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Why Google Should Be Afraid of Facebook

August 5, 2010 By 1 Comment

This is a chart of keyword searches over time for ‘San Francisco Wedding Photographers.’ It’s about a $2.75 cost per click. If you search it now, you’ll notice that it lights up like a paid search Christmas tree.

Keyword volume for san francisco wedding photographer showing search becoming less important over time.

Notice the downward trend over time. What’s going on? Are fewer people getting married? It doesn’t seem correlated to the economy or overall marriage volume.

I think today people are going on facebook and asking “Who had a great wedding photographer?” and immediately viewing their friends’ pictures.

These queries – the kind that you want real people to answer – are why social is rapidly becoming the new search.

And as these queries and their buying intention moves to social networks, conventional search engines are left with factual queries – like “When was Einstein’s Birthday?” I don’t know about you, but I have little interest in buying ads on search queries like that.

What do you think? Is social replacing search? Leave a comment and share with the community…

Update: As my friend Ishan Anand correctly pointed out in the comments, this chart actually refers to relative search volume and not absolute search numbers. It seems logical that overall search volume would go down over time for a query that’s done mostly by 27-34 year olds in the Bay Area. Additionally, facebook launched in 2006, well after the big drop.

All of this is completely correct. And I want to make a note here and say if you disagree with me about any of my points, please make a comment. (If you’re going to be a trolling, insulting fanboy, I suggest you take your commenting business elsewhere. But everyone leaving civil, insightful comments should stay.) I want this blog to be a place of fascinating discussions about business and technology, and not simply a platform for me to blather on about my unfounded opinions.

So we emailed back and forth a little, and did some more research.

Our main conclusion was that we do not have enough results to experimentally confirm this hypothesis. Just to go from first principles, what could be happened here?
Potential Outcomes:
- The absolute number of searches for this particular keyword has stayed the same, and Google remains the main research source. This bodes well for Google, because they can continue to sell profitable search ads.
- The absolute number of searches for this particular keyword has gone down over time as more social recommendations are used. This is bad for Google and good for facebook.
- The absolute number of searches stays the same, but people are also asking their friends. They are placing more weight on their friends’ recommendations, so search, but do not click on the ads or make their buying decisions based on the SERP. (Search Engine Results Page.) This is good for facebook. This is also fundamentally unmeasurable from the data we have, and would require things like CTR and conversion rates.

So I ran a Google trends report looking at the search volumes for California, ensuring the overall growth wouldn’t overwhelm the signal. I also ran a report of the % growth against the wedding category, which would give us a better idea of % traffic against other terms.
Growth of San Francisco Wedding Photographers Against the Category as a Whole

This is not a particularly clear graph, but it seems to show some amount of seasonality and a general year over year decline. I’m not sure what the second blue line is, but that appears to show a plunge around January of 2009. This doesn’t seem to correlate with, well, anything.

It appears that we do not have enough data to draw a conclusion. (This is beginning to sound like a GMAT question.) I still think Google should be afraid of facebook for the same reason, though.

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big trend for the next 5 years: using game mechanics to teach users your product

January 23, 2010 By 2 Comments

I wrote about game mechanics previously, but this idea is beginning to pop up in a lot of different places.

Robert Scoble wrote a great post about leveraging user narcissism to drive adoption.

Today, @daveconcannon pointed me at this excellent interview with Amy Jo Kim on Mixergy. She discusses meta-game design and how game mechanics are creeping into applications like eBay, programmer discussion boards, and Yelp.

Just now, I saw this where I never thought I’d see it – a music site.

On thesixtyone.com, you complete challenges (like listening to three songs in a row or friending three people) to receive “hearts”, which you can use to vote songs up to the front page.  (foursquare meets digg for indie music.)

The UI is exceptionally beautiful and well done, too.  And their challenges did engage me fully and get me to register.

Techcrunch says they’re experiencing some sort of user rebellion.  That does happen – just look at the various facebook redesigns.  Personally, if I’d seen their old UI, I wouldn’t have used the service at all.

I predict we will see game mechanics and elements become more and more common across web products in the next 3-5 years. This creates some interesting opportunities from entrepreneurs – third-party game mechanics engines, ways for game APIs to talk to one another, and the like.

Next time you sign up for a new social web product, be prepared to play a game.

What role do you think game mechanics will play in the future?  Please leave a comment…

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foursquare and user onboarding

January 20, 2010 By 1 Comment

Most websites are terrible at user onboarding.  Especially the social ones.  There’s a lot of great services out there that are just hard to get into.

Twitter suffers from a uniquely virulent variant of user onboarding issues  - when explained to a non-early adopter/innovator, that person says “Why would I want that?” And then you have to explain that it’s cool and really fun, despite doing nothing that sounds cool nor fun. But really, once you get into it, it’s fun.

Here, we can watch Kevin Spacey attempt to explain Twitter to David Letterman.

Dick Costolo, Twitter’s COO, even admits that Twitter sucks at user onboarding :

“It’s no secret that when you sign up for Twitter, you fly into this cliff and catch fire.  If you’re a brave soul and climb back up the cliff, you can look over and see the vistas beyond, you might be able to figure out how to use it.   So we’ve got this onboarding challenge…”

- Dick Costolo at the Real-Time Crunch Up (TechCrunch was kind enough to give me a free ticket to that event.)

As both Costolo and Letterman have figured out, Twitter doesn’t make sense when it’s first explained to you.  It just doesn’t.

But then you start to use it, connect with it, express yourself with it, and some magic starts to happen.

Foursquare, everyone’s favorite location-based game start-up (except the people that like Gowalla), has made some progress on this issue by disguising a social network as a game.

Immediately, new users (who I will henceforth refer to as “nusers”) figure out that they can earn badges.  Then, they understand that they can become mayor of places.  Nusers can also integrate their social feeds on day one.

Soon after that, a nuser will try to check in somewhere and find it isn’t on the map.  Then, the nuser will then add the place.

Foursquare is a social network disguised as a game.

The game teaches you to use the social network.  The social network encourages you to play the game.  And all around, users are delighted.

(Don’t worry, loyal readers, we will return to Foursquare in a future post, and what I think they should do given the recent entry of Yelp into their space.)

Conclusion: Be kind to your users – teach them how to use your service effectively.

How did you learn to use FourSquare? Leave a comment….

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How Zynga Uses Ghetto Testing and Minimum Viable Products

January 16, 2010 By 13 Comments

Zynga is a social gaming giant.  Farmville,their largest game, has more than 69 million monthly active users, making it larger than Twitter. Unlike many companies, Zynga also monetizes these users effectively with virtual goods and advertising. Zynga makes a huge amount of real money – while the company is private, 2009 revenues are projected to be around $100 million.

Today I listened to a podcast of a talk from Mark Pincus, CEO/Founder of Zynga and Bing Gordon of KPCB.  In this podcast, Mark shared some of Zynga’s methods of creating phenomenally successful social games.  As with almost all successful start-ups, Mark uses an appropriate version of customer development and rapid iteration.

Mark talked about how they assess demand for new products and features without taking up engineering hours.  All of his methods are pure customer development/agile start-up.

How Zynga Assesses Market Demand

- Create a 5-word pitch for a new product or feature

- Put it up on a high traffic webpage

- If it gets clicks, collect the emails of interested customers

- Build a ‘ghetto’ version of the feature

- Test everything

- Iterate constantly

Mark Pincus on Ghetto Testing and Minimum Viable Products

(Words are by Mark Pincus, transcribed and slightly paraphrased for clarity and grammar.  Emphases are my own.)

Mark Pincus:  We do something at Zynga that I call “ghetto testing.” I like to take someone who has a gigantic idea, usually a game designer, and they have some gigantic idea that this would just be great…  Maybe they really want a hospital simulation game…

We want to ghetto test it.  Again, we have so many bullets(engineering hours) we can fire, and we’ve got to just treasure and honor our engineers.  If we do our job right, they don’t get burned out.  They have a great life and we have successful products, so that’s what we want.

So I say to the marketing person or the product manager, “Describe it in five words.  It’s built.  If six months from now we built every dream you have, how are you going to market it?  Give me the five words.”

We’ll put that up.  We’ll put up a link for five minutes saying, ” Hey!  Do you ever fantasize about running your own hospital?” (laughter)  And, well, maybe you have!  In this economy, it’s the only growth area.

We’ll put that up for five minutes, and the link will maybe take you to a survey, where you give us your email and we say when this comes out we’ll contact you. If you’re really doing ghetto, it says ’404 not found’.  That’s bad.

So first you try to get the heat around it, you see how much do people like it, then…

(Brief discussion of usage metrics… they’re huge!)

Once we get to the point of actually building a game, or building a new feature, which we love Bing [Gordon's] idea of golden mechanics.  You should take away and steal it from us, the idea of not a game, but a feature that you can deconstruct and see that this interactive feature – a way to do a gift will drive virality or retention or revenues. So we put it in a feature we can build in a week – it’s a ghetto build we AB test it, we flow test it, we put it out to one percent.

We built a data warehouse with a testing platform so we’re running several hundred tests at any given time for every one of our games.  And no single user has more than one test.

So, we love tests.  When we see that it moves our metrics in a considerable way, that’s when we take it to be a full feature roll-out, and then we do the whole 2.0.

So, one example, we just turned on flowers in Farmville.   So now you can plant and grow beautiful flowers.  There’s so many place you could take flowers.  The holiday season is coming up – what happens if we let you level up your flowers and create your own custom bouquets?

But we don’t want to go down those paths until we test them with our users.

What’s amazing, and this is a feature that you will all have available as you enter this third internet era, is that you’re going to run a service, and you’re going to test things every week with your users, something that I never had available to me at previous companies.

It won’t be ‘build it for three months and hope and pray.’




Do you use ‘ghetto testing’ at your start-up?  How does it work? Leave a comment…

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