Posted at September 26, 2012 12:52 PM in Agency
Video may have killed the radio star, but recent ad campaign feedback indicates that the web has NOT killed the video star. As social media has grown to occupy more and more of brands’ marketing budgets and consumers’ everyday lives, other ad mediums have seen a decline, first in readership/viewership and second, in ad dollars. While television has felt the jolt of social media’s ad dollar pull, it hasn’t felt it as acutely as print publications. Data compiled both by Neilson and by multi-industry, independent brands implies that television advertising hasn’t died – it’s simply evolved.
Read More

Posted at September 19, 2012 10:09 AM in Agency
Are you a social media expert? Chances are if you’re in marketing, you think you are, and if you employ an in house marketing manager, they think that they are. But what really defines expertise in this relatively young medium?
Read More

Posted at September 10, 2012 02:05 PM in Agency
There are two common ways that people view advances in marketing technology – the kind designed to recognize, track, and record what you like, don’t like, and expect from the businesses you patronize. Most see it as either conveniently beneficial or controversially intrusive. Facebook and Foursquare tracking have already provoked a good deal of online privacy and safety discussions, and the online privacy debate continues to grow, fueled by the advent of each new convenience marketing technology.
Read More

Posted at August 15, 2012 09:34 AM in Agency
Smart brands use social media and they use it in a way that authentically contributes to their brand’s voice and its industry’s dialogue. Facebook has long been a favorite tool that marketers use to reach out to customers – but the popular platform’s already crowded. Your social media presence must have the edge to gain, not only page Like’s, but also consistent customer Facebook feed airtime. The key to achieving this is content. Your content must answer interests, feed needs, or resolve issues consistently to hold its coveted spot in consumers’ Facebook feeds.
Read More

Posted at August 14, 2012 11:19 AM in Agency
Every advertiser knows that while necessary to most large campaigns, focus group research can be a pain. How do you entice audiences to give feedback? This can get expensive, difficult to schedule, and difficult to analyze quickly. How do you guarantee that your sample group accurately represents your target customer? This can be tedious, expensive in terms of manpower, and provides only minimal reliability.
Read More

Posted at August 08, 2012 02:59 PM in Agency
Chances are, if your target market is living and human, then your target market is texting, Facebooking, and Googling. Digital and social don’t just apply to advertising. In recent years public relations has gotten with the program too. Customers DVR shows to fast forward through commercials, get their news from information streams instead of aired reports, and have turned their eyes from bus wraps and billboards, downward toward their smartphones’ glowing screens. To be effective, your story can’t stop at the newsstand. As a modern day PR professional, you must push it into the world of the interactive and engage customers to get them thinking and commenting, and eventually, talking and acting.
Read More

Posted at August 06, 2012 09:09 AM in Agency
Social media is about connections and conversations. The most successful online networks make it easy for both businesses and average users to manage both. Twitter keeps conversations fresh and tracks mentions, network, and engagement. Facebook constantly unveils new tools to do the same. From an ROI perspective, most other social media networks had a leg up on Foursquare – at least from a social media manager’s perspective. Sure, you could add your location and post specials, but the network’s two-way conversation capabilities and analytics tools were limited. However, now Foursquare is unveiling a new merchant dashboard that allows social media managers to do more, most notably:
Read More

Posted at July 25, 2012 02:21 PM in Agency
Social media’s on the up and up. As more and more businesses grow cognizant of social media’s power with the people, search engines are sitting up and taking notice. Search engines like Google and Bing rank sites on relevancy – on how useful their information is to the public for the services each site purports to provide. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) allows marketers to help businesses gain traction on online search pages, reaching hirer rankings through a number of content and technical strategies. However, search engines are now questioning the validity of their current querying qualifiers and are slowly shifting the weight off of typical SEO tactics and onto social media-reliant rankers.
Read More

Posted at July 23, 2012 09:02 AM in Agency
Everyone’s on social media, but not everyone’s enjoying the experience. Although Facebook ranked lower in the 2012 American Customer Satisfaction Index for social media networks, Twitter received a disappointing 64 points out of a 100 rating. Not one to be indefinitely outdone, Twitter already has designs on an all-new mobile app that they hope will make the network more relevant and user-friendly for mobile users.
Read More