Focusing Your Google Search

While most marketers are familiar with the various ways Google and Google Ads allow you to search and measure the effectiveness of your ads, they have now introduced yet another method to track searches and effectiveness – by region.

If you build it and they come… will you be ready?

The recent launch (and concurrent NYT story) of Internet search start-up Cuil (pronounced “cool”) was quite a production. Unfortunately for the new search engine, there were problems… the site had frequent outages during its first days of use and returned wildly inconsistent search results on common word searches.

How do we know?

While the mainstream media came out with a strong David v. Goliath storyline to paint the new search engine in glowing terms, bloggers from across the blogosphere chimed in with thoughts of their own, in the end causing the neophyte tech property to take a defensive posture towards New Media sources while only in their first week on the Web.

While this doesn’t come as a surprise, it is a further illustration of the growing importance of New Media – and their need to be courted – and accounted for.

Read the full PRWeek story here: Link

Twitter it and they will come

While you may have never heard of Twitter, the latest craze in social networking, you soon will! The service, which allows people to microblog using text messages of up to 140 characters each, is the next big thing. And as is usually the case, marketers are catching on…

From a storyin PRWeek:

“Knowing full well that media doesn’t cover who won contests, unless you won the power ball, it was not a story angle,” said Kristyn Wilson, media relations manager at MediaSource. “The premier in London could be a story but nothing the entertainment shows would pick up on.”

Instead, the team turned to Twitter in order to direct blogger attention, a strong media target for the brand, by tasking the contest winner with “tweeting” her journey overseas.

This story highlights the opportunities that new media presents to marketing beyond traditional ways of communicating.  Knowing that the media wouldn’t cover something, didn’t stop the company from pursuing its strategy.  It’s not to say that the media is irrelevant — it’s just that there are more ways than ever of communicating to decision makers.

Twitter may not be used by everyone today but cell phones weren’t that widely used even 10 years ago.  Same with email and high speed connection speeds.  Today they’re all wide spread.  Many of the Web2.0 technologies will be the same…and Twitter may be one of them
Read the full article here: Link

Social Networking Inhouse: Getting Your Intranet Working for You

Many corporations, by their very nature, inhibit idea generation across intercompany borders. IT dreams up innovations in IT, R&D moves forward with the next BIG IDEA behind their own closed doors, the list goes on. But study after study has found that the best ideas come from breaking out of the confines of the “silo approach” and taking active steps to cross-pollinate, letting the ideas bloom.

From the Harvard Business Review:

Social networks, of course, form and evolve organically in organizations. They can foster the serendipitous mixing of talent and ideas that fuels innovation. But after surveying 30 years’ worth of organizational network literature and conducting extensive research at a large IT services firm on how networks influence innovation, we concluded that when left unmanaged, informal networks tend to inhibit innovation more often than they enable it. The very aspects that are beneficial at the exploration phase of innovation may hinder progress at the implementation phase, and vice versa. Thus company executives shouldn’t expect informal, interdivisional networks to spontaneously produce innovations; they must consciously manage the structure of these networks to promote innovation at all its various stages.

What’s interesting about this article is that it talks about social networks when they don’t work. We hear this again and again from clients: we have a company intranet — as though that is a proxy for fantastic intracompany communication. Good communication always takes management and an internal communication is no different.

What do we mean by management? Well it could mean highlighting successes in different departments on a daily basis. It could mean having employee interview each other from different divsions in a monthly podcast. It could mean having a customer success stories from sales, marketing, and R&D. The point is that this is managed communication that someone has to plan out and make happen.

Read the full article here: Link