Google Success Story and Its Brand Performance

If somebody asks you who made a significant change in technology and human knowledge sharing in this decade, the answer should be Google, a big global brand name, both online and offline. Nowadays, people can simply "google" everything, seriously "everything", that they wish to know and take advantage of their different services. However, have you or other Google users ever wondered how Google actually started and what made it become so successful? Are the key factors simply an eco-system for making money, high quality products for free, smart acquisitions and also smart hirings? Anything left?

Last year, I did two presentations about Google within the brand management module in my master's program, discovering Google success story and evaluating the brand in order to explain the success and recommend solutions to boost their brand performance. I want to share them again as they are somehow an interesting way to examine a very popular brand, in the branding perspective, that I think you may want to discover

The first presentation is a brief summary of Google's starting point, their culture and brand identity. The brand success is evaluated and supported by Young & Rubicam model, focusing on its differentiation, relevance, esteem and familiarity.

Google Brand Success

The second  presentation is an analysis and evaluation on Google brand, using Prof. Leslie de Chernatony's brand building model, "From Brand Vision To Brand Evaluation", in order to fully "audit" the brand itself. From that, some ideas for boosting the brand performance are coming after.

Boosting Google Brand Performance

Basically, that's what I learned and discovered one year ago about Google. However, there have been so many changes in the virtual world  recently, therefore, the evaluation should be updated to keep up with the trends. Should any factors be added or  eliminated? Hopefully to receive your updates and opinions about this.

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Tips for Building Your Online Personal Brand: SEO on Social Networks

Nowadays, online reputation management has become a very important aspect of winning projects, getting more clients or being recruited. To investigate one person, the first common place people will mostly pass by is Google. Then it would be useful if you can control as many of the top listings about yourself as possible. These listings should be ideally the professional profile, company pages, media mentions or similarities. To do that, a good SEO strategy will definitely help to optimize your “brand” in a positive way and to help ensure the ranking as highly as possible in search engines

By starting the SEO strategy from identifying your strengths and capitalizing on them, people can get their online personal brand highlighted by utilizing every media available to spread the word about the “brand”. Nowadays, small businesses and individuals can expand its horizons drastically and effectively by taking advantage of social social media networking websites, which are mostly free of charge, such as YouTube, Twitter, Blogger, Flikr, My Space and Facebook. Here is an illustration on which and how popular social networking sites can contribute to your personal branding strategy:

Keeping that in mind, it is agreed that social networking sites, are valuable resources and tools for online brand building at an extremely low cost. Nevertheless, the issue is how to take advantage of their power to benefit your brand. Here are the tips:

• Blogging and Guest Blogging

A blog is an excellent way to generate positive personal content that will turn up in searches. A professional and trusted blog can strengthen your company, attract customers, build reputation within an industry and, through your profile page, show who you are. If hundreds or even thousands of people are subscribing to read your content and expert opinions, then this is clearly something you want searchers to find when they come looking for you online.

However, having your personal blog may not be enough, even if you update the content regularly and keep it fresh. Posting additional articles on similar and related websites can be even more beneficial. You can reach a wider audience and enhance your online reputation.

• Twitter

Based on similar concepts to blogging, Twitter is also a great way to improve your SEO. By following relevant users and providing valuable tweets, your trusted profile page will be highly regarded in the search engines. If potential clients are looking for more information about you, then a Twitter profile containing expert advice and related conversations is going to help strengthen your reputation in the eyes of the searcher.

• Linkedin

It has become popular and effective to build your personal brand on business social media networking sites such as Linkedin and Plaxo, where people can show a professional profile containing career history, skills and networks of employers, colleages and industry professionals. From being largely used to reconnect with past co-workers and trusted colleagues in the past, LinkedIn now has extended its capabilities to serve as a brand building platform for professionals looking to network, engage, and communicate with like-minded peers. Visible public profile, editable URLs and ‘inbound links’ (links to Linkedin profile from other websites) can help to optimize your profile and improve the SEO easily.

• Online Presentations

Workshops, seminars, and conferences are a great way to impress potential business partners and clients. Uploading your presentations on sites, such as SlideShare and Scribd will allow viewers to download and review your speeches and supporting documents. It will also give them a chance to share it with others, which is a great way to continue optimizing you and your company’s name. Using a headline of “Presentation name by Author name” helps to increase your SEO effectiveness.

• Online Videos

Although not much different from seminar speech uploads, video uploads can highlight a variety of life presentations and increase your online exposure, especially if you use targeted headlines, specific keywords and title tags. If someone is searching for more information about you and can find an online video presentation on familiar websites such as Youtube or Vimeo, this could go a long way towards enhancing your reputation to the searcher.

• Social Networking

Social networking is one of the fastest and easiest ways to generate a lot of personal content, in both the good and bad ways, depending on how you control and monitor them. As social networking sites tend to be ranked high on search engines; thus, professional and consistent profiles on Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc will definitely help to spread out your online brand performance effectively. The more exposure you have, the quicker your personal brand will become a major hit on all key search engine ranking pages and lift your profit margin to new heights.

In order to success in your personal branding strategy, it requires a consistent brand image on various online platforms with a professional and trusted web presence. On-site SEO and social activities are keys to promote your personal brand to wider public. However, more importantly, defining your target audience and goal clearly from the beginning will direct your online branding strategy more relevant and effective. Last but not lease, you should remember that the ultimate purpose of online activities is to support your true life, thus, make your online information real and trustworthy so that your personal true life, when needed, can totally back up your online brand.

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Internet TV – The Battlefield of Google, Apple and… Advertisers

Did you hear the news? The Internet is coming to your TV. Internet television has been a minefield for the most developing and creative technology leaders in the world. With the recent unveiling of Google TV and rumours about Apple TV, it believes that there will be soon a revolution in the industry, which is pushing a new generation of Internet-connected televisions and home entertainment devices

Viewers are much excited about the launch of Internet TV products from these two giants. A large number of consumers said they wanted to connect their computers to their televisions to watch online video. Judging from the initial marketing impact, Google TV has a slight edge at this point, in comparison with Apple TV, although this can change with the fluctuations of the market.

What are the concepts and differences?

Conceps and Strategies

For Google, it tends to be searching and information. Google is attempting to aggregate all of the content from a wide range of places into one simple list of search results. From that view, Google TV is all about giving users the ability to find the content they want across a wide variety of mediums including broadcast TV, YouTube and anywhere on the Internet. With a built-in web browser, Google TV is also pushing the concept of web browsing on your television, that would enable viewers to quickly pull up Web content on their TVs, including photos, video and music, using an on-screen search box like the one on its website, from anywhere.

For Apple, it tends to be entertainment. Apple’s strategy has been to provide content that people want, but holding that content to a high-standard quality mixed with a simple interface usage. Apple TV doesn’t support interfacing at all with broadcast TV, nor full Internet access. Nevertheless, it still offers similarities such as acessing YouTube or photos from sources like Flickr or MobileMe. Its best-selling approach is maybe the power of the connection to the iTunes Store and the App Store, that’s something Google cannot compete with at the moment.

Technologies

Google TV is backed by Sony, Intel, Logitech, Best Buy and Dish Network, and built on Android, featuring their Chrome browser with a full version of Flash Player 10.1. Its primary goal is to integrate the web into the home TV viewing experience as seamlessly as possible. It is a platform that is expected to run on many products, from TVs to Blu-ray players to set-top boxes and provides additional content and allow users to access content from the Internet and various other pay and non-pay sources.

Apple TV, based on iPhone OS, seems to be an entirely closed system, directing users into interaction with Apple formats in movies and music through iTunes. Only Apple is able to modify its software. 

The difference between the two devices is that the Apple TV is both a hardware device and a piece of software, while Google TV is essentially a platform that you can build on. This means that Google TV will potentially allow users to add on various other products to the basic feature set

What are implications for advertisers?

Google or Apple has been succesful with its advertising strategy in terms of shifting significantly ad spending from traditional medidum to the Internet and mobile phones. However, television advertising is still dominating the market. That’s why these giants are planning to expand their market by digging more in this goldmine.

Keeping the strategy of “making TV ads more relevant to viewers and delivering more value to advertisers” in mind, Google TV may hold a key advantage due to their dominance in the advertising space, targetting more on behaviours and demographics. Its model will allow TV advertisers to target specific keyword searches as well as the demographics of the audience. 

Google's advertising business is all about targeting and delivering at low cost. Google could now offer advertisers better flexibility in integrating ad campaigns across media categories. With the Internet TV device, Google now has ambition in delivering search and advertising to mobile phones, PCs and TVs. It is similar to Apple in terms of advertising.

Internet TV also creates other advertising opportunities including:

- Redirecting traffic towards internet-based video

- Enabling intelligent advertising inserted around the television program

- Developing the marketplace for TV applications

- Building up a more detailed picture of user preferences for the benefit of advertisers

At the end, there is still a long way ahead the marriage of a 50 year-old technology and a pretty much “teenaging” technology. The contrast is that web surfers have never left their desktops for the living room and television watchers have kept their remotes pointed toward familiar territory for years. Could they come closer and sit together in a “two become one” magic? The answer is still openning. In any case, this fall is going to be an interesting time for web-savvy consumers who are looking a new way to watch TV, movies and other entertainments.

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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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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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How to Generate Sales Lead by Google Adwords?

Millions of searches are happening each second. By taking advantage of search engines, companies can enhance their online advertising and sales performance. And Google Adwords offer companies this rare opportunity.

By using this, the company is generating and placing its adverts and paying Google for each click. It's a form of advertising that advertisers make a bid on selected keywords to have adverts showing on prominent position on Google’s search website result page, thus attracting more clicks from searchers. This bid can range from a few cents up to several dollars per click depending on market competition.

More important, as a pay-per-click form of advertising, Google Adwords could help to build qualified sales leads easier, more affordable, and more rapidly as it can also reach markets which were previously hard and expensive to access. However, in order to generate more sales lead, there are three keys for companies to apply in a Google Adwords campaign.

First, a keyword research to find targeted keyword phrases should be applied. It is fundamental to any Google Adwords campaign for identifying and selecting relevant and profitable keywords. Popular and obvious keyword may cost more, while keyword combinations or more specific keywords are better for the market niche. The priority is always targeted sales leads at the lowest possible cost, not just the increasing traffic.

Second, attractive advert copywriting and good landing page optimization is crucial. This will improve the conversion rates and minimize the cost per sales lead.

Last, cost per lead should be minimized. As in fact, most of sales leads are generated by a small percentage of keywords according to 80/20 rule. Therefore, elimination or lowering bid on unprofitable keywords is necessary. Adwords conversion tracking and Google Analytics are powerful tracking tools that help to select smart keyword and make clever bid strategy to minimize the cost per sales lead.

It is similar to other search engines like Yahoo! Search Marketing (Y!SM) and MSN AdCenter (known as Bing now), which offer the same principles and practices.

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