Searching for “Christmas” on Google yields sponsored results with a neat little holiday border around them. “Christmas”, “Christmas cards”, “Christmas stocking”, and even “Christmas sales” showed the festive border.

In 8 out of 10 of the top searches for “Christmas”, the border appeared:

1. christmas tree
2. christmas lyrics
3. merry christmas
4. christmas songs
5. christmas cards
6. christmas 2008
7. christmas gifts
8. christmas music
9. christmas lights
10. christmas song

(top searches According to Google Insights for Search)

Also interesting is searches for “marry christmas” increased 40% from last year, showing we’ve become badder spellers. Lucky we have Google, who shows the results for “merry”.

Marry Xmas!

You can leave the "x" in "xmas"

My email inbox is officially out-of-control. I can’t find anything and it’s over the storage limit almost everyday. This is the reason I’ve been trying out Yammer. Have you heard of it?

Yammer, a “Twitter for business”, was launched in September of this year and also won the top prize at TechCrunch50. (TechCrunch50 is a showcase for startups to present their idea to venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and the press.)

Yammer allows co-workers to make quick status updates on what they’re working on. They require a corporate email address to sign-up which ensures privacy.

Once in Yammer, you access a feed of messages limited to folks working for the same company. You can create private groups to limit communications to a select team or project. Users can also have threaded discussions, “follow” co-workers, attach files, and create a professional profile.

Mobile nuts can use their phone to send and receive messages via SMS through either iPhone or Blackberry apps.

A co-worker and I have been testing Yammer for three weeks now. Our everyday use is mostly asking quick questions and posting updates when stuff is done. I’ve been using the desktop AIR app for PCs for posting. The app is convenient and has a pop-up window when there is a new message. With just two of us in the trail, I like the pop-up. I can imagine this would start to get annoying with a larger group.

So far, the overall technology has been dependable and user-friendly. We’ve found it reduces the volume of emails for short updates which was sorta the point from the beginning. My main concern is less tech savvy employees may resist using this. I can easily see someone intending to post in the “private group” and instead posting in the public group. That would be awkward…

Since the base product is free, you can give it shout without any investment at this point. Or you can just use it to chat with co-workers– nice.

Why do we care?

The final tally is in and Yahoo has reported on the top searches of 2008. The top searches are, unfortunately, predictable.

The full report at Y! Buzz is actually interesting with a great Flashback report with a 2008 vs. 2007 Analysis for geeks who love to get into the details of even guilty pleasure type news…

1. Britney Spears
2. WWE
3. Barack Obama
4. Miley Cyrus
5. RuneScape (multi player game)
6. Jessica Alba
7. Naruto (a manga and anime series)
8. Lindsay Lohan
9. Angelina Jolie
10. American Idol

Deal with it, advertisers. Interactive copywriting differs from traditional copywriting. But how?

First: Don’t throw out the baby with the soggy diaper. Declaring yourself an interactive copywriter requires you to master the skills of traditional copywriting. If you’re going to enjoy success in this business, you still must be able to:

• Concept with an interactive designer or art director
• Come up with 9,003 big ideas and executions
• Endure dirty looks from creative directors
• Come up with better big ideas and executions
• Write smart, compelling, conceptual copy

That’s hard. No matter what kind of copywriter you call yourself, chances are good you’ll need to attend an advertising portfolio school or take a concentrated, mentor-guided journey before landing that first job. Building up to interactive copywriting requires mastery of additional considerations:

1.    Your audience cares. (Hallelujah!)
Because online and mobile initiatives require active participation, people reading your bullet points, listening to your podcast or watching your spot hold you to a higher standard. You must be able to answer their questions and make them smarter. This means you must be able to weave conceptual solutions with meaty, often expletory, content.

2.    Your audience needs you to be good at Jenga.
Interactive copywriting is how we create choose-your-own adventure stories for corporate America. It doesn’t matter how well you can write. If you can’t create (or collaboratively understand) site maps and information architecture, you’re ignoring user experience. Your copy will fail. In other words, you’ve got to keep a beanie and a pocket protector in your soul.

3.    Your audience wants to be told what to do.
Yes, traditional copywriting includes calls to action. But you’re not trying for a point-something percent response rate. Part trail guide and part waiter, you must eliminate guesswork and name action steps clearly and compellingly. Tell them to open the e-newsletter, download the widget or bookmark for a time when their boss isn’t peering over their shoulder.

4.    But, your audience wants to tell you what to do.
As a wise mentor put it, interactive isn’t another media space for messages. It’s fundamentally changing the nature of branded conversation. Your audience wants to take part in your creations. Allow them to customize, personalize and navigate their own journey with your brand. Give them space to speak up.

5.    Your audience is ready to run with the message.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the term viral marketing? Or social media? Meaning your boss wants you to crank out a blockbuster right now? In order for someone to pass along your message, you must make it compelling (hilarious, unusual or somehow otherwise relevant), customizable and somehow better when shared.

Interactive copywriting adds distinctly new skills to the traditional bread and rum butter of Mad Men-esque copywriting. That’s cool. After all, geek is the new glamorous.

Related Post:

deal with it: interactive copywriting is different.

Ginny Redish at MIMA

I’ve been on Web content strategy binge lately. I’ve been wondering if one way we can increase the effectiveness of our online efforts is simply have smarter copy?

MIMA to the rescue. I was thrilled when MIMA recently hosted a Web Content event featuring speaker Ginny Redish, author of the best-selling book Letting Go of the Words - Writing Web Content that Works. Redish focused on the concept of speaking to the site visitor and giving them what they need. Seems like a basic concept, but this is often lost on many marketing folks who put up websites.

Consider the difference between print and online content:

Print- Push Technology, you start the engagement with the customer.
Web- Pull Technology, the visitor starts the conversation.

If the visitor is starting the conversation and the average time spent on the homepage is 30 seconds, you have to capture their attention… fast.

Overall Tips for Web Content:

• Mesh your business goals with the visitors’ goals
• Visitor is not looking for a document, he is looking for information
• Don’t focus on YOU, how wonderful you are, your mission statement, etc
• Don’t put a lot of words on the page, put the right words on the page
• Respect visitors’ time: use short paragraphs, lists, visuals

Content Writing Tips:

• Use language appropriate to the visitor based on the target audience
• Heat maps show an F pattern is used when scanning content, so using bold headings and sub-headings to make it easier to scan and break up copy
• Change paragraphs to bulleted lists
• Put the main point first (inverted pyramid)
• Use personal pronouns
• Put yourself in the place of the visitor and consider questions the visitor may have, then get to the point with the answer
• Add links, if appropriate, to keep the visitor engaged on your site and to keep them from searching elsewhere
• Name links (and anchor text) in a way that the visitor will know what to expect when they click
• Find out what keywords visitors are searching for to reach your site and write with these keywords in mind

These tips are a great starting point for anyone wanting to optimize their website content. For the complete presentation, a video can be found: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/858588

We all know who won the election, but both Barack Obama and John McCain relied on online media and social networking more than in any past election.  Who formed the best connections and communities online? Did this really have an impact on the outcome?

Consider the following:

According to Pewinternet.org, a record-breaking 46% of Americans have used the Internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views, and mobilize others.

Democrats are more active online than Republicans and are more likely to participate in online communities. They say they’re more heavily influenced in their voting decisions by information they find online, according to data released by Rubicon Consulting.

Perhaps the most interesting /disturbing of all to me is Google endorses Barack Obama.

Some Fun Numbers from the Internet

Google Searches: Obama-related search terms were used almost twice as much as McCain in the last 30 days, according to data from Google Insights for Search. Google has also has created a special 2008 US Election Trends page.

Website Traffic: According to compete.com, Obama’s website had twice as many visitors in the past year as McCain.

Link Power: Obama’s website has many more external links pointing to it than McCain’s website, according to Yahoo Site Explorer.

• www.barackobama.com: 2 million links to the website
• www.johnmccain.com: 900,000 links to the website

YouTube: Both candidates have YouTube Channels, but Obama’s channel has significantly more views:

• Barack Obama’s YouTube Channel Views: 18.5 million
• John McCain’s YouTube Channel Views: 2 million

Facebook: With more than 110 million active users, Obama had more supporters from this community.

• Obama: 2.2 million supporters
• McCain: 192,000 supporters

Even with this small snapshot of numbers from around the Internet, it’s clear to see the Web presence of Obama’s campaign has been significant and pivotal in the way it has rallied supporters and formed communities around the now president-elect.

And now, your moment of Zen:

Google hearts Obama

I recently wrote a post about the great Google content network and the new super campaigns available for advertisers in Adwords. The new features, flexibility, and transparency are expected to make the content network much more efficient for advertisers.

Unfortunately, today I captured a screen shot of Google double serving image ads on the content network. Double serving is “Displaying more than one ad for the same company or person at a time”. Google has a policy against double serving Adwords ads.

How does this happen? I am told it can occur because of contextual targeting and site-targeting in one account. I’m surprised Google’s technology isn’t smart enough to recognize this and prevent it.

But on the other hand, if you wanted to do this yourself, it would be pretty simple to get double exposure? You would just have to set-up two different campaigns. One that is site-targeted, and one with keywords using the new placement feature to target the same sites. Right?

Well, enjoy the technical error folks.

Double dipping? Google serves 2 ads on one page

My friend Mike told me, “Lisa the blog is really entertaining, but I don’t really know much about search marketing. I’m just a programmer.” True, Mike. I almost forgot… I was too busy geeking out to ask you what you wanted. The Mavens were spewing CTR and ad networks and we haven’t written a back-to-basics for awhile. This is important since most of the clients we work with are beginners themselves. Much too busy running major brands, they leave it up to the Mavens to handle. And we appreciate that.

So Mike, this one’s for you.

Mike

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the practice of promoting a website through search engines like Google or Yahoo. Since there are millions of searches daily, it’s important that your website shows up in the search results when people are searching for you. Unfortunately, this isn’t as easy as it sounds.

When the search engines produce a results page (a list of web pages related to your search terms), they list the pages in order of relevancy, with the most relevant page appearing first, then the next, and so on. It’s desirable to appear near the top of these results to get the most traffic to your website.

There are paid and non-paid SEM tactics one would use to show up higher in the search engine results. You can see there are a list of web pages on left. These are called “organic results” (non-paid) because Google and Yahoo find these naturally while scanning the Web. On the right-hand side, you will see “sponsored links” (paid): these are ads that match up to your search terms.

Appearing in the search results, higher up on the page, using a combination of organic and sponsored listings is what search marketing is basically all about. See, that was easy. - Lisa

teach me the basics, please

Online Display Advertising

Online display advertising consists of using ad space on websites to reach a desired target audience. Sites may include web portals, blogs, casual gaming sites, social networks, instant message applications, widgets, RSS feeds, and more.

The most common type of display advertising is banner ads. Banner ads typically come in standard sizes such as 728×90, 160×600, and 300×250 which refers to pixel width x height and are most often animated through Flash. For an extra serving fee, banners can also incorporate rich media functionalities which include interactive elements such as banner expansion, data submission, and gaming. Other types of display advertising include things like site skins (wallpapers), fixed sponsorships, and video.

Online display advertising is an important consideration as part of a media mix due to the exciting array of targeting and messaging opportunities and the fact that people are spending more and more time online. -Sarah

We have already outlined success metrics for online display and SEM campaigns, but will be getting back to the basics in future posts, talking about pros, cons, and opportunities within the SEM and online display industries.

Us Mavens are instrumental in educating various groups on our respective fields. Lisa came up with the stellar idea to video tape some of these sessions to post on our blog. Here is the first of the series. Check back often for more on Search and Interactive Media!

What is rich media?

Rich Media ads have an added functionality such as expansion, floating across the page, games, and in banner data submission. There are limitless things that you can do with rich media. Rich media vendors like to refer to it as “a micro-site within a banner”. Rich Media vendors are third party servers that will actually serve the ad and help us build it. They also help us measure interaction rate, time spent with the video and what people actually did when interacting with the banner ads.

The Online Marketing Mavens love content. There have been a lot of improvements lately on the Google content network. I can tell you from my recent experience, there appears to be some major glitches with Yahoo’s content network (for example, campaigns not even running).

Search engines are different from the content network. In search engines, the keywords we use indicate our intent- what we want to research or buy. In the content network, Google matches ads with the content on web pages. We’re reading the content, not actively searching for anything when we see the ads. This can be accomplished by (1) contextual targeting or (2) placement targeting.

(1) Contextually targeted ads are keyword triggered (it is the default automatic opt-in). Google will show your ads on web pages where the keywords appear on the page. This is not just a straight-up keyword match, but also based on fancy linguistic processing technology. For example, if you sell coffee, Google will match it to websites about drinking coffee and knows not to show it for the Java programming language.

(2) Placement targeting is much easier to grasp because you simply select specific sites you want your ad to run on. I want to run on nytimes.com or something. You can identify placements by domain name, demographics, topics, or categories.

Early in the content network there were several problems. We couldn’t tell what sites we were served on, and had little control. Consider the previous coffee example. Targeting the content network can be a problem if you didn’t want your ad along side an article about getting scalded by coffee. So this can be a problem for the sophisticated marketer.

Recent improvements have made the content network a much more viable option for advertisers. Now, we have more advanced options:

• placement reports lists the sites where the ads show up
• pricing options of CPC or CPM
• controls to exclude sites or categories (ie, exclude user generated content or parked domains).

Just when you thought it was heaven on Google Earth, along comes another new feature currently in testing. My Google rep calls it the “Super Campaign”. Now the worlds of keyword targeting and placement targeting combine. In the Super Campaign, you can target both placements and keywords in the same campaign. In a perfect application, you could target shopping sites and use keywords related to only to coffee. Only showing up for shopping content about coffee.

You can see in the screen shot how this looks within the Adwords interface. Can’t wait for his to be widely available to test on new campaigns!

The Super Campaign could obviously lead to an entirely new approach to content targeting. Think about targeting health sites, but only with keywords for exercise (not healthy foods). Or general news sites and targeting certain type of news with keywords, only content about “gas prices”.

The possibilities are endless…

UPDATE 7-21-08: The new option appears to be available to all advertisers now. It’s accessible by drilling down to the AdGroup level in Google Adwords.