Jon W Chin – Analytics, Social Media & SEO/SEM

Every morning, I would have my coffee beside me and my MacBook Pro as a defacto “ground hog” day start for me – prowling through my emails and of course looking forward to a great positive start…

Till I saw this news and got me ‘excited”

“Langham Steps In To Calm Online Storm”

and I quote

Hong Kong – Langham Hotel is today rethinking its approach to marketing in the social media space after a series of viral videos caused an online storm overnight.

Geesh what could have possibly gone so wrong? After all, not without a day passes by, that on blogs, e-news and twitter that social media is not mentioned. Its THE “IN” thing now. Everyone is talking about it and companies are jumping into it (without really thinking it through).

However, to be fair, its us marketers that have promoted this wonderful media as the next BIG thing (the recession also helped in a way), the new media promotion as well and also last but not least the perceived low costs of social media.

In my previous post, I blogged about reputational management, when something negative is said about your brand in the social space: what are you going to do? Click here to see the post. In that post, I’ve listed a number of steps one can do to ‘remedy’ the situation but one other alternative I omitted (failed to) is, retreat from the online space. This is exactly what Landham Hotel did. They retreated. Was it a sound move? I don’t know. To me I felt they should have responded to all these bad press. But then again, I may be wrong.

So what went wrong? In my view (for the sake of brevity, I’ll just touch on three points):

1. Perhaps a misleaded interpretations of blogs/forum posts/interview excerpts that cause this. If that is the case, they should have vetted it in depth and considered all angles in which the content can be interpreted.

2. I guess a not throughout enough research was performed on its customers specifically, how the targetted customers interact in both online and offline and what makes them tick (how and why)

3. Cultural Considerations: They failed to take that into account. Remember Social media is social and being social – human take cultures into play (think Hofstead’s Cultural Dimension). This is a case, whereby (going back to point 1 & 2), they failed to understand and appreciate how their customer interacted and as a result received a backlash of negativism to their campaign.

Oh well, I guess this may serve a wake up call for all that Social Media in itself is a strategy and its requires a lot of preparation and commitment to see it through.

I wish Langham Hotel well in this regards and may this be a lesson to be learnt.

Study your audience intimately

I would love to hear your thoughts on this and hear any experiences you might have. Feel free to comment/share!

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social media marketing tools

Jer­emi­a­h Owyang chats about social media marketing, for businesses and how companies can best engage their online customers..

Two key take away points from this are 1) companies need to understand what is their business objective of using social media? and once they got that figured out, then they have measure it according to that objective stated at the outset and 2) tdudes/dudettes that venture online tend to want to express themselves and interact with others instead of looking out for advertisement (a good insight I might just add).

The question from me, is social media marketing suitable for all companies, are companies just following the band wagon? “Cause everyone is doing it so I must do so as well” I must do so as well.

I feel ultimately it boils down to the company’s objective and its means of competitions and how they view social media (Facebook, Forums, Twitter, Blogs). If the culture of the organization is pretty much conservative and bounded by heaps of regulations perhaps social marketing is not the right platform for them.

Enjoy the YouTube.

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I’m sure most of you have seen the viral effects of the Domino Pizza employees having a ‘good’ time at the kitchen and the damage it has caused to Domino Pizza. The clips ‘enjoyed’ a million views before Domino Pizza management was informed of the YouTube clip. This was an instant viral marketing success (well for all the wrong reasons).

This to most companies is a situation where they dread most. However this is something very real and this could happen to any company.

Imagine years of building your baby brand to what it is today take a lot of hard work but it only requires one serious episode to bring it down. Similar to the notion of trust. Trust takes incremental steps to build but when the trust is lost, it drops by leaps and bounds.

Well my view is though one may completely take control of its brands in the online space, one can minimize these negative effects, i.e. control the negative spread of viral marketing.

How you might ask. Here are some tactics I recommend:

1. Craft an internal social media policy for all employees — this would signal to your staff that your actions offline and online concerning your company brand name is made answerable – unfortunately no many companies have one, if you dont, dont you think you should have one soon? After all, research suggests that social media is growing at an exponential rate.

a. Well ideally you would have someone listening in the online space that can inform your company at a moment’s notice.

Well the first one is not really a tactic but a good pre step. Do have one.

2. If it does happen, adopt the “SUN-SET” rule, make sure you quickly respond to this. In the online world, speed is of utmost importance. You need to craft an official respond.

a. If you know who the originator of the spread e.g. it was a blogger, perhaps you could get the blogger to link back to your official response. Most readers appreciate the other side of the story.

b. Well if you don’t (in most cases), do craft a response on your webpage and submit that page to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – yes do some keywords. This would ensure that user would be able to see your response on the first page of Google. Typically most users would click on the official response.

c. Engage Twitter, Twitter has been known for its speed! Use that to your advantage.

As you can see, all these revolves around prompt action. Do not ignore it and do act on it fast.

I’m sure you do not want the Domino Pizza effects happening to your company.

That’s all I can think of for now. But I’m keen to hear what you would do (or have done) to control the negative spread of your brand name.

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Do you marry for love or do you marry for money?

I think the question is flawed to begin with, I think it should be to what extent do you marry for love and to what extent do you married for money.

You must be wondering what on earth am I talking about? Read on and you will understand the logic behind it.

A recent article titled “Paid search down?” by econsultancy.com caught my attention and got me thinking. After reading through the article, Being a natural hardcore tweeter decided to tweet it. Within minutes, I have an explosive number of tweeters RTing it (e.g @digitalengage, @BobKeyman). To me it means, this is HOT news and something that resonant with the market.

I felt that this article came at the right time, the time where marketers have been told that the marketing budget is slashed and so forth. So if that is really the case, a simple explanation to this fall in Search Engine Marketing – PPC could very well be attributed to this recession after all one can say we now need to priorities our spending. Gone are the days where we can pay a staggering 5 bucks a click (sheer madness by the way). Following this logic, its does make sense that PPC is going south.

BUT could there be another explanation? Could it be companies are getting smarter, they have in house SEO specialists that have been optimizing their search campaign after all SEO is not that new anymore. After years of experience, they have gotten the SEO skills right i.e. dirtied their hands and all, and as such they don’t really need PPC (that much anyways). They are ranked typically on the first page. So if that is the case, why do they need to embark on a PPC campaign – its such a waste of money (do I hear the CFO suddenly shout – “WOO HOO”) – they are not optimizing their strategy if they engage PPC if we follow this school of thought.

However (yes there is always a however), in my view, well though the figures do show a decline in PPC (according to econsultancy.com), PPC still has its place in the search engine world. Its SPEED, its ability to quickly (or fastest way) get the required amount of traffic to your site, in fact, it can be instantaneous. It allows you to start getting traffic right away, allowing one to build its customer base. But the drawback can be the pricing, the strategy to it is to use less popular key words (lateral ones or long-tailed ones) and as such the PPC cost will fall accordingly – well you need to work on that strategy cause I always believe that Search in itself is a Strategy. Apply this to your SEM/SEO and you could go a fair distance.

I think ultimately, firms have to go right down to their inner self and ask this question before they embark on any execution tools.

Ask themselves this very simple basic question* What is my objective?. Get this right in the beginning and alot of wastage can be minimized and thus develop an effective solution to meet your organization’s communication and strategic marketing goals.

So going back to the introduction of marrying for love and marrying for money, now you should (hopefully) understand why I wrote that. In my view, we digital marketers should ask ourselves this very question, to what extent do we use organic and to what extent do we use PPC? of course this is dependent on your organization’s objective and marketers being accountable for every dollar they spend and measurement results, yes you guess it ROI.

Say this to your CFO and board members, “My strategy is to use as much organic as possible and use PPC as necessary”With this, I foresee you will be able to see some nice smiles on their faces.

Well thats all from me now, I’m keen to hear your views.

*I’m sorry it still amazes me though that a fair number of companies fail to do this and even if they do, they fail to appreciate the magnitudes of tools out there and that “SEARCH in itself is a STRATEGY”

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Social Media Marketing has received centre stage in most of today’s marketer’s planning plateau, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube etc. Not is it without a day passed without a mentioned of them.

Marketers are curious about this ‘new’ media channel, proponents of it highlight its strong ability in improving the bottom line. Well to be honest, it’s really not a surprise, given that that many studies depict a sense of positivism in it. For example, TNS USA study in 2007 found the following…

“if you had 15 minutes of free time…”

1. 17% Social networking
2. 17% Talk on Cell
3. 14% Watch tV
4. 10% Surf the internet etc.

and Forrestor Research’s highly positive report on social media. For more information please view my previous entry found here.

If these numbers hold water, it definitely paints a picture that social media networking is a force to be reckon with and companies should engage them, afterall one of marketer’s many tasks is to seek customer engagement though many of the touch points available at its disposal.

However the reality is social media marketing is something of a black box, marketers inject programs into the black box and cross their fingers at the output. Though we appreciate the art of it, there should be some science involved to track. After all in the boardroom, numbers do the talking and in addition, there has been a saying, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”.

If this mantra is true, does this really hold water in the social media networking or marketing world? Well maybe, well maybe not. I do not know. But what I can offer is if we were to approach the measurement, we could perhaps look at alternatives – after all there is no such thing as a one off solution, no?

Perhaps the standard quantitative notions of approach to analyzing data (bounce rate, CTR, regression, path analysis etc) may be cast aside for qualitative methods? afterall social being social requires the need for verbal and face checks, no? or perhaps we should just get companies to state their objectives and we just track certain metrics. Do we really need to measure it? that is the question. Or shall we just let social media play its role and just cross our fingers and hopefully the spread of it is positive and will correlate positively with profitability and hope that we can control the spread if its negative.

Well what are your thoughts? I’m keen on hearing them.

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Customer value, customer satisfaction, customer loyality and many more, the marketing literature is replete with information on them. It has been put forward that customer value is a source of competitive advantage.

Academics and marketers have always promoted the notion that in order to compete in this competitive landscape – one must provide superior customer value relative to competition. But really what is customer value?

Down to a simple formula; Would the below attempt be it? What are your thoughts? Any truth? Can it expand?

From the customer’s perspective:

Customer Value = (Quality + Emotional appeal + meet expressed needs + a hosts of other benefits) / Price.

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Datran Media conducted an survey late 2008 and found these 12 most important online marketing decisions that executives will make in 2009; They are as follows:

• How to engage customers and be more relevant in their everyday lives.
• The proper way to speak to our customers.
• How to maximize behavioral targeting in our email and display marketing efforts.
• How to better leverage email, search and social networking
• Increasing the budgets for online media in areas such as affiliate marketing, search and email
• Finding a way to monetize social media.
• Diversifying our online advertising campaigns to include more emerging technologies
• We will be discussing going all digital with our marketing efforts.
• Targeted direct marketing based on user online behavior.
• The decision to increase on our email marketing spend to enable better segmentation and targeting.
• To make on-line marketing even more measurable for increasing sales…proving it’s ROI….every dime counts.
• How much of our offline budget should be shifted to online to supplement what we currently have.

Which of these do you think is the most important? and perhaps what others are important? but one take-away point is social media is on top of most’s radar attenna.

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Forrestor Research presents encouraging data for social media. Very interesting data.
­­
Andy B­e­al­ at http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/ re­ports­ on a Forre­s­te­r Re­s­e­arch pre­di­cti­on that b­as­i­cal­l­y s­ays­, “I­t’s­ gre­at to b­e­ a di­gi­tal­ m­­arke­te­r!”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC4CXRLfrso

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