Mediaboss Marketing

Public release date: 31-May-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Sarah McDonnell s_mcd@mit.edu 617-253-8923 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In 2004, a trio of researchers at Columbia University began an online experiment in social-media marketing, creating nine versions of a music-download site that presented the same group of unknown songs in different ways. The goal of the experiment was to gauge the effect of early peer recommendations on the songs' success; the researchers found that different songs became hits on the different sites and that the variation was unpredictable.

"It's natural to believe that successful songs, movies, books and artists are somehow 'better,'" one of the researchers wrote in The New York Times in 2007. "What our results suggest, however, is that because what people like depends on what they think other people like, what the market 'wants' at any point in time can depend very sensitively on its own history."

But for music fans who would like to think that talent is ultimately rewarded, the situation may not be as dire as the Columbia study makes it seem. In a paper published in the online journal PLoS ONE, researchers from the MIT Media Laboratory's Human Dynamics Lab revisit data from the original experiment and suggest that it contains a clear quantitative indicator of quality that's consistent across all the sites; moreover, they find that the unpredictability of the experimental results may have as much to do with the way the test sites were organized as with social influence.

Numbers game

In their analysis, Alex "Sandy" Pentland, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Science, his graduate students Coco Krumme first author on the new paper and Galen Pickard, and Manuel Cebrian, a former postdoc at the Media Lab, developed a mathematical model that, while simple, predicts the experimental results with high accuracy. They divide the decision to download a song into two stages: first, the decision to play a sample of the song, and second, the ensuing decision to download it or not. They found that, in fact, the percentage of customers who would download a given song after sampling it was consistent across sites. The difference in download totals was due entirely to the first stage, the decision to sample a song in the first place.

And that decision, the researchers concluded, had only an indirect relationship to the songs' popularity. In the original experiment, one of the sites was a control, while the other eight gave viewers information about the popularity of the songs, measured by total number of downloads. But on those eight sites, the number of downloads also determined the order in which the songs were displayed. The MIT researchers' analysis suggests that song ordering may have had as much to do with the unpredictability across sites as the popularity information.

"We've known forever that people are lazy, and they'll pick the songs on the top," Pentland says. "There's all this hype about new-age marketing and social-media marketing. Actually, it comes down to just the stuff that they did in 1904 in a country store: They put certain things up front so you'd see them."

Quality, not quantity

More here:
For music, social-media marketing doesn't trump quality

Source: Facebook.com

Lost in the shuffle was a lesser-played story of two guys who own a small pizza joint in New Orleans. As part of the news story for NPR, they were paired with a Facebook ad expert who set up a campaign for them to see if Facebook

The pizza joint owners spent $240 on Facebook advertising and after asking every single customer how they heard about them, realized not one had come from the ads. Failure. Waste of money. End of story, right? Nope.

Heres the story that people missed. For small businesses which create over two-thirds of net new jobs, and employ more than half of all working Americans Facebook is less about advertising and more (much more) about engagement, which Ill explain below. The real story is that you, the small business owner, possess the engagement skill in spades and can use it to grow your business. I call it Engagement Marketing.

You know your customers

We all do business with small businesses. Think about those you frequent on a daily or weekly basis: your dry cleaner, Web designer, wine merchant, day care provider, barber, or deli, to name a few. The person who owns the business, or the employees, greet you by name, ask about your spouse or children, get you what you need, and wish you a great day. We leave feeling good.

This is such a common occurrence, we dont even think about how remarkable it is! This personal touch or creating a WOW! experience is the cornerstone of Engagement Marketing.

Customers look to you for answers

Engagement is talking with your customers versus marketing at them. If a customer comes into your nursery, for example, and asks about a plant and soil conditions, you give the answer. This is what you, as the small business owner, do naturally every day. Why? Because it keeps customers coming back.

Now, take this engagement and put it online. When customers connect with you through Facebook, follow you on Twitter or subscribe to your e-newsletter, you have the same opportunity to help them, and keep them connected to your business even when theyre not physically doing business with you.

Read the original post:
Social Marketing: Engagement Equals Endorsement

BEIJING (AP) -- Google has fired a new salvo in a censorship battle with Beijing by adding a feature that suggests alternatives for search terms that might result in blocked results.

Google's announcement Thursday did not mention of Beijing's extensive Internet controls. But it comes after filters were tightened so severely in recent weeks that searches fail for some restaurants, universities or tourist information. Authorities were aiming to stamp out talk about an embarrassing scandal over the fall of a rising Communist Party star.

Google Inc. closed its China-based search engine in 2010 to avoid cooperating with government censorship. Mainland users can see its Chinese-language site in Hong Kong but the connection breaks if they search for sensitive terms.

The new feature will alert users in China if they type in a search term that "may temporarily break your connection to Google" and suggest alternative terms, Google said in a blog post signed by a senior vice president, Alan Eustace.

"By prompting people to revise their queries, we hope to reduce these disruptions and improve our user experience from mainland China," Eustace wrote.

Google cited as an example the Chinese character "jiang," or river, without mentioning that it also is the name of former President Jiang Zemin, the possible reason the government blocks search results. It says the site will recommend users in China write their search terms without that character.

A Google spokesman in Tokyo, Taj Meadows, declined to comment on reasons for the feature or whether the company was concerned about Chinese government retaliation.

Google was allowed to keep a network of advertising sales offices in China that might be vulnerable if the communist government tries to punish the company.

Google, based in Mountain View, California, had 16.6 percent of China's search market in the first quarter based on use of its global and Hong Kong sites, according to Analysys International, a Beijing research firm. It was in second place behind local rival Baidu Inc., which 78.5 percent, but ahead of other Chinese competitors.

Google is also promoting its Android mobile phone operating system for use by Chinese manufacturers. Chinese regulators approved Google's $12.5 acquisition of Motorola Mobility, a wireless device maker, last month on condition Android remains available to Chinese companies and others at no cost for five years.

See the original post:
Google adds feature to help China searchers

In a move designed to sidestep government censorship of search results, Google has added a new feature to Search in China: An alert that will tell users if their search terms are likely to trigger watchdog action.

In a move that will surely cause trouble for the Internet search giant, Google is changing its search service for users in China to add a warning that will alert users if theyre using terms that could result in some form of governmental censorship.

In a blog post today, the company announced that it will notify users in mainland China when they enter a keyword that may cause connection issues, adding that [b]y prompting people to revise their queries, we hope to reduce these disruptions and improve our user experience from mainland China. The problem with the user experience, according to the company, was that many Google Search results would be replaced with error messages reporting that This webpage is not available, or The connection was reset. Weve taken a long, hard look at our systems and have not found any problems, the blog post continues, However, after digging into user reports, weve noticed that these interruptions are closely correlated with searches for a particular subset of queries.

The blog post doesnt mention censorship at all, instead calmly referring to the companys wish to have as many people in the world as possible have access to our services. However, the company has had tumultuous relations with the Chinese government for some time, even getting to the point of accusing the government last year of attempting to hack the personal Gmail accounts of hundreds of users including, among others, senior US Government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military personnel and journalists.

Itll remain to be seen whether or not China will respond to the changes. Technically, Google isnt actually stopping the Chinese government from censoring results, its merely warning users when they might be about to trip the censorship; the blog post announcing the change even offers that if users want to press ahead with their original queries they can carry on. And yet by drawing attention to the issue in this way, and suggesting that their team of engineers has cracked the code of what, exactly, is likely to cause the censored search in the first place it feels as if this is almost daring China to respond in some way. I wonder how much trouble it would be to permanently offer 404 errors for all of Google Search

(Via)

Excerpt from:
Google changes Chinese search to alert for censorship

Illustration by http://www.fizzzbzzzz.com

Whats the opposite of free speech? If you answered, totalitarian censorship, you are right -- and you are old.

In the Internet age, censorship is all about allowing partial, temporary free speech, then shutting it down once enough has been said. The innovator, as usual these days when it comes to nondemocratic governance, is China, where the leading microblog site, Sina Weibo, unveiled its modified censorship model this week.

Users get 80 points. Monitors will take away points for violations. These include the censors old favorite, criticizing the government. You can also lose points for spreading rumor (which I thought was the whole point of the Internet) or promoting cults (a provision apparently aimed at the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong). The monitors will also scour your comments for puns or other circumlocutions used to avoid censorship in the past. If you run out of points, youre cut off.

If free speech is so threatening, why dont the powers- that-be in China just shut down the microblogs altogether? Part of the answer is that with 324 million users, Sina Weibo has become too big to fail, or at least too much a part of normal Chinese life to be eliminated. But the deeper reason to keep the masses microblogging is that the Chinese government reaps important gains from it. This is not your fathers Communist Party. Nor your grandfathers. Chinas leadership is engaged in a complicated, risky process of trying to gain some of the advantages of democratic government without the disadvantage of putting itself up for direct election. Free speech is a crucial part of the experiment.

A major benefit of allowing people to complain on the Web is that it allows society to blow off steam. This is a venerable value of free speech, recognized by U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas in a famous dissent in 1951, responding to the courts choice to uphold the conviction of 11 American Communists for teaching subversive ideas. The airing of ideas releases pressures which otherwise might become destructive, Douglas wrote. If such release is beneficial in a democracy, its doubly so in a place where there is no robust public sphere.

Another advantage of limited free speech is that it allows the government to gather information about public concerns. Chinese authorities cant rely on ordinary polling data, because pollsters in China cant operate freely, lest they learn of serious opposition to the government. And its impossible to spy on 1.3 billion people all the time. The microblogs serve as the abstract and brief chronicles of the time, as Hamlet called the theater.

Once the microblogs have conveyed what people are thinking, the government can respond to their concerns, as it did last summer after the Zhejiang train derailment when Premier Wen Jiabao made a special visit to the site in apparent reaction to public frustration with bureaucratic silence and denials. Responding to public opinion is the hallmark of accountable government. Without elections to provide oversight, Chinas leaders need every opportunity they can get to demonstrate that they respond to peoples concerns. Seen this way, limited free speech, followed by government action, is an important part of how the Chinese Communist Party seeks to sustain its legitimacy.

The party is utterly aware that free speech could help bring the government down. That is why it is experimenting with freedom in moderation, and using quasi-private entities like Sina Weibo as its proxies. Chinas leaders are trying to gain the advantages of free speech without paying its full price. First Amendment absolutists will probably raise their eyebrows at this. After all, Americans have been raised to believe that free speech has a life of its own; that truth is great and shall prevail.

Yet there is an extraordinary precedent for Chinas censorship model: the history of free speech in England and the U.S. before the modern era. When it was drafted, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution didnt contemplate the radical freedom Americans now enjoy. Its language, drawn from English precedents, was aimed essentially at prohibiting what is called prior restraint: government censorship of books and newspapers before they could be published. As with the Sina Weibo rules, once you had spoken or written, you could still be punished for what you had freely said. You were accountable under the crime of seditious libel.

Original post:
China’s Blog Censorship Rules Have U.S. Parallels