You've already seen that email open rates are not the primary metric you should care about -- you don't send an email to get people to open it. You send an email to get people to take an action (or, at least, you should!).
But the fact is, worrying about open rates too much is not just misguided -- it can also be counterproductive. And in a world where open rates are the first thing a lot of non-digital people want to know about, knowing how and why to avoid this trap is crucial.
Email marketing is a great tool that enables organizations to contact, message and drive action among their supporters. It’s easy to track, relatively inexpensive and there is a flood of email marketing companies eager for your business who have built platforms that do all of the hard work for you. Sounds good? Ready to sign up? So tell me, how are you going to get your audience to open it?
Texts from Hillary. Big bird. Relatable Romney. Binders full of women. What do these phrases coined from the 2012 Presidential election all have in common? They were all made into memes that went viral.
Internet memes have just recently skyrocketed to popularity on an array of topics, forums, social networking sites, and in various forms— from something as silly as Grumpy Cat (shout out to Professor Kreiss for getting this reference) to something as serious and controversial as memes on social issues. The point being, since memes have become an almost all-encompassing form of communicating and sharing information online, they have, of course, became an interesting piece in the political communication puzzle.
Internet memes are phenomena that rapidly gain popularity or notoriety online. Often, modifications or spoofs add to the profile of the original idea, turning it into a phenomenon that transgresses social and cultural boundaries—and adds a humorous component, which makes the meme all the more likeable.
One of the more common misconceptions about social media is that a company or brand can achieve and maintain meaningful results at little or no cost. Sure, setting up brand pages on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and just about any other social channel can be done in almost no time without spending a dime. But that’s like ordering tap water at a restaurant and hoping it will be the whole meal.
The truth is, achieving ongoing success on social media is anything but free. Based on the social media audits Renegade has performed over the last three years, we have identified five buckets of “hidden costs” that just about every practitioner will face soon enough.
This is the most epic brand meltdown on Facebook ever.
The two owners of Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro took over the restaurant’s Facebook page last night to fight unruly commenters, and man, was it embarrassing. If you recognize the name of the restaurant, it was recently featured on an episode of Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares. The owners were dumped by Ramsey after being too difficult to work with.
As the landscape of media consumption continues to fragment and change, it is more challenging than ever to reach voters with paid political messaging.
Video on demand, streaming video and DVRs are all giving voters a new sense of time, allowing them to watch content when and where they want. Presidential campaigns and Super PACs are spending more money than ever on paid political communications ($3.2 billion in 2012), and they face even greater challenges when it comes to finding and reaching the small segments of voters needed to swing elections in today’s highly polarized political environment.
YouTube has just crossed a major milestone. On Wednesday, the Google-owned giant announced that it now has over one billion unique viewers on its site every month.
That’s one billion with a B - every month.
If you are using YouTube as part of your social media marketing strategy, how can you take advantage of this popularity? How can you get more YouTube viewers, and increase your YouTube views? Wishpond wants you to succeed in your online marketing, so we’ve put together a few answers.
Eight Tips on How to Get More Views on YouTube:
1. Brand Your YouTube Channel
Be consistent in your branding image when setting up your channel. Make sure your customers can easily identify you, by using the same logo and imagery used on your website, other social media sites, and your brick and mortar business.
In the past few years, there’s been a dramatic rise in the role of the citizen-journalist and, as a result, the institution of journalism itself. Much of this can be attributed to the ever-growing presence of social networks like Twitter, which just celebrated its seventh birthday on Thursday. Now, anyone can post messages, pictures, videos, etc. that millions have access to at any second. The so-called micro-blog allows anyone to instantly update what they’re seeing or hearing from practically anywhere that has an internet or cellular connection. Twitter has facilitated revolutions, brought down powerful politicians, and allowed religious leaders to directly reach out to their followers. In its short life, Twitter has changed the very way we communicate and report news.
Of the onslaught of political advertising that ran in the 2012 presidential election, a surprising 70 percent was negative.
Even though voters overwhelmingly claim that they dislike how ugly American campaigns have become, negative ads remain a constant component in every political campaign. The longstanding question is whether these attack ads are effective.
Some people believe that negative ads turn voters off, which influences them to tune out and stay home. It would be unfortunate if exposure to negative campaigns bred widespread cynicism and antipathy toward politics and a decline in political efficacy.
Other people believe that negative ads may have a positive effect on voter turnout. This belief stems from the idea that negative advertising is more informative and memorable than positive advertising. Voters are inspired to seek out more information about issues that negative ads touch on. By facilitating candidate image differentiation and attitude polarization, negative ads may help voters feel more confident about their voting decisions and consequently intensify their involvement with politics.
The past ten years have seen a great many changes to our national political landscape. From new technologies, to new communications tools, it has never been easier to become an active participant in the political process. Indeed, the 2008 campaign season was really the first time social media became an active player in the political fray and it has clearly proven its value since then.
Initially, social media was contrived as a platform to bring old friends together and allow new friends to stay in touch. However, it wasn't long before politicians, advocacy groups, and smart businesses discovered the vast power these platforms had. Within a very short time frame all of these began using social media for member engagement purposes that helped drive their objectives past the goal posts.
Among the strongest users of social media, the Barack Obama camp definitely takes the prize as one of the most effective.
Their social media team worked tirelessly to build fan pages and grassroots support on Facebook and build followers within Twitter where they could share information and disseminate it rapidly to their followers who would then act upon it. Indeed, in both 2008 and 2012, it became very obvious that traditional message dissemination via the news, telephone, or even email were dinosaurs in comparison.
How Google Search works from algorithms to answers.
Google navigates the web by crawling.
That means we follow links from page to page. Site owners choose whether their sites are crawled. We sort the pages
by their content
and other factors.
The index includes text from millions of books from several libraries and other partners.
"The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what
you want."
Larry Page
Co-founder & CEO
Thanks to Street View, we can also include information from the physical world.
The Knowledge Graph provides better answers by organizing information about real world people, places and things.
It's over 100
million gigabytes.
And we keep track of it all in
THE INDEX.
If you want a video to go viral, promote it hard when the video is posted. The next three days are pretty much the video's fertile period.
Video technology company Unruly conducted a study that shows the "viral peak" of a brand video campaign occurs on the second day after it is posted.
"We found that the first days following the launch are key to both the video's short- and long-term success," says Ian Forrester of Unruly. There are strong correlations between shares achieved in days one to three and all-time shares.
When on a date, one should have proper etiquette! Just like being on a date, when you are tweeting away on twitter, one should also have proper etiquette. TWITIQUETTE if you prefer! So how does one have awesome Twitiquette? I’m glad you asked! Follow these simple rules:
Rule #1: Don’t start a tweet with a hashtag. Let us see your thought, idea, comment, or story first.
Rule #2: Please, please don’t use more than 3 hashtags in a tweet. If you do use three hashtags, do it sparingly. It’s just annoying.
Rule #3: This rule is going to go against what most “tweeps” believe! Don’t strive for followers. Strive for engagement. Ask people questions and engage with them! They’ll like it. In the long run, you’ll get more followers this way.
Allyson Kapin shared some very interesting Twitter stats on Care2′s Frogloop blog. Whether your organization tweets links once a week or once an hour, your click-through-rate (CTR) will be boosted if you take note of the following:
1. Tweets with question marks receive 17% more click-throughs than those without
2. Tweets containing 120-130 characters received the highest CTRs (Note: When composing a tweet, make an effort not to use the entire 140-character allotment. This enables other users to insert comments when retweeting your tweet without having to rework/rewrite your original tweet)
So your business has a Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn AND Google Plus account. How in the world can you possibly keep up with this many Social Media accounts without working a million hours a day or paying top dollar for a Social Media manager?
Often times companies think they can treat their social media accounts similar to their website in that they can just create an account and let it sit there while it grows on its own. However that is just not the case. Companies quickly realize that Social Media is a hands on time consuming job that can take up large chunks of time. Whether as a business owner you decide to manage your Social Media accounts on your own or you hire a Social Media manager it is a big job. Do not worry though, there is a solution! The key is to break things down into small steps and work on them daily rather than letting them build up.
By following the below daily checklist you will not only grow your Social Media presence but you will save time as well.
Several years ago, when politics was first starting to seep into Twitter, there was a widely held belief among conservatives that they had "won Twitter." It was pretty stupid, because winning Twitter didn't actually win you anything. But still, it was quite the point of pride.
But like everything else in their world, that victory, if it ever existed in the first place, is no more.
Recently, Roll Call published More Members Are Using Social Media To Interact With Their Constituents. It is fantastic that Representatives and Senators are paying more attention to social media. In fact, setting up Twitter and Facebook accounts was one of the first official actions for many new members of the 113th Congress.
Despite rapid adoption, my observations in working with over 125 Congressional offices align with a study released by the Congressional Management Foundation in 2011. Basically, social media is not viewed as influential as other traditional methods of communications between constituents and their elected officials.
If social media engagement is on the rise, why doesn’t it have greater influence on Congress?
Here’s an existential question for the modern era: If politicians throw a hashtag and nobody shows up, did they make any noise?
Washington is infatuated with attempts to make various buzzwords trend on Twitter, even though the vast majority of those efforts are #epicfails. In the process, they’ve embarrassed themselves and handed opponents an easy — and often unfair — way to quantify how little the public agrees or supports whatever cause the pol is trying to promote.
“If you’re putting it on your podium and then that conversation peters out or doesn’t happen, then it seems to prove that no one is interested,” said Anthony Rotolo, a professor of online communication at the iSchool at Syracuse University. “You’re shining a very bright light on that.”
Of all the digital marketing tools out there, email is still considered to be one of the most trusted mediums by consumers. If email campaigns are a part of your marketing or advocacy strategy, however, it is critical to be aware of the latest developments in the field. Says ClickZ’s Simms Jenkins: “Email is only getting more important and your email program better be adapting to this new future.”
In a campaign, tension tends to surface between the creative types and the numbers people, particularly when it comes to television advertising. But the Obama campaign, true to its “no drama” motto, managed to diffuse that tension during the 2012 cycle thanks to a rigorous system of ad testing.
“With advertising, it’s always more effective and more memorable to show somebody something than to tell somebody something,” Larry Grisolano, whose firm, AKPD Message and Media, led Obama’s media effort in 2012, tells C&E. “The problem with showing somebody instead of telling them is there are ambiguities, and you’re not always sure how it’s going to be received and how it’s going to be processed.”
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