The Social Media Blog - Methodical Madness

Tweets now on sale for $100,000

Promoted Tweets rolls out to third party apps, making the service far more valuable – but 100K valuable?

We blogged about Promoted Tweets back in April when the new advertising model was first announced, proclaiming Twitter to be on the right track in their quest to monetize the service. With the rollout onto third party platforms, that track is now leading somewhere that may actually be worth you marketing dollars.

Promoted Tweets is a solid strategy, at least in theory. Sponsors pay to have their tweets featured in relevant search results, only showing the ads to people who are looking for similar content and only staying in place as long as people show interest in them. They are relatively unobtrusive and can add useful content for users. The major problem has been that Promoted Tweets only appear when searching on twitter.com, and the majority of Twitter’s user base regularly use third party apps (Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, mobile apps) to do their microblogging. 

That’s all going to change. Soon, any third party who wants to use the Twitter API will have to agree to host Promoted Tweets on their service. Some early adopters found success through Promoted Tweets right off the bat, but now there is real potential for mass exposure. Just don’t expect it to come cheap – Twitter is selling the ads for up to $100,000.

While that is incredibly steep, if the service performs well and users are receptive to the introduction of ads into what were once ad-free zones, everyone will be happy. Making it a success is essentially on you – the company buying the ad space. If you treat it like traditional ad space with a shout-my-message mentality, users will rue the day Twitter allowed this third party invasion. But if you use the space to engage users and find creative ways to get them to interact with your brand, you could start making waves that expose your tweets to millions of tweeple. 

Most advertisers consider Twitter to be in an experimental stage. While there’s a high chance of failure, there’s also a great chance to be the first to do something innovative with the service that takes the web by storm. He who dares, wins, after all.

Would you ever pay top dollar for a Promoted Tweet or do you consider the risks too great? 

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry. 

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The 5 dangers of a half-hearted social media campaign

It was your lifelong dream to open a pizza parlor. Finally, after years of toil, you succeed in making Panucci’s Pizza a success. Then you decide a delivery service is a must since everyone else does it. But you aren’t sure how to make it work, so you decide to limit your risk by buying cheap vans that happen to be lacking brakes. Your delivery business is not in a position to succeed. In fact, it would be a miracle if it didn’t drag your whole business down with it in a blaze of flying bodies.

Pictured: Unexpected danger

We see this a lot with companies trying to market their brands through social media. Many execs are uncomfortable with going all in, so they do a little dabbling instead. This either results in no effect whatsoever, or a backlash as social media users can spot a conservative suit a mile away. So if you don’t understand social media tools and the investment they demand, they are dangerous grounds indeed.

Here are 5 pitfalls you are setting yourself up for by only making a half-hearted foray into social media. 

You can’t respond as fast as you need to
Social media is all about communicating in real-time. And communicating in real-time requires open dialogue and snap decisions – things that the traditional brand - consumer exchange does not involve. If you aren’t ready to have a round-the-clock discussion with your audience, they will take over the conversation, feel like you aren’t interested in participating and either lose interest themselves or become resentful. We see this happen when clients set up a Twitter account and don’t do more than the occasional self-promotional tweet. If you put yourself out there in social media, your audience expects you to have a dialogue with them. Building that expectation and letting them down is worse than never having entered because you’ve damaged your credibility in the process.

Dabbling = obvious lack of enthusiasm
The entire purpose of getting involved in social media is to inspire enthusiastic participation from both your own people and your audience, and half-hearted efforts never inspired anyone. If you have yet to find an enthusiasm for social media that makes you genuinely eager to get out there and meet the people you’re selling things to in cyberspace, and more importantly to really listen to them, you need to do some research and get convinced of how important it is. You’re lack of enthusiasm will only make people feel alienated from you.

You won’t be able to overcome the noise
Your audience is bombarded with messages all day long. Half-way will not get their attention because they tune most brand messaging out and instead focus on listening to each other, not to you. Going in half way will only ensure what resources you do devote to social media come to nothing. If you convinced your boss to give social media a try as a “cheap” option, you’re still expected to show some results at the end of the day, or you can kiss your social media program goodbye. 

It breaks fundamental marketing rules
Deciding to add a little social media to your marketing mix for the sake of doing it is contrary to good marketing. Your basis for all efforts should be solving clients’ problems to create pull, not just to make noise. Start like any other job with all the background research, strategy, targeting and high demands on creative work as you would for any other job. If you’re hearing suggestions that don’t go beyond “let’s start a Twitter account and Facebook fan page,” you should be worried. Start with a need, and from there decide what tools are the best way to solve it. Do not start with Twitter and Facebook and try to figure out how to shoehorn your brand into them. 

Best Buy took the perfect approach with their award winning Twelpforce campaign. They started with their customers’ problem (product support) and found the best way to solve it, which just happened to be Twitter. It ended in happy customers a Cannes Lion.

Failure is an option (when you do it right)
When you’re all in, people are forgiving of mistakes as long as you’re responsive and try to meet them half way.  When you get tyrannical after things don’t go your way, are you ever in for a backlash. Getting into social media means playing by its rules, and those rules do not include conservative policies like censorship and lawsuits. Apple and Nestle have both made costly errors in handling criticism by failing to respect people’s freedom to express themselves through social media. It’s their space, you’re just visiting. Going all in means letting go of control. Or rather, realizing you never had it.

Admit it: your brand might not be ready for social media after all. But all it takes to get ready is diving in and learning the ropes – with genuine enthusiasm. If you aren’t all that interested in social media and want in just because everyone else is, you’re better off leaving it alone. Or at least letting someone who loves it take the reins and giving them the freedom to do what it takes to engage people. 

After all, you wouldn’t send a fleet of out of control vans to mow down your customers. Why would you unleash a dysfunctional campaign on them?

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry. 

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Three ways Twitter makes you a better writer

Good Twitter writing. Now there’s an oxymoron. Twitter and its 140 character limit is often synonymous with rambling gibberish and horrifying grammar. As a copywriter, I didn’t join Twitter thinking it would help refine my craft. It was only after months passed and I realized I was getting better and better at writing concise messages that it became clear that was, in fact, what was happening. 

It makes a whole lot of sense when you think about it. Forcing your thoughts into 140 characters or less is a constant training regimen for your writing. Here are three ways tweeting your random thoughts makes you a better writer.

Brevity is the soul of wit
Sure, you’ve heard this phrase a thousand times, but stop and really think about what it means. Anyone can make a point if they have all the words in the world. But making your point concise and compelling is a whole different story. Brevity is essential to good writing (especially writing for the web) as your ideas become more compelling and are more likely to strike chord in your audience. Excess words make for forgettable writing and weak arguments. Even the best of writers struggle with chopping down their beloved words, so practice is vital. Twitter forces you to convey your ideas in as few words as possible, trimming the fat whether you like it or not.

Word choice on steroids
With less space to work with, you’re forced to choose strong words that cut right to the heart of the matter. That often means flimsy adverbs and adjectives are the first to be edited out in favor of better verbs. Using strong action words instead of multiple descriptives is a cornerstone of any good writing. Twitter will force you to break out the thesaurus to find that perfect, knock out phrase.

Hone your provocateur skills
You’re out to get something when you write. Whether it’s getting people to change their mind, to start a conversation or to buy a product, you want to inspire action through your words. Twitter lets you practice what works and what doesn’t in getting a rise out of people. Try out different hooks for getting people to click links, retweet messages and respond to your tweets. Doing so will help you understand what your audience thinks is worth their time. Knowing what your audience cares about is the basis for effective writing.

With practice, you can inspire a storm of activity in your reader’s minds in under 140 characters (you can even tweet entire stories). If you can manage such clear, powerful statements in all your writing, you’ll be on your way to greatness. 

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry. 

 

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When PayPerClick (AdWords) is better than SEO

It’s difficult to justify a long term SEO strategy to someone when their boss is breathing down their neck, demanding to see improved traffic at next week’s meeting. You may recall that we dedicated a previous post to how PPC is, in the long run, a waste of money. While we still hold to that, the truth is the fastest way to get more traffic is to pay for it, so using AdWords as a supplement to your SEO efforts is a good idea in certain situations. Let’s look at how to make a smart campaign using AdWords when the need arises. 

Too often, companies run costly AdWords campaigns with a huge list of keywords that all point to the same landing page. This results in lots of traffic to that one page, but that page may not be relevant to the visitor. The main goal for a successful PPC campaign is to make sure everyone who clicks one of your ads will be satisfied with the results they get, and that result needs to be tailored for each individual keyword. 

For example, if someone Google’s “parts for a ’65 Ford Mustang” and they see your Google Ad, it should link to a page about ’65 Ford Mustangs and not to the homepage of a site about cars. If you can direct a visitor to the exact information they’re looking for, odds are they will stay longer, visit more pages and buy more items.

People searching don’t care about your homepage or promotion for your products. If they don’t get the results they’re looking for, they will leave right away. Which means you are paying for a click with absolutely no value. 

So when exactly should you use PPC? There are a number reasons a short term traffic boost can be worth paying for, but three stand out:

When you are launching a new product
It’s extremely difficult to get a new product on Google’s first page right away if there’s any competition to speak of. Adding a couple of smart ads can help you get the message out quickly.

When you launch a new website
This is the biggest time to use PPC. A new domain and a new website are always hard to compete with for Google spots. You have no links and no strength in your domain. Even with the best on-page SEO, it will take time for Google to categorize your site by keywords and search phrases. Put up some ads and hopefully people will like your website enough to add some links to it, giving you extra traffic you don’t have to pay for and strengthening your site's SEO. 

When you are fighting for extremely competitive keywords
This one is both difficult and expensive. But to get heaps of traffic, you need to hit some of the big keywords. If you get people to your website on a search like “cars” and they like what they see, they will surely come back. And hopefully they will tell their friends about the cool website they found. Getting your ads onto that results page won’t come cheap, but the payoff may be well worth it.

We always recommend SEO over PPC, but having ads on Google can be an effective supplement while you’re trying to climb the organic search results. Keep perspective by bearing in mind that while 90% of Googlers ignore the ads, companies still spend 90% of their search engine marketing budget on them. 

The best solution for you may well be adding the expertise to do both. That way, your expert can decide how much should go to SEO and how much should be spent on PPC. And once the SEO starts to attract huge amounts of traffic, scale back the PayPerClick budget till it’s all organic traffic. After all, you shouldn’t have to pay each person to visit your site. The content should be all the incentive they need.

 

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Twitter Microsites: Gaining influence through hashtags

 

Twitter launched a microsite for New York Fashion Week (NYFW) last week sponsored by several Fashion Week players such as American Express, Bergdorfs and Modelinia. The page allows users to track different areas of interest by displaying the latest tweets about NYFW focusing on the designers, beauty, fashion shows, the scene and providing a daily recap of tweets. It’s a one stop shop for everything you need to stay in touch with the haute couture world. 

 

This page is similar to the microsites Twitter launched earlier this year for the World Cup and Haiti earthquake relief. These microsites are a great way to stay on top of conversations around major events and refine the madness of Twitter into something easily consumable. They also provide a window into a world where even people that are on the other side of the planet can participate. Through these microsites, anyone can position themselves as an authority and increase their influence. 

 

It doesn’t matter if you’re a lone Tweeter or a large corporation, these Twitter microsites show the impact of using hashtags to reach your audience. With Bergdorfs, Ask Bobbi Brown, Women’s Wear Daily and other fashion forward companies paying attention to what is being said around NYFW, there is no better time to grab their attention (or the attention of other high impact fashion bloggers) than when they are the most sensitive to what’s being said. The microsite makes finding that opening easier than ever.

 

By being proactive, replying to other tweeters using the #nyfw hashtag, retweeting links and sharing news about events, tweeters have the ability to influence others, gain more followers and establish themselves as a thought leader. Just like charities gained credibility through Haiti relief efforts and fans could follow second to second World Cup events, the NYFW page gives anyone in the world the ability to attend an event they could previously only dream about and even better, instantly comment, blog or talk to others. 

 

But you can’t join the party if you don’t know it’s happening, so get out there and monitor those Twitter hashtags relevant to your industry. Better still, you can set up your own microsite to capitalize on the next major industry event to position yourself as the one with their finger on the button.

 

What do you think of Twitter sponsored microsites?

 

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media.

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How Google Instant has fundamentally changed SEO

The game may have changed, but don't go proclaiming the death of SEO just yet

If you live in the US, you probably noticed that Google has been acting funny the past couple days. The search giant has implemented Google Instant into their engine, showing you streaming search results as you type. It’s a major shift in how Google functions and, big surprise, has the SEO world in a tizzy. Below is a video from Google explaining the new service.

 

Google’s algorithm hasn’t changed, but the user experience sure has. Time will tell if users love Google Instant and it leads to a major change in how we search. Understanding how people search is the core of SEO, and that being shaken up has a lot of SEO professionals shaking in their booties. But for SEO thought leaders, changing up how they do things is part of the game. In a way it’s actually what the whole game boils down to, as Google is always updating and users constantly change the way they use the internet. As long as SEO pros keep their heads and meet the challenge head on, they should be ok, even if old tricks became obsolete overnight.  

Here are some thoughts on what the latest change means for the future of SEO.

The top three spots are more important than ever
Being in the top three has always been a key measurement of SEO success since an overwhelming majority of clicks go to those results. With Google Instant, that’s likely to become even more the case. Users can just keep refining their search terms until they see exactly what they want sitting on top, and as such there is less impetus to scroll down through the results hoping what you are looking for will be there.  

Keyword research has to expand
Since searchers will be exposed to many more results, you have many more competitors. Many of those results won’t be of any relevance, but some of them will. It’s now imperative to go play with Google Instant when you’re deciding your keywords to see what other phrases may be thrown in front of your target before they get your site in the results list. Also, Google will be predicting what users are searching for and there’s no way to know for sure what it will be showing them without experimenting with it yourself. And as it’s easier than ever to refine your search query, users are less likely to settle for almost right. This all means that there is greater pressure than ever to find the perfect keywords and that you need to consider adding more of them to your SEO mix than you have in the past.

The riffraff will be weeded out
There are no shortage of SEO “experts” out there who rely on gimmicks to boost search rank. Many of those won’t work anymore, and if they can’t put some brain cells into adapting to the new situation they won’t survive. Google Instant adds yet more factors to SEO and ups the challenge. Expect to see the pioneers and thought leaders not only survive, but do even better. And expect many of the following horde to be picked off. 

Proclamations of SEO doom are much like any other such ballyhooing (think Y2K, 2012). The short-sighted among us panic when things change. The ones with perspective roll with the punches and keep moving forward. SEO might one day die if the importance of search engines as a traffic source tanks, which is certainly not impossible. But as long as ranking number one on Google equals massive traffic, there will be people clever enough to keep SEO relevant. 

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.

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Is Twitter biting the hand that feeds it?

 

We’ve been watching and writing about Twitter for over a year now and a recent Mashable article highlights some of the concerns we’ve seen with recent Twitter developments. Earlier this year, Twitter held its first developers conference, Chirp. It was there that the microblogging site announced its first app – an iPhone app called Tweetie. 

 

With this announcement, Twitter said loud and clear that they aren’t just going to sit back and let others dictate how their site is used. Overnight, Twitter killed a whole burgeoning development segment. Third party app developers went on alert and some were sent running scared. Venture capitalist took notice as well and funding for Twitter based apps dropped from $21.6 million between June 2008 and May 2009 to $10.4 million between June 2009 and May of this year. That’s a 50% drop in early-stage investment over the past year.

 

Twitter has seen rampant site growth and third party app development over it’s short life. If it wasn’t for the company allowing anyone and everyone to build on top of their system, they wouldn’t be the powerhouse site they are today. The microblogging site owes its success to the independent developers that created applications to make the user experience more rewarding. 

 

Twitter has added Android and BlackBerry apps to the smartphone mix, effectively cornering the market. Their iPad app has all but killed development in that area and the addition of the Tweet Button ousted Tweet Meme and other sites that do the same. So far, we haven’t seen Twitter purchasing additional apps, but we wouldn’t be surprised if they develop more location based systems a la Facebook and Foursquare, purchase an official url shorting system and photo sharing app, as well as better use of analytics and trending topics. All of these areas seem natural for Twitter expand into. 

 

With less focus from developers on Twitter apps, we could be coming to an end of the golden age of the site. If developers perceive the site as a direct challenger, the site will be left to develop their own apps and this will stagger innovation and creativity that has, to date, been one of the defining characteristics of Twitter. Could this be the beginning of the end of Twitter’s market dominance or is this just a bump in the road we try to figure out Twitter’s next move?

 

Facebook burnout: Have we finally had enough?

Innovative new sites are springing up to accommodate Facebook-weary social networkers

We speculated in a previous post about whether or not Facebook users were getting fed up, and it seems as though the sentiment has only grown since then. In the past few weeks, stories have been popping up around the web about users growing tired of the social media goliath and the new sites that are looking to capitalize by giving users a better option. 

Teens in particular are increasingly abandoning Facebook. The reason is largely that they’ve simply lost interest and are looking to other sites for amusement. Privacy issues are a relatively easy problem to address with fixes in site functionality – mass malaise is far more daunting and difficult to turn around.  

Which isn’t to say privacy issues aren’t a major reason people are getting fed up with Facebook. A Mashable survey showed 30% of respondents intended to leave Facebook because they’re uncomfortable with the accessibility of their private information. 

With the scent of blood in the water, many players have jumped into the game to try to create “the new Facebook.” The leader of the pack is the soon to be launched Diaspora. Without specifically mentioning Facebook, they make it clear they are the privacy focused alternative to the social networking giant. Investors are certainly convinced there is opportunity for a new social network to take off as Diaspora exceeded its fundraising goal – 20 times over. 

They aren’t the only ones creating Facebook alternatives. Check out this article from ReadWriteWeb for a rundown of the new social networking sites that are coming soon and how they are trying to solve the specific gripes users have with Facebook. 

Despite growing user apathy and the rise of exciting new options, Facebook’s growth continues unabated. Perhaps Facebook is so fundamentally baked into our day-to-day lives that these new rivals will all ultimately fail to make a dent in its dominance. Or maybe one site will succeed in recapturing the spirit of fun and novelty that we all got caught up in during Facebook’s early days. 

What do you think: are you considering dropping Facebook in favor of one of the new players?

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.

 

 

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