There are now 34million mothers online in the US who are confidently keeping up with the web developments as a way of connecting, improving purchasing decisions and also to help with their relationships with their children who are web savvy.

Online mothers are an incredibly powerful force with increasing influence and of course remember they influence 80% of purchasing decisions.

So how do mothers make those purchasing decisions

24% use general websites

21% use family or friends recommendations

19% use search engines

This compares favorably with the traditional methods

Newspapers 7%

Email 10%

TV 11%

This research shows to me two things

1. If you want to influence the real decision makers then you need an online strategy
2. Influence lies with both Google search but also in recommendations. Both of these need you to have a much greater understanding of the consumer. You need to understand why and how they search….and also what is important to them, so that they want to pass on your name to their friends and family.
3. The last thing is that it shows that the net..works!

Networking has many positive aspects, for me the positive aspects are learning, development, potential business, making friends but I am still unsure of how advertising and networking go together. There is part of me that finds the two incompatible and yet the numbers show that advertising works.

I was interested in research from Forrester who highlight that when it comes to reaching people and ‘advertising’ to people that the older techniques are still the most popular. The advertising results graph is here

The top 3 techniques currently being used are email, search engine optimization and paid listings. The 3 least likely techniques to be used are Online classified, display advertising through ad networks, paid placements in social media, mobile marketing.

I wonder how much these results are affected by a lack of knowledge of social media or even that people are using social media in a less direct way. Therefore, social media or online activity is not about advertising but about connecting or networking with people?

Advertising in social networks is something that I feel strange about…when I am connecting with friends whether off line or on line, I am not in the mode for receiving advertising, I am not in a mindset for marketing messages. Now I am not saying that social networking do not mix just in the old fashioned style of ads….

I think the power of social networking is as a communication channel for OTHERS to speak about YOU not for YOU to talk about YOU. I think social networks can be great for

• Creating commuities of brand advocates
• Showing your personality and allowing you to connect with potential or existing customers

But for me, these are conversational tools not selling tools - that is why I can not really see the strength of straightforward ads in social networking. So when I saw the decrease in planned spending that doesn’t surprise me when combined with the global down turn and squeeze on costs. EMarketer has produced this research

Now what I find interesting is that people may conclude that social networks are not worth investing in, yet I think the opposite is true….I just think the investment is time not advertising dollars!

Social networking increases in importance when you consider the TNS report on who people trust on the internet. In a global sense 42% said that they trusted word-of-mouth recommendations which is now similar to the more traditional TV news (41%), online news (40%) and newspapers (39%).

When you look at the split between the US and Western Europe

You can see the overall importance of friends and getting a recommendation from friends rather than through traditional advertising. There is a wide spread in the trust level between newspapers and the TV across the countries. So when I saw this research what did I think

1) Investment in friends has a high return on influence.
2) The limit is now not necessarily financial but time related
3) Any brand strategy needs to think of combining the traditional with the social media tools.

It is strange because the social media tool which has had the greatest impact on my business is podcasting! A tool that receives less press in creating relationships however when you think about it, is a wonderfully intimate tool - after all I get to speak to all those people directly, often straight into their ear buds!

The UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report 2009 is now available with some interesting facts

• Search engine optimisation is the area where companies are most likely to be investing more money, with 55% of respondents expecting an increase in their budget.
• According to agency respondents, social media marketing is the channel where clients are most likely to be boosting their investment over the course of the next year.
• Google remains king, with 85% of responding companies utilising the search engine for paid search.
• In the social media arena, Facebook continues to dominate, with 65% of companies currently using the social networking site as part of their marketing strategy. Twitter in particular has shown phenomenal growth since last year. Last year only 3% of responding organisations said that they were using Twitter in their marketing strategy, compared to an overwhelming 49% for this year.

So what does this tell us  ?

1. The world of search is not a web activity but a marketplace
2. We need to work harder if we want to get noticed. The more people enter the space the more innovative you have to be
3. The shift is happening quickly between advertising where people buy (websites) to where they decide to buy (social networks)

Facebook has been more of a personal networking site and a site in which people can connect with their brands or share a community around a brand. However the problem has always been how do brands use networking to drive revenue growth. For me networking is not about revenue it is about brand awareness, it is about creating an experience which engages the customer….but State Farm are trying something a little different.

Ad age reports that they are  extending a “a campaign…is already running with the celeb magazine” and with US Weekly “become a paid sponsor of US Weekly’s redesigned Facebook profile page, clearing the way for other media companies to sell similar sponsorships. Facebook does not get a cut of the ad deal”

Interesting, so in paying sponsorship State Farm are ‘buying’ the community. Key for this sponsorship to work for all parties is that each side of the triangle wins

Community gets valued content and their friendship is not abused, their friendship is valued.

US Weekly find a revenue route without disengaging their consumers

State Farm find engaged consumers who through brand awareness and brand engagement strategy move from potential customers to actual customers.

This triangle is a difficult one to achieve….the problem is that each side sees the deal from their own viewpoint instead of an interlinked ‘friendship’, an interlinked value proposition.

[istockphoto]

Almost everyone wants to find a way to make money from their blog, whether they admit it or not. One of the best ways of doing that is to get direct advertisers on your site. What’s the first step to attracting those advertisers and getting them to reach out to you?

Billboard: Wikimedia Commons

Create a media kit for your blog.

Your blog media kit should contain similar information to what the magazines and newspapers use to sell advertisers. It needs to give potential sponsors an opportunity to learn some behind-the-scenes facts and stories which will supplement the content on your site. It’s almost like a resume for your blog.

Before you can entice advertisers to contact you, you need to answer several questions upfront, including advertising rates, key demographics, blog traffic information and your contact details. You also want to make sure that you include the possible ad sizes available so they know what they can do with your site.

Also, do you have any specific products or services you do not want to advertise for? Develop a strong, effective advertising policies for your site.

Make sure your blog media kit information is accurate, consistent and up to date. Check your kit monthly, to make sure that it is updated as your site grows.

The things that you need to be sure to include in your media kit are:

Blog profile

Start simple by tailoring your kit to describe your blog, define your blog values, describe your blog content and you personally.

Blog target audience/traffic

It is important to show the potential sponsor what they are buying. Your blog traffic and your blog target audience are two primary motivators for the advertiser. Keep working to build your blog traffic and be ready to share your blog traffic stats, number of RSS subscribers, and number of email newsletter subscribers.

External references

Add credibility to your blog by including external, third-party references. Include links from popular blogs to your content and also include links of your guest articles on other popular blogs. Also include third party rankings of your blog like Google PageRank and Alexa Ranking.

Be prepared to back up your blog traffic stats with graphics from your Google Analytics account. You may also need to grant the potential advertiser the access to your Analytics report. Google Analytics features a very safe option to do that without giving away your username and password.

Search engine rankings

When people search the Internet for keywords relevant to your potential advertiser and they end up on your blog, you have a key selling point. One of the most powerful strategies of selling advertisements is to show the potential sponsor how you rank in search engines for their product / service related keywords. Compile a list of keywords that you rank for that you can include in your blog media kit.

Advertising options / rates

Let the potential advertiser know what kind of advertising options you offer on your blog. Include the position of ads, the size of ads, show it by including a screenshot which has the potential ad position marked. Do not forget to include pricing for each of these ads.

Contact details

This is vital! Make sure to include all the contact details needed to get in touch with you.

When you’ve compiled all of this, create an attractive PDF that you can send to advertisers. Create an “Advertise” page within your site that gives advertisers a fast overview and some key points from your media kit to entice them to request your full kit!

Auto dms, auto adders and auto-follows. Depending on who you talk to, this is totally the way to “make Twitter work for YOU!”. Except, it’s really not important how many people you follow, or how many people follow you. What is important is the engagement and interaction you have with those same followers. 

This has been an oft-repeated theme in the last couple of days for me. I was told that my chosen Twitter behaviour was “unusual” when I had the gall to reply to an automatic direct message (some people are using a service which sends a pre-programed message to new followers as soon as they hit that follow button. I’m not going to tell you what these services are, because I vehemently disagree with the practice.) which asked “want lots of Twitter followers? Try this service I’ve created”.  I replied because I’m on a quest to educate those using the stupid things, and I said that there was no way I would ever use an auto-adder (a tool designed to simply pump up your Twitter numbers).

The thing that’s the most important, when you’re using Twitter or another social networking platform, is the engagement level of you with your friends or followers or members or whatever they’re called. 

Engagement is something that MediaPost was talking about this morning. 

Given the proper definition and standardization, engagement can provide the right baseline for marketers to plan, buy and measure brand campaigns online. But there is work to be done. [source]

Joe Marchese writes that we need to find a way to quantify engagement so that we can make that the baseline metric for advertising so that it replaces the old CPM method. We need to decide what consitutes engagement (rather than a good entry for Buzzword Bingo) and ideally, standardize the unit called “engagement”. Marchese suggested that Engagement occurs when a person interacts with a brand asset of a certain size and technical capabilities, resulting in [a consumer's] active attention. 

All this said, engagements alone do not make a complete online media strategy. Just like other advertising standards, engagement will need to be applied to audience demography and the marketer’s delivery methods. Marchese argues that a marketer will “not want to buy just 500,000 engagements, the same way marketers wouldn’t want to just buy 500,000 television viewers” but I disagree. Maybe I’m reading this wrong and he means that marketers won’t want to limit their possible viewers, but I’m reading this as comparing apples and oranges. 500,000 TV viewers is nothing, but 500,000 engagements online doesn’t compare. 

Marketers need to be able to target engagers and to understand how these engagements will be delivered and engaged with. The key will be for marketers to learn and understand - the sooner the better - that you cant make people engage. Social media is interactive by sheer definition, so it makes sense that a measurement for the new advertising world would be engaging users. 

What do you think? How should we quantify engagement?

[image source: CC Atomic Jeep on Flickr]

Recently, I wrote about who owned your online identity, and today, I came across an article about Google et al, and the amount of information they gather as we trip through the internet.

According to Fortune Magazine, “Google & Co. gather a lot of information about you as you surf, including the date and time for your search, your search terms, and your IP address, which is an 11-digit number that identifies your computer and, more important as far as advertisers are concerned, your location.” [source]

At first, I didn’t think much of this. Yeah, ok, so Google (or Yahoo, or whomever) keeps track of my searches - they know that tonight I searched to find out what Singapore-style Fried Vermicelli is and if I thought I might like it. (Turns out, I do!) By the time stamp on my search, they also probably know that I was deciding on dinner options. Does that even matter? 

But then I read about when AOL accidentally released the search information of 650,000 members. AOL Stalker reported the most popular search is User# 672368. In the course of two months, this user searched “curb morning sickness,” “you’re pregnant he doesn’t want the baby,” “baby names,” “abortion clinics charlotte nc,” and “engagement rings” - in that order. Is this relevent? Maybe… maybe not. How many people know each other’s AOL user numbers (or, heck - maybe everyone does, like we used to with ICQ… I’ve never used AOL so I don’t know how it works….). What if, instead of user numbers, that had been an email address? Lots of people know my email address(es), and I wouldn’t really want them to know if I was searching for information about a pregnancy.

Now, granted, this information is only kept for a few months (Yahoo keeps information for 90 days, Google for 9 months (down from 18) and Microsoft, 18 months), but still. It all feels very ‘big brother’ to me, and that’s just kinda uncomfortable.

I suppose all of this isn’t particularly surprising given that we’re in the “Facebook era”. Many people are avid users of a social network or four, where they freely offer their favourite movies, bands, relationship status, location and contact information. Marketers point out this fact when arguing that people actually want to see advertising tailored specifically for them, and hey, maybe they do. Or, maybe this is just advertising’s way of trying to convince us the industry isn’t fading into obscurity?

Image source: Google

There’s a ton of posts out there that talk about how social media will change in the upcoming year, what will happen with our communications and predictions for the year to come and looks-back at the year that was.

Me? Sure, I did the ranty (although, perhaps it was a little too ranty!) post the other day about the things that I hoped would just go away in 2009, and I’ve been looking aroung at the posts that try to predict 2009.

Twitter gained a major following this year and started to go mainstream, big time. Growth is off the hook, (I can’t believe I just wrote that in all seriousness. What the hell does that even *mean* anyways?) and I can only imagine that will continue in 2009.

Newspapers and magazines folded, went entirely online and started to get the whole social media thing just a little more. I think that’s only going to continue in 2009. I will be stunned if by this time next year, more mainstream media has adopted some serious social media interaction and tools. If there’s an industry that seems like it should be picking this kind of interaction with readers up quickly, it’s the mainstream media, however they’re one of the industries that seem the most reluctant.

Companies and Brands are starting to get involved in social media… some of them are going it really well and others are …well, not. Here’s to brands and companies getting it more.

Advertising has taken a huge hit for 2009, and I anticipate that will continue… I think that the people are seriously tired of the spin and marketing messages that come with sales and want to know the honest truth about the product or service they’re looking at.

PR is the same as advertising at this point. It’s changing dramatically and people don’t believe the marketing hype of stories like they used to.

Even the way we communicate is changing.  More and more I find I pull away from email, towards SMS (text) messages and twitter, but even more so, if I need more than 140 or 160 characters, I pick up the phone. It’s faster, easier and accomplishes the same thing in minutes rather than hours. Partly, I think we’re moving away from the technology and going back to our “roots” so to speak, and partly I think people want to do things the most efficient way possible.

What do you think is going to come to the forefront for 2009? Are we going to get more simplified or are we going to move towards more and more social media tools and communications?