The Social Corp

Responsive Marketing

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:54:55 +1000

[shared via Google Reader from Logic+Emotion]

In the beginning, there were products and services, and some were good. Fewer became trusted brands, but those that did enjoyed unquestioned loyalty supported by a simple yet effective marketing engines built to reach people in mass quantity. The formula worked for decades. An empire was built on the shoulders of Madison Avenue and expanded globally. It is an empire, which still exists today, though arguably it’s a diminished version of its former self.

More recently, technology has had it’s own evolutionary process which it’s still going through. Well over a decade ago, when large organizations developed and updated their complex Web properties, the most popular and rigorous process one could follow in development was referred to as “Waterfall”. Think of this as a descending, linear staircase where one step of the process was completed in full before moving on the next. The methodology was rigorous, but also left little room for tweaking, testing, adapting and improving along the way.

Responsive Design
Today, digital design and development is often done leveraging the “agile” method of development, which favors smaller, cyclical bursts of development and rapid testing. Start-ups favor this approach as well building not only their tech products but also their business models in a way, which resembles more of an agile philosophy vs. a rigid, sequential approach. Even “large” start-ups like Facebook demonstrate this in how they roll out enhancements to their global platform, often making the changes incrementally, rolling them out with select users and then adjusting based off the data they analyze. Google often works this was as well. If you were to undertake designing and building a digital property today—you would also have to ensure that it would perform across multiple platforms (desktop, tablet, mobile). A popular methodology for developing this way is called “responsive design”—a technique, which leverages code that results in a shape shifting design which auto-magically fits the medium it, is being interacted with in.

Most Marketing Remains Linear And Unresponsive
Despite the pervasive nature of all manifestations of digital, including social and mobile, much of the marketing emphasis remains dedicated to reaching people in mass, following a tried and true formula for advertising designed to build off consumer insights and craft compelling messages which could be distributed across a myriad of channels (including digital). The approach is designed for the broadcast industrial machine including print, radio and television, which, despite rumors of its demise is likely to stay with us for some time. The problem it poses however is that it is an approach that much like its counterpart in tech development, (Waterfall) is neither nimble nor flexible and isn’t built for rapid change nor does it adapt well beyond the dominant media it was designed for.

“Content Marketing” Is Disrupting Modern Day Brand Building
CMOs, chief digital officers and brand managers across many organizations are currently grappling with the notion of content used in the context of marketing—inherently they understand that their customers value content, consume it, create it, and share it—and they want in on the action. They also understand that this type of content isn’t often the traditional campaigns they execute for broadcast so they face a dilemma:

What content do consumers value most?

How do they find it?

What gets individuals sharing content with peers?

How does content scale, reaching the right audience at the right time?

How do brands insert themselves into the content ecosystem in ways that bring value back to the brand?

Responsive Marketing
The solution to the content question lies somewhere between acknowledging that a brand must support both a traditional, linear marketing model in addition to a newer, cyclical construct which is constantly in tune with the current environment and operates in consolidated time frames. Responsive marketing sits at the core of the content evolution that many companies find themselves trying to navigate as they pull together newsrooms, command centers and media operations which are designed to help brands act more like publishers. All of these can be effective in treating the symptoms a brand may exhibit if they possess only competencies in linear forms of marketing, but they do not address the root issue—deconstructing a marketing machine which places the majority of resources on mass marketing will ensure it never gains proficiency in alternate forms of content and media.

A more holistic approach is needed.

The Acquisition & Engagement Funnel
Marketing is by design measurable, and most marketers are trained to value metrics, which can be at minimum tied to awareness and ideally connected to sales and loyalty. This is where the relationship between responsive content marketing and business objectives must be reconciled—what good is content if it is not connected to commerce? Content should be a vehicle, which “fills the marketing funnel” and should be leveraged as the currency, which entices the target to share, thus creating further awareness for the brand, which can lead to bringing others into the funnel. It is the consumption of content via social, web and mobile which fuels the acquisition and engagement funnel—the flow works as follows:

Shared And Found Content Drives Acquisition
Content which is optimized and valuable inevitably finds its target, whether through paid, owned, earned or shared means (usually it’s a combination of all). When content is found valuable, it often leads to an “acquisition” whether it via e-mail or a subscription to a brand’s social property. The “consumer” in this construct demonstrates intent to at minimum engage with the brand.

Acquisition Drives Engagement
Once a consumer, customer or prospect is acquired, a brand can further engage via content, messages, and through “micro-interactions” over time. Each like, comment, or share on Facebook for example is a micro-interaction, which solidifies the relationship and loyalty between the brand and the consumer.

Loyalty Creates Awareness
Customers “acquired” via social and digital means are now available for targeted content marketing tactics which can be especially effective via paid enhancements whether that be through social or search. In the case of social—shared content leads to further awareness using the networks of peers as a distribution ecosystem while organically raising its profile in organic search results.

Content As Currency: The Four Key Archetypes
For content to be successfully leveraged at the open end of the marketing funnel, brands must understand the full landscape of content types and the relationships they have with their core paid, earned and owned channels. The four archetypes are:

Curated:
A brand can curate content from infinite digital sources and provide value by deriving signal from noise. A popular tactic connected to curating is aggregating it in a single destination for easy access.

Co-created:
Content can be co-created amongst consumers via collaboration or through the consumer and the brand itself. Brands, which encourage consumers to co-create content with it, invite them to participate but cannot often control how consumers will want to co-create.

Original:
Original content is produced by the brand, specifically for its target audience and is owned by the brand. Original content can take many forms and production value and be planned in advance or spontaneously in response to emerging trends and events.

Consumer generated:
Consumer or user generated content is often produced by non-professionals and May or may not include references to the brand. It’s often in highest quantity but also lowest quality.

Building & Maintaining A Responsive Content Marketing Machine
In order to build a content machine for a brand or business, the leadership behind it must buy into the premise that content is a viable brand building tool. This sets the stage for an evolution of roles within the organization—brand managers must at minimum be literate in community management, editorial and digital analytics. Organizations internally should re-evaluate their digital centers of excellence and take stock of partners to ensure that content strategy and execution exists as part of the mix. This foundational work is core to then constructing a an “always ready” content machine, which operates in a continual, cyclical fashion as part marketing, part editorial operation as illustrated above.

Conclusion: Marketers Must Evolve Beyond The Linear
Unlike software or web development, marketers have had less pressure to overhaul their approach despite signs that media consumption is highly fragmented, shifting to digital and increasingly more difficult to track. As more pressure is applied to the CMO to produce results for the organization; it is more than tempting to rely on the mass metrics of the past to demonstrate that reach is being achieved at scale. This undermines the need for marketing to undergo it’s own transformation where shifts in resources go into building up direct media channels (social or owned media) and potentially reaching more targeted audiences who may be inclined to share a brand’s content with their peer networks. An agile and adaptive mentality is badly needed in the marketing arm of organizations—one that is less dependent on historical data to make decisions and is inclined to parse data inputs as they come in daily.

The content conundrum represent the tip of the iceberg for the marketing discipline but must be dealt with as proof mounts that content is valued while overt advertising and marketing is something to be filtered out. Brands will learn to be more flexible, in tune with rapidly changing sentiment and responsive in their approach to messaging engagement and telling their stories across a de-centralized and splintered media landscape.

Content as Currency and Other Thoughts From #Snowcial

Responsive Design: The Key to Mobile Email Engagement

How To Win With Real-Time Marketing

2013: The Year Everything Converged

The CMO’s Guide to the Chief Digital Officer

The Customer Journey to Online Purchase

Tue, 07 May 2013 21:54:40 +1000

[shared via Google Reader from Inside AdWords]

Savvy marketers understand that you don’t always seal the deal with a single message, image, or advertisement. A user may see a display ad, click on a link from a friend, or do a search before buying something from your website — and all of these interactions can play a role in the final sale. It’s important to understand the entire customer journey so you can measure all of the elements that contribute to your campaigns, attribute the right value to them, and adjust your marketing budgets where appropriate.

That’s the philosophy behind Google Analytics tools like Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution Modeling. Tens of thousands of our largest advertisers are gaining valuable insights from Multi-Channel Funnels every month, and we’ve collected these insights using aggregate statistics to develop a benchmarking tool — The Customer Journey to Online Purchase. This interactive tool lets you explore typical online buying behavior and see how different marketing interactions affect business success.

The tool draws on Ecommerce and Multi-Channel Funnels data from over 36,000 Google Analytics clients that authorized sharing, including millions of purchases across 11 industries in 7 countries. Purchase paths in this tool are each based on interactions with a single ecommerce advertiser.

You’ll find benchmark data for:

how different marketing channels (such as display, search, email, and your own website) help move users towards purchases. For example, some marketing channels play an “assist” role during the earlier stages of the marketing funnel, whereas some play a “last interaction” role just before a sale.
how long it takes for customers to make a purchase online (from the first time they interact with your marketing to the moment they actually buy something), and how the length of this journey affects average order values.

Channel Roles in the Customer Journey
The data shows that every industry is different — the path to purchase for hotel rooms in Japan is not necessarily the same as the path as for an online supermarket in Canada.

A few findings stand out, in particular:

As you might expect, customers typically click on display ads early in their purchase journeys, but in some industries, such as US travel and auto, display clicks tend to occur closer to the purchase decision.
Across industries and countries, paid search has a fairly even assist-to-last interaction ratio, implying that this channel can act both in the earlier and later stages of the customer journey.

Advanced tip:

Once you’ve explored the benchmarks, look deeper into your own marketing data with the Multi-Channel Funnel reports, and consider defining your channels and campaigns to separate out categories that are specific to your business needs.

Purchase values and the length of the journey
We also see interesting patterns emerge when examining the length of the customer journey. While the majority of purchases take place within a single day or a single step (i.e., a single interaction with one marketing channel), longer paths tend to correlate with higher average order values.

For example,

in US Tech, online purchases that take more than 28 days are worth about 3.5 times more than purchases that occur immediately. And while 61% of tech purchases take place on that first day, only 53% of revenue comes from single-day purchases.
in Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), on the other hand, most purchases (82%) are quick, likely because these are smaller and simpler purchases that don’t require much research.
in Edu / Gov, 41% of revenue comes from multi-day purchases, but 60% of revenue comes from multi-step purchases — suggesting that even when customers make decisions in a relatively short time period, they often have multiple marketing interactions before purchasing.

Advanced tip:

In Multi-Channel Funnels or the Attribution Modeling Tool, you can adjust the lookback window to reflect the typical length of the purchase path in your industry. For example, if your business tends to have shorter paths, you can zoom in on paths that take 5 days or less:

Putting the benchmarks to work
For marketers, it’s always a crucial challenge to design campaigns that deliver the right message at the right moment in a customer’s journey to purchase. We hope these benchmarks will provide useful insights about the journey and help you put your business into context. In particular, take a look at the final infographic, the “Benchmarks Dashboard,” to get a quick overview of your industry. Then, when you view your own data in the Multi-Channel Funnels reports in Google Analytics, you’ll gain a better understanding of where different channels impact your conversions and what your typical path looks like, so you can adjust your budgeting and marketing programs accordingly.

Try The Customer Journey to Online Purchase today on Google’s new Think Insights website.

Happy analyzing!

Posted by Paul Muret, Director of Engineering, Google Analytics

The Imminent Shift from Social to Digital Engagement

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 06:43:13 +1000

[shared via Google Reader from Brian Solis]

How do you define engagement?

No matter how you define it, engagement is something that we most likely underestimate. Engagement symbolizes the touches that occur in various moments of truth and this should completely change not only how you engage someone in each moment but also how the inside of your company works with one another to make it frictionless and experiential.

Whether a customer stands on the stage of awareness, consideration, purchase, or post purchase, touch points open and close. And, it is in those moments that engagement, regardless of source or shape, affects the next steps and impressions of customers.

These moments of truth however are not limited to any one channel. Whether customers are navigating social, mobile, web or IRL (in real life), they approach each stage of the journey with different needs, in varying stages of decision making, and with one of several frames of mind depending on the context of engagement and also the screen (smartphone, PC, tablet, TV, etc) they’re using in each moment. It’s becoming increasingly complex, but then again so is the path of consumer decision-making. That’s why I wrote WTF, What’s the Future of Business…someone had to tell the story of the new customer journey, their way points, and how to reach them. The answers revealed that social was only part of the adventure.

The image above represents a detailed customer journey map, which outlines the important steps your connected customers take during and following decision making. The map also introduces the diverse elements that factor in to each step. Perhaps more importantly are the channels and screens individuals use to make their way along the journey. Mobile, social, web, IRL, they each contribute to a customer experience that either helps or prevents them from moving along in your favor.

In my research I’ve found that more often than not, each stage of the customer journey along with the mixed channels that they use are defined or programmed by different groups within the organization. The social experience is developed independently of the mobile experience, which is disconnected from the web experience. The point is that customers only see one brand or business and therefore each channel should complement one another to deliver against a desired experience and journey optimized for the moments of truth and for the context of each screen.

The Expansion from Social to Digital Engagement

One of the ways I’ve defined “engagement” over the years was quite simple, when a business and consumer interact within their channel of relevance during various moments of truth. Engagement though, is then measured by the actions, sentiment, and outcomes that result from each interaction. To optimize results, experiences, click paths, outcomes, and sentiment must be defined and enlivened through each channel in each moment. To do so takes vision, articulation of that vision, and collaboration with all stakeholder groups to cast a unified approach. Yes. It’s the age-old argument of bringing down silos and opening doors between departments and groups that just don’t talk to each other right now. But, that’s just what needs to happen and the more progressive companies are already taking note.

One such company is one that you’re more than familiar with. Starbucks recently appointed Adam Brotman, former senior vice president of Starbucks Digital Ventures, was appointed to an entirely new executive role, chief digital officer. The CDO role assumes all of Starbuck’s digital projects, which includes web, mobile, social media, digital marketing, Starbucks Card and loyalty, e-commerce, Wi-Fi, Starbucks Digital Network, and emerging in-store technologies.

Sephora is another forward thinking company that is uniting disparate channel strategies and various customer journeys in the name of holistic experiences. Sephora recently underwent a makeover to define the ideal customer experience and how it would play out in digital and real world channels, including in store engagement, while complementing and optimizing one another.

Perhaps a Chief Digital Officer is just the beginning. What we’re really talking about is someone who can bridge marketing, sales, service, and technology to create a frictionless path between customers and the business…at every step of the journey. Perhaps it’s time to think about escalating the role to someone who can own the entire customer lifecycle and bring the people within the organization together to do it. To break down walls, someone must be able to show how and why everyone can and should work together and also what’s in it for them. It would take someone who isn’t tied to any one function but instead someone who has everybody’s best interest inside and outside the organization to redefine the experience and how it’s formed and sustained. As I write this, I imagine someone taking over the role of customer journey management for digital, social, mobile and IRL.

The digital lifestyle is just a way of life now and businesses that don’t think beyond social or traditional will miss the greater opportunity to lead desirable customer journeys, experiences and outcomes. Take one more look at the Dynamic Customer Journey. As you plan for 2013 social, mobile, digital, and other channel strategies, consider how each can converge into a reciprocal and congruous ecosystem. The future of customer experiences lies in experience design and more importantly, customer journey mapping…across the screens and IRL.

Welcome to a new world of customer journey management (CJM) and the ability to bring people together around a common vision for improving customer experiences, sentiment and relationships.

The story continues…

Connect with me: Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook | Google+ |Youtube

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

This post is based on a piece I wrote for AT&T’s Networking Exchange

Just Who Uses Social Media? A Demographic Breakdown

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 21:39:27 +1000

[shared via Google Reader from Mashable]

You think you know social? How about who uses it? Well, you might not know it as well as you would have guessed.

A new study from the Pew Research Center and Docstoc shed some light on just who uses social and on what platforms. Some of the findings seem in line with what you would probably guess, but others were surprising.

If you think the smarter, more attractive sex is more socially prolific than us men, well … you’re right. Women use social media 9% more than men do. Despite having more distractions, people living in cities have the most social media activity, at 70% of the population. Perhaps it’s the connectivity of large-city life. Read more…

More about Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Demographics, and Social Media

Why You Need a Mobile Friendly Site [Infographic]

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 20:54:40 +1000

[shared via Google Reader from Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog]

This week’s Infographic Friday features stats on consumer demand for mobile-friendly sites, via Demandforce.

This is an infographic you’re gonna wanna enlarge

Tweetables

Mobile traffic makes up 10% of all Internet use Tweet this

~10% of websites are mobile-optimized Tweet this

According to an Econsultancy survey, mobile optimization is digital marketers’ top priority Tweet this

48% of users feel frustrated and annoyed when they visit nonmobile-friendly sites Tweet this

52% of users who have bad mobile experiences are less likely to engage with the companies Tweet this

48% say that, when sites don’t work well on their smartphones, it makes them feel like the companies don’t care about their business Tweet this

50% of people admit they will use websites less if they’re not mobile-friendly (Google) Tweet this

61% of users are likely to leave quickly if your site is not optimized well for mobile devices Tweet this

67% of users are more likely to buy from mobile-friendly sites Tweet this

76% of mobile site users want to be able to find location or operation hours Tweet this

61% of mobile web users want click-to-call functionality Tweet this

69% of mobile website users want bigger buttons that are easier to press Tweet this

78% of mobile website users want to find information within 1 or 2 clicks Tweet this

73% of mobile website users want to be able to save information on a site for future use Tweet this

Consumers Are Addicted To Facebook On Mobile

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 08:54:17 +1100

[shared via Google Reader from SAI]

Mobile Insights is a daily newsletter from BI Intelligence delivered first thing every morning exclusively to BI Intelligence subscribers. Sign up for a free trial of BI Intelligence today.

How Addicted Are We To Facebook Mobile? (IDC via AllFacebook)
We know that Facebook has roughly 618 million mobile users, but how are they interacting with the social network from their smartphone? A comprehensive study by Facebook and IDC shows that most users on mobile check their News Feed frequently. Several users copped to checking Facebook from their phone at the movies and while they’re at the gym. Facebook and IDC polled 7,446 iOS and Android users, who were 18 to 44 years old, finding that 70 percent of them used Facebook’s mobile application (61 percent used it every day). Facebook was found to be the third most popular activity on mobile, with 78 percent saying they used the phone to check email and 73 percent using it for Web browsing. Read »

Consumers Are Using Mobile To Bank, But Not To Buy (WSJ)
Americans are increasingly using their phones to avoid a trip to the bank, but they still have little interest in having mobile devices replace their wallets. The cellphone users tapping into banking services increased 33 percent during 2012, according to a Federal Reserve survey. Nearly half of those with smart phones accessed a banking app or mobile website in the past year, the survey of 2,600 consumers found. Only 6 percent of smart phone owners used their device to make a purchase in the past 12 months, and less than a quarter say that they’re even interested in such services, the Fed said. Read »

Samsung Leads The World In Mobile Patents (TechCrunch)
Samsung lost out big to Apple last year in a mobile patent blowout in the U.S., but it’s been slowly building up an arsenal of patents that potentially will keep it from falling into the same situation again. Samsung received the most mobile patents in 2012, and it now holds the most mobile patents of any company worldwide, according to the latest patent report out from mobile analyst Chetan Sharma. Sharma looked at more than 7 million mobile patents awarded in the U.S. and Europe, the two biggest markets for patents globally at the moment. The U.S. accounts for nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of all mobile patents across the two regions. Read »

Twitter Ad Revenue To Near $1 Billion, 60 Percent Mobile (eMarketer)
eMarketer has raised its forecast for advertising spending on Twitter for 2013 and 2014, estimating the company will earn $582.8 million in global ad revenue in 2013 before nearing $1 billion next year. According to the new forecast, more than half of Twitter’s ad revenues — about 53 percent — will come from mobile advertising this year, up from virtually no ad revenue from mobile in 2011. Advertising on mobile devices will be where Twitter sees the most incremental growth over the next two years. By 2015, Twitter is expected to pull in $1.33 billion in worldwide ad revenue, more than 60 percent of which will come from mobile advertising. Read »

Windows Phones Outselling iPhones In Emerging Markets (The New York Times)
The New York Times asked IDC to qualify the research behind Windows Phone stats from Frank Shaw, the head of public relations at Microsoft. According to Kevin Restivo, an analyst at IDC, the countries where Windows Phone shipments exceeded those of iPhone during the fourth quarter were: Argentina, India, Poland, Russia, South Africa and Ukraine. A seventh “country” where Windows Phone shipments beat iPhone is actually a group of smaller countries, including Croatia, that IDC lumps together in a category called “rest of central and eastern Europe.” Mr. Restivo provided some context, though, that slightly diminishes the scale of Microsoft’s success in those countries. Three of the markets — Ukraine, South Africa and “rest of central and eastern Europe” — are small enough that there were fewer than 100,000 Windows Phone unit shipments in the fourth quarter in each of them. Read »

BlackBerry’s Android Bet Is Paying Off (TechCrunch)
BlackBerry’s App World now touts 100,000 BB10 applications. An impressive number for a platform just months old. But out of those 100,000 applications, roughly 20 percent are Android apps, simply ported over rather than being coded specifically for BlackBerry 10 (BB10). Still, this is a win for BlackBerry. Android or native, it shows that BlackBerry is successfully pulling developers into its fold. Even without the Android apps, App World still has roughly 80,000 native BB10 apps. As it sits right now, the Android ports are simply holding seats for big apps. BB10 is still missing key apps, with Instagram and Netflix being two of the biggest holes. But don’t worry, there are Android ports available. Read »

Watch Baidu As China’s Mobile Advertising Market Matures (Seeking Alpha)
Baidu is in an interesting transition right now. While it does boast good numbers and a lion’s share of the PC search market, its journey into the mobile market will dictate a lot of its revenue in the future. Baidu has two legs in this search advertising revenue model: PC searches where it boasts an 80 percent ownership of the market, and the growing mobile market where it has about a 35 percent market share. The latter is not expected to significantly grow because competition is a little fiercer and fragmented. There are other players like Tencent (23 percent market share) and Easou (22 percent market share). Read »

What Works In Rich Media Mobile Advertising (celtra via Cool Infographics)
A well designed rich media experience that uses a store locator, games or social media has a direct and positive impact on consumer engagement and return on investment. In fact, rich media mobile advertisements drive double-digit engagement rates (12.8 percent on average) across all devices types, platforms and ad placements. Read »

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6 ways to rock e-commerce

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:39:27 +1100

[shared via Google Reader from iMedia Connection: All Feeds]

Global online sales exceeded $1 trillion last year, and marketers have officially entered a new era of doing business. Mobile devices and social media are integral parts of the shopping experience, forcing e-commerce strategies to evolve. No longer do marketers wonder if campaigns are effective. Through analytics and marketing attribution, you can directly track a customer’s digital footprint to see how the customer arrived at a point of sale. These new technologies present numerous opportunities to extend your marketing efforts and derive increased business value from e-commerce.

Whether the goal is to increase customer engagement, retention rates, or up-sell and cross-sell success, your e-commerce strategy provides plenty of opportunities. Thanks to the proliferation of data via social media and mobile, insights regarding customer behavior are extensive. As a result, the benefits of e-commerce extend beyond sales by providing detailed data regarding customer interests, past transactions, and product preferences.

Below are six steps marketers can use to take advantage of e-commerce to not only nurture existing relationships but also increase engagement and reach new customers.

Personalize your marketing for targeted demographics

User generated content, online reviews, and status updates can turn marketing and PR teams on their heads. Today’s consumers love giving feedback to their networks. If your product is a miss, you can guarantee a customer will not stay quiet. Instead of fretting, take the reins and involve yourself in the conversation. Social media channels and e-commerce sites integrated with CRM systems provide a direct window to customers.

Direct customer engagement by a brand contributes to longer term and more valuable customer relationships. Through social media, customer interests and sentiment can be tracked in real time. Psychographic profiles use social data to help personalize outreach for individual customers. Is she into sports? Does he like rock or classical music? Interests say a lot about the products and brands customers find most appealing.

Multiple devices require intuitive digital design

Coordination between marketing departments and web or app developers is necessary to ensure optimal shopping experiences. Countless sales are lost every day due to faulty websites that fail to function properly on mobile. Even websites accessed from a laptop can have faults in functionality, which contributes to lost sales.

Marketers should collaborate with designers and developers in order to create e-commerce apps and websites that focus on the shopper and user experience. Faulty shopping carts that fail to accurately suggest similar purchases can hold back cross-sell opportunities. Similarly, if the payment process requires excessive clicks and pages, customers may cancel their purchasing plans altogether.

Use your brand’s mobile apps to embed offers

As your company embraces branded app development for customers, it is important to treat the app as a viable marketing channel. With 44 percent of Americans using smartphones, cross-sell and up-sell opportunities are boundless. Customers can receive discounts and offers through branded apps that help integrate mobile with the in-store shopping experience. In an ideal world, you would have customers purchasing both through e-commerce and in-store.

Also consider adding to the in-store shopping experience by increasing opportunities for e-commerce. Make sure the merchandise mentioned in e-commerce offers is physically in stock. Remember that coordination between your e-commerce operations and necessary departments is crucial to a successful strategy.

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More New Androids Than Babies, And Other Surprising Mobile Facts [Infographic]

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 22:09:40 +1100

[shared via Google Reader from ReadWrite]

Smartphones are in fact taking over the world. An infographic from Web-application monitor service New Relic offers some surprising statistics about the mobile landscape.

For example, every day more than 1.3 million Android devices are activated — which is way more than the 300,000 babies born daily. Users now spend more time each day surfing the web or on their mobile apps than they do watching television.

There are more than a billion smartphones in use around the world, and age is no barrier — teens, adults and seniors are all well represented among their users.

Infographic courtesy of New Relic

Forms of Content Marketing for Business Growth

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 21:09:44 +1100

[shared via Google Reader from Daily SEO Tip]

In the world of online businesses, the most competitive and powerful form of marketing is content marketing. Content does not only help business portray their strength and expertise to the targeted audience but at the same time, it allows audience to become fans and engage with the brands.

Content is a creative side of marketing that allows businesses to smartly educate and encourage targeted audience about the specific product or service that a business has to offer. However, many businesses and marketers think that writing 500 to 700 words of content is the only way they can attract their targeted audience and get better search engine rankings.

There are multiple types of content, a business can use in order to market them as well as engage their fans and audience. I will try to discuss different form of marketing that one should use in order to expand more and to gather likeminded people under one umbrella.

1.Case Studies

This is one of the most inspiring ways to get noticed by targeted audience and convince them to try product or service you offer. Case Studies actually minimize the level of questions and doubts that people has in mind because by case studies they can see how a person get advantage from the same service/product that the company is offering.

It is great if you can provide some sources from where targeted audience can verify your case studies because transparency will easily allow your fans to convert in to loyal customers.

2.Comics and Memes

Login to your facebook account and check, your timeline most probably you will find as many comics and memes shared by your friends on facebook. Memes and comics are highly shareable and this is why businesses use it to promote their product or service to the wider audience and increase their fan base.

You might not see hype in traffic and activity from the first comic or meme but using this on continuous basis will defiantly drive some extra traffic to your side.

3.Competitions

Anything that allows audience to participate and compete against each other usually works and as a result level of engagement increases largely. Competitions allow targeted audience to better understand your produce/service you offer and at the same time their participation will not only allow them to convert but also share the word with their circles.

It is important for a competition to design keeping the targeted audience in mind or else you might not see what you have expected from the campaign.

4.Crowdsourced Content

Crowdsourced content is actually tapping in to the vein of writers who are given a topic to write about and then choose the best articles among all. This is great in the sense that you get the chance to look in to multiple perspective and choose the one you like the best.

There are ways you can use this idea to get the attention of the targeted audience and convert the targeted audience in to fans. And then leads.

One of the best ideas is to bring all content forward (this can be anything), on the table and allow your targeted audience to decide which one is best. This will give them a sense of authority to your audience and they will automatically convert in to loyal fans that will help your market to the new audience from the word of mouth.

5.Games and Apps

This is the most famous form of content where Big and mid size businesses are investing in order to increase their authority and build trust to the wider audience. The idea is to launch a game or a mobile app that come in to the daily use of your targeted audience so that they can use that app for free.

This investment will not only allow your audience to stick to your brand but also recommend your brand to others which give you more authority as a brand and business leads that will help you grow.

6.Gifts

Content is not limited to writing articles, contests and apps but it is far more than that. Gift is also a powerful form of content that will allow your audience to stick with the brand and follow it religiously.

Offer gifts to your loyal audience on occasions like Christmas, brands anniversary or even you can offer personalized gifts on birthdays and this will kill the distance between audience and brand and people will not only follow them as loyal fans but also speak about you to increase your audience by speaking about you and your brand.

7.Guides

This is another common form of content that can allow brands to tremendously increase the word of mouth and sales of the product/service you offer. The guide should be based on the pain points of the industry or should answer the question they have in mind.

This will allow audience to not only read and download the guides but share and discuss about this on different community forums and blogs which will allow tons of new traffic and links to point back to the website.

8.Images

This is the powerful form of content that most people don’t really care about. The reason why images are powerful because it can easily get crawled by Google and can be shown in Google images against a certain keywords.

It is recommended to use high quality optimized images so that people can easily share the images with others and at the same time Google images can find the images and crawl it accordingly.

9.Infographics

Similar to Images, Infographics are the pack if information displayed in a graphical format so that people from the similar interest not only find the information easily but also share it with their audience just by coping and pasting the code available below the infographics (in most cases).

Infographics at one end allow most difficult information to present in a graphical format which is easy and fun to grasp by the targeted audience and at the same time this will encourage audience to share the information with their circles to spread information and help business to introduce with the new audience.

10.Surveys

This is one of the most powerful forms of content that will allow your targeted audience to trust you and follow you and your brand as a fan. The idea is to create some intelligent questions and survey within your industry about hot topics and then make it live for free. SEOmoz is the living example of it who does the SEO industry survey every year and put it live for people to use it.

This will not only help targeted audience to find data from your entity but this helps set your image as an expert and then you can easily sell the product/service you offer.

Discussed above are some of the most powerful form of content that can allow targeted audience to gather around your brand and then convert in to fans and customers but there are few ingredients that a brand should have in order to enjoy the benefits of content marketing that includes a level of transparency, a kick ass product/service and more or else they might not be able to stick the audience around their brand in the longer run.

About the Author:

Lalit Sharma is a digital marketer from India who works for “Ranking by SEO“. A company that offers high quality link building services to its clients.

Image Credit: 1.

Four big takeaways from Pew’s “State of the Media” report

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 08:39:07 +1100

[shared via Google Reader from PandoDaily]

Four things jump out from the Pew Research Center’s just-released “State of the News Media 2013” report. None of them are particularly good news for anyone in news publishing but they all point to a clear and easy-to-understand trend: Ads alone just ain’t going to cut it anymore; it’s officially time to be experimenting with paid content models; and the product itself – news – is increasingly being commoditized.

Google and Facebook are sucking up all the digital advertising oxygen

While the likes of Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget point to rising digital advertising revenues as cause for optimism among digital publishers, a close look at where those dollars are actually going is not so encouraging. Sadly for publishers, most digital ad spend is going to Google and Facebook (Twitter will no doubt soon join that top tier), and those two companies are also hogging the newly opened up mobile display ad opportunities. Six companies already account for 72 percent market share of mobile display ads, Pew notes, and none of them produce news. News publications are also losing local digital advertising.

Says Pew, “improved geo-targeting is allowing many national advertisers to turn to Google, Facebook and other large networks to buy ads that once might have gone to local news media. At the same time, Google and Facebook are also moving directly into local ad sales. Google is now the ad leader in search, display and mobile.” The takeaway for new and aspiring publishers: Don’t expect ads to keep you afloat.

Sponsored content is up sharply

The Atlantic, Forbes, BuzzFeed, and Gawker are all embracing sponsored content as a way to branch out beyond display ads. Okay, sometimes they call it “native advertising” (BuzzFeed) or “content-driven commerce” (Gawker) – and no-one wants to call it advertorial – but it all amounts to the same thing: a brand slapped on to special content that wouldn’t otherwise be produced.

At PandoDaily, we’ve got a twist on the model, creating series of stories based on editorially selected themes that sponsors then choose to back. All these efforts are in some part a response to the declining value of online display ads, and particularly banners, which are hopefully on their deathbed. Expect to see more such sponsored content – the category is going gangbusters, with Time, Hearst, and Conde Nast all building formats to run native ads.“Though it remains small in dollars, the category’s growth rate is second only to that of video,” Pew says. “Sponsorship ads rose 38.9 percent, to $1.56 billion; that followed a jump of 56.1 percent in 2011.”

Experiments with paid content reached a turning point in 2012

In 2012, people figured out that the New York Times’ porous paywall was actually a success, Andrew Sullivan showed that a community-supported site might be possible, raising more than $500,000 in a matter of weeks, and Marco Arment’s The Magazine became profitable in its first month, without selling ads of any kind. Just today, the first details about the Washington Post’s proposed paywall emerged. Katherine Weymouth, the Post’s publisher, said: “We’ve watched our peers in the industry, and we think the metered model is the best way to keep our reach while asking our readers to help pay for the quality journalism we are known for.”

Meanwhile, 450 of the US’s 1,380 daily newspapers have started or announced plans for some kind of paid content subscription or paywall plan, says Pew, in many cases opting for a New York Times-esque metered model, which allows a certain number of free visits before asking readers to pony up. “With digital ad revenue growing at an anemic 3 percent a year in the newspaper industry, digital subscriptions are seen as an increasingly vital component of any new business model for journalism – though, in most cases, they fall far short of actually replacing the revenue lost in advertising.” Expect to see a lot more action and experimentation in 2013.

News is being commoditized even more

Consider this sentence from Pew: “A growing list of media outlets, such as Forbes magazine, use technology by a company called Narrative Science to produce content by way of algorithm, no human reporting necessary.” This was only one sentence from Pew’s report, but it is a portentous one. Narrative Science automatically creates stories out of raw data that would otherwise have been written by human hands. More robots producing news means fewer humans needed for the task.

This year, it was Forbes, but it can’t be long until other publications – sports and business ones, especially – realize that an algorithm is cheaper than an actual reporter. That’s when news stories become commodities: easy to produce, easy to replicate, easy to distribute. Combine those factors with the decline of digital ad dollars and newsroom layoffs, and it’s no wonder that we are seeing a crisis in journalism. As Pew remarks, “This adds up to a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into its hands.”

[Image courtesy Jurgen Appelo]

Hamish McKenzie

Hamish McKenzie is a Baltimore-based reporter for PandoDaily who covers media, politics, and international startups. His first name is pronounced “hey-mish” and you can follow him on Twitter.

Build Your Own Arduino-Powered LED Clock

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 20:39:25 +1100

[shared via Google Reader from Mashable!]

If you’re looking for a weekend project, and you’re especially computer savvy, how about building an Arduino-powered LED clock?

A person with a creative mind, identified only as “Tobias,” developed a one-of-a-kind timekeeper, shown in the video above. The design incorporates 60 LED units, and hours, minutes and seconds can be displayed as a pattern of colors. An Arduino processor is the command center of the clock.

If you’re inspired to create your own, Tobias posted the step-by-step process online, including materials he used as well as a template. The project only cost him about $30 from materials on eBay. Note that the building process is not for every do-it-yourself warrior, however, and programming the device to work correctly may not be as easy as it looks. But if you’re familiar with Arduino projects it could be right up your alley.

Google Reader Is Closing—And People Are Absolutely Freaking Out (GOOG)

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 19:39:18 +1100

[shared via Google Reader from SAI]

Google, in another push to reduce and rationalize its sprawling lineup of Web apps, is closing a host of products.

The only one people care about: Google Reader. (Seriously, will anyone miss the Google Voice App for BlackBerry?)

Google is shuttering Reader, a product which allows people to quickly skim and read news articles from websites, as of July 1.

News-reader apps like Google Reader, which use a technology called RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, never got to critical mass. But they are used ferociously by people in the media and technology insiders, who depend on them to keep track of a large number of news sources. So they’re very upset, judging by the stunned reaction on Twitter. People are tagging their posts with “#savegooglereader” to signal their support for the product.

Twitter, in fact, is a large factor in what did RSS in—at least as far as consumers went. Clicking one button to follow a source is far easier than setting up an RSS feed in a news-reading app.

Oh, and by the way, do you know what Twitter CEO Dick Costolo did before he was Twitter CEO Dick Costolo? He was the CEO of a company called FeedBurner, which placed ads in RSS feeds. He sold it to Google in 2007 for $100 million, in what was likely the high-water mark for RSS.

RSS will likely remain for a long time as a back-end technology for Web publishing. But if Google couldn’t popularize it or turn it into a business, it’s probably time to call an end to RSS as a consumer phenomenon.

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

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The Creative Content Marketing Bar is Higher. Can You Reach It?

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:55:02 +1100

[shared via Google Reader from Online Marketing Blog]

The increasing popularity of the visual web as evidenced by the growth of sites like Pinterest and Instagram along with the recent updates to the Facebook News Feed and Google+ cover images has raised the bar on creative content marketing.

Not long ago, it was progressive just to create blog posts and a few social shares every day. Now so many brands have adopted a publisher model for content marketing that the web is flush with content marketing tactics.

Brands are hard pressed to stand out with their content marketing, often taking a “more is better” approach. As David Meerman Scott says, the marketing one hundred is now the marketing ten thousand.

The bar for marketing is definitely higher, not just in terms of the mechanical vs. meaningful brand effort at publishing useful content and engaging on the social web, but for sustaining high levels of content and user experience short and long term. Avinash Kaushik describes that expectation well: “You can no longer be good at just one thing, or two. It is a 10-thing world now (and maybe a 20-thing world soon).”

Sure, you can learn all the content marketing tactics and visual content techniques there are, but sometimes there are fundamental perspective changes that can make a world of difference in terms of how to approach the increasing demand for higher quality content over time. To that end, here are 4 key content marketing takeaways worth considering:

“Great Content Isn’t Great Until it’s Discovered, Consumed and Shared”

What good is an infographic, eBook or video investment unless you maximize reach and engagement? Buying ads to drive traffic is great for companies with massive advertising budgets, but that’s not most companies. Content Marketing that includes promotion in the planning process isn’t just for SEOs promoting infographics to their home-grown amplification networks, it’s a responsibility for any marketer that is to be held accountable for the performance of the content they’re producing.

Understanding how the target audience discovers, consumes and acts on content is a big move in the right direction for creating meaningful visual content over time.

“Facts Tell, Stories Sell”

Storytelling is what connects brands with consumers in a meaningful way. Every company has a story to tell, whether it’s the latest sexy tech or something most people consider boring. Online marketers should understand how each content object they create complements others and how consumer interaction with that content will advance the buyer along the journey.

Customer empathy will reveal a never ending source of rich stories about how the brand solutions solve problems for consumers and how those solutions will help consumers achieve their goals. We’re not selling hammers, we’re selling houses. We’re not selling insurance, we’re selling peace of mind.

Creative Content Marketing is About Results, Not Awards

It’s easy to get distracted with more creative marketing projects and aspire to making the next greatest content object and get recognized for it’s awesomeness. In the end, it’s the ability of that creative content to attract, engage and convert visitors to fans, prospects to buyers that drives business growth – not winning creative awards. Of course, if your creative content boosted marketing performance AND it’s creatively awesome, then why not? First things first.

Brand Leadership & Creativity + Customer Empathy = Content Marketing Results

The litany of content and now creative content marketing advice being published is finally starting to take customer insight and customer targeting into account. But an overemphasis on customer preferences for content can stifle content innovation. It’s a combination of understanding shifting consumer trends and customer preferences for content discovery, consumption and engagement plus brand content innovation that stands out.

Many customers simply don’t know what they want and it’s up to marketers to be creative about telling new and interesting stories with their content. The combination of customer targeting and creative content innovation is what will make some companies stand out amongst the sheer volume of new content being created by brands.

When you execute on daily content and visual marketing tactics, do you have the basic questions of “why” and for “who” answered? Are you planning content according to audience information needs? Are you building promotion into the content creation process? Are you investing in creative for thei right reasons? Who’s driving your content marketing bus?

I’ll be presenting on this topic at SES New York in a few weeks (Thursday March 28th at 9:30am) with examples of winning and failing in the creative content marketing game. I hope to see you there.

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How much is a piece of content worth?

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 20:39:31 +1100

[shared via Google Reader from PandoDaily]

The publishing industry has changed immeasurably in the last decade, and its massive transformation can be summed up in one question… “How much is a piece of content worth?”

This complex question was brought into the national dialogue very recently when noted journalist Nate Thayer wrote a scathing condemnation of an editor for The Atlantic who dared ask him to contribute for free.

Thayer’s frustration has become a rallying cry for many freelance journalists who feel that their work is undervalued. He claims he was once offered $125,000 to write six articles a year. So, when a new editor offered him zero dollars to write, he was quite upset. [Note: an earlier version of this story cited his rate at $500/article, though he has no official market rate].

In fairness, Nate Thayer is an exceptional journalist — he has risked his life to cover Cambodia, and not a lot of people can say that they have risked their lives for anything. If we live in a world where people like Nate can’t exist to cover wars, corruption, etc, then the world will be worse.

But, at the end of the day, publishing is a business. As I’ve said many times, it needs to be treated like one, and so Nate Thayer has a right to understand how digital publishing interacts with revenue.

To be clear, I do not claim to be the world authority on Editorial, Advertising, or Tech — but I am a self-anointed authority on how those three things come together. And so… here is my answer to Nate Thayer (and everyone else) as we ponder the question “how much is my piece of content worth?”

There are three major ways in which an individual piece of content can contribute to the revenue of its digital publisher:

1. Contributing to Measured Reach and Brand Efficacy

A digital publisher begins its existence by trying to grow unique visitors as fast as it can, in order to cross “the line.”

What is “the line”?

Specifically, it is the minimum number of unique visitors (as measured by ComScore) that a website must achieve each month in order to be viable in the eyes of major brand advertising agencies.

And every website has a line that they must cross.

For niche categories like Fashion, the line may be relatively low — just 1 or 2 million visitors. For larger categories, the line is harder to achieve.

At Bleacher Report, we found the line to be about three million unique visitors. Once we reached that point, we hired our VP of Sales, and our revenue increased significantly. Several agencies with which we spoke were comfortable advertising on a sports website with three million unique visitors, though some expressed that five million was more realistic.

An individual piece of content is valuable when it helps its publisher get past that line. Because if the publisher is on the wrong side of the line, then they cannot build a sales team and earn premium CPM rates. And no publishing business can thrive on third party sales.

This, of course, is terrible news for bloggers.

Very few blogs can earn the traffic necessary to cross any line. So even if a story goes viral and attracts a million visitors to the blog, it will still prove far less valuable without the context of a larger publisher who can hit that critical mass.

This is also bad for “blog networks” who can try to package multiple sites under one “umbrella” traffic number — but many advertisers still prefer to work with large individual websites. This was the great flaw in SBNation, our largest competitor who struggled to grow revenue at our pace. No individual blog in their network achieved great scale, which is why their CEO Jim Bankoff corrected course in launching TheVerge under one brand domain.

It also explains Buzz Media’s weakness and recent job cuts.

Crossing “the line” is essential. But so too is building a great brand.

Unfortunately for Nate Thayer, The Atlantic already has a great brand, so he alone will not move mountains for them. For that reason, newer publications like PandoDaily, TheVerge, or Bleacher Report can get more mileage out of “big name” contributors who can do more to advance the brand.

In fact, The Atlantic can probably do more to improve the author’s brand, not the other way around — just ask Anne Marie Slaughter.

The great dream that many bloggers once advanced… that big publishers would give way to a decentralized “sea of blogs” was always an untenable one. Because advertising is the lifeblood of publishing, and no blog will ever be able to cross “the line.”

Not now. Not ever. It takes a lot of content to move a website past that barrier on a month-in-month-out basis.

2. Contributing eyeballs to the site

This is the easiest value to measure with regard to a piece of content. Everyone who understands the basics of advertising — heck, even a venture capitalist — knows how this equation works.

Impressions x CPM Rate = Dollars

To bring this to life, let’s use an example… A very successful article will attract 100,000 readers. If there are two impressions per page and a $1.00 CPM, then that article will generate $200. For most blogs, those rates are a best-case scenario. It would be very difficult to make a living in such a manner.

But for a successful website that has crossed “the line” and employs a strong sales force, then those rates could be much higher. Let’s say $5 CPM’s: An article for such a site might be worth $1,000 if it attracts 100,000 readers.

Could a tyical rate of $500 per article work in such a scenario? Probably not. Because then the publisher has a “gross margin” of about 50 percent, which will likely not be enough to pay for the rest of the operation, starting with the salesperson who will take his or her commission right off the top.

But it gets even worse for the Nate Thayers of the world.

Even if his article is published on the day of a major advertising campaign that can generate $5 CPM’s, that does not guarantee that his article will partake in that campaign. Maybe his article went live at noon, right when the advertising campaign ended. Or maybe his article pertained to a presidential election, but the advertising campaign revolved around sports.

This variable highlights exactly how many things have to go right in order for his article to generate that $5 CPM:

The article has to: (a) be a hit, (b) be on a site with great advertising salespeople, (c) run during an advertising campaign, and (d) run on a day when advertising inventory was constricted enough such that some other article would not have been able to take its place.

This quadruple-coincidence means that his story — however great its literary merit — probably won’t be worth the $500 for which he is paid. And even if it were, how can a publisher know that he will consistently generate such value?

Yes, these numbers were quasi-hypothetical. And, evidently, some people do pay him $500 per article. Who knows whether the newsroom editor cutting that check has any idea how the economics of content work — given the collapse of publishing, I’ll wager that most do not understand the relationship between ‘content’ and ‘business’.

Here’s my opinion…

I have no idea how an article can justify a $500 price tag in 99.9 percent of cases.

Is it worth it for ESPN to pay Bill Simmons more than that? Probably. He is a cultural icon. The same goes with Tom Friedman. But people like Nate Thayer are far from being household names or cultural icons, and so they have to play by the rules of economics.

And I think it is unlikely that the average piece by a quality freelance journalist is going to generate more than $500 of revenue on a consistent basis. Let alone the $5,000+ it probably needs to generate in order to contribute to a profitable overall business.

If the WSJ and NYT digital subscription model starts working for more publishers, it may change the model. But I would not count on that scaling.

3. Contributing directly to sponsorship opportunities

This is more of an exceptional case than it is a strategy for writers like Thayer. But it is real.

Assuming that a large publisher can attract large advertising clients, then they can start to create sponsored content. This is all the ‘rage’ in New Media as sites like BuzzFeed shine a spotlight on it. Though there is nothing particularly complicated about it.

An advertiser may want your site to create special content around a brand-relevant message, and they may be willing to pay a lot for it.

At Bleacher Report, we had a major automotive client commission a Fantasy Football series, and for that reason we were able to pay Arian Foster — one of the most famous athletes in America — to star in the content. I won’t tell you how much we paid him. But you can guess that it was more than $500.

This is a great opportunity for writers to align their efforts with that of the advertisers in a very direct manner.

And while most writers must still understand that the publisher could just use some other writer instead of them to create the sponsored content, there is usually a fair middle ground. Most publishers pay more to create sponsored content, because it just seems reasonable when it contributes to a seven-figure check.

So, in conclusion…

If you are a freelance journalist, don’t expect to get paid $500 per article. The economics of print journalism in the 1990s may have been different, but in today’s digital age, they are what they are.

It takes hundreds (if not thousands) of articles to cross “the line” each month. The typical article will directly monetize tens not hundreds of dollars worth of eyeballs. And sponsored content is still a new concept.

To be honest, Nate Thayer’s article was probably worth a lot closer to $0 than it was to $500.

And while he deserves our respect for his willingness to risk life and limb in the name of his craft…nobody — not Nate Thayer, not The Atlantic, and not I — can do a damn thing about that great leveler:

The market.

[Editor’s Note: For another take on this issue, see Paul Carr’s recent post, “The future of journalism: It’s time to pick a side.”]

[Illustration by Hallie Bateman]

Bryan Goldberg

Bryan is an entrepreneur in San Francisco. He founded Bleacher Report, and currently advises several startups. Previously, he was a failed investment banker. You can follow him on Twitter.

Hands-on Guide to Social Media Channel Selection

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 20:24:18 +1100

[shared via Google Reader from Servant of Chaos]

I have always been a fan of the CMO.com guide to channel selection. Each year for the last few years, the CMO.com folks have put together a handy guide that explains exactly how each of the main social media channels can be best used.

This year, rather than producing an infographic (as in previous years), the guide has become interactive.

You simply select a social network and mouse over the various good, ok and bad options to learn more about how they can be used effectively.

Unfortunately, the guide only covers Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and YouTube. Which is a shame, as marketers seeking to put their content to work are likely to find niche social networks will deliver more bang for the buck. However, if you just want to validate your tactics and share that with your boss, this hands-on guide to social media channel selection may be just what you need to share internally.

Feeling Lost In LinkedIn? 5 Elements of An Optimized LinkedIn Profile

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 23:09:11 +1100

[shared via Google Reader from Online Marketing Blog]

LinkedIn has quickly achieved top status as “the” business to business social networking destination. In fact, less than two years after going public, LinkedIn’s value has risen from $4 billion to over $18 billion.

Not only has LinkedIn’s value increased significantly, but their capabilities and engagement have as well. The same Wall Street Journal article that included the valuation above also shared the following insight:

In the most recent quarter LinkedIn’s page views have risen 67%
LinkedIn’s new “content” features include news aggregation and hosting of expert blog posts

If your company hasn’t quite figured out the secret sauce needed to really make your executives’ LinkedIn profiles shine or how to make meaningful connections, you’re in luck. Whether you want to increase your brand or individual online visibility, this post shares insights into the 5 elements of an optimized LinkedIn profile.

#1 –Use An Appropriate Image

Your LinkedIn profile image should accurately reflect who you are as a professional. When users are searching for you or land on your profile your picture is one of the first things that they see.

LinkedIn profile photo don’ts:

Grainy or Pixelated
The Self Portrait
Poorly Lit
Inappropriate for Your Industry
Party Picture
No Picture

#2 – Optimize Your Headline

Adding keywords to your headline that you want to be associated with can improve your searchability within LinkedIn and beyond. While it may be tempting to add extra filler words it can actually hurt your optimization for key phrases. Here are two best practices for updating your headline for maximum impact:

1 – Multiple Titles: Create a headline that displays the different titles someone is likely to search for related to what you do. Mari Smith’s LinkedIn profile is a great example of this tactic.

2 – Descriptive: Write a descriptive headline that illustrates what you do with keywords filtered in. TopRank CEO Lee Odden’s profile utilizes this approach.

#3 – Update Relevant Experience

It’s easy to fall into the trap of simply grabbing the “about us” text from your company website and utilizing it for your position description. However, there is an opportunity within the work experience section on LinkedIn to share a little bit about your company, as well as share a list of your responsibilities and accomplishments in current and previous positions. Consider it a timeline of your growth and evolution as a professional.

Make sure that you flesh out as much information as you can for each relevant position that you’ve had. Connie Bensen of Dell provides a great overview of what she’s accomplished during her time with the company as well as a list of her specialties.

#4 – Beef Up the Summary Section

The LinkedIn Profile Summary can be used to provide additional descriptions about your experience, expertise, awards, etc. The Summary is also the section of your profile which has the highest character count. This is where you can give people a glimpse into who you are, what your background is, what you’re looking to accomplish, and additional places they can find you online or contact you.

LinkedIn Summary also presents an opportunity to include links to content that you’ve created (or participated in creating) and displays them. For example, Pam Didner from Intel has included links to a few of the presentations she’s given at conferences to provide visitors with more engaging examples of her work and point of view. A presentation is far more engaging than a block of text.

#5 – Properly Utilize Skills/Expertise & Recommendations

When someone endorses you for a particular skill or area of expertise it shows up below your work experience on your LinkedIn profile. Next to each endorsement you’ll see the number of people that have endorsed you for any individual skill set. If you find that the skills listed on your profile don’t accurately represent your capabilities you can always go into that area of your profile and either add or remove individual items from your list.

A good recommendation is going to take a little more effort than simply clicking to endorse your connections or ask that they do the same for you. If you’re going to ask for recommendations I recommend that you always personalize the message. While LinkedIn allows you to send a recommendation request to 200 people at a time, a personalized approach can go a long way. Remember that you’re asking your connections to set aside time to say nice things about you in a public forum, so your communication with them should be sincere and appreciative.

Every professional can benefit from a properly optimized LinkedIn profile in many ways. Whether you want to connect with others in your industry, find a new position, learn more about your customers, or continue to network with those you know in real life there is no question that LinkedIn has tremendous value.

As you continue to improve the content within your profile you’ll notice that your profile ranking, searchability, and number of people viewing your profile will most likely increase. The more visibile you are, the more visible your company will be.

What have you found to be the most effective tactic for promoting your business and for professional networking on LinkedIn?

Image via Shutterstock.

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When It Comes to Analytics, Are You Doing Enough?

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 22:39:29 +1100

[shared via Google Reader from SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog]

Posted by JoannaLord

We all know analytics are important. As marketers, we spend a great deal of time in the data. We all, hopefully, consider ourselves part analyst in many ways. At the foundation of a good marketing team, there is an accessible analytics platform that is set up to provide actionable insights. We should always feel that the data is just a log in away. We should feel we have the data to make great recommendations, troubleshoot issues, and forecast our efforts accurately. We should all feel totally in control of our analytics, and use them daily.

But then unicorns jump out of pink clouds and fly around our heads, because that is simply not the case. Ever.

Maybe a handful of you work on teams that are doing all they can do as it relates to analytics. Maybe some of you have even staffed your team with a handful of full-time analysts. More likely, you may all be trying to use data in your jobs, but not doing it as thoroughly or as effectively as you wish you were.

So let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the different types of analytics and common places to start with them. I believe the number one reason marketing teams aren’t as data-driven as they should be is because data is intimidating. However, knowledge trumps intimidation. The more you know, the more comfortable you will be to put on that analyst hat. And analyst hats are cool. So let’s jump in.

What are the different types of analytics?

The goal of all data analytics is to leave us more educated than before so we can perform better in the future. Sounds simple, right? Well, not really. A common misconception among marketers is that all analysis is equal, which isn’t exactly the truth. There are actually three types of analytics; predictive, prescriptive, and descriptive. Most marketers spend the majority, if not all, of their time on only one of them: descriptive. As you can imagine, that leaves a lot of awesome data and innovation on the table.

Let’s run through the three and talk through the differences…

Descriptive analytics:

Descriptive analytics is when we data mine our historical performance for insights. Often, we are just looking to get context or tell a story with the data. This is most certainly at the heart of what most marketers do on a daily basis, particularly in their web analytics. We look at how we are doing, and we try to understand what is happening and how that is affecting everything else.

Typical questions include: “How did that campaign do?” “What sort of performance did we see last quarter?” “How did that site’s down time affect other performance KPIs?”

Predictive analytics:

Predictive analytics takes that one step further. It’s less about the questions, and more about the suggestions. It involves looking at your historical data, and coming up with predictions on what to expect next. This is most readily used in our industry when we try to predict how next month will perform based on this month’s performance (month over month predictions or MoM). While it seems like an obvious next step for analysis, it’s amazing to me just how many marketers stop at descriptive, and fail to push into this arena of predictive analytics. Often, it’s because this involves predictive modeling which can, again, be very intimidating.

Typical statements include: “Based on the last few months of data and our consistent growth, we can expect to increase another 25%,” or, “Knowing our seasonal drop trend, we can expect to slow down by 10% in the next 6 weeks.”

Prescriptive analytics:

This is where things can get fun. Prescriptive analytics takes forecasting and predictions a step further. With prescriptive analytics, you automatically mine data sets, and apply business rules or machine learning so you can make predictions faster and subsequently prescribe a next move. Marketers tend not to think of this “as their responsibility.” That is for someone else to think about and solve. I think that is a super dangerous mindset, given we are on the hook for hitting the company’s business KPIs. Prescriptive analytics can be a very powerful catalyst for success at a company.

Typical questions include: “What if we could predict when customers leave us before they do, what could we surface prior to that to change their minds?” “What if we can predict when they are ripe for a second purchase and suggest it along side other products?” “What if we can predict what they would be most likely to share with a friend, how would we surface that?”

So, are you doing enough?

I ask this because somewhere along the way, marketers began to believe that descriptive analytics was our job, and “that other stuff” was for someone else to figure out. At SEOmoz, we are working hard to have each team working on all three types of data analysis in a variety of capacities. It’s not easy. There is a stereotype out there that you have to break through. Data can be fun. It can be accessible, and it can be part of everyone’s job. In fact, it really should be.

Imagine this for a second: just think about how much could get done if every team felt empower to tell a story with the data, make predictions off of it, and then brainstormed ways to operationalize that data to prescribe next steps for the biggest gains.

That is what being an analyst means and I believe we are all becoming more of an analyst as this industry continues to evolve. The platforms out there make it easier than ever, and the competition is more intense then ever. Why not be part of something more than just telling a story with the data? Why not suggest the next move? Why not create crazy ways to use the data? I think it’s time we all put our analyst hat back on and had a little fun with it.

Hopefully, breaking down the types of analytics above is a great reminder that there is more than just descriptive analytics. At the very least, you can share with your team to inspire them to do more with the data in front of them. Best of luck to you fellow data lovers!

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Content as Currency and Other Thoughts From #Snowcial

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 12:24:55 +1100

[shared via Google Reader from Logic+Emotion]

I’m in Lake Tahoe this week combining some business and down-time and recently spoke at “Snowcial“—billed as “SXSW for the snow sports and hospitality industry, it attracts a really cool cross section of people who span marketing, technology and even journalism. If you love skiing or snowboarding and marketing/technology, it’s worth considering for your event calendar. I kicked off day one yesterday with a short talk about content, convergence and connectivity. Below are a few themes from my talk:

Content As Currency

There’s a good reason everyone is talking about the role of *content these days but you have to understand the psychology of it all. Thanks to social networks, people share interesting, entertaining or even informative content because it makes them look good. There’s a reason why the word “meme” has “me” in it. So it’s not enough just to produce content—your content has to be designed for sharing. I like to think of content in today’s hyper connected world as being “snackable”—sending out bits and bites of content which can be digested and shared rapidly. The reason why we’re seeing a revolution in visual content which is designed for social newsfeeds and mobile is based on this core understanding of why people like, share and engage around content.

Everyone Can And Will Publish

I shared a recent experience I had with Jeep where I tweeted for help and was not only responded to but had my issue resolved through their customer care service which was facilitated through my initial interactions on Twitter. This is by no means a new model, but clearly Jeep had a process in place and was able to close the loop with me efficiently. This is an area brands will continue to grapple with as people move from traditional ways to initiate contact with brands and go directly to public forums. The obvious follow up question is how does this scale? My answer is figure it out because it’s not going away. And yes, my car is working just fine now.

Insights > Influence

For all the hype around influence—we’ve still largely got it wrong. We should be looking at analyzing who and what are driving conversations in the same context as we might run a focus group. Technologies that allow us to analyze conversations and how they spread and who influences them can provide great insights if we know what we are looking for. For example in working with the association that represents US dairy farmers—we analyzed conversations in forums and found these emerging. As we audited the content the organization was producing—we identified opportunities make future content initiatives more relevant to what people were talking about.

You Don’t Not Need An App For That

There’s no doubt that we are living in an App economy, but it’s time to step back and ask ourselves if we need an app for every idea. Unless that idea involves significant functionality, it might not need to be developed as a stand alone app creating yet another format to maintain. My team has been developing content solutions using responsive design techniques so the design reacts to the format it’s being viewed it. It’s not a perfect solution for every development issue, but worth tapping where it makes sense.

It’s All Converging

Lastly I talked about the convergence of media models and marketing tactics. First from a broad perspective inspired by Altimeter’s model of converged media, but also ad it applies to new digital advertising formats which blur hard lines. Facebook sponsored posts are a perfect example of how paid, earned, and owned dynamics all come together. You can read more about that on the unofficial All Facebook blog who covered my talk.

Looking forward to hitting the slopes again before I leave!

*ConAgra is an Edelman Digital client

2013: The Year Everything Converged

On Facebook, Lines Between Paid, Earned, Owned Media Become Blurred

Twitter gives new meaning to ‘snowcial’ media

It’s Time to Re-Invent Advertising

Thoughts On Altimeter’s Digital Influence Report

Google Explains How Search Works, Complete With Live Spam Slideshow

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 11:09:53 +1100

[shared via Google Reader from TechCrunch]

Google today updated its Inside Search site, its homepage for all things search, with a handful of educational and interactive features that explain in layman’s terms how Google’s Search works. Did you know the web had over 30 trillion pages, by the way? Or that Google supports over 100 billion searches every month? Or that Google’s index is over 100 million gigabytes? If you find factoids like that interesting, you’ll probably enjoying a scroll through the new “How Search Works” live infographic, which also contains a few clickable links to charts and graphs showing things like the rise of spam, and milestones in Google’s spam-fighting techniques, among other things.

The update is something of a follow-up to last year’s detailed look into how Gmail works called The Story of Send. For the most part, it’s really high-level stuff here, designed to make the details of technology approachable and understandable to a more mainstream audience looking to gain a better understanding of what happens after they type into the search box.

The new sections of the site include not only the graphical explanation of Google Search’s inner workings, but also details about Google’s major algorithms and features, a list of Google policies, plus a 43-page document that explains how Google evaluates its results. (OK, that part might be a little more in-depth, I’ll admit.)

But the best part? The live spam slideshow. Here, you can see screenshots of spam Google has removed from its search results only minutes ago. Dozens upon dozens of them, in fact. It’s almost like getting a real-time view into Google itself, which is actually pretty fascinating.

Now if only we could see what people were googling for in real-time, we would really….wait…

Nah, that might be terrifying.

Tumblr Becomes the 4th Place for Brands

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 20:39:38 +1100

[shared via Google Reader from Digital Influence Mapping Project]

I just spent the last hour browsing my dashboard in Tumblr, “hearting” many posts and reblogging a couple that live up to what I am trying to publish in my Tumblr. I follow artists, designers, comic book artists, architects, map enthusiasts, photographers of empty spaces and much more. For me, it’s about inspiration. And pausing from the frenetic pace and tension of my life to remember what I care about deeply.

“EVENT: Don’t miss my interview this week with Tumblr founder, David Karp.

A Conversation with David Karp, Founder of Tumblr: Brands Connecting Inside the Index of Passions — Ogilvy & Mather Theater NYC February 20 -Time: 10:30am – 11:30am

Join us as for a candid conversation with David Karp who has created one of the fastest growing communities of people sharing what they care about most. How can brands participate in Tumblr with meaningful brand or business impact and how do we do it without spoiling the beauty of Tumblr? Join Social@Ogilvy’s John Bell as he asks David Karp about his vision for brands and Tumblr.”

Tumblr is a place of passions, things we care about. Sure, it’s about “creators” but a broad, generous definition of creativity. As such it’s a network of people who care about the affinity that draws them there.

Many brands are more than experimenting with the site. You can browse some of the brand pages via the Brands on Tumblr page. The advantages are clear:

Tumblr hosts interest and passion-driven content through the personalized dashboard
Connecting with relevant microcommunities will become essential for brands in the next phase of data-driven social media marketing
Tumblr pages are indexed by Google and enhance a brand’s discoverability
They can be masked within a brand domain and therefore be part of the corporate domain
The network of 150 million, highly engaged users has appreciable reach and a built-in social behavior - reblogging
The simplicity of the platform supports brand ambitions to embrace content marketing
They visual design of the service lends itself to visual expression and emotion
There are some simple advertising solutions – two – that help brands be discovered

The 4^th Place

If Facebook is the key social network that brands want to master due to its broad global reach, Twitter is likely number two due to broad global relevance, it’s influencer status and suitability for service brand care. YouTube comes in next as the defacto platform for serving up video inside the world’s #2 search engine.

Pinterest? Instagram? Tumblr stands a better chance at earning the 4^th place position in social brand architecture for companies who know they need a searchable content place and who want to be inside a network of passions.

There are over 93 million Tumblrs (Tumblr blogs), users average 23 minutes on the platform per session and they clock 18 billion page views a month. It’s got reach and engagement. (Get some strong stats here)

Many arts-related brands have made a home here. Fashion brands are a strong niche.

Burberry: they established the Art of the Trench, the emotional “home” of the brand and are asking people to submit their photos of their ‘trench.’

Chanel: they keep it simple and post images that people can lust after and reblog

Dolce & Gabbana: An endless flow of fashion covers and spreads ready for reblogging and ‘hearting.’

Tory Burch: Torypedia is personal and luscious. Big, rebloggable pictures which si just what we want from fashion

Urban Outfitters: their pages start with the UP Community which aggregates a growing collection of pages that tie seamlessly into the ecommerce site. Check out the Swim Look Book in their site. Now check out the Tumblr.

Not just Fashion

Now is the time to explore in Tumblr. Brands like Ford, IBM, Amex and others are exploring how to use great content within this interest community.

The Lincoln Motor Company: our team did this work and created a poetic and beautiful site for Lincoln that taps the heritage of the brand.

Beautiful Creatures, the Movie: Hollywood embraces Tumblr as the platform of choice for new releases. Think about all those wasted dollars creating the Flash sites of yesteryear.

Coca Cola: the brand that embraced content marketing (see Content 2020) brings you a tumblr full of shareable images and gifs

Whole Foods: the Dark Rye Tumblr aggregates “pioneers of unconventional ideas…” thus building on the brand story of Whole Foods as a disrupter.

I know the guys/gals at Tumblr and have a lot of faith in their plans. They are embracing brands while staying committed to their original vision of a platform for creative-types. They have created an index of passions in my own words. That means emotion is part of what you will find there and as brands re-embrace the power of emotion and, perhaps, how to create great brand experience in a social world, Tumblr is the place to do that. They are innovating and working with brands now. That’s why our team participates on their A-List and produces Tumblr-based ideas for Ford, IBM and other brands.

Facebook and Twitter serve to point to other content. Tumblr is content.

Tumblr: David Karp’s $800 Million Art Project

Tumblr’s new notification feed: Is Tumblr trying to one-up Facebook?

Oh, The Places Tumblr Can Go