriented startups have to have both a “destination” and “distribution” or syndication strategy. They start with the former and wind up with the latter. However I think there’s a flaw in the “destination” part of the strategy for Comment.com.

The company offers a comment widget to go on business websites. This is what will make or break the service — getting adoption and distribution of the branded comment boxes onto third party sites. For example, partnering with an existing SMB platform/channel/directory would be very helpful. MerchantCircle, for example, could potentially use something like this on its profiles to facilitate dialogue between owners and customers (although there’s always good old email). But more broadly that’s what I mean by context.

SEO will also be critical to build traffic and branding. However, most people searching for local business names are looking for contact details or directions and not a review form for after-the-fact comments. Accordingly here’s a potentially constructive suggestion:

• Create branded SEO-friendly profiles for all those businesses, with maps and contact info
• Put this form on those pages

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Update: Comment.com is showing some comments on its homepage despite saying that comments aren’t going to be posted for public view. The site may need to reconsider that policy in the near term.

DiscoverOurTown Gets a Facelift

DiscoverOurTown is one of the great, little known success stories in local. I’ve written about it several times in the past. The site was in a way like Craigslist on a smaller scale: succeeding in spite of itself and its “old school” user experience.

The site has now upgraded and offers a cleaner interface and better UX overall. However, it’s less a branded destination than a marketing/SEO platform for its advertisers and a data vendor to search engines and third party sites.

Former Kelsey Sales Lead Now an Entrepreneur

Steve Vasil, who used to lead the Kelsey Group’s sales efforts, is now running a local sports portal called Local Sports Report.

In a recent interview Vasil says that frustration with the slow pace of biz dev with media partners (newspapers) caused him to shift from wanting to partner to emphasizing a destination strategy:

Vasil says he shifted gears because his programming was developing faster than the pace of creating media partnerships. He says it was easier to develop a portal and aggregate the content through feeds and direct relationships in each city.

A consumer-destination strategy is riskier and harder to execute successfully but if it works, the payout can be significant greater.

Is the ’10 Pack’ Killing Internet Yellow Pages?

In a provocative piece at SEL, Chris Silver Smith discusses how universal search and the rise of the Google “10 Pack” have negatively affected organic traffic and referrals to Internet Yellow Pages sites. But he also talks about sites that are “bucking the trend”:

A number of notable local info sites appear to be bucking the trend or holding steady—most notably Yelp which is still holding steady, but also MerchantCircle, Zillow, ServiceMagic, and Realtor.com . . .

The article discusses what directories should do about the trend:

I see quite a lot of lost opportunities in SEO terms when I look over most business directory sites. Displaying the same, bare-bones content for a business’s listing which is also being displayed on hundreds of other sites is going to be less and less sufficient to maintaining organic referral traffic from search.

It may be necessary to expand out your taxonomy development efforts or partner with a company like ShopLocal, NearByNow or Where2GetIt to find out what is being sold at many of the stores listed in your directory. Finding ways to expand out keyword-rich description data about companies could be the deciding point in whether or not sites can continue to obtain natural, non-paid referral traffic.

Whether or not Chris is correct in every detail about the deterioration of search-directory referrals (vis-a-vis the Google 10 Pack) the issues he identifies are important and need to be carefully considered.

Is There a ‘Plan B’ for Yahoo! Search?

I’ve been writing and talking to various people about the Microsoft-Yahoo! outsourcing deal in search. My operating assumption is that the deal will ultimately be approved by regulators, but it isn’t a slam dunk. A similar, and less expansive, deal was not approved between Google and Yahoo! last year. One could argue in responses that Microsoft and Yahoo! are in very different positions  in the search market and that’s a material difference.

There’s also not been a widespread outcry from advertisers objecting to the MicroHoo search combination as “monopolistic,” as there was in the case of Google-Yahoo! (partly that was the result of lobbying behind the scenes). But what if regulators don’t allow MicroHoo to go through in the end because of the same concerns about market and pricing competition?

This scenario prompts Danny Sullivan to ask What’s Yahoo’s “Plan B” For Search?

It’s not clear the company has one. It continues to say that it will invest in search in terms of the user experience and interface. But the plan between Redmond and Sunnyvale sees many of Yahoo!’s remaining search engineers shifting to Microsoft; many have already left on their own to go elsewhere or been hired by Microsoft independently.

One of the reasons that Yahoo! did the deal with Microsoft, beyond investor pressure, is that it simply saw the back end of search and related R&D as being too expensive to maintain. But there is a chance that it will be forced to answer the question “What now?” if the US DOJ or the Europeans step in to block the deal or ask for significant modifications.

Investors didn’t “get” or like the MicroHoo deal very much (at least initially) because there was no obvious gain on Yahoo!’s part: no “lump sum” cash payment and so on. Microsoft appeared to the market to be the big winner. I continue to believe that the MicroHoo deal will happen but it’s worth asking what if it doesn’t?  For one thing, if it didn’t, you’d see investors punish Yahoo! shares (much more than they would Microsoft’s).

What about you? What do you think will happen and what would you do if you were Yahoo! and the Microsoft deal were blocked?

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Related: Kara Swisher at AllThingsD reports on a forthcoming and “massive” new ad campaign from Yahoo! around the theme “your home on the Web.” If that’s correct I think it’s not a bad concept: trusted brand, starting point, organizing tools, etc.

Hitwise: Google Maps Back on Top

The most recent Hitwise US travel category data show Google Maps overtaking MapQuest. The two sites have been trading the number one and two spots according to the metrics firm. However among keyword queries MapQuest has more branded lookups:

Many of of the “generic” maps and directions queries will take people to Google maps.

FTC-Sears Deal Points toward BT Regulation

The US FTC has approved a settlement with Sears regarding online tracking that requires it to destroy data collected from consumers, who were paid $10 to download software that monitored their online behavior. According to MediaPost, the Sears program sent “pop-up ads to 15 of every 100 visitors that asked for their email addresses. Respondents were then invited by email to download software that would track ‘online browsing,’ and promised $10 if they kept the software for at least one month.”

The settlement between the FTC and Sears was originally announced in June by the government agency. Here’s the FTC’s summary of the case and the remedy:

The FTC charges that the software would also monitor consumers’ online secure sessions – including sessions on third parties’ Web sites – and collect information transmitted in those sessions, such as the contents of shopping carts, online bank statements, drug prescription records, video rental records, library borrowing histories, and the sender, recipient, subject, and size for web-based e-mails. The software would also track some computer activities that were not related to the Internet. The proposed settlement calls for Sears to stop collecting data from the consumers who downloaded the software and to destroy all data it had previously collected.

According to the FTC’s complaint, Sears invited certain consumers visiting the sears.com and kmart.com Web sites to become members of the “My SHC Community.” Sears solicited these consumers to “participate in exciting, engaging, and on-going interactions – always on your terms and always by your choice.” Sears paid consumers $10 to participate. As part of this process, Sears asked consumers to download “research” software that it said would confidentially track their “online browsing.” Only in a lengthy user license agreement, available to consumers at the end of a multi-step registration process, did Sears disclose the full extent of the information the software tracked, according to the complaint. The complaint charges that Sears’ failure to adequately disclose the scope of the tracking software’s data collection was deceptive and violates the FTC Act.

Under the proposed settlement, in addition to destroying information previously collected, if Sears advertises or disseminates any tracking software in the future, it must clearly and prominently disclose the types of data the software will monitor, record, or transmit. This disclosure must be made prior to installation and separate from any user license agreement. Sears must also disclose whether any of the data will be used by a third party.

In this case we already are seeing the future of online data collection going forward. Here are the most interesting and relevant bits from the excerpt above:

Only in a lengthy user license agreement, available to consumers at the end of a multi-step registration process, did Sears disclose the full extent of the information the software tracked, according to the complaint. The complaint charges that Sears’ failure to adequately disclose the scope of the tracking software’s data collection was deceptive and violates the FTC Act.

Under the proposed settlement, in addition to destroying information previously collected, if Sears advertises or disseminates any tracking software in the future, it must clearly and prominently disclose the types of data the software will monitor, record, or transmit. This disclosure must be made prior to installation and separate from any user license agreement. Sears must also disclose whether any of the data will be used by a third party.

(Emphasis added.)

I think these provisions point the way toward future FTC rules that will govern all of online advertising and behavioral targeting in particular. Here’s what I think the regulation will look like:

• Prominent disclosure requirements (what is being tracked and by whom)
• Prominent ability to opt-out of tracking
• Data retention (disclosure that tells people how long their information will be stored)

If I’m correct this could throw a big monkey wrench in the works for BT because if people see prominent disclosures that they’re being tracked they’re likely opt-out, wouldn’t you? The “benefits” of behavioral targeting are highly abstract to consumers, though very real to marketers. However Google, with its “interest based ads,” may be something of a model for the future. Here’s Google’s discussion of the privacy controls in the program:

• Transparency – We already clearly label most of the ads provided by Google on the AdSense partner network and on YouTube. You can click on the labels to get more information about how we serve ads, and the information we use to show you ads. This year we will expand the range of ad formats and publishers that display labels that provide a way to learn more and make choices about Google’s ad serving.
• Choice – We have built a tool called Ads Preferences Manager, which lets you view, delete, or add interest categories associated with your browser so that you can receive ads that are more interesting to you.
• Control – You can always opt out of the advertising cookie for the AdSense partner network here. To make sure that your opt-out decision is respected (and isn’t deleted if you clear the cookies from your browser), we have designed a plug-in for your browser that maintains your opt-out choice.

The Ad Preferences Manager is a kind of dashboard for consumers to convey their “interests” and opt-out:

Make no mistake, regulation and enhanced disclosure requirements are coming. Marketers and publishers should be preparing for this inevitability.

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Related (from AdAge): The Ad-Tracking Debate: Where Should Disclosure Live?:

A more perfect (and not much harder) solution would put links to disclosure both in the ads and on the page or site. As proposed by industry groups, there should be a recurring icon in or around ads that consumers can come to associate with tracking and learning about why any particular targeted ad was served to them.

But if consumers want to look into their privacy options on that site more generally, a link on every page should take them to one place with all of the privacy information they need.

Nielsen: 19% Drive 81% of Coupon Usage

According to Nielsen, a category of consumers it calls “coupon enthusiasts” account for the lion’s share of coupon-related purchases in America:

Eighty-one percent of the units purchased using manufacturer coupons came from just 19 percent of U.S. households during the twenty-six week period ended June 27, 2009.

The most avid users, called “coupon enthusiasts,” are households that purchased 104 or more items using manufacturers’ coupons. The 10 percent of shoppers that fall into this category accounted for 62 percent of manufacturers’ coupon units. They also accounted for 16 percent of total unit sales making them a very attractive and important consumer target.

Nielsen also reports “that more and more consumers are using coupons for both food and non-food items. In Q4 2008 non-food redemptions were -3 percent. However, in the second quarter of this year redemptions for non-food items were up 46 percent. Food coupon redemptions were +21 percent in Q4 2008 and increased 27 percent in the second quarter of 2009.”

Putting aside the growth figures, the takeaway is that there’s a minority of users who are the heaviest coupon consumers — although the recession has broadened the usage of coupons.

These data refer to traditional coupons. In mobile, coupons have different demographic appeal than traditional paper coupons. And earlier this month Scarborough Research found that among the ways US consumers get coupons, newspapers remain the top source but SMS (and email) now have overtaken “Internet sites.”

Eniro Providing Maps to MSN in Sweden

Discovered this via Christer on Twitter . . . Directory publisher Eniro is behind maps on the Swedish MSN site:

This is a striking thing because Microsoft has invested so much in its mapping platform and it also potentially reflects the more “advanced” position of Eniro vs. some of its American counterparts.

Facebook Lite: Diet Facebook?

Facebook Lite (we could call it  is out and nicer to look at. It’s simpler and faster and has no ads. Here’s “regular” Facebook:

Here’s Facebook Lite (diet Facebook):

This was originally supposed to be about emerging markets, where connections might be spotty, to enable a lighter weight version of the site to load quickly. But now it has been released in the US. What do you think about the differences? Do you think people will “switch”?

And what about those missing ads? They’ll come in time if there’s adoption.

Read more on Techmeme.

The Gap between Usage & Advertising

A striking phenomenon in digital media is the often huge gap between consumer usage and advertiser adoption. For example it took years after consumers adopted the Internet in earnest for advertisers to start shifting dollars accordingly. In local it’s still the case that most ad dollars remain in traditional media.

Mobile is another example of this: 70 million mobile Internet users and agencies and advertisers are just waking up to the medium. Among newer platforms, social networks are perhaps an even more glaring example. Facebook has nearly 300 million users globally and advertisers are still pretty tentative about it. They should be aggressively in there experimenting and figuring out what best works and what doesn’t.

A MediaPost survey does indicate that social networks are at the top of the list for next year in terms of marketing/ad spending. However, we’ll believe when we see it.

There’s lots more to say and perhaps lots of survey and usage data I could use to support my argument (rushing off to a conference this morning however). But I’m just struck by the fact that it often takes advertisers literally years to recognize and adapt to consumer behavior shifts.

Why is that? Who disagrees or thinks I’m completely wrong?

Business Categories and Local Search

David Mihm’s “Small Is Beautiful” column at SEL today offers a very thoughtful discussion of how SMBs are categorized and presented online by data vendors, on local sites and in IYPs and the broader implications for the local search ecosystem. Worth a read if the topic is interesting to you.

Open Mobile Summit Conference

I’m going to be moderating a panel at the forthcoming Open Mobile Summit, November 4-5 in San Francisco. My panel is called “New Dimensions in Navigation and Search.”

Keynotes include Vint Cerf of Google, John Donovan (CTO, AT&T), Cole Brodman (CTO, T-Mobile) and Michael Abbot (SVP, Palm).

The program I run for Opus Research, Internet2Go, is a conference partner. If you’re interested in attenting, you can receive a $150 discount off the full-conference price. If you register by Friday, September 18th, you get $400 off. Register and enter the VIP code: GREGS (code not my idea).

Google Offering Micropayments To Newspapers

According to Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, Google recently responded to an RFP/RFI from the Newspaper Assn of America that sought “to gather information about the products and services available from qualified providers with expertise in helping local online publishers additionally monetize digital content, either through transactions (pay for content) and/or through collection of user data for enhanced advertising targeting or other ‘access to content programs.”

In Google’s pdf response the company describes its perceptions of the requirements of a “successful e-commerce platform for publishers”:

• Single sign-on capability for users to access content and manage subscriptions
• Ability for publishers to combine subscriptions from different titles together for one price
• Ability for publishers to create multiple payment options and easily include/exclude content behind a paywall
• Multiple tiers of access to search including 1) snippets only with “subscription” label, 2) access to preview pages and 3) “first click free” access
• Advertising systems that offer highly relevant ads for users, such as interest-based advertising

The proposed Google system (partially built, partly in development) would use Google Checkout and mimic iTunes with a revenue split to publishers and Google:

Current models on revenue sharing for the selling of content typically involve a percentage of each sale to Google in order to cover maintenance, bandwidth, processing charges, and profit margin. The Android Marketplace is the most prominent example of this model. The revenue split is comparable to Apple’s models on iTunes and AppStore and consonant with experiments being currently conducted on YouTube.

Google correctly asserts, however, that micropayments are not likely to be widely popular:

While providing an option for micropayments will be important, we do not believe it will be the norm for accessing content

A broader subscription model is more viable, but even so charging for content that consumers have come to expect for free will still be challenging and there will be enormous resistance in the near term.

It’s pretty clear that Google well understands online consumer behavior and psychology. The Google payments platform would compete with several other initiatives in the market, including Steven Brill’s Journalism Online.

Here’s a dilemma: if everyone uses a single platform there are some potential anti-trust issues (which are potentially avoided if pricing is decentralized). In the absence of consolidation around one or just a couple of payment platforms this approach potentially fails because of complexity and friction.

What do you think of all this? Next year we’re going to see lots of pay walls go up around newspaper content.

Placecast Debuts “The Alert Shopper” Series

In an interesting and clever bit of marketing 1020 Placecast has launched a six-part video series of interviews with consumers about their shopping behavior, with a heavy dose of mobile. Here’s how the release characterizes it:

The Alert Shopper is an online series that is located at http://blog.placecast.net/, featuring both first-person and third-party research in conjunction with Harris Interactive on consumer shopping habits and interest around the use of mobile devices and alerts when shopping.

With all of the hype surrounding emerging mobile content and mobile advertising, Placecast sought out to talk to America’s consumer, face-to-face and captured quite a bit of insightful feedback on what people want and don’t want.

Over the next few months, the Alert Shopper blog will feature unique insights into the mobile usage patterns of today’s American consumers, quantitative survey research from Harris Interactive as well as a broad range of retail shopping trends.

As the blub above says, there will also be data on consumer attitudes and behavior from Harris.

Here’s the first installment:

BT in the Crosshairs

For some time I’ve been anticipating regulation to be imposed on behavioral targeting (and possibly more broadly on Internet advertising). The the AP reported yesterday:

Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, is drafting a bill that would impose broad new rules on Web sites and advertisers. His goal: to ensure that consumers know what information is being collected about them on the Web and how it is being used, and to give them control over that information.

The only questions in my mind are:

• How much of a burden will any new rules impose on search engines, publishers and marketers?
• Will it require opt-in or opt-out?
• Will there be the equivalent of a “do not track” list?

Any bill that eventually passes will be a compromise but it will place burdens on Internet advertising that don’t currently exist. Consumers don’t necessarily clearly see the relationships between tracking, cookies and ad relevance. And even though they only want “relevant” ads, they also don’t want to be tracked.

The biggest losers could be social networks if they have to allow people to opt out of all ad targeting. Precision targeting is what social networks have to offer marketers. If that’s taken away — and I would immediately opt out myself — they’ll have nothing left to offer except broad, vague reach.

MerchantCircle Joins the Q&A Club

Late last week Yahoo! expanded Neighbors, modeled to some degree on Yahoo! Answers, nationwide. And this morning MerchantCircle launched “Answers.” It enables consumers to ask any question and allows MerchantCircle members (SMBs) to respond. There’s no advertising or other monetization associated with the feature (other than AdSense at the top of the page). However businesses and consumers must be registered to participate.

The program has been running in a limited beta mode for roughly eight weeks and here are the preliminary findings based on MerchantCircle’s survey of usage and consumer response:

Usage:

• more than 12,000 consumers have asked questions
• nearly 15,000 merchants have answered questions
• 85% of questions are answered within 24 hours

User feedback

• 75% say Answers is “useful” or “very useful”
• 78% say the response they received was “relevant” or “very relevant”
• 86% say the answer to their question was “valuable” or “very valuable”
• 79% say they are “likely” or “very likely” to use the Answers product again

Beyond the fact that this type of service is valuable as a general matter MerchantCircle sees it as a tool to “re-engage” merchants via its site. The community can vote for the best answer (as with other systems) and the merchants who participate can gain points to establish themselves as experts.

Consumers categorize their questions and can limit the geographic scope of the response to their area:

Finally the questions that consumers are asking and the related merchant answers will show up in search results, which is how MerchantCircle gets most of its traffic today. The site claims 20 minute monthly uniques.

Nielsen: 1H Ad Numbers Off 15%

Here’s Nielsen data on US ad spending in the first half of 2009:

According to the blog post that exposed these figures:

Cable Television ad spending was the only medium to show growth through the first six months of the year (+1.5%). The increase is especially significant since Nielsen reported Cable TV ad spending was down 2.7% through the first quarter this year. Spanish Language Cable TV also saw ad spending tick up 0.6%.

It’s important to note that the Internet figure in the table above is only online display and does not include:

[P]aid search advertising, text only, paid fee services, performance-based campaigns, sponsorships, barters, in-stream (‘pre-rolls’) players, messenger applications, partnership advertising, promotions and email campaigns, compound image/text ad or house advertising activity.

Here are Nielsen’s top product categories by ad spend:

In all but “direct response products” in the table immediately above the overwhelming number of purchases will happen in stores or specific locations, offline. Most of the ad spending however is “brand” spending targeting a national or perhaps regional audience.

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Related: see MediaPost analysis: Internet Grows 37.5%, Traditional Media Declines 30%, 2006-2009

Study Reflects Soc-Nets’ Mtkg Paradox

I wasn’t in the session at Ad:Tech in Chicago where these data were presented, but they’re fascinating and reveal the challenge that social networks face as advertising and marketing platforms. Q Interactive (which owns/operates CoolSavings) conducted a study with 1,000 US women (across groups/categories) about their social networking behavior and their attitudes toward brand marketing on social nets.

Here are the top-level findings:

• 75 percent of women are “more active” in social networking than last year
• More than half (54 percent) visit social networking sites at least once per day
• Yet, 75 percent share that social networking sites “not really” or “not at all” influence what they buy

• 52 percent of women surveyed have “befriended” or “become a fan of” at least one brand
• 83 percent feel “neutral” or “negative” when they see a brand on a social networking site
• 10 percent of women engage in product / brand-related activities (“get product information, including coupons and savings” and “writing reviews about products”) most on social networking sites – above common activities like “send private messages to friends” and “share photos”

So there’s a relatively small group actively interacting with brands on social networks (although the 52% fan/friend number is interesting). But most people on social networks are indifferent or repelled by efforts to market to them on social networks.

How do social networks and marketers engage with users in ways that are effective? Offering deals, discounts and alerts is going to be an effective way. In addition, brand pages that offer valuable information that goes beyond self-promotion are going to be more effective than pure self-promotional activity.

Centro Hires MySpace Sales Exec.

Centro just announced that it has hired Bryce Emo as Senior VP of National Sales. He was previously SVP of Monetization at Photobucket (which is owned by MySpace). Before that he was at agency Digitas.

Centro is ranked 41st on comScore’s Ad Focus rankings.