The Web Uncovered

For those of you who are managing one or more online marketing campaigns, you may want to consider using multiple identities for your work.  One reason is simply to separate your work social networking from you personal life.  On most sites, my family and friends find me by my real name, Frankie Fredericks.  However, I do most of my online marketing work with  psydonyms.  This allows me to both keep my private life private, and save my friends from seeing how obnoxiously frequent my use of Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, and Twitter is.  

Just make sure that when you are using multiple identities, that you are keeping within the limits of laws regarding spamming (everyone hates spam, don’t be part of the problem!), and also be sure to play by the terms of use for the sites that you use.  This is speaking practically, as if you use an account for much activity, breaking one rule that leads to the deletion of your account could cost you hours and hours of lost work.

For more reasons and ideas about using multiple identities, check out this post on the blog SEO Smarty.

While online marketers are still determining the best practices for online marketing, the Federal Trade Commission is also figuring out some details regarding regulations governing online marketing.  Blogger Jordan McCollum explores these new policies in the blog post “Are You Breaking the Law with Social Media Marketing?”

The key phrase that the FTC is pushing is:

If you’re being compensated to talk about someone’s product, then you need to disclose it.

There are various implications and applications of this philosophy.  For more details see the original post here.

As Twitter begins teasing users with the idea of bolstering their search engine so that it not only searches through tweets, but also crawls the content of links in tweets, a new door of possibility has opened.  This would create a much more time-sensitive search engine, where search results could be populated by content updates within the last hour.

Not only could this change search technology as we know it, but it also could impact your search engine management (SEM/SEO).  This would be especially true for buzz marketing.  One key way to generate a buzz marketing campaign in the digital age is to create a very specific campaign with a viral capacity, and to create a microsite that is solely used for the campaign (see my favorite example here).  While they are created with SEO in mind, with high keyword density, often times there is a lag between their release and when search engines actually show their content.  This new search engine technology would pick up on the microsite faster  than ever, granted you successfully generate attention to it with twitter users (who are increasingly becoming representative of the American market in demographics).  Utilize the power of now in the digital age.

The Takeaway:

With traditional marketing and public relations, timing is everything.  In the modern online marketing world, the same is true, and the specificity of time is more acute than ever.  While utilizing technologies that allow you this chronological targeting, begin recognizing how changing technologies further change the face of online marketing.

While in a previous post we talked about how Obama’s 70 person team for online presence dominated in the area of social media, an interesting reports suggest there were weak parts in his campaign.  For instance, when it came to Pay Per Clicks, John McCain brought his A-game.  

In fact, as Obama began dominating in traditional media in ways that John McCain could not afford to keep up with, his team began focusing online.  At that time his ad impressions jumped by 250%.  Furthermore, the McCain camp mobilized quickly to dominate in buying up keywords for PPC ads.  For instance, immediately after Obama chose Biden as his running mate, the McCain team put bought up related keywords and had landing pages ready.  Similarly, they bought up all keywords relating to “Branchflower,” “troopergate,” and “Palin.”  They did this so well that that the actual articles covering this story were burried behind their ads and related websites created to refute the claims against Palin.  

The Takeaway:

Quick mobilization and clever keyword choice will assist in keeping the available content available to voters in your control.  Be sure to find related words that could similarly drive traffic to your site, or if you are inactive, to your opponent’s website.

In the previous post regarding Marshall Mcluhan, we talked a bit about interactivity as a means of evaluating media.  As said, the internet is a tricky new world where interaction can be built in many new ways.  Traditional media outlets, like television, radio, and print, are very much a one-way conversation, with them the outlets feeding content to us, the media consumers.  the interesting thing to watch is when traditional media outlets begin exploring new media, and trying to figure out how to effectively choose and place content in new opportunitities.

I read one prime example of this on the Sublimal Pixels blog by Manny Marrero.  In his “Open Letter to Channel 10“, he fumes about his passionate disgust for how the local television network has botched their campaign on Twitter.  Not only does he admonish them for their flood of follow/unfollow moves in an attempt to bolster numbers, but he also calls them out on not utilizing the medium of Twitter.  Rather than creating a space to interact with their audience, the station simply feeds their newslines into posts, without responding or interacting with their “followers.”

The Takeaway:  Before you can effectively market on a specific platform, website, medium, etc., you must know what the experience is for their users.  Only after understanding the platform which you are working with can you adjust the message to fit the medium.  This includes making it cooler/hotter, or more less interactive.