October 22nd, 2009 Google, Bing to incorporate tweets in its results – Good or Bad?

In my opinion, people typically search under these conditions:
1. Exploratory, discovery type of search

For example: Like last night as I was helping out my daughter with her science project, I really needed to look things up! This is the type of search where the results from Google, Bing, Kosmix, etc are of great help.

2. Real time search
For example: When I need to know what people are currently talking about Kanye West, or the latest LCD TV. For this, search engines focusing on Twitter feeds are perfect.

And now, we are talking about combining both of them!

I may not need to see the tweets of all internet junkies every time I search, especially not when I am searching for topics of my daughter’s science project. My needs are similar to a visit to the good old library!

I will definitely need to see the tweets of all internet junkies every time I search for which laptop or TV to buy. My needs are similar to asking around for feedback and understanding general trends.

The point, I am trying to make is, what I search for, my needs, my expected results are all different all the time – and search engines should respect that, understand that and offer me appropriate results.

While analyzing the historical trends, relevancy and popularity from tweets and incorporating them in search results might be good, displaying search results sprinkled with tweets may not be required all the time.

I think, it should be upto the users to decide and inform the search engine what they expect out of it – and the search engines should behave accordingly.

If I asked for the tweets in my results, only then give it to me – else its spam for me!

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September 28th, 2009 CPM – Does it makes any sense any more?

I have been following some conversations on TechCrunch about the relevancy of the CPM model in today’s world. – Let’s Kill the CPM

And I don’t agree to that call and here’s why:

CPM has been and always will be the most commonly used mechanism for advertisers to generate brand awareness. Those full-page ads in newspapers (funny how no one talks about newspaper ads these days, at all!), billboards on the freeways, banner ads on any portal, relate to something more fundamental as to how human beings think and make decisions – to buy or not to buy; if to buy, then when to buy and for how much.
But yes, the technology for delivering ads on a CPM basis will definitely change and make this an effective mechanism for advertisers.

To illustrate my point, consider this example: If you are on a page reading about Kanye West’s latest blockbuster release, you really do not care about (and thus your brain would automatically tune out) the ad for reducing your mortgage payments. On the other hand, if you see an ad for the latest lineup of shoes by him, you would look at it and if the message were sharp enough, you would probably click on it too! Agreed that clicking on an ad and landing on a page does not mean a sale, but atleast it served the purpose of generating awareness about that specific brand in your mind.

Thus, advertisers should set their expectations as to what they can possibly achieve from a CPM campaign - Generating brand awareness with a possibility of some sales.

Now, the main point that I am making in my example was that the CPM model worked - but only because of its contextual relevancy. Now, in addition to the page relevancy, add a toping of site visitor’s interest relevancy, so that in our example above, the ads were about the latest lineup of shoes only because the visitor at some point in the past on some other site, had indicated an interest in buying shoes – then we have a model that really works.

And today in this digital world of the Internet, we can rely on technology to give us this mechanism of providing contextual relevancy – both for the page the visitor is currently reading (viewing) and the interests that the visitor had expressed in the past

While this is NOT a shameless act of promoting my own company, MyContextualAds.com, is exactly on this mission and so had to mention about it.

All in all, models that have worked in the past, super charged with sophisticated technologies will herald the new age of advertising models – whereby the ads generated will be relevant to YOU, the buyer – the center of the ad world!

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