6S Marketing Blog

10 Reasons Why Google+ Will Dominate

Chris Breikss — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 23:45:24 +0000

Below is my presentation titled “10 Reasons Why Google+ Will Dominate” that I am giving today at the “Social Media Money” event in Vancouver. I am a big believer in the future of Google+ and these are my reasons why.

10 Reasons Why Google+ Will Dominate

View more PowerPoint from 6S Marketing

The next BRAND CHATTER™ LIVE! Event

Kelly Robertson — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 22:44:00 +0000

Chris Breikss, President of 6S Marketing, will be speaking as part of a marketing panel at NEXT’s BRAND CHATTER™ Live! event taking place in North Vancouver February 22^nd.

BRAND CHATTER LIVE! is different from other business events: it equips business leaders with the tools to learn WHAT to say about their business and WHERE to say the messages to make a difference to their business and bottom line.

Sandy Gerber is the creator of BRAND CHATTER LIVE! and the CEO and Founder of award-winning NEXT Marketing & Design Agency. Throughout her career she has had the fortune of working with Molson, BCLC and Grey Worldwide. BRAND CHATTER LIVE! was created out of a desire to enable business owners with the opportunity to create marketing strategies in an interactive format.

The unique, high-energy February 22^nd event will include a fun talk show component where Gerber interviews notable marketing industry representatives to showcase best practices for taking your business to the next level. Gerber will then focus on her renowned marketing strategy LIVE! where she welcomes volunteers to come on stage, dives into their business, uncovers the ‘key connector’ and shows them how to create their own BRAND CHATTER™ with engaged followers and promoters.

Over 100 guests will get the opportunity to experience NEXT Marketing’s live business interactive show with expert panel members ranging from Rogers Media, Peak Communications, North Vancouver Chamber of Commerce and 6S Marketing.

As a participant in the upcoming event, 6S Marketing has a promo code 6SCHATTER available to its readers that will discount tickets by $20.00. The promo code can be entered in the last screen of the purchasing process. To register visit the registration page or www.yourbrandchatter.ca.

Pinterest has finally answered the question: “What do women want?” (psst… it’s diamonds for Valentine’s Day)

Chris Breikss — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:39:58 +0000

Spence Diamonds on Pinterest

The hottest social media tool of 2012, Pinterest, has finally answered the question: “What do women want?”

By now you have most certainly hear about Pinterest, the social media site, that is described as an online pinboard that allows you to “organize and share things you love.” According to Pinterest, 70% of users are female and Hitwise, ranks Pinterest #7 in the top 10 most visited social media websites. At the offices of 6S Marketing, where 70% of our staff is female, I would estimate that Pinterest usage is at 100% of the females and 50% of males. (DISCLAIMER: this is not a scientific study)

People in our office are going Pinterest crazy and the debate about it’s popularity and relevance is raging on on our internal social media network (Salesforce.com’s Chatter). The general consensus is that Pinterest is awesome and that it’s going to change the landscape on how we share pictures, and products. People are sharing “things” that they love on Pinterest and retailers are beginning to realize that there is an opportunity to run Pinterest marketing campaigns and are setting up Pinterest accounts to show off their products.

Spence Diamonds is making it easy for men to find Valentine’s Day gifts by encouraging women to share jewelry they love on Pinterest. Along with having a branded Pinterest account, Spence has installed a widget on their website that makes it easy for visitors to add Spence products to their pinboards.

They have just launched a Valentine’s Day ‘Pin it to Win it’ contest where they are giving away a diamond necklace. Check out the Spence Diamonds Pinterest account at http://pinterest.com/spencediamonds or go straight to the contest Pin http://pinterest.com/pin/224265256414055419/ to enter.

For more information and case studies on Pinterest for brands, also check out Mashable’s “Pinterest for Brands: 5 Hot Tips.”

Three New Analytics Reports You Should Check Out – Part 1

Amy Bao — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:00:59 +0000

Google Analytics has rolled out numerous new features in the past half a year or so, including Real Time, Multi-Channel Funnels, and Flow Analysis, just to name a few. This all seems like a lot to absorb, so we wanted to help highlight a few reports to get you started on processing all the new information. This is Part 1, so stay tuned for Parts 2 and 3 in the up coming months!

Making your Top Conversion Paths Report More Informative

The roll-out of Multi-Channel Funnels was certainly an exciting day. You were excused if you wanted to wave your hands in the air, start dancing in your chair at your office, or whatever you do when you are excited. It was good news to the world that conversions were no longer to be attributed to only the last click!

With that, the Top Conversion Paths report quickly became one of our favorites. It shows which traffic channels interacted with each other to result in conversions. The Conversion Segment tool helps make this report more insightful by providing you information such as whether the First Interaction was from Paid Advertising (how influential is paid advertising to your overall online marketing mix?), whether the First Interaction was from Organic Traffic (how influential is having a SEO friendly site to your overall online marketing mix?) and more, which you can see in the Default Segments.

You can also customize these segments based on your specific needs by utilizing the User-defined Segment. For example, if you would like to easily evaluate how well your Facebook Ads are helping drive conversions, you can create a New Conversion Segment by giving it a name (eg. Facebook Ads), and segmenting based on how you have set up your Facebook campaign tracking using the URL builder. (Normally, Source would be “Facebook”, and Medium would be “cpc”).

As a result, you’ll be able to quickly segment out the all conversions that involved Facebook Ads, and evaluate the effectiveness of your Facebook CPC Campaign.

Another example would be evaluating how a certain referral website is performing. This way you can determine whether or not the price of the referral package is justified. You can create a custom segment by including any interaction with Source containing example.com (as an example) to look at how example.com is contributing to conversions.

Hopefully this was helpful in terms of making your Multi-Channel Funnel data more insightful. Share with us which custom segments you have created in the comments below!

“The Art Of” Event Dates – Toronto and Vancouver

Kelly Robertson — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:46:07 +0000

The Art Of Productions is Canada’s preeminent owner and producer of educational conferences for professionals including The Art of Sales, The Art of Management, The Art of Leadership, and The Art of Marketing. The program attracts over 10,000 senior decision makders annually who learn from leading edge authors and experts sucha s Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki and Michael Eisner.

The Art of Marketing – Toronto

Taking place March 5th at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. The lineup of speakers include:

Randi Zuckerberg, Former Head of Marketing at Facebook (big sister to Mark Zuckerberg)
Scooter Braun, Justin Bieber’s Manager
Martin Lindstrom, Author of Buyology, Brandsense and Brandwashed
Youngme Moon, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard
Eric Ryan, Co-Founder of Method
Bryan Pearson, President of LoyaltyOne
Mitch Joel, President of Twist Image

For more about the speaker roster visit TheArtOfMarketing.ca/Speakers.

6S has a promo code for tickets to this event, to use please visit the Art of Marketing website.

The Art of Leadership – Vancouver

The event’s first time in Vancouver, The Art of Leadership takes place on March 29th at the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver. Created due to overwhelming demand, this one day conference features six internationally renowned bestselling authors and visionaries, who will share an exciting blend of cutting edge thinking and real world experience on today’s most critical leadership issues.

Speakers include:

Patrick Lencioni, Founder of The Table Group
Robin Sharma, International Bestselling Author of 11 books
General rick Hillier, Former Chief of Defense Staff at the Canadian Forces
Jeanne Meister, Bestselling Author of The 2020 Workplace
Stephen Shapiro, Innovation Consultant
Leonard Brody, Two Time Emmy Nominee

For more information please visit TheArtOfLeadership/speakers.

We also have a promo code for a discount off tickets for The Art of Leadership event, to use, please visit The Art of Leadership website.

Article on the Adoption of Google+ in Canadian Business Journal

Kelly Robertson — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:49:34 +0000

If you’re like many companies in Canada, you’re still trying to figure out how social media can help you with your business objectives. In addition, figuring out which social networks to use within your strategy and who will manage those initiatives is also very time-consuming.

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube have been the primary social networks companies have focused their marketing efforts around; however, with the introduction of Google+ there is a new player on the field and so far, it promises to be the strongest and most adopted social network of all.

Read our article on the Canadian Business Journal website.

Nurturing Company Culture Outside the Office wins Agency Top Employer for 3rd Consecutive Year

Kelly Robertson — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:02:00 +0000

On the heels of being named “The #1 Best Communications and Professional Services Company To Work For in BC” by BC Business Magazine, 6S Marketing is placed on Eluta’s Top 50 Employers in BC list for the third consecutive year.

Now entering its eighth year, BC’s Top Employers is an annual competition organized by the editors of Canada’s Top 100 Employers.The special designation recognizes the British Columbia employers that lead their industries in offering exceptional places to work.

Employers are evaluated by the editors of Canada’s Top 100 Employers using the same eight criteria as the national competition: 1.)Physical Workspace; 2.) Work Atmosphere & Social; 3.) Health, Financial & Family Benefits; 4.) Vacation & Time Off; 5.) Employee Communications; 6.) Performance Management 7.) Training & Skills Development and 8.) Community Involvement. Read the full press release.

Nurturing Company Culture Outside the Office wins Agency Top Employer for 3rd Consecutive Year

Kelly Robertson — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:30:13 +0000

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Read the Press Release on PRWeb

Vancouver and Toronto – February 3^rd, 2012 – On the heels of being named “The #1 Best Communications and Professional Services Company To Work For in BC” by BC Business Magazine, 6S Marketing is placed on Eluta’s Top 50 Employers in BC list for the third consecutive year.

Now entering its eighth year, BC’s Top Employers is an annual competition organized by the editors of Canada’s Top 100 Employers. The special designation recognizes the British Columbia employers that lead their industries in offering exceptional places to work.

Employers are evaluated by the editors of Canada’s Top 100 Employers using the same eight criteria as the national competition: 1.) Physical Workspace; 2.) Work Atmosphere & Social; 3.) Health, Financial & Family Benefits; 4.) Vacation & Time Off; 5.) Employee Communications; 6.) Performance Management 7.) Training & Skills Development and 8.) Community Involvement.

In order to remain as one of the leading employers in the digital marketing industry and in the minds of new graduates, 6S Marketing has put a strong focus on these eight criteria to ensure they are providing the best working conditions, benefits and culture to its employees. “This ultimately keeps our employees happy, productive and helps us grow by being top-of-mind to new graduates entering the workforce” explains Managing Director John Blown. But it’s not all about work and office culture. “We all spend a large amount of time with each other outside the office at non-work events; many go to the gym together, run the sea wall and simply enjoy each other’s company outside of the office. This in turn makes coming to work that much better and makes everyone work that much harder.”

This year 6S Marketing added ski nights to their company events and an organic produce delivery service to provide their staff with healthy snack choices. “Continuously improving our culture and adding benefits such as these are what keeps us ahead of what other companies in our industry offer to their employees” says Blown.

About 6S Marketing – For the last eleven years, 6S Marketing has fearlessly rode the wild ride known as the Internet, taking advantage of every thrilling twist and turn along the way. Our company was founded in 2000, during the infancy of the digital marketing industry and just after the shiny dot-com bubble burst. Since then, we’ve been among the strong who not only have survived – we’ve thrived – and have become the trusted provider of digital marketing strategies to some of Canada’s most recognized brands.

Today, and with more than 500 digital marketing campaigns under our belt, 6S is one of the leading digital marketing agencies in North America, and one of the largest of its kind in Canada with offices in Vancouver and Toronto. For more visit 6Smarketing.com.

For more information:

Kelly Robertson
Marketing Manager
6S Marketing
6Smarketing.com
e. krobertson@6smarketing.com
p. (604) 282-7604

What should marketers and brands do about Google+?

Julien Simon — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:35:25 +0000

What brands and marketers should do about Google+

Get involved!

Google+ is not a shiny new tool or an innovative beta social media platform anymore. 6S Marketing has been telling the world for a few months to get involved with Google+. Chris Breikss insisted during his presentation during the social media week way back in September that Google+ was going to play a big role in the social media and search results world and said that brands and marketers should jump on board as soon as possible. We told you that Google+ business pages should not be ignored, and we gave you tips and tricks on how to use Google+.

In this blog post, I am not going to try and convince you to get a Google+ page by giving the top 10 or top 20 reasons why you should get one. I believe the following two should be enough:

1) Google+ is where the conversation is happening.

It took Google+ 24 days to reach 20 million users, 88 days to reach 50 million users. Google just announced today that there are 90 million users on this platform…and it just keeps growing. I forecast a big jump in the numbers since they recently allowed teenagers (13 years old +) to be on Google+.

People talk about brands, about topics, about products, and if you are not on Google+, you are not part of the conversation. Google also launched a new feature to try and bring the conversation on Google+ by asking its users to post a question on Google+ after doing a search on Google.com:

2) Google Search Plus Your World.

Last week, I wrote a blog post about this new Google search feature called Google Search Plus Your World. In a nutshell, Google now adds search results from people or pages in Google+ right on the Google search results page. This is really powerful to drive more traffic to your Google+ page or website. For a while, we saw real time results with tweets ranking in real time when searching a keyword in Google. Twitter did not renew its contract with Google in July 2011 so the real time search feature was taken down by Google. It is now back under a different form with Search + Your World and it’s even more powerful.

What does this mean to brands or marketers?

It means that if you don’t have a Google+ business page, you cannot appear in these Google Search plus your world results.

It also means that if you just created a Google+ page because “someone” told you to and have not updated it in the last month, chances are your Google+ page is not doing your brand any good. Google+ pages rank based on content and popularity so much so that neglecting your Google+ page will give you neither of these two attributes.

The strategies you use on Facebook and Twitter also applies on Google+: you want to provide useful content, grow your audience and engage actively with it. The only difference is that if you fill your Google+ page with content, you will grow your brand and end up ranking in Google. Ranking in Google will then increase the number of people who +1 and follow your page. It is a very positive brand awareness spiral and you should be part of it.

Custom Snippets and Titles in SERP’s

AlexMorrison — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:05:16 +0000

A while back, you may have noticed that meta descriptions shown in the SERP’s changed a bit – compared to what is actually written in the meta tag. Google began to allow advertisers to go beyond the standard character limits and would then customize the meta description result to best match the users query.

Matt Cutts has been talking about these types of adjustments to snippets and titles since 2009 however, this is the first time I’ve witnessed the customization of a title tag specifically. I noticed this change while looking at rankings for one of my clients – they were ranking on the first page for a keyword but the title tag was only 3 words long. I immediately thought to myself “well there’s no way I would have left the homepage title tag at 3 words long”… so I investigated. What I found, was that Google had actually taken the tail end of my title tag (which was over the character limit) to better match the users search.

Here is what I saw in the search results page when I searched for “mobile hair salon Vancouver”:

This is how the title tag – for that exact page – is written:

Snippets and Titles Explanation by Matt Cutts:

So, Google is altering snippets and titles to best match users search queries. While creating custom snippets and titles definitely helps the user find relevant pages, do you find – as an SEO, that this negatively or positively affects your optimization efforts? Do you have any examples of this occurring with your website or with one of your clients?