Vs. December 20, 2008
Posted by airyrae in Merging with the Market.Tags: new media, new media vs. old media
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“All of us who professionally use the media are the shapers of society. We can vulgerize that society. We can brutalize it.
Or we can help lift it onto a higher level”
William Bernbach
In the red corner we have new media. New media is convenient, accessible, personable, easy, targeted and since it’s mostly free it puts up one heck of a fight. Pay no mind to its ‘stalker-like” qualities and questionable reporting methods. In the blue corner we have old media. Old, or traditional media, is tried, true, private, and accountable. And in the instance that it’s not accountable there is a professional somewhere who is, and oftentimes pays for it with the loss of their job. Pay no mind to the fact that you can’t get in now! It is predicted that new media, sometimes referred to as ‘people media’, will knockout old-time media and its disgraced professionals before the final round. But before you place your bets: Caveat lector (reader beware).
You can’t believe everything read, regardless of whether you’re getting your information from new or old media. However, credible information is a lot more difficult to distinguish from sponsored results or otherwise supplied by those with ulterior motives. Despite the reports of unreliability in traditional media outlets, it has been argued that old, paid-for, mediums are more reliable than the new, free media. Because professionals are paid, trained, and held accountable for their work. As a culture we expect the absolute truth from traditional media. Yet, new media isn’t held to this same high standard, with the exception of news Web sites. The new media, on the other hand, can be very useful and compelling. You can’t beat the Internet for accessing a diverse view on a wide variety of subjects. And traditional mediums just can’t compete with the ability to provide such a vast amount of information to readers.
As such, nearly 70 percent of Americans believe traditional journalism is out of touch, and nearly half are turning to the Internet to get their news. I guess ‘traditional journalists’ don’t contribute to Internet news stories so they’re more credible. Plus we all know that ‘Jo-Blow’ has no ulterior motives so his contributions to the Internet are reliable. So before you bet, its only fair that understand that the sources you are accessing online such as Google News and Yahoo News pull stories from newspapers, television, wire services and other media sources. While it’s delivered in a non-traditional form, that doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t traditional journalism underneath it.
So who will you put your money on? Personally, I’m banking on both the old and the new. There is pain anytime the new threatens the old, but I think in the case of merging media the two rivals will mesh to create something that is so much more than its parts. Imagine media that is trustworthy, credible, timely, efficient, engaging, targeted, affordable, and requires the informed consent of its audience. Ultimately, both new and old mediums have their strengths and weaknesses. Instead of turning the media landscape into the next season of Survivor we should be focusing on merging the admiral aspects of each medium to create entities that equally benefit society and commerce.
Online behavior targeting December 18, 2008
Posted by airyrae in Merging with the Market.Tags: online behavior targeting, online ethics, search marketing
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“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don’t know which half”
William Hesketh Lever
The idea that half of the money a company spends on advertising is wasted is a realistic given the limitations of traditional media. However, new media and online behavior targeting in particular, is bringing us closer to figuring out which part of the advertising budget is wasted and which half is effective: but at what cost? Online behavior targeting aims to deliver the right ad to the right people. Seems obvious right? Isn’t this the “aim” of advertising on the whole?
Sending the right message to the right people isn’t new to the advertising industry; in fact it’s kind of a founding concept. However, digital media is effectively accomplishing this feat by observing consumer’s behavior, oftentimes, without their knowledge or consent. Simply put, online behavior targeting strives to automatically understand consumers as they interact with a web presence in order to show them the most relevant content. Search engines use online behavior targeting to construct target markets based on almost any observed behavior, which dramatically increases the potential effectiveness of marketing and at the same time increases the ‘gray’ area in regards to the ethics and advertising.
The U.S. Congress has been investigating the use of behavioral targeting since protests raised awareness of large internet service providers like Embarq, Verizon, AT&T and Time Warner Cable using the targeted ad service from web tracking company NebuAd. The question at hand is whether the analyzing these plethora of Internet traffic violates federal wiretap laws by not gaining consent from the consumer to the gathering and use of their web communications. As shown through this New York Time’s chart, the public is being heavily tracked and marketing to as a result of their particiation on the Internet:
Some providers, like Verizon, have pledged to refrain from collecting and tracking the browsing behavior of their customers unless they receive explicit permission from the affected consumers. But we’re still being watched. As previously mentioned search engines also track consumer’s online behavior to make money by helping online advertisers better target their marketing effort through their search engine. Ultimately the solution to this ‘increasingly complex’ ethical situation that online behavior targeting brings to our ‘wired’ existence seems rather simply: informed consent. Internet companies don’t need to gain the informed consent of consumers to track their online behavior. However, it is seen in the previous video that regulators are moving towards a disclosure 2.0 policy. As such, any player who partakes in online behavior targeting should self regulate themselves now to gain the loyalty of consumers, avoid negative press, and gain a competitive advantage for the day when legislation regarding online behavior target is passed if the future.
Communitainment December 14, 2008
Posted by airyrae in e-volution.Tags: communitainment, entertainment marketing, internet marketing
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“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place”
George Bernard Shaw
It has been predicted that within the next decade at least one-half of all content consumption on the Internet will be driven by communitainment: a type of hybrid between social communication and entertainment driven by the popularity of instant messaging, social networking, photo and video sharing sites. Piper Jaffray coined this term and recently released a report title, The User Revolution, predicting that global online advertising revenue will be over $80 billion by 2011. Right now over fifty percent of a person’s online time is allocated to communication and entertainment. The idea of communitainment legitimizes the internet as and emerging medium and hones in on the social interactions that are surround broadband internet users.
A study by Netpop found that broadband consumers spend almost half of their spare time online and are active producers of content. It seems that as consumers become more and more involved with new media they become less and less responsive to the more traditional forms of advertising. Broadband has revolutionized they way that we use the internet and our enabled us to do more with less time. As such, new media and communitainment specifically is going to offer marketers a new opportunity to reach consumers on an individual basis.
This study found that online consumers are oftentimes more receptive and interested in advertisements that appear on their favorite Web site. This interest is attributed to that fact that consumers trust their favorite sites and feel that these sites think like they do. Web sites are becoming more of a confidante to consumers than simply an informative digital front. Consumers can gain instant perspective, referrals, information, purchase, and build a relationship with any entity through an effective Web site. A consumer’s favorite Web site is like a best friend that they need to ‘catch up’ with on a daily basis.
New media is allowing marketers the opportunity to connect with consumers on a personal level, engage them, and then support this budding relationship through additional integrated marketing communications. Ultimately, communitainment is bringing marketers closer and closer to effectively communicating with a segment of one. But since the internet has the ability to integrate so many different mediums marketer must rethink their online efforts to create extremely powerful relationships with consumers.
‘Clicking Here’ is Detrimental to Design December 13, 2008
Posted by airyrae in New Media Effectiveness.Tags: click here, descriptive links, text links and web design
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“Indecision may or may not be my problem”
- Jimmy Buffett
So you’re designing a website: making decisions left and right that will affect how consumers perceive your brand and interact with it. If you’ve been working relentlessly to design the perfect website click here. But what are you ‘clicking here’ for? Tips on designing the perfect website? - Perhaps. An award for relentless web designer of the year? – Possibly. What information a user expects to find by utilizing a ‘click here’ link varies based on the sentence it appears with and by the individual user.
Many website designers stress over visual design, nitpicking over every little detail, striving for perfection: and then ruin all of their hard work by allowing ‘click here’ links to be used throughout the copy on the site. While the copy of a website is oftentimes someone else’s responsibility: don’t let a silly thing like job descriptions ruin your hard work. While some initially believed that ‘click here’ links were beneficial to a website because they increase traffic to a given link, they were wrong. Click here’ links can ruin an otherwise great website because they are not self-explanatory and are, therefore, impossible to use efficiently. One only needs to consider Search Engine Optimization (SEO), how consumers use websites, and those with disabilities to see the harm that ‘click here’ links can bring to a website and its brand.
‘Click here’ links harm the indexing of your web pages by making them unsearchable. And in the age of SEO, having a poorly indexed website is just as bad as having no website at all. All of the major internet search engines use the terms in link text to assist with indexing web pages. As such, using “click here” to identify content linked from pages on your website will harm the indexing of your pages, making it difficult, if not impossible for people to find your website. And most companies would like as much organic traffic to their websites as possible. On the other hand, using descriptive link text will help users find your page while keeping the SEO staff, marketing department, Ad Word budget and users happy.
As a society we are busy, internet users just want to find the information they’re looking for – now – when they go online. People generally don’t read online, they scan. And there is also a lot of information competing for the attention of web viewers. Descriptive link text stands out during a visual scan of a web page, provided the designer sticks to the norm of underlining links and using a different color from the body copy. Many users have difficulty reading online because of poor screen resolution, glare, tiny font sizes, poor contrast and so on. As such, ‘click here’ as link text makes it even more difficult for viewers to use a company’s web page. And any difficult experience a consumer has with a brand can manifest in to negative brand equity. Using meaningful or descriptive text links rather than ‘click here’ makes it simple for users to identify links on a website that are of interest to them. Analytically speaking, descriptive links can lessen the bounce rate on any given web page and increase the amount of time users spend on a company’s website.
‘Click here’ links can also be detrimental to users with disabilities. Blind and visually impaired internet users have screen reader programs (like JAWS or Window Eyes) to assist them in reading web pages and searching the internet. Just as sighted users scan a website, screen reader programs scan for the links a website provides to other resources by reading them aloud to its user. Imagine how frustrating it would be to be visually impaired and have your screen reader program repeat: “click here, click here, click here” as you attempt to use a company’s website. There would be no way to determine how to instruct the screen reader to select the link with the information you’re interested in. Having descriptive links throughout the copy of a website negates this issue and insures that a brand’s online environment is accessible to everybody: if your store is handicap accessbile, your website should be as well.
Ultimately, the copy of a website should be written to give users a clear understanding of where each link will lead them. The effectiveness of a website and the equity of the brand depend on it.
Green Consumers Care About the Online Environment Too December 9, 2008
Posted by airyrae in Merging with the Market.Tags: green marketing, green websites
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“Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally”
Marshall McLuhan
There is no doubt that new media has brought about many exciting opportunities to target and inform consumers. With the environment and the economy being of people’s utmost concerns these days the Internet has become an extremely effective way of targeting green consumers. Green consumers being anyone who has integrated green activity into their daily life.
Green consumers are a great target and are actively using the Internet as an information resource to gather green information. Companies need to take advantage of their Web site’s ability to not only target the various levels of green consumers, but also in its ability to deliver them a plethora of information. Research has shown that consumers feel that company’s do a poor job of providing information on any green benefits that are touted through their advertisements. Furthermore, consumers who consider themselves to be green are oftentimes distrustful of advertising, especially television, yet they are active seekers and exchangers of information.
The obvious solution to effectively reaching these green consumers is by having an effective and engaging Web site. I was reading an article about the Top 6 eMarketing Tips for Reaching Green Consumers and would like to discuss some of these tips in more depth because while they seem obvious there lack would be poorly received by green consumers.
To insure that green consumers aren’t dissuaded by your Web site it is pertinent that they can easily find the information they are looking for the second the logon to your site. As such, incorporating a standard green section or graphic link that brings consumers to a page with more information about the environmental initiatives of a product and company is a necessity. Green consumers are interested in new products and actively seek information. As such, it is inevitable that green consumers will gravitate to a product’s Web site to research for themselves.
It is also necessary that companies targeting green consumers support their public relation efforts effectively through their Web site. Since green consumers are skeptical of advertising in general they often seek out 3rd party recommendations or the advice of other green consumers in making their purchasing decisions. As such, any publicity that your product generates should be accessible through your Web site. Don’t make these consumers search for endorsements about your product. Enable them to find out how other reputable sources view your product.
