von Roland Hachmann | Aug 7, 2007 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing, Online Advertising, SEO / SEA, Social Media Marketing
Some more ramblings on advertising on social networks, as I have written about it lately already: Sean Carton also thinks that advertising on social networks won’t work properly using regular ads. His point of why widgets might be the better solution (and I agree):
This is why widgets have been getting so much play lately: they don’t intrude on the user experience. Yeah, they’re branded. Yeah, they’re obviously a product of crass commercialism, but when done well they enhance rather than detract from the experience. They can become part of the conversation you’re having with friends and acquaintances, not an interruption of that conversation. Are widgets the answer to how advertising can work in social networking?
Not at all, but they’re a beginning. The answer will become apparent when we think outside of the ol‘ display advertising box and start to imagine ways we can work with the essential nature of social networking, rather than against it.
How can we join communities of interest in an authentically helpful way? How can we give consumers the tools to facilitate their conversations about our products or services (conversations they’re going to have anyway, with our without our help)? How can we help connect them to get help, advice, or suggestions from others (Dave Evans has a few good ideas)? How can we make it easier for true believers and brand fans to do the selling for us (or help recruit new fans)? How can we work with what’s going on rather than against it?
The question is, whether this is really a solution for all advertisers. Also, these considerations, same as the debate about the effectiveness of contextual ads only focus on the click rate as the only measure of success. I know, I know, we’re in the interactive space, so why go back to the old ad measurement models?
But then again, an eyeball is an eyeball and nobody can deny the value of attention of these eyeballs. Even if the click rate suggests failure, the message might have stuck. Don’t you think? Otherwise you would reduce the awareness and brand building capabilities of the online space to a story of how many people clicked, not how many people saw and remembered the message. That can’t be right, can it?*
But, going back to Seans point: yes, let’s rather entice the consumers with something of value. Something that provides this value at a point in time and (web-)space, where the consumer will most likely associate the best positive times with your brand because of your contribution to their needs and preferences. If it can be done best on social networks providing widgets (at least for now), then think of a good idea and go do it!
(*I am not oblivious at all to the fact, that interaction with the ads (i.e. clicking and interacting with the subsequent pages) will reinforce the message, make the whole awareness campaign x-times more successful!)
von Roland Hachmann | Aug 6, 2007 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Online Advertising, Social Media Marketing
Apparently, some advertisers in the UK were cancelling their adspaces on Facebook, because they were appearing next to dubious content – in this case a page of the British National Party – as I found in this post at Techcrunch.
It seems that Facebook (and probably most other social networking sites) are not able to book campaigns on specific pages (or filter out unwanted pages). But, as Techcrunch rightly writes:
It seems a little strange in 2007 that advertisers would have been naive enough to believe that a run of site style advertising campaign on a site as large as Facebook would not have resulted in advertisements appearing next to dubious content to start with.
This problem is not only Facebooks‘ problem. Any social network – may be even many of the other sites with user generated sites with run-of-site advertising – will have the same problem. These sites will need context sensitive filters to deliver the right ads to the right user generated content pages. And while this works fine for text based pages (Google is offering that already for their AdSence ad placements), I am not sure how you would do the same with images, Sound and video?
von Roland Hachmann | Jul 31, 2007 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Marketing, Online Advertising
The post is a little older, but nevertheless interesting. Thomas Baekdal lists 7 tipps for successful viral marketing. Since we were just talking about this in the agency, this reminds me of a certain serendipity effect. (Accidentally finding something when you’re in the right mindset.)
The 7 tipps are as follows:
1: Make people feel something
2: Do something unexpected
3: Do not try to make advertisements (that sucks)
4: Make sequels
5: Allow Sharing, downloading and embedding
6: Connect with comments
7: Never restrict access!
Of course there is explanations and examples to each one of these, so click yourself through here and take a look. Summarising, he writes:
There is a common message in all of these tricks. It is that you need to make it right – or not do it at all. Only the best viral marketing campaigns make it – the rest literally sucks.
This is very true and it is most likely the point which is the most difficult to sell to clients…
(hat tip to Todd)
von Roland Hachmann | Jul 30, 2007 | Blog, Digital Marketing, Digital News, Marketing, Marketing Trends, Social Media Marketing
This is a headline I read at marketinvox.com. And this is the info you get there:
B2B marketers have adopted blogs and RSS more than other Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, according to the report; moreover, smaller marketers – the Davids among the Goliaths – are at the forefront: Some three-quarters of surveyed marketers that have deployed Web 2.0 tools are in companies of 10,000 or fewer people.
Some other findings from „The B2B Web 2.0 Tools Report“:
- Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of respondents use blogs, 58 percent use RSS feeds, followed by podcasts (54 percent), videocasts (43 percent), social networks and communities (42 percent) and wikis (19 percent).
- The most frequently noted blogging services were WordPress (35 percent) and Blogger (30 percent), followed by TypePad (19 percent).
- Users‘ favorite RSS readers are those offered by Mozilla Firefox (23 percent), MyYahoo (20 percent) and Bloglines (17 percent).
Fascinating news. So I went to the website of the tools report. On this site you get the results, and you can also participiate in the survey:
Tools are ranked according to the number of mentions by qualified B2B marketers. The number of ‘Votes’ is tallied in the second last column of the table.
If you sum up the votes, you can see that there are only 61 votes sofar. In my opinion this is hardly a solid number for issuing such a press release! Don’t get me wrong: the findings will be interesting, once there is a substantial number of participants. But don’t start with such a bold headline on such a small number of findings!
Regarding the statement „qualified B2B marketers“: the survey can be filled in by anyone. There are qualification questions, but you can fill in anything you want. I am sure there will be quite a few people filling in this survey in any random way, only because they are interested in receiving a full copy of the results.
Let’s wait and see what the results will be in a few weeks.
von Roland Hachmann | Jul 29, 2007 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital News, Marketing
Funny, how ideas return in this second „hype“. I can still remember letsbuyit.com, which was basically reverse-auctioning by gathering a large purchasing power in the form of a large crowd of potential buyers. eSwarms is very similar in a way, the differences seem to be in the details of the whole setup.
Wo ich sonst so bin...