Speaker:
Chris “Silver” Smith, Lead Strategist, Netconcepts

• Making your site “search engine friendly”
• “Pay-per-click” search advertising
• Benchmarking, competitive intelligence and ROI analysis
• Trends in contextual, behavioral and local advertising

Creating a buzz — viral marketing

• Blogs, RSS feeds, forums, wikis and more
• Harness “word of mouse” to enhance your brand
• Identifying the “sneezers” who will spread your viral message

Web analytics

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

• Making your site “search engine friendly”
• “Pay-per-click” search advertising
• Benchmarking, competitive intelligence and ROI analysis
• Trends in contextual, behavioral and local advertising

Creating a buzz — viral marketing

• Blogs, RSS feeds, forums, wikis and more
• Harness “word of mouse” to enhance your brand
• Identifying the “sneezers” who will spread your viral message

Web analytics

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

Already, YouTube has launched careers, such as that of YouTuber “Brookers” who was hired by Hollywood celebrity Carson Daly because of her zany videos. YouTube has also brought international fame to previously unknown bands such as Sick Puppies, a band popularized by the hugely popular and inspiring “Free Hugs” video set to the Sick Puppies song “All The Same.”

And then there are the hugely successful commercial viral campaigns, such as Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?,” the brilliant video series on various household objects that are run through a Blendtec blender—including marbles, rake handles, and even iPods.

“Will It Blend?” was the brainchild of George Wright, Marketing Director at Blendtec, and Blendtec’s Founder and CEO, Tom Dickson. George Wright recalls the birth of the idea: “Tom likes to run non-standard things through our blenders in the demo room to test out their strength. One day I wandered in to the demo room and saw sawdust on the floor. Tom was testing out the blenders again, this time it was a 2 x 2 jammed into the blender to see if he could destroy the blender or the 2 x 2.”

That gave George an idea: why not post those demonstrations of “extreme blending” online. The trick to creating a viral campaign George reckons is to make it funny and worth watching. They went to work creating the videos back in the fall of last year, starting with five videos: “Don’t Try This at Home Blending.” They built a companion microsite to go with it—WillItBlend.com—and sent an email to all employees to pass on the word of the videos and the Web site.

They also emailed their customer base and asked for suggestions of things to blend. At the time George was traveling and had his Blackberry; all the emails coming in were set to forward to him as well. Calls to his Blackberry wore out the batteries in a few hours, coming in from the media, print magazines, and TV. They were featured on a Today Show segment the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. iVillage Live did a segment on them too. They were interviewed by Newsweek, Playboy Magazine, and the New York Times.

Blendtec had a surprisingly low budget. It happened to have an on-staff video producer and on-staff webmaster, so development of the first five videos ran somewhere between $50-$100—including buying the domain name, a couple of rakes, some marbles, and few other supplies. So it can definitely be done on a meager budget.

George Wright advises that companies wishing to get into YouTube marketing focus on something that is fun, with either the interviewer laughing or scratching his/her head, because only then will they want to pass it on. But don’t force it. It really should be something worth watching.

George’s second piece of advice is to clearly demonstrate the product. For Blendtec, initially it was 100% about branding. After the brand awareness has been established, there has to be a need, a problem in need of resolution. George says a consumer watching a blender that is blending a rake handle would conclude that that make and model of blender would do a pretty good job at blending ice as well.

Blendtec has seen a dramatic increase in sales of at-home and commercial blenders (which are sold to restaurants and coffee shops, etc). The “Will It Blend?” campaign targeted the home market and online Web sales were more than four times greater than in the previous top-selling month. All other channels have seen big increases as well.

George also advises to make sure that the subject of the video is real: no “smoke and mirrors.” Tom Dickson is real. The blender is real. Tom is the owner of the company. He designed the machine. The experiments are reproducible.

Blendtec isn’t the only company having success with YouTube. Intuit, maker of the Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax software, are in the midst of a YouTube campaign, known as the Tax Rap. It was a pretty off-the-wall idea suggested in a brainstorming session; as luck would have it, Intuit was able to secure rapper Vanilla Ice as its front man. After that, it decided to just pull out all the stops—avoiding any corporate marketing feel to the campaign.

Seth Greenberg, Group Manager of Online Advertising and Internet Media at Intuit, says, “Rather than people making fun of our campaign we wanted to poke fun at ourselves.” They went to Vanilla Ice’s house in Palm Beach, Florida, and spent several hours there shooting. Vanilla Ice has been a big supporter of the campaign, according to Seth. What is interesting is that Vanilla ice is a polarizing figure. But that is what is making it a phenomenon on YouTube. (AdCritic.com said “I don’t know how to read this campaign…”)

The campaign has been getting more buzz offline than online. It has been covered at least 50 times by news outlets like CNN, as well as local stations. Entertainment Weekly listed Vanilla Ice’s Tax Rap as #10 on its Hit List. And it made it onto Page Six of the New York Post.

The key to the Tax Rap video campaign is not just that Vanilla Ice is the front man, but that it also encourages participation and viewer support. There is a contest with prize money of $50,000, with users encouraged to create their own rap about taxes to compete for the prize.

Unlike Blendtec, Intuit made a much more sizeable investment, including buying a Contest channel and a Branded channel on YouTube, as well as paying for visibility on the YouTube.com homepage. Those were crucial factors for Intuit’s getting over one million views of its video. Seth figures that it would have been hard to scale virally without it.

Online jewelry retailer Ice.com made its first foray into YouTube marketing this year as well with its “Mr. Cupid” interviews of passersby. Executive VP of Marketing and founder Pinny Gniwisch put some videos up of himself conducting impromptu interviews on the streets of New York City, in Times Square, on the ski slopes of Utah, and elsewhere, prior to Valentines Day. Pinny said the videos did very well for the company, which has even bigger and better plans for Mother’s Day: Those interviews feature celebrities, such as one of the actors from the hit TV show Heroes.

Speaking of Heroes, it was revealed that the hilarious viral spoof posted to YouTube called “Zeroes” actually had NBC behind it. NBC pulled it off brilliantly, but it was somewhat risky, because sometimes the community lashes out at the company behind the campaign when it is revealed as a marketing stunt.

YouTube has been used for effectively brand damage control as well. For example, the CEO and founder of JetBlue Airlines recently put up an apology video on YouTube because of the Valentine’s Day winter storm incident in February—a campaign that was well-received.

One product that got some excellent brand recognition and building from being on YouTube was Smirnoff’s Raw Tea. Smirnoff produced an uproarious music video called “Tea Partay,” with preppies rapping.

Another beverage, Mountain Dew, executed a successful YouTube campaign with its videos of jive-talking octogenarian Sue Teller offering surprisingly hip advice to young viewers.

H & R Block is using YouTube to promote its Tax Cuts software. The promo to the “Me & My Super Sweet Refund” contest is the most linked to comedy video in the history of YouTube.

It’s great to get the links to the video, as it increases the video’s visibility in the search engines. However, social media expert Neil Patel notes that the problem with most popular YouTube promotions is that YouTube gets the links and the original site usually does not. That means that the search engine visibility benefits don’t usually transfer to the company’s Web site. That’s not true of a MySpace marketing campaign, however, because its profile page can link directly to a company’s Web site.

Regardless of this shortcoming, YouTube offers much in the way of brand visibility when the campaign is well-executed. That doesn’t just mean posting a great video; marketers must also know how to take advantage of the social nature of the site—to build up friends and to get on user subscription lists.

Jonathan Mendez of optimizeandprophesize.com is an evangelist for the power of tags for marketing on YouTube. His advice is to make copious use of tags on your videos (ensuring, of course, that the tags are all relevant to the content), to spread your tags out among your clips, to use adjectives to make your videos more visible to folks searching based on their mood, have some category descriptor tags (bearing in mind that YouTube’s default search settings are Videos, Relevance and All Categories), match your title and description with your most important tags, and don’t use natural language phrases or waste tag space on words like “and” or “to.”

Along with all these great pearls of wisdom imparted from the above-mentioned viral video marketers, I would also interject: Don’t be afraid to make a start, even if it’s modest and has no budget behind it. You won’t get anywhere without experimenting with the medium. No risk, no reward. Who knows, it might be your inroad to Hollywood!

Speakers:
Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services
Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, JE Hochman & Associates
Don Steele, Director of Enterprise Marketing, Comedy Central
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

We’re proud to call Neil one of our “Cool Friends.” Here he is being interviewed by our founder and president Stephan Spencer…

What are the most important social media sites in your opinion? And why?

There is no particular social site that I feel is more important than another. They are all important because of the varying audience that uses each social site. For example people into politics use Netscape while people into technology use Digg. Because of this it is important to keep an open mind about all of the social sites.

Which ones are the easiest to manipulate, in other words to raise your content to the top?

I have not tried to manipulate any social sites, but it seems the less popular ones like Furl and My Web are easier to manipulate because they have less sophisticated algorithms. Once they become more popular and start becoming abused more it will become increasingly difficult to manipulate these sites due to the growth of their algorithms. When it comes to social media marketing, the idea is not to manipulate the social sites; it is to add value for users by creating compelling content that they are interested in.

What is the traffic potential if you manage to get to the front page of Digg.com, or to the del.icio.us popular page, or any other site that you recommend?

The traffic that Digg drives once a story hits the homepage can vary quite a bit. I have seen some stories get only a few thousand visitors and some have received as much as 20 thousand to 30 thousand visitors.

Del.icio.us on the other hand does not drive as much as traffic as Digg, but if you get on the popular and hotlist page you can usually get a few thousand visitors.

Some of the other sites that also drive great traffic are Reddit, Netscape and StumbleUpon. With each of these, traffic levels could be as low as a few hundred visitors and as high as 10 or 20 thousand visitors. For most social websites, traffic mainly depends on the time of day the story hits the homepage and the topic of the story.

What are some of the more clever examples of companies achieving a high level of visibility on some of these sites?

One clever example that comes to mind is a “Geek’s Guide to Getting in Shape: 13 Surefire Tips” because it did really well on the social sites and was not really related to the topic of the website.

Some of the other companies that achieve great success from these sites are all the web 2.0 sites that try to get on the homepage right when they launch.

If alpha geeks are the primary users of Digg.com, and they are not your target audience, is there still value in achieving a front page story on Digg?

There is still some value of reaching the homepage of Digg because a few of those visitors may love your site. In most cases if your target market is not tech geeks you should look at other social sites that your target audience uses. Getting on any of these can help increase your traffic, readership, branding, and links.

If it is about the links that you get out of it, what is a typical outcome in terms of the number and quality of the links obtained?

When most people judge the amount of links these social sites drive they use Yahoo. Rand Fishkin and a few others have seen up to 2000 backward links every time a story gets on the homepage of sites like Digg. Personally, I prefer using Technorati to check backward links and based on their estimates, you can usually see between 40-200 links for every successful story.

Looking only at indexation, back-links, result snippets, on-page content references, and engine popularity, MSN, Yahoo and Google are put to the ultimate Nostradamus Super Bowl test. Will Yahoo and Google level the playing field or will MSN come up with a flea-flicker at the last second?

Who will emerge triumphant in this battle of the Super Bowl SERPs? Click here to see PJ’s results.

RSS feeds are changing the way people are consuming their media. You need to stay on top of this channel in order to remain competitive online.

Web 2.0 is also changing the way people interact with web properties. The user generated content phenomena is helping site owners to actively engage an audience and build community online.

This presentation will also discuss how one online publisher, www.dmnews.com, is leveraging the Web 2.0 tool kit.

Social Media Sites are emerging as a channel to be reckoned with online. If you are not participating in these communities you are missing opportunities for increased brand recognition and traffic to your sites.

You Will Discover:

• Best practices for RSS usage
• The benefits of user generated content
• Why tagging matters for website owners
• How industry leaders are leveraging Web 2.0
• How social media can bump up your traffic and impressions

This presentation was originally held on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at The Country Springs Hotel in Pewaukee, WI.

But MySpace is hard for many of us adults to get our heads around. It just doesn’t seem logical: How does it hold the interest of so many young people with short attention spans, despite the fact that the design/usability is so atrocious, the Web page creation platform is so frustratingly restrictive, and it’s chock full of so many profiles that are obviously fake, spam, duplicated, or abandoned?

“Um, it’s about looking cool, fitting in, and hanging out, Duh!” one might imagine a teen MySpace user answering.

Then where do us adults feature in this? Besides offering a tempting place for stalkers and voyeurs to hang out and follow the daily lives of the teenagers who haven’t made their profiles private (can you say “Creepy!”?), MySpace is host to concerned parents trying to keep tabs on their kids, college students, obsessed sports fans, and realtors. In other words, the Average Joe or Jane. MySpace is a real slice of humanity.

Of course within the MySpace ecosystem exist marketers. But most are clueless. One would expect sophisticated MySpace presences from big brand marketers. However, that is usually not the case. And generally those that are present, like Blockbuster UK, 7Eleven, and Meijer, lack key ingredients for MySpace success — like an impressive number of “Friends.”

What is probably horrifying to these brand marketers is that employees and customers think nothing of developing a MySpace presence on behalf of the company — one that may not be very flattering. Consider, for example, these unofficial MySpace pages for Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and Target. Undoubtedly, this leads to customer confusion, because it can be difficult to ascertain the author of a MySpace profile. And such unauthorized pages can tarnish the company’s reputation, depending on their content.

Before you leap in to MySpace as a marketer, you’d best understand it. Because if you don’t, the MySpace community can turn on you the moment you make your first misstep. Just like bloggers can. (Note: many MySpace users are bloggers too. MySpace supports blogging within its platform.) The cardinal rule in MySpace is the same one as in the blogosphere: Keep it real.

Still, despite the hazards, MySpace offers a lot promise as a venue for marketers to hawk their wares. MySpace allows you to interject yourself into existing networks of trust-based relationships and to bond with your visitors in ways not possible elsewhere on the Web. And you can interact with huge numbers of adults, not just teenagers. Surprisingly, more than half of MySpace visitors are age 35 or older, and more than two-thirds are age 25 or older, according to comScore Media Metrix.

Do you have what it takes to crack MySpace? The most unlikely of marketers seem to have it — bars, bands, and quirky dot-coms. One of my favorite examples of MySpace marketing is Project Red. Not only is Project Red a world-changing organization on a mission to defeat AIDS in Africa, its MySpace profile is attractive and engaging.

Other noteworthy examples come from Apple Computer, the Brooklyn Museum, Drumz Clothing, the Orlando Magic, the movie studio that produced Superman Returns, the comedy character Borat, and the musical artist “Weird Al” Yankovic.

A couple of these I’ve been tracking for several months, watching the size of their networks expand. First, consider Apple Computer. Its various flavors of iPod Nano have a place on MySpace, e.g. Pink Nano, which is enjoying a meteoric rise in Friend status. I started tracking Pink Nano on October 15, when it had 1,500 MySpace friends. A week later, on October 22, it had climbed to 7,449 friends. On October 27, it was up to 37,070 friends. Now, on December 3, as I write this article, it has reached 55,776. Not a bad marketing job, Apple!

Now consider the “comeback king” of musical parody — “Weird Al” Yankovic. He’s using social media quite successfully to help breathe new life into his 27-year-long music career — thanks, in no small part, to YouTube and MySpace. Yankovic told Reuters/Billboard in a recent interview that he had accumulated 155,000 MySpace friends since he joined the site in July — all of which he had personally added. He stated, “I used to be a little pickier. Now I just kind of click as fast as I can.” (I can only imagine the Repetitive Stress Injury from that much clicking!) Here’s the kicker: a week after this article came out, he was already up to 219,033 friends! Another seven days later, and Weird Al had gained another 24,000 MySpace friends (up to 243,221). Now, on December 3, it’s at 325,614!

One small company that has enjoyed a degree of success in terms of traffic and sales through MySpace is the online jewelry retailer Pugster. Its mascot, a pug dog named Pinky, is the subject of the MySpace profile—a clever move, as it puts a disarming “face” to the company. The firm built up its MySpace page to a very respectable 8,053 friends. In a recent interview with me, Michael Boldin from its online marketing team revealed some secrets of their success:

1. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the sheer numbers on MySpace — and important to try to focus on marketing to the “right” group for your product or service — otherwise you’ll be spending a LOT of time on people who will never be interested in you.
2. But, on the other hand, when starting off, you need to get Friends. It’s kind of a bragging right on MySpace. If you have too few friends, it’ll be tough to get the good ones — the ones who will end up buying from you. So, before you go after those, get a few hundred “bad” friends — bands are the easiest. They’ll give you a respectable number on your Friends list, and will leave comments on your page — giving a little realism boost to your profile — making the addition of friends of the “good” type that much easier.
3. Where else could we find a place to actually build relationships with people — who may or may not have heard of us before. We spend time daily emailing people, and guess what, they email back. It becomes the ultimate soft-sell tool.
4. Have patience. Without a huge brand presence, don’t expect to turn profits. The only investment is your time. As long as you regularly give people something interesting — blogs, music, and other tidbits that AREN’T related to your business — then you’ll develop enough trust for them to be interested in what you DO sell.
5. Keep it personal — talk with the people as if you’d email a new friend. Say “Hi,” get to know them, and they’ll want to get to know you. If you try to sell, sell, sell, you’ll have a hard time earning respect on MySpace.
6. As far as layouts, there are a few “schools of thought” — one says make it fancy and high end, but the other, and seemingly more successful one, says simplicity is best. Since people are browsing through so many profiles with the same layout, they look for certain features in certain places. If you move too many things around, you’ll frustrate your visitors and they’ll leave. Make it intuitive and easy, just like a good e-commerce site.
7. If there’s anything a “seasoned” MySpace user hates it is a slow page. The MySpace site has loads of slow loaders. You may get friends with a lot of stuff on your page, but they won’t actually spend the time to interact with you.

You know who else gets MySpace? Site owners like this one who provide layouts, backgrounds, funny photos etc. to the MySpace community. Those folks are sitting back, sipping pina coladas and watching the moolah from Google AdSense roll in.

At top if this list are “social media” outlets and proper “search marketing.” Cohen gains input from Netconcepts’ Founder and President, Stephan Spencer for his expertise on these trends.

Spencer first describes the importance of social networks and their key role in today’s marketing. He goes on to explain the dynamics of search marketing and how companies will need to tap into the Long Tail of natural search if they want to seriously compete in the market place.

Read this entire article and learn 8 more ways to drive traffic and sales in 2007.