A few years ago, I’d see that fear in the eyes of veteran marketing and PR people—the ones who went into marketing as a refuge from math. They would literaly cower when I explained the principles of direct marketing. They no more wanted to calculate a conversion rate than balance their checkbooks. They were "message people." They had "soft skills" and knew how to promote brand image in the minds of consumers. They were truly afraid of being held responsible for whether conversion rates ticked up or down a tenth of a point last month. They knew exactly what they were good at, and this wasn’t it.

So in came the quants—math geeks who knew how to juice the clickthroughs and didn’t worry about optimizing pages for SEO. They were analytical and they were good. They tuned up Web sites and made them persuasive, but they had their own Achilles’s heel. They had gone into math and technology to avoid ever having to speak or write. When social media came along, they were aghast that marketing was becoming squishy again. I know so many of these new marketers now fearful about their lack of communications skills.

The truth is that marketing is at once a powerful communications tool and one that must ring the cash register. Digital marketing forces us to analyze and optimize in ways that we never did before, because we can measure the results and adjust what we do. But we can’t only analyze and optimize. At some point, we need to actually say something, to stand for something, and to move people.

Brand marketers who believe that they can’t succeed because of their sparse analytical skills have something in common with direct marketers who feel they come up shy in creativity: they are both right. Both kinds of marketers need the other and the sooner they realize it, the sooner their companies will use digital marketing at a new level.

Originally published on Biznology

We conducted a Q&A on the subject with Mitch Spolan, Yahoo VP of North American Field Sales. "The Super Bowl is such a unique situation," he tells WebProNews. "It’s the one time a year where consumers plan to watch the commercials as much as they watch the game. As consumers, we expect great advertising during the Super Bowl, and companies are rewarded and penalized based on their creativity." 

"Online allows advertisers to compliment their broadcast investment with campaigns that continue to live on well beyond the 30 seconds," he adds. "While the Super Bowl is powerful for its tremendous audience reach, advertisers have the ability to reach the SAME super-sized audience every day online with marquee creative. There no longer is the need to wait for one day a year to have massive audience.  Advertisers control when and how they interact with their Super Bowl audience everyday online."

Super Bowl commercials have something of a following on their own. I know people who don’t even care about the game, but like to see the new ads. How can a brand capture this kind of enthusiasm for advertising online?

"At Yahoo!, we’re constantly innovating new advertising formats that open up the creative canvas to our advertising partners’ imaginations," Spolan tells us. "For example, when you come to one of the Yahoo! Sports properties during the Super Bowl, you’re going to find an ad that captures your attention with a narrative that’s as or even more compelling and engaging than those on TV. Online advertising also opens up other possibilities such as interactive and social sharing capabilities that can extend the brand’s message even further than a TV spot. Brands that combine creativity with smart use of the Web’s inherent advantages are the ones that enhance their storytelling ability and build experiences that stay with the consumer."

If you’re wondering what your own starting point should be if you’re considering your own Super Bowl-related advertising, Spolan has some thoughts on that. 

"First, anytime a brand is looking to capitalize on the excitement of big event like the Super Bowl, it should choose to work with a site that will be a destination for consumers well before and even after the event," he says. "The campaign that HISTORY channel is running for "Only in America with Larry the Cable Guy" on Yahoo! Sports is a good model for this. The network’s campaign begins to run on February 3, when excitement for all things Super Bowl will be at a fever pitch, and runs through February 11. 

"The Super Bowl, like other culturally significant events on the calendar, is among Yahoo!’s biggest traffic drivers, and accordingly, consumers will be eager for post-game analysis from all angles," he says. "There’s great value to reaching the significant audience that will visit Yahoo! Sports, which is still the #1 sports destination online, for that coverage."

The example would appear to illustrate a useful tactic for capitalizing on physical world events by reaching those interested online in the places they are likely to go. It doesn’t have to be on the scale of the Super Bowl or have the reach of Yahoo Sports to be a potentially successful strategy.

The company says, "The online ad market is undergoing fundamental changes as advertisers increasingly shift from buying content-driven placements to buying specific audiences. This helps advertisers more efficiently spend ad dollars and avoid advertising to audiences that don’t meet their criteria. Publishers are increasingly seeking to provide audience data to match advertisers’ requirements so they can deliver ad inventory at premium rates. This shift to buying and selling audience segments requires advertisers and publishers to gather, consolidate and more easily share anonymous audience data. This has created a highly fragmented and complex ad buying and selling process."

"Our customers rank among the world’s largest advertisers and publishers and they have been asking us to help them optimize how they buy and sell online ads," said Brad Rencher, VP and general manager of Adobe’s Omniture Business Unit. "With the addition of Demdex, the Adobe Online Marketing Suite will enable advertisers to be smarter with their advertising spend and publishers to leverage their audience data to generate more revenue. With audience optimization, Adobe is literally changing how online ads are bought and sold."

"Adding our technology to the capabilities and vision of Adobe is a powerful combination for advertisers and publishers,” said Demdex CEO Randy Nicolau. "We will continue to evolve our technology as part of the Adobe Online Marketing Suite to help customers stay ahead of the rapidly evolving online ad market."

With the acquisition of Demdex, Adobe is partnering with Evidon (formerly Better Advertising) and becomes part of Evidon’s Open Data Partnership (ODP).

The key is to plan your strategy so you don’t become overwhelmed or fork out too much money.

I have outlined below some areas to consider when creating your plan:

1. Know Your Customer

Its no use starting an online marketing campaign without knowing who your ultimate customers is. They are the ones you want to target your advertising at, after all. Some questions to ask yourself in order to define your ultimate customer are:

• What is the net household income of my customer? Can they afford my products/services?
• Where does my customer look for my product/service? Both online and in physical locations?
• Does my customer work out of the home or in the home?
• What is the job profile of my customer – an executive, manager, worker, entrepreneur, stay-at-home parent, etc.

Defining your ultimate customer will give you a good idea on where to advertise/market your business and how to write and what to include in your message copy.

2. Know Your Marketing Options

Step 1 will have given you an idea on which areas to target your marketing. A coordinated effort across several sites and avenues used by your customers will be the most effective. Don’t underestimate the value of repetition – If your business is seen across sites numerous times, your message will be remembered by the site visitors (your potential customers).

When considering how to market your business there are a number of options – PPC advertising, Local business listing in websites and directories, newsletter advertising, display advertising on other website or social media – the possibilities are endless.

3. Budget

Set a budget level that you are not willing to exceed. By doing so, you will limit the areas that you can concentrate your marketing efforts on. For example, PPC advertising can be expensive if you are targeting a popular keyword, whereas a local business listing can be very cheap or cost nothing at all (expect for your time).

Another consideration when setting your budget is whether you are going to outsource your marketing efforts to an expert or do-it-yourself. There are pro’s and con’s to each. Obviously by outsourcing you will pay more than doing the work yourself. However the time it takes y

ou to setup a PPC campaign (for example), write ad copy and maintain the campaign could be better spent concentrating on other aspects of your business, so the cost to let someone else take care of all that could actually save you. Also, by leaving the work to experts you have the peace of mind that your campaign is in safe hands.

4. Measure what matters

Develop key metrics for the marketing plan – gross sales revenue, (marketing) cost per sale, and ROI by each marketing campaign. Also, don’t under estimate the value of customer feedback, even if it’s informally via forums or blogs.

Online marketing campaigns are within the reach of any business, no matter what your budget. The key is to commit to a marketing plan and see it through to the end. Good luck!

Originally published on ineedhits.com

Here’s the management line-up: Chris Winfield – Chief Marketing Officer, Dave Snyder – SVP of Search, Brent Csutoras – SVP of Viral Marketing, Jordan Kasteler – SVP of Content, Loren Baker – SVP of Online PR, Tony Wang – CTO, and Danielle Winfield – VP of Operations.

"BlueGlass started organically approximately 5 years ago," says Winfield. "Our partners started running into each other in strategic meetings, then as speakers at the big marketing conferences. As the industry evolved, each of us built thriving companies, and we formed a tight business referral network because we realized that there were very few agencies that could actually deliver all of the results that clients deserve time after time. The obvious next step in our evolution was to bring it all together under one roof, so we could create more efficiencies and even greater scale that we simply could not achieve in aggregate."

"One of the lessons each of the BlueGlass partners learned over the years is that human capital can only be extended so far, especially in online marketing services," says Wang. "By necessity, we have built one of the most powerful suites of campaign software. The main benefits to our customers are is infinite scalability, our ability to stay on top of dynamic industry changes, and the ability to deliver the best return on investment in the industry."

BlueGlass has 40 employees and claims the combined annual billings of $10 million. They count Viacom, Thomson Reuters, NBC Universal, Intuit, Yahoo, Comcast, New York University and the NFL among their clients.

"The shift from offline to online is in full swing as marketers look to measure direct increases in top-line sales, site traffic and improve overall marketing return on investment," says Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget’s director of research and strategy and co-author of the report. "Interestingly, brand reputation is becoming a more significant driver of the migration to digital marketing, particularly when it comes to social media."

Over 70% of respondents to the survey say they are increasing budgets for off-site social media marketing through sites like Facebook and Twitter, while about 65% are planning on increasing their budget for on-site social media.

Additional findings: 

- 28% of marketers are shifting marketing budgets from traditional to digital channel

- Two-thirds of marketers are planning to increase investments in social media even though less than one-fifth can effectively measure ROI.

- 64% of companies plan to increase budgets in search engine optimization.

- 56% plan to increase budgets for mobile marketing.

- 54% plan to increase budgets for email marketing.
 
- 51% plan to increase budgets for paid search.
 
- 42% of marketers plan to keep budgets the same as 2009 and 13% plan to decrease their overall marketing budget.

- 41% of marketers plan to decrease spending on print and radio marketing in 2010.

"The research shows a healthy outlook for the digital marketing industry with the majority of responding companies increasing their budgets for most digital channels," says Linus Gregoriadis, research director at Econsultancy. "Social media marketing is the area where companies are most likely to be spending more money during 2010, but areas such as search engine marketing and email marketing will remain buoyant."

A summary of the report, titled More Money, More Channels: Marketing Budgets for 2010, can be found here.

Related Articles:

> Businesses Benefit as Customers Share Current Locations

> Customer Connections Now Important for Google Results

> Facebook Most Popular Mobile Social Website

1. Twitter Lists

Twitter Lists are changing the game. We recently looked at several reasons why, but also consider that with the Lists gadget, your tweets may appear all over the web if you can get onto lists. They will appear on sites and blogs, which are more than likely going to be related to the niche you are in anyway if you have the right audience on Twitter.

2. The Openness of Twitter

The openness of Twitter, social media and the web in general, pretty much means that your messages on Twitter won’t be limited to your Twitter audience. Facebook and other social networks will bring tweets in. People will share them, screenshot them, link to them on blogs, etc. Twitter is a means of getting your message out to more people, but it’s not necessarily only the people on Twitter that will see those messages.

3. Building Valuable Relationships

Laura Fitton, the author of Twitter for Dummies, chalks up success on Twitter to four basic concepts: listen, learn, care, and serve. Basically, if you listen to the community, you will learn, and if you show that you care, you are more likely to get more out of your efforts. Serving means providing something of use to the community. If you what you’re not doing that, you may be setting yourself up to fail, as Fitton talked about in this interview with WebProNews.

4. Traffic That Cares

Twitter can bring you not only random traffic, but traffic from people who are actually passionate about the niche that you are a part of. Retweets are huge in this regard. Guy Kawasaki calls retweeting the sincerest form of flattery. He has a point. He notes that people are willing to risk their reputations by retweeting your content.

5. Staying Current

Being found in Twitter searches (not to mention real time search in general, which is starting to become a main area of focus for all of the big search engines, not to mention all of the standalone real-time search sites) provides a lot of opportunity for exposure. We discussed this here and gave tips for getting found in real-time searches.

6. Connecting with Local Customers

There are a variety of ways you can connect with local consumers and customers using Twitter and Twitter-related tools. There are tools like our own TwellowHood, which let you find Twitterers in your area, for example. Another thing to keep an eye on is Google’s new Social Search. It’s currently just a lab experiment, but could become more. It certainly has potential.

A recent Search Engine Land article made some good points about the potential of local marketing with this tool, which delivers Google search results based on the communities you are a part of. It draws from Google profiles, which include the networks that people are connected to (based on what any person includes in that profile). If you’re not familiar with this feature, watch the following clip, and you’ll understand.

7. Going International and Multi-lingual

Twitter is expanding into more languages. If you thought Twitter was important to marketing already, consider that for most of its existence, it has only been available in a couple of languages. Now it’s in Spanish, and many more languages will follow. That’s not only going to be huge for international and multi-lingual marketing efforts, it’s going to be huge for Twitter’s growth, and the more Twitter grows, the more potential customers are out there.

8. It’s Still Young

Consider that Twitter is just getting started in the grand scheme of things. It’s still young. There are no doubt going to be a lot more features added in the future. And don’t forget about the thousands of Twitter apps that are already out there that can make Twitter useful in different ways to different people and businesses. Take some time and explore them. Fitton’s site OneForty.com, which is like Yelp for Twitter apps, is pretty good for that. It has reviews, and people tell why certain helps have helped their businesses.

Did we leave some reasons out? Please share with the rest of us.

Related Articles:

> 6 Ways Twitter Lists Are Changing the Game

> By Tweeting, You Could Appear All Over the Web

> Twitter Expands the "Lists" Feature

> Microsoft and Google Score Deals with Twitter

The film boasts some pretty bold quotes from some well-known sources. For example:

"an ingenious horror film. It’s so well made it’s truly scary"  – Roger Ebert – THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

"A POTENT FRIGHTFEST That will fry your nerves and CREEP YOU OUT"  – Peter Travers ROLLING STONE

"SO SCARY! Just when you thought it was safe to close your eyes… GOOD LUCK GOING TO SLEEP!"  – Harry Knowles AINT IT COOL NEWS

Among people I’ve talked to personally, I’ve heard mixed reviews – nothing quite so positive. I’ve not seen the film yet myself.

The real story is how the movie was initially released to only a handful of theaters at midnight showings, and has blown up from there as a result of online marketing. Paramount, the studio distributing the film, used Eventful.com to get people to demand the film in their own towns. The more people that demanded it, the better shot it would have at a wide release.

It worked.

According to Washington Post, the film has become the most consistently popular trending topic on Twitter. Flixster says it’s received about 5,000 individual reviews despite only playing at a maximum of 760 locations to date. Flixster’s overall inquiries into showtimes, information and tickets for Paranormal Activity grew by 36% this week – on top of last week’s increase of 329%.

"It’s exceedingly rare for a movie to increase this much week over week, rather than see a decline," said Flixster’s co-founder and CEO Joe Greenstein. "Paranormal Activity is exactly the sort of phenomenon we’ve been anticipating – a movie fueled not only by positive critical response, but by the buzz, feedback and word-of-mouth excitement generated by moviegoers who get information and make decisions online, driven by what their friends and acquaintances say."

"Today’s audiences say that online word of mouth has become one of the most important elements of their movie decision-making, and Paranormal Activity is certainly benefiting from that shift in behavior," said Amy Powell, senior vice president of Internet marketing at Paramount Pictures.

The movie begins its wide release in theaters all over the U.S. this weekend. It’s already made $35 million. It only cost $15,000.

Seen Paranormal Activity? Did it live up to the hype? Share your thoughts.

According to the AT Internet Institute’s findings, online marketing campaigns in the UK account for over 50% of visits to websites that have adopted such campaigns. The firm explains the methodology behind this study:

As part of this study we only took into consideration websites which declared the use of online marketing campaigns (affiliates and partners, marketing emails, RSS feeds, sponsored links or advertising) on their sites. In addition to this, these websites were visited on a daily basis by internet users who accessed these websites via online marketing campaigns.

Our study involved four different European countries: France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom. For each individual country, visits to websites carried out within the specific country were only considered. The websites which were used as part of our study were those which could be measured by a specific AT Internet solution, and where the traffic to these websites tends to be mainly generated within the individual countries themselves.

Here are some stats:

- 53% of visits to these sites on average in the UK have been generated by online marketing campaigns

- 45.3% in Spain
 
- 40.3% in Germany
 
- 28.9% in France

The second source of visits so the sites in question came from affiliations and partnerships in Spain and in the UK. In France and Germany, marketing emails were the second source.

StumbleUpon has been changing though. Last year, the company’s founders bought it back from eBay and have been busy ever since. They’ve been listening to users and playing catch up to the rest of the social media world and are now doing more for sites’ traffic than ever before. Have you seen much traffic from StumbleUpon in the past? How about more recently? Tell WebProNews readers.

At the recent SMX Advanced show in Seattle, WebProNews had a discussion on this very topic with Internet Marketing consultant Brent Csutoras. You can watch the entire conversation in the following clip.

More WebProNews Videos

In the past, Brent says you would get maybe three to five thousand visitors from StumbleUpon. "It was interesting, but it was just a little bit of traffic. It wasn’t enough to really drive a lot of time spent within the site," says Csutoras. Users were only getting random content, and it wasn’t all that great for links and targeted traffic, although it was always easy to see the potential of the technology.

Now since StumbleUpon has become more web-based this year with features like a web-based toolbar, a navigational section with popular & related content, StumlbeUpon buttons for webmasters to add to their sites, etc., the company has been driving people to participate and interact with other users more.  

According to Csutoras, StumlbeUpon went from 5 million users last year to 8 million this year, and they are now drawing a more social userbase that is prone to sharing content.

So What Does This Mean for Your Traffic?

Well, Csutoras says StumbleUpon is now capable of sending anywhere from thirty to two hundred thousand unique visitors over a period of a week. He knows this because he’s seen it (the example is mentioned in the interview).

Fortunately for webmasters and marketers, it doesn’t end there either. When StumbleUpon users are stumbling through content and they come across your content and like it, they are apt to share it through another network like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc. That’s the beauty of the social web (and also a good reason to include as many sharing options on your content as possible).

If you weren’t already getting enough links from StumbleUpon, this opens the door for many more links as your content is spread from network to network – from reader to reader. This is basically (at least partially) where social media fits into the SEO equation.

Get Users to Stumble Through Your Content

StumbleUpon also has a partnership program, which Csutoras says is likely to expand (and apparently requires you to have 3,000 indexed pages within StumbleUpon). What this program does is allow you to place StumbleUpon’s technology on your site, so that readers can go through more of your content without actually being directed back to StumbleUpon at all. That means more time spent on your site.

Interesting Social Advertising Opportunities

StumlbeUpon also has a program where you can directly advertise through stumbles. Earlier this year, I interviewed the company’s VP of Business Development, John Bryan about this. Advertising through stumbles, means people get to vote ads up and down just like any other content. Not a bad way to gauge how effective an ad is.

Wrapping Up

So the moral of the story is, StumbleUpon has the potential to send some good traffic your way. It’s probably not going to happen all by itself though. You’re going to have to push it a little bit, and I don’t mean by spamming StumbleUpon. Create good content that people want to share. It’s the same principal that applies to every other facet of social media (and search engine) marketing. People will share what they like. Give them something to like. Also make stumbling a clear option on your content. Give them that button.

How have you encouraged users to stumble your content? Tell us what has or hasn’t worked for you.