While the other Republican presidential nominee candidates for 2012 have a real sameness about them, Ron Paul stands out. Whether that is because, as someone noticed on Quora, his supporters seem to like Star Trek, or for other reasons, social media like/interest data from optim.al (and their new SocialPredict data product) clearly highlights some of the differences. Click on the image to expand:

You’ll notice that Ron Paul supporters like not only Star Trek and William Shatner, but the Colbert Report, Christopher Walken and Guinness. And of course let’s not forget our trusty favorite defender-of-liberty Jack Bauer. However, there are other more real “science-y” things in there that people who like Ron Paul also like – Modern Marvels, the Science Channel, evolution and “the Universe”.

By contrast, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich are so close to one another in terms of their audience’s interests and likes that they are almost indistinguishable in the interest graph. Rick Santorum is much closer to them but still a little less same. Zoom in on the chart as it makes for some fascinating reading.

Our team put together some global growth numbers for Facebook over the last 1,001 days, including a micro-view over the last 90 days. The part that stood out was the incredible growth coming from Brazil and India over that period. Here is the % of total growth in Facebook users coming from various countries, ordered by size, over the last 3 months:

Facebook added 39.3 million users over this period, of which:

• Brazil was the biggest growth engine with 7.2 million (18.4% of the total)
• India was the second largest with almost 5 million (13% of the total)

Brazil makes up just 2.9% of the world’s population, but made up over 18% of Facebook’s growth in this period. India has a low Internet penetration compared to its overall size: at over 1.2 billion people it makes up 18.3% of the world’s population, so the growth there is not as impressive as compared to what is going on in Brazil.

I’ve been a very interested follower of adblocking software over the years, and found the announcement by AdBlock Plus that it will let some “acceptable ads” through, intriguing. Now that this is a full-time pursuit for its creator, Wladimir Palant, not to mention another employee [blog post announcement] they are figuring out ways to make this a sustainable enterprise. Here’s an article about the acceptable ads announcement.

I plan to write in more detail about publishers and the state of ad networks, and will make some reference to this particular situation, but it is not surprising to me at all.

Update/Resolution: After I posted the blog entry, we finally heard back from Todd (Tod?) at Gilt City who made sure that within a couple of days I got a refund for the three unused vouchers from Facebook, and they gave me a $100 Gilt City credit to use for whatever. My assistant took the lead on actually resolving all of this, so I gave her the $100 credit of course. It sounded like Gilt didn’t have the best experience with Facebook for reasons like the story below, and are no longer going to be collaborating in this way any more. It also indicates how potentially hazardous it is for a non-customer-service oriented company/publisher like Facebook to be drawn into an area where deep customer service is required. I think this goes for a lot of big Valley companies and is well worth keeping in mind – there’s a reason that advertising can be a nice high-margin business. You don’t usually have to worry about customer service (if and only if you do it the right way of course… and avoid the temptation to get greedy).

—-

One of my first daily deal buying experiences was with Gilt City back in March 2011, with a breakfast offer at a place I’d never tried in Palo Alto which I bought and later redeemed, and was added to their mailing list. In April 2011 I made my second purchase. They were running a promotion for a restaurant (I won’t mention their name since they’re awesome, and also it is one of a chain I should point out) in Palo Alto that I often go to, and naturally the chance to get 50% off something that I would normally buy anyway at full price, while terrible for the merchant, is a great deal for me. There was a limit of two per person, and I bought two “$40 of food for $20″ coupons.

Within the next couple of weeks I used both of them. The friendly staff at the restaurant were using a clipboard and writing down the numbers of the coupons to keep track, I’ll add. In the meantime, Facebook launched their own “deals with friends” initiative. I noticed the same restaurant chain was having a deal as one of the early Facebook Deals, and so I was immediately interested. In this case, the per-person limit was 4 and not 2, so I purchased 4 of these at $20 each for $80 total. I also noticed that Facebook was doing their deals in conjunction with a variety of vendors – in this case it was with the self-same Gilt City that received a small credit on the website as the provider of the deal. This was April 27th, this was the first email I received:

On April 30th, three days later, I received my “vouchers” – for some reason I received 12 emails that were visually identical to this one heralding the arrival of my 4 “deals”.

A couple of weeks later I went to the restaurant later to use the first of my 4 new vouchers, only to find out that in my deal-drunken haste I had failed to realize that despite its similarity to the previous offer it was actually for several of their locations excluding the one in Palo Alto. Ooops – when I presented the voucher at the Palo Alto location, the staff was very nice about it and offered to honor it. I thanked them and used it, and then wanted to follow up with Facebook to ask them to cancel the purchase I’d made in error, and refund my card (much as I like it, I wasn’t going to drive 50 miles to their other location!).

I now had used one of the vouchers and had three left, that I didn’t think it made sense to try to use at that store. On Facebook I found the spot where it had a deal “status” area and saw how I could “dispute” a deal by clicking a button or buttons, which I did. I then received the following terse email from Facebook:

If you visit that help page, the part about refunds reads as follows:

To request a refund or if you need further support, please follow the directions below: 

 
1. From the left column of your home page, click Deals.
2. Select the “Unused Deals” subheading in the left column.
3. Click the “Help” option beneath the deal you have a question about.
4. Select the “Dispute this deal and request a refund” option.
5. Fill out the reason for the refund request and submit.

Can I return a deal?

Refunds are available for unredeemed vouchers for up to 30 days from the date of purchase. If a Deal you’ve purchased becomes unavailable before it can be provided to you, you will receive a credit of the paid price which can be used to purchase future Deals.

Ok, so it looks like I was fine in terms of actually being able to get a credit for the deal. (Regardless, the legality of not refunding someone for deals is uncertain as anyone reading TechCrunch could attest to!) but a bit confused since there wasn’t a lot of information I could get in terms of being able to know if my refund was in process or not. There was very little information available on Facebook, and just a contact form to reach out to the deals team which also didn’t provide a lot of context (see this link). In fact, despite having filled out that form, the above email is the ONLY communication I’ve ever received from Facebook on this matter.

June 1st: Four days later, I sent an email to support@giltcity.com forwarding them the Facebook email, and asking them if they had been able to resolve it yet. I received a reply from “Daniel” saying that “We appreciate hearing from you and are happy to assist with your inquiry.  Unfortunately, as all of your interaction has been with Facebook, we are unaware as to the nature of your inquiry.  Can you please reply to this email with what it is that we can help you with.” I replied providing my email address and that “I got a few deals via them for _________ but it was for the wrong location, I would like a refund and they said they forwarded the information on to you. Let me know what info you need to look up my account and I can assist.”

The same day I got an email back from Jeff, and I was very impressed at first because it seems like they took immediate action:

Hi Rob,

Thank you for contacting Gilt City. We appreciate hearing from you and are happy to assist you with your inquiry.

We are sorry to hear you accidentally purchased the wrong location for__________ . While all Gilt City offers are final sale and nonrefundable, as this was a purchase error, we are happy to make a one time exception and have refunded your purchase in full back to your Amex ending with ____. The refund will show up on your statement within 3-5 business days. Your vouchers have been canceled and you can discard these.

Have a great day!

If we can be of further assistance, please feel free to reply back to this e-mail or give Gilt City Support a call at (877) 280-0541.

Best,

Jeff
Customer Support
Gilt City

Now the fun begins. I look at my credit card statement and notice something strange, and email them back stating that:

I see two refunds so far, there should be three of them (there were four
vouchers, of which I was able to use one … so there should be three
refunds).

And I realize now that even though I gave the context originally that these were Facebook deals, that perhaps they are not able to “see” that I made purchases via Facebook separate from the ones direct through Gilt. This is evidenced in the next email (still on that same day) that comes through:

In looking at your order history we can only confirm 2 vouchers for __________ were purchased under your account attached to ______  email address.  As an exception to our final sale, non refundable policy we have refunded you back to your original form of payment for both of these purchases.  We have no records of the other 2 purchases for _______ and you would need to contact Facebook Support for further assistance.

If these purchases were not made through Facebook please provide an Order ID and we would be happy to further assist you.

Have a great day!

June 2nd: So I looked back in my Facebook account, and saw — nothing. I’d disputed these vouchers, so there was no tracking information in there anymore. The email above didn’t have any unique order ID or identifier in it, nothing of the sort (except the email-from address perhaps?). The emails with the vouchers seemed to be the only things that had any kind of identifying information (and who knows why I got 12 of them?) , but other than that there wasn’t anything in the email itself that seemed like it would help. I wasn’t sure. I was using the same email address in both cases, so I emailed back and optimistically asked the Gilt Support team “The ones in Facebook I no longer have access to in FB because I disputed them … surely you have all this information under my {xxxxxx} email address in the reports you get back from Facebook?” The answer was pretty much more of the same, namely:

We apologize for the confusion regarding Gilt City’s _______ offer.  Please note, per your request we have refunded your two Vouchers purchased through Gilt City back to your Amex ending with ____ as an exception to our final sale, non refundable policy.

Unfortunately, for all purchased made through Facebook we do not have this information under your account.  Because this purchase was made through Facebook only they have access to these vouchers and would need to create this refund for you in their system.  We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

So at this point, presumably I have received two refunds for deals I’ve used and have been very upfront about (and it seems Gilt had no idea that I’d already used these weeks before) and were there to be any way for Facebook to indeed refund me and me to know this, I would have been able to get $120 of free food unsure of who is actually “eating it” at the end of the day. I copied and pasted the link that was in one of the emails that Facebook had sent me to claim the vouchers and pasted it into the support email reply I sent next. This looked something like this: http://www.facebook.com/n/?pages%2Fpromotions%2Fget_voucher.php&claim_item%5B0%5D=99910150222752276789&claim_item%5B1%5D=99910150222752281789&claim_item%5B2%5D=99910150222752286789&claim_item%5B3%5D=99910150222752296789&mid=42675baG7c2c9645G1cf695680Gb4&bcode=agEr3cVREFA&n_m=MY_EMAIL_ADDRESS

Note that it had my email address in it already, so not sure why any of the other codes would help make it any easier to track down for them, but they thought it might be helpful (Billy and Jeff said):

Thank you for providing our team this receipt number which we will pass along to the representatives at Facebook who will handle the actual refund process.

June 14: Nothing here for a couple weeks until I decided to call them (but it was after their office hours which end at 5pm EST), missed them and then sent another email:

June 22nd: I email them “hi guys – did the refunds go through?”, reply comes back: “We are very sorry for the delay. We have been informed that you should receive your Facebook refunds soon.  Please be sure to check your statement with the card used to purchase these vouchers to verify.”

June 23rd: I email in reply to Jeff that “This is not very specific. is there some way I can get an email confirmation when the refunds go through?” instead of sending them emails to check every now and then? Billy and Jeff (seems like they might be the difficult customer-tag-team) replied to me saying:

As all Facebook purchases are refunded through Facebook and not Gilt City, we apologize we cannot provide you a more specific time frame for your refunds. These purchases were made through Facebook and so there is no record of these in your Gilt City account as previously noted in earlier correspondence with Gilt City Customer Support.

We have updated our Customer Support Manager regarding your situation and he will follow up with Facebook on your behalf. Please rest assured you will receive your refunds for the Facebook offers you purchased.

I think perhaps I need to get referred to someone at Facebook about this, instead of waiting for this so I reply “thanks. Who can I follow up with at Facebook to check on these?” At this point it has all become a bit of a curiosity for me. Now just Billy replies “Please note we’ve forwarded your email to our Customer Support Manager here at Gilt City. He will be able to best assist you with the status of your Facebook refunds.”

I then decided to ask my assistant if she’d be willing to help follow up on things, figuring it could just be cleared up with a quick phone call or two that I just didn’t have time to do given the continuous-partial-attention of running a company. She said she’d give it a go and this is where I’ll share her notes that summarize what has happened since. There was another email I’d sent out which didn’t get a reply for a LONG time, namely:

On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 9:33 AM, Rob Leathern wrote:

Hi there – I’m still waiting to understand if I got these refunds (I don’t believe I have). Can you confirm what is going on here?

[no reply received]

Rob wrote on July 24, 2011 to Gilt Support:

Hi Support:

I’m still waiting to hear back from you – can someone please give me an update?
best,
Rob

[reply received, eventually (with my highlighting):]

On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 5:27 AM, Gilt City Support <support@giltcity.com> wrote:

Hello Rob,

Regretfully you will have to follow up with Facebook in regards to any purchases made via their website.  Even tho you purchased one of our products/offers the payment was processed via Facebook, not our processing system, therefore we cannot refund a purchase that does not exist.  I know it’s a bit confusing, however the folks over at Facebook will be glad to help you out!

Byron

Gilt Groupe

Now in the meantime, we’ve been calling them asking for more details on the phone. I of course still get sucked into things on email and replied to the above email asking who at Facebook we’re supposed to be talking to to resolve this, which I’d asked way earlier too without any success. The frustrated reply I give to Byron’s email is:

When you say “Regretfully you will have to follow up with Facebook in regards to any purchases made via their website.” what does that mean. How does one “follow up with Facebook”? Is there a phone number to call? An email address to send to? A ticketing system to submit a ticket for?

It IS a bit confusing, and you’re not helping (yet). Which “folks over at Facebook”, exactly, are going to help us out?

Emily from Gilt City helpfully replies:

Hello Rob,

We apologize for the confusion and the delay.

According to our records, the refunds for the two _______ purchases were applied to your American Express ending with ____ on 06/01/2011.  You should have seen two separate refunds of $20.00 for a total of $40.00.  Typically it takes 3-5 business days for the refunds to be posted on your account, so you should have seen them sometime during the first week in June.

If we can be of further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact Gilt City Customer Support by replying to this e-mail. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Emily
Gilt City Customer Support

At this point it seems pretty clear that Gilt City doesn’t have any kind of ticketing or CRM system at all. But how did we fare on the phone now that I have officially called an end to this follow up experiment? Well here’s the summary of that:

By now we have Spoken with Billy, Tiffany, Byron, Adrian, and Tod the manager. Called ~15 times, spent ~3.5-4 hours calling, explaining the situation, and emailing. We have learned that normal Gilt City customer support representatives do not have access to Facebook Deals records.  Because the 3^rd voucher was ordered through Facebook, they could not access the records/receipt of purchase. This is what caused the delay.   The manager is the only one with access to Facebook data.  Gilt City and Facebook are, in the manager Tod’s words “not partnered in these deal offerings”; according to him, they are “‘helping out’ Facebook customer inquiries”. He did not really expand on this… but it appears that Gilt City serves only as support to the Facebook deals; the point of sale is handled by Facebook only.  Essentially, Gilt City’s only involvement in Facebook deals is customer support. They do not handle any monetary transactions, which is part of the problem: how can you handle customer support for transactions you have no data for?

The rep Byron made it clear that it is a new service with “many ‘wrinkles’ still needing to be worked out”.  It was clear that she and the other representatives were not familiar with the Facebook voucher process and their role was limited.

The last conversation with Tod 8/3 or 8/4: he said he was finally able to pull Facebook data through a receipt #, and stated that Gilt City issued two refunds for the Gilt City vouchers on June 1^st and that a Facebook voucher was issued on May 31^st (the latter of which there is absolutely no record of that we can find, nor can that be confirmed).  He also did not mention that the ‘refunded’ Gilt City vouchers had been used.  He told us to double check the credit card statements and give him a call back with any new developments.  We called back Thursday, Friday, and Monday with no follow up.  Spoke with Adrian on Friday who said she could not access the Facebook data and that she would pass the message along to Tod. Tod also mentioned to dispute the vouchers through Facebook, which we had already done back in May. So they also appear to have no record of Facebook disputes. Why handle customer support for dispute tickets they do not have access to?

Everyone we spoke with was very apologetic and tried to accommodate as best as they could, which unfortunately was not much.  All representatives seemed willing to work with me to resolve the issue, but they couldn’t – how can they resolve the issue when the general consensus amongst them was that they could not find the relevant information and to default to their manager (who also seemed unable to help though).

Received the latest email from Bryon 8/9 (quoted above). Since the 8/9 email from Byron, I have called another half dozen times leaving messages on Tod’s direct line, and twice spoken to GC representatives who said they would pass the message along to Tod.  We emailed him on the 17th, called twice more and still no response.

August 19th: As this has dragged on it has become clear it needed to be shared, so here we go. Maybe now someone who can help us solve the issue will read this.

One of the features I find it ridiculous that is being touted as really new & valuable within the new Google+ service, is the notion of “circles” that allow you to categorize your contacts for selective sharing of stuff. Facebook has had this for a long time.

In fact, Facebook didn’t have this, and Ephraim Luft and Mike Greenfield (formerly a colleague of mine at LinkedIn) built a Facebook app called “Circle of Friends” that let you classify your friends into various “circles” and share messages, and chat with them etc. It got a decent amount of traction (over 6 million installs if I recall correctly, back in the ‘good ol days’ of easy Facebook sharing). Whether Facebook copied their idea or just independently thought of it doesn’t really matter (and who knows?) but Facebook later launched the ability for you to classify your friends when you accept an invitation into a number of groups/buckets. As we know, though, most people are lazy and don’t do this things effectively. Plus since it was a later add-on, lots of users probably saw that most of their existing contacts weren’t classified, so why bother with the new ones?

Google decided to give the user control over this instead of an automated process of grouping users (learning their lesson from “Buzz” perhaps). And since it’s an all-new system, it’s more likely people are going to use this feature than if they’d already started using the service without it embedded. But Google on the other hand recently implemented a suggested “other people to include on the email” feature within their Google Apps email product (I don’t really use Gmail much so I have no idea if it actually is running there too) – which feature is a very nice hybrid of automated suggestion and user selection (to choose to add the users to the email.

There are two questions to ask, though, (1) is whether this kind of feature is truly important to adoption of this system, or if it’s really just a bell that seems like a really good idea but won’t stand the test of consumer adoption in the face of the laziness of users and (2) whether Google should have just held fast to creating a more intelligent system for this instead of caving into the “creepy” police. Google is in a sensitive position with respect to customer data, but they certainly won’t gain ground on Facebook in audience-context products (“social”) if they’re not willing to push the boundaries a little further, faster.

Today Facebook adds over a million users a week, as the poster child of social networking, and companies like Groupon (which claims to be a social product but isn’t really) aim to go public while others like LinkedIn recently have gone public.

The reality is, most of the big successful consumer-oriented “Web” companies out there today are built on foundations of email, and sometimes of encouraging what some might think of as spam. There’s a fine line but let’s look at a few examples:

Facebook, LinkedIn: Both of these companies rely heavily on user-initiated email to other users for customer adoption, perhaps less so than earlier in their lives, but nonetheless, there was no tremendous organic attraction to visit the site based on advertising or great media stories about the companies, it was all about encouraging users to invite their friends. When I was at LinkedIn, I learned that one of our major growth drivers was encouraging a user to upload their address book and making it super-easy to invite new users. The strongest brand we had at LinkedIn, was that of our users — “John Brown is someone I know and if he thinks this service is great, why don’t I try it out?” — and address book uploads and the resultant email sent out turned many one-connection people into multi-friend propagators. It worked great.

Today the existing networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter with their APIs can perform the same function as the email address transfers, that of pulling user info into an application, but without the email address the system messages in these various services are really not as powerful.

This is obvious in the case of Facebook, which made a major change a few years ago to how aggressively applications could message users. Email went out the window in favor of less aggressive “inbox-style” messages, and app messages were treated as on average far less important than normal friend messages. During the time with its more permissive policies, several companies were able to take advantage and it helped them create big user bases which in turn, had their own gravity to drive other products in their stable – here I speak of course primarily of Zynga. Zynga’s ability to get viral “invite adoption” from users on Facebook was a powerful growth driver.

Groupon too, largely relies on acquiring email addresses to share its daily email updates of deals. According to their S-1, they have over 85 million email addresses today and yet only 15 million people have purchased a deal — so think about an email a day for all of those people and you’ll get an idea of how email drives this and also how they must be sending out a LOT of unanswered, unacted-upon email.

Not that that is bad per se, but anyone who discounts the power of email or argues that email is not still a major driver of user adoption should look at these examples and take heed. With email spam restrictions increasing, email will be more challenged as an adoption vehicle – but it is still the sine qua non of consumer “viral” adoption.

It’s looking pretty nasty in Greece right now with depositors pulling money out of their accounts. If you recall last year things got pretty out of hand with several people dying in protests. It is difficult to own up to, but all over the world our financial system is still very fragile with a lot of perverse incentives.

OUTsurance in South Africa is a very innovative insurance company, despite (because of?) being a fairly new company. One thing I recently heard of was a program where they install a device in your car that tracks you via GPS, the data is assessed for driver behavior and then you may be given lower rates based on that assessment. You can also log in to the website to see the records of your activity. Here’s details of the plan in this link to the company’s website. It appears that it’s firstly designed for people who drive less often, versus the average driver:

In fact, Safe_Driver@OUT is perfect for those of us who’d rather leave 5 minutes earlier for a meeting than driving recklessly and aggressively through traffic.

Safe_Driver@OUT has been designed for people who typically:
• drive less than 15,000 km per year;
• keep within the speed limit;
• do not drive through corners at excessive speeds;
• do not accelerate harshly;
• do not brake harshly; and
• do not often travel at night.

They are very upfront about tracking you, here’s how that is described:

We track your every move

Your driving behaviour is closely monitored by means of a Tracker Skytrax device that is fitted to your vehicle. This device will provide detailed reports on the position, speed and acceleration of your vehicle which will help us to accurately determine your premium.

At the end of every month, OUTsurance will e-mail you a record of your driving behaviour. You will also be able to log onto our website to view this. This data will only be available 30 days after the installation of the device.

As a sophisticated tracking device is fitted to your car to collect the required information, this product will not suit people who disconnect the battery when the vehicle is not in use.

As you can see, Safe_Driver@OUT goes far beyond just measuring how FAR you drive. We look at HOW you drive and use this data to scientifically calculate your insurance premium.

I don’t think it will be long before these types of things make it to the United States, and insurance will certainly be the first area where user behavior is monitored and the cost-benefit tradeoff is offered to users. Soon enough, not using these kinds of devices and programs will be the exception and rates will go sky-high for those that don’t. I’ve mentioned this before but I think that eventually governments will give out mobile devices for free and require you to use the freebie versions at least, or your own fully-compatible device to access local services like paying for parking. The parking meters (for example) will not only become dumber, they will disappear — policing will be in the cloud, with a simple sensor knowing that a vehicle is there and ID’ing it, and the user connected to that vehicle automatically getting dinged if they haven’t paid up for their parking, or have overstayed their welcome. Goodbye chalk marks on tires.

Here’s an ad I saw this morning on an online currency exchange calculator website, and found interesting enough to click on:

I don’t actually live in Palo Alto, but it’s pretty close to where I do live, and I really like lobster, so this seemed interesting to me. Once I clicked on it, it took me to a generic LivingSocial landing page that prompted me to confirm my city, and had prefilled “San Jose” as my location. It also asked for an email address. I provided an email address and was then taken to a page that had NOTHING to do with lobster in either San Jose OR Palo Alto for that matter (for those not from the Bay Area, San Jose is a good 20-30 minutes away from Palo Alto depending on traffic, so it’s not “close”). I saw a bunch of deals for spa’s etc.

I came into the office and went to the same website, hoping to see the ad again. Amazingly, I did. My office is in downtown San Francisco, but for some reason the ad thought I was in Union City (about 30 miles from here in the East Bay). See below:

I clicked through and landed on a landing page that asked me to confirm that I was in San Francisco (well at least the livingsocial website knew where I was this time, kinda). Still eager that perhaps now I would find the lobster I was looking for (at 70% off!!!), I looked through the deals, but alas, nothing. See the screenshot of the page I came to post sharing my email address. Not only did I waste my time visiting this site, but I also gave up potentially valuable information namely my email address expecting a very specific offer to be available. (thumbnail points to the deal page below)

My company works with several data providers, advertisers and creative companies to create ads that are actually localized and deep link to real products. To do it the right way is difficult. This stuff annoys me as a practitioner of online advertising, but more so really as a consumer. This is a total BS, deceptive ad; whether it comes from a Fortune 500 company, a highly regarded upstart, or some affiliate guy running ads out of his basement.

This Google Trends chart says it all. Yahoo!, Google, Twitter – nobody comes close to Facebook.