Subscriptions, Social and CRM
“Who is the customer?” It’s a great question and one that my managers liked to ask when I was a young sales representative. Like all great questions, it got to the meat of the matter with an economy of words that impressed as much by the brevity as for the meaning. The customer’s identity is [...]
80% of Ad Clicks on Facebook Coming from Bots? Maybe it’s Cyber-Insider-Trading
Fascinating story over on Techcrunch: Startup Limited Run claims 80% of the clicks it got through Facebook advertising were due to bots. They concluded this because so many of the clicks had Javascript disabled (they say normally only 1-2% disable Javascript) and because whatever was clicking through wasn’t bothering to fetch the images on the [...]
Hitching Your Boat to Customer Advocacy
I recently wrote about how McDonald’s and RIM had flamed out with their #hashtag campaigns on Twitter. Not pretty. However, I admit that I am somewhat conflicted about this because I completely subscribe to the notion that customer advocacy will drive successful companies to sustainable competitive leadership. Gone are the days when a company could [...]
Twitter’s Biggest Problem: Tweets are Ads
Today seems to be bash on Twitter day: – Trouble at Twitter is a Fortune article talking about how Boardroom antics, CEO switches, and other distractions are keeping Twitter from progressing. – Twitter turned down a $10 Billion offer from Google, and the Business Insider claims that although they have 200 million registered users, [...]
The Future of Advertising the Salesforce Way
Many good things were spawned by Salesforce’s Super Bowl ads. The ads themselves left us curious and wanting to know more, and that was their job. Salesforce placed some compelling videos on YouTube, one at five minutes and another at two. Find them here. For me, the longer video, “Chatter.com: The Making of Do Impossible Things [...]
How Customer Buying Cycles Affect PPC CPA
One of the hardest things for an advertiser new to PPC to get comfortable with is what we call the “CPA roller coaster”. This is the time in a new campaign when you’re spending money on clicks and have not yet seen conversions (sales/leads). If you’re calculating your CPA every day in this phase you’ll [...]
Silly Rabbits: Google is for Spam not for Search
I’m watching with some interest the growing meme about Google passing on too much spam in the search results. Mathew Ingram does a good overview while claiming Google is on a collision course with Demand Media. He mentions: – Paul Kedrosky’s rant – Vivek Wadhwa, who says we desperately need a new and better Google - [...]
Dell Knows My Facebook Friends!
Okay, this is just a little creepy. I’m sure I’m late to the party, but I just noticed this. I was looking at a Dell laptop, and suddenly a good friend’s name popped out at me. Seems he had clicked a Facebook “Like” button on the same product along with 646 others. Of course Dell [...]
Why tech advertising needs fine print
Maybe I have been watching more TV recently, but tech vendors seem to be spending plenty on TV advertising – and I keep thinking as with pharmaceuticals, they need to spend at least 15 seconds on fine print. Like Verizon with its 4G LTE commercial below. The ad shows a man at a rural location. [...]
Why Groupon Would be a Good Idea for Google
There has been a lot of speculation lately about a pending purchase of Groupon by Google. A lot of the more recent news recently has focused on all the reasons why this is a bad idea, especially around the purchase price and Groupon’s human-intensive sales model. I wanted to share a few thoughts on this [...]
