Our TWO Sense

You may or may not have noticed it, but online ads are watching you.

If you’ve ever seen an online display ad for a website you previously visited, then you have experienced Behavioral Targeting. This amazing technology is pretty simple: your browser receives a cookie from a website when you visit it, and the cookie monitors whether or not you took a specific action on the site. Depending on your action or inaction, you may see an ad for the company that owns the site when you are viewing another site.

For advertisers this is a wonderful way to refine your message, extend the sales funnel, and get another shot at converting a web visitor to a customer. And in theory, this should be a welcome form of advertising. In this overly-cluttered media landscape, a highly-targeted ad should break through because the prospect is not being randomly selected. They are being targeted by their actions.

Imagine if you changed the channel when a TV commercial came on, then later saw a commercial that addressed the fact that you didn’t watch it the first time it ran. Would you be more inclined to view it because it specifically targeted you based on your action? Or would you feel as though your privacy was invaded and your preferences were ignored?

Follow The Weinstein Organization on Twitter (@twochicago) and let us know what you think of Behavioral Targeting using the hashtag #ourTWOsense.

Today there was as much social media activity about the snow in Chicago as there were snowflakes falling from the sky over The Loop. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s perfectly cool for people to take to the social networks and express themselves, because presumably by now the people who we consider our online friends have become accustomed to how we communicate and act online. We all know plenty of “over-sharers” who benignly share whatever pops inside their heads. No editing, and no holding back.

Many posts are pointless, some are entertaining and informative, a few are outright hilarious, and occasionally one or two will give you a new perspective on life. But all of them are personal. “If you don’t like my posts, then de-friend me” has become a motto of online individualism.

If you are a marketer you can’t dare people to stop following you. Consider the marketing value of your social media posts as if they were interruptive forms of advertising. Quality vs. quantity in the age of earned media is a delicate balance because you don’t want to be noticed for being the marketer that over-shares all the time.

You need to have an online presence because that’s where peoples’ attentions are found, but how much content can you reasonably share online to be effective without being guilty of Market Over-Sharing? How many tweets can you post on behalf of your brand before you are tuned out? How much of a presence do you need to have in order to be noticed? And what’s the point of having a huge audience of followers and fans and people who are willing to click the like button if you don’t give them anything of value?

Engagement is important, but it can be more effective to engage your audience with something tangible they will respond to like a special offer or a free trial or an exclusive opportunity on an advance purchase of a hotly anticipated item. Even a game or an app that dramatizes the value proposition of your marketing message is a more effective way of engaging your audience than Market Over-Sharing to the audience you are working so hard to cultivate and keep.

For marketers, sharing is selling. Your audience is always just one click away from either going to your website, checking out your competition, or ignoring you altogether. If you over-share without offering value, your audience will drift and blow away like Chicago Snow.

It’s 2012.

Facebook and Twitter are both about six years old. LinkedIn is almost 10 years old. Digital media have been with us for almost 25 years and  a part of our daily lives for a good chunk of the last 15 years. Mobile phones have been dominated by smart phones and mobile tablet technology for the last 5 years. Even broadcast TV is now exclusively digital in almost 90% of the US.

So it seems increasingly odd to hear the term “new media” still being assigned to the above-mentioned digital, mobile and social media entities. Think about how many touch points of the internet you come into contact with on a daily basis. How many of them are truly new experiences? How many of them are daily occurrences? When is the last time you went anywhere without making sure you had your iPhone or Droid securely in hand so you could stay connected? How often do you DVR a TV show instead of making time to watch when it airs? And instead of conducting research, we’ve been Googling our way to information since 1999.

“New Media” is an old term in search of a new subject. It simply doesn’t apply to digital, mobile or social media anymore. To continue this misnomer is to confuse things. In the early 1400’s, Gutenberg’s moveable type technology started a new media revolution. Marconi invented wireless technology and gave birth to a new medium called radio in the late 1800s. Telephones and TV were new media for a while too.

For the past few years it’s been quite accurate to compare digital marketing to TV commercials in the early 1960s. New strategies for reaching people are being invented everyday, and five years from now many of these breakthrough techniques will likely be standard practice, or seem outdated and less effective.

So the next time you are in a meeting and someone says something like “we need a new media idea”, ask them if they are referring to a medium that hasn’t been invented yet, or if they really mean they need a new idea to breakthrough the clutter and effectively reach their target audience. New media become just regular ol’ media in time, but a revolutionary new idea becomes timeless no matter what medium it’s executed in.

“How many Twitter followers do you have?” is one of the most over-hyped metrics in social media marketing. What good is a large audience if they don’t act? If you are trying to attract an audience ready to actually do something, then you need to treat Twitter more like a search engine and a broadcast medium simultaneously.

There are 400 million active global monthly tweeters, and they perform hundreds of millions of Twitter searches every day. Twitter has a search engine that searches live, constant, global conversations, instead of static indexed web pages.

Twitter is a multilateral communications and broadcast medium that can actually be searched. And Twitter offers marketers something that no other search engine has: the hashtag.

By prefixing a keyword in your tweet with a hash symbol (#), you get a #hashtag.

The # takes your tweet beyond your followers and enters your #keyword into Twitter’s general timeline, where it can be found in a Twitter search. It can be in front of #one word, #ormanywordsstrungtogether. The more popular hash-tagged keywords get vaulted into the list of trending topics, which can be geo targeted as well. This is very much like organic SEO.

It’s great to have a large Twitter following, but it’s better to find people on Twitter who are actively searching for something that your product or service can offer. So use Twitter as a broadcast medium with a purpose—target your message to people who are actively looking for you “in the moment”. This is a pull-marketing approach to generating response in real time.

Followers are great because they might share your message with their networks and initiate a viral marketing effect, but they are a passive audience who might be looking for what you have to offer.

Searchers are actively looking for you, and they are more likely to respond if you Twittercast the right keywords with the right hashtags at the right time.

At The Weinstein Organization, we’ve been integrating personalized URLs (PURLs) in our direct response campaigns for several years. PURLS are personalized web site addresses that are often integrated with direct mail or email campaigns, leading the recipient to a personalized landing page.

PURLs are an excellent way to engage your audience because of the allure of personalization. When a prospect sees their name on a web page that appears to be created just for them, it triggers a sense of belonging and delivers personalized communications that encourages them to interact more with the marketer.

But why stop there? As a data collection method, PURLs stand poised to become the next frontier in acquiring consumer information that can potentially rival any other source. PURLs can tell you things about your customers and prospects based on the behavior they exhibit deep inside the sales funnel in real time.

For example, a PURL can track response timing to the delivery of an email. A prospect who receives an email and clicks the link to their PURL is actually telling you something about the quality of your creative and offer. You can measure the amount of time from email delivery to open to response, via arrival to the personalized web page.

Once a responder goes to their PURL you can capture information regarding their communication preferences (video, mobile, social, etc.), collect feedback on the current offer and use this information to provide a subsequent offer that is targeted to an audience of one.

Response to a PURL can also help to generate verified, real-time leads to your sales team. A responder to a PURL is raising their hand and saying that your marketing efforts are making progress with them. They are showing interest even if they do not complete the exact conversion you seek.

There are an infinite number of ways you can learn about your customers and prospects by integrating PURLs with your marketing campaigns. Of course use them as the response vehicle, but they are an excellent way to engage your audience with personalization and learn more about them while they are in a responsive frame of mind.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a well-known term, but it can be made to seem overly complex. Unpaid search, or more precisely “Organic SEO”, is simply your web site’s ability-by-design to break through the clutter and rise to a top position on a search engine ranking page (SERP).

According to comScore, Google clearly owns the US market share of search engine users at over 66%, while Yahoo and Bing each hover around 15%. Google flat-out dominates the global market share with over 80% of all search engine users.

With SEO, the marketer is your web site’s data, and the audience is the search engine’s algorithmic “spider” that crawls all the indexed pages on the World Wide Web. The spider is looking for relevant information that will satisfy a search query. It similar to how someone looking to buy life insurance is more likely to open up an effective direct mail piece from an insurance company, then sort through the contents looking for relevant information that satisfies their definition of a good offer.

Successful SEO is not a “one-and-done” process of optimizing your site with keywords and indexing the pages with a search engine. Just like a marketing campaign, there are several elements to an SEO campaign that work together for maximum effectiveness.

• Keyword Management = Strategy Development: Discovering, analyzing, grouping and organizing large numbers of frequently searched keywords that are highly relevant to the content in your web site. This forms the basis of your web site copy and impacts design of the site.

• Keyword Action = Creative Development: Authoring the website copy around your strategic keyword selection is literally crafting the message, making your web site relevant to the search query, and more attractive to the spider.

• Keyword Indexing = Media Planning: Keyword indexing, or “page-tagging”, most closely resembles the art of making your marketing most visible to your audience in the most efficient way possible. Spiders crawl through your page tag first, and begin assigning value to the overall content based on what it is instructed to read. Indexing helps the search engine select your site by making your site’s relevant content more visible in the right place at the right time.

• Website Aging = Campaign Evolution: Over-saturation of the same execution can lower effectiveness of any marketing no matter if it is an email, direct mail package or an online banner ad. Same thing goes for the content of your web site. Small changes to the content and re-indexing the updated pages at regular intervals keeps the spider interested because it detects something new and interesting.

• Link-Baiting = Social Sharing: Establishing links back to your web site from other relevant web sites are the equivalent of someone “liking” your ad on Facebook or re-Tweeting your post. They are votes of confidence to a search engine spider and they raise your relevance score. A web site that sells football gear will be more popular to search engine spiders if there are links back to the site from espn.com or nfl.com, for example. Those sites are likely to have a lot of football-themed keywords and ultra-high relevancy scores for football-related searches.

Beware of unethical or “black hat” techniques offered by some SEOs, such as keyword stuffing and link-farming. Search engines will eventually bust you and dramatically lower your relevancy score, or ban your site altogether from the search index.

Organic SEO is a craft just like any other form of marketing. It requires research, development, creativity and execution. And it is most effective when the above techniques are employed together over time as a campaign.

There’s an old saying that loosely goes “bad press is better than no press”. It’s better to be known for something, good or bad, than to be unknown. Or so the theory goes. And due to social media marketing that theory is being put to the test all the time now.

Take for example the latest campaign for Dr. Pepper Ten, a new diet drink that boasts only 10 calories. Their campaign theme is aimed directly at men, and their Facebook page is branded in kind with the “Dr. Pepper 10 Man’Ments”–a code of how to live life like a real man. The all-man-all-the-time approach is familiar–many brands have gone down this road before with varying degrees of success–and even goes so far as to offer the tagline “It’s Not For Women”. Ok we get it. It’s a man’s drink with only 10 calories. But that is not what Dr. Pepper is now known for.

Spend a few minutes on their Facebook page and you’ll find that Dr. Pepper Ten is now the big instigator in the most recent battle of the sexes. 10.6 million people have liked their page as of this writing–this is enough to make any CMO smile–but an unofficial analysis of their wall comments tells a different story. Alternating in almost a perfect back-and-forth debate, comments range from the defensive (“I’m a woman and I’ll never drink this misogynistic soda”) to the offensive (“if you don’t like it, get back in the kitchen and make my dinner”), from the analytic (“this campaign will kill your sales”) to the humorous (“as a lesbian, am I manly enough to drink this?”). This is enough to make any CMO cringe. Or maybe not. Maybe they intended to cause a controversy to rally people around their drink.

In one sense, marketing’s job is to create brand awareness and increase sales. This campaign certainly raised awareness (10.6 million people are definitely aware of the campaign), and likely prodded their target audience (men) to buy the product. It definitely alienated some women, but there were plenty of comments from women who shrugged off the controversy and declared their affinity for the brand (“laughing at this *fake* controversy–it’s a joke people! Going to chug a Dr. Pepper 10 right now!”). Even some men were offended, but they remained engaged (“going to check back tomorrow to see how Dr. Pepper has ruined women’s lives”).

The bottom line will be the sales figures, but the line just above the bottom line simply cannot be ignored: more than 10.6 million people know about the new drink. For better or for worse, this very public airing of instant reactions to a marketing campaign mark the rise in power of the consumer. Now when you launch a campaign you get an immediate reaction that is quantifiable and qualifiable. There is no silent majority in social media marketing because the message now gets shaped after the launch by the audience, just as much as the agency creatives and planners who developed it. Dr. Pepper launched a men-only campaign, but women have taken over the message surrounding the campaign to a large degree. The campaign is now a controversy, and garnering plenty of earned media coverage on top of it. The continuing dialog surrounding this campaign will ultimately determine how long it lives or how soon it dies because it is being tested in-market. And the results are coming in every second.

The influence an audience has over what a brand does goes beyond a marketing campaign. Recently there was so much social media backlash against Netflix and their plans to launch a brand for their DVD-only subscriptions called Qwikster, that they scrapped the whole idea before it even launched. What this tells us is that brands are listening to their customers more than ever before. Not because they’re suddenly more interested, but because now they have this real-time ability to track and measure audience reaction and response.

Social media is the world’s most dynamic focus group.

You spend plenty of time and energy segmenting your lists, crafting the right message, designing the look, and executing on time and on budget. You ship, you mail, you Tweet, you share, and then…*crickets*.

Well, what did you expect? A sale? An opt-in? A new customer? A higher Klout score? Ask yourself this the next time your results underwhelm:

Did you pull your audience in, or just you just push more marketing at them?

The Push Strategy has its merits in brand awareness as long as your push is strong and consistent. And if you have a big enough budget you can literally push your marketing all around the world. The current trend in marketing is asking people to “join the conversation”, but that is a very passive approach. You need a huge push to reach enough people in your target audience to find a tiny fraction of people who are willing to “dialogue” about your product or service.

Talk is cheap. New customers and sales are the brass ring.

If you want to do more than get a few people talking about you, you need to incentivize them to respond. You need to draw the audience closer to you, to your landing page, or to your store. You need to be direct about it. You need a Pull Strategy to engage your audience, nurture their attention, and encourage them to take a specific action.

No fisherman has ever succeeded by throwing all their bait into the water, then sat back and waited for the fish to jump into their boat.

E-Commerce is the process of developing, marketing, selling, delivering, servicing and paying for products and services on the internet. Typically, this means building a website to interact and transact with your customers. Your marketing drives people to the site, and the experience those customers have on the site will largely determine the chances of them coming back.

But “F-Commerce”, or Facebook Commerce, is different from E-Commerce. It’s almost the reverse perspective of E-Commerce in that customers and prospects are already on Facebook—it’s the marketer who must put their business there.

Facebook isn’t a website, it’s an internet platform. It’s a daily destination for the vast majority of regular internet users, almost regardless of demographic categories. It’s a consumer behavior that is increasingly relevant in peoples’ lives (whether they will admit it or not, 750 million people can’t be wrong).

Some of the world’s biggest brands are selling their goods and services on Facebook, and industry watchers are predicting that in 5 years more sales will be transacted on Facebook than on Amazon. This isn’t hard to believe when you consider how many ways a marketer can do business on the world’s busiest internet portal:

F-Stores: Facebook’s development platforms allow brands to install widgets that convert their Facebook page to an online store, with the ability to tap directly into their e-commerce website and supply chain, process orders and payments, and manage their customer relationships.

Group Buying: Trade “likes” for dollars. Provide your Facebook followers special offers that get better with every person who clicks the “like” button associated with your offer. Or generate significant social network buzz by announcing that a special deal will “go live” when an X-amount of people click the “like” button. It’s not just word-of-mouth, it’s crowd-sourced purchasing power.

Exclusive Offers: With traditional e-commerce (not an oxymoron anymore) you can make special offers to a known group of people—the folks on your list. On Facebook your offers go directly to your page fans, and any action they take on your offer is announced and opened up to their social network. You don’t need to ask them to forward the offer to a friend because all activity on Facebook is viral to begin with.

Facebook Connect: This permission-based marketing approach is conceptually similar to the opt-in, but it goes beyond allowing the marketer to connect with the prospect 1-on-1; it’s a 1-on-1-on-infinity relationship because Facebook Connect asks the individual for permission to look at their entire network and gather information on everyone. Think there’s a huge hurdle to get over regarding privacy? Think again. Every Facebook app from Angry Birds to Scrabble to Twitter on Facebook, asks for permission to tap into the users network first using Facebook Connect. The global success of Angry Birds means millions of people decided that protecting the privacy of their network wasn’t so important after all. If the offer is great, people will do whatever it takes to get access to it.

Shop-And-Tell Plug-Ins: Built into your e-commerce site, these plug-ins will tell a shopper’s network about their recent purchase (with appropriate permission granted first), not only on Facebook, but on your e-commerce site itself. When someone visits your site, they can see if someone from their own Facebook network has purchased something from you. It’s a virtual testimonial, almost as if your friend were waiting at the store for you to say “hey, I just bought this here and you should too”.

Check-In Deals: Facebook took the Foursquare concept and potentially became the biggest check-in network on the internet and in mobile, with their already-huge user base. Incentivizing your customers and prospects to check-in at your brick and mortar location with a special offer is one of the most effective ways to drive foot traffic (remember real, actual stores?) to your business. If you operate a restaurant, offering a small discount off the bill in exchange for a Facebook check-in is not only a great way to advertise your existence and location, it’s also a tacit recommendation. And if the customer checks-in on Facebook and includes a favorable comment about their experience, then you’ve just received a review even Zagat’s can’t measure up to.

F-Commerce isn’t an alternative to E-Commerce, it’s an additional component of a fully integrated marketing campaign. Instead of driving customers to your business, F-Commerce drives your business to your customers. And in turn it can potentially drive your customers’ social networks back to your business.

Mid-afternoon in the Midwest yesterday you could feel the earthquake, even if you didn’t feel the earthquake.

From just south of Baltimore: Just experienced an earthquake at Walmart

From Westchester County, NY: Holy F*****g earthquake!!!!

From Columbus: whoa…did anyone else feel that?!? Ohio earthquake??

From way up on the north side of Chicago: did my desk just shake or am I imagining things?

From Brooklyn: a link to Loretta Swit singing “I Feel the Earth Move” on the Muppet Show, posted on YouTube

From Maryland: who felt the earthquake on the east coast of the USA? i did not. I was leaving my gym in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Did not feel a thing. It was 6.0 or something??

Back to Chicago: Holy s**t! My desk was shaking!

From North Carolina: Shakin’ in Raleigh…how about you? Which earned responses of confirmed seismic activity in New Haven, CT, Boston, Northern Virginia, Jacksonville, NC, and Mount Vernon, NY. California reported stability, “tectonically speaking”.

Sitting 16 floors up above a very busy Wacker Drive construction project in downtown Chicago, we didn’t feel the earthquake. And if we did we probably confused it with a jackhammer. But we knew about the earthquake with the East Coast epicenter moments after it hit because people from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River started Facebooking about it.

All of the above Facebook postings were made in the span of less than two minutes. It’s safe to say that they were most likely the first reactions these people had to just experiencing an earthquake–to immediately post something online about it. Almost 50% of the postings were made from a mobile device, which makes us wonder how many of these people were posting while evacuating a building. Each posting received an average of 4 responses (either comments, or likes). All in the span of less than two minutes.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if your marketing could generate that kind of activity? It can.