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Archive for the ‘Zeitgeist & Trends’ Category
Pinterest: Why it’s worth the investment, and how to get your ROI
Thursday, April 26, 2012
If you’re the person in charge of social media at your company, Pinterest may cause you to groan and look for excuses to opt out of maintaining yet another communication channel. Unfortunately Pinterest is increasingly looking like a medium marketers shouldn’t ignore; fortunately, it also looks like a medium that delivers significant ROI, and might not require the level of investment required by Facebook or a blog.
A Medium Marketers Can’t Ignore: In 3 Charts
1) Pinterest is a $7.7 Billion Company, and “appeals to college-educated females between the ages of 25 to 44. A sweet demographic known for its spending decisions and habits.”
2) From Q2 2011 to now, Pinterest has grown from representing 1.2% of social media revenue for e-commerce sites to 17.4%, and it generates greater revenue per click than Facebook or Twitter.
3) Pinterest drives more referral traffic than YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+, and its share of total social media referrals is growing.
OK. So I can’t ignore it. What’s it going to cost me?
TIME 91% of marketers report using social media, and over half of these are spending 6+ hours a week doing it. A good blog post requires a lot of research because it contains a lot of content, and both Facebook and Twitter involve conversations with consumers that need to be monitored. Pinterest, however, is sometimes described as the next phase in social media – content is not (time consumingly) generated, but curated – “Pinterest offers a new level of fun and interaction for our customers as they work with us to create and curate content.” Because you are using content you already have, content created by others, and your followers are adding to and refining your content, Pinterest lessens the burden of time investment required by other social media platforms.
MONEY The chart below is one I created by compiling statistics from several sources, and averaging over the ranges given by various sources. For example, one company is selling Repins for $0.75, one blogger devised an algorithm to calculate the value of a repin, and Twitter and Facebook statistics were found elsewhere. Any of these stats are highly contested, industry-specific, and involve huge ranges, but the take home is that Pinterest is relatively cheap and appears to generate a healthy return on the investment.
So how do I do it?
It’s profitable and efficient, so how can you optimize your Pinterest board to increase brand/ product awareness and traffic to your site? Neocloudmarketing reiterates the standard adage for all content creation: show your consumer the “whole package” – how your product is used, the lifestyle and how it intersects with other brands and products on the market – ie, give content that goes beyond your product and is useful to your consumers. Social Media Examiner recommends researching how your followers are interacting with your board – which pins are they re-pinning, what information can you get about your followers’ interests by looking at what they pin on their own boards? There are also resources for creating the images that will entice users.
The great thing about Pinterest is that you don’t need several paragraphs – just a picture.
Meet the Stars of Search Marketing
Friday, September 2, 2011
SEO.com recently came out with a stellar infographic featuring the Stars of Search Marketing. You may or may not yet be familiar with these names but in the world of Search Engine Optimization, you should definitely know their work. This fun infographic also showcases the future of search according to these SEO experts.
For more information about these Search Stars visit their websites:
- Bruce Clay – BruceClay.com
- Matt Cutts – MattCutts.com/blog
- Danny Sullivan – SearchEngineLand.com
- Rand Fishkin – SEOmoz.org
Stephen Colbert to Bing, you got “hiybbprqag!”
Thursday, February 3, 2011
“For the first time ever, someone’s search history has been busted for something other than porn.” – Stephen Colbert
Earlier this week, Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land, reported that Google has proof of Bing copying their search results. Bing fervently denied this accusation and instead accused Google of click fraud involving “honeypot” search results.
Well apparently, the SEO community were not the only folks who had an opinion on the matter. Comedian Stephen Colbert, despite being sponsored by Bing, poked fun at the search giant.
He briefly described Google’s sting operation and how they made nonexistent words like “hiybbprqag” to turn up in search results, only for the same results to show up on Bing a month later.
Colbert goes on to say, “Evidently, ‘hiybbprqag’ is a word meaning, you got served.”
The video is pretty hilarious, so be sure to check it out.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Bing Gets Served | ||||
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Also, what do you think about Google calling out Bing? Or Bing’s defense regarding Google’s accusation of copying their search results? Let us know in the comments.
iPad, iPed, iPid, iPod, iPud
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Previously only one of those words was an Apple product. After January 26th, however, Apple now sells iPads along with iPods. What may be a silly name or a great name briefly caused a bit of confusion with the search engines.
IPED and IPEDS are acronyms that have quite a few results in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. But, the other spelling brethren to the iPod do not have much meaning. Because of this, all three search engines show spelling corrections for those words and typically include “iPod” search results as well. Today, we still see this for iPud and iPid. And, immediately after the Apple announcement, we saw it for iPad, too.
This was soon corrected, whether naturally or through intervention, in Yahoo and Google. Bing is still showing results for iPod when you search for the new iPad. This instance appears to show a small flaw in the search engine algorithms. How do you quickly add a new term when it had been written off as a typo?
The iPad announcement is the most recent example of this, but many web 2.0 companies experienced the same problem. When companies began to emulate Flickr’s naming convention of adding an ‘r’ to the end of their name, it also confused search engines. Is Snappr a service, or is someone looking for a lawn mower. This is especially apparent when services first launch, which is exactly what we witnessed with the launch of the iPad.
What does that mean for Search Engine Marketers? It means that Google may have a bit more to say about brand names then we would like to think. Is the new product you are launching or marketing a typo for something else? Then you may want to think about a name change. Of course, a strong product can overtake the ‘typo’ designation as they iPad has done in Google and Yahoo, but you may not have the marketing gusto and hype power that Apple carries. If you have flexibility in the name, then do your homework.
It may be time to add “Googleability” to the traditional product naming guidelines. Not only do you need to distinguish your brand from others, but you need to have a brand that isn’t even a close spelling of another product. If I sold a product called a “pespi,” I would be in a world of pain trying to market it online.
We would like to keep the search engines out of these types of processes, and they want to stay out of them as well. Google’s vision is to “organize the world’s information.” No part of that says anything about governing or changing that information. The unfortunate truth is that online marketing is growing rapidly, and to keep up you need to capitalize on the traffic that Google and the others can drive. So, pick your product names carefully, and market the heck out of them.
