The perception, then, is that Twitter is useful for what the ad types call “top of the funnel” marketing — building brand awareness and so on — but that it has yet to deliver paying customers in the way that GoogleAdwords can. Today, though, it appears Twitter has responded with a new ad product that will make it easier for brands to assess what they get for their marketing bucks.

The product, called a “Lead Generation Card,” lets marketers post expanded tweets that invite users to sign up for stuff right inside Twitter. The company showed what this might look in a blog post describing the product:

According to a spokesman, the idea reduces friction in the marketing process because Twitter already has users’ email addresses and other contact information — meaning that it takes just one click for a user to connect with the brand.

The move comes as Twitter continues to expand its ad products, including its self-serve platform, ahead of a rumored IPO later this year.

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There are two primary reasons why, the first of which is obvious: Companies are tired of managing applications and infrastructure, so something that optimizes a common task using techniques they don’t know on servers they don’t have to manage is probably compelling. It’s called cloud computing.

The other reason is that the big part of big data really is important if you want to get a really clear picture of what’s happening in any given space. While no single end-user company can (or likely would) address search-engine optimization, for example, by building a massive store comprised of data from hundreds or thousands of companies as well as the entire web, a cloud service dedicated to that specific task can.

From web security to systems management, we’re already seeing how centralized data stores provide SaaS companies a broad view into what’s happening that can then be filtered down to serve each individual customer’s specific situation. BloomReach, a SaaS startup that helps companies optimize web-page content, is another good example of this principle in action.

How do you say, “cotton maxi dress”

Ideally, BloomReach Head of Marketing Joelle Kaufman told me, the company wants to help customers ensure they get found in web searches by making sure they’re not invisible (buried deep down), irrelevant (not saying anything meaningful on their sites) or incompatible (not speaking their consumers’ language). On Tuesday, the company announced a new feature called Continuous Quality Management, which lets customers continuously monitor their pages to ensure they’re still featuring the right products and the right terminology. It’s the latest addition to a seemingly useful service that’s built atop a big data foundation few — if any — of its customers would ever attempt to build themselves.

BloomReach is able to help companies optimize their sites because it’s constantly crawling the web in order to figure out how everyone else is describing their content, laying out their pages and structuring their links. Running on the Amazon Web Services cloud, BloomReach runs more than 1,000 Hadoop jobs a day that process about 5 terabytes of data and a billion data points about users’ site behavior. With the latter, co-founder and CTO Ashutosh Garg explained, the company is trying to figure out who’s visiting sites, what they’re doing, how long they’re spending there and how they’re related in terms of behavior.

“You need to have the right amount of data and from the right places before we can do anything with it,” he said. “… It’s a massive machine learning problem.”

When you consider all the possible ways something could be described or formatted, the scale of the problem becomes more evident. Simple semantic analysis like associating “desk” and “table” is easy, Garg explained, but what if some wants a lightweight camera and you only have its exact weight listed without any indication of how it compares to other options? What if people searching for “smartphones” really mean “Android phones,” but you’re top-loading your results with BlackBerry phones and Windows phones?

Another of Garg’s hypotheticals has to do with consumers’ presentation biases. If, for example, they’re looking at a lot of websites that look the same or focus on the same things (e.g., megapixels for digital cameras), they’ll expect to see the same things from every site.

10 nonillion possibilities: Choose 1.

From a sheer numbers perspective, things get even hairier when you’re trying to determine the relationship between any two pages in order to figure out the best path for links to to take. Garg said this is what computer scientists call an NP-complete problem, which means the amount of time it takes to process the results is exponentially greater than the amount of content you’re analyzing. So, for example, analyzing 40 pages doesn’t take 10 times as long as analyzing 4 pages, but more like 100 times longer.

Actually, BloomReach CEO Raj De Datta gave me another example of this problem when we spoke in early 2012. Here’s how I described it then:

[I]f a company wants to display just 1,000 products across 100 pages, De Datta explained, there are 10-to-the-28th-power (10 octillion) possibilities for how to do that. When it comes time to describe those products, there are 10-to-the-30th-power (10 nonillion) possibilities.

If a website has a million pages, Garg said, “it will take you longer than the life of the universe to solve that problem.”

Where this type of problem arises, BloomReach turns to Monte Carlo simluations, a favorite technique of physicists and Wall Street quants. The method involves running lots of simulations over large data sets in order to determine approximate results in a reasonable time frame. (And if all this isn’t enough computer science and cloud infrastructure for you, I suggest attending our Structure conference in June, which features a who’s who list of speakers, including Google’s Jeff Dean, Facebook’s Jay Parikh and Netflix’s Adrian Cockroft.)

Different queries, different pages

Things get even trickier when you’re trying to change the content of web pages in real time as people are searching for things. This isn’t the best method for organic search, where pages need to stay pretty consistent with the indexed versions, but it can be ideal in situations such as paid search and mobile. There are millions of ways to segment buyers, Garg explained, and how accurately you assess their intent and display your content can make the all the difference. Whether someone is a new or repeat visitor often matters, as does whether someone is price-conscious (e.g., the query included “cheap”) or perhaps searching for a particular brand.

Source: BloomReach

Around the holidays, the company actually realized something interesting: The bounce rate on queries for things like “gifts for dad” or “gifts for co-workers” was pretty high, but so was the conversion rate. The time to conversion was relatively fast, as well. It turns out, Garg explained, that people don’t like to overthink certain gifts too much, so if something is presented in a visually appealing manner and is within their price range, they’ll buy.

But creating these types of models involves more than meets the eye. For all the talk about machine learning — and machines do a majority of the work for BloomReach — people also play a critical role. A person might know better than a machine whether something was likely purchased as gift, Garg explained, or they might spot the offensive content on the T-shirt the machine decided was ideal.

“Humans are really good at creativity, thinking through stuff,” he said.

Smart humans are also good at knowing when they’re overmatched, which is why SaaS is so valuable in the big data era. CMOs could try doing what BloomReach or similar companies such as DataPop are doing, or they could pay someone to do it much better. Guess which route the smart ones will take.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Andrea Danti.

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From what few details Samsung has released about the tests, the feat sounds impressive, and its adaptive array transceiver technology could very well make it into the future networks we’ll one day call 5G. But for Samsung to call its technology 5G today is very disingenuous. Quite frankly a huge global vendor vendor and researcher like Samsung should know better than to play so fast and loose with media and technology perceptions. Samsung is grubbing for headlines, and it appears to have succeeded. A search of Google News for “Samsung” and “5G” yielded 97 separate stories.

The fact is, 5G only exists as barest concept today. Groups like METIS have just started investigating the technologies and network architectures that will comprise 5G networks a decade down the road. There is certainly no standards-based definition of 5G, and anyone who claims other is frankly making crap up.

Yet we’ve been witnessing a growing number of companies and tech media outlets start tossing the term 5G about, just as we saw the industry warp the definition of 4G years ago and are seeing carriers abuse the term LTE-Advanced today. Samsung certainly isn’t the first or worst offender. Broadcom attached the term 5G to its 802.11ac Wi-Fi gear — which isn’t even a mobile cellular technology – over a year ago. But Samsung and the rest of the industry aren’t doing anyone any favors by adding to the confusion.

That said, Samsung appears to have done something impressive in these tests. Packing 1 Gbps into a millimeter-wave transmission (A minor technical point: Samsung calls it millimeter, but the 28 GHz Ka-band frequencies it uses straddles the millimeter and microwave bands) is nothing new. Backhaul specialists for years have been cramming loads of capacity into broad swathes of high-frequency spectrum. The problem is those frequencies have been useless for mobile communications because they have no range. Shorter wavelengths can’t propagate at the power levels used for cellular transmission.

Samsung, however, seems to have solved that problem by using a boatload of antennas – 64 to be exact. It’s the same principle behind the MIMO antennas used in our Wi-Fi routers and LTE phones: if instead of a single high-powered transmission, you send several low-power transmissions that reinforce one another, your signal will propagate farther. Samsung claims that by using this technique it’s produced a link in the 28 GHz band that can travel 2 km and deliver a connection speed of just over 1 Gbps.

If Samsung and the mobile industry can commercialize this technology for cellular, it could open up whole new hunks of spectrum for wide area network use. There are plenty of obstacles to making such technology viable, not the least of which is shoving 64 antennas into a mobile phone, but it’s a start.

So kudos to Samsung for pushing the bounds of wireless technology, but shame on Samsung for conflating that accomplishment with its ridiculous pretensions to 5G. “Adaptive array transceiver” may not have the same ring on a press release as “5G”, but at least it’s honest.

Pinocchio image courtesy of Shutterstock user neven

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The Lightbank and Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup on Thursday revealed it is expanding its scope from small and medium-sized business to large enterprises. The company said it’s currently working with 40 national chains, which have installed its loyalty card scanning system in 500 locations. Belly said those chains collectively represent 40,000 restaurants and stores nationwide, though it didn’t reveal the names of the names of specific companies.

But a quick glance on Belly’s merchant map in Chicago reveals plenty of big names: McDonalds, Chick-fil-A, 7-Eleven and Domino’s Pizza among them. For instance, McDonalds is offering up rewards like a free regular fries or free cookie after accruing a specified number of Belly loyalty points.

Belly’s system is pretty simple. Belly members either order a universal loyalty card with a QR code or download the Belly app to their smartphone, which displays the QR code on screen. All merchants have an iPad set up at the register or other convenient location, and customers scan their card or app into the tablet to accrue points for every visit. Get enough points and you can pick prizes. Those can come in the form of free goods, discounts or sometimes more off-the-wall rewards, such as a personal serenade from the store’s owner.

Belly has attracted interest from businesses nationwide, but its hometown of Chicago remains its biggest market with more than a thousand locations using the Belly system. As a Chicagoan, I’ve seen Belly pop up everywhere. My wife and I use it to get free booze at our local liquor store, and we’re saving up our points so we can get a free cooking lesson from the chef of our favorite local restaurant Bistro Dre.

While I love the idea of unique tailored rewards programs for local businesses, it’s easy to see the appeal for Belly to go after the national chains. Chicago has many e-commerce companies that were founded on the principle of targeting small, local merchants, but they’ve been shifting their focus to the national retailers and brands.

For instance, fellow Lightbank startup Boomerang has abandoned its original local-business focus and to turn its peer-to-peer gifting service into a viral marketing platform for big brands like Ghirardelli and Starbucks. Even suffering e-commerce giant Groupon(grpn) (see disclosure) has strayed from its local business focus to offer an increasing number of daily deals for national chains.

Disclosure: The author’s spouse is employed by Groupon.

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It’s not my intention here to to attack my peers, but I think it’s necessary to point out we’re descending a slippery slope if we start tossing around the term 5G loosely. 5G doesn’t exist except as the barest concept. It hasn’t been defined by any standards body. The mobile industry only recently began addressing what constitutes 5G, assigning its biggest brains to investigate the technologies that might make up 5G networks in the future.

I understand the frustration of my fellow tech bloggers. Presented with a bunch of byzantine acronyms, how do you explain to the average reader the differences between an HSPA network and HSPA+ network, or between an LTE and an LTE-Advanced network, in a single sentence? When dealing in headlines of limited length and Twitter posts of 140 characters, it’s easy to fall into the comfortable trap of using terms like 4G and 5G to explain the differences in technologies (I’m guilty of falling into that same trap as well).

But I think we owe it to our readers to spell out those nuances. Otherwise we’re not truly explaining mobile technology. Instead, we’re just repeating the marketing messages of carriers and vendors that have every interest in exaggerating the capabilities of their networks.

To my knowledge, T-Mobile isn’t publicly labeling its forthcoming network as 5G, but the operator has a reputation for this kind of technology inflation. In 2010, T-Mobile relabeled its HSPA+ service as 4G out of the blue. I had some sympathy for T-Mobile at the time, because it was presented with a quandary: Sprint had long used the term 4G to describe its WiMAX network, but T-Mobile’s ostensible 3G network was routinely beating Sprint in raw speed tests.

Instead of trying to explain the differences to its customers – which admittedly would have been quite difficult — T-Mobile took the easy way out and simply claimed 4G as its own. Of course, that led AT&T to do the same for its even slower 14.4 Mbps HSPA+ network. Eventually, the standards body responsible for defining the various ‘G’s, the International Telecommunication Union, caved to industry pressure and retroactively defined 4G as pretty much whatever carriers wanted it be.

4G became a meaningless term, and we tech journalists reinforced its meaninglessness by swallowing the terminology carriers fed us. If carriers get their hooks into the acronym 5G, you can bet the exact same thing will happen. Once one carrier succumbs, others will race to redefine their perfectly serviceable 4G networks as 5G networks. An the next operator to gain the slightest technical edge will start bandying about the term 6G.

I’m not dissing T-Mobile’s technical accomplishments. As I’ve written before, T-Mobile’s new LTE network, by virtue of its newness, has definite advantages over other carriers’ networks. T-Mobile will be able to upgrade to new LTE-Advanced technologies faster and cheaper than its competitors. But T-Mobile certainly doesn’t have an LTE-Advanced network today, it won’t have one in the near future and it will be years before it can legitimately make the claim to owning one. LTE-Advanced is an incremental technology, and many of its key techniques aren’t even commercially available to carriers yet.

In my opinion, carriers are already abusing the term LTE-Advanced. They haven’t started compounding that abuse by advertising their current or forthcoming LTE networks as 5G, but it’s only a matter of time. Let’s not help them along by doing their marketing for them.

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Surrounded by people he didn’t know, Brethenoux says he felt closer even than he sometimes does with members of his own family. At one point, he made eye contact with a young woman and both knew exactly what the other was thinking; her boyfriend wasn’t in on the mind meld. “During those two hours,” Brethenoux told me recently, “I had that feeling of belonging that was a little disturbing.”

And, he added, replicating that feeling is exactly what good advertisers should be looking to big data to accomplish. “How can you take that concept and build trust around it?” he asked. The answer to his rhetorical question is that you have to listen completely to what customers are talking about online and figure out their emotional attachments to certain things.

Manufacturing kinship

Only most marketing folks looking at sales data, for example, can’t tell if there’s Star Trek convention going on in within their customer bases; they just see a gathering of people at a convention center. Brethenoux preaches something he calls  the “kin” theory in order to figure out what’s bringing this cluster of people together and, better yet, to figure out how to be the company bringing them all together.

Done successfully, he said, “the attachment to the brand becomes very Apple-like.” The theory is that consumers will hold a special place in their hearts (or at least their subconscious) for brands they associate with the sense of kinship they experienced, and they’ll be more willing to become repeat customers. Some customers might share a sense of kinship around one topic, while others will rally around something completely different, but it’s that sense of belonging to a group that matters in the end.

Erick Brethenoux

When he was working in the insurance industry, Brethenoux explained, the company discovered a group of young men under 25 years old who owned sports cars and were surprisingly low-risk drivers. This, of course, goes against the conventional wisdom that young men in fast cars are about the least-insurable people on the road. It turns out they were all sports-car aficionados who housed their cars in safe places, didn’t drive them in bad weather and made all their repairs themselves (this was good because it meant fewer expensive trips to the garage).

The company reacted by creating a special policy category tailored to avid car collectors, one that Brethenoux said spread like wildfire and helped the company earn its money back about tenfold. And although, admittedly, the insurance company just cared that these guys took care of their cars, the insured felt like the company really understood their passion.

In the realm of athletic shoes, Brethenoux added, a marketer might look beyond just a shoe’s functionality (i.e., what sport it was designed for) and start looking at what the people who buy it are doing when they’re not wearing shoes. I can’t help but think of number of teenagers sportings Airwalks and Vans in the 1990s, or my yuppie brethren of today sporting barefoot running shoes from REI. The easy conclusion to draw is that we all participate in a certain activity, but the harder part is digging deeper to find out if there are other, more personal interests we might share.

Those ’90s teenagers might be wearing skateboarding shoes, but a love of indie music might be the real tie that binds. My fellow yuppies might all like trail running, but a large number of us might also be into microbrewing and craft beers. It’s capitalizing on this knowledge, Brethenoux said, that really forms a bond between brand and consumer.

Big, social data says a lot

And thanks to all the data people are giving away for free with their web-browsing behavior, as well as on social media, forums, user reviews and other places, brands can drill down pretty deeply, Brethenoux said. The consumer’s voice about who they really are and what they really like is louder than ever.

In the case of Brethenoux’s Star Trek obsession, he said, a marketer might have been able to piece together his affinity for the franchise from other data points. As he explained it, a guy who spends a fortune on Star Trek Lego sets and digital content, who’s a member of the National Space Society but works in software rather than space exploration, and who prefers exploratory video games to first-person shooters, likely feels a strong connection to Star Trek.

Although, he noted, despite all the hype about using analyzing social media data, most companies are still pretty unsophisticated, using it for simplistic and not-too-valuable insights such as overall brand sentiment. “We talk a good game about social data,” he said. “Very few actually leverage it effectively today.”

But hotel and airlines companies, in particular, might want to pay better attention to what’s actually possible. “A little increment in a market that’s so aggressive in terms of competition,” Brethenoux said, “is where a little difference can make the biggest difference.”

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user Magic Madzik.

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“This shift from what I believe to be mass communications to a mass of communicators has created a strong fundamental shift in the way brands are going to be built going forward,” he said. “They’re going to have to figure out how to engage with people instead of advertising at them.”

For Dachis that means direct engagement with people influential in their field through social media channels. Those influencers can then, in turn, amplify their message through the same social media outlets, he said.

Speaking on the same panel as Dachis, Google VP of Partner Business Solutions Bonita Stewart took issue with the idea that older formers digital marketing were ineffective. Contrary to popular belief, Stewart said, some display CPM rates are increasing, and Google’s publisher partners are seeing a lot of success using a combination of traditional advertising and new social marketing tools such as Hangouts.

Check out the rest of our paidContent Live 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

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News of the latest tune-up came on Tuesday as Facebook announced it will let marketers buy “sponsored stories” in a user’s News Feed on the basis of websites that the user has previously visited. Until now, Facebook only let brands buy stories based on a user’s profile — which is created from information the user told Facebook (age, location, “Likes” and so on).

The opportunity to use so-called “retargeting” is likely to be a hit with advertisers who regard ads based on a person’s browsing history to be especially effective and who consider Facebook’s news feed to be prime real estate. One industry executive told AdExchanger that News Feed response rates are 10 to 50 times higher than ads on the right side of the page.

Facebook also said it will be selling the News Feed through its FBX exchange, which is like an automated real-time auction house where advertisers bid to appear on your Facebook page. Until now, the tool was only available for Facebook’s right-hand ads.

Building an ad juggernaut

Opening up the News Feed for retargeting is likely to yield a nice cash boost for Facebook but, in the bigger picture, the move is part of a larger story of the company’s efforts to use different forms of data to build an all-knowing ad juggernaut.

Facebook is also, for instance, combining its own data with offline marketing information to help companies hone in on customers. As the New York Times reported, the clothing company JackThreads matched its database of two million customer emails against Facebook’s own email records — and found that two-thirds of them were on the social network. For Facebook, such opportunities are just the tip of the iceberg; the company is also working to tap into offline data on a large scale by partnering with loyalty card programs that collect drugstores and supermarket information.

All of this means that Facebook’s advertisers will be able to draw on three powerful sources of data (browsing history, offline data and Facebook records) in order to blast ads into one of the prime locations on the web — users’ News Feeds. For Facebook investors, this prospect is especially enticing given that this model can transfer nicely to mobile devices where users are spending more and more of their time. Facebook isn’t allowing marketers to buy mobile ads on its exchange just yet, but it’s a safe bet this will happen soon.

In short, Facebook appears well on its way to create a marketers’ paradise and a torrent of ad revenues. But there are still two factors that could scuttle these plans. The first is the familiar spectre of increased privacy regulation – but that is a threat Facebook and others like Google  have so far swatted away successfully. Instead, the larger peril may be the prospect of too much advertising undermining Facebook’s user experience and its vaunted design. As this all-ads screenshot from today shows, Facebook still has a ways to go in cleaning up an ad experience that too often remains irrelevant and ugly:

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As The Onion so perfectly noted, SXSW is a haven for marketers and advertisers looking to make more people aware of their companies and products. But a tent and a sign doesn’t exactly cut it here (sorry, Samsung Galaxy tent.) This is a time for the big guns. And people went all out.

Below are photos of some of the most absurd or bizarre marketing stunts we saw this weekend. Know of one we shouldn’t miss? You can leave a comment or tweet at us if we should check something else out:

TaskRabbit rolled out a rabbit van, and you could see the fur blowing in the pre-thunderstorm breeze.

Checked out the Flickr app? Flickr representatives let you take your photo in the Flickr filter, upload them to the app and then print out.

Glow in the dark drinks at MIT Media Lab’s party.

Hootsuite put together an owl bus and had it rolling through town.

AT&T provided colorful charging lockers for you to hook up your devices.

Highlight also rolled out popsicles, with the co-founders handing out treats for people to photograph and then tag on the app.

Google debuted talking basketball sneakers at SXSW, and set up a small basketball court and playground for participants.

This dude told me he wasn’t marketing anything but apparently does infomercials all the time in his question mark suits. My skepticism really shines through here.

The ride-sharing company Lyft broke out a different kind of transportation in Austin this weekend: piggyback rides. The company’s representatives donned the well-known mustaches to give people rides around town.

The location-centric app Highlight put Highlight t-shirts on some adorable dogs in Austin this weekend to promote the company. (And gather up dog fans.)

Livefyre rented out a firetruck, really amping up the crazy car genre.

A pedi-cab driver dons a panda suit to give rides around Austin. Companies like Uber were giving rides all through the weekend as a promotion.

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