YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar crowned Media Person of the Year at Cannes

by Marketing ON 23 May 2013

Following on from the past three recipients (Jack Dorsey, Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg), the Media Person of the Year at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity has just been announced as YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar.

Each year, the ‘so-called Oscars’ of the advertising world chooses its media innovator, and the figure who has shaped the industry the most in that time and for 2013 the choice was easy.

“YouTube has become a global phenomenon under Salar’s leadership,” says Phillip Thomas, CEO of Cannes Lions. “The statistics say it all: more than one billion unique users a month watch more than six billion hours of video.”

Thomas also admitting that the one-time svp, video at Google who was responsible for creating the super-earning AdWords has since 2009 expanded YouTube into a global broadcast platform, recently launching its first paid channels.

Kamangar’s YouTube has also been lauded for launching TrueView, the advertising format whereby advertisers only pay for ads watched. There has been a doubling of the number of advertisers using it in the last year.

“I’m delighted to accept this award not just on behalf of YouTube, but on behalf of the artists and producers across the world whose creativity has established YouTube as the global destination for video,” says Kamangar.

Kamangar receives the prestigious award June 19, during the 60th annual Cannes Lions festival.

Bing Ads to take fight to Google in Australia

by Marketing ON 5 April 2013

Mi9 has announced the introduction of Bing Ads to the Australian market, bringing renewed investment in the challenger to Google’s dominant platform and opening up cross-border opportunities for Australian search marketers.

Control of the development and monetisation of Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, will move to Mi9, the local joint venture between Microsoft and Nine Entertainment Co, in July.

Currently, advertising on the Bing platform was offered through the ‘Panama’ platform run out of Yahoo Search Marketing. But a global decision in 2010 by (then) Yahoo chief executive Carol Bartz to focus on its core strength meant getting out of the search business.

As Microsoft’s local venture, Mi9 is attempting to capitalise on the still-fast-growing search advertising market.

It’s about taking the fight to Google, says Steve Sirich, global head of Bing advertising at Microsoft. “For marketers, it’s about giving them a choice. We believe innovation is a function of that choice. We continue to innovate and provide differentiation with our Bing web search experience.”

Part of the move will see 12 specialists hired within the Mi9 team in sales, operations and product.

Sirich says the most noticeable difference for search marketers will be in the selling channel, with a centralised sales team bringing efficiencies. “The account managers that now represent the Mi9 digital suite will additionally represent the Bing product, so it’s a nice audience extension, especially to the performance products.”

The move also opens up cross-border opportunities, both ways, for Australian and international search marketing campaigns, Sirich says, an aspect Yahoo!7 didn’t push aggressively. “It opens up markets that Australian advertisers can now purchase that traffic in.

“So if advertisers do have an interest to purchase US traffic or UK traffic or India traffic… they’ll now have that ability.”

On the functionality of the platform, Sirich says Bing Ads will function in a similar way to Google’s product. “It is to our advantage the advertising product operates in a similar way to Google Adwords,” he says.

Roland Irwin of advertising platform Marin Software says he’s welcoming of the move, saying that increased competition will be good for the market.

With Bing’s reported 5.5 million monthly unique users in Australia and global numbers suggesting 20% are unique to Bing, that means approximately one million Australian Bing users do not use Google. “They have a unique audience so there are opportunities there,” Irwin says.

“Australian advertisers are not as acquainted with Bing due to less interaction with it compared to Google so will experience a learning curve initially,” he adds. But softening that learning curve are two things. First, the similarities between the systems means platforms such as Marin’s can be updated to incorporate both. Second, Google’s block on copying search campaigns from its platform has now been lifted, making it easier for marketers to duplicate campaigns across both platforms.

The launch of Bing Ads was announced this week and will come into effect in July.

Google’s new ‘Enhanced Campaigns’: what it means for search marketers

by Nick Gill ON 1 March 2013

Recently Google announced the rollout of ‘Enhanced Campaigns’, a major AdWords product release that attempts to simplify the management of campaigns across devices. With enhanced campaigns, search marketers will be able to target consumers based on device, location, and time of day through a single campaign. However, for search marketers that currently leverage separate desktop, tablet, and mobile campaigns, Google’s enhanced campaigns will remove some of the control and transparency we’re used to having. Additional details on enhanced campaigns can be found here.

What does this mean?

To understand the implications of Google’s enhanced campaigns, let’s review the benefits and concerns.

Benefits

Mobile-preferred creative: Search marketers will now be able to create mobile-preferred ad creative that is delivered to users based on their device or when they’re searching.
Consolidated and simplified bid management: Search marketers can now leverage bid adjustments to manage bids across devices, locations, time of day, and more from within a single campaign.

Enhanced ad extensions management: Search marketers can now assign ad extensions at the ad group level and display ads across devices with the appropriate ad creative, sitelink, app, or extension, without having to manage multiple campaigns for every combination of device, location, and time of day. Furthermore, ad extensions can now be scheduled to turn on and off, such as during times when phone operators are unavailable.
Advanced sitelinks management: Search marketers can now report on the performance metrics for individual ad sitelinks and monitor their approval status.
New conversion types: Search marketers will now have the ability to track and report on calls and app downloads, enabling the optimisation of campaigns based on these conversion types.

Concerns

Device-specific budgets: In combing all devices into a single campaign, budgets will also be combined, eliminating the ability for search marketers to set separate, device-optimised budgets across desktop-, tablet-, and mobile-only campaigns.
Mobile-only campaigns: Without the ability to opt out of desktop/tablet device targeting, search marketers will no longer be able to leverage mobile-only campaigns. This may significantly impact advertisers, like mobile app and gaming companies, who only wish to advertise on mobile devices.
Tablet specific optimisation strategies: With tablet device targeting now combined with desktop, search marketers who have specific tablet strategies in place will lose that functionality.
Bidding on mobile keywords: Since mobile bids are boosted by a percentage of desktop/tablet bids at the campaign level, search marketers can no longer calculate individual mobile keyword bids based on performance. Furthermore, bidding to a preferred position for specific mobile keywords to combat the limited real estate on search results pages on mobile devices is no longer possible.
Bid multipliers: The requirement to layer bid multipliers based on device, location, and time of day introduces significant complexities for calculating optimal keyword bids. Furthermore, since bid adjustments are applied at the campaign level, separate time of day multipliers can’t be set for separate locations. For example: +20% for New York and +50% on Saturdays, and -20% for Chicago and -50% on Saturdays.
Targeting mobile operating systems: Search marketers can no longer target campaigns to a specific mobile device or device operating system (eg. iPhone, HTC, iOS, Android).

Google plans to roll out enhanced campaigns across advertisers over the next few months. As a result, advertisers may not have immediate access to this feature within their accounts. By mid-2013, all campaigns are expected to have been transitioned to enhanced campaigns.

Did you know: in each issue of the print edition, Marketing includes the very best opinion articles curated from our huge industry blogging community, as well as exclusive columnists writing on the topics that matter? Becoming a subscriber is only AU$45 for a whole year, delivered straight to your door. Find out more »

Google revamps AdWords for multi-screen campaigns

by Marketing ON 7 February 2013

Google has updated AdWords to help advertisers manage multi-screen campaigns. The new system will enable advertisers to alter campaigns depending on where, when and via which device in order to tailor message to the context of the searcher.

“People on the go or near your shop may be looking for different things than someone sitting at their desk,” Google’s senior vice president of engineering, Sridhar Ramaswamy, explains. “With enhanced campaigns, you’ll show ads across devices with the right ad text, sitelink, app or extension, without having to edit each campaign for every possible combination of devices, location and time of day.”

Advertisers will also be able to bid for search queries based on location, time of day or device to help direct budget towards the most relevant search occasion. For example, if a breakfast cafe wants to reach people nearby searching for ‘coffee’ or ‘breakfast’ on a smartphone, it can bid 25% higher for people searching a half a mile away, 20% lower for searches after 11am and 50% higher for searches on smartphones.

A study by Google last year found that 90% of multi-device consumers move ‘sequentially’ between several screens in the same day, as well as using dual screens during tasks that enable multi-tasking behaviour.

Read: Google study: Content is King, the screen is Queen and context is God.

“With enhanced campaigns, instead of having to cobble together and compare several separate campaigns, reports and ad extensions to do this, the [advertiser] can easily manage all of this in one single place,” Ramaswamy adds.

Enhanced campaigns will roll out to advertisers as an option over the next few weeks, and we plan to upgrade all campaigns in mid-2013.

Google integrates AdMob as mobile takes centre stage

by Marketing ON 13 June 2012

Mobile advertising is beginning to take centre stage, a fact Google has recognised and is moving to capitalise on.

The search giant has integrated its AdWords for mobile – ‘AdMob’ – into the AdWords interface so that marketers can plan their search campaigns across the two platforms from the one place.

AdMob hosts ads on more than 2 million websites, in Google’s mobile search results and across 300,000 mobile applications. Many of Google’s 1 million plus AdWords advertisers also run campaigns through AdMob, which to this point had been housed on a different system.

In a blog post, Google’s director of product management, mobile, Jonathan Alferness, writes, “Mobile advertising has become a core part of marketers’ and publishers’ digital strategies, helping to fuel business growth and great content.”

“Bringing together the best of AdWords with the best of AdMob is an important step in building integrated solutions that help all businesses get the most out of digital marketing.”

The move will also helps AdMob developers and publishers increase their revenue by giving them access to a large number of new advertisers, according to Google.

With the integrated system, AdWords advertisers will be able to manage, measure and adjust search, display and video ads, reaching people on more than 2 million websites and hundreds of thousands of apps, across all screens.

AdWords for video brings greater measurability, targeting

by Marketing ON 24 April 2012

Google has taken a step towards addressing the issue of YouTube’s measurability and targeting by introducing AdWords for video.

The new service will offer several ways for businesses to gain visibility and micro-target users who show interest in their products or industry. It will also allow businesses to better understand the effectiveness of their ad campaigns on YouTube, with tools that show how many people watched the entire video, shared the video, visited the company website or stayed on the channel to watch another video after watching an ad.

Promoting YouTube’s power to reach large audiences, group product manager for YouTube, Baljeet Singh wrote on the site’s blog, “With a global audience of 800 million monthly visitors to YouTube, every day can feel like you’re advertising in the Super Bowl, and one video can launch a business.”

The announcement comes after the search giant introduced TrueView video ads recently, a solution that only charges advertisers when people watch most of the video and not for those who skip the video or are repeat viewers.

As a launch initiative, Google is offering $50 million in free advertising by giving companies new to YouTube a $75 credit when they sign up, enough money for a video campaign to reach 1500 customers on YouTube for one month. Advice to new businesses looking into YouTube is available via an Advertiser Playbook and the My Business Story channel, a free tool you can use to create your first video. A so-called ambassador program, comprised of nine businesses who have built a following through successful through video campaigns, will be another resource for businesses that are new to YouTube to learn how to grow their brand.

ACCC wins appeal against Google for deceptive paid search results

by Marketing ON 5 April 2012

Advertisers who used competitors’ names as keywords in Google AdWords campaign landed the search giant in hot water with the Federal Court five years ago, where it was cleared, but the case raised questions about the role of search engines and their responsibilities around paid content.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) appealed that decision and this week announced it had done so successfully, with the Full Court declaring that Google, by creating and serving the advertisements on result pages of the Google Australia website, engaged in conduct that was misleading or deceptive, or likely to mislead or deceive, in breach of the Competition and Consumer Act (formerly known as the Trade Practices Act).

The advertising in question involved the use of competitors’ names in keywords and in the actual advertisement headlines served to users. The ACCC alleged these advertisements contained representations that by clicking them the user would find information on the competitor, rather than the advertiser.

The original case went in Google’s favour because the judge found Google did not ‘make’ the representations but merely communicated them, even though some of the advertisements were misleading or deceptive.

ACCC chairman Rod Sims says the ACCC appealed because, “it raises very important issues as to the role of search engine providers as publishers of paid content in the online age.

“This is an important outcome because it makes it clear that Google and other search engine providers which use similar technology to Google will be directly accountable for misleading or deceptive paid search results,” Sims says.

The Full Court upheld the ACCC’s appeal, concluding that Google is responsible as it created the messages in question: “Google’s search engine calls up and displays the response to the user’s query. It is Google’s technology which creates that which is displayed. Google did not merely repeat or pass on a statement by the advertiser: what is displayed in response to the user’s search query is not the equivalent of Google saying here is a statement by an advertiser which is passed on for what it is worth.”

The Full Court also stated that, “the enquiry is made of Google and it is Google’s response which is misleading… Although the key words are selected by the advertiser, perhaps with input by Google, what is critical to the process is the triggering of the link by Google using its algorithms.”

Google will now possibly have to pay civil pecuniary penalties and the ACCC’s appeal costs and introduce a consumer law compliance program. It’s next avenue of response would be an appeal to the High Court.

There’s more to mobile in 2012 than native apps

by Simon van Wyk ON 9 January 2012

As you work out how to exploit mobile in 2012, you need to start by working out which relevant and compelling consumer problem you’re going to address and how it delivers a benefit to your business.

It’s also important to understand that mobile represents just one of the many consumer touchpoints that you need to serve as part of your overall marketing strategy. Mobile marketing should not be treated in isolation.

While the idea of a native app might work well as an engagement mechanism, your real focus should be using the channel to achieve incremental business growth and measure the value it provides to your brand.

For this reason, I think it’s vital that brand marketers realise that there’s more to a mobile marketing strategy than just building a native app. While apps can deliver a really slick and sticky way to engage with your consumers, it’s not necessarily the right solution if you need to connect with a wider audience.

Big population of non-smartphone users

Even with the rampant growth of iPhones in this country, they still only account for 45% of smartphones sold in Australia. And while there are something like 28 million mobile subscribers out there (6 million more than our actual population), smartphones account for less than 10 million of them.

There’s no doubt this number will grow, but for the time being, there’s a big population of mobile users out there who can’t even access an app. So do not let technology dictate your marketing choices.

When you evaluate the smartphone-toting audience you’ll see they use any number of devices and operating systems. It won’t be just Apple’s iOS. It won’t be just Google Android. It will be a mix of iOS, Android, Nokia’s Symbian, Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, Samsung’s Bada, HP’s WebOS, and RIM’s BlackBerry as well.

There are a huge number of different combinations of handsets and operating systems out there. With mobile, it’s far more complicated than assessing what version of Windows they have on their desktops and delivering the version they need.

So, unlike developing an application that will run on a desktop, following a device-specific or native app development strategy means you’ll need to double, triple, quadruple or more the cost of your development if you want your apps to be more widely available.

Furthermore, as consumers switch to mobile over the desktop as their first point of internet access, the need to deliver an optimised mobile web experience to your audience on the go will be a far greater consideration. Savvy marketers will make the mobile web a priority in 2012.

Just try it for yourself. Visit the websites of any number of consumer or business brands on your mobile device. While some are pleasingly easy to use, you’ll find that far too many of them perform poorly in basic areas of mobile website functionality such as load times, navigation and user friendliness. And while brands may have been able to get away with this oversight in 2011, there’s growing user expectations and sophistication. In 2012, believe me, consumers will just not stick with a sub-optimal mobile experience.

And if they don’t stick around, you’ll be losing out on the source of a growing portion of your annual revenue. As this chunk gets bigger, it would be reckless not to give your mobile presence a much higher priority.

Of course, another reason to deliver an optimised mobile website relates to AdWords performance. Google has already introduced measures that take into consideration how well an ad’s landing site is optimised for viewing on a mobile device. So not only will a sub-optimal mobile web experience negatively shape a consumer’s opinion of your brand or company, it will make it hard for them to engage with you or make a purchase, and it will adversely affect your search rankings.

In 2012, it’s all about giving consumers the best possible experience on their mobile device. And this means delivering a consistent, highly tuned mobile experience – whatever the device, whatever the platform.

When Gillard steals your (clients) thunder…

by Marketing ON 24 June 2010

Digital agency Memery flipped the biggest news week to their client’s advantage through a Google AdWords campaign.

A promotional tour orchestrated by The Diet Plate involving a star from the UK’s The Biggest Loser has leveraged the Gillard ascendancy through a Google AdWords campaign.

Searches for ‘Kevin Rudd‘ returned the following:

The Diet Plate
 Lose weight while 
eating humble pie
http://www.thedietplate.com.au

While searches for ‘Julia Gillard’ returned:

The Diet Plate
Portion control
for women in control
http://www.thedietplate.com.au

Matt Granfield, Marketingmag.com.au guru blogger and Marketing magazine writer, owns Memery.

For a full list of the AdWords campaign, see Granfield’s personal blog.

Why social media and marketing dont mix

by Marketing ON 9 March 2010

The reason why social networking websites are so popular

You’ve seen the news, been to the conference and watched the YouTube video. You can’t hide from it; social media is huge. In fact Facebook has almost 8 million users in Australia alone and Twitter is growing at a rate of more than 1000% per year. Face it – your grandmother is probably on some sort of social network by now — just cross your fingers you don’t end up coming face to face with her on chat roulette one night.

But why are social networks so popular?

Social networks are the new town halls, the village greens, the community noticeboards; the piazzas of 2010. They allow people to communicate with each other, but just as importantly, they allow people to create an online extension of their personality. It’s that simple. In fact, it’s where the name ‘MySpace’ comes from. The creators allowed people (kids mostly) to create their own personal space on the web.

Once upon a time people had secret diaries, bedroom walls covered in polaroids, a box of love letters hidden under the bed and a little black book of friends names, phone numbers and birthdays. Everything was on paper, and people shared information with their friends by handing it to them in person. Now all that personal stuff is stored digitally and people share it via email, or by uploading it to their favourite social network.

And people share rather a lot of stuff.

In fact, the average internet user spends almost 20% of their working day sending and receiving email (according to Radicati), more than five hours a month on Facebook, about two hours a month on Google and an hour and 20 minutes each month on YouTube (according to Nielsen).

And those are the figures for the average user. There are plenty of Facebook and YouTube fans who spend more time on those sites than they do sleeping.

It’s no wonder then that marketers are so keen to get their messages into these mediums.

Where marketers have been going wrong

The problem is, people don’t like sharing their personal space with marketers. Ask anyone who’s ever been called at 8 am on a weekend by their phone company, had a Jehovah’s Witness at their door or been offered a penis enlargement solution. People accept that they’ll see advertising on TV, and in the right-hand column on Facebook, but once brands start trying to infiltrate conversations outside the space where they have permission too, people get annoyed.

Shopping centre giant Westfield ran a promotion in the lead-up to Christmas last year. The idea was that if you changed your Facebook status to “All I want for Christmas is a $10,000 Westfield Gift Card” you went in the running to win one. It certainly wasn’t a terrible idea at face value. It generated a lot of publicity for the brand with more than 200,000 people changing their status, but inevitably, the novelty wore off quite quickly and a dozen popular anti-Westfield groups sprung up, including one titled IF ALL YOU WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS A WESTFIELD GIFT CARD, I DONT WANT TO KNOW, which attracted more than 4,600 fans — only marginally less than the official application, which at last count had 6,778 fans (and keep in mind they were in it to win something). Other groups included THE LAST THING I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS A WESTFIELD GIFT CARD, and my personal favourite, Hey Westfield – stick your stupid f%#king gift card up your f%#king arse!!!

Despite actually working with Facebook on the campaign, Westfield also managed to fail on a couple of technical fundamentals as well. The entry mechanism was clearly against Facebook’s Terms of Service which stated that:

“In the rules of the promotion, or otherwise, you will not condition entry to the promotion upon taking any action on Facebook, for example, updating a status, posting on a profile or Page, or uploading a photo.”

And, as Damien Damjanovski explains in his Refined Geek blog, there were some other pretty basic things they could have done to create more buzz, like getting people to become fans of the brand rather than just updating their status.

Fashion brand Witchery recently provided one of the most notorious examples of a brand abusing the trust that exists in social networks. You’ve probably already heard the story, but in a nutshell, they posted a video on YouTube showing a paid actor holding a very prominently displayed jacket which had been left behind by a cute male owner. The video was her ‘plea’ to the public to help find him. The tale attracted widespread media attention, no doubt because of its similarity to the ‘NY Girl of My Dreams’ story which thrilled the world two years earlier, and the actor even went on live breakfast television claiming the story was true. It was, of course, completely made up and Witchery copped an enormous amount of flack for blatantly lying to the public.

The agency behind the campaign, Naked Communications, claimed the campaign was successful and cited independent research which backed their strategy up. But the raw data showed that 60% of people who were aware of the campaign were either unphased, sceptical or felt negatively about it. The sudden departure of the agency’s CEO straight after the debacle didn’t exactly send a message of success either.

Facebook advertising – just because you have permission to talk doesn’t mean they’ll listen

Trying to surreptitiously infiltrate social networks is one clear example of where marketers are going wrong, but sadly, even if you have permission to reach people via social network advertising, the chances of actually getting through to them are slim.

According to industry blogs and Facebook’s own forums, advertising click through rates (CTR) in the network average around 0.01-0.1%. If you can get more than 1 person in 1000 clicking your ad, you’re apparently doing well. Compare this to the average click through rate of Google’s AdWords program, which is around 1-5%, and you’ll quickly understand the difference between advertising something to a consumer who is actively searching for your product or service, and someone who mentioned something vaguely related to your product or service a year ago when they created their Facebook profile.

That’s not to say Facebook advertising doesn’t work. More often than not it’s just not the best place to be looking for prospects because they’re probably not in the mood.

Going ‘Viral’ on YouTube (and how much money you need to spend to make it happen for free)

So what about YouTube then? According to their official stats:

Every minute, 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube
51% of users go to YouTube weekly or more often
52% of 18-34 year-olds share videos often with friends and colleagues

Given that more than half the US population watch more than 100 videos on YouTube each month (according to ComScore), Youtube is more popular than any television network in the world. Considering it’s free to put a video on the site, you’d be forgiven for thinking that YouTube sounds like a marketer’s wet dream. It’s not.

According to Business Insider, more than half of all videos on YouTube are viewed less than 500 times and 30% of them get less than 100 views. A mere 0.33% are viewed more than a million times.

While there are some great examples of corporations getting their clip to go ‘viral’, there is no magic formula to make it happen.

Producing entertaining content helps and making people laugh is a sure fire way to attract a little bit of attention (at least from friends of your friends), but there’s absolutely no way to predict how many people will end up seeing your video and that makes it incredibly hard to justify the production costs to whoever holds the purse strings.

You can’t make a video go ‘viral’ and given that 90% of videos are viewed less than 5,000 times, unless your production costs are close to zero, hoping your clip will spread over the internet like a rash is a costly gamble.

Tourism Queensland recently provided one of the best examples of how to use YouTube in the marketing mix. Beginning with a series of classified ads in the job sections of newspapers around the world, they advertised a position for an ‘Island Caretaker’ on the Great Barrier Reef – a 6 month contract paying $150,000 to basically have a tropical island holiday and blog about it.

It was a slow news week and news outlets from around the world quickly picked up on the quirky story. The total global advertising budget was rumoured to be in the millions, but the free exposure the organisation got was worth hundreds of times more than that in advertising value equivalency (an antiquated public relations term which means ‘the amount of money you’d have to pay to get the same amount of coverage via advertising’).

The result was around 250,000 views of the centrepiece video on YouTube – which is not a small number, but testament to the fact that if you want to guarantee more than a few thousand people see your YouTube video, you need an integrated global advertising and PR campaign, a big wad of cash and a generous slice from a lucky pie chart. In fact, as Tourism Queensland digital marketing manager Sarah Whyte explained to me, “the media publicity was a fundamental element underpinning the campaign — certainly in propagating the viral in the first instance.”

Social media as a customer service platform

Thinking back to that stats I mentioned earlier, you’ll remember that social media is big. People are used to communicating with each other online. It’s convenient, they can do it 24/7 and if companies are prepared to provide an online channel for their customers to use, they’ll respond happily.

Big companies, from Google to ABC Childcare, now use online forums as a way for their customers to get in touch with them 24/7. Company representatives keep an eye on the questions, but more importantly, so do other loyal customers, who often chime in with a helpful answer first.

People love to feel important and letting them speak proudly about a company they love is probably the best way to create brand ambassadors.

Optus and Telstra have also had huge success using Twitter as a customer service platform. Dedicated customer service teams monitor messages from the public and are committed to getting back to them quickly and professionally.

However, opening up your customer service to an online audience is fraught with risk.

When they’re upset people love to complain loudly and they love it even more if they know they have an audience. Once you give them a platform to yell, they will. And if potential new clients are using the same forum (or Twitter account), seeing a long list of gripes from existing customers isn’t exactly going to make you look awesome. And if you can’t get back to people as quickly as they think they deserve an answer, you’re going to make yourself look like you don’t care.

Once you start communicating on a social media channel you can’t change your mind and then shut it down again either. You’ll look like you’re crazy, or you don’t care. It’s like talking to your mum on the phone. If you suddenly stop calling one week she’ll think you’re on drugs. That being said, if you happen to work in the social media customer service department of a large company and forget which account you’re updating, people are going to think you’re on drugs anyway, as Westpac found out last week:

So what’s the moral to the story? How can you successfully use social networks to flog stuff, I mean, market things?

Social networks are spaces for individuals to communicate with each other, to hang out and to document their lives. It’s a place for friends (in fact, that’s MySpace’s strapline). If you want to get attention you’ve got to go about it the same way you would if you were trying to make a new friend: be interesting, be funny, talk about stuff they like and don’t be overbearing. Having a reputation that precedes you doesn’t hurt either – it’s much easier to make friends with a friend of a friend, and in the same way, if your social media strategy is backed up with a solid PR and above the line campaign, you’re more likely to make an impact.

Want more examples of how to do it right?

Stay tuned for my next column and we’ll go through a detailed list of Australian companies doing awesome things with social media at all levels – from small businesses, right through to the biggest banks. If you can’t wait, check out James Duthie’s great list of Australian businesses and brands on Twitter. It’s a year old now, so it’s probably a bit out of date, but it’s a great place to see some examples in action.

WotFlights launch

by Marketing ON 18 February 2010

Anyone who has worked in the travel industry or booked a hotel in the last few years would recognise Wotif as no stranger to the online travel market. They have proven it is possible for one online company to change the way traveller’s book accommodation, now it seems they’re set to change how you book a flight!

Rumours circulated that Wotif was expanding its product suite and air travel seemed the most logical next step. The 17th confirmed this with the company launching its latest product WotFlight.com, targeting domestic flights.

The company’s promotion, Qantas Oz Race – allowing consumers to win domestic flights, may prove to be an astute move. The important point is that to increase the benefit of the exposure they will gain over the next several days they are offering a smart way to build their marketing database from day one – not waiting several months when all the initial hype has died down.

The first market they seem to be aiming to corner is a very competitive Google Keyword: ‘cheap flights’. Since Wotif have proven they can be aggressive and win a large portion of the online accommodation market, ‘wot’ established airfare players are they looking to upset?

Google.com.au ranking for ‘Cheap Flights’:

Iwantthatflight.com.au
Cheapflights.com.au
Expedia.com.au
Webject.com.au
Flightcentre.com.au
Jetstar

The first obvious point is that it will take some time for the company to be ranked highly in organic search, so by building up an email marketing database with the Oz Race competition they are better positioned to compete.

The benefit of having multiple websites is that you can use banners to cross-promote your products and support new offerings like WotFlights. They have already starting buying traffic using Google AdWords to support initial bookings and to encourage people to try the new service.
I have noticed that they have been bidding for lower positions in the search results. By using this technique they can better understand the possible search traffic before committing serious amounts of money to an AdWords campaign.

wotflights

The new website seems a little buggy and slow to respond, has a very natural interface and most of the initial feedback is that people seem to like it and want to use it to book their next flight. With my small test group we found some errors and functions that we would expect to be available but are not yet and obviously there is a bit more work required to make the website more search engine friendly.

wotflights

The WotIf group are a perfect example of a company that understands user experience wins over flashy corporate websites and will likely cause a large shakeup in the market as it is only a matter of time before they expand worldwide. They are also a company that understands big investment in online marketing can win so if you are in the online air travel market now would be a bad time to be cutting budgets.

Google compares ads

by Marketing ON 2 November 2009

Google has announced it will trial Comparison Ads, displaying multiple offers to users for certain search terms.

The new service caters to more ambiguous search queries where precise targeting is difficult. Google gives the example of users searching ‘mortgage’ – instead of offering traditional single offer advertising, the search engine will offer a cross-section of options hoping to deepen user engagement with advertising.

“If they click the promotion, users are taken to a page with more detailed sponsored results. They can choose directly from the offers listed on that page, or they can further refine their search by providing additional information like income and home value. By giving users the ability to refine their search on a number of relevant attributes, we are able to show more targeted ads and provide you with more valuable leads,” said Dan Friedman on Google’s Adwords blog.

During the beta trial the service is available only to residents of certain US states and advertisers in the mortgage/refinancing space, though Google intends to opens this up over the course of the trial.