Turns out Kevin Smith was no ordinary passenger. An award winning Director of movies like ‘Dogma’, ‘Chasing Amy’, & ‘Cop Out’, he has over a million followers on Twitter. Tweet tweet!

What ensued was a potential PR nightmare for Southwest (Toyota anybody?).

The Story Spread Like Wildfire Online

The intensity of this incident was evident from the fact that in a span of 6 days it had 3,043 blog mentions, 5,133 forum posts and 15,528 tweets. Online media had the majority of the coverage of this event. Fortunately, for Southwest, their swift and continuous response (that too on a Saturday), ensured that the nightmare was short-lived. In fact the time before Kevin Smith’s first tweet and Southwest’s response was 16 minutes. The maximum impact of this story was 2 days before it petered out a few days later.

View the complete timeline of the tweets between Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines.

Overall Sentiment On Twitter

36% supported Southwest Airlines’ move. They believed the airline handled the event well. 26% were of the opinion that it was poor customer service/response on the airline’s part. In other words, they expected the airline to handle the situation better. 38% said that they won’t fly Southwest Airlines.

The Response

Southwest Airlines’ response was planned and well executed. As mentioned before, Southwest responded in 16 minutes after the initial complaint with an apology. After additional rants, Southwest responded again 14 minutes later. In the morning Southwest tweeted over an hour later trying to let Kevin Smith know they were listening and trying to engage with their Customer Relations VP. The next morning they tried to call as well. The blog post on the incident was posted the next day and tweeted. Because of the response, even though Smith’s version got the lion’s share of mainstream press reports, Southwest’s response was noted (see LA Times story Incident #1 and Fatgate #2).

Southwest’s response was textbook real time marketing and customer service. They responded quickly and in a friendly way. As a result, many of the customer responses on the Southwest blog were very sympathetic, especially after Smith continued to pound away. Southwest did not block any negative comments on their blog. They apologized to Kevin Smith and offered a refund, but restated their longstanding policy of charging 2 tickets for larger people on full flights. Social influence played an important role here as Southwest Airlines admitted that it had to more carefully implement their ‘delicate’ seating policy.

Popularity Chart: Mentions Of Southwest Airlines & Kevin Smith

The popularity of discussions around the incident took a major leap on February 14th, owing to numerous mentions on blogs, forums, news and Twitter. On February 15th, the popularity fell drastically and has been heading downhill ever since. The reason is because issues between Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines have been discussed at length in a completely transparent manner.

Overall Sentiment On Blogs

Comments on the blogosphere were remarkably neutral to the incident. About 31% reacted negatively to the incident and 17% reacted positively.

Conclusion

What this story highlights is the fact that influencers need to be listened to and engaged with as they have the power to potentially cause serious harm to your brand. Kevin Smith has over a million followers on Twitter and he is a celebrity. This makes him an influencer and opinion leader. Southwest Airlines’ prompt response to Kevin Smith’s tweet was its best move. Around 8 tweets were exchanged between both parties after which the airline wrote a blog post narrating the events and offering an apology. This led to rapid fall-off in interest with many taking Southwest’s side in the dispute.

“Companies can choose to not factor in the social influence of customers, but will be putting themselves at risk. It’s just a matter of time before a company has a social blowup, and by not trying to handle priority customers, could cause a small issue to quickly escalate into a larger one.” – Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester Analyst.

Methodology: We analyzed tweets posted between 13th February and 16th February. We initially analyzed the list of positive keywords associated with the Kevin smith incident. These users supported Southwest airlines & they felt that Southwest handled this issue well. We also analyzed the data from Twitter using the following keywords and assigned categories as depicted in the graph above.

Support SW airlines keywords: (”Southwest”) AND (”Kevin smith”) AND (”like” OR “love” OR “win” OR “awesome” OR “great” OR “best” OR “rocks” OR “support”)

We followed the same methodology for negative and neutral sentiment too. Here are keywords associated with negative sentiment, These users felt that the SW airlines service has poor service.

Poor Customer Service: (”Southwest”) AND (”Kevin smith”) AND (”poor service” OR “fail” OR “bad” OR “Inferior” OR “hate” OR “insane” OR “sad” OR “dislike” OR “disaster”)

We discovered there was another trend associated with this incident. Some users felt that they won’t fly SW airlines again.
I won’t fly with Southwest: “southwest” AND “Kevin smith” AND ( “never travel” OR ” don’t fly ” OR “never fly” OR “won’t fly ” OR ” never try” OR “don’t try” OR “don’t travel” OR “never going” )

Contributed by Nallai Wickreman and Jade Agnet D’costa, Social Media Marketing, Position²

• 59% thought that Google Buzz spells the end of Facebook’s dominance.
• 24% were unimpressed. They called Google Buzz a Twitter clone and a failure on Google’s part.
• 12% were completely in the dark and had no idea what Google Buzz was all about.
• 4% were eager to try Google Buzz, but hadn’t formed an opinion yet.
• 1% didn’t care that Google Buzz exists and were genuinely not interested.

Some of the features that got Google Buzz the thumbs up:

• No character limit on posts allows for easier updates
• Option to share messages and comments or keep them private
• Updates on messages are sent directly to your inbox
• Any updates on Google Buzz appear in real time
• New comments get updated without having to refresh the page
• Google Buzz integrates with other sites such as Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, etc., and is photo friendly.

But not all agree. According to Augie Ray, a Forrester Research analyst, a massive migration to Google Buzz from Twitter and Facebook is doubtful. Users on existing social networks will find it hard to make the transition to a new network built into an email provider. Other criticisms included invasion privacy and the intrusive nature of the tool. The criticism over privacy concerns grew, and Google responded swiftly. Google decided to alter one of the most-criticized features in Buzz: the ready-made circle of friends the service provided to new users based on their most frequent e-mail and chat contacts in Gmail. Instead of automatically connecting people, Buzz will in the future merely suggest a group of people they may want to follow or be followed by

Google Buzz will get a massive user lift as Gmail has over 175 million subscribers. But it remains to be seen if users are willing to use all social media in one place. Will privacy concerns slow down the march of Google Buzz? Not according to Jeremiah Owyang, “Privacy woes will scare consumers, yet adoption will continue upwards.”

Stay tuned to find out where the chips eventually fall. We’ll continue to monitor the social media space and keep you posted!

Methodology: We discovered keywords after doing a manual analysis via Twitter search for Google Buzz.

Keywords: “Twitter killer”, “I like Google buzz”, “I love Google buzz”, “twitter like service”, “Google failure”, “twitter clone”, “socially awkward”, “auto-following”, “what is Google buzz”, “end of Facebook”

Contributed by Nallai Wickreman and Jade Agnet D’costa, Social Media Marketing, Position²

In the words of Rajiv Parikh, Position² CEO,  “This award is a validation of Position²’s online marketing expertise and reinforces our commitment to creative excellence. We’re very happy to see the value we provide to our clients recognized and rewarded in a forum among our peers. We will continue to invest in our team and capabilities as we firmly believe ‘Surround and Intent Marketing’ provides tangible results for all our clients.”

The award was graciously accepted by Rajesh Sule, Position² Director of Worldwide Business Development. On receiving the award, he said “We’ve always been focused on delivering effective digital marketing collateral. Ensuring our creative visualization and execution is in tune with what end-customers are looking forward to is what gives Position² the edge, and it’s very fulfilling to see our efforts recognized.”

Position² partnered with Lenovo in mid-2009.

1. Paths that people take towards the goal. This can help eliminate redundant steps. For example, if the report reveals that most visitors tend to read the ‘About Us’ section, it might be useful to have the some summary information about the company on relevant pages.
2. Exit points in your site. These provide insights into reasons why visitors leave and which sites they go to. Exit points in the funnel are highlighted indicating where visitors drop out in the conversion process.
3. Click Patterns. For example, if you find that visitors click on the ‘Contact Us’ button across pages, then it may indicate that the relevant information is not easily accessible to the visitor. You can then modify your website accordingly.
4. Usability experiments: Another use for funnel reports is in usability experiments. You could create different versions of key pages like the ‘Landing Page’ or ‘Registration Form’ and see which design has the best visitor progression to deeper stages of the funnel.

Key Features

Let’s use a consumer financial tools site to highlight key features of the Lyris Funnel Tool like visitor progression and visitor segmentation.

Visitor Progression

To understand the flow from start to end, you need to map visitor progression across stages. Each stage is defined as a group of inter-connected pages, not just as an individual page. It displays which page groups enable visitors to progress to a deeper level by measuring the progression rate. For example, if a page group is requested in 100 visitor session and 50 of those sessions result in a visitor going deeper, the progression rate for that page group is 50%.

This is indicated in shades of blue as represented below. The darker it gets, the more influence the page has in driving visitors towards the goal. In the example below, the ‘Home Page’ and the ‘Sweepstakes Landing Page’ are the two most influential pages.

Visitor Segmentation

Segmentation is created by using labels. Using this mechanism, it is possible to study how different groups of visitors react on various page groups. Progression data for each label can then be viewed by clicking on the label name at the bottom of the report.

For example: Stage 1 can be defined as a group of landing pages. You can analyze which landing page had the highest visitor progression for all visitors as well as which page had the best progression for ‘PPC visitors’ vs. ‘Email campaign visitors.’

In the example shown below, ‘Social media” visitors (segment shown in Green) had the maximum progression from the ‘Home Page.’



Testing The Funnel

We conducted an experiment for a client who wanted to test the existing form completion (which was all on one page) against a registration process broken out over a couple of pages. The results were striking enough to re-evaluate the registration process. The current Registration Page was on a single landing page with 8 fields. The modified Registration Form (New Register) was split across 2 pages with 4 fields in each.

We found that at an overall level, the progression rate improved from 61% to 91% when we used the two step form.



However, this was not the same for all visitor segments. The Progression Rate for visitors landing on the home page via organic and social media sources was higher on the New Register form (two page form). In contrast, visitors who came in from paid advertising sources continued to show higher progression on the current Registration form.

Based on this critical insight, we recommended and helped implement different registration pages based on the visitor’s entry page. The result – overall conversion to registration increased by 23%.

Best Practices In Defining LyrisHQ Funnel

Defining the funnel correctly makes all the difference. Here are some best practices:

1. The first stage of the funnel must be your entry page. This includes the home page.
2. The pages should not be distinguished on the basis of their tracking URLs or parameters since that distinguishes a visitor source and not the page itself.
3. Use labels to create different groups of visitors and analyze visitor progression for each group.
4. Defined page groups should share common attribute. For example: A group of ‘Product pages’ or a group of ‘Registration pages.’ You should also analyze if page modifications have improved the progression rate.
5. Note that if a visitor visits two pages in the same page group, say Landing Page1 and Landing Page2, then the progression is assigned to the first page group (the one on the extreme left in our example). Thus interchanging the order of page groups can change the funnel data.

As you can see, analyzing visitor behavior on your site provides powerful insights on how visitors interact with your website. It can be a lot of fun as well.

If you have any questions or need help with your marketing analytics challenges, please contact your friends at Position².

Contributed by Divya Krishnan, Analytics, Position²

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

The above question will be answered in the following paragraphs.

With automatic bidding, the Search Engine Marketing systems (like: Adwords, Adcenter & Search Marketing) adjust the bids automatically to earn the most clicks possible within the given budget. It isn’t possible to set a specific CPC bid. However, we can set an upper limit on the CPC bids for the entire campaign. This is the CPC bid limit. Specify a bid limit and the Search Engine Marketing system will never bid over the specified limit for any single click.

If it’s important for us to control the cost of individual clicks on our ad, it’s good to specify a CPC bid limit. Say if we sell a product that costs $5.00, we may wish to set a CPC bid limit of $5.00 maximum, so we never pay more than the maximum limit for a click.

By setting a limit we have more control over our costs, but we also may restrict the ad position or the number of click the ads receive. If we choose not to set a click price limit, automatic bidding will function the same way as it normally does, choosing whatever maximum CPC bids it determines will earn the most clicks possible within the set budget.

If a lot more control is required from our end on a day-to-day basis, manual bidding for clicks will be the best advised process to go for. Nevertheless for long campaigns & low budgets, Auto bidding is very useful.

Here are 3 key points which will help us understand the working of Automatic Bidding

• When you place a bid, you enter the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for the item. The seller and other bidders don’t know your maximum bid.

• We’ll place bids using the automatic bid increment amount, which is based on the current high bid. We’ll bid only if it’s necessary to make sure that we remain the high bidder, or to meet the reserve price, up to our maximum amount.

• If another bidder places the same maximum bid or higher, we’ll place another bid. Our maximum bid is kept confidential until it is exceeded by another bidder.

Contributed by Leo V J

In the blogosphere,

• The overall sentiment was split into neutral at 47%, positive at 41% and negative at 12%.
• After an initial burst of positive sentiment, it turned more negative as critics commented on missing features.
• Towards the end of February, positive sentiment has been rising as negative sentiment is dropping. More people are making decisions about the device. It will be interesting to observe sentiment once advertising picks up.
• Among countries, U.S. blogs commented most about the iPad followed by U.K. and Germany.

Features

• It’s a light-weight device with a 9.7 inch display
• iPad’s multi-touch screen makes gaming and navigation an experience like no other
• The new iBook app transforms the iPad into a digital reader
• For a modestly priced gadget, the iPad has a long battery life of 10 hours
• The app store with 140,000 apps make the iPad a real steal

The Verdict – Lines At The Apple Store?

With lines at the store for upgrades of the iPhone, the answer is… definitely. The Apple iPad launch demonstrates the power of consistently strong marketing and product development. Loyal and vocal followers drive the mix as well. The initial buzz has translated to consistent mentions over a 30 day period. Sentiment has varied with time because experts were expecting more features and functionality than what was announced. At the same time, positive sentiment has risen consistently as people are digesting a new product category distinct from the Kindle or Tablet PC. The power of Apple’s positive brand equity is clear when news stories are reporting on TV ads released during the Oscars. It’s clear that Steve Job’s company is a master at marketing. While we do not know whether the iPad will be a high-flyer like the iPhone or a relative dud like Apple TV, we’ll continue to track the buzz.

Methodology: We compiled results from Sysomos as well as the Google AdWords keywords tool, to arrive at a keywords set for the Apple iPad.

Keywords: “Apple iPad”, “iPad”

Contributed by Sanjeev Dhanaraj, Social Media Marketing, Position²

What is it?

Google Base is a free online database where you can post any information free of cost as long as it follows Google’s program policies. Products and services, recipes, classified ads, you can post almost anything you can think of. However it is a dream land for those who have a list of good stuff to sell and no forum to market.

How does it work?

It’s really very simple. Just open an account or use an existing account if you have one. Choose to submit a feed and look at the various options for feed types. If you already have an RSS feed for your product, you can submit this, but some information will still be missing, so it is advisable to construct a text file as per Google’s field pattern. This allows you to think and include keywords and key phrases for appropriate searches. After the content is ready, submit it.

What’s amazing is that you can register up to 10 data feeds in your Google Base account and almost one million items equally distributed between 10 feeds.

Google Base and SEO

Submitting your content to Google Base actually helps you get additional organic search engine traffic.

Algorithm for ranking Google Base products is more literal in Google Base. It is not as sophisticated as the algorithm for Google search. This should be taken into account while preparing your product feed. Points such as including factors relevant to your product especially the product name, model etc in your product title and description, become crucial. The keywords you are targeting should also appear in the title and description. The first 10- 15 words are quite significant, so must be used wisely. But beware; do not stuff the description with a whole lot of keywords as this could lead to your listing to be penalized.

Adding relevant images to your feed can increase your click-through rates. This is another important optimisation tip you can use. It will help you rank well in Google Base. Finally, Google product search uses seller ratings; customers leave feedback about their purchase experience with a company as on any online purchasing portal. So try and get as good a rating as possible as this will only positively impact your rating in Google Base.

Contributed By Shruti Kekre

The Google Wonder Wheel is one such tool which helps to build your keyword list and also gives you new themes and ad group ideas. The tool is an easy way to research your niche to find keywords that are current and relevant to your PPC marketing campaign. It not only gives you an endless supply of related search terms to look at, but also allows you to study competition.

Google Wonder Wheel by definition is a graphical wheel display of relevant search terms. Clicking on one of the search terms will open a new wheel of relevant search terms and so on.

The following is a step by step guide on how to use the Google Wonder Wheel tool:

Enter your key word or phrase and perform a search. After submitting the keyword you would like to search for, click on the “show more options” link on the top left side. The results will be divided in to two screens. Among all the options, that Google offers to optimize, the Google Wonder Wheel is the option you should look out for. Remember to check the other ones as well once you are done exploring this tool.

Clicking on the Wonder Wheel link will create a sun shaped circle of terms, which are related to the original search. You can navigate your way around relevant keywords and phrases to find more results. The power of the wonder wheel is that it is such a natural way to brainstorm and very much mimics using pen and paper or a white board.

Contributed By Shweta Gaonkar

The real-time search allows users to view live updates from social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook which impacts the search engine result page (SERP). Headlines from blogs and news websites can be viewed just seconds after they are published. For businesses real-time search can increase the efficiency of both big and small online companies.

With the launch of real-time search corporate websites need to be more active on social media sites since any conversations on social networks will consequently have an ongoing effect on search results.

Now companies and organizations need to care for sites like Twitter or other forms of user-generated content that are published in real-time. Companies that were previously involved in Twitter focusing on engagement for customers and leads, now have to also optimize keywords that are used in each tweet. What it also means to a company is that if your brand doesn’t tweet, it is going to lose on some search traffic.

Real-time search by Google has been one of the most important social media announcements for 2009. In a nutshell, it means businesses cannot ignore social media as it is an indispensable marketing tool.

For companies that want to jump into the social media bandwagon, there isn’t much time to lose.

Contributed by Shantanu Barman

Go Vertical

Going vertical is an effective method to lower your cost per click (CPC) and to improve the overall traffic quality. The quality also tends to be better because of the increased propensity for the buyers to use vertical search engines in their purchase decision process. This gives a greater opportunity for those who are with limited budgets to more effectively spend their money online and to get higher ROI.

Keyword Research

While doing the keyword research we debate constantly on what to use with regards to long tail keywords or the head phrases and which would perform better and get more results. Head phrases are generic and broad keywords. The search volumes for these keywords are very high but cost is also quite high. Torso keywords are with 2 to 4 words keywords. The search volume for these keywords are low as compared to the head phrases, but the cost is also low. Long tail keywords are the keyword phrases which are more than 4 words. The cost and the search volume is very low.

While developing keywords for your search campaign make sure you are in the shoes of searcher. The keywords should be related to the target market and useful to the searcher while searching for your product or service.

Quality Score

Google and Yahoo use quality score to increase the quality of ads to improve the user experience. If the advertiser provides the consumer with the best experience possible, then the quality score for the advertiser should be good.  If the quality score is poor, you should check the keywords, ads and landing page and re-cluster the ad groups to improve your quality score.

CPL than CPC / Suggestion: CPL over CPC

The ultimate objective of your search campaign is to lower the cost per conversion. So bid high or bid aggressively on converting keywords and bid low for the other keywords in the campaign. Even when you bid high, you get conversions within your target cost per conversion.

Happy Optimization!

Contributed by Rajasekar Ragavan

Below are the ways to improve the quality score

• Increase your click-through rates. Always try testing your ads to improve click through rates. Always keep the ad settings to rotate while you are testing ads. This will allow the search engines not to show well-performing ad over the other, but instead they will rotate ads 50/50. As a result you will know the better performing ad which increases click-through rate, which means a higher quality score.

• One way to achieve a higher click-though rate is to have fewer keywords in each ad group. This will allow your text ad to display the actual keyword in your ad group, which results to be more relevant to the target user. This will help you to increase your click through rates.  It’s never late to organize your ad groups to improve your quality score. It’s okay to only have 5 or 10 keywords in each ad group. Adwords Editor will help us in this process to cluster the keywords easily and faster.

• Delete or pause non-performing keywords and ads. By doing this, your quality score improves as your account have only high CTR keywords and ads, all your non-performing ads & keywords are not active.

• Always check your keywords. As quality score depends on how well your keywords relate to your ads, and how your keywords and ads relate to your landing pages. Always try to use your keyword on your landing page.

• Landing page load times do matter. As quality score was implemented to have a great user experience.  Having a slow landing page load time can influence your quality scores. It’s very important to load your landing page within 3 seconds in all browsers, personal computers and Mac systems.

All your keywords in Google will have a quality score associated to them. If you have a quality score fewer than 7 then it’s time to change or test your ads to improve your quality score.  Always try to change keywords in to a different ad group or try changing ad messaging.

These changes will take time to get effect in your account. Might take couple of weeks to build history & improve the quality score.

Contributed By Ajesh B