Facebook really is first among equals when it comes to social networks. Worldwide around 500,000 new people sign-up every day and the average UK user spends three solid days a year on the site.
The network is a strange mix of public and private, and besides advertising those with pages for their business or organisation need to think creatively about how to attract fans.
Here are a few ideas you can put into practice very quickly and form a good basis for Facebook marketing campaigns. Read more >>
Everyone loves a good viral video and when successfully executed they can deliver a real boost for your brand – spreading a message or just getting you mentioned and noticed. But can you replicate viral success time and again?
The question came to mind when I heard that one of my favourite virals of recent times was getting a sequel.
J’aime la Tour
Â
Commissioned by visitBlackpool to promote tourism, this clip gives a humorous take on the Lancashire town, comparing it to Paris with a cinematic nod to French cinema thrown in.
This video is undoubtedly very clever, but by viral conventions isn’t particularly humorous, is a little slow paced and doesn’t really wow.
Despite that it still attracted 60,000 viewers on YouTube because what really made it stand out when uploaded earlier this year was its ability to jump vertically between different media channels. It had crossover appeal which was capitalised on by an effective PR campaign.
While people sharing your video on facebook, twitter, or even through good old fashioned emails is great, it is never likely to have real penetration unless it migrates to other channels.
Mainstream media remains the biggest game in town and successful PR increased viewers and the video’s spread. National TV coverage included BBC News and Sky News, with newspaper coverage including the Daily Mail and a host of regional newspapers and websites.
This was in effect a great PR campaign based around a solid, but not spectacular video.
Repeat success?
A lot what we do online is about the ‘new’. People want a succession of exciting, fun and interesting experiences (as trendwatching.com pointed out, describing it as ‘nowism’).
The media is no different and is constantly looking for fresh content and stories – especially in the 24-hour news cycle we now inhabit.
In that environment can we expect virality to strike twice? It does sometimes as Blendtec’s Will it Blend? series and VW’s recent Fun Theory videos have shown - but they are the rare exception.
If you can get one of your viral masterpieces off the ground you should consider it a success – thousands have failed in the same quest, lacking the resources to mount a PR campaign that would help it jump between channels and gain mainstream penetration.
In essence though viral videos are an opportunity to look creatively at your brand or products. While they might not lead to overnight YouTube stardom they can give you a fresh perspective on marketing . People like fun, engaging content –whether it is a video, news story, tweet, picture, or podcast.
So will the second video share the same success at J’aime la tour? I’ll let you be the judge of that…
While waiting for a train on the Underground late one night, I was intrigued by the an advert for Dixons, a high street retail brand. The creative takes pot shots at  well known department stores, advises shoppers to do all their browsing there, and then go to the Dixons site to purchase. The campaign ends with the tagline “Dixons.co.uk – the last place you want to goâ€.
I am split about the creative message and about the potential negative connotations, especially if you miss most of the creative that precedes it. However I hold judgement, though it would be interesting to see what the results are. Read more >>
Marketers and PRs have always enjoyed a fairly uneasy co-existence. Often based on mutual misunderstanding that unease has only grown in recent times as both come to terms with the power of online advertising and PR and the growth of  social networking sites.
Traditionally the ones with the bigger budgets, ad agencies have been staking their claim and winning some high profile social media accounts. Invariably when an ad agency muscles in PR execs claim they’ll lack the ‘right tone of voice’ and the ability to ‘position’ brands. They also suggest that the PR skill set is a better fit for social media.
While marketing agencies can comfortably integrate social media into their campaigns (they already often have responsibility for online advertising, email marketing and to a lesser extent SEO) the main criticism levelled by PRs remains their inability to handle the mysterious duo of tone of voice and positioning.
So what the hell do they both mean? And is that the only difference between PRs and marketers when it comes to carving up the social media cake? Read more >>
Yesterday we saw Google add a new AdWords feature that allows brands to track conversions “caused” by banners that were viewed but not clicked. The idea being that a user who views your banner and makes a purchase within 30 days should be attributed as some kind of conversion.
Today we have Linda Anderson from comScore explaining that brands shouldn’t worry about the fact that only 16% of internet users ever click on banners and that they should be thinking more about the value that might arrive from the 84% of users who see banners but never click on them.
Marketers who attempt to optimize their advertising campaigns solely around the click are assigning no value to the 84 percent of Internet users who don’t click on an ad. That’s precisely the wrong thing to do.
Savvy marketers are moving to an evaluation of the impact that all ad impressions — whether clicked or not — have on consumer behavior, mirroring the manner in which traditional advertising has been measured for decades using reach and frequency metrics.
Coca-cola has said this week that it intends to pursue a much more aggressive digital marketing presence.
While that choice of words is probably best consigned to an industry magazine, the soft drinks giant is clearly reaping the benefits of brand engagement – claiming to have a mailing list of 13 million customers in the US thanks to its My Coke Rewards site and similar success with its UK counterpart, Coke Zone.
It’s Think Visibility tomorrow, so I thought I’d do a run-down of the speakers and presentations on offer. The venue this time is Alea Casino in Leeds which has restaurants, bars and even a private cinema so there’s plenty of space for networking and chilling out in between talks.
The start is a little later than last time too at 10am – probably a good move since some of the speakers and attendees are bound to be hungover.
The morning is given over to three keynote speakers – Joost de Valk on Wordpress SEO Strategies, Julian Sambles from The Telegraph on Big Site SEO, and Judith Lewis on Maximising Universal Search.
After lunch, (which includes entertainment!) the floor is split into three rooms with three speakers on at once. That means there are nine to choose from during the afternoon so you might find yourself missing one talk to go and see another.
Up first are: Elaine Forth on creating a successful affiliate and ecommerce site; Paul Robinson on using maths and computer science to find out more about your customers, and Fiona Thomson on what eye tracking can show you about user behaviour.
Afterwards are Chris Clarkson talking about being a real life affiliate, Tim Nash talking about the relative value of links, and Tom Smith giving advice on how to make your social media site suck less.
The final three are Rob Manuel on running online community Sickipedia, myself on creating content network Ad campaigns, and Karyn Fleeting on how to make your corporate blog a magnet for new business.
It’s now around 5pm, and the very last talk of the day will be given by Artur Ortega, on how accessibility has led to innovation and new inventions that make all our lives easier.
After the talks we move onto the main event: Drink Visibility! If your partners are not going to the conference then check here for things to do in Leeds.
Last year I had the good fortune to rank highly (about 4th) on Google for “compare the meerkat” and for a few weeks received hundreds and sometimes thousands of visitors every single day. This goes to show that anybody running an offline campaign needs to carry out some level of SEO otherwise the online search traffic won’t arrive at the right place.
If you have spent a lot of money on a campaign site then you don’t want searchers to arrive at somebodys blog instead.
As you can see from the screenshot below the search results for the Gio Compario campaign have been well and truly taken over by SEO & marketing blogs such as SEOptimise & Andrew in the organic results while several competitors are trying to hijack traffic with PPC ads.
I’ve attended and spoken at a number of conferences over the past 12 months and find them to be beneficial from both a learning and networking perspective. Finding which conferences to attend (especially when you’re first starting out) can be tricky. My friend Al Carlton (coincidentally enough we first met at a conference), also saw this as a problem and developed a solution, Conference Calendar.
This morning I’ve been reading about how some of the news sites which require readers to pay for a subscription are faring. Funnily enough the article is published on paidContent.org – website that doesn’t charge for subscriptions.
The first newspaper has 670 subscribers paying $2.95 per week and lost 40% of their traffic in the first 3 weeks of requiring a subscription. At current rates the model is bringing in just $102,778 per year which isn’t going to be enough to cover the cost of 2 people to run the site. Read more >>
