SEO.cc Recommended Article: Social Media Is the New Mass Media

Insightful article in regards to current trends in the marketplace, and highlighting video adoption and potential moves social sites may take to capitalize on their popularity in the near future:

Social Media Is the New Mass Media

SEO.cc Sponsors the 2009 SFIMA Nautical Networking Event (NNE)

Fort Lauderdale, FL – October 19, 2009 –
Search Engine Operator – SEO.cc an active SFIMA member and South Florida headquartered search engine marketing and interactive marketing agency is proud to announce its third consecutive sponsorship of the SFIMA Nautical Networking Event.
About Search Engine Operator – SEO.cc

Headquartered in the Las Olas District of Fort Lauderdale, FL SEO.cc is a client-centric South Florida interactive marketing agency. With its roots in search engine marketing and ROI driven results SEO.cc works closely with ‘best in breed’ strategic
partners to provide its clients with fully-encompassed online marketing strategies.

Search Engine Operator’s past SFIMA sponsorships include:
- 2007 SFIMA Nautical Networking Event (NNE) – Marketeritaville
- 2008 SFIMA Charity Casino – A Night In Monte Carlo
- 2008 SFIMA Nautical Networking Event (NNE) – Rock the Boat
- 2008 SFIMA Holiday Event – SFIMA Holiday Wine Party and Guru Bars
- 2009 SFIMA Event - Using Search to Beat the Economic Blues

About the 2009 SFIMA Nautical Networking Event (NNE)

Setting sail aboard the 170 ft. Lady Windridge Yacht from the Tranquility Marina in Fort Lauderdale, FL on October 23, 2009, the SFIMA NNE is themed “Unmasking Your Potential”.

With an expected turn out of over 400 SFIMA members and interactive marketers from around the world the 2009 SFIMA Nautical Networking Event will be the place to meet innovative market leaders in today’s world of interactive marketing and business development. As always the SFIMA NNE will host networking games, music, dancing and entertainment along with hors d’oeuvres, open top-shelf bar and a dinner buffet.
Upon disembarking the Lady Windridge at 10:30 pm SFIMA’s guests will gather again for the SFIMA NNE After Party.

About SFIMA - The South Florida Interactive Marketing Association
Through monthly educational seminars and annual charity networking events SFIMA hosts an open platform for interactive marketers and businesses to connect. After being founded by Sheryl Cattell in 2003 SFIMA has quickly grown to hundreds of members through the hard work and dedication of board members, volunteers and event sponsors.

SFIMA’s strong connections and large following give it the leverage to present industry leaders and game changing case studies to its members in the monthly educational seminars held at local South Florida hotels like the Fort Lauderdale Beach W and the Las Olas Riverside Hotel. SFIMA also coordinates and hosts the Annual SoFIE Awards (South Florida Interactive Excellence Awards) and the Annual iHack Golf Tournament.

SFIMA has a lot planned in 2009 aside from the legendary 2009 NNE and the lineup includes:

Reshaping Marketing with Video & Social Media: Keynote speaker Jessica Kizorek will present to SFIMA attendees the latest trends in online video, branding and social media marketing.

Wine Social and Guru Bar: Hosted at the Seventh Street Wine Company the SFIMA Wine Social and Guru Bar is often referred to as the SFIMA Holiday Party. In this annual gathering SFIMA members and guest socialize while experiencing a variety of fine wines from around the world.

Those interested in tapping into the education and opportunity present by SFIMA can attend an event as a onetime attendee, enroll into SFIMA as an Annual Individual SFIMA Member, participate as a company with a SFIMA Annual Corporate Membership (3 or 5 seats) and contribute via sponsorships like the 2009 SFIMA Nautical Networking Event (NNE).

Landing Page Marketing

We have found landing page marketing to be an effective tool to complement marketing a complete website. Through the use of Search Engine Marketing – Pay-Per-Click campaigns, a landing page allows us to drive visitors toward a specific service or item our client is looking to market.

What is a landing page?

A landing page is a one page website with specific content used to focus visitors on only the information you would like them to see at the point of time during the visit.

What are the advantages and disadvantages to landing page marketing?

We have found landing page marketing to have the following advantages:

Creation of opt-in forms that allow users to quickly submit their preferences and qualifying lead information the marketer desires.

Visitors are drawn into a targeted marketing pitch based on the advertisement that drew the search visitor into your landing page.

Landing pages allows visitors to see the message an advertiser intended for them to see and not to get lost in the content and layout of a website looking for the information they originally requested.

Strong opportunity for marketing a particular service as an interested user has landed on a particular landing page.

Teaser essence of content allows marketers to pique landing page visitor interest and follow-up once the advertiser’s requested information is submitted.

Attention is quickly retained and focused on the message the marketer would like the website visitor to see and understand about the company services – and respond to a call to action.

Website content is limited in content to one page and a thank you page to allow for limited user navigation and focused interest.

We have found landing page marketing to have the following disadvantages:

Information seekers or researchers on a website may not find what they are looking for based on the limited content of a landing page.

Users of a website are limited to the exposure of information about a particular brand or item.

Landing page marketing is very effective for lead generation which becomes a core variable of new business generation. A landing page should be combined with efforts of Sponsored Search Marketing (Pay-per-click, PPC, or Cost-per-click, CPC) campaigns or controlled forms of search marketing which are most often paid for on a click basis.

We suggest creating landing page strategies around particular services or messages you would like to get out to web visitors.

For Mozilla, Google, group hugs get tricky

Below is a New York Times article that covers Firefox and it's presence in the marketplace. Enjoy - some quick facts from the article:

Current browser market share:
Chrome has just under 2% of the browser market
Firefox’s share has kept growing, to 22.5% from 19.5%.
Microsoft’s has continued to decline, to 66% from 72% - though it argues that most of that loss has been on computers that don’t readily support Internet Explorer, such as those from Apple.
Source:Net Applications

Google Search Deal Revenue numbers for Mozilla and Status:
Google-Mozilla search deal revenue accounted for 88% of Mozilla’s $75 million (Rs363 crore) in revenue in 2007, according to its most recent tax filings, and it was recently renewed through 2011.


Article in Full - below:

For Mozilla, Google, group hugs get tricky
The rise of Firefox, Mozilla’s browser, has unleashed a wave of innovation, competition among browser makers
Miguel Helft / NYT
Mountain View, California: Boxes lined the cubicles and hallways in the offices of Mozilla on a recent afternoon, and its chief executive, John Lilly, seemed a bit disoriented as he looked for a place to sit. Mozilla, which makes the Firefox Web browser, had just moved from one end of this city to the other, mainly to gain more space for its growing work force.
Yet it was hard not to read symbolism into the move. Mozilla’s old offices were next door to Google’s sprawling headquarters. For several years, Google has been Mozilla’s biggest ally and patron. But in September, it also became Mozilla’s competitor when it unveiled its own Web browser, Chrome.
Success story: Software engineers at Mozilla’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. Firefox has captured nearly a quarter of the browser market by focusing on speed, security and innovation and its ascent is one of Silicon Valley’s unusual success stories. Noah Berger / NYT
Success story: Software engineers at Mozilla’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. Firefox has captured nearly a quarter of the browser market by focusing on speed, security and innovation and its ascent is one of Silicon Valley’s unusual success stories. Noah Berger / NYT
So it seemed only natural for Mozilla to move out from under Google’s shadow.
“We’ve learnt how to compete with Microsoft and Apple,” says Lilly, a soft-spoken, earnest 38-year-old. “Google is a giant, of course, and competing with them means we are competing with another giant, which is a little tiring.”
Those big companies weren’t giving much thought to browsers when Firefox was released in 2004, and neither were most ordinary Web users. A browser was just a window onto the Web, and people often used whatever was already installed on a computer. Usually that meant Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
Since then, Firefox has captured nearly a quarter of the browser market by focusing on speed, security and innovation. Its success is all the more remarkable because it was built and marketed by a far-flung community of programmers, testers and fans—mostly volunteers—coordinated by a non-profit foundation. It is a shining example of the potential of open source software, which anyone can modify and improve, and its ascent is one of Silicon Valley’s most unusual success stories.
In short, Mozilla showed the world that browsers matter. Now the challenge is to keep proving that Mozilla matters.
The rise of Firefox unleashed a new wave of innovation and competition among browser makers. Microsoft, which makes Internet Explorer, and Apple, which makes the Safari browser, have narrowed the gap with recent upgrades. That makes it less likely that people will take the trouble to seek out and install Firefox.
At the same time, the Web has been expanding accessibility from personal computers (PCs) to powerful mobile phones such as the iPhone. Firefox won’t have a mobile version ready until later this year.
And then there is Google. After introducing Chrome, a lightning-fast browser designed to run increasingly complex Web applications, Google upped the ante. This month it said it would put Chrome at the centre of a new operating system—the software that handles the most basic functions of a PC.
“Google, Apple and Microsoft can all throw a lot of resources toward improving their browsers. Mozilla, not so much,” says Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. “When it was them against Microsoft, it wasn’t such a big problem. Now that there are other alternatives, it becomes harder for them to retain relevance.”
Despite Mozilla’s mighty and increasingly competitive rivals, the spread of Firefox has continued. Nearly 300 million people around the world use it, making Firefox not only the most successful open source consumer product, but also one of the most successful software programmes ever.
To a large extent, that success sprang from a disparate community that coalesced around Firefox and was harnessed by Mitchell Baker, Lilly’s predecessor. Baker, whom Lilly calls the “conscience” of Mozilla, remains its chairwoman and is actively involved in managing it.
Baker, 52, seems to embody Mozilla’s anti-corporate ethos. Unlike the clean-cut Lilly, Baker has a decidedly counterculture look. Her hair, dyed a reddish colour, is closely cropped on one side and shoulder-length on the other, and she is prone to wearing sandals with hiking socks.
She organized a recent meeting of non-profit groups at Mozilla that ended with what she called a “psychic group hug”—not a literal embrace, but a chance for everyone there to describe in one word how they were feeling.
For Mozilla and its millions of fans, Firefox is not just cool software but also a cause: to ensure that no company, whether Microsoft, Google or anyone else, can tilt the Web to its advantage by tweaking its browser to favour its products or applications. Microsoft appeared ready to use that tactic after its browser vanquished Netscape’s.
Baker envisioned Firefox as a counterweight to that possibility, and a way to make browsing safer. In the years after Netscape’s demise, Microsoft essentially stopped improving Internet Explorer, and the browser quickly became vulnerable to security threats, an explosion of pop-up ads and other annoyances.
Firefox was faster, safer and blocked pop-ups. It also offered some compelling innovations, such as tabs, which allowed users to have multiple pages open inside a single browser window. Word of its virtues spread quickly, first in the technology world, then through a rapidly expanding fan base.
Today the model remains the same. Only a small fraction of the people involved in building Firefox are paid employees at Mozilla, which has about 250 workers. An additional 1,000 or so programmers contributed code for the most recent Firefox release. There are also tens of thousands of other volunteers who help test and promote Firefox, write add-ons and help translate it into more than 70 languages.
“We succeeded because more people got engaged, helped us build a better product and helped us get the product into the hands of people,” Baker says. “We succeeded because of the mission.”
That community’s fervour was heard in a recent weekly conference call for engineers who build Firefox. The call, moderated but open to anyone, had 30 participants, some in Mozilla offices and others scattered worldwide.
The conversation bounced from one technical topic to another: user interfaces, bug tracking, security. Then someone interrupted to announce that in just a few hours, one million people had downloaded the new Firefox 3.5. The group erupted in cheers. (By the next afternoon, the number had topped six million.)
“Mozilla is about a community coming together and saying it can compete with the largest software company in the world,” says Sandeep Krishnamurthy, director of the business administration programme at the University of Washington at Bothell, who recently wrote a paper on Firefox’s success. “There really is nothing like it.”
Across the globe, Vineel Reddy, 21, an engineering student in Hyderabad, India, basks in the satisfaction of having contributed to that success. Drawn to the Firefox mission, but not particularly good at programming, he decided to work on promoting Firefox. He rallied some friends who were skilled at video editing, rented a camera and produced a flashy clip that compares Firefox to a slick sports car.
The video has been seen more than 33,000 times, and Reddy says he gets daily email messages thanking him. “This is the best experience I have had,” he says.
Lilly says it was that kind of dedication from volunteers that enticed him to move from a career in venture capital and to join Mozilla in 2005.
“As Americans we’ve lost the sort of civic engagement, the participation in making the world what we want and what we think it should be,” says Lilly, who became chief executive last year. “That, as a mission and as a product ethos, resonated with me.”
Lilly readily acknowledges that Google’s entrance into the browser market rocked the Mozilla boat. “Life was simpler before they did this,” he says.
That said, Chrome’s release does not signal a return to the browser wars of the 1990s, when Microsoft poured resources into crushing the upstart Netscape.
For starters, Mozilla and Google have long had an agreement that makes Google the standard home page when people start Firefox, and sends them to Google when they type something into the search box at the top of the browser.
The deal accounted for 88% of Mozilla’s $75 million (Rs363 crore) in revenue in 2007, according to its most recent tax filings, and it was recently renewed through 2011. (The gusher of income from Google prompted the non-profit Mozilla Foundation to set up a taxpaying subsidiary, the Mozilla Corp., in 2005.)
The deal has helped Google gain market share in search. But Google has also been among the biggest beneficiaries of Firefox’s success in other ways.
Google’s fortunes are tied to the advancement of the Web. As browsers become faster, more standardized, more secure and more capable of running complex Web applications, Google’s services, such as search, Gmail, maps and office software, become easier to use and more popular, and Google earns more money. Firefox’s innovations have helped with this.
“Mozilla has done an amazing job,” says Sundar Pichai, a vice-president of engineering at Google who heads the development of Chrome.
Pichai says that because of Mozilla’s vital role, the company thought long and hard about the impact Chrome would have on Firefox. Google eventually came to believe that it could help spur even more innovation in browsers by building its own, he says. And it made Chrome open source, so any advances it makes could be adopted by others, including Mozilla.
“We were all very clear that if the outcome was that somehow Mozilla lost share to Google, and everything else remained the same, internally, we would have been seen as having failed,” Pichai says.
So far, Chrome doesn’t appear to have hurt Firefox. Chrome has grabbed just under 2% of the browser market, according to Net Applications, a company that tracks browser use. During the same period, Firefox’s share has kept growing, to 22.5% from 19.5%. Microsoft’s has continued to decline, to 66% from 72%, though it argues that most of that loss has been on computers that don’t readily support Internet Explorer, such as those from Apple.
In many ways, Google and Mozilla are fighting the same battle, albeit not with the same objectives. They both contend that the Web should be open and based on common standards—Mozilla because it is its mission, Google because it is good for its business.
“Most days we are aligned with them,” Lilly says. “Their focus on the open Web is pretty amazing.”
But he says financial pressures may someday push Google to start using Chrome to favour its own services. That danger, he says, “clarifies for me how important it is for independent organizations like Mozilla to exist”.
©2009/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Corporations Lag On Adopting Social Media

Below find an article about the early adoption of Social Media for consumer/personal purposes, and information about how corporations should look to adopt the medium and where it is going.

Corporations Lag On Adopting Social Media

By Mike Sachoff - Mon, 06/29/2009 - 06:45

Just starting to understand potential

Social networking has increasingly become more visible in the workplace, and its functionality is being leveraged by companies globally, according to a new survey from Frost & Sullivan.

A majority (80%) of respondents said they personally use Web 2.0 technologies to connect and share with friends and family while at work. More than half (54%) said they use social media for professional purposes such as connecting with colleagues, generating leads, and working on projects.
Vanessa Alvarez
Vanessa Alvarez

"However, despite the current hype of social sites such as Facebook and Twitter, social networking platforms are still perceived as being used only for social purposes," said Vanessa Alvarez, Industry Analyst with Frost & Sullivan's Unified Communications practice.

"Enterprises, both big and small, are still just beginning to understand the potential of Web 2.0 tools and public and private social networking platforms. The next level of productivity will occur when enterprises can use these tools to go beyond the social aspect, and harness the unlimited potential of these tools to more effectively manage workflows and drive business."

Social networking sites are the most used Web 2.0 tool. Nearly three-fourths of respondents report using social networking sites for personal use within an organization. Besides social networking sites, other tools used include, blogs, wikis, and teamspaces.

The majority of respondents indicated that their organizations have written policies concerning the use and access of social networking sites. Among those individuals working at companies without a written policy, 80 percent work in organizations that allow access to such sites, despite no formal policies.

The survey also found client relations, advertising, marketing, and other business communications are not part of most organizations' use of social media. The majority of respondents said their organizations use social media primarily for internal use, staff relations and training.

"Social networking and other Web 2.0 technologies are literally changing the way people think about collaboration, and how willing they are to share information," says Melanie Turek, Industry Principal with Frost & Sullivan's Unified Communications practice.

"Organizations have always looked for ways to make their employees more collaborative; today, they need to look for ways to make their collaborative employees more effective."

Comparing Google to Bing? New Cool Tool!

Check out this cool new tool created to see Google results next to the new MSN Search Bing results - google vs bing compare for your self!

Zach Hoffman
www.SEO.cc - CEO
866-999-4SEO

Bing - The New Search Engine Being Released by Microsoft

Preview for the new search engine developed by Microsoft called Bing - check it out:

http://www.decisionengine.com/Default.html

Communication Overload - The New Social World

Check out this site ThatsNotCool.com, it is a great campaign!

-Zach Hoffman

Google Analytics - Lollapalooza Tracks Social Media Campaigns with Google Analytics

Below is a great article from the Google Analytics blog about tracking Social Media Campaigns using Google Analytics.


Lollapalooza Tracks Social Media Campaigns with Google Analytics
Friday, May 15, 2009

Let’s face it: Social media is here to stay, and day by day it continues to encroach on nearly every aspect of our online lives. But to publishers, promoters, advertisers and site owners, there’s one essential question left hanging in the air long after the race to join the social media crowd: “Is it working?”

This year’s Lollapalooza Music Festival is using Event Tracking and Google Analytics to find out.

Social Media Applications

There may not be a more perfect application of social media than promoting a music festival, and C3 Presents, (the folks behind Lollapalooza) came up with some good ways to capitalize. This year’s lineup page alone features a Facebook Connect application to maintain and share personal lineups, MySpace blog, bulletin and site postings, Twitter updates and email sharing, and AddThis social bookmarking.
“You don’t find anyone who thinks social media is a bad idea, but the questions on our minds are, ‘what is this doing for our fans and what kind of return are we getting back on this investment?’” says Michael Feferman of C3 Presents.

Questions to Answer

As with any successful web analytics strategy, this one started out by posing the questions that Google Analytics should answer. Specifically:

* Who’s using these sharing and social media outlets? Are they benefiting?
* Which ones are being used the most and what are their applications?
* Does social media make a visitor more likely to buy a ticket?
* Are we driving more traffic to our site as a result? Are we driving more sales and revenue?

WebShare, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant, was brought in to help implement and configure Google Analytics to help answer these questions. Measuring the impact of social media for Lollapalooza has two sides:

* The impact on those who use social media applications while on the site
* The impact of those who arrive at the site as a result of social media

The Implementation

Event Tracking and Campaign Tagging were employed in order to provide the data required to answer these questions.

Event Tracking

While a user is on the site, events “fire” as the visitor interacts with the various social media applications. Lollapalooza tracks when sharing applications are clicked, when users log into Facebook accounts via Facebook Connect and perform various actions, and when visitors register or log into their Lollapalooza accounts.


*Actual values have been modified

Drilling down into the event categories, actions and labels reveals even more about user behavior, and coupled with the secondary dimensions and pivot tables that were recently announced, we can answer some very detailed questions, like:

How much revenue and how many transactions resulted from visitors in Chicago that used Facebook Connect and found the site via the keyword “lollapalooza 2009”?

*Actual values have been modified

Campaign Tagging

In order to track visitors arriving at the site as a result of social media, links that are generated and shared are tagged with unique values to define campaign parameters. The reports and segmentation options of Analytics then help us understand these visitors and their value in terms of Goal and Ecommerce conversions.

When visitors share via Twitter, for example, a pre-populated message with a bit.ly compressed link is used that includes Google Analytics campaign tag parameters:


When followers of this user click on the link, Google Analytics attributes the visit to a source of “twitter” and a medium of “share”. This data is then available in our reports, and we can answer questions like:

What kind of revenue and ticket sales resulted from Twitter sharing yesterday?

*Actual values have been modified

The Results

The data continues to roll in, but some impressive insights have been gained so far:

* Over 2/3 of the traffic referred from Facebook, MySpace and Twitter is a result of sharing applications and Lollapalooza’s messaging to its fans on those platforms.
* Users of the social media applications on Lollapalooza.com spend twice as much as users that don’t.
* “Fan Engagement” metrics such as time on site, bounce rate, page views per visit and interaction have seen significant boosts across the board as a result of social media applications.

More details and findings are available on C3's digital marketing blog.

“This kind of data is fantastic,” says Michael. “Not only does it help us give our fans what they want, it let’s us know how they respond to it and tells us that these efforts are worth it.”

Other Resources

To learn more about the reports, configurations and features highlighted in this post, take a look at the following resources:

* Event Tracking with Google Analytics
* Campaign Tagging and tracking traffic sources
* Secondary Dimensions and Pivot Tables

Posted by David Booth of WebShare, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant

Hulu Video Content - Adds Another Publisher

Disney has invested into Hulu and agreed to syndicate video from there ABC shows on the Hulu website. Check out this article as it target how Hulu Niches Video to Challenge YouTube.

Ad Inventory Increases Across the Web

Below find an article about how ad inventory is increasing across the web and ad networks are beginning to evolve to have greater focus. And the ad copy / content is increasingly important when it comes to banner creative.

Health Related Triggers for Baby Boomers

68 percent of boomers go online after seeing a health-related TV commercial. 80 percent click health-related ads.

Source: Marketing to Baby Boomers

Demographic and Their Differences in Web Behavior

This article Men Want It Fast, Women Want It All by Jason Lee Miller at WebProNews covers ideas as to how e-tailers and all website owners in general can learn to market better to different sexes through slight web design changes.

Marketing to Women Through Design

Check out this article by part of the team at Future Now Inc. about how the new Mint.com through some graphical and interface changes were able to change the behavior of there target demographic and increase sales by 20%

Marketing to Women Through Design

Twitter Used to Create eCommerce Venture

The below article discusses how twitter is being used as a creative tool for helping eCommerce consumers find items when comparison shopping online.



Using Twitter for a Fresh Approach to eCommerce

By Chris Crum - Fri, 05/01/2009 - 13:52

Startup Uses Twitter to Inject a Human Element into Online Shopping

WebProNews looked at some interesting research from Forrester and Shop.org this week, which indicated that while online retail sales have been increasing, those for the majority of web-only businesses have actually remained flat or on the decline.

One startup launching this week thinks injecting a little human touch into eCommerce can be a way to combat this. Naturally, Twitter is the medium the company's using to do this.

The company is called IMshopping, and aims to provide an online version of the salespeople who answer your questions in a brick and mortar store like Best Buy or Foot Locker. Basically the concept is that consumers ask IMshopping questions through Twitter about products they are seeking, and IMshopping points them in the right direction.

"Just send any shopping question as an @IMshopping within Twitter (i.e. @IMshopping Where can I find an authentic Larry Bird jersey for under $100? OR @IMshopping Where can I find a LG stainless steel, bottom-freezer refrigerator for under $1000?)," a spokesperson for IMshopping tells WebProNews.
IMshopping on Twitter

The site is launching with human guides answering questions and over time the company will roll out programs for general consumers to earn value from assisting on searches and getting rated for the quality of their answers. "We can't comment more on this program right now but it will be a game-changer in terms of community incentives," the spokesperson says.

I am reminded of ChaCha, but this is strictly for shopping, and has the potential for gaining a larger following, simply because of the Twitter factor. IMshopping does have a web site that can be used just the same, but with the right marketing, I can see avid Twitter users going this route simply for the convenience factor.

Yes, consumers could simply search for what they're looking for on Google or another search engine, but we've seen examples in the past of businesses using Twitter to help users find what they were looking for, and with this as a primary goal of IMshopping, there could be a place for it.
Prashant Nedungadi - CEO of IMshopping
Prashant Nedungadi - CEO of IMshopping

"We believe human assistance will create a deeper level of e-commerce satisfaction that doesn’t exist on the Internet today," says IMshopping CEO and Founder Prashant Nedungadi. "There is a lot of information out there, but very little help when online shoppers need specific answers that will make or break their purchasing decision. At brick and mortar stores, human experts fill such a void, but on the web, it doesn’t exist. We developed IMshopping to bring the same level of personalized assistance to online shoppers."

"Twitter is the ideal medium for having a conversation; Online shoppers have the option to communicate privately with the expert on Twitter, or publicly so others can benefit from the right choices," he adds.

Is the service going to change the face of the web? Probably not, but it's an interesting look into how Twitter can be implemented directly into a business model. IMshopping has secured a $4.7m round of funding from South Korea Telecom Ventures.

As a business model, IMShopping collects revenue when consumers buy products that are recommended through the site. The spokesperson tells me that he company is staying quiet on future business plans but Prashant's background (he founded Andale, which is now Vendio) seems to suggest there may be bigger B2B plays as well.

Reckitt-Benckiser to Shift $20 Million to Web From TV - Decision Driven by Need for More-Efficient Ad Rates

Find the article below that covers a major shift in marketing budgets from traditional to online.

by Andrew Hampp

Published: March 30, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Reckitt-Benckiser will cap off its fifth straight year of organic sales growth with a new recession-approved media strategy: moving TV dollars to online video.

The company plans to shift an estimated $20 million in TV ad dollars to the web for more than 15 of its brands, including Lysol, Air Wick, Mucinex, Finish and Clearasil. The strategic shift is significant for the company, which has traditionally spent upward of 90% of its $475 million measured-media budget on TV, and less than $1 million in measured spending on the web in 2008, according to TNS Media Intelligence. Even though its 2008 internet advertising through the first half was already double its full-year internet spending in 2007, it was still only 1% of media spending.

Planting roots online
The effort goes into effect April 1 and will include partnerships with over a dozen video ad networks such as Glam, Tidal TV, YuMe and BrightRoll.

Marc Fonzetti, Reckitt-Benckiser's media manager and internet specialist, said the company has dabbled in social media and e-mail-based consumer-relationship-management promotions in the past but had yet to plant any major roots in online video until now. "We've seen a fundamental shift in consumer consumption and media habits migrating over to digital video. Obviously YouTube started it, but we want to aligned with professional content," he said. "With broadband getting to the scale that it has, the shift has happened. The integration of traditional and digital media is here now."

Reckitt-Benckiser's spending shift from TV to online has been in the works for more than a year but was accelerated by a need to find more efficiency in the cost to reach 1,000 viewers, or CPM, said Adam Kasper, senior VP-director of digital media for the marketer's digital media agency, Havas' Media Contacts. "The CPM was the driving factor here. We needed to make it compelling from a buying standpoint in terms of how these CPMs related to TV CPMs, and we had to deliver the impressions more efficiently than TV did," he said, by reaching a more targeted audience.

That's why the company opted for ad-serving networks over TV network sites such as Hulu, ABC.com, CBS.com and NBC.com, as the latter often charge significantly higher CPMs than ad networks. Mr. Kasper said Media Contacts and Reckitt-Benckiser pushed hard for CPMs that were "well into the single digits" to get more bang for the marketer's newly digital bucks, and described the results as a first for online video. "To have a big TV advertiser take such a big portion of their TV budget and put it into online video, and to do so with such an aggressive goal from a pricing standpoint, really shook up the industry."

Focus on ROI
It's a still-nascent industry, however. Scott Ferber, CEO of online video ad network Tidal TV, said the main factor that has prevented major consumer-package-goods companies such as Reckitt-Benckiser and others from investing heavily in online video has been the volume of inventory required to buy TV-equivalent audiences. The CPMs took a hit for networks such as Tidal TV, because "when you buy volume, you have to buy cheaply, because volume costs," he said. With the recession also driving pricing down, Mr. Ferber said he expects online CPMs to reach a more stable level in the next three years.

Reckitt-Benckiser's Mr. Fonzetti said the campaign will be measured using a method that combines TV's gross rating points with the web, with additional interactive layers such as online coupons and click-throughs driving traffic to each brand's microsite. Each brand's audience metrics will then be paired with data from Nielsen's Homescan panel, a shopper product that uses ad exposure on TV and the web to determine in-store purchasing behavior.
"Everything is ROI-focused and needs to be accountable," Mr. Fonzetti said. "That's why this program has taken us so long to develop. We want to make sure everybody is comfortable behind this."

Linked In PPC - Sponsored Search Marketing Discussion Reply

In response to a linked in discussions post:


It seems you have two questions 1) forecasting PPC traffic techniques and 2)
Looking into metrics like conversions, CTR, Clicks, CPC and cost per conversions. Can anyone help with formula or formulas??

* Forecasting PPC traffic techniques: I would recommend using various resources which would include WordTracker.com, Compete.com, Google Insights for search, and others you may find useful. Simple ways to use the above would be:

* Wordtracker - type in a generic term you are considering targetting and learn various related terms that may be closely related to your generic term.

* Compete.com - will allow you to type in a competitor's website address (URL) and get a look into the keywords driving traffic to there website.

Google Insights for search - will allow you to see trends of what people are searching base on the month of the year - using this data in correlation with your wordtracker today will give you an idea as to search volumes

You may also want to checkout tools available in Google AdWords.

* Looking into metrics like conversions, CTR, Clicks, CPC and cost per conversions. Can anyone help with formula or formulas??

CTR = Clicks / Impressions

CTR = Click Through Rate
Clicks = number of visitor's clicking on your advertisement
Impressions = number of times your advertisement displays

CPC = cost per click or PPC = Pay Per Click
CPC is calculated based on your bid, quality score, conversion rate, and other bids in the marketplace.

Cost per conversions = total cost of marketing divided by number of conversions from your marketing.

Hope these explanations help - feel free to touch base if you have any questions.

Zach

SEO.cc Sponsored SFIMA Search Event

Tonight we sponsored the SFIMA - South Florida Interactive Marketing Agency - monthly event. It was a great event and brought out many people in the local South Florida business world to learn how to utilize search to increase their business'.

The lineup included speakers from four major companies involved in the search marketing business including:
Jay Berkowitz from 10 Golden Rules
Zach Hoffman from SEO.cc
Lindsey Kammandel from BeyondROI
Kim Presser from SLI Systems.

Jay Berkowitz from 10 Golden Rules covered social marketing through mediums like Twitter.
Zach Hoffman from SEO.cc covered sponsored search strategies including Campaign Day Parting and Search Query Keyword Discovery.
Lindsey Kammandel from BeyondROI covered long tail keywords and ad copy calls to action to turn searchers into buyers.
Kim Presser from SLI Systems spoke about how smart search on your website can increase user participation and results.

It was an awesome event and a lot of people in the community came out. Thank you SFIMA for creating these educational opportunities for the local internet marketing space.

Zach Hoffman

Keyword Match Type Optimization for Google AdWords PPC

Broad, phrase, exact keywords match topics, why?

Sponsored search marketing strategies are constantly evolving with the search engines. The complexity to properly manage and optimize a sponsored search account continues to evolve with the structure of organic search results. From optimizing many sponsored search accounts one key component we continue to see clients and other search marketing companies miss implementing is different match types for keywords. Google has the most complex and widely used sponsored search program called Google AdWords so we will base our analysis of keyword structure setup on their platform.

AdWords allows you to target three keyword match types called broad match, phrase match, and exact match. Each of the three match types have distinctive roles in creating, implementing, and optimizing your sponsored search campaigns. Keywords will receive impressions which are the number of times they show your advertisement. Of the three match types broad match will receive the most impressions, phrase match will incur the second most impressions, and exact match keywords will receive the least number of impressions but the most relevant targeting. As mentioned each type has their distinctive roles.

Broad match keywords - Target the widest array of keywords (search terms) and receive impressions for all keyword searches the AdWords system finds related to a particular keyword. For example if you are targeting “red shoes” on broad match it will hit for many keywords including but not limited to “red shoes”, “red shoe”, “big shoes red”, “clown shoes”, “shoes that are pink”, now you may ask – why did my keyword “red shoes” hit for such a variety of keywords and how do I control this? Well first you can target pink shoes by setting it to exact match using the following keyword structure [pink shoes]. Now with the above set of keywords you hit for the next question is, well how do I optimize red shoes? Well first you want to be measuring conversions on your keywords to make sure consumers are not using keywords you may not think are not relevant to your topic – relevance. For example consumers searching “pink shoes” may actually be purchasing your “red shoes.” So to optimize red shoes you will either want to add keywords discovered using broad match to your Ad Group or add the keyword as negative. I would recommend adding the keywords discovered either as exact match or negative exact match keywords. The main advantage to using broad match type leads to keyword discovery.

Phrase match keywords - Target more focused sets of keywords and receive impressions for all keywords (search terms) the AdWords system finds to be outside of the particular keyword phrase being targeted. For example if you are targeting “red shoes” on phrase match it will hit for keywords including the phrase “red shoes”, which would include the keywords “big red shoes”, “red shoes small”, “clown red shoes”, “red shoes that are big.” Now you may ask, why did my keyword “red shoes” on phrase match hit a variety of keywords and how do I control this? First, you can target big red shoes by setting it to exact match using the following keyword structure [big red shoes]. Now with the above set of keywords you hit for the next question is, how do I optimize phrase match “red shoes”? To optimize “red shoes” phrase match you will want to add keywords discovered using phrase match to your Ad Group or add the keywords as negative. I would recommend adding the keywords discovered as exact match or negative exact match keywords. The main advantage to using phrase match type is to refine your keyword discovery and targeting by narrow-casting the related keywords your target keywords will appear for.

Exact match keywords - Increase precision to your targeting by only hitting the keyword you are targeting and receive impressions for only the exact keyword (search term). For example, if you are targeting “red shoes” on exact match it will hit only for the keyword “red shoes.” Now you may ask, why did my keyword “red shoes” on exact match hit only for the keyword “red shoes”? This is because if you target red shoes by setting it to exact match using the following keyword structure [red shoes] it will only for “red shoes”. Now with the above set of circumstances the next question becomes how do I optimize exact match “red shoes”? To optimize “red shoes” exact match you will want conversion tracking in place and you will want to set your cost per click to allow you the most optimal conversion cost. You will also want to focus on finding the strongest Ad Copy to match up with your exact match targeted keyword. The main advantage to using exact match type is to optimize what you are paying for an actual keyword click (cost per click) and controlling the auction to your optimal precision.

After learning about the different match types we would recommend refining your account further as often as possible using search query reports provided on the reports tab in Google AdWords. You will be surprised at the amount of work this refining process will create, but it will take your account to a whole new level. Good luck and happy bidding!
About SEO.cc

SEO services many industries from vertical niche businesses to global brands. SEO.cc has cultivated a specialty in Sponsored Search Management because our agency believes it is the most effective way to deliver measurable results. As a boutique online marketing agency we focus on offering unparalleled customer service. Our customer service focus drives us to tailor each marketing campaign to fit the unique needs of our individual clients. In addition to a tailor-made campaign you can expect SEO.cc to provide you with up-to-date monthly reports that spell out exactly where your investment is being spent and how your target market is reacting and interacting with your marketing message. At SEO.cc we are committed to making online marketing easily transparent and understandable while insuring every client receives optimal results!