Websites are not websites anymore

When a brand manager sits down to evaluate what she or he is doing online and in the mobile channels, the first realization they have is usually it’s not up to snuff with the massive amount of online usage that consumers are engaged in. And, more often than not, they must also grapple with what their peers and competitors are doing in these spaces as well.

More at Twisted Image

Business owners are relying on technology to connect and conduct business

“The use of technology has become an integral component of a business owners’ ability to effectively engage and communicate with customers,” said David Pope, Wells Fargo Small Business Segment Manager. “Small and mid-sized companies nationwide are evaluating their use of technology and adapting to meet the needs of an increasingly tech-savvy consumer base.”

From Business Wire

HOW TO: Build a More Beautiful Blog

Whether you’re blogging for business or pleasure, now is the time to take your little corner of the web to the next level. Social media makes your blog more visible and valuable than ever, and the amount of resources available to beautify and streamline your blog is enormous, and ever growing.

From Mashable

Why Most Digital Ads Still Fail to Work

In 2005, CNET undertook a series of landmark online-advertising-effectiveness studies with Starch Communications to identify the best approaches to online advertising. CNET made the research public, offering presentations throughout the country and on its website.

More at Adage

Apple’s Tablet and the New Splintered Web

As we all gird for the launch of the Apple Tablet, take a moment to step back and realize what all these new devices are doing. The whole framework of the web (and web marketing) is based around the idea that everything is in a compatible format. Any browser, any computer, any connection, you see pretty much the same thing.

More at Adage

Nielsen Plans for Measurement Service Could Mean More Online Ads

Nielsen’s plan to release online television ratings in conjunction with its regular TV ratings will roll out next fall could have an impact on the number of types of ads that are run on such online content sites as Hulu.

More at MarketingVox

Other News

Newspapers Losing Readership Online Too!

Connected Devices Push TV Everywhere Initiatives Forward

Ad Industry Agrees on Privacy Icon

A Battle Between Old And New Media With A Surprise Ending

Social Media Marketing: How Pepsi Got It Right

More Media and Tech links available on Twitter @merrellligons

Happy  Friday

Google, the company who has generated billions of dollars selling businesses on the merits of search advertising has chosen to promote their new phone the Nexus One using  Banner Ads.

When out selling online advertising we run into clients that make decisions based primarily on performance metrics generated by an ad serving system.  The most common set of statistics we have available to us are Pageviews, Impressions, Clicks, and the Click Rate.  Based on these metrics decisions are made about where to advertise on a website, and how an ad campaign performed.  These metrics are very helpful in general but don’t tell the whole story.

According to an survey by study conducted by Forrester a users interaction with a display ad goes way beyond a click.  People, it would appear interact with display ads in many different ways.  Some people (a

bout 31%) click on ads that are relevant to them, these clicks are recorded and reported back to clients via campaign reports.  What we really don’t have a good way to capture, measure, and report are the interactions that are not clicks.  According to the Forrester survey 27% of users reported that after viewing a display ad they proceeded to search for the product, brand, or company using a search engine.  21% of users reported that they typed the companies web address into a browser (a good argument to include a url in display ads).  9% of users turned to social media tools to investigate the company.

The results of the Forrester study mean that not only are there clear benefits of display advertising that extend beyond the initial click (if any).  It would also indicate that the performance of contextual, search, and social media advertising can be attributed to first being exposed to display advertising.

The results of the Forrester study coupled with the fact that arguably the smartest company on earth believe in the power of display advertising not only say to me that media companies are still in a fairly good position to help customers market their products and services via local media sites but that that old saying “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words” still rings true to this day.

Andrew Keen, the author of The Cult of the Amateur has some interesting views on how Social Media in particular has made our society lazy consumers of media.

Keen suggests, and I agree that if you really want to know what’s going on in the world you have to consume quality content from a number of reliable and certifiable sources.  Once you’ve done your due diligence then you can take that next step and form an opinion based on your findings.

If you want to be media literate, if you want to understand what’s happening in the world, you’re not going to get 30-second nuggets of truth…If you want to know what’s happening in the world, you’ve got to read the New York Times, which is liberal.  You’re got to read The Wall Street Journal, you’ve got to read the Financial Times, you’ve go to read The Daily Telegraph…and then you’ve got to make up your mind for yourself about where the value is.

Having the ability to form an opinion based on extensive consumption of information is a SKILL that many intelligent and wealthy people have come to master and a SKILL that many not so wealthy people and not so well off people choose not to cultivate.  I don’t think this is a new problem, people in general tend to take the path of least resistance and believe what’s they’re told.  People tend to believe that if it’s printed or on TV it must be true.  It’s a vulnerability that many powerful people have used to their advantage throughout history.

Now that technology has allowed everyone to publish content it has become increasingly important that people develop the ability to weed through the terabytes of content to find the truth.

Well it’s that time of year again people. Let’s see you Elf Yourself.

Just saw that the decline in newspaper circulation has accelerated!  As a thirty something former newspaper employee that grew up reading the Press-Telegram I really enjoy the newspaper, sometime.  Man, I’m really feeling for my newspaper peeps right now.

Though I really enjoy the content produced by traditional media companies such as newspapers I’m just not willing to subscribe!  I feel guilty about it because if I don’t subscribe then some journalist will lose their job, they won’t produce the content I like anymore, and that will make me not want the paper even more, it’s a catch 22.  As a matter of fact you couldn’t give me a newspaper subscription right now and believe me the local newspaper has tried.  I have an iPhone, no need for paper anymore.  I have more distractions than when I was a kid so no time for long articles.  I don’t feel like throwing the paper in the recycling bin every day, it’s a pain.

Come on newspaper industry, you have to figure a way to continue to produce news without producing newspapers.  I don’t know how you do that and still pay a Publisher, General Manager, Editor…… a ton of money but I have faith in you, I’m rooting for you.

Earlier this week I was going through my Facebook friends list and realized that I didn’t really know half the people.  Why had I connected with so many people I didn’t really know?  At some point having Facebook friends had become like a collection of marbles, It became more about quantity of connections than quality of the connections.  There’s nothing wrong with having a lot of connections, as a matter of fact having a lot of connections is a good thing especially in business but can the idea be taken too far?  Not only can it be taken too far but I think the ease of online social networks like Facebook to connect people make it easier to get carried away could someday be the undoing Facebook.

There is a theoretical number of social connections that is optimal, it’s called Dunbar’s Number, generally said to be 150.  “These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person”.  Once you get above this number it becomes more difficult to nurture all the relationships.  When your Facebook friends list gets too large you need to start categorizing people by creating customized lists or subgroups, you have to start adding rules such as who’s allowed to see what, you start to lose touch with some people in list because of all the updates.  If you don’t believe me then why are the Lists and Privacy Settings on Facebook so sophisticated?  It’s because at some point we just accumulate too many connections. Once we surpass our optimal number of connections then the entire network becomes tedious to manage, full of irrelevant chatter and ultimately unreliable and irrelevant.

The key to maintaining a meaningful Facebook friend list and a meaningful Online Social Network is to limit your connections to only those relationships that are most meaningful.  Avoid initiating connections just for the sake of seeing your friends list grow.  What would happen if you were only allowed to have 150 connections for free on Facebook then had to pay to have more?  Would you be more selective with the people you choose to connect with or would you just befriend the first 150 people that asked for an invite to connect?  You would probably be more selective about who you chose to connect with, right!  So pay more attention to the quality of your Facebook connections and the relationship behind them.

On the heels of ComScore finding that display advertising creates significant lift in brand-site visitation, Google launches a news tool to help marketers determine what that lift is.

According to webpronews Google has launched a new tool called Campaign Insights that measures the impact of display ad campaigns across the Google Content Network.  The system compares the online habits of a test group and a control group of users after the test group has been exposed to a display ad.

After years of explaining to account reps, ad agencies, and marketing executives spouting that display ads cannot solely be judged by click through rates, ComScore recently found that display ads, regardless of clicks, generate significant lift in brand-site visitation.

I’m so glad that someone like ComScore is making efforts to kill the click-through-ratio.  It is a legacy metric that has far outlived it’s usefulness.  The problem has always been people like me.  While browsing the internet I rarely click on banner ads for two reasons.  1. I don’t trust that they will always send me to the website I’m expecting to go to.  2. I don’t want to leave the content I’m currently reading.  Users like me take a look at the ad, Google the company, and take a look at the site without having clicked on the ad.  Does that mean that the ad worked? absolutely but in the eyes of the account rep, ad agency, or marketing executive the ad didn’t work because I didn’t register a click-through.

Some kind of metric that takes into account savvy and experienced online users like myself has to be developed if online advertising is going to really compete with traditional media for advertising dollars.  If there was a way to really account for the brand lift and increase in website traffic generated by display advertising then you would see increases in CPM rates, increases in dollars spend on online marketing, and improvements in online content, It would be a win for everyone.