People Don’t Trust People Like You Anymore
Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer survey shows that traditional media is trending downward among “informed publics aged 25-64 in 20 countries”—and so is their trust in “a person like yourself” (although much less dramatically).
The executive summary shows traditional media trust is diving, with TV news down 20%, radio news down 17% and print news down 12%. However, digital media isn’t exactly making up the gap—radio and TV news coverage still slightly beat out online search engines (38%, 36% and 35%, respectively), and newspaper articles close behind (34%). Corporate communications (press releases, I guess) were also in the same tier—significantly ahead of social networking sites (19%), which only barely edged out product advertising (17%).
I have to wonder if it’s the signal to noise ratio or the sources of search engines’ information. After all, it seems like search engines will mostly send users to corporate websites—or blogs ranting about how terrible (or great) said company is. And neither of those seem totally credible.
Most trusted for information about a company were stock or industry analyst reports (49%) and articles in business magazines (44%). Conversations with employees also ranked high (41%).
Meanwhile, expert sources are gaining trust year over year, while “average Joes” have slipped slightly. Academics or experts were rated as the most credible again, gaining 2 percentage points to 64%. Financial and industry analysts gained 3 percentage points to 52%.
The rankings changed up from 2009 with the third and fourth most trusted sources: NGO reps gained 4 percentage points to 45%, edging out a “person like yourself,” which lost 3 percentage points and fell to 44%.
Oddly enough, apparently we haven’t learned anything over the last two years. Trust for CEOs gained 9 percentage points and trust for government officials gained six percentage points. (At 40% and 35%, respectively, they’re still not very widely trusted.)
Also strange: while 41% believed conversations with employees were “extremely” or “very” credible, only 32% rated regular employees as “extremely” or “very” credible sources of information about a company.
What do you think? What’s the most credible source for information about a company? What, if anything, can we do to ameliorate digital media’s credibility?
Google Working On Translator Phone
Holy language gap, Batman! Google looks to be creating some pretty cool futuristic gadgets for its utility belt. Now, when Eric Schmidt puts out the Goog signal he can feel confident that ex-Google employees in all parts of the world will understand the signal without have to spend time changing out the filter on his light signal. (I had to use this picture again after all the trouble Andy went through to make it). This will all be made possible by Google’s translation tools that are moving toward translating voice on the fly.
Now, this technology is a few years away but The Times of London is bringing the project to our attention.
By building on existing technologies in voice recognition and automatic translation, Google hopes to have a basic system ready within a couple of years. If it works, it could eventually transform communication among speakers of the world’s 6,000-plus languages.
The folks at Google seem to feel that this is very doable. There are many naysayers, however, which are quoted in the article but also let themselves be heard in the comment string. First the confident Google version
“We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time,” said Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services.
Now from the other camp.
However, some experts believe the hurdles to live translation remain high. David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor University, said: “The problem with speech recognition is the variability in accents. No system at the moment can handle that properly.
“Maybe Google will be able to get there faster than everyone else, but I think it’s unlikely we’ll have a speech device in the next few years that could handle high-speed Glaswegian slang.
Whether this capability is ready in a few years or in 10 years it could be something that would be very interesting but in the same breath could be disturbing like it apparently was in the movie “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. In the movie, the Babel Fish device that could translate any language for users ended up creating some serious issues (a war) because everyone knew what everyone else was saying!
I’m not saying that life would imitate art but maybe what we don’t know won’t hurt us after all.
Google Display Ad Business Poised for $1 B in 2010
Well, since Google’s Super Bowl ad has signaled that it is in trouble by sending some kind of message that there is fear in the air (c’mon people relax it’s not the big deal you may think it is), what does a company that is obviously reeling on its heels look to do? Find other ways to make money of course.
Now I do not believe that Google is reeling at all. I don’t think that their Super Bowl ad is evidence of anything other than the fact that they could use an already created and packaged message to reach a large audience when their competition wasn’t. Nothing more and nothing less. Do you really think that the cost of that ad is of any consequence to Google’s bottom line? I suspect they figured they could smoke the crappy ads for chips and beer with a simple message and create buzz worth more than $ 3 mil. Mission accomplished.
Google does, however, need to figure out other ways to generate cash and display seems to be the next big thing. Business Week reports
Google CEO Eric Schmidt hinted in July that display advertising would probably be the next of his company’s businesses to generate $1 billion in sales. Analysts say 2010 is the year he’ll deliver on that prediction.
Display ads are likely to contribute a little more than $1 billion, or about 4% of Google’s (GOOG) total sales this year—an increase of as much 40% over last year—say analysts, including Doug Anmuth at Barclays Capital. That marks an important threshold for Mountain View (Calif.)-based Google, which makes most of its sales from ads placed alongside search results and which has been criticized for not getting more revenue from other businesses. Demand for display ads, which include marketing messages in videos and banner ads adorning Web pages, may rise faster this year than for search-related ads, according to eMarketer.
About $700 million of that number should come from YouTube while the remaining will come out of the DoubleClick operations that are gaining momentum. There seems to be a new surge in display ad money that is coming over to the web from TV advertisers. I guess they hadn’t heard about the effectiveness concerns regarding the ads but hey if you have blown a lot on TV ads already it shows you don’t pay real close attention to things 
. Google has rolled out its Google Insight offering, though, to help understand everything
Google is trying to help advertisers better measure the effectiveness of display ads. “One of the challenges we put to ourselves was: ‘What are the ways a brand advertiser would look to measure [ad impact]?’,” Neal Mohan, the executive in charge of Google’s display business says. The result: Campaign Insights, a tool developed over a year by dozens of Google engineering teams around the world before it was released in December.
Hair-care company Regis was one of the first to test Campaign Insights. It ran banner ads for Hair Club For Men across hundreds of Google’s partner sites while Campaign Insights tracked the number of people who had seen the ads and then performed related Web searches. “Display [advertising] drives searches and Web site visits,” says Luke Hubbard, vice-president of Beverly Hills (Calif.)-based Integrated Media Solutions, the ad agency that coordinated the campaign for Regis. “We knew that effect was there before, but now we are able to quantify it.” Impressed by the results, Regis increased spending on display ads for the brand in 2010, and Integrated Media Solutions has signed up seven other clients eager to tap the analytics.
Ahh, analytics. You mean the ability to actually track whether what you are doing is truly working or not? Those crazy kids over in Mountain View think they should provide something that measures the effectiveness of display ads and now they are going to try to sell more because of their innovation. Wow.
Is Google serious about this? Apparently serious enough to actually have real Google employees venture out and talk to live human beings. In other words they are recognizing that this type of sale requires service and not automation. I had to chuckle a little at this last quote regarding the idea of Google employees venturing out and soiling their good name with the general population.
To succeed in display, Google has also had to hone its ability to market products through a people-friendly sales force. In search, Google has tended to rely more on the technical effectiveness of its products, analysts say. “Advertising is a lot of hand-holding and schmoozing,” says analyst Greg Sterling. “Historically, Google has not been good on managing the people side.”
That’s changing, says Amy Curtis-McIntyre, senior vice-president of brand communications for hotel chain Hyatt. She says Google has begun regularly sending sales reps to her Chicago offices. “When they develop new search tools or new advertising tools, they bring them to us and present them in a usable way,” says Curtis-McIntyre.
Now, when Google understands that people also like to be visited when there isn’t something to sell then we can say that they get it. You know…..the R word. No, not Revenue! They get that one real good! It’s the other R word……Relationship. When they understand relationships then they will have something.
Google Talking Out of Both Sides of Its Mouth on China?
When Google announced that it would no longer play nicely with China, some suggested that this was a just a ploy to pull out of a country that it was struggling to dominate.
Of course, Google’s official stance was that it was just too much of a compromise to operate any business in China:
We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
Except maybe, for one that’s already successful…
A consortium led by Walt Disney Co is in advanced talks to buy into China’s largest in-bus digital media and advertising company…Google was expected to take only a small stake in the Bus Online deal, while Disney aimed to take the greater part, said the sources, adding that no agreement had been signed yet.
Wow, Google! That stance against China lasted all of four weeks!
Here we were thinking that you were putting your foot down so that other US companies might be able to get behind your efforts to stop censorship in China, when all along you were looking for a back door into the country.
Buying a stake in a successful Chinese company kind of gives credibility to the suggestion that you only backed out of China, because you weren’t able to compete. After all, if you were on such moral high-ground, you wouldn’t be buying into a company that already plays nicely with the Chinese government.
Would you?
The iPad As Platform For SEM & Social Media Marketing
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Google Warns Chinese Knockoff To Stop Using Google Logo
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3 Ways To Optimize Your Bidding Strategies
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The New Local: Location Based, Social Centric & Behaviorally Targeted
We’re just weeks into 2010, and already a host of major tech, online, and mobile companies have made some exciting announcements about their latest plans for local search.
In mid-January, Google’s Mobile division announced that it is upgrading its search engine on Android-powered devices and the iPhone to present results reflective of the current or last [...]
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