Rajeev was instrumental to the success of Baynote from the very beginning, even before we had a name for our company. He advised us why Google is a partner instead of a potential competitor. He offered many unique insights to the technology and business in the last five years. Two weeks ago, we had the fortune and luck to sync up with him one last time. He was so live, full of energy and ideas. Our one hour Palo Alto coffee talk went on and on. He was so excited about his planned trip to Wimbledon with his family this summer… And as usual, he was there to give unconditional help and made 7 connections after our chat…

Our thoughts and the thoughts of entire Baynote team, advisers and board go to Asha and the kids. Rajeev will be greatly missed physically but he will live on in our heart, spirit and via our technology!

Jack, Rob and Scott

Our Social Search solution works by observing the successful search and navigation paths of users in order to guide successive site visitors to their goals. Relying entirely on keyword search solutions is insufficient. An effective enterprise search solution will be able to detect the different search contexts that exist on an intranet. While this number is large, it is certainly finite. By employing a solution that can learn these contexts and detect them when clues are present, findability on the intranet can be greatly increased.

Check out our white paper on social search on exactly how Baynote can replace or supercharge an existing search solution with inadequate results.

The most vocal and misleading group of contributors is what I like to call the “squeaky wheels”. This could be those people who simply like to complain. But it can also be any one of us when we have a negative experience. Negative experiences tend to stand out more than positive ones and also encourage us to take action.

After the last design, users reacted similarly. Despite this, the network grew pages viewed per visit by 50% and its user base to 175 million users to be the largest social network. Justin Smith of the Inside Facebook blog said “Even though there are a lot of negative votes in that voting app, I think it’s a pretty self-selecting group of people and not necessarily representative of the entire population.” Justin is spot on with his analysis. 850,000 people voted in this survey, which is roughly .5% of the Facebook population. This backs up the squeaky wheel bias theory which states that “At the end of the day, 99 percent of the population remains unspoken for.”

Personally, I think the new redesign is a great update(although I haven’t voted), so I am glad to hear that Facebook is taking the feedback with a grain of salt.

Is Relevancy and Privacy Inversely Related? No.
So here is the question, Can we target users effectively without diminishing their privacy? Does increased targeting inherently scale with lesser privacy? I would say no. Google has made their fortune on contextual targeting. Users provide Google with questions and Google matches those questions with two types of answers, those derived from their organic search algorithms and those offered by advertisers. The success of this solution marked a victory for contextual targeting over the profiling. Google effectively targets content to users by understanding the context and intent of users, exactly what Baynote does as well. No profiling or personal preferences were required.

This topic is a bit much to cover in one post, so expect a few more posts to follow up on why relevance and privacy are mutually exclusive.

Some miscellaneous nuggets:
Consumer opinions online (61%) are nearly twice as trusted as search engine advertising (34%) and banner ads (26%), according to the 2007 Nielsen Online Global Consumer Study.

Less is the New More – overload is taking its toll. Content we care about will find us through clever combinations of friends and algorithms.

When I first learned PR it was a job filled with control.  We sent out highly crafted material to select audience of influencers and it was all about push, it was not a conversation.  Now just as PR becomes a role that multiple people in a company play, it is also a role that is blurring with customer service and customer care.  As many PR luminaries like Brian Solis keep saying, it’s a conversation. Sometimes letting go of that control has been hard but it has been well worth it.

The same shift, and the same release of control is happening to online marketers.  It is not about what you think is important, it is about what your site users think is important.  Turning site search and navigation over to the crowds might put you out of your comfort zone.  But our roles are changing.  If customer care really is part of our job, then it’s time we faciliate a conversation rather than make a speech.

While many marketers, website owners, and other business owners already know this, you’d be surprised how many of them use tools that rely on this overused and inaccurate metric. Many analytics, and even recommendation vendors, are relying on clicks as a KPI to either display to their customers or in the case of recommendations, to power their algorithms. The quality of recommendations or any kind of targeting based on user observation is no stronger than its ability to understand when and how a user has succeeded. Bounce rate, as Avinash points out, is just one of those metrics. At Baynote we track dozens of them, and clicks are by far the least utilized when validating success or failure.

Bottom line: When you are talking to analytics vendors, ad networks, or recommendations vendors ask them what KPIs their algorithms are relying on. If they say hits or clicks, they are idiots by Avinash’s definition, and he’s a smart guy.

Without further adieu here is the list of 7 criteria from GigaOm:

• Adaptability: How easily can you modify the application? This can be as simple as adding fields or building dashboards, or as advanced as a programming platform.
• Reliability: How much can you depend on the system to function well? This boils down to four things: Performance, availability, scalability and security.
• Task productivity: How effectively can your users accomplish their goals? How many cases-per-minute or entries-per-day can workers do, and how many errors do they make?
• Price: How much will it cost — really? Because SaaS offerings are so varied in pricing, it’s hard to compare them. A better model is to create several benchmark subscribers (a 10-, 100-, and 1,000-person organization) and compare upfront and ongoing costs for them.
• Back-end integration: Can you plug it in to other things? Any enterprise SaaS offering will have to work with other systems, for everything from authentication to data sharing.
• Longevity: How long will the SaaS company be around, and what’s your exit strategy? With ISVs, you could ask for software in escrow. But as the sudden disappearance of Coghead shows, when a SaaS provider closes down, your entire IT systems can vanish with the flick of an “off” switch. Offers from Intuit and others to help stranded customers notwithstanding, this is a big problem.
• Ecosystem: How many third-party developers and integrators surround a particular platform with plug-ins and add-ons, and how active are they? A vibrant ecosystem means a more extensible, flexible solution.

Fortunately, I can say with confidence that Baynote satisfies each of these criteria. I’m not going to go through each item line by line, since these 7 criteria have different implications for each business. However, our sales team will be happy to do just that. Contact them here.

Our choice was to present this bit of silliness – not quite as high-tech as a talkie, but it gets the point across.

The Era of Experts, Influencers, and Mavens
Guy noted that the old way to put a product in front of the masses was a trickle down approach. The goal was to suck up to the influencers, experts, and mavens that had an abundance of social capital and a platform to distribute your message to the masses. To make his point, he mentioned about a dozen of these “mavens,” including tech bloggers, popular media personalities and himself.
Bottom Line: Suck up to the important people, and that will effectively trickle down to the masses.

The New Age of the Masses and Crowds
Because of the advent of new technologies like Twitter, Guy argues that the most effective way to connect to users is from the ground up. Connect with users that are relevant within the context you are trying to reach. Influencers and experts will never be as valuable as the users themselves if you can reach them.
Bottom Line: Don’t ignore the experts, but make your audience and your users a source of collective intelligence that drives your business decisions.

Technologies like Twitter and Baynote’s Affinity Engine allows marketers to leverage their users in ways previously impossible. While Twitter allows marketers to speak to and gather feedback directly from their audiences, Baynote allows marketers to poll users through implicit observation. Ultimately, its all about making sure that your audience finds your products in a timely manner. Your audience may be on Twitter, but its definitely on your website and that is where Baynote comes in.

My mom had an issue with Comcast recently.  I suggested she contact them through Twitter. Their Comcast Cares persona has become pretty legendary.  But my mom isn’t on Twitter and unlikely to join so I tweeted for her and she got amazing service as a result.  It was great!  I felt social!  I felt powerful!  But really I was one squeeky wheel who happened to know about how to leverage a particular channel, Twitter.

What about the more invisible, average visitor to Comcast or anyone else’s website?  What about the person who leaves disatisfied with their experience without leaving any sort of explict feedback?  What do you learn from that person and how can you leverage this to make the experience better for the next customer?   Without my tweet, my mom would have just been an upset unknown customer, searching but not finding. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I love Twitter.  My friend’s love Facebook.  But my mom and the big silent majority are still out there, searching on traditional marketing, eCommerce and support sites for answers.  Let them help each other find what they need.   Harness their successes and their failures without making them have to actively participate in anything.   By including everyone, you really are tapping and sharing the broadest possible “social” community, both active participants and average browsers like my mom.