TELUS wants to share its love of pandas with customers.   Recently TELUS set up vending machine that distributed free stuffed pandas to visitors.

All TELUS asked in return was that visitors tweet with the hashtag #HomeTweetHome . There is a heartwarming video about TELUS’ panda project on YouTube.  You can watch the video here .  For every tweet that was sent during the campaign, TELUS also donated $1 to the WWF.  I think it is great to see TELUS giving back to the environment and spreading a little cheer during Christmas time.

This project is an example of how companies must continuously find new ways to engage with their customers.  With the rise in popularity of social media and increased availability of smartphones, many companies are starting to blur the lines between using social media for online and offline marketing campaigns.  For example, these localized marketing campaigns can be used to target specific store locations to increase traffic at a specific TELUS retail store in a mall.

TELUS takes this one step further by capturing footage of visitors receiving pandas and creating owned media in the form of a post-event video that can be shown on social media websites like YouTube or on the company’s website to increase the reach and impact of the initial offline marketing campaign.  These types of experiential marketing programs that allow consumers to become active participants in the TELUS’s marketing campaigns.  As a result, the content that is produced is more relevant and engaging to customers which increases the probability that they will share the content with their friends and families.

I recently did some consulting work related to E-Marketing for the UBC Bookstore.  Our goal was to increase awareness of Graduation Frames at the UBC Bookstore.  One of the areas I helped them out with was Google Adwords.   During the project I helped them analyze and frame the UBC Bookstore’s biggest pain points, designed and ran a Google Adwords campaign, and helped drive more customers to their e-commerce website.  Below are a few screenshots from the project.

Marketing isn’t the first department that comes to mind when you think of revenue.  However, innovative companies are now finding new ways to make marketing increase revenue and save costs by energizing, supporting, and embracing communities of customers.

One way that marketing can make money is that it can drive sales directly.  Traditional forms of marketing advertise the benefits and why consumers need certain products.  A company called Sneakpeeq has taken a new spin on this idea, changing the way customers shop and discover new brands by energizing and supporting users.    Sneakpeeq uses gamification to attract and retain long-term customers.  Users gain points for performing various tasks for brands and products they like, energizing advocates of certain products.

Some of the tasks users can perform to gain points are:

• SHARE – On Facebook or Twitter
• PEEQ – Users can “peeq” to see a special price.
• LOVE – Users can curate products they “love” and showcase them on their user profiles.

1.5 million “peeqers’ currently use the website.

The great thing about this website is that it enables customers to amplify their own person positive reviews of products and positive opinions at nearly no cost to companies that are selling the products.  This allows companies to save costs on advertising.  Moreover, the opinions that are being shared by users are more legitimate and relevant to consumers then a more broad paid media advertisement paid for by companies.

Another example is Apple’s Support Community.  Apple is energizing, supporting, and embracing communities of customers by creating an online community where users can ask other users questions about Apple products.  Moreover, users are energized by gaining points and levels every time they answer other user’s questions, giving them an incentive to continue to answer questions.

This website benefits Apple because post-purchase product support is shifted onto product advocates saving money on support services without compromising quality of service.  In many cases, the answers users receive are more personalized because the questions are being answered by users who have struggled with similar problems.  I was reading a blog post by Kyna Ng .  She mentions that Apple should get their customers to evangelize products more online.  I think the Apple Support Community is one example of how apple is accomplishing this.

Energizing, supporting, and embracing communities of customers can not only lead to increases in revenue and decreases in operational costs, but also providing a better, faster, and more personalized service to your customers.

Ten years ago creating a website that would rank high in Google wasn’t as hard as it is today.  You learned some basic HTML or purchased a template, find some keywords, and add a few title tags and meta tags and you were done.

With Google updating the way that they index and rank websites, many people have made a whole career surrounding search engine optimization (SEO).  The main problem is that many employees at companies don’t know how to make Google SEO work for them.  More specifically, employees at companies don’t know how pages are ranked, can’t keep up with the changes to Google SEO, and they can’t find opportunities to make Google SEO work for them.  If you don’t know much about SEO here is a quick video to bring you up to speed.

Luckily I have created a brief introduction to Google SEO with lots of pointers to external links for further reading.  This summary will cover and introduction to how pages are ranked in Google SEO, some of the recent updates to Google SEO, and one example of how local businesses owners can use Google+ to increase their ranking in Google SEO.  These topics are covered throughout the 3 posts below.

How Pages Are Ranked in Google SEO

Page Rank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is.  You can find more information about the complex formula here and here.

The main to ways to get your website to rank higher on Google are:

1. Make sure that you have content that is engaging and relevant to your users on your website that is compelling to read
2. Get links pointing into and out of your website

Below are a few questions you can ask yourself to check if your content is engaging:

1. What are your areas of expertise?
2. What differentiates you from other websites?
3. Why should customers care about your website?
4. Who is your competition?

Social media is another great way to create backlinks and distribute your content to many potential customers.  Social media is especially in industries where it plays a major role in communicating with customers and businesses.

Google + is also growing in importance in terms of increasing the speed that your page gets indexed on Google.  After all customers can’t find your website if it hasn’t been indexed yet.

Hummingbird probably the biggest update to Google SEO since Google’s Caffeine update in 2010.  As stated by Goodwin, Google quietly made a huge change to its core search technology in the past month, one that affects about 90 percent of searches worldwide. Calling it Hummingbird, the technological update of Google search is designed to handle more complex queries.  Caffeine, which rolled out in 2010, was designed to improve indexing speed and provide users with fresher results.  Here is a great article explaining more about Google’s Caffeine Update.

Panda and Penguin are two other major updates to the way Google searches content.  Some of the changes caused by Penguin and Panda are outlined in this infographics taken from visual.ly .

Updates like Penguin can negatively affect some websites ranking in Google.  For example, this business talked about on searchenginewatch.com lost 65% of their Google organic traffic overnight.

It may seem like a burden for business owners to keep up with all of the updates related to Google SEO.  However, there are many benefits to the updates.  See the next post to see how local businesses owners can use Google+ Local to increase their ranking in Google SEO.

According to searchenginewatch.com , Google+ Local is a new feature that allows, “small businesses targeting local customers because it combines customer reviews and local search into one platform. Yet, many small businesses still aren’t sure how to take advantage of Google+ Local.”

There are two ways that users can search for Google+ Pages.  The first is that when Google knows that a search query is looking for a local business, it will include Google+ Local pages in the search results.  The second way that users can search for Google+ Pages is that they can search from within Google+ itself.  This way Google+ Pages only compete against each other for visibility as other websites are ignored during the search.

It’s important that businesses make use Google+ Local because According to Google, “20 percent of all Google searches have local intent and 40 percent of Google mobile searches have local intent. “

The number of people searching on Google is steadily increasing.  According to Statisticbrain.com, there were 22,000,000,000 Google searches in the year 2000 and 1,873,910,000,000 Google searches in the year 2012.

According to Canadian Internet monitoring firm Sandvine, Netflix and YouTube dominate over half of downstream Internet traffic in North America showing that not all Google searches are related to consumers looking to buy goods.  However, many customers do according to Google, “Combined with the fact that 97 percent of consumers search online for local businesses, it’s easy to see why it’s essential for small businesses to have high local search visibility.”   With so many customers searching for products and services online, companies must also move online in order to increase awareness, articulate the benefits of their products to spur consumer interest in the product, and drive consumers to take action by purchasing products.  These concepts are illustrated by the Google purchasing funnel shown below.

In June of 2013, eMarketer  released a report that estimates in 2013 almost a quarter of the world’s population will use social media.  That is a large audience that marketers can’t afford to ignore when designing their social media strategies.

There are three main types of media Owned, Paid, and Earned Media.  Paid media is advertising that companies pay for. Owned media is the media a company owns an online website or a physical store.  Earned media is like word of mouth but online.

One interesting dynamic is the relationship between Owned and Earned Media, and how they complement and reinforce each other.  When used together, they have the power to turn interested customers into long term brand advocates.  For example, initially when Coke launches a new product like Coca-Cola Life the company receives a lot of buzz on social media channels.

However, this spark of interests is often short lived.  Over time users will become bored of a new healthier alternative to regular Coke.  Consumers constantly need to receive quality content that is related to their own personal interests from companies in order to remain engaged with a brand.

It’s like my marketing professor once said, “I don’t want to receive email.  I want to receive email”.  One interesting product is hardly enough to transform a customer into an advocate. However, Coke has reinforced its brand with Owned Media or media created by the company that aligns with the interests of many of its customers and engages them with Coke’s brand.  An example is Coca-Cola’s Super Bowl ad campaign that occurred in 2012 involving two polar bears who reacted to events on the field in real time.

Coke 2012 Commercial: “Arghh” featuring NY_Bear

Another example is Coca-Cola’s drive to create a safe haven for polar bears in the Arctic by raising over $2 million for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

These examples of Owned Media maintain user interest for longer, get more people talking about the brand in a positive way, and engage users on a deeper level.  Owned Media can take many forms like humanizing a brand by illustrating that Coke employees like football as much as the rest of us or that the company cares about the environment.  However, the real power of Owned Media is to retain the interest of users who were initially engaged by short lived PR Campaigns and turn customers into long term advocates by engaging them with content that is relevant to customer’s interests.

In the new age of social media, the rate that individuals and companies share information is increasing exponentially.  Previously, if a customer had a bad experience they would tell a few of their close friends around the water cooler during coffee break at the office and that would be the end of it.  Not a lot of damage was done to the company’s brand name.  Fast forward to today where negative customer experiences are tweeted to social media websites while they are happening.  Moreover, once these incidents are posted, other unhappy customers add their experiences making the problem bigger.

Consumers aren’t the only people following companies on social media outlets.  Social media outlets allow companies to gather real time information about competitors.  This allows companies to identify opportunities to launch micro marketing campaigns and get ahead of competitors by outperforming them on a global stage.

For example, back in 2012 Samsung flew two tech bloggers to Berlin, Germany to cover the product launch of the Samsung Note 2 and then threatened to leave them with the bill if they didn’t pose as Samsung employees.  The reporters believed that they were going to be guests at the event and were free to enjoy the day as they pleased.  However, when they arrived Samsung informed that they were going to pose as Samsung employees and man a booth at the event.  If they refused they would be left with the bill for the cost of their hotel and return flight.

Lucky for competitor Nokia they were closely monitoring the situation developing on social media.   Before weighing into the situation Nokia monitored and listened to what people were saying about the incident.  Nokia realized that these two popular tech bloggers had influence over a large number of followers.   As they watched the situation go from bad to worse, Nokia identified an opportunity to send a message to people following the situation.

Nokia reached out to the two tech bloggers and offered to cover the cost of their hotel and return flights.  This created a huge amount of positive publicity for Nokia.  By monitoring their competitor’s social media channels, identifying opportunities to talk and initiate small marketing campaigns, and acting in a smart and timely manner Nokia was able to create a massive amount of positive publicity for their company using relatively very few resources.  The massive amount of positive publicity was due to the fact that Nokia’s good deed was amplified over social media channels.

With the Twitter IPO approaching, Twitter is looking for different ways to justify their large evaluation of $1,000,000,000 given that Twitter did $317 million in the most recent full year, according to TechCrunch.

Advertising for television shows is one way that Twitter hopes to draw in advertisers.  According to CNBC, “Nielsen is launching Twitter TV Ratings, the first measure of the total activity and reach of TV-related conversation on Twitter—to help identify who’s really engaging in real time and to better target ads.”

The new rating will measure the number of people tweeting about certain television shows and the number of people who actually read those tweets.  Twitter is trying to partner more with traditional media companies, which is one of the growth areas they have identified during their S-1 filing in preparation for their IPO.

However, this may just be a distraction from the real problem that compared other tech companies who have done an IPO; Twitter doesn’t stack up very well.

Taken from WSJ.

According to Eric Jackson of Forbes, “Twitter is supposed to have 100 million “active” users — although, 40% of the “active” users never tweet but just read tweets.  That means Twitter is able to generate a buck thirty-nine for each of its active users.  If it’s true that Facebook did $4 billion last year from its 700 million users, they sold $5.71 for each user — or 4 times as much as Twitter.

Given that some more profitable companies such as Facebook, had a less that positive few months after their IPO, Twitter may be in trouble for its IPO.

During class the idea of how the Mackenzie Customer Decision Journey highlights the impact consumers can have on a brand and product after purchasing a product by spreading their experiences to friends and followers through social media.  These experiences can be good or bad depending on the experience the customer during and after purchasing the product.

While harsh criticism from customers about a company’s products may be hard for employees to hear, the opinions that are raised can be constructive and useful.  For example, elements of the criticism can be used to improve products and tailor distribution channels to fit consumer’s preferences, ultimately creating positive value for the company and customers alike.  However, what is not useful is criticism written by “artificial writers”, or people who are employed by competitors to write negative news about a certain company in hopes that the news will go viral.  Another danger of “artificial writers” is that the content they create could be picked up while mining for social media insights, causing marketers to come to the wrong conclusion about consumer’s behavior and brand preferences.  In order to avoid gathering incorrect data, companies need to identify if the source of negative comments are coming directly form a consumer or from a competitor.