January 18, 2010
Measuring sentiment and conversation has come a long way since the first tweet or status update. Technologies have been developed by organizations, such as, Sysomos and Radiant 6, which systematically measure business intelligence. But is measuring sentiment even possible?
The answer is yes and no.
Social media is built on sentiment (positive, negative or indifferent) and many will argue that software can not measure how a person feels and expresses. I, for one, agree that a computer could easily create a false impression when having to deal with the complexities of human opinion (which includes emotion, sarcasm, regionalized dialects, slang, etc…– none of which is straightforward).
A post would have to directly correlate to the organization/company/brand/campaign with simple positive or negative words (i.e. good, bad, great, etc…), for there to be no room for interpretation. But as we all know, even a 140 character tweet can be subversive and laced with sarcasm and innuendo.
This is not to say that measurement is still as large of a detriment to social media as it has been. It has come an awfully long way, and eventually should evolve to the point where we can successfully manage our reputations in the digital world and measure ROI as we can offline ventures.
January 11, 2010
As social media grows not only in popularity but as a genuinely effective marketing method and arena, there are 3 distinct ways in which it has improved how brands are being marketed and communicated.
The Lost Art of Listening
Social Media’s lasting legacy on brands/companies/organizations might be that it finally forced them to listen instead of just selling. A lot of this might have to do with the fact that most social media forums are not their arena to preach about their brands. In actuality, conversations are taking place and they’ve realized that they have to monitor and participate before they try to market and sell.
A Voluntary Think Tank
If a brand approaches it right, throughout the online world, there exists an active think tank that is expressing their thoughts and desires, and whose opinions could provide dividends if properly harnessed. How much were companies paying for focus groups, where most people joined just to receive free giveaways or cash?
Real Time Research
Before we execute any tactic a solid foundation of research must be in place, and social media provides a constant stream of real time research. Of course, many argue that we can’t properly measure sentiment as it is subjective, but social media still provides a window for us to see how our brands and reputation are discussed in public forums.
December 2, 2009
It’s a marketing director’s dream: imagine having access to everything you wanted to know (but were afraid to ask) about splitting atoms or deep frying Mars bars. Last night while Larry King was desperately trying to cover the Tiger Woods ‘cheater or cheated’ story and the Salahi’s White House party crashing exposé, 20 million people had already scanned You Tube for the latest videos – not to mention being exposed to over a dozen ads per view. Sorry Larry, but when the average consumer wants their daily dose of sublime content they’re not going to sit in front of their oversized, over financed flat screen TV’s – a marketing director’s nightmare. No, they’re going to their preferred social media network and pushing out links and feeds to their personal network – a marketing director’s dream. When I dream about creating our client’s perfect brand promotion or B2B product launch I dream about a connected hub of like minded people who feel empowered to share what they have just experienced with their peers or colleagues (it’s perfectly natural, we all dream about work). Image your two minute commercial, infomercial or product demo being broadcast for free, advertising impressions are systematically tracked and you only pay if a prospective buyer clicks on your ad. Now integrate that same video (commercial) post with a social media campaign that goes viral within 48 hours of launch. Time to stop dreaming, from ball bearing maintenance video’s like Sima-Tool’s to full consumer promotions from Mountain Dew, social media campaigns are changing how marketers reach their audience. I recommend you wake up to one of the most persuasive mediums available today. Good night John Boy!
November 3, 2009
With more and more companies paying attention to the value of internet marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) is a hot topic. Using proper SEO methods can help drive a lot of traffic to your website and covert leads into sales. So how can you get SEO to work for you, and what should you pay attention to when optimizing your website?
Starting in the mid-1990’s, webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines. In the beginning, site owners only needed to submit the URL of their website to the various search engines which would send a spider to crawl the page and extract the meta tags and links to other pages. Links were in turn crawled by the spider to index the entire website. Meta tags provide list of keywords describing the content of the page. Early versions of search algorithms relied on these webmaster supplied keywords to provide the link between the searched term and the results page.
Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability in providing the most relevant results to any given search, using meta data tags was soon found to be less than reliable because the webmasters choice and density of keywords could be manipulated to provide an inaccurate representation of the sites actual content. Soon search engines responded by developing smarter spiders and more complex ranking algorithms that were more difficult for the content providers to manipulate. About this same time, content owners started to recognise the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, thus creating the ever evolving techniques for both white hat and black hat SEO practices.
White hat SEO can be classified as any technique that conforms to the search engine guidelines and involves no deception. The search engine guidelines are not meant to be a series of rules or commandments, but a practice of good design. White hat SEO is about creating content for the users and not for the search engines, while providing content that is easily and properly indexed by the spiders. White hat SEO produces long lasting, relevant search results that bring intended traffic to your website.
Black hat SEO can be classified as any technique that attempts to improve rankings by deception or techniques that are disapproved by the search engines. Black hat SEO usually involves content that is not seen by the user. Some examples are hidden text that is coloured the same as the background, positioned off screen or hidden in a special HTML tag. Cloaking is a term used for displaying one set of content for users and a different set of content to be indexed by the search engine. Search engines can, and do, penalize websites that practice black hat SEO. Penalties can be a lesser page rank or the removal from the search engine results altogether.
Proper design and content writing is the first step to ensure best practices and relevant results of referrals from search engines. Develop your website to be relevant to your industry and write engaging content that is informational and industry specific and the search engines will rank you accordingly.