amit klein » Analytics

8 Lessons Learned from Zynga about Virality

amit — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 10:57:43 +0000

Editor’s Note: I’m almost embarrassed to say I actually had to play Frontierville and Farmville to write this post. These games send notifications constantly and I wasn’t entirely comfortable with all my friends knowing how my pigs were doing. Therefore, I had to go undercover and create a new FB account under my Indian alter ego: Amit Kumar

Zynga has experienced explosive growth since it’s inception in 2007. They’re absolutely crushing it with:

230 million active monthly users
8x user growth over the last 12 months (compared to Facebooks 2.5x growth over same time period)
$450mil+ in estimated yearly revenues
an absurd $5bln valuation

How did Zynga become such a profit generating, user acquiring, viral monster? Here’s a few strategies that worked for Zynga which you can apply to your business:

1. Build sharing as an integral part of the product

At every point Zynga prompts users to sign up for updates and send notifications (many times crossing the line) through: fan pages/likes, invites, shares, bookmarks, stream publishing, in game messaging, and email notifications. In fact they’re so darn good at notifying ”Facebook had to change their notification policies

Before you even get started playing you’re prompted to:

- Become a Fan/Like (so they can push updates through your news stream)

- Invite your friends (pro tip: make it look like it’s required)

- Share this page on your news stream

- They again remind you right at the start of the game:

Sharing is not an afterthought limited to an invite section, it’s an integral part of the experience. In fact the more you share and interact with others, the more you are rewarded.

2. Create ways to elevate a users status/social capital

Zynga doesn’t want you to just invite your friends to play, they want to enable you to do favors for your friends. Mark Pincus’ (Zynga’s CEO) describes his goal’s in Wired:

One way to think about social capital is we’re all in a certain bucket with each other, and the lowest bucket is maybe you’ll accept a friend request, and the highest bucket is you’ll come over and help me move, or pick me up at the airport,” Pincus told the Wired Business Conference Tuesday. “The question is, is there something we can do to help you move buckets?

While it’s cool (sort of) that I level’d up in Frontierville, I’m not gonna tell my friends about it, but… if I can share with them some of the points I’ve accumulated then that’s a lot more compelling. It no longer feels like spam, but instead that I’m helping them:

Applying this to a web business don’t just give a discount to the user who invites 5 of her friends to the service, let her pass on the discount to her friends (that’s something you really wanna share).

3. Assume you are gonna get it wrong at first

Don’t assume that your product is “the one.” Zynga does a great job of experimenting and making decisions based on data. I love this video of Pincus speaking at Stanford:

Towards the end he is asked if he could go back and share a lesson with himself when he was CEO of Tribes what would it be.

If I could do it all over again, I would have made Tribe a platform to test many ideas of social networking. We tried just one. Oh my god what the hell was I thinking? Just one? At our company we have several hundred tests going on every day and in every game. I would’ve done is made Tribe a platform to test every configuration

This is echo’d by others at Zynga:

Analysis, analysis, analysis. It’s been like that. [In traditional development] It’s just like, “Oh, it’s going to be a great experience,” and this and that. We’ll spend two years down a ship cycle, and, “Oops, I was wrong!”

So now it’s like, “If we do this, I think we can measure that, and here’s how we’re going to measure and tweak it later down the road…” We are an incredibly analytical organization, so we track just about everything. It’s the secret sauce behind all that stuff. There’s a lot of mathematics that go into it

That’s the magic behind what we do. Certain things we do will work, and others won’t. You try new ones, and A, B, C, D, E, F, G testing constant. (Source)

Several hundred A, B, C, D, E, F, G tests going on daily… sweet bejeezus.

4. “Ghetto” test

You don’t actually have to build it to find out if it works.

In the last 5 minutes of the video above Pincus is asked what’s the best way to do market research. His answer – “Ghetto Test”. If someone wants to build, let’s say, a hospital simulator he creates an FB ad that says, “Ever wanted to run your own hospital?” which leads to a survey (or if it’s really ghetto a 404 page).

All Zynga has to do is track CTR and compare it to previous historical rates to get a pretty good idea of demand. I’ve heard a lot of people test demand for a product idea, and A/B test marketing copy using Adwords (you don’t care about the goal, just the intent).

The guys at Aardvark (another product I love) call this Wizard of Oz testing.

5. Kill products that aren’t performing

Focusing on products that don’t work funnels attention and energy away from ones that do. Even if you’ve made substantial investments know when it’s time to let go.

We’ve actually made investments into some innovative games that were incredibly hardcore. If you look at Guild of Heroes, for example, we did roll that out. It was a version of Diablo built in Flash, and it wasn’t successful, and we didn’t support it any longer. (Source)

6. Create unexpected moments of delight

Surprise your users through game mechanics, humorous copy, badges, and easter eggs. If you make them smile, they’ll tell they’re much more likely to come back and tell their friends.

One of the really fun and successful features we added is what we call the ‘Lonely Cow’ feature,” said Skaggs. “You can help find it a home, then somebody claims it. You’ll get a brown cow instead of the white cow you had before. Then you milk the brown cow and you get chocolate milk! That’s a ‘moment of delight,’ totally unexpected but cool (Source).

7. Leverage your size to cross promote like crazy

The best customer for one of your new products is an existing customer. If you liked Farmville you’ll looooooooove Frontierville.

“Zynga has integrated a special invite system that lets you immediately invite all of your FarmVille-playing friends to join you [on Frontierville].”
They also have a banner at the top of their games calling out the rest of their properties:

Only by leveraging their existing user base were they able to get 100,000 users on Frontierville’s first day.

8. Maximize Trends

Pincus says the web is about repeatable formulas and once you find something that works, it doesn’t break for a long, long time. Think of LOLcats, rickrolling and Google. Nothing that Zynga does is new, but they’ve executed on it tremendously well. They’ve found a formula that works and are bangin’ out hits at an astouning rate.

Certainly Zynga has it’s flaws: their games are boring, repetitive, compulsive and shallow and they’ve made shady deals to generate revenue. But it’s undeniable that they’ve experienced enormous success due to the viral nature of their products. Anything else I’ve missed in terms of reasons for Zyngas growth? Lemme know in the comments.

Eating our own Dogfood in Marketing 2.0 Class

amit — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:01:43 +0000

Social Media and Web 2.0 is all about the collaborative, bidirectional flow of information. It’s no longer a brand, company or authority figure dictating the rules. As part of the course I’m teaching at NMIMS and ISB, I’m trying to apply the same principals and ask the students to help shape the class. Here are some examples of what we are doin’:

We have a fairly active Google Wave which covers the course goals and meeting notes. Students are free to edit the course outline, ask questions and suggest topics for future classes (please note you must be logged in to Google for this to work… the embed API is also fairly new – i.e. buggy):

We have a few really awesome guest speakers including:
- Maneesh Madambath – Founder of Smursh reviewing current trends in Social Media
- Guarav Mishra – CEO 2020 Social discussing using social advertising to recruit members into brand communities
- Vaibhav Arya – CTO of Skezno giving an overview of paid online advertising
- Brian Burns – Founder of SpeakWell Communications discussing copywriting for the web
- Adam Sachs – Co-founder of Ignightr talkin’ ’bout creating an investor pitch
- Ninad Raval – UX Lead at Directi discussing Web Analytics and A/B Testing
- Lauren Vargas – Community Manager at Radian6 discussing social media monitoring
- What’s Web 2.0ey about this is that half the speakers are based in the US and will be conducting their sessions via skype/video conferencing.
Rather then a preassigned reading list, the students are being asked to share a few links weekly with each other via Twitter and Wave.
Students can ask questions/make suggestions/provide their own examples (via twitter and wave) during the class.
The students will be partnering with a local NGO to raise awareness or solicit donations for a social cause using social media and an SEM campaign (hopefully Yahoo! and Google will come through and donate some ad credits). These projects will be posted publicly.

Other things I could be/should be doing:

Posting the course outline (as a wave) and inviting everyone whose registered for the ISB course to make their edits/suggestions (for topics or speakers)/questions/modifications prior to the start of the course.
Reaching out to students in these universities ahead of time (via Twitter) to build some hype and make sure the class is filled up.

Anyone else have any ideas on how to make the course better? Let me know…

Introduction to Paid Online Advertising

amit — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 07:11:22 +0000

This past weekend I gave my first two lectures at SPJain on paid online marketing. I thought it went pretty well, the students seemed really engaged and interested in the material. The slides, course outline and videos are posted below. I’ve also agreed to do a 6 week course at another business school: NMIMS (more or less following this outline), if anyone has any ideas on how to improve this session or the course outline, please let me know.

Video:

The videos from the actual lecture didn’t come out to well (you can see them here and here). Below is the same session I gave to our team internally:

Intro to Paid Online Marketing – Directi from Amit Klein on Vimeo.

Slides:

Intro to Paid Online Marketing

View more presentations from Amit Klein.

Course Outline:

Prior Reading:

Introduction
iTunes Case Study – You are the marketing manager responsible for launching the iTunes Store in India
- What are your objectives?
- How do you go about achieving those objectives?
Goals:
- Discuss branding vs. performance objectives
- Discuss differences between online and offline marketing (targeting, measurement, reach)
- Discuss the marketing funnel (Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty, Advocacy)
- Review options for online advertising in relationship to the funnel
Review terminology:
- Impression, CPM, CPC, CPA/L/S, Goal, Conversion, CTR

Methods of Online Advertising
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – Google Adwords Example
- How does Google determine which ads to display to users? Keyword, bid, location, quality score / relevance (clickthrough)
- Why are the bulk of most ad budgets allocated to SEM http://mashable.com/2009/07/08/social-media-marketing-growth/#mb – intent
Ads on Social Networks – Facebook Ads
- Targeting based on demographics
Ad networks – Right Media Exchange
- What is the advantage of purchasing an ad on an network rather then directly on a site itself – Non-premium, performance based, auction, reach
Affiliate Sales – Amazon
- Description of the affiliate model
Email Marketing – Email Brain
- Review analytics for email marketing
- Discuss limitations on reach

Revisit iTunes Case Study
How can you determine effectiveness of online marketing campaigns?
- Demonstrate eCPM / eCPA calcualtions
- Link online marketing metrics to sales

Ask students to come up with a marketing plan
- Split class into branding vs. performance
- Determine goals and budget allocation based on historical results

Measurement and Course Correction
Demonstrate Google Analytics
- Show ecommerce analytics
- Glean insights, create hypothesis based on analytics data (i.e. per visit value of certain states are high, let’s see if additional marketing – online or offline – will help us generate more sale with less spend)
Course Correction
- 3 slides for creative, source and keyword performance
- Discuss actively managing campaigns and getting rid of underperforming ads, sources, keywords

Measuring the Success of Social Media Campaigns

amit — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 12:56:31 +0000

Why should businesses engage in Social Media? In the end, the goal of all marketing is to increase sales/conversions. But only in rare examples can a company point to their social media marketing efforts and indicate a direct correlation with sales (one exception is Dell Outlet on Twitter). Companies should engage in social media to increase:

Reach – create buzz, get new customers, create awareness
Reputation and influence – become an authority/thought leader, improve sentiment
Engagement – improve customer and brand loyalty

But how do you determine if your campaign is successful? First you need to determine your objective. If you have a new product launch, you probably want to build some buzz and create awareness (Reach). If you have added new features to your product, you will want to measure it’s effect on user engagement/loyalty. If your goal is to increase your influence and reputation, you can start aggregating content or create your own (via a corporate blog for instance).

This is a rapidly evolving field and the tools and metrics used to determine success are changing quickly. Don’t be afraid to throw away metrics, the most important thing is that you start tracking. Below I list some methods for objectively measuring your success.

Measuring Reach

Visitors – The number of people visiting your site and the source of that traffic. This can be measured using standard web analytics tools like Google Analytics. If you want to benchmark against peers/competitors use tools like Compete/Alexa.
Number of Friends/Followers/Fans (applies to Facebook, SlideShare, etc…) – I don’t believe Twitter followers is a good metric to measure since there is a lot of spam. Much more important is quality of visitors (i.e. one Oprah or Michael Arrington is much more valuable then 1000 followers). Measuring 2nd degree relationships (number of friends of friends), is much more valuable (albeit more difficult to measure).
RSS Subscriptions – Feedburner
Links – When sharing links, you can use tools like bit.ly to determine how many people have clicked on it. Just add a + to the end of any bit.ly link (check out my self-referential example: http://bit.ly/16GZ6x+).

Measuring Reputation and Influence

Number of public mentions (Blogs, Twitter, Facebook) – To measure public mentions on blogs you can subscribe to an RSS feed for your company/product/brand/name on Google Blog Search. For public mentions on Twitter subscribe to an RSS feed from Twitter Search. For Facebook, use Lexicon (this is more interesting as a tool to compare against your competitors, though they are undoubtedly improving this tool and I’m sure will add a y-axis soon).
Incoming links (SEO) – This is the primary way Google measures the authority of pages when ranking search results. Use tools like Google Webmaster Tools, Xinu Returns and Technorati to track these.
Comments about you on other sites – Since Google doesn’t index comments on blogs (most often), you can find out using tools like BackType.
Retweets – Twitter Search
Unsolicited positive mentions – I love this metric, there’s not much you can do to actively improve this, but if you are tracking it and are open, transparent and engaging your users properly, people will speak positively about you.

Measuring Engagement
You can use standard web analytics tools (Google Analytics) to measure:

Visitor Loyalty – The number of return visitors over 1 month
Recency – The number of return visitors over 1 week
Duration – The length of time spent on the site
Actions – The number of actions taken on the site: downloading, posting, commenting, playing, etc…

The absolute numbers are not important. Track these numbers month over month and look for an upwards trends.

Off-site engagement metrics include:

Facebook – You can use FB insights to measure the number of actions on your fan page: comments, likes, wall posts, etc…
YouTube – Youtube has it’s own analytics for measuring video plays.
Trendrr – Trendrr is an awesome tool which let’s you measure public mentions and music/video plays across a variety of sites.

In short there is no easy way to measure your success across social media. Sure there are short cuts like Twitalyzer, which is nice for at a glance metrics, but if you have the time coming up with your own set of metrics is far more valuable. This all assumes that your brand is small enough that you don’t get thousands of public mentions a day. If you do, you’ll have to call in one of the big boys like Visible Technologies or Sentiment Metrics.

Anything I missed? Anything else you track? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments…

Slides from Social Media Training Sessions

amit — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:59:46 +0000

Last week I gave a few training sessions to new joinees in our company covering Social Media, Online Advertising and Analytics. From talks I’ve had with new joinees, I’ve found this information isn’t covered in college/graduate coursework. I’m planning on turning this into a longer course and teaching at one of the business schools here.

Part 1: Introduction to Social Media

View more presentations from amitklein.

Part 2: Twitter, Facebook and Social Data Portability

Advertising Is Not a Sustainable Business Model for the Web (unless you are a Search Engine)

amit — Sun, 31 May 2009 09:35:09 +0000

The long-held myth that web companies can achieve profitability through free products, services and content solely based on advertising is fading. The diminishing rates of online ads, and the slowdown of venture capital and IPOs, has led to a realization that a sustainable business model for web companies must have multiple, diverse, revenue streams.

Over the last few months I’ve seen a growing number of companies offering alternative strategies to generating revenue.

Subscription Services / Premium Content (Blizzard, New York Times, GigaOM, Forrester)

The most straightforward revenue source is paid subscriptions. Blizzard, makers of World of Warcraft, absolutely crush it.

“if [their] 10 million subscribers were to pay the regular $14.99 month-to-month fee, then Blizzard would fill its pockets with almost $150 million every single month… that means a revenue-target of more than $1.7 billion for FY 2008.”

While many media companies have experimented with paid subscription models, very few have been able to do it successfully. The exception is research focused companies like Forrester which banks on corporates with deep pockets shelling out $700 for a 12 page report. GigaOM and TechCrunch have also recently launched similar premium research and analysis services.

The New York Times recently released it’s TimesReader 2.0 Adobe Air client. While the client offers an improved user experience, I can’t ever imagine shelling out $3.45 a week for content I can get for free. Though I would pay for their $3 iPhone app.

It’s possible that with the success of the Kindle, these paid content services will flourish in the future.

Freemium (Wetpaint, Pandora, Google Apps)

A variation on premium content services is the freemium model. Give away 80% of your service for free, and charge for heavy users who want more functionality or a better experience. Pandora, a music discovery product, recently launched a premium services which, for $36 a year, removes ads, provides higher quality streaming music and offers a desktop app. A compelling offering for their top tier of users.

Wetpaint is another company that has found success through the freemium model:

“When Ben Elowitz formed Wetpaint in 2005, it was intended to let anyone create a Web site free… Wetpaint typically offers advertisers space on a few Web sites with a few hundred thousand visitors. But last fall, many of their advertisers raised their sights to publishers with more than five million readers, Mr. Elowitz said. Rates for leftover ad space fell to 25 cents per thousand views from $1… Now, Wetpaint charges its big company customers, like HBO and Fox, a fee in exchange for providing extra services like site promotion and moderating reader forums… Smaller customers can pay to keep their sites free of ads. Wetpaint plans to add more paid services, including additional storage for big files and personalized domain names. It is also considering selling virtual goods on its sites. “

Finally Google Apps is another nice example of successfully upselling premium services. The communication and collaboration platform is free for up to 50 users, but for $50 per user per year you get access to a whole range of services including: additional storage space, email security and archiving, video sharing, phone support and access to API’s.

App Stores (Apple, Nokia, Blackberry, Google Android)

It’s tough to argue against the game-changing success of the Apple App Store. Rival companies like Google, Nokia and Blackberry have launched their own stores (the Android Market, Ovi store and Blackberry App World respectively). A cursory glance on the Blackberry store only showed about 20 apps, and none of them were paid. While they won’t be competitive with Apple (at least for some time), it’s at least showing that this model is profitable and worth pursuing. I’m sure this is now central to how mobile handset makers and software developers plan on monetizing phones.

Interestingly this model is now being extended beyond just phones (and why not!). According to the Sun CEO, Jonathan Schwartz:

“Vector is a network service to connect companies of all sizes and types to the roughly one billion Java users all over the world. Vector (which we’ll likely rename the Java Store), has the potential to deliver the world’s largest audience to developers and businesses leveraging Java and JavaFX.

Our runtimes reach more consumers than just about any other company on earth. That ubiquity has obvious value to search companies, but it’s also quite valuable to banks looking to sign up new accounts, sports franchises looking for new viewers, media companies and news organizations looking for new subscribers – basically, any Java developer looking to escape the browser to reach a billion or so consumers.

How will it work? Candidate applications will be submitted via a simple web site, evaluated by Sun for safety and content, then presented under free or fee terms to the broad Java audience via our update mechanism. Over time, developers will bid for position on our storefront, and the relationships won’t be exclusive (as they have been for search). As with other app stores, Sun will charge for distribution – but unlike other app stores, whose audiences are tiny, measured in the millions or tens of millions, ours will have what we estimate to be approximately a billion users. That’s clearly a lot of traffic, and will position the Java App Store as having just about the world’s largest audience. “

I believe that a paid app store is also a viable business model for social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Microtransaction (Tencent, Zygna, Facebook)

Tencent, the largest Chinese social network, focuses on microtransactions as their primary revenue source. Users pay for subscriptions, virtual clothes for your avatar, new weapons, cute pets, etc… From their ’09 first quarter results:

Internet services (digital goods, game subscriptions, micro-transactions) – $279.9 mil (76% of total revenues)
Mobile Subscriptions – $64.5 (17.6% of total revenue)
Online Advertising – $21 mil (5.9% of total revenues)

Online advertising only 5.9% of their total $350mil revenues? Impressive.

Another company successfully generating revenues from social gaming microtransactions is Zygna. According to TechCrunch:

“Zynga, the online gaming publisher, is making a ton of money… [close] to $100 million. And clearly, it’s accelerating… There looks to be a bright future in the online gaming sphere and specifically around micro-transactions. That’s how Zynga makes most of its money. With some of its leading games on MySpace and Facebook, it charges users for playing time or for things like chips in poker. These small purchases which usually amount to only a few dollars at a time, start to add up quick. And that’s only with a small percentage of overall players opting to buy them.”

Facebook finally launched it’s much anticipated payment platform for testing. Facebook hopes to be the OS for the social web. They are banking on companies like Zygna figuring out what it the masses want and developing social applications on top of their platform. App developers will be able to charge for subscriptions and create opportunities for in-app transactions. Facebook will get a cut of each transaction. Cha-ching!

Another interesting company in this space is Tipjoy, which facilitates small payments on Twitter. I haven’t seen this used effectively yet, but I imagine a micropayment based Craigslist Twitter app could be successful.

Trend Analysis (Twitter, Zensify)

It’s undeniable that Twitter has achieved massive popularity, but that doesn’t always translate to profits (see YouTube). I believe Twitter’s most effective strategy for monetization will be mining and performing trend analysis on the millions of thought bubbles created by users daily. Both companies and individuals would pay big money to answer the following questions:

What are people saying about me/my product right now?
How has the perception of my brand changed recently and in what direction is it trending?
Geographically where is my biggest, rapidly emerging and diminishing audiences?
Who are my biggest evangelists, in what demographic do they fall in, where are they located?
Who are my biggest naysayers, how can I change their perception?
What is the perception of my product vs. my competitors?
What are the trending (in both directions) topics in my industry?

On a smaller scale the new iPhone app Zensify:

“Shows the user trends within your social graph in the form of a tag cloud of key words. In other words it brings a lot more intelligence to your social graph. Suddenly, you can see a big trending topic amongst people you follow… “Wouldn’t it be cool if “trending topics” were localized to the people who are followed by the people you follow.” Well Zensify does this… And it doesn’t just do it across Twitter. It does it also does it across updates from Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, Photobucket and 12seconds.”

I believe that providing a set of tools to monitor trends amongst your social graph (and public timelines), will be a huge revenue opportunity for companies looking to monetize on social and real-time.

Conclusion

When the internet was originally created the “page metaphor” mimicked the existing print industry. It followed that the way to monetize was through advertisements. As we move from pages to activity streams we’re starting to see entirely new, innovative ways to profit. We are still in the infancy of this new stream based revolution and while companies like Twitter and Facebook have achieved huge valuations no one (especially the Newspaper and Music industries) has yet figured out Monetization 2.0. Put on your thinking hats…

Why Would Anyone Advertise Online Without Google/Facebook?

amit — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 08:15:47 +0000

As part of my new job I’m in charge of developing and executing a marketing plan for a new website. I’ve been doing a lot of research into online advertising and trying to figure out the best way to allocate my budget. There are a number of ways to purchase ads online.

CPM (cost per one thousand impressions) is the cost to display your ad one thousand times. For the sites I contacted the range was from $20-$70 per 1000 impressions.
CPC (cost per click), instead of purchasing ads which do not guarantee clicks, Google Adwords and Facebook both allow you to pay only when someone clicks on your ads. Better.
CPA (cost per action), you only pay when a user clicks on your ad, comes to your site and does something (i.e. fills out a form). This is obviously the best for ad buyers, but worse for ad sellers (since it depends on how convincing you/your product are to get someone to take that action). I haven’t found any advertisers willing to sell on CPA basis.

There are also a number of other factors that allow you to specify your audience better.

Facebook allows you to specify where (to the city), what sex, age range, keywords, education (even to the specific college, year and major), relationship status and sexual orientation of your target audience (so that’s how my profile info is used). In my example below, Facebook tells me there are 220 single college women between 18 and 23 in New York who like Pizza (hey ladies!). You only pay per click, set daily limits on how much you want to spend and a maximum you want to pay for click.

Google also allows you to specify location, keywords, daily budgets and how much you will pay for a click. The graph below shows me how many clicks I am likely to receive and how much those clicks will cost me (in Rupees):

In comparison the Google and Facebook models will give me a lot more value for my budget. Here’s why:

Cost (CPC is better then CPM) – The number of clicks I get is much higher per dollar with Facebook and Google. One of the major tech sites I contacted (can’t give their name but you’ve heard of them), offered me 174,000 impressions for 4k over two months ($23 CPM). They estimate a clickthrough rate of .25% which would equal 435 clicks. In comparison I can set a maximum bid on Google and Facebook ads (let’s say .50 cents – $2 per click), giving me 2,000-8,000 clicks.
Targeting - While the tech sites I contacted gave a lot of demographic information about their users (what percentage are IT decision makers, developers etc…), it doesn’t mean the individual viewing my ad actually is in that bucket. With Facebook, I can guarantee that the people who are viewing my ad are in the target audience I want them to be. With Google, it’s up to me to define good keywords that people are searching for in order to reach them. Assuming I can do this (there are a lot of tools out there to help as well), I’ll know my ads are only seen by the right people.
Analytics - There is no way for me tell how many times the ad publisher is actually displaying my ad. They can tell me they showed it 100,000 times but I have no way to validate this. All I can see is the number of people that actually click on that link. Google and Facebook give me tools to see how well my keywords and ads are performing, guaranteeing my investment.

In short I can understand if you are Coca Cola you don’t really care who sees your ad. In fact you don’t even care if people click on your ad. You are huge and all you want is to continue reminding people they are thirsty, your target audience is everyone. But for anyone else why would you advertise with someone who doesn’t offer targeted CPC ad purchasing? Your thoughts appreciated…

The Transition to Real-Time, Social Search

amit — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 07:32:49 +0000

John Batelle recently wrote a great post about the shift from static to real-time search. To paraphrase he says that Google is/was awesome because for the first time, you could quickly and accurately get static information about any search term. Though this strength is also a flaw. By nature, newer content will have a lower page rank and thus appear farther down in search results. The emerging “liveweb” will be able to answer the question “What are people saying about X right now?” The current best example of this is Twitter Search. But this isn’t enough. The question I really want to ask (and the real moneymaker) is “What are people I trust saying about X right now?”

A few examples where static search is insufficient:

Breaking news/current events (we’ve seen many examples where Twitter breaks news stories first – i.e. San Diego Fires, Mumbai Terrorist Attacks, etc..,) Many times Twitter is able to provide (arguably) more accurate real-time reports that the news that traditional news outlets later pick up on. While Google is incorporating News Results at the top of it’s list:

It’s still not enough if I want to get a grasp on the current situation/perspective/events occurring now (though interestingly enough the NYTimes ad on the right is incorporating real-time content).

Finding the amount of times people are searching/mentioning a term – Google Trends allows you to verify the pretty obvious fact that searches for Santa tend to spike at the end of the year, but did you know Canadians were the most actively searching for Santa and that progressively each year less people are asking Google about him?

The equivalent of this is Facebook Lexicon (interestingly no label on the y-axis, not useful for an actual research tool) and Twitter Twist (been down for quite a while). This is huge for PR and Product companies who want to be able to monitor how much buzz a person/event/product are receiving.

Product Reviews / Social Shopping – When most people want to buy a product online, they head to Google. This is why advertising on search is a big moneymaker (as opposed to advertising on social networks which is seriously struggling – people go to Facebook to waste time, flirt, look at pictures of their friends drunk and write each other stupid messages, not buy products). There have been a bunch of entrants into this market but none so far has provided a compelling product and achieved critical mass. Hopefully now with Facebook Connect/Google Friend Connect, someone will make this possible. If I’m looking for a camera, I want to know which camera my friends use and love, then find the cheapest place to buy it. The first person who makes this easy to do (using my Facebook social data) is going to make a killing.

Google dominates static search, Twitter knows what you are doing, Facebook controls your social graph and Apple knows where you are. The company able to blend all of these services (static, real-time, social, and location), while maintaining the strictest privacy controls, which will dominate the next era of the web

Billion Dollar Business Idea

amit — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 07:26:40 +0000

I have an idea, it’s a good one too. This is gonna be big, we’re talkin’ bigger then YouTube, Facebook and Cute Overload… combined. I’m goin’ to let you in on the secret, but there’s a catch – I need your help. I just need you to answer to the following question: What is the killer service that combines people’s location (g/iPhone) and existing social data (Facebook, OpenSocial) to drive real life interactions and sales? Give up? Me too…

The convergence of the mobile and social web (although over-hyped for years) presents an enormous opportunity. For a long time we’ve heard rumors of a mystical app where you specify you specify you want some new size 13, white, Nike Zoom LeBron VI’s. You walk by FootLocker and all of a sudden you receive a message letting you know they have it in stock, in your size, and if you buy it now, you get 15% off. Or the app that let’s you know the cute chick across the bar is single, and shares your love of Stan Getz and Quentin Tarentino. Perfect? Not really, privacy concerns and unwelcome solicitation can quickly ruin this product. Success with location based services (LBS) can only be achieved by giving users complete control over their privacy, and continuously building trust by providing more useful and accurate services.

I’ve spent some time playing around with the current LBS offerings Loopt and Yelp, but I think there’s a lot more that can be done. This summer I came across an article in the NYTimes describing Sense Networks. I downloaded the CitySense app on my blackberry and was floored, absolutely incredible. It allows you to see in real-time where people are, if the population density is higher or lower then normal in certain areas and recommend places you would like to go based on where you’ve been (currently only for SF).

But this is just a for-fun demonstration of their technology. Some of the tough questions that Macrosense is trying to answer include:

Where do people make the decision to go to one place versus another? Which places in the city are “influence points” versus “stops en route”?
From where do the most people come from before arriving at a particular location? Where do most people go afterwards, and how does this change throughout the day?
What is the demand and elasticity of demand for places, activities and services by income level? What are the most dramatic increases and decreases?

This is dope and extremely profitable. The information could be used for marketers and business trying to determine the right location for their store. The company is backed by hedge funds and I bet are making some scary decisions based on their findings (i.e. economy goes down 10% no one is going into the Apple Store, short the hell out of the stock)

Another great, new product is the Sekai Camera. The concept is not only awesome, but the video is highly entertaining:

As we continue to make our phones smarter with faster and ubiquitous connections and GPS, we can enhance our real world experience by utilizing the thoughts, opinions and opportunities presented by friends and strangers alike. Ideas anyone?

Increasing WordPress Traffic (Part 1)

amit — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 03:44:28 +0000

Introduction

As part of my previous job, I used to manage development and operations for some pretty big entertainment and ecommerce sites. While my company didn’t explicitly offer SEO services, we implemented recommendations from third party SEO consultancies. Outside of work, I recently setup wordpress installations for my two friends (Ballgame’s points and Evan Cobb Jazz) as well as my own personal site. My buddies keep asking me how to improve traffic to their sites, and now that I have my own, I figured I should put it out there to help and get feedback from the community. My plan is to set reasonable goals, define tangible steps, and show (through Google Analytics/Webmaster screenshots), the results.

Goals (we’re talkin’ baby steps here)

Here’s my first two (modest) goals for the site:

Unfortunately for me, there is another Amit Klein who is a well published expert in the field of Network Security. In a google search for “amit klein” my site isn’t even in the first 10 pages (I stopped checking after that). Goal #1: Get my site to show up within the first two pages when I search for my name.
It’s great that some of my friends have seen the site, but I want to create a real online presence and attract some visitors who are interested in the topics I’m writing about. Let’s start small – Goal #2: Attract 50 visitors in one day without spamming everyone I know.

Let’s take a look at where I’m at right now…

Current State (miserable)

I’ve had this domain name for about 2 years and have used on only as a test environment for some wordpress and drupal installations. On Sept 22, I setup this wordpress installation at the top level.
I’ve removed any old installations and setup permanent redirects for any pages in Google’s current index.
Copied over my old posts from my company blog
Setup a Google Analytics Account and included the tracking code in the footer file of my site.
Setup a Google Webmaster Tools account and validated my site.
Setup a Feedburner Account and link to the RSS feed in the footer of the site.
Installed two wordpress plugins: All In One SEO Pack and Google Sitemap Generator
Using the All In One SEO Pack I’ve defined a home page title, description and keywords.
Using the Google Sitemap Generator, I automatically genereated a sitemap then told Google Webmaster Tools about it:

On the sitemap tab above, It says that 1/22 of the pages in my sitemap are currently in Google’s Index. The overview tab below says that Google’s spider last indexed my site on 9/18 (4 days before I setup this blog):

On the first day of my blog’s launch I let some close friends know about the blog, since then I’ve also setup a twitter account where I’ve announced new blog posts.
Looking at my Google Analytics traffic my numbers are pretty pathetic (some sites I’ve been managing for my site get multiple thousands unique visitors a day), my best day was the day I launched (with 30 visitors aka all my friends):

Because I have such few visitors, I can identify exactly who they are (shout out to my readers: Kenny O in Germany, Evan in Nashville, Alyson and Steiner in Denver):

Since I’ve plateaued at about 4 visitors a day and my site isn’t even indexed by Google. I have my work cut out for me on achieving my goals of getting my name to show up in a Google search and attracting 50 visitors in one day. Here’s how I’m going to do it:

The Plan

In the short term I plan on implementing as many as I can of the SEO Best Practices including:

Adding specific tags, meta descriptions and keywords for all my posts
Create a static HTML sitemap with descriptions of posts and link to it in my footer
Rewrite titles and title tags to include keywords
Provide alt tags for all images
Redirect traffic from amitklein.com to www.amitklein.com

In the long term I plan to:

Start posting comments to articles I read in the 20 blogs I go through daily. This is not a ploy to link to my site, I believe if I can make valid points about the post and join the community I can get people interested in me and what I have to say. Only if it’s appropriate link back to articles I’ve written.
Be more active on Twitter, get more friends/followers and engage people through microblogging.
Join open directories like Yahoo Directory, and The Open Directory Project.
See if I can write guest posts for blogs I read.
Find ways to distribute my content through existing syndication channels.
Explore ways to increase RSS subscription through Feedburner.

I’ll write again once Google indexes my site and share my progress and any other ideas I have.