Posted on May 15, 2008
Set and Forget PPC (AKA Burning Your Cash) - 7 Ways to Stop the Burn
BY BEN CASTELLI
Cruise control was a great idea for cars, auto pilot is perfect for planes, but in terms of pay per click advertising there is no such thing as "set and forget". A lot of companies waste their money (and Google makes a lot of money) from pay per click campaigns that are not regularly optimized. Checking up on your PPC campaigns several times a week is essential and tackling some ongoing weekly action items will really stretch that budget dollar and improve ROI. Where do you start? Below is a list of 7 digestible weekly to-dos:
Posted on May 14, 2008
Tips on Merging Social Media with Tried and True Practices to Promote Your Business
BY INGRID GETZAN
You've just spent the last week learning everything you can about building your Facebook page. Your last blog post generated 27 comments. You've spent hours reading competitor blogs and commenting on the personal blogs you follow. You have been Twittering like a pro. You have tried to immerse yourself in every pertinent online conversation you can find.
In the meantime, you've forgotten to send out your overdue email newsletter and implement the list building tactics you just read about. You haven't updated the survey on your site and your inbox has 42 new messages you haven't answered.
It's easy to lose yourself in Facebook applications or spend the day searching blogs to see who you can add on Twitter, but amidst all the new social media opportunities, don't forget about the tried and true tactics that worked to promote your business initially. More importantly, don't forget to leverage your new social media skills to continue building your business the old way.
Here are a few tips for a happy marriage between old internet marketing and new opportunities:
Posted on May 12, 2008
Brand Tagging – How is Your Company Perceived?
BY JENNIFER EUBANKS
While browsing Kottke today I came across a little snippet about Brand Tags, described as "ask[ing] people what they think of in association with particular brands and then the results are displayed as tag clouds."
The concept of this site is pretty cool. While everyone by now is aware of how useful tagging can be in terms of organizing a blog or searching through del.icio.us or similar sites, Brand Tags takes the same concept but reverses it. Instead of posting entries and then tagging them and having them searched in multiple places, this site takes some of the most popular brands and asks you to apply one tag word or phrase to whatever brand it displays to you at random (though you have the option to skip a brand if you wish). You can browse by brand, guess what brand it is based on the tags, or search for brands that were tagged with a certain word.
Brand Tags still appears to be relatively small--you can't add a new brand without contacting the site creator, for instance. However, as a starting point, this is an interesting way to see how the big brands are perceived, as well as compare multiple brands that have similar offerings. Check out, for instance, the difference between Target and Walmart. Do the results on each page match up to your perceptions? As anyone in business knows, how the public perceives your company and its practices can often have a huge impact on whether they choose you or a competitor. Knowing these popular brand perceptions allows you to get in on the conversation and help address the negatives and possibly boost the positives (Jason Cormier just posted an entry the other day on staying in front of PR crises, which addresses some helpful tactics that should be used.)
If you are a savvy company, you are already tracking your brand reputation online through a variety of methods including Technorati, Twitter, Google, and of course myriad others. The downside to this method is that you are relying on many different arenas to help provide an overall picture. If a site based on something like Brand Tags caught on as more than just a fun experiment, just think of the possibilities when searching for smaller brands. Assuming rival companies are not maliciously tagging their competitors, the results would speak of what the masses think of your brand in general, which can help during times when you are not headline news and the talk of the town. The general impression gained by all of the tags inputted by hundreds or thousands of individuals will more than likely be a better reflection of long term perception of your brand by the public. Do you know how you will rank?
Posted on May 11, 2008
Why Do You Want To Be Transparant, and How That Will Help Your Business Grow
BY STEPAN MAZUROV
If you are an ecommerce business, word of mouth marketing can help you grow it beyond the boundaries of your niche. Gary Vayerchuk, a guy in wine business, said something very interesting on Tues, May 6th show CNBC's Big Idea:
- Be who you are, be as transparent as possible.
- Don't play in your own playground, be active in communities that might find what you offer attractive.
- It is imperative to be involved in the social networks on the Internet and the real world
- We live in a world where every person's word of mouth reaches a lot more people.
Lets look at some examples of these at work.
Posted on May 9, 2008
Social Media for Staying in Front of a Public Relations Crisis
BY JASON CORMIER
Yesterday, James Clark and I had the pleasure of giving an "Understanding Social Media" presentation to the Colorado Ski Country Association. Roughly 95% of the PR and marketing communications experts for every ski mountain in Colorado were attending, eager to learn more about how they could leverage this thing called social media.
The topics we covered varied from social media planning, understanding RSS, best practices for community participation and the use of new and emerging tools like Twitter. Despite the groovy buzz around social media, one of the main subjects of concern with our audience dealt with how and when to engage in online conversations.
The typical problem relates to negative activity that gets
picked up by the press. Something happens on the ski slopes related to
closures, injury, even death, and before you know it the cameras are rolling
and the phone is ringing off the hook. As a matter of practice, a marketing
communications person is often reactive - bracing for the media onslaught and
how his response will ultimately reflect on the operation, competency, brand,
etc.
One marketer brought up the fact that a few people will get an idea in their head about why a lift line or portion of the mountain is closed, and just commence to slam the people and organization running operations for the mountain. The bashing shows up on blog posts, forums, tweets, you name it.
Staying ahead of negativity and crisis is typically not about avoiding it all together. More realistically, it's about you and your organization not getting buried and completely swept down the mountain as the slide begins and gains momentum. Not much you can do to stop the slide once it starts, but your preparation and ability to quickly react makes all the difference.
