Digitalia | Internet Marketing Blog by Firebelly Digital | Indianapolis Indiana

Video Syndication Made Simple With Tubemogul

I don't need to tell you that the world today is a busy place; anything that kills two birds with one stone is often a welcome relief. When it comes to online video distribution, Tubemogul kills a lot of birds. Simply upload your video to Tubemogul and it will automatically syndicate it to your accounts on YouTube, Revver, Vimeo, Veoh, Google Video, Myspace, Viddler and many more of the Web's top video sharing sites.

Of course any good Internet marketing strategy involves measuring results or ROI. Tubemogul makes this easy with analytics that aggregate video-viewing data from multiple sources to give publishers improved understanding of when, where and how often videos are watched, track and compare what's hot and what's not, measure the impact of marketing campaigns, and share the data with colleagues or clients via Excel spreadsheets.

It's a great way to save time, increase reach, and gain an improved understanding of viewer base.

- Chad Richards

How to Feed the World with your Internet Marketing Strategy

FreeRice is dedicated to ending world hunger by raising awareness and donating grains of rice the UN World Food Program through the FreeRice website. To do this they have developed an impressive internet marketing strategy, which draws traffic to the site via apps and widgets on Myspace, Facebook, blogs and other social media outlets. The website itself has engaging content including a video, simple and easy to understand text and a word game.

What makes it unique is that FreeRice does not ask users to donate money. Instead, the combination of large amounts of traffic to the site and the overall good cause is sold to sponsors. Sponsors buy ads on FreeRice and that money goes to purchase the rice that viewers have earned. What’s even better is that the sponsor ads are small and unobtrusive as to keep the focus of the site on the cause.

Rice is earned through a word game that contains multiple-choice English vocabulary questions. You can set your desired level so that even kids can play and not get overwhelmed with words like “popinjay”. With each correct answer rice is added to your bowl, and as rice is added to your bowl someone is being fed.

Want to see FreeRice in action? Watch the Video:

Julia Yoder

Hip factor & Internet Marketing Strategy: The Mix Tape

Those who know me know that I am passionate about a good mix. I spent hours, days, weeks of my teens and twenties huddled over my stereo, meticulously assembling mix tapes and, later, cd’s for friends, girlfriends and potential girlfriends. If you’ve ever gotten a mix from me, chances are that I like you, a lot. I recently joined a monthly mix club and am excitedly crafting my next mix. Our theme this month is “soundtrack” (I’ll give you a sneak preview: I chose Blade Runner, and the first track is Kraftwerk’s “Neon Lights ”.)

Over the last few years, a whole bevy of online mix utilities have sprung up, allowing and urging users to create their own mixes and posting them for the world to hear. My favorite, because of usability is Muxtape, which we’ve blogged about before. I also approve of Tiny Mix Tapes , and Chad’s favorite, Mixwit.  Beyond being fun and a pleasant way to soundtrack your own life, user-generated content – including music - is always a good thing in this whole web 2.0 world.

It’s not really a big surprise that marketing strategists have caught on to mixes and their ability to communicate two important factors - coolness and community. I got an email from Urban Outfitters today, urging me to check out their new mix. Starbucks has started their own record label, and you can’t get out of one of their stores without running into Mellencamp’s newest release, or a Sonic Youth best of.  But the key thing to making mixes – or any cultural marketing effort – effective is that the content has to be relevant to your listener and customer base.  Ultimately, you have to be prepared to wow them and to really communicate about yourself, just like the kids making mixes on their laptops for their friends.

-Ben

LinkedIn Offers Targeted Advertising Via DirectAds

LinkedIn recently launched DirectAds for users who would like a direct channel for marketing their business, product or service to other LinkedIn users. The process for creating an ad is simple.

The first step involves specifying the audience that will see your text ad based on company size, job function, industry, seniority, gender, and geography. Next you schedule the start date for the ad and select the number of days it should run. Then select your budget and impressions. The current price is $10 per 1,000 impressions – there is a minimum starting budget, however, of $25 and a maximum of $2000. There is no additional charge for "click-throughs."

The second step is the actual creation of your text ad. Simply enter a headline, 2 lines of text and a URL you want viewers to visit and you’re done.

The third, and final, step is payment. Yes, it’s a necessary evil.

Premium Account users get a 50% discount for ads - encouraging the top LinkedIn users to incorporate the new direct advertising option into their internet marketing strategy and get in early on the targeted distribution.

In a unique twist, ads will also include the advertisers name and a link to their LinkedIn profile in hopes of “increasing transparency and visibility into the advertiser.”

- Chad Richards

Social Media: Monitoring Conversations online: Twitter

Online Conversations are happening all around us in social media. That’s the basis of Twitter – people talking, listening, and responding. The “people”, not the brand, are in control. Brands should be listening to these conversations, but the first step is find them.

Twitter has acquired Summize,  a real time search tool for Twitter, allowing users to find conversations on specific topics. Twitter partnered with Summize during the Steve Jobs’ iPhone keynote, drawing fans to Summize to help take the load off of the crash-happy Twitter.

This is how Twitter and Summize like to explain the merger:

Summize has been rebranded Twitter-style. The URL is now search.twitter.com. Best yet, Twitter has inherited five Summize engineers who will hopefully bring some stability to the shakiness that is the Twittersphere. It certainly can’t hurt anything to have 17 engineers over 12. Right?

Summize brings order to the chaos. With the program you can search for a topic and see what people are saying about it right now. Two of my favorite features go along with this:

The yellow bar that tells you how many tweets have been made on the subject since you last refreshed the page:

And how conversations are displayed when you search a member’s username. When I come across a piece of someone else’s conversation that interests me I use Summize to follow the entire thread.

Clearly, this is an important tool for us online branding and internet marketing people to monitor  social media conversations.

Julia Yoder

Blogs and Best Sellers

Besides being an essential part of a good, convergence-based marketing strategy, blogs have become a launch pad of sorts for good writers to take their craft to the next level. While it used to take submitting manuscripts to publisher after publisher to get a book deal, now all it takes is somebody from a publishing house stumbling across your blog. Take, for example, one of my personal daily favorites: Stuff White People Like, who in less than seven months, managed to turn a blog celebrating the banality of whiteness into a $350,000 book offer from Random House.

Needless to say, not every blog out there is worth a publishing deal. Truly, blogs like Stuff White People Like, Earl Boykins (who just turned his blog into a weekly graphic in the Sunday NY Times Arts section) and Indexed  have a combination of hilarious and provocative content, as well as simple and nice design. It’s not just fun and games either, the modern design-minded and crafty folks at Apartment Therapy  turned their home-focused blog into a major book deal with Chronicle Books a couple of months ago.

I’m not saying every blog should be turned into a New York Times best seller, but there are some things bloggers can do to improve their readership, and maybe impress a bored publishing clerk who’s surfing the web on company time. We recommend these steps first:

1.    Keep your content regular and readable
2.    Try to get people to subscribe to your blog, through readers, rss or emails
3.    Authentic Inbound links, whether through bloggers quoting you leaving comments on others’ blogs with links back to your blog.
4.    Publish your blog on your facebook, Myspace, Twitter and Ning sites
5.    Incorporate analytics on your site to track where readers are coming from.

Note, these are standard, by-the-book approaches, but they work. Try them out on your blog and see how close you are to a best seller…

-Ben

Must-Reads for Social Media

We can all agree that social media is ever-changing, evolving, and here to stay. Staying on top of your Internet marketing strategy can be an exhausting feat, requiring you to shift through endless articles, blogs, and beta versions of the newest thing.

The president of Twist Image Agency, Mitch Joel, has decided to help us out with seven must-read social media-centered blogs. We think it’s a solid list:
Chris Brogan
Seth Godin
GrokDotCom
How to Change the World
ReadWriteWeb
TechCrunch
Web Strategy

At Firebelly we are always monitoring our feeds to stay in-the-know. Here are a few blogs that top our list:
PR Squared
Mashable
Influential Marketing Blog
Interactive Marketing Professionals
Proactive

Watch for updates as our list evolves!

Tell us - what are you reading?

Julia Yoder

SEO meets SMO in the Middle with Me.dium

In-browser social network Me.dium has expanded its services this week with the launch of Medium Social Search. It pulls up Yahoo results as part of the company's recently announced BOSS platform, but clicking on “I Feel Social” reveals social results from the 2 million Me.dium users, including:

Crowd Rank: a measurement of how many users have endorsed the content
Velocity: how hot the page is, as determined by how fast users are hitting it
Crowd Level: The current level of interest in the page, as determined by how many people are on it
Recent Activity: How much activity has been on the page in the past few days
Average Visit Duration: How long people typically spend on the page

Whereas the top results on traditional search engines are fairly static, the results in Me.dium social search are dynamic – moving up and down based on Me.dium attention data from users.

Is this going to replace more traditional search engines like Google and Yahoo? Not at all. But it can be a nice supplemental search tool if you’re looking for something a little different and it provides an additional reward to those who have put effort into social media optimization (SMO).

- Chad Richards

Web Traffic: site downtime realities

Fascinating piece in the NY Times by Brad Stone spurred by increasing service interruptions associated with websites and the service they provide). Alex Payne, 24, ironically an employee of Twitter, has even launched a site - www.downforeveryoneorjust me.com (like is it down for everybody or just me?).

Some reactions:

• Social networks are almost always free for users (even LInkedIn and Naymz are free for the basic membership). Losing your Facebook access for a few hours is not traumatic to any Facebook user I’ve talked to.

• Deep brand loyalty has saved Twitter from any significant migration towards other services (although they exist) and in fact has created noise for the brand online regarding the collective misery that its users experiences – aka an emotional relationship, although not the most highly desired form.

• When it comes to businesses that depend on web traffic to monetize their very existence – it’s a different story (especially from the business owner’s standpoint) – that’s lost revenue. Perhaps this would play into the social network’s advertising contracts from an uptime standpoint. Not to mention people still flock to Yahoo and Amazon despite any service interruptions from the past.

• Web traffic matters and ensuring higher standards should be developed. I don’t think service interruptions are significant enough to really cause concern from an internet marketing standpoint.

Internet Marketing Strategy - User Generated Content

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park will be turning 75 next year and to celebrate they have created a website dedicated solely to this event.

The website features history, news, and a calendar with virtual tours displaying the activities planned for the upcoming year. They’ve taken their Internet marketing strategy even a step further however, creating an interactive Family Album, which mixes memoirs and technology to create a unique social aspect. By using the user-generated content approach, the site will hopefully have fresh content - exactly what the ‘spiders’ are looking for. Although it’s not clear what the motivation is for users to post their family photos.

In the Family Album users can upload and share their own stories and photos of their experiences at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Once a story is submitted, an email with a link is sent to the author. The author can then forward this link to their friends, increasing site visits and raising awareness of the upcoming 75th anniversary. 

In addition, this UGC approach will bring a high level of personalization, authenticity, collaboration, and participation (people commenting on each others photos).

Julia Yoder

Website Design Matters

In a world filled with technicians that use templates and egocentric "artists", I've never been more convinced of the importance of good design.

On one hand, there are people who understand templates. The difficulty is the same as using stock photography. Its accessible to anyone who can pay. Its a cookie cutter approach. Its cheap, its fast, and rarely memorable. These technicians are adept at assembly and well matched for situations characterized by lower budgets, lower expectations, and vanilla-ism.

On the other hand, some designers view the web as a canvas for their talent resulting in personal agenda triumphing over client needs.

While artists have few boundaries, website design must help solve problems such as extending core brand values, providing engagement value, bringing intuitive navigation to help guide people with varied personas, and ultimately working in concert with architecture, functionality, and usability, as well as generate actions (downloading, form filling, chatting or calling). Not to mention working within boundaries of time, budget, technology, etc. etc. etc. With a painting you can go in a direction you feel like and it makes no discernible difference. With web design, its business and creativity.

And then there's the small consideration that most marketing, advertising, and PR firms neglect - Internet marketing. Lovely sites that nobody visits are useless. But thats another story.

- Duncan Alney

FLASH SITES NO LONGER AN SEO NO-NO?

When not overly obnoxious and annoying, Flash websites can be great. They allow for rich, interactive Web experiences that standard HTML and CSS can't always muster. The problem, however, is that Flash sites are mostly invisible to search engines - until now.

This week Adobe announced that it is providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! in order to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines.

Google also announced that it has launched a "Flash indexing algorithm" which will result in better search results.

Searchable Flash you say? Looks like Flash sites will no longer be a search engine optimization no-no. Web developers and designers rejoice!

- Chad Richards

A New Set of Metrics

I enjoyed a seminar by PRSA last week that featured Bob Pearson, Vice President of Conversations and Communities at Dell. Some on the points here are worth mentioning, especially since I've been asked by a couple of readers to comment on how to measure the conversations and community development online. As Bob put it, this is clearly a "new set of metrics" applicable to the Internet in general and social media in particular.

Awareness and Activity: While there are many factors to awareness, the most obvious are visits and downloads. These are a must.

Conversations: The key indicators here are comment to post ratio, screen penetration, raw word increase/decrease; and google screen analysis.

Community: Of course this implies a deeper commitment/relationship that necessitates frequency of return visits, frequency of comments within visitors, and idea generation.

In an economy characterized by downsizing, down-sourcing, cut backs and general gloom - Internet marketing presents the opportunity to raise awareness, architect conversations and build long term relationship that are all measurable. Hence the reason Internet marketing budgets are increasing despite the economy.

- Duncan Alney

Online Tunes, Great Causes and Marketing Genius

Bono, lead singer of U2 and world social leader, might be the best marketing mind out there. This week he unveiled a digital music service, yet unnamed, which will serve to raise money for AIDS relief in Africa, and provide exclusive tracks from a star-studded rolodex of rock stars and up-and-coming bands. For a $5 monthly fee, users will receive three exclusive mp3’s each week, and other, more visual content that accompanies each track. Think of it as iTunes with a conscience.

Leveraging celebrity to create community seems to be Bono’s forte in the last few years, and it’s working. From a marketing standpoint, it follows along closely with Seth Godin’s Five Easy Pieces of effective marketing, by using a product in trying to create interaction and connection among customers. The end result being the creation of a community of what Godin calls, “A band of brothers” or a “tribe” of people who want to belong to a community, and use a product or a cause to rally behind.  Really, what (Red) has created is a new Social Media Application.

Chided in the past for spending millions of dollars to raise a million dollars, (Red) has come up with a plan that puts real money into solutions for the AIDS epidemic. Plus, with artists already on board like Emmylou Harris and Elvis Costello, as well as promises for “Crackerjack Surprises” each month with the service, even this music snob can wrap his arms around it. Plus, supporting the efforts to distribute more effective and available drugs to combat the AIDS epidemic in Africa is a long overdue, and necessary venture.

-Ben

VIRAL VIDEO REVEALED TO BE AD FOR GATORADE

Have you seen the “Ball Girl” video on YouTube? A ball girl runs down the left field line at a minor league baseball game and does an unbelievable jump to catch a fly ball. The video has been viewed over 2 million times on YouTube, featured on Good Morning America, CNN, and was a most-shared video on Break.com.

Now the clip has been revealed to be a hoax – or rather – an Internet marketing campaign and ad for Gatorade. The company’s name is never mentioned – but if you look closely you will see that when the ball girl sits down after the amazing catch there’s a bottle of the popular sports drink by her feet.

On the one hand, it’s incredibly subtle, but almost any time a brand enters into pop culture discussions it’s bound to benefit – and this kind of exposure and interest is, well, “priceless.” On the other hand, authenticity-wise – I’m not so sure. What do you think?

- Chad Richards

Local Grocery Store: Brand Facelift Review

I’ve lived in Indianapolis, in a little village called Broad Ripple, for about 6 years and I absolutely love this area for the unique shopping, small coffee shops, and the great restaurants. Not to mention that I can walk or bike to anything that I need. There is a small Kroger grocery store right in the heart of the village. I’ve gone there many times, but only if I absolutely HAD to! This store has never really had a selection of fresh foods and I’ve even seen dust on canned products. The staff was always less-than-friendly, but my least favorite feature was the funky smell that used to hit you when you walked in. It smelled like an old refrigerator that had not been cleaned, ever. So my friends and I referred to this store as the “Moscow Kroger” for obvious reasons.

Recently Kroger has decided to give this store a facelift and what a difference it’s made. They’ve knocked down a few walls, brightened it up, reorganized the shopping experience – volia its a pleasant shopping experience. By making over this location it’s changed the vibe completely. I can easily get my grocery items and I’m not alone – traffic is up! There are more people shopping in there then I can ever remember seeing before the changes. I also dig that instead of the numbers that light up to tell you the check stand is open they placed Monon Trail signs (a popular nearby greenway for walking and biking) that will light up to tell you the checker is open.

Today I went to grab some lunch at Kroger and they had a Jazz Trio playing in the entry way and they were barbequing some chicken outside. When I got back to the office I wanted to see if there was anywhere on the Kroger site or a social media forum for sharing positive thoughts on this location. Although there is no provision for comments about this particular location, there is an area that you can sign up called My Kroger that allows you to register and receive the weekly ads/special coupons for your local area stores. Who could’nt use a discount on food these days, right? So, I went ahead and signed up for the weekly email updates for the ads and discounts.

Given the store facelift. I’ve now affectionately been referring to the store with it’s other moniker - K-Roger - instead of “Moscow Kroger” AND I’ve made sure that my friends and co-workers all know that is the place to shop.

Interesting how a large national corporation hasn’t harnessed the power of community (and specifically the Broad Ripple community) online to drive traffic to its updated store and build relationships with its customers.

-Angela

Nonprofit Marketing Solutions

Before I joined the amazing Firebelly, I spent about a year and a half as a volunteer in the world of fundraising for a local nonprofit, ELI. I took classes and sat through seminars offered through IU’s School of Philanthropy. I wrote grants and solicited foundations and corporations to help ELI expand their capacity. I learned a lot about raising money the hard way, by begging for it! I learned how competitive the nonprofit world is and how hard it is for young organizations to differentiate themselves from their, dare I say, competition. I know that ELI was way ahead of the pack in their use of social media, but I came away from my whole experience with a sense that the nonprofit world is behind, way behind, on this whole internet marketing strategy thing.

The fine folks at Getting Attention Blog understand that nonprofit organizations are no different than any other company or corporation. They need to get themselves in front of their constituents, the same way that traditional businesses need to get their customers’ attention.  I would recommend that NP’s take a convergence-based approach in marketing. Really, a nonprofit’s marketing shouldn’t look a lot different for a not-for-profit as it should for a traditional business. It should have room for emerging media: social media, blogs, seo, analytics, rss feeds, and even twitter.

My recommendations are simple:
- Use traditional media to drive people online
- build emotional relationships online
- Use a variety of tools to develop content, communicate regularly, collaborate, and use a rich media approach (photos, video, audio).

Plus, most local organizations that I’ve worked with are driven by passion and passionate people. What a better marketing tool than harnessing passion and good work?  George Wilhelm says, and I agree, “Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.”

-Ben

Making Sense Of Online Conversation Chaos

As we've raised our flag on the continent of social media - I've had some interesting encounters with people professing the new tool du jour (last year it was Second Life, this year it seems to be Twitter). While tools are useful and should part of an overall internet marketing strategy, I'm convinced that social media mirrors real life unlike any other form of marketing. It's about engagement. Forget the pitch - old school PR people. Forget the war talk of target audiences and blitzes. Think authentic conversations and relationship building. Think emotion.

These conversations are creating and destroying reputations, making news travel faster with many more points of view, and changing the dynamics of information absorbtion. With the proliferation of visual, app heavy, data rich mobile devices, this will only increase. Being aware of all the conversations isn't something most companies are doing. Even fewer companies are actually participating in the conversations. Save a few dollars this year and you're going to miss out on the conversations (that you're competitors might be tuned in to and participating in). While you can't lead every conversation, or even necessarily be a part of it - my recommendation is to at least be aware that these conversations are happening or that they have happened.

There are lots of tools that can help monitor these conversations - alerts, specialized search for blogs and microblogs, RSS feeds, and more. There are a lot of larger companies that, out of necessity, will have to move slower - legal, strategy, and corporate communications people that will over rule the internal evangelist in the know. And this will cause reputations to be enhanced or compromised.

But beware the quick fix. Its a social media savvy word we live in. That means you - big budget PR firms and big budget Ad cats. This isn't a one way or even two way street - its chaotic conversations everywhere, all the time. And, people or companies that break the social protocols with short sighted approaches will sacrifice brand equity.

The only approach that I believe in is a strategic approach that supports overall brand ideals and extends the core values online.

- Duncan Alney

Social Networking on Cell Phones Continues To Climb

Mobile life is blooming. It's the cell phone, not the personal computer, that is the constant companion for today's hip and socially networked – and nearly 50 mobile social networking companies have emerged globally to help cater to our need to message and communicate while on the go.

eMarketer forecasts that over 800 million people worldwide will be participating in a social network via their mobile phones by 2012, up from 82 million in 2007.

In addition to the growing audience, marketers are drawn to mobile social networking because, teamed with a mobile marketing campaign, it creates a unique context in which to promote their goods and services. It eliminates delay in response time (people don’t have to be on their computers at home to react) and adds the immediacy of sharing with friends – a powerful marketing proposition.

Because very few people leave home without them, cell phones have become, and will remain, the most immediate and personal way to connect with consumers – no matter where they roam.

- Chad Richards

Make it Easy to Navigate

CNN had a story, today, on a little Parisian teashop called Chajin (the name means tea master). The report pointed out that the little business gets half of its business from its online store. Knowing that my husband is very interested in tea, I decided to check out the website. Understandably, the default language is French but it was hard work finding the language translation button – I found it after looking for several seconds and trying a couple of buttons unsuccessfully. Finally, I finally saw a tiny blinking American flag link to change the language to English.

 

I consider myself to be a pretty savvy online navigator and I was having trouble, which makes me think I am not alone. 

The point is that websites shouldn’t make their audiences work so hard. It’s a respect issue, but more importantly – it makes good sense to not risk losing a potential lifetime customer because of bad design. In our instant gratification world, people want to be engaged instantly and navigate the site to find the info they are looking for quickly. 

The Firebelly credo places heavy emphasis on design – engagement value and intuitive navigation being some of the key components. Besides, the website is an online manifestation of the real world entity. Thus, there are no templates or cookie cutters - everything is customized to each individual company. We’ve been accused of “monetizing our client’s needs poorly”. You’re right. But it’s our long-term relationships and good design that matter to us. That’s our secret sauce. Pun intended.

We’re not a group of nerds or a group of design snobs. We’re really a mixture of design, pop culture geeks, techies, and people that like to do business with respect and passion. This cocktail approach to team building has given us a useful fluency that we’ve extended into planning for engagement on other web-based planes – social media! And so we’ve added a dash of Search Engine Optimization and some analytics – so we can measure results. Just having an online presence is not enough anymore – passionate engagement is the only way to win and keep customer’s hearts and minds.

-Angela

Digital Video Tip: Vimeo Widget

Vimeo now offers a time-saving video widget for Facebook, Hubnut, Badge, and OS X Dashboard. When you upload your videos to Vimeo it will automatically add the clips to your specified website.

Adding the Vimeo widget:

1. Go to www.vimeo.com and log in
2. Click on “Tools” and then “Make Widgets”
3. Select which platform you want to use
4. Once the widget is on your site don’t forget to link it to your Vimeo account!

Once you have the widget linked back to your Vimeo site it will automatically update when you upload a new video – syndicating that video podcast even further and saving you from the hassle of having to upload the same video to multiple sites multiple times. Try it on your site!

- Lain Ewing

A Million Dollar Idea

Recently, I was doing some general background research on Internet marketing strategy when I came across a link for the Million Dollar Homepage. Having never heard of it before, I was quite intrigued; in letting my curiosity get the better of me, I stumbled upon a small work of marketing genius - this is how I interpreted it to be anyway.

For those who don’t know, milliondollarhomepage.com was the brainchild of 21-year-old UK student, Alex Tew. Tew came up with the idea while “brainstorming ideas to make money for uni” (‘uni’ meaning university). The big idea being that every pixel has a link behind it and costs a dollar.

The results have been phenomenal. He launched the site in late 2005 and by January 2006, the final pixels had been sold - bringing Tew’s revenue from the project to a little over his intended goal of one million dollars.

The story represents three important concepts regarding internet marketing – (a) monetization (b) sheer potential and (c) the viral quality - all of course for a good idea that is well executed. Here is a young man, the same age as myself, who was able to take nothing more than a good idea and turn it in to a million dollars. The Internet truly is the “land of opportunity” where anyone with a good idea, enough drive, and a little bit of luck can make a million dollars…or more.

- Jon Collier

ALLTOP: AGGREGATION WITHOUT THE AGGRAVATION

Alltop gathers the best suggested blogs and news sites from the most active social web users and compiles links into a simple, clean discovery space. The headlines and first paragraph of the five most recent stories from forty to eighty sources for 90+ topics are displayed - kind of like"online magazine rack" refreshed every ten minutes.

It's a great site for the 99% of Internet users not using RSS feed readers and for those, like me, who are often annoyed and overwhelmed by them.

And thanks to our blog readers and their support, Digitalia is now featured on Alltop as one of "all the top" sites on the web about social media. We can even put one of these sassy badges on our blog now:

To see Digitalia, as well as a list of other great related feeds I recommend checking out socialmedia.alltop.com. Thanks again to our readers for their support!

- Chad Richards

Press Release Grader

HubSpot Internet Marketing has created Press Release Grader – a tool to measure the effectiveness of your press releases.

You simply copy and paste your press release into the given area and are instantly returned your grade out of 100, general statistics such as word count and readability, suggestions, link analysis and a word cloud. The information is both displayed on the website and e-mailed to you. While I don’t know how effective a piece of software can be at grading press releases, it was interesting to see how my releases measured up. In creating this tool, HubSpot is also maintaining a good example of how to up your SEO by providing links to articles on their website, the ability for you to easily link back to your press release grade and instructional YouTube videos.

Watch the video to learn more about Press Release Grader.

Julia Yoder

Branding and Campaign Strategy

Warning, warning! Political content ahead! No candidate endorsements follow! But Firebelly Marketing does endorse the practice of voting!

If you want to watch branding in action and brand transformation in process, election cycles provide excellent case studies. This year’s presidential campaigns, now 18 months old, have demonstrated the necessity as well as the savvy of political marketing. One of the core brand elements are slogans. You might even say that political slogans are essentially brand statements – catchy, clear, and concise statements about an entity’s values and work. Just like brand statements, slogans and logo reveal a lot about the core values of the candidate, and when slogans change, they also suggest how malleable their message (and their core values) really is.

Over the last week, John McCain’s campaign implemented a new slogan: “A leader we can believe in.” Three months ago, his branding statement was: “The American president the American people have been waiting for.” Why the change? Perhaps because Barack Obama  talks about: “Change we can believe in” for almost a year, and it’s working for him politically. In the industry, we call it “benchmarking” when someone adopts a competitor’s best practices, with the aim of increasing performance. Some might call it copying, but the ending is the same.

Benchmarking can be great, as long as the message, image or content of your competitor matches your own core values and work. It needs to be authentic. But in a political campaign, candidates from dueling parties might be better served by striking out with an entirely new message, setting them apart from the competition. That’s why understanding your core values is a critical element to working on your brand. At Firebelly, we believe that your marketing strategy should rely on who you are, not who your competitors are. Yes, you want to understand competitors and colleagues and, ideally, to learn from their successes.

Maybe McCain’s camp could have learned a little something from Judy Garland, who said, “Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.”

Emerging Media: Mobile Marketing Watch

As part of keeping an eye on emerging media, and the significant growth in mobile marketing acceptance, here are some interesting facts from Cellit Marketing.

• 85% of the U.S. consumers are using mobile phones: 85% of Generation Y, 82% of Generation X, 80% of Baby boomers
• 42.8 million Americans participate in mobile marketing campaigns (as of June 2007) SMS based interactive campaigns experience response rates up to 70%
• Over 241 Billion text messages were sent in 2007. This year it is expected to reach over 300 billion!!
• 89% of all major global brands will market via mobile by 2008
• Mobile marketing has a 95% read rate. Paper advertising 2%, and email 8%

The point is that a convergence based marketing mix should have emerging media - and room for - mobile marketing.And to lighten things up a little - here’s an interesting video on the evolution on the mobile phone. How far we've come:

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FLICKR TIP: EDIT PHOTOS IN ONE PLACE (and save time)

Want to save time editing your photos and do it all in the same place? Check out the new photo-editing feature called Picnik. Here are 3 easy steps:

1) Log in to Flickr
2) Upload your picture
3) Click on the icon "edit this photo" above the photo

Once you've done that, Flickr will take you to Picnik. Not only can you crop and edit, but you can also color correct, change exposure, and, yes, you can use histograms. This feature is a time saver and lets you edit in one place! Check it out.

- Lain Ewing

More Evidence Social Media Spending Will Rise

According to Eloqua's State of the Marketer report, more than three-quarters of marketers surveyed said they will increase their social media spending during the next three years. 74% will spend more on email marketing and about two-thirds will increase their mobile marketing spending.

Respondents were strong on online ad spending overall - nine out of 10 said they would continue to increase their direct online ad budgets. The spending increases are likely to come at the expense of print ads, since 55% of respondents said they will decrease print ad spending in the next three years.

I believe this confirms that social media and mobile marketing efforts are indeed on the minds of many marketers who deem them to be crucial components of any successful marketing campaign - both now and in the future. It also serves as somewhat of a reminder that " good ol' fashioned" email marketing is neither dead nor being ignored.

What do you think?

- Chad Richards

Social Network for Book Lovers

As part of being an analyst of internet marketing strategy, I am constantly looking for apps that demonstrate usefulness and stickiness mixed with community, connection (with other users) and choice.

I have always wished there was an iTunes for books, especially when I finished the last book I read THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy. I was not really sure where to go after reading this book.  There is Amazon.com but I have never found their recommendations of any value.  I stumbled upon a website that ranked the most beautiful websites; there was a site that caught my eye, Shelfari.com. This site design is very user friendly and more appealing than myspace. Shelfari lets you add and review all the books you have read - displaying them on your profile in a very cool bookshelf – along with your ratings and review comments.
 

You can connect with other people that have read and or reviewed the same books you have.  Shelfari also offers the opportunity to “hunt down” the other books they have read.  I have only been a member of Shelfari for a few days but I’m excited to explore and find some like-minded people that will help me find my next books.

Angela

Internet Marketing Strategy: The world is blog-crazy

Everyone these days has a blog. It’s our public journal, the new marketing tool, the electronic forum opportunity, and an extension of our public persona. Marketing gurus evangelize about the importance of businesses using blogs. Part of Firebelly’s strategy for clients is to incorporate a balance of all kinds of social media to effectively get in front of people on the internet, and not be too overly concentrated in one area. We love blogs, but we have clients who don’t. The reason most often cited is that there’s millions of blogs, and nobody’s reading them. It’s true, in a way, there’s lots of competition.

The amazing and talented folks at Creating Passionate Users agree and provide some key guidelines. My favorite blog, EarlBoykins Blog, incorporates CPU’s every method of competing for attentions. Named after the shortest man in professional basketball, and a man who has spent his career staring up at his competition while taking them head on. EarlBoykins Blog is provocative, visual, challenging, stimulating, content changes daily. Plus, who else out on the interwebs is reviewing records and concerts using charts and graphs?

Besides content-based thought leadership - blogging has other benefits too, like improving your site’s search engine optimization and building web traffic (for your website). It allows you to have a rapid fire place to share news with your stakeholders. Ultimately, blogging helps articulate the “brand”, and the best way to compete with the millions of others is to be passionate, and be yourself. Internet Marketing Strategy, according to Firebelly Marketing, is about building emotional relationships with your customers - making them feel connected to your business.