Archive for the 'Social Media' Category

2008 Online Marketing Summit

Published
by
Tom Dressler
 
on July 24, 2008 
in Customer Acquisition, Email Marketing, Lead Generation, Online Marketing, Search Marketing and Social Media
. 0 Comments

We are excited to be attending the 2008 Online Marketing Summit in Atlanta on August 12th, which is an educational event for marketing professionals.  This year, the topics include:

  • Website Strategy
  • Customer Life-Cycle and Loyalty Marketing
  • Search Engine Marketing
  • Demand Generation
  • Email Marketing
  • Social Media Strategies

A colleague and I are attending this event in hopes of honing our strategic thinking initiatives. The importance of knowledge-based decision making is critical in today’s economic environment. I think that the sessions offered in this summit will help us greatly with our goals and initiatives when we return.

I’m excited to get involved in the Complete Website Strategy session for a chance to understand user experience and how to improve it.  I am conflicted about whether to attend the Social Media Strategies session or the one one Behavioral Targeting and Technology. The first is geared towards learning how leading companies build online communities and leverage the latest Web 2.0 technologies to proactively engage customers.  The latter focuses on how experience-driven web initiatives can succeed with a combination of online marketing strategies and a technology infrastructure. Please leave comments to suggest which you think would be most beneficial.

This busy day will end with a much needed Happy Hour, with drinks on OMS!  Hopefully I’ll be able to remember the day’s lessons so I can reflect back after we return!

Video Ads on YouTube Coming?

Published
by
Eric Dudley
 
on July 16, 2008 
in Branding, Customer Acquisition, Media Buying, Online Marketing and Social Media
. 0 Comments

YouTubeYouTube is proving to be a challenging advertising platform for Google. Google acquired YouTube in 2006, signaling big ambitions for online video advertising. However, they are running into a series of problems with copyright infringement issues and the fact that many online agencies and advertisers are still weary of this relatively new medium.

Some of the snags Google is running into include:

  • Advertisers are reluctant to put their ads on YouTube due to fear of questionable content of amateur videos. For example, can you imagine a Folgers video ad prior to watching “Coffee causes heart attacks”? Or a Disney family friendly ads displayed before some provocative video of a celebrity?
  • Copyright litigation. Viacom Inc. sued Google last year because unauthorized television and movie clips were posted by YouTube users.
  • Inefficient sales process. The rapid growth of Google has hindered the sales systems.

Google has launched “Operation Spaghetti” to unclutter the mess that YouTube has been for them. Even if these problems are solved, will advertisers see a benefit to attaching ads to online videos on YouTube? This would be an extremely cumbersome process if we had to evaluate each ad prior to placing a video ad for our clients.

  • Will YouTube filter videos for suitable advertisers? Maybe
  • Will it rely on the YouTube community? Doubtful!
  • Perhaps a combination. We’ll see…

In the meantime, agencies and advertisers running video ads have other options. And knowing Google, they have a plan already in the works to further monetize YouTube. Stay tuned.

How to Develop a Social Media Marketing Strategy

Published
by
Eric Dudley
 
on July 10, 2008 
in Social Media
. 1 Comment

Although relatively new, social media and social networking have become integral to Internet marketing. If you are considering using this new marketing channel, but don’t know where or how to begin, then you may find the following suggestions helpful.

Developing a Social Media Marketing Strategy: Where to Begin…

Define your goals. What are the goals of your organization? Do you want to build your brand and increase the number of targeted visitor to your website? Do you want to improve communication among customers, employees and other stakeholders? Do you want to strengthen your relationships and increase profitability? Determining exactly what you want to accomplish through a social media strategy will drive prioritization of your actions.

Define your initiatives. How can you use social media marketing and social networking to improve how a particular function is performed or how the entire organization performs? List appropriate programs, initiatives and projects that rely on social media and social networking and how they relate to your business goals. For example if you

Implement and Evaluate. Once you have begun your social media marketing and networking strategy, you can begin to evaluate how it is meeting your organizations’ goals. Interaction and engagement are key elements of building trust in a brand. The beauty of social media marketing is the opportunity it offers for the interaction and engagement that customers desire today.

Consider the amazing growth of the following:

facebook
FaceBook: In 2007, Facebook had an estimated 65 million users, a 120% increase over the previous year. It was the seventh most visited site worldwide with an average of 250,000 new registrations per day. More than half of active users return daily for at least 20 minutes per visit, racking up 65 billion page views per month.

myspaceMySpace:More than 300 million users visited MySpace in 2007, an increase of 4% over the previous year. It is the fifth most visited site worldwide, averaging 320,000 new registrations per day.

YouTubeYouTube:Every day, more than 100 million YouTube videos are played. Approximately 100,000 new videos were added in 2007. It is the second most visited site worldwide.

LinkedInLinkedIn:The darling of the business community, LinkedIn has more than 18 million users with more than a million new members joining every month. In 2007, LinkedIn experienced a growth rate of a little over 270%.

Not only should you monitor your own social media activities, it is also useful to continually monitor your customers’ and potential customers’ social media activities. Web analytics data, as well as active involvement in key social media sites, will help you collect quantitative and qualitative information in order to understand and adjust to the activities and goals of your customers.

These suggestions assume a “top down” model where the organization’s leaders implement and lead the adoption of blogs, wikis and social networking systems. However, you may experience a “bottom up” adoption model where your employees spontaneously engage in social networking and it rises to the level of an organizational initiative. In this case, a collaborative strategy process that engages employees already taking advantage of social media can provide tremendous insight into ways to use these tools and techniques to reach your business goals.

What’s your experience been with Social Media Marketing? Please comment below.

How can you survive an economic downturn?

Published
by
Tom Dressler
 
on April 10, 2008 
in Social Media
. 0 Comments

According to Forrester…

Q1 was rough with consumer spending in the US dropping, hurting both US and global brands, and with stocks in a tailspin every time anyone used the word “recession.”

In March, Forrester asked its CMO Panel how the downturn would affect their budgets. More than one hundred panel members, with an average marketing budget of $83 million, responded that they expect their CFOs to demand an average cut by 3%. They said they would save on branding, advertising, and traditional media, while keeping budgets for loyalty programs, marketing technology, and new media mostly untouched.

Employ agencies that connect with consumers. Traditional agencies excel at above-the-line mass marketing — the line items you want to cut. Forrester believes that the agency of the future will excel at understanding your consumers, involving them in defining the brand and spreading the message, and in making them loyal brand advocates — supporting those budget items you are keeping strong. Some agencies are on the path to connecting with consumers via social networks. Is your agency, or should you switch to a strong partner in these rough times?

Start experimenting with online video. Traditional media is getting into the perfect storm: Consumer attention and trust is at an all-time low, and advertisers are cutting both ad budgets and old media budgets. To survive, they need to target ads and content to individual households and consumers. While Time Warner, Comcast, Disney, and many others will speed up their trials in this field, marketing leaders should get ready for the biggest change since color TV. How? By experimenting with Web video, to understand which processes, content, and customer intelligence you will need when television offers the same functions.

Invest in intelligence. The name of the new marketing game: targeting. Marketing leaders have voted with their wallets to reduce the two large budget items that show the biggest waste. To get the most from their reduced budgets, they need to understand their clients better — their (media) behaviors, attitudes, needs, and social connections.

This requires investments in marketing technology like CRM, in analytics, and in training. We are glad to see that CMOs kept these line items intact.

We believe that these actions are critical for every marketing leader’s success.

Social Networking in “Plain English”

Published
by
Kyle Bumgardner
 
on April 8, 2008 
in Online Marketing and Social Media
. 2 Comments

I was recently invited to speak in “Plain English” on the topic of online Social Networking for Businesses as part of a quarterly program hosted by Womble Carlyle, one of the nation’s largest and most innovative law firms.

Our discussion outlined best practices and marketing options available to businesses in social networks as well as an analysis of the potential legal risks facing companies in this space. As expected, the interesting pairing of marketing innovation and legal perspective…drew a diverse crowd of bankers (event held in uptown Charlotte, NC), entrepreneurs and even a few innovative small business owners. Our panel discussed and shared a collection of definitions, case studies, and a few humorous examples of social networking gone bad (Second Life banking crisis). Overall, the event seemed to satisfy the expectations and curiosity of the audience…there were plenty of “head nods” and notes-taken. Following the event, I eagerly awaited the anticipated growth of my social network from the 120 attendees…through LinkedIn and Facebook requests…which was the final call-to-action from our panel discussion. While, I’m still waiting for the wave of “Friend” requests, I have received a steady stream of feedback (mostly positive) and more importantly, a common theme continues to arise:

How can I explain social networking in 2 minutes or less?

While this question, indicates that our panel may have missed the mark of defining social networking in Plain English… I’ll take the feedback as an opportunity for improvement. In reality, explaining online marketing concepts can be a challenge for busy executives and marketers who need to create vision within their organizations in an ever-changing industry. So, in posing the question to my social network, I stumbled upon an interesting group, Called Common Craft, who takes visual explanation of difficult marketing concepts to a whole new level… Check out the video below, entitled “Social Networking in Plain English.” By the way, The full video of our panel discussion will be available at WCSR.com/WombleTech soon. Enjoy!