We all know there is a lot of discussion around brands getting involved with online social marketing.  The opportunity that has been leveraged the most to date is “blogs”.  In an earlier post I discussed the specific oportunuties that blogs offer marketers (link). Now let’s talk a bit about how to get started with blog marketing.

The first thing you need to do is figure out your brands current level of buzz in the blogosphere.  There are some paid services out there that can help you — I prefer digging into the free services first.  The free services I

BlogScope.net Sxample

use are:

www.blogscope.net -Just type in your brand name and see the blog posts the mention your brand as well as a graph that measures your mentions over time.

www.blogpulse.com -Same as Blogscope with some additional features.

With these two free services you can get a feel for how the blogosphere is talking about your brand, where they are talking, and what the conversation is.

A good practice is to dump the blog post results into excel then apply a “tone” rating to the posts.  This way you can rank the tone of the posts on a scale like “positive for the brand” to “negative to the brand”.  Once you start taking part of the online conversation you can trend over time how your influence improves the tone of the conversation.

As I’ve stated in previous posts, Blog marketing is not easy.  If you really want to get some bang for you buck you need to develop solid goals and a plan to achieve those goals.  It takes time, resources, and analysis.  But your first step is to figure out what the current conversation about your brand is.

Excedrin

This example comes to is from Online Media Daily.  Excedrin created a YouTube contest as part of their campaign to launch their new Express Gel.  The contest asks participants to send in a video of them displaying some amazing feat of speed.  The winner receives $15,000.  Other runner ups won Flip cameras.

The article stated that there were 200 videos submitted — but I only see 13 videos listed on the site today with links to another 54 videos as “favorites”.  The contest’s YouTube Channel has received over 154,000 views.  The top video has received over 330,000 views — the the next highest viewed video coming in at 23,600 views.

The contest was promoted through YouTube network text ads and some YouTube home page placement.  The real story here is the kid who got 330,000 views to his video.  In the video some kid beatboxes for 32 seconds — that’s it.  No softcore, no bacon or cats, no ultimate bmx crash – just some kid beat boxing for 31 seconds.  So how does this video — which didn’t even win the Excedrin contest — manage to rake up over 330,000 views?

After some digging we find that the video was one that was seeded in the contest to show the kind of videos people should enter.  The kid beatboxing is none other than the world famous Skiller the human beat box.  The guy is world famous for his mad skills — see this forum string from www.humanbeatbox.com. (yes, it’s a real site).  Skiller’s world wide following believed he could win the contest and drove up the views.  Unfortunately, Skiller is from Bulgaria and not eligible to win.

What’s the learning here?

I have some personal experience with this — when creating a viral video campaign look to leverage an existing audience.  Specifically,  use underground talent that has an online following to improve the viral-ness of your videos.  I’m not saying it is easy to do, but if you’re looking to create a viral video campaign it helps tremendously if you grease the wheels with talent that will draw an audience.  In my case, the music used in some of the videos we posted on YouTube legally used an underground artist that had a robust online community.  Just using that bands music as the videos sound track drove a ton of views.

Macy

This comes to us from DMNew’s Chantal Tode.  For their “Believe” campaign Macy’s deployed a microsite at www.macysbelieve.com that included a feature that allowed visitors to create a custom e-card that could be sent to Facebook, MySpace, and cell phones.  According to the article,  250,000 visitors have completed the “BeClaus” process since early December.

The article also included some data points about Macy’s ecommerce activities:

- They have spent over $300MM in the last 3 years on their direct to consumer initiatives.  (Macy’s did $25B in revenue last year with 3B ebitda)

- Consumers that shop both online and at the stores spend twice as much as a consumer that only shops one of the channels.

- Online sales, mail, and phone orders are to add up to $950MM in 2008

Quantcast puts Macys.com at around 6MM visits per month with a holiday spike up to 8MM.

The process to create your e-card took 6 steps and was pretty robust.  The first image I selected to upload into the Santa maker was rejected for size.  The camera I took that picture with is a 3.1 mega pixel.  Which is about 5 years old — so that may be the experience of a lot of folks.  After I found a smaller image to use I completed the 6 steps it got stuck at 82% complete — I didn’t try again.

The 250,000 number is impressive — if Quantcast is correct (and in my experience it is close) that comes to 3% of their traffic sending an e-card.  The article did not mention it, but I presume there was an ad buy that also drove traffic to the microsite.

Macy

I wanted to link over to this article from Online Media Daily because it includes some specific numbers around an effort to tweak a paid search campaign.

The gist is that Smith Micro (makers of StuffIt and other software) worked with Digital River to tweak their SEM campaign resulting in the following:

• “logged a 23% quarter-over-quarter increase in paid search results”
• “about an 80% uptick in delivery of trial products”
• “and a 3% lift to 18% in paid search e-commerce revenue.”
• “…and a 14% increase in sales from Apple Mac users”
• “Landing the consumer on the correct page gave Smith Micro “14% of the 20% overall lift in sales”

I’ve worked with Digital River and other SEM firms to tweak key words, landing pages, offers, and copy till I was blue in the face.  It’s a tough business and to show any growth in an existing SEM campaign is notable.

What I gather from this example is that Digital River started to drive mac users to landing pages that offered mac versions of StuffIt and Smith Micro’s other applications. The increase in mac users, Apple’s market share is now at 20% in the US, propbably drove this SEM success.  It’s a good example of taking an opportunity, tweaking the delivery, and ringing out a couple more pence in sales.  Anyone in the software business should take note that Mac centric keywords and landing pages may pay off.

One last note, when I used Digital River as my SEM agency they were super secretive about the key words they bought and the return on those key words. They would only report on the aggregate number.  I hope they have since changed their policy.  If not, at the very least make sure DR reports the ROI on branded key words verse non-branded key words.  Other than that I really like the folks at DR — they are very proffesional and their annual retreat is a blast.