Mobilize Those Business Bots

One recent Mobile Monday event here in San Francisco got me thinking about how business can make chatbots more useful. We hear plenty about how bots bombard social media with nonsense. We don't hear enough about how they can serve customers' needs.

Any bot business model must answer questions about what services a bot can offer that an app or algo can't accomplish. The AI tech that enterprises need to effectively deploy bots isn't always good enough to read text, so UX interactivity with a bot is limited for now. Human customer service reps must be cued to pick up from a bot when it reaches a point where it gets stuck answering a customer's inquiry.

The untapped potential of bots begs questions about how to monetize them. Interstitial advertisements during pauses between a bot's actions may degrade their appeal, unlike with apps or online games where users have come to accept them. Small sidebar ads in a bot's pop-up window may be the way to go. Inline ads certainly work with captchas, which take up about as much screen space as a typical chatbot's window.

I see enormous potential for chatbot abuse by organized religion. I'm serious here. American evangelicals pushing the prosperity gospel could easily employ bots in their online solicitations for money. Unsuspecting believers may think they're interacting with some religious personage when they're really just talking to an AI that's using machine learning to improve its pitch. Bots that learn how to push people's emotional triggers and prompt more donations are going to bankrupt lots of low-information donors, while unscrupulous preachers get filthy rich.

Enterprises should reference the FTC Business Center for emerging regulatory guidance on bot deployment. The policies on marketing and data security are probably most immediately relevant to bot developers. Users must see disclosures when they are interacting with chatbots instead of live humans. Bots generating unwanted communication (ads, emails, text messages) can run afoul of FTC rules and prompt enforcement actions. FTC guidance also covers non-profit organizations, so those ripoff prosperity preachers cannot plead ignorance if they use bots to fleece their flocks.

There is very little private sector governance of chatbot use at present, which is why FTC guidance on customer service will have to stretch in the interim until the tech industry has its own self-regulatory standards. The Friends of ChatBot Coalition is Jeff Pulver's nascent effort to self-organize the developer community around commercial bot use. Once the tech community puts some industry rules in place, it can have a constructive dialogue with the FTC. I expect to read about these future regulatory developments in Chatbot Magazine.

I used to think bots were an automated swarm of bees, programmed to multiply themselves for attacks against unsuspecting targets online. That's the malicious side of bot development. In the hands of competent programmers, bots should be UX enhancements for brand engagement. The future of AI-driven chatbots will be as good as we make it, starting now.

Financial Sarcasm Roundup for 02/06/16

We are well into 2016 and it doesn't feel much different from 2015. This situation cries out for remedy.

The tech stock crumble continues to drive the NASDAQ down. The whole enchilada is headed to its intrinsic value, which is somewhere north of zero. We can soon party like it's 1999 all over again, except valuations will be more like 2001. Pink slip parties will soon replace Silicon Valley's ubiquitous tech mixers. Come to think of it, those two kinds of parties are indistinguishable.

China wants to throw it down with the EU at the WTO. It's a bluff, like a male gorilla charging in the jungle. China has no intention of addressing any traded disputes in the WTO. It sees the TPP coming and wants no part of multilateral dispute resolution. Making noise at the WTO distracts is lip service to international norms that suckers in Western financial institutions will buy.

Twitter teases its users with a possible new algorithm. It won't matter whether Twitter make sits tweets more relevant, or longer, or more colorful. The horse named Medium has already left the barn. Ordinary schmucks who self-publish have multiple options now besides Twitter. I could go into a ton of reasons about why Twitter makes little sense but the biggest one is its inability to make a profit. It will make a good blog article later on, so stay tuned.

The 50th Super Bowl is tomorrow. Makers of snack chips, hot dogs, and chicken wings have probably had great sales for the past week. Americans should enjoy this while it lasts. Living beyond one's means makes overindulgence possible. I will probably stay home and get work done unless someone offers me free food and booze.

It would feel more like 2016 if we had a real market crash and recessions. That would really differentiate this year from 2015. I have waited so long for this to happen.

The Limerick of Finance for 01/24/16

Twitter shake-up comes into our view
Different leaders must bring something new
Independence at stake
User growth hit a brake
Radical change is long overdue

More Haiku of Finance for 10/23/15

Twitter giving stock
Hanging on to skilled people
Show them some profit

The Haiku of Finance for 07/14/15

Fake Twitter buyout
Traders scramble to tweet it
Phantom bird pumper

The Haiku of Finance for 04/23/15

Online ad spending
Driving second Web bubble
Multiple of none

The Haiku of Finance for 02/14/15

BuzzFeed for health care
Share and click but do not think
How entertaining

Viral Marketing Lessons From The BuzzFeed Video For ACA 2015 Enrollment

The latest BuzzFeed video touting enrollment in ACA-compliant health insurance plans is a winner.  Plenty of social media addicts grokked its significance immediately, and plenty more people shared it enthusiastically.  Millions of people clicked on Healthcare.gov as expected.  I must admit I could not make hide nor hare of it when I first watched it.  There must be a generational divide at work.

Effective advertising normally requires some build-up to a call to action.  In this video, the call to action "sign up for health care" is buried in the middle at 0:50-1:00 with no context other than the star making funny faces.  The ad could have ended right there to make its point, but later wanders into the #thanks meme that diminishes the ad's message.  Mentioning the meme calls attention to Healthcare.gov's critics without addressing their criticisms.  That's why this doesn't work as a traditional ad.  Compare it to the most beloved Super Bowl ads of any year.  The typical blockbuster ad manages to be cool by associating cool images (people and/or animals having fun) with a call to action at the end: drink our beer, test drive our car.  The product is also displayed visually somehow (the car in motion) with the brand superimposed.  This is so even the most ADHD-afflicted viewers can't miss it.  Compare that very effective messaging to this BuzzFeed video, which depends on tech-savvy people who are already cued in to the message to explain it through social media shares.  Again, this would not be effective messaging in a passive medium like a TV commercial.

Viral sharing among Millennials turns traditional advertising inside out.  I shared this video via Facebook and saw the generation gap firsthand.  My slightly older friends at the high end of Generation X thought it was pointless.  My younger Millennial friends loved it for the main star and the disguised message.  They didn't even notice the non sequitur text explanation under the video of how a selfie stick somehow leads to a desire to sign up for health insurance.  The mere display of a link to something is enough of a call to action for Millennials.

The video is phenomenal for its innovative take on the #thanks meme.  The original #thanks propagators were critics of the health care mandate who saw their premiums increase or had serious problems logging on to enroll.  In a capitalist economy, any corporation that saw its brand name dragged through the mud by millions of customer complaints would immediately rectify the situation with some combo of lower prices, better service, and a marketing campaign to explain their progress.  The BuzzFeed video mocking the #thanks complainers turns that customer service philosophy on its head.  Complaints about health care services are meaningless when a mandate compels compliance.

It wouldn't have mattered if the star of this video were a notable human or Grumpy Cat.  Social media addicts only need to recognize two things:  a celebrity appears, and there's a link to be clicked.  YouTube has trained humans to click embedded links that appear in fun videos with the expectation that another fun spectacle awaits.  Facebook has trained humans to click the Like button after watching something funny.  Clicking ahead to a government compliance site is exactly what a trained audience is supposed to do.  No critical thinking is required.

America is not a monarchy, despite the pretensions of our hereditary elite.  Our leaders endear themselves to us by exhibiting self-deprecating humor.  President Nixon showed us how to have fun when he said "Sock it to me?" on Laugh-In.  America loves to be entertained.  Mandatory health insurance can be entertaining, mostly for those who watch the payments roll in.  A spoonful of sugar from a viral ad helps the medicine go down.

The Haiku of Finance for 02/12/15

Stupid viral stunt
Dumb people like cute triggers
Easy to fool them

The Invisible SEO Substratum of Page Structure and Content

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a never-ending quest for marketing gold.  I change my SEO tactics all the time in my quest for massive Web traffic.  The Holy Grail of a high Google rank remains elusive.  Emergent tactics give Web stars a cutting edge.

Backlinks matter.  Google's web crawler bots rank a site by the quantity and quality of links it receives from other sites.  Quality means high domain authority, and that formula is the subject of guesswork among the professional SEO community.

Landing pages matter.  Social media gurus think that landing pages using popular keywords, globally visible privacy settings, internal photo links, and deep content make a landing page more visible to Google's search algorithm.

Content matters.  More content on a page attracts more traffic.  Deep content counts for more than thin content.  A combination of images, text, and video linked together in a block is deep content.  Some combination of these blocks on a page is optimal but I suspect that varies by each social media site or content aggregator that channels syndicated content.

Enhancing visibility matters.  Rich snippets from a page that show up in search engines provide more SEO visibility.  Duplicate description tags boost traffic by grabbing additional content from a page and making it visible to searches.

Sharing matters.  I suspect that it matters more now that the unethical practice of purchasing Facebook likes and Twitter followers is widely known.  Sharing is one social media function that has not yet been outsourced to cheap labor using fake logins.  Sharing boosts a page's Google rank if it generates backlinks to the original content.

The implied call to action for webmasters is to optimize their public webpages and social media landing pages in ways that accommodate the phenomena above.  Building out these enhancements and actively curating content means the landing pages get noticed in Google searches.  Facebook's Custom Stories API is a good example of a tech that allows social media developers to easily build multifunctional content for multiple social media channels.

Alfidi Capital does not have some multidisciplinary team of designers, analysts, and engineers.  I do all of this myself, and my main focus is generating content.  If my writing is good enough, it will overcome whatever I can't do to max out my visibility to Google.  

Alfidi Capital in Direct Capital's Point Blank and YoPro Wealth

The genius of Alfidi Capital is reaching into new corners of social media.  Two digital media sites have picked up my exclusive commentary on common-sense financial solutions this week.  Check it out.

Direct Capital's Point Blank blog published my brief discussion of a business loan.  I do track the banking sector and it's obvious to me that a bank is not going to risk a loan on someone whose income does not meet their internal criteria.  I disagree with some of the other commenters who claimed that a business owner should rely upon their business plan and financial forecasts to secure a loan.  That might be fine for a borrower with an established credit history and personal assets that can secure the bank loan.  I'm pretty sure a brand new college graduate with no income, assets, or credit history will have a tough time getting a conventional bank loan with nothing but their startup's fundraising pitch deck, unless of course a parent co-signs the loan.

YoPro Wealth shared my insights on the basics of investing.  I lived within my means for many years until I had enough capital to say goodbye to bad employers.  Living frugally is the kind of habit that turns an ordinary working stiff into The Millionaire Next Door.  It takes a while but starting sooner and saving more accelerates the date of financial emancipation.  I am not a millionaire yet but there are probably a few in my neighborhood.  There are certainly more than a few of them in San Francisco.

I do not give personal financial advice and I would prefer that social media publishers refrain from describing my wisdom as "advice," but I don't control their editorial habits.  The lessons I share are hard-won from my own life.  I don't need a securities license to showcase common sense.  My musings used to be common sense for many people but those days are long gone.  It falls to me to relight the world's lantern.

Capitalizing On ForumCon 2014

I attended ForumCon 2014 in San Francisco last week.  I assumed it would be something like the social media events I attended last year, with an emphasis on SEO and other marketing methods.  It turned out to be a much more valuable view into a sector of the digital economy I have not analyzed in a long time.  My photos may not have the greatest resolution, but I was there for the knowledge and not the visuals.

I don't know the demographic breakdown of the attendees.  I got the impression most of them ran online forums and were in the market for hosting services, developers, and moderators.  The conference sponsors have solved forum monetization with advertising networks and affiliate marketing.  I was lucky enough to sit with my friend Ania Dziadon, and she shared her insights from running EasyFinance and AddOptimization.

One panelist mentioned that affiliate marketing is a natural way to monetize a forum because users who engage content through regular discussions are likely to make online purchases.  I don't spend enough time on forums like Reddit or Quora to understand how their audiences are segmented, but I think forums with very broad coverage are more easily monetized with ads than affiliate links.  Follow my thinking.  The RTB ad network can instantly configure display ads as discussion threads address new content.  The critical thing is to have a site moderator agile enough to enable new ad links as users create new discussion threads, or to just automate that function.  I get the panelists' complaint that display ads need special configuration, especially for mobile, but I suspect that interstitial ads (like those that appear between game levels in the mobile game sector) are worth a shot on some forums.

I learned a new term from one of the panels:  "user funnel."  That may be a different way of addressing the "conversion funnel" that tracks a forum user's progress to a sale, but then again not every forum will monetize with affiliate sales.  I share the panelists' concerns about large-format data tables displaying poorly in mobile, but my solution is probably not what they want to hear.  I would relegate data tables to separate files that can be downloaded from a link in a forum.  Video and audio embeds in a forum should display much better than data and I've seen a few forum sites where that isn't a problem.

It was cool to see David Spinks discuss a "lean startup" interpretation of online community launches.  That's exactly what new forum owners need to stay viable in their early months.  David has a good article at The Community Manager on how a lean community leverages that model.  A lean community should act like a product that solves user pain points.  The expert definition of a "Minimum Viable Community" kept coming up throughout the day when forum owners described how they add value.  The lean community method relies on metrics from social network analysis like strong ties, weak ties, and network density.  David's presentation was the first mention I'd heard of the sense of community theory in the context of online life.  I wonder if measurements of membership and influence are the same as in real life given the ease with which users can construct multiple online personas.  David's work at CMX Hub is worth a look for folks who get serious about adopting his approach and lowering users' barriers to entry.

Another speaker shed some light on valid metrics to track.  Unique visitors, loyal email subscribers, and monthly influencer reach by social media platform were a few favorites I heard mentioned.  I don't know what tools forum users prefer but I got the point that viable communities have an authentic language and true superstars.  Controversy with an emotional hook will engage a community.  I've seen that on popular political discussion sites, but IMHO controversy may not translate into sales.  That would mean people must buy something when they're angry, and online shopping is supposed to be as pleasant and frictionless as possible.  Controversy probably monetizes ad-driven Web communities more than affiliate-linked communities.

The talk on forum moderation brought me some revelations.  The truisms I learned in the US military about having mission statements, using two-way communication, and celebrating little successes all came out here as moderation essentials.  I had to wonder why forum owners thought disabled veterans made good full-time paid moderators.  I realize many injured vets have limited career options and may prefer an online job that allows them to work from home.  Moderation is a low-paying, unconventional career choice and forum gurus made it sound like another dead-end job.  I know that we vets sometimes have to take what we can get, but this kind of offering keeps veterans out of high-powered careers.  It must appeal to people who want a digital nomad's lifestyle.  They key metric for a moderator's efficiency is cost per comment processed, and machine-assisted moderation reduces that cost.  I was surprised to learn that disabling a guest login feature increases user engagement, presumably by requiring people to commit to registering an online identity.

I learned another new term during a break in the panel action:  "supply-side platform (SSP)."  It is the content publisher's mirror image of the RTB ad networks' demand-side platform (DSP).  Don't ask me what it takes for a publisher to run an SSP.  I'm still trying to figure out how to maximize my own revenue from a DSP.

Startup pitches are a staple of tech conferences and the Tech Fest did not disappoint me.  I liked the one from Solve Media that inserted brand ads into captchas.  Requiring users to type an ad tagline or jingle is a brilliant marketing innovation that forces users to engage a brand.  They didn't win the pitch competition but I don't think I've heard the last of them.

Forum owners face challenges in growing their communities beyond 100 members and I paid attention to the talk on building addictive communities.  It's the kind of knowledge I can use as a self-publishing Web presence even if I never run a forum.  The motivating forces of pleasure, pain, hope, fear, social acceptance, and rejection avoidance matter as triggers for community participation but I've had difficulty transposing them to my Web readership.  Fear might work best for me.  I'll frighten the heck out of people so they don't miss a single article I write.  Seriously, real forums make social acceptance easy when people can show off their personalities and gain peer approval.  Getting people to follow habitualizing steps is the key.

The speculation on the Web's future was all over the place.  Here's my own take.  This is the single most important paragraph in my article.  Apps will somehow have to drive user collaboration and sharing so that app traffic will make it to discussion forums.  I think Disqus will be able to do this well.  The realization that image comments are winning hits, views, likes, shares, and whatever else over text comments is more evidence for me that digital civilization is regressing to a pre-literate stage of human maturation.  Images are easier to upload than typing text, and they obviously require less cognitive effort to process.  People are already stupid and they're getting more stupid by the day.  I'm not done with my ranting.  Discussion forums show us what happens when low-information proles have access to tech.  They flood the culture with nonsense like cat pictures and offensive comments.  I tried to relate to these people by posting LOLcat pics myself and it did not help me connect with average, stupid humans.  Stolen copyrighted photos on Instagram and Pinterest prove that most humans do not respect property rights or the rule of law.  I say bring on machine-based moderation to ban stupidity and illegality from the Web.  That is my main takeaway from ForumCon.

The final talk on purposeful design was excellent.  The limited scope of design in approaches based on aesthetics and content is less useful than something more purposeful.  Breaking design down into steps that build a clear purpose and manifesto into all decisions means design permeates even the most routine functions of a mature enterprise, or in this context a Minimum Viable Community.  I must have anticipated this approach when I published the Alpha-D Investment Philosophy on the Alfidi Capital main site.  I agree with the speaker that design should be simple and elegant, and I'm pretty sure my web design meets that goal, but the difference for me is that my design does not solve problems for anyone else but me.  That's the way it has to be.

ForumCon was a pleasant surprise from VigLink.  There were plenty of action items I can use to refine my own Web content.  I won't ever run a forum but I appreciate the hard entrepreneurial work forum owners put into moderation, conduct policies, design, and monetization.  Hats off to you, forum people.  

BroadbandTVcon 2014 Fits Right Into Silicon Valley

I opened up a brand new chapter in Alfidi Capital history by checking out BroadbandTVcon this month.  I only had time to attend the first day but there was enough content to spark my interest in the sector.  I took my traditional corporate badge photo prior to the first keynote, but it came out less than perfect.  Tough luck.  I was still there.

The morning keynoter from HuffPost Live could easily have a second career as a comedian or motivational speaker, although maybe there isn't much difference.  Media executives are all about panache.  HuffPost's discovery that most web article commenters engage each other instead of the article content makes sense anecdotally.  Low-information people log on to media sites to become stars themselves rather become more well-informed.  That's why HuffPost's elevation of their engagement screen to "above-the-fold" positioning in the UI drove their traffic up.  They have discovered some interest in deep dive formats beyond short-form broadcasts, but I am not surprised that such "analysis" comes from amateurs who offer only emotional hooks for the audience.  It is obvious that mobile adoption is driving content towards short-form and low-information content.  I have seen the future of webcast media, and it is downscale.  I like HuffPost's revelation that humans don't share what they search, but rather they share their "aspirational selves."  They search naughty images but share cute cats.  Our superegos are such hypocrites; advertisers meet our id-level desires as well.  I would do video broadcasting myself, but I need strong metrics.  I need monetization metrics that track subject matter (by keyword), length, page views, social media shares, page placement, live vs. recorded contrasts, and video / text mix per article.

Panels are always fun and I assembled a whole bunch of lessons from the random executives on hand.  Cable TV's value proposition is declining and rising percentages of subscribers show interest in cord-cutting.  People won't pay premiums for reduced value forever.  I have long believed that a la carte subscription channels solve an untapped pain point for dissatisfied cable customers.  I now believe that social / mobile broadcasters must deliver news and first-run shows to tap even more pain points in"time-shifted" broadcasts.  Netflix's success with "House of Cards" shows us the way.  The ad people here at BroadbandTVcon thought that ads in video-on-demand (VOD) offer huge upsides in monetization and targeting.  I cannot believe how dumb cable broadcasters are for thinking that bundled channel packages enable content discovery among customers.  Those idiots have never used web searches, or social media, or maybe even email.  I'm certain that the next decade will bring the destruction of the cable TV business model that has existed since the late 1960s.  Say goodbye to the multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD).  Cable TV will end up like VCR, a quaint tech that had a window of opportunity in the pre-digital age.

Get ready for Alfidi Capital's ultimate curveball prediction on broadband monetization.  The basic monetization metric in broadband will mirror mobile e-commerce:   LTV of a viewer compared to their acquisition cost.  Measuring both will make some traditional audience scoring methods useless.  Broadcasters will  have to migrate to the RTB ad networks on the Web for tracking data.   You heard it here first.

If you want to know who's really watching what on which devices, don't ask the traditional broadcasters just yet.  They have not used programmatic marketing equations until now.  Their interest in RTB data will metastasize when some broadcaster acquires an RTB network to do more than just master their algorithm.  They want to know the CPMs showing where dynamic ad insertion into VOD pays off the most.  Nielsen does track online campaign ratings (OCRs) but I'm not going to assume broadcasters know how to price their offerings until they plug RTB data into programmatic solutions.  The lack of NTSC-type standards for dynamic ad insertion into mobile devices means any broadcaster generating the most attractive traffic from RTBs will absolutely own standards definition.

The disguised sales pitches from various sponsors required me to read between the lines for more universal lessons.  Monetization strategies for VOD come in different flavors:  subscription (SVOD), transaction (TVOD), and advertising (AVOD).  That breakdown reminds me of the mobile game sector's discovery that interstitial ads work better than banner ads.  I suspect the most successful mobile broadcasters will use RTB data predictions of optimal CPM to manage their content streams.  Over-the-top (OTT) content is more than just the junk mail offers from broadband providers that I immediately recycle.  It's the business model that will program all those VOD ad types.

Smartphone users must be frustrated when they discover that their smartphone will only work as a universal remote for TV if they have a household subscription for all services - phone, Internet, TV - from the same broadband provider.  Even with universal standards, service providers erect walled gardens to prevent consumers from bundling competitors' services.  The downsides aren't just for consumers.  Broadband companies can't run predictive analytics if they can't see what customers are watching or surfing on competitors' networks.  These companies will have difficulty predicting the ad inventory they'll be able to deliver in their fourth quarter, which drives about half their annual ad revenue.  The upside for entrepreneurs is that walled gardens to defeat transcoding (video file conversion from produced formats to playback formats) generate pain points that entrepreneurs can solve.

I asked one speaker whether the big social media companies are serious about defeating fraudulent accounts and paid "liking" that rips off advertisers.  The answer I got is that they will have to adapt prevailing broadcast standards identifying non-human traffic that advertisers don't want to reach.  ComScore's tech is one representation of those broadcast standards.  I still think Facebook and Yelp will be slow to fully implement comScore and Nielsen audits as long as they are under pressure to generate earnings that justify their inflated P/Es.  Zuck and others want the gravy train to run as long as possible.  Social media companies do use auditing data to estimate the target rating points (TRPs) they can generate from gross rating points (GRPs).  Both social media companies and broadband providers know that Big Data offers a big analytical leap over the previous use of small samples and panel data to measure audience size.  The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) is driving the train on Big Data metric adoption in mobile / social / broadband integration.  Multiplatform users are the drivers of most of the digital audience's consumption, in true Pareto 80 / 20 fashion.  This means omnichannel ad buys (radio / TV / Internet) require metrics for reach, frequency, impression, GRP, and TRP.  This stuff matters to advertisers.  It is transparent to broadband subscribers.

Television isn't like the cable-vs-satellite choices for the lower-class families on my block when I was growing up in the 1980s.  Broadcasting has become atomized to match the delivery channels of multiple mobile platforms.  Audiences for both long-form and short-form TV have fragmented down to the individual viewer.  You make your own network now.  The BroadbandTVcon customization of television fits the spirit of Silicon Valley.  

World Bank Needs Content Marketing

The recent news that nobody reads most of the World Bank's published content made me wonder what the world is missing.  I also wonder how much money the World Bank is wasting on knowledge content that fails to generate traction.  The World Bank's own report on its downloads states that a quarter of its budget for country services goes to knowledge products, and 31% of these are never downloaded.  That's about a 7% drag on the country services annual budget.  Simply cutting the product budget by 31% may yield an immediate ROI if the remainder is allocated to more of the multi-sector reports that are most frequently downloaded.

Generating more external research citations via Google Scholar will help validate the World Bank's mission of informing policy debates.  If 87% of the Bank's work goes uncited, Google's tracking tools can reveal which ones are cited by correlating language, page count, subject matter, and other metrics.  Publishing in PDF should not be a limiting factor.  I have seen plenty of academic material circulate in PDF copy because it successfully finds and audience.

The World Bank's social media and knowledge management people need to talk about content marketing.  Google searches for marketing PDF content in social media reveal plenty of free guides from Marketo, Adobe, and other sources that want marketers to succeed.  Has the World Bank ever cross-published its conference presentations to SlideShare?  They should try it.  It works.  Have they ever completed a market analysis of the demographics that attend their conferences and request reports?  Their depressing analysis of download stats may the first step.

I suspect the World Bank's problem lies in its inability to meet a market need for solutions.  It acts like a bureaucracy that expects its captive customers to walk right in to its Open Knowledge Repository.  The audience won't come if they don't know how the portal's products will benefit them.  Private sector marketers know they must push media to a target market.  The World Bank's content can solve the world's problems if it can push relevant content to an audience that needs it.  

The Haiku of Finance for 02/28/14

Media dashboard
Tracking multiple channels
Real-time market reach

Checking Out HootSuite During RSA Conference USA 2014

I didn't have time for the RSA Conference USA 2014 this week, or the dissident TrustyCon that sprang up as a reaction to the IT security sector's problems.  The only RSA-related event I was able to squeeze into my calendar was a "Connect" event from HootSuite.  I first noticed HootSuite thanks to their Ow.ly URL shortener but they have other free tools I plan to check out.  You can all check out this awesome action shot I took at the event.

HootSuite is serious enough about building its ecosystem that it offers its own tutorials at HootSuite University and is sponsoring a certification program through the Newhouse School at Syracuse University.  I expect a lot more social media marketing companies to start partnering with brand name universities.  It will be the only way traditional universities can compete with the MOOC onslaught that is revolutionizing education.

I like the concept of a social media dashboard that integrates multiple channel feeds.  The linkbait theme of this HootSuite event was that "social media managers are dead," so companies offering integrated dashboards make social media marketing everyone's business.  Anecdotes about CEOs engaging their audience through social media make for good PR but the ROI of solving one person's problem is hard to measure.

Social media marketers have said that social media should be at the top of an enterprise's purchase funnel.  I never saw a purchase funnel depicted in my MBA marketing class.  That means I got a worthless MBA, but I realized that long ago.  I should have learned from free sources instead, like this McKinsey Quarterly article from 2009 on how messaging must move outside the purchasing funnel.  McKinsey has also discovered that the networked enterprise has a clear payoff.

I had to look up a few new terms I heard at this event.  Dashboard like HootSuite's are useful in "social media audits."  A Google search of that term leads to bunch of marketing offers and this ISACA definition of a social media audit that is probably the most objective view on the subject.  The audit's use of a people / process / technology paradigm mirrors a common definition of knowledge management.  Take heed, KM folks, because you need to work with the marketing department's social media team to make sure everyone is tracking the right channels.  Someone else mentioned "social DNA" but my search results returned more stuff like a proprietary plug-in than a broad new concept.  Lo and behold, KMWorld discussed social DNA in 2013.  I like that the KM community puts its fingerprints all over these social media concepts.  The whole social DNA scheme needs a clearer definition, and I suspect it describes the extent to which enterprise search and other sharing tools have permeated both an enterprise's internal IT architecture and its corporate culture.  Every marketer should know how to measure "effective reach" and social media now extends that reach to multiple new channels.  

Forrester has a succinct discussion of the three types of social media strategies.  I had never heard of the "hub and spoke" strategy but a Google search reveals plenty of opinions on its execution.  Once again, the obvious requirement for KM integration jumps out at me from the hub and spoke model.  I think a social media dashboard that integrates well with a KM suite (namely MS SharePoint) would be awesome in an enterprise.

I had an epiphany after listening to HootSuite's executives and clients discuss the metrics they use to assess audience engagement.  Recent reports on fraudulent likes and followers in leading social media platforms have been a hard wake-up for marketers committed to effective ad spending.  I suspect that shares and retweets are far less prone to dishonesty than likes and follows, because they require users to engage with content instead of with a static social media presence.  In other words, it's easier for a paid liker in some "like farm" in a developing country's Internet cafe to like a whole bunch of Facebook pages than it is for them to share a message from that page.  It's similarly easier for a paid shill to follow a Twitter account than to retweet useful content.  That's my original insight, fellow Web denizens.  Measure your audience engagement with metrics focusing on shared content and not some static page's artificially inflated reach.  Sharing quality content really works.

The folks in attendance were mostly in their mid-20s to early 30s.  Now I know who buys all of the overpriced denim wear I see at hip clothing boutiques all over the Bay Area.  It's these young techies working for mobile startups and social media marketing companies, and they have disposable income for expensive but trashy clothing.  I filled up on free food and drink, and chatted up a bunch of attractive women.  Those are my own personal audience engagement metrics.

Full disclosure:  I have no business connection to HootSuite.  No one paid me anything to write this article.  I may use HootSuite's free tools at some point in the future.  I like free things because I'm a cheapskate.  

The Magic Of URL Shorteners

Here's a minor policy change for Alfidi Capital.  I've been using TinyURL to shorten the links I've posted to Twitter and other social media sites.  I'm changing that to Google's Goo.gl URL shortener as of today.  Google's tool economizes on text; it has much shorter character length than Tiny URL and only a few other tools are shorter (like Hootsuite's Ow.ly).

The more important reason to change is the advantage Goo.gl delivers for integration with the rest of my social media presence.  It offers tracking tools that should indicate which of my links gain the most traction.  It is designed to work with the other Google tools I use, specifically Blogger and AdSense.  Other URL shorteners may eventually run into integration problems with Google's products.  

Even the US government is getting into the URL shortening act with Go.USA.gov.  The links to energy market data from DOE can get unwieldy but I don't plan on using this particular government product.  I don't get the rationale for creating a new government site instead of using existing private sector solutions like Goo.gl.  Google's search tools already power plenty of government databases, so using that company's free shortening tool would be a natural way to track traffic.  I can't count on government solutions to follow some common sense path.  

URL shorteners are part of the magic of the Interwebs.

The Haiku of Finance for 02/05/14

First Twitter earnings
Disappointment beat down stock
Nothing good to tweet

Alfidi Capital at iFabbo Conference 2013 in San Francisco

I obtained a rare opportunity to peek inside an industry totally unfamiliar to me - fashion and beauty.  I attended the iFabbo Social Media Conference in San Francisco this past Saturday.  I heard about it through the Meetup social media group I monitor and I couldn't turn down the chance to check it out.  I also couldn't turn down the chance to check out the very attractive women who work in the beauty sector.  Merchants Exchange Club, here I come.

The intro from Sinead Norenius and Tonia Korakis gave us all the lowdown on the social media handles to use  (namely #iFabboSFCon) and how to tune in to the live Web stream on Spreecast.  Right there was my first lesson in something other conference organizers need to provide.  I've attended finance, mining, energy, and tech conferences since 2005 and none ever conducted Web simulcasts with messaging even though the enabling technology obviously exists.  The beauty sector is ahead of them all.

The PR panel was up first.  They mentioned their favorite perfumes, and I had no idea women like to have a "signature scent."  The panelists were fond of guest blogging, which isn't my preference as it would dilute my brand, but it probably adds star power to beauty blogs that are cognizant of celebrity status.  PR people are also very cognizant of the "verticals" of specific cosmetics.  Not every eye shadow is created equal, and high-end positioning requires very different messaging from something aimed at the Wal-Mart crowd.  I noted the importance of a media kit and it dawned on me that I've never made one.  I shall remedy that in the near term with the template the panel suggested.  A good media kit contains downloadable PDFs covering a blog's editorial policy, marketing value proposition, professional bio, corporate fact sheet, target demographic, third party testimonials, success metrics, and video newsreel.  I may not need all of those elements but I'll have fun with the ones I can do.  The panel also expects beauty bloggers to build relationships with marketing and advertising agencies so they can be brand advocates, but that also means they need to meet their partners' publishing deadlines.  Apps like Muzio and RebelMouse can curate content that's easily shared in social media.

The social media panel featured the product managers from major platforms like Facebook and Google.  Those two platforms have analytics to help improve a blog's SEO but IMHO Facebook's page statistics just aren't as deep as the stats from Google Analytics.  The most useful thing I get from my Facebook page stats is a breakdown by time of of day, so the timing of article publication throughout the day probably has some merit for bloggers writing in English for a North American audience.  My stats from Google show me getting hits worldwide, so timing doesn't matter as much for me if people in daylight hours somewhere else are reading something I publish at midnight in San Francisco.  The Google rep said Google Search now shows content getting more +1 rating on Google+, so they've adapted their own algorithm to cross-sell another platform feature and incentivize users in Google+.  Smart move, Google.  Hashtags also appear in Google Search and Google+ hangouts "on air" can broadcast live conversations.  I did not know much about Google+ Communities but it seems that some are fertile ground for blog posts that match their interests.  Google's rep also said that multiple photos in a blog post work well with their ad buys, which Google's algorithm really likes.  Well, of course it does.

Our social media panelists did offer general insights in between pushing their respective platforms.  Using "call to action" language when republishing blog posts gets people to engage with content.  "Angry at Wall Street's corruption?  Press +1 if you agree."  That's an example of a call to action I would use with my finance blog articles.  The panelists like it when bloggers promote their posts across all platforms but they advised tweaking the "intro link" somewhat because followers are smart enough to notice identical things.  That's a mistake I sometimes make on Twitter.  I have noted that many bloggers like to engage their followers by enabling comments but that was something I gave up long ago because it added little value to my content.  I will probably disable comments for any other platform I use but other bloggers are welcome to allow comments if it adds value for them.  The panel mentioned that WordPress has a plugin to tweet old posts; I hope Google comes out with something comparably useful for Blogger.  I was dismayed to learn that Google Analytics cannot at present monitor or analyze Google+ traffic, which is odd if their algorithm works so well with the other platform features I mentioned in the paragraph just above this one.  They need to fix that capability gap.  The brand panelist advocated following Twitter users who follow you, retweet you, and respond to you but I think that can be unwieldy after a few hundred followers.  I use my Twitter feed to track new information from valid primary sources (central banks, government agencies) and bond fide thought leaders.  There's no way I can follow every Joe or Jane who RT's my stuff because my feed would then be cluttered with their random life observations and I would miss news that is critical to my financial writing.  It's a style preference on my part and I've noticed that many Twitter power users with huge followings also keep their own follow lists small enough to be manageable.

I did notice a common theme emerging from these first two panels.  Pinterest and Instagram are emerging as sales and branding tools in the fashion and beauty sector because their aesthetics enable displays of visually oriented brands.  The social media platform reps really like Instagram's design-oriented creative ethic.  Instagram content that is authentic, thoughtful, and genuine should get noticed.  Now I see why PR people like bloggers who personally use products they endorse.  Photos of attractive "power users" of beauty products shared on Instagram will probably go viral within the beauty community.

The next panel on photography and videography was a topic I've rarely touched in life, other than some random shots I've thrown up on this blog when I've attended special events.  I wish I had photographed some of the attractive women at this conference but I don't think they would have granted me permission.  I'll just have to cherish the memories.  Anyway, the panelists noted the availability of apps that enable embedding of metadata into photos and videos.  Hot diggity dog, that's the kind of tech that enables the geojournalist projects I blogged about recently.  One photographer said taking photos during the "golden hour" just after sunrise or before sunset captures a soft light tone.  I'll try that the next time some attractive woman agrees to be my photo subject for a financial blog post.  You may be wondering how I would work an attractive gal into a blog article about the Federal Reserve or investment banking trends.  Me too.  I think it would just be a cool way to get a gal to pose for me.  Anyway, back to the panel.  They like "how-to" content that generates good vertical use case data, so I'll have to begin more of my blog articles with "How To . . . " in the title.  I did not know that Adobe has moved many of its programs into the cloud.  I guess they learned from watching Salesforce that customers who don't need entire software packages will pay piecemeal for limited use.  They noted that viral videos are either inspirational or strange and quirky (but not creepy).  I would like to see someone write the equivalent of Cloudonomics for media production that quantifies the inputs (production time, equipment) and outputs (marketing channel action, ROI) of a viral media piece.  The experts said lighting matters.  I really dislike those YouTube selfie webcams in dark rooms.  Get some lights, YouTubers.

BECCA Cosmetics gave us a fireside chat and product demonstration.  Gentlemen, you haven't lived until you've seen your womenfolk discuss the application of their favorite makeup.  They have it down to a science and they even know how different types of application brush hair will interact with cosmetics.  This was all very educational for me as a heterosexual male who has never been married because I have no previous experience with how women approach personal care.  I only know that they worship me for my extreme manliness.  Okay, whatever.  I did learn a little about how foundation makeup relates to bone structure.  I also learned that this stuff about cosmetics is very important to women.  I don't ever want to get between a woman and her beauty goodies.

The legal zone panel wasn't your typical boring seminar.  Their perspectives were absolutely necessary for bloggers who want to stay out of trouble.  The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulates advertising and has guidelines for bloggers on disclosing sponsored content.  "Endorsements" sometimes look like personal opinions, but if there's a material business connection (even for one-time product swag in a gift bag) then it falls under the FTC's advertising rules.  Bloggers must disclose their relationships with products they endorse every single time on their blog or Twitter, so it pays to know Twitter's hashtag rules.  These attorneys said that commercial speech does not enjoy full First Amendment protection and the FTC's intent behind such requirements is to discourage false advertising.  BTW, I noticed that the FTC's operations have been subject to shutdowns and sequesters due to the budget shenanigans in Washington.  That does not mean Americans can break trade laws with impunity.  It means that regulators will work hard later on to find violators of current laws.

The attorneys thought that bloggers should trademark their blog's name and logo, provided they are unique and fanciful.  Bloggers can protect their visual content by putting the copyright symbol of their own watermark on photos they own.  It is extremely important to copyright only owned photos!  I will not ever copyright someone else's photo.  The panelists mentioned that stock photo archives (I'm thinking the likes of Getty Images and Corbis Images) make huge money collecting from violations of cease and desist orders their attorneys send to unauthorized photo users.  The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) enables social media sites to instantly report copyright violations.  Always have permission to use an image before you publish it.

Next up was the monetization panel, and I must say that the Disqus gal was extremely attractive.  I recognized her from the Disqus booth at the DataWeek Conference I attended a couple of weeks ago.   Disqus is more than just the widget I've seen on news sites and other blogs that allow comments.  It links commenters to other media they may find relevant and offers revenue sharing from recommended content.  I had wondered how they monetized their platform.  VigLink monetizes links to merchants and Luvocracy monetizes endorsements (just remember the FTC's mission from my discussion above).  I noticed The Mad Video's exhibit at iFabbo showed how it installs an embedded data layer over an online video that can link to product information or a vendor's storefront.  I might use the services that monetize text links but visual overlays are probably more useful for bloggers pushing mainly visual content.  I also wonder how these services will display on mobile devices if they are used with Pinterest and Instagram visual product endorsements.

The best lesson I took from the monetizers was that search engines give higher rankings to blogs and media pages with video content.  Videos are shared more often and are more likely to be on Google Search's first page of results.  I have my own YouTube channel and one of the first things I did when I set it up was to enable the ad display function.  I admit that I don't have many videos posted but I can make time to record some finance-related monologues once I find a decent camera.  The panel also mentioned that the most important content must be at the start of the video because that medium has a high abandonment rate online.  I can attest from experience that they're correct.  I've given up on many YouTube videos before they finished playing because they took too long to load.  If audiences like authentic content, nothing is more authentic than me running my mouth about Wall Street to a camera.  I used to consider comments to be authentic but I took them off my blog when they became havens for abuse.  I may try Disqus comments on my Alfidi Capital website pages as an experiment.  The Disqus gal assured us that her service's users are among the most content-engaged people on the Web and are often other bloggers.  I'm a frequent commenter on Disqus myself.  One panelist advised us to make our blog ads look more like our content by adjusting the ads' color schemes and borders.  Okay, but some ad services may not allow that.

More hot women appeared on the final panel to discuss the future of fashion and beauty.  Remember all of those really imaginative futures we should have had by now, with flying cars and moon colonies?  Well, they haven't happened yet and I'm still waiting for a time travel conveyance or something.  I'm also waiting to see some futuristic Star Trek fashion become real today.  I would love to see the fashion industry's interpretation of the wearable technology movement, because that will be the next big thing attracting venture funding once VCs lose their infatuation with social media and Big Data.  Anyway, enough of my wandering.  The panel said web content is so heavily re-blogged that original content matters.  Getting your blog on networks and aggregators reaches new readers who follow major brands (look no further than my presence on Seeking Alpha, which got me my first big waves of Web traffic in the finance sector).

It will eventually dawn on technologists that the emergence of Pinterest and Instagram, and the Google Search algorithm's configuration to favor videos, mark the dawn of post-literate culture in the developed world.  Those two platforms are almost entirely visual.  Text, data, and links are embedded but appear minimally intrusive.  I can't see myself using either platform because I have to publish business commentary in a text-based format.

Keynote speaker Jacqueline Wales inspired the audience with her Fearless Factor approach to motivation.  She had plenty of great advice about presenting an authentic self, having a good attitude, being focused and disciplined, knowing your audience, and recovering from adversity.  Her most memorable observations were that people fail when they play small rather than big, and that the biggest failure is the failure to try.  Lots of struggling bloggers can probably relate to Jacqueline's personal history of overcoming obstacles.

You may be wondering how I'm going to tie all this in to the finance sector.  Wonder no more.  Here we go. I haven't written much on apparel companies but I did publish my analysis of Frederick's of Hollywood a few years ago when they were executing a turnaround strategy.  Bulge bracket investment banks do plenty of corporate finance work in the fashion and beauty sector.  The bigger i-banks usually consider fashion and beauty to be a subset of their consumer/retail practices.  California Apparel News tracks fashion sector deal flow on its finance page.  Just-Style also carriers fashion finance news and market intelligence.  There's even potential for entrepreneurial disruption in the fashion sector right here in The City.  Macy's Union Square sponsors Fashion Incubator San Francisco (FiSF), where aspiring designers can launch clothing lines.  I truly believe those incubating designers should connect with the wearable tech sector and make wonderful things happen.

This iFabbo conference for fashion and beauty bloggers was really something else.  I stepped outside the pinstriped finance sector for a day and wore one of my own more daring ensembles, red shirt and everything.  I met quite a few very attractive women but only time will tell if they find Yours Truly to be intriguing.  Normal women can't help themselves around me so I have reason for optimism.  Most importantly, I got a brief education on a business sector I've never experienced before.  The blog success tips were way cool, and success is always in fashion.  

Social Intelligence Data Analytics Real-Time Big Data Marketing Disruption with Domain-Specific Use Cases

I attended a Meetup last week at Hacker Dojo in Mountain View.  I gave this article the longest title in Alfidi Capital's history because that's the only way I could incorporate the concepts announced in both the Social Media Marketing Monitoring Engagement SF group and the Frontier Big Data Cloud Weekly SFBay group.  The more Meetups I attend, the more content I absorb.  This stuff crosses so many boundaries that only a handful of geniuses such as Yours Truly can track it all.

Chase McMichael from InfiniGraph gave his talk on how marketing intelligence can find use case data in social media.  Check out his slides on SlideShare.  He observed that data harvested from outside your own organization isn't "clean."  Dirty data contains noise from inaccurate or irrelevant sources that IT managers must sort through a labor-intensive data cleansing process.  Chase thinks large enterprises lack integrated plans for aggregating and sorting Big Data.  His ideal business intelligence plan proceeds from reporting to analysis to monitoring with predictive analytics as the top layer.

Let's pause to reflect on Big Data integration.  My use of Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools pales in comparison to the challenges larger enterprises face.  IMHO DevOps people must increasingly design apps with data collection goals and analytics in mind.  If this emphasis isn't embedded early in the software development cycle, the finished app won't produce clean Big Data that feeds an ERP.  Big Data demands a redesign of CRM/ERP integration.  CRM will generate data marketers can use to adjust Customer Development, and that CustDev must drive the predictive analytics that will become ERP resource use forecasts.

I'm getting ahead of myself here, so let's get back to Chase's wisdom from his seminar.  He noted that Apple's app strategy gave its iPhone the edge over BlackBerry because the app ecosystem generated demand for the device's adoption.  I kept thinking about how companies track these ecosystems to look for demand trends.  Chase thinks that content marketing depends on trend discovery, a Big Data problem.  I now think that scoring an ecosystem's engagement with your enterprise's content is a key part of a Big Data strategy.  The real-time tracking aspect gets hard for companies that aren't savvy in social media.  User interactions in social media leave data fingerprints and DevOps people should build algorithms that track them as use cases.

Chase argues that Big Data analytics mixes anthropology, social science, and statistics.  His preferred "real-time marketing" reacts with relevant messaging to data derived from demand.  Now I see his earlier point about the ineffectiveness of labor-intensive IT methods.  Machine intelligence creates scalable data that does not require intensive human labor in its production.  The automation of Big Data's demand-driven response is what makes it scalable.

I grok this concept of automated data-driven marketing responses but I also heard similar things back in the late 1990s when I was on active duty in the US Army.  Military technology developers were excited about fielding the "Force XXI" suite of systems that were going to automate away all battlefield confusion.  These systems are now mature but the fog of war is still present on the battlefield.  Even the RAND corporation was skeptical about Force XXI's assumptions while the program was at its highest visibility.  Uncertainty in a competitive environment never disappears because executing a strategy requires human judgment to ensure the OODA Loop has the correct orientation and that progress tracks the correct milestones.

Big Data has a role to play in automating the marketing data collection feed into analytics, just as it can play on the battlefield in automating intelligence data collection.  IMHO, Big Data poses a knowledge management taxonomy challenge to large organizations once they've sorted the data streams.  My point is that humans cannot ever be fully removed from the OODA Loop, especially those C-suite executives who are responsible for ensuring the Orientation correctly reflects the enterprise's strategic posture.  Humans designing these systems can't just turn everything over to Hadoop and hope for the best.  The end result in a private enterprise would be like the US's McNamara Line in Vietnam where dirty data corrupted automated decision-making.  The human beings working on corporate CRM / Big Data / ERP integration task forces need clear guidance from the C-suite on a KM taxonomy that will prioritize the types of data that get automated.  The strategic guidance should also name the program managers or geographic region managers who will own parts of the automated decision-making cycle.

Chase finished with some hints on Googling ".xls" and other terms to see just how much Big Data that corporations have released is already in the public domain.  He thinks RSS feeds are a universal standard for content publishing (with visual content being especially powerful), and we should use them to collect content for scoring.  He also thinks we should check out InfiniGraph's SMO portal.  I think we should all check out IIA's Analytics 3.0 while C-suite folks should attend the Chief Analytics Officer Summit.  Those resources will given enterprises a start on developing guidance for DevOps and KM integrators as they start automating data-driven marketing responses.

Well done, Chase.  You got me thinking.  BTW, these Meetups make it cool to be a technology geek.  I saw several very attractive women at this Meetup, including one hot blonde Russian chick named Olga.  Hey Olga, send me your phone number and let's talk about Big Data at your place.