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The World Cup, the biggest sporting event in the world, is quickly approaching. Starting June 11^th, 32 teams representing different countries from around the world will compete for the soccer title that has been given every four years since 1930 (with an exception of 1942 and 1946 due to WWII). But 2010 is a particularly special and relevant year. Why, you ask? Because of social media!

Social Media as we know it did not exist during the 2006 World Cup in Germany. Twitter did not launch until July 2006. Facebook didn’t become public until September 2006. YouTube existed but videos looked like this #6 most popular YouTube video of 2006. Now, only 4 years later, Facebook has over 400 million members and more than 50 million tweets are sent each day. These platforms, which were infants during the last World Cup, are now globally available and hugely popular.

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It was only a matter of time before we went from using our phones to call or text friends and plan to meet in a certain location to using our smartphones when we’re in a certain location to find out which of our friends are already there.  Social networking, while already popular online, is one of the fastest-growing activities among mobile users.  In fact, eMarketer predicts that by 2013, 43% of global mobile Internet users will be accessing social networks from their mobile devices and 45% of the US mobile Internet population will be on social networks from their mobile devices.  It seems that even when we’re socializing in real life, we want access to our online networks.  continue reading

Content strategy has long been the corner stone to effectively delivering “The right content at the right time to the right person.” While this sounds a bit cliché brands will have a hard time achieving this simple premise with out a plan that is guided by consumer intent. Knowing what people are looking for, where they are looking for it and how well they find it is at the heart of understanding consumer intent.

Lets start with a simple definition of what content strategy is.

Content Strategy is an actionable plan for creating, managing & optimizing content align consumer intent with business goals. The important part of this statement is the alignment of what the consumer wants, with what the brand hopes to get in return.

Developing a content strategy is not as simple as it used to be in the early days of digital marketing. We now face an ever-growing landscape of places where consumers interact with content and a variety of new devices it is consumed on. Think about the last time you were researching for something new to buy. It is likely you started by searching Google, watched a video on Youtube, read a consumer review and did a quick poll of your friends on Facebook.

It’s also likely your customer will not be accessing content in a browser at their desk. Instead they will be using GPS enabled devices that deliver content based on their location. This can be game changing for a number of reasons.

The first use of location-based content we think of is the ability to deliver offers and promotions based on proximity to a person’s location. This has long been a dream of marketers. What I find much more interesting is when location based thinking goes beyond a simple direct response model to placing content in context of activities and interest.

Imagine if an outdoor store provided a mobile app allowing people to leave photos and suggestions along hiking trails across the country. Add the capability to log in with a Facebook account and now suddenly you can share your experience with friends in your network. The opportunity for the outdoor store to engage would be by providing useful tips for cooking on the trail, food to pack with promotions for products that will make future trips even better.

As our content becomes more distributed so do the tools for measuring effectiveness. Measuring consumption, favorability and sharing across channels is essential to make decisions on how to optimize the mix of places content goes and what content is developed.

As you can see there are a number of moving parts that must be considered when developing a content strategy. As you begin to develop your plan ask your self a few questions: Are consumer’s goals and business goals aligning? Does the content your creating have a purpose? How will you know if you content is working for you.

We often get questions about if and when brands can edit a Wikipedia article and I’d like to provide some background on Wikipedia’s format and clarify what is and is not an acceptable edit. I am not morally against brands editing Wikipedia articles and there are no rules against it but the acceptable instances are few and any edits should be done transparently and by someone educated in the format and citation process of Wikipedia. continue reading

I will be attending Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago from December 7-11 (at the Hilton Chicago - 720 S. Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60605).

On Tuesday I posted a Q&A with Bill Leake , President and CEO, Apogee Search.  Today I’m pleased to interview Matt Van Wagner of Findmefaster.com.

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I will be attending Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago from December 7-11 (at the Hilton Chicago - 720 S. Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60605).  As a lead-in to the conference I’m pleased to post a few interviews over the course of this week.

The first subject is Bill Leake , President and CEO, Apogee Search.  Bill also serves as the president of the Austin Interactive Marketing Association, and as the chairman of the SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization) committee.

Bill will be one of the speakers in the session called PR, Social Media and Search, covering how to integrate social media and search into your PR strategy.

It’s worth noting that the questions I’ve posed below not only reflect my relatively nascent knowledge of “search,” but also what I hear a lot of friends, colleagues and clients asking.  Hope you come away with a useful nugget or two.  Comments and additional questions welcomed.

More so than ever we see brands focusing on driving earned social media coverage as a way to help promote a product, service or even advocate for a cause.  For the uninitiated, can you give us the 101 on how social media impacts organic search results?

Google, in a nutshell, likes fresh relevant content (roughly 20% of the algorithm) and old links / offpage (roughly 80% of the algorithm).  Social Media, properly done, can get you both.  Fresh content, saying what you want it to say (contextually and semantically dead-on), linking back to one of your properties.

That being said, most social media folks know boo diddly about how to actually do SEO, and when they get rankings on a truly competitive keyword, it’s usually completely by happenstance.

In many organizations, PR, social media and search are “owned” by different factions within either the marketing or communications teams.  Any recommendations on how these disciplines can be integrated for the greater good?

It can get worse than that. Sometimes search itself is “owned” by multiple parties.  Paid Search / Adwords is often owned by field marketing or demand generation teams, operating tactically at the divisional level, while Natural Search / SEO is often owned by corporate marketing, or even corporate IT.

That being said, IMHO it’s vital that all customer-facing marketing teams coordinate their efforts.  Search & PR are already collaborating more and more, and I expect that ultimately social will be “owned” by the search & PR teams (at least the customer acquisition piece of social), rather than existing as a separate practice area.  Already, we’re finding that more and more of the better social media agencies are actually the social media practice areas of search engine marketing companies.

Can you talk a bit about Facebook in particular? What does it mean (i.e. what is the effect) that it’s a “closed” community in terms of search visibility (versus, for example, Twitter).  And where do you see this going in 2010?

I think Facebook is a sign that not everyone wants to be dependent upon Google for their visibility (and ultimately, their moneymaking).  Just like the Wall Street Journal has much of their content paid subscription only, and just like NewsCorp / Murdoch is talking about pulling much of their content out of Google, some of the major “publishers” (and Facebook is a publisher, in a sense, of user generated content), are going to make a courageous go of it on their own, trusting that they have enough critical mass to survive w/out Google’s help in attracting eyeballs.

In the Facebook case, they are able to use Google searches for a person to drive eyeballs into the person’s profile page, but if you want to read more (wall, etc) or see more (photos), you need to enter their walled garden.  If they can pull it off, this looks like a far more defensible business model than what Twitter has going on. Has anyone seen Twitter’s real revenue model yet?  I thought not …

This is a blog written by a PR firm, so it begs asking – what can PR people do as they build strategic and tactical plans to ensure we are leveraging search as effectively as possible?

Find a great search firm to partner with, and search firms need to make themselves partner friendly for their part as well.  A well crafted PR plan, whether a strategic plan or a tactical plan, if it covers online (and in this day and age, I’d hope that most would cover online), should have discussion areas in it about how best to integrate and leverage search.  Not just natural search / SEO either, but also paid search / PPC.

What are your three favorite blogs/online resources (besides your own) for relative beginners to learn about search?

I do like ours … as it’s one of the top ranking ones out there for a search for “Search Marketing Blog” and we really encourage rank and file participation from our team (rather than most Search Marketing firm blogs, where 90% of the posts are just 2-3 folks, including the company “great leader” type).  That being said, here goes:

1. Search Engine Strategies Blog
2. Danny Sullivan’s Blog
3. ClickZ

Neatly six months after the feds officially dropped the “Swine Flu” term in favor of the scientifically-grounded “H1N1″, web users are finally showing signs of following suit as evidenced by recent shifts in keyword searches.

According to Google’s Insights for Search tool, worldwide searchers for the first time since the outbreak have searched for “H1N1″ in greater numbers than “Swine Flu.”

The data shows that while “H1N1″ never received the surge of search queries earned by “Swine Flu” during the height of outbreak, the science-based strain term has slowly climbed atop the level of swine searches.



So what does this mean for brands?

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A really interesting example of aggregation launched recently in the academic world. Fururity.org is a no nonsense aggregator, pulling the latest research from North America’s leading research universities, compiling the finding in an easy-to-digest interface complete with a by topic architecture spanning across major research disciplines.

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By now it is certainly not news to note that YouTube is already the largest on-demand broadcast medium for anyone with an internet connection, boasting over 71 million unique users each month and the 6th largest audience on the Internet. 75% of all Americans have watched at least one video clip online in the last month. These staggering numbers coupled with the rise of broadband adoption in the US (over 80% of Internet users in the US have broadband as of March 2009) mean that online video is no longer a niche activity and has squarely hit the mainstream.

When you consider the opportunities from a Pharma marketing point of view, YouTube is certainly tempting. The FDA has yet to create significant regulations governing YouTube and there have been many marketing efforts in the Pharma space over the past several years which have seen fairly good results. Novartis’ FluFlix video contest from 2007, for example, had nearly 800,000 views of the intro video. In 2008, Sanofi-Aventis launched their GoInsulin campaign video channel which now has more than 300,000 views. More recently, earlier this year AstraZeneca saw success with their branded MyAsthmaStory video campaign sharing real stories of Symbicort patients and how the product had transformed their lives.

Concurrently, many pharma brands including Johnson & Johnson, Boehringer Ingelheim and Novartis (to name a few) have launched their own branded official YouTube channels to share a compilation of videos about various products, patient testimonials, research and development highlights and other corporate produced information. These channels represent an ongoing commitment to the YouTube channel and signal an intention to make this a longer term part of their overall corporate communications.
WHY DOES IT MATTER? continue reading

The CDC’s National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing and Media starts tomorrow with an amazing lineup of presenters and keynote speakers. The conference is in its third year and brings together social marketing practitioners, academia, public health practitioners and many others to discuss best practices in health communications and marketing.

I am thrilled to be going to this conference and am looking forward to learning from some of the best social marketing practitioners and thought leaders in the country. I plan on blogging about my experience here on the Fresh Influences Blog with my colleague Kristin Parrish. You can also follow our Tweets @KFoster926 or @sarahmarchetti or follow the conference hashtag #NCHCMM. If you are attending the conference, Alex Rampy wrote a great post you should check on on 5 Ways to Prep for the CDC Conference.

Several representatives from Ogilvy PR’s Digital Influence and Social Marketing teams will be speaking at the conference. If you are going, please stop by our sessions:

Partnering with the AME Church to Educate African Americans about P.A.D. - Erica G.Taylor (International A/B) Tuesday, 2:15 — 3:45 p.m

Twitter Best Practices for Nonprofits and Health Communicators - Sarah Marchetti (Grand Ballroom A/B)Tuesday, 2:15 — 3:45 p.m

Motivating Women to Address Risk Factors for Heart Disease by Creating an Online Community with Customized Social Media Tools - Emily Yu and Kristin Foster (Poster Session)Wednesday, 9:30 — 10:15 a.m

Redefining Teen Health Communications Through Social Media - Trish Eitel Taylor and Caitlin Douglas (Cottonwood A/B) Wednesday, 10:15 — 11:45 a.m

Policy Advocacy: The Fifth “P” of Health Marketing - Bryan Callahan (Dogwood A/B) Thursday, 10 — 11:30 a.m

You can check out the program book for full descriptions of these sessions and all the other presentations that will be going on over the next three days.

Do you have any questions for us while we’re there? Any content you’d like to see here on Fresh Influences that Kristin and I can collect for you? Let us know in the comments.