- Posts tagged instant messaging
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On the Virtual Teeter Totter
Report: IM Underused as Ad Medium
Maybe I am still a bit skewed from my last role, but if aren't advertising on IM, you are missing out on a great opportunity.
JupiterResearch just pubilished a report showing that only about 7% of advertisers are advertising in IM. After an 18 month stint of being the person who was responsible for the advertising on Yahoo Messenger, I agree with this number, but still belive that so many organizations are missing out on one of the best ways to get users to spend a significant amount of time interacting with your brand.
If I recall correctly, the numbers were just nuts. Our typical IMV had about a 15% click thru rate. No that isn't a typo. That is a 15% CTR. The average user also spent about 20 minutes over a 90-day period interacting with the environment. An advertisers would need to spend 10x+ in order to get that type of result from a banner campaign.
As the article points out, IM isn't just for teens anymore. In fact, some of our best performing advertisers were CPG and Autos companies. If you scroll throug the list of IMV's on Yahoo Messenger today, you will see ads, that users opt in to, for food, cocktails, movies, dog food & cars. All of which are being used by millions of people a day.
In the end, if you are going to be measured on the ROI of your ad campaign, you can't do better then IM.
A Long Answer to JJ's Short Question
I have had Vonage for about 2 years now and still love it as much today as I did when I got it. What isn't to love? The quality is incredible and you can't beat the cost.
So JJ recently asked, of my last post: If you already have Vonage (and you do), why do you need this [Yahoo Messenger w/Voice]?
Good question. In the house, unless I am calling Europe or Asia, I don't really need it. Even then, I have a $0.02 per minute calling card, though I can usually never find it and if I do, it is expired. Using Y! Messenger w/Voice is just a whole lot easier to make these calls.
Ultimately, we might use it to replace Vonage as it is about 1/2 the price of Vonage, however, today for the most part, you are tied to your PC. Yesterday, we announced a partnership with VTech that they have built a cordless phone that integrates into Yahoo Messenger. I've used it around the office and it is very slick, however, the base of the phone does need to be tied to a USB port on a PC that is turned on. Until I can plug said phone directly into my router, I am sticking with Vonage.
The good news for Yahoo is that a.) not too many people in the US have Vonage or another IP service yet. I would suspect, just based on the limited number of commericals that I see, is that most of America is still paying for their land line phone service by the minute. The idea of making cheap phone calls via the PC is somewhat foregin to them. Many, many, many more people already have Y! Messenger and now have access to this and b.) living here, we forget these things, but most people are just figuring out the whole IM thing. Skype and VOIP is something very foregin to the average joe.
As an employee and a user, I am very excited about the launch of Messenger with Voice. VOIP is clearly the future and the next challenge is going to be to integrate into a mobile phone. We played around with this a bit at Starfish many years ago. We had a couple of cool prototypes that would automagically switch from VOIP to GSM. The general idea of being tied to a device that can't go anywhere I go is so 1999. However, if rates globally can be comparable to our local rates for mobile, we may not have to move any further with PC client based VOIP.
New Yahoo! Messenger with Voice - Finally!!! Go call someone
I've been holding my tounge about the new Yahoo! Messenger since I got the alpha version back in November. Fortunately for me we launched alpha the week before Holly went to Europe. I was using Skype prior to her leaving, but switched over to try out Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. The alpha version, the pre-alpha version, even, was incredible. This service sounds so good, it is amazing. Bye bye Skype for the Schnaars family.
Yahoo! Messenger with Voice beta launched tonight and it is still too early to call anyone in Europe and I don't have any reason to call Asia as all my friends are back in the US right now. I am very excited to try it out tomorrow, though. If the alpha is any indication as to how good this is, it is going to be revolutionary.
Aside from the totally rockin voice codec that is part of the new Messenger, there are some other pretty slick features that may have been overlooked in the last version. The most noticable is the drag and drop photo and file sharing. If, like me, you do a lot of file transfers, you will find this to be a much faster and friendlier experience.
It seems like there are search windows everywhere in the new client. An effort to make search more prevelant within all of our products.
Hint: If you want to search within the message window, you can use the 's:' command. For example: 's:red shoes' returns the results of red shoes to both users. A word of caution, if you are trying to send a link from a shared drive 'S', as in s://documents... our service will search for whatever the drive is called. It has caused some headaches in the past for a few users.Like the old version, there is a Vicky Pollard audible. No but, yeah, but no, but yeah, but I think that she is hysterical. Graeme is working on a couple of really cool things including press to call HTML buttons (like the presence icons we have now) and some better tabs. More on that later. Finally, there is the ad unit. I fought tooth and nail to get that thing put in there and, beautifully, 2 weeks after I leave the team, this gets approved. I am glad that it is there, but it is a bitter sweet victory for me. I don't think that it is nearly as intrusive as the AIM ad unit, but it will also impact users as we have become accustomed to Yahoo Messenger not having an ad unit in the client. The new version of Messenger is incredible even for a beta (and what isn't beta in this Web 2.0 world). Go download here and see for yourself. Call me.
