Oriol Gifra 360º

From last 1th January 2012 Google Health has been discontinued.  This is another failed experiment from Google. Here is the message you can read now.

I think from this one we can learn a lot and from here I thanks Google for that. The official reason why the service has been discontinued was explained in their official blog as follow:

 ”Google Health is not having the broad impact that we hoped it would. There has been adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts. But we haven’t found a way to translate that limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people.”

After running about 4 years only “tech-savvy patients and their caregivers” mostly used it.

For me the most important reasons why the service failed are pointed below:

- Privacy matters, and even more when that information is related to personal health information. It seems Google did not succed in getting enough confidence for many users in relation to the issue of data privacy.

- Early users have found the service difficult to use.

- The service could not overcome the obstacle of requiring people to laboriously put in their own data continuously.

 Beside all those points, for me probably one of the main reasons is that Google did not meet what people probably want to check online regarding health issues.

In my opinion health is and will be a very social topic, in terms of sharing opinions and experiences online. Beside, health information needs to be covered different from any other type of data or information. Health can not be treated as if we were working with sports news or webs. It needs to express confidence, trust, reputation, authority behind the source of that information. Google probably did not have neither those atributes, or at least not enough from my point of view, although its partnering with hospitals and physicians.

Meanwhile, Google has recently announced  another approach to health information through some improvements in its search engine allowing users search for  symptoms and providing information about it causes and treatments.

I think (and it is my personal opinion) patients will appreciate more a P2P relation, which can be Physician to Patient or Patient to Patient as it’s been demonstrated by projects like Patients Like Me or the UK base project Doctors Net

I like Mari Smith and her common sense when talking about here new book The New Rules of Relationship Marketing and the concept People to People that is behind.

Although a lot of people has written about Social Networks and the Community concept, I personally think that for marketers is more appropiate the approch from the relationship marketing  as a way to understand better our customers, learn from them and work their loyalty and satisfaction.

Here is an interesting interview.

I think the concept People to People is better than the famous B2C (Business to Consumer). P2P is much better in terms of proximity and customer care. Who is behind the counter or attending us is a person, so the relation should be as personal and personalized as possible. I think the future for many companies and their reputation will come from this new relationship marketing that Mari is talking about.

I was last week at the University of VIC explaning to students something I wanted to share here with you.

We were preparing a case for a Transmedia project… and conversation finally went to a very interesting point. In reality, what online marketing shoud pay more attention is not how you promote or analize, instead I think marketers today should be obessed in providing an excellent digital experience to the users and clients.

At the end, if you think about it, all is about you digital experience and nothing else.

The experience starts from the first moment people think about looking for your product and service and search for it. What the people of Google called The Zero Moment of Tuth

From that point in less than 10 seconds user or potential client should be already reading you (blog, newspaper…) or your product or services. It means, you should be findable (SEO) and easy accessible (speed and usability).

The digital experience continues when you “enjoy” with what you are offering, doesn’t matter if it is a blog or and e-commerce. We all should make people to enjoy staying with us by explaining interesting things to them or selling interesting product or services.

In the case of e-commerce, all the factors related with that type of business have an important impact on the digital experience of the user or client. Factors such product availability, price, service and Customer Care, or better say Customer Satisfaction Department.

Digital experience continues after users have left the page, because you can send them an e-mail, a product, an alert or whatever engagement strategy you may have. Probably (depending on the type of your service or website) users may continue visiting you through their mobile phones or tablets… 

Today, online marketing is a digital experience storytelling. Do not think only in service or product terms, but start thinking on which ”story” of digital experience are you going to tell to your users or clients.

Steve Jobs did not create a mobile called iPhone or a tablet called iPad… he went much farther, he created a huge digital mobile experience behind those devices. We need to create as a marketers also that experiences.

Online Marketer = Digital Experience Director 

We need to create as a marketers our own digital experience for our followers, fans, clients…

Recently Search Engine Land posted an interesting article about the correlation between searches and phone conversions. The data provided is surprising to me (I never thought it was so high) as it is estimated 43% of the Search Engine conversions happen over the phone.

Ads that contain phone numbers are also said to have a 10% increase in clickthrough rate.

Probably this data make us to rethink about placing more visible phone numbers not only in Ads but also in pages and even in some meta data. This is an interesting ROI data to take in mind when planning our SEO and SEM strategy.

This data is provided by the phone tracking service IfByPhone:

Yestarday I was at the bike shop to fix some issues in my mountain bike. While I was waiting the mechanic to fix and set up some new accessories in my mountain bike I made a tour inside the Probike shop that distributes Specialized, a famous mountain bike brand.

I knew that there were some bikes very expensive, but never as expensive as almost 8,000€ … more than a car!!!

Here is the picture of the mentioned mountain bike:

Recently Google announced that they released a new update that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and can better determine when to give you more up-to-date relevant results.

The below video Rand Fishkin and Mike King describe how works the Freshness Factor.

a) The inception date of the document (crawled,indexed, etc.)

b) The inception date of the document first appearing in search results

Here I selected some interesting videos on what’s coming and how technology is going to change our lives even more.

The eternal question keeps being if technology will make us more happy, more humans (human values) or this is not the correct question as technology it nothing to do with happiness. What do you think about it? 

According to Wikipedia Happiness is a mental state of well-being and according to Dalai Lama the purpose of our lives is to be happy.

I wonder how many people is not happy today… and it is very simple but at the same time very difficult to be happy. The secret is Make Others Happy!!!!

Stop looking at yourself, look around you and provide free happiness.

I know it is very easy to write but very difficult to achieve, but I truly believe it is the only way we have to overcome the coming days facing a deep economical crisis and low human values. Remember we will die as we lived (in fact we are dying as we are living).

Do you imagine a world where everybody make others happy?.

The typical question is.. .what about money?. Well, I believe people of third wold are much more happy than most of the people living in first world, and the reason is they are poor but richer in human relations.  Happiness is really not about money, it is about making others happy.

My suggestion is to try to live what I call the Happiness Circle of Live:

1.  Interact with people who make you happy.

2. Make others happy

I think the future is on concepts like the Gross National Happiness (GNH) . The first step towards a National Happiness is the individual happiness, so let’s start!

I think the question all of us should ask ourselves is: how many people I made more happy today?

It is not necessary you answer here.  Myself need to improve a lot on that!

More than 4 years ago the usability guru Jackob Nielsen wrote a post in his blog under the title:How Little Do Users Read? In that post Nielsen said “On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.”

Although there is a old question regarding the impact of new technologies and the reading habits, it seems the online users need to have not only the old reading habits, but also new reading skills, as this old article from New York Times shows.

Nielsend discovered the users typically follow what he called the F-Shaped Pattern. This dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F and has the following three components:

•Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F’s top bar.
•Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F’s lower bar.
•Finally, users scan the content’s left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F’s stem.

Following this reading pattern, we should include how long do users stay on web pages. According recent post from Jackob Nielsen users often leave Web pages in 10–20 seconds. According to a recent research from Microsoft the first 10 seconds of the page visit are critical for users’ decision to stay or leave.

The probability of leaving is very high during these first few seconds because users are extremely skeptical, having suffered countless poorly designed Web pages in the past. People know that most Web pages are useless, and they behave accordingly to avoid wasting more time than absolutely necessary on bad pages.

 It is clear online users behaviour is very different from online. Your content is under consideration in less than 10 seconds!

To work with that, I suggest to be as much as visual and interactive you can using all type of formats for the storytelling, from video to infographics.

Let’s see some visual engaging and viral formats that help to retain users with us:

1. New York Times Visual DNA

An interactive and visual quiz from New York Times.

2. Pleasure Hunt by Magnum

Interactive Magnum game.

3. Ted Sphere

TED Sphere Visualization

4. Data Visualization

Real time buzz visualization.

5. Infomous

Viual News from the Buzz

6. John Paulson Interactive Infographic

John Paulson interactive infographic, an example of content marketing using interactive infographic format.

The above are some examples of formats you can use in your website to improve user retention, engagement and improve your viral marketing. Let’s work Visual Marketing: The Art to Retain Users Using Visual Formats.

As Google is making continuous improvements in its rank factors algorithm, probably we will see by 2012 a huge improvements on semantic technologies focused to understand consumer sentiment. 

Google is already working on reading social networks comments to learn and make relations between what’s being said in those conversations and brands, products, people…  The latest news came recently from Matt Cutts, fom Google, who said Googlebot already was able to index dynamic comments.

The next step is to improve relations between comments and type of sentiments described. Seth Grimes, an analyst strategist from Washington answer interesting questions in a recent article about The Future of Sentiment Analysis. He thinks still there is a lot to do to improve the SMA we have today, but companies like Radian6 are on the way.

Seth Grimes describe here what he looks in a Social Analysis Tool.  For him sentiment analysis is a set of methods, typically (but not always) implemented in computer software, that detect, measure, report, and exploit attitudes, opinions, and emotions in online, social, and enterprise information sources.

Google is already conducting a sentiment analysis for social media profiles such Twitter profiles or Google +1. Tools like Sharedcount can give you some idea of what is Google accounting. Along with that data, Google is also using its semantic technology to work in sentiment analysis.  

Online Reputation Management (ORM) will become much more important in 2012, as sentiment will be probably one of the most important ranking and quality factors for next year Google algorithm improvements.

We will see new Start Ups, like Bananity (coming online officialy next 23th November 2011) as online communities based on love & hate relations, or the sentiment analysis applied to journalism, as for instance what did Boston Globe with the Red Sox players and coaches popularity based on Twitter conversations. 

It will obviously impact on SEO, as the ranking factors will be more difficult to work… because sentiments are not something you can optimize fast, aren’t it?.

Marketing is now more than ever sentiment centric!