The Work Behind Social Marketing
My previous mini-series on Search Engine Marketing got me thinking about some of the myths of other types of digital marketing, especially social media marketing. Some people think that social marketing is voodoo. Other think it’s a new broadcast medium. The truth is, it’s just the plain old hard work of maintaining a dialog with your community. I’ve written that digital marketing techniques like SEO and SEM take a roll-up-your-sleeves effort to make them effective; you don’t just throw money at keywords and wait for the sales come rolling in. This is especially true for social media marketing. There is no “if you build it they will come”; social media is a digital marketing channel, but it’s not just about delivering content. It’s about conversations. It’s about participating. The work is ongoing, and it’s work that pays off. No voodoo. It’s not even complex or high tech. The techniques of social media marketing revolve around creating and maintaining conversations. As a marketer, you need to find the voices within your company that your audience most wants to hear. And you need to make sure that those voices come across as professional, articulate, and in step with your company goals, while remaining authentic and sincere. But even more important is in hearing what you audience has to say, and in reacting to their thoughts. You need to direct their ideas like a traffic cop to all parts of your organization, where those groups can digest, synthesize, respond, and react appropriately. This is a magical opportunity to hear what customers (or donors), potential customers, press, investors, and members of your industry have to say about you. And you have to respond. It’s a way to let the voice of the customer touch all the places in your organization that it needs to touch, so that you can improve customer support, operational execution, quality, discover features and services that people want, respond to missteps, or dispel misconceptions. You are doing this publicly, with little safety net, in a forum that will recognize insincerity, and yet professionally and in a way that you don’t open up the potential for liability. (Easy, right?) This is the goal of a “social company,” to leverage social media to achieve corporate goals. (I’m glossing over a bit the advantages that social media marketing can bring in terms of viral advertising, especially for B2C products, for which Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are so famous. I’ll save that for another posting.) The first step in any social media initiative is the work of getting noticed by your intended audience. Again, this is just a matter of plain old hard work and persistence. Let me give you two examples: I started this blog in order to support my newspaper clients, to get my ideas out into the blogosphere, to attract new clients, and for the sheer enjoyment of writing. That’s mainly a broadcast mentality. When I launched it a year ago, I also knew I had to invest the time not just in writing articles, but in promoting it. But blog promotion doesn’t mean advertising, or even good SEO techniques. I subtly (and I believe appropriately) promoted BloggingWrites while participating in discussion forums, commenting on news articles and other blogs, and in general, by sharing ideas in a variety of...
read moreSearch Engine Marketing (SEM) Tips: Analytics and Performance
John Wanamaker (1838-1922), considered by some at the father of modern advertising, is often quoted in marketing circles: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” A hundred years later, we no longer have that problem. In the age of digital marketing, with exceptional tracking systems (that stretch the very definitions of privacy), it’s no longer a matter of not knowing, but of investing the effort to find out. Today, savvy online marketers are saying “no campaigns without metrics.” SEM is a perfect example of this principle in action—a principle that can also be applied to email and social marketing. When you drive traffic to a web or mobile site using SEM, the basics of managing pay-per-click include an analysis of the costs for each keyword, deciding what to bid on, and then monitoring click-through reports to check performance and to see if you get out-bid on your keywords (in which case you may need to increase your bid or lose that keyword). But the basic reports in Google and Bing are about how much traffic you receive for what you spent. They don’t tell you how individual keywords are performing in terms of your business and organizational goals. What you don’t want to do is simply point to high SEM traffic and say you were successful. What if your top performing keywords are just draining your budget and delivering no value? You need to monitor what your visitors are doing, based on which keyword they came in on. A good analytics program will tell you not just which keywords get the most clicks (and thus cost you the most), but you’ll also gain insights into whether visitors are coming through but then immediately leaving (SEM cost with no value), or which pages they visit, in which order, and do they return to your site later (SEM cost with high value). About 10 years ago I developed a system for tracking campaign and keyword performance from Google AdWords and Overture (Overture was bought in 2003 by Yahoo, and Yahoo SEM is now merged with Bing). The idea was simple: if we tag each individual keyword with a unique search string in its click-through URL, then our site analytics page-dotting system will be able to not only identify the traffic from any given keyword, but we could also follow individuals who came in via that keyword through the site, noting what they did. Here’s how it works: First, you need to have a page-dotting system or site analytics package (or a specialized SEM tracking system). These systems can track each unique visitor to a page based on cookies. You may be familiar with email campaign systems that track recipients back to a web page, using web beacons. These are doing essentially the same thing. You can have an enterprise-strength system like Omniture, or a smaller package like StageOne (this blog uses a StageOne visitor tracking plug-in for WordPress). Next, you need an SEM reporting system, to tell you which keywords your visitors rode in on. Ten years ago I had to create my own, but today there are third-party packages on the market, supported by built-in dynamic tracking URLs supported by Google and Bing themselves, as in these tools from Google...
read moreSearch Engine Marketing (SEM) Tips: Keyword Management
In my previous post I wrote about the importance of competitive analysis as part of a Search Engine Marketing campaign. This post will discuss tips for keyword management, including targeting, scheduling, negative keywords, and multivariate ads. (In part 3 we’ll discuss analytics and performance tuning, conversion monitoring, and weeding out expensive under-achievers.) Both Google AdWords and Bing enable you to run multiple campaigns, each targeted toward a different purpose, product, or demographic. Each campaign can have its own budget and targeting options, including options for time of day, language, geographic areas, and search publisher networks. The publisher network extends your reach beyond the main Google and Bing search sites, adding sites that also display pay-per-click results relevant to their content and audience. For Google, the search network includes Google sites like Gmail, YouTube, Blogger, and Google Finance; for Bing, it includes sites like Facebook and MSN. The extended networks include many thousands of independent publisher sites, including mobile. Each campaign contains individual ad groups, and ad groups can have multiple ads, in a few formats, with text ads being the most popular and familiar. The targeting options mentioned above can be set at the campaign or ad group level. I won’t give you a full tutorial on how to use AdWords and Bing (good ones are easily found), as I want to focus on the work of making your campaigns effective. I’ll be using examples from AdWords, a system I’ve used for 10 years, but Bing uses essentially the same terminology and paradigms. Once you create your ad campaign and ad group and set your campaign budget, remember to also set targeting options. These can improve the response rate of your campaigns and will dramatically improve how your SEM budget is spent. For example, my company iMedia Revenue sells newsroom systems in the US, Canada, Ireland, and the UK, so we only run ads in those countries. After all, why pay for clicks from places we don’t serve? If your target audience tends to search from work, then you can set the ads to run from 9am-5pm in your targeted geography. You can even target mobile. If you sell pizza and beer, you can improve campaign performance by targeting the 5pm to midnight crowd (and if you can, avoid healthy living ad network publishers). Next, load the keyword list you created into the SEM system (see my previous post for tips on compiling a competitive keyword list). You can load them manually or many at a time via a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet upload is handy for long lists that contain combinations of broad and exact matches, with different bid prices for each keyword, especially if you did your homework on negative keywords and variants. There is an art and science to keyword management. First, for each keyword consider whether you will use broad match, exact match, or phrase match. The chart below is from Google AdWords, and illustrates the different types of keyword matching: Use this match type… With this punctuation… To trigger your ad on… Example broad match none synonyms, related searches, and other relevant variations adopt kittens chicago broad match modifier +keyword close variations but not synonyms or related searches +adopt +kittens +chicago phrase match “keyword” a phrase and close variations of that phrase “adopt kittens” chicago...
read moreSearch Engine Marketing (SEM) Tips: Competitive Analysis
For most organizations, search drives the bulk of traffic to their web and mobile sites. Even if you have a powerful brand and a loyal following, search traffic can represent 50% of your visitors (your site analytics system, such as Google Analytics, will give you a fairly precise accounting). Even in news sites with high traffic and loyalty, I have noted that up to 90% of the visitors are referral traffic, meaning they came via a link on another site, primarily a search channel, and not from a direct visit to the home page. (This is why I often say “Google is your real home page.”) I have written previously about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the way to improve your natural ranking in the search engine results, notably on Google and Bing. For many marketers, SEO is the most difficult and the most misunderstood. Countless search agencies make a living by peddling SEO voodoo tactics. But as I discussed in previous posts, the principles are actually fairly simple: the trick is to get the right people involved: content (editorial), marketing, and technology all need to work to make SEO a success. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) , also known as pay-per-click, is the paid search side. There is no voodoo here, right? What could be simpler than selecting your most important keywords and bidding on the traffic they bring? Well, here again, the principles are simple, but there is some real work involved to make effective use of your SEM campaign budget. There are two main players in paid search, and for most marketers, the first hurdle is in learning how to use their systems for managing the keyword buys. Google AdWords controls the proverbial 800 lb gorilla’s share of search marketing (I’ve been administering Google Adwords campaigns for 10 years, so many of my examples will be from Google). But Microsoft’s Bing is nevertheless important, in part because it is the paid search engine driving the new Facebook Graph Search. While the interfaces may seem daunting at first, there are plenty of tutorials and guides, so you should be up and running in an hour or two. Now, what is the real work involved? There are three main areas: Competitive analysis (start by compiling the right list of keywords, negative keywords, and exact-match phrases) Keyword management (bidding and campaigns, search networks, geographic targeting, scheduling, and negative keywords) Analytics and tuning (performance and conversion monitoring, multivariate testing, weeding out expensive bad performers) SEM Part 1: Competitive Analysis Chances are, you can probably come up with a good list of keywords off the top of your head. (Remember that keywords include key phrases, as single words are often too generic to be effectively targeted paid search terms.) Competitive analysis means writing up a list of competitors and adding their keywords to your list as well. There are even ways to discover which keywords they are buying. First, visit their site and do a “view source” on their pages. You should be able to see a line near the top that looks something like this: <meta name="keywords" content="[comma-separated list of keywords]" /> These keyword meta-tags may be fairly generic for a home page, and become quite specific for individual pages. News and magazine sites tag each story with relevant keywords, while commercial...
read moreKids, News, and Video
My 10-year-old daughter has become a blogger! (Kudos go to her teacher; I never thought to introduce her to blogging myself.) No, you won’t find her posts out in the blogosphere; they are safely contained behind EduBlogs.org. But her class is engaged in a unit on blogging, and you can imagine that I’m delighted. One thing that struck me was how many of the kids in her class post videos on their blogs. Video sharing has become an integral part of the digital native’s world, and it’s remarkable how engaged children are with the medium. Hardly a day goes by that Sarah doesn’t show me a video she discovered from someone at school. At this age, kids are also getting more interested in news. I remember being introduced to current events by my 4th grade teacher. Could this be a teaching moment for the news industry? I was looking over the web properties owned by a potential client today, and I noticed that they contained comparatively little video, and that the news agency itself lacked their own YouTube channel. Now, when I was at DNAinfo.com we started with a heavy video element, but we eventually re-balanced the video against text, image, and interactives when we saw that our demographic wasn’t clicking video as much as we expected. I believe that every smart, forward-looking news agency has been looking at similar metrics. But we may be missing an opportunity. Think about it: the next generation of news consumers are already keenly engaged with online video. My daughter is a digital native. She thinks that NPR and The News Hour are boring. She won’t read newspapers. “They’re for grandpas” is a direct quote. No surprise, right? When I was her age I just read the comics section. But she’s curious about the greater world around her, and it’s time to introduce her to online news sources. She needs a site that is rich with video and images and focused on the types of stories kids are interested in, including stories involving local kids (sports, community programs, theater, music, and other events). News sites of course carry a lot of material that isn’t appropriate for a child, but it’s easy to create a separate news micro-site for kids. Here are some good models for kid-friendly reporting: CNN Student News for middle school kids and high-schoolers KidsPost from The Washington Post The Learning Network from The New York Times Scholastic News (I think this is one of the best) There is a terrific list of news sites for kids here: https://theconnectedclassroom.wikispaces.com/News These sites primarily serve national and international reporting. Local news agencies need to get involved too; they are missing a chance to reach the children of their community. Anyone know of a local paper experimenting with an online kids...
read moreTablets, eBooks, and eLearning Make Middle School Less… Awkward
Last week I toured the middle school that my daughter will be attending next year. One thing that struck me was the school’s decision to issue every student an iPad at the start of the term, as a core teaching device. The operating system was slightly modified to restrict certain applications and features; students can’t download games–the general obsession with Minecraft comes to mind–and after some experimentation this year, they chose to disable messaging as well, due to the (one-could-have-guessed) distractions it causes. The staff at the school cited the weight and heft of textbooks as one factor in their decision to go with eBooks on the iPad. But the advantages I saw went far beyond the tablet as a lightweight alternative to a child lugging a crippling backpack. While observing students in their classrooms, I saw that they were adept not only at note-taking, but in switching applications rapidly and effectively, from reading to research to note-taking. And all of those tasks now embrace interactive multimedia, which makes learning not just more immersive and stimulating, but actually fun. I recall spending hours poring through the World Book Encyclopedia as a child. I don’t miss it; I’d rather use and support Wikipedia. During the tour I had the opportunity to sit down with a 5th grader who had just completed an assignment on her iPad, an extended and thoughtful blog post (“essay” for you old-timers) on “Was Cooking in the 1950’s Fun?” Not only was this bright young lady impressively articulate and engaged, she was eager to share with me the process she used for her research (searching online sources), drafting (first on paper!), and project management (Evernote, which I have now downloaded upon her thoughtful recommendation). Students and teachers admit that the ability to cross-reference and flip back and forth between pages, especially of multiple books, was often awkward. And some of the larger form-factor textbooks might be a bit squashed as compared to their print counterparts. But overall, the students were far more engaged with their eBooks, and increased engagement simply equates to more learning. The middle school’s iPad experiment for the 2012-13 school year has been a resounding success overall. Perhaps, with any luck, my own iPad will make me smarter as...
read moreEpilogue: The Miranda Proposal, Future and Facts
My posts on the future of eBooks, describing a vision of tomorrow’s eBook platform (the Miranda Proposal), is a futurist’s view based on years of immersion in the evolution of digital media. But in this closing post of the series I want to calm those who worry about a world of “dancing, singing, and shamelessly social eBooks,” while also presenting some very recent data about paper books, eBooks, and eReaders. Read the series: “The Miranda Proposal: Tomorrow’s eBook Platform”: Prologue part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 Epilogue First, despite these essays, I do not believe that there is going to be a single, inevitable path to describe the future of books. The eBook will evolve in many ways, and we will see different, concurrent, unexpected, and not always complementary adaptations. Just as there will always be those who love quietly paper books, so will there be those who embrace the social reading, interactivity, and creative new applications of tomorrow’s eBook platform. The Miranda Proposal describes an overarching eBook platform and a set of features that will transform books into rich, social, digital multimedia. But several have told me that their reading experience is one of private transportation, with the print book being the perfect vehicle. I share that love of print books as well. And if my ten-year-old daughter and her friends are any indication, that love of print could well survive for generations. (If you haven’t seen it yet, you’ll enjoy this YouTube video from Pearson, which dates from 2010 but is particularly relevant now.) There are, however, compelling reading scenarios that call out for rich media today. Consider how advances in eLearning are converging upon the humble textbook, changing the way students interact with knowledge. Imagine a student clicking through an eBook to a video mini lecture, an interactive illustration, or complementary research. Or reaching out to a live network in realtime for assistance with complex concepts. Imagine members of that network getting “points” for serving as teachers, leading to “mentor badges” that they might even list on their CVs. Unlike a novel, a textbook doesn’t typically transport you; it is a device for learning. As is a cookbook, encyclopedia, user guide, or reference manual. And all such learning devices can be effectively enhanced through the power of web-based and socially collaborative digital media. Wikipedia is the new Encyclopedia Britannica (and ironically, Britannica online now serves Netflix ads!). The point is not simply that books and the Internet are converging, but that eBooks will become the most potent aspect of the digital universe. That is the essence of the Miranda Proposal: not to say that the eBook will evolve one way, but to help us imagine the myriad ways the eBook could evolve, if we make it happen. Now on to the latest news about eBooks. A week ago, Pearson (the giant eLearning company, owner of Penguin Books, and soon-to-be merged with Random House) bought a 5% interest in the Barnes and Noble’s Nook division, for a cool $89.5 million. This suggests that the smart money still believes in a specialized eReader. Microsoft invested in the Nook last April, to the tune of $390 million. What’s the attraction for a giant with its own competing tablet device? The Nook’s power in the...
read moreThe Long Tail of Publishing
There are several companies like Lulu and the Amazon acquisition CreateSpace that are helping writers self-publish their own books. This is similar to the YouTube model, where writers gain popularity through self-promotion and viral word-of-mouth marketing, with their books appearing on Amazon alongside works published through major publishing houses. Read the series: “The Miranda Proposal: Tomorrow’s eBook Platform”: Prologue part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 Epilogue Self-publishing has long been associated with vanity publishing. It’s what you do if you can’t get a professional publisher interested, but you want to see it in print regardless. It’s largely the realm of the amateur: Auntie Irene’s favorite recipes and the calendar made by your local Girl Scout troop. But today’s digital self-publishing world includes a significant, serious, and growing movement: the democratization of publishing. Writers (and artists, musicians, and indy filmmakers) no longer have to rely solely on the rare attentions of traditional publishers; they can gain viral audiences using their own resources and the power of the social web. And it sometimes works on a grand scale; after all, pop star Justin Bieber began his career as a YouTube sensation, 50 Shades of Grey was originally self-published, and Lulu proudly states that “Over a million authors have used Lulu.com.” Some have gone on to achieve market success, with a few best-selling authors included in the mix. There is a place for small-run specialty publishing, and self-publishing may be the best option if you have a book in you whose audience is small but important. Self-publishing is not new, and has a notable history in America. Writing for the Atlantic, Sarah Fay reminds us: “Ben Franklin self-published his paperbound pamphlet Poor Richard’s Almanac. And in 1776, one of the country’s unofficial founding fathers Thomas Paine self published ‘Common Sense’, a 46-page pamphlet that sold over 500,000 copies and helped bring about the American Revolution. During the next two centuries, authors such as Hermann Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Willa Cather, and Mark Twain also self-published.” On the other hand, today’s Web-powered self-publishing can be a bit perilous for consumers. There are writers out there that shamelessly publish books on Amazon using the same or similar titles as mega-hits (titles can’t be copyrighted). They earn a living through what amounts to fraud, with poor quality pamphlets bearing titles like What to Expect When You’re Expecting, I am the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Thirty-Five Shades of Grey. (See http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/16/amazon-knock-off-bestsellers/) In order to protect consumers, I would expect the rise of community self-policing, increased focus on consumer reviews, and possibly the flagging by distributors of obviously misleading titles. Specialty publishing is another important aspect of the “long tail of the comet.” There are numerous technical manuals and other types of short-run and on-demand business, scientific, government, and institutional publishing, including the members-only world of secure, private access digital titles, that are important to a small but dedicated audience. Specialty publishers will know how to reach and how to cater to specific demographics, serving those audiences with complementary products, both digital and physical, and with the ability to host and promote targeted, specialty-group networking among their readership. Print-based self-publishing has always been expensive for the author, but eBook publishing is a cost-effective...
read moreWho Will Develop the Next eBook Platform?
The global eBook platform I have been describing—dubbed the Miranda Proposal in earlier posts—has such powerful potential, both socially and economically, that there will be significant competition among those who would seek to build and control it. Read the series: “The Miranda Proposal: Tomorrow’s eBook Platform”: Prologue part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 Epilogue The leader in the eBook platform war could well arise not from high-tech software and hardware companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, but from the book publishers themselves, who have the most to gain from controlling the platform, and the most to lose if they fail to secure that beachhead. In many ways I hope they succeed. The problem with software and hardware companies controlling our media is that they really want to restrict you, as best they can, to their hardware and software. The companies I mentioned are focused on selling their own devices, so they have a stake in developing a proprietary eBook platform that will only work, or work much better, on their systems. But tomorrow’s eReader won’t be locked to a specialty device, like a Kindle or a Nook. It will be your smartphone or tablet—whatever device you have at hand from whatever manufacturer. All devices are now eReaders, and with cloud technology, each device will know what you are reading and which page you left off, no matter which device you used last. (Picking up where you left off across devices is already a Kindle feature.) The ultimate goal of device manufacturers is to sell devices, not books, so they have little motivation to create marvelous eBook platforms based on open standards. Amazon makes far more selling electronics and clothing than books, and would probably give away eBooks just to entice you to visit their store. There is a real danger in having a tech company control the eBook platform of the future. Apple is already trying to make content itself proprietary, in the area of self-publishing. The license agreement for iBooks Author states “If you want to charge a fee for a work that includes files in the .ibooks format generated using iBooks Author, you may only sell or distribute such work through Apple.” Yikes! This is, as far as I know, the first time that a software license agreement has stipulated that you must sell any works you create using that software in that software manufacturer’s store. It’s as if Microsoft were to insist that all creative works you create using MS Word have to be distributed through MSN. Or for that matter, that all video you take using a Sony camera has to be distributed via Sony Entertainment. It’s an extraordinary stance, and I hope that it fails in the courts. (Then again, what self-publishing David is likely to rise up and fight Apple?) While brilliant platforms can arise from software giants or even startups—one has only to look at Facebook or any of a host of Silicon Valley companies—the most likely candidates for the Miranda Proposal ideal are those who can combine content (books), social networking, and an integrated third-party application marketplace. The hardest part is the content—unless of course you are a major book publisher. Unlike device manufacturers, book publishers create books. If they...
read moreWhat is the eBook Platform of Tomorrow?
I’ve described several important aspects of the digital evolution of the book, making references to an overarching eBook platform that will embody all these wonderful technological advances. But let me take a moment to better define the eBook platform as I envision it, and to give this vision a name: the Miranda Proposal. Read the series: “The Miranda Proposal: Tomorrow’s eBook Platform”: Prologue part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 Epilogue The platform isn’t the file format of the eBook itself, although that is a very important part of the equation. Today there are many eBook formats, but I believe that EPUB3 and its descendents will become the dominant standard. Most devices support the EPUB format, the notable exception being the Kindle, but Amazon may soon embrace EPUB3 as well. EPUB3 was developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum, and I have great faith in open standards, especially those that benefit society, level the playing field, and support device portability (and not a single company). A platform is also much broader than the specific eReader software used to read the eBook. There are many interesting eReaders available. Some, like the Kindle, are almost synonymous with their devices, although you can read Kindle books through a Kindle app on virtually all mobile devices and tablets. There are proprietary eReaders from companies like Microsoft and Apple, and open eReaders that support a wide range of formats. Some eReaders are already taking advantage of EPUB3 features, like rendering mathematical formulas, sharing annotations, and linking to additional resources. Some cater particularly to education, some to science and research. But the eReader is your point of contact with your eBook, it isn’t the whole platform. The eBook platform will be a much broader system, like Facebook or SalesForce.com; one that extends the functionality of your eReader in multiple dimensions. One dimension I discussed in a previous post is the ability of the platform to support a vibrant third-party application marketplace, including application developers. Another aspect of the platform, also previously discussed, is the ability to extend into outside systems, especially social networking. An eBook platform would be hosted on cloud-based servers, meaning they would be available everywhere you have access to the Internet. These servers will provide the software that will enable you to log in and manage your: Reader’s Personas, the real and fictional profiles that you maintain for different genres and social networks, as I described in a previous post; Reader’s Preferences, including privacy, language, favorite genres, certifications, and privacy settings; Reader’s Applications, third-party apps and the method for integrating them into your eBooks; Reader’s Network, the various social groups, book clubs, colleagues, and special interest groups with whom you share ideas, annotations, and techniques, on everything from favorite recipes to literary criticism. The platform should support the widest range of eBook formats, with EPUB being the most important, open standard. The platform should support all eReaders, all devices, and all of its human members, speaking all their myriad languages, across the globe. The platform won’t replace the Apple Store or Google Play, and in fact will likely integrate with those marketplaces as well as those of Microsoft, Amazon, and the stores of major and minor book publishers. The eBook platform will...
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