Interactive Advertising Q&A Roundup

As an active member of communities touching the interactive advertising world I answer many questions on a daily basis. Each week I will round of some of the best questions and answers for your consumption.

Joy Abdulla asks:

How can social marketing be shown to be effective in terms of dollar sales?

Is there a mechanism/ method/formula through which we can effectively forecast or project what would be potential earnings for a brand by utilizing social marketing techniques on various sites?

ADMAVEN answers:

Joy,

The answer to your question is that you must have a third party software (or design your own) to measure the effects of your campaign. If the campaign is simple you may be able to track metrics yourself, but if there are any added layers of complication you will need extra help.

I have linked a company called Sway that does this very thing for many campaigns rooted in social media.

LINK: http://www.swayonline.com

Rich Dettmer, Director of Digital Strategy and Partner at Slack Barshinger, asks:

What law governs web based data collection?

When collecting data on a web site, is the collection governed by the laws of the country the data is collected from, or the country where the site is hosted? For example: If I am collecting user registrations from Europe on a site that is hosted in the United States, who’s laws govern that transaction?

ADMAVEN answers:

Hi Rich!

International law is tricky in the traditional corporate sense, but combined with the Internet there is very little case law to call upon.

The generally accepted concept is that you are governed by the place where your business is incorporated (whatever mechanism that may be). If you do not have a brick and mortar establishment, you may be subject to the laws of any country through which you transact. For example, collecting money from a UK citizen and storing that money in the United States exposes you to legal liability in both countries, however collecting data with no financial transaction most likely does not expose you to the country in which the individual providing the data resides. There is some case law along these lines regarding spam as a method of collecting data, and I do not recommend mass emails as a foreign campaign strategy.

In general the United States is a rules based country when it comes to law. You can review case law and find clearly (sometimes not so clearly) written torts, statutes, and laws that govern our businesses. In Europe (since this is in your example I will use it here) the laws are principle based. In other words, courts tend to look at your intent more than your action when deciding cases. If you are not doing anything blatantly illegal, I would say your liability is very low.

You can always seek council through an international attorney, but this is a costly engagement and may not provide you with a clearer answer.

I highly recommend contacting the consulate of each country in which you are interested to discover more about what your legal exposure may be. In my experience they are very helpful and willing to discuss these issues as well as the culture of their home country (which may help you formulate regional marketing strategies).

DISCLAIMER!

I am not a lawyer, though I do hold a Bachelor of Science in International Business and am almost through my MBA in the same subject. These kinds of questions appear in case studies and course materials. I hope my answer helped!

Laura Fitton, Principal and Founder of Pistachio Consulting, Inc., asks:

How can businesses use Twitter and other microblogging tools?

Communications, advertising, PR and social media agencies, what are your client's burning questions about Twitter and other "microblogging" platforms? Where do you look for the answers to what they should be doing?

ADMAVEN answers:

Laura,

Clients do not typically know about Twitter as a business tool. When appropriate, I may suggest microblogging as a way to engage a passionate target base.

The important thing when using Twitter - or any blog based tool - is to provide relevant content that is of interest to the target audience. Because Twitter is an opt-in service, target users must feel as though they are receiving something in exchange for their attention.

You can read more about how to use blog and microblog tools in ADMAVEN - The Interactive Advertising Blog, which I have linked below as a resource. Scroll down to the article entitled, "SEO vs. SMO Part 3: The Social Metropolis". Read the linked materials in the article and you will have a complete understanding of how to engage a target audience with a blog or microblog tool.

LINK: http://admaven.blogspot.com/2008/08/sem-vs-smo-part-3-social-metropolis.html

Natalia Alexandrou, Senior Marketing Executive at Report Buyer & Piribo, asks:

B2B Affiliate Marketing - does it work!?

I'm interesting in hearing your experiences (good and bad) with B2B affiliate marketing... and I'm not talking about the affiliate programs which use B2C tactics such as printer companies etc.

Are there any success stories? How did you approach possible partners? What tools work best for you?

We are a B2B company and we launched an affiliate program 5 months ago through a network with a dedicated campaign manager... and are only getting B2C affiliate sites joining our program. Is the industry just not ready to take on B2B affiliates?

ADMAVEN answers:

Ms. Alexandrou,

My experience has taught me several things about B2B Affiliate Marketing:

1) Pursue affiliates with whom you have a long and trusted business (or personal) relationship first. This may involve a C level meeting where you speak to the CEO, COO, and CTO to generate a list of companies that are willing to go the extra mile and form an affiliate relationship.
2) Be flexible. Although you should come in with a detailed plan on your Affiliate program, be willing to tweak the plan for each Affiliate. Every company is different, and applying one model to your targets may discourage them from forming a relationship.

When I started my B2B affiliate program, we went to our CEO and generated a couple of leads with whom we knew the CEO had maintained a personal relationship. These companies trusted our brand name, and were willing to at least listen. We then came in with our presentation, including the buy in figures, terms, etc... We had a contract ready to go, but never got a signature right away. Instead, we found the average time to close an affiliate was 6 months, and involved detailed negotiations with top management on both sides. Each deal was unique, but persistence and follow-up helped get the job done!

Nicholas Kinports (follow him on Twitter @ADMAVEN) has worked in the interactive technology world for over 15 years. He is the Digital Strategy Lead and founder of Chicago-based digital marketing firm lonelybrand, where he directs the creation and execution of digital marketing programs that generate measurable signups, conversions and sales.

Yahoo Buzz: Room For Growth?

Since making its official public release three days ago Yahoo Buzz has generated just that: a lot of buzz. But has it delivered? The premise of any site using the user rated content model (YouTube, Digg, etc…) is to push relevant articles into the hands of readers by peer voting. Of course any organization can submit its own writing – ADMAVEN does it for every article – only large groups of individuals voting for a submission will bring that particular article to prominence.

So far Yahoo Buzz has acted more like Yahoo Drone.

In press releases and interviews leading up to the public opening of Buzz, Yahoo stated that individual bloggers, small-time writers, and other such users will be given a chance to be on the front page and vaulted into relevancy. Unfortunately that just has not happened. Major news organizations dominate the first page of articles, with a few non-syndicated bits buried deep within the back pages.

My advice to Yahoo Buzz is simple: get rid of the New York Times, Salon, Times.com, and all the other major news organizations bloating the service. We know where to get that information, assuming we don’t already have RSS Feeds set up for it. The key for Yahoo Buzz should be to carve out a niche of relevant, user generated content that includes the blogosphere, videos, and other popular media. In this way Buzz can differentiate itself from its competitors and get away from the traditional news aggregation model that so many other sites employ.

Nicholas Kinports (follow him on Twitter @ADMAVEN) has worked in the interactive technology world for over 15 years. He is the Digital Strategy Lead and founder of Chicago-based digital marketing firm lonelybrand, where he directs the creation and execution of digital marketing programs that generate measurable signups, conversions and sales.

SEM vs. SMO Part 3: The Social Metropolis

Social Media Optimization continues to grow at an exponential – and nearly incomprehensible – pace. In the agency world it is almost impossible to stay at the forefront of the SMO environment due to this rapid expansion. That being said, there are a few agencies that do an outstanding job of keeping abreast. In the third installment of the SEM vs. SMO series, I will focus on GoViral, the concept of The Social Metropolis, and the book by the same name.

To begin, let’s get up to speed on the concept. At the end of the article I will provide a link to download the full book free of charge from GoViral.

Jimmy Maymann, the founder and CEO of GoViral, presented his concept of The Social Metropolis this year in Cannes. The video of his presentation is below. Though lengthy, it provides a basic introduction to the concept of The Social Metropolis and what it means to enter this emerging space.

One of the key takeaways from Mr. Maymann’s presentation is the concept of democratization of information. As more people have free and unfettered access to the internet, we see a growing trend of consumer empowerment. The following excerpt from The Social Metropolis highlights the resulting disparity between consumer intelligence and the current state of the ad industry:

“The result is a genuine mismatch between a media and marketing experienced public, and a marketing/advertising industry that, generally speaking, have been delivering the same product since the 1970s. I magine if Ford or Sony did the same...? The old model is broken - a new one is only slowly taking shape. Over the past decades, companies have become used to defining their message, shaping their brand, and having complete control over the channels of communication. Now they are losing it” (The Social Metropolis – Page 11).

Though there is a bounty of new and exciting information in The Social Metropolis, ADMAVEN wants to highlight the bigger picture – respect SMO or be left in the dust.

Explaining exactly how you can take advantage of SMO to leverage your next big campaign is out of the scope of this article. This information, however, can be gleaned by reading GoViral’s The Social Metropolis. Visit GoViral and download the book here.

Happy reading!

Nicholas Kinports (follow him on Twitter @ADMAVEN) has worked in the interactive technology world for over 15 years. He is the Digital Strategy Lead and founder of Chicago-based digital marketing firm lonelybrand, where he directs the creation and execution of digital marketing programs that generate measurable signups, conversions and sales.

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Nicholas Kinports (follow him on Twitter @ADMAVEN) has worked in the interactive technology world for over 15 years. He is the Digital Strategy Lead and founder of Chicago-based digital marketing firm lonelybrand, where he directs the creation and execution of digital marketing programs that generate measurable signups, conversions and sales.

SEM vs. SMO Part 2

Social Media Optimization (SMO) seeks to drive traffic not from search engines, but from third party websites, applications, and social networking services. Adding SMO to a campaign can be the missing link between mediocre response number and an award winning response!

SMO can be added to an existing campaign – depending on the target market and product/service offering – or be the single method of generating publicity. The premise behind SMO involves connecting with the customer on a personal level without the use of a traditional click-through advertisement. Rohit Bhargava, SVP of Digital Strategy and Marketing at Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence, is credited with inventing the term Social Media Optimization. Mr. Bhargava outlines the basics in his article, “5 Rules of Social Media Optimization”:

1. Increase your linkability - This is the first and most important priority for websites. Many sites are "static" - meaning they are rarely updated and used simply for a storefront. To optimize a site for social media, we need to increase the linkability of the content. Adding a blog is a great step, however there are many other ways such as creating white papers and thought pieces, or even simply aggregating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy - Adding content features like quick buttons to "add to del.icio.us" are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but we go beyond this, making sure pages include a list of relevant tags, suggested notes for a link (which come up automatically when you go to tag a site), and making sure to tag our pages first on popular social bookmarking sites (including more than just the homepage).
3. Reward inbound links - Often used as a barometer for success of a blog (as well as a website), inbound links are paramount to rising in search results and overall rankings. To encourage more of them, we need to make it easy and provide clear rewards. From using Permalinks to recreating Similarly, listing recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you
4. Help your content travel - Unlike much of SEO, SMO is not just about making changes to a site. When you have content that can be portable (such as PDFs, video files and audio files), submitting them to relevant sites will help your content travel further, and ultimately drive links back to your site.
5. Encourage the mashup - In a world of co-creation, it pays to be more open about letting others use your content (within reason). YouTube's idea of providing code to cut and paste so you can imbed videos from their site has fueled their growth. Syndicating your content through RSS also makes it easy for others to create mashups that can drive traffic or augment your content.

I suggest reading Mr. Bhargava’s article if you want to get the basics of how SMO has grown from a relatively undefined (yet practiced) advertising technique to a clearly defined, methodical operation to supplement or found your next big campaign.

In my next article I will suggest some specific techniques I use to leverage the power of SMO for any type of campaign.

Nicholas Kinports (follow him on Twitter @ADMAVEN) has worked in the interactive technology world for over 15 years. He is the Digital Strategy Lead and founder of Chicago-based digital marketing firm lonelybrand, where he directs the creation and execution of digital marketing programs that generate measurable signups, conversions and sales.