It’s so very important to focus your SEM campaigns, there is a lot of proof that shows that the conversions are much higher the more targeted your SEM campaign is. There’s a good presentation on SlideShare.net explaining this in more detail.
Clickable today announced their latest round of funding - $14.5 million. They offer a system that allows to run a campaign on multiple ad networks but to house all the information in one spot. So instead of having to pull data from Google and Yahoo! into a spreadsheet and then analyze Clickable houses all the info so that you can use their tool to do all of the analysis. I can certainly see the benefits.
The one thing I don’t like is that they don’t disclose the price on the site, at least I wasn’t able to find it. I have never used this application but would be interested in trying it out. As I ramp up some of my personal campaigns for my breakfast blog (BreakfastInTheCity.com) I’ll test it our with their 30-day free trial.
They target small to medium sized businesses but certainly folks simply trying to make money online will find this useful.
To learn more check out their video
Online Advertising Firm Clickable Lands $14.5 Million [Digital Media Wire]
Greg Jarboe from the SES Channel interviews Li Evans of KeyRelevance (and Social Marketing Gurus) at SES San Jose where she is a guest speaker. She talks about video and social media in general. As far as she’s concerned many companies are on board when it comes to Social Media Marketing but haven’t yet completely figured out where it fits - marketing, pr or technical.
She mentions that the most important thing for companies to understand that if they want to fully employ a social media strategy then it needs to start internally with programs aimed at the employees.
Automatic, the company that produces the poular Wordpress platform has made available the latest version of their multi-blogging platform - Wordpress MU 2.6.
Ocaoimh.ie reports on some of the new features in this release of MU:
1. Version number is 2.6 rather than 1.6 because it just makes sense to synchronise the major version numbers.
2. Signup page now has a nonce which should help in the fight against spammers, for a short while anyway.
3. Redirecting to the signup page for 404s and for unknown blogs is not enabled by default. Check out wp-config-sample.php for instructions.
4. “allowed_themes” filter, much like the plugins filtered added previously.
5. New functions: get_id_from_blogname(), is_main_blog().
6. get_blog_details() can now take a blogname as well as a blog_id.
7. Custom first posts didn’t always work. Now they do.
8. Blognames in the “Add blog” form in wpmu-blogs.php are now sanitized.
9. Added “pre_site_option_*” and “site_option_*” filters like the similar option filters.
10. Meta fields will be passed on signup again.
11. Added an “admin_header_navigation” filter so the top right navigation in the backend can be customised.
12. The signup page uses “blogname” instead of “blog_id” to avoid confusion with the global variable of the same name. Plugins will break if not updated!
If you’ve ever considered running your own blog network à la 9rules Network or b5Media, then this is a solid piece of software - best of all it’s FREE!
Here are a few sites that I found that are using the Wordpress MU platform -
Twitter is free and available for everybody. As the default micro-blogging service it has a very big market. As of May 2008 they had 2 million users.
As Pandemiclabs.com mentions there are big companies starting to use Twitter as an online marketing vehicle. Here are the examples from Pandemiclabs.com:
As you can see by the number of followers there are folks in the twittershpere that are interested in receiving messages from those companies. In the Twitter world users opt-in to follow. You can’t spam people, they have to opt-in to receive info from your tweets.
Join Twitter today and make money online.
Is AdSense not working for you? Is the money slow coming?
Today I came across the Macuha blog, it’s all about helping people make money online in the Philippines.
Many first-time users of AdSense that it’s as simple as setting up a blog popping the AdSense code and then the money will start to flow, cha-ching. Well, it’s not that simple. blog where Marhgil explains his first hand account with the power of AdSense only if a good strategy is in place.
All good AdSense strategies should include the following:
1) Ad Placement: Users block ads out, so make sure you vary the size of ads as well as the placement. Putting ads where users don’t expect them is a good strategy.
2) Content is Specific: By having focussed content on one topic then the AdSense can be more focussed to your web audience.
If you need an AdSense primer to understand what AdSense is check out - TheInquirer.net.
Adweek has a great post about why big companies need to hire social media experts. As more and more consumers move online companies want to reach influencers so that they become the indirect company spokesman. The strategies employed to do this can be rather tricky. I agree with the article that if you want to reach that audience then it simply cannot be a marketing message. The tactics used have to keep changing with the times and therefore the social media strategist is essential.
The risk of specialized social-media czars is it becomes yet another marketing function, said Dachis. Indeed, some companies approach the role with a definite focus on finding new ways to market to consumers. Pepsi, for instance, describes its nascent social-media team in a job posting as “responsible for reaching new audiences, bloggers, Facebookers and other key influentials that live in the online world.” (A PepsiCo rep declined to make an executive available to discuss the role, e-mailing a statement that the company is “willing to put more resources into new media as it evolves to ensure that our message is heard.”)
Another interesting point that is made is that these new roles withing a social media strategy team do not necessarily come from strictly marketing careers. They also come from developers and project managers.
The diverse charter of the group is evidenced in the 50 candidates he interviewed over the past six months: some were in PR, but many more came from marketing or even technology backgrounds.
Source: Why Brands Need a New Kind of Leader [AdWeek]