Author, speaker, and general startup guru Eric Ries should know. His movement, highlighted in his book The Lean Startup, is almost impossible to miss in the startup community. And he’s eager to build and market in simple, minimum viable product ways.

“People are stuck on massive legacy technology,” Ries told me. “Anything new they want to do, there’s an approval process, versus with a tool like this one you can just get started immediately.”

But smart sites are a new type of website, built in two weeks for less than $5,000 … with heat-mapping analytics, A/B testing, goal tracking, and logging built right in. Everything on the otherwise standard HTML and Javascript site is built around a story, and that story is told on just one single webpage … which can get long, but never feels long.

“This is for everyone that wants to tell a story or start something great,” says Chuck Longanecker, whose Digital Telepathy firm created the concept of smart sites for Ries as well as Tim Ferriss of 4-hour body fame. “Sites don’t necessarily need pages, and working with people with like Eric challenged us to change the way a site could be.”

The key is story.

Part of Eric Ries’s Lean Startup website

Like Ries’ lean startup philosophy, a smart site is focused on one particular story. The story of your app, perhaps, the story of your project … or the story of your life. That focus on story ties all the elements of the site together.

For example, Ries’ site theleanstartup.com begins with an introduction: a full-screen photo, a headline, and an email sign-up form. After a “learn more” click, the browser view scrolls down to a teaser: three key benefits of lean. A third click gives you the heart of the story, an overview of the principles of lean startups. A fourth goes even deeper, as does a fifth, a sixth, and more.

Each time, you stay on the same page. And each time, you’re presented with a bit-sized chunk of story — never too much, always just enough to want more. A chapter, you might say, with a cliffhanger ending that you just have to click to find.

It’s a deceptive simple design ethic.

“I was really looking for something different,” Ries says. “It’s especially important to me that the site is not just a good marketing tool, but also a good example of the lean philosophy.”

And it all lives on a single page, tied together with elegant, logical steps, each of which is a user’s click indicating interest, engagement, and, ultimately, desire.

The ability to keep those clicks coming, of course, resides in the power of stories, of narrative. Stories are how we’ve shared information from the beginning of time, Longanecker says. Stories are what has connected us against the backdrop of campfires and coffee, and stories are how we interpret our world — and ourselves.

So storytelling was a natural metaphor for smart sites. The challenge is that storytelling is an art, not a science. And yet, Digital Telepathy has found a way to add both.

“Content is king, but you can’t just plaster it all over the page — you have to kind of currate the story,” Longanecker says, and therein lies the art. “You don’t necessarily know the best way to tell a story off the top of your head … you need to test it, iterate it.”

That’s where the built-in analytics come into play, and therein lies the science.

That science means that built-in A/B testing allows Digital Telepathy to play with the design and the story while the site is live, testing to see what works, what’s better, and what needs to die a quick death on the cutting room floor. Built-in analytics from Optimizely and KissInsights help, and more are coming.

The difference versus a standard website is immense, Longanecker says:

“Your website knows what its objectives are the day it goes live, and it’s giving you all this information on the backend,” he told me. “The design’s never done, it can always get better.”

I asked Longanecker and Ries who smart sites work for, who they’re optimized for.

Ries obviously uses smart site technology for the Lean Startup, among other sites, and he’s joined by diet, health, and learn-anything guru Tim Ferriss. These are examples of movements accompanied by products, but startups are also a core demographic — Longanecker cites companies in or exiting from Kickstarter, Y Combinator, and TechStars as a core demographic.

But it’s clearly not for a large corporation, and on purpose. It’s more focused than that.

“I don’t think HP corporate is going to call us soon,” Longanecker says. “However, it’d be a great page for HP for hiring.”

That’s the theory behind Twitter’s new ad tool, keyword targeting in timelines.

Available today globally, the new targeting mechanism will allow advertisers to tailor which audience they choose to market to by the content of the tweets those people write. Twitter says this is important for advertisers, since it lets marketers reach the right audience at the right time, in the right context.

And they’re right, to a degree.

Twitter’s optimistic scenario is a user tweeting about a great song from their favorite band. As it happens in contrived examples, this band just happens to be playing a nearby venue that very night, which means that promoters can run geotargeted Twitter ad campaigns against local users who have tweeted that band’s name, and thereby inform this particular user that her favorite group is in town.

There’s no doubt that there’s huge value in this new targeting option. And, as AllThingsD notes, Twitter has included negative sentiment filtering, which is critical, because no advertiser wants to target people who are tweeting about Wu-Tang Clan, only to find that they were tweeting that Wu-Tang Clan sucks, or something similar.

But it’s also challenging, because many tweets are difficult to register commercial intent for.

If I tweet about my wife’s illness, are you going to target me with a random medicine? Or if you tweet about a great dinner you’re just about to eat, will you really be receptive to ads about a Greek restaurant just down the road? Twitter says it’s helping advertisers target “signals of intent,” and that might sound like Google-ish search keyword targeting, but it’s not clear that the link is quite as obvious as an intentional, directed search.

But it is yet another tool in the Twitter advertiser toolbox, and with all the others, will add up to better results. Twitter says that it has tested the feature with Walgreens and Microsoft, among others, and “users were significantly more likely to engage with Promoted Tweets using keyword targeting in timeline than other forms of targeting in the timeline.”

Which sounds like Twitter ad products are synergistic: 1 + 1 = 3, not 2. And in fact, GoPro achieve engagement rates as high as 11 percent, Twitter says, using the new feature. That’s startlingly high.

And, doubtless, music to advertisers ears.

photo credit: mkandlez via photopin cc

Clearly, those BlackBerry users are far too busy working.

While social and search are obviously critical for digital marketers, email marketing continues to rank as one of the highest return-on-investment activities that marketers do. However, where we read and respond to our email is changing as mobile devices penetrate farther into our lives and our work.

Today, about 75 percent of us read and answer email on our phones in addition to — or instead of — our computers.

Marketing automation firm GetResponse, which offers email marketing services for companies like iStockPhoto, the Blue Man Group, and Men’s Health, recently studied how to optimize email for mobile. And it turns out that companies that learn to deliver email that’s better formatted for mobile get up to 30 percent higher open rates.

So, how do you optimize for mobile?

Some of the information is fairly obvious to long-time marketers: Keep it simple, keep it short, use large enough fonts so consumers can see your content on a small handheld device, kill the Flash animations, and so on. But interestingly, GetResponse says that iPhone users open rates are almost double Android users and an astonishing 73 times higher than BlackBerry owners. Which means that you need to know what devices your customers own and adapt your strategies accordingly.

Here’s all the data in visual form:

photo credit: marimoon via photopin cc

Shift begs to differ.

“We’re bringing the market alternative to the closed, rigid marketing cloud that Adobe and Salesforce have created,” Shift CEO James Borow told me yesterday. “If you look at their marketing clouds, it’s really only about companies they’ve acquired and built. But the problem is, as the market moves, you really can’t acquire or build companies fast enough.”

The concept of a marketing cloud is a interoperable suite of tools that together provide the digital marketer — and today, is there any other kind? — everything they need to find, understand, attract, engage, monitor, communicate, and track consumers, fans, and customers.

Today, that’s largely about search and social.

So what Shift has done is assemble what Borow considers an all-star cast of digital marketing tools together in one platform. It’s not buying them all and not integrating them all into one inseparable suite, but making them all available in one environment, with a certain amount of interoperability, data share, and single sign in.

“Ultimately, we’re trying to break down these silos of communication,” Burrow says.

Today, those tools include:

• Aggregate Knowledge (media buying intelligence platform)
• Convertro (conversion-tracking and ROI optimization)
• Curalate (marketing and analytics for Pinterest and Instagram)
• Expion (social media management)
• Fan Appz (personalized social media marketing)
• Kenshoo (search and social ad tools)
• Moontoast (rich media social ad creation)
• Offerpop (social media marketing campaign platform)
• Optimal Analytics (Facebook advertising and analytics)
• SocialFlow (conversion tool for Twitter and Facebook)
• The Trade Desk (online media buying platform)
• GraphEffect (social advertising)

Shift has brought all these tools together within one network with its own graph, somewhat analogous to Facebook’s social graph, that tracks marketing actions and attention-needed data points within each tool and provides that data in a social-network style feed.

In other words, yes, sort of like Facebook for your marketing campaign.

Source: Shift

Shift marketing cloud

The result is that all the members of your marketing team, whether internal, freelance, or at an agency, can visit the site and see what’s happening with your marketing campaign in a simple, linear view. The site incorporates a permissioning model so that people in different roles see appropriate information, and many of the updates are generated by the tools you’re using themselves.

So, what’s the cost?

“Shift is totally free,” Borow says. “And Shift will always be free.”

You can sign into Shift, create teams, invite colleagues, and go to the “app store” to install marketing apps. If you have existing accounts with them, they’ll just automatically sync up and you can use those tools within Shift’s collaboration network. If you don’t and you do happen to sign up to a new tool, Shift will take a small revshare from that transaction.

“Today, we feel like we have a really competitive stack against all the other marketing clouds,” Borow told me, adding that Shift will be adding new tools and companies on a quarterly basis. “The enterprise to date has focused on closed systems, but our thesis is that closed systems end up less dynamic and less competitive.”

That may be so, and there’s a lot in Shift’s open marketing cloud.

But there’s also so work remaining to be done. Integration between the participating apps is a little slim right now, with some integrations requiring developer work. Customer relationship management is perhaps the most obvious gap at the moment, especially considering that is natively to Salesforce clients. All of which is coming, Borow said.

And, as the company adds more tools to the toolbox, the solution will become more compelling with time.

photo credit: gordonr via photopin cc

The new site includes a short Twitter 101 overview for those to whom “tweet” and “hashtag” are still Greek. And an overview of what Twitter’s 200 million active users actually do while posting 400 million tweets a day. There’s also an overview on how to write good tweets: They should be conversational, funny, shareable, and exceptional.

There’s been a definite acceleration in Twitter monetization efforts. The company released new self-service ad tools just two weeks ago that allow small business advertisers to finely target their campaigns by geography, gender, device, and interests. And Twitter’s new Ads API for larger clients and agencies has been live for just over a month.

One interesting thing about Twitter’s new business user intro video is how the social network now sees itself as a “global dialogue where people talk about their deepest interests … including your business.”

Whether your company is one of people’s deepest interests may be of some debate. But the new Pope was announced via Twitter, so why not your business?

Here’s Twitter’s new intro video for business:

Image credit: Twitter

Enough, apparently, to win a Facebook-sponsored competition. And to know that it is a fleeting, vulnerable, and fragile event.

“About half of your engagement is in the first 60 minutes,” Optimal’s CEO Rob Leathern told me. “And about three quarters is within the first 180 minutes. That pattern is quite consistent.”

Optimal just recently won a Facebook-sponsored competition among the social network’s preferred marketing developers to create an innovative new marketing product. What Leathern and his crew came up with was the Optimal News Feed Promoter, a tool to spot early virality and enhance it. That helps marketers utilize the organic results of earned media to optimize their spend on paid media — specifically, promoted posts.

It’s a unique social take on automated marketing systems that doesn’t try to help you create viral content. It simply spots when you might have already done so — and then helps you capitalize on it.

“Our system basically takes whatever organic posts are getting traction and sets up rules to amplify and create ad campaigns in real time,” Leathern says. “You don’t want to waste money on things that don’t have potential, so instead of spending your money across everything … you can just let the data show you which posts you should focus on.”

Source: Optimal Social

Facebook post virality over time.

The rules are customizable: Posts can be set to transition to paid campaigns via relative measures such as a percentage of virality or absolute measures such as number of shares or comments. To make the system even more powerful, marketers can stack and layer triggers to build complex logic for automated social media campaigns.

Adding paid exposure to already viral content has a variety of benefits, Leathern says. It ensures that your media dollars are well spent, because the precise audience that you’re marketing to is the one that already indicated an appreciation for the content. In other words, it takes the guesswork out. In addition, adding paid media via promoted posts extends the life of those posts and even has a positive spillover effect on your other earned media.

“Paid media certainly does improve what you do organically,” Leathern says. “Even if it’s just because you’re getting more data, you’re building a virtuous cycle … learning something via organic, using it in paid, and vice versa.”

Optimal works with digital agencies and brands, including Fanscape, which says that Optimal’s news feed promoter product lets their teams “immediately amplify the most viral social interactions with paid media.”

Which just might help you enhance your chances of going viral in a major way.

photo credit: Will Lion via photopin cc

Balachandar Ganesh oversees research operations at Credii.

Twitter’s recent announcement of an Ads API hardly comes as a surprise. The rumour mills have been predicting this for nearly two years now, and with Facebook and LinkedIn already having made similar moves, it was merely a question of just when this was going to happen.

The move is widely being touted as a very wise one by Twitter — and for the right reasons. It enables Twitter to tap into the expertise of third party application developers with a proven track record of developing marketing platforms that help advertisers in launching, managing and optimizing their campaigns at scale.

Regardless of how big your advertising budgets are, Twitter’s Ads API and the value that it promises to deliver via third party ad solutions providers is unquestionable.

But how exactly will this impact marketers and marketing budgets? What tangible outcomes can advertisers expect from these third party ad solutions providers in the not so distant future?

Buying Twitter ad units just got easier

Balachandar Ganesh

Up until yesterday, the only way you could buy advertising real estate on Twitter was either off their basic self-service interface or from their direct sales team. Not only is this far from optimal, it is also extremely difficult to scale if you want to run frequent and multiple campaigns. There’s always been a demand for gaining more eyeballs on Twitter through advertising (Twitter sees nearly half a billion tweets on the platform every day!) and with this announcement, Twitter just widened the supply pipes.

The Ads API is a definitive step towards building a developer ecosystem similar to that of Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developer program. As marketers, it gives you the flexibility to buy and manage Twitter ad units from a variety of developers, and arguably, do so easily and effectively.

Creating ad campaigns on Twitter just got easier

Creating and managing ad campaigns on Twitter was a labour intensive process — a process that couldn’t scale to meet the requirements of agencies and big brands. Consider an agency creating thousands of new ad units for their clients every day. These ads had to be manually uploaded, one by one. Editing these ad units, if you had to, was equally painful.

Running scheduled ad campaigns? Forget about it!

By tapping into the goodness of third-party tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud, GraphEffect from SHIFT and TBG Digital’s One Media Manager (and likely many more in the very near future), advertisers can now upload and edit bulk ads, and effortlessly create, plan and run ad campaigns like they do for Facebook or YouTube.

Reporting and analytics just got better

Twitter’s native ad analytics and reporting tools are, well, threadbare. Here’s a look at the entire repertoire of Twitter’s analytics for promoted tweets, trends and accounts.
Twitter doesn’t offer much apart from pretty basic metrics such as impressions, retweets, clicks, replies, and follows. Hardly enough to wet the lips of advertisers spending $200,000 per day on a promoted trend (yes, they’ve upped the price from the $80,000 they used to charge when it first launched).

Adding context to these metrics and enriching them with perspective that you glean from cross-channel ad campaigns is something that Facebook, LinkedIn and now, Twitter’s partner ecosystem is more than capable of delivering on.

You can squeeze more bang-for-your-buck with hyper targeting

Twitter barely offers anything in terms of targeting.

Since launching their promoted products suite, Twitter has offered businesses the ability to target by geography, by gender and only recently, by interest. There already is an impressive ecosystem of vendors that do some pretty neat stuff around generating in-depth audience profiles, like being able to suggest and rank individuals according to topic specific influence levels, or giving you a list of users similar to your target audience. As Twitter expands their Ads API partner ecosystem, marketing software vendors with a strong focus on analytics will be able to give marketers the ability to run highly targeted and highly contextual ad campaigns.

Want to run a promoted tweet campaign to get the attention of influential folks in technology, living in Palo Alto, and are unsatisfied Verizon customers? No problem!

You can finally expect data-driven real-time ad campaign optimization

The industry for tapping into the social web, mining for relevant conversations, and optimizing engagement is awash with hundreds of vendors catering to a wide array of requirements. In the process of adopting an ‘always-on’ approach in monitoring for trends or impending crises that could snowball into something disastrous, they generate a lot of real-time or near real-time insights. These insights can now be used to complete the feedback loop in optimizing ad campaigns at run time.

And maybe, just maybe …

Right now, the only engagement metrics on Twitter that are indicative of the success or failure of an ad campaign are retweets, @mentions and replies. You really can’t measure much else with promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts. However, Twitter is looking into newer ad units, giving advertisers more options to engage with their target audience.

The ad unit that Twitter is currently testing features an image with a ‘Get it Now’ button (see image below), giving marketers the ability to generate leads directly from Tweets. You can also expect Vine lending itself as a new, meaningful ad unit. 6 second videos on autoplay could very well be Twitter’s equivalent to Facebook’s rumoured autoplay video ads.

Whether or not Twitter chooses to roll out lead cards, it isn’t outlandish to suggest that Twitter will be rolling out newer, more complex ad units in the near future, enabling their partner ecosystem to deliver algorithmic, analytics- intensive, data-driven technology solutions so advertisers can increase the effectiveness of their Twitter campaigns.

Folks, Twitter marketing just got serious.

Balachandar Ganesh oversees research operations at Credii, an interactive web-based platform for business software selection. In his previous role as an enterprise software analyst at Ovum, Bala evaluated over a hundred enterprise technologies in depth and authored reports that helped businesses mitigate technology adoption related challenges. He also undertook a number of consulting engagements, advising companies ranging from garage startups to global multi-billion dollar firms. Bala is a graduate in Technology Policy from the University of Cambridge, where he focused on Internet Governance and Policy related issues.

Image credit: ShutterStock/Tweet bird

In addition to its own tools, Facebook has tapped four digital marketing companies as official partners brands can work through: Datalogix, Epsilon, Axciom, and BlueKai. Facebook marketers can already segment audiences by demographics and specific likes and interests, like cooking or gardening:

Source: Facebook

Current Facebook targeting options

The new capabilities will be much more powerful.

First of all, Facebook will work with the four digital marketing partners or resellers to create custom fine-grained targeting categories like “soda drinkers” or “people who browsed for a specific make/model on my website.”

The first example is interesting because it’s a meta-characterization: Facebook is moving beyond the simple “X liked Coke” to the meaning of that like — and using more nuanced clues based on what Facebookers have posted and shared on the site to build that characterization. The second example shows that Facebook is getting more personally involved in offering retargeting tools for Facebook ads directly to advertisers, or at least through a list of preferred vendors.

The second thing that Facebook is doing via BlueKai and the other partners is providing the ability for advertisers who have built up significant demographic and intent data for targeted consumers to use that data in Facebook ad campaigns, which theoretically means they can find their potential clients quicker … and cheaper.

Much cheaper, according to Facebook. And much better.

The social network touts an example of a Hong Kong-based game developer, Kingnet, that reduced its cost-per-install by 40 percent via custom audiences. And a car dealership in Chicago had a 24x ROI on its ad spend by building a campaign that combined existing audience, an additional custom audience, and Facebook offers.

Privacy, of course, is always a question when it comes to Facebook and ads — particularly so when you bring retargeting and advanced audience segmentation into the picture, which is what this announcement does.

But Facebook says that “this process is specifically designed so that we don’t share private information about individuals with marketers,” and that people will still have the same control over ads they see on Facebook as they currently do.

photo credit: Bjørn Giesenbauer via photopin cc

Far too cheap.

Beauty products retailer and digital trailblazer Sephora says that per-capita, its Pinterest followers spend more money than its Facebook followers, and not just a little bit more. In fact, Pinterest users spend 15 times more on Sephora products than Facebook followers, Sephora’s head of digital Julie Bornstein told me this morning.

“The reality is that when you’re in the Pinterest mindset, you’re actually interested in acquiring items, which is not what people go to Facebook for,” Bornstein said. “Facebook continues to be just a great customer interaction tool that gives us the real-time ability to dialog with our customer; it’s a big customer-service venue for us.”

Ouch.

If you’re Facebook, that’s gotta hurt. You’ve just been downgraded from the bright and shining future of social shopping to the back office hell of customer support.

Sephora jumped on Pinterest hard, mostly because its largely-female marketing team were enthusiastic early adopters. When the company re-launched its website in April last year, it was one of the first retailers to integrate the ‘Pin It’ button sitewide. Individual users share their lists of what Sephora products they love and why — rather than just a putting together a list of fashion products, they can use Pinterest to tell a visual story about why a certain eyeshadow is so great and seek to inspire others. And a dedicated resource on the Sephora digital team helps Sephora staff craft Pinterest strategies.

All of which has made an impact.

Sephora’s following on Facebook is still huge and significant, at 4.7 million fans. And it’s a critical early-warning system for the company. “We hear instantly” about what people love and don’t love, Bornstein says, and Sephora clients connect with each other on the platform, giving each other fashion and beauty tips and advice.

But in terms of immediately measurable commercial impact? Pinterest is currently unmatched.

“E-commerce really is still in the first innings of really leveraging the power of social,” Bornstein says. “But we’ve experimented a lot with social shopping, and this is the first one that has really gotten to scale.”

photo credit: cobalt123 via photopin cc, swanky via photopin cc

Jacob Beckley is Vice President of Innovation at full-service marketing agency Fusion92. 

NFC – near field communication – is a hot new trend that has the potential to revitalize the direct mail marketing sector. It enables marketers to deliver content via an embedded NFC chip that allows wireless communication when a user touches a smartphone or mobile device to a piece of marketing collateral or brings the device into close proximity with an NFC tag.

Although NFC technology has been around since the 1980s and marketers are increasingly using it today, the technology was slower to catch on in marketing than QR code technology. QR codes – two-dimensional matrix codes that are often printed on direct mail marketing material – have found a ready user audience in the marketing realm for several years now. QR codes appear on everything from movie posters to fast-food restaurant drink cups to ketchup bottles. With QR codes, consumers can scan the printed code with their smartphone’s camera to be connected to online digital content.

Both NFC and QR codes serve a similar function: They are a bridge between the physical and digital worlds. NFC codes create a digital bridge to physical collateral, and unlike calls to action that require consumers to type in a URL or scan a code to get redirected to an online message, with NFC, all the consumer has to do is touch their smartphone or mobile device to the collateral for an instantaneous connection. It’s a unique way to connect the physical and digital spaces. This makes both technologies highly attractive to marketers.

But despite the current popularity of QR codes, many analysts believe that NFC technology is poised to replace QR codes as the marketing tool of choice. That’s because NFC is generally easier to use: Depending on the scanning application, QR codes can take seven or more steps to direct users to the digital marketing content. NFC codes don’t require any action on the part of the user other than bringing the device into close proximity to the tag.

However, QR codes got a huge head-start over NFC, mainly due to the fact that popular smartphone manufacturer Apple has been slow to embrace NFC technology. But other tech giants like Google have recently rolled out new products that use NFC, such as the Google Wallet, which uses NFC to transmit payment details to merchants for wireless transactions. Additionally, Samsung and other mobile smartphone makers have paved the way by incorporating NFC technology in their smartphones since as early as 2006.

NFC and Direct Mail

The use of NFC as a marketing tool is on the rise, but it’s not yet pervasive. That means marketers who use it now are early adopters. This is a unique opportunity for marketers such as direct mail specialist to get ahead of the curve. It is also an opportunity to build a digital bridge for consumers with a tool that eliminates the need for the target audience to take multiple steps to reach online content.

In the past, one obstacle to widespread NFC adoption was the need to embed chips or tags in the call to action material, which could take many forms, including letterhead paper, poster stock, business cards and virtually any other material on which a marketing message can appear. However, the development of NFC-enabled papers and plastics eliminate this barrier, opening up many new NFC applications, including use of the paper to create direct mail pieces of all types.

Developments like NFC-enabled paper, creating cheaper methods of tag production and technology adoption will help push NFC usage rates higher, as will Apple’s embrace of the technology since it is becoming more commonplace. The technology’s applications are practically limitless. Proximity marketing applications can allow merchants to convey messages to any smartphone within range of a particular product, allowing marketers to precisely target messages to consumers and gauge reactions to offers in real time.

Marketers who are early adopters of this emerging technology tool can differentiate themselves from competitors by developing analytics around the technology. This can provide a major strategic advantage. Marketers can also use NFC to improve their tactical approach by eliminating the need to create short URLs, relying instead on proximity to complete the connection between the direct mail marketing piece and the online offer.

By giving marketers a new way to bridge the physical and digital gap, NFC technology offers unprecedented opportunities to brands that want to convey a tech-savvy image while delivering valuable offers and collecting vital consumer insights. NFC is positioned to revitalize the direct mail marketing sector, enabling instantaneous delivery of relevant messages affordably and effectively.

photo credit: scott_bl8ke via photopin cc

On that earnings call, CEO Larry Page said he was “very, very optimistic” that Google’s mobile revenues would be going up, that Google was “working to simplify our ad system,” and that, although he didn’t have anything to announce immediately, the company was making “rapid progress in that area.”

Now we know at least part of what he was talking about.

Source: WordStream

The old way of adding mobile devices, all of which is going away

Today Google very quietly announced new AdWords API features supporting “enhanced campaigns.” By ‘enhanced,’ Google means mobile. And despite the quiet launch, it’s the biggest change to AdWords in the last five years, according to one key member of the online advertising ecosystem.

“This is a huge simplification to how advertisers manage and track mobile advertising campaigns,” Larry Kim, CEO of search marketing firm WordStream, told me today.

The problem in the past was that AdWords was desktop-centric. Building a successful mobile marketing in the past essentially forced advertisers to create multiple campaigns if they wanted to target different cities and devices effectively, massively increasing complexity to the point that only about 5 percent of AdWords users were actually using the services’ advanced features.

The key difference today is that mobile is now baked in by default.

With the update, Google is adding the ability to simply and quickly set up geo-targeted advertising campaigns via new bid adjustment features: spend more close to your locations, spend increasingly less in farther and farther locations. In addition, mobile devices can be easily be managed in the same campaign that targets desktop searchers, with an option that very simply and easily increments or decrements your standard ad price.

“They’ve re-thought the whole way of setting up campaigns,” Kim says. “Now, you just have one campaign, and in that campaign you can bid differently depending on whether the person is on mobile or desktop. You can use the ‘mobile bid multiplier’ to, for example, bid 50 percent of your desktop bid, or 125 percent of your desktop bid.”

To turn off mobile, advertisers will have to turn the bid multiplier for mobile devices to -100 percent … effectively shutting it down. On the positive side, the multiplier can be turned up to 300 percent of your desktop bid for high-value keywords in the right location at the right time.

Google says it’s done this because now “instead of having to cobble together and compare several separate campaigns, reports and ad extensions … [advertisers] can easily manage all of this in one single place.”

The new features, Kim says, address the two biggest stumbling blocks that small businesses and startups have with AdWords: it has not been easy to create successful campaigns, and the conversion and reporting tools have not made it super-easy to see return on investment.

“I think they’re the two biggest hurdles in mobile advertising adoption, and this means a lot more advertisers will adopt Google AdWords,” Kim told me. “Now you don’t have to be a full-time search marketer to do this anymore … and you’ll see more ROI from mobile searches.”

photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photopin cc

You chose one of three or four channels, spent your money, and hoped for the best. The awesome and awful new digital reality, however, is that the number of channels is now infinite, and customers interact with you in multiple separate ways. Good luck tracking your spend, understanding who you’re contacting, and determining your overall return on investment.

That’s a problem that companies like CrowdTwist are starting to address.

“In the last 10 to 15 years the ecosystem has exploded,” CrowdTwist CEO Irving Fain told me last week. “There are new channels popping up every week, and consumers are spending time with brands in new places … engaging with brands like the Miami Dolphins across eight to 10 channels, which makes them look like eight to 10 people.”

So what CrowdTwist does is aggregate those channels, and the people in them, so that brands know that Bob, Bo, and BJ are all one person, creating value for your brand by tweeting about you, sharing you, and pinning you. It starts with a loyalty program, which CrowdTwist provides as white-lable software-as-a-service for organizations like the Dolphins and the X Factor.

People join the program and connect their social media identities, helping the brand see them as one individual. Why? They get points, which lead to discounts and special retail offers. But they also get exclusive access to opportunities that others can only dream of.

“We had fans that helped bring the American flag out into the Dolphins’ stadium before a game and meet them team,” Fain said. “One flew all the way in from California. These are rewards you just can’t buy.”

Knowing who your customers are is important, but knowing what they’re doing is even more important.

Loyalty program on steroids?

“Loyalty programs were created to measure consumer impact,” Fain says. “But the only point they could identify me was when I spent money. So there was a 1:1 correlation between dollars spent and customer value.”

That doesn’t reflect a customers’ true value when you take into account word-of-mouth, social sharing, and the impact that one customers can have on two, five, or a hundred others. So CrowdTwist has created what Fain calls an “Impact Score,” which measures individual consumers’ impact on a brand, beyond their spend.

“In one program, the average spend was$45,” Fain told me. “One woman spent $43, so in a traditional program you would have just ignored her — she was completely average. But it turned out she had impacted over a thousand dollars all on her own.”

Once you find super-sharers like that woman, Fain says, you can start to create “look-alike” models by finding common trends around those consumers, creating profiles of what they look like, how they act, where they are, who they are. And then you can focus your marketing dollars, retention efforts, and campaigns on those who are most likely to “infect” others.

“In one example, a consumer that checks in on Foursquare at Zumiez spends five times more than others,” Fain said.

Second screen

Understanding your customers and where they are also helps you understand where to meet them.

“The second screen becomes another touch point in which consumers and fans are engaging with the brand on a day-to-day basis,” Fain said. “We want to measure that.”

For X Factor, mobile app usage grew from under 40 percent in week one to over 60 percent by week two. Fans “syncing” their apps to the show increase almost 20 times during the first hour of the live show, as fans unlocked bonus features and content.  ”The X Factor did a really strong job of integrating mobile into the show, and then we were able to provide Fox with the data to let them know what worked and what didn’t work,” Fain says.

The Miami Dolphins provided an interesting insight into fan behavior. CrowdTwist saw an “enormous” uptick in site traffic before the games, but during the game, most of the traffic — and the chatter — moved to the social networks: Twitter and Facebook. Traffic dropped, but social mentions were up. Then, after the game, fans returned to the website for analysis, video highlights and interviews, and more.

“Watching sports is a fundamentally social endeavor,” Fain explains. “Prior to the game it’s about personal information, content, consumption … then when the game actually starts to happen it becomes a social endeavor — relating with other people. Then after the game, people return.”

The goal is personalization

All this aggregation of social data, web data, app data, and personal information sounds like classic big data: vast, impersonal, and perhaps even clinical. But the focus and the plan is actually quite different.

“It’s really about aggregating the information across all these systems and bringing it back to individual people … about actually improving personalization,” Fain says.

If you know that a customer who checks in spends more, you can spend some time saying hello and getting to know him or her. (How many store and restaurant managers actually know who is the Foursquare mayor of their location?)

And if you know that Bob and BJ are the same person, you can send him one message, not two, and be much more aware about what he already knows about you, and does for you. Which means you can, essentially, be more real and personal.

At least in theory. Once you’ve got this data, the really hard work is using it well.

photo credit: Haags Uitburo via photopin cc, San Diego Shooter via photopin cc, Ernst Vikne via photopin cc

Google’s announced a new series of “Learn with Google” webinars for digital marketing this morning, focused on helping small, media, and large businesses grow with digital branding, social media, multiscreen marketing, and, yes, online advertising.

That is, after all, how the search giant makes its money.

The topics range from the basic — How to use Google+ and make social work for you — to a little more expert-level, with webinars on video remarketing and dynamic retargeting technologies. Other topics include Google Analytics, mobile advertising, video ads on YouTube, and Google Adwords.

Of course, despite the fact that 30 billion ads run daily on Google sites and networks, earning the company $100 million a day, there is just a little bit more to digital advertising than Google.com. Facebook ads and Twitter promoted tweets are just two examples of important digital marketing options you won’t learn about via a Google webinar.

Nevertheless, the search and mobile giant is putting together a very good lineup of introductory courses. Here are the courses, with dates, all of which will be available at Learn with Google’s webinar site.

Build Awareness

02/12 [Multiscreen] Brand Building in a Multiscreen World
02/20 [YouTube] How to Build your Business with YouTube Video Ads
03/05 [Social] How to Use Google+ and Make Social Work for You
03/12 [Mobile] Understanding Mobile Ads Across Marketing Objectives
03/27 [Wildfire by Google] The Call for Converged Media

Drive Sales

01/29 [Analytics] Google Tag Manager: Technical Implementation *today*
02/07 [Search] Your Shelf Space on Google: Get Started with Google Shopping
02/26 [YouTube] From Awareness to Sales: Making the Most of Video Remarketing
02/27 [Search] What’s New and Next in AdWords
03/06 [Display] Biggest Loser: Digital Ad Spend Edition
03/13 [Mobile] The Full Value of Mobile
03/20 [Display] Getting Started with Dynamic Remarketing

photo credit: World of Good via photopin cc

Ark grabs $4.2 million seed round

Less than a month after the company took the stage at Y Combinator’s Demo Day, people search engine Ark has raised an impressive $4.2 million seed round of funding. Ark works by crawling the major social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, RenRen, LinkedIn, and more, to find out all it can about you. The $4.2 million seed round is the largest that any Y Combinator company has ever received. Investors include Andreessen-Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Greylock Partners, Intel Capital, SV Angel, Atlas Ventures, Crosslink Capital, to name a few.

SingleHop nabs $27.5 Million

Infrastructure-as-a-service startup SingleHop has raised $27.5 million in its first round of funding. The company’s proprietary management platform, called LEAP, makes it possible for its clients to deploy and manage their web infrastructure from a unified platform. Battery Ventures led the round.

BrightTag secures $15M

Digital marketing platform BrightTag has raised $15 million in funding. The company uses data tags, embedded in HTML or JavaScript, on a website to provide user analytics. Baird Venture Partners led the round, with participation from existing investors New World Ventures, TomorrowVentures, EPIC Ventures, I2A and Silicon Valley Bank.

P2i Ltd raises $6M

For a little bit of science, liquid repellent nano-coating company P2i raised $6 million in funding from Ombu Group. UK-based P2i has developed a nano-coating for electronics that makes them repel liquids, meaning the days of ruining a phone by dropping into a toilet may soon be over.

Yandex Invests in Seedcamp

Search engine giant in Russia, Yandex has invested an undisclosed amount of money in Seedcamp’s Euro micro seed round fund. Seedcamp is a mentoring program and investment company that helps startup get off the ground.

Cell phone in water image via Shutterstock