Rocky FU

The online contest is over; now what? Online contest content strategies

Rocky FP — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:14:26 PST

Samsung 404 Page after Requesting for a contest page

In one of my recent site audit projects, I found one of broken links to be a Samsung online contest. This contest has ended and now what? Samsung has removed the contest pages, which is really bad.

Why Shouldn’t You Remove Pages with Expired Content

KFC Not Found Page

For the obvious reason number one, if anyone tried to visit the removed pages, he would be facing a “not found” error message. It could be a participant who comes back to check out the results. What kind of experience is that when a visitor see a page like the one above?

How do you feel when you arrive at the post office and find out it has moved away?

Secondly, Samsung lost link love. Online contest, or lucky draw from well known brands like Samsung often gets popular among bloggers especially when there is also an offline media coverage. Many link to the contest page and share it in their blogs. Not to mention the coverage from big online news sites.

Each link to the contest page acts as a vote to the site; the more, the merrier. Link building is one important part of getting ranked high in the search engine search results (SEO efforts). You don’t want to “remove” those efforts, either intentionally built links or unintentionally ones.

Thirdly, if the search engines have indexed the contest pages, they would soon find it unreachable if you remove them. Bad for SEO (search engine optimization).

How Should You Deal with Expired Content

Update the pages with online contest results so that visitors know they are reading expired content and just leave the pages there.

But, don’t waste the opportunities to share the fun from the online contest. People love photos and videos. So, do take them and share on the site.

You can do more than sharing love. You can invite for future participations. How?

Put an email subscription box there so that visitors can choose to be informed of future events; remember the rule, “K.I.S.S.” (keep it simple, stupid). Don’t ask for millions of information; a name and email address will do.
Ask the visitors to follow you on Twitter and become a fan at your Facebook Fan page.
Enable people to subscribe via RSS reader though it’s not as popular as email subscriptions in certain markets.

Lastly, just for precaution measure; build a good 404 “not found” page. A good custom 404 page will help people find the information they’re looking for, as well as providing other helpful content and encouraging them to explore your site further. I would recommend an extra search box in the main “error message” for better user experience in the top Samsung “404 not found” page.

Do you know what you should do online for launching a new product?

How Western Digital Let Down A Loyal Customers

Rocky FP — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 08:11:46 PDT

Customers don’t expect you to be perfect.
They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.
-DONALD PORTER

I WAS a loyal customer of Western Digital (WD) and I always bought WD hard disks even though it cost more and sometimes friends gave other recommendations.

I bought my last WD hard disk in March 2007 with five years warranty, “1 for 1 exchange warranty” printed on the package. “five years warranty” is rare nowadays and it just made me feel so right of choosing WD.

Shit happens.

After a blue screen yesterday on my Dell, the hard disk could not be detected. After some testing, I had to announce it, “time of death, 21:20, Oct 19, 2009.” Achieva is the company that is supposed be passing me the new HDD, which is also printed on the package.

As my girlfriend happens to work near Achieva, she gave up her lunch today to get the broken disk exchanged. Shockingly, the staff only agreed to fix it which will take two to three weeks. What happens to “1 for 1 exchange”? She was told “No stock”.

So, when they decided to offer the warranty, did they expect to keep producing the same model over the next five years? My girlfriend was not the only one who was frustrated and felt deceived there today. Not to mention the bad customer service from Achieva staff who even complained to the customer the trouble she had to go through.

I feel deceived too. I’m not sure what’s going on with the five-year warranty, but what I’m sure are:

I won’t buy WD hard disks.
I won’t buy any hard disks that comes with an address “Achieva”.

Isn’t it true that customer service in both good times and bad is the great intangible asset of the company?

Customer service can make a business. Zappos is a Las Vegas-based company selling shoes online, did “almost nothing” in sales for 1999, but grossed over $800 million in merchandise sales in 2007, and is projecting over $1 billion in 2008. Zappos has successfully differentiated itself by its selection (some 90,000 styles and more than 500 brands) and a devotion to customer service:

encouraging customers to order as many products as they wanted in order to “try them on,” then offering free return shipping for a full 365 days
only listing products on the site when stock was in their own warehouse (which actually lowered sales by 25% at a time when the company was still in the red)
deciding to run their warehouse operation 24/7 to deliver super-fast turnaround on orders, despite it being an inefficient way to manage fulfillment
encouraging customers to call them about nearly everything. Their call center takes 5,000 calls per day, and employees work independent of scripts, quotas, or call time limits. The longest call to date has been four hours. Zappos views the phone experience as a branding device, and speaks to virtually every customer at least once.
deciding to invest in “surprise” (free) upgrades to overnight shipping for most customers. This means that most orders are delivered within 24 hours, despite the web site indicating it will take 2-5 business days.
shipping and return shipping are free; most repeat customers get upgrades to free overnight or second-day delivery. “With Zappos, the shoe store comes to you,” says Pamela Leo, a customer in Montclair, N.J.

Customer service can break a business, too. Avis, who’s well known in car rental business, once cut customer service and reduced staff. They soon realized that its best “Avis Preferred” customers could make other choices and would. Avis realized its mistake and reversed course within a few months.

Every company knows what they can do to provide first class customer service: listen with heart, support in time, go the extra mile to make their experience unforgettable, and be anywhere your customers expect you to be.

Here is one of my favorite quotes from : Sales without Customer Service is like stuffing money into a pocket full of holes.

Mobile is on Fire

Rocky FP — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 05:20:04 PDT

Big Opportunities in Mobile

Cisco forecasts mobile data traffic globally will double every year through 2013, increasing 66 times between 2008 and 2013. Mobile data traffic will grow at a CAGR of 131% between 2008 and 2013, reaching over 2 exabytes per month by 2013.

In the 7 years from 2005 to 2012, mobile data traffic will have increased a thousand-fold. Almost 64 percent of the world’s mobile traffic will be video by 2013.

Coda Research Consultancy forecasts mobile broadband search and display ad revenues in the US to grow to $4.2 billion in 2015, up from $1 billion in 2010 (70%: search advertising). eMarketer’s conclusions estimates that mobile ad spending, including messaging-based formats, will reach $416 million in 2009 and $1.56 billion by 2013.

Mobile User Behaviors

According to Flurry, consumers are more loyal to mobile applications that provide news or reference services over the longest periods of time and they are most suited for subscription-based and ad-supported models.

Categories such as Books and Games are the two largest categories in both the Apple App Store and Android Market. Social Networking apps remain on a consumer’s handset for a long period of time, but get used only occasionally. Applications in the news, weather, reference and books categories have the highest frequency of use per week, the study found.

Yankee Group’s report early this year evaluated 27 mobile sites and reveals:

For news, Google and Yahoo show how it’s done. Both companies earn passing grades of 73, striking an impressive balance in delivering enough information to mobile users without overwhelming them. Other news sites, however, still struggle with leveraging mobile context and site discoverability.
For sports, MLB.com hits it out of the park. Major League Baseball’s site scores an impressive 71 for its device detection and ability to tailor content to fit mobile screens. Competitors Rivals.com (58) and ESPN.com (57) score a close second and third.
For search, Google is tops, but Yahoo’s a close second. Google’s mobile search site, with its minimalist interface, format-specific device detection and location- awareness, earns an 81, the highest mark given to any mobile Web site so far. Yahoo also earns a passing grade of 76, hindered only by small factors like extraneous content and HTML validation errors.
For mobile carriers, all need improvement.

And, comScore finding shows that light PC Internet users are 30% more likely than heavy PC Internet users to use their mobile devices to access Internet content.

Publishers Pushing Mobile

Audit Bureau of Circulations recently surveyed its U.S. and Canadian newspaper, magazine and business membership to learn more about publishers’ current mobile initiatives:

42% of consumer magazines are being formatted for mobile
44% of business publications are mobile-formatted
57% of newspapers are being formatted for mobile readers
44% of those already in the mobile marketplace report a 10% increase in website traffic

iPhone, BlackBerry, Android

A key finding of the “Smartphone Satisfaction Study 2009” is that the most satisfying smartphones are the ones that offer the best consumer functionality.

The iPhone continues to top all other smartphones in measures of consumer satisfaction, brand loyalty, and content usage (source: Crowd Science).

The Android was closest to the iPhone in several measures of satisfaction, but trailed when it came to hardware issues. 77% of Android users downloaded apps at least weekly, compared with 71% of iPhone owners.

Surprisingly, BlackBerry is leading the mobile market ahead of Apple’s iPhone in Indonesia, one of the world’s fastest growing mobile consumer markets, according to InMobi’s released data last month.

Mobile Marketing Opportunities

The rise of mobile marketing impacts almost all online marketers.

Mobile display advertising needs its own formats; several fit all situation on the Internet is no longer the case. Different formats are required for different devices.

Search marketers need to better understand mobile searchers’ behavior, which won’t be the same on the Internet.

1 in 10 consumers access their primary personal email accounts on mobile devices, according to Forrester Research. For that reason, optimizing emails for cross-platform performance is the challenge email marketers have to face.

When it comes to integrated digital marketing strategies, mobile is definitely one of the most important channels you should consider.

How Twitter Turbo-Charges Your Business on Branding, Sales, and CRM?

Rocky FP — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:41:29 PDT

Twitter Traffic During the Last 12 Months

Twitter has exploded as an online social network with over 50 million users and valuation of one billion; it’s hot. A hot channel among Internet users; a hot tool for online marketers.

In Singapore, I’ve seen lots of businesses during past months jumping onto Twitter, most of which are simply streaming content into Twitter. Is Twitter more than that? Definitely.

Twitter As An Engagement Tool: Mad Men Twitter Case Study

"Mad Men" Twitter Account: Don Draper

Mad Men is one of the most popular television show. It’s a drama about one of New York’s most prestigious ad agencies at the beginning of the 1960s, focusing on one of the firm’s most mysterious but extremely talented ad executives, Donald Draper. It’s not only popular on TV but also on Twitter.

Paul Isakson, who truly is in advertising from Minneapolis, created an account @Don_Draper and tweeted as actor Jon Hamm’s smoldering character for more than a year. Word suddenly got out that Matthew Weiner’s masterful creation was alive and well on Twitter. Its followers quickly grew to over 10,000. At this point, there are about 70 related accounts on Twitter.

Mad Men has given its audience a different dimension on the character. Presence on Twitter has no doubt strengthened the “Mad Men” brand image while engaging its audience.

As a matter of fact, I just started watching Mad Men after I chanced upon a few Mad Men characters on Twitter. Maybe out of curiocity; maybe because of the interesting tweets.

Twitter As A Customer Service Tool

Comcast Twitter Account

First of all, Twitter is not a replacement for phone and e-mail support for your customers but a little more personal and less formal customer support channel, which gives immediacy to online interactions.

Customers twitters their frustration after failing to receive the support they needed through phone or email support. Sometimes, Twitter is the first place the customers vent their frustration. Then, you should surprise them with a response on Twitter.

Comcast received a lot of attention and credit as being doing a great work in customer service on Twitter.

Last word of caution, use Twitter to compliment your customer service; not to replace it. And, make it a scaleable solution.

Twitter As A Prospecting Tool

80% of Twitters post updates on their everyday activities, social lives, feelings, thoughts, and emotions on Twitter. It’s a great channel if you “listen” carefully to them. Collect intelligent information for existing business as well new business ideas.

Twitter As A Sales Tool: Dell Twitter Case Study

Promotional Tweet from @DellOutlet

Dell thinks of Twitter as a good place to interact with customers and to raise awareness about the brand. But, that’s not what makes Dell a great case of utilizing Twitter.

Dell posts exclusive offers on Twitter for a few times a week so as not to spam their followers, and they use tracking URLs to gauge what followers find most appealing. Dell has made more than $3 million in revenue attributable to its Twitter posts.

DELL is not alone driving sales on Twittter. Using a dedicated Twitter account, @JetBlueCheeps JetBlue also offer their Twitter followers discounted, last-minute fares to fill flights that might otherwise take off with a few empty seats.

Is that all? Remember the old saying, “Sky is the limit.” Let your creative juice flow. Now the question is, what’s important deploying your own Twitter strategy?

Listen, respond, engage, serve, personalize.

JetBlue Twitter account has over one million followers, which is not the reason I got impressed. Its Twitter bio is impressive,

Have a question? Follow us and let us help! – Currently on duty: Gigi, Lindsey, Laurie, Morgan, and John

Unlike many other businesses, JetBlue clearly has a strong focus on its customers, as shown in its bio. It didn’t bother to give a damn about itself but the benefits of following JetBlue. Seriously, what else do you think customers are interested to find out after knowing who you are (JETBLUE). Only the benefits.

Keep these in mind: listen, respond, engage, serve, personalize. Add value; especially exclusive ones for Twitter.

The Marketing Process in Digital Era

Rocky FP — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 05:32:32 PDT

In reality, marketing is complicated. But, most marketers proceed a marketing process like this:

Understand what the market and customers need and want
Define a customer driven marketing strategy
Put together a marketing program
Build customer relationships

This century, Internet has become part of life. I’m disappointed when some marketers talked like “internet” is none of their business but the responsibility of the IT department.

Marketers can understand better what their customers want and need from the Internet.

Conduct survey online
Use keyword tool to find out what customers are looking for and the search insights
Go to relevant online discussion boards or forums to see what people are interested
Monitor the conversations people talk about your brand and respond quickly
Do the sentiment analysis
Identify the trends
Engage your customers in social media

Merge internet to your marketing process and make good use of it. Don’t separate yourself from the online world; don’t separate your marketing process either even if you don’t have an “online” before “marketing manager/director” title.

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How to Launch A New Product

Rocky FP — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 06:18:39 PDT

I was invited to the iNQ Mini (social media phone) launch event last night, which reminded me to write this post on online strategies for launching a new product. It’s important for me here to sketch the outline and I may not cover the detailed tactics. If you are interested to find out more, you can leave a comment or email me.

New Product Launch #1 Get Your Website Ready

Let’s skip the usability part for now; the least thing you want to make sure is “content”. Right; you want to make sure you have enough and detailed content available on the site. Do you know who the content are for?

Search engines. Flash is good; it looks cool and could make you look “professional”. But, don’t make it hard for the search engine to understand, will you? Make it easy for search engines to crawl and understand what your new product is. Of course you need to optimize your content copy.
Users. Yes, your customers. Make it on your homepage of your product and make it interesting so that people could be patient enough to understand all the “unique selling points”.
Journalist. Prepare a media kit for the journalists and PR people.

New Product Launch #2 Optimize for Social Network

If you really think your new product is great, why don’t you help your users to share the idea with their friends? It’s the easiest word of mouth marketing you could ever do.

Make it easy to allow people to share your new product in Twitter, Facebook, and/or other social networks. And, make it easy for them to bookmark it in their favorite bookmarking sites. The easiest thing you can do is to put a “Tell A Friend” widget on your site.

New Product Launch #3 Get the Paid Search Campaign Ready

You should be there whenever your prospects look for you or your products. Before you announce your product launch to the mass media, get the search campaign ready. Separate the search and content campaigns; brand, and product generic campaigns.

New Product Launch #4 Implement the Trackings

You want to report to the management how well the launch goes; and, you want to learn which part works and which does not. At the end of the day, you need to tell the visits by all traffic sources: direct, email, banner ads, PPC, organic search, social media, bloggers, and other referrers.

Create trackable short URLs for Twitter and Facebook respectively. And, spread the word out at the right time.

New Product Launch #5 Tell the Influential Bloggers First

Tell the bloggers first. Be transparent about who you are and what product it is. Leave it up to the bloggers to decide whether or not they want to share that information with their readers. NEVER pretend to be a reader and simply leave the news in the comment.

Collect the list first to get the “influential” ones and the relevant ones. It’s not a bad idea to share a mobile phone launch with a popular food blogger; but, it’s bad if you miss the popular gadget blogs.

More New Product Launch Ideas

Hold a launch party and invite your fans and bloggers
Show off your new product in road show
Give it to a celebrity before you release it to the market
Launch an online contest to give away new products for free
Let people try it and feel it for free

Ideas can be very fancy; but, products must be really good. Deliver a product you promised. I’m going to talk about what to do after the product launch in another post.

4 Free & Great Online Survey Tools

Rocky FP — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 23:52:18 PDT

Don’t be blind while you can actually see. Open your door and your mind to listen to your customers for feedback and suggestions. Let me share a few free but great tools for conducting online surveys.

Survey Monkey

Survey Monkey Chart

Survey Monkey was my favorite online survey tool back in my university life. You can use it to dsign your survey, collect responses, and analyze results.

The free version allows up to 100 responses and 10 questions per survey. If you conduct online survey quite often, I suggest you upgrade to its Pro which includes a lot of useful features. Free version doesn’t give you much to customize the survey.

The free online surveys allows you to create a survey of up to 20 questions and receive up to 50 responses over a 10 day period, beginning when you start creating your survey. Another company, Zoomrang’s free version allows up to 30 questions and 100 responses per survey.

Google Forms

Google Form: Grid Question Type

You can create a form from the Docs list or from any spreadsheet. The new grid question type allows you to label a few columns and create as many rows as you like. Google has just polished up the results summary charts, with clearer formatting of statistics and better formatting of charts for each question type:

Google Docs is free and so is Google Forms. The power of conducting an online survey or research with Google Forms is that, for developers who would like to integrate forms with their own applications, Google provides an easy way to pre-populate a form with data.

4Q: simple, free, powerful online survey tool for websites

The 4Q Online Survey is a free online survey solution that allows you to find out why visitors are at your website, and whether or not they are completing their tasks (and if they aren’t, what’s getting in the way?).

The 4Q online survey provides answers to the following 4 essential questions:

What are my visitors at my website to do?
Are they completing what they set out to do?
If not, why not?
How satisfied are my visitors?

Kampyle: Feedback Tool for Websites

Kampyle is a powerful on-demand solution to collect, analyze and manage your website visitors’ feedback.

How to Win more Friends and Fans

Rocky FP — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 01:07:24 PDT

How to Get More Followers in Google Friend Connect & More Facebook Fans

Google Friend Connect (GFC) and Facebook Fan Pages are two free but powerful tools for marketers, bloggers, and business owners. How to get more “members” (via Google Friend Connect) and “Fans” (on Facebook) is a topic we’re going to discuss today.

If you are a well known brand like Apple and Google, it’s a lot easier to get followers and fans; otherwise, you need to work really hard to “earn” them. Here are nine tips:

Make it easy for people to follow. Put the GFC “Follow” box and Facebook “Become A Fan” box in an obvious place on your website.
Produce quality content. Give people a reason to follow and be a fan. Ask yourself first whether you are interested. If people are interested in what you’re doing, they want to be updated.
Integrate with email campaigns. Ask for following you and becoming a fan; test different positions with different text, and button images.
Start small. You can be the first one to follow and become a fan. Then, ask your friends and co-workers to do so. It’s easier in Facebook; just suggest the fan page to your friends. And, ask your friends and co-workers to do the same as a favor.
Go crazy. Ask your customers to become a fan on Facebook. Create a short URL like fb.rockyfu.com to 301 redirect to your Facebook fan page; and, share the URL (with a compelling message) wherever possible: email, receipt, product packages, websites, stores, uniforms, and even the product itself.
Give incentives. Give away free sample and goodie bags to reward your Google followers and Facebook fans.

The rest tips are for Facebook only:

Utilize the power of MLM (Multi-level Marketing). Ask people to ask their friends to become a fan. You need to reward the “top performer” real good to get them do that. And, make sure you have an application properly designed to be able to track who the winner is.
Build a special channel on Facebook Fan page. Make people “have to” become a fan. Why? Because the Facebook Fan Page provides exclusive content they really want.
Promote the page with Facebook Ad. Be specific in the targeting settings so that your money don’t just get burned out.

6 SEO Tips for Google News

Rocky FP — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 23:36:08 PDT

Maile Ohye from Google gives a good presentation on SEO for Google News,

She gives 6 tips for optimizing for Google News,

Unique, permanent URLs with at least 3 digits
Don’t break up article body
Put dates between title and body
Titles matter
Separate original content from press releases
Publish informative, unique content

My last piece of advice: don’t try to manipulate Google. Work hard on producing informative and unique news. That’s what matters most.

Enhance Your Search Results w/ Rich Snippets

Rocky FP — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 23:18:15 PDT

Imagine this. “Rocky Fu” is a very valuable keyword which many websites compete for. This is one of the result on the first page:

Enhanced Google Search Results

And, this is a normal search result in Google:

Normal Google Search Results (Non-enhanced)

Which one stands a higher chance of being clicked through?

The enhanced search results provide the user more information; and, it takes bigger space on the search page, which could probably get itself higher CTR. Google began supporting rich snippets in the search results since this May though we don’t always see the enhanced results.

I suggest you mark up your HTML of your important pages with richer data using microformats and RDFs. You can use this tool to check how Google could display the richer snippets in the search results.

Online Sentiment Analysis: free and paid tools to identify online attitudes with your brand

Rocky FP — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:37:59 PDT

What’s your opinion about…?

Needless to be asked, consumers have already expressed themselves in blogs and social networks. reviews, ratings, recommendations…they have shared their feelings about yours or other brands: someone loves iPod, others feel “abc” mp3 player sucks. Nowadays, online opinions can make or break a product in the market place. Sentiment analysis field is emerging.

Sentiment analysis or opinion mining refers to a broad (definitionally challenged) area of natural language processing, computational linguistics and text mining. Generally speaking, it aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to some topic. The attitude may be their judgment or evaluation (see appraisal theory), their affective state (that is to say, the emotional state of the author when writing) or the intended emotional communication (that is to say, the emotional effect the author wishes to have on the reader).

I’ve previously introduced tools you can use to identify the online trends and track online conversations. Today, I’m going to share with you several free online tools for simple sentiment analysis to pinpoint the effect of specific issues on your customer perceptions, helping you respond with appropriate marketing and PR strategies.

Sentiment Analysis Tools Based on Twitter Tweets

Tweetfeel results on "iPhone"

Tweetfeel scours Twitter for Tweets about brands of your choice and shows you how positively or negatively Twitter users feel about it. The screenshot above shows results (72% positive) for “iphone” and the results show you a sample of recent tweets as well as an overall rating for the brand. It’s a quick way to get a feel for what people are thinking about your brand/product.

In sentiment analysis, you need to refine the keywords to identify the customers’ perceptions about different issues. Take the above analysis on “iphone” for example; we see even more positive results on “iphone 3gs” but very negative results on “battery” related issues:

Twendz. It’s a Twitter mining web application that utilizes the power of Twitter Search, highlighting conversation themes and sentiment of the tweets that talk about topics you are interested in (such as your brands). This tool seems more promising than Tweetfeel as you can directly join the conversation by clicking on the “Reply” button.

Using Twendz for Sentiment Analysis

You can select how fast you want Twendz to update the results; you can see clearly the sentiment in the color bars on the left; and, a tag cloud of related terms is displayed.

Twitrratr searches Twitter for a keyword (your brand or product) and the results it gets back are cross referenced against its adjective lists, then displayed accordingly.

Sentiment Analysis Based on Online News

Newssift, Sentiment Analysis for News

Newssift (a product from Financial Times) indexes content from major news and business sources and annotates all of this content (and excludes content that lacks credibility or business relevance). It matches business topics to your query (e.g. brands, legal risks, the launch of a new product, environmental impact) so that you can know about changing issues across time for a company or product.

Newssift allows you to build a complex query; the more specific your query, the more refined your results. After you have chosen a term in the query box, the tool will automatically move the box to the left and open up a new box to allow you add a term to refine your search.

Newssift suggestions are linked to the meaning and the relationship of a term or terms. These suggestions reflect the top people, places and things in the thousands of business news sources and million of articles they annotate for meaning, relationship and sentiment. You can click on to get further refined results.

If you are consistently researching a particular brand or business topic, you can have your searches saved. In future releases, you will also be able to set up alerts to let you know when breaking news occurs on topics you are researching. This feature will be very helpful to marketers.

Mood Analysis based on LiveJournal Posts

MoodViews is a collection of tools for tracking the stream of mood-annotated text made available by LiveJournal. At present, MoodViews consists of three components, each offering a different view of global mood levels, the aggregate across all postings of the various moods:

Moodspotter lets you search for mood-associations in a period: you select the period and type in a word or phrase, and Moodspotter spots the top moods associated with this word or phrase in the selected period for you. (It doesn’t seem to be working when I tried this so I can’t tell how good this is.)
Moodgrapher tracks the global mood levels, you can select the mood level (sad, sick, worried,…) with date interval; here is a sample for what many bloggers felt around Valentine’s Day 2006, while there were increased levels of flirty-ness and loneliness:
Moodteller predicts mood. This seems a useful tool but it just didn’t work when I tried.
LiveJournal enables its bloggers to tag their posts with mood indicators. Moodteller analyzes about 5000 LiveJournal blog posts per hour and estimates, according to the textual features of the posts, the percentage of them which are “happy”, “sad”, “excited”, and so on. Moodteller does not use the mood indications given by LiveJournal. After the estimation is done, we check how good it is by examining the real indications given by bloggers.
Moodsignals helps in understanding the underlying reasons for mood changes.

Semantic search engine Evri released a new sentiment web API which allows you deeper insight into the “who’s,” and “what’s,” and “why’s” associated with the particular expression or feeling. Find out more here. A few more paid sentiment analysis tools if you are interested:

Sentiment analysis allows you to identify attitudes to individuals and organizations and track key trends. Pinpoint the effect of specific issues on your customer perceptions, and respond with appropriate marketing and PR strategies.

Update (Sep 11, 2009): RankSpeed is a search tool that does a sentiment analysis on the blogosphere / twittersphere. You can search for any website category using tags and rank by any criteria: good, useful, easy, secure, etc…here’s a video on how to use RankSpeed.

You can get the results by sentiments:

9 FREE Tools to Track Online Conversations about your Brand

Rocky FP — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 06:14:35 PDT

There is an old trick about finding out who’s pissed off by your products or service, just go to Google and search “your brand name sucks” and you would find out.

To many people, iPhone is a good product, even for those who haven’t got the opportunity to own one (like me). If someone is not satisfied about iPhone, what about your brand?

Tools to Watch Online Conversations

Watching online conversations is definitely a must-do task for online marketing managers. Here are eleven free tools you can try out to help you identify the “good” and “bad” about your brand so as to manage your online reputation properly.

To manage your online reputation, you need to have a timely understanding of who and where your brand is being talked about. I’ve compiled a list of free tools you can use to help manage your online reputation.

Google Alerts: a powerful online conversation tracker

Enter your brand or product names in the “search terms” to receive email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of topic.Read also: 7 Google Alerts Tips For Your Business.

Twitter: watch your reputation in real time

Twitter is a great tool for real time search. Use the advanced search so that you get the most accurate results possible. Once you see the search results, you can use the “subscribe” button on top right menu to receive the update via feed readers. If you are new to feed reader, Google reader is a good start.
BuzzMonitor. The World Bank conceives and sponsors a open source aggregator, “BuzzMonitor” which also helps you track the buzz about your brand, products or service in the Internet.

Friendfeed

friendfeed is a service that aggregated your feeds from different online services and you can share with friends. You can subscribe to the search results as well. If in your countries, it’s not that popular, you can ignore this service. Give it a try first.

Blogpulse: track conversations in blogs

Watch the conversation in the blogsphere with blogpulse. BlogPulse tracks conversations by indexing the full content of weblog posts. First, BlogPulse technology crawls the blog, and then it segments the blog into individual posts and identifies permalinks. The search results show not only the blog content with bolded terms:

the most interesting part is, you can track the conversations and view the blog profile. When a blogger publishes a post and other bloggers link to it, the original post ( or “seed”) becomes part of a conversation. What happens next is fascinating. From those seeds sprout other links, and so and and so on, until it creates an entire conversation. The nodes of the graph are posts and the arcs of the graph are permalink citations from post to post.

Technorati

Technorati is another handy tool you can use to watch blog conversations about your brand or product.It shows the blog authority in the results. You can subscribe to receive updates via RSS.

Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.The blog with the hightest Technorati Authority is the #1 ranked blog.

Boardtracker: monitor forum conversations

Discussion boards and forums are still popular especially in some Asian countries. You can track the conversations in forums with boardtracker. You can pre-define search terms and preferences and BoardTracker will notify you in a number of ways (email, Jabber, Site) as soon as a thread matching your search term is posted on any of the thousands of forums they track. To me, this tool is not quite good if Asian market is of your concern.

Social Mention: Like Google Alerts but for social media.

Social mention is one of my favorite. It allows you to not only subscribe by RSS or Email but also provides CSV/Excel export (sentiment, top keywords, top users, top hashtags).

Sentiment is the ratio of mentions that are generally positive to those that are generally negative.

It shows several interesting figures such as strength, sentiment, passion, reach, the number of minutes per mention, the number of unique authors and retweets, post rank, and sources. With social mention, you can watch the conversations on blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, comments, news, and more.

Who’s Talkin

Who’s Talkin monitors conversations in blogs, news, social networks, videos, images, forums, and tags. I like the interface but unfortunately, the RSS subscription is not available yet.

SEO Crash Course by Matt Cutts

Rocky FP — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 09:55:28 PDT

This is really a good video I must share with you. Matt Cutts not only gives a quick course on search engine optimization (SEO) but also provides tips on blogging.

This is specially for WordPress blogs, but the tips apply to all CMS you adopt for your business.

The Power of Real Time Search

Rocky FP — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 01:11:56 PDT

I was tweeting this morning when failed to upload a picture to TwitPic
. As I’m new to use TwitPic, I was wondering whether I did something wrong. My username and password were not wrong as shown in the error message from TwitPic.Then, I did a search in Twitter and found something was wrong with the service itself:

That’s the power of real time search; it helps people find out what’s going on in real time. Other than Twitter, the following sites provide real time search as well:

Schoopler. It aggregates and organizes content being shared on the internet as it happens. Due to API limits, its Twitter results don’t seem to be as “real time” as that on Twitter.
Social Mention. It allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.
FriendFeed. Just enter a search query as you always have, and see new results instantly stream in at the top of your screen in real-time.
Ice Rocket.

What’s your favorite for real time search?

An Essential Checklist for Corporate Blogging Success

Rocky FP — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 02:25:03 PDT

Corporate blogging is not as hot as social networks nowadays; but, blogs are by no means not as important. Actually, blogs influence consumer purchases more often than social networks. Here is an essential checklist that I’ve summarized from my experience for corporate blogging success (it doesn’t cover technical part such as how to set up a blog as this blog is mainly for marketers):

Benefits of corporate blogging
- It creates transparency to the company
- It adds SEO benefits.
- It creates instant feedback and two-way communication opportunities.
- It helps building relationships with the customer.
- It’s great crisis handler.
- It drives traffic to company web site.
Types of corporate blogs
- Company blog
- CEO blog
- Industry blog
- Product blog
- Customer service blog
Corporate blogging best practices
- Determine your corporate blog goal before you start it.
- Set up corporate blogging policies.
- Set realistic expectations and allocate enough resources accordingly.
- Use a good blogging platform like WordPress.
- Make sure the design is simple and clean and it has the same feel as the rest of your website.
- Add a prominent link to the blog on the main navigation menu.
- Use casual language.
- Create author bio and be transparent about who they are and what they do in the company.
- Post regularly with original content.
- Allow comment by visitors with moderation and encourage comments (discussions).
- Write compelling headlines.
- Use bullet points to create easy-to-read format.
- Include relevant pictures in the posts.
- Enable blog subscriptions for posts and comments by both RSS and emails.
- Engage readers with survey, polls, contest, etc.
- Optimize blog posts.
- Update your Facebook friends and Twitter followers with your latest posts.
Corporate blogging topics
- Corporate press release (as stories)
- Industry news
- Expertise
- Video
- Organizing meet-up
- “how-to” post
- Case study and success stories
- Corporate event
- Make a list (like this one you are reading)
- Share a question one customer asked with the solution
- Survey / contest results
- Ask for opinions
Measuring corporate blog
- Traffic
- Subscribers
- Comments
- Incoming links
8 Popular corporate blogs

Feel free to share anything in the comment about corporate blogging.

An Introduction to Mobile Marketing

Rocky FP — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 02:10:25 PDT

Besides Internet marketing (or online marketing), mobile is another digital marketing media to target the right customers. This post serves as an introduction to mobile marketing for marketers who are interested.

Mobile Marketing Channels

When launching a mobile campaign, it’s important to remember there are multiple mobile channels to reach mobile users. They include:

Mobile websites
Downloadable applications
Mobile messaging
Mobile video

Like other marketing campaigns, mobile campaigns can have different campaign goals, either brand building or driving some kind of direct response. Let’s take a look at different mobile inventory options that work best for different campaign goals.

Mobile Inventory Types

Display. Just like what happens on the Internet, this kind of graphic or text banners inventory is purchased based on impressions or direct response (like cost per click). Keep in mind (when you buy impression based banners; e.g. CPM) that a mobile user is less likely to see a banner ad at the bottom of the page. The recommended aspect ratios for mobile web banner
ads are 6:1 (default) and 4:1 (extended).

Messaging. Users can reply to your text message with specific format or click on an included URL to open the mobile site.With MMS, interactive ads are also possible.

Paid Search. Paid search on mobile is just another keywords driven digital marketing tactic on mobile devices with less characters allowed in the ad. The landing page must be mobile friendly; otherwise, the bounce rate could be very high and it’s bad for usability. One key difference in mobile search from PC based searches is, the users are more likely to seek actionable results than reference information.

Other not so common mobile inventory types include mobile video, voice, in-application ads (e.g. in-game), and location based mobile ads.

Mobile Landing Page

As mentioned just now, the landing page you create for mobile campaigns must be mobile friendly (don’t use the same one for your PC internet campaigns). The page should also be designed to reduce the amount of scrolling needed and should be formatted to the specific phone experience. You may want to develop multiple versions of the landing page for different phones. A good mobile landing page should have the following qualities:

Compatible with different handsets
Clear call to action
Not too wordy
Visually appealing
Quick loading

Mobile Campaign Metrics

Like other forms of digital media, you can measure:

Impressions
Click-through Rate (CTR)
Conversions
Conversion rate
Branding
- Brand recall
- Message association
- Brand favorability
- Purchase intent

Mobile Campaign Integration with Traditional Media

Common Short Codes (CSCs) and 2D bar codes are two excellent ways to help integrate your traditional media campaigns with mobile ones.

CSCs are a string of five or six digits that a mobile user can send a text message to and receive information or content in return. It offers brands and companies an efficient and easy way to take advantage of text messaging as a way to connect with consumers.

With a 2D barcode application on the phone, users can scan the barcode to automatically complete an action like linking to a mobile website, or open a mobile application. Coca Cola’s recent campaign in Singapore (the image on top) is a good example.

11 Ways to Improve Site Conversion Rate

Rocky FP — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 02:19:00 PDT

“Conversion Rate”, either online leads or sales, is no doubt the most important online marketing goal. Having driven traffic to your site, what can you do to improve the conversion rate? These are 11 ways you can do; feel free to add anything else you can think of to share in the comment.

Usability Test. This is the most important test. You need to know whether your site works fine in different browsers, whether it loads fast, whether it help visitors to find what they need (like an on-site search box),… Get a usability expert; it’s worth it.
Multivariable Testing. This is what Google Website Optimizer enables you to do, testing multiple changes simultaneously to find the best combination of website elements.
A/B testing, or split testing, one element on a web page is compared to a variety of single-variable test samples in order to find a better performing one. In many occasions this is what’s needed compared to multivariable testing.
Web Analytics. With web analytics, you can find out what and where your visitors click, where they leave the site, which pages have very high bounce rate, and etc.
Heatmap. Web heatmap has been used for displaying areas of a Web page most frequently scanned by visitors. Try out CrazyEgg.
Live chat. Put a live chat box on your site; get instant feedback from your visitors and improve the site accordingly.
Online Feedback. Ask for feedback from your visitors. I recommend 4Q tool and Kampyle.
Online Survey. SurveyMonkey is one very good online survey tool I have been used for a long time.
Competitors Site. Learn from your competitors; don’t just copy everything.
Testimonials. Add testimonials from satisfied customers and the media.
Logos. Not just your company logo but logos to reassure the visitors like Verisign Certificate, BBBOnline, HackerSafe, Trust-E,… and even your well known partners.

Feel free to add more ways in the comment.

Marketers’ Guide on Search Engine Marketing

Rocky FP — Thu, 28 May 2009 20:55:24 PDT

This is the central page of a series of posts on Search Engine Marketing for marketers at RockyFu.com. This is a PPC guide for marketers from strategic perspective with a focus on “what to do”; detailed PPC tactics and operations on “how to do” are not a concern in this guide.

Table of Content

Search engine marketing (SEM) consists of search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC). But, in many Asian countries, PPC is widely regarded as “SEM”. So, this guide does not cover SEO. Examples and illustrations are given based on Asia Pacific markets.

If you are a marketer and you have questions with regard to search engine marketing, please contact me here and I’ll share the answer as part of the guide. If you would like to share tips with other marketers, I’m glad to include them in the guide as well (credit will be given to you).

Benefits of Content Network (Marketers’ SEM Guide Part 8)

Rocky FP — Thu, 28 May 2009 07:42:03 PDT

This is part seven of a series of posts on Search Engine Marketing for marketers. This part discusses the benefits of search engine content network.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

Content Network Introduction

Take Google for example,

The Google Network is a large group of websites and other products, such as email programs and blogs, who have partnered with Google to display AdWords ads. Advertisers have the option of running their ads on Google as well as the Google Network for no extra cost.

its advertising network primarily consists of search network and content network.

Search network consists of Google itself and its search partners; ads are targeted based on a user’s search terms on search results pages. Content network consists of hundreds of thousands of websites and products that display Google ads by contextual matching. Generally, search network delivers more targeted advertising with higher ROI.

Benefits of Content Network

Reach. If you want to reach broader audience, content network helps. Just Google AdWords content network reaches over 70% of unique Internet users around the world.
Awareness. The content network has the advantage of reaching potential customers at different points of the buying cycle. If you are to launch products of a new category, search can hardly help (unless you run off-line campaigns) without content network driving awareness.
Branding. Most search networks (one exception is Baidu) only allows text ads, which makes content network more valuable for online branding campaigns. You can run text ads, image ads, and video ads on content network pages.

Google recently analyzed conversions, cost, and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) on the Content Network, and compared them to performance metrics on the Search Network across thousands of accounts and many geographic regions. It published a whitepaper, which suggests the following conclusions:

Ads on the Google Content Network can be an effective way to gain additional conversion beyond those you get via search.
- When used in combination with Search, the median advertiser has a content CPA that’s within approximately 2% of their Search CPA.
- The Content Network drives nearly 20% of total conversions for the median advertisers
Conversion rates are higher for advertisers who used either of two AdWords campaign management controls: the Conversion Optimizer and site exclusion.

In a follow-up, Google recommended the following actions:

Consider complementing your search campaigns with campaigns on the Content Network, if you haven’t done so already.
Use tools for content optimization such as the Conversion Optimizer, Placement Performance Reports, and the Site and Category Exclusion tool. They can help you further tailor your Content Network performance to meet your advertising goals.

You can find some tips on optimizing content network here, here, and here. It’s more important for marketers to realize the value and benefits of content network.

SEM/PPC Outsourcing Guide (Marketers’ SEM Guide Part 7)

Rocky FP — Mon, 18 May 2009 05:23:06 PDT

This is part seven of a series of posts on Search Engine Marketing for marketers. This part discusses PPC outsourcing and ways to identify a good SEM / PPC Agency.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

Should You Outsource?

If you have experience in SEM, you are probably aware of the benefits of this online marketing channel; otherwise, you may wonder why you should do SEM, for which you can refer to part one of this SEM guide.

If your company doesn’t have an in-house team to take care of SEM, you probably need to consider outsourcing it to an agency. In addition, when you have in-house SEM team but there’s lack of knowledge or language capabilities in certain markets you expand into, you can also consider outsourcing part of your SEM activities to a third party. You can contact me if you need SEM consultancy and freelancing.

What to Ask for in SEM Request for Proposal (RFP)

Company registration certificate
Years of experience
Past accounts handled
Past accounts managed in the same industry and the produced results
Number of staff (more importantly, for your SEM campaign)
Bio and qualifications of the staff who will manage your SEM campaign; roles and responsibilities; and, how many accounts each person manages.
Who builds and maintains the keyword list (and how)
What bidding system the agency uses. If they have their own system, it’s a good sign. But you want to know more details of the bidding system. You don’t want to pay an agency tens of thousands every month who rely entirely on machine’s input.
How the agency handles seasonal effects and promotions
How frequent a report will be submitted and the content of the report
Who will analyze the campaign performance

There’s a lot more you need to find out which company has what it takes to run SEM for you. Make sure you tie the campaign to your business goals and keep improving the ROI. Move slowly to a performance based model.

Identify Good Search Marketing Agencies

Here are some more tips for identifying good search marketing agencies/companies to work with.

Previous clients and testimonials.
Ask for a list of their previous clients. Big names like P&G would give you confidence. In addition, if the agency had clients in similar industries, you would benefit from their experience. If you know a friend or two in those listed companies, you can talk to them and about for their opinions about the company.
Case studies.
If the agency shows some case studies how they solved a similar problem you are facing now for other companies, they probably can help you too.
Industry awards. Such as:
Word of mouth.
Do a blog search and forum search to find out what other people say about them. The buzz sometimes tells something you can’t find elsewhere.
Websites & Blogs.
Visit their websites and read their blogs, which usually tells a lot about them. If you are looking for search engine optimization services, you may want to check out their rankings in major search engines on industry keywords like “search engine optimization”, “Singapore SEO Company”, etc.
Ask them.
Listen to what they say and do a comparison. Ignore those fancy words like “top notch”. Check out more about what they have done in the past and find out their unique selling points which are going to bring you results. In addition, tell your requirement and ask for a proposal.
Meet them in person.
Invite a sales person and a person in operation. Sales people are good at telling stories; operation people tell you the real ones. You can also attend some well known conferences like ad:tech and Search Engine Strategies where you can meet lots of professionals.

It is important to keep an open mind while selecting search marketing agencies. Do your homework and build a win-win relationship between you and your agency.