Archive for October 13th, 2009

There is one frustration about blogging.  Just when I get rigorous and religious about posting on a planned publication schedule, along comes some piece of news on something I wrote that throws off the production line and causes me to have to interrupt the previously scheduled program and cover it.  Don’t you just love the real-time web?  Yes, in fact, you do.  So I have to be flexible and learn to balance thought with immediacy like a one-legged man standing on a log rolloing down a set of rapids.

So what happened?  Yesterday I published an article about the fact we should be using the term tailored versus targeted advertising and how our research showed that consumers would accept any number of emails as long a they were tailored to their specific concerns.  Today,  the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology at UC Berkeley School of Law ( Berkeley Law ), and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania published a study that reports that contrary to my research, most adult Americans (66%) do not want online advertisements tailored (yes, they used the right term) by marketers to their specific interests.  Moreover, when Americans are informed of three common ways that marketers gather data about people in order to tailor ads, between 73% and 86% say they would not want such advertising.

The study is called "Americans Reject Tailored Advertising and Three Activities that Enable It.".  What I find most surprising is that the study reports that even 18-24 year old feel this way (55%), which is lower than the average but still higher than I would have thought.  86% of young adults, the study goes on to say, don’t want tailored advertising if it is the result of following the online behavior, and 90% reject it if it results from following their activities offline.

I  went through the study in some detail and, so you know, I am very comfortable with survey methodologies and dealing with the vailidity of statistical results reported.  As part of this, I am always looking for holes in the methodology that could indicate bias.  The Berkeley/U Penn study had a better methodology that two prior surveys on the subject- one from Consumer’s Union conducted in 2008 and one that was conducted in 2008 by TRUSTe and repeated in 2009 by the Privacy Consulting Group.  So I think that, as a general matter, the survey is a better indicator of attitudes than anything done previously.  Having said that, there are two issues I have with the study:

1. Nowhere in the study was it asked whether or not the consumers would put up with tailored advertising if it is what paid for the information they got for free on the web.  This is a critical issue, because at the end of the day, consumers know that they are making this tradeoff – otherwise they would have fled sites with advertising in droves.
    
2. Asking people about what they would do is always dangerous.  There is a famous study by Oral-B (I think) where they put consumers into focus groups and asked them what color of toothbrush they liked most.  Universally, the two top colors reported were red and blue.  The participants were thanked for their participation and told that they could take several Oral-B toothbrushes free from baskets as they walked out the door (and yes, the baskets had a random mix of all colors).  What was chosen most frequently?  Amber.  So you see, what people tell you and how they act can be very different.

I would like to see a follow-on study that actually tests behavior, not responses to questions, especially in light of objection #1.  Having said that, I think the study is definitely on to something and we as an industry need to pay attention before concern turns into anger and the public vocally demands tighter privacy laws from their legislators.

The survey also uncovered other attitudes we need to be concerned about, and I have not seen them reported – so I quote them here for your convenience: 

• Even when they are told that the act of following them on websites will take place anonymously, Americans’ aversion to it remains: 68% “definitely” would not allow it, and 19% would “probably” not allow it.
   
• A majority of Americans also does not want discounts or news fashioned specifically for them, though the percentages are smaller than the proportion rejecting ads.
   
• 69% of American adults feel there should be a law that gives people the right to know everything that a website knows about them.
   
• 92% agree there should be a law that requires “websites and advertising companies to delete all stored information about an individual, if requested to do so.”
   
• 63% believe advertisers should be required by law to immediately delete information about their internet activity.
   
• Americans mistakenly believe that current government laws restrict companies from selling wide-ranging data about them. When asked true-false questions about companies’ rights to share and sell information about their activities online and off, respondents on average answer only 1.5 of 5 online laws and 1.7 of the 4 offline laws correctly because they falsely assume government regulations prohibit the sale of data.
   
• Signaling frustration over privacy issues, Americans are inclined toward strict punishment of information offenders. 70% suggest that a company should be fined more than the maximum amount suggested ($2,500) “if a company purchases or uses someone’s information illegally.”
   
• When asked to choose what, if anything should be a company’s single punishment beyond fines if it “uses a person’s information illegally,” 38% of Americans answer that the company should “fund efforts to help people protect privacy.” But over half of Americans adults are far tougher: 18% choose that the company should “be put out of business” and 35% select that “executives who are responsible should face jail time.

 Well, at least I guess we can put to bed the use of tailored versus targeted (although the survey did interchange them regularly).  See how good I am as an evangelist? 

More from SMX East…. 

This is a review of a service critical to owning your brand online called knowem.  For $65, knowem.com opens accounts under your chosen brand name(s) on 120 social media sites so that you lock down your brand identity on a majority of key venues on the web.  In today’s social media-intense web, owning your username at as many social media sites as possible is essential for brand and reputation management, as you will see.

A True Story of Online Branding and Social Media

I had an interesting lesson in personal branding awhile back.  In 1996, at the beginning of the Internet I was at Sun Microsystems as the head of the Java ecommerce group (that, btw, produced the first electronic wallet and a Java virtual machine called Java Card that today underlies all cell phones worldwide).  I needed a login for our intranet and since my undergraduate specialty was Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature, I chose a knight-like title (which I will not publish here for security reasons).  For my mnemonic convenience, that login migrated to numerous sites over the years as the Internet grew. 

For whatever reason, one day I decided to look at how many entries I had for my personal identity online.  When I typed in ‘Arthur Coleman’ I had/have a few entries in the top 10, but there was/is an Arthur Coleman photography (who owns arthurcoleman.com), an Arthur Coleman Danto who is a writer (so lots of content + wikipedia entry), a lawyer named Arthur Coleman, as well as a wanted criminal on ‘Crime Stoppers" (many people confuse us….).  But when I typed in ‘arthurofsun’ – there were  3,110 entries all belonging to me, mainly due to my numerous entries on social media sites over the years.

This was a wakeup call (you may notice I have lots of those. It’s a prerogative I guard zealously.).  What I learned was that my online "avatar" was my "true" brand online – not my name.  Since my brand was accidental, had nothing to do with my business, and did not match my site/business name, I was going to have to consciously "rebrand" myself and my web presence(s) for the sake of brand consolidation.  My personal brand had to be chosen carefully because I was only going to change it once.  As with any brand, changing it is painful, it causes confusion in the marketplace, as well as a loss of awareness in the short-term as people have to unlearn the old name and relearn the new.  In the case of online, there is also a substantial temporary loss of Pagerank and thus rank in the SERPs for your favorite keywords as sites are ported from an old URL to a new one.   This is especially true for me because my old site (www.rethought.net) had been in existence since 2001, and that gave it a substantial amount of authority which I was going to lose moving to a younger (new) site.

I also realized – and I was probably one of the earliest to get this – that just as it is essential to own the URL for your brand name, it is equally essential to own any account online with your brand, especially on the social media sites.  Why? 

• Because those entries will all show up under a search for your username online, so you want to consolidate its power and own the entire first page for reputation management purposes. 
   
• Imagine some crank putting up an angry rant against your company.  While you may not prevent him from getting on the first page of the SERPs without further work by your team, owning all the slots around your brand name (like I did for my username) makes it more difficult for any third party to rank on page one. 
   
• Or imagine someone with an account ID that is your brand name making a post about something unsavory.  If the social media site has enough authority, the entry may well rank high on the first page.  Even indirectly it can create a negative brand perception if someone assumes that the blogger is you (or someone in your organization) because the user name is an exact match for your brand name.
   
• I don’t quite understand the reason yet, but it appears to me that authority accrues to the username itself if it is used frequently and in multiple social media contexts to make posts or add comments.  So the more usernames/sites you control and use, the more authority you can create for your brand term  to leverage for other keywords.

Where is My %&@^!! Signup Service – Introducing knowem

So now we need to sign up for every potential social media service online – right?  Great. What are the steps:

1. I have to figure out what sites there are, and, at the same time, which I think are really important. 
    
2. I then go to each site, signup with a username and – if it is by any chance taken – find an alternate brand-related username I will use in those cases on all sites. 
    
3. I then receive a confirmation email and must respond to activate the account.
    
4. I insert my picture (or brand graphic).
    
5. I fill in a variety of personal information.
    
6. I then need to create links between the various services to simplify login or to allow for single entry into multiple sites.

Sound time consuming?  It is.  When I did it, it took me about two weeks to get all the sites I had identified (which was only a moderate subset of the total, it turns out) signed up and linked together correctly.  I had to do it between other work, the entry was repetitive, I didn’t always remember what I did on each site and often had to go back to verify or fix something I’d done wrong.  It was a boring, low value task that I, in vain,  tried to get my son (13 years old, and also know affectionately as "slave boy") to do.  But it was even too menial for him to touch at $10/hour (What is it with kids nowadays anyway? You’d think they’d want a childhood or something. ).

So when I heard about knowem at SMX East yesterday I jumped online and even before the session was over, had signed up for the premium service to go lock down all the other sites relevant to my online brand I had previously missed. knowem checks the availability of your brand name, user name or vanity URL on 120 popular social media websites.  Their tag line is "thwart social media identity theft", which says a lot about their view of how important a username is to branding online.

At knowem, you enter a URL and the service returns a list of which sites have your brand name available. 

As I looked at the list, it indicated availability for some sites where I knew I had already created accounts.  It also indicated my username (onlinematters) wasn’t available on some sites where, in fact, it was.   So something about their account retrieval algorithm still isn’t perfect.  But I imagined they would figure this out once they attempted to create the accounts — which, in fact, they did.

I also noted some limits:

1. Even this extensive list didn’t cover all the sites I had found and where I had created accounts.  Notable misses are: LinkedIn, Flickr, Facebook, and Wikipedia (huge misses, obviously), ping.fm,, Plaxo pulse, bebo, Hi5, Mashable, Friendster, getsatisfaction, Goodreads, Hubpages, HubSpot, imeem, Jabber, Joost, Ning, Orkut, Pandora, present.ly, Reunion,com, ShareThis, ShoutEm, Smugmug, ShoutBack, Spurl, Streetmavens, Tagworld, Tickle, Typepad, UrbanSpoon, Utterli, Vimeo, Yammer, Yelp, Zimbio.
    
2. Email accounts (e.g. brand@live,com) and Skype were not included. Skype especially is important.
    
3. No coverage of Twitter-related accounts/add-ons.  An example is Tweetmeme, which has strong impact on rankings (see my previous post "Social Media Channels – You CAN Own the First Page").

Still, I was happy that they had identified a goodly number of sites I hadn’t identified or tested for impact for my online brand, so I decided to sign up for the service.  This costs $65. A screen pops up and asks you for all the basic information the service needs to establish an account for you.

Once you complete your purchase, knowem promises to begin signing you up for services using the information you provided within 48 hours.  In my case is was more like 12. 

Still, even with a service like knowem, there is no free lunch.  Once knowem starts its process, you will receive numerous (can be as high as 120) emails to confirm your signup – which knowem cannot do for you.  At the same time, knowem does not upload your visual avatar and cannot fill in all the fields every account requires where this has to be done after confirmation.  So you still have substantial work.  But with knowem:

1. Your coverage/control of your online brand in the current universe of social media sites is extensive.
    
2. You don’t have to go site by site to sign up, which is incredibly repetitive.
    
3. Often the confirmation email takes you directly to the right page to fill in your information – just this element is a substantial time saver over having to remember the site name and type in the URL.

Epilogue

As an aside, at the time I had no idea just how awful this process would be.  Let me tell you that doing a rebrand online is 10x worse than doing it in traditional venues.  I am still having problems with Twitter for example, where my new account (onlinematters) isn’t showing up in people search, even though it has more followers than any account save my previously established account – so people aren’t linking to it.  (PLEASE DO, if you have the time.)

This is one reason I am so happy with knowem, despite its limitations.  There are enough problems that emerge in even the smoothest brand transition that I will sign up for any service that can, at a reasonable cost, provide organization to a portion of my process and save me time.