Lead Generation, Direct Mail, eMail, Word-of-Mouth, Buzz Marketing, Social Media Compared

Much has been written about social media, conversational marketing, buzz marketing, and shared networks. Let's compare social media to direct mail, email marketing, word-of-mouth, referral marketing, lead generation, coupons, and other traditional marketing.

Let's simplify.

What is Social Media?

Wikipedia defines social media as:

Social media are primarily Internet-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and "building" of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories and experiences.

Huh!

Let's try English.

Social media websites enable sharing - Youtube for video; FlickR for photos; Blogger for blogs; Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace for friends; Digg, Stumbleupon for recommendations; Yelp for reviews; ... the list goes on with hundreds of sites.

Many support fan-bases, friend circles, or other viral marketing tools that become distribution channels for your marketing messages.

Over one billion people access the Internet daily. More time is spent on social media websites than email, search, and other Internet uses combined.

It's hot!

What Businesses Want

What's the relevancy of social media? How do we integrate social media with business?

Any business wants reach, brand recognition, and mindshare that generates more orders. If you can reach 100,000 customers, and have a recognized product or service - then, each time you reach the customer with a message, they are more likely to respond. These orders can be online or offline through retail.

Reach, recognition, and mindshare lead to results. It's simple.

Traditional Marketing

Traditionally, businesses gather addresses or email addresses and send ; or pay for flyers, coupons, or ads through publishers who have the mailing addresses. These have been high cost, high friction activities.

• A stamp costs $0.39 and is rising. Total mailing budgets cost $2.00 plus and rising.
• Effectiveness of direct mail is declining. Few open unsolicited mail.

eMail collection and management is high friction, high decay, and dropping in effectiveness.

• Users are reluctant to register and give you an email address. Registration is high friction.
• eMail addresses decay 20% per year. An unmanaged list decays to uselessness in two years.
• Spam blockers prevent bulk mailings - most bulk email don't arrive.
• eMail formatting is limited and complex. No flash, video, or interactive component.
• Few people read the email - deleting without reading.

Not surprisingly, return on investment (ROI) on a direct mail campaign has dropped to insignificance.

Social Media - the Low Friction Approach

Effective use of social media replaces the list building, message sending, and mindshare maintenance functions. A blog is your media archive - with multi-media postings and an RSS subscription mechanism. Your presence at social networks like Youtube, Facebook, or LinkedIn are like magazine racks at popular cafes to reach fans, friends, and interested parties.

• Readers discover you or your products by friending or subscribing. Compared to registration or supplying an email address - these actions reduce the friction to join to clicks - no typing, easy decisions, less commitment.
• Lists are decentralized. Each member maintains their own current address. The connections - whether a friend or a subscription - are maintained automatically. The list stays fresh.
• The lists scale - to millions. With addresses, the cost to mail a million is prohibitive - not scalable. With emails, blocking of bulk mail stops scalability. (ed: Obama leveraged his ad budget with social media to impact 4 million voters per month.)

Like traditional media, the likelihood that a member would see/read a social message is low. However, social media compensates with:

• Scale. Your lists sum to millions of connections.
• Frequency. You can publish 1, 2, ... 10 messages a day - thus increasing the chance that a fan would see your message.
• Format. The message can be video, interactive, musical, or otherwise capture the attention of a fan.

Social Media's Impact on the ROI

The bottomline measures results relative to costs.

Although the creative costs can be the same as traditional marketing, the distribution costs is zero dollars. This means you can send more messages, test messages, and actively manage the message flow with very small investments.

Returns are measurable at each step in the sales funnel.

• Cost per action advertising, such as Google CPC or tEarn CPV, reduces the cost to bring a suspect to your website or blog.
• Low friction capture of prospects increase the likelihood for first stage engagement.
• Frequency of contact builds recognition and mindshare.
• Social referrals from existing customers among your social networks accelerate decisions by prospects to buy.
• Online convenience leads to quicker purchases.

With lower investment and higher returns, social media improves ROI. Most importantly, the solution scales from a few customers to millions.

Conclusion

What is social media? It's an efficient replacement for direct mail marketing.

Every business needs to learn. What do you need?

Two Ways Google Is Trying To Juice AdSense: Ad-Only Search Boxes And Syndication Pages

Ed: Confusion between efforts to increase the supply of ad pages versus click demand. 

Turning on ad units on maps, flash, video suggests shortage of supply where ad demand exists to increase revenues.

Using inventory to run generic Google search and link syndication suggests shortage of clicks. Getting more people to click increases revenues. 

In the recent quarterly report, the Google CFO claimed that we can sell every click. Thus, it's likely that these actions suggest shortage and possibly falling clicks - as reported.

Two Ways Google Is Trying To Juice AdSense: Ad-Only Search Boxes And Syndication Pages

Google turned in healthy third-quarter earnings largely thanks to the fact that Google is finally getting serious about cost containment. But that is only half the story. Going into the expected economic downturn, Google is now turning on every additional source of advertising revenues it can. For instance, so far earlier month it began offering AdSense in Flash games, new AdSense links at the bottom of Google Maps, and introduced click-to-buy buttons on YouTube videos. Now, it looks like it may be testing two more ways to juice those AdSense revenues: an AdSense search box and AdSense ads that link to syndication pages filled with . . . more AdSense ads!

Google might just be testing these, but these efforts are starting to get noticed. One reader who runs a site about Google Chrome, for instance, runs AdSense. But instead of a regular text ad, Google served up the search box at left, inviting people to search for specific ads. In effect, Google is saying, “We are not 100% sure what ads you’d like to see, so why don’t you just tell us?” An ad-only search box is a departure from Google’s past policy of showing the most relevant results, with ads on the side. Although it is clearly labeled, some people might still confuse the AdSense search box with a regular Web search box. Others might find it more helpful than the regular text ad links.

More troublesome is Google Syndication. Another reader, Michael Oxley, noticed that the AdSense text links on his golf site are directing readers not to a product page with information about a “Tiger Woods Caddy” or “Golf Wear,” but rather to a Google Syndication landing page filled with more AdSense ads (see screenshot below). These landing pages are run by Google (they take you to a googlesyndication.com URL). These pages basically syndicate a bunch of other AdSense ads triggered by the keywords in the original ad that was clicked on.

If Google starts using its Google Syndication pages more widely (they’ve actually been around for a while, it seems, and look similar to what are known as Link Units), it could become controversial. That is because they seem to run counter to Google’s own stated policy for landing page quality, a factor that goes into how Google scores each ad. As this NYT article explains:

Google now takes into account the “landing page” that the ad links to, and, for example, gives low grades to pages whose sole purpose is to show more ads...

The Future of Web 3.0 According to Yahoo!

The Future of Web 3.0 According to Yahoo!

Written by Lidija Davis / October 18, 2008 5:01 AM

At the Web 3.0 Conference and Expo in Santa Clara today, Dave Beckett (principal software architect at Yahoo!) and Tom Hughes-Croucher (technical evangelist, Yahoo! Developer Network), answered questions about the recent consumer release of Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) and discussed the company's future plans to open up almost everything.

"The open source, hacker attitude has been part of our culture for so long; now we're opening up the different pieces," Hughes-Croucher told the packed room yesterday. "We're taking data from across our sites and sharing it."

Dubbed the 'rewiring of Yahoo,' Y!OS 1.0 launched this week with the introduction of the social suite. Its strategy focuses on opening up almost everything to developers, including content, traffic, and Yahoo's user base.

Y!OS: What It Means to Developers

When asked what type of data will be available to developers, Hughes-Croucher said that Yahoo's strength is in historical data which can be accessed, assessed, and used to make the user experience better; the caveat of course is: with the users permission.

"If we use this data and grid computing to process the data, we don't need to ask you to import your address book - we already know that information," added Beckett. "At the end of the day though, this is your data."

But it's not just about user data, he says, search data is coming into it as well, via searchmonkey.

To make things simple for everyday developers, the Yahoo! duo told the audience they are concentrating on APIs for sites like Flickr and Delicious. "Of course, there are other technologies, like Yahoo! Query Language (YQL), the next generation of Yahoo Pipes, that brings ease of use to query language," says Hughes-Croucher....