Shared by Persuaders
It's always interesting to 'peek under the bonnet' of how other marketing people organise themselves and their thinking.. so thanks Jason for letting us see your whiteboard.

There’s a 96-inch long white board in my office. It is where I collect my thoughts for specific projects as I’m writing, planning or producing them. It is currently full of lists and reminders for a client’s digital marketing and social media strategic plan. I go through notes from client meetings, make lists of potential strategics or tactics, throw broad concepts and ideas up, enumerate client concerns, brand values and relevant research and then I study the board for a while.

As I was doing so last night I realized a picture of the board might be helpful for those of you out there working on strategic plans for your organization. No, we don’t all think or process information similarly, but when I see how someone else does it, I always get an idea or two. So here’s my board:

For obvious reasons, I made the image small and even blurred some of the words, but look at what you can read:

When I see the image, the first few things that pop off for me are these words:

• Goals
• Target
• Business Goal
• Primary Concerns
• SEO
• Insights
• Core Values
• Content
• Needs

No, you can’t read all those because of the resolution of the image, but those are the items that pop off the board to me. There are other ideas and concepts there, tucked away in the greens and oranges and blues. (No, there’s no system to my color coding other than to separate ideas from one another.) But the important things I think about have little to do with blogs or Facebooks or even monitoring solutions. I’m focused on the task at hand: what are the client’s goals, who are they talking to, what do they want to say and what does success look like for them?

Whether or not analysts, social media bloggers or even my friends on Twitter think my client work is innovative or pioneering or even good at all matters not. The only person whose opinion does is the client. This is what I focus on when I’m writing strategic plans or thinking about overall strategies for the people I work with as a digital marketing consultant.

What about you? What do you focus on? How do you think and process? Do share. We’ll all be better for it.

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Tipp-ex have developed a clever interactive YouTube video to promote the brand. ‘Shoot the Bear’ asks you to help a hunter who is about to be attacked by a bear. If the hunter doesn’t shoot the bear, you can type in what you’d like him to do…I typed in ‘dance with the bear’ and sure enough boogie on down they did!

Try it yourself here and see what you can make them do…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ba1BqJ4S2M

For other great YouTube videos and takeovers, check this out.

Read this:

Crowdsourcing is one of those buzzwords being bounced around a lot of late….we can thank Wired for coining the phrase.  Essentially it is an open call to a group of people to complete a task. In the case of the sausage makers above, apparently that task was to upload a video to their microsite, presumably to win a prize or some such thing. It’s become all the rage these days as brands tap into social media tools, searching for new ways to build long lasting relationships with consumers.

Apparently this ’sausage social-media campaign’ was the straw that broke this consumer’s cash-strapped back but this letter highlights something all those working to promote brands/services need to remember.

Many brands are successfully interacting with consumers in new ways through crowdsourcing and social media – allowing them to do things like get market insight in real time, enhance customer support, attract new consumers, build brand advocates and generate new ideas. Fabulous in theory eh!?

With crowdsourcing initiatives the important thing is not how much money you put behind the campaign, but rather what the reason behind the campaign is and how is it being run.  Campaigns must be relevant to the consumer and interesting.

Generally for initiatives such as this, unless you’re asking people to do something that’s not time consuming and is relatively easy to do, you will be targetting the few rather than the many. Obviously you’ll capture more attention and garner more interest the bigger carrot you dangle on the end of your stick.

The sceptic in my doubts this was written by Brian the ‘tasty sausage’ lover. I suspect an industrious ad agency is behind the letter.

(h/t to The Sell Sell Blog)

Shared by Persuaders
tending to agree with Joseph on the validity of these entries as 'digital' in the commonly understood sense of the word. I did like the VW campaign when first I saw it, but more as an interesting innovation in ambient media - if there had been a system whereby people could send others a 'viral' video of them playing on the stairs then it might have qualified in my book.

Shared by Persuaders
It it will be very interesting to see how travel intermediaries like Expedia react to this change - certainly in this sector they spend far in excess of individual brands ( even nation brands such as national tourism organisations )

Google has made another significant change to their algorithm which has seen a monumental development in how search results are displayed in the natural section. This has far reaching consequences for four key stakeholders.

For Brands
Previous to the change, advertisers battled for the real estate in natural search results against Publishers/Affiliates and Retailers for the share of voice on their products. Look at how many times Amazon would dominate search results on brand items which they themselves were only a retailer of, or quite often, merely an access point to other retailers who sold the product. Apple iPod would have been a good case in point. Previously, if you typed in Apple iPod the search results heavily featured Amazon, Play.com and other third parties who either sold the product or published information on the product i.e. Publisher/Affiliates.

That landscape is now turned on its head. Google are giving the Brand owner more voice and therefore causing a detrimental shift in traffic for Publisher/Affiliates and Retailers alike. Type in Apple iPod and Apple have approximately 80% of the share of voice within natural. This could result in less being spent on brand terms in PPC by large brand advertisers. Alternatively, Google are offsetting this potential impact by driving third party PPC sales by the very act.

For Consumers
A poorer experience? When consumers type in a brand product, not only do they want to be provided with access to the brand owner’s site, they also want to access the rich tapestry of information that sits on third party sites. Pages that are information rich on user experience and product reviews which brand product pages don’t typically cater for.

Google claim that providing more results from the same domain will provide a “deeper set of results for navigational search queries”. However for these searches, many of these extra “deeper results” from the same site were already available as site-links in the normal results making this change unnecessary for many searches.

For Publishers/Affiliates and Retailers
Third parties will now have to find other sources of traffic through other channels – PPC, Display, Social, Offline advertising etc. In general, it is a detrimental move for third parties and could impact the sales of brand products by decreasing their visibility on independent sites.

Eamon Collins, Cybercom’s resident Search Expert and Industry Analyst commented –

“This change by Google who claim it will make for richer results for navigational queries seems to be an unnecessary step towards favouring bigger brands and diminishes a searcher’s options overall. SEO results seem to be negatively impacted in favour of driving more PPC clicks and ultimately a poorer search experience overall.”

In summary, this move, while focused on providing greater navigation from Google, is an unnecessary step for consumers based on their wants and needs. If consumers tend to populate most of their clicks in the top 2/3 listings, having brand owners populate 7/8 natural listings seems a pointless move by Google, benefiting brand owners more so than consumers. Having a larger set of results from the same domain will undoubtedly help big brands with their reputation management but for the general consumer it is restricting their choice and impeding their search. If the page is full of results from the same domain, many people may turn to click on PPC results instead. Or, as recently reported, people may click away from Google and into the arms of Bing.

Google launched Gmail phone calls in the US this week, with one million phone calls placed in first 24 hours of its release. Read more on PC World.

Embarking on a little Facebook research when considering a new hire? According to an article from ReadWriteWeb.com this will soon be a thing of the past in Germany. The government there has introduced a draft law that would restrict a company’s ability to consult social networks like Facebook when making hiring decisions. The company could use the Internet in general, and job-specific networks like LinkedIn, but not social networks.

On the sustainability front, we were intrigued to learn that MIT researchers tested the first prototype of the Seaswarm, a pack of robots that use nanotechnology to suck up oil from the surface of the ocean for immediate processing.

Mark Oct 29th free in your diary – Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder is coming to Dublin, where he will speak at the Dublin Web Summit

Techcrunch covers Yelp deals, launched officially in San Diageo this week. They must be feeling the pressure from group deal site groupon.com Bring on the Dublin deals!

And just because we have loads of biking enthusiasts in our midst… Garmin rolls out touch screen-based Edge 800 cycling GPS – Is it too soon to mention Christmas presents?

Shared by Persuaders
Not a direct use of Facebook Places, but this is a great example from Coke of how geo-location based marketing might evolve.

Many companies struggle with ways to bridge the gap between online and offline communications. One company that’s broken the mould in that regard is Coca-Cola.

At their ‘Coca-Cola Village’ event in Israel, each guest was given an RFID bracelet encoded with the wearer’s Facebook login details. RFID receivers were also positioned all around the venue. As people moved around ‘the village’ they could touch their bracelet off any of the receivers to automatically post a branded message on their Facebook wall saying they ‘liked’ that particular thing.

Photographers were also roaming about the event taking pictures of the attendees. People could ‘touch’ the photographer with their bracelet to automatically tag them in the picture and post it to their page. This video gives an overview of what they did:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUv0GU5rfHg

The event was held over three days with visitors allowed to enter in groups of 650. Each group produced a phenomenal 35,000 Facebook posts with each visitor posting an average of 54 pieces of branded content to their Facebook page. Obviously the novelty factor played a role here but this was a great success nonetheless.

‘Liking’ something on Facebook can often be a reflex action -- Something done without thought or any real meaning. However taken from the virtual, into the real world, the action of ‘liking’ something on Facebook is transformed into something much more meaningful. It also adds depth to the overall promotional campaign, tying events and promotions into the brands online presence.

The campaign was managed by Israeli digital agency Publicis E-dologic and really highlighted that there need not be a barrier between online and digital communications.

Given that Facebook also recently launched their geo-location feature ‘Facebook Places’, this type of initiative is likely to become much more common. Facebook users in the US can now log in to Facebook, hit the ‘check in’ button to update their location and see if their friends are also there….very similar to FourSquare.

The commercial potential for brands with such location based tools is vast. Being able to reach customers with marketing information right then and there as they are at your location is a powerful tool. Brands can use this to give customers loyalty points, give them a discount on their purchases just for checking in, deliver targeted adverts, highlight special offers and so on.

Blogging can be time consuming, difficult and very hard to maintain frequency of posts once the initial momentum has worn off. But more and more studies identify consumers as using the internet to be better informed about the products they are going to purchase. If you think about a company website, they usually don’t detail much more than the products or services they offer. All in the best possible light, nice write ups and product shots, but with no insight to the people behind the website or company name. With a little online investigation you can fill in some of the blanks, maybe customer reviews or opinions on message boards. All of which are outside looking in.

Blogs provide a view from the inside of a company looking out – a way of communicating how on top of their game an organisation may be.  Blogs help to paint a rounder picture of an organisation by providing regular insight into the people, their skill, talents and knowledge in their field. It helps to build make companies feel less corporate and, like most things in social media, it’s all about the content.

This blog might be relatively new, but my own experiences writing blogs for business goes back several years. So here’s a few tips that any new business blogger should find useful.

1. Understand Why You Are Blogging

Why are you blogging for your business? What goals have you set out to achieve with the blog and how do you intend to reach them? It could be to generate awareness, position a company as a leader in its industry, help to generate leads, or even to help with search engine rankings. Blogs help make your main website more visible as search engines pick up on regular new content. Whatever your goal is, defining it at the beginning will help give it a focus and provide an framework to your blog.

2. Get a self-hosted blog

Make sure you use a self-hosted business blog. That means a blog installed and hosted somewhere on your business website. This is important for a couple of reasons, firstly it will look more professional than one hosted elsewhere, and it gives you much more control over your blog. I suggest starting with installing the latest version of WordPress.org, (try not to get it confused with WordPress.com which is for blogs hosted on the WordPress site). You may need a little computer knowledge in order to set it up but having your own self-hosted blog will be worth it in the end.

3. Appearance

Next up is how you want your blog to look. There are thousands of free theme designs available online that can be installed in seconds. Ideally use one that isn’t too different in appearance from your main site. Again a bit of HTML knowledge will go a long way in customising it. Also think about what you will be posting to the blog – will it be mainly images, text or video? As this may dictate what kind of theme you install.  In the beginning I think providing access to as much content as possible is important to keep readers on your blog. Even if they don’t read all the posts, reading such things as titles can give readers a sense of what a blog is about. Try installing widgets to highlight previous posts and archives. However, I’d wait until there’s several months of content before installing anything like ‘Most Popular Posts’ or a ‘Related Posts’ plugin’s as you don’t want the same content to be repeated several times.

4. Pre-Launch Widgets & Plugins

There’s a few plugins that should be installed on your blog from the beginning these include;

All in One SEO – This helps with the optimisation of the blog for search engines. A must have.

Google Analytics – the best free website traffic analysis tool. You should have this already set up on your website to track what visitors do when they are there. With the UA code for your website (available from your Google Analytics Account) and this plugin you are set to go. You can now check who is visiting your blog, from where and how long they spend on it.

Feedburner – this makes subscribing easy for readers and can be done in an RSS reader or by using a Feedburner subscription box. This Feedburner plugin also helps simplify the process.

Sharing Plugins – There’s a number of plugins that enable readers to share content with their own networks at the touch of a button. This means if someone see’s a post on your blog they they can post it to their Twitter or Facebook at the touch of a button. These appear at the end of most blog posts. I suggest using Share This.

Facebook Social Plugins – Sharing buttons are great for posting content to say Facebook of Digg. But with the advent of Facebook’s ‘like’ or ‘recommend’ button these can be installed separately to your blog. They can be adjusted to include names or faces of friends of the blog visitors (once the visitor is logged into Facebook). Once someone clicks the ‘like’ button notification goes into their newsfeed. There’s a few plugins for this these include Facebook Social Widgets and Me Likey.

Topsy Re-Tweet Button – For Twitter, this can track how many tweets a particular post receives across the web. It’s handy to see how many times a post gets re-tweeted and can help identify popular content.

Twitter Tools – Use this to link your blog and Twitter account. It will automatically tweet your latest blog post title and link to your followers.

5. Pre-launch Content

The point of blogs is to provide content to the reader. Launching a blog with no content defeats the purpose. So I suggest writing 5 posts before the launch. This should be enough to give the blog a bit of depth. Also have another post ready to publish within a day of the launch. I have seen 3-5 posts per week is often quoted as ideal for a business blog, but in reality that number can be hard to achieve for businesses. In the beginning try at least one post per week and focus on quality.

6. Post Structure

I have found that trying to keep posts as short and to the point as possible is best. Posts with numerical lists (for example ’16 tips for starting your first blog’), can prove to be popular. Also try to break up posts with images and try link externally to other websites and internally to posts on your own blog if you are referencing their content. I have read 350 – 500 words as an ideal length, I don’t disagree, but if its interesting going over this is acceptable. Keep in mind readers will often skim through posts so bullet points, headings can be useful. If a post is too lengthy think about splitting it up into multiple parts.

7. Post Frequency

I wrote last week how often I think you should post. It really depends on how often you can provide relevant and interesting content rather than posting to a defined schedule – until you find your feet at least. But aim for one quality post per week as a good starting point. I do think quality wins over quantity.

8. Finding Your Voice

Finding your voice in blogging terms means understanding where it is the blog fits in. In other words what is the purpose of it, why would people read it? A business blog does have certain advantages over a personal blog, because a business blog is about creating a PR channel for the company. That in itself provides an area to find a ‘voice’ in. Defining what exactly the voice is will come over time by posting different content and seeing what works best with readers.

Part 2, with tips 9 – 16, can be found here.