Tag Archives: Facebook

Facebook Is Killing the Internet – And I Love It

Posted on June 2, 2010 by Tim Kilroy

OK, so right off the bat, let’s get over the whole Facebook privacy thing. While it has spurred some really interesting discussion, Facebook is not out to steal your credit card, your social security number or anything that is really, really private. We can talk about that later. Today, I want to take a look at how Facebook is just killing the internet…and, I love it.

Facebook is a giant monster. 4 bazillion people use it every day. And according to a statistic I just made up, every man woman and child in the United States wastes 119.7 hours each week playing Farmville and Mafia Wars.

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Online Marketing Meets the Presentation Layer

Posted on April 8, 2010 by Tim Kilroy

Forget about controlling your customers and dive deep into the essentials of messaging and brand.

Marketers love control. We crave it. We want to own the discussion. Setting the parameters of the interactions that our brands have with our consumers is our professional mission.

Many marketers have “grown up” in one-way media, be it television or print or catalog. In these experiences, the terms of the discussion were at the control of the marketer. By and large, we decided what our customers saw and heard.

But with the advent of the internet, our control has started to slip away. We control the presentation on our own websites (mostly), and in the early days of the internet, that was sufficient. As the dynamic nature of the internet and social media and search has evolved, it has become harder and harder to get the consumer to our little corner of the world, where their experience is shaped by our vision. Now we must attract them to that experience through multiple presentation layers that are the discovery mechanisms from which consumers self-select their interaction with us.

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Facebook CPC Ads: How Big Can They Be in the Media Mix?

Posted on March 11, 2010 by Suzy Sandberg

Facebook CPC advertising, which started to gain traction with advertisers last year, resembles the early days of paid search marketing.  Launching a campaign is done in a do-it-yourself interface, and that interface is where bidding is established, payment is done by credit card, ads are created and messages targeted.  Also akin to paid search circa 2001 is that the execution of a campaign is mostly a manual process (as of yet there is no API).

As we saw with search, there is no doubt that Facebook’s features and tools will become more sophisticated and radically improve over time.  Facebook would surely like to monetize its 450 million users, and we know there are enhancements to the program already in the works.  With the attractive CPC pricing model, Facebook and would-be Facebook advertisers are lined up and waiting to sync up with APIs or at minimum, get easy access to reporting and some kind of bid management tool.

Looking into the future, could Facebook CPC ads ever become a force to be reckoned with in the media mix, matching or even exceeding paid search as a proportion of total online spend?

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Social Media: The Boisterous, New Triple Play

Posted on February 4, 2010 by Chris Paradysz

Until now, cable companies held a lock on “triple play” as a marketing phrase to indicate a consumer’s package of digital services, including phone, traditional cable and Internet access. Alas, social media has emerged as a (welcome) new threat to multi-channel marketing’s status quo and should be allowed to grab the “triple play” title (after all, cable has added a 4th play anyway — high-definition — with speculation of a 5th play in 3-D still to come).

Take the Lupus Research Institute’s Shady Ladies gala last Saturday night in Wellington, Florida.  The goal was to stir awareness for a deadly disease that mostly affects young women.  The evening event included dinner and good fun but, also, had silent and live auctions for celebrity sunglasses (Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scalfia, the Kardashians, Tom Bergeron of Dancing with the Stars fame, Beyonce etc.), as well as a few fashion pieces.

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Here Comes The Flood: Twitter, Facebook and Real-Time Search

Posted on October 25, 2009 by Tim Kilroy

With micro-blogging and social media about to swamp current search algorithms, reputation will be the new PageRank.

Search and Social IconsLast week was a busy one in the search world. Bing and Google both announced new relationships with Twitter, soon making all public tweets indexable and searchable from your favorite search engine. Bing also announced that Facebook updates would be part of the search experience.

This is the first step in a MASSIVE change in the way search works.

Why is this a massive change? With these true torrents of content emerging from Twitter and Facebook, it will be impossible for the search engines to use their traditional metrics to determine what is an authoritative search result. The traditional authority-based algorithm becomes significantly less relevant.

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Google Wave and the Future of Targeted Marketing

Posted on October 16, 2009 by Jeffrey Cohen

With its potential for timely and ultra-targeted offers, Google Wave could alter the rules for email and social media marketing. 

GoogleWaveLogoI was excited to receive an “exclusive” invite for the Google Wave product.  My first look at this intriguing platform, combined with the recent work we’ve been doing with the Facebook API, has left me pondering the future of both.

While we can’t be sure what Google’s final product will look like, the currently available Wave application could potentially be an e-mail and/or social media killer.  On second thought, those two platforms will never go away, but they could be somewhat diminished.  After all TV didn’t kill radio and online marketing will not completely replace off-line channels, but in both cases, the existing models had to be rethought.

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A Look at Social Media Measurement

Posted on August 11, 2009 by Anthony Avolio

SocialMediaLogosSmMost online marketers are comfortable with the measurement and metrics behind traditional click-based programs like paid search.  Less rigorously measured and discussed is activity from social media sites like user-generated links and comments placed on sites like Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon.  While social media as a channel presents unique challenges to measurement, there are several tactics marketers can take to start measuring the impact of social media on their business.

Outbound links. If your site includes a social bookmark or sharing tool, measuring usage of this tool can help answer…

  • Which social sites are my customers using to share my content?
  • Which types of content are customers sharing most?  Should frequently shared content be more prominently featured?
  • What type of customer is sharing content on social media outlets? Is your business benefiting from this?

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Social Marketing: Beyond the ROI

Posted on August 4, 2009 by Suzy Sandberg

The amount of social marketing conversations with clients has definitely proliferated over the past few months.  As a direct response agency, prior discussions usually started — and then died — when someone asked “but where’s the ROI model?”  Translated, this really means “it’s not trackable” and “I don’t get the metrics,” but considering that all of them — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others – are free, the ROI isn’t really questionable.  It wouldn’t take a lot of sales to offset the expense of maintaining even a limited social marketing presence.

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Search Sushi

Posted on July 23, 2009 by Tim Kilroy

We love sushi. Delicious, delectable, delightful…I could go on all day. But we are faced with a new challenge in the search world: search sushi. During Google’s Spring Searchology event, Google unleashed a bunch of new search options, allowing users to filter searches by media (video, forum, review, etc) and by time (all time, recently, past week, etc.) So this opens up all kinds of opportunities for search dominance. By leveraging time-sensitive content with tradition al well-linked content, you can really position yourself to cover all of the bases for search.

But as Marissa Mayer was introducing the 2009 version of Google’s Universal Search, she mentioned that it was like a “Bento Box” of search results.

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Breaking Through on Google’s Page 1

Posted on July 16, 2009 by Suzy Sandberg

Most advertisers aspire to be number 1 on paid search and number 1 on natural search with a particular focus on Google since it typically drives 80% of search-sourced sales.  Retailers in particular, though, may have noticed that for a wide array of products, Page 1 is actually dominated by Google Product Search listings and the CSEs, which push retailer-specific keywords down in the rankings, primarily affecting natural search listings.

Despite good intentions, there may be technical limitations, branding priorities and business rules that have prevented a retailer from optimizing their site well enough to jump over these sources.  You may have also recently noticed that Twitter, YouTube, blogs and Facebook are all bumping down traditional, retailer-specific natural search listings even further.

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