Online Branding Blog – reactorr.com

Online Branding Tools

Did you know that 70% of bloggers write about brands organically? And almost half of that is product reviews?

According to Jupiter Research, 52% of readers say blogs factored into the critical moment they decided to buy. And over 40% of online moms use social media for prodict recommendations.

About 65% of blog readers access blogs specifically to get an opinion, and over 90% trust user reviews over an in-store clerk.

Online branding tools for social media monitoring and reputation management are key to tracking and engaging with existing conversations.

Reputation Management

Alerts are a great way to stay informed and are delivered to your inbox. It isn’t a perfect system but effective in combination with many of the others mentioned. Set to comprehensive so you’re informed as they happen. Link

Comments on blogs can provide insight to your brand, and now you can monitor them with backtype and co.mments.

Blogs are easy to watch over with tools like google’s blog search, blogpulse, technorati,

Social Media Monitoring

Radian6 is a popular paid social media monitoring tool

dna13 provides real-time access to TV, print, online and social media content

Brandwatch is a comprehensive social media monitoring service

Brandtology is an online branding intelligence tool

Cision offers another robust monitoring tool

Spiral16 can help visualize the presence of a brand online

ScoutLabs looks very promising

BuzzLogic is used by many large brands

Twazzup gives a look at real time results on twitter

Trackur is a social media monitoring tool that can export results

SocialMention searches the web for any mention of your keyword/brand

Addictomatic provides mentions of your keyword or brand from multiple sources

monitter and twitterfall are great ways to keep an eye on twitter brand mentions

Topsy is a tweet search engine worth trying

Keotag is easy to use and gives  a glimspe across several popular platforms

boardreader helps monitor forum conversations

There are countless social media and public relations monitoring tools to be found online and this list is far from complete, but it gives you a starting point for some of the better options for online branding tools and social media monitoring.

First place to start would be setting up a google alert as it takes less than a minute and its free. You might also create a list of your brand name on twitter for an easy one click reference. The paid tools are far more advanced and often provide a dashboard for social media monitoring, but it might be more than some will need. Try out some of the suggestions to see which works for you.

Another area not really touched on but worth mentioning is online video. Using video marketing through sites like Youtube can be very effective, and your clips can also be embedded in your blog and easily shared.

Last but not least, keep an eye on Facebook. It has over 40% of social media traffic (comScore) and still shows steady growth. Understand that Facebook might not be a fit for everyone, but it’s worth exploring the idea and experimenting.

Social media accounts for almost 20% of online activity.

Branding Online – Why Marketers Need SEO

In an interview entitled Common Mistakes of Marketing Creatives and CEOs, Keith Reinhard (Chairman Emeritus of DDB) explains…

“When I was growing up in the industry, let me entertain you, let me make you smile, I’m very versatile, it was one way.”

Advertising was this way for decades, and what may have worked for the last 40 years clearly isn’t as effective these days. A shift like this comes as no surprise. Whether its advertising or just about anything, things change.
Reinhard goes on to describe the way things work now by suggesting…

“Now it’s we’re better together”.

This is a great point as the emergence of social media has had such an impact on brands, possibly one of the largest in recent times. Consumers are tired of being told and now look within their networks or trusted resources or contacts for more impartial views and recommendations.

An interesting point also brought up in the video mentions how when a CEO is really involved with the brand, the brand endures, has integrity, and can sustain the revolving doors of marketing directors.  A great point as with each change in marketing leadership comes someone that scraps direction and previously built equity.

One of the best definitions of a brand I’ve heard was provided during this interview…

A brand is who you are, what you do, why you do it, and how you do it.
One person that has maintained these types of values is Steve jobs of Apple. Over the course of the last 20 years Apple as a brand has probably never strayed far. But one example of branding confusion that comes to mind is McDonald’s. It seems with each new agency they hire (every 2-3 years) there is a different direction in the messaging. For example, they make burgers, they make them fast, and their affordable. But over the years they’ve introduced pizza, ribs, and even salads.

Online branding will take marketing to new heights with the speed at which you can connect with consumers. With social media, search marketing, and Internet advertising a brand can literally grow at sonic speeds compared with the past.

Marketers still seem to overlook the potential of SEO and how it can drive measureable revenue to their online business, yet have adopted to the virtues of social media rather quickly.

Perhaps it’s the inability of the average marketer to truly understand the benefits of how SEO and online branding belong together and how it can help their bottom line.

With paid search marketing results (PPC) accounting for roughly 20% of the clicks in typical search results, that leaves a lot of cash on the table in terms of customer acquisition.

For SEO’s, the following isn’t new information, but it might be of interest to marketers which are less familiar with the practice.
If you try the Google Keyword Tool you can get some insight to the potential of SEO and appearing in natural search results. Depending on the phrase, you can increase your visibility by thousands and more with a properly executed SEO strategy that pushes your site into the top 10 results.

It’s important to note that SEO is similar to branding in one sense. It’s a process and requires a fair amount of time to achieve those top ranking results. Realistic expectations depending on your industry to rise to the top can range from 6 months to several years. One of the keys to increased success in this venture is the quality of your content or offering. By focusing on this aspect, marketers stand to gain advocates, which will assist in the link building process by blogging, tweeting, or linking to your site for you.

You might be thinking tweeting falls under social media, but it’s the content they tweet that should be part of your SEO strategy. Sometimes referred to as link bait, it’s about the creation of quality content that will help to get those links.

Content creation and planning sometimes falls on the shoulders of an SEO, as does PR and many other tasks.  It’s always wise to have an SEO involved in the process but not necessarily depend solely on them to create this sort of material.

The role of SEO is about optimizing a site (for starters), but more important, is to improve the online visibility of said website so that it will rank for phrases that you’re targeting for your business.

When you think about it, there isn’t anything much better than your site showing up in the top listings when a potential customer is in the buying mode and looking for a product or service like one you might offer.


There is more likelihood of them inquiring or purchasing versus presenting banner ads all over. Most web users have banner blindness. Can you recall 3 banners you’ve seen in the last week? Most are lucky to be able to name one they had seen.

There probably isn’t a better way to position your brand online than showing up in the top search results. In the long run, your brand will become synonymous with the phrases you’ve targeted and displaying in those results also provides credibility to your brand’s product or service.

You should note that when you appear in those results, the url in first position will get about 42% of the clicks, while second gets 12%, third gets 9%, and it starts to drop sharply with each position after. And being on page two is like not being found at all.

You can see the entire interview mentioned above here.

Tags: internet branding, Internet Marketing, online branding, SEO

Looking Forward

Let’s start 2010 with some inspirational thoughts and discussion.

How to live before you die

Steve Jobs urges us to pursue our dreams and see the opportunities in life’s setbacks — including death itself.

William Kamkwamba – Building a windmill

A remarkable story sure to inspire.

Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Professor Randy Pausch’s last presentation at Carnegie Mellon talks about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals.

Professor Randy Pausch made a surprise return to Carnegie Mellon University to deliver an inspirational speech to the Class of 2008 at the Commencement ceremony.

Online Branding Strategy

It’s been a long time coming. Advertising has been about the same for some 50 years, but things just don’t work the way they used to. Within the last 5 years social media has grown so much that customers are more reliant than ever on referrals.

Marketers facing this shift find themselves looking towards social media to get in front of their audience and its a whole new ballgame. One recent development that advertisers should be aware of is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is watching the online space for signs that advertisers masquerading as independent third parties.

Now monitoring blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and many other social network platforms, the FTC is on the watch for advertisers posing as ordinary consumers raving or providing misleading testimonials on products or services. A recent example posted by Consumerist mentions a well known fast food chain posing as fans of a marketing campaign.

An excerpt from the FTC;

“The fundamental question is whether, viewed objectively, the relationship between the advertiser and the speaker is such that the speaker’s statement can be considered ’sponsored’ by the advertiser and therefore an ‘advertising message.’”

It’s probably a method used as long as the web has been around. I recall reading about ‘seeding’ being done by the music industry to launch new pop stars some years ago, and it probably continues today. But you can imagine how this might affect your online branding strategy should you be caught.

Online branding and reputation management is becoming more imperative to monitor, and with this news regarding the FTC, you’ll want to be listening to your endorsers as well as consumers.

What to take away from all this? Monitor, engage, and also be transparent, providing full disclosure where applicable.

Tags: Advertising, branding, Marketing, online branding

Snake Oil and the Kool Aid

There’s an interesting article at BusinessWeek that talks about the self-proclaimed experts of Social Media. I’ve felt similar sentiments on occassion, and while I believe that social media is an important part to online branding, I’ve noticed that a lot of people have jumped on board the social media band wagon. And most of them seem to be saying the same things. There’s a lot of preaching about building a following for your community, reputation management, and online branding.

They’re often valid points and advisable for an online strategy, but like anything worthwhile it doesn’t come easy either. If you feel that social media is something you wish to do for your business, it’s not only essential to have the right person, they need to be invested in it full time.

Probably this newest label of hucksters is partly because of the endless hype and large influx of gurus. The amount of conferences on the topic, both local and beyond, has businesses drinking the kool aid. But without the right Internet marketing goals in place, many start slinging comments about snake oil salesmen.

There are numerous social media success stories, and even more failures. Probably similar to a business startup, without a good strategy I’d bet than close to 90% of the social media strategies flop. From my experiences, its like most cases involving strategy, even the best one fall short without proper implementation and follow through.

SEO has gone through the snake oil cycle, and depending who you talk to, its still stuck in that light. The main problem in either case is the business often doesn’t understand enough about how it works and what to expect, which can often lead to hiring the wrong individual and being soured on the entire experience.

In most cases, either are important to your business. Both can drive sales, and both can help with online branding. While I tend to favor SEO as I can justify why one might invest in it, there are are numerous examples of social media success as well.

Internet Marketing Goals

Offline marketing is vastly different to doing so online. With traditional advertising, a media buyer takes a budget and selects a few channels (print, outdoor, tv, radio, etc) and decides on which are the best match for the demographic of the product or service. After organizing the buy, they present their recommendation and then usually move forward with their selections. And they’re done.

Internet marketing shares a few similarities, like targeting to a suitable demographic, but not a lot. The creative which might work offline doesn’t necessarily translate well to an online audience, or tweaks need to be made to work with the campaign. With online advertising you’re able to track effectiveness and use split testing to optimize for the best possible conversion. And with online markeitng data available in near real-time, you can adjust your campaign to dial up or down, or move your budget to better performing options.

Many companies measure the success of online advertising or social media simply by the increase in web traffic versus their usual traffic volume. Defining your goals is the ideal place to start for online advertising, search marketing, online branding, or social media. Some of the goals you might pursue for these are;

Search Engine Rankings – when your SEO strategy is moving in the right direction, you should see your site improve in the search results pages (SERPs) for predetermined phrases that you have chosen to pursue. The end result is an increase in both web traffic and leads.

Online Branding – while this includes an SEO component, an online branding strategy also includes internet marketing and social media. Online branding is not just ranking to have your website become synonymous with certain searched phrases, it also involves advertising online within the right circles to create that top of mind awareness with your brand. Additionally, it also employs social media tactics to develop your online brand essence and assist with online reputation management. Another way to measure is noting an increase in mentions on other websites, hopefully for the better.

Increase Sales – SEO can drive leads to your site, and if you’ve optimized for conversion, those leads should result in an increase in sales. This is a more common metric that is preferred, but not always the right one. If you’re running a pay per click (PPC) campain, then it might make sense, but if you’re campaign is social media or SEO, more suitable metrics might be followers or ranking.

Search Marketing for Small Business

There’s no doubt that it takes a little while for an SEO campaign to get off the ground. Which is why Search Marketing is a great way to get lead generation working for your business. Using Google Adwords, a business can be online and accepting leads in a matter of minutes.

Search marketing is what’s also known as Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing, where you pay only for the ads clicks on, not how often its displayed. This Cost Per Action type of marketing is popular as it allows you to better control your marketing budget.  If you’re new to this type of advertising, you’ll be glad to know that you can cap your daily spend.

It should be noted that while Search Marketing with programs like Google Adwords or similar options can bring in leads fast, the Cost Per Click quickly adds up depending on what business you’re in. Also, the paid search listing typically get 20 percent of the clicks from search results, while the natural search listings tend to get the other 80 percent of the clicks. The thing with the natural listings is SEO can be it take 6 months or more to start ranking due to the cycles of link crawling and indexing. But on the other hand, SEO tends to be a better return long term strategy, despite the initial up front investment.

An interesting introduction to Adwords can be found at NY Times.

Digital Marketing

The old rules of digital marketing have changed. Past performance measures of ROI differ to that of “traditional” digital media. Recent research shows that consumers can be up to 40 percent more likely to purchase a product if they have liased with that brand in a social space.

Consumers do their fair share of online research before making a lot of purchases, and online branding has a big influence when a potential customer searches a phrase and find you in the top 5 natural listings. Of course paid listings are fine, but almost 80 percent of the clicks go to natural listings. Which is why a lot of people prefer search marketing and Internet advertising over SEO. You can turn on your campaigns quick, and track them easily.

But when it comes to your best online marketing ROI, there’s no comparison to SEO. The only downfall is the initial time and investment up front. But you might look at as an investment in your online branding.

Another area of Digital Marketing that’s difficult to forecast a return on can be social media. It seems this really depends on whether Social Media is the right fit for your business, but it’s more than just Twitter and Facebook. Although if you’re new to it all you might have trouble telling. But it’s fairly important that online branding includes a social media strategy, as well as developing your presence within relevant circles such as participating in the right forums and commenting on blogs.

Although the performance measures aren’t clear cut, developing metrics beyond web traffic is a good start.

Google Land

Ever wonder what it would be like to visit Google headquarters? Google is supposed to have not only a great corporate culture, but also some very interesting office space. Here’s some interesting pics for a behind the scenes look.

 A slide allows quick access from  different floors. There are also poles available similar to the ones used in fire stations.

Employees can eat all they want from a vast choice of food and drink in the Googleplex cafeteria.

Each employee has at least two large screens. There are 4-6 ‘Zooglers’ per office.

Google offices are spacious and modern in design.

The Googleplex has one of the most interest open office concepts I’ve seen.

Large boards are available just about everywhere because “ideas don’t always come when seated in the office” says one of Google’s managers.

 Pool tables, video games etc. are  available in many areas.

Each floor hosts private cabin areas where employees (Zooglers) can attend to personal  affairs.

Problem with your computer ?  No problem …Bring it to this area where drinks are available while it is being fixed …

Professional masseurs and masseuses are  available.

This room offers massage chairs that you control while you view relaxing aquariums.

There are many books in the Google library – even some that are about  something other than programming.

Thanks to Dave (and Kara) of Fusion Advertising for sharing most of the images.

Will Poken Catch On?

Here’s an ingenious idea from a Swiss company that could catch one. It’s called Poken, and it might just replace business cards someday. A Poken has 2 parts to it. There is the Poken itself, which reflects some side of your identity. Then there is the Poken hand, which pulls out and connects to your computer.

The way it works is when you meet someone, instead of exchanging business cards, two people would touch the Poken hands together and your Pokens exchange ID information.  When they come in close proximity a little light glows to tell you it worked.After you get home you connect the Poken USB hand to your computer and see the information from your new friends. It’s like exchanging a business card, only quicker and with a lot more info.

From their site…

“We’re not another social network. You’ve already got that.We’ve thought bigger to let you instantly bridge the gap between the people you meet in the real world and those you stay connected to online.”

On the Poken site you create an account and add social media accounts to your profile various like Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, and many more. This might be a good time to grab your name.