Group items tagged

In fact, it isn't far from the total of all the students who have ever been there since the 19th Century.

Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera, says the expansion of online courses will raise difficult questions about what mainstream universities offer for such high fees.

if the content of university courses becomes freely available, what is it that students are paying for? Is it the interactions with staff? Or is it the time with other students? Is it something to put on a CV? "This is causing universities to rethink their value to students," says Professor Koller, who is from Stanford University's computer science department. The most prestigious universities are always going to have enough demand for places - but the emergence of high-quality online courses could be tougher for middle-ranking institutions. Why would you pay high fees to sit through a mediocre lecture, when you could go online and watch world experts at another university, even if it's in another country? "The universities in the middle will really have to think about their proposition," she says.

this sort of "anticipatory computing" could be very useful for distance learning, or perhaps job interview situations during which an interviewer meets a candidate: Their conversation could be better supported with background information available online.

How comfortable would you be with the idea that a Google, Samsung, or Apple device was actually listening to what you say all the time, everywhere you go, no matter who you're talking with or the exact subject of your discussion? It's a good question. Here's a better one: How much would you trust these firms to maintain your privacy, to keep your data safe and not to share it with ad companies or the authorities?

Content that is positive, informative, surprising or interesting is shared more often than content that is not, and while content that’s prominently featured is shared more often than content that is not, this is a minor factor compared with how emotionally resonant the content is.

It takes months and years to build relationships with people, and they all are built on many lightweight interactions over time. And people build relationships with brands in the same way as they build relationships with people: slowly, one interaction at a time. Just as we don’t suddenly become best friends with someone, we don’t suddenly fall in love with a brand – so build products that support lightweight ways for people to interact and show the aggregations of those interactions over time.

You can debate things in conference rooms all day long. You can run iterative, qualitative research to reduce risk. But when it comes to social design, if it isn’t public, it doesn’t exist. Building beats talking; it’s better to launch fast and grow slowly than try launching an all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza.

The longer things stay in meeting rooms and internal prototypes, the more competitors with public-facing products are learning about what works.

Launch early, learn fast, and iterate.

Many designers and urban planners spend a huge amount of time detailing buildings and landscapes, setting down paths for how people will move. But they often get it wrong. People will cut across the expansive lawn, laying down a muddy path through the grass. People will force their way through hedges, in the process creating fresh pathways. Rather than detailing out every last interaction, it’s better to construct the basic frameworks and then watch how people move. Then you can iterate, because you already know where the paths should be.

More than half of Gen C use the internet as their main source of entertainment, and 66% spend the same or more time watching online video as watching television [2].

Conversation drives Gen C, especially when it’s aligned with their interests. They are hungry for content that they can share and spread, no matter where it comes from: other people, content providers, brands.

The majority -- 85% -- of Gen C relies on peer approval for their buying decisions [2]. The under 35 set will be 40% of the population by 2020. But more importantly, by then, we’ll all likely be Gen C.

Gen C has a camera in their pockets, so the stuff they capture and curate looks more common, ordinary, even pointless at times. But the ordinary-ness of it all is what is extraordinary. Pictures of the everyday-ness around them allow them to find new meaning, as if they are seeing things for the first time.

They record every detail and then curate that content to reflect their personal values and how they see the world. In fact, 1 in 4 upload a video every week and nearly half upload a photo every week [2]. It’s their way of controlling how they want to be perceived by others

Giving them a way to add their own uniqueness to an experience gives them a reason to add it to the collage of their lives.

Giving them content that matches their definition of quality has become their expectation, not a nice to have.

Well-thought-out, useful and interesting branded content has more opportunity than ever to contribute meaning to people’s everyday lives. But there is also greater risk than ever from messaging that doesn’t feel authentic, relevant, personalized, and participatory.

Gen C wants to give us signals of their interest. They are looking to connect directly with brands that create experiences that offer something relevant and valuable, and they expect that we’ll be ready and willing to act on those signals and continuously improve the quality of our interactions with them.

Rather than starting by thinking about how to reach or broadcast to as many people as possible to get to those who matter, what if we began with engaging those who matter the most. We could prioritize surfacing the 5% — and make our entire plan better by learning from their interactions and leaning on their advocacy to expand our reach in a smarter way. We wouldn’t be abandoning “reach”; we’d be reorienting our thinking towards greater “engaged reach”?

By turning the reach-driven funnel upside down, we’re in effect creating an ‘engagement pyramid’. The engagement pyramid isn’t just about retention and growth of our existing customer base. It’s about starting with the 5% who will be most interested in what we have to say and most willing to speak for us. This group not only includes current customers, but also those most likely to influence others toward your brand.

you need to be “always on” because Gen C is “always on”.

Prioritize content, beyond commercials

Some of today’s most successful brands realize the power of their fans to help generate content that they in turn surface to a broader group.

And look at Facebook’s desktop ads as a whole, including both Sponsored Stories and the traditional sidebars ads. They’re getting just 0.083% CTR at a $0.88 CPC earning Facebook an eCPM of only $0.74, so mobile Sponsored Stories have 13.7X the CTR and earn Facebook 11.2x as much as its combined desktop ad offering.

Meanwhile, a quick look at a campaign in the tens of thousands of dollars by AdParlor showed that mobile ads have a CTR of 0.821% while traditional Facebook ad campaigns that mostly show up in the web sidebar with some presence in the web and mobile news feed had a CTR of regular ads have a CTR of just 0.032%. That’s a 25x better CTR on mobile. The campaign at gaining new fans for a Facebook page, and while the click-to-fan conversion rate on mobile was slightly worse – 55% on mobile versus 72% across placements – the improved in CTR makes up for it many times over.

Another Ads API giant Spruce Media told MediaPost that its tests with Facebook mobile sponsored stories have seen click-through rates from .8% to 1.7%, the same range as TBG Digital and AdParlor.

This all doesn’t seem like users are just clicking the relatively new, three month old ad units out of curiosity. It looks like users are actually perceiving them as content, and are clicking through to learn more about the Pages and apps their friends interact with.

Attaining such a high click-through rate for mobile Sponsored Stories is game-changing for Facebook, because there’s simply not as much room for it or any service to advertise on mobile. There’s no space for an ads sidebar and if far too many ads are injected into the content feed, users could get angry and stop browsing. But the impressively high CTR and eCPM mean Facebook doesn’t have to show too many Sponsored Stories to make a ton of money off of them.

Other social sites like Google+ and Twitter don’t have the scale, social graph, or on-site activity to serve Sponsored Stories that are as effective as Facebook’s. While Twitter and G+’s interest graph can power accurate ad targeting, only Facebook know who your closest friends are thanks to photo tags, wall posts, messages, and more. Its massive time-on-site also produces lots of interactions with brands and local businesses that can be turned into Sponsored Stories ads.

Facebook is just getting started. Sources say it’s working on a hyper-local mobile ad targeting product that could serve extremely relevant local business ads to users within a few hundred feet of a brick and mortar store. Thanks to the new Facebook Exchange real-time bidding system, Facebook could drive up CPC or CPM prices by getting advertisers to compete to reach specific mobile users, including ones who’ve been retargeted after visiting sites that indicate purchase intent.

High mobile Sponsored Story CTRs indicate at least some users don’t hate the ads, and wouldn’t rebel if they see more.

Foursquare will only provide notifications that are relevant to you personally. The application learns your behavior based on previous check-ins and recommendations. You won’t get notifications everywhere you go; rather, when you’re at a restaurant, Foursquare will crawl the tips and if there is one that fits your profile, you will be notified. Additionally, a new swipeable carousel of suggestions at the top of the application’s home page will show location-based suggestions, such as deals around the corner or something saved to your to-do list nearby. 

For headlines -- especially longer ones -- it would appear that the first couple of words need to be real attention-grabbers if you want to capture eyes.

The same goes for blurbs -- perhaps even more so. Our findings about blurbs suggest that not only should they be kept short, but the first couple of words need to grab the viewer's attention.

Average blurb length varies from a low of about 10 words to a high of 25, with most sites coming in around 17.

Eyetrack III found that people do typically look beyond the first screen. What happens, however, is that their eyes typically scan lower portions of the page seeking something to grab their attention. Their eyes may fixate on an interesting headline or a stand-out word, but not on other content. Again, this points to the necessity of sharp headline writing.

Navigation placed at the top of a homepage performed best -- that is, it was seen by the highest percentage of test subjects and looked at for the longest duration.

It might surprise you to learn that in our testing we observed better usage (more eye fixations and longer viewing duration) with right-column navigation than left. While this might have been the novelty factor at play -- people aren't used to seeing right-side navigation -- it may indicate that there's no reason not to put navigation on the right side of the page and use the left column for editorial content or ads.

Most news sites run articles with medium-length paragraphs -- somewhere (loosely) around 45-50 words, or two or three sentences.

Shorter paragraphs performed better in Eyetrack III research than longer ones. Our data revealed that stories with short paragraphs received twice as many overall eye fixations as those with longer paragraphs. The longer paragraph format seems to discourage viewing.

the standard one-column format performed better in terms of number of eye fixations

What about photos on article pages? It might surprise you that our test subjects typically looked at text elements before their eyes landed on an accompanying photo, just like on homepages. As noted earlier, the reverse behavior (photos first) occurred in previous print eyetracking studies.

Finally, there's the use of summary descriptions (extended deck headlines, paragraph length) leading into articles. These were popular with our participants. When our testers encountered a story with a boldface introductory paragraph, 95 percent of them viewed all or part of it.

When people viewed an introductory paragraph for between 5 and 10 seconds -- as was often the case -- their average reading behavior of the rest of the article was about the same as when they viewed articles without a summary paragraph. The summary paragraph made no difference in terms of how much of the story was consumed.

The first thing we noticed is that people often ignore ads, but that depends a lot on placement. When they do gaze at an ad, it's usually for only 0.5 to 1.5 seconds. Good placement and the right format can improve those figures.

We found that ads in the top and left portions of a homepage received the most eye fixations. Right side ads didn't do as well, and ads at the bottom of the page were seen, typically, by only a small percentage of people.

Close proximity to popular editorial content really helped ads get seen. We noticed that when an ad was separated from editorial matter by either white space or a rule, the ad received fewer fixations than when there was no such barrier. Ads close to top-of-the-page headlines did well. A banner ad above the homepage flag didn't draw as many fixations as an ad that was below the flag and above editorial content.

Text ads were viewed most intently, of all the types we tested. On our test pages, text ads got an average eye duration time of nearly 7 seconds; the best display-type ad got only 1.6 seconds, on average.

Size matters. Bigger ads had a better chance of being seen. Small ads on the right side of homepages typically were seen by only one-third of our testers; the rest never once cast an eye on them. On article pages, "half-page" ads were the most intensely viewed by our test subjects. Yet, they were only seen 38 percent of the time; most people never looked at them. Article ads that got seen the most were ones inset into article text. "Skyscraper" ads (thin verticals running in the left or right column) came in third place.