To promote Cellcom’s First Love branded content project of 150 Israeli teenagers’ love stories, McCann Erickson, Tel Aviv, commandeers the URL address bar on participating websites. Visitors to these sites could view short love letters right inside the browser’s address bar which in turn led them to the First Love website simply by pressing enter. From a tech POV, this is kinda cool. From a marketing POV, it effectively raised Cellcom above the banner ad din and yielded a 1.86% Click Through Rate (CTR), 37 times higher than the average CTR in Israel. My only real issue is this “refreshing” of the URL clogs up the browser’s history rendering the back button useless.

This is the complementary slideshow to my 10 minute presentation on Facebook basics I gave at a small business networking group (BNI) in Stamford. It is actually an “encore” presentation to one given earlier in the year about Facebook advertising ROI. Despite Facebook’s latest boast of having over 750 million active users worldwide, many small businesses are simply overwhelmed with all the social media hype. So this presentation focuses on just getting started with the current Facebook. Feel free to share and download.

Shortly after we launched the CONNECT Computer website, we were asked to design, write, and manage a monthly newsletter for ongoing client communications as well as provide useful insight into the IT industry for those who opt-in (via website, email blasts, and social media channels). After some A-B testing, this design layout below proved to be the most engaging for CONNECT’s subscribers. On average we see 18% to 24% click throughs to full stories residing on the website.

Baby Inside is the follow up to Evian’s hugely successful Roller Babies video that not only went viral but was inducted into the Guinness World Records as the Most Viewed Online Video Advertisement (over 25 million as of 8/19/09).

Both videos are part of the integrated Live Young campaign created by BETC Euro RSCG, Paris. It includes print ads, TV commercials, and social media.

Watch the video above (best to keep your eye on the T-shirt to get the full effect of the dancing baby) and then participate by adding your own video clip to Evian’s “longest music video” at Let’s Baby Dance microsite (or via an iPhone App). I did.

Here is the SlideShare from a 10 minute presentation on Facebook advertising I gave at last week’s BNI meeting. Feel free to share and download.

If you haven’t heard by now Twitter is a microblogging social network and a great way drive qualified leads to your website. In addition to the obvious social media benefits (a topic for another blog post), our clients consistently witness referral rates upwards of 6% per month from Twitter! Moreover, we often see that these referrals on average view more pages and spend more time per visit than those coming from other sources. Leveraging Twitter’s demo and  geographics in a site tracking tool like Google Analytics, you can  effectively qualify each referral and do more of the type of tweets generating the desired behavior (e.g. read a blog post, download whitepaper, fill out contact form, buy products).

I will do a follow up post about Twitter ROI later but for now, here are some helpful tips on Twitter marketing you can start using today.

Tweet Best Practices

• Schedule tweets several times every business day between 6am and 1pm. Statistically, this is the time most business people check Twitter.
• Tweets should be something useful. Most people are looking for information. Repetition is okay but it should be paraphrased so not to look automated.
• 1 in every 10 tweets can be promotional in nature. We want to encourage following and retweets. Too many promotional tweets too often and this won’t happen.
• Use #hashtags relevant to the tweets or business (e.g. #tech or #business). Try to use them in the body text of your tweets to conserve on your 140 characters.
• Try to keep tweets to 120 characters so people can easily retweet without truncating the original text.
• If tweet is a call to action, be sure to add a shortlink back to the site (or source). In a pinch, can use services like bit.ly or ow.ly to shorten URLs.

Things to Tweet About

• News about your business or organization, including your own success stories.
• News from reliable sources like a partner’s blog.
• News about your employees or staff (e.g. the company’s softball team wins).
• Retweets of anything that might interesting to your followers.
• TwitPic and TwitVid (or YouTube or eHow or HowCast).
• Special offers just for Twitter followers (get more followers).

To manage Twitter as well as all your other social channels from the comfort of your desktop or mobile device, I recommend either TweetDeck or  Hootsuite. Both are free, easy to learn, and easy to use. Great for organizing your tweets as well as your follows and followers.

Social media moves fast so would love to hear about your experiences with Twitter. What tweets have worked for you? Have a Twitter campaign going on right now you want to share?

Our client CONNECT Computer was running a year-end promotion in partnership with HP: Get a $15 Gift Card of your choice when you purchase two of the same HP LaserJet Toners. The offer expired December 31st, 2010.

We did the typical stuff like email blasts and updating social channels but given the short notice and the fact that CONNECT’s social channels were too new (we had only recently launched the website) to have yet accumulated enough “social” capital, we needed something else… and fast!

The answer was a splash page specific to the Gift Card offer and leveraging social browsing communities like StumbleUpon to drive targeted visitors to it.

The idea behind a splash page is that it is a standalone page with a singular purpose, in this case the Gift Card. There is no navigation, no extraneous copy, and one call-to-action. More importantly, it can be done quickly and cheaply.

Since the Gift Card offer expired at midnight on 12/31 we decided to create a peaceful winter scene, replete with animated snowflakes, displaying a countdown to 2011 (instant value add BTW). Both the snowflakes and the countdown were done using jQuery so the page worked even on iPads and iPhones!

Social browsing took place over the last 5 days of the year. Yes, only 5 days! Personally, would have liked to have had 3 weeks for a campaign like this but we played the hand we were dealt. We still witnessed a 33.21% jump of visits to the Gift Card page and several sign ups. I suspect we would have seen even higher numbers if the campaign started before the holiday rush (i.e. end of November instead of December).

The offer is over but you can still see the splash page here.

Commissioned by NYC marketing company Moss Appeal to develop branded content for DirecTV Ad Sales team’s social media  initiative, which included a Twitter page, a Facebook page (with two custom apps), and this interactive DirecTV Perfect Match Game that utilized video outtakes from DirecTV’s popular programming.

The game also featured a Bobble Yourself viral marketing component where participants could upload a photo to create their own bobblehead with a personalized URL that featured them on the game’s microsite. This created greater engagement and encouraged more sharing through email and social media.