Blogwell Blog

Well, I attended Gas Pedal’s Blogwell event in San Diego last week to hear how leading brands are operating in the social media space. The case study sessions I sat in on included Starbucks, USAA, Community Medical Centers and State Farm. There was also a “keynote” in the middle on social media ethics from the event organizer – the Social Media Business Council. All the sessions were illuminating in many ways and below you will see the tweet-trail of highlights I generated during the course of the afternoon. However, let me first provide some overarching observations for your consideration:

• While all these brands (and others represented at the conference) are certainly well into their use of social media, this is still new territory for them and they themselves are still learning how to best leverage the social space. In other words, even if you are just starting out in exploring social media, you are really not that far behind and have the benefit of learning from other brands’ experience (successes and failures).
  
  
• Even these large enterprises are struggling with resource allocation for social media both in terms of staff and budget.
  
  o In terms of staff, most only had 3-5 people tasked with social media responsibilities in total. And these people often had cross-functional responsibilities – social media and digital marketing, social media and public relations/public affairs, social media and advertising, etc.
  
  o In terms of budget, most did not have dedicated social media allocations but were siphoning funds from other sales/marketing buckets. The ability to provide management with compelling ROI data was cited by many as a barrier to getting more direct budget.
  
  
• Every single presentation mentioned the importance of getting senior leadership to champion social media across the enterprise.

All in all, I walked away from the conference feeling very energized and validated in terms of the 5-Phase Process DBE is using to help our clients enter the social media environment. From name-claiming to auditing to strategy to tactical implementation is certainly the right path to social media success.

Here's the tweet-trail:

@marc_engelsman
4:06pm, Feb 16
At Blogwell conference in San Diego - already met some good people in the enterprise social media space #blogwell #social #marketing
4:31pm
starbucks: social fits within larger digital strategy
4:40pm
starbucks: build internal coalition across enterprise. c-suite, legal, hr, mktg, etc
5:00pm
starbucks: social media part of digital budget now but stole from other projects initially
5:18pm
usaa financial: built on wom and using social for brand reputation
5:23pm
usaa financial: using ratings/review apps to facilitate social engagement
5:28pm
usaa financial: also using webinars to share expertise
5:39pm
usaa financial: transforming call centers to contact centers to handle social scale up
6:20pm
#blogwell social media blurs editorial and advertising line
6:23pm
#blogwell create social media policies and training programs to stay ethical and lawful
6:35pm
#blogwell ftc says brands are responsible for social media monitoring - can't claim ignorance
6:57pm
community med ctr: uses leadership blogs, employee podcasts for social
7:00pm
community med ctr: bloggers include drs, nurses, exec staff and others
7:07pm
community med ctr: testing twitter and mobile texting of health tips
7:18pm
community med ctr: employee engagement important goal of social strategy
7:37pm
state farm: social media balancing act includes personal vs business use
7:41pm
state farm: brand name claiming issues on all social properties at start
7:44pm
state farm: risk vs reward includes risk of NOT participating
7:47pm
state farm: need to provide employees path for asking questions re social use
8:01pm
#blogwell thanks for a great afternoon of social media case studies

SEMPO's State of Search Survey

As you probably know, DBE is a member of SEMPO – the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization – and have been so for as long as the organization has existed.

We view SEMPO as a critical player and thought leader helping educate believers and non-believers alike on best practices in this ever-evolving industry.

That’s why we’re not just a member of SEMPO -- we’re an active member attending sponsored events, getting SEMPO Institute certification, and participating on various committees. Currently, I am serving on the Research Committee as the lead on SEMPO’s Sixth Annual State of Search Survey.

This important initiative is unique in the way it provides parallel tracks for advertisers and agencies as it probes for the latest trends in search marketing strategies, tactics, budgets, metrics and more. I have used the results from previous surveys to help our internal teams as well as our clients gain a better appreciation of the value of their search marketing efforts as well as a sense of perspective for where they fit in comparison with others. That’s one of the real values of a long-term tracking study like this and, for that reason, this year’s version has retained many of the same questions as the past surveys.

However, as previously mentioned, search is an evolving industry and so there are also some new questions in this year’s survey that were added based on emerging trends. For example, there are more in-depth questions about social media as part of the search marketing mix and about how metrics are being used to illustrate return-on-investment (ROI) during this period of heightened spending scrutiny spurred by economic conditions.

I invite all our clients, our partners and our friends in the search industry to take part in the survey -- http://bit.ly/SEMPO-search. You don’t have to be a member of SEMPO to take the survey and all respondents will have access to the final report. It takes only about 10 minutes and the more participants we get, the more valuable the results will be for all to see. Thank you and be sure to check back here in March for my analysis of the results.

Google Remarketing

During our recent meeting with Google, I heard about an interesting Google’s service called Google remarketing.

What is Google Remarketing?

Remarketing is a new beta service offered by Google to qualified Adwords’ clients. The product helps you reach users who have previously visited your website and is used to drive increased conversions on the Content Network using display ads.

You will be able to define groups of users that you want to target, such as shoppers who have abandoned after adding items to the cart. For example, Google Adwords will serve ads to them as they browse other sites on the Content Network after leaving your site. You will be able “re-market” your products to visitors in real time. All you will need to do is install a small amount of JavaScript onto your site to provide tracking and to configure Adwords to target specific users.
Effectiveness of Remarketing Technology

According to Advertise.com, remarketing has been shown to improve ad response up to 400 percent across several Advertise.com clients. According to this SEMPO article, remarketing is the most-under utilized marketing technology.

Here is how the technology works:

- When a user visits your website, a cookie gets dropped in to the user’s computer.
- The cookie tracks where the user left your site (for example, abandoning the shopping cart, just visited the home page and left or left the membership page without signing up)
- When the user (using the same browser) visits other sites that are in Google;s content network, based on which page the user visited or from which page the visitor exited your site, you can display the ads (promoting no shipping fee, a coupon, membership benefit, etc.) to the user in those content sites.
- The user clicks the ads and comes back to your site and converts.
- Based on your sales cycle, you can tell Adwords how many days the ads are to be displayed(1 to 180 days) and the frequency.
- After the user makes a conversion in your site, the display ads will stop showing to the user.

Benefits

Remarketing technology has these inherent benefits:

- Customizes the message based on user’s browsing and purchase history
- Recognizes user intent
- Controls the frequency of views
- Governs daily advertising spend
- Excludes ads from appearing on select domains.


Issues

The two issues we are:

While privacy concerns are always a hurdle for behavioral targeting, Google confirms users can opt out. After you opt out, you will not receive interest-based ads.

Also, since the cookie is set for the browser, if the same user uses a different browser, Google will not get the information stored in the other browser.

Interested?
Since Google remarketing service is still in beta, it is not publicly available. If you want to catch the boat sooner, you need to contact your search marketing agency or your Google rep.