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Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Digital Branding | Using FB Fanpage Album


Earlier today I was trying to figure out Social Search but I ended learning about what I thought an "inexistent" feature of Facebook. 

As per my knowledge, all social networking sites are designed to be no-index | no-follow sites - meaning: they can't be crawled by the search engines EXCEPT for the personalized profile name or ID or Facebook Fanpage URL. For example, if you search your name in google, most likely the Facebook profile will show up unless you used a different profile ID name. But if we talk about what you post in your Facebook, it is designed not to be shown in the search engines.

What I find out today was that the "Album Name" of any Facebook Fanpage is indexable. So if you type an album name in google, specially if the album name is very specific, it'll show up in the search results. 

Let me give you an example (one international brand and one local brand).

If you type in Google: "Reasons to Believe in a Happier Tomorrow", one of the results would be the Facebook Photo Album from Coca-Cola's Facebook Fanpage. Please see screenshot below.

[Reasons to Believe in a Happier Tomorrow] Search Results

Second example: type in "Davao Housing Madness", you'd see one of the results is the photo album of BPI Loan Facebook Fanpage. 

BPI Loan [Davao Housing Madness] Promotions
You can try it for yourself and see if your company are ranking for the album names you specified. This (as I've mentioned earlier) however, does not work for the personal profiles. I have tried it and it failed. But if you were able to replicate it using your own personal profile page, feel free to correct me in this post! =)

Main takeaway for these two examples: The title and description of the album you created in your fanpages will be indexed by Google and it will be shown to people searching in Google using the keywords you used as album title. The more specific it is, the better its search-ability (remember the coke keyword). As you can see, for the second example, the keywords does not refer to BPI Loan but the BPI Loan fanpage is shown if these keywords [Davao Housing Madness] were Googled by random people from Davao. 

SO WHAT NOW?

Anyway, the question now is WHAT'S THE POINT of knowing this? The point ladies and gentlemen is that there might be keywords that are high in search volume and with low or medium competition that you can use to drive traffic to your official fanpage. With the added credibility of Facebook, it can boost these chosen keywords to rank in the first page (or even number one) in Google search results. 

TIP: If you have an SEO team or if you know an SEO practitioner, feel free to consult them how to determine the best keywords for your album by performing Keyword Research. 

PRACTICAL APPLICATION:

As a brand manager, you can determine keywords that you would want to target, and if your company or brand website does not show up in these keywords then the potential of getting this 'searcher' as a customer or subscriber to your website is lost. But your Facebook fanpage might do the trick. 

So to illustrate using a simple process flow:

Internet User Searches for specific "keywords" -> Google Shows Relevant Results but no link to you company page -> User Sees a link to a Facebook Page with Description -> User clicks -> User directed to Fanpage -> Fanpage has basic information about the company with link to company website or customer hotline -> User is exposed to the brand/company -> user is either converted by becoming a fan or contacting the company for more details OR user leaves the fanpage because it's not relevant. 

WHEW! simple right? =P

The point I'm trying to make is you can use this feature to pump up your album names and be seen on keywords that users are looking for. Who knows, one of those users might be your biggest client who just happen to stumble upon your company fanpage. 

Okay, I hope in some way this post will help you customize your company pages in Facebook to rank in Google and other search engines. 

Till next time! 

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Sunday, January 29, 2012

Case Analysis: Cheryl & Co.

This is a case analysis for my Direct Marketing class and it focuses on how direct and interactive marketing helped make this startup company turned into a multi-million dollar company.


Cheryl & Co.

COMPANY BACKGROUND

Cheryl & Co. is a multi-faceted business comprised of retail stores in Ohio, a high-traffic Internet business and a successful Business Gift Division, all headquartered in the Columbus suburb of Westerville, Ohio. A 2005 merger enabled Cheryl & Co. to become part of the 1-800-Flowers Family of Brands while maintaining the company’s mission to provide the finest fresh-baked gifts and desserts. The company’s four divisions are Retail (11%), Wholesale (10%), Business Gift Services (23%) and Internet (56%) with the Internet business as the rapidly growing channel.

The merger gave 1-800-Flowers.com a 24% revenue growth rate from 2006 to 2007. According to the 2010 Annual Report of 1-800-Flowers.com, the Revenues are as follows:


2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
Total Net Revenues
$667.7M
$714M
$739.2M
$725.7M
$584.8M
Gross Profit Margin
39.8%
39.4%
42.2%
42.2%
40%


Source: 1-800-Flowers.com 2010 Annual Report

The merger also allowed Cheryl & Co. to tapped into the 30M customers of 1-800-Flowers.com providing the company a bigger pool to expand their business.  Currently, they have 10.8M customers under the Gourmet Food & Gift Baskets category.

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

How can Cheryl & Co. expand their customer list by tapping into the 1-800-Flowers.com database?

OBJECTIVE
  • To increase Cheryl & Co.’s customer database from 10.8M to 15.3M by December 31,2012.

AREAS OF CONSIDERATIONS

  • ·      The group will take the point of view of Cheryl Krueger, President and CEO of Cheryl & Co. LLC.
  • ·      The group will use 1-800-Flowers.com’s 2010 Annual Report as a basis for the 2012 strategy and execution plan for Cheryl & Co.’s customer acquisition program.
  • ·      There is no change in the total number of customers in 1-800-Flowers.com database.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Ishikawa Diagram (Cheryl & Co.’s direct and interactive marketing operations)
SWOT Analysis (Cheryl & Co.’s Direct Marketing Efforts)



STRENGTHS
WEAKNESSES
·       Cheryl & Co. has access to 1-800-Flowers.com Database (30 Million subscribers/customers)
·       Cheryl & Co. has constant database analysis to determine what products are best suited for their customers.
·       Cheryl & Co. has a unified front for their entire multichannel marketing campaigns.

TAKEAWAY: Cheryl & Co. practices good database analysis to provide the best products and services tailored fit to their buyers’ need.
·       Decrease of customer list due to poor data hygiene.
·       Since the Gourmet and Gift category of 1-800-Flowers.com accounts for 36% of the entire business, the level of priority for dispatching their sales tool (emails and direct mails) are geared towards their floral business making Cheryl & Co. a lesser priority.
TAKEAWAY: Cheryl & Co. is not the biggest contributor to 1-800-Flowers.com’s business making it a lesser priority for promotions.
OPPORTUNITIES
THREATS
·       Customer Acquisition through 1-800-Flowers.com’s database.
·       Increase the revenue share of the Gourmet and Gift services of 1-800-flowers.com.
·       Social E-commerce as a potential channel for customer acquisition.

TAKEAWAY: There is an opportunity to become the biggest revenue contributor to the entire 1-800-Flowers.com business through acquiring the existing customer list of the other subsidiaries. 
·       Decrease of active customers/subscribers due to non-relevancy of the things they receive via direct mail or email.
·       Social E-commerce is prone to negative PR since social networking has the ability to damage a brand’s image at a faster rate through it’s viral capabilities.

TAKEAWAY:  Since Cheryl & Co.’s list of customers are also being shared by other companies, there is a threat of losing active customers because they will also receive promotions from other brands they did not subscribe to and might end up being marked as SPAM and cancel their subscriptions.


ALTERNATIVE COURSES OF ACTIONS

Using the Ishikawa Diagram, it has been found that the major success for Cheryl & Co.’s direct and interactive marketing operations belongs to the Internet Business division, which accounts for 56% of the entire business. It has also been determined as the fastest growing channel of the company.  Having that insight shows that the strategy and tactical programs that needs to be developed should gear towards supporting the Internet Business division while maintaining the business in the other sectors.

The focus of the SWOT analysis is to further analyze what contributes to the success of Cheryl & Co. in terms of direct marketing and how the internet channel would help increase their market share and therefore increase their revenues.  The way to do this strategically is to cannibalize the customer list of 1-800-Flowers.com and become the largest revenue contributor for the entire 1-800-flowers.com.

As a result, the following alternative courses of actions are being considered:

1.     Cheryl & Co. will perform data analysis on 1-800-Flowers.com’s database and extract a subscriber list based on purchasing behavior and execute a cross promotion campaign to penetrate and encourage product trials using E-mail as the medium.
2.     Perform mass communication by sending everyone in the 1-800-Flowers.com list an email of Cheryl & Co.’s online catalog and offerings. 



RECOMMENDATIONS

Since Cheryl & Co. is known to have a solid data analysis program integrated in their business model, the best way to achieve the objective of expanding the customer list would be alternative action #1. This will not only target the right audience in the 1-800-Flowers.com database but also provide promotions that will encourage trial and eventually convert them into regular customers. 

  1. Cheryl & Co. will perform data analysis on 1-800-Flowers.com’s database and extract a subscriber list based on purchasing behavior and execute a cross promotion campaign to penetrate and encourage product trials using E-mail as the medium. 



ACTION PLAN

Activity
Time Frame
Assignees
Feedback Mechanism
Data Extraction
1 day
1-800-Flowers Database Manager
Provide excel document listing all potential customers with complete information, mailing address and items they purchased through the 1-800-flowers.com website
Data Analysis
1 Week
Cheryl&Co Business Analyst
Provide a list of potential customers that will fit the Cheryl&Co. target market profile.
E-mail Development
3 days
Cheryl&Co. E-marketing department
Developed e-mail template, content and trial promo offer.
Cross Promotion mechanics
2 days
Cheryl&Co. Marketing deparment
Create promo that will induce trial (i.e. Free Shipping, 20% off, BOGO-Buy One Get One)
E-mail Dispatch
30 days (1M subscriber per day)
1-800-Flowers.com Email Dispatch Team
Email Dispatch Report (success rate and total failed messages)
E-mail Analysis
2 days
Cheryl&Co. e-mail marketing team
Analyzed open rates, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate and SPAM rate.
Data Analysis
3 days
Cheryl&Co. Marketing Department
Analyzed how many-purchased coming from the e-mail list and converted into a buying customer.


This is my entire case presentation in PowerPoint slides:




Cheryl & Co Case Presentation

View more presentations from Nj Lopez-Tan.


Credits to my awesome groupmates: =)
Mark Pitoc
Gen Bermudo 

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Thursday, January 19, 2012

How to Analayze Your Brand's Influence on Twitter


With the growing number of active users (emphasis on the word active) on Twitter, it is imperative for marketers to focus on optimizing their twitter usage to be of advantage to their brand. But the problem is, it has always been hard for marketers to measure their brand's Twitter influence. And I believe what you can't measure, you can't improve. 

Of course it's easy to go to Twitter, create an account then start populating your feed and hope by some miracle you'll be found by your target market. If you're a very popular company or brand, I think it's going to be easy for you to generate your followers. But what if you're just a small brand with a very specific target market? How will you generate your list of followers? And since Twitter just launched their advertising program (and it's still on beta of course), assuming you don't have the budget for it, then how do you think you would generate that very specific list?

Okay I think I'm moving a bit far from my main topic which is analyzing your influence, so let me go back. I'll just create another post about how to build a tightly niche list of followers for your Twitter account. 

Luckily there are tools out there that can help you analyze your Twitter performance and I'm here to tell which one really works. 

For starters, the best way to measure your influence is to know who are the people you are currently influencing. Basic marketing tells us that in order to be competitive, you have to target the people that your product would be of great use. For obvious reasons - you wanna generate a sale and therefore increase your revenues. You can't simply target everyone, that is futile. 

So how do you translate this to twitter since twitter doesn't have it's own built in analytics? Simple, use Twitalyzer http://www.twitalyzer.com. Twitalyzer is a good tool that you can purchase for a small subscription fee and it gives you specific measures and metrics that you can use to further analyze your Twitter audience. It will give you an insight on who are following you, their demographics and in which twitter community you would most likely belong based on your published tweets. What I like about it is that it shows you your activities and it's corresponding impact trended over time.

Second step: now you know who are actively following you, next step would be to know the REACH of your tweets. Defining reach using marketing language would mean the number of people you would "hit" for every action/activity you create - in this case, your tweets. You have to know this because you want to know how significant your tweets are and you can estimate how big your account can be if you use Twitter correctly. I suggest you use http://tweetreach.com/

Step three: Post analysis! now this is a bit trickier since there's no proven way of really understanding what posts or tweets work best. The most scientific way of doing it is through statistics (yeah yeah fellow marketing communications specialists and experts, I know you hate numbers but we have to embrace it to further improve ourselves yah?! hehe). The only tool I can suggest for now in order to see which tweets gain and lose you followers would be TweetEffect http://www.tweeteffect.com. It's not as reliable as you think it is but at least you have a general idea of how your tweets are performing. My suggestion, export everything in excel and try to correlate your dependent and independent variables to get a numerical insight. 

So there you go. To summarize, use these three tools:

1. Twitalyzer 
2. TweetReach
3. TweetEffect

And export everything to excel and use statistics to further analyze!

Good luck!

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Sunday, January 8, 2012

The 5 "Can Your Brand" Questions You Should Ask Before Using Twitter For Business

A lot of people often come to me and ask about Twitter and its effectiveness specially for business. More often than not, their first question is "can a lifeless brand succeed in Twitter?" because most popular twitter accounts are usually celebrities or famous people. It is usually the dilemma of the brand manager once they start thinking about the capabilities of Twitter and how their brand can take advantage of it. Until today, I'm pretty sure a lot of marketing people are still baffled by this tool. 

So as a guide to my fellow marketers, here are some questions that you need to answer before creating a company/brand twitter account. And if your answer is mostly YES then by all means, your brand or company is ready to use Twitter for your digital marketing campaigns. 

  1. Can your brand... sound/pretend like a real person (using first-person narrative form)? 
  2. Can your brand... cater to a large and diverse demographics as well as socio-economic classes?
  3. Can your brand... be also used to target a specific group of online users?
  4. Can your brand... talk about other things beside your brand (diverse topics like can it tweet about silly and funny tweets)?
  5. Can your brand... be covered by a dedicated person to response to followers' mentions or tweets?


If you say at least 3 YESes in the 5 questions above then congratulations, you can start your brand's twitter account as soon as you close this window! =)

Next post, I'll be discussing how you measure success and influence in Twitter. 

Okay that's it for now. 

and P.S. What is the past tense of Tweet? =) Let me know your answers by commenting below. =)

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Sunday, January 1, 2012

Winter Is Coming (Video)

Hey guys,

I don't have anything new yet but I really want to post something for January 1, 2012. This is to encourage me to post more for 2012.

Anyway, to kick things off. I'm posting our final exam for my event marketing class last term - Winter is Coming. This is the fall collection of Memo, Regatta, Calliope and Memo.


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