A 30-second commercial advertisement for Super Bowl XLVI is going for $3.5 million. Can you imagine what you as a marketer could do for your company if you had that kind of budget? If you can’t even fathom what you’d do with a marketing budget that big (and just think, this is just one of many campaigns they’re running this year!), we’ve come up with some ideas for how you can better spend that chunk of change. And if you’re thinking you’d spend it on a commercial during the Super Bowl, well, maybe these ideas will give you some perspective on just how far $3.5 million can go in the marketing world.

25 Ways to Spend the $3.5 Million Budget of a Super Bowl XLVI Commercial

1.) Buy 1,458 years of HubSpot Basic Inbound Marketing Software. Tweet This!

2.) Direct mail the entire country of Sweden. Tweet This!

3.) Hire someone to blog for you for the next 70 years. Tweet This!

4.) Put up a billboard along the highway from Boston to D.C. every one mile. Tweet This!

5.) Purchase 2,333 years of Salesforce Enterprise CRM. Tweet This!

6.) Buy inbound links from enough web pages to fill the Oxford English Dictionary 16 times. Tweet This!

7.) Use PPC to buy a search presence for 2,333,333 keywords after Google dings you for purchasing links. Tweet This!

8.) Give 2,060 employees their own personal version of the entire Adobe Creative Suite. Tweet This!

9.) Send those 2,060 employees to classes so they know how to use the entire Adobe Creative Suite. Tweet This!

10.) Buy the email list of the entire population of Chile and SPAM them; try to do it before your IP is blacklisted. Tweet This!

11.) Repair your company’s spamtastic image by plastering your company logo and tagline across 35,000 park benches. Tweet This!

12.) Hire Al Gore to be your company’s celebrity spokesperson for a full 24-hour day. Tweet This!

13.) Let everyone know Al Gore is your spokesperson by, ironically, printing enough flyers to stick to every single household door in the United Kingdom. Take that, environment. Tweet This!

14.) Buy the stamps to send out your 2012 holiday cards. Let’s hope you have 7,777,777 customers. Tweet This!

15.) Purchase about 35,000 shares of Facebook after it IPOs. Tweet This!

16.) Keep a web designer on call 24 hours a day for 4 years to change your website whenever you want. Tweet This!

17.) Commission enough content from the Zerys Content Marketplace to post a new blog to your website every hour of every day for the next 26 years. Tweet This!

18.) Hire the entire graduating class of Emerson College’s Masters of Marketing program to work in your department. Tweet This!

19.) Or, if you’re happy with your current team, you could send 23 of them to get their MBAs. Tweet This!

20.) You should probably also buy them all brand new MacBook Airs for their studies; you’ll have enough money left over to hoard 3,477 for yourself. What? Marketers love Apple products! Tweet This!

21.) Hire Lady Gaga to follow your CMO around all day, singing “Happy Birthday” on repeat, every year for the next 145 years. Tweet This!

22.) Develop 542 mobile apps. Because the other 541 just weren’t good enough. Tweet This!

23.) Purchase enough color toner to print brochures that can span the Atlantic Ocean from Dublin to Boston. And then back again. Tweet This!

24.) Pay to rank for the rarely searched keyword phrase, “best company in the world” for 11,666 years. Tweet This!

25.) Air 17 regular commercials on network television any other time of the year. Tweet This!

Now just think of what you could do with the additional $1-2 million you’d spend actually producing the commercial…

If you had $3.5+ million to spend on marketing, how would you use the money?

Image credit: Images_of_Money

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25 Things You Could Buy With a Super Bowl Ad Budget is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

Podcast topics include:

• Making the Most of a Mobile Moment (with Tim Hayden of 44Doors)
• Sally Hogshead and the $500 Cup of Coffee (with author Sally Hogshead)
• Have You Killed an Innovation Today? (with author and professor David Owen)
• Calculating the ROI of Social Media (with guest Nichole Kelly)
• Unleashing Creativity, One Team at a Time (with author Alicia Adams)
• Why Humor Belongs in Marketing (with guest Tim Washer)

Visit the Marketing Smarts podcast page for a complete list of our info-packed episodes.

Free Friday: Marketing Smarts Podcasts is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

As a society, how we watch, read, and consume information is fundamentally changing. News, information, and entertainment will never go back to “the way it was,” and this change will have a powerful impact on all aspects of inbound and outbound marketing. In 2012, marketing is publishing, so let’s learn how to be a great publisher in an industry under constant disruption.

This week, some of the most intense shots yet were fired in the battle for the eyes and mind of the world. Stop. Listen for a second. Do you hear the cries and confusion? Those are the cries of the publishing and broadcast executives.

As a marketer, you should be cheering.

Amazon’s Unwavering Assault on the Publishing Industry

Brick and mortar bookseller Barnes and Noble announced this week that it would no longer stock books published by the digital book juggernaut, Amazon.com. “What’s that?” you ask? “Amazon publishes books? But I thought they only sold them.” That’s right — Amazon is a book distributor AND publisher.

In the fourth quarter of 2011, Amazon said it sold millions of Kindle electronic reading devices, but the business still came in a billion dollars in revenue below Wall Street expectations.

But Amazon doesn’t care.

As reported by the New York Times, Amazon published 122 books in the fall of 2011. This number is seemingly insignificant when compared to the total number of books published by all publishers during the same time period. But what doesn’t matter, because a secret about the publishing industry is that it makes most of its money from a small group of best-selling books and authors. Amazon understands this and seems willing to lose money in order to take the best and brightest writers away from traditional publishing houses. And with more than $6 billion in the bank, it can.

Barnes and Noble, citing the lack of ability to sell ebooks from Amazon’s published works, has decided to return the favor by not selling the print versions of those Amazon-published books in its stores. This marks a continued battle for control over distributing the words of the world.

The Third Wave of Media

Salar Kamangar, CEO of YouTube, believes that we are in a third wave of media. At an event in California this week Kamangar said, “The first wave was the broadcast networks. The second wave was cable networks. Now, it’s about giving people exactly what they want to watch today.”

Mashable reports that YouTube has invested more than $100 million into premium content channels around niche topics including food, fashion, pets, and fitness, making it clear that YouTube is willing to spend money to be a major player in this third wave of media. This week, YouTube hired Bruce Seidel, who oversaw shows on the Food Network and Cooking Channel, to lead programming for YouTube’s new food-focused channel. According to a New York Times article, Seidel hopes to “discover new stars and galvanize the niches that are driving the internet food conversation.”

User Experience and the Third Wave of Media

Since the early beginning of the internet, pundits have discussed the rise of internet-based entertainment, but the fact of the matter is that online video has never really made it into the living room. One core barrier that is too frequently ignored is the user experience of watching online video compared to watching television. People watch television to relax, and having to click a new video to watch on YouTube every three minutes is not relaxing. Plus, you have the added anxiety that, for many people, the computer equals a device, and devices subsequently mean stress. 

It is the deficiency of user experience that third wave media companies have to overcome in order to infiltrate the living room. But Kamangar, who plans to launch 100 niche content channels on YouTube this year, says, “The idea is that you’ll subscribe to a channel, and you’ll go and just keep watching.”

Niche AND Quality

The knock against many ebooks and online video shows is quality. The fact of the matter is that because anyone with a computer or video camera can create an ebook or online show, the quality and production value in many cases is much lower than that of traditional publishing houses and cable networks. That’s why Amazon is signing top-quality authors and YouTube is hiring some of the best minds in cable programming. Both of these companies understand that, to take over the living room, the core content has to be remarkable.

The idea of remarkable content isn’t anything new. However, content has the potential to become even more remarkable when it is applied to a niche. And that niche factor is the leverage third wave media companies have over the first and second wave media companies. Imagine if 100 new cable networks launched this year to cover niche topics. It simply wouldn’t happen. Online video providers and ebook authors’ best shot at disruption comes from a laser focus on increasing content quality standards while still serving and representing niche communities currently underserved by cable networks.

Change Is Hard: AKA Why This Hasn’t Already Happened

The fact that the world is constantly changing isn’t news to any of us. We write it off as a fact of life. Despite this constant change, we are at a paradox. Change is easy to hate, especially major disruption to our daily routines and habits. And it’s not that we as people or as a society don’t want to change. It’s the simple fact that change is exhausting.

Chip and Dan Heath explain this idea perfectly in their book, Switch. The Heath brothers write: “Change is hard because people wear themselves out. And that’s the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.”

The way we read, watch, and consume information is changing at the pace of a rapid turtle. This means that you won’t blink and suddenly live in a world where no publishers exist, but every couple of months, a stack of small changes starts to become noticeable, and the media world becomes slightly different. Before you know it, a few years have passed, and the media world is completely different.

Marketing in a Transitional Media World

It’s time to find your niche. The way information is distributed is gradually yet radically changing around us, which means you can’t wake up years from now and decide that it’s time to change. It’d be too late. Instead, you need to take action now to be an active part of this transitional media world.

Start executing on these four action items today to not only survive, but also succeed in the next generation of media.

1. Find Your Niche – Your niche isn’t the product you sell. Rather, your niche is the subject matter that is of greatest interest to your prospective customers. If you sell supplies to auto body shop owners, then your niche is content about operating a successful auto body shop in every facet of the business, even those for which you don’t have products to sell.

2. Balance Quality and Velocity of Content – The challenge of content in the online media landscape is that content has to be high quality enough to stand out, but also be agile enough not to be out of date the moment it’s published. The only real way to know what a good quality/velocity balance is for your business is to test different options to understand what works the best for your niche. You can do this by changing the frequency in which you publish blog posts and other content. Do you get more leads and engagement when publish a blog post every day, or once a week? Do blog posts that you spend more time polishing and improving generate more traffic and leads than other posts? These are the elements to test as part of your marketing content. 

3. Have a Personality – Don’t be bland. Look at the text or videos that capture your attention. They probably have a clear point of view and an interesting tone. Don’t be afraid to be fun, sarcastic, edgy, or any other tone that aligns with your brand and products.

4. Start Planning Beyond the Desktop Computer Screen – For most of us, we still think of a computer as the device that sits on our desk with a big screen that isn’t touch-sensitive. But from the Kindle, Nook, and iPads to iPhone and Andriod smartphones, the definition of a computer has changed. Yes, these changing devices will impact your marketing content. And it isn’t just about their size, but it’s also that they all have one key element in common: touch. Start thinking about what your content looks like in a world without mice (the computer kind). It will have a huge impact on how we design our content and collect information from our leads.

Success of digital-only magazines like the Daily demonstrate that consumers are willing to not only consume but also pay for touchable content that is personalized for their devices. Survey your target audience, and understand what devices they are using to consume information. Then make sure your content works well on the most popular devices.

Change is here.

Image Credit: Ariane Middel

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How the Third Wave of Media Is Transforming Marketing Content is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

When it comes to converting your leads into sales, lead management is a crucial and powerful tool. Most of your leads will not be ready to engage with a salesperson after their first conversion, but are potentially qualified and require further nurturing and development.

Lead management gives you the tools you need to filter out your less-qualified leads and provide them with educational content through targeted lead nurturing campaigns, which will bring them closer to being ready for that sales call.

However, this is only one of many functions of lead management, which can actually benefit your marketing and sales teams in different ways. Here are seven benefits of implementing really great lead management.

1. You can determine when your leads are sales-ready. Lead scoring, which is part of good lead management, allows you to gauge your leads’ potential interest in your product or service based on factors that are important to your business, such as job titles, what forms they’ve filled out, or other criteria that is important to you. You should work with your sales team and marketing analytics to decide upon the criteria that you will use to score your leads. As you continue executing your lead management strategies, you can collect information to help you further optimize your lead scoring schema. You can compare your leads’ scores against that of your ideal customer or your sales team’s top-quality leads to help you understand when your leads are ready to be handed over to your sales team.

2. You don’t lose your unqualified leads. About 50% of B2B sales leads are not ready to buy after their first conversion, according to a Gleanster survey. Instead of wasting your sales team’s valuable time or just tossing these leads out the window altogether, you should place them in lead nurturing campaigns. By using well-timed campaigns with matching content to their original interest, you can guide your leads along the path from unqualified to qualified or determine who is permanently unqualified. Sounds a lot better than losing out on half the ROI of your lead generation efforts, doesn’t it?

3. Your sales team can operate more efficiently. Lead intelligence tools allow you to provide your sales team with various important and highly useful pieces of information, such as the level of activity of a lead, which pages of your website they have visited, what marketing emails they have received, and more. Lead scoring is another helpful tool for allowing your salespeople to prioritize their calls based on which leads are the most sales-ready (or “warmest”). Thus, effective lead management allows your sales team to work more efficiently and convert more leads to customers in less time.

4. You can position yourself as a thought leader in the industry. The main idea behind lead nurturing is that you are providing content to your unqualified leads to educate them further about your field, your company, and/or your product or service. By sharing this information with leads to help them with their decisions, especially before they ask for it, you make it more likely that they will view you as an authority in your industry. It is also likely that they will share your content with others, thereby spreading the word about your company and your offers.

5. You can get a better understanding of your leads’ needs. Lead intelligence tools can help you determine your leads’ behavior patterns on a higher level. They’ll show you which offers your leads downloaded, in what order they downloaded them, which pages of your site they visited, how many times they visited each, and so on. The trends you find in this data can be used to inform your content strategy (e.g. 23% of our highest quality leads downloaded this ebook) as well as your lead nurturing campaigns (e.g. the email send for this webinar was most effective for leads who had downloaded that whitepaper).

6. You can establish trust by building relationships with your leads. By understanding your leads’ behavior and needs, and using this with closely targeted lead nurturing campaigns, you show your leads that you know what they are looking for—and you’re ready to help them. This not only educates them about the specific topic or product in which they are interested, but also builds more trust, thereby making them more likely to convert to customers.

7. You can better measure your marketing and sales ROI. Lead management gives you the tools to track and analyze your lead metrics throughout the entire sales cycle. Even after your leads have been handed off to your sales team, you can continue to refine, score, and evaluate as needed. You should be able to identify what works (and what doesn’t work) for your business and your lead management process, and optimize accordingly to yield the highest possible ROI.

Lead management isn’t always easy. The deep understanding of your leads and their needs is not something that anyone develops before diving into lead management. Creating and refining your strategy takes time, but you will end up with a seamless lead management process that will provide you with more qualified leads in less work for your sales organization.

Sarah Goliger is an inbound marketer at HubSpot, a marketing software company based in Cambridge, MA that makes inbound marketing and lead management software.

7 Reasons You Need to Love Lead Management is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

The trend in Social Media Manager salaries is interesting. Both December and January are showing some uptrend and at this rate Social Media Manager salaries might even meet the averages of Online and Digital Marketing Managers .   

Web Developer salaries are heavily concentrated in the £21k to £31k range and the comparison with Developers is interesting..(where there is a more “classic” distribution pattern). Of course it’s not just seniority, knowledge and experience that infuence salary;  geography plays a part as well, especially in London. Given however the virtual nature of this type of work , much of it can be physically carried out in lower cost parts of the country even if the ultimate customer is London based. So whether you are a buyer, employee or contractor we hope the report gives you at least some idea of the range of salaries on offer UK wide.

For more detailed analysis of the distribution of salaries for each job title ( December data) check our average web salaries page. (where you will also find an explanation of how the data is gathered)

Web Jobs Salary Trends UK update Jan 2012 is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

Email is a powerful marketing channel, but it’s also one that presents many questions and difficulties. In its 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, MarketingSherpa surveyed 2,735 companies and asked them to rank the significance of 12 common email marketing challenges. In this blog post, we will focus on the top five challenges and suggest some ideas through which you can address these issues.

The best inbound marketers like to amass valuable data across their different channels. For instance, they might like to see the possible relationships between landing pages and emails or track the sales process of an email conversion. In addition to the obvious reporting benefits such integrations provide, they also open the door to a much more enjoyable experience for email subscribers.

Just think about it: if you could bridge the gap between email marketing performance and social media activities, landing page conversions, or new customer acquisitions, you are that much closer to improving your sales funnel and delivering content that your community loves.

‘Other data,’ including form submissions and activities on site, can point you to the resources your recipients are truly interested in. In that way, you have a clear understanding of how to further engage them through careful targeting and segmentation.

Solution: Integrate Your Data Systems

In order to integrate your email marketing with your other data systems, you need to use marketing software that allows for that integration to take place. In fact, integration is the foundation on which HubSpot’s software was built as it connects SEO, blogging, social media, lead management, and reporting with email marketing and lead nurturing.

Combining your different marketing databases allows for clear segmentation and the ability to better target your customers and prospects with relevant email messages. Once you have access to an integrated marketing system, keep your buyer persona in mind and focus on the opportunity to target the right audience with the right message.

The more targeted your email campaigns, the more content you’ll need. The key to promoting relevant content in email is to provide an offer that is connected to the initial request. What action have your contacts taken on (or even off) your website? Offer them content that fits with their intent and their needs.

Deliverability rate is the percentage of email messages delivered to your recipients’ inboxes
versus the total number of messages sent. It tells you how many of the emails bounced back,
and it’s a sure sign of inactivity. The two factors that influence deliverability rate are soft bounces and hard bounces. The soft bounce is temporary and occurs when an email server rejects an incoming message (for instance, when your recipients’ inboxes are full). A hard bounce, on the other hand, is less benign and represents a permanent error to deliver an email. This generally occurs when the addresses you send to are bad or don’t exist.

A low deliverability rate might get you blocked by ISPs (internet service providers). If your list is full of inactive emails, you don’t really know what your complaint rate is. Sure, you probably look at the total complaints over total list size, but ISPs are actually registering the total number of complaints over the number of active email users.

In addition, ISPs can mark abandoned email addresses as spam traps. So even if you have acquired emails legitimately, the abandoned addresses may have turned into spam traps. Aside from all the ISP problems, low deliverability rate also means you are wasting money sending messages to nonexistent addresses.

Solution: Practice Good Email Hygiene

Start by cleaning up your email list by removing the unengaged addresses. (You can identify these addresses with metrics such as opens, clicks, or website activity.) If you have a really serious problem with deliverability, you might want to redefine your opt-in process to prevent invalid emails from getting on your list. Either ask people to enter their email twice or experiment with double opt-in. Lastly, make sure your recipients have an opportunity to update their email addresses. Invite them to your preference center from every email you send. That might also help you with segmentation and achieving higher engagement overall.

In MarketingSherpa’s survey, marketing professionals shared that their third most serious challenge in respect to email marketing is growing and retaining subscribers. No wonder! Increasing the size of your email list and keeping your contacts engaged in your messages is no easy task. In fact, according to MarketingSherpa, the average email list depreciates by 25% every year.

Unfortunately, companies often battle this problem by purchasing lists. This practice will surely get you into trouble: it might add invalid addresses to your list, and thus, pollute your entire database. Even if the addresses you acquired are valid, the new recipients will most likely not be interested in your content and either unsubscribe or not engage with your emails altogether.

To retain subscribers, a lot of companies also send fewer emails, thinking that the communication frequency might in some way define engagement. A few emails means they are more special, right? Wrong. Frequency of emailing, as we have established in our Science of Email Marketing research, doesn’t necessarily negatively impact subscriber retention.

Solution: Earn Your Email Subscribers

Don’t purchase email lists; instead, earn your subscribers. Be clear to your target audience about what they will get out of subscribing to your emails. Give them a clear description of what the value proposition is. For example, will your emails offer: (1) tips and tools on how to run their business more efficiently, (2) product updates from your company, or (3) special offers via email? Your audience will want to know “why” they should subscribe before they decide to clutter their inbox with even more emails.

Are you concerned that you are emailing your subscribers too often? Give this thought a break and instead ask yourself if you are emailing the right people with the right message. In order to retain your email subscribers, you’ll need to provide them with ongoing value that is targeted to their needs. Make sure you are segmenting based on knowledge you have about your recipients.

Don’t limit your email testing to subject lines. Embrace testing of various elements in your email marketing efforts to optimize email performance. For instance, you can do A/B testing of the landing pages you’re promoting in your emails.

Achieving measurable ROI (return on investment) is another challenge that marketing professionals face in the land of email marketing. It’s difficult for them to connect the dots between the messages they send out to prospective customers and the moment when these subscribers get further engaged and turn into customers.

Interestingly enough, this problem is tightly connected to challenge number one — integrating email marketing with other data systems. When your marketing channels are not speaking to one another, it’s hard to identify how they affect conversions. For instance, you might see that your email blast got a 3.4% click-through rate (CTR), but can you also see if that communication contributed to generating new leads? What is more, do you see if it resulted in any new customers?

Solution: Closed-Loop Marketing

The solution to achieving measurable ROI from your email marketing campaigns is to practice closed-loop marketing. Follow a contact from the point of visiting your website through further engagement (viewing other web pages, downloading resources, clicking on your emails), to her final conversion into a customer. Implementing closed-loop marketing empowers you to track leads from their initial channel through a first conversion all the way to becoming customers. Such intelligence, in turn, enables you to identify your most powerful marketing channels and assign clear value to each of them. In this way, you will be able to measure the ROI not only of your emails, but also of your other efforts, which might include social media marketing and blogging.

Your email campaigns should only be a part of your holistic marketing approach. The real power comes from achieving a strong marketing mix. Email cannot be truly as fruitful just by itself; rather, it should also strengthen your other initiatives, just like you shouldn’t use social media in a vacuum, only rely on blogging, or trust that search engine optimization is enough to meet your goals. This, however, seems to be a challenge for marketers. How do you optimize your sales and marketing funnel with emails?

Most marketing professionals are accustomed to sending one-time email blasts that are not necessarily related to the actions of their email subscribers, their interests, or needs. Such a practice doesn’t help push leads down the sales funnel, and it can actually alienate them.

Solution: Nurture Your Leads

Lead nurturing sometimes goes by other names: marketing automation, drip marketing, auto-responders, etc. Simply put, lead nurturing is a system that allows you to send an automated series of emails to an early stage lead in order to better qualify them before handing them over to your sales team.

If it typically takes your leads a month to make a purchasing decision, then make sure you’re spreading out your communications to keep them engaged throughout the month. By taking this approach, you save your sales organization time because you educate and qualify the lead overtime.

Among some of the key benefits of lead nurturing is that it enables marketers to establish contact with their fresh leads fast and stay top of mind for potential, and even current, customers. In comparison to email marketing, lead nurturing is also relatively easy to set up because it is automated and doesn’t need a ton of maintenance over time.

What are some of your top email marketing challenges? Do you have any to add to this list?

This blog post is an excerpt from the ebook Introduction to Email Marketing. To gain a better foundation on executing and measuring successful email marketing, download your free copy of the ebook.

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How to Tackle Your 5 Toughest Email Marketing Challenges is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

Facebook in Numbers: Prior to the IPO

The big news in social media and business this week is Facebook’s new IPO.  This infographic from statista and creative commons shares some very interesting figures about Facebook, before it goes public.

Highlights include:

• In 2012 Facebook is expected to reach: 90% of U.S. Social Network Users & 60% of Internet Users.
• Assuming a valuation of $100 billion, Facebook would be work 67 to 100x’s it’s estimated 2011 net income.

The Social Media Buzz

“How to Harmonize Google+ With Your Other Social Platforms”  Search Plus has placed even more importance on blending your online marketing strategy in order to adhere to the social, personal, and personalized search algorithm.  This post offers some great tips on harmonizing Google+ with your current platforms.  Via Search Engine Watch.

“StumbleUpon Kills Direct Links, iFrames Everything”  With over 20 million users StumbleUpon may be getting some heat for their recent updates.  One particular change to be aware of is the removal of all direct links which point back to content sources from within the platform.  If you are a Stumbler I strongly recommend reading this article.  Via Search Engine Land.

“The Social Enterprise: Your Path to Job Security”  While it is not surprising that social networking technologies will receive increased budgets this year it is important to understand the shift that many industries are taking.  Social media has become a recognized method in which your customers and potential customers will consume information about your services.  Social media must be used a s tool to educate, communicate, and engage on an ongoing basis.  Via InformationWeek.

Your Brand & Your Customers

“Inside the mind of your buyers”  Each of your customers has something that makes them different.  It may be their specific pain points or their budget restrictions.  This article provides 6 helpful tips on how to close a sale by focusing on what motivates your customers to buy.  Via Entrepreneur.

“The big tip for 2012: Convergence is here”  The need for a multichannel strategy has been around for awhile.  However, this year marketers will be focusing more and more on the convergence of those strategies.  Some of the trends we are seeing these days are popular television shows encouraging viewers to interact via their mobile device or iPad in real time.  Since we are finding that many customers are multi-tasking the 4 tips within this article provide guidance on dealing with convergence and what steps you should take to keep up with a rapidly evolving means of communication.  Via Econsultancy.

“3 key features of Twitter brand pages”  This piece takes a deeper look at the changes rolled out by Twitter late last year and the potential impact for brands.  It covers changes such as the expanded header area, featured Tweets, and separating your mentions from replies.  Definitely worth taking a look.  Via Ragan.

Working as a Team to Bring You the News – TopRank

Alexis Hall – Pinterest Driving More Referral Traffic Than Google+
Reports are showing Pinterest is now driving more search referrals than Google+ and YouTube.  This post, from Search Engine Watch, explores the question if the online pin board can compete with Facebook and Twitter, featuring an interesting infographic from Monetate.  Via Search Engine Watch.

Brian Larson – Super Bowl Viewers Will Check Phones 10 Times During the Game
Sometimes it takes just the right stat or factoid to drive a point home. Mobile’s growth cannot be denied by any rational person, but how about this stat: super bowl viewers will check their smart phones 10 times during the game. That’s right, the most compelling and entertaining football game of the year, which is augmented by million dollar commercials and halftime performances from Grammy award winning artists, can’t keep viewers from the powerful pull of mobile. The real question isn’t whether you should engage in mobile marketing, but rather are you positioned to be on their screen when they check their phone one of those 10 times?  Via Mashable.

Emily Conley – Inside Facebook’s S-1 Filing: 845 Million Users, $3.7 Billion In Revenues In 2011
On Wednesday, Feb. 1st Facebook filed its S1 registration (which companies use to register securities with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission).  The filing makes public certain financial and user data, including:

• 2011 net income: $1 billion (up from $606 million in 2010)
• 2011 revenue: $3.7 billion (up from 1.97 billion in 2010)
• 2011 monthly users: 845 million (roughly 50% active on a daily basis)
• 2011 average daily photo uploads: 250 million

This article also delves into shareholder information and background on the company’s ‘hacker way’ culture centered on having a positive impact on the world. Some very interesting insights into this social media giant’s success!  Via Fast Company.

Ken Horst – 5 Ways to Brand Your New YouTube Profile
YouTube has provided users with a number of smart ways to get more out the Brand/Profile page.  Some of the great updates are the ability to add multiple custom URLs in an area that is clearly visible to users and the ability to create your own custom overly ad for your videos.  You can also prevent other ads from showing up on your videos.  Via Social Media Examiner.

Time to Weigh In:  Have you taken any steps to integrate Google+ with your other platforms?  If so what have you done that has worked?  When trying to get into the mindset of your potential customers, what is the most important thing you should know?

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Online Marketing News: Facebook IPO, Harmonize with Google+, Pinterest Dominates Traffic | http://www.toprankblog.com

Online Marketing News: Facebook IPO, Harmonize with Google+, Pinterest Dominates Traffic is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

I’m sitting here next to an empty pan of mini red velvet donuts, and all I want to do is find another recipe to bake this weekend. No, my first stop won’t be the Food Network, Gourmet, or Cooking Light. What I am dying to do is head over to my new obsession — Pinterest – to discover the next pastry to tackle. Currently, I’m using Pinterest to save links to just about everything: recipes I love, clothes I want to buy, or furniture I want to furnish my house with someday. As a 25-year-old graduate student, someday is a little farther off than I’d like, but it’s best to be prepared. 

Since you already know how to use Pinterest for marketing, now you’re probably craving some inspirational real-life examples of brands using it effectively. Many businesses have recently discovered that, not only is Pinterest another way to engage with fans and customers without spending advertising dollars, but it’s also a great way to impact purchases, especially when it comes to impulse buying. Data from Monetate shows that referral traffic from Pinterest to the websites of five specialty apparel retailers jumped 389% from July-December 2011.

Based on this data, it’s not surprising that many businesses-focused early adopters have been lifestyle brands like home goods retailer West Elm and Real Simple Magazine. However, tech brands like Mashable and The Next Web, as well as design network Behance have quickly seen the benefits, too. For these brands, Pinterest’s knack for allowing an interesting, visual way of categorizing information is likely the draw. So whether your brand is based on fashion or you’re just trying to show your followers what your brand is all about, Pinterest offers a great medium connect with your audience. And the brands that have been most successful aren’t just enabling users to “pin” their content; rather, they’re getting in on the pinning themselves.

While Pinterest is still very young and its true ROI remains to be seen, here are 7 examples of brands who are already using Pinterest the right way: to engage fans in a meaningful way that gets them to react, share, and even convert!

Chobani

You may wonder why anyone would want to follow a Greek yogurt brand, but like Facebook and Twitter, it’s all about the content you share, not necessarily what you sell. 

What They’re Doing Right:

Chobani’s Pinterest account doesn’t just feature its different yogurt types, but it also shares recipes of how users can use its products differently. Chobani also has a featured board called “Nothing but Good,” the company’s tagline, which only showcases fun and funny pictures that go along with its brand image; there’s no yogurt to be seen. In this way, Chobani is embracing the main goal of Pinterest — to focus on the concept of a person’s lifestyle and encouraging users to share their tastes and interests with others and discover those of likeminded people. In other words, by promoting the lifestyle its products promote, Chobani is using its Pinterest account to enable people to learn more about its brand beyond just its signature products.

Oreck

Yes, the vacuum cleaner brand. Sure, Oreck may be a more boring, industrial-type product (not a brand you would typically think of following on a social media site), but then again, you haven’t see how clean its floors are.

What They’re Doing Right:

On its Pinterest page, Oreck has taken its industrial cleaning product and made you forget that a vacuum cleaner brand is behind the pinboards you’re looking at. For example, Oreck has a board just to feature pictures of beautiful flooring styles and layouts. The images are so beautiful, and it reminds viewers about the fact that they also have to clean them every once in a while. My favorite Oreck board, however, is its board devoted to ‘Furry Friends.’ It subtly points out one type of cleaning job its products help take care of without hitting you over the head with it. After all, we’re all well aware that the hairy aftermath of your favorite pets isn’t always the easiest thing to clean.

Mashable

Mashable is the largest independent news source dedicated to covering digital culture, social media, and technology. Pinterest currently has a pretty girly vibe, considering that 54-70% of it user base is female. But as this tech brand is proving, the overwhelmingly estrogen-charged demographic of this social network could change quickly.

What They’re Doing Right:

Mashable is preparing to be ahead of the curve for when the male population finally gets on board with Pinterest. Mashable’s Pinterest account showcases the gadgets and infographics the news source is well known for reporting on, taking its immense amount of data and information and making it more visual and shareable. Even if you’re a more data-driven company, that doesn’t mean you don’t have something interesting to share.

Etsy

This online shopping website, with 43,000+ followers, is one of the biggest I’ve seen. Beware: I’ve seen items I’ve pinned for a later purchase quickly disappear before my very eyes.   

What They’re Doing Right:

As a retailer of homemade and vintage goods, Etsy’s pinboards really take to heart what its brand stands for. You can of course connect to the thousands of items for sale on its ecommerce site, but Etsy’s account also shows you how you can make your own products and how to put their products to work in your daily life, which again, emphasizes the lifestyle philosophy that Pinterest promotes. Not sure what to buy your love for Valentine’s Day? Don’t worry, Etsy has all its pins organized to give you tons of ideas. In other words, giving your customers new ideas for how they can use your products will give them more reasons and incentives to buy from you. When using Pinterest, think outside the box of how you’d typically use social networks to market your products and services.

Drake University

Drake is one of the few universities jumping on the Pinterest bandwagon, and at the same time, they’re doing an unbelievably awesome job. I sort of wish my beloved Wisconsin Badgers would jump on ‘board,’ too (hehe).

What They’re Doing Right:

Drake University showcases items its student population might actually be interested in (sorry, I don’t exactly mean different kinds of beer bongs). Drake has its boards organized by clothing that matches the school’s colors, room décor perfect for the dorm, what kinds of food to make when you run out of “Bulldog Bucks,” study inspirations, fan experiences, and even a board completely devoted to its bulldog mascot. Obviously, Drake is following Pinterest’ lifestyle credo, making its boards specifically about the school and student experience. If you are a potential student, you can learn everything you need to know about the school with just a few quick glances. The takeaway here is to make your Pinterest brand page personal for your fans. Remind them why they love you (or should love you)!

General Electric

General Electric seems to be all about social media lately. They’re rocking it on Instagram, and I shouldn’t have been surprised to find out they’re dominating Pinterest as well.

What They’re Doing Right: 

Not only does GE have a board specifically devoted to the “Badass Machines” the company works with everyday, but it also has an “Archive” board that gives a visual history of the company’s products through the years. They also have an amazing board where they’ve posted all the fan photos taken during their #GEInspiredMe campaign, exemplifying a great use for Pinterest — leveraging and featuring user-generated content. All in all, as its description says, GE is clearly devoted to “#Pinning things that inspire us to build, power, move and cure the world.” On Pinterest, stay true to core of your brand, and if you get your fans involved too, that’s even better.

Peapod

Peapod is the largest grocery delivery service in the United States, and if you are having trouble figuring out why, look no further than its Pinterest page.

What They’re Doing Right:

Ever wonder how the food gets to your office or home? Want to know what sort of produce Peapod has in stock this season? The Peapod Pinterest page has all the answers. I particularly love the behind-the-scenes board devoted just to Peapod’s delivery trucks. It really highlights that, at the end of the day, Peapod is primarily a delivery service. Showing the cities it’s traveling through or watching its signature green bins getting loaded onto its trucks is a great way to give customers an inside look into a business that, on the outside, may not seem so glamorous. Even if your company isn’t exactly devoted to “pretty things,” it doesn’t mean you can’t be on Pinterest. It just means you have to get creative about showing off your brand in an interesting and unique way. You can do this by showcasing some behind-the-scenes content that shows the people behind your brand, injecting some personality into your business and make it easy to relate to.

As you can tell, the trick to succeeding on Pinterest isn’t necessarily about showing off your products or services directly. It’s about finding creative ways to show how those products and services fit into the lifestyles of your target audience. Find ways to do that, and you’ll have what you need to pop on Pinterest just like these brands do.

Are you experimenting with Pinterest for your brand? What are some pinboards you’ve created to highlight your business?

Image Credit: Christian Guthier

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7 Examples of Brands That Pop on Pinterest is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

Change is necessary for almost any business. In fact, two of the most important jobs of any marketer are to anticipate customer needs as they evolve over time, and then translate those emerging needs into the next thing you do for customers. Change can be positive and very profitable if these two jobs are done well. If not—as I believe we have in this case with what Netflix did—change can be stressful for customers and shareholders (and you).

With that, let’s take a closer look at a few of Netflix’s missteps—and lessons you can take away, as marketers, and use in your day-to-day work:

1. Leading with a price change. A 60-percent price increase was the first of many changes Netflix customers would hear about. Ouch. Right off the bat, customers were riled up. Although the reality that the 60-percent increase translated to just a few dollars more per month for most customers, the problem was that customers began to re-evaluate the value of Netflix’s service. Lesson: Carefully consider where price increases fall on the timeline of announcing business changes.

2. Failing to explain why in an authentic way. Prices often change for goods and services, but when times are tough, people want an explanation for price increases. To be fair, Netflix did write a detailed blog post on the changes. However, had they offered more insight into why the changes were happening in the first place, customers may have been more understanding and accepting. One possible reason it could have pointed to: Netflix’s licensing payments for content have become more expensive. Lesson: Be authentic. Most customers will understand business decisions if they are given a full explanation. And, don’t be afraid to provide more detail to your customers—it will help them better understand the change.

3. Losing sight of customer effort. When Netflix announced it was creating a second entity, Qwikster, it split its core services into two separate businesses. Let’s look at this from the customer perspective: One day, there’s one company handling all your entertainment content needs, and the next day, there are two companies. Customer translation: Two bills, two websites, two account logins, and two customer service numbers. Whose life was made easier by this decision? Netflix simply lost sight of its promise of convenience and effort in its target customer experience. Lesson: Every decision you make should be driven by the clearly defined, ideal version of your customer experience. Plain and simple.

4. Forgetting why your business exists. When Netflix launched and later added instant streaming, it filled a need for customers who wanted any media, at any time, through one service. By splitting into two companies, Netflix lost track of the problem they originally solved for their customers. The company literally moved backwards. Lesson: Remember the original need your business filled for your customers—the offering that made you successful in the first place. Even as your business changes and evolves, don’t stray from that mission.

5. Falling into the trade-off trap. Netflix made massive operational changes, and in doing so, short-shrifted their customers’ experience. It doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition, though. Does it take more planning and thoughtfulness to achieve both? Yes. Is it worth it? Absolutely. Lesson: Don’t fall into the trap of thinking operational excellence and customer experience is a tradeoff. You can have both. Top performers in any industry know this.

6. Leaving your customers behind. Netflix has always been ahead of the curve, but this time they were leaping a bit too far ahead of its customers. There will likely come a day when everyone will be streaming, and DVDs will fall by the wayside; but we’re not quite there yet. The infrastructure for streaming is simply not available to all consumers. In addition, not enough in-demand, “hot” content is available via streaming from Netflix (or anywhere for that matter). Netflix’s aim to solve an emerging need for anytime, anywhere streaming is smart and spot on. It just executed too early. Lesson: Be careful not to move your customers to a future they can’t have yet. You can make a good decision—just make it at the right time.

One thing Netflix did right: They recognized that it wasn’t worth pushing a bad plan forward and decided not to split the company in two (although they did keep the increased prices). They didn’t avoid a few bruises, though. The company lost 800,000 subscribers in Q3.

What did you take away from the Netflix debacle? What lessons did you learn?

6 Customer Experience Lessons to Learn From Netflix is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

Did you hear? You probably heard…just about everywhere. Facebook filed their S-1 yesterday, and is charging full steam ahead to their much anticipated IPO. Many of us have been poring over the juicy details that were revealed in the S-1 — Facebook revealed revenue and profitability numbers, mind blowing usage metrics, and the even more astonishing take-home pay of some of their employees. Take a look at the S-1 for all the gory details; but we’ve also consolidated what we think are the most fascinating stats and data to come out of the document if you don’t want to read the 150+ pages of it.

Facebook Usage

1.) As of December 2011, Facebook has 845 million monthly active users worldwide, and 483 million daily active users worldwide. Tweet This Stat

2.) Mobile accounts for half of Facebook’s user base at approximately 425 million active monthly users. Tweet This Stat

3.) There were 100 billion friend connections on Facebook as of the end of 2011. Tweet This Stat

4.) In Q4 of 2011, there were 2.7 billion likes and comments per day on Facebook. Tweet This Stat

5.) 250 million photos are uploaded every day on Facebook. Tweet This Stat

6.) More than 100 quadrillion bytes of photos and video were shared on Facebook in the last quarter of 2011. Tweet This Stat

Global Penetration

7.) Facebook is available in more than 70 different languages. Tweet This Stat

8.) Facebook has a penetration rate of greater than 80% in countries such as Chile, Turkey, and Venezuela. Tweet This Stat

9.) Facebook has a 60% penetration rate in the United States and United Kingdom. Tweet This Stat

10.) In countries like Brazil, Germany, and India, penetration rates are estimated at 20-30%. Tweet This Stat

11.) Japan, Russia, and South Korea have Facebook penetration rates of less than 15%. Tweet This Stat

12.) Facebook is restricted in China, resulting in a 0% penetration rate. Tweet This Stat

The People of Facebook

13.) There were 3,200 employees at Facebook as of the end of 2011, a 50% increase over 2010. Tweet This Stat

14.) At $500,000 a year, Mark Zuckerberg makes three times more a year than Google’s co-founders did when they filed for their IPO in 2004. Tweet This Stat

15.) Zuckerberg is trailed by COO Sheryl Sandberg and CFO David Ebersman, who both make $300,000 a year, the second highest salaries at Facebook. Tweet This Stat

16.) Sandberg may only have the second highest salary, but she is the highest paid employee, even over Zuckerberg. In 2011, she ended up taking home $30,873,579. Tweet This Stat

17.) Like Steve Jobs did as CEO of Apple, Zuckerberg plans to take a salary of $1 per year starting in 2013. Tweet This Stat

18.) Zuckerberg owns 28% of Facebook, which could translate to $28 billion in worth after the IPO. Tweet This Stat

Facebook’s Financial Information

19.) Facebook has only been profitable for the last three years. But in 2011, they earned a profit of $1 billion, far more than Google and Zynga when they IPO’d. Tweet This Stat

20.) In 2011, Facebook reported $3.711 billion in revenue, 88% more than the $1.974 billion they reported in 2010. Tweet This Stat

21.) This revenue growth seems enormous, but the percentage of growth year over year is shrinking. They point out that annual revenue growth from 2009 to 2010 was 154%. Tweet This Stat

22.) 85% of Facebook’s revenues come from advertising. Tweet This Stat

23.) Zynga, the gaming developer who brought you the much beloved and bemoaned Farmville, accounts for 12% of Facebook’s revenue. It came from direct advertising they purchased, and processing fees related to purchase of virtual goods. Tweet This Stat

24.) Marketing and sales expenses increased $243 million in 2011, or 132% compared to 2010. The increase was primarily due to payroll and benefits expense increases because of their 46% increase in headcount. Tweet This Stat

25.) In 2011, diluted pro forma per share profits were 43 cents a share. Tweet This Stat

26.) Share-based compensation expense increased from $2 million in 2010 to $43 million in 2011. Tweet This Stat

27.) Facebook did not grant any stock options in 2011. Tweet This Stat

When Facebook IPOs, will you be buying shares in the company?

Image credit: Sean MacEntee

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27 Startling Pieces of Insider Info Facebook’s S-1 Revealed [Data] is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site