Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

iPad is “Magic” for Tradeshow Floor Demonstrations

Saturday, August 21st, 2010

There is a reason Apple characterizes its iPad as a “magical” device: Physically interacting with interface elements heightens a user’s connection with the user interface, and creates a sense of immersion.

Tablet computers are a great tool for physically sharing information with someone in a way that they are immediately invested in the content that is being communicated. The small screen forces the listener and communicator to interact on a close, personal level, and the positioning of the two parties as they stand close, peering into the screen, evokes a sense of discovery.

What a great way this would be to demonstrate the user interface and features of web-based product interfaces at a trade show! The one-on-one nature of iPad demonstrations immediately pulls prospects out of the tradeshow’s crowd atmosphere and pulls them into an intimate conversation where the sales engineer or sales representative can powerfully speak to their individual needs.

Flicking through a few screens on a large monitor is a decent way to draw people to a booth, but the ability to easily hold a personal, private, one-on-one demo is a purpose for which the iPad has seemingly been custom designed.

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Posted in Marketing | No Comments »

Measuring The ROI of Social Media and How To Gain Value from Twitter, Facebook, and Linked In

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Call it what you want, “Social Media,” “Web 2.0,” “Twitter,” or even “YouTwitFace,” the big buzz right now in marketing is to, somehow, even if you have no experience personally in any of the networks, squeeze, cram, and force your brand into every online social space possible.

Every marketing publication and PR firm is pushing Facebook, Twitter, and Linked In right now. To make things worse, thousands of people are fleecing companies by offering services as social media “experts.”

The problem is that very few companies have had any direct quantifiable return on investment (ROI) on their investment in social media.

As a marketing professional, I’m struggling to find ways to measure the results of all the posting, publishing, and commenting that I’ve been doing. Sure you can simulpublish content, but to really be building a relationship with your customers/audience, you need a live person to do the commenting and @ reply tweeting. How do you track the value of all that time spent?

One nice thing about the Big Four social networks is that they all let you set up a presence for FREE.

First, we need to establish the value of each social media platform:

Facebook – Is it for work or play, or both? I can’t figure this out, either. Pop products (hey there, Coke and Pepsi) as well as companies that cater to niches (geographically or topically) will, and have done well here. If you or something you sell has a cult following, CREATE A FAN PAGE NOW! If you’re selling insurance, though, you’re going to need a good strategy to be successful on Facebook.

Twitter – Anything goes here, but the value of Twitter comes from it’s ability to let you establish awareness, and speak directly to your customers’ problems/pain. Also, if you are in the content creation and publishing business, the value of Twitter is in the power of passed links.

Linked In – People go here to network professionally. You won’t find individuals looking to choose between Coke and Pepsi, but if you are looking to build your brand as a visible, authoritative, thought leader in it’s vertical, this is a good place to start. You’ll mostly meet people looking to find a job, though.

MySpace – Forget it, it’s dead!

That’s the Big Four of social media. From the three that are worth any investment, you can expect to derive value from:

1. Creating awareness/building traffic – You certainly don’t want to look dead in the water by not having a profile on each of these networks. Do at least enough to get by on each: Set up a company/product profile with the canned info/pitch from your website, and make sure you are going to get email notifications if anyone hails you (sends you a messages, @ tweets you, posts a comment to your LI group, et cetera) on any of the platforms. Make sure your company’s Linked In profile is up to date.

If you’re ready to experiment and invest some time/resources into the networks outside of just planting a flag, I would recommend:

  1. Setting up a Twitter profile for your company, following others in your industry and anyone that tweets about you or your product, and tweeting at least three times a week about something interesting that your company is working on. Offer coupons/specials to the first, tenth, or hundredth person that RT retweets your post!
  2. Setting up a company group on Linked In as a place for fans of your services, company employees, and company alumni to come together and chat. Post questions (what new feature should we add to our product in the next release).
  3. Create a Facebook fan page for your company/product, and if you are catering to a niche, update it with interesting, exclusive, or insider information.
  4. Any time your company/product is mentioned in a publication, post links to the story or article across all your social media presences. Automate this if possible!
  5. Make everyone in your company and any strategic partners aware of your presence on these social networks, and encourage them to join/follow/fan you.

Finally, in regards to building awareness, be open to conversations across your social network presences. If someone compliments your product, service, thank them–retweet them! (Check out their background and what info is readily available about them, and then) Hail them as a supporter! If someone criticizes you, respond openly. On Twitter: Offer empathy, respond quickly, engage honestly. Make the offended party feel like they have your CEO’s ear (even if they don’t!). Make sure you respond first in the medium that the complaint was lodged, and offer to take the conversation offline to a phone call or in-person meeting. Admit mistakes, and work with the offended party to remedy the situation. I think this will work wonders for your brand, and will breed positive buzz and word of mouth.

2. Establishing your company/brand as an innovative, visible, authoritative, thought leader in your vertical. Write a whitepaper. Commission and publish studies about your services/industry. Tweet about what your company is doing to be different. I haven’t really figured out the best way to accomplish this goal, but I’ve seen companies do this through social media (and I’d love to hear ideas about how to do this). If there is demand for your product or service, and your are the thought leader in your area, you will be successful.

3. Lead generation and sales. For most execs that have heard the social media buzz, and those that haven’t yet been cheated by someone calling themselves a “social media expert” the biggest misconception about social networks lies in the fact that they will directly generate business. This is simply (currently) not the case. It’s also very hard, without spending a lot of money on technology like SalesForce.com, to get a good handle on how pageviews and awareness are contributing to sales. I don’t think anyone not catering to niches is deriving a lot of direct sales from social networks at the moment (except from paid advertising), but as it becomes easier to directly link a customer’s social media profile to a company’s online checkout system, I think conversions will become more common (and will definitely be more quantifiable).

OK, OK, finally, here are my thoughts on how to measure the ROI of your efforts on each social media platform:

  1. Use a link analytics service like www.cli.gs to track click-throughs. Every link you post through a social media platform should be a tracked link.
  2. Segment traffic by sending users to specific landing pages on your site. Analytics, such as Google Analytics, will give you a window into the success of your social media forays by letting you see which sites are referring traffic to these landing pages, and showing you if visitors are sticking around to learn more about you (and where they are going to do this), or if they are jumping ship. Have forms on these landing pages as gateways to exclusive deals or information, and from these forms, try to gauge visitors’ intent to purchase.
  3. Post surveys to your customers (offer one lucky randomly-selected participant an iPod–and actually give it out!) and ask what you are doing right, what you could do better, and what they would like to learn about your service or product. Survey customers about what drew them to buy from you. Survey lost prospects (again offer them something in return) about why they did not purchase or went with someone else. Let everyone know that you have a presence across social networks and provide links!

I’m a multimedia designer and producer in Annapolis, Maryland. Follow my twitter feed: www.twitter.com/jeffreyahaines

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Posted in Buzz, Marketing, Media Theory, Social Networking | 5 Comments »

Quick Guide to Success on Twitter

Monday, April 27th, 2009

For any blogger, especially those covering a geographical area or specific topic, I would definitely recommend setting up a Twitter account.

For your Twitter “handle” or name, try to use the name of your blog or your blog’s URL.

Now it’s time to start building an audience.

Before you write your first post, use the navigation at the bottom of your new Twitter profile to do a search for terms related to your topic or area. I would might search for “Annapolis, “Designer,” and “Multimedia.”

Look at recent “tweets” (posts) and click on the names of Twitter users who have interesting things to say about your topic area. Once on their profile page, click the “follow” link.

Now it is up to you to “tweet” interesting material.

Twitter’s biggest potential, I believe, is its ability to localize conversation by topic, and to a lesser extent, geography.

Twitter has great potential for covering live or breaking news. If you are “Tweeting” to promote your blog, one strategy is to live blog events on Twitter, and then write a blog post summarizing the event–a post which you would promote to your Twitter audience using a short URL.

For example, if I wanted to cover a local mayoral candidate’s run announcement ceremony, I would get to the event early, and post to my Twitter feed every 5 minutes, or anytime a notable event occurs.

In your first post, you want to localize the event by noting the location, city, and topic. It would be important to refer to the candidate by their name, as well as their twitter handle:

jeffreyahaines: I’m at Eastport Elementary School in Annapolis waiting for NaptownCandidate’s announcement–The place is empty

jeffreyahaines: NaptownCandidate has taken the stage, but the crowd is still thin. Does she have any supporters?
jeffreyahaines: An audience has formed. NaptownCandidate is talking about her plan for transportation.

Later, you would write a summary blog post, and “Tweet” a link to it through your Twitter feed.

jeffreyahaines: NaptownCandidate doesn’t have a chance in the Annapolis mayoral race: www.gol.ly/jeff

When writing your blog post, and publicizing it, you might want to send a direct public “tweet” to NaptownCandidate by starting your message with @naptowncandidate

jeffreyahaines: @naptowncandidate read my blog post about your candidacy announcement at www.gol.ly/jeff

And she might direct reply to you:

NaptownCandidate: @jeffreyahaines I like your post!

I think the biggest things new Twitter users should remember is that that people don’t want to be harassed (so don’t repeatedly send someone direct messages or Tweets unless they respond!), and that people want to read interesting things–not the latest scoop on my laundry (unless, of course, I am a laundry expert!). New users should follow a few people who seem to have respect in their topic area, and then work to build a reputation as a good source for information on the same topic.

One great thing about Twitter versus blogging is that there are no anonymous comments. If you often blog about controversial topics, you will be able to have a good idea about who is responding to you.

I recently attended a Twitter meetup (or “Tweetup) for Annapolis Twitter users. It was a great experience to meet other locals who were also experimenting with new technology. Once you have established yourself as a user, consider starting a meetup group for your geographic area!

I hope you take some time to give the world of Twitter a try. If you have questions about getting started, feel free to message me! My handle is @jeffreyahaines

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Posted in Buzz, Interactivity, Marketing, Media Theory, Public Relations, Social Networking, Social Networks | 1 Comment »

How To Instantly Attract Traffic To Your Blog

Saturday, April 18th, 2009

A few hours ago, I wrote this post, which increased traffic to my site by 10,000% within a short timespan.

I have to admit that the post is slightly misleading, although I think I did a good job of summarizing the topic, and providing interesting links to material that would be a natural progression of exploration from the blog post.

This post was successful because:

  1. It covered a current, breaking topic/event (The ad is receiving massive exposure at the moment)
  2. It took advantage of a topic that had not yet been explored in-depth by other sources
  3. It summarized a variety of fragmented sources
  4. It uses an authoritative, suggestive, intriguing title to snag visitors
  5. The topic covered plays off sexuality
  6. The post was quickly listed in major search engines and blog indexes
  7. I correctly anticipated and implemented the best keyword for driving topical traffic to the post

I have to admit that I created the post not because I was extremely interested in the topic, but because I knew it would drive traffic. I am not running advertisements on this portion of my site, but a similar post on a monetized blog would have brought in revenue, especially if the referenced advertisement had been displayed alongside the content.

I’m still relatively a beginner at SEO, and I doubt I will ever have the mind, interest, or patience for all the algorithms and time consuming link building that goes into the meat of the field, but this post served as a successful experiment, proving, for me, that if you post interesting, relevant niche content, and if you are at the top of your niche, visitors will come in droves.

It is mostly about being topical, and anticipating your audience’s interests and they keywords they will use to search for your content.

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Posted in Buzz, Marketing, Media Theory | No Comments »

The Civony Girl Revealed

Friday, April 17th, 2009
The Hot Model Civony Girl

The Civony Girl

Who is the Civony girl?

You’ve seen her countless times the last few days if you’ve been browsing tech sites, and probably even more times today, since she seems to be feeding off the keyword “pirates” and the blowup over the Pirate Bay conviction.

I spotted her the for first time on a TechCrunch post in my RSS while I was reading on my lunch break. I think all heterosexual guys in that situation make a mental note to figure out who she is. I didn’t see the PG version to the right (click the image for the PG-13 eyeful).

Later, when I was catching up on tech news, I spotted her again. A quick Google search revealed that I was not alone in succumbing to the primal marketing. I agree with other bloggers that the Civony advertisements are the most risque I’ve seen on Google’s ad network.

I’ll get into the juicy details first to placate the majority of people who will find this post, and then I’ll break into a marketing rant for those that care about the real reason I am writing this.

First off, what is Civony?

Apparently, it’s a browser based city building strategy game. Kevin Sung has a full wrap-up with the lusty (apparently lust-less) details. The game is a Civilization clone (even uses the same font), whose creators obviously could not come up with a decent original fantasy name–”Let’s combine the words ‘Civilization’ and ‘Colony!!!’. This forum has a great post that explains how the game’s revenue plan isn’t exactly player friendly (and players aren’t happy about it!)

But back to the babe:

EDIT: A comment from Dom (see below) reveals the girl’s true identity:

The girl is just one of many costume models, in particular she is showing an “Adult Forest Fairy Costume” which can be found on a number of costume warehouse style sites, but I believe was primarily from here:
http://costumecraze.com/FAIR82.html?SSAID=87543

Be sure to read his comment for the full scoop! Here is the full resolution pic.

Not only is Civony being heavily criticized as a scam–apparently their marketers are taking the cheap way out and are stealing imagery from costume websites! I doubt they secured permission to use the image they have implemented in their ad. The true identity of the Civony girl: She’s just a model for a costume reseller, but at least you can purchase the costume for your girlfriend or wife!

Now for the marketing rant:

Even though I will admit I generally ignore advertisements when I am reading my RSS feeds, as a 23 year old heterosexual male, I can’t deny that I definitely paid attention and looked closer when I spotted the Civony advertisement.

As a marketer, and a conscious fiancee, I am troubled that I succumbed to such a cheap marketing trick.

I’d like to think that most marketers that aren’t in the Adult or male and female fasion, style, and beauty publishing and product fields try to avoid stooping to the level of using sex to sell, but I have to admit that it does probably provide greater return on investment than any other method of advertising–almost regardless of what your product or service is.

The girl is pretty, and I know that a lot of males would brim with excitement if an attractive woman addressed them as “my Lord.”

The sad, but inevitable thing about the advertisement is that it is working. I don’t have time for, or interest in, playing online games, but I clicked on the ad.

I am honestly shocked that the Civony ad was being displayed on a major ad network, and I feel that although it is not by most standards sexually explicit, I hold the opinion that it is not family friendly or safe for all audiences. Most of the mainstream advertising networks have policies that prohibit sexually suggestive advertisements, and I can’t really figure out how this ad was approved by the censors.

My thoughts and opinions about sex in advertising aren’t really collected right now, and I’m sure they are still developing, so I will digress from further analysis. I do have some questions, though:

  • What is the future of sex in mainstream internet advertising (Google)? Will major networks have to relax content guidelines in order to maintain revenue?
  • When and where is it professionally and socially acceptable to use sex in advertising, and what are the boundary lines?
  • Why are the ad networks’ standards censors allowing advertising with sexual content to appear on their networks?
  • Why are ads that contain obvious non-parody copyright infringement being approved?

Disclaimer: I only have eyes for the woman to whom I am engaged. The words that I have used to describe the woman in the Civony advertisement are used only for SEO, and because they are the general language which I believe web surfers would seek when looking for information about the attractive woman in the advertisements. I understand that many people probably believe she is being depicted in a demeaning way, and I want to note that I agree that the advertisement is unwholesome.

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Posted in Gaming, Interactivity, Marketing, Media Theory, Virtual Worlds | 43 Comments »

SEO and Monitoring Your Brand’s Web Penetration

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

I’ve always been interested in SEO, but I think a lot of people look at it from the wrong end.

There is a lot you can do when designing, organizing, and first setting up your brand’s online hub or website, but after you’ve given the search engine spiders time to crawl and done your initial open-for-business press outreach, how do you best measure your marketing success and decide how to tackle an improvement process?

Most organizations determine marketing success and areas for improvement by looking at site analytics statistics. If traffic is hitting the front page and immediately bouncing, the wrong visitors are being lured.

Dispatching landing pages and looking at traffic sources in analytics individually are traditional ways of getting to the root of where your marketing plan is failing or succeeding, but new tools are making it easier to drill deeper to actually survey, quantify, and categorize instances and occurrences of your brand in social media and across the web.

Until now, I’ve been using Google and social media specific searches, such as Twitter’s search function, to survey a brand’s penetration. My method takes too much time, and doesn’t really yield quantifiable results, or results that comprise a complete tangible share of a medium.

I’m currently trying out a web application called Axonize that purports to scour the web for all instances of mentions of your brand’s keywords and terms and links to your brand’s site and web presences. Axonize calls each instance a “conversation,” and does a decent job of categorizing each conversation by medium (such as Blog or Digg) or genre (such as Technology or Education).

Axonize’s power resides it’s ability to catalog conversations, and to do the same searches and categorizations for your competitors’ brands and campaigns.

I’ve only been using Axonize briefly and I’m excited to see how the application picks up on new conversations over time. I’m also interested to see how well Axonize performs when a new marketing campaign is launched–how well its list of new conversations matches or augments those that have been specifically arranged.

The next step, I believe, is looking at each conversation and determining if any action can be taken to:

  1. Augment a conversation’s specificity to a brand–By adding an comment to blog entry conversation that will help better direct readers to more information about our brand or generate interest in it
  2. Redirect a positive conversation about a competing brand so that readers consider my company’s brand as an alternative
  3. Reverse a negative conversation about my company’s brand–By presenting a positive example in an @ tweet in response to a negative Twitter post

I’m sure there are other solutions out there that look as deeply as Axonize, and probably some that even do a better job. Axonize is a new product, and I have already noticed some bugs and deficiencies (as far as I can tell, Wordpress and Twitter are not being scoured at this point), but we’ll have to see how the development team moves forward.

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Posted in Buzz, Marketing | 1 Comment »