Online marketing requires more than counting cash to succeed!

Ha!  Based on the title above, I bet you thought we’d be discussing the more ephemeral elements of social media marketing today.  Surely you know me better than that by now! We’re Streetsmart for a reason:  when the chips fall, it’s all about results (real results – be they increased visibility online to actual conversions in property sales).  I’d be willing to wager: most estate agents out there don’t have the first clue about what results to look for, or how they came to the results that exist.  How many of you are actually tracking your source enquiries? In other words, do you ask each and every customer how they found their way to you?  Hands up!  I see very few hands…  Naughty.  So the billion pound questions remains:  how do we know what to spend where? How do we calculate the value of our digital and social media activity in business terms our bookkeeper can get their heads around?  Simples!

Keeping it Real

Results are everything.  In our hard pressed economy, and our beleaguered sector, results make a very real difference in our lives. On a personal level, it’s the difference between sipping champagne or enduring Gallo.  On a professional level, it means flourishing in a troubled economy and setting yourselves up to rapidly expand and take advantage of the downturn in all of its opportunities, or clinging to mere survival.  But in a world with so many customer ‘actions’ and in the case of many businesses, a lack of hard ‘conversion points’, what metrics are needed to make sound business decisions about which marketing channel works best for you?  Everyone bangs on about social media – but is it working for your agency?  Are you seeing the return on investment (ROI) you’d expect?  If not, you’re not doing it right.  That’s as real as I can get, though let us not digress from today’s most serious of topics: return on investment.

ROI: More Bang for your Buck

You’ve got property stock and you either a) need more, b) need to shift it or c) need to accomplish both.  Your chief concern is property marketing.  You have multiple channels to get your business in front of the right customers.  But how can you measure what’s working and what isn’t?  Smart business owners know that diverting budgets from underperforming channels to more effective arenas pays big dividends, rather than following the herd and simply marketing in the way ‘everyone else’ does it.  You may feel safe reviewing your portal statistics, but it’s just not enough.  Property marketing portals, provide monthly reporting and analytics to show how much your property listings were engaged with on their site.  But that’s only the beginning of the story.  What happens when the customers arrive on your doorstep, or pick up the telephone and ring you, or navigate to your website and request a viewing?  How do you know where they came from?  The ads? The billboards?  Google search?  Facebook?  Portals?  Tracking your source enquiries at the point of contact is the single most important thing you can do for your business.

“But it will take time and customers don’t like it!”  You know, if you can’t ask a quick question in all of your customer contact with ease, then you’re in the wrong business.  Creating lasting relationships and trust is key to swaying customers for big ticket items.  If you’ve got time to get their email, you’ve time to find out where they’re coming from.   Why?  It’s VITAL in determining a true ROI figure.  We cannot do the math without it.  Okay, I am getting bored with the marketing lingo and for lack of a simpler language, we’re going to provide some clear examples and instructions.

Brains & Brawn: The Daniel Craig Way

I admit it. The above title is a shameless, unaffiliated plug for a current obsession of mine (flying the flag and setting standards for all of our older gents! No excuses!).  But there is substance too.  Bond isn’t just a pretty face.  Nor is he all cutting edge technology.  He’s a smooth operater, cunning, shrewd, fit and debonair.  He knows what he’s doing, why and how – which makes ad libbing under pressure all the more successful.  He’s got it all.  And so should you.

ROI Defined

ROI is simple:  is what you’re doing making or saving you money and / or generating positive brand experiences?   Any communications channel you use should be designed from a business point of view to do one of these three things.  What ROI is not:  black magic.  You cannot massage the balance books, or hang on to outdated modes of marketing simply because you’re fond of seeing your properties in glossy printed magazines.   You must examine everything (print advertising, direct mail campaigns, your website, PPC, and social media channels) with the same impunity.

Math Lesson Alert

Are we all still awake?  Good.  Time to grab a coffee to keep you going!  So the calculation is simple. There are a few ways to calculate ROI, but let’s go with the most commonly accepted, expressed as a percentage.  ROI = money (and/or time)  spent divided by money (and/or time) made x 100.  Yes.   That easy.  So let’s represent that a little clearer:

ROI = x(money/time spent on a particular marketing channel) / y (money/time earned or saved from a particular marketing channel) x 100

So you spent 20,000 GBP on your new website.  You’ve generated 10,000 more views of your site in the last quarter as a result.  From those views, you’ve had 30 new customers, each with a value of 5,000 GBP to your business (this figure should be calculated based on the average profit margin of each customer to your business in each service level of your business – i.e. lettings/sales).   Here’s how it looks:

£20,000/£I50,000 x 100 = 13.333%.

Calculating time is fairly straightforward too.  Simply assign the hourly value of your team members and apply this value to the units of time saved.  The math lesson is over folks.  Now let’s tackle what we’re measuring.

BUT WHAT TO MEASURE?

Let’s go back to business basics.  The first step in any successful business effort is determining your key business objectives.  Whether they involve cutting costs in certain departments, getting more traffic to your website or expanding your online real estate – you can’t demonstrate ROI unless you’ve nailed this.  Take a look at all the core areas of your business performance and review your strategic objectives.  Here are some questions to ask to get to these bare bones essentials:

• Marketing and Communications:  How are we spreading the word to our customers and potential business partners/investors?  Are we doing this most effectively?  How can we cut marketing / IT costs while increasing business?
• Customer Service: Are we managing online complaints about our services?  Are we effectively servicing our customer needs?  Is there a way to do it better?  Can we make it cheaper?
• Brand Building:  Do new potential customers know who we are?  How can we ensure that we have most visibility online?  How can we make sure our customers feel valued by spending less time, not more?
• Human Resource: Are we attracting the right employees to our business?  Are we utilizing all tools and resources to do so online?  Can we cut recruitment agency / advertising fees by utilizing social media?

Brainstorm each area of your business and apply strategic objectives to the department(s) you are responsible for.  This allows a firm foundation for all of your future metrics.  Here are some example objectives and targets (but bear in mind, you must set reasonable and specific goals to each of them:

• Sell more products or services (10% increase in new home sales, 5% rise in property stock, etc)
• Cultivate influence and authority (more press inches and more online real estate, including engagement with key influencers in social)
• Customer Loyalty (25% higher customer retention rate, year on year)
• Cut business overheads (reduce customer service overhead by 20%)
• Optimise business efficiency (15% reduction in time spent on sharing property details in social media)
• Optimise marketing efforts
• Open new market demographic (50% increase in traffic to site from foreign markets)
• Increase Visibility in Market

Visibility in search engines for:

• - Company Profile (20% increase in rankings)
• - Property portfolio & intellectual property assets (i.e. area guides, etc) (100% improvement in ‘owning the search page’ for our properties and assets
• Increase Influence

Developing profile of key executives to:

• - Develop Partnerships & Relationships (2 new partners and business relationships developed via LinkedIn per quarter)
• - Increase share of voice with key influencers (5% increase in trade/ press enquiries for key market issues)

The Holy Trinity

Once you’ve decided your key business objectives, it’s vital to round them up and assign into areas that you can focus on with ease.  With so much to calculate, I can feel your pain.  However, we recommend using our Holy Trinity (Social, Digital and Business Objectives) to help you get started segmenting your measures of success in getting to your eventual ROI calculation.

Social Metrics:  From Likes, Shares and RTs to engagement with key market influencers online, you should set up your measurement system to include:

Quantitative Metrics – The numbers: Fans, Followers, Likes of FB page, etc

Qualitative Metrics – The value of the numbers:

• Clicks on content
• Re-tweets
• Shares
• Likes of content
• Comments on content
• Positive customer service experiences/referrals in social
• Social Bookmarking

Influencer Metrics

• % of following comprised of market influencers
• Volume of engagement with Influencers vs customers
• @replies
• Conversations in social (@replies, comments on blog, social bookmarking, forum discussions)
• Increased reach via Influencer Engagement (number of new followers reached through engagement with Influencers

Digital Metrics:  These are by far the easiest measures to collect (usually via a combination of Google Analytics).  They give you everything you need to know about how customers arrive at and interact with your website.  You should look at digital metrics in two segments: micro-conversions and macro-conversions.  Metrics should map back to your original business objectives at all times, so ensure you’ve accounted for them.  Sample metrics could include:

Higher macro-conversions

• Increased traffic from foreign markets
• Increased traffic from key search terms
• Property details download
• Registration onsite
• Requests for viewing
• Social shares

Higher micro-conversions

• Multiple category views (i.e Looking around your site for longer, in different property areas)
• Download of property brochure or informational pdf
• Increased dwell time on site
• Customer Survey responses
• Increased activity in registered log in area on site

Business Objectives:  These are by far the simplest measures.  Have you increased business in key areas?  Are you selling more houses?  Are more customers finding you in social media or online?  This is where your source enquiry tracking pays the most dividends.

Bringing Home the Bacon

Once you’ve gotten to grips with what to measure, your ROI calculation in social media, digital and other marketing channels should be straightforward.  Of course, we’re always here to help answer your questions and guide you.  Feel free to email me at tracy@streetsmartsocial.co.uk with your issues and we’ll continue this discussion in weeks to come.  But before we leave you all to counting, there are two key points for consideration:

• Measuring impact on brand, sentiment and reputation is hard to measure.  If you’re getting it right, you’ve ‘averted a crisis’ – so it’s hard to measure something that you’ve avoided (like www.ihateyourestateagencyname.com or an all out petition discrediting your property management expertise),  but it’s no different to measuring PR activity in a traditional since!
• Most marketing uses for social are about relationship building. Measuring the return on a relationship happens over an extended period of time, and you need the technology in place to capture this customer data to really calculate full return on investment.  Social, of course, can be a campaign channel, but social relationships just don’t work this way.  It’s about constant relationship building through trust and giving good content/value, to get real monetary return.

Happy number crunching!

*  This article first appeared in PropertyDrum magazine.

Streetsmart Social & PropertyDrum invite readers to take part in the world’s first real estate social media survey.  Please email tracy@streetsmartsocial.co.uk to participate. We’ll be collating the results and publishing them in a special PropertyDrum article in the near future!

What are they on about?

The core of any search or social media marketing program centers on content. Digital assets, rich media, web pages, MS Office and PDF docs as well as content created and shared by consumers all offer opportunities for optimization. If it can be searched, it can be optimized!

Online marketing is increasingly competitive and brand marketers world-wide are seeking real advantages that will improve the efficiency and impact of their social media and SEO efforts.

Tracy gets some unique insights from Lee into content based optimization strategies and processes as well as tactics for sourcing, creation and promotion of optimized content on the social web. Tracy also asks Lee about ways of educating the next generation on the subject of content and Lee brings up several examples of today’s social networks for kids, including Club Penguin.

[Originally published in PropertyDrum Magazine]

Spent good money on your website lately?  Happy with what you’ve got?

(Can you hear the pin drop?)

Or do you wish there was a Dominic Littlewood  for the property industry who’d go round your web developers for a wee argy-bargy?

There’s not much I can do to help you recover lost costs and opportunities arising from a bad website.  Nor can I give you a full overview of what you must do to execute a web development project successfully in a handful of articles.  BUT – we’ll illustrate some common pitfalls and streetsmart solutions to selecting a good web developer. 

The Usual Suspects

You can spot them a mile away:   great sales, a dream team intent on dizzying you with digital jargon, and a low low price!  When you get into the nitty gritty of actually making the website you want, they weave their web and before you know it you’ve signed a 2 year deal for a software product, web development, and rights to your first born child.

Heaven help you when your company grows and you want to make changes to your site, or just need some basic tools to keep you up to speed in a fast moving digital world.  Need social media buttons to connect your website customers to major social media platforms?  Sure!  But that’ll be XXX per month.  Want to connect your property stock database to social media products that allow customers to search for property by area, postcode, street name, tube stop or more?  Of course – but that’ll be new fields in the database and api development which will cost you XXX?  Want to make sure your site is visible for key customer searches  in Google?  No problem, BUT, we have to reengineer our whole ‘code base’ to cope with the industry standard best practices in development that occurred over 10 years ago!  And you’ll need to pay for it!!!!

Don’t Get Done, Get Dom

There’s probably not a single one of you reading this article that hasn’t seen the havoc cowboy builders wreak.  From horror stories following the 1998 tornadoes, leaving a slew of homeowners with unfinished, not to mention dangerous, building repairs and renovations, to the tawdry tales of deceit regularly filling a prime time slot on Channel 5’s Cowboy Builders series, the property sector is plagued by people promising the world and delivering ….!  The obvious question: How do I avoid being the next mug?

Top Tips for Avoiding ‘Cowboy (Web) Builders’

1.       Beware false profits!

First things first.  Of course your website needs to work hard for you.  But it’s hard to place an ROI figure that’s accurate for the property industry – given the multiple channels you advertise and market in without an accurate portrait of the sources of enquiry to your business.  But how many estate agents take the time to actually investigate which channel their customers found them by?

In addition, high ROI figures are nigh on impossible to promise in the shifting landscape of the online property sector – given that property portal prices have gone up, while referrals to your business stagnate.  Unless you find out where each and every one of your customers come from, you cannot possibly begin to calculate the best channels to market in, the best product to purchase for your digital needs, or the best budget to allocate to digital marketing?

Any developer selling his software or web dev services by utilizing ROI figures needs to be interrogated more intensely than the Spanish Inquisition.  What is he basing his figures on?  What is the calculation used to determine ROI – specifically?  Can you contact any of their customers referenced in ROI case studies to confirm the claims?

2.       One size fits all

So you find a developer and they flash a range of website choices for your project.  You try to ask if you can change this or that, if they can make it look more like the designs you’ve drawn up,  or if you can have x, y or z feature.

“Sure! We have a social media module that does just that”

What you should hear inside your head right now is the sound of tyres screeching to a stop, leaving long black lines of tar behind you.  This way lies danger!  Module coding means many things (very few of them good):

• Almost all of your web developers’ clients will share a single code base.  This means that any changes you request and pay for will be available to your competition.  Any client’s your developer has will be able to access these changes, sometimes for free, other times by paying an upgrade fee.
• Modules are often built in bloated javascript code, which is – in layman’s terms – renowned for creating long, long, long lines of code that slow down Google’s crawl of your website (a crawl: what Google does to read and index the content on your site that visitors can see).  Bottom line?  You decrease load speed of your site, a Google ranking factor, and Google also gives less importance to the IMPORTANT readable content on your site because it’s too busy reading 1000 lines of javascript code.
• Every time you want something that doesn’t exist in a current developer module – you’ll have to pay!  Remember what we said about paying for the rest of the developer’s clients as well!!!

Not all modular coding is bad, and certainly, if you’re on a budget and/or don’t have much choice  – there are ways to work around these issues – but careful digital consultation and a decent development team capable of implementing recommendations is the key to salvaging value!

3.       Getting what you pay for

We’ve all been strapped for cash. But would you jeopardise your business’ future just because you’re hard up?  The recession dictates we’ve all tightened our belts.  So let’s do a little math.

 Thousands upon thousands per month to property portals

+ local print advertisements and papers

= LOTS OF MONEY!  Let’s call this “traditional spend”. 

I am willing to bet that you spend MORE in 3 months on “traditional spend” than you spend on a single website set to represent you in the digital world for years to come.  Can you see where I’m going with this?

Classic blunders in choosing a web developer can often be traced back to being miserly.  Either you choose a bedroom developer, someone who has shown aptitude and is ‘pretty sure’ he can build you what you need, hire an “IT guy” – with or without nepotism involved – or go with a cheap package that promises the world.

Your business pays the piper:  not being able to update your site without development requests,  or connect to new technologies (such as social media platforms and products), or specify ANYTHING really.  Oh yeah:  your site looks pretty bad on mobile devices too!

Solution?  Map out your website aims.  Hire a digital consultant (but beware here too!).  Create a user experience that is perfect for your customer base.  Create wireframes and initial designs for the site you want to see, even if you do it with paper and pen!   Create a ‘brief’ for your web developers to show them  exactly what you want.  Send this brief to multiple developers. Get quotes. Ask for example work. Have these website vetted to make sure they’re technically up to scratch for the modern digital world.  If it sounds like hard work, you’re right!  But it’s the single most important thing you can do to protect your business online and prevent bad (present and future) spend.

PMH (NOT hormone related!)

PMH.  Otherwise known as Project Management Hell.  We’ve all been there.  Your web development firm is spending more time on conference calls, being pedantic with fancy spreadsheets or arguing deadlines with your internal teams than they are coding your website.  You meticulously check your website product, and document your requests for changes, and package it all up to make it easy for you to track and trace project progress.  But STILL, things seem to drag on, and you’ve got more emails than solid code?  This is a typical outcome of property sector specific web development firms.

Your project manager isn’t your friend, he’s your attendant in the 3^rd ring of Dante’s Inferno.  If you find yourself in this position, you can almost guarantee your developer is juggling a range of clients utilizing a ‘single’ code base product and your needs and request for change are in a long queue of updates requested via their customer base.

How can you step out of the ring of fire?  Document once and document well.   Make sure you know what each and every page of your website looks like and will contain.  Check outcomes against this.  Call for real-time accountability by putting all your development requests through easy to document and track online tools such as BaseCamp or Lighthouse.  In fact, go so far as to put the whole project through Odesk.com – where you can even track live screenshots of developers working on your project!  Odesk also allows you to set up a budget and stick to it – it will not allow invoicing over and above the budget and time you have set for a project.

The golden rule: your developer is working FOR YOU – not vice versa.

We invite all of our readers to submit their tales of Cowboy (Web) Builder woe totracy@streetsmartsocial.co.uk for a chance to win a free consultation.  In addition, we’ll select individual entries to highlight and help solve in upcoming articles. 

• Can you contract STDs from sitting on the bus?
• Where did my baby go?
• What happened to the days when I baby-proofed every room in the house so she wouldn’t trap her little fingers?

Remember how proud you were when she had her first steps? As she turns to smile at you & step out of the door for her first prom night, you almost shout “Stop!” You want 10 more minutes to coach her on all the things you should have said, the things she needs to know to protect her innocence from the perils sure to come. But you stop. You smile back & let her walk away, praying that all the advice you’ve dispensed over folding the laundry together sticks. You’ll know she’ll be back & she’ll be ready to listen.

Your brand is your baby. Social media is…scary.

I work for a digital agency with a portfolio of clients who’ve just entered the social media space. After years of careful, reluctant acceptance of the ‘Learn, Measure, Engage’ model, they’ve moved from baby steps to full on careening round the house with the big headed balance of a toddler. Of course I’m scared. Of course I’m worried. But here’s how I sleep at night.

Good Old Fashioned Values: Social Media ROI for B2B Clients

So you taught her that it was better to be herself, to know what she was good at & to work hard to be the very best she could be. You taught her manners & the basics of how to get on in the world. But when she’s standing on the dance floor with some over developed goon breathing down her neck — will she remember these fundamental lessons?

For your business, it’s the same. CEOs, CMOs, PRs & marketers across the globe are worried about sending their darling brands out into the uncertain & tenuous world of social. They know they have to do it. They’re also expected to make this endeavour into a commercial & PR miracle. All eyes are on their interactions in these spaces with a global scrutiny that leaves little room to fail. So how do you prepare your brand for the adventures surely to come? How do you turn what you thought might be a new marketing fad into a profitable way to expand your business & satisfy your stakeholders?

Let’s lay it out in no uncertain terms:

Understand your unique selling points: Back to marketing 101. What does your business do very well? Why would I choose you to provide me with products & services? What would I look for as an investor to ensure your organisation was fit for purpose? Why would I want to work for you? What is your company doing that deserves column inches with my media group? If you haven’t hit all the stakeholder bases, go back to boardroom with some post it notes & your top level execs & hash it out.

Understand your audience & their issues: Beyond the simple “Who?” of your target market, think: “Who’s sitting on the other side of the computer screen?” What are their dreams? How would your business make their life easier? What are their sales objections? Have they been burned before? How do they educate themselves online to continue their development within the business they work? What might they type into a search engine to find this info? What are they interested in that might overlap with your company’s objectives (eco-friendly policies, corporate social responsibility efforts, innovative technologies). You get the gist. Find their need. Fill it.

Understand your objectives: It’s not all about the other person. When you enter the long dance of funnelling a big business lead into a tangible conversion, it’s also about getting what you need out of the situation. In the end, whatever you’re doing to engage with your audience & stakeholders, it should also come down to protecting & improving your bottom line. What can social media offer you in tangible, real numbers you can take to the boardroom? How will you use these metrics to get you from “We want a website/app/social media campaign” to a fully fledged, integrated digital strategy?

Understand SEO: If you do nothing else I say, please do this. Learn as much as you can about search engine optimisation (Bruce Clay’s training courses are a great start) & use this power. If you can find the words that people use to discover you or your offering, you’re onto the best thing since sliced bread. Sound keyword research & planning these keywords across your digital activities (from press releases to CEO blogs to how you create new content pages on your corporate site, or what you Tweet or upload to Facebook) will be the core of your success. Good SEO knowledge can help you discover where your audiences are, what they’re talking about, & how they’ll find you. Use this more advanced method to audit your keywords, & you’ll soon be on the way to completely targeted, perfectly crafted SEO, PPC & social media campaigns (read: more money with less time & effort!).

And when it comes to the pay-dirt of SEO — inbound links — you’ll find that your knowledge of the keywords & keyphrases you’ve discovered will not only allow your audience to find you, it’ll make them happy to link to your relevant content, too.

Understand Digital: Build with integrity from the bottom up. More important than any other weapon in your arsenal, digital provides answers. But only if you’ve married your analytics bone to your CMS, CRM & your Social bone. Execute your web development with every consideration for search, your audience, & your objectives. Work every back end system & front end interface to the max. But it’s not just about technology. Make sure you integrate the whole of your marketing efforts, matching your digital & social media strategy to every single outreach carried out in your organisation. Across the globe. Use analytics systems to prove increased traffic referred from social networks. Give these ‘micro-conversions’ a monetary value, just as you’d tag a banner ad. Use these systems to document your social interactions, then feed them into your CRM systems so that you can begin to prove the kinds of things that make financial directors smile. We promise.

Understand why IT departments hate Social Media: Imagine it, you rode the crest of the digital wave & found yourself transformed from closet computer games geek to Head of IT. Suddenly, you have power. With that power comes a lot of anxiety too. People come to you for everything from a faulty computer cable to a missing email. The last thing you want is the nightmare of potential viruses that social media can unleash. So how do you release the corporate shackles of group IT policies so that all relevant members of your staff can be your very own army of brand ambassadors? Give IT back the power. Ask an outside agency to audit their perceived challenges with opening up your business to social media platforms. Then ask them for solutions to these challenges (tiered security profiles for different levels of the business, restrictions on downloads, etc.) Re-package this feedback in a way that presents a good business case for social media & your job is done. Kick it up the chain as high as it needs to go to get it done. After all, you won’t find many boardrooms that aren’t chattering away about social media these days.

Understand Social Channels: Social media is dead. Gotcha. Never have four words elicited so much attention online. But it’s the truth: it’s just the way we ‘do the internet’ these days. So get out there. Experiment in the channels on your own time, use the platforms you hear about so that you understand their functionality. More importantly, follow the FedEx ‘Launch a Package’ model & spot the gaps in what these social environments offer so that your business can provide a solution. What else can I say about social media that you don’t already know? Be polite, be just as you would be when you’re standing in front of another human being. The clue is in the name of this new media: be social. Like you’d tell your daughter: you don’t need to wear revealing clothes & tons of makeup to attract attention. You just need to be there & be yourself. It’s about opening up, knowing the audience, being confident in your organisation, & using these channels to spread your word. If you build it, they will come. Which leads to my next point:

Understand Crisis & Reputation Management: Like your daughter, out on her first prom night, it’s important to understand that bad & weird stuff, so it’s best to be prepared. What am I talking about now? When you’re being ‘social’, you just can’t stop. You’re there. So if your organisation makes a mistake, or there’s a bump in the road, don’t lie. Be honest & open. Because social media platforms are much, much more than a campaign channel. If you begin to engage in these channels, you have to keep the dialogue going. Your social media properties (the Twitter handles, the Facebook page, the LinkedIn & YouTube accounts) are permanent digital communications. Get them optimised & running like a well-oiled machine so that if disaster strikes, you have a real & immediate way of both communicating your messages to interested stakeholders as well as protecting the first page of your search engine results. Remember: don’t go Nestle, get even. Flood your networks with well-optimised copy that protects your brand values & your corporate site’s position in the search engines.

Leveraging Social Media: It’s All About How Much You Put In

The way you leverage social media in your business & beyond is all down to the right upbringing. The success or failure of your brand & business in these environments depends entirely on how much you’ve prepared. If you love yourselves & your babies, do it right. Once you set this prolific marketing machine running, it will keep on going. Whether it comes back to take care of you in retirement is entirely in your grasp.

How Much is This Going to Cost Me?

Worried about resource, time & the amount of hard work that organising your social media strategy will take, don’t panic! Need to understand the finer arts of how to work each social media channel to your corporation’s best advantage? Get in touch —tracy@streetsmartsocial.uk or sign up to Streetsmart Social’s  newsletter for more!

[This article was originally published by Bruce Clay International Blog, reproduced with permission by Streetsmart Social | Social Media Digital Agency]

Your Mother’s Face

When you’re born, you cannot see your mother’s face. Two months: that’s how long you spend learning to see. Though born with all the components needed for vision:  your eyes and your brain – you do not see clearly. Arguably, you also don’t know what you’re ‘seeing’.

“…[T]hough the optics of the eye are mature, infants still can’t see as well as adults because brain areas responsible for vision are still immature. To use the camera analogy, the reason that infants’ vision is blurry is because of the “film”, not the lens. The retina (the film of the eye), in addition to other visual parts of the brain, is incompletely developed in infants.”  The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, What Can My Baby See

So, you have the necessary hardware, but your software, your database, your processing power, and your neural networks aren’t yet up to scratch. They can’t take meaning of what is in the line of site.  Nor can the brain cook up a response based on this stimuli.

But inside of two mere months, you begin to respond to complex signals and develop the neural processing skills required to truly see. Biological vision, in its purest form. Visual acuity. Vision no man or machine can emulate.

Your vision at birth is an analogy for the current state of visual search.  So let’s start at the beginning.

The Infant State of Augmented Reality and Visual Search

The gap between the physical world and digital is immense. Despite significant pedigree and influence, the Church of Holy Technology (aka the Singularity) and us regular mortals still struggle to make meaningful connections between real world experiences and the rich digital world we’re evolving into.  (Heads up: if you work in tech or search and don’t know about Google, NASA, and the Federal Government’s ‘link’ to the Singularity movement, you should.)

Augmented Reality, computer vision, mobile hardware, wearables are the next waves driving techno-evolution. If we’re intuitive, we also see they hold potential to change the very way human beings experience the world, for better or for worse.

Have I gone mental? A bit too much lead in the pipes here in London? Nope. When Google alludes to ‘augmenting humanity’ in such a sexy, mysterious way (not to mention establish a university dedicated to it) you better sit up and listen.  In fact, in a recent augmented reality week long series, many of the world’s top augmented reality experts spilled these juicy nuggets about future bio-tech and AR chimera.

“The day I have a pair of funky sunglasses and walk around with non-obnoxious advertising, news, social networking, totally immersed in the world, then AR will really have arrived.” Prof. Blair MacIntyre, director of Augmented Environments Lab, Georgia Institute of Technology (see this visualised in the 2nd video below)

“And AR contact lenses, yes, they’ll happen but my question to you is this – why have it washing around on the surface of your eye when you can have it implanted inside your head? Sure there are social and ethical issues but these things will change with each generation as it becomes more acceptable.” Prof. Steve Feiner, Head of Computer Science, Columbia University

The Horror. The Horror. I hear you shriek. “Human beings would never allow this to happen!” or “Only with medical need!” But please. Think about it. Why wouldn’t you? That phone that you carry in your bag or your pocket, that you see first thing morning and night, that sleeps next to your bed… it contains the same chip. So do some of the American soldiers in the Middle East. Mobiles and wearables are merely the transition devices. You are the next carrier. Let’s keep it real here: people exchange freedom for stability and convenience every day (from Facebook privacy/image recognition to our Net Neutrality – severely threatened by the Patriot Act).

Enough Of The Highbrow Stuff: Show Me the Money

What the hell am I talking about here? See for yourself. Here’s a few more clichés for good measure: Seeing is believing. A picture paints a thousand words. But this is exactly how I felt when I first saw augmented reality in practice at the world’s leading search and social conference, Search Engine Strategies (SES) in New York at the beginning of last year.

Pretty cool, huh?  With Google going quiet on augmented reality for way too long to be comfortable (update – GOOGLE GLASSES! OH YEAH!), followed by their acquisition of facial recognition startup PittPatt, and the launch of Google+, we’re not very far off of this very cool, ‘opt-in’ iteration of augmented reality.

How Does It Work?  Augmented Reality’s Current Guise

You have devices which see (mobiles, web cams, wearables, and motion sensor devices like Kinect). Then there’s the retina, which processes (computer vision technologies, GPS hardware, the sensors) and the brain (augmented reality and visual search). However, we’re still lacking the physiological practice of biological vision, the physics and machine vision required to help our ‘database’ of experiences evolve. We don’t even have a database, or the neural networks required to make the invisible world around us a universal, homogenous experience, nor a context for how to respond (or serve back the correct information to the user) or true visual search.

Augmented reality can be experienced with the devices below to launch a range of digital content experiences (sound, pictures, web pages, video, 2D or 3D animations, and haptic response).

Augmented Reality: The Future of Visual Search

If computer vision and hardware innovations are the what in this equation, augmented reality is the how.  What we need next is the why. Have a look at the state of theaugmented reality industry at present for yourself.

Hampered by awkward and insufficient technology, bandwidth, data charges, and most importantly – cohesive content, true visual search is yet to be achieved. We need meaning for these experiences. We need them to be organised in a way that is both beautiful and useful. What does this mean for search?

“The dominance of desktop systems in the search arena is rapidly drawing to a close. Their lack of portability, of context-awareness, reducing them to “dumb” WWW terminals useful only in office environments. 

We’re on the cusp of a new world order where handheld devices and wearables will become the primary discovery and information retrieval mechanism.  By 2020 between 50 and 500 billion objects will be networked. Current search taxonomy will fail and, arguably, is already.

 A sleeker, smarter, more natural search interface will be required – one that enables you to touch, swipe, drag, gesticulate, talk and interact with the data in the world around you. Augmented Reality will provide that interface.” Howard Ogden, Founder: AugmentReality and Mobilistar

So what we need now is an information retrieval system that can help us to contextualise, give meaning, and respond to the Internet of Things. What will provide this lens to the brave new world?

• Social interaction in digital, primarily through social media and ‘folksonomies’ of information we provide
• Coupled with behavioural data our mobile devices broadcast (on a second-by-second basis  - what you do, where you are, what you buy are all tracked)
• Bio-feedback
• Advances in computer vision

Or, as one of the luminaries of search, Mike Grehan said on information retrieval and Google recently:

“You are the black box.”

[This article was originally published by Bruce Clay International Blog, reproduced with permission by Streetsmart Social | Social Media Digital Agency]