Grapevine Consulting

The Blog Herald reports on Trackur a new tool to help you manage your online reputation. The atricle ponders whether the cost, at $88 p/m, is a little prohibitive but if it does what it’s meant to I don’t think that’s too much of an issue.

I checked out the demo and the first thing that struck me was that there was no way of seeing at a glance whether you or your product were being spoken about in reverential tones or if a blogger is ‘about to flush [your reputation] down the toilet’ to quote the slightly odd text on the website.

While the tool itself seems to look well put together, easy to use and good at filtering results, if you’re seriously monitoring online reputation, especially on a large scale, this ability to get a feel for the trends of online coverage is important. The demo highlights this by performing a search for Google which returns over 2000 results for one day alone. How are you supposed to cut through all the “so, I did a quick Google search” mentions and find out if any issues are building without reading all of those entries?

I know this technology is not easy to create or 100% accurate but I’ve seen this type of tone indicator in practise with Attentio’s social media monitoring tool and it’s hard to imagine not having that capability.

With this Friday the traditional date for women to ask men to get engaged I took a look at the recent ‘pay-for-engagement’ models, announced by Microsoft and VideoEgg, where advertisers pay based on reader response to an ad (tenuous I know, but just go with it).

While it’s good to see developing technology which continues to delve into consumer behaviour online and prove the value of online advertising (e.g. see an ad for a travel agent, book a holiday with that travel agent a week later) I still feel introducing this model isn’t dealing with a major issue when it comes to online advertising - why is online advertising not as valuable as traditional advertising?

I may be over-simplifying the situation but I still can’t fathom why an advertiser is happy to pay for brand exposure via a billboard consumers walk past but not necessarily a website where it will be virtually “walked past”.

Online advertising campaigns already have quite stringent metrics relating to response e.g. watching a video, click through to the site, register etc. But it also has some other tricks over the billboard. For example the ability to do demographic targeting means that the advertiser is only paying for the ad to be seen by their ideal audience. Billboards tend to cost a lot of money due to the volume of people who will see them but how many of them are likely to be target consumers for the advertiser?

The Microsoft advertising model will show advertisers a great deal of value in their ad spend - so could we expect that this advertising would then be charged at a premium rate if the model proves itself?

Any thoughts on why online advertising won’t be taken seriously very welcome here.

This post over on Attentio raises a subject close to my heart, online forums are fantastic pre-exsiting communities which are discussing and dissecting the latest products every day.

As I’ve said before blogging is not the start and finish of a good new media campaign. Forums offer some fantastic opportunities to get direct-from-consumer feedback, if you’re confident enough that a product can stand up to debate.

All forum activity needs to be carefully undertaken though and comes with a Health Warning: You can’t just parachute in to a community and start bugging them. In addition, they don’t take kindly to fake posts so be transparent!

Anne Hunter, VP Strategic Advertising Solutions at AOL, has shared her knowledge in creating succesful online media plans at iMedia Connection. It makes interesting reading based on the fact that she has 12 years experience in interactive advertising. As with PR, some media agencies are still coming to grips with new media advertising.

Here’s some of the recommendations:

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This is an interesting set of figures on video viewership in the first month on YouTube from Data Mining.

In the first month on YouTube

• 70% of videos get at least 20 views
• 50% of videos get at least 100 views
• Fewer than 20% of videos get more than 500 views
• Fewer than 10% of videos get more than 1, 500 views
• 3% of videos get more than 25, 000 views
• Around 1% of videos get more than 500, 000 views

See after the jump for how it looks in a chart but basically the average video should expect between 20 and 100 views.

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