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September 28th, 2009

Mobile Marketing – still being tested

With mobile browser use on the increase, it is certain that new marketing will begin to be developed on the mobile front. It is amazing that we haven’t seen many remarkable mobile marketing tactics other than the mobile app development, which honestly only has real sustainability if it is something useful – not just a “neat feature”.

Useful mobile application examples include E*Trade’s mobile app that allows customers to securely trade etrade stocks from their Blackberry, Smartphone or iphone. In certain cases of mobile app development, these are added value services that customers purchase – such as Verizon’s VZ Navigator that helps customers locate businesses using their mobile phones and retrieve directions to the location of choice (similar to the Google maps app).

But wait . . . I am not saying that everyone should run out to develop a mobile app. You also need to consider the usage rates.

For example, a recent study Compete Smartphone Intelligence survey shows that for social applications, 73% of Blackberry owners have downloaded 5 or fewer applications; in contrast, 72% of iPhone owners have downloaded 10 or more applications. And the usage rates are likely much lower. So, make sure that you are developing your mobile apps for the right browser user, as well as providing a reason for them to use the application.

Don’t rush into mobile marketing unless it fits your strategy. If you are considering the development of a mobile app or mobile marketing plan, here are some basic guidelines to consider:

1. Research and review your target audience’s mobile use and access to see which browsers are used the most, if any.

2. Provide a mobile-friendly website, or at least a page on your site, to give the audience the option of learning more about your company or to direct a call to action. Please make sure that if you direct the audience to a form, that the form works!

3. Make sure that the mobile marketing you are considering is relevant to your brand.

4. Most of all, make sure that the user is actively involved in the decision to accept and interact with you and your marketing on their mobile phones – don’t become an annoyance to them or cost them money without their consent or request.

Also keep in mind that you don’t have to develop some complicated mobile app with all sorts of bells and whistles. You can implement something simple, such as a targeted mobile search engine marketing campaign – but make sure that you not only have at least some mobile friendly pages to direct the users to, but that these pages contain relevant content to what your mobile search ads are marketing.

Let’s review a couple mobile marketing application examples, that although are still being tested, have been useful for reaching customers and helping to turn mobile advertising into sales or developing relationships.

Mobile Marketing Application #1: Cellfire Mobile Coupons
In case you aren’t the target audience, you may not have heard of this, but if you register for a Cellfire account, free to the user of course, that allows you to access coupons from your mobile phone. And, c search for retailers near you. JCPenny is one of the larger retailers just recently trying scannable mobile coupons and is ll over the media news pubs, but may more have been using this marketing platform – Sears, Hollywood Video, 1-800-FLOWERS to name a few.

The results of these efforts are not known, but it will be something to watch with coupon redemption climbing to 23% redemption so far for the first 6 months of 2009 as reported by the New York Times.

Mobile Marketing Application #2: CellSpin Mobile blogging
Basically, this allows us to constantly blog about everything that we are doing – wherever and whenever we want. CellSpin lets you easily post video, voice, photo or texts to all of the top social networks – Facebook, MysSpace, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr Picasa. WordPress, Blogger, and on and on. It is a great app for those that are constantly logging into their various Facebook and Twitter accounts, since this allows you to post to multiple sites with a simple and quick app.

From a marketing standpoint, this is great for marketers that want to have this access to their site – integrating this application to the company website and being able to post important information any time. Plus, you can set up a Clog (a Community Blog) that allows any member to post videos, or other information that is applicable to your blog request or topic – and of course can do so from their mobile phone.

We have a long way to go in learning and testing mobile marketing, but hopefully the coming year will bring about some exciting new tactics that are both useful and follow appropriate marketing practices.

Posted by Christina on September 28th, 2009
Filed under Marketing, Miscellaneous, Search Engine Marketing, Web | No Comments »

July 13th, 2009

The trouble with pay-per-click tools & guidelines

With Google leading the way in the search engine marketing world, we can be assured that there will be more and more “tools” and efficiencies built into every pay-per-click program. But will this lead us to a less favorable environment?

When Google banned ebay on Google’s AdWords, many advertisers paid attention to the new guidelines for providing relevant information to the users. Not to mention that following the new editorial guidelines also helps achieve higher positioning based on incorporating the targeted keyword term into text ads. Which, let’s face it, for a user it makes sense – they will find more relevant ads based on their search. And as a user, I am all for more relevant information to my searches.

And with all the guidelines and tools that Google provides to AdWords customers, there are less and less targeted sem_ad_titles messages starting to be deployed. For instance, you can use keyword replacement for all of our keywords, basically saving you time by writing a couple text ads, and allowing Google to replace a specific term in the ad with each keyword that you are targeting – how ingenious, right? Oh – but every other advertiser can do the same thing, can’t they? And if everyone does it, and is basically writing the same message, how are the advertisers differentiating? Why would I choose you over your competitor touting the same thing? And, how does the instance of the keyword term in your ad make me want to click on your ad?

Although the theory of adding more relevant information and options to the user seems to make sense, particularly for natural search engine ranking, but applying this to the search engine marketing function may prove to be detrimental for the industry as a whole.

Posted by Christina on July 13th, 2009
Filed under Advertising, Miscellaneous, Search Engine Marketing, Web | No Comments »

March 31st, 2009

Social Media Monitoring – How to Protect Your Brand

Do you know who is talking about your brand? Monitoring social media is becoming increasingly important for public relations. You can respond to both negative and positive feedback about your brand instantly and manage your online buzz.

In the online world today, with new social media popping up constantly – how do you keep track of all of those mentions of your products, company or brand?

Of course you can purchase a service like Radian6, Trackur, or others that monitor your brand through keywords across the social media world and feed the information to you. The main benefit to using these services of course is that your time to manage all the social media activity is greatly reduced.

But, if you want to try managing the major social media sites on your own and want to get a sense of the content being posted out there on your brand? Here is a quick list of free tools to help you keep track of some of the top social media sources.

For the popular search engines provide tools to keep track of news items posted about your brand, although these can be somewhat limited:

Google gives you Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts?hl=en)

Or, select the Google blog search or news RSS feed for more info.

Yahoo provides alerts for news and a whole host of other information, but you can select the “keyword news” to keep track of information related to your brand: http://alerts.yahoo.com/

Of course MSN provides a similar service as well: http://alerts.live.com/Alerts/UserHome.aspx

Of course other social media sites also provide monitoring tools:

http://search.twitter.com/ (Twitter’s own search engine)

http://tweetbeep.com/ (Send’s you Twitter Alerts in your email)

Facebook has a service called Facebook Lexicon, but you have to be logged on to use it – enter a keyword and find out what is being said about your company!

And More! You can subscribe to RSS feeds from other top social media sites, such as:

Other free tools:

Of course you can use free tools the pull from multiple social mediums, here are a few for you to check out, but keep in mind that these are typically not comprehensive and provide only a quick or limited view on the social media out there!

Socialmention - allows you to select a specific form of social media, whether on blogs, bookmarking sites, etc.

Backtype -monitors blog comments.

Moreover – this is an RSS feed that you can set up to send you information on a specific search term or category from 30,000 new sources.

There are plenty more, but hopefully some of these resources will help you keep on top of what your customers, competitors and even employees or vendors may be saying about your brand!

If you want to share your favorite social media monitoring tools or just want to discuss the impact of social media on branding, send me a comment or ping me!

Posted by Christina on March 31st, 2009
Filed under Branding, Media, Web | No Comments »

November 21st, 2008

SearchWiki . . . Is there a point where personalization is too much?

You have to ask the question – how will the new SearchWiki feature play into the ranking of sites in general? With this new feature, you can personalize sites within your search results and list the sites you want based on specific search terms – aren’t we going too far with customization? And, isn’t that what a bookmark is for?

The big question for marketing is: how will this impact our Search Engine Optimization efforts in 2009? Is this good or bad? Well, I think that this provides both good and bad. For general searches, this supposedly will not impact natural rank, so we can be safe to be follow the same general principles – content & relevancy = rank, etc., etc. However, in the world where enough of the Google users that you are trying to reach log in to their account and use this feature, possibly pushing your competitors sites to the top positions and ignoring you altogether, what good is search engine optimization?

Do we need to start implementing a user-generated content strategy for the Google SearchWiki Community? Making sure that our sites are appearing in this community by influencing the community’s rank for our sites? Furthermore, will Google share with us any of the information on the users that we are targeting, how they rank our site, our competitors’ sites, etc.? Will our search engine marketing ads still appear within these searches? Will the preferences of the Google users have any impact on the search engine marketing placement and costs? Time will tell.

Maybe we should all consider that personalization for some things might be going too far.

Posted by Christina on November 21st, 2008
Filed under Search Engine Marketing, Web | Comments Off

June 25th, 2008

StumbleUpon – Search and Social Media

If you are like me, you have accounts with multiple social networks and can barely keep up with the contacts and communications with everyone on them. I find that managing my accounts can even become frustrating – and the few people I communicate with frequently, I used to email and call, so how is this helpful?

Although in the professional networks, such as LinkedIn, I do like to be linked to colleagues that I may have not worked with in the past month, and it does provide for the opportunity to find other contacts with some of these individuals when I am looking for specific information. But, I don’t tend to use even LinkedIn on a regular basis – honestly, I tend to only go on there when someone wants to join my contacts or I need to find a particular resource.

So how are social networks truly useful? Well, if LinkedIn was smart, they would start following the StumbleUpon approach to get the users to find their way into the LinkedIn network on a daily basis. If you are not familiar with StumbleUpon, check it out, it is a social network that is also a search engine of sorts, where registered users that have the same interests as you rate websites, which then are presented to you based on what subject that you are searching for. This network feature provides a unique toolbar that integrates into your browser window provides quick access to the subjects that you are interested in. However, there are downsides to the functionality – searching doesn’t provide the best results, often non-related websites, so sticking to your categories to find interesting related content seems to be the only useful part of this network search feature. But – interesting and provides a unique approach to social networking, which keeps me going back. This may not be for everyone though.

Posted by Christina on June 25th, 2008
Filed under Miscellaneous, Search Engine Marketing, Web | No Comments »

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Mobile Marketing – still being tested

The trouble with pay-per-click tools & guidelines

Social Media Monitoring – How to Protect Your Brand

SearchWiki . . . Is there a point where personalization is too much?

StumbleUpon – Search and Social Media