NFL Video Giveth and Taketh Away

The NFL is an interesting study in how social media can be your best friend or your worst enemy. The NFL is a media savvy, marketing powerhouse and is now the center of the sports world with baseball gone and other leagues just getting under way. Thursdays and Sundays belong to the NFL and there is a lot of talk in between as well.

So what’s different this year? Social media. There is a lot of talk about how players can or cannot use Twitter. Well known teams like the San Francisco 49ers have just started their official Facebook page. Everyone is talking about the NFL. That can be good and that can be bad. What happened yesterday, however, with the owner of the pitiful Tennessee Titans might have been just an urban legend a 10 or so years ago. A few drunken fans could reminisce that they were there when the owner, Bud Adams, lost it a bit. Evidence would have been their blurry memory. Now the blessing of ubiquitous video is a curse. Here’s why. Cover the kids eyes, please. Apparently Mr Adams, who is 86, was directing this show to the Buffalo Bills sideline. Call it the heat of the battle I suppose .

Wow! I think we know how he feels! What does the NFL do about this one?

Smartphones: Taking Over the World in 2011

We talk and think a lot about mobile marketing. But frankly, only a small proportion of cell phone users have devices that are equipped for any substantial web interfacing. But that may soon change—Nielsen predicts that smartphones will make up the majority of the cell phone market in two years.

MediaPost reports that by mid-2011, half of cell phone subscribers, about 150M people, will be using smart devices. Smartphones are already showing a marked increase—Nielsen predicts that Q4 of this year will show that 40% of new phones sold are smart devices (as opposed to the Q309, slowest quarter in recent memory with smart devices accounting for only 25% of new phones).

I think that smartphone adoption will be crucial to mobile marketing finally taking off in the US. The fact that most phones today are still incapable of real web browsing has contributed to the slow start to mobile marketing. I’ve been saying for years that a better web browsing experience, like that of a smartphone, is crucial to the success of mobile marketing. And Nielsen agrees:

Nielsen also anticipates more users paying for video and premium content on their phones.

What do you think? Will smartphones reach this much of the market in another 18 months? Will 2011 be the year of the mobile?

Golden Twitter Nuggets & Takeaways From SMX East

I took a lot of notes at SMX Toronto earlier this year and posted them in this column as Golden Nuggets From SMX Search Analytics. Looking back at them now, the evidence undeniably reinforces my memory of how much I learned, and I’m glad to say that three days at SMX East this week was [...]

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I Coulda Been an AdWords Contender

"You don’t understand. I coulda had Google class. I coulda been an AdWords contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a pay-per-click bum, which is what I am, let’s face it."

Ah yes, those immortal words. Uttered by all of us marketers at some point. Well now, Google wants to rub our sorry little noses in the mess we made of our AdWords campaign, with the launch of its bid simulator.

What does the bid simulator do? It…

…shows you the potential impact of your bid on your advertising results. While it can’t predict the future, the bid simulator allows you to explore what could have happened if you had set different keyword-level bids.

Using data from the past seven days, the bid simulator re-calculates the number of impressions for which your ad could have shown had you chosen a different maximum CPC, how many clicks your ad could have gotten for those impressions and how much those clicks could have cost.

While it’s not a magic bullet for your AdWords campaigns–past performance does not guarantee future results, etc–it’s a pretty useful tool for discovering how you can increase traffic without spending too much more. My memory is foggy, but I seem to recall Yahoo has offered something similar since the Panama launch.

Anyway, this video can explain it a whole lot better than me!

Whoops, sorry. This is the video!