Google NEVER rests and now, I know why – it’s all that Caffeine! In their continuing quest for world dominance, they have made a pretty significant recent update for their core product – search. Before we even get into the updates, can I just say that with close to ten years in the industry, I’ve never seen a company so good at maintaining and even re-inventing relevancy. I must confess, I have a love/hate relationship with Google. I’m in AWE of how good they are at the technical product side of the business, but am conversely DISGUSTED by how horrible they are at the human side of the business.

Okay, enough of that! Let’s talk enhancements, let’s talk Google Caffeine. A little over a week ago, Google announced that they had developed a new, enhanced web indexing system called Caffeine. As the name may suggest, it’s a more amped-up, hyper indexing system than Google previously used to generate search results.

Before we delve too deeply into the new index, let’s make sure we understand how web searches work. If you remember my earlier post about real-time search, although most searches are in real-time, the content delivered against them rarely is. So, indexing Twitter and including real-time results was the first step in making the search more relevant to the period in time when the search occurred.

When you perform a search on any engine, be it Google, Yahoo! or Bing (I know there are more, but really, are you searching there?), you aren’t actually getting a RIGHT now result. What you are getting is a result based on the sites on the Web that these engines have previously crawled and identified as relevant for the search phrase that you entered. Those results may have been compiled days or even months prior to the time your search was performed. As a matter of fact, the typical guideline that SEO experts and companies used to give clients regarding search optimization was that it may take 3 – 4 months for the engines to crawl the web again for new content and update their indexes. So, the expectation was that you would make the changes today, but wouldn’t see the impact until months down the road when the engines decided to crawl again. That blows, huh?

Over the years, there have been gradual changes to this approach that have moved towards making the search results more relevant to the moment the search was performed. For example, three or four years ago, while at USATODAY.com, we made significant changes to the site that incorporated search optimization best practices and were able to see immediate, as in same day indexing for content. At that time, the search engines, with Google being the best at it, were actually using some sort of vertical category segmentation of the index to determine how often they crawled sites. Newspaper sites that added tons of new content regularly that was often time-sensitive or had a short shelf life, e.g. breaking news, were crawled constantly to provide good search results. Or, say there are sites that have newly launched or in-demand consumer goods, e.g. video game systems or video games (Halo anyone?); around the time that the product launches or the demand is high, Google began segmenting that vertical and indexing more often.

As I mentioned, I noticed this occurring around 2006 or so. Fast-forward to 2010 and the web is a totally different place. Videos, photos, blogs, Twitter, Facebook – it’s lousy with user-generated content! Often, the content is time-sensitive and a reaction to topical events occurring around the globe. There are so many recent new stories, e.g. Michael Jackson’s death, the European Volcano Ash Crisis, Iranian Elections, etc., that have broken or been updated via user-generated content and not traditional channels. In order to provide a more relevant experience, Google has been cooking up many updates to its search algorithm.

Which brings me back to Caffeine, which according to Google, will provide search results that are 50% fresher – remember this is hyper, amped-up indexing baby! They say the change was driven not only by the fact that lots of today’s content is user-generated, but also because when you combine all that social content and the publisher developed content, there’s just so much more content period. Here’s Google’s illustration of the old layered way of indexing by vertical and the new Caffeine methodology.

See the old implementation on the left? Multiple layers, with different updating schedules dependent upon the importance of the layer (not sure which color is most important). See the new layout? Look at all that content  – photos and videos, real-time updates, books (I guess this is the illustration of that content) and the user is RIGHT in the middle of it all, not on the outside looking in, like they were before. They are a key part of the experience, at least that’s what I get out of the artwork. Good thing for Google that they are in engaged primarily in the search business and not design work! J

You can check out the rest of the Caffeine post on the Google Blog.

What does this mean to you? I think it means that you will need to develop a more systematic approach to covering all of these key content areas to ensure that you maintain relevancy in the new algorithm. Although you SHOULD already have most of these, consider creating photo galleries for your business on Flickr – syndicate those pictures to not only your website, but also to your social media profiles, e.g. Tweet them, post them on Facebook, post them on your blog – make the experience circular! That’s the huge benefit of combining search and social. Socially shared information drives people to search engines, where inevitably, they will find more socially generated content that will drive them BACK to social. Particularly an approach like I mentioned above. Do the same thing with your videos, your blog posts, your Facebook pages. Share the information in a manner that makes sense, but ONLY when it’s relevant. Otherwise, you’ll just seem silly!

I see this change as not only being about making the searches relevant, but also as upping the power of social media as it relates to other channels, most particularly search.

This is a side note and then we’ll move on, but I’ve also noticed that Google is now utilizing not only more social data, but more of MY social data to power the results I’ve received over the last few weeks. Look at this search I performed before I started writing this post.

Here’s the search:

When I scrolled down to the bottom of the page, look at what I found!

Let’s see what Google has to say about this change after it’s out of BETA. Expect a follow-up from me! Until then, toodles darlings! J

The post Understanding The Google Caffeine Search Index & Algo Update appeared first on Subliminal Pixels.

I think the thing that I love most about the Internet is that it levels the playing field and allows small businesses to compete on a global level. Unlike in the real world, where the mom-and-pop shop has been replaced by the big, corporate store in your neighborhood, the Internet is a little more accommodating. In fact, having a good online strategy for your small business may help you avoid going the way of the traditional bricks-and-mortar small or family-owned business.

First, an absolute must – get a website! It amazes me the number of small businesses that do not have a legitimate web presence. There’s nothing worse than businesses that appear on Google Local or Google Maps, but don’t have a website for users to find more information. If a person is searching online, then provide the information for them online. If they need to call, it’s generally as a last resort. Why alienate customers before they’ve ever had a chance to interact with you? Not having a website in 2010 is the equivalent of having an unpublished number for your pizza delivery business – it’s just not a model for success!

And, please, please, I said get a website, but don’t just GET a website. Find a good designer and have them DESIGN a website. Although I’m still on the fence and go back and forth, I’m not sure if a poorly designed, ill-conceived website isn’t just as bad as not having one. Think of the website as the entrance to your business. In our wired world, most people are finding you online, before they ever find you in the real world. And, you know the old saying about first impressions…

The great thing about web design in 2010 is that you can build a really nice website for a fraction of the cost from even 5 years ago. One of the hardest things to convince a small business owner without a web presence to do is to put dollars behind a website build. But, let’s say you are a real estate agent who makes approximately $1,000 from each home sale where you provide representation. If your website helps you acquire just ONE new sale per month, the site will pay for itself in five short months and the rest of the income it generates (minus hosting and maintenance costs), is pure income! How awesome is that?

And, when you pick a web designer or company to build your site, don’t forget to choose someone who understands the value of SEO. Building a site that is fully-optimized for search can dramatically impact the success of your online efforts. Let’s look at an example; I searched for “Washington, DC cupcake shop” on Google – here are the results:

Three of the top six listings are for local cupcake bakeries. You know why they showed up? Because someone was smart enough to include search terms that appear in that keyword phrase in the website content. The website is necessary, but the content is KING! There are many, many things you can do to optimize your site for natural search (link-building, site map, etc.), but the content is what’s really going to bring it home. As a small business owner, you probably aren’t well-versed in all the ins-and-outs of website SEO – and you shouldn’t be! Just hire a firm that knows what they are doing and let them do it! I’ve got an SEO firm recommendation for your small biz if you’re looking for one! J

And, if your business makes a product that can be sold online, DO it! There’s no reason why someone in West Virginia, Texas, California, etc. can’t enjoy one of these awesome cupcakes even when they aren’t in DC. See how the Internet can help you take a local business national? Once you’ve conquered that, the next step is the global takeover!

Okay, so you’ve got the site – how do you market it? First, some tips on what NOT to do:

1. Say NO to banner advertising. That’s more of a brand-building play than direct response and there are much better ways to utilize your marketing budgets and build your brand online.
2. Don’t try to compete too fiercely for broad search terms, e.g. hotel. If you are a small business owner with a hotel in ONE town in the United States, trust me when I tell you that you don’t want to appear in the search results for that term. It’s expensive and it makes no sense because the people looking for “hotel” aren’t just looking for one in your corner of the country.

My “don’ts” are pretty short, primarily because I prefer to focus on the positive! So, here’s what you SHOULD focus on:

1. Local search – more than 80% of all in-store visits start online. You know what that means? That people are turning to the Internet to guide not just online purchases, but local, in-store purchases too! If you’ve got a bakery in DC that sells cupcakes, why wouldn’t you want to capture some of that search traffic?
   1. Google Places – it’s not only free to claim your business, you can add your hours, post coupons and get performance reports
   2. ReachLocal – I love these guys because they help small businesses not only manage paid local search campaigns on engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing, but they also have a technology that tracks calls driven by the online local search ads.
   3. Google, Yahoo, Bing and a ton of other online startups have increased their focus on small business and advertising options on the Internet – much of it local, so the options are opening up rapidly for this market segment. Now is the time to define, test and implement an online strategy for your small business!
   4. Social Media – most small businesses benefit significantly from WOM (word-of-mouth) recommendations. I’ve noticed on a ton of my friends Facebook pages that folks are asking for or giving location-specific recommendations.
      1. Crowd-sourced Recommendations and Reviews – what’s better than hearing from other customers about products, services and goods that you are interested in purchasing or trying? A good review on these sites increases the likelihood that you will see an uptick in business. Also, as Facebook’s Open Social Graph (we talked about this last week), infiltrates the Internet, you will begin to see not just crowd-sourced reviews, but crowd-sourced reviews from YOUR crowd – your Facebook friends! Too awesome. A few of these directories where you want to make sure your business has a presence (I wouldn’t recommend writing your own recommendations, but you can certainly direct your patrons there. It’s the feedback/comment card in a new forum!)
         1. i.      Yelp – this is my fave! You can find reviews for everything and they are already pulling in results from your Facebook network.
         2. ii.      CitySearch – they provide a mix of paid placements and reviews. No Facebook Open Social Graph yet!
         3. iii.      MetroMix – this one is a little less crowd-source (okay, a LOT than the other ones). Not as many categories as the other two, but worth listing if your business is in the categories that they do have.
2. Microblogs, e.g. Twitter – if you aren’t on Twitter, please GET on Twitter! You’d be amazed at how quickly your loyal fans will follow you, re-tweet you and just show love. And, you can show them love by tweeting channel specific deals or inside information that only your followers would know. Or, if you provide a service, use it to establish your expertise by giving out tips and good advice.
3. Social networking sites, e.g. Facebook
   1. i.      Build a fan page – it’s an easy way to interact with your most active brand loyalists and it works REALLY well for local business. You need a strategy, so again, FIND an agency to at least help you train and understand how to interact.
   2. ii.      Facebook ads – the targeting options are fantastic. Why not test these ads for your target customer? You can drive them to your fan page for special promos or insider information.
   3. iii.      Foursquare – this is the BEST of both worlds! Location-specific social! Establish a presence on Foursquare so that people can check-in! It will display to their followers where they are and maybe inspire a spontaneous meeting at your place of business. You’ve got them in the door – now convert them!

Before I go, a few things:

1. Don’t be afraid to invest online. Yes, resources are limited, but you’ll get results that are measurable and easier to optimize (improve for the future) from putting those dollars into online marketing.
2. Engage an expert. If you can’t afford to have them manage your efforts, at least let them build it and train you so that you can achieve maximum success.
3. BUILD A WEBSITE! I know, I know, I’ve said this before, but it really is the crucial first step that will make everything else possible.

As small business owners, ourselves, we know all about budget limitations and lack of resources like time. But, putting a budget and time into some of these tools listed above will have an exponential impact on your financial success. And, this is just the tip of the iceberg! There’s so much more that you can do for your small business with online marketing. Look out for blog posts dedicated to each of these individual tactics and a few others that I haven’t covered yet.

The post Online Marketing Tips To Grow Your Small Business appeared first on Subliminal Pixels.

I think one of the things about social media that terrifies huge corporations is the loss of control. In the old days, if you pissed off a consumer, they may have sent a few angry letters, made a few irate phone calls and told a few friends about your awful experience (wow, now that I’ve typed it, those things sounds pretty bad). But, seriously, how many people could you possibly impact using those methods? Your ability to make those bad feelings viral and spread them beyond your circle was pretty limited.

Fast forward to today’s current social media environment – Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube (remember the guy whose guitar was broken by the airlines?), and your ability to make your dissatisfaction known to a global audience is unlimited. How does a company respond to that? They can’t make a video response pleading their case or defending themselves on YouTube – no one is going to watch a boring corporate response to a hilarious song about their crappy service. They can’t blog seed any PR outreach efforts about a crisis – no blogger worth their salt is going to post that message without adding their two (and possibly contradictory) cents. The company blog? Forget it – that’s just as boring as the YouTube video AND, it’s generally preaching to the choir. Even if you’re Apple, the only people faithfully reading your blog are your hardcore fans and tech journalists. Facebook? You can do some things there, but that too is usually your hardcore fans – they normally love you so much they tend to jump in there and manage your reputation for you – how awesome is THAT?! So, that leaves us with…Twitter!
For so many reasons, it’s the perfect tool to not only effectively manage crises that can impact your brand reputation, but to also proactively manage your brand reputation.

1. There are so many Twitter tools that allow you to monitor what folks are saying about your brand and identify trends, both negative and positive and jump into the conversation as it occurs. These tools allow you to show that whether the conversation is good or bad, you are listening to conversations about your brand and interested in participating in the discussion. Ahh, the great listening platform that we’ve heard so much about – it’s POWERFUL!

2. Twitter armies. Similar to how your Facebook fans will defend your reputation for you, if you build a network of Twitter followers and actively engage them, they’ll not only loyally defend you when something negative is said, they’ll spontaneously tweet about why they love your brand AND re-tweet your PR messages about your green initiatives, charitable efforts or whatever other PR news you choose to tweet.

3. The main reason Twitter is my favorite tool for reputation brand management? Because Google indexes it in real-time search results, of course! Say you do have a crisis – if it becomes a heavily searched topic, rather than having it blow-up like the Nestle Facebook crisis (if you remember my last post, I’m clearly obsessed with how tragic this was), Google will also index Twitter results in the real-time search. You can use your corporate Twitter to get out the real facts and have them index alongside the negative Facebook conversation. That’s much preferred to having your Facebook community manager engage in a battle of words with the rabble-rousers. And, it gives your network something to re-tweet or a reason to tweet their own positive opinions. Everyone loves to show up in Google search results! And, there is no crisis, it provides an opportunity to proactively manage your reputation. E.g. if your company has always taken great strides to be green and environmentally-friendly, then tweeting about green initiatives on Earth Day, when there’s a high likelihood for your company’s tweets to be indexed in Google’s real-time search, can help build or maintain positive brand reputations.

Of course, you can’t do any of this effectively without being active on Twitter. Look at this screenshot of a search on Google for “oil spill.” (Just in case you’ve been under a rock somewhere, that BP oil rig that exploded in the Gulf is pumping huge amounts of oil into the ocean – SUCKS! I LOVE the bayou. Anyhoo…)

BP is buying paid search to explain their response to the crisis and how they are helping (good job with that since YOU spilled it). See “Latest results for oil spill?” You know who is NOT in those results? BP!!! Where you at BP? “Oil spill” has been indexing in Google’s real-time search results since the spill was first reported – WHY isn’t BP there? It’s their crisis and they are letting news outlets (see CNN above) control the conversation. And, do you see the tweet about the sick “sock-puppet” corporate shill Lisa Murkowski who doesn’t think BP should have to pay for full clean-up of oil spill? You can’t have that conversation occurring and not participate. You certainly can’t just buy paid marketing placements and hope that people are going to be as responsive to that as they are to what their friends and influencers are saying in the social world. Word-of-mouth is always more powerful as an influential communication than a paid placement. It seems a little cold and heartless – not only did they make a huge mistake and pollute the environment, they are totally out of sync with how to manage the aftermath in today’s socially-wired world.

I wonder if they are even monitoring this conversation on Twitter? Remember that’s the first step. Although as a Comcast customer, I’m no fan of the brand, they definitely have the listening platform on Twitter to manage conversations of their brand down to a science. I read this really interesting blog post about a case study of Comcast use of Twitter for customer service and brand management – they are killing the game in using social media to manage brand management and customer satisfaction. Look at this screenshot – it only took them 11 minutes from the initial post to jump in this conversation – that is AWESOME!

And, not only did they win this customer over and end with her thanking them and saying she was going to write a blog post about Comcast’s Twitter reputation management, Frank Eliason, who is in charge of Comcast’s Twitter strategy, also followed the conversation to the blog post that she finally wrote and provided a second mea culpa in the comments to her post. Look at this (be sure to actually go to the post and see ALL the comments – Comcast is putting their Twitter army to work outside of the channel).

That’s fantastic! And, do you see the date? This was almost two years ago and they’d already figured it out! What are the rest of these big brands waiting for? I think that most of them are ignoring these channels and hoping that Twitter, Facebook and all of these social media tools go away and that they can regain control of their brand identities and messages that are disseminated about their brands. But, guess what? It ain’t happening!

A word to the wise – figure it out! We’re already a few years into the game; the sooner you figure it out, the easier it will be to develop an effective strategy. So, understand corporate Twitter best practices and identify a listening platform for your company. Don’t have time to do it? Don’t worry, I’m all over it! I’ll be blogging about it later this month. Until then…I’m out!

The post How To Use Twitter to Avoid a Online Reputation Disaster appeared first on Subliminal Pixels.

I’m pretty sure that I don’t have to tell you how important marketing in social media has become to businesses. I believe that EVERY business, regardless of what vertical they operate in, can benefit from social media. Yet, there are many old school, traditional companies that are either not engaging in social media, or doing it wrong. Why, you ask?

Well, social media requires that you give up some of the control. Can you imagine how difficult it must be for people, say in their 50s and 60s, and in charge of a multi-national company with a brand identity that the company has controlled for decades (or maybe even HUNDREDS of years), giving up that control and letting the world at large actively drive that conversation about what the brand is? Also, put yourself in their shoes; if you are my age, then you’ll remember life before email and how difficult that transition was. These folks have made a leap from typewriters, to computers, then email and NOW you want them to swallow and embrace this newfangled social media thing? If you can’t wrap your mind around that, think back just a few years to how difficult it was to get large corporations to buy into search, both paid and organic. Well, social media is the new search.

I’ve worked for a large, multi-national company (that shall remain nameless) for the last two years. My role is responsible for testing and implementing new and emerging media technologies. In order to make that happen, I’ve had to become an evangelist, boning up on best practices, finding case studies and sharing information to convince leadership that social media has value for the company. As part of that process, I’ve learned a few key things that you might be familiar with if you work in a similar role for a large, multi-national too.

1. Social media is a paradigm shift – TV, radio, print, even paid search, the company gets that. Tweeting? Facebooking? Forget about it! Unfamiliarity breeds skepticism.
2. Project management processes built for offline or traditional marketing; it’s difficult to anticipate in May 2010, what you the new and emerging media that you will need funded the ENTIRE year in 2011.
3. Speed-to-market; if it takes 6 – 9 months to select an agency, develop a strategy and put it in market, there have been so many changes, that the strategy is no longer valid (and forget adjusting on the fly – that’s NOT happening!)
4. Budgets are determined the previous year; often, in order to fund the efforts, money has to be taken from another program. In order to do that, you MUST prove that you will drive more revenue for the company using the funding for social media. But social media is NOT primarily about the sales – it’s about the ENGAGEMENT with the brand.

Now, this isn’t to say that my company hasn’t had some success with social media. We just ran a viral video campaign to support a product launch that was really successful. It included blogger outreach, video optimization for Google SEO and YouTube and really allowed us to extend the reach of our campaign on a limited budget. Although it took 18 months and a huge product launch to win approval to launch the campaign, it drove a dramatic shift in perception for social media within the company. Since launching the campaign, we’ve presented for a variety of internal stakeholders and higher level executives to highlight our successes and communicate the value of social media. Are we all the way there yet? No, but I’m confident that we are a lot closer than we were when I started.

Enough about me and my company, let’s look at some social media case studies. First, let’s start with the bad. One company’s recent social media failure is top of mind because it’s so recent. Nestle’s Facebook page recently had a huge PR nightmare blow-up on their page because they mismanaged the response. An environmental group, Greenpeace, posted negative comments on the page regarding the company’s use of palm oil. The response from Nestle was personal and angry and clearly indicated that the employee handling communications on the page had taken offense. There’s much more to it than, that, but I’ll let you get all the gory Nestle Facebook crisis details yourself. I’ll just share with you a few pointers that may be helpful:

1. Your company should have a crisis communication plan REGARDLESS of where they interact with the public.
2. Make sure the person managing your page has some community management experience or that your company provides training. Similar to a customer service position, the person needs to be mindful of the customer relationship and respond accordingly.
3. THINK before you respond!!! A member of the social media team at Studiocom (LOVES them!) likened it to negotiating with terrorists. Do NOT engage if the engagement is going to be an argument.
4. Develop rules of engagement before you enter the space (another Studiocom gem). That way, removing a post, or reminding the audience to be on their best behavior and contribute constructive and not inflammatory (and unproven criticism) will just be par for the course, not a one-off angry response.
5. Allow your community to work for you; nine times out of 10, the people who come to your page and post comments are FANS of your brand, not people that hate you. Many times, they’ll defend your brand to the dissenter for you – it’s one of the biggest values of social media engagement. Most of the people on your page love you, they really do!

Lastly, let’s look at the good. I’ve got a few social media favorites – Dunkin Donuts (Facebook & Twitter), Starbucks (Facebook & Twitter) and Coke (Facebook & Twitter). I always joke and say the reason they are so good has nothing to do with strategy, it’s because they all are addictive products – sugar and caffeine! People NEED their fix, and they have made their social media engagements just as addictive as the actual products. How do they do it?

1. Have exclusive offers, such as coupons for their fans to keep them engaged and give them something to thank them for being customers. Do you know how much money Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts make off additional product lines when they give you free coffee or donuts or SOMETHING, to get you into the store?
2. They are making their page and their promotions viral, by encouraging folks to make pictures of them with products (Dunkin Donuts), their profile pics. I’m giddy just thinking about all those free impressions for their brand. And, recommendations don’t getting any stronger than that – proudly associated with your brand and wanting others to see the love – that’s SO awesome!
3. Only Coke did this, but they actually made a page spontaneously created by two mega fans (I won’t believe you if you tell me you haven’t heard of Dusty and Michael), and made it the Official Coke page, rather than trying to work against them and create their own profile. And, it’s working – of more than 250 Coke fan pages, it’s the only one with 1MM+ fans and (don’t quote me), the second most popular page on Facebook!
4. Use the customer input to create new products and processes to make sure they continue to love and support the brand. Dunkin Donuts (Studiocom – the love is real) hosted a contest to create a new donut. You could share this with your friends, vote on the final winner and actually GET the donut in the stores. That’s product development at its finest. And, do you know what those people who come in for the donuts buy? Additional products!! Starbucks drives processes via feedback through its social interactions, which include an ideas forum, which has driven more than 30 changes in Starbucks stores and processes.

Check it out:

Dunkin Donuts Social Media Case Study

Starbucks Social Media Case Study

Coke Social Media Case Study

There are SO many more social media case studies, good and bad. These are just a few of my faves. And, if you notice, I heavied up on the good and included only one bad. That’s intentional. One thing I’ve learned with my current job experience is that you say the worst that can happen first and provide solutions to show that you’ve put a lot of thought into mitigating those risks. Close with multiple examples of the good and let the last memories be the good ones! Trust me when I tell you it helps a lot.

Mashable has some really good social media case studies (this isn’t all of them search on the site; I’m just linking you to one that I love about Facebook), including an awesome one on the recent volcano ash crisis in Europe and how travel companies and organizations used social media to manage the crisis effectively. There’s also a Social Media Wiki with what they call the Social Media SUPERLIST – it’s 23 different lists with case studies of social media!

Don’t take my word on this as the definitive list – Google “social media case studies” yourself. There are so many new ones coming out, that the information increases and changes every day. As a matter of fact, stay tuned for one about the viral video campaign that I mentioned earlier. Until then, my friends, this is a really good start. Toodles!

The post A Guide to Social Media Case Studies appeared first on Subliminal Pixels.

Back in September, while I was at OMMA Global, I attended a session called “Can Real-Time Results Be Found in Real-Time Search?” It was an awesome panel discussion that really made me question what real-time search is.

Something important that I realized from that session – in a user’s mind, EVERY search is real-time. Think about it – have you ever performed a search on Google and NOT wanted to get the most relevant, up-to-date information for that search?

According to the research presented, the breakdown of search usage is 20% navigational – people are searching to get to known sites, e.g. typing “www.youtube.com” in the search box, 40% known information – people searching for information they know exists, e.g. Yahoo! article on reversing gray hair growth and 40% RIGHT now – people searching for new information regarding a topic, e.g. Rush Limbaugh (after he suffered his heart attack).

The longer I sat in the session, the more convinced I became that real-time search, like most of our industry’s innovations is about one thing – MONEY and how the search engines can make more of it. To me, the last gamechanger in search was the rise of paid search advertising. Google AdWords is a form of real-time search – it allows advertisers to display their ads when searches are performed on specific keywords. Your brand is in front of users EXACTLY when they are looking for it – it doesn’t get any more real-time than that!

Now, with the rise of social networking sites like Facebook, and the rise of micro-blogging sites like Twitter, the industry is trying to figure out how to pull all those updates into search engine results. Back in October, Microsoft announced that it had signed non-exclusive deals with both Twitter and Facebook to index Tweets and status updates in search results. Directly on the heels of that announcement, Google inked its own deal with Twitter.

Twitter made a quick $25 million when these deals closed (~$15MM from Google and $10MM from Bing). So, what did the search engines get in return? They got the Twitter Firehose – a direct blast of all tweets as they occur, with no delay. Prior to the deal, only 4 companies had ever had access to the Firehose – Summize, which Twitter bought and now calls Twitter Search, FriendFeed, which only got a subset of Twitter users who also used FriendFeed, Zappos and TwitterVision. Without access to the Firehose and Twitter effectively dominating real-time search, Bing and Google needed the partnerships to enter real-time search in a real and impactful way.

Around the same time, Facebook announced its own real-time search engine and will most likely head down a similar path to monetization with the search engines. Bing has already signed a deal with Facebook to index status updates  and has been testing the functionality. Facebook’s path to monetization and the search engines is a little bit trickier than Twitters. There’s been a raging debate about which company is better-suited to effectively dominate this space (or at the very least, create a viable revenue stream). An argument from both sides that Mashable blogged about recently:

Twitter Pros

1. They were first. To most people, Twitter IS real-time search. Think about it – do you say you need a cotton swab or a Q-tip? Twitter is the Q-tip of real-time search.
2. They have the experience – they’ve been playing around with real-time search for a lot longer than Facebook.
3. Almost ALL Tweets are public – it’s a rare thing when a person makes their Twitter account private.

Facebook Pros (AKA Twitter Cons)

1. Facebook is HUGE – they’ve got more than three times the monthly U.S. visits, 90MM compared to 25MM for Twitter, a user base of ~300MM. Facebook can provide a more accurate picture of what people are talking about.
2. Facebook search is deeper – it indexes videos, photos, what your friends are saying and all public profiles (most profiles are not public though).
3. The FriendFeed engine powering Facebook real-time search was created by the dudes from Google that built GoogleMaps and Gmail. Now, they work for Facebook on real-time search.

But, have you ever seen what people Tweet about and post on their Facebook status? It’s about THEIR feelings about events, not the facts of the events. Real-time search is not about capturing relevancy, it’s about capturing sentiment.

The real-time results are a good proxy for how users feel about the subject of the search, but rarely is it as information-based as the results that the engines were already serving. Don’t believe it? See the example below, with the real-time search results highlighted in the red box:

Here’s a larger screenshot of the real-time search results:

Where’s the informational value in those tweets? There IS none! But, it does show how the real-time results capture sentiment regarding a story.

This is an example of how Google displays real-time search results. Not all searches produce real-time results and I’ve been trying for weeks to figure out how Google decides which searches should show them and which searches shouldn’t.

I tried to find the rhyme and rhythm by searching on terms from two sources – Google Trends and Twitter trends.

All of the Hot Topics show real-time search results, with the exception of “umar farouk abdulmutallab.” The Hot Searches show real-time results only for four of the terms – “happy new year greeting message,” “new years eve moon,” “new years around the world” and “rush Limbaugh.”

I also looked at the top Twitter trends for a 7 day period on Trendistic.com to see if there was a correlation with the real-time search results on Google. I wasn’t really expecting these terms to be a significant driver for the real-time search results on Google; especially since one of the top terms is “iwishyoasswould!” The trends on Twitter that are not news-related, are for the most part, specific to the Twitter audience.

You have to be part of the crowd for “iwishyoasswould” to mean something to you. And, if you are part of the crowd, then guess what? You’re ALREADY on Twitter and would perform the search there and not on a major search engine anyway. Played around with a few news-related terms, “TCU,” “Boise State” and “The Bachelor” that I found in the trends and, lo and behold, they are producing results!

“Boise State”

Look at where these results are serving – it’s pushing organic search results 4 – 10 below the real-time results. I guess that would be worth getting upset over if you could do anything about it…but it’s free and it’s Google  – who can you call? Also, I almost anticipate it improving things for folks in the lower results, as the change will probably make it more likely that people will scroll down the page and pay a little more attention.

The post Opening The Pandora’s Box: Google Real Time Search appeared first on Subliminal Pixels.

What The Hell Are Ad Extensions Anyways?

Google is always looking for new ways to display ad$, and what better way than turning a page with 8 ads, magically into a page with up to 28 ads. In a nutshell, Ad Extensions expand on traditional Adwords text ads by adding additional information about your business like Address, Phone Number, Product Images, Prices, Descriptions or Additional Text Links.

There are 3 types of Ad Extensions:

• Location Extensions
• Product Extensions
• Ad Sitelinks

There is no additional cost to the actual Cost per Click for using ad extensions, but I can foresee bidding wars ensuing over non trademarked branded terms and the top position. Below I detail all 3 types of Ad Extensions, how to set them up and how to track them. Ad extensions are currently limited to Google.com, Google Maps and some network properties.

Location Extensions

Location extensions attach location-specific information ( i.e. address, city, state) to your Adwords text ads. These extensions are shown only to users searching for or physically near a specific geographical area associated with the ad.

On Google.com, the Location Extensions are displayed when a user searches for a location specific query, within the target location. Google will match your business locations to a user’s location or search terms and show the address beneath your text ads, along with Plusbox format contact info, Google Map Image and Get Directions link. (See image above for example) There is no additional cost for expansion of the ad, only when a user clicks through to your site. If for some reason Google cannot determine the users IP, they will be served a regular text ad with no Location Extension.

On Google Maps, along with adding the location extensions mentioned above, you can also add an 16 x 16 icon, like a logo and a 125 x 125 Business Image. If you do not choose one, Google will select the default “Map Marker” as your icon. So if you want to stick out, I recommend uploading a custom icon. You will see the difference in your CTR.

One of the benefits for advertisers of having this format is that you won’t be charged for clicks on your ads that expand the “Plusbox” or for displaying your contact info including your Phone Number. You will accrue click costs from the click through from the expanded info box to your site. These enhanced Location Extensions are only for Google Maps and limited to “location specific queries”.

According to Google: “As with Google Maps natural search results, the user’s IP address isn’t considered. For example, if you advertise a hotel in New York, users searching for “New York hotels” may see your ad, no matter where they’re physically located. This ensures that all potential customers will have a chance to see your ad. On Google, customers who live near your business will see your ad.”

As for mobile distribution, Location Extensions will show on regular phones using “Google Maps for mobile” and also on Iphone, Android and Blackberry type phones with Full HTML browsers.

With the launch of the new Location Extensions, Google is now phasing out all of the old Local Business Ads. If you’re currently running Local Business ads, they will continue to run until you try to edit them. Once you edit them, they will become a regular text ad with Location Extensions automatically assigned by Google.

You can target Location Extensions at the Campaign Level or at the Ad Level.

For example, if you have a store in Miami, FL  that’s having a special new years eve sale, you can create an ad for that sale, within an existing campaign and assign a Location Extension, targeting users within a 20 mile radius of the Miami, FL address you provided as your geographic target.

Doing research for clients and for this article, I found that for the most part Location Extensions are being triggered by very specific search queries like ” Miami Florida Ford dealer” or “Disney Orlando, FL Hotels Hilton”.

Something else I noticed is that although Location Extensions are usually limited to top position, proximity trumps position in some instances; like in image below, where the location extension is in Position #2 . I assume because it’s actually a “Miami Ford Dealer” and not an affiliate/lead generation site, which is what’s in the #1 position.

There are 2 ways to add addresses/locations to your Adwords account to use as Location Extensions.

1) The easiest and smartest way to add locations is to sync your Google Adwords account with your Google Local Business Center (LBC) account. Adwords will take all of the verified addresses within your LBC and ad them as available Ad Extensions within your account.  Usually takes about 24-48 hours for new locations or edits in LBC to show in Adwords Extensions.

2) You can also add your addresses manually in Adwords under Ad Extensions (which is under the Campaign Settings Tab). This link explains in detail how to add location extensions manually.

You can also create a specific ad, targeting users within a specific geographic location. The default targeting setting is at 20 miles radius, but you can make adjustments to the targeting radius, if required. You can only enter 9 business addresses manually, once you reach your limit.

Product Extensions

Product Extensions use the Google Plusbox format to allow advertisers to display relevant product images alongside your Adwords text ads.

Currently, Google only allows use of products in Google Merchant, AKA Google Base. It uses the Google Merchant product data to display product descriptions, prices and product titles. Product Extensions will show only on the top #1 position of the Paid Listings and must have high quality scores to show.

There are 2 choices of destination URLS with Product Extensions, you can use a site landing page or the Google Merchant product URL.

Adding Your Products To Adwords

In order to include your Google Merchant products as Product Extensions beneath your ad texts, you have to include attributes in your Google Merchant product listing. This allows Adwords to sync and match your products accordingly.

Attribute : adwords_queryparam   – Example: aid=450

Attribute: adwords_queryparam  – Example: kw={keyword}

Attribute: adwords_prefer_for_query –  Example: red luggage

Attribute: adwords_redirect    – Example: http://www.acme.com/widget.html

For more information visit Google’s help section on Product Extension Attributes.

Product Extensions are not to be confused with Product Listing Ads. Product Listing Ads are created and managed via the Google Merchant Center, NOT Adwords. See below for example.On a sidenote, I find it interesting that via Google Merchant Listings, Regular Search PPC Text Ads and Product Listings, Google is allowing certain advertisers to dominate a SERPS page with up to 3 ads and an additional 4 products on one SERPS page. Target seems to have some sort of special arrangement with Google which allows them to be the dead last ad on 1st page and still show Product Extensions. Just saying!

Ad Sitelink Extensions

Ad Sitelinks were created as a way to capitalize on existing SERPS real estate and give advertisers a way of increasing CTR and performance all the while giving end users more relevant options on one query. The general idea behind Sitelinks is to make your ad attractive to a wider group of users by adding additional target links beneath the text ads.

As opposed to a regular text ad, Ad Extension Sitelinks allow business owners to send users to various landing pages by displaying up to 4 additional links beneath the regular PPC text ads.

Ad Sitelinks use the same text format as the Organic Sitelinks. But unlike Organic Sitelinks , Google gives you a bit more control by allowing you to pre select a pool of 10 Sitelinks per Ad Text. From these 10, Google will select which 4 Sitelinks to display.

According to Google, Ad Sitelinks are more likely to be triggered by unique brand names, rather than other types of search queries. Like the other Ad Extensions, Ad Sitelinks are limited to the Top Ranked ads with Highest Quality Scores.

A couple of points of interest regarding Ad Sitelinks, first off the CTR of the additional Sitelinks do not affect your ad CTR or your Quality Score.

Secondly, by adding “Self Segmenting” links to your ads, you will see a drastic drop in bounce rate. This occurs because if done correctly, sitelinks can be used as a self segmenting tool which leads them down the appropriate funnel. This works particularly well for keywords that represent specific services or products that are used in different ways, by different target groups.

Lastly, prior to mass launch of current version of Ad Sitelinks, Google ran a beta test with select advertisers. Basically, they worked with certain search queries and would rotate between 3 versions of one text ad:

1) A regular Text Ad with No Extensions

2) A Text Ad with Logo and Sitelinks

3) A Text Ad with Sitelinks but no logo

Based on the results from their tests, Google phased out the losing versions and is rolling out the current version of Sitelinks we see now.

Since Sitelinks are editable, you can also use them to highlight special sales, seasonal messaging or other relevant links.

Reporting

In addition to the visual changes, Google has also rolled out a number of additional metrics to compliment the Ad Extensions within the Report Center. Below is a list of the new metrics available for Ad Extensions.

For Product Extensions, Google has added a lot of new metrics to help measure performance.

Plusbox Impression: Number of impressions with a plusbox

Plusbox Expansion: Number of plusbox expansions

Offer Click: Number of clicks on offers

Headline Click: Number of headline clicks that occurred on impressions with a plusbox

Offer Click After Plusbox Expansion: The number of clicks on offers that occurred after a plusbox expansion

Plusbox Show Rate: Share of impressions that showed a plusbox

Expansion Rate: Share of plusboxes that were expanded

Normalized Expansion Rate: Number of expansions divided by the number of headline clicks on the product extensions-enabled impressions

Post-Expansion CTR: CTR for ads when the user expanded the plusbox

Plusbox Headline CTR: Number of headline clicks divided by the number of plusbox impressions

For Location Extensions and Sitelinks, the reporting options are still very slim. The only real metric available is CTR. It still isn’t possible to see individual ad extension impressions, or compare regular Text Ads Vs Ad Extension Ads performance within Adwords.

Also, as of writing of this post, neither Adwords Editor or Adwords API have Ad Extensions support.

Conclusion

Ad Extensions are a powerful new tool for online Advertisers to add to their arsenal. Although they are not suited for every campaign. Based on my results so far, I would strongly suggest you try your own tests and see what combination works best for you.

Photo Credit: zombikombi1959

The post Adwords Ad Extensions 101 appeared first on Subliminal Pixels.

A Open Letter to Channel 10 ABC(WPLG) Twitter Account: @talkto10

Dear  @Talkto10,

(the Twitter account for the Local ABC affiliate in Miami WPLG)

I understand sometimes mistakes are made in social media strategy.  In fact, I’d go as far as to say if you haven’t made any mistakes, you probably haven’t done much of it.  But with that said, you are being a total douche.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for traditional media expanding into new media.  And there are tons of wonderful examples of people doing it right. They engage with other users, they retweet and they follow.

Here are some good examples:

• http://twitter.com/sunsentinel
• http://twitter.com/miamiherald
• http://twitter.com/fox5newsedge
• http://twitter.com/10TVnewsdesk
• http://twitter.com/SunTimes
• http://twitter.com/ColonelTribune

As of me writing this, @Talkto10 you are NOT one of them.

Although, you wouldn’t know it from reading what you wrote on your website (about Twitter).

It’s another way to engage a two-way conversation with Local 10, as JustNews.com’s Barb Besteni says.

Barb,  NEWSFLASH!!  Have you seen how many people @talkto10 is following and talking with on Twitter?

A  two-way conversation implies the number 2, which means there would be 2 people talking , NOT a  “Broadcast”, or an RSS feed, but two real people exchanging information.

What you are doing is attempting to apply old school broadcast rules to new media game.  But rather than adding value, you are just adding more noise in an echo chamber, which is already very large and already very noisy.

Why should I get the news from you, when there are thousands of other news sources on Twitter, who do want to interact with me, and are more transparent.

It’s not a one way street! It’s not TV!  And you’re most definitely not developing a loyal base or acquiring any actionable data.

You are essentially making Twitter into a news feed.  That’s not social or two-way!

But that’s not the biggest problem between us, not only do you have a horrible Social Media strategy and totally do not understand the point of Social Media or Twitter.  But now you have delved into the Social Media Spamzone and are beginning to piss off a lot of  the Twitter users in Miami and elsewhere, by doing the Follow/Un Follow hustle.  Not only once, but 4 or 5 times to the same people.  It has become dead obvious what your up to!

Have you become so delusional in your hunger for followers that you have followed and unfollowed the same people 3 and 4 and 5 times? All in an attempt to inflate your follower count?

Please don’t claim ignorance, either. Back in  early March when @theduedean originally brought this to your attention you understood what you were doing was spam and you still continued to Follow/Unfollow people.

http://twitter.com/talkto10/status/1302521828

http://twitter.com/talkto10/status/1302595890

Now don’t go postal on Me @talkto10,  its not all fire and brimstone.  I actually like you the best of the 4 Local TV stations.  Your always calm and comforting on TV.  Not like some of the other guys who hype everything up, and make every piece of news that comes across their desks Breaking and NEW.  So there is hope for us but only if you get help.  Your going to have a lot of amends to make.  You’ve  pissed off all my twitter friends, you have deceived them by following them and then unfollowing everyone. Amassing more followers as you go on,  in one sick follow/unfollow cycle .  I know, you were playing the numbers game!! (Pats @talk210 on the shoulder)

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the value of having a lot of Twitter followers.  In fact, there are people willing to pay up to half a million dollars just to be a recommended user on the Twitter sign up page.  Why??  Because they have done the math and figured it would be worth the traffic it would bring their website.  And I agree to some extent.

But if your going to gain these followers on a false pretense (i.e. fake giveaways, fake donations to charity, following and unfollowing), then  you’re missing the whole point and shooting yourself in the foot in the process.  It’s a very shortsighted strategy.

What makes what you’re doing  different than someone spamming my email box with Viagra offers I didn’t ask for, or creating fake twitter accounts around the names of popular users?  It’s all down hill from there.

@Talkto10 What is your point of differentiation?  What’s your value proposition to Miami’s TV and online content consumers? Ask yourself, why are you on Twitter?  If it’s to create a news feed, then state it.

But, if as you claim on your site, you want to “engage a two-way conversation” then start talking to/following some local people that engage you.

To be fair, @talkto10 is not the only Media Twitter account that doesn’t follow anyone @nytimes, doesnt,  nor does another Miami local TV station @wsvn.  But you are the only ones which I have seen following and unfollowing people in bulk over and over again.

Sincerely,

Steaprok

The post Dear WPLG (@talkto10) What have you been smoking? appeared first on Subliminal Pixels.

I’ve been using Facebook Ads for a little less than a year now. And contrary to my initial thoughts and most of the posts I’ve read about them, they have worked out pretty good for me and my clients. Just to be clear, it has nowhere near the scale or robustness of Google Adwords, but it does provide some opportunities Adwords does not. So with that said, I figured I’d write a quick rundown of how Facebook ads work, how to set them up and what tracking and optimization features they offer.

The place to start your Facebook campaign research is Facebook Lexicon Keyword Tool. It allows you to see the trends for different words and phrases on Facebook Walls. The data is calculated by counting the number of occurrences or posts for every keyword (ex: “vampires”) across profiles, groups and events on Walls every day. All personal information is removed so there is no way to track data back to a specific person. You can use Lexicon to identify new trending keywords or topics to target with your Facebook campaign.

You don’t have to be a Google Adwords Expert!
Setting up a Facebook campaign is fairly cut and dry once you understand the key elements that make up Facebook Ads (Ads & Creative, Targeting, Bids & Budgets, Analytics & Optimization). Although each part of the campaign is important, I cannot stress enough how important it is to test targeting segments, creative and landing pages. If you don’t test, your campaign is pretty much doomed from the get go. So test, test, test.

At the moment Facebook is offering multiple marketing platforms: Facebook Pages, Facebook Applications, Facebook Connect, Facebook Events, Traditional Facebook Ads, Facebook Social Ads or Engagement Ads. I am only going into Facebook Ads and a little into Facebook Social Ads on this post.

Ads and Creative

Facebook Ads accepts 2 types of ads, a Facebook Ad and a Social Ad. The Facebook Ad is a straight forward branded ad, linking to either an external site, a Facebook application or a Facebook Page.

A Social Ad is also a fully branded ad, but it ties in social interactions performed by user’s friends with a brand. Facebook then uses that action as the headline of the creative for the Social Ad and displays it in their Mini Feed. (See Example Below)

Here are the 3 types of Social Ads explained by Jeremiah Owyang much better than I can.

1) Comment Style Ad: Members can now leave comments on these advertisements, much like wall posts. Brands that are focused on entertainment, new product rollouts, autos and apparel are well suited. The ad can show up to 4 comments per object, and the activity spreads to the users newsfeed.

2) Virtual Gifts Style Ad: Brands can now create virtual items that users can share, spread to each other. This wildly popular behavior within applications and Facebook is suitable for consumer products, entertainment, and some media.

3) Fan Style Ad: A play off the Facebook pages, users with a persona affinity for a product (like Apple) can become a fan, triggering a notification to their network, and could then tie on social ads. Will work great for established brands, like guitar hero, passion products, luxury products, or any brand with a rabid customer base.

For smaller to midsized companies without a large enough existing brand following, I suggest staying with the standard Facebook ads in the beginning. You can start by using Facebook ads to build up a larger share of voice and transition over to Social Ads once you have grown your number of followers on your Facebook Page. You can decrease the amount of time this takes substantially by incorporating Facebook Connect on your sites, to encourage and make it very easy for your visitors that are Facebook users to connect with your Facebook Page and share content with their Facebook friends. When executed properly the exponential effect is huge! In fact you can also kick start your efforts by design a Facebook Ads campaigns specifically targeted to generate brand awareness and grow your company Facebook Page fans via ads and Facebook connect.

Once you can develop a good number of Fans on the company Facebook Page, you can begin using Social actions on a much larger scale. “Social actions” are the “Golden Egg” of Facebook Ads. Once you get Social Actions going, your likelihood of your message going viral increases dramatically. Your ads will begin appearing on the Walls and Mini Feeds of your Fans Friends. The more Fans you have, the farther your message travels within the Facebook network. The more users interact with your Facebook Page and Ads, the more you come out on their friends Walls. It’s that simple.

Don’t go overboard when developing the creative. Use simple and clear copy with a attention grabbing titles. That doesn’t mean to write an irrelevant or false title like a lot of the Facebook Ads I’ve seen, just one that sticks out. Your titles are limited to 25 characters and 135 characters for the body. So don’t try and cram every service or product you offer on the ad, leave some content for your landing pages. Create multiple versions of each ad with different images if possible so you can do some A/B tests. Always use an image on your ads. The images should be 110 x 80 pixels and less than 5 megabytes. If the image is larger or smaller than 110 x 80 Facebook will resize it automatically, so don’t stress it too much! They do not accept animated or flash images.

Example Social Ad

Example Standard Facebook Ad:

Complete list of the Facebook Ad creative and landing page guidelines

Targeting

Facebook has fairly robust targeting options compared to Adwords. They allow you to target by State, City, Gender, Age, Keywords, Workplaces, Relationship and Sexual Persuasion. According to Facebook, there are 33,849,820 targetable persons in its network. 14,350,900 Men and 18,548,300 Women in the US.

Facebook determines geo targeting via user IP, NOT their geographic network on Facebook. A very useful feature is the ability to target by specific workplaces or universities. Although you can target to High School students via the age targeting, you CANNOT through school networks. When setting up targeting make sure to only select areas serviceable by your business. When selecting keywords to target use Facebook lexicon to see estimates and find keywords. Step out of the box and try and identify new relevant keywords.

Bidding and Budgets

Facebook allows you to set daily budgets at the campaign level, starting with a minimum of $5 per campaign or 2X your Minimum CPC/CPM. The current minimum CPC is $0.01 and the minimum CPM is $0.15. But don’t expect to start with a $5 campaign at $.01 CPC, it won’t work! I started my first tests with $250, I suggest you start with at least that much. I say this because with less than that, I doubt you will be able to gather enough actionable data to make educated decisions on creative, landing page optimization and testing.

Facebook assigns an internal Daily Spend limit of $250 when you start off, which they increase over time depending on your daily spend and after 5 successful payments. Budgets and prices are going to vary based on your targeting options, but don’t be fooled, there are A LOT of impressions on Facebook, so plan accordingly. Make sure you set your targeting right, set the daily budget at what you want to spend, and test from there.

For the most part, I would suggest going with CPC model on Facebook. Why you ask? For several reasons: #1 CPM based bidding is dead #2 and more importantly both on my campaigns and other Facebook Ad case Studies I’ve read CPM ended up costing more because of the very low CTR% on Facebook.

Analytics and Optimization

Once your campaign is set up and running you’re ready to start collecting data. For this, Facebook has Facebook Insights. If you are using a link to an external site you can tag the link and gather data with Google Analytics or any other analytics program. But for this post, I will be focusing on the metrics available via the Facebook Insights.

There are 3 main reports I use. Responder Demographics provides the aggregate age, gender and geographic location of the users who have clicked on your Facebook Ad. Responder Profiles provides psychographic information of these same users, which is aggregated from user profiles and shows common interests, favorite TV shows, movies, books and music. This is a great report to identify new targets by finding new keywords, locations and interests of the users clicking on your Facebook Ad.

The Advertising Performance report provides an exportable version of the metrics you see in the interface: impressions, clicks and click-through rates, data by unique user and performance data specific to your ads that contained social actions, if you’re using Facebook Social Ads (see definitions below). In addition, you can also summarize your report by Account, Campaign or Ad .

The Account level report aggregates data across all campaigns, ads and targets, while the Campaign Reports breaks these statistics down to the campaign level, and the Ad reports break them down further to the individual ad level, etc, etc.

Within the Facebook Ads system, there are 2 types of promotion of ads, Organic and Paid. Organic promotion refers to News Feed stories generated based on social actions taken by users on your Facebook Page or Facebook App. There is a huge opportunity here to make it go viral, by testing actions and headlines and identify the ones with best distribution rates. Paid promotion refers to Social Ads created specifically to promote traffic to a Facebook Page.

Facebook Insight Metrics Defined

Date: The date on which the activity reported in the row of the report took place. Please note that monthly reports will be dated on the first of each month and weekly reports will be dated on the Sunday that marks the beginning of the week.

Ad/Campaign Name: The name of the ad/campaign reported in the row.

Ad/Campaign ID: The unique ID number of the ad/campaign reported in the row.

Total Impressions: The total number of times the ad referenced was shown has been shown on the site.

Total Clicks: The total number of clicks on the ads tracked by that row in the report.

Total CTR: CTR stands for click through rate. The CTR for an ad is calculated as the number of clicks the ad received divided by the number of impressions (times the ad was shown on the site) in the given time period.

Total Average CPC (US$): The average cost per click in US dollars for the given row.

Total Average CPM (US$): The average cost per thousand impressions in US dollars for the given row.

Total Spent (US$): The total cost in US dollars for the given row.

Unique Impressions: The number of people who viewed the ad(s) tracked by the given row of the report.

Unique Clicks: The number of people who clicked on the ad(s) tracked by the given row of the report.

Unique CTR: The unique click through rate. The unique CTR is calculated as the number of unique clicks the ad(s) received divided by the number of unique ad impressions.

Total Social Impressions: The total number of views (impressions) for ads with social actions attached to them for the given row. Not all ads have social actions attached to them.

Total Social Clicks: The number of clicks on ads with social actions attached to them for the given row. Not all ads have social actions attached to them.

Total Social CTR: The click through rate for ads with social actions attached to them. It is calculated as the number of “social clicks” divided by the total number of “social impressions”.

Unique Social Impressions: The number of people who viewed ads with social actions attached to them for the given row of the report.

Unique Social Clicks: The number of people who clicked on ads with social actions attached to them for the given row.

Unique Social CTR: The unique click through rate for ads with social actions attached to them. It is calculated as the number of “unique social clicks” divided by the number of “unique social impressions”.

Header Photo Courtesy of DanTaylor

The post Facebook Ads 101 – How to Set up and Track Facebook Ads appeared first on Subliminal Pixels.

The 2008 presidential campaign has had the largest online ad spend of all other U.S. presidential elections combined. With that said, we still have a long way to go to catch up with traditional media when it comes to total dollars spent.

As of September 2008, TNS Media Intelligence estimated that the candidates have spent an estimated $7 million in online advertising and estimated $300 million on TV since February of 2007. To put it in perspective, the 2008 Presidential election online ad spend was just over 2 percent of the traditional media spend for the same period of time, compared to an estimated 7 percent of total ad spending in the US. So on pure percentages, these presidential campaigns spent less per dollar than the average US spend.

More interesting than the unprecedented amount of dollars which are being spent, both on and offline, is how they are spending it and the wildly different strategies they are employing. With election day closing in and Obama dominating TV and Radio with his massive amounts of money, it seems the McCain campaign has doubled up on their online efforts , McCain’s display ad impressions jumped by over 250 percent, and his text-based search ads increased by over 40 percent in August and September.

In the last weeks before Nov 4th (election day), Obama is generating twice as many Search queries as McCain in the swing states, according to a recently released Yahoo report

Although Obama has the bulk of the search queries, its not all good for him. Many of the searches indicate that people still have a lot of questions about Barack Obama. For instance, according to the the recent Yahoo report and the Hitwise reports, for the four weeks ending on October 25, 2008 “barack obama birth certificate” was the fourth-most common search term driving traffic to BarackObama.com. “Barack Obama Antichrist” comes in at 26. Other top keywords driving traffic were “Obama Biography”, “Obama Grandmother”, “Obamas GunControl Platform”, “facts about Barack Obama”, “Where was Obama born”, “Barack Obama religion” and “Obama Barack Muslim”

Complete List of Obama Search Keywords

Complete List of Mccain Search Keywords

Percentage of Paid Search Traffic for Barack Obama

Percentage of Paid Search Traffic for John McCain

Graph by Spyfu Kombat

In contrast Obama’s keywords consisted mostly of variations of candidates’ names; they bid on very little issue related keywords. And even on the keywords Obama was bidding on, McCain was out performing him. In fact the McCain campaign was faster than the Obama when he announced Biden for VP. They had landing pages and campaigns ready to go instantly. When the Sarah Palin “Branchflower Report” was released, the McCain campaign immediately bought up all the related keywords like “Branchflower Report”, “troopergate”, “Palin report” and others. They were testing various creative and created custom landing pages w/ tons of information to refute the report, successfully diverting some of the traffic to the original stories which would have been more damaging. Not only that, but they turned it into a fund raising opportunity with a donation form right above the fold.

In fact, on Oct 31 while finishing this post, when I searched for Barack Obama on Google, position 1 and 2 were a John McCain site and GOP Party site with custom landing pages. Where was Obama’s PPC ad? In Position 5!

In non paid search organic traffic or SEO, Obama has a huge lead with an estimated 4.5 million unique visitors, more than double the estimated 2.5 million visitors to McCain’s site from search engines according to Nielsen Online and Compete.com.  Obama also has the Social Media space on lock. He dominates McCain in views, followers and interaction.

Obama Google Rankings for Top 250 Keywords

McCain Google Rankings for Top 250 Keywords

One thing that’s very obvious when looking at these numbers. The McCain campaign dominated Paid Search, and the Obama campaign out spent and strategized them everywhere else. According to WSJ/Neilson, in July the McCain campaign had 15 Million Search text ad impressions, as opposed to 1.2 Million for the Obama campaign. In contrast Obama campaign had 416.7 million image ad impressions, compared with McCain’s 16.5 million.

That means that McCain was out buying Obama in Paid Search by 22 to 1 search ads according to Nielson. (PDF Download). Obama’s image ad impressions fell sharply by nearly 50 percent, and his sponsored text-based ads were down nearly 20 percent as well.

John McCain’s campaign stepped up its online advertising in August, particularly in image-based impressions, which increased 254% month-over-month. Sponsored search links were also up for the McCain camp – by 43%.

With the campaigns finally coming to a close and with the clear differences in marketing strategies and availability of funds between the McCain and Obama campaigns, I wanted to dig a little deeper and take a look at how both the candidates had used Search Marketing and Social Media and if they had been effective.

As mentioned earlier, in paid search McCain has consistently outbid and out spend Obama. In addition, McCain’s strategy has had a much larger scope than Obama’s with McCain having close to 9 keywords for every 1 of Obama’s. The McCain campaign has executed a multiple pronged approach with their search campaign. First they were bidding on issue or peripheral type terms, like “gas prices”, “abortion”, “Iraq war”, “U.S. economy” and “housing crisis,” which take visitors to Web sites outlining Sen. McCain’s plan on those issues.

According to Nielsen Buzz Metrics and Technorati on straight blog mentions, Obama also has McCain beat but not by much. And in Mobile/SMS, Obama campaign has a full mobile website containing news, videos and ring tone and wallpaper downloads, where the McCain has neither and a non existent program compared to Obama’s.

Barackobama.com Search and Social Campaigns by the Numbers

Search Marketing

PR 8

Pages Indexed in Google for www.barackobama.com 3210

Pages Indexed in Google for barackobama.com 3,930,000

Links to barackobama.com on Google : 10,400

Sub Domains: 59

Percentage of #1 Rankings: 35 #1 out of 214 Pages Ranked

Keywords Driving Traffic: 5794 Keywords

Percentage of Keywords Paid Traffic: 20%

34 Keywords in 1st Position in Google

Highest CPC: $.78

Estimated Daily PPC Budget: $145.68 – $1.02k

Keywords Driving Paid Search Traffic : 50 – 173 Keywords

PPC Landing Pages: 17 Variations

Social Media

Facebook Supporters: 2,169,943

Facebook Pages: 12

Myspace Friends: 726,042

Twitter followers: 100,922
252 updates since April 2007, mostly focusing on live events and interaction

Videos on official Obama YouTube channel: 1589 Videos
YouTube Channel Views: 17,248,219
YouTube Subscribers: 102,522

Linkedin: 500+ Connections

Meetup: Members 14,504 Meetups 2,624

Ustream views: 809,261

Stumbleupon: 35 Stumbles and 201 Reviews of barackobama.com home page

Digg: Both my.barackobama.com and barackobama.com are listed in the top 1000 sites submitted to Digg.

Obama was the 17th most popular word in submission titles with 1157

my.barackobama.com Total Posts 27 Total Diggs 38683 Total Comments 6777
barackobama.com Total Posts 49 Total Diggs 716 Total Comments 2455

Flickr: 116,291 Images with “Barack Obama “ in text and 45,945 images tagged with “Barack Obama”

Analytics

Analytics Software: Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, Double click

Mobile

SMS: 2.9 Million Numbers

________________________________________________________________

JohnMccain.com Search and Social Campaigns by the Numbers

Search Marketing

PR 8

Pages Indexed in Google for www.johnmccain.com: 29,200

Pages Indexed in Google for johnmccain.com: 31,700

Links to johnmccain.com on Google: 8,820

Keywords Driving Total Search Traffic: 2767 Keywords

Percentage of Keywords Paid Traffic: 15%

49 Keywords in 1st Position in Google

Sub domains: 59

Highest CPC $1.46

50 – 924 Keywords

Est Daily Ad Budget: $552.48 to $5.24k

PPC Landing Pages: 50 Variations

Social Media

Facebook Supporters: 581,438

Myspace: 177,839 Friends

Youtube channel videos:
Youtube Subscribers: 25,698
Youtube Channel Views: 1,813,460

Twitter followers: 3,363
Updates 25 since Sept 2008 (Mostly attacks, negative or in defense)

Linkedin: 500+ Connections

Ustream Views: 196,966

Meetup: Members 1772 Meetups 246

Stumbleupon: 35 Stumbles of Home Page with reviews 81

Digg : JohnmcCain site was not in the top 300 sites submitted this year, but “McCain” was the 18th most popular word in title submissions with 1025.

Flickr: 3,254 images tagged with “John McCain” and 18,951 images with “John McCain” in text.

Analytics

Analytics: Web side story

All of the data for this post was compiled from various sources and tools. Below is a list of tools and sources for the data in my post. Many of the data might have changed from initial research. I know it is not exact, but it is indicative of the general trends. If you have any additional data to share , I would love to hear from you.Compete

Hitwise

Spyfu

Google Trends

Nielson/Buzz Metrics

Technoratti

Yahoo

Below are additional sites I used for quotes, data and graphs. Thank you to all the authors.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/technology/07hughes.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000649.html

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/obama-drawing-twice-as-many-searches-as-mccain

http://www.fec.gov/finance/disclosure/efile_search.shtml

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121988099541678063.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122524577359178845.html?mod=rss_whats_news_technology#project%3DNETPOLL08%26articleTabs%3Darticle

http://www.nationaljournal.com/njonline/no_20080808_6873.php

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/080809-172535

http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2008/08/mccain_v_obama_search_and_wiki.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/16/AR2008101603111.html

http://www.netratings.com/pr/pr_080908.pdf

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/search-findings-from-third-presidential.html

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20081030005210&newsLang=en

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/technology/07hughes.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

http://adon.typepad.com/pvmg/files/obama_mccain_socialmedia.pdf

pic thx to Anthony Cain

The post Barack Obama & John Mccain: A 2008 Presidential Election Search and Social Marketing Analysis appeared first on Subliminal Pixels.

This is a first in a series of guest posts by Yogini. Detailing how to use Social Media to raise awareness for charitable causes. In the coming posts I will go into much more specific detail on tips and techniques used to do this.

Things YOU can do to Raise Awareness RIGHT NOW

• Creating a blog with WordPress or Blogger.
  

• Registering with social networks like Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, Friendster and Livejournal.

• Registering and starting communities in sites like Ning and PBWiki.

• Registering for microblogging sites like Twitter, Jaiku and Plurk.
  

• Registering for video sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo.
  

• Registering for news  submissions sites like Digg, Mixx, Reddit.
  

• Creating Ads on Craigslist & other free online classifieds

• Joining and taking part in Online Forums and groups like Mixx, Google Groups and  Yahoo Groups.
  

Social Networks can be used as a private journals, blogs, discussion forums, content distribution and network site. They allow you customize your profile page, network and get the word out. A good suggestion, is start by adding people you already know to build up some momentum.  Make sure to use “keywords” related  to the missing person within the profile pages so that they start appearing in the search engine results pages like Google , Yahoo and MSN.

These are professional networking sites. Plaxo has an online contact management feature which  is very handy to share information and  links with your connections. Linkedin allows you to ask questions from professionals in any industry. You can ask questions to professionals in Non Profit sector or Marketing sector for ideas to get your message out. You would be surprised at how many useful answers you will get.

Using Video Sharing Websites to Find Missing Persons

• YouTube
• Vimeo

Using Online Picture Sharing Sites to Help Find Missing Persons

• Flickr
• Pikchur

• Twitter
• Plurk
• Identica
• Jaiku

Examples of active Missing Persons related social media sites

(Consider joining these if you have a missing loved one and need help!)

• Flickr Missing Persons Group
• Friendfeed Missing Persons Room
• Care2 Missing Persons Group
• Missing Children and Missing Persons Community
• Justice in Miami

• National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

North America Missing Persons Bureau – Listing of officially reported missing persons

Listing of officially reported missing persons

Listings for missing persons who are US military veterans.

Help Find the Missing – Listing of officially reported missing persons.

Social Media Video – Social Media Networking in Plain English

It is my sincere wish that this be able to help someone find their missing loved on. If this was useful, please let me know. I would love to hear from you.

Want to reprint this post?  Feel free to reprint headlines and excerpts with a link back to the post’s permalink. To reprint the entire post, contact me first.

The post Free Online Resources For Finding Missing Persons Using Social Media appeared first on Subliminal Pixels.