iThnk.com

Advertising Conversations – An AdWords Experiment

Generally advertising and social media are regarded as separate entities. Social Media is about transparency, dialogue and building relationships; whereas advertising is merely interrupting your day to get a message across.  But things are changing.

It used to be quite foreign to see corporate URLs in ads, but nowadays you couldn’t call yourself a decent marketer if you didn’t promote your URL. Similarly, not so long ago it would have been considered shameful to part with any amount of coin to promote your blog.  However,  recently I’ve noticed people advertising their blogs on facebook, and some are even using Adwords.

This got me thinking, is social media going the same way as the URL? Are we going to see an explosion of twitter, facebook and myspace icons all over billboards?

I’m dubious as to whether you can actually draw people into a conversation through advertising, but I thought I’d put this trend to the test by taking advantage of the Google Business Stimulus Offer. Over the next couple of months I’m going to use the $75 free AdWords credit to see if we can boost iThnk.com’s readership. I’ll be looking at a number of things, total page views, time spent on the site, returning visitors and on site activities such as comments, diggs, retweets and sharing.

I set up the initial run of ads for this wee experiment two weeks ago and so far my limited exposure to Google AdWords has already taught me some valuable lessons. After reading that some companies will pay upwards of $60 U.S for a single click using keywords such as “car insurance”, I felt compelled to do share my thoughts on how NOT to spend that much.

Country music your thing? You like it so much you’ve started a blog about it? Well of course you’re so stoked on your blog you want to share it with everyone that may (or may not) be interested…you could run an AdWords campaign!  Watch out though, simple keywords like “country music” will could cost you $0.78 a click – and Google estimates you’ll expose your ads to almost 3 million searches. Ouch, that could be expensive. “Country music blog” will not have anywhere near the same amount of traffic but could sting you $1.20 a pop. Can you afford to fork out $1.20 every time someone clicks on your site? Remember there’s a reasonable chance they won’t like what they see. Money well spent?

So what do you do to get that wicked blog seen by interested peeps without needing to chuck the acoustic on ebay? Target your campaign locally, use local search terms, and get REAL value for money. “New Zealand country music blog” may not get millions of Garth Brooks fans to your site but those who do respond to your ad will definitely stick around a lot longer. At an estimated $0.09 a click it won’t take long busking outside New World to fund an awesome AdWords campaign.

Quick tips:  Keep an eye on what search terms are generating clicks and modify keywords accordingly, keep your daily limits at levels you are comfortable with, and use keywords in the ad text. Oh and don’t click on your own ads everyday to make sure they work!

I’ll be back with an update on our progress sometime in the near future. (Update here)

Blogs Are Conversations Waiting To Go Viral

A few years ago I stumbled across Dr Ralph Wilson suggestion that there are 6 fundamental principles of viral marketing:

1. Gives away products or services
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
3. Scales easily from small to very large
4. Exploits common motivations and behaviours
5. Utilizes existing communication networks
6. Takes advantage of others’ resources

When I first read Dr. Ralph’s 2005 post I didn’t truly understand the impact that viral marketing was going to have on us. While his hotmail example is still a great guide for product adoption, since 2005 the web has changed. Now everything can go viral.

We now live in the world of status updates, retweets, and diggs. We spend more time online, devour more information, and share that information across a far wider range of networks. Why? Because it’s easier and more fun than it has ever been.

Everyone can ‘go viral

Because every company has a story to tell, every decision is fuelled by inspiration, and every person has a passion to share, everyone can now ‘go viral’.

In the past if you were posting on a blog or Vlog to fuel an on going conversation what you were doing was not considered viral marketing, it was relationship marketing or PR. This was simply because adding to a conversation didn’t scale dramatically into the same explosive buzz that giving away email accounts did. But today any post that is shared, retweeted or Dugg becomes part of mini-viral interaction, and there are thousands of these mini-viruses spreading and then dying  out every single day.

6 has become 3

There are three fundamental viral conversation guides:

1. Start a conversation that inspires us
2. Make it easy for us to retweet, digg & share
Scales easily from small to very large – What number does your retweet button go up to?
Exploits common motivations and behaviors – We’ll share it if your story is good enough
Utilizes existing communication networks - We’ll share it wherever we want to
3. Use third party tools and apps e.g. don’t make a video & not upload it to youtube or vimeo

What do I do with this viral attention?

All traditional viral messages die eventually. The more people that know about your viral campaign the smaller the incentive to share becomes, but the more people that are involved in a conversation the more valuable the dialogue. With blogging, viral marketing shouldn’t be viewed as a once off promotion, but instead a catalyst for a drawing people into your conversation.

If you continue to spark enough mini-viral conversations, one day one of  them might just reach millions.  Just ask Jeff Jarvis who’s Dell Hell experience is now being used as a case study in first year marketing classes around the world.

Popular plugins and widgets to help your blog ‘go viral’

Digg Digg WordPress Plugin

Reblog with Zemanta

Sexy Bookmarks! WP Plugin – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn…

Social Media Revolution (Short Version)

I recently gave a presentation to a group of relatively high powered social media newbies about what social media could do for their business. I needed to make an impression and finish it off with some wow-factor. Naturally, I turned to the web to find a video that illustrated exactly how important social media is today, and how important it will continue to be in the years ahead.

Unfortunately, all the decent videos that I came across on both youtube and vimeo were just a bit too long for my presentation. So simply using windows movie maker I decided to edit the “Social Media Revolution” video by Socialnomics.  The result is the ‘presentation friendly’ 2.37min video that you see below.

To my absolute delight the video went down a treat and I might just have some work coming my way shortly. I’d strongly recommend using this or something like this in your presentations as it’s incredibly powerful and gives you loads to talk about.

If you decide to use this clip for any reason I’d be eager to hear how it works out, so please do let me know.

Why Free Is The Answer For Rugby

Professionalism, television and the loss of “love for the game” have all been blamed for the declining crowds at Rugby grounds around the country. The irony of the professional era is that while SKY pays $664million a year to players, unions and administrators, it’s also killing gate takings.

Otago’s solution for their non-existent crowd has been the construction of Forsyth Barr Stadium which is estimated to cost ratepayers $261million. For a population of 120,000 it’s a massive investment. One that may never actually break-even.

Before committing to such a huge project you’d think they would have tried absolutely everything to get people to games in the existing stadium, but you’d be wrong.

While they have tried various promotions, nothing they’ve done has come close to a new business model. At the moment the number of officials & security people at games appear to outnumber the fans, so with such dismal attendance why not try a  new ticketing model.

Free Tickets

The answer is free because …

• It erodes the difference (the cost) between going to the stadium and watching the game at home. This helps fill the stadium.
• More bums on seats means that the money not made at the gate would be recovered through food and beverage sales.
• More eyeballs equals more advertising dollars. With a stadium full of people more money could be made from advertising on signage throughout the stadium.
• Some premium sets could be charged for as people don’t want to rush for the best seat in the house (similar to Ryanair’s Premium boarding).
• A full stadium creates a great atmosphere. More people makes for more fun. More fun and more kids seeing their hero’s in the flesh may just reverse the loss of love for the game.
• You don’t have to charge for everything to make money, you can make money from the add-ons.  More loving fans, means more merchandise sold.

So what have they got to loose – it’s not like they’re making any money from tickets at the moment anyway. But the question at the heart of this model is…would you go to a free game?

This post is based on an idea shared by @ophil, and is backed up by Chris Anderson‘s new book “Free, the future of a radical price” (download the free audiobook here).

Social Media Vids Everyone Should See

These are some of the greatest social media videos available online today – if you know of any vids you think we should add just post a link in the comments.

As the song hint’s boom of the social media is “right here, right now”. This is 4 minutes and 22 seconds of wicked in your face social media facts – These facts should serve as a wake up call to anyone who still think that they’ll be able to get through the rest of their working days without the the social web affecting them.   Get on board or get left behind.

While at first this video seems quite cutsie and whimsical there is a very real message here….stop shouting and start engaging! Stop interrupting the things I enjoy just to get your message across, and start becoming the thing that I enjoy. Be the business that I want to engage with and I’ll spread your message for you = No more cash spent on interruptive ads that I either ignore or skip over.