Conferences & Events
Social Media: Peter Hershberg Lists Five Ways To Manage Your Brand Reputation
|
Written By Noah Mallin | July 14, 2008 | Share This
|
|
Reprise Media’s Managing Partner Peter Hershberg has a commentary titled “Five Ways to Manage Your Brand Reputation” in today’s Mediapost Online Media Daily. He was inspired by a recent Business Wire panel discussion on social media to look at how the relationship has changed between marketers and consumers thanks to the open forum of the online world. His five steps give a good blueprint on how to explore the world of social media, what can be learned there, and how it can be used to manage a brand’s reputation. For a lot of marketers who are scared of engaging online this is a valuable set of first steps.
Search Marketing: The Knot.com Ties Online and Offline Strategies Together, but Can They Make This Marriage Last?
|
Written By Noah Mallin | June 26, 2008 | Share This
|
|
Search is a sacred place where online and offline, consumer and brand, meet and join together in holy matrimony. Can I get an “Amen?” Except when it’s more like The Lockhorns and your online and offline messages end up tripping over each other instead of amplifying your brand story. The New York Times ran a story today about plastic surgeons who offer discounts to their customers in exchange for making a video about how great their elective surgery was and posting it on YouTube. So testimonials good, right? No, paid testimonials for Dr. Giggles bad – me no trust. What probably sounded like great online-offline synergy (and yes, I did taste a little three-hour old breakfast when I typed that word) actually has led to bad press, negative blog postings, and hurt the reputation of the doctors involved.
SEM: Blogging from the Personal Democracy Forum – Republicans Have Issues, Democrats Have Questions
|
Written By Noah Mallin | June 23, 2008 | Share This
|
|
The Personal Democracy Forum is a chance every year for advocacy and political groups to find out how the internet can help them connect to their audience. I had the pleasure of attending Day One of the conference today at
SEM: You Say Tomato, I Say Disaster – Crisis Management and Search
|
Written By Noah Mallin | June 11, 2008 | Share This
|
|
Who would have thought that the least healthy thing on McDonald’s menus might end up being the tomatoes? Certainly not Mickey D’s, which ended up on the griddle during this week’s tomato scare.
Check out the peak in search volume on Google Trends for “Tomato Scare” (my new favorite fake band name btw) and “Tomatoes” between June 8th and June 10th:
Events: Reprise Media to Speak on Search and Branding at Conversational Marketing Summit
|
Written By Noah Mallin | June 9, 2008 | Share This
|
|
Those of you lucky enough to be attending Federated Media’s 2008 CM Summit : New Brand Way in New York are in for a treat as Reprise Media’s very own Managing Partner Josh Stylman will be a featured panelist tomorrow at 11:00 AM.
He’ll be on the on the panel Search and Brand: The Missing Link (which I’m told has nothing to do with Sasquatch) moderated by John Battelle, Chairman and CEO, Federated Media.
Live-Twitting the Search Insider Summit
|
Written By Drupad Sil | May 19, 2008 | Share This
|
|
Our very own Brooklahn, aka Reprise Media Director of Marketing Anthony Iaffaldano, is attending the Search Insider Summit, held at lovely Captiva Island till Wednesday. With attendees from across the industry, the summit provides some great debate and discussion on search marketing. Follow all the action from Anthony’s twitter feed or get the digested session notes here.
Super Bowl Insights and $600 Off Admission: Reprise Media at the Online Marketing Summit
|
Written By Sepideh Saremi | January 17, 2008 | Share This
|
|
For the last three years, the team at Reprise Media has spent Super Bowl Sundays with its eyes glued to the TV, and like most of America, we’re just as transfixed by the commercials as we are by the football they interrupt. Unlike the rest of the country, though, we huddle around the TV with our laptops, conducting searches on all the major engines to determine the relative Internet marketing-savvy of companies that are spending millions of dollars on the most premium TV airtime.
Each year, we compile and analyze our results in the Super Bowl Search Marketing Scorecard, an in-depth look at how Super Bowl advertisers are using (or, as we’ve often found, not using) search and online media to capture user attention during the biggest game of the year. For the curious, here are our 2005 (PDF), 2006, and 2007 reports. We’re now preparing ourselves for the biggest Scorecard yet.
So if you’re coming to the Online Marketing Summit this year in San Diego, be sure to catch Reprise Media’s Managing Partner, Peter Hershberg, when he presents our 2008 Scorecard findings on Friday morning, February 22.
And if you don’t have your ticket yet, we’ve partnered with the OMS to offer a limited number of tickets at a big discount. The offer’s good until this Saturday, January 19 and, as they say, seats are limited. Go to www.onlinemarketingsummit.com/reprise/ for more details, and see you in San Diego!
In Good Company at SMX
|
Written By Joshua Stylman | June 7, 2007 | Share This
|
|
Yesterday, I returned to New York after spending a couple of days at the inaugural Search Marketing Expo, hosted by Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman. I wasn’t going to attempt to blog the individual sessions because no one could have done a better job than Barry in doing so at Search Engine Roundtable.
As Danny’s first hosted conference since his breakup with Search Engine Watch, SMX was expected to run like a repeat of its predecessor event, Search Engine Strategies. Though SMX definitely had a “getting the band back together” feel, the event was surprisingly different from recent Search Engine Strategies shows. Like SES, the conference featured excellent content and a strong range of speakers, but the dialogue was noticeably more sophisticated. Whether talking about strategic issues (e.g.: privacy or industry concerns) or tactical methods (quality score, spam penalties, etc), the attendees exemplified a level of passion that has long been lacking from SES. I had equally outstanding conversations with in-house marketers from Fortune 500’s like Time, Inc and CondeNast to more niche companies, but equally savvy folks from organizations such as PlasticSurgery.com. It was very reminiscent of search shows from the early part of the decade, when the audience was familiar and the attendees seemed truly excited about the industry.
As such, the hallways conversations were less about lead generation for exhibiting companies, and more about actual innovations in search. Granted, the competitive lead-driven atmosphere of SES isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is perhaps the inevitable result of industry maturation. Nevertheless, I really appreciated the grass-roots feeling that resonated throughout SMX - if for nothing other than to exemplify that, though the industry is growing, search events don’t have to be corporate.
On that note, I’d like to say Congratulations to Danny, Chris and the rest of the SMX team for a phenomenal debut. And, yes Danny, you can lose the suit…we’re all more comfortable when you’ve got your Vans on.
Blame It (and Everything Else) on Quality Score
|
Written By Peter Hershberg | June 6, 2007 | Share This
|
|
This week’s SMX Conference featured a panel called “Inside the Auction Black Box.” Not surprisingly, most of the panelist’s presentations – and nearly all of the questions from the audience – focused on the search marketing community’s collective inability to understand exactly how Google’s Quality Score (and all the associated mechanics of the ad ranking system) works. Questions ranged from “Why did my ad’s minimum CPC go from $.25 to $5.00 when it was getting a 10% click-through rate?” to “Are my landing pages being crawled?”
What was somewhat surprising, however, was the amount of time spent discussing how the black box impacts the type of support Google provides to its advertisers. And I couldn’t help but walk away from that session feeling that my suspicions had been confirmed - that the account teams at Google either have no better understanding of how their ad ranking system works than the rest of the search marketing world does OR they’ve been advised that, when in doubt, blame the unexplainable on Quality Score.
For example, for the past few weeks we’ve been managing an AdWords campaign for a local advertiser. His keyword list, consequently, is extensively populated with local “tail” terms. Not long after the campaign launched, a high percentage of keywords were deactivated due to low quality scores - which we pretty much expected to happen. To our surprise, however, dynamic keyword insertion wasn’t working for many of the city names that we wanted to feature in the ad creative. The instances when it was working seemed to be completely random.
We reached out to the folks at Google to see if they could help us address the issue. Nearly two weeks after opening a help ticket, we received their formal response:
“You’ll recall that we spoke specifically about keywords like ‘XXXX,’ ‘YYYY,’ and ‘ZZZZ.’ These keywords are not dynamically inserted into your ad text because their corresponding Quality Scores aren’t high enough to qualify for keyword insertion.
Maintaining high-quality ads for both users and advertisers is important to AdWords. Your keyword’s Quality Score reflects your clickthrough rate (CTR), plus your keyword, ad text, and landing page content.
This quality standard can affect your ads and keywords using dynamic keyword insertion. Therefore, if a keyword’s Quality Score is low, the keyword won’t appear in the ad (we’ll insert the default text instead). This ensures that users see relevant keywords in a dynamic keyword insertion ad, so that they continue to see relevant ads overall.
To learn how to improve the quality of your ad text, please visit https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=27648&hl=en_US.”
Needless to say, I wanted to see how Google suggested we could improve the quality of our ad text, so I visited the url they had provided us with.
Unbelievably enough, Google suggests the following:
“Review your keyword list to choose your ad title. Find keywords with the highest number of clicks or impressions. For example, if the keyword phrase ‘online advertising’ is clearly generating the most clicks and impressions in your account, use this term in the title of your ad. This is an effective way of increasing clickthrough rate because users can see immediately that your ad is relevant to their query. Also, any keywords you include in any part of your ad text are automatically highlighted in bold type on Google, when a user enters the keywords as part of their query. This helps draw the user’s attention to the ad.”
So, the best way for me to increase the quality of my ad is by featuring the keyword that the user searched for in my ad copy? That would be great were it not for the fact that I was just told that my ad’s Quality Score wasn’t high enough to justify using dynamic keyword insertion to feature the keyword in my ad copy. How else can I make sure that user keywords are always featured?
Well, according to Google:
“To help ensure that your ad appears for a specific keyword and includes this keyword in the ad text, please manually create the ad. Such ads that do not use keyword insertion are considered ’static text ads.’ The static ad you create can appear with your specific keyword when your dynamic ad is not eligible to appear with that keyword. “
Forgetting for a moment that creating tens of thousands of “static ads” is a complete pain in the ass, I’m having a hard time following the logic here. On the one hand, Google is suggesting that the use of dynamic keyword insertion on ads with low Quality Scores may cause users to see “irrelevant” ads. But if I manually create a static version of the *exact* same ad that was previously deemed irrelevant, users will suddenly find it relevant? Right.
Call it a catch-22, call it poor customer service…or just blame it on Quality Score.
Web 2.0: A Cult of the Amateur?
|
Written By Sepideh Saremi | May 22, 2007 | Share This
|
|
On Friday May 18, Craig Newmark, Robert Scoble, Clay Shirky and Andrew Keen met on stage to debate the merit of today’s “Web 2.0″ revolution at the Personal Democracy Forum. There were a number of notable people in the audience - Jeff Jarvis, the women from Feministing, and dozens more bloggers hidden behind their glowing laptops.
The debate centered around Keen’s controversial, soon to be published book, “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture.” Keen’s thesis is that the internet is causing a decline of professionalism, particularly in journalism, and that the blogosphere is “a kennel of dogs who are all barking and don’t know how to listen.” Our current structures are disintegrating, he said, in the face of these amateur networks.
Not surprisingly, the panel and the room (aka, the kennel manifest) jumped in gleefully after Keen presented his ideas. Shirky, Newmark and Scoble each took turns essentially debunking his book.
Shirky argued that the death of culture isn’t necessarily bad, citing the decline of vaudeville when movies emerged. He used the example of the high cost of advertising being challenged by cheaply created viral marketing, to point out that big-budget advertising is really more about controlling access to a distribution bottleneck than about creativity. Web 2.0 opens distribution, he said, thus helping to “level the playing field”.
Newmark talked about the wisdom of crowds, aka democracy, as an equalizer. When experts aren’t great at their jobs, the crowd fills in the gaps of information. Newmark admitted that there are issues with crowdsourcing problem solving, but maintained that the community will work through any kinks that arise. This is Craigslist’s basic philosophy.
Robert Scoble was much more combative than Shirky or Newmark. He read excerpts from the galley of Keen’s book and called it “a brilliant marketing strategy wrapped in a book.” Keen argued that Web 2.0 can’t be trusted because it doesn’t have any “gatekeepers” (editors, fact-checkers, etc), to which Scoble replied that no one should trust anything - audiences are the new editor, he said. Scoble furthermore pointed out the comments section of any popular blog acts as the proverbial “gatekeeper”, where the crowd is ready to point out and argue any errors. Traditional media doesn’t foster that sort of participation from its audiences, which makes it arguably less accountable than blogs and other collaborative media.
There were a million hands up at the end of this session, but not a single memorable question. It struck me, though, that Keen’s “old-guard” stance is controversial because it’s so rarely addressed. The so-called kennel isn’t even tuned in to the concepts of “amateur” and “professional”, which kind of proves Keen’s point. In the end though, I have to side with the new media advocates - the power of crowd proves itself time and time again in citizen journalism, open source, etc. Web 2.0 helps close the digital information divide, which, though it may displace some of the “old-guard”, is returning power to a global public.
Further Reading
- Battle Between Old and New Media (Down the Avenue)
- Who Do You Trust to Edit Your News? (Union Square Ventures Blog)
- Web 2.0 Good Thing/Bad Thing? (Steve Urquhart)