esmoretti.com

If you’re in internet marketing, metrics and data are your part life (or at least they should be.) Permit me to be overly buzzwordy, but using data driven decisions to increase ROI should be a goal. However, understand and interpreting data is what separates the good from bad decisions. In the fast paced world of the internet, people are all to eager to jump on the latest fad in fear that we might miss some incredible opportunity.

Compete, Inc. has released information that shows that Facebook now directs more traffic Google. If you haven’t been paying attention for the past year, every month somebody declares that Facebook is the new Google, and as a person that has chronic ‘this-is-too-good-to-be-true’ syndrome, I don’t buy it.

Here’s why, and this is a shocker, because it’s not a data driven decision. It’s also nothing new, and it’s been said before. People using Facebook or social media aren’t looking to be sold to, they are looking to see what their friends are up to. Aaron Wall said it best, Social Media traffic does not buy.

When people search for something they are actively looking for a solution to a problem. So while Social Media gets more traffic, it doesn’t convert. Traffic by itself is worthless. I’d rather have 1000 unique visits per month with a 10% conversion rate than 10,000 visitors with 0% rate.

B-b-b-ut branding… conversations with the customer… my excuse to use twitter at work!? Sure, those are good points (ok, 2 outta 3 ain’t bad), and any company’s marketing mix should include Social Media efforts, but as lead generation activity, SoMe falls flat compared to search.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go get all these buzzwords off me.

It’s about the conversation – not the number of friends or followers.

Social Media has become the buzz word of the day on the internet. Carrying websites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace and turning them to the glorious way for marketers to make money without spending money. It couldn’t be farther from the truth. For one, if you get everyone in your company to Twitter, you’re taking them away from their real jobs. To successfully work in Social Media you need to have a person who understands it and to continually monitoring and developing the plan.

Having a person dedicated to social media does not mean hiring a full time Twitter intern. Social Media is not simply creating Facebook profiles. Social Media is away for companies to open up dialog for consumers and to achieve granular details about the client like never before.

What really attracts people to Social Media is the fact that they can reach people they wouldn’t normally have access to. If you aren’t responding and actively engaging your customers through your social media initiatives then you’re paying someone a lot of money to screw around on the internet.
read more »

There have been a lot of social media efforts I’ve seen latley that just don’t cut it. It’s a really obvious problem that gets neglected when social media outlets become buzz words on the evening news. Usually it starts out something like this:

Boss: Hey! I heard about this Tweety or Twitter or something like that on the news last night, are we on that?
Marketing Head: Ummm no.
Boss: Well we should be, get us an account ASAP!

First of all, before I get negative, it’s great that companies are trying to stay current with marketing trends. Ugh, I hate that word, trends. That’s really the wrong word for this. Marketing Fashion is a more appropriate term, or maybe marketing fads. If there is one thing to remember about the internet, it’s that it is constantly changing. While Twitter is vogue right now, the shelf life in indeterminate. We can sit and debate how long Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, etc. have to last or we can approach everything with the same question: How can we use this to leverage our company?

Are you ready for some internet marketing blasphemy? Some companies don’t and/or shouldn’t have Twitter. The reality of Twitter, and social media outlets is that it’s addictive. We might go out there as internet marketers to post a new ad, or to tweet about a cool new company product… but then you get sucked into the vortex of poking that attractive person you met at the networking event last week or retweeting that hilarious YouTube video. Which is a really quick way to get fired because internet marketers have a lot of legitimate work. So you think, I know… hire some college kid to do some tweeting for the company. Ok, great, but now you have someone else doing the exact same thing and wasting a whole lot of time and money.

If you can’t answer the question, how can we use this to leverage our company? Don’t do it! Better yet, look at ways you can actually use things to leverage for the company! Traditional marketing, or what I like to call “dumb marketing” like a dumb bomb is a lot of “drop from a plane and hope it hits its target.” Dumb Marketing is the same approach, the flashy ads, the billboards, the TV commercials, etc. Create a big enough presence and eventually that translates to sales. And look, it’s proven, it has worked for eons and that’s great. There’s a big problem with that, it’s costly and it the actual sales generated isn’t all that great considering how many people see an ad.

So, again, how can we use social media to leverage our company. If you’re a traditional marketer your probably think of this word as “incentive” but internet marketers call it engagement. You need to create incentive, or engagement with your social media efforts. If you don’t give your followers something to tweet about then fire the college intern you hired to tweet because you’re wasting time and money. Besides, interns are supposed to learn something and teaching someone how to twitter takes 30 seconds. As marketing differs between industries I will leave you with the same question: How can we use social media to leverage our company? Stop thinking about following the fashion and try to think about why social media is such a buzzword. I’ll give you two big hints, it’s the data and the interaction.

I’m not sure I buy into Jon Friedman’s approach to Facebook. He thinks Facebook (and Twitter) is for journalists because they can source people. Sure they can, and I can source Wikipedia for my term paper. The problem is that it just isn’t enough. I’d like a little more investigation from supposedly credited news papers like the Wall Street Journal than quotes captured from status updates and tweets.

Why? Because I’m sick of “Buy the rumor, sell the news” mentality of media outlets. You’ve no doubt heard, don’t believe everything you read. Part of that is because of the media. If you missed the humiliation of Jim Cramer on the Daily Show, you missed one of the greatest televised humiliations of a news personality in recent memory. Jon Stewart held Jim Cramers’ feet to the fire and had such indisputable evidence of Cramer’s fraud that even Cramer couldn’t deny it.

Facebook is an invaluable tool for journalists though. For the same reason it’s a invaluable tool for the rest of us, networking. So is Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on. It’s about networking, not about news. There might be some truth in tweets and status messages, but dig a little deeper than that. Just like there is valuable information in Wikipedia, but go to the source, don’t solely rely on the Wiki. So Journalists, join Facebook, Tweet away, but when it comes to the news, “Just the facts, Jack!’

In the past month or so at least 4 executives have branched out from both Google and MySpace. If you know what it’s like to work at Google you have to wonder what they are thinking. Apparently, it’s that they think they can do social networking better. Most recently, three executives from MySpace, including Amit Kapur, left MySpace to join a start up. It seems a little crazy to ditch a well paying job in this economy but you gotta do what you gotta do.

The biggest question it sparks, is just how much social networking can we take? Isn’t the social networking market pretty well saturated? Between MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and many other sites what are the odds for social networking startups to succeed?

One of these start-ups is Likaholix. Started by a former Googler, Likaholix seems to be a Twitter like item for products and media. The idea is that you make suggestions for things that you like and people comment it and favorite on it. It is still in private beta, so to say it is a tad undercooked is being pretty accurate.

[Read] Total Telecom Three MySpace execs quit, including COO
[Read] Mashable Why Googlers Are Leaving to Start Social Sites

To the non-corporate user (IE, most of us) the most noticeable changes will come in the form of the visuals. Both the Facebook “homepage” and corporate pages are changing to become more personable. Now those pages that you are a fan of will look less corporate and more like your buddy. Also good news for you super friendly types, no more cap on 5000 friends.

read more »

Yesterday I wrote about Facebook changing its ToS, and how it made people a little upset. This morning I woke up to this message on Facebook:

Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog.

If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.

read more »

Facebook changed its Terms of Service (ToS) last week. Not surprisingly, Zuckerberg says Facebook has rights to your data. Guess who gave them those rights? You. Zuckerberg’s logic is that in order for you to control who sees your Facebook data, you have to give rights to Facebook, who controls the privacy management to other profiles. In order for them to manage this, you have to give them rights (IE, sign up and input data). This really isn’t any thing to get upset about, in fact it’s pretty standard fair. If you read every ToS for every service you signed up for, you wouldn’t been on the internet, have credit cards, or quite a few other things. It sounds far worse than it actually is.

Here’s an excerpt from Mark Zuckerburgs Blog explaining the low down:

One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.

But if you’re still angry, Robert Scoble thinks you should chill out.
read more »

Although I keep waiting for MySpace to die out, it’s quite frankly just too big of a money maker. MySpace made an estimated $1 billion in ad revenues in 2008. A figure that’s not crazy considering that any given day the MySpace homepage is festooned with some movie or album dropping that week. Still, there is only too many glitter gif’s one person can take.

Where does Facebook fit into all of this? Good question! Because even though they managed to nab another 222 MILLION unique visitors in December, twice as many as MySpace they only managed a measly $300 million in ad money. What gives? Well Facebook’s model gets exploited without making profit. Burger King made headlines with the often mentioned “Dump 10 friends, Get Whopper” ad, and Facebook made zilch.

Facebook doesn’t play the same game MySpace is. Facebook doesn’t get taken over, or super plastered with advertisements. And that’s their game. Facebook is working the Pull mechanism while MySpace is sticking to tried and true pushing. The problem for Facebook is that while alot of companies rely on on the Facebook platform for free advertising and networking, Facebook has yet to figure out how to capitalize on it. The plus side is Facebook’s popularity might be more recession proof for it. Which puts a oncstant drain on the servers, without a constant poor in to the bank.

Are you waiting for the pull? Here it comes, while companies have been getting ads for free, their fans have been increasing. It’s a measurable figure. You know who is paying attention to you. Viewers of MySpace colorful ad pages might be ignoring them, but not the New York Times Facebook fans. When the Gray Lady allowed people to “gift” images of Obama on their front page, NYT fans tripled to 160,000.

Facebook is also adopting more engagement ads like offering up surveys. Markets now get brand awareness and concrete numbers to analyze. It’s a dream for them, and probably a cash cow for Facebook. The worry is that as these yet untested methods are now offered, companies now on the rocks might be cutting experimental advertising and sticking with cheap banner ads. Maybe Facebook’s approach is not so recession proof.

Read: AdAge “Facebook’s Plan to Amp Up Ad Revenue”