Monthly Archives: January 2012

blogs

Marketing Emergency: Nobody’s Making Content Worth Reading | Fast Company

How can I go about teaching enterprise, and their B2B marketers, how to produce better content? This is a real marketing emergency, if there is such a thing.

Have you looked at the number of white papers out there lately? And how they all suck? At the collateral? At the websites? At the press releases and the fatuous corporate blogs? At the 178 social media sites per company–few of which offer much relevance or are of interest to customers, shareholders, suppliers, or even employees. Enterprise writing does not “go viral.”

There are better things to do with time and money than produce content no one will read or see. “Content marketing” is king, but not if you create the wrong content, or bad content.

via Marketing Emergency: Nobody’s Making Content Worth Reading | Fast Company.

Facebook

3 Metrics that Will Change the Way You Market on Facebook

Facebook isn’t just the largest social networking site on the web with more than 800 million active users; it also collects a massive amount of information about those users. Through the newly revamped Facebook Insights, Page owners can access a staggering amount of information about their fans’ activities. This information gives business owners valuable insight into what they need to do to give fans a better experience and, in turn, achieve better marketing results.

via 3 Metrics that Will Change the Way You Market on Facebook.

Facebook

Want More Stickiness? Users Logging In Through Social Networks Spend 50% More Time On Site | TechCrunch

Site owners, administrators, web business owners, content producers, and everyone in between, are always trying to find the best ways to encourage visitors to spend more time on their sites. It’s hard enough getting people there in the first place, but keeping visitors and customers on the site once there? No walk in the park. Just ask Groupon.

via Want More Stickiness? Users Logging In Through Social Networks Spend 50% More Time On Site | TechCrunch.

Facebook

UH, OH! Facebook Pages Only Reach 17% Of Fans

The Average Performance of 4,000 Facebook Pages

I teamed up with the folks from EdgeRank Checker to examine what was going on, and the findings were disturbing.

First, we found that (in a review of 4,000 Facebook pages) the average page post is only reaching 17 percent of the page’s fans.

Your mileage may vary, so do your own calculations — look at your page insights, average the reach of the last ten posts, and divide that by your total fan count.

via UH, OH! Facebook Pages Only Reach 17% Of Fans.

video

New Jersey Newspaper Animates Editorials

The editorial board of New Jersey’s largest newspaper, The (Newark, N.J.) Star-Ledger, has taken to a new story form to express its point of views: the animatorial.

It’s an editorial that’s in animated video form. The result is amusing, hilarious and a surprisingly effective storytelling method.

The production values are pretty corny. It’s cheesy text-to-speech animated figures on a real-life background. But the story (in this case about toll hikes) is told in a way that anyone can understand. It speaks to the viewer more than a traditional text-based editorial would.

For a video to be an effective storytelling tool, it need not have tons of bells and whistles. Instead, it needs to be well-written and understandable. And that’s exactly what these animatorials are.

via New Jersey Newspaper Animates Editorials – 10,000 Words.

community management

Do Social Media Postings Always Require a Brand Response? – eMarketer

Not all social media users are convinced that connecting with companies on social sites will be more than a passing fad, according to research from Conversocial, but those that do seem to expect that the connection will be two-way.

The social media customer service software provider asked about user attitudes toward companies that left their questions on Facebook and Twitter unanswered; most said they would be at least a little bit angry, including over a quarter who would no longer do business with the company. At the same time, nearly 28% said they understood that companies don’t have time to respond to each consumer.

via Do Social Media Postings Always Require a Brand Response? – eMarketer.

measurment

Why You’ll Start Paying for Analytics in 2012

As I reviewed those notes, I realized something. Most of them were really about measurement. That’s when it hit me: Search as a topic is interesting—there’s certainly academic value in exploring how search engines work and how we use them—but for all practical purposes, there’s very little perceptual difference between search and measurement. After all, we’re not that interested in what people are searching for in general; we’re interested in what queries people use when they are searching for the kinds of products and services we offer, and especially in how they get from their search to our websites. In other words, what we’re really looking to understand is the feedback loop that exists between search engines and websites, and the key to doing that is in measurement.

In the past year, however, there has been at least one major change to how Google participates in that feedback loop—one you’ve probably noticed and have urgent questions about. I’m going to get to that. In fact, discussing that single change will be the bulk of this article. But before I get there, let me offer a prediction for the coming year that is, for better or worse, largely the result of decisions Google made in the last few months: 2012 will be the year that many of us start paying for analytics. Whether for specific web analytics applications, API integration, or AdWords, we are going to start discovering that consistent, reliable access to data and analysis is well worth budgeting for.

via Why You’ll Start Paying for Analytics in 2012.