The American comedian Bill Cosby, in his early 1960s comedy album, 'Wonderfulness', talks about a child's playground merry-go-round that the children push round and around and around until someone gets dizzy and throws up. With each additional conversation on the subject of customer experience management (CXM), I feel as if someone has just spun the merry-go-round that much faster.
I was in the UK last month attending presentations on coming products and directions for customer experience management, which is really the new hot phrase for targetted advertising and targetted content. The UK has the highest number of surveillance cameras per capita in the world. While on the one hand, it allows the retrospective review of the actions of terrorists before bombing the underground, and on the other, according to an introductory talk, it could be used to recognise the licence plate number on the car, tie that to a consumer and understand where they shop. Think of the power of targetted advertising!
The speaker led me, as all good salespeople can, to believe that this was an actual, prototype target-marketing product. This is a type of selling which is often called 'imagine!'
We eventually got down to what is being constructed, met with a vendor, and talked about a realistic product for our industry. What I was shown was a unified approach to intelligence gathering to provide both targetted advertising and targetted content. It is either Big Brother or Big Data, depending on whether 1984 is the title of a book or the year you were born. Because it is all so common in news reports, we will all treat Big Data as very ho-hum, but an approach like this doesn't involve telling Google, or anyone else about our customers.
The approach is rather simple, track everything your users do on your website, the website of your sister newspapers, and if you are feeling expansive, share data with other newspapers and news sites to gather more comprehensive data. Get your user to log in using their Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn credentials and then mine their data and that of their friends to build a profile for the user. This will improve the user's experience by presenting ads that reflect their interests, and news that reinforces their opinions. Easy, the software does it all.
I mentioned this to an acquaintance in the US military who is studying 'Network Science'. His response was, that yeah, he was doing the same thing: Looking at social media as part of a project to evaluate security risks.
His real point of confusion was that we don't really care who the actual person is, we care about their profile so that we can get a higher rate for presenting more targetted ads, and keep them looking at our website longer.
His statistics were interesting: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn account for 46 per cent of the world's social media. Meaning the rest of the sites are just not worth the effort. His approach is the same as ours, but for DoD (US Department of Defense) personnel: look at what they post, look at what their friends post, do sentiment analysis and scoring. Where in our world, we then take that profile and figure out what ads and stories to display, he sends information about people with bad scores to a security officer to potentially have their clearance yanked. He tells me his goal is to prevent another Fort Hood - where 17 people were killed in two separate incidents by individuals who were entitled to be on base. There is one wrinkle in his search: He can't look at anyone who is not DoD. US laws prevent that. And despite what we might think, at least in the US Army, they take the laws quite seriously. Or, so he tells me.
The riddle of how to tell who is DoD, is an interesting one. LinkedIn, which is considered trustworthy, is used to ID a person and establish that they are DoD employee. More than 600,000 DoD employees list this fact in LinkedIn. Then, use LinkedIn as a gateway over to Facebook. But how do you tell whether those friends are DoD employees, if you can't link them back through LinkedIn? One novel idea is to encourage DoD employees to join a Facebook group that only DoD employees can join. There is no American law that says DoD employees can be subject to this scrutiny, but their employment contracts say they can.
I called the person who introduced me to the term Big Data several years ago. He told me not worry about any of this, because in two months everything will be upside down.
Only 34 per cent of the ads posted on the web are ever even seen, he said. And, until now there was no way to verify whether an ad was ever seen. Yes, we can tell whether it was placed on a page, and whether that page was displayed, but there was no way to tell if that user ever scrolled down to see the ad. In two months (November 2014), there will be a push to pay for ad views rather than page views. This will change our entire industry, the digital pricing model and revenue.
Will it? Perhaps this will become part of the services we'll provide: Access to users that read to the end of the story. Or we'll only provide stories that fit on a single screen.
Some websites place the share button, with a pre-written subject above the story, because most readers don't scroll down.
But, according to Ethan Zuckerman, writing in The Atlantic, American newspapers generate four times more money per reader than Facebook. Small comfort, Mark Zuckerberg has a billion customers.
I recently wrote about Digital First Media as a victim of its own success. Company executives that I spoke with lamented that they were too successful to see their plans come to fruition. Of the two executives mentioned, one is abruptly gone from DFM, the second tells me he'll be gone within a month. The buyers for DFM? Nowhere to be seen.
The CEO of a newspaper software company that was purchased in the last few years, told me in an email recently that he was now in the healthcare industry. It's like the old days in newspapers, he wrote, with money flowing in the door and double digit profits.
The merry-go-round seems to be going faster and faster. The centrifugal force flings some of us off, but we're not always unhappy about where we land.
Newspaper systems industry veteran John Juliano writes regularly for GXpress Magazine. He is North American vice president of business development at Miles 33. Contact him at john@jjcs.com