Social Media Marketing Summit: Segmentation/Diversity
This session took place October 1st and promised to teach those in attendance how marketers can reach very specific groups of users via behavioral targeting, niche social sites, campaigns at specific demographics, hyper targeting and more. The panel consisted of:
- Chris Saad, Founder and CEO, DataPortability.org
- Will Moss, CEO, ConnectPlatform.com
- Ian Swanson, Founder and CEO, Sometrics
To be honest I didn’t like the unorganized nature the panelists took, but there were some decent take-home notes to be had from the session.
Bullet Point Review!
- Methods to find a niche are Google Search and Twitter Search.
- Don’t just observe, participate.
- Lots of people started with apps and then moved to a main web property.
- Find your audience – use demographics, psychographics, behavioral marketing – find them and partner up.
- Partner with fast growing niche networks or create one if it doesn’t exist yet in the niche you’re interested in.
- Experiment with creative ads with the owners of these networks.
- Advertising is yelling, marketing is having a conversation.
- Learn the social contract and participate accordingly.
- Have a process in place on how to respond and join the conversation.
- Put your money where your mouth is and allocate resources to monitor and respond in social media settings.
- There is a need for a new metric. Keywords used to tell people, not so much anymore.
- Need for interests to be measured (APML).
- How do you target? Try – do sample buys, experiment, do lots of little buys.
- Social networks are still cheap to advertise on because they don’t yet perform like traditional ad buys in terms of CPM.
- See what keywords people associate with your brand (quality, sucks, etc).
- Use social networking for lead generation.
- No one’s talking about your product, they’re talking about your brand – so collaborate and build a product that they’ll want to talk about.
- Use social media to saturate a niche market; brainstorm about communities of interest and participate and show your subject matter expertise.
- Use search engines to find individuals and follow them back to their communities.
Points brought up during the Q&A
You might want to go local before going national – not all products and services scale effectively to a national audience.- Widgets are the bumper sticker of the web.
- Develop content and specific tags (zip codes, city names, etc.) in targeting.
- Get analytics to see where your traffic is coming from.
- Keyword ads like AdWords, Facebook, MySpace are great for segmentation.
- Hyper targeting is growing in adoption.
- Open Social – create widgets that will work across multiple social networks.
- If you’re going to buy advertising on a social network, you should also participate in that network.
- Be part of that eco system in as many ways as possible.
- Using engagement to see how well ads work can also be used to see what a particular segment is interested in (e.g. how many people mouse over, click, etc.)
- Data portability will break down barriers to entry.
- Using a 3rd party metric contrasts vs. internal and lends credibility and gives you a comparison of you vs. your competitors.
Even the Q&A portion was just an extension of the session, so it was hard to really distinguish what people were asking. It was a decent session but could have been perked up with a bit more empirical data and maybe some real-world experiences.
Read MoreNew Edge Media Website is Live!
At long last, the website for New Edge Media is live and operational (almost)! Go check it out immediately: New Edge Media! I started with NEM almost a month ago and it’s been great so far. We’re doing a lot of awesome things, and there hasn’t been any shortage of work for me. Right now most of my efforts have been directed towards the PrintPlace.com affiliate program, getting everything running off the ground.
We offer a lot of great services at New Edge, including Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and Paid Search Marketing.
The blog link isn’t operational yet since our company blog isn’t quite ready for unveiling to the public just yet. We are excited to chronicle our journey as a new company in this crazy space. It’ll feature blog posts by our CEO, Brandy Eddings, as well as by our entire senior staff.
Another great development ready to unveil today is that we now have a PrintPlace.com Sub-Forum on the AffSpot.com Affiliate Marketing Forums. I hope for this to be an active place for affiliates to talk to each other, collaborate, ask questions, and have fun. I really hope that it’ll explode into a really great area for discourse among affiliates and give everyone the opportunity to get exactly what they want out of the program.
I’m so excited! Please, we’re always open for feedback so if you have any, leave me a comment!
Read MoreBlogWorldExpo 08: Affiliate Marketing Secrets for Bloggers
I was looking forward to attending this panel despite knowing that I probably knew all there was to know on this subject, because I knew two of the panelists. Boy was I wrong – it just goes to show you that there’s always something new to be learned when attending trade shows! The panel consisted of:
- Shawn Collins, Co-Founder, Affiliate Summit
- Mike Allen, CEO, Shopping-Bargains.com
- Tim Jones, Blogger, TheRealTimJones.com
I was proud of the boys – despite having a crowd of general noobs to affiliate marketing they did an excellent job and really threw out some solid information.
Bullet Point Review!
- Blended ads look nicer and work better.
- PopShops has a WordPress plugin that’s super easy to use.
- Remember to work the ads in creatively.
- Think and plan for the long term.
- Your blog is your brand.
- Be the expert.
- Share your space.
- Affiliate marketing is a great start but doesn’t stop there.
- Be careful – advertising the wrong way can tarnish your image.
- Think like a business and set goals.
- Craft a business plan and follow it.
- Look for other retail opportunities (your own affiliate program?)
- There’s lots of opportunity for creativity.
- Most people don’t know it’s an affiliate link and most don’t care (when using text links).
- .htaccess redirect helps clean links up – fairly simple process.
- 50%+ of subscribers come by email.
- Utilize social media to build readership and establish yourself as an expert.
- People have to get there before they can click.
- MaxBlogPress, OpenX are good free ad serving plugins.
- Ninja Affiliate 1.5 is a paid plugin that automatically ads contextual links to keywords you enter in.
- Peel away ads (page ears) also work well
- Target your ads to your audience.
- Yahoo! Answers works well to help establish yourself within your niche as an expert.
- Don’t venture too far outside your niche. You want to upsell and compliment your blog.
- The first thing you’d do? Tim says sign up with the affiliate networks. Shawn suggested doing a Google Search to get a feel for your competition. Mike advises to make sure your site works and that content is up before applying for the affiliate programs – the merchant has to want you.
- Spend the $10 on a domain & it’ll get over the first threshold when affiliate managers review your application.
I don’t have any notes from the Q&A portion of the panel because a lot of it was specific to those bloggers asking the questions – they wanted to know specifics. Personally I don’t think a Q&A session is really the time for that but I understand the desire for people to take any opportunity they can get to ask a question of an expert!
Read MoreSocial Media Marketing Summit: Brand Spotlight on Best Buy
This panel was done differently from the rest at the Social Media: The Marketing Summit conference at the beginning of this month. Instead of a self-moderated panel, event organizer Lisa Picarille moderated this by grilling the two panelists from Best Buy on Blue Shirt Nation (BSN), their internal social network. The panelists were:
- Steve Bendt, Sr. Manager Social Technology, Best Buy
- Gary Koelling, Sr. Manager Social Technology, Best Buy
These guys were hilarious AND on target – something that was supposed to help out the advertising guys with selling plasma screen televisions turned into such a great outlet for employees.
Bullet Point Review!
- Started out with a couple hundred users across the network of stores.
- For the first few months it was just a collection of jokes shared with fellow employees.
- Started in June 2006 – by October ’06 the execs liked it and threw money at them and said, “Grow it. Fast”.
- They actually gave some of the money back so they could take some pressure off and feel free to fail on the way to growing.
- Used the money to go to the stores around the country to get feedback from employees on what they wanted to use the BSN for.
- It no longer belonged to Steve & Gary; it belonged to the users.
- They needed to build trust – gave out t-shirts and stickers to woo the employees they talked to.
- Part of the success is relate-ability to Steve & Gary but not much. Gary said, “We can’t be interesting for that long”.
- Members became just as important, if not more, as admins.
- Early on they identified users who had admin potential and promoted some moderators.
- In 2 years they’ve only had to moderate 3-4 posts.
- Mostly users are moderating each other pretty well.
- The average employee age for Best Buy is 22, so these are the social media generation.
- A device/mobile version is coming so execs and higher up employees who rely on these devices more than the average sales clerk can access the BSN readily.
- Have there been any outside benefits? They hosted a video contest to help boost 401-K enrollment – something they thought for sure would fail when the HR department came to them with the idea. 401-K enrollment increased 30% with 40,000 more employees nationwide enrolling.
- Does it help control the “bad stuff” that gets out there? Not really; they do have about a 50% turnover rate, which is just the nature of retail.
- How do things get acted on? They pass on feedback to those who need to hear it. Example: the company was going to announce that they were going to be severely modifying the employee discount and that got leaked to the forums. Activity skyrocketed with concerned employees who put out there all the reasons why they needed the discount to stay as good as it was. Management listened and kept the discount unaltered because they not just saw people complaining but saw intelligent discourse on why people wanted it to stay the same, and they agreed.
- There have been a lot of smaller and medium sized issues that corporate has seen on the BSN and acted on.
- Now employees have a voice that matters.
- Has there been an impact on employee retention? This MAY be coincidental since they have no actual data to back it up, but they did notice that before the BSN, Best Buy had about a 60% turnover rate, and as of a couple of months ago it was down to below 50% for the first time ever.
- Has the venting been positive? What they see more often than angry venting is organic problem solving & collaboration. Example: person at store A says they have a fixture that doesn’t look right, person at store B chimes in to tell them it’s the wrong one and who they should call to get the right one.
- They can set up user names like any other social network, but they are traceable back to their employee ID if they break the rules.
- Videos are uploaded almost every day, original music; it’s interesting to watch how people group up, whether it’s by their personal interests, departments they work in, etc.
- BSN is all internal, but one step they took towards being external is BSN Bazaar. Vendors can set up a room & members can come look up product info.
- Also launched a universal gift registry, GifTag.com.
- Most companies aren’t built for co-creation like this; they’re built for command & control.
Points brought up during the Q&A
- There’s no immediate plan to expand the BSN to consumers.
- When an employee leaves the company, their account is blocked – it’s an HR thing. They’d love to keep them around; maybe it’s something they can work out in the future. If they rejoin Best Buy, their account can be reinstated.
- Has there been any correlated rise in sales? There might be, but they really haven’t been looking at that data or concerned with it.
- Sales aren’t the point.
- Used an open source platform called Drupal to set up the network; had to kill & resurrect it several times in the early days. Now they have a great relationship with the Drupal developers.
- There haven’t been any cases of management retribution that they know of. The closest they could remember was that someone complained (rather clearly and thoughtfully) about a particular product line the store carried and their negative opinion of it. Someone in purchasing, probably related to the decision to carry that line, saw it and asked them to remove all the posts. They refused because the employee hadn’t broken any rules and they were honoring the social contract.
- Any plans to sell this to other businesses? No, they’re not in that business.
Fascinating stuff; it’s great that the Blue Shirt Nation has stuck to the social contract of being for the employees and isn’t violating that with some evil corporate agenda. Sounds like something more retail chains might consider doing.
Read MoreCJU Course: Innocent Until Proven Guilty
his is the last of my notes, finally! This panel promised to deliver real live examples from advertisers and publishers who have faced the best practices issues and discovered the resolutions that helped both sides continue a successful working relationship. The panel consisted of:
- Brian Conchuratt, Sr. Sales Manager, Commission Junction (Moderator)
- Matt Earls, Sr. Marketing Manager, Yahoo!
- David M. Lewis, CEO & Founder, Cashbaq
- Kurt Lohse, CEO & Founder, Keycode.com
- Maggie Tucker, Manager of Performance Marketing, Intercontinental Hotels Group
I didn’t get many notes from this session, but it was some good stuff.
Bullet Point Review!
- 2009 is the year of the data feeds.
- CJ is listening to publisher complaints about data feed accuracy and uniformity.
- Threshold of quality needs to be raised on CJ so advertisers can take advantage of IT resources effectively when asking for the creation of data feeds.
- Utilizing data feeds is top priority for the top publishers.
- Advertisers wonder if anyone’s listening? Always looking for better ways to speak to publishers.
- Understand what your core publishers need. Give them exactly what they want.
- Lead time is good to make it easy.
- Don’t mark offers urgent if they’re not – publishers need to appropriate their time wisely.
- Understand how your publishers want to communicate, whether it’s IM, email, phone, etc.
- It’s difficult to write one email for all publishers.
- -> Don’t worry about flashy templates, data is the most important aspect.
- -> Segment to different publisher groups and address their needs.
- Keycodes white labels their syndicated content.
- Publishers should tell the advertisers straight out if they develop a new promotional method.
- The higher the trust level, the more aggressive you can be with payouts.
- Look at click-through URLs, conversion rate, cancellation rates.
- -> Not looking for secret recipe, but just a general idea of what the publisher is doing.
- Good publishers are looking to be transparent and will let you know when they’re experimenting.
- Violation of T&Cs us more of an opportunity to start a conversation than to punish.
- Affiliates are direct marketers.
- Run the numbers before you go to publishers with unappealing offers or news to prove it’s necessary.
There was no time for Q&A on this panel, but there are definitely some good take away tidbits. This concludes all my notes from CJU! Until next year…
Read MoreCJU Course: Web 2.0 Affiliate Marketing in Practice
This session was September 18th and promised to tell publishers and advertisers alike how to embrace web 2.0 in their marketing campaigns and get in on the discussion about upcoming trends for emerging markets, Commission Junction, and the industry as a whole. The panel consisted of:
- Angela Mihalakopoulos, Associate Business Development Manager, Commission Junction (Moderator)
- Shergul Arshad,Vice President Business Development, Stylefeeder
- Melissa D. Salas, Director of Marketing, Buy.com
- David Silverman, Director Business Development, Aggregate Knowledge
Other than a stray weird comment about user generated content being the primary technology of web 2.0 (it’s not a technology), the panel was pretty good. Lots of good ideas, but I apologize in advance if my notes are a big fragmented.
Bullet Point Review!
- The piece of the pie this represents is still small.
- Common tie for web 2.0 is UGC (user generated content).
- UGC drives social interaction.
- Collaborate, engage, interaction, control.
- You don’t have to do everything, do what’s right for your business.
- Web 2.0 allows the ability to grow rapidly.
- Open source software is your friend.
- Modules: RSS, blogs, video, podcasts, forums, chat rooms.
- Bookmarks integrated with advertisers RSS feeds.
- Many technologies can work together without developers to alter them.
- How do you measure?
- -> Increase in conversions/revenue.
- -> Ask for reviews.
- -> Brand awareness can’t always be measured.
- -> For video, how long did viewers watch
- -> Natural search
- -> Test & improve.
- CJ has “emerging markets” team.
- Advanced link section works well with web 2.0 technologies.
- Market to individuals instead of segments.
- -> Use personalization and customization whenever possible.
Points brought up during the Q&A
- Try using the CRM angle when approaching management about embracing these web 2.0 avenues.
- Create your benchmarks at the beginning so you know your goals.
I was a bit ahead of the curve in terms of web 2.0 so I heard a lot of stuff I’d heard before, but hopefully this is new for you!
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