News

So…you thought you were starting to get a grip on all the Web 2.0 stuff? Well here we go again!

Web 3.0 – Google Wave is coming. But not to worry, it promises to be a better way of integrating all that you do now – so feel free to exhale. Google says that Wave will integrate e-mail, social networking, instant messaging, and document collaboration crossing the lines of various media as well as offering real-time functionality.

According to Google’s Wave preview, a Wave is:

• equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
• is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
• is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

For a sneak peak and more visit: http://wave.google.com/

Mary Grimborg

www.kmkmedia.com

Various segments of your customers and prospects have different relationships with your brand depending on where they are in the Customer Life Cycle (CLC). CLC describes the progression of steps a customer goes through when considering, purchasing, using, and maintaining loyalty to a product or service. Some have never heard of you. Others are raving fans, some not so happy with their experience. Which relationship are you trying to reach with social media? You need to be specific, more so than with traditional media, because what your target audience already knows about you dictates what you can credibly have a conversation about.

It is important to note that no single marketing tool should be used to move a customer through the cycle. Social media is a unique medium that can be used as a catalyst to move customers from stage to stage at a micro-targeted level. Below are the generally accepted stages.  How is your organizations using social media to target customers in each stage on help move them towards brand advocacy?

Doug Burton
www.kmkmedia.com

Twitter does a good job of laying out how business owners can utilize its application in its basic Twitter 101 site. (Click here to get into it).

Some basic steps to follow include:

1. Sign up. Some companies sign up as a business entity (i.e., ABC Machines) and others sign up their CEO (i.e., Bob Smith). Which route you choose depends on your business goals. Your Username is important – this is the “handle” with which you’ll be listed and recognized in Twitter.

Also be sure to fill out the information boxes as thoroughly as possible. People will check those out to see if you’re a credible source of information who they’d like to follow.

2. Find people to follow. Twitter is searchable. If you’re in the office supplies business, for example, search out “office products” or “recycled paper.” Also search out the leaders in your community and those people who may be talking about your company. Click to “follow” the relevant people you find.

HubSpot has a neat little app called Twitter Grader that lets you see what a Twitter user’s “grade” is. Type in their username and you can see basic information as well as their user statistics.

3. Start messaging. Twitter is limited to 140 characters, so obviously brevity is key. Don’t spam – offer messages and content that people who follow you would find interesting. It’s about starting a conversation, not distilling your ads into 140 characters.

Twitter – like all social media – is a process, and you’ll find what works and what doesn’t over time. But have a strategy and create benchmarks for yourself. Test your offers and track how many people are talking about you or following your tweets.

Don’t think you have enough time? Here’s a case study of how a wine maker with three TOTAL employees leveraged Twitter to increase sales and word of mouth.

As we reported just over a month ago here on ADWire, Twitter has been an influential tool in spreading the word about unrest in Iran in the wake of disputed presidential election results.

Tomorrow, memorial services are planned for the approximately 40 people who died in clashes with authorities when protesters took to the streets, and some media experts are expecting another surge of activity on the social media site. This article takes a look at how protesters – and their supporters – used the service to spread the word as well as how protest organizers could use Twitter more effectively in actually organizing their efforts on the ground.

Last month, Twitter  posts kept the world up to date on the situation, flowing in by the thousands, and the US State Department went so far as to ask Twitter executives to delay a planned server shutdown and upgrade so they could continue to gather intelligence about the situation as it unfolded. The Iranian government started shutting down cell-phone service to stem the tide and used the channels to spread misinformation as well.

Will tweets come into play tomorrow? Tune in to your Twitter account and see.

As lyrics by The Who famously ask, “Who are you?”, your corporate identity should be easily recognizable and help to establish your reputation. How does your identity reflect on your business? It’s often the first thing your customers and prospects see – on your website, brochure, product, advertising, delivery truck or site sign.

Take a look at your competition’s identity and compare it to yours.

• What conclusions could someone unrelated to your industry draw from comparing them?
• Does your identity define or differentiate your business?
• Is it used consistently enough for your audience to even recognize it?

A well-designed identity, applied consistently, can help establish a professional reputation for your business. Some internationally recognized logos are so ubiquitous that they no longer need to include a signature. Think Nike: The ‘swoosh’ says it all. Applied to a quality product, it has successfully marketed the brand for several decades. While good design cannot compensate for an inferior product or poor business plan, it is essential to successful marketing.

Is GM Blue Going Green?

Identity is often part of the strategy to communicate change or build on a strong reputation. An example is the recent hint that General Motors is considering changing the color of its blue logo to indicate it is literally “going green.” Whether the strategy helps GM rebuild its business—or is even implemented—shifting its corporate identity is reportedly one consideration in the struggling automaker’s recovery plan. See http://www.wired.com/autopia/2009/07/gm-is-going-green-literally/.

So take a step back and think about who you are: What does your corporate identity communicate about your business? Does it need an upgrade?

Written by Lynne Koenigsberger, KMK Media Group Graphic Designer.

Anderson Analytics has developed a survey that interviews respondents on their attitudes and behaviors regarding social networking. Based on these results, Anderson was able to identify and categorize seven types of individuals, from the social media pessimist to the social media maven.

What type of social media user are you?  After taking the quiz, share your results.

Doug Burton

As a video producer a metric you may have is how long visitors watch a particular video before navigating to another page. 100%, 60%, 20%, etc.  You want to maximize this number.  So which social networks have the highest viewer completion rate?  Adam Ostrow says, “As it turns out, users who visit videos from Twitter links spend the most time watching them, as compared to visitors referred by Facebook or Digg. According to a study by TubeMogul, Twitter users view a video for 1 minute, 58 seconds on average, versus averages of 1:14 and 0:58 for Facebook and Digg, respectively.”

Share your findings with our readers to see if it matches the research done by TubeMogul.

Doug Burton

From hailing a cab to napping at work and tossing cows into outer-space, these silly iPhone apps are sure to entertain – if only for a moment.

Do you have any silly or annoying apps on your iPhone?

Believe it or not, it’s back-to-school time in advertisers’ minds. JC Penney yesterday launched an integrated campaign targeting teens who want to look stylish in the halls this fall but are hamstrung by their parents’ wallets.

The campaign features a Facebook page – www.facebook.com/JCP Teen – where teens can check out the new looks and the video that highlights JCP’s new partnership with skater Ryan Sheckler.  The campaign also features traditional television spots, concert promotions and mobile applications.

Here’s the Ryan Sheckler spot:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2wqtsqILww[/youtube]

JCP, like most retailers, has high hopes for the back-to-school and holiday seasons after multiple quarters of stomach-churning losses. They’re aiming for a “hip but budget-friendly” feel with the campaign, and they seem to be on the right track. Plus they’re utilizing relatively low-cost options like Facebook and mobile platforms – which hit their teen target directly – to get their message across.

Locally, if you haven’t already thought about your fall campaigns and promotions, you should start now. How can you add value and promote a budget-friendly face to your customers? “Budget-friendly” and “Value” will be on the minds of every consumer brave enough to open his or her wallet this fall.

The goal of an organization’s PR department is to work to increase the number of positive comments written about your company, product, or service and immediately address those who have negative experiences. But, how do you make that happen in the social media world? What steps to you take to keep negative social media damage to a minimum?

Sharlyn Lauby, president of Internal Talent Management, suggests a few steps to help you manage negative comments on social media networks.

1. Monitor Sites Constantly
2. Respond quickly with a consistent message
3. Respond to the social media world
4. Educate employees on proper social media etiquette
5. Deploy a crisis strategy

Read the full article here for all her tips.  Does your organization have a social media crisis strategy?  Share your experiences.

Doug Burton

We have all heard some variation on this phrase:

“All press is good press.” 

“Bad press is better than no press.”

Fortunately, most people realize that this really isn’t true. A series of bad press can lead to degradation of your brand. In tough times any sign of decrease in value can seriously injure a company’s success. 

One national brand is betting against the value of good press and aligning with the old adage that, “Press is Press.” I have posted several times in the last few months about this company and their edgy ads. Media attention, national coverage, online chatter – is it creating a desirable image? You be the judge. 

Yes, Burger King is in the news again. Their global insult efforts have hit several groups – Hispanics, Hindus, people with square butts….what’s next?

Burger King’s MO: Offend, Earn Media, Apologize, Repeat

“Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic.”

The above sentence reads like it was posted on a marketers blog just a few days ago. It was actually written in 1759 by Samuel Johnson, published in issue 40, “The art of advertising exemplified”, of his magazine The Idler.

Do you feel this is the case? Is it possible that something written 250 years ago could be relevant in today’s advertising world? Share your thoughts.

Doug Burton

We all know that if social media is to become a staple in the marketer’s tool bag we must be able to track its effectiveness. There are many ways to measure effectiveness based on your objectives, in this example I will focus on click throughs. An unscientific study performed by Daren Barefoot of Capulet Communications, suggests a click through rate of 2.8%.

Compared to other forms of electronic media marketing, a click-through rate of 2.8% is significant. Darren notes, “It’s lower than the average for email newsletters in most industries, but it outperforms the vast majority of online advertising stats that I’ve seen. As one of my colleagues said about Twitter a while back, “Twitter is a fantastic lens for focusing attention.” I’m not sure it’s “fantastic,” but it beats a lot of other traffic generation strategies.”

If you use a tool like Bit.ly or Tr.im to track links, take a few seconds to post your responses as to how effective you have found Twitter.

Doug Burton

Say you buy a billboard space for your business – would you “share” it by renting a large portion of it to just about anyone who offered you a little cash? I didn’t think so. In fact, if I brought it up, I’d probably be laughed out of the room.

But if you’re James Ready Beer, a discount Canadian brand, the idea was so popular and effective it was awarded Best of Show at this year’s OBIE awards.  (The OBIE’s are one of the out-of-home industry’s highest creative honors, awarded annually by the Outdoor Advertising Association of America).

Take a look here:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xqu2HbCRkgE[/youtube]

The best part of the campaign? It did what every advertiser longs for – it went “viral” and got people talking about James Ready beer and its campaign.

All that for giving up some billboard real estate.

Facebook’s chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, told reporters in a conference call yesterday that the social media behemoth will be streamlining its privacy settings for users and making them easier to customize. The new settings will allow users to pick and choose who sees photos, status updates and other personal data…something which, until now, has been difficult to figure out.

Kelly made clear that this move does not have anything to do do with advertising; rather, Facebook wants people to feel more comfortable sharing even more information with their “friends” and networks.

The social media network isn’t concerned, at the moment, about targeted text ads or pay-per-click models; they have their sights on becoming an Internet portal that rivals Google in influence and number of users.

Building their advertising revenue model will come later.

This month’s issue of Wired magazine features a fascinating look at where Facebook wants to be and how it could be a legitimate threat to Google’s dominance.

One of Facebook’s tent-poles in its plan to take on Google is the fact that FB data is tucked safely away in its fire-walled servers – Google’s crawlers and data-crunching algorithms cannot access it.

Facebook assumes that if, for example, you need a plumber, you’d rather take the recommendation of your friends and family than that of an anonymous Google search, hence making Facebook the logical choice for searching.

Facebook’s gamble on taking down Google is a pretty big one, but their basic instincts are right. Word-of-mouth and personal recommendations are always a more effective form of advertising than the yellow pages or blind Internet search.

For local advertisers, you have to get some skin in the social media game. I can’t tell you that social media will replace your traditional advertising model or even which services will come out on top six months from now. But I do know that social media should be a part of any marketing mix now and a year from now.

The key is to start figuring it out and keep your plans flexible. You have to be able to change and adapt in this new media reality. We’re moving at a million miles an hour here, so let’s get going.

According to The Guardian, Evan Weaver, Twitter’s lead engineer in its services team, revealed the following interesting Twitter stats at a QCon 2009 talk:

-the average user has 126 followers;

-only 20% of its traffic comes through the Twitter website; the other 80% (logically) comes from third-party programs on smartphones or computers. So if you’re looking at Twitter stats on your website, you’re probably underestimating that source of traffic by a factor of five;

-an early peak test of the service came during President Obama’s inauguration in January, when more than 300 tweets per second were being added to the message queue.

Click Here to read more

The good news is, the Leading National Advertisers (LNA) report from Ad Age says that advertising spending dipped only 2.7 percent in 2008. The bad news is, they’re predicting the LNA to trim spending by a 5.1 percent, the most in nearly a decade.

Why the discrepancy? The 2008 data includes the BR Days (“Before Recession”) prior to the markets’ collapse last fall; 2009 won’t be so lucky.

Ad Mix

The decline in spending shouldn’t be surprising by any means. What surprised me a bit is the advertising mix in 2008 – it remains pretty traditional, with the lion’s share of dollars being pumped into television advertising. Internet ads accounted for just 6.9 percent of the total spend in 2008, and my hunch is we’ll see that number rise once this year’s data is reported.

(chart courtesy of Advertising Age)

Top Spenders

The report also ranks LNAs based on total number of dollars and the percentage change from the year before. In 2008, the top 5 spenders were:

• Proctor & Gamble – $4.8 billion (- 6.6%)
• Verizon Communications – $3.7 billion (+9.5%)
• AT&T – $3.4 billion (-10.4%)
• General Motors – $2.9 billion (-5.2%)
• Johnson & Johnson – $2.5 billion (+5.0%)

If you really want to get into the data, here’s a chart on the top 100 LNA which breaks out how they spent their money.

By Category

Nearly every category trimmed its spending in 2008 as well – with “government, politics and religion” upping their buys by more than 46%.

And, no surprise, retail advertisers took the top spot from automotive advertisers in 2008.

It’s a sign of the times, my friends.