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Social Media Growth in Emerging Markets, 2012 Trends and much more… | Best of the Week

Team Position² — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 10:58:45 +0000

This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

From the Position² Blog This Week:

Tracking the Growth of Social Media in Emerging Markets
Social Media usage in emerging markets is growing very quickly, with higher engagement and higher levels of usage compared to those in advanced markets. How does this matter to marketers and brands? Here’s a little research on the difference between emerging and developed markets as well as online marketing tips to get started.

Video of the Week
Fan Fiction and Social Media: Lessons From the Trenches Carri Bugbee, founder of Big Deal PR is better known for her role tweeting as Peggy Olson, a fictional character on AMC’s Mad Men. She shares the story behind her fan fiction role and the lessons brands can learn from her story.

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Google Makes Web Search More Secure

Team Position² — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 16:15:11 +0000

Google recently announced that it will now use the encryption protocol called SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to encrypt all the searches that people do using the Google Search Engine if they are signed-in using their Google Account login.

This means that these logged-in Google users will be redirected to https://www.google.com (note the extra’s’) from http://www.google.com (non SSL) once they are signed-in with their Google account. This switch to SSL encrypts your search query which means that the sites the user visits after clicking on the results from Google will no longer contain the “Referrer data” (data which tells the destination site how it was found, whether from a search term entered into a search engine or from an external link) except in the case of ads.

Only Google and your web browser will see your searches and a third party (not even Google Analytics) will not know what is being searched. The new encryption will block referrer data, which means site owners will know that you came from Google, but won’t receive information on what the exact search was.

How does this affect SEO?

With the new system in place, Organic Traffic can still be tracked, but it will not be possible to drill down to the keywords from which the website visit was derived. Even Google Analytics isn’t spared, one will no longer be able to isolate the search term associated with the visit in GA.

However the keywords or terms Google search engine users use to find their websites will still be offered on Google Webmaster Central. Presently, Google Webmaster Central shows the top 1,000 queries that a site appeared for at Google – as well as was selected for – over a 30 day period.

Referrer Data for Ads:

However referrer data will be passed into the advertiser’s site, which means they (ad sites), will still receive information that they currently get with unencrypted search. The main reason stated by Google being that advertisers need the referrer data to evaluate their ad campaigns, to know which keywords or search terms are driving traffic in order to improve the ads which we believe is to keep the advertisers happy.

However, when the user is signed-in and clicks on an ad with the advertiser’s website being HTTP rather than HTTPS, Google will send the search term for that specific search to the advertiser over HTTP.

The encryption change as per Google will impact only the single digit percentage of search users, anyone who hasn’t signed-in will still send referrer data to the websites he/she visits which means lots of data for SEOs to do a conversion analysis to the keyword level.

With the move to SSL, Google has taken web search security to the next level; the trick is to balance data security for the web users and to keep advertisers happy.

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Tips to Create a Successful Social Media Campaign and much more… | Best of the Week

Team Position² — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 11:32:22 +0000

This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

From the Position² Blog This Week:

Designing a Winning Social Media Campaign
Content is one the key factors that defines a well-thought out social media campaign. However, there are some equally important components that go into creating winning online marketing messages. In this article, we discuss these less obvious building blocks that every social media marketer should keep in mind.

Video of the Week
Fly Or Die: G+ Or Facebook? Who Flew Higher? F8 is afoot and it looks like Facebook schooled the Internet. But what about G+ and, most important, the new features added to head Facebook off at the pass. Both services are wildly impressive – but only one can fly higher than the other.

Get 10% off your CONVERGE Fall 2011 tickets!
CONVERGE is a premier event this September that promises practical and tactical information from leading companies that are clearly ahead of the curve in professionally managing social, search and mobile marketing. Features keynotes by Randi Zuckerberg and speakers include Tim Collins, Brian Solis, Jory Des Jardins and Rajiv Parikh.

All you have to do is enter the discount coupon code “Position2″ while making your ticket purchase to get a 10% discount! Click here to know more about CONVERGE 2011.

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Best of the Week! – Feb 18 2011

Team Position² — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 09:13:55 +0000

This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

Video of the Week
The Future of Social Media?
Representatives from Facebook, Wildfire, Zappos.com, Altimeter Group, Sprout Social, Discovery Communications, and the Marine Corp give their thoughts.

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Tracking The Fallout Of Groupon’s Super Bowl Ad

Team Position² — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 17:01:08 +0000

Superbowl ads are among the most-watched TV (and most expensive) commercials in the United States and Canada. They have an audience in the hundreds of millions on TV and many more on YouTube. A Superbowl ad reaches a captive audience of football fans, with millions of viewing parties ensconced in the comfort of their homes to watch the biggest NFL game of the year.

So it was with high expectations that 3 Groupon ads (Save the Money – Tibet, Save the Money – Rainforest and Save the Money – Whales) were run on Superbowl Sunday to a mass audience. One featured actress Elizabeth Hurley talking about the Amazon rainforest and pitching Groupon for helping her get a major discount at a bikini waxing salon. Another showed Oscar winning actor Cuba Gooding Jr. Talking about saving the whales and getting a hefty discount on a whale-watching cruise. So far so good.

Some of the most memorable Superbowl ads use humor to drive home a point. Groupon’s daily discount offers are often written by comedy writers and are usually cheeky and sardonic. This time, though, the commercials, directed by mockumentary expert Christopher Guest (of Spinal Tap fame), clearly missed their mark.

The ad featuring actor Timothy Hutton started off looking like a conscientious ‘Free Tibet’ statement, but ended awkwardly with a line about being able to get fantastic Tibetan fish curry at a Chicago restaurant by having bought Groupon discounts. While all 3 ads were created by Crispin Porter Bogusky and intended as spoofs of celebrity-endorsed public service announcements (PSA) that frequent the airwaves, the light hearted humor in the Timothy Hutton ad did attract lots of attention in a way that was not foreseen.

There was widespread revulsion to the apparent trivialization of the suffering of Tibetans under the oppressive Chinese rule. Team Position²’s Brand Monitor™ tracked the reaction across millions of Blogs, Forums, Tweets and Facebook posts.

We can easily see the major spike in mentions of ‘Groupon’ on all social media channels (on blogs, forums, twitter and traditional online media) immediately following the Superbowl.

The Fallout

Stung by the widespread negative sentiment, Groupon’s founder Andrew Mason wrote a blog post reflecting on his motivations behind the campaign, emphasizing Groupon’s commitment to social causes with efforts such as The G Team website and the fact that Groupon was born out of The Point, a Web site that helps organize people to raise money or bring people together for a particular cause.

Alas, the tongue-in-cheek ads did not mention or suggest anywhere that Groupon was an ardent supporter of social and environmental causes. Millions of viewers thought the ads were done in bad taste and this opinion spread throughout the web and hurt the Groupon brand image, as these Brand Monitor graphs indicate:

US States Sentiment – Before and After Super Bowl

Blogs Negative Sentiment Growth

Traditional Media and Forums Negative Sentiment Growth

The high negative sentiment numbers seen above forced Groupon to withdraw the controversial ads on Feb 11 and Groupon’s Andrew Mason was compelled to reflect on the imbroglio in an apologetic blog post:

“We hate that we offended people, and we’re very sorry that we did – it’s the last thing we wanted. We’ve listened to your feedback, and since we don’t see the point in continuing to anger people, we’re pulling the ads (a few may run again tomorrow – pulling ads immediately is sometimes impossible). We will run something less polarizing instead. We thought we were poking fun at ourselves, but clearly the execution was off and the joke didn’t come through. I personally take responsibility; although we worked with a professional ad agency, in the end, it was my decision to run the ads.

To the charities (for which we expect to net over $500,000) and others that have spoken out on our behalf, we appreciate your support. To those who were offended, I feel terrible that we made you feel bad. While we’ve always been a little quirky, we certainly aren’t trying to be the kind of company that builds its brand on creating controversy – we think the quality of our product is a much stronger message.”

Conclusion

While humor certainly can improve ad stickiness, enhance a brand and contribute dramatically to its growth, it can sometimes backfire if the comedic reference is in poor taste or not easily understood by viewers. The plight of Tibetan refugees in this case was seemingly swept aside by the flippant reference to Groupon’s discount on meals at a Tibetan restaurant in Chicago, and that angered social groups and activists fighting for a free Tibet.

We feel that Groupon lost a great opportunity to reinforce their service to social and environmental causes by not specifying that they donate generously to several important groups. This incident is a good example of the speed of feedback brands can receive via social media. In only a few days, a TV campaign was deemed inappropriate and taken off the air, based only on social media feedback. Also, this proves that popular brands are no longer owned, promoted and supported only by their companies, but also by their customers and the general public.

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Quality Score myth buster

Team Position² — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:08:00 +0000

In the PPC world, a Quality Score is a measure which tells you the relevance of your keyword to the users search query. Specifically, Quality Score is a score given to a particular keyword taking historical data of the keyword’s Click Through Rate, quality of the landing pages, relevance of the ad with the keyword and several other factors.

Why Quality Score is important for a PPC professional? Not because it gives a rating on a scale of ten but as a score which reduces your CPC when your Quality Score moves up, which affects your First Page Bid Estimates and your Ad Position.

Today I would be breaking 5 myths about Quality Score.

Restructuring your account does not cause you to lose your Historical Quality Score data. We will not lose the historical performance of keywords, ads and landing pages, all these data is preserved, so feel free to restructure your account to optimize for higher conversion goals.
Quality Score does not suffer when your ads are paused or shown infrequently. Quality Score is determined by the performance of a keyword in combination with its ads. So pausing an ad or showing it infrequently does not affect, as these ads are not accruing any performance data. Showing your ads seasonally wouldn’t reduce your Quality Score.
A higher bid will not improve your Quality score. A higher bid will increase your Ad position but will not increase your Quality Score, as it is determined by a number of factors like CTR, Ad Relevancy and others.
Changing a keyword from broad to exact will not improve its Quality Score. For example a keyword like schools in broad match will show ads for variations of it like B schools, Animation schools etc. Even though your ad might show up in these instances, its performance will have no impact on Quality Score. The keyword’s Quality Score would only be affected by how your ad performed on the search term schools since it exactly matches the keyword. So changing a broad match to exact match will not affect its Quality Score.
Ad conversion rate does not affect your Quality Score. Setting an easy conversion event on your landing page to artificially boost conversion rates will not have any effect on Quality Scores of a keyword. So let the landing pages have the required set of fields to collect all the details of the prospective customer.

On the whole it becomes mandatory for a PPC professional to always look into Quality Score as a measure of how his keywords, ads and landing pages are working as whole but not as individual entities and make corrections to increase relevancy between these.

Contributed By Chetan Prakash

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