Internet Marketing Blog

Online Politics Is The Same Old, Writ Large

Star Tribune political reporter Bob Von Sternberg had a piece yesterday about online politics finally coming into its own. My Tunheim colleague Pat Lilja and I discussed online politics with Von Sternberg for the piece, and, you know, that's always fun because who doesn't love to talk shop?

For years we've heard that this will be the year the online politics comes into its own while the final result proved underwhelming. Things are different this time.

As Von Sternberg points out, to date, much of the focus of online politics has been on fundraising. That certainly is a huge part of how the Internet can make a difference in an Internet campaign.

There are three things that have changed: 1) Citizen branding, 2) social networking, 3) and Millennials.

As I've written before, never before has it been possible for an individual to brand a candidate to a world wide audience by essentially creating their own TV ad. Among the results thus far, we've had one candidate kicked out of the race (Senator Allen) and another's sex appeal punched up (The Obama Girl).

The social networking aspect should not be underestimated. Due to this remarkable technology that includes status updates and friends lists,  political messages that are distributed through these trusted networks can efficiently gain traction. Social networks is word-of-mouth on steroids.

In one particular way, online politics is the same old thing, just larger. What, after all, is politics if not networking? Mixing online social networking with politics is a natural.

Lastly, as I've said before, Millennials are having and will continue to have a major influence this election season. Having grown up online, they are at ease with and know how to exploit social media. They have built the campaigns' infrastructure and are exploiting it to its fullest.

It is noteworthy that the three examples Von Sternberg cites include one Xer and two Millennials. These kids turn out to vote. And they bring their friends with them.

Social Networking Statistics

Morgan Stanley's March Internet trends report shows that social networking sites are quickly becoming major hubs of online activity: Six of the top ten Web sites are social.

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LinkedIn Marketing Presentation

I've found LinkedIn to have the most remarkable technology I've seen in a long time. By examining the relationships among my contacts and among my contacts' contacts, LinkedIn can suggest people I may, or should, know. It is breathtaking just how accurate it's predictive abilities are and how often. Nine times out of ten, the person LinkedIn says I should know, I know of and know that I should know them.

This fascination with LinkedIn has made me take a very close look at the service, and, as I am wont to do, examine it as a marketing vehicle. No, not as a way to spam but as a way to build business relationships. Or just relationships.  I have, as a result, created a presentation about how to use LinkedIn strategically for marketing purposes:

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Microblogging In Plain English

I am a huge fan of the microblogging service Twitter (which, by the way, explains why I was so upset when my estrategy Twitter account just up and stopped working and Twitter ignored my pleas for help. I'm still fairly bitter about it, but, you know, sometimes you just gotta move on. I have another Twitter account, so if you want to follow my Tweets, go to twitter.com/derickson.). I am also a huge fan of plain English. Anyone who has followed this blog for a while knows, therefore, that I'm also a huge fan of Common Craft's In Plain English series of videos. Their latest is about--tah dahhhh!--Twitter. Enjoy:

See also:

 
• Social Networking In Plain English
• Social Bookmarking In Plain English
• Wikis In Plain English
• RSS In Plain English
• GoogleDocs In Plain English

Marketing To Millennials Presentation

This is a presentation for a seminar Pat Lilja, my colleague at Tunheim Partners, and I conducted on Wednesday for some public health people who are interested in how to reach the Millennial generation. We will have video of the session soon.

The Tactical Marketing Utility Of Social Networking Sites

The more I use social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and even Flickr and YouTube, the more impressed I become with their usefulness as tactical Internet marketing tools.

The ease with which you can find like-minded people with these sites is pretty breathtaking. The ability to precisely define a demographic target audience is particularly fine tuned with MySpace and Facebook's advanced search functions.

Understand The Community

These sites, of course, are particularly sensitive to their users getting spammed, as they should be. The thing is, the users of these sites are not averse to receiving commercial messages, they just need to get them on their terms. They are happy to be brand fanboys and promote their favorite brands on their pages and friends lists; you just need to give them a valid reason to do so.

That's why it is essential to become an active member of these communities. It is imperative that you understand the culture of a given social networking site. You do that by joining the conversation, listening to the community, and exploring how the community works. Add value to the community by being helpful or providing valuable information or content and in that way build up trust among the community members.

I've also seen many cases where the users of these sites have created their own communities around a brand without the company even being aware of it or before the company has established a presence in the social networking site.

Social Networking As A Media Relations Tool

I'm seeing more and more journalists, bloggers, and other online content creators using Facebook and LinkedIn as a tool for cultivating sources and maintaining relationships with them. This aspect of social networking is clearly mutually beneficial. It makes it very easy to communicate with journalists and bloggers on their terms.

Social Networking As A Business Development Tool

Of all the social networking sites, I am most impressed with LinkedIn, by far. Based on the notion of six degrees of separation, LinkedIn examines the details of your contacts and makes suggestions of people LinkedIn thinks you should know.

Nine times out of ten, those recommendations are exactly right. The people LinkedIn recommends may not always be people I know, but more often than not they are people I know of. And if I don't know who the recommendations are, they are at least in the right industry or there is some clear rationale behind the recommendation.

You never get those bizarre, from-left-field suggestions you sometimes get at Amazon.com. Like, why in the world would you think I wanted a book knitting for beginners?!?

LinkedIn's search function is just as impressive as Facebook and MySpace, except with LinkedIn, you're getting a list of people who are often among the most influential people within their organization. If that person sees that you know some of the same people, they are going to be more likely to trust you than they would otherwise.

As with Facebook, I'm seeing a lot of media people on LinkedIn. A search for "New York Times" returns 50 pages worth of results.

Colts.com Internet Marketing

I've been meaning to write about this for a month but since the Super Bowl is today, I figured it's now or never.

Early last month a got a call from Dwight Adams, a reporter for the Indianapolis Star, who wanted my opinion for a story he was working on about the online marketing efforts of the Indianapolis Colts in particular and the NFL in general. He called me because of a two posts I did on the redesign of NFL.com.

When a reporter calls asking me to talk about my two favorite subjects--Internet marketing and football--I'm definitely game.

After taking a look at the Colts' online presence, it became quite clear quite quickly that the team is ahead of the curve compared to a lot of other teams' online marketing efforts.

That didn't really surprise me, though, because Indy's online presence is overseen by the Colts' Executive Director of Digital Business, Pat Coyle. I've been following Pat's excellent Sports Marketing 2.0 blog for a while now; it is the only blog that I know of that gives you a perspective of the Internet marketing issues being faced by professional sports franchise.

The Colt's maintain three web sites: The team's web site at Colts.com and the social networking sites MyColts.net and MyIndianaFootball.com. MyColts.net caters to the team's fans while MyIndianaFootball.com associates the Colts' brand with high school football. (There's even a team page for the high school I attended.)

The Colts are embracing social and embeddable media in a big way. The site features a podcast, a widget you can add to your blog or MySpace or Facebook page:

And embeddable video:

At MyColts.net, fans can discuss any and all things Colts on the site's forums or they can read Head Coach Tony Dungy's blog where he actually does post. Having your head coach maintain a blog is way ahead of the curve. Kudos for the Dungy and the Colts for having the courage and the insight to launch it.

The team does not appear to have a presence at the most popular social media sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube & Flickr. That absence, I suspect, has a lot to do with the NFL's attitude toward those sites than anything else: The league routinely asks YouTube, for example, to delete game highlights that users have uploaded.

Nevertheless, the Colt's online presence points the way toward those social networking sites. I'm betting that before too long, the Colts model and outposts at YouTube, Facebook, et. al. will be standard operating procedure.

Punch Pizza Flickr Photo Contest Campaign

Punch Pizza was in the process of getting their web site built when they came across a blog post by local pizza blogger Aaron Landry that was mildly critical of Punch for prohibiting him from taking a photograph of their pizza oven, as was wren at Flickr.

Landry's post led them to Flickr and they realized that many people were posting they'd taken at Punch Pizza locations and the quality of those photos were striking. On Facebook, they found a Punch Pizza fan club.

If your product or service is great, then your customers are likely to fans as well. Punch has great food and as the Flickr photos and Facebook fan club illustrate, they have fans.

This social media activity inspired Punch to create the Punch Neapolitan Pizza "Capture Our Fire" Flickr photo contest. Though they had legitimate business reasons to keep people from taking pictures of their ovens, Punch Pizza eliminated the no-photos policy. As Landry's blog post and the photos of Punch at Flickr made clear, their customers were also fans. If they wanted to take photos, the potential of someone stealing trade secrets was outweighed by making their customers happy.

They are giving away $3000 worth of Punch Pizza dining cards to the winners and they'll use the contest entries for their new web site when it launches. That will certainly make customers very happy.

We helped punch Punch navigate the social media waters by building the infrastructure through which they could learn a new way of communicating with their customers.

Punch Pizza co-owner John Puckett wanted to let Aaron Landry know that they'd changed their photo policy and were launching the contest, so he emailed Aaron and invited him to take part in the contest.

With that, the contest was launched.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Interview On 60 Minutes

This is the interview 60 Minutes did with Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg last Sunday:

What If God Had A MySpace?

Here's a very funny Friday video for you that ponders the profound question  (with a nod to Joan Osborne), what if God had a MySpace?

An Ode To Digg (And Its Supporting Online Campaign)

Kina Grannis loves to Digg.

  Two Weeks For Kina 
  Originally uploaded by kasuya

She loves to Digg so much, in fact, that she's written a very clever and catchy song about her Digg love. Clearly, Kina's not alone.

But she's taken it another step by entering her song, Gotta Digg, in the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl music video contest. The grand prize winner gets their music video aired during the Super Bowl and gets a recording contract with Interscope Records.

[UPDATE: Two kind readers have helpfully pointed out (see the comments below) that Grannis entered another song to the contest, not Gotta Digg.

I'm a bit disappointed because I really like Gotta Digg, but the fact that she composed that song for her online campaign only makes the campaign itself all the more brilliant!]

Kina's clearly got some marketing savvy in her corner because she's running a pretty sophisticated online campaign to solicit votes for her video.

In addition to asking for votes at her official web site (which is very professionally done, by the way), she has a separate web site for the contest itself: TwoWeeksForKina.com. It is this site that she promotes from her YouTube account and her MySpace page, where she has 2,820 friends and her Facebook page, where she has 850 friends.

She's hosting her contest campaign photos at her Flickr account , where, as of this writing, her 93 contest campaign photos have been viewed more than 900 times. Her only slip at Flickr is that she's wearing a Michael Vick jersey. Oops.

Naturally, her video has been submitted to Digg five times and, as of this writing, has been Dugg 10,734 times.

As of this writing, since Grannis uploaded her Gotta Digg music video to her YouTube account on December 23, the video has been viewed 124,234 times, boasts four out of five stars from 1,438 raters, has been marked as a favorite video by 729 YouTube users, and received 462 comments.

Those numbers are not surprising because the video is number 3 on YouTube's Top Rated Video this week, is the 11th Most Viewed music video this week, and the 42nd Most Responded to video today.

As of this writing, Google Blog Search lists 267 blog posts citing "gotta digg," most of them posted within the past 24 hours. That's pretty remarkable, considering the time period is Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Technorati, meanwhile, lists only 18 posts within it's universe of registered blogs, but among those are highly influential blogs like TechCrunch,  Neatorama, and Buzz Machine. These posts are likely to inspire many more posts about the video down the long tail.

Kina Grannis is either one Internet savvy kid or she's got some very smart online marketers working on her behalf. Regardless, I would not be surprised at all to see her win the contest.

Oh, yeah; here's the video:

New Word Of Mouth Networks - Teens Talk Online

I haven't fully digested the new Pew Internet & American Life Teens & Social Media report, but the summary makes clear that teens' online behavior is creating new networks that will require online word of mouth marketing to be an increasingly crucial tactic within overall Internet marketing strategies.

The Pew study shows that they are prolific online content creators:

• Of the 93% that are online, 64% of them have created content online.
• 39% of online teens share their creations online.
• 33% create or work on others' blogs or web sites, be it for friends, groups they belong to, or classroom assignments.
• 28% have created their own blog.
• 27% have a personal web site.
• 26% create mashups.
• 55% have created a social networking profile at sites like Facebook and MySpace.
• 47% have uploaded photos.
• 14% have posted video online.

Teens share their online content and that sharing builds the foundation of their word of mouth networks because that content is a virtual conversation starter. The Pew study found:

• 89% of teens who upload photos say that people post comments about those photos at least sometimes.
• 72% of video posters say those videos elicit comments at least sometimes.
• 76% of teens who use social networks say they leave comments on other people's blog posts.

It seems clear that teen marketing for the short term, and, as these kids grow up, overall Internet marketing for the long term, will depend upon tapping into these online word of mouth networks.

Facebook Business Pages

There has been nearly no coverage of Facebook's new business pages feature.

Inside Facebook reported on the feature in early November, but I hadn't heard a peep about it until a colleague stumbled upon the business pages feature yesterday.

Facebook, wisely, requires its users to represent themselves honestly when they open an account by using your real name, which then becomes your account name, which you cannot change after the fact. Because the accounts are based on individuals, it makes it virtually impossible for an organization to have an individual page without lying about it and thus violating Facebook's terms of use and, more importantly, the spirit of the community.

The problem I've been struggling with is that if I wanted to create a Facebook Group for a client, for administrative purposes at the very least, that Group had to be attached to an individual's account because that's the only way you can create a group.

So who, then, within a given organization, controls the Facebook account that created the group? The only real choice is the owner and/or CEO or Executive Director of the organization because they would be the least likely to move on to another job, thus avoiding ownership/access issues.

Happily, Facebook's business pages obviates that issue.

I'm testing out the service now with an e-Strategy page I just created.

At set up, Facebook offers you an array of choices for organization type (business, nonprofit, government, etc), brand or product pages, or even band, artist, and writer pages, for precise categorization.

The pages themselves have much the same functionality and features as an individual's pages, including the ability to plug in an RSS feed to automatically populate your Notes section with blog posts.

Facebook Business Pages Search Optimization

Business pages also are viewable outside Facebook's walled content garden, so a limited version of the page is viewable without having to log in to Facebook. The limited pages include a logo, a listing of "fans," a link, your description, and Wall postings.

That makes Facebook business pages also search engine readable, so expect more Facebook links to begin appearing in search engine results.

The ability to search engine optimize business pages is limited to including the account name within the HTML Title tags, external links to web site(s), and the Company Overview,  Mission, and Product text boxes.

Flickr Has Stats

I got my wish. Or I've got part of my wish, anyway.

In September, I asked why I couldn't get usage statistics with my social networking accounts like Facebook and MySpace.

Flickr added basic statistics to the Pro version of their photo sharing service last week. Now that gives me tremendous incentive to pay the $24.95 annual fee for a Pro account.

A Pro account will show you page views, which sites are linking to your Flickr photo pages, how people are finding your photos within Flickr, and what search terms people are using to find your photos using the search engines. Search Engine Land has a detailed breakdown on how the stats work.

This is the first time we've had readily available usage statistics for photo sharing sites, which help a great deal in understanding how people use such sites.

Microlending Via Social Networking

I stumbled onto Kiva.org today and pretty much blown away at what I found.

Kiva.org is a microlending site that allows you to give small loans (as small as $25) to specific entrepreneurs in developing countries and then get updates on their project while they pay your loan back. What a great idea!

You then have the option of rolling that money over into a new loan to someone else. The site gives you all of the particulars of the project to which you may loan as well as the organization sponsoring that loan.

Each project has a page that includes both the details of the project as well as links to the Kiva.org profiles of all the people who have made a loan to the project. It's not precisely social networking since the site doesn't allow you to connect with all the other people who have loaned a project money, but it comes close enough to social networking that you can see where they could take it.

Building in the ability to make those connections could have the effect of encouraging more loans because that, after all, is why people are visiting the site. Throw in some embeddable code so you can put a widget on your blog or MySpace or Facebook accounts, and you've really got something.

Kiva.org is a very cool concept that could be taken a lot further.

All Roads Lead To Rome...Online

Colosseo
Originally uploaded by sebatl

Just as all roads led to Rome during the Roman Empire, all online roads must lead back to your client and their message, if you are to have a successful comprehensive Internet marketing strategy.

Think of your client, your product, or whatever it is you are marketing as the city of Rome. You must make it as easy as possible for people to find you and travel to your city. The map must be clear and the roads easy to travel.

One of the primary reasons for the construction of Roman roads was to move the empire's armies quickly for their many military campaigns. Likewise, you too must build your online roads for your Internet marketing campaigns.

Multi Channel Marketing

The use of the word "channel" in the subheadline is deliberate, evoking, as it does a television metaphor and its content channels. Especially cable channels with their narrowly focused content; ESPN for sports, Comedy Central, the History Channel, and so on.

Internet channels define content as well: The Daily Kos for left-wing politics, ProFootballTalk.com for NFL football gossip, and engadget for consumer technology news. But Internet channels also define types of content: Technorati has blog posts; YouTube has videos; Flickr has photos, and Twitter has text messages.

Internet audiences are fragmenting because of hugely popular, deeply engaging sites like MySpace and YouTube. People are no longer spending a majority of their time at search engines, using them as portal to their final destinations. Now many people are going directly to their favorite online communities and spending a lot of time there. The word "community" is the operative word here because the most important thing most of these sites have in common are some sort of social networking feature.

All of these channels boast large, self-defined audiences: sports or history lovers; online video or photo enthusiasts. They give us the ability to reach the people who are most likely to want what we've got.

We know a lot about the audience already by the mere fact of them being there. MySpace users probably want to hook up with one another for whatever reason and because of the large presence of musicians and bands there, MySpace users are more likely than not music fans. YouTube users want to watch video; Flickr users want to share and look at photos; Technorati users want to read blog posts.

If you want to reach your audience online most efficiently, it is essential that you establish a presence at the online channels where your target audiences hang.

When In Rome

But, because of the social networking/media aspects of these channels, merely establishing a presence at these channels is likely not enough.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

The lingua franca of YouTube is video; for Flickr it is photos; for MySpace it is "friending" and comments. Take a look at what content you own and/or produce and match it to the medium. If you produce audio, upload it to Odeo. If you blog, make sure you feed your posts to Technorati. If you establish a YouTube account but don't upload and share your video, what's the point?

It is not just content type but also the tone of your content that matters.

Formal, Corpspeak on MySpace pages and comments just sounds weird. It's not in tune with the MySpace culture. Your blog posts that proclaim rather than discuss, announce rather than engage will fail; it's just not how the blogosphere works.

The Search Engine Glue - It's All In The Metadata

While, as I said above, people are spending more time at centers of online gravity, search remains a central function that serves as the glue that holds your comprehensive Internet marketing strategy together.

People don't abandon searching once they leave their favorite search engine; more often than not, they continue searching at the destination site. Search is, in fact, the primary and most efficient way of finding content at YouTube and Flickr and Technorati.

In order to reach the self-selected audience that search provides, you shouldn't forget to search optimize the content you provide these centers of gravity sites.

Finally, as I discussed in a previous post about blended search results, the content from the YouTubes and Flickrs and MySpaces of the world often rank well in Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live.

If you're skilled and a bit lucky, many of the links will lead to Rome.

What's Up With OpenSocial?

In the short term, Google's OpenSocial effort to codify a standard API for tapping into social networks probably doesn't effectively mean much. But with support from MySpace and LinkedIn and Bebo , among others, the effort could be very significant. It leaves Facebook as the odd man out, with it's proprietary FaceBook Markup Language.

The OpenSocial standard would allow developers to write their code once to be used on all networks that support the API, rather than having to write special code for individual networks. If OpenSocial takes off, and I think it probably will, it will help to add a great deal of value to social networks and spur innovation.

From a marketing point of view, this can only be good because it makes widget marketing a hell of a lot easier.

Robert Scobel interviewed Marc Canter today, whose company makes social networks:

• Google's OpenSocial API Blog

Facebook Demographics Slideshow

Forrester Research's Charlene Li has provided a Slideshare presentation on Facebook's demographics (found via Beth Kanter via Steve Rubel):

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Web 2.0 Summit Video

These are a few videos (courtesy of Blip TV) from the recently concluded Web 2.0 summit that "brings the intelligence, innovation, and leadership of the Internet industry together in one place at one time. The Summit is known for its interactive format, stressing audience interaction and participation.". The videos feature an opening welcome by Tim O'Reilly & John Battelle, High Order Bit with Mary Meeke, and a conversation with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.

Google Buys Jaiku - Is Jaiku Now A Twitter Killer?

Mashable reported yesterday that Google had acquired the microblog service Jaiku and asked the obvious: Why not Twitter? (Robert Scoble says Google's going to couple Jaiku with their social networking service, Orkut).

Microblogging services such as Jaiku, Twitter, and Pownce combine the publishing technology of blogs  with the ability to update your microblog via a standard web interface, through your Instant Messaging client, or from your phone using text messaging. Each post is limited to 140 characters--the size limit of text messages; thus the term microblogging.

Mashable said: "This is somewhat surprising news considering the perceived dominance of Twitter in the so-called “lifestreaming” space. Additionally, Twitter is co-founded by Evan Williams, who was the creator of Blogger, which was previously acquired by Google. In a world where price is no object for Google, it’s interesting that they would opt for Jaiku and not Twitter."

One reason may simply be feature sets: Pownce allows you to share files and events through your Pownce blog while Jaiku lets your plug in your own RSS feeds so you can automatically update your Jaiku blog with other online content and the service allows you to create communities of interest. Twitter offers none of these features.

I wonder, though, if Google's preference for Jaiku over Twitter points to something fundamentally fatal about Twitter itself.

I love Twitter and I use it all the time but the service has had some well-documented scaling problems. Anyone who has used Twitter for a moderate amount of time has run into the cat or bird error notice when trying to perform some routine function.

I myself am a victim of Twitter's technical snafus. I haven't been able to post to my Twitter account for about three months and my pleas to Twitter about it have been either ignored or unheard.

You'd think that scaling issues wouldn't be obstacle to overcome, considering the resources Google could bring to bear to fix any technical problems. But then when you look back at how long Twitter has been having these problems, you gotta wonder if their technical problems are so deep that Google trying to fix them wasn't worth the effort.

Regardless, with the resources that Google will no doubt invest in Jaiku, Twitter has got to be worried.

I Want A Healthy Serving Of Statistics With My Social Networks

I live and die by statistics.

I use Google Analytics and Webmaster, Statcounter, Performancing Metrics, MyBlogLog, Feedburner, AddThis, ClickTracks and other for that very reason.

I've got great statistics for my web sites, blogs, and RSS feeds; so why can't I have them for my social networking and media sites?

The video sharing sites like Google Video and YouTube and Metacafe provide basic statistics on viewership for a given video. That's helpful but not enough. But at least it's better than the social networking sites, social media, and social bookmarking sites.

Most of these sites do not even have a function for adding code to your account and even if they do, as MySpace does, they do not allow you to add JavaScript code so that rules out using third party web analytics services such as Google Analytics to do the job. 

There are plenty of very good reasons to prohibit people from posting JavaScript code to their social sites, foremost among them the risk that someone will (and people will) post malicious code that will effect users who visit that page.

I understand. So instead, why can't the MySpaces and Facebooks, and LinkedIns, and Flickrs, and del.icio.uses and Twitters of the world give me those stats themselves.

I doesn't have to be anything fancy; the basics would do just fine: Number of unique visitor by hour, day, week, month and year, how they got to my page and where they came from, and if they used a search engine, which one did they use and what search phrase brought them to me.

That's all I ask. I might even be willing to pay a little for the service.

Right now, the only indicator of how highly trafficked your social media account is, are the number of friends or contacts you have or how many outside sites are linking to your page. But that doesn't count how many people are actually visiting your page. You could go out and find a bunch of friends but they may not ever visit your page again after the initial friend approval.

The volume of comments you get on your content is a better indicator of popularity and engagement with your page but that still offers no concrete numbers.

I want to know a lot more than that and I don't think I'm alone.

So here's a plea to the social networking and media sites please add some basic statistics to your services before some smart developer figures out a way to provide that service through a JavaScriptless widget.