February 24, 2010
For years now, online marketing professionals have stressed the importance of the human element, particularly in social media. The point was elaborated on in a keynote at the Online Marketing Summit in San Diego today, where an audience of B2B and B2C marketers listened to Federated Media CEO John Battelle and special guest Anne Holland, who runs Which Test Won, discuss how to apply this concept to branding. Note: If you're not familiar with the Online Marketing Summit, WebProNews discussed it with founder Aaron Kahlow (who was also present at the keynote) recently at SES:
Battelle says to engage in a conversation with the advertisers, and look for points for engagement with the company. Make sure you understand the framework of the product, because not all things work for all clients. Holland says that if you're a known brand, it's been proven over and over that your search result will get a higher click rate and your landing pages will get higher conversion rates. That is the value of brand awareness, but marketing online isn't all about hard conversions and numbers of clicks. Brand marketing is very valuable, she says. The big brand wins, and becoming the big brand is immensely important. "Branding matters!" she declares.
Battelle says that large brands get to be large brands by projecting themselves. They run their business in an extremely mechanized fashion, and they forget sometimes that a brand is only what one person says to another person about the brand. He says the tools around now allow more and more people to join the conversation, and encouraging people to join the conversation about the brand is key. The most important thing to a brand, he says, is using the tools and leveraging opportunities for more people and employees to create and grow a conversation about the brand. Holland stressed the importance of going and looking for customers. This means finding out where they are, whether that be Facebook, LinkedIn, or anywhere else. Look at what they're doing there, and figure out how you can be where they are. Battelle made it a point to mention that advertisers are people too, and that sometimes marketers forget that.
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February 5, 2010
This week's big TV event was unquestionably the season premiere of "Lost"; lots of people have, over the course of the previous five or so years, become huge fans of the show. But new stats imply that very few of them sat in front of computer monitors on Wednesday, rather than televisions on Tuesday, in order to watch the two-hour episode. Nielsen took a look at why people watch online TV, and the leading reason doesn't have much to do with convenience or fewer commercials. Instead, 54 percent of people simply watch TV online because they forgot to catch an episode as it aired. And the next-most common reason, with 47 percent of people citing it, is similar: because they missed a large number of episodes.
It's not until you get down to the least popular reasons ("Another member of my household watches another program at the same time," "I watch TV programming online when I am at work," and "I watch TV programming online when I travel") that online TV sort of distinguishes itself. Otherwise, it appears to act as more of a memory aid (or way to avoid buying DVDs) than anything. The details relating to how people watch TV online also make the activity look like less than an integral part of everyday life. Jon Gibs, Nielsen's Vice President for Insights, Online and Cross Media, noted, "When we go online to watch TV shows, that activity dominates that particular online session," and "the viewing of TV shows online proves to be a rather solitary activity." This all makes for less than fantastic news for Hulu and YouTube. Of course, we have to note that neither site is exactly starving for page views, regardless of people's reasons for visiting them.
Have You Read This?
> DivX Rolls Out Online TV Platform At CES
> More People Watching Online TV
> DVR Users Fans Of Online Television
January 27, 2010
Facebook has become the most-visited social network on the mobile web, according to Opera's State of the Mobile Web report. Unique users of Facebook grew more than 600 percent during 2009, helping the site surpass Russian property VKontakte, formerly the most popular social network among Opera Mini users. Twitter saw its usage increase more than any other social network, jumping more than 2,800 percent in just one year.
In December 2009, more than 46.3 million people used Opera Mini, an 11 percent increase from November 2009 and more than 159 percent compared to December 2008. Opera Mini users viewed more than 20.7 billion pages in December 2009. Since November, page views have increased 10.1 percent. "Fortunately the divide between the mobile Web and the Web accessed on PCs is now disappearing," said Jon von Tetzchner, Co-founder,Opera Software.
. "People want to use the same sites, regardless of whether they use a phone or PC to access those sites. The success of Facebook and Twitter among Opera Mini users shows that consumer habits do not change even though their devices do." Have You Read This?
> Facebook Page Owners Getting More Stats
> Facebook Gets Into Customized Data Centers
> More Reporters Using Facebook And Twitter For Story Research
December 26, 2009
As a follow up to a recent article we ran on how press releases can be great for search, a representative for PRWeb, a press release distribution company, contacted us with another interesting example. This one looks at the shelf-life press releases can have, with regards to search traffic. "A small business called Leatherup.com, which sells peripheral gear for motorcycle riders issued a news release on November 6, 2008, titled, 'LeatherUp.com 2008 Sales Explode to over $20 Million,'" the representative tells WebProNews. "This year alone, this release has received more than 11,000 unique page views excluding advertising (I can see that Leatherup.com used this release as a landing page for some Doubleclick ads which boosted the total unique views to more than 20,000, so have excluded them)."
"Once I had the 11,000 number, with the exclusion, I looked at the entrance sources," he says. Among the top ten, these include (all numbers are unique views):
Google: 2,832 Direct: 1,551 AOL: 696 search.rr.com 247
"Moreover, peak views included December 11, 2009 – more than a year after the release was published," he continues. "The flat periods before April 7, 2009 are due to the fact that we had not yet implemented Google Analytics at that time, and the flat period in June 2009, is when PRWeb.com migrated over to a new Web site – the point being these search results could well be higher." There are a number of reasons that press releases can be great for search. They're great for spreading word to the media (journalists/bloggers), they can contain links, when used with credible news wire services, they are often looked upon with some authority, and as discussed above, their shelf-life can be significant.
> Search Engine and Social Traffic from Press Releases
> Press Releases New SEO Back Door to Top Rankings
> Getting the Media to Cover Your Business
Filed Under Review and Story, SEO · Leave a Comment
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