Now, I appreciate that to some people the connection might not be immediately apparent, and others may even think it tenuous, but bear with me and all will become clear.  And if, like me, you very much like paid search and snowboarding, then you’re in for a treat!

Now, without further ado…5 ways in which you can use snowboarding best practice to improve your PPC ROI:

1. Check your bindings are secure before you launch  /  do your pre-campaign checks

When you’re barrelling down a mountain and carving a track through a group of unsuspecting skiers, the last thing you want to do is look down and realise that the binding which is keeping you bound to your snowboard is flapping loose, causing you to lose concentration and your edge and face plant into a drift of snow.   Such a calamity can be avoided by taking the time at the top of the mountain to ensure that all those vital straps are tight and secure before you set off.

For paid search, it’s no understatement to say that the set up is the single most important time of a campaign and as such there are commensurately many checks to go through before you go live and start spending the big bucks which will help you avoid an ROI related disaster.   My top 5 easy pre-launch checks are:

• Do a test purchase to check that the tracking has been installed correctly and ensure that all URLs are appended or encoded correctly.
• Double check all destination URLs are the best match for their respective keyword to ensure maximum relevance
• Ensure all the language and geography targeting settings are as per your campaign specification and not Adwords’ Editor’s default
• Spell check your ad copy (nothing looks shoddier than ads which contain typos)
• Ensure you split out the Google’s content network into a separate campaign for evaluation in isolation to the search network

2. Allow your board to run flat before initiating a new turn  /  allow a new strategy chance to build up data before changing tack

To successfully initiate a turn when snowboarding it’s imperative to first allow your board to run flat and true down the fall line of the mountain.    Failure to do this will pretty much guarantee that you catch an edge and slam face first into the snow.

The consequences of failing to hold your nerve when making a change to your paid search campaign trajectory are less snowy than when riding, but if you don’t allow a new strategy to unfold and garner some results, you will never truly develop insight and learning.   This is point is pertinent because many people try to be creative and decide make a campaign change only to completely reverse it at the first sign of poor results.   Yeah, some new strategies start flying right away but most take evolution, tweaks and refinement - none which is possible if you don’t allow a new tactic to accrue enough data to make statistically valid decision on whether or not to can it.

3. Hit the mountain early after a dump to get fresh tracks  /  keep an eye out for tactical paid search opportunities

To snowboard is to ride miles of deep virgin powder; truly there are few better experiences in life.  However to do this so usually requires commitment and an early rise.

In paid search there is also a payoff for the proverbial early bird in catching the worm of a breaking news story and thus benefiting from first mover advantage and deliciously low CPCs.   That’s right, for the fast-thinking, committed and agile paid search manager a breaking news story represents an opportunity to capture new search volume at rock bottom CPCs.  The catch is of course that not every news story is going to be applicable for your business to piggyback on, nor does a single news story comprise a long term strategy, but the more you do this and think about the opportunities that come along then you’ll be surprised at the chances that present themselves.

4. Start your rotations small and build from there  /  build paid search success from a small and manageable base

Let’s face it, if you look to start your snowboarding trick repertoire by mastering the tomahawk it’s going to hurt.    The same principle applies for a successful paid search approach;  you simply must start from a solid base and progressively build to a huge ROI.

A few common mistakes when starting out a new paid search campaign which relate to a pursuit of quantity over quality which you should avoid include:

• Building out keywords list out to an unmanageable and irrelevant degree through a lack of thinking and a surfeit of permutation (thus hampering subsequent optimisation and development)
• Adding broad match keywords on a wholesale basis to an account without sufficient effort put into phrase and exact match combinations
• Making an initial tracking specification so complex that it leads to confusion, delays and errors in installation (initially it might be sufficient to focus only on tracking conversion events)
• Splitting a limited budget between too many search engines such that you dilute optimisation efforts and are unable to achieve market penetration in any one area (where budgets are limited it usually better to get one area performing well first and roll out incremental coverage).

5. Check your speed in flat light conditions

In snowboarding flat light means essentially that you can’t really see where you are going; and of course this greatly increases the chance of your mush hitting the piste (are you noticing a pattern here?)  The simple solution is to take things just that little bit slower and accept that ‘low viz’ might take a touch off your top speed.

The equivalent of flat light in paid search would be a poorly configured or non-existent (!) tracking mechanism.  Thankfully the days of non-existent campaign tracking are all but over (although it does happen - you know who you are!) but more frequent are those occasions when developers “didn’t realise that code should be there” or “Jim in IT says it’s going to have to wait until the next release schedule to get this installed” - which is inconvenient to say the least.   Such occasions are a fact of life and my advice at these times is usually the same: employ the concept of prudence.   If you can hold off a campaign launch until the tracking is installed and you can “see” what you’re doing, then do so.  Similarly, wait on rolling out that big budget increase until that small but crucial bit of code is resident on your site so you can actually analyse the effectiveness of the increased expenditure; you will thank me for doing so, later.

So, there you have it - how snowboarding can improve your paid search.   Next week, how ballroom dancing can turbo-charge your SEO…

Image Credit: by rhys logan

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5 tips on how good snowboarding technique can improve your paid search

I created MademoiselleRobot.com in November 2007 as a personal endeavour. Having worked as a journalist/editor for many years before relocating from Paris to London, I needed an outlet for my writing, and what started off as a hobby has since become my job.

I currently get an average of 150,000 page views a month and in the past two years have been both a witness and a protagonist in the rise of online fashion.

Why should brands reach out to bloggers?

The rise of online fashion means that bloggers are now firmly on people’s radars. User recommendations and reviews are the flavour of the moment. Bloggers can be seen as ’super reviewers’ - they are everyday people talking to an engaged audience.

Blog readers are more likely to go and buy something they have seen on their favourite blog than in a magazine for example. Very often, people will buy something online straight away after seeing it on a blog, because bloggers are trusted by their readers most of the time.

If brands want to boost their online sales, I believe the best way of doing so is through an efficient blogger outreach campaign.

Bloggers vs. Journalists

A blogger is by definition anyone online with an opinion and a journalist is someone who has received formal training in order to either formulate an opinion or deliver information.

There are different types of bloggers, and this is the main point agencies and brands have yet to understand. It is primordial to differentiate professional bloggers - who influence other bloggers and benefit from a large following - from ‘leisure bloggers’ - who influence a small to medium community.

What it comes down to is that bloggers and journalists should be treated in the same basic way: with simplicity and respect. A lot of the time, elaborate marketing ploys don’t get the attention of influential bloggers as they just don’t have time to ‘play’, much like journalists.

However, in some instances, bloggers shouldn’t have the same access as journalists. I think Tavi is very talented and has a unique take on fashion, but I don’t think bloggers should be covering Haute Couture shows. This is something for the traditional fashion press. Really this has nothing to do with Tavi.

The importance of an editorial line

Especially post-‘Tavi-Gate’, bloggers have to make sure they keep their integrity and make sure they don’t fall prey to similar PR strategies.

I can’t stress enough how important it is for bloggers to be aware that they can be used by brands. They absolutely must have a strict editorial line and ethics.

The editorial line I set myself on MademoiselleRobot.com is very simple: if I like a product and would happily go and buy it myself, I will write about it. If I think it is not quite right, I will politely decline.

How to reach out to bloggers

Partnerships seem to be one of the ways brands have found to reach bloggers. Personally, I disapprove of such practice as the basis of the collaboration is very one-sided: the blogger receives products to review every so often and in exchange places the company logo permanently on their blog.

To me, a badge on a blog = display advertising, which comes with a price tag. Also, reviewing products = giving coverage to the company. What’s in it for the blogger? Clothes? Not every blogger wants to work for freebies, and would prefer to get paid.

The correct way to approach bloggers is very simple: read their blog, email them with targeted products, meet them, take time to explain what your brand does, if necessary loan or gift a product to be shown on the blog. Simple and efficient, non?

A few blogger outreach tips for brands

• Don’t judge the quality of a blog by the access the blogger appears to have. Since brands don’t yet know who to reach out to, a lot of blogs of varying quality have access to the same events and information.

• Read blogs and subscribe to a handful of them via RSS. Get someone on your team to spend an hour every morning reading through them. That should be enough for you to assess who to get in touch with.

• Find the most influential bloggers and reach out to them, then wait for the ripple effect. Make the bloggers you reach out to feel special, not one of many.

• Stop thinking that all bloggers are friends. Most of us don’t even know each other.

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How brands should work with fashion bloggers

This map shows the popularity of different mobile browsing platforms country by country, with some interesting results.

Apple’s dominance can clearly be seen, with the iPhone and iTouch accounting for over half the market in the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany and Japan.

The Android platform has its largest share in the US and the UK, but has a much weaker share in other countries. This could change in the near future as new phones emerge that run Android, such as the Nexus One.

Docomo and KDDI are the largest mobile phone operators in Japan, and account for 12% of the mobile browser share platforms.

Canada seems to like the iPhone and iTouch, with 86% of mobile internet users using this platform to access the internet.

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Mobile browser market share map

Last Friday I presented at the NMAlive event* on Online Engagement Demysitified event, running with the hopeful title “How Engagement Measurement Will Change the World” (see slides above).

As ever, it was a good opportunity to revisit the theme of engagement measurement and think about how we talk about it at iCrossing.

We’ve effectively spent the last four years looking at how you quantify and understand the concept of engagement. It’s only with evidence and actionable analysis that the idea of connected brands, organisations in touch and in dialogue with with their customers and stakeholders online becomes real.

Evaluating engagement has become increasing sophisticated. Right now the social media analysts in the UK are re-mixing the whole idea of search and social media data as a research discipline in incredibly exciting ways for clients as diverse as banks and soft drinks brands. Our work in this area has been profiled in two Forrester case studies on our projects for Channel 4 and Toyota.

The technology has moved at an incredible rate too. We started with social network analysis visualisation and a lot of manual work on collating data. Over time the expertise of out technical department, performance insight experts and insights from our journalist team have all been fed into new approaches to using our own tools and those of technology platforms like Brandwatch and Buzzmetrics. We remain open-minded as the the best technology and metrics mix for any particular campaign or brand.

What has remained a constant though for the past two years or so, is the basic framework that we use when developing an evaluation, iCrossing’s Framework for Measuring Evaluation (see diagram).

Three things we have learned about evaluating engagement are:

1. It can drive creative: Good evaluation of engagement delivers data and insight that constitute “live research”, which in turn - with the right processes and platforms in places - allows “live creative”, creative played out in an agile way, responding to how content is being received and re-used. It was this realisation that allowed an insight from web analytics to inspire the hyper-miling creative in the Toyota iQ campaign which was the outstanding success in that project.
2. User-centred perspective is key: Measurement mentality is shaped still by the channel media world we come from. The emphasis is too often on simply the brand’s and its marketing messages’ “impact” or “penetration” of target consumers. Colleagues from iCrossing’s user experience team have ensured that user behaviours and how they change during engagement have remained our focus in developing measurement approaches for engagement. This has also meant that we have been able to step out of the sales-funnel model of measuring (which ends with a sale) and create a model in which a purchase is an elevated but not always the ultimate form of engagement.
3. Stories+numbers: “Stories and numbers” have become a mantra for us over the past couple of years. It helps us to remember that both are equally important to meaningful measurement. Numbers without stories don’t travel far in organisations, don’t affect change, inspire action, without stories that make the meaning easy for people to grasp and communicate to others.

This last point gives us the justification for the title. As Alan Moore put it, “social data is the black gold of the 21st century” and it is engagement evaluation where we are closest to unlocking the value of this data to organisations. The insights and data (stories and numbers) that are being created need to travel further in organisations than the marketing and PR functions. They are so valuable that they create the business case for wiring organisations differently, having the connections between “departments” like PR and customer care stronger, the lines between “divisions” blurred and eroded.

Being able to understand and act on engagement data will change how brands - and more broadly all organisations - function.

* If you’re not familiar NMAlive’s a particularly useful format for speakers and delegates alike. Here’s what I like about it:

• Concise and well -priced: The events are on a Friday for the morning only - it’s easy to justify a morning out of the office.
• Short-lead time: Events tend to be organised about six weeks out, which means the topic is fresh - in this instance related to big brands using Cost Per Engagement (CPE) as a means of setting payment for publishers.
• Mix of people: It seemed all parts of the media/marketing complex were represented well: clients, agencies, media owners and obeservers. It makes for interesting, direct discussion (as does the size - about 100 people max).

It’s a winning formula I’d hope to see emulated by other publishers / event-organisers.

Post from: Connect

How engagement measurement will change the world

Like most people, I’ve spent the last week watching the depth of the devastation caused by the earthquake in Haiti reveal itself with an increasing sense of horror and disbelief. And probably like most people, I’ve donated as much as I could afford to the relief effort via the Disasters and Emergency Committee (DEC) website, because, as one colleague put it: “There’s pretty much nothing else that I can practically do to help the people of Haiti.”

The story that has been playing out on our TV screens and newspapers is truly shocking, and there seems to be a battle going on over which story the media wants to tell. What’s going to sell more papers or get more views or viewers? The story of “hope” (the one word headline on the Sun’s front page on Monday) - that people are still being pulled out of the rubble alive nearly a week on from the earthquake? Or the story of “human evil” - that “thugs” (as the Metro’s front page so eloquently described the Haitian earthquake survivors) are “looting, shooting and lynching” (the Telegraph) as a response to humanitarian efforts to provide them with food and water. (The fact that we’ve all donated £25million so far tends to suggest the Sun got it right again!)

Of course, the need of the media to create simplified, exaggerated, panic-driven narratives in order to grab attention from their competitors is nothing new. But as my sister (who works in the digital communications team at the Department for International Development  - DfID) explained to me as she worked a Sunday shift whilst visiting me this weekend - the way that the media tells these kinds of story has had a direct impact on the amount of money raised by DEC in the past.

I was fascinated, then, to see that her emergency shift supporting the DfID press office with their communications relating to relief efforts in Haiti wasn’t so she could help with press enquiries. Rather she was working to publish updates on DfID’s own website, and pictures and relief plan details directly to social media places such as Flickr and Twitter and on their blog pages. I watched her upload this Creative Commons map (which she sourced from Wikimedia) showing the exact location of the Leogain to Flickr, a region of Haiti that no one had yet managed to get to, and where DfID co-ordinated rescue teams were planning to travel to next. In a situation like this, providing pictures, updates and information directly to people like you and me - rather than relying on the press to tell the story - means that we are able to make up our own minds whether we think that this is a cause that’s worth our money without the filter of headlines, editors and ad sales targets.

Personally, I find this a very easy decision to make! But for those who might be worried that their money might somehow end up being “looted” by “thugs”, these images and updates tell a pretty clear story.

I’d really recommend adding DfID and other relief co-ordinating agencies to your social media feeds and streams if you are interested in getting a clearer understanding of what is happening in Haiti. With news breaking today that a second earthquake  measuring 6.1 shook the island this morning, the success of social media to help raise awareness about the need for donations could make a big difference to Haitian survivors.

IMAGE CREDIT: Michael Haig / Department for International Development via Creative Commons licence

HEADER IMAGE CREDIT: The U.S. Army

Post from: Connect

When ROI is truly a matter of life and death

Image credit: Creative Common Attribution: webtreats

2009 was the year social media became mainstream and your mum got a facebook account. Twitter took off in a big way (Twitter bigger then Amazon) and Facebook saw massive growth (Facebook bigger then Yahoo!) but search was still king of the hill, will that change in 2010?

Hitwise released some interesting stats last year that showed that social was now bigger then search in New Zealand and that at the end of the year Facebook overtook Google as the most visited site on the internet (albeit only for two days). So is this a trend that will likely continue into 2010? Well the growth of Social Media has not levelled off yet, people are now using the internet to blog, upload pictures and videos, socialise and network in greater numbers all over the world (click right for larger image). It looks like social media will soon surpass search in Australia and I would expect the same to happen in many countries this year.

So is search passé? Most definitely not, 2009 saw many of the big search engines integrate social data into their search results. You can now see real time Facebook and Twitter results in search pages, results based on your social graph and a whole litany of other social data (images, videos, news etc) right on your search page. The web is evolving, search results are becoming more personalised, social media is playing an ever increasing role online and as such online marketing must evolve too. No longer is it enough to simply “SEO” your site, companies are now learning that they must engage in holistic digital marketing campaigns that create captivating content that users naturally want to engage with and share. They are increasingly finding that the old model of pushing a message at people is failing, instead activities like creating branded engaging content and applications is a more successful way to capture attention.

2010 is going to be an exciting time online, new powerful smart phones mean that we’re spending more time accessing the internet from a mobile device, augmented reality if implemented correctly promises to further evolve social media and how we interact with our surroundings and with brands. We’re searching more using our mobiles, browsing social networks and micro blogging from our mobile device. 2010 is full of exciting challenges and opportunities and I look forward to seeing what it brings.

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2010: The year Social becomes bigger than Search?

This is the first post in the ‘decade in search’ series. We’ll probbaly  see a whole host of predictions being made for 2010, but before making ours we thought we’d the take time to  review the major events that have shaped the search industry over the last 10 years.

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A Decade in Search - 2000

2009’s been a bad year for it – first there was Spotify, which instantly transformed my music listening and sharing habits. Then there was Twitter, which woke up after a year snoozing and ate my blog.

And now my world’s been realigned again: this time by Posterous.

I was alerted to it by Antony’s recent presentation, which gave it a special mention among things to watch out for in 2010. Since then I’ve gone slightly nuts for it.

Pre-Posterous printing press, 1930, from Seattle Municipal Archive

Others have done the hard work of describing what Posterous does: in short, it’s a tool that makes it absurdly easy to publish text/audio/images/video and push it to wherever else you’d like it go.

Apathy + telepathy

At its simplest and most powerful, it allows you to post almost anything via email – simply attach the document, jpeg or MP3 to your email – or just include a URL for it - and send to post@posterous.com. The subject field dictates the post title.

Send a bunch of photos (or links to photos) and it arranges them into a tidy gallery without being asked. If you’ve hooked up your Posterous account to Flickr, attached files will automatically be uploaded to your photostream as well. If you have another ‘proper’ blog you can you autopost to that too.

It also syncs with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and most other things, with the capability of posting to one, several or all of them.

And – I haven’t yet tried this myself – but publish an audio file and it will turn it into a podcast, to which anyone can subscribe via iTunes.

You don’t even have to sign up for an account. Just send an email to post@posterous.com and you have your first blog post online. Short of telepathy, I can’t imagine a more user-friendly process.

Way of the web

The instant attraction of Posterous is symptomatic of a problem I’m usually reluctant to acknowledge.

I can bore for Britain about how revelatory, how revolutionary the internet is. But in the midst of my enthusiasms, I’m prone to gloss over the rubbish stuff – the information overload; the daily task of resetting some or other password; the ease with which you can be busy doing nothing.

The simplicity of Posterous reaffirms the inspiring possibilities, while dispensing with much of the tedious admin. Because on the one hand, it’s further reason to believe that super-easy, non-techie publication will draw the web into even more lives and areas of life - making it possible to find, connect, arrange and improve more of the stuff of life itself.

And on the other, it looks like a significant step towards a faff-free online future.

Header image credit: Flickr user Katie@!

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Posterous and the faff-free future

Even with the Bing’s announcing it will be delaying its UK launch until Q1 2010 at the earliest it is still worth considering Bing as part of your online marketing campaign. Here are a couple of things to consider:

• It appears visibility results in Bing differ from Google. Some websites have a great visibility in Google and not so much in Bing - other sites have the opposite. Websites that don’t have the visibility will need to address this fact, whilst websites that do have good visibility will hopefully receive a boost new year traffic boost
• Bing’s launch will now challenge Google to be even more cutting edge, as we have started to see from the integrated twitter search
• Bing is now using Wolfram Alpha results within its search results. Another refinement that could give a boost in market share to both these Google competitors. It will be really interesting to see how Bing applies it, because it will provide very accurate responses to technical questions, but it may take time for the results to load. Bing may need an infrastructure update similar to Google’s Caffeine update that will be launched shortly
• Bing’s offline marketing will challenge Google to market their brand in areas that it might not feel so comfortable
• Just like Ask have been running PPC campaigns on Google, and offline campaigns in the tube, etc, but has that helped their market share.
• Ultimately it doesn’t matter how much you spend on marketing if your product does not deliver. Bing needs to make sure it is consistently return valuable, relevant results to confidently challenge Google – for generic and niche terms. Otherwise this will all be in vain.
• In actual fact will Bing eat into Yahoo! and Ask’s market share instead of Googles

Find out more at Revolution Magazine

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Preparing for Bing’s UK Launch

Here’s a quick word to introduce our Connected Brands Index that has been making the headlines recently in the UK.

The research, which identified Google as the ‘most connected’ brand of Interbrand’s top 10, was conducted by iCrossing in the US - with plenty of input and support from the team here in the UK. It is based on the model of Connected Brands that iCrossing has been working with for the past 12 months.

The Connected Brands Index is iCrossing’s grand unification theory of measurement that starts to look at a brand’s effectiveness online - not just on their own properties, but also across search and social media. It accounts for the five attributes we believe make up a successful brand online: visibility, usefulness, usability, desirability, and engagement.

The first thing to say is that the newest research does NOT tell us the most connected brands on the web as the survey measured only the top 10 global brands according to the Interbrand study. However, now that it’s done (though it will constantly evolve), it is a benchmark against which any brand or set of brands can be evaluated.

As we rapidly become a full-service agency, with creative services sitting alongside our core competencies in search and social, we considered it important to be able to measure the effectiveness of campaigns across all digital activity - both onsite and offsite. And, following on from the US research, we’ve found it useful as a competitive benchmarking tool that has already helped some of our clients. We’ve found it can be used in its entirety or for benchmarking around the 3 disciplines of search, site and social independently. ‘Visibility’, for example, naturally focuses on search;  ‘usefulness’, ‘usability’ and ‘desirability’ are about the effectiveness of the user experience of a brand’s online properties; whilst ‘engagement’ applies to its endeavours in social media.

There are 65 different metrics used in the Connected Brands Index and while even this is by no means exhaustive, we do believe it’s a robust collection of metrics that provides valuable insight based on both industry best practice and our own experience of online evaluation.

The key is to realise that the research is not about enabling or informing strategy but for benchmarking performance against competitors and how that performance develops over time.

So, for more information on our Connected Brand Index, download the full research, tell us what you think and feel free to get in touch with more feedback and questions.

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The Connected Brands Index