http://www.anvilmediainc.com/search-engine-marketing-blog

The biggest thing to consider when deciding when the right time to invest in a mobile site is that – without a strong mobile presence, you’re delivering a poor user experience to your customers and prospective customers. With the total percentage of mobile visitors making up your site traffic growing – how many customers are you willing to serve a poor experience too? If you asked the CEO of your company that question – what percent of visitors are we willing to give a bad experience? It may just help you case for additional budget for a mobile site.

To read more about tips for developing a mobile-friendly site, and why its more important than ever, continue here.

Unfortunate ad targeting on Facebook

If your an advertiser, it’s always a good idea to think about if your ads could be serving in the wrong places after such tragic events.  In keyword-targeted AdWords, it seems a little easier to foresee and avoid such unfortunate placements — take a few minutes to look at your keyword list and scan for any possible connections, and add a quick Negative Keyword List including “tsunami,” “earthquake,” etc. across your campaigns.

But, with Facebook, what would you do?  Pause anything water-related?  They don’t have any sort of exclusion mechanism that I’m aware of, a la negative keywords.  Does Facebook have some responsibility to try to disable ads on any content relating to natural disasters, wars, etc?

I don’t know.  But I do know that this particular example would test the limits of even the darkest sense of humor…

The Kraft version of the game plays out like this – when any two people tweet “mac & cheese” they get sent a link – the first person to click the link and provide their address gets 5 boxes of cheesy awesomeness and a sweet t-shirt. Clever way to bridge old and new I think. By connecting people with their childhood memories Kraft is capitalizing on the main appeal they have, which is the comfort that pretty much all adults gets from thinking about eating mac and cheese when they were little. Clever campaign in my opinion that does a great job of reconnecting older customers with a familiar and comforting brand – you know you want some mac and cheese now.

Screenshot of Link  (via AgencySpy)

Sitting through the mobile session at SearchFest 2011 last week I ran into an interesting set of slides: which Fortune 100 companies have mobile specific sites.

You would think that with all of their financial resources each would through a bunch of money at the problem and get a mobile site up in a matter of days or weeks.  Surprisingly though, a huge chuck of the group didn’t have a mobile site.

For some it makes sense: I don’t think if I want to find a gas station I’m going to go to the Exxon site necessarily, but considering how much money each of these companies have they could at least have some sort of mobile optimized presence.  Here’s a summary of who has mobile site (Yes) and who doesn’t (No), broken down by industry:

Retail & CPG

CVS (Yes)

Sears (Yes)

Best Buy (Yes)

Lowe’s (Yes)

Safeway (Yes)

Costco (Yes)

Walmart (Yes)

Target (Yes)

Walgreens (Yes)

Kroger (No)

Home Depot (No)

Kraft (No)

Pepsi (No)

P&G (No)

Johnson & Johnson (No)

Finance & Insurance

Bank of America (Yes)

Wells Fargo (Yes)

JP Morgan (Yes)

Citi (Yes)

State Farm (Yes)

Aetna (Yes)

MetLief (Yes)

New York Life (Yes)

Allstate (Yes)

Prudential (Yes)

AIG (No)

United Health Group (No)

Services, Manufacturing & Entertainment

Disney (Yes)

Exxon (No)

Chevron (No)

Conoco (No)

GE (No)

FedEx (No)

UPS (No)

Tech, Telecom & Auto

Cisco (Yes)

Microsoft (Yes)

Intel (Yes)

Dell (Yes)

IBM (Yes)

Verizon (Yes)

Ford (Yes)

GM (Yes)

HP (No)

Apple (No)

Sprint (No)

AT&T (No)

Comcast (No)

Bottom line: you can beat many of the Fortune 100 companies in the mobile space now.  Get on those mobile optimized sites.

Like Google, they will still be fairly stringent on use of trademarked terms in ad copy — for example, it must be “truthful and lawful” and include relevant comparison of product attributes represented by independent, 3rd party research.

This change certainly opens up an opportunity for nimble advertisers — build a competitive campaign ASAP to get out in front of your competition.  In AdWords, where bidding on competitors has been allowed for years, competitor campaigns somewhat cancel each other out — whatever clicks you are taking from your competitors, they’re likely taking just as many clicks from you!  And, of course, maintaining a healthy Quality Score on a competitor campaign can be difficult, to say the least.

But, if you get your adCenter campaign up & running ahead of your competition, you’ll have a few precious days/weeks all to yourself.  And even when they do join the fray, you’ll have a head-start on collecting click data & building a performance history.

• Why did this person have a bad experience? Did their experience not meet their expectations? Perhaps there was a less than stellar interaction with someone who represents your company. No matter what the cause, its critical to determine why they had a bad experience so you can work to remedy the experience that already happened, and prevent similar experiences from happening again.
• Offer personalized solutions when possible. Some folks just want to have their complaints heard and understood. Usually a small peace offering can go a long way in restoring a favorable view of your brand, especially if something truly unusual or unfortunate happened to this customer.
• If you have done a great job of building a strong brand and engaging your advocates online, they’ll often come to bat for you. Those advocates are created by providing an excellent experience. If you seek to make each of your customer’s experiences as great as possible, you advocates will far outweigh the naysayers.

I highly recommend reading the full article found here. Any company engaging heavily in social media should be prepared to receive some negative feedback as well as the positive engagement that all brands hope for online.

Via Mashable, we read that YourTango is dubbing February 13th “Break Up With Your Ex Day”, and is providing guidance and tools to help those who just can’t break up with their ex(‘s) on social media. Not only a timely tie in between  their website and social media to get some great coverage for YourTango, but also a very valid proposition.

We’ll pose the same question that Mashable did – is it necessary to disconnect from your ex on social media? Tell us what you think – and if you have any stories about how psycho-stalker you’ve actually gotten, even better. For example if you’re guilty of scouring Facebook at 3am, obsessing over the pages of every girl with a relationship status of “single” who has commented, liked or friended your ex since your break-up, comparing your physical attributes, fashion, wittiness of comment, and friend count to each and every one of them (um, not that we’d ever do anything like that because we’re, like, totally secure in our current relationship).

So, Happy Cord Cutting & Happy Valentines day!

Good Reviews

• When do I respond?
  • When you get a rave review
• How do I respond?
  • Be gracious and humble
  • Make sure you let them know that you appreciate the kind review
  • Consider rewarding comments with discounts or promos

Bad Reviews

• When do I respond?
  • You know your company is in the wrong
  • The review is misstating facts
  • You can tell the reviewer is maD at you and not just life
• How do I respond?
  • Be calm
  • Be honest –if your company is in the wrong, admit it
  • Figure out a way to make amends and direct them to a contact that can help offline

What is the key takeaway here? It is important to not only respond to negative reviews, but positive ones as well.

With smartphone market share expected to pass 50% by the end of this year, clearly the mobile space can’t be ignored any longer.  A couple of other interesting demographic facts online advertisers should remember as they enter this space:

• Texting is HUGE among teenagers (more than double of any other age group).  Facebook clearly understands this trend as is modifying their messaging system as a result.
• Hispanics, Asians are Most-Likely Smartphone Owners in U.S.  If you cater specifically to these groups keep these stats in mind.
• Low-income groups in the U.S. are adopting mobile internet devices faster than their high income counterparts.

As you think about monitoring your reputation online, don’t forget how you appear on mobile devices, especially if you target specific demographic groups with your product or service.