For a number of years, I’ve spoken about SEO-PPC keyword management integration and I’ve spoken a few times about the need to integrate Social Media and SEO efforts. But what many of us have forgotten from time to time is that awareness via display can significantly impact search traffic and conversion.

Josh Dreller of Fuor Digital writes:

“As we move away as an industry from “the last ad click” methodology and start measuring all of the media interactions that influence users to perform our converting actions, it’s become clear that other engagement strategies should be considered within the media mix. In a recent campaign for one of my clients, 39% of all search conversions had a previous banner view in the mix. It’s very possible that a portion of those conversions would never had happened unless the banner drove a user to search.” (Emphasis mine)

Thirty-nine percent is a lot of paid search conversions that were assisted by display. Indeed, back in 2004, DoubleClick, working with Continental Airlines, did one of the most thorough and often referenced studies on view-through and found the following:

Click-through rates dropped slightly from 0.48 percent in the first quarter of 2004 to 0.43 percent in the second quarter, but view-through rates — which measure responses over time — grew considerably. According to DoubleClick, the view-through rate for Q2 measured 0.73 percent compared to 0.59 percent in Q1.

Take Aways

1. Is your team doing cross-channel tracking?
   People don’t experience media (and your brand for that matter) with a series of separate discrete media channels, and you shouldn’t track it as such.
2. Are you needlessly cutting Display for the sake of the ROI safety of Paid Search?
   Your C-level boss is breathing down your neck to ensure all marketing activities are ROI accountable and this sometimes means that display (online and offline like TV) gets cut for the sake of the trackable paid search. But maybe those sweet ROI numbers you’re getting on Google Adwords is driven by your local TV campaign?
3. Paid Search has limits.
   Many folks talk about paid search like it is the only game in town, but as Josh Dreller points out, conversion is a multi-stage process. Search is sometimes simply the final click before deciding to make a purchase.
4. Understand each stage of your customer purchase relationship lifecycle
   …And how you can help move the customer from awareness to customer to repeat customer and evangelist. Here’s how SocialRep define the customer relationship lifecycle, but your company is probably slightly different:
   

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Last Sunday after brunch, I happened upon a sign in Noe Valley in San Francisco which said “Fuck Mormons” in bright pink (fuchsia?) colors that was a response to the recent Prop 8 Gay Marriage ban that was passed in California.

Click to See URL Referrals for photo (24-36 Hours)

I uploaded the photo to Flickr on Monday. That photo made it to SFist.com (a local website covering San Francisco) and quickly sparked an intense discussion of over 100 comments. In a mere 2-3 hours, it made it to Reddit, Facebook, Stumbleupon and other social media websites quickly generating over 800 visits (as of now, over 1,800 people have viewed the photo).

Click to Google Search Results. Achieved in 3-4 Hours.

What’s also interesting is that SFist became ranked within the top 10 Google search results for “Fuck Mormons” within 3-4 hours of the posting going live. But yet as of today, SFist has fallen off the top ten ranking, with SFCitizen and Reddit’s coverage of the sign in the ten instead.

And by Tuesday, the photo caused enough of a stir that the home owner was interviewed by a local news team from CBS 5, which asked him: “You’ve been following the discussion on SFist. While some comments support you, others are saying, ‘this isn’t going to help.’”

And apparently, some people thought it was photoshopped: “CBS 5 walked the neighborhood in search of the home. There have been concerns the photo might have been photo-shopped, but it does not appear to be the case.”

Yes, I’m kinda Internet famous now, but more important this event does have some interesting social media lessons….

Social Media Lesson

• Social Media travels fast. From a Flickr upload on Monday to a news reporter on Tuesday.
• Context is Everything: SFist editor Brock Keeling took a simple photo and turned it into a political question by posting the photo and asking if the sign was an appropriate response to prop 8. If it was uploaded to Flickr without any such questions, I’m sure news wouldn’t spread as fast (or far).
• Don’t underestimate traffic from “second tier” websites like Reddit, which brought more traffic than all other channels.
• Surprisingly, Facebook didn’t carry as that many visits to the photo as I thought it would, considering the size of Facebook.
• Google ranks news pages very fast, putting SFist within #10 for the “fuck mormon” keyword in 3-4 hours of the blog post going live. Yet at the same time, they got quickly outranked by Reddit and other local blogs covering the event.

Personal Feelings about the Photo

I wasn’t trying to be a citizen journalist or even trying to make a political statement. Additionally, I don’t want to make a political statement on this blog and would like to ask any commenter here to not do so either.

I took the photo because I found it humorous at the time and I’m surprised by the intensity of the discussion stirred by this photo. I hope everyone involved – from the home owners to their neighbors – are doing okay and I hope that photo generated positive discussions on political expression.

In any case, I feel that the photo is not really “mine” per se. Someone, somewhere would have taken the photo eventually and it is likely the same thing that happened to my photo would happen to anyone else’s. Obviously, the “F*ck Mormon” sign was exactly that – a sign – which by definition is made to be noticed by the public. And get noticed by the public it did.

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Which can be brokendown into specific tactics and channels:

I could go on, but I suggest you signup for SocialRep’s webinar and read Ron Frederick’s notes on it. I would love to get in touch with Chris Kenton, SocialRep CEO, and converse with him. I’m surprised I havn’t heard or bumped into Chris.

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SMS from Obama Campaign for Opting-In VP Notification Text Message

As you may know, the Obama Campaign this week announced that supporters can sign-up to be the first to know about who Barack Obama’s VP nomination pick is via text messaging. Obama’s campaign has become the defacto case study on use new and emerging media for everything for fund raising, organizing and motivating his supports.

Garrett Graff writes an excellent op-ed piece in the New York Times, “Text the Vote“, on the three central reason’s why the text notification of Obama’s VP pick is more than just a candidate adopting the “latest tech fad”:

• Text Message increases turn out by 4% at $1.56/vote
  “A study conducted during the 2006 elections showed that text-message reminders helped increase turnout among new voters by four percentage points, at a cost of only $1.56 per vote — much cheaper than the $20 or $30 per vote that the offline work of door-to-door canvassing or phone banking costs.”

• New Younger & Minority Voters are Effectively Reached via Text Message
  “For Mr. Obama, who is building his campaign around bringing in new young voters and registering minority voters, there’s no more effective outreach than a text message. Cellphones, which legally can’t be called by pollsters and can’t be reached by campaign “robo-calls,” are the most intimate form of communication technology today.”
• Build a SMS Phone List: VP Pick Notification as the Hook
  “The move should add thousands — and more likely tens or hundreds of thousands — of cellphone numbers to what is already one of the most detailed political databases ever created.”

I’ve never heard of Garrett Graff before, but I’d keep his name in mind when it comes to how emerging media is changing the landscpae of marketing and PR – no matter if it’s for selling a consumer product or helping elect the next president of the United States.

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“Let’s face it, the news is more about entertainment and ad revenue than it is about reporting facts and accuracy. Just because it happened online doesn’t make it real.”

Unfortunately, he’s incorrect. If enough people believe in something it can be as good as real. Like I blogged about yesterday, anecdotal stories are powerful forces effecting products, brands and company images. And it is part of how our brains are generally wired.

People believing the Internet is why PR and and Social Media matters. Your brand is not under your control, it is beholden by the same people – that’s everyday people like you and me – who may believe an email forward, word-of-mouth story via an Amazon.com review or a powerful brand-bruising blog like the Consumerist.

Take a look at one of the top articles on Consumerist today “Delta Makes Woman With Muscular Dystrophy Crawl Off Plane“.

” Julianna, who has muscular dystrophy, missed the connecting flight because nobody came with a wheelchair until 8:05—the same time the connecting flight took off. To make matters worse, the plane crew told Julianna she might make the flight anyway if she stopped waiting for help and got off the plane right now, so she crawled down the stairs on her own.

While I have no reason to not believe what Julianna says, what if the Consumerist or any similar site not “double-checked the source” like Jeremy Toeman asks for? That doesn’t matter. Despite 4-5 pages of commenters denouncing Delta, no Delta community manager has responded to the article. Does Delta have a tool like Radian6 to monitor their brand online? Or a community manager to address issues?

Instead we are left with comments after comments of these:

I’m utterly aghast and disgusted. My sister also suffers from MS and I, for one, was furious to read about your treatment. Delta Airlines will no longer be seeing any more of my travel money.

For these Consumerist readers, Delta’s brand has been killed and there is no one at Delta responding.

Is Julianna’s account accurate? As of now, we don’t know and it does not matter. Damage has been done to the Delta brand for everyone who has seen the article.

Who cares if you should believe everything on the Internet? If you know enough of your audience does, you should be there to protect your brand. What are consumers saying about your brand right now?

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Conversations image from b_d_solis

Survey after survey have shown how word-of-mouth is a powerful force in helping people form decisions on what to buy or what to think of brands and products. Fresh Chat has list of some of the latest data on word-of-mouth:

• “Recommendations from family and friends trump all other consumer touchpoints when it comes to influencing purchase” (AdAge, April, 2008)
• Consumers trust friends above experts when it comes to product recommendations (65% trust friends, 27% trust experts, 8% trust celebrities). (Yankelovich)

Such trust among friends and connections only has been the basis of the allure of social media and why it is one of the pivotal forces in shaping a brand. But why? Why are anecdotal evidence – like user reviews – so convincing? It’s apparently hardwired into our brains.

Recently, an article in the Scientific American declared that “These anecdotal associations are so powerful that they cause people to ignore contrary evidence”.

The article goes in further to describe brains as more geared towards “belief engines” rather than scientifically-centric:

The reason for this cognitive disconnect is that we have evolved brains that pay attention to anecdotes because false positives (believing there is a connection between A and B when there is not) are usually harmless, whereas false negatives (believing there is no connection between A and B when there is) may take you out of the gene pool. Our brains are belief engines that employ association learning to seek and find patterns. Superstition and belief in magic are millions of years old, whereas science, with its methods of controlling for intervening variables to circumvent false positives, is only a few hundred years old. So it is that any medical huckster promising that A will cure B has only to advertise a handful of successful anecdotes in the form of testimonials.

The article goes on describe beliefs that continue to prove popularity despite like solid scientific evidence: from concerns about vaccines and autism to health benefits of wheatgrass.

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The past five years have been marked with “social” and “viral” buzzwords about how to best do marketing and advertising. We’ve been hearing everything from “Tipping Point” and”Mavens” to lots of mentions of “influencer” and “A-List Bloggers”. Yet, the increasingly popularity of these terms also breeds confusion. That’s how I feel about Steve Rubel’s latest posting called “Trust in Peers Trumps the ‘A-List,” Study Finds’“.

In it Steve Rubel writes:

There’s an ongoing debate online and in marketing circles as well over who “matters”: the super node influencers or basically anyone that a particular peer group looks to for information, entertainment, inspiration and more.

This meme got kicked around in the ’sphere a few weeks back when Duncan Watts released some research that contradicts Malcolm Gladwell’s theory outlined in The Tipping Point. Today, however, there’s new data that to me may just reveal that Watts is right. The key factor, once again, all comes down to trust. (Emphasis is mine.)

His specific evidence?

Mediapost reports that a new study from Pollara found that people who engage in social networks and communities put far more trust in friends and family who are online than in popular bloggers, or strangers with 10,000 MySpace “friends.”

Unfortunately, Steve Rubel is conflating several separate issues on what is Word of Mouth, an influencer and an “A-Lister”.

What Do We Mean by Word of Mouth, A Listers and Influencers

Let us set-up our definitions (at least according to me):

• Word of Mouth is the Strength of Personal Trust
  Word of Mouth works because you generally trust someone you know more than a stranger. So yes, you’d probably trust your friend more than a blogger off the Internet.
• A-Listers *does not equal* Word-of-Mouth
  A popular media publisher (be it a blogger or CNN) does not correlate to a high-trust factor. Just because Mike Arrington is a popular blogger doesn’t mean I trust everything he says. Yes, he has immense influence in terms of audience reach, but just not necessarily trust.
• Influencer does not mean A-Lister: Remembering 150
  Malcom Gladwell talked about Connectors, Mavens and Salespersons – not “A-Listers” or “Popular Bloggers”.

  Indeed, Gladwell dedicated a chapter to “150″: the ceiling level of how many social relationships a person can have. A person with “10,000 MySpace Friends” does not count. You trust your actual personal friend, not the guy who is “friends” with 10,000 people on MySpace. The “10,000 People on MySpace” guy is able to pass information quickly, but not necessarily influence decisions directly.

In short, you probably need the mass audience of an A-Lister to connect with the influencer (connectors, mavens, salespersons), who tell their friends what to buy, etc. The A-Lister is the medium.

So rest assured, Malcom Gladwell’s “Tipping Point” is not wrong. Nor is the study that the MediaPost article cites forcing us to choose between the “Tipping Point” and Word-of-Mouth’s emphasis on the trust of friends and family.

And what about Steve Rubel mention that people said “Duncan Watts released some research that contradicts Malcolm Gladwell’s theory”?

Duncan Watt: Does he really say “No” to the Tipping Point?

Duncan Watt’s criticism of the “Tipping Point” has been overblown in proportion. Watt never said that there is no such thing as influencer. What Watt is reminding us that an endorsement by an influencer is no guarantee that a large trend will start:

Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That’s because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. “And nobody,” Watts says wryly, “will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire.”

Following the analogy above, Watt is not saying that you shouldnt worry about dry wood and sparse rain. He’s just saying that that only a few fires become large forrest fires each time.

If anything, all of this just affirms the 80/20 rule. Even with similar conditions, there’ll be lots of small fires but only a few major, raging firestorms. And not everything a trendy person will say will become trendy, but enough will for people to pay attention.

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When reading U.S. Senator Barack Obama’s speech on race this month, one particular line caught this marketer’s eye:

And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and YouTube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way. (Emphasis mine)

In Obama’s pivotal election year speech to the American people, Obama not only mention YouTube but does it in the same breath as television. We’ve come along way from when YouTube was just a way for Americans to see clips of shows like Saturday Night Live.

While Social Media is not the end all be all of media, the influence is wide ranging – from the U.S. 2008 elections to the TSA Blog/YouTube Channel to helping organizing mass street protests against FARC in Columbia.

See below for a run down…

Contents:

1. TSA does Blogging and YouTube
2. Facebook helps organize millions of Columbians protests against FARC
3. Churches live stream their services on Ustream.TV

United States Transportation Security Authority

TSA Agent Bob explains why the MacBookAir can cause issues in airports

One of the biggest questions major brands have is “If we start a blog and someone comments something nasty about us, what do we do?” Our response always has been “there will always be someone being negative, but the best thing to do is to address it and be open”.

One major “brand” that has taken the step on sticking its own neck out is the US Transportation Security Authority (TSA), a name many travelers in the US has made synonymous with frustration. Starting last month, the TSA has started their very own blog called “Evolution in Security” in their attempt to address travelers concerns and frustrations.

And what happens when a bad comment arise? Surprisingly, for the most part, most of the comments are left uncensored and brutal. And they also respond to blog postings about the TSA:

1. “Rumor Alert: Conflict of Interest at TSA?”
   This blog post is a response to a blogger at PajamaMedia: “Blogger and pundit Annie Jacobsen published a piece titled, “Top TSA Officials in Cheating Scandal Also Ran Private Consulting Firm” on Saturday, March 15. This piece has been linked to from several blogs and other sites in the past day.”
2. MacBook Air YouTube Response
   There’s been a story circulated by a blogger on how he was missed his flight because his MacBook Air arouse suspicion from TSA agents who didnt believe the MacBook Air was a real computer. TSA did a YouTube response explaining the situation.

Facebook and Mass Protests in Columbia and the World

Source: Paul White/The Associated Press from IHT.com

As reported by IHT in February 2008:

Facebook has helped bring public protest to Colombia, a country with no real history of mass demonstrations.

A young Colombian engineer used the social networking site last week to organize a massive protest against the Revolutionary Armed Forces, known as FARC. On Feb. 4, millions of Colombians marched simultaneously in 27 cities throughout the country and 104 major cities around the world shouting “No more kidnappings! No more lies! No more deaths! No more FARC!”

The Churches are Steaming on the Internet

Beyond politics and government, Social Media is also possibly changing how many people worship. A quick look at the video streaming website Ustream shows over 150 churches using Ustream.TV delivering their Sunday services and sermons live on the Internet. Will the next Billy Graham, the famous TV evangelical preacher, come not from television but on some future version of YouTube? And yes, there is a service called GodTube.

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I recently asked the “Twittersphere” on their thoughts on wikis (specifically, I was thinking for use with Emergence-Media). Should I use PBWik or try out WetPaint? I’ve used PBWiki for a long time and belong to over 10 PBwikis, but I was compelled by WetPaint’s refreshing interface. What I didn’t find so refreshing was PBWiki’s initial response to my Twitter:

Now, I’ve met PBWiki folks and they’re good people. But, their simple comment “I would go with PBWiki” completely turned me off. Why?

I had a really bad taste in my mouth for being so directly pitched to by what felt like was a one-to-one person medium. I was expecting not a “pitch” but “customer service”: “What are you looking for in a wiki? Would you like to try our free trial?”

Am I nitpicking? Maybe, and again I love the PBwiki guys so I hate to use them as an example (albeit small example). But, I fear how may other consumers out there could be so easily turned-off by something so small, yet so big.

The ability to deliver context and proper conversation right off the bat is everything and in this one small case, that didnt happen.

The lesson (as best done in humor of Hugh MacLeod):

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Already, January has shown some major negative coverage on Social Networks:

1. MySpace is Engagement Are Down?
   “The average length of time users spend on all of the top three sites is on the slide. Bebo, MySpace and Facebook all took double-digit percentage hits in the last months of 2007.” From the Register.Co.UK
2. Google sees issue with Social Network Ads
   “We have found that social networking inventory is not monetizing as well as expected.” George Reyes, CFO of Google. From the Financial Times
3. Facebook Applications (Widgets) Decrease in Popularity
   “All of the top 10 leaderboard applications have seen substantial drops in daily users since peaking in November and December,”
   From Read/Write Web

Of course not all negative press on Social Network will pan out to be true (such as the suspect Register article above). However, overall the fickleness of users people and the notoriously low CTRs for Social Networks will become more and more common talk. And how will this be addressed?

My colleague, William Gaultier, over at e-Storm’s Blog will be writing about how marketers doing Social Networks Ads need to look less at direct CTRs but rather “view-through clicks” as a the smarter metrics for success. “View-Through” tracking through cookies allows marketers to correlate between ad impressions with latent clicks, such as users who see an ad on Facebook for an “iPod Cases” website, but visit the website later directly and not through clicking on the ad.

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Last Saturday, I attended the CommunityNext Viral Marketing conference in Silicon Valley. The Conference, by Noah Kagan and Adam Kalamchi, brought together an interesting array of speakers to talk about Viral Marketing – from tactics, strategy, philosophy to viral marketing as Facebook widgets to community building.

Most of the speakers ranged from the experienced serial entrepreneurs (Dave McClure: PayPal, SimplyHired) to founders of accidental start-ups (Eric Nakagawa of icanhascheezurger). The atmosphere was very much on the casual side, with some point reaching nearly 1990s dot-com humor with of Adam Rifkin of Booze Mail making a cocktail during a talk to clearly very sharp and serious with Keith Rabois of Slide.

Below are my notes on:

1. Widgets – Metrics, Key Points on Facebook Widgets
2. Notes from Keith Rabois, one of the most impressive speaker at CommunityNext (Definitely Read This)
3. Flickr Photos: Including PowerPoint Slides given by Speakers. Plus: All Photos of the event
4. Feedback for the next CommunityNext Conference

** General Notes by Theme **
The Power of Leveraging Existing Networks: iLike v. last.fm

• The long established music discovery service from 2002, Last.FM, has been quickly overtaken by iLike which grew quickly once it launched the iLike widget for Facebook. (Tom Conrad of Pandora)
• Leveraging Existing Off-site Networks: It is a simple feature for your product to ask if the user if wants to import her Gmail Address book (or Yahoo, etc) and see who else is on the site and to “friend” existing contacts.

The Appeal of Widgets on User Profiles – Unique, Media, not Technology (From Jia of RockYou)

• “It’s like the first day of highschool” and you want to show-off how you’re different.
• Think of Widgets as a Media tool and a product, not a technological gadget
• It is not about “being technologically cool” but “being cool to use”

Facebook v. MySpace Widget Marketing Channels (Flickr Slide)

• There are 14 channels (opportunities) for spreading widgets, such as from the mini-feed, refer a friend (shown when adding a widget) and the profile page. (From Jia from Rock You).
• MySpace channels were mainly focused on In-Profile, Profile Comments, Bulletin Messages (e.g. “Your Friend Daniel has added Widget X”), and Forums (not often talked about, but highly effective).

MySpace v. Facebook Differences, Openness (From Jia of Rock You)

• FaceBook: Users do not necessarily browse around by visiting profiles, they have more reliance on using the FaceBook Mini-Feed on keeping touch on their friends
• In FaceBook, you need to rely on the Mini-Feed to place your call to action, e.g. “Daniel Riveong has just added the widget ZYZ, you should too”
• In Facebook, a user can only invite 10 friends a day to add a widget, making the friends feel more special

UGC Challenges

• With Yelp.com: Debate the use of paid-reviews to seed reviews. How authentic is it?
• Use MyBlogLog, Friendster and Others: Spam. Black-Hat marketers will always look for cheap tricks to hijack a platform for spam marketing tactics.
• From Friendster: The need to constant “prune” bad content to help develop the culture of the community and thus the brand

Miscellaneous Viral and Widgets Metrics

• Booze Mail on Facebook was able to grow its userbase at 30% per day
• RocketYou achived 9 million users in Facebook in 1.5 months
• Friendster: For every 1 (Exhibitionist) profile, there is 5,000-10,000 (Voyeurs) viewers
• Development of Widgets: ranged from 2 days to 4 weeks, using 1-2 programmers.

** Keith Rabois of Slide **

Lesson 1: “Viral Growth is Really Hard”
A very, very good reminder that Viral marketing and growth (user adoption) is just not magic and not just putting a YouTube video of a “funny video” and expecting traffic. It’s a mix of luck and strategy.

Examples:
Only 1 really great viral video every 6 months
Facebook Widgets: LinkedIn and Yelp.com have 2 widgets each, all have so far failed to reach beyond 4000 users each.

Lesson 2: Knowing the Value of a User: Viral Marketing v. E-Commerce Projection
E-commerce (Online Retailers) have data on the “tangible of users”, and so there is no real need for viral marketing. They know how much they are willing to spend for each user.

In a space where the value of each new user value is unknown viral marketing becomes very attractive; it has potentially the “lowest marginal cost for user acquition”. It is the safe choice to go far, when you don’t know how much you should spend, so you spend as little as possible.

Lesson 3: Is PR helpful in Viral Marketing? Not Really.
Keith felt that the best PR is done in-house, based on his experience and from talking to others. He cites the story that out of 5-6 start-ups in a room, only 1 company raised their hand when asked if they were happy with their PR firm. Other speakers repeated a similar theme.

Lesson 4: Viral/Social Network Structures & Business Model Changes
Yelp was originally an “Ask a friend where to eat tonight” referral service. YouTube was more focused as a dating service, but changed after utterly failure in the Los Angeles market. Slides was originally desktop-based before going into the Widget space with Facebook.

** For Next Time: Suggestions for Improvements **

Noah, Adam and the rest of the CommunityNext gang pulled off a heck of a conference. So I’m providing suggestions here, but in no way are they intended to criticize either the CommunityNext team or their invited speakers. This is stuff both CommunityNext and the speakers will hopefully (I hope that is) find constructive and useful.

Overall, I think a quick 30 minute session on refreshing one’s presentation skill will go a long way in making many of the speaker’s performance. We all need reminders! Also, maybe invite folks from the Marketing Agency world too to talk about their experience, especially working with a client to understand the viral/social-media space…of course, I’m not suggesting merely me. :)

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Yahoo: User Data and Smart Ads
Emergence-Media has been hot on the idea of Yahoo’s potential to do Behavioral Targeting and Social Search in a big way for awhile now. Yahoo has a mountain of user information (Y! Jobs, Upcoming, Flickr, Del.iciou.us, Y! Games) that the ability to do customized ad servicing (behavioral targeting) and social search is quite obvious.

The introduction of Yahoo’s SmartAds is a major step for Behavioral Targeting (BT). Behavioral Targeting has been a buzz since 2004 (if not earlier), which makes it interesting that it took this long for Yahoo, who has oodles of user information, has taken its first step in doing BT in a big way.

As per Yahoo’s demo on SmartAds, the system works by matching a user’s behavior to a customized on the fly advertisement. In the demo, it has user Joe (who Yahoo knows lives in Los Angeles and plays Yahoo! Poker Superstars II game), being served “LA to Las Vegas” flight ads (which is a banner ad created on the fly):

Beyond Tim Mayer’s “Cool Lamps” Social Search
Yahoo’s demo with SmartAds gives a glimpse of what Behavioral (with Social Search) can look like. Tim Mayer, Yahoo’s VP of Product Management, is fond of giving the “Cool Lamps” example of Social Search: A user would be receive not only what is traditionally algorithmically ranking for “cool lamps” but also what the user’s friends have tagged as being “cool lamps”.

While that’s the “Social” side of search, what about the behavioral (intent) side of search? The SmartAds example of the gambling enthusiast named Joe can be applied to both SEO and PPC:

PPC: Link Joe’s search for “cheap flights to Vegas” with more accurate geographic information “Joe is from Los Angeles” (than by using IP information), giving greater weight to ads for Casino.

SEO: Like PPC, organic SERPs could give higher relevancy to websites with “Los Angeles” in them due to Joe’s geographic location. Also, more generic searches like “Las Vegas” will lean towards Las Vegas casinos, since Joe is a gambler. On the Social side, maybe webpage URL recommendations based on the behavior of his fellow gambler players online.

Potential Impact
Note that the above is pure speculation, but it is not difficult to imagine Yahoo eventually adopting their SmartAds system to the Search world. In any case, the impact will be more evolutionary than revolutionary: SEO is already increasingly more about PR and relevancy and PPC has been moving to a similar model with the use of Google and Yahoo’s Quality Score. Attempting to assess user behavior and their social network is just one more layer of complexity.

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SEO is Dead! Well, maybe your Google SEO

Why is SEO important? Because the majority of people search on the Internet to find things…reviews, contact numbers, shopping etc. But what is Search? Google? Yahoo?

If you’re search engine optimization campaign is targeting Google, then what are you doing about the “searches” on Del.icio.us, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Yelp, Wikipedia, Oodle and even Digg? Maybe those searches are not for the mainstream (yet), but it maybe where the Linkerati, the savvy “Influencers”, go?

Is your SEO really just “Google Search Optimization”? Have you brainstormed with your marketing team to see if your company, product and/or service needs to do more?

The Linkerati: Where Are They?

Rand Fishkin has made much about how SEO folks need to make sure their linkbait (and ditto for Viral/WoM campaigns) needs to cater to the Linkerati audience, the savvy online influencers who create and forward content.

But moving beyond finding what appeals to the Linkerati, is the need to find out where are they online, We need to diversify our thinking on 1) how where/how they create content; and 2) how they find content.

Recently, ValleyWag noted that while the number of active blogs tracked by Technorati has stagnated “personal publishing is still growing, but the fastest growth is occurring on social media properties”, such as MySpace, Digg, Yelp, and Twitter. Indeed, a recent study suggests that “40% of all social networkers said they use social networking sites to learn more about brands or products that they like”.

Questions to Ask:

1. Where are my customers? Who are the influencers within those circles?
2. Where do they search?
   (Do they search on Yelp, Technorati, Digg or Del.icio.us?)
3. Have I distributed my content there?
   (E.g. Placement of Yelp, Blog on Technorati, Content on Digg, Bookmarked on Del.icio.us)
4. Is it searchable? Or, simply, Findable? Is it “optimized”?

Counter Point: Who needs the Linkerati? Web-2-What and Big Seed Marketing.

There is the question of how important the Linkerati crowd is in shear physical numbers and how important the Linkerati and influencers are in general.

In May’s Harvard Business review, Duncan Watts and Jonah Pertti proposed the idea of “big-seed marketing” as opposed to “Influencer”-based viral marketing, which:

combines viral-marketing tools with old-fashioned mass media in a way that yields far more predictable results than “purely” viral approaches like word-of-mouth marketing.
…
big-seed marketing harnesses the power of large numbers of ordinary people, its success does not depend on influentials or on any other special individuals; thus, managers can dispense with the probably fruitless exercise of predicting how, or through whom, contagious ideas will spread.

The Tiny Linkerati

According to a Pew Internet May 6 study, 49% of the US audience are those that have “few “tech assets” and limited use of technology”. The survey goes on to show how little of the US audience are among the Web 2.0 Internet savvy. They are so little of them. Is it worth the effort on being on Yelp, Twitter, Digg, MySpace etc to appeal to them?

Of Course, It Depends

It is important to understand that you can create online marketing success without getting caught in the buzz about about “influencers” or the Linkerati. It depends what market your client and your customers are in. Of course, innovation carries risk – but this is not to forsake the long-hanging fruit for risk taking and vice-versa. You need both.

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Summary: Up Your Analytics, Strengthen Your Content, Smarten Your SEM

A recent study by the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association has found that traditional offline media – such as Magazines, TV and Newspapers – were a high factor (>~42%) in leading to consumers conducting online research on the product/service advertised.

This completes the conversion loop when comparing to the Google’s number showing that of the “25% purchased an item relating to their query, and of that number, the majority – 63% — completed that purchase offline.”

What does this mean:

• Analytics Integration: Reinforces the Need for Marketing and Sales Analytics that can take offline and online consumer activities and behavior, since consumers freely move from offline and online worlds.
• Multi-Stage SEM Strategy: The SEM Strategy (SEO and PPC) must properly target both research phrase consumers, as well as, purchasing phase consumers.
• Content Funneling: Good Content is key to help funneling consumers in “research mode” to become consumers in “purchase mode”.

Offline Awareness, Online Research, Offline Conversion

MediaPost has recently reported on a “Retail Advertising and Marketing Association” done by “BIGresearch’s Simultaneous Media Survey”, which found the following numbers that consumers were most likely to search online after viewing:

• Advertisements in magazines (47.2%)
• Newspapers (42.3%)
• Ads on TV (42.8%)
• From reading articles (43.7%)

Combine this with Google’s 2006 ComScore data which pointed to:

“Of 83 million Americans tracked by comScore who searched at one of the 24 top search engines in November and December, 25% purchased an item relating to their query, and of that number, the majority – 63% — completed that purchase offline.”

Tracking Offline and Online Marketing/Sales Analytics

At the moment, many companies house their online marketing/sales data completely segregated away from their offline marketing/sales data. Indeed, most website analytics tools are packaged this way, with the exception of the enterprise models that integrate with the company’s CRM datawarehouse. But that’s a major effort and still mostly focuses one way traffic flow: Online Visitor > Offline Purchaser.

Off the top of my head, hear are some straightforward suggestions I’ve offered.

• Getting the ZIP code (from the online registration) and geographic area (of those that visit online) and mapping that to where your stores are (or should be)
• Website-Only Coupons
• Ask your customers! Do a survey as part of loyalty program

e-Storm International, my employer, does have an interesting partner that has a powerful tool that can actually estimate how offline media can shift people’s behavior online and vice-versa. Time for Emergence-Media to conduct interviews?

Multi-Stage SEM Strategy and Content Funneling

Keeping in mind that the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association data shows that online search is a major research tool for consumers, this reinforces the need for 1) “content funneling” (see below); and 2) also translates to need a smart SEM strategy to push that content to consumers who are researching those that are looking to by.

Note this applies to both consumers who convert offline and online; what ties these two together is both use the web as a research tool.

Content Funneling

Content Funneling is an issue that Emergence-Media has dicussed before in “Building Content for Branded and Non-Branded Search“:

“Content is King” is the old Maxim. And for “SEOing” e-commerce websites, it is about ensuring that the e-commerce website has the type of content the user is looking for for each step of the buying process: 1) General Research (”Why are HD DVD Players different?” Page); 2) Targeted Research (”HD DVD Player Review & Guide” Page); and 3) Purchasers (Product Page for the Specific Item).

It comes down to this: around 40% of consumers will be motivated to do an online search after seeing your ad on TV, Print etc, so when they do their research online will they find buying/product guides (for those not ready to buy) or maybe your product page (if they are ready to buy online)?

Multi-Stage SEM Strategy

Avinash Kaushik has just done an incredible insightful posting on this in “How Thick is Your Head and How Long is Your Tail?“, so I’ll show a teaser here, but I highly recommended reading the whole thing.

Take From Avinash Kaushik

Avinash’s “Killer Search Marketing strategy recommendation”:

1. Focus your SEM budgets deliberately to leverage the Long Tail (/Category key terms).
2. Focus all your SEO efforts on SEO’ing the heck out of your website / web pages for your Brand key terms (those that are in your Head).

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