After further research I discovered that despite investing time and money into the commercials for Flo, Progressive was not at the top of the Search Engines for those terms.  Neither Progressive’s web site nor the youtube videos were optimized for the most popular terms.  I thought this was odd considering that the natural step for me was to google Flo and find out more about her.  What was even more surprising was that www.progressivesflo.com was available.

As a little SEO experiment, I decided to buy the domain name and set up “the unofficial fan site” of Flo.  What was I going to write about?  I went to the Progressive youtube channel and wrote a blog post about each of the commercials.  I made sure to optimize the posts for search engines.  Since launching in July of 2009, the site has gotten over 4,000 visits and 7,500 page views.  In the last thirty days it’s received over 800 visits.  I haven’t promoted it beyond tweeting it (at launch).

That’s about 500 potential leads a month that are hitting my site all because of search engine optimization.  The next time you plan a marketing campaign you may want to think about how people will search for your campaign on the web.   Will they google the slogan, the character’s name, the celebrity you have starring in the commercial?  These are all opportunities to get visits to your web site.

Recently, Progressive has done a better job in ranking for the high volume terms related to Flo.  They now have two listings on the front page for “Progressive Flo.”   However, with the SEO value of their web site, they could easily dominate the google rankings for these terms if they optimized their web site and social media campaigns for them.

It’s a very cool interactive application.  The techology itself has all kinds of potential.  I got really excited because I’ve build interactive flash applications that plug in user information and make it completely unique.  I would highly encourage you to check it out.  This combined with learning how to build custom facebook pages leaves all kinds of potential for interactive and customizable contests and trailers even more viral.   In the meantime, check out http://www.flashforwardexperience.com.

I just tried to use whatever was on his homepage.  The result is pretty cool.  If you look at the design I’ve added to the post, you can see that I have incorporated his contact us form and also his youtube video.  So if you find him on facebook or just by googling him, you can contact him from facebook. I think the youtube video (which I shot and edited) helps bring out his personality and allows him to demonstrate his expertise.  After all, if you are going to ship him your priceless glass item, you would want to trust him.

A custom facebook fan page can help you stand out among your competitors and impress your customers.  If you would like to know more about the process, please leave a comment or contact me.  In the meantime, I’m looking forward to more expermenting with facebook fan pages.  Please check out the Bruening Glass Facebook Page.

However, because of the youtube wedding dance video, the song makes me think of this great dance and the amazing things that come with marriage and love. It makes me wonder if the millions of other people who have viewed the video feel the same way. In a time where Brown has attempted to rebuild his career by publicly apologizing, this could potentially help him out tremendously.

Given that, will we see this tactic used by marketers in the future trying to rebuild a client’s reputation? Do you think this helps or hurts Chris Brown?

UPDATE:
As of the last few days, the song “Forever” has been in the 10 ten on the itunes top songs. Before the video came out, it was nowhere to be found in the top 100. You now wonder if it becomes a staple song at weddings going forward along with the Electric Slide, YMCA, and Shout.

• http://www.couponland.org – formerly carlscoupondiscounts.com
• http://www.athensohiohotels.net
• http://www.progressivesflo.com
• http://www.wordpresshosting1.com
• Bowling Green Ohio Hotels

They are all in production so please don’t judge them too harshly. I’m showing them not only to you but also to google (so google will start indexing them). I’ll have more for you soon. Feel free to contact me with questions.

Here’s the link to the blog post about it – http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=258. I’m actually testing it out in this post: see below and feel free to roast me .

Here’s the video:

• The importance of google local listings
• How to set up a blog under your own domain name
• Newspapers and the internet
• Setting up a forum on your web site

Look for video to accompany my web site posts. You also may have noticed a redesign of my web site. Since I’m planning on blogging more, I wanted to change up the look so that my posts are more readable.

Thanks!

Common questions we are asked are: Why should I be on twitter? What’s the big deal? What do I tweet about? There are several uses for twitter for both individuals and organizations and I thought I’d outline them with showing you how Frank the Tank, the infamous character from the movie Old School could have used it.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, the movie is about three guys(Mitch, Beanie, and Frank) in their 30′s who start a fraternity comprised of college students, middle aged men and early retirees.

Frank is a key leader in organizing fraternity functions (like Blue’s birthday party), promoting and marketing the frat (through his dj gig), and disciplining the pledges (“drop down and give me ten”).

Given that, there are a lot of ways Frank the Tank could use twitter. Here are a few that I came up with:

1. Branding/ Marketing

Frank can use twitter to market himself to the potential pledges and others and as a representative of this fraternity. His goals would be to drive up membership and attendance at parties. On an ongoing basis, he would highlight fraternity activities, discuss planning for upcoming events, and possibly tweet about current members of the frat. He could post links to things potential pledges may be interested in such as the latest and greatest beers or the top 10 streaking techniques. The goal would be to posting things that your audience would be interested in.

2. Education

Twitter can be a great resource for people trying to learn. I pay close attention to about 5-10 who I follow. I feel that this keeps me up to speed with the always changing internet marketing world. Frank could use twitter to follow other fraternity leaders at other campus’s across the country to see what types of functions/events that they are having. He can also use it to follow rival fraternity members on campus to track what they do. If you have a lot of followers, programs like TweetDeck, can help you organize your tweets so you can more easily pay attention to the people you feel are more important.

3. Communication

Twitter is a great way to get feedback from people interested in you or your organization. Frank could easily use Twitter to see what his followers thought of a party that they had the previous weekend or get feedback from people on what major recording artist they should bring in for Mitch-a-palooza 2. He could have contests to see what followers could re-tweet or pass along the link to a upcoming party. The point is to try and interact and connect with people and it will hopefully make either yourself or your organization better.

4. Networking

People will often re-tweet other people’s tweets for various reasons. Browsing the profiles of people whom your peers re-tweet could lead to networking. For Frank, it could lead recruiting friends of his followers as potential pledges. Also you can meet people through things you are mutually interested in. For instance if Frank visits the KFC twitter page, he could share memories with someone who is also a late night craver of fried chicken.

5. Research

There are various tools that allow you to search twitter for keywords. Frank could use search.twitter.com to search for what people are saying about his fraternity or even the fraternity’s parties. By monitoring this, you can both get an understanding about the online vibe of your brand online. You can also target the people who are talking about you and see if they would be a good candidate to pledge. If someone is saying something negative about you, you have the opportunity to message them to address the issue.

My recommendations for Frank aim to help you figure out how to best use twitter for your organization or even yourself. Hopefully your twitter strategy brainstorming will not throw off your lovely Saturday plans to go to Bed, Bath and Beyond or Home Depot.

Being an internet marketer, I highly enjoy a good viral video campaign or contest (did my first in 2006). Viral Video contests have been done quite a bit in the last few years. In order to get the greatest potential response and reaction from visitors, you have to go the extra mile. So when I see these types of campaigns I try to break it down and analyze the structure of it and see if it will work.

I looked over the site and found plenty of room for improvement with this contest. Here are a few observations from dissecting the contest site and strategy:

1. Search Engines Still Count - With a viral campaign, the goal is to get someone forwarding it onto a friend. However, you still need to consider search engines when building the site. When you click on a video right now it pops up movie player. Why not structure the site to where you add a new page every time someone submits a video? If you add a new page to the site with a unique page title, google will see that you are adding content and reward you for that. So as it stands right now, google sees one page with 50 videos on it. If you follow the “Sammon Method” (humor me), google will index 50 unique pages. Which will give people more opportunities to find your web site.

2. Visitor Interaction- Web sites are no longer a one way communication stream. You want to engage and allow your users to interact with your site. Why not give people the ability to comment on each individual video? Half the time the best part about youtube videos are the comments made for the videos. This is also a reason for the visitor to come back to the site.

3. Incentives – Why should I make a commercial for you if you aren’t giving me anything. There are a million online contests a year and people want incentives. As easy as making a short video is these days, people won’t participate unless you give them a reason to.

4. Voting – They should implement some kind of voting incentive on the site for visitors and for contestants. It could be something like the video that gets the most votes will win Chipotle for a year. Something like that. But you also have to give voter incentive too (it’s also a good opportunity to ask they for their email address). There’s nothing like a overall leaderboard to get one hungry contestant to email every person they’ve ever met to vote for them so they can be at the top of the leaderboard. It’s amazing how people get into these contests.

5. Embrace Social Media -The very basic goal is to have someone forward the site or the video to a friend. That functionality is not included here. What would be even better is if you hired a programmer guru to wire up your web-site to interact with facebook/twitter. So that when someone could post notice that they were in the contest to their facebook wall or twitter page. The number one referrer to the Cambria Suites Polaris contest, a viral contest for a hotel chain in Columbus, was facebook.

I don’t mean to roast the campaign because they may plan to add more features as time goes on. As with future posts, i’m trying to stimulate conversation among the community of online marketers. What are you thoughts?