serendipity? or smart planning. nabisco made the right play by getting the right decision-makers together for guerilla marketing

You need a brave brand to approve content that quickly. When all of the stakeholders come together so quickly, you've got magic...

 

matt grant is a thinker. it shows in everything he writes, including this piece on the use of long-form "advertorial" content. it seems to me (and to matt) that as the trend continues toward content marketing, sponsored content will risk convergence with "real" content. this excerpt is from an interview matt did with the atlantic's digital editor shortly before they ran a poorly received ad from the church of scientology.

“The reader needs to know what is an ad and what is not an ad,” he told me. “We are not trying to confuse the reader into reading advertising products and thinking they are reading editorial products.”

As far as interfering with the reading experience goes, he added, “I should say, ‘Don’t unduly interfere’ because some people believe that any ads interfere with the reader’s experience.”

(note: I am testing diigo.com's annotation features. please click through on the 'magazine readers link above and let me know if the yellow highlighting shows up about halfway down the page. thanks!)

"Embedded Tweets display photos, videos, article summaries and other content shared in a Tweet, just like you see on twitter.com," Twitter said in a blog post. "You can also view retweet and favorite counts to better understand engagement, and we've made some tweaks to the design so that embedded Tweets are easier to read."

 

nice article from thrivehive on boosting your profile on google's local business profiles. google plus is still not getting a lot of respect in the marketing world, but when you're talking local search, it is smart to play as nice with the big g as you can. I have summarized the recommendations in the excerpt below.

we’ve pulled together our list of four things to do and 2 things to avoid to help your Google Plus Local listing dominate the local results.

Do

1. Link it up

include a link to your google plus listing on your website 

2. Take a N.A.P.

consistent use of business name, address and phone number

3. Show your stuff

photos and video - visual content is more engaging

4. Seeing stars

try to get customers to review the business

Don’t

1. Can’t buy me love

don't try to game the system with phony reviews

2. Quit nagging

google doesn't like reviews resulting from "please review us" reminder emails. thrivehive suggests using a QR code to encourage customers to do quick reviews on site.

 

thinglink lets you put links into images.

Todd Pollak, industry director of retail at Google, summarized what he calls the first "Nonline holiday shopping season" in a blog post. "In short, the shopper's journey looks less like a funnel and more like a flight map, and the lines between online and offline shopping experiences are blurring," he noted.

 

gotta agree, this is cool stuff. now everybody who jumps through a few "I'm not a scammer" hoops can leverage their quality video work...and get some verifiable roi. brand new news, although everyone will have it tonight or tomorrow. check out the reelseo writeup for more. h/t to mark traphagen

So everyone rejoice, it's here!  You can now link within videos to do just about everything now: send people to other videos, send people to a featured video, send people to the merch store, and send people to your website.  This interactive video thing is awesome, and it increases the power of what you can do with YouTube videos.

 

linkedin continues to move aggressively to increase its allure for advertisers. this excerpt describes why an API is so important for big advertisers:

An ads API is like steroids for an ad platform. Consider Facebook. The social network in 2009 began letting a few companies access its ads API and brought even more on board in 2010, when advertising revenue grew 145 percent to $1.87 billion. The following year Facebook officially released the ads API, which would open it up to more developers who would be able to manage and run more ads for marketers. Facebook closed 2011 with $3.15 billion in ad revenue; it already has $2.95 billion in ad revenue over the first three quarters of 2012. Obviously the ads API isn’t the only reason Facebook has seen such a steep rise in ad revenue—hitting a billion users and increasing ad rates certainly helped—but the API definitely catalyzed that growth.

 

it's worth the extra time!

For users, copying and pasting to share content holds obvious appeal: It’s almost frictionless, and it allows the sharer to choose exactly what to pass on to a friend or social network.

“You probably have a lot of friends sharing the same article,” Tynt general manager Greg Levitt said. “But when you can specifically call out a personalized, relevant aspect, it makes the story your own.”

 

wow.

Evidence for the effectiveness of mobile advertising keeps rolling in—and goes beyond clickthroughs and any question of “fat fingers” vs. real engagement.

Research from video ad network AdColony and Nielsen found that mobile video ads for CPG brands were more effective across a variety of brand health metrics than ads on TV or videos online among US males. Recall, favorability and purchase interest were all significantly higher on mobile, according to the May research.

 

getting found. it's a searchable world, so businesses and organizations like to believe that when people are looking for something they provide, their name will pop up. here's a somewhat snide little post that dismisses "the obvious SEO signals" for some less wellknown but pretty easily accomplished tweaks to kick your findability up a notch.

#6 is highlighted here - go to the article for the rest

Images. This is more an addition to Facebook and Google +, but has massive impacts for image search. I personally was having an issue getting certain images to show up on Facebook from my blog, and couldn’t diagnose the issue. Rather than pulling in the images I uploaded for the post, it was pulling in the Social Sharing icons I had set. Bad user experience for anyone else sharing. I found a great plugin to fix the Facebook like thumbnail which brings the images you want to the top, and adds a tag to identify those as the preferred images for the post and for Open Graph.

Do yourself a favor and ensure that the images on your site are descriptive, and they are being picked up by social networks and Google image search.

 

Online Ads “Annoying” And “Distracting”

Although only 3 in 10 consumers (and just 16% of marketers) believe that online advertising is not effective, consumers don’t appear to have warmed to online ads. When asked to select from a list of adjectives to describe them, “annoying” led the list at 68%, followed by distracting (51%), all over the place (46%), invasive (38%) and creepy (16%). Just 14% described them as eye-catching, 10% as clever and 7% as persuasive. 6% feel online ads are evil.

I had seen a few posts about the list.ly service, but this post from social media examiner offers a really cool use for it that invites community participation. list posts are the evergreens of the blog world - what are some other ways you could see a crowdsourced list like this being a good thing?

Create a Community-Driven List Post

List.ly is a collaborative list-building tool. You create the initial list on the List.ly website and you can embed it as part of your blog post. Embedding means that it appears as if it’s in your blog post, but it still resides on List.ly.

What’s cool is that your community can then add and/or vote for items on the list. This can be a useful tool to engage with your community and discover more about their interests.

 

a post about LinkedIn's new Endorsements feature I wrote on my btrandolph.com blog has been getting a lot of comments in a LinkedIn group, but that's just the tip of the iceberg for changes. LinkedIn recently made huse enhancements to functionality and formatting for brand pages, and now that comes to personal profiles, too. Check out the full article in Adweek for deets.

LinkedIn is revamping its core profile pages.

Starting Tuesday (Oct. 16) the company's 175 million users will see a host of new tools and user options on their Linkedin profile pages, part of an overhaul CEO Jeff Weiner described as “one of the biggest changes to a LinkedIn pillar product in the company’s history,” during an event at its Moutain View, Calif., headquarters.

The changes to Linkedin's profiles include several new photo, biography and editing options. But overall, the biggest difference in profile pages are a series of new features Linkedin hopes will encourage users to share a whole lot more content via the networking site.

 

for as long as music has been performed, performers have seized fame and had it snatched away again. sometimes this is due to a fickle public. sometimes it happens because an arist hits the skids creatively or physically. but sometimes, if they (and we) are lucky, they find fresh energy and step again to the front of the stage. elvis in 68. aerosmith in the 90's.

like the musical artists it helped fans to celebrate, myspace seized fame as an early icon of social media. users found and shared with like-minded peers. new and established bands found a new channel for releasing music and communicating with their fan base. then, it faded away. sure, the audience was fickle. sure the site made missteps and lost its focus. and now, with fresh investors and poster comeback wannabe justin timberlake leading the way, myspace is launching its bid to get back in the spotlight. 

if you haven't seen the teaser video for the relaunch, here it is:

The new Myspace from Myspace on Vimeo.

I'm a music fan. but I'm an older one, so I missed the myspace bus the last time round, other than occasionally finding a cool richard buckner track there or something. this writeup was triggered by a post in one of my facebook groups that was itself a reposting on an article on the culture-ist: "will myspace bring sexy back to the social media stage?" despite the lameass title - social media has been and remains all about the sexy - the article does a good job highlighting the goods and the bads of the as yet un-relaunched relaunch. here is an excerpt describing two cool features of the new myspace:  

Like Facebook, there’s a “friend” button attached to an artist, but unlike Facebook, Myspace isn’t built on exclusivity. When you “friend” an artist there’s no awkward wait time when you angst about whether or not your invitation’s going to be accepted or not. Connections are automatically established at the click of a button. There’s less of a fluctuating social hierarchy. Once you’ve connected to your favorite artist, you’re able to keep track of their updates in case they put out new songs or are about to embark on a world tour, but the really cool part is you’ll also get to keep track of what your favorite artist is listening to. So, the next time you’re listening to a track and your friend asks you, “Who is this new folksy band?” You can nonchalantly say something along the lines of, “Oh this? This is ________. Rihanna introduced me to them.”

One feature that has been getting a lot of press attention (and it’s easy to see why) is the opportunity and possibility for fans to see their profile publicized on their favorite artist’s page as a #1 fan, which not only gives them bragging rights, but also a chance to be recognized by one of their favorite artists; it’s very similar to getting  retweeted by your favorite celebrity. These personalized touches and virtual interactions might make Myspace a prominent platform  among the social media landscape.

I was the first to comment on the posted article on linkedin:

 the 'new' myspace looks like a combination of pinterest and facebook. they have one big advantage - a database of users from back in the day. that is diminished somewhat by the age of their prinary demo - young ppl tend to cycle email addresses as they progress. can they recapture the music crowd? I think maybe if they partner with some big players and every soundcloud out there and function as a distribution hub for other social channels so casual users don't need to GO to myspace to benefit.

I'm one of those users, so I did get the announcement and that prompted me to look at the press coverage, and I will certainly try out the service when it goes live. so friend me or something. 

here's a good one on posting links:

Tip: When you share links on Facebook, make sure that if you put a link into a Facebook post first and it automatically shows a preview of the link, close that preview and add a photo before posting.

alternatively, attach the picture you want first, then write the copy, including the link. either way, it will come out looking like this instead of this

 

in our visual world, tweaking the images on your site for seo takes a little extra time but can result in a good branding payoff

Google Image Search

Most search queries in Google image search aren’t very competitive. Well ranked images are seldom the result of great SEO and often sheer luck. The basics of image search are however easy.

Using your keyword in the URL/image name, including it in the alt-/title attribute and placing it within keyword rich textual content is often enough for high ranking. Defining ornamental images as CSS backgrounds makes all the remaining img-tags stand out more. Images on well optimized pages with a lot of link value have the highest chance of scoring.

Only the first 4 to 7 images will appear in regular search results and only when your queries show images, so make sure you outrank everything else.

Branding the Image

Generic images for generic keywords don’t show that one of the images belongs to you. Adding some big logo to the image would really make it stand out more and the branding value of your logo high within the search results can be enormous.

 

the wsj contends that comscore's numbers put instagram ahead of twitter in the race for advertisers' dollars:

Here’s why the “daily user” metric matters: It’s a measurement of how many users (roughly) check the app every single day. That’s important for selling advertisements, because the more engaged a user is, the more likely they are to click on an ad.

Basically, better engagement typically leads to better monetization.

congrats to instagram on their impressive adoption growth. however, I question the implication that this means instagram is further along the road to monetization. the article actually throws up a red flag in stating the TOTAL number of twitter users is much higher due to desktop users and acknowledging that instagram is only on mobile. but the point is just left hanging. left in the editing room was the conclusion that if only 60% of twitter use is on mobile, the total count should be nearly 70% higher!

the other question relates to the nature of engagement on the two services. the findings show that instagram beat twitter out in the average amount of time spent using the app. first, I would eliminate the minority obsessive users of each by looking at median time. then, I would want to see the median time spent on each app per visit. - I use instagram mostly to check in and rarely browse others' pics. I would suggest that twitter has a much better shot at driving actual conversion for advertisers since the ads will be integrated in the use process (reading streams, participation in conversations) rather than an interruption of the use process.

money shot: new social media analytics outfit ohtootay lets marketers track posts all the way through to website conversion - even when the post doesn't point directly to the e-commerce site! too cool, right?

One of the platform’s standout features is its competitor comparison tool. That is, it can track what your company’s performance looks like versus competitors on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and even the iPhone App Store, Android app store (Google Play) and Facebook’s App Center. “In some senses, Ohtootay is compete.com for social media and mobile apps,” Mark explains. “And we believe that angels, VCs and social media managers that are armed with this kind of data will be way more effective decision makers than their peers who only navel-gaze at their own data in isolation,” he says.

 

Last week I posted on why Google "Plus Ones" help links pop more in search results than Facebook likes. Here's some great tips straight from Google on how to makes the same Plus magic happen in your ads

Example

George creates a Google+ Page for his company, Happy Burgers. He also creates an AdWords campaign, some ads, and then a social extension by linking his Google+ Page to his campaign. When 32 people +1 one of his ads, Happy Burgers' page will receive 32 new +1's.  Alternatively, if George connects his AdWords campaign to his Google+ Page after it already had 32 +1's, all of his ads can now have these +1's as social annotations.

 

I've been skeptical about the value of instagram for non-visually oriented brands. the new app from venueseen described in business insider doesn't change my mind - visual brands will do a lot better with integrating instagram submissions on their site than, for example, a maker of commercial ovens.

The tool aggregates photos that have been labeled with a specific hashtag and brings them to a company's campaign page. Instagrammers can then claim their photograph and collect prizes, coupons, and other incentives the company have put in place. This allows for easy company/consumer interaction and gives brands customer contact information.

 

UPDATE: more information from the AdWords help pages on make google plus endorsements show up

adding the Google +1 button to a website offers much more benefit than adding a Facebook Like button to a website. And it's incredibly easy to do.

 

I keep being surprised at how little attention the shift toward social search is receiving. if you want a recommendation on getting a rebuilt transmission, where do you go? you might not know that a work associate or cousin had a great (or terrible) experience with xyz transmission. google doesn't know. but facebook does. and you are more likely to pay attention to someone you know than anonymous recommendations:

Like Facebook, Google knows that search is moving from keywords and links to providing answers for users to questions such as “Where should I eat?” and “Who can repair my car the best?” That’s why the company has been spending so much time and effort adding expert information from places like Wikipedia and from its own sources like Zagat. But that isn’t social data, and while there has been plenty of debate about the ultimate value of social recommendations, there’s no question that Facebook has a far better grasp of that than Google. And unless Facebook and Twitter choose to change their blockade of the search engine, it is likely to stay that way.

 

this info is from back in february, but there's no reason to think things have improved. I would say take comfort, but it's not very comforting.

Have you looked at the “virality rate” statistic in your page insights — the percentage of fans who reshare a page’s posts and wondered why the percentage looked so low?

Take heart: 61 percent of page have a virality rate of 2.5 percent or less, according to EdgeRank Checker.

The median rate came out to 1.9 percent.

 

another adoring paean to pinterest, this time with a video. ok, pinterest is the fastest growing service ever. ok, it drives more traffic than anything except facebook and stumbleupon (who? yes, it's still number 2). from the marketingprofs piece:

So, does all the data show that Pinterest, that red-hot online pin board, is worth your time, energy, and effort? Can folks who don’t give a pin about about making their own panna cotta or holiday buntings still use Pinterest for their business?

Yes. And, most definitely, yes!

 

that's great, but..I am still waiting to hear a better breakdown of who's receiving all these referrals to verify the value for business outside the fashion, decor and similarly visual sectors. I saw an article on oreck's pinboards, and some appear to be attracting followers and some engagement.

but I am looking for a case study on a non-intuitive brand that is generating conversions from pinterest activity and showing superior ROI to other social activity. I'm no purist - conversion doesn't have to be pinterest-referred sales. rather, it could be something like driving to interact on FB (not just another Like) or sign up for coupons or news. 

big hat image:  Some rights reserved by Lon2000

great tip on a new linkedin service to help tap your board's network on beth kanter's blog. and it's free!

Using Board Connect on LinkedIn allows you see past first connections on LinkedIn, check out a potential candidate’s knowledge and their connections. It streamlines the process. But, if all board members add their networks, this produces a richer set of potential candidates. And, remember,  you are not just adding a board member, you are also adding their network.

As part of the board connect program, nonprofits get free access to a Talent Finder account (valued at $1000/annually), an exclusive LinkedIn education webcast (with tools and tips to use the account), and membership to the Board Connect Group on LinkedIn.

 

the voting study showed that patterns of influence were much more likely to be demonstrated among close friends, suggesting that “strong ties” in cyberspace are more likely than “weak ties” to influence behavior. It also found an indirect impact from the messages: friends of friends were influenced as well.

gushing review from search engine land of a new search engine for facebook that will be available this week. I'm not a huge facebook searcher, but I see this as having a big effect in commercial use - competitive research, copyright enforcement etc. and apparently it will be available for services like Tumblr, Flickr and Instagram....

It’s no secret that Facebook’s existing search engine is bad; that drum has been beaten to death. But you don’t have to wait for Facebook to make it better; there’s a pretty darn good Facebook search engine out there now.

It’s called Trove, and it’s officially launching on Tuesday. But you can connect your Facebook account and get started now; the site had a soft launch about two weeks ago. I’ve been testing it, and it’s easily the best Facebook search experience I’ve seen. There are a few missing features that I’ll mention below, but Trove’s potential is obvious.