By Heather Razukas, Associate Account Director

Ask any digital marketer to name a few opportunity areas that are top of mind, and chances are a little game changer known as Facebook will be one of them. And rightly so. According to a study of top web brands released by Nielsen earlier this year, Facebook has fallen in line just behind the big three – Google, Microsoft and Yahoo – in terms of unique monthly visitors in the US, at just over 160 million. Meanwhile, Facebook is winning handedly amongst this group in terms of the average user’s time spent on site – over 7 hours per month, representing 2 to 3 times that of the other properties.

While much of the intrigue lies in Facebook’s ability to help marketers reach customers in a revolutionary new way, a rather sophisticated advertising platform, advanced audience targeting capabilities, and competitive pricing has many wondering if this is also the next best paid advertising opportunity since SEM. And it just may be – for the right offer. Following are some critical factors that every advertiser should consider when weighing a Facebook advertising program.

Entertain me. We all know that Facebook visitors are in the mood to casually consume and engage with content. So how well will your offer fit with that motive? A social gaming site such as Zynga is an easy example of a brand that may appeal to this mindset. Other advertisers, meanwhile, opt to create a community or environment to meet this objective. An excellent example can be found in SanDisk – a producer of world class memory cards – who employs advertising to send qualified visitors to a branded Facebook fan page dedicated to conversation and contests for the photo enthusiast.

Rise above the noise. Unfortunately for most, many advertisers have grown wise to Facebook’s paid media opportunity, which of course means more competition and more noise. So how will your creative catch someone’s attention? There’s no doubt that a clean, eye catching image and pointed headline are two of the biggest considerations. But at the end of the day, what’s in it for the user? Advertisers with something tangible to offer – the more the better, be it a sweepstakes, giveaway or a lucrative discount – are going to stand a better chance of winning the click.

What do you want from me? It’s also important to consider the level of commitment and time investment you’re requesting – is it realistic? The most attainable responses will be ones where users can complete the desired action right in the ad itself – for example, submitting an RSVP to an event or becoming a “fan” of a brand. Advertisers who ask users to navigate elsewhere on Facebook up the ante, and those who are more aggressive still ask users to leave the site entirely. The ultimate question is how easy can you make it for a user to complete your desired action?

Are you talking to me? I find that some clients are still surprised by the targeting capabilities that Facebook offers advertisers, which include geography, age, gender and stated interests to name some of the most critical. What brands should consider is how well these parameters will allow them to reach their audience. Offers that do not readily align with these parameters – thereby reducing the assurance that ads are shown only to a reasonably qualified audience – may not fare as well.

Keep momentum. Brands must understand that their defined audience will likely be exposed to repeated ad impressions, particularly in the case of a healthy advertising budget and multiple targeting parameters. Oftentimes, this means that a campaign enjoys an initial surge in performance as the offer is fresh and the most qualified audience is ripe for the picking. From that point on, brands may need to work a little harder to keep the momentum going. How can this be accomplished? First, new conversions are going to be generated by new clicks which are going to be generated by consistently fresh ads – if one creative didn’t reel someone in, another one may. New conversions can also be generated by new eyes on the ad – something that could be achieved by testing response to gradually relaxed targeting parameters. While targeting is critically important to success, it’s key to strike an appropriate balance between the right exposure and enough exposure.

At the end of the day, there is no question that Facebook offers a lucrative paid media opportunity to advertisers. However, the brands that will fare best will be those who can successfully make the above factors work in their favor.

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The expansion of media choices is growing so rapidly that advertisers are looking for better ways to classify, plan and measure the media channels in their marketing plans. One framework that clients find helpful is the Paid, Earned, Owned and Partnered model for better understanding consumer media behavior and advertising impact.

Paid media are the standard advertising units we have known for a while in the industry. It’s the 30 second TV ad, the page in the magazine, the banner ad online, and the paid search ads. Paid media helps build a foundation of controlled messaging and consumer reach that is necessary for any campaign looking for scale.

Earned media is everything that consumers say about your brand in the communication marketplace where they are in control on the message. It is social media, blogs, word of mouth, anything where consumers can express their POV and have it influence a larger group of people. Earned media is a part of every marketing plan whether clients plan for it or not.

Owned media encompasses all the communication assets that an advertiser builds and controls everything from the environment to the messaging to the consumers who have access to it. It’s a company website or special event that clearly communicates the brand essence to consumers. SEO is an important part of managing the online “owned media” properties.

Partnered media is one area that is often overlooked by advertisers because it involves finding another advertiser(s) where you can exchange communication assets and have a win-win for both companies. Partnered media can still involve paid advertising but it is more about creating an integrated advertising program that uses untraditional formats to build engagement with consumers and allows them to interact with the brand in a unique way. Many media companies offer advertisers special programs to integrate with their content assets and they are open to new ideas from their agencies.

The Paid, Earned, Owned and Partnered media framework allows advertisers to take advantage of the changing landscape and develop new communication opportunities. It also allows marketers to allocate budgets where they can create the most impact with consumers. At Red Bricks Media we talk with clients about this framework and how it can add value to their marketing efforts. We are able to better steer a client’s budget to the channels where consumers find the most value in the client’s brand message and therefore create a stronger response. As the media world continues to change, it is now time to change the way we talk about it as well.

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By Jason Stevens, SEO Director

There is little else that whips the search community into frenzy than a prognostication from Google about “changes.”  The truth is that we love the quest to deduce the mystery of what Google thinks is important for ranking web pages.  So, when Google Caffeine was announced in August 2009 with unusual fanfare the speculations were rampant and the past year was spent wondering when our website rankings changed we asked: “Is this it?”

Since its inception, Google has striven to provide the cleanest and most relevant search results.  To accomplish this, they make frequent updates to their ranking algorithm.  And, over time, Google has evolved those ranking updates from periodically to seasonally and then monthly and finally to daily.

In fact, currently, Google updates the weight and priority of the over 200 ranking signals multiple times a day.  Sometimes the exact same query may return two different results within seconds of each other depending on the Google datacenter in which the searcher is routed.

However, Google Caffeine is not a major ranking algorithm change like we’ve seen with “May Day” earlier this year or “Vince” of last year.  It is actually an entirely new indexing system in order to provide fresher results for search engine queries.  And to boot, the index is larger thereby providing more choices on content to show searchers.  The primary adage of SEO has been “it takes time” to see changes to existing pages or the addition of new pages in Google search results is no longer necessarily true anymore.

Google decided that the method by which they compiled their index was not fast or fresh enough.  So, instead of refreshing the index linearly, they now analyze web pages and refresh layers on the index in parallel thereby potentially reflecting changes in minutes instead of months.   This is especially applicable to frequently changing content like blog posts, news articles, and social networking updates.

What does this mean to SEO?  It means that what you do on your website could be reflected in search results in a manner of minutes or hours instead of months.  Maybe there is a new topic in the news or public conscience that you can capture before competitors join in.  Or maybe you’ve held off deploying changes to your website content thinking that it will take a long time to be noticed.  Nothing could be further from the truth now.  The search landscape has changed not by how content is ranked but how often and how much content is now available to be ranked.

Why did Google do this?   The primary reason is to continue to be the most popular way to find information.  With the increased usage of social networking services like Facebook and Twitter, people are finding information where they spend their time.  If those services can be relied on to tell you what is happening now then search engines may decline in usage in favor of social graphs.  If Google wants to stay a verb then it has to get faster in serving what is relevant right now.  Universal search, social search, and real-time search gave Google more breadth in helping people find what they are looking for – and now they want to do it all much faster.

So, fear not, the mystery remains.  Google Caffeine may mean the results of testing a new title tag to rankings or construction of that new targeted entry page to capturing long tail keywords may be observed faster but it doesn’t mean we will know why with any more certainty.

We would never want that, right?

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By Scott Neslund, CEO

I am happy to announce the additional responsibilities and title change for two managers at Red Bricks Media who are helping to move the agency forward.

Scott Tieman will take on the additional role of leading strategy services for our clients including social media strategies. As Head of Client Service & Strategy Scott will help clients develop the right digital communication strategies to achieve their marketing goals and grow their business.

John Bosso has been successfully managing our web development practice for the last year and he now formally takes on mobile application development as well. As consumer online experience gravitates from their computer to their mobile devices it makes sense that we extend our capabilities as well. John will take the lead on growing our mobile capabilities as Director of Web Development and Mobile Applications.   

Please join me in congratulating Scott and John in their new roles and responsibilities.

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By Vincent Ma, Product Guy

No one can deny the incredible success of social media games such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars.  But what is it about social games that make them so appealing and so successful? 

Some of the more popular social games appear to have the following attributes in common:

+      Collections:  Many social games have ancillary goals of accumulating points or collecting different sets of virtual goods as they progress through the game.  

+      Scarcity: Closely tied to collections, is controlled scarcity of items.  Certain game related virtual items are intentionally difficult to acquire or limited in number.  

+      Bragging Rights:   Whether it’s a race to build the biggest farm, earn the most points, or obtain the rarest game item, social games inherently have a dimension of competition about them beyond simply beating the game. 

+      Groups:  Borrowing from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, humans need to feel a sense of belonging and acceptance. 

+      Individuality: At the same time that we yearn to belong, we also strive to be different and unique. 

+      Feedback:  A mainstay of role playing games, the concept of “leveling-up” or acquiring experience points is a time tested game mechanic that keeps players engaged.  

+      Luck:  Although it doesn’t apply to everyone, there is something exciting about games of chance.  

+      Sharing:  Possibly the most important piece from a growth perspective are the mechanics that drives the social and sharing aspects of the game.  

Like what you see? Read the full article at MediaBizBloggers:

Red Bricks Media: What Can Marketers Learn From Social Games? - Vincent Ma - MediaBizBloggers

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By Vinnie Ma, Product Guy

As of April 2010, more than 83 million of the over 400 million Facebook users fertilized virtual crops and gifted their friends a lost cow or two in the wildly popular social networking game FarmVille.  Zynga, the company behind FarmVille, has been recently valued at 3-4 billion dollars.  Given that the challenges of building a customer base, keeping them actively engaged, and ultimately increasing revenue are not specific to social game makers like Zynga and PlayFish; are there opportunities for marketers to leverage some of the tactics and strategies that have made social gaming so successful?

Some people enjoy the cooperative nature of Restaurant City and FarmVille while other players revel in the competitive nature of MafiaWars as they try to build their mafia empire.  Although there is no secret recipe for a fun social game, there are some attributes that consistently show up that contributes to the addictive nature of social games.

+      Collections:  Many social games have ancillary goals of accumulating points or collecting different sets of virtual goods as they progress through the game.  All of the people who have checked-in to places through Foursquare to accumulate badges or have purchased a McDonald’s Happy Meal to get that last beanie baby to finish the set understand that there is just something satisfying about completing a collection.  Point systems and loyalty programs have been around for decades, but in the virtual goods world, the rewards are that much easier to administer and have no marginal cost associated with them.  Marketers can incentivize particular actions in their communities by adding badges or point accumulation mechanics.  Reward your top content creators on your Facebook page with a special badge for their wall or offer loyalty points programs to non-employees that contribute to your company’s support forums. 

+      Scarcity: Closely tied to collections, is controlled scarcity of items.  Certain game related virtual items are intentionally difficult to acquire or limited in number.  In addition to the rarity of an item, another way to add a sense of scarcity is by putting a time limit on a particular offer.  We’ve seen Amazon use this mechanic for their Black Friday specials as door buster deals were rotated throughout the day that are valid for only 3 hours (or until supplies last).  Popular social buying startup Groupon has built a business around offering great deals that are time sensitive and shared through the social web.  Some rich media ad networks offer the capability to have real time availability of data of a limited deal or a countdown clock until the expiration of the deal in the ad unit. 

+      Feedback:  A mainstay of role playing games, the concept of “leveling-up” or acquiring experience points is a time tested game mechanic that keeps players engaged.  Users play the game to grow their character and to open up different features of a game.   An important element of the level-up mechanic is feedback about the player’s progress throughout the game.  Take a cue from Linked-In and incentivize your users to complete certain actions by implementing a progress bar that reminds them of the next step in the process and shows them how close they are to finishing.   People love completing tasks and friendly reminders about how close they are to checking something off their task list is a great way get people to act.

+      Luck:  Although it doesn’t apply to everyone, there is something exciting about games of chance.  Many social games have a gambling or a luck aspect to them.  For example, MafiaWars offers players a “mystery box” of items.  Players effectively buy a lottery ticket to see if they get a mundane item or hit the jackpot with a rare item in game time.  Similar to the “mystery box”, marketers can offer a game of chance around a particular promotion where the percentage off ranges from 10%-25%. 

+      Social: Possibly the most important piece from a growth perspective is the mechanics that drive the social aspect of the games.  Games like Restaurant City allow you to hire your friends to help you run your restaurant while MafiaWars require you to connect with other people in the game before advancing in the game.  In addition to the social mechanics of the game itself, many of these games allow players to “gift” items to their friends as an invitation to play.  With the release of Facebook’s Graph API and Twitter’s @Anywhere framework, it is easier for brands to connect with their users and to make their content sharable with their user’s social networks.  Have a new product launch, an important product update, or a great sale coming up?  Consider using one of these and other content sharing tools to get the word out. 

Social games are a serious business, and while not all of the tactics implemented by social game makers are new or unique, the success of these game makers remind us that sometimes adding a bit of fun to your product and/or website is the best way to connect to your customers.

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By Peter Vaughan, Social Media Strategist 

Did you miss our April 21st panel on social media? Here’s a breakdown of the five biggest takeaways that came out of our discussion with marketing experts from Facebook, CODA Automotive, Kaleidescape and Media Link, LLC.

1) Consumers Don’t Want to Be Friends with Brands – The fundamental reason why social media is seeing such a growth in popularity amongst consumers is because of its ability to provide a true connection with the content and people consumers care about on a day-to-day basis. Therefore, it’s a mistake to think that consumers want to form an ongoing relationship with a product or brand just because you’ll offer the occasional discount or coupon. To achieve true success, brands must first ask themselves if their social media strategy really provides the framework to provide the emotional connection that is needed to sustain long-term engagement.

2) Avoid Silos in Your Social Strategy – Good ideas can come from anyone. No one division (PR, Marketing, Sales, etc.) should be the sole owner of your corporate social media structure. Nor should there be separate fragmented silos that operate without transparency to the rest of your organization. Instead, the foundation for your social media strategy should start with a fundamental change in corporate culture. The same collaboration and transparency you want to show externally with consumers on social media channels needs to be embraced internally. Work with members of each division within your corporation to set technology standards, interaction policies and integrated consumer strategies so that everyone buys into the same overarching social media identity.

3) Start Experimenting with Mobile – Statistics indicate that more and more people are connecting to their social networks via mobile devices instead of desktop PCs or laptops. This not only speaks to how far the mobile market has come in the past five years with the aid of smart phones, but also how important social media is becoming to the everyday activities of the average person. So do yourself a favor and prepare for the coming of the mobile age by trying marketing efforts like live event coverage, social media tie-ins to brick and mortar locations and more so that the eventual transition and expansion into the mobile world becomes like second nature.

4) When is Enough, Enough? - Recent concerns about consumer privacy and addiction on social networks are only going to get bigger. Eventually, we could see a time when the majority of consumers realize that just because you can use social media technology every minute of every day doesn’t mean you have to. The same can be said of corporations. When considering your social media presence don’t just jump on to every channel because you feel like you need to. Choose the channels that make sense to not just your marketing goals, but also your ability to handle the fast-paced interaction that’s often required.

5) No One is an Expert – Funny we’d admit this simple fact considering we are an agency that provides social media services. The truth of the matter is that this is a young space that’s evolving faster than anything we’ve ever seen before. Currently, there are no true experts with tried and true formulas that can be applied to any and every situation. That being said, because of this reality social media is wide open and the playing field is level no matter if you’re a huge brand with millions in marketing spend or a startup with little resources. So even though the first “class” of social media experts has yet to graduate, you shouldn’t be afraid to get a jump on the competition. Recognize that any time there is big change within an industry, there is an even bigger opportunity to come out ahead.

Were you at the panel? Did you have a different point of view? Want to learn more about our approach to social media? Leave your thoughts in the comments section of our blog or reach out to us on twitter: www.twitter.com/redbricksmedia.

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By Stan Wang, Director of Search

The latest news in the SEO world is that Google recently announced that they are including site speed as a factor in their ranking algorithm.  “Site speed” is defined simply as how quickly a website responds to web requests.  Before we talk about the implications of this change let’s go over a few important facts as mentioned by Google:

·         Page relevance is weighted much more heavily

·         The changes were launched “a few weeks back”

·         Fewer than 1% of search queries are affected

·         Currently only applies to English searches on google.com

Now of course the obvious question is - what does this mean for my SEO efforts? 

Borrowing from the Google Search Quality Team’s Principal Engineer, Matt Cutts, the first order of business is: don’t panic.  According to Google, this change has affected a very small percentage of search queries. 

Casual observation would support this attitude as well.  Few if any people even noticed the change when it was rolled out around early March.  Unsurprisingly, we have not seen any unexpected changes in our clients’ rankings at Red Bricks.  With nary a change in search engine results, the time to hit the panic button is not now. 

Google also mentions that relevancy factors are still weighted much more heavily than site speed.  That means things like keyword relevance, site authority, and backlinks -. i.e., all the things a good SEO program has been doing all along - are still the most important factors for ranking.

Does this mean there that nothing should be in done in response to this algorithm change?  Certainly not!  Google uses a multitude of factors to rank pages and it is important to do well in as many of them as possible.  While it is difficult to pinpoint precisely what Google may be looking for in a newly released factor, we can definitely approximate site speeds by looking at the page load times of the top performing sites out there.  The slowest of top performing sites generally have page load times of up to seven seconds.  A good rule of thumb for your website’s pages is to outperform this bottom quartile and have page load times of less than 7 seconds. Ideally, your page load times would be clocked at under 4 seconds.  There are several free page load analysis tools available, including Google Webmaster Tools, Page Speed, and YSlow. 

The good news is that the majority of sites require no immediate action., Page load times are easy to measure, and having a faster website offers benefits beyond helping search engine rankings.  As is typical for Google, they will monitor this change on google.com before rolling it out internationally. 

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