Posts by InsightsDigital

I read on a blog that it is a great time to advertise since it is lower cost CPC.

"According to Efficient Frontier, advertisers have "capitalised on this price reduction and achieved more click volume" while at the same time boosted ROI. Specifically, advertisers in the UK were able to cut their spend 11% year-over-year while boosting ROI by 2%. Across the pond in the US, advertisers fared even better. They were able to reduce spend 21% year-over-year while boosting ROI by a whopping 29%."

Source: http://econsultancy.com/blog/4241-recession-trend-more-clicks-lower-cpcs-higher-roi

So will this new news prompt your business to spend on CPC advertising?

I recommend reading:
Internet Advertising Board's report on Social Advertising
http://www.iab.net/socialads

One aspect of life that is constant is change. Thus, this change occurs everywhere and anywhere, especially when executing a marketing plan. You may encounter unforeseen pebbles on the road. Hence, you may need to change course to improve chances of your marketing success. So when this happened to you, how did you:
1. monitored it?
2. how long you waited to make a decision?
3. made a decision?
4. monitor the success of new decision?

Thanks,

Marketing plans usually include much more or much less than necessary. In your experience in creating marketing plans, what lessons have you learned?

I am working on developing a social media marketing strategy on Excel and thinking of everything and anything that can identify and strengthen the connection of the client's business in the social media community. So I have included:
1. Business Identity and branding - associated keywords and phrases.
2. Business url and any associated SEO
3. Who are the clients types and words they would use to find or associate the business with.
4. Which social media tactics helps achieve specific goals.

What are your thoughts?

Thanks,

So my question is, are we gaining or losing from the ability to utilize new technolgoy, online communities and social media to interact acorss long and not-so-long distances while saving money and increasing the number of meetings and demos that can be done in a day?

Though Businesses may be gaining with utilizing social technology with increased productivity and saving money, the human interaction factor may be sacrificed. Now, there are so many different options to communicate in a business setting that understanding the best way to communicate could be time consuming and potentially costly as well. For example, let's say in Company X, person A sent an email to person B and is waiting for an email response. Days passed and person A is still waiting and re-sends email. Person B is too busy and has tons of emails and best way to get hold of person B is via phone conversation or posting a message on the chair, "Call Me". Thus, I have seen this scenario occur so often that I wonder if valuable decisions were postponed due to this.

Definitely! Social media can be used to leverage customized/targeted marketing to different consumers' personas or segments. For example, my client wants to reach consumers' who just have a child in college and feeling empty nest. Thus, the client can create a targeted messaging for their services or product to specifically targeted this consumer group and then executing a social media campaign along with a SEM/ Facebook ads to increase the reach.

I actually developed a metrix grid for measuring various social media. The metrics were more qualitative in nature but I tried to make it somewhat quantitative and universal.
For example:
Wikis
Numbers of Members
# Number of Contributing Posts
# Number of Revisions
# of active members
Feedback/Comment on Blog
# of Comments
# of likes
Type of Comments
Sentiments - # of neutral; # of positive; # negative; # self promoters

A client posed the same question to me recently. Many people believe that creating profiles on various social media communities is all that is needed. This is just a tactic and not a strategy. The strategy involves thinking and executing:
1. Brand's positioning
2. Brand's messaging
3. Setting tone
4. Ensuring that all the social media tactics evoke the same positioning and messaging to strengthen the identity
5. Getting dirty with keywords, products, services, and really making these profiles alive with the business' offerings.

I do believe the success of microblogging platforms like Twitter is due partially to the fact that blog readers welcomed a fast, straight to the point communication rather than reading long blog posts. Just my once cent.

Many websites have Google Analytics as their web analytics tool. Though GA is easy to use, there are many features that require knowledge and experience. Thus, how would you prepare to learn GA as soon as possible?

My tips are:
1. Create a GA account and add some of your sites
2. Play around with the custom reporting
3. Go to Avinash K's blog - http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/

What would you recommend?

For me, I think social media is both a strategy and a tactic. What differentiates a social media strategy with a tactic is whether it affects the overall direction of the marketing plan or is it just one way to reach a particular segment or promote a certain message.

For example, the business objection is to promote a brand to Generation Y that this well known brand also understands their need. Social Media strategy will leverage social media to reach this target group and consolidate various form of social media outreach. A social media tactic is included within the strategy.

Though YouTube has a wider reach, Viddler and Vimeo business model allows for more proprietary flexibility than YouTube.
http://www.centernetworks.com/video-smackdown-vimeo-viddler

Well, that is an exact question a very well regarded and known social media and web analytics blogger asked me just recently. We think it is possible as long as it is associated industry. I will report findings.

We all know pop up ads were not welcomed by many but what about pop unders or ads in an unintrusive ways, like small bottom lines on a video or on a free mobile app. What do you think?

Have you ever chronicled your site's or products launches and posted on Youtube? Has this approach helped increase the amount of targeted visitors to your site? Or are you planning to do so? Form an SEO and traffic perspective, it can be beneficial.

All the advice on this thread is great. I also recommend:
1. Create a Twitter account and be an active and engaged user. Dont just post your site's url. Contribute and retweet and comment on others tweets.

2. Join related meetups - not only you meet others but it gives an opportunity for learning about other businesses and potential business partners.

I want to add not only regular business card, but e-business cards. Do you create one and how often do you circulate it in today's e-world?

I agree with high end product bad reviews. Being a market researcher, I also wonder if these bad comments are legit or planted by spies so it is important to do your due diligence and ask for a trial or free version, if possible, just to test drive it. There were a few 5 figure softwares that I got the test version and tested it out. This way, I discovered if it works for my goals or not. Sometimes this route is not possible and thus, relying on reviews becomes more necessary. It is always good to find legit review sources and user comments.

It be interesting on what type of webinars and who is presenting. I have arranged webinars for my clients about a particular product and for these type of webinars, I had C-level executives. Otherwise, if it s a training webinar, I except more junior and associate level professionals.

To answer your question-The C-level executives I have dealt with who have published videos felt more comfortable from a professional standpoint releasing videos on Viddler or Vimeo. Why? Viddler and Vimeo allows for more SEO control.

I think we read the same blog post. These are the issues I observed with having a thought leader within the shortest period of time:
1. Internal Acceptance within the company
2. External Acceptance within the company
3. Being part of the communication loop - it is a must - especially with social media. Worst case scenario is when someone outside the company post some breaking news about your company or team before you knew.
4. The thought leader needs to be given space to expand the role and also support
5. Cant be silo.
6. Engagement..Engagement..Engagement.

Thus, social media does allow for someone to become a thought leader but this thought leader also have to demonstrate a value to the community it serves. Otherwise, it is just advertisement.

Do you mean the slides on my site? Some of the slides are very easy to load - the ones that are not slides take forever to load. If you mean the picture above, it supposed to immediately pop up.

Google Analytics have an online test to help individuals became more proficient on GA.
http://google.starttest.com/
It is called Google Analytics IQ

I actually spoke to a few vendor a few months ago about their online reputation management solution. For clients who dont have a budget, I recommend using the free tools - like Google Alerts and to include all types of alerts.
In regards to the sentiments of the type of comment, negative comments stir curiosity and action to learn more about the product or services while positive comments may only stir curiosity. Good study to research further.

I actually created two very small scale dating sites - non existent now - and though I had no ads on them, from my experience, the ads that will get most clicks on dating sites are ones that have a strong sexual innuendo.

I saw a blog post on Brian Solis (Mr. PR 2.0 blog) about using mind maps to visualize your social media self. I am sharing this image because I know it can be very helpful in developing a social media strategy for your business. What do you think?

I know it took hours to design and finalize on the type of business card I will buy that will represent a professional business image. At various networking events, I must have received a plethora of different type of business cards that dont even fit in the traditional business card holder anymore.

http://gizmodo.com/5200377/cardapult-score-a-new-job-with-the-business-card-that-transforms-into-a-catapult

Maybe after I run out of my 10000 business cards, I will go for a different one... What about you?

I actually saw a virtual exhibit booth on a nephrology site - http://www.vbooths.com/

I truly do not know the metrics of success for these vendors and I wonder how often doctors who are on the site would actually click to it.

I agree with you in regards to making a blog look salesy. I did see a Wordpress blog where one tab was just for Press Releases and it was made very clean and professional. It was not part of the regular blog roll.

I do believe that many event twitter accounts are just for that particular event and don't expect to add Followers afterwards. In some cases, the twitter account is not event related but the event is tracked via hashtags and monitored via twitter search or some other twitter alert tool.

Embracing social media in-house is a must for survival for traditional agencies. Why? Clients expect it and Agencies must abide in order to save the business.

I have a few different twitter accounts - each one with a different purpose. One for personal and it is locked. The other is for a group I created and the other one is for a cybershow I produce. Different purpose and different people I follow in each twitter account.

Another type of Twitter Fake Followers are ones that capitalize on a Twelebrity's status and picture. The fake twelebrity uses a slight misspelling of the name and then post a link to a spammy site. This was the case some time ago with Jeremiah from Forrester. I was surprised he followed me and I clicked to the link and it was to a site that advertised "Free Google tricks" but it required credit card information for the shipment. I did not trust the fact that this transaction was not in a secured site - thus, no https. So I aborted the process. Then, for the next two days, I must have received at least a dozen or so calls from a weird number stating that it needed my credit card info. I did not trust this and after telling each caller a few times to stop calling me, it finally stopped. I wonder how many other people felled into this. You just have to exercise caution.

It is the conversation engaging element that is the glue of success on twitter and other social media tactics. It is very obvious on many Twitter accounts that someone is paid just to add links one hour a day and have no real multi-way conversations.

Have you seen this page? http://bingtweets.com/

I thought it was a very nifty merge between the two. From a SEO perspective, I wonder how this search engine can cause a shift in how companies tweet. What do you think?

Some time ago, I started a thread about Freemium models as a way to entice visitors to sign up. Now, I saw this very interesting post on Mashable about the various business models online businesses use to grow their community. So what do you think?
http://mashable.com/2009/07/14/social-media-business-models/

I am working with an early stage startup and I recommend the freemium model though it may not be the best model for others.

I actually agree with you. From a personal perspective, I am actually turned off from blogs or communities that are too self promoting and not really providing any real value to the visitor. I stopped following certain accounts on Twitter whom the account holder only self-plugged. I wonder how many other people out there are turned off by this as well. Do share.

Some ad agencies partner with a sister company to provide the social marketing surveillance and strategy. Some agencies specialize in providing social marketing surveillance like VML.

Even though I dont have access to the drop off rate, I strongly suggest you to contact Jeff Pulver. He has created many live events with associated twitter accounts and a very active twitter activity right before, during, and after the events.

I actually have a marketing friend who did this for his company's site and from a SEO perspective, it surely helped bring traffic to the site as well as helped the site appear on the first page of results. It was a for a green energy computer server. I was amazed to see how the company's various press releases were out there and helped market the company online.

I actually something like what you mentioned but on an old Yahoo career group I created. The Yahoo Group did not allow for banner exchange (at least back between 2002-2006) but I did:
1. Let the associated partners to upload a brochure/file about their services
2. I wrote an email to the members introducing the vendor and how their services helped me with my career development
3. Asked the vendors to provide a discount for the members.

This approach you mention is very similar to what companies were doing years ago with recruiting bloggers to evangelize their products. I do know bloggers who were paid in form of free product in exchange for the plug. But what made the difference between gray and white hat was the transparency factor. This factor really mattered to the readers of the blog.
Thus, this could also be a factor with Twitter promotion and whether these Twitter members mention they are getting paid.
There is a new service that allows for Twitterers to get paid.
http://www.adjix.com/WebObjects/Adjix.woa/

Wow - that is definitely daily surveillance. I wonder for other posters if you use a software tool to automate the process?

If you want to discover the most searched keywords, I suggest you to check out:

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#

http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

It does but I wont know for sure until I get access to it.

How often do you check on the quality of the sites you are linked to and you link to? Do you think it is necessary to help with your website's SERPs? What do you think? I personally have check sites that included a link to my site and in some cases, I asked to be removed due to the quality of the site have changed since my link was first added.

I totally agree with you. The tone of the community is created by the members and founder. I am a member of a technology board that every time a member posts a self-promoting link, immediately, other members share their dismay. This helps prevent other future spammy posters.

I also agree that in any online community there are always:
1. The Creators - create content
2. Collectors - share links
3. Lurkers - those who watch but dont contribute.

http://blogs.forrester.com/groundswell/2007/04/forresters_new_.html

I know some businesses use high end service/tools like Radian6 and BuzzLogic but for the small business owner, I wonder what other tools other than the ones we mentioned above do small business owners use.

I consider fake followers like weeds and there are many of them on Twitter.

I think its TweetLater allows you to tweet for the future. TweetDeck is a great tool for monitoring and instant url shortening.