Measuring Earned Media vs. Paid Media
The newest buzz word for engaging current and prospective customers through social media is earned media. It’s measured with the same metrics as traditional paid media (advertising, press releases, telemarketing, direct mail, and email marketing): impressions/audience size, lifts in brand awareness, message awareness, and purchase intent. Quantifying the value of earned media has moved up the priority list as multi-channel marketers have learned that “free” marketing tools like social media aren’t really free. (Yes, it’s free to set up a Facebook page or a Twitter account, but it takes time and dollars to create the strategy, messages, campaigns, and marketing Read More
Two Examples of Multi-channel Marketing Gone Wrong
Here’s this week’s round-up of news stories that we think offer insights or lessons that can help multi-channel distributed marketing organizations. Usually, we select five items, but this week, we’re focusing on just two because they seemed especially compelling. Court Approves Lawsuit Over Toyota Advertising Stunt In 2009, Saatchi and Saatchi (Toyota’s agency at the time) came up with the idea of a website called “YourOtherYou.com”. The idea was to create a site where friends could sign up 20-something guys who hated advertising for a prank that would expose them to a video about a Toyota car. Ads in print, Read More
Improving SEO Ranking: All Tools Are Not Equal
Everyone knows that optimizing your website, press releases, and blog posts for search engines make it easier for people to find your site and improve traffic. It’s less well known that search engines like Google and Bing change and update their algorithms regularly. If you’ve noticed a recent change in the visibility and ranking of your site or blog, it may be because of recent changes in Google’s algorithms. Google is the leading search engine, with around 90% of the global search volume. Yahoo and Bing take second place in popularity, with less than 5% of searches, with all the Read More
Managing Customer Service & Employee Privacy
After the LIMRA Social Media Conference in Cambridge, MA a few weeks ago, one of the attendees who downloaded the presentation deck used for the Customer Service Meets Social Media panel posted this question: “One of the points made in this panel is that front-line employees are often recorded (audio and video) and the results can be posted on social media sites immediately. How do I stop people from doing that? I could be held liable if one of my employees is photographed or videotaped without their permission.” In following up with the person who drafted the question, we found that Read More
Friday News Round-Up: Links Have a Short Half-life, Crowdsourcing at the White House & More Useful News
Here’s this week’s round-up of news stories that we think offer insights or lessons that can help multi-channel distributed marketing organizations. The “half-life” of links depends on where they are posted. Bit.ly, the link-shortening service, reported this week on the results of a study by Hilary Mason that shows how a link’s half-life is, depending on where it’s posted. Borrowing a concept from nuclear physics, Mason and her team looked at the patterns for 1,000 popular Bit.ly links across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube links. Half-life, in this case, is “the amount of time at which [a] link will receive half of the Read More
Repetition, Transparency, Multi-channel Communications Help Rebuild Trust
One of the daily challenges for marketing is building trust among consumers. It’s never been easy, but it’s gotten harder over the last two years. Luckily, multi-channel marketers have a clear path to reaching out to the public through web, social media, PR, and trusted local agents or managers. Building trust in difficult economic times is all about repetition, transparency, and multi-channel communications. Consider the three tables included in this blog post, all from Edelman’s 11th Annual Trust Barometer study, released earlier this year. Then there’s this table — where consumers look first for information. It may be a little misleading because Google Read More
Four “Old-fashioned” Marketing Tools That Distributed Marketing Still Needs
There’s been so much buzz lately about QR codes and social media that it’s easy to forget about some tried and true – even “old fashioned” marketing tools. But here are four that research shows should still be at or near the top of your distributed marketing checklist. Why? Because they work! Adding these four “old-fashioned” tools to your multi-channel distributed marketing mix may just be the lucky four-leaf clover you need to generate more leads and sell more products. Targeted advertising. Advertising was the #1 channel for marketers in decades past, and it’s still a vital lead generation tool for most companies. Read More
Happy Labor Day!
No new post on The Distributed Marketing Blog today — it’s Labor Day in the USA. Have a safe and enjoyable holiday weekend!
What Employers Want When Hiring Social Media Talent
Peter Shankman, founder of HARO (Help a Reporter Out), a service that links bloggers, journalists, and content producers (video, audio, digital, print) with expert sources, has said, “Don’t hire a social media expert. It’s like a deli hiring someone who’s an expert in taking the bread out of the freezer. Unless they can also make a great sandwich, being an expert on taking the bread out is a pretty useless skill.” He’s right (as usual). When it comes to hiring a social media marketing manager, the operative words are marketing and manager. Here’s the sad truth that all too many hip Read More
Email Evolution: New Trends in a Proven Marketing Communications Channel
By Deb McAlister-Holland For nearly 3 decades, I’ve had an email marketing campaign of some kind running every business day. Yes, there was email 30 years ago. In fact, email is 40 years old. Back when I sent my first few campaigns, there wasn’t a lot of commercial email being sent. I worked for a computer company, and the people who got our email were mostly people who had purchased our products. They were happy to get a notice from us about a new toy they could buy to add to their system, or a new software product that was Read More
