Tag Archives: Internet marketing

July 24, 2012 · 8:41 am

Painting A More Complete Picture

Two pieces from eMarketer caught my eye last week.  Both have to do with marketers’ usage of social media.  From the first, you might be tempted to short Facebook stock and wonder why Google is spending so much time on G+.  From the second, you might just realize that once again we find that getting beyond a sexy headline and into some facts can help paint a very different picture.

The first piece was all gloom and doom:

Social Media Usage Plateaus Among Marketers

Oh no!  Is this whole sector of the digital economy heading right down the tubes??:

When the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) surveyed US marketers this year, 90% said they were using social networks for their efforts—about even with last year, at 89%. While this percentage has risen dramatically since 2007, when just 20% of marketers used social media, growth has plateaued—and shifted to other new digital media platforms instead.

It goes on to talk about mobile and location-based services.  Of course, it also mentions that the investment in social was $3.63 billion in the US and over $4 billion more in the rest of the world. And that’s just paid ad spending.  Which leads to the other piece, which asks the obvious question:

What Are Marketers Spending on Social Media?

It turns out that:

most marketers have less than 20% of their marketing budget set aside for outreach on social sites—including advertising and maintaining a social media presence…While these percentages may seem small, marketers reported that budgets were increasing. AdAge and Citigroup found that 72.9% of respondents said they expected their overall social media budget to increase over the next year. This is in line with data from Useful Social Media, which, in April 2012, found that 54% of US companies planned to increase their social media budgets by up to 25% in 2012.

If 90% of marketers are, in fact, already using social (and there’s an entire book to be written on how badly most of them are doing so), of course the growth rate is slow – there’s hardly any room to grow.  If nearly 3/4 of them are expanding their budgets, the dollars flowing to social are going to be the envy of many other media.  It’s on the social companies and the marketers’ agencies (and consultants!) to help develop metrics and other criteria to assure and measure success so the investment pays off.

Interesting when we get past the headlines and start asking questions, right?

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July 18, 2012 · 9:49 am

This Is My 1,000th Post!

I posted my first bit of drivel on May 22, 2008.  It was all of 218 words and by way of introduction I said:

My name is Keith, and I’m a guy who works with companies on using media to grow their businesses. It could be that nasty old traditional stuff like radio and TV or it could be that newfangled stuff like social media. Either way, bubba. Since it’s not about the channel.

Hopefully the writing has improved a little but what I like is that the basic mission hasn’t:

You would be surprised how many folks I’ve met over the years do something because it’s cool…rather than because it ties in nicely to their business goals, strategies, and tactics.  So that’s what we’ll look at in this blog, with a particular emphasis on the emerging media business as well as sports. I’ll probably throw in a few food tips as well since we can’t be all work and no play.

Which is pretty much where we still are although I guess there’s the odd tip I’ve learned over the last 35 years about managing thrown in as well.  The technology has changed a lot in four years but business hasn’t.  We’ve committed to Friday as our food day and I probably don’t write as much about sports now as I used to.  We still generally avoid politics other than to use them to illustrate a broader point (although I’m thinking about using one day a week to focus on facts without advocacy as we hit election time – thoughts?).

Here’s the most important thing I can say to you after 999 other attempts:  thank you.  Thank you for reading, for sharing posts with others, and for taking the time to comment, both here on the screed and back to me via email (I realize some of you don’t want your thoughts quite so public – fine with me!).  Hopefully you’ll do more of each of them in the future.  I’m always surprised and grateful when someone I’m just meeting or with whom I’m reconnecting says “I like your blog.”  I can see readership numbers but it’s always better for me to meet just one actual reader.

If you had asked me a few years back if I’d still be posting every work day four years down the road, I’d have said that I don’t have that many words or cogent thoughts in me.  Turns out I was wrong.  Thank you all very much!

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July 11, 2012 · 8:38 am

An Audience Of One

I was catching up on my podcasts the other day when one of the marketing gurus

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

used the phrase “an audience of one.”  It resonated with me because it seems a concise expression of everything we’re trying to achieve in marketing and media:  reaching exactly the right individual at exactly the right time via the exact channel with the unique message that will get them to use our product or service.  The Holy Grail, right?

To a certain extent, search marketing comes closest to that.  The user is expressing intent – where can I get a pizza around here?  What’s the best replacement hard drive for a PC?  We don’t know always know for certain if the search is for themselves or on behalf of another nor do we know where they are in the purchase cycle.  On the other hand, when they click on a search ad – not just on a search results listing – my thinking is they’re indicating that they’re nearly ready to buy since one generally conducts research with neutral sources and not something as obviously prejudiced as an ad.  Maybe that’s wishful thinking.  But whether it’s search or some other form of audience targeting, the ability to gauge intent and anticipate a reply is at the core of digital marketing technology.

I’m raising this today because of the record fine levied against Google yesterday.  As you probably know, they were caught bypassing some privacy controls to snoop on iPhone and iPad users.  I’m sure in some engineer’s mind, being able to use all the data made available by this tracking would help improve a user’s search experience and bring them (and Google’s advertisers) closer to the nexus of intent and message.  But it was, and is, a nasty invasion of privacy.

That issue – how to balance the quest for the audience of one and the rapidly disappearing concept of privacy – is big and getting bigger.  I think it may invoke the law of unintended consequences – as we try to make advertising better and more relevant we end up making it less so due to the imposition of strict controls by folks who don’t understand technology.  Not only won’t we get to the audience of one but the audiences we currently can distinguish will become less clear.  That helps neither the marketers nor the recipients of the messages.

Any ideas?

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