HotHouse content director Ray Welling talks to Rebecca Lieb, US vice president for digital research and publishing company Econsultancy. She is also author of the business best-seller “The Truth About Search Engine Optimization”. Rebecca talks about universal search, the importance of fresh online content, and why companies today need to “think like an editor” to gain new business.
Listen to the podcast below.
By Simon van Wyk
As Peer Group Media director Andrew Reid mentioned in an the earlier post “The music in me…”, successful music marketing campaigns are a multi-year commitment, which means there are a wide range of things that need to be measured to gauge the overall success of the venture.
By Simon van Wyk
We recently discussed the merger between art and commerce represented by brand music marketing with Peer Group Media’s strategy and research head Andrew Reid. Here’s a bit more information on a couple of Peer Group’s projects:
By Simon van Wyk
Music is a powerful tool. It can affect people emotionally and physically. Hearing a few bars from a familiar tune can immediately take you back to a time long past, when you first heard that song or when something significant happened while the song was playing.
It’s no surprise that sharing music has emerged as one of the most popular ways people have used the personal realm of social media.
As most people know, music was one of the first media to be transformed by the Internet – think Napster and Kazaa. But just as illegal file sharing led to iTunes, music has moved from a grassroots phenomenon online to one that is becoming entwined with big brands.
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The traffic numbers you see for social media sites can be staggering. But what do those numbers really mean? Besides getting into the conversion rates, it’s crucial to ensure that your data is accurate and that you understand it in the way it was intended to be interpreted. CNET has recently reported on an apparent reporting gaffe involving YouTube and Warner Music Group. The surge in numbers reported by ComScore certainly suggest that the numbers are not as they appear.
Determining the success of word of mouth marketing activities, like measuring social media campaign success, is best done on a case-by-case basis. Importantly, it needs to integrated with the measurement of other marketing activities, particularly since so much word of mouth activity happens offline.
Having said that, there are a few general guidelines to follow when attempting to measure word of mouth. Larry Freed from US website satisfaction agency Foresee Results has identified what he calls the six truths of word of mouth measurement:
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In this month’s HotHouse podcast, Yooster founder Justin Kirby talks about how the company helped Australian natural healthcare company Blackmores create word of mouth for one of its supplements aimed at arthritis sufferers.
Yooster recruited 1,000 people to try samples of the product, and by the end of the campaign 85% were converted to the product – and all of those converts had told their friends and family and had convinced at least one person to use the product. This niche product, which was not suitable for traditional advertising, had a noticeable lift in sales as a result of the campaign.
After all the fear mongering that’s been going around about the hazards of social media, this heartening article in smh points out how iPhone applications, Facebook, Twitter and Google have literally been saving lives in Haiti.
By Simon van Wyk
In the same way that digital technology helped convert the world’s oldest profession into the booming global industry of Internet pornography, word of mouth, probably the oldest of all marketing techniques, has emerged as arguably the most powerful selling tool of the 21st century, thanks to the Internet.
Traditional advertising and marketing is in chaos as people turn their back on advertising messages and turn to recommendations from their friends, via social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter, when deciding what products and brands to buy.
Businesses who can use online tools to cleverly and ethically leverage the power of word of mouth will be able to successfully make the transition from traditional marketing .
Word of mouth marketing online can even be a successful business model in itself. Yelp, a US-based service where people write reviews of restaurants and other local service providers, recently knocked back a US$500 million offer from Google to buy its business.
Justin Kirby, interviewed for this month’s HotHouse podcast, is the founder and CEO of both one of the UK’s first digital agencies and Australia’s word of mouth marketing firm Yooster, and is a globally recognised expert on word of mouth marketing.
HotHouse managing director Simon van Wyk talks to Justin Kirby, founder of Yooster, Australia’s pioneering word of mouth marketing agency. Justin is also founder and CEO of Digital Media Communications, one of UK’s pioneer digital agencies. He discusses the ins and outs of word of mouth marketing, why social media is a misnomer, and the seductive but ultimately counterproductive nature of viral campaigns.
Listen to the podcast below.
