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cgseo — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:32:56 +0000

Web Marketing Services: Strategy, Management, Marketing, Consulting, Design, Development, Content Creation, Content Marketing, Search and Social Media Marketing.

Quicktake: Powered, A Social Marketing Suite, Acquires Crayon and Social Media Agencies

admin — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:10:01 +0000

News hit this Monday that Powered has acquired three social media agencies: crayon , Drillteam and StepChange . I just had a skype video conversation with Aaron Strout and Joseph Jaffe to learn more, here’s my take. You can read crayon founder Joseph’s take and Aaron Strout the CMO of Powered and a quick mention in NYT . A Solution Set of Services Bolsters a Marketing Platform I’ve heard of crayon, and have many conversations and even podcasts with founder Joseph Jaffe, I’ve also spent time with the Powered executive team last year. Stepchange is a 13 person team out of Portland focused on Facebook Apps and mobile, and Drillteam, from NY, has been around for 10 years and focuses on experitntial and advocacy marketing, such as connecting events to online like street teams, guerrilla, and ambassador programs. Powered isn’t just a community platform, I learned they have other marketing features that really intent to provide a suite of offerings. Natural Evolution Of A Growing Market: Consolidation happens in downturned markets. As the recession starts to show signs of it lifting, now’s a great time for companies to come together and create a greater value. We saw this type of acquisition behavior from agencies during the first boom, and we should expect similar patterns here. Acquisition provides key services software platforms can’t fill. It makes sense for Powered platform to partner up with a service(s) teams that have already been successful for some time, this improves the time to market to deployment. In addition to coming with a book of business, they can quickly deploy the Powered platform, expanding the software footprint. Joseph Jaffe has strong thought leadership, an existing marketing brand, and reach needed to the group. Yet, brings risk for Powered and new partners. First of all, there are some big names coming together, the real stress will be can these cultures, and their strong willed leaders, be able to jive together. Secondly, it’ll be interseting to see if Crayon and services teams forces stragies on their clients that involve the Powered platform. I asked if there are any layoffs coming from consolidation, they haven’t made any plans, but when you have 4 companies coming together expect redundancy. Impacts To Customers, Partners and Competitors: Social Agencies should rekindle and bolster relationships . This impacts other social agencies like Stage 2, Social Media Today, AdHoc, Ant’s Eye View, ForumOne, Community Roundtable, Shift Communications, Dachis, FutureWorks who may be at medium and small tier, they should quickly partner up with other firms to increase their value. Customers of crayon, Drillteam, and Stepchange should request agnostic recommendations. Any client of these three agencies should make sure that the strategy they are being offered includes other vendors and platforms –not just the Powered platform and Facebook platform. Remember, first find out where your customers are online before choosing the tools to use. This is competition for larger agencies –yet savvy agencies will partner. This is a threat to large agencies like Organic, Razorfish, Ogilvy, and Edelman. Yet the smart agencies won’t get defensive, they should partner with this team, and figure out what offerings they can offer that they don’t have in their portfolio. Congrats to the Powered, crayon, Drilldteam and Stepchange team for this merger, I’m excited to see the industry emerge from small disparate startups to a larger entity going forward.

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Quicktake: Powered, A Social Marketing Suite, Acquires Crayon and Social Media Agencies

Discover the Google Adwords Account Slap Remedy That Is Going to …

cgseo — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 02:49:42 +0000

The final analysis is it is not adwords or media buys which make you cash its traffic and I absolutely kick ass at getting traffic from search engines and the social web. The reason i kick ass is … Continue reading Google Adwords ...

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Discover the Google Adwords Account Slap Remedy That Is Going to ...

Who Reads This Blog? Find out with 2009 Web Strategy Survey Results

cgseo — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 13:53:07 +0000

Web Strategy Survey View more presentations from Jeremiah Owyang . To me, this blog belongs as much to the community in which I serve as it does to me, as such, it’s important to find out who the readers are and what they want, to learn about previous efforts, see 2008’s results . The goals of this survey are simple 1) Find out who the readers are, 2) Find out if they are they influenced by this blog, and how, 3) How this blog can improve year-over year. With a sample size of nearly 200 respondents, some of the key findings from this survey were: Overall, Satisfied: Overall, respondents were pleased with the blog, and 47% rated it a “10/10″ in recommending it to others when asked “would you recommend this blog to a friend or colleague”, and 54% read more than half the posts, and over one-third shares it monthly with others (slides 3, 4, 5) Many are Buyers at Corporate: 59% of respondents said they are buyers, 28% of respondents have budgets $100k-$1 million (although one-fifth do not hold budget), and over a quarter work at enterprise class companies with over half of respondents in the United States (slides 10, 14, 18, 19) Some are Influenced By Blog: Over one-third of respondents said this blog strongly informs their actions at work, but it was nearly split between influence in their buying process, with 40% agreeing, and 39% disagreeing. (slide 6). Sophistication of Social and Mobile at Work Varies: 39% of respondents said their company was intermediate when it came to social strategy, and 43% said their novice when it comes to mobile strategy. (slide 20, 21) Identified Many Areas for This Blog to Improve: There was a large request for adding more case studies, and interviews with thought leaders in the space, and a variety of comments in the open-ended section that I’m all taking to heart. (slide 8, and qualitative answers) You can read the qualitative answers on a separate page , in case you want to understand why they read this blog, and what they want to see improved. Overall, I’m pleased with this year’s results, while there are many areas to improve, I strive to write for decision makers in corporate, and I think we’re headed this direction. If you want to influence the readers of this blog, it’s simple. Be part of the ongoing conversation (not be pitchy) by leaving comments and demonstrating your knowledge and expertise. Also, you can schedule a briefing with me, but I’ll have to admit up front, it’s been hard getting on my cal as we just launched this new company. I’m figuring out ways to make briefings easier, such as blocking out Friday mornings, using web based forms to collect more information up front. Thanks to the nearly 200 folks who took the time to answer the 20 question survey, I read every response, and am constantly trying to improve this blog. Here’s to making this blog even better in 2010!

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Who Reads This Blog? Find out with 2009 Web Strategy Survey Results

To The Future! A List of Intention Enabled Websites

cgseo — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:03:42 +0000

The web is quickly moving to real-time, people share the information about what they’re doing while their doing it. Yet the next step beyond real time, is future-looking data, which is called the Intention Web (get up to speed by reading this post) . In an effort to map out this trend in 2010, let’s list out the vendors, companies, and beyond that will facilitate this type of forward looking data. There are countless opportunities for people to connect with others with the same goals, or for companies that want to serve them as new technologies like Social CRM evolve and develop. Scope: These Intention websites facilitate a person to publish their future goals in the context of their community, or sometimes even in public. For example, an unshared CAL isn’t a qualifier. To The Future! A List of Intention Enabled Websites 43 Things : This “wish list” , they suggest that you make a list on 43 Things and see what changes happen in your life. They encourage you to connect with others with the same goals. Facebook Events : Facebook allows members to RSVP for future events, publish their own events, or see what friends are doing. Meetup : Encourages groups to organize events, plan events, and connect with others. Plancast : Is a social network that allows members to publish their future plans. It allows people to see who is going to other future goals, and to publish to Facebook, and Twitter. Tripit : This website allows travelers to plan out their travel itineraries . (thanks Sameer ) Upcoming : This Yahoo owned property allows people to find, publish, and share future events. Leave a comment if you know of other technologies that meet this critia

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To The Future! A List of Intention Enabled Websites

Your influencers are not my influencers

cgseo — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:01:39 +0000

So many lists, so little time. These people helped me move the social business needle in 2009.

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Your influencers are not my influencers

Pay per Click (PPC) vs. Pay per Impression (CPM)

admin — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 21:25:12 +0000

Today, online advertisers are constantly looking for new ways to advertise their products and services. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Sponsored Search, Social Media and Affiliate Marketing are some tactics used by business owners to ...

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Pay per Click (PPC) vs. Pay per Impression (CPM)

Finding: Social CRM Vendors Don’t Walk The Talk

cgseo — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:34:48 +0000

I first posted this on the Destination CRM blog , thanks to Josh Weinberger @kitson. Surveying the Social CRM Industry Business partner Ray Wang (focused on enterprise strategy) and myself (customer strategy) of the Altimeter Group is undergoing a major project for a client in the nascent Social CRM arena. We’re surveying the landscape to learn about a variety of vendors in the space, their capabilities and deployments. A small portion of our survey is to see who’s eating their own dog food, and truly demonstrating they understand the ’social’ aspect of social crm and living it. Companies Who Sell Social Products Should Demonstrate Credibility By Living It While critics may be quick to dismiss the mere inclusions of a blog or community to a product landing page, the message goes much deeper. Social CRM isn’t just about bolting on a new plugin to your system like a new air foil on your minivan but instead a new way of doing business. The promise of social crm says that companies are truly listening to their customers wherever they are, responding, anticipating, and making the commitment to improve products and services. Vendors that are assisting brands with this promise to the market need to demonstrate they fully understand the ramifications of social crm –not just a keyword checklist of the buzzword du jour. Criteria: How We Graded the Social CRM Vendors There are four major areas of grading, from very tactical ability to 1) Simple sharing of social content from the corporate product page 2) Surfacing a developer or business community, and a look inside of the discussions in each community, with bonus points for integration with product page. 3) Thought leadership with relevant blogs on the subject, and a gauge of their level of interaction and any twitter accounts they may have. 4) A subjective look at the overall page experience in the context of a company that’s offering a ’social experience’. Findings: Overall, Social CRM Vendors Aren’t Walking the Talk We’ve decided to make our findings public, at least for this part of our client deliverable to see how different vendors that are in the Social CRM space are walking the talk. Sharing Features on Product Page (out of 1 point) Community and Integration (out of 1 point) Thought Leadership: Blogs, Twitter (out of 1 point) Overall Social Experience (out of 1 point) Final Score (out of 4 points) Salesforce 0 0 0 .25 .25/4 Microsoft Dynamic 0 0 0 .5 .5/4 SAP CRM .5 0 0 0 .5/4 Jive (Community Platform) 0 0 .5 .5 1.0/4 Oracle/Siebel Social CRM 0 .5 .5 0 1.0/4 RightNow CRM 1 0 .5 0 1.5/4 Lithium (Community Platform)* .75 .75 .75 0 2.25/4 To pass, companies need to receive greater than a .5 in each category for a total score of 2.0 plus making Lithium the only vendor to pass. For details, see the data, and our justifications on this Google Sheet . Highlights From Study The product pages are devoid of true social interaction, and none of them actually surface discussions about how the market is even talking about them. Marketing machine Salesforce demonstrated they aren’t engaging in a social experience on their own product pages and SAP and Microsoft’s typical enterprise looking design stayed consistent with ‘boring’ social experiences. Although Oracle’s bland web experience looks like it’s designed for the media-phobes, there is links to community and thought leadership blogs. Despite the overall meager findings, there were a few social hopefuls such as Lithium (Altimeter client*) who integrated social throughout the experience followed by RightNow Technologies who demonstrated thought leadership through executive blogs. Honorable mention to Jive engaging online video that captures the spirit of the Social CRM movement. We know that soon every webpage will be social, even if you don’t choose for it to be , so companies should enable features that allow websites to have conversations. Social CRM vendors that want to demonstrate to the market they are experts at this space should gear up to demonstrate they’ve the ability to do as they preach –as for now, it doesn’t show. *Altimeter Client. At the Altimeter Group we practice open leadership (also the topic of Charlene’s upcoming book) and disclose our relationships with clients, given their permission. We hope you will trust us more if we do.

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Finding: Social CRM Vendors Don’t Walk The Talk

When Real Time Is Not Fast Enough: The Intention Web

admin — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:15:54 +0000

Things started slow I remember when people would go to conferences, take notes, then share them a few hours or days later. Then in 2005-2006 I noticed people started to live blog sessions, anxious readers would refresh as the page was updated in real time –sometimes with photos. Fast forward to Dec 2006, Twitter emerges to the early adopters and people begin to share in real-time. Plurk, Jaiku, and then Facebook status updates emerge, followed by the enterprise vendors like SocialText, it’s not just a product, status updates are now a feature. [The Intention Web: A Published, Anticipated Goal.] When Real Time Is Not Fast Enough: The Intention Web I’ll be presenting at Europe’s largest tech conference, LeWeb next week. My topic? When Real-Time Isn’t Fast Enough: The Future Of the Web . In particular, with event planning features, like Facebook events, upcoming.org, we’re starting to see people make explicity public remarks on what they want to do, when, and with who. Welcome plancast.com a startup by Mark Hendrickson formerly of Techcrunch who created this simple website that allows people to broadcast what they plan to do next using Twitter or Facebook. Web Strategy Matrix: Asynchronous Web, Real-Time Web, and Intention Web What It is, and Examples Opportunities Risks Asynchronous Web Information exchanging between multiple sets of time. People publish, someone else reads later. Examples: News sites, press releases, websites without social features. Information with longer term shelf life can be archived and consumed. Much of today’s information is related to real time events, people want to share their thoughts and experiences, this is quickly getting outdated as social features empower real time conversations appear, regardless. Real Time Web Information published as it happens, often, content is consumed in real time, with the reader also broadcasting back, resulting in synchronous communication. Examples: Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook Status updates. Consumers can give instant feedback about their needs. Companies can respond to the immediate needs of customers. Excessive noise from everyone publishing their status. Companies unable to sort through noise, prioritize, and react. This problem to compound over time. Intention Web Information that provides explicit predictions of who will do what next, although it’s not happened yet. Examples: Upcoming.org, Facebook events, Plancast. People can connect to each other, improving experience. Businesses can provide a more contextualized experience for customers or prospects using Social CRM Explicit intentions may not be true, the future is always uncertain. Companies can barely keep up with real time web –let alone predict the future. Intention Web Provides People and Companies Opportunities Some may call this the, anticipation web, intention web, or forward looking web, but regardless of the name, there are some unique opportunities: 1) People can now use their social relationships that have similar goals or events on their cal and improve their experience. 2) They can also identify who in their social circles are most likely going where, increasing their knowledge of top events. 3) This provides businesses with the ability to listen to provide highly contextualized offerings and experiences for those explicitly stating their intents. Expect Social CRM to be in the foreground mining, organizing, and making this data actionable. Yet Barriers Will Challenge Consumers and Companies Yet the intent based web is also fraught with challenges for both people and companies. 1) Status updates are still getting traction. Twitter has the media hype, but not yet the mainstream adoption, so you can’t expect the social behaviors of everyone to broadcast their future intents. 2) For those that do broadcast their intent, should be concerned about privacy and personal security. 3) The future is always uncertain, a great degree of intention data will be inaccurate. 4) Most companies can’t even keep up with the asynchronous web, let alone the real-time web, and certainly not the intent based web. Above : Plancast allows me to broadcast my goals which include, what, where, and when. Above : My goals can now be published to Twitter, Facebook, or to my friends on Plancast. Intention Web Will Provide Consumers With Contextualized Experiences Expect the real-time web to quickly evolve into the intention web. People will work together to share their information about what they plan to do, and improve how they work or organize. Expect Social CRM systems (Salesforce, SAP), Brand Monitoring vendors (Radian6, Visible Technologies), and Search Engines (Bing and Google) to quickly try to make predictive models on what could happen, and what are the chances. Businesses that have a physical location like retail, events, or packaged goods can use this data to anticipate consumer demand. They may offer contextualized marketing, or increase or decrease inventory or store hours to accommodate. Don’t be surprised in the future and you walk into a store with your preferred items, meal, or drink already nicely packaged for you.

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When Real Time Is *Not* Fast Enough: The Intention Web

Guest Post: Site Updates

cgseo — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:09:42 +0000

Jeremiah: The Web Strategy Blog isn’t just about me, but the overall community. One of the key members of the team is Mitch Canter, my web designer, and the guy who keeps my blog and all the features up and running. I aim to implement many of the social technologies that I cover. It helps me to learn, stay current, and understand the limitations and benefits of the tools, which I pass on to you and my clients. The following is a guest post from Mitch of StudioNashVegas , about a few updates (based on your feedback) we’ve made this past week : Mitch: Hey everyone, it’s your friendly neighborhood WordPress guy Mitch Canter again! I’ve been doing some work to Jeremiah’s site in the last few days, so if you’ve seen any strange goings-on, that’s what it was. Just to give you a quick update: I’ve updated Jeremiah’s commenting system to DISQUS. There were a number of different options I could have chosen from, but I use DISQUS on my own personal site, and have had zero problems with it. The goal is to make commenting more interactive and more conversation-like (which is what Jeremiah’s blog is all about, anyway). Now, you can reply to specific comments and see the progression. This will also separate comments, trackbacks, and social media reactions for easy viewing. The “People on the Move” graphic is getting got an overhaul. Something that goes a little more with the site, and yet sticks out for quick scanning in long content blocks. The static pages have been updated – Jeremiah’s doing a lot of new stuff, so we have to find a nice home for it on his blog. The pages Speaking and Media have been added in the navigation at the top of the page. Check them out – he’s got lots of great stuff to share! Other smaller CSS / design fixes have been implemented to tighten up the design and make it look as nice as it can (the biggest one being the increased font size). So, at any rate, I hope you like the changes and the new commenting system (leave your comments on it below and revel in the irony!). As always any feedback is appreciated. You can send it directly to me at mitch@studionashvegas.com – I will hopefully get back to you as soon as I can!

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Guest Post: Site Updates