Objective and opinionated insights on current trends in corporate branding, advertising, marketing, sales, and PR communication strategies; all colored with pithy punditry and comments on the current events of the day.
Ok..so we've teased you in the recent updates by suggesting we could only locate (2) truly credible providers of low cost, high quality video broadcast/video chat applications...
We can't explain how/why we overlooked Oovoo.com, and we won't bother telling you how we tripped over this company...
The first glimpse of the application and the platform suggests that it looks good, its priced right (there's a free version and options i.e. enterprise version), but also reminds us that when it comes to B2B technology applications, the first-movers' disadvantage is the notorious obstacle that is increasingly prevalent: firewall.
That said, we think this platform is a good one..notwithstanding the fact that for broadcasting, its powered by an executable that needs to be downloaded...and that element might introduce some hiccups..but we haven't kicked the tires hard enough or long enough to determine whether or not your computer might have a digestion problem....
Video, video, video..we've been playing this harp and harping on the subject of businesses needing to leverage new media apps while their competitors are languishing in the world of traditional messaging techniques.
The proposal below was prepared by an agency that's been around the block more than a few times, and in our opinion, they hit the bulls eye when crisply condensing the client's already nicely configured value proposition. Equally appealing, the agency formulated a very cost-sensitive strategy that provides the client with an approach that will have extended shelf life, and can inserted in multiple applications.
After establishing a PPC ad program via LinkedIn at beginning of week, it took less than two days to recognize that the campaign in question has been charged for noticeably more clicks/visitors than we have documented for the same period of time by two different site traffic applications that are installed on the destination website.
One of those meters is google analytics, the other is a tool provided by AMZN.
After presenting this to LinkedIn advertising "online support", and requesting explanation or otherwise a credit, we were disheartened to receive a canned email reply indicating someone would eventually send another canned reply. Surprising that you don't have a live chat staffed by people to service paying customers, but I suppose that would be a reach..In the mean time, it would be nice if someone were to actually reach out and address the issue. Would hate to instruct credit card company to dispute the charges...or to be the source of 'unhappy customer testimonial'
Thanks in advance for your reply.
To customer support:
This is the second attempt to contact support re: what definitely appears to be your double-charging us for clicks on recently-implemented PPC program.
After noticing that you have charged us for almost 2x the number of clicks than the number of actual LinkedIn referrals reported by two different traffic logs that we maintain, we immediately reported this issue and we scaled back our program by half. Six hours later, we noticed you reported 2x the traffic than what our traffic logs reported for the remaining ads that were 'live".
Dear ,
Thank you for your quick response.
We do not provide support for third party web tracking or analytics software. Because of this, we are unable to supply information regarding possible differences.
We are confident in the information provided by reporting tools that monitor the clicks redirected to your site as well as our other reporting tools across the entire LinkedIn platform. At this time, we would encourage you to contact the third party vendor directly for questions related to their software or potential discrepancies in reporting.
Thank you for your continued use of our DirectAds product.
Regards,
Stephanie
LinkedIn Customer Support
Thank you Stephanie…
We didn’t suggest that you do support third party traffic log reporting software.
But the fact is, when two independent applications report exactly the same thing and completely contradict your reports and you respond to customers by insisting that your charges are accurate, and that your reporting meter works better, or is more accurate than Google Analytics, or Amazon’s vendor tools, any reasonably experienced advertiser would take exception to your reply.
After noticing that you had charged us for almost 2x the number of clicks than the number of actual LinkedIn referrals reported by two different traffic logs that we maintain, we immediately reported this issue and we scaled back our program by half. Six hours later, we noticed you reported 2x the traffic than what our traffic logs reported for the remaining ads that were 'live".
Needless to say, we will be terminating our ad program with LinkedIn immediately, disputing the charges with our credit card company, and we’ll look forward to sharing this experience within the various LinkedIn groups that we participate in, as well as the various industry blogs that we contribute to on a regular basis.
If you've been following this blog for more than the last 5 updates, you'll know that I've always been a big proponent of video-centric marketing and communication applications for corporate, B2B and small businesses.
We're not newbies when it comes to digital communication, as this writer was arguably among the first wave of pioneers that advocated internal corporate instant-messaging applications when most Fortune companies were still busy trying to figure out how to leverage enterprise email.
Then came blogs, next came Twitter, and while "Marcomm Guru's" imbedded in corporate cubicles are still trying to get their arms around what works and what doesn't work, the Rich Media train keeps on rolling over those that haven't figured out which "best practices" are best vs. those that make the bean counters barf when attempting to monitor how the EVP of Sales and/or EVP of Marketing are working to connect the tag line to the bottom line.
Click on the link to the title of this posting--and then read in between the lines. If you can't understand how this story underscores how to leverage existing technology with your "social media strategy", give us a call and we'll paint a connect-the-dots picture so that even your CEO will "get it".
Post script reminder: "Cutting Edge" initiatives often result in a little bit of bleeding at first.
We don't typically re-print other people's work, but this makes for a good read if you're taking a long sit, or especially if you've got one of those new e-reader/tablets that look like Etch-O-Sketch devices and find yourself reading more on the porcelain porch..
Courtesy of Boston.com's Drake Bennet (click on the title link for the full article):
This would probably not strike you as a great idea. But, if recent research is to be believed, it might just be brilliant.
One of the hottest topics in psychology today is something called “cognitive fluency.” Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard. On the face of it, it’s a rather intuitive idea. But psychologists are only beginning to uncover the surprising extent to which fluency guides our thinking, and in situations where we have no idea it is at work.
Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process - even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it - can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities. Similar manipulations can get subjects to be more forgiving, more adventurous, and more open about their personal shortcomings.
Because it shapes our thinking in so many ways, fluency is implicated in decisions about everything from the products we buy to the people we find attractive to the candidates we vote for - in short, in any situation where we weigh information. It’s a key part of the puzzle of how feelings like attraction and belief and suspicion work, and what researchers are learning about fluency has ramifications for anyone interested in eliciting those emotions.
“Every purchase you make, every interaction you have, every judgment you make can be put along a continuum from fluent to disfluent,” says Adam Alter, a psychologist at the New York University Stern School who co-wrote the paper on fluency and stock prices. “If you can understand how fluency influences judgment, you can understand many, many, many different kinds of judgments better than we do at the moment.”
A handful of scholars have already started to explore the ways that advertisers, educators, political campaigners, or anyone else in the business of persuasion can use these findings. And some of the implications are surprising. For example, to get people to think through a question, it may be best to present it less clearly. And to boost your self-confidence, you may want to set out to write a dauntingly long list of all the reasons why you’re a failure.
Its only been 30 days since we last pounded the table about "now-generation" technology that delivers HDMI quality, live video consultations via the Internet.
In point of fact, we've been pounding the tables and screaming from the rafters on this very topic for more than three years.
Its only within the last year that the technology has finally evolved to the point where its top quality, low maintenance and efficiently priced for any small business, no less large business than never wanted to spend mid six figures for "enterprise video teleconferencing" solutions.
Lo and behold, the NY Times must be following this blog, because today, contributor Catherine Saint Louis is credited with a column that focuses on the rapidly growing use of this exact technology within the health care arena.
The article is objective, insightful. The article title "Should Surgeons Meet Patients Online?" is almost irrelevant; the debate about whether plastic surgeons should be consulting on line is tantamount to asking whether barn doors should be sealed like a crypt. The fact is, the genie is out of the bottle.
And the technology that powers the technology that was once only imagined by The Jetsons is easily procured. We've promoted our friends at Montreal-based LCN Technologies on several occasions, as we think they've got the best for less..We've also tripped over a few other vendors...
Now all you need to do is research the questions that need to be asked of those vendors, and compare their answers and offerings.
The NY Times' David Carr opines today that he's convinced Twitter will not only endure, but expand into every tiny intellectual crevice known to modern man.
We've talked, and even "tweeted" about this topic in the past. We've pointed out that a continuously growing universe of Branders, Marketers, and a slew of corporate communication gurus believe that Twitter is as important today as having a website was ten years ago.
Fifteen years ago, this pundit insisted to his clients and prospective clients, that if you were a business, and you didn't have a website, even a rudimentary single page that merely displayed who you were, then you really weren't in business. And you probably wouldn't stay in business for very long.
And, in today's NYT, David Carr takes his own stab at it. Don't be shy--this is a topic that anybody should chime in about--so we invite you to post your own opinion!
Two years ago, we began profiling technologies that provided low cost, high-quality live video broadcasting that could be utilized by small and large businesses.
After all, combining real-time sight and sound has always proven to be exponentially more compelling when compared to static "WebEx" presentations.
Well, once again we're being proven prescient: according to a story in today's NY Times, the health care industry is beginning to embrace pay-per-chat with experts broadcasting live via the Internet. Live, private consultations for less than $50/hr-and allows partients to see the doctor, and ideally, for the doctor to see you (now).
All the patient needs is a video-cam connected to his/her PC--and good devices can cost less than $75..
The cost to broadcast? It's come down to peanuts when compared to the legacy teleconferencing systems that companies such as Cisco have promoted for the past several years. For less than a few thousand dollars (see LCN Technologies offerings), lawyers, accountants, "training gurus", or anyone else can have their own live broadcast studio, and communicate in HD-quality live conferencing.
Two weeks ago, I profiled LCN Technologies, a company that's on the 'cutting edge' by providing low-cost, high quality ("HD quality") technology for those that "get it" and recognize that live, internet broadcasting will prove to be what sets competitors apart.
For pundits, "pontificators", or simply corporate-arena presenters, these tools are a must have. Its that simple.
For those that "vlog"--(which incorporates either canned or live video within a blog), the content becomes that much stickier, and real time, is well, real time.
Aside from LCN, there are actually few credible vendors within the space. Another is Silicon Valley-based Dyyno, which is sponsored by two leading Venture Capital firms--and my bet is that they'll be gobbled up by Google before they even bother to do a second round of venture funding.
Although Dynno's technology is somewhat different that LCN (Dynno requires broadcasters download an executable file while LCN does not), and its cost to implement and administer (licensing fees) is higher than LCN's, its presentation strikes at the heart of what we're talking about.
The real bet however is predicting the actual number of "celebrity" bloggers, corporations and media outlets that will leverage the technology in 2010. My conservative guess is that it should be in the tens of hundreds, if not thousands.
Twitter, now almost as ubiquitous a name as Google, is apparently coming into its own (for those who own a slice of the private company), and has struck open source deals that will allow for advertising messages to be imbedded within all of those tweets that so many people are (purportedly) subscribing to.
I'll admit that I did sign up to follow the tweets of a few of my pundit friends, and I'm only glad that I turned off the "alert via txt msg" button, otherwise I'd have to cancel my cell phone service entirely.
Of course I believe in the concept of leveraging social networks to promote consumer products. And of course, I'm influenced by what my friends are buying in the course of making my own purchase decisions. Well, sort of.
But now that Ad.fly and others are making it easy for my 'friends' to insert advertising messages within their tweets, do I really buy into it? Do I really want to be cluttered with messages, knowing that my 'friends' are exploiting ther friendship in order to make money from me? What does this say about the social contract, that we, as 'friends' have made with each other?
OK, I'm jealous; unlike Ashton K., or Larry K., I don't have 1 million+ "followers". I only have a few hundred or so. Most of them prefer to go to this blog, or one of the others that I've become famous for. How many of them are going to appreciate knowing that I'm getting paid to pitch my favorite toothpaste, or my favorite burger joint?
And what happens when the FTC decides to enforce their stupid new rules about blogger disclosures, and single me out for promoting a product on my tweets without including a disclaimer? I won't be happy. But its safe to bet that big time bloggers that have friends in Washington won't have to worry about this. Does Eliot Spitzer tweet?
