MarketingSherpa Blog

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.

Consumers are expressing themselves in thousands of ways online, including in videos, images, forums, and blogs. The diary-like style of blogs can offer unique insight into a person’s life and opinions. And, since they’re written in text, blogs can be more easily aggregated and mined for insights than other media, such as video.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Janet Eden-Harris, VP of Web Intelligence, J.D. Power and Associates, on this topic. Eden-Harris works in a division of the market research firm that is responsible for mining social media for market insights. Information gathered this way can, at times, be more valuable than a survey, she says.

“People go to their blogs, to message boards, chat rooms, and forums, really, to talk to one another. And they talk spontaneously about products, services, and their lives… You’re not prejudicing them by asking a question. You are listening in, or overhearing conversations that are taking place spontaneously.”

Well-read bloggers also tend be very passionate and knowledgeable about a specific topic, she says. “These are the people that you very likely want to listen to most because they are more or less your thought leaders and opinion leaders.”

Eden-Harris and her team gather data from publicly available social media sites across the Web. They do not gather information from any sources that require a password, such as Facebook. Other social media sites, such as MySpace, do not always require a password. The team is not concerned with the gathering information about specific bloggers, she says. Instead, they are concerned with their topics and opinions.

“Essentially what we’re doing is collecting [this information] into a database, and we mine millions of posts every week and continually mine them,” she says. “It goes beyond demographics. It goes into what motivations do people have for buying or using a product or responding to a trend.”

Her team uses Natural Language Processing, a branch of computer science, to scan the posts for insights. NLP can be used to analyze text for subject matter, sentiment, and assumptions about a person’s background, such as sex and age. By scanning millions of posts, the team can uncover who is saying what about products and companies, and create reports.

Types of Reports

There are four main categories of information that companies ask J.D. Power to research that can involve mining social media, Eden-Harris says. They are:

1. Brand monitoring – This is the most common type. Marketers want to know what consumers are saying about their companies and their competitors. Marketers could survey their own customers, but it is much more difficult to survey their competitors’ customers themselves.

2. Trend analysis – Marketers also ask for analysis on the current trends in a market, and where the market is heading. It can be difficult to pick up on trends in surveys, but you can often pick up on them through blog and social media research, Eden-Harris says.

3. Customer information – Marketers also ask for more information about their current and potential customers. Blogs provide particular insight in this category since many consumers will identify themselves as a customer in one post, and talk about their personal lives in other posts. The posts can also provide information on the best language to use when communicating to customers.

4. Unmet needs – it is also possible to collect information about what products consumers wish they had. “Consumers are classically not particularly good at coming up with product innovations, but, boy, are we good at saying what annoys us and what we wish we had,” Eden-Harris says.

Think of all the organizations that have a single, powerful purpose that drives them. Google aims to help people find what they’re looking for online. AARP aims to enhance the aging population’s quality of life. Kohler aims to transform everyday commodities into art.

Purpose should drive social media efforts as well. It worked for the Brooklyn Museum, which won the 2008 Forrester Groundswell Award for “Social Impact.” The museum created a Facebook application called ArtShare, hosted a crowd-curated exhibit online, and put its entire collection online.

ArtShare allowed any museum or artist to share artwork on the social networking site. It allowed any Facebook user to display selected artworks on their profiles. The application attracted 3,007 active monthly users. The crowd-curated exhibit got 400,000 votes from the public.

And it was all driven by the museum’s purpose “to serve its diverse public as a dynamic, innovative, and welcoming center for learning through the visual arts.”

This might be a small example, but it’s one worth noting because these efforts raised awareness about the museum while perpetuating the museum’s mission.

I recently came across a great free resource for B2B marketers looking for tips on starting or refining their PPC campaigns for lead generation. Todd Miechiels, a B2B search engine marketing expert, has compiled his list of the “7 Cardinal Sins of B2B Search Engine Marketing.” It features such missteps as:
o Not Establishing a Clear and Realistic Goal
o Not Being Diligent About Testing and Refining

The upshot of Miechiels’ report is that PPC campaigns are so easy to start that marketers often jump into a project without the proper planning, research and budget required to generate significant results and actionable lessons to improve their campaigns.

After reading the report, I was inspired to humbly offer an eighth “cardinal sin”:

– Sin #8. Neglecting your PPC landing pages

When developing a PPC campaign, marketers may be so focused on the mechanics of the search channel – such as keyword selection, ad placement, or bidding strategies – that they forget to focus on the action prospects are supposed to take once they’ve clicked on a search ad.

Landing pages are the lynchpin of PPC campaigns. A click isn’t a lead until you’ve convinced that prospect to take an action and provide some information about themselves that will allow you to continue nurturing the lead.

So when planning a PPC campaign, you may even want to work backwards from your landing page, focusing on key elements that will influence your conversion rate, such as:
o Headlines and body copy – Does the searcher know they’re in the right place and understand the value of your offer?
o Design and layout – Do the text and graphic elements offer a clear eye path to get prospects toward the call to action?
o Call to action – Is it obvious what step you’re asking prospects to take next?
o Registration form requirements – How much information do you *really* need from prospects in exchange for the offer?

If you’re confident that your landing page is optimized to generate conversions, you then can build out the PPC campaigns you’ll use to drive traffic to those pages.

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.

It’s easy to say *testing the access model* is a key to making money from content on the web. Most of you know, that’s easier said than done.

After interviewing Rob Grimshaw, Managing Director of FT.com, about the website’s stellar performance of lifting paid subscriptions and registered users last year, that’s the tactic that stuck to my thoughts.

I won’t go into all the details of how FT.com achieved a 9% lift in online subscriptions. You can read about it in an upcoming case study. But I will say that a series of simple tests around access to content was a huge part of the strategy.

Here’s a takeaway that didn’t make it into the article:

-Test the presentation of pricing

I noticed from a former case study about FT.com that the site formerly presented the pricing of subscriptions as per month or per year. And the new model automatically presented pricing as per week. Example: Under “Standard Subscription” the price is $3.49 per week (52 weeks in total).

When asked if the *per week* presentation boosted subscriptions, Rob said that testing it made “a tangible difference in the kind of response that we get.”

When browsing the Web today, I came across a report of a mobile marketing campaign by a luxury auto brand—not unlike the mobile case study from BMW we published in our B2C newsletter today. Mobile Marketing Magazine covered the campaign well last year, and I want to pass along a few choice bits from their report.

Jaguar Cars created a WAP site in 2007 to promote its new luxury car, the Jaguar XF. The site included:
– Images of the car
– High- and low-res videos
– Downloadable wallpapers
– Jaguar dealer locator
– Email submission form to request a brochure
– Performance stats, innovation info
– Quotes from the press

The site was launched in November to coincide with the Los Angeles Motor show, and was promoted solely through mobile banner ads on sites such as MSN Mobile and Yahoo! Mobile. The ads generated:
– Over 15 million ad impressions
– Over 85,000 UVs to the WAP site
– About a .6% CTR

Results seen on the WAP site include:
– 12,000 video downloads
– 16,000 wallpaper downloads
– Users clicking beyond the homepage stayed for about 2 minutes, 12 seconds, on average
– 1.2% of users submitted their email address for a brochure
– 2.6% of users located their nearest dealer

BMW and Jaguar are not the only auto brands dabbling in the mobile space. A San Diego-based Cadillac dealership ran an SMS campaign in January, and Kia launched a mobile site last year to promote its car Soul. It looks as if high performance, luxury auto brands–brands consumers associate with cutting edge innovation–are delivering campaigns in one of the newest, fastest growing platforms.

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.

When times are tight, every marketing campaign and employee’s performance is checked. And when you’re holding the budget axe, everything can look like a tree. But try to stifle your inner lumberjack. A few tweaks can turn a busted campaign into a boon, and a few suggestions can turn a struggling worker into a solid performer.

I talked with Kelley Quain Troia, Senior Director, Marketing Operations, Wal-Mart, earlier this month about accountability in marketing. She described a few of the challenges to setting up a smooth accountability system.

Later in the conversation, we touched on what marketers and managers should do when campaigns or people aren’t meeting expectations. The immediate reaction may be to swing the axe, but Troia says you should first look for something that could be holding back the under-performer.

For campaigns that aren’t meeting set KPIs, try a few tweaks in the copy. Or look for underlying infrastructure problems, such as poorly rendering emails or a dysfunctional landing page.

For struggling employees, sometimes a few suggestions or even peer pressure can help, Troia says.

“You can use the pressure of others to help raise the bar with folks that might not be meeting their KPIs. And it’s not always saying ‘why can’t you be more like this person?’ But it’s trying to gently push them. ‘Here’s what these guys are up to. You might want to leverage some of the ways that they’re working to help get yourself at their level.’”

You can also encourage collaboration between strong teams and weaker teams to help bring them up to speed, Troia says.

Confusion in the organization–such as a disjointed hierarchy or poor reporting methods–can also hold people back. Be sure to take a second look at a person or campaign’s situation before letting the axe fall.

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?