An Ad Promoting…Another Ad?
Super Bowl ads [...]]]> Volkswagen’s Barkside is a fun teaser promoting the brands’ involvement in the Super Bowl — as an advertiser. It continues to tap into the Star Wars phenomena and mashes it up with a costumed pet meme to come up with this fun, minute-long teaser ad.

An Ad Promoting…Another Ad?
Super Bowl ads have become the TV equivalent of a retail brand’s flagship store. The ads, like the stores, forgo much of the brand’s established look and feel for something new. Advertisers want to make a big statement that gets consumers talking and ultimately buying.

In the past few years, we’ve seen several examples of how media convergence has Super Bowl advertisers building much bigger campaigns around their 30 second spot.

Streaming & Sharing the Game
Between advertisers investing more to support their TV spots to the news that the game will be live streamed this year, we’re sure to see more interesting campaigns from advertisers.

Hopefully we’ll see a better integration of mobile and the Super Bowl this year. UPDATE: Chevy just announced it’s Super Bowl App.  Last year there was no obvious app that added value to the game. This year Verizon users will have access to the live stream on their phones. But mobile doesn’t simply mean outside. The multi-screen experience holds much promise for advertisers  gearing up for game day.

The stakes are high and whether its a 30 second spot, social media, mobile or other media play, marketers and consumers will have so much to experience they’ll have to remember to watch the game.

:: By Kevin Dugan, Director of Marketing 

The changes span the Twitter platform, [...]]]>
Twitter began to roll out a design overhaul last week for many of its users, and everyone else will get it sometime within the next three weeks. The changes are quite possibly the most significant shift Twitter has undertaken since its launch nearly six years ago.

The changes span the Twitter platform, including:

My colleagues will tell you I’ve got an Instagram addiction. While I’m not sure about that, the social photo-sharing platform has a loyal following.

Instagram has shown me some great examples of brands testing and learning the concept of No Channels.

Brand Power
Of the 35 or more brands I [...]]]>

My colleagues will tell you I’ve got an Instagram addiction. While I’m not sure about that, the social photo-sharing platform has a loyal following.

Instagram has shown me some great examples of brands testing and learning the concept of No Channels.

Brand Power
Of the 35 or more brands I follow on Instagram, (RED) seems to have the most fun playing up the visual nature of its brand and the various partnerships it has with other brands.

But more than brand awareness, (RED) is smart about giving followers simple calls to action. In one example, (RED) is using Instagram to encourage users to tap into a promotion for the (RED)-branded Shazam app for music discovery on the go. The proceeds benefits the non-profit’s push for AIDS awareness.

Convergence & Cross-Platform Thinking
The promotion starts and ends on a mobile device and it uses two niche apps to get users to support (RED). This is certainly not new. But it is a great reminder that thinking cross-platform doesn’t just apply to multiple platforms. In this case it applies to a single-device.

:: By Kevin Dugan, Director of Marketing

Cross-Posted to my personal blog 

Empower CEO Jim Price joined a variety of entrepreneurs, academics, venture capitalists and area leaders to discuss innovation.

“All About Innovation” was sponsored by Enquirer Media and [...]]]> 10 Ways Agencies & Media Are Changing

Empower CEO Jim Price joined a variety of entrepreneurs, academics, venture capitalists and area leaders to discuss innovation.

“All About Innovation” was sponsored by Enquirer Media and the Greater Cincinnati Venture Association. Held in the historic Emery Theatre, it felt like a wonderful paradox of sorts. However, while the focus was local innovation, the impact of the presenters content is far-reaching

*University of Cincinnati’s Dr. Jason Heikenfeld discussed an electrofluidic display technology which is being used to impact e-readers, smart phones, signage and display technology, boasting the color levels of traditional screens with the thickness of e-paper.

* Northern Kentucky University’s dean of informatics showed attendees how its state of the art program is cultivating sought after graduates for jobs in cyber security, mobile and social media, health technology as well as analytics, market intelligence and cloud computing.

Jim’s deck is above as he outlined 10 Ways Agencies and Media are changing. Technology, convergence and an unprecedented rate of change is impacting consumers, media and brands. Jim’s deck highlights some of this and, while the themes should ring familiar to the marketing industry, they’re helpful reminders as we head into 2012.

:: By Kevin Dugan, Marketing Director

Shift to Multiple Screens
While TV remains one of the most popular digital entertainment platforms, computers, tablets [...]]]>
Media channels continue to provide examples of the well-established media convergence trend. The integration of network programming, consumer electronics and mobile devices as well as social platforms is changing how consumers watch television.

Shift to Multiple Screens
While TV remains one of the most popular digital entertainment platforms, computers, tablets and mobile phones offer an alternative to the traditional TV set. Even record and skip technologies such as DVRs and TiVo have not slowed the shift to multiple screens for TV content viewing. In fact cable companies and sites like Hulu give users the ability to watch their shows on their terms.

Sets Get Social
Several TV manufacturers have models that tap into this shift. Vizio and Samsung offer TVs with built in applications like Twitter, YouTube, Netflix and Hulu that allow users to stream online services from the TV set itself. This is well on its way to becoming the standard for all TV sets in the near future.

Networks Truly Connecting With Consumers
TV networks are enhancing the viewing experience by engaging viewers while they watch – usually in real-time. The Bravo network engages viewers by encouraging them to interact online with each show’s celebrities, vote in polls to see relevant social media content and to gain access to exclusive content. Bravo does a great job of using mobile apps, their site and their shows to thread viewer content with their programming. Fox’ The X Factor also takes engagement a step further with an online community using gamification to encourage viewer participation as well as using real-time voting to influence the show’s content.

This second-screen experience, derived from the notion that one is watching TV while working with an additional device, is perhaps best exemplified with Yahoo’s IntoNow application. Available on mobile phones and tablets, the app listens to audio cues from news, sports and other broadcasts that matches with a database to serves up supplementary content to viewers on their device.

Paid & Earned Media Convergence
The amount of social TV examples we’re seeing speaks to the potential of paid and earned media convergence. MTV’s site boasts a heavy branch of mobile tools and options for its younger viewers to carry MTV with them seamlessly. And its social efforts leading up to their Video Music Awards, for example, garnered the attention of millions. In fact, its VMA Tweet Tracker broke the tweets-per-second record with 8,868 tweets at one point during the program.

It’s important, now, to ensure companies are capturing Social TVs full potential with the help of paid media. Both social and paid media efforts need to coincide under a consistent brand message to work together. TV still boasts some of the strongest viewership of all media channels and seamlessly integrated social media is helping  TV maintain this lead. Incorporating these two channels by leveraging complementary efforts across each can help brands garner the largest, most relevant level of engagement with consumers they have seen to date.

:: By Zach Murphy, Word of Mouth Marketing Associate

The Conspiracy Theory

Have you noticed over the past six months that natural search results are gradually disappearing from the first page of Google? No? Then the following post might seem like a conspiracy theory to you. But have an open mind.

Just humor me and do a Google search for any [...]]]>

The Conspiracy Theory

Have you noticed over the past six months that natural search results are gradually disappearing from the first page of Google? No? Then the following post might seem like a conspiracy theory to you. But have an open mind.

Just humor me and do a Google search for any term that could end in a potential advertiser making some kind of profit. Everything from “checking account” to “car insurance” to “Abraham Lincoln costume” returns a results page that is increasingly cluttered with some form of paid results or a link that takes you to another Google property.

Most of these updates are made to the search engine to “increase usability” or “mirror user intent”, but it’s still interesting that almost all of these updates that make it easier to access information are also ways for Google to very quietly make a little more money off of the search results they show people.

Where’s Your Proof?

A few examples can be pointed to that prove out my theory.

1. Redesigning search results: Google announced on Wednesday that they were redesigning the search engine results page to “to provide the best experience for [their] users” by removing ads from the side of the page and place them at the bottom instead. Yes, this might provide less clutter on the page, but they also make the top spots even more valuable to advertisers now. After all, ads above the fold are seven times more likely to generate clicks. And now that the ads above the fold are in short supply, we are going to be paying more to get them.

2. Sitelinks: When I search for Empower client “U.S. Bank” to login to check my account statement, I’m now served six sitelinks. This is up from the previous four sitelinks, below the top ad (pictured below) that take me to supposedly more relevant deep content within a website. These results also conveniently push down the natural rankings. Add to the fact that Google now serves internal sitelinks for natural results, and suddenly there’s one natural ranking above the fold.

3. News Results: See the screenshot below for the term “online banking”. Notice that aside from the large amount of real estate dedicated to paid ads, news results also appear in the natural search results. Now you may be asking, “how is Google possibly making money on that?”. Well click through to the top news story and you’ll find there’s a DART Floodlight tag on the page. Remember, they make money off of display ad exposures too, not just clicks.

4. Places: When I type in “auto insurance”, I see the standard paid search results with the various ad extensions, which give me more incentive to click, but I also see the natural results heavily populated with localized search results powered by Google Places. When I click through to these Places results, not only am I served more ads, but I’m also served results that are solely powered by Google users since they stopped using results from other platforms. Sorta takes away the need to visit Yelp and Citysearch, or use their apps, all things that were the major revenue drivers for those companies.

5. Social Search: I’ve been observing social search for quite awhile now, and while it is an extremely exciting development, it also gives incentives for users to stay logged into their Google profiles and to share content across its new social network. Right now, Google Plus doesn’t show any advertisements to its users, which is one of the many reasons I love the platform. But we all know that the ads will come, the same way we accept them now on Facebook, which is scaling its ad serving platform to hit $7 billion by 2013. There is obviously a lot of money to be made in owning a social network, which is why we will see Plus become increasingly integrated into all Google products in the future, making it a bigger part of the everyday lives of Google users.

Where’s the Motive?

The above are just five examples. You could also include Google Advisor, shopping results, and the endless list of ad extension updates to Adwords, and it becomes very clear that Google knows the search page is where it is going to continue to make most of its revenue and there are no shortage of new ways for Google to capitalize on information. And I can almost guarantee that advertisers and consumers will continually be told that each update is for their benefit.

But how much could this really be worth? Take the term “online banking” I searched for above. Google’s own Adwords Keyword Tool tells me that more than 20 million people search for it monthly and that the approximate cost-per-click is $1.41 (which is a very low estimate, trust me). Assume that 25% of people click-through an ad since historically about 70-80 percent of web traffic goes through natural search results. Google could make more than $7 million off of that one word every month. The Oxford English Dictionary currently contains over 170,000 entries. And Adwords is just one ad serving platform.

Compound that with the fact we typically see 1-3 natural search results now, as opposed to the 5-7 we saw a few years ago, and the idea that Google’s platform is going to be more and more populated by paid advertisements does not seem so crazy. They are without a doubt one of the smartest companies in the world. And smart companies make money. Lots of money. Any way they can.

:: By Alec Painter, Digital Search Strategist

Since one of the findings discussed last week was to keep posts short and simple, let’s dive right into to this week’s discussion of [...]]]> In the prior post, I reviewed the results of a new study by Buddy Media offering a number of best practices for brands wanting to increase user engagement on Facebook.

Since one of the findings discussed last week was to keep posts short and simple, let’s dive right into to this week’s discussion of best practices surrounding post content.

Ask, Don’t Tell: Ask questions in your posts to spark customer discussions. While the questions must focus on topics that will resonate with the target audience, brand posts asking questions generate double the rate of comments of ‘non-question posts’.

Consider asking customers how they use your brand, what do they like about it, what untraditional uses have they found for it? One of the most engaging techniques to do this is through the use of the fill in the blank post. The fill in the blank post generated an astonishing nine times more comments than other posts. In my business nine times more posts could mean _________________?

The Art of the Deal: While deals are an easy, well-received go to for marketers on Facebook, the study concluded that not all sales keywords are created equal. Among 10 sales related keywords measured, two in particular performed much better than the rest. Posts containing ‘$ off’ were 55 percent more engaging and posts containing the word ‘coupon’ were 39 percent more engaging than the average sales keyword. Interestingly, the word ‘sale’ was almost 30 percent less engaging than the average sales keyword, followed by ‘% off’, ‘deal’, ‘save’ and ‘bargain’.

Nobody Likes Math: The careful reader may now be asking, “Why does ‘$ off’ keywords perform well above average, while ‘% off’ does not?” In fact, the study found that ‘$ off’ offers generated twice the engagement of ‘% off’ discounts. The bottom line is customers hate doing math. They prefer tangible cash discounts — even if the actual dollar amount is smaller.

As Facebook continues to evolve its platform, the extent that these changes will impact Facebook best practices is not yet known. However, they can help you hone your use of Facebook and create better engagement with your target audience.

:: By Kirby Thornton, Director of Consumer Insights

When Kirby isn’t working on primary research for Empower’s clients, he can be found checking the latest research on new media and every now and then updating his Facebook status.

Image originally uploaded by Hubspot

But despite its ubiquity among consumers, marketers are still finding the best approach to posting content to their brand pages. This is understandable as Facebook [...]]]> Current estimates suggest that by 2013 half of the U.S. population will have a Facebook account. And according to Citi Investment, Facebook now accounts for 16 percent of time spent online.

But despite its ubiquity among consumers, marketers are still finding the best approach to posting content to their brand pages. This is understandable as Facebook is the first engagement platform marketers have dealt with after only having access to broadcast channels in the past.

Even marketers that have established their Social Brand℠, and identified the type of content that their target audience will connect with, can optimize their approach to posting content.

Buddy Media analyzed user engagement from nearly 100 of the world’s largest and most prestigious retail brands measuring the number of ‘likes, the number of comments and the overall fan base of the brand.

The study offers a number of best practices for brands wanting to increase user engagement on Facebook. This is the first of a two-part addressing these best practices. Today, I’ll look at timing, frequency and the optimum length for posts. Next I’ll review the best practices related to post content, structure and offers.

Post When Customers Are Listening (Not when you’re in the office) – Sure, most of us sneak a peek at Facebook during the workday (website traffic doesn’t lie), but if you want to see 20 percent lifts in user engagement post between 8 pm and 7 am. And remember, when you’re in your warm pajamas getting settled in at 8 pm on the East Coast, those on Pacific Time are fighting traffic on their evening commute. Keep this in mind, particularly if your brand is strong on the West Coast. Using a publishing tool to schedule posts automatically during work hours can help overcome this obstacle. If you do use a publishing tool, be certain someone can access it at all times and cancel posts that might seem insensitive in the event of breaking news about a major event or disaster.

Post When Customers Are Engaged – When are your consumers thinking about your brand? When do your customers decide to visit your store or purchase your product or service? If you have sales data by day of week, what does it tell you about consumer engagement? Is the decision to buy made on the same day or in advance? For retailers, the study revealed that Wednesday was the best day of the week for retail brands to post on Facebook, while Friday was the worst day. On average fan engagement was 8 percent higher than average on Wednesday and 6 percent below average for posts made on Friday.

Limit Posts to Two a Day No More Than Four Days a Week – When it comes to posts; it is quality, not quantity that counts. Most of us can name that one friend on Facebook that abuses us with endless top ten lists, pet pictures and videos of their favorite singer. Don’t the same rules apply to brands? Engagement rates are 40 perceent higher when there are less than three posts a day from the brand. When only one or two posts are made these posts receive 32 percent higher ‘like’ rates and 73 percent higher comment rates. It’s said that absence makes the heart grow fonder, and this is true of posts as well. In the study, posting one to four times during the week produced 71 percent higher engagement than five or more posts during the week.

Keeping Posts Short and Simple – Americans are busy people, between careers, families, activities and our favorite TV shows it’s amazing we have time to Facebook? Thankfully, we do find the time but remember that customers  have short attention spans. The study concluded that posts with 80 characters or less had 66 percent higher engagement than longer posts and posts with 40 characters or less had 86 percent higher engagement. Likewise, status-only posts had 94 percent higher engagement on average followed by posts containing a single photo. To avoid user tune out stay away from posts that provide a status with a link or a link with a thumbnail. Posted videos also did not yield strong engagement results and should be used with caution by brands.

In the spirit of keeping it short and simple, I’ll conclude this discussion of Facebook best practices surrounding timing, frequency and length of posts. In the coming days, I’ll review the best practices related to post content, structure and offers offered in Buddy Media’s review of nearly 100 retail Facebook pages.

:: By Kirby Thornton, Director of Consumer Insights

When Kirby isn’t working on primary research for Empower’s clients, he can be found checking the latest research on new media and every now and then updating his Facebook status.

Image originally uploaded by Hubspot

One of [...]]]>
Geosocial services (a.k.a. geo-location services) like Foursquare, Gowalla, SCVNGR and others have introduced a new way for users to share their shopping preferences with friends via the check-in (the action of sharing that you are at a particular location with your social connections through a mobile device and/or status update).

One of the most straightforward tactics marketers have to leverage a platform like Foursquare is delivering a check-in special, a coupon/ deal/ perk obtained by checking-in. Now, this can be a move that doesn’t make sense because, after all, why would you want to deliver a coupon to someone who is already in your store and about to make a purchase? You wouldn’t.

It’s benefit is about behavior
Geosocial is an emerging technology, but it is taking hold. With 10 million users reaching 1 billion check-ins after only being at 100 million check-ins 14 months ago, Foursquare, the check-in leader, is growing.

In addition, the U.S. has 80 million smartphone users, 20 percent of which have used check-in services. It’s not going away anytime soon.

Check-in deals shouldn’t be used to reinforce the same behavior. They should be used to influence consumer behavior to achieve business objectives. For example:

• Encouraging a consumer from around the corner who’s never been in your store to come in, check-in for the first time and receive a special discount to meet the objective of customer acquisition.
• Increasing the amount purchased by offering a deal that says if you spend over a certain threshold, you get a certain amount off or a free gift.
• Encourage loyalty by offering a deal/ perk to someone who checks-in a certain number of times to encourage them to come back.
• Reward sharing by offering a deal or perk when someone checks-in with a certain number of friends, so they can’t unlock the deal by themselves.

Identify objectives before the Special
There’s no point in creating a check-in special to reward someone to do what they were going to do in the first place, but there are plenty of reasons for businesses to align on their business objectives, whether those objectives are customer acquisition, increase “cart-size” or reward returning customers, first. Then they can align on how those objectives can be achieved using check-in specials. Consumers like deals and perks. Use their desire to deliver an experience that resonates with them and deliver on your business objectives at the same time.

:: By Taylor Wiegert, Word of Mouth Strategist, Social Media Specialist
Cross-posted to my personal blog. 

Last week at Empower’s inaugural Knowledge Bomb information sharing session, I gave a presentation to my fellow co-workers about the overlap and necessary integration between Word of Mouth Marketing and Search Engine Marketing entitled “Your Website Is Not Your Battleship: How Social and Search Can Work Together”. As I shared my top-line [...]]]>  

Last week at Empower’s inaugural Knowledge Bomb information sharing session, I gave a presentation to my fellow co-workers about the overlap and necessary integration between Word of Mouth Marketing and Search Engine Marketing entitled “Your Website Is Not Your Battleship: How Social and Search Can Work Together”. As I shared my top-line thoughts with my Empower comrades, it slowly started to dawn on me that search engine marketing was going through a another major and much quieter sea change for the third or fourth time in the last twelve months.

While speaking, I kept referencing the chart “Future of Search” from SEOMoz’s 2011 Search Ranking Factors. I continually pointed out the fact that the leading search marketers in the world seemed to think that social signals to pages and domains would become increasingly important. As I did, I also started to notice that anchor text in external links, the SEO’s Holy Grail, was deemed increasingly less important. I quickly realized that building social signals to content was quickly going to replace building links because of the new way results are displayed and the inherent way we use social networks.

The Realization

Take this example. Below is pictured a clean search engine results page (SERP) for the term “digital marketing agency”, which is a highly competitive and valuable term. Our company is nowhere to be seen on page one for a term that is directly in our site’s title tag:

Then I searched for the same term while I was logged into my Gmail account, which is connected to my Google Plus profile. For the same search, suddenly our company, which was shared by my friend Drew McKenzie, was suddenly in the top 10 for an extremely valuable term, pictured below:

The Implication

This ultimately drove home the impact of this new SERP for me. Our company had achieved something I had previously thought unachievable: we were ranked in the top 10 for one of the most important terms in our industry…kind of…

Seeing this led me to believe that increasingly in the future, the standard SERP will disappear and monitoring our rankings will be less and less important as each individual in a social graph will be served a result that is unique to them and their query. You will be served a result based on what you typed in the search box, who you are friends with, and the things that you and your social circles are interested in.

The 25 million Google Plus users will increasingly see more customized results as more content is shared across the network every day. And imagine what would happen if Google was able to link sharing behavior to its almost 250 million Gmail users. As for Facebook users searching on Bing, I start to wonder if it’s possible for two people to see the same results page for a common term. Think about it: when was the last time you hit the “logout” button on either platform?

And just imagine if Facebook and Google were ever able to put aside their differences and integrate: 750 million Facebook users seeing customized search results for over 690 million unique queries daily for over 1 trillion unique URLs, and hundreds of millions of images, videos, shopping results, and news stories. The possibilities start to make me feel lightheaded, like the first time a college professor taught me how to calculate limits to infinity.

The Impact

What this means for search marketers is that our job just got tougher. We now have to build links to content from not just reputable and popular websites, but reputable and popular people. We need the help of WOMMers more than ever to generate content that is targeted to the nodes on a social graph, or the highly-influential individuals within social networks. And for those of you working in social media, you need our help to optimize every last piece of content imaginable so it’s not just engaging to the right people, but to the right people for the right words in order to maximize the total impact.

This all loops around to my original point that your website is not your battleship. In the same way, neither is your search team, your WOMM team, your development team, your out of home team, etc. It’s just not enough to own one or two channels anymore. We have to connect with them at the hundreds of millions of ways in which they connect with our brands.

::By Alec Painter, Digital Search Strategist