The Super Bowl is tomorrow and I`m looking forward to watching some good football as well as being entertained by great TV commercials. This year the average spend for the 30 second slots ranges about $3 million –  about the same figure as last year’s average. Just to grasp how much money is to be made, NBC earned over 200 million dollars in Super Bowl advertising  in 2009.

I am looking forward to some of the entertaining commercials from Budweiser and CareerBuilder – both of these companies have traditionally done well. Budweiser has even won a number of top spots in the USA Today Super Bowl ad meter survey in the last few years. What I am a bit disappointed by is how Pepsi shied away from the Super Bowl this year – a fact that Coke knows and will benefit from.

But my main interest lies in the Doritos “Crash the Super Bowl” contest. That’s the viral marketing campaign that the Doritos guys started back a few years ago. The campaign is simple: the public is invited to send in self-made Doritos commercials. The selected finalists get cash prizes and airtime during the Super Bowl. There is a bonus payout of a million dollars if the ad is rated best by the Super Bowl Ad meter.

The simplicity of the idea is the reason for its success. In 2009, the Doritos finalist Free Doritos was one of the best rated by the USA Today survey and created major social-buzz post game. So, I’m very eager to see who will win this year. My favorite finalist is called “Kids these days” (shown below).

The other 5 finalists are listed below.

• House Rules
• Samurai
• Underdog
• Casket
• Smack Out

What is the first image that comes to your mind when you hear the word ‘Finnish’? If you are not familiar with Finland, Finns or Finnish culture maybe you will see an idyllic snowed landscape with smoking chimney cottages and possibly some reindeers wandering around. On the other hand if you are close enough to this Nordic country surely some immaculate sauna, hi-tech mobile phone or salmon over rye bread images will fly in your mind. But what does Google Images think about keyword ‘Finnish’?

That is what @taalto wanted to show on an experiment that compares the results Google Images gives for ‘Finnish’ and ‘Swedish’ keywords. Images speak by themselves, while for the ‘Finnish’ search pictures showed are:

the results for ‘Swedish’ search are:

After this experiment an initiative was born from Finnish Advertising Agency W. Steinmann to try to revert these negative tendencies. They used a simple SEO technique of tagging uploaded photos -  whether the file name, alt-tag or surrounding text, with the keyword ‘Finnish’. Perhaps the simplicity of the technique is the reason why its often overlooked.

The Campaign for Finnish Image(s) aims at improving the quality of pictures going around the web, reflecting more realistically the modern life in Finland. Can a simple SEO practice make the difference on how Finland is perceived? At least through search engines eyes. This is a job not only for the Finnish authorities, but for anyone who lives or loves this magic land.

Over the past year, we at Target Info Labs have been working very hard to use different venues for online advertising, from Google Adwords, Yahoo, Bing, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Our success with Facebook has been immense bringing in more than hundreds of thousands of unique visitors from around the world to our clients websites. So it’s with great pleasure and pride to be recognized for our work by being featured in the exclusive Facebook Advertising whitepaper.  The whitepaper released this week, is the brain child of Julie Gallaher, CEO of Get on the Map Local Search Marketing.

The whitepaper is packed tight with great advice and success stories on Facebook Advertising.  Two of the prominent pundits mentioned in the paper include Lisa Making from Tyrrell Museum and Eric Hagegborn from Real Decoy. They both make a valid point that Facebook holds detailed user data which makes it easier to target specific groups.

Other heavy weights mentioned include the likes of Freddy Nager of Atomic Tango, who details a point-by-point guideline for creating a winning Facebook Ad.  Jen Dwyer of The Cute Kid recommends creating a Facebook fan page. Target Info Labs successful experience using Facebook for B2B lead generation is also mentioned in the paper.

Over all, this whitepaper offers great tidbits for businesses that want to use Facebook for advertising. The paper is available for free by request only. So please email us to receive a PDF copy of the whitepaper.

Other interesting work from us regarding Facebook Ads are:

• Facebook for Viral Marketing
• Facebook Ads 101
• Landing page analysis of Facebook Ads along with Google and LinkedIn

How do you make a good logo?

That’s a good question to ask – and it’s the million dollar question for the 2012 London Olympics committee to answer. But unlike them, your logo shouldn’t cost you a million bucks.  Here are few guidelines for you to consider as you design your logo.

What is a Logo?

• It’s a visual representation of your company
• It’s part of your branding engine
• It’s as unique as a face.

What it is not?

• It’s not the only marketing tool.
• It’s not cast in stone.  Logos change and develop over time.
• It’s not the silver bullet – a new logo won’t fix your sagging sales.

What elements make a good logo?

Let’s see what design elements need to go inside a successful logo. Other than the creativity aspect, a good logo must:

• be simple
• be easily recognizable
• reflect you

What are dos and dont’s of designing a winning logo?

Now that you have an idea about logo elements, how do you go around designing one? Here are a few do’s and don’ts about the design process:

• Do Brainstorm a list of “Ons“ and “Offs“ that your logo should have. These could be simple design elements as colors, text, symbols, emotions, and themes.
• Do research your industry to see what kind of logos your competitors and partners have. Figure out what elements you like in them and what you want to avoid.
• Do hire a professional graphic designer to help you create your logo. Make sure your designer agrees to various different composites and multiple iterations of the top designs.
• Do think of your entire corporate brand as you develop you logo. Don’t think of it as a “one-off-thing”, but as the tip of the iceberg of your brand.

These are the points your Logo should have, but now how about the things you should stay away from? Along with the obvious, I’ve listed a few below:

• Don’t DIY logos: Unless you have a graphic eye and are comfortable using professional graphics software, stay away from designing the final logo yourself.
• Don’t “Cookie Cutter” your logo: Use of stock photography or websites that provide a “logo maker” tool are a complete No-No.
• Don’t go cheap: Stay away from $50 designers that you can find on Google as sponsored links. These guys will create semi-professional logos at best.
• Don’t make your final logo with any raster images. It should be all vector based so that it can scale well.

Who do I hire and how much does a logo cost?

Use a reputable local design agency that you can interface with to reflect your company culture, mantra and personality. You can use a one-man show or a large design house. It really depends on your budget and the importance of your branding engine.  A good enough simple logo starts off at 500 dollars and can run up to tens of thousands with field tests and focus groups.

How do I know if my final design is a good Logo?

Answer this question by applying  the Logo Tattoo test. If your company was your adult child (your big baby), would you be comfortable if she were to get that logo as a tattoo? This answer tells you what you want to know.

I know that Social Media isn’t just a fad. I’ve implemented a Social Media strategy that makes my brand visible in the most popular networking places like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube… I even have a corporate blog. But now what? How can I find out my efforts count for something?

Social media measurement still seems to be a blurry topic for many, mainly because of a clear standard criteria lack that would apply for all media. Some weeks ago I attended a conference by Peter Granat, CEO & President of Cision Europe. Peter stated that the main rule applying to new media communication dynamics is: “It’s not anymore about trying to control the message, but the chatters”. Taking care of what these say about our brand on blog comments or social bookmarking sites.

I would dare to add a second rule: “Every one of us is still learning on the go, trying to figure out how to use Social Media to drive real business value”. I wondered which would be a good starting point for a structured measuring, I propose the following steps:

STEP 1: Define what are you measuring

• Corporate reputation
• Conversations
• Customer relationships?
• Return On Investment?

(In order one can really arrive to reasonable conclusions, comparing same nature values is fundamental)

STEP 2: Track behaviours/paths

• Website visitors vs. time spent on your site
• Blog to website click-throughs
• Blog visits

STEP 3: Go deep in Social Metrics

• Inbound links
• Blog comments
• Citations on social news sharing sites
• Direct brand mentions
• Brand-related links

STEP 4: Look for patterns

• In topics
• Through seasons
• Mainstream media vs. Social Media

Quality vs. Quantity

Another approach that I found interesting is quality against quantity pondering. Qualitative objectives like those related with corporate reputation or conversations relevancy require a particular measurement approach. Begin for asking closed questions to benchmark the brand:

• Within our sector/product category, are we part of conversations?
• Are we compared with our competitors?

Then to measure Social Media success, we may ask:

• Were we able to build better relationships with our key audiences?
• Are we participating in conversations where we previously weren’t?
• Is our brand keeping still running monologue or is it moving to a meaningful dialogue with customers?

Qualitative assessment requires more human analysis over the automated results to understand nuances and brand positioning across different social media platform, I found interesting how Buzz Logic specialises in this.

If you have in mind quantitative statistic-based metrics like traffic, sales or SEO ranking, there are some free tools that can help with them:

• Google Analytics and Feedburner are essential, free tools to help analyze your blog traffic, subscriber count, keyword optimization and additional trends.
• With Xinu you can find out how well your site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking and other site statistics.
• For ROI I found a good starting point in the Social Networking Media ROI Calculator.
• HubSpot is an inbound marketing software as a service (SaaS). HubSpot typically tracks keyword rankings; competitor’s web marketing presence, traffic analysis, leads and leads intelligence. But recently added social media tracking features to measure the impact of social media on your goals.
• During 2009, two social media monitoring tools emerged as leaders: Radian6 and Scout Labs. Offering some accurate data like buzz volumes or people’s sentiments (a.k.a. what people are loving or hating, in real-time) amongst other interesting features.

Conclusion

The important thing is, regardless of how you choose to measure engagement, to have a clear metric in mind before you begin. Without some sort of benchmark, it’s impossible to determine success. What is pretty clear is that in order Social Media measurement pays off, it requires considerable commitment, besides time and staff investment.

Read more from Delfin Vassallo at Hormone vs. Neuron

A landing page is a simplified version of your website that showcases a single product or service.  The web visitor comes to a landing page from an external site (i.e. Google.com) and is enticed to try or buy your offer. A good landing page only focuses on a single message with a goal. This goal can be a download, registration, trial or a buy action.

As you consider designing a landing page as part of your SEM program, remember the 4 main elements:

1. Consistent Look-n-feel: A Landing page must be a simplified version of your site, but still honor the “corporate theme.” This ensures your visitors have the same visual brand experience, but find it easy to read and understand your marketing message. Key design elements here are simplicity, creativity and logic.
2. Wow Factor: A good landing page has a creative graphics that grabs the visitor’s attention. Remember the 2-20 rule: you’ve two seconds to interest the visitor to spend another 20 seconds on your landing page.
3. Marketing Hook: Keep your marketing hook short and to the point. This is your 20 seconds to tell the visitor why he should care about what you offer. It’s important to tie your message with the sponsored ad that brought the visitor to the page. So if your Google ad said “Miniature Aluminum Widgets”, then make sure this is your landing page headline.
4. Call-to-Action: This is the most important part of the landing page, a visible call-to-action (such as download, registration, trail, purchase). Make sure this stands out on the page and is clearly visible as soon as the visitor lands on the page.

You can use tools to optimize your landing pages for best conversion. Some tools include Clicktale, Pagealizer or even Google Analytics. Also it’s a good idea to have many different versions of the landing page and use Google Website Optimizer to find the winning design.

Use our services to create and optimize your landing pages. Contact us for a free consultation.

I was looking at improving my web analytics software when I came across eTracker’s Web Analytics. I have followed this company for a few months now, but I never had a good close look at their application until recently.

As a company eTracker focuses on web-analytics tools. Its flagship product is called “Web Analytics” and is very similar to Google Analytics. It’s a SaaS tool that uses page tagging to generate visitor stats. It can offer path analysis, visitor segmentation, campaign tracking and a few other features. The price starts at 150 euros per month with various upgrade packages.

So in summary, eTracker’s Web analytics is a typical service for web visitor tracking and analysis. The only unique aspect of their offering is that they are fully compliant with the German data protection laws. This is clearly stated in their website as their Unique Selling Point, and perhaps the only one when you compare the rich feature sets of other web analytic tools in the market.

This would explain the new line of products eTracker has developed that build on top of web-analytics. They offer a product called Visitor Voice, which allows you to survey website visitors and poll their feedback in easy to understand pain points. What’s interesting is how you can combine quantifiable web-site stats (Web Analytics) with a qualitative survey (Visitor Voice) to do house cleaning on your website. This is further enhanced by correlating your data with industry benchmarks through a service called Web Controlling.

The company also markets their professional services packages considerably, including developing customizable web-analytics solutions. This approach could have merit, considering the number of new German based SaaS vendors. SaaS vendors can get a wealth of marketing data by analyzing their SaaS tool usage. It seems eTracker is well poised for growth in this respect – lets see what the future holds for them.

Other Web Analytics Software

• Clicktale
• Google Analytics
• Linkpulse
• Web Trends
• Woopra

I remember a time when I used to get weather alerts as text messages on my phone. Now, I get them as tweets while sitting at conferences. And this time, I got to read about our first snow in Montreal while listening to a keynotes session at Webcom. Ironically, the session was about the power of Twitter.

There were a number of interesting speakers and exhibits at the show. One interesting technology was from umen, showcased by Francois Gaumond. These guys offer a content management system that helps builds comprehensive websites without all the web-guru knowledge. I also had a chance to speak to Simon Rouillier from NVI solutions on project management/invoicing for social media marketing. His interview from an earlier part of the day is here on Youtube (in french.)

Sylvain Paillard from Guidyu showcased new technology that adds near-human intelligence into an e-commerce website. You can read more about Sylvan’s application on his blog. What I found interesting was Guidyu’s pricing model. They are leasing their software license each year with an 100% annual renewal. According to Sylvian, lager enterprises prefer this approach. Firstly because it lowers their initial investment since they don’t have to buy the software license outright (very similar to SaaS.) And secondly, the customer can run the application on their own server and data center (unlike SaaS.)

I also met up with IT guru Thierry Hubert from Darwin Development Corp. Thierry has *evolutionary* new technology that makes heads and tales out of the content on the web. While Thierry was eager to start of his demo, the lights at the show floor went out for a few seconds. I thought he wasn’t kidding… he does have some technology that’s going to get us out of the dark. His application can parse different web feeds and make sense out of the chaos by rendering Tag clouds at various topic levels. Thierry is selling this as an API as well as a SaaS service. More on his technology at www.darwindevcorp.com.

Finnland ist in Sachen Technologie an der absoluten Spitze. Es ist die Heimat vieler weltbekannter Technologiefirmen wie Nokia, Kone und Polar. Deshalb sollte es uns auch nicht wundern, dass Finnland vor einigen Tagen wieder eine technologische Innovation präsentierte: am 14. Oktober wurde Finnland zum ersten Land, das eine Breitband- Internetverbindung zum Grundrecht für die Einwohner machte.


Das Gesetz wird in zwei Phasen vom Ministerium für Transportwesen und Kommunikation eingeführt. Die erste Phase wird im nächsten Sommer in Kraft treten und garantiert allen Bürgern eine Verbindung von 1 Mbit. Bis zum Jahr 2015 soll die Verbindung auf 100 Mbit erweitert werden. Mehr dazu auf Silicon.

Was bedeutet dieser Schritt für den Rest der Welt? Wird dieses Recht bald in der gesamten EU gelten?

Die Europäische Kommission hat im März dieses Jahres schon einen Schritt in Richtung „Finnland“ gewagt. Sie hat sich bis 2010 das Ziel „Breitband für alle“ gesetzt. Hiermit will sie auch den „restlichen“ 30% der ländlichen EU- Bevölkerung einen Hochgeschwindigkeitszugang zum Internet ermöglichen.

The types of tweets you publish define your Twitter Channel. Your channel can be for company news, customer support, sales promotions or anything else.  Whatever it is, the channel must be consistent with your overall business objective. Companies with limited manpower tend to choose a single channel whereas larger companies have multiple channels. For example, Salesforce has at least 9 different official channels on Twitter.

Target Info Labs has developed a Twitter Channel Wizard that should help you decide on your Twitter strategy.

Strategy #1: Universal Branding
Most businesses use a universal branding approach on Twitter. The universal branding strategy is a direct extension of the company’s overall branding. It’s not a strategy developed exclusively for Twitter.  So if the company appears as fun and green in other mediums, then it appears the same on Twitter as well.  @Bestbuy and @Google have good universal branding channels. They tweet about products, company, industry, jobs, environment, etc.

• Pros: This channel strategy is good if you want to have one central corporate Twitter account. It’s easy to manage and requires medium level of operational effort.

• Cons: This channel is the jack of all trades but master of none.

Strategy #2: Thought Leadership
This channel strategy is extremely effective if you are a small, agile company with an industry pundit as part of your team. You can have your pundit blog and gain more currency in the social space. By adding a thought leadership Twitter channel, you further extend your guru’s persona. Some examples of Twitter thought leaders are @Zappos and @Pistachio.

• Pros: You set yourself as a trend setter. When you tweet people listen to you. You Twitter presence adds value to your brand image.
• Cons: Requires immense effort and a well maintained blog. You need commitment from the guru towards this project (easier said than done.)

Strategy #3: Demand Generation
Creating a specific channel for demand generation can be a good idea, especially if you’re in the B2C domain. If most of your tweets link back to your website, then you are building your demand channel. Sometimes these incoming links can to be informational tidbits (such as @BBCNews) or freebies/coupons (@DellOutlet.) Notice how these channels distinguish themselves from the main brand by adding a suffix of –News and –Outlet.

• Pros: Can be easily automated and managed by marketing team or even farmed out to agency. Builds up large follower-base.
• Cons: Creates non-sustainable social traffic. Once the freebies/promotions are gone, then so is your social network. Care must be taken in how you tweet or you risk being labeled a spam channel.

Strategy #4: Customer Support
Twitter has proven to be a practical tool in providing customer service and support. Factors that make Twitter successful as a customer support channel include: low cost of communication, ease of use, ubiquitous presence, and a large community base.  Some great support channels include @Firefox and @SouthWestAir. Alongside their corporate accounts, the CSRs work with individual twitter accounts. This way,  “personal support” is provided rather than from a single corporate account.

• Pros: One of the best ways to build up positive brand on social media.
• Cons: It’s labor- intensive. Requires a lot of training and team collaboration. Use of Twitter specific collaborative tools is a must.

These are just four of the basic types of channels. You can always have more than one channel, depending on your market, business and man power. If you don’t have a clear cut channel now, it’s about time you sit down and figure out what will give you best bang for your buck. Use the wizard above to get tips on what to do with your selected channel.