Welcome to SuperBowl weekend.  Are you ready to watch the Patriots destroy the Giants and get a little payback? I know I am. ;) But before all that, let’s snack on some Weekend Coffee Links. They’re nutritious AND hilarious. What more could you ask for? Nothing, I say.

First we’ll share what caught our eye this week, then you can share your own links in the comments.

• Flash Fans: This commercial will run during Sunday’s game but you can see it here first. It’s the work of Budweiser Canada and, fine, I was completely crying by the end of it.  I love when brands do awesome things.  This will be remembered way after the Patriots tromp the Giants.
• It’s not me, it’s you: A New York Times article about how Facebook has made the “defriending” process easier, if not more blunt. Also some good information about how we form friends and then, sometimes, grow out of them.
• The wilderness survival skills everyone should know: I’m not sure where I was when they were handing out survival skills in school, but I definitely didn’t get any.  If you’re in the same boat, this guide may just be the paddle you were looking for but didn’t know how to carve yourself.
• 28 words that don’t exist in the English language: Oh, but how we wish they did.
• Lost in translation: No one tells a story like The Bloggess.  And apparently no one creates mugs like she does either.  And if you haven’t pre-ordered her book, you should. Because it’s going to be awesome. I already have.
• Kirsten Bell’s Sloth Meltdown: If you haven’t watched this yet, you must.  Even if you don’t know who Kristen Bell is, it’ll be worth it.
• How to pronounce things hilariously: Just trust me. Go check it out.
• 10 awesome ways to have a really great time with your friends: I originally clicked on this thinking it might be give me some good ideas on what to do this weekend…but then I immediately started laughing. Because I have NO idea what this article is talking about. ;)

That’s it from us.  Enjoy the rest of your weekend and we’ll meet you back here next week.

This post is an entry for SEO Chicks’ contest SEO: The Next Generation, which challenges folks who’ve been in SEO less than a year to predict what the industry will look like in the year 2022. This post is not meant to be taken seriously, nor does it refer to current or planned future services offered by Bruce Clay, Inc.

January 2022:

It seems like only yesterday that augmented reality (AR) contact lenses were considered just a toy for video gamers, a weapon for Special Forces commandos or a tool for rescue workers. Now I catch myself wondering how I ever got along without them.

I’m reminded of the early ’00s, when cell phones seemed to go from novelty to necessity overnight. But no one suspected how quickly mobile AR would become so ubiquitous. By the fourth quarter of 2022, 60 million Americans will be wearing some sort of AR device, and the rate of adoption isn’t expected to level off for at least another year.

We’ve already seen massive upheaval in the search engine marketing industry (along with the usual yahoos screaming that SEO is dead) and the coming year promises even more change, as companies shift ad budgets toward augmented reality marketing, including tactics like psychosocial-based hypertargeting and In-Real-Life (IRL) remarketing.

With that in mind, here’s a look at some recent developments in the SEM industry, as well as a peek at where we’re headed in 2022.

User Attention: The New Trust Indicator

In the first decade of the 21st century, search engines used a site’s linking profile to gauge trust and authority. This led shady webmasters to buy and sell links in an effort to pay their way to the top of the SERPs, and eventually forced search engines to switch to social indicators as their primary metric of Web authority.

That switch, of course, led to the buying and selling of Likes, +1′s, Friends, Followers, etc. in the second decade of the 21st century.

Now it looks like the third decade will be less about artificial social signals like Facebook Likes and Google +1′s, and more about genuine, natural engagement between an object and a user. (And besides, how much do you like something when you “Like” it, anyway?)

AR devices track a wealth of data about what wearers see, say and do – and Google and other search engines are now using that data to measure what they’ve been after all along: user attention.

After all, aren’t links and Likes just crude proxies for user attention?

Better yet, search engine marketers now have access to data about user responses. Google Analytics just added a new section, “Expressions,” which has a slew of awesome new metrics. Not only can SEMs track the amount of time users spend looking at a page, but also see data about users’ reaction to content – including my favorite metric, the percentage of people who roll their eyes after viewing an ad.

Google’s Matt Cutts recently announced that Eye Roll Rate is “not expected to be a major ranking factor in organic search.”

Mobile Augmented Reality (AR) Devices

Forget about staring at that tiny screen on your smartphone, and toss out those bulky projection glasses. New functional contact lenses by Microsoft, Innovega and Sony are the latest in AR wear, seeing strong sales even after the holiday season. Expect Apple to instantly grab a 15 percent market share in early spring when they release their much-anticipated iPeer lenses:

More Privacy Issues with Facebook EEG measurements

Facebook is under fire for giving advertisers access to more biometric data from users. Now, in addition to heart rate and perspiration, marketers will gain access to real-time electroencephalograph (EEG) measurements in order to gauge the effectiveness of ads.

The company insists that user privacy is, as always, one of their greatest concerns, and that their intention is simply to provide users with the most relevant ads possible. CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded publicly to accusations of mind control: “No one is forced to join Facebook.”

Hypertargeted Marketing to Friends

Why not let users’ friends advertise to them? Since November, Facebook’s FAdPro service has let marketers automatically hypertarget ads for individuals based on their psychosocial profile. Draw up an ad, set your desired input fields, and FAdPro will do the rest. Here’s an example of what some people are doing:

In-Real-Life (IRL) Remarketing

In-Real-Life (IRL) Remarketing programs are popping up in malls all across the country. Software tracks and monitors shoppers, and decides what deals and specials to advertise to them. All this happens automatically, without any human having access to personal data.

I’ll use an ad called the “15/15 Special” to demonstrate how IRL retargeting works.

Ms. Gupta comes to the mall to do some shopping. Her first stop is a little trinket shop where she likes to browse but rarely makes a purchase. This time, however, a certain glass vase catches her eye. She knows just the perfect use for it. It’s even reasonably priced, compared to the rest of the shop’s items.

But she ultimately decides it’s still just a little too expensive, and goes off to do the rest of her shopping. The mall’s analytics program tracks where she goes and what she pays attention to, and decides that the 15/15 Special is appropriate for her.

On her way out, having completely forgotten about the vase, Ms. Gupta passes by a hypertargeted billboard that flashes a custom advertisement at her:

There’s that vase! With 15 percent off, there’s no reason not to buy it now. And even though 15 minutes is plenty of time to get to the Trinket Shoppe, she hurries anyway: the ad haunts her from every hypertargeted billboard she passes, the seconds visibly ticking away.

Sure, we’ve all had negative experiences with IRL remarketing. There’s something uncanny about ads that literally follow you around town. Some states are even allowing restraining orders against marketing campaigns.

But remarketing serves a useful function – without it, how would consumers remember what they want to buy?

Department of Justice Data Request

Under a new section of the Patriot Act, the US Attorney General’s office last month served Google, Facebook and Microsoft with warrants for access to their users’ search, traffic, biometric, GPS and financial data.

This demand from the U.S. government, which has civil libertarians up in arms, requests that Google, Facebook, Bing and other major search/social engines provide the Department of Justice with unrestricted, real-time “firehose” feeds of user data.

Privacy advocates warn that the government will be able to engage in warrantless spying on citizens, but the DOJ insists that the data is necessary in order to identify and stop potential acts of terrorism.

Onward into 2022!

There are some exciting developments on horizon for 2022, with some of the key advancements being:

• The number of AR device wearers climbs to 60 million in America.
• Artificial social signals such as Likes and +1′s becoming less influential on organic rankings, while actual user attention gains importance.
• Tactics that were once only feasible online, like hypertargeting and remarketing, become possible to implement in real life.

I can’t wait to see what new developments arrive during 2022; if the past is any indication, the only predictable thing about the SEM industry is its sheer unpredictability.

A 30-second commercial advertisement for Super Bowl XLVI is going for $3.5 million. Can you imagine what you as a marketer could do for your company if you had that kind of budget? If you can't even fathom what you'd do with a marketing budget that big (and just think, this is just one of many campaigns they're running this year!), we've come up with some ideas for how you can better spend that chunk of change. And if you're thinking you'd spend it on a commercial during the Super Bowl, well, maybe these ideas will give you some perspective on just how far $3.5 million can go in the marketing world.

25 Ways to Spend the $3.5 Million Budget of a Super Bowl XLVI Commercial

1.) Buy 1,458 years of HubSpot Basic Inbound Marketing Software. Tweet This!

2.) Direct mail the entire country of Sweden. Tweet This!

3.) Hire someone to blog for you for the next 70 years. Tweet This!

4.) Put up a billboard along the highway from Boston to D.C. every one mile. Tweet This!

5.) Purchase 2,333 years of Salesforce Enterprise CRM. Tweet This!

6.) Buy inbound links from enough web pages to fill the Oxford English Dictionary 16 times. Tweet This!

7.) Use PPC to buy a search presence for 2,333,333 keywords after Google dings you for purchasing links. Tweet This!

8.) Give 2,060 employees their own personal version of the entire Adobe Creative Suite. Tweet This!

9.) Send those 2,060 employees to classes so they know how to use the entire Adobe Creative Suite. Tweet This!

10.) Buy the email list of the entire population of Chile and SPAM them; try to do it before your IP is blacklisted. Tweet This!

11.) Repair your company's spamtastic image by plastering your company logo and tagline across 35,000 park benches. Tweet This!

12.) Hire Al Gore to be your company's celebrity spokesperson for a full 24-hour day. Tweet This!

13.) Let everyone know Al Gore is your spokesperson by, ironically, printing enough flyers to stick to every single household door in the United Kingdom. Take that, environment. Tweet This!

14.) Buy the stamps to send out your 2012 holiday cards. Let's hope you have 7,777,777 customers. Tweet This!

15.) Purchase about 35,000 shares of Facebook after it IPOs. Tweet This!

16.) Keep a web designer on call 24 hours a day for 4 years to change your website whenever you want. Tweet This!

17.) Commission enough content from the Zerys Content Marketplace to post a new blog to your website every hour of every day for the next 26 years. Tweet This!

18.) Hire the entire graduating class of Emerson College's Masters of Marketing program to work in your department. Tweet This!

19.) Or, if you're happy with your current team, you could send 23 of them to get their MBAs. Tweet This!

20.) You should probably also buy them all brand new MacBook Airs for their studies; you'll have enough money left over to hoard 3,477 for yourself. What? Marketers love Apple products! Tweet This!

21.) Hire Lady Gaga to follow your CMO around all day, singing "Happy Birthday" on repeat, every year for the next 145 years. Tweet This!

22.) Develop 542 mobile apps. Because the other 541 just weren't good enough. Tweet This!

23.) Purchase enough color toner to print brochures that can span the Atlantic Ocean from Dublin to Boston. And then back again. Tweet This!

24.) Pay to rank for the rarely searched keyword phrase, "best company in the world" for 11,666 years. Tweet This!

25.) Air 17 regular commercials on network television any other time of the year. Tweet This!

Now just think of what you could do with the additional $1-2 million you'd spend actually producing the commercial...

If you had $3.5+ million to spend on marketing, how would you use the money?

Image credit: Images_of_Money

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As a society, how we watch, read, and consume information is fundamentally changing. News, information, and entertainment will never go back to "the way it was," and this change will have a powerful impact on all aspects of inbound and outbound marketing. In 2012, marketing is publishing, so let's learn how to be a great publisher in an industry under constant disruption.

This week, some of the most intense shots yet were fired in the battle for the eyes and mind of the world. Stop. Listen for a second. Do you hear the cries and confusion? Those are the cries of the publishing and broadcast executives.

As a marketer, you should be cheering.

Amazon's Unwavering Assault on the Publishing Industry

Brick and mortar bookseller Barnes and Noble announced this week that it would no longer stock books published by the digital book juggernaut, Amazon.com. "What's that?" you ask? "Amazon publishes books? But I thought they only sold them." That's right -- Amazon is a book distributor AND publisher.

In the fourth quarter of 2011, Amazon said it sold millions of Kindle electronic reading devices, but the business still came in a billion dollars in revenue below Wall Street expectations.

But Amazon doesn't care.

As reported by the New York Times, Amazon published 122 books in the fall of 2011. This number is seemingly insignificant when compared to the total number of books published by all publishers during the same time period. But what doesn't matter, because a secret about the publishing industry is that it makes most of its money from a small group of best-selling books and authors. Amazon understands this and seems willing to lose money in order to take the best and brightest writers away from traditional publishing houses. And with more than $6 billion in the bank, it can.

Barnes and Noble, citing the lack of ability to sell ebooks from Amazon's published works, has decided to return the favor by not selling the print versions of those Amazon-published books in its stores. This marks a continued battle for control over distributing the words of the world.

The Third Wave of Media

Salar Kamangar, CEO of YouTube, believes that we are in a third wave of media. At an event in California this week Kamangar said, “The first wave was the broadcast networks. The second wave was cable networks. Now, it’s about giving people exactly what they want to watch today.”

Mashable reports that YouTube has invested more than $100 million into premium content channels around niche topics including food, fashion, pets, and fitness, making it clear that YouTube is willing to spend money to be a major player in this third wave of media. This week, YouTube hired Bruce Seidel, who oversaw shows on the Food Network and Cooking Channel, to lead programming for YouTube's new food-focused channel. According to a New York Times article, Seidel hopes to “discover new stars and galvanize the niches that are driving the internet food conversation.”

User Experience and the Third Wave of Media

Since the early beginning of the internet, pundits have discussed the rise of internet-based entertainment, but the fact of the matter is that online video has never really made it into the living room. One core barrier that is too frequently ignored is the user experience of watching online video compared to watching television. People watch television to relax, and having to click a new video to watch on YouTube every three minutes is not relaxing. Plus, you have the added anxiety that, for many people, the computer equals a device, and devices subsequently mean stress. 

It is the deficiency of user experience that third wave media companies have to overcome in order to infiltrate the living room. But Kamangar, who plans to launch 100 niche content channels on YouTube this year, says, "The idea is that you’ll subscribe to a channel, and you’ll go and just keep watching.”

Niche AND Quality

The knock against many ebooks and online video shows is quality. The fact of the matter is that because anyone with a computer or video camera can create an ebook or online show, the quality and production value in many cases is much lower than that of traditional publishing houses and cable networks. That's why Amazon is signing top-quality authors and YouTube is hiring some of the best minds in cable programming. Both of these companies understand that, to take over the living room, the core content has to be remarkable.

The idea of remarkable content isn't anything new. However, content has the potential to become even more remarkable when it is applied to a niche. And that niche factor is the leverage third wave media companies have over the first and second wave media companies. Imagine if 100 new cable networks launched this year to cover niche topics. It simply wouldn't happen. Online video providers and ebook authors' best shot at disruption comes from a laser focus on increasing content quality standards while still serving and representing niche communities currently underserved by cable networks.

Change Is Hard: AKA Why This Hasn't Already Happened

The fact that the world is constantly changing isn't news to any of us. We write it off as a fact of life. Despite this constant change, we are at a paradox. Change is easy to hate, especially major disruption to our daily routines and habits. And it's not that we as people or as a society don't want to change. It's the simple fact that change is exhausting.

Chip and Dan Heath explain this idea perfectly in their book, Switch. The Heath brothers write: "Change is hard because people wear themselves out. And that’s the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion."

The way we read, watch, and consume information is changing at the pace of a rapid turtle. This means that you won't blink and suddenly live in a world where no publishers exist, but every couple of months, a stack of small changes starts to become noticeable, and the media world becomes slightly different. Before you know it, a few years have passed, and the media world is completely different.

Marketing in a Transitional Media World

It's time to find your niche. The way information is distributed is gradually yet radically changing around us, which means you can't wake up years from now and decide that it's time to change. It'd be too late. Instead, you need to take action now to be an active part of this transitional media world.

Start executing on these four action items today to not only survive, but also succeed in the next generation of media.

1. Find Your Niche - Your niche isn't the product you sell. Rather, your niche is the subject matter that is of greatest interest to your prospective customers. If you sell supplies to auto body shop owners, then your niche is content about operating a successful auto body shop in every facet of the business, even those for which you don't have products to sell.

2. Balance Quality and Velocity of Content - The challenge of content in the online media landscape is that content has to be high quality enough to stand out, but also be agile enough not to be out of date the moment it's published. The only real way to know what a good quality/velocity balance is for your business is to test different options to understand what works the best for your niche. You can do this by changing the frequency in which you publish blog posts and other content. Do you get more leads and engagement when publish a blog post every day, or once a week? Do blog posts that you spend more time polishing and improving generate more traffic and leads than other posts? These are the elements to test as part of your marketing content. 

3. Have a Personality - Don't be bland. Look at the text or videos that capture your attention. They probably have a clear point of view and an interesting tone. Don't be afraid to be fun, sarcastic, edgy, or any other tone that aligns with your brand and products.

4. Start Planning Beyond the Desktop Computer Screen - For most of us, we still think of a computer as the device that sits on our desk with a big screen that isn't touch-sensitive. But from the Kindle, Nook, and iPads to iPhone and Andriod smartphones, the definition of a computer has changed. Yes, these changing devices will impact your marketing content. And it isn't just about their size, but it's also that they all have one key element in common: touch. Start thinking about what your content looks like in a world without mice (the computer kind). It will have a huge impact on how we design our content and collect information from our leads.

Success of digital-only magazines like the Daily demonstrate that consumers are willing to not only consume but also pay for touchable content that is personalized for their devices. Survey your target audience, and understand what devices they are using to consume information. Then make sure your content works well on the most popular devices.

Change is here.

Image Credit: Ariane Middel

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I’ve been on both sides of the small business SEO coin.

I’ve been an SEO. Having done the intensive SEO work I know the value of good SEO and why it comes at such a premium. SEO is labor-intensive and ever-evolving, but extremely effective when executed well.

I’ve been the lone marketing manager in a small business, wearing fourteen different hats and trying to figure out how I am supposed to fit SEO into the schedule… and the budget. And I’ll be totally honest:  Working for a small business, even though I knew how important SEO was and even though I wanted to do it all myself… I honestly just didn’t have the time.

But I didn’t want SEO to fall by the wayside. So I sought outside help.

I reached out to some local SEO companies in the hopes of finding someone who could help me prioritize our SEO efforts at a price that I could actually present to my boss. Here’s what I discovered. It’s not pretty.

• Many SEO companies don’t really understand what a “reasonable budget” is for a small business.
• Many SEO companies offer off-the-shelf “packaged” solutions for small businesses, in an attempt to streamline their services and make attractive presentations. Unfortunately, there are pitfalls to this approach.
• Many SEO companies fail to prove the value of SEO during the sales pitch process . My feeling is that many SEO firms are used to dealing with IT or website development teams for larger companies (who already have at least a working knowledge of what SEO is), and when faced with a small business owner who doesn’t have the time to learn much about SEO, they forget to actually outline why SEO is important or what it entails for their site and business. When small businesses are doing everything they can to cut costs in a down economy- you MUST to be able to explain what it is you do and how it is going to translate into money for your clients.

From a small business stand point, the truth is that many of them know that SEO is something they should be doing (because that’s what they have heard), but they don’t understand it, and they don’t have the time or manpower to be able to do it themselves… so they are coming to you. It’s your job to lay it out for them and help them see the benefits of an SEO investment. So how can we do that? How do we bridge the gap and bring SEO and SMB budgets together?

3 Ways SEO Companies Can Improve their Small Business SEO

1. Understand your clients’ unique budgetary needs:  Maybe a small business can only afford $300 a month. Or maybe it’s a one-time payment of $3,000. Each company is different. A small budget doesn’t mean you can’t do good work for them… it just means that you are going to have to prioritize and pinpoint your efforts to achieve very specific goals. And when a small business owner says that their budget is $3000… please don’t send them a proposal for services costing twice that amount. That happened to me on more than one occasion, and I was not appreciative.
2. Respect their business by customizing your approach: No small business is alike. Each one is going to have its own customer niche, its own unique set of challenges, and its own unique brand. However, I interviewed some SEO service providers who didn’t seem to understand this. For example, after one young man pitched his company’s new SEO service to me, I asked him how it would work for us. He proceeded to tell me about how successful it was for a local pizza shop. Except, I was in real estate… and there is a huge difference between selling a house, and selling a pizza. That meeting didn’t end well. I needed to hear how SEO was going to help my business, not someone else’s.
3. Set realistic expectations with your small business clients: There are a lot of bad SEOs out there that make big and empty promises to unsuspecting small business owners. And this , in turn, creates one of two scenarios:

1. It gives those business owner the illusion that SEO is a magic bullet, and results are almost instantaneous OR
2. The business owner gets burned and becomes convinced that all SEO is a scam

I’ve seen both, and both offer their own challenges. However, each situation can be somewhat healed through transparency and honest communication. Tell your prospective client exactly what you would like to do for their business, why you want to do it, what it’s going to cost, and what the realistic payoff will be. Keep it short, simple, and specific to them.

And of course, for small business owners who may be looking to hire an SEO.

3 Ways Small Businesses Can Make Their SEO Efforts More Effective

1. Become SEO educated: The more you know, the easier it will be to spot scams and shady SEO tactics and protect yourself and your company from making a costly mistake. Having that knowledge base and shared language, you’ll also be able to better understand what is happening on your Web site and to ask better question. The more you know, the more you’ll come to appreciate the value of good, high quality SEO services and choose the firm that will be the best fit for your business.
2. Focus your efforts on things that matter: If you are running a location-driven business like a store or restaurant, your SEO efforts should be focused on the things that will have the biggest impact on a local scale. Therefore, your first SEO priorities should be:
• Having a clean, simple, easy-to-navigate website
• Creating a social media presence in your local community
• Setting up and optimizing local listings for your business in all the places where your customers may try to find you
• Creating fresh, relevant, hyper-local content that people in your community are likely to share with one another
• Focusing on a few, targeted keywords that you can realistically rank for and which will drive relevant traffic to your site
3. Understand that SEO is an investment in your company: Search engine optimization should be considered a vital component of your online marketing strategy. SEO can improve your business’ visibility, help protect your brand’s reputation, and increase revenue. But, it’s not a magic bullet, and it is not going to come cheap. Don’t quit doing the other marketing activities that work for you (whether it is newspaper ads or mailers), but make it a priority to set aside some of your marketing budget for SEO, and stick with it long term so you can see all the good things that it can do for your business.

Are you an SEO specialist that specializes or caters to small businesses? What would you add? I’d love to hear your point of view…

Twitter is aggressive about advertising

Obviously. Twitter’s main source of revenue is their promoted products, and they want to compete with other self-service advertising platforms like Google and Facebook. In my opinion, it is actually easier to target users with one of Twitter’s promoted products than with a standard Facebook display ad.

Initially, promoted products were only available to US advertisers, but they have been expanding with new offices in the UK and Japan. According to reports, Twitter’s ad revenues are expected to be close to $400 million during the year 2013. Which is a pretty impressive number considering the community is only a few years old.

Consumer don’t mind promoted tweets

But how do people on Twitter feel about ads in their Twitter stream? Check out these statistics from eMarketer on attitudes towards promoted tweets.

Only a small percentage said they find promoted tweets annoying, and a much larger group is engaging with them and even finding valuable discounts. The vast majority of Twitter users surveyed were OK with seeing promoted tweets that are relevant to them – possibly even enjoying them.

Twitter trumps Facebook in fan loyalty

When comparing Twitter to Facebook, CMB Consumer Plus recently found that users who follow a brand on Twitter have a higher likelihood of buying something from that brand than those who are a fan of the brand on Facebook (67% compared to 51%). They also found a higher likelihood that Twitter followers of a brand would recommend it to others as compared to Facebook fans (79% compared to 60%).

The competition is low – for now

Because Twitter’s advertising program is still in a beta, the competition is low. You bid against other advertisers, and without many other advertisers to bid against, you can pretty good cost per engagement (CPE) prices. The minimum CPE bid is only $0.50 (which is not necessarily what you would pay, as you have to bid high enough to beat out other advertisers), which presents a great opportunity to start a campaign on a reasonable budget.

But that window could be closing soon. Twitter Sales Chief Adam Brian spoke with the Wall Street Journal a few months ago and said that more than “1,000 advertisers, including many small businesses” have used purchased ads from Twitter, “and about 80% have made more than one purchase.” As more and more advertisers purchase more ads on Twitter, the competition will rise.

How to get started

If you can spare $5,000 a month (Twitter’s minimum commitment, for 3 months) from your advertising budget, consider testing a Twitter campaign. Right now, you still need to apply for an account to begin running promoted tweets or accounts.

Usually, you will be required to complete an insertion order, but a few weeks ago Twitter announced a limited beta allowing electronic payments – a good direction, as their ultimate goal is for advertisers to be able to set up and launch a campaign without help from a representative. Still, I can tell you that you can easily get a sponsored follow or tweet campaign running within seven days. Your options are:

Promoted accounts

Promoted accounts are probably the easiest and most straightforward advertising solution on Twitter. Your account is listed under the “who to follow” section on Twitter.com, and you bid against other advertisers in a cost per follow bidding model. Just like with AdWords, the bidding really depends on your industry and the competition but generally CPF starts around $1-$2.

You can target users by location, interests, and keywords mentioned in their Twitter stream. Here’s an example of what a promoted account looks like on Twitter.com.

This is the official Occupy Wall Street account being promoted, by the way. If an occupier hooked up to a car battery, using WiFi from a nearby coffee shop can run ads on Twitter, your business can too!

Promoted tweets

With a sponsored tweet, you can promote a message in Twitter’s search results, in a follower’s timelines, or in the timeline of users that Twitter deems “similar” to your current followers. Advertisers pay on a cost per engagement model, where you can bid your maximum CPE. Promoted tweets carry a minimum CPE of $0.10 and a suggested CPE of $0.50.

Engagement is defined as one of the following actions:

• Click (can be a link, hashtag or open of the promoted tweet to the details pane)
• Favorite
• Retweet
• Reply

Notice that you will be charged for the click of a hashtag. This is why, unless you have a specific reason for doing so, I usually don’t recommend including a hashtag in your promoted tweet.

Promoted trends

Worldwide promoted trends are Twitter’s most expensive advertising solution by a long shot. For a $120,000 flat fee you can promote a trend to all users in the USA. The trend will also appear on third party and mobile apps. Experts estimate this promoted trend can deliver an average of 25,000,000 impressions a day.

With such a high price tag, this is obviously not an option for most advertisers. But for those representing, say, a large brand launching a new product, or a television network looking to create conversation about a new show, then promoted trends can actually be a pretty effective way to reach a huge audience.

Layer on top of organic efforts

If you’re ready to run a Twitter promoted campaign, make sure you’re getting the most of out those advertising dollars. The most important piece of advice I can give you is that any effective paid Twitter strategy must be paired with natural interaction in the community. You, or your community manager, will need to be active in posting valuable updates, interacting with your followers, keeping on top of popular trends, etc.

If you don’t have that foundation in place before launching a sponsored campaign, it will inhibit the success of your paid effort. Why? Because no matter how high you bid on a promoted follow campaign, if users don’t see any value in the updates in your Twitter stream then they aren’t going to follow you. Plain and simple.

Set goals before launching

Before you begin spending money on followers or actions, think about your goals. Exactly what actions do you want users to complete? Exactly how will you define the success of your campaign? Always establish your goals first, and then build your campaigns around these desired actions.

You may just want to get more followers for your brand. That’s an easy goal to achieve. But maybe you have a more complicated goal, like getting people talking about a new product launch. Maybe you want to get users to click through to sign up for a newsletter on your site or complete a contact form. As with any paid effort, it is always important to define these goals, otherwise you could be wasting your advertising dollars.

I have no affiliation with BeachBody (the P90X workout company) but I think this is a great example of a promoted tweet.

I took this screen shot on November 10th, 2011 – the day before 11/11/11, which was trending worldwide on Twitter. BeachBody did a great job of capitalizing on the popularity of 11/11/11, and tied in a contest for $1,111. Also, notice how the only link they have in the promoted tweet is a link to enter the contest. No hashtags, no push to get users to retweet, the goal is very clear: click the link and enter the contest.

Consider deals and contests

According to a study from Shop.org, 58% of people surveyed say they follow retailers online to find discounts. Another 39% said they follow retailers for information on contests. These are great elements to include in your sponsored effort, and they often lead to higher engagement rates.

As an avid Tweeter, I have entered probably hundreds of contests that I’ve heard about on Twitter. From iPads, to books, to gift cards. Users on Twitter have come to expect contests and special “Twitter followers only” deals, so why not give them what they want?

Mathew Guiver specializes in paid search and sponsored social campaigns at e-storm International. He is also a mega Britney Spears fan. Find him on Twitter @MathewGuiver.

Have you considered or run a promoted campaign on Twitter? What were the results? Tell us about it in the comments!