John Battelle of Federated Media is giving today’s keynote address.
He mentions his New Orleans speaking and mentions talking about both The Search and launching Federated Media. The first computing wave was older back-end office tasks on mainframes. The command line interface was how people understood and communicated with the machines. The next wave was the front office being digitized with personal computer. Almost everyone who has a desk had a computer. The graphical interface was how people interfaced with the digital world. Web 2.0 digitized customers and the number of people who are now involved in technology is growing. Google (search) is the new interface to technology. Graphical interface became the hunt and poke interface, that made sense at the time, but historians will look back in confusion at the decision we made to use a desktop interface. The search box is command prompt of the technology interface. Search is starting to work with natural language. Search is the steering wheel of navigation.
He uses shopping at whole foods as an example. When you purchase your wine and you want to be seen purchasing a cheap wine. Instead of purchasing it you scan the barcode into your phone, and it returns a price in your neighborhood lower than the whole food price. He mentions since using this example in the book people have sent him business plans with that example. Web 2.0 is about using the web as a platform for business.
Search allows marketers to place their at the point of intent instead of the point of content. Traditionally people placed ads where the demographics were, for example watching Oprah. A search box allows marketers to place there ads on the result page right at the point of intent. Content changes to the conversation.
Marketing need to change to be part of a conversation and not an interruption.
Marketing needs to become part of the dialouge which is a opportunity that exists in web 2.0 places like MySpace, Friendster. Search has also changed from distribution based model to an attention based model. How do you do brand marketing and let the people on the site control the conversation. The best businesses allow customers to help build the business.
He uses IBM think pad as an example, and how he tried to convince Levono to let their customers help with the brand and product. Another example Microsoft bought five sites on the FM network with the dinosaur advertising. There was a limited amount of creative which irritated the site owners where the ads were running. Someone at FM wrote a new ad talking about the wi-fi capabilities, which resulted ina 60% conversion increase. Another example was when Symanted wrote a story about the lack of Mac viruses which drove a huge amount of traffic and links. Cisco wanted to drive discussion of a new product the “human network”. They wanted to get a wikipedia listing which had problems do to it’s commercial intent. After getting involved in the commercial version of wikipedia which later on spawned a natural wikipedia listing.
FM has two ways to advertise, the first is a self service method. They select high quality to put into inventory. he does a walk through using Dooce as an example. After getting 10,000+ readers he started to wonder what to do with the site. He also mention Boing Boing needing money to fund hosting. He came up with the idea to develop an advertising platfor to support high quality publishers. It’s about voice, point-of view, accuracy, and relationship. They have closed now and have 150 sites with 750,000 readers. They also use a sales force for larger corporate clients in major cities like New York, San Francisco, and other locations. They also have an author service division to help authors with technology.
Q: Can you talk about the seperation in church and state between advertisers
A: They have a level of transparency that other publications like the New York Times don’t have. As long as they are honest open about things and aren’t selling the the words. If you acknowledge and don’t abuse the trust the readers they will stay with you.
Q: As google is getting into radio and newspapers what is it that makes CPM a better choice
A: He mentions a conversation he had with another executive recently that says Google is now validating the model.
Q: What is the most unique thing you have ever seen a blogger do to increase readership
A: there are lots of things like lists do really well, asside from those one time hits, having a passionate conversation with your readers about a subject you both care about. This is the against the traditional approach of those who chase markets
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{ 1 comment }
Thanks for the summary. Very detailed!
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