You have to be interactive in this digital world…
The Future of Marketing is Interactive — Don’t Get Left Behind!
The Lotus is the perfect icon of “promise”. In today’s clouded landscape of uncertainty, Lotus Interactive represents new ideas with the promise of success for its clients in this dynamic, fast changing marketplace.
Check out our site: http://lotusinteractive.com/
(1)Offshore Qualification Trip sail sailing.
“Robots.txt” is a regular text file that through its name, has special meaning to the majority of “honorable” robots on the web. By defining a few rules in this text file, you can instruct robots to not crawl and index certain files, directories within your site, or at all. For example, you may not want Google to crawl the /images directory of your site, as it’s both meaningless to you and a waste of your site’s bandwidth. “Robots.txt” lets you tell Google just that.
Creating your “robots.txt” file
So lets get moving. Continue reading ‘What is “robots.txt” anyway?’
I found this article on the MediaPost Blog and thought it worth passing along for those of you on the fence about engaging in social media. Very compelling data.
A recent joint study from Nielsen and Facebook, titled “Advertising Effectiveness: Understanding the Value of a Social Media Impression,” analyzed survey data from more than 800,000 Facebook users with regard to more than 125 Facebook ad campaigns from 70 brand advertisers. The report provides quantifiable data that can be mapped to trusted advertising benchmarks: Ad Recall, Brand Awareness, and Purchase Intent.
Studies have shown that consumers trust their friends and peers more than anyone else in making a purchase decision. The authors acknowledge that it’s critical to understand advertising not just in terms of “paid” media, but also in terms of how “earned” media (passed along or shared among friends) and social advocacy contribute to campaigns.
| Percent of Respondents Trusting “Completely or Somewhat” in Selected Forms of Information | |
| Form of Information | % of Respondents |
| Recommendations from people known | 90% |
| Consumer opinions posted online | 70 |
| Brand websites | 70 |
| Editorial content | 69 |
| Brand sponsorship | 64 |
| TV | 62 |
| Newspaper | 61 |
| Magazines | 59 |
| Billboards/outdoor advertising | 55 |
| Radio | 55 |
| Opted-in Emails | 54 |
| Ads before movies | 52 |
| Ads fromSearch engine results | 41 |
| Online video ads | 37 |
| Online banner ads | 33 |
| Text ads on mobile phones | 24 |
| Source: The Nielsen Company, April 2009 | |
The study took a close look at 14 Facebook ad campaigns that incorporated the “Become A Fan” engagement unit and sliced the effectiveness results three different ways, by each of the types of ads available on Facebook:
For those Homepage engagement ads at the top of the marketing funnel, awareness increased on average by 4% between exposed and control audiences. Purchase intent also increased on average by 2% following ad exposure on Facebook.
| Variance Between Control Group to Homepage Ad | |
| Benchmark | % Lift Change vs. Control |
| Ad recall | 10% |
| Awareness | 4 |
| Purchase intent | 2 |
| Source: the Nielsen Company/Facebook, April 2010 | |
Comparing the responses of those users who had seen ads with social context against users who saw ads with no social context from the same campaign, there is a measurable lift in lift.
| Relative “Lift” between Homepage and Homepage with Social Context Added | ||
| Benchmark | Homepage Exposure Lift | Homepage with Social Advocacy |
| Ad Recall | 10% | 16% |
| Awareness | 4 | 8 |
| Purchase intent | 2 | 8 |
| Source: the Nielsen Company/Facebook, April 2010 | ||
While exposure to the homepage ad itself increased ad recall, those users exposed to both the “paid ad” and the organic impression remembered the ad at three times the rate of those just exposed to the paid homepage ad.
We saw a similar effect for the other two metrics evaluated. Homepage ads increased awareness of the product or brand by 4% on average, but exposure to both homepage ads and organic ads increased awareness by a delta of 13% versus the control group. Exposure to organic impressions also impacted purchase intent as well, increasing the impact of the ad from 2% to 8%.
| Variance in Lift Between Homepage Control and Homepage Ad With Organic Context Added | ||
| Benchmark | Homepage Ad Exposure | Homepage Ad + Organic |
| Ad Recall | 10% | 30% |
| Awareness | 4 | 13 |
| Purchase intent | 2 | 8 |
| Source: the Nielsen Company/Facebook, April 2010 | ||
To access additional visuals in the TopLine report, please visit Nielsen here, or for the complete PDF file on earned media, social advertising and the methodology behind the study, please visit here.
I found this on Mashable and wanted to share. Great tips if you want video to in your arsenal in the social media game.
By Catherine-Gail Reinhard an Executive Producer & Director at Videasa, an award-winning web video agency that creates campaigns on YouTube and emerging media platforms. You can follow her on Twitter @catherine_gail.
There was a time when YouTube
was considered a wild-wild west of content — a place where marketers shied away from uploading their commercials, let alone building a branded channel. But these days, YouTube has become more mini-van than stagecoach. From Toyota Sienna’s high-profile television commercials urging consumers to visit their YouTube channel, to (what might be considered the anti-minivan) Harley Davidson’s fan-centric YouTube universe, there has been a noticeable shift in corporate adoption of the platform.
There are many companies now that are hopping on the bandwagon. Just about every corporation and small business is creating a branded channel on YouTube, but there are still relatively few marketers who have managed to harvest the full potential of the platform.
Whether your brand already has a YouTube channel that’s in need of a facelift, or if you’re interested in developing one from scratch, this article will provide some practical tips and valuable tricks to help you kick-start the process.
Next, think about your marketing objectives and overall brand strategy. Are you using the channel to attract prospects, provide customer support, or build a list of subscribers? Understand that there might not be “one size fits all” content if you are trying to accomplish all three.
Let your strategic goals drive the tactics you use to create and promote videos, and consider whether a paid sponsorship would offer an advantage. If you check out YouTube’s advertising channel, you can get a basic overview of what brands can do with the platform, but be forewarned — the information is a bit heavy-handed on the sales side.
The United States Navy Channel has a wide variety of videos aimed to attract potential recruits. The Navy’s recruitment-focused channel is organized into playlists that target specific groups of recruits with military precision.
While you should allow yourself the flexibility to experiment, YouTube can be a high-profile place to make gaffes, so don’t say I didn’t warn you. If you’re going to outsource, you might consider looking for a specialist who is already set up and can implement your strategy. Creating web videos and knowing how to market them on YouTube requires a whole different skill set than web development — just because it’s online doesn’t mean that it’s a job for the company that builds your website.
Start by searching your brand on YouTube and see what the existing conversation looks like. Then try reaching out to people who already have an affinity for your product or service by commenting on their videos and/or “friending” them. Remember that YouTube is an online community, and if you’re not participating in the dialogue, then you are missing the opportunity for true engagement.
And don’t just post your commercial and 15 derivative videos about the making of it, or “director’s cuts” of the same, unless they have legitimate value as content in their own right. YouTube is an opportunity for your brand to go beyond traditional “push” marketing tactics and to create videos that address multiple audiences and a variety of consumer needs.
Intel uses their popular television campaigns as the feature reel on their channel, but they also offer a wide variety of other content, including a look at what it’s like to work at Intel, and video from a game developers conference.
Harley-Davidson took advantage of it’s photo shoot with popular model Marisa Miller for the V-Rod Muscle as an opportunity to get some behind the scenes footage and put together a video for YouTube. Harley definitely got extra value from the photo shoot as the video is one of the most-watched on their YouTube channel.
Twitter’s real value for business is not in communicating. It is in searching real-time conversations. Here’s a recent MediaPost article I found that illustrates this…
by Laurie Sullivan, Friday, April 23, 2010, 4:00 PM
Search, meet social. Social, meet search. The two of you will spend much more time together as brilliant minds continue to find new possibilities to integrate marketing and technology.
Search and social marketing began that long journey years ago, but became stronger partners when Google, Microsoft and Yahoo announced last year that their respective search engines would integrate Twitter streams in search queries. The two media cemented a tighter bond when Twitter announced the long-awaited rollout of its Promoted Tweets search advertising platform earlier this month.
Some analysts believe the marriage of search and social puts Twitter and other social sites at a “critical juncture,” but it remains unclear what revenue these initiatives will generate.
Research analyst firm eMarketer estimates the number of U.S. adult Twitter users will reach 36 million in 2012, up from 18 million in 2009. As a percentage of people who use the Internet, Twitter users will account for 18.8% in 2012, up from 10.5% in 2009.This forecast assumes that Twitter will deliver on its mission to shift its focus from audience building to revenue generation in 2010.
Twitter reported at its first conference nearly 106 million registered accounts worldwide, with just under 40% coming from the U.S. Those figures translate to 39.1 million U.S. accounts, according to eMarketer Analyst Paul Verna.
Verna tells me the numbers take into consideration that some Twitter users have multiple accounts. And I know there are the blackhat SEO spammers who have hundred of automated Twitter accounts — a problem Twitter continually tries to get a handle on and clean up.
“Unlike MySpace, where you saw a clear downward pattern in traffic to the site, we don’t see that with Twitter,” Verna says. “We see a more complicated picture.”
That picture makes Verna believe Twitter has something to build on but needs to answer lots of questions. Twitter’s strengths have been overblown by media reports, but he admits the company shows potential.
For one, there are those licensing agreements with Google Microsoft and Yahoo that enabled the search engines to tap into tweet streams. Reports that Twitter earned about $25 million from those deals were not refuted, which led some industry insiders to assume Twitter became profitable. Some believe the real money will come from Twitter Sponsored Tweets, announced earlier this month.
Apparently, the strong and relevant tweets will survive. The Twitter Sponsored Tweets will have a “Resonance Score” to help move up the tweets on searches. If they aren’t replied to or retweeted by other users they will disappear. Digg also told me it would launch a similar search feature this summer.
If it sounds like search marketing, it’s meant to, as this emerging business model that considers consumer feedback follows Google’s paid search business into the social space.
In an eMarketer report titled “Twitter: A Strong Current in the Social Media Mainstream,” Verna points to Anderson Analytics’s estimates that 15% of U.S. social network users tapped into Twitter monthly in 2009. Assuming eMarketer’s estimate of 88.1 million U.S. social network users that year is correct, Anderson’s figure amounts to 13.2 million Twitter users.
Other indicators of Twitter use by consumers include the length of time that people have been using the site. Verna points to Dynamic Logic and Millward Brown estimates that in Q3 2009, 58% of Twitter users surveyed had used the service for less than six months, while another 25% had been using it for 6 to 11 months. Versa suggests that at this time Twitter use continued to ramp up through late 2009, compared with other social media sites such as MySpace and LinkedIn, which had smaller percentages of recent users and much larger portions of longtime users.
Facebook, which now boasts closing in on 500 million users, up from 100 million in the year-ago quarter, could change it all with its open graph initiative announced at this year’s F8 conference as the company moves to become the fabric of the Web.
Still, Twitter’s popularity represents an opportunity for marketers, Verna says. “With more and more companies dabbling in social media, Twitter is emerging as an increasingly powerful weapon in their marketing arsenals,” he writes in the report.
(0)
Hiring an interactive or digital ad agency can be quite the challenge despite the seemingly transparent nature of online and social media marketing. In reality, the landscape is tricky to navigate even for the pros, much less a company seeking to hire the best expertise.
Forrester Research has put out a report describing the changes underway for ad agencies in what it calls a new era of adaptive marketing. Essentially, it said “mass media is no longer the foundation of marketing communication, forcing yet another change in the expectations of what marketing agencies can and should deliver.”
Specialty Agencies
In short, a door has opened for a new set of specialty agencies and consultants that has created some significant confusion for marketers as to the roles of agencies,writes Sean Corcoran at Forrester. “They see Crispin Porter + Bogusky build out the skill sets of an interactive agency, interactive agency R/GA win the role of lead agency for Ameriprise, media agency Starcom Mediavest reposition themselves as a ‘human experience’ agency focusing on a more holistic media experience, and they see PR agencies like Edelman make significant strides into the interactive space through social media. This leads to frustration for marketers.”
According to Forrester research, most interactive marketers don’t trust their traditional agencies with digital work and yet most don’t believe their interactive agencies are ready to lead yet either, Corcoran said. “All of this creates somewhat of an agency purgatory – where different agencies try and take on each others’ roles but no one type of agency is ready to take over.”
Or as Aaron Schoenberger of The Brainchild Group, wrote, “just because a company can create awesome television commercials doesn’t mean they can kick butt in search engines. Social media marketing and SEO is a totally different animal.”
The bottom line for companies seeking to hire a digital marketing company, Schoenberger concludes is simply this: “quiz them and make sure they know their stuff.”
What to Ask – As a Start
To warm up, he suggests asking the following:
1.How will you improve the rank of my website?
2.Do you manually submit social bookmarks and business directory listings, or are these automated?
3.Are you familiar with Google PageRank?
4.Can you provide me with a list of keywords you have targeted and the outcome/ranking?
Stay tuned for part 2: Getting into Hardcore Questions
Facebook allows for 2 networking tools:
The major differences become evident only after you try out them first. The 2 major differences include:
Continue reading ‘Facebook Group vs Facebook Fan Page: What’s Better?’
Information covered includes:
What is the difference between a business account and a personal account?
How do I create a business account?
If I already have a user profile, can I create a business account?
What happens if I click the ‘Create Your Profile’ button at the top of my business account?
If I turn my business account into a user profile, can that action be reverted?
Can multiple people use the same account to administer a Page?
What actions can a business account take on the site?
The WOMMA Ethics Code is the cornerstone for prudent practices in the WOM industry. In light of the December 2009 effective date of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, WOMMA leadership responded to member demand for additional meaningful disclosures for social media marketing. This is a continuation of an effort started in 2008 when WOMMA began formalizing best practices by engaging industry leaders, members, non members, academics and consumers. The process included:
One of the reasons that I find Facebook so interesting is because it has a variety of features that are focused on community building and sharing information with friends and contacts. It is especially useful for smaller, lightweight community efforts.
While we tend to think of Facebook as something for college students, recent college graduates, and technology early adopters, the reality is that Facebook users in the 35 and older category are growing at a very fast rate. According to Inside Facebook, as of the end of March, 30% of Facebook users are over 35. Continue reading ‘Getting Started with Facebook for Companies and Organizations’
