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Posts Tagged ‘digital marketing’

So, Is It OK To Sell On Social Networks?

Thursday, November 19th, 2009 by Reid Williams

Razorfish Graphs On Social Network Brand EngagementThere’s an ongoing debate here at the WELD Global Headquarters about whether people who sign up for online social networks really want to receive sales messages. We know that social media users readily interact with businesses and brands just like their friends, but do they actually buy products and services as a result of that?

This is a pretty critical question — especially if you’re in a business like ours, recommending and executing digital marketing strategies such as, say, getting a client’s organization active on Facebook and Twitter.

So, on the one hand, there’s success to be found in marketing where the crowd gathers — but not if the crowd is explicitly gathering someplace where they expect to be free from marketing messages. That’s the concern on one side of the debate, anyway.

Fortunately, there are researchers attempting to resolve this debate. What concerns me, however, and what became the impetus for this post, is the possible hyperbole used in reporting the results of this research. Anything seem odd (or just plain wrong) about these charts shown here?

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Our Future Mobile World (Part II): Bar Codes

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 by Reid Williams
Photo by Chiarra Marra/Flickr Creative Commons

Photo by Chiarra Marra/Flickr Creative Commons

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been grocery shopping and while inspecting the product labels looking for information, spy the 800-number that every piece of merchandise seems to have, and I’ve wondered, “Does anyone ever call these things?”

Soon, it won’t matter. The numbers won’t really be needed.

Oh, people will still use their phones to get product information and give their feedback, but dialing will be the least of what they do. It’ll start with scanning.

And the scanning won’t be limited to items on the shelf in the grocery store. We’ll be scanning buildings, paintings in an art museum, billboards or posters for movies, and applications we haven’t even imagined yet.

These bar codes, however, will have three big differences from the bar codes you’re used to seeing:
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Positive Press For Sentiment Analysis

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 by Reid Williams

Image by 漂泊的鱼/Flickr Creative Commons

Image by 漂泊的鱼/Flickr Creative Commons

You’ll read this post and make up your mind about how you feel about the technology. But if you describe those feelings anywhere on the Internet, well, we’ll know about it. See, that’s what our technology topic for today does — it listens for the sentiment in what you’re saying.

My intuition is that, within the next 18 months, sentiment analysis will be just as familiar to you as any other kind of search. Sentiment analysis tools round up what people are saying about your company or product on the web, and determine whether what they’re saying is negative or positive. There are several companies offering such tools, but in this post I’m going to focus on Scout Labs.

We’ve been using Scout Labs for 3 months on behalf of a client that’s in a highly competitive business-to-business market. We experienced some difficulty with the application, and when we submitted a bug report, I was pleased to get a rapid response. Then, I read a New York Times article about sentiment analysis, and when I realized the person who responded to my bug report was being quoted there — and happened to be Vice President of Product — I set out to get an interview for this post. (more…)

Video Viewing Through The Roof In July

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 by Reid Williams
Image by Dan Taylor/Flickr Creative Commons

Image by Dan Taylor/Flickr Creative Commons

While it might be proof that people are spending too much of their summer in front of a computer screen, it’s still good news for online video producers and the companies and brands that employ them: Video viewing rose to new, astronomical levels in July.

According to a comScore release, the number of videos Americans viewed this past month was up 42% over the same month last year.

By the numbers, 158 million unique U.S. Internet users watched 21.4 billion — that’s billion with a “b” now — in July.

The blood pressure of officer managers everywhere is rising wondering whether or not this increase is occurring during office hours, I know. If I were a network TV executive whose broadcast company didn’t already have a website and mobile app for viewing video, I’d probably be reaching for the hypertension medication, too. (more…)

Can 10 People Empower 90,000?

Friday, July 24th, 2009 by Reid Williams

We really believe the answer is yes, and not just because our job depends on it.

Led by our partners at Mythology, a marketing strategy and management services firm, WELD has been contracted by Computer Sciences Corporation to help augment their foray into the cloud computing arena.

CSC is jumping into the mix alongside household names like IBM, Amazon and Microsoft in offering big business and government agencies help in moving their information technology to the cloud.

Now, wait a minute, you say? Who could dare to compete with companies on that scale? (more…)

Does Facebook Stack The Eye-Tracking Deck?

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 by Reid Williams
This 'heat map' shows where users tend to look on the page, with the red indicating more looks than green. Image available from Oneupweb in their most recent white paper reporting the study.

This 'heat map' shows where users tend to look on the page, with the red indicating more looks than green. Image available from Oneupweb in their most recent white paper reporting the study.

According to a report on recent eye-tracking studies of user interaction with ads on social network sites, people might be actually, well, looking at ads. On the right side of the page, even.

But this is where I have to crowd-source a reality check:

Is it me, or does Facebook seem to (intentionally, maybe) serve up those ads-targeted-just-for-me before anything else on the page.? Like, at least just a fraction of a second?

I think they do it on purpose. (more…)