Tracking a new media artifact
How was I paid by British taxpayers to be in an ad for an American bank?
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| Dave Olson's podcasting talk, Fresh Media Conference 2009. |
Digital photography will ultimately change childhood as photography had previously. Now instead of a few shots of us as babies and kids; parents, relatives and the internet will already have a thorough record of our early days. When generations change their practices somethings are forgotten only to be repeated.
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| photo by: iciskaye. used under creative commons license. |
This is the same neighborhood. Note the square building in the lower center of both photos.
Economic devastation runs deep these. So how did this happen? Think of globalization and international trade as the ultimate long term equalizer. As much as the emptiness of Detroit is a tragedy, somewhere else in the world auto workers are making cars and creating prosperous cities to support those efforts as Detroit once did.
What happened? How did this occur? We hear a lot of different things about Credit Default Swaps and Collateral Debt Obligations. If you seek answers to these questions this video is a well done explanation of the current financial situation.
Early this year I received a strange call from a representative of Charter One Bank requesting my approval for them to re-air an ad from 6 years ago, a smart and cost saving tactic. Thanks to Google I was the first one she found. I waited a few months for them to contact the others from the video and decide whether or not to proceed with re-airing the commercial. I was happy to receive a cheque in the mail for three times the amount I had originally been paid in 2004. Catch me in the blue jacket and green hat at 8 seconds.
I was part of this commercial because at the time I was a volunteer with the VON's Meals on Wheels a program that produces and delivers healthy meals. The commercial was made in Canada but for a bank in the US. The video is meant to highlight the ways the bank helps in their community as each program is something that the bank contributes to.
The commercial was created when Cleveland-based Charter One Bank* was taken over in 2004 by Citizens Financial which has been owned by the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) since 1988. In 2010 when I received that phone call the British Government was a majority stakeholder in RBS due to bailouts in late 2008*.
Billions of pounds of “toxic” sub-prime mortgages were bought by Royal Bank of Scotland traders in a spree that was not disclosed to the bank’s board. -March 2009, The Telegraph*.Charter One was one of many banks born from the US banking system*. The realities in a 50 state nation meant that system evolved as was necessary to enable a balance between competition and stability. The Free Banking* era in the mid 1800s and the deregulation of the 1980s have helped lead to today's situation. This deregulation was dangerous in a nation where barriers to entry were low and the market increasingly unregulated.
Critics have pointed out that the federal government's attempts at deregulation granted easy credit to federally insured financial institutions, encouraging them to overextend themselves and fail. -Wikipedia*.As the British government is a majority stakeholder in the Royal Bank of Scotland which owns Citizen Financial Group which is represented by Charter One Bank it can be inferred that I was paid by British taxpayers to appear in a commercial for an American bank. Did I really get paid by the British taxpayers to promote an American bank?
No the cheque said Charter One Bank on it. Tracking a media artifact can lead down interesting paths and should be done more often. Digital scrap-booking? What's that? It's exactly what we do everyday we use or input information into anything digital. Now the real challenge is what's better than a blog to organize that content? How will we curate our digital content? How will we allow access to it? What are your thoughts?
Facebook Ad Rates are the Cheapest. Here's Why.
Thanks to one of my favourite e-newsletters. The Silicon Valley Insider Chart O' D' Day -or in less irish terms "of the". Today's chart confirm something I've suspected all along: Facebook might serve up more display ads than anyone else, but they are the cheapest. The next cheapest? Email.
Thanks to a chance phone call from Richard at the Goodline Group I was reminded of the power of permission marketing. Beyond permission marketing is a strong strategy for the customer focused businesses of the future. Today organizations are clamouring just to get people to see them in a world full of marketing and advertising.
photo by: Doug Wheller. Remixed under creative commons licence.
That means getting a chance to have eyeballs see your brand, product or services and hopefully click a few things can be costly. See the chart below to see the most expensive and least expensive types of sites to advertise on. The rates are in CPM or cost per thousand impressions. That means about 2000 eyeballs had the chance to see an ad. It doesn't even mean that they saw the ad. It may cost you significantly less on Facebook than on any other site to get the chance to be seen but low prices reflect users likelihood to ignore your advertisement.
Some users ignore them entirely. Some users click them all the time with no intention of taking any further action. Some users are playing games when they click an ad and really just want to back to their game. Some users are doing research on your use of the ads and where you direct them with that ad. Some users genuinely connect with your brand. It's challenging but at this time and when used right represents strong current and better future marketing value.
photo by: Penny Higgins. Remixed under creative commons licence.
On the bright side some users read ads and don't click, raising awareness. Using a strong brand image can help to build familiarity of that brand and cut through the generic ads. You get great metrics, but have to draw some of your own conclusions.It was announced today during Zuckerberg's Web 2.0 interview that 250 million facebook users are daily users. 50% of users come back everyday. Last I hear the average user spends almost an hour on facebook each day. I like Facebook advertising and I advocate it for many reasons; especially targeting and related brand awareness. For more on this please see Facebook Advertising: Beyond the Click. Below I have embedded Zuckerberg's 60 minute 'interview' at web 2.0 today.
Internet Marketing Workshop
Internet Marketing is not totally different from traditional marketing as it is the process of marketing of products or services over the internet. The internet allows us to reach a global audience. Internet marketing is by its nature an interactive medium which provides instant responses this is unique to internet marketing. Using Analytics and feedback loops we can analyze and improve our internet marketing efforts. According to Wikipedia Internet Marketing includes:
- Display Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Interactive Advertising
- Social Media Optimization
- Web Analytics
- Cost per impression (CPM)
- Cost per action (CPC or PPC)
- Affiliate Marketing
- Contextual Advertising
- Revenue Sharing
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Paid Inclusion
- Search Analytics
- Mobile Advertising
That can seem overwhelming, but thanks to Wikipedia you can find out all about each of these internet marketing tactics and the differences, just click through and see what each item is about. Before we get started with all of these amazing tactics let's take a look at one of my favourite web-based tools: Google Docs. Google Docs is a cloud-based office suite of software that allows you to have a secure mobile office. If you don't have a Google or Gmail account please sign-up for one now. If you already have one let's head over to docs.google.com and check out the features of this amazing free set of tools.
There are two reasons I want to show you Google Docs. The first is to show you the ability to create documents on the go no matter what computer you are using. Google Forms is the second reason. Creating feedback loops is a key part of internet marketing. There are two ways you are going to be able to analyze your online visitor behaviours: analytics on your site and by creating feedback loops. One way to create feedback loops is to create short surveys. Please take some time to fill out my survey below ahead of our Friday class on Social Media:
The above survey is a longer Google Form and can help to bring me some valuable information in preparation for Friday's class. I strongly recommend asking 3-5 short questions for short surveys. If you would like to do a longer survey be very thoughtful about the questions you choose. Asking people for too much information will turn people off. If you would like to ask a lot of questions you should incentivize the completion of the survey by offering a deal or gift card to those who fill it out
We need to start by looking at the roots of our internet marketing strategy. The roots are made up of:
- Research - Situation, competition, audience
- Strategy - Attract, engage, convert, multiply
- Branding - Focused, clear, brand message, compelling
- Content - Relevant, benefit driven, organized, unique & valuable
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| -mainlinemedia.com |
These items should sync with your business strategy with a focus on conversion and retention of visitors in your system. Let's look at a number of tools that can be used to analyze and research other sites before you start building yours:
One should also try to have more than one or two conversions on a website. What's a conversion? Conversions can range from very soft conversions to very hard conversions. Here are five conversions from soft to hard:
Tracking everything:
o Compete
o Alexa
- Facebook like or Twitter follow
- Blog subscription via email or RSS
- e-newsletter sign-up
- Request a quote, Inquiries, email, phone
- Purchase
Don't give people too many choices as this can overwhelm and put visitors off. Let's look at a few sites who are trying to serve so many customer groups that it can be challenging to navigate their websites. According to the tree chart above the website has two parts which will stem from the roots: research, strategy, branding and content.
The two parts of the website are development and design. Development should involve rich media: video, photos and sound where appropriate. Development should be scalable. What if your site is a great success? You need to be ready to grow when your user base is ready to (See: Facebook, Twitter, etc.) Your design elements should be usable, straight forward and flexible. Imagine that a visitor of average intelligence reaches your website, will they know what to do? This is what I call the LCD factor and it's something that I tried to incorporate into most of my thinking about marketing.
When building your website start from the top three things you would like visitors to do when they get to your site. Those things can be: call us, sign-up, subscribe or learn more about the company. The site should be framed around your goals. In the beginning of websites we want to put as much information as possible online. We were thinking that's what users wanted from our sites and in the late 90s it may have been, but in reality too many options and too much information can cause visitors to get lost on your site.
Create some funnels or buckets for your website and try to keep the initial options for your visitors to five at the most. Your website will need to be optimized for search engines. There are number of levels to SEO or search engine optimization. SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website or page in search engines via un-paid search results. SEM or search engine marketing targets paid listings.
You can spend hours or thousands of dollars working on SEO. It is recommended that you build your site with SEO in mind but don't spend too much time on this initially as you will learn more from your site over time. Today let's look at keywords, link building, backlinks or inbound links and page rank. Here are some tools for link tracking and SEO:
The most basic level is keywords or how people search for your site. This can be optimized with tools like Google Seach-based keyword tool or Google AdWords: Keyword Tool. Each of these tools will help you to learn new ways that people find your products or services. It's very important that your content reads naturally and doesn't seem jam-packed with keywords for search. The ability of a blog to keep fresh content on your site and increase the frequency of keywords is important. For more on SEO and SEM be sure to see this massive list of blogs about SEM and SEO and here are 150 more.
This just brushes the surface of SEO; a deep and complex science when a company can afford it. Next look at Monitoring and Measuring everything you do online. This is a vital part of using the web effectively. The first thing I want to do is a short lesson in tracking everything. Click here to get started.
Email Marketing is a very important part of your internet marketing strategy. People who have subscribed to your email newsletter are the most likely to make a purchase from your organization. The name of the game with email marketing is value. You need to provide value in your e-newsletter. If you don't provide value and continue to hammer your list with pushy sales messaging you will lose those subscribers over time.
Landing Pages are a very important part of any internet marketing campaign. A landing page is a webpage specifically designed to receive visitors from a campaign or ad. It is often said that "A homepage is where clicks go to die." Most often this is because we are trying to serve so many different customer groups on our home pages that visitors from ad campaigns don't know what to do when they do when they get there.
Now that we've talked about the free methods let's look more closely at the kinds of internet marketing we have to pay for. Today we will be discussing the following:
Blogging and why it's so important to your site. Blogging is a word that has had it's day. The word originated from it's initial meaning of "web log" which was shortened to "Blog". A blog is a publishing medium for ideas, opinions and thoughts. Some people blog about their personal life or interests while others use blogging to discuss ideas in their work and bring together insights gathered from others. The name of the game is value, provide it. Don't know what it is? Ask your audience. The largest blogging platform isWordpress.com and it is the recommended option. I use Blogger because it's what I am used to and it works for my purposes. Advanced users or those with access to capable technology professionals should use Wordpress.org. The major differences between Wordpress.com and .orgare listed here by Wordpress.
Your blog should be consistent and consistently create value for your target audience(s).
Create some funnels or buckets for your website and try to keep the initial options for your visitors to five at the most. Your website will need to be optimized for search engines. There are number of levels to SEO or search engine optimization. SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website or page in search engines via un-paid search results. SEM or search engine marketing targets paid listings.
You can spend hours or thousands of dollars working on SEO. It is recommended that you build your site with SEO in mind but don't spend too much time on this initially as you will learn more from your site over time. Today let's look at keywords, link building, backlinks or inbound links and page rank. Here are some tools for link tracking and SEO:
- 10 Link Building and tracking Tools for SEO
- Google's Webmasters Tools - Need a Google account
- Yahoo! Site Explorer - Need a Yahoo! account
The most basic level is keywords or how people search for your site. This can be optimized with tools like Google Seach-based keyword tool or Google AdWords: Keyword Tool. Each of these tools will help you to learn new ways that people find your products or services. It's very important that your content reads naturally and doesn't seem jam-packed with keywords for search. The ability of a blog to keep fresh content on your site and increase the frequency of keywords is important. For more on SEO and SEM be sure to see this massive list of blogs about SEM and SEO and here are 150 more.
This just brushes the surface of SEO; a deep and complex science when a company can afford it. Next look at Monitoring and Measuring everything you do online. This is a vital part of using the web effectively. The first thing I want to do is a short lesson in tracking everything. Click here to get started.
The most valuable thing you can do is track everything that you do to analyze the usefulness of each tactic. The first and most important part of this tracking is ensuring you have analytics on your site. Let's go through how straight-forward that can be. The next most important thing is URL Shortening
These are tools you can use to analyze your own efforts. Let's talk about measuring and monitoring all of your activities online with these tools:
These are tools you can use to analyze your own efforts. Let's talk about measuring and monitoring all of your activities online with these tools:
What is value? It depends on your audience, but if you are real estate agents it could be 5 ways to increase the value of your home before you sell or 5 ways to quickly inspect a potential home before you bring in the professionals. If your audience is mothers then your value will be different. Front load your newsletter with the valuable information and supply more conversion opportunities throughout. These could be a survey, a coupon, an invitation to find you on Facebook or follow you on Twitter. Mail Chimp is the best free tool for email marketing and Constant Contact is the best paid email marketing tool.
Landing Pages are a very important part of any internet marketing campaign. A landing page is a webpage specifically designed to receive visitors from a campaign or ad. It is often said that "A homepage is where clicks go to die." Most often this is because we are trying to serve so many different customer groups on our home pages that visitors from ad campaigns don't know what to do when they do when they get there.
Now that we've talked about the free methods let's look more closely at the kinds of internet marketing we have to pay for. Today we will be discussing the following:
o Display Ads
o Web TV Preroll
o Web TV Preroll
o Affiliate Links
o Google AdWords
o Facebook Ads
Blogging and why it's so important to your site. Blogging is a word that has had it's day. The word originated from it's initial meaning of "web log" which was shortened to "Blog". A blog is a publishing medium for ideas, opinions and thoughts. Some people blog about their personal life or interests while others use blogging to discuss ideas in their work and bring together insights gathered from others. The name of the game is value, provide it. Don't know what it is? Ask your audience. The largest blogging platform isWordpress.com and it is the recommended option. I use Blogger because it's what I am used to and it works for my purposes. Advanced users or those with access to capable technology professionals should use Wordpress.org. The major differences between Wordpress.com and .orgare listed here by Wordpress.
Your blog should be consistent and consistently create value for your target audience(s).
Social Media Marketing and it's uses will be covered in detail in Friday's class.
http://www.hubspot.com/internet-marketing-whitepapers/ - hubspot
http://mashable.com/ - The Social Media Guide
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