Yes, Social Media is fun. If what you are doing is not fun then why do it.  Same goes for Social Media.

If you want to promote your business through social media and business networking, but still have your doubts on it, then I suggest you drop it.

Like I said earlier, if what you are doing is not fun then don’t do it at all. Promoting your business through the social media sites can prove to be very beneficial to your business and bring in a high ROI.

We often hear people say that promoting your business has to be taken seriously.  That is true, but who said that serious cannot be fun.

When businesses drop their feelings and hide behind their logos and not show their face, it brings in more fun, curiosity and excitement to Social Media. Getting them to do it is hard and not fun, but once they do it more business comes to them from consumers though having better trust in whom, it is they are doing business. A positive result in business is where the fun begins.

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, My Space, etc helps create a network with friends and other people, with whom one can establish contact and not just share what’s happening in and around their little world, but also exchange some very important information, like important links, or create homepages, etc which could prove to be very useful in the future.

Sites like LinkedIn, which is a business related though, can also be fun too, where people can exchange contacts and important information on any events happening related to their business.

The entire premise of Social Media is based on drawing attention to something by using effective communication through social channels.  What draws consumers to something is fun. If it is fun and exciting, they will come.

So what are you still waiting for? Unless you give Social Media a try, you will never know what you’re missing out on.

Contributed by Pooja Giri

• Tracking The Buzz On Apple’s iPad (0)
• Impact of Google’s Real-time search on social media marketing (1)
• Engagement – The cornerstone for social media marketing success (2)

Mobile ads are a format of Adwords ads that appear on mobile websites and Google search pages when a user searches from a mobile device. Mobile ads are available as either text or image ads.

Mobile ads work on a pay per click as well as a pay per call basis. Every ad contains a headline and a description with a maximum of 18 characters each. The third line contains the site URL or a telephone number or both. Advertisers can therefore choose to connect to customers via whichever medium – phone or website – that they prefer, or they can let customers choose.

Mobile ads can be targeted only to following countries:  Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Always create a separate campaign for mobile ads. This campaign won’t require a separate landing page, because clicks on the ad will be directed to a Google-supplied mobile-friendly page describing your business.

Mobile ads pricing works same as PC based text or image ad. Advertiser only pays when user clicks on the ad and advertiser can even bid to connect users to their business via telephone (click to call).

It’s recommended to start off with just a small list of strong keywords and a few different targeted ads. Based on performance, the list can be expanded later on.

Opt for contextual targeting so that your ad reaches readers of specific mobile web pages written about specific concepts.

Target campaigns to iPhones, T-Mobile G1s and other high-end mobile devices with full Internet browsers through demographic settings of the campaigns.

Mobile ad performance can be measured pulling campaign level and placement performance report.

Contributed by Manisha Singh

gtafxsumz4

• Improving Performance of PPC Campaigns (0)
• Google Trademark policy changes and its impact on PPC campaigns (0)
• The Positive Effect of Adding Negative Keywords (0)

YouTube has been the revolution in the Internet for sharing videos covering different topics. There are 24 hours worth of video uploaded every minute on YouTube making it the second largest search engine in the World. It has become vital for business to gain market value over the Internet and YouTube has the right mix with its varied topics.

YouTube has a reputation of being the place to look for funny videos. It is the second place to go after probably ‘Googling’ it. Most videos generate a one-time audience response, as very few people look for the same video again. Since YouTube plays such an important in search results and ranking, it cannot be overlooked. To reach out to your audience and to keep them coming back to view the videos again, here are some rules to be followed :

1. Creation of a channel specific to the videos
2. The video has to be optimized with the desired keywords and involving in the community discussions is vital
3. It is also essential to upload new videos frequently
4. It important to keep in mind while creating the videos that viewer would come back to view the videos only if the videos are informative, original and interesting
5. Share the video across the social networking channels like Facebook and Twitter using the sharing options provided by YouTube using the share option provided. This helps increase visibility and better search engine optimization
6. Embed the videos in the blog. This generates higher views for the blog as well as reaching out to the desired target audience

YouTube has become feature rich with its recent launch of trending topics, to provide more real time value and ease of use for the user in finding information on trending topics. This new addition has made YouTube all the more attractive making it vital for business to get a share of voice in the online market as the volume of search in YouTube is growing at an increasing pace.

Contributed by Vishnuram Muthukumarasamy

• Brand Monitor Product Updates (0)
• Brand Monitor™ v2.0.1 Released! (0)
• SMM = Social Media Measurement (2)

In the modern business scenario, there is nothing more painful than knowing that a potential customer seeking more information online, is getting negative feedback about your company or product.

Nowadays, a brand is defined by how well you rank in Search Engine results. I can be in a news site, blog or a forum. Irrespective of the source of negative listings, the impact can be devastating. Most companies experience challenges from hostile customers, displeased employees and wicked competitors who attempt to damage businesses by posting disparaging statements/comments online about the company. They aim to negatively impact a target’s business and reputation.

This is where the role of Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) comes into play. SERM is the process of defending as well as elevating the reputation of a company or brand in online search results. In other words, Search Engine Reputation Management is a kind of of brand management. By this method, the brand image of a product as well as company is maintained.

Even if a link containing negative or false information cannot be deleted or removed, it can be outranked. This is achieved by creating positive websites, links and PR about the company or product, moving negative information off the first page of search results and moving positive results into higher positions.

As Search Engines continue to dictate the Internet, and millions of people rely on websites such as Google, Yahoo and MSN to help them find the information, Search Engine Reputation is an unimpeachable factor of brand image.

• Brand Monitor Product Updates (0)

Online and Search marketing are even more important now to marketers in the current recessionary environment. It is more cost-effective and measurable than other media. Further, expectations from Search and Social Media Marketing are now much higher than before.

How to advertise effectively using Social Media networks?

Join Position2 in Effective Advertising via Social Networks, a panel discussion on Social Media and Video forum at the five-day Search Engine Strategies Conference from August 10 to 14, 2009. For the first time in 11 years, the Conference will include a full-day track Social Media and Video, where Position2, represented by Soumya Ravi, Director of Client Management, will share insights on Effective Advertising via Social Networks.

An expert on Social and Search Marketing, Soumya Ravi says, “Social Media acts as a catalyst that enables companies to shorten their marketing cycles. Today, online video and social media are experiencing significant growth compared to the past couple of years, from both the audience and engagement standpoints. The adoption of social networking capabilities, by both consumers and corporations, has seen online outperforming all other media in terms of growth. This has helped digital marketers achieve their goals faster and improve their ROI.”

At the Panel Discussion, Soumya will share her experiences and learning on using Social Media as an effective tool for advertising. The discussion will open with a keynote by Clay Shirky, a New Media expert and author of the book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Nate Elliott, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research will moderate the discussion. Other panelists, apart from Soumya Ravi, include Stacy Gratz, Social Media Marketing Manager, H&R Block, and Beth Murphy, Sr. Director of Marketing & Communications, Digg.

• Bid on Competitors Brand Keywords (0)
• Position2 Enters TiE50 Start-up Competition at a Turning Point for the Company. (0)
• Tough Times, Tough Questions? Answers for Search and Social Media Marketing. (0)

Search engine visibility of a brand is an integral part of an Online Marketing strategy. A Press Release (PR) is a great way to increase your brand’s visibility in Search Engines.

Generally, a PR is used to spread news about your service, product, product features, alliance or acquisition.  There are two phases to get the maximum exposure in search results from a PR:

1. Writing the PR

2. Promoting the PR

Writing the PR

Ensure that your PR is Search Engine Optimized (SEO). Include the top keywords and the brand name in the title and repeat these in the summary and description.  We do this because Search Engines give more importance to keywords that are repeated at the top of the PR. Therefore, there is a higher possibility of your PR being ranked better in search results.

Promoting the PR

• Choose the right site for submission

Make a list of PR submission sites (paid/free) based on its Page Rank Value (PRV) and Alexa rank. Make sure the site you are submitting the PR to shows up for similar PRs in Search Engines for keywords similar to yours.

• Choose the right category

Select the appropriate category in PR submission sites for approval processing of your PR. In addition, some PR submission sites syndicate PRs to other sites. So choosing the right category for your PR is very important, as your PR will be syndicated across to your service/product-specific sites based on your category.

• Submission

Submit your PR to the shortlisted sites over a period five to six days. This is to ensure that your PR will show up on the news/web search results throughout the week for your top keywords.

• Bookmarking

Bookmark the active PR from the PR submission sites in websites such as Digg, Stumbleupon, etc. to enhance Search Engine visibility.

Follow these simple rules and do not forget to check if your PR is optimized in Search engines, news/web search results for your top keywords.

• How to effectively connect with your target audience through Social Media (1)
• Picking a search-friendly domain name (3)

Campaign Structure is the foremost thing that makes or breaks an account. This is where you can manage your budgets for your account. The most basic campaign structure is classified into these four campaigns, namely:

Corporate campaign is where you create clusters for your corporate keyword and its variations. In this campaign, you look into the fact whether your corporate keyword appears in your ad and in the landing page.

Core Campaign will have all the clusters of keywords that directly relate to your business. For example, if you are a used-car seller, your Core Campaigns will contain clusters like used-cars, second-hand cars, pre-owned cars, and so on. This is the campaign where you should allocate more budget as this relates to your business directly.

Competitors Campaign will have keywords of all your competitors’. In this campaign, you bid on the same keywords as your nearest competitors who affect your market share. This campaign will allow you to show your ads for competitor keywords, and if there are customers who are not satisfied with your competitors’ service or products, may switch to you if they see your ads are more convincing.

Fringe Campaign will contain keywords not directly related to your business but will contain keywords that are close to it. For example, a used-car seller’s Fringe Campaign could have “car seats,” “car performance kits,” “tires,” and so on. A small budget should be allocated to this, though it is not directly related to your business, it might attract customers who are looking to enhance their car’s performance at a smaller budget. This is where in you can chip in and offer a used-car at a good price.

Now, the question is where all you want your ad to show up. You have  three options: Search, Content and Site-targeted.

Search allows your ad to show up only on popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. This is beneficial if you know that your customers search for your product on the World Wide Web.

Content allows your ad to show related content on various sites like forums, community sites or social sites. This can be used when your customers are not aware of your product and research for it on these content sites.

Site-targeted strategy allows your ads to show up on those specific sites where you want to advertise. This can be used for sites you know your customers visit often.

Other than these, you can also use Geo targeting when you are targeting specific geographic regions. In Google, you can target specific cities and its surrounding areas. Language targeting can also be used to target those customers who use certain language-specific search engines.

These are the most basic campaign structures that you should use to create an effective campaign strategy to reach your goals.

• Elements of a good Landing Page (0)
• Picking a search-friendly domain name (3)
• Tips for SEO-friendly website architecture – Part 1 (5)

The best Landing Page (LP) is not what it is, but what it can do. A good Landing Page should provide a customized sales pitch to the visitor.

Improve conversion rate by applying the Continuity and Congruence concepts

When visitors land on your landing page, are they able to find what they were looking for? If they are not getting the right mix, or if the content is incomplete, it affects the effectiveness of your landing page and you could miss a potential customer.

Many landing pages fail because the products’ value proposition is not communicated effectively. Here are some steps that will help reverse this effect.

Continuity

By ensuring that each step in the conversion process either states or supports the value proposition preserves the continuity.

It is all about the keywords – the Ad-to-LP relevance. To increase this relevance, create a dynamic landing page. Dynamic landing pages help increase the continuity and the Ad-to-LP Relevance.

By inserting a token in your ad, you can automatically replace the content with the search term a searcher would search for – this is dynamic insertion.

Or, Dynamic Insertion + Landing Page = More Conversions

Dynamic Insertion helps in the following ways:

•    Achieve more relevancies and increase quality of a landing page.
•    To  target your landing page content to your visitors for greater conversions and ROI
•   Saves significant time by using just one template with huge volumes of search terms, rather than creating separate landing pages for each search term

Relevancy is an important part of a landing page. Being relevant to what visitors are searching for gives a much higher chance of success. A visitor converts into a customer if you offer him what he is looking for.

For Instance,
•    You sell Mobile phones and one of your search terms is ”Nokia mobiles”
•    A person types in “Nokia mobiles” as the search query
•   Your ad appears, and it is relevant to his search, i.e. it includes the terms ”Nokia mobiles”
•  She clicks through to your ad, which mentions and continues the theme “Nokia mobiles” in the landing page. You could also display the Nokia logo or Nokia phone images from a database by adding some parameters in the destination URL.

Using this Dynamic Insertion technique, we create a landing page that loads the headline and the images from the database, based on the campaign name and passes the URL parameter.

Take another case; we create a landing page that loads the headlines with the region name on the landing page, based on the campaign name and the IP. Here is how the result could occur:

Keywords searched for: Foreclosure in Alabama

Ad says: Stop Foreclosure: AL
Save Your Home. We Negotiate With Your Lender. Free consultation

The landing page contains the headline: Get the better of foreclosure in Alabama

If you see, this helps in continuity and increases the keyword (Ad-to-LP) relevance, which in turn helps increase conversion rates.

Now, the main problem is that one does not have complete control over search terms that a person inserts in a search query. Dynamic Insertion does not make sense for misspelled keywords.

Best practices for Dynamic landing pages:

1.    Enter all the keywords you want to bid.
2.  Use variations for search terms within a landing page to dynamically insert the broader keywords, specific search phrases, or a combination of both.

Congruence

Congruence refers to the act of ensuring that every element of your page either states or supports the value proposition, in terms of:
•    Design
•    Copy
•    Images
•    Colors
•    Logo

If the flow of the landing page’s elements is not right, visitors may not find what they were looking for and will not convert. The performance of the landing page depends on how well the elements drive the point home and facilitate conversion.

Contributed by Rajasekar Ragavan

• Landing Page Optimization – Tips For Effective PPC Campaigns (0)

This Wednesday, June 17th, I will be speaking at a Lyris sponsored webinar: Social Media Marketing: CPR for Email Marketers in a Challenging Economy. For all those interested in viewing the webinar, I thought I’d give you a preview of the talk. We will focus on the integration of Email Marketing and Social Media Marketing (SMM) in a flat economy.

Email marketing is a powerful tool to drive customer acquisition, however there’s been a significant impact by increased mailbox sizes, spam filters and the explosion of messaging. We will go beyond the typical examples of how Twitter or a Facebook app can drive people to your site. Rather, the discussion will center around the phenomena of social networks, the rapidly expanding usage, and how email and social media can work together. No, social media will not replace email. With all the different types of messaging, email usage keeps increasing. And it works… how many newsletters do you subscribe to?

There will be specific steps, guidance and case examples of this integration in 4 areas: brand building, customer acquisition, customer retention and product launches. The idea is to demonstrate how business of all sizes can achieve continuous growth using both as a means of building and enhancing customer relationships. As customers delay decision cycles, it enhances the brand to surround them with your messaging wherever they goWe will not just discuss the big brands, rather how any business can use this cost effectively to get ahead of their competition. At Position2, we enjoy sharing some of the techniques we’ve seen and integrated into our solutions.

Erick Mott of Lyris will discuss how the Lyris uses social media to enhance their email marketing efforts. He gives an excellent behind-the-scenes look on how Lyris got this webinar to have the largest registration size ever. Let’s just say in the thousands. Any company would be happy with that result.

Karen McNaughton of In-Touch Survey Systems will describe how her company uses the Lyris platform to manage her email and social media efforts. It’s pretty interesting on how it comes together.

We’ll take questions as well, so feel free to ask away. As long as you don’t ask about how Twitter and Facebook will monetize their efforts, we are happy to answer . Our objective is to show you how your company can deal with challenging times and dramatically improve their email marketing with SMM to achieve continuous growth. So sign up – the hour will be well worth it.

• Social Media is fun (0)
• Tracking The Buzz On Apple’s iPad (0)
• Impact of Google’s Real-time search on social media marketing (1)

The March 26th edition of The New York Times carried a story about Twitter and how celebrities have turned to ghost writers to put out the 140 character text messages. The article cited examples, and quoted celebrities and consultants (i.e., ghost Twitterers) who explain and defend the “ghosts” in Twitter as acceptable. Basketball star, Shaq and cycling great, Armstrong, were the standouts in their opinion that it is pitiful if someone, even a busy celebrity, couldn’t regularly string together 140 characters conveying their own thoughts and opinions to their fans and followers.

So, what should we make of this? Does it even matter?

It definitely matters. In this age of information overload when messages are being created, re-transmitted, amplified and often spun out of control, full disclosure about the true source of messages from influential role models and decision makers is very important. Decisions to agree, endorse, or re-transmit (ReTweeting)—or not—any original message are predicated on knowing the true source of that original message. That’s why we have elaborate conventions for written and verbal forms of communications: attributing, quoting, citing, official spokespersons, declared official biographers, and speechwriters to name a few. Once we know the true origins of a message we apply our own filter and a different standard in judging what to make of the message.

So, we’re comfortable with President Obama’s declared use of a social media team that also Twitters for him, or Guy Kawaski’s hand-off to his Twitter team. It’s like all the other help that people at the top of their respective ‘games’ use to get and stay there: image consultants, speech writers, fitness trainers, or mental sports coaches. The critical delineation is that all these consultants, are generally just that—consultants—providers of input for the final product that their clients absorb but then personally deliver.

Obviously, we all sit up and pay very different attention when The President himself hosts a session with the press corps, though we’ll also listen with interest when it’s his White House Spokesperson delivering a message.

The NY Times article and its examples just indisputably demonstrate that people are using firms to manage their personality and image. But it’s some of the holier than thou opinions about keeping social media “pure and personal” that are naive. And the strong, implicit stance The NY Times takes by stuffing its article with examples of ghost-writing may belie their irritation about Twitter emerging as yet another distracting digital medium stealing precious time and mind share–putting them, even if only temporarily, in the slow lane for real time news sharing and engagement.

However, for marketers, microblogging presents a good opportunity to leverage services like Twitter in an up-front manner as many already do: a real-time, hip way to engage with your fans, followers and prospects.

Marketing on Twitter and some other social media is inherently risky today if marketers seek traditional “control” over messaging. But bold, innovative brands like Skittles are doing it. Their willingness to expose themselves online and take the good with the bad is actually pure, more authentic, and even “human”–part of being mature, secure, learning adults is to become comfortable with mixed messages of praise and criticism directed at us. The same holds true for a brand’s online persona.

So, as marketers, we should quickly leverage the phenomenon that is Twitter, get clients’ messages out there in an open and transparent manner, build momentum, and see where it takes us. Twitter is a very effective way of engaging with people who are undoubtedly opinion leaders and often the early adopters every new product or service craves. As a general practice it’s best to make clear the original source of messaging. It’s easier to sort through any downstream negative spin or malicious messaging and create an effective Social Media Marketing led brand defence, or reputation monitoring.

A sign of the maturing of Twitter and its readiness for planned marketing campaigns is the very agenda based, business-like turn it is taking. The same maturation process that led email, blogging, or mobile/cell phone messaging, and the Web, in general, to become rich media for marketers is happening with Twitter. As the targets of marketers, we didn’t turn away from email—we just constructed mechanisms to filter what we choose to receive.

Our desire to invoke filters for Twitter isn’t strong just yet. Twitter is a growing phenomenon, and it’s going to be cool for some time to come. The majority of Twitter users love it, and stories of Twitter junkies are growing. The proof is in the pudding—Twitter has grown 1300+% from Feb 2008!

While it’s still cool and hip, marketers need to quickly warm up to Twitter, hatch a ghost or self-generated Twittering plan, and grow that plan till Twitter and micro-blogging become deeply entrenched mainstream marketing media. Rest assured some new digital product or service will come along to serve those with a strong need for exclusively personal, “pure” communication–maybe those folks should just pick up the phone!

• Tracking The Buzz On Apple’s iPad (0)
• Impact of Google’s Real-time search on social media marketing (1)
• Flying Tweets: Kevin Smith vs. Southwest Airlines (0)