BOC Partners

The 3 things that I can't get enough of:  bagpipes, the Irish countryside (or is it Scottish?, well whatever they're both the same anyway), and Johnnie Walker.

It can take years to build a brand, but minutes to destroy it. Brand spokespeople can be a brand's own worst enemy by inadvertently inflicting wounds that could lead to the brand's untimely demise. Luckily, the American public is quite forgiving. You just have to go about it the right way. This requires some public relations expertise that, unfortunately, Tiger Woods doesn't seem to have.

The first lesson is to shift the public's anger and resentment (or even hate in some cases) to the actual misconduct itself and away from the person/business that did the misconduct. This is because public sentiment depends on how you respond to rumors of misconduct rather than on the misconduct itself.

The second lesson in public relations is to plan for crisis management. If you have both an operational and a communications response, you will hopefully maintain confidence in your brand among key stakeholders such as customers, employees, investors, and suppliers.

The third lesson in public relations is to start early. Tiger waited way too long to comment on the media rumors about his indiscretions and the rumors blew way out of proportion. No comment or too little comment from you gives others permission to comment on your behalf, leaving more room for rumor and speculation. Commenting early will put you in control of the story.

And the final lesson in public relations that is to be learned from Tiger Woods' is to make sure there are no information leaks. You need to make sure your public relations teams or departments aren't speaking with any outsiders or media. Word travels fast, so confidentiality is key.

Public relations is a tough job because you need to keep in mind how people react to certain things. You need to understand human behavior at a sociological and psychological level. These few lessons will help you stay ahead of your game, but it's probably in your best interest to hire a public relations agency. A public relations agency will not only have the know-how, but also the connections to properly perform some crisis management. And while they're doing that, you can continue to focus on your business.

Companies have been told that using social media as a means of public relations is beneficial in the long run, but ROI might take a little while since networking on social media sites like Facebook or MySpace is all about establishing relationships.

Online marketing consultants observe that many internet marketing professionals are hesitant about investing portions of their budget towards social media because returns are slow and not immediate.

However, if done well, social networking builds long-term relationships with online consumers.

Those looking for long-term, sustainable customer relationships can spend less per month using social media.

While 64% of surveyed businesses state they have tried social media out, 31% are not spending in this area at all.

While maintaining email advertising lists and creating a strategy during a down economy, don't overlook co-registration.

Co-registration is an arrangements between companies to collect user information for purposes of email advertising. Usually this would be a separate check-box on a Web signup form where the user can opt-in to receive messages from a third-party.

Such potential partners are hard to come by because it's expensive and time consuming to set up partnerships on an individual basis. Because of this, most organizations work through a third party that makes the arrangements, processes the leads, and sells them.

Whenever money is involved, there will always be unscrupulous people involved. Marketers looking for a quick way to grow their email advertising list combined with suppliers looking to sell as many addresses as possible usually leads to significant problems that people must be aware of. These are the problems that people must defend against if they are going to enter co-registration for their email advertising campaign.

Before contracting with a co-registration provider, find out:

• Is this really co-registration or is it just a list purchase or rental? Some vendors have a hard time separating the two concepts. Co-registration is where individuals opted-in to your list on someone else's site. A vendor can't have thousands of addresses for you immediately; if they do, you know that something is wrong.
• How does the sign-up process work? You should try it out with a fake address and see what happens. Can you choose lists individually? Does the vendor honor those choices or do they sell your address elsewhere as well?
• How signups validated? Do they use double opt-in or will they be selling you potentially invalid addresses?
• What other data comes with the addresses?
• Will you receive any other demographic information? Will the data include where and when the subscriber opted in?
• Who else will receive the same addresses? The point of co-registration is that the subscriber signs up for multiple lists. Will you have any control over, or visibility of, which other organizations are receiving the same address?
• What happens in the event of complaints and non-deliveries? Will you be compensated for recipients who complain? What about for non-deliveries?

Even if all these things look good, take some more defensive measures.

Try Before You Buy

You must verify that you're getting what you expect. In the most egregious cases, vendors have been known to forge email advertising co-registration addresses. Ensure that the economics don't give incentives to the unscrupulous. To that end, you should pay for addresses only after you've sent to them.

Monitor Your Sources

If a particular vendor or site goes rogue, or even if the site is scammed and starts providing poor quality data, you must be able to identify it quickly and immediately segregate those addresses to prevent damage to your reputation.

Follow the Money

Track ROI for your email advertising co-registration addresses and sources. Keep the ones that work; drop the ones that don't. List size is far less important than the ROI you get from it.

Despite claims to the contrary, email advertising co-registration isn't a quick fix or shortcut for list growth. It requires significant planning and maintenance to keep the program running well. However, if your partners and vendors are well chosen and monitored, it can be a solid way to grow your list beyond what you can achieve through more traditional means.

As 2009 ends and businesses begin setting strategies for 2010, it's time to review your email advertising campaign, and what you want to focus on for the upcoming year. The question is what should you focus on for email advertising in 2010?

It doesn't matter what type of email advertising rep you are, whether your a novice or expert, B2B or B2C, 2010 is introducing a revolution. An entirely new way of reading and navigating information will the change the Internet as we know it. Web 3.0 is finally here and Apps are the new Internet.

As consumers are becoming more digitally driven, they're buying more enabling devices, i.e. ones that are connected to the Internet 24/7. Most of us already have these devices: iPhones, Android phones, netbooks, TVs, gaming systems, electronic readers, and more.

This means that email advertising will need to evolve in order to be more conducive towards a mobile accessible phenomenon that is drastically changing the way in which we read and interact with our messages.

For example, people that are connected 24/7 on mobile devices can see email advertising right now, and for those already in a store, they can purchase faster than they can shop online. Why? Because they're standing in the store when the email advertising arrives.

For B2B, this means that email advertising received at a trade show can also be tweeted to drive traffic to a booth, or a conversation happening in a large hall.

This also means that emails will face an important challenge to remain actionable for a later date. When you read most of your emails on your PC or laptop, the messages are staring at you, reminding you to read them, file them, or delete them. But when you read your emails in a mobile setting, you remove the bold black "new message" label and hours later when you look in your inbox, you run the risk of losing the message to the sea of other messages received while you were gone.

So when you sit down to consider your plans for 2010, remember this:

• Getting a solid commitment to opt-in messaging is key. The decade of digital devices starts in 2010, and you'll need as much commitment as you can get.
• Be ready to test messages that resonate when people are mobile. Mobile doesn't mean a phone necessarily, it also means walking around. Think out of the box; imagine someone becoming a brand facilitator for you with the push of a button.
• Don't claim victory over any type of messaging strategy. I'll put money on the fact that in the fourth quarter we'll be messaging differently than we do now.

The next year and a half will bring significant changes to our lives as email advertising gets better.

This is a map of the U.S. with eBay's sales numbers from Black Friday.

Your full service ad agency might explain to you a handful of social media tactics that they will claim you should use employ as a strategy. However, its usually more of a bunch of tactics that they want to be paid for rather than a strategy.

But it should always come back to answering why you should be doing this.

Social media strategies involve much more than just putting the accounts together. The members of social media communities want valuable and quality content. If you have that, you will be a trusted source of information for your service/product.

So what exactly does a social media strategy involve? Here are some simple questions you should consider before wildly deploying social media marketing tactics.

• Answer the Question of "Why?": Your social media strategy should fully tell you why you're using a particular tactic. Is it because your audience is there and interacting already? Is it because the potential for branding and exposure is there?
• How to Deploy a Strategy: How do you gain respect in social media? Do you go in guns blazing, or do you sit back and get a feel for what you're about to embark on? Is it an approach of asking questions first and then offering advice? Do you want to ask for submissions from the audience or start by writing valuable content? Your strategy should fully answer these questions before you start.
• Defining Your Goals and Measuring Analytics: How do you know your efforts are doing anything? What is your company expecting as a return on your time and resources spent on your marketing efforts in social media? If there isn't a clear set of goals to be measured for your efforts, how can you justify your tactics? Do you have clear ROI for your social media efforts?
• When to Should You Re-evaluate?: Some New Jersey marketing companies sometimes forget to define when they should re-evaluate their efforts. But what if something isn't working, and you aren't meeting your goals? What if something else is working really well? Set points in your strategy for re-evaluation. Remember, nothing is ever set in stone when it comes to social media marketing.

It's very common to create a MySpace account or Facebook fan page because it's free, easy, and everyone else is doing it. While New Jersey marketing companies should secure accounts on social media sites for their clients or brand names, they shouldn't just devote massive amounts of time to one particular social media marketing tactic just because of the above three reasons.

Implementing social media marketing tactics for any reason without a good strategy in place will ultimately lead to confusion and disappointment in your efforts in the social media game.

If any full service ad agency, public relations agency, or search marketing firm comes to you and says that you need a Facebook fan page without any reason other than that it's new, you need it, and they know how to do it for you, then you might want to stop and ask yourself why you're using that advertising agency.

Many companies view social media as another outlet to pump their marketing messages into, especially marketing companies that have had success in other areas of marketing such as SEO, PPC, email advertising, or traditional media marketing outlets like television advertising, radio advertising, or print advertising.

Facebook fan pages, MySpace accounts, Twitter streams, blogs, YouTube channels, Digg submissions, Flickr accounts, Wikis, even rating and review sites are all social media marketing tactics you see commonly touted as efforts companies should be doing. But have you ever stopped to ask why?

Why should your company have a Facebook fan page? Is it because everyone else does? Maybe your competition does?

While it may seem cool to be able to say that you have all of these different social media accounts, you have to ask yourself if these marketing tactics are what you need to be doing to be successful in social media?

Consumers are changing the way they research and buy products. If your marketing strategy hasn't changed, it probably should. Traditional media marketing is still important, but marketing companies must move beyond pushy-style communication and learn to influence consumer-driven touch points, such as word-of-mouth and Internet information sites.

Because of how consumers are now making decisions, word-of-mouth is more important than ever. Consumers overwhelmingly say that a recommendation from a close and trusted source is most important to them when making a purchase.

The people that others turn to for advice are called Influentials. They are the most powerful opinion leaders in their communities. They are the most active 10% of the public, they are turned to for advice and opinion, they generate word-of-mouth recommendations, they are connected to more groups, and they are more educated and engaged in the world. Influentials are twice as likely as the total public to recommend and be sought out for advice.

Influentials are connected consumers who are more active Internet users. With the rise of Internet and social media, Influentials can now influence many more by writing reviews on Websites, sending mass emails, and postings on social networks. In the past, the Influentials were limited to impacting friends/family. Now their areas of influence have grown exponentially.

About 20% of word-of-mouth is stimulated by traditional media and online advertising. This is about 700 million word-of-mouth impressions each day in the U.S. Also, the effectiveness of word-of-mouth is significantly increased when stimulated, encouraged, and/or supported by traditional media or online advertising.

Buying media across the Internet and television advertising helps maximize the strength of influence of the Influentials. Your business should strive to connect to consumers wherever they are, fully activating your advertising messages, and word-of-mouth research is a key component in that mission.

Comcast will acquire a 51% interest in NBC Universal from General Electric in a deal valued at $30 billion.

As part of the deal, the French media company Vivendi will sell its 20% stake for $5.8 billion, leaving GE with a 49% stake.

This deal creates a massive media giant with assets spanning broadcast, cable advertising, telephone, internet, and movie and television advertising, as well as theme parks. NBC, the network in the middle of it all, will be just a small part of it.

NBCU's cable presence will be much more prominent with the addition of Comcast's Versus, the Golf Channel and E! Entertainment to its portfolio, which includes CNBC, MSNBC, USA, Bravo and SyFy.

However, integrating it all while winning regulatory approval could take well over a year.

What it will mean for media buyers and any full service ad agency is hard to say at this point. The upside for marketing companies is the ability to place clients across a wider range of media outlets. However, such deals are difficult to execute, and media buyers have long turned away from them.

The downside for media buyers is that consolidation typically leads to higher prices.

But Wall Street analysts have favored the deal, believing Comcast is far better suited to run an entertainment company than GE.

Jeff Zucker will remain chief executive of NBCU, reporting to Comcast CEO Steve Burke, but at some point Zucker will likely be replaced. Zucker has survived under GE but his track record as a CEO has not been up to par. He's been widely criticized for managing for the bottom line and blamed in particular for NBC's tumble to 4th place in the ratings.

Presumably an early goal for Comcast will be to invest dollars and talent in making NBC the flagship TV property once again.

In relation to measuring analytics, most cable advertising reps know about audience reach, demographics, and top-line results. Of course, this data is nowhere near as deep as the analytics data from an online advertising campaign. With online, we can know who's responding to our ads, what they're doing on our websites, how much time they spend there, and whether or not they complete a purchase.

But even without that in-depth level of data, most people believe that cable advertising works. But too many cable advertising reps allow themselves to be beaten when it comes to measurement. When compared with the detailed analytics available for online ads, television advertising can be somewhat sketchy. However, that only makes it far from being useless.

Television advertising (and offline tracking in general) can provide much greater insight than most people think. Understanding this can help make cable advertising measurement almost as precise as online advertising measurement.

Gathering data, and making decisions based on that data, requires a system that can take into account imperfect, incomplete, and subjective information, and then provide context for that data in order to help us understand the situation.

In order to deal with the vagueness of cable advertising measurement, you need to find a doable level of tracking, accept it with all its imperfections, gather the data, analyze the data, and learn more as you go. You can improve on the system itself as you learn more. This enables your television advertising measurement system to evolve into a system that is almost just as accurate as online data analytics.

Some rules to follow are:

• Have intimate knowledge of the company, its performance indicators, and the patterns and trends that already exist with its performance. How would the company be doing if no advertising was running? Identify the patterns and trends that already exist.
• Make sure to do the work. You need to gather data from your advertising campaigns and compare it to your baseline. Analyze the data. Make the incremental changes as you go. Keep an eye out for any peculiarities for that time period and make allowances for those. Over time, this will evolve into a highly efficient analytics machine.
• Make comparisons with what your performance model is telling you with big company-wide metrics like profitability.
• Finally, never burden your potential customers with tracking. Don't create custom URLs just to track the campaigns. This will reduce your overall response rate.

You can know if your system is working if the ROI is positive. All you need to do is measure it. And an ROI-positive campaign is incredibly scalable, so it will give you the ability to increase frequency and build brand awareness.

U.S. retailers spent 7% more on paid search campaigns between October and mid-November 2009 across all major search engines -- Google, Bing, Yahoo -- compared with the same time last year, according to the SearchIgnite Mid Q4 2009 U.S. Search Marketing Report released Monday.

Consumers continue to buy online, but many are spending less on average per transaction. During the first half of the quarter, traffic conversion rates rose 17% year-on-year, but the average order value declined 27%.

People are buying online, according to Roger Barnette, SearchIgnite president. "We're feeling pretty good about how the quarter will end up," he says.

Retailers allocated a higher percentage of ad budgets to Bing this holiday season. U.S. retail marketers dramatically increased their search spend on Bing -- up 47% compared with MSN in the year-ago first half of the fourth quarter. Average order values on Bing are 21% higher than across all engines.

Despite retailers' increased allocation of their paid search dollars to Bing, Google still captures the majority of retail paid search campaigns with 75% of all budgets in the first half of the fourth quarter, compared with only 16% on Yahoo and 8% on Bing.

"Although the Monday after Thanksgiving is a big day for online retailers, there are several big days from now through mid-December," Barnette says. "You can't really compare it to 2008, because last year everything got thrown out the window. After Thanksgiving it all just fell off a cliff."

Research from SearchIgnite may reveal a rise in conversions and retail sales, but findings released Monday from CrownPeak suggests that companies are not making the most of online search marketing dollars. The study, "Holiday PPC Ad Strategies," suggests that retailers could do better by improving the connection between paid search ads and Web site landing pages.

In fact, of the 66% of advertisers that did not connect holiday search ads to targeted landing pages, nearly 13% drove traffic to the advertiser's home page. The remainder misdirected ads to general category pages, or ads that did not integrate the advertising copy. Only 34% of holiday-themed search ads analyzed in the study drove traffic to retail landing pages, but few had a call to action.

Half of product-specific advertisements linked either to a canned search or category page, or the retailers' home page. Some advertisers -- primarily content aggregators -- directed ads to specific landing pages, which featured advertisements for other providers of the product.

As part of the two-week study, CrownPeak analyzed search marketing results across 10 different holiday-themed phrases, including holiday deals, holiday gifts, Nintendo Wii, Elmo Live, and Christmas decorations. Individual advertisements were analyzed from more than 100 online marketers, all of which leverage the Google AdWords pay-per-click advertising product to disseminate campaigns.

Source:  MediaPost News

In its venture to convince advertisers and advertising agencies to buy television advertising time through its online auction-based Google TV Ads platform, Google has made a deal with TiVo giving media buyers access to digital set-top data generated by subscribers of TiVo. This deal is the most recent move by Google to gain a following among mainstream marketers and advertising agencies for its television advertising platform. The platfrom has gotten alot of popular buzz but it has failed to gain any critical mass because of its limited access to quality television advertising inventory.

Up to now, Google TV Ads has plans to sell local advertising on DISH Network, and national TV ads on a handful of mostly low-rated or emerging cable TV networks.

Google is using the deal with TiVo to leverage their enhanced data to make the Google TV Ads platform more attractive to advertisers, and as a result, more appealing to big TV networks to begin using to sell their television advertising time.

Google TV Ads main data source is the digital set-top boxes of DISH Network subscribers, and some small digital cable TV systems that have partnered up with Google. Google subsequently enhanced those TV audience data streams by licensing demographic TV audience information from Nielsen Co., and more recently by licensing geo-demographic analytics data from Nielsen's PRIZM system.

The new deal with TiVo gains access to second-by-second DVR viewing data, which will give Google TV Ads advertisers insights about household-level advertising impressions generated by their buys, but it does not include any of the enhanced analytics generated by TiVo's StopWatch service, which is not covered by this deal.

Google hasn't disclosed how much television advertising is actually being processed through its platform, but the system is believed to be popular mainly with direct response and "long tail" advertisers and advertising agencies, and among bigger advertising agencies using it primarily to test and gain insights about TV audience exposure via the system, which competes with Microsoft's NAVIC, and Spot Runner's Malibu platforms. The cable TV industry's Canoe Ventures also is seen as a potential competitor or collaborator with Google TV Ads, but its long-term market play still remains unclear in the minds of many TV buyers and sellers.

Meanwhile, the amalgamation of TV audience data streams and analytics tools being assembled by Google TV Ads has been both intellectually attractive to Madison Avenue, as well as confusing, as was evident during a series of presentations made by various data suppliers and end-users during a TV audience measurement summit held by Google earlier this month.

During one of those presentations, Nielsen Senior Vice President-Insights, Analysis and Policy Pat McDonough, noted there still are a number of problems with the kind of set-top data being used by Google TV Ads, including the fact that it's difficult to know when people are actually sitting in front of their TV sets when the set-top devices are on and tuned to a channel. According to Nielsen's estimates, 10% of digital set-top devices "never get turned off," and 30% are on for 24-hours in any given day. While methods have been developed for editing the digital set-top data to factor out the non-viewing portion of their tuning, the real value is in reporting the "long tail" of the TV universe - the part not measured by Nielsen's traditional TV methods.

During another presentation by the full service ad agency Karlen Williams Graybill Advertising, which showcased the results of an actual TV buy made earlier this year for the Act and Gold Bond Ultimate brands across eight cable TV networks, comparing both Google TV Ads and Nielsen's conventional TV ratings samples, the agency concluded that there were no "statistically significant" differences, and that, "There is no perfect rating methodology."

Source:  MediaPost News

The advertising agency of the future will have to adapt to the changing ways of the business world.  Instead of distinguishing themselves between specific disciplines, such as just a public relations agency, or just a direct mail advertiser, or just an outdoor advertising agency, or billboard advertising agency to get even more specific, advertising agencies of the future will have to broaden their horizons. They will have to become full on all-solutions marketing companies. A recent post on a great blog called Actionable Insights by Covario explains in full detail why a simple advertising agency may be a thing of the past. In the future, a marketing solutions company will be the answer to a business's problems.

You can read the full blog entry here.

Sports radio ratings aren’t as high as many people thought.

For big games, ratings shoot way up. But there are only a handfull of big games in any season. For other games, ratings drop way down.

As a result, the radio advertising rates that stations used to get for their live sports coverage have gone down significantly, by about 20% to 30%. Industry sources reveal that some stations radio advertising rates have dropped even more than that.

Some people think that the more accurate the ratings data is, the better it will be for everybody, even if it means stations having to reduce their radio advertising rates.

One such person is Bob Snyder, founder of Beason Broadcast Partners, which consults with sports radio stations and sports franchises on ad sales. He thinks that the more reliable ratings data serves to build credibility with New Jersey marketing companies, advertisers, and retail advertising agencies, making sports play-by-play broadcasts that much more attractive for advertising.

However, others think that the numbers don’t tell the whole story when it comes to play-by-play sports.

Tim McCarthy, senior vice president of radio at ESPN, says that overworked media buyers, who face tons of pressure from clients to get the best deal, only look at the numbers and without taking into account the unique, passionate audience that radio broadcasts deliver.

“What’s the value of a Yankees/Red Sox game or a Bears/Packers game? These are rivalries that have packed arenas for years. They have value. To say no one cares is not true.”

The problem is that radio stations are seeing less radio advertising revenue from broadcasting rights they agreed to pay big dollars for before the more accurate ratings data was released.

Those deals, since they are no longer profitable for the radio station, create a problem for the station's bottom line. However they are still valuable because they set in place a station's position in the market.

Now is the time to invest in radio advertising since the rates have become incredibly low. You can get more air time and reach more people with the same amount of investment, thereby drastically increasing your ROI.

What do you want your online New Jersey marketing campaign to accomplish for you? Are there any reasons why you would not want your pages to be found for your targeted keyword phrases on page 1?

Here are 3 reasons as to why that may be the case.

Is there intent for actual commerce?

Let's say you are the first result.

You should be asking yourself, what is the intent of this keyword phrase? Do the words contained in the keyword phrase give any indication of someone getting ready to spend money on a product/service that you offer?

For example, consider three keyword phrases we would use: Britain O'Connor, co-op advertising, and automotive marketing ideas. The latter 2 phrases give an indication of someone who is getting ready to spend money. The first phrase does not.

If you are targeting a keyword phrase that has questionable intention, there really shouldn't be any reason to be found on page 1. It would be better to target more appropriate phrases instead.

If there's no intent for actual commerce then that keyword phrase isn't helping your online New Jersey marketing efforts.

Traffic Really Matters

If you can have a first page result in position 4, or a second page result in position 12, which would you choose? Is this an obvious choice?

What if the first page choice has 3,300 monthly search queries for its keyword, but the second page choice has 22,200 monthly search queries for its keyword.

Would you still believe that the best choice in this example is the first page result?

According to numbers from Aaron Wall's site, approximately 6% of search users will click on the number 4 result in Google. That's 198 visitors in a month.

And over 1% will click on the number 12 search result. That's 222 visitors per month.

The second choice is now the obvious choice. The higher traffic volume will result in a higher percentage of online conversions.

Smart Searchers Bring Value

The people that click the first result in the SERPs are more often that not less serious than people who go through the first few results or who continue searching onto the second page.

There is something to be said about avoiding people who almost randomly click the first result and who may have impulse control issues.

These may not be the best potential clients for your products/services. For an automotive ad agency, retail advertising agency, or public relations agency like us, we like our clients to be a bit more informed so we can be on the same page when it comes to performance. The searchers who don't just click on the first result but read through a few are usually the more informed people.

A second page result could bring you more serious potential customers, people who are more likely to actually read your website content, understand your products/services better, and be more likely to become a traffic conversion.

This is another example of one of our cable advertising spots. This one is for a local New Jersey car dealership, George Wall.

This spot proves a couple of things. First, not all cable television advertising spots need to have one person screaming over another about their amazing deals in order to be effective. Second, not all cable advertising spots need to cost alot of money. They can be made by utilizing a minimal amount of resources, both human and other. Third, your company's daily business doesn't need to be interrupted with a film crew on site.

Finally, it is a buyer's market in the worlds of both online and traditional media. This small dealership, by adding a 3rd franchise, is expanding, and it needed an affordable way to get it's message out to the local market. In the example of this cable advertising spot, visuals play a vital role in attracting customers to the business. And it is all done at an affordable rate.

Here is the spot: