Is It Time for Social Email Marketing?

Email marketing has been developing for a long time. However, its biggest threats, spamming issue and poor out-of-date list, lead it to low open rates. So does email have a future? Is it on the way out? Or is it just getting smarter?

Email isn't dying. It’s still "the glue" of an integrated campaign. It has its own place in generating mass interest and mass distribution of messages and offers to a target audience. According to eMarketer’s survey, 69% of respondents plan to increase spending on email marketing efforts – more than any other marketing strategy in 2010.

Nowadays, people are exposed to around 5,000 ads a day. With flooding inboxes and increasing number of companies sending email, email-marketing strategy is required to gain a new positioning in order to cope with the intense competition. In order to convey a consistent and personalized experience, integrated marketing solution with the combination of multi-channels such as email, landing pages and social media, make it easy to spread the message, but still keep it focused.

A lot of email marketers are still hesitant about using social media. In fact, the integration of email and social media help to achieve a better reach, offer people more choice and provide them content and value in function of their needs. What’s more?

• Social media improves email response rates. According to a recent report from GetResponse, it is found that email with social media button generated significantly higher click-through rates than email with no sharing option.
• Social media has its huge sharing power thanks to its large base of users. Its multi-level effect can spread the message not only people in your network but also their friends’ networks and so on
• The cost of inserting social media function is almost zero. So it’s pure ROI
• Active social networkers check their email inboxes far more regularly than those who spend less time on social networks, according to a recent finding
• Social marketing and email marketing are sharing some common characteristics. First, they are all about dealing with people, creating connections and relationships, based on sharing, listening and engaging abilities to build trust and respect. Second, in order to do that, it requires both social marketing and email marketing to provide good and relevant content to create the “right” personalization in the “right” context in order to receive value. Finally, Both of them are considered parts of an overall marketing strategy. 

Social networks and email can feed each other, but just knowing that isn't enough. Much like successful email marketing requires more effort than blasting away at your customer list, getting your recipients to share your emails on social sites requires more effort than just dropping icons into your message template. So you have to know how to do it correctly to make it work. Some tactical ideas for integrating the two strategies include:

Testing and Educating

• Experiment the placement position of social network links in your messages (top, middle or bottom), what social networks you link to and how many social network links you should include in your messages
• Educate your readers about how and why they should share your content. Give them a good reason to share your promotional emails with their friends. Feature your social-sharing option in your welcome messages. Devote prime space in your regular mailings to highlight the location and use of your sharing icons or links.

Content

• Encourage consumer-generated content and peer reviews on your different social media platforms, and then add this as a section in newsletters. People seem to be more interested in these content than the traditional information.
• Set up an automated trigger that sends a message requesting a product review after a purchase to build up your database of user-generated reviews. You can then populate personalized emails with these reviews according to each recipient’s interests or purchase history, resulting in messages that are more targeted and engaging to recipients
• Create your own corporation network. Site visitors can discuss about products and industry topics. These discussions create good fodder for e-newsletters, and forming ideas for specific articles from new e-mail newsletters
• Use the search functions. You can follow your company and product names via Google e-mail alerts, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to gain market knowledge and good ammunition for e-mail marketing.

Distribution

• Include a sharing button to other social networks on your emails.
• Use the email service provider (ESP)’s social marketing capabilities. Most major ESPs and e-mail software providers can send your e-mails directly to your social networks
• Use your status to publicize the e-mail newsletter on social media, probably a day before sending the newsletter to remind people it’s coming, and get them excited about it
• Using a blog to highlight content from an e-newsletter once or twice a month, and inviting readers to download the full content via a landing page
• Conduct a timely poll on social networks and creating a visual representation of the results, in an e-newsletter
• Leverage social media channels to offer email subscribers customized options 
• Set your company up as a resource and an expert by responding to questions or getting involved in discussions on Facebook or Linkedin. 
• Make sure the people, who were sent from social media sites, can easily find the content you want them to see on your landing page. So you should have a clear and clean design with good navigation.

Today, many marketers believe that if your messages are relevant, timely and interesting with a great integration with social media, your audience will gladly help your brand message ripple across the Internet. How’re about you? Are you confident enough to say so? Is there anything left in the list above? Waiting for your thoughts! In the mean time, have a look on this interesting video, explaining the  convergence between email and social media. Enjoy!

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Online Search - Latest Trends and Innovations

Online market is growing rapidly and it will continue to grow in much more better way. According to Forrester’s report on interactive marketing tactics, the top three areas where marketers feel most potential over the next three years are social media, online video and SEO. Companies will focus more of their marketing budget on SEO. However, trends and techniques in search marketing tend to fluctuate over the years regarding to the fact that search engine market is developing in a very fast pace. It’s been time to watch out these changes and trends in online search for appropriate corporate marketing strategies

Currently, Google still rule the world’s search engine market, following by Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing. After the Microsoft- Yahoo partnership at the beginning of this year, it's now going to be a Two-Engine, 80/20 world. The end users will be the beneficiaries of this highly competitive landscape. What the numbers need to show in the future is not so much the percentage of total searches each engine has but more so the influence of each engine as they compare to all the other ways that people are getting their information these days. So the question is: What is happening out there? 

1. Search engines keep its traffic 

Traditionally search engines wanted to send traffic to the most relevant web pages based on search terms. But today players like Google and Bing are both doing more to make their visitors stickier and get their queries answered without ever having to leave the engine to keep more traffic. Anytime when you “google” the weather forecasts, the currency exchanges, the soccer scores or the travel information, the results are right there on the search page, no need to go anywhere. More of this type of information is expected to be available.

2. Mobile search by location, voices and sights

• Searching by location on mobile shows that the geo craze now has come to search engine on mobile devices. Google optimizes mobile search suggestions based on location to make its its search suggestions on mobile devices even easier.. Now you have the option “Near me now” on Google page in iPhone or Android cell phone to bring up search results close to your immediate location. Let's take a look, comparing the desktop search suggestions to the mobile suggestions.

• Searching by voices, which was launched a year ago, enables millions of users to speak to Google. The combination between voice searching and language translation is expected to spread the search power to a larger base of users and new markets.

• Searching by sights is rather new but expected to gain more notice and increasing usage. Now with only a mobile phone’s camera, you can send your picture to search engines like Google to know what you are seeing. It’s extremely helpful when going travel, exploring new places and studying. It is just so convenient and practical!

3. Search teams up with social media 

Social media has proven itself to be a productive and effective way to get the word out there and it seems like search engines are picking up on it. Social sites within the search engine results pages are here to stay. If brands do not control their Twitter page, they risk losing control of their brand’s message on Twitter and in search. So, search matters in social media marketing. So it’s time to include social media optimization as one of the SEO strategies for SEO companies.

4. Real-time search 

Microsoft and Google are racing on the real-time search integration in a response to the increasing power of social media and networks. Being partnership with leading social networks like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular social sites, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. So basically, the real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it's happening, even if it's not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn't know about it beforehand. And, as part of the launch of real-time, Google also added "hot topics" to Google Trends to show the most common topics people are publishing to the web in real-time. 

5. Personalized search

Personalized search is here to stay. Both Google and Bing have released their "permanent" personalization of results. Search engines are now storing information about what you’re searching for even if you’re not signed in. So basically, personalized search helps you to get more relevant, useful search results, recommendations, and other personalized features

Personalized search does present some new challenges for SEO. It is difficult to explain to clients how personalized search results appear at various positions depending upon who is carrying out the search. So changes in SEO tactics such as providing fresh, relevant, engaging and updated content, making it easy to bookmark but still not overlooking the universal search are necessary.

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The Underwater Iceberg of Location-Based Mobile Services

Last time I have mentioned about the concept of location and geo-fence as one of the expected trends in mobile marketing this year. It becomes hotter with more competitors, including established services, emerging businesses and big online companies. All of them are joining the geo-location battle.

Currently there are two most popular location-based mobile apps, Foursquare and Gowalla, working as both a social network and a game, built on GPS function and user-generated contents. Basically, they two all allow users to share their location with friends. So, when you walk into a bar or restaurant or mall, you probably "check-in" on your cell phone, and your friends will see where you are. You get rewarded for frequent check-in activities. That’s quite simple!

Just in case you really still have no idea about what they are, or for further information, here are the summaries of FourSquare and Gowalla on CrunchBase

What are their differences?

Here is a brief comparison done by Mashable:

What do users get? 

• Connecting with friends, knowing where they were and getting tips from other people for each location

• The fun of earning badges and various perks from the places where they check in.

• Accessibily to your check-in history, giving you a snapshot of “What, Where, When, Who”

Let’s talk business!

The clever part here is that you get points for checking-in. But the really cleverer part is more about business. These geo-social networks are certainly capturing marketers’ attention. Through smartphones that signal someone’s location, stores and brands like Starbucks, Tasti-D-Lite, Macy’s and Pepsi are getting live information about when and where people are shopping. Some companies are turning Foursquare or Gowalla into a virtual loyalty-card program, while others are creating their own location applications, customers discounts or other rewards for shopping.

So basically, Foursquare and Gowalla are rolling out free analytics programs that will give participating businesses detailed information on who is checking-in to their locations, and give them the ability to communicate with the visitors. That’s what set these services apart.

The risky side

While some may find interested in sharing their location, the concept of automatic geo-location a little hard to accept, especially in terms of privacy concerns, Are people ready to share their personal locative information? Probaly. Or not really.

A recent poll on some reasons more people aren’t using check-in services revealed privacy and security concerns as a number-one reason.

The future

• Giants get into the game with motivation of the true value which comes from targeted advertising based on locality. The only question for these businesses to answer now is whether or not location-based rewards are the killer feature or if location can stand alone.

1. Facebook has been actively testing multiple location products and considering various implementations of some form of location feature.
2. Twitter has announced their official plans for location. “Twitter Places”, the product enables users to “tag Tweets with specific places Additionally, the product integrates with Foursquare and Gowalla. However, Twitter isn’t implementing a badges service right now. 

• Database of consumer behaviors and lifestyle can be built from location-based services. For instance, insurance companies can start tracking this data to have a more accurate way of determining risk and rates.

• Companies and retailers will have more creative approaches, incentives and campaigns to encourage consumers using these check-in services.

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Social Games – No More Playing Around!

If you have a Facebook account, you're probably familiar with games like Farmville, Mafia Wars or Texas Hold’em Poker. The world of social network gaming is seen as a comparatively gentle one. Players are more likely to be growing crops and cooking dinners than slaying monsters and killing bad guys. These games might seem like a good way to entertain with no entrance condition. However, anyone who is involved deeply into it will find that it’s only the surface of the iceberg. So what’s more?

1. What are Social Games?

Social Games = Casual Games (user engagement) + Social Networking (viral distribution)

Basic types of social games include:

• Multiplayer games that utilize the social graph as part of the game. (Parking Wars, PackRat,..)

• Games which mainly involves socializing or social activities like chatting, trading, or flirting. (Farm Ville, Pet Society, Friends For Sale…)

• Turn-based games that are played within a social context or with friends. (Texas Hold'em Poker, Scrabble,…)

• Competitive casual games with friends-only leaderboards. (Who Has the Biggest Brain?, Word Challenge,…)

2. Working Principles

Most of social games work on four basic principles:

• Simple gameplay, which does not require much tactical or strategical thought. Just simply click on something and get the reward, then make it to other higher rewards in similar steps 

• Real-time based element, which require you to wait for sometime when starting a process and doing activities. It doesn’t take much time for each visit but requires you to come back everyday, or even several times per day.

• Microtransactions, which are the solution for the dilemma of real time elements. To advance faster, game players need to buy more clicks or more rewards per time unit. For those who don’t want to spend money, they can do something like signing-up or taking a survey with the game company’s commercial partners

• Network connections, which means using the power of social networks. Friends can help or recruit each other in a social game even if you aren't online at the same time. 

So basically, the common rule is to get people hooked with easy rewards, then block them from gaining those rewards as fast as they want, make them pay you money directly or via another company, and encourage them to invite all their friends to participate. In fact all of these games can be played without spending any real money, and without signing up for shady offers to receive more in-game currency. But in-game earnings will never be enough to keep things interesting. That’s the story!

3. Top Games

4. Top Companies

Most of social-game companies have built their entire business model around relatively tiny micro-transactions. Because the games are free, what companies are trying to do is get as many people engaged in the game as possible. Then they try to maximise the number of those players that we can offer something interesting to - that they would be willing to pay money for. Furthermore, the companies also try to maintain players’ interest through constant updates. 

Current big players include:

• Zynga - 700 employees and $200 mil revenues in 2009, the developer of Facebook.

• Playfish - 250 employees and $75 mil revenues in 2009 

• Playdom - 300 employees and $50 mil revenues in 2009, the leader on MySpace

Even these companies have made huge revenue, their reputation is going down. Last year, Tech Crunch revealed a video featuring Zynga CEO Mark Pincus saying the company "did every horrible thing in the book" to make money off of player. It was a hit to the company and players at that time

5. Security and Social Risks

• To accumulate significant amounts of currency, players can either purchase some with their credit card or sign up for an account or do some surveys with a third-party service. But it found that these surveys contain risks with its request to get your mobile phone number and end up at subscription for an unknown service at a specific cost.

• Being targeted by hackers and viruses is another possibility of playing social games. Some bugs can destroy all of your game progress.

• Spamming friends by numerous updates, requests or invitations might cause inconveniences and may lead to losing some “real” friends

6. Future of Social Games

• The expansion of social networks in terms of size and popularity will bring social games to more users. Furthermore, social networks are widely seen as the new email and the new SMS diving rich, shared content that capitalizes on mass interaction

• The development of smartphone market, app market and social networking usage on smart phones will enhance the popularity of social games.

• Game companies are planning to build up their own social networks

• Current social game players are aged between 18 and 34 but the 40+ market and the “mass market” are also present and potential.

• The upcoming social games will be more targeted and diverse in categories in order to cope with the increasing competition. 

• The second generation of social games will be more developed in terms of gameplay and graphics. With Flash 10's 3D capabilities, 3D games may be coming to social networking sites soon.

• More channels and methods of trading virtual goods will be established. More online platforms to support game players will become popular.

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IKEA's Brilliant "Tagging" Campaign on Facebook

One of the most clever digital campaign last year should belong to IKEA. They set up a profile for the store manager and launched a simple message: "Tag yourself on the furniture that you want to win (in each image). Then write a statement about why you should win in the comment field below the photo. Then hope you were the first to tag that item and had the best justification. Winners will be contacted directly through Facebook. Good luck!" 

Some of the best campaign strategies are simple, and none simpler than using the default “tagging” tool on Facebook to help create a buzz for an online competition. With the way tagging works on Facebook, the moment you tagged anything, everyone in your network instantly knew what was up for grabs. Subsequently, thousands and thousands of people were flooding the Facebook page in search of freebies. A very clever approach for small budget campaigns. 

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The Latest Hits in Mobile Marketing

The mobile market is exploding. Cell phone penetration has been surpassing cable TVs and home PCs in many countries. Mobile marketing expenditures are expected to exceed $2 billion in 2010. Thirty-eight percent of youth already claim that mobile is more important to them than their wallet! Click-through rates on mobile ads are even higher than online. Mobile advertising is beginning to show a track record of results, both on click-through and in leading to purchase.

So marketers surely see the potential of mobile marketing. But what are the latest hits and take-aways for them to get on the current market? Here come four highlighted trends to think of

1. Smartphone market's growth

Smartphone ownership increased to 17% of mobile users in 2009, according to Comscore. Smartphone penetration is estimated to reach 50% of the market by the middle of 2011

• Smartphones change mobile users behaviours, leading to more entertaining usage (music, games) and mobile web activities (internet, email). As a result, mobile web will reach more people and mobile sites will be significantly invested in the upcoming years. 
• Smartphone owners continue to be predominantly male, most likely between the ages of 25 and 34
• Mobile platforms for smartphones are enhanced with social media apps, such as Twitter and Facebook, which just announced a 54% increase in mobile use in the past six months. 

2. Change in SMS campaign tactics

There is a lot of potential with SMS campaigns and a number of companies have shown real success with them. 

• Previous SMS campaigns shown that the key to success is to integrate the SMS campaign into the rest of the marketing campaign; highlight the shortcode across other forms of advertising. SMS is highly measurable, so the results should be tracked and campaigns should be modified over time
• SMS campaigns are now built not simply based on one-way messaging but consumer-created content and active participation. 
• CRM databases tend to be linked into mobile marketing. Retailers can apply this into their SMS campaigns.
• Mobile coupons through SMS become popular

3. Increasing mobile apps

Mobile apps differ from standard WAP banner ads, location-based text ads and mobile video by engaging consumers and immersing them into a branded environment in which users will be more receptive to brand messages in a far more interactive and viral platform. Mobile app downloads across all handsets are estimated to climb from over 7 billion downloads in 2009 to almost 50 billion in 2012. Advertising contributed almost 12% of the overall apps revenue in 2009 and is expected to more than double to over 28%. Games are most downloaded apps, coming next Entertainment and Social Networking

• Supply will exceed demand in mobile apps. Discovery of apps is now an issue with the massive increasing number of apps. Launching a new app becomes a challenge and requires more innovations and investment. Apps markets are evolving differently worldwide, indicating a need for creating different apps business models instead of a "one size fits all" approach.
• The battle of the app stores becomes more intense. In 2009 the number of app stores leapt from 8 to 38 and is expected to further increase in 2010. It signifies a battle for survival of the fittest among app stores worldwide, with app revenue and growth opportunities growing significantly.
• Apple still dominates the app market. Though Blackberry has a huge number of handsets,  low awareness of the app store and complicated app installation are a pain for them. 
• Most of the current mobile marketing campaigns request a mobile app development.

4. Geographic and behavioral targeting

Targeting people based on location and using behaviours is the biggest opportunity for marketers in mobile. Location and behaviour data will begin to be mined as a rich new source of insights that marketers can harness to improve the effectiveness of their efforts. By knowing the location of the phone, SMS campaigns can be directly targeted. 

• Foursquare, a geo-social network, allowing people to share location with friend, is capturing marketer’s attention. 
• Geo-fence, a virtual field around any location that is used to trigger a mobile marketing message to a user when they enter or exit the area, is forecasted to become part of marketers' vocabulary.
• Retailers and businesses are offering coupons, promotions and sales for consumers checking in through location-triggered application on their mobile phones.
• The evolution of search is also moving to mobile platforms with more emphasis on the local and social, as well as behavioral targeting. Mobile search will continue to grow in 2010 and beyond. More localization and businesses will be expected to relate to mobile search. 

All in all, three key drivers of mobile marketing in 2010 and perhaps in upcoming years have been predicted as Location, Relevancy and Immediacy. Advertisers will be increasingly drawn to mobile's unique opportunity to reach and engage consumers with immediate and location-specific content at the most relevant content to different consumer groups. And privacy is another critical issue for advertisers to consider in order to protect personal identification information.

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The Handshake of Social Media and World Cup 2010

As the world’s biggest sport event is coming in the next three days, its heat is spreading further and hotter than ever before. The world is going to stop for a month to watch out the game.

Sport connects people. And so do social media. With more than 40 million active Facebook users, 50 million daily tweets and millions of views on Youtube everyday, social media have been becoming more popular since the previous game in 2006. So this will be the first World Cup experiencing the explosive growth of social marketing. There’s buzz about the role the social media will play in the action off the field. The only question: What have you seen, here and there?

FIFA developed its own service

FIFA has plans to get in on the action with its own social networking service called TheClub on its official website. There are more than 1.6 million members attended so far, who connect to other fans around the world.

Social networking sites are ready

The marketing strategies of World Cup 2010 include the use of Facebook sites to connect fans on global and regional levels and Twitter accounts to provide updates on the preliminary news and action. It’s expected to drive a record amount of social media traffic as users descend on Twitter and Facebook to critique refereeing decisions, celebrate goals or simply taunt the opposition.

• Facebook has an app that ranks soccer passion based on number of “Likes” fans hit for their team, divided by the number of Internet users in that country. Moreover, football fans have already participated in Facebok fanpages and groups and got daily updates about this global "social" event in advance of the 32 team competition.
• Twitter has already commented that they expect this year’s World Cup to drive more online traffic than the U.S. presidential election and the Super Bowl. Very much like the Winter Olympics look for Twitter to be a tremendous source for 2010 World Cup breaking in the moment news, insight and reactions.

Brands are getting more social 

FIFA sponsors and partners have also evolved their strategies for building and sustaining online buzz around the tournament. Brands have multiple planned online touch points for the World Cup. They are also directly or indirectly participating in World Cup social media marketing related endeavors.

• Coca-Cola has launched an online contest called the ‘Longest Celebration’ competition , inspired by Roger Milla’s post-goal dance at Italia ’90, which allegedly inspired a new generation of dance moves. The contest simply encourages users around the world to upload their own creative goal celebrations to YouTube.

• Budweiser takes creativity to the next level with the “Bud House”- an online reality show featuring one fan from each of the 32 qualifying countries living in a house in Cape Town with contestants eliminated when their team is knocked out
• McDonalds launched its online World Cup Predictor, in the form of an online fanstasy tournament, asking fans to use their knowledge to predict which teams will win which games, round-by-round
• Sony Ericsson has launched the Twittercup which appears to be an online competition at its very simplest – the more tweets your nation receives, the further they go in the cup. Launched in December 2009, the Twittercup has already amassed 43,000 tweets
• Castrol is launching the ‘Castrol Index’ and Castrol Predictor apps this month – the first a system for rating players (measuring passes, tackles and moves) housed on www.fifa.com to find the team of the tournament, the second using past team and player performance data to calculate which nations have the best chance of success at South Africa 2010

The real question is what kind of impact are these campaigns going to have on helping brands get the online traction their multi-million dollar investment demands?

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Fahion 2.0 – Not Just a Fad!

Today, I will talk about the combination of fashion and social media, my two favourites. Let's start with the recent rising of fashion bloggers, who have ruled front rows in fashion weeks of high-class brands, which is not a surprise anymore. They are young, quirky and stylist, from a 13-year-old girl, Tavi Gevinson to the shoe-loving teenager, Jane Alridge and many other twenty-something online writers. With a combined audience of half a million readers and the power to make items sell out instantly with their recommendations, these bloggers were clearly people worthy of fashion’s attentions. So, the questions are: Where is this power actually coming from?And why in fashion and beauty industry?

• Power of Word-of Mouth

There is a fact that the fashion and beauty business has always enjoyed a certain word-of-mouth evangelism. When it comes to the promotion of these kinds of products to enhance people’s appearance, consumers listen and believe more in advice coming from friends or acquaintance that they can trust. Keeping that in mind, the fashion industry has tried different approaches to leverage the power of word-of-mouth product endorsement. 

Levi’s is a good case. This year, they launched a campaign named “Levi’s girl”, targetting the female fan base, to find a voice for their brand on Facebook community, following their successful “Levi’s guy” last year. That person should ideally already have a strong social media presence and be passionate about fashion and style. Videos of finalists will be shared and voted by Facebook community members. This campaign is just great as it helps the brand to engage with existing Facebook fans and attract new fans from contestants’ social networks. What’s more, it will create a huge word-of-mouth for Levi’s on social media.

• Consumer-Created Content

On the first generation of fashion brand websites, marketers have promoted and sold products directly. They did miss the word-of-mouth factor, which has been playing an important role in consumers’ mind for building their own “colour”, image and personality. Consumers want to be fashionable and beautiful in their very own way. Therefore, the absence of this important dimension to personalized selling was soon corrected with consumer-created content. Many brands, such as Nike, Longchamp, etc, allow their consumers to design and personalize the product themselves online through the interactivity of web 2.0. Inspirational online stores and social shopping trends are also blooming.

• Peer Recommendations

Blogs, social networks, discussion boards, and so on are containing consumer’s recommended brands and also their reviews and comments on different products. It opens a new era of peer recommendation on the internet. Many consumers started to take notice of these newfound opportunities, and developed a whole new category of must-visit web destinations. From the traditional “point of purchase” concept, marketers are now familiar with the new concept of “point of recommendation”. 

Nowadays, to catch up with the trend, powerful fashion bloggers have been cooperating with brands to “recommend” their products to readers. They have been attending fashion events frequently and even becoming brand designers. Jane Alridge, author of the fashion blog SeaOfShoes, who was invited to design a new shoe collection for the Urban Outfitters, is one of many examples for this.

To sum up, social media can dramatically increase return on investment and allow brands to generate a global following of loyal customers with relatively low investment. Marketers in fashion and beauty industry seeking to leverage these exciting new trends should pay attention to social media as they represent the best opportunities to take full advantage of the Internet for your brands. 

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Six Reasons of Using Google Adwords for Your Advertising Campaign

To compete, you need to be found. Then to be found, you need to say something. But to build sales lead, you need to connect to your targeted customers. So it's all about competition on the internet. And it is undeniable that search engine marketing helps marketers a lot to enhance the performance online. The topic seems outdated but should be reviewed frequently. Anyone who is interested in or curious about online marketing in general or search engine marketing in particulars should understand thoroughly how it works and benefits your organization. Here it comes with 6 reasons for choosing and using Google Adwords, the leading search engine advertiser, for your online campaign:

• Google Adwords can generate qualified sales lead

It is fundamental to any Google Adwords campaign to identify and select relevant and profitable keywords. Popular and obvious keyword may cost more, while keyword combinations or more specific keywords are better for the market niche. Therefore, smart key word selection can increase the qualified the sales lead according to 80/20 rule.

• Google Adwords can reach worldwide and reach targeted customers 

Google's AdWords match up advertisers with content that their target market peruses regularly. It can also reach markets which were previously hard and expensive to access.

• Businesses only pay Google when the ads were clicked

As a pay-per-click advertising form, businesses only pay when their ads work.

• Google Adwords is a very affordable form of advertising

With low entry fee and spending on performance, Google Adwords is very cost-effective in comparison with other traditional advertising channels

• Google Adwords offer opportunities to improve the search engine optimization (SEO). 

Generally, SEO can be defined as the activity of optimizing Web pages or whole sites in order to make them more search engine-friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results. Therefore, it helps to improve quality and popularity of the corporate website.

• Google Adwords is easily to monitor and control.

Google Adwords Service allows advertisers easily monitor the performance of their ads, provides detailed report on their spending and analyzes the effectiveness of the ad campaign.

So that's the point. Hope you enjoy it and welcome discussion!

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Corporate Blogging – DOs and DON'Ts

There is a truth that you can’t avoid, that is your story being cut by traditional corporate communications. The story is diluted with every single layer when going through the “traditional” routes of corporate communications, thus, often delivering a watered-down product. Blogging is different.

Many organizations are still finding their voice online and corporate blogging is one way to achieve this. It is not surprising that they are still making mistakes. The secret to success is accepting that a blog is not a traditional marketing tool. So basically, what are Dos and DON’Ts in corporate blogging?

DOs

• Identify the corporate blog’s primary objective. Internals or externals?
• Know your audience
• Create blogging policies. 
• Decide who should blog. CEO or employees or both?
• Use your company knowledge wisely by encouraging contributors within the company
• Embed thought leadership, connection with leaders, corporate culture, and branding
• Decide how to obtain feedbacks and handle them
• Engage readers and encourage them to contribute through comments and constructive criticism
• Make a mix of forums and blogs by allowing people continue the conversation in a more constructive forum.
• Trust bloggers and readers to go and find out for themselves the answers
• Provide time and long-term commitment to your blog
• Keep it short, fresh, consistent and professional. 
• Update regular content
• Be structured
• Monitor frequently
• Have fun and enjoy!

DON’Ts

• Say "We should have one but..." or “ We have no time to blog”
• Keep in mind that“build it and they will come” mentality. Because a blog will not magically generate traffic. 
• Act like faceless corporation. As people don’t like interacting with organizations, corporations or machines. People like talking to people. So throw the "corporate" out the window. 
• Make it a marketing blog. As people prefer to read something with personality rather than advertising posts. So marketers should think of yourself as an editor rather than an author
• Post all the robotic press releases and boring business jargon.
• Worry that their competition will read it and rip off their expertise and ideas
• Expect too much from your readers
• Give up!

Again, these are some guidelines, not rules. Make your blog unique, but do remember that it is likely to be a popular touch point for the people you want to reach, probably more so than other areas of your website. Use it to inform, educate, inspire and engage.

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Quit Facebook Day – To Leave or Not To Leave?

May 31st is the first officially unofficial Quit Facebook Day. To mark protest against issues such as privacy, data management, fake warnings and phising attacks, the day is when users plan to delete their accounts and leave Facebook altogether. It was formed by a teamed-up group of dissatisfied Facebook users in an effort to organize a mass, coordinated exodus from Facebook--and they're using social networks to do it.

However, quitting Facebook isn't easy. Facebook is engaging, enjoyable and addictive. It keeps people in contact with family and friends. Quitting Facebook is like quitting smoking. To many people, Facebook is the internet. 

Therefore, not many people have seemed to like the idea of quitting Facebook. Up to this moment, only 34506 have committed to delete their Facebook accounts (counts on quitfacebookday.com) Considering the fact that Facebook has somewhere in the range of 500 million users, 35,000 just doesn't seem substantial enough to make Mark Zuckerberg shed a tear. The lack of interest thus far is a telling indication of the average Facebooker's indifference to the ongoing privacy debate.

Currently, Facebook’s privacy policy has 50 different settings, 170 different options and contains almost 6,000 words, longer than the US Constitution! Although there is an evolution in privacy issue to protect users (check this LINK for more details), Facebook makes it difficult for the average user to understand or manage this.

So the simple rule is this: if you don’t want your personal information made public, don’t post it on the web. That’s especially true for sites where data sharing is an integral part of the system.

In the end, what's your decision? To leave or not to leave?

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