SnapAds: Survival Of The Fittest Meets Madison Avenue

Snapads has created a system that dynamically adjusts the appearance of banner ads over time to maximize engagement.
And it seems to work - a three day trial campaign for a recent film saw an increased clickthrough rate of 1922% over three days (not a typo).To create a campaign, advertisers provide SnapAds with a special Photoshop file containing a number of specially-tagged layers with all of the art and text assets they’d like to potentially display in their banner. Advertisers can create rule sets specifying which layers are allowed to appear together, allowing them to ensure that SnapAds never generates an ad that is nonsensical or potentially offensive. Once all of the rules and assets are in place, the platform can get to work.

FEED: The Razorfish [US] Consumer Experience Report 2008

• 91% of these consumers use one of the five major Internet portals—Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and Ask.com—to start their online experiences.
• 28% use Twitter, a relatively new communication tool, with some frequency [$500m takeover bid by Facebook rejected]
• 41% use tag clouds with some regularity
• 52% use RSS feeds with some regularity
• 52% have shared bookmarks with others through services like del.icio.us
• 55% use widgets on the computer desktop with some frequency
• 62% use widgets on Web sites such as Facebook or iGoogle
• 81% read “Most Popular” or “Most Emailed” links with some frequency

The centralized analog model is disintegrating in our new online, networked world.The real value for advertisers is the role of social influence in persuading consumers to purchase. Nearly half of all respondents (49%) indicate they have made a purchase based on a recommendation through a social media site.

Though Facebook and MySpace are still seeing record global traffic, their year-over-year U.S. growth rates have peaked and are on the decline.

Interaction Levels

• Low-level: rating, poking, tagging, commenting, subscribing
• Mid-level: writing statuses, twittering, playing games, adding widgets, uploading photos
• High-level: making videos, writing blog posts and reviews
• Expert-level: moderating groups and message boards, creating applications, running feeder businesses on the social network’s "economy”

Thinking beyond the message to create services requires a different strategic lens!

People aren’t reading our Web pages; most of our tediously crafted relics of desktop publishing and ubiquitous Web 2.0-ness sit
inactive, gathering digital dust like awkward, long-form textbooks in languages that no one really speaks anymore.
Design the new customer experience as a map of interactions.

 Download the electronic version of Consumer Experience Report.

Slideshare.net

75% of Fortune 1000 companies with Web sites will have undertaken some kind of online social-networking initiative for marketing or customer relations purposes in the next year.
But 50% of those campaigns will be classified as failures.
- Gartner, October 2008

 Download the electronic version of Social World.

 Download the electronic version of Social Media Measurement - Widgets.

Global Voices Advocacy

Advocacy 2.0 Guide: Cross-posting for Advocacy, An Introduction to Effective Social Media Integration. This guide offers us a brief introduction to how to use cross-posting for online advocacy campaign. It reviews different web 2.0 tools, showcasing successful examples where cross-posting has been used for advocacy. The guide also includes the pros and cons of the cross-posting technique.

 Download the electronic version of Advocacy 2.0 Guide.

Chris Brogan.com

[Chart by Brian Solis]

He found 20 different ones that might be interesting to you. It never hurts to get a few different perspectives. In all cases, the first link is to a PDF file, the second link is to the site where it’s hosted.

1. The New Rules of Viral Marketing - David Meerman Scott
2. Marketing Apple - MarketingApple.com
3. Masters of Marketing - Startup Internet Marketing
4. Podcast Marketing eBook - Christopher S. Penn
5. Google Adwords Secrets - SEOBook
6. Get Viral Get Visitors - Stacie Mahoe
7. Marketing With Case Studies - Dynamic Copywriting
8. How to Write a Marketing Plan - Geisheker Group
9. SEO for WordPress blogs - Blizzard Internet
10. Social Web Analytics - Social Web Analytics
11. Geeks Guide to Promoting Yourself With Twitter - Geekpreneur
12. The Zen of Blogging - Hunter Nutall
13. What is Social Media - iCrossing
14. A Primer in Social Media - SmashLab
15. Effective Internet Presence - Effective Internet Presence
16. Introduction to Good Usability - Peter Pixel
17. Increasing the Response to Your Email Marketing Program - CRM Transformation
18. We Have a Website. Now What? - Craig Rentmeester
19. Blogs & Social Media - PRSA
20. The Podcast Customer Revealed - Edison Media Research