By now, it’s clear in the minds of webmasters and Web site owners that SEO (search engine optimization) is important to some degree. For many responsible for their companies online property, the full impact of SEO can still be somewhat difficult to understand and make clear, especially when they are asked to build an ROI statement, against the optimization investment of getting an expert on board.  Just the other week, we spent an incredible amount of time helping one of our client contacts in building ROI statements around SEO that were coupled with forecasts and divisional impact.  Though it sounds like an arduous task, it was what was necessary to convince all internal players that a full SEO campaign was what we needed.

From time to time we do come across people who have posted examples or analyses, if used in the right setting that can be used as the item that convinces organization leaders to forge ahead, with their own SEO campaign and today we found a great piece by Mike Ramsey, of Nifty Marketing, on his analysis of title tags and business ranking on Google local search (O-Pack) and Google Places.

Snippets of Mike’s findings:

• 22 of the 28 High Ranking Places listings (79%) had the keywords in the website title tag.

• Whereas 12 of the 28 Low Ranking Places listings (43%) had the keywords in the website title tag.
• 17 of the 28 High Ranking listings (61%) have the Business Name in the website Title Tag.
• 15 of the 28 Low Ranking Places listings (53%) have the Business Name in the website Title Tag.

The report is filled with insight such as the above, but the summary of Mike’s findings show that if business owners do not have an  optimized Web site, they rank lower on Google’s local search query.  This is compelling stuff when trying to build the argument around SEO pros and cons. You can read more of Mike Ramsey’s piece here.

The handling of comments and user reviews around your brand or product still comes up in conversation with clients today, as we create their digital content strategies and medium vehicles.  Lucky for us, we have had the pleasure of working with clients who get it and understand the importance of transparency and every user comment, even the negative ones.  It hasn’t always been like this however.  The issue over openness used to pain newspapers and some of them still refuse to open up commenting on their properties today.  But with the rise and power of social media, and crowd-sourcing effectiveness, the voice of the customer and the review process, should by now be a part of your company DNA.  Social Networks and review agents, as they should, make it easy for users to express their honest feedback, regarding the products and the services they are using, and if you, as the product and service owner are acting in accordance with the new rules of the social Web, you would have found a way to handle these instances. With this being said, we were forwarded an article today, from someone complaining that many of us still assume we can put it (product, project, brand, etc…) out there and never have to weather a single storm.  The story that boiled their blood, goes like this, Telsa Motors, the folks who make the Telsa Roadster, announced that they were going to sue BBC’s Top Gear, for giving them a poor review.  There are a few things fundamentally wrong with this, the main being, could this quake the professional and unbiased review properties, making them skittish about what they publish.  If this ends up being the case, it would shed the sense of genuineness and honesty that many of these professional review agents have been classed with.  [As an aside, I have heard of people questioning the validity of some of the professional review sites, thinking that they could be biased.  The Top Fear conundrum proves their validity and this could work in their favour].

As a business thought leader and or a product manager, we have to be aware of the fact that not everyone is going to like what we create or worse yet, what we stand for – and that’s ok.  Where we come out looking like ‘rock stars’ is when we listen to the feedback/reviews and address them – without fear, as some of them could be right and some could be completely inaccurate and based on emotion only.  Either way, the comment or concern is being addressed and this is another form of good corporate responsibility.

Given the Tesla kafuffle, we could not close this post with out providing our thoughts on corporate readiness and the concept around corporate nakedness, in this day and age.  Whether you are embarking on a crowd-sourcing campaign that has you investigating solutions for your product or brand, or even just applying the basics - operating on the social Web, the pointers below will aid you in ensuring you are built to ‘weather the storm’, so they say:

Corporate Readiness: when you know that whatever you release to the public will attract response, ask yourself if you are ready to accept the responses you will get.  The many uses of social media today makes it inevitable that your concepts and product may be challenged, but if you are honest and recognize the worth of your customer or a potential customer, you will be accepting. Think of this as your massive focus group, which consists of the entire World Wide Web.  You can quantify the cost when you take a look at what you pay for instructor led focus group sessions, market to market.  Making sense now?  Corporate Readiness also applies to having an appetite to act on and institute the viable ideas received from the public and there is definitely no harm in that, if it does not alter the brand or the fundamental product.  Imagine if you took the time to acknowledge customer feedback and showed them the end result that was born out of their taking the time to communicate with you.  You would create brand loyalists for life.

Ensure the Resources Are in Place: are there brand advocates in your organization who are trained in handling customer feedback, both good and bad?  Have you outlined the process around responses, time to respond and then the offline follow up activity that needs to occur, to properly handle honest user and public feedback?

Openness: as hard as this may be, your address, if above board, of the queries laced with negative sentiment can be a testament to your brands honest approach to consumer relations.  This will only build trust and a genuineness around your brand and with so many options for consumers today, within the same vertical market, often the purchasing or subscribing deciding factor is how they ‘feel’ about the brand.  In essence, how the brand will take care of them during their life-cycle.

In the sense of our own openness and transparency, there is some convincing talk that there were claims made about the vehicle, which were not completely accurate, but I guess that will be hashed out in the courts, if this case even gets there.

We would be amiss if we did not post our thoughts and comments on LinkedIn’s coffee truck campaign, promoting their LinkedIn Today, digital vertical news set, which has been integrated into LinkedIn user accounts.

First, what is LinkedIn Today you ask?   It is LinkedIn’s drive to push the vertical news content that is shared across their network and serve it up in the form of an online newspaper.  As a registered LinkedIn user, your version of LinkedIn Today is customized, to show you the news bits that you would be most interested in.  Your stories will be aggregated from:

• News those in your network are sharing
• Top news from the industries you’ve told LinkedIn you were interested in
• News from the top 50 venture backed companies

To dive deeper, inside each story you’ll be able to take in the ‘share stream’ and see who is saying what, about what.

What about this coffee truck campaign business?

To promote LinkedIn Today, the group has taken to the streets of New York and San Francisco, offering free coffee and a physical copy of LinkedIn Today.  If you are in New York or San Francisco, you will be able to take in the campaign and enjoy coffee on LinkedIn, until Friday, April 1st.

The amount of buzz the campaign has garnered LinkedIn,  over the past two days, has been formidable and its warm welcomed reception from users is an obvious.  It’s targeted news aggregated across my network and watched industries, personalizes the content consumption process.  So far, LinkedIn today is available online and can be accessed via their iPhone app..  Unfortunately, I take in my news via my iPad and would definitely subscribe to the service there, if it was available.  Hop to it LinkedIn!

 

 

It was confirmed today that Facebook has purchased the Israeli based social network Snaptu.  Snaptu specializes in creating mobile applications that accompany popular social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.  The company was founded in 2007 and has made a mark for itself because it not only offers mobile applications for smart phones, but it also caters to the feature only phones, which believe it or not, are still utilized by a fair number of people.

It is rumored that Facebook purchased Snaptu for $70 million dollars.  The move is a very strategic one for Facebook, as it gives them another strong hold in their global footprint, not just in user acquisition, but also in it’s mobile application road map.  It will be interesting to see if Facebook takes the steps of Twitter, and starts to now clamp down on third party developers, deflecting them from creating accompanying applications.  Only time will tell.

Below is a great visual from the guys at All Facebook, showing the impact of mobile and Facebook.com.

What Came First? Your Brand, Facebook or Twitter?

March 9th, 2011, In Advertising, Social Media, Strategy, by Beverly Crandon

Social media branding and usage of social networks has been a debatable topic around our coffee table for quite some time now.  We tell everyone who will listen and I am confident that by now our clients secretly call us the S&M branding girls behind our backs, but in this case, we’ll gladly take the name calling.  We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, the rules of advertising and market awareness do not change, just because social networks have become a source of potential brand loyalist, instead, social networks and social media afford marketers and brands another tool to build awareness, and in turn drive users back to an area (your Web site) in which they can further engage, research, become brand loyalists and hopefully purchase.  You use social networks to add personality to the brand and post relevant resources for your target demographic that will hopefully spark conversation, in ways your property Web site may not allow you to do.  However, social networks should never overshadow your brand or take away from who you are.  Have you ever stopped to wonder by Facebook and Twitter do not advertise?  It’s because we’ve all done a good job of doing it for them – free of charge.  This is not to say social media does not play a part in bolstering your brand awareness and likability – it sure as hell does!  These networks and their users are, in laymen terms, your bread and butter.  But marketers need to learn to encourage their clients to use these tools wisely.  Consider using easily recognizable Facebook and Twitter handles (the whole world assumes you are on one of these social networks and will just search for your business name anyhow); use the ads you’ve paid for to display the messages you need to get across about your brand or service; include social widgets on your Web sites, clearly laying out the path, there, for users to find you socially (see Starbucks - arguably the strongest social media brand); advertise your social handles on ads you pay for only if there is a purpose (campaign or contests managed on Facebook) and ‘follow us’ is not a campaign. Now stepping off of my soap box, what led me to write this post was my digesting Michelle Megna’s thoughts on the Facebook/Warner Bros. relationship that will allow Facebook users to essentially rent movies from their Facebook account.  At first we found this interesting and wondered if anything would be taken away from the brand (Warner Bros.) by doing this.  In this case, we concluded that it was actually an act of brilliance on the movie production companies part, for a few reasons:

Fear of losing the market: like most publishers, movie houses are concerned that piracy or other online video streaming services, namely Netflix, could impact the industry – or more specifically – their bottom line, negatively.  So, instead of sitting back and fearing what tomorrow may bring, Warner Bros. decided to team up with the largest social network, to make their recently past films available for users, for a fee.  This allows them to include another revenue source into their mix and it keeps the company engaged socially.

Make it easy to play with you: Warner Bros. could have gone out on their own and introduced a similar offering, but they never could have created that immediate ‘many to many’ relationship on their own.  Now let me explain why this relationship creates a ‘many to many’, as opposed to a ‘one to many’ scenario.  In order for a Facebook user to gain access to watch the Warner Bros. movie, they need to head over to the movies Facebook page and ‘like’ it first.  By liking it, their entire Facebook network of friends and family will learn of their movie rental and the service as a whole.  This is what creates the many to many.  Warner Bros. has just bought themselves great brand syndication press, for which they get paid.  Not a bad deal!

No impact to brand: yes, it’s true, Warner Bros. is a brand, but let’s face it, the brand is often overshadowed by the actor’s brand and the sentiment it’s movie titles bring to the public.  So, in the case of Warner Bros., pageviews isn’t something that keeps them up at night, but movie related reveues do and this partnership with Facebook allows them to add to their revenue pool.

Although the marriage of envelopment works for Warner Bros. and Facebook, it does not mean that this approach will work for all industry verticals.  If you make money from site impressions; if you house important brand related information on your Web site; and if the number of people subscribing and buying your product is more important to you than how many fans or followers you have; you want to think twice the next time your advertising methodology has lower case t or an upper case F overshadowing your brand.

Mobile OS market share reports have trended in showing the massive growth and now market leadership that the Android phone has amassed and now to add to these, Nielsen has released an updated snapshot of the manufacturer OS share, by smart phone, through use of a neat visual.  The table (see below) shows Androids dominance and proves that their open all players approach to the operating system model, has allowed them to scale through a many to many relationship, versus Apple or even RIM’s single OEM approach.

The fact that Microsoft is applying the same operandi to mobile, as Google’s open Android vision, sparks the possibility that we may see some exciting mobile wars in months to come.  More surprisingly, we estimate that Microsoft will gain additional share that once belonged to RIM- given the similarity in the user demographic, finally making Microsoft a formidable competitor when looking at next step technology.  We state our surprise in Microsoft’s possible competitive nature, as they stepped on to the mobile scene (April 2000) before Google, but have only now made an impact on the mobile space, with their release of Windows 7 mobile.

The Semantic Web, is that the quintessential Web 3.0 or has that stage of the Web already passed?  We here internally have often debated it’s role, and how it will effect our Web experience, but regardless of your personal viewpoint, the embedded short documentary, by Kate Ray brings you to a level of thinking about the Web and content that I guarantee  you have never done before.  Those in this short documentary range from Clay Shirky to David Karger , all well suited orators on the topic.  They share thoughts like content is not necessarily the key anymore and the openness of the Web that will apply to all lives, regardless of the makeup and this extends past the basic selection of devices and offered applications we see today, because the Semantic Web will improve in making data understood by machines and computers alike.

Once you’ve seen this, you will have a greater understanding of why the Semantic Web is such a debated topic today.  I also hope that it will do to you as it did to me and spark new ideas that cause you to say “what if…”

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

It’s been months since we’ve written about the automotive industry, largely due to the same old negative hum drum the OEM’s or other publishers were sharing.  However, the most recent news of the auto industry sales being up by 27% in February, is something not only worth writing about, but also worth celebrating, if you are an ad agency or marketer.

For years the auto industry has been seen as the primary spender when it came to appointing dollars to advertising and as the industry struggled through low auto sales, so too did our marketers.  The recent trend in car sales (up!) and the still newness and novelty applied to new media’s such as social media, have OEM’s more excited than ever to push the envelope, not necessarily with just their dollars, but with their chase to find the next new, appealing and engaging advertising idea.  Take Porches Facebook ’decaled’ 911 GT3 R Hybrid – this campaign blended social media online fans, with Porches offline luxury product.  It was clever and a great example of how new media will be used in this auto advertising industry rebound.