When speaking with Erick Barney, VP of Marketing, at Motorcycle Superstore, about how his team saves precious marketing dollars for the company I couldn’t help overhearing a really innovative way they track organic search rankings.
The team creates thousands of web pages for key search terms to improve the site’s SEO. To make sure SEO efforts are effective they produce a monthly “Keyword Visibility Report.” It’s basically a report of how well the company’s top 100 keywords are performing.
“We have a scoring system to assign any movement,” Barney says. “Anything that’s 30 or above we just put an N/A. We track anything that’s got a position from 1 to 30 and we’ll plot it each month and as it moves around we’ll assign a new rank.”
The report makes it easy for them to see if their SEO efforts are paying off. In addition, Barney has an incentive program tied to the report, giving the team a reason to push the bar even further. How cool is that?
Think Twitter is going down? Think it’s just for kids? You might want to think again. A graph from comScore shows an enormous spike in visits in January and February. Eyeballing the graph shows about 100% growth worldwide, about 5 million more unique visitors.
More recent comScore data on the US market shows a continued surge in visits to the micro-blogging site, from 2 million UVs in January to 9.3 million in March. That’s a 365% increase!
My guess is that Twitter’s most recent explosion in traffic has been magnified by the press. A search for “twitter” in Google News for the past month retrieved over 65,000 results. The same search for all of 2008 retrieved 25,500 results. I don’t understand the nuts and bolts of Google News nearly enough to consider this solid data–but I can say for a fact that I’ve heard more talk and press about Twitter in the past six weeks than I have since the site’s 2006 founding.
Also, traditional mass media typically has an older audience in the US, and this generation has been checking out Twitter–a lot. The largest portion of February’s 4 million UVs were age 45 to 54, according to comScore’s second chart on this page. The second largest group was age 25 to 34, followed by age 35 to 44. (The chart’s time period is not mentioned, but we called to check–it’s for Feb.)
What does this mean? Twitter is exploding, the media is talking about it, and people older than 20-something are checking it out. You cannot assume that the platform is insignificant and only appeals to a younger audience.
Advertisers beware: the FTC is reviewing changes to its guidelines for testimonials and endorsements–the first such changes since 1980. If approved, they could impact everything from social media marketing to late-night TV ads.
The proposed changes, outlined in this lengthy legal document, seek to curb ads with testimonials that emphasize best-case scenario product performance without mentioning a product’s typical results.
“On the issue of consumer endorsements, the proposed revisions state that testimonials that do not describe typical consumer experiences should be accompanied by clear and conspicuous disclosure of the results consumers can generally expect to achieve from the advertised product or program,” according to a FTC press release.
That means ads like this weight loss ad that features a testimonial from a woman who lost 150 pounds, and 22 pounds in the first six weeks, would have to include a “clear and conspicuous” disclosure of the program’s typical results.
The Financial Times reported last week that the changes may also impact social media marketing and blogging:
“If a blogger received a free sample of skin lotion and then incorrectly claimed the product cured eczema, the FTC could sue the company for making false or unsubstantiated statements. The blogger could be sued for making false representations,” according to the article.
The changes may also impact spokesmen such as Subway’s Jared Fogle, according to a report from the Chicago Tribune.
However, the changes are not official–yet. The FTC’s commissioners are likely to vote by the end of the summer on whether to adopt or revise the amendments, said Betsy Lordan from the FTC Office of Public Affairs. Until then, you might want to plan a new strategy if your ads or blogging partners make high-flying product claims.
About a month ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Tamara Adlin about best practices in improving users’ ecommerce experiences.
She was speaking at Etail West 2009 in Phoenix and I wanted get her insight since she’s been in the field for the past 18 years. She created the Customer Experience services team at Amazon.com.
Here were her Top 3 Tips for Enhancing Users’ Ecommerce Experiences:
Tip #1. Display differentiators and value propositions on the homepage
Adlin says 99% of the sites she sees fail to apply this simple rule. It’s as easy as constructing a simple statement, or bullet points, or a general voice that relays: Welcome. Here’s who we are. Here’s what we sell. Here’s how we’re different. Here’s why you should care. Here’s what you should do.
Tip #2. Look at the site from end-to-end
Companies should get into the habit of clicking through their site every day. Go to the site, click on the sale or promotion creative. Where does it take you? How can you make that process make more sense for the user? How can you give them exactly what they want?
Tip #3. Customer service is the key
Don’t slack on customer service efficiencies. If a customer says the product doesn’t work, invest in a proactive customer service department that offers to expedite a new product immediately. The positive word-of-mouth garnered from that simple gesture is worth thousands of marketing dollars.
Eric Anderson, VP of Emerging Media at White Horse, made some interesting points about what social media metrics marketers should and should not be measuring based on what he sees going on in the marketplace.
Here are some pointers I gleaned from his webinar, “The Only 3 Social Media Metrics That Matter:”
1. Don’t over quantify
Tools that measure social media are taking a cue from the web analytics industry. The problem is a company’s true social media presence is far too nuanced to be captured by measurement software.
2. Don’t focus on direct response
Marketers shouldn’t be looking at direct response actions that can be driven from social media. It destroys the real potential of social media. The purpose should be engaging with people in places they like to be, not turning them off by trying to make them go somewhere else.
3. Don’t freak out about ROI
He doesn’t mean don’t measure ROI. Marketers need to acknowledge that the ROI is much more complicated than anything that can be measured, Anderson says.
It’s important to recognize that social media – when considered a component of marketing – is so relatively inexpensive that it does not require the ROI metric.
So, what does he think is the right kind of metric for social media? Impressions!
Pretend that each social media interaction is an impression.
If measured that way, it could tell you: Will this program extend my message to more people than if I didn’t engage? If I add a social media component to my campaign will it add more impressions than if I did not?
Whenever a new technology or channel emerges on the marketing landscape, debate inevitably follows over its impact on traditional tactics. Not surprisingly, the rise of social media marketing has sparked questions over whether these channels will diminish the importance of email as a means to reach customers and prospects.
I recently raised the topic with Sergio Balegno, one of MarketingSherpa’s senior analysts and the author of our 2009 Social Media Marketing & PR Benchmark Guide. Sergio also moderated a panel discussion on Tuesday, March 17, at Sherpa’s Email Marketing Summit, titled “Long Live Email: Enabling the Continued Success of Social Marketing.”
Here’s his take on the issue:
Read more…
Dan Heimbrock, President and CEO, HyperDrive Interactive, had so many great examples to share about how word-of-mouth and email marketing can work together to create brand advocates that I couldn’t help sharing one.
Heimbrock is presenting a case study at MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Email Marketing Summit, March 15-17, and I had the opportunity to interview him last week about the topic.
He says often the only incentive that people need to become brand advocates is an opportunity to belong to something they care about.
Read more…
Is there a way to measure the ROI of social media?
I ask this question all the time and rarely get a concrete answer because it’s just one of those tactics that’s difficult to measure.
Research from MarketingSherpa’s new Social Media Marketing & PR Benchmark Guide suggests that 43% of marketers rank the inability to measure ROI the most significant barrier to social media adoption.
I still don’t have the answer, but here’s one example of a way social media can impact an Internet marketing campaign:
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…
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…
