Monthly Archives: February 2010

Benefits of Online Streaming for Sports

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Sports fans from all areas of the sports arena have been vocally demanding one thing from their teams they are loyal to… online streaming of their sporting events that can be seen anywhere at anytime.

The spread of paid-streaming content online by U.S. leagues brings huge audiences for sporting events like the Olympics, March Madness, and the U.S. Open. Major League Baseball however, is the leader in capitalizing on this new trend offering its fans streaming live-game content on a paid basis. According to the Sports Business Journal, MLB has built an online streaming package that generated around 40 million dollars in 2009! The NFL, NBA, and NHL are also putting their best efforts forward to get their online streaming capabilities up-to-par for their fans.

Also, with the increase in smartphone use and data plan subscriptions from sports teams, this opens up demand for streaming sports and video content to call phone and mobile device users.

The increase in online and smartphone streaming allows many benefits for all different types of groups:

• Avid sports fans will now be able to watch games they are interested in seeing online, on their phones, or at a later date. This keeps fans interactive with their teams and up-to-date with how their teams are doing during their season.
• Advertisers now have an opportunity to sponsor online and smartphone videos and content allowing them to increase their branding strategies as well as hit some of their target markets
• Sports teams now have the opportunity to profit from an online market by offering these live streams of their team.

Here is a graph of the leading U.S. Sports teams taking advantage of video-streaming:

So, for all you sports internet marketers out there, give your fans what they want and start making some money off of it!

Information Provided By: eMarketer
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders

Social Media Marketing Seminar: SDSU

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San Diego State University’s Entrepreneurial Management Center presented an interactive seminar called “Social Media for Business” yesterday afternoon. This interactive seminar/workshop enabled the SDSU student population and all others interested in attending to discuss the opportunities for all businesses in social media with experts in social media, online marketing, the media and business.

The seminar was developed to show the importance of social media upon the marketing and branding of businesses everywhere.

Experts in the field running the seminar included:

• Kevin Popovic, founder of Ideahaus®, author of Satellite Marketing: Using Social Media to Sell
• Rodney Rumford, co-founder of TweetPhoto, founder of Gravity Summi
• Steve Kousky, technology correspondent, San Diego 6 TV
• Dexter Bustarde, senior web analyst, Digitaria

Each panelist had some great things to say about social media and its importance in the marketing arena for businesses of all shapes and sizes. These panelists also offered great examples of success stories using social media as well as those that were disasters. For example, they said if you wanted to see some successful social media campaigns currently being utilized, many of them said to check out the following companies: The Red Cross, Best Buy, Dell, Kodak, Cisco, The Susan G. Komen Foundation, Invisible Children, Intuit, and Intel.

There were many tips that they provided for those in attendance including:
• Identifying your target markets: demographics, psychographics, etc.
• Developing a strategy that pertains to your communications objectives and target market
• Developing Satellites: Integrating all forms of marketing to reach your “Prospects”
• Deploying those Satellites: Putting your integrated marketing plans into effect
• Measure and Mend: Measure your results and track your progress to learn from your mistakes and successes
• Take advantage of the free tools our there that are available
• Use social media to interact one-on-one with your consumers and help to improve your product/services by fixing what your consumers are telling you about what’s wrong

Overall, it was a successful seminar that gave a lot of good advice to those interested in social media for their current or prospective businesses!

Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders

The Future of Social Media

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There is no doubt that social media utilization has become the most popular and highly adopted form of emerging media within today’s marketing strategies. Every company that has a presence online has been frantically trying to increase their company’s exposure by following outrageous numbers of users of Twitter, bombarding fan pages on Facebook, and are seeking the newest markets within other social media networks.

According to eMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson, the future of social media and its benefits are not only ever-changing but will play an entirely different role for companies who utilize them.

“Advertising—which some might say has already failed as a business model for social media companies—will not be the primary revenue driver,” said Ms. Williamson.

The better business model, other than utilizing social media, will lie in the mastery of analytics tools to track their conversion rates of visitors coming to websites. The use for social media in the future will not be for advertising specifically but rather for a plethora of other reasons including:

• Should be integrated within all marketing efforts

• Should be available for consumers to find out more information about your company, products, or services

And more importantly should be used for:

• Brand Monitoring
Social media will soon be the best way for companies to track and begin to understand the “why” of consumer chatter about them and their products/service as well as the “who”, “what”, and “when” of their customer base.

This statement was offered by Ravit Lichtenberg, founder and chief strategist, Ustrategy.com, in response to brand monitoring:
“Naturally occurring conversations will be utilized in product innovation and design, and companies will create incentives for people’s attention and engagement while repurposing and analyzing content and engagement in new ways that will deliver valuable input.”

In essence, social media and its use for companies will be ever-changing. However, the future use of social media will lie in helping companies get information about their consumers and hearing what they have to say about specific products or services to help them improve customer relationships.

Information Provided By: eMarketer
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders

Hispanics turn to the Web!

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A study from AOL found that Hispanic Web users are more likely to be more trustworthy in the information they find online. The Hispanic population is a relatively younger market on the internet but their numbers are growing.

The study concluded that nearly three-quarters of Hispanic Web users had confidence in product rating sites, for example, compared with 28% who put more stock in the opinions of their friends. Many of the other results of the study are provided in the graph below:

This study also showed that Hispanics were:
• More likely to turn to the Web in almost every phase of the purchase decision (from learning process to brand awareness to final purchase decision)
• More likely to be online via mobile technologies
• Less likely to use email or talk over the phone or in person
• More likely to share deals or information with friends from online sources

Here is a graph that demonstrates the Hispanics use of communication:

Information Provided By: eMarketer
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders

Social Media Strategy: A Necessity

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Social media networking has now become a necessary tool for any companies marketing efforts. Rather than answering the question: Do we need social media?, companies are now asking themselves: How and where should we be using it?

It is common for companies to create social media accounts across all networks they are familiar with without an initial game plan. Instead of doing this, companies should be conducting research to find out what networks hit their target markets the best which in turn, will give them higher returns on their investments and ability to benefit their consumers within social media. A strategy needs to be developed rather than just putting your company on every social media network known to the marketers!

A strategy for social media is also necessary because users of these networking sites are assuming each company with a social media presence are savvy enough to not only effectively communicate, but are strategically seeking to improve their branding and marketing strategies over their main competitors.

Most companies limit their social media use to aid in their marketing and communications efforts. However, many companies have unique plans to use these social channels for their sales, customer service, and IT services! This will give those companies an edge over their competitors and can offer them very valuable information regarding customer feedback.

After all, according to Paul Verna of eMarketer, “A Facebook promotion is only as good as the information that it feeds back to the sales, CRM, marketing or senior management executives who can turn it into a business gain.”

Information Provided By: eMarketer
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders

Online Video Ads Study

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A study completed by video ad network YuMe evaluated the click-through rates preroll ads were receiving and the number of those who watched the videos until completion.

This graph below shows their results over the course of 2009.

The click-through rates on preroll ads decreased from 1.88% to 0.74%, from Q1 to Q4 of the study. Completion rates dropped as well with 74.4% to 66.3%.

These specific results tell us that there were higher completion rates for 15 second videos rather than the typical 30 second videos. However, the longer videos online received more click-throughs. The graph below shows these specific results of their study.

YuMe has also concluded that video ads targeted toward children ages 6-14 had the highest video ad click-through rate but the lowest rate of viewing to completion. It was in fact, the ads that targeted older viewers (mainly over 35) were more likely to be watched until the end.

Online video analytics and distribution company TubeMogul reported higher completion rates for 10-30 second preroll ads appearing before short-form video clips. They also report that rates were even worse at magazine and newspaper sites!

This research sums up a few things about online video ads:
• Shorter videos receive higher completion rates
• Longer videos receive higher click-through rates
• There are higher completion rates for those ads that come before a short-form video clip
• Online videos are least effective in magazine and newspaper websites

Information Provided By: eMarketer
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders

Astounding Facebook Stats

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Happy Birthday Facebook! On February 4, 2010 Facebook officially turned 6 years old. Facebook is used world-wide and has become the platform for internet networking with over 400 million users and more than 900 employees.

Quick Facebook facts:

1. The average user spends about 55 minutes a day on Facebook- this is equal to over 8% of their day.

2. Facebook is now able to be viewed in 65 different languages.

3. 30% of Facebook users are from/in Europe.

4. Every day 35 million users update their status and 20 million become fans of pages. (There are 1.6 million fan pages, by the way).

5. Of the 1.6 million fan pages, 700,000 are local businesses.

6. 2.5 billion Photos are uploaded every month by users.

7. Each month 3.5 million events are created.

Did we mention that now users don’t have to wait until they get home to log onto Facebook? The Facebook mobile application is supported by three phones: Blackberry, iPhone, and the new Android. Facebook mobile has 100 million monthly users and is still growing.

Facebook is dominating the networking game on all levels; especially for marketers. People can directly advertise to their target market via Facebook using pay per click. You can use Facebook as a tool that will post your ad on the pages of those people you select to target- a marketers dream come true. No wonder Facebook is a billion dollar company.

WebitMD knows the value and importance of marketing via social networks like Facebook. It is crucial that businesses, especially local businesses, take advantage of getting their name out to members of their community and using Facebook pages to reach people is the fastest way. WebiMD specialized in social media marketing among the other services we offer.

Information provided by: mashable.com
Written by: Samantha J Stephan

5 Free/Inexpensive SEO Tools For Your Website

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Looking for some free tools to help you improve your website’s SEO? Get familiar with the following 5 tools that can help improve your website’s visibility online and increase your conversions!

1. SEO Analyzer: You submit your website’s URL into this SEO Analyzer and it will provide you some feedback regarding your SEO and conversion strategies. It actually gives your website a rating on a point scale between 1-100 on how you are currently optimizing your website for search engines and optimization. It also gives you a report on every aspect of your website, including inline styles, obsolete HTML, and download time. For being a free tool, it is worth taking a look at!

2. Website Grader: This free tool is one like that of the SEO Analyzer. Instead of giving you a grade on a point scale between 1-100, it actually gives you a letter grade. Website Grader provides a great deal of information in a short amount of time and tells you all you need to know about optimizing your site, making your SEO efforts easier, and in less time. This tool also tells you how many del.ici.ous bookmarks you have, as well as grading both on-site and off-site SEO.

3. AWStats: This tool is also free and is mostly helpful when researching who is visiting your site, what search engines visitors use, and when visitors are actually showing up on your site. This is more of a log analyzer than an analytics tool but still provides free and useful information.

4. Crazy Egg: The basic version of this tool is free, but can also be upgraded if you pay a little extra. Crazy Egg allows you to see what visitors do when they get to your website, as in where there mouse is actually moving and what they are clicking on. It even has a heatmap to show you the exact mouse movements made by your visitors! Very easy to use and great free information!

5. Mint: Mint is a tool that provides great information regarding unique referrers, popular pages, and number of visits. This tool is around $30 dollars, which is not bad when the pay-off will hopefully be increased site traffic.

One should of course use web analytics tools first to receive most of their information like Google Analystics and Google Webmaster Tools. However, yo should be using the free and inexpensive tools that are available out there to find out more information about what your website is doing right, wrong, and to find out more information your analytics tools don’t tell you. In this economy, any beneficial information you can receive on a tight budget can only help your website grow, so get out there and start utilizing these tools!

Information Provided By: Moe Tamani
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders

Social Media Use at Work is a Liability

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Have you ever considered the effects of social media use your employees are engaging in during business hours? According to the “Social Networks vs. Management?” report from employment services firm Manpower, they claim that although social network networking sites can be utilized as an effective marketing tool for your business, it is just as big of a liability.

Lower productivity, security problems, and reputation issues are huge threats to the success of any company and these happen to be the end result of increased social media networking performed by employees during and after business hours.

The graph below demonstrates how many companies have a formal policy for employee use of external social networking sites worldwide. Only one-fifth of the companies that were surveyed in Manpower’s report even have a policy that concerns social media use. It seems that the U.S. and the Asia-Pacific business worlds are leading the pack with setting policies about social media use during business hours.

Among the companies that did have one of these policies, around 63% of them claimed that it was pretty effective in fighting off the lost productivity social media use encourages.

The loss of productivity in the workplace is one major concern of the use of social media. However, one must not forget about the effects of social networking and how it could potentially negatively effect the reputation of your company. Currently in the U.S., 8% of the companies surveyed in Manpower’s report confessed that social media did in fact have a negative effect on their overall reputation.

I personally believe that limiting the use of social media in the workplace is a great way to increase productivity of one’s employees. I also would want to encourage my employees to either promote a positive outlook on their company or even become unaffiliated with it altogether in order to keep the overall reputation of a company’s brand free from harm online through these sites.

Information Provided By: eMarketer, Manpower
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders

Is SEO Dying?

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It was bound to happen- some person writing about the death of SEO. There are a few reasons for this speculation, try searching for “is seo dead.”

Reasons why people think SEO is dying are as follows:

First, people do not really know what SEO is. Even among marketers, people continue to believe that SEO is the “process of tricking search engines to rank a site for search queries for which it isn’t one of the better matches. With this viewpoint, it’s easy to see why people would want to conclude that SEO is a dying medium. Google and Microsoft make billions of dollars in revenue from their search engines, and protecting that revenue stream is a critical activity for them.”

If people are not using SEO correctly, they will ruin the search engine system. This is why Google has invested so much in WebSpam. When consumers receive poor search results they become dissatisfied and turn to different search engines.

Second, other people believe that social media will soon replace SEO. “These people argue that inbound links are an elitist system of voting for Web sites (you have to own a Web site to vote), and that social media will provide a much broader array of signals, because anyone with an Internet connection can sign up for a social media service and start making their opinions known. Further, they argue, more people will rely on social media for opinions on things because people love to learn from the experience of others.”

Social media sites have not been adopted broadly across the population, making the data lumpy and inconsistent- and it is easily spammed. In creating an account, no real investment is needed; all you have to do is sign up and begin posting your opinions and thoughts.

Authority is another issue here. We can assume those with tens of thousands of followers on Twitter have some authority on a topic, but the most they can offer is their own opinions. “Someone with a Web site has made a significant investment in building that site, and here the stamp of authority is likewise relatively easy to measure. However, it’s much more meaningful to receive an authoritative link than an authoritative Tweet.”

So is SEO dying?

“Not a chance. Defined properly, but still somewhat narrowly, SEO is the practice of helping publishers bring new traffic and customers to their Web site, by building and promoting high quality Web sites using technology that the search engines can parse. That need isn’t going away anytime soon.”

Make the most out of available opportunities. For example, Microsoft’s Bing. SEO can and will evolve with the changing times. The advent of universal search resulted in some changes, and created new opportunities for SEOs. The rising prominence of local search did as well. Increasing personalization will create yet more opportunities.

“For the SEO professional, staying abreast of the changing market environment is part of the price of being in this business. While change is constant, publishers use SEO as a means for obtaining new customers from search engines. As long as search is around, there will be a need for people who know how to make that happen.”

Information provided by: searchenginewatch.com
Written by: Samantha J Stephan