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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.

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 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.

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.

Bob Hoffman is one of those guys you love and hate all in the same breath. At least he is for me. Longtime author of the amazingly thought-provoking blog The Ad Contrarian, Hoffman bemoans bad advertising, berates ad industry idiosyncrasies, but also spends an awful lot of time bashing social media.

I had the honor (though at times I’ve questioned that label) of serving on a panel discussion with Bob once. It was at an advertising conference a few years back. I recall him trying to call bullshit on social media as a whole and me throwing it back at him as best I could coming from a relative neophyte in the marketing world.

(Bob is old. He’s run his own ad agency for 20 years. He’s so old he only has one job listed on his LinkedIn profile. We’re not sure if it’s because he never held one or that he forgot what came before he owned his own agency.)

Whether or not I won him over that day, I’ve read almost every word he’s written on his blog since. The guy is flat brilliant. And he calls a spade a spade. I guess we’re cut from similar cloth. (Though unlike his, mine was probably produced using machines that ran on electricity rather than burrows.)

As he is apt to do, Bob made a most important point about social media recently with his post, “My Overnight Success In Social Media.” In it, he explained how he produced the 2nd best-selling advertising eBook on Amazon in a span of just 18 hours. I wanted to share with you how he became such an “overnight success” to help illustrate a point, but also to let you know you should probably buy the book. I’ve read it. It’s awesome.

Here’s how he did it, quoting from the list he blogged that day:

1. First I wrote and published a book called The Ad Contrarian. This took a couple of years.
2. Next I started a blog called The Ad Contrarian.
3. Then I spent virtually every Saturday morning for five years roughing out ideas for Ad Contrarian blog posts.
4. For almost five years I spent at least two hours a day — usually between 3 and 5 am — writing my blog.
5. I also spent at least an hour every day scouring online and offline sources for blog post ideas.
6. I wrote several articles for trade publications sticking assiduously to my “Ad Contrarian” POV.
7. As a result, I developed a nice body of subscribers for my blog. I try to keep it fresh, entertaining, and controversial to attract non-subscribers every day.
8. Although I have several thousand Twitter followers, I act to maintain credibility by only tweeting about the blog when there is something I believe is unusually interesting in it.
9. To develop credibility among my readers, I have never used my blog to promote my agency.
10. In order to advance The Ad Contrarian I have traveled frequently to do speaking engagements and never accepted money.

Every person or company that has achieved some case study of success in social media has a similar story. If they don’t, then they’ve done something unscrupulous to invent their success that we probably wouldn’t recommend.

Not a single person I’ve talked to about social media marketing in the last five years isn’t looking for an easy button. The problem is that there’s not one. You will have to work at it. You will have to build an audience. You will have to hone your craft of communicating through these channels. You will have to rinse and repeat. And it still may not be the astounding success you were hoping for.

But not a bit of that isn’t true for other communications channels. Sure, you can throw a lot of money at television advertisements (or other channels, too) and drive numbers in the short term. But you’re never going to achieve the kind of success that grabs people, sinks your brand into their consciences and gives you long-term stability without putting in the hours, doing the dance and getting the work done.

Stop looking for the easy button. That and other flashes of brilliance can be found in 101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising by Bob Hoffman. You should buy it (it’s $0.99 for chrissakes). While you’re at it, go subscribe to his blog, too. For you social media enthusiasts, it’ll piss you off more often than not, but it will make you think and, frankly, that’s a good thing.

And if you want something a bit more direct about building a social media strategy, there’s a book for that, too.

NOTE: None of the links here are affiliate links.

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Estimating influence is a delicate balance of art and science. People are drawn to quantitative methods because scores are easy to understand. The downside of reducing influence to a number, though, is oversimplification.

Lately, I’ve been looking at Klout, the popular new tool that bills itself as “The Standard” for influence measurement. The more I look at it, the less I like it.

This posts covers a new Edelman Digital Insights package we're releasing today on "Attentionomics." You can find the deck below and on Slideshare.

 

http://www.slideshare.net/EdelmanDigital/attentionomics-captivating-attention...

 

 

The essence of this deck is that attention is linked with economic value creation. However, with infinite content options (space) yet finite attention (time) and personalized social algorithms curating it all for us, it's going to be increasingly challenging to stand out.

 

Let's  consider Twitter, for example. They are seeing a staggering 110 million tweets per day. And the volume is growing. But therein lies the challenge. Each tweet decays almost as soon as it is released. Some 92% of all retweets (and 97% of replies) are within the first 60 minutes according to Sysomos.

 

 

View Slideshow

 

The situation in some ways is worse on Facebook where a highly personalized algorithm called EdgeRank curates our feed based on personal affinities, content formats and timeliness. There's not just one Facebook but 500M Facebooks. And, according to Vitrue, the majority of us participate at top and bottom of the hour. This means that anything you post to your Facebook page needs to create a social surge well before then.

 

 

View Slideshow

 

So how do you make this work in your favor? Simple, businesses must obey the laws of attentionomics (e.g.) time and space. In the deck above you will find two sets of solutions. 

 

The first set of solutions covers space. It explains how to scale their surface area via digital embassies by...

• Hand-crafting your content for each embassy
• Activating employees as thought leaders
• Tightly integrating owned and social assets

The second section covers time and how to make it your ally through "dayparted engagement." The action steps here include:

• Practicing mindfulness with bifocal awareness (different than, but related to monitoring)
• Optimizing for the best times to engage
• Testing, planning and measuring

If you're an Edelman client you will also get access to specific tools and techniques, but I will share one with you today. Check out Timely, a brand new tool from Flowtown that helps you optimize your tweets and track their performance. It's a good start and they are planning to add some Pro services soon that I hope will elevate this into a must-use tool.

 

 

View Slideshow

 

As always, we are eager to hear your feedback on this important topic.