T-Error

Sharing stories on social voting and bookmarking sites both grows your social media profile power and enables you to reach your audience. Surprisingly enough, being one of the most important element of the story success, proper tagging is very often overlooked.

Let me first make it clear why you should do at least some research on relevant tagging before sharing the story:

• Relevant tags ensure your story is seen (found) by people interested in the topic;
• Proper targeting ensures your story is voted for, hence you have more chances to get it hot;
• Relevant tags make it less probable you will be attacked by social community trolls (yes, most popular communities do have them).

StumbleUpon has one of the most intricate network of tags and categories - so let me share how to use correct ones: make sure to use tags popular within the community (using relevant keywords isn’t enough).

1. Identify a few main keywords associated with the story;

2. Run Google search for [site:stumbleupon.com keyword];

3. Find SU submissions of the stories on similar topic:

4. Open a couple of them and check if they were popular (StumbleUpon stars are good indicators of popularity):

5. See what tags it was shared in:

You are done! Use these (add yours too!) tags when submitting the story.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

StumbleUpon Tip: Use Google to Choose the Best Category and Tags

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One large issue when running a business on or offline is training staff. The main issue that arises is whether you feel comfortable training your future competition. This is especially true in a service or consultancy based vertical, such as internet marketing.

In the end, a well trained staff is an asset, and you cannot control whether your employees become your future competitors. So how do you go about training a competent internet marketing staff?

Training Courses – There are a few training courses having to do with internet marketing that I find worth while. The first and foremost is Aaron Wall’s SEOBook.com. His offering is a great place to start someone new to the space. Other sites offer amazing content on a subscription basis, including SEOmoz.org and SearchEngineLand.com. If you couple a few of these subscriptions you can build an amazing educational library for your staff.

Weekly Roundtables – Each week select a topic for your team to meet about and discuss. Have each person create a presentation around one concept in the topic. For example, if you are going to discuss linkbuilding, you may assign one person to present on linkbaiting and another on a topic such as blogger outreach. This is a great hands on way to learn, and a way for you to spread the educational responsibility across your team.

Conferences – These are a coin flip. Dependent on the personality of your employee you could be wasting a few thousand, or you could get ten fold on your investment. Make sure to explore the topics at a conference and match the content with what you want your employee to learn and engage in.

Company Wiki – Create an educational wiki for your office only, where you can unload your knowledge base for your team to absorb, and add on to. This again spreads the responsibility of education across the team, and minimizes your ongoing time investment.

Other ideas to leverage an educated staff can be outside the realm of education itself. You can alleviate the need to train staff by utilizing these concepts.

Tools – By equipping your staff with Raven SEO Tools or tools you have created on your own, you can streamline workload. Utilizing a strong tool kit you can substitute mid grade labor with lower quality labor and not see much drop off. This of course is not going to be the cure for a really strong marketing mind.

Outsourcing – If you have specific needs a better option than hiring might be outsourcing. You can find labor that specializes in the skill set you are looking for, and by doing so you can not only alleviate unneeded labor costs, you can also often raise your prices due to the expertise behind the offering.

No matter what business you are in, a well trained staff is always going to be one of the key differences between success and failure. By putting processes in place to assure your staff is running efficiently you will give yourself one of the tools you need to succeed.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

How to Effectively Train an Internet Marketing Staff

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Your reputation, online or offline is vital extremely important. Recently, a friend of mine owned a travel business. After hiring an employee with a light criminal background and having thousands of dollars embezzled from him, he started to pursue legal action against this individual. This person decided to get revenge by badmouthing the owner and business through Rip Off Report and other online platforms. Now, anytime you Google his name or business some very offensive things are displayed as a #1 result. Consequently, his business has suffered tremendously.

This situation is the perfect example of the need for reputation management.  One of the most powerful (and easiest) methods to begin to control your reputation in the search engine result pages (SERPs) is to create social profiles on major social media websites. Since domains like Twitter or MySpace have such high authority it takes a lot less effort to rank, than creating your own site, by creating a profile that will outrank and push down undesired search results. Also, these search results gives you the added benefit of having control over your brand and being accessible and available on multiple platforms strengthens your overall branding efforts.

Which social profiles should I have?

Once you understand that you should be monitoring and repairing your reputation, you will need to figure out how to do it.  As a rule of thumb the Big 4 social media sites are a great place to start. Generally your goal would be to obtain user profiles that are an exact match as the keyword you are trying to manage. In most cases this is a branded term such as your company name. Additioanly branded usernames are generally available on social media websites. Many sites, particularly niche sites, can be useful to your company and your specific ORM situation. But the 4 you must have are:
•    Twitter
•    LinkedIn
•    Facebook
•    MySpace

If you want to check across 120 different social sites to see which keywords or names are taken you can do so very easily with KnowEm.com. Just type the desired username and click “Check Username”. Additionally, they offer a service that will register you on all those different social media sites as well for .50 cents per social media site.

Steps to Take

Once you have your accounts setup, you will need to do a few things before your campaign can be effective.

1. Create a complete profile
Simply obtaining the name twitter.com/companyname, isn’t enough.  You need a complete and full profile to have a legitimate working account, this includes bios, avatars etc. As much information that you can fill in and feed to search engine spiders, the better.

2. Engage and Interact
Participating in the community strengthens your profile and gives your account credibility. An account that has your name but nothing else looks like a spam account.

Also, you gain the added benefit of internal links from these social sites. If you just create a profile and let it sit then it doesn’t gain internal link equity it needs, for high SERP rankings, from other profile pages, group pages, etc.
Interacting (e.g. returning messages, commenting, voting) is vital to the strength of your profile.  For an example, check out the hat tip to Steve Espinosa for showing how to get DoFollowed links on YouTube here.

3. Monitor
When a company engages in social media they are opening themselves up for a lot of commentary regarding their brand. Be prepared to monitor the sentiment to measure if it’s positive or negative. Have a contingency plan for when you come across negative sentiment. I’ll spare the lesson on monitoring and handling sentiment and direct you to The Online Reputation Management Guide by Outspoken Media. Another good resource on ORM is The M&Ms of Online Reputation Management by @DaveSnyder.

Summary

Remember that social media profiles are only one small part of online reputation management but a critical step indeed. Even if you don’t have any negative sentiment in the SERPs, pre-empt now by registering and building out your profiles today to prevent it from happening in the future.

Jordan Kasteler (aka. Utah SEO Pro) is a co-founder of Search & Social, the parent company of Search Engine Journal. Search & Social integrates social media marketing into the Online Reputation Management, SEO, link building & search marketing mix.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Social Media Profiles for Online Reputation Management

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Facebook is estimated to have 70.2 million unique visitors per month in the United States according to comScore.  Social networking is booming, everyone is friending, following, tweeting, tagging, and grandma and grandpa are getting involved too.  Wait a minute, did I just say grandma and grandpa?  That’s what some recent Facebook research has shown.  It seems the fastest growing demographic on the social networking giant is women 55 and older.  That segment grew by 175% in February 2009, while men 55 and older grew by 137%.

I was definitely excited to see the data.  I’m a big believer in social networking and love to see people in that age group join a site like Facebook.  That said, reality set in a few days later.  I ended up speaking with someone 66 years old who needed my assistance with their email account.  Like many of you reading this post, I usually end up being the point person for technology-related questions for friends and family.  I had an interesting few minutes on a phone call with her.  Here’s a quick transcript:

Her: I can’t seem to find some emails I’ve written.
Me: Did you check your sent items?
Her: I’m in my email already. Where are my sent items?                             
Me: It’s the folder labeled “Sent Items" in Microsoft Outlook.
Her: I don’t think I’m using Outlook…
Me: What are you using to check your email?
Her: The e with a circle around it (AKA: Internet Explorer)
Me: OK, so it’s web-based mail.
Her: No, it’s on my computer.
Me: Yes, but you are accessing your email on the web.  I can help you.  What’s your email address so I can send you some instructions?
Her: I’m not sure, hold on.
Me: Jumping off roof now.

That conversation reminded me that not everyone is as tech savvy as the readers of Search Engine Journal.  We come with computer chips built into our brains.  Our kids instinctively know how to text and have built in wi-fi.  But, we also grew up using computers on a regular basis.  People that are 55 and older didn’t…  We were typically the ones introducing computers and explaining how to use them. Needless to say, there’s a big difference between the various age groups and how they utilize new technology.

My 3 Degrees of 55 and Older

After the phone call, I started thinking about people 55 and older and the data I saw about Facebook.  I’ll be honest, I started having doubts that many people 55 and older are jamming on Facebook, tagging photos, using apps, providing status updates, and grabbing their vanity URL’s.  So, why was I skeptical?  My parents are in that age group, and all of their friends.  My in-laws are in that age group, and all of their friends.  In addition, all of my friends’ parents are in that age group, so on and so forth.  So, I like to think I have a pretty good feel for that demographic, based on interactions I’ve had with them over the past few years. 

They Are Signing Up, But Not Coming Back…

The initial data I read showed that people 55 and older was a fast growing segment for Facebook (with women over 55 being the fastest growing).  But, recent data revealed that although they were signing up, they were not returning to Facebook.  Unfortunately, that did make a lot of sense to me.  I can only imagine someone 65 years old hearing about Facebook from their children or grandchildren, signing up, and looking at their blank profile thinking, “What the heck is this??”   

Getting My Own Data

Although reading all of this data about people 55 and older was great, it wasn’t sufficient for me.  I wanted to know more. So I decided to collect some of my own data!  I reached out to my network of friends and family with a quick Facebook questionnaire.  I came up with five simple questions to try and understand how people 55 and older were using Facebook.  I sent an email to my network and waited patiently for the data to come in.  It didn’t take long to start receiving responses.  Some of the emails cracked me up, others surprised me, and most reinforced what I thought.  Here are the five questions I sent out:

1. Are you currently on Facebook?
2. If yes, what do you use it for?
3. How often do you visit Facebook per day, week, and month?
4. Do you enjoy Facebook? Why or why not?
5. Do you plan to join other social networks like Facebook in the near future (over the next 6 months to year?)

I ended up receiving 57 responses from people 55 and older.

A quick disclaimer before I reveal the data.  This is obviously not a scientific study, nor was it meant to be.  I just wanted to receive feedback from a trusted group of people that were 55 and older to see if and how they use Facebook.  Let’s see what they had to say.

Lots of No’s, But There is Hope

As I started receiving responses, I saw a quick trend.  NO.  That’s the overwhelming response I received to question one (Are you currently on Facebook?)  It ends up that 80% of the respondents were not on Facebook.  When someone did choose to elaborate, I received some funny responses.  For example, I found out about one man who isn’t on Facebook and also refuses to upgrade to broadband.  I think the exact quote was, “Dial-up is fast enough!”  I laughed out loud and couldn’t help but think that his response was something right out of an episode of Seinfeld. :)  Another comment that cracked me up was, “I think I was there once.”  Wow, Facebook made such a big impression on her that she didn’t even know if she was on the site!  Although I was hoping to see more people from this group on Facebook, I had a feeling this would be the case.  Then I opened a few emails that gave me hope… 

Wait, Facebook Can Be Helpful!

Sprinkled in with the no’s were some great responses supporting Facebook.  These enthusiastic responses made me think there is hope.  The first one that struck me was from a friend’s mother-in-law.  Her enthusiasm about Facebook jumped off the page. Literally, if she could friend me, tag my photo, challenge me to a trivia game, and become a fan of my Facebook page, I think she would.   She explained how much she loves Facebook, how she keeps up with her children and grandchildren, and loves seeing everyone’s status updates, photos, video, etc.  She logs in a few times per day.  Yes, she was the exception, but she got it (big time).

After reading her story, I received a few more no’s and then another great response came in.  This time from a friend’s father, who logs in a few times per week to see what his kids are doing, he searches for people he went to college with, connected with some of them online and offline, etc.  It was another great example of someone using Facebook in smart ways.  He seemed to really like it. 

Then there were a couple of responses from people that were on the fence, not knowing whether Facebook was really for them.  There were several people who log in just a few times per month, explained that they don’t have time and don’t really know how to use Facebook.  Personally, I think that’s a big problem for Facebook, Twitter and other social networking websites (at least for this age group). I don’t know if there’s anything more frustrating for people than signing up for something you don’t understand.  And if you don’t know much about Facebook, you might end up just staring at a blank page wondering what the big deal is.

A Typical Bell Curve

I’m sure many of you have visualized this already, but my data ended up creating a typical bell curve, with a majority of the people not on Facebook, some loving it, and some on the fence.

No More Social Networks, One Is Enough…

My fifth question was, “Do you plan on joining more social networks over the next 6 months to a year?”  Almost all of the respondents that are currently members on Facebook said they probably won’t be joining other social networking websites.  To be honest, I’m not exactly sure they could name another one.  So, if Facebook can get more people 55 and older to join and actually use the website, they can probably retain those members. Better training and education would be a smart move for Facebook.  Heck, send out a team of people to 55 and older communities across the country.

A Note About When 40 Year Olds Become 55 and Older

One point I kept hearing from friends was that although their parents weren’t on Facebook, their aunts and uncles were (and their aunts and uncles are currently in their 40’s.)  So, many of them will already be members on Facebook when they become the 55 and older demographic (that’s if Facebook is around in 5-10 years).  As fast as things are moving, chances are Facebook will be something completely different by then.  Twitter might be linked to a chip in our brains, and BisKotti, the social network built on interactive TV, will take over our lives.  Never heard of BisKotti?  That’s because I just made it up, but it very well could be the next big thing. :)  {BTW, don’t even think about it, I just registered the domain name!}

My Final Thoughts About People Currently 55 and Older and Social Networks

Although I wish the numbers were better, I think 80% will never adopt social networking.  I think 15% will be interested, but run into barriers and be confused with the best way to use social networking sites like Facebook.  Then I think 5% will truly get it and benefit from its power.  They will connect with friends, use it help organize events, keep up with their children and grandchildren, and yes, probably grab their vanity URL’s while they’re at it.  There’s no doubt there will be some great stories from the 5%, but it unfortunately won’t make up for the 95% that never come back. 

That’s my take.  What’s yours?

Glenn Gabe is an online marketing strategist and focuses heavily on SEO, SEM, Social Media Marketing, Viral Marketing and Web Analytics. You can read more of Glenn’s posts on his blog, The Internet Marketing Driver and you can follow him on Twitter to keep up with his latest projects, news, and updates.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Facebook or Just Face-Look? Are People 55 And Older Really Using Social Networking Websites?

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We have way too many resources to track today: thousands of blogs, social media networks, forums - somewhere someone may be talking about you and you may be unaware.

Here’s a cool solution to keep an eye on everything: create your own united, customized RSS feed and add it to your preferred feed reader.

Feed Killer is one of the tools for that too consider. It is very basic, yet offers all necessary features and, what is also great, requires no registration. Two features you are going to love:

1. Add and mixx as many feeds as you need;
2. Customize the number of stories you want to see from each feed.

Now, let’s say I want to track my name in Twitter and throughout the blogosphere; what I need to do is:

• Search Twitter search for [Ann Smarty] and grab the RSS feed link;
• Search Google Blog Search for [Ann Smarty] and grab the RSS feed link;
• Go to RSS-mixer, add both links and click "Build it!"
• You are done:

Feedstitch is another similar tool with some added options (It supports RSS, Twitter, Twitter search, Delicious, Tumblr, GitHub and Flickr data feeds.):

• Login using your open ID;
• Add as many feeds as you want;
• Sort feeds into groups for easier management;
• Customize each feed URL.

More tracking tips:

• Track Hot Trends With Twitter Tools
• Track Google SERPs for Reputation Management and Rankings Monitoring
• Track SERPs, Blogs, Social Media and More with Trackle

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

How to Track Your Reputation or a Keyword in Multiple Resources via One Unifed Feed

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Are you in need of some video inspiration? Need some fresh air? Let’s have a look at a few video search engines that can help you refresh ideas for your upcoming creation (note: I didn’t mention here most popular engines, like Youtube and Google as I am sure you are well aware of those):

Truveo

Truveo is a video search engine with multi-lingual support. It supports boolean operators (OR, AND and -) and exact match search (”your search phrase here“). Another fun thing about the platform is that it has cool Twitter integration allowing to see most “Twittered videos.”

TagBulb

TagBulb is a tag search for images and videos aggregating several popular platforms. Its search results page is no more than a list of video thumbnails:

VideoSurf

VideoSurf aggregates results from popular video sharing sites like Youtube and links them together using combination of facial recognition and text search (based on video description and tags).

It also offers handy search suggestion feature. It also lets you refine your results by excluding any search channel, category or content type (e.g. Slide shows, full episodes, web series, clips).

CastTV

CastTV is an excellent search engine for tv shows, movies, news, sports, celebrity, and viral online videos. The site is divided into categories and also offers a handy search option.

Each search result includes a source link, description and a video thumbnail. Besides, you are able to sort and filter search results in multiple ways: by source, genre, type, etc:

Tagoo

Tagoo is a search platform that lets you search for all types of media-content: mp3 audios, music albums, audiobooks, music videos and podcasts. The site contains a huge database of sites to crawl but the overall result quality leaves much to be desired:

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

5 Lesser Known Video Search Engines

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Google is extending its services to mobile phone users in Africa via Google SMS. Google SMS is a suite of mobile apps that provide access to information covering various topics such as health and agriculture tips, news, local weather sports and more. This is Google’s way of extending its services and reaching out to African mobile users who rely so much on SMS in carrying out their day to day activities.

Google SMS features Google Trader, a mobile app which African users can use to sell or buy any any type of products or services. It’s like an SMS-based eBay where you can find used cars, mobile phone, crops, livestock, jobs and other consumer goods which are up for sale.

Aside from this, Google SMS also features SMS Tips which is SMS-based query-and-answer service which works like a mobile search interface. Of course the answer is delivered through SMS.

Google Trader and SMS Tips are the products of collaboration among Google, the Grameen Foundation, MTN Uganda and other African local organizations.

The African region has the world’s highest mobile growth rate. Compared with the Internet, mobile phones has a higher penetration rate on the African population. It’s no wonder that Google focusing on this avenue especially since one third of the African population own a mobile phone.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google Launches SMS Mobile App in Africa

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Google Android applications are currently written in Java and run off Google’s Dalvik Java virtual machine, however, that will soon change.  Last week Google announced the Android Native Development Kit (v. 1.0) that will allow software to run natively on the Linux layer below.  Without getting into the nitty gritty details of software development, what this all means is that Mozilla is likely to bring the mobile version of Firefox, called Fennec, to the Android platform.

A year ago, Mozilla decided not to focus on Android because of the Java constraints and because it already had a browser of its own.  They wanted to first focus on platforms that either didn’t already have a browser, or didn’t have a good one.  However, Mozilla did note that they were anticipating the day that Google would open up the platform.

Jay Sullivan, Mozilla’s vice president of mobile, said recently:

“Developers are taking a look at the NDK to see if it provides the capabilities we need to bring Fennec to Android. If it’s possible, I think our community would be interested in doing it, because Android will be appearing on more smartphones with the capabilities to provide a good browsing experience.”

In addition to expressing interest in an Android version of the Firefox/Fennec browser, Mozilla also has interest in a variety of sub-PC devices, including Netbooks.

In other Mozilla news, a new version of the desktop Firefox is about ready to be released.  On Friday the company said that Tuesday looked like it would be the ship date for version 3.5.  Then again, it could still be a couple days.  You’ll know when it happens though - your browser will alert you that a new version is available to install.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google Android Version of Firefox Likely to be Developed

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Google currently has more than 25,000 news sources that contribute content for Google News, and now they are inviting them to share professional news videos via YouTube.  After being approved as a YouTube Parnter, these news sources will be permitted to host videos for free on YouTube.  While that in itself probably isn’t enough to convince them to share their videos that way - there’s more to it that makes it a very enticing option.

YouTube news partners get some nice perks:

• Featured placement on the YouTube news page
• Opportunities to generate revenue via advertising
• Visibility in Google News, thanks to the redesigned results page, which began including YouTube videos in its results back in May.

In addition, by participating in this program, it can create a larger audience for the news sources by sharing videos on a site that reaches millions, instead of being limited to just their own smaller audiences.

As the owner of a Google News participating website myself, I am definitely going to check this out, and see if we can ramp up our production of news videos.  I’ll let you know how that goes.  In the meantime, if your a part of a news organization interested in becoming a Google News partner, you can apply here at Google News.  After that, if you would like to be involved as a YouTube partner, you can apply here.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google Invites News Publishers to Share Videos on YouTube

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I don’t usually write columns like this.

This one is more philosophical than usual, but I think it’s an important topic for everybody in search and modern advertising and marketing to read and comment on.

I want to discuss what I’ve realized is my bias against traditional PR and marketing- in an open-minded way, as one who understands those things still have value- and also discuss the divide between digital and traditional marketing, as well as web analytics and accountability.

If You Learn PPC Direct Response Marketing First…

I started my advertising and marketing journey in PPC (2005) and SEO (2002′ish)… during the infancy of the shift from traditional to digital/interactive marketing. That major shift - about which I think many traditional marketers are still in denial - has also led to a shift toward greater accountability in results, and increased emphasis on marketing ROI.

I’m an outsider to the PR and TV and other traditional media industries, but I read the big journals like AdAge and others, and it doesn’t sound like the shift toward ROI has affected them too much. Or maybe they’re just not advertising it. We see charts that show marketing dollars shifting toward digital and toward the highest ROI digital channels (pay per click and email marketing), but the discussions that those in traditional marketing are having seem blind to the larger shifts toward digital and ROI.

So, as someone who learned marketing and advertising in PPC, a highly trackable, highly accountable channel, and learned by reading about Claude Hopkins’ scientific advertising and the methods and results of direct marketers like direct mail experts, I initially was very judgmental of traditional marketers.

Misgivings About Traditional Advertising

TV; "Brainwashed" by Aaron Escobar™

For example: I watch TV and see beer ads and later realize I remember the ad but not which beer it was for.

Does this increase sales of that brand’s beer? I doubt it. I suspect it reinforces the brand affinity of those who already drink that beer, but I doubt it brings in too many new customers. And you can’t track it to find out, can you?

I was definitely jealous of the money agencies were getting to produce these commercials, often fun ones that were probably fun to conceive, possibly to win awards and be thought of as standout agencies, and yet not be held accountable for whether these campaigns produced any uptick in sales at all.

Emphasis on ROI

Meanwhile, in the early days of my PPC education back in 2004, I could produce remarkable ROI for an advertiser, tell them they could spend more and make more profit, but they wouldn’t divert the funds.  Either they had an annual budget and bureaucracy that made it impossible to spend more- senseless to me, because where was that unexpected profit going? Just reinvest it in PPC!

Now times have changed, not only with more understanding but also with economic forces. Now it’s not hard to find an advertiser that wants better ROI. Now we have different problems…

The Double-Edged Sword of Analytics

Juggling Swords and Chainsaws by morbuto

The most trackable advertising is also the easiest to hold accountable. And our tracking isn’t perfect. So PPC could bring in great ROI, or it might be mediocre. Even if it’s mediocre, some of its effects could show up in other marketing channels and it doesn’t get the credit.

Most savvy marketers know that every channel in a marketing plan makes the others more effective because of multiple exposures to the same prospects. But many of us in the digital ad industry are stuck with analytics that leave us blind to these multitouchpoint paths, and unable to prove the full value of PPC to our clients.

The outcome is that advertisers ask us to pause part or all of their PPC campaigns, against our advice. And we find that subsequently, their other channels do not perform worse- sometimes significantly worse. (reference value of brand ppc post) This is another indicator that PPC deserves partial credit for sales often not attributed to it.

Why Is Traditional Advertising Not Held Accountable

Advertising on the tube by Sarah G…

Bringing it back to traditional marketing and PR… they are generally not as trackable as digital marketing channels. But my skepticism about their effectiveness is not enough to dismiss them. If scientific marketing has taught me anything, it’s that even experienced, effective marketers are surprised by what does and doesn’t work.

It would be heretical to suggest that genius and experience in advertising are not effective- they are, and inspiration is where the ideas you test come from- but they must be tested scientifically if you want the best results.

Lets combine Ogilvy’s genius with Claude Hopkins’ scientific approach.

How to Track Traditional Media ROI With Web Analytics

So the question is, can we evaluate the effect of traditional media at all, and if so, how?

Awesome billboard! by otakuchick

The easiest way to do it is to use a custom URL… but there are other ways to leverage web analytics to judge the effect of offline marketing and PR.  For example, we had a client that was purchasing billboards in Charlotte, NC- the billboard gave both a phone number and a website URL. First, we looked at the volume of web traffic to the client in the months before the billboards began. Second, we set up call tracking and a unique phone number to track phone results.

A much more vague method, but still better than none at all, is to begin a traditional marketing campaign after you have benchmark web stats for all your other efforts. Analyze your web results before, after, and during the traditional campaign. If there’s an uptick, but it varies by channel, consider whether it makes sense that the traditional campaign would have affected specific ones more and others less. This, again, is imperfect- hindsight is not only 20/20 but also infinitely rationalizable. Explanations of cause and effect behavior can seem compelling but be completely inaccurate.

So good luck

A More Sane Approach to Accountable, Measurable Advertising

Some thoughts about ROI tangible and intangible benefits by cambodia4kidsorg

But my point is, our tracking is imperfect, so we should use it, but lightly- don’t judge any channel too harshly since we don’t have completely clear 360 degree vision of all touchpoints, nor do we yet have a crystal ball to look into customers’ heads, nor are all customers the same, which is obvious when we look at human beings but we seem to forget when we plan campaigns.

The best marketing will be a combination of genius, science, inspiration, luck, and guesswork. Avoid the temptation to believe we have all the answers or are omniscient. Our analytics are not good enough yet to start thinking you’re some kind of advertising god who can see all and control all prospects.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

The Clash of Web and Traditional Advertising

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