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June 12

Facebook Username Alert for Brands

At one minute past midnight tonight EDT, brands (and individual users) can choose Facebook username URLs on a first-come, first-serve basis. Rather than a randomly assigned number, users can select vanity URLs. For example:

www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=123456789
vs
www.facebook.com/name

In short, if you already have a fan page, have over 1000 followers by May 31, and you have a relatively unique brand name, this is not “break your Friday night plans” type of news – but there are actions you can take today.

Why is this relevant?

Part of Facebook’s success is based on authenticity and a perceived trusted environment. This is largely shaped by the fact that most people use their real names and pictures. This paradigm is broken when people refer to URLs that look like code, rather than real names.

Just like brands commonly publicize their web page URL in marketing, a brand may choose to promote their Facebook fan page. Because a custom URL is easier to remember than random numbers, the effectiveness of a promotion can be increased.

Perhaps more interestingly, Facebook user names will be cataloged by search engines, so fan pages will be automatically promoted when a user performs a search. For instance, when doing a search on Google for a brand name, a Facebook fan page will be prominently features in the results, assuming there is one.

What should you do?

Tonight there will be a ‘land grab’ of sorts while people register usernames (most will be individual users claiming their personal names). This will not, however, be the domain name issue of a decade ago.

A few notes that help mitigate the urgency:

  • The Facebook fan page must meet two requirements: it must be live on Facebook prior to the May 31, 2009 cut-off date and have a minimum 1,000 fans as of May 31, 2009.
  • Generic usernames are not being offered at this time… ie you can not register “facebook.com/sneakers”
  • You can only register one user name per Facebook page
  • Usernames are not transferable

Today you should go to this Facebook page to prevent others from registering your trademarked name. If you meet the criteria, you should log in as an administrator after 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13 to create your user name.

If you do not meet the criteria, consumer oriented brands should be actively building fan pages! Because of the search engine twist, this is yet another way to build engagement with your brand.

Where can you find more information?

June 10

Molecular Named a Strong Performer among Interactive Marketing Agencies for Web Design Capabilities

Rigorous Design Process and Commitment to Ongoing Measurement and Improvement Help Agency Remain a Strong Performer in Prominent Independent Analyst Survey

Molecular was named a Strong Performer in the June 2009 report, “The Forrester Wave: Interactive Marketing Agencies – Web Design Capabilities, Q2 2009.” Molecular was included as one of 18 agencies deemed by Forrester to have a significant market presence and a set of blue-chip clients that validates their presence in the market. Forrester analysts evaluated the agencies across a set of comprehensive criteria and found Molecular’s “unusually clear market positioning and industry focus contributed to a standout strategy score that propelled Molecular deep into the Strong Performer category.” 

In the report, Senior Analyst Vidya L. Drego writes, “Molecular’s strong user research, standout personas, rigorous design process and commitment to ongoing measurement and improvement help the agency remain a Strong Performer.”

The report also points to Molecular’s technical expertise. “…the sophisticated technology platform underlying one of the sites demonstrated that Molecular retains the deep technical skills it developed as a one-time systems integrator.”

“We are very proud that a respected research firm such as Forrester recognizes what makes Molecular stand out in this competitive industry,” said Howard Kogan, president of Molecular. “We feel the report reflects our strategy to refine areas of expertise – like the use of brand personas – that help companies drive dramatic improvements in the way they engage and influence targeted customers and drive their business goals.”

June 3

Best Practices for Tweeting as a Company?

We’ve had a thread going internally on how we want to use Twitter as a company with @MolecularInc. We all want to open up this conversation to a broader audience and get all our good ideas together. So let me bring everyone up to speed:

Options

Some feel that one employee should own the account and can act as editor or contributed tweets. (That is, take any tweets employees wish to offer and post them).

The primary advantages of a singular editor are:

  • ultimately accountable for quality
  • a unified and consistent voice — not all over the place

CoTweet was offered a solution, which offers companies a unified publishing platform and (we assume) some sort of workflow option. While we don’t have access yet, a number of tweeting companies leverage it and presumably enjoy it.

A suggestion (from Bryan) is for @Molecularinc to retweet a tweet from an employee. Retweets have emerged as a de-facto standard for sharing someone else’s thoughts/links/etc. This would require employees (that wish to contribute) to have their own twitter account, of course.

Voices

Steve said, “My experience is that Twitter is a bit different than other channels in that it works best when there is a consistent human voice behind the tweets. Blogs and conferences work well with disparate voices and perspectives, but the business Twitter accounts that seem to be most effective (Zappos, Comcast, etc.) are written by one person or (in Comcast’s case) one voice that feels like one person even though it isn’t.”

Heather offered, “I understand that the ideal state of affairs for companies and brands to take advantage of the Twitter platform is to engage an audience- be it peers in the digital community, existing clients, prospective clients, or just interested parties- in a lively and active conversation.
“In doing so, the brand/company demonstrates transparency and authenticity, and as such, accepts that they have exposed themselves to some degree of risk. But, I think we’d agree that the payoff in customer trust and loyalty far exceeds it.”

Bryan said, “I second Steve that a consistent voice is an important element of organizational success with Twitter, but I also agree with Heather that the power of the Twitter platform is the potential for “lively and active conversation” – something that generally requires a diverse set of voices. ”

What are your thoughts?

June 1

Molecular Inc. Further Strengthens Data & Analytics Practice, Taps Sardinha to Lead Practice Group

Isobar Interactive Agency Sees Data-Driven Insight and Measurement Taking Center Stage in 2009 and Beyond

Molecular has appointed Kevin Sardinha to lead its Data & Analytics Practice. He will lead the multi-disciplinary team of experts focused on driving data-led principles and practices in all aspects of the firm’s client work. Kevin moves into this role from his position as a Senior Strategist within Molecular’s Strategy team, where he led engagements for adidas, Nikon, Reebok and The Hartford.

“The ability to gather and act on intelligent customer data often spells the difference between success and failure in the online channel,” said Howard Kogan, president of Molecular. “We have always placed a strong emphasis on creating programs with data and analytics capabilities ‘built-in’, and we’re committed to investing more in this area to ensure we remain at the top of our industry for data-fueled, results-oriented interactive solutions.”

The Data & Analytics team helps Molecular clients optimize the value of their customer relationships by integrating and analyzing key data across all channels to deliver relevant and actionable insight. Its experts take clients from the creation of a performance measurement strategy, through the technical implementation of the project roadmap and finally to the delivery of insights and recommendations that drive value to the business and its constituents. Companies including Reebok, adidas, Nikon and The Hartford have been beneficiaries of the practice’s expertise. Reebok now has an integrated measurement platform that allows it to track and optimize its online campaign investments across cost-per-click, e-mail, search, and referral sites, as well as track key performance indicators regarding consumer behavior and brand recognition across multiple geographic regions.

As practice lead, Kevin brings more than 12 years of management consulting experience that spans the financial services, pharmaceutical, telecommunications, and government industries. Prior to Molecular, he was a Senior Business Analyst within Keane’s Architectural Service group. Previously, Kevin held several strategic and business analyst roles at companies such as One to One Interactive and Exchange Solutions. During his time at Exchange Solutions, he focused on developing customer management strategies and economic models for financial service clients such as Fifth Third Bank, State Street Bank, Sovereign Bank, Huntington Bank and TD Bank Financial Group.

May 11

Metric of the Month May: Using Content Management Systems for Data and Analytics

Intro to Post Click performance tagging:
Post Click performance measures the actions a user takes after entering a site via paid placement such as a banner ad or paid search term. Evaluating the connection between user behavior and which ads or ad locations (such as a particular partner site) helps optimize ongoing marketing by assigning value to those visitors. We can determine value by setting up measurement campaigns surrounding those click-through visitors, watching their drop-out rates and comparing them to successful conversion. Post Click measurement allows effective performance evaluation on individual ad campaigns.

Post Click performance tagging usually involves adding an image to your page. This image (1×1 pixel) uses the SRC attribute, a descriptor telling a visitor’s browser where to retrieve a file, to collect information about the users arriving to the site through an online advertisement. This is typically done by adding a string of campaign-specific identifiers in the space after the URL left for setting variable values (the stuff after the “?” in your browser’s location bar).

However, if there are numerous campaigns running through different timelines on your website, adding (and removing) the image code from the site is very tedious. The effort is exponential if the website is still under development and requires you to back up the production release code, add the image tracking code to each page and re-deploy!! The less dynamic your Post Click tagging scheme, the greater the effort to keep it current.

A great work around to the constant extra work to keep things current during deployments and post development is to use your content management system to store the tags (the image SRC and its URL variables) and use a general library to add an image node to the corresponding page document if a tag is configured to appear on that page.  This elegant solution eliminates the need for re-deployment every time new tags are added.

Anatomy of the image tag:
Post Click performance image code looks similar to this, in which we have a simple conversion funnel of visitors landing on index.html and successfully converting once they have visited StoreFront.html:

In index.html:
<img style=”border: 0pt none; height: 1px; width: 1px;” src=”serverName&amp;tagId=31354″ alt=”" />

In StoreFront.html
<img style=”border: 0pt none ; height: 1px; width: 1px;” src=”serverName&tagId=24395″/>

If you look closely only the tagId changes for each page and the rest of the image properties remain the same.

Content Management solution:
1) Using the CMS to store the tag Id. There are two ways this can be achieved:

a. Creating a page attribute (call it analyticsTagId) and assign it the tagId: This is better from the point of view of performance. It is however a bit more difficult to manage; the content owner has to remove the tags when the campaign is over. There is no central place to view all the current tags.

b. Create a separate CMS page, which maintains a Map of pages and their tagIds: This takes a bit of performance hit (which can be overcome by caching) and presents one central place to manage all of your tags.

Once the CMS has the tags, the business objects in the code will need to check for a tag on a given page and call a JavaScript function if that tag exists.

2) Write a JavaScript function that takes tagId as a parameter and adds an Image to the DOM. Using JQuery, this function can look like this:

function AddTags(tagId){

if(tagId!=”null”)

{

var source;

if(document.location.protocol == “http:”){

source = document.location.protocol +”//adserver &tagID=”+tagId;

}else{

source = document.location.protocol +”//adserver&tagID=”+tagId;

}


//create the image node and append it to body
$(’<img/>’).css({height: ‘1px’,width:’1px’,border:0}).attr(’src’,source).appendTo(’body’);
}
}


That’s it!

This will give you a very strong and adaptive framework to add/remove your Post Click performance campaign codes from your website without actually deploying your code.

Notes:
1) If your ad serving code is in an iframe format, it will still follow the same steps,but instead of creating an image node, create a div and place your iframe in it.

Sample js code:

function createIframeTag(src){

var axel = Math.random()+”";

var a = axel * 10000000000000;

src = src.replace(”RAND”, a);

$(’<div/>’).attr(’id’, ‘tagDiv’).appendTo(’body’);

$(”#tagDiv”).html(’<IFRAME SRC=’+document.location.protocol+src+’ WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1 FRAMEBORDER=0></IFRAME>’);

}

2) If there are more than one parameters that differ in two instances of an image code, use a dummy separator in the CMS (ex: @@) and then use js to replace it.
3) This framework is very well suited for web analytics code. The page attribute will now contain the name of the page, any special event that needs to be recorded, segmentation details and so on.

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