The problem with Bing is that people in the tech community still think of it as MSN. If you didn’t know, the M in MSN stands for Microsoft, and that word still sends technologically minded people into a catatonic state. Microsoft spent years – decades, really – ingratiating itself to normal users (in particular, business people) while simultaneously alienating the coders, programmers and other nerds who were asked to work with their products behind the scenes (in a fascinating bit of irony, see present-day Apple for a startlingly similar approach to the art of burning bridges). As a result, Microsoft was almost universally regarded as the least cool tech company in the history of tech companies. MSN could never quite get that monkey off its back, so Bing was born in a last ditch attempt at re-branding.

While Bing still isn’t challenging Google for the title of search champion, at least it hasn’t been pulled into the great search engine vortex that has consumed the likes of Web Crawler, Alta Vista, Ask.com and even Yahoo. In fact, for certain target audiences and products, Bing can be an excellent vehicle for your message. I didn’t find that out right away, however. While I was never a card-carrying Microsoft hater, I was a huge fan of Google Adwords for delivering PPC messages. After all, it’s hard to argue with the kind of volume that Google can deliver.

A few years ago I was looking for an innovative way to expand the audience for a client of ours who sells mainly to financially secure, middle-aged men. This sounded sort of like a typical MSN user, so I thought I would give Bing a try. What’s the worst that could happen? Nobody clicks? Well, since I was using the PPC model, that would cost us nothing. In other words, it wasn’t much of gamble, but it certainly paid off.

Our click-thru rate (one of the more basic measurements of a PPC campaign) was almost double on Bing when compared to Google. Our message and the products it was selling resonated with Bing users, and the results were excellent. Since then, I’ve employed Bing for several other clients (with similar target markets), and I’ve been very happy with the results. The moral of the story is this: only a product’s target audience can decide the worth of a medium. In other words, don’t get caught up in what the world thinks of a media vehicle, take stock in what the product’s users think of a media vehicle. If your target audience reads the newspaper, then you better put your message in the newspaper, no matter how old-fashioned it seems.

So there you have it. Do your homework on your target market. Compare that to the audience that Bing delivers, then give it a try if it makes sense. Better yet, give me a call and let me help you out. Together, we may be able to teach an old dog some new tricks.

If you’ve read this blog for a while or ever met me, you know that I have a soft spot for the underdog, and also for those who seem to be unfairly criticized. So you might expect me to write an article defending Facebook and asking you to “look at the situation from both sides.” Nope. As a professional whose job it is to deal with Facebook on a daily basis, I can tell you with great certainty that they have made their own bed, so to speak. In other words, when you run your company poorly, bad things happen.

Our clients pay us to deal with media companies like TV networks, radio stations, search engines (like Google) and social media providers (like Facebook) because they don’t have the time to keep up themselves. The more I deal with Facebook, the better I feel about doing this job. The interface that Facebook offers to their “business partners” isn’t just primitive (I’ve been expecting an upgrade for years), it’s broken on a daily basis.

In fact, the system has so many bugs that it has become almost impossible to determine when something is broken and when the problem has been created by Facebook’s now legendary penchant for unnecessary tweaking. One day I created a new ad, but it never showed up on my account interface. I tried several times from different browsers. It was as if Facebook was no longer taking new ads. But I knew better. I made sure to keep tabs on it, and sure enough a few days later my “invisible ad” was running full bore, happily collecting pay-per-click dollars for Facebook. If you aren’t paranoid, Facebook’s bugs can actually cost you money – a lot of money.

Of course, you can always call Facebook to tell them about their problems. Ha! Anyone who has ever tried this is now rolling on the floor laughing. Talking to Facebook is like trying to call the White House to talk to the president – it’s pretty much impossible. You can use Facebook’s clunky online support tools, but they will never get back to you anyway.

In all fairness, I got a call from Facebook a few weeks ago because they wanted to offer me some new features that are available to their volume advertisers. I was encouraged, at least until they found out how much I spend with their products. Then they weren’t interested in me anymore. Evidently I am neither new enough, nor large enough to warrant their attention. It was a short conversation, and they didn’t leave me a number to call.

This morning I ran into a new glitch. It looks like today I can’t even view the ad manager interface – at all. Instead, Facebook will only allow me to create a new ad – not see or edit any current ones. Hopefully this is just a new bug and not some misguided attempt to force me into additional spending. But with Facebook you never know.

Google used to be this way, but they cleaned up their act very quickly when they decided that taking care of business was their business. Now I love Google. My hope is that Facebook does the same, because while they seem to be a shoddily run company, they are still a huge force in the online world. And we continue to have great success using them as a delivery method for brand messages. You just need to be diligent, and it pays to be experienced. Give us a call – we can help.

But wait. Are these “classics” really so threadbare? Are they so old-fashioned that they are without value? The answer is no. Instead, most of these message delivery options have simply evolved from being broadcast media to being narrowcast media. Television and magazines started this trend thirty years ago. Where there was once a few general interest options (such as CBS and Time magazine), now there are hundreds (thousands?) of media vehicles with much more specific target audiences (Bravo, Food Network, Backpacker magazine).

The convergence of print, video and the web has forced many of these businesses to adapt (Hulu, iPad magazines, online newspapers) but the smart ones are finding new footing with their audiences. That being said, there is still a time and a place for their original incarnations – at least most of the time.

Outdoor advertising is a good example. While our cars seem to get smarter every day, it’s still important to watch where we are going. That means we still see billboards and vehicle wraps as we drive, and the “geographic targeting” opportunities are very valuable. However, with more and more cities imposing strict limitations on billboards, the prices of existing signs can be high. If your budget allows, though, outdoor advertising can be a great way to build your brand – especially a retail brand.

As newspapers age, so do their audiences. If you read that last sentence as a negative, however, you are missing the point. A mature audience is simply a different kind of audience. If you want to reach millenials, don’t buy newspaper advertising. If you want to reach baby boomers and their parents, newspapers are still a great option, especially if they’ve managed to include a digital edition in their offerings.

Why buy terrestrial radio? To reach anybody who is interested in local news and issues. That’s not everybody, but it is somebody – and it could be somebody who is your target audience. Direct mail is a great example of a medium where competition has decreased so much that it is actually easy to stand out again. A direct mail campaign has become unique by its very nature. Why not be the only brand-building message in your customer’s mailbox?

As you can see, the days of using these media vehicles to reach a mass audience are gone. The truth is, however, that new media can’t do that job either. There is simply no such thing as “mass media” anymore (and nobody should be priced like there is). Instead, you need to clearly identify your target audience, then narrowcast your message specifically to them by carefully seeking out the right media vehicles. It takes some strategic planning on the front end, but the improved efficiency is most certainly worth it as your message is delivered.

Don’t forget the “classics” when it comes to your media mix. Depending on your target audience, they may exactly what your plan is looking for.

I manage pay-per-click and look over timeline posts for quite a few of our Facebook clients. That means I’m on Facebook a good bit. I gave a speech at a university a few years ago and I predicted that Facebook would change drastically once it had to make money. I’m not psychic – I just know humans. Once humans are responsible for making money, things change – and boy has Facebook changed. In the last few months it has gone crazy with new advertising opportunities for its business users. If you’re large enough, you can even buy a giant ad on the “log out” screen! Facebook even shortened the number of words you can use in your pay-per-click ads, presumably so they can fit more ads on a page.

Oddly enough, at the same time that Zuckerberg Inc. has introduced these new “innovations,” some large retailers – most notably General Motors – have bailed out, citing a general lack of response to its ads. Rather than fight the growing clutter, GM redirected it’s advertising dollars elsewhere.

So what does this mean for the rest of us? Should we abandon ship? In a word, no.

Facebook may be one of the most poorly programmed and frustratingly organized web sites that I deal with, but if your target audience is a good fit, it is still a very, very effective way of reaching them. In fact, for small and mid-level advertisers, not much has changed. Having a company like Anchor manage your Facebook content is still smart (overcoming the aforementioned clutter and keeping up with Facebook’s obsessive tweaking are just two good reasons). If you do a good job, your message can still utilize very specific targeting, and the time your message spends in front of those people is still hard to beat. Best of all, if your Facebook marketing is done right, you can convert your target audience into fans, and they are as good as gold. For example, we have a client who adds 20 new fans a day to its Facebook page via a very reasonable pay-per-click budget. That adds up fast, and those fans become a tremendously valuable resource over time. They’re like a wonderful opt-in mailing list, except with infinitely more interaction.

So don’t give up on Facebook. As with every medium, it’s all about how you use it. Let us help.

In most of these cases, the advancing technology has made its predecessor less relevant. For example, low-cost video really put the hurt on radio (the Buggles wrote a song about it, for Pete’s sake!). As marketing evolved with communication technology, it tended to leave the old ways behind.

Interestingly enough, this doesn’t seem to be the case with the Internet. At first, the world wide web struggled to deliver video properly (remember when streaming was optional?), so the two technologies held an uneasy partnership. Today, Netflix and Hulu and Vudu do nothing but stream video – tons and tons of video. And you don’t have to be connected to your cable to watch it. Want to check out the game on your phone? In 2012, that’s no big deal.

For the first time, a new technology (the web) has completely merged with an established one (video). What began with shaky videos of dimwits jumping their skateboards off of parking ramps has turned into an integrated way of showing off products and services that is getting more and more professional.

If you have a TV commercial that people enjoy, they expect to be able to re-watch it on your web site. (Which is amazing in itself: people seeking out your TV commercial!) In fact, now you can have a single video production and use it for a ton of purposes. Make a commercial, make a bunch of videos for your web site, make a version for your meetings and presentations, put some video into your pay-per-click ads, then put all of it on YouTube and Facebook and tell the world.

But just as some things change, others stay the same. For a few years, shaky video and terrible audio were perfectly acceptable ways of communicating online (“Look – I shot it with my phone!”). Then human nature took over, and – as it always has – the better a message was put together, the more it stood out. At first, professionals spent a lot of time trying to look like everyone else (“I want it shakier!”), but then we realized that since everyone else had video that looked bad, the only way to stand out was to look – good! And now professionalism is taking over video online as well.

The good news is that professionalism doesn’t need to be expensive. In fact, high-end video is less expensive today than it ever was (we recently made a nationally- televised TV commercial for 1/10 the cost of a spot made 20 years ago). Anyone can afford video – and everyone can afford to do it right!

Video is here to stay, folks. And I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Under these circumstances, building a mobile version of your web site made a lot of sense. But things have changed a lot in the last two years, and now I have to question whether the “mobile web” is all that different than the “regular web.” Here’s what’s changed: (1) Most web developers have foregone the use of Flash entirely. Even Adobe, the makers of Flash, seem cautious about its future. (2) Research In Motion, the makers of BlackBerry smartphones, have dropped the ball and their smartphones have fallen out of favor with the public. This is good news for web developers, because the BlackBerry’s web browser is problematic to say the least. (3) iPhone and Android devices browse the Internet just like a laptop, and people are using them as their primary means of connecting to the web.

iPads and the Kindle Fire have made this even more hazy. Their larger screens are quickly propelling them ahead of laptops, and they occupy a weird space that is somewhere between the mobile and traditional Internet experience.

In fact, as more and more people use the Internet on their mobile devices, the overall line between the “mobile” and “traditional” webs has blurred significantly. That’s why I’m not sure a mobile version of your web site is necessary anymore. Instead, you need to prepare your web site to be viewed in a number of different ways. Maybe that should be the new definition of “mobile web” – a site that is mobile enough to be viewed on a smartphone, a tablet or a computer.

So there it is – you probably don’t need to build two versions of your web site anymore. On the other hand, if your web site isn’t made to be flexible, it’s time for an update.

It got me thinking about a speech I made at the University of North Dakota a few years ago. I predicated that Facebook and Twitter would look a lot different in just a few years once they decided that they would have to actually make money. We’re just starting to see the ugly truth in that prophecy now. It seems like every Facebook “update” now comes packaged with some way to make Facebook money. Since we’re all pretty sure that the company will go public in 2012, this isn’t too surprising, but some of the “sponsorship opportunities” are becoming a little much. Do we mind the small ads on the sides of our screen as we look over the day’s posts? Not really. Do we really want them in our news feed? Not so much – but that’s not going to stop Facebook from putting them in there in 2012.

Whether it’s more ads on Facebook, sponsored Tweets or “spokespeople”on Twitter (thanks for telling me about your favorite energy drink, Ms. Celebrity!) or your favorite TV show spending ninety seconds discussing the car they are driving (White Collar is notorious for this), some kinds of marketing are obvious while others are not.

I think we’re starting to discover that it’s not really about choice (after all, almost no users would choose to have ads if they could avoid them and still get their content for free), it’s about volume. When any media outlet gets greedy and starts to overload themselves with selling messages, users / viewers get turned off. We’re willing to live with that short ad before our video starts to stream, but don’t make us watch three of them. When the media outlet crosses the line (with too many ads), users find other options. The key is to ensure that your messages don’t interfere too much with the user experience. In my mind, Google is one of the best at this, as is Apple.

We’ll see how things play out, but it seems that the more things change, the more things stay the same.

It’s more complex than that, of course, but for the most part, every PPC opportunity on the internet shares most – if not all – of those characteristics. Google Adwords has long held the crown as the king of PPC, but virtually every other internet giant has used the model to make money, as well. Thousands (millions?) of web sites partner with Google Adwords to take advantage of PPC. Bing and Yahoo! share a PPC infrastructure. Ever wonder why Facebook is worth $100 billion when they don’t charge anybody to use their service? It’s PPC of course! Twitter now uses a similar model as well (they call it cost per engagement, but it’s the same thing).

Here at Anchor we work with PPC almost every day. We write ads. We identify keywords. We research demographics. Then we monitor results. Sometimes our goal is to increase visits to a web site, sometimes it is to directly impact sales and sometimes it is to add “followers” (Facebook “Likes,” for example). Whatever the result you are looking for, there are a few key tips to remember no matter where you are spending your PPC dollars:

(1) Identify Your Target Audience: A message you put in front of an uninterested user isn’t just a waste of time (because presumably they won’t click on it anyway), it can actually hinder something called “relevance” – a unique part of that mathematical algorithm that is meant to gauge how “good” your ad is. It’s important to create targeted messages for each of your primary and secondary target audiences. The more targeted your message is, the better.

(2) Make Sure Your Web Site Keeps Up: Another factor that can impact your “relevance” is how much your web site matches your message. This is meant to discourage advertisers from creating an ad for one thing (“Great Stock Market Advice”) and sending you to a site about something else (“Save On Prescription Drugs!”). If your PPC message talks about used cars, the web page that it sends users to needs to talk about used cars as well, because the magical algorithm software will check.

(3) Test Your Messages: This is the one that most people forget. It’s also the most time-intensive step of successful PPC – but it is absolutely critical. Make two ads, then see which performs better. Take out the laggard and replace it with something else, then test again. Repeat until your messages are performing like you want them to. Even then, it pays to test once in a while just to keep up with changing trends and attitudes. It pays to have a good creative team for this process – it can be a challenge to write and rewrite ads so that they can be tested. By the way, some companies make this task easy (Google Adwords is excellent) and some make it very cumbersome (Facebook, I’m looking at you).

(4) Evolve: As we all know, technology changes every day. It is said that Google changes its search parameters 10-20 times per week. What was good enough yesterday may not be good enough today. Facebook is notorious for making changes, then changing things back, then changing something else. The internet giants take evolution very seriously, so you need to, as well. Keep learning, keep reading and keep experimenting yourself. We recently discovered a way to add Facebook followers for our clients that has been tremendously successful for some of our clients, and we discovered it through experimentation.

Getting ahead of the curve with Google, Facebook and Twitter can be a big job, but it’s worth it in the end. If you’d like for us to help, give Anchor a call today.

I am a recovering Apple fanboy. I used to believe that everything that Apple Computer did was perfect. And if you’ve ever used a Mac at work, then went home to a PC, you might agree with me.  I love my iPod (anyone who reads this blog regularly knows how much I love my music), I love my iPad and I love my Macbook Pro. I’ve been a user for a long, long time. I bought my first Mac 20 years ago in college (and yes, they were incredibly expensive even then). I’ve used a Mac almost every day ever since.

But Apple isn’t perfect (sorry Jasper). I was around when Steve Jobs left to start Pixar, etc., and it was a dark time for the company. Leadership made some crazy decisions, the company lost touch with its core demographic (creative people) and worst of all, quality suffered. In other words, Apple without Steve Jobs was a below-average computer company.

That’s why it made so much sense to lionize Jobs when he returned. Apple chose to make Jobs the poster boy (something Jobs seemed to go along with willingly) for the company’s marketing efforts, and it paid off. Not only was Jobs a brilliant innovator, he had the right mix of personality and mystery to make him something of an icon. In fact, Steve Jobs very quickly became synonymous with Apple’s brand. When he fell ill, Wall Street panicked, solidifying the fact that the company could just has easily been called Jobs Computer.

Apple knew what it was doing when it turned the Apple brand into the Steve Jobs brand. It worked perfectly, and Apple has been printing money ever since. But now that he’s gone, Apple has a big problem on its hands – the same problem that any company has when all of their marketing equity is in a person rather than in the company itself.

If the CEO of CocaCola left tomorrow, would anybody know the difference? Would you be worried about the future of Coke? Probably not. The Coke brand is infinitely more important than any one person. That’s a long-term project that Coke has excelled at. On the other hand, Apple’s short-sighted gains may become a long-term headache, especially if their products don’t remain on the cutting edge.

I hope it doesn’t happen. I hope that they are able to find a new way to sell themselves, and I hope they keep up the good work when it comes to their products. In the meantime, we can all learn a lesson from Apple Computer. Your brand is bigger than any one person or thing, and that’s how you should keep it.

Recently  I saw the topic “inbound marketing” on several blog sites, a term that I had not heard before. If you read the first couple of sentences in this blog you already know what I did next – I did some research! Here are the five steps that make up “inbound marketing”:

1. Create great content for a product or service.
2. Optimize that content so that search engines all pick it up very quickly.
3. Promote that content through social media, blogs, forums and other online services.
4. Convert those people that visit your web site into customers!
5. Analyze, analyze, analyze! Utilize a service such as Google Analytics to see what is working and what is not. Get good metrics in place to track everything about your campaign.

In other words, “inbound marketing” is what we do every day here at Anchor!

Once you complete the steps above, the fun really starts: looking closely at all of the pieces of the puzzle, taking them apart, then putting them back together again. Here are some tips for each of the steps:

Create – You’re excited about this product or service and your future customers should be too! Create dynamic content that grabs the interest of your target demographic.

Optimize – Utilize key words and other SEO techniques to rank higher in search engine rankings.

Promote – Tell everyone! Blast links to your content and talk about it on all of the social networks (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Linkedin…etc.). You want people to know? Then get the word out!

Convert – Turn people who hit your web site into customers! Make it easy for them by giving them a clear call to action: buy now!

Analyze – This part is tedious, but one of the most important parts of “putting everything back together.” It is in this process that you learn that the red “buy” button seems to be working much better than the blue “buy” button, or that any “buy” button works better if it is placed higher on the page.

If you were to put this into a drawing it would look something like this:

If you’d like, take this system apart and put it together again piece by piece – for almost any marketing situation. Better yet, give us a call here at Anchor and let us help!