Tech companies and “the service problem”

Over the past few weeks I have had occasion to talk with a number of digital leaders who lamented the experience of working with tech start-ups. I want to start by saying that these critics are not people who don’t appreciate innovation – to the person, they love it – but at the same time they find it difficult or off-putting to deal with the companies that are driving the change in the industry.

Versus our experience with the media companies we deal with on a more regular basis, service from tech firms generally doesn’t stack up. Our core complaint is that the tech company is there when an IO needs to be processed, but impossible to reach when you want to talk about business issues or address issues in a program that is running.

While sales people tend to be thinner on the ground for tech firms than media companies, that doesn’t excuse bad service. The ironic thing is that while media companies are desperate to hear more about business issues – to be treated as partners – tech companies tend not to be. Not always, but frequently.

So why aren’t tech firms as responsive? First, I think we need to recognize that the tech world values TECH, not service. VCs are primarily concerned with the quality of the tech team, thinking that for the right product other disciplines can be backfilled in. Not an excuse, but a fact just the same.

Second, most consumer facing tech solutions were devised to meet consumer needs, not advertiser needs. We all know that most media-rooted properties – magazines for instance – exist because advertisers want access to an audience AND consumers want information. So media companies tend to be more flexible about providing more and more intrusive ways to reach out to readers. Contrast that with a service like Twitter. I will wager that virtually no attention was paid to advertiser needs when that product was first conceived. The result is a service that is highly appealing for consumers but harder for brands to get their heads around.

Third, media company models and service structures were conceived in an era of information scarcity – where producing, say, the best shelter magazine meant consumers got exponentially more “with you” than “without you.” Scarcity meant more revenue, and that they could afford to pay for more service providers. By contrast, au courant tech companies are developed in an era of consumer control – where that shelter content competes with thousands or tens of thousands of other “fish in the sea,” and the vast majority of those “fish” offer up their content for free. It is only natural, then, that those companies place more emphasis on ensuring that they deliver what consumers want rather than what advertisers want.

Fourth, great service for advertisers tends to focus on qualitative factors, custom offerings, and high touch experiences. Those are not the core strengths of tech companies. I think of it like this. That tech CEO is trying to change the world, not change the way I feel about anti-perspirant stains on fabric. Not an excuse for bad service, but something to consider as we ponder what we can realistically expect to get from them in terms of service.

Finally, they really haven’t had to care about us until recently. Put yourself in their shoes for a sec. If your sole source of revenue is a VC, and the VC vales tech leadership over everything else, what incentive would you have to build out a partner services org? But as those VCs shift to wanting tech companies to start generating revenue more quickly, the companies themselves need to find ways of satisfying the very people that make that possible. In addition to their consumer users.

In a market driven economy, money talks, and if a tech company wants $500K of your budget, you have the right to expect them to treat you right, answer your calls and messages, listen to your needs and go back and see if they can address them. If they don’t do those things, they shouldn’t get your money.  

There is no excuse for bad service. But it might be useful to give a well meaning team the benefit of the doubt if they really are in the process of changing the world. In many cases, these teams are filled with people who must make up their service strategies as they go along, and it is possible that you could forge a great relationship with a great company in the process of helping them better help you.

But marketers absolutely have the right to expect service to improve over time. In my view, dealing with a few growing pains along the way is acceptable if the tech company really is transformational in nature. But persistent crappy service isn’t acceptable. And even the largest transformational tech companies need to remember that just as consumers have thousands of choices online, so too do marketers.

Start-Up Watch COD: Wingsplay Rewards Influentials for Distributing Your Vids

Viral distribution has always been one of the Holy Grails of digital. The idea of people seeking out your marketing messages and then distributing them for you – at no cost – has activated the salivary glands of many a brand leader.

But for most brands, it shares another characteristic with the Holy Grail: elusiveness. Many brands have tried to create “viral” programs, and very few have succeeded.

Part of it is our own fault. We fail to recognize that our ham fisted marketing messages aren’t the sorts of things that people care about or want to share. But there’s another thing. Some brands jump the hurdle of relevance and make content that people would share if they knew about it. But those same brands often fail because the would be spreaders never see their content.

Enter Wingsplay. What this company does is offer a platform through which you can work with influential people in social media to distribute your videos on a cost per view basis. Instead of paying a publisher to drive plays, you reward influential voices online through Wingsplay.

So let’s start with the first question on your minds. Is it “OK” to reward people to distribute messages in social media? A couple of years ago there were some shady businesses driving blog posts about brands without disclosing the compensation they were providing. This ain’t like that. Rather, I’d liken it to paying a celeb to drink your Pepsi or use your basketball shoes.

Says Wingsplay Founder Olivier Lasry,

As celebrities are paid to lend their name and image to campaigns, Wingsplay rewards influential social media users to share the most entertaining viral ads. But this democratization of endorsement goes way further: contrary to working with big celebrities, influential social media users have strong ties to their social connections and 2-way conversations with these friends, fans and followers. They consequently generate much more engagement and visibility,

Online content is more likely to be played and interacted with when it has been posted by a friend versus a celebrity simply because the former values their comments and interactions much more than the latter.

Wingsplay also ensures that every post made as a result of the platform transparently communicates its sponsored nature. That ensures you live up to the letter – and the spirit – of the FTC regulations.

Not just anybody is flogging your videos. It’s not like that at all. Rather, you choose your target audience, and then set a CPV for the program. Then, those that LIKE YOUR CONTENT and are interested in your program distribute your video to people with a high degree of likelihood to be in your target audience. They are then compensated based upon the plays they drive. Obviously, programs that offer a higher bounty are going to attract more influencer attention, but in my view most of these influencers will ultimately select content they like best. But a healthy CPV wouldn’t hoit!

I like this approach. I am a huge believer in the need to seed video distribution. While we may think or hope that millions of people are constantly scanning the web looking for messages, the reality is that there is so much content out there that even the best stuff sometimes dies on the vine. I constantly find good content online that never really went anywhere because you had to really be digging around to find it. And most people aren’t spending time online doing that.

With a service like Wingsplay, you get passed the initial awareness problem so that your ideas are seen by thousands – maybe even millions. Additionally, you get to target the sorts of people who you want to expose to your video. Where it goes from there, of course, is up to the quality of the creative idea and the content itself.

Start-Up Watch COD: Doat remakes the mobile search experience

Most people agree that the most useful and pleasant mobile experiences occur in apps, not on  mobile-appropriate web pages. Apps have been the key to iPhone’s ascendance on domination in smart phones, and they have also propelled Android ahead of venerable competitors like Blackberry and Nokia’s Symbian. More apps means more market share, broadly speaking. Few or no apps = death in today’s smart phone environment.

But Mobile Search was singularly focused on finding the best content on web pages. At least it was until now.

Doat (say Doh-At) is an Israel- and San Francisco-based start-up focused on transforming mobile search by querying and providing results from apps rather than the web. When you search for a term in Do@, what you get in response is a sort of visual menu of app screen shots housing content appropriate to your request.

So what does that mean?

 If you want information or the trailer on Hangover 2, an ordinary mobile search result might refer you to the web site, which may or may not have a mobile version. With Doat, you get screen shots of the IMDB , Flixster, and other theatrically oriented apps. Tapping a particular result takes you to a version of the app delivered in HTML 5, essentially a web page but with the appearance and functionality of an app. This “page” simulates the functionality of the fully functioning app, and enables you to experience all of its benefits.

Here’s the vid:

Because app viewing experiences are designed for the small screen, there is a high degree of likelihood that your overall experience as well as info access will be better through an app. Additionally, because the user does not actually have to download the app before they review the content, Doat actually offers a powerful trial mechanism for app developers anxious to get more users, and for users to try before they buy

Because so much mobile search has a local component, Doat takes your location into consideration when you make your query. So, for instance, if you are looking for a restaurant recommendation nearby, the app will connect you to location-focused results in the Yelp app and the like.

I think this is a big deal for digital and for brands. For digital, it is, perhaps, a really positive harbinger of  a broader revolution in mobile user experience. I believe the figures are that mobile web access will surpass PC web access in about 2013 in the US – it already has in several Asian countries. But in order for Mobile Internet to deliver on its promise, basic connected utilities need to evolve experientially to be OPTIMIZED for the handset. Since Search is arguably the most ubiquitous such utility, Doat is an important step in the mobile transformation of the web.

From a marketing standpoint, the app-centric nature of Doat may be a reason for many marketers to rethink their mobile advertising and marketing strategies, opting for a greater presence in the world of apps. While it is too soon to tell how much app usage will come from Doat or its future imitators, it is plain that we’ll need to take a serious look at those figures as they materialize.

Doat has made its debut as an iPhone app, and is available for free in the App Store.

Start-Up Watch COD: Media6Degrees Drives Strong Results By Applying an “Act-Alike” Social Science Principle to Targeting

I gravitate to companies that take a different approach or direction in digital media.

Because there are now so many companies doing more or less the same things with the same data points and the same units, many of us are skeptical about competing claims in the same industry categories. Raise your hand if you find the claims of reach, quality, and transparency a little tiresome when spouted by ad networks. Nuff said.

So I like different, and because of that I have liked Media6Degrees from the first time I heard about them. Media6Degrees was founded upon the social science principle that people with similar interests tend to cluster into groups that share brand affinities and purchase patterns. They use a four stage process to deliver results.

1. Identify:  The company begins an engagement with a client by cookie-ing visitors to client web sites, taking one or two weeks to collect enough data points to build a seed population for a campaign.
2. Match: They identify the clustering behavior of your site visitors on the web, and match potential prospects (usually in the tens of millions of people) to deliver scale.
3. Execute:  They deliver media to those matches through exchange based buying:.
4. Refine: They adjust the model based upon new learnings and refinement

So imagine you visit a brand web site and then go on your merry way, doing the things you like to do online. Like visiting blogs about quarter horses, sending e-greetings, checking the A’s scores, lurking in eBay auctions for beanie babies, taking a ten-minute break looking at paparazzi photos of celeb cellulite, flipping over to Facebook to leave a status update about how busy and overworked you are, and so on.

Your set of activities is compared to those of tens of millions of others. Individuals that demonstrate similar web consumption patterns are identified as having a high degree of likelihood of having similar interests. People who behave like you start seeing banners and videos for the product. And over time, the set of people seeing the banners and videos is refined to drive better metrics and scale.

Media6Degrees isn’t collecting user interest data, or leveraging 3^rd party interest data. They actually DON’T CARE that you like cellulite photos and quarter horses. As with all reputable networks, individual identities are anonymized. But Media6Degrees offers two additional layers of anonymity – they don’t try to record your interests or bucket the types of content you visit.

You aren’t classified into some sort of “horses and corsets” psychographic to them. They don’t even focus on your demographics. What a person is – is someone with similar interests as certain other people, ergo more likely to have interest in the brands that those other people buy.

In this way Media6Degrees identifies the “Social Signature” of a brand. Then they purchase media against others who demonstrate similar interests, constantly tightening and refining the algorithm to improve the match.

That refining and winnowing is important because Media6Degrees optimizes to a desired metric, not just site visitation. They often find that while site visitors have one behavior pattern, actual buyers have somewhat different patterns.

A new offering called Planner can also provide brands and pubs information on the best sites to find brand users, and the best brands through which to monetize site users. 

Anyway. By constantly tightening these Social Signature parameters they drive better and better results.

How much better? Well, I will only speak for the half dozen or so campaigns that I have knowledge of – ones that we fielded at Catalyst S+F. In every single case Media6Degrees was the number one or number two performer on the plans. By wide margins. We’ve seen results more than 3X better than any other plan element on several occasions.

And what I like best is that they drive those mega results by breaking the rules. While the rest of the world is getting more and more interest data from third parties, Media6Degrees says they don’t give a stuff about your interests, only a sense of how what you do on line is similar to what other individuals do. I am not condemning interest based targeting by saying this. Just pointing out that there may be more than one route to Zanzibar.

Me, I like having another path to take.

I like rule breakers. The crowd zigs. Media6Degrees zags. And based upon the results we have seen…zagging = good.

Start-Up Watch COD: Scayl Delivers “HDemail” That Enables Attachments of Unlimited Size

Today’s post is to tell you about a new service that you may find rather useful in your own professional and personal lives.

Scayl is a start-up out to “fix” email by eliminating many of the restrictions that impede it from being a great sharing platform for larger files.

While sending and receiving large files has long been a nuisance, the problems are only getting worse as richer and more high def content enters our daily lives. 10 years ago, a couple of megs was enough to activate firewalls in many companies. While most companies have raised their file size limits significantly since then, the reality is that the size of the sort of content files we might like to share are rising faster than the capacity of most email servers and platforms to process them.

This is particularly true given the ascendancy of video as a critical means of business and personal communication.

The Scayl system eliminates many of these issues by allowing a file to be downloaded from multiple sources and on a background, streaming basis. So if you want to send that home vid of baby’s first steps or that vid of your presentation from the last sales meeting, the recipient receives the file from any Scayl enabled computer that already has it. The more people who have the file, the faster it will be shared to the recipient. It’s a concept that you are familiar with if your ever did P2P file sharing.

Additionally, users can start viewing content like a video before the download is complete.

But there’s a lot more to this service than just that. Scayl also offers superior authentication and security layers that help reduce the threats of phishing and other sorts of attacks. It can also be used with the leading email clients, including Outlook.

Here’s the video of their pitch from last Fall’s DEMO competition.

Businesses can reduce server and file distribution costs with Scayl, while also beefing up their email security. For enterprise the benefits really kick in when a company is regularly sharing large files to many people. It appears that Scayl will be charging a modest annual fee per email account, with no charge for individual file shares.

Scayl facilitates delivery on a broad range of connected devices from PCs and Macs to tablets, set top boxes, HD TVs, and media servers. Based in the Pacific Northwest, Scayl is an ambitious outfit. By transforming email – the most familiar of online communication utilities – into something more useful, their efforts are likely to breathe additional life into what remains one of the most ubiquitous means of sharing content digitally.

Start-Up Watch COD: ThinkNear Helps Brick and Mortars Drive Business During Slow Sales Periods

One of the biggest challenges facing a local brick and mortar business is managing staffing levels for the amount of customer flow you are probably going to get during different time periods.

• For example, given that employees don’t want one or two hour shifts but that many businesses have heavy sales periods during the day that last one to two hours, there’s a fundamental resource problem.
• Another example: say you operate a restaurant in Daytona Beach. Business may be strong during the “Season” in Florida when the Snowbirds come south, But come April or May you can probably hear crickets in the kitchen. While you COULD let your employees go every year, we all know that when you find a great worker you want to hold on to them.

Do you staff for the slow periods, and risk losing customers from poor service during rushes? Or do you staff for the rush and then have staff standing around doing nothing but collecting wages? Or do you staff somewhere in between and try to balance it all as best you can?

And one friendly reminder before I get on with this review: rent and electricity don’t cost any less during slow times, so anything that can help drum up business during those periods can be a godsend.

ThinkNear is a location-based promotions service for local businesses that aims to eliminate this problem by enabling store owners to drive up sales during slow periods with limited time offers delivered to smart phones within a certain radius of a location.

OK, so say you own a Subway. Your team is busy 11:30-1:30, but then has little to do from 1:30-4:00 when people begin coming in for take-out dinner sandwiches. Instead of accepting your slow time as a given, you instead work with ThinkNear to offer a $1 off coupon to individuals in the immediate vicinity, valid only during the slow period. You drive up incremental sales, ensure that your people are fully utilized, and dramatically increase the total revenue for your business.

This sizzle vid explains both the issue facing these small and larger businesses, and how their service can help turn it into an opportunity:

 

As some of you may know, I am on a bit of a crusade to point out to people that we are turning the web into a gigantic coupon ATM – and that this is not good for the future of our brands. If I hear of one more start-up working on a way to give away more of the margin, I am going to scream. But ThinkNear is different in my view. The service is clearly delivering business that would not otherwise go to a retailer, and while discounting is involved, the degree of savings is a bit more reasonable than Groupon et al.

Further, ThinkNear is something for national brick and mortar entities to consider as well. If you are Chili’s, having some incremental business around 2:00-5:00 would probably be welcome at virtually any location nationwide.

It’s an interesting service – of a type I think we are going to be hearing a lot about in the months and years to come.

Start-Up Watch COD: CPG Product Discovery Comes of Age With Consmr

These days, when I want to try a new restaurant in the Bay Area, I head over to Yelp to see what others have said about it. When I want to find new books to read, I visit LibraryThing. These platforms are really rather powerful ways to get some perspective on a new business or item.

Not perfect, o’course – there are certainly instances in which bad actors have tried to manipulate the scores.

And there are certainly times when the crowds are decidedly unwise. Witness the fact that at the moment I am writing this, Snooki’s A Shore Thing is rated slightly higher than Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. No matter. These sites can provide AN INVALUABLE INPUT into your decision making process.

One world that hadn’t really been touched by the whole reviews and ratings thing was CPG. Until now. Consmr.com has debuted, billing itself as a fun and easy way to share your opinion about consumer products.

Now, many people think of CPG purchase decisions as fairly low involvement or routinized. I agree that some are, but then again some aren’t. I’ll wager that there are millions of people who get a little pulse race when they see a package of Oreos, or have a strong belief in and loyalty for Tide.

Tide is, after all, a miracle product.

But I digress. Given that CPG touches the lives of virtually every person on the planet, it’s logical to expect that millions of people will care enough about a need or category to read before they buy and review after they try.

The current economic situation exacerbates this tendency. More and more people have to think about how they spend every dollar – buying the wrong $4 cereal is damned important when it’s what you have for the kids to eat all week.

So in my view the opportunity is there. For cult products like Nutella as well asworkaday allies like Swiffer. Consmr.com makes the experience of reviewing, rating, and reading about the most seemingly mundane things engaging and addictive. I’d liken it to when you read 11 pages in Consumer Reports about bar soap testing. Or a long post on Consumerist about someone’s dreadful experience at a big box retailer.

Naturally you won’t read through the pages for every product category, but it’s sort of empowering to know that there are other people who share your interest in a simple, everyday product or activity.

Consmr.com offers a variety of ways for brands and companies to partner with them. The site offers ways to engage site visitors in social media campaigns, to create brand activation programs that leverage and expand your audience of brand advocates, contests to drive message virality, and the like. I’ve spoken with one of their charter clients who attested to their flexibility combined with their vigilance to empower consumers and be 100% transparent.

Bloggers and other opinion leaders are also being signed to be category experts for the site. While it may seem a bit odd to think that there is a peanut butter expert out there, I for one have no doubt that there is. Actually, there are probably 43 of them. Which is one of the wonderful things about connected, democratic media. And another reason why I think there’s real business opportunity in Consmr. For them, and for CPG brands.

Start-Up Watch COD: SimplyCast is the PaaS Solution for Multi-Channel Marketing

Now here’s something you don’t see every day. A start-up based in Nova Scotia that has attracted attention and customers from around the world.

That company is SimplyCast, and what they offer is a Platform-as-a-Service solution for multichannel marketing management. So what is that in English? It’s a single system for managing, monitoring, and analyzing consumer communication efforts across multiple points of contact.

With SimplyCast, you can create, deploy, and analyze communications in the following formats:

• Emails
• Surveys
• Faxes
• Autoresponder Messages
• SMS
• Link Tracking
• More

To make it easier to create marketing communications, SimplyCast uses a wizards-based toolset that enables the user to drag and drop elements into their messages and forms. Very WYSIWYG, which makes it easy to use the platform even if you are a bit of a web novice. Additionally, SimplyCast offers more than 1000 templates to get you started  - many companies find that editable templates make all communications look more professional.

For message deployment, the platform enables you to manage and segment lists, and their expertise in email coupled with close ISP relationships ensures a high delivery rate. The platform also integrates with SalesForce, Drupal, and other legacy systems prospects and clients may already be using.

Further, SimplyCast offers a solid set of real-time metrics through which to monitor, evaluate, and report results of efforts. While I have only seen demos of the offering, and have not actually used it myself, it appears that their web based reports are easy to use. Additionally, the platform offers simple export and download features for those looking to develop Excel, PowerPoint, and other types of reporting documents and presentations.

A platform like this is best suited for small to medium sized businesses, and they offer a variety of pricing plans to cover the waterfront in terms of offerings. You can:

• Use it for Free: SimplyCast allows users with less than 1000 contacts per month to use its platform for free to deliver an unlimited number of communications.
• Credit Based Pricing: You can pay by the delivered message with pricing beginning at $5. In this plan you bank a number of credits and use them on an as needed basis depending upon your contacts schedule.
• Contact Based Pricing: Those sending lots of messages to the same list can purchase plans based upon the number of contacts or records rather than the number of delivered messages. Pricing begins at $13.
• PAYG: In this plan your credits do not expire, so it is set up for infrequent mailers.

What I find most significant about this platform is the idea that it is enabling small to medium sized businesses to take a much more holistic view of contacting consumers. It often takes too long for technology to filter through all business levels. The flexibility in enabling multiple contact points makes it easy for companies to truly reflect consumer preferences in their contact plans. And to adjust those plans as consumer preferences change.

Startup Watch COD: Stickybits rewards consumers who scan items and read/write reviews

here are a host of new cell phone application designed to provide information and deals on products sold in brick and mortar stores. For marketers, it stands to reason that connecting with consumers at the point of purchase makes a great deal of sense. While I have my own misgivings about the number and size of discounts brands are making available at the point of purchase, there is no disputing that such mobile applications attract consumer attention, and impact behavior.

Stickybits is one of the applications that has gained a great deal of attention and consumer adoption. With Stickybits the consumer downloads the application and then scans barcodes of products that they are contemplating. From there the application provides a variety of different types of information. The scanning of the barcode might spawn consumer reviews of the item, or product videos or tweets and pictures that others have left. The consumer is also able to leave their own comments and user generated content at his or her will.

Game mechanics come into the picture because brands and retailers have the opportunity to enable consumers to receive discounts, information about sweepstakes and contests, and a variety of other rewards and benefits.

Consumers get positive feedback and rewards in several ways with the Stickybits application. Obviously the first way is through these instant rewards and information that appear when they scan a UPC. But the second, more ubiquitous rewards system relates to earning points for every completed UPC scan. Obviously this rewards system encourages more widespread and deep adoption by users.

Thus Stickybits is trying to become a part of people's everyday shopping and buying experiences, not an item occasionally used when the consumer is considering making a new purchase or changing brands.

So does participating in an application like this make sense for your brand? In my view the answer relates to your business objectives, the extent to which your consumers are loyal, and your product margin. I've written in the past about my fear that all of this winning and discounting on everyday purchases is simply subsidizing loyal users. That has both short-term impacts on the financial success of brands as well as long-term impact on brand equity.

Are we are training a generation of consumers to only make purchases when discounts are offered? That is the opposite of creating brand value.

Nevertheless I see tremendous potential value in an application like Stickybits. What is necessary is for a brand to carefully consider its strategic objectives and develop a way of participating in such a platform based upon those objectives.

For example the brand introducing new items or new product sizes might use an application like this in order to encourage incremental purchases or the purchase of a larger size item.

Another way to use an application like Stickybits would be to encourage incremental purchases of those items that have highly seasonal or highly irregular purchase cycles. An example of this might be a consumer product like canned pumpkin. I would imagine that about 90% of canned pumpkin is purchased in the months of November and December in the United States. By participating in a program like Stickybits, the brand might be able to create incremental purchase occasions by impacting consumer behavior right there at the shelf. This wouldn’t be based upon a program that spawned reward for scanning a pumpkin UPC but rather a related item like pie crust.

Another way to sensibly utilize an application like Stickybits might be to communicate incremental value for an item in order to "close the sale." Recipes, or a reward for multiple unit purchase are examples here. In extremely commoditized categories, it might make sense to have an ongoing offer associated with the scanning of your UPC. A small discount might make the difference between routinized purchase and lost share, dollar sales, and volume.

And let's not forget that UPCs appear on a variety of durable goods, not just packaged goods. In the context of selling a stove or a refrigerator, being able to offer a sweepstakes entry or some form of discount might have tremendous impact on brand sales. Essentially, such discounts could be built into the suggested retail price of an item so that the appeal of a discount delivered through an iPhone application would feel unique and special to the user. Without negatively impacting the overall financial and brand health of the appliance maker.

Stickybits, which is available for both iPhone and Android devices, can play an important role in the marketing programs of items that bear UPC's. They are definitely a tactic to consider as you develop the marketing program of your brand. Just use them in a sensible way that clearly delivers on your overall brand business objectives.

Start-Up Watch COD: RadiumOne delivers precise targeting and scale by comprehensively analyzing social sharing

Chances are, people connected to you are pretty aware of what interests you. Chances are people connected to you know what you are thinking about buying. Naturally there are more than a few reasons for this – not least that we share our interests through our daily usage of social media. I am looking for a new fridge, so I ask people about their fridges.

I am seriously thinking about buying a Lincoln MKZ (that’s actually true in my case…) so I ask people what they think of them. With so much research showing us how much MORE we value other people’s opinions than we do marketing messages, it should surprise no one that we actively discuss products and services online that reveal our interests and purchase intent.

Interestingly, few targeting methodologies have capitalized on this. It follows that there’s real business opportunity in leveraging this insight in a big way.

Enter RadiumOne. RadiumOne is an SF-based start-up focused on collecting as much information as it can that relates to what we share online, and using that to deliver passionate and engaged audiences.

While they also leverage the basic “behavioral targeting” data and approaches as a supplement, their “secret sauce” comes from their ShareGraph platform that analyzes enormous amounts of social sharing activity across the open web’s many different platforms to identify audiences that are clearly interested in categories, brands, and products.

It’s not just FB or Twitter data. Rather, their goal is to capture the preponderance of social sharing wherever and how it occurs. Access to many different sources of data can be really beneficial because it means they can identify multiple types of social interactions reflecting an interest, as well as better gauge depth of interest. Intuitively, I think it’s also likely that we may talk about different kinds of products in different places. More access = more insight. Says Doug Chavez, VP Marketing,

“When it comes to social sharing data, more is better. That’s why our focus is on capturing the broadest possible range of social sharing data sources. We were delighted to hear Mark Zukerberg say that the key metric Facebook is focused on over the next five years is sharing. It lends even more credence to our strategy. But our approach is to reach beyond a single community to encompass as much as possible of the exponential social sharing happening on the open web.”

An important aspect of ShareGraph is that it operates in near real time. Social sharing taking place today is reflected in its methodology and targeting today. That’s a big advantage because if you think about most “behavioral” data takes significant time to get gathered, parsed, bundled, packaged and sold to brands. While our interests and intended purchases may be noodled over for much longer than a day, it’s clear that the more recent the data, the more relevant it may be. A month from now I may have purchased my MKZ, or indeed a Cadillac CTS. Whereas an hour from now it’s pretty likely that I won’t have yet, so there’s still time to influence my purchase.

Now consider this. With auto, the decision process takes months. For your decision on where to go for dinner tonight, the process can only take so long. When a tool gets insights in near real time, far more purchases are effectable.

RadiumOne is focused on using a different data set to identify ideal media opportunities. That’s important because with so many other media solutions providers focusing on the same data sets, many brands have long passed the point of diminishing returns using conventional approaches.

While much of the data used by Radium One is social in origin, the media aren’t, or at least aren’t necessarily. This may help some brands be more comfortable because they can define and refine a white list against which Radium One will buy.

I like unique approaches that try to identify a different path to results. Innovation is far more likely to change the game than making minute variations on the same theme. RadiumOne strikes me as an important new direction for targeting, and perhaps even more importantly a more mature approach to leveraging social in service of brand objectives.

Start-Up Watch COD: Rapportive helps you learn everything about contacts, right in GMAIL

I’ve spoken a couple of times on this blog about how having rich information about business contacts can make a big difference for your business. We thrive on personal relationships, and Rapportive gives you the essential informational grist about your contacts right in Gmail.

Rapportive is a free add-on for Gmail that works in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. It enables the user to view a broad range of information about a business contact quickly and easily. The content appears in a sidebar, and includes recent Tweets and other social communications as well as the opportunity to follow individuals in Linked In, Facebook, Twitter, and more. You can review this content, understand their professional and personal interests, and build bridges with them by mentioning and understanding all of this rich info.

All this can be rather important because personal connection is such an absolutely critical currency by which to build, strengthen, and cement relationships. We naturally like people better that take an interest in us, and Rapportive makes it far easier to demonstrate that sort of interest in clients and prospects.

Another valuable component of the service is a notes section that works sort of like a contact manager to help you record and store other information relevant to your relationship with this person.

Here’s an intro video featuring a couple of the founders:

The feature set the offering currently provides is very valuable, but its also easy to imagine a number of ways that this product will likely be enhanced as time goes on. I would imagine we’ll see a convergence of the capabilities of a Gist and a Xobni in this offering, though I would also expect some of those components will be premium services.

If your business uses Gmail, as a growing number do, I think you should give this product a whirl. It’s currently free, and the convenience and ready access of information will potentially transform some of your business relationships – for the better! Rapportive is funded in part by Y Combinator, which bodes well for their ability to create a meaningful business model for the future.

Start-Up Watch COD: SundaySky enables websites to create dynamic personalized videos on the fly

Video is among the fastest growing media sectors in digital, and for good reason. Sight, sound, and motion all rolled into one.  

The downsides of video, of course, have always been the amount of time and money it costs to produce a high quality execution. While the development process has been greatly democratized over the past several years, most brands still view video as a “major production” (pun intended.) Additionally, videos have always been a lot harder to update than, say, text. And when you do those updates, you go back to the time and money challenges.

A Tel Aviv and New York based company called SundaySky has developed a remarkable new platform that enables web sites to offer personalized videos of site content on demand. The technology gathers assets from pre-defined locations in real time, and assembles them in professional looking templates that Sunday Sky develops for clients.

So, for example, an online store could offer a video for every product it sells by using the platform and defining the locations of  images and text fields that would be assembled during the video call. The consumer visits a site, sees an item that captures their interest, presses play for a video, and Sunday Sky grabs the latest photos and text from the CMS and mashes them up in an attractive video that highlights the item.

The process-oriented among you are probably beginning to see the tremendous power here. Say you sell 500 types of candles on your web site. You have a CMS that delivers text and photos to your pages in a common format. Well, by telling Sunday Sky where to get the latest content about an item in the CMS, the platform can instantly make a video of EVERY CANDLE available. One template, multiple items and asset calls. And when you update the content in the CMS, future video calls for that item will reflect the NEW text.

Ingenious!

Of course what works for 500 items also works for 500,000 items.

And that’s just what SundaySky can do on the simplest level. A web site could also have a template made that enables a user to compare different items of their choice, or one that grabs the latest user ratings and comments for an item. The videos are pretty nice lookin’. To ensure this, Sunday Sky has a team of creative talent that hand prepares a template for your needs at the beginning of your engagement with them.

It’s easy to see how this works for e-commerce. But it can also be very relevant for content and social sites as well. For example, the platform could take a news story and associated photo assets and assemble them into an engaging video experience. And since news sites also use CMS systems and common templates, the results could be just as universal and compelling.

Additionally, imagine the power of enabling individual users to have their own personalized profile videos based upon content they make available!

Here’s their value prop vid:

I’m not the only one who’s impressed. The company has already garnered a variety of large and niche sites as clients. One place you can see the fruits of this technology is on Overstock.com. Click here and then click the video tab for an example.

Great production values, broad appeal, and a remarkably simple implementation make this solution and company worth watching in the months and years ahead.

Start-Up Watch COD: Outbrain drives strong results for brands and pubs with powerful recommendation widgets

Brands: If I told you there was a performance-based solution to drive HIGHLY qualified traffic to your rich brand content, would you be intrigued?

Pubs: If I told you that there was a way to take currently useless real estate, way way way below the fold, and drive big revenue from it, would you want to know more?

Outbrain is a start-up that says it has the solutions to deliver on those promises. They offer a unique platform that delivers recommended content links at the bottom of every story on a website, so that readers can indulge their passions with more rich content. And the pub where it appears gets both more PVs and more revenue.

Sounds too good to be true, huh? I see your point in that many of the existing content management platforms out there do offer a related articles feature, which is currently driving little or no revenue.

But these are essentially “dumb” tools that choose articles to list based upon matches to keywords in the story you’ve just read.

Outbrain is far more sophisticated. Essentially, they create a content consumption profile of a user, much as Amazon records all of one’s past browsing and purchasing in order to serve up recommendations. In a very real sense, you can think of the technology behind Outbrain as a collaborative filtering engine for content.

So that’s why the links are more relevant for users. But from here the story gets even more interesting. The latest Outbrain widgets offer a combination of on-site and sponsored links, so that a pub can drive more traffic to its own pages or get compensated for traffic it drives to brands or other pubs.

For example, this widget appeared below a CNN article on personal health:

As you can see, the recommendations are well tailored. The links on the right hand side are sold on a CPC basis, which provides performance based certainty for the advertisers and strong revenue for the pub. For its efforts, Outbrain gets a cut of the revenue.

As we all know, more and more brands are realizing the importance of offering rich content as part of their marketing mixes. Many of those brands have begin to use Outbrain links to promote their content, including American Express Open, Colgate-Palmolive, University of Phoenix and Procter and Gamble. Many of the other sponsors on Outbrain units are other pubs looking for a way to drive up their page views – particularly in sections where ad rates are strong. If for example you can drive a highly qualified viewer to your health content, that can potentially be quite lucrative – well worth the CPC fee.

According to the company, the clickthrough rates on these units average over 6%, meaning that about 6% of the viewers of a page of content click on at least one of the links in the unit. 6% not 0.06% or 0.6%.

6% would be cause for celebration for virtually any ad unit, but when you consider where these recommendations live – at the end of the story way way way below of the fold - it makes the figure even more noteworthy. When a user clicks on a link off the original site, it spawns a new browser tab or window, so the user is not lost to the originating pub.

I love this from both the buyer and seller angles. I want pubs to make more money to produce more and better content. I want new, more effective advertising tactics so brands can drive more value out of online. By turning heretofore low value real estate into a real traffic and business driver, Outbrain appears to be making a major contribution to digital growth. Certainly their client list, which includes many of the most important online sites, is evidence of that.

By making itself easy to implement, Outbrain offers a real, actionable way for pubs to do more – for their advertisers and their bottom lines.

Start-Up Watch COD: flavorpill creates a locally centered influencer community focused on culture

As the focus of marketing continues to shift from mass focused to influencer driven, it’s natural that we are seeing more and more communities expressly created for the purpose of attracting and connecting with influencers.

One of the most interesting such communities is flavorpill, a city-centered local activities resource with emphasis on more erudite people and experiences. flavorpill uses a blog like format to publicize some of the most interesting and diverse activities in major metros. They cover cultural events of all sorts, art exhibits, books and readings, films, outdoor activities, and more. It’s the eclectic nature of the content that makes it such an interesting venue.

Influencers are tough to please, but it appears that the editors of Flavorpill have a good insight into what makes this group tick. Rather than prescribing a rigid format and content guideline, the site enables the viewer to see a diverse range of activities with an emphasis on interesting and unusual.

The site also recognizes that there are influencers in a variety of walks of life. Because of this you can find decidedly mature items and events juxtaposed to activities for families and kids. In addition to professional editors, the site also invites members to submit items and events that they think will interest the community.

The roots of the site were in an email list of people searching for great things to do. Their work has expended as their audience has grown.

I would imagine that it is rather difficult to attract and retain an audience of influencers – they are, after all, people who set trends rather than following them. The incredible variety of activities listed on these city sites is key to their appeal.

As you consume more and more of the content on these sites, you become aware that they are trying to do a great deal more than package up an audience. For them, curation is a critical element of the value proposition. They want to focus on the best. Apparently the model holds strong appeal – they have more than 2 million regular users.

They break another one of the emerging “rules” of online communities – everyone that writes for flavorpill is compensated. In fact, they are incented to drive page views. Here’s a video that talks about the core concept of the site. Note that they have added additional sites since this was recorded.

For brands, the site network offers a variety of sponsorship opportunities from standard banners to video, page wraps, and deeper sponsorships including branded content. Local events and businesses are also able to offer giveaways as a means of publicizing activities to this influential audience.

If you’re looking for a way to attract an eclectic and hip urban influencer audience, give them a look!

Start-Up Watch COD: ChallengePost and the phenomenon of crowd sourced innovation

When I started in advertising, I worked on a brand that challenged P&G in one of its core categories. We developed a great product and started rolling it out region by region. The product was a triumph of an incredible team of six household product scientists.

Unfortunately, Procter developed a better product in about four months, and rolled it out nationally before we hit 40% ACV. For you see, not to diminish the fact that Procter always attracts great individual scientists, they ALSO had about 300 of those great scientists working in the category. In one day they logged 50X the “man hours” our team did. When focused on developing a product better than ours, they were able to unleash the power of numbers.

Fast forward 20-mumble years. Procter is one of the leaders in crowd sourced innovation, having developed a multimillion dollar platform that enables anyone – yes, anyone – to submit product ideas designed to addressed challenges the company pre-identifies.

Of course, many of the best ideas come from vendors. But the principle of unleashingeveryone against a challenge is merely the logical endgame for a principle I witnessed and got clobbered by more than a couple of decades ago.

Fortunately for the rest of us, a NYC-based start-up called ChallengePost has created a crowd sourced innovation platform that lets virtually any organization or company benefit from strength in numbers.

The platform enables an organization to post a challenge, set a prize for the best entry(ies), and manage the process of collecting and evaluating ideas quickly and easily.

As part of the challenge the organization can provide a variety of different kinds of inputs for use by the would be innovators. For example, several of the major programs delivered thus far were focused on the development of apps that leveraged sponsor-provided data sets.

For example, the City of New York made available a broad range of data sets and asked people to develop apps to solve city problems. Similarly, the US Department of Agriculture posted data sets related to the nutritional value of foods as part of a challenge to help encourage kids to make healthier food choices.

Contestants ask questions and submit ideas along with relevant presentation materials using ChallengePost’s robust platforms. Participating organizations can choose which ideas to post as part of audience voting, as well as curate entries for a professional judging organization.

ChallengePost offers three levels of service at different price points:

1. Basic service offers a sub domain and a variety of communication tools to publicize your challenge and keep people abreast of progress. This option also gives you access to the platform’s robust challenge management tools.
2. Premium service enables you to use any domain and enables the sponsoring organization to customize forms and other features so as to tailor the offering to the precise parameters of a challenge. You also get access to greater publicity tools, as well as community features that encourage greater participation and collaboration.
3. Platform level service enables an organization to run multiple challenges, provides more complete customization, and even enables company employees to post specific challenges if desired.

In addition to the quality of solutions that have been developed in challenges thus far, the company points to a tremendous return on investment using this approach. By empowering virtually anyone to respond to challenges, and by making all submissions the property of the sponsoring organization, the platform often yields ROI well in excess of 20X.

I adore this concept. I don’t know how else to say it. The idea of crowd sourced innovation is of course very sound. And the application of industry standard submission and management tools gives virtually any organization to solve important challenges through the power of the crowd. Great stuff.

Start-Up Watch COD: Quirky compensates people for sales of products they design

The democratization of innovation continues apace, with more and more sites, communities, and apps enabling people to submit and prosper from ideas. One such site with a really interesting mission is Quirky.

 

The idea behind Quirky is for people to create products and submit them for consideration to the community. Well liked ideas are actually manufactured, with some of the revenue going to the inventor and the people who influence others to buy the item. It’s a multistep process:

A would be inventor submits an idea for consideration. They submit words, schematics, drawings, descriptions, whatever they think will make their item compelling to the site’s “jury” of members. The application form is a simple, well organized system to collect information about the need, the item, its competitors, and why the inventor feels it is compelling. The inventor then pays $10 to complete the submission and submit it to the voting public. Each week offers a new competition. In addition to open ended submissions, you can also respond to a product brief.

Site members vote on ideas as well as provide input and suggestions to the project. Those who participate in these stages earn what the site calls influence, which is a measure in their role of bringing the item to fruition. A site member earns influence and through it a share of the revenue for an item in a variety of ways:

• Submitting a winning product idea
• Submitting a winning idea in another project
• Voting for a winning idea
• Rating the majority of ideas in a product evaluation round
• Participating in a product research project
• Committing to a product in presale

The winning item is selected for further development. Whether or not you win, the site sends you information on who liked your product and the verbatim comments of evaluators. You can use that feedback to revise and resubmit an idea, or as the nucleus to help you “go it alone” with your invention.

At this point, the product begins a research, design, branding, and engineering process that culminates in a product offering for presale. If enough people commit to buying the product, it moves forward for manufacture. When the product sells, the inventor and various influencers earn money. The site says the inventor often earns about 35% of the distributed earnings. The item may only sell on the site or it may enter broader distribution.

I’ve oversimplified the process in this piece a bit, but it is plain that the many stages and many input points for the community have created a system that offers a strong opportunity for product success.

Here’s their “manifesto” vid:

As you peruse the community you quickly take note that there’s real money available here for both inventors and very active influencers. The items the site produces are unique, intriguing, and eminently giftable.

What’s great about this community is the power that it unleashes in people – to invent, to suggest, and to drive sales for great items. It is yet another example of how digital is upending virtually every sector of business, including manufacture.