Despite its recent management shakedown, Yahoo takes advertising and behavioral targeting up a level today. Dubbed SmartAds, these creative deliver on a very old promise of the web: deliver the right product, to the right person, at the right time. The idea is to bring targeting into the ad itself as opposed to merely using demographics, geographics or any behavioral target as a parameter for serving the ad.

Essentially, this means that Yahoo! can, based on the info it has on me, serve me an ad that only I will see. Mass customization in action.

This is not new.

Direct Marketers have tried to make advertising personalized and as relevant as possible for years. Remember the Reason magazine covers with a photo of your house on it, warning that "they know where you are?".

In my early days as an online advertising professional, back in 99, I was sending out email newsletters that would promote, say, a travel offer. It was a time where we had a database of over 1 MM members. We had their first and last name, their wife's, kids, their zipcodes etc...The mailing would be dead simple: target the chicago area in February (rainy, cold, miserable) with a personalized message. The subject line would read:

Dear <insert first name>, take <insert wife's first name> and the kids to sunny Orlando?

The open rate, response rate and conversion we had were through the roof. And that was in 99. So yes, personalized advertising works. But what next?

We are reaching a point where scale is no longer an issue. Google, Yahoo! and all the big players have the ability to customize ads to death, for millions of users, in real time. It is a milestone. This widespread use of the technique means that users will feel empowered, as in - wow this is cool and will gradually overcome their fear of lack of privacy etc... Having ads calling you by name will almost become routine.

But at some point, users (you and I) will realize that the information used to target them so precisely is actually theirs. It's their attention data, behaviors, demographics, clickstream etc...and this will open the floor to new business models I have blogged about here previously: models that involve the user as a partner. Models that evolve from a publisher/ad serving centric model to a user centric model. Models that tell users: here's your cut.

Given that Google is commited to data interoperability (as in: Google lets you take your data to go to a competitor - see this Eric Schmidt interview, scroll way down), I would not be surprised if these models were appearing within the next 18 months. Watch this space.

Great post by Adam Ostrow detailing how Google owns his personomy: his contacts, what he reads, who reads him, his schedule and a whole lot more. The real question to me is: can Google, and others, continue to generate massive amounts of revenue without sharing it with us, the users? I say no. If Google does not do it, somebody will. That would be a company i'd love to start.

I have been busy doing some evangelizing outside of the World Bank recently and it has been a great experience. On March 29, John Bell (from Ogilvy PR) and I spoke at the Web Managers Roundtable, a group of web execs in the DC area. The topic was "Creating a complete social media strategy" and both John and I had great fun presenting. John has a very flattering account of the event here. What's interesting about John is that he truly gets it. He and his team are busy developing models, methodologies for rolling out, measuring and pushing social media in its truest sense: people communicating with other people. I have interacted with many other PR professionals who see social media as just another way of shoving messages, of faking authenticity etc...We have seen what happened when they get caught...John and I are taking the stage again towards the end of may, on another session focusing on measuring social media. I will be talking about the buzzmonitor and he will lead us through the fairly advanced methodology he has developed for Ogilvy. More on that later.

Anyway, yesterday, I delivered one of the two keynote addresses at the Government's web managers university. The main topic of the workshop was "Focusing on top taks to improve services to citizens". Like many large organizations, the US government is facing several challenges on the web: disjointed look and feel, turf issues, duplication of content and services , heavy technology, low digital literacy etc...

Alex Langshur, from Public Insite opened the workshop with a very compelling presentation on how to use metrics to understand user tasks, align your supply (i.e. your content) and your business (mission) and remove politics from the web management process.

My spiel focused on trying to explain what social media is, why it matters and how can large organizations start embracing it. The two main challenges are technology - i spoke about open data, apis, web services, the need to integrate various sources - and culture - we are talking about organizations who still largely perceive the web as a large repository of content and not as a strategic communications tool. I emphasized that social media is organic (not to say bottom up) and that the natural champions in an organization should be encouraged to take the lead and evangelize. During the Q&A session, someone made a very telling comment: she created a facebook account just to see how student were coping with the Virginia Tech massacre and this led her to browsing around, finding a page about her organization  etc.. etc....This curiosity, I said, is how social media will happen in government. The session was videotaped, i will put a link to it when available. If you attended the session and have some feedback, please leave a comment.

Two related pieces caught my eye on techmeme yesterday. One by Mike at techdirt wondering why people are such jerks online and the other by Vint Cerf, the resident evangelist at google.

Whereas Mike believes that the lack of visual cues encourage people to let loose and act like trolls, Cerf argues that the web is merely a reflection of society and that no technology can fix it. He says:

If you stand in front of a mirror and you don't like what you see, it does not help to fix the mirror.

Boy do I agree with this. It reminded me of the blogstorm Mena Trott faced a couple of years ago when, in a keynote asking for bloggers to be more civil to each others, she ended up calling a participant an asshole! Sweet Irony huh? (read the insulted account )

The medium is not the point. Bloggers, surfers, economists...it's just people. There are good people, bad people, smart and dumb people. People full of love and others full of hate.

Ultimately, it will come down to this: We are increasingly empowered as commercial, social and politic beings but, as spiderman would say, with great power comes great responsibility. The web, by shifting the power to us is also shifting the responsibilities. Are we up for it or do we just want the good part?

In 10, 15, 100 years from now when all is known and connected, what will the mirror reflect?

A responsible, ethical society who cares about the future or a cutthroat "every man for himself" jungle? It depends whether you believe that men are good by nature or not. What do you think?

Woke up this morning to find that BoingBoing is reblogging a post from Bruce Sterling at Wired about personomies. My traffic is the highest it has ever been!

I also find that someone created a personomy page in wikipedia and that several other blogs are mentioning the concept.

Edgeio, the service created by Michael Arrington of techcrunch and others sent me a password to check it out. I did and i like the concept.

Basically, Edgeio allows bloggers who assign a tag to a blog post ("listing" is one of them) to have this post published one edgeio, along with potentially many others, thereby creating an ubber marketplace that aggregates, organizes and re-publish gazillions of listings from all around the web. 

I very much like the idea of writing my listing on my blog, without having to register or create an account and let technology find me a buyer, web-wide. This is directly in line with the concept of personomies in the sense that it enables me to find a buyer. Not e-bay or craigslist. Like Jarvis says, this model could be adopted by other services like google and yahoo answers, dating services, movie reviews.

With internet searches playing an increasingly important role in murder trials, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation calling for a boycott of Google's desktop, with cellular phone data being available online, with Yahoo! helping out censors and dictators jail dissidents... privacy and online identity have never been such a hot issue.

I am getting really amused by the tone of the Google blog. I blogged about this recently when the froogle announcement came out and they have done it again today.

If you read the gmail / gtalk announcement, it follows the same tone as the other product announcements: " I am an engineer, someone came and said: dude, why dont we merge gmail and gtalk? I said right on! so we worked real hard and stuff and here it is. Cool huh?"

Please. stop. the. BS.

The Google Personalized search history feature is where it all comes together. After recently adding news searches (and news items clicked), well, it's froogle's turn!

Rejoice comparison shoppers who have a short term memory problem! 

The Google official blog says, in the always playful tone of the product manager that "just thought it would be a cool feature"
But one thing Froogle couldn't fix was my lack of a short term memory. That's one reason we recently integrated Froogle with Personalized Search. Now you can view and manage your history of Froogle searches and the products you've looked at, just as you already can do with Web Search, Image Search, and News.

When I was studying law on the french riviera (sounds weird huh?)...I became really interested in one particular concept in commercial law: Affectio Societatis. After a bit of research to find the english equivalent, I found this document (ctrl+f' it) that describes it as the "spirit of cooperation". It goes:
The combining of contributions and the sharing of profits are not always enough to distinguish a contract of partnership from other juridical acts, such as association and indivision. The courts and legal authors have therefore added an indispensable subjective criterion: the intention to be involved in a partnership or affectio societatis, which is enshrined in the new Civil Code by the expression «spirit of cooperation».