Unless you happen to be fluent in the plethora of programming languages needed to develop for each of the main mobile contenders (or have recently developed the means to clone yourself) then you have certainly faced this problem. Luckily for us mere mortals there has been great advancements in the world of cross platform development.

Platforms like Appcelerator’s Titanium, PhoneGap, and Corona (to name a few) allow coders to develop a single code base that can be deployed to almost all of the current mobile operating systems. Here is a quick overview of some of the big players currently vying for your attention, download, and development.

PhoneGap

PhoneGap is a platform that utilizes technologies web developers already know and love and gives them the ability to access native features in a mobile web view, allowing for rapid prototyping and development.

Strengths:

• Simple API with clear, concise documentation allowing for easy development
• Easy plug-in development and usage
• Very low learning curve with immediate results
• Utilizes popular known languages and standards (HTML, CSS, Javascipt)

Weaknesses:

• The mobile web view performance is variable from device to device, and even from platform to platform
• No access to native UI elements, users must render out their own, or rely on jQuery Mobile or Sencha Touch for native-quality UI performance
• Will eventually be overtaken with the advancement of HTML5 and CSS3 as in-browser experiences gain access to native features such as the Camera (getUserMedia), Accelerometer (getDeviceOrientation), and many more on the way

Appcelerator Titanium

Titanium Mobile is a high level javascript runtime and API that utilizes the existing native UI widgets, where appropriate, without the unnecessary need to learn how to use platform-specific references and API’s.

Strengths:

• Utilizes a high-level programming language (javascript).
• Uses common UI elements that do not require CSS or OpenGL to render and slow down user interaction with the application.
• Extensive API with most native features implemented and extended into Titanium out of the box.

Weaknesses:

• It is currently only being built out and available for what Appeclerator deems as “the most critical mobile platforms.”
• API documentation is still not optimal, you will have trouble finding out the necessary information you need to begin development, which leads to a very large learning curve.
• Their mobile web browser support is still being tweaked and developed. Appcelerator recognizes they lack quality in this area, but they are continually working on fixing and optimizing Titanium.

If you haven’t heard of these guys, you will soon. They just recently signed a deal with AT&T that allows them access to speech, mobile messaging, and mobile payment services.

Corona

Corona SDK is a mobile development platform geared towards creating mobile games on multiple platforms in a rapid manner allowing for smaller code to do much more.

Strengths:

• Large and well documented API that is easy to utilize
• Built-in physics, Facebook Connect, maps, push notification, in-app purchases and many more game oriented features built in
• Automatically handles display scaling from device to device

Weaknesses:

• Only geared towards game development, so there is no options for data driven applications
• Requires learning a new branch of ECMA scripting language, Lua

Sencha

Sencha is a set of tools that utilizes JavaScript frameworks in combination with its own design elements to create HTML5 applications for mobile.

Strengths:

• Gives you access to pre-made UI elements
• Comes with an easy to use IDE that allows you to customize the web view quickly
• Can be used in tandem with PhoneGap or Titanium if desired

Weaknesses:

• Very limited native features to choose from and develop
• Although the documentation is very thorough, development time and the learning curve is higher than most other platforms

This is in no way a definitive list of platforms that are being developed to make your life easier in cross platform development. There are quite a number of platforms not discussed here such as appMobi, Tiggzi, appmakr, and iBuildApp that have REST API’s, HTML5 development, and click-to-create interfaces if that fits your needs and expertise. Ultimately it’s the tools that you use that will make a difference. So I urge you to go, research, code, conquer the world of cross mobile development!

Blendamaze takes color theory and turns it into a fun & engaging puzzle. With over 100 different levels, and over 35 GameCenter achievements, this game is sure to be in the running to be the next ‘Angry Birds’ or ‘Draw Something’.  Don’t believe us? Check out the video here:

Blendamaze is a product of BorderLeap Games, a company founded by former Modean Nate Dicken. Blendamaze is now available for download in the iOS app store on iTunes.

Ever wonder who’s on Pinterest?  We did.  That’s why we created our first Pinterest Infographic: Pinning = Winning in February, which visualized the power and growing popularity of this social media platform.  Now we’ve put together a new Pinterest infographic that takes a deeper look into the lives of Pinterest users, revealing everything from where they purchase their groceries to which mobile provider they use.  Learn who’s visiting Pinterest, how they access information, their shopping and leisure habits, and much more.  We even compared these habits to internet users at large, so you can get a handle on what is unique about Pinterest visitors.

View full Pinterest Infographic
 

What insights do you find most surprising? How will Pinterest fit into your overall marketing strategy?

To sum up Part One of the Ultimate Guide, the internet marketing industry sits right in the middle of an intense collision of search (as we’ve henceforth known it), social, and rich web experience.

We’ve got the tools to inject our great content right into the mix, and I briefly explained a few markup tactics that can give Google and other search engines the information they need to put your content in the right place, in front of the right people.  In part two of this three part post, I’ll explain what actually happens with all that extra effort, thought, and code that we’re being asked to put forth, and why it’s totally worth it.

Schema.org: Rich Microdata Support

In Part One, I spoke of a collaborative initiative by search engines (Google, Yahoo!, and Bing) to support rich meta data (microdata) for webmasters to describe and represent their great content in much more detail than ever before. This move to support schema.org vocabulary essentially means that search engines have identified a way to more consistently identify the subject matter and/or properties of a piece of content. In plain English, they’re encouraging webmasters to markup as much relevant information about their content as they can, to give more signals to bots looking for relevant content. 
From Google’s blog:

Just to clarify, by markup, I mean the addition of code that alerts the bots to where important information is. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to go “data graffiti-ing” all around your content and add every bit of information that you can possibly fit.  In fact, if you do too much, you may be penalized! In this supplemental post on content optimization, see a quick rundown of hints, tools, rules, and suggestions that Google has given us recently. As a rule of thumb, give your users what they want, and nothing more. Of course that’s easier said than done!

We must realize that the support of such markup as rel=author directly ties in to Google’s (and as referenced in the article, other search engines) push towards richer back-end meta data in general, and it is extremely important to start using this rich data now. Right now.

Rich Snippets

I spoke in Part One of a reward. What does Google do with all of that extra data? What’s in it for you or your clients, and is it worth hours of development time?  Well, if you’re relevant in a search, and you’ve got appropriate back-end data in place, it shows. Literally. Enter the rich snippet. You’ve probably interacted with quite a few rich snippets in your Googling career, whether you realized it at the time or not. Below are a few examples of authorship snippets from the search ‘what is a rich snippet’; notice they take different forms):

An authorship rich snippet for Matt Cutts.

An authorship rich snippet from Joost de Valk containing a video.

According to Google’s official video on rich snippets:

”The purpose of rich snippets is to present users with more information about the content that exists on a page so that they can better decide which result is most relevant for their query. And this may result in additional traffic to your site.”

This is very telling, and a beacon to webmasters who want their content to be a relevant part of that decision!  Part 3 will discuss the decision portion of this in much more depth.

In the meantime, what is a rich snippet? Exactly what it sounds like – a snippet, or search engine result, with rich content in it. They can take the form of numerous different enhancements, based on the type of content being searched for. The most popular rich snippet is the aggregate rating snippet, which shows ratings in stars. But there are many other kinds as well.

Shopping result for ‘lacie little big disk’ (LaCie) containing the aggregate rating snippet.

Event snippet result for Death Cab for Cutie, and in the same search (‘death cab for cutie’), a music result for the band:

NOTE:  This result is for the band’s MySpace page. It is VERY important to pay attention to these – while this could easily just represent the band’s digital strategy, if it so happened that they wanted to use their own site to provide their brand experience here in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), it would be absolutely necessary to optimize their site’s content with rich microdata just as MySpace has done in this case.

Death Cab, if you’re reading, Modea can do this for you! Drop us a line.

And what MySpace has implemented here, they’ve done so site-wide, which will give all of their music content similar rich snippets (see below). Last.fm has the same type of profile markup - nicely played, MySpace and Last.fm.

I’m sure you get the picture here, and that picture is that really anything is possible in SERPs if your content is described in the right way. And we can use the schema.org structure for just about any type of content, from movie showtimes, to actor names, to other social media links – the point is that Google just wants to provide additional utility right in the SERP, and it can only help those who are prepared!

The full list of currently supported schema types and how to implement them is publically available, as is the type hierarchy.  The implementation examples are very high level, feel free to refer to Part One of this post for more examples.

The Rich Snippets Testing Tool

Now you know what these things are, and you implemented all the markup I keep linking to. How do you know if it worked (aside from all the additional code you generated)?

The first sign that authorship and other microdata is important to Google – they have provided you a tool to test your markup effectiveness! This tells us that Google really values the rich data we’ve provided, enough in fact to put some development time and thought into it. While it’s limited for now, and based on what microdata Google can find, it’s a sign that authorship and other rich data (see the image!) is very valuable to Google. This tool is available to any Webmaster Tools user free of charge.

It’s pretty simple: you enter the URL in question, and this tool will tell you whether or not your rel=publisher or rel=author implementations were successful (remember though, even though my markup is confirmed here, I won’t get a verification badge because I don’t have enough Google+ love [1,000 circles or +1 required]):

The tool gets even more granular when you put in a URL of a content page (as a best practice, each important piece of content should have its own page). Most often, these are in the form of blog posts, articles, portfolio pieces, or other specific creative works.

Currently, the tool can detect schema.org markup for applications, authors, events, movies, music, people, products, recipes, reviews, and TV series, and even show you a preview of your rich snippet (minus the description)! Below is an example of a content-containing page, and you can see that the tool recognizes my authorship markup (the example site in the shots below is no longer up, it was used as a test domain. My site will re-launch soon).

The tool will parse your code to look for any other rich snippet items. I didn’t have any in my particular article, but below is an example from Craig Bradford (via Schema.org - Why You're Behind if You're Not Using It...)

As you can see, this level of detail is an extremely valuable reputation management tool! Not to mention – with this amount of data available to Google, the possibilities for rich snippets are endless.

This is a three part post – Coming soon in Part 3:  the benefits of using these tactics, from click through rates to conversion!  Stay tuned.

Part One - Rel=Author, Rel=Publisher: SEO Today – The Ultimate Guide, Part One

As marketers, we should focus on that aspect of telling a story, and connecting with the consumers on a subconscious level. The Facebook Timeline presents a way for brands to do just that. Timeline for brands should be treated in the same way as people treat their pages. Aside from the various technical possibilities in the Timeline update, there is a new horizon in terms of engagement. 

The focus should be placed on developing a story surrounding the persona of a brand, rather than just pushing product sales. Remember that content is still king; even more so now with Timeline. Some brands, such as Hulu, have even taken it further by adding changes in the history and evolution of their industry to their Timeline; instead of only including information about their brand.

Instead of looking at Facebook as a marketing platform, look at it as an experience platform and build experiences for your fans that they can’t get anywhere else. Adding transparent and compelling content can humanize a brand and further connect them to their consumers. However, that mentality is just a piece of the puzzle when it comes to marketing in the social space. Since Timeline is so new, we have to experiment to engage fans on it.  Will the novelty of brands’ Timeline last? Only time will tell for the new Facebook feature, but there is one thing that is known for sure: Timeline definitely cannot be ignored.

With Timeline, tell your story and make it memorable. Sharing experiences with your fans adds the ability to get on a personal level that we as marketers and brands strive for. There are thousands of ways to tell a story, find a way to tell yours.

If you have found any individuals or brands that are leveraging Timeline in an innovative way, please share with us, we’d love to see it.

This post is part one of a three part series on how we foresee search engine marketers must evolve to keep pace with this shift.

Consider Google’s Search, Plus Your World implementation a few months back, as well as the support for authorship and schema.org beginning last summer. These announcements clearly hint at a few of the sweeping (and continuous) changes now taking place in the SEO industry.

And just as you thought you finally had it (sort of) figured out, you hear something about semantic search about to be "switched on”. Uh oh…

So what now? Are all of us SEO professionals out of a job? I think not. As long as we hold true to the one core principal – the philosophy that Google and other search engines have drilled into us since day one, our occupation will only get more exciting, more involving, more rewarding, and more relevant.

This principal is not a secret or a privileged rite granted to the elite inner SEO circle.

The answer is, always was, and continues to be high quality, relevant content. While our methods of optimizing content will continue to evolve and become more complex, it is the content itself that will ALWAYS win out. Sure, between every tweet, post, and update there’s a lot to keep track of, but, rest assured, if your efforts are focused on creating and promoting the content that your audience wants, you’re already ahead of the game.

The main point – search engines NEED quality content with ownership, relevance, and identity.

The bottom line for search engine marketers and online marketers in general? You MUST prioritize your content strategy and development budget above all else. Content is the cornerstone of your success going forward. Period.

However, what about semantic search? How do we optimize for that? What about the next thing, and the next thing after that? IT’S SO MUCH WORK! So you’ve got great content, and have uploaded it. Well, you’re half way there. All that’s really left is to tell search engines what it is, and what it’s about. Simple, right? Actually, yes! More so than you’d think.

In this three part post, I’ll walk you through some things you can and should be doing right this minute that will help your content shine. The great thing about having great, accurately described, search-engine friendly content is that you don’t need to worry when you hear about a massive Google update – your content will soldier on.

A note on social search

While content is hosted on websites and media networks, it is created and attributed to individual people. Welcome to the age of social and personal influence in search – as this is refined, it’s vital to realize how important the content’s original creator, or author’s role is in determining where and how high the content ranks, and most interestingly, how unique, correctly supported content is displayed in a SERP.

As internet users and content creators, individual people are a rapidly growing piece of Google’s search algorithm. With social signals strengthening within this algorithm, authorship and identity in this digital, social world are critical.

Implementing authorship markup is extremely helpful to search engines in their effort to map this web of people - connecting people directly to their content. It gives what’s missing in a digitally driven online world:  personality, credibility, and relevance. Those who are taking advantage of Google’s subtle hints and tips, and are doing it correctly, are being handsomely rewarded.

So what is all this stuff? How does it work? How does it affect anyone but SEO people?
And what is this REWARD you speak of? All in good time – first explanation of the technical jargon:

Rel=author and rel=publisher

Rel=author

Implementing rel=author markup on your blog or webpage is really the first, and easiest step in preparing your great content.

Google announced last summer the support of rel=author markup in search results. Straight from their blog:

"Why? Because authorship is a great way to identify and highlight high-quality content. Plus, the web is centered around people. People discovering content on the web often want to learn more about its author, see other content by that author, and even interact with the author."

They went further to explain that rel=author is a way to "connect authors with their content on the web" in an effort to "help people find content from great authors in [Google’s] search results".

Put simply, the rel=author markup, when correctly used, is a way to connect, reciprocate, and verify authorship on content pieces, based on a linked Google+ account. The rel=author command will also help to identify and reward original content creators on the SERP if their content is scraped, re-shared, or linked to. In addition, if used on all content, the markup serves to also create a dynamic hub directly within the SERP for users to find more content by the appropriate author.

Implementing rel=author is relatively easy:

• First, any and all content pages on your site must contain a link to a dedicated "author/about" page on the same server, and must use rel="author"
  
  

NOTE: If you don’t have a Google+ profile, stop what you’re doing and set one up now before proceeding to the next steps.

• Next, the dedicated “author/about” pages must contain a link to that person’s appropriate Google+ profile, and must use rel="me"
  
  

• Finally, the author’s Google+ page must contain a link back to the "author/about" page, and must use rel="me". This part is pretty easy - any links added to the "Other Profiles" section in the sidebar of your Google+ profile will automatically be appended with this markup:

(Thanks:  How to Implement rel=author)

That’s it! Within a few days (or weeks, depending on the size and crawl frequency of your site) your markup will be verified. In my code example for the rel=author markup, I’ve used an hCard microformat, which I’ll talk in detail on in the next part of this post!

Rel=publisher

Along with authorship markup support, Google has implemented a verification badge, which can be obtained using the rel=publisher markup.

Straight from Google’s blog:

"Verification badges are designed to help our users find what they're looking for by ensuring that people, brands and businesses that are subject to broad-based impersonation are protected."

Rel=publisher and rel=author markup should always be used hand-in-hand. The rel=publisher markup provides a verification badge to publishers’ Google+ profiles, helping to confirm authenticity of a profile or page (much like a verified Twitter account).

Implementation of rel=publisher should only take place on the HOME page of a site. It’s important to note that rel=author and rel=publisher will not function correctly if placed on exactly the same page. A good rule of thumb is that the rel=author markup is for content pages only, and rel=publisher is verification for your site as a whole (not needed on individual content). In a nutshell:

• homepage of site must contain a link to the person or entity’s Google+ profile, and must use rel="publisher"
• Google+ profile must contain a reciprocal link to the homepage (no specific modifier needed)
• Google+ profile must be in 1,000 circles or have 1,000 +1s. This count increases simultaneously - +1 on the site’s homepage counts as well.

(Thanks:  Google+ SEO)

<a href="http://plus.google.com/112623893783515275069" rel="publisher">Chris Tallman</a>

More from Google Webmaster Tools on rel=publisher.

What does all this mean?  We’ve got to let the search engines know who we are. We’ve got to claim and identify our content. And we’ve got to do it now.

Interestingly, while authorship is the first (and most important, with Search Plus Your World) bit of rich data (or microdata) that Google will attribute to pieces of content, it’s most certainly NOT the only one! I’ll talk about more in my next post.

Don’t forget – This is a 3-part post – Part 2, "Rich Snippets and Microdata: SEO Today – The Ultimate Guide, Part Two" will be coming soon.

Steve Grant, Head of Strategy at Modea, presented at the IAB Case Study Road Show Series in San Francisco today and will be visiting the Detroit session next week. The conference is a collection of digital marketing success stories and his presentation detailed our 2011 work with Chiquita Snacks. We were delighted to be invited to present alongside our clients Chiquita and Vitrue.

Should you have any follow up questions or commentary, please reach out to Steve directly at steve.grant@modea.com.

Modea worked under four main objectives:

• We developed a solid understanding of the target’s media behaviors as a foundation for campaign development.
• We grounded campaign messaging and creative in strategic insights around the target’s decision-making processes.
• We used integrated execution to remain agile and continually optimize the campaign based on analytics and consumer feedback.
• We connected digital efforts to measurable in-store results.

We relied on three innovative, key tactics to drive the Chiquita Snacks campaign:

• Hypertargeted Display Advertising – To be efficient and effective, we sought to buy our audience instead of buying impressions.
• Social Couponing – We used digital mechanisms to drive consumers in-store, creating measurable outcomes as we continuously optimized throughout the campaign.
• Key Influencer Outreach (KIO) – We engaged key influencers in the social space to amplify campaign reach and supplement product information with high-value peer recommendations.

Below we’ve included further details about our work on Chiquita Snacks, but first we’d like to thank our partners who played integral roles in the success of this campaign.

Vitrue

Vitrue was an invaluable social media management tool as we created and managed a presence for Chiquita Snacks on the Chiquita Banana Facebook page. Services they provided include:

• Tab hosting
• Post management and scheduling
• Dynamic post moderation
• Coupon integration on Facebook
• Detailed analytics reporting
• Customizable modules reduced the need for development resource and increased speed to market

Quantcast

Working hand-in-hand with Quantcast we used Lookalike Modeling tactics for our display advertising and retargeting efforts.

Finally, we’d also like to shout out to our advertising and promotional partners at Google, Macaroni Kid, AdMarketplace, Klout, The Trade Desk and Facebook.

CHIQUITA CASE STUDY

Company Background: When you hear the name Chiquita, the first thing you probably think of is bananas – but there’s more to it than that. Chiquita provides consumers with a wide selection of fresh fruits, vegetables, juices and value-added products, including natural fruit ingredients, healthy snacks and salad blends. Headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, it has approximately 21,000 employees and operations on six continents. Chiquita has committed itself to providing high-quality foods with the utmost freshness through innovation, new technology and corporate responsibility.

Problem: In late 2010, Chiquita came to Modea to manage the re-launch of its Chiquita Snacks product line. With low consumer awareness, limited distribution and a premium price perception, they asked us to introduce this product online and drive up awareness of the Healthy Snacks brand, while encouraging product trial through in-store purchase. Modea also needed to educate a traditional sales team about the power of digital and get them excited about the first online campaign launch for Chiquita Snacks. We presented them with a short video at the Chiquita National Sales conference to do just that:

Research: We started with a Research and Discovery phase to develop market, audience and brand insights necessary to inform the digital strategy for Chiquita Healthy Snacks. Our research methodologies included stakeholder interviews, industry and market analysis, competitive analysis, target audience analysis, one-on-one interviews and shop-a-long ethnographies with our targets. Through this process, we were able to build out our target market from simple demographic information, to a psychographic and media consumption habits profile. The findings of this phase also provided creative direction for Chiquita Healthy Snacks in the digital space.

Strategy: By understanding our target’s decision-making process online and in-store, we were able to effectively position our messaging and focus geo-targeting key markets where Chiquita Healthy Snacks products are distributed. In this case, we used occasion-based marketing to increase awareness and further engage the consumer through deals and discounts to increase trial.  Our campaign was developed in a modular fashion – Discover the Snack Side of Fruit – as a way to create a revolving platform for the three key consumer apertures.

Solution: Using this strategy, we launched a full-scale advertising campaign from July through October of 2011. www.TheSnackSide.com serves as the campaign hub, promoting product information, offering coupons and a "Flavor Experiments" social media contest. The contest encourages Facebook fans to submit creative ways to test new fruit combinations for the next Fruit Duos product. Then our “scientists” film reproductions of their favorite ideas and post them to Facebook for the audience to enjoy. We chose to create content internally instead of asking users to generate it because we understood that our target audience is primarily very busy moms. This way, we’re lowering the amount of effort required for participation while still fostering engagement online. The full-scale campaign also includes display advertising, paid search, in-store promotions and social media management/promotions, as well as partnerships with Six Flags, both in-park and online.

Display Advertising: Our team implemented a comprehensive and integrated display advertising strategy, targeting publishers across interest categories for food, health, family and travel.  The focus of the campaign has driven awareness for the Chiquita brand, healthy snacks for kids, ideas for children’s summer activities and recipes. Below you can find examples of display advertisements used in the execution of the campaign. Additionally, Modea utilized the Google Content Network (GCN). The GCN is supported by a group of contextually relevant sites where visitors are targeted by geographic, demographic and interest categories. Interest categories include food, health, family and travel. Text, display and video ads are all supported throughout the network.

Online Behavioral Targeting: Hyper-targeting via lookalike modeling was focused on buying audiences vs. buying ad inventory. This method of media buying allowed us to not only reach our target audience, but to focus only on a subset within this audience based on matching desired behavioral characteristics of our top campaign converters.

Social Media: On Facebook, Modea created two tabs, promotions, coupons and an editorial calendar to manage social postings 3-4 days a week for the duration of the campaign.

The Flavor Experiments tab allowed users to view their suggested videos, provide their own creative concepts and vote on the final video. These same comments are mirrored on TheSnackSide.com, to ensure that user voices are represented regardless of what platform they are using to submit ideas. On the second tab, The Snack Side, we displayed coupons to drive users to retail locations and offered product information when no coupon was available. Coupons lived here from their initial posting until they expired.

Finally, Modea created an editorial calendar detailing all posts to be made from the Chiquita Facebook page. This included posts for upcoming coupons, videos for the Flavor Experiments contests, as well as Chiquita merchandise prize giveaways. Our team worked closely with Chiquita Corporate Communications to ensure on-time posting and promotions via Facebook. When the coupon was posted to Facebook users were allowed to print it directly from the Chiquita Wall, allowing for high rates of coupon redemption.

Key Influencer Outreach: The Key Influencer program operated in two parts. First, through partnering with Klout, Modea reached out to 200 key influencers in the social media space and rewarded them with exclusive Chiquita-branded merchandise in an effort to generate awareness around the 2011 Chiquita Healthy Snacks digital campaign. This produced a significant number of impressions relevant to the family, healthy snacking and healthy eating categories. Secondly, Modea identified nine individual key influencers within the food, camping, active, family and healthy eating space for a special prize. Aside from a plethora of Chiquita branded swag and messaging around healthy snacking, they also received Chiquita-branded bike cruisers personalized with their Twitter handle.

Six Flags Partnership: Since the locations of Six Flags theme parks across the nation aligned with the distribution channels for Chiquita Healthy Snacks, an organic partnership evolved. Leveraging a new corporate partnership between Chiquita & Six Flags, Modea implemented display advertising on the Six Flags web site, coupons for guests in parks where products were sold and the Discover the Fun Side of Fruit messaging in :15 and :30 spots. Cross-promoting Six Flags on Facebook, we also rewarded Chiquita’s social media audience with Six Flags tickets as prizes.

Search Engine Marketing: In order to help Chiquita effectively reach its target audience across the Google Network and help gain share of voice where its customers were already searching online, Modea developed a comprehensive and integrated Search Engine Marketing strategy and campaign.

Our team started by conducting a search engine marketing analysis of Chiquita and its major competitors, concluding that Chiquita had a significant opportunity to gain share of voice for key terms related to the fruit snack category. Additional analysis against a core set of 32 keywords provided insight into which advertisers are most active in the space. Our research allowed us to become familiar with the space and develop a paid search strategy that identified the campaign objectives and target audiences for Chiquita, along with targeted keywords and relevant messaging. Once the campaign’s objectives and strategies were defined, we were able to move forward and implement an effective search engine marketing campaign, optimizing and delivering the maximum value and return to Chiquita.

Analytics & Optimization: As with any of our client’s campaigns, it is critical for the analytics strategy to support the campaign and business objectives of Chiquita. This alignment ensures for proper measurement and attribution of value to Chiquita. The Chiquita campaign presented many challenges for analytics, as the campaign consisted of several disparate parts, including a landing page, Facebook page, multiple Facebook tabs, YouTube channel, Twitter account, numerous content applications and a great number of advertising/media channels. Additional complexity derived from integrating POS data and offline coupon data. However, we took careful consideration to understand the holistic nature of the campaign and to ensure that all data points were integrated into the overall campaign reporting.
This approach to analytics not only provided us with rich business intelligence, but also enabled us to tactically manage the entire media campaign and optimize individual keywords, ad groups, ad creative (sizes and messaging) and media channels. It resulted in allowing us to deliver the highest possible return on ad spend for Chiquita.

Results: The Chiquita Snacks campaign excelled in raising consumer awareness for the Chiquita Bites and Juice + Fruit Duos product lines. It also demonstrated a significant increase in trial of product at retail. Modea exceeded client expectations as outlined by the following campaign key performance indicators:

Awareness:

• Total Media Impressions: 120MM+ (+100MM of goal)
• Visitors: 207K (+3% of goal)
• Coupons Printed: 138K / 1,174% of goal
• Coupons redeemed: 74K / 53% redemption rate – 2-3x’s national average for Facebook coupons
• Facebook “Likes” of Chiquita’s page: 58K+ new fans (+172% of goal)

If you remember one thing…
Modea effectively applied the occasion-based strategy to social and media enhancements, which unquestionably resulted in increased consumer purchasing.

• traffic to your site from Twitter
• traffic driven by certain keyword searches
• visitors from Des Moines, Iowa

You may ask yourself why would I want to do this, or who cares about people from Des Moines?

For starters, you can apply advance segments across key performance indicators (KPIs) which are critical in measuring the success of your site. By leveraging advance segments you are able to look at specific audience segments to see how each contributes to the overall success of your site. Perhaps through advance segmentation, you’ll discover that visitors from Twitter are higher value visitors than Facebook. Use advance segmentation to group categories of organic search terms or even your mission-critical search terms to see which are driving the most value. You’ll never know whether or not visitors from Des Moines, Iowa spend 20% more per transaction than other cities if you aren’t using advance segments.

Advanced segments can be applied to all Google Analytics standard reports: Audience, Advertising, Traffic Sources, Content, and Conversions by simply clicking Advanced segments at the top of a report and selecting the default and custom segments you want applied. Default segments are built-in to all Google Analytics profiles and allow you to filter out common segments like: mobile visitors, paid search traffic, and visits resulting in conversions. If you don't see the segment you want, you can create a custom segment to filter the report. Using custom segments allows you to break-out just about any view of the data you would like to see, no matter how granular.

Earlier this month, Google announced that users would now be able to share advanced segments. This feature makes collaboration in GA easier by allowing users to trade and build off of each other’s advanced segments. It should come in handy for large implementations where many different users may have access to the same accounts and profiles.

Here are a few examples of custom advanced segments I've used recently:

Segmenting traffic from visitors who entered the site from a Google domain:

Segmenting traffic coming from social media:

These are two simple examples. By specifying parameters across multiple metrics you can create even more focused segments.

Here's an example of a segment for traffic from a Google domain using Firefox:

We hope you’ve found these tips on Advanced segments for Google Analytics helpful. Please check back at modea.com/blog for more Google Analytics Tips and Tricks, as well as articles on other categories like digital marketing, search engine optimization, and social media.

To learn more about how Modea can help you with your analytics strategy, implementation or reporting please contact us at newbiz@modea.com.

Twitter:

• 6% of all retweets occur around 5 PM (ET) and hovers above 5% of all retweets occurring between the hours of 4PM and 7PM
• highest click through rates (CTR) occur during the lunch hour and at 6 PM when employees arrive home from work
• highest CTR occur on Twitter during the middle of the week (especially Wednesdays) and on the weekends

(figure 1 source: Kissmetrics*)

Facebook:

• Saturdays see roughly 4 times as many shares compared to Monday - Friday
• Sunday is the second best day to post on Facebook, yet Saturday still sees twice as many shares
• Facebook has its highest share rates during the lunch hour and shortly after employees get home from work (with peak performance at 7PM)

(figure 2 source: Kissmetrics*)

What does this mean for engagement and social media strategy? Users are clearly more engaged in social media when they are not at work. Brands need to recognize this lifestyle and engage accordingly. Since 50% percent of the U.S. population lives on the east coast and 80% live in the Eastern and Central time zones combined, it is crucial that brands and social media strategists prioritize their social media campaign to reach audiences during Eastern time zone lunch breaks, weekends, and the 5-7 PM window that occurs during after-work hours.

Yet, social media brand building isn’t all about following the metrics. Building quality relationships and brand equity are much more important. The initial response should not be, “why aren’t we posting at 6PM?” but rather “are we fostering the desired relationship with our customers?” coupled with “why are our followers posting at this time?” Is your brand trying to engage people while at work (looking for quick shareable content) or at home (looking for deeper more engaging/stimulating content)? Is your brand aiming to foster a professional relationship that adheres best to 9-5 sharing? Or would your brand’s content receive higher quality engagement from users that utilize social networks afterhours? The most successful brands work to understand the human story behind the stats and the motivations that lead consumers to follow certain lifestyle patterns. More importantly we operate under their terms -- customers dictate whether they want to do business with us, not the other way around. Consumers are online 24/7 so meet your followers online; DO NOT force social media users to come to you.

For many brands, a social media plan should take advantage of the aforementioned after-work/weekend social networking hours. There are a variety of applications to help manage your social media campaign. Vitrue , SocialBro , Buffer , Crowdbooster, Timely , Post Planner are just a few of the tools to schedule posts on Twitter and Facebook. Many tools will also analyze your followers’ peak hours in order to pinpoint the best time to share content to get retweets and Facebook shares.

Furthermore, such applications have the capability of identifying key influencers amongst Twitter and Facebook followers so that brands can attract the attention of social media power users. Although tools are a great way to analyze and coordinate a social media plan, the most opportunistic community manager will use peak after-work hours to not only post on Twitter and share on Facebook, but also be available to answer their follower’s inquiries and react to post responses, retweets and shares.

Wrapping up, brand builders should be initially asking “what is our relationship with our followers?” Social networks are all about the engagement and value your followers receive from reading your content.  Remember, more user engagement leads to more impressions and greater brand exposure.

*Source of information and graphs via http://blog.kissmetrics.com/science-of-social-timing-1/