Jay-Z & Bing Team Up and Make Sweet Marketing Music

In order to promote Jay-Z's recently released book, Decoded, the rapper teamed up with Bing and creative agency, Droga5, in a marketing effort that created quite a stir in several major cities. 


Content from the book's 300 pages was placed on various "secret pages" in locations throughout cities like New York (the rapper's hometown) and London. The goal of the month-long campaign was to engage fans in a real-life treasure hunt. Jay-Z's fans, who Bing researchers found to be heavy search engine users, were eager participants in the online/offline effort.


Once fans spotted the secret pages in such places as billboards and even at the bottom of swimming pools, they were to log on to Bing.com/Jay-Z  to "decode" the messages they found. As more pages were found, the Bing website allowed Jay-Z fans to work together and share clues about where the next "secret page" could be spotted. Every fan who participated in the "decoding" was automatically entered to win a copy of the specific page they found signed by the rapper himself. 


Great idea. Great Pairing. Jay-Z has tons and tons and tons (ok you get it) of fans. Naturally the book was going to be fairly successful based on that alone. But throw in an impressive marketing campaign to top it off and BAM- not only did the book get listed on Oprah's Book Club and on the NYT Best Seller List, but Bing also boosted its relationship with new and existing users.


The "Decoded" scheme seems to have unlocked several very important take-aways for future marketing campaigns, as well. Primarily, it is going to become increasingly important for campaigns to engage consumers through an interactive and incentivized strategy that cohesively links offline participation with online participation. Secondly, fellow marketers should take note of the power and reach of search engines and how a participation with one could produce a very successful and mutually beneficial relationship.

Cool Tool - Google AdWords Keyword Tool

If you manage an AdWords account or are just in need of an effective way to research good keywords definitely check out the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Enter the search term you are researching and the tool will give you related search terms, the competition rate for each term, the global and local monthly search volume of the word, and the local trending of the term. For those of us in charge of AdWords accounts, using this tool will allow you to easily identify which keywords in a campaign will be most effective (and worth company $$) and which keywords can be done without. Sweet!

HTML for Marketers 101- Very Simple SEO Basics

I often get questions from friends and peers about how to easily boost a site's search engine optimization and basic HTML strategies are the first thing that come to my mind.


Without getting all complicated, start with title and meta tags. Not sure what these are? Click on the View tab in your browser and select the View Source option.  The image below is a screen shot of the title and meta tags for target.com:

Here is what this HTML looks like in Google's search results:

Title tags are what appear at the top of a search results so it is important that they encompass the most strategic keywords to describe your site. The better the terms in your HTML title tag match to the key terms your target audience searches for the better the likelihood that they will find your site in their search results.

• It is important to remember to limit the length of title tags to 65 characters or less. This is the amount of room that search engines will  allot for a single title so its best to keep it concise. (different search engines vary on exactly how many characters but I stick to 60 to keep it safe when possible.

Meta Tags should be created for every unique page on a website. This peice of HTML helps search engine crawlers index your site's information more easily, making your site available to potential visitors faster (or thats the idea anyway). Meta descriptions enclose a short, keyword rich summary of what appears on a particular page. This description appears in search results directly beneath the Title Tag (described above). 

• The general rule of thumb is to keep meta tags 160 characters or less, but there doesn't seem to be much proof that a longer meta will actually hurt a page's SEO.

Often, dense websites do not contain meta descriptions for every single page because it can be tedious. 

When no HTML tag is provided, search engines will crawl a page and basically throw in the most frequent terms from its content. Much debate about the pros and cons of this have been discussed in great detail in the marketing world-- seems that the best approach is a trial and error. If a page is not performing as well as expected, try optimizing its title tags and meta tags with better keywords.

For more on HTML rules for better SEO check out Internet Guru Rand Fishkin's post. I always look to his blog for professional tips.

A Steve Jobs Tweet of the Day

@ceoSteveJobs: "I may know exactly what millions of people want every day, but when it comes to Laurene's birthday, I don't have a clue."

What is Digital Death? Celebs Are Signing-Off To Raise Awareness

If your Lady Gaga twitter feed isn't its usual self on November 30th, don't worry your Twitter account is not malfunctioning.

As part of a new campaign called Digital Life Sacrifice, celebs like Gaga, Alicia Keys, J. Timberlake and many more, will be signing off of their social media pages on behalf of World AIDS Day. The "Digital Death" of these celebrities on Facebook and Twitter aims to bring attention to the millions of unheard voices dying from AIDs around the world. The participating celebrities will remain logged-off of their accounts from the 30th until the Keep A Child Alive charity has raised $1 million in donations.

Video clips depicting each of the celebs laying in a coffin will be the last post on their pages until the charity meets its goals. Sounds pretty jarring but I guess that is the point. Its kind of sad that it takes a "digital death" of a celebrity on Twitter to get people's attention on such a serious global issue...but nevertheless it is always good to see the power of social media being reinvented for the betterment of humanity.

Combined, Lady Gaga and Alicia Keys have approximately 9.8 million followers on Twitter. With such a huge reach, Keep A Child should be able to reach their goal and ten fold. Gaga follower or not, if you are interested in making a donation you can do so here.

Whether critics find the "digital death" idea preposterous or not, the campaign should serve as an interesting case study on the relations between charities and social media fundraising.

Definitely stay tuned.