Photo Credit: Photo date: 1968 “2001: A Space Odyssey,” MGM 1968.
Keir Dullea Photo by MPTV - © MPTV - Image courtesy mptvimages.com

As Black Friday holiday shopping approaches, I thought I’d share my 4 Advanced Moves to Effective Paid Search Marketing Nirvana.  Is this eCommerce optimization framework you would use (read the list first)?  What resonates? Is search marketing no longer on your radar?  And, what if you’re not a retailer?  I’d love to hear your thoughts on what’s worked for you and well, what went in the trash.  Please post comments below.

Here we go….

Number 1.

Build out a localized Black Friday PPC Campaign that can be deployed around territories, stores or products that leverages insights from your consumer insights team.

a. Connect with your Customer Insights and Merchandizing teams to leverage recommendations by Merchants and Retailers to identify new opportunities of BF09.

b. Review archived PPC results for previous Black Friday trends and brand marketing goals. What worked?

c. Build out segmented ad groups with day parting that focus on attracting customers and linking them to product purchase behaviors based on customer insights. Here’s one model to stimulate some segmentation of your own:

i. Bought on Black Friday from a source (circular, brochure, catalog, direct mail piece)
ii. Bought on Black Friday but not from a particular source
iii. Didn’t buy on Black Friday but made a purchase during the holiday season.

d. Get your IT team on board as soon as possible and share your plan with your ad agency partner. Your new keywords are likely to guide site architecture for new pages so get your requests in early to the IT team. In fact, think of IT team as your part of your Ad Operation team. If IT is not informed your not as likely to achieve or sustain your desired campaign goals. Get their feedback on retargeting and display ad opportunities to boost profit growth.

e. Forecast maximum allowable investments (MAI’s) down to the keyword and ad group level.

Number 2.

Ensure the campaign and ad groups support the generation of high quality scores. You’re going to have one shot so make it count. Refine you keyword pool and bids, have a copy testing methodology in place with position targets across all ad groups on Google Adwords combined with deactivation of poor performing keyword phrases and ad groups. Have you established a deactivation threshold? Get to work. Connect with analytics team. Look for trends in ad groups and across keywords to find your ideal deactivation threshold. And, be sure every member of team is aware of that number and that it has been plugged into your optimization tool.

a. Use Omniture’s SearchCenter or another ad optimization tool. If you’re using SearchCenter, Leverage Born on Dating so that you can easily track performance of new ad groups.

b. I like to start with ad element testing then land pages. Titles, descriptions and URL would be tested (A/B split approach) to build 4 to 6 ad units for testing per ad group. Then introducing test to uncover winning titles and descriptions.

c. Start with phase and exact matching options and then scale up using broad matching and contextual networks.

d. If going mobile, only select iPhone platform since those uses out search other mobile devices users by approximately 4 :1.

e. Utilize insights from four customer tiers to fine tune messaging.

f. Map Keyword Assists (non-converting keywords that lead to a desired action) to converting terms and flow KA’s back in the ad copy as new creative tests. Did it work? Test hypothesis on why the Control may be winning.

g. Landing page testing will also be incorporated to assess the use of single terms on specific product pages vs. a single term and a category page as a method for achieving higher conversion rates. If you’re launching a new brand, drive people to product pages with pricing if pricing is your competitive advantage or to the homepage if Operations or Services are at the core of your organizations excellence.

h. Using testing as a syndication of best knowledge for ongoing testing on other search engines to expand reach, sales and profit. Learn in small chunks then plant a lot of seeds to expand your growth. Remember engines have different types of users, interests and matching options. Don’t forget: Search marketing campaign results on one engine are not interchangeable with another.

Number 3.

Create higher value performance metrics that will be used to drive campaign decisions now and in the future.

a. Utilize the COGS Vista rule within SearchCenter. SiteCatalyst allows you to upload a list of product IDs and unit costs so that SiteCatalyst can apply the unit costs in a custom event automatically on each purchase. I know I’m making a bunch of assumptions that your using a paid vs. free product. I love free but you get what you pay.
b. The objective is to calculate gross profit using the COGS Vista rule.
c. Combine the COGS Vista rule with an EBITA (earning before the deduction of interest, tax and amortization expenses). This is how Vintage Bath & Tub are cleaning up!
d. So what happens when you optimize around revenue or profit? In many cases, the sales volume is going to go down initially. Therefore, be sure to share the strategic implications with Sales, Finance and other executives. I had this experience with a retail client. They wanted to improve their PPC performance. I took that to mean ROI and even forecasted a 3x increase in ROI performance (I came in a 2.6x – not bad). When the campaign was fully implemented the ROI levels increased to 4x at one point with 18% decline in order volume. Let me put it this way: the sales team was not happy.

Number 4.

Begin to Close the Loop on Untracked Revenue Gaps. If you have a physical location, the hypothesis to explore is whether individuals who live within 10 to 12 miles of one of your stores are likely to respond to sales promotions by exhibiting Urgent Printer Behavior (UPB). Urgent Printer Behavior is when a customer goes to your site for an immediate product or service need and adds a desired product/service to a shopping cart so that they can see the price. (Note: This happens all the time in the real estate industry.  You see a house you like a printout pages of the listing.) The customer then prints the page to take to a local store to get the product and the price-matching price for that product. How do you close the gap for your organization? Monitor dialogs across message boards, tweets, and blog posts and comments to uncover unpredictable user behavior and insights. How does your marketing organization fulfill the “now” need and capture data and insights that can be shared across your entire organization? The idea is to look at your organization form the standpoint of Search Engine Marketing Readiness from how analysts are pulling in insights into dashboards to when the search team is brought in to do their optimization magic. In many cases, search optimization is a silo. Start planning for 2010, you may just realize “My God! It’s full of stars!”

Note: Quote from Keir Dullea who played Dave Bowman in 2010 A Space Odyssey.

Earlier this week AdAge published a piece by Jack Neff highlighting remarks made by Unilever’s CMO Simon Clift at Ad Age Digital Conference.  Here are a few thoughts I scribbled down:

Unilever is moving on.  The corporation feels they are unlikely to be successful in the social media arena.  Why? Unilever has a scale problem when it comes to launching social marketing initiatives.  Think about it. People don’t wake up and share what brand of toilet cleaner they used this morning to make the toilet shine.  Even if a few people do are you really going to care? I think Simon Clift, CMO of Unilever, has already answered that question for us by noting, “social media is not a strategy” for his company.  Unilever can’t amplify and syndicate enough dialogs to achieve business growth using social media. So what do you do if you’re Simon Clift and you want to harness a little word of mouth power?  Leverage the existing relationships you already have and innovate PR and ad agencies strategies around storytelling media.  Perhaps even introduce a few well-timed Cause Campaigns that can leverage social media distribution to reach new consumers so that they can stimulate unaided dialogs with new audiences.   Short bursts.  Easy to implement.  Pull at our heart stings.  But don’t be broken hearted.  Social media may not be a strategy option for Unilever but for your business who knows…

I wrote an article for iMedia Connection that was published today titled 6 Ways to Simplify Social Media Updates.  The piece maps out a simple and powerful way to spending more time communicating with customers and less time having to update profiles.

I’d love to hear what tools your using.  Please add your recommendations in the comments I’ll publish out the list.

I gave a three-hour workshop on Audience Generation with David Robinson of Birch Studio for The Charlottesville Chamber of Commerce.

You can download the presentation here => Audience Generation - Social Media, Search and Email

PostRank is launching a Discovery Engine to support dialog monitoring.  The announcement is not earthshaking news but the announcement is an interesting industry twist with individual collaboration vendors spinning out their own dialog “discovery” tools.  Finding dialogs is one thing but finding business value is another.

As Discovery Engines evolve from simple pointers that identify the location of a dialog to a reference tool that can be used to help initiate new conversations among individuals with shared interest you have to wonder about how marketing will evolve.  These tools could lead to content generators of segmented page content that shed light on the deep web of unranked and unindexed user generated information.

I think PostRank’s announcement also points to the beginning of the end for big monitoring vendors.  How does the army of PostRank announcements impact big dialog monitoring players like SM2’s Techrigy?  Who knows but I’m interested to see how PopUrls.com and Alltop.com (Guy Kawasaki’s aggregation platform #guykawaski) move from conversation clearinghouses that aggregate dialogs to businesses that become audience engagement generators.

Very exciting stuff… Here’s the announcement that has me think:

From:     info@aiderss.com
Subject:     Discover and share great blogs with PostRank!
Date:     April 7, 2009 2:19:57 PM EDT
To:     todd(at)audiencemachine(dot)com
Reply-To:     beta@aiderss.com

Hello, we have some exciting news about PostRank, and want to share it with all of our community!

We’re launching the PostRank Discovery engine, which enables everyone to:

- discover the most timely, relevant, and engaging content online
- search and segment content by specific topic areas and interesting and influential publishers
- create, share, and subscribe to the the best curated and auto-updated reading lists.

You already have an account on postrank.com, so you’re ready to get started. Head over to the PostRank website (http://postrank.com/register) and create a profile. You can use your existing login information — email and password or OpenID.

Check out these topic lists created by people in the know:

Marketing by Joe Thornley: http://beta.postrank.com/user/thornley/topic/marketing
Venture Capital by Jim Murphy: http://beta.postrank.com/user/jimmurphy/topic/vc
Ruby by Ilya Grigorik: http://beta.postrank.com/user/igrigorik/topic/ruby

And here are some of our most popular topics:

Moms: http://postrank.com/topic/Moms
Politics: http://postrank.com/topic/Politics
Technology: http://postrank.com/topic/Technology

Once you’ve created a profile, all the feeds in your account will be publicly viewable by default. You can make feeds private if you like. (That is, only you will be able to see your subscription to that feed, and only if you’re logged in to PostRank.com.) You can change your feed privacy settings on your account’s Subscriptions page once you’re logged in.

For more information on what PostRank Discovery is all about, check out the blog post: http://blog.postrank.com/2009/04/05/postrank-delivers-the-best-blog-discovery-engine/

And for a quick start overview: http://blog.postrank.com/introduction-to-postrank-discovery/

If you have any questions or problems, please let us know via:

- email: melanie@aiderss.com
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/aiderss)
- Get Satisfaction: http://getsatisfaction.com/aiderss

We hope you’ll love PostRank Discovery as much as we do!

The AideRSS Team

This email was sent to todd@audiencemachine.com.
You can instantly unsubscribe from these emails by clicking the link below:
http://aiderssinc.cmail1.com/t/y/u/hynjk/dyxkybi/

REQUEST FOR RECOMMENDATIONS!  Get Your Recommendations Published in the Workshop Handouts

On Wednesday, April 15th David Robinson of Birch Studio and I will be leading a 3 hour workshop for the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce.  The workshop is titled: How to Cost Effectively Drive Audiences to Your Website.  And, I need your help.

Would you be willing send me your recommendation on how to cost effectively drive audiences to websites? I’d love to plug in your recommendations into the workshop materials we handout to attendees and that will be presented during the workshop.  It is also a great way to demonstrate the collaborative power of social networking to attendees.

Each person providing a recommendation will get a dedicated slide in the deck.

When you send over your recommendation, please include a photo of yourself, your company name, URL and either a Twitter link or blog URL so that workshop attendees can learn more about you.  Please email me your recommendation to todd(at)audiencemachine(dot)com.

The handbooks are going to be printed on Monday — that’s the plan as far as I know — so please send me your recommendation before Monday, April 13th.

And, of course, I’ll give you a copy of the deck.

Many thanks!

When Dana Todd talks about the future of communication  strategies you can hear a distinct level of comfort in her voice.  It’s the voice of experience.

As a well-known pioneer in the search marketing area, Dana Todd is trailblazing again.

Dana’s recently launched - Newsforce — with a team of heavy-duty overachievers with a mission to expand the communication and monetization offerings of the news industry.

The company is not wasting any time.

Ms. Todd who is the firm’s CMO and co-founder is on a whirlwind tour delivering 100 demonstrations in 100 days sharing her own story about how Newsforce’s storytelling tools will revolutionize the online media industry.  The tool suite is

1.    Self-service search optimization tool for story and press releases
2.    The Newsforce Network

How will Newsforce expand the communication and monetization offerings of the news industry?

According to Ms. Todd, it starts with deconstructing press releases into editorial content so that advertisers can build-in longevity into the distribution of corporate communications.  Ms. Todd noted, “Newsforce’s storytelling media network compliments traditional PR initiatives, media buys and organic search objectives.”   And, according to Ms. Todd your campaign can be up and running in as little as an hour.

I think Newsforce’s storytelling media will also serve to enrich and renew the value of article marketing efforts.  In fact, a storytelling media network is likely to be great matches for the publishing industry as well as authors even if the platform is geared more toward supporting branding than a straight out performance buy.

One thing that is attractive about Newsforce is the simplicity of their model.

The ingredients for making a storytelling campaign are assets and processes that are already being used in the ad and PR industry that have been combined to create a new media offering:

Storytelling media starts with a simple persuasive story. Write for consumers rather than editors.  Create an editorial experience rather than an advertising vehicle.  Then, plug in non-traditional sources of content.  When you’re ready, syndicate your “advertorial story” content across 283 premium news platforms including Yahoo News and Los Angeles Times among many others into a “storyboard” module that appears on these sites.  Optimize content for search indexing.  Enable your content for social network distribution via tagging.  Set your budget.  Now sit back and measure the results.

And the results are compelling.

Eye tracking engagement studies have proven the Newsforce storyboard unit is nearly 3 times more effective at capturing attention over Google Adwords units and 8 to 12 times more effective than banner ads.

The Newsforce storyboard is also redefining our understanding of what an ad unit is online. The offering reminds me of YellowBrix’s content distribution model from 1999 that was based on the integration of contextual ad units into site content.

Newsforce has also productized part of the brand storytelling and constituent relations processes developed by storyteller practitioners like Michael Margolis of Thirsty-Fish among others.  It will be interesting to see how storyteller practitioners and media product vendors partner to expand revenue opportunities.

Let the storytelling begin.

To learn more about storytelling media opportunities visit Newsforce Network or follow Newsforce on Twitter #newsforce.

PHOTO CREDITS: thewebmama

Developing a consumer database by capturing email addresses during a pre-launch phase for a beta site, product or service release is easy to do and can serve as a spring board for amplifying viral pass along once your service, product or brand is made publicly available.

If you’re looking for a great  example of a beta release site, check out Likaholix “a fun and easy way to share and discuss your likes and discover new ones with people you know.”  It appears as if the company is diving into the “interest + relationship = trusted recommendation” arena.  Very interesting!

So how did Likaholix.com create a great beta release site?  It starts with a pretty simple landing page with a number of well executed elements to capture email addresses.  Note: This  framework can drive a 20% to 40% conversion rate for email capture off traffic to the site.

Here are few key takeaways to consider as you build your beta release site:

1. Prominently position data capture elements. The goal is acquire as many emails as early as possible to support future release goals as well as to gain insight from users. The underlying goal is to make it as easy as possible for visitors to sign up and become registered active users.  Start by making it as easy as possible for people to see how to sign up.  Site visits for early releases are in many cases are friends and family as well as individuals that have a category affinity or interest in a technology or service. Think technology application geeks that want to be the first to try something and, blog about it.

2. Keep data requests to a minimum. In this case, Likaholix is only asking for an email address.  Very smart.

3. Create exclusivity. Likaholix uses “private beta” and presents a relatively small pool of participants with an added “counter” of the number remaining beta accounts remain to drive email submissions.  The call to action - Request Account - is used to reinforce the perceived notion of exclusivity.  Again, very smart.

4. Deliver an activation link in an email communication that is triggered off the submission of an email address. There is always room for upgrades and, in this case I believe Likaholix would benefit by expanding their email communication model to include:

I. A reference to their privacy policy with a link to a privacy policy page. It is on the site but always nice to reinforce this information in the confirmation email.

II. Reinforce the incentive - five Amazon Kindles to drive activation — in the communication and turn it into a data capture vehicle.  Before Seth Godin sold Yoyodyne to Yahoo, he was running one the best email marketing data capture models online.  His Get Rich Click (GRC) framework prompted users for information before they could gain access to other links/contest information. In any event, Likoholix does request additional information - name, screenname and password - when you activate your link.  Again, nicely done.  Small innocuous data elements.  One small step for user, one giant step for Likoholix.

III. Leverage celebrity endorsements.  The activation email doesn’t mention Paul Buchheit or Jason Shellen.  Paul and Jason are Google rock stars and are likely to drive Tweets and blog posts because of the work they did at Google.  This is a missed opportunity to fully leverage the implied technology endorsement!

IV. Humanize the closing by including the name of the founder(s) or community director.  I would encourage Bindu Reddy and Arvind Sundararajan to be people signing email communicating to members of Likaholix community.

V. Add the “if this wasn’t you who requested to use to this cool tool” disclaimer paragraph to inform non-requesters that their email address is not going to be sent to fundraisers but rather that they — the receiver — simply need to act like a couch potato and do nothing because this is the last time they will hear from your great company unless they of course decide to click the activation link.  Problem solved.

5. Include a simple incentive framework to boost conversion off the data capture page. The incentive - the possibility of winning one of five Amazon Kindles - was enhanced by an implied technology endorsement from two super geeks (see above) who are judging the contest.  And, more importantly, a viral marketing campaign (get 10 friends — kind of a mini Moby campaign was integrated into the beta release to stimulate tool usage and viral pass along.  Well done Likaholix!

6.  The link to the Privacy policy is a nice touch.

TAGS: Likoholix, Bindu Reddy, Arvind Sundararajan, Google, beta release, viral marketing, Amazon Kindles, Paul Buchheit, Jason Shellen, Seth Godin,

When you think of Twitter the first thought that pops into your mind is most likely not community destination but Chad Engle is challenging that concept.  Chad’s created Design Community Twitter Hours a Thursday night - 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm EST - online group that connects via Twitter at @DCTH to discuss graphic design.

I interviewed Chad recently to get his take on Twitter and community.

Audience Machine:  Let’s start from the beginning.  What was your inspiration for creating DCTH - Design Community Twitter Hours?

DCTH:  Sounds good. The inspiration came from a conversation one night with Adelle and Graham about the design community. We had a conversation in a forum type chat room and it was impossible to keep up and it seemed tons of people had questions about everything design related. So I decided that we as a design community needed a forum to talk to each other.

Audience Machine: When did you activate your the DCTH — http://twitter.com/DCTH  — account on Twitter?  And, and many Followers do you have?  What do you know about your Followers?  Who are they?

DCTH:  Believe it or not I did not even think about making a twitter account for DCTH. I ran it from my personal twitter account ( @chadengle ) the first few weeks and then Niki Brown was a co-host of #DCTH for a few weeks (and will be again provided she will help ) mentioned that I should have an account for it so I made one. At first I just let people follow it who were designers/creatives. Then I realized thats not really how I wanted to build my network, I wanted to make go after as many designers and creatives as possible. So I have started to follow them all because I want to build the DCTH community as big as we can make it. Its been great to hear all of the success stories and have the community support that has come from this. (more…)

In May of 2006, I published a research paper with Osterman Research highlighting the challenges brands would face as they embarked on implementing word of mouth marketing campaigns.  The study took 6 months to implement and eventually grew to 54 pages of content.

My goal was to provide organizations interested in, or even intimidated by, word-of-mouth (WOM) campaigns with data and guidance designed to help them integrate this exciting strategy into their marketing and media plans.

The study is titled Perceptions, Practices & Ethics in Word of Mouth Marketing.  And, I’m making it available again.  Is it still relevant?  Well, from a planning standpoint I think the topics are still as relevant today as they were two years ago.

I also turned the release of the study into an example of how to support viral marketing pass along.  The study was downloaded over 150,000 from May 2006 to February 2009.

Here’s how we did it:

1. We started with no marketing budget and decided to use a free e-book framework to drive distribution.
2. We became members of communities to hear what was going on and to gain qualified participants for the survey. This platform also allowed us to announce to relevant communities when the study was available.
3. Created a database. We captured the email addresses, names, and company names of all survey participants. We also included email requests for the survey that were appended to the database. There are 217 records in the database for email requests.
4. We communicated. We thanked individuals for participating.  And, sent them a link to pick up the results.
5. We said something important. The study took 6 months from formulation to publishing and we focused on giving readers valuable and actionable information. The content publishing focus was on tips and techniques.
6. We focused on co-creation. This is an important step. We reached out to 45 industry experts and competitor firms in our industry ten days before we published and, asked them for their feedback and insight. 38 individuals responded, and 17 of those people provided lengthy comments and insight that enhanced the quality of the work and required us to rethink some of the conclusions and rationale. Personally, I’m still thrilled and humbled that competitor firms say that the work is incredibly valuable and comprehensive.
7. We recognized the contributions of those that contributed feedback.  And, even asked some individuals for reviews of the study that we published as Accolades.
8. We did a blogged press release. Having a blog press release really helped to drive distribution.
9. We created a counter so that we could track downloads.
10. We provided links to relevant publishers that cover the WOM industry.
11. We talked about the study at industry events.
12. We commented on comments to be part of the conversation.  Thanking people for reviews gave us more content to reference in the form of lists of people who were talking about the study.  This became blog post content.
13. We shared our success by publishing download counts.
14. We published snippets of content from the study with additional insight on our blog.
15. Once it was added on Wikipedia — we linked to it.  NOTE:  If you feel the study is worth adding back into the Wikipedia article for Word of Mouth or Word of Mouth Marketing, I hope you’ll add it as a resource.

In addition to the 150,000 downloads, I was interviewed for a New York Time article on social media and generated $1.685 million in new business.

TAGS:  Word of mouth, word of mouth marketing, wikipedia, Osterman Research, Audience Machine, content distribution, viral marketing,