From CNN (Click for original article)

Editor’s Note: Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of Mashable, a popular blog about social media. He writes a weekly column about social networking and tech for CNN.com.

London, England (CNN) — Social media aren’t always perceived as an effective way to coordinate fundraising efforts or bring change: In some circles, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the rest are seen as the domain of armchair activists.

But are times changing? Will technology prove its worth following the disastrous Haiti earthquake?

All talk and no action?

“Slacktivism” has become the popular pejorative to describe the various Internet petitions, well-intentioned Facebook groups and copious retweets intended to sow the seeds of change or bring help where it’s needed. “It’s all fed by slacktivism … the desire people have to do something good without getting out of their chair,” Monty Phan wrote in a 2001 Newsday article.

The term has stuck in large part because its claims are true. Even tech optimists like myself are forced to concede that while online fundraising campaigns can rack up thousands of tweets in an afternoon, persuading those same participants to open their wallets remains a challenge.

Hitting a button to blast out a message to your friends is easy, but when faced with a credit card payment form, many Web users shy away.

How can we combat such poor conversion rates online? The Twestival campaign of 2009 did so by taking proceedings into the real world: Twitter was used to spread the word of offline gatherings, at which more than $250,000 was raised to bring clean water to towns in Uganda, Ethiopia and India.

Some online campaigns, meanwhile, have simply accepted this poor conversion rate as fact. They use social media sites as marketing vehicles while corporate sponsors bring the cash. October’s “Beat Cancer” fundraiser asked brands to donate 1 cent for every tweet carrying the “#beatcancer” tag: Nearly 700,000 tweets were posted, and the campaign as a whole claims to have raised $70,000 for cancer charities.

Haiti relief: Red Cross paves the way

Haiti may be different: Here, we’re seeing well-intentioned Web users open their wallets and give generously. While the scale of the disaster and harrowing images in the media fuel a desire to help in any way we can, it’s technology that has made the process efficient and enabled tens of thousands of individuals to take action toward a common goal.

As of Thursday afternoon, the Red Cross had raised more than $4 million in donations via its text message campaign: Text “Haiti” to 90999, and a $10 donation is added to your cell phone bill. The mechanism is so wonderfully simple — removing credit cards and PayPal accounts from the equation entirely — that donations have flooded in. Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti, meanwhile, is leveraging the same technology: Text “YELE” to 501501 to make a $5 donation.

Social media spreads the word

While text messaging provides the payment solution, Twitter and Facebook have spread the word. At midday Wednesday, CNN reported, four of Twitter’s top topics were related to Haiti earthquake relief.

Celebrity Twitter users, many with millions of followers on the service, have taken to tweeting the simple message so easily expressed in Twitter’s 140 character limit.

“You can text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to @RedCross relief efforts in #Haiti,” writes singer Katy Perry. Shaquille O’Neal, Chelsea Handler and Randy Jackson are among other notable names echoing the Red Cross message.

There’s no doubt that text message donations coupled with the word-of-mouth buzz provided by Twitter and Facebook are proving a powerful combination in the Haiti relief efforts, not to mention the vital role of those services in bringing us first-hand reports in real-time.

Endeavour Marketing and Media, A Murfreesboro, TN Advertising Agency

From the New York Times (click for original article)

KRISTIAUNA MANGUM, 22, a senior at Ohio State University in Columbus, said she always had a flair for makeup, but never considered it a professional calling. Then she heard about a pilot college program offered by Avon’s little sister brand, Mark, two years ago. “My mother was an Avon Lady, so I thought, huh, maybe becoming a Mark Girl could really be the way to go,” she said.

Now Ms. Mangum is the sales manager for Mark at Ohio State, and manages 155 other Mark Girls who roam the dormitories and sorority houses, selling Mark beauty products and fashion accessories for a commission in the range of 20 to 50 percent.

“It’s really a grass-roots kind of thing, hitting the dorms, sororities, Facebook,” said Ms. Mangum, who uses her share of the profit, about $800 a month, to help settle her student loans. “I even rented space at local high school fairs — with 16- and 17-year-olds, you can move a lot of lip gloss,” said Ms. Mangum, whose major is marketing.

She is one of more than 40,000 Mark Girls in North America, mainly 18- to 24-year-old women who are changing the nature of direct sales by using the brand’s personalized e-boutiques, iPhone app and new Facebook e-shop, one of the beauty industry’s first forays into Facebook e-commerce.

“We’ve taken the same DNA of direct selling that has always been a part of Avon’s history and applied it to the digital world for our Mark reps to reach their customers,” said Claudia Poccia, president of Mark at Avon, which introduced the brand in 2003. “Now, we’re offering our Mark reps the opportunity to sell products not just door to door, but on Facebook, wall to wall.”

The Mark brand is evolving. It has its own spokeswoman, Lauren Conrad, the former reality TV star of “The Hills,” now a fashion designer and best-selling author of “L.A. Candy.” Its Facebook fan page has over 84,000 fans. According to estimates from Stifel Nicolaus, an investment bank, Mark’s revenue last year was about $70 million.

Unlike other companies involved in direct sales — including Amway, which may dedicate a product line or two to a more youth-oriented market, or Mary Kay and Avon, whose products are geared toward middle-aged women — Mark focuses almost exclusively on teenagers and women under 30.

The younger demographic, at least concerning sales representatives, has its drawbacks. “The fact that the reps are younger can mean different rules apply as to how a direct-selling company is going to have to manage them,” said Linda Bolton Weiser, a managing director of consumer equity research at Caris & Company, an investment bank. “There could be questions about volume limits and credit — a younger rep may be cut off earlier. And, if a rep is under 18, obviously you would need parental permission.”

Still, Mark’s motto — “Make your mark” — seems to resonate with its zealous representatives.

But can Tweets and news feeds from Mark Girls compete with over a century of Avon Ladies’ experience?

Because of the difference in how the products are branded and the separation between Avon and Mark representatives (those selling Avon can also sell Mark products, but not the other way around), there is some internal competition among representatives.

On the mark.girl discussion board on Facebook, the Mark-versus-Avon topic sparked a lively debate when one Mark representative wrote: “Has anybody else noticed Avon reps not taking the Mark product seriously?” An Avon representative replied: “A lot of Avon women I know don’t push Mark because it has a lower profit as compared to the Avon core product line.”

Some experts in the beauty business are fans of Mark. “It really helps that Mark has such low price points,” said Elaine D’Farley, beauty director of Self magazine. “Visually, it’s fun. The products hit the trend.”

Indeed, products such as the magnetic refillable color palette compact ($4) and Hook Ups (about $10) — two-ended cosmetic dispensers that can be customized to connect, for example, lip gloss and lip pencil, eyeliner and mascara — are so popular, as one Mark representative said, that “they’re impossible to keep in my purse.”

But some products have been criticized online, where a bad review may resonate more negatively than an item quietly returned to a store. On the Mark Web site, one reviewer said that a cheek tint left “zero shimmer on my cheek but plenty on my hands.” And on Makeupalley, a forum for comments on beauty products, a reviewer complained about Mark’s Good Riddance: “I have under eye circles and it didn’t even come close to covering them.”  Read Rest of Article

Endeavour Marketing and Media, A Murfreesboro, TN Advertising Agency

From Business Week (original article)

How Much Are Twitter’s Tweets Really Worth?

Google and Microsoft are paying millions for tweets, but even they can’t tell whether their deals will pay off

By Spencer E. Ante

Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) are paying Twitter $25 million to crawl the short posts, or tweets, that users send out on the micro-blogging service. It sounds like big money. Enough for Twitter to turn a small profit in 2009, say two people familiar with the company’s finances.

But do the math and the payments look less impressive. Last year, Twitter’s 50 million users posted 8 billion tweets, according to research firm Synopsos, which means Google and Microsoft are paying roughly 3¢ for every 1,000 tweets. That’s a pittance in the world of online advertising. Top media sites often get $10 or $20 per thousand page views; even remnant inventory, leftover Web pages that get sold through ad networks, goes for 50¢ to $1 per thousand. The deals put “almost no value” on Twitter’s data, says Donnovan Andrews, vice-president of strategic development for the digital marketing agency Tribal Fusion.

Truth is, no one has figured out how to make real money off of tweets yet. Google and Microsoft are paying $15 million and $10 million, respectively, as a bet on the future. By laying out what are relatively tiny sums, they get first crack at experimenting with Twitter data. Both are already including tweets in search results. Sean Suchter, general manager of Microsoft’s Search Technology Center, predicts the company will end up profiting. “Many times in history when you amass the attention of users, that has proven to be a moneymaking endeavor,” he says.

Location Data Could Help

A few entrepreneurs are showing ways to advertise via Twitter. Sean Rad, chief executive of Beverly Hills-based ad network Ad.ly, has signed up 20,000 Twitter users who get paid for placing ads in their tweets. To determine the size of the payments, the startup has developed algorithms that measure a person’s influence. Reality TV star Kim Kardashian, with almost 3 million followers, gets $10,000 per tweet, while business blogger Guy Kawasaki fetches $900 per tweet to his 200,000 fans.

For Google and Microsoft, the real payoff may come from tying tweets to local information about products. Twitter is building software that will automatically allow users to add location data to every tweet. Armed with user locations, Microsoft and Google could sell more targeted ads and provide more relevant search results. “That is potentially very useful,” says Microsoft’s Suchter.

Google isn’t focused on making money from its Twitter deal in the near term. Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, says Twitter’s data are necessary so that people who use its search engine get more complete information. “I never think about dollars and cents,” he says. “My job is to run the best search service.”

Twitter and its venture backers, however, need to see the deals pay off. The three-year-old company has said it hopes to go public someday, but it needs a viable business model to live up to its latest $1 billion valuation. It’ll take a long time to get there at 3¢ per thousand tweets.

Endeavour Marketing and Media

From the AP:

Fast-food chain KFC is giving two Indiana cities $7,500 so it can emblazon founder Colonel Sanders’ face on their hydrants and fire extinguishers to promote new “fiery” chicken wings.

Experts say to expect more ads like this, on public property from sewer grates to the local landfill, as companies look to cut through the clutter of traditional advertising. Cash-strapped governments have long sold space on mass transit, benches, trash cans and other public property to help stretch budgets.

KFC told Indianapolis and nearby Brazil, Ind., it wanted to improve their fire safety by helping pay for new hydrants and extinguishers in exchange for advertising on them. The company plans to e-mail a national network of mayors on Wednesday to find three more cities to participate in the approximately $15,000, monthlong effort, which began Tuesday.

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From Steve Strauss for the American Express OPEN Forum (original article)

Jan 05, 2010 -

Want Page 1 search engine result rankings? Of course you do; we all do. Well, what if I were to tell you of a little known way that profoundly increases your odds of getting a Page 1 search engine result – might that be of interest?

I thought so.

The answer is video. But not just any old video. It has to be search engine optimized video. Properly post that, and according to a recent study by Forrester Research, you stand a 53 times better chance of getting a Page 1 Google ranking.

Yes, I know, the holy grail.

By now I’m sure you know all about search engine optimization – keywords and key phrases and incoming links and all the rest. The problem is, so does everyone else. That means that getting Google to think that your page is more valuable, more deserving of a high ranking than other pages, is harder than ever, despite all of your fancy SEO work.

That is where SEO video comes in.

What I am not talking about is simply putting a video on your homepage or some other desirable page. And similarly, I am not talking about submitting a video to YouTube and then embedding a YouTube player on your site. Neither of those will generate great Google results for your site because

1.     They are not search engine optimized, and

2.     Videos using YouTube result in click-throughs results for YouTube, even though the videos are re-posted on your site

But what will work – the magic bullet if you will – is video SEO. Video SEO is the process of using SEO tools with your video and then submitting the SEO videos themselves (not just the pages where the videos reside) to the various search engines.

Here is why video SEO is such an incredible Page 1 generator: First, search engines like Google are increasingly using “blended” search results – articles, video, pictures, and other forms of content. So video inherently gets more play because there is less competition for video results. And that is the second, and more important, reason. Because there is so much less of it, and because only very little of all online video is properly submitted with SEO, there is a disproportionate bias towards properly submitted SEO video.

You end up being a big fish in a very small pond.

So here is what you do:

1. Create some great video for your site. Note: Research indicates that if you have video on your homepage, up to 80% of your visitors will click that first, so it better be good!

2. Post it prominently throughout your site.

3. SEO it and submit it. Here’s the trick, and it is two-fold. First, you must optimize the video for search engines. That means key words and phrases must be used in the file name, in the captions, etc. Second, once posted on your site, you must then submit the video itself using XML tools to Google and the other search engines.

I know that last part may sound a little intimidating, but it need not be. There are some great online services that will submit the videos for you. For example, one I like a lot is Fliqz.com. Fliqz will, easily and affordably, index your pages and video, and properly submit them to the various search engines.

The upshot is that your videos and video pages should end up at or near the top of any default search results, the “Web” results, and not just the video results.

In fact, according to Fliqz, by using their “SearchSuccess” tools, “more than two-thirds of all videos submitted produce a first-page Google search result, and up to 25 percent have resulted in a number one Google ranking.”

Well, what are you waiting for?

Endeavour Marketing and Media, A Murfreesboro, TN Advertising Agency

Can Facebook, Capitol Hill be friends? Lawmakers learn social networking.

Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Inside the headquarters of the National Republican Congressional Committee, 25-year-old Adam Conner — registered Facebook lobbyist, poster of multiple Obama attaboys and a guy whose Facebook photo is a grizzly bear wielding two chain saws — sits to teach a course. The subject: How to use Facebook better. His student: Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.).

“If we’re going to improve our presence on Facebook and really maximize it, what would you recommend as tangible steps?” Roskam asks, thumbing his BlackBerry.

“It looks like you’re very comfortable with your BlackBerry,” Conner replies earnestly. “Maybe commit to a status message a day? A photo a week? Dive deeper. You’ll be surprised at how things that seem routine to you as a congressman are so interesting and cool to constituents.”

Conner is Facebook’s evangelist in Washington, a social-networking pro summoned by elected officials and bureaucrats alike to teach them, free of charge, how to leverage Facebook — within strict government rules and security guidelines. The mere existence of Conner’s hand-holding lessons illustrates the cultural gulf between Washington and Silicon Valley, and spotlights the complex web of congressional rules that limit social networking among federal workers.

Read Rest of Article from The Washington Post

From the brilliant Jay Baer on his blog Convince and Convert

How can you catch more fish? By using more poles.

If you’re going to create social media content to establish or perpetuate thought leadership for you, your company, or your clients, you can’t silo your ideas.

The old method of thought leadership was to create a white paper. A carefully crafted, highly edited, incredibly boring, 18-page tree killer that you provided for download on your Web site.

Guess what? In a 140-character world, a white paper feels like reading Moby Dick. Backwards. While covered in maple syrup.

Mmmmm. Info Snacks

Don’t put all your thought leadership eggs in that one, large basket. Like a salad at a fancy restaurant, deconstruct that white paper and instead create an array of info snacks that you can sprinkle across the Web.

Each of those snacks will be consumed by a slightly different audience, and perhaps more importantly each will be indexed by search engines, multiplying your inbound marketing opportunities geometrically.

Let’s think about how this might work in practice. Let’s say your core concept is that Blue Cross/Blue Shield in your state is helping improve the health of the citizenry through community health initiatives like immunization, exercise classes, and so forth.

Read Rest of Blog Post

From Nathaniel Perez for Fast Company (original article)

While brands still try hard to “crack the Social Media code,” most seem to understand consumers no longer find the prospect of being friends with a brand more engaging than the single click it took to fan the brand page on Facebook. After all, what’s so novel about the thought of a friendship with my butter? Precisely, nothing.

The impact of social media at the heart of new media is shaking up how brands think of experience design and what consumers expect from brand experiences.

Let’s talk digital sociology. I’ll quote three impactful points of view from Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. In his series called “The machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube and the politics of Authenticity,” he describes the following (which I’ve roughly transcribed):

• “Media defines us while we define media.”
• “We’ve shifted from media to mediated relationships.”
• “Connections were the constraint, we now have connections without constraint.”

How can these statements help us understand how to be better at building brand through social media and digital experiences in general? Here’s a set of guiding principles to help you get beyond tactical earned media generation and enable you to create richer and more successful “social movements” around brands.

• You can shape the outcome, but can’t prescribe it. Leave predictable outcomes behind. Successful social experiences all have one thing in common: They relinquish control. Bring your consumers closer to action and let them take over. When insights are scarce, leverage the good old reward method to get them to play, then watch them play. If your brand has risk and readiness constraints, consumer control is not a pipe dream. Make it a priority.
• From Communication to Connectivity. Your brand should no longer think of itself as an authority (even if it is one), but rather a facilitator or enabler. Its role is no longer to broadcast, but to connect. Understanding brand connectivity requires more than just digital listening and influence identification. Moving beyond single degree measures is crucial.  Examining passions and motives within dynamic behavioral contexts is essential. Digital discovery (or anthropology) can help uncover motive “in action”. Social media is an unbound source of insights, allowing limitless exploration of digital personas and their behavior. Your brand can engage and build connectivity through behavioral contexts it can associate with.
• Create mediated experiences. Focus on understanding the potential impact of various media interactions against consumer motives and apply that understanding to your experience strategy. Leverage YouTube as more than an outlet for brand video and search traffic. Instead, study how video sharing can promote the quality of the engagement and motives you seek to trigger. As you plan your experience, don’t limit yourself… Define the media while giving it the opportunity to define you. Create experiences that are engaging but unconfined. Experiences that impose less constraint (or more connection) lead to a greater ability to mine insights from engagement. Branded widgets and social network applications can surely help amplify brand messaging but are really little more than evolved direct media. UGC campaigns with very prescriptive requests cannot allow you to measure much more than response rates.
• Listen to your experiences. Leverage digital listening to clearly understand how the media has shaped you. Extend your discovery efforts against your conversation to understand patterns of behavior, motives of engagement, audiences and other measures of how your brand is or can be more connective. Measure impact beyond response and conversion by putting your data to work across all sources to truly understand consumer behavior against key business metrics, both offline and online.
• Keep Shaping & Being Shaped. Whether looking to sustain successful initiatives or creating new ones, brands need to understand how to play in a fully dynamic context. Focus too much on the media itself and your efforts won’t scale. Instead, focus on measuring and extending your “connectivity” step by step, creating a well balanced insights & experience machine.

While butter brands of the world now have their work cut out for them, I’m hoping they’ll leverage Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, or their own media as mere interaction vehicles while devoting their attention to understanding the essence of consumer engagement within the media. Only then can they design experiences that shape conversation, to then understand how those conversations have shaped their brand.

Endeavour Marketing and Media, A Murfreesboro TN Advertising Agency

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The latest Facebook breakthrough is coming not from a software developer but from an agency.

Resource Interactive, an Ohio-based digital agency with offices in Columbus and Cincinnati, this month launched “Off the Wall,” a platform that allows consumers to purchase a product directly from a retailer’s wall or their own feed on Facebook without leaving the popular social-networking site.

The product was developed by the agency’s in-house research and development lab, which keeps the company up to speed on new developments in the digital space, while also coming up with prototypes and concepts for a “digital future.”

“We needed a group of people that could take the time and have the focus to look out a little bit ahead,” said Dan Shust, director-emerging media, who heads up the 18-month-old group. “We get caught up in project work occurring right now.”

As marketers look to reign in costs in a tough economy, agencies have felt the squeeze, so ad shops are looking to new revenue streams from product development that have included everything from clothing to widgets to books.

Mr. Shust said he believes product development will become a bigger piece of what the agency does. He said Resource Interactive has determined it made more sense to begin building its own platforms and products that could be used by both clients and others, rather than building customized solutions from the ground up for each client or project.

Opening its products up to non-clients is proving beneficial for the agency, which is adding new clients as a result and has received some interest from international agencies looking to become the exclusive provider of Off the Wall in other countries.

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Endeavour Marketing and Media – A Murfreesboro Advertising Agency

By Doug Brooks for AdAge (Original Article)

During the past 18 to 24 months, senior executives at many companies have been forced to move away from long-term growth strategies to focus on short-term survival. These strategies have focused on making the numbers for each quarter, and, in many cases, have been funded by reallocating investments from brand-building activities. Chris Dickey from Barkley addressed this topic in his article on rethinking discounts and pricing strategy. While I agree with his assessment and pricing strategies, I’d like to take the discussion a step further and delve into exactly how marketers can execute these strategies by using analytics to balance both brand building and price promotion.

As the economy begins to strengthen and marketers chart their course for 2010, the discussion topic in many boardrooms will be about striking this balance between investments in long-term brand building and short-term price promotion. To do this, many companies will need to break some of the dirty habits they adopted and carefully wean customers off the “buy only on deal” mindset.

Consumer research demonstrates that shopper behavior has changed dramatically, with shoppers acting in a more deliberate and mindful manner. A recent IRI study, entitled “Competing in a Transforming Economy 4.0,” found that 64% of consumers say they are now making lists before they shop, while 51% consider coupons an important factor in their purchase decisions. And some consumers have even said they only go down the aisles that include the items that are on their list.

Additionally, this study organizes respondents into three emerging categories of shoppers — optimists, maintainers and pessimists — based on a diverse array of consumer demographics, psychographics, values and beliefs. IRI discovered that pessimists exemplify many of the attitudes that are driving behavioral change across channels and categories, such as searching for sale prices (87% vs. 82% for all households), making personal-care products last longer (62% vs. 55% for all households) and buying fewer prepared meals at grocery stores (61% vs. 55% for all households). Each of these emerging segments views fiscal responsibility from a different perspective. And, importantly, each group professes a different appetite for the “right” cost to pay in order to integrate or not integrate frugality into day-to-day life.

But these trends don’t all represent doom and gloom for marketers. In fact, they create new opportunities. One of the most telling findings of what’s most important to consumers is familiarity with the brand and price. The good news is marketers and sales teams can pull both levers. But the big questions are: Which levers to pull? When to pull them? How to balance them as consumer attitudes and behaviors continue to transform? Read Rest of Article