Talk to ME
Two topics for your tech-life edification this month, both related to our social media lives. As sort of an aside, I realized how much social media has come to mean when several friends and I were discussing how we handled our "social media time." We acknowledged that Facebook, Google+, and assorted others were now simply all part of our routines, like checking our emails first thing in the morning. What we learn from these various platforms often sets the tone for our days, or provides the information we need to simply do our jobs.
While most of us who have computers have succumbed to Facebook pages, you may or may not be directly involved with a business page. It's highly likely that you've "liked" a business (you used to be a fan, I'm not sure why that changed), or you may have created a page for your business, or be aware that the company you work for has a page. It's more or less another website for your company, the big - BIG - difference being that information is pushed to subscribers (once you've "liked" a company page, you will be notified when that organization adds content), and because of the nature of social media, we're much more likely to like a business on Facebook than we are to subscribe to a company's webpage via RSS, though many companies offer that option. Moreover, even if you do take the step of subscribing to a website's RSS, you will still have to access that content via a reader or in some other way, whereas with Facebook, information will be delivered to your door via your newsfeed. So easy.
Now you may recall that not too long ago, a new social platform took the Internet by storm: Pinterest. This was a highly specific way of posting your likes and favorites to "boards," which you could then share with followers. You would be notified in the manner you preferred about updates, you were free to follow one or all boards your friends created (so you might follow books but not food, for example), and you were free to choose from a selection of board types, or create your own. For whatever reason, this caught the public fancy, and pretty soon everybody was on Pinterest.
I played with it for a while in the beginning, but while I still enjoy checking out pins from some of my more creative friends, I rarely pin things myself (the whole idea evolved from artists' pin boards, or inspiration boards, where they would pin designs, ideas, colors, photos, etc. to give them focus for a project). I thought I might keep boards of books or movies, but I find that blogs are more effective for us writer-types, as we work in less visual inspirations. Granted, you can post quotes and books and so on, and many people do, but I just never got the habit.
Me aside, lots and lots of people did, and Pinterest was the darling of the Internet for a while. Still is, really. But now Pinterest has created "business pages," and some speculate that advertising is sure to follow. Or even, possibly, a "pay to pin" option. Right now, the only difference between a personal page and a business page is that you have to "authenticate" your account. Pinterest is very, er, interested in businesses converting from personal to business accounts, and will be adding incentives and features that should (oh, I can't help it!) interest business accounts.
Along similar lines, we know that Facebook went from a college cutie ripoff to a full-blown social network that now emphasizes business pages, and more than that, advertising.
I was actually not anti-advertising - at least in its early incarnation - on Facebook. That's because the ads tended to relate to interests I had expressed - bands, foods, fashions, and so on. Google was doing something similar with its Gmail advertising. It would parse email threads, and using words and expressions, make a best-guess at what you were talking about, and then serve you ads based on a subject you appeared to be interested in. This type of advertising doesn't annoy me nearly as much as random advertising, or tv-type advertising where you are clustered demographically, and based upon what seem to me to be wild assumptions, offer you ads based on your choice of a single tv show. Obviously, a service that has a much broader glimpse into your life and choices is going to do a much better job of telling you about products and services your likely to be interested in.
The Big Thing in online, socially based advertising now is something called "real-time bidding," or RTB.
To understand what that is, you'll need a little bit of understanding of how it all worked pre-RTB. Essentially, the model was all based on key words and phrases. As an advertiser, you could bid on a word or a phrase. The more popular the word or phrase in searches (or email, or whatever), the more expensive that word or phrase would be. This clearly put many advertisers out of the running on certain expressions or words.
However, it served the platforms very well as they got the best possible dollar for the individual. We're not talking about a silly thing like placement in the Super Bowl - that's just entertainment any more. (TV ad pricing was first based on the popularity of a television show or event; then it evolved a bit and pricing was based not just on popularity, but advertisers would also get a little information about the type of viewer a particular program was likely to attract, and not bother advertising Anthropologie to a seniors-only audience.)
Now, of course, social media has made our lives an even more open book. Demographers don't have to dig - we hand them whatever they want to know about us! Amazon was probably the first to exploit this deep knowledge of our behaviors. Computers, of course, make this type of correlation and prediction based on sheer masses of data sets manageable. If I know what ten things you've done, and what ten things a million other people have done when looking for a similar result, I have pretty good chances of predicting what you're going to do the next time - and what else you might be likely to do. So Amazon, in its own interests, would offer me products likely to interest me.
Now take that kind of knowledge and offer it to advertisers: Nancy Roberts likes this type of music, attends concerts, owns a video camera and uses it, reads a lot of science fiction, etc. etc. So we can conclude that, based on her interests and behavior, and the interests and behaviors of millions of others, she's likely to pay close attention if we advertise your product to her.
Ok, so that much has been established for a while now. And with Facebook, I've already established all sorts of interests and behaviors (and who knows what else goes on behind the scenes in terms of data sharing?) upon which Facebook can base the advertising it offers me.
Now add to that real-time. What's that? Simply this: you ask for something - a webpage. What ads should you get with it? Here's Wikipedia's dumbing down of the behind-the-scenes millisecond activity: "Let us explain with a simple real time example, a user heads to a page on a publisher’s website, causing it to start loading. In the same instant the publisher sends out a “bid request” to tens of hundreds of potential advertisers saying, “We’ve got this user who is 30, Indian, male and based in New Jersey, US, and recently searched for return air tickets to Delhi, opening a page on our site. How much are you willing to bid for being the only ad on this page?”Within about 100 milliseconds the publisher gets bids from different advertisers, which then analyses to figure out the highest bidder and the brands being advertised. The winner is alerted by the publisher and allowed to place its ad on the page. The remarkable thing about this entire process is how fast and how often it takes place. The entire series of to-and-fro communication between publisher and advertisers takes place in 300-500 milliseconds, causing no visible delay to the user. This process is repeated for every ad slot on a page."
Holy cow. (In this case, maybe literally!)
And the real kicker is this: the more data sets are collected, the more specific the information that can be gathered (what season is it? has the user just had a child? is there an election going on? etc.), the more deeply correlations are analyzed, the better advertisers are going to get at all this - the more targeted, the more individualized the advertising will become. For my money, this is both a good thing (at least I'll only be pestered by ads for things I'm really interested in) and bad (it's a little scary, right?). But it's a sure thing.
While most of us who have computers have succumbed to Facebook pages, you may or may not be directly involved with a business page. It's highly likely that you've "liked" a business (you used to be a fan, I'm not sure why that changed), or you may have created a page for your business, or be aware that the company you work for has a page. It's more or less another website for your company, the big - BIG - difference being that information is pushed to subscribers (once you've "liked" a company page, you will be notified when that organization adds content), and because of the nature of social media, we're much more likely to like a business on Facebook than we are to subscribe to a company's webpage via RSS, though many companies offer that option. Moreover, even if you do take the step of subscribing to a website's RSS, you will still have to access that content via a reader or in some other way, whereas with Facebook, information will be delivered to your door via your newsfeed. So easy.
Now you may recall that not too long ago, a new social platform took the Internet by storm: Pinterest. This was a highly specific way of posting your likes and favorites to "boards," which you could then share with followers. You would be notified in the manner you preferred about updates, you were free to follow one or all boards your friends created (so you might follow books but not food, for example), and you were free to choose from a selection of board types, or create your own. For whatever reason, this caught the public fancy, and pretty soon everybody was on Pinterest.
I played with it for a while in the beginning, but while I still enjoy checking out pins from some of my more creative friends, I rarely pin things myself (the whole idea evolved from artists' pin boards, or inspiration boards, where they would pin designs, ideas, colors, photos, etc. to give them focus for a project). I thought I might keep boards of books or movies, but I find that blogs are more effective for us writer-types, as we work in less visual inspirations. Granted, you can post quotes and books and so on, and many people do, but I just never got the habit.
Me aside, lots and lots of people did, and Pinterest was the darling of the Internet for a while. Still is, really. But now Pinterest has created "business pages," and some speculate that advertising is sure to follow. Or even, possibly, a "pay to pin" option. Right now, the only difference between a personal page and a business page is that you have to "authenticate" your account. Pinterest is very, er, interested in businesses converting from personal to business accounts, and will be adding incentives and features that should (oh, I can't help it!) interest business accounts.
Along similar lines, we know that Facebook went from a college cutie ripoff to a full-blown social network that now emphasizes business pages, and more than that, advertising.
I was actually not anti-advertising - at least in its early incarnation - on Facebook. That's because the ads tended to relate to interests I had expressed - bands, foods, fashions, and so on. Google was doing something similar with its Gmail advertising. It would parse email threads, and using words and expressions, make a best-guess at what you were talking about, and then serve you ads based on a subject you appeared to be interested in. This type of advertising doesn't annoy me nearly as much as random advertising, or tv-type advertising where you are clustered demographically, and based upon what seem to me to be wild assumptions, offer you ads based on your choice of a single tv show. Obviously, a service that has a much broader glimpse into your life and choices is going to do a much better job of telling you about products and services your likely to be interested in.
The Big Thing in online, socially based advertising now is something called "real-time bidding," or RTB.
To understand what that is, you'll need a little bit of understanding of how it all worked pre-RTB. Essentially, the model was all based on key words and phrases. As an advertiser, you could bid on a word or a phrase. The more popular the word or phrase in searches (or email, or whatever), the more expensive that word or phrase would be. This clearly put many advertisers out of the running on certain expressions or words.
However, it served the platforms very well as they got the best possible dollar for the individual. We're not talking about a silly thing like placement in the Super Bowl - that's just entertainment any more. (TV ad pricing was first based on the popularity of a television show or event; then it evolved a bit and pricing was based not just on popularity, but advertisers would also get a little information about the type of viewer a particular program was likely to attract, and not bother advertising Anthropologie to a seniors-only audience.)
Now, of course, social media has made our lives an even more open book. Demographers don't have to dig - we hand them whatever they want to know about us! Amazon was probably the first to exploit this deep knowledge of our behaviors. Computers, of course, make this type of correlation and prediction based on sheer masses of data sets manageable. If I know what ten things you've done, and what ten things a million other people have done when looking for a similar result, I have pretty good chances of predicting what you're going to do the next time - and what else you might be likely to do. So Amazon, in its own interests, would offer me products likely to interest me.
Now take that kind of knowledge and offer it to advertisers: Nancy Roberts likes this type of music, attends concerts, owns a video camera and uses it, reads a lot of science fiction, etc. etc. So we can conclude that, based on her interests and behavior, and the interests and behaviors of millions of others, she's likely to pay close attention if we advertise your product to her.
Ok, so that much has been established for a while now. And with Facebook, I've already established all sorts of interests and behaviors (and who knows what else goes on behind the scenes in terms of data sharing?) upon which Facebook can base the advertising it offers me.
Now add to that real-time. What's that? Simply this: you ask for something - a webpage. What ads should you get with it? Here's Wikipedia's dumbing down of the behind-the-scenes millisecond activity: "Let us explain with a simple real time example, a user heads to a page on a publisher’s website, causing it to start loading. In the same instant the publisher sends out a “bid request” to tens of hundreds of potential advertisers saying, “We’ve got this user who is 30, Indian, male and based in New Jersey, US, and recently searched for return air tickets to Delhi, opening a page on our site. How much are you willing to bid for being the only ad on this page?”Within about 100 milliseconds the publisher gets bids from different advertisers, which then analyses to figure out the highest bidder and the brands being advertised. The winner is alerted by the publisher and allowed to place its ad on the page. The remarkable thing about this entire process is how fast and how often it takes place. The entire series of to-and-fro communication between publisher and advertisers takes place in 300-500 milliseconds, causing no visible delay to the user. This process is repeated for every ad slot on a page."
Holy cow. (In this case, maybe literally!)
And the real kicker is this: the more data sets are collected, the more specific the information that can be gathered (what season is it? has the user just had a child? is there an election going on? etc.), the more deeply correlations are analyzed, the better advertisers are going to get at all this - the more targeted, the more individualized the advertising will become. For my money, this is both a good thing (at least I'll only be pestered by ads for things I'm really interested in) and bad (it's a little scary, right?). But it's a sure thing.
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