HighContrast » Digital Media

Do social networks care about your privacy?

Simeon Simeonov — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:57:41 +0000

Following my post yesterday on Twitter having to think carefully about privacy, a friend pointed me to a study that shows how social networks leak deep personal information, allowing third parties to combine what you do with who you are. Read the story here.

By itself, this may be absolutely OK depending on how much of this data is collected and how it’s used by third parties. However, most of the entities (targeting companies, ad networks, etc.) operate in a rather opaque manner for most consumers. First, you often don’t even know who those third parties are because they have no visible presence on the websites you visit yet your browser makes HTTP requests to them and they typically set multiple cookies on your machine. Many of them don’t even have a web site for a consumer to visit, for example, to figure out which business sits behind the URL and read their privacy policy.

A good (random) example is ad.yieldmanager.com, requests to which are typically hidden in the HTTP redirect chain. You need a tool like Live HTTP headers for Firefox to see them. If you make a browser request to ad.yieldmanager.com or yieldmanager.com you get nothing. The WhoIs record shows that Yahoo owns the domain. If you go to www.yieldmanager.com you’ll be redirected to the HTTPS version of the page https://www.yieldmanager.com which Firefox will refuse to display because it has an invalid security certificate. You’ll have to go through several dialog screens in Firefox to make a security exception and see the site. It will show a login screen for RightMedia (an advertising exchange bought by Yahoo) but no information for consumers. If you hit the home page of RightMedia, you’ll see a tiny link to “privacy” on the bottom which takes you to the privacy policy of the corporate site. At the end of the third paragraph, there is a link to the privacy policy on ad.yieldmanager.com. If you click on that, you’ll finally get to find out what RightMedia collects from you and what they do with it. Well, sort of.

The privacy policy says “Non-personally identifiable information is automatically sent to the Yield Manager technology by a user’s web browser. This information includes the date and time of the ad request, the user’s Internet Protocol Address, browser type, and the web page that the user is visiting.” How can they be sure that the web page I’m visiting doesn’t have personally-identifiable information? Does my Facebook URL personally identify me? Do my LinkedIn, blog, FriendFeed, Twitter URLs personally identify me? You bet they do. I have no idea whether RightMedia operates on those sites but if they do and if they can see links that can be tied to my account I’d certainly argue that their privacy policy is misleading.

Oh, one more thing. Do you know what’s the title of the privacy policy? “CONFIDENTIAL” Huh? Somebody better fix that.

<head>
<title>CONFIDENTIALtitle>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://my.yieldmanager.com/styles/css.php" type="text/css">
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://my.yieldmanager.com/images/default_icon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">if (top.location != location) { // if in frame
	top.location.href = document.location.href; // break out!
}
script>
head>

Do you think most consumers care about their information being potentially misused? I haven’t seen the studies but I hope lots do. How many of them do you think will be able to find out that yieldmanager.com/RightMedia exist and get around to finding the privacy policy and understanding it? Right.

In a world where it’s hard to even know who these third parties are let alone what one of the them says they are going to do with your information, how can anyone one be certain whether they’ll actually do what they said they would? Is it too much to ask that consumers have an easy way to (a) find out who collects data as they browse the Web and (b) have the privacy policy of those entities at most one or two clicks away?

At D7

Simeon Simeonov — Wed, 27 May 2009 17:57:05 +0000

I’m in Carsbad for the D7 conference. Shoot me a note / DM (@simeons) if you are close by. Event is shaping up nicely. Carol Bartz is on stage now fencing politely with Kara.

Last night I had a good chat with @biz about what it means to add features to products. Will blog it if I find the time.

Plinky Launches Content Encouragement Platform

Simeon Simeonov — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:39:16 +0000

Plinky is out of stealth. Check it out. Use it. Live it. Love it. Or not. But either way, send us feedback.

It felt strange to be on the opposite coast from the team as they were going through the final checklists but I guess this is what I get for co-founding a company in the Bay Area. I’d do it again with the right partner, though. Jason Shellen has been great to work with as a founder, partner and CEO. His vision for expanding blogging and, more broadly speaking, self-expression on the Web to an ever broader audience of contributors is powerfully present in the initial release. The team has done a fantastic job integrating the feedback from our private release in the fall into a neat service with great consistency of purpose.

A: you win the cool CFO award
C: you carry the spirit
G: you are funnier than your brother
J: now comes the truly exciting part
M: let’s do that mountain ride again
RF: your design makes me wish for your cooking
RK: thanks for pushing it over the hump
W: I’ll assemble furniture with you again
Z: where were you earlier?

Go Plinky!

Let’s Be Smarter About Privacy

Simeon Simeonov — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:07:03 +0000

I don’t know what it would take for history not to repeat itself.

The story goes something like this… Company X figures out a cool new way to collect and analyze lots of data for the purposes of better ad targeting or delivering better product recommendations. Company X comes up with a decent privacy architecture because they care about privacy. They launch. Things are going OK but business isn’t growing as fast as the investor presentation promised. Then, in a confluence of greed and idiocy, Company X does something crazy, sleezy and/or deceptive to make the business grow faster. Inevitably, someone finds out. They dig in and investigate. They write a blog post. It gets picked up. Then the lawsuits come. Then execs start resigning.

The latest story to follow this pattern is that of NebuAd, the company that snooped ISP traffic and surreptitiously modified, amongst others, Google’s home page in order to drop cookies on hapless consumers’ machines (that’s a simplification of what actually went on). I read some of the NebuAd whitepapers a while back and was struck by how they seemed to have taken the right steps from a technology standpoint to protect privacy. They were anonymizing IDs, using double hashing and other security techniques to break the link between personally identifiable information (PII) and the ad targeting profile they had created by observing traffic patterns. All that went to waste when they decided to act badly.

The point that gets lots in much of the privacy analysis in situations like that is that it is not the collection of information about consumer behavior that’s a problem. It is what companies do with that information. Or, in some cases such as NebuAd, what they do independently of that. Modifying the traffic coming from major Web properties is a terrible idea that has absolutely nothing to do with data collection and building consumer profiles.

Personally, I don’t see a problem with companies tracking consumer behavior and building ad targeting profiles as long as how they use the information is legit. Advertising is just another form of content. Targeting adds relevance and increases the quality of consumer experience. When content is relevant consumers like to see it. For example, in the age of TiVo, I have friends who watch the Superbowl just to see the ads (yes, they fast-forward the plays).

What does it mean to be legit in this context? First and foremost, it means protecting the privacy of individuals. There are lots of ways to target without disclosing PII to advertisers. Second, it means clearly documenting and explaining what you are doing. No shady, secret stuff. Absolutely no deceptive behavior. Third, in some cases, it means allowing for a clear opt-out mechanism (unless the entire program is opt-in in the first place).

In every industry there are shady companies that misbehave and, inevitably, there are cries for more regulation. The latest one I’ve seen (and the reason for this post) comes from the mobile space, as reported by Adotas.

ADOTAS — Two consumer groups demanded today that the Federal Trade Commission launch an investigation into the mobile market, focusing especially on practices that they say compromise user privacy.

The Center for Digital Democracy and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group jointly petitioned the FTC and asked that the agency look into alleged mobile marketing privacy threats and inappropriate practices targeting children, adolescents, and multicultural consumers.

The reasons for the request are that “as our petition makes clear, mobile marketers have refined a wide range of sophisticated practices that allow them to track, analyze, and target millions of Americans who increasingly rely on their phones for information.” I have an issue with that positioning. I don’t think the mere act of tracking and targeting is objectionable. And I don’t see regulation as a good solution. Mobile media is an emerging, fluid market. I can’t see how the FTC will be able to regulate it in a meaningful way without substantial inefficiencies. I would suggest an alternative approach. An industry, in this case the mobile industry, should develop clear, testable guidelines for acceptable privacy architectures & tracking/targeting behavior. Testable in this context means that it should be possible to certify within reason whether a vendor is or is not following the guidelines. There is an opportunity to leverage technology to protect privacy and identify bad players. Once the bad players are identified, the market takes over. You know how it goes. The lawsuits come. Then execs start resigning.

Three Generations of SEO (Part II)

Simeon Simeonov — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:39:05 +0000

This is part II in a series of posts on SEO-driven businesses. Part I is here.

I see three generations of SEO optimization in the wild that build upon each other. Below are their distinguishing characteristics.

SEO 1.0: human-driven SEO. This is primarily about people tweaking content and linking structure. The main distinguishing characteristic of an SEO 1.0 company is that there are people on staff who spend a portion of their time optimizing content for SEO. The best example is probably About.com, with its 750+ experts and dozens of editors. The experts and editors choose which topics to write on and know how to write to drive rank. They know how to format titles and what words they should avoid and what’s the “right” length of an article, etc. They also know how to build a strong link internal structure, albeit mostly by hand. Our own TechTarget and THCN are pretty expert at SEO 1.0. For Internet marketing, HubSpot is a great resource which helps many companies get on the SEO 1.0 train. The biggest problem of SEO 1.0 is scale–it takes humans to optimize content.
SEO 1.5: adding UGC for scale. What you may not be able to do with a dozen or a few hundred experts you may be able to do with lots of contributors. Blogging sites are the main examples. They key here is to get to scale and avoid “poisonous” SEO–the type of content that actually can drive your rank down.
SEO 2.0: machine-driven SEO. If SEO 1.0 is about the human touch, SEO 2.0 is about software crunching through content databases. What SEO 2.0 lacks in human skill it gains in scale. The key is having good meta-data. WordPress.com is a good example. Although the content is UGC, nobody is teaching WP bloggers how to write for SEO. However, the smart folks at Automattic are taking the meta-data from blog posts, including but not limited to titles, tags, linking and visit histories, and using them to generate both new pages (for example, using the SEO tag) and new links in content (as in the auto-generated possibly related posts at the bottom of blog posts). E-commerce sites are great candidates for SEO 2.0 because products carry a lot of meta-data allowing new pages to be built by brand, price and other features. Many also do SEO 1.0 through on-staff experts/marketers writing about the products and SEO 1.5 by adding (or syndicating) reviews. Another good example is EveryZing, run by my friend Tom Wilde, which can add meta-data to media assets (podcasts, videos) and make them search-friendly by doing speech-to-text. Yet more examples are what BitPipe (now owned by TechTarget) or Scribd are doing.
SEO 2.5: content enhancement. I’m noticing an increasing effort, particularly with UGC, to use software tools to enhance the quality of content that is produced as opposed to try to add value around it (such as through additional reading links, etc.). The idea is simple: the better the content and the more relevant links in it, the more interesting it is for the search engines and potentially for visitors. One player in this space is Zemanta (which Fred Wilson recently invested in), whose widget I’m staring at now as I write this post. I like what these guys are doing. At Plinky, we are taking a very different approach with the same goal–help people create better UGC.
SEO 3.0: it’s all about back links. If you have a lot of content with good meta-data you can create an amazing internal linking structure within the sites you control. But you need to have back links to drive rank. Domain squatters for years have built link farms across the domains they own and have tried to hide the coordinated nature of their linking from search engines. Then came the comment and review spammers who essentially poisoned much of that pool of UGC for search. On the legitimate side, businesses have struck content partnerships that increase back links for years. But it wasn’t until the last couple of years that many companies approached the problem of building legitimate, value-added back links with scale and automation in mind. We first saw this through site templates (MySpace or WordPress, for example) and widgets and the back links to their creators. I am now seeing a next generation of startups innovating in this area. The delicate balance is to add tons of back links that add value to visitors as opposed to look like a link farm.

The majority of SEO experts and consultants built their fame doing SEO 1.0. Some have experience with SEO 1.5 and can suggest manual widget distribution strategies to help with SEO 3.0. These people tend to be focused much more on content than on software. In my own experience and in talking to heads of marketing and CTOs at Polaris portfolio companies I get the sense that very few SEO gurus have any experience with building the foundational software systems that drive SEO 2.0-3.0. This is a big problem. It is not easy to build an SEO-optimized content management + publishing system driven by a large content database with largely automated editorial processes. If you want to take your business to scale, you have to think about your SEO strategy and architect your service for this from the ground up. This is not something you can bolt on. Also, unless you already have an SEO-knowledgeable architect on your team, expect to spend a long time finding one and consider building an SEO advisory board to augment the knowledge/experience of the person you’ll end up with.

The next part in the series will look at the economics of “free” traffic.

Building an SEO-Driven Business (Part I)

Simeon Simeonov — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:48:58 +0000

I’m no SEO guru but over the past couple of years I’ve talked to enough entrepreneurs who are leveraging SEO to develop a perspective on the impact of making SEO a big part of a startup’s future. I plan on doing a few posts on this topic in the coming days.

It helps to mention some of the key ingredients of the SEO value chain.

action = f₁(user_intent, traffic)
traffic = f₂(search_query, rank, url)
search_query = f₃(user_intent)
rank = f₄(content, internal_links, back_links)
internal_links = f₅(content, meta-data)
back_links = f₆(content, meta-data, partnerships)

There are many complex variables here. SEO has quickly evolved from being a craft to being both an art and a science practiced by some of the best and some of the worst people on the Net. The search engines have evolved in turn not to be duped. However, old habits die hard and the one bad habit I keep seeing in the SEO world is the overwhelming focus on content.

Content, be it expert-generated articles or user-contributed product reviews or the “yo, buddy, what’s up?” on Myspace, is very important but is just one piece of the puzzle. I’m surprised more startups are not focused on scalable approaches for adding value on two other fronts:

User intent. Everything stems from that. The search engine marketers know this cold. They know that different search queries lead to different conversions after a paid click. On the SEO side, however, I haven’t seen great examples of recognizing the importance of user intent and the fact that different search queries often indicate different intent. By focusing too much on the content that drives traffic and not enough on the dynamism and adaptability of the user experience visitors get after they land through a natural search link, businesses are leaving value on the table.
Meta-data. My friend Glen Daniels says “It’s just metadata.” In most situations we’d be better off by trading off data for meta-data, or volume of content for understanding about the content. There is a reason why e-commerce product reviews are so valuable for SEO. Not only do they provide content but they are organized in context and have all the meta-data associated with the product they are about. Notice how Amazon is smart to display the same reviews for items with different colors, or for the hardcover vs. the paperback version of the same book, or for a newer version of a pair of headphones, etc. They couldn’t do that without meta-data associating the review with a product and then some smarts that associate similar products together. The other reason why meta-data is so important is that it allows for links created through software. For example, WordPress.com is smart to enhance the value of blog posts for both readers and search engines through an auto-generated set of possibly-related posts. I see too many businesses invest to generate a large volume of content but not enough to add great meta-data to the content, which ultimately limits both SEO and monetization.

The next post will be on the three generations of SEO.

Measuring Conversational Media

Simeon Simeonov — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:30:08 +0000

Many panels at the conferences I go to end up being drab affairs with softball questions, way too much agreement and way too little insight. Which why I was pleasantly surprised by the Measuring Conversational Media panel at the conversational marketing summit yesterday. The panelists were:

James Lamberti, SVP, Search & Technology, comScore
Steve Rubel, SVP & Director of Insights, Edelman Digital
Don Springer, President & CEO, Collective Intellect

Debra Aho Williamson from eMarketer, who was the moderator, didn’t have to ask too many hard questions as the panelists were more than happy to disagree with each other. There were three key issues:

The difference between measurement and insight
Approaches to measurement
The role of standards

“Measurement doesn’t necessarily lead to insight” was a point Steve Rubel made a few times. He was implying that much of the new-fangled data collection and measurement focused on social & conversational media brought little value and insight to brand marketers. That may be true in general but in fast-changing environments it is rather difficult to say a priori what data one must collect and what analysis one must perform to achieve insight. Insight tends to be serendipitous and in my experience I’ve found that serendipity tends to correlate well with data availability. It’s hard to see what you can’t look at.

comScore’s Lamberti was emphatic that measurement doesn’t need to be reinvented. Although conversational media and traditional media are rather different on a number of axes–reach vs. engagement campaigns, large vs. low volume, targeting value vs. targeting advocates, pushed messaging vs. dialog, etc.–the fundamental measurement is the same. Don Springer’s take was that one does, in fact, need fundamental advancements in measurenment in order to track key metrics such as number of conversations, share of voice and sentiment change. I think I fall on the side of Springer here. What’s the equivalent of sentiment change measurement in traditional Web analytics? Tracking star ratings or equivalents is insufficient since they won’t tell you want a blogger is thinking about a product or brand.

Steve Rubel and Don Springer really got into it when they discussed standards. Steve’s take was that w/o standards much of the measurement conversations are meaningless as they are about apples vs. oranges. At one point Don said “standards stifle innovation.” Both positions have truth in them but that’s topic for a longer post. I have to catch a flight back to Boston.

Update: the panel was also covered by PaidContent.

Amazon Funds AWS Darling Animoto

Simeon Simeonov — Thu, 15 May 2008 12:39:54 +0000

My friend Stevie Clifton, CTO at Animoto, pinged me early this morning with the news that Amazon has funded his company. This comes on the heels of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos using Animoto as a great example of how to leverage Amazon Web Services. Get the full story from Stevie who recorded a video telling how Animoto scaled from 50 server instances to 3,500 server instances after their Facebook launch.

Congrats to the Animoto team. They’ve built a very cool service and deserve to get a little breathing room.

Cloud Computing: You May Need It If You Go Viral On Facebook

Simeon Simeonov — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:02:53 +0000

I organized a panel on cloud computing at the Nantucket Conference last weekend. One of the panelists was Stevie Clifton, founder/CTO of Animoto. He shared a story about Animoto’s experience with Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud and going viral on Facebook that speaks for itself so much so that Jeff Bezos used the example in a recent presentation.

Handling this type of spike the old-fashioned way would have been painful and expensive. If you plan on being successful and see these types of spikes in traffic, you should think about cloud computing from day one.

Consumer-Selected Sponsorship

Simeon Simeonov — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 00:32:56 +0000

Sponsorships are growing as an advertising concept and the most interesting sub-segment is the one where consumers select the sponsors they want to be associated with. One of our companies, AWS Convergence Technologies (the folks behind WeatherBug) was a pioneer in this space. They even pioneered the Sponsor Select Network, which opens this for third parties.

An interesting twist to the model comes when you combine it with social incentives. The latest arrival (I saw the news in PaidContent today) is ArcheType Media / SocialVibe. They let brands sponsor your social network profile. Here is an example (on their site and on MySpace). The bait is doing good and getting goods.