I recently experienced my first day of jury duty. After carefully being scrutinized during a question and answer session, I was one of the few still left in their chairs. Those standing were instructed to leave the courtroom. As the rest of the crowd walked past me towards the swinging doors of freedom, I daydreamed about what the rest of the day had filled for them. But I decided that I’d pay attention, do my duty and hopefully learn something. To my surprise, I did learn a few things:

• How to discretely take a nap while appearing to be paying attention. (I could have really used this lesson in college).
• A room for six hours without a window is in fact a cage.
• You fit a stereotype whether or not you like it.
• Tell the story like it’s your own.

Aside from the amazing napping talents of the sheriffs, the one lesson I connected with was telling the story like it’s your own. It was not new advice. I heard it from the master of presenting himself, Peter Coughter at a recent BrandCenter training session. But I had never really seen it make such and impact as it did that day. This is a lesson that should be integrated into the fabric of every agency. It should apply to both the work we produce as well as giving presentations.

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Social Marketing! Blogs! Facebook! Twitter! Last year, in a sort of symphonic convergence, most of the world’s clients and agencies arrived at the same conclusion, at about the same time, expressing the same question -  “How can we make social marketing/media work for us?”

Agencies tried to wrap around specifics of revenues, billing, staffing, and what kinds of projects could provide value.

Clients struggled to see how Social Marketing would serve their brand, their culture, their org chart, and their customers.

As 2010 begins some of the answers, for both, are clear, or at least clearer. Follow me as I detail a favorite project of 2009, social implementation for a regional health care client.

A year ago, the client had a thriving website, a plan for email marketing, and no social presence or plan.
Today, the client has created a social presence that includes:

• a constant stream of new content to their primary web site
• a blog
• a dynamic calendar of events
• Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts

The creation of social marketing began in February 2009.

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Happy Holidays from Launch Interactive! We wish all a happy and healthy holiday, and good luck in the New Year!

In the meantime, we’ve dug out our old photo albums and are reminiscing about our favorite holiday memories. Check out our holiday greeting and help us figure out, who is who!?

Click here to view our e-card.

I think it’s safe to say that we can go ahead and etch this into stone:

Launch survived the year 2009.

This year proved to be a challenging one as new and existing clients struggled to keep an interactive perspective on their marketing budgets. All and all, we pushed through projects, knocked on doors, soared in wowing clients, waved goodbye and hello to clients, pitched our hearts out, and pushed through each day.

Just keeping the projects flowing was a huge accomplishment considering the economic state of the outside world. But interactive seemed to take and upswing as many of our clients realized that going online is an affordable and organic way to approach getting the word out. We’d have to agree it’s the way to go. Although some of our projects included the smell of freshly-printed paper.

It’s true that many of our projects humbled us and some inspired us, but somewhere along the way we realized a few things…

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A few months ago, I gave a presentation to the local PHP group on CouchDB. For some background information, see my previous blog post about CouchDB and key-value data stores. Today I would like to provide a little more information on CouchDB along with a few examples.

CouchDB uses a RESTful API for queries and returns information in JSON. In my database, I set up an example database named phpug that models how CouchDB may be used to store events for an events calendar. I populated the database with random events occurring between 2009 and 2012 and belonging to a few different categories. Here are some example queries.

When no parameters are sent to the database, it returns a welcome message and the version.

URI: http://db.exampledomain.com/
Response:

{
	"couchdb":"Welcome",
	"version":"0.8.0-incubating"
}

When a database is added to the URI, statistics for that database are returned.

URI: http://db.exampledomain.com/phpug
Response:

 {
	"db_name":"phpug",
	"doc_count":0,
	"doc_del_count":0,
	"update_seq":0,
	"compact_running":false,
	"disk_size":4096
}

Finally, when an id is added to the URI, the document associated with that identifier is returned. Note the _id and _rev fields. The _id holds the identifier for the document. This can either be set or automatically generated. In this case, the populate script I used created the id. _rev denotes the revision of the current document.

URI: http://db.exampledomain.com/phpug/meeting-2009-09-24
Response:

 {
	"_id":"meeting-2009-09-24",
	"_rev":"4184112083",
	"location":"Kelly's",
	"time":"19:00",
	"date":"2009-09-24"
}

Views are an important way to bring back specific data in CouchDB. They could be considered somewhat equivalent to the WHERE clause in SQL. The following view was setup to bring back data by date and type (I have only included one meeting type in the example below) as well as provide a count of events in the database.

{
	"date": {
		"map": "function(doc) {
			emit(doc.date, doc);
		}"
	},
	"meetings": {
		"map": "function(doc) {
			if( doc.category == 'Meeting' ) {
				emit( doc.date, doc );
			}
		}"
	},
	"counts" : {
		"map": "function(doc) {
			emit( doc.date, 1 );
		}",
		"reduce": "function( keys, values ) {
			return sum(values);
		}"
	}
}

Bring back all results sorted by date:

http://db.exampledomain.com/phpug_calendar/_view/cal_views/date

Bring back results for a specific day (February 10, 2009):

http://db.exampledomain.com/phpug_calendar/_view/cal_views/date?key=”2009-2-10″

Bring back results for a range (2010):

http://db.exampledomain.com/phpug_calendar/_view/cal_views/date
?startkey=”2010-1-1″
&endkey=”2010-12-31″

Bring back first 5 results from the previous results:

http://db.exampledomain.com/phpug_calendar/_view/cal_views/date
?startkey=”2010-1-1″
&endkey=”2010-12-31″
&count=5

Get second page of results (from past two examples)

http://db.exampledomain.com/phpug_calendar/_view/cal_views/date
?startkey=”2010-1-1″
&endkey=”2010-12-31″
&count=5
&skip=5

(It is more efficient to keep using count and startkey_docid than skip=5 for large datasets)

Get the first 5 meetings

http://db.exampledomain.com/phpug_calendar/_view/cal_views/meetings
?count=5

Get the number of events on a specific day

http://db.exampledomain.com/phpug_calendar/_view/cal_views/counts
?key=”2009-2-10″

I have glossed over a few details such as the purpose of _rev, and how map/reduce/rereduce works, but this time I just wanted to show a few examples of how CouchDB works. For all the details, head over to the CouchDB site where there is plenty of documentation on how everything works.

Many of you have watched the “Did You Know” viral videos on YouTube. Recently, the creators of those earthshaking social media pieces have released a new one related to the growth of Social Networking in comparison to the Industrial Revolution. The information in the attached piece will rattle your brain. Enjoy!

Recently, I built a Google AdWords campaign for a small (fewer than 50 pages) advertising client website with a B2B focus. Let me tell you what I discovered about the relationship between key phrases and site or landing page content.

For most consumers, and businesses, Google is The One, because it was first to figure out how to return the best, most relevant search results, including those attached to pay per click text ads and sponsored links. Google’s algorithms have become incredibly precise in their assessment of web content to the benefit of consumers - and of course, to Google itself.

So, back to the campaign I built for a small site. In terms of SEO, the site does some things very well:
- customized page titles and meta descriptions were written specifically for each page
- the site has over 300 legitimately created inbound links from clients and partners
- the site has a Google page rank of 4 (on a scale of 1 to 10 – high for a site of this size)

However, the site’s SEO weaknesses were exposed by the Google AdWords campaign created for it. This was a reminder that Google rewards quality content – and quality is based on relevance.

The key phrases I created for the campaign’s six Ad Groups were highly relevant to the page title, meta description and meta keywords. The text ads that I wrote for each ad group included as many key phrases as possible.

But the page content itself did not include many of these key phrases.

The page text was full of happy talk and beauty text. There was not a bulleted list of company products or services to be seen. Neither was there repetitive use of terms. Images did not have alt text containing those key phrases.

As an experiment, I activated the campaign and monitored the Google Campaign Management tool’s reaction.

For the first day or so, there were no red flags raised by the key phrases. After the campaign was live for a few days, CTR data started to flow in. Key phrases that I had assumed were good displayed an error message – “Rarely shown due to low quality score.”

When the icon beside this error message was moused over, a pop up window revealed a low quality score, detailing two separate components of its failure.

Your keyword isn’t triggering ads to appear because your bid is likely below the first page bid estimate. The first page bid estimate approximates the cost-per-click (CPC) bid needed for your ad to reach the first page of Google search results, based on your keyword’s Quality Score and recent advertiser competition.

The second component of the error message addressed key word quality, and assigned a quality score and reasons for low quality score. This is an actual result from the campaign:

Quality score - (a link to a Google.com help page to learn more about the topic)

• 2/10 (on a scale of 1 to 10)
• Keyword relevance: Poor
• Landing page quality: No problems
• Landing page load time: No problems

So, the most important criterion for this key phrase is relevance.

A second “reaction” to the key phrases started to flow in after 10 days of testing the campaign. The overall rank for key phrases was dropping - the average page display was pushing down. None of these key phrases in trouble were displaying on page 1 search results. According to Google,

If your average ad position has dropped, it’s probably a sign that users are finding competing ads more relevant to their needs, or that other advertisers have raised their cost-per-click (CPC) bids for those keywords.

I adjusted my bids upwards for some of the key phrases, with poor results.

Beware, if you don’t adjust the content on your pages, even bidding up towards a top position won’t help. You’ll pay more for each click through, but your text ad will still display on a page other than the first, and eventually, the poor position simply means fewer impressions.

Make pages whose content supports use of key phrases. If the page is already made and doesn’t relate, then go back and re-work the page text, image alt text and metas.

If you can’t adjust the page, create a landing page that IS relevant.

Google Adwords explains quality evaluations:

…we built the AdWords system to reward and promote the most effective and well-targeted ads within our system. This helps maintain, or even increase, the value of an AdWords ad to both advertisers and users.

We’ve found that the best way to maintain our goal is to build quality evaluations into AdWords pricing. One of our primary tools is quality-based pricing, which means we charge lower cost-per-clicks (CPCs) for more relevant ads and higher CPCs for less relevant ads.

Google’s focus on quality can keep costs low for advertisers, and satisfaction high for consumers, who know that clicking through on a Google text ad will take them to a page that answers their search for information, service, or product.

Congratulations to Elizabeth Lester, President of Launch Interactive, for being chosen as one of the Top 40 Under 40 professionals  in the Hampton Roads area, by Inside Business.  Elizabeth will be honored this evening, along with the other 39 winners, for showing success not only in the workplace, but the community as well.

This is the 11th year Inside Business has compiled this list and honored those businesspeople that really make a difference.  Check out this special interview with Elizabeth and learn a little bit more about how she juggles her success, volunteer work, and life. Elizabeth Lester: Top 40 Under 40

Congrats again E. You’ve always been at the top of our list!

So a few months have passed since my training at VCU BrandCenter, and I’m still sorting through all of my experiences I had there. It was a whirlwind tour of zealots, speakers, advice and homework. But I did learn one very important lesson. Documenting it here will help me define a very important detail about Launch Interactive.

The first night was the welcome reception. We all moved in small shifting pods of handshakes and introductions. As I made my way through nametags and small talk, I noticed a trend. You were no longer a name or from an agency. You were a representaton of the brands you worked on. So here I was in a room full of Chevy, Lexus, Frito Lay and Phillip Morris. Needless to say, I was a little humbled.

But over and over I introduced myself as the brands that no one knew. I found myself strangely uncomfortable about these new personifications. And I was ashamed that I was feeling somewhat less important. Why was I feeling this when I really share a personal connection with the brands I take care of?  I mean, I own four  STIHL power tools, and all family picnics have historically included Taste Unlimited’s sandwiches? Regardless of their public recognition, I carry a large amount of pride and ownership in the brands I work on. They are like family to me. So I truly felt like I had let my team, clients, and brands down. I was entrusted to care for and nurture, and although I did love them, I didn’t hold them up when faced with some of the other brands. I was a horrible babysitter and  Creative Director.

But I had a revelation a few days later.  Over and over my new cadre revealed insights on their struggles with babysitting the brand kings and queens. It seems that the larger the cultural impact and esteem, the larger the gap. They knew their brands and studied them, but rarely had the opportunity to interact with them on a more personal level. There voices were filtered through a line of upper managment. Regardless of the hours they put in, or the ideas they came up with, they were always on the other side of the red carpet.

It was from that moment on that I realized that the brands I took care should have just as much cultural impact because I believed in them. My fame and glory will never come from brand dropping, but from building the success of the brands who might be getting lost in the shuffle. Launch is a small agency, and we don’t always take care of the “popular” brands. But that’s who we are. We are the caretakers to every client that we have. And every member of our team works every day on building relationships and partnerships. There are no dividing lines or filters of management.

We are a personification of our clients and their brands.

Check out this sneak peak of the video we are shooting for The Roosevelt Hotel - New York, featuring comedian Frankie Hudak.