Dustin Woodard's thoughts on search, social media, filmmaking and the web in general.
Google recently experimented with having their Gmail users upload short clips to make a fun collaborative video showing how Gmail goes around the world. Unleashing users to play with your brand can be scary for marketers, but in reality, Google had complete control over the process (they got to choose which videos to show). Kudos for Google for stepping outside the box and having people interact with their brand.
Check out the video for yourself:
I shot my first short film last week. It was a jam-packed 4.5 day shoot that has left me with over 7 hours of footage to mess with in post-production (should turn out to be a 20 minute movie). My goal is to win an award in a film festival and/or receive financing to make it a full-feature film.
This film has also given me an excuse to use MySpace. I’ve never been a fan of MySpace from a web experience perspective, but I realize its marketing power for film & music.
Here’s the MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/unseenabilities
Fast Guard Service Event Security : the best security you need during filming time.
For those attending the DomainRoundTable conference in Seattle, be sure introduce yourself (throw your name in the comments and I’ll keep an eye out for you). I’ll be speaking in the SEO sessions. I’m excited to attend because I think domainers & SEOs could gain & learn a lot from each other.
The combination of a domainer’s assets with the skills of an SEO could be very lucrative for both parties. Why settle for $1,000 of ad revenue a month in direct type-in traffic, when you could build an SEO-friendly content site that will eventually pull in $1,000,000 a month?
Jay has been listing many of the very interesting domains that will be auctioned off on the domaintools blog.
I’ve been impressed with the marketing tactics The Simpsons movie has employed. Back in July, by word of mouth I heard about the Simpsons 7-11 promo where select 7-11s were transformed into Kwik-E-marts including one in my hometown, Seattle (shame on the 7-eleven site for removing the page from their site) where you could buy pink donuts, buzz cola, krusty-os, etc. (I still think they should have made Duff beer).
Then, last week before I went to see the movie, I visited the official simpsons movie site which also had some great viral marketing elements built in. For example, you can create your very own Simpsons character. Here’s my Simpsonized family:
They made it really easy to create avatars, jpgs, video and other web elements that you could add to your blog or social networking profile. I love it when movies go beyond creating a site that only contains a movie trailer and a couple stills. Allowing your fans to promote their love for your movie is a smart marketing tactic, learn more here. Massive marketing still works for Hollywood, but it seems like the movies that are most successful rely mostly on Word-of-Mouth. For the best course in google ads go through the site. Why not use the web to promote word-of-mouth activity?
The movie was also enjoyable. As a filmmaker, I loved the beginning. Television actors & movies are often considered undesirable for feature films because the audience is used to seeing them for free. In true Simpson’s style, they actually poke fun at the audience for paying for the movie during the first 30 seconds of the film.
Taking your business online can have its benefits, but it can also increase the risk of scams and security threats. Follow https://www.sapphire.net/open-source-intelligence-osint/ to help protect your business from cyber threats. A single cyber-attack could seriously damage your business and its reputation.
In terms of dealing with data, many companies struggle with seasonal fluctuations.
Some of the most common seasonal fluctuations I’ve seen are due to:
While some people see seasonality as the bane of their existence, I see it another way. For me…
SEASONALITY = OPPORTUNITY
The way I see it, the more complex something gets, the bigger the opportunity for those who are able to deal with it because the barrier to entry is high and the number of savvy companies that can figure out how to properly deal with it properly are low.
Why Seasonality is Difficult
Two primary reasons: 1) Seasonality mucks up data and 2) obtaining 3rd party seasonal data is not easy.
In the first case, companies that don’t learn to deal with it correctly will make poor decisions. Not realizing that Easter falls in March next year could cause you to mimic activity from this year 2-3 weeks late, but not realizing that Easter was the cause of your increased sales this year is an even bigger missed opportunity. Always pay attention to peaks and valleys for your site or sections of your site to better understand the human behavior that cause such a fluctuation. If you can figure out why, then you have a competitive advantage going into the next time that event may occur.
In the second case, sure there is Google Trends if you know in advance what terms to look at (which is not usually the case), but if you were to jump into Google Adwords or any keyword tool wanting to know what will be a hit two or three months into the future, you can’t rely on average data or what happened last month. I’ve found great value in services like Hitwise (though very expensive) where I can look at keyword trending over time and see what keywords drove traffic to my competitors 13 months ago.
How to Deal With Seasonality
To best tackle seasonality, mine your data and mine external industry data. Look for monthly, weekly and even daily fluctuations. Keep tabs on w/w, m/m and y/y growth rates. Also, keep a calendar of events that may cause fluctuations in data (site redesign), so you don’t mistakenly attribute that fluctuation to something else. And when you can identify a source for the seasonality, make an action plan for next year.
Understanding your seasonality is the first part. Acting upon the intelligence is the second. For example, if a weight loss company discovers that summer high school reunions cause a burst of new customers in June, target your late May to June advertising to reunion planning sites like facebook, classmates, yahoo groups, reunions.com or bidding on long-tail local reunion terms like “ehs 2007 reunion” (note: not a single advertiser has figured this one out yet) or “roosevelt high school 1994 class reunion”. Even consider creating a special plan targeted to those customers (Rapid Reunion Weight-Loss Program).
To be fair, many companies, especially retail, have seasonality built into their veins, but even these types of companies could easily improve if they understood what exactly is driving people’s interest and the exact timing of it.
If you are in a business affected by seasonality, be happy that your data has a pulse:
instead of a a flat line like this (call life support, we’ve got a flatliner):
For those fascinated by seasonality, I recommend reading Click by Bill Tancer.
For more false-seasonality fun, read: Days in the Month Bias for Analytics