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By Susan Davis for the Wall Street Journal (read original article)

If YouTube video views were to decide today’s Senate election in Massachusetts, Republican state Sen. Scott Brown would win in a landslide against Democrat Martha Coakley.

A study conducted by the Emerging Media Research Council out today found that Brown had a more effective strategy of using social networking tools including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to promote his campaign and connect with supporters.

Here’s a look at the numbers:

Facebook Posts since Jan. 1: Brown (128), Coakley (58)

Facebook Fans: Brown (70,800), Coakley (13,529)

Tweets since Jan. 1: Brown (142), Coakley (144)

Twitter Followers: Brown (9,679), Coakley (3,385)

YouTube Videos: Brown (57), Coakley (52)

YouTube Video Views: Brown (578,271), Coakley (51,173)

The study concludes that Brown’s use of social media helped in several ways, including boosting his name recognition both in and out of Massachusetts. They note that just 51% of Massachusetts voters had heard of Brown in a Nov. 12 poll, by Jan. 14 his name recognition was at 95%.

The study also found that Brown more openly embraced social media sites on his campaign Web site, where he “prominently” features social networking channels including a Twitter feed while Coakley “gives social networks less prominent real estate.”

In recent elections, Democrats—including President Barack Obama–have gotten the bulk of the credit for using social media networks to boost their campaigns. However, other recent studies suggest that the tech divide between the two parties is narrowing.

A report released last week on lawmaker’s use of Twitter found that Republican lawmakers are taking advantage of the Twitterverse significantly more than their Democratic counterparts. In the House, GOP lawmakers send out 529% more tweets than Democrats.

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From Avi Dan for AdAge:

It took the telephone 45 years to penetrate half the homes in America; radio, less than 20; color TV, 15; computers, 10; cellphones, eight; and the internet, a mere six years. The speed of change is accelerating. Five years ago Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Hulu and the iPhone didn’t exist. Today Facebook has 350 million members; Twitter boasts 30 million; and Hulu is the second biggest “channel” in America, having surpassed Time Warner Cable.

Technology now has profound impact on consumer behavior. Take brand loyalty, for example. Smartphones enable consumers to comparison shop on the basis of price at the point of sale. The democratization of information may result in commoditization of brands as consumers make purchase decisions by searching for the lowest-priced product. Technology may also alter the purchase cycle and give rise to powerful third-party influencers, counterbalancing paid media’s “management” of the purchase cycle. These are transformational shifts for brands. Read Rest of Article

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You Decide!

From AdAge (read original article)

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Even in recession, there’s an upside opportunity. And there might be billions of retail dollars up for grabs for smart marketers able to expand their footprint by taking advantage of cheaper leases.

The downturn that began in December 2007 has been disastrous for companies including Circuit City, Steve & Barry’s, Linens ‘N Things and S&A Restaurant Corp. (which owned Bennigan’s, Steak & Ale and Tavern restaurants), which have all filed for bankruptcy. Others, such as Sears Holdings, Foot Locker, Quizno’s and Ruby Tuesday, have shuttered locations. In total, retail sales declined 6% in 2009, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.

But in the coming year, economists surveyed by Bloomberg expect Americans will open their wallets once again and increase spending by 2%, the first gain since 2007. While not a stellar prediction, it’s a start. And even though more retailers and restaurants will certainly close in the coming year, one retailer’s misfortune could be the fortune of another able to snap up prime locations.

“There’s going to be a lot of opportunity out there,” said Charles Wetzel, president-chief operating officer of Buxton, a market-planning firm. “[Companies] are not as aggressive as they might have been in years prior, but, having said that, they’re not being conservative either.”

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From AdAge (original article)

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — For some marketers, a new year means a new agency. If that’s your company’s annual resolution, you should know that line of thinking will lead to a bad reputation in adland.

Agency new-business executives and industry search consultants report a growing blacklist of sorts, composed of marketers that tend to put ad duties into play every year or two. Thanks to rapid turnover in the chief marketing officer seat (a CMO’s tenure averages 28 months, according to the most recent figures from executive search firm Spencer Stuart) and pressure to perform amid the troubled economy, long-lasting agency-marketer relationships are becoming more rare.

“I have a huge disagreement with people changing their agencies like they change their underwear,” said Jane Bedford, partner at the Bedford Group, a consultancy based in Atlanta. “Our clients tell us it takes them about three to six months for them to get fully engaged with their agencies. It’s very difficult for an agency to get up and running, and totally please the client, within the first year.”

And that’s coming from an exec who actually benefits when accounts go into review.

Take Chipotle: In January 2004, the burrito chain tapped Mother, New York, to be its first advertising agency. Six years later, that account has cycled through four different shops: After Mother came TDA Advertising & Design, Boulder, Colo.; Devito/Verdi, New York; Butler Shine Stern & Partners, San Francisco; and, its latest, hired this month, Compass Point Media, a division of Campbell Mithun in Minneapolis.

Thinking twice
The regularity with which Chipotle changes its agencies is more than most. But it’s hardly the only marketer with a penchant for flitting from shop to shop. Retailer Ikea and luxury automaker BMW are known for frequently reviewing their creative and media accounts, and Mitsubishi Motors North America moves its ad business around a fair amount as well.

Too many reviews could also mean that, over time, the very best shops will think twice before going after those accounts. “Agencies do a risk assessment when deciding whether to pitch an account, and there’s definitely a toxicity factor they look at. If [a client] does a lot of reviews, the client gets blacklisted,” Ms. Bedford said.

Even at a time when agencies are hungry for more revenue, such flip-flopping has consequences: Two different new-business executives said two accounts they wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole are 1-800-Flowers and Quiznos, as the businesses seem to be too volatile, regardless of their billings. The marketers did not respond to requests for comment.

Another consequence is cost: Constantly opening reviews can be incredibly costly and disruptive to both the marketer — for whom travel and other fees associated with agency reviews racks up — and the agencies, which shell out thousands of dollars in the hopes of crafting the perfect pitch that could win the business. If they do land it, there’s often an added cost of having to quickly ramp up freelance and full-time staff to work on the new account.

Michael Houston, chief marketing officer at Grey, New York, said the window for agencies to prove themselves has lowered dramatically.

“Results in our business are no longer evaluated on a semi-annual or quarterly basis, but on a monthly, weekly and sometimes daily basis,” Mr. Houston said. “Couple that with the level of dollars attached to the advertising line item on a client’s balance sheet, and we find clients forced to justify their marketing ROI in a way never seen before. In that process, agencies sometimes become the scapegoat, with the easy solution being to call an agency review.”

Consistency
What’s more, “serial reviewers” risk damaging their brand with inconsistent marketing messages.

“Clients shouldn’t be constantly jumping ship,” said Lisa Colantuono, managing partner at AAR Partners. As communication between consumer and client evolves, “they need to work together with their agencies. If that foundation is constantly changing, the marketer is hurting themselves in the long run in terms of building brand loyalty with the consumer.”

The Association of National Advertisers, the marketer’s trade group, doesn’t exactly see it this way. The ANA’s position is that conducting formal agency evaluations on a regular basis offers the best chance for fixing problems before frustration sets in. It believes that the companies that have two-way assessments at regular intervals have the most-productive relationships. “Having a formal agency evaluation process is always imperative but even more so at a time of heightened focus on marketing accountability,” Bob Liodice, president-CEO of the ANA, has said.

Said Grey’s Mr. Houston: “Desperation may be something new to many industries in the recession, but it’s something the agency business has known, embraced and perpetuated for decades. Agencies only have themselves to blame by playing right into the hands of these serial agency-review ‘players’ [and] making it too easy for the client to bully us.”

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From CNN (Click for original article)

Editor’s Note: Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of Mashable, a popular blog about social media. He writes a weekly column about social networking and tech for CNN.com.

London, England (CNN) — Social media aren’t always perceived as an effective way to coordinate fundraising efforts or bring change: In some circles, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the rest are seen as the domain of armchair activists.

But are times changing? Will technology prove its worth following the disastrous Haiti earthquake?

All talk and no action?

“Slacktivism” has become the popular pejorative to describe the various Internet petitions, well-intentioned Facebook groups and copious retweets intended to sow the seeds of change or bring help where it’s needed. “It’s all fed by slacktivism … the desire people have to do something good without getting out of their chair,” Monty Phan wrote in a 2001 Newsday article.

The term has stuck in large part because its claims are true. Even tech optimists like myself are forced to concede that while online fundraising campaigns can rack up thousands of tweets in an afternoon, persuading those same participants to open their wallets remains a challenge.

Hitting a button to blast out a message to your friends is easy, but when faced with a credit card payment form, many Web users shy away.

How can we combat such poor conversion rates online? The Twestival campaign of 2009 did so by taking proceedings into the real world: Twitter was used to spread the word of offline gatherings, at which more than $250,000 was raised to bring clean water to towns in Uganda, Ethiopia and India.

Some online campaigns, meanwhile, have simply accepted this poor conversion rate as fact. They use social media sites as marketing vehicles while corporate sponsors bring the cash. October’s “Beat Cancer” fundraiser asked brands to donate 1 cent for every tweet carrying the “#beatcancer” tag: Nearly 700,000 tweets were posted, and the campaign as a whole claims to have raised $70,000 for cancer charities.

Haiti relief: Red Cross paves the way

Haiti may be different: Here, we’re seeing well-intentioned Web users open their wallets and give generously. While the scale of the disaster and harrowing images in the media fuel a desire to help in any way we can, it’s technology that has made the process efficient and enabled tens of thousands of individuals to take action toward a common goal.

As of Thursday afternoon, the Red Cross had raised more than $4 million in donations via its text message campaign: Text “Haiti” to 90999, and a $10 donation is added to your cell phone bill. The mechanism is so wonderfully simple — removing credit cards and PayPal accounts from the equation entirely — that donations have flooded in. Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti, meanwhile, is leveraging the same technology: Text “YELE” to 501501 to make a $5 donation.

Social media spreads the word

While text messaging provides the payment solution, Twitter and Facebook have spread the word. At midday Wednesday, CNN reported, four of Twitter’s top topics were related to Haiti earthquake relief.

Celebrity Twitter users, many with millions of followers on the service, have taken to tweeting the simple message so easily expressed in Twitter’s 140 character limit.

“You can text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to @RedCross relief efforts in #Haiti,” writes singer Katy Perry. Shaquille O’Neal, Chelsea Handler and Randy Jackson are among other notable names echoing the Red Cross message.

There’s no doubt that text message donations coupled with the word-of-mouth buzz provided by Twitter and Facebook are proving a powerful combination in the Haiti relief efforts, not to mention the vital role of those services in bringing us first-hand reports in real-time.

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From the New York Times (click for original article)

KRISTIAUNA MANGUM, 22, a senior at Ohio State University in Columbus, said she always had a flair for makeup, but never considered it a professional calling. Then she heard about a pilot college program offered by Avon’s little sister brand, Mark, two years ago. “My mother was an Avon Lady, so I thought, huh, maybe becoming a Mark Girl could really be the way to go,” she said.

Now Ms. Mangum is the sales manager for Mark at Ohio State, and manages 155 other Mark Girls who roam the dormitories and sorority houses, selling Mark beauty products and fashion accessories for a commission in the range of 20 to 50 percent.

“It’s really a grass-roots kind of thing, hitting the dorms, sororities, Facebook,” said Ms. Mangum, who uses her share of the profit, about $800 a month, to help settle her student loans. “I even rented space at local high school fairs — with 16- and 17-year-olds, you can move a lot of lip gloss,” said Ms. Mangum, whose major is marketing.

She is one of more than 40,000 Mark Girls in North America, mainly 18- to 24-year-old women who are changing the nature of direct sales by using the brand’s personalized e-boutiques, iPhone app and new Facebook e-shop, one of the beauty industry’s first forays into Facebook e-commerce.

“We’ve taken the same DNA of direct selling that has always been a part of Avon’s history and applied it to the digital world for our Mark reps to reach their customers,” said Claudia Poccia, president of Mark at Avon, which introduced the brand in 2003. “Now, we’re offering our Mark reps the opportunity to sell products not just door to door, but on Facebook, wall to wall.”

The Mark brand is evolving. It has its own spokeswoman, Lauren Conrad, the former reality TV star of “The Hills,” now a fashion designer and best-selling author of “L.A. Candy.” Its Facebook fan page has over 84,000 fans. According to estimates from Stifel Nicolaus, an investment bank, Mark’s revenue last year was about $70 million.

Unlike other companies involved in direct sales — including Amway, which may dedicate a product line or two to a more youth-oriented market, or Mary Kay and Avon, whose products are geared toward middle-aged women — Mark focuses almost exclusively on teenagers and women under 30.

The younger demographic, at least concerning sales representatives, has its drawbacks. “The fact that the reps are younger can mean different rules apply as to how a direct-selling company is going to have to manage them,” said Linda Bolton Weiser, a managing director of consumer equity research at Caris & Company, an investment bank. “There could be questions about volume limits and credit — a younger rep may be cut off earlier. And, if a rep is under 18, obviously you would need parental permission.”

Still, Mark’s motto — “Make your mark” — seems to resonate with its zealous representatives.

But can Tweets and news feeds from Mark Girls compete with over a century of Avon Ladies’ experience?

Because of the difference in how the products are branded and the separation between Avon and Mark representatives (those selling Avon can also sell Mark products, but not the other way around), there is some internal competition among representatives.

On the mark.girl discussion board on Facebook, the Mark-versus-Avon topic sparked a lively debate when one Mark representative wrote: “Has anybody else noticed Avon reps not taking the Mark product seriously?” An Avon representative replied: “A lot of Avon women I know don’t push Mark because it has a lower profit as compared to the Avon core product line.”

Some experts in the beauty business are fans of Mark. “It really helps that Mark has such low price points,” said Elaine D’Farley, beauty director of Self magazine. “Visually, it’s fun. The products hit the trend.”

Indeed, products such as the magnetic refillable color palette compact ($4) and Hook Ups (about $10) — two-ended cosmetic dispensers that can be customized to connect, for example, lip gloss and lip pencil, eyeliner and mascara — are so popular, as one Mark representative said, that “they’re impossible to keep in my purse.”

But some products have been criticized online, where a bad review may resonate more negatively than an item quietly returned to a store. On the Mark Web site, one reviewer said that a cheek tint left “zero shimmer on my cheek but plenty on my hands.” And on Makeupalley, a forum for comments on beauty products, a reviewer complained about Mark’s Good Riddance: “I have under eye circles and it didn’t even come close to covering them.”  Read Rest of Article

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From the AP:

Fast-food chain KFC is giving two Indiana cities $7,500 so it can emblazon founder Colonel Sanders’ face on their hydrants and fire extinguishers to promote new “fiery” chicken wings.

Experts say to expect more ads like this, on public property from sewer grates to the local landfill, as companies look to cut through the clutter of traditional advertising. Cash-strapped governments have long sold space on mass transit, benches, trash cans and other public property to help stretch budgets.

KFC told Indianapolis and nearby Brazil, Ind., it wanted to improve their fire safety by helping pay for new hydrants and extinguishers in exchange for advertising on them. The company plans to e-mail a national network of mayors on Wednesday to find three more cities to participate in the approximately $15,000, monthlong effort, which began Tuesday.

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From Business Week (original article)

How Much Are Twitter’s Tweets Really Worth?

Google and Microsoft are paying millions for tweets, but even they can’t tell whether their deals will pay off

By Spencer E. Ante

Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) are paying Twitter $25 million to crawl the short posts, or tweets, that users send out on the micro-blogging service. It sounds like big money. Enough for Twitter to turn a small profit in 2009, say two people familiar with the company’s finances.

But do the math and the payments look less impressive. Last year, Twitter’s 50 million users posted 8 billion tweets, according to research firm Synopsos, which means Google and Microsoft are paying roughly 3¢ for every 1,000 tweets. That’s a pittance in the world of online advertising. Top media sites often get $10 or $20 per thousand page views; even remnant inventory, leftover Web pages that get sold through ad networks, goes for 50¢ to $1 per thousand. The deals put “almost no value” on Twitter’s data, says Donnovan Andrews, vice-president of strategic development for the digital marketing agency Tribal Fusion.

Truth is, no one has figured out how to make real money off of tweets yet. Google and Microsoft are paying $15 million and $10 million, respectively, as a bet on the future. By laying out what are relatively tiny sums, they get first crack at experimenting with Twitter data. Both are already including tweets in search results. Sean Suchter, general manager of Microsoft’s Search Technology Center, predicts the company will end up profiting. “Many times in history when you amass the attention of users, that has proven to be a moneymaking endeavor,” he says.

Location Data Could Help

A few entrepreneurs are showing ways to advertise via Twitter. Sean Rad, chief executive of Beverly Hills-based ad network Ad.ly, has signed up 20,000 Twitter users who get paid for placing ads in their tweets. To determine the size of the payments, the startup has developed algorithms that measure a person’s influence. Reality TV star Kim Kardashian, with almost 3 million followers, gets $10,000 per tweet, while business blogger Guy Kawasaki fetches $900 per tweet to his 200,000 fans.

For Google and Microsoft, the real payoff may come from tying tweets to local information about products. Twitter is building software that will automatically allow users to add location data to every tweet. Armed with user locations, Microsoft and Google could sell more targeted ads and provide more relevant search results. “That is potentially very useful,” says Microsoft’s Suchter.

Google isn’t focused on making money from its Twitter deal in the near term. Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, says Twitter’s data are necessary so that people who use its search engine get more complete information. “I never think about dollars and cents,” he says. “My job is to run the best search service.”

Twitter and its venture backers, however, need to see the deals pay off. The three-year-old company has said it hopes to go public someday, but it needs a viable business model to live up to its latest $1 billion valuation. It’ll take a long time to get there at 3¢ per thousand tweets.

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From Steve Strauss for the American Express OPEN Forum (original article)

Jan 05, 2010 -

Want Page 1 search engine result rankings? Of course you do; we all do. Well, what if I were to tell you of a little known way that profoundly increases your odds of getting a Page 1 search engine result – might that be of interest?

I thought so.

The answer is video. But not just any old video. It has to be search engine optimized video. Properly post that, and according to a recent study by Forrester Research, you stand a 53 times better chance of getting a Page 1 Google ranking.

Yes, I know, the holy grail.

By now I’m sure you know all about search engine optimization – keywords and key phrases and incoming links and all the rest. The problem is, so does everyone else. That means that getting Google to think that your page is more valuable, more deserving of a high ranking than other pages, is harder than ever, despite all of your fancy SEO work.

That is where SEO video comes in.

What I am not talking about is simply putting a video on your homepage or some other desirable page. And similarly, I am not talking about submitting a video to YouTube and then embedding a YouTube player on your site. Neither of those will generate great Google results for your site because

1.     They are not search engine optimized, and

2.     Videos using YouTube result in click-throughs results for YouTube, even though the videos are re-posted on your site

But what will work – the magic bullet if you will – is video SEO. Video SEO is the process of using SEO tools with your video and then submitting the SEO videos themselves (not just the pages where the videos reside) to the various search engines.

Here is why video SEO is such an incredible Page 1 generator: First, search engines like Google are increasingly using “blended” search results – articles, video, pictures, and other forms of content. So video inherently gets more play because there is less competition for video results. And that is the second, and more important, reason. Because there is so much less of it, and because only very little of all online video is properly submitted with SEO, there is a disproportionate bias towards properly submitted SEO video.

You end up being a big fish in a very small pond.

So here is what you do:

1. Create some great video for your site. Note: Research indicates that if you have video on your homepage, up to 80% of your visitors will click that first, so it better be good!

2. Post it prominently throughout your site.

3. SEO it and submit it. Here’s the trick, and it is two-fold. First, you must optimize the video for search engines. That means key words and phrases must be used in the file name, in the captions, etc. Second, once posted on your site, you must then submit the video itself using XML tools to Google and the other search engines.

I know that last part may sound a little intimidating, but it need not be. There are some great online services that will submit the videos for you. For example, one I like a lot is Fliqz.com. Fliqz will, easily and affordably, index your pages and video, and properly submit them to the various search engines.

The upshot is that your videos and video pages should end up at or near the top of any default search results, the “Web” results, and not just the video results.

In fact, according to Fliqz, by using their “SearchSuccess” tools, “more than two-thirds of all videos submitted produce a first-page Google search result, and up to 25 percent have resulted in a number one Google ranking.”

Well, what are you waiting for?

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