1. Dell Outlet - see one of their twitter pages here - Dell have Stephanie@Dell offering customer support on their page
   
2. Misco  - see their twitter page here - Misco have added a deal of the day to their background.
   
3. Viking Direct - see their twitter page here

I think these are great uses of Twitter. Each company can add or remove offers by the second. On the basis that “birds of a feather flock together” it’s highly likely that these offers will be re-tweeted to friends of colleagues of each first generation follower.  Links can be tracked,  sales can be measured, sales ROI can be calculated. On that topic if you go to the Dell Outlet page you can see that it has 1.5m followers which makes it the 89th most popular page globally (twitterholic). That gives Dell more followers than Paris Hilton, Stephen Fry or Sarah Brown.

To cut a long story short the Dell Outlet page offers these things: Utility, Relevance, Value.  If you can’t score more than 7/10 on each of these three measures, and you’re not a celebrity, then you will struggle to make twitter work for your business.

So why did they do it?  Television does amazing things for brands. It builds stature, it builds status, it builds employee confidence, it rocks competitors and it drives lots of traffic. More than that, TV advertising embeds brands into popular culture. It’s powerful stuff.  However, Google is already part of popular culture so why advertise on TV? My guess is they’re interested in seeing how TV ratings can be correlated to web traffic. I could have saved them around $1m here. TV ads drive web traffic at a rate of between 0.015% and 0.25%.  So with an audience of around 100m viewers, Google could have expected traffic uplifts in the US of between 15,000 and 250,000 within a few hours of transmission. What value is this to Google? When Google searchers clicks on AdWords it generates income for Google. Assume 50% of that 250,000 clicked into AdWords at a cost per click of $2, then there you have it; £250,000 of revenue. Not enough to cover the cost of the spot. But Google shouldn’t be disheartened by this  - these figures are based on buying a spot with inherently high premiums. Outside the Superbowl, the economics might look considerably better.

And for Google’s fan base (of which I am one). They are right, Google AdWords is a very powerful business generator. It collects response at the end of the sales funnel - just as the Yellow Pages did for so many years. But something has to populate that sales funnel and drive search volumes. Something has to make each brand credible; make it top of mind, the safe choice; the right choice. That’s where TV comes in.Even though things look good for Google in search at the moment, I suspect there may be changes ahead - demand for AdWords is forcing up click costs at Google and this may drive search marketing budgets to competitors like Microsoft’s Bing. As Google loses traffic it will look to fight back and it has to do that by holding and  winning back search traffic - the source of its revenue. There may well be a ferocious marketing battle to be fought amongst search providers, with Google standing to lose the most. Testing TV now, may indeed be a dress rehearsal for future TV advertising activity.

It’s interesting to note that predictions of the end of mass marketing tend to come primarily from within the non-TV marketing community. The reason for this is that those who have not been at the “business end” of TV advertising are unlikely to have made careful study of the effects of mass marketing versus the costs of undertaking it. Mass marketing can still be very powerful and it can be very cost effective. The temptation is to assume that because it costs so much, it couldn’t possibly work is erroneous. Perhaps with Google’s use of TV advertising, some of mass marketing’s critics may take time to reconsider. Google has.

Re-messaging (sometimes called retargeting) must be one of the best kept secrets of online advertising. Yes, many brands are doing it, but many more are not - and these brands are missing a major opportunity to reach historical site visitors and re-engage with them to increase sales.

What is re-Messaging?

Re-messaging enables an advertiser to re-serve online display advertising to people who have visited their website and left without purchasing or engaging in-depth (becoming a lead, registering for newsletters etc). So, imagine that you are an ecommerce retailer selling shoes. If you get a 2.5% conversion rate to sales, that means that 97.5% of your online visitors leave your site without purchasing. That’s a lot of potential customers, potentially lost forever. Well, it doesn’t have to be like that. Re-Messaging can help you bring these lost sales opportunities back into your business.

In order to run a re-messaging campaign you generally need to be working with an online advertising network. These networks gather together publishers of larger sites and do deals to sell their unsold advertising space. Nothing special there then. I agree. But here comes the interesting bit. These networks employ tracking technologoes which can detect people have been to your site and subsequently visited sites within their advertising network. It is when your past visitors visit these sites in a participating ad network that you are able to re-serve your online advertising to your past site visitors. This means you can track, follow and re-engage with people who have visited your site, but left without making a purchase.

There’s a huge creative opportunity here too. It is possible to re-message visitors who have been to specific pages within your site. Knowing which pages have been visited means you can serve custom display ads to people who have visited key pages within your site. So for example, we can identify all visitors who have been to the “Basket Completed” page, but not gone to the “Buy Now” page. These users can be served a sales reminder message such as “New Range of UGGs now in stock” or “Buy UGGS now and enjoy 5% discount until March 31st”. In this way you are able to re-incentivise past visitors who are interested in your products, but did not convert to purchase.

What kind of results can you expect from re-messaging?

In our experience click through rates in re-messaging are around five times higher than in normal online display. Conversion rates are also significantly higher because you are communicating with visitors who have already shown an interest in your site. It’s also worth mentioning that a conversion doesn’t need to be a sale; you can use re-messaging to build your database which can then form the basis of a CRM campaign. Either way, re-messaging is an extremely effective way to identify and re-connect with past visitors to your site.

Recommended advertising media and communication planning books

Advanced Media Planning by Rossiter and Dahah

Advertising Media Planning, Sixth Edition by Sissors and Baron

Advertising Effectiveness: Findings from Empirical Research by Giep Franzen

Advertising Media Planning: A Brand Management Approach by Larry Kelley and Donald Jungenheimer

Advertising Reach and Frequency: Maximising Advertising Results Through Effective Frequency by Colin McDonald (NTC Business Books)

How to Plan Advertising by Cooper (Ed)

Introduction to Advertising Media: Research, Planning and Buying by Jim Surmanek

How Advertising Works: A review of current thinking by Colin McDonald

How Advertising Works: The Role of Research by Professor John Philip Jones

Kellogg on Advertising and Media by Kotler and Calder

Media Planning Workbook by William Goodrich and Jack Sissors

Media Strategy and Planning Workbook: How to Create a Comprehensive Media Plan by Donald Dickinson

Spending Advertising Money by Simon Broadbent and Brian Jacobs

The Communications Challenge: A practical guide to media neutral planning by Cowley, White et al, eds

The Advertising Budget: Advertiser’s Guide to Budget Determination by Simon Broadbent

The Media Handbook: A Complete Guide to Advertising Media Selection, Planning, Research and Buying by Helen Katz (LEA’s Communication) (LEA’s Communication Series)

The MRG Guide to Media Research by Mike Monkman and Colin McDonald

Recommended general advertising books

Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy This is one of the classic books on advertising. Some people say why read a book by a man who time has gone? But on the other hand why not read a book by a man who single handedly created one of the world’s greatest ad agencies?

Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples(Prentice Hall Business Classics) Another classic. This books reveals many of the tried and tested rules that are deemed “unfashionable” by those trying to understand why their campaigns aren’t working.

Truth, Lies, and Advertising: The Art of Account Planning (Adweek Magazine Series)by John Steel Interesting contemporary look at the discpline of account planning by a seasoned and experienced practitioner. An easy and informative read.

How to Do Better Creative Work by Steve Harrison Can it all be put into just 150 pages? Well if the word of Steve Harrison is anything to go by, the answer is yes. He may not be wrong. An impressive summary of how to produce strong and effective advertising.

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Ries and Trout The word “positioning” is now firmly ensconsed in the marketing vernacular. Ries and Trout are the people who put it there.

Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins This book did for David Ogilvy what Lonnie Donnegan and Elvis Presley did for John Lennon. In other words, this is the book the got Ogilvy into the advertising business.

Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing by Drayton Bird The master of direct marketing shares his knowledge on direct and data driven marketing in the context of the digital age.

So we’ve had more than a decade of measuring online advertising effects primarily through the generation of direct click traffic. But now many a marketer is asking ‘what effect does online advertising have beyond the click?’ Marketers want to know whether online display advertising can be justified on the basis of anything other than clicks.  The answer is yes it can - so let’s explore what some of these more difficult-to-measure beyond the click effects are. Here are seven effects of online display advertising that cannot be defined or measured by clicks alone.

1. Online advertising drives offline sales: Online advertising drives purchase behaviour in offline channels - particularly retail and phone. This was shown by a Yahoo! and Comscore in a study (2007) that revealed 89 percent of consumers shop for information about products online, but less than 7 percent of retail sales actually take place online. These effects are not measurable in clicks, though one of our clients does undertake weekly in-store surveys to identify search terms that are driving retail traffic.
2. Online display populates the search sales funnel: Search volumes are driven by consumer demand for information and this demand is accelerated by all forms of online and offline brand communication. Online display is one of the drivers of search term demand, but consumer response often takes place outside standard “cookie windows” or in forms that are not easy to track unless you have a form of universal tracking in place to analyse click paths. As a result this effect is not always fully understood and accounted for.
3. Cross-media synergy: When two channels work together, engaging with the same person about the same product on the same day, there is likely to be a 2+2=5 effect. Of course it’s very difficult to quantify the precise effects of this especially on a micro level but the difficulties presented in measuring this type of cross-media synergy do not mean that the effect is not present. An ad exposure online may well stimulate a purchase elsewhere - an effect not measured by clicks.
4. Attitudinal change: Ongoing online display is likely to drive attitudinal change over long periods of time. Over periods of weeks, months and even years, online advertising can positively re-enforce, modify and update brand perceptions. These changes are unlikely to be reflected in short-term click traffic, but are likely to be valuable to a brand from a positioning perspective.
5. Pre and Post Purchase effects: Advertising has effects both before and after the purchase. Sometimes this is long before the purchase - when consumers are not consciously selecting products but subconsciously compiling their preferred sets. Sometimes it’s after the purchase and during ownership when consumers are reassured about their brand purchase decisions. This may result in increased future sales and increased brand loyalty, but this cannot be measured by real-time clicks.
6. Accessibility signals: Because online is a distribution channel as well as an advertising medium, its use can send signals about accessibility to consumers. It says “we’re open for business in the digital space”. This was certainly the case with direct response advertising and direct brands where the presence of phone numbers in ads was viewed by consumers as making the company appear more accessible and ready to talk. These accessibility signals are not directly measurable by clicks.
7. Relationship with technology: Advertising online helps to demonstrate how companies relate to digital technology and the internet. By ‘being there’ in the digital space a brand is saying that it values the digital channel as a means of communication and distribution and has the competencies required to participate. Again, a brand attribute which is not measurable by clicks alone.

Came across this - great fun. It delivers a visualisation of your twitter universe. Assuming you are tweeting of course.

Visualise your twitter universe here

The TV trade marketing body Thinkbox doesn’t like it, claiming that it’s not fair to lump all internet marketing spend into one pot.  But the reality is that the Internet’s share is likely to be even higher than that reported here.

Despite the fact that they condemn TV to second place, the likelihood is that the TV figures are more accurate than the Internet figures  - which are almost certain to be an underestimate. This is because the TV market is supplied by a much smaller number of larger individual players (mostly public companies), making accurate reporting and measurement more feasible. Online spend is established through a analysis of a sample of 135 online advertising companies, but internet transactions are facilitated by a long tail of hundreds of small companies which makes accurate measurement more difficult.  Clearly there is further online advertising expenditure beyond the 135 companies surveyed.

Interestingly, online is the only medium that is growing; all other channels are in decline with press classified down by nearly 40%, directories down by 25%, outdoor down 22%, press display down 20% and TV down 16%.

The 40% decline in classified makes me feel quite proud.  Sometime around 2000, whilst Communciation Planning Director at Initiative, I was asked to address the Newspaper Society’s annual conference and discuss the likely effects of the internet on the newspaper business. The Newspaper Society represents regional press titles, who rely on classified advertising as a key source of revenue. Much to the very real consternation and irritation of the audience I informed the gathered delegates that if they didn’t adapt to the internet, they were staring extinction in the face.  I think they consoled themselves by thinking either a) I was an idiot or b) I was joking.

Just had to set out all the elements of an effective paid search strategy for a client. Thought it might be worth setting out some of the important areas to consider if you are to develop an effective paid search strategy. It’s not exhaustive, but it is helpful if you need a quick check list of things to cover.

1. Platform Selection – determining which of the search platforms to use. The main options are Google, MSN/Bing and Yahoo! Bear in mind that in the UK Google’s share of the search market is around 90% (Hitwise Sept 09). This raises issues about work loads versus potential returns. In my view, sadly, alternatives to Google are below critical mass now.
   
2. Network Deployment – do you run across the site’s extended network/content partners? This means your ads appear on other sites apart from the search engine you are using to create the campaign. This can be good or bad  - it depends on the ROI both options deliver to the campaign you are planning.
   
3. Campaign and Ad Group Structure - Organise your keywords into Campaigns and Ad Groups for optimal targeting efficiency. Remember that budgets can only be set at campaign level so if you want to allocate specific budgets across groups of target keywords you will have to set up individual campaigns for each set.
   
4. Keyword Selection – Select the keywords your target audience are searching. Remember that generic terms are likely to produce more traffic and fewer purchase conversions than highly targeted lower volume keywords. Given that you are likely to be paying for clicks, you need low levels of clicks and a high conversion rate.
   
5. Negative keywords – if you’re selling ‘flat pack furniture’ you don’t want to be selling ‘flats’ or ‘puncture repairs’! Negative keyword settings allow you to eliminate these problems.
   
6. Keyword matching – Search engines will return your ad against phrases that contain your target keyword terms. But because the words in a phrase can be rearranged to mean something else, poorly targeted keyword phrases may deliver searchers who are looking something different to what you are selling. You can solve this problem by using Phrase match or Exact match keyword targeting.
7. Bid Tactics - Your keyword bid will determine how high you appear in the search engine’s listings. But remember that the #1 position does not always provide the best ROI. Lower positions can have a much higher cost efficiency. You will need to set up tests to monitor this and refine it as your campaign gathers sales data. Remeber you pay for clicks but only conversions will build your business.
   
8. Day / Day parts - Your target audience may be more or less active on certain days or at certain times of day. Setting up the days and times of day that you want your ads to run allows you to target prospects when they are most active or most likely to convert to a sale.
   
9. Budget Setting – You can manage budget deployment by setting your daily / monthly budgets at the campaign Campaign level.
   
10. Budget delivery – Search engines will “spend” your money in two ways, either 1) as the searches are pulled through by consumers or 2) spread evenly throughout the day. The problem with route 1 is that you can be out of budget by lunchtime. You can set the way your budget delivered across day.
    
11. Ad Text Copy Writing – Preparing copy to fit the confines of the ad text box and reflect your keyword selection is a vital component of search marketing. You have a fixed number of characters across each of the three lines including the headline. It pays in terms of ranking and response to match the ad text as closely as possible to the keywords you are targeting. Relevance is key.
    
12. Linking / Deep Linking - Linking ads to the relevant web site page(s) and/or landing page(s) can take your prospect directly from their search, through your ad and to the page containing the product information they’re seeking. That makes for better conversion rates.
    
13. Analytics tracking – setting up Google Analytics to track your campaign in detail will allow you to generate in-depth insight about where your visitors come from, how they enter your site, what they do on it, and the pages they leave from. But perhaps best of all, once you’ve gathered enough data Analytics will allow you to start optimising your campaign parameters around sales rather than clicks.