Happy Birthday 2.0

The ol’ birthday came around recently, and wow, was it a different experience. No, there were no suprise parties or wild nights I’ll regret; instead, it was social media that turned my birthday upside down.

It all began the day before when I started to get a few Happy Birthdays on Facebook in advance. Then before my work day even got going, I’d been wished happy birthday a few more times by email, Twitter and instant messenger.

At school, when dropping my son off, another mother, whom I’m friends on Facebook, but who otherwise wouldn’t have a clue it was my birthday, surprised me with a birthday wish as well. It shocked me at first, but then I realized “oh right, Facebook gives you birthday reminders…” as do many other social media tools. My colleague, Simon, noted Plaxo had been sending him reminders that it was my birthday for a week! Geesh!

So you get the point. I have NEVER received so many happy birthday wishes EVER. How delightful.

And this drives home one of the biggest benefits of social media — helping you stay top of mind with your chosen friends/followers/connections. Whether they read about your latest work achievement, check out an interesting article you’ve shared — or simply see it’s your birthday. People are remembering you. And that can be good for business and birthdays!

Motrin Moms, Target Too

There are lots of good uses for social media, but I’d like to highlight consumer power today. Social media tools give us the ability to share a message far and wide in near real time. Companies, beware. If you make a misstep, the world is going to hear about it fast and you’d better be listening and prepared to get in on the conversation fast!!

Have you heard about the Motrin ad that got moms across the country in a tizzy? Maybe not, because this amazing incident took place in about the span of 72 hours.

Let me give you the story. Motrin posted an ad on its Web site (watch it above) that used the voice of a mom, citing how while the use of baby carriers and slings made her feel like “an official mom,” they sure made her body hurt and, thus, had to take Motrin. Well, moms across the Internet, bloggers and Twitterers and more, took offense to this seemingly shallow and not very well thought out depiction of moms who carry their babies. And frankly to me, they missed the point. I mean, carriers and slings are supposed to take some of the strain OFF your body. They HELP, not make it worse. But that’s beside the point.

Moms on Twitter created a special group called MotrinMoms just for talking about this topic. They blogged about it, emailed Motrin, called them out on Twitter (read their discussions) and spread the word far and wide. In fact, for a couple of days, it was one of the most popular things discussed on Twitter.

Within 3 days, Motrin posted an apology on its Web site and pulled the ad completely. I think we can thank social media for this quick response. I’m sure it would have happened eventually without Facebook and Twitter and blogs, but moms would have had to write letters, emails, make phone calls — all of which, are not as instantaneous and viral as social media. Kudos to Motrin, however, for listening and doing the right thing. Best thing they could have done in this situation.

Now, on to Target. I hope you will help me spread the word about this as well. Earlier this week, a Mom blogger who writes the “Deal”icious Mom blog, posted a fab deal on Twitter. A Britax carseat, normally $280 now on sale for $42. We really needed a second car seat for our youngest and had been looking for a deal, so as soon as I saw this, I had my husband hop on and buy it. Done, no problem.

Well, two days later, Target sends us an email “canceling” our order because the item was “incorrectly priced”. Here’s what else the email had to say:

“We’re sorry, but we are unable to offer this item for the incorrect price. The correct price is $279.99. We have canceled your order for this item. If you would like to order this item at the correct price, please visit Target.com to check for availability.

Despite our best efforts, a small number of items on our site are occasionally mis-priced. We do, however, verify prices as part of our shipping procedures. If we discover that an item’s correct price is higher than our stated price, we will either contact you for instructions before shipping or cancel your order and notify you of the cancellation. This pricing policy is posted in the Help section on Target.com.”

This is such an example of poor, poor customer service, which I would not expect from Target. In these times of economic uncertainty and predictions of poor holiday sales, do they really want to alienate more customers, a lot of whom are probably moms, their biggest customers?

They have seriously underestimated the value of word of mouth here, as well as the viral abilities to spread this horrible service online. I have started my own group on Twitter – #TargetMoms. See the discussion thus far. Please join me in lobbying Target to correct this grievous mistake. Please blog, Twitter and email them here.

Power to the people man! Thank you social media!

Make Google’s Results Your Own

This looks to be pretty major -Starting today, Google is adding a wiki function to the search results,

“Have you ever wanted to mark up Google search results? Maybe you’re an avid hiker and the trail map site you always go to is in the 4th or 5th position and you want to move it to the top. Or perhaps it’s not there at all and you’d like to add it. Or maybe you’d like to add some notes about what you found on that site and why you thought it was useful. Starting today you can do all this and tailor Google search results to best meet your needs.”

As with all things Google related, people are pretty quick to jump in with their opinions. Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch is not a fan,

“Google search wasn’t broken. It’s one of the few things on the Internet that isn’t. I love it, as does 62% of everyone on the Internet. This new stuff is a mess of arrows and troll comments and stuff moving around the page.”

While someone (sorry, I couldn’t find a name on the blog) over at I’ve Said Too Much, has responded to that with a post simply titled ‘Arrington is Wrong’,

“Google seeks to build a massive distributed curated search into which we are all adding intelligence without ever being aware of it. It is, I would contend, the Big Thing At Google For 2009.”

Meanwhile, over at eWeek, they’re a lot more enthusiastic, seeing it as a boon for users, advertisers and, of course, Google,

“That’s Google’s genius stroke; we believe SearchWiki is letting us control our search destiny, but Google gets to keep putting up more search ads in front of us. Google wants us to find what we’re looking for, and now it has provided a way to keep us in Google.com to do so.”

I’m personally not sure right now.

I think it will be clearly used for Google to start collecting yet more information about what people think of the search results – with the positives and negatives that suggests. People will try and game the system, promoting themselves and so on. If, however, enough people use it, then hopefully the ‘wisdom of crowds’ will help to improve things by adding that human element which is often missing from Google.

That said, I can’t help but agree with Arrington that it looks a mess. Remember how clean Google used to be?

When they first launched it was one of the major things that set them apart. All that lovely white space. The sponsored links were completely separate from the natural SERPs. No nasty banner ads. Just good search results.

But now, between the maps, local search, images, addresses and so on – these additional buttons just seem like yet more clutter.

Will it work? I don’t know. If I search for something, I’m used to Google telling me what I need to know. Using their example from above, I would not use Google to revisit a trail map site time after time, I would bookmark it instead, either on my PC or with Delicious.

I can see times when it would be useful to remove particularly bad results, but how often am I going to suggest a site be added?

And the notes I suspect, will be more trolling than useful unfortunately. I’ve tried a few so far, and there’s nothing that enhances my searching at all. A search for Liverpool FC, for instance, just has 3 right now:

Comment by: Searcher, 9:05am – searching: lfc
“great”

Comment by: Mike, 6:41am – searching: liverpool
“Liverpool FC”

Comment by: 360spin, 8:39am – searching: liverpool
“Wow!”

How do they help me at all?

Perhaps Google is threatened by the growth of social networks and feels that is one area search can be improved. I’m not so sure.

What do you think?

Does Yahoo Hate You? (then why won’t they listen?)

After giving  Google some limited praise last week for the additional reporting stats on their partner networks, I thought it only fair that I balance things by showing how it compares at Yahoo.

And, well, it’s not good!

Not only does Yahoo not allow you to see the stats from the search partner network, they don’t even allow you to opt-out of the partner network! Instead you can block up to 250 domains.  Unfortunately the search partners are SO numerous, and SO spammy that it’s like playing whack-a-mole trying to keep up with them.

As we have better and better website analytics reporting all the time, from Google, Webtrends, Omniture and so on,  it becomes easier to judge where best to spend your advertising money.

I’ve been using that PPC engine from GoTo, through Overture, up to the present YSM brand, and while things at Google, and even Microsoft AdCenter, have improved, the quality from Yahoo has dropped significantly.

For example, this is from one of our client’s reports from last month:

As you can see, the top referring domain on one day was Shopica.com, which sent over 4 times as much traffic as Google. What do you mean you’ve never heard of them? They’re 4 times as popular as Google.

Unfortunately, as we couldn’t see a single lead, booking, inquiry or anything as a result of that traffic, we put Shopica on the blocked list. However, it takes Yahoo a while to update, so the next day, we got even more visitors from them. And, even more impressively, all the visitors from them came in a one hour period:

Wow!

No doubt you’ll be surprised to learn that Shopica get a cut of all the ad money that I pay to Yahoo for that traffic.  As does Nexplore, who were the next day’s bonus traffic:

Not as impressive, but considering we’re paying around $1.75/click for some of these terms, not to be sniffed at either.

I spoke to my Yahoo Account Manager, who was very polite and understanding, and agreed it was “junk” but said that there wasn’t anything they could do about it. Oh, and no refund either.

What I don’t understand it why doesn’t Yahoo just let us opt out?

Yes, the reach is far greater with all of these sites in the network, but if the end result is a waste of money, people will just stop advertising.

As we learn more and more about the quality of traffic from different sites, it’s hard to justify spending $10,000+ a month (as this client does) on “junk”.

It’s not that we don’t want to use Yahoo, it’s we don’t want to use Yahoo’s partners. Cut them out and we’ll still spend the same amount – only we’ll get more qualified visitors and Yahoo will get to keep more of the money.

Everybody wins, right?

Web 2.0: Connecting Us on Election Day

This election was one that will go down in history for a multitude of reasons, but the one I’d like to highlight is the role of the Web, not just in campaigning, but on Election Day itself. For the first time, people had access to tools online that allowed them to share in real time their experience and their feelings and emotions, good or bad.

Watching Twitter on Tuesday, I saw people all across the country detailing their experience in line, how long they had to wait, problems that were happening in different districts, and much, much more. Facebook was similar. Status updates expressed people’s frustrations, pride, excitement… People shared videos, articles and news as it appeared about the election.

Personally, by watching locals on Twitter and Facebook, I got a great feel for what I was in store for when I went to vote and how long I could expect to wait. When I stood in line with nothing to do but read a magazine for an hour and a half, I instead chose to “tweet” my experience, even posting a photo taken with my iPhone of the line. Even better, while Twittering, I discovered another Twitterer who was in my line and introduced myself. Very cool.

Did you share your experience online? Please share how!

Folks also posted videos of their experience, with one guy even posting a video with supposed Black Panthers outside a polling booth with a billy club! True or not, this is a perfect example of citizen journalism, people putting the information about their experiences out there for unfiltered consumption, no media to choose what gets through or doesn’t. Course that also means that a lot of junk gets through.

This election brought a lot of people together (and a few people apart, but that’s par for politics) behind a common cause, and the Web and social media helped accelerate that process. It enabled us to connect, explore our common bonds, our shared experiences (waiting hours in line) in real time, connecting us in ways we’ve never experienced before during an election. No matter your politics, that is surely a good thing.