Campaign sites vs social media: the shift is starting.

von | Jan. 13, 2010 | Blog, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Social Media Marketing

There has been a lot of talk about the end or decline of the destination sites. Mainly about the big portals as well as brands sites – the decline in daily visitors happens at the same time as visitors to social media sites are steadily increasing. Here is a blogpost that nicely visualizes this effect for a few famous brands and social media sites.

Coca-Cola and Unilever now announced that they’ll start shifting their online campaign activities from dedicated microsites to sites, profiles or channels on social media sites. Makes sense, considering the users are already there and they can tap into a ready community:

The FMCG giants are moving away from sites created on a campaign-by-campaign basis in favour of investment in existing communities.

Coca-Cola: “We would like to place our activities and brands where people are, rather than dragging them to our platform,”

Unilever: “You’ll see fewer brands creating a site for one campaign and then throwing it away. Certainly we won’t do that at Unilever any more. It’s natural online to go to the place where people are already consuming media,” she added. “It’s less effort to ask people to leave an environment they’re already in.”

They won’t do that for all campaigns, and certainly not immediately, but given the current change in the media landscape it does make a whole lot of sense for some brands to move closer to where their customer are.

Some new years social media resolutions.

von | Jan. 13, 2010 | Blog, Digital Marketing, Marketing Trends, Social Media Marketing

Happy new year (almost „belated“, since I haven’t posted anything in two weeks…). First post should hence be about new year resolutions. But not mine, which do in fact include the obvious (more sports, loose weight, etc.), but some listed by the viralblog:

1. Make Social Media marketing line budget item (so that it gets its proper place in the marketing mix)

2. Generate ROI using Social Media (prove the added value of social media tactics within the marketing mix)

3. Start listening to the audience (they are already talking about you, and they know what’s best for them).

4. Develop Social Media Strategy (don’t tinker from one tactic to another).

5. Always remember the 4 C’s (Content, Context, Connectivity, Continuity).

They are, obviously, not resolutions for me as an agency person, but they are nevertheless my resolutions when advising my clients this year. Let’s see how social media develops this year.

The valuable relationship between SEO and SMM

von | Dez. 6, 2009 | Blog, Digital Marketing, SEO / SEA, Social Media Marketing

Something which I am currently thinking about is the relationship between Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing. There surely is a direct relationship, and this short post about SEO and Social Media Marketing mentions it, too:

When it comes to social media, millions of links are shared every day on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and blogs.  As more people share a link to a website, the ranking of the webpage will increase.  So the more your links are shared via social media, the more search engines pick up on this and increase your website’s overall rank.

But it doesn’t only work in one direction – it also works the other way around:

It’s also important to note SEO’s impact on social media.  Primarily, if a link is easier to find on a search engine, then people are more likely to share it.

So far, SMM and SEO experts don’t seem to be working together much. Social Media Marketers might think about a presence on Youtube, or conducting a „blogger outreach“ programm, some crowdsouring, etc.

But when selecting platforms or target audiences, Social Media Marketers tend to only think about „social value“ of the respective platform or person. This Social Value is determined by the potential influence of that platform or person on the opinion or actions of other users.

The SEO tends to only think in „Link Value“ of a platform. When doing offsite optimization, SEOs try to place links on other sites that have a high link value in the „eyes“ of Google, so that it helps to improve the ranking of the SEOs site.

So SEOs don’t necessarily care about the Social Value of a site, and SMMs don’t care about the Link Value of a site.

Quite often this might correlate, since the Google Algorithm is based on social dynamics (sofar, most links are still published by human beings), but not always. And as far as I know, SEOs and SMMs don’t yet plan their activities together, trying to increase the intersection between the two online marketing approaches. It could prove to be interesting to unite these two approaches the next time activities are planned!

Social media trends 2010

von | Nov. 7, 2009 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing, Marketing Trends, Mobile Marketing, Social Media Marketing

You know it’s getting closer to a years end, when people start forecasting trends for the following year. This time it’s really early. It’s only the beginning of November and the first selection of six trends is already online.

David Armano writes about these 6 trends:

  1. Social Media begins to look less social: as more people contribute ever more content on social networks, updates-fatigue sets in and people filter out other users for reduction of clutter. I agree, and I would like to add: social media will have less farmville and mafia wars…
  2. Corporations look to scale: companies leveraging social technology to better serve customers, e.g. Best Buys Twelpforce
  3. Social Business becomes social play: playful social (mobile) applications with a competitive component for users are used for (local) marketing.
  4. Your company will have a social media policy (and it might actually be enforced): the title says it all.
  5. Mobile becomes a social media lifeline: Due to the IT departments locking down  social sites, people will increasingly turn to their smartphones during (or instead of) coffee breaks.
  6. Sharing no longer means e-mail: Well, that is kind of obvious in times of facebook and twitter…