Usability Notes - by Chris Baker

ROI of Social Media Marketing: on average, nearly breaking even

Marketing Sherpa have just published their 2011 Social Marketing Benchmark Report.  There's an interesting graph in the promotional email about this report, showing the ROI that marketers are reporting, in a survey of 3,342 responses. The mode is a 95% ROI (25% of respondents) but about 30% of respondents said they were making a profit (i.e. ROI more than 100%). Forty-three percent were not yet in happy street, making an ROI of 50% or less.

 

There are some more samples and stats (and a link to buy the full report) on MarketingSherpa's site

eBook pricing problems

Publishers are now under 2 investigations about price-fixing of eBooks (just investigations - no proof so far that anyone has done anything illegal). Whatever happens, the episode raises some interesting points about how publishers, wholesalers and customers do businesss.

Until recently, publishers typically sold by the Wolesale model. The publisher and wholesaler agree a price and a number of printed books to be shipped to the wholesaler. It is then the wholesaler's business to decide what price to charge their customer. Since the collapse of the Net Book Agreement in the 1990s, a UK publisher has had no legal right to dictate retail prices. Probably that has resulted in a lot of books that I have bought since then have been cheaper for me as a consumer. But it has caused some discomfort in the publishing industry, and probably not just moaning about having to work harder to survive in an industry that has become more competitive.

Critics of the wholesale model say that it leads towards monopolies in book-selling. A wholesaler doing large volume can arm-wrestle better with publishers over terms, and then gain competitive advantage from that lower price. That can drive up market share, enabling the seller to get better terms out of the publisher next time. And so it goes. Moreover, sellers with enough volume can afford to sell some titles as a loss-leader (i.e. making a loss on every copy sold but hoping to make up in other ways). Later Harry Potter novels famously were used as loss-leaders, with stories of small bookshops buying stock from supermarkets and reselling, as they could get a better price there than from the publisher or their usual wholesaler. Only those with deep pockets can loss-lead, and trade magazines at the time had a lot of copy about the fairness of all this.

Perhaps because of these problems, a number of publishers are using the Agency model for eBooks. In this, the publisher and wholesaler agree a price and a percentage commission that the wholesaler gets. With eBooks, it would not be necessary to agree a quantity of copies - the agent could sell what they can and the publisher could find  out how things went from the sales data the seller provides. Apple use this model for iTunes, for example.

But once publishers are again able to set prices (nowadays without legal cover from the Net Book Agreeement) publishers have to be very careful what they discuss with each other, lest they move into cartel land.

It is a confusing time for the industry - I recently was discussing the fate of fiction publishing with my friend the author and lecturer Anthony Nanson. We couldn't decide whether a combination of price-cutting and piracy would render today's publishing models mostly un-economic, or whether there would be a new golden age.

 

 

Social media and the weak tie

Malcaolm Gladwell recently wrote a thought-provoking article "Why the revolution will not be tweeted". His argument is that Twitter (and other social media) are good at "the weak tie" -

"The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.

This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism."

His example of "high-risk activism" is involvement in the US Civil Rights movement - activists ran a substantial risk of threats, abuse and violence.

The article has been the source of several rebuttals - by Chris Lake on eConsultancy  and by Leo Mirani in the Guardian, for example, but these authors seem not to be disagreeing with Malcolm Gladwell as much as they might seem to be - Mr Gladwell does not (as you can see from the quote above) say that social media are ineffective or useless, just that they are only good for certain things (and potentially VERY good at those).

What blurs this further is that the people who follow your tweets or are your facebook friends do quite likely include those who most passionately and unconditionally wish you or your cause success. But they are probably right up the top of the Zipf curve, greatly outnumbered by people to whom you are not massively important (at least not yet). Zipf curves seem very common in volunteer- or activist-powered areas: you get a Zipf curve when a small number of people contribute a lot, a larger number contribute some, and most contribute hardly at all - here's an earlier Usability Notes post on the zipf curve and user-generated sites.

There are many cases where getting many to do a little is more effective than getting  few to do a lot. As a humble example, take the Oxford Oxfam Group street collection for the victims of the January 2010 earhtquake in Haiti (I'm picking this example because I'm currently the Chair of the Oxford Oxfam Group). Facebook was notably successful as one means of spreading the word that we needed collectors. Standing on a  Oxford street corner for some hours on a winter Saturday strikes me as a reasonable-sized ask: it's cold and boring, though of course well worthwhile for the money collected. But, let's face it, it's most unlikely to risk intimidation, abuse or violence as Civil Rights campaigners did.

 

 

 

 

 

Kids' usage of parents iPhones

I have just come across research from Greystripe about how parents let their kids use the parental iPhone. Parental iPhones are key for developers of  apps for younger children, who are unlikely to have their own machine. (The typical iPod touch user is a teenager or young man, and the typical iPhone owner is a middle-aged man, according to demographics I reported in an earlier post .)

The research "How Moms use their iPhones" Includes a survey of how the kids use Mum's phone (or "Mom's" since this is US data). 59% of Moms let the kids use their phone. Of these, 41% had bought games for the kids, and 20% had bought educational content. As regards age of the children, 29% of the moms had children between 0 and 4, while 43% had children between 15 and 17. The survey also covered the role of iPhones in shopping (use of the phone to make or email shopping lists, or to locate stores or compare prices and download coupons)

 

Thanks to @ruhanirabin whose tweet alerted me to these results!

More smartphone developers choosing Android, but iPhone still ahead (Flurry data)

Smartphone developers choosing to include the Flurry usage statistics tool in their apps tend to contact Flurry early in application development. So Flurry have a leading indicator of what app developments are getting underway. They have used this information to produce a lot of interesting stats about the smartphone market, in what they call the "Smartphone Industry Pulse (July 2009)"  Data from Flurry features in my last post , but I also wanted to discuss their data on projects getting underway for Android and for iPhone.

In the first half of 2009, the number of Android projects incorporating Flurry increased - Android projects made up 10% in January, up to 20% in June (over 200 projects started in June). Flurry have this rather striking graph:

This graph looks pretty alarming for Apple, until one also knows that the total number of smartphone apps was increasing dramatically over this time. The following chart shows the number of iPhone projects - rising from 200 in February to just over 1,000 in July.

(The corresponding Android graph is available on the the "Smartphone Industry Pulse (July 2009)" post of the Flurry blog, along with much other interesting data).

Some thoughts about this:

First the caveat - these data are only about projects that include Flurry (possibly the pattern would be different if we had data about all the apps that don't plan to track usage)

Secondly - loss of market share by Apple is probably inevitable now that other players are in the market big time.But since when was Apple about market share? I see them as a sort of computer  Bang & Olufsen - making highly designed, high quality and expensive stuff for the part of the market that likes it, and leaving other companies to scrap over the mass-market.

Lastly, I wonder how many of the Andriod projects are apps that are ALSO being developed for iPhone. As far as I know it is difficult and risky to develop the one app for multiple platforms (technical issues, and Apple are said to be sniffy about passing any app not built with their SDK ). So developers may be forced into running twin projects, just we we used to do in the late '90s to develop desktop apps for Mac and PC.

I have unhappy memories about developing for the cranky PowerMacs of that era!  You could use file extensions that had profound powers on the Macintosh OS. On a good day that was excellent, but on most days you ended up with a gang of file extensions fighting each other like a sackful of cats until the OS keeled over. To make things more frustrating, patches to the OS would suddenly declare a particular file extension persona non grata and uninstall it. That happen to one of my projects just before it was about to launch. Hence the joke of the time - "Q. What does MACINTOSH stand for? A. Most Applications Crash, If Not, The Operating System Hangs." [For balance I should say that the counter-joke wasn't bad either: "Q. What does MICROSOFT stand for? A. Most Intelligent Customers Realize Our Software Only Fools Toddlers ] All that put me right off Macs until quite recently - and should remind me to be a bit patient with strictnesses Apple might want to impose about use of their SDK.

One more thing - if you include Flurry on an Apple application, do you have a MacFlurry? ;-)

eBooks second most active smartphone apps category: Flurry

Flurry provide a usage statistics service for smartphone applications, collecting data when the application is downloaded or used. As a result they have interesting data on the state of the smartphone market.

Eyecatching for me is the chart in the "Smartphone industry pulse July 2009" showing that customer use of eBooks is rising quickly and is second only to games:

The data probably underestimate the situation, as far from all eBooks will have Flurry embedded in them.

In another analysis "Mobile apps: Models, Money and Loyalty" Flurry have also looked at how frequently apps are used, and how likely users are to return to them after 90 days. That suggests that books are used intensely (maybe 10 times a week), but are not used much after 90 days. The customer has finished the book by then, presumably.

For the technically minded, Flurry describe the technical workings of their service thus:

Flurry Analytics places a lightweight agent into an application, so that performance data are tracked, logged and reported back for analysis. This information is confidential and available only to the developer to analyze in aggregate. Individual user data is not identifiable. Developers are provided a wealth of metrics around usage behavior, any custom event they choose to track and technical information about the device, firmware version, carrier and more.

Demographics (age) data for iPhone and iPod Touch users

I've finally found some demographic data for iphone and ipod touch users. The data come from a survey done by Admob and comScore, as published on the AdMob blog  and reviewed by BusinessWire (which has figures not included in the blog post). The survey was in the first half of 2009 (presumably in the US, though this is not stated). I was after age data, which gives me this chart:

 
iPod touch ownership was highest among the 13-17 years age group (46%) falling sharply after age 25 (23% of ipod touch users were 18-24, 12% were 25-34 and 12% 35-49. After that it's single figures). iPhone owners are older - only 6% were 13-17; 20% were 18-24; 27% were 25-34; 31% were 35-49. This is pretty much what one would expect:  iPod touches are cheaper and can be bought for a one-off payment (no ongoing mobile phone bill). So they are a possible (generous) Christmas or birthday present. In the UK at least, you still have to sign up for some hefty costs to own an iphone. So probably another case of "you can tell the men from the boys by the cost of their toys" as a friend of mine used to say. Speaking of men and boys, >70% of the owners (of both iphone and ipod touch) were male.

For other data (income, how mobile usage compares with usage of other media) check out the original article at AdMob

These data may go some way to explaining an interesting observation from "Just Another iPhone Blog" - "Do Crap Apps have legs?" The author comments on the curious popularity of "Crap Apps" - (applications that are trivial and/or  puerile).

Pains of moving online from print - What went wrong at Rocky Mountain News

The Rocky Mountain News was Colorado’s oldest newspaper, founded in 1859. It published its last edition in February 2009. John Temple, the last Editor, has a fascinating article on what he thinks went wrong and what lessons publishers can learn from the paper's demise, especially in Rocky Mountain News' attempts to move online. In a nutshell, he thinks that the web operation suffered from being though of as something that had to serve and make revenue for the old "core" (print) product, and which got saddled by practices, rules and mindsets of the print publication. Fascinating and sometimes painful reading for print publishers trying to manage an online product as well.

How to find promising keywords for Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns

How to work out which words to choose when optimizing your site for search engines? Once you have decided which words to use, you can buy advertising that will appear on search engine results when your key terms are typed. And you ensure that your copy contains these words (within reason - search engines are sophisticated  enough to penalize sites that simply list all the likely terms). That should make it more likely that customers find your site in search engine results. But none of that is likely to be effective if you are choosing to describe your content using words that your customers don't use.

The excellent Marketing Sherpa have interesting results showing what SEO practitioners think works. Here's a chart, (reproduced with MarketingSherpa's permission) and from their series of Benchmark reports. Interesting that the most useful tactics may well be the easiest: analyse your server logs or usage stats service (e.g. Google Analytics) and any search function that you have on your site:

Cannibalism! Pirates! Beautiful Princess!

Just have a guess - how may professional conversations do you think I've had about cannibalism since I joined the publishing industry in 1993?

Can't give you an exact number, but the answer is much more than zero. Not that publishers are prone to having a barbecue with someone from Marketing roasting on a spit - the conversations I am recalling are a risk of introducing electronic as well as print formats. "Cannibalism" is shorthand for this concern: "What if start publishing electronic formats as well as print, and the only outcome is that people switch from one format to the other, giving us no additional sales, but the additional costs of making two formats?"

A number of factors mean this is not simple to sort out. The market might include:

• Customers who will only buy one format and would certainly have bought print if that was all there. Any sale of an electronic format is at the expense of a print one
• Customers who buy both formats (when I worked at OUP during the late nineties, we were pleased to find a good number of customers wanting both the printed Oxford Textbook, and the CD-ROM. One was for searching, the other was for long reads, and for having impressive spines on the Consultant's shelf)
• Customers who will only buy the publication in electronic format (and buy a rival publication if yours is only available in print). Publishers tend to feel they are protected from this at least a bit by the "Content is King" argument - i.e. competition is perhaps more likely to be about who has the best textbook, or best story, rather than format being the key feature. Some other factors may apply, though: in some markets (e.g. business reports) the customer needs the information NOW and will settle for a second-best product if that is all that is available within the deadline.

To further confuse the picture, electronic formats can easily be made into products that have no direct print equivalent. For example, what was once a printed book can be amalgamated with other content into a bookshelf or library, or it can be disaggregated into smaller pieces of content to be sold individually.

The differences don't stop at Production, either -  if you have electronic formats, new sales channels and marketing oportunitiesbecome available - for example it becomes much cheaper to offer a free sample or trial subscription. You can try to sell via affilliates. Electronic formats are cheap to store and distribute and so it may be practical to keep a "long tail"  of publications in electronic format beyond the point where it would be uneconomic to keep stock in a warehouse. Also to distribute them to markets where it would be uneconomic to ship paper products.

Want more reasons to be confused? - add the prospects of piracy (arguably easier when he digitally-pirated copy is the same quality as the original, rather than a grotty photocopy), and the debate about whether piracy is a dead loss, or whether Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy (for all but those products where the "obscurity" problem has already been solved; and for whom the pirates are now parasites only).

Hey, cannibals and pirates all in one post! Basically, we're never going to sort this out by a priori reasoning. There are too many unknowns for that - it's about as likely as me working in a Beautiful Princess into this post, so we can rescue her from the pirates and cannibals and then live happily ever after.

Oh, all right then, just for you, I'll finish this post in the style of a Choose Your Own Adventure book...

The track leads up to the sheer cliffs, and with the pirates and cannibals closing in, you and the  Beautiful Princess draw  your swords and stand back to back determined to sell your content dearly.
"You'll never eat me alive!" she shouts at the cannibals
"And I'm not going to be Jolly Rogered!!" you challenge the pirates.
[One moment - aren't Beautiful Princesses meant to be grateful and supportive and not to flare their nostrils sarcastically? ...]

• Do you assume that the cannibals are not a significant threat? To see data from O'Reilly (computer book publisher) see Does Digital Cannibalize Print? Not Yet.
• Do you think that the pirates only want to impose progressive taxation? See Tim O'Reilly's thoughts on the matter.
• Do you think the existing model of copyright is breaking down? See Content, Cory Doctorow's essays on the subject (informed in part by his experiences of routinely publishing a free electronic version of his science fiction novels).
• Do you grab the Princess's hand and jump into the sea (this being what you do in stories like this when at the top of a sheer cliff, just as you climb into the ventilation shafts of a Secret Base)? Go to X
• Or do you want to fight the lot of them? Go to Y