One of the pillars of our digital practice at Flightpath is to integrate the art of technology with the technology of art.  Nowhere is the fluidity of this precept more evident than in our SEO work.  The best search-engine optimization requires a mercury-quick understanding of what is happening in any given market at any given time, what words describe that market snapshot in an informative, creative way, and what technology delivers the information in compelling design (incidentally, another of our tenets).

A major breakthrough for us, then, is Google's increased ability to index Flash.  Flash, when it broke into mainstream consciousness, was the pretty new girl in school.  Everyone was a little bit in love and wanted to take her for a ride, but there was a rumbling contingent that warned about the correlative probability that good looks can mean less substance. 

This turned out to be true--Flash didn't offer much in the way of text that search-engine spiders could index; the crawlers couldn't link back to anything, because the browser didn't reload after interactivity.  Even pages that spiders indexed were useless in search results, because users landed on Flash home pages instead of product pages.   

Flash was . . . well, at least it was pretty. 

But, then, last year, Google dedicated the resources to figure out how to index text in Flash sites:

[We] developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed.

The trick, then, is to put the text that you want indexed "along the way" the algorithm travels.  This might include adding text to Flash applications, including a Robots.txt file or adding alternative HTML code.  Making sure the site's organizational strategy includes lots of deep links helps with long-tail optimization, and page titles have never gone out of style.  

Essentially, as Google becomes more and more ubiquitous, making nearly everything about the digital space more inclusive and included in a more intuitive way, we can expect to allow our artistic strengths to shine in happy equilibirium with our market goals and technological requirements.  

We have a project we're wrapping soon for an amazing, artistic client with big-figure goals that will show this to great effect.   Stay tuned! 

Note: We try to keep topics timely here at the Digital Insight Blog. This blog was lost in the archives prior to my family vacation but several people have been asking us about the difference between Facebook Group Pages and Fan Pages so I dug this out an posted it this week. Now that I think about it, this is my first post since vacation but you can expect some more regular postings in the coming weeks. This blog post references real events that took place all the way back in July 23, 2009, seems like an eternity ago.

Seems like a simple question, no?

 @fabiogratton captured the moment well with this tweet.

Notice the caps for "it IS confusing to folks."

A room full of over 300 pr, marketing and social media experts at a recent BDI event seemed to be flummoxed…at least for a moment attempting to answer my question.

As Tricia Goeghegan of McNiel Pediatrics told me back stage afterwards (while I was apologizing for asking this seemingly trick question), "if the folks in this room can’t answer this one, it’s clearly a timely question to ask and an opportunity for those who can."  Several other folks echoed how apropos the question was.  So here is my blog about it as promised.

Our social media manger at Flightpath found it to be a pretty easy question to answer. On the spot here is what I was told via my blackberry during the event:

Groups have very limited functionality and don't publish to the news feed. You can't have videos, or custom FBML. Groups are basically a wall with a moderator.

I was also directed by our social media manager to a number of blog posts about it including the Mashable posting others cited on twitter from within the room.
 
But all BDI attendees shared a brief moment of levity with me when Tricia Goeghegan said to me “Well, I’m not sure how to answer that because we have a group page” and asked me if I had the answer. To her credit she was a very good sport. We all got a good chuckle outa that one as I put the ball back in her court.

Tricia deferred to the audience who had several varying answers then she turned it back to her agency partner, Rick Wion, who gave us another moment to pause and chuckle when he said, "well actually its not a group page it’s a fan page that we are using like a group page." Meanwhile the twitter wire blew up with bitly links and tiny urls to Mashable: http://bit.ly/rrzMh.

Here is one sample response (more in the image above and right):

So it begs the question how much do we all really know at this point about when and how to deploy these Facebook pages? Later at the conference in a round table discussion someone from Johnson and Johnson (the parent of Tricia’s company) actually offered another theory: they were actually using an application that mimicked a group wall but was neither a fan nor a group page. Hmmm.  Better get an expert social media manager involved to lock this one down.

The real answer for me on which type of page to use comes back to using the POST method: People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology as described in Groundswell. And yes, this is the 4th time I’ve referenced Groundswell on this blog, people! And I’m proud of it.  We have adopted this method at Flightpath for our Social Media initiatives. And it’s working well. Start with the people, where they are and what they do in the groundswell. Then keeping your objectives in mind, select a strategy and finally choose the right technology.

What are your thoughts on this question? I’d love to get some conversation going here on the Digital Insight blog and some good examples if you care to share them with us.

 

Lisa Lacy, Clickz, reveals some startling facts and figures in a recent analysis of The Neilson Company’s report on ad spending on social media sites.  The report lends us some hard dollar figures that any data-lover can easily sink their teeth into:

     “…ad spending on social networking and blogging sites grew 119 percent, from an estimated $49 million in August 2008 to $108 million last month.”

That’s most definitely note-worthy growth.  But where do all these dollars and cents go to in the vast realm of social media sites?  The answer, of course, is Facebook, and why is very, very important.  We’ll turn back to Ms. Lacy for her pithy explanation:

     “A recent blog post from Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted the site now has 300 million users worldwide, up from about 100 million last September.”

But, that’s not all:

     “..the average person now spends five hours and 46 minutes per month on the site, up from one hour and 40 minutes in August 2008.”

These figures reflect a hand-in-glove relationship and seem to point towards a very natural reciprocity—more users, more time online, more ad exposure.  But now is really the time to start dropping big bottom-line question:  Are those social ad dollars well spent?  Are all those ads well-placed, well-designed, and well-targeted to their audience?  That proof, I’m afraid, is obscured away on several digital marketing experts’ desks in office buildings far, far away, and I’m speculating that while some companies do very well, others will inevitably fail.

The reason for success and failure hinges mostly on an understanding of the creative medium, the positioning, and, the most important factor, audience behavior.  Users are spending nearly 5 times as much time on Facebook, why? Because they like it.  They’re enjoying themselves, and they feel comfortable in that social media medium.  Freedom of expression, social contact, and the opportunity to forge new and creative connections quite naturally has a pretty captive hold over people.  Successful Facebook ads, in turn, must not only understand that but embrace it.

Running a successful Facebook ad campaign that will get you the click through and conversion rates you seek means spending the time on Facebook to learn how to craft creative that’s going to suit the time, place, and sentiment of your audience.  Learn to speak Facebook and your campaigns will resonate.  Ignore the lingo, and risk a series of missed connections.  The good news is business is booming, and that means it’s a great time to get your feet wet.

While we’re told the recession is over or coming to an end, new studies referenced in an article published in today’s NY Times show that, in light of economic circumstances, coupon redemption is way up over the last 12 months, especially for food/groceries.  Here are some quick stats:

• Redemption up 10% in Q4 2008
• Redemption up 23% in the first half of 2009
• Coupon use up 14% by young, single consumers in 2009
• Redemption of digital (web & phone) coupons up 25% in first half of 2009

Even with that last stat – 25% growth in digital coupons – research shows that digital coupons still account for less than one-half of one percent of all coupons distributed.  Why? The primary reason seems to be that old habits die hard.  This appears to be true from the marketer’s angle (they’ve always distributed coupons in newspapers) and the consumer’s perspective (they’re used to clipping coupons from newspapers).

That said a number of factors are converging, making electronic coupons a more relevant part of the marketing mix, certainly worthy of testing.  These are:

1. Youth: Probably spurred by economic factors, young consumers are taking advantage of coupons – providing a great opportunity for CPG companies to reach new audiences.  Of course, today’s younger consumers are tomorrow’s heads of households. 
2. Mobile: New technologies and systems like those from Cellfire are making instant, mobile coupons (and associated sampling) a reality.  This is an important trend, especially as it concerns younger consumers that are more likely to have a mobile/smartphone at the center of their day-to-day endeavors.
3. Newspapers: Weekend newspapers are still the dominant means of coupon distribution however, it’s no secret that newspaper circulation is declining –especially among younger people, who favor accessing news via the web or other electronic channels.  In many geographic areas, printed newspapers have ceased to exist completely.

In the not-too-distant future, it will be critical to use digital channels (including coupons) to reach significant demographic chunks that don’t read newspapers.

Here are some links to some related sites of interest:

www.coupons.com
www.cellfire.com
www.redplum.com
www.selectcouponprogram.com
www.freebies4mom.com

Google announced last week that it is ready to begin its DoubleClick AdExchange.  AdAge reports:

The AdExchange works similarly [to how the search market matches ad buyers and ad impressions in real time], but for display advertising. It also includes integration with Google's search ad-sales system, with the idea that it will let search advertisers move money more easily to display and vice versa. In addition, all of Google's network inventory will be available as part of the exchange . . .

The exchange draws criticism from advertising leaders for failing to offer quality inventory based in genuine relevance because of a focus on moving ads as part of exchanges with other exchange centers that are already part of the display-advertising marketplace, but where Google's offer differs in the combination of its transparency and scalability. 

This combination of offers has always been the advantage of Google's advertising programs--any advertiser who has tested click-based against impression-based programs knows that quality scores and targets require a fine balance and that tinkering with that balance within each program is vital to return on investment. 

The criticism, then, that the DoubleClick exchange's weakness is its inability guarantee quality is no different than any criticism that one could make against any Google advertising program.  Advertisements ranked by quality scores--indeed, advertisements in any channel--have only ever been as good as the creative and marketing teams behind them.  Consumers do not respond to poor-quality ads in any channel.  The fact that Google traditionally rewards advertisements that will generate responses because they are constructed well--and that it continues to do so in new mediums--doesn't change that much from the perspective of a consumer market that benefits from additional creative display and more focused and scalable targeting.  

In that context, the criticism of "But will it be any good?" seems a bit like it's based in the straw-man and red-herring fallacies, whereby those that have an interest in maintaining premium, static pricing on digital-advertising real estate find it a protective necessity to play only with the major players within a narrow range of price points.  

This is where we find the true genius in the new exchange.  Before advertisers even begin to consider the elements of paid-search marketing, the core offers on their websites must be relevant, high-quality offers, and organic search concepts, arguably the foundation of search marketing, allow even the minor players to optimize and sustain competitiveness through the idea of the long tail, a frequency-distribution concept that means businesses sell less quantity of more unique unit types.  When sites communicate relevance for a specific product, that product gains visibility in search-engine results because it is focused to a specific target's need or needs.  

Google's DoubleClick AdExchange allows a similar focused targeting and scalability, only, now, advertisers can marry these benefits with high-impact creative, which has previously been limited to a mostly static, contract marketplace.  What this means for advertisers is that the best of all worlds are now coming together, so that the real opportunity of the DoubleClick AdExchange network is exactly that for which some are criticizing it--everyone now has the ability to compete based on merit, as measured by consumer response, across all playing fields, regardless of scale.