Tuesdays with Tukaiz

5 Tips to Keep Your Audience Engaged on Facebook

Chris Little — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:38:06 +0000

As we pass the one year anniversary of the Facebook IPO, investors and marketers are watching closely to understand how to best monetize the popular social network. With a surplus of consumer data, the ability to engage with member, and its general viral attention from end-users, there are many opportunities for marketers to leverage Facebook in their own marketing campaigns. For many brands on Facebook, this starts with the “Like” button.

Increasing Brand Awareness through Pinterest

Chris Little — Mon, 13 May 2013 21:48:08 +0000

Today, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are the top choices among businesses trying to create brand awareness, but relative newcomers like Pinterest are worth keeping an eye on. Why? Pinterest’s user community is receptive to brand awareness campaigns if they are engaging and compelling. For example, Wayfair, a home goods company that is active on Pinterest, found that users who were referred to its site by Pinterest spent 10% more than those who found the site through Facebook or Twitter. Other brands, such as the companies behind Mason Jars and Kotex, have experienced similar success.

Omni-Channel Experiences will Change the Face of Retail Marketing

Chris Little — Mon, 06 May 2013 17:43:39 +0000

With the inception of eCommerce in the 1990s and continuous developments being made in mobile commerce technology, the processes through which consumers choose to make purchases have changed dramatically. In addition to viewing traditional brick-and-mortar stores as an option for making purchases, today’s consumers also turn to the Web to find more attractive deals. Web-only companies such as Amazon.com, eBay, Craigslist, and most recently Quibids have been major contributors to drawing consumers away from brick-and-mortar locations.

To remain competitive, most retail stores have embraced some level of eCommerce as part of their business model. In response, marketers and advertisers have had to broaden their marketing efforts to capture the attention of online consumers. According a recent InfoTrends study entitled Understanding Vertical Markets: Enterprise Communications Requirements, 24.5% of enterprise retail communication spend is devoted to the creation and distribution of Web-based marketing messages and advertisements. Additionally, communications spend for Web-based advertising is expected to increase by 9.4% over the next two years, averaging out to 29.1% of total communications spend.

Is Wearable Computing the Ideal Platform for Advertisers?

Chris Little — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 20:31:41 +0000

The past year has seen rapid developments in wearable computing technology. Google launched its glass product, which has been randomly spotted throughout New York City and on Runways during Fashion Week. Telepathy, which was founded in January of this year, announced that it is in the process of releasing the Telepathy 2. This product is a competitor to Google Glass and is actually expected to hit the market first. Additionally, there have also been rumors that Apple’s next big product to come to market will be an iWatch. With all of these new developments, the social experiment of wearable computing is expected to reach a new level.

Achieving Contextual, Hyperlocal Marketing with Geofencing

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 03:27:32 +0000

Mobile technology can provide a wealth of data about its users based on the variety of sensors and signals found in today's smartphones and tablets; one of the most compelling pieces of information that marketers and advertisers are leveraging with increasing frequency is location. With GPS technology integrated in the majority of smartphones and tablets on the market today, along with more platforms tapping into these types of location-based services, opportunities abound to deliver more contextual, hyperlocal experiences to users that help drive value and results.

It's been over three years since we first highlighted location-based services for marketing on Tuesdays with Tukaiz. Back then, a lot of the applications that utilized location data were user-initiated, such as finding the nearest store or checking into a physical location on a social network like Facebook or Foursquare. While those use cases are still prominent and the experiences around them have been enriched over the past few years, marketers are figuring out new ways for location data to provide greater relevancy to target audiences. One key enabler to these new experiences is geofencing.

A Multi-Screen World Poses New Challenges for Marketers

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:28:28 +0000

The use of multiple screens in peoples' everyday lives is becoming commonplace. According to a 2012 study conducted by Google and Ipsos Research entitled The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior, found 90% of consumers move between multiple devices-smartphones, tablets, personal/work computers, and in the near future, smart televisions-to complete tasks throughout the day.

This reality is a challenge for marketers and advertisers that increasingly want to deliver a holistic experience to their target audiences across all of these devices. While strides have been made over the past year or two to use intelligence to tailor content for specific devices and even specific contexts, being able to actually track how an individual moves from screen to screen and have marketing and advertising follow that person remains a major complication.

For Inbound Marketers, Content is King

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 13:59:31 +0000

Last week, The Pulse Network-a digital media and event solutions company-hosted the New York City leg of its Inbound Marketing Summit (IMS), which highlights the latest trends and practices marketers are using to succeed with inbound marketing. The overall goal of inbound marketing is to make it easier for companies, products, and services to be found by prospects, which is commonly achieved through content marketing like blogs, videos, whitepapers, eBooks, social marketing, search engine optimization, and more.

Content is a critical enabler to effective inbound marketing, making it a key underlying theme of IMS NYC 2013. Specifically, the issues of quality and authenticity came up quite a bit. While all marketers battle with the same challenge of quantity-the need to constantly be pumping out content to a growing number of digital channels-quality and authenticity are critical success factors. Content being used to attract new prospects and customers needs to resonate with the target audience and built trust; quality and authenticity helps further those goals.

Healthy Company Cultures Including Alternatives to Sitting at a Desk

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 14:23:06 +0000

Over the past four decades, the U.S. and other developed nations have transitioned from the industrial age to the information age, which has transformed the way the way that people work. While a recent study from the McKinsey Global Institute found that 20% of the global economic output in the past decade came from manufacturing, it also found that the number of workers in the sector contracted by 24% over the same time period. Furthermore, the research firm also found that at least 30% of jobs in the sector are so-called white-collar jobs like sales, engineering, design, and more. There are still factory floors, but they are more automated than ever with hardware and software technology ultimately reducing labor headcounts.

Google Pushes Search Marketers to Mobile with Enhanced Campaigns Update

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 14:27:21 +0000

Over three years ago on Tuesdays with Tukaiz, we emphasized the increasing importance of inbound search marketing with a three-part series that detailed its practice. A lot has changed in three years, including increased automation, new capabilities, and the explosion of mobile devices that emit signals to influence the context of search and ad results.

The variety of smartphones, tablets, and now "phablets" on the market has created a big challenge for search marketers, because on most ad platforms they had to create hundreds of campaigns to reach people based on their device type, location, time-of-day, and other attributes. This inherent complexity for mobile search marketing also prevented smaller advertisers from going mobile, even as mobile search volumes grew.

Brand Governance Helps Support a Holistic Customer Experience

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 21:24:16 +0000

Maintaining a clear and consistent brand identity across all media channels is something that marketers strive for executing marketing and advertising initiatives. Many times, that's easier said than done, although technology is helping open up new models that increase marketing efficiency and effectiveness, especially for marketing content. Establishing a clear structure of corporate brand governance for procurement of marketing content across the entire organization is essential to achieve a holistic customer experience with a brand.

According to a recent study conducted by InfoTrends entitled Understanding Vertical Markets: Enterprise Communications Requirements, 98% of enterprise organizations surveyed currently have some type of an approval process when purchasing marketing content. Even with the prevalent use of approvals, the workflow process differs depending on the structure of the company and the protocols around brand governance. Brand governance around marketing procurement can be separated into four models:

Rough Seas Ahead for Behavioral Targeting

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 14:51:12 +0000

Behavioral targeting has been a topic of great interest here at Tuesdays with Tukaiz, as we continue to cover the evolution of digital advertising and the associated issues around tracking, targeting, and data privacy. While marketers continually strive to deliver more relevant advertising and messaging with the growing use of big data and social media, on the other side of the equation there are consumer and privacy advocates that are pushing for giving consumers more transparency and control of how their information is collected, analyzed, and utilized for the purposes of behavioral targeting and advertising.

The latest battle in an ongoing saga between the digital advertising industry and consumer & privacy advocates came from Firefox web browser maker Mozilla, which announced toward the end of February that it added code to the nightly builds of its future browser versions being developed to block third-party cookiesfrom visited websites by default (in other words, the block will be on when a user downloads and uses the browser for the first time). While first-party cookies originate directly from a website being visited-often for the purposes of tracking, remembering login credentials, and personalization-third-party cookies are used by... you guessed it, third-parties such as advertisers to collect and track visitor information across websites to enable and deliver more targeted advertising.

Connecting and Collaborating in Today�s Wired Workforce

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 21:50:46 +0000

With the wired workforce of today, more employees are working remote out of home offices than ever before. According to a 2011 study by the Telework Research Network, a consulting and research firm focusing workplace flexibility, working remotely increased by 73% from 2005 to 2011 in the United States. Technology advancements have been a major contributor to this shift by enabling employees to securely connect to their companies' networks a few days a week or even full-time from virtually anywhere in the world with an Internet connection.

The opportunity to telecommute is appealing to many. First and foremost, the types of jobs being performed in the United States today have changed. While jobs in manufacturing and the service industry require a physical presence to perform work tasks, so-called "knowledge" workers that primarily rely on computers to do their jobs are becoming much more common. These types of employees can sometimes be more productive when they're not in a corporate office culture, and those with young children can benefit from having a lot more flexibility in raising them when working from home.

Five Tips for Keeping Your Online Brand Secure

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 15:36:37 +0000

As we've covered quite extensively on Tuesdays with Tukaiz, marketers continue to shift their spending and tactics to online channels. While digital marketing is providing a mix of cost-effectiveness, measurability, and real-time optimization to marketers that need to be more accountable than ever before, it also poses new risks for brands that are more heavily relying on third-party services and platforms than ever before. One of those risks-vulnerability to cyber-attacks-is a persistent threat to brands, their digital investments, and the agencies that are increasingly tasked with managing those brands online.

Happiness: The Key to Unlocking Great Customer Experiences

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:15:25 +0000

Walt Disney once said, "Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends." Disney's entertainment empire-especially its amusements parks-are laser-focused on delivering a great, enchanting experience to all of its customers. As we highlight last year on Tuesdays with Tukaiz, delivering an exceptional experience cultivates trust, loyalty, and advocacy among customers, which ultimately drives greater profits. One of the core elements of delivering great experiences is having a strong company culture, and one of the keys to a strong company culture is keeping employees happy. Happy employees = happy customers.

In a recent blog on the Wall Street Journal, entitled "Ways to Be Happy and Productive at Work," writers of the WSJ and the iOpener Institute for People and Performance, published their findings from their study on happiness in the workplace. They concluded that employees who are most productive at work are also the happiest: happier employees are more willing to assist their colleagues with everyday troubles, and their performance typically exceeds that of employees deemed as "not happy." Furthermore, happy employees are expected to achieve goals and maintain higher levels of motivation than those that are not happy.

Real-Time Marketing Requires Organizational Alignment

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 16:31:00 +0000

Last week on Tuesdays with Tukaiz, we covered how Super Bowl ads are transforming to include social elements that help marketers listen, measure, and engage with their audience in real-time. One specific campaign we mentioned was Oreo; its "Whisper Fight" ad was the only one that prompted viewers to engage with them on photo-sharing network Instagram. What we didn't mention was Oreo's response to the now-infamous power failure that killed half the lights in New Orleans' Superdome and delayed the game for 34 minutes.

Just minutes after the power went out, the cookie brand pushed out an ad to Twitter and Facebook with the teaser text of "Power out? No problem" that linked to an image of a halo-effect Oreo cookie with the tagline "you can still dunk in the dark" on the bottom-right corner. While's Oreo's actual television ad ranked in the middle of the pack in terms of overall buzz, its extremely responsive and relevant social media ads were a hit. The ad generated over 16,000 retweets on Twitter, as well as over 19,000 likes and 5,500 shares on Facebook.