blogging

My weekly update of what’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

Study: Half Of Ad Impressions, 95 Percent Of Clicks Fraudulent

This sounds pretty alarming at first, but for those using legitimate campaign evaluation methods, they’ll be able to identify the fraudsters quickly and cost effectively. It’s all about using the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). If you haven’t heard by now, forget clicks. Click’s aren’t even last week. They’re last century. Focus on metrics that can’t be gamed near as easily by a bot. The major KPIs include: Visit rates – how has the campaign effected your overall site traffic? Engagement rates – are people actually finding your site relevant to your marketing messages? Conversion rates – are visitors actually doing something to impact your bottom line? The deeper you look, the harder it is for scammers to skew your results.

Timing Is Crucial To Maximize Exposure With Social Media

Timing in social media is key from a cultural point of view, but also tactically in terms of what time of the day or day of the week you launch the campaign. And while much of this focuses on what I consider digital PR rather than social media, the principles apply on a broad scale.

Google’s Ad Exchange Honcho Joins “Real-Time Advertising” Startup

When I saw this headline, I immediately thought of what Doug Weaver from Upstream has been writing about for the past several years. That the process of buying and selling media is due for a major streamlining. The Cliff Notes version of this is to think of Google Adwords for display advertising, industry-wide. And potentially video units, as well. As a creative, I generally favor anything that streamlines the non-creative department part of the business, because it tends to shift emphasis to the process of creating the ads. Of course, the challenge for creatives will be the overall commodotization of the advertising business. To date, when one part of the business reduces friction, it affects the whole industry. As an example, when media buying became detached from creative and handled by separate agencies, there were cost savings for clients. But there was also a struggle to get the two groups working together conceptually. And the creative process became more akin to filling out a job order.

Evolving Beyond The Banner Ad – Digg’s new ad unit

Speaking of ad units, this is interesting, if not clearly overdue. In social media, why not let the community evaluate the advertising the same way they evaluate the content? That’s what Digg is doing. And this could be great for your Nike’s, beers, and on Digg, Ron Paul. The big question is, What about the brands that don’t have lifestyle cache or emotional relevance to the audience evaluating them? And if that can’t be created in all brands, which I think is a challenge, then how will Digg be able to sell ads to those companies?

Really great Demo of new experiment from Mozilla

A good, early stage peak into the future of the semantic web. And, unlike so many concepts in beta, this one’s ready to go.

Technology to run video ads in print magazines

This is certainly attention-getting, and at this point anything that gives that advantage to magazine advertising will probably help them sell ads. But print publications are going to need to become a lot more than low-grade video display units. Instead of feeling like a print breakthrough, this feels more like an obvious indicator that all content will soon be digital. What this misses is the idea that the online video content experience is so much richer than just a page with video. There’s sharing, favoriting, commenting, etc. If anything, viewing these small screens only makes me realize how much better the experience would be online. So hopefully they can use this to sell some ads, but I don’t think it’s even close to a long term solution for print publishing.

Twelp Is On The Way!

A good breakout of Best Buy’s Twelpforce, and how the real power of this is not just being on the latest new media bandwagon, but about taking thousands of employees and making them feel like a bigger part of the brand story.

Jack Daniel’s ‘Toast’ Application Going Strong

This is a great campaign idea – send a toast to your friends. And it’s pulling strong results early on. But having tried it, I’m surprised that it isn’t easier to select a single friend to toast, versus the system’s recommendation engine. Secondly, I can’t figure out why they wouldn’t prominently promote this on either the default page of their Facebook Fan page, or their website.

Ford’s Fiesta to Party on — Without the Fiesta

I really liked this campaign when it came out. Take 100 top YouTube video stars, and give them the new Fiesta and a gas card, with an agreed number of blog posts they’ll write about their experience with the car. And some of the bloggers actually exceeded the minimum posting requirements, partly because they found their posts about the vehicle were getting more views than their regularly-scheduled content. That speaks volumes about the effectiveness of social media and sponsored blogging. But they ran the campaign a full year prior to the vehicle’s availability in the US. And now there’s a time gap in which they have to maintain momentum. My only guess to this is that they were afraid the social media campaign might not work, or even have a backlash, and by running it so far in advance, everyone would forget about it by the time the car launched. Any better theories?

Burglar leaves his Facebook page on victims computer – gets busted

One of those stories almost too good to be true. I’ve read of burglars doing all sorts of things during their robberies. Napping. Fixing themselves a snack. Watching TV. But this trumps them all.