Social Media Marketing Summit: James Lamberti
This should be interesting, as the topic is on the intersection of social media marketing and search. The speaker is:
- James Lamberti, Senior Vice President of Media and Technology, comScore.
Started with a comScore plug – that’s kind of a turn off for me personally. I’m the kind of person that is savvy enough to look you or your company up on Google if I didn’t know about you before and actually care to know more going forward. Seems like something a search guy would understand, right? I know that obviously people accept speaking engagements, in part, because it brings attention to their company, but to use it as a platform for a mini commercial is a faux paux – or at least should be – in the conference world.
I digress, overall it was informative if just a bit dry.
Bullet Point Review!
- In 1996, 2/3 of the world’s online population is in the US. Now it’s more spread out.
- Most commonly used internet categories include Search, Entertainment, and Retail.
- Social networking sites are exploding, so are multimedia sites such as YouTube.
- Community and Personals sites are seeing negative growth, likely a result of social networking sites replacing a large part of these sites’ functionality.
- America is slowest growing area given internet maturity, but there’s explosive growth internationally.
- 25.3% year-over-year increase in queries on search.
- Eyeballs -> Awareness, Consideration, Preference, Action, Loyalty -> Buy.
- Most consumers admit to being receptive to more leisurely products like music and entertainment being advertised on UGC sites than necessary items like financial services and utilities.
- MySpace monetization nearly 6x that of Facebook.
- Search is everywhere, not just on search engines but within the communities themselves, like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook.
- 2.5 billion queries within YouTube.
- 68% of web users never click on a display ad, and only 16% drive 80% of all clicks.
- Clickers are predominately younger with lower income.
- 90% of site visitation is view-through with no engagement.
- There are free tools lying all around the internet to help.
- 83% of the sales impact of Search is latent or offline.
- Brand advocates represent about 40% of online buyers.
- Advocates are very avid searchers – 104 queries vs. 72 for non-advocates per month.
- Hasn’t seen anyone really leverage search to create an advertising campaign or tie it to a social media strategy.
- Identify search query points-of-origin to determin optimal markets for print, TV, radio ads.
- Search intersects with EVERYTHING.
- Search is a logical and desired outcome.
- The value of search is almost always dramatically underestimated.
- A lot is being left on the table – too concerned with ROI metrics sometimes.
- Search is an under leveraged asset in the strategic and creative process.
Points brought up during the Q&A
Engagement mapping trying to measure touch points, undervalued. Shave money off your TV campaign and make sure your search is solid. There’s no more an expression of human interest than someone actively looking for your brand.- Ways to take this knowledge and make it actionable?
Last complaint, I swear! If you have a lot of interesting data points with numbers and facts, don’t skip through them in nanoseconds. There was a lot of interesting data presented, but no time to write it down. Jumping around slides is a bit awkward as well, but if you’re a data nut that wasn’t as concerned with writing things down as I was this was a valuable presentation to be sure. I enjoy sharing facts and percentages with others because they have more weight, but can’t share them when reviewed at 90 miles per hour.
Read MoreOnline Marketing Glossary: Delisting
Delisting:
- When webpages are removed from a search engine’s index.
Most of the time this is done because a page breaks the search engine’s terms of service. On rare occasion this can happen when the spiders misinterpret something on your page that’s questionably close to the line.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
CJU Course: Affiliate Marketing 101
As the first course of the conference yesterday, I’m sure there was a lot of pressure for this hour and fifteen minutes to really set the tone for the three days of Commission Junction University. Titled “Affiliate Marketing 101: Back to the Basics”, I attended hoping to maybe pick up some things I didn’t actually know considering I taught a lot of the basics to myself a couple years back. The speaker was:
- Jeremy Palmer, President, QuitYourDayJob.com
I converse with & follow him on twitter and I’ve heard great things about his last projects The Black Ink Projects and Black Ink 2, although haven’t had a chance to check it out myself. I won’t know until Thursday if this session really did set the appropriate tone for the conference or not, but it was definitely worth my attendance!
Bullet Point Review!
- Choose Your Niche
- The niche you choose should be your passion – it’s the easiest foundation to build upon.
- Know a lot about your niche to be successful.
- Develop a Business Plan
- Put together a SWOT analysis for you AND your closest competitors – their weaknesses can be your opportunities.
- Just make it a simple spreadsheet.
- Have a unique selling proposition. It’s not enough to just copy someone else, you have to see what they’re doing and how you can do it better.
- Learn about the customer persona.
- Inventory your own skills objectively – what can you do yourself and what would you be best served by outsourcing?
- Write Value Added Content
- Start writing content before you design your site.
- Content is the key to the site.
- Have 10-15 pages of content before you launch to improve Quality Score.
- Design Your Site
- You must have professional tools to create a professional site.
- Be objective about your experience and consider outsourcing.
- TOOL: 99Designs for design contests – you only pay for the winner, and you pay much less.
- Develop Your Site
- Outsourcing programming can be done on Elance or oDesk quite effectively.
- Be sure to write extremely detailed specifications on what you want the site to do and how it should be done when using outsourced talent.
- With these services you can escrow your payment so that no money is released until certain milestones are done – and done to your satisfaction.
- Test the Waters with PPC
- Google hates “rich pages” (also referred to as “thin landing pages”) where the only intent is a conversion.
- Google recently updated their algorithms and human QC when assigning Quality Scores, so be sure to read up.
- Essentially Google wants you to develop your own content: they want independent reviews, content not found directly on the merchant’s website, and the comparison of several merchants.
- Many affiliates have had good success with video reviews because they resonate more with consumers.
- Remember that Google isn’t the only game in town – test on Yahoo & MSN to discover what works in terms of keywords and ad copy.
- Test & Optimize
- Look at conversions using keywords.
- TOOLS: Tracking 202 (free), Prosper 202 (free), Optimize My Site (paid), Google Website Optimizer (free).
- Pay equal attention to conversion rate and click through rate.
- Don’t use vague or hype laden copy – it won’t convert well.
- Split test your landing pages.
- Build a Sustainable Business.
- Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
- You want to thrive without Google just in case.
- Facebook Ads are growing with better ROI.
- Remember the viral marketing element (what can you do that people will pass on?)
- You want to be who people will think of when they think of your niche.
- Create a brand for yourself.
- Random Tips
- Some books to check out: Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin & Malcolm Gladwell and The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, & David Weinberger.
- When doing product comparisons, try throwing in a weaker competitor to enhance the value of the better products.
- DO NOT use the standard WordPress template when adding a blog to your site – make sure it looks like the rest of your site.
- Comparison pages only need to be very simple tables.
Points brought up during the Q&A
- Mobile has great opportunities for merchants and advertisers, but it’s hard for affiliates. People are not (yet) likely to use mobile devices to make purchases.
- Outsourcing content? Elance is ok but Jeremy expressed some displeasure with what he’s got from that site. An audience member suggested PR Newswire and searching for keywords to find experts.
- My own suggestion is to try going to LinkedIn & looking for experts to approach for writing.
- Go where the good designers and writers hang out to find them – when you go to freelancing sites you’re getting the people who might be hard up for work and not that great of results.
- In regards to CJ, pay a lot of attention to the Network Earnings bar.
- Once your site’s Quality Score tanks, you’re done. You have to start over with a new site because there’s no way to get that back.
Jeremy did an excellent job mixing up the experience level of the information he put forth, knowing instinctively that most people attending wouldn’t quite be at the 101 education level in regards to affiliate marketing.
Read MoreOnline Marketing Glossary: Keyword Domain Name
Keyword Domain Name:
- The use of keywords as part of the URL to a website. Positioning is improved on some search engines when keywords are reinforced in the URL.
Many people take advantage of this in buying their domains, not just because of the improved results with the search engines, but to keep the URL as relevant to your topic as possible. When the URL is relevant to the content, it’s easier for visitors to remember when they want to come back.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Martheketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
Online Marketing Glossary: Distribution Network
Distribution Network:
- A network of websites or search engines and their partner sites on which paid ads can be distributed. The network receives advertisements from the host search engine, paid for with a CPC or CPM model.
To be completely honest, I don’t have an example of this or any experience. If you do, please share it in the comments so we can all learn from YOUR expertise! You have all weekend to “school” us!
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
Online Marketing Glossary: Inbound Link
Inbound Link:
- A link to a particular page from elsewhere on the Internet. Inbound links are important to SEO because many search engines’ rankings are at least partially based on the amount of inbound links.
Your break from the glossary is over! Inbound links are tricky as you usually have no influence on whether you get them or not. A good tip is to submit your site to directories at the beginning to start building some inbound links, and make sure your content is good. If you have excellent content, more blogs and other websites within your niche will want to link to yours.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
