advertising

Big Changes Coming for Social Commerce and Social Shopping

jim wilde — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:34:36 +0000

You could almost take your friends shopping with you

From eMarketer - Paul Dunay is global managing director of services and social marketing at Avaya and author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies. He talks to eMarketer about the future of social commerce as it shapes up on brand Websites, Facebook and Twitter.

eMarketer: How do you define social commerce?

Paul Dunay: Social commerce is working with or using your social graph, which is defined as your followers or your friends, and allowing them to help you make buying decisions.

eMarketer: What role does Twitter play in social commerce?

Mr. Dunay: Social commerce can be anything from a buying suggestion or recommendation perhaps a tweet from a Dell outlet saying, "Hey, we have a special on this" to something like Facebook Connect.

Facebook Connect would allow you to go to a Website like Dell.com and authenticate yourself using your Facebook profile, allow your identity to be known and access your friends so you could spark up a chat. So I could say, "Hey, Jeff, I'm looking at this new fancy laptop or this netbook. I heard you bought something. Would you recommend this to me?"

"You could almost take your friends shopping with you."

So you could almost take your friends shopping with you. That is the potential with this example.

We're in a period now where we're all starting to get comfortable with Twitter and get comfortable with using Facebook and LinkedIn and a lot of these other tools, and now we're about to expand.

Read more about, The Future of Social Shopping

This is all about collaboration... He goes on to talk about Facebook Connect, which is great, but I think Google Wave will be the real killer app for social commerce and social shopping.

"Recommendations by personal acquaintances and opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising globally. The Nielsen survey shows that 90% of online consumers worldwide trust recommendations from people they know, while 70% trust consumer opinions posted online." Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey

Two-Minute Video Makes a Lot of Sense of Google Wave

From WSJ, Why Email No Longer Rulesâ€¦ nd what that means for the way we communicate

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Tips for Measuring Display Ads

jim wilde — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:55:36 +0000

Is the long-used click-through rate now officially useless?

(AdAge.com) -- The number of people online who click display ads has dropped 50% in less than two years, and only 8% of internet users account for 85% of all clicks, according to the most recent "Natural Born Clickers" study from ComScore and media agency Starcom. As the pool of people who click on banner ads rapidly decreases, it begs the question: Is the long-used click-through rate now officially useless?

What to Measure? Only16% of the Web Is Clicking Display Ads

Tips for living in a post-click world:

...it's important for marketers to ask their agencies how display ads fit into the larger marketing plan. "With the media mix, how do you set up overall metrics?" he said. "It's unrealistic to look at one element of one media for success. Since online media is so trackable, it's is held to a higher standard. The reality is no one looks at print advertising like that. You can't measure print that way or TV because they don't have built-in capacity. It's a little unfair that display becomes the whipping boy."
In the digital space, look at how elements like display and search coalesce, Mr. Spanier said. How do people end up at a website to make a purchase? Look at sales of a product on-site with consumers' exposure to ads. "There is no way display advertising is wasting money," he said, "even if people don't click."
Clicks are a direct-response measurement. For display campaigns, look at brand-awareness studies, purchase-intent lifts and engagement rates. "Users might work with an ad, but not click on it," said Paul Gunning, CEO of Tribal DDB Worldwide.
Look at display view-through rates. "CTRs have a value, there is still a hand being raised, but view-through is more important," Mr. Gunning said. "How many people actually end up where you wanted them to? How much time are they spending?"
Look at the creative. While consumer attitudes online have undoubtedly changed, think about how messaging does or doesn't demand clicks. If you want to measure success against click-throughs, include strong calls for action. Or, if you have a rich-media experience, other metrics such as engagement time are probably more telling. And that may be the case as more banners include innovations such as embedded video and rich media, said Atmosphere BBDO's Warren Griffiths, group account director for Visa, Emirates Airlines, Hertz and Starwood. "More banners have become the destination. I don't believe that would account for a 50% drop in clicks, but this may have had some impact."

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Social Applications Will Thrive In A Recession

jim wilde — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:26:51 +0000

"...social applications are about consideration, not awareness. Blogs, word of mouth, social networks... they're about people connecting with other people."

I pulled this post from Conversation starter, "Why Social Applications Will Thrive In A Recession". It was posted by Josh Bernoff .

"...social applications are about consideration, not awareness. Blogs, word of mouth, social networks... they're about people connecting with other people. You may resist advertising if your finances are tight, but if your bud tells you that new movie is really worth seeing or that the Gap has the cutest new tops, that's more persuasive than advertising. Basically, in a recession, the consideration phase is more important than awareness -- and that's where advertising flops and social applications succeed.

* It's cheap. Social applications can be nearly free (think blogs, Ning.com, facebook pages) and even more sophisticated communities are typically $30K to $200K -- a lot cheaper than a significant sized ad campaign. After our last post, all the responses were positive. One interactive marketer from a highly cyclical company told us this:

"Budgets are tight in light of the economic conditions as you surmise, but [the budget for social applications] has not been impacted. We are still keen to move forward with our trial and have supportâ€¦.at this point anyway. Interactive in general has been more protected than other comms areas and saw an increase."

* It's measurable. If your social application doesn't have a measurable output, you'd better get one. But if it does -- if it generates leads, or conversions, or buzz, or something useful -- then you can prove it's working. beinggirl.com is four times as effective as TV ads, Procter & Gamble told us. That won't get cut in a recession."

Josh Bernoff is a vice president at Forrester Research and the author, with Charlene Li, of the forthcoming book, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

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Web 2.0 website development

community software applications

Business Development Ideas

Advertising taking on new art forms

jim wilde — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 15:47:47 +0000

Continuing to muse about advertising - confused in calcutta

This is about social media taking on new art forms.

...we're going to see something new emerge soon. We're going to see marketers and advertisers compete for sponsorship of ultra-short videos and cartoons, which will become a whole new art form.

Micro-sponsorship at event level, where each clip is an event. The event itself will have no relation to the brand or product doing the sponsoring, or at best a loose connection. What does AIG have to do with Manchester United, or for that matter Carling to do with football? So what we see in the world of sport will move into the world of YouTube, but the eventsbeing sponsored will get smaller and smaller.

I've been working with a group of international artists, release01.com. Some of them make money creating art work around virtual worlds. So, it's not too far of a stretch for them to create new art forms, videos, cartoons, etc., for marketers and advertisers.

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web design website development

New media marketing

jim wilde — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 20:58:21 +0000

"THE NEW FACE OF MARKETING SMILES ON CUSTOMER VALUE"

By Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D.

"Whether it's the social network access of peer-to-peer marketing or the youth culture of wireless messaging, companies have never had more options to choose from when connecting with customers. But making those choices should not necessarily be a question of new technology, lower cost, or even media preference, per se. The choice should be made based on the most efficient use of your customer opportunities.

Some "new" marketing channels are now tried-and-true. A recent Forrester Research report, Interactive Marketing Channels to Watch, shows that 83 ercent of the 259 companies it surveyed use email marketing and more than two thirds plan to increase their online activities. In terms of emerging marketing channels the report shows that social networks, RSS feeds, and advertising within video games will get the most attention and dollars over the next five years. Media, communications, and consumer packaged goods firms are the most willing to experiment with new channels because it enables them to find the most specific groups of customers."

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Web 2.0 website development

web design website development

Because markets are changing faster than businesses

jim wilde — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 13:41:03 +0000

Controlling the flow of information to employees, customers, partners etc, used to be easy with newspapers, TV, radio, print, email, and the like.

Today, your brand is being watched, augmented, and de-located. People are writing their own stories, thoughts, ideas, and developing new products and services using social media technologies. These simple social networking and web 2.0 technologies and services: Blogs, Wikis, Forums, Tagging, Podcasts, and RSS are connecting people and information in new ways, conversations, faster than you can say oh shit.

What, how, and where people are discovering new ideas.

Marketing has a marketing problem. Seth, "Marketing is not about trickery or even insincerity. It's about spreading ideas that you believe in, sharing ideas you're passionate about... and doing it with authenticity. Marketing is about treating prospects and customers with respect, and realizing that it's easier to grow the amount of business you do with happy people than it is to find new strangers to accost.

"The Importance of RSS By Kevin Hale from Particle tree is an essay on quot;...the state of RSS, taxonomies, advertising, [tagging, social software and services]. Kevin, "I think the reason Del.icio.us is so successful at bringing the appropriate audience to good material is because they track the changing web by using people to calculate what is essentially page rank. They get access to decent fuzzy logic for a fraction of the cost and the democracy of the system allows anyone to get their idea of what deserves face-time into the system almost immediately.

Basically, tagging systems are wonderful breeding grounds for the principles contained in Malcom Gladwell's The Tipping Point. They do a great job of gathering Salesmen, Mavens and Connectors all in one place. Mavens stalk the new entries on the front page and certain tag pages to filter through the chaos and find the latest treasures. The RSS feeds act as a sort of technological bridge/pseudo-connector to get the information to the real Connectors and Salesman. From what I've noticed, a good idea can make it into del.icio.us/popular in about 5 days, a good Salesman/Connector/Maven like Dave Shea or Jeffrey Veen can get a good idea into del.icio.us/popular in less than two hours."

Terry's post is about journalist's students and the old guard and the way information used to be handled. I think the ideas apply equally to any business since most organizations follow a hierarchical structure with tightly controlled information flowing from the top down instead of the bottom up.

The POMO Blog, Following the cultural shift with Terry Heaton - "The matter of hierarchically-determined licenses and "position" will be one of the most gut-wrenching battles we face, as the world moves farther down the postmodern path. Obviously, this does not sit well with the status quo, and I would add that I'm only a messenger on this. There is no requirement that you accept any of it, but it is my experience and observation that the higher one ascends society's pedestals, the less open-minded one becomes. In my belief, that is the most dangerous issue facing the professional journalism community."

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