Archive for February, 2010
Will a lack of understanding deter marketers from taking advantage of Apple’s iPad?
Feb 8th
An online survey conducted by YouGov in the days following the launch of Apple’s iPad shows that awareness of the product is high but that there remains some confusion about its features and capabilities. Will this stop marketers from getting on board?
While 70% that were shown an image and provided with a brief description of the Apple iPad claimed to have heard about it, which is good news. But many were unsure of how to approach the new product and what they would use it for.
A large majority of respondents recognized that the iPad can send and receive emails (68%) and that it can connect to the internet via wifi (65%).
The e-reader capabilities of the product are also well recognized with almost two thirds (64%) of respondents expecting to be able to read electronics books and magazines on it.
Apple is famous for its lack of advertising and marketing activities in the lead up to the launch of its new products. It creates hype and buzz without ever confirming what it is doing, which in the past has been hailed by marketers. But this time, it could actually hurt Apple.
Marek Vaygelt, Head of Technology and Telecoms Consulting at YouGov points out that misunderstanding of the iPad’s operating system capabilities is greater among existing Apple customers.
He said that “Apple customers who own three or more Apple products have a very high awareness of the iPad but are way more likely than the population as a whole to believe it has a multi-tasking operating system. While this is a software rather than a hardware feature it suggests Apple’s core market might want to wait for an upgraded version.”
Despite this misunderstanding, while 7% of the survey’s respondents believe they will probably or definitely buy an Apple iPad, 23% of owners of three or more Apple products believe that they will definitely do so.
With 40% of British adults owning at least one Apple product, YouGov estimates that the vast majority of Apple iPad sales will come from existing Apple customers with iPhone and Apple iMac customers the most likely purchasers.
The company has done well to ensure it has a following of loyal brand advocates but will it be enough to guarantee the success of the iPad?
Perhaps what will really sell the iPad to new consumers is the apps that will be available. The only problem now however, is that no one has come up with anything compelling enough to capture the imagination of potential users.
It’s an open platform for marketers though, and we’re eagerly awaiting to see what they can come up with.
The influential Web Celebs marketers need to be targeting
Feb 5th
Back in 1968 Andy Warhol predicted, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”
Today the technology to achieve global fame exists with the internet revolutionising business, media, marketing and communications practices
But who from the influential ‘Who’s Who of Web Celebs’ should marketers and PRs be aiming to influence themselves?
Forbes’ ‘Web Celeb 25’ aims to provide the answer. The annual poll champions “the people who have turned their passions into new media empires,” people whose fame grew out of, and is dependent on, the internet, from stay-at home-mums to geek entrepreneurs.
Each candidate in a list of over 200 Internet personalities was ranked in four areas: Web references as calculated by Google, traffic ranking of their home page as calculated by Alexa, TV/radio mentions and press clips compiled from Factiva, and number of followers on microblogging site Twitter. These four categories were totaled and weighted to produce a final score, then sorted to produce our rankings.
For the third year in a row, controversial gossip blogger Perez Hilton has been crowned king. His site attracts more than 7.2 million people a month, putting it among the 500 most-visited sites on the Internet, and Hilton has more than 1.77 million followers on Twitter.
The No. 2 Web Celeb, Michael Arrington, is one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, as editor of TechCrunch.
“A mere mention of a company on its pages can make or break a startup,” say Forbes.
But perhaps the most interesting entry is Pete Cashmore, in at No. 3. Cashmore came up with the idea for what has become one of the world’s most influential websites, not in Silicon Valley, but at his parent’s house in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Oh, and it was when he was a teenager too.
Today Mashable has more than 10 million unique monthly users reading its ‘outsider prespective’ on the web, while 24-year-old Cashmore has almost 2 million Twitter fans.
LA, NYC, London… Aberdeenshire. As Thomas L. Friedman claimed, “the world is flat.” We’re all now playing on a democratised playing field thanks to the net.
In the latest ‘Web Celeb 25’ edition eight faces appear for the first time. The highest-ranking new members are Evan Williams and Isaac ‘Biz’ Stone, cofounders of Twitter. The pair have more than 2.8 million Twitter followers between them, closely watched by legions of fans.
The youngest Web Celeb coming in at No. 25, is Shane Dawson, 21, who posts short comedy videos to his YouTube channel which has over 1.2 million subscribers. His videos have been watched more than 204 million times.
The Forbes ‘Web Celeb 25′
1. Perez Hilton – perezhilton.com
2. Michael Arrington – EditorTechCrunch.com
3. Pete Cashmore – Founder Mashable.com
4. Evan Williams & Biz Stone – Twitter
5. Kevin Rose – Founder Digg.com
6. Guy Kawasaki – GuyKawasaki.com
7. Heather “Dooce” Armstrong – blogging Mum at Dooce.com
8. Tila “Tequila” Nguyen – model/singer blogger at Tilashotsspot.buzznet.com
9. Gary Vaynerchuk – win expert blogger at GaryVaynerchuk.com
10. Cory Doctorow – author CrapHopund.com
11. Om Malik
12. Leo Laporte
13. Frank Warren
14. Robert Scoble
15. Chris Brogan
16. Wil Wheaton
17. Matt Drudge
18. Danny Sullivan
19. Jeff Jarvis
20. John C. Dvorak
21. Ana Marie Cox
22. Ree Drummond
23. Jason Calacanis
24. Seth Godin
25. Shane Dawson
Happy 6th birthday Facebook – what did we ever do without you?
Feb 5th
Today marks the sixth birthday of Facebook. Although the site was not the first entrant into the social media space, it certainly put the medium on the marketing map.
In all honesty, I can hardly remember the days before Facebook. What were they like…it seems as if it must have been the dark ages. And I’m not even ad avid user of the site, but every now and then, it is good for something.
Not only did Facebook liberate us and bring the world closer together (so Facebook believes, anyway), it brought about an entirely new platform for marketers and advertisers, essentially changing the digital landscape forever.
It has, as I have said before, fundamentally changed the relationship between brands and consumers and of course, they way that consumers talk to each other. It has allowed marketers to test human behaviour, to listen in on the conversation and sometimes, manipulate us into promoting them for free (this, by the way, isn’t a bad thing).
With over 350 million users worldwide, Facebook is well on its way to taking Yahoo’s spot as the third largest web property in the world (Google and Microsoft are No. 1 and No. 2, respectively).
Last summer Facebook took the No. 4 spot globally, displacing AOL, but according to comScore there was still an estimated 241 million unique visitors a month separating it from the No. 3 site, Yahoo. In December, 2009, that gap narrowed to 125 million unique visitors globally.
In December, 2009, Facebook attracted 469 million unique visitors, up an incredible 31 million visitors from the month before, making it the most visited website on Christmas Day.
In December alone, Facebook gained as many new visitors as Yahoo did all year. That one-month gain was also the equivalent of adding as many people as all of Digg or half of Twitter.
For the year, Facebook grew by nearly 250 million unique users. Repeating that will be difficult in 2010, but even if it slows to half that pace and Yahoo remains stagnant, Facebook could overpass Yahoo within a year to become the third largest site in the world, all without even necessarily going public.
So how can marketers captialise on these numbers?
Stephen Haines, Commercial Director at Facebook UK, recently wrote a brilliant piece on UTalkMarketing about how brands can create and update a Page’s on Facebook. He says that Facebook ads allow people to engage with ads in the same way they interact with other content on the site without leaving the page they’re viewing. For example, potential customers can directly engage with your business by clicking on the “Become a Fan” link or the “RSVP to this Event” link. In addition, this action automatically creates a story on the person’s profile page and possibly in their friends’ home page “Highlights”—generating free distribution for you. You can read more here.
And if you’re more interested in learning how to use Facebook for market research, Ray Poynter, a director at Virtual Surveys, explains that marketers can use Facebook Polling.
He told UTalkMakreting that to find out quick answers to simple questions, you can simply log in, type a simple question, specify a geographic location and a sample size, pays as little as 51 US dollars (for 100 interviews) and the results start flowing in.
These polls are clearly not going to replace U&A or ad-trackers, but they could spawn new ways of working. Traditionally, we have expected everything to be designed before the research begins, but often the basic assumptions were wrong. You can read more here.
So if you’ve not delved into the world of Facebook, now you have no excuse. Facebook is trialed and tested – and it really does work in terms of getting in the faces of consumers. It’s true, I Facebooked it.
72m read their news online. Will advertisers stick around after pay walls though?
Feb 4th
Guess what? Newspapers and online media sites aren’t dead. And what does that mean, marketers will be coming back to them in droves over the next few month, but will pay walls see a decline in the numbers?
Newspaper websites in the US have attracted an average monthly unique audience of 72 million visitors in the fourth quarter of 2009, representing 37% of internet users, according to new figures from Nielsen Online.
Newspaper websites users generated more than 3.2 billion page views during the quarter, spending more than 2.4 billion minutes sites.
The results come as News Corp reports a net profit of $254m for 2009. It’s CEO – Rupert Murdoch, who is the main voice behind the push for pay walls by the year 2011 on major newspaper websites – said that “content is not just king but the emperor of all things electronic,” reassuring advertisers that consumers “will pay for content”.
So the world is going digital, this is not news. What is interesting to note though is how multiplatform the media industry has become and the variety that advertisers are now presented with.
Furthermore, with online newspaper figures so positive, it brings further confidence to the market that devices such as the Amazon Kindle and Apple’s iPad will be able to succeed.
As the economy begins to stabilize, newspaper companies are in position to leverage their trusted brands to reach a highly engaged audience and deliver maximum value to advertisers, according to Newspaper Association of America.
News Corp will be announcing within two months its model for charging for the online content of the New York Post, Times of London and all its other newspapers.
While today’s Nielsen figures sound impressively up 5.5%, it is still not known if advertisers will be willing to pay to have their ads behind paid-for content given the negative reactions from readers.
Asked what they would do if their favorite news site suddenly began charging, 74% of online news readers said they would “find another free site,” according to a Harris Interactive study commissioned by PaidContent UK. Only 5% said they’d pay to continue reading for fee.
The debate continues…
Why do most social networking campaigns fail? Marketers can’t track ROI
Feb 3rd
Enterprise use of social networking data to improve productivity a long way off, according to Gartner.
Just 25 per cent of advertisers will use social networking data to improve performance and productivity by 2015, according to analyst firm Gartner. But social media has been around for some time now with marketers continualy experimenting with the medium. So why have they failed to make use of the information they are acquiring with such campaigns?
Most businesses are still a long way from using social networks to analyse the information gathered through a campaign.
Users resent knowing that automated tools analyse their behaviour, according to Gartner, which recommends that companies secure the buy-in of the people they hope to include in the analysis.
Furthermore, social networking and email capabilities could soon merge into a single service.
“Email will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering, while social networks will develop richer email capabilities,” said Gartner analyst Matt Cain.
This could be another way to track information, but Gartner says its a few years off yet.
The biggest dilemma for social media marketers is tracking ROI.
In the absence of any accepted metrics, businesses still need to be able to determine whether or not a social media program is tempting sales making an impact.
Here are a few ways to consider measuring social media ROI:
First, determine what you want to measure, whether it’s corporate reputation, conversations or customer relationships. These objectives require a more qualitative measurement approach, so start by asking some questions. For example, if the objective is measure ROI for conversations, create a benchmark:
- Are we currently part of conversations about our product/industry?
- How are we currently talked about versus our competitors?
Then to measure success, we ask whether we were able to:
- Build better relationships with our key audiences?
- Participate in conversations where we hadn’t previously had a voice?
- Move from a running monologue to a meaningful dialogue with customers?
There are companies that offer services to assist with this kind of measurement, which requires a great deal of human analysis on top of the automated results to appropriately assess the tonality and brand positioning across various social media platforms.
If the goal is to measure traffic, sales or SEO ranking, we can take a more quantitative approach. There are some free tools that can help with this type of measurement, including:
- AideRSS allows you to enter a feed URL and returns statistics about its posts, including which are the most popular based on how many times they are shared on a variety of social networking sites (Google (Google), Digg (Digg), Del.icio.us).
- Google Analytics (Google Analytics) and Feedburner are essential, free tools to help analyze your company’s blog traffic, subscriber count, keyword optimization and additional trends.
- Xinu is a handy website where you can type in a URL and receive a load of useful statistics ranging from search engine optimization (SEO) to social bookmarking and more.
Augmented Reality is no longer science fiction, it’s your new digital strategy
Feb 2nd
Augmented Reality holds potential for a wide range of industrial and consumer uses, but marketing projects are one of the few areas where augmented reality tech companies are doing steady business today.
The market for Augmented Reality (AR) services is expected to reach $732 million by 2014, with revenues derived from a combination of paid-for app downloads, subscription based services and advertising, according to research from Juniper.
Marketers are increasingly trying out the new technology in an effort to make deeper connections with consumers, but is augmented reality really the next big thing?
AR may still not be at the forefront of the digital strategy, however, with the upcoming launch of the iPad this new medium could become more commonplace sooner rather than later.
Although initial service adoption will be driven by AR location-based search, Juniper Research expects the first substantial revenues to be derived from AR-enabled games, bolstered by revenues from mobile solutions from 2012-3 onwards.
AR is expected to be increasingly attractive to advertisers and brands as AR ad networks will be able to charge higher CPC and CPM rates because of location relevance.
But what will make AR so attractive to consumers?
According to Niall Cook of Hill and Knowlton getting people to think about a physical object (reality) and data about it (or data about that data) that could exist online are the two core components of AR.
He says that the technology will do a number of things:
– Provide the user with a way of capturing the object
– Recognise the object
– Search for the relevant data about the object
– Display the data in a way that augments the physical representation
Visuals are an important part of advertising, so it’s not surprising that so many companies have jumped on the AR bandwagon, offering tools that visualise their products in a magical and memorable way.
AR is already a reality in the US with consumer brands such as Kia Motors, Nestlé, and Frito-Lay all experimenting with campaigns.
The hope for marketers now is that it will engage an audience more deeply than other forms of social media, such as viral videos, fan pages on Facebook, or Twitter followings.
Is AR part of your digital strategy? We can’t wait to see what brands come up with.
Marketers still searching Facebook for that “Holy Grail”
Feb 1st
Facebook was offering up the “Holy Grail” of advertising in 2007. Two years on, what’s changed, better still, what has improved?
It’s no secret that Facebook has never been the “Holy grail” of advertising that is so promised in November 2007. Yes the site had to undergo some radical changes after the failure of Beacon, but the site still offers up some 350 million consumers. Surely advertisers can take advantage of this, but how?
I was there at the IAB Engage conference in 2007 listening to Facebook executives explain how they were launching something revolutionary in the digital marketing landscape. But despite all the fact and figures that pronounce the majority of ad budgets are going to social networking sites, why have the ads not got any better?
Alterian’s “Annual Survey 2009″ — which included 1,068 marketers, 62% North American, 36% European and 2% from the Asia-Pacific region — found that 40% of respondents were shifting more than one-fifth of their traditional direct marketing budgets toward digital and social media channels.
Overall, 66% of marketers plan to invest in social media, while 67% increasingly important or critical to success.
So where are all these ad dollars going then?
Just today, UTalkMarketing reports that Facebook is increasingly falling victim to hackers which could lead to users distrusting advertisements they see on the site. What’s a way around this for advertisers and marketers then?
The key is engagement. And to be honest, it’s probably a drum you’ve heard us bang before.
But with more and more users less likely to leave Facebook and as the number of users goes over and above 350 million worldwide, marketer would be silly to ignore the medium.
However, the key for advertisers now is to find the right way to advertise on the site.
Fifty-seven per cent of marketers plan to use their budgets to improve their websites so that they can open dialogues and increase engagement with consumers.
But how do marketers do this?
Here are some simple steps to get you started:
Step 1
Go the advertising page on the Facebook website. Click on the “Advertising” link at the bottom of the page. Click on the “Create Social Ad” button to get started.
Step 2
Insert your website. This is where users who click on your ad will be directed.
Step 3
Target your ads. On the next page you’ll have the opportunity to choose the demographics you want your ad displayed to. Choose a gender, age group, educational status, relationship status or political views or leave the options blank to create a more inclusive group. In the keywords section, put in keywords relating to the interests you would like your targeted group to have.
Step 4
Create your ad. Move to the next page to input your Facebook ad. Create a short, catchy title and a few sentences of copy to explain your website or product. To insert a photo, click “Upload Photo” from the drop down menu below.
Step 5
Choose whether you want to pay per click or per view. When you pay per click, you’ll only pay Facebook when someone clicks on your ad. When you select pay per view, you’ll pay every time your ad is displayed to a user. Then, click on the appropriate tab.
Step 6
Set a budget. Put in the amount of money you’re willing to pay every day. You may pay less than this, but this is most money you’ll pay for one day of Facebook ads.
Step 7
Bid for ad space. Facebook determines which ads to display by how much you’re willing to pay per click or per 1000 impressions. Choose the maximum amount you want to pay. The amount you actually pay depends on how much other advertisers have bid, so enter the maximum amount you’re willing to pay.
We’re still waiting for the “year of social media” and 2010 could be it. There certainly are a number of tools now available for marketers to track ROI on Facebook, but I’ll save that for another post.
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