Tim.McGuinn.es/s

Just spell it out

It’s Search & Replace with Social

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It was back to Times Square today for the DigiDay Social event and thanks to some video being available it will be able to bring you some information.

In a session “Publishing for Social Media” Jim Bankoff, Chairman & CEO of SB Nation, discussed using social media to drive traffic to generate revenue. It could have been 2005 at AOL where Jim’s content team passed that same message to those of us on the search team. The goal then was to use search to drive traffic to higher CPM pages. Now just change “search” to “mobile” and the story is the same

The first of the two videos is from Rishad Tobaccowala, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer, VivaKi. He spoke about The People Network and the top piece of advice from him when it comes to working with new technologies is to use them.

The other video is along the same path — it’s not a case study, but it goes more to approach. This is from Adam Kmiec, Director of Social Media at Walgreen’s. He discusses choosing partnerships, asking your agency “explain”, and look for a wow factor that can separate your program from your competitors. He cited Walgreen’s program to donate a flu shot for every Foursquare check-in and how that beat CVS to the punch.


Watch live streaming video from digiday at livestream.com

Video:
Rishad Tobaccowala, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer at VivaKi
Adam Kmiec, Director of Social Media at Walgreens

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Countdown = 0 – And the Top Tactic in Social Media …

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Count down

Top Tactic in Social Media

Today is the day. The tactic used in social media to stir up interest: The Countdown.  Just like I did to get you here.

First my apologies for using a self-serving trick, but I did so to make a point.  And that is — it works.  Even with nothing really to offer I added 14 new followers in the last 3 days.

The best thing about the Countdown tactic is that it’s really easy. The only challenge is the planning because you have to get out in front of it to give you the lead time.  What should you do:

  1. Find a reason — a new product launch; the anniversary of an event in your industry; anything with some relevance and value to your intended audience.
  2. Layout your announcements.  I think it’s best to write them up in one sitting, so when it comes time to execute it’s just a matter of paste and schedule.  Remember that these are just teases, so they shouldn’t be too long, so writing up a bunch isn’t that difficult.  I advocate this, rather than write as you go, because it’s tough to stay on topic and on schedule if you write as you go over multiple days.
  3. Plan your Twitter posts to hit different parts of the day. Not everyone reads Twitter at 8am, so spread them out at different times to hit different users.

Coming Next Week — Just 4 days until I give you the next most popular tip: What do you think it is?

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Estimating Views: Newspapers vs Facebook

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Vineyard overlooking Canandaigua Lake, from Ro...

Image via Wikipedia

Some people do puzzles to stay sharp, I like to run a marketing model.  The kind where I set up a spreadsheet, make some assumptions and justifiable estimates, and then hope like hell my hypothesis is in the ballpark. From there I usually have to spin it to make it easy to digest.  Good times.

This week an idea came up about the effectiveness of using PR to support a regional project that would cover Central to Western NY vs using a Facebook Fan page.

Here’s some background with the names changed.

About the Newspapers:
Below are the five largest regional newspapers and their circulations that I found by searching around.  The two assumptions that I added are:
a) Views – each purchased newspaper is viewed twice
b) Impressions – I assumed that an article like this would be read by 20% of the buyers.

Bottom Line: Getting an article in each newspaper in the region would be seen by 180,000 people.

NEWSPAPER    Circ     Readers/Circ   Views  Impressions
Buffalo    160,000   
Roch       119,000   
Syr         85,000   
Bing        65,000   
Elmira      23,000   
           452,000           2        0.2    180,800

 

Now, Facebook:
a) Group size – I used 30,000. I realize that this is a fairly large group, but there is a similar group in the region that already has more fans than this, so it is certainly achievable either working independently or doing a coordinated project with the other group.
b) Impressions – Total impressions are generated by getting “Like” clicks and comments that will then get your post to appear on Facebook walls of non-fans. To determine how many impression a single announcement post would get, I used 5 impressions/fan. This is a very conservative estimate since it is based on the impressions I get for another project that is non-consumer so less viral, but let’s go with 5.

FACEBOOK    
Group Size   Impressions/Fan    Total Impressions
   30,000           5              150,000

 

Bottom Line: A post to our groups Facebook page would get 150,000 impressions.

From the bottom line numbers it seems like newspapers would still prove the strongest plan.

Intangibles:
If you ever placed a newspaper article, you know how much work it is. Now think about doing that for five newspapers. It’s a lot of work to get thos 180,000 views.  Along with the work, you have also relinquished the message to local writer, so you have lost some control in the message. Now let’s look at the effort for doing a Facebook post.  Once you tweak the voice of your press 

Now let’s look at the effort for doing a Facebook post.  Once you tweak the voice of your press release to talk directly to your buying audience, you can post it right up.  You control the message and you don’t have to do all the follow-up and scheduling involved in the newspaper placement.  For this I estimate 150,000 views.

But still 150K is still less than the 180K for the newspapers, so why is this better. First the work effort is less, but #2 is the big thing — you can do it again next week!!  Why not? Add a few new pictures and an update to the schedule, and bam! Another 150,000 views.

FACEBOOK    
Status Update Imp/Fan Fans: Finger Lakes Wines   
imp/fan 2 30,000  62,821
    
Picture Update 4 to 6 30,000  150,000

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Dirty Hands – Semantic Web Style

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090521_web3-logo Since I’m not having the greatest luck in the Web 2.0 era of the Internet, I decided to skip ahead a generation by attending the Web 3.0 Conference this week. Web 3.0 is a term often applied to my time at Hakia with the driving concept being the Semantic Web or Linked Data. I say “or” because I am not an expert on the subject, so when I am around those that are (or make my eyes gloss over with claims to be), I hear many prospectives on how these terms are used. My perspective is broad, not hands-on, so I tend to group these ideas together as they play themselves out.

The conference program went beyond this broad view of Web 3.0. It included panels on cloud computing and social media from both technical and business angles. Overall I thought the programming offered options for everyone. I focused on topics around monetization and marketing applications, along with a panel on semantic search technology — as you would guess.

One consistent result of these panels is that I get all antsy and want to start building things. So tonight I’m taking my “just good enough to be dangerous” programming skills to the NY Semantic Web Meetup to get a demo of some hands-on tools. Let’s see what I can learn there. Maybe I will be able to post my own little semantic web application here in the next couple weeks — or else, I’ll come back next week and delete this paragraph.

Social Media Feeds – You, Now

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Gratuitous Donuts Photo

Gratuitous Donuts Photo

Very compelling article in Ad Age today from Peter Hershberg at Reprise Media about search and social media called What Social Media Means for Search. On the upside, it adds to the observation that search and social media are coming together, and it also provides a good backgrounder for understanding the relationship. However, it does not offer any tactical side to take advantage of this activity.

Using his Search 3.0 label, Peter and I agree that the new feed-driven social world takes us beyond the “intent” shown by a user during their search engine experience and provides us direct insight to the “it is happening now” stage, such as the millions of daily tweets for “need coffee.”

We’ve heard the story forever from proponents of mobile advertising that they will be able to deliver a Dunkin’ Donuts (my coffee of choice) coupon when we walk past a store. Great in theory, but when does it reach the masses and will it work? My answer to when, is who knows. I’m sure it can happen now with the proliferation of location-based services, but is it better plan than monitoring social media feeds — I say no.

The mobile ad plan is not marketing to a person who has shown intent in this activity; they just happen to be walking by a Dunkin’ Donuts, so now you are hoping that you can change a user behavior as they pass by. However, monitoring a Twitter/Facebook feed will directly let you know who is going to get coffee, NOW! It is up to the marketeer to hit them directly with the coupon for the coffee or a complimentary donut. I guess the next question is when will Twitter or the Twitter apps we use start monitoring our Twitter feeds, or Facebook for that matter, to match ads to its updates.

Update: As I was posting this, I took a look back at the current Ad Age they have posted an article “Google Uses Twitter to Sell Ads.” So it looks like this idea is taking its first steps. This will evolve to feed-targeted networks, not the general Adsense network, because the higher “happening now” feed network will be drive higher CPC values.

Track the Trends from Social Media to Search

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TreetStats - Twitter TrendCloud

TreetStats - Twitter TrendCloud

It seems all of our favorite insider blogs are floating a heading that contains “Search” and “Social Media.” Even next week’s Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York contains no less that 6 sessions around social media, including a special social media track. However, with as many of these articles that I have read, none seem to explain how social media and search mesh other than being buzz topics for them to claim an expertise.

I see it as a “Chicken or the Egg” discussion on whether social media drives search or search drives social media. More importantly, if you are in the business of identifying trends, where should you watch if you want to stay ahead of the curve? For my money, I would look at two places, Twitter analysis tools to understand breaking news events and search tools for identifying what people are interested in.

Why two places? News events get reported first on twitter. The event could be as big as the Hudson River plane landing or “I’m having coffee.” It’s highly probably that 99 of 100 event trends discovered on Twitter may have no legs to affect the social media space. However, there is still that 1 in a 100 that strikes a chord with someone. That person does an entry in their blog, that entry gets posted on a Twitter feed, that eventually finds its way into Facebook by someone who has their Twitter and Facebook accounts linked, and all of a sudden you have people searching for the topic to learn more.

The life-cycle of this event would be like this:
News Event > Twitter Post > Twitter Trend > (Facebook) > Search Trend > Steady Search Traffic

Think of the Motrin Mom story or the Octomom. To so many people these were non-issues when they first read it. I remember reading about the women who gave birth to eight babies, and then thinking how amazing that was and that she would get the hero treatment. Then someone looked closer and the story got some serious legs. Soon “Octomom” had regular Google search traffic, and the sentiment completely shifted.

Let’s look at how you can track events and that lead to social trends. Below are some tools that I have used for in tracking terms:
1) Discovering Breaking Trends – Using Twitter trending tools
Below are some tools

  • Twitter Search – Found below the search box
  • TweetStats – Provides a trend cloud and historical list
  • @trending – From Karelia Software (http://karelia.com/)
  • Twendz – Highlights conversation themes and sentiment of tweets

2) Identifying What People Actively Want – Use search engine trends

Update (4/1/09)- Thanks goes out to David Berkowitz and his fine blog, Inside the Marketers Studio, for pointing out this article on other Twitter analysis tools: 8 Excellent Tools to Extract Insights from Twitter Streams by Yung-Hui Lim on Social Media Today.