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Last week I discussed how Google was preparing to announce the release of it's new Ad Planner tool.
It's now available in beta with selected Google customers and an Ad Planner sneak peak is available online, with an image of the interface which demonstrates how the tool can segment site reach by demographics including gender, age, education, location and income.
The tool enables marketers and PR professionals to get a clearer picture of the demographics of different websites to aid them in effective communications and advertising targeting.
It also enables effective planning of online media buys, either through setting reach goals or media mix.
Does this remove the need for media buyers?
Certainly not yet - however I believe Google is gradually disintermediating this group as it moves further into television, radio and print advertising alongside its online search cash cow.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Sneak peak at Google Ad Planner | Tweet |
Useful introductory resources for social media | Tweet |
I'm on a bit of a social media kick this weekend due to all the fantastic resources I've found on the topic in the last several days.
I wanted to flag a couple of these in particular that I found useful, and may be useful for others.
My first great find was a CIO magazine article from May this year, Enterprise 2.0 - What is it good for? (A 12-step guide to getting the most out of Web 2.0 tools and making it safe-for-purpose).
This article provides a good step-by-step approach to getting your toes wet in the social media space, starting with creating a Web 2.0 strategy, getting buy-in from all Senior Management (as it's not simply a technology decision), establishing ownership, developing appropriate policies, monitoring and response times.
The seond resource was the Cook & Hopkins Social Media Report - 3rd edition.
As a free online resource this is an enormously valuable tool for establishing a basic understanding of some of the social media options out there. If you're new to the area, or need to provide information to someone who is, this resource can provide a good starting point.
Anyone still going viral? | Tweet |
I remember viral advertising being the flavour of the month a few years ago.
Every ad agency out there was touting the concept - create some tool, video or website that would capture the popular imagination and create enormous online 'word-of-mouth' at a low cost.
However when it came to execution, it was very hard to create a viral ad. No-one could accurately pick what would fly and what would bomb.
These days I don't see the word tossed around very often - everyone, including me, is talking social media.
However that doesn't invalidate viral marketing.
If you can create that buzz, the approach still works. The challenge is in the buzz (which this BMW ad has managed to create).
I've not seen much in the way of innovative government advertising for some time - not since the ten-pin bowling grim reaper - The reaper can still be viewed online at YouTube and has been featured on The Chaser. The original ad was created over twenty years ago.
Does this reflect the difficulty of creating viral ads? Or the loss of creativity in government advertising?
Have you seen any online advertising lately you just had to pass on to at least one friend?
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Mid-point - Australian egovernment strategy - how's your agency tracking? | Tweet |
I'm very interested in receiving comments on how different government departments and agencies are tracking towards meeting the goals of the 2006 e-Government Strategy (which runs to 2010).
We're close to the midpoint and I've not seen much in the way of progress reporting.
Background for those unfamiliar - the 2006 e-Government Strategy, Responsive Government: A New Service Agenda outlined four main goals in its vision for 2010:
- To meet user needs
- Connected service delivery
- Value for money
- Public sector capacity (to deliver on the other goals)
There are a number of challenges to delivery of the strategy across government, and it would be interesting to understand how various agencies are meeting these.
Make government data freely available | Tweet |
An interesting article was released in the Yale Journal of Law & Technology earlier this year discussing a view that government should focus on providing usable data online rather than full-blown websites.
Titled Government Data and the Invisible Hand , the premise was quite simply explained in the abstract:Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design [web ]sites that meet each end-user need, we argue that the executive branch should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data.
This approach is very much at odds with the current approach both in the US and Australia, where in most cases the respective governments provide both the data and all the interpretation designed to meet the needs of specific audiences.
Via the current approach, data can becomes difficult to extract, or is presented in a way that is not useful. On that basis these websites are difficult to use. They are also expensive to develop and maintain and difficult to keep current.
The approach in practice
I've encountered both approaches in Australian government websites.
In a past role, managing the website for a private sector water and energy utility, one of the consistently most trafficked areas of our website was local weather. This section had only a peripheral involvement with the main focus of the site, however the level of usage made it important to retain.
We did not run this weather service ourselves. Instead we used a raw data feed provided by the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) for free. The data was simply customised and represented in an attractive way in our website.
Ours was not the only organisation using this data - a number of other organisations had built businesses though providing weather information - sometimes combined with video, maps, commentary or other feeds. These sites collectively attracted more traffic than the BOM itself.
To my recollection, provided this data was not packaged and directly resold commercially, the BOM had a policy of giving away the data freely.
This approach helped ensure that the public were able to access accurate information, to the public good. It is important to note that BOM data was collected and processed by people and equipment already paid for out of the public purse.
On the other hand, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) provided a great deal of the data I used in my day-to-day role.
This data was preprocessed by the ABS into tables or excel documents. These were often chunks of information that were not much use to my audience.
My team spent many hours manually deconstruct and reconstruct the ABS data into different forms to make it useful for our corporate needs.
The ABS did not provide data as a raw feed. While the ABS did gave away its data for free online - and this was fantastically useful - the overhead that went into its website inevitably made it less timely, therefore reducing its value in a commercial sense.
So, in comparison:
BOM
- Gave its data away for free online (public access to public data)
- No data analysis required (lower cost to the agency, faster to market)
- Referrals from everyone reusing the data (reach)
- Enormous innovation in how the data was 'mashed' with other sources / analysed and presented (lower cost to agency, transference of risk of misinterpretation to private sector)
ABS
- Gave its reports away for free online - but not the raw data (public value but less timely)
- Provided intensive data processing (quality assurance but higher cost to the agency, slower to market)
- Limited online reuse, therefore fewer referrals (lower reach)
- No innovation in data analysis and presentation (higher analysis/presentation cost to agency, any risk of misinterpretation stays with the agency)
Bt the way, it's worth pointing out that BOM is the most trafficked government website in Australia. ABS, despite a wider range of statistics, is much further down the list.
Can the data approach be used across other agencies?
I believe it can. Even in my agency we release numbers and resources which could be indexed and provided in a raw data form for reuse.
We also have a website estimator for calculation purposes. There are around a dozen similar estimators that do a similar job - several providing virtually the same result as the official estimator. However those 'fan' estimators cost nothing to the public purse to create or maintain.
So if members of the public are prepared to create these tools, why should the agency?
Granted this last example is a little more tricky than that - the estimation process is time-consuming and maximising accuracy is a key goal.
However there are other government websites and tools which could and would be delivered by private organisations and individuals, if only the government allowed access to the data stream.
Level the playing field
Note that the article does not suggest that government should stop analysing data and presenting this analysis in websites.
What it suggests is to provide the raw data on a level playing field, thereby allowing private and public organisations the same capacity to use it.
The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.This means that government agencies such as the ABS can continue to provide reports for people who choose not to do their own analysis.
However it opens the field to innovation and the use of various data sources to make connections that government, in a siloed form, is not as able to do.
This levelling is critical - if the government wants to see innovation it should not hold back the 'secret sauce'. The data needs to be available in a way that allows private and other public enterprises to use it in an equal way.
Open systems are available today via standards such as XML and RSS - look at how Google syndicates maps and ads or how Facebook allows the creation and dissemination of applications.
In conclusion
Government has a crucial role to play in the collection of data across the country. This is a task well suited to the public sector as it is in the public interest that this be available.
However government doesn't have the systems or culture to be best suited to interpret and combine this data or make it useful for individuals and organisations.
Government should provide interpretations - however it should not hold an artificial monopoly over this.
By allow other organisations to access the raw information innovation in its presentation can occur more rapidly, providing deeper insights for the public good.
Make government data freely available.
Does anyone have other examples of where government collected data has become freely available? I'd love to blog about the successes.
