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Week 1: Mile High to Capital City and How it Happened

12
June
2009

Transamerican Trip to a Big Media Market

Blake Bowyer
Media Program Analyst

On some corn-lined highway between Hays, Kansas and Cumberland, Maryland I realized I was crossing a Rubicon. But it wasn’t until hour 21 of my 25-hour odyssey to D.C. that it really hit me: media, as I know it, will soon be redefined.

To give this journey some context, a little about me …

My name is Blake. I am 26 years old and I spent 25 of them in Idaho. I currently attend the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado where I am pursuing my Master of Science in Marketing with a concentration in statistics. I am a marketing junkie, a social media-phile, and a sucker for new experiences. However, I also like to think I have a purpose from time to time. And it’s that belief that took me through the cornfields, backroads, and Waffle Houses of the Midwest to Washington, D.C. and my internship with EyeTraffic Media.

That brings us to today – Friday, June 12. My first week is coming to a close and I already sense a shift in perspective. Working for consumer electronics companies and developing a career in the Information Age, my professional exposure to technology and media has not been limited. However, it has always been in-house and less-than-best practice. With EyeTraffic Media, I applied for the internship expecting a bleeding edge media experience in which I could gain a lot and hopefully contribute from my own areas of expertise – whatever those might be – in return.

For now, the former is dramatically tipping the scales. Since Monday, I’ve been caught up in a whirlwind of crash courses in SEM, online media buying, viral marketing, and even fortunate enough to attend the first event in the CoolTwitter Conferences World Tour. Whew.

So this is big market online media from a best practices marketing consultancy? It’s a long way from wearily looking for Georgia Avenue through a cracked windshield on Monday at 2:30 a.m., but punch my ticket for the rest of the ride. I hope you’ll join me.

Now, if I could only figure out this Metro thing …

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Great Marketing for Lousy Economic Times

29
October
2008

Economic problems continue to mount in the United States and consumers are spending less resulting in lower revenues. As a consequence marketing budgets are getting tighter. Now, more than ever, organizations must optimize their marketing efforts.

George Assimakopoulos
Principal Manager

Recessions are periods of opportunity that can be taken advantage of or which can take advantage of you. By cutting your marketing activities, not only will you sell less than if you had kept your marketing steady but you may lose core customers to competition. That means you’ll have to spend more time, money and energy in the future to win them back. We have noticed that across our vertical clients online marketing budget are not getting cut - but we are getting scrutinized like never before.  We have to choose promotional indulgences carefully and we must prove the value of emerging Web 2.0 media expenditures.

During such challenging economic times, we remind our clients that "the low-hanging fruit" opportunities should be where we concentrate marketing budgets to mazimize return on advertising spend (ROAS).  David Warschawski of B2B Magazine illustrates this point well in his most recent article.  He says "…even when a business is cash-strapped, there are ways to market that enable you to enjoy greater dividends. Two online marketing strategies that have great return on investment are:

1)  Reaching your core target audience through brand-centric public relationship campaigns that secure local, regional and trade media coverage.

2)  Updating your Web site so it uses the latest search engine optimization techniques. This will dramatically increase your chances for being found when members of your core target audience do an Internet search for your type of product or service."

Smart businesspeople know that when they continue to invest or buy even more when the stock market is down, they secure a stronger future for themselves. The exact same approach is true for marketing.

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Tips for Using Viral & Social Networks for Online Marketing

5
August
2008

Strategies to ensure success for social networking campaigns.

Stefanie Berliant
Media Coordinator

In today’s day and age, most companies engage in some form of online marketing. Search engine optimization (SEO),Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns  and media buys are the more established solutions of interactive marketing. However, newer mediums such as viral and social marketing are becoming more prevalent online marketing tactics among companies of all sizes.

Some viral and social marketing practices include blogging and creating profiles on social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.  There are 90 million active users on Facebook, 25 million users on LinkedIn and over 1 million users on Twitter, and over 112.8 million blogs (according to the blog search engine Technorati).  Of these millions of users, individual companies have blogs and a presence on social networking sites as well.

The goal is for companies to use these mediums to increase brand awareness, network, find new business and get better qualified leads. Though these tools companies can spread information about their organization through “word of mouth” and allow a company to interact with its audience on a more personal level. However, while using these tools may be less expensive than other interactive strategies, maintaining these outlets usually requires more time and effort. Below are a few key takeaways from MarketingSherpa to help utilize these new marketing tools. To see more tips, click on the link below.

1. Be selective with online networks. Pick networks that are relevant to you and your company, where you will be able to contribute to the online space.

2. Link to all of your social platforms. If you do choose to have multiple networking sites, make sure you link them to each other. This helps find new clients and contacts, teach them about the business and keep in touch with them over time.

3. Create a backlog to plan ahead. You need to continually maintain the dialogue between your company and your audience to keep them engaged and attract new business. This takes time and if in a rush, the quality of your conversations and blog posts will show.

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Cuil: Better Than Google?

30
July
2008

Former Google employees create their own search engine which could reduce Google’s market share.

Stefanie Berliant
Media Coordinator

According to ComScore, an online measurement company, in May 2008 Google held a 62% share of the U.S. search market followed by Yahoo at 21% and Microsoft at 8.5%. This month, another search engine, Cuil, joined the list of Google competitors which also includes Teoma (whose technology is used by Ask.com), Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo and, most recently, Powerset, which was acquired by Microsoft this month. What gives Cuil an edge over all the other competition is that it was created by Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier, all former Google engineers.  

Patterson built and sold a search index that probed old websites for the internet archive to Google in 2004. Patterson and Power worked together on the same team at Google. Monier was the former chief technology officer of AltaVista, the best search engine before Google launched in 1998. Monier also helped build the search engine on eBay’s online auction site. This group is also teaming up with Tom Costello, who built a once-promising search engine called Xift in the late 1990s. Costello later joined IBM where he worked on an "analytic engine" called WebFountain.  It is clear that this team has extensive knowledge in this space and also of, Google, the industry leader. Because of this, the possibility of creating a more comprehensive and efficient search engine seems more realistic.

Patterson emphasizes that there will be many differences between Cuil and Google.  For example Cuil’s search index is 120 billion web pages. Google has an index of 8.2 billion web pages as of three years ago (when Google stopped publicly announcing its index count).  Cuil’s results are gathered by the actual content of a page, not by ranking the quality and quantity of links as Google does.  The results on Cuil are displayed with photos, and the layout resembles that of articles in a magazine. The results page on Cuil also includes additional categories related to your initial search, conveniently displayed in a drop down menu.  Additionally Cuil will not track the users search histories, as Google does. 

Cuil faces several challenges such as building a better search engine and winning over the public who are loyal to the Google brand.  However, the bigger question is, if Cuil raises the bar for search engines, how will this change the world of online marketing?

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Widgets: The New Online Marketing Tool

30
June
2008

The evolution of widgets into powerful online marketing tools.

Stefanie Berliant
Media Coordinator

A recent study by eMarketer predicts that US companies will more than double their spend on widget creation, promotion and distribution from 2007 to 2008.  Marketers are expected to spend about $40 million on web widgets in 2008, up from $15 million in 2007.  A widget is a miniature, portable software application that can be placed on a section of a website, a desktop, or on a mobile device.  Widgets have transformed from meaningless applications on social networks into a legitimate marketing tool. Its viral nature allows companies to increase brand awareness by extending their web presence, acquiring new customers at a minimal cost, driving qualified traffic to targeted websites and leveraging a website’s existing content.

We have not yet seen the full potential of widgets as an online marketing tool until they are able to improve a website’s natural search rankings (Search Engine Optimization).  If widget developers are able to place text links within the code of a widget, the website that the widget promotes should benefit from an increased link count and move up in natural search rankings. When widget creators are able to close this marketing loop, the widget will truly be a powerful online marketing tool.

Web Widget and Application Advertising Spending 2007 and 2008

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