tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33354184694475391202024-03-13T09:03:18.329-07:00CopyLounge DigintuitionThoughts on the digital marketing landscape and processKen Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-81538085574345140652017-07-09T09:44:00.001-07:002017-08-14T11:28:56.284-07:00Why is Digital Integration important across your enterprise?You have a successful company and you're quickly moving up the digital maturity curve. Many of your business units are pursuing digital practices, some very effectively. And you've realized you're at the point where you need to take your digital marketing to the next level -- to drive the internal disruption that will make you a truly Integrated Digital Enterprise. That means all business units working together and leveraging each others' strengths and insights -- to make Digital Capability an integral component of everything you do rather than something you do that's extra.<br />
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So this post is about how to make that vision of a mature, integrated digital enterprise a reality.<br />
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<b>First Things First - The Customer</b><br />
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As we're going through this thought process, I'm going to encourage you to put yourself in your customers' shoes and look at everything you do from their point of view. Because we can implement all the best practices in the world, leverage the most cutting edge technology, create the most beautiful campaigns, the cleverest promotions and the most intuitive and easy to navigate mobile sites. But if these elements don't come together to answer our customers' questions, if we don't deliver the content they're looking for, if we don't make it easy for them to meet their needs, we're not going to be successful digital marketers.<br />
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<b>KNOW What the Customer Needs. Don't Guess!</b><br />
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So let's start by knowing what their needs are. How do you know? Well, digital capabilities are literally bursting with sources of customer insight. Some you can leverage now, other are capabilities that can be built.<br />
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<b>Deep Keyword Research</b> goes beyond <a href="http://bit.ly/Digintuit1">Keyword Discovery</a> to tell us, not only what keywords to optimize our pages for, but what kinds of content our target audiences are looking for. We can understand which topics are trending and where customers are finding this information now. We can know FOR SURE what will draw them to us.<br />
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<b>Social Listening</b> gives you insight into conversations that are happening in the social space that are relevant to your business. What your customers and potential customers think about your brands and your competitors. <a href="http://bit.ly/Digintuit2">Social Listening</a> tells you what makes them happy, their challenges and frustrations, their needs, their ideas. It tells you where these conversations are happening so you can join in. And it tells you who's leading those conversations. The influencers.<br />
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<b>Tracking and Scoring</b> It's possible to follow customers' activity on your Web and Mobile sites to see what they're interested in. And you can go beyond that to score their behavior at the individual level so you know when they're ready to be presented with an offer or talk to a sales person.<br />
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<b>The Sales Force</b> is an astonishing trove of customer knowledge about what influences customers to pull out their wallet or press the buy button. And, by the way, sales people like to be asked.<br />
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<b>Surveys</b> can fill in any information gaps you're left with by asking customers for the information directly.<br />
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<b>Advocacy Channels</b> happen when you invite your customers to work with you directly to create products or features they need. And those people will become the most valuable marketers you could dream of as they talk to their friends, families and personal networks about you.<br />
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<table align="left" bgcolor="white" border="0" cellpadding="8" style="width: 250px;"><tbody>
<tr> <td><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: large;">Drive the internal disruption that will make you a truly Integrated Digital Enterprise.</span></td> </tr>
</tbody> </table><b>The 3 Legs of Customer Experience</b><br />
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Once you understand your customer, the next step is to insure they have a good experience when they interact with you. And Search, Social and Content are the 3 legs of customer experience. Let me start with a couple of words about content. Discussions of User Experience often give content short shrift but for me, content is arguably the key ingredient of the user experience.<br />
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You use search and social listening to gain insights into the content your customers are looking for, create the content from the ground up based on that information, then use Social to syndicate it and Search to bring them to you.<br />
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<b>Why Integrate?</b><br />
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Getting everyone focused on the customer is the first step toward integration. You want your visitors to have a consistently good experience, no matter where they touch your business. So how do you make that happen and what's at stake? What's the advantage? Why do you want to do this?<br />
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<b>Branding</b><br />
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Well, if all your businesses are using the same <a href="http://bit.ly/2sU4248" target="_blank">content strategy</a> and templates, your customers see a single company, speaking with a unified voice and common messages. There's no confusion or dissonance to create friction or distract them from their reason for interaction with you. And it strengthens the brand.<br />
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<b>Shared Insight</b><br />
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If all your businesses are sharing customer insights, you know your customers better and can recognize them no matter where they're connecting with you.<br />
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<b>Avoid Search Competition</b><br />
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Competition between business units for SEO keywords is a SHAME because if more than one of your pages is optimized for the same keyword, none of them can rank highly. But competition within the same company for paid keywords is a CRIME because internal units are all driving up the cost of keywords for each other and the company. It's much better to cooperate, assign a single page to each high-value keyword and optimize other pages for longer tail keywords. This expands the keyword universe you capture, drives incremental traffic and higher rankings. It also drives huge savings in paid search.<br />
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<b>Reuse and Consolidate Content</b><br />
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Content development is expensive, whether for product pages, collateral, press releases, blogs, social, email, packaging or whatever. But it becomes dramatically more expensive when it's created in silos that are sometimes creating the same content at the same time. Events, for instance, tend to be huge forcing functions for the creation of high-volume content. But once the event is over, that content is often abandoned and often never used or seen again. Much better to have all business units work from a common editorial calendar, tag and store all content in a common repository so that when content is needed on any topic, it can be easily found in the repository if it already exists. Think of the savings!<br />
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<b>Common CRM</b><br />
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Are your customers receiving multiple emails from different parts of the company on a monthly basis? Maybe even weekly? Do you know? This exhausts customers and makes your email far less effective. A common tool and good governance can fix that.<br />
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<b>Operational Cooperation</b><br />
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Integration isn't just about working across business units though. It's also building relationships with other teams like Sales and Customer Care. Both are rich sources of customer information. And they'll love marketing for partnering with them to get them better leads and solve customer problems.<br />
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<b>Tools</b><br />
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So, all the ideas we've talked about so far can be facilitated with a stack of digital enablement tools. Again, I'm not suggesting anyone do all of these at once. But you can start with some insights projects, like the deep search listening I mentioned before. This is called Consumer Intent Modeling and it's a process of taking unstructured keyword data and turning it into structured semantic maps by categorizing keywords into topics and sub topics to understand customer interest, trending and seasonality. This helps determine what content needs to be created to meet customer search demand.<br />
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A shared, cloud-based editorial calendar and a simple, taggable, filterable content repository would be an easy and inexpensive next step.<br />
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A Social media tool allows you to listen and respond in a coordinated, consistent, and real-time manner to the insights you gather.<br />
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Web content management and a data analytics dashboard to help optimize<br />
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Later, you can move on to more sophisticated tooling that lets you track and score your visitors' behavior on the site to see where they are in the buying cycle and even begin some level of personalization.<br />
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You can also activate your employees to advocate for your brand and empower your sales people for social selling by way of an employee advocacy platform.<br />
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But through it all, remember: Integration drives significant growth, but only if it's centered on the customer.<br />
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Let us know if we can help 914 715 6715.<br />
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Visit <a href="http://copylounge.com/">CopyLounge.com</a> for more Digital Marketing Intuition.<br />
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<a href="https://plus.google.com/+KenGodfrey?rel=author">Ken Godfrey</a><br />
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Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-47442341112841850302017-03-31T07:18:00.000-07:002017-04-07T07:31:40.657-07:00Marketing Madness<div style="direction: ltr; line-height: 90%; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0.24in; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: -0.24in; unicode-bidi: embed; word-break: normal;">
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Dunkin’ <a href="http://bit.ly/2naJtZF" target="_blank">Awesome</a></div>
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This <a href="http://bit.ly/2ng503U" target="_blank">just </a>in hit’s the Target</div>
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Gettin' <a href="http://bit.ly/2o5xhKu" target="_blank">Giphy </a>with it</div>
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Bumper <a href="http://bit.ly/2o5JtLf" target="_blank">Tube</a></div>
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<a href="http://read.bi/2ogKFzw" target="_blank">Google </a>Goofs</div>
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Random acts of <a href="http://bit.ly/2nQpSC3" target="_blank">Stats</a></div>
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<a href="http://bit.ly/2naJtZF" target="_blank">Dunkin' Awesome</a><br />
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I had the opportunity to attend the Mobile Marketing Association's Mobile Video Event last week in NYC and saw 2 kinda jaw dropping things there.<br />
The first was Dunkin Donut's brilliant Social Video campaign, the World's Fastest Dunkin Run, to promote the start of On The Go Ordering for DD perks members. Sure, they could have driven a race car or a plane, but what fun would that have been really?<br />
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Instead, they built a Dunkin Donuts store on top of a mountain in the Rockies, then got Ellen Brennan, the world's fastest flying woman, to don her pink wingsuit, order up a donut on their new app from the top of a higher mountain, then jump off the cliff and fly 200 miles per hour, grab the back off the 'Flight Pickup' hanger and open her chute. She enjoys a bite of her donut on the float down to earth.<br />
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Brilliant, almost a million views so far on You Tube and they used stills of it on Insta, promoted the video on Snap, then created and promoted more videos about the making of the video, about Ellen and about Wingsuit basejumping. #WTFast<br />
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<a href="http://bit.ly/2ng503U" target="_blank">Target This just in!</a><br />
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The Digital Marketing Manager of target also spoke at MMA, they recently introduced a weekly video series. They call it This just in! And it's like a video circular, highlighting a few interesting and timely products.<br />
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When they were looking into this, they were finding that doing it with an agency, locations and talent would be crazy expensive. So the Digital Marketing team decided to rent a house near their minneapolis headquarters. They decorated it with Target furniture and accessories and bought some camera equipment. They call this the Target Style Studio. Then they recruited a sales associate from one of their stories to be their spokesperson. And they shoot and edit all their videos in-house.<br />
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A couple of key learnings: Keep the video right around a minute AND show all the products they're going to talk about in the video in the first 4 seconds. And they have a small team that writes, shoots edits and distributes this each week via social and email. The first one had an 18% conversion rate and it's improved from there.<br />
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<a href="http://bit.ly/2o5xhKu" target="_blank">Gettin' Giphy with it</a><br />
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They say a picture is worth a thousand words so an animated gif may be worth many more. Our messages have morphed from text to emoji to pics and now gifs are beginning to dominate the textosphere because they can convey really complex emotional content in seconds<br />
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Anybody here send animated Gifs to their friends via email or text message? I know my digital teammates are big fans of Giphy. News or congratulation notes are often accompanied by a telling gif. So the old graphic interchange format, which was created by Compuserve in 1987 is enjoying a rennaissance 40 years later. Of course it started with mobile device users, but it's been picked up by Brands which are creating branded gifs to express topics or emotions that are relevant to them. You'll find Dominos gifs when you search for party, hangover or hungry and Starbucks gifs when you search for Happy, Good Morning and You Got This. Which people do over 2 Million times every month. And when their gif is shared, the brand has slipped it's presence into places where advertising doesn't usually show up.<br />
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Gifs are becoming a key part of campaigns and requirements in agency briefs. What themes, emotions, situations and topics would fit with Philips? How about indescribable, yummy, clean, cut, breathe, what else can we come up with. Let's get some clever gifs into Giphy so people can start sharing them.<br />
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<a href="http://bit.ly/2o5JtLf" target="_blank">Bumper Tube</a> <br />
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While we're on the subject of short videos, YouTube is doing away with 30 second unskippable preroll and pushing brands to create 6 second bumper ads instead. These are designed for snackable consumption on mobile devices. But the question is, can a company tell a story in 6 seconds. YouTube went so far as to commission an agency competition to create 6 second versions of popular novels, like Jayne Eyre, Dracula and The Origin of species. <a href="http://bit.ly/2nAWsFV" target="_blank">You can enjoy a whole reel of them</a>.<br />
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There's a lot of skepticism out there in the marketing world about whether this will catch on. But I love it. It really requires stretching the creative muscles and thinking differently about how to do it. Long time readers know I have always been a big Vine fan and this is like Vine revisited. So I'm hopeful. How about a whole camnpaign of 6 second ads? Wouldn't that be a cool breakthrough thing? <br />
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<a href="http://read.bi/2ogKFzw" target="_blank">Google Goofs</a><br />
The Times of London chose the week before advertising week Europe to ramp up its investigation into brand ads inadvertently appearing next to extremist content on YouTube and, thereby funding the videos' extremist creators. Within a day, more than 250 Brands from McDonald's and Audi to HSBC -- had suspended their campaigns on YouTube and Google's display ad platform until Google could assure them that their ads wouldn't appear next to hate, terror or other content that would be damaging to their brand. Google has promised updates to it's policies, controls and hiring strategy to fix the problem, but the bleeding is still going on. Verizon and ATT pulled their ads this week.<br />
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While it's a legitimate problem, there's some opportunism here where people are enjoying being able to bash the big primary color and some advertisers might be hopeful that this will give them some leverage in their ad negotiations.<br />
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This is a hard problem to fix though. 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and thousands of sites are added to their network each day. And there's no easy way to determine what is offensive vs a 'legitimate voice'. So the Search and advertising giant has a long slog ahead of it to get this figured out and flattened. But they will. They rise to challenges exceedingly well.<br />
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<a href="http://bit.ly/2nQpSC3" target="_blank">Random acts of Stats</a><br />
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In the last 6 months the number of monthly advertisers on Instagram has doubled, growing from 500k last September to over 1Mn according to their announcement this week. And there are 8Mn businesses using a business profile on Instagram.<br />
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74% of shoppers will abandon a purchase after putting an item in their cart. Consumer electronics items are abandoned most often at 78.8% while beauty items are abandoned least at 68%. 27% of abandonments are due to issues with shipping<br />
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83% of shoppers will shun a retailer that they've had a bad returns experience with. Shoppers return 10% of goods they buy online and 40% of shoppers buy multiple items to send back what they don't want. That's a surprise to me, but the message is clear. Online retailers need to streamline their returns processes and make them user friendly.<br />
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Only 50% of charities have a digital strategy in place most of them cite lack of funding but 75% believe they could increase fundraising but growing their digital chops.<br />
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25% of shoppers surveyed say they're planning to spend more this year on Mother's Day than last year and 45% said the planned to shop for Mom online. Finally, 38% of shoppers want more gift ideas and inspiration from retailers<br />
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44% of advertisers are considering establishing an on-site or in-house capability. Why? Speed of turnaround. 68% of marketers with exteral agencies express frustration over the time it takes to get things done while this figure drops to 20% for inhouse agencies and 8% for on-site agencies. Interesting. Agencies with on-site presence are more than twice as fast as in-house agencies.<br />
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See you next month!Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-25302039732568490152017-01-27T11:35:00.000-08:002017-02-01T11:41:44.049-08:002017 Begins!<br />
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What to <a href="http://bit.ly/2hD7aei">look for</a> in 2017<br />
<a href="http://bit.ly/2iYXNFS">Advocates </a><br />
The year of Amazon...<a href="http://bit.ly/2iH9X6k">again</a>!<br />
Probably <a href="http://bit.ly/2iZRZf4">not </a>happening<br />
Customer experience vs <a href="http://bit.ly/2jFakPI">Capability</a><br />
Microsoft <a href="http://bit.ly/2jFN6Zp">officemates</a><br />
Insta <a href="http://bit.ly/2j04UxC">engagement</a><br />
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<a href="http://bit.ly/2hD7aei">What to look for in 2017</a> <br />
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As a service to our loyal community members, we've scanned a number of digital content sites to capture an overview of what they think the most important trends are for 2017. Here's what we found:<br />
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With live video platforms now available on all the major Social networks, live video is now TVs biggest competitor. But it's just beginning. While lots of brands experimented with it last year, it'll likely shift to mass market use in 2017. Live enables brands to break out of the traditional advertising mold, letting them create a more real connection with customers in real time. Also look for more vertical video.<br />
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74% of agencies are working with celebrities. But Micro-influencers are a thing now. Attention is currency and anyone who has the attention of a discrete, specialized group of people can be a valuable influencer for some brand. Moving away from expensive celebrities with millions of followers, some brands have realized that they can generate an impressive return partnering with people who have about 1000 followers. We're seeing success with this approach with our Male Grooming social presence. I think we'll see more tools popping up in 2017 to match these micro-influencers with brands who want to leverage their attention.<br />
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We'll see an explosion of messaging apps driven by Chatbots or 'Conversational Marketing'. In fact, our own Philips Customer Care group is launching a Chatbot pilot. I'm really interested in seeing how that goes. Facebook will be releasing Whatsapp for Business sometime this year. AI is increasingly playing in this space, whether on company sponsored text chats or in-home interfaces like Amazon's Alexa and Google Home which will really come into their own this year. Controlling your home and entertainment with just your voice is really seductive and I can tell you from experience with my new Google Home that it feels really natural really fast. So voice interfaces will start to creep up on text as more people become more comfortable talking to their devices. One other point about voice interfaces: Voice Responses from devices don't come with advertising -- yet. This could be a big game changer if the trend continues.<br />
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AI will also find its way to become more of a player in testing and analytics, sowing the seeds of automating some agency and marketing tasks.<br />
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<a href="http://bit.ly/2iYXNFS">Advocates</a><br />
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I was really pleased to see a number of my sources citing Employee Advocacy as a trend to watch this year. It feels great that Philips is leading rather than lagging on this. our PhilipsVoice initiative, which we started in March, now has over 200 North America employees who can share approved Philips content with their personal networks and we've received requests to train over 400 more. About half of these are Sales people who want approved content to share with their clients in their own Social networks. This is a runaway train -- in a good way! And I'm also happy to let you know that our little pilot will be picked up and scaled by the Global team this year. Yeah us!<br />
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<a href="http://bit.ly/2iH9X6k">The year of Amazon...again!</a><br />
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I wonder if you guys get tired of hearing about Amazon on these calls. I find it really interesting to talk about it though. This company is breaking new ground all the time and the implications are breathtaking. 2017 will be another Year of Amazon. With the Kindle Fire, they put happy little Amazon stores into the hands of millions of people. With Prime, they built a huge barrier to entry to other retailers online or off and created a level of loyalty that has never been seen before. (More than half of American households are prime members who default to Amazon for most of their non-food purchases.) Then pushbutton replenishment with the Dash button. A year ago Amazon Alexa made it possible to buy without a click. Just say the word. Amazon buy me batteries. (if you say it that way and you don't specify a brand, you'll get Amazon private label batteries.) It's the same with anything Amazon has a private label for: Amazon Basics, Amazon Elements, Happy Belly, Wickedly Good and others are all taking over their categories. They've just launched grocery stores without checkout lines. These are all steps to removing friction from the buying process. One click, free shipping, voice ordering, no checkout. But all these methods capture data. So what's the next step? No ordering. Amazon knows what you buy. With your permission, they can send you what you need when you need it. If you get something you don't need, you just send it back. But we know that'll almost never happen. Don't we? Yup, within just a few years. Amazon will ship us just about everything we need when we need it and we'll never have to order again. And they'll be the first Trillion Dollar company.<br />
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<a href="http://bit.ly/2iZRZf4">Probably not happening soon</a><br />
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So on the flip side, what's NOT likely to happen in 2017?<br />
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Drones, certainly not at scale, lot's of challenges still to be worked out. And they're not all about FAA restrictions. How would a drone deliver to an apartment? If there were tons of drones in the air all the time and they started to get annoying, would people start shooting them down? Aren't they at risk of being stolen and reprogrammed? I think drones will remain mostly a PR story for another couple of years.<br />
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My Hue lighting addiction notwithstanding, Connected devices aren't all that cool unless they really make something better or easier. Do you really need a cup that tracks your water intake? Probably not. I'm still suspicious of the fridge that knows when to order more milk.<br />
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VR for marketing is still a head fake, no one has figured out how to use it as anything other than a PR gimmick yet and it may not be worthwhile to do so unless the prices come down and the hardware shrinks significantly. Nobody is going to don a headset to watch an ad so the communications will have to evolve to something else.<br />
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<a href="http://bit.ly/2jFakPI">Customer experience vs Capability</a><br />
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Marketers are failing on customer experience because they lack digital capabilities. 84% of companies studied say identifying users, personalization and measuring impact is 'very important to growth,' but only about 10% are able to deliver in these areas. I don't think we have a capability problem. Philips has done well training us in Digital and the importance of Customer Obsession. We're ahead of the game in North America on leveraging Search and Social insights. I do think we're still falling a little short in technology. But we're looking at fixing that problem from a number of angles. Customer behavior tracking and scoring, CRM development and hygiene, just to name two.<br />
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<a href="http://bit.ly/2jFN6Zp">Microsoft officemates</a><br />
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We don't talk very much about Microsoft, because it's just not that interesting. But it's talent is. It's the number one place that other digital companies recruit from. Over 12,800 former microsoft emnployees now work for Google, Apple, Facebook or Twitter.<br />
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<a href="http://bit.ly/2j04UxC">Insta engagement</a><br />
This week, Scott Galloway mused about Instagram. It's become the dominant platform for brand engagement when compared to Facebook and Twitter, commanding 92% of the social interactions for the 420 brands L2 tracks. But when you add YouTube to the mix, Insta only account for 42% of interactions while YouTube gets 55% and the others fight over the crumbs. But interestingly, the platform's organic reach has declined in the face of recent changes to it's algorithm. THe frequency of brand posts is up 6% but the interaction rate per 1000 followers has decreased 30%. I bet we'll be seeing more changes to the platform's algorithm to bring its attractiveness to advertisers back up.Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-86273811647212101642016-12-09T16:54:00.000-08:002016-12-29T17:10:34.190-08:00Look out Snapchat!!<br />
- Lookout <a href="http://bit.ly/2g13TAG">SnapChat</a><br />
- <a href="http://bit.ly/2gq1nF4">Peripheral </a>Vision<br />
- Attention <a href="http://bit.ly/2goQeVr">grabbing</a><br />
- Amazon <a href="http://for.tn/2h8ANo0">grocer</a><br />
- <a href="http://tcrn.ch/2gEjASo">AI </a>and Machine Learning<br />
- Trend <a href="http://a.co/ebfxhxQ">spotting</a><br />
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One liners<br />
- Where to buy<br />
- Another Black Friday another record<br />
- Top toy!<br />
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Special <a href="https://vimeo.com/l2inc/review/192359148/eed11e300b">Bonus</a>: Dan Ariely: Marrying Disruptive Technologies and Behavioral Insights<br />
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<a href="http://bit.ly/2g13TAG">Lookout Snapchat</a> <br />
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Facebook is testing a camera-first interface design in Ireland. Sound familiar? On his last quarterly earnings call, Zuck said Facebook now sees the camera as the future of how people share and communicate. Snapchat CEO Iram Kahn recently told investors that they're not a Social company, they're a camera company. Not much suspense about who's gonna win this battle. Facebook is the most agile company in the world. They've already adopted a number of The Snap's good ideas in the form of Slingshot, Bolt, One-hour messages and Stories and soon they'll have it all without ever needing to buy it. Nonetheless, my son says he won't use facebook even if it does all the same stuff. He'd rather use Snapchat.<br />
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<a href="http://bit.ly/2gq1nF4">Peripheral Vision</a> <br />
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L2 held their consumer behavior clinic 3 Fridays ago and there were some really fascinating speakers as always. I didn't get to attend because I had to be in Andover for a meeting, but videos of all the talks are available and I partook of two of them.<br />
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The first, really fascinating was from Behavioral Psychologist, Susan Weinschenk who talked about how your brain does most of your seeing for you and the interesting ramifications of this. For instance, peripheral vision is more blurry because it isn't meant to capture detail. It's meant to capture context and motion. So, in Web design, for instance, putting good content at the periphery, will get it noticed. <br />
Brain keys in on things in a different color, with a different shape or orientation. This is how to capture attention.<br />
<ul><li>Visions happens in the brain</li>
<li>You see what you pay attention to</li>
<li>Peripheral vision calls the shots</li>
<li>We orient to faces</li>
</ul><br />
<a href="http://bit.ly/2goQeVr">How to get attention</a> <br />
<br />
In the second speaker video I watched, Adam Alter, a professor at NYU Stern, talked about how to capture people's attention.<br />
<ul><li>Give people ways to interact with your content. Can a picture move when they mouse over it? If you find ways to provide feedback when people interact with it, they will do it more.</li>
<li>Set subtle goals. Suggest something for visitors to strive for. A call to action is a good example. The professor actually used Sonicare for kids as an example of this. The little character on the connected device used to dance as long as kids brushed, so they would brush indefinitely. But now the app has been changed so that after the kid has brushed for the correct amount of time, the little creatures gets tired and falls asleep.</li>
<li>Get social. The social version of any product is more successful. Hipstamatic and Retrocam were precursors to instagram. Let you take pictures with different filters and effects. But Instagram did that PLUS made it a social network. Instantly capturing the market.</li>
<li>Add cliffhangers. We've all heard how marketing should be based on stories. That's certainly true. but the ending doesn't have to be apparent. Save a little something to make them come back for more.</li>
<li>And finally, Turn everything into a game. activate people's competitive nature</li>
</ul><br />
<a href="http://for.tn/2h8ANo0">Amazon Grocery</a> <br />
<br />
We've discussed the difficulty of pure play retail many times on this call. These are retailers who are ONLY Brick and Mortar of -- which there are almost none anymore. Virtually every traditional brick and mortar retailer now has an online presence with varying degrees of success -- or ONLY Online. LIke Amazon. Well we've seen the online giant begin some tentitive forays into building stores and this week, The Financial Times reports that Amazon is soon to open two grocery stores in Seattle.<br />
<br />
Both stores will be similar to drive-throughs, with customers able to collect groceries they have ordered online. <br />
<br />
The move is Amazon's latest push into groceries, a market where the logistics specialist sees room for considerable growth. And growth is in the plan. Amazon is looking at opening 2000 Grocery stores across the US. Starting with 20 in the next couple of years, where they'll experiment with a click and collect model as well as more traditional grocery stores, perhaps only open to Prime Fresh subscribers.<br />
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<a href="http://tcrn.ch/2gEjASo">Amazon AI</a> <br />
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Continuing with the Amazon stream of conciousness, at the company's Re:Invent conference last week in Las Vegas, the retail and Web services giant announced the launch of its Amazon AI platform. This new service leverages the machine learning capability that they've developed and used in-house for a number of years now. According to Web Sercices CEO Andy Jassy, they have thousands of people dedicated to AI in their business. <br />
<br />
They made a big deal of announcing an advanced image recognition service called Rekognition (with a K), along with Amazon Polly, a text to speech service that produces life-like speech in 47 mail and femaile voices and 24 languages, and LEX, which is the tech behind Amazon's new Alexa service. It allows developers to build conversations applications that can feature multi-step conversations. This will be useful for Chatbots and other types of Web and mobile applications taht supposrt engaging, Lifelike interactions.<br />
<br />
But though it wasn't the center of attention at the developer conference, Amazon's own new Machine learning site describes something I think is even more exciting. Machine learning, a technique first developed by IBM to train it's Watson AI, is a way of feeding a machine massive amounts of unstructured data and letting it create it's own understanding of the patterns and meaning within it. Then the machine can use these modles to analyse new data and generate predictions for an application. Usually, Machine learning requires data scientists to create powerful algorithms. But Amazon's offering provides visualization tools and wizards that guide you through the process of creating machine learning models without having to learn complex technology. Then you can generate predictions about your business.<br />
<br />
And the tremendous amount of data that Amazon processes about virtually everything every day can provide insight into almost everything. For instance, the information was just released that 3 of the top 10 top-selling items for the month before the election were Trump hats and T-Shirts. Which I'm <br />
<br />
<a href="http://a.co/ebfxhxQ">Trend spotting</a> <br />
<br />
I was surprised that no one took me up on my offer on our last call to get a Free early copy of Rohit Bhargava's latest book Non-Obvious 2017, How Think Different, Curate Ideas and Predict the Future. Well I had the chance to read my preview copy and I can highly recommend it. It just launched THIS WEEK on @Amazon for just $0.99. That's the next best thing to free. So go get your copy. It'll be well worth it. <br />
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Wouldn't it be great for our company if we could get better at predicting and capitalizing on trends? Let's all work on it.<br />
<br />
A couple One Liners... <br />
<br />
A survey from PPRO found that, this Christmas, 61% of consumers will be buying gifts online at home while watching TV, while 13% will shop from their smartphones while lying in bed. 17% also admit they will be buying their Christmas gifts online while at work.<br />
<br />
Adobe figures shows that online sales records in the US hit $3.34bn on Black Friday, a 17.7% increase on sales last year.<br />
<br />
Lego Creator Sets were the top toy, and iPads the top electronics sold.Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-22024445223890266792016-10-28T16:45:00.000-07:002016-12-29T17:38:50.742-08:00The 5th Horseman?<br />
- Netflix is the <a href="http://bit.ly/2enQ6WW">5th Horseman </a> <br />
- Rise of the <a href="http://bit.ly/2eKIJrf">Chatbots</a><br />
- <a href="http://bloom.bg/2e2c8Pp">Bad</a> news tweets<br />
- Snapchat <a href="http://bit.ly/2e1B4X8">envy</a><br />
- Samsung's on <a href="http://cnnmon.ie/2eVEJVk">Fire</a><br />
- Agile <a href="http://bit.ly/2fjD1Qy">Marketing</a><br />
- Trend <a href="http://bit.ly/2eB34Bw">spotting</a><br />
<br />
One liners<br />
- Google Pixel <a href="http://newatlas.com/google-pixel-phone-review/46142/">Launch</a><br />
- Unilever launch in house <a href="http://www.thedrum.com/news/2016/09/29/unilever-building-house-content-studios">content division</a><br />
- Philips <a href="http://bit.ly/2egLHD5">41st</a> most Valuable Brand, <a href="http://bit.ly/2eBbCbE">37th</a> desired workplace<br />
- <a href="http://bit.ly/2dQ4Xqc">Videos</a> feature in a quarter of search results<br />
- Sponsor a <a href="http://bit.ly/2eJUi1X">podcast</a><br />
- <a href="http://bit.ly/2eWtqLv">Mobile Ad Spending</a><br />
<br />
<br />
<a bit.ly="" enq6ww="" href="http://bit.ly/2eWtqLv%3EBearded%20%3C/a%3EHalloween%20costumes!%3Cbr%20/%3E%3Cbr%20/%3E%3Cbr%20/%3E%3Ca%20href=" http:="">Netflix is the 5th Horseman</a> <br />
<br />
Regular Digital Community Call members are well versed in our discussions of the 4 Horsemen, that is the big for Digital Stacks named, Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon. Our friend Scott Galloway at L2 coined the phrase and has done visionary work on understanding these company's success attributing it to a combination of elements such as a great CEO, they have access to capital that allows them to experiment and innovate in unique and uncharted ways, they've become the virtual operating system for their categories, they're seen as good corporate citizens, they're geographically close to a major engineering university, they control their own vertical distribution, along with several lesser factors. Scott is putting his money on Netflix as the next $300Bn company.<br />
<br />
Netflix added 3.2 Mn international customers in Q3, blowing the doors off analyst predications of 2 million. The increased quarterly revenues by 31% to $2.3Bn and causing the stock price to jump 20% to $119. It was at 126 last night. The company now has over 83Mn subscribers and just did a licensing deal with streeaming servcies in China. Of course, As Scott says, he gets this stuff wrong all the time.<br />
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<a href="http://bit.ly/2eKIJrf">Chatbots</a> <br />
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If you're a regular reader, chances are you've seen quite a bit about how messaging is the latest disruptive platform in digital. It's also seeing the most growth in media spending. Facebook introduced message bots on Messenger and Whatsapp in April and brands are jumping on board with dollars. In Asia, companies have been connecting with customers on WeChat and Line for years.<br />
<br />
Google once had the leadership position in chat with gChat on it's massive android presence, but it squandered that lead to Facebook and is now trying to recover with Allo, a third party smart messaging app that uses AI to make suggestions during conversations. That sounds annoying and misguided to me. But Google has also just started testing text response capability in ads on it's mobile ad network. If you haven't seen it already, some ads on your mobile phone will have a little messaging icon next to them. If you click the text bubble icon, it opens your default messaging app with a pre-populated, but editable text message to the advertiser's bot which can then provide service, help you shop or otherwise move you down the purchase funnel. This is one of a number of new media opportunities we should be exploring related to messaging. I see it being just as viable for B2B as it is for Consumer.<br />
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<a href="http://bloom.bg/2e2c8Pp">Bad news tweets</a> <br />
<br />
At the beginning of October, Twitter leaked acquisition rumors that it was in takeover talks with Alphabet, Comcast, Disney and Fox, the share price ticked up, then dropped about 20% a week later as the would be suitors each passed. Now it's being sued over share price which is at $17 today, down from it's high of $52 in 2015. The suit alleges that Jack Dorsey and other officers of the company changed their key growth metric from monthly average users and timeline views to Daily Average Users to mask a stagnation in user growth and engagement while these execs quietly sold off hundreds of millions of dollars of their own shares.<br />
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<a href="http://bit.ly/2e1B4X8">Snapchat envy </a><br />
<br />
Snapchat must be doing something right. Facebook just rolled out changes to both Whatsapp and Messenger to add Snapchat-type filter and stories features. On Whatsapp, the new editing tools let you write or draw on photos and add captions in different fonts and colors, Messenger is rolling out its new Stories feature, called Messenger day in countries where Snapchat isn't popular yet. Messenger day lets people share illustrated, filter-enhanced photos and videos that disappear in 24 hours, just like the Snap. Even Twitter is getting into the act, with Twitter Moments, which is a way of aggregating Tweets you'd sent and received around a specific event or location, rearranging them into a story and saving it with a unique url to share. THAT could make an interesting advertising execution, no? Anyone want to look into it? Meanwhile, Snapchat has made some changes to their own platform to promote user content over sponsor content as it demotes the paid discover channels content below user stories.<br />
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<a href="http://cnnmon.ie/2eVEJVk">Samsung's on Fire</a> <br />
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Anyone who's been doing any travelling recently has been shaking their head over the constant announcements that Samsung Galaxy Note 7's are not welcome on planes because of the risk of their batteries catching on fire. You're not even allowed to have them in checked baggage. So the first thing I wonder everytime the Note owners are asked to come up to the podium for 'assistance' is what will happen to their phones? Do they mail them back to their house? Second questions is Why would someone still have one of those and the third question is Yikes, how much damage is this doing to Samsung?? Well, the figures came out this month and Samsung has announced that they're lowering their third quarter guidance by 5.4 Billion dollars. That's gotta hurt, huh? But that's just this quarter. the 5Billion in erased profits and 9.5 Billion in lost sales, plus the drop in the stock price since it announced the recall will cost it over 26 Billion overall.<br />
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<a href="http://bit.ly/2fjD1Qy">Agile Marketing</a> <br />
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The term agile marketing has become 4x more popular as a Google search since 2010 and there are more blogs and books written about it every day. In fact, it was one of the featured topics at the Richmond Executive Forums event that I just attended. <br />
<br />
Since it's a relatively new concept, it can mean different things to different people, but the definition in Wikipedia says. it's an organizational effectiveness strategy that drives growth through focusing team efforts on those that deliver value to the end-customer.<br />
<br />
It is an emerging practice in marketing which applies key principles of agile software developement to increase speed, quality, flexibility and effectiveness of a marketing department.<br />
<br />
Agile marketers follow a process of plan, iterate, fail and succeed to keep them in line with the demands of the market, the business and the customer.<br />
<br />
In agile environments, Cross-functional teams are empowered to make changes to campaigns, designs, even products, based on a prioritized list called a Backlog. They prioritize their work considering what changes will bring the most value to the business and the customer within a designated short span of time called a Sprint. Usually a Sprint is a two week period within which the team sizes the tasks they will be able to commit to accomplishing from the prioritized list. Each person takes responsibility for part of what needs to be done and they all work together, supporting each other to complete the work, the team delivers and presents their work, then does a quick retrospective to optimize their process for the next sprint. The next day, they start the process from the beginning with planning, prioritization, sizing and the work begins again.<br />
<br />
Agile promotes innovation and creativity, it allows testing and fast failing to get to successful executions. It is flexible enough to respond to changes in the market situation or stakeholder needs without scope creep or having to replan an entire project. Because the only detailed plan is what will be included in the next sprint.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://bit.ly/2eB34Bw">Trend spotting</a> <br />
<br />
And now, some news about the future: <br />
<br />
One other presentation at the Richmond forums that stood out to me was a talk on How to think different, curate ideas and predict the future. It was a quick course in how to spot emerging trends. Non-Obvious trends. Which the author and presentor, Rohit Bhargava, defined as a 'Curated Observation of the Accelerating Present.'<br />
<br />
A Non-Obvious Trend is halfway between an Obvious Fact and Wishful thinking. He gave us 5 habits to develop to help us see what other people miss. And I'll share them with you. <br />
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Habit 1: Be observant. Be aware of processes in action. A new waiter magically knows who gets what dessert by where each spoon was placed by the waiter who took the order.<br />
Habit 2: Be Curious Empathize with Magazines Read magazines for people unlike you.<br />
Habit 3: Be Fickle. Take notes with Sharpies, preferably on post its so you force yourself to be concise. Capture ideas without needing to fully understand them in the same moment<br />
Habit 4: Be Thoughtful: Wait a moment, allow ideas to combine. Take the time to reflect on a point of view and share it in a considered way.<br />
Habit 5: Be Elegant. This is my favorite. It means developing your ability to describe a concept in a beautiful and simple way for easy understanding.<br />
<br />
Wouldn't it be great for our company if we could get better at predicting and capitalizing on trends? Let's all work on it.<br />
<br />
The link above is to his presentation on SlideShare. His book, which he reissues every year, predicting new trends and scoring how he did on the ones before is called Non-Obvious.<br />
<br />
<b>A couple One Liners...</b><br />
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Google launched its Pixel phone Hardware and Software both totally developed, integrated and controlled by Google. A true answer to Apple.<br />
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Both Goldman Sacks and Unilever have created in-house content organizations<br />
<br />
Interbrand ranked Philips as the <a href="http://bit.ly/2egLHD5">41st</a> most valuable brand, which joins our ranking this year by Linkedin as the <a href="http://bit.ly/2eBbCbE">37th</a> most desired company to work for. <br />
<br />
<a href="http://bit.ly/2dQ4Xqc">Videos</a> feature in a quarter of search results <br />
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Has anyone thought of <a href="http://bit.ly/2eJUi1X">Sponsoring a Podcast</a> as part of a content marketing strategy? Very targetable <br />
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<a href="http://bit.ly/2eWtqLv">Mobile ad spending </a> overtook spending for desktop for the first time this month according to a report by PriceWaterhouse and the Internet Advertising bureau... <br />
<br />
Halloween costume searches have an interesting new component this year. Hitwize reports the searches including the word <a href="http://bit.ly/2eWtqLv">Beard or Beards</a> are up almost 20% Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-51701125409624311012016-09-30T16:17:00.000-07:002016-12-29T16:43:48.869-08:00GE's Social Prowess<br />
- GE on <a href="https://econsultancy.com/blog/68268-10-examples-of-great-ge-marketing-creative/?utm_source=Econsultancy&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7530680_2453-daily-pulse-us-2016-09-13&dm_i=LQI,4HEPK,L6OGFL,GK43E,1">social</a><br />
- <a href="http://bit.ly/2cN3OiK">Watch </a>what Philips is up to in Health Tracking!<br />
- <a href="https://econsultancy.com/blog/68270-how-can-retailers-create-more-engaging-mobile-experiences-in-store/?utm_source=Econsultancy&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7526500_2447-daily-pulse-us-2016-09-12&dm_i=LQI,4HBHG,L6OGFL,GJPH4,1">Mobile users</a> do what they do, not what they say<br />
- Living in the <a href="http://www.practicallyefficient.com/2010/09/28/the-adjacent-possible.html">Adjacent Possible</a><br />
- Selling on <a href="http://bit.ly/2clN2cb">Instagram</a><br />
- Whatsapp What’s <a href="http://nyti.ms/2cwPe1J">privacy</a>?<br />
- Amazon <a href="http://nyti.ms/2d7AZCQ">Subscription</a><br />
- Ideas from GSI Search Summit<br />
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<a href="https://soundcloud.com/creativegood">Bonus</a>: Mark Hurst's Creative Good Podcast: <br />
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GE <a href="https://econsultancy.com/blog/68268-10-examples-of-great-ge-marketing-creative/?utm_source=Econsultancy&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7530680_2453-daily-pulse-us-2016-09-13&dm_i=LQI,4HEPK,L6OGFL,GK43E,1">Social</a><br />
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I don't know if anyone's noticed, but GE is doing some really interesting things on their Social channels, often effectively encouraging follwers to generate content for them. <br />
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Their Insta account features beautiful, artful photos of science and engineering, shot by award winning photographers. These are often from unexpected viewpoints which make them really compelling and draw the viewer in to read about what the picture is. GE also sponsors #Instawalk, a program where thought leaders, influencers and superfans are invited into their facilities for a tour and encouraged to take photos and instagram them with this hashtag. <br />
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Their UN-Impossible Missions video series on You Tube showcases their expertise in experimental surroundings by attempting to disprove popular expressions like 'A Snowball's Chance in Hell'. Another YouTube campaign, #SpringBreakIt leveraged videos of advanced materials testing to spectacularly destroy items like a tennis ball, Travel mug, sneaker, shell, watch and more by crushing, blasting or dropping. It holds the same fascination as the #WillItBlend videos that Jonah Berger talked about at our DigiSummit. Their Pinterest account includes snarky boards like 'Hey Girl' where famous scientists like tesla, edison and Lewis try out pickup lines like 'Hey Girl, what's your sine, cause I feel like we're on the same wavelength or Hey Girl, did we just share electrons? Because I'm feeling a covalent bond between us. Shows off the big company's sense of humor.<br />
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On Vine, #6secondsciencefair showcased GE's quick bursts of educational inspiration and again invited viewers to add the hashtag to their own efforts. Vine's shooting star seems to have burned out a bit, but I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling that it still has a lot of untapped potential in our short attention span world.<br />
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Finally, their GE Reports section of their site hosts Debates, analysis and information using imagry and infographics. This is basically a news publishing site with some third party and guest content thrown in, it never mentions the word 'Innovation' but it demonstrates how active the company is in linking it's work to wider trends. GE publishes frequently and offers a subscription. This is where we're trying to get with our content marketing efforts on the Government and Healthy Society sites, so it's nice to see this validation of our strategy. Philips could also try some similar tactics on our Social Channels. <br />
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<a href="http://bit.ly/2cN3OiK">Watch </a><br />
<br />
The Well-respected DigitalTrends Technology site reviewed the newly launched Philips Health Watch last week and gave it a favorable nod. For those of you who may not know, the Philips Health Watch joins the wrist blood pressure Monitor, the connected scale and body temperature monitor as part of the Philps Connected Health Device Suite. And these will be joined by the connected toothbrush next year, all connected through the Philips HealthSuite Digital Platform. The watch has a metal body, a silicon strap and a heartrate monitor on the back, and the main interaction is via the wide metal bezel surrounding the screen. It tracks movement, sleep, calorie burn and heartrate and automatically recognizes when you start exercising, but's not a smartwatch, so there are no phone notifications. It's priced just a little less than Android watches, though it doesn't have nearly the functionality. But the big advantage is the HealthSuite Platform ecosystem.<br />
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Most health monitoring tools from other companies give us health measurements because we wnat to be healthier but they don't often give much feedback or coaching. But if you wear the watch and use the connected devices, it's all aggregated, visually in the healthsuite app. And next year it'll get even better because the app will use the data to run coaching programs developed by Doctors and Psychologists to help you reach your goals.<br />
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The Suite is not designed for athletes or casual fitess buffs, but for people -- most often mature people -- who have a chronic condition, want to lose weight or have been told by a doctor to change their lifestyle. The multi-data-point picure is an essential part of managing this. The app will see how much you move and progress and, through pre-generated intelligent responses, it will increase your goals incrementally.<br />
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It's an interesting product targeted to a rapidly growing niche audience, and it's looking good so far. To be really disruptive, we could provide an API and open the source code to developers to improve the efficiency and experience of the app and bring other data gathering tools into the mix.<br />
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<a href="https://econsultancy.com/blog/68270-how-can-retailers-create-more-engaging-mobile-experiences-in-store/?utm_source=Econsultancy&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7526500_2447-daily-pulse-us-2016-09-12&dm_i=LQI,4HBHG,L6OGFL,GJPH4,1">The Paradoxes of mobile</a><br />
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Mobile is where everything is moving so it's important that we keep up with how people are using it. Some interesting Stats about mobile browsing, shopping and buying came to light this week from EConsultancy. <br />
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Over 90% of mobile users say they would prefer to browse for products on a Desktop/laptop or tablet rather than on their phone, but 65% of these same people regularly browse on their phones even though they're prefer to do it on their Desktops! Same with buying. why? convenience and availability trumps enjoyment. So that means that we need to be constantly working to make the mobile experience as enjoyable and easy as the desktop experience. Sellers who do that successfully are in for a windfall!<br />
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The same study found that people browse for products at least twice a week, usually on mobile and that they're 4x as likely to visit a store online as they are offline. And even though they do most of their browsing and shopping on Mobile, they still do the vast majority of buying on Desktops. So that means that most purchase journeys involve multiple devices and that we need to enable that as well. <br />
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Finally, all those mobile and desktop shoppers also shop in brick and mortar stores. And when they do, they're still using digital. Do they use in-store kiosks? Store-provided iPads or Digital assistance from iPad-wielding sales associates? Actually 60% of shoppers say their preference is to use Their own devices to look up or compare prices, to get product into, to check availability to find an item in the store and even to check out! But, surprise, only 20% of these same shoppers actually use their mobile when they're in a store. WHY?? Mainly because it's not possible to do most these things with your own mobile phone in most stores. One more thing omni-channel merchants need to enable and one more huge opportunity to differentiate and win in the marketplace!!<br />
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<a href="http://www.practicallyefficient.com/2010/09/28/the-adjacent-possible.html">Living in the Adjacent Possible</a><br />
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I was reading an article about transformation the other day and came across the fascinating and very cool concept of the 'Adjacent Possible'. According to Steven Johnson, writing in the Wall Street Journal, This is a kind of shadow future, hovering at the edges of the present state of things. A map of all the ways the present can re-invent itself. It's the set of opportunities at the boundries of our reach. Boundaries which receed as we explore them, expanding the possibilities even further. For instance, North America was once an adjacent possiblity to Europe, and once discovered, it opened so many more possibilities, settlement, the West, government by the people, industries that never existed before, mass production, the new technologies that were needed to make these transformations happen. <br />
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We are in the midst of an exciting digital transformation here at Philips. Let's be aware of the adjacent possibilities before us and embrace them. To do this, we need 3 types of people. Pioneers, Settlers and Town Planners. <br />
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Pioneers are designers and engineers who chart new territory. They're comfortable with uncertainty and not afraid to fail, which they do often, but they look at failure as a learning opportunity. They are the inventors, early adopters and disrupters, always playing on the edge of the Adjacent Possible.<br />
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Settlers are the people who see and seize the opportunities once new possibilities are uncovered. They're entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs who excel at nurturing new products and practices and getting them to scale.<br />
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But maintaining scale is hard work and requires the specialized skills of Town Planners. The people who design operations, conduct research, QA, plan, provide structure, governance and leadership.<br />
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Clearly, all these roles are equally valuable but they occur more or less frequently depending on the maturity of the company or organization. Which are you? Which would you like to be? And how does each of these roles contribute to our digital transformation? We'll talk more about this over the coming months.<br />
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<a href="http://bit.ly/2clN2cb">Instagram: The Store</a> <br />
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Artistry enhances experience and therefore also enhances marketing. This seems like it should be self-evident, but maybe it's not. I talked about it on last month's call and our friend Maureen Mullens talked about it at the DigiSummit: The Advertising Industrial Complex is teetering because there's too much of it or maybe because too much of it is so bad. Meanwhile, Instagram established itself first as a social art form, and now, more recently as an incredibly successful marketing and even selling platform. Marketers are using Like2Buy, InstaShop or just directing viewers to an instagram page on their site that aggregates the items showcased on instagram for customers to purchase. But one fashion retailer, REVOLVE, has hacked the system by labeling posts on both Instagram and Snapchat with 'stylecodes. These are unique product identifiers like SKUs that can be searched on the retailer's Web site or Googled to get to a commerce page. However we do it, though, we should find a way to direct instagram users to mobile product pages becasue 2/3 of Instagramers have used their phone to make a purchase and 70% are willing to shop on mobile.<br />
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<a href="http://nyti.ms/2cwPe1J">Whatsapp changes it's mind about privacy</a> <br />
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Whatsapp became a popular Worldwide platform early on largely because of its strong stance on Privacy and individual liberty which grew out of it's founder, Jan Koum's youth in the Societ Union. The fact that it only requires a phone number to create an account, not a birthday or home address, and that it encrypts its users messages so only the sender and receiver can read them, has set it apart from Facebook. So some privacy advocates were concerned when Facebook paid 19 Bn to purchase the service in 2014, because they worried that their data might be misused at some point. <br />
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2 years later, those concerns have been validated. Though WhatsApp remains an automomous service and Mr Koum has repeatedly stated his commitment to the privacy of his Billion users, They've recently changed that privacy policy in order to help monitize their business. The company announced a couple of weeks ago that they'd begin to share user phone numbers and analytics data with Facebook as part of an initiative to unify information across the Facebook suite of businesses. Among the changes: WhatsApp plans to allow businesses to connect directly with customers in the same way as they do with Facebook Messenger and Facebook will be able to use a person's phone number ro improve other Facebook services like friend suggestions and better tailored advertising. These wouldn't be surprising if not for Koum's vocal opposition to having advertising on the service. Just a reminder that companies can change their mind about pretty much anything in their user agreement -- even their privacy policy -- as long as they inform the user. But this is a disappointment to people who signed up for WhatsApp rather than Facebook for just this reason. So we might see the FTC jump into the mix on this soon.<br />
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<a href="http://nyti.ms/2d7AZCQ">Amazon subscription </a> <br />
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A New York Times article last month uncovered a situation that many Amazon subscribers may not be aware of. Everyone knows Amazon members can get a discount on products when they subscribe to have them delivered on a regular basis. And I'd bet most of these folks expect that, when they subscribe to a product, they expect to lock in the price. After all, that's the way it works with newspapers, magazines, netflix and beer of the month club. But that's not the case at Amazon. Amazon 'subscriptions' simply set up a timer to create individual orders and Amazon's terms and conditions state, somewhere in the middle of all that text, that the Subscribe and Save discount which is typically 5% or more, is applied to the price of the item at the time each order is placed. Keep in mind that Amazon also has a dynamic pricing model which increases prices for more in-demand items. So it stands to reason that for products that many people subscribe to, prices could go up. And they often do so significantly, <br />
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Artificial Intelligence reviews content<br />
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I was at the GSI search conference last week and heard David Tsau, the Digital Leader from CDW talk about some really interesting and innovative programs they were piloting to improve the user experience on their product pages. I asked him if I could share some of his strategies with you on this call and he said he'd be happy to have our thoughts and feedback on what they were doing. He made a really interesting point starting out. He said their goal used to be to increase traffic on their pages, but now the goal is to improve the user experience with the expected result being higher traffic and better engagement. So here are a couple of interesting things they're doing...<br />
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First of all, CDW is an IT equipment distributor. They sell everything from Network Servers and Routers to Desktops and Laptops to cables and accessories. And they also have a services business that helps customers set up and maintain their infrastructure. But most of their traffic goes to their product detail pages and he noticed that their PDPs were almost exactly the same as their competitors pages, on NewEgg and Zones. So they needed to differentiate their pages from their competitors. <br />
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At the same time, his content people were getting frustrated because They create a lot of content, from articles in magazines that they publish to blog posts to Case Studies and more. This content is distributed across a number of internal repositories and external platforms like Tumbler and LinkedIn. But their content wasn't getting good traffic. They were coming to his team to 'SEO this for us'. <br />
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Now David knew, as we all do, that's not the way SEO works. It shouldn't be an afterthought, content should be created based on keyword and social insight. If you know what people are searching for, and you make content to answer their need. Then you'll never have a traffic problem. In addition, much of the content was very difficult to optimize for search because it was on a platform like Tumbler which resists search optimization becasue it's hard for Google to index.<br />
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Does any of this sound familiar? Do we have these same challenges?<br />
<br />
David's team came up with an idea to solve both of these challenges. Rather than trying to SEO the editorial pages after the fact, they decided to link to the articles, blogs, reviews and case studies from their relevant high-traffic PDPs. This would improve the user experience by providing the customer with deeper decision support information, it would drive higher utilization of the content, and, at the same time, it create a point of differentiation from their compeititors.<br />
<br />
But the challenge was how to identify which content would work for each product. He only has 5 people on his Digital team and for the first tests, they assigned a few products to each of the people on his team and they each curated 4 articles for each product. They found that traffic to their related content increased dramatically, and conversion improved as well becasue it was easier for customers to make an informed decision. They didn't increase traffic because the Google algorithm doesn't work that way, it assigns authority for inbound links, not outbound links. But by differentiating themselves and improving the user experience, the increased the yield from the traffic they were already getting.<br />
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But the content curation process was extremely labor intensive. How could they scale? They ended up using the Watson Alchemy Artificial Intelligence API to analyze over 65K relatively recent articles to determine which articles were most relevant for which products. And now they're just adding those articles to the pages. They're also working on automating the process of adding relevant articles to Web pages.<br />
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Now, obviously, this is something we should look at doing with our content and PDPs. But the larger point is to strive for this kind of problem solving. It doesn't take a big team. It just takes a good idea and some open minds.<br />
Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-34474472811195415992016-06-24T15:48:00.000-07:002016-12-29T16:16:43.680-08:00West Coast Inspiration II<br />
- Jeremiah Owyang<br />
- Facebook<br />
- Amazon<br />
<br />
- Change to <a href="http://searchengineland.com/official-google-green-ad-label-global-251958">Google SERP</a><br />
- <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-gains-link-to-a-network-1465922927">Microsoft buys </a>LinkedIn<br />
- <a href="https://econsultancy.com/blog/67858-eight-reasons-why-content-strategy-should-be-central-to-every-marketer/">Blake Cahill</a> on Content Strategy<br />
- LinkedIn's <a href="https://lists.linkedin.com/2016/top-attractors/en/global">top 40 Employers</a><br />
<br />
<br />
Special <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/may/22/nap-pods-and-rooftop-parks-how-silicon-valley-is-reinventing-the-office">Bonus</a>: A rare tour of Tech’s mind boggling HQs<br />
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<br />
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On our last call, I told you guys about the first day of the California trip with the Personal Health Market and BG leaders. That first day, we had visited Google, Apple, AirBnB, Target and TechShop and had a consulting session with Charlene Li of Altimeter group. If you missed that and you'd like to catch up, you can go to our Digital Community Sharepoint at bit.ly/DigitalNAShare. The deck is there and the transcript of my comments is in the speaker notes.<br />
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So today, I'm going to tell you about the rest of the trip which included Jeremiah Owyang, Facebook and Amazon. And I promised to share Google's second presentation about the Empowered customer. I'll also hit a couple of important pieces of News.<br />
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Google Empowered Consumer<br />
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Google's Empowered Consumer presentation was fascinating. We don't just 'go online' anymore we live online now. They talked about how life isn't lived in hours, days or weeks, it's really lived in moments. Micromoments that are associated with an immediate need: I need a new one moments, How do I fix this moments, Where do I find this moments, let's celebrate moments, where do I start moments, And as people everywhere try to make the most of each moment, brands need to understand the context and intent of these immediate needs and do their best to be there when they happen. The center of gravity is moving to the palm of consumers hands. And in these moments, consumers are far more loyal to their need than they are to any brand.<br />
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They had a new take on the funnel: The moments that matter are when a customer wants to know, go, do or buy. Most consumers are looking up more information than every before, even about what they see on TV Commercials. Searches that include the words 'near me' have doubled in the last year and more than 80% of people use their smartphone to search for places in the real world, like local businesses. Over 90% of people use their smartphones to find out how to do a task and more than 100Mn hours of YouTube How-To videos have been watched just so far this year. 80% of people use their phones to help decide on a purchase while they're in a store and mobile conversion rates are up almost 30% since last year.<br />
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1 in 20 searches are HealthCare related and since last year, most of them are on mobile devices. 156Mn people are online right now searching for a health solution! <br />
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Owyang <br />
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We started our second day with Jeremiah Owyang from Alitimeter Consulting, talking to us about the collaborative economy. This is a relatively new business model that lets people use common technologies, like cell phones, to get what they need from other people. This new model has spawned a new class of workers, empowered people, Freelancers, and private companies to make this happen. Of course the most well known of these are Uber and AirBnB, but there are thousands of these. Jeremiah suggested we look for ways to shift products to services. For instance, BMW introduced their driveNow program to let people book a car and parking spot by the minute in a couple of cities. They look at the trends and see that there won't be enough sales volume in the future, so rather than selling 1000 cars to individuals, they're trying to sell 1 car 1000 times. Apple now has a subscription model for $40/mo where you always have their latest phone and if you lose or break your phone, you get another. <br />
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Facebook connection <br />
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From there, we headed to Facebook where their mission is to make the world more open and connected. Facebooks is proud of its Hacker Culture, putting people and innovation at their core, to achieve their goals. Their key tenets are... Be Open, Move fast, Be bold, Build social value, Focus on impact, Ship Love. And they have ambitious goals! Connecting the world is something they take seriously. Of the 7 Bn people on Earth, 2 billion don't know about the internet, a billion can't get it and another billion can't afford it. So they find themselves in the aerospace business. They've partnered with sattelite companies and governments to provide sattelite internet and they've built a plane with the wingspan of a 737 but that only weighs as much as a volkswagen. It can stay in the air at 90 thousand feet for 3 month at a time, beaming internet connectivity to a large area. They've also created Facebook Safety Check, a system that prompts people who are in an area where there was a natural disaster or terrorist attack to check in so their friends and family know they're safe.<br />
Facebook wants users to think of them as something that's useful, fun, enhances their relationships, enriches them and protexts their privacy. Facebook cares about users more than advertisers and even more than money. They continuously work to improve the experience for the user and the money just follows.<br />
They also manage people differently. People have no set hours, they can work whenever they want. They're evaluated by their peers. Everything on the campus is free, from coffee nooks stocked with every kind of drink and snack to full themed restaurants and bars to transportation via car, bus, train or bike. They have a barber shop and a dentist office and the central open space was designed by Disney Imagineers. <br />
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Their ambitious 10 year plan includes connectivity, artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality and bot-based customer interaction from sales to service via messenger apps.<br />
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Amazon <br />
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The next morning we were up early for the flight to Seattle and Amazon. We learned that Amazon is no longer just the world's largest marketplace, it's now the first stop online in most shopping journeys. More people start a search for a product at Amazon than at the top search engines or at all specific retailers combined. But it's also becoming the world's foremost logistics company. Having outstripped the capacity of UPS, FedEx and the Postal Service, they're now offering to pay customers to warehouse goods in their basements and attics and even make local deliveries. In many cities, they can now deliver within 1 hour of purchase.<br />
India is a notoriously difficult place to ship anything to or from, but Amazon is now doing it. Customers in China can shop at Amazon in any country and have their Western purchases delivered to them within a week. <br />
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It was a great trip. But I only have a couple minutes left and I want to tell you about some Digital News.<br />
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<a href="http://searchengineland.com/official-google-green-ad-label-global-251958">Change to Google SERP</a><br />
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In the last week, more and more users have reported seeing the green labels instead of Yellow on paid search results in Google.. On Wednesday, Google confirmed with Search Engine Land that the switch is officially no longer a test and the green labels are rolling out to all users. Google says they're doing it to make the experience better, but it looks to me like it blends into the link and isn't as prominent as the yellow. They say that's not the case. but if it looks like a dog...<br />
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- <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-gains-link-to-a-network-1465922927">Microsoft buys </a>LinkedIn<br />
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Unless you've been on vacation or under a rock, you've probably heard by now that Microsoft bought LinkedIn for 26 Bn last week. Why? For the contacts. They want to incorporate them into Office 365. <br />
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- <a href="https://econsultancy.com/blog/67858-eight-reasons-why-content-strategy-should-be-central-to-every-marketer/">Blake Cahill</a> on Content Strategy<br />
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Don't know if you caught it, but our own Blake Cahill often contributes to the eConsultancy blog and he had a really good one 2 weeks ago about Content Strategy and 8 reasons why it should be central to every marketer. It's a good read and very much in line with my thinking about how content and the user experience are key to marketing success.<br />
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- LinkedIn's <a href="https://lists.linkedin.com/2016/top-attractors/en/global">top 40 Employers</a><br />
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And to end on a high point, Philips was ranked by LinkedIn as the 37th of the top 40 places people want to work in the whole world. So yay for us. We work at a great company. <br />
Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-37770463133571484072016-05-27T15:19:00.000-07:002016-12-29T16:17:35.605-08:00West Coast Inspiration<br />
- Charlene Li<br />
- Google<br />
- TechShop<br />
- AirBnB<br />
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Special <a href="https://personality-insights-livedemo.mybluemix.net/">Bonus</a>: Have your personality analyzed by Watson<br />
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Two weeks ago, the global digital team embarked on an entirely new kind of executive digital education. They sponsored a trip for all the worldwide Market leads from the Personal Health organization to San Francisco and Seattle. The purpose of the trip was to introduce all these Philips leaders to the most successful companies in the world. Companies we've often referred to on this blog as the 4 Horsemen. It was an immersive experience into how these companies leverage digital technology to change the way relationships are built with customers, to change how business strategy is built and goals are set as well as the way people are managed. It immersed them into Digital, New Business Models and Disruption. I was privileged to join the group for this experience and I'd like to share some of the insights and learnings with you now. <br />
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We started our first day with a talk and then a discussion with Charlene Li, one of the founders of Altimeter Consulting. Charlene's topic was Disruption. Disrupters shift power in relationships which leads to growth. She talked about nurturing disrupters in our company and building a disruptive organization. She showed how traditional businesses are being disrupted by digital upstarts. We've talked about many of these examples on this call. <br />
<br />
Netflix has completely disrupted not only the video rental business, where it started, but also the TV and Film businesses. But it's well aware that it is swimming with sharks who are all out to disrupt their business, so their reaction is to disrupt their own business. First with streaming, then by producing their own award winning content and now through key partnerships. They know that to stay successful, they'll need to continue to disrupt. I'm sure our community members can name a number of other businesses who've had the same effect on other industries. This is a theme we heard over and over again. Disrupt to thrive, then disrupt to survive. To do this, leadership needs to push people out of their comfort zone and at the same time empower them by <br />
Focusing on the Vision, Foster internal conflict with diversity, create entrepreneurs, provide structure and measurement and amplify with Digital. She said Create a culture of customer obsession. Another recurring theme.<br />
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Next stop was Google. They spent quite a bit of time talking about their company and culture.<br />
A poster on the wall describes work rules for building a great culture: Give pepole slightly more trust, freedom and authority than you are comfortable giving them. If you're not nervous, you haven't ''given them enought.ATheir core values start with hiring great people and creating an environment where they can flourish and grow. They value diversity in people and ideas, and treat people with respect but challenge each other's ideas openly. They use data to make decisions. They expect a lot of people but working there is fun. It's challenging and energetic work environment where people enjoy each other and celebrate each others' accomplishments<br />
They're all about technology, which they apply creatively to solve important problems.<br />
They aspire to improve and change the world. Aim High. Think Big, Take Risks<br />
Have a healthy disregard for the impossible<br />
They strive to earn customerand user loyalty and respect every day. <br />
User Experience comes before the money<br />
And, of course.... Do the right thing. Don't be evil.<br />
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We ended that day with a visit to TechShop. This is a collaborative maker spaces that includes a metal machine shop, a wood shop, textile and fabric tools, a computer aided design studio, numerous 3D printers and anything else a person would need to build anything they can imagine. Not only are the tools there, TechShop offers classes in using all the tools and also features a community of makers who will help each other by teaching, mentoring or even contracting to build something that someone else needs. The creator of the mobile payments processing company Square built his first prototype here and many other businesses have been launched from this space. The San Francisco location we visited was the first TechShop, but now they're all over the country and in many parts of the world. The collaborative has a long list of requests from companies looking to jumpstart co-creation and municipalities looking to add this resource to their communities, all asking to sponsor a TechShop in their backyard. <br />
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The next day, we were off to AirBnB at their new offices in an old paper factory which they've completely transformed with a familiar open plan, conference rooms decorated like the apartments they rent and a huge open building foyer with a living ivy wall.<br />
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They presented to us about the Sharing Economy. A relatively new business model based on 3 principles: Access vs Ownership, Idle resources are made available, Matching Needs with Haves.<br />
They mentioned that most people have a cordless drill/driver and most of these tools are used for a total of an hour and 45 minutes over the course of their lives. Seems like it would be better to rent one when you need one than buy one that you'll hardly ever use.<br />
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AirBnB was started by a couple of guys who decided to go online and offer to rent air mattresses on the floor of their apartment during a developer conference in San Francisco...And by the 3 people who took them up on that offer. The rest is history. They now make more than 2 Mn properties available in 191 countries, 34K cities and the company is valued at over $24Bn. Remember, this is a company that doesn't own a property outside of their headquarters. They bring together people who have a need for space with people who have unused space. Other companies have sprung up to help musicians who have instruments, audio equipment and practice space meet musicians who need these things. Or travelers who need a bike with local bike owners who aren't using theirs. And even to connect people who'd like to sport a high end purse with people who are willing to rent theirs. Why buy something when you can use someone else's whenever you need to? It's a big business. There are currently over 9K sharing companies, 24 of which are valued at over $1Bn and the sharing economy brought in over 26Bn in revenue in 2015. But that's nothing. By 2025, 53% of the us workforce will rely on primary or secondary income from the sharing economy which will generate over 335Bn in revenue.<br />
Astonishing when you think that this kind of business didn't really exist before 2007.<br />
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Next month, I'll talk about what Jeremiah Owyang had to say about the collaborative economy and also share insights from our visits to Facebook and Amazon.<br />
Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-20054084097305042712016-03-25T15:06:00.000-07:002016-12-29T15:08:23.286-08:00Google Changes the SERP<br />
- <a href="http://searchengineland.com/googles-new-serp-layout-4-biggest-winners-losers-based-data-243292">Google changes the SERP</a><br />
- Google <a href="bit.ly/1UnUpkO">Accelerated Mobile Pages</a><br />
- Influencer <a href="bit.ly/1R9n5sb">influencing</a><br />
- Digital and bad <a href="http://bit.ly/1R3PHGu">pizza</a><br />
- <a href="http://cnet.co/1Rjh4OX">Snap Vision</a><br />
- B2B <a href="bit.ly/1R1sdOm">online</a><br />
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<br />
Special <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfjg0kGQFBY&feature=share">Bonus</a>: Scott Galloway talks about the 4 horsemen <br />
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<a href="http://searchengineland.com/googles-new-serp-layout-4-biggest-winners-losers-based-data-243292">Google changes the SERP</a> <br />
The biggest news of this month actually happened last month but I wanted to see it in action a little bit before reporting on it so I could give you some good insight. <br />
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You may have noticed a pretty major change to Google's Search Engine Results Pages 9which search people call SERPs) Since February 18th. Paid search ads have disappeared from the right column They're just gone. And there are now up to 4 paid search ads at the top of the page above the organic results (There won't be 4 on every search, only on 'highly commercial queries' which are the most valuable search queries, including car insurance, mortgage rates, home equity line of credit. This is about 36% of searches) Finally, there will still be 3 more paid keyword ads at the bottom of the page. For a total of 7 ads.<br />
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Wow, huh? <br />
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I'm going to spend some time on this because 1. Any major changes to Google are important because they have the potential to change the face of digital marketing which will effect our business and 2. Because It also gives me an opportunity to spend some time on user experience and content quality, which as you know, are two subjects that are very close to my heart.<br />
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There's been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about this because with 7 ads on the page instead of 12, lot's of experts predict that cost per click will inevitably increase, maybe drastically because of lower supply of space and the higher Clickthrough rates of the ads. But that hasn't seemed to happen yet. Why?<br />
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Well, according to Wordstream data, only 14 and a half % of all clicks go to ads on the side or bottom-of-the-page. And the change only applies to Desktop, which is less than half of all searches. So only about 7% of queries are effected. And really less than that since Paid Keyword results at the bottom of the page will still be there.<br />
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Google says the change improves the User Experience and makes the experience more consistent from Desktop to Mobile, where the majority of searches now happen. Their data showed less visitors were clicking on the side rail so it's been eliminated. The 4 ads above the organic results at the top will have access to all the ad extensions, like Ratings, types, sub pages, addresses, phone numbers. And each extension makes the ads bigger. So those top 4 ads should be richer and therefore get more clicks. The other effect of these larger ads will be to push the organic results down the page even further. In most cases, and especially on mobile, searchers will have to scroll to see ANY organic results at all.<br />
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In addition, the new layout makes the ads look much more like organic results, so even though they're carry that little yellow 'Ad' label, 45% of consumers still don't realize they're clicking on and ad when they click the top links.<br />
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The right column now hosts knowledge graph content. This is when Google provides its own deeper information about a query beyond the links. For instance, if you search the name of a movie, the knowledge graph in the right column will show you the movie poster, the year it was made, who directed and starred in it, and links to movie reviews. Or if you search for a restaurant, the graph will show you a map, pictures of the restaurant, the address and phone number, type of food, zagat review, etc.<br />
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The only other thing that the right column will be used for is Product Listing Ads. Yes, ads, which are delivered as a carousel of vendor choices with pictures and pricing on searches for specific products. These used to appear in the center, but now have moved to the right where they'll stand out more.<br />
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So there will be more competition for the fewer paid search spots on the SERP. One way to win in this more competitive environment will be to pay more, but another way will be to have higher quality content in your ads. If CPC goes up. some companies will be squeezed out of the paid search market for the highest value keywords. That will mean more concentration on SEO, which for me will be a good thing. SEO is also about quality, relevant, customer-oriented content. And we need to get more consistently good at this because more than half of our Web traffic, both from Desktop and Mobile, comes from organic searches. So failure is not an option for us.<br />
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The big lesson, as always, is: know what your customers are looking for and provide valuable content to answer that need. Whether in paid or organic, that's what's going to get you to the top of the SERP.<br />
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How do we know what our customers are looking for? Come talk to us about it. The North America Digital Team is working with many of our brands to do Deep Keyword research which we call Customer Intent Modeling or CIM as well as Social Listening. These tell us what our customers are thinking about and talking about. what their challenges and needs are, what ideas they have and the words they use to describe them and search for solutions. That tells us what content we need to create. It also tells us where customers are finding their solutions, where these conversations are taking place and who is leading them.<br />
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There's lots more to say about this and I'll be expanding on this thread over the months ahead.<br />
<br />
<a href="bit.ly/1UnUpkO">Accelerated Mobile Pages</a> <br />
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Has anyone heard of the AMP project? This was started last October as an open source project by Google and Twitter to make Web pages load much faster to improve the Mobile user experience. It's just starting to be rolled out now, mostly by news organizations. It's kind of an open source equivalent to Facebook Instant News pages. AMP is a stripped down form of HTML. No Forms, limited very structured CSS, only a few standardized Javascript components, etc And it's designed to be light and cacheable. In fact, when Google indexes these pages, it will cache them for quicker delivery and it's expected that others will create cashing archives as well. The practice is intended for Moble pages as the name suggests, but it also works on desktop pages and I think we should start considering using AMP as we work on redesigns of our site. It's an easy way to do responsive design and it brings an elegant simplicity to pages on the desktop as well as quicker load times, which, combined with good content can also mean higher authority and search ranking.<br />
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<a href="bit.ly/1R9n5sb">Influencing Influencers </a> <br />
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Some of you may have seen a note from Blake Cahill asking us to be vigilant about paying for influencers or native content. Lord and Taylor just received a costly and precedent-setting smack for what the FTC decided was misleading content around their 'Design Lab' campaign which featured both paid influencers and native published advertising content that looked like independent editorial. The company tried to make the case that it was using #designlab to indicated that this was part of a campaign. But the FTC wasn't buying and slapped them with a hefty fine. The lesson is that whether you're talking about an influencer or a publication that you're paying to represent you. The FTC rules state that <br />
They have to give a truthful opinion,<br />
They have to clearly disclose their affiliation/compensation<br />
The brand has an obligation to monitor the 3rd party's activities to make sure they're complying<br />
And if they're not, the brand has to make them correct or take down the non-compliant content. <br />
In addition, for native advertising, Advertising messages not identifiable as advertising (based on the net impression to a reasonable consumer) are deceptive. <br />
<br />
<a href="http://bit.ly/1R3PHGu">Digital and Bad pizza</a> <br />
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In a disturbing development, pizza has become a harbinger of digital disruption in a bad way. The first ecommerce transaction happened in 1994 with an order for a pepperoni pizza from Pizza Hut. And now, according to L2, local pizzarias have lost 21% of their market share in the last 5 years to the well known purveyor of bad pizza, Dominos. Online ordering has grown 300% faster than dine-in. And DOminoes is the winner. I'm sad that if this trend continues a generation of kids will never know the wonder of watching a master toss a spinning pizza into the air and catch it on his fists to stretch it out the last few inches. As a New Yorker, I'm an avowed Pizza snob, like Jon Stewart, I don't recognize Chicago Pizza as actual pizza and I'm suspicious of anything that has pineapples on it, has a stuffed crust, or is made outside the safe borders of the NY Metropolitan area. But Dominos and Pizza Hut are the worst, like a virus which has crept into our world while we were sleeping. Their only resemblance to pizza is their overall shape. New York local pizza places need to step up their digital game<br />
<br />
<a href="http://cnet.co/1Rjh4OX">SnapChat's Vision</a> <br />
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I mentioned on our last call that Snapchat recently caught up to Facebook in Video views. Which is a really impressive feat given that they did it in less than 2 years. One reason is that they've streamlined the process of capturing video in their mobile app. You tap the button to take a pic and just hold it to capture video. Nice, right? As a result, it's now the go-to app for capturing socialvideo which is moving it towards being the go to social media app period. So what else can they do to make their app easier to use? How about not having to take your phone out of your pocket?<br />
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SnapChat has never produced a physical product, except branded merchandise, but they launched SnapChat Research division in February of last year and they've been recruiting hardware experts, including about a dozen wearable tech vets, for a secret project. A hint? SnapChat bought Vergence labs at the end of 2014. Until they were acquired, Vergence manufactured and sold Epiphany Eyewear, a cooler-looking Google Glass clone that recorded video of what the Wearer sees, and 5 of their top people are still with Snapchat. They also have an eye-tracking expert, a glasses designer. So there are indications that we might see hands-free instant social video from snapchat soon.<br />
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<a href="bit.ly/1R1sdOm">B2B ONLINE</a> <br />
<br />
In the B2B space, we often hear that B2B ecommerce doesn't work either because of the long sales cycles or the high ticket items. So I was interested to see a new report from Accenture that finds 59% of B2B organizations see a third of customers transactions happening online. 86% allow customers to make purchases on their site. Only 14% offer no online purchasing options. And 92% say email marketing is the most prevalent B2B tactic. But we already knew that, right?<br />
<br />
Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-83827774874914334762016-02-26T14:23:00.000-08:002016-12-29T14:24:22.453-08:00Super Bowl!<br />
- <a href="bit.ly/1SCNovL">Super Bowl</a><br />
- <a href="bit.ly/1KE78wS">Private messaging</a> comes of age<br />
- <a href="bit.ly/1R1sdOm">B2B online</a><br />
- <a href="bit.ly/1n68k1v">Niche Technology</a><br />
<br />
Special <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-Z2BDDogCI">Bonus</a>: Walk off the Earth cover of Adele’s Hello<br />
<br />
<a href="bit.ly/1SCNovL">Super Bowl</a> <br />
<br />
- Since the last time we got together, the Super Bowl came and went and with it another display of profligate advertising spend. A :30 spot on the superbowl now commands $5Mn to reach the game's 112Mn viewers That was a 11% increase in cost over last year for the 3rd largest TV audience of all time. Of course, as with all TV ads, many of the audience aren't interested in the brand's that are advertising. But on the other hand, according to a study by the National Retail Federation and Statista, 1 in 4 viewers are there mainly just to watch the ads.<br />
<br />
But in a digital world, that begs the question: 'wouldn't the money be better spent on digital platforms that not only offer precise targeting but trackable engagement as well?' That same $5Mn would buy 250Mn Facebook video views, 10 days of YouTube Mastheads, 750Mn paid search impressions or 15Mn paid search clicks. In fact, <br />
<br />
Gatorade did a weeklong snapchat campaign sponsoring a filter that animated the traditional pouring the Gatorade cooler over the subject of the snap. That weeklong campaign cost them 350K per day or half the price of a Superbowl ad and completely engaging and trackable.<br />
<br />
Companies should especially be evaluating this in light of the decrease in effectiveness of Social Media extensions of the super bowl ad content this year over last year. Trickle down views of extended content were just about non-existent. In fact, the 4 extra snickers ads, 5 additional TurboTax ads, and 14 additional Shock Top videos that were available online only accrued a total of about 85K views. And interestingly, social uplift from SuperBowl ads was almost 3x higher BEFORE halftime than after. OK, enough about the Super Bowl and congratulations to whichever team won. Just kidding, I know it was Denver.<br />
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<a href="bit.ly/1KE78wS">Private Messaging</a> <br />
<br />
We've spent quite a bit of time discussing messaging in it various forms on this call. I think I even mentioned that it seems like advertisers are starting to try to use native messaging to reach out to their customers. Most of that is spam now, but advertisers are getting smart about making text a notification option for many routine business transactions. For instance many sellers now offer the options of delivery updates by text and once you've said yes to that, you may be in for other updates, like promotions and such. I let Delta give me flight status updates by text and now I also get notices when there's a discounted fare on a route that I've flown and when I pass frequent flier milestones. We've also talked about the prevalance and popularity of private messaging apps like WhatsApp, Viber, Line, and WeChat. These have become vibrant communities of their own, some of which offer rich communication options like video and livestreaming.<br />
<br />
Up until now, most of them have had a hard time monetizing these apps, but that's about to change. Facebook is about to bring targeted texts to it Facebook messenger app. And that means that it'll be coming to their WhatsApp service as well. It'll be pretty restricted at first and again, dependent on the consumer initiating a chat with a business. businesses will be able to send ads as messages to people who previously initiated a chat thread with that company. To prepare, the document recommends that businesses get consumers to start message threads with them now so they'll be able to send them ads when the feature launches. So fair warning. <br />
<br />
And hey, how many Facebook fans do we have? Let's see if we can get them to engage in a text conversation with us. According to TechCrunch, Facebook has also launched a short url link.fb.com/msg/ that instantly opens a chat window with that company, this is, reportedly, already operational, but I couldn't find a way to make it work. <br />
<br />
Where Facebook goes, others will follow so look for this as the dawn of a new advertising medium. And with the young user-bases these apps have -- many hundreds of millions worldwide -- it's going to be a big important and powerful one, So let's get onboard and take advantage of the opportunity. <br />
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<a href="bit.ly/1R1sdOm">B2B ONLINE</a> <br />
<br />
In the B2B space, we often hear that B2B ecommerce doesn't work either because of the long sales cycles or the high ticket items. So I was interested to see a new report from Accenture that finds 59% of B2B organizations see a third of customers transactions happening online. 86% allow customers to make purchases on their site. Only 14% offer no online purchasing options. And 92% say email marketing is the most prevalent B2B tactic. But we already knew that, right?<br />
<br />
<a href="bit.ly/1n68k1v">Niche Technology</a> Technology Head Fakes <br />
<br />
- Earlier this month, Scott Galloway released a bit of a rant about what he called Technology Head Fakes, calling 'LOSER' on anyone who's bought into technologies which will never rise beyond a niche market. At first look these are surprising because they've all recently been touted as the next big thing. The technologies are Mass customization, Internet of Things, beacons, 3D printing, and virtual reality. Scott is a bit of an agent provocateur and he's also the first person to say he gets this stuff wrong all the time. So let's dig into these a little bit. I'll tell you what I think, and you guys should feel free to jump in and agree or disagree.<br />
<br />
Let's start with Virtual Reality. The hype around this has been deafening of late, with Samsung even opening a purpose built Virtual Reality studio in lower manhattan last month. Nonetheless, I agree with Scott on this, at least in it's current incarnation, because it requires a crazy looking headset and the 3D aspect of it literally gives many people a headache. I'm one of those people. So those seems like pretty significantbarriers to widespread adoption.<br />
<br />
Internet of Things, we hope isn't limited to a niche becasue it's a significant part of our healthcare and lighting businesses. While there has been some overhype - connected blender? -- I think there's a lot of potential for wide adoption for many IoT applications.<br />
<br />
Mass Customization. I strongly agree that this was a concept doomed to failure. A great example of this is Nike allowing people to pay a premium price to design their own sneakers. Now, remember, I'm not saying no one is going to do this. But I do think it will remain a niche because most people buy products from top brands becasue they like the edgy designs that the brands come up with. Very few people can out-design Nike.<br />
<br />
Beacons - In case anyone doesn't know, Beacons are bluetooth devices that are being placed in stores around the country -- actually around the world. In a store, beacons use Bluetooth to detect nearby smartphones and try to bridge the physical and digital experiences, sending media such as ads, coupons or supplementary product information. I agree that nobody has figured out a way to make beacons really benefit their bottom line yet, certainly not in a directly trackable way. But I have seen some uses that positively impact the Customer Experience and that can only be a good thing. And remember, nobody made money with a Web site for many years after the Web started to happen. Beacon technology is still developing. So I think there's a good chance that we'll see them play an important role in the omni-channel environment. <br />
<br />
3D printing - again, there are customers who will benefit from this tech. College engineering departments, manufacturers, etc. It IS exciting technology, but I've never been able to see how it's going to go mass market. Just print anything you need right in your own house. You'd have to keep a huge inventory of materials around to be ready to print whatever you needed on demand, The cost of the various materials is just too high. And it seems that there would be too much wasted material and energy. I think we're all waiting for a star trek type replicator anyway. Now THAT I'll be ready to adopt.<br />
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<a href="bit.ly/1PFARoY">RANDOM ACTS OF STATASTICS</a> <br />
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Couple random interesting stats...<br />
<br />
Google made 74.5 Bn in 2015, and the new holding company, Alphabet reported earnings of 21.3 Billion just for the last quarter.<br />
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61% of retailers have a transactional moble app and half of retailers say 21-50% of their Web sales come from an app.<br />
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I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: 74% of all Web traffic will be video by 2017. This needs to be part of all our marketing strategies. And to be efficient, we need to look at how we can produce more video in-house. I'm not talking about fully produced ads on YouTube, but short, engaging videos on Vine, FB, Insta, etc. I'm very interested in your ideas about how to produce and use video in our marketing. Can you guys post some of your video-related successes in the comments?<br />
Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-75033525452948876982016-01-29T11:41:00.000-08:002016-12-29T11:44:02.009-08:00Mobile Genius- Mobile = <a href="http://bit.ly/20hEmp6">Genius</a><br />
- Brick and mortar <a href="https://www.l2inc.com/3-brand-stores-that-arent-stores/2016/blog?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=the-daily&utm_campaign=email">non-stores</a>!<br />
- <a href="http://www.l2inc.com/research/social-platforms-2015">Snapchat </a>takes on Facebook<br />
- 2016 eCommerce eMail <a href="https://econsultancy.com/blog/67403-ecommerce-email-marketing-benchmarks-for-2016/">benchmarks</a><br />
- Video holds <a href="https://econsultancy.com/blog/67413-nine-glorious-digital-marketing-stats-from-the-past-week/?utm_source=Econsultancy&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6666276_2106-daily-pulse-us-2016-01-15&dm_i=LQI,3YVQC,L6OGFL,EBQDD,1">eyeballs</a><br />
- <a href="https://www.l2inc.com/technology-head-fakes/2016/blog?utm_source=et&utm_medium=email&utm_content=winner-losers-011416&utm_campaign=email">Niche </a>Tech<br />
<br />
Special Bonus: Internet Statstics <a href="https://econsultancy.com/reports/internet-statistics-compendium/">Compendium </a>(Caution: Addictive)<br />
<br />
Mobile = Genius<br />
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More than 50% of Web searches now happen on a mobile device. That's why L2 Research has awarded Genius status to any brand that meets three criteria: They have a mobile first strategy, ranks number 1 on Google Mobile search for their brand term and uses the mobile technology for more than just an optimized site, for instance, they use location data to benefit either their visitor or their company. Clearly, WE'RE not there yet, but Home depot was a big winner in this space, which will be no surprise to anyone who has used their app. It lets you search for items and availability in a particular store, helps you find stuff when you're in the store itself and even let's you search for an item by taking a picture of it!! That's pretty cool cutting edge stuff but with slope of the current customer expectation curve, I predict these features will be table stakes for any brick and mortar retailer in the very near future. Maybe even this year.<br />
<br />
Brick and mortar non-stores<br />
<br />
Speaking of physical stores, here's an interesting trend that bears watching: we've talked over and over again about the death of pure play retail and how even giant etailers like Amazon will eventually need brick and mortar presence to fully succeed. Stores have been undervalued for years through the e-commerce era but as it turns out, they add tremendous value as local warehouses as well as distribution or pick-up points. They're also showrooms where customers can see and touch products before they buy them. Well, now a number of ecommerce companies are trying a different take on brick and mortar. They're building stores that aren't stores. For instance, the men's grooming brand Harry's has expanded from online only into a chain called Cornershop, a retro barbershop offering haircuts, shaves, beard trims and Harry's shaving products. Customers can book appointments online and use the 'cut archive' app to record their favorite haircuts and beards for future visits. The positioning of a neighborhood shop where customers can build long lasting relationships complements their messagoe of old-fashioned quality. Is there a lesson here for Philips? definitely. Though we probably missed the barbershop opportunity. What about pop up snack bars that sell food made with our Kitchen Appliances? Or sleep bars that offer people with respritory disorders the chance to try our SRC products while they grab a nap in a comfy bed in the middle of the day?<br />
<br />
Another creative application of a real-world presence comes from the previously online only Trunk Club, This is a Style site where you input information about yourself and a personal stylist puts together a 'trunk' of clothes tailored to your needs. The unique trunks are shipped to each customer who only pay for what they decide to keep and returns the rest. The company just opened several 'Clubhouses' in a number of cities where customers can meet with a stylist in person, see, touch and try on the merch and even have a complementary beverage before they meet with their stylist. It's a whole new take on clothes shopping.<br />
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While we're on the subject. American Eagle, an established brick and mortar has gone well beyond just adding a Web presence. Since 2010 they've invested heavily in becoming a true omnichannel business. They persevered even as their stock price took a hit in 2013. They hired a Chief Digital Officer, Opened a Tech Center in Silicon Valley, introduced ship from store, built a state of the art fulfillment center and perhaps most important, rolling up ecommerce and retailer reporting so everyone was working from the same information. Their long game was rewarded last year as their stock price climbed 11% in just 6 months. Kudos to them for having a clear strategy, hanging in and doing it right. <br />
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Snap vs Facebook<br />
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A couple of calls ago, we mentioned that Snapchat was starting to position itself as a marketing platform as they made sponsored 'Lenses' available to Brands. These are branded filters or frames that users can put around their pictures garner up to 16Mn impressions. At 750K for special days, the pricing for a sponsored Lens rivals the cost of a super bowl ad. Snapchat also allows Brand accounts. But now the popular channel is reportedly building a sophisticated ad targeting platform to compete with Facebook. This may explain why they turned down an acquisition offer of 3 Billion from Facebook two years ago. Smart, because their current funding round just valued them at 16Bn. While Snapchats 100Mn users pale in comparison to Facebook's 1.2 Bn, the demographics of Snapchats 18-24 dominated user base, and it's younger group of users with a potential for exponential growth are clearly compelling to brands. A study shows that marketers who are active on Snapchat and post daily, maintain an average of 9 posts/day. Much higher than averages of 1.8 on FB, 2.3 on Insta and 3.3 on Twitter. Then again, Snapchat could fade away in a couple of years and never be though of again. FB's not going anywhere.<br />
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ECommerce email Benchmarks<br />
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I touch on this every couple of months, but it bears repeating because marketers tend to think of email marketing as old or passe. The fact is email marketing is the gift that keeps on giving. I think I mentioned last month that a quarter of all black friday weekend traffic was driven by email. But how many emails did it take to drive that traffic? How do you define email success? Great question and one that a recent study by Remarketry is helping to answer as they provide some email benchmarks for 2016. <br />
If you send out a regular email newsletter, you can expect an open rate of 23.4%. 17% of those will click on something in your newsletter and 1% of THOSE will likely convert. If you beat that, you're doing something very right.<br />
But once people have bought something from you, the story changes pretty dramatically. Order follow up emails get a 46% open rate. CLick rate is 16% and 5% of those people will convert, though probably not to another sale right away. People ARE willing to give feedback though, they'll RATE SOMETHING or sign up for a loyalty program once they bought something so let's capitalize on that. Could be a way to increase our ratings and reviews<br />
When someone hasn't seen anything from you for a while, they're more likely to pay attention, this includes inactive customers. 38% of them will open an email from a brand that they haven't done business with in a while, 19% will click and 2.5% will convert<br />
Maybe the best opportunity is email follow ups to cart abandons. 46.6% of people who've abandoned a shopping cart will open an email about it. 28% of them will click and fully 5% will convert to a sale. So let's make sure we're following up on cart abandons. Otherwize, we're leaving a lot of money on the table.<br />
<br />
Fun video stats<br />
<br />
I want us to do more video in 2016. Lot's more. And I don't mean fully produced 2 or 10 minute videos that only live on YouTube. I mean Vines and Snapchats and Instagrams and even animated gifs and jpgs. They're just more involving and people look at them longer than static images And as long as they're looking at them, they're thinking about our brand. Here are a couple interesting stats...<br />
Snapchat now delivers 7Bn video views per day. That's up 1Bn views year over year. And only a Bn short of Facebook but with only .1% of the users. Wow!<br />
Periscope has delivered 100Mn live broadcasts in the last 10 months and it just became autoplay on twitter which could geometrically impact it's growth.<br />
People watched 12Bn hours of Netflix in the last quarter of 2015. That was a 70% increase Year over Year, in case you were wondering why the bars are all empty. <br />
<br />
Niche Technology<br />
<br />
Earlier this month, Scott Galloway released a bit of a rant about what he called Technology Head Fakes, calling 'LOSER' on anyone who's bought into technologies which will never rise beyond a niche market. At first look these are surprising because they've all recently been touted as the next big thing. The technologies are Mass customization, Internet of Things, beacons, 3D printing, and virtual reality. Scott is a bit of an agent provocateur and he's also the first person to say he gets this stuff wrong all the time. So let's dig into these a little bit. I'll tell you what I think, and you guys should feel free to jump in and agree or disagree.<br />
Let's start with Virtual Reality. The hype around this has been deafening of late, with Samsung even opening a purpose built Virtual Reality studio in lower manhattan last month. Nonetheless, I agree with Scott on this, at least in it's current incarnation, because it requires a crazy looking headset and the 3D aspect of it literally gives many people a headache. I'm one of those people. So those seems like pretty significant barriers to widespread adoption.<br />
Internet of Things, we hope isn't limited to a niche becasue it's a significant part of our healthcare and lighting businesses. While there has been some overhype - connected blender? -- I think there's a lot of potential for wide adoption for many IoT applications.<br />
Mass Customization. I strongly agree that this was a concept doomed to failure. A great example of this is Nike allowing people to pay a premium price to design their own sneakers. Now, remember, I'm not saying no one is going to do this. But I do think it will remain a niche because most people buy products from top brands becasue they like the edgy designs that the brands come up with. Very few people can out-design Nike.<br />
Beacons - In case anyone doesn't know, Beacons are bluetooth devices that are being placed in stores around the country -- actually around the world. In a store, beacons use Bluetooth to detect nearby smartphones and try to bridge the physical and digital experiences, sending media such as ads, coupons or supplementary product information. I agree that nobody has figured out a way to make beacons really benefit their bottom line yet, certainly not in a directly trackable way. But I have seen some uses that positively impact the Customer Experience and that can only be a good thing. And remember, nobody made money with a Web site for many years after the Web started to happen. Beacon technology is still developing. So I think there's a good chance that we'll see them play an important role in the omni-channel environment. <br />
3D printing - again, there are customers who will benefit from this tech. College engineering departments, manufacturers, etc. It IS exciting technology, but I've never been able to see how it's going to go mass market. Just print anything you need right in your own house. You'd have to keep a huge inventory of materials around to be ready to print whatever you needed on demand, The cost of the various materials is just too high. And it seems that there would be too much wasted material and energy. I think we're all waiting for a star trek type replicator anyway. Now THAT I'll be ready to adopt.<br />
<br />
Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-51647068311592646922015-12-04T11:25:00.000-08:002016-12-29T11:26:39.482-08:00Personalization Personalization Personalization<br />
- <a href="http://cmo.cm/1IAzvp2">Personalization</a> is important<br />
- Instagram CTR <a href="http://blog.marketing.rakuten.com/first-instagram-ad-performance-metrics-released-by-rakuten-marketing-rc-willey">outperforms</a><br />
- 3 in 5 companies NOT there!<br />
- Baby <a href="http://blog.marketing.rakuten.com/first-instagram-ad-performance-metrics-released-by-rakuten-marketing-rc-willey">Names</a><br />
- Google Quality Rater guidelines<br />
- L2 Predicts, Yahoo <a href="http://blog.marketing.rakuten.com/first-instagram-ad-performance-metrics-released-by-rakuten-marketing-rc-willey">Acts</a><br />
- Black Friday and Cyber Monday <a href="http://bit.ly/1QWMkC3">recap</a><br />
- <a href="http://bit.ly/1NK21ft">Amazon</a> drops mic<br />
<br />
Special <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQYtQa6CKz8">Bonus</a>: The extended Trailer<br />
<br />
<br />
Let's spend some time today talking about personalization. Almost all companies agree that it's important and most are working towards it in some way. When asked to name one marketing capability that will be the most important in the future, 1/3 of businesses say Personalization is their top priority. Customers want personalization and are beginning to demand it. Nonetheless, Many companies find themselves hamstrung by privacy concerns. Very few are doing personalization well. In fact, according to Greenlight research, even though personalization capabilities are most advanced on Web sites and in email, with 54% of companies doing it on both these channels, Mobile, which is perhaps the most personal experience, lags behind with less than a quarter of businesses personalizing on mobile sites or in-apps. In fact, 9 out of 10 brands are failing to personalize effectively. They don't recognize customers across channels, which is a shame because, according to L2, customers are twice as likely to buy from a brand who knows them wherever they are.<br />
<ul><li>Personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates but only 30% of brands use them.</li>
<li>Only 39% of retailers send personalized product recommendations via email</li>
<li>3/4 of online consumers get frustrated when content has nothing to do with their interests. I know I do.</li>
<li>Customers want personalization, but they also want control: 2/3 want the option for privacy controls and just having privacy controls available makes customers 30% more likely to trust a company with their data. </li>
<li>58% want personalization based only on information that they proactively provide and 38% are willing to specify their individual interests so that the company can deliver content tailored to their needs.</li>
</ul><br />
Based on all this, I would like to see Philips offering our customers a subscription to a customized newsletter which allows them to specify what Philips-related topics they're interested in and how often they want to receive it. An offer like this would help build our opt-in database, it would keep us in regular touch with these customers with content that interests them, giving us the opportunity to market to them in a personalized way.<br />
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In addition, we should be building a sophisticated back end into our Web presence which allows us to track customer behavior on the site so we know what their interests are and where they are in the buying cycle.<br />
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These technologies aren't just possible. They're widely available and absolutely necessary for us to succeed in a world where personalized marketing is increasingly expected by our customers. And the fact that most companies aren't getting this right yet gives us a window of opportunity to gain a competitive advantage. Let's make 2016 the year Philips moves into this important space to make our mark with best in class personalization.<br />
<br />
<br />
Instagram advertising has been available for a couple of months now and the first reports are making people jump up and down. Not only does the new ad platform have the reach to connect with 400 Mn people, but the clickthrough rate is 17x higher than standard ad clickthrough and 1.5x higher than Facebook ads. It's possible this will wane as more ads show up. but take opportunities when you can get them. The platform offers full-funnel marketing capabilities to raise brand awareness, attract prospects, retarget site abandoners and retain current customers.<br />
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The bar has been set high for creative imagery. Stock and studio photography won't work on Instagram. But when good creative is combined with all of the targeting and optimization capabilities available on Facebook, Instagram advertisements provide a powerful and visual way to reach target audiences. If you're not on Instagram already, you should at least be considering it.<br />
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Couple other cool comments about Insta, while we're on the subject...<br />
3 in 5 marketers are not targeting Instagram users. but half are planning to, mostly to boost brand awareness<br />
The platform is so influential that parents have started naming their children after it's filters.<br />
The boy's names Lux and Ludwig are up 75 and 42% respectively since last year. And for girls Valencia and Juno are up 26 and 30% Amaro, Willow and Reyes are also up, though not quite as much. Yikes! This is the first time ever that a technology has inspired baby names.<br />
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<br />
Followers of SearchEngineLand and SearchMOS know that Since at least 2005, Google has been using a large, worldwide focus group to help refine the algorithm. These highly trained people review search results from Google's current algorithm side by side with results from a proposed new algorithms to determine which delivers the best results. The people in this program are called Quality Raters and, as you can imagine, the work they do is important to search marketers everywhere. So it's big news that Google just published their updated Quality Rater guidelines. The document gives us a look inside Google’s decision-making processes and what the search engine wants to see from a site. Reputation is a big factor. Google expects big brands to generate positive and trustworthy mentions (not just links) and it will be problematic to a brand’s SEO if that’s not happening. This will force SEO and PR people to work together.<br />
Google also added several other exciting new capabilities in 2016. Offline measurement, which is when a search concludes with a searcher arriving at a new physical location rather than a Web page. And app search, which delivers content from apps in search results and in some cases, through app streaming, allows users to engage with an app they don't have on their device through the Search Engine Results page interface. In fact, the results page, especially on a mobile device has become a much more transactional engagement space where searchers can click to do something concrete rather than just to choose a Web page to visit. <br />
I'm an android user and I definitely crossed the chasm this year to treating my phone as a personal assistant, especially when I'm driving, telling it, through the Google Voice interface to do things like send a text or call someone, get directions, set an alarm or play a song or artist. It's really a different way of interacting. You don't even need to look at your phone to get what you want.<br />
<br />
<br />
On November 19th, L2 Research offered a recap of Yahoo's management under Melissa Meyer, suggesting that this company should be sold. Ms 'lean in' has one of the best known brand names in the world, among the world's oldest and top trafficked sites with a solidly respectable reputation for news, finance and sports yet after all this time, they haven't been able to monatize their considerable assets. Right now if you subtract their stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, their core business is worth negative $5 Bn. Scott Galloway is the first to say he get's this stuff wrong all the time, but that's apparently not the case here as on December 1st, The Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo's board is planning a series of meetings this week to discuss spinning off the Alibaba investment and finding a buyer for the core business. We with them the best of luck.<br />
<br />
<br />
I've never liked the term Black Friday, it's incredibly cynical and unfestive for the name of the beginning of the happy holiday shopping season and it seems a lot of people agree. 82% of tweets about Black Friday in November were negative. That may be because past Black Friday incidents have left a lot of people cold. In store sales over this THanksgiving weekend dropped over a $Bn -- almost 10% -- since last year to 10.4Bn while Cyber Monday was the largest US online sales day in history, up 16% year over year, topping $3 Bn. and that's after $4 Bn in online shopping on Thursday and Friday. By the way, a quarter of consumers began their Christmas shopping before Halloween this year so a LOT of spending has already happened.<br />
The online shopping was so robust that a number a retailers, most notably Target experienced Website overload on Monday. They were putting visitors into virtual lines where they had to wait before they could even browse Target's sweet deals which included at least 15% off on everything on the site as well as doorbusters on many larger items.<br />
More than half of Online transactions over the weekend happened on mobile -- 3/4 of those on Apple devices, a quarter on Android -- and for the first time, Average Order Value was higher on Tablets than on Desktops.<br />
Finally, we may think of email as an out of date technology, but it drove almost a quarter of all sales over the weekend, outperforming organic, paid, direct traffic, affiliates, social and display. So email is still very much alive and well.<br />
<br />
<br />
I'm sure no one will be surprised to hear that Amazon crushed it this weekend. Largely through their unprecedented presence in paid search. You should think of search as the biggest store window in the world. And in that all-important shelf space, Amazon scored the highest in paid search visibility in almost every holiday product category. Electronics, sporting goods, toys, you name it. As L2's Scott Galloway says, you CAN buy your way to happiness on Google. Unlike organic, paid search isn't a skill set. It's just a function of deep pockets. And with $115 Bn market cap and a stock price up 105%, no company has ever had access to such cheap capital for so long. As a result, they have more chips to put down on more numbers, they are going underwater with the world's biggest oxygen tank and forcing other retailers to join them. But the other retailers are beginning to drown.Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-82889728237768165432015-10-30T11:05:00.000-07:002016-12-29T11:06:44.857-08:00It's all BACK to the Future Now!<br />
- It’s all BACK to the future now<br />
- Bing makes <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/22/bing-is-profitable/">money</a>!!<br />
- Transformation <a href="http://bit.ly/1k3Khhn">Perception</a> Gap<br />
- <a href="http://bit.ly/1M0rmvu">Instagram</a> – the ‘it’ social network<br />
- Prepared for <a href="https://econsultancy.com/blog/67074-is-the-healthcare-industry-prepared-for-wearables/?utm_source=Econsultancy&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6307882_1985-daily-pulse-us-2015-10-22&dm_i=LQI,3R76Y,L6OGFL,DITA1,1">Wearables</a>? <br />
- Snapchat <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/snapchat-expects-sponsored-selfie-filters-to-reach-up-to-16#.kt7Dwggag">sponsored</a> filters<br />
- Twitter <a href="http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/march-2013-by-the-numbers-a-few-amazing-twitter-stats/4/">stats</a><br />
- Twitter <a href="https://econsultancy.com/blog/67106-new-twitter-polls-the-opportunities-for-marketers/?utm_source=Econsultancy&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6321197_1987-daily-pulse-us-2015-10-26&dm_i=LQI,3RHGT,L6OGFL,DJWPR,1">polling</a> <br />
- <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-way-to-sell-oreos-1445824919?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=the-daily&utm_campaign=email">Mondelez</a> vous? <br />
- Google Shopper <a href="http://on.recode.net/1OT3eki">Insights</a><br />
- The BIg Box <a href="http://on.wsj.com/1MPfbkS">shrinks</a><br />
<br />
Special <a href="http://bit.ly/1Nx0wxA">Bonus</a>: The preferred Social Networks of The Breakfast Club<br />
<br />
<br />
We entered a new era last week in which all of Back to the Future now takes place in the past. I confess to a little ambivalence because it makes me a little sad, but it's also exciting because we're now in uncharted territory. The movie correctly predicted wearables, smart phones, video conferencing (though only on a wide screen, not a small one), googleglass and maybe hoverboards?. We're still waiting for coats that automatically resize and dry themselves, self-tying shoes and Mr. Fusion. But the Cubs definitely didn't win the World Series, thanks to the Amazin' Mets. #letsgomets<br />
<br />
Interestingly, the flood of references to Back to the Future day last week benefitted the brands that were associated with it. Especially Pepsi and DeLorean, althought it's too late to do DeLorean any good.<br />
<br />
<br />
Enough with the fun and games...<br />
<br />
<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/22/bing-is-profitable/">Bing makes money!</a><br />
<br />
It's been a long wait, but Microsoft's Bing search business has finally become profitable, generating $1bn in revenues during the company's first quarter of this fiscal year. Here are some key stats related to the surprise announcement:<br />
<br />
•Search revenue grew 29%, driven by higher revenue per search and search volume.<br />
<br />
But here's the kicker!!<br />
<br />
•Nearly 20% of search revenue in September was driven by Windows 10 devices.<br />
<br />
Why is this interesting? Anybody? Anybody? Beuler... Because Windows 10 devices, their Tablets, their Phones and now almost every existing Windows 7 and 8 laptop and desktop, which are all eligible for free upgrades to Win 10, all have Bing as their default search and are notoriously difficult to change. So all these miriad devices are now functioning for Microsoft the way the Kindle works for Amazon. That is -- Amazon takes a loss on it's Kindles because it's essentially putting a really streamlined amazon store in every owner's hand. Microsoft has this growing media sales business, they're putting a Bing search engine in every owners hand, lap and office. But the Windows 10 upgrade offer has only just begun and there 1 and a quarter BILLION Windows 7 PCs out there in the world. So this is likely just the beginning of a rapidly expanding period of good news for Microsoft's and Bing. I predict it'll be worth the wait for the Big M.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://bit.ly/1k3Khhn">Perception Gap</a><br />
<br />
There's a perception gap in digital organizations. According to a recent study by L2, 9 in 10 organizations are undergoing a digital transformation, only 1 in 7 think they're doing it fast enough. 55% of CEOs think they're doing this very fast, fast or about right. 64% of Line Managers think the transformation is happening slow or very slow.<br />
<br />
How is Philips doing? I'd love to know what you guys think. Can you respond either in this thread or on the SocialCast group at bit.ly/DigitalNAConnect? But I can show you some results of the Digital @ Scale Change adoption survey and other stats that Blake just reported to the Exco last week. The survey tracks what respondents think about the progress we've made in Digital since the inception of D@S: <br />
<br />
The strongest improvements have been made in analytics<br />
Half the respondent's now think Digital Strategy is extremely important<br />
North America is above average in Digital Capabilities<br />
North America is the leading market at collecting new marketing contacts<br />
The Level 2 training onboarding level for Personal Health in August is leading the world at 89%<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://bit.ly/1M0rmvu">Instagram</a> <br />
<br />
If you're a regular reader, You know Instagram is the growingest presence in Social. We talk about it almost every <br />
month. According to research by eMarketer, 32% of US companies with 100 or more employees currently use Instagram as a marketing tool. This figure is set to increase to 49% by next year, and will reach an incredible 71% by the following year. According to the research, the photo-sharing app could be more popular with marketers than Twitter within two years.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://bit.ly/1HfgvM3">Twitter stats</a> <br />
<br />
And as much as we all love Twitter, it's hemmoraging users and over 44% of its Bn members have never sent a single tweet! 391 Mn of them have no followers. Interestingly, I couldn't find a stat about the % of Twitterers who only post but never read Twitter. I'm sure there are a lot of them. Anyway, Something needs to be done to jumpstart the venerable channel and there's increasing scepticism that Jack Dorsey will be able to do it as a part time CEO while he's also getting ready for an IPO at Square, the other company he's CEO of. But here's a bright spot...<br />
<br />
<a href="http://bit.ly/1PNYCvM">Twitter polling</a> <br />
<br />
Twitter just launched a new polling feature. Tweeters can now create a 2-button poll that will remain live for 24 hours. Voting is anonymous and there's no limit to to how many polls you can create or participate in. Seems to me this is a great new way to engage on Twitter. Although it may get overused for a while before it settles down. Of course, you could always ask questions and get answers on twitter, but I think the anonymity and ease of just choosing a button rather than composing a tweet may get more response. Like any other tweet, the cleverness of the <br />
<br />
question and choice of answers will likely be determinative. It's also rudimentary social listening. And it can even help you shape your approach to your twitter account...<br />
<br />
What do you think of tweets without links? 1. They're useless. 2. Tweets can be fun and infomative without links.<br />
<br />
How about this one...<br />
<br />
Is two buttons enough to be useful? Yes No ?<br />
<br />
Two choices is pretty rudimentary, but I think Twitter chose this simple version to test the waters. So we may see them roll out multiple choice pretty quickly as this catches on.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://bit.ly/1kHF6nV">Prepared for Wearables?</a> <br />
<br />
With the popularity of Wearables growing so rapidly, you'd think that Health Organizations would be dedicating recources to being able to leverage this treasure trove of data. But eConsultancy and Ogilvy conducted an interesting survey in Sept on how ready the Healthcare industry is to jump on the opportunity presented by the consumer adoption of wearables. Only 5% of respondents said their organizations were very prepared, while 66% said their orgs were either unprepared or very unprepared. Only 25% of HealthCare organizations even use data from medical devices, and only 11% are collecting data from wearables. This validates the tremendous opportunity for Philips Healthcare Informatics, solutions and services to leverage our deep expertise in this type of integration, especially with our HealthSuite Digital Platform (HSDP) to help the industry take advantage of this rich trove of data and insight.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://bzfd.it/1P8PQXL">Snapchat</a><br />
<br />
SnapChat just completed a new round of funding that pushed it's valuation over $16Bn. Does anyone use Snapchat’s Lenses? Apparently a LOT of people are. The social network launched Lenses a month ago. These are little decorative filters that you can pull over your selfies on The Snap to make your pictures more fun. And they're about to make these available as a media buy. Companies can create branded ones and pay to make them available for a limited time to Snappers. Snapchat expects its new sponsored selfie filters to reach a staggering 16m viewers a day, according to a report by Buzzfeed. The catch? Snapchat is asking advertisers to cough up $450,000 per day for sponsorship running Sunday through Thursday, $500,000 per day for Friday or Saturday, and up to a staggering $700,000 for holidays. <br />
<br />
<a href="http://on.wsj.com/1k5iZqV">Mondelez vous?</a> <br />
<br />
Do you Mondelez? You may not have heard of Mondelez food, but you've definitely eaten them. Nobody could get through life without trying an Oreo, a Cadbury chocolate or a Ritz Cracker. As it turns out, Mondelez is the world's second largest packaged food company, just behind Nestle and just ahead of Pepsi. According to the Wall Street Journal, as part of a massive cost cutting program, this giant has reduced it's TV advertising more than 50% in the last 5 years and almost 20% since last year. Where has the spending gone? Why to digital of course which is less expensive and twice as effective! And to some cost cutting. BUt this company is overcoming challenges from learning new capabilities at a very fast pace, to executive education to tracking. Digital was 32% of their North America media spend last year and will be 45% this year. They've made big deals with Google and Facebook to create new communications paradigms for them beyond simple ads and promotions ad they're starting to get into impulse oriented e-commerce, which, though commonplace in a store setting is entirely new to the snack food market. How will this work? Don't know yet. We'll have to wait and see. But it sure sounds like these folks are finding new ways to market very traditional products.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://on.recode.net/1OT3eki">Google Shopper Insights</a> <br />
<br />
Shoppers have used Google for a long time to help them find products and retailers. But this week Google announced Shopper Insights - a new tool that combines search and maps to help retailersfind shoppers. Or more specifically when and where shoppers search for stuff. For instance: In NYC, Gamers are shopping for Playstation 4 twice as often as XBoX One, but on the West Coast, shoppers were 10x more likely to be looking for the Microsoft console. Or on Black Friday, people tend to shop with their phones, while on Cyber Monday, they're more likely to use Desktops. For the first time, retailers can tap into insights yielded by search queries to understand shopping trends in individual markets.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://on.wsj.com/1MPfbkS">The Big Box shrinks</a> <br />
<br />
Here's a surprise: WalMart is getting smaller! Most of their supercenters have around 2500 less products than they had last year and they're looking to further reduce to make inventory easier tomanage as they streamline their systems to boost online sales. Spending on these initiatives, along with it's determination to increase wages for the average worker have the company on track to lose about 12% in profit next year. That news caused the stock to drop 10% in a single day, allowing Amazon to surpass Walmart in value for the first time and wiping out about $11Bn of the Walton kids' fortune. But don't worry, they'll be OK.<br />
Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-70743972258734702512015-09-25T21:12:00.000-07:002016-12-27T21:14:47.205-08:00Wikipedia leaks, Asos wins SEO.<br />
- Wikipedia <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-suffers-decline-in-traffic-2015-8?r=UK&IR=T">leaks </a>page views<br />
- Infinitely scrolling <a href="http://digiday.com/announcement/introducing-tldr-new-way-read-digiday/">content </a>feeds<br />
- ASOS wins with the basics<br />
- A <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/one-trillion-songs-have-been-streamed-online-in-the-first-6-months-of-this-year-technically-1032225905640-2015-8">trillion </a>streams<br />
- Periscope looking <a href="https://www.l2inc.com/periscope-meerkat-battle-for-live-streaming-dominance/2015/blog?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=the-daily&utm_campaign=email">over the top</a><br />
- Look out email, Slack <a href="http://fortune.com/2015/04/16/why-slack-just-raised-160-million-at-a-2-8-billion-valuation/">impresses</a><br />
- Google’s New <a href="http://motherboard.vice.com/read/google-has-a-new-logo-and-were-not-sure-how-to-feel-about-it">Logo</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/418754/americans-space-josh-gelernter">Special Bonus</a>: Americans in Space<br />
<br />
Wikipedia has lost a quarter of a billion visits/month from Google over the last 3 months. Though they haven't commented on it, Google has clearly made a quiet change to it's algorithm to favor brand sites over Wikipedia for the first time. This is a big big change. For years, Wikipedia's search authority has been unchallenged for almost any term they had a page for, including pages about a brand, but most importantly, up until now, brands could not effectively compete for the right to win many generic search terms that Wikipedia expounded on. Google has apparently decided that allowing brands to win terms like this will also increase their bids for these terms and that logical business decision has trumped their previous leaning toward impartial purveyors of information. <br />
<br />
I wanted to point out a relatively new trend in Web site content presentation. A number of sites that I spend time on have started to load one article after another in an infinite scrolldown. Similar to a Facebook or Twitter feed and very mobile friendly. Most often there's some intelligence built in so the next article you see is related. This is because for many sites, the article page has become the new home page because that's the search bait where people enter the site. I think this is a very cool development because until this, if you're on a content site you have to keep clicking back to the home page to find the next thing to read. As we get more into the content marketing business, we should follow this model. Digiday has added a new wrinkle, a TLDR button. in Internet Slang, TL;DR means Too Long, Didn't read. But this button is a way of switching to summaries of each article, of course you can always switch back. This is even better for mobile and a really good user experience. Wish I'd thought of it. But I'm not too proud to implement best practices when I see them.<br />
<br />
Speaking of Search, L2's recently released Digital IQ Index of department stores surfaced an unexpected leader. It's ASOS, Britain's big online only retailer. How has it beaten global Digital Omnichannel success stories like Burburry and Macy's? First page search visibility is their secret sauce. And they're beating their competitors across the world for 650 incredibly high value keywords like Shoes, Shirts, Socks and the like. How are they pulling this off? They're doing it by blocking and tackling and getting the SEO basics right. Tagging photos, consistent use of Keywords in Title Tags, H1 Headers and intro paragraphs as well as correct keyword density. They're careful not to allow their pages compete against each other for the same keywords and they have relevant content that answers searchers' needs precisely. It's really not a secret at all. They behave less like a retailer and more like an SEO company that sells clothes.<br />
<br />
Music streaming has had it's best year ever, over a Trillion. That's Trillion with a T, songs were streamed in the first 6 months of this year. That's already twice the number streamed in all of 2014. Last year 41Mn people payed for streaming services and streaming revenue increased almost 40%. Can't wait to see the stats for this year. <br />
<br />
And staying with the subject of streaming, I can give you an update on the Periscope/Meerkat battle of live-video streaming apps, Periscope appears to be winning due to its native access to 300Mn twitter users and incrementally better design. The result is that over 40 years of footage are watched on Periscope every day and it appears to be the favorite of brands just recently streaming one of Ralph Lauren's runway shows.<br />
<br />
Anybody sick of email? I know I am as I receive over 300 emails a day, many of them cold solicitations from vendors. But what's the alternative? Well it could be Slack. An app trying to replace email for internal business communications. This small company has grown from nothing in Jan of 2014 to 1.1Mn daily active users in March of this year. But the most amazing thing is that its most recent round of funding in June valued the company at $2.8Bn. This works out to $2500 per user which is completely unprecedented. The nearest competitor is LinkedIn at $282 per user. Seems like some people are expecting big things from this company and they're putting their money where their mouth is. The generation coming up behind us is managing to do just fine without email, preferring Instant Messaging and Social Media. So as they enter the workforce, it's very possible that there's hope for the end of this time sucking scourge of business.Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-264531809461068002015-08-28T20:43:00.000-07:002016-12-27T20:48:51.050-08:00Learning your Alphabet<br />
- Do you know your <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-alphabet-googles-new-company-2015-8?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=the-daily&utm_campaign=email">Alphabet</a>?<br />
- Amazon going <a href="https://www.l2inc.com/googles-umbrella/2015/blog">postal</a><br />
- Lucky or good? <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/under-armour-jordan-spieth-2015-6">UnderArmour </a>and Jordan Speith<br />
- Christian Louboutin <a href="http://us.christianlouboutin.com/us_en/news/christian_louboutin_celebrates_the_launch_of_louboutinworld/">World </a>campaign<br />
- Is <a href="http://withoutbullshit.com/blog/augie-ray-can-we-admit-now-that-social-media-marketing-is-dead">Social Marketing</a> Dead??!!<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qW9wqUI4Lg">BONUS</a>! : Tiny Dancer<br />
<br />
You may have heard that Google is getting a new CEO, Sundar Pichai, but did you know that Larry Paige is restructuring Google into a holding company called Alphabet? The current leaders of Google will be the new leaders of Alphabet. Larry will be the CEO, Sergey Brin the President and Eric Schmidt will continue his role as executive chairman and at some point later this year, every share of Google will become an equal share of Alphabet. <br />
<br />
Under that big new umbrella will be a subsidiary called Google, run by Pichai, who's been Larry's right hand man for a while now, The new Google company will include the core businesses, Search, ads, maps, apps, youtube, android and the related technical infrastructure. <br />
<br />
But also under the Alphabet umbrella, will be a group of other businesses like Calico, Nest, Fiber as well as google Ventures, Google Capital and incubator projects like Google x which will all be managed as separate businesses. This is pretty big news. The market sure liked it as the stock jumped from 633 to 660 on August 10th when the change was announced. Although it got Crushed with the rest of the market last week going from 660 on Aug 19th to 580 on Aug 25th and today it's back at 637. Whoa!<br />
<br />
Why do this? There are a number of theories, <br />
They want to Slim down and simplify the Google company to focus on it's core competency, which is of course printing money.<br />
or maybe Larry and Sergey want to focus more on the big picture and not need to run day to day google stuff<br />
or it was a way to make room for lots more CEOs and executives?<br />
Maybe they wanted to give more visibility to the smaller companies, bringing them out from under Google's giant shadow, probably all or some combination of these.<br />
Though we probably won't be hearing much about Alphabet, expect to see news stories about ... Life Sciences - our competitor, Calico - longevity, Nest - Home automation, Fiber - Home video and communications services and so on. They'll be free to promote themselves and, who knows, maybe be sold or taken to IPO... the possibilities are endless. <br />
<br />
When you go to check out Alphabet on the Web though, you won't be typing alphabet.com cause BMW already owns that. Instead, try abc.xyz. No really. That's the new url. I encourage you to go read Larry's excellent and aspirational statement there which ends with...<br />
We are excited about<br />
Getting more ambitious things done.<br />
Taking the long-term view.<br />
Empowering great entrepreneurs and companies to flourish.<br />
Investing at the scale of the opportunities and resources we see.<br />
Improving the transparency and oversight of what we’re doing.<br />
Making Google even better through greater focus.<br />
And hopefully… as a result of all this, improving the lives of as many people as we can. <br />
<br />
Now let's talk about an UNPROFITABLE organization, the US Postal Service, which has lost more than 46Bn over the last 10 years. They seem to have found a sugar daddy in amazon and are now delivering about 40% of Amazon's packages or about 150Mn items a year, including on Sundays. Amazon pays them an average of $2 per package, which is half of what they pay FedEx and UPS. Amazon gets that deal by presorting everything for the post office using machines and automation rather than workers who move in an almost comically practiced slow motion. That 300Mn should help the old USPS stay afloat a while longer but it's really just a drop in the bucket for an organization that's losing almost 5Bn a year. Amazon may need to buy them yet. <br />
<br />
The post office may be neither lucky or good but UnderArmour is both. Back in May, we highlighted UnderArmour on this call, and talked about how they had effectively used social and some uncommon 'athletes' like Misty Copeland and Giselle Bundchen to broaden their all masculine brand so successfully into the female market that they are already threatening Nike and Lululemon. Misty just became the first African American woman to be named principal dancer at a major ballet company. which has boosted her UnderArmour video over 9Mn views. Well they haven't forgotten about the guys as we saw watching the young Jordan Speith write his way into the record books winning both the Masters and US Open in the same year with the UnderArmour logo adorning his gear. Before his Masters win, when he only had one big win under his belt but was already under a 3-yr contract with them, the brand had preciently rippped up the old one and given the golfer a new, 10-year contract. It'll be great to see another classy and talented young role model staring in the company's breakthrough social media. <br />
<br />
Fashion and beauty brands have expanded their social media efforts on Instagram by about 40% in the last year, but Christian Louboutin has taken it a step further, realizing that not many are getting their customers involved in the fun. To do that, the brand launched Louboutinworld, a User Generated Content site gallery that gives visitors who post great pix with the # louboutinworld a chance to have their art featured on the LouBoutin site. Effective? Since the beginning of this past July, They've grown their community by 80% and increased organic brand mentions to 5.1Mn! <br />
Maybe we could use a campaign like this to fill our Philips Asset Library!<br />
<br />
In light of all the talk of successful social media campaigns, today and in the past on this call, I thought it might be good to discuss the post from Steve McGrew of Philips Design that many of you may have seen on SocialCast this Tuesday. It recommends a post by Josh Bernoff on his Without Bullshit blog that seems to claim that Social Marketing is Dead. For those of you who may not be familiar with him, Josh Bernoff is the author (with Charlene Li) of GroundSwell, perhaps the seminal treatise on Social Marketing and he was also the editor of Outside in - the power of putting the customer at the center of your business. I've found both quite influential. He's a great speaker and a really good writer and thinker. I suggest you read the post but more important, read the comment discussion below it, because that's where the real value is and I think that was his motive in stirring the pot like this.<br />
Josh is agreeing with a post from another digital pundit, Augie Ray who quotes a lot of stats that say that Social doesn't work. <br />
<br />
To that I say Social media doesn't work as pure advertising, it doesn't work as a broadcast medium. Wholeheartedly agree. As I said in my reply to Steve's post, What social has always been primarily about, for me, is listening. It's an almost bottomless mine of customer insight for companies willing to invest in developing it. Understanding what the market is thinking. Learning about your customers' needs. Then using this insight and these channels to RESPOND to those needs and thoughts in a meaningful way that connects you to the people who are looking for your help. Not talking about yourself, but doing things that cause customers to talk to each other about you in an upbeat and positive way. That 'asymmetrical' communication is the holy grail of Social. <br />
<br />
There's more to it then that. Facebook has sqeezed the life out of social marketing on their platform so that you have to pay for impressions rather than get them organically because that's their business. As we've discussed here before, they did it nefariously, getting brands to pay to build communities, then walling off those communities and charging them for access. <br />
1. That's not social's fault, nor is it marketings fault, it's Facebook's fault. 2. Advertising on Facebook is perhaps the most surefire way to reach a very specific, even a niche audience. It's the most targeted ad buy available. But it's an ad buy. It's not social media.<br />
<br />
Last thing I want to say about this is Social is too often used as a broadcast medium by people who don't understand it. Marketers are just as guilty of this as anyone, but it's not a marketing problem. To be effective, Social marketing requires a very refined degree of a specific kind of creativity. Personality that resonates with the reader, quality, value to the reader, honesty, wit and charm, craftsmanship and art are the keys. Quantity is counterproductive. The idea is to find a way to engage that makes your audience feel something. The point is to create situations that make customers talk about your brand to each other. When that happens, earned media will talk about you too.Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-29808106633534264602015-07-31T20:32:00.000-07:002016-12-27T20:33:18.757-08:00Peak App?<br />
- <a href="https://www.l2inc.com/meerkat-pivots-to-facebook-with-new-update/2015/blog?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=the-daily&utm_campaign=email">Meerkat </a>moves to Facebook<br />
- App <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/08/22/peak-app-comscore-fledgling-app-developers/">Overload</a><br />
- <a href="https://www.l2inc.com/email-proves-whats-boring-is-sexy/2015/blog?utm_source=et&utm_medium=email&utm_content=winner-losers-71615&utm_campaign=email">User generated</a> photos beats commercial photography<br />
- Highest ROI digital marketing tactic?<br />
- <a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazons-first-ever-prime-day-breaks-global-records-sales-exceed-black-friday-2015-07-16">Amazon Prime Day</a> kills<br />
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<a href="https://vimeo.com/92322801">Bonus</a>: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic<br />
- Arthur C. Clarke<br />
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Enjoy this demonstration of projection mapping. A technique for using software to project imagery on moving irregular shapes like cars or shoes…in this case, moving panels precisely controlled by a pair of robots<br />
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Meerkat has been getting lots of attention recently. Back in March, Twitter blocked the app from accessing it's users to promote it's own Periscope streaming function. At the time, it was seen as a major blow, but Twitter may have done Meerkat a huge favor because it's pivoted to Facebook. Meerkat users can now sign in with a Facebook account and connect to all their friends and followers. Facebook has said it has no plans to build it's own livestreaming app and we know it has a very keen eye for acquisitions, picking up WhatsApp and Instagram at bargain basement prices compared to what they're worth today. Could the slinky little streaming rodent be next? <br />
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Over 1000 apps are submitted to the apple and android app stores every day and more than 1.5 million apps are already available. Have we reached peak app? Certainly the odds of having a successful are much longer than they used to be. In the 4th quarter of last year, people spent an average of 37 hours per month on an average of 27 apps. The amount of time has doubled in the last 3 years, but the number of apps has stayed the same, indicating either that 27 is about the app saturation point - that is - most people can't really use more apps than that or that people have found their favorite apps and they're sticking with them. I think people are just getting tired of downloading and managing tons of apps. Oh and BTW, anyone want to guess the most used app worldwide? No surprise, It's Facebook, according to comscore by a 20% margin over it's nearest competitor, YouTube. Something to think about if anyone is considering creating an app. Of course, I don't think apps that are part of a product, like a fitness app that goes with a fitbit, or something similar are in any danger. one of the problems apps have is finding visibility in the crowded app store, but connected apps are not only visible, but necessary to the people who buy the products they're associated with.<br />
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A recent study from L2 on User Generated Content shows that more than half of consumers surveyed believe in User Generated photos while only 45% have faith in professional or corporate photos. On Insta, UGC also produces a higher conversion rate. 9.6% higher than Brand photos. So it makes sense for us to look for ways to solicit customer photography and place it in the path of customer's buying journey.<br />
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And you've heard this before on this call. What digital tactic has the highest ROI? It's boring old email. Far from being on it's last legs, eMail is one of the fastest growing channels for customer acquisition. better than direct mail or social media. Even spam is decreasing. Down 1/3 from 90% of emails in 2008 to 60% today. <br />
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How many of you took part in Amazon's first ever Prime Day? You were part of something really big. Amazon sold more units on Prime Day than Black Friday 2014, which is the biggest Black Friday ever. 34.4 million items across Prime-eligible countries or about 398 items per second. Worldwide order growth increased 266% over the same day last year and 18% more than Black Friday 2014. More new members tried Prime worldwide than any single day in Amazon history. Sellers on Amazon that use the Fulfillment by Amazon service enjoyed record-breaking unit sales – growing nearly 300%. Customers ordered hundreds of thousands of Amazon devices – making it the largest device sales day ever worldwide. It was a huge day for Amazon, and it'll only get bigger each year. But the long tail effect of the hundreds of thousands of new members and 10s of thousands of new Fire tablets, which are really just the company's way of putting little Amazon stores in people's hands, will be astronomical. Did Philips take part? If we did, please someone come on next month and tell us how we did. If not, let's start planning to be part of this phenomenon next year. I predict this will become a new worldwide holiday that people will take off from work to participate in.<br />
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A subtle little thing that no one is talking about, Amazon's self-managing infrastructure weathered a 250% increase in their usual daily traffic apparently without even breathing hard. That's a pretty nice endorsement of their Web services product which will likely also generate more business for them. Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-497110997558813492015-06-25T20:16:00.000-07:002016-12-27T20:17:53.369-08:00Let's talk Twitter<br />
- Twitter <br />
◦ Jack Dorsey <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk-gVIJG3_U">replaces Dick Costolo</a> as CEO<br />
◦ Introduces two new tools<br />
◦ Product Pages <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/19/twitter-product-pages-and-collections/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=the-daily&utm_campaign=email">with buy buttons</a><br />
◦ Project Lightning – <a href="https://www.l2inc.com/twitter-expands-user-and-brand-offerings/2015/blog?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=the-daily&utm_campaign=email">curated event tweets</a><br />
- YouTube will also curate <a href="https://www.l2inc.com/youtube-to-verify-user-generated-content/2015/blog">User Generated content</a><br />
- Facebook <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI6iJByFu6o">disrupting YouTube</a><br />
- LinkedIN has a more robust business model<br />
- Keeping Messages consistent across channels<br />
- Personalization <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3uEY553hOg">without forms</a>? <br />
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Bonus: The Science of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3uEY553hOg">Great Visuals</a> (NewsCred)<br />
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It's been a heck of a month for Twitter, On June 11th, Dick Costolo, the popular CEO stepped down and co-founder Jack Dorsey has stepped in as interim CEO as the Board searches for a permanent replacement. There have been whispers that Costolo would be out since January because, though Twitter continues to be an important platform, it's user growth has been stalled at around 350Mn users and the stock price has been struggling. Professor Aswath Damodaran of NYU Stern who is considered one of the world's foremost company valuators -- one of about a dozen people in the world whose opinions and comments actually move the market -- has said that Twitter could be a very valuable company, but not with it's current management who doesn't have a plan to convert users to revenue. That's what it needs.<br />
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So interesting that within 2 weeks of the transition, Twitter introduced two new tools. One for brands and one for consumers<br />
- Twitter Product Pages will be created around some products to provide more information and content.Those pages will include multiple tweets, but they’ll also have basic product information — and, yes, the ability to actually make a purchase. A second revenue stream to tack on to their advertising revenue.<br />
- And with Project Lightning, Twitter will collect and curate Tweets from live events. A button at the center of the Twitter app will direct users to events that are being talked about in real time.<br />
And they say there are more tools to come. Twitter will continue to be powerful and relevant. It's not going away, in fact they may be an acquisition target. The word on the street is that one particular giant has a Googlie Eye on them. So stay tuned.<br />
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Along the same lines of Project Lightning, YouTube Newswire has just been announced. With more than 5 million hours of news video watched on YouTube every day and user-uploaded content comprising a major component of global events, YouTube's new service will be selecting the best of those pieces of eyewitness footage, complete with a dedicated Twitter feed and email newsletter. From my perspective, the only problem with that is the same as the problem with the mainstream media. The 'best' of those are in the eye of the beholder and there will be a natural slant that wasn't there when users selected what to watch purely by popularity.<br />
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According to eMarketer, Mobile video ads are expected to expand to $4Bn in 2016. That's a 50% increase in the last 2 years! And who will be the beneficiary of this? It's Facebook! The big story this year was supposed to be how YouTube was going to disrupt TV, but it's turned into how FB has disrupted YouTube. FB video views have exploded since the end of last year from 1Bn to 4Bn views. And mobile advertising now accounts for 3/4 of their $3.3Bn in quarterly ad revenue. That's up from ZERO% 30 months ago. That is an amazing performance! Seems like Facebook finds a place in our Digital News every month and it's not because I'm a Facebook fanboy. I don't really even like the platform. But credit where credit is due.<br />
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Remember, we talked last month about which companies were in the running to be the 5th Horseman of digital, joining Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple in the saddle. Uber was the closest, but I told you I'd dig into some of the other contenders over the next few months. And this month, it's LinkedIn...<br />
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According to L2, LinkedIn has a more robust business model than Facebook since it has multiple strong revenue sources pretty evenly divided between Premium membership, Recruitment tools and ad revenue, whereas FB only has ad sales. and LinkedIn is active in 200-plus countries, pretty much anyone who matters is on the site, including their fastest growing demographic, 38Mn college students and recent grads along with 1/3 of all professionals globally. Once you put a resume up, you’re unlikely to remove it. LinkedIn drives 1/3rd more traffic to corporate sites than all other platforms combined. They also have the biggest moat around them -- that is the most difficult barriers to entry for would be competitors. The next horseman? we'll see.<br />
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2/3s of brands don't keep messages consistent across platforms and only 7% of brands can recognize customer from channel to channel, even though half of consumers in a recent survey self-identify as more likely to buy if they are recognized across platforms. <br />
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But there's hope. 33% of brands say personalization is their primary focus for improving customer experience but a slight majority of consumers still don't want to share their data because of privacy concerns or form fatigue. Most brands are stymied by this barrier. Some are pioneering shopper assistance tools on their sites, helping customers build a profile that recommends products for them. But there are implicit ways of understanding customer needs like leveraging Browsing Behavior and Purchase History that allow a more personalized experience. Even allowing customers to customize and build their own navigation experience based on content tagging. We'll be talking more about this.Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-63587563513694179872015-05-29T19:05:00.000-07:002016-12-27T20:18:26.093-08:00Amazon Stock Lifts<br />
- Amazon stock <a href="https://www.wired.com/2015/04/amazons-cloud-is-the-best-part-of-its-business-aws/">ticks up</a><br />
- Vanity economy<br />
- Human Capital<br />
- What company could be the <a href="https://www.l2inc.com/fifth-horseman/2015/blog">5th Horseman</a> of the Digital World?<br />
- Nike – Because denim is dying<br />
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A few months ago, I had noted that Amazon seemed to be in the business of losing in the hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter and growing, it's $20 Bn+ revenue numbers insulating it from losses that would be the death knell of any other company and even some countries, But the online retail behemouth was a winner this week, due to a 15% increase in its stock price. While the usual status of high growth with low earnings continued, Amazon’s cloud storage business impressed Wall Street with over $1.5Bn in EARNINGS in Q1, on track for 6Bn this year. That'll make up for a LOT of shipping losses. A number of recent reports on E-Commerce Agility have shown that cloud solutions offer better flexibility in international markets, and therefore make scaling easier. Clearly many companies are turning to Amazon to put the flexibility of cloud to work for them.<br />
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Beauty, luxury and apparel make up the vanity economy, which is expected to grow from 3.5 Trillion to over 4.5 trillion over the next 3-5 years, driven largely by China. In 5 years, vanity may be one of the most successful sectors of the economy. Possibly only surpassed by the HealthCare sector. And Philips is a major player in both of them. Let's keep it in in mind and play to our strengths. <br />
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Last month, we discussed how Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are 4 companies who collectively equal the population of Lexington, Kentucky with 310K employees. But with those employees, the companies generate the equivalent of Australia's GDP at a little over 1.5 Trillion in Revenue a year. That's almost 10Mn in revenue per employee per year. By contrast, the worlds richest principality, Monaco, has a per captita GDP of 163K. <br />
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Earlier this month, L2 Research dug deeper on that, releasing 2 studies centering on these companies. The first was about the return on Human Capital there's a dramatic difference in valuation between these firms and their non-digital peers. I just added Philips in for reference. Remember that these are all consumer companies and we're mostly B2B/B2G. Still we're doing OK as a non-Digital-Pure Play company. <br />
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Facebook and google need only 6 and 8 employees respectively to generate 10Mn in revenue, whereas competing media companies need 65. Amazon only needs 17 people to generate 10Mn compared to other Retailers who need around 50. And Apple can do it with 5, vs other manufacturers, again, I added Philips in and we're doing pretty well<br />
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Here's the real eye-opener though, lots of people are leaving packaged goods companies to go to Google, FB and Amazon. Not so many coming back. So if you want to know where the smartest people at P&G are, they're at Google.<br />
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For the second study, They also looked at what companies might be next to join the '4 horsemen' based on an eight-piece algorithm. The fifth horseman must have a differentiated product, cheap access to capital, a global consumer-base, a maternal attitude towards employees, inventory control through vertical distribution, they need the ability to track data to specific identities, an aspirational brand that gives people the benefit of feeling better about themselves by associating with it and finally, access to high end technical thinking like a world class engineering university. <br />
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Seven companies come close. They are Uber, Alibaba, Starbucks, Linkedin, Tesla, Nike, and Walmart. But none have demonstrated all of the above characteristics. Walmart, Linkedin, and Alibaba don’t have a brand people want to associate with. Starbucks spends more on its employees than on coffee beans, but does not have access to cheap capital. Tesla has a finite consumer base rather than a global one. And although Nike is a prestigious global brand and a fantastic place to work, its product is not all that differentiated from competitors.<br />
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Uber was the closest brand to the four horsemen. One million people ride the service every day, which is more than the Chicago CTA or Boston T. At 162,000 drivers, Uber’s employee base is triple that of Delta Airlines. So where does Uber lag in the algorithm? It does not have a maternal attitude towards employees, as it has access to the cheapest source of on-demand labor without unions or health insurance. While that is good for users and the company, it may not be as good for the workers, on the other hand, no one is forced to work for Uber.<br />
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But over the next couple of months, I'd like to take a closer look at these potential horsemen. And Today I'm going to zoom in on Nike. Let's look at it via the algorithm. It's the preferred brand of upper income teens. They are the most desireable demographic, the future of wealth, the most influential people in the world. Among the contenders, Nike is by far the number 1 brand. There's a huge shift going on in the fashion industry, it's the shift from Denim to athletic wear (sweat pants). It doesn't seem like a big deal, but it's a techtonic shift in an enormous industry. Fashion is the second largest consumer category in the world. Athletic wear has now overtaken denim for the first time and what company is at the top of the list? Nike by threefold over any of the competitors in a crowded field.<br />
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BUT, there’s no real defensible Intellectual Property around their products. They’d have to create something new and tech-related beyond the fuelband that was truly differentiating. Their stock trades at a healthy multiple, but nothing like the digital giants. They need to establish a presence outside Portland where they would have access to world-class engineering talent.<br />
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We'll look at another company next month, but till then, let's think about how Philips fits into the algorithm, where we can improve and how we can make it better. Maybe someone would like to spend a couple of minutes plotting where our company is against these 8 elements and present that on our call next month? Please tell me your thoughts about this. Who are your favorite companies? Did L2 miss any good prospects? Let's have a discussion about it in the SocialCast group.Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-640863839698352432015-04-24T18:29:00.000-07:002016-12-27T18:37:04.535-08:00The 4 Horsemen- Apple watch <a href="http://www.macrumors.com/2015/04/10/apple-watch-sold-out-launch-day/">‘sells out’ in 6 hours</a>. More than Samsung sold in a year.<br />
- Differentiating through <a href="http://www.l2inc.com/the-rise-of-customized-apparel/2015/blog">customization</a><br />
- With a combined market cap of $1.3 Tn, the ‘4 Horsemen’ <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=4&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDYQFjAD&url=http://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/2xwbrc/the_four_horsemen_amazonapplefacebook_google_who/&ei=-KcyVd-mDMXjsASZxoHwDg&usg=AFQjCNEVsYOdal9jkigtdTFlbIxhqT4J2g&sig2=3DAdPbRrM5u2yfZabvelwA&bvm=bv.91071109,d.cWc">Amazon/Apple/Facebook/Google</a> are worth more than the GDP of So Korea.<br />
- Scott Galloway of NYU believes <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grU0xJ7JwLs">Pure play is dead</a>. Prediction: Amazon will undertake a transformative brick and mortar purchase in the next year. Who?<br />
- Uber and other rideshare platforms could <a href="http://seekingalpha.com/article/2282003-what-industries-could-uber-disrupt-next">disrupt the delivery business</a>.<br />
- Facebook is still the <a href="http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/01/09/social-media-update-2014/">DOMINANT </a>social network by far and becoming more powerful. <a href="https://www.bluetube.philips.com/media/22+Jon+Kirwan+-News+from+the+Facebook+F8+developers+conference+%5bDigisummit+e(m)commerce%5d/1_hlibmm36">Check out Jon Kirwan on the F8 conference</a><br />
- Is <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/google-in-decline-2015-2">Google losing its grip</a> on Search leadership??<br />
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Seems like Apple comes up a lot in our Digital News, and here we are again, The Apple Watch became available for pre-order on April 10th and sold out in 6 hours. No one actually believes they sold out, except the crazies on MacRumors.com, but Apple has become very crafty about creating the perception of scarcity. Really it's marketing 101. But don't worry, you probably won't have a problem getting one if you camp out at your nearby Apple store on the 24th. Or just show up there on the 26th. But regardless of whether the scarcity was real or manufactured, they still sold more watches in 6 hours than Samsung has sold in a year. That's pretty impressive. Interestingly, the model that 'sold out' first was the 18 carat gold one which pushed back delivery dates to July almost immediately. The others are only back ordered till sometime in May.<br />
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Customization is on the rise in the online apparel market, according to a new report out last week from L2 Research. It's apparently becoming an expectation for some consumers as shoppers look to put theri own stamp on everything from coffee (Starbucks enables around 80K drink combinations) to digital playlists. Sportswear and Fashion brands are putting the most resources behind customization to develop more revenue and profit through this new means of differentiation. Think of Nike and it's advanced customization tools that let customers print and share posters of their custom sneaks. It got me thinking that offering some level of customization of Philips consumer products might be something to look into. Avent bottles with a baby's picture on them or Sonicare toothbrushes with a kids artwork wrapped around the handle, Norelco shavers and trimmers monogrammed or engraved with the owners signature... hmmmm, something to think about.<br />
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And here's something else to think about... the 4 horsemen of technology, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google have a combined market cap of $1.306 Trillion that's just more than the GDP of South Korea, and that worth breaks out to about $5Mn per employee, if they were a country, they'd be a utopia.<br />
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One of my favorite analysts, Scott Galloway of NYU Stern School, is predicting that Pure play retail is dead. Stores will need ecommerce but etailers will also need stores to survive. Amazon forced other retailers to offer free shipping in the last year, so more than 2/3 of Christmas deliveries were free this past season, but this advantage is eroding because stores are incredibly valuable, flexible warehouses that are allowing businesses like Best Buy, Macys and a dozen others to grow their eCommerce businesses faster than Amazon over the last 5 years as they use stores as local, on-demand delivery sources and click and collect points. Based on this reality, Galloway is predicting that Amazon will make a transformative purchase of a brick and mortar company in the next year, his favorite possibilities are Radio Shack, a Gas Station Chain or the US Postal Service.<br />
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We talk alot about disruption here and how it can come from anywhere. Here's another example: Uber and other ride share and car sharing services have already disrupted the rental and taxi businesses, but they may now be positioned to disrupt the package delivery and shipping businesses. In most cities, point to point local transportation is far less expensive and faster than messenger services and big shippers like Fedex and UPS. I'll be interested in how this plays out.<br />
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This month's Facebook mention: Though teenagers are spending less time on FB, they're all still members as is almost everyone in Europe who's on a social network and overall, 91% of users age 18-34. In fact, 2/3 of all time on Social Media is now on FB. And other than gmail, FB is the ONLY platform that can track you specifically by your identity. And now, thanks to their cookie free Atlas ad-server, they can do it anywhere on the Web. I hope you all had the chance to listen to Jon Kirwan's terrific presentation on Philips global Digital Excellence Network call. Jon did a great job relating his experience at Facebook's F8 conference which Brands were invited to for the first time this year. GREAT information. If you haven't joined Sarah's bi-weekly call yet, check it out. You won't be disappointed.<br />
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Finally, Google still owns the search market with 3 Billion searches/day, but its beginning to be challenged for the first time. There are now a billion searches a day on Facebook, 300 Mn on Twitter, 2/3 of PRODUCT SEARCHs begin on Amazon. These are arguably the highest value searches. And the mobile economy isn't friendly to Google. People are not likely to search when they're in an app. So their cost per click is finally declining overall, net profits and revenues, while still astronomical, are slowing down and Google + is all but dead after a 97% decline in engagement rate, shares of Android devices declined for the first time in Q4 compared to the previous quarter and I heard someone say that Google Glass isn't a wearable it's a prophalactic that will insure the wearer will never conceive a child because no one will ever get near them.Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-71944138563789794562015-03-27T16:25:00.000-07:002016-12-27T17:58:11.223-08:00Spock is DeadSpock is dead. Long live Spock<br />
Is Instagram <a href="http://www.l2inc.com/research/instagram-2015?utm_source=et&utm_medium=email&utm_content=instagram-2015&utm_campaign=email">the world’s most powerful platform</a>?<br />
If we’re gonna be on Insta, <a href="http://www.skyword.com/contentstandard/news/fast-growing-instagram-demonstrates-power-of-visual-content-to-boost-brand-engagement/">let’s do it right</a>!<br />
<a href="http://www.cnet.com/products/apple-watch/">Apple watch</a>…to buy or not to buy<br />
<a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCUQFjAB&url=http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/11/17/apple-isight-supplier-sony-unveils-new-21mp-cmos-sensor-with-4k-video-phase-detection-af&ei=cdYSVY-9FMjBggTZk4CACA&usg=AFQjCNFuz0cFl6x9Cf4GegxiOnmGnzS15A&sig2=bJkBEB_jQTktegiVyUnu4w">Sony’s </a>Apple blues<br />
<a href="http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/more-uber-cars-yellow-taxis-nyc/">Uber bests Yellow</a> in NYC<br />
<a href="http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/microsoft-done-with-internet-explorer-brand/">Microsoft’s project Spartan</a> Goodbye to Internet Explorer?<br />
<a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/target-ceo-plans-digital-small-store-investments-to-fuel-growth-1425416165">Target cuts jobs to invest</a> in Digital and Mobile on major mobile gains<br />
<a href="http://qz.com/351281/chinas-great-firewall-is-demolishing-foreign-websites-and-nobody-knows-why/">China’s Desktop</a> Weaponization<br />
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Bonus!: Pharell Williams <a href="http://bit.ly/1CasEnl">interviews Leonard Nimoy</a>. Fascinating!<br />
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- Last month, the digital/geek domain lost a true master, Leonard Nimoy. Known for his iconic role as Spock, he was a gentle and thoughtful man who strove throughout his life to rise beyond Spock as an artist, photographer, poet and director. But he had created a character so vivid, that when his bright light went out, it left an indelibile impression burned into our collective consciousness. I was a fan so I'm happy to be able to take a moment to remember him and say thank you. Check out the bonus link to an interview of Mr Nimoy conducted by Pharell Williams.<br />
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- A couple of months ago, I mentioned on my monthly call that FB had paid a $Bn for Instagram and that that may have been the deal of the century. Well, with a new study out this week from L2 saying that the photosharing app may be worth as much as 35x what FB paid, the acquisition looks more brilliant every day. It's the fastest growing social platform with 200 Mn users and with Engagements rates that are 80% higher than Twitter and 15% higher than Facebook, consider that around 3 Mn teens have fled FB since 2011, but FB is still in touch with them because they're all on Insta! And they consider it their most important social network. It's becoming the same for Brands which are posting more on Instagram now then they are on Facebook. That's probably because, for now at least, there's the possibility of 100% organic reach on Instagram whereas only 6% of Facebook messages reach the end community. Facebook is forcing brands sto pay for access to their own communities. Today's teens are tomorrow's decision makers. So as we relaunch our brand let's think about whether it makes sense to get in front of this audience with our End to End health messaging which study after study shows they are receptive to.<br />
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- And if you're chasing likes on Instagram, here are a couple things to keep in mind. According to the Content Standard Web site, Images with Faces get 32% more comments, Real customers using real products, 30% more likes, Likers prefer light images over dark images by 24%, photos versus video by 26% and bluer images over redder images by 24%.<br />
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- The Apple watch announcement on March 9th introduced the Cupertino Giant's first all new product since the debut of the iPad almost exactly 5 years ago. Hard to believe iPads have only been around 5 years. And like that launch, this one was accompanied by many reviews predicting that it would fail for one reason or another. I personally wouldn't buy a first generation one, even if I was an Apple acolyte rather than the Android person I am, but I know better than to bet against Apple. They'll sell tons of these, and probably even a lot of the crazy $10k gold plated ones. And they'll keep getting better and better, driving innovation across the competitive set. You can stand on line to preorder your Apple Watch on April 10th or Stand on line to get one on April 19th.<br />
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- With success like Apple has seen, there are bound to be losers and the big loser of late has been Sony which is hardly even an electronics company anymore. The most profitable division at Sony is now their Financial Services Group, which most people don't even know they have. It's been bleeding money from it's mobile division for years in a world that has become a game of iOS with 42% of the market revenue and Android with 53%. That doesn't leave much room for anyone else and the once great gaming and computer giant has been relegated to a supplier of components for Apple.<br />
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- We've talked before about digital disruption: The NYC Taxi and Limousine commission announced last week that there are now more Uber drivers registered in NYC than Yellow Cabs. Yellow Cabs still give more rides overall than Uber, but it's still a big indicator of major shakeup of an established industry.<br />
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- Microsoft is hard at work on it's next generation browser which will debut with Windows 10. Which will have a name other than IE in order to put decades of IE problems behind them. But they assure us that it's not the death knell for IE 'so that companies who limit themselves use it can still use it.<br />
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- More evidence that conversion rates are better on mobile than desktop. Target has seen that clearly, releasing a report this month showing a 69% increase in mobile conversion on a 44% increase in mobile traffic year over year. They have announced they'll be cutting jobs to invest more in Digital and mobile.<br />
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- China has effectively weaponized all the computers in the country. When a chinese citizen tries to access a banned site like Facebook or Twitter, the Great Firewall of China automatically redirects them to another site. They have been experimenting with directing all traffic to random sites and crashing them with the traffic overload like a denial of service particle beam.Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-57162794574682009152014-03-24T14:17:00.001-07:002017-07-09T10:00:40.830-07:00Digital Content Strategy -- What's Your Story?<b>Digital content strategy</b> is the third leg of the digital marketing table, along with search and social. Content quality is the key to the success of a business in the online space. This has been said countless times and by now, pretty much everyone has heard it. But the question is...how do you define quality? And what is the strategy for creating quality content?<br />
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</div><div>The first is really a user experience question and the short answer is: <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vfgtwGfhm30/UzCllX6WZ0I/AAAAAAAAB-o/cvQXj7ZGPSg/s1600/Content-Strategy-320x162.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Digital Content Strategy" border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vfgtwGfhm30/UzCllX6WZ0I/AAAAAAAAB-o/cvQXj7ZGPSg/s320/Content-Strategy-320x162.png" /></a></div>Quality content is content that meets the needs of your audience in the way they expect it to. That is -- content that provides the answers that they are seeking with their search queries -- in concise, scannable, honest and easily understood language. This is content that is VALUABLE to your audience. </div><div><br />
</div><div>So, how do you create content that meets that high standard? Simple. Understand your audience and their needs! OK, maybe it's not so simple, it requires some work. But it is pretty straightforward process.</div><div><br />
</div><div><b>Keywords First</b></div><div>93% of online experiences start with a search engine. So the ideal content creation process starts with <a href="http://copylounge.blogspot.com/2014/03/search-keyword-discovery.html" target="_blank">keyword discovery</a>. The details are in the link, but in short, keyword discovery is a research project where you learn...</div><div>1. What relevant words and phrases actual people are actually typing into search engines </div><div>2. How often each of these keystrings are searched and </div><div>3. How much competition there is for them among other Web sites</div><div><br />
</div><div>For your content to be effective...</div><div><br />
</div><div>1. It should be based on these words and phrases from this list that have a good balance of high relevance and low competition</div><div>2. It should effectively answer the question posed by the search</div><div>3. It should include a registrable offer or other call to action to allow the visitor to engage with you</div><div><br />
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<tr> <td><span style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="font-size: large;">Keyword discovery and social listening insights are a sound basis for high-quality content.</span></span></td> </tr>
</tbody> </table><div><b>Listen and Learn</b></div><div>If you build your content strategy based on the keywords people are searching for, you're off to a good start. But if you have time, there's another key source of insight you should tap before you start writing. That's <a href="http://copylounge.blogspot.com/2014/03/social-listening.html" target="_blank">social listening</a>. Again, you can learn the details in the blog post behind that link, but basically, you query the vast social mediasphere to discover how the potential customers and influencers in your market talk about the challenges that your products and services solve...<br />
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</div><div>1. The words they use to describe the issues, products and features in the competitive space -- perhaps even new keywords that you weren't aware of</div><div>2. How you measure up to the competition and </div><div>3. What kinds of information they need to help them make their decisions and even</div><div>4. Needs they have that no products or services are addressing yet</div><div><br />
</div><div>You can easily see how this kind of insight would be valuable to the creation of quality content.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Keyword discovery and social listening insights are a sound basis for high-quality content. These practices allow you to build a page of content around each keyword, and deliver the answers the market is looking for. By building pages around the keywords your audience is searching for, you'll draw more organic search traffic. If you couple that with an effective call to action, on each page, which offers the visitor a next step in their learning or engagement that promises value to them, you'll start to generate responses that can turn into leads. </div><div><br />
</div><div>The knowledge you've gained through listening tells you where relevant conversations are taking place in the social space, and who leads those conversations. You can use your social media presence to syndicate your socially-influenced content into these conversations to build your brand's social reputation and credibility.<br />
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<b>Nothing Engages Like a Good Story</b><br />
OK, but there's one more element that really puts the icing on the cake. That element is storytelling.<br />
If you can weave your content into a compelling storyline, where your audience can see themselves as the hero, your content will be all the more effective. Humans are wired to remember and pass on stories. So if your story is good enough, your content will be memorable and will be shared.<br />
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How do you tell a story? The best way is to start with your customer. Talk about them rather than talking about you. Only talk about yourself (your company) in the context of how you help your customers solve their problems. Let them see themselves in your Web site.<br />
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Talk about why you do what you do, about how your customers inspired you to create your company or your product. Give your customers the credit for your success.<br />
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<b>Metrics, Audience, Voice and Freshness</b></div><div>Content is King! Content is Key! Content is the Killer App! But there's more to content strategy than just the content. Like any strategy, it starts with your business goals. What are you expecting of your content? How will your content get you there and what does success look like? What will you measure? Be sure you start with a baseline as soon as you launch your site or before you redesign it.<br />
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For instance, if your goal is simply awareness of your company, products and services, then you will be measuring simple things like page views and visitors, time on site, social likes and mentions. You'll want to track how many times each piece of content is reused and shared, how many people it touches throughout it's lifecycle.<br />
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<table align="left" bgcolor="white" border="0" cellpadding="8" style="width: 250px;"><tbody>
<tr> <td><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: large;">There's more to content strategy than just the content. Like any strategy, it starts with your business goals.</span></td> </tr>
</tbody> </table>your goal is to generate demand, then in addition to the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) above, which are the top of the marketing funnel, you'll also want to add downloads, subscriptions, responses, leads and probably lead revenue.<br />
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Of course, you'll want to grow each of these metrics, but also accelerate their growth over time. You'll want to know which pieces of content are most effective for which audiences for each metric, so that you can create more successful content.<br />
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Speaking of audiences, an effective content strategy consider the key audiences to target and tailor content to each. Different roles, different demographics, different locations, even different points in the buying cycle will have different needs. (often, the keywords used in a search can convey quite a bit of information about these characteristics of the searcher, this is called Consumer Intent Modeling and it can be a very powerful tool in content strategy).<br />
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In order to allow the audience to connect with the brand, the content strategy must set and monitor the voice of the brand. Voice should be consistent across all channels and includes elements such as style (serious vs. witty, cool vs. warm, lyrical vs. punchy), tone (colloquial vs. formal, technical vs. non-tech), and word choices (short vs. long, familiar vs. esoteric)<br />
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Finally, there must be a strategy in place to keep the content fresh. What discovery cadence should be followed to identify new keywords, add new pages, sunset unpopular pages and refresh popular ones? <br />
An editorial calendar that outlines weekly or monthly themes for the next 3-6 months is crucial. Will there be a blog or content curation and aggregation so that there's always something new on the site? How will content be syndicated, repurposed as Social Media, as downloadable offers or emails to subscribers.<br />
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At its core, effective content strategy is mostly about putting yourself in the visitors' shoes, using search and social insights to build a content strategy that meets and exceeds the visitors needs, and storytelling to help them relate to your content, remember it and pass it along.<br />
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</div><div><div>Content that attracts search queries is good. Content that answers the visitors' questions and engages is better. Content that is memorable and sharable is best. Content that is all of these is Quality.</div><br />
</div><div>Let us know if we can help 914 715 6715.<br />
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Visit <a href="http://copylounge.com/">CopyLounge.com</a> for more Digital Marketing Intuition.<br />
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Next week: Information Architecture<br />
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<a href="https://plus.google.com/+KenGodfrey?rel=author">Ken Godfrey</a><br />
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</div>Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-82126978227197858662014-03-13T17:38:00.001-07:002017-07-09T10:02:41.628-07:00Social Listening -- Limitless Insight<b>Social listening</b> is probably the second most valuable source of insight necessary for creating user-centered content, right after <a href="http://copylounge.blogspot.com/2014/03/search-keyword-discovery.html">search keyword discovery</a>. Many marketers think of listening as a way of knowing what the market is saying about you -- positive or negative -- and of course, that's important, but there's so much more to it than that.<br />
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No matter how good your products and services are, no matter how relevant your white papers and commentary, there will always be<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img align="right" border="0" alt="Social Listening" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JCF-i0JiQU0/UyJOGqs3HDI/AAAAAAAAB-I/GXD_V8TfwdE/s320/social-listening.png"></div>conversations that are relevant to your business happening outside the web space you own. Mostly, these take place in the social mediasphere. Around Twitter Accounts, blogs and forums, Linked In and Facebook groups, among people who have strong opinions about your market environment, the business you're in, the products and services you sell, the features you promote.<br />
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<b>Monitor and Understand</b><br />
It is in your business's best interest -- and the best interest of your customers and visitors -- for you to be aware of these discussions. Social listening enables you monitor these conversations, and gain 4 key types of valuable insight.<br />
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1. Understand who's taking part in these relevant but far-flung conversations.<br />
2. Understand who's leading the conversations.<br />
3. Understand what their issues and concerns are that are relevant to your business.<br />
4. Understand the words and language the market uses to discuss these topics.<br />
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The people taking part in these relevant conversations by commenting on a blog, discussing in a forum or a group, or responding to tweets are likely potential customers for your product or service. They're engaged for a reason. The people who own the blog, or moderate the group or forum, or the ones who post or tweet most frequently are influencers. If you can engage with them and win them over, they can become powerful advocates for your brand, product or service.<br />
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<table align="left" bgcolor="white" border="0" cellpadding="8" style="width: 250px;"><tbody>
<tr> <td><span style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="font-size: large;">There will always be conversations that are relevant to your business happening outside the web space you own.</span></span></td> </tr>
</tbody> </table>The discussions they are taking part in give you valuable information about the needs of your market, what people think of your company, your competitors and individual offerings. You can learn what's important to them, what keeps them up at night, what challenges they need solutions to. You can take advantage of this information to inform your thinking about new products, services and features, new areas of content marketing for your digital presence, how to solve user experience issues, even how best to communicate to these potential customers.<br />
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Moreover, discovering these relevant conversations gives your business the opportunity to participate in them. You or your social team should do this subtly at first, by subscribing, making positive comments and following other members of the community. Once people are familiar with your contributions, you can engage more deeply by suggesting relevant links to your own or other social properties, and eventually, by making contact with the influencers in the group who you think may be amenable to sharing your company's information about your launches, events and other content. This is advocacy, the digital marketing holy grail.<br />
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<b>Keyword Insights from Listening</b><br />
Finally, social listening reveals the words and phrases the actual market uses to describe their needs and the solutions to those needs. This first person narrative is an important source of keyword discovery, suggesting words you should be optimizing your pages for and building content around. It also gives you key insight into how to name and communicate about your brands, products, services and features.<br />
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There is no substitute for this kind of data because if you optimize around the words your market is searching for and build your content based on those words, then...<br />
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1. You'll get more visits to your site because people are actually searching for those words.<br />
2. When searchers for those words arrive at your site, they're more likely to find the answers they're looking for.<br />
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If your product, service and feature names and your marketing communications take this data into account, then it'll be easier for your customers to find you.<br />
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<b>Social Listening How-To</b><br />
Social listening techniques can run the gamut from a simple, free approach using a dashboarding app combined with various searches such as Icerocket social search and Google Alerts, to paid approaches involving full-fledged social listening suites, which can run from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.<br />
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You can have your own people do this in-house using the tools, or most of the search tool vendors will also contract with you to do the listening for you and add expert consulting, reporting and recommendations to the service. Many agencies also offer this service.<br />
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You can arrange to do listening in real time continuously or on some set cadence, monthly, quarterly, etc.<br />
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Depending on the size of your business and your available resources, you choose the combination of these that fits your budget. But I'd recommend starting small and free, learning how to use the insight, then expanding.<br />
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At the very least, every company should set up some Google Alerts for their company name and the names of their products and key people and check those alerts at least once a day. That way, you're sure to pick up any negative comments that are specifically directed at your company. It's best to know about this type of comment at the outset and respond to it as quickly as possible in as engaging a manner as possible to prevent it from escalating into a serious PR problem.<br />
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Of course you'll also be able to catch positive comments about your company and expand their effect by retweeting or tweeting about them and using them on your Web site and in your marketing materials.<br />
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Any way you do it, social listening is empowering for a company. The market is speaking whether you're listening or not. If you are, you can reap the benefits.<br />
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Let us know if we can help. 914 715 6715.<br />
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Visit <a href="http://copylounge.com/">Copylounge.com</a> for more Digital Marketing Intuition.<br />
<br />
Next week: <a href="http://copylounge.blogspot.com/2014/03/digital-content-strategy.html" target="_blank">Content Strategy</a><br />
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<a href="https://plus.google.com/+KenGodfrey?rel=author">Ken Godfrey</a><br />
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Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3335418469447539120.post-10632013910217454702014-03-05T04:10:00.000-08:002014-03-31T12:51:02.699-07:00Search Keyword Discovery - The Foundation of Digital MarketingSearch Keyword Discovery is the first and foremost action a business needs to take before they build a Web site, or before redesigning the one they have. Not surprisingly then, it's also the way most digital marketing consulting engagements begin. In fact, it's really the foundation of all Digital Marketing.<br />
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Why is this? Because the words you optimize your pages for matter. <img align="right" border="0" alt='Search Keyword Discovery' src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cywbivemB-U/UxaUAEFkCFI/AAAAAAAAB8E/wCRYUQblZ8g/s1600/keyword-research-seo2.png" height="133" width="320" /><br />
The right keywords are probably not words that are about you or your company. They probably won't include the name of your product, service or business. Nor should you optimize for the name of one of the divisions of your company or your CEO's favorite word. It's about understanding what audience problem your business solves and discovering the words that your visitors will search for to solve that problem. When you have that insight, then you create pages of quality content around each of those words. One keyword, one page.<br />
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Because to create quality content that your audience can find, you need to start with the keywords they will use to find it. As prevalent as SEO has become, when most companies think about 'optimizing' pages for search, they think: Put the terms you want your pages to score for in the right places on the page and in the code so that the search engine ranks your page highly for those words. But it's not that simple anymore.<br />
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This 'paste it on' approach to SEO would probably have been pretty effective 3-5 years ago, but since Google's most recent updates have focused on content quality, the content on your page needs to truly be based on those keywords to score highly. And if you're going to be writing pages about a set of keywords, it's best to be sure those keywords are the ones your audiences are searching for.<br />
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It's more trouble to do it this way, but the upside is that if you do this right, your audience will find your page and the content you present to them will be what they're looking for. So they'll stay. And if you give them the opportunity to engage with you on that page, such as a registerable offer, they'll engage <br />
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</b> <b>Effective Keyword Discovery - How it's Done</b><br />
As I mentioned, most digital consulting engagements start with Keyword discovery because businesses know they don't have the traffic they need and many have heard that SEO is the solution to that problem. So that's what they come to us for. We start with brainstorming. We work with our client to come up with a list of keywords to start with. <br />
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<table align="left" bgcolor="white" border="0" cellpadding="8" style="width: 250px;"><tbody>
<tr> <td><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: large;">To create quality content that your audience can find, you need to start with the keywords they will use to find it.</span></td> </tr>
</tbody> </table>Sometimes, depending upon the client's resources, we'll also use <a href="http://copylounge.blogspot.com/2014/03/social-listening.html" target="_blank">social listening</a> to identify words that the market is using to talk about subjects that are relevant to the client's business. We'll add these words to the seed list too.<br />
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The next step in the discovery process is to put these seed words into a tool that will give us a larger list of related words, along with the search opportunity (the number of searches for a word per month) and the level of competition (expressed as a percentage) for each word. The art is in finding keywords that are most relevant to the customer's business which have a good balance of higher opportunity and lower competition. Only trial and error -- and experience -- can help with this.<br />
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Once we've identified the words, it's time to start building a page of content around each of them. Now the old SEO rules come back into play. The keyword needs to appear in a number of specific places and a sufficient number of times on the page to get the highest google rank. We run tests on the pages to validate the SEO, make any necessary adjustments, make sure we have a good set of metrics on the existing site for the last few months as a benchmark, then the new pages are ready to go live.<br />
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On a regular cadence (monthly, quarterly, half yearly) We'll re-assess the metrics, run the SEO tools against the pages to check their progress and run the keyword discovery tools to determine if there are any new words we need to include or old ones we need to retire.<br />
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If you follow this process closely, and keep your pages fresh, you should see an immediate improvement, then a steady climb in search rank for your pages over time. There will also be an accompanying increase in traffic, time on site and - if you provide visitors a way to engage, such as offers they can register for, live chat assistance, etc, you'll also see an increase in engagement.<br />
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Let us know if we can help. 914 715 6715.<br />
<br />
Visit <a href="http://copylounge.com/">CopyLounge.com</a> for more Digital Marketing Intuition<br />
<br />
Next week: <a href="http://copylounge.blogspot.com/2014/03/social-listening.html" target="_blank">Social Listening</a><br />
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<a href="https://plus.google.com/+KenGodfrey?rel=author">Ken Godfrey</a><br />
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Visit <a href="http://copylounge.com/">CopyLounge.com</a> for more Digital Marketing Intuition.Ken Godfreyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08841302521277839712noreply@blogger.com0