Great article in BtoB's Hands On enewsletter...one of the best comments in this piece is: "These companies want to differentiate themselves and, with a normal sales message, I understand that. But this isn’t a normal sales message. It’s matching up searches."
It makes you think. Doesn't it?
Branding efforts can clash with SEM
Story posted: July 1, 2009 - 2:52 pm EDT
Source: BtoBonline
Ian Harris is CEO of Search Laboratory Ltd., based in Leeds, England, which helps companies’ search engine marketing and optimization efforts. BtoB recently asked Harris about best practices in search engine marketing.
BtoB: You’ve said that b-to-b companies spend too much time thinking of new ways to describe what they do in terms that prospective customers don’t understand. Can you elaborate?
Harris: Let me give you an example. We do some work for a big video conferencing company, and the marketing team there spends its time trying not to be a video conference company. What I mean is, they try to brand themselves as a “video communications” company, because all their competitors do conferencing.
They get so obsessed with this that they put it on their home page, title tags and paid search keywords. The problem is, their clients do not see them as a “video communications” company. Their clients want video conferencing, and that’s what they see them as.
Believe me, this is a common theme. Again, we do work for a few companies that do IT support and services, but without fail they brand themselves as something like “system care.” or “logi-care” or “integration change.” It’s like “IT suppor”’ is a rude word.
Read More.
Labels: Branding, Drip Marketing, Messaging, Search Engine Marketing (and other interactive) Tidbits, SEM
I am a friend of Katie's, and I think she would be fine with me sharing this article with everyone. Needless to say it is from her great site www.themeasurementstandard.com. All the great information is from Chris Near and the folks at KD Paine & Partners...enjoy!
Which Twitter Profile Analysis Tool Rules the Nest?
5 online Twitter profile analysis services compared: Twinfluence, TwitterAnalyzer, Twitter Grader, Twitterholic, and TwitterScore.
by
Chris Near, Director of Research, KDPaine & Partners
So you want to measure Twitter... The good news is that you have several online Twitter profile analysis/ranking services to choose from. The bad news is that you will probably find that none of them offer all the metrics that you really need or want. Especially if you are looking to do the kind of between-client comparisons that we at KDPaine & Partners are usually interested in.
To do very accurate measurement of Twitter, you typically have to use human readers. It's the only way to really understand the language. But, to have human eyes read and rate every tweet often takes a lot of time and money. For fast and free measurement, the online profile analysis tools are the way to go.
Automated analysis has accuracy problems, especially when it comes to the subtle language iinvolved in measuring sentiment. (See
"5 Twitter Sentiment Analyzers Reviewed.") If we had a way to combine all the tools reviewed below, then we might have something really useful. Until then, we'll have to weigh the pros and cons of each and make the best decision.
So here's my report on five of the Twitter profile analyzers. I'm sure there are more out there, and I'd love to hear about them. (And if you think what I have to say here needs some clarification,
please let me know).
Twinfluence offers interesting statistics (social capital, velocity, centralization) as well as a percent ranking system that compares the twitterer you analyze to other people. The catch is that it only compares you to other people that have previously been analyzed on Twinfluence. Their website says: "The #XXX score is your overall rank compared to all other twitterers that have been analyzed by Twinfluence. If your rank is #400, that means there are 399 other twitterers in the system who have higher reach scores than you."
To date, there have been less than 100,000 profiles analyzed on Twinfluence (that number is going up every day). So you can't rank anyone against the other 5 or 6 million twitterers out there (and that number is really going up every day, see
Mashable). That makes the Twinfluence ranking pretty useless until more people get analyzed on their site.
TwitterAnalyzer is good for getting graphs that show your past month's message volume, your tweeting habits, the subjects you discuss, the links you use, and pretty much everything you would ever want to know. Which is great. But it lacks what is sometimes the most important thing: a ranking or scoring system that compares different Twitter pages. Without that you can't make competitive comparisons.
Twitter Grader sounds excellent, in theory. It takes the follow/follower ratio and combines measures of engagement to come up with a final grade of 0 to 100. It gives a score based on a large population (2,158,455). However,
a recent hubspot Twitter grading blog post implies that their algorithm is still a work in progress.
And I do have problems with it. Consider the following results:
How can Vocus have relatively few followers, zero updates and still get a score of 87? Even if there were 10,000 people following Vocus, there are no updates so there is no communication or engagement between Vocus and its followers. Why does it get any score at all?
I also looked at
Twitterholic and
TwitterScore, but found them too problematic to take seriously. On the day I tested Twitterholic over half of my searches resulted in page errors. (Since then, I've tested it with a little more success.) The site gives a ranking for your Twitter page, but it is based entirely on the number of your followers. It doesn't calculate anything like updates or other forms of engagement. It's good for popularity, but not activity or interaction.
TwitterScore gives you a rank comparing you to all the other people that have previously been ranked on their site. Right now the rank is only out of 43,048 users. They also give you a score on a 10 point scale, but there is no information on how they come up with that score or what their ranking is based on.
Which service rules the nest?
If your goal is to give the clients a final score or ranking that compares one Twitter page with others, then I would recommend Twitter Grader. (But look out for anomalous scores, as noted above.) If your goal is to track clients' competitors and how they use Twitter and what topics they discuss and who follows them, then I would recommend TwitterAnalyzer. I also recommend that you keep looking: None of these is perfect, and newer and better tools will come along quickly.
Chris Near is Director of Research for KDPaine & Partners. Chris recently graduated with his master's in communications and currently devotes most of his time to measuring PR and developing social media methodologies. That is, of course, when he's not at home tending to his lovely wife, Valerie, or chasing around his tireless two year-old son, Brendan.
Arketi and client ERDAS are featured in a MarketingSherpa case study out today about the use of Ajay-enabled web pages as a strategy to increase web leads. Have a read...
MarketingSherpa
Case Study #CS1994:
Organize Content with Ajax-enabled Web Pages: 5 Steps to Increase Web Leads
SUMMARY: Does your Web design make it hard for prospects to find all the product information and supporting content you’ve created for them? See how a software marketer improved his team’s online lead-generation capabilities with Ajax-enabled product pages that brought together brochures, demos, downloads and education content in one location. Carefully-placed registration forms are now capturing leads where once chaos ruled. Read more.
Source: MarketingSherpa.com
New MarketingSherpa Chart: Managing the B2B Marketing-to-Sales Process
Some great info from MarketingSherpa...One way to overcome this is to put a Marketing Automation system, like Pardot, in place. Want to know more about this? Check out the June 2009 issue of Core (which will be coming out later this week, so if you are not on the Core enewsletter list sign up now at: http://www.arketi.com/newsletter.html
From MarketingSherpa:
Which best practices are marketers NOT using to effectively manage their marketing-to-sales process? The one that stands out here is the ability to hand leads back to marketing when they have proven not to be sales worthy.
These are usually qualified prospects that simply aren’t ready to purchase. And not having process to handle this is a missed opportunity by allowing these future sales to fall through this gaping crack in the pipeline
Labels: CRM, Drip Marketing, Marketing Automation, Sales
The June PRSAGA luncheon, a sellout, featured a myriad of PR and tech practitioners filling up the Cumberland Mall Maggiano’s. The featured guest speaker and social media superstar was Peter Shankman, founder of HARO, the largest free source repository in the world. Shankman noted the continued parallel between social media and trust while emphasizing the importance of using social media to propagate positive influences. Shankman provided examples of companies effectively using social media to engage their customers and prospects as well as detailing the tenets of effective social media: Transparency, Brevity and Relevance.
Spotted in the crowd was Lisa Pitrof (BusinessWire), Kristin Wallace (Sprint), Neil Hirsch (Solvay Pharmaceuticals) and Karlie Stanton (Popeyes). For more information about PRSAGA and the July luncheon, visit http://prsageorgia.org/.
Arketians Attend First Tweet-Up
Over 100 Atlanta PR and tech professionals gathered at the new
5 Seasons Brewing Company Wednesday to network, mingle and…..tweet? The tweet-up (twitter slang for an informal gathering) featured
HARO founder,
Peter Shankman. In addition to giving away a free weekend stay at the new
Loew's Atlanta Hotel, Peter had a chance to converse with many of the excited professionals in attendance, including Mousa Ackall and Amy Leefe (pictured here). Shankman, known for his propensity to think outside the box, noted how continued technological advancements are changing the way we think, communicate and act. The trick is, according to Shankman, to stay optimistic and find ways to channel that technology for the overall societal good.
Spotted in the crowd was Jeremy Porter (
Journalistics), Matthew Nagel (
Georgia Tech) and Jenny Schmitt (
CloudSpark). For more information about Peter and HARO,
click here.
A record crowd of technology marketing executives gathered last Thursday at Maggiano's Cumberland as TAG conducted its ninth annual TAMY Awards for Technology Marketing excellence. Nearly 170 executives participated in this year's award ceremony, which also featured an insightful presentation from Coca-Cola executive Penny McIntyre on the ways social media and emerging Web 3.0 technology is changing the game for marketers.
Arketi's work for the following clients helped earn them a 2009 TAMY Award:
Reveille Software, a fast growing experience and performance management software company for the emerging growth corporate repositioning category.
ERDAS, a geospatial business systems company for the large company repositioning category.
Virtual Premise, a leading web-based provider of on-demand real estate information, for the Marketing Tactic by a small company category.
For the fifth straight year, Arketi's corporate positioning work swept the repositioning categories.
Finally, Karin Bursa, vice president of Marketing for Logility, was honored as TAG's Technology Marketing Executive of the year. Seen in the large crowd were Shana Keith (Cbeyond), TAG President Tino Mantella, and James Marlow (Radiance Solar). For more information about TAG, visit http://tagonline.org/.
