The Software Abstractions Blog

Should you invest in New Media Marketing in a down economy?

Over the past couple of years, companies and brands have been increasingly engaging with New Media, which can be broadly defined as blogs, feeds, wikis, micro-blogging (twitter), social networks (such as LinkedIn and Facebook) and social bookmarks.

As the economy goes sour and budgets decrease, however, does it make sense to continue to invest Marketing dollars into these word-of-mouth, engagement programs?

Here are some of my initial thoughts.

As with everything else, it comes down to a cost-benefit analysis, comparing these types of programs with alternatives such as direct marketing, trade shows, magazine advertisements and so on.

Benefits

On the benefits side, some of the core value propositions of New Media Marketing are pretty strong:

Increased Brand Awareness
Research has shown that consumers most often buy brands that they are already familiar with; generating brand awareness and familiarity is thus as important as pure direct conversion rates.

Engaging with Customers and others in the Ecosystem
The first simple step to irrelevance for any brand is when a company stops listening to those who are most affected by its products. By engaging with customers, users, suppliers and others, a business can get direct, rapid feedback and potentially head off problems before they turn into major crises.

Getting Product Ideas
Discussions about your product and its use in social media are a fertile environment to get new product ideas, especially involving novel settings or uses of your existing products or discovering gaps that can be filled.

Lead Generation
In the same way, social media can be mined to harvest meaningful, highly-qualified leads, significantly reducing the cost of customer acquisition.

Find, Encourage, Enable and Reward Advocates
Who are the users who really like your products and are most vocal about it? How can you provide encouragement and rewards and remove barriers? By engaging directly with users, you can find the answers to these questions.

Participate in the Conversation
If your product is at all popular, you can be certain that customers and users are already talking about it somewhere, somehow - whether you know it or not. If you can participate directly in this conversation, you can at least react to what they are saying, even if you cannot and should not directly steer the conversation.

Monitor => Engage => Influence => Monitor
This is the virtuous cycle New Media enables. By its very nature, social media is interactive; it is a dialogue, rather than the outward-bound one-way Marketing messages of the past.

Costs

By its very nature, social media marketing is low-cost compared with traditional approaches. What it takes to be effective in this field is time (which, of course, also translates to cost) and authenticity.

The Marketing Mix

So is it worth investing in this type of user engagement? Obviously, the decision depends on your particular products and your environment, but increasingly in the future, the answer to that question is going to be another question:
Can you afford not to be a part of the conversation, especially if your competitors already are?

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Terrorist Attacks in Mumbai, India

As I write this, the terror situation continues in Mumbai, India. The Times of India first reported the initial news sometime around 10 am this morning, which means it has already been going on for over twelve hours. Although Mumbai has suffered from other significant terrorist actions in the past few years, this is the most violent and long-running attack that I can remember. According to the latest reports, at least 101 people have been killed and hundreds more have been injured. The beautiful Taj hotel building has flames shooting through its top floors and terrorists are still holed up in the Oberoi Trident hotel.

One tragic outcome is that the Mumbai police have been hard hit by this attack, having lost three of their top people: ATS Chief Hemant Karkare, Encounter Specialist Vijay Salaskar and ACP Ashok Kamte, have been killed. Our thoughts and prayers are with their families.

Atypically for terrorist activities in this region, this particular attack seems to have specifically targeted foreigners. That, and a high level of coordination across multiple targets, points to a new level of sophistication for the local terrorists.

The best way to monitor the situation from afar, I've found, is via twitter. The catchall twitter tag #mumbai (thanks to @fredwilson for pointing this out) is currently getting multiple updates every minute. Although CNN is much more visual and includes more analysis, it's hard to beat twitter for real-time updates of breaking news. Gaurav Mishra provides some great commentary on the role of real time citizen journalism in covering these attacks (as does TechCrunch).

"The purpose of terrorism," Vladimir Lenin once said, "is to terrorize." Perhaps, but I think that these terrorists have underestimated the resilience of spirit of the people of Mumbai. In the same vein as New Yorkers, the Mumbaikars will survive this brutal act of terrorism and eventually emerge the stronger for it. Terrorism has become a scourge worldwide, but in the end, it cannot succeed; by simply going on with their daily lives, the regular folks - unsung heroes all - will eventually prevail.

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"Doctor, I read it on Google"

As I observed earlier when writing about Emerging Trends in Healthcare, the relative knowledge levels are changing rapidly in the physician-patient relationship. In the past, the physician was clearly the expert and the patient simply accepted the doctor's judgement and counsel without question.
 
Today's web-savvy Healthcare consumers, however, are adept at finding comprehensive and detailed information about their own condition and disease. In many ways, in fact, they have an advantage over the doctor - a patient only has to learn about one particular condition (or a few); whereas a physician, even a specialist, must necessarily cover a far wider range of medical knowledge.

By and large, most doctors are uncomfortable with this sudden shift in patient knowledge level and the potential for second-guessing the doctor's opinion, that goes with it. New research from Microsoft suggests that the doctors may be right!

Microsoft Research has just published an article on this topic: Cyberchondria: Studies of the Escalation of Medical Concerns in Web Search. The study authors found that patients who perform Web Searches about their symptoms, tend to have an exaggerated sense of their illness. Says the article:

However, the Web has the potential to increase the anxieties of people who have little or no medical training, especially when Web search is employed as a diagnostic procedure.
...
We show that escalation is influenced by the amount and distribution of medical content viewed by users,

Overall, though, this finding is hardly surprising. As any layperson who has ever perused a medical encyclopedia knows, just reading about the specific symptoms for any random disease makes one start to start imagine those very same symptoms - it is part of the human condition! Obviously the same thing happens when patients read medical information online.

At the same time, there is a distinct upside for patient health in having all of this medical information easily available and accessible to all. Informed patients are in a better position to understand what is happening to them; they can handle it better and can take better care of themselves in addressing their own health problems.

In any case, this is a one-way street. The genie is out of the bottle now and patients will be increasingly better-informed in the future. Whether this is preferable or not, physicians had better gear up to deal with this change.

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Shared Searching from Microsoft - a new form of Social Search

The New York Times reports that Microsoft is developing a tool to enable users to collaborate in real-time on web search. This free IE7 plug-in allows users at different computers to divide up a search task among themselves, and then pool their results and recommendations in a shared space displayed on their browser.

 

Meredith Ringel Morris, a computer scientist at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash., has created one of these collaborative tools, SearchTogether, now available in a test version as a free download at http://research.microsoft.com/searchtogether. The program is designed to work within the Internet Explorer 7 browser.

 

“Web search is usually considered a solitary activity,” Dr. Morris said. “But many tasks can benefit from joint searching.”
...
The system also has a “peek and follow” feature that lets a group member watch another member search.

This is a fascinating idea that hasn't been tried before. Although search is commonly an individual activity, there are many scenarios when being able to directly share the search activity and discuss the results is invaluable; e.g. in a business context, geographically distributed team members could collaborate on project tasks that include internet search activities; similarly, in a family context, you could remotely assist less-computer-savvy adults or children in completing tasks that include web search.

Coincidentally, earlier this week Google also launched their own take on social search. The Google SearchWiki enables you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. These results only affect your own searches, but you can share your annotations and changes with others; although as Marshall Kirkpatrick notes on the ReadWriteWeb, viewing these annotations leads to a poor user experience. No doubt that will change soon; the area of social search is very important to Google, as Marissa Mayer noted in a VentureBeat interview in January of this year.

Of course, there are many other social search engines - Delver, OneRiot, Scour, Tusavvy, Yoono, et al (I still remember Lijit, but it seems to have turned into a publisher application); Mashable has a has a list .

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"Connecting With Your Intimate Bot" - by Sramana Mitra

I've just started reading Sramana Mitra's new book, Entrepreneur Journeys. More thoughts on this to follow, but in the meantime, here is an excerpt.

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Connecting With Your Intimate Bot

We've all had this thought: When will technology slow down enough for me to catch up? Just managed to get a grip on Web 2.0 (or did I?), and already there are rumblings about Web 3.0.

But the Web's evolution slows for no one. Here's how to get ahead of the next wave.

There are numerous definitions of Web 3.0 floating around. Tim Berners-Lee, a father of the World Wide Web, talks about the "Semantic Web," a way that computers employ the meaning of words – not just pattern matching – along with logical rules to connect independent nuggets of data and so create more context for information. The formula that makes the most sense to me is this: Web 3.0 results from combining content, commerce, community and context, with personalization and vertical search. Or, to put it in a handy phrase: Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS).

Here's what it means.

Web 1.0 was all about driving online commerce and trying to find "anything" in the tangled jungle of the Web. It produced companies like Yahoo!, Amazon.com, eBay, Netflix and Blue Nile. The rush for dollars also resulted in the dot-com meltdown. Even so, people's habits of searching, buying and selling genuinely changed.

Web 2.0 has been a relatively niche phenomenon, with hundreds and thousands of tiny companies primarily focused on social networking through online communities. MySpace, Facebook and Digg, have been the most notable companies to emerge. But there are a plethora of others where you can "meet," "connect" and "make friends" online these days – habits no longer considered weird.

At the same time, we've seen a great deal of investment in vertical search companies. If you are looking for a job, you can go to a site like Indeed.com and search across various job portals and career sites. Or go to Kayak if you've got travel questions, or TheFind if you're seeking shopping advice. In each case, the sites have carefully customized search parameters (job seekers, for instance, can search on salary ranges, locations, job levels and so on). Therein lies the big difference with Google, a generic horizontal search engine.

Finally, Web 2.0 has brought an onslaught of user-generated content in the form of blogs, podcasts, appending comments at the bottom of articles, posting reviews of restaurants, movies, stores, and hotels. Media has become truly interactive, as opposed to the one-way world we were used to. Many more voices are being raised, and heard. The media industry, as we have known it, has been shaken to its roots.

The next wave – Web 3.0 – will organize itself around two different elements: context and the user.

By "context," I mean the intent that brings you to the Web, your reason for surfing. Looking for a job is "context," as is planning a trip or shopping for clothes. Fundamental to context is the user. And when you fuse a specific user with genuine context, you wind up with truly personalized service.

Imagine this: You are planning a trip to Rome. You are looking for a hotel around Piazza di Spagna, but not something large and impersonal – which rules out the Hassler Villa Medici. You like smaller bed-and-breakfasts, with charm, warmth, character. You want an online travel agent who can understand your needs and preferences, and find you not only the right hotel but really interesting restaurants, boutiques and shows all aligned with your taste. Normally, you use Guide du Routard as your travel guide, but today there is still a gulf between travel guides and online travel-booking sites – in other words, content and commerce are fragmented. In Web 3.0, you will see content and commerce finally come together in a big way, no longer forcing you to hop from site to site to get one job done.

On this same trip, you would love to meet local people who share your interests – say, cooking, jazz, opera. In Web 3.0, you will see the community elements of Web 2.0 pulled into context, making it as easy to find new friends with common interests, even in a distant city, as it is to book a hotel room.

Some user-generated content is already evolving into an integral part of travel planning today. At TripAdvisor, for instance, travelers report back on their experiences at hotels around the world. The missing element, however, is the notion of the individual user and his or her personal needs. You don't want to read reviews from anyone. You want to read reviews by people whose taste and judgment you trust.

In a Web 3.0 world, then, a personalized travel agent will help you find and book a highly customized itinerary, leveraging all the power of previous generations of Web technology –searching (both generic and vertical), community building, content and commerce. That's how I get Web 3.0 = (4C+P+VS) – the sum of content, commerce, community and context, with personalization and vertical search.

This is complex technology, requiring sophisticated artificial-intelligence algorithms. After all, your Web 3.0 travel agent will not be a "person" but a "bot", or intelligent agent.

But I suspect you will like your travel bot. And your career bot. And your shopping bot.

So be patient with the technology entrepreneurs around the world, who are working through these generations of the evolving Web, trying to bring about a dramatically better user experience. After all, they - and their bots - are working for you.
 :)

                      Entrepreneur Journeys
                           

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Windows on OLPC: Is it a Deal-breaker?

The latest issue of the Boston Review has an interesting essay by Richard Stallman, the father of GNU and the Free Software movement. Stallman takes great issue with OLPC's recent switch to allow the machine to become a platform for running Windows. [OLPC - the "One Laptop per Child" project, is working on developing a low-cost, connected laptop for educating the world's children.]

Stallman was initially a proponent of OLPC. Now that OLPC has enabled it to run with Windows, he argues:

... the main effect of the OLPC project—if it succeeds—will be to turn millions of children into Microsoft users. That is a negative effect, so the world would be better off if the OLPC project had never existed.

In the article, he lists the four essential freedoms of free software: freedom to run the program, to study the source code, to distribute exact copies of the program and to distribute modified copies of the program. With these freedoms, he says, users become more powerful; they get access to software that does not include malicious features and does not encourage user dependency.

Windows programs, on the other hand, do not give the user any such powers. As Stallman says,

Windows Vista has features to spy on the user, restrict use of data in the machine, and even attack the user (Microsoft can forcibly install changes in the system at any time). Windows Media Player restricts copying, format conversion, and even viewing of files.

While I have the greatest respect for Professor Stallman and the achievements of the Free Software Foundation - open source has truly changed the world - I wonder if his call for withdrawing support from the OLPC is akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

There's little doubt that distributing free software, rather than Windows, on OLPC machines is a worthy goal - it will give a boost to alternatives and help propagate them to different corners of the world. Having said that, the OLPC initiative itself is a far-reaching, historic effort to get real computers, however simplified, into the hands of schoolchildren everywhere at a price that's far more affordable than ever before. 

In the long run, the ranks of open source programmers are likely to swell due to this wide exposure to computers at an early age, whether or not it is Windows. And in the meantime, OLPC will provide those children in developing countries who would otherwise not have any possibility of computer access, with the benefits of learning and connecting using computers. As such, I believe OLPC still deserves our support.

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Prediction Markets and the US Presidential Race

Last night, we saw history in the making as Barack Obama won the race for the White House and became the first African-American person to become President of the United States, after a long and arduous campaign that the NYT calls "near-flawless".

Although consistent hard work, strong organizational skills and an uncanny ability to stay cool under pressure, all played a big part in his win, I suspect that one of the core qualities that brought him so far so fast is his ability to bridge differences and to bring people together, even over heavily-divisive issues. [e.g. check out these articles from Slate magazine, about his work at the Harvard Law Review  and his position on abortion. ]

Enough politics! Let's get to technology - well, the technology of politics, at any rate. Specifically, about applying the Wisdom of Crowds, with all the attendant risks, to predict the outcome of the Presidential race.

Professor Sam Wang of Princeton has been tracking WoC data to do just that. Although I don't understand the mathematics of it, his final predictions were very good - check it out!

Other prediction markets also correctly forecast Obama as the eventual winner.

Oh, and good news for Twitter fans - the service stayed up, even as it got backlogged, during record-breaking activity on its site on election night.

Let me end with this elegant quote from President-elect Obama's acceptance speech: "America is a place where all things are possible".

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AltSearchEngines goes independent

My friend Charles' blog, AltSearchEngines, is now independent! ASE started life as part of the ReadWriteWeb network.

Since the inception of ASE, Charles has established a reputation for high-quality reporting, focusing relentlessly on covering all happenings in the search engine space. Although the Alts form his main subject, he also devotes some space to the mainstream search engines, providing a fairly complete picture. He's now seen as an authority in this space even by the MSM, as recent mentions in Newsweek and Wired indicate.

Congratulations, Charles! And Best of Luck!

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8 Top Trends at the Health 2.0 Conference, 2008

I attended the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco last week. This conference, presented by Mathew Holt, primary author of the Health Care Blog and Indu Subaiya, healthcare consultant and entrepreneur, focuses on the application of Web 2.0 technologies to the venerable fields of medicine and healthcare.

Web 2.0 is no longer a new concept - I've been writing about it for a couple of years now - but at conferences like these, it is refreshing to see the Web 2.0 technologies and mindset being applied to create actual solutions that will directly benefit both physicians and patients. Not to mention the health plans, and eventually, big pharma, which is where most of the real money resides in this sector.

The ideas and solutions on display at the conference were exciting! It is mind-blowing to think about the ways in which technology is going to change the practice of medicine and health management in the coming years.

The healthcare field, more than most, has always been fragmented into many discrete groups: physicians, nurses (and Physician Assistants), caregivers, patients, patient family/friends, pharmacists, medical researchers, health plan administrators and pharmaceutical company employees. The primary changes from Health 2.0, I believe, will come from applying the "4-Cs" principles - communication, collaboration, community and content - to this field, leading us into an era of unprecedented information-sharing and collaboration among all of these diverse groups, enabling them to work together seamlessly using these new tools.

These features of collaboration and community can be applied to any type of activity that physicians get together and perform. With the appropriate tools, physicians can get together quickly and easily to discuss and consult on unusual medical cases; detect, diagnose and treat conditions that span multiple specialties; address rare conditions; and so on.

As an example, look at the web site: syndicom spineconnect - a community purely focused on the issues faced by spine surgeons. This type of niche solution is going to become increasingly common. So the only pediatric spinal cord surgeon in a small town will be able to connect with peers across the country when she faces a patient with a rare complication.

Overall Trends at Health 2.0, San Francisco

The conference has been covered in detail at many other places (including on my friend Charles' blog ). On my way back, I started thinking about the overall trends I had observed over two days, which were the following:

1. Community
Community is in! The number of startups at the conference focusing on building communities - for physicians, patients, caregivers, and others - was astounding. Many of them have surprisingly rich sites with large user networks. With the prevalence of Wikis and low-cost community-building solutions like Ning, this is no surprise, but it remains to be seen how many of these sites can build sustainable business models, especially in the current economic environment.

2. Wellness and Preventive Health Management
For purely economic reasons as much as anything else, the healthcare industry is beginning to put a great deal of emphasis on preventing health problems and on increasing patients' health in general, as opposed to treating them in a clinic or emergency room after they've had a problem. Overall, this is a good thing, although there is the risk of undesirable side effects once the health plans get into the act. (Mandatory exercise and ice cream rationing, anyone?)

3. Power to the People!
With today's unparalleled access to information on the World Wide Web (especially free, high-quality sites like Wikipedia), today's patients are singularly well-informed about their own conditions. The patient has the advantage over the doctor, in that he or she has to only learn about their own condition or illness, and that knowledge can go very deep indeed! This causes a power shift in the patient-physician relationship; in the past, it was a given that the doctor knew more. Therein lies the business opportunity: patient-education sites are on the rise.

Most physicians, however, are still uncomfortable with this shift, and unused to patients second-guessing them (which is understandable). Get used to it, Doctor - this is a one-way change, and there's no going back!

4. Remote Visits / Tele-medicine
A number of companies presented solutions that enable patients to gain access to a physician instantly on the web, 24x7x365. The remote physician could be based in the United States or in another country; as long as the physician was certified, she could write a long-distance prescription. This could make medicine affordable to a larger percentage of the population and reduce healthcare costs; on the other hand, actual physical examinations still require a real visit to the doctor. While the presentations in this area were very well-received, it remains to be seen how quickly these types of solutions will gain traction and how popular they will prove to be.

5. Mobile Healthcare
Health plans and pharmacies are experimenting with software solutions that enable automated phone calls to patients for a variety of reasons: to remind them to take their medicine (compliance), to remind them to get a refill and order it during the phone call, to communicate test results, to provide encouragement and feedback on wellness programs and so on. Several startups in this area made presentations in the Tools for Consumers segment of the conference.

6. Privacy Concerns
HIPAA notwithstanding, all this collaboration and information-sharing makes people nervous. Accordingly, there was a great deal of discussion at the conference (a lot of it offline) centered around HIPAA-coverage, security breaches and data privacy strategies.

7. Genetics
If you had detailed knowledge about your specific genetic heritage and the health conditions you're predisposed to, would it help you to tailor your lifestyle and take precautions to manage the risk of contracting those health conditions? Companies like 23andme believe so and are already producing solutions in this space. The price point is still somewhat high, in my opinion ("$399 and a tube of saliva!" according to the company's web site), but should come down as it becomes more popular.

8. Public Policy
Is the healthcare model in the US broken? As healthcare costs spiral out of control, what can the government and public organizations do to change our course? The final panel of the conference, made up of thought leaders in this space, discussed this topic at a high level and exhorted the audience to carry the discussion forward within their own communities. I came away with the strong impression that public policy on healthcare is likely to change sometime in the near future because there is really no other choice.


The knowledge and application of Medicine marches forward - as it always has in history, since the time of Hippocrates - and there has never been a better time to obtain medical treatment, especially for a rare condition or disorder. Nevertheless, as physicians and healthcare workers start using these new tools to collaborate even more strongly amongst themselves and with their patients, I have a strong hope that we will see discontinuous improvements in the practice of medicine in the near future!

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