Category Archives: Web Marketing
Compelling Social Media Communication (Viva the Internet)
One of the many reasons to be passionate about the Internet, and to defend it from politicians who want to curtail it, is its capacity to be a great democratic leveler. Social media tools, with their potential reach limited only by language and access to an internet connection, provide a megaphone for the little guy to be heard as never before.
Dave Carroll’s video United Breaks Guitars on YouTube is the social media case study de rigueur, a not too subtle warning to companies that they ignore the power of bottom up communication at their own peril.
Carroll’s video, 11 million views to date, resonates in part due to its authenticity, its sincerity. Carroll demonstrates that effective communication on a shoestring budget is indeed possible using social media channels.
United breaks guitars
Naturally social network sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ have each done their part in spreading his message by virtual word of mouth.
Digital media measurement: campaign tracking made easy + free tools
So many digital communications channels, yet so little time. As more and more channels emerge for website traffic acquisition, it becomes ever more important to accurately measure a channel’s effectiveness. That means asking and answering difficult, if sometimes awkward, questions of the type “Does anyone really engage with the monthly newsletter?”. If readers are engaging, where exactly does the engagement occur, i.e. which links get clicked? In the case of social media marketing, does anyone really care enough about Facebook page posts or twitter tweets to click through to the company website?
Facebook EdgeRank and 3 steps to optimize visibility in the Facebook News Feed (NFO)
The Facebook News Feed contains a selection of highlights from Facebook friends, pages to which a person is connected on Facebook and, to a limited degree, groups. The news feed receives significant visibility in Facebook due to its prime location in the central column of a Facebook user’s home page and its ongoing updates. The News Feed content consists of news and posts from friends and pages, friend requests, tagged photos & notes, responses to event invitations and notifications of group memberships.
The News feed is actually divided into two streams: Top News and Most Recent. The Top News stream, the default, contains selected highlights deemed by Facebook to be the most interesting and relevant, while the most recent stream, visible by clicking on a link, contains almost all of the current activity of friends and pages. It seems that about half of Facebook users click to view the most recent news. The Most Recent updates are limited to activity from 250 pages and friends but you can remove this constraint by choosing the Edit option at the bottom of the page.
Eying Search Engine Market Share in the era of Bing
At the end of May Microsoft announced its new search engine, Bing. As data from Bing’s first full month becomes available, I thought it would be interesting to take a quick look at the current market share enjoyed by the major search engines in the US and a “typical” European market, Italy. The real test of Bing’s success will to be to check back in a few months to see if Bing has picked up traction with users or not. As the folks from Cuil can attest, a burst of publicity doesn’t necessary translate into loyal search users.
Search Engine statistics, USA vs. Italy
Most web intelligence services are currently US centric with very little worldwide reach. Unless stated otherwise, the data which follows is for the US market. Where available, I’ve also provided data for the Italian market, which for search engine usage is rather typical of most west European markets.
Google AJAX Search results, tracking in Google Analytics and, um, an API rant
As many may know by now, Google has been experimenting for a few months with Ajax (JavaScript) based search results. One problem with the initial trial was that no referrer information was passed when a user clicked on a search result, “breaking” the historic ability of Web Analytics systems to track search traffic from Google. Google has more than one service on each of it’s domains which may send traffic to a website, such as the Google Reader, so just knowing traffic is from Google isn’t so informative.
Keyword information from search referrers is in particular very important as we want to know not only where our visitors came from, but what was their intent, intent indicated though the keywords they use to express their need or desire while searching.
What’s New With Social Media Marketing?
Search Engine Marketing is part of a bigger web ecosystem. At SMX West 2009, three habitués of the social media scene shared tips on successfully promoting a website using social media.
Moderator: Sara Holoubek, Consultant, Columnist and SEMPO Board of Directors
Speakers:
- Chris Bennett (@chrisbennett), President, 97th Floor
- Brent Csutoras (@BrentCsutoras), Online Marketing Consultant, Brent Csutoras, Inc
- Gab Goldenberg (@GabGoldenberg), Founder, SEO ROI Services
Brent Csutoras describes the user-generated news site reddit. When logged in, the front page is dashboard of reddits. You can create your own social media site using a CNAME sub domain name and the Reddit platform. (Add a CNAME record aliasing your domain to rhs.reddit.com. Enter this new domain, e.g. social.antezeta.com, in the domain field when you create a new reddit. – Sean)
The human dimension of Search Marketing
I love the web. Despite being somewhere in Italy, I’m able to follow many professional conferences like SMX West through session write-ups posted online. After all, it isn’t always possible to attend conferences in person. Yet even when the post quality is high, there’s something missing, something that can’t be replicated virtually. Above all, its the human dimension, the networking experience. If you haven’t had the opportunity to attend professional conferences (or you’re a bit shy!), you might think, “what’s he on about?“.
As I reflect on the various breakfast, lunch and cocktail chats I had at SMX West, I think about the breadth of interesting people I met.
There’s excitement in being around so many bright and curious people– digital novices to seasoned veterans, those who practice search marketing to those who know that understanding search is a key to their company’s (and their own) future.
Page views value little in the monetization of a website
The title might be a bit provocative, but the topic is important for companies which want to insure their website is a profit center rather than a cost center. The number of page views tracked by a web analytics system is often a weak indicator of website monetization potential. With the advent of monetization programs such as Google’s AdSense, the specific content of a web page has become much more telling in this regard. Let’s see why.
In this article we will restrict ourselves to advertising as the monetization tool.
The success factors for the monetization of a website depend on the advertising model used. The traditional approach is to sell banner space, historically at a cost per 1000 impressions (CPM). In this model, the greater the number of page views, the better. Life is all rather straight forward. Yet over time many advertisers have become more sophisticated, offering to pay just for the traffic actually received, e.g. the click-through model where the site carrying the ad receives a fee only if a user clicks on the banner, arriving at the advertiser’s site.
Recent Comments