Stemato - Stephen Tompkins Writes About Anything but Mostly Digital Marketing
With all these words of war between Mac and PC, where do us Bi-users fit-in? I have Windows products that I love and Mac products that I love.
Microsoft’s (disclosure: my employeer) launch of the ”I’m a PC” ads stoked my fire for Bi-user unity. So all us Bi-C’s unite!
Keyword research can be a daunting task. Relationships between consumers and brands can be like the difference between Japanese and English. Finding an appropriate starting point for setting up your first search campaign can be the biggest roadblock. After determining what product or products to build your campaign around putting together a great set of keywords is the next step.
Keywords form the spine of the your search campaign; getting these relationships right is important to your success. Where do you begin? Corporate websites, brochures and other marketing materials can be a good starting point for relevant terms being used to discuss your brand but they sometimes lack closeness to the consumer. Don’t be alarmed though because consumers have left a virtual digital treasure chest of keywords waiting be discovered in blogs, message boards and forums.
Here is my 5 step process to begin to gain insight in the blogosphere to what is being said and using it for keyword research:
These 5-steps are starting points for introducing consumer-driven keywords into your paid search campaign. You can not only increase your paid clicks but gain valuable CRM insights into your brand by adding them into your web strategy. The only question left is. When do we start?
* I remember when I worked at a satellite radio manufacturer we had one radio that was called: XTR1, Jimi and Stream | Jockey. Combing through forums, blogs and message boards would have yielded consumer preference for its name.
# Keywords that originate from consumers of a brand and are not necessarily brand driven.
There are many tactics to influencing the SERPs (search engine ranking pages) but you can still end up with listings on your search shelf-space that can damage your brand. Using defensive branding and reputation management measures can be the cornerstone to fortifying any good online marketing plan against negative entries. My colleague says keyword-buys, social-media and press releases are all good weapons to have in your arsenal but one less obvious tactic flies under the radar. That is buying negative domain names and linking them to a positive result.
I was reminded of the importance of fortifying your brand’s domain today, when I read an article in the Guardian, that showed the influence cybersquatters were having on the London Mayorial election between Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson. This site was particularly scathing in the way it portrayed Ken Livingstone as a freewheeling politician attempting to turn London into New York. And to make matters worse, they were using the domain kenlivingstone.org and showing up on the first page of Google results for the keywords “ken livingstone.” (Ken Livingstone’s real site is located at kenlivingstone.com.)
This is a prime example of the importance of making sure that you purchase the top results of your brand’s domain name and the negative results. Or risk someone else purchasing and deciding how you are portrayed online for you.
A whitepaper my company put out last year states that CPG (Consumer Product Goods) product launches can increase buzz by leveraging media spend. That buzz is significantly multiplied by a variety of factors surrounding a product launch. And major public announcements can be amongst the biggest drivers. The above chart shows how Led Zeppelin’s announcement of a charity performance gig sparked major ancillary insights. These secondary branches off of original announcements provide valuable insights, via CGM (Consumer-Generated Media), into your current brand.
What can you mine about your brand from the chatter around the internet?
Today on Armano’s blog he mentions something called “ambient interruption.” Its about the pervasive ever-present aurora of brands in the digital space. Its true that we are facing more subtle engagements from brands everyday. Email, display advertisements and search are all forms we experience on a daily routine. Our minds are able to block out many of them but they still seep into the brain.
All this “ambient interruption” has some interesting side-effects including subsurface recall. What is this? Today’s consumer is bombarded so frequently by messages that they are able to ignore most of these ads. But some are ignored at the conscious level and soaked into the subconscious for later recall.
These messages however sit inside the mind and can infect you at any time. Do you remember seeing and ad and wondering why it was astonishingly familiar? Perhaps because you have seen it before but blocked it out only to have it find it lodged in your subconscious.
I have been reading quite a few blog posts lately discussing self-branding. And, in the world of social media and fragmenting media models it’s important to realize the breadth of our brand online. A digital trail of “brand you” is everywhere–from Google SERPs to social networking profiles.
Due to this increasing lack of control over one’s digital image, I started to think about my real image as seen by the outside world, and whether that image aligned with my own thoughts and digital interactions. In a highly unscientific study, I asked a few friends (some who know me well and others who know me casually) to suggest five adjectives that they felt described me. Their answers represented an interesting range of ideas with some overlap. Here is a list of the adjectives I received from my subjects:
Subject #1 - Creative, Conversational, Inquisitive, Immature, Selfish
Subject #2 - Driven, Consumer, Abstruse, Elusive, Charming
Subject #3 - Cultural, Particular, Confused, Smart, Inquisitive
Subject #4 - Funny, Stylish, Happy, Flirty, Cute
Subject #5 - Creative, Driven, Intelligent, Hard-working, Flaky
The interesting takeaway here is that each subject has a slightly different idea of me, but overall, their descriptions do reflect me. The pattern that emerges is of a creative, self-driven, and fun person. The results are not quite what I hoped for but I think with a new year it’s a good start and gives me a solid place to start improving.
If you know me I would really appreciate your input. What five adjectives do you think describe me? Please use negative or positive words to help with accuracy.
I was riding the train today, when I saw a young man reading Wikipedia articles whilst studying his class work. It immediately started my brain to think about my time in College and the amount of information available back then. The Internet was in its infancy and things like Wikipedia were mere ripples on the horizon. The internet was a series of message boards loosely or not so loosely tied together. Collaborative learning meant organizing a study group and hoping everyone showed up.
All the information available to Kids today is amazing. They are constantly being bombarded by information and must learn to quickly process or dismiss it. Today’s youth must be eons smarter than past generations due to the resources available.
They have become hype-sensitve filters able to block-out advertising and absorb content they desire. This is bad news for brands who face a huge challenge in the coming years attempting to break through these hyper-sensitive filters and score a remarkable product.
Dictionary.com has six different definitions for the term brand and branding. Some of them reference a sword (ie. excalibur); others recall the term in the context of marking ownership of livestock. All seem to be slightly askew for the term branding as it relates to marketing and advertising. Branding has both holistic and physical properties and creates confusion for marketers who hastily try to build brands using poor core values. Brand building is a process which takes time, and must be done with exact strategic goals set in motion long before the brand is born.
Contagious is something less confusing to define but no easier to implement. It is defined this way on dictionary.com:
tending to spread from person to person: contagious laughter.
Brands typically hope to incorporate some degree of contagiousness that embody? its essence in order to spread the ideas centered at its core. That is where the name of this blog comes from. BRAND + conTAGIOUS = brandtagious. And it is my sincere hope as I embark on this journey that I learn and experiment with ideas and thoughts that relateto branding development, strategy and marketing.
Recent Comments