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Tag: Online Marketing Summit

  • Academics Endorse Social Media Marketing At OMS

    It’s an unfortunate fact that the speakers at some conferences can be self-serving; few people are going to go onstage and not promote their own company, never mind admit its faults.  However, when it comes to social media, it’s hard to accuse the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania of bias, and so an OMS keynote on the subject run by two Wharton representatives was rather informative.

    (Coverage of the Online Marketing Summit 2010 continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

    Researchers at Wharton recently studied user-generated content and social networks.  Eric Bradlow, Vice-Dean and Director of the Wharton Doctoral Programs, and Steve Ennen, Director of the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative, then used the findings to create a presentation called "Wharton Dispels Myths of Social, Viral and Online Marketing through Cold Hard Research."

    Here’s one detail that shouldn’t be buried: the academics agreed there’s value in social media marketing.  They’re not advocating that advertisers stay away from Facebook, Twitter, and the like.

    Indeed, a main point the two men made was that social media behavior can be indicative of buying behavior.  Put another way, this means that heavy social network users are often also heavy buyers.  And this correlation opens the door to an effective – if sneaky – marketing tactic, since businesses can give a lower price to their first customer and then exploit their second customer.

    The theory is that as one person engages in an activity, their peers are more inclined to want to play.  So an optimal approach to making iPhone apps, for example, would be to give them away until they become popular, and then start charging.

    Then one other interesting thing Ennen and Bradlow had to say related to the practice of crowdsourcing.  They suggested that the "wisdom of crowds" isn’t worth much, instead qualifying as an inconsistent method of producing useful ideas.  Businesses might still use crowdsourcing as a sort of marketing ploy, of course, but the academics asserted that it’d be smart not to depend on it for good product concepts.

  • Branding Sometimes Means Being Human

    Branding Sometimes Means Being Human

    For years now, online marketing professionals have stressed the importance of the human element, particularly in social media. The point was elaborated on in a keynote at the Online Marketing Summit in San Diego today, where an audience of B2B and B2C marketers listened to Federated Media CEO John Battelle and special guest Anne Holland, who runs Which Test Won, discuss how to apply this concept to branding.

    Note: If you’re not familiar with the Online Marketing Summit, WebProNews discussed it with founder Aaron Kahlow (who was also present at the keynote) recently at SES:

    As the audience waited for Battelle to arrive, they engaged in some time-killing chit chat with Kahlow, revealing some specific goals for strategies they’d like to learn more about. These included social search, baselines and benchmarks, linking power and strategies, trends in social media, international SEO, and conversion optimization. 

    Anne Holland of Which Test WonTalks Branding at Online Marketing Summit This keynote dealt with principle foundations of online success. Holland said its about finding and identifying the "pain point" of the business, and how you position your product to fill that pain point. This includes looking at the existing marketing, seeing what is strong and what isn’t, and looking at conversion points and landing pages. Holland says to find the obvious problems, and look at how you’re measuring conversions that add up to money…not metrics like page views and opening rates.

    Battelle says to engage in a conversation with the advertisers, and look for points for engagement with the company. Make sure you understand the framework of the product, because not all things work for all clients.

    Holland says that if you’re a known brand, it’s been proven over and over that your search result will get a higher click rate and your landing pages will get higher conversion rates. That is the value of brand awareness, but marketing online isn’t all about hard conversions and numbers of clicks. Brand marketing is very valuable, she says. The big brand wins, and becoming the big brand is immensely important. "Branding matters!" she declares.

    John Battelle of Federated Media Publishing talks branding at Online Marketing SummitBattelle says that large brands get to be large brands by projecting themselves. They run their business in an extremely mechanized fashion, and they forget sometimes that a brand is only what one person says to another person about the brand. He says the tools around now allow more and more people to join the conversation, and encouraging people to join the conversation about the brand is key. The most important thing to a brand, he says, is using the tools and leveraging opportunities for more people and employees to create and grow a conversation about the brand.

    Holland stressed the importance of going and looking for customers. This means finding out where they are, whether that be Facebook, LinkedIn, or anywhere else. Look at what they’re doing there, and figure out how you can be where they are.

    Battelle made it a point to mention that advertisers are people too, and that sometimes marketers forget that.