Birchwood Kitchen is a gourmet sandwich shop located in Wicker Park. They use their Twitter page to communicate lunch specials and upcoming events . Fans can follow Birchwood Kitchen on Twitter to get these updates and not worry about calling or stopping by to stay in the loop.

Social media is especially powerful if your store is a local favorite. The more attached locals are with your brand, the more likely they are to follow you on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook, for example.

Homer’s is a local music store in Nebraska that might benefit from such a strategy. They have a Facebook group page, but not a Twitter page that I’m aware of. At the time of this post, they have over 700 fans on Facebook, which represents a strong local following. By communicating with locals through these social platforms, they strengthen their brand by making their friends and fans feel like part of a community. Not to mention they are able to communicate what’s happening with their store, including special deals and promotions over the holiday season. A great way to prompt an already targeted market.

What I want to discuss is the unfair standards that Internet banner advertising is held to. Because of technology, we can track how many users view the banner, how many click and how many of the clickers complete a conversion. But just because we can track this doesn’t mean it is the ultimate metric on whether a campaign is successful.

Think about traditional advertising for a minute. Millions upon millions of dollars are spent every month on advertisements that are placed on billboards and in the pages of a magazine. This is brand advertising. Obviously, there is value in these forms of advertising or they wouldn’t be used as often. But advertisers can’t track who bought what from them after seeing a particular billboard or magazine ad.

So why, then, are banner ads held to such a standard that they are only successful based on clicks and conversions? The answer is because we can track them. It’s not because it’s the best solutions, but that it’s available. Online advertisers need to be aware of the brand advantages that banner advertising to the right audience can produce. This is especially true if you can reach a large audience for a small price. Click-throughs and conversions may be low, but think about exposure you will receive. Something to keep in mind when analyzing your campaign.

The overall goal of brand advertising is the same. It’s one thing to get a reaction from someone on how hilarious they think a commercial is or how much they love it, but it’s entirely different to get a response and drive sales at the same time.

image courtesy of adage.com

Campaigns can be entertaining while increasing sales, but the latter has to be there at some point for it to be good advertising. A perfect example of a campaign that is highly entertaining (at least in my opinion) and shows results is the “Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign for Dos Equis. A recent article in Advertising Age explains its success in further detail.

I don’t always flaunt advertising campaigns on this blog, but when I do, I choose Dos Equis.

Movie Reviews and Advertising

By taking a look at movie advertising, it’s no wonder we’ve shifted to an age dominated by recommendations. Take, for example, the critical reviews that you see on either a movie trailer or on a DVD case. It seems every movie is the next oscar winner or some obscure website is raving about it.

Despite these coordinated reviews, in the past we had to guess whether the movie we were considering renting would be something we liked, or an absolute bust. Now, with sites like Netflix, we can not only see reviews, but Netflix will show us recommended titles according to our taste (which is based on past rentals).

Authoritative reviews can’t compete with peer reviews or unbiased recommendations. We now have too much information at our disposal to have to rely on what the marketing company for the movie is telling us.

When someone is searching for a generic term, often they are looking for information, or in the research phase. Let’s take a look at the keyword phrase “jumper cables,” for example. If your site contains a page that sells jumper cables, this term may seem attractive because it receives a hefty amount of traffic. Here are some of the results I received when researching this phrase on Google’s AdWord Keyword Tool:

jumper cables – 27,100
battery jumper cables – 1,900
jumper cable – 12,100
heavy duty jumper cables – 1,000
buy jumper cables – 210

Now, if you ran a PPC campaign in for these exact phrases, I would almost guarantee that “buy jumper cables” would be your best converting keyword. When a user types this phrase into a search engine, we know exactly what they are looking for. If your page is properly optimized, you’ll have a shot at ranking well in the SERP’s.

Aside from the relevancy, generic terms are more often than not more expensive than long-tail keywords. Users searching for “jumper cables” could be looking for information on how to use them, or just browsing brands as they are in the research phase. It might be worth bidding on this term for branding purposes, if you can get it for a reasonable price, but don’t expect a high click-through-rate or conversion rate. As far as optimizing your page, make sure not to waste your time optimizing it around ambiguous keywords.

The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine, is about how our culture has changed its habits by demanding niche products. I’ll save the rest of it for you.

Jeff-ometer rating: 5 out of 5

The November issue of Wired Magazine featured an article about the conception of Hulu.com (read the article online: Free, Legal and Online: Why Hulu is the New Way to Watch TV).

I am an avid user of Hulu. In fact, I watched the entire first season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia last week. My digital cable package only has the most recent episodes archived and I didn’t feel like trekking to the nearest Best Buy to spend money in the cold when I could instead pay by having to wait through a few commercials, which I’d have to do on TV anyway.

The site makes tens-of-millions in advertising each year (although the article claims that 70% is paid back for content), so it has a sufficient revenue stream to survive. More importantly, however, is the image that this has cast on me of Fox and NBC. They decided to not whine about how the Internet is pirating their shows and instead became a part of the online community. It gives them a hip, savvy image that I think users of Hulu appreciate. Welcome to web 2.0.