Google’s Plan to Take Android Everywhere

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What are the key data categories companies want to control?

What are the key data categories companies want to control?

Help us build a data layer for the Web 2.0 Summit map.

by John Battelle | @johnbattelle | Comment | 11 May 2011

This post was originally published on John Battelle's Searchblog ("Building A New Map And I Need Your Help: What Are The Key Categories of Data In Today's Network Economy?").

Many of you probably remember the "Points of Control" Web 2 Summit Map from last year. It was very well received. Hundreds of thousands of folks came to check it out, and the average engagement time was north of six minutes per visitor. It was a really fun way to make the conference theme come to life, and given the work that went into its creation, we thought it'd be a shame to retire it simply because Web 2 has moved on to a new theme:

For 2011, our theme is "The Data Frame" — focusing on the impact of data in today's networked economy. We live in a world clothed in data, and as we interact with it, we create more — data is not only the web’s core resource, it is at once both renewable and boundless.

Consumers now create and consume extraordinary amounts of data. Hundreds of millions of mobile phones weave infinite tapestries of data, in real time. Each purchase, search, status update, and check-in layers our world with more of it. How our industries respond to this opportunity will define not only success and failure in the networked economy, but also the future texture of our culture. And as we're already seeing, these interactions raise complicated questions of consumer privacy, corporate trust, and our governments’ approach to balancing the two.

How, I wondered, might we update the Points of Control map such that it can express this theme? Well, first of all, it's clear the game is still afoot between the major players. Some boundaries may have moved, and progress has been made (Bing has gained search share, Facebook and Google have moved into social commerce, etc.), but the map in essence is intact as a thought piece.

Web 2.0 Summit, being held October 17-19 in San Francisco, will examine "The Data Frame" — focusing on the impact of data in today's networked economy.

Save $300 on registration with the code RADAR

Then it struck me — each of the major players, and most of the upstarts, have as a core asset in their arsenals data, often many types of it. In addition, most of them covet data that they've either not got access to, or are in the process of building out (think Google in social, for example, or in deals, which to my mind is a major play for local as well as purchase data.) Why not apply the "Data Frame" to the map itself, a lens of sorts that when overlaid upon the topography, shows the data assets and aspirations of each player?

So here's where you come in. If we're going to add a layer of data to each player on the map, the question becomes — what kind of data? And how should we visualize it? My initial thoughts on types of data hew somewhat to my post on the Database of Intentions, so that would include:

• Purchase Data (including credit card info)
• Search Data (query, path taken, history)
• Social Graph Data (identity, friend data)
• Interest Data (likes, tweets, recommendations, links)
• Location Data (ambient as well as declared/checked in)
• Content Data (journey through content, likes, engagement, "behavioral")

Those are some of the big buckets. Clearly, we can debate if, for example, identity should be its own category, separate from social, etc, and that's exactly the kind of argument I hope to spark. I'm sure I've missed huge swaths of landscape, but I'm writing this in a rush (have a meeting in five minutes!) and wanted to get the engine started, so to speak.

I'm gathering a small group of industry folks at my home in the next week to further this debate, but I most certainly want to invite my closest collaborators — readers here at Searchblog, to help us out as we build the next version of the map. Which, by the way, will be open sourced and ready for hacking ...

So please dive into the comments and tell me, what are the key categories of data that companies are looking to control?

Related:

• Points of Control: The Web 2.0 Summit Map
• The state of the Internet Operating System
• State of the Internet Operating System Part Two: Handicapping the Internet Platform Wars

tags: data, data products, web 2 summit

 

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Android Market will now suggest apps based on what others install

Android Market will now suggest apps based on what others install

Alberto Vildosola on May 11 at 10:51 am1 comment 

• Tagged
• #android market
• #app discovery
• #suggestions

Hidden by all the madness that went down yesterday, Google managed to sneak a new feature into the Android Market web app. Every time you install a new app, the service will now show you new apps that other people have also installed.

While not a huge new feature, small improvements like these help the Android Market slowly but surely get better at app discovery. The sum of all these little enhancements equal a much better and more user-friendly experience in the Market. Specially in the app discovery space, where the Android Market still needs a lot of work.

Later today, Google will be making some announcements about the Android Market. Make sure you stay tuned toAndroid And Me to find out what those are. What would you like to see Google improve about the Market?

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5 Tactics to Improve Your Community Balance

May 10th, 2011 - Posted by thogenhaven to Social Media

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The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

With more than 100 million Americans contributing content online this year, websites are doing anything they can to attract users to contribute to their site. With the notable exception of search engines, all major websites are depending on the community to drive their growth. Imagine YouTube without user uploads; Facebook without photos and updates or Wikipedia without users writing/editing articles. 

There are so many advantages of fostering and nurturing a community:

• Lots of (almost) free content
• Direct feedback
• Higher conversion rates
• Higher rankings

In addition to all that, this community-driven strategy also scales extremely well. It is a clear win-win situation that has us all looking for new ways to grow our online communities.

Consequently, companies invest many resources in community building. But it’s hard to get right – just ask Google about this (Google is now making social efforts a top priority and staff bonuses dependent on it). The hard thing about online communities is that attaining critical mass is not enough – you have to maintain it over time. 

Getting users to participate over a long period of time is the key to success. you want users to spend less time with their family and friends, and more time contributing to your community for free, you better make sure the users are motivated.

Extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation

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Luckily we don’t have to guess what motivate users. Decades of research in social psychology give great insights into how we can motivate users to contribute content over a long period of time. A key distinction is between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.

Intrinsic motivation is about the joy of performing something. People are likely to be motivated if an involvement in an online community helps them reach a personal goal, if they improve their skills or if they simply are having fun. This is why people have hobbies and spend their evenings and weekends learning Ruby on Rails. For intrinsic motivation to kick in, the person must feel it’s his decision to perform a certain task. Autonomy is key.

Extrinsic motivation means that a user is driven to perform a task because it leads to something else such as rewards and benefits. This kind of motivation usually relies on tangible rewards. Classic examples of this include salary and performance bonus.

But there are many methods to reward users with tangible rewards, and several are already being applied online: Mechanical Turk rewards turkers with money for solving tasks; SEOmoz offers community members one month free software when compiling 200 mozpoints in one month; BettingExpert offers prizes and merchandise for points, and Threadless offers money for winning designs and slogans. The web is full of examples of rewarding desired behavior with tangible rewards.

The effects of tangible rewards (and why it's not sufficient)

Giving tangible rewards seems like a great way to increase desired behavior, right? Increasing the rewards will increase the desired behavior. But it is not as easy as it sounds. The challenge is that extrinsic rewards potentially erode intrinsic motivation.

For example, people often have hobbies to improve their abilities. But when someone is paid to do a hobby, it’s no longer a hobby. The person no longer does the tasks to improve his skills, and does no longer have the autonomy to perform the task exactly as he wants to. Due to this, the users are likely to stop contributing as soon as they don’t get rewards for it. Or even worse, they’ll lose interests in the rewards and then have no motivation to continue. 

In other words, extrinsic rewards can give a short-term boost in motivation to participate, but is not enough to provide long time loyalty. Thus, there is a need to strike a healthy balance between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Besides being more sustainable, intrinsic motivation is a lot cheaper than having to pay users for everything.

5 Tactics for Increasing Intrinsic Motivation in Your Community

Now that we know balance is crucial, I thought I would throw out some ways you can help nurture this balance. It is worth noting that there does not exist a strict borderline between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, as tactics often affect both. The aim of the following tactics is to help communities rely less on “hard” extrinsic rewards such as money, and more on “softer” forms of motivation.

1. Commitment

Have your users make a commitment to perform the desired actions. If you run a patient network, ask the user how many questions the user thinks he’ll answer a month. If you run an ecommerce site, ask the user if he’d “ever consider helping other users by rating a product he has purchased“. If you do, this will make the user motivated to honor the commitment. 

Threadless used this practice embedded in their design rating. When giving a design top rating, you can mark that “I’d buy it” either as a t-shirt or a print.

2. Social comparisons

It’s human nature to better understand where we stand compared to our competition. Allowing users to compare their abilities and opinions to others is a powerful drive for many people. Especially when comparing to similar others. One often seen implementation of this is leaderboards.

But this is not the only possibly implementation: You can send out emails in which users’ effort is compared to the median score of the community and/or similar others (e.g. other users who signed up at the same time). 

A recent study on MovieLens found that “after receiving behavioral information about the median user's total number of movie ratings, users below the median demonstrate a 530 percent increase in the number of monthly movie ratings, while those above the median decrease their ratings by 62 percent”. 

This indicates it would be highly effective to email the users below the median, but not those above.

3. Social learning

When users are new in a community, they often don’t know what to do. Highlighting desired behavior of successful users will make it easy for users to see what they should do. This is what Facebook does when showing that your friends are connecting to new people. You can do the same by prominently highlighting desired action whenever existing users perform these actions. 

For example, Flickr wants users to upload, tag and geotag pictures. On the home page, the number of uploads, tags and geotags are highlighted. As a new (or existing user), you know which action will contribute to the community

Alternatively, ask employees to engage actively in the community and serve as role models for the community members. E.g. rate products yourself, post comments to blog posts, ask questions in the Q&A etc.

4. Praise

Despite the (flawed) assumption that people are always driven by self-interest, most people actually like to help each other. An obvious way to facilitate praise is to let users express gratitude easily and give each other rewards can help motivation.

On the SEOmoz Q&A Forum a questioner can mark an answer as “Good Answer”. 

But humans are not the only ones who can give praise: so can your website. Although the effect of getting praise from a human is bigger than getting praise by a “machine”, the praise still has an effect. For example, the Mailchimp monkey is letting users know when an email has been sent out. But it could also praise users for creating a new list, sending out newsletters etc.

Don’t have a fancy mascot like Mailchimp? Don’t worry. You can just do like Tumblr: say that your user is great! It’s simple, but it works.

5. Mastery

One of the key components of intrinsic motivation is mastery. It is often hard to know if you are on the right way to mastery, so help is needed. 

A good way to do this is to let the user get a sense of his progress. An effective way to do this is by letting the user compare current performance to past performance. This practice is being applied on Casey'smozpoints.com – a microsite that collects historical data on the thumbs up / thumbs down received on SEOmoz.

There are obviously many different ways to motivate people to participate online. There can be derived many different tactics from social psychology literature than those mentioned here (See for example Rand'sIllustrated Guide to Cialdini's Science of Influence and Persuasion). But these can hopefully be a beginning in striking a better balance between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.

 

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Thinking of attending a conference anytime soon? You should definitely check out the Distilled Pro Seminar in Boston 16th/17th May and the SEOmoz Mozcon in Seattle July 27th - 29th.

 

About thogenhaven — Thomas Høgenhaven is a PhD Fellow on Copenhagen Business School, researching in the motivation behind online participation, as well as Creative Director at Chrisper Economy. He is currently a visiting researcher at SEOmoz.

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Word of Mouth Marketing

BY MARK SMICIKLAS · MAY 11, 2011 · VIEW COMMENTS

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Word of mouth marketing (WOMM) has the power to quickly build up or tear down the reputations of products, services and organizations.

Although many brand stories are shared offline, word of mouth can also spread very rapidly through social media. In order to leverage the power of WOM brands need to understand the dynamics of this intangible and often elusive form of marketing.

Building Trust

Trust lies at the core of every strong personal relationship – the same goes for relationships stakeholders have with brands. The driving force behind consumers’ desire to share positive stories about organizations is the trust they have in the products, services and people associated with those entities.

Trust is not built overnight. It’s nurtured over time with every customer, vendor and employeemicro-interaction. The simple fact of the matter is that stakeholders see through brand hype and the only real way to build trust is make a promise and deliver on it. The classic example is customer service. Organizations need to make sure they meet or exceed the service expectations they’ve created with customers – falling short on these types of basic brand promises will result in the wrong kind of WOM.

 

Viral Capacity

As social media becomes ubiquitous the speed and frequency of WOM communication will continue to increase. The ability for stories to scale beyond traditional channels i.e. face to face, phone, etc. becomes a double-edged sword for organizations.

Unfortunately, as quickly as positive stories get exposed, negative word of mouth seems to travel even faster. When it comes to WOMM brands need to understand the growing role of technology and its ability to aggregate, amplify and distribute individual voices.

Elusive

Word of mouth is often viewed as the pinnacle of marketing. By its nature it is enigmatic and difficult to fabricate. Consumer experiences driven by basic business fundamentals such as quality, service and experience seem to fuel WOM. So why aren’t more people talking about products and services?

Because WOMM is intangible it’s easy for leaders to lose sight of the effects to the bottom line. There needs to be more awareness of the individual online and offline interactions taking place across organizations and the potential long term impacts to brand equity.

Maybe it’s as simple an honest look in the mirror. What would you tell your friends about your own products, services and culture? What types of individual interactions do feel are the most important in helping prompt positive WOM? The comments are yours.

Tagged as: brand promises, infographics, micro-interactions, Social Media, WOM, WOMM, word-of-mouth marketing

About Mark Smiciklas

Mark Smiciklas

Mark Smiciklas is a Digital Strategist based in Vancouver, BC. His firm, Intersection Consulting, delivers practical marketing plans and implementation strategies based on the dynamics of online search, social media and brand journalism. Mark is passionate about the evolution of social business, visual thinking & teaching and hangs out full-time at theIntersection Marketing Blog. You can follow Mark on Twitter at Intersection1.

Other posts by Mark Smiciklas

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Selling vs. inviting

Selling vs. inviting

Selling is often misunderstood, largely by people who would be a lot more comfortable merely inviting.

If I invite you to a wedding, or a party, or to buy a $500,000 TV ad for $500, there's no resistance on your part. Either you jump at the chance and say yes, or you have a conflict and say no. It's not my job to help you overcome your fear of commitment, to help you see the ultimate value and most of all, to work with you as you persuade yourself and others to do something that might just work.

If the marketing and product development team do a great job, selling is a lot easier... so easy it might be called inviting. The guy at the counter of the Apple store selling the iPad2 isn't really selling them at all. Hey, there's a line out the door of people with money in their pockets. I'm inviting you to buy this, if you don't want it, next!

The real estate broker who says that the house would sell if only he could get below market pricing and a pre-approved mortgage is avoiding his job.

The salesperson's job: Help people overcome their fear so they can commit to something they'll end up glad they invested in.

The goal of a marketer ought to be to make it so easy to be a salesperson, you're merely an inviter. The new marketing is largely about this--creating a scenario where you don't even need salespeople. (Until you do.)

Selling is a profession. It's hard work. Ultimately, it's rewarding, because the thing you're selling delivers real value to the purchaser, and your job is to counsel them so they can get the benefit.

But please... don't insist that the hard work be removed from your job to allow you to become an inviter. That's great work if you can get it, but it's not a career.

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Breakfast on the Fly — and on the Cheap

Breakfast on the Fly — and on the Cheap     Print

Wednesday, 11th May 2011 (by Donna Freedman)  

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This post is from GRS staff writer Donna Freedman. Donna writes apersonal finance column for MSN Money. She also writes about frugality, intentional living, and life in general at her own blog, Surviving And Thriving.

Everybody talks about the cost of lunches out. But what about breakfast? How much are those bagels or egg-and-cheese burritos costing you each week?

The first meal of the day can be challenging. Some people aren’t hungry when they get up and thus need to take food with them for later. Or they spend the early-morning hours trying to get kids up, dressed, fed, lunchboxed and off to the bus stop or the child-care center. Or they sleep until the last possible second and fly out the door, and then hit the coffee cart in the lobby.

But have you checked the labels on those sweet rolls? (Hint: The only thing higher than the fat and calorie contents is the price of the pastry!)

It is possible to create breakfasts that are fast and easy yet not nutritionally bankrupt. After all, even McDonald’s is offering oatmeal these days. More to the point: A homegrown (or at least home-assembled) breakfast is almost always going to be cheaper than one you pay someone else to fix for you.

Oatmeal can be tasty. Photo by Nate Steiner.

 

The many faces of oatmeal
To some people, breakfast = cereal. Full stop. For me, cereal = oatmeal, because it’s easy, inexpensive and tasty. And it’s here: For the past few years I’ve used coupon/rebate combos to get old-fashioned oats for as little as 2 to 4 cents per bowl; sometimes they were even free. Currently I’ve stockpiled nine 42-ounce boxes of horse’s food, enough for the next nine months. (By which point it will have gone on sale again.)

Oats, water, a pinch of salt, five minutes in the microwave at 50% power and I’m eating breakfast. Sometimes I add blackberries that I pick for free each summer and freeze. You could stir in nuts, cranberries, raisins, wheat germ, flax seed or whatever floats your healthful boat.

Tip: Check the bulk-buy bins at grocery stores. At one supermarket near me, old-fashioned oats can be had for $1.09 per pound. Over in the cereal aisle a box of oats costs about three times as much. That’s a steep price to pay for a picture of a guy who looks like Robert Bork in a Quaker hat.

 

You can make “overnight oatmeal” by preheating a wide-mouthed thermos with boiling water and then adding a serving’s worth of oatmeal, salt and more boiling water. Close it up and go to bed. The next morning, breakfast is served.

A woman I know makes a week’s worth of porridge at a time, parcels it into single-serving containers and heats up one up each morning. This oats-for-one deal could also be taken along to work if you have a microwave oven there. Either add sweetener/fruits and milk at home, or keep them in the workplace fridge.

Some folks keep cold cereal and milk at work. This works only if your boss doesn’t mind snap-crackle-pop noises in the workplace – and if you don’t have the kind of cubicle mates who’d pilfer your stash or take the prize out of your box of cornflakes. (Bastards!)

Whatever you do: Resist those single-serve cold cereals. They’re outrageously priced. You can achieve the same effect by putting a cup of Cheerios in a lidded Tupperware container (or into a Tupperware alternative).

Whether you’re buying hot cereal or cold, watch for those loss leader/coupon combos. These can make even instant oatmeal cheap enough to buy. Personally, I find the texture too runny. I like my oats to put up a fight.

Drinking your breakfast
I did not just give you permission for a 7 a.m. tipple. I’m referring to breakfast shakes or smoothies, i.e., mixtures of milk and/or juice and/or fruit and/or yogurt. Add wheat germ, protein powder, peanut butter or whatever else will hold you until noon.

Pressed for time? Right before bedtime put some yogurt, fruit (fresh or frozen) and whatever else you want into the blender canister, then pop it into the fridge. Next morning, add your liquid of choice (which could include soy or nut milk) and blend. Like your smoothies cold and thick? Fill an ice-cube tray with juice and store the healthful result in a plastic bag or container, to be added one or two at a time later.

Note: This is a breakfast you can sip while waiting for the bus or the train. But please, please don’t drink and drive. Keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel.

 

“Instant breakfast” powders abound. They’re easy. But making your own breakfast drinks is probably cheaper, especially if you buy fruit and juice at warehouse clubs, or make your own yogurt. (Or grow your own fruit.)

And speaking of fruit: Bananas should always be available at your house. They’re the ultimate grab-and-go solution if you oversleep, and they add flavor and nutrition to cereal or smoothies.

J.D.’s wife sometimes makes these cinnamon muffins for breakfast.

 

Cookies for breakfast!
Likewise: I did not just give you permission to eat Oreos as soon as you get up. I am also aware there is a cereal with the word “cookie” in the title, but I refrain from comment.

No, I am referring to what’s basically a palmful of nutrition disguised as a dessert. Myscha Theriault at Wise Bread published a recipe that features bananas, applesauce, oats, skim milk and dried fruit — but no flour and no eggs, for those avoiding such things for reasons dietary or humane. A Year of Slow Cooking offers a “baked oatmeal” recipe that you actually cut into squares, like brownies.

Healthy muffin recipes are out there, too. My sister makes a lovely apple/walnut variety with practically no sugar and just a hint of cheddar cheese. Make a double batch and you’re set for weeks. Do this to avoid the commercially available muffins, most of which are both expensive and unhealthy.

But dang, they look good. Cinnamon rolls, doughnuts and bear claws are likewise a huge temptation but a bad idea. Most are crammed with fat and sugar, which means they’ll make you feel like a happy and productive citizen — until your blood sugar crashes, leaving you twitching and cranky and filled with self-loathing. Also, you’ll have Krispy-Kreme breath. Is that the kind of impression you want to leave with your 10 a.m. client?

(For the record: Chocolate-chip muffins are against God.)

Whole-grain toast or an English muffin with peanut butter or some other nut butter would stay with you longer. (But since PB breath is as bad as doughnut breath, make sure you brush your teeth before you leave the house.) A bagel with cream cheese or nut butter works for plenty of people, too.

Or how about making your own breakfast burritos? Recipes abound online. By fixing them at home you not only conserve money but also calories and fat content. Make enough burritos for a week (or a month) and freeze them. The same could be done with breakfast biscuits; put on eggs, meats (or “facon,” i.e., breakfast-meat substitutes), cheese or whatever you like.

Note: I pay $1.39 for a 20-ounce bag of tortillas at my local bakery outlet, which also sells numerous kinds of breads, rolls, English muffins and other carb-y delights. Or bake your own bread.

 

And other fancy stuff
If you’re a practical, organized sort of person, please come over and clean my apartment. After that, try one or more of the following techniques:

• Breakfast batch cooking. Make and freeze a ton of French toast, pancakes or waffles. Everyone in your workplace will be wildly jealous, especially if you’re heating up French toast made with cinnamon bread. (Again: Check the bread outlet.)

 

Fruit cup. Spend an hour on Sunday afternoon cutting up melon and pineapple and washing grapes. Apportion it into little cups, and keep a spoon at work. Just for fun, price the precut fruit at the grocery store and then congratulate yourself on your thrift.

 

Yogurt parfait. The classy way: Layer yogurt, granola (look for easy recipes online) and fruit in a container. The lazy way: Pour some yogurt into one of your fruit cups, and sprinkle on some granola if you remember.

 

Miniature omelets. These are basically a mixture of beaten eggs and/or cheese and/or meats and/or sautéed veggies baked in muffin cups.

 

Frittatas or quiches. Like omelets, only you might find it easier to wash one casserole dish than to swab out a couple of dozen muffin-pan divots. Look for the simplest recipes and doctor them to fit your/your family’s tastes.

Taste is the most important issue here, because “breakfast” can mean whatever you think it means. It could mean having half a dozen hard-boiled eggs and some string cheese ready to pack into your briefcase. It could be a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or leftover pizza. I distinctly remember eating cold spaghetti on some long-ago mornings.

Now I eat oatmeal — but because I want to, not because I have to. You’re a grownup, too, so you get to make your own decisions. May they mostly improve your health and spare your wallet.

Skip the chocolate-chip muffins, though. Seriously.

J.D.’s note: When Kris read this article, she suggested I point folks to one of her favorite blogs, Food in Jars, which recently wrote about breakfast baked eggs in half-pint jars.

 

 

 

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This article is about Food, Frugality  

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