Article: The High Price of Creating Free Ads

A very interesting article…

From an advertiser’s perspective, it sounds so easy: invite the public to create commercials for your brand, hold a contest to pick the best one and sit back while average Americans do the creative work.
…
But these companies have found that inviting consumers to create their advertising is often more stressful, costly and time-consuming than just rolling up their sleeves and doing the work themselves. Many entries are mediocre, if not downright bad, and sifting through them requires full-time attention. And even the most well-known brands often spend millions of dollars upfront to get the word out to consumers.
…
That’s kind of a popular misnomer that, somehow, it’s cheaper to do this,” said David Ciesinski, vice president for Heinz Ketchup. “On the contrary, it’s at least as expensive, if not more.”

In the past, the main difficulty was getting sufficient volume of entries because the mass audience didn’t have access to Web cams, video cameras and video editing software.

I’ve been looking at the submissions for a campaign we currently have running and can attest that maybe 1% of the submissions followed instructions and produced an interesting video.

Lessons I’ve learned from experience:

• Be sure to budget for the time to manage and review all entries.
• Set up a fair judging criteria and process.
• Make the requirements easy for consumers to satisfy, but be extremely clear about what is expected.
• Put clear limits in place to help manage expectations. (i.e. limit to specific file formats, length of time, etc.)
• Use a qualified promotions vendor to write explicit rules for your contest/sweepstakes/drawing. Let them manage the review process to narrow down the potential finalists. They can also handle the prize fulfillment details (i.e. affidavits, awarding the prize).
• Don’t pass around entries to make fun of people. That’s mean spirited, might violate the promotion rules and could get you in trouble.

Related Links:
Check out the full article at NYTimes.com

Build Relationships With a Live Broadcast Show

You may want to look at using TalkShoe as another tactic for your marketing mixed bag.

Basically, TalkShoe is a FREE service that enables anyone to easily create, join, or listen to Live Interactive Podcasts & Audioblogs.

These podcaster-hosted Talkcasts can be audio talk shows, discussions, conversations or monologues. Podcasters can also upload an existing pre-recorded podcast. Recorded Talkcasts can be listened to, downloaded, or subscribed to.

Friends and associates, as well as the general Internet surfer can find and join a Live Talkcast. It’s a great way to connect with people of common interests, and you might even make new friends. You can choose to talk (by telephone or microphone), text-chat, or just listen along.

It’s free, but for a fee, TalkShoe can provide more custom tailored solutions for more professional needs. (I.e. custom skinned interface, customer support during peak times)
The host interface may seem a bit intimidating, but it’s quick to understand.

IDEAS TO DRIVE YOUR BUSINESS:

• Create a recurring show (weekly, bi-weekly) at a designated time featuring you or a personality talking about success, big ideas — whatever is appropriate for your market or niche.
• Host an Ask the Expert style talk show and interview passionate enthusiasts.
• Have chats about exercise, recipes, healthy habits for managing/preventing a health condition sponsored by your brand.

Then allow the listeners to submit questions and/or speak real-time with the hosts.

When the episode is over, the file remains available on TalkShoe.com. You can do any post production you want on the source audio files and publish to a promotional web site, and place that feed on iTunes/major podcast directories.

BENEFITS FOR YOUR BUSINESS:

• Draw interested people to the event.

• Consumers can choose how much or how little to participate.

• Individual passion comes to life much better as audio than by reading chat logs.

• Consumers can decide to consume the media when-where-how they want it.

I hope you find this useful. Please contact me with any thoughts or suggestions.
Thank you.
-Roland

Use Twitter, Tumblr and Jaiku To Build Your Personal Brand

I’ve been playing with Twitter, Tumblr and Jaiku.

These are relatively new social media tools. I informally polled my colleagues to gauge their awareness of these applications.

		Twitter		Tumblr		Jaiku
No, I’ve never heard of it and never used it.		65%		88%		76%
Yes, I’ve heard of it, but I don’t use it.		29%		12%		18%
Yes, I’ve heard of it and post to my own account.		6%		0%		6%

Sample size (n = 17)

These are three Web applications that are quickly growing in popularity. Essentially, they allow anyone to post thoughts immediately, in real time, and share with a community they associate themselves with. These are supposed to be short posts, typically under 140 characters, to share a thought, observation, learning, news. Some people post what they happen to be doing at the moment. It enables a community to follow a popular person, and create a more intimate relationship/understanding.

Essentially, with one of these accounts you are creating/publishing an RSS feed. The user has a great range of flexibility to publish from a phone, a wireless PDA, an instant messenger application or via a Web page. Likewise, the user can receive posts from others where, when and how he/she wants it.

Tumblr takes Twitter a step further and allows the user to post images and longer test posts on their Tumblog.

Jaiku does the same as Twitter, but the really nice feature is that the user can aggregate all the RSS feeds associated with him/herself into one feed for anyone wanting to follow that user. For example, a user posts on two blogs, publishes a podcast, publishes photos to Flickr, bookmarks favorite videos on YouTube and still posts to Twitter. With Jaiku, others can see every place that user is active online.

From my research/experience, Twitter is the most popular, having been growing in popularity since last year. I find most of the popular personalities in technology, podcasting and social media posting on their Twitter accounts. But they are beginning to migrate to Jaiku, often citing frustrations with Twitter server outages, delays and lost posts.

It can be fun and addicting. There is also a voyeuristic nature to this. It can also be frustrating to see a string of useless posts, such as: “Going to sleep now” or “At home with family.”

So how is this useful from a marketing perspective?

I’ve observed…

• People who are busy building themselves as subject matter experts and personal brands use this to share insights.
• Various software companies creating posts to get news out to the tech/podcasting community.

Would it make sense to have a fictional brand character make friends and post daily? It’s hard to say whether that would be successful or stir backlash. But having a brand’s Ask the Expert feature posting a tip a day or some useful nugget of advice might make sense.

Feel free to check out my Jaiku where I’ve aggregated some feeds together.

You should create your own accounts to test drive for yourself:
www.twitter.com
www.tumblr.com
www.jaiku.com

I hope you find this mini-brief useful.

Please share your thoughts.
Thank you.
-Roland

Submit Mobile Friendly Web Sites to Mobile.Chaos365.com Directory

Are you the developer or publisher of a mobile friendly Web site? Or perhaps you are looking for an easy to use free directory to access from your mobile phone.

Mobile.Chaos365.com is a free directory of mobile friendly Web site URLs for people on the go. Web site URLs are included based on usefulness for mobile users.

Inclusion in the directory is based on quality, not quantity of links.

Please use the Mobile Friendly Web site Submission Form to review the requirements and send your recommendations.

Thank you.
Roland

Google Analytics Rolls Out New Interface and Features

I just received an email from Google informing me of the new enhancements being rolled out to Google Analytics.

If you haven’t used it before, Google Analytics is an amazing, free Web analytics application. Originally developed as Urchin and acquired by Google in the fall of 2005, Google Analytics is a full feature Web analytics application.

Hello from Google Analytics,

We are happy to announce the release of a new version of the
Google Analytics reporting interface. Since you are an existing
user, you will automatically be upgraded - there is no action
required on your part. To access this new version click the “View
Reports” link next to any profile in your account by logging in at
http://www.google.com/analytics.

For a smooth transition, we’ve listed some helpful resources and
notes below. Also, you will still be able to access your old
reporting interface for at least a month by clicking “Previous
Interface” below the “View Reports” link for any profile in your
account. Other than a few improvements detailed in the version
notes below, your data and configuration settings remain
unaffected by your choice of interface and your data continues to
be tracked in the same way as it was prior to this redesign.

*What is new?* In the new version, your reports have been
redesigned for clarity, greater visibility of important metrics,
and ease of use. Here are just a few of the features you’ll
notice:

- Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc
personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.

- Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all
the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can
email to others.

- Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select
date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.

- Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and Conversion
University tips are available from every report.

The new interface has everything the previous interface had and
more. In addition, links within reports make it easier to navigate
related information and explore your data.

The following resources are available to help you get the most
from the new Google Analytics interface:

- Report Finder Tool: will help you see where data from the
previous interface is located within the new version (it is
also linked to from within your reports on the left
navigation menu):
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/static.py?page=v1v2map.cs

- Product tour:
http://services.google.com/analytics/tour/index_en-US.html

- FAQs for more details about the new version:
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/static.py?page=FAQ.cs

- Help Center: includes articles related to the new version:
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/

- Support: if you encounter any issues with the new version
that you can’t resolve with the help center, you can contact
our support team through the Contact Us link at the bottom of
the help center web page, or receive higher-touch support
through a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant. Find one
here:
http://www.google.com/analytics/support_partner_provided.html

- Analytics Help Forum: If you would like to discuss the new
version or get tips from experienced users, please visit the
Analytics Help Forum in English within Google Groups at:
http://groups.google.com/group/analytics-help

A few notes about the new version:

- The new version works best with Flash 7 or higher. Most
browsers have this installed already, if yours does not,
please download it at Adobe.com .

- Google Analytics now uses the same geo-data source as
AdWords, therefore, map and geo-location report results may
vary slightly between the previous interface and the new
interface. For those of you with filters designed for
geo-data, you may want to verify the results and edit if
necessary.

- Limiting the Available Reports for a profile by specifying
which Report Dashboards and Report Categories are available
has been removed from the product in favor of the new
customizable Google Analytics dashboard. If you would like to
limit the availability of data within a certain profile for
certain users, we recommend removing those users from the
profile and instead scheduling an email to deliver data to
them.

We hope you find the new version even more useful and thank you
for using Google Analytics!

I only spent five minutes digging around and I am extremely excited. There was a lot of reorganization to put more data points on a single screen — extremely helpful to reduce the amount of clicking to gather a complete picture of certain metrics.

It also “feels” like the data loads much faster than before. I’m blazing through these screens.

The feature I don’t see yet is the ability to add comments on certain dates/milestones. That would be helpful to identify historical events tied to traffic spikes.

Definitely check out Google Analytics if you haven’t done so already.
-Roland

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