Tweeting for Cha-Ching

Twitter has announced its intention to enter the world of advertising, posting ad tweets to searches. When word broke, a collective tweet of horror emanated from Twitter’s vast online networking space. But are the alarm bells unwarranted? If there was a tweet for the word yes, this would be the perfect time to make that little blue birdie sing.
Twitter’s simple, non-invasive advertising plan goes like this – brands with websites on Twitter or those interested in developing such an online presence will be able to purchase what Twitter’s calling Promoted Tweets about their products; the goal being top placement on search engines. In actuality, Twitter has been an unofficial advertising medium for some time. Unlike those informal ads, Promoted Tweets will be obvious enough to get noticed but understated enough to ward off mass user hysteria.
Twitter’s marketing model seems like a well-executed no-brainer but if you read between the lines, you’ll grasp its underlying significant message – Twitter needs loot. And their mechanism for generating profit should prove fruitful for both the social media giant and advertising brands, especially if the latter are wise enough to acquire Promoted Tweets on trending topic searches.
Promoted Tweets, as currently constituted, is a PPC system, charging companies for every 1000 people who view a tweet. So how does this news positively affect performance marketing? Perhaps the question should be posed as follows – How can savvy marketers effectively incorporate Promoted Tweets into their marketing spend? Our agency needs to strike while the ad tweeting is hot to help advertisers recognize precisely when potential customers are seeking information on desire products or services, thus, enabling them to get the highest return on their marketing spend.

25 and Just Getting Started

25 Years Ago on March 15th, 1985, the first ever .com was launched, Symbolics.com. But it wasn’t until roughly 10 years later, when Netscape launched the Netscape Navigator, the first widely adopted web browser, that the Internet and the World Wide Web took off. In 1995 VeriSign handled 18 billion website and email connections. Today VeriSign does the same amount of transactions in approximately eight hours. In 1995 there were 16 million Internet users. Today there are over 1.7 billion, amounting to 25% of the world’s population. In 2010 there will be more than 12 million .com addresses. The Web will help drive more than $1.5 trillion in global commerce. The explosive growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web came about when Netscape made it more usable, when their browser made it possible for the average Joe to easily get the content they wanted.

The power of the internet as a communication tool is unprecedented. Where else can a tech geek chair dance to an obscure Romanian pop song and become a global sensation? But the power of this medium is still under leveraged by the marketing community. In 2010 despite digital media accounting for more than 30% of individual media time, digital ad dollars will represent roughly 10% of total advertising spend. Given the increasingly complex online marketing landscape (think social media, ad exchanges, DSP’s, mobile integration, etc.) this gap is understandable. But, just like the tsunami of usage that followed Netscape helping people figure out how to get what they wanted from the Internet, a tsunami of ad dollars are on the way to the Internet as marketers figure out how to take full advantage of the target-ability, customizability and real interactivity that make digital media the best communication tool ever.

Performance Marketing: A guide for CMOs

Chris Trayhorn of MThink.com and Peter Klein, GM of MonetizeIT, the MediaWhiz Affiliate network sat down for a Q&A recently. Chris's blurb below summarizes the article that can be found by clicking on the link below.

bit.ly/97MLCX

Chris writes "After a year in which the performance marketing industry had to deal with controversies ranging from Oprah to the FTC, many of the larger, smarter networks are trying to move to higher ground. They’re seeking to attract more quality, brand advertisers, but that means selling performance marketing as a solution to Chief Marketing Officers who may have no experience of it."

Managing social media amid real-time search results

Along with the rise in the importance of social media is the rise in the need to manage your social media presence on search engines. Google has recently begun to include listing from the likes of twitter and facebook in their SERPs, and our Director of Search Marketing, Adam Riff penned a great article on the topic for DMNews that can be found here.
Look for more great thought leadership in the coming days from the Mediawhiz team

Performance Marketing: More than "a Little Skin in the Game."

Kirshenbaum Bond has developed a novel way to put some skin in the game with their clients. They have developed a stock portfolio of their publicly traded clients and will link their financial rewards to the portfolio’s success. See the NY Times article @ Advertising: Agency Combines Clients' Stocks for a Mini-Mutual Fund .

Having an agency link their financial reward to the client’s is a great thing. It aligns incentives and gets the agency focused on the returns the client’s marketing investments are generating. Not something typically seen from large brand oriented agencies, but clearly a winning formula. Hats off to Lori Senecal and the KBS&P team for aligning their rewards with their client’s financial results in this clever way.

But, “hello,” we in performance marketing have been doing just that for nearly a decade! MediaWhiz, and other performance marketing agencies, have been getting paid for results since 2001. We get paid to create the specific customer actions that our clients know, with statistical predictability, will generate profits. In most cases it is not our bonuses that are on the line but our entire fee. It’s not just some “skin in the game” but our financial lives on the line. We live or die by daily market results which determine whether our programs are providing a positive ROI.

As the competition for high quality customers becomes increasingly intense, every dollar a client invests in marketing needs to be productive. Great marketing programs will be continuously optimized to ensure they are creating the customer response that will lead to profits. Aligning the agency’s incentives with the client’s financial results is a strong step toward making this work. It’s great the KBS&P team will get a bonus if their client’s stock goes up. But if an advertiser wants more than a little skin in the game, if they want marketing partners fighting for their client’s profits as if their lives depended upon it, they should add more performance marketing to their overall marketing mix. As a performance marketing agency, we at MediaWhiz understand our financial life, just like our client’s, depends upon driving more profitable marketing. Now that’s alignment!

Death of the marketing budget

In a recent article penned by Mediawhiz CEO Jonathan Shapiro and published by iMedia Connection, Jonathan makes the argument that traditional marketing budgets should be tossed out the window. To his point, the Internet allows brands more visibility into the performance of their marketing efforts than ever had before. Combine the visibility the Internet allows with performance based distribution channels and you'll see there is no cap on what you can spend.

In Jonathan's words;

"Future winners in the online marketing space will understand that success means investing in performance marketing programs of continuous improvement that provide increasing and demonstrable profits. That's performance marketing, and you won't want to cap its success with an annual budget."

Read the whole article here.

Death of the Marketing Budget

Affiliate Summit West Alert

MediaWhiz SEO industry expert John Carcutt is popping up everywhere. This time, at Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas, as a member of an expert panel discussing the relationship between SEO and Affiliate Marketing.

Blogger Stephanie Lichtenstein, creator of the influential affiliate marketing blog, stephanielichtenstein.com had this to say about John;

"Since I know a little more about John Carcutt, I can tell you that he is
the real deal when it comes to SEO. He hosts a weekly podcast called
SEO101 on Webmaster Radio every Monday. He also has been in the game for a long time calling himself the, “SEO Oldtimer.”

The details of the panel are listed below.

When: Sunday, January 17, 2010
What: Monetizing Blogs for Affiliate Marketing and SEO
Learn to maximize affiliate commissions using blogging, increasing your
community, and utilizing SEO.
Who:
Kristopher B. Jones, President, Pepperjam Network, A GSI Commerce Company
(Twitter @pepperjamceo) (Moderator)
Drew Bennett, Professional Blogger, BenSpark.com (Twitter @BenSpark) John
Carcutt, SEO Manager, MediaWhiz (Twitter @JohnCarcutt)
Tim Jones, Owner, TheRealTimJones.com (Twitter @TheRealTimJones)
Murray Ross Newlands, Founder, Affiliate Heat (Twitter @murraynewlands)
When: 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Where: Brasilia 1-2 Rio Hotel
Passes: Platinum, Gold

Look for John's video summary =of his panel session on January 17. Stephanie Lichtenstein will also be covering the session and explore MediaWhiz's MonetizeIt business.