Market research bureau Multiscope will end Visiscan, its service that measures the reach of Dutch websites. Visiscan has been running for ten years and offered Multiscope’s clients a benchmark in reach, branding and evaluation of the top 1000 websites in the Netherlands. The service was most well known for it’s yearly ranking of the top sites.

The ranking has been under attack of various Dutch marketers in the past (website in Dutch) and indeed it seems that making a ranking that everyone agrees upon is near to impossible. Even with explanations from the side of Multiscope there remained questions about certain sites being perceived as ranking either way too high or too low (in Dutch), which disappeared from those spots later on. In any case the list was much valued and debated every year, but increasingly seen as superfluous, ranking just an increasingly steady top list every year on the one hand while not listing small sites by definition, which could mean the neglect of interesting niches.

In a press release Multiscope indicates (Dutch) that the market for web-reach research has stabilised while they, have seen other activities grow. Aiming for growth, they mean to focus more on their panel and software activities and new international opportunities. Services for existing Visiscan clients will continue up to the end of this year and 2010 will also see the last of the now traditional ranking list.

At school you learned to write of course just making words but, at least here in Holland, also how to write neatly. Just writing sentences in the neatest, most beautiful way you could in a notebook. If you would do that really well, the teacher would give you a colourful sticker in your notebook to award your good work. The real fanatics would of course want a sticker like that every time! A nice way to make learning something, writing in this case, something fun. You can find similar gaming element online, which combines the urge to save things and the urge to compete into one serive: Foursquare! Visiting your favourite bar is nice, but if you are a really frequent visitor you would of course like to hold on to that ‘mayor’ status.

Since I wrote the initial version of this article, things have already started changing more in the general direction I’m describing here. But maybe that’s all the more reason to put it here as well. One of the nicest aspects of Foursquare is of course connecting with friends and seeing what they’re up to, but the one thing that makes it so attractive is the badges system and the fact that you can become mayor of a place. Last year, Coen Jacobs made more or less the same observation when he was putting up Brightkite against Foursquare and Gowalla. (in Dutch) This element of play makes a service like Foursquare or Gowalla something people want to keep on using: it adds a playful element of competition and it looks good as well.

Of course this is not a new idea in the world of marketing: having the consumer play, having people earn points and thus creating loyalty has been existent in different forms for a long time already. The nice thing for us here, however, is that this is an online service that is used (moslty) on mobile devices. It is perhaps one of the first really successful location based applications, although you might wonder what exactly is the goal of all this: does it have any use at all? A business model to this service may not appear to be all that clear, but this doesn’t stop the service from growing rapidly, making the first commercial initiatives to be based on this platform approach rapidly as well, and actually we’re seeing that happening right now.

Opportunities.

The fact that the play element is well used to keep people engaged and even to attract new users is of course really great, but what can Foursquare do with all these users?

The answer to this question is twofold. First there is that element of play itself: collecting badges is an incentive and it can thus be used to guide visitors to certain places. From the start Foursquare noticed this opportunity and actually used it at it’s introduction at SWXW by handing out special badges when ‘checking in’ to certain spots, venues, at this event. Imagine how cities can use this to guide tourists to certain spots, perhaps sending them to new interesting places instead of the usual hot spots! This way, cities, festivals or brands can make a Foursquare into something that actually guides the movement of people. (Of course Fsq. would earn money in this case by allowing special, custom, badges for certain places.)

Secondly there is another, maybe even simpler way of cashing in on the number of users by thinking about the venues themselves. Because if you are a frequent visitor of some place, why wouldn’t you be thinking about getting a discount, for example? With this idea in mind Starbucks is handing out custom badges as a start, but says it wants to think about using Foursquare to test ‘alternative reward strategies’.  This is indeed not all too far away from collection points or coupons somewhere or perhaps even more like collecting that sticker in your notebook!

When we realize that the internet is still changing every day and that the mobile web is really in it’s infancy then we can expect to see more and more of these new initiatives arise very quickly from now on. Location based is no longer just a nice thought, it’s really something that can be used and can be useful!

And don’t forget: don’t cheat with your checkins!

This article is loosely based on an earlier article (in Dutch) that I’ve written for marketing blog Bijgepijkerd.

Nothing new, walk along! Because you should have noticed already that Google announced as early as April this year that they will start ranking your websites based on the site speed as well. If you think you’ve heard this one before: I’ve written about this before on my blog. This means you’re probably already aware of the fact that Google is trying to adjust it’s search more and more to the ideal of relevance and speed. Google’s mantra will be ‘Make the web faster’ this year and to ensure you’re helping as well they’ve published a blog post in May about some helpful tools you can use.

One of the tools to determine your site speed, and thus if this will help your ranking, is Google Page Speed, which you can find here.

It does seem a bit odd; meeting each other in real life after an initial online contact. It does happen quite often anyway, already since the first chat groups there seems to be a need to meet ‘the other’ in real life. This is how the first ‘internet meetings’ started. While internetting was for the ‘geeks’ at school, some 10-15 years ago you were even more frowned upon if you were meeting those internet people offline as well. Even today online communication is sometimes met with disbelief, but as more and more people have been using the internet it has started to become normal to have online friends. Using this momentum, the internet meeting is starting to break through , maybe as early as this year. This development is not only fun and entertaining; it is also a good way to make contact with consumers, customers and business partners.

Even though internet meetings, even large gatherings, have been there since way before Twitter, it seems to be Twitter that is driving the ‘meeting’ to a new level. Just this year it seems to get to a point where it’s really popular. In Holland there was a Twitterdisco, and a crowd-sourced Twitterparty already. And of course there was the ‘Twittershizzle’ party that I helped organizing as well. Of course to me personally it is this last one that is closest to me, but it’s also the event that got me loads of reactions like ‘we should do this more often’ and ‘will there be spinoff Twittershizzle parties’?

Drink turning into event

Drinks, ‘open coffee’ and other events organized via twitter, facebook and ning are, in my opinion, just the start of things to come. There is a demand and more Twittershizzles or whatever you’d like to come up with will be there soon. But there will also a larger demand for more specialized gatherings, dedicated to making new useful contacts. These won’t be like one of those ‘networking drinks’, just some sort of generic presentation about something or a large sponsored event. These will be different; a mashup of all these, informative but ‘fun’. Currently there is a development in the direction that I named earlier; the offline consolidation of knowledge and contacts by a central ‘actor’ that knows how to find the right people from the online social networks: commercial dating. (On which I wrote an article that for now is only available in Dutch on Bijgespijkerd.nl here)
Yes, of course these are offline events, but it’s setup will make it have similarities with the online social networks. Selected on a specific target group (maybe just ‘self-selection’), but open, honest and with a focus on sharing information and knowledge.

The role of the mediator will play an important role in this second form; the organizing of specific network events, whether you call it commercial dating, or not. I assume a lot of readers will be able to give me several examples of this already. There have been countless examples all over the world of interesting events, in Holland there are “tweetups” and things like “Mobile Monday”. However, I think we will see in the rest of this year that organizations will plan these type of events more on their own to attract a specific audience of consumers, reviewers or promoters and get these all together in a fun but (commercially) useful way.

Maturity

Press conferences, première nights and other presentations which we’ve been familiar with for quite some time, will be changed or altered to a real ‘twitterparty’ or similar event, for like minded people or converted to an event where knowledge sharing will be the key. Essential in this, perhaps not so apparent, renewal of events is the connection to ‘online’ communication-wise during and after an event and the collection of knowledge online to make sure you get the right people there to begin with. These little changes in meeting could mean the ‘meetup’ will start to reach maturity in 2010.

This article is based on a longer article (in Dutch) that I’ve written for marketing blog Bijgepijkerd.

On 12^th April 2010 Twitter announced its new business strategy to include promoted tweets [1] in its organic search results. This new direction in collecting revenue from advertisers raised many questions among the online marketing community and avid Twitterers. Is Twitter not going to affect the user experience in the network by “polluting” the content with promotional tweets? At the same time, marketers have been eagerly anticipating Twitter’s rollout of a strategy for monetizing its value.  The new initiative by the company to mix user generated content with advertisements was therefore hailed by them as the most logical step by a company that wants to maintain sustainable profits in the volatile online technology market.

Figure 1: How a promoted tweet looks like

Connoisseurs following closely how Twitter’s marketing strategy is developing, may be likely to conclude that promoted tweets is not such a breakthrough given the similarity of the strategy with Google Adwords. The only difference with Twitter is that its search engine is (still) not as accurate as the one of Google, with the main issue that Twitter Search displays search results in chronological order, which makes organic search results in Twitter (as they were before the promoted tweet) quite irrelevant at times. Thank God the live Twitter feed is included in the Google search results since last year! However, the promoted tweets will now appear on top of the Twitter search list no matter what time they are posted, which could render keyword searches on Twitter more targeted and relevant to the user.

This seems like a win-win-win situation for Twitter, the user and advertisers. Twitter will substantially improve the quality of its search engine, the user will find more relevant content easier (the Advanced Twitter search is good, but is still not as half as elaborated as Google’s algorithms), and advertisers get the opportunity to engage in valuable conversations with their target audiences, so called “Permission marketing”. (Seth Godin has been promoting this since the beginning of this decade!!). Twitter will protect its users from spamming and will compel advertisers to engage in real value creation by letting users decide which promoted tweets get to remain in the timeline. When a promoted tweet is published, Twitter will look at the amount of “retweets” and “favorites”, which will raise the popularity of a Tweet or doom it to oblivion. Tweets that fail to become popular will be simply removed from the timeline.

While this seems like a great strategy to retain the unique value of Twitter as a social network for content sharing and brand-to-consumer two-way conversations, it is still no guarantee how promoted tweets in the timeline of users will increase their experience in Twitter. To draw a comparison, let’s look at the Farmville Facebook addicts and the displayed Farmville updates in the News feed. Many people simply unfriended other people just not to be spammed with Farmville updates, simply because they didn’t know how to change their settings on the Facebook news feed. Surely, these settings were only enabled by Facebook a few months ago and since then you can adjust the Facebook timeline to your taste, skipping irrelevant status updates from Farmville aficionados (among others).

The question that Twitter has to answer now is: What will happen when promoted tweets are included in the timelines of users that don’t follow the company which sends these tweets? Wouldn’t that wind up the avid Twitter user? And does Twitter offer the option for one to customize the timeline so that promoted tweets are only displayed when the user is interested in them? An example: in Google, promoted search results are mixed with organic search results, which doesn’t directly enhance the user experience, but motivates companies to compete for relevance and improve their website content, which ultimately improves user experience online. As Twitter now offers a similar service to advertisers at the danger of deteriorating user experience, it needs to make sure that:

a) Either the users have the option to customize their timelines (exclude promoted tweets altogether, or allow only promoted tweets from companies they follow)

b) Or companies that are tweeting regularly but not buying keywords for promoted tweets can compete on an equal level playing field with big advertisers (just like in Google, where bigger brands “own” the most expensive and sought keywords and smaller advertisers can only slowly rise to the top of the search page by optimizing their website content for crawlers)

If Twitter is to follow the threaded path of Google’s success, it needs to make sure it has the right equipment for climbing the top. What seems like a shortcut to becoming profitable may turn into a slippery slope towards a collapse. Only time will show how Twitter’s management will tackle this new challenge…

Update: A brief video showing how the tweets are sent by the company and what the user in Twitter actually sees:

(This is a guest article, by Silvia Todorova)

Nothing new here, but worth to note anyway; the new ranking system Google has started to use earlier this month. I wrote about SEO earlier and have been talking about it quite a lot, it still seems to be the hottest thing on web promotion. Not saying a good ranking is not important, but that is actually exactly the point why SEO sometimes bothers me:  the ranking has to mean something to the end user, not to the site owner.

Google has (of course) the same sort of idea about what good ranking sgould be; ranking the content that the user actually wants to find as high as possible and not the content that a site owner wants to be found. In my article about the ‘end of SEO’  I went on about the importance of your content, Google has now started to add a long awaited other variable to the mix: speed.

Eduard Blacquière was kind enough to remind me of this in his (Dutch) article here. He is rightfully pointing to the fact that Google is trying to adjust it’s search more and more to the ideal of relevance and speed. ‘Make the web faster’ is one of Google’s new mantra’s and the reason seems obvious; don’t you just hate it when you have seemingly found the best resource for something and it loads forever? (Of course only to find out it wasn’t so brilliant anyway…) Site speed is not a very important factor yet, but combined with the fact that users will move away from your site if it’s really slow the curtain may have finally fallen for those overly slow loading websites.

A more detailed overview about the changes can be found here on Google’s own blog, and I just want to add something I’ve been using a lot recently: you can go on about SEO tricks, if your site is really that slow, it’s hard to use SEO against it.

Think about how you present your data to your readers, consumers and customers first. Raving on about the upcoming semantic web is useless if you like to catch your visitors in a non-semantic web of tricks and clicks. (Because spent-time is one of your KPI’s?)

It is often said that the key to ‘how social media works’, or at least how you can gain inlfuence as an actor in social media is staying honest and true to what you believe as a person. (ie: don’t try to operate as a typical company) Although one can certainly make arguments against that, I do support the notion that an open and honest approach is appreciated by many. This is true in real life, but even more so online, where hiding ones true intentions can be a lot easier.

Thus, when it became apparent that the Dutch ‘twitterer of the year’ election was set up by a advertisement agency people began to criticise they way this was set up. Of course it didn’t take long before freelance journalist Bert Brussen announced on twitter that he would take care of organising something more fun. What followed is an example of a typical social media effort.

This is how Twittershizzle got born; an effort to do something fun for twitterers (or ‘tweeps’) that was more than just meeting up for some drinks. You could call it crowdsourcing, but maybe that doesn’t do justice to how these kind of things usually work. With Bert’s following on twitter he quickly gained attention and a buzz of enthusiasm was spreading through the Dutch twittersphere. With friends and colleagues from the Dutch weblog deJaap Bas Paternotte and Levi Boitelle agreeing to help the event was taking shape.

As part of the deJaap editorial board I was happy to do my share in making this event a success. It wasn’t a complete smooth ride, but we all know our fair share of how things work online, so in the end we got it together. Staying true to what we thought would be fun to do, not thinking too much about marketing practices we managed to get it done; #Twittershizzle the Twitter event was born and would take place on the 9th of February.

Word about this event spread quickly, and set up as a free event with artists and musicians participating for next to nothing it became quite something. There was a stream from ‘Ted’, there were paintcartoons, there were writers, there was beer and there was more beer and sigarettes.

(CC Photo by Anne Helmond)

I’ve been setting up meetings for more than 10 years now, from get-togethers in the local pub to lectures, but this was something unique indeed. A nice 300 active twitterers from all kinds of sub groups in the Dutch sphere showed up, along with newscrews from papers, radio and television, trying to see what this could possible be.

Let me be clear, there is nothing wrong with organizing something and making a profit out of it. But especially online people want to participate, not just be bothered with offers or things that they should really buy in to. Or as Bert Brussen puts it:

beware of stains on your purple pants

Personally this all is what I love the most about the internet. You get together with long-time online friends, strangers and everyone in between, while others are still trying to grasp what this is really about. Yes, “the internet really is my thing” and I love every second of it. What’s next? I can say a new Twittershizzle, and plans for international versions of this type of event are uttered, so we’ll see where we stand, tomorrow, next month, next year. And never forget that it’s you, it’s me, it’s us all together making fabulous things happen again and again, sometimes failing miserably, but always creating something beautiful. I hope this will come across on television as bright as I feel it now.

Of course most of the postings about Twittershizzle are in Dutch, but you can search by Hashtag if you’d like and pictures can be found here or here. A nice linkdump with even more and some (Dutch spoken) videos is here on Mark Hulstein’s blog.

Following the recent acquisitions in the research industry, think about Toluna buying Greenfield Online/Ciao Surveys, one would expect a response from other players in the market. And to be a bit more specific; what would smaller players in the market do with their panels? There are several obvious solutions to the troubles of maintaining smaller panel(s), one could thing about an advanced sharing system or outsourcing panels.

As all of these seem to be happening there is the other obvious solution to which I’ve been pointing several times in the past; several companies ‘chipping in’ together and combine their panel efforts.

And indeed; now several European research agencies have committed themselves to pooling their panels together and create a new fieldwork business called Panelteam. Founding members are Multiscope, Mo’web Research, M3 Research, Panelbase, Directpanel Research and SWG according to Research-Live. Peter-Paul Laumans, now working at Multiscope, will be heading this new company, no doubt having to navigate it to the hard times of crafting a single structure out of the separate panel entities. It will be interesting to see how fast they can set up a smooth working new organization out of these separate resources.

Even more, it will be interesting to see what kind of influence this pooling has on the market. No doubt Panelteam would like to establish itself as an important player in the field, but they will feel the competition of both existing larger multi-country players as well as others pooling together their resources in a similar way. My guess would be that a next step might well be consultancy firms combining some of their research efforts in a similar vein.