Facebook has become so entrenched as the social media leader, it’s difficult to imagine any new threats emerging…but what about old threats? What about long forgotten ancients, stirring from their slumber and rising from the sea to reclaim their throne? In the world of social mediathis may be happening right now.

What about Myspace?

Well, it turns out sexy isn’t the only thing Justin Timberlake is bringing back.

That’s right; Justin Timberlake and the Specific Media Groupare finally putting their new plans for Myspace into motion. The duo purchased the flagging social network for about $35 million dollars, waving the old guard bye bye bye.

How do they plan on competing with modern juggernauts like Facebook and Twitter? Well, for starters they have adopted a truly genius registration system (adopted, not invented, this I promise you.) Basically, they’re going to let users register on Myspace using their accounts from other social networks. This does two things exceptionally well. First, it lets users test the waters without going through some pain in the butt, everything I own, form submission, which will make people more willing to give it a shot. Secondly, the account info from the other social networks will be automatically imported to Myspace; this will likely include friends lists, enabling a relatively painless conversion to a new form of social media.

This isn’t Tom’s Myspace though. The social network has received and aesthetic and functional facelift courtesy of it’s new ownership. The new site is heavily focused on visuals, much like Pinterest, but its look seems to be a little sexier than the Pinterest’s board format.

Will anyone care? That remains to be seen. In the meantime, check out their video showing off the new site.

Original article about the new Myspace posted on Wikimotive's blog under the title Myspace Has a New Look!

Retargeting is the newest toy in the toy chest for digital marketing companies. The perceived ROI it brings is making it very popular and the trend has grown to the point that now even Facebook is getting in the game. So what exactly is retargeting and what are the benefits?

At first retargeting was focused mostly on bringing back bounced website traffic or people who had abandoned a shopping cart. This is accomplished by placing a cookie in the users browser that allows targeted ads for your product and service to reach them even after they’ve left your site. The technology has since evolved, no longer focusing only on the bottom-of-the-funnel. Search retargeting now lets marketers target display ads based on users search history, and it’s proving to be a very effective top-of-the-funnel tactic for driving traffic to your site.

Most retargeting campaigns end when a user coverts, either making a purchase or submitting a lead, to ensure that you don’t continue to badger a user with ads after they’ve already converted. However there are still opportunities for marketing after a user has converted. It can be beneficial to burn the user from the initial campaign, by removing the targeting cookie when they convert, while at the same time adding a new cookie for your post conversion retargeting campaign. For example, once you’ve sold some one a car you don’t just forget about them right? Starting a new retargeting campaign based around service would be a great way to continue your engagement post-conversion.

Just like any marketing campaign, whether it’s in social media, SEO, TV, or even direct mail, you need to make sure you properly plan out your campaign and its goals before jumping in headfirst. Okay so maybe there’s less planning involved in a direct mail campaign but you get the idea. For a full and effective remarking campaign you need to think about the different stages of the funnel. Your top of the funnel campaign should focus on brand awareness and your unique value. The post-visit ads can go a little deeper into the specific benefits of your product or service, because awareness is clearly not an issue any more. Lastly you’ll want to craft a post-conversion campaign that will keep your customers brand loyal, and hopefully coming back for years to come.

Original article about remarketing posted on Wikimotive's blog under the title Retargeting What It Is And Why It’s Important

Facebook and Apple are two of the most influential companies on the internet today, but they’ve never really worked well together. The fault falls mostly on Facebook. Their mobile application has been notoriously buggy and all the functionality it promised was never truly delivered. When Apple released iOS 5, everyone thought Facebook integration would be one of the main features, but it was conspicuously absent, to the dismay of many. With the newly released iOS 6 though, functionality for one of the world’s most popular social media sites is finally a priority.

Once you update to the new iOS, simply go to settings and you’ll find a header for Facebook. Open that up, and you’ll be guided through integrating Facebook into your phone. What does integration mean on iOS 6? Let us break down a few of the more interesting features.

The first thing you can do is the main thing most people do on Facebook, which is update your status. Once you enable the sharing widget, you will be able to update your status from any screen simply by pulling down the notification tray.

In fact, sharing things easily seems to be the driving force behind the Facebook integration. You’ll be able to easily share URLs from safari, photos from all your apps, and your locations from Maps. You’ll also be able to “Like” things apps from the app store. You’ll actually be able to “like” things across a bunch of apps, and that functionality will only increase as more and more developers come up with interesting ways to implement Facebook into their own apps.

As an additional organizational benefit, Facebook will sync all your contacts and calendars, enabling you to merge the data of your phone and Facebook. This can be a little intense as you likely have way more Facebook friends than contacts, but it has its uses. Just make sure you reexamine your privacy settings to ensure you aren’t sharing all your personal data with your entire extended network.

Finally, if you have Siri, you’ll be able to update your status simply by speaking to her.
These changes may not seem like much, but they’re a big step in increasing the ubiquity of Facebook. If your business doesn’t have a strong presence on the social network, now is the perfect time to jump on.

Original article about Facebook and iOS6 posted on Wikimotive's blog under the title Facebook Integration Finally A Priority With iOS6.

Running contests on social media is a risky proposition. It has to be just the right idea, and it has to be handled just the right way. Today, I want to take a look at one recent contest that has completely taken over marketing using Facebook.

Which contest is it? If you’ve spent any time on Facebook this month, I bet you can already guess. That’s right, it’s the Gerber Generation Photo Search 2012.

This is a perfect example of how a contest can be some of the best viral marketing you’ll ever see. It takes a behavior that people already enjoy engaging in (sharing baby pictures) and makes it into a challenge. “Do you think your child is the cutest?” Of course you do, and that’s why you’re going to spam your family and friends with the link and remind them to vote every day.

Gerber does a couple things really well here. It’s an obvious tie-in to their product, and seeing their brand name plastered over the faces of adorable babies is sure to have a subliminal effect on all Facebook users. Also, by allowing people to vote once every day, they keep engagement high and ensure that the entrants will drive traffic by requesting friends and families to vote.

Use this contest as inspiration for one of your own. Using adorable babies won’t make sense for most businesses, but chances are there’s some aspect of your company that is photogenic. Just remember, make it something people care about, and be careful not to spam.

Original article about Facebook contests posted on Wikimotive's blog under the title Gerber’s Great Contest.

Google just rolled out a new feature in their AdWords service: the shared budget. Basically, it’s exactly what you would think it is. It lets you create a single daily budget that is then shared by multiple campaigns in your AdWords account. The idea being that this will make it easier for businesses to optimize their AdWords accounts, enabling them to achieve higher business SEO results in a shorter time.

Lets go over a brief example of how this would break down. Say your running a business that has three main campaigns on AdWords, a desktop search, a mobile search, and a remarketing campaign. You’re budget is $60 so you split it across the three efforts evenly. The majority of the time, this works out fine and there is no need for tweaking. Sometimes though, one campaign is booming while the others languish.

Under the old setup, you would have either had to be monitoring and changing the campaign as the day went by, or you would have lost those opportunities. With the new shared budget, Google would just move funds from the underperforming campaign to the hot one. It seems like a simple thing, but it should save most businesses a lot of time and energy moving forward.

Like every other new facet of Google’s service, we’re not sure exactly how this is going to play out yet. Some people are concerned that a campaign may be too successful and cannibalize the money from another campaign too early in the day. We’ll test out some different techniques and be back soon with the results, but overall it seems like a great feature, especially for businesses on a tight budget.

Original article about Google AdWords posted on Wikimotive's blog under the title AdWords New Shared Budget.

Have you heard the theory that no one is more than six degrees of separation away from Kevin Bacon? Well, itʼs a pretty decent party game (if youʼre at a party with no booze or music) and itʼs been banging around the Internet in one form or another for a decade now. So why are we bothering to talk about it? Well, Google has yet another notch to scratch into its bedpost (probably using one of Yahooʼs sharpened bones.) Thatʼs right, you can now play the Kevin Bacon game in Googleʼs search.

We know, we know, youʼve heard this story on the Internet twenty times already. Youʼve already wasted an hour of your work day trying to find the biggest gap you can (our record is 7) so why are we bothering to write about it?

Thatʼs exactly it. Youʼve already heard it.

The Kevin Bacon game is as old as dirt and still, you heard the story. Itʼs not even like itʼs new technology; websites that perform the same service have been around for years. The fact that every site on the web felt the need to cover Google adding the game speaks volumes.

Google already controls the vast majority of the search market, but they refuse to stop having fun. Theyʼve already earned their audience, but that doesnʼt keep them from putting up interesting takes on their logo to support causes or celebrate days, and it doesnʼt stop them from going out of their way to develop fun, show-off tricks like the Kevin Bacon game.

Itʼs something to keep in mind for your own company. Google is one of the biggest businesses in the world, and they refuse to stagnate, even when it wouldnʼt hurt them to do it.

Anyway, go play the game. Just put “bacon number” (no quotes) in front of any name you can think of. If you can beat our score, you get a free pat on the back.

original story about the Kevin Bacon game posted on Wikimotive's blog under the title Google Adds Kevin Bacon Game

On August tenth of 2012, we wrote about the movement to Boycott Clay Nissan (you can read that article here.) As a quick refresher, a woman–named Jill Colter–was fired from her position as a service writer at Clay Nissan of Norwood. Jill has stage 4 brain cancer, and her brothers Jon and Adam claimed that her illness is the reason she was terminated. They started a boycott of the Clay Nissan Family of dealerships and Clay responded with a defamation lawsuit. Our article talked mostly about how the Colter brothers used social media to get their sister’s cause to go viral and rally support, and the Clay group handled their reputation management on Facebook pretty poorly.

The two sides have since met in court to discuss the issue. In a document that was issued from the Dedham court yesterday, it seems that the law is coming down on the side of Clay Nissan.

In the ten-page document, the Justice of the Superior Court granted an order of attachment to the plaintiff, The Clay Corporation, against the Colter brothers. The Justice wrote, “…there appears to be a reasonable likelihood that the plaintiffs will recover a substantial judgment” as the reason for the order. This essentially means that the Colters must present The Clay Corporation with financial information in anticipation of impending payment.

So Clay is winning the battle in court, but the very fact that they’re winning means that they lost in the court of public opinion. The Justice found that the boycott initiated by the Colters, if continued, “…may very well have its desired effect: the crippling or destruction of the plaintiffs business”.

That’s right, the Facebook based boycott was so effective, that it had the potential to completely destroy Clay Nissan of Norwood. Not only that, in the couple of months that the boycott has been live, Clay has lost over $100,000.
Think about that; one…hundred…thousand…all because of a Facebook page.

Will a court ruling in Clay’s favor be enough to change the negative connotation now associated with the dealership group? Unfortunately, the damage has likely already been done, though it’s not for lack of support from the court. In fact, the Justice wrote, “…the Colter’s have been exposed to many additional facts which would cause a reasonable person to conclude that Jill’s termination was not based in any way upon her illness. The Colters have chosen to ignore those facts and have stepped up their relentless campaign against Clay.”

Even that condemnation of the Colters won’t be enough to change what happened. Use Clay as a lesson for your own business. It appears they were in the right, they defended themselves courteously, they took (most likely) successful legal action….and they still lost and lost big.

The point is you can’t fight the kind of negative publicity that goes viral. If Clay had just apologized and worked to have the Facebook page taken down right at the beginning, they probably wouldn’t be dealing with the potential annihilation of one of their dealerships.

Original article about the Clay Nissan court rulings posted on Wikimotive's blog under the title Clay Nissan Boycott Followup

One of the best parts of the new Google Analytics is the custom dashboards. This is something you should definitely start using to properly measure your SEO, PPC, Conversion Rates, and more. You can also make custom dashboards for WordPress blogs using a simple plugin called Google Analytics for WordPress plugin. Getting a handle on your Automotive SEOand other digital marketing efforts is always easier when you have the proper measurement tools.

The new dashboard is built to give quick and accurate insight into the most important things you might want to know about your blog at any time. Some times measurement for a blog is going to be different than for a website, for example using visits rather than visitors because you want to know if people are coming back more than once to continue reading your content. You can also measure metrics specifically about posts rather than measuring all pages on your blog so you can get a better understanding of how your readers interact with your blog.

The WordPress plugin mentioned earlier takes this even further, allowing you to track post types, authors, categories and tags. Tracking by tags and categories is only useful of course if you’re vigilant about being organized and clear with your application of categories and tags to each blog. If you are using these features correctly though, you could gain a lot of insight from tracking stats on individual categories and tags so you know what your readers like reading and what they don’t particularly like. You can also view data on different traffic sources like used medium, social sources, and used organic search terms.

Original article about Google Analytics dashboard posted on Wikimotive's blog under the title Using The New Google Analytics Dashboard With WordPress

Recently, I called out a couple of vendors for selling a sub par product. I thought about it and decided that if my own services can’t stand up to that level of scrutiny, I have no business telling anyone else what they should do about their service. So over the weekend, I tore apart every thing we do for our clients – Top to bottom; report after report. You know what I found? Something we sell SUCKS and it is completely UNACCEPTABLE.

I have to admit, they pulled me in and talked that sweet Google talk about how awesome Google+ was going to be. The unbelievable growth. It was going to catch and usurp Facebook. But even if you didn’t believe that, they said +1′s were going to effect SEO in a B I G Googly Google kind of way.

So we jumped on the band wagon early. Told all our clients they need to get on this Google + wagon because it was going to give them this big SEO edge and that Google had positioned it so that you HAD to be there if you were going to be relevant. And after all this time and all this focus on Google +, you know who is on Google +? Marketers. Millions of marketers all happy about their +1′s and how many circles their in and the only people in their circles are more marketers like us! What a SHAM! Forget about the business of Fake likes or twitter followers, this whole Google + platform may as well be FAKE!

So what is Wikimotive doing about it? We are TERMINATING all Google + Services immediately. We have informed our clients and are offering to replace their service with another of equal value or simply reducing their monthly expense by the cost of the Google + service we were providing. In some cases that means losing a client. But I would rather lose a client than keep taking money from a dealer if we can’t substantiate ROI.

We’ll keep monitoring Google + and if it ever becomes useful at all. We’ll be the first to let you know. In the meantime, ask yourself this question. Would my vendor stop taking my money if they knew something they were selling me didn’t work?

Original article about Google+ posted on Wikimotive's blog under the title Our Service Sucks, So We’re Throwing It Out!

Blogging can be tough, especially when your marketing strategy has you posting every day. When you’re blogging for business posting everyday can be extremely beneficial but writers block starts to become a serious problem. So how do you makes sure that you’re getting regular inspiration and at the same time ensure that you’re writing about topics that are relevant to your business? One really great way is to let Google Analytics be your muse.

Pulling up your search keyword reports is a great way to start. Look for more long-tail keywords that are specific enough that you can reasonably write a short blog about them. The benefit of using long-tail keywords is two fold because it will also help you bring some lower funnel traffic to your site.

If you’re not aware at this point Google also has some pretty excellent social reporting features. You can use this reporting to find out how much people are clicking and sharing your content on social media. This can give you a general idea what your audience is more interested in and what you might want to be writing about. Don’t just focus all your energy on shares though another handy feature is average visit duration from social media links so pay attention to topics that had people on your site for longer that will tell you a lot about what people are truly interested in.

Taking this even further you can have analytics sort all the pages on your site by average time spent on the page. This should again give you an idea what topics are more important or interesting to your audience and therefore should be focused on heavily when blogging.

Going through this process when you have some writers block can give you enough basic inspiration and information to do some brainstorming and choose a relevant topic that will really have some impact on your blog.

Still having trouble writing a blog everyday? Do you just not have the time in your current role to dedicate yourself to blog writing? Wikimotive can help, contact us for content creation for your blog. Our writers are all U.S. based and are trained to write engaging, informative, and ultimately traffic and lead generating content for your blog.

Original story about writers block for bloggers posted on Wikimotive's blog under the title Finding Inspiration For Your Blog.