Marketing Biz: Personalization, MindMeld & Tumblr Metrics

This week we had plenty of examples of data (our digital wake) being used to personalize the web experience. Whether it’s Criteo’s intent-based display advertising, Gravity’s website personalization or GraphDive’s inferred demographics, the static website is quickly becoming a dinosaur. Even your conversations could be used to deliver personalized content if MindMeld has it’s way. […]

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This week we had plenty of examples of data (our digital wake) being used to personalize the web experience. Whether it’s Criteo’s intent-based display advertising, Gravity’s website personalization or GraphDive’s inferred demographics, the static website is quickly becoming a dinosaur. Even your conversations could be used to deliver personalized content if MindMeld has it’s way.

We also had new features from Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook who are all moving to better define and position themselves. And don’t look now but Tumblr is growing up and has the analytics to prove it.

This is … Marketing Biz.

Introducing Union Metrics for Tumblr

Tumblr Analytics

We’re thrilled to announce Union Metrics for Tumblr. This is the very first measurement product designed specifically for Tumblr that provides analytics based on their entire firehose of data. That includes more than 100 million Tumblr events per day. And, to add to the excitement, Tumblr has officially named us their preferred analytics provider!

This is a big step for Tumblr. An analytics package will give marketers a better idea as to the power and value Tumblr provides. I’m guessing many will be surprised at the levels of engagement and will allocate more resources accordingly.

Foursquare and OpenTable just made it even easier to plan your perfect night out

Now when you’re searching for the perfect dinner spot with Explore on iPhone or Android, you’re just a few taps away from making a reservation. Foursquare’s teamed up with OpenTable to provide painless in-app reservation making at thousands of restaurants across the U.S. and Europe, no phone calls necessary.

Foursquare continues to move quickly and smartly as they try to increase platform engagement and utility. Will this integration drag the OCD check-in crowd (me included) to actually engage with the search features? I’m not sure but I give Foursquare an A for effort.

Criteo completes €30 million Series D led by SoftBank Capital

The company now serves more than 3,000 advertisers worldwide, with the US being the number one revenue generating market. This new investment will help Criteo to continue reinventing the online display advertising market, with a goal of making it as efficient as search marketing.

Marketers should pay close attention to companies like Criteo and Yieldbot who are seeking to change the DNA of display advertising. The age of premium CPMs may be coming to an end faster than any of us thought.

More Tweets to discover

Discover Tab Tweet Stream

Now we’re improving Discover again: when you visit the Discover tab on twitter.com, you’ll see a continuous stream of Tweets, which automatically expand to show you the most relevant stories and most engaging photos.

This isn’t surprising in the least. Twitter clearly understands that users need to be on Twitter and that the platform needs to be far more visual in nature if it’s going to support a robust advertising ecosystem. First the Discover tab, next your own personal feed.

Bottlenose pulls in $1M in funding for social search

Bottlenose infuses social elements into your search “stream” — a term the company uses to refer to the sea of status updates and news. Search for a term on the website, and Bottlenose will surface what the world thinks, organized by relevance to you. Social search is Google’s greatest weakness — fixated on Google+, it does not do the job of incorporating results from the leading social networks.

Actually, Google does incorporate results from other social networks through Google+ but … I digress. Billed as the Now Engine, Bottlenose will have to provide more value to escape the legacy of so many other doomed real-time search engines.

Gravity Gets a $10.6M Vote of Confidence in its Web Personalization Technology

The company helps each of these publishers tune their homepage and mobile apps to the individual user and deliver personalized content based on their unique interests. The underlying technology combines knowledge about a user’s browsing activity within Gravity’s network of partner sites, with that user’s social graph, including comments, Likes, shares, Tweets, and recommendations by friends. Natural language processing and machine learning algorithms then filter the resulting signals to assign meaning and significance to this information.

Web personalization is a powerful way to move toward that mystical one-to-one marketing we were promised. Gravity wants to now take the impressive results they’ve had on individual sites and expand it via an API and content ad exchange. Can personalization become a commoditized service?

Best Buy Hires Top Global Technology TalentBest Buy

(Scott) Durchslag will lead the company’s overall strategy to advance Best Buy’s global ecommerce vision, retail multi-channel capabilities and online business development. He will be responsible for all of Best Buy’s global ecommerce channels, including BestBuy.com and mobile commerce.

Durchslag comes with experience from Expedia, Skype and Motorola. It’s an interesting move but seems to indicate that branding will continue to be more important than trench warfare on search and social.

Square Launches Online Directory for Buyers and Sellers

Square, the company making commerce easy for everyone, today launched Square directory, the first web-based search engine that enables buyers to discover new places to shop, search menus by item, and find nearby loyalty deals and specials. Over 200,000 businesses have already listed themselves in the Square directory, making it easier than ever for sellers to showcase their offerings and for buyers to find new businesses in their area where they can pay with Square Wallet.

Fresh off a ton of funding Square launches a local search engine. The problem I see is that it only includes those businesses that use Square. Coverage will obviously be a problem and I’m not sure businesses will adopt Square just to be ‘on the map’.

Did Facebook Decrease Page Reach?

Facebook Page Reach

The typical Facebook Page in our data set was experiencing 26% Organic Reach the week before the 20th. The week after the 20th, these same Pages were experiencing 19.5%. These Pages lost approximately 6.5% of their Reach after the 20th.

Yes! Facebook decreased the reach of Pages by tweaking their EdgeRank algorithm. This is just another in a long line of moves that makes me believe that Facebook would rather not have Pages at all. Even if that isn’t the case, Facebook is making it more difficult to use the platform without utilizing one of their paid ad products.

GraphDive Distills Inferred Demographic and Interest Graph Data from Social Feeds

The company boils down each piece of social data, including comments, shares, likes, links, and even the age and actions of one’s connections to infer demographic insights about users. Most powerfully, the company delivers an estimated age range for every user, including the 80 percent who don’t list this data on their social networking profiles and others who list it incorrectly. According to co-founder and CEO Shahram Seyedin-Noor this inferred age has proven more than 90 percent accurate in early testing.

What if you could get and append reliable demographics for your anonymous users? As personalization becomes more important and privacy concerns loom this type of inferred demographic information could make a big difference to marketers.

Expect Labs raises $2.4m from Google Ventures, Greylock for predictive computing engine

The San Francisco, California-based company’s upcoming MindMeld iPad app looks pretty killer. The software supposedly can listen in the background of a voice chat and predictively grab information from the Internet for users to interact with and share with each other.

MindMeld looks pretty crazy interesting, surfacing relevant materials to users based on an analysis of voice chat. Imagine having the menu for a specific restaurant being presented to you after it’s been offered up as a suggested place for dinner? This is the future of search. (Why do you think Google invested?)


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

AJ Kohn
Contributor
AJ Kohn is Owner of Blind Five Year Old, a San Francisco Internet Marketing firm specializing in search. An experienced marketing executive with a successful track record spanning 20 years, AJ combines a deep understanding of search marketing with a passion for product strategy and iterative product development, fusing design and user experience with quantitative analysis.

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