SoVibe

New Facebook Features Give Users Privacy Control

sovibe — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:39:36 +0000

How seen do you wanna be?

To help its over 200 million users better manage their personal and professional lives — which increasingly intersect on its website — Facebook is testing new privacy controls.

The tools enable users to decide which groups or people are able to see respective photos, videos and text-based updates posted on their profiles. In addition to hiding casual photos from colleagues, the controls can also, for example, enable families to discuss a surprise birthday party without the birthday girl seeing, according to The New York Times.

“Our overall philosophy is that people should be as open or as closed as they want to be,” stated Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly on a conference call with reporters yesterday.

The features are being tested on a limited number of users, but Facebook ultimately plans to unroll them across its entire network. Once implemented, they will also help Facebook better manage its privacy settings, which have grown unwieldy: they comprise over six pages and 40 different options. Following the launch of these revised settings, the privacy section will be condensed to one page.

“When tools are simple, people are more likely to use them,” explained Kelly. “If there are too many options, users are not fully appreciating what they are sharing with whom.”

Earlier this year, in another effort to simplify its offering, Facebook changed its Terms of Service to include a clause that grants the site ownership of any data a user uploads, whether or not it is later removed. The resulting media/user tempest stimulated a response from founder Mark Zuckerberg, who ultimately decided to let users create a crowdsourced TOS.

On the advertiser side, Facebook recently launched hybrid engagement ads and real-time search terracing features.

Source: MarketingVox

Case study: An affordable way to build a social community

sovibe — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:06:08 +0000

Marketing and brands are relationships between consumers and products, and relationship building is a two-way conversation. It is not the one-to-many broadcast commercial that defines a customer’s relationship with a brand. Rather, it’s the more informal — often personal — interactions with a product or company that result in long-term brand engagement. Technology, specifically the social web, has transformed marketers’ ability to run lower cost, targeted marketing campaigns with measurable return on investment. The result is a new category of marketing: social marketing.

Social marketing is conversational. It’s focused on facilitating interactions that are more directly connected to the process of relationship building with customers. And social marketing is, in all cases, propelled by social publishing technologies that turn spectators into member and contributors, and transform websites into community platforms for engagement with customers and future prospects.

Enterprise software vendor JackBe offers an example of this new strategy in action. JackBe sells enterprise mashup software to developers that enables them to use web services to connect internal and external data to create new, loosely coupled (or “mashed up”) applications. Because this is a new approach in software development, part of JackBe’s marketing agenda is to educate developers about mashups — what they are, how to build them, and what applications are a good fit for this approach.

To do this, JackBe adopted a social approach in its education strategy by building the JackBe Mashup Developer Community, which targets the developers who will potentially be using JackBe’s software to build their own mashups. The community is not about JackBe — it’s about mashups in general. Most importantly, the community is all about the members themselves. They can connect with one another; share ideas, experiences, and even best practices; and ultimately help move the enterprise mashup industry toward maturity.

Technology considerations
In researching available technologies that could be used to build its community website, JackBe considered a number of options, including traditional proprietary software, software-as-a-service, and open source products such as Drupal. Because JackBe is a small, venture-backed startup company, the project’s budget was finite, and the company needed to get the most bang for its buck. But JackBe also needed to move fast, with less than two months to deliver a member-ready community.

After much deliberation, JackBe ultimately chose the open source option and built its website on Acquia Drupal, a commercially supported distribution of the open source Drupal social publishing system. Keeping its budget well within range, JackBe spent only 25 percent of what a comparable proprietary solution would cost and was able to implement 90 percent of desired functionality within the same period. Such a project could easily have cost six figures for the software alone if purchased from a traditional software vendor.

The results
JackBe’s community site provides the framework to establish a deeper dialogue with customers. The developer community is a place where software developers can converse with each other, ask questions, share code samples, research mashup solutions, and educate themselves and their peers on how best to build and deploy mashup applications.

For example, one community user was researching mashup technologies on the site in preparation for a proposal to his boss. He used the JackBe community to educate himself on the market space in general and JackBe’s products specifically. Not only did he use a number of the presentations and videos available on the community, but the community member felt comfortable enough to call JackBe to ask specific questions as he prepared his proposal. While only a certain percentage of members will get to this level of conversation, such interactions are only possible within a social marketing environment like JackBe’s community.

Thus far, the Mashup Developer Community is exceeding its initial goals. From the day the community launched, JackBe saw a sustained increase in traffic across all of its website properties. A thousand members joined the community in the first few months, and the community now has more than 2,000 members, resulting in an almost immediate 30 percent incremental increase to overall web traffic. While JackBe could have temporarily bought this type of traffic increase, it could not get this type of sustainable traffic without building its own community.

Most importantly, members of the community have shown that they are willing to interact instead of just look. And interestingly, JackBe’s employees were just eager to join the new community. Upon launch of the site, some of the best forum participants and blog posters were JackBe’s own developers. This outward-facing community became a conduit for people with vast knowledge on the subject who previously lacked a public outlet to share experiences.

Better sales and customer support. In addition to the incremental increase in site traffic across JackBe’s web properties, the company has seen the Mashup Developer Community have a decided impact on its sales efforts. Since its launch, the community has resulted in additional leads to the company’s marketing database. More importantly, the community’s influence on closed sales deals is trending toward 100 percent — almost every single lead that results in a sale is a person who is visiting the community and taking advantage of it as a resource.

One reason the community site touches almost every deal is that the enterprise mashup software market is in its early stages. All of JackBe’s prospective customers are beginners who have questions. Of course, each potential customer who downloads JackBe software has an account team and sales resources assigned to it. However, the community complements this traditional sales ownership as prospects visit the community for answers to their questions and learn by doing. The result is a scalable way for the buying audience to find high-quality answers to questions without inflating the demands on the sales teams.

Better market research and market reach. At the same time, JackBe’s marketing and development groups use the community as a valuable first-hand market research tool. Whereas statistical research and analyst reports offer generalized, high-level analysis (typically with a high price tag), the community offers immediate, tangible feedback unlike other traditional market research vehicles.

Forum questions, blog posts, community polls, and other user-generated content on the site provide tangible, concrete market research directly from the people who are using them. In addition, JackBe’s community has quickly resulted in high organic search engine rankings in dozens of niche search terms and phrases. The resulting click-through traffic is highly focused and therefore very likely to be engaged by the content on JackBe’s community.

Measurements of campaign success include the following points:

30 percent increase in overall web traffic
Delivered 90 percent of desired functionality in two weeks
Platform development required only 56 lines of custom code
More than 2,000 new community members in six months
25 percent the cost of a proprietary solution
Community influence on sales pipeline close to 100 percent

Lessons learned and best practices

Marketers looking to construct their own online communities can take away several lessons from JackBe’s experience in building its Mashup Developer Community. A few best practices and lessons learned include:

The agenda should be broader than your products. Make your community an educational resource on a general topic (and not just another marketing outlet for your product), and you will appeal to a much wider audience.
Everyone is a member. You cannot predict who will be your best contributors, and everyone should have the opportunity help sell and market your company, including your own employees.
Help people help themselves. Provide an environment where visitors can learn by doing, and they will become members. Enable members to discover answers to their questions on their own, and they will keep coming back.
Don’t reinvent the wheel and pay for it. Explore open source social marketing technology as a cost-effective way to extend the reach of your limited marketing budget, while taking advantage of innovative new concepts and technologies that enable you build better relationships with your customers.

Chris Warner is VP of marketing for JackBe and co-manager for JackBe’s Mashup Developer Community. Bryan House is director of marketing for Acquia.

On Twitter? Follow Warner at @jackbe and House at @acquia. Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet.

Source: iMedia Connection

The Twuth About Twitter: Its Impact on Businesses and Communications

sovibe — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:11:54 +0000

Twitter may well be struggling in its search for a profitable business model, but the company has made an impact on multiple levels of the marketing chain.

As the real-time web service gains steam, more entities – from big-time corporations to grassroots-level nonprofits – are starting to benefit from its enormous reach.

Most people are not particularly interested in reading what others had for breakfast – the stereotypical tweet – but Twitter’s reputation as yet another social media site with real-time news is gradually evolving toward one as a valuable source of information across the media horizon. Some examples:

The news of the Mumbai terrorist attacks was first spread via Twitter, as was the landing of the UA plane on the Hudson River.
Twitter delayed its planned maintenance this week week in support of heavy coverage of the Iranian elections by Iranians themselves.
Governments have used it to promote both transparency and direct communication with their constituencies.
Academics have used it as an online tool to follow up on research and expert opinions.
Doctors used it as a didactical device detailing every step of a brain tumor operation for students to follow.
Corporations use Twitter for sales pitches.
Small businesses find Twitter useful to keep customers updated.

So far, Twitter’s most productive use has been for businesses that want customers’ immediate reactions to a product:

Amazon quickly responded to a tweeted outcry about their censoring of so-called adult books.
Starbucks did some reputation damage management after it was rumored that the company would stop serving the troops in Iran as a protest against the war.
Dell noticed customers complaining on Twitter that the apostrophe and return keys were too close together on the Dell Mini 9 laptop – they fixed the problem on the Dell Mini 10.

Recently, Dell claimed Twitter helped make it some millions of dollars in sales. With 600,000 followers, it is one of the Top 100 most-followed accounts on Twitter.

Dell posted 6 to 10 times a week to its Twitter-based DellOutlet account for the last two years, and tracked the sales with proprietary software. Every post includes a coupon or a link to a sale and half of the posts are Twitter-exclusive deals.

It reportedly chalked up more than $1 million in sales over the past 6 months. And on Thursday, Dell said it made over $3 million in total from Twitter followers that clicked through its posts to its websites to make purchases.

Three million in sales over two years may not be impressive for the world’s second-largest PC maker in the first quarter of 2009 (Dell posted $12.3 billion of revenue in the first quarter of this year, alone), but the PC maker has become one of the first public examples of how companies might profit from Twitter.

Twitter does not charge companies for such benefits, but does not rule out doing so in the future.

Twitter had approximately 17 million unique U.S.-based visitors in April, and about 24 million worldwide, according to Nielsen. Its number of users has grown by more than a thousand percent over the last year.

A recent study indicates that more than eight in 10 Twitter users, most of which represent small businesses, expect their company’s use of the popular microblogging tool to increase in the next six months.

Food mogul Nestle recently turned to Twitter for an ad campaign to promote JuicyJuice by creating an ad that features real-time tweets within its borders.

Source: MarketingVox

5 Habits of Successful Executives on Twitter

sovibe — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:09:47 +0000

When company executives speak publicly, they become part of their customer’s brand experience, and that’s especially true when those executives venture into the Twitterverse. Probably to the horror of their handlers, many corporate leaders are starting to ask questions about Twitter (), and some are already using it and speaking directly to customers. That’s great, but it can also be potentially perilous, at least in terms of the brands they represent. If you’re a CEO, President, VP or other executive, stepping out from behind the curtain exposes both you and your brand to intimate scrutiny.

Yet there are a few corporate tweeters who instinctively get it right, and when they do, they add tremendous value to their enterprises. Those that do it the best authenticate their brands, and add to the bank of customer goodwill every business depends on. Executives that have mastered Twitter have pioneered a new way for people to connect with the companies that want their business.

Of course, when they get it wrong, it can be damaging to the brand experience their company works to cultivate. Whenever I see executives using Twitter detrimentally, I’m reminded of a time I boarded a plane and a dapper fellow strolled on behind me, fired up the PA system, and introduced himself as the president of the airline. He thanked us for our business — which was cool — and he proudly informed us that his airline was the most profitable in the world and shopping for expensive new jets — which was not. Whether he realized it or not, he became part of the passenger experience that day, and talking about profits and capital expenditures didn’t reflect the customer focused brand we’d all put our faith in. Corporate leaders on Twitter face the same potential pitfalls as that airline exec.

Those who know how to use Twitter well consistently demonstrate five truths about how a CEO –- or any leader — should speak when they step into the Twitter spotlight. Emulating how they do it can help other executives get a huge return on their investment when using Twitter and avoid doing any damage to their brand.

1. They are their brand’s conscience

For most consumers, an ideal CEO is someone who uses their power to make sure a brand keeps its promises. As a business leader on Twitter, that should be your platform. What people sense in an effective company executive on Twitter is not the echo of marketing, but the principles by which they lead the company behind it, and their passion for the job. Skip the brand rhetoric. Your brand will thank you for it.

2. They don’t sell – They share

Twitter isn’t advertising, it’s a conversation. Great executive tweeters don’t try to sell to their followers, they try to engage them in a personal way. They share things about their company’s corporate culture, their leadership values, the great people around them. They help followers with problems. They make business competition personal, and sometimes even funny. Each tweet should be a window into the life of the company behind the marketing, which will make the marketing stronger as a result.

3. They are real human beings

On Twitter, what you talk about is who you are. Every Twitter user’s update history paints a true portrait of their character and what matters to them. So, the best executive tweeters are real people and sound like real people — always. They know the responsibility to keep their brand honest is a duty they owe their customers, but they also know that baseball practice, Saturday errands and that great burger they had at their favorite local eatery last night are the things that make them human. In moderation, share some of those things, too. People will be able to relate to you on a personal level and as a result, they will like and trust you more.

4. They write well

Nobody will say so out loud, but believe me: Bad grammar and punctuation, or hasty abbreviations to get the character count down to 140, are just a little too humanizing. Great leaders are characteristically great communicators, and it’s no different on Twitter. Sure, informality is fine, charming even, but confident prose is one way people recognize leadership in this forum. Nobody wants to do business with a sixteen-year-old CEO, and the best executive tweeters don’t write like one.

5. They commit

The best executive tweeters are people who have decided to join the party. They tweet a few times a day, and do so at least a few days a week. They build a community and become familiar with their followers. They establish relationships, running jokes, and a personality that defines them. Corporate leaders on Twitter that don’t tweet often can seem distant, or worse, when they do. We don’t feel like they’ve joined the party. We just feel like they walked into the room to make an announcement, and then left. I won’t go so far as to say that you shouldn’t be a Twitter user if you’re not prepared to commit. But almost.

Joining the Twitter community as a leader makes your voice inseparable from your company’s reputation and its brand. What effective CEO tweeters understand, though, is that this doesn’t mean you are that brand. People will follow you, initially at least, because they’re curious to understand who your company is in a deeper way than traditional media allow. But they’ll stay with you only if they like, respect and trust what they discover. Which, as any leader will tell you, is what leadership is all about.

Finding executives on Twitter

Though it is actually a marketing vehicle for Microsoft, ExecTweets is a great resource for finding executives on Twitter. The site categorizes executives who use Twitter and lets users vote on their favorite tweets from those corporate leaders. The WeFollow () directory is another good resource, just search for tags like “CEO” and “executive” to locate executive tweeters.

Disclosure: ExecTweets is a Federated Media program. Federated is an ad partner of Mashable ().

Source: http://mashable.com/2009/06/12/twitter-executives/

Twitter Tracker: Jessica Simpson…OMG

sovibe — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 05:35:02 +0000

Keeping you up to date on all the hottest and most exciting celebrity tweets? It’s The Tonight Show Twitter Tracker!! The over-the-top segment pokes fun at the media’s obsession with celebrity tweets. Mashable says the celebrity tweets were made-up but the clip still pokes a lot of fun at all the interest in celebrities on Twitter.

Take a look!

What Is Conversational Currency?

sovibe — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 05:15:12 +0000

Social Media and all the related tools are creating a new currency whose worth increases over time. We call this Conversational Currency and it is created by the propagation of your conversation and its relevance to your audience.

Conversational currency is created by people who share their enthusiasm for a topic, a conversation, with their peers. Because conversations are peer-mediated, they have more authority—this much we know already. However, what Conversational Currency reveals to us is the value conversations create which is reflected by endorsement, or propagation of a conversation by the community of peers.

A conversation turns to currency when people discover something meaningful in a “conversational” experience, they are prepared to spread the conversation as if it were their own. Conversations about brand experiences, topical perspectives and innovative ideas have become a new currency.

Today value added conversations are increasingly creating a draw to people whom have an affinity to a brand, an experience or a topic of interest. What we consume and how we consume it are important parts of developing “conversational currency. Conversational currency is created by the propagation of a conversation by others that incorporate your conversation into their own narratives. The more valuable your conversation is the more likely they are to be propagated by others.

The conversational process is a form of powerful currency that transforms the relationship between individuals, brands and media perspectives. In this new type of transaction, individuals and brands can provide people valuable conversational currency by successfully delivering outstanding and meaningful information, knowledge and innovative ideas and perspectives. In return, the conversation propagates and, by extension, increases the value of the discussion by drawing attention, attraction, affinity and subsequently an increase in the audience. The audience then adds its perspective, insights and value to the original conversation thus creating a “new currency” of exchange and value creation.

What Determines The Value of Your Currency?

Conversations propagate based on the rate of interest. Bankers don’t care about money; they care about the rate of change of money. People don’t care about your tweets, they care about the rate of change of your tweets. People don’t care about your message; they care about the rate of change of your message relative to their position. Rate of interest in your conversation is reflected by the rate of change. The more your conversation “changes” from one to one to a million the higher the interest rate becomes.

You deposit money in a bank for “use and interest“. Social media is about depositing conversational currency for use and gaining “interest” from it. A conversation can and does create a currency exchange of value, if you know how to create interest.

The last mile of conversational currency is the conversion of conversational interest rates to a return. A return from your conversation is represented by the application of the relative information, knowledge and innovation which is applied to a transaction. A transaction is the exchange of value for economic return. The economic return is not only represented by the currency of money but by other forms of currency that eventually lead to money. Get it?

What say you?

via What Is Conversational Currency? | The Relationship Economy…….

Twitter Tracker

sovibe — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:24:51 +0000

What do you get when you combine over-the-top voice narration, celebrities, and Twitter? It’s Conan O’Brien’s Twitter Tracker. Conan took over the reigns of the Tonight Show last week, and this segment pokes fun at the self importance of Twitter. Let’s hope Twitter Tracker becomes a recurring segment. Conan introduces a brand new Tonight Show gadget… That gets a little out of hand! Some tweets can’t be beat, maimed, beheaded or killed for that matter.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/75638/the-tonight-show-with-conan-obrien-twitter-tracker

Email’s new best practices

sovibe — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:03:52 +0000

One of the great joys — and great frustrations — of my job comes from working with clients whose email experience spans from accomplished professional to rank amateur. The experienced pros help our organization blaze new trails in email marketing while each new client gives us the chance to start fresh and enjoy the benefits of having made mistakes in the past. On the down side, however, we often find ourselves repeating some basic tactics over and over again.

While each brand has its own challenges in email and little quirks that make its emails unique, the fact remains that over time, certain trends emerge that generally hold true for all marketers. By now, you have probably absorbed most of the conventional wisdom of email, such as testing subject lines early and often; using short, crisp copy to highlight the offer; and designing calls to action as text to avoid image rendering issues. These basics comprise Email 101, the freshman course. But over the past year or so, new rules have emerged for email’s upperclassmen — let’s call these rules Email 201.

Onboarding
Most email marketers welcome new opt-ins with an email or two. Whether introducing new opt-ins to product ownership or to email subscriptions, marketers know that the consumer’s engagement with the brand stands at a high point at this beginning. Regardless of the objectives for these emails, they should follow these new rules:

Be direct with subject lines. The first time your opt-in receives an email from you, she needs to get acquainted with you. So emailers should make sure to use the brand name in the subject line — even if it also appears in the from name — along with words of welcome. Marketers could do far worse than “Welcome to [brand]‘s newsletter.”
Include whitelisting instructions once or twice, then forget it. For years, emailers put “add to address book” calls to action in the headers of their emails and many still do. While this call to action helps improve deliverability over time, the recipient simply begins to ignore it after a while. To put it another way, if the recipient doesn’t add the email address to her address book after two shots, she probably never will. By limiting the use of the “add to address book” call to action, the emailer can free up the header for other uses (see below).
Let them know what’s coming. Use welcome emails to give an overview of what types of content recipients will see in the coming months. If they elected preferences during the subscription process, remind them of their preferences and provide the opportunity to correct those preferences if necessary.
Include a welcome offer as well as welcome information. Direct marketers know the power of recency-frequency-monetary segmentation, and emailers know that it works with email too. Turn your new customers into repeat customers with a “can’t refuse” offer — especially if it’s dynamically offered based on the first purchase.

Headers
The header has only grown in importance over the past few years. For one thing, about half of all consumers use a preview pane to view emails, according to a MarketingSherpa survey from last year. Thus, they will see what’s in the header. In addition, an increasing number of consumers view emails on mobile devices, performing “mobile triage” to determine which emails to keep and which to delete. Forrester estimates that 15 percent of consumers do so now and that many more will do so within the next few years. Both trends place increasing importance on the space at the top of your email.

Put a “view on mobile” call to action at the very top. Because many mobile email platforms (especially Blackberry) mangle HTML, mobile email users will rarely scroll down to see what lies beneath. So appeal to these users by linking to a hosted page with an all-text version of your email formatted for mobile screens (30 columns wide).
Treat the header as a call to action. Since consumers may only glance at the email in the preview pane before deciding to delete or read further, smart email marketers make sure that their entire main offer can fit in the header space. In fact, many marketers put the entire call to action — link included — in the space.

Transactional messages
As with welcome messages, transactional messages arrive at a time when consumers are engaged with the brand. Thus markers can use these emails to build on this engagement with smart and timely offers.

Announce your brand. The transactional email may represent the first email that a consumer sees from your brand. Thus, the email should carry the brand name in both the from name and subject line. Moreover, both the from name and subject line should indicate the nature of the email. So for instance, the from name might read “[brand] store” and the subject line might read “[brand] thanks you for your order that shipped today.”
Enhance the email with appropriate offers. Using simple business rules, a transactional email can feature relevant offers. First and foremost, the rules should indicate that all transactional email recipients who are not subscribers to a regular email should receive a call to action to subscribe. After that, offers should be based on the contents of the email. Product purchasers should see offers complementary to the product. Consumers seeking information should see offers for information on related topics. Existing e-store or support data can support these business rules.

Subject lines
The world of subject lines changes constantly. As mentioned earlier, all email marketers should therefore test constantly. However, it’s worth noting a few recent trends that have come to light.

Don’t fear the $ symbol. In the early days of spam filtering, symbols such as $ or ! came to be feared. Simple spam filters scored any emails with these symbols toward the spammy end of the spectrum and thus created many false positives. These days, spam filters take a more sophisticated approach to identifying inappropriate emails. So a marketer should feel free to talk about the price of his or her offers or throw in the odd exclamation mark. References to lengthening bits of human anatomy, however, will still set off alarm bells. Which brings us to our last point:
Sometimes, silly works. If subject lines have two hard-and-fast rules, they are 1) keep it short, under 50 characters and 2) be direct: explain the main offer clearly. While these rules generally apply, marketers should test humor or puns in their emails from time to time. Every once in a while, these subject lines draw more opens than the more straightforward examples.

We’ve learned much more than the few tips listed above. And we have more to learn as email and email users continue to evolve. But try out these ideas for now until we’re all ready for email graduate school.

Chris Marriott is vice president and global managing director for Acxiom Digital.

Source: iMedia Connection

How social media and search can reach the pickiest audience

sovibe — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:59:45 +0000

More than ever, consumers are turning to the internet, their online social networks, and search engines to research before buying. Consider Yelp, a consumer review website and community. According to a recent episode of National Public Radio’s “On the Media,” Yelp is the bane of most local business owners, who have no way to run interference on the site’s consumer reviews of their services and products. Unfortunately for business owners who feel slighted by the site, Yelp’s consumer reviews and product research are a cleared-eyed view into the future of advertising.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal Microtrends blog in January, consumers want to be in control of decision-making information and don’t want to be sold – these consumers are the “new info shoppers.”

Penn, Schoen and Berland, who conducted the New Info Shoppers (NIS) survey, found that 92 percent of respondents said they had more confidence in information they seek out online than anything coming from a salesclerk or other source. Meanwhile, 62 percent of the total — and 73 percent of those polled under 45 years old — said they spend at least 30 minutes online every week deciding what, and if, they should purchase.

NIS consumers aren’t just conducting research and opinion polls of their social networks before buying big ticket items; they are equally diligent about everyday purchases such as toothpaste and hair products. So how do brands reach consumers in the new immediate, comprehensive, information age? One helpful way for brands and advertisers to consider the problem is to view search and social networks as two sides of the same coin, both squarely directed at NIS.

Heads up: Search is the starting point
NIS consumers start their research broadly. So despite the fact that American Express “experts” may tell business owners not to waste money in search, SEM and SEO are critical. Search is the starting point of informed consumer purchase decisions; it is where the online, and now offline, conversion funnel begins. Brand information can be found everywhere on the web. The trick is to make sure your content is where the NIS are looking.

The way new info shoppers search is different than any other consumer segment. They tend to ignore paid search items and look at more than standard organic search results. When the NIS search for information, they are not just going to Google, but are going one step further to Google Blog search. These shoppers review photo- and video-sharing sites, wikis, and online forums when making purchase decisions. And that’s not all: They are using Feedburner to track specific data in RSS content feeds. In fact, there are so many new sources to search, is it any wonder that conversion rates among this group remain high?

Social discovery is the tail of NIS strategy
The tail side of this equation is the social networks. The new info shopper is heavily reliant not just on search, but on their own community and social networks. NIS consumers turn to review sites like Yelp, as well as MySpace and Facebook, when they want information. Now branded content can reach consumers in a variety of new forums: Newsfeed posts, social commenting, social widgets and apps all inform consumer purchase decisions. To reach these social networking consumers, brands need to give something, not sell them something. After all, social networks are all about sharing, which means giving back.

That is where portable social applications come into the NIS picture. By engaging consumers on social networks with free music, games, community, charity, and other branded entertainment and engagement, you can educate the social networking community while giving back. Branded portable applications carry your message throughout the community. Newsfeeds are the new front page. Instead of clipping articles, people are now posting stories to their social networking pages and forwarding them to their friends through the networks and mobile devices. When consumers encounter your brand in social media via their network of friends, they are more likely to engage and to share that experience with additional friends.

Search and social applications have long tail benefits
Because NIS shoppers are keen on research, you need to have your eye on the long tail. Do make sure that you are engaging in the best white hat SEM and SEO practices. While social networks may be the tail side to the NIS coin, they are also a part of any great long tail campaign strategy, as many social applications are evergreen. Whether you are a national entertainment or beauty brand, or a big box retailer trying to drive traffic to your local stores, tapping into consumers’ social discovery patterns to reach these new info shoppers is a good idea.

So what if consumers are getting smarter and more demanding before buying? It just means interactive advertising will have to raise the level of our interactive strategies. Do you think we are up for the challenge?

Dave Yovanno is CEO of Gigya.

Source: iMedia Connection

So This is What You Look Like!

sovibe — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:36:47 +0000

A cool thing is happening through sites like blogging service Xanga, review site Yelp, and Twitter. Some of their faithful users have started attending meet-ups, where folks who interact online and live in the same geographic area can actually meet—in person! What a concept.

Now, here’s the really good news: These frothy public rendezvous-points open up plenty of room for brands to join the fun, ingratiate themselves, and encourage a few WOM-worthy memories.

Some ways to invite yourself to the party:

Sponsor a Yelp Elite event. A few times a month in major cities, Yelp hosts free events for its top reviewers—enthusiastic young people who love getting together and trying new things. Advice: Don’t hard-sell; just let ‘em sample. Yelp’s elite is generous with its praise, but can also scald if pushed too hard.

Start a Facebook Group. This’ll enable you to keep in touch with your fan base and tell them about local events you’re hosting in their area. Advice: Use its RSVP features for events you choose to broadcast.

Hijack a Tweetup. Twitter users are all about what’s going on in real-time, and one of the things they love doing is hosting tweetups—local meetings among community members. Advice: Throw your own, or piggyback on one. (Just make sure you’re a good fit.)

The Po!nt: Put your best face forward—the real one. Even for Generation Social Media, there’s nothing quite like a real-life encounter.

Published on 6/4/2009 in Get to the Point: Interactive Marketing