Posted by: Heather Green on March 24
Adweek has a great, indepth story the explains the experimentation around trying to figure out advertising on social networks. There's lot of good work going on, with advertisers trying to figure out how to come up with metrics that show how advertising is performing on the social networks.
But what it makes you realize is how much of a bind these sites are in in terms of advertising.
What's ironic is that whenever the Internet becomes social, with email or chat or now social networks, it becomes so much less measurable.
Basically, what we're seeing at social networks is either a push by advertisers to go back to traditional metrics, like awareness and lift or a push to create new metrics that measure, get ready to gag, engagement. But really despite the fact that that's such an overused word, they are working to figure out how much time and interaction and involvement people are spending with their brands.
Now, going to awareness and lift has problems, because, as Ian Schafer from Deep Focus points out so well in the article, advertisers need to be more patient than they would with other media because they have to wait for communities to grow and people to get engaged.
Engagement on the other hand seems like something destined to frustrate advertisers. Schafer explains how they are gauging it by involvement in T-shirt giveaways and design contests. That's very creative. But how do you standardize that kind of measurement overtime so that advertisers know what they're getting? And then what's the cost and time commitment companies will need to put into ad campaigns to figure out their impact? For the moment, it looks like the social networks are doomed to lower CPMs or sponsorship pricing.
Posted by: Stephen Baker on March 22
Talk about clueless... Here we are "covering" blogs at this magazine, and unbeknownst to us, our colleague, Kerry Miller, has developed a rip-roaring, hilarious blog that appears to get massive traffic. It's called Passive-Aggressive Notes, and it's worth looking at.
And wouldn't you know, I learn about this in Kerry's good-bye note. She's leaving BW to pursue other opportunities opened up by the blog.
Posted by: Stephen Baker on March 21
Those interested in surveillance should subcribe to Bruce Schneier's blog. Great links and insights. Two recent ones. This one, from Popular Mechanics, describes the state of the art in security cameras, which will soon be looking in surprising detail at nearly everything we do. Then there's the British camera that can spot weapons under people's clothes.
Posted by: Heather Green on March 20
Story out of my hood, where New Jersey state prosecutors are subpoeaning records from JuicyCampus, a college gossip site that's been growing as it has rolled out across campuses across the U.S. What's caught the prosecutors attention are sexual, racial, anti-semitic and malicious comments that's students have been posting anonymously about each other.
The issue isn't the anonymity, it's the boundaries on the anonymity. Allegedly, the allegedly claims to provide a way to counter or report false claims but apparently doesn't. That's prompted concern not just by the prosecutors but also by students on some campuses.
The state is looking into whether the JuicyCampus violates the Computer Fraud Act for deceptive practices, I suppose, but also the "unconscionable commercial practices."
So does this mean that Web sites can’t clean up their own act, will government officials try to do it for them? Are they just able to pursue this case because the company allegedly promised something and did something else? And if you make a best effort to monitor for hate speech or libel, are you basically immune?
Posted by: Stephen Baker on March 17
Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan writes in the Financial Times about the shortcomings of the statistical models underpinning the world financial system. Seems like a serious indictment. The skinny: For all their smarts, the quants cannot capture the complexity of global finance in their models.
What does this say about their ability to model humans as shoppers, workers, voters and patients. That's what I write about in the book (that's going through copy-editing now), The Numerati.
Greenspan notes that the data used in finance is variable, because it comes from both times of euphoria and panic. He says it's not a good idea to average it. That would be like studying two days of a person's life, his wedding day and a loved one's funeral, and saying, "Well, on average he's emotionally balanced." My question: Is Greenspan only learning about this statistical shortcoming now?
