Social Media has the potential for large companies to feel small and make each customer feel valued like local businesses have been doing for years.

My local dry cleaner

Each week when I drop off my dry cleaning at the local dry cleaner, the owner greets me by my first name. I've even seen the owner working out at the local gym and he still referred to me by my first name.

Making me feel valued and worth remembering

It's one thing to see a customer's vehicle pull into your parking lot giving you have a few moments to recall their name, it's another to see the customer out of context and still remember their name.

It's hard to explain how this feels as a customer to be remembered both in and outside of the business.

I have yet to feel this way after visiting or purchasing from a website.

Which is your social media strategy?

That of my local dry cleaner? Or something else:

There's little in the relationship and loyalty department to be gained when your business' Twitter account is for posting your cheapest products, your Facebook page is about acquiring the most followers, and your blog is filled with content designed for search engine rankings and not people.

Build a relationship, not a campaign

The point of Social Media is not to "build a list," "go viral," or "get impressions/mentions." Social Media is not a campaign.

Social Media, done correctly, enables your business to intelligently connect with your loyalists to build deep relationships over time.

• To build our mailing list?
• To "get more traffic" to our site?
• To increase average time spent on our site?
• To increase average pageviews per visit on our site?
• To get more new users to visit our site (no matter how qualified)?
• To get more followers on twitter?
• To get more fans on Facebook?

None of the above.

These are by-products of a marketing campaign. In fact, these are not even indicators to suggest positive or negative performance of a campaign. Why? Because they are not relevant to a consumer/customer. If these are listed as goals of a campaign then this is "marketing for the sake of marketing."

What is relevant to a consumer/customer?

Growing your mailing list by 10% does nothing if that 10% never buys your products. Increasing time spent on your website does not suggest you've tapped a resource for new brand advocates, either (it may however suggest you've created additional roadblocks preventing site visitors from completing desired tasks in a short amount of time).

Meaningful messaging that triggers action leading to a conversion -- this is marketing and it's why we're in business. Anything else is just noise that makes your brand irrelevant to your target audience.

In January this year I was doing an analysis on the traffic sources to the hobby-based site I run (SuperMotors). Since we run the site as a hobby, it must pay for itself via direct subscriber fees and advertising revenue (on a CPM basis). From ad revenue standpoint, more traffic to the site equates to more revenue. Simply increasing the pageviews that existing traffic is already making is not enough in a CPM environment because ad networks will optimize ads to show less frequently to visits/sessions that have already seen their ads. Instead, we needed to look at creative ways in drawing in more visits to the site.

Referring search traffic is a significant driver in website traffic

What I found over an 8-month period -- I knew it was the leading referrer in traffic, but it was surprising to see that it was the leader by a clear mile -- was Google Organic search was driving over 37% of traffic to our site. The next closest traffic referrer was only at 11.7%.

Google's search index of our site (in January '09): 56,800 pages

Perform a Google search on your site index with this query: site:www.yoursite.com . In the case of SuperMotors, the 37% of traffic being driven by organic results in Google was a result of 56,800 pages in the Google index for www.supermotors.net. Not bad, but when compared to competing enthusiast sites who had indexes in the several hundred thousands, it was substantially low.

Bottom line: we were missing out on revenue opportunities by having a small natural search index.

Google Webmaster Tools: Adding Sitemaps

Sitemaps are the single most cost-effective way at increasing search visibility for your site with Google and getting additional, free organic traffic driven to your site. The premise is simple: the more content that Google indexes from your site, the more keyword hits there will be for your site. Rankings of these pages are another story altogether, but long tail search can account for a substantial portion of traffic being driven to your site. Here's the link to Google's webmaster tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Here is a screenshot of one of our sitemap indexes (for photos posted by our members), there are 11 separate pages each with 50,000 records each:

Even 8 months after submitted this Sitemap, of the 529,979 unique URLs submitted, Google has still only indexed 339,578 or 64% of them. Over time, this figure will continue to grow as the Googlebot absorbs more and more pages out of the Sitemaps.

Google's search index (8 months later) of our site after adding Sitemaps: 1,200,000 pages

For the past 8 months, the Googlebot has been methodically inhaling more and more pages from our various sitemaps to increase our searchable index for SuperMotors.net in the Google Search index. Our search index increased from 56,800 to 1,200,000 -- a 2100% increase in indexed content free of charge.

Your results will vary -- we have a lot of user-generated content and the 1,200,000 million pages represents forum messages, pictures, sounds, and videos posted by 10's of thousands of members over several years. For sites without user generated content, indexed content will probably be much lower -- and this is OK. Apple.com for example, has approximately 115,000 indexed pages in Google at the time of this writing.

Referring organic Google visits have increased 5.76%

As the result of simply adding Sitemaps and telling Google about them via the Webmaster Tools page, we have seen a 5.76% increase in organic visits from Google. All other things equal, when you increase site visits by any percentage free of charge, this will result in increased revenues from CPM advertising programs. Or in the case of e-commerce/retail sites, this should increase online sales provided that you're converting these visits at the same rate as other visits.

Look at some of your favorite websites in Google's search index -- impressive results or not really? When you have a big brand name, you may not spend as much effort in the Sitemaps arena. However, organic search is highly qualified traffic because someone has searched for a keyword that you have on your site. Increasing your search index size is the first step in taking share away from your competitors online. Optimizing the content on those pages is another tactic altogether -- but content optimization won't matter if Google doesn't know the page exists on your site.

Abandoning the purchase funnel

Having said that, I went through the multi-step validation process on Apple's site, but it was unable to retrieve our account information from AT&T, to which I was prompted to search for a local Apple Store. Not needing to do this, I simply abandoned the purchase funnel with a mental note to "visit the store this weekend" since I hit a dead end on the site and wasn't going to be able to complete the upgrade online.

Automated follow-up to purchase abandonments

About 15 minutes later, I received the following, automated email:

Very impressive -- an automated follow-up recognizing that I abandoned the purchase funnel for the iPhone upgrade. I must say that I am not used to this type of marketing where the website acts like a true salesperson.

Technically speaking, it's not difficult to implement this. It's a perfect blend of leveraging technology to solve a business problem: how do you capture the consumer's attention after they've left your site without making a purchase?

Frustrated by Difficulty, Half of Marketers Forgo Analytics

Marketers will continue to invest significantly in online marketing this year, but less than half (47%) actually use analytics to measure their campaigns, and one-fifth only have a 'basic' website, according to the sixth annual marketing survey from Alterian (via MarketingCharts).

A marketing department can be a competitive advantage, but only if marketers understand how to measure campaign effectiveness.

Marketing budgets are usually the first to get trimmed in difficult economic times and it's no surprise with over half of marketers not being able to tie a return (in revenue, customer satisfaction, brand awareness, etc.) to marketing dollars invested. A CFO at any company is going to quickly zero-in on this spending and cut what they don't understand and certainly what isn't being measured.

Are you measuring the effectiveness of your website with web analytics?

Free analytics tools readily available from Google and Yahoo! allow you to jump right in. But, it's not just the access to the technology that will help derive value from marketing investments; ultimately, it's accountability and the desire to continually improve your campaigns. Without either of these two characteristics, then you're just viewed as an "expense" that can eventually be cut.

Many businesses fail to understand or are able to justify the value of an implementation of BI software. Instead, decisions are based off of "gut feel," advertising and marketing decisions are made based on "how we've always done it," and at the foundation of it all: inadequate intelligence.

Want to see Business Intelligence (BI) in action? Visit a hospital.

After spending 5 hours at the hospital this week for a "false alarm" (my wife is pregnant), I was fascinated by the uterine contraction machine that the hospital staff had hooked up to my wife's stomach. Through a series of sensors, this machine was hooked up to a PC and displayed a real-time readout of fetal heart rate and contractions both on the monitor and via a continuous printout on paper.

As my wife would wince with the pain that each contraction brought with it, the machine readout was right-on. Occasionally, I would see the contraction monitor start moving up (indicating a contraction was building) before she would feel it. Furthermore, over time we could see the frequency in which contractions were happening which enabled the doctors to see important trends with the contractions. As we began to recognize the trends, we could predict the next contraction for my wife within a 20-second range.

At no point were we left wondering whether the contractions were consistent or not, or how long they were lasting. It made me realize that if this was not a hospital room and if we were at any random business, chances are we'd be making decisions based on little or no data.

The three pillars of Business Intelligence execution

Our hospital visit showed "business intelligence" at its finest. In this particular case, this was a basic implementation of intelligence gathering, but essentially BI breaks down into the following:

1. Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) -- in this case when we were at the hospital, there were 2: fetal heart rate & contractions
2. Implement a method of collecting data -- the monitoring machine
3. Implement a reporting tool so you can analyze the data to base your decisions off of -- by evaluating the printed graphs from the machine, the doctor could identify trends with the contractions and determine if she was progressing with labor (in our case, it was a false alarm)

Do you have KPIs set for your business, department, website, advertising, or social media initiatives?

If you haven't identified KPIs for running your business, then collecting data and reporting against it do very little if you can't convert the data to insights. For example, consider the following scenarios when viewed in isolation, they may sound like accomplishments. Often times, quantity/volume or completion is used as a universal KPI:

• You just sold 100,000 units of XYZ widget!
  • What if XYZ widget has a Gross Margin (GM) of only 5%? 10,000 units sold at 50% margin (at the same price) is just as profitable. Volume can often times be misleading because the effort that goes into selling 100,000 units can be far greater than 10,000 units.
• Your department just completed a critical project on time!
  • Great, the deadline has been met. Does that mean success? Not necessarily. If each member of your department has just spent the last 6 weeks working 80-hour weeks, this is not success -- it's burnout.
• Your website had 100,000 unique visitors to your website yesterday!
  • Unique visitors to your website mean nothing if you're not measuring the "next step" in the conversion funnel of your site. What does your website exist to accomplish? Generate leads? Sell products? Provide product support? Unique visits that don't convert to sales or brand advocates are just a waste of bandwidth.
• Your TV ad ran during the SuperBowl!
  • How much did you spend on the ad and how many sales can be attributed to the ad? Don't know? Then running an ad during the SuperBowl is not a success.
• Your social media campaign generated 5,000,000 impressions!
  • Like your TV ad that ran during the SuperBowl, how much was invested in this campaign and what time frame are you using to measure the return on the impressions generated from the campaign? Impressions are NOT a KPI for social media unless you can equate an impression to revenue or another unit of measure that is of value to your organization.

Business Intelligence tools

This this is by no means comprehensive but is a start to discovering what's available in the industry for business intelligence solutions (based on the "top of mind" companies). Rarely will you find a "one size fits all" approach -- often times you'll find yourself utilizing several niche tools, particularly as you get into advertising and marketing campaigns.

Pillar #1: KPI Tools

There's no software that can tell you what your KPIs should be for your business. KPIs vary widely by industry, type of business, department, and ultimately boil down to what you're being measured to produce.

Pillar #2: Data Warehousing Tools

This is an important pillar, and there are many options available for data warehousing. A simple Google search for the topic produces many vendors who play in this space. Visit the Wikipedia entry for this subject and check out these vendor offerings:

• Open Source
  • MySQL
  • Infobright
• Commercial
  • SAP Business Objects
  • Oracle

Pillar #3: Reporting & Analysis Tools

Once the data is collected, you must have the tools to report and analyze the data. It's one thing to see your KPIs, but the real skill behind Business Intelligence is the ability to correlate this data, mine the data, and discover information and trends you otherwise might have never known.

• Businesses & Department-Level Tools (See my BI links on delicious.com)
  • Open Source
    • JasperReports
    • Pentaho
  • Commercial
    • Cognos
    • iDashboards
    • SAP Business Objects
    • Omniture Discover OnPremise
• Website Tools (See my web analytics links on delicious.com)
  • Open Source / Free
    • Google Analytics
  • Commercial
    • Omniture SiteCatalyst
    • WebTrends
    • ClickTracks
    • ZoomRank for SEO
• Advertising, marketing campaign measurement tools
  • Google Adwords for TV
  • WebTrends AdDirector for SEM
  • Omniture SearchCenter for SEM
  • Visit the Dashboard Spy blog
• Social Media measurement tools
  • Nielson BuzzMetrics
  • BuzzLogic
  • Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Analyst) has a string of blog posts on this topic covering the likes of twitter, blogging, and most other hot technologies struggling to prove their ROI to the business world

Click on it and you see this page:

Target ads still recognizable even when fast forwarding on DVR

And while fast-forwarding through DVR'd TV shows tonight, the familiar red background and white stick figure running with the shopping cart flew by on a few frames. How often do you recognize an ad and/or brand name in just a few frames of DVR fast forwarding? I've been paying more attention to this lately and it's difficult to recall anything...particularly in anticipation of getting back to your DVR'd show.

Here's a clip of similar animation which it looks like Target is recycling from this 2007 campaign (found on YouTube):

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eKP7alp8xM

Consistency is key with integrated, multi-channel marketing

The consistency of the creative of these ads enabled me to recall the Target campaign with HIGHLY passive viewing (browsing for news on CNN.com -- which I do several times per day) and fast-forwarding through commercials on our DIRECTV DVR. I can't think of any other ways where I'm less engaged than quickly scanning for the latest news on a website or sitting on the couch watching TV.

As marketers grow to accept a world where consumers can easily ignore their ads, it's really interesting to see how Target is able to penetrate the barrier to recalling an ad. It begs the question: how does one test the "recall" and "effectiveness" of multi-channel marketing prior to executing the full media spend?

Traditionally, consumer panels are shown various ads and asked follow-up questions. The problem is this doesn't simulate a real-world environment of cross-channel entertainment & news consumption.

Think big, start small, deliver quickly

Incremental releases of ads combined with analysis of ad performance in each channel are really the only way to truly optimize a campaign -- especially across multiple channels. I'm still not quite sure if Target is at the level of being able to measure or test the effectiveness or recall of their ads if only a few frames of them are seen. In any case, this current campaign of theirs has worked on me to generate awareness. Now the question is: will I make it to Target for the sale and purchase something?

The two ads, while physically separated on the screen, were designed to interact with each other as "PC" walks away from "Mac" from the right-hand ad to the top ad to destroy the customer satisfaction odometer:

As engaging as the ad was, I realize now that I didn't even click on the ad -- probably because I'm not in the market and already am a Mac owner (and thus fully aware of my satisfaction with the Macs I own).

After "PC" is finished breaking the odometer, the ads fade out and we see the Apple logo up top and the call-to-action on the right-hand side. Very interactive and one of the few ads I've actually wanted to toggle the audio ON for. Smart of Apple to default the audio to OFF as I'm usually scrambling for the pause or mute button when audio automatically starts playing when I visit a site.

An excellent way to leverage the interactive medium of banner advertising by utilizing characters originating from traditional television spots.

Problem: You've alienated your target demographic

The speed at which a big brand like Motrin reacted was decent. Rumblings started over the weekend and by Monday afternoon, Motrin had this announcement posted on the homepage of its website (although several hours after the entire motrin.com site was not available):

Not sure what's distasteful about the ad? Read the coverage:

http://blogs.forbes.com/sciencebizblog/2008/11/twitter-moms-si.html

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/11/17/motrin-mothers-groundswell-by-the-numbers/

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/motrin_bows_to_social_media_pr.php

How can this type of situation be prevented in the future?

In short, it can't be 100% prevented. At the end of the day, even the best processes and procedures can fail and its why we live in a world of product recalls and warranty repairs. Dealing with a negative reaction to an advertising campaign is similar to a massive product recall -- it's all in how you react to the problem.

How should I react to an internet riot?

I jokingly refer to these types of situations as "internet riots" however I realize they are to be taken seriously otherwise they will spiral out of control -- much like a riot.

While mommy bloggers certainly rallied and voiced their opinion to Motrin via blogs, twitter, and other outlets, we have to remember that there are other types of visitors to the site -- visitors who, like me, had never seen the commercial and had no idea what "everybody was mad about" this morning.

Plastering an announcement on the homepage of the site is probably "good enough," but not ideal. Here's why the Motrin execution falls short:

1. The entire homepage announcement is an image and not text. This means Google and other search engines cannot index the contents of the image. This then means the message will not be searchable on search engines. As of this writing, "motrin moms" (the ad campaign's main message) dominates search results and motrin.com is nowhere to be found.
2. The message on the homepage is not clickable -- it doesn't take me to more information on the product, status on when the rest of the campaign will be disabled, or even a way to contact Motrin.
3. How long will this message stay on their homepage? What if we need to refer to it at a later date after the initial groundswell as died down?

Instead, the following steps would have been much easier and faster to produce and maintain on an on-going basis:

1. Post a blog posting containing detailed information on what the problem is, what you're doing to fix it, and make sure to have keywords in the article that are found in the referenced blog posts, tweets, and articles (no need to involve IT or web developers to update the site)
2. Link to the post on the homepage of the Motrin site (so it can be later removed without eliminating the content of the article!)
3. Post a tweet on twitter to the channel of the dialogue with a link to the blog posting
4. Openly accept comments (I like the reference to the feedback, although there's no mechanism to contact Motrin from this message on their homepage)

What can I do to monitor whether or not a riot is brewing?

In late 2006 I outlined some common ways to monitor your brand online via this post. If you find a site that is not RSS-enabled, you can also monitor it with a service such as this.

Help "steer the ship"

Posting content to your own site and managing comments on it can help you "steer the ship." The last thing you want is a situation like Motrin's that continues to spiral out of control with blog entries and tweets that carry a negative connotation about the product or brand name. By funneling all attention about the issue (good or bad) through a blog post our your website, you now function as the central source of information.

You may have an SEM management gap

The above article claims budgetary and resource concerns. I think the bigger picture is one of the following scenarios that many marketing organizations face:

1. Marketing, being resourced constrained, probably pawns this off as an "IT project" because it involves technology.
2. Marketing has assigned SEM efforts to a vendor specializing in SEM and no other marketing initiatives.

Scenario #1: SEM lives in IT

I can understand why SEM has traditionally been an "IT responsibility" because SEM in large part, is still a rather large mystery to marketers. They don't understand the rules of the game and the execution of your organization's SEM campaigns requires a fundamental knowledge of your website and the visitors of your website. It's commonplace that a marketing communications department, who handles traditional print and television advertising, may not be the resident experts on web strategy and design. It's easy to pass SEM off to IT -- because they handle "the technical stuff."

Scenario #2: SEM execution lives with an outside firm

There are many companies providing SEM services and not surprisingly, these companies are technical in nature and not traditional direct-marketers. Those that are direct marketers are generally small and have a localized client base, making it hard for them to penetrate the mold of Fortune 500 companies. Those that are technical may have a great technology to sell, but lack the marketing savviness of a direct marketing firm to truly bring SEM the return on investment it demands -- resulting in poorly performing SEM campaigns. This leads to the disconnect in online and offline marketing mentioned in the above MediaBuyerPlanner report.

How do you close the SEM knowledge gap? Who should manage SEM?

SEM "belongs" in marketing and should be on the radar of anyone executing any outbound marketing and awareness campaigns (email, direct mail, or otherwise). "Belonging in marketing" and "being executed by marketing" are two different things. From marketing communications, to product marketing managers, to channel marketing, each group has their own functional needs/goals for SEM. Establishing a governing body to ensure the proper SEM techniques and optimization are in place is recommended -- but simultaneously avoiding the bureaucracy that's often accompanied by "governing committees."

A good place? The web experience/usability group within your organization. SEM may be funded by marketing while the governing body and "gatekeeper" for SEM can be facilitated through the people who know your site inside and out and intimately understand the experience an end-user desires when arriving at the landing pages on your site via an ad. After all, not much ends up on the site that doesn't pass the approval of this group. Any campaigns directing traffic to the site are right up the alley of a usability professional.

I came across IntenseDebate.com today and am extremely impressed as well as excited about this new service. The service provides blog owners the ability to install a plug-in on their blog which will centralize the storage of blog commenting, streamline comment threading, improve comment moderation, and encourage additional posting.

The problem I run into a lot when reading blogs is while I'd like to take the time to comment, I'm busy, and don't often want to create a new account to post a simply reply. Plus, when posting in an established community and without "street cred", it's hard to feel like you're adding value to a conversation if you've never posted before.

IntenseDebate.com changes this. As an end-user, I now have a centralized account and any blog that uses IntenseDebate.com for their commenting system, I can automatically comment and my profile on IntenseDebate.com will be shown, as well as other posts on other blogs I've made via my IntenseDebate.com account. It's really quite impressive.

I'll post a few quick comments below to display how it works.

Huh?

I couldn't disagree more. You can't honestly tell me that Lamborghini, BMW, Lincoln, and Hyundai (just to name a few random automotive brands) are all on equal playing fields when a consumer searches for "car" on Google. 

The post goes on to talk about the power of SEO and why SEO is not dead. SEO is most certainly not dead and should make for a critical component in your online strategy. His point in trying to prove why SEO is not dead is muddied by the claims of "branding being dead." Brands don't matter in certain categories (probably because there's no clear category leader), but certainly not across the board.

Proper SEO can elevate your brand to the top of the listing for non-branded searches.

They key is creating brand awareness (through advertising, promotion, PR, etc. outside of search engines) and dominating on branded AND non-branded searches for your category. This is done by juggling your SEO work with your SEM campaigns to find the "sweet spot" so SEM can pick up the slack where you lag behind in SEO. Branding then goes onto heavily influence clicks on search engine results.

This type of tunnel-vision thinking is why "online" is still broadly viewed as an IT function.

Flat-out comments like this show the still "techy" and misguided view of some Internet strategists and how marketing and "tech" still quite aren't aligned -- even on established sites such as searchenginewatch.com. Any marketer worth their salt should understand that brands can drive search results. When industry publications and commentary throw out claims like this, it's difficult to create alignment with a marketing department -- especially when marketing should "own" (or at least have visibility to) SEO and SEM strategy.

It's fairly easy to cost-effectively monitor your brand names and trademarked terms (and anything else you'd like to keep tabs on) using Google's Blog search RSS feeds (and several other aggregator service RSS feeds). When you don't have the funds (or a low volume of online/blog conversations pertaining to your brand) for a service like BuzzLogic or BuzzMetrics, it's about as "grass roots" as you can get.

But what if you want to automatically monitor changes to your competitors' websites that don't have feeds built into them?

Page2RSS is the answer.

Page2RSS is a free service which creates an RSS feed out of any URL you enter into the site. Their free service creates a cached version of the page every 4 hours. Simply subscribe to the RSS feed and off you go -- be the first to know when your competitors update their homepage, product pages within their sites, and so on.

Many advertisers have no methodology for measuring the effectiveness of their ad campaigns. In a flourishing economy, taking risks with a low probability for success is often encouraged in hopes of the big pay-off. In a tough economy, investing in anything (advertising, R&D, etc.) will require a great deal of scrutiny.

At SES NY in '06 I attended an invite-only dinner with WebTrends with a group of about a dozen online marketers -- some existing clients of WebTrends and some were potential clients they were wining and dining. One of the dinner guests I sat next to was Rex Briggs, co-author of What Sticks.

For anyone who thinks "advertising cannot be measured," I would recommend reading this book. It covers concepts that online marketers should hold close to their hearts: Test, Learn, Deploy, Repeat. Many traditional marketers are used to deploying large budgets on print and TV advertising with no plan or budget to measure the effectiveness of the ad spend. They excel at developing the creative, but fail miserably when it comes to answering the simple question of "Did it work?" 

In the online world, measuring ad spend becomes somewhat easier with the various tracking technologies (particularly if you sell online). If you can definitively prove how advertising positively impacts sales (directly or indirectly), then you'll most likely see your ad budgets remain flat in a tough economy, but not entirely eliminated like some marketers are experiencing this year.

The "Elf Yourself Campaign
Put together by Officemax, here's the comparison of the ElfYourself.com demographics and Officemax.com demographics:

The above graph is for ElfYourself.com

The below graph is for Officemax.com:

Demographic & site analysis
Officemax.com hits the internet average for female and male visitors skewing slightly higher in the 55-64 and 65+ demographics. The ElfYourself.com campaign however is highly skewed towards 65+ females. We do see an obvious jump in traffic to OfficeMax.com during the same timeframe that the ElfYourself.com site has been running (presumably due to the coupons offered on ElfYourself.com when you click on the OfficeMax logo).

Will it translate to revenue? Time will tell.

PR firms focusing on "viral" vs. product
Switching gears from OfficeMax to my day job...it's interesting seeing the campaign ideas we are pitched from marketing firms who aspire to earn our business. There's an overwhelming amount of focus with online marketing, but in our industry (blinds & shades), is making it up the ranks of digg.com really going to translate to revenue? Many marketers think so and go out of their way to focus on links we receive due to PR, blog mentions, and diggs. Let's step back for a moment and focus on digg.com's demographics (courtesy of Quantcast):

Skewing higher than the internet average on the 25-34 Male demographic is not exactly the sweet spot for us when it comes to spending money on press that end up on digg.com.

Common sense in online marketing
Viral campaigns are fine -- if they are targeted towards the demographic you are seeking as customers. digg.com is not a "mass consumer" demographic and should not be treated as one by marketers, but for some reason it is. This is nothing against digg. There comes a time when you have to ask yourself the "So, what?" question when a marketing pitches you a concept. With the viral success of the Elf Yourself campaign, be sure to ask yourself the "So, what?" question if a marketer comes to you with a great viral idea that does not pave a clear path to sales revenue.

Marketing campaigns can and should be measured in sales
Some marketing agencies are not held accountable to revenues generated from campaigns. Generating impressions is great, but if the campiagn cannot be tied directly to sales, then you should find a way to measure it. Every campaign we run is measured -- sometimes we may not know the potential return (which is often the case testing new ideas/technologies surrounding promotions and marketing), so we measure it to see what the return is after the campaign is over with.

Your sales cycle may be a long sales cycle, so campaign "success" may not be measurable immediately -- it could take weeks, months, or even years. If this is the case, plan your campaigns accordingly because the sales cycle should help drive the types of promotions that work for your business. OfficeMax seems to have played their cards right with the coupons/discounts on ElfYourself.com and the traffic spike to Officemax.com.

However, traffic spikes do not always equate to revenue -- especially if the campaign is driving unqualified customers to your site. This is the one thing that many agencies fail to grasp in this new age of viral campaigns and del.icio.us, YouTube, and digg.com's of the world.

This presents an interesting dilemma for those keywords that don't convert well (i.e. "blinds") but are high-volume in nature. Some terms are so generic that for folks in the market for the product, it can actually make sense to play in these areas for branding-related purposes.

A proper SEM strategy with channel partners and an SEO strategy for your own site now theoretically will not only help conversion rate, but the influence of your brand. Sometimes you can't show up for every possible keyword that relates to your products, but through a combination of leveraging the breadth of sites that sell your products online (i.e. your channel partners) and your own SEM/SEO strategy, search has a significant potential to influence buyer preferences.

In essence, the more they see your brand for all keywords related to your product, the higher the probability they will associate your brand with those terms -- and hopefully convert/purchase your products.

This year has been a good year for Omniture customers -- seeing their favorite web analytics vendor gobble up other businesses such as TouchClarity, Offermatica, and Visual Sciences. The recent shake-up at WebTrends as outlined by webmetricsguru.com, poses a lot of questions for web analytics customers.

We're actually in a unique position being both a WebTrends and Omniture customer. We use the WebTrends Dynamic Search product for SEM management and optimization. I would love to see Omniture acquire WebTrends so we can stop dancing around separate reporting for the WebTrends Dynamic Search product. However, it doesn't look like an acquisition of WebTrends will be a reality. Oh well, for now.

Omniture's Challenge: Information Architecture and UI
Included in webmetricsguru.com posting is the following:

I told Josh that I've worked with Omniture some, recently, but found the platform, while it can do everything, doesn't always do it elegantly - he responded that I should be using the newer technology Omniture has come up with - not the older stuff; I replied the newer stuff (IE: Discover 2) is very expensive and not everyone can afford it.

The above comment couldn't be further from the truth. The good thing about Omniture is it can do whatever you want. The bad thing about Omniture is it can do whatever you want. It can be a very complex system and for us, we have actually done 2 implementations. The first round established the basics, and after 2 months of being in production, we fine-tuned the implementation considerably after we learned more about the intricacies of the tool.

Taking a page out of the Google Analytics book
Omniture should take a page out of the Google Analytics book and check out the report designs, navigation, and general user interface of this free product. Omniture is a complex interface for the average business user. Google seems to master the ability to create interfaces that most users can figure out without any knowledgebases, tech support, or training. There is power in this and it's why Google is good at what they do. If Omniture could start adopting some of this thinking their SiteCatalyst UI, it'd be a great start.

Omniture's other challenge: Timely Customer Service & Support
What I really, really, really would like to see is for Omniture to focus on improving their customer support. Phone support is speedy, but rarely resolves in a question being answered if the problem is complex and doesn't involve basic functionality of their application. This is not to downplay the expertise of their tech support -- it's just that each customer's implementation is different and it takes time to dig into some issues. Perfectly understandable.

However, e-mail support is terrible. I'm not really sure why they offer it because the response rate is, on average, a week for basic requests (which can be handled on-the-fly with a single phone call). Support requests that require higher-tier support go unanswered for several weeks. It often takes an e-mail to our account manager to get an update that is more detailed than "we are working on the problem." As a customer, we feel like they are either blowing off our follow-up inquiries about open tickets or their support system does not do a satisfactory job at escalating stale tickets in the queue. Coming from an agency and project management background, this is a big no-no.

Soliciting Feedback from Customers
There are several usability issues throughout their interfaces. Nothing that prevents you from getting your work done, but just design issues that force you to do a lot of extra clicking. This, combined with the continued frustration we run into with support inquiries makes me believe they would really benefit from using OpinionLab or any feedback tool for that matter. My single biggest complaint is that it feels like there is no venue for customers to provide feedback.

Sony is closing the doors on its ImageStation online photo hosting product. This is an interesting move and makes me wonder exactly how much money they were losing on this venture. Quantcast has ImageStation.com ranked at #2,994 with an estimated 790,000 unique visitors per month. With the combination of products (coffee mugs, calendars, etc.), premium memberships, and traffic to the site, it's amazing that they are completely shutting the service down.

ImageStation has been around for quite some time and was always one of the larger sites funded by deep-pocket companies that we (SuperMotors) had to look at for competition and feature comparisons. I guess when you're up against the likes of Shutterfly (4M uniques/mo), KodakGallery (7M uniques/mo), and Photobucket (16M uniques/mo), at only 790K uniques/mo, you are in a very distant 4th place. Not to mention the other services out there that offer photo hosting.

David vs. Goliath
This presents an interesting challenge for significantly smaller sites like ours without the deep-pocket funding. Is this a sustainable business model? How do you capture market share against companies offering arguably similar services? For us, being a part-time venture, the biggest challenge is finding the time to add value to the site and continue to improve it. We are sitting on several months of work that has yet to be launched due to the commitments of each of our collective day jobs.

At the end of the day however, we offer a very niche service to automotive enthusiasts. While photo, audio, and video hosting remain the core of the features offered, the added bells and whistles that make us unique will always set us apart from larger sites like the ones mentioned above. They cater to the masses and as a result, have to be generic in nature of their service offering. We continue to add services and features to the site that specifically support the automotive enthusiast.

Still though, it would be nice to have a name like Sony or Kodak bankrolling the operation.

AuctionAds.com (which we've been running on SuperMotors) was purchased by Media Whiz last week.

This makes me happy because we've been running AuctionAds for about a month and while initially we were receiving a 1.5% CTR, these days it's down to a paltry 0.58% CTR. We are still serving the same amount of unique visitors and traffic to AuctionAds which suggests their caching system is drastically suffering. We dynamically supply keywords to the AuctionAds code to generate eBay ads that are closely aligned with the content being viewed on various pages of SuperMotors. The end result, when it works, is a highly-relevant ad which in the beginning, generated 1.5% CTR. In the display advertising world, this is quite high.

Media Whiz also owns Text-Link-Ads.com, which is a highly reliable service (albeit completely different technology) with great support. With 100% ownership over AuctionAds now, I hope they can take AuctionAds to the next level of service that it desperately needs to be a success. Right now, we continue to run the ads because they do not replace our existing ad inventory.

When AuctionAds can't find a match, it displays the "most popular" eBay ads which typically end up being Coach handbags and designer purses -- hardly relevant to our demographic of automotive enthusiasts. The continued success of AuctionAds will be an improved caching system first and foremost before any other bells and whistles. Once they nail the caching system down, then it will be almost like printing money.

This comes at a perfect time for the ad networks we're now involved with on SuperMotors. In the past week, we have signed on with Casale Media and CPX Interactive (on top of Tribal Fusion, AuctionAds, Google Adsense, and our own in-house ads).

What's also interesting is experiencing the different interfaces each ad network has developed. Tribal Fusion's is very, very outdated and lacks reporting and information that I'd really like to see. However, according to this article, it looks like a new campaign manager is on the way for Tribal Fusion.

I'm really excited to put the ADSDAQ system to the test and help it centrally manage all of our ad networks while simultaneously maximizing our revenue potential. I'll post more feedback on ADSDAQ after the beta period starts as well as my experience with Casale and CPX after we have a couple weeks of traffic under our belt with these two additional ad networks.

Tribal Fusion continues to be our #1 performer to date. I'm looking forward to seeing if these other networks give Tribal Fusion a run for their money. Even if they don't, we will have a much more diverse ad network strategy, which is always a Good Thing.