Theme: Search and Social platforms are converging – which  means successful marketers musth have one unified team with one set of data.

Key takeaways from this session

1. Connect: facebook to offline experience. feed the metadata
2. Bring: search and social teogher. People, process, and technology
3. Expect: social SEM data unification and all our war among Google, facebook, and twitter for ad dollars

2013

Paid, owned, and earned are converging.  Look at facebook where you can have your owned pages, people who like you and you also buy ads. They might even be on the same page.  Google search results even shows paid and owned assets together, especially with Google + and it’s continuing growth.

2014

Quote: “There’s no free lunch”

Quote: It could be argued from a consumer point of view that the better the search engine is the fewer advertisement  you will need. (Google)

Note that they followed that with a picture of a Google results page with TONS of ads.

• Social will become more like search and search will become more social.  As social becomes more like search, you will pay for it in some form or fashion.
• Search is improving within facebook and users are starting to use the natural search.  The results are like a combination of Yelp and Bing
• Point, you should search for your company or product to see if the results look good or if you need some work.
• Google Hummingbird search uses natural language processing.  They actually followed facebook on this
  • Google is trying to tie in Google+ as much as they can.  There’s a lot of
• Twitter has marketing events but it will depend on real time interactions and key words. You social guys should be talking to your search team.
• Look at all the reviews on facebook.  Although there seems to be some major rate inflation.  It could become the best way to find a restaurant.
  • Note that Google moved their reviews to Google plus so you’ve got something similar going on.
• The clunky: three results for Thornbury Castle on the facebook search right now.  It needs some cleanup.
  • natural language search on facebook is still a bit clunky
• Stalker: Can now search for divorced women over 30 years old. (Creepy)
  • Or divorced women who like a specific tv shows
  • key learning, watch out what you like. It will come back to you.
• Political implications: Femen is illegal in Tunisia but it’s a piece of cake to find people who like Femen in Tunisia.

How to improve your search and your social?

• Update your metadata
• use checkin to your locations
• encourage offline customers to go mobile with likes, checkins, and recommendations
• Great idea: everyone checks in when they upload a picture.   So put something photo worthy in it.
• Don’t forget stickers like rate us on trip advisor, etc.
• It will be easy to get yourself to the top of a list by checking in a fair amount.
• Be careful and remember that Facebook is still working on this. Graph search isn’t even available on mobile.
  • It’s early in the game. They’ve got a lot to do. they just had to index 1 trillion pieces of content.  So something has to slide
• Publish at least one per day on Google+
  • Find something to push out once a day to get decent looking results.
• use Google + social to put content in display advertising in Google ad network
• Twitter strategy
  • Conversation analytics
  • keyword strategy
  • creative development
  • bid optimization
  • Looks a lot like search ad strategy doesn’t it……….

Integrate Search and Social

You need to evolve your approach.

• Disparate teams with social, search etc need to come together.  Adobe uses a hub and spoke framework
  • Other options for approach include centralized, distributed, and holistic
  • Don’t just use a PR agency for your social. Become social yourselves
• Inconsistent KPI’s need a common framework across teams
  • and if you aren’t doing a good job tracking then start.  You need analytics and key measurements
• Siloed tracking and report becomes common tracking and reports
  • Common tracking will push you to channel optimization
  • Which will push your towards attributions.
  • Which will lead you to media mix modeling
  • It must become unified between social and search.  Of course, that’s the whole point of campaign management services.
• Volume, sentiment need to become something that proves value to the business
• In evolving, define what you want to do. Recognize the role of social in YOUR organization
  • PR and communications?
  • Marketing and ecommerce?
    • Search probably belongs mostly in this bucket.
  • Customer service and support?
  • Product innovation?

The ultimate aim is to get to the right mix of search, ads, email, and social media.  Doing that depends on how well you converge it all.

Creating a dynamic platform to support global digital marketing programs? PwC and USG developed a strategic plan and roadmap to deliver an integrated solution that enables local markets to take advantage of the global investment, from digital asset management, assets and product data, to developing country-specific workflows, while also ensuring brand compliance and consistent analytics and measurement. This scalable, Adobe Marketing Cloud based solution provides USG with the framework to target its marketing and optimize experience based on real-time data. Learn how USG and PwC collaborated to develop a cloud-based platform based on Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics and Adobe Tag Manager, and DAM. In this session: – Learn how starting with a Mobile First mentality drove the experience design – Discuss global analytics dashboards – Explore marketing automation platform integration, and hear how USG is leveraging the platform for their employee intranet This session is for digital marketers.

Data

• 50 billion connected devices by 202
• 2X the E7 GDP will double
• Gartner by 2017 the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO
• eMarketer – just under 40% of marketing big data spending will go to software investment

USG is a building manufacturer. They had a large impact in the recent downturn and needed to deal with that plus making changes in how the company dealt with the market.  They had a lot of challenges including an outdated site, outdated technology, no clear user experience, no analytics or decent benchmarks. On top of that they were in the midst of going global

The old site was a bunch of links focused on their products and not much. It had little valuable information.

What did they do?

It started with user research

• Interviews
• Personas
• customer journey
• Industry research
• full technical and architecture analsysis
• Better metrics and a plan for metrics

The deliverables was a scorecard and a roadmap on moving forward.  They used the term “insights” that would drive a more valuable experience

1. Organization of content was needed
   1. Search vs browse. Needed to support both
2. Must focus on the user experience
   1. Mobile first philosophy
   2. Data rules with key analytics
   3. Structure that scales

The customer journey

One key focus was on supporting the customer journey with the focus on the four sub-principles.  USG chose Adobe Experience Platform and other tools.

Search vs browse:

had to support both.  Purposeful navigators and inspired explorers both needed to be supported.  Insights came as they looked at the web analytics with a lot of site failures.

The home page is now much simplified. Search is now predictive and allows for search by item and form numbers.  The search results are very clean with an easy to use “add to submittal” feature

Mobile First

It’s a Philosophy of designing for mobile interfaces first and then for more rich interface, add to it.

Data

They built a set of customized dashboards to get actionable insights using Site Catalyst.  It allowed for more detailed dashboards to see what was working and what was not.   They could view by market (Mexico vs USA) and by a lot of other filters.

Structure that Scales

They started with the simple stuff like templates and web analytics and move on to features like countries, languages, intranet.

• Consistent branding across the world. May change colors but other features in the theme remain the same
• Developer a product wizard to create a uniform product page that fits that structure that scales mantra
• Pulled in 10,000 digital assets localized through the tag manager
• Wanted to use Adobe Cloud for intranet and campaign
• Intranet
  • Unified security
  • Reuse of the tool
  • Social connections and commenting on articles
  • Team publishing and collaboration
• Support for microsites like Team USA that went live during the Sochi Olympics

Getting It Done

• Multi-phase plans
• Agile appraoch
• Parallel development teams
• 7 total iterations over 12 months
• Rebranding with the Olympics
• Included changes to design based on market changes

Results

• 153% increase in useage
• exit rate down by 5%
• 15% increase in return to site
• 16% increase in product page views
• 76% more page views
• 13% decrease in home page bounce rate

USG now has a a rocket ship prepped for future changes with a great view on the digital experience of their users.