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Posts Tagged ‘Neglect’

Attorney David Castor, an attorney firm specializing in startups and SaaS businesses, emailed me over the weekend with the news that the FTC has settled with its first victim of new disclosure laws.

As part of the proposed settlement (PDF), PR firm Reverb Communications and owner Tracie Snitker must remove any iTunes reviews that were written by Reverb employees posing as ordinary customers and who failed to disclose a relationship between Reverb and its game developer clients. The agreement also bars Reverb and Snitker from posting further reviews on iTunes that pretend to be from independent consumers or that neglect to disclose any connection between the company and its clients, according to the FTC.

This is pretty scary stuff. In two decades, I’m not sure that I’ve worked with or for a marketing or PR firm that DID NOT go out of its way to promote its clients goods and services. I continue to promote my clients whenever and wherever I can – not because I wish to deceive the public, but because I believe in what they’ve accomplished. I try to disclose my actions each time – but I’m sure that I miss the mark plenty.

This could change everything. As your company wishes to deploy comment strategies, linking strategies, promotions, etc… it appears all of it could be a criminal act if it’s accomplished within the United States and doesn’t disclose a connection between the company and clients.

• Will Nascar drivers have to announce their sponsors in every interview because they’re wearing a hat or drinking a soda? Will they have to put a disclosure below each bumper sticker?
• Will Political Action Committees (PACs) have to announce on every comment on every site that they’re part of an organization with a paid relationship with the politician? How about when they send thousands of members to go answer polls online?
• If I mention a client in a presentation or speech as an example that’s not related to our relationship, do I now need to disclose they are a client?
• What about fans and follower counts? I don’t have a means of disclosing how many people follow me or how many people I follow because they’re clients or I’m a client. Isn’t that number swaying public opinion and used for marketing?
• I just wrote a blogging book where I utilized many of my clients and vendors (including Alerding Castor) as examples in the book. Am I going to get fined because I didn’t disclose that we may have, or once had, a business relationship?
• Will product evangelists at conferences need to wear a badge or hat that states that they’re going to talk about their clients, products or services?
• Sometimes I target companies and write about them, or introduce myself for the opportunity of building a business relationship in the future. Do I now need to disclose when I’m buying them a coffee or shaking their hand that I am doing it because I’m hoping to get their business?
• Will celebrity voice-overs and appearances in commercials now need to end with them telling you that they are a paid endorser of the product or service?

I understand that the law is attempting to thwart deceitful practices, but the problem is that my entire online persona, my twitter account, my Facebook statuses, my websites, and my writing are ALL based on relationships I’ve had with businesses. My company’s income is based on how well my clients are marketed. I am a paid advocate for them – twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. I’m not trying to deceive anyone… but I am trying to increase authority, awareness, and evangelize on behalf of my clients. Who else am I going to talk about?!

You might as well put the cuffs on me now and throw away the key.

Or I could move to Canada and keep doing what I’m doing. There’s the loophole folks… move your deceitful practices offshore.

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more. Douglas is also the author of Corporate Blogging for Dummies. Follow him on Twitter @douglaskarr.

Corporate Blogging for Dummies is now available on Amazon and in book stores. Check out our new site, Corporate Blogging Tips, to find out what events that we'll be speaking at.

Got an event? Let us know that as well - we're looking forward to going on tour later this year.

Don't forget to follow @corpblogging on Twitter or become a Fan on Facebook!

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Anyone who has been working on a PPC account for a while- whether it be your own or a client’s- probably reaches a point of inspiration deficiency. A new PPC account can be like a new toy (if you’re not as nerdy as us, as I’m assuming you are, and this does not hold true for you I apologize); it’s fun setting it up and seeing what it does and how the world responds. But after a while, you have other new accounts to play with. Or you don’t, and this is the one account you’ll be handling forevermore. Either way, boredom can lead to neglect, and neglect will eventually damage your account’s profitability. So what to do? Get a little creative and find new ways to improve your accounts:

• Use your colleagues! It really doesn’t matter if they do PPC as well (though that helps)- anyone with familiarity with your product or service can give a new perspective, which can be very helpful when your ad texts all start to look the same and you can’t think of one more benefit for your landing pages. If you do work with other internet marketers, you can take this one step further and ask them to review your accounts for anything you may be overlooking, and for new ideas. This works beautifully and I think you should try it. Aside from actually having coworkers review your accounts, if you have access to theirs, you can also get ideas for settings or account structure changes by looking at what works for them and then applying relevant findings to your own clients.

• Remember there’s a world outside of your PPC account. It’s not all keywords and ad texts- don’t overlook landing page testing! Clients, even if wary of website redesigns, often will allocate budget for one-page design projects if you can adequately justify the increase in conversion rates they’re likely to see as a result.

• Think outside the PPC box- luckily, at Hanapin we have both PPC and SEO clients, so we have a bit of an advantage in this area, but if you don’t, you can still look at your website from a non-PPC perspective. Improvements to your site’s structure, updated content or products, and social media integration can all translate into new PPC opportunities. Updated content can give you ideas for new ad texts and landing page messaging. New products translate to keyword targeting opportunities. Understanding who your customer is and what they want from you via social media can help your messaging become more targeted as well. Meeting your visitors’ needs and expectations is paramount to success in all areas of internet marketing, and exploring how you’re doing that outside of PPC can open your eyes to a lot of possibility.

• You can ask search engine reps for help and ideas, particularly if you work at an agency and have dedicated reps for this kind of thing. I’ll just say a) they are extremely helpful, and sometimes have great ideas and b) you should always take their ideas with a grain of salt, because ultimately their first job is to increase their employer’s profit…not yours. If you choose growth avenues wisely, you can find a balance that does both simultaneously: lovely!

One last note: don’t let your desire to try something new win out over your ROI’s best interest…some ideas are more likely to have a substantial impact than others, and you know your account well enough to understand logically what’s most likely to be useful and what is just a pointless waste of time and money. Trust yourself, do your research, and get inspired. Everyone will be better off for it.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

One of the great advantages of blogging, twitter and other social media is that they provide a human face to your business. People buy from people and people buy emotionally, so the human impact is essential.

One strategy that businesses neglect to incorporate into their social media strategy is their philanthropic endeavors… and that’s a mistake. Promoting the charities your business and your employees support is a great way to provide more than a human side to your business, it provides a caring side. As well, promoting the charities you work with will help the charities – who often don’t have the resources your business does!

I’m not talking about bragging about how much your business does for charity. Rather, discussing the events and how your readers and followers can help the charity as well. On that note, I’d like to introduce Samaritan’s Feet, a charity that The Marketing Technology Blog and my company, DK New Media, is supporting:

Samaritan’s Feet is a non-profit organization dedicated to changing lives though Shoes of Hope distributions around the world. 300 million people wake up each morning without a pair of shoes to protect their feet from injury and disease. The goal of Samaritan’s Feet is to provide shoes to 10 million of these individuals in the next 10 years by teaching them a biblical story of faith, hope, and love, demonstrating those truths in touching them by washing their feet, and treating them to a new pair of shoes and socks.

Samaritan’s Feet is well on the way – providing just under 3 million pairs of shoes to date!

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: what are you doing for others?” As January 18 nears, we hope that you follow @tweet4feet and @samaritans_feet to support and spread the word on this incredible charity. If you’d like to Blog for Feet, I’ll send you a free copy of my eBook as well as mention your blog post on MLK day!

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! From all of the bloggers at The Marketing Technology Blog, we'd like to wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! Our present to you... download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO at no cost.

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Having worked heavily in the online software industry that last decade, I suppose it’s not a surprise that more folks are seeking my advice on the development and enhancement of their platforms – especially with regard to social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes an application optimized for social media.

1. Syndication – the majority of applications start and stop with this step. They simply use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other applications as a place to force their message into each of those networks. This is the bare minimum of social media optimization… delivering your message into your network, wherever they are located. It doesn’t truly leverage social media.
2. Reaction – If you’re pushing your message out to social media, how is your application or business dealing with the reaction to that messaging? Are you recording responses, responding to reactions? Are you adjusting your strategy accordingly? A conversation is only a conversation when both sides are listening and speaking with one another.
3. Reward – What’s the reward for responding or participating? If you’d like ongoing quality interaction to fully leverage social media, the participants must be rewarded. This doesn’t mean you have to spend money – it could simply be providing the information requested. It could also be virtual credit in the form of point systems, titles, badges, etc. Unless your rewards are directly impacting revenue, you’re going to have to keep a close eye on this. I’ve watched quite a few social media optimized applications rise and fall immediately when their rewards systems were broken or static.
4. Analytics – This is such a missed opportunity… so many applications dive into social media integration but neglect to measure the impact of that communication. The volume of traffic your business, product or service can attain by tracking the viral nature of social media is enormous – but you need to ensure you’re accurately measuring it so that you can determine how many resources to apply to it.
5. Targeting – the ability to target messaging to prospects in social media can improve overall adoption and use of your application. If you can target your application by keyword, geography, interests, behaviors, etc., you’re going to have much deeper engagement with your audience.
6. Replication – users don’t like bouncing back and forth between applications, so bring the user experience to them. If your users are on Facebook, try to bring as much of your user experience there that makes sense. If the conversation is on your site but started from Twitter, bring Twitter back to your site. This was a key reason that I recently dropped IntenseDebate and picked up Echo by JS-Kit. JS-Kit effectively brings conversations across several social media applications and integrates them directly with The Marketing Technology Blog’s commenting system.

If your company is looking to expand your applications or strategies into social media, be sure to have a complete strategy. Blasting your message across a bunch of social media applications may have a little bit of impact – but optimizing your strategy can fully leverage the incredible power of it.

Ultimately, what you’re trying to do is to enable the power of social media by building a programmatic or virtual bridge between your business and the medium. Once you effectively build that bridge, watch out!

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization.

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I was recently reading the Quality Score Fact of the Week over at the AdWords Agency blog. This week’s Quality Score tip inspired me to do more research and expand upon the topic that was discussed. First, here is the Fact of the Week:

Restructuring your account does not cause you to lose your historical Quality Score information. The historical performance of your keywords, ads, and landing pages is preserved when you restructure your account. Therefore, we encourage you to restructure or optimize your client’s account structure as needed.

Let me first say that I agree with this statement. The historical Quality Score for a particular keyword does transfer when the term is moved into a new ad group.

However, keep in mind that when you move a keyword you can temporarily reset its Quality Score, therefore negatively effecting your ad position and overall performance.

Why does this temporary set back occur? AdWords needs to re-acclimate to this keyword’s new location and possibly new ad text. This means that when you do a major account re-structure, you will see a fluctuation in your performance. If you have optimized your account for the better, then your performance will begin to pick up after the restructure – but it will take a little time.

Another reason a temporary set back can occur is due to the relationship between your keyword and ad text. As your keyword builds its click-through rate, it is invariably tied to a specific ad text within your ad group. In a way, they share the Quality Score. When you move a keyword but neglect to bring the ad text with it into the new ad group, you have effectively severed that relationship.

If your keyword has performed well historically, then it will gain back its Quality Score, ad position, and performance relatively faster than a keyword that was performing poorly in another ad group, or a completely new keyword. So, what was said in the Fact of the Week is true, you won’t lose your historical Quality Score and that historical Quality Score will help you re-gain your keyword’s traction.

And this brings me to another topic on restructuring: moving a keyword that is doing poorly will not automatically help improve its performance. If you have a keyword that is relevant and has more potential if it’s in a different ad group, then move it. But if you are moving a bunch of keywords to try and reset their historical performance, that won’t work. And this is why historical performance does follow a keyword even if its moved. A bad keyword in any group is going to have a low Google AdWords Quality Score.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t restructure your account. In fact, we highly encourage you to optimize your account structure in order to enhance your account’s performance.

This is why I want to expand on this Quality Score tip. It isn’t wrong. It just doesn’t give the full picture. Restructuring your campaigns is a great to make your ad groups more focused and write better targeted ad texts. But there will be some bumps along the way.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.