Business Line Articles

Do social media ads even work? Question: When is an ad not an ad? Answer: When it’s a story, maybe even one shared by a friend. "Call of Duty" game maker warns of zombies in Promoted Tweet In the ever-changing world of digital advertising, and the never-ending quest for business models for online publishers, “social advertising” is suddenly all the rage. In part this stuff resembles what we called “advertorial” back in my print days. The rule then was we had to clearly mark advertorial so it wouldn’t be confused with properly vetted editorial content. On the social web those lines are somewhat blurry to non-existent. A case of banner blindness It’s natural, even predictable this would happen. I’ve written in this space before about the ineffectiveness of banner ads. Publishers need to find other mechanisms to generate revenue. Brian Solis, principle at the Altimeter Group, a California-based technology advisory firm, put...

Welcome to the launch of Screencast Saturdays! For our inaugural instalment, communicatto team member Mary shows you how easy it is to change your Twitter background in under 3 minutes. Enjoy! By the way, if you do decide to do a custom Twitter background image, check out the info, dimensions and resources available in our blog post “Your Twitter background is probably borked.”    ...

  In this week’s edition of the digital literacy series we examine the power of social relationships – what makes them possible, why they’re powerful and important and why they matter to businesses. To get insight into this interesting topic, I turned to Harley Rivet (@HarleyRivet), President and CEO of Deep Dish Digital, an online and social media marketing company based in Saskatoon. Credit: www.schneiderb.com What makes social relationships possible? According to Rivet, today’s digital climate is allowing conversations to take place on a global scale and in all shapes and forms – between individuals and between thousands of people all at once. What’s making this possible? He points to the widespread availability of Internet access and a new wave of simple communication tools. Tools like Facebook and Twitter have torn down barriers, allowing people of all ages and demographics to form online relationships and to have meaningful conversations about a wide...

  The world’s biggest focus group for brands   When you want to do a gut check on consumer opinion, there’s nothing like a quick focus group to tell you what you don’t know. Credit: BACD.ca Researchers will tell you, quite rightly, that focus groups are not statistically valid. They are a form of qualitative not quantitative research and thus can’t be extrapolated to any larger population. Pollsters and marketers will also tell you how useful they can be to unearth hidden sentiment or to shape more formal research. Data mining Twitter Social media is becoming a bit like the world’s largest focus group. In some cases it goes beyond that to a sample size that is sufficiently large and thus random to accurately predict outcomes. Occasionally it predicts as well or better than traditional polling. Take for example the UK political/media tool Tweetminster that was used to analyze tweets and predict...

his is a guest post by Kelly Ferrier, owner of Calgary copywriting company Kay Phair Advising. You can find her on Twitter at @kayphair. If you’re working in the PR and marketing field, there’s no doubt that you’ve heard of David Meerman Scott. And you’ve probably read his bestselling book “The New Rules of Marketing and PR”. This book was a game changer – kick-starting social media awareness and introducing the industry to the power of these tools to spread brand awareness. Well, with his latest book “Newsjacking”, David takes the complicated relationship between journalists and PR people and spins it on its head.  David describes newsjacking as a way for PR people to inject their brands into breaking news stories in a way that’s relevant, interesting and guaranteed to get the attention of journalists. Essentially, this book is a guide on how to hijack the news and level the playing...

One way or another it has to be about the bottom line Carpenters have a saying “measure twice, cut once” designed to prevent wasted materials. The same principle applies to social media marketing – get the right measure before “cutting” a campaign and you’ll be a lot more productive. Credit: taste-of-torah.blogspot.com Most companies start by measuring the obvious: fans, followers, views, tweets and retweets. The problem is, you’re likely not in the business of collecting fans or followers, and volume of tweets or retweets only vaguely approximates influence. It’s a bit like measuring success by how many business cards you collected versus appointments or sales. You’re paying attention to the wrong things. Focus on outcomes, not fans After all, you could be tweeting your brains out with robots aplenty retweeting you and nary a person paying attention – not exactly what you were hoping for. As Jeremiah Owyang says on web-strategist.com: Companies...

This is a guest post by Kelly Ferrier, owner of Calgary copywriting company Kay Phair Advising. You can find her on Twitter at @kayphair. Today we continue our series examining the importance of digital literacy to Canada’s economy. This post is focused on the impact of digital media on the non-profit sector. For insight into this topic, I turned to Bob McInnis, current executive director of Brown Bagging for Calgary’s Kids (@brownbaggingit), a registered charity that delivers daily lunches to students in need at Calgary schools. With his 25 years of leadership experience in the non-profit sector, McInnis is in a unique position to reflect on the ways that digital media has changed how charities spread their message and to offer advice to other non-profits on why they must include digital media as part of their messaging strategy. Brown Bagging for Calgary’s Kids (BB4CK) currently includes blogs, forums, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube...

What may be the most impressive thing about these new apps/networks is how much venture capital pours into these things I do a lot of public speaking all over North America. After almost every engagement someone comes up and asks something like “Have you heard of SquigglyWoo.com? It’s the bomb!” No, I have not. That’s because there are literally thousands and thousands of social networks that even a full time practitioner can’t keep up with it all. While the big ones like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, SlideShare, flickr and Google+ prevail, there are lesser known ones on the horizon that are creeping into the public’s consciousness. Six to watch Here are six that have caught my attention of late: Pinterest is a kind of photo sharing meets scrapbooking meets web clipping site. Wikipedia describes it as “a vision board-styled social photo sharing website and app where users can create and manage...

  Thank God for iPhone apps Back when I lived in Saskatoon a bunch of us went running each day at noon. I know, those of you who know me today would find that very hard to believe, but I swear it’s true. Whenever it was too cold or we wanted to do a certain type of training we’d all congregate at the Fieldhouse, Saskatoon’s indoor track and field facility. Each year in January our Fieldhouse gang would put on a weight loss competition. We’d organize ourselves into two teams; privately giving our starting weight to the coordinator who would tabulate the total weight for each team. No individual’s weight was revealed except to the coordinator, so it was the team weight that mattered. Losing team paid for lunch A few months later (end of March I think) we’d compare the start and finish weight of the two teams, and the team...

Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn. YouTube. Social media. These buzz words are getting a lot of attention. From teenagers and grandparents posting profile pics on Facebook, to celebrities sharing their “genuine” love for cheeseburgers and purses on Twitter and HR professionals recruiting potential employees on LinkedIn, there’s no segment of society that hasn’t been impacted by social media. And that includes business. There’s no doubt that social media can be profoundly beneficial to businesses – that is, if it’s done right. With his book “The REAL Truth About Social Media”, Eric Harr sets out to help businesses of all sizes master social media. Harr is the founder and CEO of Resonate Social Media and when I @mentioned him on Twitter, he told me that his goal with this book was to introduce newcomers to social media and inspire and empower them. And this is most definitely the book’s target audience. Social media strategists...

20 per cent of the pea pods contain 80 per cent of the peas The Pareto principle, aka the 80-20 rule, seems to magically apply to many areas of life, including social media marketing. Anyone who has ever managed a sales team is familiar with the axiom 80 per cent of your sales come from 20 per cent of your customers, but where else does it apply? Remember pea pods Credit: thesportsphysiotherapist.com According to Wikipedia, early 20th century business consultantJoseph M. Juran figured it applied to land ownership and pea pods. He concluded this after studying the work of Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto “who observed in 1906 that 80 per cent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 per cent of the population; (and) he developed the principle by observing that 20 per cent of the pea pods in his garden contained 80 per cent of the peas.” In business the...

2011 may have been the year Google finally got social networking right with Google+ It’s that time of year again for Digital Doug to summarize the year in social, fess up to the accuracy of last year’s predictions (or lack thereof), and break out the crystal ball for 2012. Here goes: Credit: beartoons.com 2011 may have been the year Google finally got social networking right with Google+. After dismal failures in previous years with Buzz and Wave, Google stayed true to their roots and kept launching new spaghetti at the wall until something stuck. Another, perhaps more notable event in 2011 was the successful initial public offering (IPO) of LinkedIn.com. The stock has consistently traded above its $45 opening price, currently trading at around $62.90. Obviously the market sees value in the “world’s largest professional network” and for good reason. As baby boomers retire and labor becomes increasingly scarce, LinkedIn is sitting on a...

You need to know who frequents each social network to make it work for you Talk to some executives and they use the phrase “social media” as if it is a homogenous monolith. Like every platform is the same, and they are all equally worthy of a corporation’s attention. That’s not the case. Credit: CMO.com - click to enlarge Like every medium, you need to know who frequents each social network and to what extent. Facebook vs. Twitter vs. LinkedIn For example, Facebook’s advertising “wizard” tells me 15.7 million Canadians over the age of 18 are on that social network. 8.1 million of them are women. Facebook claims to have more than 800 million users worldwide. In other words, it’s a safe bet whatever demographic you might want to reach is on Facebook. Twitter, on the other hand, has over 300 million users (according to Wikipedia) with 50 million active...

  Social media audits balance art and scienceSocial media audits balance art and scienceSocial media audits balance art and scienceMost companies think publicity when they think social media. Usually their thoughts go straight to Facebook or Twitter, and the focus is on external audiences. Which begs the question, why ignore those closest to you – your employees? In my experience, the “internal social” discussion generally begins when everyone agrees the intranet is a disaster. Many companies default to the path of least resistance, Microsoft SharePoint. According to intranet consultancy Prescient Digital Media, this may be a mistake. From their blog: SharePoint is a fantastically powerful and complex solution that offers more features and bells & whistles than almost any technology platform on the planet. However, it cannot be all things to all people all the time . . . it works well for some things like team and document collaboration, and less well...

A recent study by RSW, an agency that helps agencies, found “social media comes up short for agency prospecting”, eMarketer.com reported: When it comes to identifying prospects online, RSW … found the vast majority (95 per cent) of U.S. ad agencies used social media to identify potential clients. But the results of those efforts were modest at best. Most agencies attributed 10 per cent or less of their new business revenue to social media outreach. Credit: http://kazexchange.wordpress.com/ Don’t be tacky Well, duh. Selling intangibles on social media is a bit like selling insurance at a cocktail party. It’s tacky and overbearing. “Pssst. Hey. You. Wanna buy an ad campaign?” According to Jeff Nelson, President ofAnduro Marketing, a prominent Internet marketing firm, these findings were to be expected. “The point is, social media doesn’t drive new prospects,” said Nelson in a Twitter exchange. Nelson’s right, at least insofar as it concerns intangibles like agency services....