Insightful articles, opinion and commentary about mobile and web.

Brand marketers - join us as our guest at the sumptuous Ivy Room for a scrumptious breakfast with mouth-watering presentations and stimulating discussion on everything social and mobile.

We’re flying out US author and leading brand strategist, Jonathan Salem Baskin to give the keynote address which will focus on the truth in marketing. Jonathan asserts that as a brand marketer,  you should ask yourself how involved you are in contributing to truths, not merely “content” or engagement, whether about your brand, your industry or the world in which your business operates. What makes your social involvement necessary? How do you propagate truthful information that empowers and inspires your consumers to use P2P media to make better, more durable decisions?”

HotHouse Founder Simon van Wyk and Bill Kearney, Senior Sales Director at Oracle Corporation will join Jonathan on stage to explore how you can best optimise your marketing activities to seamlessly interact and engage with customers across mobile and social channels.

This event is fully booked.

Toyota’s website has been ranked among the top 10 business websites in Australia by the Australian Institute of Management’s Management Today Magazine.

The top 10 were selected for their use of online technologies and having an online presence that both enhances and expands their brand.

As well as the wealth of content, functionality and product detail presented on the Toyota website, Toyota’s vehicle comparison tool was singled out as market leading. Useful and easy to use, the tool provides users with the ability to quickly compare models based on a handful of specifications such as body and engine type, number of seat and fuel economy, power and towing capacity. There’s also a more comprehensive version which is also a cinch to use.

HotHouse has strategically managed Toyota’s online presence for more than ten years. As well as the car comparison tool, HotHouse also connected Toyota’s car configurator to the supply chain which was a world first.

Who isn’t looking to improve their bottom line performance and consumer engagement? The upcoming ADMA seminar on Wednesday, 22 June will be addressing exactly that. The seminar will feature a panel of five visionary marketers who will share their success stories and practical insights in regards to Email and Social Marketing. Simon van Wyk along with Christian Magel, the founder of amaysim, will be speaking specifically towards successful digital strategies for the launch of a new brand.

To register, and for more information, go to adma.com.au/events

Download seminar brochure

• The internet is poised to overtake newspapers as the second largest U.S. advertising medium by revenue behind television, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
• Search currently represents 50% of U.S. online advertising revenue with Google being the market leader strengthening the position they earned in 2006 as the largest media company in the world.
• Google earns the bulk of its US$24bn+ a year in revenue from paid search advertising which represents less than 10% of the clicks on search engines.
• SEO is about capturing the remaining 90%.

This seminar will be presented by Jeremy Tang, our Director of Search who has over 9 years experience in Search, most recently as Head of Search at Telstra Business. read more

By Simon van Wyk

Number one on Google – that’s the Holy Grail that search engine optimisation (SEO) was meant to deliver to savvy site owners.

SEO involves tweaking your website to appear in the first page of Google search results for the keywords your customers are most likely to enter and yes, it’s Google we care most about, because Google still reigns on the Internet.

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HotHouse founder Simon van Wyk talks to Jeremy Tang, the newly appointed director of search at HotHouse. Until recently head of search at Telstra Business, Jeremy has also held senior marketing roles there and with Dimension Data. He also has extensive consulting experience through Oracle where he worked with clients including Merrill Lynch, Fosters Group & NRMA. Jeremy talks with Simon about SEO as an ongoing process, conversations with customers and the importance of focusing on what customers actually search for.

Listen to the podcast below.

 

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The oldest of all marketing techniques, word of mouth (WOM) has re-emerged as the most powerful selling tool of the 21st century, thanks to digital technology.

HotHouse is offering you and your team a singular opportunity to learn how to apply WOM to your business by attending a seminar by international WOM authority Justin Kirby

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By Simon van Wyk

How do you measure the impact of blogger engagement and other social media activities? Because you’re able to collect more hard data for online activities than for traditional marketing activities, there is an inherent assumption by management that online magically provides an answer to the old dilemma of “Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the problem is, I don’t know which half.”

The thing is, it’s not nearly as simple as that. Although a lot of data is collected, it still needs to be harvested, organised and interpreted. And if you want to express the data in terms of return on investment (ROI), you need to be able to match the ROI framework used in other parts of the business.

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HotHouse has been named as a Leader in Australian Interactive Marketing Agencies in a July 2009 report by Forrester Research, Inc.: The Forrester Wave™: Australian Interactive Marketing Agencies, Q3 2009.

Forrester’s first-ever evaluation of Australian interactive marketing agencies looked at 36 criteria and revealed a market that is split between its roots in technology and its emerging focus on marketing strategy. Agencies were placed into one of four “waves”: Leaders, Strong Performers, Contenders or Risky Bets. read more

There is an enormous amount of debate about how ‘value’ is defined and measured on web projects, particularly ROI on content. This thorny issue is still not resolved, so I’m going to point you toward some places where robust debate is going on, and you can make up your own mind.

Online Metrics Insider: This is a subsite of the MediaPost portal that deals with all angles of the web measurement and analytics debate, including content. Recent article titles include “It takes a village to measure social applications,” “Does content matter?” and “Does online metrics need a stimulus package?”

Web Analytics Demystified blog: Eric Petersen has written one of the seminal works on using web analytics in business. His associated blog contains interviews, comments and news of interest in this area.

Real Time Content blog:  This blog is dedicated to personalisation within online video advertising. This link is a compilation of all their articles about measurement of online video content.

American Marketing Association: Summary of a presentation by Jim Sterne, chairman of the Web Analytics Association and author of Web Metrics: Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success, on how defining the right metrics leads to online success.

If you have any other sites you want to nominate, please add them below in the comments.