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How NOT to Get Brandjacked on Google+

Posted on June 17, 2013 by skulkaew

Sometime last week, a few of us at the studio were wondering how we might procure a vanity URL to replace the 21-digit ID our Google+ profile currently has.

The thought process being that if we had something more manageable like plus.google.com/bravodesigninc, it’d be easier to share on assets (e.g., on printed materials like business cards, stationary, etc.) or over the phone.

After some digging, I found that Google rolled out vanity URLs for verified pages in August of last year, but that they weren’t made available to all G+ users. I’m late to yet another party. Initially, Google had indicated that it “should be available to many more of your business pages over time.” Ten months later, that isn’t really the case, even for household brands.

Coca-Cola (989,781 G+ followers) and The Coca-Cola Company (4,774 G+ followers) each have their vanity URLs. Pepsi (703,818 G+ followers) does not.

When searching for PepsiCo, I found this:

And since people and pages are grouped together in +search, it goes on and on and on.

Six sites, three “official ones.” Seems legit. I’ll get to that momentarily. Using Google, I searched for the Pepsi Company which populated a G+ profile in the site’s metadata/link section.

Here it is:

Womp, womp. Each of the unofficial “official” pages has more followers.

What threw me for a loop is that when I went back to see if I had set up the Bravo Design, Inc. G+ page correctly, I found that I can create what seems like an unlimited number of Google+ profile pages despite the fact that a verified listing already exists with a vetted phone number that corresponds to our local listing. Not cool, Google. I can only imagine that the ability for random people to create profiles using your brand name at will would be a vulnerability.

Unlike Twitter, which allows parody accounts, Google has a ban on all pseudonyms used on G+ profiles, and they’ll suspend you if they catch you. Tell that to the 300 PepsiCo profiles.

Brandjacking happens when “someone acquires or otherwise assumes the online identity of another entity for the purposes of acquiring that person’s or business’s brand equity.” An example of such would be if I hypothetically pretended to be 50 Cent, borrowed [read: stole] part of his following and used it draw attention to my own personal causes (e.g., distributing my mix tape).

Notably, it has happened to Starbucks, Nestle, Exxon and British Petroleum.

Bank of America was infamously brandjacked on G+ when a satire page was created advertising its “new” slogan: “We took your bailout money, and your mortgage rates are going up.” While obviously a fraud, it stayed online for a week before being pulled. I don’t know how that could have possibly happened. But reputation risks aside, knock off pages could include redirects for phishing purposes or to spread malware.

We recommend verifying your G+ business page. All you have to do is add a G+ badge or snippet of code to your page, request a PIN if you have a Local page and fill out an application online. It’s pretty painless. This won’t stop someone from setting up G+ pages with your name, and it won’t guarantee you the option to claim a vanity URL in the near future, but it’ll help differentiate your verified page from an imposter if both come up in a search query.

Just for kicks: another site that has a vanity URL is K-Mart. Its competitors, Target and Walmart, do not. In-and-Out, Burger King, McDonald’s and Jack in the Box don’t. Wendy’s does. Wendy’s. There is no justice in this world. Just kidding. Kind of.

To follow us on Google+ and/or come up with ideas to create an imitation Bravo Design, Inc. profile: click here.

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The Attribution Problem

Posted on May 6, 2013 by skulkaew

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” –John Wanamaker

Throughout the history of advertising, drawing a line between an asset and a sale has been notoriously difficult, but the Internet changed that. In its infancy, it offered a distinct advantage over its older, offline predecessors in the form of measurability. But despite the enormous progress made, the online advertising industry continues to face several challenges including a critical dilemma known as the attribution problem.

Neil Mason, SVP of Customer Engagement at iJento, writes, “Marketing attribution is both a business problem and an analytical problem. The business problem is simple: ‘How do I best spend my budget?’ The analytical problem is a bit more complex: ‘How do I develop a methodology that delivers some valuable insight to solve the business problem with the data, time, and budget available?’”

Currently, the last impression or click served is attributed as being the tipping point in a purchase and fails to credit other touch points thus discounting the impact of previous ad impressions made previously. By ignoring the contribution of previous ads, the current system devalues high impact ads and obfuscates the impact of social media on downstream conversion.

Think about the last time you saw a movie. What coaxed you into seeing it? Was it a billboard, a trailer, something you heard on the radio or maybe a mention on Facebook? In reality, all of those touch points probably contributed towards you making that decision in part. With regards to the attribution problem, only the last interaction is credited with a conversion. If that were the Facebook ad, should movie studios then decide to allocate more of their ad spend towards Facebook ads? Well no, not necessarily at least.

Last November, IBM issued its annual Black Friday Report analyzing sales trends and year over year changes on a percentage basis. In 2012, online sales for doomsday Black Friday increased 17.4%, contributing to a 20.7% overall surge in sales. Pretty surprisingly, it goes on to say that Twitter delivered 0% of referral traffic and Facebook just 0.68%. And finally that between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube, the social sites generated 0.34% of all online sales on Black Friday, down just over 35% from 2011.

But before you abandon your ad spend on the aforementioned social media services, you should probably take the report with a gain of salt. Because it doesn’t disclose the methodology used to compile the results, it’s difficult to assess how significant the data is without the proper context. Curiously, it’s worth noting that Black Friday is a day where retailers push to get people into stores, not make purchases online. It would’ve been interesting to see follow up data from Cyber Monday in a second report, but it doesn’t seem as if that was taken into consideration.

That said, this doesn’t mean that Twitter or any of the other social media sites aren’t driving referral traffic or that they don’t have the capacity to influence, neither of which is true obviously. What it does indicate is that there are serious issues in tracking and quantifying downstream conversion when it should clearly demonstrate a return on investment (ROI) to businesses willing to shell out precious advertising cash.

In a Forbes article on “Search vs. Display Advertising,” Michael Blanding writes, “Faced with this conundrum, most companies allocate their advertising budgets in a an ad hoc manner—throwing money into whatever bucket they perceive to have most influenced past purchase decisions leading firms to overspend on some actions and thus waste money and/or under spend in others.” Blanding goes on to say, “The only way to truly determine the efficacy of display ads versus search ads is to watch the effects over time, and to see how modifications in budget allocations change customers’ purchase decisions.”

That’s exactly what Sunil Gupta, a professor of business administration at Harvard would do in a working paper titled, “Do Display Ads Influence Search? Attribution and Dynamics in Online Advertising.” Through the use of persistence modeling, Gupta along with Pavel Kireyev and Koen Pauwels were able to figure out the ROI on search and display ads for every $1 spent by a major US bank in new customer acquisition. By first calculating the expected effect of advertising and later using a series of regressions over time to isolate the effects of display and search ads, the three were able to see how changes in ad budgets change those expectations over time and optimize ad spend.

Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of us don’t have Harvard business school professors available to fine tune our ad budgets or expertise in advanced statistics, so we’ll have to tough it out on our own. But going back to Mr. Blanding’s article, you’ll have to tinker with your ad budget to figure out where you should be spending ad dollars and where you should taper back. Don’t be discouraged if ads fall flat. That’s really just the nature of the beast.

Have questions? Leave a comment in the box below or fill out a contact form here. We would be happy to work with you to create a plan that best serves your business by maximizing your ad dollars.

Photo Credit: Inc.com, IBM

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Tips on Avoiding the Pitfalls of Content Marketing

Posted on April 29, 2013 by skulkaew

I was reading an article by Mauro D’Andrea on KISSmetrics the other day where he wrote that: most blog adopters were successful because they adopted content marketing early on. They anticipated a trend at a time when few others did and were able to stand out and be noticed. Today, content marketers face competition in every segment of the economy, and many aren’t accomplishing it in a great way.

You and I? We’re a little late to the party, at least I am.

Content creation is a core component of inbound marketing and, hands down, one of the best ways to generate traffic to your website. That said, doing so effectively is really difficult. Outside of coming up with things to write about on a regular basis and actually writing, you’re clamoring for attention amongst a countless number of distractions whether that be Facebook, Candy Crush Saga, Amazon, YouTube, Reddit, possibly even your local competitors.

According to MBAonline.com, each day, two million blog posts are posted, enough to fill Time magazine for 770 years, and 532 million statuses are updated. Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter, revealed that 400 million tweets go online daily.

So how does that bode for those trying to break through the noise? Not great though the task is certainly not insurmountable. Whether you’re launching a new blog or getting back on the horse, here are tips on amplifying your message.

Users Can’t [Don’t] Read

They skim. At least that’s what Jakob Nielsen has said time and time again. To summarize the latter study, when supplied with a dataset detailing nearly 60,000 page views provided by Harald Weinreich, Nielsen found that as users encounter pages with ever increasing amounts of information, they’d expend an average of 4.4 seconds for each additional 100 words. And since the average reading speed is estimated to be around 300 words per minute (WPM), an additional 4.4 seconds would net 22 of the 100 words meaning that readers would only consume 22% of additional information shown. Nielsen used 250 WPM as his benchmark and landed at 18% hence the variation.

While one takeaway might be that the average web user has little or no patience, another might be that we, as content providers, are failing to provide things worth spending time on. Instead of trying to skirt this by pruning copy, prioritizing information above the fold, A/B testing, calls-to-action, etc., we should aim to optimize the experience as whole.

Remember: humans are visual creatures and while exceptional content is paramount, content takes form in different shapes and forms outside of text (e.g., pictures, tables, infographs, videos, etc). Switch things up to take full advantage of each medium’s strengths and to play them off one another. Pamela Wilson has an excellent article on Copyblogger with simple tips to get more people to read your content.

Share Your Content on Channels off the Beaten Path

Next, if you’re sharing content via Twitter, Facebook and Google+, you’re on the right track. But you can also use Reddit, StumbleUpon and Pinterest to supplement the process. According to data released by Shareaholic, Pinterest “continues to outpace Yahoo! organic traffic and hold its spot as a significant traffic driver.” StatCounter ranks it as the second most frequently used social site just behind Facebook.

If you’re employing StumbleUpon, use the su.pr URL shortener so that when users click on links, they’ll see the StumbleUpon dashboard where they’ll have an option to give you a thumb up. In turn, whatever you originally shared will then be shown to other users with similar interests. Free traffic? Yes, please. After tinkering with a few mediums, you’ll know which ones to invest in more heavily when searching through your referral traffic on Google Analytics.

Network or No One Will See Your Message

And last but certainly not least, you need to expand your network by interacting with other bloggers and readers, prospective or otherwise. That might mean grabbing coffee with people who might help you further your message, regularly commenting on blogs, going to conventions or just providing answers to questions on Yahoo! or Quora. Though it might pain you to resist going to completely obscure conventions and/or answer random questions, neither are likely to help your content marketing efforts even if they are hilarious.

I wanted to touch on this point because even if you are sharing your content via social media, without a following, you’re really just screaming into the abyss. It took me forever to figure out that by tweeting random followers back and forth and by failing to form real relationships, I wasn’t setting Bravo Design, Inc. apart from any of its competitors. It was just this weird dance, and I’d like to help you avoid making that mistake if at all possible because it can be a huge time suck.

TL;DR (Because You Skim)

I hate to end this entry with a quote, no less a long one, but Seth Godin capped this off so succinctly in an article on Fast Company. In it, he wrote: “I’m driving through France with the family. And for the last 12 and a half hours, there’s been nothing but a ruckus. Suddenly, it’s quiet. My kids are transfixed, looking out the window at these beautiful cows. Then it’s a ruckus again. Because cows are boring. If you’ve seen one cow, you’ve seen them all. But what if one of the cows were purple?

Purple cows are remarkable. At least for awhile. Remarkable means two things. One, it means cool, neat. Two, it means worth making a remark about. If you make stuff that’s worth making a remark about, you’re 99% of the way there.”

We challenge you to be purple cows. In the comment section below, let us know how you engage and share remarkable content with your audience!

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Five Things Marketers Can Take Away from Politics

Posted on September 17, 2012 by skulkaew

As we approach the finish line of yet another election, millions of Americans are gearing up to head to the polls to exercise their right to vote. And while it may seem as though presidential elections have become decided largely by likeability versus policy or competency, that might not be as surprising a change as it seems. In 1960, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon squared off in the first televised presidential debates in what proved to be a key turning point in both of their campaigns. An estimated 70M viewers tuned in. Nixon, who had not yet recovered from a two week long hospital stay, looked pale, sickly, was about 20 pounds underweight and tired from having campaigned until just a few hours prior to the broadcast. Kennedy, by contrast, having spent the early part of September campaigning in California, was tanned, confident and well rested. Nixon later wrote, “I had never seen him looking so fit.”

Those who heard the broadcast on the radio pronounced Nixon the winner, but those who watched it on TV thought otherwise. They focused on what they saw and not what they heard. What they saw was a candidate who was frail and sickly who was very obviously discomforted by his younger opponent’s smooth and charismatic delivery. Of their four debates, the consensus is that Nixon won bouts two and three, and that the two men drew in debate number four, but it was too late. Between the first and second debates, it was reported that there was a drop off in 20M some odd viewers. As a result, Kennedy, who had been trailing by a small deficit up until this point in the campaign, gained a little bit of traction that gave him a slight lead. And in November, he was elected the 34th President of the United States.

While you and I might not see eye-to-eye on how things should shake out come November, we can probably agree that since the first televised debates, politics have become increasingly focused on the marketing component as opposed to the policy aspect. Listed below are a few pointers taken straight from the political arena that marketers can use in their daily grind. If nothing else, it might help should you decide to run for office one day.

Anticipate

Whether it is a candidate, issue or product, the ability to change rapidly and respond effectively is character of resilience. Successfully running a business extends past identifying consumers’ needs to anticipating how that might evolve in the future. Take the time to plan for the ups and downs, and you’ll be better prepared to navigate through the unknown and capitalize if and when opportunity knocks.

Be Consistent

The best way to avoid flip-flopping back and forth on an issue is to clearly define your messaging early on. This requires a well thought out plan as well as both courage and conviction. The problem, both in the private sector and in politics, is that messaging focuses more on winning than on being sincere. Stick to your guns here. And if you happen to be wrong, own up to it.

Use Multiple Channels

While the Internet and social media have changed advertising and marketing by and large, candidates are known for utilizing every channel available (TV, radio, outdoor, e-mail, bumper stickers, buttons, etc). Politicians play for keeps, and that means reinforcing their position in the minds of constituents at every opportunity possible. Finding out who you want to target and where they’ll be is half the battle.

Measure Your Progress

Political candidates know if they’re ahead or behind and by exactly how much. If you want to be successful, you need to figure out what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. If certain forms of content are performing better than other types, stick to what works instead of expending precious time on something that doesn’t.

Be Transparent

John Adams wrote, “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right and a desire to know.” In a world filled with bloggers; Tweeters; and ever connected social media users, consumers and constituents alike want to know where their money is going and if the companies they support are operating ethically so be forthright.

It’s pretty clear that the coming election will make for one of the most heated in recent memory. If you haven’t registered to vote or aren’t sure if your registration is current, you can check here to see. If you need to register or have questions about voting, this should help.

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Why You Have One Less Reason to Use Google+

Posted on August 14, 2012 by skulkaew

When “Search Plus Your World,” the feature that ranked Google+ content at the forefront of search engine report pages (SERPs) was initially unveiled in January 2012, Amit Singhal, head of Google’s core ranking team wrote, “Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of web pages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box… We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships” much to the ire of its competing social media networks (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc.).

Social graphs, a term popularized by Facebook to describe its social network and, essentially, the global mapping of everybody and how they’re related, have worked their way into ranking algorithms having been designated as an attribute based on trust and authority. And though it was expected that G+ would eventually garner more momentum, which would be reflected more heavily in SERPs, Google has announced that results would no longer be prioritized at the expense of the aforementioned rival social networks. This last Sunday, Singhal told Emma Barnett, a technology and digital media correspondent for The Telegraph, that the company had found a “better place” for results linked to G+. In defense of “Search Plus Your World,” Singhal went on to say, “I think it’s a learning process – even for us. We experiment, we learn, we improve – that’s what Google does.”

What happens now is anyone’s guess. It might be safe to say, at least for the time being, that if you had few reasons to use G+ prior to this update, you have even fewer now.