#and it is specifically ~*a social beverage*~ and i think it's true to its advertising

[fereldanwench]

valerie is a tech + gun lady to her core but every time i see her with a cool katana pose I'm like... could i find a legitimate reason to also make her sword-wielding badass because damn girl

[bambiguertinus]

Transformation of Search Summit roundup

This past Friday we held our inaugural Transformation of Search Summit here in NY. Let’s just say, we’re already looking to book our venue for next year! On a scale of one to success, it was smashing.

Firstly, thank you (yet again) to all who came out to sponsor, speak at, and attend the event — couldn’t have done it without you.

As frequenters of many events ourselves, we did our best to ensure this one was full of high quality, fluff-free content. None of those talks where you get the end and think, “okay, but take out the buzzwords, and what did they say?” We asked for the moon, and our wonderful speakers delivered.

Some particularly rich (dare we say featured) snippets from the day:

Where search is heading

Siddharth Taparia, SVP and Head of Marketing Transformation, SAP, kicked off our morning speaking on the future of where search is heading. Social is the new storefront. The top 500 retailers earned 6.5 billion from social shopping in 2017, up 24%.

With the rise of voice search, position 0 is the ultimate prize. Over half of search queries will be voice based by 2020. A quarter of US homes have smart speakers. 92% of 18-29 year olds have smartphones. 90% increase in capabilities for voice search with only 8% error rate

Protecting privacy is a big deal. Alexa is coming to the office, the hotel, healthcare, the car, even learning. When you put a chip in everything, the whole world becomes a security threat. Even Google and Amazon are not immune to these.

New research: The Era of Ecommerce

Kerry Curran, Managing Partner, Marketing Integration, Catalyst & Clark Boyd, Research Lead, ClickZ, presented our headlining research report for the day: The Era of Ecommerce. Among many things, this research found a notable gap between how consumers browse, purchase, and behave online, and where advertisers put spend to reel those consumers in. Hint: not the same places.

There’s a lot more we could (and surely will) write about this report — not to mention that it was already 50+ pages long. For now I’ll direct you here for more information and here for the free download — enjoy!

How blockchain will affect search

Jeremy Epstein, CEO, Never Stop Marketing. For those who have never heard Jeremy speak, he is the best kind of fireball on stage. Spirited and smart, with the perfect sprinkle of self-deprecating humor. Jeremy speaks often on blockchain and the decentralized economy, and at this summit he focused on what those will mean for search. There’s a new sector — still in its infancy — of decentralized content that poses unique challenges in the search world: hard for search engines to index, curated by the audience, and where revenue generated goes directly to the creators of that content.

Panel: ClickZ, Adobe, Microsoft, Google

Panel discussion: Clark Boyd, Research Lead, ClickZ. Pete Kluge, Group Manager, Product Marketing, Adobe, Christi Olson, Head of Evangelism, Microsoft. Juan Felipe Rincón, Global Lead, Trust & Safety Search Outreach, Google

This was an interesting panel discussion on what awaits us in the future of search — things like connecting content and searches over several days, and more gender equality for women who search in emerging markets. They of course touched on types of search, and how Amazon is affecting the industry.

Visual search, which starts to answer the long-held question of “how do you search for something if you don’t know what it is?” and which particularly rings true for retail: this person has a nice scarf, where did it come from, where can I get one?

They also discussed how the input:output exchange of search is changing. It used to be only text:text. Now it can be image:voice, voice:voice, or any number of expanding options.

We need a bit of a mindset shift. We do a lot of our planning in terms of old paradigms, but more and more searches are being done by default, through lots of entry points.

They voiced how the future of search is no search, because search implies uncertainty. Instead, it will be about how you populate something before someone knows what they don’t know. In the future we won’t be searching, AI will do it for us. The experience of a user going through search is not here’s a keyword, here’s what I need. Sometimes we actively search, sometimes we want to be kept informed about things interesting to us.

And finally, bringing us a bit back to our feet — they reminded us that while we talk a lot about the future and transformation of search, a lot can be done now. Particularly around visual search, there’s still a lot of basic groundwork that people aren’t doing, such as using alt tags on images and making sure our visual content is properly described. As Rincon put it, “Look at the web as if you didn’t have eyes.”

Mobile search

Jason White, Director, SEO, Hertz. Fun fact about Jason: he started off doing SEO in 2003 because he competed in cycling races and worked at a bike shop to get discounts on parts, and the bike shop wanted to sell excess inventory in the winter. Fifteen years later, he’s Director of SEO at Hertz. Yet another quintessential example of great, self-taught SEOs who stumbled into the field and were pleasantly surprised to find it stuck.

Best quote from Jason? “You’re going to have a smart toilet bowl at sometime in your life. What will it say about you?” He talked about the future of IoT and security. We learned our data is worth $250 per year, and it’s going up every year. And finally, that billions of queries are made every day, 15% of which are completely new — ones Google says people had never searched for before.

Amazon and Amazon Marketing Services

John Denny, VP Ecommerce & Digital Marketing, Cavu Venture Partners (formerly Bai Brands). Luis Navarrete Gomez, Head of Global Search Marketing, LEGO

This was a particularly hands-on session with 7 excellent tips for leveraging Amazon and Amazon Marketing Services, i.e. both paid and organic search. And it was certainly from a trustworthy source — John Denny helped lead Bai beverages to be named 2015 Vendor of the Year by Amazon.

They related how running search campaigns on Amazon has been a struggle, one which many compare to what it was like running Google search campaigns in 2005. Happily, there’s been some rapid development of ad tech platforms changing the game of late.

They also talked about the tangible nature of Amazon campaigns versus elsewhere on the web — marketers selling physical products. As John put it, “A lot of execs hear about Amazon ads and think great, let’s rock and roll! But the reality on Amazon is that you can’t rock and roll anywhere if your product is out of stock. Build your foundation first.”

The full-funnel search approach

Claudia Virgilio, GVP of Strategic Partnerships, Kenshoo spoke to us about the importance of taking a full-funnel search approach. Amazon advertising has 197 million monthly unique visitors, and $4.6 billion spend.

How to optimize for voice search

Melissa Walner, Director, Global SEO, Hilton led another particularly practical session, coming from a brand that certainly gets asked a lot of questions — everything from “what’s the address of my hotel” to “what are fun things to do in Maui with kids?” Melissa had great insight into how to optimize specifically for voice search, and viewing SEO these days as not just search engine optimization so much as search everywhere optimization and search everything optimization.

She pointed out that 1 billion voice searches are made each month already, and that by 2020, 30% of all searches will be done without a screen.

In a voice search world, position 0 is queen: 80% of google home responses stem from a featured snippet. She then gave great tips for securing those featured snippets, on both high-level strategic and in-the-weeds technical levels.

Visual search and ecommerce

Clark hopped back up to cover visual search and how it affects ecommerce. One key quote from this session was pulled from our research report, from Amy Vener of Pinterest: “Shopping has always been visual. We’ve just been taught to do the opposite online.”

93% of consumers consider images to be be key deciding factor in a purchasing decision.

61% of consumers aged 18-34 discover new products through social media. If consumers start purchasing directly through these social platforms, that could pose a big problem for someone like Amazon.

We also learned about structured data to help search engines understand content, and the importance of always marking up price, availability, image, and product name. For the curious, the Pinterest engineering blog is quite open on how their visual search works.

Panel: UPS, Codecademy, Heineken, Condé Nast

Panel: Andrew Spikes, Head of Global Paid Search, UPS. Kunal Arya, Performance Marketing Manager, Codecademy. Nikolai Zeinikov, Ecommerce Director, Heineken. John Shehata, VP, Audience Development Strategy, Condé Nast

To close out the day, we had a final panel discussion on strategies for search transformation. Panelists from UPS, Codecademy, Heineken, and Conde Nast carried us through with light-hearted, quippy, down to earth thoughts on how they strategize search at their organizations.

They reminded us that almost 80% of successful add to baskets happen through search, and that people use search because they can’t easily find the products.

They also exemplified how SEO teams are still very much “lean beasts.” One of them mentioned that even at such a large company, their “search” team was a mere four people — and two of them were UX/UI. “When I first started, it was a huge mess,” he said. Further proof that a lot can be done with few hands on deck, and that strategy has a lot to do with choosing what not to do.

All in all, it was an excellent, enlightening day. We’ll have some more in-depth video content to come on specific sessions. Until then, another s/o to those who joined us!

from Digtal Marketing News https://searchenginewatch.com/transformation-search-summit-roundup

[oscarkruegerus]

Transformation of Search Summit roundup

This past Friday we held our inaugural Transformation of Search Summit here in NY. Let’s just say, we’re already looking to book our venue for next year! On a scale of one to success, it was smashing.

Firstly, thank you (yet again) to all who came out to sponsor, speak at, and attend the event — couldn’t have done it without you.

As frequenters of many events ourselves, we did our best to ensure this one was full of high quality, fluff-free content. None of those talks where you get the end and think, “okay, but take out the buzzwords, and what did they say?” We asked for the moon, and our wonderful speakers delivered.

Some particularly rich (dare we say featured) snippets from the day:

Where search is heading

Siddharth Taparia, SVP and Head of Marketing Transformation, SAP, kicked off our morning speaking on the future of where search is heading. Social is the new storefront. The top 500 retailers earned 6.5 billion from social shopping in 2017, up 24%.

With the rise of voice search, position 0 is the ultimate prize. Over half of search queries will be voice based by 2020. A quarter of US homes have smart speakers. 92% of 18-29 year olds have smartphones. 90% increase in capabilities for voice search with only 8% error rate

Protecting privacy is a big deal. Alexa is coming to the office, the hotel, healthcare, the car, even learning. When you put a chip in everything, the whole world becomes a security threat. Even Google and Amazon are not immune to these.

New research: The Era of Ecommerce

Kerry Curran, Managing Partner, Marketing Integration, Catalyst & Clark Boyd, Research Lead, ClickZ, presented our headlining research report for the day: The Era of Ecommerce. Among many things, this research found a notable gap between how consumers browse, purchase, and behave online, and where advertisers put spend to reel those consumers in. Hint: not the same places.

There’s a lot more we could (and surely will) write about this report — not to mention that it was already 50+ pages long. For now I’ll direct you here for more information and here for the free download — enjoy!

How blockchain will affect search

Jeremy Epstein, CEO, Never Stop Marketing. For those who have never heard Jeremy speak, he is the best kind of fireball on stage. Spirited and smart, with the perfect sprinkle of self-deprecating humor. Jeremy speaks often on blockchain and the decentralized economy, and at this summit he focused on what those will mean for search. There’s a new sector — still in its infancy — of decentralized content that poses unique challenges in the search world: hard for search engines to index, curated by the audience, and where revenue generated goes directly to the creators of that content.

Panel: ClickZ, Adobe, Microsoft, Google

Panel discussion: Clark Boyd, Research Lead, ClickZ. Pete Kluge, Group Manager, Product Marketing, Adobe, Christi Olson, Head of Evangelism, Microsoft. Juan Felipe Rincón, Global Lead, Trust & Safety Search Outreach, Google

This was an interesting panel discussion on what awaits us in the future of search — things like connecting content and searches over several days, and more gender equality for women who search in emerging markets. They of course touched on types of search, and how Amazon is affecting the industry.

Visual search, which starts to answer the long-held question of “how do you search for something if you don’t know what it is?” and which particularly rings true for retail: this person has a nice scarf, where did it come from, where can I get one?

They also discussed how the input:output exchange of search is changing. It used to be only text:text. Now it can be image:voice, voice:voice, or any number of expanding options.

We need a bit of a mindset shift. We do a lot of our planning in terms of old paradigms, but more and more searches are being done by default, through lots of entry points.

They voiced how the future of search is no search, because search implies uncertainty. Instead, it will be about how you populate something before someone knows what they don’t know. In the future we won’t be searching, AI will do it for us. The experience of a user going through search is not here’s a keyword, here’s what I need. Sometimes we actively search, sometimes we want to be kept informed about things interesting to us.

And finally, bringing us a bit back to our feet — they reminded us that while we talk a lot about the future and transformation of search, a lot can be done now. Particularly around visual search, there’s still a lot of basic groundwork that people aren’t doing, such as using alt tags on images and making sure our visual content is properly described. As Rincon put it, “Look at the web as if you didn’t have eyes.”

Mobile search

Jason White, Director, SEO, Hertz. Fun fact about Jason: he started off doing SEO in 2003 because he competed in cycling races and worked at a bike shop to get discounts on parts, and the bike shop wanted to sell excess inventory in the winter. Fifteen years later, he’s Director of SEO at Hertz. Yet another quintessential example of great, self-taught SEOs who stumbled into the field and were pleasantly surprised to find it stuck.

Best quote from Jason? “You’re going to have a smart toilet bowl at sometime in your life. What will it say about you?” He talked about the future of IoT and security. We learned our data is worth $250 per year, and it’s going up every year. And finally, that billions of queries are made every day, 15% of which are completely new — ones Google says people had never searched for before.

Amazon and Amazon Marketing Services

John Denny, VP Ecommerce & Digital Marketing, Cavu Venture Partners (formerly Bai Brands). Luis Navarrete Gomez, Head of Global Search Marketing, LEGO

This was a particularly hands-on session with 7 excellent tips for leveraging Amazon and Amazon Marketing Services, i.e. both paid and organic search. And it was certainly from a trustworthy source — John Denny helped lead Bai beverages to be named 2015 Vendor of the Year by Amazon.

They related how running search campaigns on Amazon has been a struggle, one which many compare to what it was like running Google search campaigns in 2005. Happily, there’s been some rapid development of ad tech platforms changing the game of late.

They also talked about the tangible nature of Amazon campaigns versus elsewhere on the web — marketers selling physical products. As John put it, “A lot of execs hear about Amazon ads and think great, let’s rock and roll! But the reality on Amazon is that you can’t rock and roll anywhere if your product is out of stock. Build your foundation first.”

The full-funnel search approach

Claudia Virgilio, GVP of Strategic Partnerships, Kenshoo spoke to us about the importance of taking a full-funnel search approach. Amazon advertising has 197 million monthly unique visitors, and $4.6 billion spend.

How to optimize for voice search

Melissa Walner, Director, Global SEO, Hilton led another particularly practical session, coming from a brand that certainly gets asked a lot of questions — everything from “what’s the address of my hotel” to “what are fun things to do in Maui with kids?” Melissa had great insight into how to optimize specifically for voice search, and viewing SEO these days as not just search engine optimization so much as search everywhere optimization and search everything optimization.

She pointed out that 1 billion voice searches are made each month already, and that by 2020, 30% of all searches will be done without a screen.

In a voice search world, position 0 is queen: 80% of google home responses stem from a featured snippet. She then gave great tips for securing those featured snippets, on both high-level strategic and in-the-weeds technical levels.

Visual search and ecommerce

Clark hopped back up to cover visual search and how it affects ecommerce. One key quote from this session was pulled from our research report, from Amy Vener of Pinterest: “Shopping has always been visual. We’ve just been taught to do the opposite online.”

93% of consumers consider images to be be key deciding factor in a purchasing decision.

61% of consumers aged 18-34 discover new products through social media. If consumers start purchasing directly through these social platforms, that could pose a big problem for someone like Amazon.

We also learned about structured data to help search engines understand content, and the importance of always marking up price, availability, image, and product name. For the curious, the Pinterest engineering blog is quite open on how their visual search works.

Panel: UPS, Codecademy, Heineken, Condé Nast

Panel: Andrew Spikes, Head of Global Paid Search, UPS. Kunal Arya, Performance Marketing Manager, Codecademy. Nikolai Zeinikov, Ecommerce Director, Heineken. John Shehata, VP, Audience Development Strategy, Condé Nast

To close out the day, we had a final panel discussion on strategies for search transformation. Panelists from UPS, Codecademy, Heineken, and Conde Nast carried us through with light-hearted, quippy, down to earth thoughts on how they strategize search at their organizations.

They reminded us that almost 80% of successful add to baskets happen through search, and that people use search because they can’t easily find the products.

They also exemplified how SEO teams are still very much “lean beasts.” One of them mentioned that even at such a large company, their “search” team was a mere four people — and two of them were UX/UI. “When I first started, it was a huge mess,” he said. Further proof that a lot can be done with few hands on deck, and that strategy has a lot to do with choosing what not to do.

All in all, it was an excellent, enlightening day. We’ll have some more in-depth video content to come on specific sessions. Until then, another s/o to those who joined us!

from Digtal Marketing News https://searchenginewatch.com/transformation-search-summit-roundup

[sheilalmartinia]

Transformation of Search Summit roundup

This past Friday we held our inaugural Transformation of Search Summit here in NY. Let’s just say, we’re already looking to book our venue for next year! On a scale of one to success, it was smashing.

Firstly, thank you (yet again) to all who came out to sponsor, speak at, and attend the event — couldn’t have done it without you.

As frequenters of many events ourselves, we did our best to ensure this one was full of high quality, fluff-free content. None of those talks where you get the end and think, “okay, but take out the buzzwords, and what did they say?” We asked for the moon, and our wonderful speakers delivered.

Some particularly rich (dare we say featured) snippets from the day:

Where search is heading

Siddharth Taparia, SVP and Head of Marketing Transformation, SAP, kicked off our morning speaking on the future of where search is heading. Social is the new storefront. The top 500 retailers earned 6.5 billion from social shopping in 2017, up 24%.

With the rise of voice search, position 0 is the ultimate prize. Over half of search queries will be voice based by 2020. A quarter of US homes have smart speakers. 92% of 18-29 year olds have smartphones. 90% increase in capabilities for voice search with only 8% error rate

Protecting privacy is a big deal. Alexa is coming to the office, the hotel, healthcare, the car, even learning. When you put a chip in everything, the whole world becomes a security threat. Even Google and Amazon are not immune to these.

New research: The Era of Ecommerce

Kerry Curran, Managing Partner, Marketing Integration, Catalyst & Clark Boyd, Research Lead, ClickZ, presented our headlining research report for the day: The Era of Ecommerce. Among many things, this research found a notable gap between how consumers browse, purchase, and behave online, and where advertisers put spend to reel those consumers in. Hint: not the same places.

There’s a lot more we could (and surely will) write about this report — not to mention that it was already 50+ pages long. For now I’ll direct you here for more information and here for the free download — enjoy!

How blockchain will affect search

Jeremy Epstein, CEO, Never Stop Marketing. For those who have never heard Jeremy speak, he is the best kind of fireball on stage. Spirited and smart, with the perfect sprinkle of self-deprecating humor. Jeremy speaks often on blockchain and the decentralized economy, and at this summit he focused on what those will mean for search. There’s a new sector — still in its infancy — of decentralized content that poses unique challenges in the search world: hard for search engines to index, curated by the audience, and where revenue generated goes directly to the creators of that content.

Panel: ClickZ, Adobe, Microsoft, Google

Panel discussion: Clark Boyd, Research Lead, ClickZ. Pete Kluge, Group Manager, Product Marketing, Adobe, Christi Olson, Head of Evangelism, Microsoft. Juan Felipe Rincón, Global Lead, Trust & Safety Search Outreach, Google

This was an interesting panel discussion on what awaits us in the future of search — things like connecting content and searches over several days, and more gender equality for women who search in emerging markets. They of course touched on types of search, and how Amazon is affecting the industry.

Visual search, which starts to answer the long-held question of “how do you search for something if you don’t know what it is?” and which particularly rings true for retail: this person has a nice scarf, where did it come from, where can I get one?

They also discussed how the input:output exchange of search is changing. It used to be only text:text. Now it can be image:voice, voice:voice, or any number of expanding options.

We need a bit of a mindset shift. We do a lot of our planning in terms of old paradigms, but more and more searches are being done by default, through lots of entry points.

They voiced how the future of search is no search, because search implies uncertainty. Instead, it will be about how you populate something before someone knows what they don’t know. In the future we won’t be searching, AI will do it for us. The experience of a user going through search is not here’s a keyword, here’s what I need. Sometimes we actively search, sometimes we want to be kept informed about things interesting to us.

And finally, bringing us a bit back to our feet — they reminded us that while we talk a lot about the future and transformation of search, a lot can be done now. Particularly around visual search, there’s still a lot of basic groundwork that people aren’t doing, such as using alt tags on images and making sure our visual content is properly described. As Rincon put it, “Look at the web as if you didn’t have eyes.”

Mobile search

Jason White, Director, SEO, Hertz. Fun fact about Jason: he started off doing SEO in 2003 because he competed in cycling races and worked at a bike shop to get discounts on parts, and the bike shop wanted to sell excess inventory in the winter. Fifteen years later, he’s Director of SEO at Hertz. Yet another quintessential example of great, self-taught SEOs who stumbled into the field and were pleasantly surprised to find it stuck.

Best quote from Jason? “You’re going to have a smart toilet bowl at sometime in your life. What will it say about you?” He talked about the future of IoT and security. We learned our data is worth $250 per year, and it’s going up every year. And finally, that billions of queries are made every day, 15% of which are completely new — ones Google says people had never searched for before.

Amazon and Amazon Marketing Services

John Denny, VP Ecommerce & Digital Marketing, Cavu Venture Partners (formerly Bai Brands). Luis Navarrete Gomez, Head of Global Search Marketing, LEGO

This was a particularly hands-on session with 7 excellent tips for leveraging Amazon and Amazon Marketing Services, i.e. both paid and organic search. And it was certainly from a trustworthy source — John Denny helped lead Bai beverages to be named 2015 Vendor of the Year by Amazon.

They related how running search campaigns on Amazon has been a struggle, one which many compare to what it was like running Google search campaigns in 2005. Happily, there’s been some rapid development of ad tech platforms changing the game of late.

They also talked about the tangible nature of Amazon campaigns versus elsewhere on the web — marketers selling physical products. As John put it, “A lot of execs hear about Amazon ads and think great, let’s rock and roll! But the reality on Amazon is that you can’t rock and roll anywhere if your product is out of stock. Build your foundation first.”

The full-funnel search approach

Claudia Virgilio, GVP of Strategic Partnerships, Kenshoo spoke to us about the importance of taking a full-funnel search approach. Amazon advertising has 197 million monthly unique visitors, and $4.6 billion spend.

How to optimize for voice search

Melissa Walner, Director, Global SEO, Hilton led another particularly practical session, coming from a brand that certainly gets asked a lot of questions — everything from “what’s the address of my hotel” to “what are fun things to do in Maui with kids?” Melissa had great insight into how to optimize specifically for voice search, and viewing SEO these days as not just search engine optimization so much as search everywhere optimization and search everything optimization.

She pointed out that 1 billion voice searches are made each month already, and that by 2020, 30% of all searches will be done without a screen.

In a voice search world, position 0 is queen: 80% of google home responses stem from a featured snippet. She then gave great tips for securing those featured snippets, on both high-level strategic and in-the-weeds technical levels.

Visual search and ecommerce

Clark hopped back up to cover visual search and how it affects ecommerce. One key quote from this session was pulled from our research report, from Amy Vener of Pinterest: “Shopping has always been visual. We’ve just been taught to do the opposite online.”

93% of consumers consider images to be be key deciding factor in a purchasing decision.

61% of consumers aged 18-34 discover new products through social media. If consumers start purchasing directly through these social platforms, that could pose a big problem for someone like Amazon.

We also learned about structured data to help search engines understand content, and the importance of always marking up price, availability, image, and product name. For the curious, the Pinterest engineering blog is quite open on how their visual search works.

Panel: UPS, Codecademy, Heineken, Condé Nast

Panel: Andrew Spikes, Head of Global Paid Search, UPS. Kunal Arya, Performance Marketing Manager, Codecademy. Nikolai Zeinikov, Ecommerce Director, Heineken. John Shehata, VP, Audience Development Strategy, Condé Nast

To close out the day, we had a final panel discussion on strategies for search transformation. Panelists from UPS, Codecademy, Heineken, and Conde Nast carried us through with light-hearted, quippy, down to earth thoughts on how they strategize search at their organizations.

They reminded us that almost 80% of successful add to baskets happen through search, and that people use search because they can’t easily find the products.

They also exemplified how SEO teams are still very much “lean beasts.” One of them mentioned that even at such a large company, their “search” team was a mere four people — and two of them were UX/UI. “When I first started, it was a huge mess,” he said. Further proof that a lot can be done with few hands on deck, and that strategy has a lot to do with choosing what not to do.

All in all, it was an excellent, enlightening day. We’ll have some more in-depth video content to come on specific sessions. Until then, another s/o to those who joined us!

from Search Engine Watch https://searchenginewatch.com/transformation-search-summit-roundup

[alanajacksontx]

Transformation of Search Summit roundup

This past Friday we held our inaugural Transformation of Search Summit here in NY. Let’s just say, we’re already looking to book our venue for next year! On a scale of one to success, it was smashing.

Firstly, thank you (yet again) to all who came out to sponsor, speak at, and attend the event — couldn’t have done it without you.

As frequenters of many events ourselves, we did our best to ensure this one was full of high quality, fluff-free content. None of those talks where you get the end and think, “okay, but take out the buzzwords, and what did they say?” We asked for the moon, and our wonderful speakers delivered.

Some particularly rich (dare we say featured) snippets from the day:

Where search is heading

Siddharth Taparia, SVP and Head of Marketing Transformation, SAP, kicked off our morning speaking on the future of where search is heading. Social is the new storefront. The top 500 retailers earned 6.5 billion from social shopping in 2017, up 24%.

With the rise of voice search, position 0 is the ultimate prize. Over half of search queries will be voice based by 2020. A quarter of US homes have smart speakers. 92% of 18-29 year olds have smartphones. 90% increase in capabilities for voice search with only 8% error rate

Protecting privacy is a big deal. Alexa is coming to the office, the hotel, healthcare, the car, even learning. When you put a chip in everything, the whole world becomes a security threat. Even Google and Amazon are not immune to these.

New research: The Era of Ecommerce

Kerry Curran, Managing Partner, Marketing Integration, Catalyst & Clark Boyd, Research Lead, ClickZ, presented our headlining research report for the day: The Era of Ecommerce. Among many things, this research found a notable gap between how consumers browse, purchase, and behave online, and where advertisers put spend to reel those consumers in. Hint: not the same places.

There’s a lot more we could (and surely will) write about this report — not to mention that it was already 50+ pages long. For now I’ll direct you here for more information and here for the free download — enjoy!

How blockchain will affect search

Jeremy Epstein, CEO, Never Stop Marketing. For those who have never heard Jeremy speak, he is the best kind of fireball on stage. Spirited and smart, with the perfect sprinkle of self-deprecating humor. Jeremy speaks often on blockchain and the decentralized economy, and at this summit he focused on what those will mean for search. There’s a new sector — still in its infancy — of decentralized content that poses unique challenges in the search world: hard for search engines to index, curated by the audience, and where revenue generated goes directly to the creators of that content.

Panel: ClickZ, Adobe, Microsoft, Google

Panel discussion: Clark Boyd, Research Lead, ClickZ. Pete Kluge, Group Manager, Product Marketing, Adobe, Christi Olson, Head of Evangelism, Microsoft. Juan Felipe Rincón, Global Lead, Trust & Safety Search Outreach, Google

This was an interesting panel discussion on what awaits us in the future of search — things like connecting content and searches over several days, and more gender equality for women who search in emerging markets. They of course touched on types of search, and how Amazon is affecting the industry.

Visual search, which starts to answer the long-held question of “how do you search for something if you don’t know what it is?” and which particularly rings true for retail: this person has a nice scarf, where did it come from, where can I get one?

They also discussed how the input:output exchange of search is changing. It used to be only text:text. Now it can be image:voice, voice:voice, or any number of expanding options.

We need a bit of a mindset shift. We do a lot of our planning in terms of old paradigms, but more and more searches are being done by default, through lots of entry points.

They voiced how the future of search is no search, because search implies uncertainty. Instead, it will be about how you populate something before someone knows what they don’t know. In the future we won’t be searching, AI will do it for us. The experience of a user going through search is not here’s a keyword, here’s what I need. Sometimes we actively search, sometimes we want to be kept informed about things interesting to us.

And finally, bringing us a bit back to our feet — they reminded us that while we talk a lot about the future and transformation of search, a lot can be done now. Particularly around visual search, there’s still a lot of basic groundwork that people aren’t doing, such as using alt tags on images and making sure our visual content is properly described. As Rincon put it, “Look at the web as if you didn’t have eyes.”

Mobile search

Jason White, Director, SEO, Hertz. Fun fact about Jason: he started off doing SEO in 2003 because he competed in cycling races and worked at a bike shop to get discounts on parts, and the bike shop wanted to sell excess inventory in the winter. Fifteen years later, he’s Director of SEO at Hertz. Yet another quintessential example of great, self-taught SEOs who stumbled into the field and were pleasantly surprised to find it stuck.

Best quote from Jason? “You’re going to have a smart toilet bowl at sometime in your life. What will it say about you?” He talked about the future of IoT and security. We learned our data is worth $250 per year, and it’s going up every year. And finally, that billions of queries are made every day, 15% of which are completely new — ones Google says people had never searched for before.

Amazon and Amazon Marketing Services

John Denny, VP Ecommerce & Digital Marketing, Cavu Venture Partners (formerly Bai Brands). Luis Navarrete Gomez, Head of Global Search Marketing, LEGO

This was a particularly hands-on session with 7 excellent tips for leveraging Amazon and Amazon Marketing Services, i.e. both paid and organic search. And it was certainly from a trustworthy source — John Denny helped lead Bai beverages to be named 2015 Vendor of the Year by Amazon.

They related how running search campaigns on Amazon has been a struggle, one which many compare to what it was like running Google search campaigns in 2005. Happily, there’s been some rapid development of ad tech platforms changing the game of late.

They also talked about the tangible nature of Amazon campaigns versus elsewhere on the web — marketers selling physical products. As John put it, “A lot of execs hear about Amazon ads and think great, let’s rock and roll! But the reality on Amazon is that you can’t rock and roll anywhere if your product is out of stock. Build your foundation first.”

The full-funnel search approach

Claudia Virgilio, GVP of Strategic Partnerships, Kenshoo spoke to us about the importance of taking a full-funnel search approach. Amazon advertising has 197 million monthly unique visitors, and $4.6 billion spend.

How to optimize for voice search

Melissa Walner, Director, Global SEO, Hilton led another particularly practical session, coming from a brand that certainly gets asked a lot of questions — everything from “what’s the address of my hotel” to “what are fun things to do in Maui with kids?” Melissa had great insight into how to optimize specifically for voice search, and viewing SEO these days as not just search engine optimization so much as search everywhere optimization and search everything optimization.

She pointed out that 1 billion voice searches are made each month already, and that by 2020, 30% of all searches will be done without a screen.

In a voice search world, position 0 is queen: 80% of google home responses stem from a featured snippet. She then gave great tips for securing those featured snippets, on both high-level strategic and in-the-weeds technical levels.

Visual search and ecommerce

Clark hopped back up to cover visual search and how it affects ecommerce. One key quote from this session was pulled from our research report, from Amy Vener of Pinterest: “Shopping has always been visual. We’ve just been taught to do the opposite online.”

93% of consumers consider images to be be key deciding factor in a purchasing decision.

61% of consumers aged 18-34 discover new products through social media. If consumers start purchasing directly through these social platforms, that could pose a big problem for someone like Amazon.

We also learned about structured data to help search engines understand content, and the importance of always marking up price, availability, image, and product name. For the curious, the Pinterest engineering blog is quite open on how their visual search works.

Panel: UPS, Codecademy, Heineken, Condé Nast

Panel: Andrew Spikes, Head of Global Paid Search, UPS. Kunal Arya, Performance Marketing Manager, Codecademy. Nikolai Zeinikov, Ecommerce Director, Heineken. John Shehata, VP, Audience Development Strategy, Condé Nast

To close out the day, we had a final panel discussion on strategies for search transformation. Panelists from UPS, Codecademy, Heineken, and Conde Nast carried us through with light-hearted, quippy, down to earth thoughts on how they strategize search at their organizations.

They reminded us that almost 80% of successful add to baskets happen through search, and that people use search because they can’t easily find the products.

They also exemplified how SEO teams are still very much “lean beasts.” One of them mentioned that even at such a large company, their “search” team was a mere four people — and two of them were UX/UI. “When I first started, it was a huge mess,” he said. Further proof that a lot can be done with few hands on deck, and that strategy has a lot to do with choosing what not to do.

All in all, it was an excellent, enlightening day. We’ll have some more in-depth video content to come on specific sessions. Until then, another s/o to those who joined us!

from IM Tips And Tricks https://searchenginewatch.com/transformation-search-summit-roundup from Rising Phoenix SEO https://risingphxseo.tumblr.com/post/179326859220

[evaaguilaus]

Transformation of Search Summit roundup

This past Friday we held our inaugural Transformation of Search Summit here in NY. Let’s just say, we’re already looking to book our venue for next year! On a scale of one to success, it was smashing.

Firstly, thank you (yet again) to all who came out to sponsor, speak at, and attend the event — couldn’t have done it without you.

As frequenters of many events ourselves, we did our best to ensure this one was full of high quality, fluff-free content. None of those talks where you get the end and think, “okay, but take out the buzzwords, and what did they say?” We asked for the moon, and our wonderful speakers delivered.

Some particularly rich (dare we say featured) snippets from the day:

Where search is heading

Siddharth Taparia, SVP and Head of Marketing Transformation, SAP, kicked off our morning speaking on the future of where search is heading. Social is the new storefront. The top 500 retailers earned 6.5 billion from social shopping in 2017, up 24%.

With the rise of voice search, position 0 is the ultimate prize. Over half of search queries will be voice based by 2020. A quarter of US homes have smart speakers. 92% of 18-29 year olds have smartphones. 90% increase in capabilities for voice search with only 8% error rate

Protecting privacy is a big deal. Alexa is coming to the office, the hotel, healthcare, the car, even learning. When you put a chip in everything, the whole world becomes a security threat. Even Google and Amazon are not immune to these.

New research: The Era of Ecommerce

Kerry Curran, Managing Partner, Marketing Integration, Catalyst & Clark Boyd, Research Lead, ClickZ, presented our headlining research report for the day: The Era of Ecommerce. Among many things, this research found a notable gap between how consumers browse, purchase, and behave online, and where advertisers put spend to reel those consumers in. Hint: not the same places.

There’s a lot more we could (and surely will) write about this report — not to mention that it was already 50+ pages long. For now I’ll direct you here for more information and here for the free download — enjoy!

How blockchain will affect search

Jeremy Epstein, CEO, Never Stop Marketing. For those who have never heard Jeremy speak, he is the best kind of fireball on stage. Spirited and smart, with the perfect sprinkle of self-deprecating humor. Jeremy speaks often on blockchain and the decentralized economy, and at this summit he focused on what those will mean for search. There’s a new sector — still in its infancy — of decentralized content that poses unique challenges in the search world: hard for search engines to index, curated by the audience, and where revenue generated goes directly to the creators of that content.

Panel: ClickZ, Adobe, Microsoft, Google

Panel discussion: Clark Boyd, Research Lead, ClickZ. Pete Kluge, Group Manager, Product Marketing, Adobe, Christi Olson, Head of Evangelism, Microsoft. Juan Felipe Rincón, Global Lead, Trust & Safety Search Outreach, Google

This was an interesting panel discussion on what awaits us in the future of search — things like connecting content and searches over several days, and more gender equality for women who search in emerging markets. They of course touched on types of search, and how Amazon is affecting the industry.

Visual search, which starts to answer the long-held question of “how do you search for something if you don’t know what it is?” and which particularly rings true for retail: this person has a nice scarf, where did it come from, where can I get one?

They also discussed how the input:output exchange of search is changing. It used to be only text:text. Now it can be image:voice, voice:voice, or any number of expanding options.

We need a bit of a mindset shift. We do a lot of our planning in terms of old paradigms, but more and more searches are being done by default, through lots of entry points.

They voiced how the future of search is no search, because search implies uncertainty. Instead, it will be about how you populate something before someone knows what they don’t know. In the future we won’t be searching, AI will do it for us. The experience of a user going through search is not here’s a keyword, here’s what I need. Sometimes we actively search, sometimes we want to be kept informed about things interesting to us.

And finally, bringing us a bit back to our feet — they reminded us that while we talk a lot about the future and transformation of search, a lot can be done now. Particularly around visual search, there’s still a lot of basic groundwork that people aren’t doing, such as using alt tags on images and making sure our visual content is properly described. As Rincon put it, “Look at the web as if you didn’t have eyes.”

Mobile search

Jason White, Director, SEO, Hertz. Fun fact about Jason: he started off doing SEO in 2003 because he competed in cycling races and worked at a bike shop to get discounts on parts, and the bike shop wanted to sell excess inventory in the winter. Fifteen years later, he’s Director of SEO at Hertz. Yet another quintessential example of great, self-taught SEOs who stumbled into the field and were pleasantly surprised to find it stuck.

Best quote from Jason? “You’re going to have a smart toilet bowl at sometime in your life. What will it say about you?” He talked about the future of IoT and security. We learned our data is worth $250 per year, and it’s going up every year. And finally, that billions of queries are made every day, 15% of which are completely new — ones Google says people had never searched for before.

Amazon and Amazon Marketing Services

John Denny, VP Ecommerce & Digital Marketing, Cavu Venture Partners (formerly Bai Brands). Luis Navarrete Gomez, Head of Global Search Marketing, LEGO

This was a particularly hands-on session with 7 excellent tips for leveraging Amazon and Amazon Marketing Services, i.e. both paid and organic search. And it was certainly from a trustworthy source — John Denny helped lead Bai beverages to be named 2015 Vendor of the Year by Amazon.

They related how running search campaigns on Amazon has been a struggle, one which many compare to what it was like running Google search campaigns in 2005. Happily, there’s been some rapid development of ad tech platforms changing the game of late.

They also talked about the tangible nature of Amazon campaigns versus elsewhere on the web — marketers selling physical products. As John put it, “A lot of execs hear about Amazon ads and think great, let’s rock and roll! But the reality on Amazon is that you can’t rock and roll anywhere if your product is out of stock. Build your foundation first.”

The full-funnel search approach

Claudia Virgilio, GVP of Strategic Partnerships, Kenshoo spoke to us about the importance of taking a full-funnel search approach. Amazon advertising has 197 million monthly unique visitors, and $4.6 billion spend.

How to optimize for voice search

Melissa Walner, Director, Global SEO, Hilton led another particularly practical session, coming from a brand that certainly gets asked a lot of questions — everything from “what’s the address of my hotel” to “what are fun things to do in Maui with kids?” Melissa had great insight into how to optimize specifically for voice search, and viewing SEO these days as not just search engine optimization so much as search everywhere optimization and search everything optimization.

She pointed out that 1 billion voice searches are made each month already, and that by 2020, 30% of all searches will be done without a screen.

In a voice search world, position 0 is queen: 80% of google home responses stem from a featured snippet. She then gave great tips for securing those featured snippets, on both high-level strategic and in-the-weeds technical levels.

Visual search and ecommerce

Clark hopped back up to cover visual search and how it affects ecommerce. One key quote from this session was pulled from our research report, from Amy Vener of Pinterest: “Shopping has always been visual. We’ve just been taught to do the opposite online.”

93% of consumers consider images to be be key deciding factor in a purchasing decision.

61% of consumers aged 18-34 discover new products through social media. If consumers start purchasing directly through these social platforms, that could pose a big problem for someone like Amazon.

We also learned about structured data to help search engines understand content, and the importance of always marking up price, availability, image, and product name. For the curious, the Pinterest engineering blog is quite open on how their visual search works.

Panel: UPS, Codecademy, Heineken, Condé Nast

Panel: Andrew Spikes, Head of Global Paid Search, UPS. Kunal Arya, Performance Marketing Manager, Codecademy. Nikolai Zeinikov, Ecommerce Director, Heineken. John Shehata, VP, Audience Development Strategy, Condé Nast

To close out the day, we had a final panel discussion on strategies for search transformation. Panelists from UPS, Codecademy, Heineken, and Conde Nast carried us through with light-hearted, quippy, down to earth thoughts on how they strategize search at their organizations.

They reminded us that almost 80% of successful add to baskets happen through search, and that people use search because they can’t easily find the products.

They also exemplified how SEO teams are still very much “lean beasts.” One of them mentioned that even at such a large company, their “search” team was a mere four people — and two of them were UX/UI. “When I first started, it was a huge mess,” he said. Further proof that a lot can be done with few hands on deck, and that strategy has a lot to do with choosing what not to do.

All in all, it was an excellent, enlightening day. We’ll have some more in-depth video content to come on specific sessions. Until then, another s/o to those who joined us!

from Digtal Marketing News https://searchenginewatch.com/transformation-search-summit-roundup

[thesharkmaster23-blog]

torby foliowe z nadrukiem - oferta

DEMONSTRATIVE Articles

torby foliowe z nadrukiem - oferta

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[trendexplainer]

Kermit the Frog: It’s Not Easy Being a Meme

When Jim Henson created Kermit the Frog in 1955, he surely had no idea that his puppet would go on to become a timeless cultural icon, a celebrity in his own right, and most recently, an internet meme sensation. Yet decades before Reddit and Imgur, Kermit was already the perfect candidate to become all those things. His simple character design has remained virtually unchanged for over 60 years, making him instantly recognizable and easy to edit and remix. His static ping pong ball eyes and relative lack of features make him dependent on body language, props, and captions to express emotions. And he has appeared in hundreds of episodes of The Muppet Show and Sesame Street and starred in dozens of films, so the internet holds a dizzying array of Kermit photos to form the basis of memes. Kermit has competed on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and made the rounds on daytime and late night talk shows with multiple generations of hosts. There is not one, but two Kermit puppets behind glass at the Smithsonian. He is the most interesting frog in the world.

How could he NOT occasionally take over the internet?

According to Google Trends, the most popular Kermit meme is what Know Your Meme calls “But That’s None of My Business.” It typically features Kermit nonchalantly drinking a beverage and calling out questionable behavior or hypocrisy, asserting at the end “but that’s none of my business.” I think it’s meant to play Kermit as a gossipy casual observer, and often a condescending one. Many of these witty social observations originated in black internet subculture and made the rounds in those circles before reaching the internet at large.

There are two main incarnations of But That’s None of My Business: one of Kermit drinking tea in a 2014 Lipton advertisement, and the other of Kermit sipping milk through a straw in the very first episode of The Muppet Show (skip to about four minutes in, you’ll know it when you see it). This trend reached peak popularity in the days following June 20th, 2014, when an Instagram account was created to highlight the best of Kermit’s shade throwing and gained over 130,000 followers.

(I just want to pause here so I can imagine reading the previous sentence to Jim Henson in 1977 and wonder how he’d react to the idea of his character thriving in a bizarre, complex world Henson would never live to see.)

But That’s None of My Business enjoys blue-chip meme status to this day, but was given a brief boost on June 21st, 2016 when Good Morning America infamously tweeted a collage of popular memes and used the hashtag #tealizard to describe Kermit. Tea lizard! Predictably, Twitter lost its collective mind. Mocking of GMA as an out of touch corporate enterprise ensued, as well as the inevitable corrections that frogs are amphibians, not lizards. There was even backlash accusing GMA of whitewashing the Kermit meme by erasing its black comedian origins. In a strange turn of events, the social media coordinator for GMA tried to claim on Twitter that people have actually called this meme Tea Lizard, implicitly casting everyone else as out of touch.

Here’s the great thing about tea lizard, though: a year earlier, in the spring of 2015, scientists announced they discovered a new species of glass frog in Costa Rica that bears a striking resemblance to you-know-who:

Newly discovered frog is a Kermit look-a-like. #StopEverything #StillNewStuffInTheWorld http://t.co/8qZuTYoO3G pic.twitter.com/2e0gt5sIIf

— KariAnn Ramadorai (@KariAnnWrites) April 20, 2015

This does little to rebut the Tea Lizard truthers, and maybe we have to brush aside the fact that the original Kermit actually did look more like a lizard, but I still find it hard to believe that many people would call a fuzzy, toothless, scaleless creature—who again, calls himself a frog—a lizard.

The other famous Kermit meme has been dubbed “Evil Kermit,” and it’s taken from a screenshot of the 2014 film Muppets Most Wanted. It’s a shot of Kermit facing his evil look-alike nemesis Constantine, who is wearing a black Sith robe over his eyes. (I think it really speaks to Kermit's unique design that neither Kermit nor Constantine's face is visible in this photo but it’s still obvious who it is.) The captions always imagine the poster’s inner urges to make poor choices in the form of a two-line dialogue—essentially a version of the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. The tweet that started it all was posted on November 6th, 2016, and the meme grew in popularity over the following weeks, even inspiring a Miss Piggy version.

You’ll notice that the popularity bump from But That’s None of My Business has an immediate sharp decline, while the spike from Evil Kermit decreased more slowly. I have a few thoughts as to why. One, leisure time on the internet seems to increase in late December as people have time off work and school (see The Annual Cycle of Netflix Popularity). Around this time, a smaller Kermit meme—a Kermit aftershock, if you will—began to reemerge on Twitter thanks to the large following of the quirky high-concept account @jonnysun.

On December 12th, 2016, @jonnysun tweeted this:

when u give urself a gentle hug evrey night before u go to bed, reassuring urself that no mater wat, the day was yours bc u chose to live it pic.twitter.com/fTH8o5k3h9

— jomny sun (@jonnysun) December 13, 2016

This sad, fuzzy Kermit doll belongs to a 17-year-old girl from Finland named Pinja. In September 2016, she began taking photos of her Kermit in various settings and positions and posting them in a thread of tweets, which garnered attention in certain corners of Twitter. Sad Kermit originated in a tweet from Pinja about how much she missed one of her friends. When Jonny posted his own caption for Sad Kermit, he replied to it with a challenge for his followers to turn Sad Kermit into a ‘wholesome meme,’ meaning to lend it a positive and encouraging caption rather than a snide or sarcastic one. Many people obliged in the following days, and BuzzFeed has kindly curated the highlights.

@jonnysun the chalemge.. can u wholesome the sadest meme in the worlbd, i think.. no

— jomny sun (@jonnysun) December 13, 2016

I mention all this because December 12th also happens to be the point on the graph where the negative slope abruptly becomes less steep. The wholesome meme crusade wasn’t enough to stop the inevitable decline of Evil Kermit mania, but I think it did have an effect in prolonging it. I also believe (or at least I want to) that good natured humor—like the captions for Evil Kermit tend to be—naturally has stronger staying power than the condescension and criticism offered by But That’s None of My Business. Perhaps there is more social incentive to share a meme that lets people laugh at themselves or at life in general than a meme that chastises others, even if it’s also for laughs.

(If that’s true, it would be a fair criticism to point out that the snarkier meme was more popular. But I’ll remind you that trend popularity is based on how frequently Kermit was Googled as a percentage of total searches at the time, and the world got pretty busy searching for non-Kermit related subjects a couple days after November 6th.The election appearing to interfere with unrelated trends may turn out to be relatively common— it showed up at the end of How Google Trends Works too.)

My annotated graph would have you believe Evil Kermit was only 60% as popular at its peak as But That’s None of My Business, but of course it’s a bit more complicated than that. It turns out the spike for Kermit searches in April 2013 had nothing to do with Kermit the Frog, but is instead related to the conviction of abortion provider Kermit Gosnell for murder, manslaughter, and a host of other federal drug crimes related to his abhorrent cesspool of a clinic and his felonious practice of late term and even post-birth abortions. I did NOT see this coming when I set out to write a lighthearted blog about a Muppet and I don’t want it to take over this post. But clearly, using generic terms like “Kermit” to track meme popularity is subject to unintended and confounding interference.

Aside: I can’t fathom that there was a period of time when people named their sons Kermit. But lo and behold, there’s a whole side controversy over whether Kermit the Frog was named after a friend of Jim Henson…though I’ve never heard of anyone by that name born after The Muppet Show aired.

Anyways, I think choosing more specific search terms can shed some light on the popularity of the memes independently of the popularity of the Muppet himself:

trends.embed.renderExploreWidget("TIMESERIES", {"comparisonItem":[{"keyword":"evil kermit","geo":"","time":"today 5-y"},{"keyword":"but thats none of my business","geo":"","time":"today 5-y"},{"keyword":"kermit tea","geo":"","time":"today 5-y"}],"category":0,"property":""}, {"exploreQuery":"q=evil%20kermit,but%20thats%20none%20of%20my%20business,kermit%20tea","guestPath":"https://trends.google.com:443/trends/embed/"});

You can see three spikes we’ve talked about, but this time I’ve included two names for the tea drinking meme. Because every data point is normalized based on the largest spike, I don’t think it’s a bad assumption to compare the sum of the red and orange lines to the blue. In which case, But That’s None of My Business was more like 94% as popular as Evil Kermit. But that’s assuming there are no other aliases for the Evil Kermit Meme. One starts to get the impression Google Trends isn’t the best tool to do thorough mathematical comparisons.

So we’ve covered a case of mistaken identity with a murderer, a ridiculous Twitter gaffe, and a rare species of frog. What’s next?

Guerilla marketing, it turns out. In the midst of a summer of high-profile celebrity split-ups and divorces, Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy released statements on Facebook and Twitter on August 4th, 2015 announcing they were ending their long-term romantic relationship. But— of course—they would continue to work together professionally on their upcoming TV show “The Muppets” on ABC later that fall. This generated headlines in publications like USA Today and The Hollywood Reporter, but also in the style section of The Washington Post and CNN. (Miss Piggy even did a tell-all on Good Morning America just 9 months before they would forget who Kermit is.) Some reactions contained real emotion, as the news was meant to be taken as the end of a celebrity romance that spanned decades. A few weeks later, it was announced that Kermit had found a new girlfriend, a redheaded pig named Denise. All this internet buzz set up the character dynamics for the beginning of the new TV series when it premiered September 22nd, 2015 on ABC. These news articles were a show outside a show about making a show, because sometimes the Muppets just roll three layers deep.

I find it striking that this well-timed marketing stunt generated less than half as much interest in Kermit as the creation of an Instagram account that did nothing but post pictures of Kermit mocking social faux pas. Perhaps internet users saw the drama as the corporate stunt that it was, rolled their eyes, and moved on. Either way, it’s a startling reminder to modern PR executives that no amount of focus testing, brand development, and approved social media language will give them full control over what happens to their intellectual property.

Also striking is the fact that I just referred to Kermit as intellectual property and it probably felt a little odd to think about him in such cold legal terms. It did to me when I first typed it. But it’s true: as of 2004, Kermit the Frog is the property of an international media conglomerate called The Walt Disney Company. And by the way, so is C-3PO, Epic Rap Battles of History, and Good Morning America (which airs on ABC, yet another Disney subsidiary). We try to ignore the faceless corporations behind our beloved fictional characters the way we try not to think about how dirty our belts must get when we buckle them before washing our hands: often successfully, but not always. But the Muppets are different than virtually every other TV and movie character because the media and pop culture in general seem bent on pretending that the Muppets are real people.

Okay, yes, C-3PO, R2-D2, and BB-8 did appear at the Oscars last year and give a shout-out to John Williams. And sure, there is an entire attraction at Disney World premised on the droids being real. And yes, okay, fine, live Stormtroopers march around Disney’s Hollywood Studios. But that’s pretty much the extent of their interaction with the real world, and it’s the same for Disney’s other characters. Mickey and Minnie don’t give interviews to journalists and run official Twitter accounts. They don’t even speak! They interact with the real world by giving kids hugs, autographs, and photo-ops. Adults join in too, one reason being to have fun with their kids, a more cynical reason being the $95per person incentive they paid just for the opportunity. But I suspect most guests - kids included - know it isn’t real but play along anyways because there’s no other place where you can get a big hug from a 7-foot tall Pooh Bear. It’s special not because The Walt Disney Company or grown-ups say it’s real, but because we let it be real.

So it goes for the Muppets, but for some reason, we let them take their reality way farther into ours. It probably has to do with the way they entered the public consciousness through a variety show about making a variety show guest starring real human celebrities decades before wacky meta hijinks became popular. (One surefire way to attract praise and adulation from Hollywood is to affectionately and relentlessly lampoon it.) Audiences became used to seeing the Muppets interact with human stars. Next thing you know, the Muppets are being invited to speak in public and make TV guest appearances of their own. Kermit was evenbeing credited a the author of a best-selling book. The crossovers between Muppet world and the real world became part of their charm. But unlike Mickey, Pooh Bear, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny, normal people like you and I can’t go to a theme park or a mall and shake their hands. The Muppets were accessible only to celebrities, which made them celebrities on their own.

Of course, the real reason non-celebrities can’t meet the Muppets in person is because it would be impossible to hide the talented voice actors and puppeteers who bring them to life below the camera, and seeing how the sausage gets made would shatter the layers of pseudo-reality they’ve fabricated for themselves. So rarely are the human performers behind the Muppets recognized for their work. They generally get press only when the story is about the current Muppet production itself rather than the actual Muppets. It has become totally normal for reporters to interview Muppets in character. It’s been argued that this practice makes reporters complicit in providing free advertising for Muppet movies and TV shows under the guise of arts journalism. Is the charade necessary for the Muppets to stay unique and relevant in our postmodern TV world?

I was thinking about the media and the future of the Muppets when just last Sunday, Sesame Workshop introduced Julia, a young Muppet with autism who will join the cast of Sesame Street on April 4th. David Folkenflik’s segment on NPR’s Morning Edition and Lesley Stahl’s segment on 60 Minutes include brief scenes where they talk to Abby Cadabby, Big Bird, and Elmo in character. Neither of them really needed to do this for their stories to work, but there’s something irresistibly charming about getting to interview Muppets. In NPR’s segment in particular, the in-character exchange with Abby set up how the Muppets describe Julia and her condition before Folkenflik moved on to the substance: interviewing the actors and showrunners at Sesame Workshop. With a format allowing for extended segments, 60 Minutes went more in-depth about how Sesame Street began as an experiment in educational television for children and how they continue their mission today. The Sesame Workshop conducts extensive research and consultation with educators and child psychologists to develop their characters and programming. They reached out to 14 autism advocacy groups for input into how to best portray the condition, and published books and digital content featuring Julia before bringing her onto Sesame Street. The Workshop hopes to familiarize non-autistic children with the kinds of behaviors autistic children commonly exhibit. And by showing how Julia fits into her group of Muppet friends, they hope to send the message that autistic kids can fit into their friend groups too. This is the latest of many difficult social situations Sesame Street has tackled to help today’s children better understand the world and treat others with respect. They’ve introduced children to wheelchairs, skin color, incarceration, and even death. As long as Sesame Workshop continues to pioneer new ways to make our increasingly complex world understandable to children, I believe Muppets will have no problem staying relevant. (The real question is whether or not local PBS stations will continue receiving federal subsidies to broadcast it, and for that, you’ll have to ask Ronald Grump…I mean…you know  who I mean.)

The Muppets of the movies are like the rude older siblings of the Sesame Street Muppets. Their mission is entertainment, not non-profit children’s education. Obviously, nostalgia lends a lot of power to the Muppets, which is one reason why the 2015 TV series was marketed towards adult audiences and dealt with less than family-friendly themes.

I don’t know if the rude older sibling Muppets will forever hold the respect of the public simply because they’ve endured the test of time, regardless of what they have to offer today.

But I do know this: if I saw Joy and Sadness from Inside Out at Disney World, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second to get my photo taken with them. To be honest, I think I’d be a little starstruck. I literally keep a Sadness plush doll on my bookshelf to remind me how much the message of that movie resonated with me. I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about Inside Out, and it’s made me invested in the characters to the point where if I were offered the opportunity to simply pretend to meet them, I’d have no reason not to, regardless how silly it is. Maybe some people have a similar bond with the Muppets. Maybe this country has that kind of a bond with the Muppets, so our culture gives them attention whenever they have something to say. If we're really so invested in our relationship with them, maybe we have no reason not to as well. because we’re invested and have no reason not to. The Muppets make their share of problematic (and dare I say unfunny) jokes. But their timeless, cornball humor gave them a place in our culture long enough for them to become a fixture and even make fun of themselves along the way.

Iconic, self-aware, and eager to self-parody?

Kermit didn’t need the internet to become a meme.

[joannaritsoni-blog]

The recipe behind Buzzfeed’s Tasty success story

Beginning with the French Chef 1963 TV show setting the standards for online cooking and moving to successful online cooking delivery business models such as Martha Stewart, using digital media to share cooking ideas is clearly a successful trend. Step by step cooking guidelines, recipes with short preparation time frames, varied and nutritious menus created by in-house nutritionists, naturally sourced ingredients, relatable presenters and flexible order deliveries are the standard success drivers but by adding the following nuances, Buzzfeed’s Tasty series epitomized the free online cooking idea’s model. The viral digital publisher’s “Tasty” Food Brand truly created a “World Wide Rave” as David Meerman Scott would put it.

Reasons for page virality and hype was the unique digital marketing synergy of finding a growing theme trend, harnessing the preferred media and learning styles for segmented buyer personas, creating exemplary content for each segment, leveraging social media and search engine marketing and continuously testing, adjusting and improving practices.

Decipher the trends and leverage the appropriate media

According Sharablee on an Adweek post, food content and healthy lifestyles is one the fastest growing online categories. Also, digital video is an industry growing at a more than 20% annual growth since last year according to eMarketer, 2016. Video marketing is effective in leading targeted traffic to visit specific landing pages, improves social media sharing and boost conversions and digital marketing ROI.

Be valuable, brief and keep it light

For overworking people solving the problem of “how can I find something healthy to eat today” is a true concern. Combining this “frustration” with an activity we could perform ourselves to destress from our daily hurdles, feeling childish, cheerful and creative again is something we crave. But we want it quick and original. Tasty cooking videos positioned cooking as an inspirational and sharable task that is achievable even from the cooking amateurs. DIY is also on the rise and cornerstone in content marketing. The Tasty team succeeded in thinking from their buyer’s perspective and creating snackable, remarkable and entertaining content that is easily shareable across social media accounts and digital devices. Using a light, upbeat and humorous-approach to convey their story-like recipes they managed to produce buyer-centric, graspable and efficient content in their instructive 1 minute quality videos that were also mobile optimized. Focusing on valuable and free content creation they achieved authentic audience connection and were consistent in their playful, memorable and uptempo brand personality.

Decoding Tasty’s thought leadership video content reveals a unique mixture of creative and mostly healthy recipes, easily replicable with limited supplies (apparent through their “5 ingredients or less recipes” section), smooth hand movement videos, and a flair of professionalism with recipes prepared as if from the point of view of actual cook.  

The site is made-up of a range of segment videos that lead to sub-pages indicating the emphasis on niche audience targeting for meaningful connections. From breakfast, dinner, appetizers, dessert recipes, the "Tasty Happy Hour" section on alcoholic beverages, "Tasty Fresh" and the variations of the same dish in the “Recipes 4 Ways” section, Tasty caters for diverse tastes. The multitude of section offerings aims to provide relevant and thus, shareable content for diverse audiences. The best examples are "Tasty Junior” which became its own page TastyJr.com with its personalized cookbook for kids, sections on international cuisines such as British, Portuguese, French etc. and  "Tasty Story" with celebrities such as Marcus Samuelsson and Martha Stewart taking the lead.

Content marketing & link building for SEM results

According to David Meerman Scott content marketing is indeed the best recipe for SEM. “Brand journalism” as he calls it; thinking as publisher of information instead of a product advertiser and selling free advice rather than products, pays off online. Tasty cooking series used short and catchy titles and descriptions in their videos and leveraged the long tail of search using targeted keyword search terms. For SEM organic search including keywords and phrases that buyers are searching on search engine's is recommended and Tasty aced the game. Furthermore, successful link building on social channels for content promotion is also key to success. Links of Tasty’s videos lead to unique landing pages offering specific content for the per case targeted buyer personas.

Ubiquitous Social Network presence & impressive stats

Tasty started out optimized for Facebook but soon deployed its presence across all major social media networks with native video uploads. The team continuously posted visually rich content across Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Vine and Tumblr accounts to increase reach of videos and boost engagement and they also optimized social sharing buttons. Their good branding, social selling reach and use of social media etiquette lead to impressive social networking stats.

According to TubularInsights’ “February’s Most-Watched Facebook Publishers” Leaderboard Report 2017 Tasty ranked at #6. Their results are so remarkable that it is worth considering some actual numbers per social networking platform:

Tasty’s total Social Reach across the 5 major social networking platforms was as high as 94.9m with 87% followers on Facebook. Its February Total Views reached 1.3bn, 93% of which was from Facebook alone (1.2bn). Total Facebook Views since the page was launched on July 31, 2015 are 29.4bn with an average view per video of 23.6m people! 25% of active Facebook users watch at least 1 video every month!

Visiting Tasty’s “Likes” Facebook page on March 16th, “Total Page Follows” were more than 83m with a 0.6% weekly increase, “People Talking About This” stats were more than 8m and there was a 30.5% increase in “New Page Likes” to more than 470K. For content uploaded only 1 day ago they received 5.7m views, 82.8K likes and 40.9K shares. Their posts were also optimized for Facebook’s autoplay feature and Tasty also leveraged the fact that the food category in general has mass appeal which makes it easy to insert ads.

Their YouTube channel is the fastest growing platform with more than 2m Subscribers and Total Views peaking to approx. 350m on March 16. They have a total of 751 videos uploaded and an average view per video of 450K people. Their last 90 days channel stats included 190 uploads, 60.5m views and and an impressive engagement of 63.1K comments. Just in the last 7 days likes were up by 127K! They also have an impressive link building per YouTube post. A single post might be accompanied with as many as 5 links landing on their Facebook page, different landing pages on Buzzfeed’s website such as “Customize and Buy the Tasty Cookbook Today” or “Find Recipes Here” and the Cast & Crew Lead Producer’s BuzzFeed Motion Pictures Page.

As expected, there is a clear upward trend Tasty’s Instagram viewership. For their 614 posts (of which 379 were videos) including explicit recipe preparation they have achieved 8.9m Total followers, 542m Total Views and an Average View per Video of 1.4m people. For posts uploaded just 1 day ago (i.e. 15 March) there received 871K Views, 72.2K Likes and more than 1.3K Comments. Tasty maintains a regularly updated account making approx. 1 daily post. For their last week’s posts (3/8/17-3/15/17) they received approx. 1.5m Views and 1.7m Comments! Most importantly, as an indication of user engagement and sharing of content, most users are tagging posts to their friends!

Tasty is not not so active in Vine with 305K total followers and 214m Total Views for their 185 posts and with a stable follower growth trend in this account for the last month. On Pinterest they have 631K total followers, have segmented their boards per category, and have an average of 3.5K pins per post. They also make good use of Tumblr etiquette applying hashtags and appropriate category tags. For their latest Tubmlr posts they received an average of 3K notes, 2K likes and 700 reblogs per post! Last, on Twitter they have more than 428K Followers, more than 1.4K Likes and most importantly 575 Tweets. They also have links to their iTunes app, Buzzfeed page and Vine account proving their stunning link building and cross social platform practices.

Data driven decisions, test & improve

Tasty’s data leveraging was apparent first from their informed adjustments of ingredients swapping healthier for less healthy choices and effective use of analytics to determine the platform and time with optimal audience response for their posts.

Tasty is truly rocking it!

NBCUniversal has doubled its investment in Buzzfeed and evidence of Tasty’s success is that the brand is planning to air cooking spots on NBC's Today show. Also, a by-product of Tasty’s success is Goodful’s Facebook (with more than 12m likes) and BuzzFeed’s page creating original shows on Healthy lifestyle.

Always track meaningful success metrics

Tasty is indeed the epitome of social media and buzz marketing success. Not only have they received sky-high number of Views, Likes and Followers across all their accounts but they have also excelled in user engagement with their content. As shown, their "share rate" ratio (social shares/impressions x 100) and other much more meaningful social media metrics (pins, reblogs, tweets) of valuable and resonating content were exceptionally good. According to Adweek Tasty has a well-performing video benchmark of 33% share rate and 165,000 shares per video. Also credible industry sources such as  Adweek and Fortune have praised the brand’s cooking ideas and success.

Nevertheless, as explained in Adweek, savvy digital marketing and media analysts should also track “ROI-related metrics such as brand lift, ad recall and sales”. As stated in the relevant article, “one of the challenges with branded content and native advertising right now is measuring it from a brand rather than a publisher perspective”.