Earlier today I came across a thought provoking blog post that compares internet search problems to those of enterprise search over at SharePoint Blogs. The biggest point that I took away from this post is that enterprise searchers on intranets often know exactly what they are looking for. In fact, they often know that what they are looking for definitely exists. While it may seem subtle, this is an extremely important distinction from internet searchers who give up on a website if they are not immediately satisfied with results.
Our Social Search solution works by observing the successful search and navigation paths of users in order to guide successive site visitors to their goals. Relying entirely on keyword search solutions is insufficient. An effective enterprise search solution will be able to detect the different search contexts that exist on an intranet. While this number is large, it is certainly finite. By employing a solution that can learn these contexts and detect them when clues are present, findability on the intranet can be greatly increased.
Check out our white paper on social search on exactly how Baynote can replace or supercharge an existing search solution with inadequate results.
Last Friday MediaPost published an article reporting that 94% of users that rated the new Facebook design didn’t like. A few months ago, our CTO Scott Brave published a white paper discussing the seven deadly consumer biases. One of those biases is “The Squeaky Wheel Bias”. Here is a brief excerpt describing this bias:
The most vocal and misleading group of contributors is what I like to call the “squeaky wheels”. This could be those people who simply like to complain. But it can also be any one of us when we have a negative experience. Negative experiences tend to stand out more than positive ones and also encourage us to take action.
After the last design, users reacted similarly. Despite this, the network grew pages viewed per visit by 50% and its user base to 175 million users to be the largest social network. Justin Smith of the Inside Facebook blog said “Even though there are a lot of negative votes in that voting app, I think it’s a pretty self-selecting group of people and not necessarily representative of the entire population.” Justin is spot on with his analysis. 850,000 people voted in this survey, which is roughly .5% of the Facebook population. This backs up the squeaky wheel bias theory which states that “At the end of the day, 99 percent of the population remains unspoken for.”
Personally, I think the new redesign is a great update(although I haven’t voted), so I am glad to hear that Facebook is taking the feedback with a grain of salt.
There is an article over on MediaPost that talks about the tug of war between more relevance and more privacy. This is far from a new topic, but Google’s latest dive in to the behavioral targeting space has caused quite the uproar. This backlash is pretty common when companies that have access to large amounts of personal information decide to start using that data for targeting purposes. It happened when Facebook launched the beacon program a year back. It even happened a few weeks back when Facebook updated their Terms of Service Agreement. Again, Zuckerberg was forced to retract this move to appease the concerned Facebook users that felt violated.
Is Relevancy and Privacy Inversely Related? No. So here is the question, Can we target users effectively without diminishing their privacy? Does increased targeting inherently scale with lesser privacy? I would say no. Google has made their fortune on contextual targeting. Users provide Google with questions and Google matches those questions with two types of answers, those derived from their organic search algorithms and those offered by advertisers. The success of this solution marked a victory for contextual targeting over the profiling. Google effectively targets content to users by understanding the context and intent of users, exactly what Baynote does as well. No profiling or personal preferences were required.
This topic is a bit much to cover in one post, so expect a few more posts to follow up on why relevance and privacy are mutually exclusive.
I didn’t say it, I’m just repeating it, so don’t kill the messenger. Earlier today, Avinash Kaushik from Google stated that Hits (aka pageviews or clicks) should stand for “How Idiots Track Success” in an interview at MediaPost. Over on Avinash’s blog he frequently talks about KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that should be used to measure the performance of campaigns. Well today he explained what not to use as a success metric, and he is spot on.
While many marketers, website owners, and other business owners already know this, you’d be surprised how many of them use tools that rely on this overused and inaccurate metric. Many analytics, and even recommendation vendors, are relying on clicks as a KPI to either display to their customers or in the case of recommendations, to power their algorithms. The quality of recommendations or any kind of targeting based on user observation is no stronger than its ability to understand when and how a user has succeeded. Bounce rate, as Avinash points out, is just one of those metrics. At Baynote we track dozens of them, and clicks are by far the least utilized when validating success or failure.
Bottom line: When you are talking to analytics vendors, ad networks, or recommendations vendors ask them what KPIs their algorithms are relying on. If they say hits or clicks, they are idiots by Avinash’s definition, and he’s a smart guy.
Earlier today, Alistair Croll from GigaOm posted a blog entry listing the 7 criteria that should be used when evaluating a vendor, and I think it is spot on. (begin shameless promoting) Last year we launched the Collective Intelligence Platform to function as a content targeting system with a robust API that can accept plugins from third party applications and distribute content to any channel including, web, mobile, email, call center, and more (end shameless promoting). In all seriousness, without the release of this platform I wouldn’t be pointing to this article because we definitely wouldn’t meet these criteria.
Without further adieu here is the list of 7 criteria from GigaOm:
Adaptability: How easily can you modify the application? This can be as simple as adding fields or building dashboards, or as advanced as a programming platform.
Reliability: How much can you depend on the system to function well? This boils down to four things: Performance, availability, scalability and security.
Task productivity: How effectively can your users accomplish their goals? How many cases-per-minute or entries-per-day can workers do, and how many errors do they make?
Price: How much will it cost — really? Because SaaS offerings are so varied in pricing, it’s hard to compare them. A better model is to create several benchmark subscribers (a 10-, 100-, and 1,000-person organization) and compare upfront and ongoing costs for them.
Back-end integration: Can you plug it in to other things? Any enterprise SaaS offering will have to work with other systems, for everything from authentication to data sharing.
Longevity: How long will the SaaS company be around, and what’s your exit strategy? With ISVs, you could ask for software in escrow. But as the sudden disappearance of Coghead shows, when a SaaS provider closes down, your entire IT systems can vanish with the flick of an “off” switch. Offers from Intuit and others to help stranded customers notwithstanding, this is a big problem.
Ecosystem: How many third-party developers and integrators surround a particular platform with plug-ins and add-ons, and how active are they? A vibrant ecosystem means a more extensible, flexible solution.
Fortunately, I can say with confidence that Baynote satisfies each of these criteria. I’m not going to go through each item line by line, since these 7 criteria have different implications for each business. However, our sales team will be happy to do just that. Contact them here.
This morning I was lucky enough to listen to the famous(or infamous depending who you ask) Guy Kawasaki at the User Generated Content Expo. I have yet to hear Guy speak and leave unsatisfied, and on top of that Guy is possibly the most relaxed speaker I have ever witnessed. He spoke about everything from Twitter, to Facebook, to the new media and Amazon’s Kindle 2. However, the part of his casual chat that really hit home for me was his take on the new era of marketing. There were really two parts of this segment, his discussion of the old marketing methodology and that of the new.
The Era of Experts, Influencers, and Mavens Guy noted that the old way to put a product in front of the masses was a trickle down approach. The goal was to suck up to the influencers, experts, and mavens that had an abundance of social capital and a platform to distribute your message to the masses. To make his point, he mentioned about a dozen of these “mavens,” including tech bloggers, popular media personalities and himself. Bottom Line: Suck up to the important people, and that will effectively trickle down to the masses.
The New Age of the Masses and Crowds Because of the advent of new technologies like Twitter, Guy argues that the most effective way to connect to users is from the ground up. Connect with users that are relevant within the context you are trying to reach. Influencers and experts will never be as valuable as the users themselves if you can reach them. Bottom Line: Don’t ignore the experts, but make your audience and your users a source of collective intelligence that drives your business decisions.
Technologies like Twitter and Baynote’s Affinity Engine allows marketers to leverage their users in ways previously impossible. While Twitter allows marketers to speak to and gather feedback directly from their audiences, Baynote allows marketers to poll users through implicit observation. Ultimately, its all about making sure that your audience finds your products in a timely manner. Your audience may be on Twitter, but its definitely on your website and that is where Baynote comes in.
Earlier this week one of Belkin’s employees has been caught manufacturing product reviews on Amazon.com(In fact, he paid for them). Many customers rely on these reviews to make purchase decisions, but as stated in Scott Brave’s Seven Deadly Biases article posted below, these reviews are frequently a subject of gaming.
Gaming Bias
Another type of reviewer is someone who is “gaming” the system. Sometimes such gaming is malicious, but often it’s altruistic. While writing this article I went onto Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) to look at the reviews of a book I co-authored called Wired for Speech. The first one was very positive; perhaps someone my coauthor knows. But I have no doubts about the second 5-star review, titled “Amazing Insight.” To my surprise, it was from my dad! Enough said.
Gaming such as this is actually the rule, rather than the exception on Amazon and other media sites where products have authors or artists and personal connections abound. I admit to having given 5 stars to articles on my company … heck, if I can do it for this one, I will. Go ahead, try it out, give this five stars if you can!
For more of this whitepaper on The Seven Deadly Consumer Biases click here.
The irony is that the guy used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to game Amazon.com. Here’s a link to the full article.
I read a great primer on Social Search yesterday on the Rise to the Top Blog. While Social Search is often poised as a replacement of keyword based search, we prefer to take a less cannibalistic approach and position Baynote Social Search as a compliment to traditional keyword search as proven with our recent partnership with Google Search Appliance..
The blog post correctly identifies two types of Social Search: 1. Explicit-based – Solutions where search results are powered by “simple [influencers like] shared bookmarks or tagging of content with descriptive labels.” 2. Implicit-based – A solution that is powered by the uncovering social intelligence with complex computer algorithms.
Baynote Social Search is closely aligned to implicit-based Social Search description given, as we do not utilize explicit information like bookmarking or tagging to derive our search results. And according to the post this turns out to be the differentiator that immunizes us from the pitfalls of social search mentioned:
Social Search Cons
Despite the obvious benefits social search has some glaring defects too. As said earlier social search hinges heavily on human judgment. But the web today is growing at a pace which humans simply cannot match and this means there will be a lot of content that would remain unnoticed and hidden from the user. Also the tagging method through which the search works is not the ideal way of organizing web data. There is also the risk of spam because users have the freedom to directly add results to a social search engine which can be misused. We all know the way some SEO’s behave!
However, Baynote Social Search does offer the same benefits that are mentioned by the author:
Social Search Pros
Social search engines have potential benefits deriving from the human input qualities of social search. Some of these include:
Relatively free from link spam as there is less reliance on link structure of webpages
More relevant search results as each result has been selected by users
The user gets more current results
The user gets his precise perspective reflected in the results
The human judgment that social search uses is more accurate than computer’s ability to analyze a webpage
It was great to see Baynote standing out as the only company mentioned that is both bringing social search to websites rather than just a general web search engine and avoiding the negative pitfalls of explicit-based social search.
Product reviews have been around for a while and are likely going to stay around. However, its important to understand it’s place and where it can go wrong. Baynote CTO Scott Brave, wrote up a whitepaper on the seven deadly biases that detract from the effectiveness of user generated product review and rating systems. To test this hypothesis, I decided to write up a survey to see which biases impact the reviews and ratings given by our readers. Please take a minute to take the survey, it’s only 7 brief questions. Thanks!
A good buddy of mine gave me a iTunes gift card for Christmas, and with my upcoming trip back to my hometown for Christmas I decided to pick up a few movies for the trip. My first choice was “Death Race.” I pondered seeing it in the theaters, but decided to wait till it came out on DVD/iTunes. I’m a car nut so it was an easy choice. Then I looked to the music recommendations at iTunes which are driven by other users that purchase for other movies similar to Death Race. As shown by the screen shot above I didn’t get the results I was hoping for… I’m open to suggestions for a list of shared qualities between “Death Race” and “The House Bunny” because I couldn’t find any.
I’m not exactly sure went wrong here, but there are a few problems with recommendations driven by previous user purchases that are likely culprits in this disaster. Often multiple users on the same account that purchase different products. This creates a pretty useless source for data. Here is a link to the full image.
ReadWriteWeb just posted an in depth article stating that the contextual web is the next stage in the development of the web. The article states that technologies like open API’s and web services like those offered by Baynote’s contextual targeting platform have paved the way for a more personal and contextual user experience. While many of these new products designed to target the user’s context are being guided by similar methodologies, the data they use to drive relevant content is often quite rudimentary.
Given the state of the economy, this shift to the contextual web makes perfect sense. The last few years have been about finding new ways to spend your money to drive more people to your website like determining the best viral marketing techniques for getting 5 million unique users per month. This next step is constructing a more efficient web. A web where websites need less visitors to produce the same number of conversions, and to use those conversions to attract new visitors within the same context.
Apple’s MacWorld Expo has become wildly famous with the technology community worldwide. Each year Steve Jobs gets on the podium and delivers a keynote that introduces another innovative product to his ever growing customer base. Today Apple’s website announced that this upcoming January will be the final MacWorld. What’s their reason? Their website is just that powerful.
Websites are now the primary way to get in touch with your customers, at least thats what Apple says and I agree. I’m not declaring the death of trade shows as a way to reach customers, but I am marking today on the calendar as the day where one of the biggest marketing machines in the world declared just that. This is a powerful message that will be heard around the world. Apple is usually the company that epitomizes a customer-centric company. Their company ideologies and methodologies have created arguably the most loyal and passionate customer base on earth.
That said, ensuring that your website users have the “Apple customer experience” should be a high priority for a company’s web strategy team. Enhancing the user experience means something different to all different types of businesses. A few months back I wrote up a post on just that. Bottom line, greet your customers with relevant information immediately and stay in touch with them on their terms(no irrelevant email blasts).
A new post on InternetNews.com reveals the findings of a new report released by Verizon advising companies on technologies to leverage to cut cost for surviving in the 2009 economy.
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is one of the technologies the company [Verizon] picked. Many businesses are turning to the category of product to cut costs, avoid the expenses of installing and maintaining on-site software.
Check out the latest Baynote Mob Commerce webinar on how eCommerce companies can reduce costs and increase revenues with the Baynote SaaS platform.
Jeremiah Owyang, senior analyst at Forrester Research, wrote a great post a few days back on the technology scalability vs. services in startups. It is often stated that the holy grail of technology startups is to have a highly scalable product while offering minimum human services for maximum scalability. However, as Jeremiah states, combining great technology with great education, implementation, training, and support services is required to provide value to large brands and enterprises.
While The Baynote Collective Intelligence Platform delivers the best products and content to website visitors automatically through the use of a very scalable technology platform, our professional services organization(PSO) has been at the core of every customer success we’ve enjoyed as a company. Here is a brief look into our processes.
Education. Education at Baynote starts on our first call by explaining our core methodologies in cross-channel content and product targeting, but it continues with an engaged PSO delivering best practices to our customers ensuring they get the most value out of our technology platform.
Implementation. Our solutions are served via Software-as-a-Service SaaS, therefore our implementations are not resource intensive. Still our PSO team is quick and responsive during the implementation process.
Training. Again, Baynote is automated, but we do have a reporting and editorial interface for delivering business intelligence and control over our recommendations delivered. Despite the intuitive nature of our tool, our customer engagement managers ensures that our clients are well versed with the interface.
Support and Custom Applications. For customers that have special needs, our professional services team will assist with more complex integrations or building custom applications driven by data exposed through our API.
There’s plenty of doom and gloom to go around these days, but its not all bad news. Choosing a vendor has never been easier, so don’t wait for the dust to settle. Companies are licking their wounds and only the strong will survive. Defenses are down and now you can see the true colors of a company. So if you are looking for new ways to boost revenue or cut support costs, now is the time to look at vendors that can help you in these areas.
Here are a few things to look for:
The Client list. This one is obvious, but I’m going to throw it out there regardless. Does the vendor have reputable companies they are working with? This is always important, but right now even the big companies with big budgets are cutting low performing projects.
Do they have money? This is partially tied to their client list, but you can also check out their investors. If investors aren’t interested in their company, then why should you invest in their products? And now is a tough time to secure funding. Only companies with a viable business model and strong products will be able to pull in some cash.
Are they laying off a lot of staff? A company not performing up to expectations is likely going to be cutting down on wage costs. The Tech Crunch Layoff tracker is a great way to monitor this. If a vendor you are looking into is on the list, it means they are not performing up to their expectations, and would likely fall short of yours.
Every company says they are awesome, but as they say “the proof is in the pudding.” Check these company vitals to see if they really are as awesome as they claim to be.
How’s Baynote doing? Obviously I wouldn’t be posting this if our vitals were poor, they are strong. We’ve got revenue flowing in from companies enjoying high revenue boosts and cost reduction. We are not a member of the TC Layoff Tracker, so if you are a rockstar at what you do, check out our careers page. We are hiring!
The New York Times had a great article today expressing the importance of not being “penny wise, and pound foolish” with your marketing expenditures. Now, more than ever, is definitely the time to be critical and performance driven when executing your marketing campaigns. Throwing money away at Adwords, PR, and other marketing channels without first optimizing these efforts has come to an end, and rightfully so.
Over the last few months, we have had some of our best successes, and this is greatly due to the cost savings and campaign optimization gained by our customers. While our service isn’t free, the fuel that powers it is, your website community.
Why spend lots of money driving people to your website when there are search and navigation pitfalls? If your car was leaking oil, would you just fill it backup up with oil, or fix the leak first?
is scary. I was watching Minority Report last night, the futuristic action packed Tom Cruise movie from a few years back. You know, the one with that super sleek Lexus, and the computers with multitouch-on-steroids interfaces. If that movie is indicative of the future of product recommendations, we need to seriously rethink our trajectory. In case you might not remember the scenes I’m referring to, here they are below.
If you aren’t slightly disturbed yet, here is one more.
Think more about the context your users are currently in, and less about the identity of your users. If they are anything like me at all, trying to advertise to them based on some user profile created by a computer, “expert,” or their long history of purchases isn’t going to be as effective as discovering their current context. It also just might freak them out. Our identities, retina, and fingerprints are quite private and need to stay that way. Brian made a funny cartoon a few weeks ago describing an experience you might be able to relate to.
At Online Marketing World, we’ve been speaking to many potential clients and partners and one thing that has really resonated is the move from demographic based behavioral targeting to contextual targeting. At Baynote, we’ve been championing contextual targeting for product and content recommendations over the last 3 years. Initially, this wasn’t a popular position, likely due to a lack of technologies on the market being able to distinguish one context of a user from another. However, over the last year, the success of contextual targeting and the failure of demographic based targeting has ushered in a new era, one where Context is King.
Yesterday, one of the conference attendees that visited our booth created a blog post explaining her take on targeting technologies, but on a personal level.
My favorite part of Baynote’s technology: it ignores demographics. Yes! When are people going to figure out that this is an individualistic age? Advertisers, you are wasting your dollars on serving me with endless weight-loss and dating ads. Not all 27-year old females are the same!
I’d have to agree with this point, not all 27 year old females are the same. Not simply because I’ve seen our technology benchmarked against demographic or profile based targeting technologies(which I have), but also because my 27-year old wife would have me sleeping on the couch if I said otherwise.
If you are a new reader, or would like more background on our contextual targeting approach, check out our whitepaper “In Search of The Human Element.”
Driving the right people to the right places is a hot topic at the TechCrunch 50 conference. Mobile technologies has improved to facilitate the advancement of location based product recommendations. Companies like GoodRecs are allowing users to explicitly rate restaurants, books, and nightlife by giving a thumbs up-thumbs down type rating indicator.
Survey Bias. I can see how location based recommendations would be extremely useful, but explicit recommendations introduces survey bias and the only people praising or condemning the products are the loud users. Studies often show that users that dislike or disapprove are more likely to rate a product then those enjoying the product.
Contextual Differences. Additionally, its often unclear what context the person is in when the recommendation is given. For example, I may rate a product poorly because its not what I was expecting. However, it could be great for someone with different expectations. In order to discover these expectations, we’d need to know what is the higher level intent of the user. Accurate recommendations must take into account the context of the user voting for the product. While Baynote is able to uncover a user’s context on a website, this information is difficult to extract offline.
Baynote Product Recommendations enables our customers to more effectively merchandise their products across their entire site. However, many ecommerce vendors invest heavily in their merchandisers to create complimentary and comparative products to increase conversion rates and average order values.
Today I had an enlightening conversation with one such vendor. He spoke highly of his merchandisers and explained their extensive knowledge of the business. He questioned the need of a recommendation engine when he had access to such experienced merchandisers. Point well taken. This continues to be a hurdle for many recommendation companies trying to break into the ecommerce industry. Lets move the conversation away from an “either or” scenario. Combining your experienced merchandisers with automated intent driven recommendations incorporates the knowledge of your business experts with the collective intelligence of your website visitors.
We’ve spent many resources on our merchandising console within our reporting interface Baynote Insights to facilitate this goal of “merchandising harmony.” For the last few months our clients have been combining our recommendations technology with their merchandising expertise to deliver an enhanced user experience while increasing conversion rates and average order values. Why substitute when you can combine?
Last Friday MediaPost published an 
There is an 
I didn’t say it, I’m just repeating it, so don’t kill the messenger. Earlier today, Avinash Kaushik from Google stated that Hits (aka pageviews or clicks) should stand for “How Idiots Track Success” in an interview at 
Earlier today, Alistair Croll from GigaOm posted a 
This morning I was lucky enough to listen to the famous(or infamous depending who you ask) Guy Kawasaki at the User Generated Content Expo. I have yet to hear Guy speak and leave unsatisfied, and on top of that Guy is possibly the most relaxed speaker I have ever witnessed. He spoke about everything from Twitter, to Facebook, to the new media and Amazon’s Kindle 2. However, the part of his casual chat that really hit home for me was his take on the new era of marketing. There were really two parts of this segment, his discussion of the old marketing methodology and that of the new.
Earlier this week one of Belkin’s employees has been caught manufacturing product reviews on Amazon.com(In fact, he paid for them). Many customers rely on these reviews to make purchase decisions, but as stated in Scott Brave’s Seven Deadly Biases article posted below, these reviews are frequently a subject of gaming.
Product reviews have been around for a while and are likely going to stay around. However, its important to understand it’s place and where it can go wrong. Baynote CTO Scott Brave, wrote up a 
A good buddy of mine gave me a iTunes gift card for Christmas, and with my upcoming trip back to my hometown for Christmas I decided to pick up a few movies for the trip. My first choice was “Death Race.” I pondered seeing it in the theaters, but decided to wait till it came out on DVD/iTunes. I’m a car nut so it was an easy choice. Then I looked to the music recommendations at iTunes which are driven by other users that purchase for other movies similar to Death Race. As shown by the screen shot above I didn’t get the results I was hoping for… I’m open to suggestions for a list of shared qualities between “Death Race” and “The House Bunny” because I couldn’t find any.
ReadWriteWeb just posted an in depth 
Apple’s MacWorld Expo has become wildly famous with the technology community worldwide. Each year Steve Jobs gets on the podium and delivers a keynote that introduces another innovative product to his ever growing customer base. Today Apple’s website 
A new 
There’s plenty of doom and gloom to go around these days, but its not all bad news. Choosing a vendor has never been easier, so don’t wait for the dust to settle. Companies are licking their wounds and only the strong will survive. Defenses are down and now you can see the true colors of a company. So if you are looking for new ways to boost revenue or cut support costs, now is the time to look at vendors that can help you in these areas.
The New York Times had a great 
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