You might have heard about the traditional 5 key metrics in measuring your marketing and online marketing success:

1. Awareness
2. Influence
3. Attitude
4. Response
5. Value

But what if there was a different approach we should be taking in our measurement?  One that will clearly define whether or not we need to rework and refine our own messaging and positioning in the marketplace?  The 6^th Key metric, in fact, encompasses them all, and lies in the term we (not so) loosely term: Customer Value Management.

So let us explore…

1. Awareness
   Getting awareness right in the sense of volume to your site, your brand name and your social presence, is a great way of measuring your marketing success.  In terms of Customer Value Management (CVM), though, this does not clearly indicate our success in getting our message across.The measurement here is to ensure that your brand persona or messaging clearly outlines your value proposition, and that it is interpreted this way.  People build trust relationships, and if they do not understand what you’re representing and understand your positioning, they won’t trust your brand and interact.

   It’s not about what you say, but about how they interpret it.

2. Influence
   To measure your influence in understanding that people believe in you so much and enjoy the influence you have in their decision making process, that they want to keep you close. They want you to not only influence them, but also the people around them continuously.
   
   
3. Attitude
   Oftentimes we measure attitude by what we hear people say about our brand or marketing messages.  Let’s turn it around and start by looking at our own attitudes.  If our attitudes are right, if what we say and do make people want to draw near and feel the need to connect and affiliate, then we got it right.  If not, we need to go back to the proverbial drawing board and re-assess where the attitude pointing outwards should or could be adjusted.
   
   
4. Response
   Traditionally response is seen as the response to your message.  Increased sales, increased revenue and more likes and fans in the social realm.  These are all good principles to measure response and have been the driving force behind charts and graphs for years.  And they work.But in terms of the customer and their value, we need to look at our own response to their response.  When faced with a challenge, do we respond with an open mind, or do we react arrogantly?  Do we welcome their opinions on our brand, or follow the regiment ways of mass media, not allowing them to form part of our ethos?

   People don’t care what we know, until they know that we care.
   

5. Value
   And finally – instead of seeing our clients and marketing as just the impact on our bottom line, seeing what value we are adding to them. This is exactly the shift marketing needs to make when we look at our brands becoming interactive instead of trying to dictate to the mass media and enforcing our ideas on the predominantly ‘prosumer’ market.

   Our measurement in engagement value should provide the flexibility and insight to measure whether or not the market is letting us in.

Most of us love the idea (still) of speaking or broadcasting our ideas and values.  The world has changed and is changing as we speak.  New measurement metrics are key to keeping abreast of our client partners, and in this measurement, crucial to our realignment of voice and strategy.

Influence and Collaboration: Robin Pullen, BCI

We have written quite a bit about White Hat vs Black Hat in the past, in case you want to go have a look.

People have been using black hat SEO techniques to artificially manipulate organic rankings for a long time. And it worked. These individuals did everything from using invisible text stuffed with keywords to building massive link farms. The SEO professionals that strive to perform white hat Search Engine Optimisation and sticking to Google’s guidelines have often felt that their success is somewhat unfair. Sites with obvious black hat SEO often outranked their white hat competitors. To be fair, Google has improved this over the years. In the late 90s you could get away with basically anything. However, although the ethical route does pay off with hard work, even today certain black hat strategies still work.

Could it be that the game might finally change for good?

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team recently made the following statement:

“What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working on in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.“

A popular example of Google’s recent crackdown is the link network, buildmyrank.com. The site has openly admitted defeat and offered a refund to their customers after Google deindexed the majority of their network.

I am not sure if Google will phase everything in gradually. We have, however, seen some surprising results during the last month. One of our clients’ sites was competing with a website that was using obvious black hat SEO techniques. This site dropped out of the SERPs completely a few weeks ago. We have also seen quite a few dramatic positive shifts for our clients, possibly this is due to Google penalising all the black hat competitors and therefore shifting white hat sites up the rankings.

All this cracking down proves that you need to be very careful about anything you do. You might get penalised even if your intention was not to be black hat. Be sure to read up on Googles guidelines and remember that if you always strive to optimise for the user, you can feel safe. Google has sent a message to the webmaster tools interface of sites that violate their guidelines. If you find that a site you manage might possibly be one of these, take the steps to remove all suspicious SEO activity. Remove bad backlinks where possible, remove spammy content and meta data.

In the land of Pay Per Click advertising, competitor bidding remains a controversial topic. Questions regarding ethical business practices come into play as well as the effectiveness of such keyword strategies.

It has been my own experience that apart from being a costly exercise, it most often yields poor results, certainly not worth the herculean effort put into it nor the barrage of angry competitors threatening to sue you , no matter how feeble their claims are. The simple fact is that bidding on competitor brands terms is completely legal and allowed on major search engines, provided you don’t mention your competitor’s brand in your own ad.

However competition is all about options and by not bidding on competitor’s brands some may think that you are taking away the consumer’s right to choose. By positioning your ad next to your competitor you are proving that you are offering the public alternative choices.

Competitor brand bidding would work to the advantage of the start up businesses who place their ads alongside their well established counterparts, thus gaining exposure while riding on the coattails of the bigger brand. However you should note that if you are planning on bidding on competitor terms that your own brand’s website is up to standard and that you offer competitive products otherwise you could do more harm than good to your brand reputation.

Bidding on competitor keywords is a practice to follow with caution, and needs to be evaluated depending on the type of product or service you offer.

Happy Marketing!

Take a look at these three exact and phrase match keywords in Adwords:

[car insurance]          “car insurance quote”          [car insurance quotes]

At the moment only these search queries will show ads for the terms stated above.

Car insurance                        need car insurance quote                car insurance quotes

The changes will allow close variants of the search terms to appear as well like the following:

Car inseurnce                        need car insurance quotes              car insurance quote

From mid May phrase and exact match keywords will match close variants, misspellings, singular and plural forms, stemmings, accents and abbreviations.

Based on Google’s research and testing they believe these new features will greatly benefit users and advertisers.

At least 7% of search queries online contain misspellings and the longer the query the higher the rate.

Even with perfect spelling variations occur between users that are searching for exactly the same product such as “climb Kilimanjaro” and “climbing Kilimanjaro” or “mens hiking shoes” and “men’s hiking shoes”.

Google’s organic search systems detect and compensate for misspellings and close variants.

Google has been testing these new changes with advertisers and the participants have seen positive results.

I believe this will help all advertisers as we spend a lot of time making sure that misspelling of keywords and other close variants are included in our keyword lists.  You will still have an option in advanced settings to use the original setting or make use of the new matching behavior.

Try it out and tell us what your findings are.

Facebook announced on Monday 9th April that they would be buying the leading photo sharing application ‘Instagram’ for a total of $1Bn in cash & stocks, marking their biggest acquisition to date.

Instagram, launched in October 2010, allows users to take pics, digitally filter them & share them to various social networking sites including Instagram itself. The application has accumulated 30million users since January 2011 & 5million pictures are uploaded daily.

Upon its launch, Instagram was only supported on iPad, iPhone & iPod Touch. Earlier this month the application was extended to work with Android Camera Phones running 2.2 (Froyo) or higher, seeing more than a million downloads within the first 12hours. The app is distributed via iTunes App Store & Google Play.

Both CEOs posted the acquisition announcement on their respective platforms, adding that the companies would continue to run independently, though the staff would be integrated & work together to strengthen and grow each company independently in areas where the other has achieved success. Mark Zuckerburg’s statement added that Instagram users would continue to be able to share their pics with users of Facebook’s competitor social networking sites as they had been able to before. They will also maintain the ability to have followers & follow other people independently on Facebook.

Users have expressed worry about Facebook’s Privacy policies being carried over to Instagram because of the acquisition, & that Facebook would use information on them gained from Instagram to target Ads to them. Some even adding that they will be closing their Instagram accounts.

With Instagram currently being a fully Mobile Application, the purchase will give Facebook a much sought after ‘in’ to the mobile market.

The acquisition is sure to strengthen Facebook as a force given that the companies are both built on Photo Sharing & have done relatively well in their own rights. We will be watching to see what great ideas & improvements are brought to both these products with the fresh ideas & outlook the new staff will bring to each company.

References:

http://blog.instagram.com/

http://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10100318398827991

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram

http://mashable.com/2012/04/09/facebook-instagram-buy/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/facebook-acquires-instagram-for-about-1b/2012/04/09/gIQA180H6S_story.html

http://www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2012/04/11/what-facebooks-acquisition-of-instagram-means-for-brands/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-voakes/the-numbers-behind-facebo_b_1418406.html