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

Online gaming has no doubt grown over the years. Think Farmville, My Cafe, Mobster and all. These games had people’s logging in their Facebook accounts and iPhone just to ensure that their items they have cooked does not expire.

This is evident that games play a role in many people’s life. And now McDonalds sees this as an opportunity and decides to enter this space. They created a “1 day campaign” online game on Farmville whereby players will be able to grow their farm twice as fast with all the McDonalds rewards.

Looks like marketers – you want their attention and grow your brand affinity – one of the ways are online gaming. Leverage them. Interesting space here and I am of the view it has alot of potential. Other than communicate on social space, the other activity is to have fun i.e. play games.

The question now is hmm…how does it read into my business objective? Dont get carried away by all these crazes – ultimately as a brand owner – you need to answer that very question. By having this game, how does it serve my business objective?

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News has it that brands are buying Facebook Ads (great growth) in order to drive traffic to their Facebook Page (read: secure “Likes” – sorry today this metric is a something that clients seems to be fixated about).

As a marketer, what should you choose? Impressions or Clicks?

Literature in the main have suggested that if you want to brand awareness choose Impressions, if you want call to action – choose “clicks”

So what really works? . I will give a generic answer – it depends.

For me, both impressions and CPC has worked well. A recent campaign (1 month campaign) that I ran, I started with CPC and then moved on to Impressions.

It is when I moved to Impression, the stats went ballistic, my CTR was higher than usual and the social conversion increased whilst paying less. The CPC price was approx USD$0.60 and for CPM I was paying USD0.11 & Average CPC of USD0.04. Juxatpose that with the CPC I was getting at the outset i.e USD0.60. A savings of USD0.64! (of course the clients was all smiles) – better CTR and all.

Curious me decided to find out why is this the case, after much testing – one of the variables that helped was the rotation of ads – and the image of the ad. It played a big role. I did 3 ads with the same ad text but different images – the clicks were vastly different and of course results were as well.

In this particular 1 month campaign, it seems that impression had worked well – as you know there are many variables that affect the effectiveness of an ad. For the sake of brevity I’m only going to touch on 2 variables for this campaign 1) Ad image – That had significant bearing on the effectiveness and conversion. Lesson is play with multiple ads – do the neccessary testing and you can save a bundle and get much better results and 2) Clear CALL TO ACTION (CTA) – Putting the work – Join US or Like US had an impact.

I came across this mathematic formulae (Source: http://www.searchabilityinc.com/2009/03/15/facebook-ads-cpm-vs-cpc/)

Mathematically speaking, the formulae below is saying what is the condition that a CPC model would be more effective than a CPM model.  Ultimately according to the author if the following expression holds true:

I*CPC*CTR < (I/1000)*CPM, where

I = impressions

CPC = minimum CPC bid required for Facebook to run your ad

CPM = minimum CPM bid required for Facebook to run your ad

CTR = target audience’s propensity to click on your ad (fancy way of saying click-thru rate)

The expression could be satisfied if CPC and CTR are low or if CPM is high.

Well looks totally wicked. The formulae could very well work for you.

So is this a science or an art? Well my ‘answer” to them is, the questions is flawed to begin with, its to what extent this is science and to what extent this is art.

Keen to hear what successes you managed for your campaigns.

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Jon Chin wearing a Facebook user cap:

I am an avid Facebook”er” if there is such a term. I spend hours on it. Its a place where I catch up with my friends (“see whats up in their lifes – their bragging adventure etc) – to find out where they are up to.

Jon Chin wearing a marketer cap:

Sources from Facebook Singapore tells me: “Singapore has 2.4 million accounts and of course 1.8 million log in DAILY”. To a marketer, that means business.

The potential reach & frequency (read impression in the ad world) – woohoo that gets all excited. How can a marketer capitalize on all these to build its brand and people to talk about my brand so I can increase my brand profile and ultimately sales.

Hmm…is there a mismatch here? I wonder…

or is this a space that PR practitioners own after all PR dudes/dudettes say this is “earned” media not a “paid” media space… Did I conveniently leave the PR folks out?…

It seems that authenticity, non-paid means, increased transparency, engaging in conversations – one to many – seems to play into PR strengths…PR helps to “soft-sell” – so should this be a PR thingy? Interesting…

Did I miss out a category of “Jon Chin wearing the PR cap”….

Thoughts? Keen to hear your views…

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Way cool! BooneOakley.com a full service creative ad agency developed their entire corporate webpage on YouTube.

Basically it is like those interactive story book where they give you an option to select A or B, which will then direct you to the respective options. Just play with the video below to see.

Love it to bits. Would you put your entire website on YouTube? Love to hear your thoughts.

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Creativity is up the ante here. In this video by Samsung, an out of the box interactive video titled “Follow Your Instinct” – a departure from typical advertisements so to speak.

Samsung seeks an alternative route to engage its audience by using YouTube’s latest innovation – Annotation.

With this, Samsung was able to create an interactive video permitting users to determine the storyline. Its amazing, so far it only works in YouTube. Good stuff, YouTube.

Its a much watch! Love it to bits!

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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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(*Thanks to someone that inspired me to write this – thanks pal)

The field of strategic marketing is organised around a central question. The question is “why do some firms persistently outperform others” This question does not presume that there will always be persistent performance differences between firms. Rather, it presumes only that it may be in some situations, persistent performance differences will exist between firms and that those differences cannot be explain by traditional economic theories of firm performance. And here comes marketing (woohoo hooray) into the picture.

A major trend of marketing in the last decade, marketers have consistently emphasised that success in the marketplace rests on the firm’s ability to attract, satisfy, and retain customers that is being customer oriented – the essence of the marketing concept and market orientation a derivation from it as a strategy to achieve sustainable competitive advantage – a cornerstone of modern marketing thought.

Customer satisfaction is the primary determinant of customer loyalty and subsequent retention and the key to creating a valuable business organization. Continued success rests on reinventing oneself in the eyes of one’s customers and to meet their expressed or latent needs. This requires a thorough understanding of customers in the marketplace and ways to use this information to take market action. The fundamental objective of this perspective is to provide superior customer value relative to competition in order to attract, satisfy and retain customers.

As such leading-edge companies increasingly seek ways to measure customer satisfaction, as means for setting strategy, growing revenues and market share. This trend has been accelerated since 1988 by the American Baldrige National Quality Award, which places considerable weight on customer focus and satisfaction.

As a result, we has seen firms advocating the provision of customer satisfaction (how many times have you heard “everything we do is from the customer’s point of view” “we place our customer on the pedestal) as it is believed that it is an effective way to improve one’s bottom line in this fast changing landscape that we live in today. Much progress has been advanced. So if that is indeed the case, why do customer accept half baked solutions even though a better alternative is available? If the above holds water, there has to be another explanation.

Is it because at that point in time a quick fix solution is preferred (believer of context)? or is it because we resist changes due to the fear of not knowing what to expect should we change – the uncertainty element or we need to learn new things (learning curve is steep)? or are we just be plain lazy? Maybe…or maybe not…

I have a more sinister explanation (*evil eyes*)– its most probably due to higher profits through customer lock-in as a competitive tactic. What do I mean by this? Think about this.

• · Customer lock-in acts as a shield from abrupt customer preference changes and competitive influences – making it more costly for the customer to switch.
• · Customer lock-in has the ability to reduce the volatility of customer base and achieve higher stability of the revenue stream as compared to customer satisfaction.
• · Business environmental uncertainty has the ability to influence the satisfaction/lock-in doctrines and its link to business performance.

Reeks of inferior solution? shouldn’t the firms provide superior customer value a means of competition instead of tying them down. So I say its not only because of the reasons cited above such as a quick fix solutions, plain lazy etc. Firms have made it a strategic direction of locking customers in.

Some examples, with many complex products such as ERP, extensive user learning is required to reap full benefits from it. This is also true with simpler office application such as Office. Most people need time and support from experts working with a new spreadsheet to learn how it works. People typically become more effective in using software as they gain experience. hmm….doesn’t this then become switching costs caused by learning.

My view is that the impact of learning costs on a brand’s competitive position can be tremendous. Consider the struggle of Sun’s Star Office against Microsoft Office. (I wont talk about network effects here – just learning). Star Office an excellent product – why did it fail to over throw MS office? Don’t think its due to being an inferior product more likely its due to user’s switching costs and of course the IT department doesnt help (they are control freaks)  and also due to the fact that they are am certified in Microsoft blah blah blah not Staroffice – I rest my case.

More recently, seen the cool Mac VS PC advertisement? Steve Job knows this really well. In order to compete with MS, he has to convince new customers that Apple is no different from PC. “Whatever you can do in PC, Mac can do it better” was its selling message. Kudos to its communication strategy team. Apple not only convinced its existing loyal customers that Apple is a great product but have made them evangelists. Making every loyal Apple customer is brand ambassadors in promoting apple. Well done! A picture speaks a thousand words.

Apple has a great solution here – its simple, works right out of the box and its simply beautiful and of course its way cool to be associated with Apple. Brand gurus would tell you

People do not buy products but images associated with products

Apple has done a wonderful job here removing some of the lockin tactics employed by Microsoft – (one of which have helped in this removal is the Mac Vs. PC advertisements)

Concluding…This suggest that the important question is not that of which mode of explanation is a more appropriate one, but rather that of the conditions and/or context under which a given mode of explanation is most appropriate. no?

Feel free to offer your views by commenting.

P.S. Ever wondered why Doctors, lawyers, accountants are all professions but managers not? hmm…

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I’m a car enthusiast and Audi runs in my blood afterall the Audi (and VW) online interactive forum in Singapore was spearheaded by me (and my friends).

We all know that Outdoor advertising includes various types of promotional displays, from highway billboards to transit posters and arena placement, all geared towards communicating a message to the public. The message might be to buy a product, take a trip, vote for a politician, or give to a charity. It might even be a public service announcement.

But this is seriously entertaining, Audi taking an obvious hit at BMW by stating “Your move BMW” and BMW reacted with their top of the line E92 M3 saying “check mate”. This really got my attention! So in this instance, the hypothesis that the greater creativity the greater the brand recall hold waters? well all I can say is You bet! (ok N=1 in this context)

Smart tactical advertising promotional move by Audi, first it presented the massage that Audi is no longer an alternative but a contender and Audi is in the same leaque as BMW if not better. To a layman, this ad has just reaffirmed the brand positioning of Audi as a strong contender to BMW. To me in this instance Audi has won this promotion and brand battle. Why (you all might say, you are biased afterall you are an Audi fan). Nope think logically, by the sheer fact that BMW retailiated with an advertisement at the same location speaks volume of the threats BMW is facing from Audi.

Well done Audi. Vorsch sprung durch technik!

P.S. Any chance of this type of advertising happening in Singapore? hmm…maybe not, oh well….

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Gone are the days where ads are one dimensional – where firms hone in into product specification.

This brilliant masterpiece by BBH, has taken a product and translated it into a story that touches ones heart. True to the slogan of “Keep Walking”.

Here it is. Enjoy. I know I have…We need more master pieces like this.  Its really inspirational.

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

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