Digital Marketing Blog

Who Does Search and Social Media Data Say Will Go Home Tonight?

Share

 

American Idol Season 9 is quickly coming to a close. With only 3 contestants left, the competition is growing in intensity. On last night's show the final 3 contestants sang 2 solos a piece, one of which the contestants chose and one that the judges chose for them.

Lee DeWyze sang "Simple Man" and "Hallelujah"

Crystal Bowersox sang "Maybe I'm Amazed" and "Come to My Window"

Casey James sang "Daughters" and "OK, It's Alright With Me"

The judges praised Lee's performance of "Simple Man" and gave Crystal mostly positive remarks for her performance of "Come to My Window," but they were not impressed with Casey's rendition of "OK, It's Alright With Me."

Again this week we looked at social media and search data to determine who we believe will be going home tonight. Who do you think will make it to the finale?

If you have been keeping up with Season 9 please share your thoughts by commenting below. But before you do, check out the facts from search and social media data that we have gathered below.

 It looks like though Crystal was the clear front runner in the beginning of the season, Lee has been gaining momentum in recent weeks. Casey is clearly falling behind in popularity and will likely be the contestant to go home tonight.

According to a Tweet from Access Hollywood, Lee and Crystal are taking the lead:

 **If you are a new reader to ymarketing's American Idol Prediction Project, check out our past blogs to understand how our Idol Prediction Project works, and how it led to the correct upset prediction of Kris Allen over Adam Lambert in 2009.

American Idol: Who Will Be Eliminated Tonight? Let’s Ask Twitter and YouTube

Share

 

With only 4 contestants remaining we’re nearing the end of American Idol Season 9.  On last night’s episode (5.11.2010), Grammy and Academy Award winner Jamie Foxx returned as a guest mentor to help the final four prepare to sing hit songs from popular movies.  Each contestant sang a solo and a duet.  The judges were unimpressed with the solos but gave rave reviews for the duets.

The four finalists include: Crystal Bowersox, Lee DeWyze, Casey James, and Michael Lynche.

Who do you think will be eliminated tonight? We want to hear from you!  If you have been following American Idol Season 9, please comment below and tell us who you think is going to be the next American Idol. But before you do, check out the facts we have gathered from our search engine and social media data.

Celebrity Twitter Endorsements:

Justin Bieber recently tweeted about how amazing one of Crystal’s performances was.

Alex Lambert, a former contestant, showed his support for Lee calling him the “next idol.”

Lindsey Lohan showed her support for Casey by simply calling him “American Idol.”

Momentum is building in Twitter and YouTube

The most compelling numbers lay within Twitter and YouTube.  While Crystal was the front runner for weeks, Lee seems to be catching momentum; making this somewhat of a 2 horse race.  Casey comes in behind both in sheer search and social media numbers but Michael seems to be trailing them all.  If the momentum continues Lee DeWyze just may take the coveted title of American Idol over season-long frontrunner Crystal Bowersox.
What do you think?  Will our actually predict the outcome of American Idol Season 9? 

**If you are a new reader to ymarketing's American Idol Prediction Project, check out our past blogs to understand how our Idol Prediction Project works, and how it led to the correct upset prediction of Kris Allen over Adam Lambert in 2009. 

Can Google & Twitter Continue to Predict Who Will Be Voted Off American Idol?

Share

 

And then there were 6...

As the 2010 Season of American Idol comes to a close there is no shortage of speculation as to who will take the coveted title of American Idol 2010. On Tuesday night's episode (4/27/2010), the contestants each sang a Shania Twain song and America then voted for their favorite performers. The votes are now in and the top 5 will be revealed tonight.

If you have been keeping up with American Idol Season 9, please tell us who you think will be eliminated this week by commenting below. But before you do, check out the facts we gathered below.

NOTE: If you are a new reader to ymarketing's American Idol Prediction Project please check out our past blogs to understand our Idol Prediction Project works, and how it led to the correct upset prediction of Kris Allen over Adam Lambert in 2009.

What the data tells us about tonight:

After reviewing our search and social media indicators it appears that tonight Crystal and Lee will safely make it into the top 5. Michael and Aaron, on the other hand, are most likely to be in the bottom three; leaving a toss-up between Casey and Siobhan for the remaining spot in the bottom 3.

What is Twitter telling us?

AC Television said:
@AC_TV: People Get Ready Crystal Bowersox; Best American Idol Performance of All Time: Review on... http://bit.ly/9bNJZR

According to the Adam Lambert fan site:
@_adam_lambert_ Why Lee Dewyze Will Win 'American Idol': Crystal Bowersox might be the front-runner, but so was Adam Lambert... http://bit.ly/c25LgE

What do you think?

Agree or disagree with our data? What other data points would you like us to explore? Post your comment below and together we'll track how American Idol Season 10 plays out.

Put the Prediction Team to work for you

If we can use search and social media data to predict the results of American Idol, imagine what we can do to predict trends in your industry. Contact us today to find out how we can help you improve your presence online through search and social media.  

The New ROI of SEO and Social Media | ymarketing

Share

 

In poll and after poll of marketers and business decision makers alike, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes out on top or near the top in terms of ROI. But how do we really know? How does an organization measure the ROI of an SEO initiative? And with mounting evidence of the impact Social Media has on Search Marketing, how do we measure the ROI of Social Media initiatives?

ymarketing conducted extensive research on the web from July to October of 2009 looking for the definitive answer for Return On Investment from SEO and Social Media (looking for ROI calculators, case studies and other research) and, aside from a bevy of polls citing the high ROI value of SEO, were surprised to find that there seem to be no great standards or agreed upon methodologies.

TopRank poll on the top digital marketing tactics in 2009

Your Input Sought

In the first of a series on the topic, we'll share some of the evidence we uncovered and invite readers to contribute their own innovative ideas, experience and evidence that they've found. If you'd like to participate, leave a comment below and add it to the discussion.

What's Coming Up

In part 2 of the series we'll cover the traditional methods that SEO practitioners use - ranked keyword lists and other forms of measurements that, by today's real-time web standards, look pretty crude and unscientific. We'll also de-mystify the confusion around ROI and ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend) and evaluate if there is a meaningful distinction between the two.

SEMPO Study on top three marketing tactics for 2009

In part 3 of the series we'll delve into solutions: new methodologies, tools and solutions companies are using to track, measure and quantify the value of their SEO initiatives, including exploring a topic we like to call organic keyword monetization.

Because of the tight partnership between Social Media and Organic Search, a part of this discussion will be focused on exploring a topic raised by David Spark in an article "Social media success doesn't start with ROI" which highlights the troubles in using old media metrics in a new media world.

There is consensus about the value of SEO... but how do we measure it in our own businesses?

6 Ways Businesses Must Leverage LinkedIn | ymarketing

Share

 

LinkedIn has quietly posted some very impressive numbers once again.

Sure, Twitter gets all the media attention, but it's warranted given its explosive 802% year-over-year growth. But LinkedIn's 89% YOY numbers look remarkable when compared to anything but Twitter or Facebook. But look deeper at the numbers and you'll find that LinkedIn actually grew 6Xs faster than Twitter in August, and 4.5Xs faster in July, according to compete.com

Consider LinkedIn's vitals (as of August 2009):

• 27 million total users
• 14.2 million users in August 2009
• Representing all 500 of the Fortune 500 (how many companies can say that?)
• Average stay: Over 7.3 minutes per visit
• Visits per person, per month: Over 3.7
• Pages per visit: Over 13

• Rank: #67 among all websites (ahead of USA Today, Southwest Airlines, HP, Wells Fargo, TicketMaster, Priceline and MLB.com mid-summer)

But this isn't meant to be one more blog raving about LinkedIn's interconnected networking prowess. What we're looking at is LinkedIn's power to elevate your business for free; specifically to lend search equity from LinkedIn's mighty vault into your company website's SEO account.

Here are six (6) ideas you can implement to improve your website's search equity leveraging LinkedIn:

1. Company Page

Within LinkedIn your company page serves as a "cliff notes" version of your website and as a valuable "peek inside your company" as it will contain links to the individual LinkedIn profiles of each of your team members who has associated their individual profile with the company's. This serves you well as long as the page is kept up-to-date and as long as individual members keep their profiles in good shape. We recommend businesses ask all key employees to setup profiles, keep them up to date, and associate them with company page.

2. Anchor Text

Nearly every LinkedIn user knows they can include their company website (example shown), but the common setting does not give your company's site as much value as it can. By selecting "Other" instead of "My Company" you can use descriptive text, keywords that describe your business. After all, you don't want your website to be found for the term "My Company", do you?

The way to really leverage this idea is to get everyone in your company using the same keywords, the same descriptive text. This works because of the inherent Search Equity that LinkedIn has earned (and passes each time it links to your site) and because of the extra value search engines place on keywords placed within anchor text (the descriptive text that contains a hyper link).

3. Join a group, Create a Group

As our good friend from Hubspot Pete Caputa says so well, "LinkedIn Groups are an amazing opportunity to build an opt-in email list quickly. (Almost like the early days - late 90s - of email list building.) If you're into internet marketing... you should join the HubSpot Pro Marketers list." (nice plug, Pete!)

"You should also start your own group about a topic related to your business, which would interest your target prospects," Caputa notes. "LinkedIn Groups spread quite virally throughout LinkedIn because group badges automatically display on members' profiles. Once your list is built, you can gently promote your educational content, blog, etc. For example, if you sell software to accountants, create an 'All Star Accountants' group or something along those lines."

4. LinkedIn Answers

Answer a question and your connections will see it in their Network Updates feed. LinkedIn rewards quality; you will gain expertise points when the person asking the question votes your answer as the "best answer".

5. Network Updates

These are the LinkedIn equivalent of your Facebook Status update, or your latest update on Twitter, and they tell your entire network what you're up to. This is a great place to let people know of your latest blog post.

6. Direct Advertising

While the minimum advertising level used to be $50,000 a month, LinkedIn has followed Facebook's lead and rolled out an innovative new advertising platform they call "Direct Ads" that, at a $50 minimum and a pay-per-action / pay-per-click model, is affordable to a much broader array of businesses.


Ads are simple to create, targeting is powerful and relatively simple, and the scale and access to high profile decision makers is unparalleled on any network.

We've been running these paid campaigns on LinkedIn and Facebook for our clients and have developed a testing strategy that works. With the right strategy and attention, you should be able to recognize results from your paid social network efforts as well.

Feedback
What do you think? How are you utilizing LinkedIn in your business? Do you have some great ideas we missed? We'd love to hear from you and add to this list...

Why Businesses Must Blog | ymarketing

Share

 

As I talk about the virtues of social media marketing and blogging in particular, with business owners from 20-person companies to marketing executives representing Fortune 1000 enterprises, I frequently encounter the same objections when it comes to Business Blogging:

• "I just don't get it. How would blogging possibly help us reach our business goals?"

• "Blogging is fine for other people, but we're serious about driving our business forward and need to spend our time marketing."

• "Who has time to blog unless they're unemployed?"

And just recently I heard my favorite objection yet:

• "Don't some people blog when just a simple tweet would do?" (a hip reference to Twitter and its 140-character limit and a shot directed at the long-windedness of some bloggers, all rolled into one!)

All of these are legitimate questions and objections (and they all have equally legitimate answers, hopefully answered in this post).

Businesses that don't invest in blogging are losing out on a huge opportunity. 

Here are the top six (6) reasons Why Businesses Must Blog, in order to thrive in 2009 and beyond, in order of importance:

1. Increase Search Equity. Search Engines crawlers (affectionately known as "spiders") scour the internet for food daily; their favorite meals consist of text, headlines (H1 tags), meta data, page titles and links with descriptive anchor text. Well-crafted blogs are a virtual feast. The search engines behind these spiders don't really care if a newly discovered page is a blog or a regular web page; what they're particularly interested in is new, unique, well-crafted content. Blog posts between 200-400 words with good use of headlines, descriptive anchor text and relevant keywords are a virtual Olive Garden to the search engine spiders in a sea of soup kitchens. So the domains these Blogs reside on are rewarded with deposits in their search equity account. If your blog is on your company site (i.e. blog.yourcompanyname.com) then your site benefits and accrues the search equity; if you use a "free" blog site (i.e. yourcompanyname.blogspot.com) then Google or some other webhost gets the benefit. If you need more convincing that using a "free" service is a bad idea for your business, read Top Reasons Why Business Blogs Shouldn't Be On BlogSpot.com.

2. Increase Website Traffic. The clients who we have worked with to setup and properly promote integrated blogs (blog.yourcompanyname.com) have seen their traffic increase between 300% and 2,000%. The effect of these traffic gains - although by itself quite dramatic - is that the number of inbound links multiplies and additional search equity is applied. Since starting our blog (blog.ymarketing.com) we've seen our amount of content pages indexed on Google and Bing triple, and the blog has played a direct role in tripling the number of quality inbound links to ymarketing.com.

3. Increase Search Engine Spider Crawl Frequency. The question of "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it fall" has an application in the world of search: if a website gets updated and no search engine spider comes by to re-index the site, then the change didn't really do your business any good. We've seen clients increase their crawl frequency from monthly to several times a week; I have to attribute this primarily to the addition of an integrated blog, and the results are that changes to the site (i.e. meta data testing, new content pages, news updates, etc.) get indexed nearly immediately, so we can get a read on what changes had a positive impact right away. The whole process of test, read and refine is greatly accelerated.

4. Increase Sharing and Word of Mouth. Have you noticed that people typically don't share product information on Facebook? Not too many people "Digg" company information sheets, right? And most of the Internet population resists the temptation to "bookmark" the "About Us" page on your site. People like to share things that are of interest to them on a personal level, and things they think their peers and friends would be interested in. This is true for B-to-B as well. Blogs make it easy for people to share with others. They give site visitors a reason to connect on an emotional level. In our research we have collected data that proves that referred visitors are between 1.5X and 4X more likely to convert into a qualified lead or new customer than general website traffic, so the financial, rational argument for sharing can be made. When we setup client blogs we include the most popular business sharing tools as buttons to make tweeting, digging and sharing on Facebook and LinkedIn as easy as emailing a friend.

5. Qualify Leads before they ever make contact. I recently experienced this myself. A prospect for our business read a comment that I wrote on someone else's blog, liked the line of thinking of my comment as much if not more than the original author, followed the link I provided back to our blog, read several posts, agreed with our approach and philosophy, then contacted us as a well-read, highly-informed qualified prospect. That is happening more and more, and would not have been possible let alone probable before we started blogging.

6. Build Community. The reason most people think of first ("You blog so that you build a community of like-minded individuals, promote discussion, etc.") is actually my #6 reason Businesses Must Blog. Let's be real: If you're not the size of Microsoft, Cisco or Netflix, the community construction aspect of blogging is going to take a while to fully develop. But it will, as long as you make the decision to start blogging, continue to publish quality content, and invite others to participate in the conversation.

A Word on Blogging Best Practices

The Best Practices of Blogging recommend that you spend equal portions of your time reading the blogs of others, commenting on those other blogs, and crafting your own. So if you can only invest, say, two hours a week to this valuable new pursuit of blogging, be sure you start with 1 half hour into finding and reading other people's blogs of interest to you and your business goals, a half hour or more leaving comments and asking questions on those blogs, and an equal amount of time writing your own posts.

Leaving Blog Bread Crumbs

Taking a cue from would-be social media pioneers Hansel & Gretel... One of the best ways to build a community in the early days of blogging is to include a bread crumb - a link to your blog - every time you read and comment on someone else's relevant post or blog. An example:

"A very interesting and provocative idea about the greening of marketing, Michael. I thought you were absolutely right on your assessment of the topic of how direct mail impacts our environment, but consider this one idea you may have missed: Search is the new direct mail. I've written about this topic at http://blog.ymarketing.com/?Tag=inbound%20marketing and invite you to have a look..."

That way when interested readers see your comment and agree with your point of view or unique insight, they'll follow your link and discover your blog.

What do you think... What did we miss? What are the compelling reasons for business to blog that we neglected to include?