Twitter has always been a hard thing for me to get a handle on. For one, it always seems to skew a little young and it didn’t have a great infrastructure for targeted ads until very recently. In the last year Twitter has made huge strides in being friendly to advertisers and they’ve also done a great job of doing it without alienating their fanbase. Clearly they learned a huge lesson from the failures of Myspace. They didn’t dilute their core product and alienate their fanbase. They managed to integrate more advertising pretty seamlessly. By doing things like putting a promoted topic in with the trending ones and not changing the user experience, twitter has become a great place for advertisers without sacrificing the simplicity that made them unique and interesting in the first place.
Read MoreArchive for the ‘Business’ Category
Don’t Call It A Comeback: 5 Brands That Found a Second Life Using Social Media
Advertising is full of great comeback stories from brands that were on their way out but came back with a vengeance. Radio Shack has clawed its way back from near extinction in recent years. Some brands have done it using social media to rebuild their audience. If you can find something that catches on virally via the web, it doesn’t matter what your past reputation was as a brand and here are a few brands that will show you how to do it.
Read MoreBehind The Curve On Streaming Video: Netflix and The Streaming Video Debacle
Remember TiVo? When it first came out in 1999 TiVo was the biggest thing going. TiVo was going to be the next Microsoft or Apple. Judging from those first few years TiVo has got to be in every home in the country right? Well a funny thing happened, when TiVo got popular companies took their business model and applied to a much larger infrastructure and improved upon the technology. In the end TiVo was left with nothing but a mostly forgotten brand name. Because, as social media has shown, being the first one in on new media means the moment you’re successful everyone is going to take your model and run with it in directions you can’t control.
Read MoreInterest-based digital advertising: It’s the right thing to do
This is a brief abstract of an important article appearing in AdAge this week that we felt was worth sharing with our readers. At Billups Design we’re engineering solutions that enable advertisers to focus on interest-based advertising that delivers the right message at the right time and place in every consumer’s consideration process. We agree with AdAge that current (outmoded) methods of retargeted advertising result in massive media spend waste and actually create negative brand-association with consumers. It past time to do it a better way – and we have the media strategies, technology and creative insights to help retailers…
Read MoreKickstarter: Everything You Need To Dive Right into The Deep End of Digital Marketing
It’s really hard to predict exactly what great new social media sites are going to take the internet by storm. Even companies like Google need three tries to break in and even now it’s still not a guaranteed shot. Every site has a social media expert who has said it’s the next big thing. I was a big fan of Formspring for a long time and it hasn’t taken off like I thought it would, the same goes for Justin.TV. Although with original sponsored programming coming it could be in for a boost but that’s not this article. This time I want to highlight a site that is already starting to pop in a big way, Kickstarter.
Read MoreHow Borders could have used Social Media to boost their Chances of Survival
When I did marketing for one of the riverboat casinos in the Chicago area I was told a lot of excuses for why a particular day didn’t draw as many people as they wanted. Some of my favorites were. “No buddy wants to go the casino in the winter. It’s cold and snowy. People just want to stay in.” “No one wants to come out in the spring.” “Kids are still in school and they want to be outside after being cooped up inside all winter.” “People don’t go to the casino in the summer. They want to be outside…
Read MoreIs Google Plus Finally Getting Google a Foothold in Social Media?
One of my favorite quotes, and one I use when talking about digital advertising, comes from hockey legend Wayne Gretsky. He said “Don’t go where the puck is; go where it’s going to be.” In a nut shell I mean that if you are looking to invest in a new form of digital media you probably aren’t going to be successful if you just do what everyone else is doing. Facebook wasn’t a success because it just copied MySpace, it connected you with people in your school with similar interest, once it got big doing that then it branched out…
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