Marketingsherpa Blog

Client-side marketers are optimizing social-media efforts this year, says Karen O’Brien, Partner, Interactive Services, Crimson Consulting. I asked Karen to describe the social-media trends among her big-brand clients.

Optimization is a big trend, she says.

Companies are optimizing social media by:

o setting standards and goals about how many members, RSS subscribers, friends, etc. they’d like to have on social-media channels

o setting standards and goals about conversations they want to target on social networks

o consolidating multiple presences on social networks, such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace (often, big companies have several profiles on various social networks, each profile representing a different product line, brand, or service)

“From a customer standpoint, it’s confusing to see a bunch of different [presences] unless they’re clearly labeled,” Karen says.

About 70% of consumers consider social-media sites to be sources of information that will influence purchasing decisions, according to research data in MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Social Media Marketing & PR Benchmark Guide.

Now is more important than ever to optimize. Make sure your brand is not only meeting its goals, but also consolidating its social-media presence and clearly labeling each one.

I recently participated in an email marketing webinar with Al Iverson of ExactTarget on the subject of email . As we discussed the importance of email reputation, an attendee sent a note saying: “I wish my boss could hear this…”

Pressed for more details, the attendee noted that his boss thought the marketers’ concerns about spam and reputation were overblown, and that they didn’t need to be as diligent in maintaining the integrity of their opt-in process and email preferences. Read more…

Google Audio Ads – a service that sells broadcast radio advertising over the Web — will end on May 31.  We covered how marketers were using the AdWords-based system for airing ads across the country at a low cost. I thought it was an interesting service that illustrated the breadth of Google’s advertising ambitions.

The marketers we talked to for the article thought the service was much cheaper and easier than buying ads direct from radio stations. Read more…

If you love Flash or SEO, keep an eye on our search newsletter. A two-part report that describes how to reconcile the two opposing forces should be published in the coming weeks.

I found a ton of great information while researching the article. Some of it just didn’t fit. One interesting tidbit involves the value of images in search engines. Read more…

Karen O’Brien, Partner, Interactive Services, Crimson Consulting, said something really interesting about trends she’s been seeing with her Fortune 1,000 clients. I share it with you.

We were chatting about social media (a specialty of Karen’s), and she said she is seeing every business unit within companies, as well as every group with a geographical, segment, or product focus within companies, start to consider social media and implement it into their marketing efforts Read more…

Yikes. Sometimes one letter can make a huge difference.

I was glancing over our blog today and something didn’t sit right with my post for last week.

“Only 85 million searches at Google Sites last year? That seems really low. I feel like I searched Google 85 million times last month.”

And sure enough, that stat should be “85 billion.” My bad!

Grandparents.com aims to entice grandparents to register a profile and/or subscribe to a free email newsletter by providing useful content that’s relevant to being a grandparent. Sound familiar? That’s kind of what we do at MarketingSherpa (for marketers, of course).

Whenever you have a site like this there’s one thing you’ve got to keep in mind, says Jerry Shereshewsky, CEO of Grandparents.com: “The Web is research on the hoof.” Read more…

Google is a growing giant. Some stats from comScore’s 2008 Digital Year in Review (a free report if you surrender some info):

- Nearly 85 million searches were conducted on Google sites in 2008

- Google sites captured 63.5% of the searches among the top five engines in December 2008

- Google captured about 90% of the overall growth in search volume last year. Read more…

MarketingSherpa members got a preview of our 2009 Social Media Marketing and PR Benchmark Guide last week. An executive summary, table of contents, and some great charts and analysis were released to them in PDF form.

The complete guide will be released the week of Feb. 9. Here are a few interesting nuggets for all of you to contemplate right now. Read more…