I'm an Avatar: Can I Help You?

Yes, perhaps they can. Since the early days of the Internet artificial intelligence experts have been touting the potential of “virtual people” to provide customer information, service and support. I’ve been writing about them for most of that time and run into the same problem each time; the firms whose products I used as examples before are no longer around. This has been a really difficult market in which to get sufficient traction to survive.

That’s why a post on Dave Jackson’s Weekly Web Tools blog a couple of weeks ago caught my eye. He focuses on small businesses and really cares about customer service, so his evaluation of some of the current services was thought-provoking.

SitePal essentially allows you to create “talking FAQs” using their avatars or customer avatars from a photo you supply. All their services are based on a one-time fee. They have 3 service packages ranging in price from $9.95 to $39.95 per month based on usage and number of avatars. Check it out for yourself, but turn the volume down; all their pages open with an audio message—that’s what they do, after all.

Live Face on Web (also opens with audio) produces those little people who walk onto your screen and start talking to you. These are essentially videos, so they have a different business model—a one-time fee for production. Prices range from $259.95 for a 15-second/50 word video to $3,281.95 for a 300 second/1,000 word video.

The difference between these live avatars (is that an oxymoron? I don’t know!) and the earlier chatterbots is that these deliver audio, either automatically or on request by the visitor. Earlier versions were chat or SMS-based. They are the “chat with a live agent” functions that you see on many ecommerce sites, just using the bot to put a face on the chat. The Marketing & Innovation Blog reviewed several of these back in March. The VirtuOz site, for example, offers several agents, each to perform a specific task, from customer service to lead generation and conversion, on your site.

MicroSoft Live Agent also offers chat-based agents. You can take them for a trial run on their site and they have a good gallery. They offer APIs so developers can customize applications for their own sites.

There are lots of solutions out there. Hopefully some of these will survive, because the possibilities of improving customer service and support in a cost-effective way are real. The early developers loved to say that these agents don’t take coffee breaks or vacations. True, and the opportunity for consistent service 365/24/7 is important. Marketers have to remember, though, that good customer service requires access to a human agent if the automated services don’t satisfy the need. The trick is getting people to use the automated services before they pick up the phone or fire up their email program.

These autoplay video avatars are intrusive and annoying to some of us (not to mention the person in the next cubicle!). However, they may be what’s needed to say, “Use the cost-effective automated support service first.” How you say “then you can access life help if you need to” without encouraging people to go directly there is a problem. I’d suggest that you probably don’t make the offer until the automated service is finished. What’s for sure is that a good plan for customer service escalation is required to keep customers happy and costs low!

Big Portals Open Up

While financial dominoes were falling over the weekend, two of the big portals announced major changes in the way they offer services to consumers, advertisers and developers. Neither is totally new news, but events over the weekend represented major steps in making the new strategies reality.

As early as October 2007, Chief Yahoo Jerry Yang made a post on the corporate blog that gave the broad objectives of his strategic review. He said Yahoo! intended to:

1. Become the starting point for the most consumers

2. Become the must-buy for advertisers

3. Deliver open, industry-leading platforms that attract the most publishers and developers

In April they announced Y!Open as the implementation of these strategic goals. According to PC Magazine, “YOS is a bold initiative to open all Yahoo sites, online services and Web applications to outside developers, and give users a "social profile" dashboard to unify and manage their Yahoo services.” This past weekend the project became very public when Yahoo invited 300 developers to Open Hack Day. According to Yahoo a “hack” is a little program, easily put together, that does something useful and fun. For example, one developer has developed an app that allows users to combine Flickr photos with the My Trips section of the Yahoo! Travel page. Since I had to look to find what My Trips actually was, it immediately occurs to me that this can be promotional for Yahoo’s lesser-known services. For more complex apps developers can use APIs like Yahoo’s BOSS, which lets sites construct their own specialized search services.

This graphic representation of the Y!Open concept comes from a video made at last week’s conference. Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh would like for you to think of the new Yahoo as an open, social, and very sticky platform. It looks quite comprehensive, including search, dynamic pages, mail, mobile and other. You can access the video from this page.

AOL’s strategy seems less comprehensive than Yahoo’s. They are allowing users to check other mail from their AOL page, and they explain how it works on their corporate blog. This is a step for the once-walled garden, but it’s not a major change in strategic direction. AOL does have APIs for developers. Some, like the one for MapQuest, are widely used, but they seem to be individual services, not a major opening of the AOL platform.

Both these strategic moves, especially coming so close together, are indicative of evolutionary growth in the Internet, all in the direction of Web 2.0. On one hand, it clearly indicates the continuing desire of the large portals to be the oft-visited gateways to the Internet for their users at the same time they offer an array of increasingly-social services that keep users on their own sites longer.

On the other hand, it offers huge opportunities to smaller sites and less technology-focused businesses to take advantage of leading-edge user services. Using the APIs of the tech powerhouses, they can develop their customized services at relatively low cost and have them hosted on the powerhouse site.

Google, Amazon and eBay are all major originators of this open platform strategy, making it a key part of their business model. Yahoo is making what appears to be a bold move to join them; AOL is moving although perhaps less boldly.

This all suggests a new type of business consolidation. It’s one that is not represented by mergers and acquisitions, but by shared services. Interesting and worth watching!

Cloud Computing - A New Model?

Cloud computing is one of those concepts that’s either very simple or very complex. Until you know which, it’s hard to understand the concept. I’ve been wrestling with that for several months and I’ve come up with a few nuggets of understanding that I’d like to share. Last week the AlwaysOn network posted a video from one of their conferences that’s helpful. The “chief geeks” of both NASDAQ and HP give their perspectives. Russ Daniels of HP points out that cloud computing can reduce operational costs, which his IT-manager customers obviously care deeply about. As a marketer I cared more about his follow-on statement that IT could then put more effort into creating value for customers. Think about that as you watch the video!

So cloud computing is a potentially valuable concept. What IS it? Irving Wladawsky-Berger is a retired IBMer who writes a tech blog that’s comprehensible to laypeople on the Always On Network. He’s a proponent of the cloud computing concept, seeming to see it as a logical extension of his work at IBM eservices. In a July 14 post he says:

I prefer to think of what is happening as the long-needed evolution of application software to something that is far more usable by humans. When virtualizing applications to be used by people who care nothing about computers or technology - as is mostly the case with Clouds - the key thing we want to virtualize or hide from the user is complexity.

In a more recent post he links to a page with 20 different—and all useful—definitions of the concept. That’s a strong indicator that the field is still evolving.

According to Gartner, the evolution is in its early stages. Actually, the interpretation of being near the top is their “hype cycle” is that sanity will soon return and the field will mature. Cloud computing is nearing the peak; note that Green IT is even closer. Translated, does that mean it’s a maturing, but not yet mature field? A field for IT managers to watch closely, but not necessarily ready for major investment.
Wladawsky-Berger likens cloud computing to other major management initiatives like Six Sigma and Lean Production. He says:

If cloud computing implies delivering high quality consumer and business services to your customers around the world over a variety of channels, as well as operating well engineered, efficient data centers - how can you stay in business and ignore this major marketplace strategy? It would be like an industrial company saying that all the advances in manufacturing and production over the last 25 years are not for them. It would be nearly impossible for a business to stay competitive with such an attitude. In fact, a number of enterprises have already been embracing cloud-like methodologies for delivering services to their customer, even if they don’t call it that.

The take-away? Cloud computing is a new model—an IT model, not a marketing one. Is it a new business model, allowing companies to outsource technical infrastructure (where have we heard that before?) and concentrate on their core business competencies? Maybe. It bears close tracking.

Applications like Amazon Web Services and Google Maps are examples of “computing in the clouds.” The Amazon cloud and the Google cloud, to be precise. They maintain the infrastructure, users take advantage of the functionality--as explained in yesterday’s post. Another example would be Facebook APIs. There are plenty of places to experiment without much risk or investment. Shouldn’t marketers be pushing those experiments—and doing so with the understanding there’s a greater implication than just a single application, important though it may be to their current marketing tactics?

Social Banner Ads?

This morning’s Media Post reports on a keynote speech at the IAB Social Media Conference by Seth Goldstein, CEO of Social Media Networks. His agency is preparing to introduce a new type of “social banner” ad format, so he is not unbiased. That doesn’t make what he says less relevant.

"Social media is killing advertising," Goldstein said. "A few years ago people started to become more interested in each other [online] and less interested in advertising." With response rates for standard banner ads under 1% and search not geared to brand advertising, social media is the next frontier for major marketers to attack.

Even Google admits that its deal to serve ads on MySpace “is not monetizing as well as we had expected.”

In his talk Goldstein mentions advertising for the BMW Series 1, which I’ve mentioned before. I looked around to see what was going on specifically on Facebook and this is what I found; a contest on the Facebook Graffiti Wall app. The shot of the top looks pretty much like other contests we’ve seen, particularly in that viewers can not only participate (note that participation is directly on Facebook) but they can also vote on the winners. The bottom half shows product information that’s part of the page. According to what’s on the page the contest (now over) drew 9006 entries and 2143 fans who presumably followed it closely. Ok, so you’ve looked at the top of the page and you see entries by 2 highschoolers. What good does that do BMW (think tomorrow vs. today when answering that one)?


I looked further to see how much I could find about the entrants. You can see the Top 150 and the Winners. Do take a look—a screen shot just can’t do these justice! If you click through on the names of some of those who placed highest, you find that you can’t see their full profiles unless you “friend” them (which requires their permission if you aren’t a denizen of Facebook). So there’s a vote here for a modicum of privacy among these young adults. And from their pictures, it’s obvious that the winners and top entrants are young adults, not teenagers messing around. Young adults, remember, is the target market for the BMW Series 1.
Is this a digression? Maybe not. I found a hint about what social banner ads might look like on Goldstein’s corporate blog. He describes the evolution of online advertising as being, first, display then behavioral with social on the horizon. I know you can’t read what’s on that section; I had to blow it up so much I couldn’t copy it, but here’s what it says:

•“Where do you want to take a test drive?”
•“Have you seen Indiana Jones yet?”
•“Have you heard the new Goldplay (?) CD yet?”

You get the idea, especially once a social banner is on a targeted site. Where do you want to test drive (virtual or real?) the BMW? Let’s talk movies. Let’s talk about some band (that I’ve never heard of, so don’t target me!).

Engage people in a subject that interests them and begin a dialog with interested prospects. That’s the theme song of social media! Here are a couple of interesting ways to think about doing just that!

OpenSocial Attracts "Friends"

When Google’s OpenSocial debuted in November of last year it attracted a lot of attention. It was positioned as Google’s answer to Facebook’s open platform. When I wrote about the social graph and related apps in February I noted that Facebook had over 15,000 apps that members could use on Facebook or sites. When I looked today, it had over 20,000. The industry quickly realized that Facebook was onto something when it opened its platform to developers so they could write these apps. Google was not to be left behind.

Just before OpenSocial debuted in November, Michael Arrington wrote a post on TechCrunch that proved to be prophetic:

Facebook has a platform to allow third parties to build applications on Facebook itself. But what Google may be planning is significantly more open - allowing third parties to both push and pull data, into and out of Google and non-Google applications.
In the long run, Google seems to be planning to add a social layer on top of the entire suite of Google services, with Orkut as their initial main source of social graph information and, as I said above, possibly adding third party networks to the back end as well. Social networks would have little choice but to participate to get additional distribution and attention.

Given the incredible success of the Facebook open platform, it was big news on Tuesday when Yahoo! and MySpace opted to join Google’s initiative, forming the OpenSocial Foundation. Several smaller networks had already signed on.

A lot of this is written for developers who have to do the work of creating the apps. It isn’t DIY for most of us. What does it actually mean to marketers? Charlene Li of Forrester has a graphic that portrays it well.
She calls it ‘relationship mapping” and explains that the technology will help us keep track of all our important relationships. Now we have them in separate places. The social networking APIs will help us to organize them in a single repository. According to Google, developers “can create apps with OpenSocial that access a social network's friends and update feeds.” In plain terms, organize them all in one place and keep them up to date. I haven’t seen any mention of Charlene’s vision that they could monitor frequency of use and regulate access, but Facebook’s open platform and OpenSocial are first steps. Who knows what will follow?

And that’s what marketers need to think about. This suggests both convenience and loss of privacy for the user. It also makes it possible that one of your network “friends” could use an app that accesses data in a way that you didn’t/wouldn’t approve. However, the fact that you are connected on the network gives her app access to your data.

I suggest that there are two issues. The first is that this particular horse is already out of the barn. User agreements like Facebooks already make that sort of data sharing possible. The second is that most users, even young sophisticates, don’t seem to really understand that. What will they say when they do?
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