Blog covering all aspects of Internet marketing including search optimization & marketing, email marketing, blog marketing, video marketing, social network marketing, SMS marketing & online pr.
This is the presentation my Tunheim Partners colleague Pat Lilja and I gave to the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits annual technology conference this year:
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.
I've been thinking about social media a lot lately and how people interact with Web 2.0 technologies and services themselves as well the other people who use those services.
In particular, I've been thinking about the comment function of blogs. And how to improve that function.
As a football nut and a die-hard Vikings fan who still reads everything about the team despite their abysmal record this year, I spend a lot of time on Vikings blogs, especially the Star Tribune's superb Access Vikings blog by their beat writers Judd Zulgad and Kevin Seifert.
I'm sure it's one, if not the, most popular Strib blog. There is certainly a lot of participation by its readers. A post from yesterday about Daunte Culpepper coming back to town boasts 162 comments.
I often read the comments because there's some very good stuff in there, but wading through the crap and the banter from one reader to another is usually a waste of time. Separating the conversational wheat from the chaff is a problem for all blogs with a lot of reader participation, not just Access Vikings.
Step One
I'd love to see some smart programmers at Six Apart or Blogger or some open source guru create a plugin for WordPress that would do this: Allow me (as a registered user of the blog in question) to annotate the blog post and apply highlighting and/or my own comments in the form of, say, a sticky note(s) that I can place anywhere on the page.
Step Two
It would also have a function like the fantastic ClickTale service that gives you a "recording" of each site visitor's behavior on the page by following mouse movements. I often, for instance, click and drag my mouse over text to highlight interesting text. I don't know why I do it, but I do. That behavior could be captured.
Step Three
Combining ClickTale recordings with the sticky notes data should give you enough aggregate data to create a heat map for that page.
Apply heat maps to the blog comments and, voila, as a blog reader I've got a quick visual representation of the relative "interestingness" of blog comments. And as a blogger, I'd get extremely valuable data on how people were interacting with my blog.
Perhaps someone could come up with a semantic solution that analyzes the text of blog comments and the frequency with which blog comments refer to other comments or commenters to determine "interestingness."
However it's arrived at, we sorely need a solution and it seems to me that the technology is probably already in place to create it.
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.
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.
My daily contact with AOL is the start page that launches when I open the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) program. I scan that page as well as Yahoo! Instant Messenger's start page to see what headlines teens and young adults are seeing.
Last week, an intriguing headline on the AIM start page caught my interest enough to click: Mom Finds Osama Video Before Release. It was not, however, the fascinating story of a mom outwitting terrorists online that intrigued me after I'd clicked; it was what AOL was doing with their beta AOL News site.
The AOL News beta combines a news aggregator function with blogging, tagging, and embedding features to enable conversational media. The news, photos, and video are served up by content partners, primarily the Associated Press.
The left-hand sidebar features a "blog chatter" tag cloud with links to related content within blog posts powered by the blog search engine Sphere:
Also on the left-hand sidebar, the "blog chatter" tag cloud, are links to the most popular stories, most commented on stories, and the most recent comments:
This is where AOL begins to really enable conversational media as an integrated extension of modern journalism. One aspect of this is providing embeddable content that users can share at their own online homes such as their blogs or MySpace pages. AOL News is giving users embeddable video from the AP and other sources:
Here's the actual video:
In addition to sharing video, the AOL News beta site features links to top user-submitted news from Propeller, Netscape's digg-like social editing clone, tools for sharing stories on social bookmarking, a link to AOL forums to discuss stories, and, finally and most importantly, the blog commenting function for each story.
I think this must be the type of model traditional media must take if they are to survive in this environment. In order to maintain an audience large enough to sustain an advertising supported model, traditional media will need to use their content to enable conversations around that content and build themselves into the central gathering point for people to discuss learn about and discuss the events of the day.
From a PR and Internet marketing perspective, this conversational media is another opportunity for earned media and the a chance to engage targeted audiences with your client's story.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Google must really like Common Craft's Lee LeFever because they've totally ripped off his "In Plain English" gig.
I've posted LeFever's wonderful explanatory videos before and I will again, but I came across this derivative video produced by Google that explains Google Docs, which recently added presentations to the office suite of online word processor and spreadsheets that the service offers.
NOTE: I was wrong! Read the comments below and this correction post that explains that Google hired Common Craft to produce this video:
See also:
I've spent this week talking about the importance of claiming your online identity by creating accounts and profiles with the various social networking and Web 2.0 sites.
When you begin to do this, though, it immediately becomes apparent that you're going to have a logistics problem on your hand when you try to manage all these accounts.
The service does not yet exist but whoever creates a unified login/management application that will allow you to update your MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn pages, upload content to your YouTube and Flickr accounts, manage your del.icio.us and StumbleUpon bookmarks, and post messages to your Twitter and Jaiku microblogs will have an instant hit on their hands.
We need consolidation tools.
Though it doesn't address the problem I've just outlined, Spock is a new entry in the people search space that offers a way to consolidate all of your online outposts on one page.
If you've never used Spock you may nevertheless find your name listed there because it appears the "people search engine" is harvesting data about individuals from sites like LinkedIn. I found two friends listed at Spoke whom I am certain have not used the site, much less heard of it. Both listings included my friends' names, their geographic location, their job title, and a link to their LinkedIn profile. As Facebook opens up their profile pages to the search engines, expect that site to be added to Spock's crawl list.
If your name is in Spock's search results, you can "claim your search results" by creating an account and filling out your profile. It's a rather clever approach on Spock's part because it certainly gives people an incentive to create an account and add data.
Two of the main features of Spock are the ability to add links to all of your online profiles and the ability for you to apply tags to your profile. (Spock allows anyone to apply tags to your profile, which begs the question: What's to prevent people from tagging you an "idiot" or some other derogatory term?)
If it takes off, it could prove to be a great platform from which to promote yourself.
Also Read:
One of the first things I do for a new client is conduct an audit of their current online presence and assets. That includes not just how their web site is faring in terms of traffic and visibility, but what domain names they own and what accounts have they opened with any centers of online gravity?
I call this Preemptive Marketing. Dictionary.com defines preemptive as "taken as a measure against something possible, anticipated, or feared; preventive; deterrent."
In our case, then, Preemptive Marketing is doing some kind of marketing activity in anticipation or defense of a potential opportunity or danger. The purpose of Preemptive Marketing is simple: To prevent someone else from obtaining your name or brand and/or preserving the future option of using your name or brand in specific ways and places.
The first and most obvious example is with an organization's domain name strategy. Does an organization own all the domain name variations of their name or their brand names? Do they own the .org, .net, .tv, et al versions of their name?
Unless you can afford it, you don't have to go crazy with this by buying up not just example.com, .org, .net, .tv, .us, .info, .mobi, .name and .biz, but also all the crazy variations that the domain name registrars now give you: myexample.com, yourexample.com, examplehome.com, exampleonline.com, examplewebsite.com, etc. The list goes on.
The most important reason for securing all the variations of your domain names is primarily to prevent someone else from using it. You never know what people will do; you may have a net-savvy disgruntled customer or employee who decides to exact revenge online.
Having secured our primary domains, let's turn our attention to the Web 2.0 centers of online gravity.
It seems a new Web 2.0 startup is launched every five seconds. As this graphic shows, there are a dizzying array of Web 2.0 services and sites out there already:
You certainly don't need to register an account most of them but you certainly should open an account with the most popular ones and those that are most applicable to your organization, services, products, or target audiences.
By far the most popular Web 2.0 sites are MySpace.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Flickr, but you can find plenty more at these Web 2.0 industry sites:
Such sites are often an invaluable tool for reaching very narrowly targeted audiences. For that reason alone, it is a good idea to set up shop at such sites.
These sites often use the username of your account to create your online profile at their site. These profile pages can often rank well in search results. These are the URL structures of some of e-strategy.com's profile pages:
You'd obviously rather have control over that link than having someone else controlling it and the content on those profile pages. It's better, then, that you own the account.
I was a bit critical in my last post about the NFL.com website redesign, and the failure to account for existing incoming links to the site from pro football bloggers and elsewhere.
Pat Coyle, the Digital Business Director for the Indianapolis Colts, points out at his Sports Marketing 2.0 blog, "how hard it is to relaunch a site for one nfl team. I can only imagine how hard it was to get this league site back up off the ground!!"
It's a point very well taken and something I should have mentioned previously. The depth of content that the NFL has to deal with for their site is simply astounding. NFL.com is not just a site for news stories of all things National Football League, it is a trove of data on individual games, teams, players--and now historical data on all of the above--as well as video and photographs. The list goes on.
The programming and logistics of bringing all of that together into a coherent and usable whole is pretty staggering when you think about it.
So, yes, I second Pat's sentiments, however belatedly.
But I do write about Internet marketing and after further review of the site, I've found something else lacking from an Internet marketing point of view.
NFL.com's New Features
The graphic design and layout of the new NFL.com is great. You can see at a glance where to find the different types of information, and that's no easy feat for a site as rich in content as this one is:
I won't go into great detail about NFL.com's new features (for that see BizOfFootball.com and Rotanation.com via Pat Coyle and DigiSpo). I will, however, share a few of my favorites.
It's all very cool and there is a lot of content to make football fans happy.
Content Is King...And Embeddable
If you want to market online, content is definitely king these days. As I've said before, content needs to be embeddable because, as Steve Rubel points out, traffic happens elsewhere.
This is especially true for professional sports. I'd be willing to bet that there is a far higher proportion of sports and political bloggers than there is for any other content category. Both love to talk about their passion online. And people like to read them.
I love to blog about sports and I'd love to be able to cut and paste some video highlights of the last Vikings game, for example, to highlight my points without requiring my readers to go offsite. But doing an iffy proposition because clips of NFL games on YouTube are constantly being taken down, so, instead of broken links, I'd have broken videos on my site.
Professional sports teams are notorious for clamping down on their content and there used to be good reasons for that. But now I think their just swimming upstream and failing to exploit an opportunity at the same time.
The new NFL.com site goes right up to the door of the sharing Web but refuses to cross the threshold.
The site is completely RSS-enabled; I can subscribe to a feed of just Vikings news or videos, so I am alerted when there's new content. I can email and link to but not embed Vikings game highlights. I can only email photos, and even then not to specific ones but to photo sets.
All of the "sharing" features are designed to drive traffic to the site rather than marketing to people where they are at.
It would be simple to include a pre-roll ad in the embedded videos. You could allow people to only embed small photos and require a link back to the high quality, large photos at NFL.com.
Sports bloggers wouldn't mind that. In fact they'd love it, reasoning that it's the price they pay for the content. Bloggers are trying to build an audience, too, by creating their own quality content, so they're not inclined to send their readers elsewhere when they don't have to.
But they're perfectly happy to share their audience, on site, and even host advertising without charging for it, as long as they can embed the content they want to embed.
Embedable content is, indeed, a win-win situation for both the content provider and those who are embedding their content. But sadly for both parties, pro sports seem loath to fully embrace the spirit of Web 2.0.
CEOs from top technology companies, including the founders of TechCrunch, Technorati, Rojo and Socializer, discuss Web 2.0 and what it means to them, their companies, and the future of Internet communication.
This is a very good explanation of Web 2.0 by Andy Gutmans, the Co-founder of Zend. He explains the technologies that power Web 2.0, the applications and services that comprise Web 2.0, and the role of the end-user in Web 2.0.
Here's another great video from Lee LeFever for Common Craft that explains in plain English how social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us work:
Also See:
I'd like to add to the conclusions I made last week at the end of my Minneapolis Bridge Collapse & Citizen Journalism post.
I'm beginning to wonder if the explosion of citizen journalism produced by Minneapolitans in the aftermath of the collapse was atypical. I wonder if Minnesota and Minneapolis merely enjoy certain traditions, characteristics and capabilities that, combined, create an ideal environment for citizen journalism to thrive.
I mentioned some of them in my previous post, but I didn't tie them together. Let me try.
Traditions
The social scientist Robert Putnam once observed that if Minnesota has a problem, there's likely a group of Minnesotans who have spontaneously gathered together to try and solve it. We have a high degree of social capital and a genuine sense of civic duty. That tradition helps make such activities as citizen journalism seem natural to us.
With E-democracy's email list forums and our thriving blogging community, we are at home communicating online.
Technology
We also have a high technology tradition. From Engineering Research Associates to Seymour Cray, the "father of supercomputing," and Control Data Corporation to the Gopher protocol to the birth of electronic democracy, Minnesota has been on the leading edge of technological innovation.
As Pioneer Press technology reporter Julio Ojeda-Zapata points out, Minneapolis' municipal wifi had recently been rolled out and actually played a crucial role in the emergency personnel's ability to respond to the crisis.
With broadband wireless access across most of the city, the prime technological component was in place for immediate, on-the-scene citizen reporting.
Creativity
Minnesota has a long tradition of supporting the arts, so it is no surprise that the state in general enjoys a large artistic community, and Minneapolis has a particularly thriving arts scene. The community, therefore, has an abundant pool of creative talent from which to draw.
Those talents--writing, photographic and videographic, specifically--lend themselves perfectly to journalistic pursuits.
Climate
Perhaps because of our harsh winters, Minnesotans have learned the value of helping one another out. If your car stalls on a long stretch of road in January with mercury at ten below and the wind chill making it even more brutal, that approaching car could be literally the difference between life and death. Knowing this, Minnesotans are more likely than not to lend a helping hand.
That attitude is required for the collaborative journalism on display at the MNSpeak thread about the bridge collapse.
Is the explosion of citizen media resulting from the 35W bridge collapse a confluence of factors unique to Minnesota or can we expect to see the same variety, quality, and volume of content elsewhere?
Only time will tell.
Mobile, Broadband, RSS & High Definition
Several trends bode well for citizen journalism:
Combine all these trends and suddenly you have the ability for one citizen with a blog and a high-def video camera to be an on-the-scene reporter who can upload her video footage to her blog right from the scene and through the magic of RSS, stream the report directly to the televisions of her subscribers.
Aggregators & Editors
The problem with citizen journalism is that much of it is spread over disparate sources; blog posts here, Flickr and YouTube uploads there, and microblog posts over here.
In a disasters such as the Minneapolis bridge collapse, finding all these citizen reports is problematic absent a system that aggregates and consolidates them. You either have to already know about a particular source of citizen media, or you need to know where to look and how discover such sources.
Currently, there is not one central source you can go to consume citizen media. We need an infrastructure that formally aggregates such sources with a function--perhaps a digg-like feature--that would bring the quality content to the fore.
With its run recently ended, Michael Cera's webisode series Clark and Michael marks an interesting chapter in the transition of Internet television programming.
CBS' experiment in Web-only content started in May and has received largely favorable reviews. The ten minute episodes star Arrested Development's Michael Cera and Cera's buddy Clark Duke, who play fictionalized versions of themselves as they try to sell a pilot for their television show.
The show has been promoted online through the official Web site, clarkandmichael.com, the show's own MySpace page and YouTube channel, and through uploads to YouTube by CBS itself.
So what's the verdict on the show's online marketing campaign?
The show's official site is not search optimized but that's not so much of a problem when you've got CBS promotional power. Along with the episodes, the site features a blog written in first person by, presumably, Cera and Duke themselves.
With admittedly incomplete data (July data is not included) from Compete.com, the clarkandmichael.com site enjoyed 22,000 visits a month in June, up from about 4,000 visits from its launch month in May:
The site enjoyed fairly deep engagement, with 3.3 pages per visit by June:
The clarkandmichael.com site has 315 other sites linking to it.
The show's MySpace page boasts 3,340 friends, a rather underwhelming albeit imprecise measurement.
The YouTube stats are probably a better indication of the show's popularity online. The uploads by CBS are notable because the network has allowed embedding code for them so YouTube users can copy and paste an episode into their Web sites or blogs. That's a practice traditional television has been loath to use. Here's episode two:
The stats for the CBS uploads have been mixed, however. The above episode enjoyed 14,500 views while episode 6 garnered only 730 views.
The show's own YouTube channel, however, has enjoyed a much stronger viewership. None of the eight videos uploaded to the channel are actual episodes of the show. Those eight videos enjoyed a total of 130,627 views from 518 subscribers as of this writing.
The YouTube channel was established long before the launch of the Clark and Michael show, however; it was used to share the duo's comedy sketches and stand-up routines. Clark and Michael, therefore, had already built a base video audience and the loyalty of those viewers carried through when the show launched. The six uploads prior to the show averaged about 16,000 views each; the two uploads promoting the show averaged 18,000 views.
Strangely, neither CBS nor the Clark and Michael YouTube channels bothered to create a playlist for the show; an oversight that would seem a natural, particularly since CBS is allowing embedding of the shows.
These numbers aren't phenomenal by any means but the show is a fascinating experiment, regardless. Is this simply CBS piloting a potential on-air show? Are they testing the waters of online-only content? All of the above?
I do believe this is a glimpse of the future of television programming. I think more and more we'll see shorter, more focused entertainment such as Clark and Michael.
The most obvious question is one of revenue: How do you make money with content that will eventually be downloaded to your HDTV via RSS? Will such audiences balk at pre-roll TV ads? Are these product placement vehicles? One Arrested Development show's storyline, remember, revolved around the Sidekick II telephone. Will such content support a subscription revenue model?
Those questions remain but the experiments, happily, continue.
The Washington Post reports today that Rudolph Giuliani and Mitt Romney may be backing out of the CNN/YouTube GOP Primary debate. The report says Giuliani is unlikely to participate and quotes Romney dismissing the seriousness of the debates: "I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman."
The reason the two Republicans want to skip the debate probably has more to do with the success of YouTube itself than with the dignity of the debate format.
Search for rudolph giuliani at YouTube and the first link you get is to a video of the former New York city mayor in drag:
A search for mitt romney at YouTube returns a bunch of links to videos produced by the Romney campaign but also a link to a video of the 1994 U.S. Senate campaign debate between Romney and Ted Kennedy featuring Romney expressing views that Republican primary voters could find distasteful and even offensive:
Both videos could easily make it to the debates if hooked on legitimate questions. Romney's video is easy: Because he's expressed views contrary to those he now holds, how are we to believe him? Giuliani in drag could be used in the context of a question about gay rights, an issue Giuliani probably would like to avoid addressing before a Republican primary audience.
Indeed, as two of the most popular presidential campaign political videos on YouTube (the Giuliani video has been viewed more than 373,000 times; the Romney video got more than 162,000 views), their absence from the debate would be glaring.
See also:
Watching the CNN/YouTube debate for the Democratic presidential primary candidates on Monday, I thought it was a fairly good format but not quite the populist innovation I was hoping for. The one thing that struck me from an online politics and marketing point of view, was the candidate's YouTube commercials that ran going into, appropriately, commercial breaks.
With the exception of Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, though some were cute or humorous, all the candidates had the pretty standard boilerplate political TV ads we've come to expect. Only Clinton and Edwards embraced the culture of YouTube.
There are certain communication conventions that have percolated to the surface of the YouTube community to become common practices. Take three prominent examples 1) Webcam commentary where the video creator(s) speaks directly to the camera, 2) mashups, where you take various pictures or video clips and mix them with music or commentary to make an entirely new video, and 3) crowd sourcing, where you ask the YouTube community at large to create a video for you.
John Edwards' campaign produced their own video for the debate with a mashup of the title song from the musical Hair and photos that contrasted images of hair with images of Alberto Gonzalez, President Bush, mayhem in Iraq, and the desperation during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:
The video is very sophisticated in the sense that it addresses an Edwards weakness. Edwards has been criticized as a pretty boy and Democratic primary voters may worry that this presents an electability issue for him. A YouTube video of him combing his hair before an interview has enjoyed more than 825,000 views and not long ago he was in the news for paying exorbitant prices to his hair stylist:
Edwards' ad address the issue, makes fun of himself indirectly, while bringing up substantive campaign issues. It also looks like a YouTube video with it's blurry, over-compressed graphics and using the slide show, photo montage format with nonstandard size photos that leave black bars on the screen.
Hilary Clinton's YouTube ad is the result of yet another campaign contest, this time asking her supporters to create a video for the occasion. The last time the campaign tried such an approach was when they asked supporters to pick Clinton's campaign theme song. That didn't go so well when supporters voted for Canadian Celine Dion.
But this time, the campaign got a hit. The winner of the contest mashes up "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from the Peer Gynt suites by Edvard Grieg...
...with the iconic placards from Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues...
... right down to the same font:
By using crowd sourcing (a democratic activity, in this case), the Clinton campaign got a video that looks right at home on YouTube, evokes a cultural icon representative of change in the form of Bob Dylan with imagery that touches two generations (the 80s band INXS did a video using the placard theme as well) and echoes the campaign's catchphrase (Ready For Change), addresses specific campaign issues, and ends with a clever tagline that appeals to women.
I have one real criticism about the debate.
I would've liked to see CNN and YouTube use the wisdom of crowds, the Web 2.0 idea that many heads are better than one, by allowing people to vote on which video questions would be used for the debate rather than leaving it up to the news organizations to choose.
Sure, the campaigns would no doubt game the system by having their supporters vote for the best questions for their candidate. And there's no surefire way to prevent people from voting multiple times, though there are restrictions you can implement. But the sheer critical mass of the volume of CNN viewers and YouTube users would no doubt level that playing field.
And, God forbid, foreigners might vote for the questions! But you know what, who cares? It's not like, in this day and age, the rest of the world's perception of or issues with us don't matter.
My hunch is that the most pertinent and pressing issues would rise to the top and the questions would be formed in a manner most people thought would elicit a valid answer.
Finally, I would have really liked to see the candidates fully embrace Open Source Politics by, rather than directing their message at voters, eliciting opinions from voters. I would've liked to have seen one or more candidates use their commercial to ask the viewers and YouTubers for their feedback, for their issues and concerns, and to post them as a video response to that commercial.
By and large, though, the debate was more than a ratings gimmick, it was a step forward in online politics.
All Candidate Commercials For The Democratic Primary CNN/YouTube Debate
This is the full presentation <
