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The best overall brands in health and beauty, and food and beverage categories are Crest, Gillette, and Dove; and Kellogg, Heinz, and Kraft, respectively, according to a pair of new Forrester rankings based on online surveys this year of 4,500 adults. The Boston-based market research firm argues that brand health comes from the extent to which it is trusted, remarkable, unmistakable, and essential. If you turn that into an acronym, you get Forrester's TRUE formula for brand equity.... 
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Just when you got your SEO mojo, out comes Penguin 2.0, trippin' up your flow. Here's what to do about it!
... Post-Penguin 2.0, the message is clear: if you want to rank and drive real traffic, you need to build your online brand. By strong branding, I’m not talking exclusively about giants like CNN and Zappos et al. I mean a strong brand in relation to the other sites in your industry fighting over specific SERP territory. Say you're a local dentist trying to rank for your best keywords. You won’t ever have brand recognition equal to that of Apple. But you can have an amazingly strong web brand for your local market. And if you do, you’re much more likely to rank.
When you think about branding as a ranking factor, it makes a lot more sense. Google is trying to replicate the logic of the “real world” and apply it to the online world, after all. For instance, if you have a business and you’re trying to build your brand as part of a local marketing blitz, how would you do it? What constitutes a strong brand offline? Well, you might have printed ads in the local magazines and newspapers, or maybe radio and television ads -- you know, the kinds of things that might help create some brand recognition for your target market when they're not at a computer or mobile device....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Google's new search algorithm changes keep impacting marketing and SEO. That's not a bad thing. In my view, branding has always been about building trust with customers whether it's online or off-line. What's most significant is the need for a higher level of engagement by brands with consumers who have more power and, it seems, more interested in engaging especially in social media.
Stephanie Katcher's curator insight,
June 6, 2013 9:32 AM
While the changes may disrupt marketer's formula's for success, as consumers we have to appreciate the Google's continued attempt to improve their algorithm with Penguin 2.0. The digital world is simply an extension of our reality, meaning it's ecosystem is as vital as any other. Business owners and marketers should be proud and embrace the importance of branding as it is as fundamental as understanding P&L. 
William Hanna's curator insight,
June 6, 2013 11:01 AM
Once again, if one reads between the lines, you will see building brand recognition, authority and trust is what marketing online is about anyway. 
Alwin Samayoa's curator insight,
July 18, 2013 1:17 PM
Proactively manage all aspects of your brand, ensuring these aspects are in sync and that they continue to reinforce your brand attributes and market niche.
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If you run a small business, one thing that you probably don’t have a lot of- is time. You don’t want to spend a huge amount of time learning how to find and learn how to use the best tools to achieve your goals. Since my business is social media and web development I actually enjoy researching the best tools and have developed a portfolio of great tools and a workflow that works well for me.
In this article I list the main tools I would recommend to most small businesses. Of course every situation is unique so I do recommend tailoring a system that works for you...
Jeff Domansky's insight:
These social media tools can be very helpful to small business efficiency in using social media. Several tools you may not be familiar with and worth exploring.
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Small businesses prefer to conduct their marketing efforts on social networking sites over location-based marketing, according to a May 8 article by Fox News. Given the word-of-mouth nature and sharing features of sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest, 97 percent of business owners said that they use these platforms to promote their businesses.
Only 17 percent of businesses say they utilize location-based ads, such as Foursquare, in promoting their products and services. Additionally, 66 percent of small business owners are optimizing their website for mobile platforms, reflecting an evolving use of the web and social sites. Just 34 percent of business owners say they have no desire to use social media in the future. Many believe that they don’t have a demand from customers to utilize such platforms....
Most important, 61 percent of small business got no return on investment...
Jeff Domansky's insight:
For me the BIG question is what are the 39% that are getting ROI doing right? And how can we utilize that learning for better results?
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As marketers, it is our jobs to assure our clients that the time and money that they are investing in social media is not in vain. Therefore, we are constantly tasked with searching for studies and statistics that suggest that social media is still heading for world domination.
One particular source I like to turn to for said stats is AllTwitter.com by MediaBistro. They frequently feature studies done by excellent social media companies. Recently, they featured an infographic by Balihoo that had some great and validating social media statistics. As we know, infographics are meant to present data in a quick and easy to digest way, so let’s apply some context to the data....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Useful stats on social media.
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Secrets to millennial marketing success? ... Fromm recommends small businesses constantly make “little bets,” taking small risks on novel products and services that might hit big.
“If you’re going to win with millennials, you have to temporarily suspend your notion of ROI and EBITDA,” he says. “You have to make little bets and see if they win or lose in the real world. Test things that are way beyond your definition of normal and see if they work. Technology allows you to do that every day.”
Social channels will tell you quickly if your wagers are effective or not. “The little-bets theory is based on the fact that millennials are willing to experiment because it’s part of their adventurous DNA,” Fromm says. “And if it’s a hit with millennials, others will follow.”...
Jeff Domansky's insight:
here's a great reminder that social marketing sometimes takes different timeouts and certainly doesn't follow the usual quarter by quarter earnings, life or death measurements of Wall Street.
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Starting a social media campaign? Check out these top 32 tools that will help you manage the campaign, via Jamie Turner and Erik Qualman....
The e-book was so popular that our good friend Shelly Kramer suggested that readers of the V3 blog might benefit from it, too. So, with that in mind, here’s an excerpt that includes 32 of the most important tools to help you manage your social media campaign. (If you’re interested in downloading the entire e-book, just click 83 Top Social Media and Mobile Marketing Tools)....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
You're sure to find several tools to add to your social media toolbox here. An excellent overview and suggestions to help you manage your next social media campaign more effectively.
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![B2Bs say email, content marketing best for lead gen [study] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/F39gwUX3FJ7OVm7rkkZu0zl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
Brafton reported that 60 percent of B2B brands say their greatest marketing challenge is generating new leads online. Fifty-five percent say they fail to reach their audiences in the right ways, despite engaging in multiple marketing techniques. Businesses may see the value of high-quality internet marketing efforts, especially with custom content, but they may not have a defined strategy behind their campaigns. The flashiest website content in the world may draw readers in, but if marketing collateral doesn’t communicate anything of substance, then lead-gen opportunities miss the mark.
With many business-facing organizations focused on acquiring new customers via web marketing practices, Ascend2 and Research Underwriters conducted a survey to understand what practices help organizations achieve their goals. The study looked at most effective channels and most difficult to implement tactics....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Good study looks at lead generation challenges faced by business.
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It is very easy to confuse social media and social business. The graphic in this post, created by my colleague David Armano, is a great illustration of the differences between a social brand (for the purposes of this post, this is synonymous with social media) and social business. At a very high level, a social brand is what we all do from a communications perspective to include marketing, public relations, customer support and so on. So what is a social business strategy? It helps evolve the thinking and preparedness of an organization by bridging internal and external social initiatives, which results in a more collaborative company and shared value for all stakeholders (customers, partners, employees). If you study the above graphic, a social business is very much focused on the internal dynamics of a company, from training and governance to knowledge sharing and culture. Social media policies and employee engagement also play a pivotal role in shaping a social business. A social business strategy can almost be considered an enabler, because if you have your internal process and structures sorted out, it is much easier to scale your social media initiatives externally. Whether it is launching a global Facebook page or empowering employees to engage in social media, having a solid social business plan will help minimize mistakes. As a marketing guy by trade, I will try to communicate the value of how a better social business strategy enables a better social brand....
Jeff Domansky's comment,
April 19, 2013 4:10 PM
Here's a great effort to distinguish between social media and social business. The chart is a little confusing at first but it makes sense when you read this excellent post.
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If you work in digital, you're probably getting a bit tired of the ROI question by now. We are all tasked with justifying our pitches and projects with proving where the ROI lies directly.
...Since it’s physically possible to buy from the place that you’re running your digital campaign, we’ve assumed that this is how we judge success. That’s where we’ve gone wrong, and where we will keep going wrong. We’ve thought that because you can just be a click away from buying a product or converting on a website, if users don’t do that straight away, it’s a failure. So the ‘trust’ remains in costly methods such as TV, which will never be expected to prove this because they can’t.
Buying Behaviour To understand this, we need to think about the process of how we buy something versus what we engage with online. A recent study released by Invodo found that consumers are 174% more likely to buy something after watching a video about it online. While this is a wildly encouraging figure that will probably need to be toned down a bit, this finding in itself is significant. The fact that we’re more inclined to buy something from a brand after engaging with it online is what’s important. An increased likelihood to buy is all that should ever be asked of an online campaign, particularly one that is content led. To force a transaction at that point, or to judge that as an indicator of success is detrimental....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Here's a reality check on social marketing from Simply Zesty.
Margaux Bergonzoli's curator insight,
April 19, 2013 2:21 PM
Interesting point of view about the ROI of Digital
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Social media is a great way for businesses to market their products and services and to increase awareness of their brand. However, social media marketing is often a long-term play that does not generate an immediate increase in sales. In fact, it may not be obvious that social media is helping you at all for quite some time, and you may be wondering why you should even bother continuing to implement your social media marketing strategy. Before you give up on social media altogether, consider these measures for evaluating the impact that your social media campaign is having on your business — or the potential impact it will have on your business...
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We placed ads on AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and StumbleUpon. Which service provided the best ROI? The results will surprise you.
Social media sites already offer free advertising in the form of tweets and Facebook posts, but these tools can only take your brand so far. The next step involves paying for social media ads, and if you're considering this option, you're probably most concerned with one big question: What will my return actually be? Will spending money on an ad on Twitter or Facebook bring more customers to my business than the same amount spent on Google AdWords?
I put that question to the test by setting up experimental ads across five services: Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and StumbleUpon. I wanted to see exactly how these tools benefited my own content-creation and corporate blogging business. Indeed, Null Media is exactly the kind of small business that could benefit from social media ads—in theory....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Great test and interesting results for marketers, content and PR pros to consider.
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Many online marketers get too wrapped up in measuring data that, though useful, is not the most important for understanding how your website is performing as a marketing channel.I say that because each investment of your time, money, and people should have a very solid ROI expectation attached to it. Without ROI, there's no pot at the end of rainbow, so you have to focus on those activities/metrics that provide the largest gains.Therefore, here are five online marketing metrics you should be looking at every day....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Really practical tips to help you monitor the things that matter in terms of online marketing ROI.
Sarah Bivens-PR's curator insight,
July 11, 2013 12:15 PM
This is a great article to read for anyone involved in any part of the marketing field. Not only does it give the five online metrics important to monitor when having a company website or blog, it explains why these metrics are necessary to take into consideration. The author explains the need to focus on how engaging one's articles or blogs are by how often guests return to the site, how often viewers become customers, how much guests click around to different parts of the site and more.
This article goes right along with my current internship. I deal with product descriptions and write blogs for my company. It has made me aware that I am not just writing this description or blog because my boss tells me to, but rather to engage our potential customers by making them love our site and want to come back again. 
Chris Agro's curator insight,
July 12, 2013 9:43 AM
Never before has there been so much data accessible to marketers and website designers. The key is to understand what the important metrics are, what they are telling you and then taking the initiative to act and monitor the results. This article does a good job of highlighting some key website meterics and what to do about the results.
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Overall usage on social media platforms is exploding. Millions and millions of consumers are expressing likes on Facebook, tweeting about products on Twitter, and pinning on Pinterest every single day. Retailers and brands are therefore increasingly focusing their attention on social commerce. But, many struggle with the question: how do you convert a "like," a "tweet," or "pin" into a sale?
In a new report from BI Intelligence, we look at successful examples of businesses and business models for generating commerce via social media-based strategies, analyze Pinterest's success as a social commerce platform, look at Facebook's potential as a social commerce contender, and examine the e-commerce conversion and order value gap. Here's an overview of the converging trends that promise to transform social media into a viable commerce platform....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Success in social media comes from converting your traffic and engagement online. This report has some really valuable insight for social marketers.
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...He's also a data guy. An MIT alum and lecturer, Brian knows how to separate useful data from vanity metrics, and he's quick to let you know what truly counts as an indicator of how our company is faring at delivering on its promise. While we proudly think of Brian as a unique leader, this laser focus on measuring the right metrics is something I'd wager he shares with CEOs across the board. And when it comes to social media, in particular, vanity metrics abound. So here are some social media metrics that actually matter to our CEO --- and likely yours, too! ...
Jeff Domansky's insight:
A good snapshot of ocial media metrics your CEO actually wants to see. Recommended reading for marketers, PR and content marketing pros.
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With a defined social media strategy in place, marketers can rock social media in 30 minutes a day. Sound too good to be true? It is actually possible if your daily use of social media is built upon a well-developed social media strategy.
But, a strong social media strategy does not mean that your brand has to be on every single social media channel out there. Instead, focus on the social media channels that the majority of your customers frequent. The infographic below explains how having an over-arching social media strategy in place can save you time and make you a more effective social media strategist....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Take a look at this info graphic for some valuable insight on where to spend your time in social media and social marketing.
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"Freemium" often backfires Trying To Hook Consumers With A Free Product Is A Dicey Strategy Seems like every third startup nowadays is using the “Freemium” business model: The lowest service tier is free, and the business is designed to get those users hooked and then upgrade to a paid plan. It can work wonderfully of course, but usually it crushes and destroys companies, not only because it costs more than anticipated but because the founders didn’t realize the business model itself caused them to make incorrect decisions....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Here's a valuable reality check and reminder that "freemium" is definitely not a winning business model in most cases.
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From obsessing about real-time data to buying advertising based on ad impressions/page views to celebrating Likes, learn how to avoid eight common mistakes....
I'll expand my purview a little bit in this post, from just looking at silly metrics to also looking at silly data "things." My hope is to use these eight examples to illustrate to you how, if you are spending 30% of your time with data, you can use crazy cool data strategies/metrics to ensure many, many promotions.
Eight data things that marketing people believe that get them fired…. 1. Real-time data is life changing. 2. All you need to do is fix the bounce rate. 3. Number of Likes represents social awesomeness. 4. # 1 Search Results Ranking = SEO Success. 5. REDUCE MY CPC! REDUCE MY CPC NOW!! 6. Page views. Give me more page views, more and more and more! 7. Impressions. Go, get me some impressions stat! 8. Intent beats demographics and psychographics. Always....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Really valuable explanation of eight common metrics that marketing people often get wrong. Nicely explained in depth.
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Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook are on a meteoric rise, and so are social data. Here are five insights social data can provide for businesses....
With social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook on a meteoric rise, companies are beginning to incorporate data collected from these social sites and their users into many aspects of their business from marketing to internal Human Resources issues – and with good reason. The sheer volume of social media data makes it incredibly difficult to analyze. However, various data services are popping up to answer the challenge of making sense of all this potentially advantageous consumer information. Here are five insights social data can provide for businesses....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Here's a useful look at five ways social data can provide valuable insight for business.
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After years of significant growth, social networks exhibited mixed results last year. It was bound to happen. Here are 10 reasons social media has peaked. Maybe it concerns you if you are in the social media business, but I will give you 8 reasons that it’s a relief that social media has peaked....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Great counterpoint and answers to whether social media has peaked.
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Yowza! Take a look this huge list from Beth Kanter. Includes social media monitoring and a long list of tools for every social media need. Fill your hat... and your toolbox.
Jeff Domansky's insight:
This is a great resource for anyone from solo PR, small business to nonprofit and big business.
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A recent study conducted by the online marketing firm Vertical Response and reported on in Forbes concludes that small businesses are spending more time on social media but struggling with the added workload it represents. Perhaps as a consequence, most are doing social media marketing in a vacuum because they’re not tracking results, which means they have no way of quantifying if their time and effort are paying off. “Our survey confirms that small businesses are understanding the value of social media,” says Vertical Response CEO and founder Janine Popick. “They’re spending more time doing it, and investing more money into it at a faster rate. But the extra work will likely lead to time management issues, especially for the small business owner who’s handling social media on top of all the other responsibilities of running a company. This implies that small businesses are in need of tactics and tools now to help them save time.”...
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Friday fun. This app can get you free bacon..? Rashers, "North America's Only Bacon Sandwich Shop," is a small business based in Toronto, with one location and a no-frills, bacon-only menu. Founders John Clark and Richard Mulleny have adopted all the usual social media gimmicks: daily Twitter and Facebook updates from the store advertise promotions in which customers can answer trivia questions for in-store discounts. And they have a knowing logo (that's the helvetica typeface, much favored by hipsters, in case you didn't know). It's Rashers' mobile strategy, however, that really brings home the bacon....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
This puts a whole new meaning on a slice of social media...
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Forrester research adds insight into what makes healthy brands successful online. In a word, it's the trust factor.