Author Archive

  • Feb 08
  • 29

Should A Company Blog Have Ads?

The Pros and Cons of On-Blog Advertising

It’s a funny thing sometimes, consulting for our client’s blogs. Often, our clients express identical opinions and questions to those we’ve expressed internally at one time or another. Specifically when it comes to the debate around on-blog advertising, I often find myself telling clients “you wouldn’t believe how much we understand your position right now”. While sounding ’salesy’, it couldn’t be more true.

Running a company blog, you’re bound to think at one time or another “hmmmmm. Maybe this blog can help the early stage of the business by generating ad revenue!” Before immediately dialing up Google (if you still have dial-up that is) and jumping on the Adsense bandwagon, I’d suggest that you take a moment to consider some pros and cons of having ads on your blog.

Pros:

  1. Ads provide additional revenue for your business. Especially if you’re a self-funded start up, squeezing money out of every opportunity might be your M.O. and blog ads can definitely help in this area. For example, at an entrepreneurs meetup event on Tuesday, I met a blogger who was making $5k/month from just the Google ads on her blog and her other ad services did even better (she gets 12 Million page views a month). Clearly, if you have the traffic, you can can make the ca$h with very little effort.
  2. Ads can provide readers with additional resources. Don’t have a resources/library/learn/etc link on your blog where readers can go to find additional related info? Luckily, well-targeted ads (provided through a good service), can benefit your readers by providing additional, related resources to augment your content.
  3. Ads can put your readers at ease. While initially counter-intuitive, I personally think this point has great merit. On-blog ads are not common on most company blogs. So by having ads, you are subconsciously making your company blog appear more like a regular, non-company blog, thereby putting the readers in a different mindset. If the company blog also provides great content (aka the blog is useful in its own right), the presence of ads can have a similar effect on the readers as viral marketing videos have on their viewers. By putting the blog readers at ease, they are more likely to let down their “I’m being sold to” defenses and consider your content more fairly and openly.

Cons:

  1. Ads clutter your blog. Many blogs are already so cluttered by widgets and unwieldy blogrolls that ads might not be the main problem in this area. However, adding ads to even a clean blog can cause the blog to become cluttered and unwelcoming to the eye. Even if you think your blog exists solely to promote your business, the reason people come to your blog is to read, correct? Don’t lose sight of this; readability is of the utmost importance.
  2. Without proper planning you can accidentally advertise competitors. Even with a well-targeted ad service, it may be hard to ensure your competitors don’t get onto your site to steal your readers/business. Unless you’re extremely diligent in babysitting your ads, that new destination URL your competitor created last week isn’t going to be blocked by your ad service. Before you realize it, your competitors may have taken precious loyalty and attention away from your brand. Is the revenue stream provided by the ads worth undermining the business the blog was created to promote?
  3. Ads look unprofessional. People have different expectations of a company blog than other blogs. A professional look and feel is often one of those expectations and ads detract from this professional look. Do you want to enter a competitive situation against a competitor that looks more professional than you in any way?

As you can see from the layout of this blog, we’ve chosen to remain ad-free. Most companies have more to gain from improving their consumer touch points than from advertising on their blog. If the world-at-large has an exceptional experience with your company blog, that can’t be a bad thing. Think about who your readers are and how they will react to ads on your blog. Then apply the Golden Rule.

If you need help figuring out whether your business can support ads, I’ve created a flow chart that takes you through the high-level questions quickly. Points in the chart that require further clarification are marked by purple numbers and will be discussed below.

Flowchart

  1. By “probably fine” I mean that I’d be willing to bet it wouldn’t have an adverse affect on the success of your blog. Clearly some people will prefer no ads in all situations, but I view these people (myself included) as the fringe.
  2. “Significant Revenue” could be clarified further by saying “revenue that would have a significant impact on the success of your business”. Significant, here, refers to business needs, not some subjective measure of dollar amounts.
  3. Web-based companies often use their blog as the main way to reach the online community. If the blog is the main way people interact with your brand, meaning your company hasn’t begun to utilize other interactive online avenues, I believe ads are not worth the ‘Cons’ they bring with them.
  4. As outlined in the ‘Cons’ section above, ads in many cases can drive business away and otherwise decrease your conversion rate. The ‘cost’ I’m referring to is any lost business caused indirectly or directly by these ‘Cons.’

Clearly, putting ads on a company blog is an involved decision. Our experience speaking to clients going through this exact decision has provided us with insights that I’ve attempted to aggregate here. I hope my thoughts help anyone going through this decision process.

Any opinions and insights are welcome.

4 Comments
  • Feb 08
  • 21

Reviews #1: Tide’s “My Talking Stain”

Abstract:

Introduced with a Super Bowl commercial, Tide’s newest social media effort takes the form of a destination website. The site, located at www.mytalkingstain.com, not only hosts the original commercial, but also provides visitors with the ability to create a customized stain and commercial.Tide Comp Score

The Scores:

  1. Value to Consumer: 65
  2. Engagement: 88
  3. Creativity: 73
  4. Ease of Use: 83
  5. Viralness: 87
  6. Forwards: 4

Category Drill-Down:

Value to Consumer: Anyone playing around on this site for more than three minutes will realize that the main value added to the consumer is entertainment value. Having spent 30 minutes on the site myself, I must say it is definitely more entertaining than I expected. Uploading my photo, recording my voice and sending the absurd result to a friend actually is fun. While, in the end, I learned nothing about life, love or even Tide, there was definitely entertainment value to be had.
Value to Consumer Score: 65

Engagement: Interestingly, My Talking Stain offers many levels of engagement. If you want to upload a photo and watch the commercial, you can do that for a quick bit of fun. If you want to record your voice, send the commercial to your friends and enter to win some prizes, you can. If you want to make your own talking stain vid, you can do that too. Simply choose your level and rock out. This is a great feature as many people aren’t interested in playing with all aspects of the site to write an accurate post about it. Some people only want to play a little bit and Tide clearly considered this. The brand is present, but not offensively so. The addition of My Talking Stain branded content for ringtones, MP3s and buddy icons allows Tide to engage consumers where the consumers choose to live rather than demanding the consumers come to them. This shows a nice understanding of the social media space.
Engagement Score: 88

Creativity: The idea of the talking stain is definitely amusing. Building a social media experience utilizing a pre-made commercial, a destination site, customizable sounds and faces is a great way to expand upon the commercial. However, the customization of the talking stain is basically one small technological step above Elf Yourself and could have been better.
Creativity Score: 73

Tide Pen

Ease of Use: The site is very easy to navigate; your options are clearly defined upfront by the stains on the shirt. The site is very well made and it’s very easy to make yourself a spoof video. Calling in to record your voice does require having a phone around, but that isn’t too much to expect these days is it? I wish they streamlined the “get famous” section of the site more, but the “spoof toolkit” is a big step above the “make one and post it online” that I was expecting. I’d bet 99.999% of people visiting don’t even seriously consider making a video but every .001% convinced to engage further with your brand via making a video is a huge win. This is especially true when applied to the very large numbers of people aware of the site due to Superbowl exposure.
Ease of Use Score: 83

Viralness: The site provides various opportunities for sharing and spreading the video online. While the medium is inherently not as viral as a video, they’ve offset this by prompting people to create their own videos and by facilitating a quick upload to Youtube. I was prompted multiple times to share, all in non-offensive ways. I was pleasantly surprised that they included, prominently, an embed option for your custom-made commercial; most companies would overlook this move. The lack of social news/bookmarking sites (think digg/del.icio.us/etc) was the only big mistake I saw.
Viralness Score: 87

Conclusion:

From the composite score (80) we can determine that Tide’s ‘My Talking Stain’ website provides a very solid forum for users to engage their brand. While some areas could definitely be improved slightly, no one area carried the marketing effort. The combination of usability, viralness and the utilization of multiple consumer engagement points allows this social media marketing campaign to promote the brand very well.

BONUS: the video I made

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6 Comments
  • Feb 08
  • 20

PandemicBlog Introduces the “Reviews Series” for Social Media Campaigns

ApprovedAt Pandemic Blog, we try to provide quality content to people looking to learn more about viral and social media marketing. To further this goal, we’re starting our ‘Reviews’ series of blog posts. In this series, we will review online marketing efforts from successful businesses, summarize their key features and assign scores in six categories. From these categories, we will arrive at a final Composite Score. This will result in a relatively standardized rating system that can then be used to accurately compare different online marketing efforts. The end goal, as always, is to further valuable discussion and to gain insight to viral and social media as they come into being, progress, succeed or fail.

The scores will be presented as follows:

  1. Value to Consumer: 1-100
  2. Engagement: 1-100
  3. Viralness: 1-100
  4. Ease of Use: 1-100
  5. Creativity: 1-100
  6. Forwards: 0-Infinite

Composite Score: Calculated by adding the scores of sections 1-6 and dividing by 5.

Category explanations:

Value to Consumer: This category represents our belief that a successful viral or social media marketing efforts should bring actual value to the consumers that experience them. This value, as I’m defining it, is pretty open and can be anything from entertainment and interesting discussions, to information and helpful resources. Since an online consumer is not captive to the marketer in any way, the marketing effort needs to bring real value to the consumer’s life if the marketing effort has any hope of being watched, engaged with or passed along. This category’s score ranges from 1-100 (100 being the best possible score).

Engagement: This category represents the ability of the marketing piece to engage the consumer with the brand. More than just “time spent on site”, this metric takes into account how much the consumer actually gets to “play” with the brand behind the marketing effort. A video can be very engaging, but destination sites, games, and blogs have even more potential for drawing the users into the “world” of the brand. Campaigns that combine multiple “new media” elements can be more engaging still. This category’s score ranges from 1-100.

Viralness: This category measures the ease by which someone can share the marketing effort with their network and any incentives that they have to do so. Are consumers prompted to share the marketing piece via social networks, email or embed tags? Is it even possible for them to do so? An important factor when discussing the ROI of an online marketing effort will be the ability of the effort to disperse easily on its own and reach a significant number of consumers. This category’s score ranges from 1-100.

Ease of Use: This category represents the ease of use or user-friendliness of the marketing piece. Can people see/play/download/upload/etc what is necessary to make this piece engaging in a quick and effortless way? Marketing efforts that are too involved and require much work on the part of the consumer will not spread optimally. The more time or tech savvy required to successfully experience the marketing message, the smaller the group of consumers using it will be. This category’s score ranges from 1-100.

Creativity: This category is relatively self explanatory. Something has to earn the consumer’s attention and the more interesting and different the marketing effort, the more easily that attention can be earned. This category’s score ranges from 1-100.

Forwards: This is a more concrete, “the proof is in the pudding”, category that simply reports the number of times I, personally, forwarded the marketing piece before sitting down to write a blog post about it. I figured, rather than trying to come up with a more subjective measure, why not simply record the number of times I ACTUALLY forward the piece and weight that number significantly less in the overall calculation. This category, barely affecting the Composite Score, almost amounts to a “bonus” category and can only shade the final score slightly in one direction or another. This category’s score range begins at zero and could theoretically be as large as the amount of connections I have in my network at any given time.

Composite Score: This number represents the overall assigned score to the marketing effort as a whole. With the first five categories equally weighted and the final category (Forwards) weighted significantly less, the composite score provides an easy way to compare otherwise disparate marketing campaigns. The range of the composite score is theoretically infinite, but the score of the campaign should be considered as if it were on a 1-100 scale.

Our Reviews series will hopefully provide a platform for discussion about actual viral and social media efforts that are currently online. Acting as a bare-bones case study, our readers will be able to see not only how each marketing effort stacks up against other efforts, but also what factors go into creating a successful viral and social media campaign. After reviewing multiple campaigns, important trends, strategies and techniques will be discussed.

As always, email us directly or comment if you have questions, improvements or social media marketing campaigns that you’d like to see reviewed.

1 Comment
  • Feb 08
  • 15

Viral Marketing in the Fabric Industry?

Pandemic Labs Co-Founder Quoted in Industrial Fabric Trade Magazine.

IFAI Review MagazinePandemic Labs co-founder, Matthew Peters, was quoted extensively in an article in the January Issue of the Industrial Fabrics Association Review magazine (page 42, titled “Catch the Fever”). The article, offering a high-level view of Viral Marketing, is filled with helpful quotes from social media thought leader Beth Kanter and Blendtec Director of Marketing, George Wright. The piece provides a brief history of viral marketing along with some valuable commentary and is a great read for anyone looking to catch up with the past few years of viral marketing news.

It’s interesting to see how each industry individually takes to Viral Marketing. It’s particularly interesting that, if this article is anything to go by, the industrial fabric industry seems to be very open to this new form of advertising. In fact, this article makes obvious to me a ridiculous assumption I was secretly harboring about “older” industries. Having worked in tech companies throughout my career, I had unconsciously assumed that non-tech industries were colder to these new technologies. Specifically, I had assumed that the earlier adopters of these types of marketing would come from the tech sector. Clearly this is faulty logic once I actually spend two braincells on it, and this article serves me a slice of humble pie.

The article embraces not only the history of viral marketing success (all the way back to the original BMWFilms), it embraces that history without the usual push-back from more traditional marketing thinkers that demand traditional marketing ideas and metrics. This excites me personally as, something I view as, an “old industry” is embracing a new technology better than most tech companies I’m working with!

In a similar, ‘tech isn’t as forward thinking as you’d assume’, vein Matt and I attended a tech industry panel event the other night that had a relatively high-profile group of panelists. In the Q&A, someone from the crowd asked a question that caused, in my mind, a very telling and depressing series of events. The question was, “What is the future of pre-roll video advertising?”. The panel took turns attempting to answer this question and it was painful! The comments ranged from, how ‘a study’ showed that pre-roll ads longer than 15 seconds actually “did better” than shorter pre-roll ads, to, how companies are now able to target pre-roll ads “better”. The small knot of social media folks I was sitting with started muttering unhappily. Did NO one see that pre-roll ads are demanding something that can no longer be demanded online? Do any of the CEOs of these extremely successful Preroll Adstech companies see that consumers will NOT put up with pre-roll ads since the exact video they hoping to watch is probably available in 10 other places online with no ads at all? Finally, after much floundering from the rest of the panel, Mike from Polaris Venture Partners saved the day with his dead-on, one-sentence answer “Pre-roll is dead!”. To me, the success of online, interruption-based advertising isn’t even a question. Its days are already numbered.

To sit and watch powerful tech people, who theoretically have some power over the future of my technological experience, not grasp the engagement marketing/interruption marketing difference, is unsettling. Couple that experience with the full-on embracing of viral marketing by an industrial fabric industry trade publication and companies like ours suddenly feel like they might be barking up the wrong industry tree when offering our services heavily to the tech industry.

Whatever the implications to the industry as a whole, the Industrial Fabric Association’s viral marketing article is a great read for someone looking to catch up with some of high level points on viral marketing.

4 Comments
  • Feb 08
  • 12

Will Social Media Weather the Coming Recession?

Last week, Brian Morrissey of Adweek published a much-needed article confirming what viral marketers have been claiming for the past six months: viral and social media marketing will weather the coming (current?) recession. The industry may even gain significant market share. That is, if you believe Forrester Research.

The Plight and the Flight

Those of you who remember the plight of online advertising after the tech bubble crash and the flight to traditional marketing, may be surprised to hear that Forrester, predicts a flight to more affordable, long term social media and viral marketing during this coming recession. One of Forrester’s main reasons for believing this is that they see companies beginning to shift “their focus from building awareness to motivating consideration, a middle-of-the-funnel activity social media applications like discussion boards are ideally suited for.”

This middle-of-the-funnel focus is something we’ve seen quite a bit in our own business. Companies seem to be vMiddle Funnelery interested in not simply “getting the word out” but also in building their status as thought leaders, building sites that add value to the consumer (entertainment value included) or designing campaigns that promote values beyond their brand. Liberty Mutual’s Responsibility Project site is a great example of a company embracing a mid-funnel, value-add website that is both in line with their brand and not heavy-handed when it comes down to selling you. In fact, the site never comes down to selling you at all (at least not in our 30+ minutes of playing around on it). On this site, the company chooses to move past the disappointingly common, thinly-veiled company site that is based on the-old media principles of A.I.D.A (for further clarification, ask a marketer or watch Alec Baldwin’s speech in ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’), and embraces a truly sales-free site that benefits the company only by associating the Liberty Mutual brand with positive discussion. Sites like these, while probably not lending themselves to easily-derived traditional metrics such as directly-trackable sales, require little upfront cost and provide an ongoing benefit for the community at large. Also, simply because the metrics are different than those of old-media, doesn’t mean social media marketing efforts are untrackable. If you have a question along those lines (as the Forrester analysts seem to), just check out the number of companies entirely based on viral and social media tracking.

Forrester’s report also predicts a decline in “online vehicles geared to building brand awareness.” Personally, I see all social media as “online vehicles geared to building brand awareness” with varying degrees of other goals added in, so I find this prediction hard to swallow. A few more questions that come to mind when considering their position are:

  • Might it behoove some companies to take a longer term view–especially during a time when profits aren’t expected to be spectacular–and put in place long-term, low cost, viral and social media marketing campaigns that will bear fruit not only during the recession, but also the entire time the economy is back in the upswing?
  • Why spend lots of capital on each television campaign when each campaign exists only for a limited time period?
  • Why not pay significantly less money for a long (possibly infinitely so) campaign that engages users and drives them directly into the sales process?

The Tracking Question

Forrester points out that tracking social media and providing accurate data to prove the ROI is going to be a requirement during the recession if companies are going to adopt these new marketing outlets wholesale. While we agree with the need for accurate trackability, this reminds me of a MITX event that Matt and I recently attended where Jeff Taylor, Founder of both Monster and Eons made a great point that seemed to go over the heads of many in attendance.

He said, “People who advertise on my site are either REALLY happy or TOTALLY unhappy, there really is no middle ground.” His point, he went on to explain, is that people looking to track new media with old metrics are frequently unhappy. People who are willing to rethink of social media marketing as not just “the new tool I use” but as “a new way to engage people” are the ones taking full advantage of the changing online landscape and, consequently, aware of the full scope of benefits afforded by social media. Personally, I tend to agree with this view and think that Forrester might be missing the overall tracking argument slightly.

Forrester also goes on to point out, that P&G’s Beinggirl.com website as an example of well used online marketing. They point out that the site is “four times as effective as a similarly priced marketing program in traditional media.” Imagine what the effectiveness could be if the site actually added real value to the community and inspired real discussion rather than simply masqueraded itself as something other than a product-driven destination site?
Overall, Forrester’s report and Adweek’s commentary are both worth the read if only to encourage some forward-thinking and discussion about meaningful tracking metrics. I’d love to hear what others are predicting.

2 Comments
  • Feb 08
  • 11

Pandemic Labs Launches Viral Dictionary and Library

Pandemic Labs has launched a totally revamped website based on user feedback obtained over our first year of business. The new community-oriented features include:

  • The Viral Dictionary- An attempt to aggregate terms and definitions used in viral and social media.
  • The Library- A gathering of valuable articles, reports and studies containing important viral and social media marketing data and statistics.
  • Useful White Papers- Including “How Does Viral Marketing Work?”, “Viral Marketing Terminology…” and more. These were compiled and written by Pandemic Labs to clarify what we’ve learned in this revealing first year.

We’ve put a lot of time and resources into making our Research page and white papers useful to both the marketing community and every day enthusiasts. Any feedback you have on the look, feel and usability of our site, our content or our blog is welcome.


No Comments
  • Dec 07
  • 13

Pandemic Labs quoted in Social Marketing article from Wharton Business School

Pandemic Labs co-founder, Matthew Peters, is quoted in an article published yesterday in the Wharton Business School magazine, “Knowledge@Wharton.” The article, entitled “Social Marketing: How Companies Are Generating Value from Customer Input,” discusses numerous aspects of the industry. The article is fantastic in its scope and detail, highlighting some great examples of the power of the use (and misuse) of social media, and discussing its evolution into mainstream marketing campaigns. We will try not to quote too much of the article here because it should be read in its entirety by any who are interested in social media marketing and viral marketing. However, we do want to elaborate on some points with which we strongly agree.

One point which find particularly poignant is from an April 2006 blog post of Charlene Li, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research:

“If you’re going to participate as a marketer in the social computing arena, you’ve got to have thick skin and be ready to engage in the messy world of your customers’ opinions. Marketers that have the guts to turn over their brand to the public will in the end win over their customers.”

We have all seen and read about the trepidation felt by marketers at that thought of losing some control over their own brand message. However, as we mentioned in our December 12, 2007 blog post, Are DVRs killing the commercial?, “Advertisers need to move away from a theory of interruption and embrace a theory of facilitation in order to remain successful.” The architecture of the internet has empowered customers with methods of product research and communication, and consumers are becoming decreasingly receptive to the old ways of advertising. Customer loyalty and respect will vastly increase for companies who facilitate the buying experience, rather than just “shouting” their message at as many people as possible. Marketers need to realize that the world where they control absolutely everything just isn’t going to work as well any more.

The article continues by discussing the importance of metrics and trackabilty in the social marketing industry. As Paula Amunátegui Perelló, project manager for new media at Switzerland-based General Motors Europe, says, “traditional metrics won’t do.” Pandemic Labs co-founder, Matthew Peters, is then quoted raising a point about the incorrect way many marketers are viewing social media possibilities.

“People come to us saying, ‘I hear viral video is cool. How do we do it?’ That’s funny, because if a company wanted to do a TV campaign, they wouldn’t walk into [advertising agency] Ogilvy and say, ‘TV is cool. How do we do it?’” The first question companies should ask themselves, says Peters, is, “‘What do I want to accomplish from this form of marketing?’ If you’re a non-profit who wants to drive an unprecedented number of people to a website to raise awareness and money for a cause, then you have a very different goal than a company that wants to strengthen its brand image. The metrics for both would be different.”

Again, we hope that you read the article in its entirety. Pandemic Labs is happy to have been a part of the article and we whole-heartedly agree with GM’s Amunátegui Perelló, when she says, “…social media is no longer a fad. It is a larger evolution of society.”

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