DigiTales Blog - Mel Carson

Learning from Vodafone to Keep It Clean

Mel Carson — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 18:38:00 GMT

Last week’s Twitter comment by a Vodafone employee was unfortunate.

To be honest, something like this was bound to happen. But one rogue Tweet in amongst millions of corporate others doesn’t make social media some kind of danger area to be avoided.

Business owners shouldn’t panic but just take a step back to review their procedures, training, password protection and strategy, to minimize something like this happening to them.

What doesn’t seem clear is whether it was a disgruntled employee or one who just flicked the wrong switch.

What we do with @MSAdvertising is separate our personal accounts from applications we use for working the corporate feed.

Keeping the company and personal accounts clean and free of each other would be one step in the right direction, making it difficult for staff to tweet the wrong thing to the wrong followers.

Search Engine Strategies London 2010 – Get 20% Off a Ticket

Mel Carson — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:24:00 GMT

It’s that time of year again when search engine marketers from the UK and Europe descend on the Business Design Centre in Islington to learn the latest trends in SEM, SEO, PPC and social media.

Last week, I was lucky enough to interview Mike Grehan, who runs the show, and get readers of our Microsoft Advertising Blog a 20% discount on a ticket, which I’m passing on to you!

So what does Mike feel is top of mind for marketers in 2010?

“Real time search. There’s no doubt that practitioners want more information on search and social and how to optimize their campaigns to tap into this new stream of live information.

And social media is such a hot topic. Not just how do we do it better. You can take a step further back, it’s more about how do I convince my boss that we should be doing it. So explaining where it fits into the marketing mix is just as important as talking about pure tactics."

Check out the rest of the interview and pick up the discount code!

See you there?

PS: You can also follow me on Twitter & Facebook

How to use Twitter Part 4 - Tools

Mel Carson — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:37:00 GMT

Continuing the Twitter Tips I embarked on last year, we’re now up to number 4 in the series – Twitter Tools Now you can run your account quite easily from your web browser.

If you’re just after having a chinwag with friends, or clicking on links to learn from folks you follow, the web will do fine.

But what if you want to dig a little deeper? Back in June when I interviewed Biz Stone, he said Twitter had 11,000 tools registered plugging into their APIs – of course I’m not going to list them all, but I’ll call out a few areas where you might explore some additional help to make your Twitter experience just that bit more fruitful.

Desktop Management Apps

These use a bit of S+S to help you get more out of Twitter.

Download the likes of Seesmic, Tweetdeck, Bdule, Hootsuite or Twhirl and they let you manage multiple accounts, easily search for keywords so you can follow conversations, update your Facebook status at the same time, and notify you if someone sends you a DM or replies to one of your Tweets.

Very helpful if your only blocker to engage is you don't have the time. These save you time by making it easy to chat and easy to be kept informed.

URL Shortening

Ever wondered how people you follow get those long links to shrink? They use URL Shortening services which create a “re-direct” link to a longer news item or blog post. This leaves more space for text within the Tweet so you can explain the context.

Remember you only have 140 characters!

The beauty of these is in the analytics most provide. They let you see how many people have clicked on the link you tweeted, and very often give some geographic data as to where they’re clicking from. I use http://bit.ly/ but Lee Odden has a great rundown here. Twitter

Analysis

How many followers did you gain or lose last month? Twitter Counter will tell you.

What’s your reach? You may only have 500 followers but once your stuff gets re-tweeted, what’s your potential impact? Tweet Reach will tell you that. Need some fancy charts and in depth numbers on your retweets, popularity, impact or generosity? Twitteranalyzer & Tweetstats & Twitalyzer will help you with that! Now that is not all of them, and not one of them is really the all-in-one solution because they all do different things.

But it gives you an indication of how developers are using the Twitter APIs to come up with data mining gizmos and helpful apps that help you be more Twitter productive, and could help justify your foray into Social Media!

For over 50 tools and explanations check out this huge post from HoneyTech!

It's a monster!

If you have a fave tool then let us know! Next time I'll wrap up the series with some advanced ideas on how to get the best out of Twitter.

PS: If you haven't had enough, you can also follow me on Twitter & Facebook

5 Reasons Why PPC is Crucial to Social Media & Brand Reputation

Mel Carson — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 12:07:00 GMT

At a conference on social media before Christmas, one of the presenters suggested PPC wasn’t relevant to brand reputation management as "nobody clicks on the ads".

It was a plainly wrong assumption given Google’s whole business model is based on them, and look how much money they have in the bank!

A straw poll on my Twitter feed, and some internal numbers, state that between 10% and 50% of clicks occur on paid ads versus organic “free” listings depending on the industry and the brand.

That’s a lot of clicks and 56% of digital marketing spend in the UK going on search speaks volumes.

So here are 5 reasons why PPC is important for brand rep and social media campaigns and monitoring:

1) Some search engines let you bid on competitor brand terms. Who’s bidding on yours and appearing in your place?

2) In a crisis, you can use PPC to get a message out in a few minutes. British Airways did this well just before Christmas when all the strike shenanigans was going on. They bought the keyword “ba strike” and had a message directing desperate passengers to a dedicated page on their site with up-to-date info on the situation.

3) A disgruntled customer could write a damaging blog post about your brand that ranks highly in the search engine results pages. While you work on a strategy to bump that story down the organic listings, a PPC ad could be a stop gap to detract from the negative sentiment further down the page.

4) Sometimes it takes time for a page on your site to be crawled and gather authority. Let’s say you have a new brand of widget you want to promote. A potential customer might see your offline marketing, go to a search engine and search for it. If they can’t find it because your sites not been optimized or crawled, then that’s one unhappy customer, one less sale, one brand damaged and who’s to say they won’t tell their friends not to bother either. Using a PPC ad as a short term tactic would win out in this case.

5) PPC plus a good organic ranking leads to positive brand uplift. Gord Hotchkiss published a white paper a while ago using Honda as a case study.

Key findings of the white paper:

“A significant lift in brand affinity: Online consumers who saw Honda in the top ad placement and the top organic search result were 16 percent more likely to think of Honda as a fuel efficient car than when the automaker's brand didn't appear on the page at all.

A significant lift in brand recall: Online consumers were 42 percent more likely to recall Honda if the company appeared in both the top ad placement and the top organic search result, rather than just the top organic listing.

A significant lift in purchase intent: When Honda was featured in both the top ad and top organic listings, purchase intent for Honda increased. However, other automaker brands absent from the page suffered a significant decrease in purchase intent.”

So it does go to show that paying for clicks through PPC platforms is about more than just generating leads.

These are just 5 reasons. If you can think of any more, please do so below…

Next week I promise to finish my Twitter tutorials!

PS: You can also follow me on Twitter & Facebook

Simple ROI Tip for Corporate Blogging

Mel Carson — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 11:52:00 GMT

Lovely post from Jason Falls – aka Social Media Explorer - who gives some excellent advice for all you doubting Thomas’s who want hard ROI numbers for your social media efforts.

In short, you take a look at your blog post rankings, find out what the CPC would be for those major key terms at those positions on Google, Bing and Yahoo! and multiply that by the amount of traffic you get.

Easy!

Tomorrow I'll explain why PPC is crucial to reputation management!

PS: You can also follow me on Twitter & Facebook for more digital insight!

Social Media Discussed at CES 2010 Digital Hollywood

Mel Carson — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 16:47:00 GMT

Coming into the last day here at CES – Consumer Electronics Show here in Las Vegas and I’ve had great fun playing with a lot of gadgets, phones, netbooks, PCs and robots!

The Digital Hollywood sessions have been worth sitting through. Some very senior folks have been on large panels discussing digital advertising and what we can all expect in 2010.

What’s driving the conversation is Social Media, partly because it’s a phenomenon gaining more mainstream marketer attention because of the dizzy rise of Twitter & Facebook, but also because of the measurement conundrum.

As one speaker said – “We can’t report on the metrics if we don’t have a single way of doing so.”

Well anyone who is in the thick of Social Media Marketing will know there are a myriad of ways to track ROI but it really depends on your goals. I suspect what many brands don’t find appetizing is all the heavy lifting involved. One panelist said they’d had conversations with a big brand who had recently hired 40 people simply to track, monitor and respond online to customer queries or issues on social networks.

If you’re going to do Social Media right you need to invest in people to be sociable on behalf of your brand.

Social Media are the tools you use, Social Media Marketing is the discipline your marketing teams should employ to keep the conversation around your brand positive and alive.

Other topics included mobile. No one would be drawn on "the year of mobile" question but the feeling was upbeat now we're coming out of the recession.

Given the amount of gadgetry on show here, it doesn't take a genius to work out how important integrated marketing is going to be. Not just online/offline, but between devices.

The big message was around joined up efforts to not only push messages out in a unified way, but the need to track it back and understand where each channel fits in the mix.

Check out these posts for more from the show and some photos too!

PS: You can also follow me on Twitter & Facebook for more digital drivel!

ROI of Business Travel from CES in Las Vegas

Mel Carson — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 05:39:00 GMT

Just landed in Las Vegas to cover the Consumer Electronics Show for Microsoft Advertising. Should be a good craic and as I’m not drinking in January – trying to lose some Xmas pudding poundage, I’m hopeing my Tweeting won’t lose steam!

On the flight I read a nice article in the Alaska Airlines magazine by Michele Whitehead who’s a freelance writer from Seattle.

It was all about giving business the personal touch in a digital age. One piece of research caught my eye from the US Travel Association called: The Return on Investment of US Business Travel.

Firstly kudos to them for calling out it’s only a US study. I know my wife’s American but at least she recognizes that not all her compatriots generally recognize the relevance of research beyond their own borders.

Secondly it makes for some fascinating findings:

- For every dollar invested, companies see a $12.50 return for the travel lay out.

- Execs say they reckon 28% of business would be lost if they didn’t get any face time with prospects.

- 40% of new customers are converted in in-person meetings as opposed to just 16% on the phone or by email.

- 5-20% of news business is thought to come from trade show participation.

I have to agree that there is no real substitute to meeting a potential customer or a colleague in the flesh. There’s something about seeing the person, watching the body language and getting a feel for them and how they tick.

My boss and team are based in the US, and ever since we started using video teleconferencing, I’ve found our meetings so much more productive than simply dialing a phone number and listening in.

Maybe it’s just a visual thing but this research does go a long way to justifying me being here in the devil's playground in 15 degree sunshine!

Ooops – just seen the London weather – sorry guys – non-alcoholic margarita waiting….gotta run!

PS: You can also follow me on Twitter & Facebook for more digital drivel!

How to Use Twitter - Part 3 - What NOT to do!

Mel Carson — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 10:54:00 GMT

So now you’re set up on Twitter, you’ve started following friends and started tweeting, I thought I’d jot down a few hazards that people stumble over or smack straight into!

It’s much easier to do the right thing if you know what you shouldn’t be doing, so here goes:

Don’t auto Direct Message or auto Follow people back.

This “technique” uses software, readily available on the web, which you can program to send a direct message to someone that follows you with some banal, inane message normally containing a link to “check out” some other of your wares. It’s very impersonal, looks lazy and, in a week long experiment I ran with a couple of accounts, registered not one click though on the link I supplied.

Auto following people back is also a bit shoddy. To get in the spirit you need to take the time to look at your follower’s profiles, assess their stream and then make a call. Using a program doesn’t cut it – UNLESS you’re so overwhelmed with followers it makes sense to auto follow a big batch in one hit.

Don’t over-tweet!

The best Twitterers manage to use the glorious English language of ours to get their point across in just 140 characters. Using up 3 whole Tweets to rant about something defeats the object, shows your sub-optimal grasp of the Queen’s lingo and will turn off your followers pretty pronto. Go and set up a blog if you can’t be concise.

Don’t overdo it with event coverage.

It’s nice that you’ve got a ticket to #SESLondon or #IABEngage and your followers may like to know what’s going on, but remember not to flood their stream with words of wisdom from the podium. Once every 7-10 minutes is fine for spreading nuggets of insight. Throw in a few TwitPics too and folks will feel like they’ve been there, even though they’re chained to their desks.

Don’t just talk about yourself and your company.

Try and spread your Tweets with a combination of self-promotion, engagement with your followers, retweeting of others’ news, tidbits and insight. Mixing it up a little shows you have - and I know I sound a bit boarding school matronly here - a healthy, wholesome and generous stream!

Don’t be un-generous about who you follow.

Just because you’ve never met someone face to face doesn’t mean you shouldn’t follow them on Twitter, especially if they are following you. Of course they have to be in a relevant space and resonate with you, but there’s something about people with 2K followers and they’re only following 100.

There’s a fascinating psychology behind different Twitterers attitude to follower/following ratio. Firstly you’re more likely to get less engagement if folks following you know you’re not following them back. Secondly people following WAY more people than are following them back do look a little desperate so proceed with caution. And thirdly you just look a bit pompous if you’re not even attempting to reciprocate and show that you don’t know everything and want to learn from others.

There are plenty of tools now to wade through any noise, Twitter Lists for one, so as in most situations in life, being generous and a little self-effacing will pay off I assure you!

Do let everyone know if you have a Twitter No-No below and on Monday we’ll talk TOOLS!

BA Strike - Customers Sound Off Using Social Media

Mel Carson — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 09:46:00 GMT

Being affected by the strike – my wife and I are supposed to be flying to Seattle on the 26th for what's left of Xmas with her family – I thought I’d experiment with a post on the BA Strike calling for people to tell their stories.

Tweeting the post gained a little traction, 15 re-tweets according to Tweetmeme, but what I didn’t foresee was quite how much traffic and comments - over 60 so far - would come through search and word of mouth.

Given the magnitude of the situation, regular newspapers are dominating the search engine results pages, but my post seems to be getting through helped by a plug on Jeremy Vine’s BBC Radio 2 show yesterday by Sylvia Tidy-Harris.

Other brands have tried to get in on the action and bidding on related keywords which, as a victim of all this, leaves a little bit of a sour taste in the mouth, but I’m all for creativity as well so will sit on the fence.

Suffice to say, this whole rigmarole is turning out to be a great case study for social media marketing. Some of the people commenting on my post may be doing so for the very first time, but it goes to show that if you give people a platform to sound off, they’ll do it in spades…..

How to Use Twitter - Part 2 - 1st Tweet & Following Friends

Mel Carson — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 10:38:00 GMT

In Part 1 of the 5 part guide to How to Use Twitter, I talked about the simple steps you need to take to get set up so you’re ready to utter forth your first Tweet.

Now if Biz Stone had a dollar for every 1st Tweet that was along the lines of “Trying to figure out this Twitter thing!” he’d have more money to play with than Elin Woods. So try and make it original.

If you’re in this for professional reasons, i.e. you want to communicate and learn about what’s going on in media/advertising from your peers, then say it. Or, if you can carry some withering wit well, then kick off with something personal but follow up with something professional too.

The best Twitter streams, in my opinion, are those that mix a bit of personality and individualness with professional insight and news propagation. It just adds colour, and when someone’s looking at your Twittering, like minds are more likely to follow you if they can see it’s not all about you, and that you’re adding some value.

Check out http://myfirsttweet.com to see what others said when they were 1st starting up. Mine was all about cricket!

Before you start following people, get up a head of steam. Keep adding in a few Tweets, mixing it up a little, so when you do start following or letting people know you’ve succumbed, they have a little more to go on than your first Tweet.

With a few nuggets of wisdom and a smattering of waggishness, you can now start to follow people. You may be interested in news or some journalists or a media provider's ramblings, but wait a sec before starting to follow them. Start with people you know who might tell their followers that you’re a good egg and to follow you. It’s what Twitter is about.

I remember about the 1st person I started following was Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land. Now we’ve met a couple of times, he knew I had some insight for his followers into Microsoft and adCenter so he told them so. I got about 50 followers within 30 minutes thanks to his recommendation – cheers Danny!

Send an email to your friends you know maybe on Twitter and let them know. They’ll start following you, if your settings are correct, you’ll get an email saying so, click on the link and start following them back.

You're away!

Next week, we’ll talk about where to find like minds to follow that you may not necessarily know personally, but could make amazingly fruitful connections with online.

How to Use Twitter - In Five "5 Minute" Tutorials

Mel Carson — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 10:31:00 GMT

With Twitter now part of our mainstream consciousness, marketers incorporating it into their social media strategies, and search engines releasing real-time search capabilities, I get asked more and more to give some advice on how to get set up and use Twitter well and efficiently.

So I’m going to try over five posts to give “5 minute” lessons and best practice tutorials to get you up and running quickly and Tweeting like a fury!

Getting Set Up on Twitter

• Go to Twitter.com and click on the “Sign Up Now” button

• Enter your name or company name as you would search for it on a search engine. It’s important to get this right as it’ll get indexed by search engines and it’s your full name that appears in emails to people you start to follow. Even if you choose a username like “thickjack” you’d still want your name “Jack Jones” to be discoverable and appear in follow emails or no one will follow you back!

• Pick a username. Most are taken, like many domain names, so it might take a while but make it short and meaningful. If you’re starting on Twitter for professional reasons make it a little more professional than “SickBoyJones”. Also use CAPITALS in your username as they show up better in your feed and are easier to read – “MelCarson” looks better than “melcarson”

• Pick a strong password

• Pick an email address you use regularly so you keep up to date with all the comings and goings on your account. You can always filter incoming mail if it becomes too much!

• Then create your account.

• I’d skip the next step as you can come back to adding friends from contacts later.

• If any of the suggested Tweeters look appealing then select one of them but I’d skip that too until you’re completely set up.

• Congratulations – you now have a Twitter account!

• Before you start Tweeting or adding followers click on Settings in the top right hand corner.

• Add your Time Zone - this helps with times tamping

• Add some kind of URL – it might be a blog, or company website or even LinkedIn profile – just something to add some authenticity to who you are if people are interested to find out more.

• Add a Bio – this is important as it’s the one chance for people to see at a glance what you do and why you’re on Twitter. Witty helps, calling yourself a Guru or Evangelist might turn people off. The bio is letting your potential followers know who you are, so think carefully and be truthful and authentic.

• Add you location – “London” or “Reading UK” – you may attract followers from all over the world whose grasp of geography ain’t all that hot, so help them!

• Save your details and click on Picture in the row of tabs at the top.

• Some kind of Picture is crucial – whether it’s a snap of you, a company logo or an avatar, it shows you're serious and not doing all this willy-nilly. Twitter is all about transparency, so giving folks some insight into what image goes well with your words goes a long way.

• You are now ready to gain some followers and Twitter your first Tweet............more on that next time….

Will Carling Video Interview on Twitter, Social Media, Rugby & PR

Mel Carson — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 11:36:00 GMT

Met Will over Twitter in the summer and he came to speak at an event I was organising.

Witty and engaging, Will is the epitome of the celebrity Tweeter.

In this interview he talks for 12 minutes on how he got into social media, his niche website and how he sees the dynamics of PR, journalism and people in the public eye changing.

Enjoy!

To Bing....? The Big Question!

Mel Carson — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:11:00 GMT

One of the best bits of feedback I’ve ever had as a Microsoft employee was an email from a US super-affiliate – and I mean SUPER-affiliate – after adCenter and Microsoft in general were being discussed in unfavourable and fruity language on his blog.

I’d added a comment saying I thought we could perhaps do a bit better and soliciting some actionable data with regards to his readers’ concerns so I could send them to our product teams.

His email said, “The thing about you Microsoft guys is, whenever you screw up or something isn’t well received, you don’t get all down about it but come straight back asking questions! That’s how to run a business!”

Although I’d rather not screw up, it does pay to ask the right kind of questions, listen intently and collaborate with your customers to act on the path to constant improvement.

The recent launch of Bing out of beta in the UK last week is a good example of how we’ve listened... a lot!

I must have spoken at over 100 conferences to thousands of people about Microsoft adCenter and search engine marketing, and not a day has gone past in the last 4 ½ years when I’ve been asked, “When can we get more traffic? The conversions are great but we need more volume. This market needs more competition. We can’t have such a one-sided industry. We want variety!”

Now my role has always been to evangelise adCenter, but unofficially I’ve had to keep my fingers in the Dutch flood barrier – so to speak – keeping track of any piece of feedback received from the industry and feeding them to the engineers, forcing them out of their lab to exchange face-to-face with our users.

That unofficial job is now really redundant.

With the launch last week, the guys in our Search Technology Centre in London have done their bit and will continue to do their bit to push the boundaries of innovation. They’ve asked all the right questions and worked tirelessly to create a search engine that I am proud of and very happy to use. Bing is a search engine that not only delivers in the worldwide #1 search market, but also meets the needs of local consumers and advertisers.

Although my better half is American, the other half is still very keen on its conker battles, Yorkshire puddings and warm beer. So the in-depth localisation efforts on the user experience and algorithm results keep reminding me I'm in Britain and not in a Vegas hotel.

Here’s the rallying cry!

So we can gauge what you think, please use Bing.com as your default search engine for a week and comment below on what you think after 7 days. Have it as your homepage and discover some new facts about different parts of the world from the daily changing photo that teachers all over the world are now starting their pupils’ day at school with. Use it to check football scores and do your Christmas shopping while you’re at it!

The industry wanted a game-changer, and while we start working on the consumer marketing, where better to start talking about and using it than within the industry itself.

If you’ve enjoyed any of my previous 323 posts over the last 2 ½ years just indulge me this once... you might be pleasantly surprised!

http://www.Bing.com

Win a £5k Search Audit with Reform Digital

Mel Carson — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:07:00 GMT

Just fill out this survey if you're a UK Advertiser http://www.reformdigital.com/research for the chance of a digital makeover.

Thanks for the heads up from the wonderful Amanda Davie who, I'm sure, will answer a few questions on the findings when the data has been put through the mangle!

Sunday Paper Pick ‘n’ Mix

Mel Carson — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:06:00 GMT

I spend around 15 minutes every month down at the recycling bins in Sainsbury’s car park in Richmond.

It’s be a lot less frequent if I wasn’t throwing away a load of the Sunday Times I don’t read.

Regular news – forget it – rather get it from the BBC
Sport – too much footy and again rather hear what Aggers has to say
Appointments – quite happy where I am thanks
Culture – although I need some I have a TV to tell me what’s on next

What I do read?

Style – because gawd knows I need it and I like AA Gill’s restaurant reviews
Home – because I always want a bigger one and like to snoop
Magazine – the features are often very good
Travel – I like to get away from it all on the train
Gadget – because I love to see how negative the journos can be about MS products

So does that say something about me?

If I only went for the last 5 would that give advertisers something better to aim at?

It would save some trees, energy, and do much for the paper delivery man’s heart condition as I live on the 3rd floor with no lift.

Someone tell me why I can’t?