I noticed that social media wants to work it’s way into companies at pretty much every seam. It rises up from the bottom as employees start using social media tools to discuss their workplace and respond to incoming sentiment, its been creeping into management meetings because service providers are pitching social media projects, and now it’s coming down from the top leadership that has identified it as a potential means of satisfying business goals.
Resistance To Social Media
Of course, this is not happening without resistance and there are some real concerns to consider. For example, many leaders fear what will happen if employees start communicating directly with customers, sending mixed messages, and misrepresenting company policy. For the manager’s part, they have concerns about implementing a social media campaign without understanding how it fits with their overall strategy. Of course, certain industries have significant legal concerns to look out for and there is a sense that companies that wait can learn from the mistakes of the early entrants.
Tenaciousness of Social Media
On the other hand many companies are discovering that social media is a flexible and tenacious vine that can grow under remarkable constraints. For example, if you’re a bank and are worried about running afoul of the complex legal code associated with providing investment advice, you can start a blog about something that’s tangentially related but outside legal review such as ways to improve your credit score or how to save money with home upgrades. Or, if you’ve got employees who are Twittering in response to customer service, you can provide them with some resources that will help them provide the right answers, such as a moderated wiki or faq directory.
In fact, these kinds of resources have often already in place, having been created by the people using social media to save themselves time and effort (i.e. no point in re-writing the same answer twice). The problem is that social media starts popping up in different parts of organizations without coordination. For example, there may be multiple people who have started twitter feeds. Or, one department is running a newsletter and another is running a blog and they’re not working together. On the positive side, you’re engaging with your community. On the negative side, you’re probably not making the best impression.
If this is the case at your organization, check out my post on Managing The Social Media Mix where I talk about how to pull together and optimize the social media vines that are popping up in your business.
Manicuring Social Media
From a strategy perspective, one of the most significant challenges associated with social media is managing the balancing act between providing your team with tools to engage your community while also making sure that they fairly represent your business in a distributed fashion. When I think about the projects I’ve worked on that dealt with this challenge the idea of “freedom within constraints” keeps coming up. This articulation is really a design principle that guides the development of social media guidelines and protocols. Too much constraint and your internal team won’t want to use social media, not enough and it may get unruly.
Just like manicuring a plant, it’s not possible to set the constraints once. Rather, it’s a process of ongoing trimming and direction that seems to produce the best results. Because social media grows and evolves so rapidly, iteration and experimentation are key to a successful program. I’m particularly interested in how social media plays out internally at companies because I believe that many of the best social media ideas come from within. I believe the best results are achieved when internal channels are combined with regular social media audits.
As always, thanks for reading and I look forward to your comments.
Wait, is today Friday? Crazy.
- UNDERSTAND/FIX THE WORLD
- Future Now has a good post about making the case for avoiding jargon and acronyms: http://bit.ly/m1vTe
- Wired: some last minute excitement for the Netfilx Prize …. more crowdsourcing madness: http://bit.ly/NXDIt
- Dan Roam draws helpful pictures that explain the healthcare crisis, or should I say insurance wars? http://bit.ly/onbqL
- Kate Rutter’s Slime Mold post is brilliant. Let’s use other biological metaphors other than “viral” http://bit.ly/13LyEe
- Seven lies about lying, a great NY Times piece by Errol Morris (via kotkke) http://bit.ly/W9pxe
- MARKETING
- DESIGN
- SOME FUN
Have a great weekend.
This post is intended to be an introduction to search engine marketing (SEM) and paid search for marketing managers. In short, SEM is the practice of managing your online assets to improve findability. If you’re interested in learning about search engine optimization (SEO), which is part of SEM, check out my previous post Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics For Marketing Managers. In this post, I’ll focus on the practice of buying paid search listings from search engines such as Google.
What Is Paid Search & How Does It Relate To SEM?
SEM falls under the domain of internet marketing and is focused on improving findability through two primary means, organic and paid search. “Organic” is used to describe the search listings that are returned in the main area of the search engine results page (SERP) when you run a search. They are considered “organic” or “algorithmic†because they are based on an algorithm that matches your search terms, or keywords, to indexed content from the web. In contrast, paid search describes the listings on the periphery of the page such as Google Adwords, or sponsored links. See an image of Google’s page layout with organic and paid content highlighted.
The Big Take Away
Before reading any further, you should know that SEM is something with which most companies gradually gain experience. It’s rare that I would recommend that any company jump into an aggressive paid search program because it takes time to understand the market for the terms that are relevant to your brand, to identify what those terms are, and to determine their value. This is partly because services like Google’s AdWords are based on an auction model, which I’ll discuss below. For now, think of paid search as something that you want to get into gradually so that you can measure ROI and iterate on your program as you go.
SEM Speak
- Keyword – This is just another way of saying “search term”. Consumers enter keywords into Google to find things. For example, if you’re trying to find a local auto-mechanic your keywords might include “mechanic”, “subaru” and “San Francisco” or “94110”.
- Pay Per Click (PPC) – This is a pricing model for paid search where advertisers pay only when someone clicks on their advertisement and is taken to their website.
- Cost Per Click (CPC) – This is the cost associated with each clicked-on advertisement within the pay-per-click pricing model.
- Cost Per Action/Acquisition (CPA) – Another online advertising pricing model where the advertiser pays when a specified action takes place after a click-through to their website (for example, a purchase, a form submission, etc). Sometimes, the action might be entering contact information, in this case the cost is measured as the Cost Per Lead (CPL).
- Cost Per Impression (CPI) or (CPM) – The cost per impression is measured by the thousand, or cost per thousand (CPM), and refers to the cost associated with exposing a customer to an advertisement. In this pricing model, the advertiser is charged by the number of impressions (i.e. number of times the advertisement appears) regardless of whether or not it gets clicked on.
- Click Through Rate (CTR) – This is calculated by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad on a web page by the number of times the ad was delivered (impressions).
- Conversion Rate (CR) – This is the ratio of people who take a specified action on a website divided by the number of people who were offered the opportunity to take the action. For example, you might have a page on your site where people land, after clicking on your ad, that includes some kind of offer. If 100 people land on that page and 25 of them take the offer than your conversion rate would be 25%.
- Click Fraud – Click fraud happens when people click on advertisements online not out of interest in the related products or services, but so that the advertiser will be charged for the click. Such fraudulent clicks can be automated so as to financially damage a company or competitor. Search engines have developed technologies to prevent click-fraud, but they are not completely motivated to resolve this issue because they are a beneficiary of the fraud.
- Flat Rate vs. Bid Rate – With flat rate placements the advertiser pays a fixed amount for each ad placement. With bid rate placements advertisers are bidding on the price of each placement. Google’s AdWords is a bidding rate model based on the ongoing auction of chosen keywords.
Google’s AdWords & AdSense
Chances are that if you’re interested in paid search you’ll want to start with Google’s AdWords because Google is the current market leader. That said, other paid search options are available including, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft ad Center. (now combined under the Bing search engine).
AdWords
As I mentioned above, Google AdWords is based on an auction model that serves contextually relevant advertisements in search engine results pages and on ad network websites. This means, that the paid advertisements that show up along side a search should be relevant to the search terms, or keywords. Where a paid advertisements show up on the page (how high up) depends on an advertisement’s rank number. The rank number is calculated by the cost per click bid multiplied by a quality score. The advertisement quality score is determined by the keywords it contains, the keywords on the page the advertisement is directed to, and other factors such as it’s historical click through rate. The quality score essentially insures that relevant advertisements have an advantage with respect to page rank and cost per click. If you want to get a sense of how your advertisement will rank and how much it will cost to get to the top of the paid search results, you can use the Google AdWords Traffic Estimator Tool. For more detailed information about how pricing works, check out the Paying for AdWords tutorial at the Google Education Center.
AdSense
Google AdSense is worth mentioning because paid advertisements can be served not only to search engine results pages, but also to websites in the AdSense ad network. For example, if you’re a blogger you might set up an account with AdSense that would allow Google advertisements to show up on your blog. Google tries to serve contextually relevant ads based on the content of the site on which they appear rather than on search terms. If someone clicks on an advertisement that Google places on your blog then you’ll get a cut of the cost per click. If you’re an advertiser, you can specify where Google can serve your ads. In essence, you’re trying to help Google make sure that your advertisements are being placed in the most relevant places whether that is ad network sites, search engine results pages, or other specific sites.
Placement
Placement choices can be specified across a variety of dimensions (i.e. time of day, regions of the world, ad networks, etc). But, keep in mind that AdSense customers can block specific advertisements from showing up on their sites, such as advertisements from competitors who might seem to be a good contextual fit!
Search Targeting vs. Contextual Targeting
Google serves advertisements in two situations, either on a website in the AdSense network (they call this the content network) or on a search engine results page. We’ve already discussed the latter, which offers search targeting using a cost per click pricing model to serve text based advertisements based on keyword relevancy on search engine results pages.
With contextual targeting Google doesn’t have search terms to determine which advertisements to place. Thus Google looks at the information on the page where the advertisement will be placed and compares it to your advertisement’s keywords to determine which ads will be most relevant.
Another thing to know about contextual advertisements is that they are not limited to the four-line format that you find on the search engine results page. With contextual advertisements Google offers additional formats including: image ads, flash ads, video ads, and gadget ads. Finally, the pricing model can be either cost per click or cost per impression. Which brings me to the anatomy of the AdWords advertisement.
The Anatomy of A Google AdWords Advertisement
A Google AdWords text advertisement has four lines including.
- Headline – you’re looking for a succinct message which immediately identifies your advertisements relevance.
- Description Line 1 – this is usually used for a key benefit of your product or service
- Description Line 2 – this is usually an action request or demand.
- Destination URL – the link where the user can make the purchase or learn more, but may not be the actual landing page URL where you send them when they click on the advertisement.
Here’s a sample of what an advertisement might look like for my consulting practice:
As you write advertisements, you’ll want to have several variations running so that you can determine which ones perform best and migrate towards those. For more on Writing Targeted Ad Text check out the Google Education Center. You may also want to explore Ad Groups, which allow you to set up different keyword combinations for your advertisements so you can learn about which keywords produce the best results for your business. Which brings us to keywords.
A Word About Keywords
Choosing the right keywords is important because they can allow you to get more relevant placements at lower cost. As I mentioned above, you’ll want to experiment with keywords to see which groups work best for your business. I’ll introduce the four types of keyword matching options that Google offers, but if you’d like to learn more visit the Keyword Matching Options tutorial on the Google Education Center.
The four types of keyword matching options include:
- Broad Match – Allows your advertisement to show on similar phrases and relevant variations
- Phrase Match – Allows your advertisement to show for searches that match the exact phrase
- Exact Match – Allows your advertisement to show for searches that match the exact phrase exclusively
- Negative Match – Ensures your advertisement doesn’t show for any search that includes that term
By combining these matching options, it’s possible to target your advertisements and improve your click through rate. This in turn will allow you to improve your quality score and reduce the cost of getting top placements. If you need help finding appropriate keywords to experiment with try Google’s Keyword Tool.
The Campaign Management Process
Campaign management is an ongoing process. Assuming that you’ve created some advertisements that are running, you’ll want to establish a review cycle that captures enough data to support statistical significance. In other words, you’ve got to let the advertisements run long enough to get a realistic sense of how they are performing over time.
The next step it to review the performance metrics such as click through rates, cost per click, etc. You should see that some advertisements are performing better than others … which is where you’ll want to look to identify what’s working and what’s not. Next you’ll want to set some performance goals to work against and start iterating on your advertisements to improve your overall performance.
If you’re setting up an AdWords program at your organization plan on dedicating ongoing resources for campaign management. This will require more time until you get a set of advertisements that are optimized and performing well. To learn more visit the Google Education Center’s Campaign Management Overview tutorial.
Learn By Doing
Many small businesses can’t afford to work with a professional to set up an AdWords account and campaign management program, so they start experimenting on their own. Google’s learning center is wonderful and if you have time to go through the entire center you should have everything you need to get started. That said, the single best thing you can do to start getting results from AdWords is to simply get an account and start experimenting.
As you do this, I highly recommend spending a good amount of time running every search that you can think of that someone might enter to find you or your competitors. Take a good look at the advertisements that come up and ask yourself how relevant they are. Are your competitors there? What does their copy look like? Is there a set of keywords where they don’t come up? Take a look at your competitors landing pages, and in general get a feel for the market and where you might fit in.
As a final note, buying AdWords is not a good fit for every business. And, if I had to choose between spending on AdWords or improving my SEO, I’d go with the latter to improve where I come up in organic search results first. That said, the nice thing about AdWords is that you can start slow and with any sized budget. Thanks for reading and let me know if there’s any other high level stuff I should add to this post!
We’ve all heard the expression, “the cobbler’s children have no shoes”; internal marketing and design projects can give the expression new meaning. It’s truly confounding when design firms struggle to design their own collateral and when marketers fail to market themselves. Having been through some of these experiences myself, I’m writing to share some of what I’ve learned about why it happens and what you can do about it.
Why we fail
My top 3 list of pitfalls that cause projects to fail.
1) We can’t empathize with ourselves
When we design experiences, we usually start by trying to empathize with the people we’re designing for. If we can understand how they feel, it’s possible to understand the design challenge on a deeper level. Usually, we can embrace empathy while maintaining a perspective on the design problem, however, when we’re designing for ourselves things tend to short circuit. In this case, we often “feel” the problem in a way that prevents us seeing the bigger picture and preserving our perspective. Without being able to do so, we tend to narrow the opportunity space and bring emotional baggage into the design process.
2) We don’t treat ourselves like our clients
We basically assume that we’re going to be good clients to ourselves and that we’re going to provide good service to ourselves, so we stop doing all the things that we’ve developed to keep ourselves in line. We take a laissez faire approach from the project proposal process all the way through project management and customer service. When we do this, things slip and projects head into a downward spiral that either leads to a crash or a slow disappearance into the fog of organizational memory.
3) Our leaders aren’t leading
The leaders within our organizations don’t think they need to lead internal initiatives actively and tend to be drawn away be external efforts. I’m not really sure why this happens, but I’ve seen it over and over again. Perhaps it’s because leaders think this is the job of managers. but the reality is that internal projects often require more supervision than external ones due to the backdrop of internal politics, deep investment in the brand, and other factors. There’s also the case where leaders take a top down approach, which they’d avoid with clients, that prevents the project team from going through their normal process.
What you can do about it
1) An independent team
One way to deal with the fact that we can’t empathize with ourselves is to create a firewall between the project team and the internal client. This team should then go through a normal engagement process as if the project were with an outside client. It will be a little frustrating because it will take longer, especially considering that internal stakeholders often believe internal projects should be quicker, but it’s really the only way to insure objectivity.
2) A complete team & a room
Creating the firewall will not be enough in and of itself, you’ll need a complete team that can manage the project on a normal schedule. Thus, you’ll need your project lead, a project manager, and all the rest on the project team. Plus, you’ll want a defined client contact and approvals team on the other side. One common challenge is that the project team usually has ongoing regular external responsibilities that don’t just stop while the internal project is going on. One good way to deal with this is to set up days, or times during the day, when the team is not to be bothered with work outside of the internal project. This can be hard to do, but setting up a project team office can be very effective at stopping interruptions.
3) A leadership advocate
Dealing with the leadership problem can be solved by getting a commitment from a project sponsor on the leadership team who will communicate about your progress as the project is in process. The leader should ideally be independent of the project team as well as of the client side. And, most importantly, they need to understand how challenging internal projects are, what the pitfalls are, and be motivated to serve as a project advocate.
Thanks for reading and shoot me a comment to share your experience with internal projects.
Welcome to Friday.
I have a bunch of stuff from Kottke.org, so I just wanted to mention that it’s an awesome feed.
- UNDERSTAND/FIX THE WORLD
- MARKETING
- DESIGN
- SOME FUN
Have a great weekend.
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