Imagine my surprise as I was sitting in the Philly airport, reading a copy of Lucky Magazine, that I should come across something I love. It’s an advertisement from Bing. Yes, I said love. It’s a blatant advertisement, and it’s from Bing (stop groaning, they are getting better!).
The total win is that they are using the community (aka Blogger Jen Lula) to reach online shoppers. Magazine readers like me who go online to find the products we like in magazines. Priceless.
Style Magazine June 2010 p 66
Here is what Bing is doing right (and wrong) and what you might think about in your social and link building plans.
Mix Your Style in with the Medium
Bing’s Play: The ad looks just like any other section of the magazine with specific articles of clothing and accessories, cost and designer. It’s well integrated with the magazine’s feel, but also has a blatent “Presented by Bing” at the top.
If you are doing a campaign with Facebook, Twitter, Lucky, or Men’s Health, match your campaign to your company and the medium. You want to be transparent in the fact that you are advertising, but also want to keep the continuity of the publication. Think about adding a blog into your site using wordpress. The best theme is going to be your own site. You want a seamless transition between your site and wordpress. In a magazine, having an ad look something like a page from the magazine with good content is awesome. But make it plain as day that it’s you, not the magazine editors. No hiding things.
Involve the Community
Bing’s Play: The social part of this is that the advertisement included a shout out to a fashion blogger and included some fashion ideas for readers.
Including a member of the community is a sure fire way to get in with the crowd. But more than that, it opens up the playing field for that community leader. In this ad, Jen will surely add more readers to her blog from this exposure and I am sure will become a Bing user for some time. It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved, including the brand. Remember karma is a real thing in business. Show the love, and the love will be returned.
Give them a Reason to Visit
Bing’s Play: Included in the ad is a giveaway integration with Bing, Style, and Jen.
Be one of the first 75 readers to upload a photo of your favorite Bing fashion find to StyleSpotter.LuckyMag.com and win a studded cluth from Lucky. Visit StyleSpotter.LuckyMag.com for expert shopping advice from Jen.
You can’t get much better than a push to purchase from a Bing search and then throw in consumer generated content to Style, and reference the expert level advice from Jen. This promotion has it all within 2 sentences. When pushing a social media/link bait promotion, don’t make it all about you, and give people a good reason to visit and link to your site. The more it’s about them, the better your campaign will do.
Include New, Fun Technology
Bing’s Play: In a final knock out punch, they included a mobile tag to be read by Microsoft Tag on the user’s mobile device.
Talking to the younger generation is all about what else their mobile phone can do. This little tag stands out on the page (differentiation, think 1998 when magazine ads didn’t always include a URL) and makes the user use a Microsoft service.
Downside: the link goes to mobile Bing only. Now how cool would it have been to include in that tag a link to all the products on the page and where they can be purchased? #justsayin
One Note to Bing
You have search boxes to the products on the page, but they are VERY general searches. How about for a month or so having a one-box type of thing displaying that product for that very general search? Or at least hand coding those glasses into a search for “oliver peoples eyeglasses” because that frame just would not show up for me. Minor fail there guys.
Tomorrow night, the Distilled crew is coming to my house for a party. It’s called Boardgames and Beverages. Rocking. While I stayed up all last night decorating personalised menus and filing the party bags with appropriately luxurious gifts, I was reminded of all those times I’ve stayed up all night crafting the perfect bit of content*. As it happens, the analogy holds:
1. Scout the idea.
If no-one’s interested, there’s no point. “Hey guys, who’s up for a party at mine?” If this happens, come up with a better idea. The same applies to linkbait: if no-one’s the slightest bit ‘baited’ by your content idea, it might be worth having a rethink.
2. Make sure you have some reliables.
Before I emailed everyone at Distilled, I checked that a few reliables were keen to don their party hats and would attend without fail. I don’t know about you, but I like going to parties that I know lots of my friends are going to. It’s kind of the same with social networking: people attract people and traffic attracts traffic. If you’re really lucky, your friends, followers, whatever, will also attract lots of new visitors to your site.
3. Plan something wonderful
There’ll be boardgames, there’ll be beverages. Who knows, I might even get out the indoor remote control helicopter. Similarly, you should try and impress with your content. Think about who it’s trying to attract and go all out to blow their socks off.
4. Build up the hype
I’ve sent round a few emails about my party, dropped it into conversation here and there, pointed and laughed at the people who can’t come, that sort of thing. There are two things to think about:
Anticipation is often better than the experience itself
If people think they’re going to have fun, they’re much more likely to actually have fun.
5. Go go go!
Timing is critical. My party is neither on a schoolnight nor in the morning. That would be silly. When you launch your linkbait, think about when you’re doing it. If your audience is US centric (so, Digg), it’s a good idea to launch pieces at around lunchtime here. Get a few diggs and comments going (hey, that’s like inviting a few people to your party early to get the atmosphere going) and that should hopefully attract the attention of the US at the start of their day.
Once the launch is underway, there’s no going back. You need to be on call for the next few hours at least to nurture the linkbait on its young unsteady legs.
6. Follow up and recovery
Phew, party’s over. Hopefully, we’ve all made some new friends and/or found out something new and interesting. Every time you launch some linkbait, you should try and build some new connections and/or learn from the experience. This can seem quite overwhelming to begin with, but a thoughtful comment here and a genuine shout there can really add up.
*I’ve not ever actually done this. I do dream about linkbait quite regularly so that sort of counts, right?
Given my over-arching interest in all things mobile (and especially mobile SEO), I subscribe to a fair few feeds giving me mobile and mobile SEO news and opinion. I am always keen to learn of good ones I don’t know about, so feel free to drop a link in the comments. I currently subscribe to:
General Mobile News
As you will see from my round-up, I get a lot of my general mobile news from smstextnews – a highly recommended read
Our friends the texperts – a great read of facts you probably didn’t know
News round-up
Given that I am reading all this stuff, I thought it might be useful to do a quick round-up, summary post (it might happen regularly, you never know). If you can’t wait for round-up posts, you can keep track of mobile stuff I’m interested in by following my weekly mobile del.icio.us tag.
The more data we all use when we’re out and about, the more backhaul becomes a problem. It’s not one that many people outside the industry think about. Backhaul is the process of connecting mobile base stations to the core network. This week Vodafone has struck a deal:
Vodafone has announced that it’s struck a five year deal with BT which will see BT’s wholesale arm providing connectivity between Voda’s base stations and its own network.
Particularly interesting (to me) is the talk of BT’s 21st century network…. Go read the article then do a bit of googling around that if you are feeling geeky…
Much like the turning off of analogue TV that is going to happen over the next few years to free up spectrum once everyone can use digital, the mobile networks have a load of spectrum that is currently used for 2G services and that many people would like to see used for more modern services once 3G coverage gets good enough. It would be Ofcom’s remit in the UK, but the Australian government is making headway on the issue:
Telstra has finally received the go ahead from the Aussie government to close down its CDMA network, after three months of waiting. The telco had hoped to close it down in January of this year, after its 3G network reached the same coverage levels, but was prevented by the government.
I have written before about how the mobile operators are desperate to avoid becoming “just the pipe” in the sense of simply allowing people to access the wider web with no value add. Strategy Eye report (via smstextnews again!) that:
CNN International has signed a deal with Samsung in which the manufacturer will be the first to offer a pre-loaded CNN news application.
On a light-hearted note, you might enjoy watching a (grainy, low sound quality) mobile video of a flash-mob descending on London’s Liverpool Street station to do a live ‘rick-roll’ of the station.
In the course of some of the work we have been doing recently, we have been thinking about the differences in mobile usage between the UK and the US. There are a lot of reasons why people use phones differently on opposite sides of the Atlantic:
Early technology differences in the networks
Business model differences from the networks
Different handset adoption patterns (caused by technology and business model differences)
Geographical differences
and a variety of other social and technological factors
Without getting into the usage differences too much, I wanted to highlight two key language differences that I think have a significant impact on people’s way of thinking about much of mobile.
Cell vs. mobile
Handsets are ubiquitously called mobile phones (or mobiles) in the UK.
In the US, the normal terminology (from the cellular communication underpinning the network) is cell phone (or cell).
In and of itself, this different is not particularly noteworthy, but, when combined with one more factor, I think it provides a fascinating insight.
In both countries, the buzz is all about mobile internet (and, to a slightly lesser degree, mobile search). In the UK, my belief (given that we call the handsets ‘mobiles’), this is equivalent in people’s minds to ‘internet / search on the handset’.
I am not the right person to speculate on the US, but the fact that it isn’t the ‘cellular internet’ leads me to think that there would be a tendency for the man on the street to think about the ‘mobile internet’ as potentially distinct from the handset and more about any kind of internet access on the move (e.g. a laptop with a data card).
I have no data to back this up – it is pure speculation – but in conversation with a few Americans, I have gathered a bit of anecdotal evidence that there is a different way of thinking about the meaning of ‘mobile’ as it pertains to the internet.
Operator vs. Carrier
The other difference has less of an impact in my opinion, but I find it interesting the way the languages have evolved in parallel.
In the UK, we talk about mobile operators, mobile networks or, officially, MNOs: Mobile Network Operators. (There used to be 4 main operators: Vodafone, Orange, O2 and T-Mobile. They were joined by 3 a the 3G spectrum auctions and there are also now a variety of so-called MVNOs: Mobile Virtual Network Operators who don’t actually run a network but offer a branding / pricing / customer service differentiator piggy-backing on an established operator’s network e.g. Virgin Mobile, Tesco Mobile(+)).
In the US, the primary terminology is carriers (e.g. Verizon, Cingular).
As Orwell noted, the words we use to describe things have a huge impact on our feelings about those things. By calling the networks ‘carriers’ in the US, as mobile data services grow, there is a tendency to think of them as providing ‘just the pipe’. The carriers are desperate to avoid the fate of their fixed-line cousins who found themselves in a commoditised market shuttling bits between content providers and consumers. In the UK, I think the pull of the content providers will prove stronger than the walls on any kind of walled-garden ‘mobile internet’, but the ‘operator’ terminology could be seen as an attempt to make it sound as though there is more to the job than just ‘carrying’ the bits – that they need to somehow ‘operate’ the whole system to make it work well.
MVNO
Incidentally, Tesco’s MVNO, which is powered by O2’s network could become a hugely-powerful force in the UK, in my opinion. T-Mobile’s MVNO plays have been hugely successful for them in increasing network usage gathering marginal revenue that wouldn’t otherwise have been on the table and combining O2 (currently the UK’s ‘cool’ operator, with the iPhone) with the brand, power and reputation for cost-effectiveness of Tesco could be huge.
I’ve been writing a lot about mobile stuff recently – I think it’s just been on my mind a lot. With revelations like 50x more iPhone search volume than from any other handset, however, I think we might be hearing more about mobile search from everyone in our industry.
At least it provides a little signal in among the noise about The Sunday Times on the blog recently!
A search marketer’s take on m. versus .mobi
Much has already been written on the m. versus .mobi debate including interesting stuff from the perspective of a domainer.
For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, the discussion is around the best way of differentiating mobile internet content. On the one hand, ICANN has released the .mobi top-level extension (e.g. amazon.mobi etc.). On the other hand, there is a growing adoption of m. sub-domains – m.example.com e.g. m.facebook.comm.bloglines.com (and we are seeing a lot more iphone sub-domains which are designed for a smaller screen but include a lot more interactivity than regular mobile content – I suspect this will be a short-lived phenomenon with the iPhone coping perfectly well with the regular web – and falling back on the mobile web if needed).
There is a third viewpoint in this debate which is worth bringing up which is that the mobile web shouldn’t be anything different to the regular web. Exponents of this view think that the answer is technology that makes the experience better on a mobile device (typically small screen, fiddly input). Couple this with the big, bad world of the www and you have a recipe for fun. I’m not going to address this part of the argument in depth in this post – that’s for another day (in brief, my view is that there are certain tasks which are particularly well-suited to mobile and for which you want a site optimised for that experience, though I agree that technology will bridge this gap to a large degree I don’t think everyone wants an iPhone in their pocket – many will want a micro-handset that lets them get online just enough to check train times etc.).
Incidentally, whenever you are reading about mobile internet (whether on our blog or elsewhere), the mobile emulator at mtld.mobi enables you to replicate the mobile experience inside your regular browser – handy both for checking your own sites and researching the marketplace.
Pros of .mobi versus m.
The benefits of .mobi as I see them (with a particularly SEO hat on) are:
A .mobi domain has to be a strong indicator of relevance for a mobile search. I am going to write more about mobile search ranking factors soon, but this has to be a good one
They look good in mobile search results – whenever you do a search from your handset and see a .mobi, you immediately know they have a site designed for you (unfortunately, sometimes, the .mobi is all you need to rank in Google mobile at the moment which was a bit of a disappointment when I went to train-times.mobi as, at the time of writing, it ranks in Google mobile, but doesn’t actually offer any train times!)
Domain prices in the secondary market are cheaper than .com and .co.uk at the moment (and there are a lot of decent ones left on the primary market)
Cons of .mobi versus m.
It’s not all smelling of roses for the .mobi, though, here are the cons as I see them:
It’s a new domain and is going to get none of the domain-weight of your main domain(s) whereas sub-domains (handled well, sometimes) gain some of the trust of the main domain (it remains to be seen how important this is for mobile search)
It’s a stupid extension to type on a small keyboard – particularly a non-qwerty numerical keypad where m and o share a key. Why on earth didn’t they pick .m?
It’s not .com or country-code tld (e.g. .co.uk) which still means you have an uphill branding struggle (see .biz, .eu, .travel (who thought that was a good idea?) etc.)
It’s possible to share first party cookies with the main site if your mobile site is on a sub-domain – this is useful for enabling people to navigate between the mobile and regular sites while staying signed-in (particularly likely on high-spec devices like the iPhone)
The brand stays stronger with a sub-domain – it is easier to reap the rewards of all your regular advertising if people remember your primary domain and know they just have to put ‘m.’ on the beginning to get the mobile version
You only get one for the whole world! This isn’t a problem (assuming you can get hold of your branded domain name) if you only operate in one country, but if you operate worldwide, it’s quite restricting – many big sites use their tld to distinguish content for different countries (amazon.co.uk is a different site to amazon.com which is a different site to amazon.fr etc.) whereas there is only one .mobi for each domain (e.g. amazon.mobi) whereas m.example.com, m.example.co.uk, m.example.fr would work fine to distinguish mobile versions for different countries
To expand a little on that last point, you can auto-detect surfers’ countries very reliably when they are browing by mobile, and you can then auto-serve them different content based on their location. This is technically cloaking, but anyway is unlikely to achieve the desired result since the search engines don’t crawl from every country looking for the different forms of your content.
So what is the right answer?
My view is that you should have both (assuming you can get your hands on the .mobi) and then the best practice depends on your situation:
Established multi-national company with nothing executed for mobile yet: use m.primarydomain.tld in each country you serve. Have example.mobi conditionally redirect to the appropriate m.example.tld based on surfer’s country
Established single country company: as above (based on the strength of your existing domain) but with .mobi simply redirecting to m.yourdomain.tld
Start-up (non-mobile specific): concentrate on building your main domain and use m. for mobile (with .mobi redirecting to it) (unless .mobi works so well in mobile SEO that you just have to have it – we’re all waiting for mobile ranking factors – I’ll try to get that started soon!).
Start-up (mobile specific): consider .mobi for branding purposes – otherwise the same as for any other start-up
That is not to say you should necessarily move to this configuration if you have started down another route. Care needs to be taken whenever you move content around between domains and sub-domains. Use your judgment and care. Your mileage may vary. Etc.
Ciaran just wrote about how everyone is buying Yahoo! including Nokia, the mobile handset manufacturer (something Rebecca talked about as well). We have spent time here speculating about the exact same things. The combination of this train of thought and Rand’s post on what might dethrone Google made me decide to write my thoughts about what kind of company might win in mobile search.
In my mind, there are a few possibilities:
an existing large search engine (Google being the obvious choice)
a comeback play from a smaller search engine (e.g. Ask)
a mobile operator (e.g. Vodafone, Verizon)
a mobile operating system / software player (e.g. Symbian, who make the software for Nokia handsets, or Microsoft)
a start-up (e.g. ?)
something human-powered or with a different business-model (e.g. texperts)
a handset manufacturer (e.g. Nokia)
I’m going to deal with my thoughts on each in turn (and then tell you my favourite) but if you want to have your say, cast your vote:
Can Google parlay its dominance in the grown-up web into mobile dominance?
This seems relatively likely in my mind – they know how to do search, and they can certainly work out how to do mobile. They have incredibly strong branding, and association with search. They are also already doing a lot with mobile maps, mobile gmail, mobile reader etc. Finally, as handsets get more iPhone like (if that is inevitable?) more and more people will be using grown-up Google anyway.
They have a huge headstart with their index, technology, branding and manpower. But it’s not a foregone conclusion – for example, they have no particular advantage in the localisation arena or integration into the other features of the handset. Let’s look at the next possibility.
A comeback play from a smaller search engine
It seems a little unlikely to me. I don’t want to write off the smaller engines as I think there is a lot to be said for Ask’s algorithm, for example, but they just aren’t growing in any sectors at the moment. The skills and technology they would need to win at mobile aren’t that different to the skills they need to stage an online comeback. Unless we see signs that’s happening, I’m going to remain a sceptic on this possibility.
A mobile operator
We know the operators are desperate to avoid the fate of the fixed line operators, who became “just the pipe” during the explosive growth of the Internet. Remember AOL’s walled garden? That didn’t work out too well, did it?
For the same reason, walled gardens provided by the mobile operators (called ‘carriers’ in the US) have been being gradually rolled back. Consumers want to go where they want to go – they don’t just want the news and sport that the operators want to force-feed them. If it’s not going to be through the walled garden approach, then the operators need to get innovative to avoid the “just the pipe” fate. One way they might try to do this is by going after the search market.
At the moment, many of the operators have relationships with the regular search engines (see today’s T-Mobile announcement), but they might see this as an attractive game to be in. The problem is the same as broadband providers going after the search market (such as we see in some European countries – e.g. free.fr, or such as AOL attempted to do) – even if they win 100% of their users, that is still a pretty small market share compared to what a network-agnostic competitor can achieve in principle. This is enough for me to believe that it’s not going to be the answer here.
A mobile operating system / software provider
Ah. The classic ‘Microsoft’ route. Use dominance of the platform to leverage your way into a service market.
Hasn’t worked so well for Live search yet (couple of percent market share in the UK and the US despite being the default search through IE7 and the search provider for the MSN properties which are the default homepages of Internet Explorer browsers).
Having said that, the mobile market is a different beast, due to the timescales of market and technology development. For search, the first time round, the timescale looked a bit like this:
no-one uses search engines (no, really, we didn’t always have them)
search technology arrives but it sucks
Google creates something better
everyone ends up using Google
Microsoft attempted to grab this market through their desktop dominance somewhere between 3 and 4 with a sub-standard product. This is a tricky time because Google is the darling of everyone for changing their lives.
On the mobile, the timeline is a little different:
everyone uses search on the desktop (mainly Google!)
search technology mainly rocks (that’s not to say there won’t be significant improvements in coming years)
very few people use mobile search
???
Whoever grabs market share (through branding, leverage of online presence, leverage of some kind of market power in a different sphere or however) will presumably have a search engine that works pretty well. This seems to suggest to me that there is a much greater chance of the play working in mobile than it did on the desktop.
The hindrance, of course, is that there isn’t a Microsoft of the mobile world. Microsoft isn’t a Microsoft of the mobile world. Symbian is probably the best contender and they have around 7% of the total market.
A start-up
Google was a start-up, remember, who came along and ate the lunch of the (at the time) dominant search engines. Therefore in a market that isn’t really that well-defined yet, you would be hard-pushed to bet against the guys in a garage somewhere right now. With the market the way it is, though, you have to wonder if they would be able to stay independent all the way through to dominance, or would they get bought by one of the other players identified here before they got a chance?
A human-powered solution
Texperts are solving a problem in a fantastic way, but I think it is unlikely that human-powered is going to be the answer for general mobile search in the long-run. Remember that only a tiny fraction of the world’s mobile users are using data / search at the moment – if that is going to grow in the same way as web search has (whereby search is the second most popular activity after emailing) then I reckon the winner is going to be (at least mainly) algorithmic.
A handset manufacturer
Handset manufacturers would seem not to have the expertise to own the search market on their own. They would presumably need to acquire technology. They do, however, have the route to consumer and offer significant integration capability with other handset technologies (e.g. GPS) that may not be available to other players.
Duncan and I were discussing on the train home the other night about how at first glance, Nokia buying Yahoo! is similar to Microsoft buying Yahoo!. You could argue that Nokia would be foolish to tread down this route since they would be replicating a failed strategy -i n many ways, this option looks more like the Microsoft route of using dominance to leverage growth than the Symbian example above. Having said that, the same caveats that mean Symbian could pull it off (mainly related to the timescale / technology differences) apply here as well.
Similarities between Nokia and Microsoft
Nokia and Microsoft control platforms (the handset in Nokia’s case, Windows in Microsoft’s)(*)
Both want a (bigger) share of the search market (Microsoft across the whole Internet, Nokia across mobile)
Both have market share and clout (Microsoft have a well-documented monopoly on desktop operating systems and office software and Nokia have nearly 40% of the total worldwide handset market)
Both fear irrelevance (Microsoft fear “not being part of the web revolution”, Nokia fear handsets becoming a commodity like the desktop PC)
(*) I know a better comparison would seem to be Symbian (who make the operating system for many Nokia handsets) and Microsoft, but actually, I think the market power is primarily (at the moment) with Nokia rather than Symbian – most consumers know they have a Nokia rather than knowing they are using Symbian in a similar way to the way most consumers know they use Windows but don’t know whether the box is a Dell or HP.
Having said that, there are a number of differences as well
Microsoft is a monopoly, Nokia has a large worldwide market share (and only 5% of the US market)
Microsoft is already doing search, while Nokia is ‘just’ doing handsets
Microsoft has the cash pile to buy Yahoo! if it wishes, Nokia would be putting up practically its entire current assets to match the cash portion of Microsoft’s bid and its market cap is only just over half that of Microsoft
My thoughts
I personally quite like the Nokia option (though as noted above, I think it has to happen through acquisition). I don’t think they can build their own search solution from scratch, but as others have noted, they could be an attractive proposition when combined with Yahoo! Even though they don’t have the cash pile Microsoft has:
They have a market cap of 3.5 times YHOO and their shares are looking good:
The possibility of combining some of the localisation technology that Yahoo! has acquired with the direct handset integration and technology Nokia has at their disposal creates some pretty interesting possibilities, to my mind.
While digging around a little bit into the various mobile versions of Google (and other large sites), I found their iPhone version. They also have a version at google.co.uk.
Now, I don’t have an iPhone but I have changed my user agent to mimic the iPhone and done a few searches on there. It appears that the UK version isn’t doing any geo-targeting (but this might be because I’m not really using an iPhone so it can’t work out where I am).
I searched for [ebay] (and a few other major brands) on the UK version of iPhone Google and the results were all related to the US websites (unlike the results under most mobile versions of Google).
Localisation is even more important than normal with mobile search, so this surprised me a little. Does anyone have a UK iPhone? Can you verify my results?
At the end of last week, we heard the news that the initial bids in the FCC’s auction of 700MHz spectrum reached $2.4 billion. This auction is being run to reallocate spectrum previously used for analogue TV that has been freed up by the move to digital.
I don’t know very much about the technical details of spectrum, but I find it a fascinating commodity and allocation process (OK, I’m a geek). It’s a classic public good – it isn’t at all clear who should own it in the first place in order to sell it. There is a tragedy of the commons problem though if it isn’t allocated somehow – if everyone tries to use it, then no-one gets to (because of interference problems). This isn’t a problem for some low-power, short-range technologies (like bluetooth or ultra wideband (UWB) (not that UWB seems to be a problem anyway, given no-one is using it)), but you need allocation before you get technologies like mobile phones, TV, radio etc.
Historically, governments tended to allocate spectrum to public bodies (e.g. the BBC) or companies by beauty parade (read: cronyism). Back at the end of the 1900s, the economists, mathematicians and game theorists crashed the party and argued that allocation by auction would bring a number of nice benefits:
Revenue for the Government / taxpayer
Efficient allocation (i.e. the party prepared to pay the most should be the party who has the ‘best’ use of the spectrum in the sense of the one that people are most prepared to pay for)
Fairness of allocation – no reliance on ‘contacts’ or cronyism – it becomes all about the business model. The markets sort it all out.
I am actually more qualified to write about this stuff than pretty much anything else you’ll see us blathering on about here on the Distilled blog since auction theory research formed part of my graduate studies. If you care about the background, I’ve included a bit at the bottom of this post.
As well as a bit of academic background, I also used to work for a company called Analysys consulting for industry, financiers and the Government on telecoms and Internet issues. One of the things we studied (which I still can’t really talk about) had to do with re-allocation of spectrum used by the mobile operators for 2G services (which is theoretically being made redundant by the introduction of 3G). Another study that is public knowledge that I was involved with was reallocation options for a range of selected spectrum bands that had become free after use in various public safety, military and emergency services roles (among other uses).
US 700MHz spectrum
The 700MHz band is a particularly attractive band for many commercial users. It is a long enough wavelength that a single ‘cell’ can cover a significant distance and also has good penetration of barriers such as walls and buildings. As wired says:
Generally, the lower a radio signal’s frequency, the farther it can propagate and the more easily it can penetrate obstacles like walls and buildings. Lower frequencies also tend to be more efficient, enabling radios to transmit more bits for each hertz of frequency band. As a result, the 700-MHz band should provide better coverage than current cellular bands, which are between 800 MHz and 1900 MHz. So if you’re frustrated by the lack of reception you get on your mobile phone while in the office, a cell service that uses 700 MHz spectrum could offer some relief.
The flippant answer for why SEOs should care about the results of the 700MHz auction is that Google is involved (and we all care about everything Google does, right?).
In fact, I think there is another reason. There is a pretty good chance that the eventual winner of the so-called “C-block” of coveted spectrum is going to roll out a new (US) nation-wide wireless data transmission network. People who know about these kind of things (see GigaOM link above) estimate that using this spectrum in place of the most attractive currently available alternative will half the cost of building the infrastructure for such a network from $4 billion to more like $2 billion. That makes it pretty likely that someone planning to do this kind of thing will be the efficient user of this spectrum.
Especially in rural areas, the properties of the 700MHz spectrum mean a far greater chance of ubiquitous wireless connectivity. Finally, mobile internet comes of age.
More than anything we are currently seeing, this will result in game-changing shifts in power for online marketers. We are going to be writing more over the coming weeks about the differences between ‘regular’ online marketing and online marketing targeting mobile users. But for now, suffice it to say that much of what you currently do is going to need to be re-evaluated as more and more users go mobile.
Going back to the flippant reason: the ‘Google factor’, there has been some speculation that Google would like to win the 700MHz spectrum not only to create ubiquitous wireless data connectivity, but also that they might want to launch free services supported by usage-contextual advertising (link). Scary huh? Opportunities, though…!
Some light relief – past auction comedy
While my overview of auctions above lists loads of good reasons why they are an attractive allocation mechanism, they can also backfire badly (as can anything when governments are involved). From my paper on combinatorial auctions (compiled from J. McMillan, “Selling Spectrum Rights”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 8, 145–162, 1994.):
Having been advised by the US/UK consulting firm National Economic Research Associates (NERA), the New Zealand government decided to adopt a second-price sealed-bid auction for their radio, television and cellular telephone spectrum. The scarcity of competition in the small New Zealand markets caused a politically embarrassing situation when winners paid prices far below their bids. Some extreme cases included a firm paying the second highest bid of NZ 6 following a bid of NZ 100,000 and another paying NZ 5,000 after bidding NZ 7m (at the time NZ 1 equaled 55 (US)). Whilst these can perhaps be justified in terms of economic efficiency (if not revenue maximization) another case of a student from Otago University bidding NZ 1 for a television licence for a small city and being awarded it for free after no-one else bid simply makes a mockery of the process.
If the New Zealand government wanted to take advantage of the nice theoretical properties of the second-price auction, they should have anticipated the relatively low competition and imposed reserve prices. Due, though, to the media furore surrounding the fiasco, this route was discarded in favour of first-price sealed bid auctions for future allocations.
Similar difficulties were had in Australian auctions for satellite television services, described by an opposition politician as “one of the world’s great media licence fiascoes”. The licences were won unexpectedly by Hi Vision Ltd. and Ucom Pty. Ltd. (beating favourites including a consortium of Rupert Murdoch, Kerry Packer and Telecom Australia). They did this by exploiting a flaw in the auction design that allowed them to default on bids without paying a penalty. They bid very high: A 212m and A 177m respectively (at a time when A 1 was worth 68 (US)), which was widely hailed as demonstrating that the Australian television industry had come of age.
In fact, they never had any intention of paying these high prices. As they defaulted on their bids, the licences were awarded to the next highest bidders: the same companies. They had placed bids at A 5m intervals right down to A 117m and A 77m respectively (both in fact going to Ucom after Hi Vision defaulted on all their bids). Ucom proceeded to sell both licences at a profit. This auction had both failed to award the licences to their efficient owners, and to generate decent revenue. In addition, the repeated default process had delayed by almost a year the introduction of pay television to a country already behind much of the world. If the cost of defaulting is low, the bidders are effectively bidding on options on the items for sale rather than the items themselves (P. Klemperer, “What Really Matters in Auction Design”, Economics Working Paper, WUSTL, 2000.).
It has been suggested that even the deposits of hundreds of millions of pounds may not have been enough to prevent default in the UK 3G telecom auctions had the desire arisen among the winning bidders – who were paying billions of pounds (P. Klemperer, “The Biggest Auction Ever: the Sale of the British 3G Telecom Licences”, Economic Journal, 2002.).
My background in auction theory
At university, I studied combinatorial auctions (which are often used in spectrum allocation) during my ‘part III’ 4th year. Combinatorial auctions are those where bidders are bidding on multiple lots at once and may have preferences for particular groups (making it inefficient to auction the lots one after another). The difficulty from a mathematical perspective is that depending on how you structure the auction, either the bidders or the auctioneer has a very hard (NP-complete) problem to solve.
I even managed to introduce a small bit of original thinking (I believe) around a particular class of auction whereby the auctioneer distributes the hard calculations across all the bidders and asks them to search for the winner. The problem with this, of course, is that bidders have an incentive to only report improved solutions that benefit them. I wrote about game-theoretic approaches to stopping bidders gaming this stage of the process.
Domaining has been interesting me for a while. I think it mainly bugs me because I distinctly remember conversations from ~10 years ago about whether it was worth buying some generic .com domains that would be worth quite a packet these days. Darn it.
I don’t think the game is over, however, but it is taking (in my mind) two divergent paths:
the .com tld and most cctlds look to me more like the (real world, bricks and mortar) property market – with money to be made in clever speculation but mostly in development. Buy a nice undeveloped plot, develop it and sell it for a multiple.
new tlds, where it is quite hard to predict the future value of the domains (.biz??? please).
One area that is ripe for the picking in my mind is mobile. There has not yet been a winner in the battle for hearts and minds that is the mobile internet (m.example.com, example.mobi etc.?) but mobile domains have a few characteristics that are unique relative to the regular domain markets:
shortness is (even) better
all-number domains might make more sense because of the input method on many mobile devices
What am I doing about it?
Well, I spent a bit of time yesterday (yes, it was Sunday, I’m soo cool) writing a script to let me easily check the availability of some of the domains I’m toying with buying up. This highlighted a couple of issues:
I don’t have £150k. Any investors out there with that kind of money who fancy dabbling, I have identified a mobile niche you could pretty much own with an investment along those lines… Drop me a line
Automated whois queries are quite hard. Who decided that whois servers didn’t need to return information in a standard format? Nice one.
It’s not even easy to see if something is registered in an automated way (please, someone, correct me in the comments if I’m missing something):
Know what today is? iiiiitttt’s…. Analogy Friday!
Before I emailed everyone at Distilled, I checked that a few reliables were keen to don their party hats and would attend without fail. I don’t know about you, but I like going to parties that I know lots of my friends are going to. It’s kind of the same with social networking: people attract people and traffic attracts traffic. If you’re really lucky, your friends, followers, whatever, will also attract lots of new visitors to your site.
but I have changed my user agent to mimic the iPhone and done a few searches on there. It appears that the UK version isn’t doing any geo-targeting (but this might be because I’m not really using an iPhone so it can’t work out where I am).
