Sarah Worsham | Sazbean

Sarah Worsham / May 20, 2008

Types of Online Advertising

Advertising online can increase your brand awareness and promote a product/service. Online advertising has a major advantage over other types of advertising (tv, radio, print) because it is very easy to measure the effectiveness of online campaigns. In a series of posts, I’ll discuss the different types of advertising, their advantages and disadvantages, and how to measure their effectiveness.

There are 3 Main Types of Ads:

Rich Media: The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has defined these as “advertisements with which users can interact” and can include video, sound, animation. Ads which just animate but don’t have any interaction are just display ads (see below). Ads should follow IAB guidelines to maximize impact without being overly annoying (which has the opposite effect from what you want). There are many types of rich media ads, including:
- peel-back
- floating
- expanding
- transitional (interstitial, introstitial, exterstitial)
- video
- popup/popunder
Display Ads: These ads combine text, images, and animation (but are not interactive – those are rich media – see above) to convey a message. Display ads mostly differ in sizes (see IAB for Ad Size Guidelines). Here are some of the most popular sizes:
- leaderboard (728 x 90 pixels)
- skyscraper (120 x 600 pixels or 160 x 600 pixels for wide skyscraper)
- banner (468 x 60 pixels)
- half-page (300 x 600 pixels)
- square button (or tile) (125 x 125 pixels)
- medium rectangle (300 x 250 pixels)
Text Ads: Text ads are typically just that, text. These ads typically are cheaper, but have the added bonus of usually being searchable by search engines and are less-ignored by readers than some other types of ads. Some of the more common types of text ads:
- link ads
- contextual ads
- search engine marketing ads (pay per click – ex. Google Adwords)
- online directories

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Technorati Tags: advertising, ads, rich media ads, display ads, online advertising

Sarah Worsham / May 18, 2008

IAB Internet Advertising Report for 2007

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)’s report, Internet advertising revenue increased 26% in 2007 over 2006. Advertising to consumers leads spending, and search still leads display, classifieds and lead generation. See the full report at the IAB.

Sarah Worsham / May 13, 2008

What are Your Customers Tweeting About You? – Part 2

In Part 1 , we discussed how to know when and what are said about your company and products on Twitter. Now that you know, how do you respond? Let’s start with a story….

I recently had my Internet service go out when I was working from my home office (which I twittered about). It often seems to go out in the afternoons during the week, but usually only for 20 minutes or so. This time it was over an hour and a half, so I got fed up and called Comcast. They could see a signal going to my house, but couldn’t see the cable modem. They even tried resetting the signal, but suggested that I schedule a tech to come out the next morning to check everything out. Two minutes after I got off the phone, my service came back on. I twittered about this and suddenly received a response on twitter from comcastcares that this was normal. We had a bit of a sarcastic conversation back and forth, but the point is that Comcast almost immediately responded to my tweet (my second one, not my first):

sarahworsham: Called Comcast – they said poor signal strength – now suddenly I’m back
comcastcares: @sarahworsham That can happen with signal quality. If it keeps up, let us know
sarahworsham: @comcastcares Kind of strange that it came back immediately after the phone call, don’t you think?
comcastcares: @sarahworsham Not usually. If signal quality is weak they should have you check cables, then they reset signals
comcastcares: @sarahworsham Sometime that corrects the problem
sarahworsham: @comcastcares or they turn the pipe back up 🙂
comcastcares: @sarahworsham Actually they do not control that. There is limited abilities representatives would have
sarahworsham: @comcastcares trying to sell me phone service when my internet isn’t working wasn’t helpful tho 🙂
comcastcares: @sarahworsham I would agree with that. First priority is resolution
comcastcares: @sarahworsham I apologize for the trouble

Their immediate response to me seemed a bit creepy and I already had scheduled an appointment for the techs to come out. I’m not sure what else they intended other than to respond to my public tweet. Mostly it seemed like a PR ploy because they could have easily replied to me directly instead of publicly. However, I did appreciate the apology. Comcastcares is manned by Frank Eliason from Comcast Customer Outreach. Browsing his twitter feed you can see that he obviously is trying to help. The question is, does the company follow up and actually fix the problems? (Our Internet did get fixed – so far) Has their customer service improved because of this outreach?

In my opinion, monitor twitter for comments about your company or products, but take the conversation offline to protect and respect the privacy of your customers and avoid the possible PR nightmare. Follow up with great customer service and work to improve your products. Your customers will write and share the great experience they had – which is the most valuable kind of PR.

What are your thoughts on using twitter to respond to your customers?

Technorati Tags: twitter, comcast, customer service, B2B, B2C, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting, B2C internet consulting, business internet consulting

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