OTOinsights

Desktop Applications, Screen Mates, Widgets, Gadgets, Modules, Oh My!!!

Consumer control of media continues to shatter old paradigms of content publishing and distribution.   More and more enterprises are exploring disaggregated media strategies that embrace the web as a platform for services and allowing consumers of information to install, embed, and/or configure small executable applications that are customized to fit into very individualized and personalized media portfolio.  From Branded Desktop Applications such as Southwest Airline’s Ding! to Apple’s iPhone Mobile Widgets, the marketplace is heating up with new and innovative solutions to answer the consumer cry for rich, modular, and customizable streams of content and information. 

Last week, One to One Interactive and MITX hosted the second Digital Marketing Series event that explored these emerging platforms, case examples of successful deployments, and best practices.  Participating in the session was Chris Heitmann, EVP One to One Interactive & Managing Director of OTOlabs, Stephen DiMarco, CMO of Compete.com, Nick Quagliara, M.S. IU School of Informatics, and Dan Gallagher, VP Audience & Architecture of NetworkWorld. 

The presentation and survey data that was discussed at the session may be downloaded here:

Speakers' Presentation (PDF, 11MB)
Compete Disaggregated Media Survey (July 2007)

Special thanks goes to Jeffrey Bardzell, Ph.D. and Shaowen Bardzell, Ph.D. for their valuable contributions.

Monitoring your Online Reputation

The most recent findings from the Pew Internet & American Life tracking surveys and comScore Media Metrix estimates 60 million American adults are using search engines on a typical day.  Furthermore, they report in two surveys of American adults conducted between January 13 and March 21 that involved 2,871 Internet users, that 9% of Internet users now say they have created blogs and 25% of Internet users say they read blogs.  Another way to render these numbers is to note that 6% of the entire U.S. adult population (Internet users and non-users alike) have created blogs. That’s one out of every 20 people. And 16% of all U.S. adults (or one in six people) are blog readers which is approximately 20% of the size of the newspaper-reading population. 

Reporters, consumers, clients, investors and employees are learning about your organization every day when they search the Internet. Tracking, measuring and managing your company's online reputation (or your competitor's) is becoming increasingly important.  Your company's reputation is its most important asset, not being immediately aware of a negative or erroneous article, blog post or forum comments can begin to quickly and significantly errode that asset.  One nasty rumor that circulates freely on the Internet can have a lasting and damaging effect on your company's reputation, image, brands and public relations efforts. An article entitled "The blog in the corporate machine", published on February 9th, 2006 in The Economist, states:

The spread of “social media” across the internet—such as online discussion groups, e-mailing lists and blogs—has brought forth a new breed of brand assassin, who can materialise from nowhere and savage a firm's reputation. Often the assault is warranted; sometimes it is not. But accuracy is not necessarily the issue. One of the main reasons that executives find bloggers so very challenging is because, unlike other “stakeholders”, they rarely belong to well-organised groups. That makes them harder to identify, appease and control.

Monitoring thousands of news sites, millions of Web logs (blogs), message boards and user groups can be a daunting and time consuming task, however today's content discovery and  mining technologies can help your company track, react to and counteract damaging rumors and issues that exist and thrive in blogs and elswhere the Internet. But doing so requires a commitment that stretches from the CSR department to the executive suite.

Corporate marketing and PR departments must begin to augment their current interactive strategies with a Consumer Generated Media (CGM) strategy that focuses on anticipation, prevention, management and education.

"Training Good Clients to Be Great Clients" (2005 Chicago Search Engine Strategies Conference)

I traveled to Chicago yesterday with Greg Slama, our team's lead search marketing strategist, to participate as a speaker at the 2005 Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference. For marketers and others with an interest in search marketing, Danny Sullivan's series of SES conferences are "must-attends."

Our morning session, part of the "Managing Clients" track, explored why agency clients so frequently are unable or unwilling to implement improvement opportunities identified by their search agency partners:

"Clients come to you for SEM advice then have a litany of reasons for why the can't implement even the simplest of search engine friendly recommendations. Or, if they do take your advice, the department you're working with gets into a standoff with another one. Or, it turns out the goals they thought they wanted to achieve were the wrong ones. This session looks at issues like these and others, with the aim on how to help you help your clients better. It's also a good opportunity for anyone outsourcing for SEM work to understand how to be a great partner in the process."

Danny moderated the panel which was rounded out by Rob Murray of iProspect and Shari Thurow of Grantastic Design.

My presentation focused on what I tell my clients who are interested in working more effectively with their search agency partner. Importantly, I believe -- and stressed to the group -- that the search agency partner has an equal responsibility to understand the world of their client and drive towards improvement opportunities that can actually be implemented. That said, there are many things that savvy clients could and should be doing to get more implementable work from their partners. Asking hard, probing questions during the RFP process is just the start of a rather long list that I shared during my presentation.

If you'd like to scan my presentation, "Training Good Clients to Be Great Clients", it's available for download here:

Download ses_chicago_one_to_one_interactive.ppt

For anyone wanting to continue the discussion, I'd be happy to field questions via email about my presentation, our agency's search marketing capabilities, and more generally the world of search marketing.

Best,

- James Gardner
Group Director/Life Sciences Practice Leader