Candace Lombardi over at CNet has a great article today about how universities are incorporating web 2.0 tech such as wikis, podcasts, RSS, discussion groups and even Second Life in getting students to engage in content. These new applications (I completed grad school less than 3 years ago, before nearly all of these things were popular) all make sense, and as I was reading I was thinking about how marketers could use the ideas to improve workflow and foster creativity. For example, a wiki distributes the workload across several employees, and can be used to show the progress of a marketing initiative, tech rollout, or white paper in development. This allows management and all participants to see what is happening and comment on ways to modify the direction. Not everyone likes to speak publicly at meetings, and sometimes the most vociferous workers steal the floor at group meetings, preventing the less assertive from contributing. But a wiki and discussion board format allows the meek to contribute ideas in a safe manner. Marketing ideas will be much richer if everyone can contribute, and discussing the wiki at periodic meetings forces people to update their part ahead of time. This also makes sense for distributed projects. Second Life is interesting in that having a place for workers to virtually collaborate and chill out can show the corporate culture and be used as a recruiting tool.
Web analytics firm WebTrends has updated its Marketing Lab software suite to version 2, adding two modules for quantifying visitor engagement, and I was briefed on what it adds to behavioral analysis. WebTrends Score lets companies create their own scoring system for measuring the value of activities on their websites. For example, making a purchase can be worth 10 points, viewing a video 5, or requesting more information 3. These scores can be applied retroactively and allow companies to create their own metrics to decide the effectiveness of a campaign. There is no metric for measuring time spent on a page, but you can track individual’s activities over a day, week, or month. WebTrends Visitor Intelligence is a tool for correlating the relationship of different events within a visitor experience, such as tracking people who put products in shopping carts but didn’t buy and compare their activities across a variety of other variables including offline transactions, frequency of purchasing, etc. This kind of cross tabulation lets you get inside the numbers to see opportunities and weaknesses in your marketing strategy and website design. It lets you find out what people with undesired behaviors have in common, and what separates them from your best customers, valuable information indeed. WebTrends developed a new UI for this application including the ability to annotate reports, and has standardized on it for the entire product suite. Pricing for the products is based on the level of analysis and the traffic volume of the websites.
Don’t get me wrong. The default search in my firefox is still Google but Yahoo just forced me to take a second look at making the switch back to Yahoo. The Yahoo Search blog announced a new feature enhancement that has gone relatively un-talked about in the search community but I think it deserves some acknowledgment. Go to Yahoo and search for that place you’ve been yearning to go, for me its Phuket and see if you get a similar result. Yahoo has mixed up their travel search results in hope to help people research their next vacation a little easier (or day dream at your desk some more). What this little box is bringing to you is results from various Yahoo properties around the web Flickr images, Yahoo Travel community, Yahoo Farechase, and Yahoo Maps. I am all for anything that can make my online life more efficient and this is one of them. Rather than scouring all over the web for pictures of Phuket or things to do in Phuket, I have them all in one little place at the top of my page. There is more to this search result enhancement than just making searching easier, Yahoo is changing your search marketing plan. We all know about the “traditional” search marketing tactics, SEO and PPC, well now there is even more reason to work on that social marketing you’ve been putting off. By now, everyone should have see the “Web 2.0 Machine is Us/ing Us” video, if not watch it here. As the video says, we are teaching the machine. Everyday we go online and tag our pictures, links, web pages, and videos and what we are doing is helping organize the world’s data. I know these guys wanted that job, but everyone is helping. Yahoo is taking that data , combining it with the data from their properties and producing a very satisfying result. This is how they are changing the online marketing game. If you are in the travel industry, you need to get yourself out there. Get your pictures on Flickr. Get your links on del.icio.us. Get involved in travel communities. Put your data out there, tag it, get involved and watch it grow.We are people powered search, Now you just need people powered online marketing to go along with it.
Marketing to mobile devices has fast become the best method of reaching Blackberry/iPhone addicts. The cross-platform initiatives are delivered by radio, television, and outdoor signage and provide easy-to-remember text numbers to respond to an offer. For example, Vibes.com recently processed its 200 millionth text marketing message, while NAS Recruitment Communications has scored clients including Fidelity Investments, Toyota, and Verizon Wireless, for its interactive job listing services. Linking a phone’s text message response with an e-mail account can start the chain of communications more quickly than having to log on to reply to a marketing message. This takes advantage of the ease of mobile devices without having to require typing on miniature keyboards. RSS could also be an effective marketing method for the increasing number of people who are using feed readers on their mobile phones. While free wireless services have increased the use of laptops as “always on” communications devices, direct access the mobile phone crowd has the broadest reach.
Google is quickly becoming a household world across the globe as the company’s brand strength grew by 44 percent over last year, according to a report by BusinessWeek/Interbrand. Google was ranked as the 20th most valuable and the only company that does not manufacture/sell consumer products, which is amazing considering that the company name is only spread online, whereas every other company has products available at retail and advertisers in print or through outdoor ads. The only other online companies to make the top 100 were eBay (48) and Amazon (62). Of the top 10 brands, only 2 were from non U.S. companies — Toyota and Mercedes-Benz, and 3 were tech companies (Microsoft, IBM and Intel). Also of note — Apple and Nintendo were also among the biggest gainers in brand value.