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!

Myth #1: More questions equal more information.

Lengthy questionnaires often have weak response rates, which leads to poor sample sizes and incomplete results. Put simply, customers don’t want to take the time to fill out a wordy survey. In addition, lengthy surveys are more expensive to write, conduct and analyze.

Myth #2: If respondents are unbiased, the results will be too.

Even if you’ve taken the time to put together an objective sampling of people to give your survey to, how you conduct the survey can lead to biased results. For instance, phone surveys using land line numbers will exclude a younger demographic that only uses cell phones. A survey sent to houses will speak to a different audience than one sent to apartments. In addition, how you word a question can have a significant impact on the response it generates. For example, “Scientists believe that eating chocolate is healthy. Do you agree?” is a lot different than “Do you feel that eating chocolate is healthy?”

Myth #3: If you survey them, the answers will come.

Businesses often conduct a survey to find out how their customers truly feel, but traditional surveys seldom give customers a true means of expressing themselves. If a traditional survey is not written and evaluated properly, the resulting data may be worthless – or even worse, misleading. Initiating open communication with customers is more likely to lead to meaningful information.

Traditional surveys have been around forever, but as technology changes, our means of collecting data may also need to evolve. Keep surveys short. Keep questions clear. Make the survey meaningful. That’s what we’re doing here at Anchor for our clients, and it’s working out well for everyone. Give us a call, and let us tell you all about it.

You may even know what Twitter is (short answer: a social media web site where you can follow someone else’s “Tweets” – 140 character messages about anything), but the truth is that – compared to Facebook – not many people understand it. In fact, a huge number of people who sign up for a Twitter account abandon it immediately when they simply can’t figure out what to Tweet (“I’m eating a ham sandwich.” “Watching Real Housewives ha ha.” “Waiting at the DMV.”).

On the one hand, this sort of gives Twitter a false sense of size (users shouldn’t really count if they never log in). On the other hand, it’s a shame that more people don’t stay with Twitter, because it is a vibrant, viable communication tool with a lot of potential. I have had a Twitter account for a couple of years, but rarely used it. Recently, I made a point of looking for organizations and individuals that I was interested in so that I could check my Twitter “feed” each night when I go over Facebook. I had a lot of luck with sports personalities (ESPN staff are very active on Twitter) and some actors and authors, but not many of my favorite musicians (a  lot of my heavy metal heroes had only ever Tweeted once, usually something like “How the X&#$!! does this work!” and then were never heard from again).

At any rate, I put together a pretty cool list of people that I am interested in and now I get an update on what they are doing (as long as they are active Tweeters). For example, Adam Shefter from ESPN keeps me up to the minute on NFL comings and goings, seemingly from his phone (it’s the middle of the night Adam… go to bed!) while actor Bruce Campbell tells me all about his adventures at various ComicCon get-togethers. My friend Steve likes to forward everyone links to interesting articles, something that web nerds love to use Twitter for. All in all, I like the information I get in short bursts from Twitter.

Now, you may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned what I Tweet myself. That’s because I rarely do, and that’s one thing about Twitter that kind of bothers me. It’s sort of a one-way street for many of us (though some media outlets such as ESPN use it for 2-way communication now more than email). We are mostly listening, but not really interacting that much. I don’t think that’s just me, either. I think it’s a lot of Twitter users.

What about marketing with Twitter? How can we put it to work for us to communicate with our customers? Well, in that instance Twitter is a lot like Facebook. That is, unless you have customers that want to hear from you, they really won’t follow your feed. And as for traditional “advertising,” Twitter has a long ways to go to even catch up to Facebook. You can buy “Promoted Tweets” that show up when someone searches Twitter for a certain topic (as well as other places). You can also purchase “Promoted Trends” and a couple of other marketing opportunities. All things considered, Twitter is only now getting cranked up with trying to make money by capturing marketing dollars (much to the dismay of users who have enjoyed a long relationship with no advertising to speak of), and they’re a little behind the curve. I look forward to Google+ being a lot more organized when they finally go live.

Anyway, what good is Twitter? It’s a great way for you to get information and share it. What good is Twitter for your business? I’m not sure yet. It may take a little bit for the good folks at Twitter to get a better handle on how to include small- to medium-sized businesses in the mix (at least for the purpose of finding new customers – a feed for your current customers is a great idea if you think they’ll pay attention).

Stay tuned… here at Anchor we have our fingers on the pulse of all things social media and pay-per-click and search-based. When you want to take advantage of the incredible opportunities those kinds of marketing promise, just let us know.