MichaelOrlinski.com

Facebook Timeline for Business Pages- Question

Administrator — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 14:26:33 +0000

Boy if you think those Drunk college photos are going to be an issue you should wait and see Brand timelines.

Could PR & Brand managers do more harm by omitting major brand events in their timeline or do brands now need to FOREVER carry that burden in a social enabled page? Easier for an established brand, but what about an emerging brand.

Imagine the Timelines…
- BP Oil Spill
-Tylenol Terror
-IBM during WWII

Business Pages to get timeline as well…

Go Negative…at least with your keywords- Negative Keywords

MO — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 20:23:32 +0000

The great folks at Radiolab recently posted the following video on language and context that’s a great illustration on why it’s vital to add Negative keywords when doing a paid keyword campaign:

Context is Crucial

Negative Keywords too often are an afterthought of campaign creation. It’s human nature to get fixated on what we want to buy(keywords) and forgetting to establish the context in which we want something- “I’d really like to get a speaker in here”…is it an audio speaker or a guest speaker? For paid search platforms, context is everything, they’re very much like literal minded children in many ways.

Using Negative Keywords shapes the context that PPC ads are displayed and remove irrelevant or unwanted impressions for a selected Campaign or Adgroup. Doing this has the great benefit of a lowering a keywords cost-per-click. This is certainly the case within Google AdWords, as narrowing the context of a keyword you are bidding on via Negative keywords helps increase a keywords Quality Score. Of course, Quality Score is primarily driven by a keywords click-throughrate(CTR), hence using Negative Keywords decreases wasted impressions and improves CTR.

Picking the Keywords you are going to buy is far easier than compared to what you don’t want to be associated with. Start with the obvious terms that are not in line with your product or service and over time just keep adding. Imagine you are bidding on commercial software term’s; having Negative terms such as the following would help ensure Ads are serving to the right type of active user:
Software Negative Keywords:

burn
burner
PHP DEA
cd
cheap
code
community
Snake–> Based on “Python” root term
desktop
developer
developers
disk
download

Adding Negative Keywords is an ongoing discovery process from two sources:

Reactive approach: Run a Search Query report that will show the actual user query, and then add the non-relevant terms as a Negative Keyword.

Proactive approach: Use tools such as the Google Keyword tool, WordStream Negative Keyword tool, and good old group brainstorming

From the onset of any campaign developed, negative keywords should be part of a launch strategy. Adding Negative Keywords is a moving goal , but I’ve found that consistent monitoring (daily if not weekly) is a be a key tactic to cut waste and decrease a cost-per click.

Beyoncé’s YouTube Channel, Ok Go Goes, and Embeddable music video makes a return…

MO — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:19:36 +0000

Vevo.com- The Hulu.com for Music Videos...

The three mammoth record labels of Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and EMI joined forces a year ago to create a new video distribution site called Vevo.com. The site has been billed as the “Hulu.com for music videos”, and similar to Hulu, Vevo.com displays pre-roll and screen overlays on each music video with a top-tier advertiser. The goal of the site is not to replace YouTube for music video views, but to return revenue to the music industry from viral views. As YouTube is currently the go-to source for music videos, the big three wanted more control of their content. Eric Schmidt even attended their launch party back in December, so within Google the site is not seen as a threat, but rather a partner.

Ok Go's viral video "Here is goes again" with Embedding disabled

However, the cost benefits for the music executives can have increasingly negative effects on smaller music acts trying to break through to the “big time” by using embedded videos on sites such as YouTube. On February 19^th Damian Kulash, lead singer of the band Ok Go, published an op-ed article in the New York Times which highlighted his frustration with EMI’s new strategy of disabling the embed function on their YouTube channel. Ok Go, best known for its ‘06 hit viral video “Here It Goes Again”, where the band dances in unison on treadmills, became popular through users embedding their YouTube video on other sites such as music blogs. The embed function on YouTube helped the obscure band garner tens of millions of video views on YouTube, which helped earn them a Grammy for the video’s song. While the label got free advertising and increased music sales off their new top 20 artist, they did not receive any revenue for those embed video views.

So began the Music Industry v. YouTube negotiations. In the past year, all three record labels involved with Vevo negotiated that YouTube would pay them a percentage of the advertising revenue for each view of their artists’ videos. In the negotiations it was also decided that the embed feature that helped many bands such as Ok Go get on the top 20 be removed from their artist pages.

The numbers are shocking:”When EMI disabled the embedding feature, views of our treadmill video dropped 90 percent, from about 10,000 per day to just over 1,000. Our last royalty statement from the label, which covered six months of streams, shows a whopping $27.77 credit to our account.”-Damian Kulash, NYT 2/19/2010

Looking at the industry’s past with paying DJs to “hype” their artist, it seems illogical to disable a feature that helps artists get heard, especially via targeted music blogs. Vevo was the big three labels’ solution to re-enable an embeddable format that users can use to share artist content virally, while retaining full control and creating another potential advertising avenue. Today, the labels’ apparent strategy is to use Vevo as the video management agency for all of their artists’ online video assets. Vevo’s strategy with YouTube appears to have changed in the past two months, to start to building awareness around their own site while still allowing some functionality for all worldwide users on YouTube. The benefit for Vevo(aka the big three) is they now have control of embeddable content while having two revenue generating marketing channels via both sites having embedded calls to action for purchasing songs via Amazon or Itunes.

While OkGo has decided to leave EMI based on EMI’s decision to “wring revenue out of everything we make, including our videos” many of the labels’ artists now have a [artists name]VEVO channel on YouTube with all the music videos from their previous profiles. Artists such as Beyonce still have their previous channel, but all favorite videos and the majority of links are now pointed to the beyonceVEVO channel. The future relationship between artists and YouTube will be interesting as Vevo currently only has a comment field for user interaction. Could Beyonce have the same success with “single ladies” on a platform that does not promote user interaction and user submitted versions of her video? Is the goal to have users watch videos on Vevo and then interact on YouTube?

What are your thoughts on Vevo.com and the music industry’s embargo of embeddable content on YouTube? Any predictions on Vevo.com’s success now that artists videos are linked with Vevo?

*original post on blog.ovrdrv.com

Why?- Yahoo! User’s keep there Man.

MO — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:59:54 +0000

Search Engine auto suggestion function has always amazed me. It populates the most popular search term as you type your query. Today I searched “why” and learned that Google and MSN/Live users have higher relationship issues than Yahoo! users. All Engines do have “Why did I get Married” as a top query and I’m certain not all of them are looking for the 2007 Tyler Perry film…

Google:

MSN/ Live:

Yahoo!:

EA SPORTS is just that good.

MO — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 06:34:30 +0000

Today I saw a myriad of great case studies of how advertisers are starting to engage and reengage with the Youtube community. According to YouTube, this community is made up of enough users to be the third largest country in the world, and these users in August ‘08 help YouTube overtake Yahoo! in the number of searches in a given month. Big numbers and even bigger opportunity.

A member on the EA team did a search on their 2008 Tiger Woods game and saw the following video from the YouTube user Levinator25:

The video shows some poor coders mistake of allowing the virtual Tiger Woods being able to play golf while walking on water, hence the name of the video “Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 Jesus Shot”. It’s cute and cheeky, and garnered a few views over a 8 month period of time since it was publicly posted on 8/30/07.

As the ‘08 game grew in popularity YouTube users heard about or stumbled upon this well tagged video. At around 10-20K video views is the time I’m guessing someone on the EA Sports team must have found the video. I’m sure for the game developers seeing a game glitch highlighted was a hard thing to watch, but instead of ignoring it they decided to use it. Good call EA.

A little over a year after the original (now a little over 50K video views) “Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 Jesus Shot” was posted EA decided to post a reply on YouTube to the original video that just made the mistake…cool:

What was the cost for this?
Hopefully little as they likely / hopefully tied this in with another shoot they were doing cutting the cost greatly. Could they have done it cheaper? Yes. While Youtube has upgraded their video specs (now in 16:9 ratio) people are not expecting to see amazing Michael Bay H-D videos and advertisers should use that to there advantage.

What was the pay-off for EA?
While the original 2007 video has roughly 800K video views to date the EA reply video has generated:

2.5 million video views

6,873 ratings (users ranked the video 1-5 stars)

27 Responses from other YouTube users

Favorited by users 9,872 times

Not to mention that it’s currently ranked #8 for top gaming videos for all-time.
Overall good job EA for listening and reengaging- you are just that good.

We Won!- Overdrive Interactive Wins Award for Best Use of Search at the 2008 MITX Awards

MO — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:19:19 +0000

Very excited to announce that Overdrive Interactive won “Best Use of Search” for our Harley-Davidson Campaign. Check out the official Overdrive statement, which has a dark group photo of us celebrating the team win. I’m very proud of all the team members who worked on this highly publicized win.

Take a walk up to the Stage for the Win:

*note: yes I did say Vroom on stage, the moment and Harley-Davidson Brand got the best of me.

Search Campaigns are not often given public limelight so it’s nice to get the praise from the Boston interactive community. Overall though the limelight is for suckers; I’d rather show a report with measurable metrics and a positive ROI any day. In someways I’d love to see an award in the interactive community for “Best improved ROI“, “Best Landing Page Optimization“, or “Best Synergy in the conversion path-Adtext through desired action“. As a community I think that would be the better signal to send to our potential client market then “It’s pretty Branding, hooray”.

Live from Times Square

MO — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 07:13:18 +0000

On November 2nd I completed my 4th marathon by running the ING NYC Marathon. It was cold, windy, and a total blast. The folks of New York graciously came out and supported all 39,000 runners and helped make for a great energy along the course; a special thanks to my future in-laws for standing in the cold even though I missed them along the course.

While running the race was the weekends highlight another fun part of the weekend was having an image of me and the fiance broadcast on the Giant Billboard above the ABC studio in Times Square. As mentioned in a previous post “LocaModa-Free Mobile Interactive Applications” it’s become standard for company’s to tie digital billboards in Times Square with a interactive mobile campaign. Asics a NYC Marathon sponsor footed the bill and hosted the interactive campaign for nearly eight hours.

How it worked:

Photo taken at Marathon Health Expo: given business card with unique SMS number

Walk to Times Square and enter SMS number

System sends back message saying when your photo will post on the billboard

Image posts and you take photos and video of yourself in Times Square and have people ask “Why are you on the Billboard?”

Cross ” be on a Times Square billboard” off your bucket list

Next Marathon: Boston with the Dana-Farber Marathon challenge team. Helping to cure cancer by running. Last year the team raised $4.5 million for innovative cancer research at Dana-Farber.

Citizen Journalism & Old Media News

MO — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 05:48:35 +0000

This Fall several events have taken place that placed Citizen Journalism into the mainstream. It’s no surprise that Old media has been spoon feed news for sometime; just read the PR newswires then watch the news. Even old media news anchor Dan Rather has spoken out against the mass media establishment; albeit because he was pushed out of that system.

To help reestablish there news gathering abilities every major news outlet has adopted some method of using there listener/viewer as a news reporter. A great idea on paper, but it’s very easy for lazy news gathering organizations to not due their own due diligence on a news story.

There are two recent cases where MAJOR news organizations screwed up. The first was the CBS eyemobile.com Iphone application blunder. CBS built a great Iphone app that connected users with each other and CBS news. The only issue was it appears that no one at CBS was monitoring this. The result was many false news reports which boiled over when three ladies making out was sent to users. As the story and images were basically porn, the errors with the system were quickly realized

To get the full NSFW story about the CBS eyemobile go to Gawker

While the above blunder by CBS likely did not have any real effects other than a loss in productivity there was a instance in October that did have a lasting effect. On the morning of October 3rd the Apple stock took a sharp 10 point drop as news broke that Steve Jobs had been seen at a hospital having a heart attack.

A CNN iReport poster was the alleged source of this rumor which sent shockwaves through out the tech community and apples investors. As these sources are unseen and unconfirmed one would hope that prior to posting this news CNN would have put some sort of gatekeeper filter, sadly no. Instead it was then picked up by Bloomberg and it then spread to all old media networks. While I don’t think information should have gatekeepers, I do believe in a solid fact check when being sent out. If I were apart of the old media industry I would embrace these new sources of information gathering but hire a hit squad of fact checkers and establish your news organization as a true trusted source. Yet in reality old media got to pay the bills and STEVE JOBS DEAD sells. Fortunately the SEC is conducting an investigation and will provide recommendations to protect the market from bogus citizen journalism claims.

Long term the technology is fantastic. Just ask USC photojournalism student James Buck. It all started with a twitter message (tweet) that said, “Arrested”. James on a study abroad in Egypt found himself in a gnarly situation when photographing an anti-government rally. Prior to getting bagged by the Egyptian police he was able to send out the one word tweet that let his family and friends know he was in trouble. That tweet mobilized the media and helped expedite his release. It also helped shine a light on Egypt’s current situation of growing anti-democratic policies.

I’m in love with ChaCha

MO — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 04:02:20 +0000

ChaCha is the greatest party novelty in a long time. As explained from the site:

ChaCha is conversational, fun, and easy to use. Simply ask your question like you are talking to a smart friend and ChaCha’s advanced technology instantly routes it to the most knowledgeable person on that topic in our Guide community. Your answer is then returned to your phone as a text message within a few minutes.

Amazingly enough it works pretty well and has given me the correct information 90% of the time. While I could simply perform a Google search on my palm to find the info there is some prestige in saying I’ll just ask ChaCha and continuing in a conversation. The only con right now is it sometime takes up to ten minutes to get an answer, which is unacceptable. Give it a try the next time you have a random question.

Sarah Marshall on Rottentomatoes.com

MO — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 07:19:57 +0000

While stumbling around I came across an ad that leverages a great movie authority community directly in their creative:

If you have ever been to a movie and said, Why did I spend $10 on that! then rottentomatoes.com is a great resource prior to spending a wad of cash. Their Tomatometer is a score that factors in a variety of sources (newspaper, online, magazines) and average them into a single score. Its community driven with over 7 million readers and nearly one million reviews of movies (any recent film has certainly been reviewed).