Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2006 Wrap Up: Part I

SES San Jose 2006 came and went, and with it the many parties that remind me of the Dot-Com Bubble (scary, non?). While SE Roundtable has great transcripts (as always) on all 38 sessions, I’m covering some quick thoughts on the various sessions and commenting on the general atmosphere of the events. This posting will be specific to (with more to come):

1. Yahoo and Social Media:
   User Profile Building, Social Media CTR rates, Cultural Differences, Yahoo! Answers Opportunities for Marketers
2. On-site Analytics Vendors:
   Future of On-Site Analytics – Integrating Competitive Analytics?

Please Note: If anyone feels they or their company are misrepresented by this post, please feel free to email me or comment on the posting and let me know. I’m always open to constructive feedback and fair evaluations.

Yahoo and Social Media

Speakers:

• Kakul Srivastava, Senior Product Manager, Flickr, Yahoo! Inc.
• Yumio Saneyoshi, Senior Product Manager, Answers, Yahoo! Inc.
• Ashish Baldua, Senior Engineering Manager, TripPlanner, Yahoo! Inc.
• Tim Mayer, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Inc.
• Kakul Srivastava, Senior Product Manager, Flickr, Yahoo! Inc.
• Joshua Schachter, Director of Engineering, creator of del.icio.us

On Social Search, User Profiles and Advertisement
Responding to a question by yours truly, Tim Mayer answered that they have no current plans for user profiles and stressed the privacy issues associated with that. At least in the mid-term to long-term, Mayer said their goals were to grow the userbase for different social media properties. I was not sure if that included database integretion across the multiple properties as well.
Social Search/Media and Lower CTR Rates?
An attendee asked Tim Mayer if Yahoo finds that social media websites have lower CTR rates, which Tim said he could not answer. The argument that social media websites have lower CTR rates seem to make sense: Social Media websites have great stickiness and promote browsing behavior, behavior that may decrease “bailout” rate to other sites via ads.

Cultural Differences between Flickr, Del.icio.us and the rest
Hearing each speaker, the different Yahoo properties all seemed to come from very different cultures and perspective – most likely result of these properties like del.icio.us and flickr being bought by Yahoo rather developed in-house. Flickr and del.icio.us sounded very much like Internet purist of the dot-com era, focusing on the power of the Internet to change culture with flickr focusing on the “Culture of Sharing”. The Yahoo! Answers and TripPlanner folks seemed more focused on monetization in addition to growing their user base.

Yahoo! Answers on Monetization
The speaker for Yahoo Answers mentioned two experiments on monetization: branded Answer channels and sponsored experts. The idea of sponsored experts answering questions, say on behalf of Black & Decker, should sound very interesting to marketers and PR folks.

Vendor Chat on Measuring Success

Speakers: John Marshall (ClickTracks), Akin Arikan (Unica/NetTracker), Brett Crosby (Google Analytics), Chris Knoch (Omniture), Warren Raisch (WebSideStory) and Barry Parshall (WebTrends)

On the Future of Analytics: Adding Competitive Analytics?
All of the speakers stressed integration with bid management, A/B Testing, and email marketing tools. John Marshall of ClickTracks pointed out that analytics is helping to drive marketing, but there’s no links yet between analytics and CRM/Sales teams.

When I asked the speakres about the integration of on-site analytics (like comScore, HitWise) and competitive analytics, Chris Knoch (?) immediately jumped in and said it was coming soon and that there are partnerships and discussions occurring between on-site analytics tools and competitive analytics reports. Such a move would follow Hitwise quisition of HitDynamics, a search bid-management analytics company.

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