July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Joe Griffin has served as the co-founder and CEO at iAcquire, a digital marketing firm, since 2008.

Re-launching a website is a massive, multi-layered task for any business.

You have make decisions not only about design and branding — a re-launch requires a seemingly endless checklist of tasks: benchmarking, content strategy, audience research, SEO, back-end hosting … the list goes on. Plus, as a business every decision is hinged on ROI: What impact will the remodeled website have on your business’ traffic, engagement, and conversion?

Your business’s flaws and weak links are often exposed when it comes time to reinvigorate your web presence.

Whether this comes in tandem with an organizational restructure, a change in services or products, a reinvigorated brand strategy, or simply after realizing that your current website is not converting customers at the level you’d like, every business should re-convene on their web strategy at least every few years.

I co-founded iAcquire, a NYC and Phoenix-based digital marketing agency, and recently re-launched our agency site to reflect our evolution as an industry and as an agency. As a 15-year veteran of the digital marketing world and a captain of our agency’s recent remodel, I have gathered years of insight into necessities of a website relaunch.

These tips can serve as a blueprint, checklist, and guide for your enterprise’s future website remodeling plans.

1. Get everyone on the same page

Talk to each and every stakeholder about the impending re-launch. Meet with colleagues (within your department and cross-functionally), shareholders, clients, board members, industry mentors, and other key parties as you embark on your re-launch planning.

Ask each group similar questions:

• What is missing?
• What do you like about the current site?
• Do you think it’s the right time to re-launch?
• Do we have the capacity to do this as a company?
• Do you think we will come out better afterwards?
• Do we want a re-skin, which impacts the overall design aesthetic of the website, or a re-launch, a total overhaul?

Answering these questions early on – and getting buy in and feedback from all parties — will help you in the long run. When relaunching iAcquire.com, for example, multiple departments within our agency combined forces to create a vision for the website. Doing this helped us define scope, high-level direction, budget, requirements, and most importantly goals — all essential for the beginning strategy documents of a website redesign.

2. Allocate a budget and bandwidth

Your overall budget for your website redesign will frame your bandwidth. If your budget is in the tens of thousands of dollars, you have the budget to utilize a big agency to create a new website for your enterprise. If your budget is smaller ($7,500-$15,000) you may be able to utilize outside help on a consulting basis.

Either way, a large chunk of change will be needed for a website redesign. Hosting isn’t free either, so even if you do everything in-house you’ll need a budget.

Also, consider the project scope and if your in-house team has the capacity to complete such a large-scale project. Creative, content, promotion, SEO, and developers will all need to commit a large part of their workload to the project. For example, our marketing and strategy team dedicated a good solid three month to the project.

CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, and legal need to be engaged from the beginning as well. And project status should be communicated at least one time per week to high-level stakeholders.

3. Ensure benchmarks are in place

Create benchmarking documents to track the current website’s design and content, layout, as well as audience targeting and current website analytics (visitor interaction and conversion) so you can accurately measure success after the new site launches. Define your current and future KPIs and keep track of them. Keep in mind that these may change as your organization grows, so be inclusive and collect as much as you can.

For iAcquire, we use the following key performance indicators:

• Leads
• Time on site
• Share of voice
• Number of links
• Organic search rankings
• Impressions
• Traffic

4. Define or redefine your key audience personas

Consumers are getting savvier and savvier by the minute and modern technology allows users to tune out various messages. With that being said, it is crucial to craft your remodeled website around your converting, engaged personas.

Once you define audience personas, you can better direct:

• The tone of the copy
• The website’s overall design/look
• What type of content (images, copy, videos) resonates best
• Calls to action – where the are placed, what copy to use, user path

Creating audience personas helps all creative, content, and allows marketing stakeholders to maintain uniformity. Leverage audience market data, survey results, and need states to create personas and user stories. Use this template and create your own three to five personas. Utilize market research tools like Experian, Nielsen, Facebook data, and even Google Analytics to get to the core of your visitor base.

5. Plan as much as you execute

Draft a creative brief that includes all project requirements – from copy and SEO to technical hosting and color scheme requirements. This brief will serve as the blueprint for all parties working on the redesign.  The plan can be as long as 30 pages, though the length is not important; the content is the important part. If it helps you, then delegate specific sections to different leaders within your team. Come together and review the plan, and then from there start executing your strategy.

6. Consider your copy

A shiny, well-designed site is great, but like your looks it’s the first thing to go with age. If your content isn’t great, neither is your site. And it’s not just about well-written prose; it all has to be planned out, persona-driven content, created by understanding your key audiences and how they behave online. Develop a roadmap for content strategy and your copy will fall into place.

Within iAcquire, we know that governance and establishing an editorial calendar is just as important as setting up the content framework. Without structural guidance organizations can fall into content paralysis. These processes defines the players, topics, and requirements necessary to curate and publish content.

7. Keep the bot in mind

Within your re-launch two key “audiences” need to be kept in mind: your visitors and the search engine spiders. Search engines have a very detailed algorithm for ranking pages, and with your re-launch you want to make sure that you stay even or above in your rankings. Here are three key considerations you should have for SEO:

• Redirects
  If specific URLs are no longer active, or you are changing the site architecture, make sure 301s redirects are in place. Non-existent redirects can lead to a “docked” search position.
• Conversion end-points
  Your re-designed website will probably not have the same conversion funnel or path as your last site, so make sure someone is dedicated to checking the conversion points on your redesigned sites to make sure they are a) working, b) properly migrated, and c) tracked.
• On-page keyword analysis
  Target two to three keywords per page and intertwine them organically throughout the copy and metadata. If your organization previously targeted a list of keywords, look at them again as competition and volume changes from year to year and even month to month.

8. Who’s your host?

Consider where you are going to host your site.

Is it going to sit on a server that your enterprise owns and maintains, or will it live with a hosting company? Is your hosting bandwidth enough? Consider what frameworks you will use on the front end, and what Javascript libraries you will use, such as MooTools or jQuery. PHP, .Net, or Rails? WordPress or Drupal?

All of these decisions need to be made early on.

9. Utilize Google Webmaster Tools

Once your website is in development, have your organization set up a Google account (if you don’t already have one) and get acquainted with Google Webmaster Tools. This free Google tool can tell you any problems with site/page indexing and even click-through rates. If the content is being rearranged on your new site, it could be buried deeper, making it harder for search engines to crawl, which leads to a non-indexed area.

10. Strategize a post-launch plan

Your job isn’t over when your redesigned site launches. Create a plan to promote the new site on social media, PR outreach, and blog announcements. Plan on pushing marketing messages through these channels for at least two weeks past the launch. Connect with key influencers on social who can push your message further.

Then create a plan to organize, develop, curate, and publish new content so you keep luring new visitors in: inbound marketing at its finest. On an internal communications front, make sure that your organization is kept in the loop as well. Inform all departments of the re-launch. Be clear on what has changed and how they can utilize your “2.0” or “3.0″ website to optimally conduct their respective jobs.

While every organization has needs, adopting a process is a crucial element. Use this list as a guide, and customize it to meet your organization’s unique challenges, and develop a website that reflects your company in a way that is beneficial to you and your customer.

Joe Griffin has served as the co-founder and CEO at iAcquire, a digital marketing firm, since 2008. Prior to founding iAcquire, Joe co-founded SubmitAWebsite.com, which was acquired by Web.com, and before that he spent three years with iCrossing, where he led business development and later their paid search division. Joe writes at joegriffin.me and the iAcquire blog, tweets at @joegriffin, and lives on Google+.

photo credit: baldiri via photopin cc

Financial terms of the agreement were not released, but are probably in the same ballpark as Starcom’s $200 million deal with Twitter that was announced just over a month ago. The deal includes data and analytics from Twitter which WPP will use to “deliver more effective campaigns, enhanced targeting, and more real-time insight to clients.”

In addition, WPP companies will launch new data products and integrate Twitter data into their existing media and metrics platforms.

You’ve probably never heard of WPP, but the communication giant’s various brands drive $70 billion in media spend and took in $16.5 billion in revenue last year. They include iconic advertising agencies like Ogilvy  & Mather, consumer insights companies such as Kantar, PR agencies like Burson-Marsteller, and numerous other branding, communications, and digital marketing companies.

This is the second mega-marketing deal that Twitter has struck in just over a month, and it both validates Twitter’s position as one of the major social media marketing platforms of the day, and enhances Twitter’s revenue — and hence IPO — possibilities.

“Twitter’s relevance continues to grow – not only as a social platform, but also as a window into consumer attitudes and behaviour in real time,” WPP’s CEO, Martin Sorrell, said in a statement. “We are delighted to … ensure that Twitter data is a key ingredient in many of our disciplines.”

You know the deal is a big one for Twitter, because CEO Dick Costolo also commented on it (smaller deals would have comments from product managers or mid-level executives.)

“As Twitter has grown, marketers are leveraging the platform for brand insights, relevant real-time messaging, and customer research,” Costolo said. “This partnership will benefit clients by pairing Twitter with WPP’s world-class analytics, targeting, and creative capabilities.”

While the deal does validate Twitter and enhance revenue, there is a potential downside.

All these mega-deal might make smaller companies start to wonder how they can compete against the big boys as the giants of the marketing and communications industries are paying Twitter big bucks for special access to data as well as, potentially, special access to advertising slots.

The companies promised more information on the partnership in the coming weeks and months.

photo credit: ·Cuentosdeunaimbecila· via photopin cc

In fact, social media referrals represents just 1.55 percent of all traffic to major e-commerce destinations. And when that tiny trickle of traffic arrived, only .71 percent of it actually results in any kind of sale. Email marketing, by contrast, generates twice as much traffic as social media, and has four times the conversion rate to sales.

Those are not good numbers for social.

Source: Monetate

Conversion rates by traffic-referring sources

The darling of the omnipresent social media gurus on Twitter, social commerce was supposed to totally disrupt e-commerce. And, because people trust other people’s recommendations and spend a lot of time on Facebook where they meet other people and read what they say, social commerce was supposed to be huge, turning social media influence and shares into sales and revenue.

Unfortunately, there’s a problem:

“The challenge for social media — and for its big brother, word of mouth marketing — is that they are inherently additive pieces of the conversion funnel, rather than causative,” Monetate’s new report states.

But Monetate says that the problem isn’t in the social. It’s in how companies are using it.

Loyalty isn’t about clicking on an offer, report contributor Mitch Joel says, it’s about building a relationship. And a relationship goes far beyond “do you want to buy this.” Which means that social is not short term, social is not transactional, and social is not the same as direct response.

In other words: shocker, social media is, well, social.

Taken in that context, social can still be very worthwhile for brands, as marketing firm Syncapse found just a few weeks ago, valuing some Facebook fans at over $1,600. But it’s the relationship that’s valuable, not the episodic communications per se.

And that relationship can be very precious indeed. When an actual sale is made from a social referral, it’s often a large one, with the average Pinterest-referred sale clocking in at over $80, and the average Facebook and Twitter sale at about $70.

Source: Monetate

Average order value by social-referred sale

photo credit: zoomar via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

85 percent of us know that websites track their online shopping behavior, a new report from ecommerce optimization company Monetate says, and 75 percent of us want retailers to use our personal information to customize our shopping experiences.

That’s going back to the future, according to Monetate: going back to a time when all commerce was personal.

But there is a yin and a yang here.

While we may want personalized experiences, and we want websites to be smart — to know us, essentially, and act as an intelligent, solicitous person might — privacy is part of the picture. A good third of us don’t want our website activity tracked, and a quarter of us don’t want the websites we shop to personalize our experience at all.

Monetate has four tips for online retailers:

1. Use marketing automation technology and big data to assist with personalization
2. Target segments with relevant content based on what you know about them
3. Don’t think of channels, think of customers first
4. Be in it for the long haul, not the quick win

All the data, in visual form:

photo credit: crsan via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

This is a guest post by entrepreneur Adam Peterson, CEO of video-sharing platform VipeCloud.

Do startups need a video strategy? I’ve been in and around the “video for business” industry for the last six years and I get asked this question by startups quite often. The answer is always yes.

Video is the most engaging form of online content. But it’s also a highly expensive and time-consuming proposition for startups. So the strategy you take will depend a lot on what stage your company is in.

Here’s a breakdown of what kind of video you’ll want to invest in at each stage:

Pre-funding and pre-launch

There are really only two types of videos a startup at this early of a stage should consider. Most companies this early are going to change their messaging and possibly even direction several times. Taking valuable time or bootstrapping dollars to create a video can be a tough decision to make; however, these two use-cases should qualify:

1. Create a simple screenshot or animation of the problem you are solving and your proposed solution. This will help you tell your own story, and it will help you with customer discovery to validate the problem and your proposed solution with prospective customers or buyers. I would not invest any funds in the first versions of this video. Simply use a screen recorder like Quicktime or Camtasia and run through a PowerPoint presentation, basic animation, or recorded whiteboard drawing.
2. Create a professional looking video if you’re planning to do a crowdfunding campaign. A good-looking video will show your audience that you’re serious about your project. Tim Ferriss discusses the idea of “Minimum Effective Dose” in his blog about how Soma Water raised $100,000 on Kickstarter in 10 days. A professional-looking video is a required “Minimum Effective Dose.” If you’re on a tight budget, don’t worry; there’s an overwhelming number of resources available about how to make good videos. For reference, here’s an article offering tips for how to record a video on a skeleton crew and a series about how to make professional-looking content.

If you’re not one to pick up video editing software quickly and have a few bucks to invest, it might be worth hiring a videographer. A handful of low-budget options exist, including videographer networks like BBN3, Pixelfish, or SmartShoot. If your budget is slightly larger, you might try the animation approach with Ephipheo or AutoDemo. Of course, you might also have a friend of a friend who’s willing to help.

Pre-launch but MVP-demo-ready

Once you have a functional minimum viable product, recording a typical use-case of your product is a great way to validate your problem/solution and even generate pre-launch signups. Dropbox has one of the more recognized success stories doing this. Their waiting list purportedly went from 5,000 to 75,000 overnight after launching their simple screen recording video demo. That said, they took great care to cater to their audience by adding in several easter eggs.

Near this stage, your company might also begin social media and other efforts to generate attention. Videos are expensive and you shouldn’t always promote your own product on social media, yet video is one of the most effective forms of content to generate engagement. So what do you do? Share other people’s videos.

Sharing an interesting, educational, or new video meme with your network will still make you the source of the great content to your audience and thus help you generate attention. For example, you can generate thought leadership by sharing industry- or business-relevant videos like this strategy discussion from the Harvard Business Review, or an interesting TedTalk, or even the new Psy Gentlemen video if you dare. With 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, something should be interesting to your audience.

Launched

If all goes well, you’ll eventually get your product out the door. At this stage it’s almost a requirement to use video. Why? Because your buyers want it. Ninety-five percent of business-to-business (B2B) tech buyers are watching videos. Furthermore, your competitors are more than likely using video, as 87 percent of B2B enterprise marketers and 70 percent of business to consumer marketers use video.

What kind of videos should you make? The first priority should be product overviews. Product demos are more valuable than case studies or white papers for influencing purchase decisions. These overviews can include a high-level product showcase, highlights of key sections, feature releases, and use-case scenarios.

Product videos for customer support and onboarding efforts can also hit two birds with one stone. A quick screen capture can be much faster than typing up support guides, at the same time, the more FAQs you get on video, the more you can automate your support engine. If you check out the Box channel on YouTube (below) it’s clear their video focus is on supporting their existing customers. Zappos has also publicly discussed how videos have increased conversion rates and reduced return rates.

Whether you’re funded or not will really only affect the quality of videos you can produce. Quality is important; however, there are workarounds. For example, if you can’t afford a professional video to represent your brand on your homepage, then put one on your blog. Write an article and embed a “micro-webinar” product overview that’s positioned as something you made quickly like a screencast or a live interview.

What do you do with your videos once you have them?

Everything you possibly can. Videos can be the most expensive sales and marketing assets your company creates, so you should get the most out of them. Here’s what you should consider:

1. Post them to YouTube. Though be careful not to rely too much on the “SEO value.” When a link to your website shows up in a Google search, it brings the searcher to your website or a landing page that’s also on your domain. When a link to your YouTube video shows up in a Google search, it brings the searcher to YouTube. You can turn the in-video ads off; however, ads and distracting promoted videos can still show up within your channel (for instance, click on any of the videos on Box’s channel and you’ll see a featured video ad on the right).
2. Consider private hosting. There are thousands of video hosting options. We offer this at VipeCloud, so does Brightcove, Vimeo, and several others. Note, if you’re going to use Vimeo, you’ll have to upgrade to VimeoPRO as their community guidelines don’t allow videos for commercial use on their free or plus levels.
3. Get everyone to share them, including your sales team, support team, and any evangelists inside and outside your company. The more people distributing your videos, the more value you’ll get. Buyers are looking to build relationships earlier in the process as they look for trusted advisers. Furthermore, your sales teams, support teams, and evangelists build different relationships with buyers than marketing does, and can guide video suggestions as such.

Video is a means to an end. It will soon represent most all of Internet bandwidth and a majority of mobile data. However, your company still needs to solve a real problem for a large market. The exercise of making your first video at an early stage will help you think through the details of the problem you are really solving. Once you’ve chosen your path, video becomes a requirement. Put together a strategy that works for your company, and remember to track if it’s working.

Adam is CEO of VipeCloud and an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at StartX, Stanford’s student startup accelerator. Prior to VipeCloud Adam launched eFaceTime in 2010, integrating video into Cendyn’s eProposal, the hospitality industry’s leading sales proposal software tool used by more than 10,000 hotels and venues worldwide. In 2008 he launched VipePower, an offering that became the leading recruiting and staffing video solution. From 2008 to 2012 he served as the Technology Chair on the board of the Silicon Valley Chapter of the California Staffing Professionals. 

Top image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

If you want to highlight a product, build a landing page. If you’re an internet marketing guru, make a squeeze page. But if you want to start on online movement — and maybe sell a few books, speaking events, or other products along the way, create a “smart site.”

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.”

The deal is for “special access” to advertising slots, as well as research data and new, as-yet-unannounced advertising products, in return for which Starcom has committed to spend $200 million — or more — of its clients’ money. Full financial details were not released, but I would assume that a deal of this magnitude also includes significant financial incentives, AKA discounts.

Twitter has been unveiling new advertising products such as demographic targeting tools and keyword targeting options with furious rapidity in the past weeks, as well as Twitter #Music. That seems to indicate the company is focusing on monetization … and, if the Silicon Valley buzz is to be believed, a 2013 IPO.

In any case, Twitter is certainly focused on advertisers and advertising. But even with all its recently-announced products, it’s still early days, and the upside is difficult to estimate.

“We’re in really uncharted territory here,” said Eric Covino, president of digital marketing firm Creative Signals. “You have these tremendously large user groups with advertisers salivating over them … but they’re still in their infancy in terms of advertising.”

In any case, this is not Starcom’s first rodeo. The company has been experimenting, testing, and learning on Twitter for a year and a half, Starcom CEO Laura Desmond said. Which means that it believes Twitter ads are driving real, measurable ROI for its clients.

Covino is a little skeptical.

“All these millions of dollars have to overcome basic psychology,” he says. “Twitter has publicly announced that they look at themselves as a media company, not a social media service. But its users think Twitter is social media.”

In other news, Twitter and Starcom are also apparently building a “social TV” lab together, so perhaps Twitter #TV will soon be joining Twitter #Music.

Image credit: Starcom; Hat tip: AllThingsD

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

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

We’ll drive 2.8 miles for a sandwich, but 7.1 miles for a great Italian restaurant. And while we may only go 3.6 miles for a coffee shop, we’ll easily go almost nine miles for just the right mall.

Nagivation services company Telenav knows a little bit about what people will drive for — and when it’s worth showing hyper-local ads to them.

Powering navigation apps like Scout for iPhone and running its own advertising team gives Telenav billions of monthly data points on ads and services that people will drive for. The company has summarized that data in a new report, unveiled today.

“Location is an extremely powerful tool for targeting mobile ads, but most advertisers are still applying a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to location targeting,” Eli Portnoy, Scout Advertising GM said in a statement. “For example, I live in Los Angeles and it makes no sense to show me an ad for coffee in Pasadena because I will never drive the nine miles it would take me to get there. That would take me over an hour.”

One size especially doesn’t fit all when you look at different cities.

While shoppers in Dallas, Seattle, and California’s Bay Area routinely drive between 7-8.5 miles for shopping, New Yorkers and Chicagoans drive few than five. And in San Diego, car owners travel on 2.7 miles for gas, while Houston drivers almost need a top-up station on the way to the gas bar, driving 7.1 miles, on average, to fill ‘er up.

All of which data needs to inform your local marketing strategy.

Here’s all the information, in visual form:

Image credits: Telenav

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

iPhone users open 17.5 percent of their commercial mail, while Android users open 8.93 percent, and BlackBerry owners open only .24 percent.

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

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

Those are some of the questions social media marketing firm Offerpop hopes to answer for you with two new interesting tools released this morning into public beta.

The New York-based company, which already works with brands like Pepsi, Gap, and MTV, wants to help you better understand your audience — not just your fans, and turn your ongoing data collection into a simple, actionable asset. And the new tools are already boosting engagement by 84 percent for brands like Viacom’s Logo TV and increasing fan loyalty by 195 percent.

What’s really new?

“It’s the first time I’ve seen a product offering get a sense of your full social engagement,” Offerpop’s director of content marketing Jesse Noyes told me this morning. “Not just the people who have liked you, but all the people who have engaged with you in any way.”

The two new tools are a Facebook post database, which shows what kinds of content is driving engagement, virality, and clicks, and a fan database, which helps you build rich profiles of your Facebook fans and enriches them over time. Twitter, which Offerpop also offers campaigns on, is coming soon.

The tools not only tell you that the post last week about Brad Pitt’s graying hair resonated well, but also that all your posts that reference aging movie stars generally go viral. And with about three clicks, you can generate a list of your fans — and non-fans — who are responsive to similar messages.

“This also works for people who aren’t fans of your page,” Offerpop CEO Wendell Lansford said. “That’s a completely unique offering … no one to my knowledge is doing this.”

The new fan database tool automatically calculates scores for three key metrics based on people’s behavior: loyalty, engagement, and influence. In the future, Lansford hopes to have tools that enable you to post to Facebook specifically targeting groups based on those profiles, but currently marketers can do three fairly powerful things with data: They can email sets of users based on what they’re most likely to respond to, target specific people with specific ads, or find look-alikes of the people who are their most loyal and engaged fans.

“Right away, we started making valuable discoveries about what our fans find interesting,” Shawn Hollenbach, a digital marketing manager at Logo TV said in a statement. “We were able to use these insights to inform our promotional strategy and drive value beyond social marketing.”

The new products are available immediately in public beta on Offerpop’s site, and anyone using the company’s campaign tools has access to them at no extra charge, the company told me.

photo credit: mindfreeze86 via photopin cc

“Zappos wants viral repins on Pinterest,” Pinfluencer chief executive Sharad Verma told me. “They’re also using our analytics product to understand which images are the most popular and generating the most engagement … and to know who their advocates or fan are.”

The year-old marketing and analytics company now boasts an impressive customer list that includes Etsy, Jetsetter, Martha Stewart, Sephora, and Orbitz, mostly because the hundred or so marketing campaigns that it has run have generated an astonishing 250 million product impressions.

Those per-campaign numbers are huge – 2.5 million impressions each — and I asked Verma why they’re so big. The key, it seems, is in the Pinterest platform.

“That is where Pinterest and Facebook are very different,” Verma told me. “Pinterest is all about products.”

Facebook is about conversation and brand awareness, he said, while Pinterest drives sales. According to Pinfluencer, the average brand on its platform boosts website page visits per pin by 400 percent, doubles the pageviews per pin, and boosts revenue per pin by 50 percent, from $0.14 to $0.21.

In the December shopping season, Pinfluencer says, its clients took home a massive $0.64 in revenue per pin.

Zappos used Pinfluencer’s free version for four months before making a decision to jump to paid levels, which is typical, Verma says. Signing on gives companies competitor tracking — Pinfluencer currently tracks 10,000 brands on Pinterest, and will be bumping that to 100,000 — Pinfluencer’s marketing and analytics suite, and unlimited users, for an annual price that “fits on a credit card.”

“Through Pinfluencer, we have been able to boost audience engagement, site traffic and virality which results in increased earned media conversations and sales for our company,” Graham Kahr, a social scientist at Zappos, said in a statement. “We now have a way to actually measure the ROI of our Pinterest initiatives. This is huge for us as a company and for the industry.”

With Pinfluencer currently tracking 10,000 brands on Pinterest and planning to bump that by an order of magnitude, I wondered aloud if the company has a relationship with Pinterest, perhaps using an API.

“I think the only thing I’m allowed to say is that they’re aware of what we’re doing,” Verma answered.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Marketing used to be simple.

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

Now pinch yourself, because that’s exactly what ThingLink does via a partnership with Twitter that allows any ThingLink user to publish expanded tweets.

“We’ve seen click-through rates of over a hundred percent within a photo,” ThingLink chief marketing officer Neil Vineberg told VentureBeat during a call today.

“With multiple tabs and hotspots for more information, each ThinkLink image has multiple engagement points.” This is what it looks like on Twitter – it’s an HTML5 entity with an image, intelligence, links, and layers.

“If you force ads on people, they avoid it,” Vineberg says. “But if you give them content in a photo, they like to discover it.”

For example, car company could tweet a picture of the latest Ford Mustang and enable mouseover points for details about specs, pricing, and performance, giving Twitter followers multiple touch points to connect, all in the same tweet.

ThingLink offers an online tool to create the interactive images. To create the image, you simply upload an picture, identify hot spots, and add text and links. Dropping in a product listing from eBay or Amazon brings up the photo, description, price, and a “buy now” link.

The service is free for individuals and brands, but the company does offer business accounts that add more customization options; analytics on views, hovers, and clicks; and improved engagement. Brands that sign up pay on a CPM basis.

“Our traction has been phenomenal,” Vineberg said, while declining to provide specifics. “When you add interactivity to the image, it’s like adding steroids to the engagement.”

What’s next?

ThingLink works on any site or blog as an embed, just like an embedded YouTube video, and obviously works within the Twitter feed. But the company would also like to work on Facebook. Currently, users need to add an app to view ThingLink images within their Facebook stream.

“We’d love it if Facebook would make Timeline compatible with ThingLink,” Vineberg said. “I think it’d be a real positive for Facebook too.”

Image credit: Doro via ThingLink

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

When it comes to digital marketing, you have two main avenues for promoting your business website: SEO and PPC. Although both are viable options for improving your Web presence and increasing the amount of traffic flowing into your site, the degree to which you’ll want to invest in each of these methods will vary based on your company’s unique needs and priorities.

To understand which blend is right for you, it’s important to first understand the key distinctions between the two techniques:

• SEO: Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the process of controlling various on-site and off-site factors in order to make your site more appealing to the search engines.  Good SEO campaigns should result in higher placements within the natural search results pages (SERPs), leading to an influx of free traffic from the search engines.
• PPC: Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, on the other hand, involves purchasing ad spots within the “Sponsored stories” section of the SERPs, or in the content block that displays on program publisher websites. Instead of paying a flat fee for a certain number of impressions, PPC ads are charged based on the number of click-throughs each ad receives, based on the bid price offered by the advertiser.

Both SEO and PPC advertising have their own advantages and disadvantages. SEO, for example, often results in sustainable, free traffic, once high SERP positions are achieved. Unfortunately, it may take more than a year to reach these top spots, depending on how competitive your industry is.

Alternatively, PPC advertising results in an immediate influx of website visitors, though you’ll pay for this privilege, at rates that can range from $.01 to more than $20 for each click.

Given these disparities, there are situations in which it makes sense to focus on either SEO or PPC over the other. Concentrate your efforts on search engine optimization if you’re dealing with any of the following scenarios.

1. Your company has no digital marketing budget.

If you don’t have any money to spend on click fees, PPC advertising clearly won’t be an option you’ll even want to consider.

2. Average click fees in your industry are quite high.

If you operate in a field like auto insurance or legal services, you may find that average bid prices are too high for you to be competitive. As an example, the Google Adwords Traffic Estimator places the cost-per-click (CPC) for the keyword “DUI attorney” at $15.71, meaning that you’ll pay more than $15 for a single click on your ad (whether or not that visitor results in an on-site conversion).

3. You don’t have the time to actively manage a PPC campaign.

Given these sometimes-high click prices, PPC campaigns require hands-on attention to ensure that any click fees paid result in a positive ROI. There is a learning curve associated with the practice, which makes it a bad choice for companies that can’t invest in either understanding the system or hiring an outside PPC consultant.

On the other hand, PPC advertising certainly does have its place when it comes to website promotions. If you find yourself in any of the following situations, this method may be a better choice for your business’ needs if the following situations are more common for you.

1. You have more money than time.

If you prefer to spend money to attract website traffic, rather than spend weeks or months toiling away at monotonous SEO campaigns, PPC provides a faster alternative for growing your Web business.

2. You’ve been dinged by past SEO algorithm changes.

In SEO, top SERPs positions aren’t guaranteed, as the search engines are always tweaking their ranking algorithms in order to provide the best possible web results. Sometimes, these changes result in a serious loss of traffic, which may make PPC advertising a necessity.

3. You want to speed through website testing.

Good website management relies on ongoing testing to maximize conversion rates. However, to complete these tests, you need website visitors to determine which on-site changes lead to the best results. PPC advertising can help you to secure this traffic faster than you’ll achieve by waiting on your SEO campaigns to inch your site up the SERPs.

Of course, SEO/PPC marketing doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing project. In fact, plenty of businesses will find that a combination of both SEO and PPC marketing helps them to both secure the immediate traffic needed to make quick improvements to website efficiency, while still capturing the high natural search results rankings that will sustain inbound Web traffic levels in the long run.

Sujan Patel is the founder and CEO of Single Grain, one of the top Digital Marketing agencies in San Francisco, CA. With more than 10 years of Internet marketing experience, Sujan leads the digital marketing strategy for companies like Sales Force, Yahoo, Intuit and many other Fortune 500 caliber companies.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

Image via Thiophene_Guy/Flickr

This is a guest post by Corey Christiansen, Social Media Strategist for global digital marketing agency Metia. More details about him below.

If there is one thing that we’ve seen as a constant throughout the 2012 presidential campaign it is that social media has been the go-to-tool for engaging younger audiences and getting them to influence their friends.

There is a lot for marketers to learn from this campaign about engaging large audiences, managing reputations, and instilling passion. Here are the top five things we learned from studying the 2012 Presidential Campaign:

1. It’s all about engagement

Many of the lessons for brand marketers are the same whether we’re looking at presidential debates or some other event.  In an age where content is king, just having fans and followers isn’t enough. It’s increasingly important to know your audience and their preferred method of communication.

As you can see in the graph below, for this election, younger voters were much more likely to engage with political material on social networks (promoting and reposting political materials and posting thoughts on issues). So in order to increase engagement across social networks, it’s important to post content that resonates with this younger age group.

Bottom line:

In order to earn engagement, brands need to familiarize themselves with their audience and focus on topics of interest to that audience.

2. Passion is key to social media response

Social media data showed a lot of buzz and activity leading up to and during the presidential debates. Social media allows people to share their passions easily, and politics is one of those topics people are very passionate about.  In the case of the debates, users created their own hashtags, memes, and fake Twitter profiles in response to lines from the candidates. These spread like wildfire throughout social media channels.

Bottom line:

Think of ways to tap into the passion of your followers or fans in the social media realm by using a simple catch phrase or hashtag that can be easily shared within social media channels and include those in your ads.

3. Prepare your defense

Engage your audience when appropriate, but anticipate criticism beforehand and be ready to play defense. Brands tend to crawl under a rock as soon as they receive negative remarks on social channels.

This year in particular, both candidates have taken a barrage of negative comments on social media sites. In fact, Pew Research stated in a recent article that of all the platforms they studied, including blogs and mainstream news channels, the tone of conversation was the most negative on Twitter. As you can see in this chart from Pew, negative Twitter conversation about Romney exceeded positive by 42 points in the eight weeks studied. For Obama, negative assertions outnumbered positive by 20 points, though it demonstrated somewhat more fluidity from week to week.

Bottom line:

Be prepared to rally your supporters to defend your brand from critics and trolls when things get ugly.

4. Don’t forget the “human touch”

Scrutinize social media data for measurable insights but stay aware of the limitations. Sentiment analysis of social media data inevitably needs a human filter. No matter how well you train the software, it’s impossible to have 100% accuracy. (And most sentiment analysis tools actually assign a percentage around their estimated accuracy).

Bottom line:

Don’t forget the “human touch.” Read your users’ comments, post responses, and be engaged with the community you are building. This community will return the favor by sharing their passion with others. When it comes to data, remember that the machine can’t do it all. Make sure the sentiment analysis makes sense and adjust the numbers accordingly.

5. Don’t waste time and money by attempting to buy your opponents’ fans

While this may work well for some consumer brands, people searching for a presidential candidate on Facebook likely don’t want an opponent to be the first to pop-up in their search results.

Bottom line:

Just because you can buy search results, doesn’t mean you should. Confusing people into looking at your content is a desperate strategy to gain fans.

Were there other tactics used in this year’s political campaigns that marketers should avoid using? What other lessons can marketers learn from this year’s elections? Drop your comments in the box below!

About the Author
Social media simply doesn’t work if the content isn’t credible and doesn’t build a real relationship between users. Corey creates and implements social media marketing strategies that produce authentic relationships between consumers and brands. His significant experience creating, managing, and measuring online communities for brands including AT&T, Google, Microsoft, Reebok, Revlon, and T-Mobile has built an impressive arsenal of best practices, measurement tools, and success stories. As a social media strategist at Metia, Corey continually engages with clients regarding social business, building social roadmaps for clients, and delivering action-oriented research and recommendations based on real-world data. Corey received his Masters of Communication in Digital Media from the University of Washington.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Digital marketing software provider Kenshoo has raised $12 million to scale the company.

Kenshoo offers solutions for search marketing, social media, and online advertising. Its flagship products are Kenshoo Enterprise, Kenshoo Local, and Kenshoo Social, which help businesses drive their marketing efforts and sales. The Universal Platform delivers automation, business intelligence, integration and scale to manage and optimize marketing.

The Kenshoo platform powers campaigns in 190 countries. Clients include over 20 of the Fortune 50 and 10 top global ad agencies. High-profile clients include Careerbuilder, Expedia, Facebook, Kayak, LendingTree, Sears, Tesco, Walgreens, and Zappos.

The company is growing fast and will use this investment to support that growth as well as expand into to new geographic markets.

This fourth institutional investment was led by Tenaya Capital and contributed to by previous investors Sequoia Capital and Arts Alliance. Read the press release. 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

So you have a million likes on Facebook and your latest sweet nothing on Twitter was retweeted 10,000 times. How many dollars found their convoluted ways through all those pipes and tubes into your pocket?

That’s a question social infrastructure company Gigya is looking to answer.

Gigya promises to make sites, services, and apps social, fun, and engaging via simple-to-integrate plugins, giving brands the ability to integrate social sign-on or gamification strategies. Now, a few months after announcing a $15.3 million fifth round of funding, the company is releasing new capabilities for brands to use the social data they collect and feed it into marketing automation systems such as HubSpot and Marketo.

Gigya, which is in a hyper-growth phase right now, already touches over a billion Internet users with its social plugins and architecture. As Victor White, the company’s senior marketing manager told me, Gigya is on target to triple revenue this year, having just completed seven consecutive quarters of double-digit sales growth, signing new clients in the past few months like Adidas, Time Warner, and Italy’s national airline, Alitalia.

Now the company is taking that momentum and building a partner ecosystem, which it is calling NEXUS. The make the millions of data points Gigya’s social tools collect on your site and your apps available to marketing automation tools.

For example, online retailers using Gigya’s tools can integrate Certona’s product recommendation engine into their site, which can then segment users based on rich social data, target specific groups and subgroups, and make better product recommendations. Another example would be feeding social data into an email marketing campaign, which sounds old-fashioned but is actually still one of the best ways to connect to customers and drive sales.

“By strengthening our relationships with top online marketing vendors, we are able to help our clients extract the incredible value that social data brings,” Gigya CEO Patrick Salyer said in a statement.

NEXUS integrates seamlessly with a number of launch partners out of the gate and offers an open API that allows businesses and partners to connect any existing technologies.

photo credit: Chris Pirillo via photopin cc

Top global brands such as Nike, Gucci, Starbucks, and Audi have gained over a million new followers in just the last three months. That means, according to a new study by business data analytics company Simply Measured, Instagram is fast becoming the “best of the rest.”

While Facebook and Twitter are the social marketing leaders with near full adoption — both are at 98 percent participation from the 100 leading global brands — Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram are back in a pack of three. But while Google+’s 67 percent participation and Pinterest’s 63 percent still outweigh Instagram’s 54 percent, Instagram is growing at a much faster pace.

In just the last quarter, Instagram has jumped 35 percent, while Google+ has only grown a miserly 5 percent. Pinterest is in the middle of the pack, at a trailing-but-still-healthy 24 percent.

That adoption and growth is surprising, given Instagram’s complete lack of focus on brand or corporate support: no admin pages, no brand profiles, no verified accounts. And, of course, it is the only major social network — over 100M users — that is mobile-only.

One major benefit, however, is Instagram’s close integration with Facebook, which allows users’ Instagram likes to be cross-posted on Facebook. And, given Instagram’s simple sharing features, brand owners often post directly to Facebook and Twitter from Instagram. 60 percent of Instagram photos, Simply Measured says, are shared to Twitter automatically, and 90 percent are published to Facebook.

One warning to brands still wondering about Instagram: eight brands control 92 percent of the consumer engagement on the mobile social network. Waiting any longer will only tend to prolong that circumstance.

Top brands on Instagram:

Source: Simply Measured

MTV, Starbucks, Burberry, Nike, Gucci, Tiffany, Audi, and GE are the top brands on Instagram

photo credit: Dirk Dallas via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

I kind of feel like Fat Bastard in Austin Powers: the Spy Who Shagged Me as he’s laying back on a couch, shirtless, displaying his abdominal pulchritude, saying “I’m dead sexy!”

Or not.

But I am one of the sexiest writers in the world. I know that, because the One True Source of All Knowledge, the oracular fetcher of all truth, says so. I’m speaking, of course, of Google. Type in sexiest writers into your search box, dear reader, and the results will astonish. Or disgust — I can’t predict.

Naturally, it’s all a gag.

But it does show what Tiptopio can do: get you to the top of Google search results. It’s search engine optimization — but a little different. I spoke to founder Katharine VanderDrift last week.

“We’re trying to build more visibility for products and services from the US,” she told me. “Almost everyone uses outsourced manufacturing, shipping products to the U.S. and taking U.S. jobs. I want to help American-made products rank for the first page on Google.”

And, it works for more than folliclely-challenged insecure technology reporters: we tested the service on VentureBeat. Don’t believe us? Look up best blog in SF. Whoa: would that be VentureBeat? As you and I both know, Google never lies.

Some very sexy writers, no?

Tiptopio promises results quickly — in 30 days or less. But the big shock is the price: just $49/month.

I’ve personally authorized search engine optimization campaigns for $15,000 a month and worked with many of the leading firms in the field, and not always had results that good. So I asked VanderDrift about Tiptopio’s strategy.

“Our process is much simpler than most SEO firms,” she said. “We purchase free-standing domains, and we create a content strategy that we call ‘topic modeling.’”

With “topic modeling,” Tiptopio creates a particular concept — such as sexiest writers — builds content around it, and sets it free on the interwebs. The key is knowing to not only create content on that particular topic but to build content on related topics as well.

“For example, we take a phrase or a word, like Superman. To rank for that, you have to include some things about the topic … in this case Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and so on. Google knows these things are connected to ‘Superman,’ and you can’t be relevant to Superman unless these related topics are also there.”

That’s a smart approach, and it’s paired with a ballsy decision: Tiptopio only does on-page SEO, no link-building. That means the company doesn’t pay for links, solicit links, or otherwise try to artificially bump a particular website in the Google link economy. All of its SEO efforts are content based, right on the domain that Tiptopio is trying to get to rank.

In other words, it’s the SEO without the sleaze, something that anyone who has had to hire — and fire — SEO firms will definitely appreciate.

(Except, of course, for the very sexy writers.)

One more thing: the “Made in America” seems to not just be a schtick or market differentiator for VanderDrift.

“I’m very passionate about it,” she told me when I questioned that part of Tiptopio’s strategy. “I’ve done simple studies on products and services, and what happens is they’re completely dominated by massive importers.”

photo credit: Brave Heart via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Forty-one million visitors. Nine hundred sixty million pageviews. Three days.

That’s what Hurricane Sandy is doing for Weather.com. As panicked coastal residents up and down the Eastern seaboard are wondering what mother nature is going to bring them, they’re going online. And Weather.com is a big beneficiary.

AdClarity, the advertising analytics tool, studied Weather.com for the past three days. It’s clear that big storms mean big traffic … and big ad numbers.

Weather.com is already the biggest and heaviest trafficked weather site in the U.S., an AdClarity spokesperson told me. But in the last week, its already-high traffic has jumped 20 percent.

Wondering how The Weather Company survived? We asked them.

And just yesterday? Almost 30 percent:

Source: Alexa

Weather.com traffic, as guesstimated by Alexa

That’s big news for the advertisers on the site, says AdClarity, who are now accessing even larger swaths of the population. Top advertisers include NationWide, with the insurance giant taking 11.5 percent of the available adspace, Travelers, and Advil.

Source: AdClarity

Travelers’ ad on Weather.com

AdClarity’s snapshot shows how marketers are reacting almost instantly to changing circumstances.

Travelers’ ads, for instance, highlight Hurricane Sandy by delivering almost a public service message: what your emergency kit should contain, how to prepare your home for a disaster, and so on.

Instant tailoring of ads and quick buying to jump on an opportunity shows the possibilities in real-time advertising, in which marketers adjust campaigns on the fly to fit news, trends, and even, in this case, weather.

The challenge in jumping all over advertising opportunities when a disaster is looming, of course, is avoiding the inevitable ambulance chaser comparisons.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Thirteen million times a day, someone, somewhere, clicks a Google ad and becomes someone’s customer.

An angel may not get its wings, but somewhere, a click sells a product, downloads a white paper, or takes some personal information. In short, some exchange of value takes place — at huge, mind-boggling scale.

Larry Kim of the web marketing firm WordStream analyzed a huge divot of Google data — which I published in infographic form earlier today. WordStream offers a free Adwords Performance Grader, which gave it access, Kim told me, to about 1 percent of Google’s revenue over the past quarter.

And the data that comes out is fascinating.

Source: WordStream

The shopping industry does a lot of ad shopping

For instance, the finance industry places 617 million ads on Google.com and 5.32 billion ads on Google’s ad network each and every day, generating 28 million clicks at the highest average cost per click of any industry: over $3 on google.com, and over $1 for ads in the network. Top five advertisers in finance include names like State Farm, Geico, and Quicken Loans.

The second most prolific industry buying Google ads is travel, where brands like Expedia, Hotels.com, and Kayak place 2.5 billion ads a day to generate over 20 million clicks at an average price of just under $0.30, and complete 360,000 sales a day.

“Different advertisers define conversions differently,” Kim told me today, so those sales include not just actual flight, rental car, and hotel bookings but also any leads generated via an ad.

But the highest conversion rates belong to the education industry, which enjoys almost three times the conversion rate of travel companies. Education advertisers such as the University of Phoenix, DeVry, and Kaplan University convert at a red-hot 6.27 percent.

30 billion ads served … a day

All those millions of click and hundreds of thousands of conversions come out of probably the biggest advertising engine in the history of the world. Between ads on its own site and ads on its network, Google delivers an astounding 29.8 billion ad impressions every single day. That’s mind-boggling.

The good news for advertisers is that Kim’s data shows that average cost-per-click has come down significantly, which is part of the reason why Google lost almost $20 billion in market value in a single morning last week. Advertisers are now paying between 16 percent and 18 percent less for clicks than they did just four months ago.

Source: WordStream

The finance industry spends a lot of green with Google

“I think that’s fantastic news,” Kim says.” “It’s not only cost-per-click going down, but also that the inventory of ad impressions is going up substantialy … it means you can get more customers for less money.”

That sounds bad for Google. But not really, he told me.

“It’s actually really good news for Google, too … even though Wall Street cheers when the cost-per-click goes up and Google gets more money from advertisers … that’s not sustainable. By increasing the available impressions and clicks and lowering the costs, more advertisers will see more value from online advertising and that will be beneficial for Google in the long run.”

One caveat: While Kim is pretty confident in the data, saying that by analyzing 1 percent of Google’s revenue he’s checking a far higher percentage than Gallup, for instance, would poll for an election preview, it’s not Google data.

So it’s possible that WordStream’s data is off. With such a large sample, however — over a billion dollars in annualized revenue — it’s not likely that it is very far wrong.

photo credit: captcreate via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Out of ideas for a fresh and creative advertising campaign that will resonate with your customers?

BIScience, a Tel Aviv-based startup that pulled in its first round of funding today, has found a way to inspire your next online ad strategy. In a nutshell, it’s an intelligence tool that lets sales and marketing professionals as well as media buyers spy on the competition.

Founded in 2009, the Israeli company was originally intended as a business intelligence and analytics tool. However, its AdClarity product (pictured, left), which offers a birds-eye view of the competition, resonated best with customers.

Its technology monitors over half a million Internet pages in eight regions across the world to unveil competitors’ online advertising campaigns.

“This is a cut-throat competitive business,” Orey Gilliam, the company’s CEO, told me. “Players will not allow their competitors to see what they do without seeing what their competitors do – it will turn into an intelligence arms race.” Prior to joining the company as its chief executive, Gilliam was the Israel-based lead executive for AIM, AOL’s messaging tool.

In the competitive intelligence space, which is relatively untouched by innovation, competitors include InfoArmy (a startup with the founder of SalesForce-owned Jigsaw as its CEO) and dominant player Dun & Bradstreet.

With the funding, the founders plan to invest in research and development and to expand to new channels like mobile and video. Currently in beta, the company will launch its media intelligence tool in New York next month.

Today, BIScience pulled in $3.5 million in first round funding from CyHawk Ventures and Moscow-based venture capital firm Bright Capital.

Image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

If given the choice, I will always patronize a small, local business over a national corporation. However, many small business owners lack the technological or social media expertise to effectively manage their online presence.

LocalVox, a startup that gives local businesses tools to wage online marketing campaigns, hopes to help and has just raised $7.4 million.

The company functions as a subscription service. Business owners load information into their profile, including descriptions, photos, testimonials, social media accounts, and keywords. The platform then distributes this information across multiple online channels, as well as through its network of local publishers. When businesses want to update their profiles, make announcements, or offer deals, they can log in to the dashboard and the information is published to various locations.

“There are 4.9 million businesses with less than 99 employees and every local business is struggling with how to manage the constantly fragmenting world of online marketing,” said founder and CEO David Pachter. “Life used to be simple when all they had to do was buy a Yellow Pages ad.  Now there are hundreds of services and so many seem mandatory (a website, SEO, Facebook, Yelp, FourSquare, Google Places, email marketing, Twitter, and most recently mobile). It’s far too complicated and moving far too quickly for a local business to keep up.”

This helps LocalVox’s list of 700 small businesses communicate with and engage their existing customers, as well as attract new ones at a reasonable cost. Since the target is a local audience, LocalVox has partnered over 20 local publisher partners, including newspapers, magazines, and blogs. It not only works with restaurants, bars, galleries, and gyms with a single shop, but also with franchises such as Whole Foods that want to reach people in specific locations.

LocalVox is headquartered in New York and has solutions for businesses in the New York Metropolitan Area. With this funding, it will expand into new markets. The investment came from media company Talus Holdings, which is backed by Blackstone affiliate GSO Capital Partners LP.

In other words, everywhere she turns, a few or many times a day, your prospect is seeing reasons, rationale, and offers to buy from you. That’s a powerful vision for a marketer.

But not just a vision — today Madison Logic is launching exactly that with two new products. VentureBeat spoke to Madison Logic’s chief executive, Eric Matlick, about the platform.

“As far as we know it is the first lead generation platform of its kind on the market at this time,” Matlick says.

(Note: LiveRamp does something at least somewhat similar.)

Originally, Madison Logic focused on the data management industry. A pivot directed the startup toward building the first ad-serving platform for lead generation. Currently, 400 companies use its lead-gen platform, including publications such as Forbes and PC Magazine and five of the top 20 Fortune 500 companies.

In fact, even preeminent online advertising giant Google is on Madison Logic’s client list.

In the course of running lead generation campaigns for hundreds of major companies, however, Matlick had a revelation: Madison Logic was sitting on a huge amount of data. And it was valuable, scarce data.

“There are two kinds of customer data: demographic and behavioral intent. Everyone has demographic data, but no one else has the behavioral intent data we have,” he told VentureBeat.

Behavioral data, unlike demographic, is extremely perishable. While address, ethnicity, and age factors change slowly, if at all, what business prospects are interested in buying changes by the week and month.

Because Madison Logic manages data that helps clients distribute white paper downloads and other buying signals, the company is in a good position to know who is interested in what. Aggregate the data, serve it up in an ad-buying network, and tie it to a marketing automation platform, and the company has a powerful tool for accelerating sales.

With the first new product, companies can simply buy the behavioral intent data to use on their own. The downside is that it’s not easy for all companies to integrate into Eloqua, Marketo, Salesforce.com, or another marketing automation system immediately.

“Marketing automation is sort of like CRM in the ’90s,” says Matlick. “A lot of people are buying it, but the majority are not really using it well.”

So Madison Logic has a second product in which the company will sync your clients and prospects with their opt-in cookie database and retarget them with display ads online, wherever you wish.

“We launched in beta 30 days ago,” Matlick told me. “Almost every customer we have is buying the retargeting product right now.”

The killer use case, according to Matlick, is the prospect who downloads a white paper, perhaps on database management software. Instead of that lead trickling through a traditional lead management system and resulting in a phone call, perhaps weeks later, Madison Logic can immediately surround that customer with display ads. As in, minutes after the download.

It gets even freakier (or better, if you’re a marketer).

“With our influencer campaigns, we’ll soon have the capability of showing display ads to all the other influencers at the same company,” says Matlick who says that all prospects are opt-in.

Thinking about trying to compete with that via traditional marketing.

It’s almost not fair.

photo credit: HikingArtist.com via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Act-On embraced $16 million in its fourth round of funding today to accomodate high-demand for its software and accelerate growth.

The company provides marketing automation technology that small and medium-sized business use to organize their online marketing campaigns. It offers a range of solutions for lead generation, nurturing, and management as well as content syndication.

The suite includes tools for email marketing, social media, landing pages, and website analytics, all accessible in a simple dashboard that is designed for marketers, rather than developers. It can also be integrated with enterprise products like Salesforce, WebEx, SugarCRM, and Microsoft Dynamics.

Act-On has over 1,000 customers and has seen triple-digit growth over the past couple years. Today’s investment will toward developing new products and expanding globally. It was led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from Trinity Ventures, US Venture Partners, and Voyager Capital, who participated in the company’s previous rounds. This brings Act-On’s total funding to $30 million.

Act-On was founded in 2008. It is based in Beaverton, Ore., with offices in Roseville, Calif., and Menlo Park, Calif.

Spain-based internet marketing company BlueCaribu recently did a review of SEO resources online. And some of the results are astonishing. India, for example, is the nation most interested in search engine optimization. Germany, hardly at all.

Search engine optimization, of course, is the black art of ensuing that your website bubbles up to the top in organic or unpaid search engine results. It’s also getting harder and harder to accomplish, as Wordstream recently showed.

Other fun facts? Amazon has almost 3,000 books on SEO. 13 million blog posts have been published with “SEO” in the title. And Twitter averages almost 250,000 monthly tweets about SEO.

See all the details in the infographic below:

Image credit: Nasirkhan/ShutterStock

The question, of course, is how.

Working with social infrastructure company Gigya, Indigo sharply increased social sharing and doubled social traffic from all sources, including Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest … in just two months.

“We’re going through a massive transformation into becoming the book lover’s lifestyle store,” Indigo director Dave McLean told VentureBeat. “That includes home and lifestyle products.”

As the company works through the transformation from books to the bookish lifestyle, Indigo wanted to engage with clients and invite them into the brand evolution. That’s where Gigya came in. Gigya provides social plugins, gamification tools, and extensive social data that helps sites find and reward top fans.

“We wanted three things,” McLean said. “A tool for customers to become more engaged, insight into which new products where worthy of being pinned, and the ability to reach the global Pinterest marketplace.”

When Indigo launched Pinterest sharing tools in early March of this year, the company saw an almost immediate 78 percent jump in social sharing and 218 percent leap in social traffic.

“It spawned a sharing frenzy,” McLean told VentureBeat.

Indigo credits three things for the instant Pinterest success.

First of all, the site’s core demographic is women in their 30s and 40s, which matches up with Pinterest fairly well. Secondly, the company’s new products were highly pinnable: visual and appealing. And thirdly, Indigo credits Gigya for the tools that made it happen, simply.

But it wasn’t all about sharing. Using the Gigya tools, Indigo is also finding out what content is worthy of being pinned, and feeding that data into the innovation and product development process on a weekly basis, helping the company decide which products to carry and market.

And sales results? I asked Indigo about sales from social traffic.

“We do track sales as a result of social traffic, but so far social referred revenue still represents a small portion of overall revenue,” McLean says.

The company says it’s still early to decide what social commerce really means and how it works.

“We’re in the first inning of a 9-inning ball game,” according to McLean.

But one tidbit of data the company will release: Conversion rates for Pinterest traffic are 50 percent higher than conversion rates from other traffic. That’s not just social traffic but all referred traffic, and that’s a major increase.

This is something we’ve heard before, and it’s good news for Pinterest and retailers, though perhaps not as good for Facebook and Twitter.

Mclean says the company, which also runs 240 physical locations, is still just learning to understand social.

With results like these, Indigo is obviously off to a good start.

Image credit: Stefano Lunardi/ShutterStock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Constant Contact, a well-known entity in social media marketing and email marketing, has just added a new area of expertise: storefronts and discovery tools for local businesses, via the acquisition of SinglePlatform for $65 million.

Since Constant Contacts bread and butter are small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), the acquisition makes perfect sense. In addition to its existing suite of “engagement marketing” tools, Constant Contact will now be better prepared to offer their SMB customers services specifically tailored to helping them reach their own local markets better.

SinglePlatform helps businesses publish their information — such as a menu, special discounts, and photos — to review websites, city guides, and other first-stop destinations for consumers doing their homework. It’s a more passive form of marketing, almost akin to SEO; but it’s important for local businesses.

“There are hundreds of online and mobile sites that consumers use to find local businesses and make purchase decisions. It’s literally impossible for time-starved small businesses to keep up with all of them,” said Constant Contact CEO Gail Goodman in a statement on the acquistion.

“Almost 50 percent of searches for local businesses happen without a specific business in mind, so it’s absolutely critical that small businesses are listed everywhere to ensure they are found when and where consumers are looking.”

Post-acquisition, basic listings on SinglePlatform’s publishing network of sites and mobile apps will be free from Constant Contact. SinglePlatform will continue to sell its digital storefronts, which let SMBs add videos, images, and menus to those basic listings.

In addition to the $65 million purchase price, Constant Contact kicked in an additional $5 million in cash and equity to keep existing Singlelatform team members on board. Also, if SinglePlatform meets certain revenue goals, Constant Contact has earmarked an extra $10 million to $30 million for special compensation.

SinglePlatform was founded in early 2010; the team raised a total of $4.45 million in two rounds of funding from such entities as First Round Capital and DFJ Gotham. The deal officially closed June 12, 2012, making SinglePlatform a wholly owned subsidiary of Constant Contact.

“The internet is shifting from a listing directory to a discovery engine,” said SinglePlatform CEO Wiley Cerilli (pictured) in a release today. “The first step is making sure your listing is available wherever people are searching. The real magic happens when rich business information… is delivered at the moment that people are making a purchase decision. SinglePlatform’s Digital Storefront is designed to do just that, getting small businesses in front of more people with the type of information that drives new customers and increased sales.”