Cebit Australia – Keynote Address

Steven started out with a nice flash presentation that briefly outlined how the idea for moderated websites came about in the bathtub and originated and transformed from online education to website moderations. The goal is to humanise the internet. Engagement through advertising – often offline commercials are emotional, human, stimulating exciting and appealing. While online advertisements are dry rather than emotional, factual rather than human, animated rather than stimulating and dumb rather than appealing. In the offline world you would never leave your customers alone.
With human banners you get 3-4 times higher clickrates, while 89% of the visitors stay a minimum of 40 seconds, up from 4 seconds with traditional banners, even on a boring topic such as financials. Online engagement is vital so you need to listen to your customers.
Modsite’s main function is to design and implement human overlays/salespeople that are shown on several websites that direct you to the chosen topic or explain the site in general. The overlays can actually move to different pages within the website. Moderated isn’t really the word to describe what Steven does, it should be labelled ‘explanation websites’. This is really cool, it is not annoying and is really engaging. One great feature is the overlay’s ability to help fill out difficult forms. This functionality never starts if you put in the URL directly – only when you arrive from Google or another advertising platform.
[Ok if you missed the keynote and really don’t understand what Marc is talking about here… Join the club! Click through to the Modsite website and the nice lady with the cool accent will explain how it all works – Kate]

This is a unique form of online engagement, it’s not the solution for everything but is a nifty feature in order to humanise the web, what’s next? Possibly a true human [Whahhh? The girl with the accent is not a ‘true’ human? – Kate] The next stage of the internet – reality web! I thought this functionality is truly something new and unique and applied in a way that is not too intrusive or irritating.

See Bruce's author page for links to connect on social media.