You hold an event to gather key stakeholders together, say a couple of dozen, and you want to maximise the positive networking such an event should catalyse. You’re also aware of a few potential personality clashes. But how many one-to-one relationships are you actually trying to manage here?
It turns out, your relationship with each of them included, that there’s 300 relationships in that room! Wow, and compared to the big ‘World Wide Web’, or the even bigger ‘World’ come to that, this is a relatively insignificant number of people.
Let’s go a step further. Say that there’s just five critical issues facing your industry, each of which has just three positions, say “for”, “against” and “no position”, then each stakeholder can have one of 243 combinations of points of view.
To complete this picture, imagine now communicating the dynamic of this group in a report back to your boss say. How do you represent 300 relationships and 243 combinations of positions? Moreover, how do you portray the network evolving year-to-year, month-to-month, hour-by-hour?
Welcome to the world of data visualisation.
Digesting data
Information technology has made the collation and manipulation of masses of data relatively mundane. When you’re looking to manipulate data in a specific way, the machine can chunk through it pretty quickly and answer your defined and closed questions:
What were the sales in week 39?
How much did we invest in PR last year?
In our last market research, how did our perceived value for money rate versus the competition?
But what if you don’t know what you’re looking for? How do you decipher the mass of data? How do you see what’s going on so you can learn and respond appropriately? How can you answer undefined and open questions such as:
What’s the buzz amongst our customers?
Who or what is exerting most influence?
What trends should we know about?
Who’s most likely to have started this rumour?
Who should we add to our list of key contacts / influencers?
Gathering the data is, of course, no mean feat. But the rise of the social Web presents the broadest and deepest pool marketers have ever had to swim in, and I cover this topic in The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 (which, to my surprise, is being downloaded over 500 times a week!). Of course, there is also the little issue of who owns this information, which this article about the Social Graph on Read Write Web covers succinctly.
The next biggest challenge to spotting patterns and trends is simply that the data has more dimensions than we can cope with. Take your computer screen… two dimensional. Add some nifty mathematics and you can represent three dimensions. Change it over (compressed) time, and you can “see” four dimensions… but that’s about the best we can achieve.
So now we have two new battles on our hands.
The first is presenting data brilliantly in the three or four dimensions we can deal with. And the second is building in some intelligence so that we’re more than likely looking at the right combination of three or four dimensions amongst the dozens or hundreds represented in the data set.
Great visualisations
One of the fascinating outcomes of this new branch of public relations is the value non-geeks can literally “see” in it. There’s a reason someone coined the term “a picture paints a thousand words”. Perhaps “a data visualisation renders a million influences” will trip off the tongue in the future?! How cool is it to ’see’ a meme?
And it’s not coincidental that some visualisations are beautiful; not that I’m about to author a treatise on beauty, but heuristically it makes sense that we’re more likely to find the interpretation of something that looks good easier than something that looks a mess.
I’ll leave you with some visualisations, with hyperlinks to the source should you, like me, become entranced by visualisation.
Noel Hidalgo was walking around Tiananmen Square in China on Saturday when he came across a free-Tibet protest. He decided to Twittertheprotest, and also broadcast it live over Qik.
It turned out that the live broadcast ended up being his ticket home.
Chinese authorities deported Hidalgo as a result of the live video streaming, sending him back to the United States. So while it has been reported that many Chinese have been very eager to please visitors during the Olympic Games, it turns out that anything involving Tibet is crossing the line.
Even while the Olympic Games will be taking place on the other side of the world, viewers will now be able to watch whatever events they want, thanks to some cool new technology.
No, not YouTube – that’s only available to countries that don’t have access to NBC and their long line of advertisers.
Instead, NBC’s Olympics Web site will feature 2,200 hours of live coverage, thanks to Microsoft’s Silverlight, their equivalent of Flash (However, this will only be available to viewers in the U.S.).
Thanks to this technology, viewers will have the ability to:
- See multiple camera angles & rewind video.
- Watch whatever sport they want whenever they want.
- See 3,000 hours of ‘on-demand encores of full events and highlights’.
- Switch between up to 4 live streams.
- See the standard world feed that is sent to all broadcasters, with no TV commentators.
- Access statistics, biographies and other information.
This enhanced Olympics viewing experience will be great for people looking to catch certain events that aren’t always on TV, especially as NBC aims to stick countless hours of competition into nicely organized time slots during their prime time hours.
With the Olympics starting on Friday, there is so much to look forward to. I can’t wait to see the track & field events – especially the 1500 and 5000 meter races. Volleyball is always exciting to watch, and who doesn’t want to see Michael Phelps’s attempt for eight gold medals? However, what most people don’t realize that until this year, not everyone had access to this worldwide event.
Thanks to the popular video site, for the first time ever the Olympic Games will reach 77 territories that aren’t officially covered by Olympic sponsors, including South Korea, India and Nigeria, according to The Wall Street Journal.
YouTube will be streaming about three hours a day of exclusive content from the Olympics on a dedicated channel during the Games. However, viewers from outside those 77 territories will be blocked from the channel because of broadcast rights.
While it’s hard to believe that the Olympics weren’t available around the world before 2008, it’s pretty funny to think that the first year they will be available worldwide (via the internet) will be the same year the Olympics are taking place in Beijing – where open internet access has become such a hot issue.
It was reported a while ago that China was going to allow uncensored internet during the Olympics in Beijing next month. Well, apparently that’s not quite true anymore.
The New York Times reports that “since the Olympic Village press center opened on Friday, reporters have been unable to access scores of Web pages — among them those that discuss Tibetan issues, Taiwanese independence, the violent crackdown on the protests in Tiananmen Square and the Web sites of Amnesty International, the BBC’s Chinese-language news, Radio Free Asia and several Hong Kong newspapers known for their freewheeling political discourse.”
For reporters covering the games, it is important that they have access to the internet to research, communicate, and file their stories. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) had negotiated with China to provide unregulated internet access, but China’s concern for their national security, particularly relating to Tibet, has trumped their one-time promise that there would be an open access for all.
In a world where some people are connected to the internet 24/7 via their cell phones or other devices, China’s decision to block certain sites and information from thousands of foreign reporters and their own citizens seems like quite a bold move.
What’s your take? Should countries have the right block certain sites that they believe are dangerous for their national security?
UPDATE (8/1)
The Associated Press is reporting that some sites have been unblocked at the main press center & media venues on Friday, after the IOC met with some Chinese officials.
Well, they’re trying to. Anna Patterson and Tom Costello have launched a new search engine, Cuil (pronounced: cool), which they say searches more sites then any other search engine and knows how to analyze and sort its pages to get the most relevant results.
Sounds ‘cuil’.
The problem is that people don’t just use Google for search. It’s used for Gmail, iGoogle, Google maps, Google images, Google news, Google blogs, Google shopping, Google video – should I continue? Google is not successful just because it’s a search engine – it’s successful because of every other feature it brings to the user.
Getting back to the first point, Cuil claims that they’re superior to Google because they can search three times as many pages and produce more relevant results. My question is how we can know these extra pages are relevant and not spam sites? When I’ve searched Google, I’ve always had a lot of success, and almost always found what I’m looking for in the first couple results, or somewhere on the first page.
Also, Cuil organizes their pages in a much different format then Google, which may take a lot of getting used to for some. Instead of creating a list, it has a paragraph on each site scattered around the page.
Tom Costello told The New York Times, “I think it will be better, but there is no question that the public has to decide.”
Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are plagued by users abusing the fact that all someone needs to sign up is a valid email address.
In the most recent incident, reported last night by MSNBC, Matthew Firsht from the U.K. won nearly $44,000 in a lawsuit against a former friend that created a libelous profile in Matthew’s name. Because apparently, when some “adults” join a social network originally used by only college and high school students, they feel compelled to behave like 14 year olds.
The former friend / culprit / juvenile delinquent, Grant Raphael, added intentionally incorrect information about Matthew in regards to his sexuality, political views and finances. When Grant claimed that someone else must have created the page on his computer when his party was crashed last year, the judge called the statement “far-fetched” and awarded Matthew nearly $30,000 for libel, $4,000 for breach of privacy and $10,000 for libel against his company.
The silver lining of this story is that Facebook did an excellent job managing the problem, promptly removing the phony profile and cooperating with the proceedings which helped Matthew win his case. This however, is clearly not the first fake account to be created and surely will not be the last.
Do you think Facebook and other social networks will begin requiring more verification when people create profiles? How can we protect our identities and prevent this from happening in the future?
Google not only lets you search for content, but now they will help you create and publish it (minor note: they will make money off your content). Yesterday, Google rolled out Knol – a site they’ve been testing for about seven months that allows “experts” to contribute articles under a Creative Commons license.
Although many are calling Knol the Wikipedia Killer, there are some fundamental differences between the sites. 1 – Wikipedia functions through “Wisdom of the Crowds” while Knol relies on one “expert” to write on a topic. 2 – Changes made to a Knol article must first be approved by the author, making the usability similar to About.com. 3 – Knol pages will make money through Google AdSense, a program Wikipedia does not use.
Controversy has quickly arisen around whether or not content on Knol will get pushed to the forefront to promote the interests of its parent company. For the time being, Wikipedia is still the leader in content, with over 2.5 million articles submitted to the English version alone – all of which typically appear in the top Web search results on Google – but it will remain to be seen if Knol will take the lead.
The New York Times spoke to a Google spokesperson and reports: “We will treat Knol pages as we treat other Web pages,” said Cedric Dupont, a Google product manager. “If there is a Knol that is the first place in search results, it deserves that place.”
Is Google gaining too much power, dipping its toes in both the content creation and delivery pools? Are they just upset Wikipedia didn’t buy into AdSense? If we all trust one “expert’s” article on Google, aren’t we closing ourselves off to the power of collective intelligence? Would love to hear your thoughts.
In the meantime, you can learn more about Knol here on Wikipedia.com. (Irony at it’s finest)
I took in the “How Net Content will be Monetized Round Table (Wedding Table) at Fortune Brainstorm: TECH this morning. Hosted by Fortune’sAdam Lashinsky the round table included Greg Waldorf, CEO of eHarmony; Neil Ashe, President of CBS Interactive; Robert Glaser, CEO of RealNetworks and Mike Volpi, CEO of Joost.
Here are some of the excerpts from the round table:
Adam Lashinsky: Good morning, we are going to be talking about “Net Monetization.” This is not the format that we planned on doing for a breakfast round table (straight table facing the audience). We had so many people sign-up we decided we’d do something like a head table at a wedding with you being the guests. However, we’re not going to talk to you we are going to talk with you.
Robert Glaser, President & CEO of RealNetworks:
600 million in revue last year. 2/3 of monetization comes through consumer purchases. 1/3 is from net carriers.
Our goal is to create a balance in revenue streams.
You look at what Google does with only one revenue stream and may think we are taking the wrong route, but you have to diversify.
Behavioral targeting is an major opportunity, but there doesn’t appear to be an Overture type idea out there that goes beyond search.
Greg Waldorf, CEO of eHarmony:
eHarmony was founded 8 years ago to be a series match making site. It was a crazy idea at the time because the industry was dominated by the photo-clicking approach.
We recently released Harris Interactive numbers, which found that 236 people marry each day (on average) through eHarmony.
This has allowed the business to become very successful and over 200 million in revenues last year.
Lashinsky - ”My best friend met his wife through eHarmony. He’s a serious guy, so I guess he needed a serious relationship site.”
96 - 97 percent of our revenue comes from subscriptions.
Match.com and ourselves are really the biggest players in the space.
We want to keep a “happy” churn rate - given our goal to match couples in serious long-term relationships (which leads to them leaving site). Usually takes a couple of months for that to happen.
You can’t just create great content first and then say we’ll figure out how to monetize it later. I think people have this belief that good content will easily translate into ad revenue and that is just not the case when you are looking at scale.
Mike Volpi, CEO of Joost:
Joost was created in October of last year and has slightly under 1 million unique visitors.
We have a revenue share model that goes back to content owners.
We’ve really been the first online video destination to use the 30-second in-spot ad that is seen on TV.
Music has been really hard to monetize on our site because its hard to understand interests in music to target relevant ads at users.
President of CBS Interactive:
Earlier this year I was the CEO of CNET Networks and now I am the President of CBS Interactive after the close of our sale to the CBS Corporation.
We reach the 8th largest Internet network in the world.
80 percent of business is ad supported through sponsorships or advertisements.
About 20 percent of our business is in major countries in Europe.
We’ve found that you can’t out grow your category. The growth of advertising revenue has grown across the Internet but there is a cap in how it can grow within certain markets on the Internet.
We’ve made mistakes along the way. We never could monetize Webshots. We could sell certain sponsorships but not for each individual page view.
Disclosure: eHarmony is a client of the Racepoint Group
Wedding budget a little tight? Get corporate sponsorship on eBay!
Kelly Gray and her fiancé Karl Gau were set to be married in April of 2009, but the budget was tight and the couple hoped to have a bit more money to put toward the wedding. The solution to their money woes: creating the “Be My Bridesmaid” eBay auction.
The highest bidder wins a spot in the wedding party, a dress/tuxedo, shoes, and a “plus one” invitation to the reception. The auction created instant buzz, gaining the attention of media people waiting to see how far bidding would go.
When bidding closed on June 25, a member called “drpeppersnapple” had bid $5,700. To Kelly and Karl’s amazement, they had caught the attention of the people at The Dr. Pepper Snapple Group – who later raised their offer to $10,000. (Note: They will also be providing drinks for the wedding… Snapple iced teas all around! Wooo!)
The Dr. Pepper Snapple Group put out a press release yesterday saying “Weddings are about families, and we have a large one … more than 50 different brands from Dr. Pepper to Rose’s Mojitos,” said Greg Artkop, spokesperson for Dr. Pepper Snapple Group. “In fact, you can find us behind the bar at most weddings, so we’re looking forward to being up at the altar for once.”
Snapple has had super-creative advertising campaigns in the past… but this one takes the [wedding] cake. Cheap publicity or not, Snapple sure knows how to leverage online buzz to its advantage.
