Personalization Is Not ...

Editor’s note: Scott Brave is the CTO and co-founder, Baynote . We’ve all watched from the sidelines as companies have come out in a burst of glory, and then, two years later, spent their venture capital, lost their user base, and failed to monetize. This begs the question – what are the factors that drive a company’s survival, differentiate it, and ultimately make it a winner? In today’s online world, personalization is increasingly making or breaking companies. The companies that win are the ones making personalization a key company value – not just a feature. In the early days of the web, consumers were happy just to gain access to information. However, as technology became more sophisticated, and as more consumers and companies came online, we quickly moved out of the access age and into a state of information overload, often leaving consumers frustrated and confused. Companies that helped consumers cut through the clutter to reveal relevant information had a critical and sustainable competitive advantage in their respective areas. The concept of relevance is critical to the success of Google, for example. Personalization is not new. Popularized by Amazon and Netflix more than a decade ago, personalization is the practice of tailoring information to people based on what they are looking for, what they have found interesting in the past, what their friends have engaged with, or based on explicit inputs like their interests. Personalization has gotten a lot of positive attention recently because it can be used to great effect to organize the web’s information overflow into relevant, meaningful experiences. Winning companies approach personalization as a core value of how they do business – a “customer-centric” philosophy – rather than an add-on “feature.” As proof, here are some examples of companies that have built their businesses around personalization and the competition that they left in their wake. News: Flipboard vs. Yahoo! News In 2001, Yahoo! launched Yahoo! News , providing a repository for news articles that became the first-ever most-emailed page on the web. However, Yahoo! News neglected to treat personalization as a core value – and in so doing missed out on the opportunity to tap into the social graph of personal information to personalize and curate content for users based on their interests. With Yahoo! treating personalization as a feature and not a core value, by 2010, consumers moved on to new, more personalized content curation services that were specifically designed for consuming media. One example of such a personalized news source is Flipboard , which works across Apple devices, and allows users to “flip” through their social networking feeds and feeds from partner websites to find the news articles that are most interesting to them. Within a year of its founding, Flipboard had amassed a $200 million valuation. Today, the company’s valuation and user base continues to skyrocket, while Yahoo!’s continues to hemorrhage. Flipboard won because it applied personalization to consumer choice for news articles that other news providers hadn’t accounted for, sparking the beginning of the content curation boom. Interestingly, Yahoo! recently announced plans to eliminate many of its online properties in order to focus on its most popular ones and make the content on those sites personalized to the user. It seems Yahoo! has finally caught on to the fact that users like personalized content and will engage with brands and services that provide content tailored to their interests. Music: Pandora vs. Internet radio This example seems counter-intuitive – wouldn’t people want to listen to their favorite radio station online? This just never took off. Why? Internet radio contained way too much content – it wasn’t focused or specific enough. Consumers had to work too hard to find the music they liked. Once consumers were introduced to a better way to curate and listen to music, they were never going back. When Pandora allowed users to input their music preferences through both explicit selections and implicit actions to help shape their content stream, it changed the listening experience. Pandora made listening to music online personal. After Pandora, just listening to the radio online seemed like a waste of time. Dining: Alfred (Google) vs. Opentable OpenTable provides a free service that lets users make reservations online. The company first came on the scene in 1998, and has steadily built up its business – today over 25,000 restaurants are signed up with the service. While OpenTable provides restaurant recommendations along the side of the screen based on location, it is a feature rather than being core to the experience. Alfred, on the other hand, is a mobile app developed by Clever Sense (purchased by Google in December) that delivers dining recommendations based exclusively on your inputs and your Facebook check-ins and profile. By offering recommendations for restaurants that are personalized to consumer’s inputs and behavior Google could become a leading provider of time-critical dining data, and a big player in the multi-billion dollar restaurant industry. These examples have all shown how companies that embrace personalization as a core value, and not just a feature can win. In today’s consumer-driven society companies that don’t pay attention to what people want most at any given moment risk losing significant market share to competitors that have built a culture around delighting customers with a highly personalized experience at every turn.

DataSift Raises $7.2M F...

DataSift , a data analysis company that provides developers and third parties with access to Twitter , Facebook and other social data sources, has raised $7.2 million in a follow-on Series A round from existing investors GRP Partners and IA Ventures. This brings DataSift’s total funding to $15 million. For background, developers, businesses, media companies and organizations can essentially use DataSift to mine the Twitter firehose of social data, as well as Facebook, YouTube, blogs, forums and online message boards. But what makes DataSift special is that it can sort through billions of social interactions then filter this social media data for demographic information, online influence and sentiment, either positive or negative. As we’ve reported in the past, DataSift does not limit searches based on keywords and applies natural language processing to turn unstructured data into structured, digestible information. The company’s product allows companies of any size to define extremely complex filters, including location, gender, sentiment, language, and even influence based on Klout score, to provide quick and very specific insight and analysis. The company also recently launched Historics , a cloud-computing platform that enables entrepreneurs and enterprises to extract business insights from Twitter’s public Tweets dating back to January 2010. And DataSift recently integrated with NewsCred has to extended its ability to monitor not just social media, but also news articles. In terms of pricing, DataSift features a cloud-based pricing model with pay-as-you-go or subscription options. The company says a startup can start using DataSift for as little as $200 per month. Since launch last year, DataSift, which faces competition from Gnip, has accumulated 200 corporate customers, including a number of well-known news organizations, social media monitoring companies and Fortune 500 companies. Rob Bailey, CEO, DataSift explained to use in an interview that while the company’s first goal is the “nail the U.S. market,” the startup has received major interest in a localized product from Europe, Latin America and Asia. The new funding will be used to mitigate this demand and towards additional product development. Bailey adds that DataSift will be adding a number of traditional new data sources as well as international data in the near future. Bailey also said that Datasift was not looking for financing, but received offers from existing investors and chose to raise an inside round now as to not distract from focusing on the product.

Bing Strips Down Result...

While Google keeps cramming its search results pages full of tools and social content, today Bing confirmed with me the full roll out a redesigned search results page that completely clears the left sidebar, and replaces the tabbed header with a cleaner set of links. Bing Facebook integration is also more subtle now, instead of plastering names and faces beneath Liked results. This more relaxing, dare I say zen, design gives Google a more claustrophobic and exhausting feel by comparison. Microsoft seems to have realized that if it can’t match Google’s algorithmic prowess, it could win with sleek design that doesn’t bombard you with a thousand options. Bing has been testing several of these changes for a few months. Here are the rest of details on redesign that’s supposed to reach everyone by the end of Tuesday if it hasn’t already: Related Searches have been shifted from the now-gone left rail to beneath the ads in the right rail A ‘thumbs up’ icon now indicates that friends have Liked a search result, and you can see who did by hovering over the icon The “narrow by time range” filter formerly in the left rail now only appears if you select the “News” search type  from the “More” options Personally, I dig minimalist product design that keeps things focused. If there’s a tool or option I only need sometimes, I’m okay spending an extra click to reveal it. The desktop Internet is brain-frying enough with so many applications and windows and tabs displayed at once. That’s why it seems more people are championing streamlined apps like Path, ad-blockers, and services that strip clutter out of news articles. When faced with a much more established competitor, your only move is to differentiate or die. For a while that meant Bing getting cozy with Facebook and Twitter. It appeared to be working as it  surpassed Yahoo in search query volume in January, though the product was still bleeding billions of dollars. But then Google Search went social, sparking controversy and solidifying the public as uncomfortable with personalized results . In fact, Google’s disastrous Search Plus Your World created an opportunity for a clever Bing pivot. Microsoft heard that people were asking for a return to the simple results pages of yesteryear. Today that’s what we got. Now we’ll see if less really is more — more market share for Bing and less for Google, that is. [Image Credits: Old Bing Diesgn Tnooz , Mr. Clean ]

DataSift Teams Up With ...

DataSift , a data analysis company that provides developers and third parties with access to Twitter , Facebook and other social data sources, is teaming up with NewsCred to allow clients to perform deep data analysis and monitoring of social media and news sources. For background, developers, businesses, media companies and organizations can essentially use DataSift to mine the Twitter firehose of social data, as well as Facebook and other sources. But what makes DataSift special is that it can then filter this social media data for demographic information, online influence and sentiment, either positive or negative. As we’ve reported in the past, DataSift does not limit searches based on keywords and allows companies of any size to define extremely complex filters, including location, gender, sentiment, language, and even influence based on Klout score, to provide quick and very specific insight and analysis. NewsCred licenses content from more than 750 premium media brands, like Bloomberg, Forbes, Guardian, and The Economist, and provides a news API that allows companies to access premium content from those publishers. Users can filter and customize news articles by topic, location, language, sources, and date via the startup’s proprietary semantic and natural language processing technology. The idea behind the integration with DataSift is that companies can monitor and analyze not just social media, but also news articles about a topic, industry or product, and understand how that news spreads through the social web. So companies developing social media monitoring applications can now use DataSift’s platform to listen for mentions about a company or product via news organizations, public Tweets, Facebook posts, blogs or a multitude of other online networks and forums. For example, businesses can monitor for positive or negative news articles about their company, and then see the trends in public sentiment about the news on Twitter over time. Or social media monitoring companies can make sense of surges in social conversations about a brand by analyzing news surrounding a company or topic. And financial organizations can track public sentiment to news to help guide trading decisions on capital markets. “It’s critical that companies of all kinds evolve beyond passive monitoring of news from traditional channels to getting a deep understanding for news in the social channel…Breaking news goes viral through Twitter as people share and respond to major events, creating a ‘multiplier effect’ on both positive and negative news,” said Rob Bailey, CEO, DataSift. “By partnering with NewsCred, we are able to provide our customers with more powerful tools for understanding the diffusion of news on social platforms like Twitter.” The ability to mash up social media data with premium news content seems like an attractive combination for any company or even news publication. And we know DataSift is seeing traction and interest amongst customers. Almost a thousand companies, including 100 of the Fortune 500 companies, have already joined a waitlist for the product. DataSift says customers can access news content from NewsCred in a monthly subscription. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

Google’s Consumer Surve...

We have seen enough around the web about this innovative way of creating a “paywall” that is not really a paywall for publishers premium content. What’s that you say? A paywall that’s not a paywall. It’s actually a viewing “speed bump” if you will. Google Surveys allow companies to gather market research as publishers require visitors to premium content areas to answer survey questions to get to the content. In theory it sounds at least interesting especially for publishers looking to create revenue streams without taxing their readers. The cost falls on the survey data collector who pays Google who then pays the publisher for each completed survey. Here’s the video from Google’s Small Business blog . The post explains further Here’s how it works: people browsing the web come across your questions when they try to access high quality content like news articles or videos. Answering the question gives them near instant access to the page they want. All responses are anonymous; they aren’t tied to users’ identity or later used to target ads. This provides an alternative to the traditional paywall model: site visitors don’t have to pull out a wallet or sign in, publishers get paid as their site visitors respond, and you gain insight into what people think — for just $0.10 per response for the general US population or $0.50 per response for custom audiences. Notice the emphasis on anonymity . As I said, in theory this seems fine but if there are suddenly thousands of surveys popping up everywhere so bloggers can collect nickels the backlash might be real. Then again it may not since premium content, in this example at least, will appear to the end user as “free” although it will require additional time and effort which costs something. Sounds a lot like a pitch for social media doesn’t it? Happy data collecting! Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

Germany Wants Search En...

Content is what makes Google run. Every result it returns is linked to a piece of content somewhere else on the web, be it an article, photo, video or website. Over the years, Google has increased the detail in their results so you get a better idea of what’s behind the curtain before you click. All results have a couple of lines of text under them drawn from the start of the article or keywords from the site. Some even show you a preview of the site before you click. All of this is intended to help the searcher find what he needs. So it’s a good thing for both the searcher and the content provider, right? The German government doesn’t think so. New legislation proposes that Google and other search engines and news aggregators are profiting off the works of others and offering nothing in return. So they want to create a new law that says anyone using even a snippet of someone else’s work would have to pay for the right. Eric Pfanner, writing for the New York Times says; The proposal addresses a debate that has raged since the early days of the Internet: Who benefits more from digital links and the traffic they generate — search engines, aggregators and other online hubs, or the sites that produce the content? Google does not sell advertising on its German news aggregation service, which displays snippets of articles and links to the originating sites. But the company earns billions of euros from advertising on its search engine and other services. Under the new law, if I was Google Germany, I’d have to pay the New York Times for posting that snippet here. But as a journalist, I’d be okay because. . . Freedom of speech would be protected, they insist, because certain uses, like journalistic citations from other news articles, would be exempt. The coalition document says private Internet users would not have to pay any fees. I certainly agree that content producers should be compensated when someone else profits from their work, but I can’t imagine how you would implement such a system. Imagine Google having to pay for every search result, every photo and every video that pops up on their pages. If we’re talking about reproducing entire articles, then yes, payment is due. But where in between do we draw the line? Is a paragraph fair use? And how would you apply that to photos? It’s okay to show half a photo but if you show the whole photo then Google has to pay the creator? And who is the creator? With billions of photos being grabbed and shared from page to page, finding the original source is near impossible. I like that Germany is trying to police unfair usage, but in this case, it’s likely that the users will simply close up shop and move out rather than comply. Don’t think so? When Amazon was told to pay sales tax in certain states , they simply cut off the thousands of affiliates who depend on that income. Don’t think Google wouldn’t hesitate to shut down rather than pay up. Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community