Posts tagged search engines


Warning: Social media may be hazardous to your health

Oct 29th

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A lot has been written about the “danger” social media poses to companies and brands, but what about the real threat it poses to us as individuals?

Immediate, transparent, global, free communication is one of the most breathtaking information advances since the telephone. But when there is an opportunity for human corruption, there probably WILL be human corruption. Here are the biggest threats posed by the advent of social media:

Risk to personal security. For fun, I follow a few celebrities on Twitter, the digital Post-it note. The other day, one of them tweeted: “Down at Gino’s having a pizza with my boys.” Earlier in the day he had established the city he was in. With this kind of shoot-from-the-hip public broadcasting, it’s only a matter of time before we see the first Twitter-related crimes. Even for non-celebrities, how safe is it to post to the world, “My husband and I are off to Boston for the Web 3.0 conference.” Not very … unless you want your next post to be “Our house got wiped out by crooks while we were away!”

Risk to public safety. People are easily duped and through social media, we are creating the most effective rumor mill in the history of mankind. We caught a small glimpse of the destructive power of viral misinformation when rumors of swine flu being caused by eating pork spread around the globe in a nanosecond. The innocent pork industry is still recovering. Numerous experiments have shown the ease of planting falsehoods that become reported as fact, even by legitimate news agencies. What happens when a sinister prank goes out of control and creates a panic far beyond a loss in pork sales? It will happen. What can prevent it? Nothing.

Risk to personal finances. Every time you register for a site, sign up for an app, or populate a social media profile, you are adding to a databank all about you. Strangers can find names, birth dates, family members, school and work history, e-mail addresses and much more. One blog writer recently quipped, “Honestly, it doesn’t take a genius to steal a person’s identity online.” Even more severe than identity theft and the obvious financial ramifications for an individual — we will begin to see online crimes being committed under the alias of another person.

Risk to personal reputation. Thankfully, nobody was holding a video camera in my face during my college years. But the lives of today’s youth are explicitly documented on You Tube, blogs, photo albums, and social media sites, creating a permanent online record. One corporate recruiter told me that a web search is more important to him than a resume. How will your Google-image affect your future job prospects, personal relationships, political aspirations? Did you read about the teen girls who took pictures of themselves in their bras at a sleepover, texted them to friends and then hours later ended up on porn sites? How do you erase something like that? Google never forgets.

Risk to data and information. A few weeks ago, a computer worm, using Twitter, infected tens of thousands of computers as it replicated itself across the Internet. The worm was created by a 17-year-old to “expose the vulnerabilities” in Twitter. The red-hot social networking/microblogging service has been scrambling to plug cross-site scripting and other Web site vulnerabilities to thwart worm attacks but, as one researcher points out, it’s much easier to misuse the Twitter API as a “weak link” to send worms squirming through Twitter.

Risk to personal health. Neurologists and doctors warn that obsessive immersion in screen technologies and social network sites will lead to short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathize, weight gain, and a tenuous sense of identity.

Risk to personal productivity. A friend recently told me that he needed to find a way to block himself from social media sites at work. “I’m hooked,” he said. “I can’t stop myself from getting online every minute that I can.” According to a U.K. study, British firms are losing $264 million A DAY on lost productivity due to undercover activities on Facebook. Businesses are starting to look for ways to deal with the social networking problem. Several companies in America already block social media sites.

So, where does this lead?
I’m a fan of social media. These new platforms have connected me to countless interesting people, opportunities and ideas. The purpose of this article is to serve as a counter-point to those who seem to be hypnotized by the hyperbole and beat the drum of social media while ignoring these certain consequences. There is virtually NO dialogue on the risks of the inevitable corruption that will result from having a free and pervasive window into YOUR life.

I’m hoping the dialogue will start now …

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The world’s greatest viral marketing success story?

Aug 1st

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Can you name a national, brand-name product with zero advertising or marketing budget, yet serves over 6 million satisfied customers a year?
I took a day off this week for digital de-tox and spent it hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This American treasure may be the greatest example of viral marketing in history.
It is the nation’s most-visited park with 6 million visitors a year. Yet it has no social media plan, no advertising, no celebrity spokesperson, and no search engine optimization plan. It is just a great product. People visit it, tell their friends about it, and come back year after year to experience it all over again. The Internet is filled with hundreds of thousands of product photos, stories and testimonials.
Can you name a better viral marketing success story? 6 million customers. No advertising.
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Looking into the future of B2B online marketing

Jul 17th

2 comments

This is Part 5, and the final installment, of my interview with Dr. Ben Hanna, VP of Marketing for Business.com.
 
Ben, with your previous leadership experience with eBay and Iron Planet, you’ve been a true pioneer in online marketing. What parallels do you make between social media and other marketing revolutions you’ve experienced? What’s next for B2B marketing?

Well thank you, that’s very flattering. I may be biased toward the present, but I think the most interesting online marketing development is a trend we’re starting to see among the largest brands and agencies, both B2C and B2B – the re-integration of marketing channels.

We currently live in a world where B2B marketers largely trade off their budget between online marketing channels, or between online and offline channels — an ebb and flow we have seen in other historical contexts. Choices are made based on the individual ROI of each channel, historic or competitive precedent (e.g., “we’ve always run print ads in that publication, so we’ll continue to do so”), or some combination of the two. The strategy/budget discussion largely occurs around which channel performs best, rather than how multiple channels work TOGETHER to deliver results. This occurs because 1) the online channels are developing quickly, making it hard to keep up with changes, even with a staff dedicated to a single channel, and 2) solid cross-channel metrics are so hard to come by for the vast majority of B2B marketers.

This “either-or” approach to marketing channels makes little sense in B2C and even less sense in B2B where most purchases involve multiple decision-makers and longer sales cycles. Think paid search marketing on one of the “big three” general search engines performs vastly better than banner advertising? Research suggests they serve different roles in the buying process: general search engines getting undue credit for being the major online portals from which people navigate just prior to purchase (e.g., 71% of paid search clicks are navigational) and banner ads exposure – simple exposure, not a click – driving a hidden 22% increase in search marketing conversion rate.

Unfortunately, B2B marketers are largely blind to these types of interactions. A study we recently conducted of over 27,000 B2B websites found that only 6 percent used a web analytics solution that allowed them to see the influence of more than one campaign on conversion.

Thankfully, online marketing tools and techniques are catching up and enabling the discussion B2B marketers should be having – how different channels work together to deliver results, and what the optimal channel mix should be, based on these interactions and business goals.

It’s possible to see the impact of TV ads on web site traffic, or how banner ads increase the volume of branded searches on general search engines or how site visitors coming from branded vs. unbranded searches perform during later email-driven lead nurturing programs. As Craig Macdonald of Covario, one of my co-panelists on the search attribution panel during the recent Search Insider Summit, put it, measuring cross-channel impact is no longer a technology issue, it’s a “governance” issue involving people defending their specialties – those specialties they’ve worked so hard to build in a single channel.

This evolution – the re-integration of marketing channels as we remove technology barriers – is critically important for improving overall B2B marketing efficiency and should lead to a number of fascinating, useful insights in the coming years. Change is never easy, but shedding our “either-or” mentality for a more informed, integrated approach is a change worth making.

Next week in {grow}: Fanatic-focused marketing, a new series examining the ROI of social media marketing, and more.
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It’s midnight. Do you know where your ad is?

May 11th

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I love history and was scanning a website about Medieval Europe when I noticed this ad for Bob Evans family restaurants … embedded in the middle of an article about the Black Plague, the most devastating disease in history. I wondered … was this to introduce their new farm-fresh “plague on a plate” value meal? Hey, can I have some ketchup with that?
Obviously this is a disastrous placement for the restaurant and it made me wonder … how did it get there in the first place? And if I were the marketing manager for Bob Evans, what could have been done to prevent it? I sought the opinions of some trusted professionals:
Ludmila Zadayannaya is a marketing manager for Russia’s Ekodar and had this to say: “The advertisment was placed through some service, such as Google AdWords. The advertisers chose an option of CONTENT TARGETING in the advertising network without specifying places.
“In this case they could not control the location of their ad at the page … somehow the key words for the ad agreed with the key words of this website, or before visiting this website, you had searched for something connected with restaurants/ food/ Bob Evans, etc. … as a result, the advertising system ‘decided’ that the ad about Bob Evans restaurant would be relevant to the content of the page or to your previous search request, and it showed the ad to you. The fact that the ad is shown in the middle of the text about the Black Plague is entirely the fault of the site owner.”
Stephen Rowe of Dirextion adds this comment: “It really depends on what type of a campaign Bob Evans was running. By that I mean, was it run of site, run of network, behavioral targeting, etc. The reality is that no matter what type of campaign that they ran, if the campaign was not managed correctly, this type of thing will happen. That is why the agency needs to speak with their service providers to determine the potential pitfalls of any particular buy.
“Further, it is one of the pitfalls of relying entirely on the optimization programs without human interaction. Advertising is a business of nuance, and to date I have never seen the level of nuance in a computer program that a human being has. It all goes back to Advertising 101, The right message in the right place at the right time. When someone develops the program to do that, then we can plug into the program and not worry about monitoring it.”
Thanks to Stephen and Ludmilla for these insights! With the inherent danger of having your ads run in the wrong places, how would you ever know unless it shows up in a blog like this? You probably wouldn’t. One way I try to prevent this happening for my clients is that I rarely choose the “content” option. This way I have much more control over the keywords associated with the advertisement.
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