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Twitter Says No to Political Promoted Tweets

posted on September 29, 2010

There’s a story on ClickZ today that states that Twitter is not going to allow politicians to buy promoted tweets. An internet consultant working on a campaign inquired and was told that Twitter wasn’t accepting this type of ad at this time.

At first, it seems like this was big news. A company turning away business? And turning away a topic that is trending at that moment? Why? Is it because Twitter is afraid of looking politically biased? But what about promoted tweets from alcohol companies or cigarette companies or bad movies. Couldn’t a promoted tweet be seen as an endorsement from Twitter?

My years of watching West Wing had me thinking constitutional rights and freedom of speech and bipartisan tweeting! Then I read the rest of the article and realized that maybe it’s not Twitter but the consultant who got it wrong.

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Mobile Email Marketing Pitfalls; How Do Your Messages Measure Up?

posted on September 29, 2010

By Len Shneyder

Recently, I had the pleasure of presenting with eROI’s Dylan Boyd on the topic of Mobile Optimization. We had a wonderful audience with a bounty of great questions stretching the limits of our imaginations and knowledge.  Seriously, if you don’t learn something from your audience then I doubt you’re really listening. I’m writing today to answer, in greater depth, one of the great questions that came in during the webinar: what kind of pixel resolutions should I code for?

In truth, the most common appears to be 320×480 for most of today’s smart phones. The following resolutions might give you an idea of the slight to drastic variance and how the nuances of the handset’s specific rendering will affect the final outcome:

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95% of Companies Have Tried Social Media; 40% Didn’t Inhale!

posted on September 29, 2010

There are so many great findings in Econsultancy and bigmouthmedia’s Social Media and Online PR Report 2010 I barely know where to start!

This will probably be one of the few reports you’ll want to spend dollars on this year, although I will add one caveat: the data is skewed towards the UK. That aside, here’s a sample of some of the insights:

1. While 95% of companies have added social media to their marketing mix, 45% have either only “experimented” or not done anything in social media. Really? Do these companies also turn away 45% of all customers? They may as well!

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Google’s Bringing “Sexy” Back to Display Ads

posted on September 29, 2010

During a presentation at the IAB advertising conference, Justin Timberlake Barry Salzman explained how Google believes “display [advertising] is bringing ‘sexy’ back.”

While you thought that Google was all about search ads, the search giant insists that “display advertising really is at the heart of what we’re doing at Google these days.” With 99% of its top advertisers running display ads, Google’s making some bold predictions of where display advertising will be by 2015, including:

  • Just like most news articles on the web today can be commented on, shared, discussed, subscribed to and recommended, in 2015, 75 percent of ads on the web will be “social” in nature—across dozens of formats, sites and social communities.

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Cause Marketing Creates Consumer Loyalty

posted on September 29, 2010

Ford announced yesterday, that it’s teaming up with Web radio station Pandora for a new cause marketing campaign involving Jewel and John Legend. The program surrounds Ford’s new Sync system that allows you to stream audio from a mobile device through the car’s speakers. When consumers visit Pandora they’ll be asked to share songs from either of the two artists and for each song shared, Ford and Pandora will make a donation to charity.

According to a survey by Cone LLC, as reported on by Adweek, this move will help endear Ford to car buying consumers. 41% of the people surveyed this past July said that they’ve purchased a product or service because it was associated with a cause. 85% went so far as to say “When a product or company supports a cause I care about, I have a more positive image of the product or company.” More than half the people said a donation to a cause would make them willing to “try a new brand or one they’ve never heard of.” That’s a huge kick to brand loyalty.

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Face Time Meets Social Media Marketing

posted on September 28, 2010

We love our Twitter, Facebook and email for marketing, but nothing beats face time with a potential consumer – just ask the Fuller Brush Man. But before you start knocking on doors, download this new, free ebook from GoToMeeting. It’s called ‘The Best of Both Worlds: How to Effectively Leverage Social Media Relationships with Real-Time Collaboration Tools” and though the title is way too long, it’s packed with practical suggestions and inspiration to help you get face-to-face with your customers.

The ebook outlines ways for marketers to ramp up their social media marketing efforts through the use of Webinars and online conferences. If you’re like me, you probably associates those words with corporate training sessions but after reading the report, I saw the possibilities for creative marketing. Let’s start with the basics of any campaign.

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Ontolo: Link Building Tools to Beat All Others!

posted on September 28, 2010

Just over two years ago the folks over at Ontolo–Ben Wills and Garrett French– set out on the impossible quest to design a link building service that would bring forth the most relevant and valuable link prospects for link building campaigns.

They began work on a toolset to automate as much of the Link Prospecting and Link Qualification work as possible by crawling and analyzing thousands of link prospects against over 100 different valuation metrics.A tool that eliminates at least half of your link building work and doubles the time you can spend on link outreach. A tool that, In effect, gets you twice as many links each week without your having to work a single minute more.