Archive: Social Media
SOCIAL SPARK IS LIVE!!!
The first thing I want to say is how proud I am to be working for a company that is on the cutting edge of social media marketing. We have come a long way even in the short time that I have been here. And now the questions about our new product are starting to pour in.
The new Dynamic Pricing has really caused a lot of questions. How does it work? Why does it work that way? Is this better for the advertisers or the bloggers? Well, I will do my best to address all of these issues here. I do have a finance degree so, as Crystal says, that should come in handy!
How Does It Work?
It's simple supply and demand really. If there is more demand than there is supply, the price will change until there is equilibrium. If an Opp seems undesirable because it is offered at a lower price, no Postie will take the Opp. After a certain period of time, the price offered for the Opp will increase until someone takes the Opp. If a bunch of people rush to take the Opp (demand), then the price offered will drop back down. Advertisers choose the range they want to pay for each Opportunity.
Why Does It Work This Way?
We often had Opps that never filled in PayPerPost because they were offering a lower price for harder requirements (high word count, embedded pics, multiple links, etc). Advertisers simply did not know what to offer for certain kinds of Opps. We have added the dynamic pricing feature so that the advertisers will be able to offer a price range for every Opp. Therefore, the dynamic pricing system takes the guesswork out of pricing an Opp. Now, you simply offer a range.
Is This Better for the Advertisers or the Bloggers?
The answer to this question is .... BOTH. IT IS MORE BENEFICIAL TO THE ADVERTISERS AND THE BLOGGERS!!! Advertisers no longer have to worry about overpricing or underpricing an Opp. If it is over-priced, the price will drop to decrease demand. And if it is under-priced, the price will rise to increase demand. Bloggers now can decide if that 300 word Opp with four links and a pic is worth $5.50 to them. Or if it is worth waiting to see if the price will go up. Either way, the Blogger gets paid whatever they reserve the Opp for (as described in <a href="http://community.izea.com/blog/2008/04/dynamic-pricing.html#comments">Carri's Post</a>)
Just Remember: SocialSpark relies on Supply and Demand. If you have any questions about how this works, please send in a ticket by clicking on the 'Help' tab at the top right of your SocialSpark account.
Hello All,
I'm the new outside West Coast Sales Director at PPP... and as you can see from the picture below... I did receive a warm welcome! Folks missing from the picture who also made me feel welcome include Dan, Sandi, Joe, and Randy in sales; Jenni, our office manager; Ted Murphy, head honcho; Karen, head of customer love... well come to think of it everyone was quite nice really... so thanks to everyone for a warm welcome!
From Left: Glennis/HR; Kash/Sales; Britt/Marketing.
I'm looking forward to engaging with some great brands/advertisers (Toyota, Edmunds.com, Neutrogena, PlayStation, EA, XBOX, Apple, Starbucks, Nike, movie studios, etc.) over the coming months and look forward to presenting some outstanding opportunities to the PPP community. That said, I better get back to work... so much to do, so little time...
Rock On!
Kash
[Hey folks...this is Dan, not chicken hat Dan, but venture capital Dan. I managed to hack into PPP's new blogging platform (hint: Ted's passwords are names from his Littlest Pet Shop collection) and access the Advertiser blog. I wear various PPP hats -- advertiser, postie, investor -- so I'm hoping to hack into all the blogs eventually. Until then, I'll share some thoughts, perspective and experiments for advertisers here. Shhh...I think I hear Mark reconfiguring some firewalls or something...]
As an advertiser and investor, I draw a lot of analogies between sponsored search and sponsored social media. GoTo/Overture was the PayPerPost of sponsored search and pioneered the multi-billion dollar pay-per-click (PPC) search revenue model that funds most of the "cool stuff with no revenue model" that Yahoo, Google, MSN and others provide today. Early adopters of the two platforms were also similar -- with measurement-minded direct marketers leading the way for broad-based online marketer adoption.
Although PPP offers a broader ROI than sponsored search (like the branding benefits, viral opportunity and ROI growth over time from persistent posts), it's worth monitoring best practices in the PPC field for PPP insights. One that hit my inbox recently, was a MarketingExperiments (MktgExp) report on the importance of relevance in paid search campaigns. The folks over at MktgExp reported the results of two case studies:
1) Click-thru-rate (CTR) Impact of Ad Title Relevance, and
2) Conversion impact of Keyword Relevance
I'll leave the detailed process/results to MktgExp, but takeaways from each case study were:
1) The ad title that including the purchased keywords generated 147% more
clicks than those that did not, with CTR almost two and a half times
that of the next-highest treatment. For example, "Encyclopedia Britannica" had much better CTR than "Brittanica Sets" and "2007 Brittanica Set" for visitors searching variations of "encyclopedia" and "brittanica".
2) Purchasing indirectly related keyword terms yielded a higher CTR than directly related keyword terms.
However, the conversion rate decreased from an average of 0.8% for
directly related terms to less than 0.01%. So, despite increased CTR,
the indirect key terms performed much worse where it counts: conversions.
So, how could these results improve PPP ROI? It comes back to relevance: both in the opp description and the link text. Bloggers, readers and searchers are the same people, so the psychology of rewarding relevance remains. All else being equal, opp descriptions that are more relevant to your product or business may garner more interested bloggers (higher opp-take-rate, OTR). Sponsored posts driven by relevant opp descriptions and relevant link text may garner more interested readers (higher click-thru-rate, CTR). And, last, click-thrus driven by relevant opp descriptions and relevant link text may garner more conversions.
My experience has been that CTRs for sponsored posts are already significantly higher than banners and sponsored search. That makes sense given the reader's interaction with sponsored posts versus other online advertising. However, it never hurts to review PPC lessons to optimize PPP efforts. Relevance is relevant!
Guest blogged by Dan...an entrepreneur in venture capital clothing
When creating your post simply point the Posties to your video in the body of the description. Ask them to embed a copy of the video along with the text post. It usually helps if the body of the post can be about the video. You can easily distribute your video to thousands of bloggers and their readers.
