The User Journey: Understanding your Visitor to Optimize your Website

There sooner you understand who is visiting your site, the better you can guide them through the user experience. The better you guide them through the user experience, the more effective your site and ultimately your campaign will be.

Personas are an effective tool that allows you to internalize the differences between individual users. Jessica, a kindergarten teacher and mother of 4, who married her high school sweetheart and still lives in the same town where she grew up a half hour outside of Pittsburgh may visit Gilt Groupe, the same deeply discounted luxury brand website as Michaela, who recently graduated top of her class from Yale Law and is a young associate working 100+ hour weeks at Sullivan & Cromwell. While these two women are the same age and ethnicity, they have very different motivations for visiting this same site.

Jessica may be browsing pictures of pretty things and day-dreaming of a different life outside of the only one she has ever known. Michaela, on the other hand, is using her only free moment between 2 and 2:30 am to order that perfect dress for her best friend’s wedding that she is desperately hoping not to miss because she is tied up in depositions and at the bottom of the totem pole at work.

The sooner you segment the Jessicas from the Michaelas on your site, the more effective you will be in selling that perfect dress to Michaela and the perfect dream to Jessica.

Can new companies compete with "tech giants"?

Here is an article written for all of those aspiring tech entrepreneurs out there. The author offers some notable examples of companies that have held a stake in the market despite competition from the “tech giants”. We are operating in an extremely competitive environment with a handful of very innovative and powerful players. This can be discouraging for entrepreneurs interested in entering the market. New ventures are often dismissed too soon because of the competitive threat of these companies. Often this is justified given the resources the large players are working with but there are the exceptions where small companies really can provide a better product. The author suggests that while these major players can’t be ignored, it is important to note that when it comes to specialized products small companies can prevail.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/13/tech-giant-eats-your-lunch/

Is Twitter a social media or a social game?

Twitter announced that it has already have 175 million accounts by May, 2011. Although according to some reports, the active user number is about 85 million, it is a huge number and more people treat twitter as one part of their lives. People not only use twitter to follow celebrities as well as friends, but also use it to let the WORLD know what they are doing, e.g. what restaurants they are going, what thoughts they have etc. A question come to my mind, is Twitter really a social media website, that people use it to gather information/build up relationship, or it is also something else? I found it interesting that Twitter also looks like a social game to me. Different people use it differently. It is just like you are playing a role in the twitter game, you are playing a "twittered you" online. You decide what kind of information you want to twitter. Because people can not twitter every aspect of the their life online, they choose what they want to say and what kind of image they want to show to others. Although these information is true, I would say there is still a sense of acting in the twittering behavior. Someone always twitter what books they read. They maybe are true book-lovers, but it is also possible that they want to establish themselves as book-lovers. It is just like playing a game. Just my two cents here after I heard my friend said that is easy to find out what kind of person a people is from his/her twitter account.

Arrival of "The King" to the world of financial transparency

According to a CNBC report released today Facebook is very likely to finally enter the arena of publicly traded companies sometime early next year. The arrival of the "King of Social Media" to the world of financial transparency will be the biggest test of all social media.

As more and more social media companies go public to finance their growth, the more attention investors and the world pays how well these companies can deliver the expected financial results. Companies like Groupon that is going public with a valuation around $20B while still being in the red despite its $713 million revenue, or LinkedIn at $7B IPO valuation that quickly doubled in the first day of trading will be under scrutiny from investors.

Facebook has been the success story of the post-dot-com-bust era and the icon of the new online business opportunities. The big test of these social-media-fueled business models has just begun and the arrival of "The King" will accelerate this process to a great extent. The question is not whether social media provides viable foundation for a business model but whether investors assess the potentials in those business models with a cool head. If they don't, I recommend everyone to buckle up and get ready for the ride, it's gonna be rough...

http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/13/report-facebook-planning-100b-ipo-for-q1-2012/

The Value of a Good Domain Name

Since our last two classes have revolved around SEO, I will share some thoughts on the value of a domain name as it applies to search. Based on my experience, the three most effective ways of earning rank in Google's search results are by earning back links from relevant websites, titling your pages properly, and using a domain name that includes your targeted keyword.

I spent a few months pursuing traffic from the keyword "Bored." It turns out that "Bored" and "I'm Bored" are two very common search queries, driving hundreds of thousands of clicks from Google every day. After a painful negotiation, I secured the domain name ibored.com as a way to tap into the popularity of those searches, and made it to the first page of the results for the above queries.

However, over the past few years, the rise of social media and apps have made search a little less relevant for media sites. Media consumption has become more passive than active -- users consume by seeing what their friends are sharing on Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr rather than seeking it out. As a result, the value of those top results on Google have become slightly less important, and the real value of the domain name has slightly decreased. This trend is only growing, and is a strong threat to both search and entrepreneurs who invested in buying top tier domain names.

The Evolution of Internet Goes Beyond Search

Although I find the tools learned in class extremely helpful and beneficial for increasing website visits, search-ability, and therefore profits, I wanted to focus on how the evolution of the Internet and social media goes beyond business. In the TedTalk: Robert Ebert: RemaAlthough I find the tools learned in class extremely helpful and beneficial for increasing website visits, search-ability, and therefore profits, I wanted to focus on how the evolution of the Internet and social media goes beyond business. In the TedTalk: Robert Ebert: Remaking My Voice (20min. on Hulu.com), Robert Ebert describes the process by which he communicates now after several surgeries and the loss of his voice.

At first he wrote messages in notebooks, but found he was able to type faster than write, and moved on to typing words into a laptop and using a built in computer voice. Ebert describes the process of trying out different computer voices and the odd sense of speaking through someone else’s voice. His favorite voice is currently the Alex Voice by Apple because it knows punctuation and is able to integrate it into the fluctuation of the computer voice. Most recently Ebert contacted a group in Scotland who makes custom computer voices. He sent them several clips from his TV shows and commentaries. The company was able to piece together a voice that sounds much more like Ebert’s however, the fluctuation and emphasis of each word is a bit sporadic, which makes for an uneven sounding sentences. Ebert continues to use the Alex Voice as the Scotland-based company continues to tweak Ebert’s voice based on pre-recorded copies.

The most touching part of his story was his description of how the evolution of the Internet, along with Facebook, Twitter, email, and Blogs have given him back his voice – he can speak again and relies on these tools for his daily existence. Another point he makes is that online – everyone speaks at the same speed – not all people are patient enough for Ebert to type his thoughts and wait for Alex to speak them outloud in real-time. This is irrelevant for Internet use. Ebert concludes by reflecting on the terrible isolation he would feel if he was not living during this time, with these tools. He describes how his ability to think and write has not changed because technology has given him the ability to express himself.

I was very touched by this presentation and began to think…how can we expand this? How can businesses, hospitals, nonprofits, etc. maximize their use of these tools not only for business purposes but for the benefit of human health and communication? Thoughts? Experiences?

Personas - Threat or Opportunity for TV?

My background is in cable TV ad sales and I'm nowhere near fully aware of what potential the digital world has...I just know that it has a lot. I've been hoping to find out how digital marketing capabilities are better than TV and I've found the first of what I imagine will be many in the form of the personas discussion.

TV's strength has always been its combination of sheer scale and offering of a collective viewing experience. That said, a hit show can pull in a ton of viewers, but it's one-size-fits all. As a marketer, you just have to hope that the spot you spent six figures on will be seen by some of your target audience...and you only get to pick one target.

...which is where personas come in, because they allow you as a marketer to offer each of your target segments a tailored experience. That's something TV simply can't match and it strikes me as an amazing opportunity to apply psychological / psychographic research to highly targeted marketing. So, I wonder if there's a way to apply the persona approach to TV so advertisers can merge scale with customization. For all the talk of interactive TV being the future, there's very little insight into how it'll play out. Could it be something like programming with different, selectable perspectives or commentary, each tailored to a specific niche? Sort of like a DVD special feature on overdrive? I think that could be a cool idea; what I know for sure is that TV dinosaurs could learn a lot from ideas like personas if they're going to cut through all the clutter.

Branding for Digital vs. Non-Digital Companies

I recently had an interesting conversation with a friend and fellow entrepreneur who is starting a beverage company. I was telling him how hugely helpful our graphic designer (who also built our brand) has been at Sportaneous (www.sportaneous.com), and suggested that he find someone good in-house to take care of his branding and graphic design like we did. I said that given the number of ongoing graphic needs, it's worth finding someone good (if you can) and offering a small equity chunk in exchange for high-quality ongoing work. My friend responded that for a more non-digital, traditional company like his, he was inclined to just hire somebody contractually rather than give them equity, since he didn't see them having the same kinds of ongoing needs that a digital company like mine has.

This raises an interesting question: do non-digital, more traditional companies, like a beverage company, have less significant needs for their digital branding? I think this question actually hints at a larger question: do these traditional companies need to "go digital" at all or will there always be a place for such companies in tomorrow's world, regardless of their digital presence? I'm curious to hear everyone's thoughts...

Customizing to Customers

Here is an interesting article on TellApart which was started by to ex-Google engineers. The service helps to take the users cookies and customize their experience based on their preferences. We touched on this some in class. The interesting thing is the parallel they draw between old marketing and new when discussing the fears of privacy. The team argues that using the cookie information is no different than direct marketers keeping tabs on household information for catalog mailings. Somehow, I think it's not exactly the same thing. Here's the full article.http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/tellapart-raises-money-to-help-online-retailers-advertise/?ref=technology

SEO and Social Media for Non-profits

Coming from a non-profit background, learning about digital marketing has me thinking about ways that these methods can be used for non-profits as well as for-profit companies. My experience with non-profits is that they have a long way to go in terms of SEO; it’s not something I hear people thinking about and I’m sure that most of them (the smaller ones anyway) are not tracking analytics. I’ve noticed in e-mails I get from various groups, for instance, that many links say “Click here for more information” or something along those lines as opposed to information about where the link will take you. It seems like this could be a big area of growth and improvement for non-profits and those that do focus on SEO should gain an edge. However, they have fully embraced social media and this is an area where non-profits have an advantage over for-profits. It makes more sense to friend or follow an organization whose activities align with your personal interests than a corporation who is trying to sell a product. Successful non-profits know this and have done a lot to increase their visibility and promote their agenda through Facebook and Twitter. Text message donations have also been a huge boon for larger non-profits and are an interesting and exciting fundraising strategy. It will be interesting to see how they are able to innovate in the years to come in order to use social media to their advantage, and to see if SEO starts to become the buzzword in non-profit circles that is for for-profits.

FTC regulations and Digital Marketing

A substantial amount of data collection activity on the internet seems to rely on information placed on consumers device (a cookie).

The Federal Trade Commission has published a report and offered a frame work and also testified on a proposed legislation by congress women Jackie Speier, on allowing consumers greater control on what kind of data is being collected by sites.

From the congress women's site:
"The Do Not Track Me Online Act of 2011 would direct the Federal Trade Commission to develop standards for a “Do Not Track” mechanism that would allow individuals to choose upfront to opt out of the collection, use or sale of their online activities, and require covered entities to respect the consumer’s choice. Failure to do so would be considered an unfair or deceptive act punishable by law. The covered entity would have to disclose its collection and sharing practices, including with whom the information is shared. The bill would allow the FTC to exempt commonly accepted commercial practices like the collection of information for billing purposes..."

There is a lot written about this topic but I have'nt seen any mention of how data collection tools and marketing agencies plan on countering this if it does become a law.

Any thoughts on how to effectively plan to reduce reliance on tools and strategies which are dependant on tracking cookies placed on consumers' devices?

The power of mobile internet

Since the first lesson of this course I could not avoid thinking that here in US digital marketing is very powerful also because internet penetration is already very high and growing. Looking at small countries in Europe such as Italy, Austria and Portugal, not to talk about the majority of developing countries, we see a very different situation. Even if internet users and their average time online is growing, internet penetration is still low, and in the majority of developing countries the quality of the network is still very bad and the computer penetration is very low. How will digital marketing approach those countries? I guess the answer is mobile internet. Cell phone penetration is incredibly high almost everywhere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_mobile_phones_in_use) and many telecom providers are now heavily investing in this business. This will definitely give digital marketing the possibility to reach millions of people everywhere in the world. How the communication is going to change? Customization is going to become more and more important and highly dependent on the country’s language, culture and type of mobile devices available. Websites mobile optimization, word-limited advertising messages, smartphones applications are all going to be country specific? Mobile internet would probably become the most used marketing vehicle along the entire marketing funnel, more widespread then TV and newspapers. Mobile digital marketing will have to find ways to become more and more effective in creating awareness/building the brand and activating the demand, also considering the fact that the benefits of halo effects will be significantly reduced due to the low penetration of the other media vehicles. Will digital marketing be able to successfully exploit this multi-billion dollars opportunity!?

Can Social Media be more effective than SEO for startups?

While doing a search on Search Engine Optimization(SEO), which I figured could have been like “googling” Google, and was worried about some sort of implosion, I came across an interesting blog post on SEO for startups. The article “SEO is no longer a viable marketing strategy for startups”, was written earlier this year and takes the view that SEO is very 2008 and that using it as your single marketing strategy is not effective enough in getting users to your site.

I agree that using SEO as the only marketing strategy will generally not be very effective but the process and use of the tools to make sure your site is optimized is now more of a cost of entry into the market than something that is going to get you in front of the competition. Although many of the search engine algorithms are kept secretive, it is still important for these websites to have the correct labeling, inserts, links, captions and keywords to make sure that their site gets indexed. That way, if the spiders are only looking for those items, then at least your site should appear somewhere in the results. It would be expected now days, that any website that is a major player in the market is using these tools and therefore you would be even further behind if you decided not to use SEO for your site.

Looking further at the costs of entry and as part of setting up your site, it would seem to be more important to register your own Facebook page, Twitter account and Blog linked to your site. Building on that, working on creating more social buzz, by blogging, tweeting and posting on Facebook to get fans, followers and readers, can be a more effective tool for getting users. Getting others to repost, retweet and link into your articles and effectively market your side for you could be the better, more value play. After all, external linking into your webpage is supposed to get you higher ranking on the list for search engines. So rather than hire one of the many SEO experts, it might offer more value to hire a more rare social media expert.

Does this mean that the SEO of 2008 is now the social media of today and leveraging those tools are the better more viable startup strategies?

Beware of Groupon

We are all familiar with Groupon's business model: selling discount vouchers to restaurants, spas, etc., at a major markdown—up to 90 percent off a retailer's usual prices—and then requiring the retailer to pay a big chunk of the voucher revenues back to Groupon. As one of the fastest growing businesses in history, Groupon has done extremely well and is set to go public by the end of the year. However, as more competitors or "copycats" start to emerge, the holes in the groupon model start to become more noticeable. For example, although groupon is an effective marketing tool for some businesses, it is certainly not for everyone. Jessie Burke, owner of Posies cafe in Portland, announced via twitter and Facebook that using groupon was the single worst decision she ever made for her business. She ended up losing money and attracting customers who werent likely to be regulars- which is an issue when you are running a neighborhood/ local coffee spot. In addition, she had an unfavorable experience with her groupon sales rep who wasn't helpful, providing little or no information on logistics- for example on how to prevent customers from using the groupon several times. An increasing number of dissatisfied small business owners with similar complaints have since come out of the woodwork. On the consumer side, groupon buyers have also become agitated with the fine print on many groupon deals. So I am curious if Groupon has implemented any new tactics to improve the relationship between it's sales force and the small businesses or if Groupon has become blindly focused on attracting big corporate clients. Or is groupon finding a sustainable way to successfully retain both types of clients by recognizing and fulfilling very different needs. There is still a lot of excitement around groupon, and while it will be interesting to see where the company goes in the next few years, groupon needs to be careful not to lose any more consumer trust which can damage it's public perception permanently.

Tell Apart raises $13 Millions to bring personalized display advertising to a new level

TellApart helps retargeting customers, i.e. showing display ads to potential customers who visited but abandoned their shopping on e-commerce website. More than 95% of visitors are not buying… Basically TellApart is offering a second chance to Digital Marketers of E-Commerce websites . TellApart Transactional Retargeting helps bring them back through the use of dynamic, personalized banner ads which show your products to the right visitors. Simply put, it turns lost shoppers into return customers.

Not only does TellApart helps follow potential customers, but also it evaluates each individual shopper, based on the data collected from previous customer behavior. This is then used to decide which customers have the most potential value to the business, and to serve them product-specific display ads.

I think the value proposal of TellApart is very exciting; it gives the chance to Retailers and E-commerce websites to study the user journeys and their personas during and after their visit to the website. If this company is able to come up with truly efficient Customer Quality Score, the use of both personalized display ad and personalized website experience could really help improve conversion rates. Plus the two former Google founders are going with a low-risk, high-return pricing by opting for a pay-for-performance model. To be followed…

Online deals move to cars

Today's news: Edmund.com, an online auto research and shopping site, is launching a program - "Edmund Exclusives" - that will basically apply to cars the daily deal model that sites like Groupon and SocialLiving created for more "small ticket" items. The program is currently in beta in one market - South Florida - but the company will probably run it out nationally this summer.

Essentially, Edmund Exclusives will offer geotargeted deals for new and used cars to consumers. As said by Edmunds.com's VP of business operations Michelle Denogean, the program will give people access to local deals directly at Edmunds.com, where people go when they are at the bottom of the purchase funnel and ready to buy. It will give automakers a topical sales ointment to treat inventory problem flare-ups that might not be responding to a more systemic treatment of national or regional incentives: "It helps automakers and dealers who have excess inventory or oversupply of specific models, or have a need to get rid of the past model-year vehicles through additional discounts," she says. "So it is intended to be very targeted to areas that need that focused conversation around certain vehicles," she says.

The program will offer cash-back, financing and leasing deals to people from dealers in their market. It may also expand to include deals on repairs and parts, maintenance and body shops, aftermarket audio dealers and auto broker services.

The company, she said, had been considering a program like this for a while, "When the Daily Deal took off, it became clear that at some point someone would do this for cars. Why not Edmunds?"

Let's see.

Infographic on How Advertising Dollars are Spent

Here is an interesting infographic from Mashable.com about how advertising dollars are split among internet, television, newspapers, radio, etc. The graphic shows, as Professor Kagan explained in the first session, that while internet spend is growing, television still makes up the vast majority of advertising dollars spent.

The infographic also shows how while internet revenue dipped during the recession, it has basically recovered and is expected to reach $28 billion in 2011.

In my opinion, the most interesting fact contained in the infographic relates the time consumers spend on a given medium to the dollars advertisers spend per hour. The graphic shows that for every hour consumers spend reading the newspaper, advertisers spend $0.53, but for every hour consumers spend on the internet and mobile, advertisers only spend $0.12 and only $0.01 respectively!

This last statistic regarding the amount spent on mobile advertising is staggering. There seems to be enormous room for growth in mobile advertising. However, it is hard to ignore the vast differences in physical size of medium. A newspaper's expansive surface area allows for tons of ads, but an iPhone screen can become cluttered extremely quickly. Similarly, frequently changing and moving mobile ads can be extremely disruptive. How will marketers increase mobile and internet spending without cluttering the page and overwhelming consumers? Or will the targeting of ads become so precise that it will be possible to spend much less than $0.53 per hour for the same results?

An alcohol brand that knows how to engage young people...

I was thinking last class in creative ways to make people visit a particular website and engage them in such as way that they recommend this website to other people. Particularly I remember an example of a beer brand in Argentina called “Quilmes”. Somehow they always manage to have the best advertising on TV and online. A fun experience I had in this website was a game where you chose an argentine celebrity, selected from a set of options what you wanted the celebrity to say and then included a friends’ name. The idea was to send this video to a friend by email or post it on Facebook and they would receive a “private” message from a celebrity. This was a campaign for the “friend’s day” we celebrate in Argentina; basically a day where all friends get together and celebrate their friendship. Your friend would receive a tempting proposal and decide whether they wanted to spend the day with you or with the celebrity.

Anyway, after one day, I had received several videos and Facebook was flooded by the brand “Quilmes”. I believe the added value of Internet and especially social communities lies behind understanding what you and the people that surround you find as fun. Thus, by thinking creatively you can engage the community and enhance traffic.

Check this link to see the ad! (After minute 0:37)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxZBRnFH5W0

Advertorials - Good or Bad?

My fiance just got an iPad, and so far I feel exactly about it the same way I did one year ago....I'm not sure if it adds any value to my life. Yet, digital marketers are always running to keep ahead, or rather keep up, with emerging technologies, and the iPad presents yet another channel for advertising experimentation. As companies seek to maximize presence and format across the burgeoning types of screen devices, I am always questioning the effectiveness of advertising across all these channels. I know there are very sophisticated strategies developed to help guide professionals in terms of their budget allocations, but as I've stated before, what I find interesting is that to some degree, advertisers are still limited by the templates provided by each medium. Enter advertorials. What is an advertorial?

An advertorial or is an advertisement designed to simulate editorial content, while at the same time offering valid information to your prospective clients.

Advertorials have always existed, and I've had many clients jump at the opportunity of adding this type of advertising to their portfolio mix. It makes sense....who doesn't want curated content next to their products, seamlessly integrated deep within the folds of web content? It's a great way to break free of the IAB molds. It's a great way to reach out to customers in a more engaging way, and it's a great way to validate your advertising.

BUT, what is different about the Internet, in my opinion, is that we expect a lot of content writers to write for free (i.e. bloggers, editors, etc.), and not only that but we pretty much get the news for free, whether it be a limited version of the New York Times, or a news aggregation site like HuffPo. Are we comfortable with the idea of bloggers and the like getting paid to write about about products, and are we comfortable with nondisclosure about such agreements?

Monetization on the Internet is...complex, so it fits sensibly that advertorials help grease the wheels, but are we comfortable with posts blending into advertorials? Can there be a balance achieved where content providers get remuneration, companies can have more advertising options, and the integrity of news content remains steadfast?

Mobile MKT = 1:1 MKT

We all know that traditional MKT was based on mass MKT, and marketers used CPM to measure how 'many' people were exposed to certain messages and the cost of doing so. I guess that the basic concept of reaching out for more and more people was not different in internet MKT.

There are clear pros and cons in mass MKT, but in terms of effective resource allocation, 1:1 MKT was the ultimate goal for these marketers who always had tight budget. They wanted to send messages to 'customers' (who pays, or will pay), not to bunch of other people who had zero interest.

However, nowadays, I have a strong belief that the monster called 'mobile MKT' can be the ideal ways to achieve 1:1 MKT. It automatically tracks where you are, where you have been, and when you move around. Also by checking twitter or facebook mobile, marketers can find out what you wear, where you eat, and what you have bought for your girlfriend. They do not need regression analysis to find 'middle point' for everyone.. they only need to 'sort' from the data base that is updated by mobile devices, on time.

As Binhe said in the previous article, this is really a shift in MKT history. Now the technology is sending us to the stage where no marketer even have dreamed of, the 1:1 MKT.