Molecular Voices » Digital Marketing

Posts from Digital Marketing

Marketing is different in a digital world. Things like Search Engine Optimization, promoting your brand online, and search engine marketing, all are important factors.

October 14

Facebook pages want to know: Are you for real?

Following up on my post on Facebook fan pages, InsideFacebook’s Eric Eldon broke the news that Facebook is working harder to verify the authenticity of the people behind fan pages on its site. If you are fan of say, Lenovo laptops, there was nothing preventing you from setting up a fan page for the company. If Lenovo decided to launch their own fan page at a later date, they would wake up to the fact that it was already occupied or taken. Brands are left with little options other than join forces with people who do not necessarily behoove to their marketing message, or try and launch a page in parallel, to varying degrees of success. Contacting Facebook for help does not guarantee you action or relief.

We feel fan pages hold great promise. A story on PRI radio show Marketplace tells the story of The Coca-Cola company successfully teaming up with individuals who set up its fan page before its own marketing team got to it. The brand’s strength and its passionate following helped it garner a following that is almost 4 million users strong.

Hopefully the new verification measures will reduce the chances of such brand name squatting on Facebook.

posted to: Digital Marketing, Digital Strategy, Web 2.0 & Social Media | 3 Comments »

October 2

Shift in the advertising power base

by Dirk Reckerman

After years of anticipation – the shift from traditional to digital is becoming real. The UK became the first major economy to achieve this milestone – according to the Internet Advertising Bureau of Britain. Internet ad spend accounted for 23.5% of the British advertising market . Print was still in first place, with 30% of the market, but had recorded steep declines.

As the internet begins to replace print as the primary source of consumer news and information, as well as encroach upon television as a deliver vehicle for info-entertainment, this trend will only continue to be more exaggerated.

The industries recovering from the global economic downturn will demand measurable channels in which to spend their marketing budgets. Internet has an inherent advantage around measureability – although solid practices enabling this are still in its early stages . As he internet transitions into the central medium around which overall marketing campaigns will be based, digital marketers will be tapped to deliver robust strategies to lead the marketing initiatives within their organizations.

posted to: Digital Marketing, Digital Strategy, Web 2.0 & Social Media | No Comments »

September 30

Digital Equals Measurable

by Dan Calladine (Isobar)

Isobar Global’s Dan Calladine is Molecular’s guest blogger. If you have any questions for Dan, add a comment to any of his posts. You can also follow Dan at http://digital-examples.blogspot.com/ or on Twitter @dancall.

I was at a media event in London recently when someone from the traditional media side (not my company, I should add) went into a big rant about ‘what is digital?’

I really don’t see where the confusion comes in. ‘Digital’ isn’t an abstract concept, like ‘Girl Power’; it’s pretty easy to define and visualise.

Are posters digital? Yes, if they’re digital posters
Is mobile digital? Yes, almost all mobile is through digital networks these days
Is press digital? Yes, if it’s online… & so on.

The main thing about ‘digital’ is that the content and data is transferred digitally, and this means that you can often collect it and count it. This is what I love about digital media – admittedly I’m a bit of a geek – we’re constantly finding new and unusual ways of measuring actual data, not just surveying people. (& that’s why Omniture, a digital measurement company was sold for $1.8bn last week.)

Some relatively random recent examples:

Video: Services like Visible Measures can track and aggregate the number of views of a video across all the major video platforms in the world – they were able to show that Thriller received 28m views across all sites in the week after Michael Jackson died.

Social Media: While the twitter user base is not demographically representative, the site provides lots of data that can be aggregated and analysed. At university we used to do content analysis on newspaper stories; content analysis on twitter can looks at hundreds of thousands of posts and return findings like 20% of tweets are related to brands or products, or 15% of tweets can be classified as ‘porn spam’.

Mobile: Mobile ad servers can show the direct response rates of mobile ads, and demonstrate that the average click rates on mobile ads are approximately half those of online ads. Of course the click is not the only reaction an ad is intended to create, but it does show that apps and content are likely to be more powerful communications devices with mobile, and luckily you can measure the popularity of different apps.

Finally, you can be very creative about what you measure, and get high-sample size results for the strangest things. The free dating site OkCupid did this last week with this study of the response rates to emails sent on their sites, based on the content of the emails.

“#1 – Be literate. Netspeak, bad grammar, and bad spelling are huge turn-offs. Our negative correlation list is a fool’s lexicon: ur, u, wat, wont, and so on. These all make a terrible first impression. In fact, if you count hit (and we do!) the worst 6 words you can use in a first message are all stupid slang.

Language like this is such a strong deal-breaker that correctly written but otherwise workaday words like don’t and won’t have nicely above average response rates (36% and 37%, respectively).

Interesting exceptions to the “no netspeak” rule are expressions of amusement. haha (45% reply rate) and lol (41%) both turned out to be quite good for the sender. This makes a certain sense: people like a sense of humor, and you need to be casual to convey genuine laughter. hehe was also a successful word, but much less so (33%).

Scientifically, this is because it’s a little evil sounding. So, in short, it’s okay to laugh, but keep the rest of your message grammatical and punctuated.”

That’s the thing about digital – so much is potentially measurable, and you can really start to have fun when you think about what to do with the data that you collect.

posted to: Data & Analytics, Digital Marketing | No Comments »

September 23

How to Score Higher in iPhone App Store Searches

by Glenn Barnett

App Store search placement is a huge driver of iPhone app downloads and sales, especially if you don’t have a big media buy to support the app. If a consumer finds your offering in the App Store, it’s safe to assume they’re a qualified lead, and they’re literally one click away from converting.

But what affects how “findable” an app is in the App Store? If one can’t count on getting in Apple’s “Top 25″ or “What’s Hot” lists, what other options does a fledgling app have to gain consumer visibility?

The answer is keyword search optimization, which is like web SEO, but focused on the nuances of the iTunes App Store search algorithm. The following article provides tips for improving the searchability and findability of your iPhone applications and, ultimately, increasing downloads and sales.

1. Downloads are huge.
The number of downloads is the number one factor in search ranking placement, by a large margin. For this reason, brands should consider launching apps at a low initial price point to help boost the download count as quickly as possible.

2. Ratings don’t matter (for search).
Positive (or negative) consumer ratings and reviews are not included in the calculations for ranking placement (or if they are, it’s a very slight effect). Of course, ratings are still important for conversions, but if your primary objective is search placement, you’ll want to focus your efforts elsewhere.

3. Descriptions don’t matter either.
Due to the emergence of “spammy” app descriptions that go on and on for pages and mention every keyword imaginable, Apple is changing the way keyword search works. Instead of matching against both title and description, the company has added a new “keywords” field and will be phasing out descriptions from consideration in the search algorithm.

According to Apple, “It is important to enter keywords for all applications as soon as possible so your application can continue to be successfully located on the App Store.” Due to these changes, be sure to focus your app descriptions on telling the features-and-benefits story, and not on search placement.

4. Make every keyword count.
The new keywords field can contain a maximum of 100 characters (comma-delimited). So instead of a thousand-word description, you’re down to around 12 keywords. These keywords can only be entered when you upload a new version of your app; at that point, they’re set in stone until the next version.

These 12 keywords are the most important decisions you can make for search placement, so it’s critical to develop a strategy. Come up with a prioritized list, and try searching for various combinations to see what comes up in the store. Some strategies may involve picking keywords where there’s no competition; others may involve piggybacking on the competition.

5. Get creative with the title.
One workaround for the new keyword limitation is to put a short description after the App Store title. For example, I recently changed the title of one of my apps from “On the Clock” to “On the Clock – time tracking for clients, projects and tasks.” However, like keywords, titles are “set in stone” and can’t be changed until you release a new version. Treat them as an extension of your keywords, and if you touch on a target word in your title, don’t waste a keyword on it.

6. Review text is ignored.
Textual consumer reviews are not considered at all in keyword search matching. For example, if a review boasts that “This bird watching app sure beats fishing!” that app will not appear in searches for “fishing.” In other words, worry about what reviews will do for your conversion, not what they’ll do for your search placement.

There are over 65,000 applications available on the App Store today. The vast majority of apps enjoy a brief spike of downloads upon release and then quickly fall off as other newly-released apps fill in behind them.

Optimizing your iPhone applications for search using the guidelines above can help to build and sustain demand for your applications. While these guidelines work for the App Store today, the rules have changed since launch, and they’ll no doubt change again as Apple continues to evolve the App Store. Until that happens, choose your keywords carefully, get creative with the title, and beg, borrow and steal to increase your download count.

posted to: Digital Marketing, Mobile | No Comments »

September 21

The future of public relations

by Dirk Reckerman

When you live in the middle of the digital marketing and media revolution, it is sometimes easy to overlook the problems and changes that many industries are experiencing. Not long ago, Public Relations (PR) was considered the most cost-effective way of getting an organization’s name out to the masses. Here in Boston, there are a myriad of PR organizations, and they are fighting tooth and nail to retain business. I wonder, however, if they don’t see the change that is happening around them. Or perhaps, similar to print media, they see it, but are not quite sure what to do about it.

As I pondered this dilemma, a few possibilities occurred to me. I segmented my thinking in the three ways- short, medium and long term. I also realize that painting in broad strokes affords me liberties that are not true in business. Oh, the beauty of blogging!

I strongly believe that the goal of public relations has a great deal of value. It is not the value proposition that needs to change, but rather the mechanism/tactics through which it is delivered. Therefore, in the short term, the tactics employed by a classic PR agency must evolve to embrace and leverage social media elements. If you consider the capabilities being offered by many PR agencies today, they still tout old school capabilities like press releases, media tours, messaging, highlighting executives, by-lines etc. These are all well and good, but how many of us read a press release? And if I wanted to learn about an executive, I expect to hear what that person has to say on YouTube or perhaps read it on their blog. A PR agency does not have to change the overall strategy, It simply has to incorporate these social media elements and tactics.

In the medium term, there may be opportunities for intersection of PR and digital marketing. To this point, digital marketing has been focused around traditional marketing through digital media. The skills and approach that PR experts bring to the table might be key to understand what drives people to organically and virally consume content. Communication strategy has not been the strong suit of digital agencies, but by virtue of being a rapidly evolving space, it may be time for the digital team to drive this strategy. In other words, leverage the experience, approach and thinking that is the corner stone of PR , but apply it to the digital medium and realize that the sum of these parts will be greater than the whole (i.e. PR + digital agency = future)

The long term approach is far more radical. It is anyone’s guess as to where the quickly changing environment will settle. The good people in the print media are having one summit after another to morph their operational and profit models to return to viable businesses. These media outlets have been the main stay of PR – not to mention the bane of their existence. My belief is that the trade of PR relations will begin to focus on experts and consumers. The middle ground of journalists and print publications as we know it will seize to exist. They will be replaced by centers of interest (i.e., think communities or groups), who create and maintain their own ecosystem content creation, commerce, reviews, communities – specific to that interest. This would not only impacts PR, but digital marketing and business in general.

There is a future for PR, but it is irrevocably coupled with the digital medium and digital marketing. The scary consideration is that these PR agencies must act now so that they do not face the same predicament as the print industry.

posted to: Digital Marketing, Digital Strategy, Industry Trends, Web 2.0 & Social Media | 1 Comment »