I usually try not to write negative about things, because unless it’s constructive criticism for the creator of the content, nobody gains much. But since there is no possibility to comment on things at marketingvox, I will do it here.
I am referring to the post with the title „How-to: 9 Basic SEO Tips„. It caught my attention, because just the other day, I had a discussion with colleagues at the agency about how creative agencies rarely know how to properly search engine optimize the websites they build.
However, with the 9 basic tips, we won’t get very far either. Let me quote some of them:
Find out how well you rank online. […] It may be helpful to download the Google Toolbar, which gives you the „PageRank“ score for websites. Pages are scored on a scale of 1 to 10. The goal will be to make this number higher on your website.
Ok – and how? (It doesn’t say). Another great tip:
Submit your site to search engines. Do it personally; avoid „submission services“ or software. You only need to do it once.
I won’t continue with other tips like „place relevant keywords in the title tag“ or „use alt tags on images“ that they also featured.
Was any of this new to anyone? Please ? If so, just leave this blog immediately. In fact – please leave the internet and switch off your computer completely.
Gheez – we’re in 2008 by now, it’s not 1998 any more!
Not sure about the target audience of marketingvox, but for this article, it sure isn’t your average webmarketer!
In short: time spent on social networks is declining, for whatever reason – one could of course be increased advertising on these platforms. So this could be a problem for advertisers in the near future. Secondly: social networks need advertising, the same way media has always been ad supported.
But it’s not only the fact that user numbers are going down, ads on social networks are also less effective than on regular websites:
Many of the people who hang out on MySpace, Facebook, and other sites pay little to no attention to the ads because they’re more interested in kibitzing with their friends. Social networks have some of the lowest response rates on the Web, advertisers and ad placement firms say. Marketers say as few as 4 in 10,000 people who see their ads on social networking sites click on them, compared with 20 in 10,000 across the Web.
The solution to this is new targeting mechanisms, to serve users more relevant messages.
Last fall, both rolled out programs allowing marketers to pitch products to people in hundreds of categories of interest, such as fashion and sports. News Corp. President Peter Chernin said on Feb. 4 that response rates on MySpace improved as much as 300%.
Could be a solution. But at the end of the day, this whole approach still tries to use old answers to new problems. How about taking an approach that looks beyond plain advertising? How about introducing branded widgets, services, or exclusive whatevers to these platforms, so that brands can provide an added value to the interaction between users?
I am thinking of such things as the Red Bull Rosham Bull Challenge in facebook, which is a game that two users can play against each other. Or even just plain and simple things like the fact that you can sponsor digital gifts in facebook. There still is lots of potential for these kind of approaches.
Oh, and from a business model perspective: I don’t think social networks need advertising support. At least not to the extent that their business models are in danger if there is no proper ad solution in place.
Think about the German platform Xing.com. There you have a choice of paying a monthly premium for additional services – one of which is the fact that you don’t get to see any ads.
There could also be other models, like changing the business model slightly and starting e-commerce around certain product groups (i.e. certain information-based, digital products or even real products).
These problems are not really new. But what this whole discussion shows, is simply the fact that social networks have, all of a sudden, exposed the need for new marketing approaches much clearer than any of the previous developments on the web.
This blog celebrates its third birthday today. Three years ago I started this as an experiment at blogger.com, because I wanted to test this phenomenon called blogs, which was already mentioned a lot back in 2004.
I still enjoy this a lot, even though daily work and twoother blog projects have taken a considerable chunk of attention. Nevertheless I am very much looking forward to the next 3 years (or more)!
There is a lot of thinking and research going on in order to find out, what will trigger a viral (marketing) explosion of any sort. Is it the people, the context or the actual idea? Or would it be a mixture of all? Most people will have read Malcolm Gladwells „Tipping Point“ or similar literature. In his book, all three are important, yet most marketers have started to focus too narrowly on the people part of the equation.
Now Gareth points me to an article to that article on fast company magazine. And it seems from this work that the ‚who‘ is not really what matters; instead it’s the context and, most importantly, the idea itself that matters the most when it comes to the spread of new things. Like in a forrest fire, where nobody would expect the person causing it to be highly influential or the match extremely flammable. Instead it is crystal clear that the forrest was ready for it…
„If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,“ Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an „accidental Influential.“
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.“
Duncan Watts, the originator of this not really new, yet still untrendy thought (I guess the context still isn’t right), calculated this with computer models:
That may be oversimplifying it a bit, but last year, Watts decided to put the whole idea to the test by building another Sims-like computer simulation. He programmed a group of 10,000 people, all governed by a few simple interpersonal rules. Each was able to communicate with anyone nearby. With every contact, each had a small probability of „infecting“ another. And each person also paid attention to what was happening around him: If lots of other people were adopting a trend, he would be more likely to join, and vice versa. The „people“ in the virtual society had varying amounts of sociability–some were more connected than others. Watts designated the top 10% most-connected as Influentials; they could affect four times as many people as the average Joe. In essence, it was a virtual society
So, a computer model, a rather static even, I would assume, is behind this? Not sure if I want to really believe in the validity of this approach. But hey, I am a marketer – and it says in the article that us marketers are amongst the heaviest doubters of this research.
Mind you, Watts does agree that some people are more instrumental than others. He simply doesn’t think it’s possible to will a trend into existence by recruiting highly social people. The network effects in society, he argues, are too complex–too weird and unpredictable–to work that way. If it were just a matter of tipping the crucial first adopters, why can’t most companies do it reliably?
True, damn it, very true. I wish there would be a reliable mechanism, of course I do. We do try to design built viral campaigns along the learnings of past campaigns, because that is the only thing we have.
As Watts points out, viral thinkers analyze trends after they’ve broken out. „They start with an existing trend, like Hush Puppies, and they go backward until they’ve identified the people who did it first, and then they go, ‚Okay, these are the Influentials!'“ But who’s to say those aren’t just Watts’s accidental Influentials, random smokers who walked, unwittingly, into a dry forest? East Village hipsters were wearing lots of cool things in the fall of 1994. But, as Watts wondered, why did only Hush Puppies take off? Why didn’t their other clothing choices reach a tipping point too?
What you can do, and that is part of the conclusion of that article, is to offer a mechanism to spread your ideas to every single person who might actually be able to send it on to at least one other person. Doesn’t sound like a great strategy, but if your goal is maximum spread, why focus only on so called influencers – i.e. focus too narrow. Spread to everyone, as far and wide as your own resources allow you to. Start with the people you consider influencers, granted – you have to start somewhere, but once you’re done with those, include everyone else, too.
Wo ich sonst so bin...