David Alpern's Perspectives

In early December, Google Goggles, a visual search app was launched for phones running on the Android mobile operation system. Goggles refers to the process of searching visually, by taking a picture of an object with your camera phone, rather than typing (or speaking) a search query using words. Google then attempts to recognize the object in the picture and return relevant search results about it as well as other information about other local businesses in the area.

Like many new features that are first released in beta, or to selected users at first (as is the case here with Goggles being offered initially only for Android phones), there are questions about what it is and how useful it ultimately will prove to be.

Visual search has tremendous potential to influence everyday life. Consider, for example, tourism. When visiting a new place you can take a picture of an object or landmark, such as a picture in a museum, and instantly receive back information about its title, who painted, what it is about, its history, significance, etc.

Another useful application is capturing and organizing information from business cards. I speak here from personal experience as one who has a collection of business cards still waiting to be organized, scanned, and indexed. Visual search recognizes text, thus it is able to scan a business card and add the captured information into your contacts. There are other tools and apps that offer to aide with capturing and scanning business card information already offered in the market, but most of them have not amassed large user bases.

Visual search technology is still in its infancy and works today on relatively well known or easy to discern objects, but not so well yet on things like food, plants, or animals. I see a future in which visual search will be capable of helping determine appropriate next moves (such as in a chess game), identifying plant species you encounter while hiking (stay away from poison ivy!), and making tourism even more enlightening.

A survey this week from 24seven inquired about marketing trends I think will decline or go away in 2010. Among those I cited was phone-a-friend because viral activities are moving so rapidly toward online application domination. A similar question can be asked as to what will be this coming year’s new growth trends, and high on my list is location social, the process of combining location with interactivity and discovery of places, akin to being the Netflix of local recommendations.

Among the Internet’s early adopter set, foursquare is the nearly unanimous designee for the social-media service that will become tech’s next mainstream app. It’s a location-based mobile startup that lets users share locations with friends and also earn badges for checking in at various designated venues. Others players who are competing in the location-based services market include Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, Google’s Latitude, as well as Twitter, which has been this year’s poster boy for the new app with all the buzz. In fact, Twitter is actively working on building out its own location-based features.

In marketing it often asked about a new product if it serves a need. In the case of location social, the answer is yes. Here is an example/opportunity from my own recent experiences: I was at a charity function for a local school earlier this month. Several people I know are associated with that school, so I was casually looking around the crowded facility to see if any of them were, by chance, there. Imagine how much easier it would have been to be able to confer with a widely used app that could alert me if they were actually in attendance.

One more trend I expect to see more of in 2010 is app-to-app linkage, and indeed foursquare is already all over this, with Twitter integration already part of its offering.

If the social networking revolution has you scratching your head wondering about why people are investing time in all of this and how companies can actually benefit from this activity, there is a Harvard Business School study that relays surprising findings about the needs these networks fulfill, how people use these offerings differently, and how Twitter is holistically different.

Most obviously, social networks are an information hub about the activities of those you know. They also serve as a gateway to introductions to new resources and contacts. The HBS study also identified how they enable “under the radar” job searches without giving off the appearance of being proactively engaged in such activity, especially if presently employed.

What are people doing on social networks?

Since people spend lots of time on these sites; what are they actually doing? Answer: Pictures. The killer app of social networks. People love to look at pictures. 70% of observed actions were related to viewing pictures and other people’s profiles. As related in the Robin Williams movie “One Hour Photo”, pictures typically show people at a moment when they are having fun and are happy, a sentiment that we as humans seek for ourselves. Pictures also provide a channel that is a form of voyeurism. While we would not pry into other people’s lives physically, online it does not feel intrusive or objectionable. Many first encounters that happen in the flesh after social networking voyeurism include comments like “you’re that guy that did that internship in (fill in the blank) last year.”

Studying behavior by gender, the biggest grouping was of men looking at women they don’t know, followed by men looking at women they do know. It turns out that women also look at other women they know. Overall, women receive two-thirds of all page views. A lot of guys in relationships are looking at women they don’t know. Similar to how some people use social networks as a cover for subtly pursuing a new job, they also provide an easy channel to see if anyone might be a better relationship match.

How Twitter is Different

Did you know that Twitter is used mostly by adults, Facebook was originally the domain of college students exclusively, and LinkedIn is populated by executives and professionals? Twitter, was found to be quite different not just in terms of who uses it but also how it is used. Twitter restricts users to 140-character messages. The HBS study found that 90% of posts were created by just 10% of users. This was attributed to how the service uses just words not pictures, and writing is a difficult skill for many people, whereas pictures can simply be posted without commentary if desired on other social networks. Gender-wise, there are more women then men on Twitter, men imbed links in their tweets more often, whereas women actually say things.

Who’s Hot?

Twitter has the buzz and has grown to 20 million monthly U.S. users, Facebook has 90 million, and MySpace can boast 70 million. So why doesn’t MySpace get the attention it deserves? It may be that it tends to be stronger in smaller cities and communities in the poorer south and central parts of the country like Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and parts of Florida. The authors commented how MySpace users “aren’t in Dallas, but they are in Fort Worth. Not in Miami but in Tampa. They’re in California, but in cities like Fresno…not near the media hubs (except Atlanta) and far away from those elite opinion-makers in coastal urban areas”.

Forming Your Social Strategy

Corporate marketers struggle with how to use social networking to reach potential customers. They treat it as another channel to get people to click through to a site rather than what it truly should be used for, which is to create awareness and to offer up a different perspective. Studies have found that people don’t respond to advertising on social networks. It is analogous to hanging with friends, when an uninvited stranger joins your conversation and tries to sell you something.

That does not work in real life, nor is it a successful social strategy. A good corporate social strategy emulates the reason for social networks in general - solving social failures in the offline world. What could work is approaching that group of friends we discussed above and saying that your product is designed for them and will make them all better friends. This may necessitate product innovation to make them more social by leveraging group dynamics, which we agree is hard, but will be more effective than just using social media as but another channel to talk to people or advertise on. These are good first steps but they are not a social strategy.