Blog de Puree » Online marketing

Unifying Your Digital Content and Marketing Properties

paul — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 17:41:23 +0000

Thinking about the myriad of Internet tools available to digital marketers, brand managers, content publishers and community professionals is enough to make many professionals want to hide under their desk and quiver in fear. I see weekly requests for advice and ‘what tools are out there for…” questions through my social and professional circles, and there’s no doubt that managing all these assets is a daunting task.

Thankfully, there is a strategy that digital professionals can use to wrangle all the madness: Unification.

With more than one audience to contend with it’s imperative that you go where your fans, followers and users are. There’s the corporate website, company blog (or blogs), Facbook and Linkedin pages, Twitter account, YouTube channel, Foursquare presence, the list goes on. The hazard is that it can also dilute your brand and overextend your resources. This is where unification comes in.

Associate Editor Jennifer Van Grove, from Mashable, has a great article on managing company brands on the Web and touches on unification as one of her five main tips. She points out a great use case, Director of Interactive Marketing for the Chicago Bulls, Jeremy Thum. Jeremy and the Chicago Bulls Interactive Marketing Department is redesigning Bulls.com and focusing on pulling all of its online initiatives together with BullsConnect to provide a consistent brand experience across all fronts.

BullsConnect creates

a singular login and commenting experience across their online properties. In the future, they’ll be incentivizing fan activity with a Chicago Bulls points-based loyalty system to draw attention to this unification initiative. Moving forward the team will also work to bring a “Lite” version of BullsTV to their Facebook Page, as well as use it to spruce up their “dormant YouTube channel.

Thum explains that they have and will continue to re-build or build digital marketing components that are unified while still allowing unique opportunities to engage fans on the Web.

David Churbuck, the VP of Global Marketing at Lenovo also has interesting thoughts on this topic, though he refers to it as “recentralization” and focuses on digital marketing.

He describes how, in 2005 and subsequent years, IDG merged customer databases with the creation of IDG Connect. This database and lead generation consolidation assisted with providing a unified customer experience.

I had the opportunity to work on part of the IDGConnect project through the redevelopment and launch of CXO Media’s (part of the IDG family) e-newsletter program. Two of the challenges we had to overcome were sharing and combining CXO’s subscriber database with the other business units and implementing an email service provider (ESP) solution that allowed subscribers from all IDG properties to have one account management experience. My team led the way by choosing and testing a powerful ESP (Lyris) that was customizable and easy enough to distribute and teach to the other units.

Churbuck also touches on the challenges of managing far-flung social networking assets. He aptly points out:

Brands are falling over themselves to establish a presence on the highest populated social networks and sharing services. First: you can’t be everywhere, second, this is where the real chaos is occurring.

This has presented a real challenge for content and marketing teams worldwide. Global brands especially face a tough road. As Churbuck shares, “digital brands don’t have national boundaries.”

Why try to unify? You can’t control what others do and where they do it, but you can at least work toward ensuring a consistent message and experience.

How Digital Marketers Can Use Geotagging Applications

paul — Tue, 25 May 2010 17:06:38 +0000

I came across a Mashable.com article for journalists last week that I thought would be valuable for online marketing and community professionals as well. 7 Ways Journalists Can Use Foursquare pointed out some key elements that news writers can engage their audience and source valuable information. And those use-cases can also be extremely valuable for digital marketing teams.

For those not familiar with Foursquare, it’s a geo-tagging application for online and mobile users that tells your friends know where you are and vice versa. It also provides you with online schwag such as points, badges and even coupons for use at local businesses. It’s also not the only geo-tagging game in town and anyone interested should check out Gowalla, Brightkite, Loopt, Where and Hot Potato.

Like journalists, marketing professionals often need to target communities and get valuable information. In today’s social environment, where interacting with one’s audience is a key element, these geo-tagging apps have the potential for greatness. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the valuable ways to use them:

Find targeted contacts. With geo-tagging applications, you can attach real people to actual places. Find people who frequent certain types of establishments. Reach out and chat. Find out what type of people are going where. There’s valuable information here.
Get tips on local business, customers and competitors. Users leave lots of tips regarding local businesses and venues which provide insight that a professional analyst may not be privy to. Knowing how people view a restaurant chain or coffee shop can be gold for marketing teams.
Learn about people you’re profiling. You can learn a lot about people based on where they go and things they say. Make more friends on apps such as Foursquare and you can follow their activity, as well as begin to understand their habits. Find out where folks are going and you can “accidentally” show up to observe activity. Yeh, it’s essentially like cyber-stalking, but if you have a relationship with them, it’s not too creepy.
Discover and monitor trends. This is easy with Foursquare and other apps. Find out where people are suddenly going and why. Find out if a local joint that sells competing products is becoming popular and why. More gold here.
Publish and distribute content. As a member of a community, there has to be some give with the take—one of the golden rules of digital marketing—and it pays to link to places you go, as well as share your tips. An online marketer would be wise to share tips and information about places you like, in addition to just peddling your product or service.
Crowdsource real-time information and reward readers with badges, etc. People just love online schwag and badges. It’s like Internet coolness merit badges. You need to find out what people think about your client’s juice stores or a local event? Create a badge, ask folks to check out and offer them incentives with badges and coupons. Forget surveys, this is uber-valuable marketing information. You can also offer different badges and incentives for different levels of participation.

Geo-tagging applications now provide digital marketers a fast, effective way to gather market information about clients, businesses, services and the people who rely on them. Tools such as this could be a massive game-changer for marketing budgets and gathering valuable metrics. I believe that any marketing team or service with their salt should be looking into using one of these tools.

And be sure to read this hard-hitting article about social networking tools and how we cover them.

Viral Heat and Performable: Two New Online Marketing Tools to Check Out

paul — Fri, 07 May 2010 11:08:51 +0000

I’ve been digging into some SaaS online marking tools and came across two new apps that digital marketers should take some time to check out. From getting valuable metrics on the ROI of your social marketing efforts to optimizing our online marketing tools, Viralheat and Performable look like they offer some great features.

Viralheat

Viralheat seems to be a few months old, judging by the history of their “In the press” section. It is a social measurement software as a service platform that provides social marketers and social networking types with an in-depth way to slice and dice information from Facebook, Twitter, “the realtime web,” and viral video. (And I suspect they’ll be adding more sites in the future.) One can then track, react and optimize social campaigns and audience engagement.

Poking around the site reveals a clean and easy-to-use user interface, as well as offering important geolocation data for global brands and an API to embed key statistical information into applications and internal websites for the movers and shakers at your company.

Notably, Viralheat has been instrumental in the helping to decide the outcome of the geolocation war between the two social-geo giants Foursquare and Gowalla after the recent South by Southwest conference.

For marketers grappling with analyzing the right social data, this primer post about ‘Making Sure You’re Tracking the Right Data‘ by Viralheat CEO and founder Raj Kadam on Mashable offers a great starting point.

Performable

Performable is a new product that’s in a closed beta mode. It offers analytics that help to optimize important online marketing tools such as landing pages, lead acquisition forms, newsletter sign up pages, targeted videos and contact forms.

At this point, the information at Performable.com is rather sparse. However, the potential is huge. I’ve been in countless meetings with UI designers, editorial teams, marketing and sales teams, as well as developers, trying to figure out how best to create a landing page, lead acquisition form or newsletter page. Each stakeholder has a different perspective and level of understanding. I would leave frustrated as these pages were diluted into watery mud puddles that proved to be ineffective in the end.

With Performable, one can: A. Easily create numerous variations based on stakeholder input without having to worry about design and development time and B. Easily gain insight from measurable real-time usage statistics. That’s a double win in my book.

Unfortunately, I can’t find any quick data on results or customer testimonials, but this looks like a good group to keep an eye on.

Pixar Goes Viral with Toy Story 3

paul — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:43:28 +0000

Sure, I’m only helping Pixar‘s viral marketing campaign here, but I wanted to point out the great use of word-of-mouth and the Internet.

Coming out on June 18, Toy Story 3 takes viewers through new a new adventure with Woody, Buzz Lightyear and the gang as Andy gets ready to go to college. And Pixar is creating quite a product awareness buzz through YouTube with a bunch of retro videos, most notably the one for Lots-o’-Huggin Bear, one of the new characters in the Toy Story franchise.

Check out the official movie trailer for a few chuckles as well.

Back to the viral video campaign, they’re deliciously 80′s with grainy imaging and a tracking blur on the bottom of the screen. The folks at Pixar created a YouTube channel, MrCrazycommercials, chock full of similar, but real, spots to complete the fun.

Random Friday Video: Subtle and Not Subtle Schick Women’s Razor Commercials

paul — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 11:15:56 +0000

Compared to Europeans and European TV, Americans always lean to the conservative side. Often, our sensibilities are downright stodgy. Check out these two fabulous Schick women’s razor commercials, first the American version, then the European version.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Helium.com videos educate members and publishing partners

paul — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 11:30:32 +0000

I’m excited to announce (somewhat belatedly) that Helium.com, the Internet company I work for, has started using multimedia videos to inform and instruct members, visitors and potential clients.

Until about a month ago, we’ve been relying solely on written copy in our User Guide, community forums and other scattered areas on the website. Typically—and as often predicted by Internet user studies—many visitors would not take the time to read online documentation and would veer towards the forums for one-on-one or one-one-many help requests, and community connection. (The fact that many members would seek advice from other members and directly from moderators rather than reading the manual is also an interesting point to note.)

The videos help to answer some of the most basic and frequently asked questions such as what’s Helium all about, how do I write on Helium, how do I rate on Helium, how do I earn money on Helium and how does the Marketplace program work. We’re still awaiting initial user statistics, but I suspect that each flash video will appeal to members who are inclined towards visual learning tools and quick answers, rather than reading guides or waiting for questions to be answered in our forums.

The videos reside on a few key pages, as well as within advertising blocks that appear throughout the site. This should ensure that they get enough exposure to visitors.

I’m excited because it’s also a first successful step in demonstrating our ability to use alternative multimedia learning tools that we can leverage in places like tutorial pages that are specific to certain types of members, visitors or business partners. For example, let’s say we want to create a page that teaches Helium writers how to optimize their titles and articles for web search while still providing an easy-to-read and professional work of long-lasting knowledge to the community, a video might be a better way to go. A picture is worth a thousand words, right? It could be reasonable to assume that a video would be worth more.

These videos are also a great marketing tool. What better way to educate the time-strapped publisher about what Helium is all about than with a quick video that’s just under two minutes. By showing, rather than explaining, the ease of how Helium can be used as a cost-effective and time-saving publishing resource, I hope that it will bring potential business partners knocking on our door asking for more information.

Here’s a video that briefly provides instruction about how to rate articles on Helium.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A little permalink SEO on Blog de Puree

paul — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 11:24:47 +0000

I’ve decided to make a small search engine optimization (SEO) tweak on Blog de Puree. I changed the format of the web address (URL) for each page on our blog, from a numberic organizational format (http:www.kersteins.com/blogdepuree/post#123) to date and topic related format (http://www.kersteins.com/blogdepuree/2007/06/14/closet-refurb-day-3/)

The URLs are a bit longer, but the date and topic information will make them more easily searchable on the ‘Net by search engines such as Google, Yahoo, etc. and it will also be easier for someone looking at the URL to glean what the post or page may be about.

It won’t affect our readers, but will just be one of those seamless—we hope—background changes that will make this blog work just a little smoother.

If you have any problems or notice a glitch, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment or shoot me an email.

Another print newspaper subscription bites the dust

paul — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 16:02:03 +0000

We’ve canceled our print subscription to the Newburyport Daily News, and we did it for a couple of reasons.

The price, hovering over $200, was not worth the amount of news and information that we actually read and felt was worthwhile.
It was also a waste of paper. Better to read online than destroy the environment.
I can use the RSS feeds to get only the sections I want.

Now we subscribe via the paper’s RSS feed. It’s free and I can see the news that interests me every day. Unfortunately, the paper needs A LOT of work to bring its site into the 21st century, because wow, is it lagging. Here’s a few quick fixes that the Eagle Tribune company, the parent company of the Newburyport Daily News, could do to bring it’s site up to date.

Fix some of the links in the RSS feeds. Don’t include articles that will be blocked through registration. That’s annoying and unprofessional.
The RSS feeds include the same stories for days on end and clogs RSS aggregators. Just include the new stuff each day.
Don’t gate or require registration for online content at all. For a small, regional paper, how much profit do they really think this is going to make?
The site would be better served by opening all of its content and making more ad revenue off of page impressions and through other ad strategies.
The calendar is gated? Totally bogus! The amount of traffic the paper could derive from that alone could be huge. Especially if it is properly marketed.
The page is buried with ads. I don’t know where actual content ends, begins or if it’s even there sometimes. Pick a few spots on the page to place ads and leave it at that. (This will also help with page design.)

But the Eagle Tribune’s sites have made some improvements, so to be fair, I’ve included those.

The rotating photo block on the home page, which links to related stories is a nice visual touch. I’d love to see more photos throughout the site.
A new baseball blogger, Rob Bradford, is doing a great job and it’s refreshing that he’s actually posting on a regular basis. Nothing is worse than a blogger that posts once a week or less.
The design of the site has been tweaked. It’s definitely an improvement, but it’s still rather old school and a bit painful to stare at.

The Eagle Tribune company must also be given credit for having working RSS feeds, whereas the Townonline sites and the Amesbury News still don’t. I bemoaned many of the Townonline weakness back in December of 2006 after the Community Newspaper Company was bought by Gatehouse Media, Inc. and they still don’t have a working RSS feed. And if it does exist, it sure as heck isn’t easy to find.

Online rating systems can be manipulated by crowd-hacking

paul — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:14:52 +0000

There’s a great article on Wired magazine titled “Herding the Mob,” about a phenomenon that is rearing it ugly head and becoming more prevalent on Web sites that rely on positive feedback and customer rating systems. Any online content expert, retailer or Web site company will tell you that this could really hurt a site’s reputation.

In the article, contributing editor Annalee Newitz details how sites like eBay, Digg and those with special ratings systems that identify power users, trusted retailers or “must read” articles are getting scammed by individuals and companies looking to herd or bilk the masses. Not only that, it can also be great business!

Newitz writes, “In some cases, crowdhackers are looking to boost sales or increase traffic to their Web sites. In other instances, they’re simply ripping off unsuspecting consumers. Either way, the more we base decisions on the wisdom of crowds, the greater the incentive to cheat.”

But there are defenses, which those interviewed for the article would not disclose for obvious reasons. Newitz writes that what’s happening now is a sort of arms race between the crowd-hackers and the crowd defenders, made of developers and users who discover and scrub scams out of sites’ systems.

In the end, University of Michigan information studies professor Paul Resnick—who was interviewed for the article and who conducted a study years ago to find out if ratings systems can be manipulated—believes that a good reputation system is going to prevail because it makes people more trustworthy. And word gets around if they’re not, he said.

But while the theory may not be foolproof, there’s always the hope. Meanwhile, Internet sites that rely partially or heavily on users to rate a core product or feature, need to be ever-vigilant for crowd-hackers who may already be circling like vultures. Popular content and rating sites such as Digg, eBay, Reddit, Youtube, Yahoo Shopping and del.icio.us, which get hundreds of thousands to millions of page visitors each month, are most likely to be targeted.

And for smaller, up-and-coming sites, failure to maintain a wary eye could bring disaster.

Townonline.com – Is this the end of a quality Internet news brand?

paul — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 15:06:26 +0000

I’ve been following the events within the last few months surrounding the sale of the Community Newspaper Company and its online properties within Townonline.com to Gatehouse Media.

I’m doubly interested because my career currently revolves around online media and content delivery, and because I used to work with Herald Media years ago, when it owned and operated TownOnline.com and BostonHerald.com.

While I do agree with Gatehouse’s move to create one newspaper staff, as done by larger, more national and globally visible papers, such as The New York Times. (Read this memo from Executive Editor Bill Keller to the NYTimes staff on Poynter Online.) But so far, I have been very disappointed to see the quality of TownOnline sites go downhill since the official separation from Herald Media, and from what I understand, the responsibility of producing the papers online shifting to the paper editors.

Before the demise of the dedicated TownOnline Internet staff, the homepage for the site and the home pages for all of the local papers had a unique layout, with a large feature photo and accompanying caption, small thumbnail photos that were all the same size and the layout was condusive to moving or rotating the week’s top stories throughout the top of the page, creating a pleasant user experience. As the reader scrolled down the page, news and columns were clearly marked as coming from different sections of the paper, such as sports or opinion. Additionally, the content management system and layout of the paper allowed staff to post breaking stories to the front page as they happened.

I am completely unimpressed after navigating through the Gatehouse-owned TownOnline newspaper sites. After visiting just five different CNC papers, I found: the layout of some home pages are broken up and have a lot of wasted space at the valuable top of the page; some of the sites don’t have photos at all, but look like a textual news index page; some of the pages have random sizes of thumbnail photos down the right side of the news column; random pages within the sites keep giving me pop-up login windows for some unknown reason (Either gate the papers or don’t); and some of the pages are completely blank.

Clearly, there are some evolutionary growing pains taking place as newspaper editors are acclimating to a combined Web/print atmosphere. I’ve worked with many of them and they are a dedicated, hard working group who care very much about the quality of the news they deliver. But I wonder if Gatehouse has provided any training, or if the extra workload involved with creating Web sites that was given to an already light staff is just too much. But slapping up news and photos isn’t exactly rocket science. Has Gatehouse thought about it’s current site architecture to allow easier delivery of standard photo sizes and textual information so the beleaguered staff can keep the pages from looking like amateur news Web sites?

As the weeks go by and the online representations of these papers continue to look like garbage–in my humble opinion–and fail to work, this can only drive away an online readership that the company desperately needs to succeed. With increased competition from hyper-local online communities who are able to deliver information within various forms of media quickly, Gatehouse could lose its audience. I hope the company realizes that with the speed of Today’s Internet, user patience is not a commodity it can leverage.

I am currently still visiting these sites, even though I am an enthusiastic RSS feed user, and I hope something changes soon because my patience as an online visitor to TownOnline.com is growing thin. I’m now more apt to get my community news from The Daily News whose site’s user interface still looks like it came from the era when newspapers first went online back in the early 90s. But at least it still functions properly.