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SEO – Penguin Update Hits!

The big news in SEO was something called the Penguin Update that hit the Google search index on April 24th. This was the second major update this year. What it aims to do is to weed out low quality content. Several sites like SearchEngineLand have a number of posts up describing this update, and how it affects you.

In fact, the official name before it got the name Penguin was the “Over Optimization Penalty”. The kind of sites that seem to be hit the hardest are Directories, Aggregation sites and sites with very few High quality links.

Most business sites should not suffer from these problems, but in case your site rankings/traffic have dropped, a good resource to refer is Amit Singhal’s post from last year on high quality content. He lists out 23 different questions to ask about your content, that may be getting it into trouble with the Google index.

AdWords – Changes for Optimization

The first major AdWords change is that Google has changed the way the “broad match” function works. It automatically takes misspellings, singular/plural, abbreviations and shows your broad match keywords more often. If you use broad match a lot in your campaigns, you should expect an uptick in the number of impressions and clicks from there. Do closely observe the conversion rates and shift these keywords to “phrase match” if needed.

The second change is that Google has started providing more guidance when it comes to Quality Score in your campaigns.

It provides three new pieces of information:

• Expected Clickthrough rate – A guidance on whether you need to touch up your ad copy
• Ad Relevance – A guidance on whether you need to tweak your keywords and ad groups
• Landing Page Experience – A guidance on whether your landing page needs a redesign

This change should make a bit easier to decipher the complicated world of Adwords optimization.

AdCenter – Share of Voice (SoV)

A low impact, but fascinating in the PPC world happened when AdCenter launched a new metric called SoV. This is a term very familiar to brand marketers who use display advertising or premium banner buys as this metric is provided by publishers.

Just like brand advertising, this metric aims to capture the percentage of times your ad was shown in the larger pool of all possible times it could’ve been shown. SearchEngineLand has an excellent piece of different uses for it in your KPIs. As Google adapts to the world of large brand advertisers, I can see this metric coming to AdWords soon too.

Facebook + Search

As Facebook’s IPO rolls ever closer, the rumors about it entering the search market keep getting louder. There was a whole set of rumors that Microsoft was willing to sell Bing to Facebook, arming the social media giant for a real fight with Google. But followup rumors also said that Steve Ballmer (yep – the man who can dance like crazy, and sell Windows like it’s on TVC) wasn’t on board with the deal.

If Facebook did get into search though (it’s a really long shot in my view), it would ease the Antitrust pressure off Google’s back significantly. So maybe Google’s secretly hoping for it?

SEO & Email still popular with Social Marketers

Social Media Examiner released its annual survey of Social Media Marketers (44 page PDF) - and surprisingly SEO and Email marketing are still very popular activities.

That’s it for search marketing news, if you’d like to read more news summary in Social Media, Mobile, Display Advertising and much more – subscribe to our Singapore Marketing Newsletter here.

2:00am – Kim Gould from Facebook just started the intro with a laptop in front of her. Her preview says we’ll kick things off with Sheryl Sandberg very soon.

2:06am – Pop-ish music playing the background while we see a crowd in a auditorium. Camera’s panning to an empty stage. A lady announces “Please take your seats, we’ll start soon!”

2:08am – “Ladies & Gentlemen – Please welcome the Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg!” Sheryl’s starting her intro!

2:10am – Interesting story about Deb, Stephanie and a kid who was diagnosed with Kawasaki disease over Facebook by a neighbour! Another story about “We are all Khailal Saeed” about a revolution about police corruption. The story ends with a revolution.

2:12am – More stories about Facebook making a difference in the world. Think I’m getting the theme here.

2:12am – And as the viewer count goes up towards 8,000 – The video player starts to stutter and hang.

2:14am – Even dogs can even have an identity online. Something about Mark Zuckerberg’s dog. And Sheryl’s stories about her being one of the oldest people at Facebook. Programmers ask her for an “Old Person’s” opinions. Zuckerberg asks her when “Mid Life crisis happens”

2:16am – “What do all these stories have in common. The answer is voice”. Sheryl’s shooting for inspiration, probably better than going on about Facebook’s numbers. Somehow it seems more hollow when Google tries this pitch.

2:18am – Now talking about more celebrities (like Oprah, Football players, Congressmen) who use Facebook to broadcast and converse.

2:22am – “Your customers are listening. And your customers are talking. Use this”. Sheryl’s message to businesses. I feel a timeline announcement coming up …

2:24am – BTW, those of you logging into this Live Blog – Thank you! I’m loving watching you pop up in my Google Analytics Real Time. Check out the screenshot here.

2:26am – VP of Product, Chris Cox walks in. Starts telling the story of his interview at Google (only joined when it was 18 months old).

2:28am – Very cool story about how he was overdressed when he walked in. Apparently Dustin Moskovitz gave him “Inception” download of all the features of Facebook.

2:31am – The story of how we moved from static home page, to Live News feed …

2:34am – After 25 minutes, I’m kinda bored about the motivational talk. Let’s get to the part about helping our business!

2:35am – By the way, apart from this live blog – my colleague Prantik is also live tweeting from our Happy Marketer account. Check it out here.

2:37am – So far we’ve heard computers are everywhere, descriptions of Skynet. And absolutely nothing about marketing. Bye bye Chris Cox!

2:39am – Mike Hoefflinker, Director of Global Business Marketing walks in. Might beat Sheryl Sandberg to be the oldest guy in Facebook.

2:43am – Many many brand stories about Facebook Timelines for stories – Macy’s, Kia, Today show and many many more. The Today Show’s story here.

2:47am – Pretty cool trailor of an upcoming movie – Will Smith Productions. Probably the most interesting part of the whole presentations so far. And the comments on the official FMC event are just brutal and hilarious!

2:49am – Talking about Featured Stories. So, they’re definitely moving away from ads. I wonder what happens to advertisers who don’t regularly update their Facebook updates?

2:51am – Ben & Jerry reached 98% of their Fan Base. Sales went up with a 3:1 ROI. I don’t know that means.

2:52am – Dr Pepper reached 78%. 140% more people talked about their stories. For their expenditure, I’m not impressed.

2:53am – Butter Fingers increased their Brand Favourability by 6%. Meh.

2:54am – More stories about Reach Generator. That’s the name of the tool which shares stories to a brand’s fans. Dont’ think that helps most of the Singapore businesses that don’t really have any fans.

2:55am – Premium on Facebook. Now pushing out the way to reach 10s of millions of folks.

2:56am – Premium Listings will now be incorporated into the news feed. Now, that’s interesting. 5-10X click through rate improvement over the rest of Facebook. Finally, something nice for marketers.

2:57am – Premium News Feed stories will also appear in Mobile. 425 million out of a billion users now eligible to see Premium Feed.

2:58am – They’re gonna spam premium stories even in the Logout Experience! So, four places for Premium – Page Post, Right Side, News Feed and Logout Experience.

3:00am – Final line on Stories Evolution in ads – Businesses focus on fans & stories, Facebook focuses on distribution. Works with updates, links, stories, photos, videos, questions.

3:01am – David Fischer, VP of Business & Marketing Partnerships. What a royal hairstyle. Dude should be some kind of a Prince in the UK!

3:05am – If you’re feeling a little rage towards the boring Facebook talks, try this article. According to Mashable, if students use Facebook while studying, their grades drop!

3:07am – A panel with leaders from Walmart, Aegis Media and 1-800-Flowers. More white dudes and stories about huge businesses. Good job Facebook, completely ignore the SME and International market!

3:09am – The Walmart SVP boasting about how his team is awesome. Next, the head of an agency boasting about his best clients. Get me out of this LoveFest! This is not worth staying up all night for!

3:13am – The old white men aren’t too bad. But this is too damn boring. 1/10 compared to a 10/10 presentation a few hours earlier by Microsoft when it introduced Windows 8 Preview and it’s features.

3:17am – A fair bit of talk focused on selling Facebook within huge organizations. Not really sure if any of the right people are actually listening in though. It’s mostly SME folks, and they’re going to be disappointed.

3:18am – Another theme repeated by Walmart. We’re going back to the future. Jumping back into relationship based marketing with fans.

3:24am – Sorry for the delay. Fell asleep while listening to the speakers there. Okay, not really. But am glad it’s over! How about some more features people?

3:26am – Zuckerberg reading from the teleprompter is crreeeeeeeeeepy!

3:29am – Kim Gould is back. Taking Live Questions! She’s got Neha from Facebook and Chris McCann, President of 1-800-FLOWERS.com

3:38am – In case you’re not watching, Live questions are happening at the FMC site. Still more pretty young women from Facebook interviewing White dude agency/client side fellows.Surprisingly, it’s more interesting than most of the speeches!

3:43am – First time in two hours, one of the question talks about marketing on Facebook outside of the US.  Mentioned Mumbai and Singapore. Thank you speaker-man for acknowledging the rest of the world. Apparently Facebook marketing doesn’t really know there’re marketing folks outside of Menlo Park.

3:47am – Two product managers of Facebook Pages jump in. Geeky but probably more interesting. They use the word “Mission Control” again.

3:50am – Interesting. They recommend you don’t change your profile photo often. It’s important for identity.

3:51am – Profile pic for logo. Cover photo for changing often. Bottom left for a quick elevator pitch. Bottom right for rich-apps.

3:53am – Showing examples for Harley Davidson, Verizon and Red Bull. PMs say “The first thing you think of when you think of Harley Davidson’s bikes”. Prantik says “What geeks!”

3:56am – Fascinating to curate the past of a brand. I wonder how our Educational clients will create this Rich history in the timeline. We’ll be launching our very own service to do this, this weekend. Stay tuned!

4:04am – Super cool! 5 new admin permissions. You can now have admins focused on content. Different ones for tech problems. Can’t wait for these details.

4:07am – Back to Q&A with Neha Jogani. She’s got someone from Macy’s talking about Pages and Timelines.

4:11am – Macy’s strategy on monetizing their facebook fans, and promoting offers is fascinating.

4:20am – Pretty cool, they have a NFC linked auto photo-upload-to Facebook feature!

4:30am – Finally, the hosts answer a bunch of questions about how the changes impact existing users. This is good stuff.

4:33am – The next breakout is about the Page Insights product. But we’re going to sign off this morning and complete this blog post in the morning. Check back in 12 hours for a summary of that!

Why are MEME’s important to us marketers? MEME’s represent our society’s collective interests. MEME’s are social proof on what types of content appeal to a mass audience. It’s hard to put a logical reason why some MEME’s get ridiculously popular so the right thing to do is to just accept its appeal factor and ride its current popularly.

The average internet user can take part in meme by creating her own spin off of memes. Like what we’ve done for the popular meme ‘what people think’

I’ve seen lots of local company create their own spin off of these meme and very viable way to create social media awareness of your brand. Here’s a great example from my dance friend Evan Lee from oneshift.com.

Have you ever tried to make your own version of a popular meme? Try it out and see what your audience’s response is like.

It is amazing how transient life is and how quickly things can and do change. No, I ain’t discussing the Vedanta Vani or The Philosophy of Josiah Royce, but am referring to the efforts of the world’s largest food and nutrition company on social media and its impact on their online brand perception, at least in Singapore.

About a year ago, when I was still at my previous assignment, I often used Nestle as a negative case study to highlight how age old archaic brands don’t get social media and the perils of not respecting it’s power. I obviously used to cite the infamous case of the social media backlash against Nestle’s use of questionably sourced Palm Oil in its products, as raised by GreenPeace.

But as with many things in life, positive intent and the will to learn lessons in a timely manner can pay rich dividends. I for one, was pleasantly surprised to personally witness the resurrection of brand Nestle last weekend at the 313@Somerset. Rachit & I were hopping across stores to find a suitable gift for one of our close friends’ 5^th wedding anniversary (now if you don’t care about Nestle or social media, do check out the awesome yacht photos here.) and suddenly we spotted a huge red sign board with the words “Nescafe. In celebration of World Happy Day. 12 February 2012 | Singapore”.

We simply took it as a standalone offline outdoor advertising campaign. And off late wherever we see the words “happy” or “marketer”, we get unduly excited and have gotten in to the habit of “camwhoring” and uploading the stills on social media immediately. Moments later when we went past the hoarding, did we realize the true essence of the entire campaign.

On the occasion of World Happy Day (till I ‘googled’ it right now, I had thought this day was a creation of Nescafe Singapore’s marketing-agency team!) Nestle wanted to bring a smile on people’s faces and spread love, cheer & joy with everyone around in the real & virtual world combined, including those of the underprivileged. I thought the idea was simple, fun-loving and very powerful.

To participate, one had to stand in a queue to order a cup of one’s favourite hot/iced coffee (I opted for an iced white coffee, which was unexpectedly delicious, I recall admitting to Rachit), then opt to be captured on lens by a professional photographer in front of that same red hoarding. For each photograph, Nescafe Singapore was going to donate S$0.5 to Operation Smile Singapore. Since it wasn’t a Polaroid camera and neither did they want to rouse the anger of activists (especially given their tussle with GreenPeace a year ago!) by distributing printed copies of the digital photos, participants could only access their shots the following day on Nescafe Singapore’s Facebook FanPage.

So what impressed me about this campaign, apart from the good iced coffee and the friendly on-the-ground staff, especially from a digital marketing perspective?

It was one of the rare campaigns that I have seen in Singapore which truly leveraged the power of “social” media. Very often brand marketers are under the impression that digital & social media is a new magic wand that can replace all the other weapons in the marketer’s arsenal, including the ever impactful, real life interaction on the ground. I always advise clients that social & digital are new channels and merely function as another conduit to reach, touch and engage the customer. While it has its merit in being a trackable, cost-effective media, it shouldn’t be used in silo and as much as possible must be integrated with other traditional offline marketing channels to meet one’s objective – that’s exactly what Nescafe Singapore did last weekend.

They integrated and ignited an offline corporate-social-responsibility (CSR) activation event with social media. The campaign began on the ground at Somerset but its reach and impact was felt on Planet Facebook for a few days beyond World Happy Day. The very fact that Nescafe Singapore sought people’s participation in this charitable act, made it more engaging – they were only going to donate money if people opted to be “shot” while taking a shot of coffee! This reminded me a lot about Macy’s “Million reasons to Believe!” campaign.

By not giving into the desires of immediate gratification of distributing the snaps then & there, not only did they subtly win over the hearts of the erstwhile angry environmentalists, saved money & more importantly created anticipation amongst the participants. They had to go back home and “Like” the FanPage to subsequently access & tag their respective photos. The moment each participant tagged himself and/or his friends & family, the content began spreading its wings across Facebook’s newsfeeds and people took notice. In essence the smiles and the joys associated with it were “virally” shared:)  By virtue of this activity, Nescafe “earned media” through mentions and coverage on the local blogosphere.

Participative CSR – ?. On-the-ground product activation – ? Social Media Integration – ? Earned media coverage - ?

As a digital marketing practitioner, it was a pleasure to see a century old, Fortune 500 company embrace & integrate social media with traditional channels to engage, entice & enthral its customers. And in the process bring back smiles on the faces of numerous children, by contributing to repairing their facial deformities.

While I personally believe that they could have made the digital connection a bit stronger & more fun-filled through integration of mobile check-ins, better tagging mechanisms & follow up social media incentives & engagement, I believe it is a good start – a step in the right direction.

Social media is a big leveller. The same channel ripped the brand apart last year but once the egos were shed and the medium was embraced in the right way, it once again blew life into it.

Brand Nescafe stands resurrected and is alive & kicking.

Now it is time to breathe some life into me by taking a Kit-Kat break and pouring myself a hot 3-1 Nescafe Rich mix.

Disclaimer: Neither Happy Marketer nor I as an individual was responsible or associated with this campaign and neither have we been paid to do a plug. We are merely agents of joy and as ‘Happy Marketers’ we appreciate the goodness of meaningful campaigns and share the love. 

A peek into what is Pinterest, why is there a sudden buzz about it and how can brands make the most of it?

Now, I must admit I am a digital addict – even though I have push emails & notifications setup on my iPhone, I have this compulsive desire to constantly check for new emails and Facebook newsfeed updats every now and then. This habit begins right from the time I wake up in the morning, even though I know that every morning prior to 9AM (yeah that is around the time I wake up!), most of the emails I receive are either from lists I had signed up for but don’t value anymore (TODAYonline News), promotional messages (Groupon coupons) or downright junk. I was really perplexed till last week as to why do these same string of emails disturb me each morning, till I saw this infographic, which put matters in to perspective – contrary to popular belief the highest email activity happens to be between 5AM to 9AM!

While this mystery got resolved, another trend in my inbox piqued my interest. In the last 3 months, I had been receiving loads of emails from “Pinterest” – notifications about people following me or re-pinning my content, weekly curated lists and early adopters talking about this new social networking site. 128 when I counted last.

As I mentioned in Happy Hour Episode 2 last week, I have been following this site for the last 15 months (it was founded sometime in late 2008) and had joined the network on 30^th June 2011. I was always intrigued and fascinated by their visual interface but only much later did I realize the value of such a network. And it wasn’t just the email avalanche that intrigued me but the fact that suddenly I was seeing Pinterest everywhere – on certain days the top 3 news items on my ‘LinkedIn Today’ segment was all about Pinterest; the techies on my Twitter timeline were going gaga about the network, its valuations and its multiple utilities and I could gradually see colourful, funny, artistic “pins” being featured on my Facebook timeline.

I think it has crossed its tipping point and the buzz, hype and activity on it is only going to grow and grow exponentially. It is enjoying its “hockey stick moment” – in Jan 2012 Pinterest recorded 11.7 million unique hits in a month in US alone – crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history. And more importantly, users were spending about 98 odd minutes each month on the network every month. It is amazing that a company with just 7 employees could create such a “sticky” platform that has not only caught on with users but also with some big angel investors and venture capitalists in the valley. It is basking in glory for the moment – awarded the best new startup of 2011 at the Crunchies & also leads the buzz chart on Crunchbase ahead of Facebook.

So what is Pinterest and how is it different from Facebook & Twitter? Why the need for another social network and why are people flocking to it? And should brand marketers pay any heed to this trend?

What is Pinterest and what makes it unique & sticky?

Do you recall pinning posters, post-its and other notes on those brown pin boards in college quads and dorm rooms? Mine was full of cricket photos, motivational posters and personal greeting cards! Pinterest, in simple words, is an aggregation of such visually appealing pin boards from around the world. But unlike physical pin boards at colleges, dorms, offices & clubs its beauty lies in the following features:

a) Classification – the pin boards are segmented and classified in about 31 odd categories – from Architecture to Gardening to Travel & Places. This makes it much easier to find content and there is a different kind of pleasure in browsing through different thematic pages or pin boards. It is as though someone is dynamically curating different art galleries for you based on your taste and interest.

b) Content Discovery – I am a firm believer that most of us don’t exactly have a specific idea of what we want or like until we are shown some samples or examples – hence the need to seed discussions or give options at focus groups; or show samples when one is selling something, be it creative banner ads in agencies or selling saris or ornaments at retail outlets. While Google helps me search something, social networks like Facebook & Pinterest help me “discover” things. This has the potential to spark new ideas or help me crystallize my thoughts on what I like. And the process refines itself. The more Pinterest knows about what I like or share, it learns about my behaviour and shows me stuff that I would prefer. This to me is very powerful.

c) Design – The interface is visually very appealing. The individual pins are well-sized and has enough meta-data to pique one’s interest and upon clicking the pin, it zooms out in a lightbox, where the focus is purely on that one particular image that you can ogle at in leisure.

d) Personalized – You don’t see random pins and boards. The experience is quite personalized based on your personal tastes and interests. So in my case, most of the pins that I see are about cricket, beaches and book covers I love.

e) Its Social – You can “Follow” specific thematic boards that you like; you can “Like” a particular pin; you can “Re-Pin” something just like how you Re-Tweet on Twitter, similar to forwarding an email to broadcast something; you can share your comment on a particular pin; or like Facebook’s OpenGraph, you can “Pin” something you like on other websites. I recently “pinned” a new shirt design I liked on Threadless on to one of my boards. And most importantly it integrates well with other social networks like Facebook and Twitter – which makes discovering & sharing content a much easier experience.

How is it different from other social networks?

It all boils down to the discussion of “social graph vs. interest graph”. Allow me to explain. Whilst Facebook constitutes a network of people you know personally in real life (social graph); Twitter constitutes people you follow/are followed by with people who share a common interest (interest graph). Similarly LinkedIn constitutes of a network of people you know in your professional space. Each social network has its own niche and provides a distinct value.

Pinterest to me is a beautiful mash up of both my social & interest graphs. I can choose to follow the pin boards of random, unknown people with whom I share a common interest like cricket (similar to Twitter) but at the same time I can also chose to follow the boards of people I know in my social circles (similar to  Facebook).

Apart from this interesting mash-up of social & interest graphs, to me it’s USP lies in its visually appealing design, which is very different from the text-heavy & rigid structures of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And nothing beats the ability to discover & consume visually-appealing, interesting content that suits my taste as well as the opportunity for me to curate things that I love and find interesting across the web.

This is what differentiates Pinterest and this why more than 11 million Americans are spending more than 98 minutes every month on the network.

Is there any value for brand marketers here?

Should brand marketers add Pinterest to their long arsenal of social networking sites? I think they should if and only if they are willing to invest in creating visually appealing photos & info-graphics.

While it makes a lot of sense for B2C companies like fashion, retail and hotel brands to display an interesting portfolio of their products & services, I believe over time we would see a lot of B2B enterprises participate as well. Expect to see pin boards display an array of propeller engines, gear boxes, ammunition, surgical equipment etc.

Like with using any other social network, the idea is not to use it as another store front to sell (although the network has a Gifts tab, which classifies gifts according to different price points) but to engage, enthral & entice your audience with fascinating content that they love. Use the platform to build your brand through visually appealing, curated content. And if your audience is happy, this will not only improve the recall of your brand but also drive a lot of referral traffic to your website/Facebook fanpage.

And if your customer segment is focused on women, you are in luck. Of the 10.4 million registered users, 9 million monthly connected Facebook users, and 2 million daily Facebook users, 97.9% of Pinterest’s Facebook Fans are women. While Facebook Fans is a proxy metric, it is definitely indicative of the actual user base. Interestingly Pinterest by founded by 3 men!

You can read more here to check out ideas about how brands can leverage Pinterest now.

While I expect the Pinterest email avalanche in my inbox to only get stronger in the coming months, what I will be interested to track and analyze is its acceptance and growth in Asia.

If you have 15 minutes to spare, do check out Pinterest now. If you like it and want an invite, ping me at prantik@happymarketer.com

Happy curating!

Social TV & Sports

I recently wrote a blog post about how social media is revolutionizing the way we consume, disseminate and monetize sporting content, focusing on some of the innovative strategies that were launched at SuperBowl XLVI last week. Following the match where the Giants piped the Patriots 21-17, I was personally hooked on to my iPad on the YouTube AdBlitz channel that had hosted the 64 brand ad campaigns that were launched during the championship. My personal favourites were the Coke Polar Bear “Catch” ad & the Chevy Silverado 2012 ad that took a cheeky dig at Ford!

This perhaps was one of the rare times that I was enjoying a live event on Television and simultaneously consuming, critiquing & sharing content related to it about the event on what is touted as the “second screen”. I understood from my some of my cousins in the US that they used apps such as GetGlue to ConnecTV to make their SuperBowl experience even richer!

The experience compelled me to think this through and figure out what is “Social TV” all about and why is everyone going gaga over it? Is it just a new passing fad or is it set to revolutionize the way people consume & enjoy televised content? Is the era of TV coming to an end? More importantly, why are multi-billion dollar brands like Coke, Pepsi & Chevy so keen to experiment & embrace it? Here is my perspective:

Is the era of TV over?

Firstly, TV in the traditional sense is not dead – in fact far from it. If advertising dollars are any indicator of the prevalence of a medium, TV advertising grew by 6% in 2011 and generated US$169 billion in revenue and this is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.5% to total US$243 billion by 2016. But what is evolving is the way TV content is being broadcast & accessed (through the Internet and not necessarily through satellite & cable); the quality of TV hardware (HDTV, LEDTV) and business models around consumption (Pay-per-view).

While the medium is not going to be extinct any time soon, especially in emerging economies, there is general concern about the rise of online TV channels (100 million Americans watch online video every day on channels like YouTube, Hulu & Vimeo watching about 43.5 billion videos a month), content piracy and free video streaming on the Internet and the penetration of Digital Video Recording (DVR) devices like TiVo, that allow users to skip through advertisements. Perhaps the larger brands read this as a sign of things to come in the coming decades and hence are experimenting with new media themselves before a disruptive innovation throws them off guard?

What is Social TV?

“Social TV” is a combination of these new different media channels across different content consumption nodes or touch points (TV, tablets, smart phones being the most common ones) that aims to make content consumption, creation, critiquing, sharing & monetization a fun & easy experience. Still sounds too geeky? Let us take a specific case in point to elucidate this better.

Social TV & Sports are natural team-mates!

Imagine this coming weekend you have decided to watch ManU fight it out against Liverpool on TV. If you are sports buff, typically the banter about the team constitution, past meeting records, field records etc. begin a couple of days before the game. Bets are placed, abuses are rattled and everyone’s excited to enjoy at least 90 minutes of play time. Now imagine, the pre-game research, commentary, abusing, betting & banter is not just limited to your soccer gang but rather amplified & accentuated with the participation of soccer lovers around the world? While the respective Facebook FanPages of the two teams & Twitter are brilliant multicasting channels to do this, niche social networks like Footbo, Ole Ole and ShareTheMatch are brilliant platforms to find & interact with like-minded soccer maniacs across the world!

On D-Day, you can stream the game live through official or unofficial channels (In the case of SuperBowl & the Australian Open, the games were officially streamed for free!). You can then choose to carry on the live, exciting chatter sharing goal & penalty updates, expressing emotions & frustrations, uploading photos of the gang you are watching the match with, on these generic & niche social networks.

Now usually you would do so on your PC or laptop if you are at home. But what if you are at the neighbourhood bar with just your mobile phone or your iPad? No worries. The ConnecTV app picks up the sound signals from your TV to intelligently decipher that you are indeed watching a the ManU-Liverpool soccer game (yeah its a magical experience!) and then links you up with a real-time online community across the globe that maybe going ecstatic about Rooney’s magical goal or Brad Jones brilliant save!

The key drivers of Social TV

But wait, why would you be doing all these activities if you are enjoying the match on the large 40 inch LED TV screen in your drawing room or in the bar? Isn’t it distracting, rude and downright anti-social? Apparently not! Keeping morals & etiquettes aside, a recent research by Yahoo indicates that about 86% percent of people use mobile Internet while watching their TV – 40% of them using social networks; 56% texting their friends; 33% using mobile apps and 37% simply surfing the net.

The volume & sentiment of online, social chatter is hard to ignore!

It is this user multi-tasking behaviour that has led to the genesis of Social TV and drives its growth. People don’t just want to consume content; they want to emote & express their opinion while consuming it and tweets are perhaps a good indication of the same. During the 2010 FIFA World Cup, the Denmark-Japan game set a new Twitter record of 3,283 tweets per second; last week at the end of the SuperBowl XLVI game, Twitter stats showed that there were a record 12,233 tweets per second claiming the all-time #2 spot & Madonna’s half-time show grabbed the #3 spot at 10,245 tweets per second. The only thing ahead of these two milestones is the #1 spot held for Castle in the Sky when they aired the anime movie in Japan with 25,088 TPS in December 2011. And by the time we reach Sau Paulo for the 2014 FIFA World Cup, TPS may just become more important than TRP for brands and for good reason.

The digital world is binary – everything is a series of 0’s and 1s and every data point can be categorically logged, measured and monitored with accuracy. And in the Social TV ecosystem, there are some fascinating tech start-ups that have begun to make sense of the aggregate data that’s being voiced out, created & shared by consumers and fans while they watch television. MIT’s Bluefin Labs processes about 1,389 hours of television a day and more than 166.7 million corresponding comments around those televised shows. Based on this data mining it has the ability to tell that viewers of TV show A also liked TV show B, something that TV networks and advertisers value.

What’s more, Bluefin can mine connections among shows, social media, and advertisements. For instance, this summer, Diet Pepsi studied audience reactions to an advertisement starring Modern Family‘s Sofia Vergara. During the airings of the ad, social-media comments about Diet Pepsi increased about 19%. Bluefin collected data from 1.8 million people who commented on TV shows on which the ad played. Then they discerned “affinities” by finding out how many commentators were saying something about each show and Diet Pepsi. Understanding these affinities gives Diet Pepsi something valuable for the future: Directing more ad dollars to the commentators’ favoured shows may prove far more efficient. It has the ability to mine 5 billion online comments and 2.5 million minutes of TV per month to advise Gatorade that it can generate the highest ROI by advertising during Talk & News shows and should completely ignore comedy gigs – it complete takes guess work out of the picture.

Brands can not only do their post-mortem online but also market through Social TV

The magic doesn’t end there. Not only can brand marketers make sense of the volume & sentiment of chatter going on before, during & post a televised show or a live event, they are even able to “offer a variety of follow up actions to the TV viewer, including coupons, reminders, contact info and more through a mobile app”. WiO is one such service provider, which enables TV watchers to immediately get information about the products and services they see advertised on screen, both in TV commercials and within the shows themselves.

With these recent innovations, a brand marketer has enough & more data points at his disposal: about what TV shows are best suited for her brand; what is the real-time sentiment about a brand ad campaign online; the ability to push out information and incentives about her products & services to a niche, captive audience. Check out this blog post to get a sense of what’s coming in 2012 in the domain of Social TV – the possibilities are immense. And if you think this affinity of Social TV is limited only to sports, you are wrong. It transcends across domains such as politics, current affairs and even soaps such as Glee!

This perhaps explains why brand marketers like Shiv Singh, PepsiCo’s global head of digital, have been so gung-ho about integrating TV ads with the power of mobile & social on second screens. And if these trends are anything to go by, very soon David Ogilvy’s famous adage, “50% of all advertising is useless. We just don’t know which 50%” may be a myth of the past!

This morning, I woke up to an interesting snail mail in my inbox – My insurance provider Prudential Asset Management (Singapore) Limited would be changing it’s name to Eastspring Investments (Singapore) Limited. That was a perfect way to awaken with my eyes wide open as we have recently been working on a number of Rebranding projects. In most of these projects, the client is changing their name or moving to a new domain name.

Most of the time, we get called in for a simpler sounding task like “Make us a new website” or “Figure out our new Social Media strategy“. Search, as always is the black sheep in the family of Internet marketing tools. Even though 20-40% of every website we see gets its traffic from natural search, presence & traffic from that medium is just assumed, without much thought.

In reality, getting listed in Google, attaining impressive ranks and getting significant traffic is a tough job. And most businesses don’t realize that until calamity hits, and they’re suddenly 10,000 visitors/day poorer due to nobody taking charge of the SEO impact of Website & IT decisions.

Anyway, back to Prudential. So, a search for “Prudential” brings up a page where Prudential is #1

That’s good news. (Although it’s not perfect – the sitemap listings are pretty badly filled with incomplete descriptions, inaccurate sections of the site etc – there are no news or video listings for such a large brand – and most of the links that come up are bland and unclickable). Still, it comes up and ranks #1, so that’s pretty good news.

Now, if we run a search for “Eastspring”, we get a page where the new website isn’t even on the page.

There is one result at #4 referencing www.prudentialcorporation-asia.com, a completely unknown site within the prudential family. And Prudential’s UK site is #9 on that page, where the press release announcing the new brand is ranked.

The main problem with this is that people ARE going to be searching for both Prudential and EastSpring releated keywords. And they just expect to be led to the right page.

Most IT departments don’t have the internal know-how to manage that process. The typical process is that on Feb 14th (official launch date of EastSpring), the old Prudential site will be turned off. If the IT dept is really good, they’ll redirect all Prudential.com.sg/xxx queries to the new home page EastSpringInvestments.com.sg (although most don’t). The new site, unfortunately will contain all new content that contains almost no traces of the old “Prudential” related keywords.

For a few months, Google will penalize them as the old site and Prudential related content is now gone. And the new site and EastSpring related content is new and unproven.

After that, EastSpring related content will come back up the ranks. And any hope of ranking for Prudential related keywords will slowly fade away.

Of course, I’m just guessing here – hopefully the Corp Comm department has a good SEO agency on staff, and they’ve already forseen this entire scenario. I sincerely hope they do, and for the rest of the post, I’m just using these guys as an example for general lessons on Rebranding SEO.

In our SEO training and Enterprise SEO consulting engagements, we go much deeper into this process – but in the interest of making this post readable, we’ll stick to the most important things. And I’ll do my analysis using the KARATE SEO framework we use in all our engagements.

1 – Keywords to use in Rebranding SEO

The first stage in SEO project is to figure out which keywords we need to rank for. For such a project, we need to expand from one to two families – “Prudential” related keywords and “Eastspring” related keywords.

Of course, standard keyword best practices will apply in putting on hats of different types of users and expanding this family into many keywords. Prospects, Customers, Employees, Investors, Media – will all have different variations of these keywords they’ll type into Google. I recommend expanding each brand into 200 odd keywords.

2 – Architecture to modify for Rebranding SEO

The next stage is deciding the sitemap & architecture to accommodate these keywords.

We have two sites to contend with:

• Original site (Prudential.com.sg) that will be scheduled to sunset soon
• New site (Eastspring.com.sg) that will be the main site going forward

All those keywords related to Eastspring would obviously be needed to mapped to the new site. But the interesting part is that all the original keywords relating to Prudential Asset Management will also need to be mapped to the new site because the old site won’t exist in a while.

The best bet for the initial site launch would be to mirror the structure & content of the old site as closely as possible in the new site. That will allow for accurate redirecting from old pages, to their new relevant equivalents.

3 – Relevance & On Page Optimization during Rebranding SEO

The next step would be to increase the content on the new site to accommodate all these keywords. Here, the delicate balance between SEO, Copywriting, Corp Comm and Compliance comes in. The simplest way to keep both Prudential and Eastspring related keywords would be a tweak to the title that has both words.

For example, on the “Contact Us” page, I’d recommend a title like “Contact Us at Eastspring (formerly Prudential) Asset Management, Singapore”

We need something like this that accommodates multiple keywords, the Page’s purpose, and satisfies typical compliance requirements.

4 – Authority & Link Building during Rebranding SEO

The best way to get instant authority into the new site – would be to redirect all the pages from the old site, to the new equivalent pages on the new site.

So for example, the old contact page (www.olddomain.com/contact) should be 301 redirected to the new site’s contact page (www.newdomain.com/contactus). In the same fashion, all the old pages (can run into hundreds) should be redirected to the right page.

Be careful not to redirect all the pages blindly to the home page – that’s poison for SEO. It’s important that internal pages redirect to internal pages.

Now, if complete redirection is not possible (if for example, only 1 division of Prudential is getting the name change, and the rest of Prudential.com.sg is still relevant) – then the old pages on the old site, should contain text links to the new pages. The same deal as above (each page linking to then new version), but instead of permanent 301 redirections, we use simple text links to maintain both assets.

All of the internal company links to the old products and pages, should be reset to the new site to pass on the PageRank juice to the new website.

And all of the PR activities should start mentioning the new site and encouraging partners and media to link to the new site.

(Of course, link building is a huge topic – but this is a simple to do list for the IT folks if they have 24 hours or less to do SEO).

5 – Technical Challenges & Trouble Spots during Rebranding SEO

The main issue is going to be deciding how to handle two separate sites. Options include:

• Keep both sites alive (but have extensive linking between them)
• Keep only the old site alive (with just the content changed)
• Keep only the new site alive (with the old site being killed off)

Depending on the strategic decision here, the main challenge will be doing accurate 301 redirections to the new pages.

Of course typical SEO challenges (making sure the pages are HTML friendly, they’re being indexed, Not using Flash or Frames, No programming errors & infinite loops) will still exist. A proper audit will have to be done to ensure other trouble spots are avoided during the building/maintenance of whichever site is being kept alive.

6 – Experience & Usability Management for Rebranding SEO

The final step of any SEO project is ensuring that the new site’s customer experience is optimal. That’s because, more and more, the bounce rates and time on site are being factored into search rankings (along with newer factors like social media engagement, Schema.org compliance etc).

Some of the things that can be done include:

• Keeping the layout & navigation of the new site similar to the old one
• Indicating that the brand was formerly called “Prudential” in the logo and Page titles
• Referencing the old brand name plenty of times in the content, for folks who haven’t gotten used to the change yet
• Removing any old content / elements that aren’t accurate for the new brand

Figuring out how to make the User Experience better through Google Analytics Consulting and Usability Best Practices is another longer discussion, but for now – don’t rock the boat. Keep things as people expect them, and that’ll be a good start to the new brand.

So, that’s our 6 step KARATE SEO process, customized for brands undergoing Rebranding. Again, Prudential/Eastspring are just examples – any company undergoing rebranding can hopefully pick up a few tips from this article.

After a lacklustre 2010 which saw the Google Analytics team mostly working on back-end changes, and not doing much in terms of improving the feature set, 2011 was a whole new ball game. Sparked by Facebook’s explosive growth, and their internal Google+ initiative, the Analytics division also moved at a much faster pace.

The year was full of announcements, feature launches, improvements and a much greater attention to the Analytics business. Here are the 10 different areas that saw the most changes:

1. Upgrades to UI & Features
2. Brand New Features
3. Mobile
4. Social Media
5. SEO & Site Speed
6. API & Back-end
7. Education
8. News & Controversies

1. Upgrades to Existing Features & the UI with GA v5

As certified Google Analytics Consultants, we had been teased with images of Google Analytics version 5 since late last year, but the official announcement of the upgrade to the new Google Analytics v5 was made in March 2011. At that time, we also posted a GA v5 review with a mixed report card.

But over the course of the year, GA v5 has gotten more robust, more features and the best part, it hasn’t been made compulsory yet. The new Google Analytics now only lacks two notable features (email scheduling and PDF export), and brought with it – a whole bunch of new features.

This journey of feature launches started in March with the official announcement, followed soon after by introductory posts introducing the new features. This included features walkthroughs of the new Dashboard, Plat Rows, Goals & Event Goals, Custom Reports, non-interactive Events, new Intelligent notifications and many webinars posted on the Google Analytics Youtube channel.

Before you proceed to the advanced features, remember to make sure all your existing campaigns are already tagged. And the quickest way to do that is to watch my speech at the GoMeasure event by Google Analytics – about 360 degree tracking with GA.

2. Brand New Features

The award for the coolest new feature definitely goes to something that was called “Analytics Right Now” (right now, it’s called “Real Time (Beta)”). This awesome feature lets you see what’s happening on the site with a delay of less than 1 second! Pretty amazing feature and an amazing tool to demonstrate to clients what an awesome, feature-rich tool Google Analytics is.

The most useful tool released this year would be the Multi-Channel Attribution report. It lets you get a complete picture of your marketing efforts, letting you see which mediums and sources your audience used before converting into a sale. This is a well needed development that will finally push clients away from last-touchpoint-attribution which usually increases the importance given to search marketing, and doesn’t capture the effect of all the online branding efforts.

Google Analytics also launched some fancier features like Path Analysis (excellent intro by Justin Cutrioni here), DoubleClick integration (part of Google Analytics Premium). These are probably more appropriate for really large organizations with significant investments into the digital realm.

3. Mobile Tracking Features

Before 2011 rolled around, Google Analytics already had healthy support for tracking activities in Mobile Apps (Android & iOS) & Mobile Websites (high end sites, and low end sites). All that support had rolled around the previous few years and is still admittedly, the most robust & flexible platform for Mobile tracking (even in the face of dedicated frameworks like Flurry, Localytics & Webtrends Mobile)

This year, most of the work on the product included improvements in number of features and the flexibility of the SDKs. February started off with the iOS SDK getting Custom Variables (about three months after the Android SDK got them. For a great explanation for using Custom Variables on the web version, check out this post by e-nor). The May update brought ecommerce tracking and validation to Android apps.

In August & September, both the Android and iOS SDKs saw new versions with features like campaign tracking within apps. Finally in November, both versions again got an upgrade with significantly easier tracking because of the EasyTracker library.

4. Social Media Tracking Features

If there’s one feature that gets a marketing division excited today, it’s Social Media! Trust us, our Social Media Training division gets more enquiries than we can handle wanting to know how to tackle the whole social landscape.

Unfortunately, this is also one area in which Google Analytics has been sorely lacking. While platforms like Radian 6, Brandtology & ThoughtBuzz have been working hard on analytics in this space, Google Analytics has been stuck mostly in the world of Pageviews & Visitors.

Now, to their credit, they’ve been working on various things to fix that. They have shown off social tracking solutions to select partners under NDAs. They’ve acquired Social Media companies like PostRank and SocialGrapple which will eventually show up in some of their products. But everything they’ve done is private and there’s really nothing we can work with as users.

Well, in 2011 they finally started waking up to Social with the Google+ initiative. The whole company got into a competitive mood with Facebook, announcing raises to stop defections to Facebook, matching week-to-week launch schedules and betting everyone’s bonuses to their success in Social.

In terms of Analytics, they had plenty to announce this year.

In June, they announced the “+1” button for web results. These later got extended to Ads and could be placed freely anywhere. (Incidentally, this was a week before they announced “Google+” … seriously, nobody in branding & PR could come up with better names?). Google Analytics also started auto-integrating +1 results into the data. BTW, if you’re not into the in-built solution, you should check out this ultra-geeky alternative by tracking Social Activities as Events from Analytics Geek Eduardo.

Almost immediately afterwards, Google extended this feature for tracking Facebook “Likes” and Twitter “Tweets”. These features are definitely not seamless like the tracking of +1, but with a little work webmasters can accomplish these for their own sites.

In October, they finally announced that the Social Tracking feature would be automatically built into Social Plugins by AddThis and ShareThis.

At the end of the year, Google Analytics announced something called “Social Data Hub” which would basically allow social media networks and platform owners to auto-send usage data to Google. A little optimistic on Google’s part to expect this as there’s no way the large platforms like Facebook & Twitter are going to do this, but this could take off for smaller networks (starting with Google+, Orkut and YouTube). For an explanation of this feature, check out this post on Lunametrics.

5. Search Engine Optimization & Site Speed

The biggest feature in terms of SEO features for Analytics came in the middle of the year in the form of Google Webmaster Tools integration with GA. Webmaster tools collects and shows some excellent data (though nowhere as insightful as GA), and there was no way to share that data until now. In June, Google Webmaster Tools data could finally be passed on to GA.

Another huge push Google made this year was towards giving more importance to Site Speed. Apart from other initiatives like the “Page Speed Tool”, which analyzes your sites and makes suggestions to improve loading time, and announcing that Speed is a factor in search results, Google Analytics also introduced tools to help marketers adapt to these new ranking factors.

May brought with it, a launch of a feature called “Site Speed” which helped measure the Page Load time on your site. Over the course of the year, the feature got upgrades and finally was made available to all pages without any code customization. For those interested, here’s a tutorial on getting insights from the Site Speed tool.

But the biggest news of the year was actually a controversy when Google decided to auto-send visitors to the “https” (secure) version of the site. When people on a secure version of Google search for something and then get redirected to the site, now Google Analytics (and any other Analytics tool), doesn’t see the actual keywords used by their visitors.

This was a huge change, and the controversial part was that if you ran campaign on Google AdWords, you could still see the keyword data for that source. It was just for the free search results (clicks on which don’t directly make Google any money), that all the keyword data was stripped out. Needless to say, this would be terrible as it takes away our ability to understand our audience or tailor or message based on keyword behaviour.

Pretty much every online expert jumped in to criticize Google for this double standard – some openly accused Google have having ulterior motive (Danny Sullivan in his passionate piece “Google Puts a Price on Privacy”). Others thought it was mostly a messaging and communication gap, the actual gaffe was minimal (More comments here from Brian Clifton and Lunametrics).

Personally, I think it’s a crappy move on Google’s part stripping out this data considering it’s still providing this data to advertisers. Anonymized keyword data doesn’t hurt users’ privacy any more than age-old cookies, but helps marketers, webmasters and businesses get a much more complete picture of the marketing

In my private conversations with Googlers in the Analytics team, they admitted they’re helpless on this move as this is a diktat from the top. Google’s going overboard to show regulators around the world that it’s one-step ahead in terms of protecting people’s privacy. While I appreciate their compulsions, the future with this kind of thought is scary – I hope we’re not looking at a world where Google refuses to release any data and goes back on it’s basic “openness” DNA.

6. APIs & Back End Upgrades

Google Analytics v5 brought with it tonnes of invisible upgrades that weren’t discussed much in the blogosphere – from faster AJAXy loads, to unique URLs to reports, a much more refined number crunching system and overall UI coherence.

Early in the year , Google announced new features for the API – with Server Side Authorization and announcing new dimensions and metrics being available.

In April, the Google Analytics blog highlighted new tracking code improvements (client side POST support) that build upon it’s asynchronous code introduced in late 2009.

Finally, two old features were overhauled. Benchmarking as we knew it was killed (with a creatively titled post called “Evolution of Benchmarking” ) in favour of a private email that goes out to webmasters with benchmarking data. We haven’t seen much about this report through the rest of the year, so I guess this feature may get a boost sometime next year when the Social Media Monitoring features that came from the PostRank acquisition make their way to the launchpad.

The second feature was a difference in the way sessions were calculated, logically ending the session when one of the one of the variables (utm_medium, utm_source, utm_term, utm_content, utm_id, utm_campaign and gclid) changes.

7. Education

One area in which the GA team excelled in 2010 was Education. That year, they started the excellent web series called Analytics TV. Every episode featured the energetic, enthusiastic & passionate Analytics Guru Avinash Kaushik and other Team Leaders from the Analytics team answering questions from the web audience. For most regular users, the content was probably too technical … but for regular Analytics users, it was pure gold.

Our very own Vinny launched the Conversion JAPAC blog which brings together awesome Analytics and Conversion focussed case studies in the Asian context. That blog featured several fascinating case studies including Fairmont Hotels and one on Price Testing (written and shamelessly plugged by yours truly).

In April, a new Help Center was also launched to match the  new GA version 5. Thankfully this version gets updated much more than the previous version and links to articles contributed by external authors

And finally, there were also plenty of articles from the usual array of bloggers, authors and Analytics expert. One highlight that I’d definitely like to bring up is an awesome Google Analytics infographic from Tatvic on improving your GA setup.

8. News & Controversies

Among all the feature launches, upgrades and integrations – probably the biggest news for the product that stretched the entire year was the launch of Google Analytics version 5. Mostly because it was such a slow rollout (that’s still not finished), the Analytics team has taken their time to introduce features.

The Google Analytics Premium was another product launch that was much discussed in the blogosphere. At Happy Marketer, we’re still unsure about whether our clients require paying for the tool (as Avinash says, you need 10x the investment in Analysts than in Analytics tools), but for many of the global Google Analytics Certified Partners, this is a significant revenue & support opportunity.

And the biggest controversy was the removal of keyword data for regular search engine traffic from the tool. Obviously a huge deal for SEOs and Webmasters, this was discussed, dissected and was a hot passionate topic on the interwebs.

Wrapping Up …

As we start off 2012, we can remember 2011 as a turning point when the Google team started taking the pace of launches and features really seriously. This has been a standout year in terms of product development and we hope that some of the major holes in GA’s features (social media, better mobile tracking, more automatic integrations) will get filled up in 2012.  For a more well informed prediction post, here’s a recent Justin Cutrioni video by Online Behaviour on Analytics Future.

Awesome video! Love it when the checkout times out

Finally, let me leave you with an awesome video above from the UK Analytics team that encourages you to pay attention to user behaviour on your site.

And it was also a very fun year for us! David and I got to spend time at Google Mountain View, and have a quick conversation with Avinash, one of our Analytics idols!

What do you think of this wrap-up? Did we miss something important out? Do you disagree with some of my analysis? Chime in below in the comments section!

I recently studied hundreds of examples of how brands found success and failure on social media. I’ve broken their processes down into 4 simple steps, and also done up a nice attractive infographic for you to understand the concepts better. Enjoy!

I’ve also attached a power point presentation that explains the graph in more detail.