If anything, and with the rise in the number of users of FourSquare and Gowalla in these shores here, would only mean that marketing would be more and more a cross experience of lives in virtual and real-world.

How would these affect what we do and what our clients seek by appointing us to do what we do? Simple really. We are in the business of ideas. The client is in the business of selling things. Social and Location Based Services bridges that gap. What used to be a community of virtual users now get expanded into a community of real-world visitors.

Another insight gathered, going beyond this case study and location based services, are the innovations that younger much smaller agencies are doing. Obviously being smaller and more agile means upstarts have the breadth and space to put innovations beyond just ideas into practice. What are they getting right in the new media space that larger agencies are only starting to do? Or perhaps the big agencies need to start breaking down into smaller innovations based teams, and work closely with the brand management teams in coming up with ideas that is not only innovative in the minds but also in the experience.

Discuss in comments below.

“Leadership is over-gloried… Being a first follower is an under-appreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that makes the fire… There’s no movement without a first follower ”

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Retailers are embracing social media like never before this holiday season. More than half are including it in their marketing strategies, up drastically from only 4% in 2007, according to a new survey out from BDO Seidman. Of those who reported plans to use social media, 76% are focusing on Facebook, 50% on Twitter, 14% on MySpace and 14% on YouTube. Ten percent said they expected to utilize each of those outlets…

We look at five social-media strategies that are getting it right and five that could use a little — or a lot — of improvement.

Social-media strategies we love …

–> BEST BUY
Even its commercials have a social-media tie-in, featuring its Twelpforce Carolers offering gift advice. (Its YouTube channel offers behind-the-scenes footage of actual employees trying out for the Twelpforce Carolers.) The retailer also has a robust Facebook presence, featuring several exclusive applications such as Hint Helper, Secret Santa, Idea Giftr and, coming soon, Christmas Morning Simulator. The Hint Helper will drop personalized hints to friends and family via a cookie placed on their computers. While Best Buy’s application section is robust, it could do a better job of leading the conversation on Facebook, as opposed to simply responding to customer complaints. Still, when it comes to customer interaction, Best Buy has it down on Twitter. Its handles @bestbuy and @twelpforce, not to mention CMO Barry Judge’s own handle, @bestbuycmo, all do a stellar job.

–> EBAY
The online retailer kicked off the holidays with a free WiFi offering on Delta flights over Thanksgiving, which earned plenty of mid-air tweets of appreciation. Those following eBay on Facebook or Twitter have also been rewarded with up-to-date sales and promotions data (for example, a Zhu Zhu pet giveaway to the first 100 visitors at the eBay pop-up store). On Facebook, eBay leads the conversation with sales news or by posting content from popular sites such as Chow. And its Twitter handles @ebay and @ebaydailydeal are completely holiday themed. The former supports the retailer’s mobile boutique, which is popping up in 12 cities this holiday, and the latter gives out hints about its “12 Days of Deals” program, which features a new item with limited availability at a deep discount each day. Both Twitter feeds are streamed onto ebayholiday.com. Also, there are streams of texts and tweets featuring holiday gift wishes.

–> JCPENNEY
JCPenney uses its Facebook page as much for customer service as for marketing. When customers post complaints or praise to Penney’s wall, the retailer jumps in to address them , offering personal assistance and thanking customers for posting their love for the brand. It occasionally posts video content and links to buyer guide CheapToday.com. Another tab on its Facebook page links to a follow-up to “Beware of the Doghouse,” the 2008 video from Saatchi & Saatchi that drew millions of views, as well as a new website from North Kingdom. (The new “Doghouse” site is in itself a user-generated fest and users can post that content back on Facebook.) Fans can also participate in an online giving tree, and view designer collections and sale items. On Twitter, the brand tapped blogger and tweeter @SavvyAuntie to disseminate sweepstakes and sale items on Cyber Monday to her nearly 12,000 followers.

–> TOYS ‘R’ US
With Shaquille O’Neal, Toys ‘R’ Us will donate $1 to a charity for every new Facebook fan. Shaq even tweeted about the promotion — what he called the “Shaq-a-Claus” challenge — to his more than 2.6 million followers. The brand also appeals to parental nostalgia on Facebook, providing audio and surveys on the old-school jingle “I don’t want to grow up.” Mixed in with callouts of discount products, polls have a substantial presence on the brand’s wall, with queries on favorite board games or Disney characters. The page also contains coupons to use in the brick-and-mortar stores. On the customer-service front, Toys ‘R’ Us is an exemplar brand for responding to fans and managing customer reaction. On Twitter, the brand used tweets to drive traffic to Facebook with offers of online discounts for new fans. While the brand responded to a few customer tweets, next year they should Twitter more in this way.

–> WALMART
Since the last holidays, Walmart has gone from no holiday traffic from Twitter to being the most-visited retail site during Black Friday and Cyber Monday after Amazon. With nearly a dozen Twitter handles, the brand addresses topics from music to customer service and calls out deals online. The biggest retailer in the world dubbed the week following Thanksgiving “Cyber Week” and used social-media channels to drive traffic to its online specials. On Facebook, the brand features apps to support U.S. troops and generate wish lists, as well as sections that aggregate commercials and photos. While we can offer Walmart lots of advice for its social holiday next year — get into the conversation on the comments wall; Facebook isn’t a broadcast channel, it’s a chance to foster conversation with customers. The brand does a good job with holiday-themed articles, such as “Using Leftovers,” that offer advice and don’t just shill.

… and those that could use some improvement

ABERCROMBIE & FITCH
It’s hard to believe that a teen retailer has such a lack of involvement in the social-media space. The initial link on its Facebook page is for an A&F casting call looking for models for its back-to-school and holiday campaign — in 2010. Its current holiday print ads are posted, though there are no other mentions of holiday products, gift ideas or promotions from the brand. There’s also no response to customer comments, though admittedly the majority are positive. Still, with a following of more than 540,000 fans, many of whom are asking for a store in their area, it’s clear that A&F is passing up a major opportunity to engage this group. Similarly, a Twitter account, @AbercrombieNY, boasts a respectable 7,591 followers even though it hasn’t tweeted since July 11.

AMAZON
Twitter and Facebook drove more total traffic to Amazon than any other retailer on Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, according to data from Experian Hitwise. But even with all that traffic, the brand is pretty absent from social media with a holiday-specific effort, and seems to be resting on its laurels as an early adopter in the space. Amazingly, the e-tail giant does not manage an active Facebook page; its last updates are from September 2008. Amazon’s traffic from Twitter actually dropped more than 30% this Black Friday, and on Cyber Monday it only saw a 1% bump. The brand maintained its steady clip of lightning deals and product call-outs on Twitter, but holiday-specific content was isolated to links to the retailer’s many blogs and a smattering of Cyber Monday mentions.

KOHL’S
Admirably, Kohl’s committed to increasing its investment in digital and social media by 25% this holiday season. On the social-media front, the retailer said it planned to seed consumer blogs with merchandise giveaways, leverage its Facebook page and maintain its partnership with Stardoll, an online community. Where Kohl’s falls down is on Facebook and Twitter. The Facebook page is noticeably devoid of holiday content and deals, though it has posted its holiday commercials and a link to its homepage, which touts “25 deals of Christmas.” But, with nearly 900,000 fans, the retailer is missing out on an opportunity to speak directly to consumers about its sales, promotions and exclusive products. Instead, the Kohl’s page seems to be merely doing its best to address a portion of the hundreds of complaints posted by disgruntled holiday shoppers. And on Twitter @Kohls_Official there was an inexplicable gap in tweets lasting from 12:28 a.m. on Nov. 26 until 8:59 a.m. on Dec. 1, the entirety of the Black Friday weekend and Cyber Monday shopping period.

OLD NAVY
The sparse holiday messaging and unanswered consumer complaints on Facebook are a far cry from the engaged fans that were breathlessly posting about how to find deals through the retailer’s interactive circular just a few months ago. The week after Black Friday, an outdated tab on the page continued to promote GobblePalooza, which ran from Nov. 26-28, and the most recent video content, posted about five months ago, promotes tank tops. Similarly, the last videos posted on the brand’s YouTube channel are from eight months ago. Third parties have also taken to piggybacking on Old Navy’s nearly 350,000 fans, promoting their own products on the page. Old Navy’s Twitter page, @OldNavyOfficial, is similarly sparse, with one-way communication about deals linking to the brand’s home page. The brand’s Supermodelquin Twitter pages were also eerily quiet through the biggest shopping weekend of the year.”We currently have content up from prior campaigns as record of our overall campaign. We will update our holiday content shortly,” said a spokesman.

TARGET
Target, a brand touted for its current, youthful appeal, is conspicuously quiet in the social-media space and serves as a prime example of the damage unchecked social-media pages can cause. While it’s created a forum for Facebookers to comment and contribute their own photos and videos, the brand seems deaf to negative comments and fans’ personal promotion. Target broadcasts videos and articles without ever responding to comments such as “extremely disappointed in Target’s customer service. ” Some customers use the fan photo and video section to promote their own agendas — one fan posted a YouTube video and a link to his not-at-all-retail-or-holiday Facebook page. “Some customers have had enough with all the non-related content on the page. “Could you please remove/delete the trashy posts on your site?” asked one fan. The brand does maintain a daily deals Twitter handle, which also tweets to consumers without responding. The main Target Twitter account does a better job of addressing its followers, but only totaled three tweets during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Posted via web from drnoor’s posterous

Josh Warner is president and founder of Feed Company, which promotes and distributes brand videos, including campaigns such as Levi’s “Backflip,” Ray-Ban’s “Catch” and Activision’s “Bike Hero.” In three years, Feed has seeded more than 100 videos across the social web.2009’s crop of top viral video advertisements show us that people are willing to embrace a host of creative approaches on the social video Web, from beguiling mini-films, to user-generated advocacy, to YouTube celebrity endorsers, to elaborate commercial-grade productions. That’s good news for creators.

Regardless of the approach, the key for marketers is a solid understanding of what a brand is, who is the brand’s audience, and what moves them. Strangely enough, this formula sounds like traditional advertising. This year’s Top 10 is certainly a glimpse of how the viral video ad business is evolving, and as marketers, what we can learn from that evolution.

1. Inspired Bicycles

Advertiser: Inspired Bicycles
Ad Agency: N/A

Why it works: Inspired Bicycles’ team rider Danny MacAskill scales fences in and around Edinburgh, Scotland. The video is as mesmerizing as its hypnotic soundtrack from music group Band of Horses. It’s a solid example of how a brand pursuing a niche market – mountain bike trailblazers – can reach the masses with a brilliant viral video execution.

2. SIGNS

Advertiser: Schweppes
Ad Agency: Publicis Mojo and @RadicalMedia

Why it works: A love story with few words, Signs compels you to watch until its poignant end. It conclusively dispels the myth that viral video executions must be short and gimmicky to grab your attention.

3. Piano Stairs

Advertiser: Volkswagen
Ad Agency: DDB Stockholm

Why it works: “Take the stairs instead of the escalator and feel better” is something we hear but didn’t often see until this sly video from Volkswagen appeared on the Web. It’s part of an inspiring campaign, The Fun Theory, that encourages people to come up with fun ways to “do good.” The video itself did well indeed, imbuing Volkswagen with a fun new ethos and racking up millions of views in the process.

4. BooneOakley.com

Advertiser: Boone Oakley
Ad Agency: Boone Oakley

Why it works: Boone Oakley, an ad agency from Charlotte, North Carolina, uses an interactive YouTube video to tell its story and showcase client work. Audacious and attention-getting, it puts the young company on the short list of ad agencies who get it.

5. Hosting Your Party

Advertiser: Microsoft
Ad Agency: N/A

Why it works: This is the ultimate anti-viral: a video that generates millions of views simply because of how profoundly it misses the mark. Comments have been disabled, but all you have to do is talk to someone you know who’s watched it to know why it was so generously passed around.

6. YouTube HD Camera Trick Challenge

Advertiser: Samsung
Ad Agency: Viral Factory

Why it works: One cunning way to get people talking about and sharing your video is to make them wonder how you shot it in the first place. Samsung went to great lengths to protect the “trick” in the video for their new HD camera phone, which got tech geeks riled up to try solving the puzzle. Geeks happen to be the audience most likely to buy the HD new camera phone, which is why this video makes our Top 10.

7. United Breaks Guitars

Advertiser: Dave Carroll
Ad Agency: N/A

Why it works: A traumatic experience for one flyer becomes a public relations disaster for United Airlines, when musician Dave Carroll uses a YouTube video to vent frustrations after his guitar is damaged at Chicago O’Hare airport. The takeaway: Viral video is a wonderful tool for consumer advocacy because chances are you’re not the only one who is upset. In this case, United was inundated with additional complaints after United Breaks Guitars.

8. All the Single Babies

Advertiser: singlebabies.com
Ad Agency: User Generated

Why it works: The huge popularity of this video, a baby dancing to a Beyonce (

) song, is channeling ad revenue and donations into his college fund. This quick reaction to a YouTube hit shows us the toddler’s dad has moves of his own — something sluggish advertisers can learn from.

9. Guy Catches Laptop with His Butt

Advertiser: MSI Computers
Ad Agency: N/A

Why it works: In much the way Airplane parodies disaster films, this cheeseball video spoofs last year’s viral video hit Ray-Ban’s Guy Catches Glasses with Face. The inside joke is why we picked the video for this year’s Top 10. If you’re not on the web, you don’t get it. But for the millions who saw Ray-Ban’s video, it’s a wink and a nod, and an ironic sign that the viral video medium is maturing (or not).

10. JK Wedding Dance

Advertiser: Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz
Ad Agency: N/A

Why it works: A couple’s wedding entourage dances down the aisle to Chris Brown’s (

) song “Forever,” springboarding this video into viral history (at least for ‘09). Instead of stripping the video of its music — something copyright owners are permitted to do on YouTube — Sony used its popularity to sell more Chris Brown albums

Posted via web from drnoor’s posterous

Jessica Faye Carter is an award-winning author and columnist. Her company, Nette Media develops social media technologies for women and multicultural communities, and she blogs at Technicultr.

The expression of community has changed considerably since the emergence of social media technologies, but its basic foundation — the notion of individuals exchanging information, ideas, and opinions — remains firmly intact. Today, one of the most widely-used tools in developing these types of exchanges online is WordPress, the popular blogging and publishing platform. Part of its appeal is the ease with which users can build advanced functionality into their sites with plugins. If you’re interested in building a community around your site, there are plenty of third-party add-ons that can help create one.

These 10 WordPress plugins add features that will help you to engage your user base.

Highlight Your Best Content

1. Featured Content Gallery – If you’re not an expert in programming or design, Featured Content Gallery makes it easy to highlight images, posts, or pages anywhere on your site. It comes with a sleek and contemporary design that is fully customizable through the WordPress dashboard, so that you can integrate your highlighted content seamlessly with the rest of your site.

2. Popularity Contest – Your users will want to know what’s popular and interesting to their peers in the community and the Popularity Contest Plugin can help. It keeps track of the most popular posts and pages on your site and acts as a leaderboard that directs users to the most active content in your community. You can customize the point values assigned to user actions on the site, such as comments or views, and display the results easily in a widgetized-sidebar.

Facilitate User Engagement

3. Viper’s Video Quicktags – Including video in your community is easy using Viper’s Video Quicktags. Just enter the URL of the video in the prompt box and see a preview of the video right on your screen. Then specify the dimensions and other customizations you’d like to add and see your final product before saving it into your post. Supported video sites include YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo and others.

4. WPtouch – Part of keeping the community vibrant means letting your users take it with them. You can go mobile with your community using WPtouch and avoid building a mobile website or the costs of developing an iPhone application. You can control the mobile user interface by allowing the browser to automatically route users to the interface of your choosing — your site or the WPtouch interface, which looks similar to an iPhone app. You can also show or hide post excerpts and customize the icons and general appearance of your mobile site.

5. Disqus Comment System – Nothing stops a potential commenter in their tracks faster than having to set up a user ID and password in order to leave a message on your site. At the same time, most of us would like some sort of authentication process we can use to identify and correspond with other users as we develop our communities. The Disqus Comment System allows users to engage with your site using their Twitter, Disqus, Facebook, OpenID or selected other accounts. This prevents users from having to set up new accounts while allowing for authentication. Bonus: the Reactions feature allows you to include the social component of user feedback into your comments.

6. Customize Your Community – Customize Your Community (CYC) provides some useful options for those building communities in WordPress. It allows you to re-brand the WordPress pages for registration, logging in/out, and lost passwords, as well as the user profile pages. In addition to giving your community a standardized look and feel, CYC helps with a long-standing navigational issue in WordPress: it automatically directs “subscribers” to their profiles and bypasses the WP backend entirely.

Measure on the Fly

7. Clicky

– While Google Analytics provides you with a long-term perspective on your site metrics, Clicky gives you instantaneous feedback. The dashboard includes traditional site metrics, but also offers cool features, like “Spy”, which pinpoints the location of current visitors on a map. It’s an easy way to get a snapshot of your site’s current activity and, in conjunction with Google Analytics, gives you a comprehensive overview of your site’s activity.

Improve User Navigation

8. Breadcrumb NavXT – Your users aren’t exactly Hansel and Gretel, but they still may occasionally need help navigating your site, particularly if it’s content-heavy. Breadcrumbs are usually located just below a site’s primary navigation system and look something like this:

Home » Dance Music » Saint Etienne » Method of Modern Love

Breadcrumb NavXT, the successor to Breadcrumb Navigation XT, improves your site’s navigation by building this kind of virtual breadcrumb trail for your users to follow. This way, users will know where they’re located on your site. This plugin may require customization, depending on your theme; check out the Advanced Options section of the plugin’s homepage for additional instructions.

Monetize It!

9. Advertising Manager – If you were previously using the Adsense Manager plugin, you’ve probably noticed that it hasn’t been updated in a while. That’s because it has been succeeded by Advertising Manager, which is recommended unless you are using WordPress version 2.5 or earlier. The renamed version supports a broader group of ad networks in addition to Google AdSense, such as Adify, AdBrite, and several others. It also imports your AdSense Manager settings, for users of the previous plugin.

10. WP125 – Do you prefer a more hands-on management style for your advertising? WP125 allows you to do everything from arranging the ad display so that it fits your site design to setting timelines for ads (they can be removed automatically or manually at expiration). It also provides a placeholder for empty ad space, which you can switch to your own customized version.

Do you have another plugin that’s been helpful to you in building your community? Share your favorites in the comments below.

(via Mashable)

Posted via web from drnoor’s posterous

By Jason Falls
Published November 10, 2009

You’ve probably heard people talking about social media monitoring. It’s wise to listen to conversations before you participate in them. Social media monitoring allows you to do just that.

But many brand and marketing managers responsible for social media don’t quite understand what social media monitoring is and why it’s important. Here’s a quick primer:

Social Media Monitoring Is Listening

Listening to online conversations is technically done without ears. Using search engine technology, social media monitoring tools scan the Internet looking for documents that contain keywords you select. They return those results in some sort of order that allows you to see where people have mentioned your brand, company, product or whatever you specified.

Seeing these results reveal which websites or blogs you should visit to either see what people are saying about you or actually participate in those conversations. Without monitoring, the conversations are happening without your knowledge.

Social Media Monitoring Can Be Free

The easiest way to start monitoring social media is to sign up for some free tools and services. Google Alerts allows you to search for a word or phrase just as you would in a regular search, and then notifies you when something new pops up on the web with that search term. You can subscribe to email updates of the new search results or add them to your RSS subscriptions. (If you don’t know what RSS is, watch “RSS in Plain English,” a video from CommonCraft.)

You can also search for your company or product name on Twitter to see real-time conversations that include mentions or discussions of your brand. Add Technorati to the list and your monitoring will cover the majority of blogs as well.

Paid Social Media Monitoring Solutions Are Often Worth the Investment

The one drawback to the free monitoring solutions is that manual work will be required to quantify the results for your executives or report your findings. Paid social media monitoring services like Radian6, Scout Labs and Techrigy pull all those conversations together into an organized, web-based dashboard and allow you to pull charts and graphs that explain the information with very little work on your part.

One big benefit to many (but not all) of the paid solutions is their ability to analyze sentiment and tone of the conversations through fancy computer algorithms using natural language processing. What this means is that you can log in to your service, see that there were 250 conversations mentioning your brand this week, and of those, 83 percent were positive, 10 percent were negative and the other 7 percent were neutral.

Paid monitoring solutions offer dashboard experiences like this one from Radian6 which makes monitoring your brand easier

Monitoring Is Only the First Step

Finding and cataloging the online conversations about your company is just the tip of the iceberg in social media monitoring. Once you know where conversations are taking place and what is being said about your company, you can then participate in the conversation. This is critically important for companies because today’s web-savvy consumer requires direct access to the people behind the products and services they buy or shop for.

Let’s say you find a customer upset about the service she received at your place of business earlier today. Letting the individual mouth off to her friends who have a natural predisposition to either agree or jump on the bandwagon of hate only guarantees your company will be thought of negatively by those involved in the conversation. However, social media case studies show time and time again that entering into similar conversations with a simple, “I’m sorry you had a bad experience. What can I do to help?” shows the disgruntled fan—and her bandwagon-jumping friends—that you’re truly interested in improving the situation. The customer response is almost always something like, “Wow. I didn’t know you were listening. Thanks for offering.”

Smart Monitoring Can Build Your Business

Please don’t think that social media monitoring is limited to mitigating online detractors. By analyzing the conversations around not just your company, but also your industry or even competitors, you can gain a significant market advantage and actually drive business.

Let’s say you’re monitoring mentions of your nearest competitor and uncover a trend that people are complaining that their product (say, a coffeepot) is great but not durable. You then change your advertising campaign to trumpet the fact your coffeepot lasts three times longer than the competitor’s.

For another example, suppose you have a national product that has inconsistent sales patterns from region to region. Your social media monitoring shows you what people in the Pacific Northwest say are the best and worst qualities of your product, but the answers are different in the South. This consumer intelligence helps you better market your product based on geographic and cultural specifics which can be the difference in customers choosing you or your competition.

Last but not least, sophisticated monitoring can even reveal individual customers who are at the point of making a purchase decision, enabling you to reach out and help them make a connection to your product at the absolute perfect time.

What Are You Waiting For?

Now that you have an idea of what social media monitoring is and what it can do for you, dive in. Start a Google Alert for your company or product. Add one for some general industry terms your customers might use when discussing your category. Add one for each of your competitors. As you feel comfortable, add Twitter and Technorati searches, then branch out and start exploring other social media monitoring tools. At the very least, you’ll have a better idea of what people are saying about you.

What social media monitoring tools are you using? What are your thoughts?  Please leave a comment below.

Posted via web from drnoor’s posterous

The explosion of social networking sites over the past decade has facilitated a transformation in the way we communicate with each other. Here we look at some of these communities with over 1 million users, both active and defunct.

(via: Focus.com)

Social Media Examiner
is a free online magazine designed to help businesses discover how to
best use social media tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to find
leads, increase sales and generate more brand awareness (via: Inspired Magazine)

Brand interaction with consumers via new media has gone from a nice-to-have to a need-to-have over the years, a development supported by research from Cone.

More than one-half of new media users (53%) believe brands should have a presence in new media, interacting with consumers as needed or by request only, while a further 36% demand a new media presence with regular interaction.

(Via: eMarketer)

#1. Ego

1. Ask yourself: Does this feature increase the users self-worth or stoke the ego?
2. If a user is contributing to my system, what emotional rewards do they walk away with? What (visible) rewards will they receive?

#2. Simplicity

1. Stop over building features
2. Pick 2-3 things to focus on
3. Ask yourself: Is there anything I can take out of this feature?

#3. Build & Release

1. Stop thinking you understand your users
2. Learn from what they’re actually doing on your site, not what you think they’ll do
3. Decide on what you’re going to build… and build it (avoid analysis paralysis)
4. Build, release, iterate, and repeat

#4. Hack The Press

1. Invite only system (Pownce, Digg v3)
2. Talk to the junior bloggers
3. Attend parties for events you can’t afford – network w/influencers, bring a demo

#5. Connect with your community

1. Start a podcast (it’s OK if not everyone listens)
2. Throw a launch party, then yearly/quarterly events – invite the press/influencers personally – don’t tell the bar
3. Engage w/the community, be an active participant your own ecosystem

#6. Advisors

1. What technical problems are you going to have?
2. Advisors can be helpful in a whole slew of areas (marketing/hiring/bizdev)
3. Stock compensation, typically not a board seat, solid advisors help during fund raising

#7. Leverage your userbase to spread the word

#8. Does your product provide value for 3rd party sites?

#9. Analyze your traffic

1. Install Google analytics
2. Entrance sources (search?)
3. Paths through site
4. Top exit pages

(Read more at: Carsonified)

Billboards. You’ve heard of them. You’ve probably created for them or crafted a media plan including them. You’ve driven by them. You’ve chuckled at the cheesiness of some of them and appreciated the brilliance of others.

Sadly, no one talks about billboards any longer. But they’re still out there and they still work. So why are we talking about the lowly billboard today? Social media, of course. After all, social media is the only thing anyone cares about these days, right?

So, without surprise, it’s big news when a billboard is used to promote a Facebook page which is exactly what Northern Wisconson’s Forest County Chamber of Commerce recently did.

Located just south of Lakewood on HWY 32, travelers from Milwaukee and Chicago heading north will see the board which carries an invitation from the Crandon Chamber to “Become a friend of Crandon” on Facebook.

Old school media begs for new school media participation. Gotta love the irony of this one.

(via: Adrants)