MediaWhiz’s leaders are continually sought after as resources for opinions, advice and expertise, based on our deep understanding of industry trends, the needs of our customers and the broader marketplace in which we operate.
For the week of Oct. 1-5, 2012, MediaWhiz experts were quoted or featured on a variety of digital media news and trends, including debunking the myth that proposed Do Not Track legislation will kill online advertising and what Bruce Springsteen can teach marketers about success brand marketing in the digital age. | Read previous MediaWhiz In the News posts.
Do Not Buy the Do Not Track Hype
Digiday | Oct. 2, 2012 | Op-Ed by Peter Klein
Reality check: The proposed Do Not Track legislation won’t kill online advertising. It may hamper innovation and cause financial hardship for businesses that thrive on online consumer-data tracking, but it won’t kill a $31 billion industry.
Not all see it this way, of course. 33Across CMO Allie Kline recently called on marketers to “fight [the] anti-tracking forces.” It’s a call to action growing with increasing alarm in the digital media and online publishing industries.
That argument, which my MediaWhiz colleagues and I respect, comes about 10 years too late. Some form of anti-tracking legislation is inevitable given the industry’s size and influence. How marketers, publishers and advertisers respond to this legislation will determine whether the industry retains its sizable influence on consumers’ purchasing habits. Read more … (more…)
By Peter Klein | SVP, Media Services
Editor’s note: The following post was originally published in MediaPost.
Mobile marketing is all the rage at the moment. It seems that every day another startup emerges with the word “mob” or “mobi” in its name.
While I firmly believe that mobile marketing is the immediate future of digital media, the landscape for marketers and brands is exceptionally challenging. Recent data from eMarketer indicate that 115 million people in the United States — 43% of the total population — own a smartphone. That number is projected to reach 200 million users, or 60% penetration, by 2016.
Marketers who aren’t building mobile-friendly website or landing pages will soon find themselves missing out on revenue opportunities from almost two-thirds of American Internet users.
The explosive growth of smartphones has presented a number of perplexing challenges for performance marketers. There is a lack of scalable mobile lead-gen programs. Few brands have a clear definition of their mobile user or a coherent mobile strategy. Advertisers aren’t always equipped to manage the mobile traffic channel. And quality is often no better than co-reg.
These issues are leading to inefficient mobile lead-gen traffic that further complicates an already messy formula for consistent return on investment in mobile marketing campaigns. (more…)
Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about marketing, advertising and digital media from the team at @MediaWhizLLC. Read previous Friday Five posts here.
Mobile Ads: What Works and What Doesn’t | Wall Street Journal
It’s no secret that there are a lot of bad mobile ads out there. From poor creative to brands not realizing that a consumers’ tiny smartphone screen isn’t the best place to use detailed copy in an ad, the number of bad mobile ads seems outweigh the good ones. But as this Wall Street Journal article examines, those characteristics are starting to change. Marketers are learning more about how to work around the “fat finger effect” that afflicts smartphone users. And they are also tailoring their mobile ads specifically for users of different smartphones, rather than just scaling them to size.
RELATED: WSJ Article on Mobile Ads Nearly ‘Content Free’ (i2G)
Social Media Proves Value, Gets Budgets | eMarketer
Despite prognostications from naysayers suggesting otherwise, budgets for social media marketing are on the rise, with both B2B and B2C marketers proving they have generated leads and sales from their social outreach, according to eMarketer.
140 Characters of Risk: Some CEOs Fear Twitter | Wall Street Journal
“CEOs should accept that social media is part of their job description.” That’s the prognosis of this Wall Street Journal analysis of Twitter use by Fortune 500 CEOs. Despite having been around for more than five years, some CEOs still don’t see the value of Twitter or are leery of using the social network. But in an era when consumers expect transparency from brands and their executives, those fears may be misplaced and potentially damaging to a company’s bottom line, reports The Wall Street Journal. (more…)
MediaWhiz’s leaders are continually sought after as resources for opinions, advice and expertise, based on our deep understanding of industry trends, the needs of our customers and the broader marketplace in which we operate.
For the week of Sept. 17-21, 2012, MediaWhiz experts were quoted or featured on a variety of digital media news and trends, including the effective use of social media for b-to-b lead generation and the growth of mobile payments and the “digital wallet.”
Silverpop’s Sign-In Supports LinkedIn: What It Means for B2B Lead Gen
DM Confidential | Sept. 21, 2012 | Featuring Steve Goldner, Sr. Director of Social Media
… While this is sure to get B2B marketers excited, they should exercise caution and tact. “Certainly, a business email address is more valuable, but it really comes down to how each marketer will use the email address,” says Steve Goldner, senior director of social media marketing at MediaWhiz and Ryan Partnership. “There needs to be a trust factor built into how the business communicates with its customers and collects their data.”
Collecting email addresses via social channels is OK only if marketers are looking for genuine engagement with their audience, according to Goldner. “I would hope that marketers are smart enough to focus on delivering valuable information to reinforce their brand rather than providing direct product or service information,” he says. (more…)
Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about marketing, advertising and digital media from the team at @MediaWhizLLC. Read previous Friday Five posts here.
Big Data Rewrites the CMO’s Role | Marketing Week
With the mass of customer insight available to brands adding another weapon to a chief marketer’s arsenal, Marketing Week asks whether their job titles should reflect this. If you believe the surveys, the pressure to improve the return on the money invested in campaigns has combined with an explosion of data to squeeze creativity from the role of chief marketing officer and turn it into “chief data and marketing officer.”
Source: Forbes.com
For Social Companies, a Battle to Own Photography | The New York Times
Many brands, marketers and industry pundits contend that the great battle in social media is over mobile. The chant from tech giants, New York Times technology columnist Nick Bilton writes, is “mobile, mobile, mobile.” But there’s a greater evolutionary force at play: photos. From Facebook’s revamped Newsfeed that places an emphasis on photos to Twitter now commandeering users’ photo sharing via its own proprietary photo app, the battle isn’t just for the mobile Internet. The real battle is for photos on the entire Internet. (more…)
Source: NewLaunches.com
By Daryl Colwell | @DHColwell | VP, Business Development
Thursday’s Financial Times has an excellent analysis piece by Richard Waters, the paper’s West Coast managing editor, on the nascent mobile payments industry. “Are smartphones about to swallow the payments business,” he asks as he moves on to dissect an industry valued by the Yankee Group at $162 billion in 2010, the last year of available data.
The piece centers around the eye-popping investments in, and growth of, mobile payment startup Square, now valued at $3.25 billion after it raised more than $200 million in a new round of financing.
Waters examines Square within the prism of its larger and more established comrade in the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem — Apple and its new Passbook digital wallet platform, launched this week. Waters rightly points out that however awe-inspiring most Apple products tend to be, a key component is missing from Passbook: a way to make a payment. “Apple’s bet is that consumers still prefer to pay with a card or hard cash,” he writes. (more…)
By Adam Riff | @AdamRiff | SVP, Digital Strategy
Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt of an op-ed that was originally published in Search Engine Land.
There is little doubt that mobile search is the hot topic in the SEO world at the moment. Some brands are now finding that more than 30 percent of all searches come from mobile devices,according to Mobile Marketer. It’s fair to say that mobile search is quickly moving out of the Stone Age and into the digital age.
That’s the premise of a new insight paper, Mobile SEO Best Practices, published recently by my company, MediaWhiz (disclosure: I lead MediaWhiz’s search marketing and digital strategy divisions). In addition to a list of our top-10 tips for effective mobile SEO, the paper offers marketers a step-by-step guide to delivering effective mobile search campaigns.
The tips range from the simple (e.g., understanding the differences in how people search on mobile devices compared to their searches on desktops) to the complex, such as best practices to ensure a site’s mobile content can be properly viewed and crawled by search engines.
Below are my top-10 tips for effective mobile SEO. What are yours? Share your tips in the comments section.
1. Be A Search Psychologist
Searchers using mobile devices enter keyword queries differently than they do with desktop applications. They use shorter tail phrases.
Often, their searches are more local in nature and more prone to rely on Google’s Autocomplete feature complete a query. When optimizing meta title and descriptions, it is important to optimize for these shorter tail queries.
2. Think Social-first, Mobile-second
Mobile users tend to want to be “entertained,” and in many instances, they are connected 24/7 to their social media networks via apps. Content displayed for mobile users should be “entertaining.” When developing online content, think social-first, mobile-second.
Mobile sites should have social media links embedded on every page, as many smartphone users are connected to their social networks 24/7. Doing so will increase exposure, traffic and engagement by ensuring content is easily shared across social networks.
The examples below from Macy’s and Tiffany’s show how a social-first, mobile-second mindset with site design leads to more visually appealing mobile sites.
Read the full op-ed in Search Engine Land.
Source: Tech Radar
By Daryl Colwell | @DHColwell | VP, Business Development
Yesterday’s launch of the iPhone 5 was a bit anticlimactic. Brands, marketers and tech pundits were expecting something “magical” in the words of the late Apple founder Steve Jobs. What they saw, however, was more of an incremental improvement to the iPhone – a larger screen, lighter weight, the new Passbook mobile coupon system and the confirmation that the iPhone 5 will run on 4G LTE networks.
But sorely missing from the iPhone 5 is the implementation of Near Field Communications (NFC), the technology that powers mobile payments and the nascent mobile wallet.
As I have written before, it is imperative that the major mobile phone developers make a significant commitment and push to introducing NFC and mobile payment capabilities in new smartphone models. This is especially true of Apple, which is seen as the market leader in innovation.
The fact that the iPhone 5 — a sure success — does not include NFC capabilities places a significant damper on the growing mobile payments industry and the future of the mobile wallet. (more…)
By Keith Trivitt | @KeithTrivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
Mobile SEO isn’t your grandfather’s SEO.
Mobile SEO is one of the fastest-growing sectors of digital marketing.
Mobile SEO is hot. It is one of the fastest-growing sectors in digital media and marketing. It is also a huge growth opportunity for brands and marketers — if they know how to properly optimize their mobile campaigns. Mobile SEO best practices are no longer a nice-to-have; they are essential to any effective digital marketing campaign.
The steep rise of consumers accessing the Web and performing searches on their mobile devices has generated a significant demand on mobile-device-friendly Web content. Search engines are indexing this mobile content and deciding when it is most appropriate to serve it to consumers, depending on the device they are using. At this time, Google and Bing have had conflicting recommendations for Web developers with respect to how their search engines index and serve up this influx of mobile-friendly content.
While the debate continues for search engines, MediaWhiz believes that best practices will evolve and, eventually, an industry-wide standard will form.
It’s with this in mind that MediaWhiz is proud to release its new insights paper, “Mobile SEO Best Practices.” This informative paper was unveiled this week in the Search Engine Land newsletter. It presents our point of view on the best practices for digital and mobile marketers, helping them ensure their mobile marketing campaigns are SEO-effective.
This insight paper will help marketers:
- Develop successful mobile-search campaigns
- Create mobile-friendly Web pages and content that attracts consumers’ attention
- Understand new technologies that help brands rank first in mobile searches
The mobile marketing space is fragmented. Cut through the clutter with insight from integrated digital media agency MediaWhiz. Let us know how we can help you solve your mobile search and SEO needs. Contact our sales team for a consultation.
Download Now >
Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about marketing, advertising and digital media from the team at @MediaWhizLLC.
Bing Offers Own Version of ‘Pepsi Challenge’ Against Google: ‘Bing It On’ | Search Engine Land
Bing is breaking out its own version of the infamous “soda wars” between Coca-Cola at Pepsi in the 1980s. This week, it launched an ad campaign called “Bing It On” in which it asks people on the street to compare search results between its Bing search engine and Google. According to Search Engine Land, Microsoft claim’s that “people prefer Bing by 2:1 over Google.” Unfortunately for Microsoft, the stats on consumer use of Bing don’t reflect that comparison. More than 65 percent of Americans use Google as their regular search engine, according to SmartInsights.com, while Bing comes in third, behind Yahoo! Search, at just under 14 percent.
The Social Media Hype Cycle: Can It Bring Us to Our Socially Happy Place? | MediaWhiz Blog
“Facebook has failed” screamed the headlines all summer long, as Facebook’s stock continued to tumble amid mounting analyst, investor and advertiser concerns over the efficacy of Facebook’s ad platform. For Facebook, the concern present a troubling reality: it must evolve or die. The trick to keeping Facebook relevant to users and brands, according to Ryan Partnership’s Michael Velasco, will be to not only enhance the feeling that users have of the social network being indispensable to their daily lives, to extend that feeling to new areas and features that users find appealing.
[RELATED: Join MediaWhiz on Sept. 28 for a Social Media Week Chicago panel exploring the “Social Media Hype Cycle.” Register here.] (more…)
