What Sort of Social Media Services Should An Online Marketer Offer Clients?
Monday, March 03, 2008
Here are the services an online marketing company can (or should) offer clients:
- Blogging: Providing blog content, including content that has a "real" voice and is calculated to drive traffic/comments/interaction. Metrics to measure the effectiveness of this include # of comments, traffic, link-tos, and Technorati ratings.
- Blogger Outreach: This involves first creating contact lists carefully targeted to the client in question – and having the ability to identify the influential bloggers within a particular niche. Then the bloggers are contacted regarding the client story in question. This is similar to traditional PR, but involves a far more personal hand, and the ability to network and create relationships online. Traditional press releases do not work in this outreach – they must be short, friendly letters. Metrics for this include hits and link-backs to your site.
- Forum Outreach: Similar to blogger outreach. Part of this is identifying in advance what forums might be useful to the client and developing a relationship with them BEFORE making the "pitch" on the site (or else you are labeled a spammer).
- Social Networking Sites: The creating/maintenance of MySpace and/or Facebook accounts for the client, including the creation of Groups, Friending, sending out bulletins, etc. In addition to Facebook & MySpace there are many other social networking sites to focus on, both broad-based (like Bebo) or specialized (depending on client’s needs). Part of offering this service is the ability to tell clients what specific sites will be best for them demographically, and keeping up with trends. Metrics for this would be page hits, increase of hits on referenced URL, number of "friends" and comments.
- Podcast & YouTube: Some clients will be particularly suited for these forms of viral marketing. Marketers should offer very basic services in making simple podcasts & videos with the goal of going "viral" within the social networks. There is also a social networking component to these podcast and YouTube communities that have to be maintained and "worked." Metrics for this would be hits, # of downloads, link-tos from other sites, and increase of hits on referenced URL.
- Social Bookmarking: Interfacing between client blogger and bookmarker to shape content most likely to be bookmarked. Metrics include # of "Diggs" or "stumbles" a bookmarked story gets, and corresponding hit spike on referenced URL.
Within all of this is the need to provide the client a list of metrics to demonstrate that the social networking is creating a result. Companies are more likely, even in the case of budget cuts to their overall online marketing plan, to keep a budget for social networking because it is relatively inexpensive – but because the technology is so new, they want to see tangible results. It will be necessary, then, for a shop to create their own methodology and protocol for collecting data for metrics and presenting them in a convenient and comprehensive manner for the client.Labels: blogger, buzz, Facebook, Myspace, new media, social media, social networking, Stumbleupon, video, Web 2.0, Youtube
Stumble Upon Channel Surfing
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Recently, I've been able to add Stumble Upon to my Internet Explorer 7 beta. I think when I started using Stumble Upon, it was FireFox only, which was a major boon to FireFox, but probably quite a large detriment to Stumble Upon, for limiting its reach. But now that Stumble Upon is available for Explorer, I find that it plus Google Bookmarks is about the ultimate combo for channel-surfing and favoriting goodness.
The irony here is that with broadband access, the modern equivalent of channel surfing has become fun, fast, addictive and visual on the Web. And simultaneously, it has become slow, boring and totally text-based on TV. This is another case of mainstream media just not getting it. Where did channel surfing go?
I made a post about this awhile back on my personal blog, but this is more of a Connors media topic. I made the observation that the only people I've seen cognizant of this problem is ATi, which is now purchased by and part of AMD. The ATi HDTV Wonder card, which is essentially a $100 over-the-air HDTV tuner/PVR card, was going to scan all the HDTV channels and make a thumnail preview of what's on now available in their channel guide. This would have appealed to visual learners, as opposed to the classic TV Guide grid (interactive program guides), which frankly is more auditory in nature than visual. One may argue that text is a visual way of absorbing information, but for most, pictures are much more instantaneous, and text must often be sub-vocalized and funneled through the voice box or bronchial tubes--quite literally a bottleneck.
I mentioned in my previous post, the days of rapid-fire channel surfing ala Toy Story 2, where the pig is looking for the toy store commercial, passes it, and has to go around the dial again because it's faster. That perfectly epitomized the days of analog cable, and taps into a part of the human brain discussed in Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink. Well, those days are over (for now), replaced by more cerebral channel guide, that makes you sit back and intellectually pursue what's on before making your choice. Any attempt to channel surf is met by really long, annoying time-delays that makes going around a 500-channel dial completely unrealistic. I could easily blink my way through 500 channels... if the technology (which is supposed to be following Moore's Law) could keep up.
So, it is ironic that Stumble Upon has come onto the scene, literally adding the channel surfing model to the Web--in an even purer sense than surfing links, because no thought is necessary. A thoughtless, click, click, click to see what's interesting has come to the Web, but it has been removed from digital television! How ironic. The TV broadcast industry just can't afford to let nails be so thoughtlessly driven into the coffin. They should be jealously defending the characteristics of old-school broadcast television that people loved.
Whose at fault? The MPAA for creating digital channel formats that are processor-intensive and only have full picture data every 10-or-so frames? The set-top box people, like Motorola and Scientific Atlanta who leave out circuitry for instant channel-changing (a THIRD tuner)? Is it the component manufactures that make the decoder chips used by the set-top boxes, such as Broadcom? Somewhere in this chain, engineers forgot that people like to channel surf, and by forgetting, thereby shifted away a major usability advantage that was previously held by traditional media, towards the new media competition.
I notice that YouTube is sensitive to this issue, and added a "Next" link in the lower-right of their video. Watch out, television media. Even YouTube is getting it. I guess the big saving grace is that Stumble Upon is still a well kept secret, and is not a default feature in Web browsers (yet). But for those who are not exposed to Stumble Upon, it's like taking the Yahoo Cool Site of the Day from ages ago, combining it with an inexhaustible set of cool pages, adding social aspects that make the coolest things come up most frequently, and taking away all navigation except for a browser button that says "Stumble!" Brilliant.Labels: Firefox, Google, Stumbleupon, Yahoo, Youtube
 |
