Skittles: Innocent Candy or Evil Spammer?

Another week, another blow up in the Twitterverse. And this time it’s all down to a small, sugary treat.

If you haven’t yet visited skittles.com, do so now. They have replaced a traditional website with a small navigation box which overlays a search for #skittles on Twitter, the Facebook Fan page, Flickr-hosted photos and a Youtube channel. The Social Web’s dream, right? Well, maybe.

I first came across it on Saturday evening and thought it was pretty cool, and more than a little daring too. Giving over complete control to the world? Huge potential for that to backfire. Still, a fun idea, and a lot more interesting than most product websites.

Well, as with so much on the internet, it didn’t take long for the backlash to begin.

• Many pointed out that the concept was kinda-sorta ‘borrowed’ (wholesale) from Modernista, an advertising agency in Boston who had done the same thing last March.
• Others complained about having to be an adult to see the site, as Tim Allick puts it, “Can’t believe that #skittles website bans KIDS! Doesn’t send them to a safe page, just tells ‘em to go away. How is this smart marketing?”. (He does have a point. It’s a kids candy after all. )
• The Wall St Journal chimed in with a round-up of comments, most of them negative.
• Joanne Jacobs wrote  a blog condemning the whole exercise as a failure – just one day after the site launch – ‘Why the Skittles social media campaign failed’: ” Skittles has failed in its social media campaign because all it has done is hold a mirror up to conversations, without providing any content of its own, any context for remotely valuable conversation, and any rationale for productive engagement.”
• A poll by PR Sarah Evans, shows that 60% of respondents wouldn’t be swayed by the new site to buy more Skittles.
• Etc, etc, and etc

Sigh. Sometimes it all seems so predictable. The constant flow of negativity. The need to show that ‘I’m not taken in by their sneaky advertising’. Jumping on the ‘this is just a rip-off’ and ‘besides, it doesn’t work anyway’-bandwagons.

Come on people! Where’s the joy? Where’s the ‘Yes, we can’-spirit we keep reading about!?

My 6 year old has recently begun spotting website addresses on things that I ignore – mcdonalds.com, orville.com, quakerkidsdoinggood.com – pretty much *everything* has a website now, and they’re all the same. A nice Flash intro. Maybe a game or something. A code you can enter to unlock the hidden area. Yawn.

At least Skittles.com didn’t do that.

So, personally, I’m sticking with my initial reaction, “It’s kind of cool”.

They may not have been first, but they were the first Big Name Brand to do it, and that’s something. It may not convince 60% of people to buy more, but that still leaves a lot that might. It has generated a ton of publicity, and got them over half a million fans on Facebook. And it’s different and interesting.

Unlike so much of the commentary around it.

Are You Making the Most of Google Local?

It has been almost 4 years since Google launched the Google Local Business Center, but it still amazes me that many businesses, small business in particular, and not taking any steps to boost their profile here.

Considering that for many searches now, there are 10 Google Local results listed before the rest of the results, see here for example,  it seems that far too many people are ignoring this huge potential source of traffic. Free traffic, no less!

So, if you’re one and you don’t know where to begin, here’s a few tips to get you started:

Find or Add Your Site.
Head over to http://www.google.com/local/add and sign in with your Google Account info. Click Add New Business, and start completing the info – name, address, etc.
Once you click Next, you may well find that your business is already listed. Just click Claim Listing. If it’s not there, select Add New Listing instead.

Take Control.
Obviously you don’t want just anyone to be able to change your listing information, so Google has a couple of ways to verify that you have the right to edit this account. By far the easiest is the phone method. If you are sitting by the work phone, Google will give you a PIN on the screen, and then call you at the phone number they have. Enter the PIN and you’re all set.
If that’s not possible the alternative is to have them mail you a postcard with the PIN. This can take a couple of weeks.
It is worth telling everyone in the office to keep an eye out for this card. It’s easily mistaken for junk mail and tossed, which will require you to start again.

Build Out Your Listing.
This isn’t the Yellow Pages. It doesn’t cost you any extra to make your listing an all-singing, all dancing ad that shows off how great your company is. You can add up to 10 photos, so do so – not just a logo, but anything else that you think may help. Put in your office hours, types of payments accepted, even add in up to 5 Youtube videos. Really take some time and add in all the bells and whistles that you can.

Monitor the Results.
As well as seeing the traffic on your website analytics reports, Google also provides rolling stats of the last 30 days, with the number of impressions and clicks that your listing generated. You might very well be amazed at just how much traffic is now coming your way. As an added bonus they even offer the ability to show coupons. These are branded with the Google logo and a bar code so when your customer requests their free cup of coffee with any sandwich/car wax with any full service wash/website evaluation/whatever, you’ll know just where they came from.

Have you had any success with Google Local? Please let us know.

5 Ways to Improve Your Life with Twitter

(plus one bonus one!)

1) Quit Smoking – I used to smoke. A lot. And giving that up was one of the hardest things I’ve ever accomplished. If only I had been able to use a service like Qwitter.

Qwitter currently has 725 people using it to help them stop smoking. It tracks your cigarette consumption, allows you to keep a journal to help express your frustration, shows you your progress, and probably most importantly, provides support of others in the same boat.

2) Lose Weight – Similar to the support provided for smokers, using friends to help each other stay accountable can help with your weight loss goals. Just this week Lyn reached out to find like-minded people looking to lose a few pounds.

Making your goals public is a great way to help you stick to them. And if you want to skip the fast food and just eat better? Try searching for a ‘healthy recipe‘ instead.

3) Grow Plants – I love having plants around the home. They reduce dust and noise, make you feel calmer and (apparently) remove chemicals from the air. What’s not to like?

Well, I guess the downside is when you look around and see the beautiful green thing you envisioned has been reduced to a browning mess in a bucket of dry dirt.

For some reason, I’m absolutely incapable of keeping up with watering my plants. Enter Twitter! How about this amazing concept, a device which will let your plants tweet you when they need water? (ok, it’s almost a $100, but the idea is cool!)

4) Laugh - “University of Maryland School of Medicine presented results of the university’s study on the effect of laughter on cardiovascular health. The study indicates, (that) laughter appears to cause the endothelium to dilate and increase blood flow. Specifically, laughing was found to increase blood flow by more than 20 percent, with the positive effect lasting for up to 45 minutes.”

You know who’s funny? People on Twitter. Well, not all of them obviously, but enough that you can enjoy yourself. Much has been written about how Twitter has made tv more social. It also makes it a lot funnier. I wasn’t even watching the Grammys on Sunday, but there were so many funny comments appearing in my stream I had to turn it on to fully appreciate them (favorite of the night, @chrisroberts: “coldplay, the wiggles called. they want their jackets back.”)

No? Well how about a little schadenfreude? When actor, director, comedian and writer Stephen Fry got stuck in an elevator last week, he posted this picture which has been seen almost 80,000 times so far. And certainly if you’re going to get stuck, there are few people who would be more entertaining to be stuck with.

5) Exercise your brain – Why not write the Great American Novel?

Each November NaNowriMo (National Novel Writing Month) encourages people to write a novel of at least 50,000 words in 30 days. Of course, now they’re on Twitter to help you, as are many other participants.

If that doesn’t appeal, how about this? In Japan, 5 of the top 10 best-selling novels of last year were ‘cellphone novels’ – “composed on phone keypads by young women wielding dexterous thumbs and read by fans on their tiny screens ” (NYT) – surely that could be done just as easily on Twitter?

Actually, it’s already being done – check out the Twitter novels, Small Places, Slice (from Penguin Books, no less!) or Novelsin3lines. Can you do better?

And Your Bonus! – Use Twitter to Help Others
On Thursday, 12 February, over 175 cities around the world will be hosting Twestivals, bringing together Twitter communities to raise awareness (and money) for Charity: water.
All the events are 100% volunteer, and 100% of the money goes to charity:water projects. Find out more at Twestival.com, and see how you can help others.

That might even make you feel better about yourself too!

Hubspot Study Suggests Blogs Best Social Media for Leads

A new study from Hubspot, who canvessed 167 small to medium sized business owners and executives,  is both encouraging and confusing.

The percentage of leads from each source was broken down as:

Other (including public relations and print and online display advertising) 25%
SEO 16%
Email Marketing 14%
Pay Per Click 13%
Telemarketing 9%
Blogs+Social Media 8%
Trade Shows 8%
Direct Mail 7%

I find this very encouraging – particularly as we offer services for PR, SEO, email, PPC and Social Media, that’s 76% of the leads right there! – it’s certainly good to know that more and more businesses are trying a variety of methods to generate leads, rather than sticking to whatever they have done in the past. That has certainly been my feeling from talking to clients in all kinds of businesses lately.

However, I’m also slightly skeptical of the accuracy, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, if you’re in are a small or medium sized business yourself, you know the difficulty in pinning down exactly how a lead found you.

If they remember you from a trade show, but Google* you to find your contact info, does that count as SEO or a trade show?

If you send offers via both email and direct mail, as many of our clients do, which one gets the credit for the sale?

And Mike Volpe, Hubspot’s VP of marketing, even goes on to say that there are additional benefits to blogging,

“Not only are you creating a community around blog articles, but all those articles get indexed by search engines, so blogging has elements of search engine optimization (SEO) as well”

So how can we accurately claim that SEO is 16% vs Blogging’s 8%?  I don’t feel that we can. But I also don’t see that as a problem.

One thing we try to stress here at Step Ahead is that your marketing efforts, particularly onlne, will help each other. Being active on Twitter can drive traffic to your blog, which can help with your SEO, which can get people to sign up for your email marketing, which can inform people about your trade show appearances, which, well, you get the idea.

One final thing which jumped out at me from this was this statistic:

Companies with less than 50 employees earmarked more than three times as much of spending on blogging and social media than larger ones, and 36% more on SEO.

On the Internet, there is no reason the small companies can’t compete with the Big Boys. In fact, the lack of barriers to getting things accomplished, which plague many a large corporation, can be to your advantage. If you aren’t already blogging, tweeting, facebook-ing, etc, you can start right now. You don’t need to organize all the different departments, have a bunch of strategy meetings, get the lawyers to overlook things, and waste months of everybody’s time. Just sign up for an account and jump in.

So, what are you waiting for?

*I really don’t like using Google as a verb, but everyone else does it!

The Easy Way to Increase Your Sales by 23,000%

Another ‘Free-conomics’ Success Story

With so many people from author Neil Gaiman to Nine Inch Nails (who released the best selling album of the year on a Creative Commons license ), now giving away free work to generate sales, the idea is no longer the novelty it once was. But for those who continue to doubt the power of the web, Monty Python give us what is surely one of the biggest indicators yet.

Apparently fed up of seeing their clips being pirated all over YouTube, they took an unusal step. They formed the Monty Python channel, collected all their stuff themselves, and simply gave it away. But not solely from the goodness of their hearts,

“We’re letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there! But we want something in return. None of your driveling, mindless comments. Instead, we want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years.”

The channel has been a huge YouTube hit. with most clips having 100,000+ views in the first couple of months alone. The real success though is in how these free videos have led to real sales. Lots and lots of real sales. In fact a 23,000% increase in sales, and moving them to the number 2 spot on the Amazon tv bestsellers list!

I think that this shows us two things. Despite all the hype about pirating of music and movies, people are still willing to pay for what they like. As I was working yesterday I heard a song I liked on Pandora radio, so immediately hopped over to Amazon and bought it. It just needs to be made easy for people to do it, without tying them down to contracts, DRM-locked files and other hindrances.

It also demonstrates the amazing power of Youtube for getting your product seen. It seems such a regular part of daily life that it’s hard to believe YouTube is less than four years old, but in those 4 years great strides have been made. Widescreen, HD videos, with captions, links to buy and so on make Youtube one of the most valuable places to be seen on the web. Just ask the Monty Python guys, who are leading the way in making money by selling products which are available for free.

If that isn’t a web 2.0 success story, then I’m a dead parrot.

Welcome to the new look Step Ahead!

New year, new website.

If you’ve visited us in the past, you’ll notice we’ve undergone a complete overhaul here at Step Ahead. Gone is the old, static thing of the past, in comes the all-singing, all-dancing thing you see before you.

Why change?

Well, a few reasons. We’re very active on various forms of social media (Lyn & Simon on Twitter especially, but also Facebook, Youtube and more – see buttons on the top right), and our website just didn’t reflect that. Even the blog just linked out to a blogspot hosted account.

Secondly, maintaining the site was a real pain. All files had to be FTP’d and changed manually. That’s way more time-consuming than I realised.

Basically, we were stuck in the past while trying to live in the future (deep, eh!?).

Although we had planned on upgrading once we were up and running, there just never seemed to be enough time. But we have big plans for this year (more to come on that), so – with a little nudge from a few friends - we decided now’s the time.

How did we do it?

Well, we kind of cheated. A one-click WordPress (2.7 no less!) install with the good people at Dreamhost. A lovely new version of the Revolution 2 theme from Brian Gardner, and we were basically ready to go. Well, a couple of days importing old posts, fiddling with CSS and PHP, but nothing too heavy.

So, what do you think?

Hackers target Twitter

What do Barack Obama, Britney Spears, and Bill O’Reillyall have in common? All were among the 33 celebrities who had their Twitter accounts hacked yesterday.

This followed hot on the heels of the weekend’s Twitter phishing attempts, and a number of reports of people being DM’d affiliate links and marketing tools.

What can you do?

• Treat your Twitter account like your email, don’t give out your password to third party sites.
• Change your password regularly.
• If you receive a spammy DM from a friend, check if they really sent it. It could be that their account is compromised without their knowledge.
• Beware of phishing. Check the URL of the site. Be sensible!

Make Google’s Results Your Own

This looks to be pretty major -Starting today, Google is adding a wiki function to the search results,

“Have you ever wanted to mark up Google search results? Maybe you’re an avid hiker and the trail map site you always go to is in the 4th or 5th position and you want to move it to the top. Or perhaps it’s not there at all and you’d like to add it. Or maybe you’d like to add some notes about what you found on that site and why you thought it was useful. Starting today you can do all this and tailor Google search results to best meet your needs.”

As with all things Google related, people are pretty quick to jump in with their opinions. Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch is not a fan,

“Google search wasn’t broken. It’s one of the few things on the Internet that isn’t. I love it, as does 62% of everyone on the Internet. This new stuff is a mess of arrows and troll comments and stuff moving around the page.”

While someone (sorry, I couldn’t find a name on the blog) over at I’ve Said Too Much, has responded to that with a post simply titled ‘Arrington is Wrong’,

“Google seeks to build a massive distributed curated search into which we are all adding intelligence without ever being aware of it. It is, I would contend, the Big Thing At Google For 2009.”

Meanwhile, over at eWeek, they’re a lot more enthusiastic, seeing it as a boon for users, advertisers and, of course, Google,

“That’s Google’s genius stroke; we believe SearchWiki is letting us control our search destiny, but Google gets to keep putting up more search ads in front of us. Google wants us to find what we’re looking for, and now it has provided a way to keep us in Google.com to do so.”

I’m personally not sure right now.

I think it will be clearly used for Google to start collecting yet more information about what people think of the search results – with the positives and negatives that suggests. People will try and game the system, promoting themselves and so on. If, however, enough people use it, then hopefully the ‘wisdom of crowds’ will help to improve things by adding that human element which is often missing from Google.

That said, I can’t help but agree with Arrington that it looks a mess. Remember how clean Google used to be?

When they first launched it was one of the major things that set them apart. All that lovely white space. The sponsored links were completely separate from the natural SERPs. No nasty banner ads. Just good search results.

But now, between the maps, local search, images, addresses and so on – these additional buttons just seem like yet more clutter.

Will it work? I don’t know. If I search for something, I’m used to Google telling me what I need to know. Using their example from above, I would not use Google to revisit a trail map site time after time, I would bookmark it instead, either on my PC or with Delicious.

I can see times when it would be useful to remove particularly bad results, but how often am I going to suggest a site be added?

And the notes I suspect, will be more trolling than useful unfortunately. I’ve tried a few so far, and there’s nothing that enhances my searching at all. A search for Liverpool FC, for instance, just has 3 right now:

Comment by: Searcher, 9:05am – searching: lfc
“great”

Comment by: Mike, 6:41am – searching: liverpool
“Liverpool FC”

Comment by: 360spin, 8:39am – searching: liverpool
“Wow!”

How do they help me at all?

Perhaps Google is threatened by the growth of social networks and feels that is one area search can be improved. I’m not so sure.

What do you think?

Does Yahoo Hate You? (then why won’t they listen?)

After giving  Google some limited praise last week for the additional reporting stats on their partner networks, I thought it only fair that I balance things by showing how it compares at Yahoo.

And, well, it’s not good!

Not only does Yahoo not allow you to see the stats from the search partner network, they don’t even allow you to opt-out of the partner network! Instead you can block up to 250 domains.  Unfortunately the search partners are SO numerous, and SO spammy that it’s like playing whack-a-mole trying to keep up with them.

As we have better and better website analytics reporting all the time, from Google, Webtrends, Omniture and so on,  it becomes easier to judge where best to spend your advertising money.

I’ve been using that PPC engine from GoTo, through Overture, up to the present YSM brand, and while things at Google, and even Microsoft AdCenter, have improved, the quality from Yahoo has dropped significantly.

For example, this is from one of our client’s reports from last month:

As you can see, the top referring domain on one day was Shopica.com, which sent over 4 times as much traffic as Google. What do you mean you’ve never heard of them? They’re 4 times as popular as Google.

Unfortunately, as we couldn’t see a single lead, booking, inquiry or anything as a result of that traffic, we put Shopica on the blocked list. However, it takes Yahoo a while to update, so the next day, we got even more visitors from them. And, even more impressively, all the visitors from them came in a one hour period:

Wow!

No doubt you’ll be surprised to learn that Shopica get a cut of all the ad money that I pay to Yahoo for that traffic.  As does Nexplore, who were the next day’s bonus traffic:

Not as impressive, but considering we’re paying around $1.75/click for some of these terms, not to be sniffed at either.

I spoke to my Yahoo Account Manager, who was very polite and understanding, and agreed it was “junk” but said that there wasn’t anything they could do about it. Oh, and no refund either.

What I don’t understand it why doesn’t Yahoo just let us opt out?

Yes, the reach is far greater with all of these sites in the network, but if the end result is a waste of money, people will just stop advertising.

As we learn more and more about the quality of traffic from different sites, it’s hard to justify spending $10,000+ a month (as this client does) on “junk”.

It’s not that we don’t want to use Yahoo, it’s we don’t want to use Yahoo’s partners. Cut them out and we’ll still spend the same amount – only we’ll get more qualified visitors and Yahoo will get to keep more of the money.

Everybody wins, right?

Some (Limited) Praise for the Google AdWords Changes

In the latest round of updates at the end of last week, Google announced that they would (finally!) be adding more detail about where your clicks are coming from:

“Previously, these pages divided statistics into two categories: search, which included Google and search partners, and the content network.
Now, we show one set of statistics for Google and another set aggregating search partner performance. Search partners include AOL, Ask.com, and many other search sites around the web. ”

This is a major change, comparable to when Google started showing where exactly your ads where coming from in the Content network.

That was a huge step forward, and one that made sense for Google. Previously advertisers were skeptical about throwing money down a black hole which included some very, um, shady Made For AdSense sites alongside the high quality sites they may have wanted to target.

However, these latest changes don’t go far enough. Yet.

We can now see how Google stacks up against the other search partners, but not how the individual partners (Ask, AOL, etc) are performing individually. Rich, over at Destilled is asking the question, “Have Google Shot Themselves in the Foot?”, and it’s a valid point.

Here’s the data for one of the accounts we manage:

(I removed the campaign names for anonymity for my client)

As you can see, in each case the cost per click for the search partners is higher, up to 25% higher, than it is on Google, but even more importantly, the number of conversions (final column) are way down. So I’m paying more, and getting less. That is why all the Search partner ads are now set to ‘Off’. I’d rather spend where it is working.

So, what happens now?

Well I suspect that that many others will follow suit and shut off the complete search network, for example, see this thread at Webmaster World:

“At first glance it looks like 90% of my conversions are from google search only not the network.”

“Wow, just split stats on an account. Bye bye Search Network!”

“We totally disabled Partners in a few campaigns after seeing 100 to 200% higher conversion costs.
No wonder they didn’t show this data for so long.”

And if that happens, I’d have to assume that Google will be forced to show the search network in greater details, if only due to pressure from their partners. If AOL is performing well, for instance, they’re unlikely to be happy about being cut out due to the deficiencies of other sites.

However, for now we have to deal with what we have, and I’m at least glad that I’ve been able to learn this much.

How about you? How do your stats measure up across the different sites?

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