I Said, OK

A few weeks ago my co-worker Maliki told me to check out a blog called CSS Tricks and to consider placing some banner ads on the site about KickApps. CSS designers, and web designers in general, are a major audience/customer for KickApps. Afterall, we’re essentially a software solution which designers and developers use to add cool features and functionality to their websites, such as social networking, user-generated content, video and widgets.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about banner ads for KickApps. I think they do help with awareness and brand building but for the most part we’ve had trouble measuring the effectiveness of some early campaigns we ran. Overall though, I’ve been hesitant to spend on this type of marketing unless it produces a direct and measurable result. Our strategy with online display advertising has been to only do it on highly targeted web design and development websites.

Following up on Maliki’s advice, we started a campaign on CSS Tricks a few weeks ago. The blog is run by Chris Coyier. He does an excellent job all around, and man, I have to say, the results for us have been tremendous. We’re currently running a banner on the homepage and we’re sponsoring his RSS feed and have sponsored two video screencasts. I’m not going to go into detail about the traffic stats and conversion rates but all I’ll say is that the results have been extremely impressive. Check out the short video screencast that Chris produces which we sponsored.

I still have mixed feelings about the effectiveness and ROI of display advertising for KickApps but when it’s something as targeted as CSS Tricks, the results have made it worth every penny.

Originally posted on A View With A Point on June 27, 2008.

I was on a panel about the future of social media at Ned Sherman’s Digital Media Conference in DC yesterday. Really good discussions came out of it. I recapped some of the main points (at the least the ones I remembered) during my train ride back to New York late last night on the KickApps blog.

The panel was moderated by Rohit Bhargava, who did an excellent job. Check out Rohit’s new book, Personality Not Included. Also on the panel were:

Greg Johnson, CMO, GGL
Terry Farrell, Senior Product Manager, Zune, Microsoft Corp.
Craig Stoltz, Blogger & Web Strategy Consultant, 2.Oh….really?
Nick O’Neill, Founder, The Social Times & AllFacebook

Craig posted a great summary of the panel on his blog. He writes about a point a I made during the session.

[Michael] said something interesting in response to a question about how people can make money from social media. Paraphrasing here, he said companies ought to go out and hire as many anthropologists as possible to try to figure out what’s going on with this new behavior–and then figure out how to make money.

After the presentation, a woman from Motorola came up and introduced herself, said she enjoyed the panel. She handed me her card. Her title read “Anthropologist.”

For real. Not a winky-funny-hip-corporate-title. Her actual job title.

Yes, Motorola has an anthropologist on the payroll.

I’m telling you, this thing is big.

Pretty f’ing cool coming from the world’s #22 blog according to Time.com.

This photo captures one of the reasons why I love San Francisco so much but hate it at the same time.