Facebook - Great for Old Friends and New Marketers

Wired today posts a story about how Facebook (and other social media network sties) can not only help you reconnect with old friends, but also provide marketers with invaluable information about how to market to you

It’s easy to forget how much personal information about you is out on the web. For a marketer, these networks serve as great hunting grounds for new business. For the social media network member (you) these networks open up your life to anyone you may know. Or who many know someone who knows you.

While your sense of privacy may be pricked by the open nature of these sites, remember that you can use them to your advantage as well. With 180million people using Facebook alone, there’s got to be a few thousand people interested in your business.

How To Know What Works

What if you knew what happened every time someone saw one of your advertisements?

You’d be able to see how they react to your message, what they think of your offer, whether they like your logo, and if they intend on following your Call To Action.

Unfortunately, hiring people to watch over every ad you place is terribly expensive. That’s why AdSymetrix offers Real-Time Response Tracking. Our Dynamic Call Tracking and Dynamic Click Tracking allows you to know who’s responding to your ads, as soon as they respond to them. If you’re online, you can see every screen they see. If you’re advertising using more traditional - Outdoor, Print, Broadcast, etc - you can see what ads generated what calls and who made them.

And, because you don’t want to leave a Call to Action unanswered, our Response-Triggered Marketing Services offer Dynamic Direct Mail, eMail and SMS services that send out individual messages to everyone who contacts you because of your ad.

You’ll know what works, and you’ll be able to focus your advertising.

Taking Advertising Fight from Outdoor to Your Face(book)

Sometimes, the only ad you want to place is the ad that sticks in peoples’ minds.
Audi and BMW are engaged in a seemingly-light-hearted Outdoor Advertising fight in California.

First, there was a regular billboard advertising the Audi A4:

Germans goading Germans in Santa Monica can never end well. BMW took the bait:

Fun stuff. But somehow, the escalation must continue. So Audi decided to take the matter to the one place everyone can go to air their grievances: Facebook.

Visit Audi’s page on Facebook and you can make your own response to BMW’s response to Audi’s ad. Suddenly everyone wins.

Why Social Media Marketing Will Change Your Business

Facebook has over 180 million users. Twitter has 14 million (and no business model). Your customers, and your competitors, are interacting with your friends every day. What are you doing? What is your business doing to use Social Media to grow itself?

Social Media is a commitment. Think of Facebook like a cocktail party. If you’re contributing to the conversation, people will be interested in talking with you. If you just sit in the corner, no one will notice you.

Earlier this month, T-3, Dachis Group and Facebook held a talk about what’s going on in the social media world. The most important thing you can takeaway from the talk is the idea that by connecting with people using social media, you’re connecting with real people. You are not just sending out an ad to a few hundred or thousand possible customers, you’re talking directly 1-to-1 with each person who follows you. And that means your message has to be more conversation than campaign.

AdSymetrix can help your business become a part of the conversation. Contact us today for a free consultation.

How Smart Marketing Can Save The Publishing Industry

Every day news breaks about broken newspapers and magazines. Smaller audiences, higher CPMs, tighter advertising budgets and a generally slow economy mean that the thin profit margins are now non-existent.

Publishers are going out of business because they don’t know how to respond to the changed marketplace. Not changing, changed.

Magazines and Newspapers (and Broadcasters and Online Content Services) are in the business of presenting advertising to their audience. They do this by providing content - articles, pictures, movies, interactive services, etc - that brings the audience to the publication and interrupting that content with advertising. The tension of providing a place for both advertising and content is the core of the industry.

No one got into publishing because they love advertising. Editors want great sections, journalists want great stories and publishers want great distribution. The problem is that magazines and newspapers aren’t selling their great stories, or their great sections. They are selling ad space. They are in the business of collecting audiences that are going to react to the ads that interrupt their entertainment in ways that drives business to the interrupting advertisers.

Advertisers will flock to any media that generates new business. Prove that your publication generates new business and you’ll have new advertisers.
Smart Marketing is about knowing what works, and focusing on only what works. If publishers knew just how well their publications generated new business for their advertisers, the sale would be that much easier.
Response measurement is how you should value your advertisements. Even if publishers are still charging by impression (or how many people are able to see a particular ad) they can adjust their sales pitch to explain that an ad in their publication is X amount more likely to create a response than in some other publication.

The only way to do that is to know what works. The best way to know what works is to use AdSymetrix.

Sprint Goes Multi-Platform to Save Their Company Through Advertising

Poor Sprint. They’re currently the also-ran in the wireless phone industry. For years, they’ve been bleeding customers - having swallowed the bitter pill of Nextel a few years back - and have been hit with poor customer service reviews and eclipsed by other companies’ cooler handsets. They’ve shed thousands of employees, a few corporate divisions and are desperate for something, anything, that can turn their business around.

If the story sounds familiar, it’s just about the same place ATT was before Apple partnered with them on the iPhone. That story is a case study for how a desperate business can gamble and win. At the time wireless phone companies believed that they needed to own every aspect of their phones: the design, the operating system, and the billing. ATT was the only wireless company in such dire straits that it was willing to hand over those decisions to Apple, and launch the most successful consumer electronic device ever. And create a windfall for their business - gaining subscribers, generating new revenue opportunities and upgrading their network.

Sprint recognized their need, and has similarly partnered with Palm for the launch of the new Pre mobile smartphone. The new phone, really the new “WebOS” operating system, has generated iPhone-levels of interest in the beleaguered companies (Palm is in trouble too). While the world awaits the launch of the new handset, Sprint has decided to spread its message across as many advertising platforms as you can imagine.

Their campaign seems to target the places where people will use the Pre, once they own a Pre. Their engineers answer questions on Twitter, developers are showcasing videos of their upcoming WebOS applications and the overarching campaign is introducing the idea of all-encompassing connectivity.

When you go where you customers are, even if they don’t know they’re customers yet, you can build the kind of relationships that keeps the customers your customers. Sprint knows this. Do you?