Your Brand is Batman
originally published in MediaPost’s Social Media Insider

“People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy…  As a man, I’m flesh and blood. I can be ignored. I can be destroyed. But as a symbol, I can be incorruptible. I can be everlasting.” – Bruce Wayne, “Batman Begins”

Bruce Wayne understands brands better than anyone. A brand is different from the sum of the people working for a company. A brand, as Wayne noted, can be everlasting.

But brands have a challenge now. This is the age of real-time content production. The focus has shifted from being iconic to posting a status update. With the demands so great for brands to keep telling new stories, how can brands keep up? After all, don’t consumers only pay attention to what’s new?

This issue came up last week during a Social Media Week panel, “Who Owns This Sh#t, Anyway?” Moderator Adam Devine brought it up after the panelists kept discussing storytelling. It seems like community managers, strategists, and brand marketers have a practically impossible task with nonstop demands to micromanage output across dozens of channels.

I fully appreciate the challenges marketers face today, but the challenge has to be put in perspective. Fortunately, the morning of the panel, I caught some of the movie “Batman Begins” on television, and I was reminded of how the fundamentals of storytelling work.

The Batman story is probably familiar. An orphan, the scion of American tycoons, becomes a vigilante, fighting the city’s most heinous criminals by dressing up in a bat costume. He is a skilled detective and fighter cooperating with the local police commissioner, but he is often derided for his unaccountability and his flying mammal alter ego.

It’s a story that first appeared in May, 1939 as a saga in Detective Comics, issue 27. Seventy-three years later, his story continues to be refreshed through comics, films, cartoons, video games, and other media. In all that time, plenty has changed, from the tone to the villains to the love affairs. Yet if you ask anyone around what the Batman story is about, most people should have very similar responses.

All enduring brands have overarching stories. Apple’s is the story of sleek, user-friendly, best-in-class consumer technologies. Coca-Cola is about a kind of happiness that’s always within arm’s reach. The Mets are about 162 games — no more — of overpaid underachievement. If you recognize those brands’ logos, those are probably the stories you’ll tell, because the brands have been such relentless and successful storytellers.

That means community managers don’t have to create entirely new stories at all. It’s not their job. What they have to do is constantly create new episodes and editions that fit in with the story the brand created. Community managers can team with strategists, creatives, and others to create new arcs, with subplots that go on for months and span various social channels. Those arcs can’t be independent stories, though; they have to tie in to the one that already exists.

This doesn’t make managing social marketing any easier. It does at least define some roles and guidelines as to what the socially focused team should be doing.

The most important part is learning the brand’s story. It was Bruce Wayne, the unmasked face of Batman, who acknowledged this himself in the New Earth comic series. Wayne said, “There’s a lot we have to learn — about each other and about ourselves — before we can present ourselves to the public in any major fashion.” Learn the story well, and then tap social media to keep on telling it and to bring it to life.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

• Google AdSense Earning Predictions Based On Simulated Experiments
  A senior member at WebmasterWorld forums says that he received a message from Google within the Adsense message center informing him that if he makes a change to his site, it will result in more money…
• Google Video Filter By Source A Porn Spam Target?
  DecorPlanet posted a complaint in the Google Webmaster Help forums where Google Video search is showing pornographic and adult videos even when the filter is set to only show search results from his site…
• Microsoft adCenter Giving “Maximum QBR Penalty” For “Disallowed Characters”
  A Microsoft Advertising Help thread shows that a small little thing like using disallowed characters can put a complete halt to your other ads in the adCenter network…
• Bug With Pagination On Google Maps Reviews
  If you navigate to reviews within Google Maps and try to click on the “next” button to see more reviews for that Google Maps/Places listing, it might not work for you.

  Try going to Google’s reviews on Google Maps and clicking on the next button…

• Video Welcome From Forum AdWords Reps
  Eric, Zee and Agata has made a video welcoming everyone to the new AdWords help forum.

  Here is the video welcome:

  They filmed this at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California.

  You can check out the new forums at en.adwords-community.com…

• Huge Google+ Circles
  Sam Roberts shared pictures of Social Media Week on the chinwag.com Flickr page. The pictures are of really large, life size, Google+ circles. This display was likely a booth at Social Media Week wh

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

• Doodle A Barto’s b.day, Google Blogoscoped Forum
• Google Stealth Launching Latitude Leaderboards, WebmasterWorld
• Google’s New Feature Latitude Leaderboard, DigitalPoint Forums
• +Google advertising all over the USA Today. Hmmm… Getting…, Tim Moore – Google+
• Which Search Engines Do You Monitor Your Sites In?, HighRankings Forums

MarketersStudio.com is a media sponsor of BDI. You can read my media sponsorship policy here. These BDI events are among my favorites, and I get no monetary reward of any kind for plugging them. They combine of elements that make for a valuable day: strong speakers, a concise agenda, networking opportunities, and a crowd of interesting people.

For additional information, including registration, please click here to visit the event website. Use promo code MS for a discounted rate of $175.

Date: March 22, 2012
Time: 8:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Place: The Graduate Center of The City University of New York; 365 Fifth Avenue; New York, NY 10016
Registration Fee: $195.00
Website: www.bdionline.com/socialconsumer2012.html 

Social Consumer News:
The Rapid Ascension of Pinterest and Social Shopping Sites, 2/09/2012 PC Magazine
10 Hot Web Startups Changing the Face of Retail , 2/03/2012 Mashable Social Media
Startup Launches to Save Men From Giving Bad Gifts on Valentine’s Day, 2/01/2012 Mashable Social Media

About the Event:
We all know that consumer behavior is rapidly changing. This half-day conference will showcase very specific case studies that demonstrate how leading brands engage, influence and service consumers through innovative social programs. 

This conference will answer the following questions:

• How are brands using content strategy and content marketing as valuable currency to attract and retain customers and prospects?
• What are specific examples of how brands provide better customer service through social CRM?
• How do you embrace mobile social strategies including location-based programs to increase sales and strengthen your brand?
• How are leading brands engaging customers through social games?
• What are the best examples of how leading e-commerce brands embrace social commerce to increase sales and provide better service?
• How does Facebook’s open graph and the explosion of the “like button” impact consumer marketing?
• How do leading organizations use and integrate social data from measurement and monitoring programs to shape and refine their marketing and communications strategy?
• How do leading brands integrate social with their overall marketing, communications, and customer service platforms?

Speakers and Roundtable Moderators:
Stephanie Agresta, EVP, Managing Director of Social Media, Weber Shandwick & Board of Directors, Social Media Advertising Consortium 
David Berkowitz, VP Emerging Media, 360i & Blogger, MarketersStudio.com
Marcy Cohen, Sony
Jenny Dervin, Vice President of Corporate Communications, JetBlue Airways
BJ Emerson, VP Technology, Tasti D-Lite LLC 
Ed Garsten, Head, Electronic Communication, Chrysler Group LLC
Matt Gentile, Director – PR and Social Media, Century 21 Real Estate LLC
Jason Metz, SVP Client Strategy, AWESTRUCK Marketing Group
Tom Miale, Director, Multimedia Engagement, MultiVu
Beverly Thorne, Chief Marketing Officer, Century 21 Real Estate Inc.
Jessica Valenzuela, The Empress and Curator, Mavin Digital, Inc.

Hotel Sponsor: Hotel 373 is the official hotel of BDI’s events. Click here to receive a discounted rate

Sponsors:
PR Newswire; The Wall Street Journal Digital Network; Anderson Direct Marketing; Awestruck Marketing Group; The JAR Group; MotiveQuest ; Adrants; Cinchcast; Interactive Advertising Bureau; Marketers Studio; Mavin Digital; National Association of Women MBAs; New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies; Public Relations Society of America – New York Chapter; Social Media Advertising Consortium

For event related questions and registration, please contact Maria Feola-Magro at mfeola@bdionline.com or 212.765.8043.
For sponsorship/speaking opportunities, including pricing, please click here or contact Jennifer Brous at jbrous@bdionline.com or 212-765-8358.

For additional information, including registration, please click here to visit the event website. Use promo code MS for a discounted rate of $175.

In fact, Google said they ran simulated experiments on making the change and it led to increased earnings. Now all the publisher needs to do is implement it and see the money come in.

The Google message said:

Recommendation to opt in to image ads in a text-only ad unit. We’ve run a simulated experiment on your site’s ad traffic. It shows that some of your ad units, which are currently enabled for text ads only, could earn more if they were also enabled for image ads.

I’ve never seen Google say they have run a “simulated experiment” on a site but I guess it is easy enough for them to do and then dish out automated recommendations for the publisher.

Nice to see Google AdSense making these predictions not just based off of generalities but now based off of specific case examples on your web site and your audience – at least, that is what this applies.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Image credit to ShutterStock for fortune cookie.

Update: Google just posted about this new feature on the Inside AdSense blog.

Like most bloggers, you probably want to make some money from your blog. Chances are good you’ve tried things like writing product reviews or putting banners or links to affiliate products into your sidebar.

But while many bloggers have mastered the “Art of Blogging” (or at least the basic principles) successfully, earning money from your blog doesn’t seem to be that easy. So what could be better for you than to use your blogging experiences and skills to improve the results of your affiliate promotions?

In this post, I’ll show you how you can re-purpose three of the most successful blogging strategies to get more out of your affiliate promotions. As a nice extra, these tactics will also have a positive effect on your blog. But more importantly, you’ll learn how you can merge them into a combined and even more powerful strategy for your affiliate promotions.

While some of what I write may seem simple or self-evident to the more experienced affiliate bloggers, it’s this way of tying it all together into one strategy that will make the affiliate promotions on your blog really stand out.

Let’s look at the three important blogging strategies on their own first.

Write (and promote) for your audience

You know that well enough—if you want your stuff to be read, it has to match your audience’s interests. The same is true for your affiliate promotions, in particular for the products you choose to promote: they have to be relevant for your audience.

This sounds self-evident, but frankly I’m stumped at the number of bloggers who have an affiliate banner for a hosting company on their blog—even though their audience clearly isn’t thinking about computers or internet when visiting their blog.

So instead of promoting your hosting company on your garden blog, why not try it with an affiliate link for garden tools, or link to an ebook about gardening?

Publish (and promote) quality

You know the game… Quality content attracts real readers which are interested in the topic. An excited and engaged audience. (Just look around here on ProBlogger if you don’t believe me.) It also makes people stay on your site longer, come back for more, engage with you and others, and recommend you to friends.

Just the things you want for your blog.

The same holds true for any products you promote: choose quality. Again, this seems to be self-evident. But take a look around at some blogs and see what they promote. (Or take a close look at your own blog, just for good measure.)

A lot of times, I see just the same banners or “product reviews” for the same old products. It seems that a lot of affiliate bloggers don’t bother to pick a product by its quality. Nor do they care about the “quality” of the vendor, i.e. about his integrity, and about how much he cares about his customers.

In the long run, your readers will notice the difference. And they will trust your recommendations just because they know you watch out for them.

Even the quality of the affiliate program should matter to you as affiliate. After all, you can and should expect a fair treatment for your efforts. Affiliate promotions are a business deal between the vendor and you, the affiliate. If a vendor doesn’t care about the success of his affiliates, why should you bother to promote his products?

So, again, be picky. Choose the right kind of products to promote.

Establish expertise—not only for yourself

This powerful blogging strategy has several facets which can all play together:

• You can establish yourself as expert on your own blog by posting the right kind of content.
• You can establish yourself as expert to a wider audience by guest posting on other blogs.
• You can establish other people as experts on your blog by publishing their guest posts.
• And you can establish yourself as a “meta expert”, as the go-to guy/girl of the experts in your field, by publishing a selection of guest posts by recognized experts in your field and/or by interacting with them on your blog, e.g. through interviews.

Again, you can make use of the same strategy in your affiliate marketing. If you want your readers to buy the products you’ve selected for them, they need to do two things: trust your judgement, and trust the vendor to deliver quality. A big step towards the first is if your readers see you as the expert. That will make them much more likely to trust your recommendations.

But don’t forget about the second part, about trusting the vendor. Before somebody buys from a vendor you recommend, they have to be reasonably sure that this person will be honest, and that (s)he will deliver quality.

To some extent, you can establish that trust towards the vendor with your recommendation: if readers see you as trust-worthy, your recommendation carries some weight, too.

But you should also consider establishing expert status for the product creator on your blog. Then when a reader clicks on your affiliate link, he will already be prepared to trust the vendor whom he sees as expert.

Tie these strategies together for even more power

Just by using these three strategies, you can improve the results from your affiliate efforts a lot. But there’s a very simple, though rarely used way to combine these strategies into something even more powerful:

Publish guest posts by product vendors on your blog, and include your affiliate link in the byline.

Now, just to be clear about it: I’m not talking about promotional content or “product reviews”. I’m talking about guest articles with real, quality content. And about establishing the vendor as the expert (unlike a product review, where you are the “expert” who reviews). And, of course, about picking and promoting the right kind of products in the first place.

To fully understand the power of this strategy, put yourself in the shoes of your readers for a moment:

They come to your blog. They know you publish good stuff, and you’re an expert in the field—you’ve done your best to establish that status. On your blog, they read a guest article by another expert. It contains great content, is helpful, informative, and entertaining.

They like the style and want to read more of the same.

Do you think they’re likely to click on the link (your affiliate link) in the byline? And do you think they might be willing to spend money on a product by this expert?

To achieve this, you only need to re-purpose and tie together the three simple strategies you’re already following when you blog: write for your audience, publish quality, and establish expertise. Do this by choosing the right products, and then publishing informative guest posts by product vendors with your affiliate link included.

In return, you get more out of your affiliate promotions for everybody involved:

• Your readers get to read great content.
• You recommend a good product which will improve your readers’ lives in some way.
• You make it easier for your audience to trust your recommendation, to buy the product and thus to improve their life.
• The vendor has a chance to make more sales and get happy customers.
• And you? You benefit from fresh quality content. You have a chance to enhance your reputation even further. And of course there’s the thing with the affiliate commissions…

In short, it’s a win-win-win. What I like most about this strategy is its simplicity. Despite being a really powerful strategy, it’s also about as simple and easy as it gets.

To show you just how easy it can be, I’ll give you the outline again in eight simple action steps. Why don’t you just give it a try and actually do the steps while you read along?

1. Choose a few good products to promote

By “good”, I mean quality products from trustworthy vendors with a quality affiliate program. And of course products which fit the interests and needs of your audience.

2. Sign up for the affiliate programs of the vendors

Make sure you read the terms of the affiliate programs, and are happy with them.

3. Check the existing promotional material

If the vendor offers promotional material for his affiliates, browse through it to check if there are any suitable articles you could use.

Don’t be disappointed if there aren’t any, though—usually vendors provide what is most asked-for by affiliates, and most affiliates don’t use this strategy… (bad for them, good for you!).

If you find ready-made articles by the vendor anywhere, make sure you’re allowed to enter your affiliate link. If in doubt, ask. If no suitable articles are readily available, go to step 4.

4. Get in touch with the vendors

Introduce yourself, and give them the URL of your blog. Be professional: you’re contacting a potential business partner.

Ask for suitable articles, and explain what you want to do with them (establish the vendor as expert on your blog, give your audience good content, and generate sales for both of you). It should be clear that you’re not looking for purely promotional material, but for actual content.

Make sure it’s absolutely clear that you will use your affiliate link in the resource box and/or the article content—you don’t want to risk any misunderstandings about this.

To increase your chances of getting suitable material, you can also point out that the articles could have been published elsewhere before. Most vendors, especially the more established and successful ones, won’t provide each affiliate with a different set of “unique” articles.

I’m not going into the depths of the “unique content” discussion here, but since this is not primarily an SEO strategy, it may not matter for you whether the guest articles on your blog have been published in other places, too. The quality of the articles is much more important! The internet is a huge place, and chances are very high your readers haven’t seen them before.

5. Read between the lines

Not every vendor will send you suitable articles. But regardless of that, their replies might tell you a lot about how they do business, and how they treat their customers and affiliates. Even if somebody can’t provide you with articles, he/she might be a great guy or girl, and there might be options for other business ventures in the future.

Just be open for ideas.

6. Check the material you get

Seriously. You want to feature the vendor as expert. So to make this strategy work, you have to stick to your standards. Make sure you only publish articles which:

• are a good fit for your audience and topic
• contain real content, are entertaining, informative, or helpful
• aren’t promotional
• meet your quality standards

A good test is to ask yourself if this article would be worth publishing without your affiliate link. If an article doesn’t match your requirements, don’t use it.

7. Insert your affiliate link

Insert your affiliate link for the vendor in the places you two agreed upon. Then double-check the link, just in case.

8. Publish

To add even more leverage, don’t just publish the article on your blog. We’re talking about serious, quality content here—about guest articles you could and should be proud to anounce to your audience and to the world.

Use social media to point people to the article. Link to it in your newsletter, or publish it in your ezine. Add it to an autoresponder sequence for your mailing list, so that any future subscribers can read it, too. Or link to it from your “thanks for opting in” page.

After all, if you’ve chosen the right kind of guest article, your audience will love you for the pointer to the post! Once you’re done with all the steps, go back to step 1 and start over.

The biggest enemy of success…

We’ve all been there: you read about a great new strategy that would move you forward quite a bit. You’re very excited about the idea, and make plans to implement it as soon as possible. Only “asap” usually turns out to be tomorrow. Then next week. Then next month. And then never.

Sound familiar? Why don’t you do it a bit different this time? I’ve given you eight action steps above. Take a piece of paper or open a file right now and start a list of suitable products and affiliate programs. If you’re already signed up for such affiliate programs, go straight to step 3. Check the available content for suitable pieces. And if you can’t find any, don’t pass go, proceed with step 4 and send a note to the vendor(s). Right now.

Worst case is you’ll spend the next hour getting in touch with potential business partners—not the worst thing that can happen to you today, is it?

Editor’s note: tomorrow, our final posts in this series look at blogging smarter (and more profitably) with WordPress.

Regine Becher is an affiliate manager and JV broker. To help affiliates and bloggers get more out of their affiliate promotions, Regine runs a service called Syndicated Partners, where affiliates can download quality articles and publish them with their affiliate link inside.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Blog Smarter: Turn Your Blogging Skills into Successful Affiliate Promotions

To reproduce the bug or the spam target:

1) Go to Google Videos and search for “shower panels videos”
2) Under Any Source filter, click “decorplanet.com”
3) Go to page 4+ (first 3 and a half pages have legit decorplanet’s videos)

Now, I don’t see the pornography until closer to page ten or so. But I still see it, even when I am filtering the results to just show me videos from the decorplanet.com source.

I am not sure if this is a bug with Google or if pornographers are spamming an loophole in Google – or maybe both?

Gary Illyes from Google said in the forum thread:

Thanks for reaching out. I let the engineers know about it and they’ll take a look.

The issue is still there and there is no word on a fix from Google yet.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

I am not sure what this specific advertiser used as disallowed characters, I assume they used some funky HTML entities, like a ♥ or a ♠ or maybe funky arrows. But I had no clue how serious of a penalty it is. Where it would disallow the advertiser from advertising other sites or using other ads without the disallowed characters.

Ricky Poole from Microsoft said the advertiser received the “maximum QBR penalty,” (QBR = Quality Based Ranking). But after careful review of the account, Microsoft manually removed those disallowed characters and the account is now active again.

Ricky said:

We have investigated your account and found you had a maximum QBR penalty for disallowed characters in your ad text. However, we have reviewed the account and they have removed these special characters. Thus, we have removed the penalty. As the QBR penalty is no longer on the account, the quality scores will most likely start to increase, and hopefully the impression volume will as well.

Hope this helps! Please let us know if you should need any help going forward.

Forum discussion at Microsoft Advertising Help.

Try going to Google’s reviews on Google Maps and clicking on the next button. It will only show you up to 13 of the 1,000+ reviews. Try clicking on the next button and it won’t take you far.

This is not just a bug with Google’s specific reviews, it seems like it is a bug with any company with over 15 or so reviews. See the Facebook Google Maps reviews and it will have the same issue.

A Google Places Help thread has confirmation from Googler Vanessa that Google is working on a fix. Vanessa said:

Team’s working on a fix right now. I’ll keep you posted once we’ve got it sorted. Thanks for the report!

Forum discussion at Google Places Help.

Here is the video welcome:

They filmed this at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California.

You can check out the new forums at en.adwords-community.com.

Like I said before, I really like the new forums over what others are switching to now.

I wish all the other forums that switched to the Google Groups platform switched to this instead.

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.

What are customers saying about your brand?

I recently attended a great presentation by Taylor Pratt (@taylorpratt) of Raven Tools at OMS in San Diego.  He focused on the importance of using content marketing for improved social engagement.

TopRank has been a long time and well-recognized advocate for the notion of customer centric content marketing.  Over the years we have seen SEO, social media, and content marketing industry change and grow at a rapid rate, so now more than ever marketers must create content to meet customer needs in order to execute a successful online strategy.  The social media game is not only evolving but the way that our audience consumes this information is constantly changing.

In fact, a study by NM Incite (a Nielsen/McKinsey Company) found that 2 in 5 social media users are accessing their social platforms from their mobile devices.

As additional devices are released on the market content marketers should be aware of these trends and create optimized content not only for computers, and Internet enabled devices, but for their customers as well.

How Do Your Customers Access Social Media?

Pratt also provided some valuable information on the different cycles that content marketers should go through in order to effectively target new customers.

Discovery

Any time that you launch a new client what is your first step?  I’m going to bet that discovery is typically your first step post sale (or pre-sale).  It is essential that you take a similar approach with your own company when launching a new social media campaign.  Some of the  key items you should be looking for when running your initial discovery might include:

• Brand mentions
• Product mentions
• Keyword mentions
• Competitor mentions
• Influencer mentions

It is also recommended that you begin determining which social sites you should participate in, key influencers you want to get in front of, and topics that are trending or popular.

Listening

After you have discovered what is currently being said about your brand and your industry it’s time to really begin listening.  Attempting to jump head first into the deep end will not produce the results you are looking for.  Begin by tracking how your customers are using social media.  Are they sharing particular pain points or problems?  Are they looking for tips or advice in a certain way?  It is imperative that you interact with your customers in the same way that they interact with everyone else.  You may also want to determine:

• Where are they participating?
• What are they already saying about you?
• What is their activity level on each social network?

Planning

Pratt shared a very insightful formula for the Planning phase of the process.  First you want to identify your business objectives.  This could be anything from improving your customer service to generating more sales.  Other objectives might include:

• Improve brand sentiment
• Generate brand advocates
• Increase your brand reach
• Reduce your sales cycles
• Improve your product reviews or ratings

The second step involves identifying your organization’s value add.  Work to determine what sort of words your customers or potential customers are using when they mention your company.

Finally you need to define your level of commitment.  How often do you plan on interacting?  What steps must you take in order to create an engaging social media strategy?

Execution

When implementing your social media campaign it is very important that you as marketers consider how it will align with your other online marketing strategies.  The convergence of SEO, social media, and content marketing is no longer an option, it is a necessity.

Measurement

When beginning to measure your brand awareness there are four particular KPI’s to keep in mind.

• Brand recognition
• Share of voice
• Engagement
• Reach

A recent report by the Altimeter Group provides specific formulas for calculating each of the KPI’s listed above.

Although there are quite a few steps involved in creating a customer centric social media strategy it is well worth the effort.  Have to fear, there are many reputation management and social media engagement tools at your disposal.  Some require a monthly cost while others are at no charge.  Some of the tools available on the market today include:

• Brands Eye
• Sysomos
• Trackur
• Social Mention
• UberVU (Raven Tools offers monitoring using UberVU)
• Sprout Social
• Radian6

Remember, one of the keys to a successful social media campaign is asking questions.  The more you know about your current and potential customers, the easier it will be to engage them online.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. |
The Key to Social Media Success is Understanding Your Audience | http://www.toprankblog.com