Written on May 15, 2008 – 5:08 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The Next Web Blog covers start-up news from all over the world (not just the Valley), exciting new technologies and inspiring entrepreneurs. If you're new here, you may want to read our '
About' page and subscribe to our
RSS feed.
If you came here from Digg it would be great if you could actually Digg us too! Do you have a start-up that we should write about?
Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!
“Marketers have no idea how to use social media”. Nate Elliot made a clear statement at Next08 this afternoon. He’s working for JupiterResearch, a New York-based research firm that interviews 10,000 executives from Europe and the US every year. So he’s the kind of guy who knows how to use social media to engage the desired target audience. There are two major problems in this field. The first one is clear, marketers just don’t get the new technologies and the fundamental changes in the way people interact with brands. Although they spend 30,000 dollars on a campaign, half of the branded social network pages only have 1,000 friends or less. Secondly, more than 75 percent of the marketers doesn’t measure whether their campaigns were successfully engaging the audience. And only 15 percent measures brand metrics like ‘awareness’ and ‘attention’.
So while consumers are talking about their brands online, marketers do a bad job in participating in those conversations. “If no one solves these problems, social marketing will have a limited future”, said Elliot. In order to prevent an early death of this new marketing branch, JupiterResearch has created some rules for social marketing - based on similarities in successful campaigns. Elliot” “They’re not revolutionary, but a vast majority of the marketers makes these mistakes”.
Rule 1: Your messages aren’t going to promote themselves
Although a lot of marketers trust on the viral effect of Internet campaigns, 85 percent of them found no viral pass along. So the viral magic only works for less than 15 percent of the campaigns (which I think is still a surprisingly large percentage). Elliot gave the example of the Intel Powers Music campaign. The chip producer started a contest to find the best MySpace bands and created “a really good site” The marketing team realized they had to run payed ads to get people’s attention. So they did. After three days, Intel stopped advertising, expecting the viral hype to take off. It didn’t happen… So lesson no. 1, you have to keep promoting your branded page as viral pass along is scarse.
Rule 2: Focusing on engagement can double your ROI
Most marketers treat their branded social network pages as micro sites. “The Rambo MySpace page looked exactly like Rambo.com. There was no interactivity, no games, nor contest. I see that happening over and over again”, Elliot complained. He stresses that at least a little bit of interactivity can generate on average twice as many friends. A good example is online retail store Zappos. Their CEO Tony Hsieh uses Twitter to promote his store. “It really works”, said Elliot, “it puts a personal face on a huge company.” The consequence of this kind of marketing is that it becomes part of your life. Elliot: “Tony has to update 25 a 30 times a day, just like everybody.”
Rule 3: if you’re not measuring results, you throw away money.
“It’s a little bit scary to learn that more than 75 percent of the marketers isn’t measuring the results of their campaigns. If you’re not measuring you don’t know whether your money is well spent nor if your campaigns are getting better”. No matter how you do it, set a goal and measure against it! When the audience asked Elliot for some ways of measuring, he didn’t really give a satisfying answer. Of course you can measure the number of friends, but that doesn’t say a lot about engagement. You can also use technology to study the online behavior of visitors or take surveys to find out what your consumers think. “Eventually, marketers have to connect the dots”, Elliot concluded.
Further reading
I was slightly shocked to learn that marketers make so many mistakes on the field of social marketing. If you count yourself to one of those marketers, I suggest your start following Muhammad Saleem, whose well-know as THE social media marketing expert and marketing guru Seth Godin, as he blogs about the way you should think these days.
Written on May 4, 2008 – 10:42 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Keeping track of blogs like The Museum of Modern Betas and KillerStartUps sometimes drives me nuts. How many new start-ups could there possibly be? Everyday, another fifty seem to launch. So obviously, when you’re building a start-up of your own, getting attention is vital.
And this is the point where Lauren Nash from Sososher corrects me. She thinks “a big percentage of the success of a web start-up, among many others, is based on traffic.” Her start-up is at the beginning stages of design and construction. Nash: “We thought rather than do a Beta or Soft launch, we would start to generate traffic before the website has actually been launched.”
So she and the rest of the team created one fancy page that certainly creates high expectations.
The news reporter desk includes all kinds of gimmicks, focused on two things: impress you with eye-candy and persuade you to sign up to a newsletter or social network group. We don’t know anything yet, only that this English start-up will “change the way you shop online”. But it MUST be something cool right?
So although there’s still nothing going on here, I’ve posted this article to inspire other start-ups out there. Find ways to stand out, it absolutely works. If you asked a Next Web conference attendee which presenting start-up they can remember, he or she would probably mention Soocial. Why? Because they created a hilarious campaign around lost-glory star David Hasselhof. That’s how easy it can be. I’m sure you can mention another example?
Written on March 29, 2008 – 12:08 pm
Mike Sheetal, Next Web WebTipr in Japan
I have written before about how QRcodes are a great way to access websites on mobile phones and how they are already commonplace in Japan. They are used in advertising and in everyday services that allow mobile access.
Cabal recently blogged about another method for locating websites in Japan. The method shows a search box with the search term inside that will help you locate the website in lieu of a URL. Of course this implies you should go home and type this term into your favorite search engine to locate the website.
This system only works if you have the top search result position or the top advertising position on that keyword, but I am guessing these companies have made sure at least that they bought the keyword out so they appear as the top paid search result on all the major search platforms. The thinking is that people can remember a keyword easier than a URL. From doing a quick ask-around of Japanese friends, it seems that most find this advertising annoying and unclear. I am not a fan of it either.
Another method that seems to have a quite high representation in Japan and hasn’t been talked about in western press that much is the menu navigation method.
The Menu Navigation Method
This method of getting people to your website is also aimed at mobile users. Entering URLs on a mobile phones can be time consuming and frustrating, so many advertisers are looking at ways to get users to their pages in simple ways that involve scrolling and clicking rather than typing.
This method is based around one of the sad realities of the Japanese mobile web. Most traffic on the mobile web is funneled through the landing pages of the major carriers (DoCoMo, AU and Softbank). It is changing slowly but it is still the case that most people use these pages just as many PC web users use Yahoo, Google or other portal pages to find their content.
This is an example from the ANA website showing the navigation paths from each of the three major carrier topages. NB. DoCoMo uses iMode, AU uses EZWeb and Softbank uses Yahoo Keitai.
Using this established familiarity with this portal page navigation, a lot of advertising replaces the URL with a path of navigation from the top portal page from the major carriers. The carriers are obviously happy because it keeps people in “their world” as long as possible.
More important though, they also charge money for portal listings. This process allows them to filter for “approved” content and control the economics which is fast moving towards free for connectivity on the mobile phone. As connectivity charges go down, total advertising and listing revenues are growing.
The main flaw to this method is the difficulty in remembering the navigation steps, sometimes there are up to 8 pages to click through before you get where you are going. The negative effects of this are limited by the usage case which usually has the advertising appearing in locations where you can refer to the navigation path while entering in your mobile phone. Places such as magazines, train platforms and PC sites are common locations to see them.
The Menu Navigation Method looks to be here for a while, but only as long as the carriers control the navigation pathways. Once people start to break out from the major portals, you may see the use of this technique drop, but if history is anything to go by, the Japanese people will keep to their safe portals for a while yet.
Written on March 13, 2008 – 11:54 am
Reinout te Brake, online gaming expert
Hey you, yes, you! You are responsible for that huge buzz about online casual games! Since you are playing online games everywhere, whenever and so many times, you were helping in the past years to get a whole industry started. Do you actually know the term “casual games”, “ingame advertising”, “return on investment” and “venture capital”? We do. We, as in the online casual gaming industry. We are building games to please you as a player and make money of it. We try to understand your behavior in every way so we can develop specific games for men, women, boys and girls. Strategy games, role playing games, multiplayer games, arcade games and many more. You just have to choose or did we already know what you would choose?!
The online casual gaming industry has grown the last years significantly because more and more sites are offering games to the public at large. Not only you will find these games on specific games portals like Miniclip, GamesGames, and Pogo, but you will find more of these games in social communities like for example Facebook.com. Every day millions of games are being played online and therefore lots of companies did start to develop (often flash-based) games. These companies are located all over the globe, from China to USA, from Holland to India.
So I ask you just take a moment to think about it. What kind of games do you like? Where do you normally go to online to find these games? Do you (want to) pay for games or do you accept advertising around these games? All of these questions went already through the heads of those smart game developers and their marketing teams. They figured that these games are interesting marketing tools. You probably consider them just as nice playable games, but this industry is building on knowledge and experience on your behavior when it comes down to playing games online. (more…)
Written on February 28, 2008 – 1:22 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Yesterday TechCrunch reported that LinkedIn would launch its new lay-out today. Mark Hendrickson wrote that ‘these updates feel like an attempt to mimic Facebook’. Well, LinkedIn is not just using Facebook as an inspiration for the design, also some marketing techniques are copied.
You might remember that Bill Gates joined Facebook a while ago, but left as he was overwhelmed with friend requests - around 8,000 per day. It created a good buzz, and that didn’t go unnoticed by LinkedIn.
Because, surprise surprise, the Microsoft Chairman has now asked a question on LinkedIn:
The answer is of course: stay on Facebook and talk with them! Before you go ahead and answer the question, you might want to check out this demo of the new LinkedIn features. Since whether they copy marketing techniques or not, they’re still a good service for professional networking.
[WebTipr: Yaniv Solnik, Israel]
Written on February 8, 2008 – 3:18 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
When online marketing expert David Sadigh from IC Agency asked the LIFT08 audience who used the Internet in 1995, he was surprised by the huge response. “In 1995 it used to be a tool for geeks”. The situation has obviously changed, since the Internet is a mass medium now. “Even dogs are about to go online” Sadigh joked (no response this time). That makes it interesting for sales, he said. But the striking thing about the Internet is that the content is the same for everyone, yet we’re all unique and have our own wishes.
Because the content is not adapted to their needs, 98 percent of the visitors leave commercial sites without buying. Yet business pump in 35.5 billion dollars in online marketing on a yearly basis to attract visitors to their site. “Imagine if you had a store where everybody walks in but nobody is buying anything - you would definitely fire the person whose running the shop. Then why do we accept this on the Internet?”
As you might have guessed, Sadigh had the answer to this shocking question. ‘Internet isn’t really born yet”, he said, it’s a new medium, sort of like a 2 or 3 month old fetus”. So because of its new character, we’re not yet focusing on things like customer experience. Well, actually we just started, since Sadigh confronted us with this phenomenon. He urges companies to decode the visitors’ intentions and personalize content according to the decoding. Just like Amazon already did in the early years with the personalized recommendations. It’s just that Sadigh wants us to take it to another level.
How can we do that? What can we personalize? Some suggestions made by Sadigh:
- Intentional targeting, display a specific product related info related to an engine search on that specific model. When somebody searches for family vacations in Italy, you don’t show just a classic Italian picture but go for the family-eating-at-a-big-table photo.
- Geographic targeting
- Event targeting, like showing product info related to a current TV campaign.
- Behavorial targeting, when people buy something on your site, they’re probably there for the third time. So keep track of their surfing behavior and adjust the product related info to that
To be honest with you, I find the numbers Sadigh mentioned shocking, but his suggestions don’t sound revolutionary to me. Maybe he sees them merely as a way to prepare companies for the REAL personalization, or the techniques needed aren’t available yet. To give it a positive twist at the end: things can just get better.
Written on January 25, 2008 – 5:27 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Professional networking service LinkedIn announced today that they’ll open a London office. Chief Executive Dan Nye explained the strategic move in a statement:“LinkedIn has seen outstanding growth in Europe in the past year, and by opening an office in London we expect to accelerate our momentum and better serve our users in the European market,” LinkedIn wants to double the number of members, which is now 18 million.
According to Nye, LinkedIn should grow faster in Europe. They have more than five million members now, mostly in Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands.
“I think in 2008 people will start to see the difference between social networking and professional networking.” And professional networking is different in Europe, Nye says. “In the U.S., people do business over the phone, through email. It’s perfectly normal never to meet someone you’ve done business with. In Europe, that’s really unusual. It’s much more of a personal interaction that people want to have.”
However, Europeans, - and especially the Dutch - seem to like professional networking tools. It’s remarkable that one of the smallest countries is responsible for a large share of the LinkedIn European user base. We earlier reported that Plaxo is also extremely popular in the Netherlands.
There is still a huge number of people who have never heard of LinkedIn and Nye wants to target them as well and he has a ‘healthy’ budget for marketing. So far, LinkedIn’s promotion was merely through word-of-mouth, a pretty good buzz and its networking effect . Now it’s time for the not so geeky crowd to start networking.
Written on January 15, 2008 – 12:56 pm
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web
This article is written by affiliate- and search marketeer Eduard Blacquière.
A few days ago I noticed one of the most creative Google AdWords Ads I’ve ever seen:
But…it’s not allowed!
Just a couple of hours before I saw this remarkable AdWords ad, I went to a Google training about Google AdWords. They had used the exact same ad to illustrate that overuse of punctuation isn’t allowed.
Is Your AdWords Ad Remarkable?
This example illustrates the importance of the fact that you have to be remarkable. Your ad has to diverse itself from your competitors. Of course you run into restrictions of the Google AdWords policy, yet that’s where creativity comes in. (more…)
Email
Twitter
Facebook
Netlog
Linkedin
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
