For those of us following Google’s foray into online finance, it was always kinda strange that Google, the contextual search behemoth, never had any ads on its fledgling financial site, Google Finance.
Until last week.
Yes, folks, last week included that fateful moment when Google schlocked up their pretty clean interface to deliver more ads about investing in tropical hardwood floors or purchasing a financial newsletter “guaranteed to triple my money”.
So, ads are now showing up on the hompage to the right of the market charts and on under the news section on company pages like this one.
I thought this link was interesting. Google says, “Google Finance provides up-to-date financial information, news, blog posts, and access to lively discussions; these services are entirely separate from the ads on our site. A company’s status as an advertiser with Google does not affect the way data and information about that company are displayed on Google Finance.”
As submitted by NewRulesofInvesting:
This is a side to side comparison of two of the best online financial sites: Yahoo Finance and Google Finance. Yahoo is still the largest and most popular finance site by far but Google is serious about finance. Let’s see how the two financial portals stack up against each other.
Speed
Google Finance: Typical fast-loading Google pages. Google’s site is broad and doesn’t go deep. Pages for individual stocks are only 1 page deep (Google links out for things like option chains, major holder, etc.)
Yahoo Finance: Yahoo Finance is fast. As opposed to Google, Yahoo content resides primarily on Yahoo pages and Yahoo is responsible for page load speed throughout the site. This can fluctuate as any large website can throughout the day.
Charting
Google Finance: Google primarily uses a simple javascript-loaded chart without any bling. It loads fast and allows easy to manipulate x-axis (time period). When you’re figuring out what a particular stocks has done over the past 17 days, the chart also calculates the return for a given time frame beyond the standard 1-day, 5-day, 3 month, etc. time period. Google also plots news events onto their charts which is kind of cool (not necessarily tradeable).
Yahoo Finance: Yahoo Finance charts are much more robust. Advanced charts have incorporated a similar charting function like Google’s and provides an overlay of numerous technical indicators (MACD, RSI). Because these charts are so powerful, they also tend to be bulky and seize up.
Real Time Quotes
Google Finance: Google provides real time quotes both during market hours and pre- and post- market. Google’s quotes on market indices tend to skew erratically during the transition to an open market as well as trails when the market makes large moves to the upside or downside.
Yahoo Finance: Yahoo also provides real time quotes both during market hours and off. Yahoo’s premarket quotes are not as reliable as Google’s. Yahoo occasionally doesn’t have a price premarket for a wide array of stocks. Yahoo has a scrolling ticker as well for stocks that is personalized to the behavior of the user.
Breadth
Google Finance: Google gives basic info all on one page. Anything more a user needs to link off. News, financial info, blogs all included. Very shallow, quick and dirty use. Google does a good job bringing in blog content but lacks good, standardized PR content, still necessary in the research process.
Yahoo Finance: Yahoo provides an entire research environment. All the content and data is supplied by Yahoo. From major holders to options chains to blogs and PR, Yahoo is a virtual poor man’s Bloomberg.
Innovation
Google Finance: Google allows users to download data, making the site more portable than we’ve traditionally seen. Google portrays the data environment well around a stock. Beyond that, nothing particularly innovative about what Google’s done so far.
Yahoo Finance: Yahoo Finance is the 800lb gorilla and essentially helped to democratize financial information. Yahoo has done a good job bringing in financial blogs in a controlled environment, using SeekingAlpha to help filter. Charts are very powerful. Not too much current innovation going on either on the surface.
Sales 2.0 technologies
Web 2.0 technologies, like our new website, blogs, wikis, tagging, etc. are more than just some AJAX and cool, simple apps. The better technology and platforms have begun to take shape and are currently powering Sales 2.0 and making people real money. I’m currently employing some of these technologies and platforms to sell my business: investment research and management.
First and foremost, Sales 2.0 has begun to redefine the traditional sales funnel. Because web technologies are involved, a certain level of new automation has crept into the sales process. For me and others competing in today’s marketplace,
Sales 2.0 has done a couple of things:
- Increase the circumference of the funnel
- shorten cycle times in terms of how long it takes to get through the funnel
- Increase conversions
Increasing the Circumference of the Funnel
What I mean by this is that given Web 2.0 technologies, I’m finding that I’m able to get a dramatically greater reach with my marketing efforts, effectively creating wider and more frequent ways to connect with potential clients. From there, given Sales 2.0 tech and platforms, I’m able to push more people through a wider funnel.
casting a wide-r net: Web 2.0 technologies are effectively being used by sales organizations to build brand over a wider reach. Companies like mine are using these technologies to build huge marketing machines in a much softer, gentler, and more precise way: via content. Oodles of it. I work in the financial advisory field and am using my blog to effectively reach folks around the world who are interested in what I have to say. Because my firm is small, I have a relatively shallow reach. I work with blog aggregation firms like SeekingAlpha to ramp up my exposure. SeekingAlpha, due to its content base of hundreds of blogs, has negotiated distribution deals with Yahoo Finance and E*Trade, deals I could never have negotiated on my own. Now, my content shows us exactly in front of the types of people who are my potential clients.
I’m using metrics tools like Google’s plug-and-play Analytics to track my efforts and in step, I add more marketing/content gas to those sites providing the best feeders to my core business. Enabling my content with RSS allows me to get my content out there. Sites like RSS hosting/tracking firm, Feedburner, allow me to position my content to become portabilized and allow users to read my content wherever they may be. As I’m building a Sales 2.0 organization, it’s more important for me to reach a larger audience as this point than it is to drive direct traffic to my own blog.
reputation building or becoming an expert: these technologies provide companies and individuals to build their own brands in increasingly narrow niches. I run my blog on the WordPress platform. WordPress has developed an app so that my blog posts also show up on Facebook. Not only does this further my reach beyond my blog and any aggregators to whom I’m submitting content, it also gets my content onto Facebook. My existence on Facebook is centered around groups and people who overlap my sphere of influence, specifically investing in Israeli technology companies. By putting this content directly into their news feeds, I’m continuing to build my reputation as an expert in public market investing in Israeli companies.
I’ve just begun to use Twitter to microblog some of my market commentary during the day. As more and more mainstream users adopt twitter-like apps, I am sure that this will compete for other media as a way to build reputation and distribute my expert opinion.
I’m using sites like Vestopia and Stockpickr to increase sales. Both sites allow me to create model portfolios and submit them to a community of like-minded investors. Vestopia tracks real trades I make in my investment account while Stockpickr tracks play money, but both allow me to put my best ideas forward to potential clients. Another step in building my repuation as an expert in my niche.
Previously, as head of business development and sales at SeekingAlpha, LinkedIn was an invaluable tool for opening up deals and closing them. Creating a well-thought out profile was essential when I used the LinkedIn messaging system to target potential partners for content syndication deals. I was able not only to target the appropriate person for the deal, but they were much more likely to respond from an internal LinkedIn message than they were to a cold email or phone call. Why? Because they could see and filter out why I was approaching them. By the time we connected, the relationship was already in context. I closed deals with Dow Jones, Reuters and Etrade from approaches made via LinkedIn. Additionally, I participate in LinkedIn’s Answers to answer questions posted by my network to show that I know what I’m talking about in my field.
Salesforce.com and other CRM solutions like 37 Signals’ Highrise and Zoho are building more than rudimentary APIs for me to hook in other office/business critical solutions that I’m using, like Google AdWords. I’m using Meetup to plan, manage, and communicate with numerous seminars that I’m holding as a way to garner new business.
All these things are providing mechanisms for me to connect with as many warm leads as possible and bring them into a process that I can begin to close a proportion of them.
one-to-one sales: Sales 2.0 technologies essentially allow one to widen the mouth of the traditional sales funnel by creating a cheap and wide-reaching distribution network and given the ability to build brand/reputation along very narrow borders, companies are able to cast their message to the appropriate audience in a way that was never possible previously. The result is that I’m consistently marketing to my existing and future customers.
Sales 2.0 is all about relationship marketing. My future clients are reading my content on my blog, on SeekingAlpha and on Yahoo Finance. The next step in the process is to make the relationship a little more intimate by soliciting an email address. I accomplish this by using a email services company, like Contstant Contact or StreamSend. These service providers provide hosted email services including easy-to-use auto responders. So, when a prospect comes to my website after I’ve caught their attention on SeekingAlpha, I offer a quick, easy — and free — giveaway. A whitepaper. The user inserts his email address in the javascript email capture box I’ve embedded on my website and they’ve now entered my sales cycle. They get personalized emails from me with important information regarding markets, picks, etc. All these emails have a call to action to buy my product. I continue to convert my blog traffic to paying subs via this method — using all Web 2.0 type tools.
making customers into distributors: Sales 2.0, given its integration into the tangle of relationships that is Web 2.0, has some interesting outcomes. Satisfied customers actually become value-added distributors for my business. The more users I have tracking my portfolios on Vestopia or Stockpickr (see above), the more legs my sales and marketing efforts have. In turn, users who track or follow my followers are also exposed to my content. In turn, what’s occurred, is that my customers or soon-to-be customers reinforce my positioning as an expert in my field and in turn, act as quasi-distributors lending approbation to my efforts.
Shorten Cycle Time
Automation
I spend most of my time creating content and allow the hooks into various Sales 2.0 platforms to work their magic. Every article I write shows up on my Facebook profile because I’ve integrated Wordpress and
Facebook (see above). My email auto-responders treat every new trial subscription to my research the same way. A series of personalized, automated messages go out, creating a conversion channel for my readers. RSS feeds are pushed out automatically via Feedburner. Feedburner even has an automated RSS-to-email plugin that allows me to offer email subs to my web content and continue the sales conversation that way as well.
Something worth noting is that many of these apps have taken software and turned it into a hosted, web service. This means I just pay for usage, implementation is really simple, and the service company takes care of updating the service, not me.
Increase Conversions
The Sales 2.0 funnel is inherently more stickier than its predecessors. Potential clients enter my wide-mouth funnel and have access to my research, my blog, my real-time market commentary. It’s not hit or miss advertising. Instead, potential clients who don’t buy right away continue to hear, see, and feel my messages. They stay connected to me longer and instead of just slipping through the funnel, they hang out for a while. While cycle times are sped up, more conversions actually take place.
Integrating Sales 2.0 apps into existing apps
I think we’re still in the early stages of using Sales 2.0 apps and platforms and just beginning to integrate them into existing business critical platforms that we use to conduct business.
In the chart to the right, I’ve tried to describe the process of integrating these services. As they become
more integrated, not only are sales activities more and more automated, the ability to market directly 1-to-1 becomes greater as well.
1st Stage: Sales 2.0 in the Sales Process
We and many like us are currently using Sales 2.0 platforms and most of the time, these are standalone activities. Meaning, while I blog, use email services firms, facebook, twitter, most of these activities are accomplished individually. I blog on Wordpress, send email via StreamSend, and use Facebook and Meetup to get the word out there about my services using content as the marketing message.
The point is that while some of the apps are integrated in a minimal sense (the wordpress blog app allows me to blog on Wordpress and it shows up on Facebook) , essentially all these activities are distinct from one another.
2nd Stage: Integrating into other sales apps
As APIs get better and easier to work with for small businesses, more and more of these Sales 2.0 technologies mentioned above will get integrated in existing workforce management apps. By this I mean that the division between *new* sales apps (salesforce, email services, meetup) and *old* sales apps (ACT, Outlook, Excel) gets blurred.
3rd Stage: Integration with Company-wide apps
After integration between old and new sales apps takes place, the next step in the Sales 2.0 movement is to integrate these apps into mission-critical business apps like Office, Outlook, Finance/Payroll etc. We currently use ACT as our contact manager, Outlook as an email handler, and an in-house financial app/process. As our software gets better and more tightly integrated. APIs and platform-agnostic hosted services will eventually allow me to tie everything together and manage sales together with all the other functions
Summing Up
Sales 2.0 is not merely Sales 1.0 with some cheap and easy software. It’s a game changer. Given cheap and easy to deploy tools, I use content to market myself to millions of potential clients, effectively enlarging the circumference of the traditional sales funnel. Sales 2.0 then allows me to cycle through more leads in shorter times and convert more than I would through traditional, expensive methodologies.
As we wrote about President Bush’s address yesterday, IOI is spending two days at the President of Israel Shimon Peres’s Facing Tomorrow conference.
While yesterday’s events centered around political issues, today’s festivities focused more on the business environment in Israel. Google (GOOG) founder, Sergey Brin kicked off a panel focused on the future of the Internet and new media. In a somewhat disappointing and disjointed rambling, Brin said that he was amazed at the corporate growth he’s seen in Israel in just a few years since his last trip. The search giant has two operating research centers in Haifa and Tel Aviv. (see our coverage of what’s going on here in Israel for Google).
Brin said that the evolution in both web and cellular technology augers for a future in which we’re even more connected, that we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg so far. This evolution of technology, according to Brin, is just an extension of the human spirit working toward quality of life improvements.
Next up was Sue Decker, president of Yahoo (YHOO). In an engaging talk, Decker looked at where we’ve come from and where were headed. Her thesis was that the more things change, the more they really stay the same — amidst all the enabling going on, the more consumers just want to simplify and connect to those people who are important to them. She said while 1.3 billion people currently use the Internet monthly, it leaves a lot of growth ahead of us. Technology according to Decker is helping to bring borders down.
Decker quoted some figures:
- Did you know that 12% of recent newlyweds in the US last year met online? I didn’t. That’s an amazing, staggering figure.
- We send 9 trillion emails per year
- Yahoo has 10 billion reviews on Yahoo Music.
As to the future of media, Yahoo’s president said we’re moving from mass media to my media to our media while individual consumers are becoming their own content monarchs. Transparency is becoming more important to publishing agendas. In an interesting aside, Decker said that with 500m users per month, Yahoo is the largest social network although not nearly the most useful. Because of this, Yahoo is focusing on bringing all their disparate properties, content and activities and trying to bring them all together with one button. Yahoo will be focused on 3 things going forward: 1) creating open platforms where consumers define how, when and where they consume content, 2) really personalized content filters, and 3) establishing a stronger linkage between online and offline worlds.
News Corp (NWS) CEO and media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, spoke to the crowd about freedoms. He believes tech destroys obsolete business models. Murdoch really feels that we are on the cusp of a golden age of information with the human element becoming more and more important. He spoke about the importance of building strong human capital, part of his motivation for investing in NDS (NNDS), previously News Data Systems. He said it was started by four guys in a Jerusalem apartment and now NDS employs over 1,000 in Jerusalem along and is the largest R&D center in Jerusalem.
Terry Semel, previous CEO of Yahoo, closed the session. He described the differences in Silicon Valley work culture to the boardrooms of Warner Bros. boardrooms which he resided over during his 20 year career in the media industry. “Facilities of the past” were nowhere to be found in a more equal work environment in the Valley. On his first day at Yahoo, he had no reserved parking space and no private dining room and chef. He cited a famous memo sent in the 1950s by Jack Warner who advised his employees to steer clear from the nascent television guys. 9 months later another memo went out explaining Warner’s desire to be the biggest in TV. Semel praised his ability to see the bigger picture and not fight change. He too thought we were entering the best years for both premium content as well as for user-generate content (UGC).
Disclosure: Author’s fund has no position in any stock mentioned as of 5/14/08 but author and his family own GOOG stock.
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