Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Digging inside private social media for web intelligence
The new private online communities (facebook/twitter/myspace) have becomes the new social forum for consumer discussion. Traditionally media/brand monitors and people interested in consumer sentiment analysis looked at at open forums for insight into what people are thinking (news, tv, magazines even google). How do brands get access to, interact with, understand and analyse these walled gardens for what people are really saying about them? more soon... Labels: communities, consumer, pr, social networking, viral, web 2.0
Monday, July 30, 2007
Sydney Viral Marketing
A few people recently have been asking how to create successful Sydney viral marketing campaigns. We decided to put together a few notes on Sydney Viral Marketing. If you are interested in Sydney Viral Marketing, call one of our friendly team to discuss your business. Behind every successful Sydney Viral Marketing campaign is an engine that allows participants to contribute to and to share an idea with their friends. Consumers must genuinely WANT to spread the idea your viral is based on. As such, the ideas behind your viral marketing campaign must be authentic, genuine, human sounding and actually interesting. The easiest way to create an interesting idea that is actually viral is to create something controversial, emotive or divisive. Playing it safe in viral campaigns is risky. Doing something really unqiue, different, risky and edgy is much more likely to be successful than a middle of the road, "dont offend anyone" type idea. The more people your viral idea upsets, the more likely it is to succeed. Creating successful viral campaigns requires distribution and seeding of the video to send it truly "viral". Typically Viral Campaign results are reflective of the level of distribution effort and media spend associated with the campaign (as well as the uniqueness of the core viral idea). Here are a few tips for seeding successful Sydney Viral Marketing campaigns - Run an Email marketing campaign using opt in email lists - Submit your viral homepage url to all leading Social Media sites - Offer easy "share with your friends" functionality (Email, MySpace, Facebook etc) - Forum - start telling stories about your viral on relevant internet forums - A blog friendly online PR submission - Place banner and text ad's on relevant websites - Buy Search Engine traffic - Buy direct traffic - Submit videos to all video sharing / voting sites (100+ sites) Successful Sydney Viral Marketing Campaigns aren't a science, they are an art-form. How will you spread your idea? Labels: sydney viral marketing
Friday, July 27, 2007
Twitter and the power of influencer communities
We have blogged about Twitter and emerging lightweight social networks over the past few months. This week in Sydney was the first STUB meeting (Sydney Twitter Underground Brigade), a group of 100 or so sydney twitterers. We were pleased to attend and meet the other elite emerging web 2.0 community influencers. The interesting aspect of the twitter community, is that the majority of members are either - Internal influencers within companies
- Change drivers within digital agencies
- Influential bloggers and podcasters
- Jerky corporates trying to understand and exploit the social media space (like telstra)
- Awesome net-savvy community engager's from non evil companys (like microsoft)
You can catch some interviews from the evening at the NetX Blog. One of our team was lucky enough to have a few words. ( Download the Nick HaC Shifted Pixels Interview) If your on twitter, you can connect with us at http://twitter.com/nickhac or http://twitter.com/shiftedpixels Dave King of our own St Edmonds Lab hypothesizes that Twitter circles can amplify existing social circles Download MP3 (2.3M) Nick Hack of Shifted Pixels imagines casual group gatherings that are instigated and organized through Twitter bursts. Download MP3 (1.8M) Cathy Edwards of the Telstra Chief Technology Office points to the corporate dimension of Twitter: Maintaining and deepening business relationships Download MP3 (2.5M) Ian Grant of Sound Alliance sees worldwide fan circles spontaneously forming around live gigs, bands and music minutiae. Download MP3 (1.9M) David Whittle evaluates the true data amassed through Twitter. He envisions that the constant messages about state create new marketing opportunities Download MP3 (3.7M) Labels: Blog, communities, consumer, online, pr, social networking, web 2.0
Thursday, July 26, 2007
In praise of boldness
It seems today we have become so risk averse and so keen to play it safe that we are missing out. Creating new and wonderful things requires us to be prepared to fail. Our social and business structures don't reward risky experimentation, thereby re-enforcing a culture of mediocrity. "There was once a time, when people did bold things to open new frontiers, we have collectively forgotten that lesson. Now we are at a time when boldness is required to move forward." - Bill Stone Here's a Job advertisement for Shackleton's 1914 Antarctic Journey: how things have changed... " Men Wanted For hazardous journey Small wages, bitter cold Long months of complete darkness Constant danger Safe return doubtful Honor and recognitions in case of success" Ernst Shackleton 1914 What are you doing that is bold?Labels: behaviour, communities, Ideas, technology
Monday, July 16, 2007
Ethical online marketing - delivering fantastic results
Ethical online marketing means giving people the info they want, when they want it. By contrast, Television & Radio ads give you the information you can care less about when you least want to hear it. In that sense, TV ads are worse than email spam because they interfere more with the task at hand and they are even harder to avoid. Of you leverage online permission marketing and search marketing, you can achieve better results than many forms of traditional marketing. You also don't piss your customers off. Everyone will think much more highly of you if you don't interrupt them.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
I'd rather be a filthy hardcore spammer than be in direct marketing
Seriously, why is spam illegal and so bad that you can go to jail for it? Direct Mail is the real crime! We checked out mail today and it would have had a kilo of junk mail in there. Here's why DM sucks soo badly 1. Direct mail wastes precious natural resources (paper, manufacturing, energy), on the otherhand, Spam is just a bunch of zeros and ones in a server somewhere. 2. Junk mail creates soooo much paper/trash waste for councils/landfill/garbagetrucks, spam makes none of this. 3. Collecting mail can now be very frustrating and we have to sort it out which takes time and thought. You can also miss REAL legitimate mail, or dont get a letter in time cause it is burried in junk. Just like spam, but without the spamfilters! (Lightbulb... new business idea.) We're not hippies or anti marketing or anything, just damn frustrated and even angry at the crap these brands expect us to put up with. I wouldn't tolerate direct email if it was email spam, would you? Labels: advertising, branding, consumer, Email, Ideas, reputation
crowdsource your creative innovation
You have heard of outsourcing? But what about crowdsourcing? Instead of traditionally outsourcing work to agencies, new economy businesses are leverging a new paradigm of creative resource - the consumer. Its a really exciting trend where more and more businesses are harnessing the power of the internet combined with the talent of the skilled / empowered / passionate consumers. Examples: - Looking for a new corporate logo? Hire a corporate branding agency OR run a internet "submit your logo" viral/interactive campaign with user voting capabilities to find your new brand. (London 2010 Olympics logo cost GBP400k, and it is quite frankly... shite)
- Hire Saatchi to make a 1 million dollar tv advertisement OR create a youtube submit you own video to win 50k viral campaign.
- Hire a professional photographer to make images for your marketing material OR use iStockPhoto.com and leverage the leagues of kids with cameras to capture that unique look for your business.
- Hire a market research firm to find out how people like your product, OR create an online viral poll/survey with incentives for participants and get real/honest consumer insight
- Spend billions on government paid scientific research, OR create million dollar prizes for scientists who create solutions to specificed problems (see Aubrey de Gray's Life Extension project)
No matter what industry your in, you can leverage the power of crowdsourcing to get better creative results for your business at a better price. -------- Warning, shamless self-promotion At Shifted Pixels, we create campaigns that leverage the wisdom of the masses for our clients. If your interested, contact us for a quick chat. Labels: behaviour, communities, consumer, Ideas, social networking, web 2.0, websites
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Facebook's changing user demographics
Over at AdRants there is an interesting post on Facebook's recently changing user demographics.
"Perhaps to the dismay of students across the nation, 40 percent of Facebook's audience, following the lifting of membership restrictions in September 2006 , is now over the age of 34. It's not like we didn't see this coming since day one. What was once an exclusive social network for 18-22 year olds (or anyone with a .edu address) is now home to the masses. The much older masses according to new figures from comScore.
Since September 2006, membership has jumped 89 percent from 14 million to 26.6 million as of May 2007. Fully 10.4 million members are 35 or older. Though that's a significant shift, the biggest growth came from the 25-34 set which jumped 181 percent and the 12-17 set which jumped 149 percent."
There is also rumor in the VC community that FaceBook will be picked up by Google. You might remember Facebook declined an $800m USD offer in mid 2006. Given Google's recent acquisition of YouTube and DoubleClick for 2bill+ a piece, there is some speculation that Facebook may be on the market for more than 4 Billion USD. Wow Interesting times ahead for the facebook community. If you are already on facebook you can add us as a friend! Click here
Monday, July 9, 2007
8 Seconds to capture attention
It's estimated that up to 50 percent of visitors to landing pages will bail in the first eight seconds.And while that amount of time can feel like an eternity to a bull rider in the rodeo, it's a mere blink of an eye to an email marketer hoping for strong conversions and a positive return-on-investment. Online marketers spend countless hours and untold millions trying to make recipients click on a link leading to a landing page. But delivering only clicks is short-changing the company. Marketers need to convert prospects to customers; clicks need to result in purchases. with online marketing, the bridge between the click and the credit card is generally a landing page. As online competition intensifies, greater efforts are being placed on maximizing revenues from each and every opportunity. And few opportunities are as rich with possibilities as when an email recipient clicks a link within a message and comes knocking at your online door. A MarketingSherpa reader survey found that average landing page conversion rates for email campaigns ranged from 5.67 percent to 11 .31 percent for free offers, and from 5.67 percent to 7.63 percent for e-commerce campaigns.If your conversion rates are running near the bottom or below those ranges, consider making changes to your landing page program. A new evaluation by Silverpop of landing pages from 50 companies finds that placing a little more effort on nurturing recipients once they hit those landing pages would be time and money well spent. This report, evaluating landing pages from companies throughout North America and the United Kingdom, can serve as a valuable guide. Key FindingsLanding pages that pass the eight-second test successfully feature a number of important attributes. Unfortunately, many of those reviewed in this study failed to grab the attention of customers and prospects, leading them down a clear path to conversion. Silverpop found that: - Successful landing pages grab attention quickly by matching the promotional copy in the email's call-to-action that yielded the click. Yet 45 percent of the landing pages evaluated failed to repeat the email's promotional copy in the headline.
- Catapulting a clicker to a Web site's home page generally fails to deliver on the promise inherent in the email's call-to-action. Yet 7 percent of email campaigns dumped recipients there.
- Recipients can be taken aback when they click on a link and end up on a landing page without the same look and feel as the email that captured their attention. But three out of 0 marketers risked confusing customers and prospects by sending them to landing pages not matching the email.
- Asking too many questions can lead prospective customers to become wary and frustrated enough that they abandon the process. Nevertheless, 45 percent of landing pages that included forms required more than 0 fields to be completed.
- While the presence of a navigation bar on a landing page can be a distraction that pulls visitors away from the primary conversion goal, nearly seven out of 0 landing pages included them.
- Professional writers know it's a lot harder to write short copy than long. Apparently some marketers are taking the easy way out, since 25 percent of the landing pages reviewed by Silverpop required scrolling through more than two screens of text.
Download the full PDF ReportLabels: advertising, behaviour, Email, Marketing, online, websites
No matter what industry you're in, you're in the fashion industry
We have seen an explosion of consumer choice, a new level of scarcity of consumer attention, the growth of abundance of options and masses and masses of online consumer review and comparison sites. Under 30's have grown up with advertising, and are fully aware of the processes that corporate marketers use to sell them products. Are there are more products than consumers need? Just go to the supermarket, you have 20 types of peanut butter, 200 types of cheese and 80 types of toothbrushes. Want to but a tshirt online? Which one of the 10 million sites do you choose? We could speculate that consumers and businesses make more choices based on social recommendation than advertisements. We could also speculate that are seeing the end of the media-industrial era, and the rebirth of the pre-industrial era consumer run Market Place (this time with global, realtime efficiencies). This new era is the market place of the people for the people. Of course there will still be a strong need for insustrial processes, but these will become commoditised as platforms, just like electricity and the railroads have become. If you are selling a product, a service or an idea... spreading your brand will soon strongly rely on person to person social reccomendation. But with so many products and features on offer, how do you get noticed? Instead of selling based on pure functionality, as a coat functionally keeps you warm, the new market is about style! So what defines style or fashion, social influence and reccomendation? The drivers of social reccomendation are the early adopters, the merchants of cool. Those who take early risks and by breaking the norm send waves through the social landscape. Sometimes they succeed, and sometime they miss the mark. Aside from the risks of this space, this is the source of new social influence and trends. And this space must be recognised. Dont think this only applies to consumer goods, business to business services and products follow the same rules. Business communities and social networks are potentially even closer, tighter and more intimate than those of the consumer social community. Is it possible that the tightness of the business community creates an even stronger desire to use the hip process or service or business practice? The rules of consumer influenced have changed. Has your businsess shifted? Labels: advertising, behaviour, branding, communities, consumer, design, internet, Marketing, online, pr, reputation, social networking, technology, viral, web 2.0
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Viral Presents - 2007 Broadband Emmy's
How cool! Apparently now broadband has its own emmy awards. Check out this years winners! :)
Thursday, July 5, 2007
A quick explanation of how SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Works
A client of ours recently asked for a brief explanation as to how Search Engine Optimisation works, we couldn't resist but share this on the blog. Leave a comment and let us know what you think?
SEO is a combination of keyword research, onsite optimisation and offsite link building.
Keyword Research
Keyword research involves finding the right keywords to optimize for, in the context of SEO Budget and Keyword competition. For example "Resume Template" receives 10 times the search volume of "CV Template', thereby making it a more attractive keyword to rank for.
Onsite Optimisation
Onsite optimization requires tweaking the placement and density of specific keywords on your website, as well as ensuring page names, file names, internal links and alt tags are targeted to your chosen keywords.
Basically if you want to rank well for a keyword, eg "ipod fitness" you need to ensure that this phrase is in the page title for your website, and appears in with an appropriate "Keyword Density" throughout your website copy.
Link Building (Offsite Optimisation)
This process involves researching and building links from contextually relevant external websites that have as high a Google Page Rank as possible. It is often necessary to buy high quality inbound links to achieve rankings for competitive keywords.
Labels: reputation, search, sem, seo, web 2.0, websites
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Emerging web development technology - using ruby on rails instead of asp.net
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