Marketing Pilgrim Published: "Wednesday is Sharing Day on Facebook" plus 6 more |
- Wednesday is Sharing Day on Facebook
- The Cure for Your PubCon Hangover
- Google's Verbatim Search For A True Exact Match
- Social Commerce: Where Do We Go From Here?
- YouTube Gets a Google+ Update and Plus Pages Get Ugly
- Google Further Personalizes Your Map Experience
- Political 404 Pages: From Informative to Irreverent to Boring
| Wednesday is Sharing Day on Facebook Posted: 16 Nov 2011 02:00 AM PST Wednesday is the most misunderstood day of the week. It's far enough away from last weekend that the fun memories are fading. It's far enough away from next weekend to keep you from getting too excited. And then there's that awful nickname: Hump Day. Here at Marketing Pilgrim, we say Wednesday deserves a little respect and here's why. Turns out more people share and click on Facebook posts on Wednesday, than any other day of the week. Take that Friday. Here's a chart from a new study by EdgeRank Checker.
Look at Wednesday, beating the pants off all those other days! EdgeRank took this one step further, measuring the correlation between clicks and other behavior on Facebook. Here's what they came up with: § Avg Clicks Per Like: 3.103 § Avg Clicks Per Comment: 14.678 § Avg Clicks Per Impression: 0.005 Frankly, I thought the numbers would be higher. One like for every three people who clicks isn't bad.
EdgeRank's numbers also point to the fact that pages with a large following have benefited most from changes in the news feed. But that was a whole two weeks ago. Since then, Facebook has rejiggered the formula a second time, so there's no telling where everyone is now. How's Facebook working for you? Have you seen a change in traffic since the news feed redesign? And how do you really feel about Wednesdays?
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| The Cure for Your PubCon Hangover Posted: 15 Nov 2011 09:30 PM PST
If you're one of those people who diligently keep up with your work while you're at a conference, I would like to remind you that you don't actually exist. Answer emails first Every emergency starts and stops with an email. Take Matt Cutts, who mentioned to an eager crowd gathered for his keynote address, that Google Webmaster tools is going to email you if your WordPress is not the latest version (they do for me now). Ignoring that email could get your site hacked! Check your email first to avoid a major problem. As an added bonus, answering emails early in your PubCon hangover might just check off a few tasks on projects you're going to have to get to anyways. Knock out your emails first to put out fires and familiarize yourself with the status of your projects. Approach projects with care Eventually you're going to have to pour countless hours into those detailed projects you were caught up on before you left. Work has been piling up and there's nothing short of good old fashioned blood, sweat, and tears that is going to fix that. Early in your hangover it will be hard to find the time to dedicate to intricate projects. Try to at least go through the action items and status of your projects so you're not surprised with a pending deadline you overlooked. Try to keep project time to a minimum in the beginning so you won't add to your email backlog by dedicating all your time to one or two projects. Beware of meetings Meetings are your enemy the first few days back from a conference. Avoid them like the plague, and when cornered, insist they be a phone conference or located at your office (if you can). Travel time, long winded peers and post meeting follow-ups can eat up half a day before you know it. Limit meetings to one per day and spread them out over the next week. Remind people that you just got back from a conference learning all kinds of cool stuff that will help them. Short of an emergency, they'll be happy to oblige. We've all gone through a conference hangover. Figure out your business cards If you're like me, you come back from a conference wondering who the heck all these people are. Go through your stack of cards and look for ones where you wrote on the back. These are the low hanging fruit and will usually contain the clues you need to decide to act or trash. When you decide to act, maybe consider setting a calendar reminder or task for yourself to respond to the person at a later date. There's no shame in punting a few relationships that you can get back to later. For cards without writing or from people you don't remember, check out their website. It could be that they had some tool or service you really found interesting. Again, set a reminder or bookmark the site if you like it so you can get back to it later. Of course, if the business card is about sending you business, you need to contact those people right away! The conference hangover is the opposing force of the "conference high" and can be a quick liberator of cordial feelings expressed across an open bar. Reach out to conference buddies ready to send you money before the good friend you have turns into "some guy I met at a conference". Do something with your notes This is often the most heart breaking part of my own conference hangovers. I spend a ton of money on travel, meals, conference passes and lost work time to take pages of notes that sit on my desk and eventually get shuttled away into a drawer. So many great ideas banished under old boxes of business cards and iPhone cables. Don't let your well paid for information go to waste. Dedicate some time to transcribing your notes into an actionable form like a calendar reminder set for a later date. Set it two weeks from now and maybe then you'll have the time to check out the new tool or technique you picked up in the sessions. For PubCon specifically, you'll receive a copy of the presentations on a USB drive. If you can't read your chicken scratch or you missed a session you really wanted to attend, you'll get a second chance at the information in a few weeks. Make sure to stay social This is a personal decision you'll have to make for every relationship you made at PubCon, but try to lump people into the social network where you feel it's most appropriate to engage with them. Try to limit people you're a fan of to Twitter and maybe Google + (depending on the person). For people you shared a deeper connection with, take the plunge and connect through Facebook or Foursquare. The key to maximizing your relationships will be connections through social networks. Continue your conversation and watch what they're doing next. Chances are, if you thought the person was smart at the conference, they'll be posting something else just as interesting in the future. Get this knocked out early on so you can maximize the relationship while the conference memories are still fresh. Keeping the conference high Trudging through backed up work can quickly put an end to your conference high. After a few days of catching up, go read blog recaps or watch videos from the conference. Use these visual cues to re-ignite the fire which has been dampened by your return to the real world. By waiting a few days to relive your conference experience, you'll be able to fully relish in your inspiration, free from the distraction of your new email notification flashing like a strobe light. Good luck! Image Credit: Andy Beal Photography Pilgrim's Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!
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| Google's Verbatim Search For A True Exact Match Posted: 15 Nov 2011 09:29 PM PST
When you go click on more search tools at Google.com you can choose "verbatim search" and the following typical algorithm assists are NOT used according to the Inside Search blog. § making automatic spelling corrections § personalizing your search by using information such as sites you've visited before § including synonyms of your search terms (matching "car" when you search [automotive]) § finding results that match similar terms to those in your query (finding results related to "floral delivery" when you search [flower shops] § searching for words with the same stem like "running" when you've typed [run] § making some of your terms optional, like "circa" in [the scarecrow circa 1963] So in other words, on those occasions when you are looking for that perfect misspelled search you can have it so Google won't go in and do the thinking for you. I'll be honest, I am not sure when this would be used but Google has to keep making "improvements" to search to look like they are concerned about competition.
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| Social Commerce: Where Do We Go From Here? Posted: 15 Nov 2011 03:25 PM PST Social Commerce is one of those terms you wouldn't have found in the encyclopedia a few years ago but it's currently one of the hottest concepts in online marketing. Useful Social Media has put together a fun and informative infographic showing the history of social commerce beginning with virtual gift sales on Facebook in 2007. Here's a small piece of the large chart:
I love the 32% of people who said they'd shop right from Twitter if they could. Count me in, too! So where do we go from here? Sudha Jamthe, the Social Media Strategist, Social Commerce for Ebay, says we should be on the look out for three "game changers" in the coming year. First, the gamification of social. This is a concept we've talked about before and it's growing stronger than ever thanks to mobile apps. It's all about roping in that consumer with an entertaining product that will keep them engaged over a long period of time. A consumer might watch a 3-minute video once, but they'll play Angry Birds for hours, returning day after day to play again and again. Last year, statistics showed that globally, Angry Birds ate up 200 million minutes a day. That's what you call sticky. Now imagine those birds flying by a company logo, over and over, and over. That's brand awareness to the nth degree. Second on the list is "social shopping scaling up inside Facebook with marketplaces and malls." This is a tricky one, mostly due to security and payment issues. People just aren't ready to go shopping inside Facebook. They don't trust the site with their personal data, they aren't going to trust it with their credit card numbers.
Finally, says Jamthe, "A lot of experimentation with social data to learn customer's intent to purchase to drive to better merchandising and facilitating shopping." Experimentation is key. We simply don't have enough data to say for sure what will work and what won't. We do know that recommendations from friends make a difference. We know that humor helps things go viral. We know that as much as people complain about privacy, they gravitate toward personalization. What we're still working on is how we can use the unique abilities of a tablet to create an exciting, new shopping experience. How we can use our mobile phone to pay for lunch. And yes, how to get people to shop through Twitter. After that, it's onward to things we can't even imagine at the moment. How cool is that? Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community
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| YouTube Gets a Google+ Update and Plus Pages Get Ugly Posted: 15 Nov 2011 01:49 PM PST
Last week, Google+ added a YouTube widget to the news stream making it even easier to share videos with your friends. Now, it looks like the reverse is about to happen, as YouTube prepares to add Google+ functionality to its site. The Next Web broke the story thanks to a tip from someone who has seen the light. The biggest change is a navigation sidebar that will make it easier to find what you're looking for. Like Google+, the sidebar will offer quick links to subscriptions, popular videos and other categories. You'll also find videos recommended by people in your G+ circles. Overall, it's cleaner, more professional looking and a big step toward becoming an actual social network. All of which, should help you make more money on your videos. Click here to see the screenshots on TNW. Google+ Pages Take a Turn for the Worse
Google's initial response was that they don't comment on individual pages and apparently they don't close them at the drop of a hat. The offending page stayed online for a week before it was shut down. So where do we go from here? Should Google require some kind of identification when setting up a company page? I set one up for a client and I didn't even need a company email address. I simply picked a name and created the page. As Google+ becomes more popular, more fake accounts are bound to pop up. Look at Twitter. Even with their verification system, fake celebrity accounts are rampant on the network. While Google works the kinks out of the system, companies and brands need to be pro-active. If you haven't claimed your name on Google+, do it now before someone else does.
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| Google Further Personalizes Your Map Experience Posted: 15 Nov 2011 10:47 AM PST
But as with any marketing update in the online space, how I use it doesn't matter a bit. In a post from the Google Lat Long blog comes an explanation of this newest maps feature.
his could be good for the "out and about" set. My question is, how many places does the average person go out to eat at and do they actually forget whether they rated it as being good bad or indifferent? And do they just wander about and look for recommendations to something else in the vicinity? Anyway, it doesn't matter how I see this. It's how the target market does that counts. Are you one of the targets for this kind of map functionality?
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| Political 404 Pages: From Informative to Irreverent to Boring Posted: 15 Nov 2011 09:52 AM PST OK, let's set the ground rules here. This is a post about the online space but it has to do with politics. I saw a post on Facebook from the Wall Street Journal about political candidates 404 pages. It's an interesting thing to consider as political races are now very dependent on strong online strategy and execution. Based on a survey of this particular website element, it's apparent that the Republicans must fully realize just how bad they got their online butts handed to them in the last presidential election, that's for sure. So here is a glimpse at the 404 pages of those wanting to get into office. First, out of respect for the office we'll share President Obama's 404 page which opts for the informative route and does a nice job of providing options for the wayward site user to check out. Pretty much what one would expect from an online savvy group like the Obama camp.
Now for the Republican side of the ledger and it looks like the front runners are playing hardball. Herman Cain's 404 page.
Mitt Romney's 404 page
Now for the rest of the field which looks to be an indication that we may not expect too much from these folks in the way of online irreverence or pizzazz. Michelle Bachmann's page does give at least some options and good information.
The rest of the pack though? Plain vanilla and done pretty poorly at that. If their 404 efforts are any indication of their ability to help people navigate from a bad place then these are not your guys. Newt Gingrich
Rick Perry
Ron Paul
In the end this may not seem like much but it's this kind of attention to detail in today's political environment can score big points with voters or cost you votes as well. While we will have to suffer through endless TV ads that are design to denigrate and humiliate an opponent that is no longer the only way to get information about politics……thank God. What are you looking for from the next year of campaigning that we will all need to suffer through for the next year? WIll it be another Democratic online runaway or do you think the Republicans grasp the importance of this part of their efforts to get to the White House?
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