The Internet of Things

While everyone is talking about Facebook’s desperate dash for cash (hashtags, really?), its purported rival from down the 101 has recently generated some of its own buzz.  Depending on which report you choose to believe Google+  is either: a) The second most popular social  network with 500 million registered users which will overtake Facebook in 2016 in share activity (+1′s versus ‘shares’ on FB) Source: Janrain and Searchmetrics via  Venturebeat b) The Mountain View Kool Aid is overflowing at Venturebeat since only 2% of social sharing occurs on Google+   Source: Gigya  via Marketingland Firstly lets be clear on the most important point: Nobody you know uses Google+ and nobody is suggesting that more people will be using Google+ than Facebook at any point in the future. Facebook has about a billion registered users and Google+ 500 million.  Its most likely that both will continue to grow in lockstep, Google could narrow the lead through innovations in the home and both will have the necessary resources to buy off any competitor before they become a threat. Neither will ever have Twitters cool factor or real time ‘as it happens’ authority and the price tag will be too rich for anyones blood beyond a middle eastern royal family. First off lets look at some of the data Venturebeat was taken by in its write up about Google Plus. Heres the growth  trajectory of ‘plus ones and shares’ from May 2013 to July 2016 :   Of course 3 years is an eternity in the digital space and who knows what and how we will be sharing on the interwebs. Reading through the report from Searchmetrics is a headache inducing experience given the conflicting statistics and fact forest. For example, in addition to the main attraction of the study (see above chart) referenced in the release, ‘Social sharing on Google+ to overtake Facebook by 2016 predicts new study’  there is a different, longer study, referenced by Searchmetrics in bolstering its optimistic outlook on Google Plus. Here is the chart they link to in their press release: The trajectory of the red line is heading skyward while the blue line is muddling along far behind, hence its easy to presume Google Plus is dominating Facebook  from a growth perspective, which is true.  Here is the problem: Facebook  (as of when is not disclosed) generates more than ten times the shares of Google (29.6BN to only 2BN). So Google has a lot of catching up to do which Searchmetrics assumes will happen.Where this assumption comes unstuck is how Google is adding this activity: forcing all new Android devices to create a Google account, driving total Google+ activations  up while active usage trails behind at less than 25% of total activations. How many of these Google accounts will in time become active is unknown nor what they will be used for in the future. The second half of the Venturebeat piece are some stats from janrain, ‘who makes tools to help web developers use social network logins on their sites’. They keep track of how often Google, Facebook etc are used to login to various web properties, mostly of a social nature. Here is the chart from janrain outlining how competitive Google Plus and Facebook are as an ‘oAuth’ social login: So its a two horse race with the exception of eCommerce logins where Pinterest is king.  Gmail, YouTube and Google.com are ubiquitous with an everyday repeat visition profile that transacts without much thought or attention. Venturebeat clearly includes this chart to support its headline POV that  ’Google+ continues to dominate LinkedIn & Twitter, could catch up to Facebook’ when social logins do not correlate to actual use of Google Plus versus other Google services. Clearly if  you are using Facebook to login to a site you are active on Facebook. At this stage its not looking so good for Google Plus, given a review of the evidence at hand. The picture darkens when we switch to Marketinglands post and the results of a recent (Apr-June 2013) Gigya social login survey :     To clarify both janrain and gigya are using social login data, not the same source, each has a proprietary tracking system, but the same type of activity. jainrain’s research has Google Plus in second place and far ahead of  rivals like Twitter, Yahoo and ‘other’.  Gigya of course has Google Plus lagging far behind not only Facebook but all other rivals including ‘others’, garnering only 2% of all social login activity.   Marketingland notes that ‘When presented with data like this in the past, Google has typically explained the numbers by saying that most sharing on Google+ happens privately, making such sharing invisible to data crawling. But rather than data crawling, Gigya would be measuring clicks via its social tools that are embedded on client sites — so the charts above show that very few visitors to those sites are clicking to share content on Google Plus. In conclusion, its fair to say Google Plus is growing at a rapid clip although mostly due to piggybacking on Android activations. Google is far behind Facebook in the social space and will only catch up by extending the engagement loop to include the home and hoping Twitter stays in its corner. Searchmetrics involvement in this discussion needs to taken with a ladel of salt, they have pushed a controversial and counterintuitive narrative with little in the way of inarguable facts to support it. So a cynical attempt at driving awareness of them by exploiting the short attention span and pageview obsessed tech blogs  like Venturebeat. And here I am 800 words deep on z list blog talking about them too. Well played.      

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Another cracking write up by Marketing land, this time rolling up a handful of new mobile shopping studies from the likes of Nielsen, Pew & Google.  Mobile is where social was 2 year ago- everybody is talking about it but nobody is doing it. Most agencies have yet to think [...]

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I love Twitter, it’s replaced my daily newspaper and as a marketing platform it doesn’t get any better.  Last year I launched a promoted tweet/account campaign in conjunction with the NBA during the Finals.  I blew thru 20k in 1 hour bidding against Gilette, Hyundai and a coterie of big [...]

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Are you ready to have your mind blown? If so, I hear Vegas has some great magic shows.  If your ready to think differently about customer relationship management, I have an off Broadway production of ‘How To Succeed In Business Without Even Trying’ for you.   You know that long [...]

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This blogs mission is to share only the most exciting news about digital marketing. To wit, today’s expose is about media math(s) so consider it a test of your mettle as a media maven. Firstly lets get an important definition and distinction out of the way: AVERAGE: Usually means the [...]

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Ever wonder what your parents and your kids have in common? New research from Nielsen suggests boomers disposable income and millennial’s web savvy lifestyle appeal to advertisers wallet and vanity. Appealing to each generation requires a bespoke (hello London!) approach- think Jay Leno (safe and reassuring) versus Jon Stewart (anti [...]

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Socialmediaexaminer.com, a clip art friendly site with an intuitive name and Steve Irwin design motif (I’m Australian, that’s a compliment), has published its ’2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report‘ (pdf download) which surveyed 3000 marketers with ‘the goal of understanding how they use social media to grow and promote their businesses’. They have kindly written [...]

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As of June 2013 two prominent CEO’s are active on Twitter; Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch, both polemical individuals and magnets for controversy. Perhaps that’s why so few CEO’s want any part of the medium. Piers Morgan, who is not a CEO but counts both individuals as current and former [...]

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As the barriers to entry for hardware production continue to drop and the promise of 3D printing takes off, are we catching a real glimpse of the internet of things to come? Now software developers can design and build connected devices that are all in one products, often funded entirely [...]

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Below is a post from Marketing land rolling up a handful of recent mobile usage surveys (By Experian, Inmobi & IDC)  with the former proclaiming 98 Percent Of Smartphone Owners Don’t Watch Mobile Video.  Previously Google, with a noted vested interest in mobile adoption, announced close to 50% of mobile [...]

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Don’t get too excited but there is new news about Mobile SEO innovations via Bryson Meunier and Marketing Land  this month. Now I know that SEO is about as exciting a read as Moby Dick in Japanese but mobile is the future and there’s nothing we can do about it except come [...]

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The post does not clearly explain what double serving is;  its from a search insider blog  so the assumption is that its a known concept. For the uninitiated we are talking about instances where one company is able to own more than one paid search slot due to running two seemingly distinct [...]

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Most DSPs are similar to AdWords in that they are used to create ad campaigns. But, DSPs provide advertisers access into the vendor-neutral RTB ecosystem; whereas AdWords only allows campaigns to run within the Google network. The differences go beyond that, as well, especially on the display advertising side of [...]

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1. Better Omnibox Better Omnibox is an extension that improves the relevance of your search results, thanks to a combination of your bookmarks and search history. To use Better Omnibox, type “#”, press tab, and then type your search query. When you select one of the results displayed below the Omnibox, [...]

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