FOOA and FM Marketing

Chas Edwards (Federated Media) ‘Marketing Beyond Google, Yahoo, AOL & MSN with Scale, Quality and Safety’

Some good examples here about different ways of online advertising, a lot more target and customised.

New websites are launched everyday, but as with print, you don’t have to worry about everything that is printed on paper The leaders, the ones that you want to look at, are emerging. But growth on websites is happening on Social Media, but we should not treat SM different from traditional online ads. You should look at online marketing and assess where are my customers, where are they most engaged and how do I do business with them.

You have to think about influence as well as reach. Business Week online says TechCrunch is more influential than BW. Look at inbound links – ivillage has 11600 inbound links, Dooce has 20000 inbound links. Babycenter has 4k. Reach here is different to influence.

So it is easier to get reach, even down the longtail, in terms of impressions but impact is getting harder.

Example from Microsoft. They tested two types – the standard banner that was mass(ish) but one of their sites asked for something that was specialised..and wrote the copy from the MS site. The customised unit worked 60% better.

FM have run co-branded ads to cater for site communities, tapped into affinity. Co-branded units had 4x better performance.

With Symantec, they built an ad unit that pulled the blog post (titles) from the company blog – used specialist content as the ad. They saw a 300% increase in response several weeks into the campaign; it developed as content and got people to pay attention.

A further thing they tried was more author driven copy, with the authors/blog writers adding their own definitions of ‘the human network’ for a campaign for Cisco. They invited 15 FM authors to wrote the copy that ran across the network. this was not the authors writing about the product, but to define something beyond the product. They allowed people to vote for favourite definition or provide their own. Results were great SEO, a wiki article etc., great blog conversation.

For ask.com, they partnered with Ask A Ninja. Ask sponsored 9 episodes of AaN and offered a bonus video if they went to ask.com and type in ‘ninjuice’. 8.3% queried the se and watched the video. They did not create own viral, but got involved with someone who had the right audience.

Intel sponsored product development for Digg, Digg Arc.

There are 3 principles I suggest

Locate your Brand Communities Don;t worry whether social or traditional
Follow the Leaders and Partner with them – something that bots can’t do
Add value to the existing conversation. the conversation is theirs, not yours and good conversations involve listening not just talking.