This Week in Relevance

We’ve been pretty clear about our appreciation for data and its role in interpreting user signals and driving relevance. If you haven’t seen, everyone has until 9/24 to submit an entry for our Data Visualization Contest to try to win a iPad. We have posted some great examples of early entries here. This week we are taking a look at how marketers are measuring success across Social Media Channels and the platform specific signals that help contextualize campaign performance.

Big Changes at Twitter
Twitter made a big announcement this week regarding updating their UI and corresponding user experience. Per Peter Kafka’s piece at All Things D, an update to the frequency in which users are exposed to “Promoted Trends” and “Promoted Tweets” is not far behind. Not having gotten our hands on the new Twitter yet we cant provide an observation on the “consumption environment” user experience and how it may or may not be more conducive to relevant Ads but we’ll be watching closely.

Reviewing 5 Social Campaigns
Zachary Sniderman at Mashable reviews several recent social media campaigns by high-profile marketers. The piece does a good job of playing devil’s advocate and extolling the pros and cons of each campaign in the context of the respective brands. While Sniderman likely was not privy to the necessary data, it would be interesting to revisit the success of these campaigns 1. In relation to similarly funded campaigns on the same platform and, 2. In relation to what a similar budget what have purchased elsewhere (TV, print, search, display, other social platforms). Social Media clearly affords some unique brand marketing opportunities – understanding performance with a broad enough context still seems to be a bit of a challenge.

Social Context in Facebook
Inside Facebook covers the the addition of Social Context to Facebook’s ad platform metrics. This feels like a great first step in the effort to understand what influence users’ networks perception of an ad has on their likelihood to click & interact. Again, it will be interesting to see how Facebook evolves reporting and platform controls around network context. Ultimately, we imagine that this metric could really enhance the effectiveness of look-alike modeling for marketers.

Pining for Better Display metrics
Paul Pellman of Click Forensics outlines his perspective on the need for more actionable metrics in the display ad marketplace. Pellman raises the particularly big question about Display “How is my brand doing with viewers who don’t visit my site?”. The answer continues to be unclear as does the true influence of analytics on display budgets. If display platforms are going to be the genesis of brand + promotional launches – rather than a secondary channel to support traditional media channels – marketers are going to need increased visibility into how their branding effort are resonating with users.

Contest Reminder
Again, if you haven’t, please take a moment to review our Data Visualization Contest details. Pete Warden’s OpenHeatMap tool is really easy to use and we’d love to see your entry in the drive for the iPad!

Kim Kardashian is Over-exposed AND Over-priced?
An AdAge article authored a few months ago on to the economics of social influence caught our eye this week. Edmund Lee covered a talk by Yahoo “Principal Research Scientist” Duncan Watts at the Ad Age Digital conference where he presented a study on whether it made more sense to spend a big chunk of money to have Kim Kardashian send your sponsored tweet or to spread a budget across a bunch of smaller, but less expensive social influencers (short answer: Kim’s not worth $10k a pop). We have no idea if his methodology was sound, and even Watts leaves the door open to being off the mark (“I’m assuming a lot of things in this model”), but it sparked a fun conversation around the TWIR water cooler: what are all the ways we are going to measure and map influence in the brave new world of social media? How could you quantify the difference between Kardashian, Shaq O’Neal, and Barack Obama, for example? The tools are likely to be crude for a while, but we have no doubt that one day we will have all the necessary knobs and dials to ensure our messages are properly harnessing the power of all sizes and kinds of social network influencers.

In the meantime, we are hoping Watts takes the next logical step in breaking the problem down – a study on why Kim Kardashian is famous in the first place.

(Somewhat Related) Be Careful of Self-Inflicted Social Media Saturation
A short MediaPost piece by Kaila Colbin covered a few good points on retaining an authentic and personal social media voice. Colbin cites how easy it is to connect and combine content from all of your different social media channels, but notes that doing so can create a lot of noise and repetition. Instead, Colbin aruges, you should be figuring out how to create a more personal experience at all of your touch points with consumers. Clearly she is preaching to the choir – we are strong advocates for resisting the urge to carpet bomb your way to results in social media. But how to actually execute still appears to be an open question.

This sounds like it could be the start of something big…
As covered by Leena Rao at TechCrunch, TWIR idol and e-commerce juggernaut Amazon.com launched their first integration with Facebook this week. Obviously this could be really powerful if done well. We’re guessing even if they happen to miss the mark this time it wont be long until we see something pretty cool using collaborative filtering across your social networks to drive better personalization.

Search Still Moving Product
Enough about social media – let’s get back to a good old fashioned “why search is great” article. Matt McGee at Search Engine Land obliges with a look at how search dominates social media in online shopping. Not many surprises here (at least to us grizzled search veterans), but the compelling data referenced serves as a reminder of the importance of search.

Nobody “Messes” with the Jesus
Since you’ve read this far here’s a fun and totally irrelevant link for all the Lebowski / Turturro fans out there (note: The Big Lebowski is a TWIR Top 5 of All Time Movie). Hat tip to @pkedrosky.

Stop B.S.-ing:
And finally we will sign off with a quote of the week from legendary communicator and trailblazing former President of the Philippines, Corzaon Aquino:

“One must be frank to be relevant.”

Amen. (And yes, we are foreign policy buffs here at TWIR too.)

Advanced or Needs Sophistication? You make the call.
In Josh Dreller’s recent piece on advanced PPC copywriting techniques, he calls out Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) as a commonly used technique for scaling great copy across a search marketing campaign. In fairness, Josh calls out potential pitfalls of this approach, but we feel that marketers can actually get into quite a bit of trouble when leveraging this approach too broadly as the below example shows – hate to kick a wounded animal when its down, but for the query “oil spill disaster” we see this ad:

Oil Spill Disaster
Stay Updated On BP’s Gulf of Mexico
Response Efforts. Learn More.
www.BP.com/GulfOfMexicoResponse

Clearly BP’s strategy to influence the flow of information surrounding the spill is a sound one, but they’d probably prefer not to echo the public’s sentiment that it truly is a “disaster.” This is just one of many DKI pitfalls – we’ll explore more in later issues.

UPDATE:

BP has now changed their ad on the term “Oil Spill Disaster” to a static Title — great move on their part, starting to understand the potential pitfalls of using DKI.

Location, Location, Location
Wired offered a piece this week on the growing momentum behind Zip+4 targeting online, which would add an incredibly powerful tool into marketers’ arsenals. However, as the amount of data available explodes, the tools and technology required to accurately message to and engage these audiences grows as well. We like the sound of that challenge!

Search Meet Social, Social Meet Search
For years we have heard the somewhat trite but always buzz-worthy phrase, “social drives search.” Finally, with the launch of the “Like” button, Facebook may actually be unlocking the true underpinnings of that phrase. The folks at Business Insider take an in depth look at Facebook’s social search aspirations, and while it is still very early, there are definitely some promising (and relevant) results driven not by crawling algorithms, but social ones.

Relevance Doesn’t Just Matter When You’re Paying
Search Engine Land published some great tips on how to use PPC Copy and relevance scores to drive SEO copy (Page Titles and Meta Descriptions). A simple reminder that relevance should drive every marketing copy decision that we make, not just the ones where there is a monetary penalty for not doing so. We also love the test and learn approach!

Start Thinking About Longer Queries
A new study from ad network Chitika provides some interesting insight into query length and its effect on SEO volume and conversion rate. We all know that query strings are getting longer as users get more sophisticated in their searching, but this study ties actual value towards optimizing meta content towards longer queries. Additionally, in the context of the above story, search engine marketers should be using results like these to help drive their campaign content.