Mad 4 Blog

On the Internet, launching a successful viral video or popular website certainly has its own merit. But gaining brand recognition and traffic may only be part of a complete business model. Once a presence is established, the fastest way to generate revenue is through advertising. Selling valuable advertising space (much like real estate) allows businesses to capitalize on their traffic by receiving payments per thousand visits or per click. Whether the end goal of online efforts is a high conversion rate or new customer acquisition, it never hurts to make some extra proceeds, even if advertising only pays for domain hosting, website management and overall marketing campaign costs.

After originating in 2006, and becoming a household name by 2008, Twitter is only just looking to cash in on its increasingly valuable social interface real estate. Previously known for its lack of ads, Twitter aims to start small by sending out targeted sponsored messages—dubbed Promoted Tweets. This announcement came in April 2010, when the company was rumored to be pairing up with major players such as Sony and Starbucks.

One reason that many booming websites hesitate to launch full-fledged advertising campaigns is that ubiquitous advertisements can be perceived to cheapen overall look and experience. No forum wants visitors to feel used for their contribution to an outstanding CPM. But reluctance to plan for advertising from the ground floor of a burgeoning online operation may be a detriment. For Twitter, users may express distaste and disdain once they see advertising appear where there previously was none. Whereas on Facebook, advertisements have been seamlessly—albeit sparingly—integrated for years so that they don’t interrupt the layout or feel of the site, and visitors are accustomed to their presence. When questioned on their timing, Twitter expressed that it has only been analyzing and determining the best way to introduce effective advertising for both buyers and users.

Currently, Twitter is often accessed through third-party services and interfaces (rather than through Twitter.com); in fact, it was created for its SMS remote-access appeal. That’s why posting standard banner ads on the website alone is not necessarily going to do as much for the company as it might for more stationary social media platforms, such as Facebook. Instead, the plan for Promoted Tweets is to send out sponsored messages that relate to key words that users enter into a search field. That way, ads are more likely to reach their intended audiences. To keep these expensive ads from getting lost in the noise of incoming tweets, they will always be queued to the top of lists (instead of ranked by their timestamp). Over time, Twitter may begin to show Promoted Tweets at the top of all feeds, whether users searched for any terms or not.

One way that Twitter assures quality control for both the user and advertiser is by taking down any Promoted Tweets that don’t have ‘resonance.’ For the advertiser, this means that if their ads aren’t doing well—as gauged by a nine-point system that includes visibility and interactivity—it will be taken down and they won’t have to pay for it. On the user end, they won’t have to encounter ads that aren’t relevant to them. Ostensibly, this process will only become smarter and more accurate—and more profitable—as time and trials progress. Though slow to start, there’s no going back on advertising on Twitter.

Your website may serve as a full-service e-commerce interface through which you sell products and services. Or it may simply be a place where people can learn more about your business. Either way, viral marketing can help you increase website traffic––and therefore brand awareness and sales––at a very low cost, with minimal effort.

What is Viral Marketing?
The phrase ‘viral marketing’ refers to almost any means of using word-of-mouth campaigning to pass along your message. Typically, marketers target individuals or groups who are likely to pass along or share a given campaign message. For example, a funny YouTube video is likely to be shared with friends and it is easily forwarded to colleagues; therefore, putting your business message in this format and getting it out to people who are likely to share it with others can create a big buzz for your brand with little effort. In many cases, key message sharers may even be given incentive for their efforts. Many contests which are hosted online offer extra entries or added prizes for fellow bloggers or website owners who use their own forum to promote the contest.

How Can Viral Marketing Promote My Website?
By making your website the centerpiece of your viral marketing campaign, all of your advertising efforts will have one single call to action: visit us online. Although it can be coupled with other media to really strengthen your campaign, online viral marketing is key for websites because viewers of your message will be able to click straight through to your web address once they’ve interacted with your ad. Once your audience is at your website, they can further engage with your brand or even complete transactions.

The best part is that even non-conversion visits can help you strengthen your website’s presence, because increased traffic to your page and more interaction with it will make it rank higher organically in a search engine, such as Google. When your rank rises, your website will be even easier to search and locate for people who are specifically interested in what you have to offer. This begins a cycle of increased traffic begetting increased traffic, which will ultimately impact your website’s success. Because such little cost is needed in the first place to initiate a viral marketing campaign (compared to other online marketing tactics such as a pay-per-click campaign) it’s easy to achieve high ROI.

What Comes Next?
Viral marketing campaigns may occur organically. Sometimes a website becomes an overnight sensation with very little work on the part of its owners. But that’s not something you can rely on when planning to put your business online. One of the best things about viral marketing is the fact that it’s completely accessible to everyone, and you don’t even need a ton of insider information to kick off your campaign. All you need to do is create an easy-to-use website, and then utilize social media tools that you probably already know, such as business-relevant discussion forums and Facebook.

However, to ensure that your efforts have a huge effect, you may want to consider a professional viral marketing team. These experts can help you come up with the unique creative needed for this kind of campaign to launch. Viral marketers are also familiar with a myriad of potential vantage points from which to target and approach your audience, to keep your message moving. This team of professionals can not only determine where your efforts will have the biggest impact, but they can also help you collect and analyze the results of your campaign. By tracking responsiveness and user data, you can sharpen and hone your viral marketing strategies. This will enable you to build even stronger platforms in the future.

Curious to learn more about viral marketing? Ask Mad 4 Marketing how we can help you create a buzz about your business without breaking the bank.

By now we’re all aware of the incredible impact that social media can make in terms of brand awareness, promotions, sales and networking. However, social media is a dual-edged blade. With ongoing open access across the globe, the same lines of communication that you’ve opened to strengthen your business may become potential avenues for brand denigration. Although you can’t micromanage your company’s image online, you are in a position to help shape and monitor conversations about your company in public forums. Especially those initiated by your own employees.

The news is littered with stories about employees who use Facebook, Twitter and other online forums to represent their place of business in a negative way. Inflammatory items may include job-bashing, coworker gossip, office confidentialities, inappropriate pictures or simply making a not-so-funny work-related joke. Examples range in scale from enacting personal behaviors which are counterintuitive to company policy to posting controversial remarks about clients. Though these may not be malicious in intent, once a person is publicly associated with your business, you want them to consistently uphold its reputation in all respects, no matter how small.

The foremost thing you can do to protect your business is create a social media policy. Typically, this legal contract is enacted between the company and its employees through your human resources department. Social media policies delineate what online behavior and language is acceptable from employees and reminds them that they represent your company by affiliation at all times, whether or not they’re on the clock. But it isn’t always easy to formalize lines between a person’s professional obligations and private life. Policies should cover:

•    What constitutes social media and the public sphere
•    What type of language and behaviors are approved
•    What company data or materials are considered confidential
•    What repercussions will occur when policy protocols are breached

Most social media policies explicate that it is up to each employee to take personal responsibility for their public representation by using good sense and keeping the company’s best interests in mind. Accountability makes up 90% of social media policies.

Naturally, it’s impossible to govern every message board, every posting and every photo of each of your employees. Businesses can start by monitoring their employee’s computer use while at work, and then follow up by making sure that social media outlets directly affiliated with your brand (such as your Facebook fan page) are free from harmful remarks. Further efforts vary according to budget and business size; however, one simple way to check up on your online representation is to regularly browse for the company name and key words through a standard search engine. This action takes just a few moments of time, but the results can be a very useful for determining how your company is being showcased online and by whom.

With a social media policy in place, when/if employees come into breach of protocol, your business will be in a position legally and ethically to respond with adequate remonstration. Think about it this way: you put so much time, energy and money into building and advertising your brand—so isn’t it worth protecting? One sheet of paper with a few guidelines and room for two signatures at the bottom may be all that stands between your business’s success or failure at the mercy of social media.

In 2010 it’s time to ask: why isn’t the face of your business on Facebook?

True, Facebook has been around as a social networking site for students since 2004. But rather than become an outdated tool over the years, Facebook has been expanding its services to better enable professionals to use the popular website for interacting with clients and colleagues. And it’s not just about marketing to the college-age kids who were Facebook’s original audience—though they remain its main demographic. In 2009, adults between the ages of 25 and 34 doubled by the month, while adults between 35-54 years of age demonstrated a growth rate of 276.4% in presence over six months in the first half of the year. In fact, Facebook was increasingly utilized for adult marketing as soon as the website opened enrollment to all adult age groups in 2006. And it’s been taking off as a popular marketing platform ever since.

The relevance of Facebook is that it’s all-in-one social media marketing. It’s a quick and easy way to let prospective customers know what’s new with your business, in real time. You can reach out to interested individuals anywhere in the country—or anywhere in the world. And you can immediately receive their thoughts and feedback about your announcements, products or services. Whether you’re courting new clients or keeping in touch with existing contacts, Facebook is a casual and convenient way to communicate via words, pictures, links and multimedia. It’s easy to get started and easy to use, and your consumer base is already built in. Plus, there are several ways to get involved.

The first way to get involved with Facebook is to create an account. Although accounts are reserved for individuals (rather than businesses), an account for your company can be started by an employee, or a dummy account name can be used to represent the company name. This account will allow your representative to link directly to friends, post status updates and shared pictures. This account can also be used to fan pages, join groups and leave commentary on other relevant pages of Facebook.

Then you’ll want to create a ‘Group’ and/or ‘Fan Page’ for your business or product. The difference between these two options is that a group is a static page that other users can join, which doesn’t give companies the option of communicating directly and freely with its members. However, every time someone joins this group, Facebook will tell all of their friends that they are a member, which may bring about brand awareness and inspire others to join. The group’s homepage can provide further information about what your company does, and allows you to contact members directly through their inbox.

However, a fan page may be even more pertinent to businesses joining Facebook because this page allows you to advertise your brand’s identity while also sending out messages and updates to those who are interested in your services. Notifications will be shown to a user’s friends when they ‘become a fan’ of your page. Messages are sent out as live feeds, rather than as messages which stay in someone’s inbox until it has been read. However, fan pages can be accessed by non-Facebook members or those who aren’t logged into their account, so these may be more accessible than group pages overall.

Furthermore, you may wish to purchase advertising directly on Facebook. Though pricing remains competitive for space on this popular website, advertising on Facebook pages is popular because it allows buyers to tailor viewings to certain age groups, geographic locations, personal interests–or any of the other information that users supply when they join Facebook. This means that none of your advertising dollars will go to waste, because you are able to specifically target the audience who will most likely be interested in your company’s services.

Last but not least, complementary advertising campaigns (such as any coinciding print advertising you do) should feature elements that promote your Facebook page and encourage fellow Facebook users to become friends with your main account, join your group or become a fan of your business through its unique page. Your presence and pages become a hub which interested parties can easily access from a site where they are already likely to traffic and be active, which means you’ll have a leg up on expansive, dynamic marketing when you put your business on Facebook.

It was a day like any other. I woke up, got ready for work, checked the ‘vitals’ on my iPhone; BBC News, Hotmail, Facebook. And there it was, staring right back at me in (appropriately) black and blue; ‘You have a friend request from Caroline F.’

This was no longer a day like any other. It felt like my entire existence had changed forever. My mother had gone and joined Facebook.

OK, so maybe I’m overreacting. After all, some of my colleagues, ex bosses, clients and even old school teachers are friends of mine on Facebook, so I’d learned the multi-generational/colleague/client Facebook etiquette a while back. But my own mother? So many thoughts ran through my mind. What will she think of my statuses? What will I think of her statuses? Will she disown me for parading photographs of her to hundreds of strangers? Will she tag me in embarrassing baby pictures? Will she even know how to tag?

When four Harvard students launched the site in their dorm rooms five years ago, little did they know they had started something so big. Now, with 200 million users and growing at an exponential rate, Facebook is a sign of the times, a global platform for all walks of life, which apparently now includes my mother.

There are now 50 languages by which to navigate the site, including Welsh (my own Facebook language of choice). And speaking of languages that make you sound like you’re choking on a hard candy, Facebook very recently launched a version in Swahili.

Just as the site’s users grow in demographic, so does its advertising, the advertisers behind it and the way in which they advertise. Like other social websites of today, Facebook provides a platform for highly-targeted advertising, giving excellent value for money to small businesses who need more ‘bang for their buck’.

Now, companies in Tanzania have an opportunity to reach their Swahili-speaking demographic in a very targeted manner without spending money and time in research and development trying to figure out exactly which geographic locations they frequent, or which newspapers they read.

With more than 4 billion minutes worldwide being spent on Facebook each day, advertisers are of course thrilled that social networking plays such a huge role on the global stage, and Facebook doesn’t have a monopoly, either.

With no national press coverage in the highly censored country of Iran, Twitter has lately been one of the only mediums for political comment on the local election since a country-wide crackdown on journalism. This cyber activism against the ‘big brother’ government means that Iranian members are also growing in their thousands, adding to the worldwide increase in social networking and a worldwide increase in online advertising.

So, after a week of getting used to it, I have learned to live with my mother being a member of Facebook. She’s now quite happily commenting away on people’s pages and photos, searching for long lost friends and expanding her own social network, one click at a time.

But I can’t help but think, who next? Will this social media fascination soon extend to my eighty-five year old grandmother wanting to look up the American soldiers she shared a beer with in World War II? Quite possibly.

Some Facts on Facebook
* More than 200 million active users
* More than 100 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day
* More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college
* The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older