Intent - and how to "Like" it
superamit:
gustafalstromer:
Hoan Ton-That is one of the smartest people I know. Earlier today we spoke about how the social gaming/virtual goods companies could save the incentivized offer industry which have had a bad week.
The offer industry is built on the concept of product bundling. Andrew Chen wrote a great post about here so wont go into the details.
In search marketing we’ve learned that the magic term “Intent” is the key to how most of the value is being created for someone like Google. By capturing the intent of a person who is out to buy something you have the power of directing traffic of huge value. How do you carry intent over to other sites where we’re not searching? It’s hard but here is an idea:
Amazing has something called “wish-list”, basically a list of books or products that I’ve saved on Amazon that I might buy sometime in the future. There could be many reasons why I’m putting something in my wish-list but one of them is certainly that I might buy it in the future. Compared to any book on Amazon the intent captured in my wish-list has a much higher value for Amazon. Basically Amazon have captured and saved my intent for the future.
In my opinion it’s crazy that this isn’t something that is being used on other sites, especially e-commerce sites . If I was able to “Heart” or “Like” products on any e-commerce site and they were able to save those “intents” for the future they’ve created value for my next return.
The big idea here is to capture someone intent and link it to a specific user. I think there is a huge opportunity with the mysterious Facebook Open Graph API to do just that. And it doesn’t have to be the same thing as with the beacon-fiasco. Imagine I’m on Etsy, I find something pretty and click “Like”. Etsy is connected with facebook and my (possible) intent is shared with my friends. Privacy-issue? Possibly, but the value of sharing something I like to facebook is probably larger for most users.
Value created for Etsy? Duh.
Facebook should start sharing Intent over the social graph and enable the “Like” function for everything on the web.
Here are some stuff I would “Like” if I could:
A universal Facebook like button that shares a line to your newsfeed would be awesome.
At the last FB dev brouhaha they talked about expanding the social graph to objects outside Facebook. Is it possible to build a widget that displays a button on any page to “like” it? (This would add a one-liner to your stream, and presumably save that like info on the site.)
No brainer.
Most online experiences are made, like fast food, to be cheap, easy, and addictive: appealing to our hunger for connection but rarely serving up nourishment. Shrink-wrapped junk food experiences are handed to us for free by social media companies, and we swallow them up eagerly, like kids given buckets of candy with ads on all the wrappers.
These experiences are sensitive neither to individual humans nor to the human collective, but only to page views and growth (in a corporate, not personal sense).
— I fucking love Jonathan Harris. Read all of World Building in a Crazy World notes. (via fascinated)
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
— Oscar Wilde (via justbesplendid) (via aestheticthoughts)
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
— Winston S. Churchill (via kari-shma) (via abeshafi)
Nothing contributes so much to tranquilizing the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
— Mary Wollstonecraft (via bluechameleon) (via vruz)
We are pretty much the same as we were twenty thousand years ago. We have in the course of these twenty thousand years actualized an immense number of things which at that time and for many, many centuries thereafter were wholly potential and latent in man.
—
Aldous Huxley
There many other potentialities remain hidden in us. Let’s develop the methods and the means to actualize them!
via Tinkering till the end of time
(via zachklein)
Everything I have learned that has been really useful has been by doing things.
— Paul Buchheit at Startup School 09 (via hiten)
The future of branded advertising
tedr:
bijan:
Much has been said about the issues facing publishers and advertisers particularly when it comes to branded advertising.
My head always hurts when I hear people say that at least with television, brands can safely advertise their brands.
Yes, television has been a success story when it comes to branded advertising. The dollars are big. Forget big, they are enormous.
But I’m convinced that it’s a fragile business. First, it’s not growing. And our attention is shifting. Even if Nielsen says we are all watching 25 hours of TV per day we know it’s not true in our hearts and our brains. The second the TV commercial comes on we whip out our mobile phone or we turn our eyes to our laptops. Or we just click thru the ads on our DVRs.
Yet online branded advertising has real challenges. The current search business doesn’t deliver branded advertising. The classic banner ad if targeted works well for many things — except branding.
To make display advertising ads friendlier to brands, new formats are being introduced like this super sized banner ad I saw on Alley Insider today.
To give you an idea how big that Mercedes ad, that photo is my 15” MacBook Pro which has a 1440x900 display!
I’m not sure this format is the best for publishers, advertisers and consumers. I have a feeling it’s not.
But I am optimistic that there will be more compelling solutions for branded advertising. I’ve seen a number of creative ideas & technologies over the past few months and I’m sure we’ll see others too.
@bijan. I’m with you 100%. Though the first way for brands to be effective online is to ditch standards and seek out publishers that are willing to prepare custom integrations for the brand into their media form. Advertising has been a lie for 100 years and we have the metrics to prove it now. Brands needs to be where their customers are and make their intentions known by helping their customers enjoy their lives more. Red Bull’s arial and DIY events are a great example. Samsung power stations at airports are another. Even the Bud Light Wheat / SNL takeover is the future. All of these were envisioned by the brand (and with the publisher or property holder) as an actual adn real (vs. pretend) benefit to the customer. It says we think your lifestyle is great and want to make it better. (Note the Bud Light ad buyout meant there was more time to show more programming (classic SNL clips) which along with reduced total ad minutes is a win for viewers.)
This is how advertising will work in the next century. It will take much more work, it will allow for far fewer martini lunches and a roiling of creative destruction for years to come before things settle out.
I’m speaking with confidence as our advertisers on Dogster and Catster get all their ROI from providing fun and information to our audience. They still use banners, but their just to set the stage for the real sharing points. We almost always turn down agencies that request pure banner buy, because they’ll never get the return they want and thus never come back.
So think big about how advertising will change, but think beyond IAB and standards and think about integrating with customers actual lives in a meaningful way.
You need music, I dont know why. It’s probably one of those Joseph Campbell questions, why we need ritual. We need magic and bliss, and power and myth, and celebration and religion in our lives and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it.
— Jerry Garcia (via newspeedwayboogie)
…those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work [are] being retained. They are the new untouchables. That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today. Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college — more education — but we need more of them with the right education.
—
Thomas Friedman - The New Untouchables
“our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.
Bottom line: We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.”
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