Search Engine Marketing Blog

On February 24, when Google announced that its real-time search results would now include Facebook public status updates, the importance of professional social networking sky rocketed. Google’s attempt to deliver the newest and most widespread results is causing businesses everywhere to address their relevance in today’s society, and more importantly, on the web.

The Impact on Businesses

Google’s real-time search is forcing businesses to step up their online marketing campaigns. As Google begins to produce search results that are more and more current, businesses are being compelled to constantly update and edit their websites in order to stay relevant. The freshest information will move web pages higher up in the search.

Although Facebook has not yet taken over all of the search results, web analysts expect that to change. They predict that with the advent of real-time searching, companies that do not already use Facebook will decide to build pages in order to better promote their brands.

Search Results

Currently, Google’s search results yield only news-related or trending topics. The real-time search will also include pages from MySpace, Twitter, Google Buzz, and other social networking sites.

Google has developed over a dozen new search technologies that help the company monitor billions of real-time sources. The real-time search allows users to view news the instant it happens, regardless of the topic’s popularity.

The Future of Real-Time Searching

As social networking updates are instantaneously pulled into Google search results, these sites will begin to be used more as marketing tools and less as communal fan bases. Businesses will not only strive to keep their pages current, but will place a greater emphasis on the navigability and comprehensiveness of their social networking media.

UPDATE: Since this mornings post (link below) the Denny’s fan base has risen by 10% of so just passing 27,000 fans.

2010 Superbowl viewers totaled 106.5 million viewers according to reports. It also happened to break the record for most watched television show in history (they outdid the finale of M*A*S*H).

I’d say Denny’s should have had 300-400k fans by now…but what do I know.

Superbowl Media = Ouch dollars and OMG cents

ORIGINAL POST: http://www.digitalsurgeons.com/blog/archives/294/dennys-free-grand-slam-misses-out-during-the-superbowl

I must say i was pretty disappointed to see the superbowl ads this year.  I feel as though brands left tons of value on the table.  The whole reason for advertising during the Superbowl is to get impressions.  My angst is in the amount of impressions the brands failed to capture by not placing enough emphasis on other platforms . Especially Denny’s.

Granted, everyone in my office talked about the Free Grand Slam breakfast at Denny’s and they all might go this Tuesday but what else…Is that where the promotion dies? Will the chicken become the Dennys icon?

Perhaps they could have turned the chicken into their Facebook ambassador and said become a fan to get your coupon for a free grand slam , hook up twitter to a real chicken so he/she can tweet/cluck and you gain followers, brought in some Foursquare or Gowalla action. Anything would have made a difference. (OVER DRAMATIZATION but it could happen)

I’m interested to see how their fan base and engagement grows in comparison to the spike of free grand slam breakfast they will hand out.

Maybe they should have computer stations and ask people to become a fan when they enter the restaurant and wait for a seat.

//rant over.

Denny’s Facebook Fan Base Today - 25,547 - Become a fan http://bit.ly/aOGr98

Denny’s Allnighter Fan Base Today - 64,940

IHOP FB Fan Base Today - 67,674

GREAT CONCEPT BTW…

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/6934589/18024243 -

The New Facebook Promotions Guidelines: What it Means for your Business

With the rapid growth in the use of Facebook for business promotions, it was inevitable that the social giant would set some guidelines on the practice, both to keep a certain level of standards and to reap the potential benefits.

That day has arrived with the new Facebook Promotions Guidelines that are just recently put into effect. With so many of our clients already promoting specials and contests on the venue, or interested in doing so, Digital Surgeons decided to outline the guideline highlights and just what it means to your business.

Key Highlights of the Guidelines:

• Promoting a contest does not require Facebook approval.
• Administering a contest does require approval from Facebook.
• Good News: Businesses Large and Small can still Promote on Facebook.
• The new rules only apply to contest and sweepstake type promotions.
• You must use an approved Facebook application to run your promotion.
• Certain types of business are now prohibited from running Promotions.

Publicizing vs. Administering Campaigns

Central to the new guidelines is the distinction Facebook makes between publication and administration of a contest or sweepstakes campaign.

Publication does not require approval: This is defined as the promoting or advertising of a campaign on your Facebook page (now using one of the approved applications) without actually gathering entry information or sending replies via Facebook.  Businesses can still post RSS feeds and require visitors to become Fans in order to enter the promotion.  No collection of entries or data (administration) can occur on the Facebook site without approval.

• Good News: Contest administration can be efficiently handled off site. Working with Digital Surgeons or another competent online marketing agency, contest entries can be gathered, winners selected, and notifications sent smoothly.
• Off site Promotion Administration is an excellent option for small to medium size businesses. As you read more about the new administration rules below, the cost efficiency of this option will become readily apparent.

Administration does require approval: Administering a promotion involves all the data collection, statistic gathering, drawings, and participant notification that go with a contest or sweepstakes. To handle all this via the Facebook website requires approval.

• A Facebook Sales Rep is required in order to gain approval to Administer a promotion.

• A substantial level of spending is a requirement to qualify for a Facebook sales rep. ($10,000 per month minimum spend)
• Digital Surgeons can facilitate the process of gaining a Facebook sales rep for you. We can design the promotion based upon your goals and audience, manage the campaign set up, and handle the details of obtaining and working with your Sales Rep. Contact us via the website or at (203) 672-6201 to find out more about creating a Facebook Promotion.

More on the New Guidelines…

Applies to Contest and Sweepstakes Only: Promotion using surveys, coupons, trivia quizzes and giveaways do not require approval and do not fall under these guidelines.

A Facebook Application must be used to Publicize your Campaign: the social network has several applications that can be used to run a promotion.  Digital Surgeons can advise you on the best choice for your promotion and manage all details of the campaign. Contests that require user video uploads and voting will require a different app then a more standard sweepstakes entry.

Promotions that are now Prohibited: Facebook has now made certain business types and promotion situations off limits.  These include:

• Promotions open to Minors
• Promotions open to citizens of countries embargoed by the U.S.
• Promotions that advertise or give as a prize alcohol, tobacco, guns, or drugs.
• Promotions that require purchase of product or a lengthy task in order to enter
• For full details on restrictions and more on the guidelines visit http://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php.

Planning your Facebook Promotion:

To learn more about what the new guidelines mean for your business and to get planning the best campaign to meet your goals, give us a call at (203) 672-6201or contact us via the website.  Check out Digital Surgeons on Facebook.

The short answer is: hell yes! Let me expand. If you think of your marketing message, regardless of media, as being targeted to a person whom you want to be engaged by that message, then good design can only tilt the field to your advantage. Conversely, poor design can garble a potentially interesting message, leading to confusion, disinterest, and a quick disconnect. And I do mean “quick” - because in today’s tsunami of emails, tweets, texts, and social media interactions, you really have only a few seconds to stake your claim for attention. Here are a few ways good design can help:

• Does your landing page match the design of your email? If not, your corporate identity is clashing with itself. Customers may feel - and rightly so - that they have clicked to the wrong page.
• Is your layout clear or confusing? It’s always tempting for marketers to cram in every last selling point about their product or service, but - as has been true since Shakespeare’s Web 0.0 days - brevity is indeed the soul of wit. Avoid busy backgrounds, a cacophony of fonts (it’s best to stick with one), miniscule fonts (use 10 pt type or larger), long (and reader-intimidating) blocks of copy, or a call-to-action that is anything less than crystal-clear.
• Be careful with your graphics. Especially with regard to emails, this can be a fatal design flaw, because not every e-mail reader (or mobile phone) is set to accept graphics. Unless you’ve used ALT tags in your images, your recipient won’t even know what the graphic was supposed to represent. Use teaser text and HTML colors and layout rather than an image, so readers can get a “quick-scan” sense of your e-mail, even if images are disabled.
• Put it at the top. All important content - your offer, call to action, key “what’s in it for me” benefit, etc. - should be at the top, or as much at the top as possible. Because if you can’t hook your reader with that info, you really haven’t given him or her a good reason to keep reading.
• For websites only. Try captions under images, zoom in and zoom out features, call-outs, video messages and/or demos, slide presentations, and text pointers in images.
• This is only a test. Consider your digital marketing efforts to be a continually evolving work in process. Test and tweak. Test and tweak. And test and tweak again! Direct marketers don’t merely guess what will work, they know what will work because they have hard real-world data. Online marketing, with its cornucopia of metrics and analytical tools, is a smart marketer’s dream come true. You can test subject lines, offers, lists, copy, etc. - and you can test specific design elements such as color, graphics, layouts, font, font size, short vs. long messages, etc.
• Avoid expensive lessons. Working with a designer or (ahem) agency that is already knowledgeable about what works online and what doesn’t can streamline your learning curve. After all, why pay for lessons or tests when you already know the answers . . . or already know someone who does?

2009 will go down in web history as the year that social media grew up and marketers from all industries and company sizes took note. Social media has permanently transformed the way people connect and share information, but while many folks are still trying to wrap their heads around what’s going on (no easy task, to be sure), we’re assimilating all the pundits and factoids in an attempt to coolly calculate what’s next. Here’s what we’ve got, so far:

• More companies become more invested. According to the Direct Marketing Association, U.S. marketers spent $1.2 billion on social media in 2009 and are projected to spend $1.3 billion on it in 2010, an increase of 10.4%. Of the businesses surveyed, 69% and 59% said they will increase their spending on e-mail and social media respectively - making these channels the two highest-growth areas of marketing expense.

• Integrated and sustained programs replace one-shot initiatives. In other words, one-shot campaigns turn into ongoing programs, much like how e-mail marketing has evolved. Social media will help companies become more “real-time responsive” - as it has with Best Buy, whose “Twelpforce” leverages hundreds of employees to provide customer support via Twitter.

• Platforms will increasingly cross-connect. TweetDeck, for example, will now let LinkedIn viewers view status updates and reply to them (and do other things) from within Twitter. LinkedIn will be integrated into the 2010 version of Outlook (as always, the best way to predict the future is to invent it). As one LinkedIn development partner remarked, “Essentially, LinkedIn is not just a destination anymore. You can take your network wherever you go on the Web.”

• E-mail becomes more sociable. One major e-mail service provider has added a feature that allows its clients’ e-mail recipients to post messages they receive to their MySpace or Facebook pages. Reporting tools reveal which e-mails have been picked up and posted, which social networks have produced the most shares, and how those shared messages have performed. “Encouraging e-mail recipients to share your message on their social networks can make a big difference in turning a message viral,” says Scott Voigt, Silverpop’s vice president of marketing.

• Social colonization segues to social context. By late 2009, Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang writes (www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/ CRM-News/Daily-News/Social-Media-The-Five-Year-Forecast-53635.aspx), technologies such as OpenID and Facebook Connect will begin to break down the barriers of social networks and allow individuals to integrate their social connections as part of their online experience, blurring the lines between networks and traditional sites. In 2010, the era of social context will dawn, as sites will begin to recognize personal identities and social relationships to deliver customized online experiences. Social networks will become the “base of operation for everyone’s online experiences.”

• Mobile gets big. We’re talking Godzilla-big. With over 258 million wireless lines in the U.S. alone, SMS (or “texting”) will proliferate as a marketing tool. From new customer acquisition to ongoing customer retention programs, SMS is a way to reach audiences in a timely, effective, and measurable manner. 49% of mobile users in the U.S. actively use SMS in any given month, according to m:metrics. The introduction of mobile payments could definitely add fuel to the fire. From PayPalX to Amazon’s mobile payments platform for developers, the big players are already seizing the mobile payments opportunity.

• More solutions for “too much information.” If your desk or inbox looks like mine, you know what I mean - there just aren’t enough hours in the day to keep up with the whirlwind of information we can access 24/7 and any which way. Sites like Google News source the best stuff by technical means, but don’t allow for much personalization. Facebook Connect lets your friends become your filter - content personalization based on the collective preferences of your network. Google’s Social Search is also based upon this type of filtering. Twitter’s “Lists” feature allows users to create collections of interesting people to follow on the micro-messaging service. Filtering by experts in their fields (like the topic moderators on about.com) will also be offered.

• More engaging and intuitive data depictions. As Buzz Canuck notes in his Agent Wildfire blog: “To be able to pull out insight from the excrement of data, smart left brains have teamed up with smart right brains to look at interesting ways to visualize data (http://thedoublethink.com/2009/08/). Look to advancements that wend their way into social media and make tag clouds and social graphs look like simple hobby horses in the future.”

In her recent and highly recommended book, The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff, Clara Shih likens the status quo of online social networks to where we were with the Internet in the late ’80s: “Though there are plenty of unknowns, such as which vendors and business models will prevail, certain trends are already taking shape: flatter organizations, stronger offline communities, more small businesses, greater collaboration across organizations, and tighter integration with mobile devices. Despite the uncertainty, companies can and need to start thinking now about how this revolution will affect their business so that they can take the necessary steps to thrive in the Facebook era.”

We can help. To start the conversation, please call or contact us today.

Recently we noticed that Fan Pages on Facebook have been disappearing with no explanation.  These pages cannot be found through a vanity URL, search, or profiles.  We did some investigation and apparently this has been happening on and off since July.

We reached out to Facebook and this is what they has to say.

Hi,

Thanks for your report. Some users have been experiencing difficulty logging into and using the site for several days. Specific symptoms of this issue include:

• Inability to log in due to a “Site Maintenance” error message
• Missing friends from the Friends page
• Errors when trying to access Inbox

Unfortunately, we do not have a specific date for when this issue will be resolved, but we are working to fix it as soon as possible. Please note that this is a temporary display issue and no content has been removed from your account. Although we are unable respond to every bug report individually, we are reading them. We appreciate your patience.

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

In summation:  Facebook is the almighty and doesn’t care about your fan page or problems. Unfortunately they have 300 million users and their base continues to grow by 1.2 million sign ups a day so we cannot boycott or switch sides now…we think.

Peter and I recently were asked to speak at the Connecticut Center of Advanced Technology on Social Media.  We covered a slew of topics from Social Media Basics to specific ways of using Social Media to increase growth and decrease expenses.

The L.E.A.R.N method coined by me is pretty cool so feel free to use it and give me a link-back or a shout out

Google is rolling out a new feature in Google analytics called Analytics Intelligence. It will provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly, and monthly periods. This way, you do not have to spend all your time sifting through data. Instead, Google will automatically send you an alert with the most significant information to pay attention to that can affect your business. You can then spend your time actually taking action, instead of trying to figure out what needs to be done.

Custom Alerts make it possible for you to tell Google Analytics what to watch for. For example, lets say you are running a Pay-Per-Click campaign on Facebook. Your goal is to get qualified people to sign up for your email newsletter. Your CPA (cost per acquisition) goal is $2.00 and your daily budget is $20. You can set up a custom alert that tells you when you have less than 10 signups in a day, so that you know you need to make adjustments to your Facebook campaign as soon as possible.

Google has stated that this feature should be available in your analytics account in the upcoming weeks.

This morning Digital Surgeons was featured on the front page of the business section in Connecticut’s very own New Haven Register. The article highlights the inception and growth of our organization and our continued plan to add staff and expand despite the economic recession. Read about our focus on New Media and forging community relationships in the New Haven area. See the original article on the New Haven Register’s website at http://www.nhregister.com/articles/2009/10/13/business/c1-_chamber13.txt