16 case studies prove ROI of mobile marketing~By Rob Petersen.

Are you paying attention to your mobile marketing yet? After years of being the next big thing, mobile might finally be the current big thing. But there is a big problem–most people don’t know how to prove it. A joint study by the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) and MediaVest shows marketers are excited about opportunities for mobile marketing but frustrated about the ability to prove return on investment (ROI). Are you one of them?
Consider these highlights:

• 96% of marketers currently use or are planning to incorporate mobile marketing into their marketing mix
• 85% report an intent to raise their mobile budgets in the near future
• 84% use mobile websites; 78% mobile search; 76% mobile apps and 75% mobile display ads
• 42% are concerned about having proper mobile metrics in place
• 42% report an ability to prove ROI
• Only 21% state they have been successful in mobile – a decrease from 2010

To help alleviate the frustration, here are case studies. They cover opportunities from mobile optimized websites, mobile apps, mobile search, mobile ads, MMS, SMS, QR Codes to social media. They also prove ROI is more often achieved when marketers pursue mobile with a specific business purpose rather than mobile for mobile’s sake.
Here are 16 case studies that prove ROI of mobile marketing

1. BMW: Began using MMS (Multimedia Message Service) to send images, video, sound files and text messages for customized snow tire offers. They increased conversion +30%
2. CARITAS HOME CARE: Boston-based home healthcare agency used mobile health devices to enhance communications and data collection with its 150 mobile clinicians. Caritas documented how the mobile devices were able to save 19,200 hours or 98 hours per clinicians per year. Although Caritas didn’t release salaries of clinicians, if we estimated $50/hour, which would be conservative, Caritas saved $960,000. If the devices were $100 each for 150 clinicians at $15,000, which would also be conservative, the ROI would be 64-to-1.
3. DUNKIN DONUTS: Used SMS (short message service) or text messaging to increase store traffic and drive sales. The SMS campaign offering mobile coupons. It increased store traffic +21%.
4. HAIR CLUB: North America’s leading provider of hair restoration solutions for men and women created a mobile website with one purpose, to get mobile phone users to “click-to-call” for more information. Their “click-to-call” button goes to a live sales person within seconds. Once a call is made, their close rate goes up exponentially. ROI for the mobile website was 30-to-1.
5. HARLEY-DAVIDSON: Wanted to maintain visibility with current customers and add new customers and revenue through a holiday promotion. They sold HD related merchandise through a Route 66’s mobile club. Communications of the 12 Days of Christmas campaign were promoted through a mobile social media campaign. Sales increased 250% on helmets; 16% on leather jackets and there were significant increases in holiday dealer traffic which was also an objective.
6. HOTEL TONIGHT: Sought to acquire new customers who would download its last-minute hotel booking app and ultimately use it to book room nights. To acquire new users of its app (available in the App Store and Google Play), Hotel Tonight used Facebook’granular targeting and two key products: the mobile app install ad and Facebook Offers. For three months between October 2012 and HotelTonight ran app install ads that: 1) Drove people to the App Store, 2) Targeted people based on demographic information and likes and interests such as “travelers,” “parents” and “golf” and 3) placed on mobile news feeds targeted to iOS users. Hotel Tonight receive 10X higher click-to-install rate from the mobile app install ads and 80% higher return on ad spend from Facebook Offers than average mobile advertising spend
7. JANSSEN (PSORIASIS 360): Launched a mobile phone app to help psoriasis patients track the severity of their condition. The index helped them know when to seek professional care and allowed their medical professional assess to the severity of their patient’s condition. Janssen also opened a Facebook page, which they moderated for regulatory reasons, to let patients tell personal stories and had over 30,000 posts and comments. According to Janssen, the investment in the mobile app overachieved ROI but more important delivered the right therapy to the right patient at crucial times.
8. MCDONALD’S: Designed a ‘restaurant finder’ app to enable consumers to find a late-night McDonald’s. 2/3′s of its restaurants close at 11pm. McDonald’s employed location-based technology and geo-targeted above-the-line messaging, to avoid sending potential customers to a locked door. The app was downloaded 1,300,000 times over the course of the campaign, and when the sales uplift was calculated, the campaign delivered an ROI of 2:1.
9. PETCO: Expected the creation of a mobile website and a mobile ad campaign would be made up by higher conversion rates to coupons and offers. Mobile coupon redemption outnumber online coupon redemption by 5 to 1 more than paying back the cost of the website and ad campaign.
10. PIZZA HUT: Created a mobile optimized website, integrated with Pizza Hut’s back-office systems and all devices had a user experience tailored to each device. By the end of the first week after going live, the site accounted for 10 per cent of all online orders increasing at a rate 60 per cent each week.
11. ROY’S RESTAURANT: Used a paid search mobile-only campaign that enabled them to budget, bid, target, and track their mobile performance separately from their desktop AdWords campaigns. They also focused on Google’s click-to-call phone numbers in local ads on mobile devices and hyperlocal advertising, They achieved an astounding 8-to-1 ROI by focusing solely on mobile advertising.
12. VEGAS.COM: Noticed that mobile visitors to their destination‐based travel and entertainment booking website didn’t stay long. They created mobile versions of the: 1) Homepage, 2) Category pages and 3) Hotel room search tool with special functionality to improve the mobile customer experience. An improved mobile experience resulted: 1) 22% lower bounce rate 2) 16% more page views and 4% higher conversion rate.
13. VERIZON: Used QR codes to take store customers that scanned the QR code through to a competition to win a smartphone, via sharing on Facebook. If one of those Facebook friends brought a Verizon mobile, the original customer would get a free smartphone. A pretty nifty promotion that generated $35,000 in additional revenue during the week of the promotion, with a mere $1,000 investment. The promotion generated a 200% in smartphone sales, a staggering figure that can be attributed to a QR Code.
14. WINNEPEG HEALTH AUTHORITY: Used SMS to get adults 18-24 tested for sexually transmitted infections (STIs), increase awareness of STI incidents and remove false perceptions about testing. Text the keyword PEEINACUP to the short code 82442 or go to www.peeinacupwinnipeg.ca for clinic locations and a chance to win $1,000. Over the course of the four-week campaign, more than 10,000 people visited the Web site and 825 people entered the contest, which is 1.2 percent of the total target population in Winnipeg.
15. WOOGA: The world’s third largest social game developer. Among its popular social game titles is Diamond Dash, a colorful jewel blitz game that challenges players to match three or more of the same colored gems in under 60 seconds. Wooga ran sponsored stories in Facebook mobile news feeds that displayed when one of their friends had played Diamond Dash for at least four minutes or twice during the previous month. This campaign strategy generated great success for Wooga, from increasing installs by over 25% to lowering the cost-per-install by 10%.
16. zPIZZA: Had a business goal to deliver at least 1,000 heavy‐use customers who spend $50+/month for each of their restaurant locations. They also had a loyalty program, zTribe, to identify regular customer and reward them with sweepstakes, cash prizes and inform them of new product. zPizza decided to use SMS messaging to improve registration and timeliness of the zTribe rewards and product information. The result was a 5% improvement in registration and a +106% in conversion for program participation.

Does your company use mobile marketing? Do these case studies prove ROI to you? Do they help teach how mobile marketing could be better used for your business?

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Internet Becoming Tool of Choice for Negative Politics

Social networking sites are giving opposition researchers a whole new field to play in.

By Drake Lundell, 

The growing popularity of Twitter, Facebook and other online social networks, and, of course, the Internet in general, is helping political dirty tricksters reach new heights -- or depths. And if you think this midterm election cycle was especially active, just wait until the jockeying for 2012 gets under way. Oh, by the way, that begins even before the smoke from this go-around clears.
To say there's a bright side and a dark side to politicking by way of the Web is an understatement.
WhiIe candidates use it to raise large amounts of campaign contributions from mainly small donors, tricksters see it as a good way to put opponents in a negative light. With the electorate so evenly divided, and with so many races supertight, swaying even a few votes can help determine an outcome.

Impressions gleaned from the Web can have a big impact on voters, since more than half of them now use the Internet to get political news and information.
This election season, both Democrats and Republicans put up scores of "hit" sites, designed to smear opponents with half-truths and air their dirty laundry.
Also in vogue: Pushing negative stories high up on search engine listings of stories and sites about candidates. The technique, known as "Google bombing," is seen as a highly effective strategy to disrupt opponents' campaigns.
One of the forerunners of political Google bombing is the liberal-leaning Daily Kos website. It has started a campaign to drive negative articles about Republicans high up on the search results for GOP candidates.

"Here at Daily Kos, we are going to engage in a very different, but still very important, form of election activism. It is a type of activism that no one else is working, and it is well suited to our medium," explains Chris Bowers, the site's political director.
"It's a grassroots-based search engine optimization," he adds. Kos urges its members to conduct research to find damaging articles about Republican House candidates online and then post those Web links to a special website, since any mention of an article anywhere on the Web is counted in the search engines' ratings.
"As a result of this, not only is it possible for us to use our hyperlinks to impact what people find when they search for information on candidates, but we would be foolish not to do so in a way that benefitted our preferred candidates," Bowers says.

Read more at http://www.kiplinger.com/article/business/T043-C012-S001-internet-becoming-tool-of-choice-for-negative-poli.html#K8188e0z1EQ0JQ0m.99

Are Honeybees Losing Their Way?~ By Christy Ullrich

Christy Ullrich

National Geographic News

Published February 13, 2013

 

Photograph by John Kimbler, My Shot

 



A single honeybee visits hundreds, sometimes thousands, of flowers a day in search of nectar and pollen. Then it must find its way back to the hive, navigating distances up to five miles (eight kilometers), and perform a "waggle dance" to tell the other bees where the flowers are.

A new study shows that long-term exposure to a combination of certain pesticides might impair the bee's ability to carry out its pollen mission.

"Any impairment in their ability to do this could have a strong effect on their survival," said Geraldine Wright, a neuroscientist at Newcastle University in England and co-author of a new study posted online February 7, 2013, in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Wright's study adds to the growing body of research that shows that the honeybee's ability to thrive is being threatened. Scientists are still researching how pesticides may be contributing to colony collapse disorder (CCD), a rapid die-off seen in millions of honeybees throughout the world since 2006.

"Pesticides are very likely to be involved in CCD and also in the loss of other types of pollinators," Wright said. (See the diversity of pollinating creatures in a photo gallery from National Geographic magazine.)

Bees depend on what's called "scent memory" to find flowers teeming with nectar and pollen. Their ability to rapidly learn, remember, and communicate with each other has made them highly efficient foragers, using the waggle dance to educate others about the site of the food source.

Watch as National Geographic explains the waggle dance.

Their pollination of plants is responsible for the existence of nearly a third of the food we eat and has a similar impact on wildlife food supplies.

Previous studies have shown certain types of pesticides affect a bee's learning and memory. Wright's team wanted to investigate if the combination of different pesticides had an even greater effect on the learning and memory of honeybees.

"Honeybees learn to associate floral colors and scents with the quality of food rewards," Wright explained. "The pesticides affect the neurons involved in these behaviors. These [affected] bees are likely to have difficulty communicating with other members of the colony."

The experiment used a classic procedure with a daunting name: olfactory conditioning of the proboscis extension reflex. In layman's terms, the bee sticks out its tongue in response to odor and food rewards.

For the experiment, bees were collected from the colony entrance, placed in glass vials, and then transferred into plastic sandwich boxes. For three days the bees were fed a sucrose solution laced with sublethal doses of pesticides. The team measured short-term and long-term memory at 10-minute and 24-hour intervals respectively. (

This study shows that when pesticides are combined, the impact on bees is far worse than exposure to just one pesticide. "This is particularly important because one of the pesticides we used, coumaphos, is a 'medicine' used to treat Varroa mites [pests that have been implicated in CCD] in honeybee colonies throughout the world," Wright said.

The pesticide, in addition to killing the mites, might also be making honeybees more vulnerable to poisoning and effects from other pesticides.

Stephen Buchmann of the Pollinator Partnership, who was not part of Wright's study, underscored how critical pollinators are for the world. "The main threat to pollinators is habitat destruction and alteration. We're rapidly losing pollinator habitats, natural areas, and food-producing agricultural lands that are essential for our survival and well being. Along with habitat destruction, insecticides weaken pollinators and other beneficial insects."

Watch video of a similar type of bee experiment.

 

 

VIDEO..SHOWS BEE DOING THE WAGGLE DANCE:

Go beyond bulk uploading with SocialOomph’s suite of tools~By Chris Abraham

 

 

 

There are some Web apps that have withstood the test of time — tools that I still use and sometimes abuse. Let’s look at what SocialOomph offers through its Pro account.
Though there are quite a few features that SocialOomph offers, I use it for a couple of things that it does very well: prospecting folks to follow on Twitter based on the keywords as well as the hashtags they use in their profiles and tweets, and also queuing up loads and loads of evergreen bulk tweets that can seed my personal (as well as my clients’) Twitter feeds over time while my team and I are busy being much more responsive and timely with the tweets that we add by hand when we’re online and active. SocialOomph makes this easy and a little more flexible than the other tools I’ve used.

Twitter keyword and hashtag auto-follow

I like to follow folks who use the sort of language that I consider interesting or industry-specific, including keywords, keyword-phrases, and #hashtags.
I have done it on auto-pilot before, but that just ended up being madness, resulting in being lured into following spam Twitter profiles because they’re getting better and better at dropping high-value keywords and hashtags into their tweets.
What I do instead is set up the keywords in SocialOomph and then review the results they get. I can reject the false positives or I can choose to ignore them if the error was an acceptable keyword mistake (maybe #smm means Social Media Marketing and Strong Muscle Men — fair game).
I can also block them if they’re phishing on keywords and #hashtags that have nothing to do with what or who they are.
Finally, I can report the worst ones as spam to Twitter, which blocks, bans, and reports them.
If you have the time to go through this, you’ll improve your catch over time.
It’s quite a nice approach and gets rid of a lot of the chaff and spam if you’re willing to put the time in.

Queued bulk tweets

Another thing I really like to do for myself and my clients is to create a very long list of evergreen tweets. These are things that are less time-sensitive than they are essential in the contextualization of the who, what, when, where, why, and how of each person, brand, or organization behind each Twitter handle.
Twitter is funny. It’s not like a blog. They say that Twitter is a river of news, and like a river — to quote Heraclitus, “ever-newer waters flow on those who step into the same rivers.” As a result, posting the news that Chris Abraham was chosen #15 on a top 23 social media power influencer list really only reaches the folks who happen to look at the @chrisabraham Twitter feed at exactly 3:45am on Friday morning — a pretty low probability — which isn’t enough. It’s essential to get that in there a few times over different time zones so that there’s not only better pick up but different pick up. Caveat: You’ll note that Twitter prohibits one from posting identical tweets but you can post the same link, so you’d need to mix up the wording of the tweets if you want to bulk upload 25 tweets about the same topic.

Evergreen tweets can include articles that have been written about the company, even if that article has been posted before. They can include links to the About Us page or the bio of the management team. It can even include press releases, content, links, visions, business plans, philosophies, ethical stances, and “best of” content — content that at one point was timely but is now not so much stale but not exactly current.
Evergreen tweets are essential. People only care about your tweets (favorite-starring and retweeting them) when they bump into them. If you only tweet them once, they won’t reach their full potential audience.
SocialOomph has one of the most challenging interfaces of any set of social media tools, but it’s worth digging deeper.

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Dangerous Youtube Marketing, Sales Training and Tutorial for Men Only

 

by marketing on 01/25/2013

You do what you do to put food on the table. To you, it’s second nature. You get a kid out of college- even a fancy ivy league college to try to do what you do and it will take him years of additional blood sweat and tears to do it well. Then another decade to do it as well as you do.
That’s because for you, what you do as a pro is autohabit.
For him, every little step and every little decision is a nerve racking stressor.

So, now that you’ve decided that you’ve got to start producing you tube videos to promote your firm, products, and services, what have the most effective Youtube video marketing pros picked up along the way that drives the highest number of conversions and sales? If there was a Youtube marketing tutorial or a sales training video that could raise your sales by 5%, would you watch it?
The above tutorial will raise your sales by at least 25%. It’s for manly men only.

 

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Game Guides and Strategies

Good Morning, Today I am doing a little something different for this post. I am not a gamer but several folks have asked if I knew of places to go for help with games. I came across a few sites where I do some affiliate marketing so I am sending them out to you for your consideration. I do have a small request, since I do not play games should you decide to give one of these a try I would appreciate it if you would get back to me with the pro and cons of the games.

I promote a lot of products so it’s difficult to try each and ever one, customer review is most important to me. Your opinions help me decide if they are worthy of further promotion.

Recently we released a lot of features for the Dugi addon but we ran out of time to announce it and provide detailed explanations. Some of you might have noticed the new features already if you recently updated and read the change log. Anyway, check out this new video below which will show you on how to use all the display options in the settings menu, which will also feature the new Multistep Mode.


Special Offer for the Dugi Fans:

This is a special 'heads up' announcement to give you an early warning of our upcoming sale next Friday.

On February 15th EST Dugi Guides will have a Half-off (50% discount) sale of ALL our guides and packages for ONE DAY ONLY.

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Asteroid to Make Closest Flyby in History~By Andrew Fazekas

National Geographic News

Talk about too close for comfort. In a rare cosmic encounter, an asteroid will barnstorm Earth next week, missing our planet by a mere 17,200 miles (27,700 kilometers).
Designated 2012 DA14, the space rock is approximately 150 feet (45 meters) across, and astronomers are certain it will zip harmlessly past our planet on February 15—but not before making history. It will pass within the orbits of many communications satellites, making it the closest flyby on record. (Read about one of the largest asteroids to fly by Earth.)
"This is indeed a remarkably close approach for an asteroid this size," said Paul Chodas, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Near Earth Object (NEO) program office in Pasadena, California.
"We estimate that an asteroid of this size passes this close to the Earth only once every few decades."
The giant rock—half a football field wide—was first spotted by observers at the La Sagra Observatory in southern Spain a year ago, soon after it had just finished making a much more distant pass of the Earth at 2.6 million miles (4.3 million kilometers) away.
This time around however, on February15 at 2:24 pm EST, the asteroid will be passing uncomfortably close—ten times closer than the orbit of the moon—flying over the eastern Indian Ocean near Sumatra (map). (Watch: "Moon 101.")
Future Impact?
Chodas and his team have been keeping a close eye on the cosmic intruder, and orbital calculations of its trajectory show that there is no chance for impact.
But the researchers have not yet ruled out future chances of a collision. This is because asteroids of this size are too faint to be detected until they come quite close to the Earth, said Chodas.
"There is still a tiny chance that it might hit us on some future passage by the Earth; for example there is [a] 1-in-200,000 chance that it could hit us in the year 2080," he said.
"But even that tiny chance will probably go away within the week, as the asteroid's orbit gets tracked with greater and greater accuracy and we can eliminate that possibility."
Earth collision with an object of this size is expected to occur every 1,200 years on average, said Donald Yeomans, NEO program manager, at a NASA news conference this week.
DA14 has been getting closer and closer to Earth for quite a while—but this is the asteroid's closest approach in the past hundred years. And it probably won't get this close again for at least another century, added Yeomans.
While no Earth impact is possible next week, DA14 will pass 5,000 miles inside the ring of orbiting geosynchronous weather and communications satellites; so all eyes are watching the space rock's exact trajectory. (Learn about the history of satellites.)
"It's highly unlikely they will be threatened, but NASA is working with satellite providers, making them aware of the asteroid's pass," said Yeomans.
Packing a Punch
Experts say an impact from an object this size would have the explosive power of a few megatons of TNT, causing localized destruction—similar to what occurred in Siberia in 1908.
In what's known as the "Tunguska event," an asteroid is thought to have created an airburst explosion which flattened about 750 square miles (1,200 square kilometers) of a remote forested region in what is now northern Russia (map).
In comparison, an impact from an asteroid with a diameter of about half a mile (one kilometer) could temporarily change global climate and kill millions of people if it hit a populated area.
Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center at Cambridge, Massachusetts, said that while small objects like DA14 could hit Earth once a millennia or so, the largest and most destructive impacts have already been catalogued.
"Objects of the size that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs have all been discovered," said Spahr. (Learn about what really happened to the dinosaurs.)
A survey of nearly 9,500 near-Earth objects half a mile (one kilometer) in diameter is nearly complete. Asteroid hunters expect to complete nearly half of a survey of asteroids several hundred feet in diameter in the coming years.
"With the existing assets we have, discovering asteroids rapidly and routinely, I continue to expect the world to be safe from impacts in the future," added Spahr


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Photography and the growing mobile movement ~By JD Lasica

     

Photography and the growing mobile movement

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Richard Gray’s photo of Alice Cooper, taken with a DSLR and processed with an iPhone editing app.

Even the pros are increasingly using smartphones & mobile editing tools

Will smartphones not only influence but dominate the next generation of photography?
I’ve come around to the conclusion that answer has to be a qualified yes. And although I documented last week’s Macworld | iWorld Expo 2013 with a Canon 5D — here’s my 35-photo Flickr set — I was very much in the minority among the waves of iPhone-wielding attendees.
If there’s any doubt about mobile devices’ impact on the world of professional photography, I refer you to Friday’s session at the conference titled “iPhoneography: iPhone In Education & The Mobile Movement in Photography” by British photographer Richard Gray. Gray tweets at @rugfoot, writes the iPhoneography blog iphoggy, and he shared his presentation Lessons learnt teaching iPhoneography on Google Drive.
Sessions on iPhoneography — defined as “a purely digital photographic process using Apple’s iPhone camera as the primary tool” — often focus on some of the cool if gimmicky apps (some of which I use) such as Percolator, WordFoto, TinyPlanets, ArtRage, Color Splash, Decim8, Slow Shutter Cam, AppAlchemy, ToonPaint and others.
But Gray, who teaches iPhoneography to students in Great Britain, brings a professional photographer’s eye to this fascinating emerging landscape. On a recent trip to Corsica, he supplemented his big camera with his iPhone and came away with some stunning images.

Mobile photography offers a journey down riveting side roads

Richard Gray captured his image with his iPhone on a subway ride.

“The arrival of iPhoneography shows that people don’t always want to take a journey of perfection. Sometimes they want to take side roads and find imperfection and distortion and dirt.”

“With traditional photography, using a DSRL (digital single lens reflex camera), it’s a linear journey toward perfection,” Gray said. “The arrival of iPhoneography shows that people don’t always want to take a journey of perfection. Sometimes they want to take side roads and find imperfection and distortion and dirt.”
As has happened with music and video, with photography once again technology is disrupting cultural norms that had persisted for generations. While a great photographer still needs that ineffable quality — a good eye, a sense of how to capture movement at just the right moment — mobile technology is democratizing photography in a big way.
“I think tomorrow’s professional photos will come from those who are taking photos with the iPhone,” Gray said. “Today they’ve begun to hone their skills and sharpen their eyes, and I’m sure that’ll translate into making money with photos in the future.”
The marketplace is beginning to reflect that. On a recent magazine assignment, Gray said, 85 percent of the photos he sold were taken with an iPhone.

Mobile photography, journalism & art: A revolution in the making

A winner at the Mobile Photo Awards.

Gray mentioned three resources for photographers who want to monetize their mobile photos:
• FOAP, a mobile photo agency with a straightforward business model: You and agency get $5 each on each $10 sale.  Scoopshot, a photojournalist agency that lets you sell photos and video to local news outlets from your smartphone.
• RooM, a rights-managed mobile content agency.
Last April I was drawn into iPhone and iPad art at ArtHaus Gallery in San Francisco, which featured a stunning exhibit of Mobile Photography Awards from photographers, including my friend Shane Robinson. And last week’s Macworld Expo featured an iPhone Film Festival and an art gallery filled with images created on the iPad or iPhone.
If you know of other mobile photography exhibits or awards, please share in the comments. With more than a billion smartphones in the world — a number expected to double in just a few years — it’s a trend worth keeping an eye on.

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Facebook Graph Search Is Here. What Do Marketers Need to Know?~By Michael Lazerow

           Social Graph Combined With Intent Data Is   Powerful Mix for Marketers... 

When Facebook announces something, people listen. And  when  the words "Facebook" and "search" are mentioned in one event, people really listen. And when marketers learn the possibilities presented by this new search product, called "Graph Search," they'll listen even more.

While Zuck did not focus on brands, it's clear where Facebook is going with its search strategy. And businesses large and small will be one of the primary beneficiaries.
What Did Facebook Announce?
Zuck announced the social networking giant's foray into search in Menlo Park Tuesday. Instead of pages and links, the heart of Facebook search is called Graph Search, which is the love child of its scantily clad search bar and Facebook's humongous social graph. And it's the third child of the Facebook ecosystem, which already includes News Feed and Timeline.
Zuck made clear that Graph Search is not a search engine. Instead, when people go to search for a term, they'll be directed to people, places, or Pages that already exist on Facebook, instead of a series of links. And because Facebook has its massive social graph to flex, search results will be displayed based on personal relationships that you've established on the network.

So How Does it Affect Marketers?
Think about the potential in terms of sheer volume of search queries. With over a billion people on Facebook, creating more than 240 billion photos and more than a trillion connections, imagine how many search queries will be performed each day. Every time someone searches for something, your branded content will have an opportunity to appear to Facebook's vast user base. Though users can only find content that has been shared with them, Graph Search makes it much easier to find track.

Consider that by creating a tie through the social network between a user and your Page, you are now providing another chance for you to reach people; this time, in the form of a branded search result.
This points to a larger trend in personalization.
I've said many times that people are people, and need to be treated as such. We're done with the days of people being labelled as expiring cookies or data points; instead, marketers need to treat people like human beings. Graph Search is the next logical step in this process for Facebook and social marketing. By building a fan base, creating engaging content and building a community, you can ensure that you're there when your fans and the friends of your fans are searching for something on the site.
The secondary benefit to marketers is that Facebook will now be conditioning its billions of users to search for what they're looking for. Does this sound familiar? Yes! It's intent. And Facebook has never been able to capture intent. The combination of social context (what your friends like) and intent (what you're looking to buy) will make it possible for advertisers to take Facebook's already amazing targeting to the next level.
I don't want to blow your mind just yet, so I won't go much further down this path. But imagine what happens when you combine intent, social context and custom audiences (i.e. the data you have about your customers). All of a sudden, Ford can advertise to friends of their current customers who are in the market for a car today. That's exciting and opens up many possibilities to take loyalty and social referrals to the next level.
Graph Search is only available to a few Beta testers. So for now, you should continue to focus on creating great content and buying sponsored stories to amplify the resulting engagement across the social network. Connecting to consumers using today's strategies will turn out to be the best form of SEO down the road as Graph Search takes off, and will ensure you aren't trying to play catch up when the functionality is launched to over one billion people across the social network


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3 More Critical Roles that Need SEO Skills~By James Mathewson

 

 



Panda and Penguin

Last month, I wrote about how SEO is not just the domain of consultants. Rather, every person in digital media production needs to know how their work affects search effectiveness. If SEO is seen not as a well-kept secret by the few SEO consultants, but as a vital skill for everyone, organizations will be much more effective in producing findable content for the target audience, especially in the age of Google Panda. Thing is, if you rely on Google to discover your content and give it the value it deserves, you will often be disappointed. You also need to build a network of links into your content, which tell Google about the relative importance of the content in the context of other related content. In the age of Google Penguin, this can’t be an artificial process performed by SEO consultants. It needs to be built into the publishing process. This means coordinating your publishing efforts with other internal content strategists, with paid search leads, media relations managers, and especially community managers. Giving these folks the SEO skills they need to help promote your content is just as important as building the content right in the first place.

Paid Search Leads
You would think that in-house SEOs have strong connections with their counterparts who run paid search. In my experience, this is rare. Most of my counterparts in the B2B tech space don’t even sit in the same division with their paid search leads. Yet we know that the two roles need to collaborate closely.
The consensus among experts in both paid and organic is that 1+1 =3, meaning that you get much more value if you buy the words and point to the pages for which you rank organically. Several studies showed that users tend to click organic listings up to 30 percent more often if there is a paid listing for the same page on the search engine results page (SERP). On the other hand, if the paid listing points to a different page than the organic ranking page, it just confuses prospects.
It is not hard to train paid search leads to work with their organic counterparts. You certainly don’t have to convince them of the importance of search marketing. And even the mechanics are similar. In paid, you rank against the other ads on a SERP based, in part, on the page’s quality score. The quality score criteria are similar to what it takes for a page to rank organically. Another thing that can help you climb the rankings in paid ads is the quality of the “creative”–the text and images around the link that entice clicks. If a paid listing has high click through rates (CTR), it will ascend the paid rankings all things considered, similar to organic. But if the landing experience has a high bounce rate, it will descend the rankings, again similar to organic.
The main difference between the two roles is bid and budget management, which is beyond the scope of this article. But the words that the paid search person bids on, the creative she uses, and the landing page she designates can all be improved if she understands SEO and collaborates with her organic counterpart.
Media Relations Managers
It has long been a dream of enterprise SEOs to be able to train their media relations colleagues in SEO, and thereby to maximize opportunities to build links. At minimum, press releases and other media relations assets need to use the right keywords and URLs they list within them. This might be easy for a small company. But enterprise SEOs struggle with this mightily. I lost count of the press releases that used only branded words and pointed only to the home page.
Every time a media relations manager publishes a press release without the right keywords or URLs within them, it is a missed opportunity to build links. Of course, the press release itself carries some link juice (contrary to Matt Cutts’ December statements). But that is of minimal consequence compared to a reputable journalist or blogger writing an article or post with the link inside of it. In the age of Penguin, links are only valuable to the extent that the domain of the linker is strong. Getting an influencer to link to your page can improve your ranking by several slots in one day.
In my experience, the biggest barrier to training media relations professionals in SEO is a disdain for marketing “chest thumping.” So Job One is convincing them that the pages you want them to link to from within their press releases are authentic, transparent, accurate, and clear. Above all, you need to convince them that they are free of hyperbole. Not coincidentally, these are some of the qualities that can help your content rank better for Google’s Panda algorithm.
Community Managers
Community managers, also known as social business managers, constitute a new role within marketing and communications. Part blog editor, part influencer relations manager, part social media expert, these folks are on the vanguard of digital. As I recently wrote on WritingforDigital, search and social are interrelated. With the advent of the new Facebook Social Graph, and the ascendency of Google+, they are, in fact, converging. I expect within the next three years that the roles of SEO, content strategist, and community manager will be functionally interchangeable.
I normally have no difficulty explaining to these folks the importance of SEO. More often than not, they come to me asking for advice on how to make their blog posts rank better. But we can’t take for granted that their blog authors are using the right keywords and URLs in their posts, or that the shortened links in tweets and Facebook posts stem from the right canonical URLs. And we need to work together to ensure that their blog authors are registered with Google+, so they can begin accruing Author Rank and we can get their pictures in SERP snippets. Consequently, I’m in almost daily conversations with dozens of community managers. I consider them to be some of my closest colleagues. Enterprise SEOs would do well to follow my example.

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