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
posted by Valerie D'Orazio
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Decision '08 and Web 2.0
Friday, August 31, 2007
Next year's election is certainly driving old and new media to become more creative. First, we had the CNN/YouTube debate and now the online divisions of the Washington Post and CBS are teaming up to create a unique kind of coverage. The two media moguls plan to announce the news on Tuesday. Both websites will feature material from the other media. The Washington Post site will have political clips from CBS affiliates and the CBS site will feature political commentary from The Washington Post. In addition, visitors will be able to interact with reporters by commenting and asking questions in a live exchange. This last bit has yet to be detailed, so who knows what it really entails. Sure it's nothing super groundbreaking, but it is an interesting step, considering how fiercely territorial media companies are with their material. If successful, it could signal the first of many big media convergences online. It should be noted, though, that this seemingly unorthodox approach has been in the making. Research firm, the Bivings Group, reported that 92% of the 100 largest US newspaper websites are offering video, which is a 31% increase over last year. Some of the sites pull the video from the AP or local news stations, while some make their own original content. So it is a natural step for these two big players to team up to try to stomp out the growing competition. Labels: new media, politics, video, Web 2.0
posted by Gina Bolotinsky
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YouTube Embedded Video Forces a Site Visit
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Something just changed at YouTube, and let me explain how significant it is. When you embed video using THEIR video embedding techniques, or if you use a Widget, then you're giving up a lot of control over your page, and perhaps even your entire site.
Just yesterday, I was explaining to a friend, and creator of ChangingThePresent.org how Widgets, the type that get embedded into Web pages, are incredibly powerful. No one would do it, but technically the person controlling the Widget (the publisher of the Widget) has the power to do anything they want with the entire page, including stealing data from other Widgets, or even blanking the whole page and replacing it with another.
It's with this coincidental timing of me just explaining this that YouTube decides to go and make its move. Now HitTail, like so many others was leaching off of YouTube's bandwidth to show our own demo. As of today, they started running Previous/Next arrows to step through (seemingly) related video. Also, they're showing a row of postage-stamp video icons that zoom up at you as you mouseover, much like the Macintosh launch pad.
Now I won't describe every nuance I noticed, but the system is rigged to make you end up on the YouTube site, where a little bit of banner advertising is being run. What YouTube has avoided was embedding advertisements INTO the videostream itself--something that could have resulted in users screaming bloody murder. As it turns out, YouTube has experimentally struck a delicate balance between "evil" behavior that pulls you back into their site to show advertising, and leaving the embedded videos intact in a way that the individual site publishers will not pull YouTube video off their sites. The new features arguably enhance the embedded video experience.
One annoying nuance is that even if an embedded video is running, if you click the next arrows repeatedly, it will pop open a new window of the YouTube site, playing the same video. And what you have then is the same video playing twice in two different windows, with the double narration track and all--very disconcerting. But I'm sure YouTube will work out these problems.
They're finally making their move, and thankfully for all of us, it didn't involve embedding ads into the video stream. But still, it makes you wonder what's next.Labels: advertising, Google, video, Widgets, Youtube
posted by Mike Levin
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Silverlight Video Search
Monday, April 30, 2007
Will Microsoft be able to make an impact with their Silverlight multimedia offering? Hopefully it has more substance than its current promotional video. Of course Microsoft is guaranteed a small audience for the technology through its own devices. No doubt the Xbox 360 and Zune players will support the plugin in short order. Yet can they seriously challenge Flash? Microsoft has shown before in its bastardization of Java that not every platform it creates is always accepted by the industry. Flash is a product with over a decade of backing in the multimedia industry, and the primary reason Adobe bought Macromedia for $3.4 billion. It's the product that enabled YouTube to be sold for $1.4 billion. Millions upon millions of people have the Flash plugin installed. So most people are probably not going to care what kind of video that Silverlight delivers because Flash has already delivered quality through a codec by On2 Technologies (a former Connors client). The one weakness in Flash is search. Google and its brethren will continue to have difficulty indexing Flash for the foreseeable future. Even if search engines can figure out how to find the text in the animation, what frame do you lead users to? If Silverlight can solve this problem and intelligently incorporate text so search engines can actually find this content without relying on user-submitted tags, then the battle will get exciting. Labels: Adobe, flash, Microsoft, search, silverlight, video
posted by Adam Edwards
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