royadvertising.com

Forums are like social mixers, where everyone is at equal level, milling about and discussing with others. These many to many communication tools allow anyone to start a topic and anyone to respond to one. Members are often at equal level, and content is usually segmented by topic. (rather than by people).

Blogs are like a keynote speech where the speaker (blogger) is in control of the discussion, but allows questions and comments from the audience.
Blogs are journals often authored by one individual, and sometimes teams. In the context of business communication, these are often used to talk with the marketplace and to join the conversation that existing external bloggers may be having.

Social Networks are like topic tables at a conference luncheon. Ever been to a conference where different lunch tables had big white signs inviting people to sit and join others of like interest? It’s like that. Social networks allow members to organize around a person’s relationships or interests, rather that just focused on topic. People that know each other (or want to meet each other) will connect by a variety of common interests. These are great tools to get people of like interest to connect to each other and share information.

• Comments (0)

Proximity Marketing

ZipZone Media
http://www.zipzonemedia.com

This company allows you to deliver wireless, location-based offers, content or advertisements to people via their cell phones or other targetable devices.

To do so, they provide you with a ZipZone Media Server, which is a server smaller than a laptop that has a range of about 30 feet for cell phone contact and 300 feet for laptop/PDA contact. It scans for Bluetooth targets in the area, decides if said targets are within your desired audience and then attempts to push your message to them by asking people walking by if they would like to receive your message.

This may sound invasive, but do be aware that this particular company has conducted successful campaigns on behalf of the US Navy Reserve and CBS, which beamed previews from their upcoming TV show lineup to interested recipients (this particular campaign was conducted in NYC’s Grand Central Station). One of the benefits of this kind of advertising is that if you do generate sticky or interesting content or offers, it is very easy for recipients to forward your messages to their friends.

NOTE: This concept is known as “proximity marketing” and it can be accomplished in one of several ways –

1. Via cell phones that are in a particular cell;
2. Via Bluetooth or WiFi-enabled devices within range of a transmitter;
3. Via GPS-enabled devices that can access localized content.

AvantGo iAnywhere
http://www.ianywhere.com/avantgo/advertising/index.html

AvantGo delivers content and applications to consumers via PDA, wireless PDA and smartphone. There is no cost to the consumer to sign up for an AvantGo account. Because AvantGo was one the first companies to jump into this business, today hundreds of major brands and marketers deliver their online content through the AvantGo mobile Internet service. Marketers delivering content include The New York Times, CBS News, MarketWatch, CNN and Sporting News.

In addition, over 250 brands use AvantGo mobile advertising to reach their audience of more than 7 million subscribers. Those brands include both B2C and B2B marketers. Ads can revolve around content, around location, within a company’s own proprietary channel (ie., NYT can advertise on their own channel) or around a concept. One interesting example of this was Hyatt’s campaign to business travelers, wherein consumers who were willing to register and share information with Hyatt were given an electronic tip calculator application. Advertisers include Jeep, Hyatt, Mitsubishi, Toyota, Astra Zeneca, Bayer, Bank of America and many more.

Paid Search Marketing

SpyFU
http://www.spyfu.com

If you handle pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, this is your ultimate reconnaissance tool. Use it to find out how much is being spent on PPC advertising by category or industry… or you may prefer to drill down and and discover how much a competitor is spending per day on PPC, plus the number of clicks their site is receiving per day, the average position of their ad and the average cost per click.

First look up your own domain to view the stats. Based upon the site’s reporting of this editor’s PPC spending, the deets (aka details) were spot on, from daily budget to total number of clicks per day and average cost per click. Amazing.

Or look up a specific keyword phrase. We looked up “search engine marketing” and found that (at the time of this writing) the top bid for that phrase was $13.42. Two of the top advertisers for the phrase were FathomSEO and Google. Drill down and you can see their top organic and paid competitors. The spying goes on and on. At the time of writing, we also spied on the top 500 biggest keyword advertisers (aol.com ranked number one with an estimated daily spend of $410,404) and the top 500 most expensive keywords (”data recovery services los angeles” was curiously the number one, ringing in at $52.82 maximum bid).

Bidvertiser
http://www.bidvertiser.com

Bidvertiser is a PPC network that allows you to place your ad across their publisher’s sites either by industry, category or geographic location. According to the site they have over 25,000 publishers in their network. Like Google AdWords, you select keywords and set up maximum bids for each keyword and ad that you create. Categories range from arts and humanities to the very interesting Web 2.0 and online communities category. Advertisers are not disclosed, although if you drill into the site you can find references to companies as diverse and FriendFinder and Vertical Response. One very interesting feature that Bidvertiser offers is the ability for eBay sellers to target publications and then create their product-specific display ads with a click of the button. These ads can drive traffic to either specific items or to the seller’s eBay store.
Social Media Marketing

Facebook Ads
http://www.facebook.com/ads/

The Facebook Ads network enables marketers to connect with target audiences on the Facebook social network. To do so, businesses first build pages on Facebook that resonate with their desired audience. Their pages should be “with it” and contain everything a Facebooker would expect such as photos, videos, music and Facebook apps. Companies can also incorporate apps that they built themselves, such as restaurant reviews, buying tickets on a movie page, creating a custom tee shirt and so on.

Facebook’s ad system virally spreads your brand messages through Facebook based upon member interests and activities (Facebook calls this network of activity and connections the “social graph”). Conceptually, the ad network itself is distributed based upon member activity on the site — and thus they are called “social ads”. A big part of this ad system is the encouraged use of referrals from one Facebook friend to another to share brand messages, which is why companies are encouraged to provide great content and/or applications that are worth sharing within the network.

Advertisers have a Facebook dashboard to track how things are going and gain insight into their target audience. As an interesting aside, Facebook facilitates member sharing of content, referrals and the like through RSS feeds and your advertisements can also be placed in the feeds themselves as sponsored content.

BTW, participating advertisers at the time of this writing include Blockbuster, CBS, Chase, The Coca-Cola Company, Microsoft, Sony Pictures Television and Verizon Wireless.

Buzz Logic
http://www.buzzlogic.com/index.html

The BuzzLogic service monitors in real-time all of the conversations that are going on in Web land on blogs and social media. The goal of this monitoring is to identify those people who are the drivers and influencers of opinion on any topic. To do so, they monitor and map the people who are posting to blogs, where they are posting, how many people are commenting on their postings and how their opinions on a given topic spread from one site to another. Marketers get a dashboard in order to identify “influencers” within a category and zero in on who’s saying what.

A major benefit of this monitoring is that fact that BuzzLogic allows you to conduct “conversation queries” that pinpoint where major conversations about your brand or products are taking place, and then zip a text or display ad right into the social media discussion. They use the Google API to enable you to create your text or display ads, and then you select the properties where you want to run your ads just as you would for a Google AdWords contextual campaign. BTW, BuzzLogic refers to this as a “conversation targeting” ad system.

Affiliate Marketing

PepperjamNETWORK
http://www.pepperjamnetwork.com

Pepperjam is an interesting full-service Internet marketing company with a well-established affiliate network. Unlike many other networks, Pepperjam encourages communication between the marketer and the affiliate to the point that their network has been Web 2.0ized with tools such as live chat between merchants and affiliates.

They also offer a product called pepperjamADS, which the affiliates can use to present customized contextual ads from one or more of their merchants. The ad units come in various shapes and sizes, which affiliates can mix and mash together to perhaps sell complementary products in one ad space. The example given at the site is that if you are affiliate who wants to present fashion-related ads, you can select various ads from multiple fashion merchants and perhaps present an “outfit of the day”, wherein all the featured products lead to affiliate sales for you should your readers click through and buy.

Thanks to an exclusive partnership with DoubleClick, clients have very sophisticated tracking and reporting technology to analyze their programs. Advertisers run the niche gamut, including SEOmoz.org, Jelly Belly, Old Spice, the Washington Redskins and Just Sweet by Jennifer Lopez. You will also find an SEM and affiliate marketing blog at the site.
Direct Response Copywriting

SuccessDoctor
http://www.successdoctor.com

Here is where you can find lots of articles, resources and services geared to boosting your response rates and maximizing your copy’s selling power. This site is dedicated to creating the best sales copy possible. Professional copywriter Michael Fortin is the brawn behind the site.

At the time of writing, resources found at the site included hundreds of articles and blog posts. A few that caught our eye were “Using Vivid Mental Imagery” and “Creating Scarcity and Urgency”. We also enjoyed the 51-page PDF entitled “The Death of The Salesletter: Web 2.0 and Its Impact On The Future of Internet Copy”. Mr. Fortin also provides a forum for copywriters, an email newsletter and an RSS feed. As expected, you will also find a fair amount of sales copy dedicated to selling his products and services, which include copywriting, videos, sales courses and more.

Dashboard Marketing

iDashboards
http://www.idashboards.com

iDashboards is a company specializing in - you guessed it - Web-based dashboards. They seemingly have a dashboard for just about every industry and for just about anything you would want to track and measure: marketing, sales, scorecards, call centers, risk management and so on. And their dashboards are anything but dry and boring. They are Flash-based and highly interactive - they even offer 3D views and animations of your data (now that’s a real cocktail party conversation starter!).

iDashboards can pull data directly from all relational databases, legacy data, Excel, etc. and they can merge data from multiple sources. At the time of writing, you could try out the dashboard of your choice on a complimentary basis. Clients include NASA, the US Navy and Cisco as well as all kinds of industry vertical midsized businesses.

• Comments (0)

Over the past few months I have been thinking about the distinction between social networks, the social graph and social platforms. While preparing for a presentation the other day I decided that it was time to actually define what social platforms are. In the process of defining “social platforms” I had to first define what social networks are and what the social graph is. There has already been much discussion as to whether or not there should be any distinction between the social graph and social networks.

My assumption is that there is one social graph for each individual and they can be part of multiple social networks. The social graph is the sum total of all our real-world connections and the sociological bonds (or ties). While social networks have a very similar definition the primary distinction is that we can be part of multiple social networks but we each only have one social graph. There are three primary types of social networks:

1. Those that represent our real-world connections,
2. Those that represent virtual/fantasized connections, and
3. Those that represent a mix of virtual/fantasized and real-world connections.

This brings us to social platforms. Social platforms are one step above social networks. Social networks can be both real-world and virtual; our social graph combines all of them. So what is a social platform?

A social platform is an operating system that leverages the power of social connectivity to virally distribute applications.

It’s as simple as that. We can leverage our various social networks or anybody in our social graph to help distribute the applications that we find useful or entertaining. All social platforms must include the following features:

1. A markup language enables developers to display both personal and social information without accessing the information
2. An API (application program interface) that provides access to the core elements of the platform (e.g. a cell phone’s phonebook or Facebook profile wall)
3. A system for defining a user’s connections (bonds or ties)
4. Privacy settings that enable users to control what information applications have access to

• Comments (0)

A few examples of what success could look like for you:

We were able to learn something about customers we’ve never know before

We were able to tell our story to customers and they shared it with others

A blogging program where there are more customers talking back in comments than posts

An online community where customers are self-supporting each other and costs are reduced

We learn a lot from this experimental program, and pave the way for future projects, that could still be a success metric

We gain experience with a new way of two-way communication

We connect with a handful of customers like never before as they talk back and we listen

We learned something from customers that we didn’t know before

• Comments (0)

• Comments (0)

designing-marketing-plans-1195162412251922-2.ppt

• Comments (0)

Measuring Social Media

Ten Things to Know About Measuring Social Media

If you believe that social media is all about your customers being able to talk to each other online, then it’s time to go back and read the Cluetrain Manifesto from 1999. The basic premise is that the marketplace is a conversation. That does not mean that social media is a new tool to push your message out there. It’s a new tool to help you converse. Companies must listen or die.

Only one problem. Those who hold the keys to the kingdom (read: budget) want to know the ROI. They want to know how you’re going to measure this new-fangled thing. Here’s what you need to know in order to hold your own in those conversations.

1. Ya Gotta Getta Goal

The first thing that comes to mind with social media is that we want to use it to get the consumer to interact with the brand. We tend to think about social media in terms of customer engagement. Are customers paying attention? Eric Peterson defined engagement as “an estimate of the degree and depth of visitor interaction on the site against a clearly defined set of goals”.

The newest way to communicate with customers does not negate time-honored business practices. Nothing is worth doing for its own sake. So pick a goal, even if it’s just to learn about whether this is going to work for your company or not. But be ready to measure whether your education was successful.

A decent goal must not only be about directional intent, but include quantitative and temporal attributes. It’s great that you want to increase customer satisfaction or sales, but by how much? And how soon? In the meantime, there are a number of discrete social media elements you can measure.

2. Sum Up Your Subscribers

How many people are listening? How many subscribe to your RSS feeds, your email newsletters, your Twitterings, your YouTube channel or your FaceBook account, etc.? This is a simple metric, and ever so slightly deceptive if you don’t account for subscriber fatigue. 250,000 subscribers? Wonderful. But how many of them are actually information consumers? People are happy to sign up and then ignore, rather than unsubscribe. This isn’t your basic churn or attrition where you can count those who drop off your list. These people simply don’t continue to read your feeds and don’t open your email even though they are still on the list. They are not engaged with your brand. They no longer hang on your every word.

3. Assess Awareness

With subscriber fatigue skewing the count of how many people are actually tuned in, it’s important to rely on a tried and true metric called awareness. The advertising industry has long used this public survey method to find out what percent of the population has ever heard of you, what they’ve heard and how they feel about you.

The request to: “Name three airlines / dishwashers / home builders”, is followed by “Have you ever heard of XYZ Corp”? Next come the questions about what XYZ Corp means in their hearts and minds. Does Nordstroms stand for luxury and WalMart for low price? Or do the phrases “wildly expensive” and “community destructive” show up more than you’d like?

With all of these, you’ll want to start with a baseline. If 28% of them think this and 35% say that, you have no gauge to determine if those figures are good bad or indifferent. But once you have an awareness baseline, you can continue to read the numbers to see if your social media investments have any impact on the results.

4. Parse Out Your Participants

Totting up the number of people who subscribe to your outpourings is only the first step in the dance of creating a relationship with your marketplace. Absorbing your pearls of wisdom is level one. The next metric is the number of people you can get to actively participate in some aspect of the social media activities that you participate in or create. Measure how many people post to your online discussion group, comment on your blog posts, upload pictures and videos and/or answer your surveys. How many willingly sign up to be part of your online customer advisory council? These are people who care enough to a) have an opinion, and b) express it. They are pure gold. They are engaged. They are involved.

5. Figure Your Forwarders

Between the passive consumers and the active contributors lies a class of people who are the connective tissue in this network. They are the ones who pass along your message. You can count them by the number of blog post trackbacks, inbound links, tell-a-friend pass alongs, diggs and del.icio.us-nesses. This layer is vital to your social media strategy, as they are the conduit to those who might not otherwise know about you or hear of your talents and value.

Soon, you’ll be looking to comScore Widget Metrix to count up the number of widget adopters you’ve attracted. Whatsa widget? It’s a small, branded application that can live on others’ Web pages. Thousands of FaceBookers will want to host your latest party game, parlor trick, entertaining gizmo or tiny, useful software application. Viral, yet sticky.

6. Assess Attitude

Only in Hollywood is it true that there’s no such thing as bad press. Oscar Wilde was only right about celebrities when he said, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about”. Large numbers of people posting unpleasant opinions about you is not good for business.

When you invest in a social media project which results in you becoming the laughing stock of the Internet, it would be good to know that it’s time to change tactics. When something your firm has published is received badly, you need to be on the listening end and ready, willing and able to respond openly, honestly and speedily. Yes, you want to monitor how often your name is mentioned, but you need to layer that with whether the mentions are good or ill. It’s a qualitative calculation as well as a quantitative one.

7. Rely On Ratios

Numbers are great for bar charts showing progress over time, but they do nothing to help drive business decisions. Your measurements must be actionable to be valuable. There’s nothing worse than a calculation that has a negative ROI - a metric that costs more to collect and calculate than it delivered back in any P&L-positive business decision.

Don’t print out and deliver reports, but set up a dynamic dashboard that lets you compare the number of comments per post for a given subject matter or the number of forwards per subscriber for a newsletter. Calculate the ratio of social media-driven website visitors who complete on-site tasks vs. those who found you via search engines. Figure out the comparative impact of your social media projects so you can clearly determine which are working and which are not. The possibilities are many and depend on your business goals.

8. Did It Drive Traffic?

This is one of many intermediate metrics you can use to your advantage. Between the social butterflies buzzing about you and the your true end goals (see #9), there are some figures that can help determine whether your efforts are having any impact at all.

Did your investment in participating in those Yahoo discussion groups bring people to your website? Did those people stay longer than people who came to you from other sources? Did they look at more pages? Come back more often? Were those people more engaged on your site? Did the people who uploaded pictures to your contest forward your newsletter more than others? You want to measure whether your actions evoked actions in others.

9. Ya Gotta Getta Goal - Reloaded

Your well defined goals, attributed with specific amounts and deadlines and fully aligned with your business strategies, are the only metrics that matter. All the rest are just to help gauge whether you are headed in the right direction or headed off track.

These specific business goals are eminently measurable and tangible. They are the successful completion of your prospective customer Calls to Action. They are contacts, leads, sales, dollars saved and accumulated good will. They are the very goals every company has: earn more, spend less and increase customer satisfaction. And now you have a new way to trigger those actions so long as you are careful, clever, measure well and use the results to make prudent business decisions.

10. The WAA Is Working On Standards

One more thing you should know: The Web Analytics Association is actively pursuing a set of standards for measuring social media. These are early days - there are no maps or guidebooks to this territory. But the WAA’s Social Media and Standards Committee is fully engaged in frothy discussions and welcomes your participation if you are so inclined: The Web Analytics Association.

Yes, measuring the success of your social media efforts is a bit more complex than counting up your MySpace friends. But the upside is worth the effort.

• Comments (0)

marketingtowomen.pdf

• Comments (0)

• Comments (0)