My attention was drawn by a simple commercial:

I think the beauty of Old Spice’s traditional and new media campaign is that the brand isn’t afraid to stay true to its roots, try new things, and push the envelope to capture your attention and ultimately buy their product.  Lets take a look at how Old Spice has been able to capture a large social following and entertain people while selling their product.
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Today’s society is really about more. More bang for your buck, more Twitter followers, more customers, more updates. Unfortunately, the answer to more money, more conversions and more profits isn’t always more. It’s better. Sometimes instead of focusing on casting a wider net and bringing in a small percentage of a large (unlikely to convert) population, you need to focus on a smaller, more appropriate audience. In most cases, you’ll get a better return on your time and effort by cutting down the number of people you pitch or contact, even online.

Proper targeting and segmentation is one of the biggest inefficiencies in marketing and advertising. It is extremely important to increase your customer base while maintaining (or increasing) your rate of conversion. Otherwise, you quickly waste money by expending energy and time on non-profitable consumers. Due to the relative ease of mass social media marketing, many marketers mistake the ability to appeal to the largest audience possible as a necessity. Because, “why not”? The reason is there are costs (even online) of time, effort and resources that add up and could be better spent targeting customers better to increase conversions rather than building up the base that you’re pitching.

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For many, building a website means hours upon hours of drafting up designs and even more time trying to get it all together. Still, one area that few take the time to think about is the website font. While it is important to have a great logo to represent your company, having the right font and font size is just as important as it can play a big role in overall customer experience and most importantly, conversions.

For companies that are in the process of building a website, the font they choose may seem like a simple process, but in fact, it can be quite difficult depending on the presentation and ‘personality’ you want your website to present. (more…)

I love using Whole Foods as a social media case study in my presentations.  Whole Foods is a first-mover that doesn’t wait to see what its competitors are doing; instead, it looks to constantly innovate and embrace new forms of media to build a closer relationship to its consumers.  From a sleek, professional blog, to a useful iPhone app, Whole Foods has noticeably made the effort and succeeded in engaging consumers.

The most impressive feature of Whole Foods’ social media campaign is its use of Facebook.  It not only has a central FB Fan Page where campaigns are run and conversations held, but it also maintains individual FB Fan Pages for individual stores.  Lets dive into the details of what has made the Whole Foods FB Fan Page so successful…

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Over the past couple years I’ve heard a lot of complaints from people saying they don’t know how to properly measure their own social media marketing campaigns. These tend to be smaller companies that eventually decide to just “trust that it’s working”. Big mistake. How do you know that you’re not just wasting your time getting involved with social media? How do you know you can’t be doing something better? Well here are 5 easy steps that anyone can take to measure their own campaigns.

There are dozens of advanced tools you could use to help you with each of these steps (thanks to your votes, we’re developing our own, called Dynamic Insights), but the process and ideas are still the same. Everyone should be measuring the success of their social media efforts, if only for informational purposes. Ignorance is not bliss; it’s irresponsible. (more…)

There was a time when search engines and Flash based websites were the worst of friends. Wherever Flash went, search engines would ignore them, but then something changed. Search engines had a change of heart. Through the help of Google and development by Adobe, Flash and search engines are slowly becoming the best of friends. While Flash still has a ways to go as far as search engine optimization best practices, the fact remains that no longer do website developers and companies have to be afraid of Flash.

The Problems and Solutions

Problem I: Indexing the Invisible

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The team at Viralogy wishes everyone a very happy New Year. To celebrate the start of 2010, we decided to put together a list of New Year’s Resolutions from our team, and share both our personal and professional goals. After having had a successful 2009 full of growth and change (Viralogy Year in Review), we look forward to a prosperous 2010. We wish you all the best, and would love to hear your own New Year’s Resolutions in the comments below.

Yu-kai Chou (Co-Founder & CEO)

Personal Goal: Lose 20 pounds.
Professional Goal: Raise $2M for Viralogy and get to sustaining revenue.

Jun Loayza (Co-Founder & CMO)

Personal Goal: I want to maintain a healthy and happy relationship with my girlfriend Kim Ear. We’ve been together for over two years now and have never spent more than a week away from each other. I have never been a fan of the long distance relationship, but to be honest, Kim is definitely worth it. I know it’s going to take a lot of sacrifices on both our parts to make it work, but I’m confident that Kim and I will be able to stay together throughout my new startup journey in 2010.
Professional Goal: 1. Make a sale of our new analysis product/API during March 2010
2. Get $1,000,000 in funding by June 2010 (more…)