While writing our client's ads we saw some opportunities to link our client's product to a similar but better-known competitor's products. I was wondering if this is really such a good idea, so I went to my go-to resource, the ACM's digital library. Apparently the technical term for what we are doing is "piggybacking," or bidding on competitor's keywords.
Piggybacking is common but little research has been done to evaluate its effectiveness. What is known is that it drives up the costs of keywords, which benefits search engines and makes our ad campaign more expensive! It is interesting to consider that Google does not consider piggybacking to be trademark infringement, which is sometimes a disputed issue. Is piggybacking good for the consumer? Unfortunately, the article says that more analysis is needed to answer this question. For myself, when I am doing research for a big purchase, I like to be made aware of competitor's offerings. But then again, I never click on ads.
My source:
"Smart Marketing or Bait & Switch? Competitor's Breands as Keywords"
Mark A. Rosso, Bernard J Jansen
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Thursday, September 8, 2011
ACM article on Social Media Use and Potential
"Social media use and potential in business-to-business companies' innovation" by Hannu Kärkkäinen, Jari Jussila, and Jaani Väisänen of the Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland, looks into the issue of how social media is used by B2B companies and compares it to B2C companies.
Overall, businesses are well aware of the potential for social networks to be used for brand building and lead generation, but the actual use of social media is much less than might be expected from the stated interest of the companies. The main problems in integrating social media into a company's business model were difficulties assessing the ROI and in understanding the exact possibilities of social media in practice. About 90% of respondents indicated that their company offered no formal training or guidelines for the use of social media, even though between half and a quarter of companies agreed that social media could help them discover customer demands, shorten product development time, and save costs.
I think the overall takeaway point of this paper was that the pragmatics of social media adoption is still very much a developing area, and I think it illustrates the importance of having metrics to quantify the impact of adopting any business practice.
Article accesses online through the UA library system at:
http://dl.acm.org.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/citation.cfm?id=1930488.1930536&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=41287953&CFTOKEN=37394128
Overall, businesses are well aware of the potential for social networks to be used for brand building and lead generation, but the actual use of social media is much less than might be expected from the stated interest of the companies. The main problems in integrating social media into a company's business model were difficulties assessing the ROI and in understanding the exact possibilities of social media in practice. About 90% of respondents indicated that their company offered no formal training or guidelines for the use of social media, even though between half and a quarter of companies agreed that social media could help them discover customer demands, shorten product development time, and save costs.
I think the overall takeaway point of this paper was that the pragmatics of social media adoption is still very much a developing area, and I think it illustrates the importance of having metrics to quantify the impact of adopting any business practice.
Article accesses online through the UA library system at:
http://dl.acm.org.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/citation.cfm?id=1930488.1930536&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=41287953&CFTOKEN=37394128
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