Mediarketising

Regardless of what you may think of Kanye West he is putting on a Twitter-centric marketing campaign at a level we have not yet seen.

Society’s new mass communication tool, Twitter, is being near perfectly used by Mr. West. On July 28, 2010 Kanye joined Twitter amid a west coast trip where he did stunt performances at Twitter HQ and Facebook HQ. Can you imagine a better place to do performances announcing your entrance into the social media world?

Kanye is using Twitter as a distribution channel for his thoughts and free content. He used to have a quite awesome blog at kanyewest.com/blog where he used to do this stuff at but is currently under construction. I believe Kanye is in the middle of a persona reinvention. Putting his blog on hold, starting up a Twitter account to communicate quicker with fans (on a much larger base) and apologizing to Taylor Swift, and introducing a free single every Friday for over the past few weeks in something Kanye is calling Good Friday (the arrogance hasn’t left).

Kanye has made Twitter his personal sounding out medium and is allowing his fans to connect with him on a very (seemingly) personal level. You can debate whether this is sincere, either way it’s working. He is allowing people to gain a different perspective of him and adding more time people spend on thinking about him. Throw in a reason to come back to his Twitter page every Friday for free content and you have a solid marketing campaign. I’ve broken it down to: give people new access to your brand, free valuable content, and a reason to revisit on a scheduled basis.

I think the next step in this campaign will have Kanye start following some people on Twitter. He currently follows nobody and he can further the effectiveness of his communication by talking back to the community and also increase the excitement around his brand. Excited to see what happens next in the lead up to his next album.

A few months ago, Twitter rolled out a new part of their service called Promoted Tweets, which are part of two paid media opportunities being offered in a private beta to select clients. The other paid opportunity offered is called Promoted Trends.

Both of these products are our first glimpses into how Twitter will begin to monetize their service from an advertising perspective and the paid media products also offer up a fundamentally new way for advertisers to connect with consumers.

Some clients that have already participated with Promoted Tweets and Trends are Coca-Cola, Universal, and Disney and the results are showing that Promoted Trends offers great visibility and engagement for brands.

Promoted Tweets work quite differently than usual paid media buys (read: online ads). Online ads generally take the form of a disruption to the content one is looking to consume on a specific site. The ads may be fun and interesting, even delightful, but in most cases they do not add value to the content you want to experience. Promoted Tweets changes this paradigm. As Dick Costolo, Twitter’s COO has stated, Promoted Tweets are not ads and I agree with him. They come from advertisers’ Twitter streams and are not separate ads. To clarify, they are tweets, not ads.

Currently, Promoted Tweets only show up in Twitter searches, but we should expect to see promoted tweets coming into our Twitter feeds soon. When we do, they will allow advertisers to ensure that opted-in followers will have a greater chance of seeing their tweet.

I think Twitter has come up with a super-smart idea on how to monetize their service. With that said, what may seem like a super smart idea at first can be gamed and lessen the value the service offers. When Google’s AdWords program started to gain a lot of traction, it seemed like the perfect advertising medium for direct response advertisers.

Search ads are still highly effective, but doing a few searches today on Google or Bing shows it’s clear that the system can be taken advantage of and not all ads are useful. The industry is always getting better, but we have significant room to improve.

Twitter didn’t rush to launch their paid media offering. They took the time to build a robust advertising medium. The information Twitter aggregates gives them a competitive advantage to take their users’ insights and turn them into effective programs for advertising. If Twitter succeeds at doing this with Promoted Tweets, it could be big win for Twitter, brands, and users as well.

Originally featured on The Next Great Generation

There are a few things that signal summer is here. Ice cream trucks riding around, bad programming and reruns on TV, and going to the beach. I finally happened upon the last of these today for the first time this summer. While lounging on the sand, book in hand, I look up at the sky and see a small plane dragging along an ad for a cell phone carrier or so I think, it was hard to read. Watching this indistinguishable advertisement soaring across the sky I started to think about what is the CTR of this ad? How is this piece of advertising fitting within the experience of going to the beach? Is this the only beach this ad is being shown at? Etc. Etc. Etc.

Advertising is not new. I’ll spare you the reading and me the research of going through the history of advertising but Wikipedia says it going back to the Egyptians and papyrus circa 4000 BC. I’m confident it goes beyond recorded history. It’s an innate desire to evangelize something you believe in and are excited about. This trait is not isolated to humans either. We have all seen a dog looking for validation from the ball they just fetched. Like humans, that dog wants to spread a message that is assumed to have value to the other party. There have been nefarious advertising that has come and gone but I will stick to the advertising which looks to benefit both the seller and consumer.

What does papyrus posters from 4000 BC have to do with the airplane banner at the beach? Both of these ads are interruptions. They are non-organic experiences which attempt to promote an idea into the thoughts of those inside the context of that medium. This is advertising and it sucks.

We are comfortable accepting advertising in its current form and we have no other choice, I understand this. I want to start a dialogue which begins to bring this issue to surface. Advertising should be a natural part of our media consuming experiences. I am not talking about ad targeting, behavioral targeting, and sophisticated forms of advertising like this. This form of advertising is helping ads be more useful for users but is still a disruptive part of media consumption. A banner ad will never be organic. I hope my banner ad will stop being for an AARP membership (I’m 24) but even if the ad is for Girl Talk tickets (I like Girl Talk) the ad is still a disruption unless I’m in the current mindset of wanting to learn more about Girl Talk. Yet, I still see the AARP ad or an ad for a new car. I live in NYC and I am 24. I can barely even afford a cab ride let alone a car. Come on advertising!

The point is that even the most targeted advertising in most cases will not be an organic part of the media consumption experience. I believe we need advertising that naturally fit within the media we are consuming at any point in time. If we are reading an article on NY Times about the traveling to Mexico offer me more content on traveling to Mexico. Don’t offer me a discount for the local Mexican restaurant or to watch an ad about extended business class seating. Advertising should enhance the users’ experience. As Nick Law from RG/A recently put it, advertising needs to be interesting. I believe interesting resides within the medium and the context it creates.

In following posts, I will dive into popular mediums for advertising and ways I believe we can begin to change advertising to be more useful.

This is my semi-response/thoughts to Forrester: Why Most Marketers Should Forgo Foursquare (only 4% of Adults using it)

There are brand/business rewards from foursquare ranging from mayorship and frequency of check in rewards but currently the rewards with foursquare look to be much more intrinsic than extrinsic.

The people I follow on Twitter and my friends on 4sq look to be using the service for much more social, intrinsic motivating reasons than to get a $1 off a drink. People enjoy the glory of being mayor of local place that they have to battle for with another patron. They enjoy showing off their “School Night” badge to a friend. It’s cool to check-in to that hot spot restaurant or some made up venue (try checking into Heatpocalypse). It’s a bragging right, a badge of pride. The coolness factor, ‘it’ company, and novelty of the service is surely helping to drive this but this informal way of sharing information is just fun. From a communications stand point, when you meet with friends what do you talk about, “Where you’ve been recently?”, it’s fun to share (as Twitter asks) “What’s Happening?”

How long these intrinsic motivating factors can last is of course uncertain which is why we are seeing so many biz dev deals being struck with major brands (Bing, Starbucks, etc) and loyalty reward programs like CardStar. Extrinsic motivators should (3 things) help bring in people that are skeptical of “Why would I want to use this”, create that longer lasting value after the coolness affects wears off, and prove to other brands that they can run with the best.

I believe the extrinsic motivators will help gain more of that 96% not using LBS and then turn those people experiences with LBS into an intrinsic motivating experience.

The verb “to check-in” has taken on a drastically different connotation over the past 18 months. Checking in has gone from the realm of a person-to -person connection as in “Hey Mom, I’m staying at Tyler’s house for the night. Just checking in with you.” To a person to place relationship as in “Noah Singer just checked into 9th Street Espresso” or how it would appear in Twitter “noahlsinger I’m at 9th Street Espresso http://4sq.com/2kr8jW.” I believe that the latter version of checking in will be how we predominantly think of this verb and will play a prominent part in our social lives as people. Marketers should also take notice and they have since this is an important pillar in branding and spreading messages to your audiences.

Marketing is about finding and influencing people to sell goods or services to . There have been many ways that marketers have gone about doing this: TV, newpapers, radio, billboards, magazines, phone booths, the yellow pages, people’s foreheads, and the list goes on. Enter in the rapid increase of Internet usage and digital devices and these media choices explode. Marketers are able to data mine terabytes of human activity information to personalize messages for each individual consumer, or so the goal is. That Overstock.com ad you see in Grooveshark for a little black dress that you looked at 2 weeks ago is no coincidence. Advertising based on behavioral targeting is not a new thing and will only improve. However, the behaviors we are aggregating data on are changing. Online, always connected technologies like our ever so useful mobile devices are leading this change.

At the vanguard of this change are location-based services (LBS). Some of the more common LBS are foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Loopt, CauseWorld, and SCVNGR. All of these services let you check in at certain locations and share this message with your friends on that LBS, Twitter, and/or Facebook. Beyond this shared function they all differ in their unique value propositions and offer different experiences on their platforms. The key here is that people are beginning to create a database of information which shows where they are going and which places they are actively choosing to show an affiliation with. This is awesomely powerful from a sociological point of view and more importantly for marketers, marketing of course! Marketers are using this information to strengthen their connections with consumers through specials for those who check-in at certain locations, by creating journeys/scavenger hunts through these services, and adding more contexts to what their brand stands for through tips about cities and places.

Based off the number of advertisers who are exploring this on foursquare, it is clear that LBSs are a marketing hit but is it appealing to Millennials? I believe this is appealing to Millennials. My first hunch is based off my own group of friends. My friend’s Facebook walls are becoming more and more populated with 4sq.com location links and this trend doesn’t seem to be stopping. My second hunch is that with major universities being some of the first organizations to create LBS experiences, like Syracuse University & the University of Arkansas, that any Millennials not on board, will soon be. Most university students will now be introduced to an LBS when going off to school to help explore their new homes.

In two years from now what will checking in come to stand for? Will we be still checking in with Mom? Friends? Your girlfriend? I’d think no. I believe the way we communicate our location will change. We will still call people to say, “Hey, where are you?” as an ice breaking question but this won’t be the crux of the conversation since this information will be already be known.

Originally featured on The Next Great Generation

Wikipedia defines metropolis as “an important hub for international connections” & no other place in the world connects a diverse array of people like New York which is why New York is the King of Cities. Before you read any further it is important to understand that New York means everything & anything to everyone who has ever stepped foot on this island. My two cents on the city are as subjective as any other New Yorker pulled off the street. This is the greatest thing about New York and what makes New York the King of Cities since everyone’s connections are unique and non-duplicable. And while these hands will paint a particular picture; New York can only be experienced and appreciated in person.

I believe in this since New York City transcends Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Seinfeld’s Upper West Side, or Samantha’s SoHo. While great entertainment, these media only help glorify what a typical NYC experience is like and there is nothing typical about NYC. Part of NYC’s atypical-city nature comes from the mashup of industries whose home is here: Fashion, Finance, Media, & many others. No one type of people dominates the city’s landscape and the result makes for enriching experiences that differentiate NYC than any other city in the world.

For 20-somethings or those in the mindset of a 20-something, enriching experiences are what we strive for. We want to explore. Going to a friends’ friends’ friend’s rooftop party and meeting someone who is doing a job you could never even imagine is common. Experiences like these helps further that exploration and keeps you on your feet as to what’s possible. Then as the night settles over the city and you look out from that rooftop onto the color-lit Empire State Building herculeanly standing over the rest of the city, you understand the immensity you’re caught in and can’t help but smile.

NYC is also known for our non-stop action, always-something-happening atmosphere that begs to be discovered. Not a day goes by that there isn’t a new bar or restaurant that opens up and a new museum exhibit or art gallery that debuts. Subscribing to Thrillist or Urban Daddy keeps your to-do list ever growing and during the summer we all check Vanity Fair’s Summer Guide (pdf) for what’s popular but of course, we all knew of those hot spots anyway.

In addition to the new places that always catch buzz, NYC has more types of places to go than Epcot’s wildest dreams. Exploring the wide array of options is part of the adventure of living here. Whether it’s a Bavarian Biergarten, 5 Shots for $10 bar, Pretzel Shop, Venezuelan Arepas Restaurant, Secret Cocktail Lounge, or a Milk Bar that serves cereal milk ice cream, NYC has it all (and that’s only in the East Village!).

One thing that does connect everything together is that NYC is always changing. Some changes happen over a short period of time, like the mural on Houston Street and some go across generations. The saying may be trite, but the one constant NYC has in its life is change. People are always coming and going and every summer as new college graduates come here, a new influx of people ready to take on the city emerges. At first they stick out in the crowd like a family from Nebraska gawking at Times Square but soon enough they fit right into the thick of things, directing that family to take the F train since that goes down Delancey.

That is the power of New York. No matter if you were a punk, geek, outcast, jock before you came here, once you are here, you are a New Yorker. This is the place where dreams are made of. It is so nice you better say it twice. In short, it is the King of Cities.

Originally featured on The Next Great Generation

There are great tools available to help search marketers expand upon their existing campaigns and come up with actionable insights to make their campaigns more efficient. Tools like Microsoft Advertising Intelligence & Microsoft adCenter Labs do a fantastic job at precisely this. You can do new keyword research, pull demographic information, & find keyword price estimates all at the click of a button. Search engine marketers find tools like these to be very helpful, but what else can be done to optimize campaigns?

Social media offers a great resource to help generate ideas on how search marketers can expand their current campaigns and optimize ad copy to best address searchers’ needs. Twitter, Facebook, online forums, blogs, & other social media outlets are where consumers are engaging in conversations about your products, brand, & industry. Listening in on the conversations happening on these properties can translate into insightful, precise optimizations for your search campaigns. Below are three ways to use social media to optimize search and I invite you to list more ways in the comment section.

For more information on social media check out Microsoft Advertising’s social media white paper Learn and Earn.

Keyword and Negative Keyword Expansions

Bing Social searches & Twitter searches reveal the topics people are tweeting about regarding your search terms. Bing Social search works better for this research since Bing aggregates tweets by top shared links which makes for easy scanning of popular topics.

A good place to start your search would be with your brand or top selling product. For this blog post, let’s say we are an online retailer who sells sport jerseys. A quick Bing Social search shows that there was a lot of buzz around Bing sponsoring the Seattle Storm’s jersey. We can use this information in two ways to help optimize our account.

The first way we can use this information is to expand our current keyword set. People may begin searching on ‘Bing jersey’, ‘Seattle jersey Bing’, etc. in looking to purchase the new Seattle Storm jersey. This is an opportunity for this retailer to see sales from a new set of search terms.

The second way we can use this information would be to prevent our ads from serving on these terms with negative keywords. Suppose this retailer who sold jerseys did not sell W.N.B.A. jerseys, we would want to mitigate the search traffic looking for the new Seattle Storm jerseys. We would want to use ‘Bing’, ‘Microsoft’, etc. as new negatives for our sports jersey campaigns.

Ad Copy Optimization

Engaging with consumers through ad copy is a part of search engine marketing (SEM) that can keep us constantly on the edge of our seats trying to figure out what words and phrases resonate best with searchers. One practice a marketer can use is to scan the social media conversations happening across the web to ensure that their ad copy is speaking the needs of their audience. Again, a Bing Social search will help you scan the conversations that are related to your business. Look for recurring themes and issues people are experiencing with your product. Tailoring your ad copy to address the needs people are tweeting about can help you connect better with consumers when they are searching on Bing.

There are many ways marketers can use social media to listen in on the online conversations occurring about their products. The ones listed above are ideas to get you started and I look forward to hearing from others on how they have used social media to help better engage with consumers through search and other marketing mediums.

Originally featured on the Microsoft adCenter Blog