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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Well I guess this depends on who you ask…

End-users would go ”cool stuff!”, privacy activists would say “its about time! and a major victory to privacy” and what about digital asset owners or digital strategist. What would be their reaction?

I reckon would be “thats not too good” I thought everything is trackable on line and how are we (agencies) going to say to our clients. Maybe oh well you see we have approximately 20% of the traffic unaccountable for and that explains why the drop in x & y. I strongly believe that this is due to the missing 20%.

Today, analytics is part and parcel of any online asset – clients demand them so to know exactly how people are surfing their sites, SEO specialists love them cause they can find out what are the keywords people use to get into the site.

Agencies (Client-side Marketers as well) use them to justify the investment (amongst many other metrics) and say how well they have done. Now with people able to opt out – would this mean a loss of valuable data that now relate to a negative relationship to the ability to generate insights that inspire a strategy?

It has been said to a strategist we need numbers to make business cases and to position our argument. So what does this mean to digital strategists. How else are they going to go our data so easily and at such low cost and so quickly!

With this opt out feature, does this signal a massive demand of quantitive/qualitative research whereby we conduct surveys or gather focus group and run modeling equations to make sense of it out.

Would this Google Analytic opt out feature ‘cripple” the digital industry? and how are digital strategists going to work around this problem? after online its seems we are very data-drive, no?

What are your thoughts? I’m keen to hear.

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You bet! of course that depends on how you interaction and converse online. Social media gives firms the opportunity never before access to consumer’s candid feedback and are given the opportunity to shine like never before if done right.

But the ‘problem’ I see is that a significant number of firms still treat the social media as a channel for sales i.e make the next sales. Firms should think beyond that and use social media as a means to better interact with their customers and garner feedback and of course genuine treat feedback as something positive not negative.

But from experience, it seems (having spoken to many firms) is they seem to be concern about one major point – what if something talks bad about me “can i delete that comment” and “why should I get myself in that situation” instead of talking about how I should engage my customers or have a content strategy. They seemed fixated on “negativity”…

For those firms, I always have a standard reply “Social Media did not invent criticism” – firms have always dealt with complains via phone calls etc. So how different is this? Why are firms using this as an “excuse”?

Do firms always cite “online criticism” as something that are really concerned about? I’m keen to hear your thoughts…

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A day doesn’t go by (online and offline) where people talk about seeding conversations – afterall it has been said social media is all about conversation and that content whilst important (takes a queen role) where interactions (or conversation) take a KING role.

So naturally, we need to have conversations online to ensure success (an indicator of success) – afterall agencies will be hammered should there by no conversations online – darn boring!

So what do agencies and corporations do? they seed! they enter the social media space and start talking (in the pretense of just another person – like a customer or potential customer) and hopefully they will engage the audience. Nothing wrong with that per se but is it authentic and may I dare say ethical?

I’ve also seen job placement ads that explicit states “Social Media Seeder” – in my opinion, its fine if one states it at the outset that X is a seeder in the social media space at least that sets the audience in the right frame of mind but my argument here is for those who pretend that they are just like you and I and start contributing away…

Afterall in social media – audiences that participate in this space want candid and truthful feedback and it has been found that a fair number make decisions based on those feedbacks.

So if that is the case, is it ethical to do that from an corporation point of view? Are these corporations ‘lying’ to the audience? What are the implications if the audience finds out that it is actually the agency or the company feeding all these information to the people and they had the impression that they were genuine. Would there be a public backlash? and in turn people may lose trust in the organization and ultimately it will hit the firm’s bottomline.

There are many questions here, until the industry starts to realize and debate about this, then this can move forward, at this moment it is still rather grey.

Is this the beginning of “Stealth Marketing”? – actually lets start defining “Stealth Marketing”

I’m keen to hear your thoughts.

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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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The YouTubey says it all. Love watching it.

What are 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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Here are some of the Social Media Marketing Monitoring tools that I’ve used. Some are pretty good and some not so but nevertheless still works. Try it out for yourself.

Hope this helps.

Social Media Marketing Monitoring Tools

Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

• Google Alerts @ http://www.google.com/alerts (Generic KeyWord)

• Alert Rank @ http://www.alertrank.com (Accompanies Google Alerts)

• Social Mention @ http://www.socialmention.com (Targets blogs, forums)

• Tweetbeep.com @ http://www.tweetbeep.com (Targets Twitter)

• Twittrratr @ http://www.twittrratr.com (Targets Twitter with Sentiments)

• Watchthatpage @ http://www.watchthatpage.com (Monitor Specific Page)

• Lexicon @ http://www.facebook.com/lexicon (Targets Facebook)

• Backtype @ hhttp://www.backtype.com (Targets Blogs and Forums)

• Addict-to-matic @ http://www.addictomatic.com (Create One-stop Page of all mentions) *Love this*

• TechrigySM2 @ http://sm2.techrigy.com/main (Dashboard – Targets mentions of keywords)

• Board Tracker @ http://www.boardtracker.com (Tracks Forum Discussions)

• Trendrr @ http://www.trendrr.com (tracks everything according to them)

Paid Social Media Monitoring Tools

• Trackur.com @ http://www.trackur.com (Targets ALL social media mentions) – reasonably priced

• Dialogix @ http://www.dialogix.com.au (Targets ALL social media mentions) – mid tier pricing

• Radian6 @ http://www.radian6.com (Target ALL social media mentions) – high tier pricing.

Social Media Trend Tools

• Google Trends @ http://trends.google.com

• Blogpulse @ http://www.blogpulse.com

Please feel free to add to the list for those I’ve missed out. Thanks!

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Brand Reputation & Search Engine

Advertising Age ran an article titled “Search Shifts Means Visibility Must be Earned, Not Paid” – does this infer that brand reputation and search engine optimization are  correlated? If so, this has many ramifications.

One of which is that marketers should devote more attention to SEO rather than SEM, as the title in Advertising Age suggests. Pull demand is the force online, consumers look to the internet for information and education to help them make a more informed decision. They are unlike our forefathers who fall over to pressured advertising and hard sell. The generation today seek info and pull info towards them, they want companies to educate them not hard sell them. Hence its more of a PULL marketing at play here.

In the fast paced, interconnected world that we live in today, consumers are going to talk about your company regardless if you have entered the online space. So what you do offline campaigns, online campaigns, customer service, product quality will be talked about online. And these conversations can make or break your brand reputation. As part of SEM, one of the variable of a getting ranked higher, content needs to be refreshed and of course rich in content, conversations and (as a result interactions with other consumers) can be a very powerful variable in pushing up your brand name (be it positively or negative publicity) in Search Engines.

Consumers want to know what is the reputation of a firm (especially if its a new firm/product and they need to find a reason to trust you and develop a relationship) and what others have been saying about this particular company or product. Hey isnt that social marketing? Are you involved? Well regardless if you are involved or not, arent they still engaging in a conversation about your company? How would this affect your brand reputation and your sales figures? If your research studies shows that a fair number of your customers are online (well recent Google studies suggests that a vast majority of people are online and the number of hours spent online is increasing year on year) – so what does that suggest?

People are searching, people are also perhaps engaging in long-tail searches on your company and your product – as you know long tail searchers are people who are at the tipping point of buying or not buying your products. So having good or bad pages on the 1st or 2nd page of Google or Yahoo! may be a deal winner or breaker for you – depends how it swings.

As we move forward, I share the same as the author in Advertising Age, people are getting more involved in searching for brands and the search is getting more social – they want to read more about how others have to say about the company and the product – its no longer PUSH marketing but PULL marketing at play here. Not new I might say, in the past we have always trusted our friends more than than companies’s advertisement. But the differences here is the speed and the reachness and richess of the online medium that differs from yesteryears.

So concluding, I personally feel that your brand reputation and search engine are correlated – be it good or bad reputation – if it hits on the first or second page of search engines, it has the power to swing customers to you or to your competitors. Search Marketing is not just about generating leads, its also a strategy in itself that goes beyond selling a product.

What are your thoughts here? I’m keen to hear what you have to say.

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