Tag Archives: Digital marketing

March 19, 2012 · 10:27 am

I Need To Call Dunbar – What’s His Number?

How many people do have in your Rolodex? Actually, do you even have a Rolodex or is the contact list on your phone your go-to list? How many friends on Facebook? How many LinkedIn connections? How many Twitter followers? How many folks do you know from the golf club or the gym or the playground where you take your kids who don’t fall into any of the above categories?

English: present model of Rolodex card file, c...

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For me, the answer is a lot, as in thousands, and I don’t even consider myself to be as socially connected as many folks I know. I also do have a Rolodex – actually four of them – that’s filled with business cards of people who, for the most part are not in the other databases.  Obviously, I am not trying to maintain on-going social relationships with each and every one of them.  That’s where my buddy Dunbar comes in.

Dunbar’s number is an estimation of the number of people with whom one can maintain a stable social relationship.  This theorem was developed way back in the digital dark age of 1992, before interacting with hundreds of your high school friends, and chatting to another hundred college buddies was something you did every five or ten years, not daily.  Dunbar set the number around 150.  Other studies have set comparable numbers at 231 and 290, a fraction of what any college kid has as Facebook friends alone.

Since this is a business blog, I’ll throw out the obvious question.  If we’re trying to engage our customers in conversation as we would friends, are we limited to the Dunbar number with respect to having those sorts of relationships?  Are we kidding ourselves if we believe that an individual will use one of their 150 or even 300 relationship slots for a business entity instead of a cousin?  Or maybe there needs to be another study on how businesses fit into the social ecosystem.

I think Dunbar was right.  When I think about it, the folks to whom I’m truly connected is a small fraction of those connections I have.  I know a network like Path is trying to create that subset by limiting your connections to 150.  What’s your take on that?  Is there an opportunity for a business to create a 150 person VIP network?

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February 28, 2012 · 9:43 am

I Can Do It All By Myself

For those of you with children (or those of you who can recall when the adults you’ve raised were children), you might remember one of the great parental moments.  It’s the one where the child – probably only 4 or so – realizes that they can do things for themselves.  Maybe it’s pour a drink of water or maybe it’s get dressed on their own.  No matter which of the dozens of tasks we as parents undertook for our kids, at some point we all hear “I can do that all by myself!”

I bring this up because by the time  most folks are old enough to use the web, they can do most things by themselves.  Which is why I can’t understand many sites’ choices to present audio or video elements which aren’t user-initiated.  As someone who used to run a large site that made a fair amount of money based on ad views, I get that showing more ads is a good thing.  But as someone who spends too much time (and more than a second is too much time) finding and closing the pane providing me with an annoying sound or a video that’s running down my laptop’s battery, I can’t help but wonder if web-masters are doing this just to increase their video views, ads served, or audio files played.  They can’t be doing it because users like it.  More importantly, advertisers are starting to ask the same question and about how it affects consumer response to and engagement with their ad.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, auto-initiated content is that which plays automatically when users visit a web page.  According to SpotXchange, which is a video ad network and market:

 There is a significant difference between auto- and user-initiated video ads, which results in two different user experiences.  An auto-initiated ad plays automatically when a user visits a web page, but the video ad does not block the user from viewing intended content.  User-initiated ads must be viewed by consumers before reaching their desired content, such as a video or game.  Because higher levels of consumer engagement are associated with user-initiated video ads, advertisers are willing to pay a premium for them.

By not letting the user decide what they want to see, publishers may actually be shooting themselves in the foot, since the value of the content displayed is diminished.  We can all do the web all by ourselves and choose what we want to see and hear.  Turns out it’s better business too to let the user decide.  Imagine that!

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February 27, 2012 · 11:04 am

Who ARE These People?

I consider myself to be a friendly guy. Maybe my gregarious nature is what helped me to be successful in sales; maybe it’s what helps me play golf or hang out at a party with total strangers and be comfortable. But I’ve been thinking lately that maybe I’ve over-reached a bit.  You see, lately when I look at my LinkedIn connections or even some of my Facebook friends, I wonder who they are.  Why that’s a little scary to me is that I’ve really tried over the years to keep Facebook to my personal friends, not business connections or people who know others that I know but whom I’ve never met.  I used to have a LinkedIn policy that I had to have met the connection in person but that went out the window a long time ago.  Still, I try not to accept random people as connections and yet I’ve got a few dozen that I can’t place at all.

Turns out I’m not alone.  This is from the Pew Internet and American Life study:

Social network users are becoming more active in pruning and managing their accounts. Women and younger users tend to unfriend more than others.

About two-thirds of internet users use social networking sites (SNS) and all the major metrics for profile management are up, compared to 2009: 63% of them have deleted people from their “friends” lists, up from 56% in 2009; 44% have deleted comments made by others on their profile; and 37% have removed their names from photos that were tagged to identify them.

That’s less of a big deal to businesses than this:

Privacy appears to be the new preference of social media denizens. The majority of social network users (58 percent) have set their profiles to private, and just 20 percent of adults said their profiles remained public.

Marketers have a vested interest both in networks being large and users being discoverable.  When we all start to contract those networks – who ARE these all these “friends” anyway? – it runs contrary to those interests.

The above two items gave me pause.  You?

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