ITZ Publishing

13 Super Startups to Watch

Read the original post at Website Magazine here:

http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2012/02/17/here-s-what-s-hot-13-super-startups-to-watch.aspx?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter

The Web world moves at a furious pace, and digital workers can miss the next big thing in the blink of an eye. Some emerging services such as Pinterest are fortunate enough to take center stage while other solutions of seemingly equal value to Web pros wallow in relative obscurity.

When WM covered this week’s launch of Chirpify, a new retail sales platform for Twitter users, it made us realize that we were due for a look at some of the hottest new products, services and startup companies on the Web. Some you may have already heard of (some we’ve even mentioned before), and some you may actually be using, in which case we would like your honest input in the comments section below. Please free to also use that section to add your own selections to the following list.

AdClarity 
A newly launched product from Israeli company BIScience, AdClarity aims to give online advertisers the most detailed analysis yet about their competitors’ advertising campaigns. The product has been designed to show users where on the Web a competing advertiser’s campaign has run, which ad networks, agencies and affiliate networks were used, and exactly what was included in the campaign’s ad creative.

CrowdVi.be 
Peanut Labs has launched a new iteration of its crowd-sampling tool that allows businesses and brands to receive real-time insights about products or procedures from the Web community. The online surveys go out to more than 50 million Internet users on 200 social networks around the world, who participate in order to earn Facebook credits or other forms of virtual currency. Users can target specific segments of consumers based on their attributes and the types of questions a company wants answered. The new service costs a dollar or less per user and results are returned within seconds.

Dwolla 
This new payment network was created to eliminate credit card fees and make it quicker and easier for online businesses to receive payments. The platform offers free micro-transactions for purchases less than $10, and a flat rate of 25 cents for all other transactions. Dwolla offers many plug-ins to enable its services to work with e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento and creLoaded.

Gremln 
Similar to HootSuite, Gremln is a social media toolset for small businesses. The service enables users to schedule tweets on popular social media sites including Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. It comes with four packages that start out free and range up to $500 a month. The Basic (free) package enables users to sign up for five social network accounts, provides an engagement dashboard, allows for five scheduled messages per hour and recurring scheduled massages, translation, goal tracking, two RSS feeds, social analytics and integrates with Bit.ly.

Jun Group 
This startup’s embedded video platform gives users a way to deliver video to targeted audiences in the channels they consider most important, such as social games, mobile devices and YouTube. The Jun Group already generates millions of opt-in video views each month and reaches over 101 million active users, as well as providing built-in analytics tracking and pinpoint targeting based on factors such as age, gender, location, mobile device and content category.

LaunchBit 
Former Google marketing manager Elizabeth has just launched an email advertising network she describes as providing an experience similar to AdWords. LaunchBit users create their ads, identify the demographics of the audience they want to reach via email, then choose the cost-per-click (CPC) price they will be willing to pay. The ads win a certain number of impressions in multiple newsletters, ensuring that users reach their target demographic while getting their campaigns in multiple newsletters.

LiveIntent 
Another email advertising platform that caters to publishers, advertisers and agencies, LiveIntent comes fully compatible with all ESPs and delivers its LiveTag display ads in real-time via email newsletters. LiveTags can be delivered on any type of device the moment a recipient opens his or her email message. Advertisers can target audiences based on a variety of factors, and all ads are optimized for location and device. Publishers can use the platform to maximize the value of their email inventory while keeping control over ad ops. So far, the company has partnered with major brands such as MSNBC, Verizon, The Weather Channel, Maxim and more.

MiNeeds 
With more than 50,000 registered professionals and services providers, MiNeeds is quickly becoming an online marketing tool of choice for smart, social businesses. By offering consumers a highly efficient way to shop for services, the startup has become a consistent lead and revenue generator for local vendors and small businesses. Users post their needs online and then receive competitive proposals from local professionals without having to initiate contact, negotiate costs or waste time on the phone.

Nimble 
Startup social relationship manager Nimble has been around for a few years and is earning the reputation as a revolutionary online business solution. Named to ZDNet’s 2012 CRM Watch List, the startup enables small businesses to engage customers in a two-way dialogue by leveraging the power of traditional CRM and social media with its Web-based social CRM platform.

Profitero 
This startup provides pricing intelligence solutions for retailers and manufacturers, meaning it helps you answer questions about how much your competitors charge for similar products; how many they have in stock; what new products they’ve started selling; which of your products are more expensive; if you’re missing sales, and which products you don’t price high enough. Profitero will help users sell their products at the most accurate price-point possible in line with the rest of the market, and it does so by providing up-to-date competitor pricing information and answering the aforementioned questions in minutes.

Retailigence 
Retailigence is a startup company that powers location-based shopping solutions, mostly mobile apps and websites, by providing specific information about a retailer’s products by location. The platform helps brick-and-mortar retailers reach local shoppers, and promises to do so at the height of their intent to purchase. Retailers use Retailigence by providing their product-specific (such as in-store availability) and location information, and then Retailigence shares that information with its developer and publisher partners to include on their sites, apps, etc.

SinglePlatform 
Launched in 2010, SinglePlatform helps local businesses get discovered online. The platform helps small businesses extend their storefront to millions of customers through publisher networks of hotels, city guides, review sites and mobile apps. It also helps local businesses promote their menus, specials, photos and services, as well as manage social media pages, websites, mobile sites and more. Most recently, SinglePlatform partnered up with Foursquare in order to provide menus for restaurants on the location-based social network.

 

The metrics you should be using

Read the original Post at Imedia Connection here:

http://www.imediaconnection.com/article_full.aspx?id=30946

 

• Jarvis Mak
• Contact

Web Analytics Posted on February 15, 2012

"You can't manage what you don't measure," is an old management adage. However, by the same token, just because you can measure something, does not mean you should manage by it.

I authored a previous iMedia article about why clicks are the wrong metric. In that article, I alluded to the view-through effectiveness of display advertising despite the absence of clicks. In the spirit of that conversation, I want to discuss the relevance of other metrics in determining campaign success.

Use: Brand measures like lift in awareness or consideration

You can't click on a billboard, radio, or TV ad but we know they impact awareness, consideration, even purchase intent. Of course, the same is true of online ads. If the campaign has a branding objective, then optimize to it, ideally with a real-time data-driven approach.

Brand marketers want solutions that demonstrate improvement over time, transfer learnings across campaigns from top of the funnel to mid-funnel, and finally, result in sales. Everyone loves search for converting in-market folks but don't always remember to widen the funnel. As a marketer, if you rely on offline media (namely, TV) to be your lone awareness vehicle, then you're subject to over-saturation in television and missing out on cross-media optimized exposure. Complement offline with a digital awareness initiative.

Use: Ideal customer composition

Most advertisers know their customers inside and out, or at least they think they do: They have detailed customer profiles, even personas of Jim the Technophile or Susan the Savvy Bargain Shopper. However, when it comes to reaching those audiences in media delivery, the richness of the Jim and Susan personas are often lost to become coarse gender and age descriptions of "men 25 to 54" and "women 18 to 34," respectively.

Publishers that have personas that perfectly match advertisers' personas are one step ahead of the game. For advertisers, you trust that the targets those publishers claim to have are good proxies for your ideal customers. If there are no publisher persona targets, then we've seen agencies often default to the age and gender target as the next best proxy.

Why use a proxy though? Optimize segment composition in real-time. How? With a survey-based approach. We tried this with a couple CPG brands, with excellent results. The first advertiser wanted to reach previous brand customers. Utilizing real-time survey input to optimize segments, targeting of previous customers increased by 50 percent over the course of the campaign. The second CPG advertiser wanted to reach frequent users, and the same technique resulted in the target composition of this audience growing by 40 percent during the campaign. Results were validated with an offline sales impact study from Nielsen with a 250 percent return on ad spend.

Use: LTV (Lifetime value) of acquired customers

For direct response advertisers, especially in finance and retail, customers acquired cheaply are often low-value customers, especially when promotions are involved. The value of more expensive leads (as measured by account balances or subsequent basket size and purchase frequency) ends up much higher than cheaper direct response leads. An agency that is maniacally focused on low CPA without regard to LTV is doing their advertiser a disservice.

To advertisers, this means arming your agencies with visibility into these LTV measures. It means you need to do homework about customer behavior and transactions so that agencies can also pass information about customer value along to publisher partners, even anecdotally. We once executed a campaign for a bank but we didn't have access to back-end metrics like deposit amounts. As the campaign slowly auto-optimized toward the metric we had, CPA, the agency provided us feedback that we should go back to what we had been doing before day 45 because after that point, although CPA improved, the average starting balance amounts started shrinking considerably. With that bit of feedback, we were able to rejigger settings to pre-day 45 and go back to acquiring higher value customers.

Ignore: CTR

See the aforementioned iMedia article. We almost always provide data about how optimal segments are negatively correlated with CTR. For many agencies, they are glad to get this analysis to provide back to their advertisers as part of ongoing education.

For example, we demonstrated to a customer that pursuing segments that demonstrated higher CTR for the campaign would have led to incorrect optimization. Trying to maximize CTR would have led to a lower quality audience, since "clickier" segments were not the ones with the highest target composition.

Ignore: Ad interaction rate

It is not universally true that ad interaction rate doesn't matter. When the rich media unit has rich functionality like lead capture or submit, some other transactional feature, or a product catalog based on recently shopped items, then interaction is highly relevant. This is usually accomplished with dynamic creative and an XML feed.

However, when ad interactions are really opportunities for an expanded canvas that tell a more elaborate brand story, the benefit is dubious at best. At Rocket Fuel, we repeatedly see that thesimpler ads are, the better. In fact, we have run static ads for a campaign alongside the long-looping Flash versions and find that performance is 50 to 300 percent better with simpler creative. 

If advertisers want to understand impact of ad interactions, work with your publisher partners to instrument their pixels in ad unit expansion frames. Get ahead of the game and work with your creative partners before the assets are finished. Then the publishers can do the same type of correlation analysis with a brand metric, as well as optimize in-flight if there really is a positive correlation.  

Ignore: Video completion rate

This is in the context of in-banner video. It is a natural extension of the other two "unimportant" metrics. Does it matter that a video plays all the way through to completion? How much does auto-start inflate the metrics? It really doesn't matter what percentage of ads went all the way to the end unless it was all reaching the desired customers. As a marketer, I'd be happy with static ads shown to the right audience over a 75 percent video completion rate to the wrong audience.

A very notable exception to this is when video completions are well-documented to correlate directly with sales, like movie trailers for theatrical releases.

Conclusion

In general, we almost always see that metrics about online ad engagement or interaction (alone) not translate to bottom line results as effectively as lifetime value, ideal customer targets, and changes in brand measures. Ad metrics can definitely be a part of the overall story of the campaign; however, I wouldn't recommend them in isolation. It happens too often that an agency measures (and eliminates) partners along a single dimension like ad interaction rate.

Instead, the advertiser and agency should compare partners along a multitude of dimensions. Better yet, go the extra step and attribute value along all these dimensions. Here are some thoughts to get you started on attribution. It is important to review and compare partners but measure in ways that give you a comprehensive view of their overall campaign impact.

Jarvis Mak  is VP of analytics for Rocket Fuel.

 

7 Hyperlocal Tools to Increase Business During Off-Peak Times

Read the origianl post at :

http://streetfightmag.com/2012/02/07/7-hyperlocal-tools-to-increase-business-during-off-peak-times/

 07 FEBRUARY 2012 BY STEPHANIE MILES

The employees are present, the tables are bussed, and the shelves are stocked. Now where are all the paying customers? Most businesses have slow periods or times of the day when they’d be willing to sell their products or services at a discount rather than let their inventory go to waste. The challenge, it seems, is finding the best way to do that.

New hyperlocal platforms aim to address this problem with real-time deals and offers targeted to potential customers in the immediate vicinity. By offering limited-time promotions during off-peak periods, small businesses get new customers through the door without displacing faithful regulars. Local merchants are often willing to accept the trade-off — which involves taking significant cuts off the prices of the goods and services they sell — if it means putting employees to work and unloading perishable products before they go bad.

Here are seven platforms that can help drive business during off-peak times.

1. ThinkNear
Developed as a way to help businesses attract the right customers at the right times, ThinkNear is a great solution for SMBs looking to increase foot traffic during certain hours of the day. Merchants tell ThinkNear what types of discounts they’re willing to offer and what hours are typically the slowest, and ThinkNear uses this information — combined with an algorithm that takes weather, holidays, and special events into account — to send targeted deals to people using smartphones nearby. In exchange for paying a $99 monthly fee, merchants are guaranteed that their ads will be seen by at least 5,000 mobile phone users. ThinkNear CEO Eli Portnoy says the service works best for restaurants, salons, spas, and other businesses in large-margin industries.

2. Chalkboard
Chalkboard is a hyperlocal network that uses mobile ads to help small and medium-size businesses increase foot traffic. Businesses experiencing a slump in sales can visit their Chalkboard account and type in the name of a new promotion, like half-off drinks or a 2-for-1 spa special. These promotions are instantly displayed on third-party mobile applications (like Friendly for the iPad) being used by people within a “few mile radius” of the merchant, as well as websites in the Chalkboard network. Merchants can run as many promotions as they want for a flat fee that ranges from $0.99 to $2.99 per day.

3. Closely
Small business owners interested in real-time marketing efforts are perfectly suited for Closely. The daily deal, social promotion, and mobile marketing platform gives SMBs the tools to publish offers and sell purchase-ready coupons on demand. Closely then delivers those deals to nearby consumers and promotes them on relevant social networks. A nail salon suffering from a rainy day sales slump can publish an instant deal to boost immediate traffic, while a restaurant that seems slow on Mondays can set up recurring deals that only run on that day each week. Closely doesn’t publish its exact pricing, but a rep for the company says it provides merchants services in the $50 to $200 per month range, with a 25% to 35% share of deal revenue.

4. Groupon Now!
Merchants who want to take advantage of the Groupon craze without getting in over their heads are using Groupon Now! to post limited-time deals for customers nearby. Local merchants can schedule their deals in advance to run during slow times of the day — like 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., for example. Once a deal closes, merchants get a check for the proceeds of the promotion, minus Groupon’s commission fee. Customers who fail to redeem their vouchers during these limited time slots can get full refunds, which means businesses don’t profit from unredeemed deal vouchers like they do with traditional Groupon deals.

5. LivingSocial Instant Deals
Remarkably similar to Groupon Now!, Instant Deals is LivingSocial’s take on real-time promotions. The service is best for merchants who’ve worked with LivingSocial before and enjoyed the experience. Deals are live for a short period of time, and they’re sent out to people using the LivingSocial mobile app within a half-mile radius. Merchants using Instant Deals don’t have to offer discounts as substantial as they would with a traditional deal, although LivingSocial still recommends that businesses offer deals that are at least 30%-off. Like Groupon Now!, LivingSocial Instant Deals requires no upfront costs and sends merchants their cut of the deals once the redemption period has closed.

6. Foursquare
Businesses that already use Foursquare as a loyalty rewards platform can leverage the service to attract customers during certain days or times by varying the check-in rewards and incentives they offer. Cafes wanting to boost their early morning sales can offer time-sensitive specials between the hours of 7 a.m. and 9 a.m., while retailers looking to get more people through their doors on a holiday weekend can offer charity donations for each check-in on specific days. Foursquare’s tools are free, which means the only costs merchants incur are based on the specific discounts and rewards they give to customers.

7. Qwikon
Most text messages are read within four minutes of receipt, which is why Qwikon believes that SMS marketing is the single fastest way to get real-time promotions in the hands of loyal consumers. The company provides merchants with all the tools necessary to gather contact information from customers in their neighborhoods. Once this information has been collected, merchants can blast out SMS offers any time they’re slow. Qwikon says 95% of these offers are opened within minutes, and the response rate ranges from 10% to 20%. Pricing for Qwikon is based on the number of messages sent per month, and varies from $49 to $249.

 

Twitter Shortcuts Cheat Sheet

Read the original post at 

http://blog.grovo.com/2012/02/twitter-shortcut-cheat-sheet 

From Grovo.com

Twitter Shortcuts Cheat Sheet

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Nick Narodny

At Grovo, we are all about efficiency. After writing our course on Twitter, we realized that very few people know about Twitter’s keyboard shortcuts–designed so that you can navigate and tweet to your heart’s desire without touching a mouse. To make everyone’s lives easier, we created a one-page Twitter shortcut guide:

Download it and tape it to your desk; it will save you quite a bit of time if you use Twitter 

News Sites Struggle with Ad Targeting | Digiday

Read the original post on Digiday.com here:  

http://www.digiday.com/publishing/news-sites-struggle-with-ad-targeting/#

By Josh Sternberg

News publishers are trailing behind the rest of the Web when it comes to ad-targeting technology.

Pew’s Research Center for Excellence in Journalism released a study of 22 news sites and found that just three employed “high levels” of targeting technology that delivers ads based on users’ previous online behavior. (Pew defines a high level of targeting as a site with at least 45 percent of the ads showing different ads from one user to the next.) Pew said 15 used “minimal” levels of targeting.

The research employed a curious methodology; Pew’s researchers would visit sites using their regular browser, then re-visit them using a different browser. The findings were based on the researchers’ perceptions of whether or not the ads were targeted. It did not deploy tech like Ghostery that sniffs out whether ad targeters fire pixels in order to target ads.

The study focused on premium digital ads that appear on the homepage or top of the article, where ad rates are the highest. Additionally, the study found that the tried-and-true banner ad philosophy that’s been driving online advertising for more than a decade is still the dominant form across these websites. The issue is that there are other tools the study points to—namely, behavioral targeting—these media outlets aren’t employing to its best use.

It’s no surprise then that Pew found the efficacy of the ads to be low. Perhaps just as important, the study found, “top news websites in the country have had little success getting advertisers from traditional platforms to move online.”

The larger issue for news sites goes beyond the use of off-the-shelf targeting tech. It’s that the data they’re using—people’s reading habits—isn’t all that valuable of a signal compared to others available online. Content consumption is unlikely to trump search and e-commerce behavior anytime soon as a signal for consumer intent.

 

 

Top 10 Facebook Apps for Fan Engagement and Building Community

Read the original post on SocialMediaExaminer.com here:

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/top-10-facebook-apps-for-fan-engagement-and-building-community/

By Andrea Vahl

Are you looking for ways to better engage Facebook fans and build your community?

These top 10 Facebook apps are, in my opinion, some of the most useful ones for pages when it comes to encouraging fan engagement and giving value to your community.

They are also very easy to use. Some may be familiar to you, but you may find some new gems to try out.

By the way, check out Top Ten Facebook Apps for Building Custom Tabs & Pages. If you are looking for a more comprehensive list, check out the one by Mari Smith: Top 75 Apps for Enhancing Your Facebook Page.

#1: Fan of the Week for Pages

Your fans like to be recognized. This application keeps track of participation on your Facebook page and then automatically posts a “shout out” to your fan of the week.

The application is free for the basic message, but in this post, Club D’Ville has upgraded to the paid version to post a custom message that rewards the fan of the week even more with some free passes.

Reward your fans with recognition or go a step further and give them some free goodies.

The fan of the week application also adds a custom tab to your sidebar that features that week’s fan on the tab.

To add it to your page, just go to http://apps.facebook.com/fanofthe/ and then choose the page to add it to. The app will automatically post to your page wall at the same time every week. Make sure you add the app to your page at the exact time you would like it to post.

Enabling the Fan of the Week for Pages app is easy.

#2: Booshaka

Booshaka is another application that will highlight the fans who are participating on your page more often. When you install the application, a custom tab called Top Fans is added to your page.

Fans get the most points for posting to your wall and they also receive points for comments and likes.

Booshaka gives points for participation.

You can view the stats of each fan listed to see how they have participated. The app gives a complete history of the fan’s activity on your page.

To install Booshaka, just go to www.Booshaka.com and click the blue Install button. They also have a Top Fans Pro version that rewards the top fans with perks.

#3: NetworkedBlogs

Facebook has changed the news feed algorithm, so it can be hard to keep track of what’s working and what’s not.

But in recent news, Facebook appears to have changed its algorithm again so that third-party posting applications such as NetworkedBlogs, HootSuite, TweetDeck and others will not be hidden in the news feed.

I have done my own research and have not found any collapsed posts from these applications, which is good news.

Even though it’s always best for engagement and EdgeRank purposes to post manually on Facebook, sometimes a little automation can be helpful. NetworkedBlogs is an application that automatically posts your new blog posts to your Facebook wall. You can use it to post to your personal profile, your Facebook page and Twitter accounts.

The application will pull in the title of the blog post, the first picture in the post (or a screen shot of your entire blog if there isn’t a picture) and the first few lines of the post. When someone clicks on the post, there are Share buttons at the top of the post to allow readers to easily share it with their networks.

NetworkedBlogs automatically posts your new blog posts to your wall.

I find the setup and navigation of NetworkedBlogs a little challenging, but there are help files. The easiest way to add NetworkedBlogs to your fan page is by going tohttp://www.facebook.com/networkedblogs and clicking on the Add to My Page link on the left sidebar.

#4: Post Planner

Sometimes you need to schedule your posts to your Facebook page. There are some scheduling tools such as SocialOomph, HootSuite or TweetDeck, but none has the capability to schedule posts with pictures or video. Post Planner can help with that.

The tool does cost $4.95/month to post to pages, but having some peace of mind that you won’t forget to post at the perfect time can help. Always make sure you are engaging and checking back into the conversation.

Post Planner also has a White Label version so you can customize the app name and send people who click on it to your website instead of to an application.

Post Planner can schedule posts with pictures.

The easiest way to install Post Planner is to go to www.postplanner.com.

#5: YouTube

If you have a YouTube channel, I recommend integrating it into your Facebook page so that people who come to your page can easily access your videos. There are many YouTube applications, but my favorite is YouTube for Pages by Involver. It’s easy to install, the layout is nice and it offers easy sharing.

Your most recent video is automatically displayed as the largest. The application will not automatically post your newest video to the wall, but you can easily post it with just two clicks.

The YouTube for Pages app prominently displays your most recent video

The application is easy to install from http://www.facebook.com/YouTubeApp and then click the Add to My Page link on the left sidebar.

#6: Livestream

Livestream is a great way to bring live video events to your Facebook page. The chat feature can make it more interactive with the audience. You can record the events for later viewing.

Mari Smith's recent Livestream broadcast.

To add Livestream to your page, go to http://apps.facebook.com/livestream/ and click the green Get Started button.

#7: ContactMe

Make it easy for people to get in touch with you with a contact form on your Facebook page. With the ContactMe app, you can add many different fields and customize the form to suit your needs. Install the ContactMe form athttp://www.facebook.com/contactforms.

Customize the fields or just keep it basic with a name, email and message.

#8: Constant Contact

Many people wonder how to add a newsletter signup to their page. There are lots of ways that include iFrame apps and design.

What I like about the Constant Contact application is that it is very simple to use. But it doesn’t allow for a lot of bells and whistles. You can add text to talk about your newsletter and even a picture as shown in the figure below.

But for people who are intimidated by code and too much customization capability, this application can be just the ticket to add a newsletter signup if you use the Constant Contact email service.

The Constant Contact Join my List app is easy to use.

Get started at http://apps.facebook.com/ctctjmml/.

Note: MailChimp also has a Facebook app for newsletter signup if you use their service: http://apps.facebook.com/mailchimp/.

#9: Scribd for Pages

Scribd is a document-sharing service that makes it easy to upload and share PDF, DOC, XLS, JPG and PPT files. People often want to be able to share a document with their Facebook community.

While you could upload the document to your website and share the link, the Scribd application allows people to easily view the document right in the tab and download it if they wish.

Involver also developed Scribd for Pages, and the easiest way to install it is to go tohttp://apps.facebook.com/involver_epdmxwnq/. You can also access it by going towww.Involver.com.

Add PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, pictures or Word documents that your audience can download.

#10: Ecwid

To open a storefront that operates within Facebook, add Ecwid to your page. Ecwid integrates with PayPal, Google Checkout, Authorize.net and several other payment processing options.

Setting up a store is a little more involved than the other apps listed here, but can easily draw attention to your products and services. Ecwid has forums and very good customer support to help you on your way to becoming a social e-commerce pro.

To get started, go to www.ecwid.com.

Easily create your own storefront that integrates with your Facebook page.

Applications can and should enhance your community’s experience with your Facebook page. They can also make your life easier with a little automation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR, Andrea Vahl

Andrea Vahl is the Community Manager for Social Media Examiner and the co-author Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies. She is also a social media coach, speaker and strategist. Other posts by Andrea Vahl »

 

Social And Email Top Growing Marketing Budgets For 2012

Read the original post on MediaPost here:

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/164416/social-and-email-top-growing-marketing-budgets-for.html

by Jack Loechner, 

 A recent StrongMail survey, conducted by Zoomerang in November, reflects the attitudes of business leaders about their planned marketing budgets, priorities and challenges for 2012, revealing a healthy outlook for marketing budgets with 51% of companies increasing and 41% maintaining current levels.

For the third year in a row, email marketing and social media marketing remain the top targets for increased spend. For the 2011 holiday shopping season, email marketers plan to focus on cross/upsell offers and promotion of in-store events.

Survey Highlights

• 92% plan to increase or maintain marketing spend in 2012
• 60% plan to increase email marketing budget; 55% social media; 37% mobile/search (tied)
• 45% cite data integration as primary email marketing challenge in 2012; 43% lack of resources/staff; 40% content management
• 48% cite increasing subscriber engagement as top 2012 email marketing initiative; 44% improving segmentation/targeting; 32% growing opt-in email list
• 68% plan to integrate email marketing with social media; 44% with mobile; 17% with search

Email marketing and social media were cited as the top two areas for increased marketing spend. According to the survey, 51% of businesses plan to increase their marketing budgets in 2012, and another 41% plan to maintain current levels.  Only 8% of respondents plan to decrease marketing budgets. Other areas of increased spend included mobile and search. Direct mail and tradeshows are top targets for decreased spend.

Plans For Increased Spending in 2012
Program	% of Respondents
Email marketing	60%
Social Media	55
Mobile	37
Search	37
Advertising	28
Direct mail	18
Tradeshows/events	18
Public relations	16
Source: Strongmail, November 2011

The top email marketing initiatives for 2012 are increasing subscriber engagement, improving segmentation and targeting, and growing opt-in email lists.

Top Email Marketing Initiatives for 2012 (% of Respondents Selecting Top 3)
Email Marketing Initiative	% of Respondents
Increasing subscriber engagement	48%
Improve segmentation & targeting	44
Growing opt-in email list	32
Integrating social media & social marketing	24
Implementing lifecycle messaging	20
Re-engaging inactive subscribers	19
Source: Strongmail, November 2011

Data integration is key to achieving these top priorities, but it is also identified as the primary email marketing challenge in 2012, followed by lack of resources and content management. These opposing data points represent an opportunity for email service providers to fill the gap, says the report.

Top Email Marketing Challenges for 2012 (% of Respondents)
Challenge	% of Respondents
Integration with customer data	45%
Lack of resources/staff	43
Content management	40
Maintaining high deliverability	33
Managing send cadence & frequency	29
Source: Strongmail, November 2011

More than two-thirds of businesses plan to integrate social media and email in 2012, versus 44% integrating mobile and email. The strong ties between email marketing and social media are also emphasized by the businesses that plan to increase investment in using email to drive growth in their social media channels, such as corporate Facebook and Twitter pages. 

Channels Planned for Integration With Email in 2012
Channel	% of Respondents
Social media marketing	68%
Mobile	44
Search	17
Display	14
Source: Strongmail, November 2011

More than a third of businesses plan to increase their investment in mobile marketing programs such as mobile apps and SMS alerts, but there is a lack of consensus on the primary value of this emerging channel.  Building customer and loyalty was identified as the top benefit, followed by expanded reach and awareness building.

Primary Values of Marketing Channels  (% of Respondents)
	% of Respondents Considering Valuable
Marketing Channel	Email	Social	Mobile
Awareness building	51%	64%	29%
New customer acquisition	38	36	23
Customer loyalty and retention	67	48	35
Reach new audiences	26	44	29
Driving revenue	44	14	26
Lead generation (B2B)	29	19	12
Not sure	3	11	24
Source: Strongmail, November 2011

Christopher Marriott, vice president of agency services at StrongMail, concludes that, “... while email marketing leads... in terms of increased investment in 2012... marketers need to overcome key challenges around data integration and resource constraints..."

For more information from Strongmail, please visit here, or to access the report PDF file, go here.

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/164416/social-and-email-top-growing-marketing-budgets-for.html#ixzz1mJcSvnjV

 

Pew: News Organizations Struggle With Digital Dollars

Read the original post at Broadcasting & Cable here:

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/480428-Pew_News_Organizations_Struggle_With_Digital_Dollars.php

New study finds that news outlets are not attracting the largest advertisers from their traditional TV and print platforms to their websites

George Winslow -- Broadcasting & Cable, 2/13/2012 12:01:00 AM

After more than 15 years of heavy investments in their online efforts, news organizations are still having a hard time getting the big advertisers on their traditional broadcast, cable TV and print platforms to place online ads on their main websites, according a major study of online advertising at 22 major news organizations by The Project for Excellence in Journalism at the Pew Research Center.

The study focuses on a key issue for traditional news organizations: How can they fund more of their newsgathering operations from the rapidly growing online and digital advertising sector? The question is a critical issue for the future of newspapers and magazines seeing a slump in print advertising and circulation figures. But it is also an important one for TV news organizations who face rapidly mounting costs from their digital efforts at a time when they face increased competition from online news sources.

So far the answers to that question are discouraging, the study found.

While news organizations have worked hard to persuade their print and TV advertiser "to buy space across multiple platforms, there is little evidence that they had succeeded" because "the kinds of products and service being advertised online were quite different than in legacy platforms," the study found.

Worse, the study found that "in-house ads, ads selling or promoting a news organization's own products, fill more space across these news websites than another advertising category," making up 21% of all ads captured during the study, Pew found.

The study also argued that news organizations are doing a relatively poor job of attracting the fastest growing types of online advertising.

For example, the 22 news web sites tended to rely heavily on static banner ads, rather than rich media or video ads, which EMarketer expects to grow by 43% in 2012. In contrast, the banner ads widely seen on news sites will increase by about 18%.

The study also found that very few news organizations were offering targeted ads based on consumer behavior, another increasingly lucrative online practice. "Just three of the 22-CNN, the New York Times and Yahoo News-employed high levels of targeting, delivering different ads to the researchers based on that person's recent online activity," wrote the authors of "Digital Advertising and News: Who advertises on news sites and how much those ads are targeted."

Overall the study found that the top advertising categories online were in-house ads (21%), followed by financial (18%), toiletries/cosmetics (5%), leisure time/activities (5%), corporations (5%) and job search (5%).

The breakdown is based on the volume of ads, not the money they may have produced.

In-house ads were most prevalent on the websites of magazines, accounting for half of all ads, followed by newspapers, where they accounted for 21%. In-house ads were less prevalent on the websites of TV news organizations, with Foxnews.com carrying the most at 12%.

Financial services were heavy advertisers on some TV sites, accounting for 45% of the ads on ABC.com, 30% on CNN.com, 25% at MSNBC.com and 21% at Foxnews.com. CBSnews.com slightly under-indexed with 15%, compared to the 18% average for all 22 sites. 

The study also found significant differences between the prevalence of different types of advertising on cable TV news channels and their web sites. While financial services was the biggest category for cable news online sites, it was the 5^th largest category on cable TV news channels in terms of the volume of ads. In contrast, movies, which were the largest cable TV news category, were relatively rate online.

In terms of network TV news, prescription drug ads accounted for 16% of the ads on network morning and evening news, but "they were just half that on the web," the study concluded.

Online the network TV news sites also relied heavily on financial ads, which made up 31% of their total analyzed, while those ads accounted for only 4.3% of ads on the network TV shows.

Overall, video ads were also relatively rare. "They were most common on cable news websites but they still made up only 2.5% of the ads," the authors noted. "Video ads made up even less on network TV sites, 1.2% at CBSnews.com and less than 1% at ABCnews.com."

Overall the study analyzed 5,381 ads on the main websites and legacy outlets of 22 different news organizations. The initial phase covered ads in various days between June 28 and July 1, 2011. The researchers also followed up with various sites on their targeting efforts on Jan. 27, 2012.

 

Google Knowledge Graph Could Change Search Forever

Read the original post on Mashable.com here:

http://mashable.com/2012/02/13/google-knowledge-graph-change-search/

10 hours ago by Lance Ulanoff21

 

Click to see full graph example

Google has a confession to make: It does not understand you. If you ask it “the 10 deepest lakes in the U.S,” it will give you a very good result based on the keywords in the phrase and sites with significant authority on those words and even word groupings, but Google Fellow and SVP Amit Singhal says Google doesn’t understand the question. “We cross our fingers and hope someone on the web has written about these things or topics.”

 

The future of Google Search, though, could be a very different story. In an extensive conversation, Singhal, who has been in the search field for 20 years, outlined a developing vision for search that takes it beyond mere words and into the world of entities, attributes and the relationship between those entities. In other words, Google’s future search engine will not only understand your lake question but know a lake is a body of water and tell you the depth, surface areas, temperatures and even salinities for each lake.

To understand where Google is going, however, you need to know where it’s been.

Search, Singhal explained, started as a content-based, keyword index task that changed little in the latter half of the 20th century, until the arrival of the World Wide Web, that is. Suddenly search had a new friend: links. Google, Amit said, was the first to use links as “recommendation surrogates.” In those early days, Google based its results on content links and the authority of those links. Over time, Google added a host of signals about content, keywords and you to build an even better query result.

Eventually Google transitioned from examining keywords to meaning. “We realized that the words ‘New’ and ‘York’ appearing next to each other suddenly changed the meaning of both those words.” Google developed statistical heuristics that recognized that those two words appearing together is a new kind of word. However, Google really did not yet understand that New York is a city, with a population and particular location.

Still, word sequences and the meaning they have is something, but not enough for Google or Singhal, who was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

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Big Changes Coming

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Google now wants to transform words that appear on a page into entities that mean something and have related attributes. It’s what the human brain does naturally, but for computers, it’s known as Artificial Intelligence.

It’s a challenging task, but the work has already begun. Google is “building a huge, in-house understanding of what an entity is and a repository of what entities are in the world and what should you know about those entities,” said Singhal.

In 2010, Google purchased Freebase, a community-built knowledge base packed with some 12 million canonical entities. Twelve million is a good start, but Google has, according to Singhal, invested dramatically to “build a huge knowledge graph of interconnected entities and their attributes.”

The transition from a word-based index to this knowledge graph is a fundamental shift that will radically increase power and complexity. Singhal explained that the word index is essentially like the index you find at the back of a book: “A knowledge base is huge compared to the word index and far more refined or advanced.”

Right now Google is, Singhal told me, building the infrastructure for the more algorithmically complex search of tomorrow, and that task, of course, does include more computers. All those computers are helping the search giant build out the knowledge graph, which now has “north of 200 million entities.” What can you do with that kind of knowledge graph (or base)?

Initially, you just take baby steps. Although evidence of this AI-like intelligence is beginning to show up in Google Search results, most people probably haven’t even noticed it.

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Knowledge Graph at Work Today

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Type “Monet” into Google Search, for instance, and, along with the standard results, you’ll find a small area at the bottom: “Artwork Searches for Claude Monet.” In it are thumbnail results of the top five or six works by the master. Singhal says this is an indication that Google search is beginning to understand that Monet is a painter and that the most important thing about an artist is his greatest works.

When I note that this does not seem wildly different or more exceptional that the traditional results above, Singhal cautioned me that judging the knowledge graph’s power on this would be like judging an artist on work he did as a 12- or 24-month-old.

It could be seen as somewhat ironic that Google is addressing what has been a key criticism leveled at it by its chief search competitor, Microsoft Bing. The software giant ran a series of scathing commercials, which while never mentioning Google by name, depicted the search results most people get as comically lacking context. Most people understood that the criticism and joke was aimed at Google, and now Google is doing something about the quality of its results.

When I asked Singhal if he had thought about Bing’s criticism and realized that Bing has long advertised that its results focus more on useful answers instead of links, Singhal deflected, saying he couldn’t comment on what Bing may or may not be doing.

It’s also worth noting that millions of people now believe they already have AI search thanks to Apple’s iPhone 4S and Siri, the intelligent assistant. It uses the information it can access on your phone and through the web to answer natural language questions. Whatever Google’s Knowledge Graph can do, it clearly needs to go beyond Siri’s brand of AI.

Pinpointing exactly how far you can take the”search of the future,” however, is somewhat difficult for Singhal. “We’re building the ‘hadron collider.’ What particles will come out of it, I can’t predict right now,” he said.

On the other hand, Singhal does admit that it is his dream to build the Star Trek computer. Like Siri, you could ask this computer, which appeared on the 1960s sci-fi TV show, virtually any question and get an intelligent answer. “All aspects of computing or AI improve when you have such an infrastructure in-house,” said Singhal, referring to the massive knowledge graph Google is building. “You can process query or question much better, and you get a step closer to building the Star Trek computer,” he said.

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Beyond Search

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Speaking of Star Trek, there is another frontier that might benefit from the power of Google’s Knowledge Graph: Robotics. Singhal is, admittedly, no expert, but noted that robotics, which exists at the intersection of mechanical engineers and computing, struggles when it comes to language capabilities. “I believe we are laying the foundation for how robotics would incorporate language into the future of robot-human interaction,” he said.

It’s an exciting thought. Being a robot geek, I proceeded to paint a picture of the future that Singhal did not disagree with: Future robots with access to Google’s entity-based search engine might be able to understand that the “tiny baby” they’re caring for (What? You wouldn’t leave your baby with a robot?) is small, fragile and always hungry. The robot might even know how to feed the baby because it would know the entity “always hungry” has to be cross-referenced with the fact that it’s a “baby,” which is also an entity in the knowledge graph, and includes attributes like “no solids.”

As we talked, it occurred to me that while 200 million entities is a lot, the world of knowledge is vast. How many entities would it take for the Google’s Knowledge Graph to know the answer to everything? Singhal laughed and instead of pinpointing a number spun the question around:

“The beauty of the human mind is that it can build things and decide things in ways we didn’t think were possible, and I think the best answer I can give right now is that the human mind would keep creating knowledge and I see what we’re building in our knowledge graph as a tool to aid the creation of more knowledge. It’s an endless quantitative cycle of creativity.”