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.
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:
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.
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.
By Simon van Wyk
How do you measure the impact of blogger engagement and other social media activities? Because you’re able to collect more hard data for online activities than for traditional marketing activities, there is an inherent assumption by management that online magically provides an answer to the old dilemma of “Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the problem is, I don’t know which half.”
The thing is, it’s not nearly as simple as that. Although a lot of data is collected, it still needs to be harvested, organised and interpreted. And if you want to express the data in terms of return on investment (ROI), you need to be able to match the ROI framework used in other parts of the business.
By Simon van Wyk
Following on from last week’s post about blogger engagement, here are summaries and/or links to some case studies of successful blogger engagement programs and campaigns. We’ll also post House Party’s case studies over the coming months.
HP: (Case study summarised from the book “Digital Strategies for Powerful Corporate Communications”) The computer behemoth enjoyed a 10% increase in PC sales in one month simply by leveraging the blogging community to promote its HDX Dragon computer system in 2008. HP sent a new computer system to 31 bloggers it had identified as influential to their business, offering to let them give the computers away in competitions among their readers.
