Rocky Bayou Christian, NAACP talk diversity

bogartlocal-

Guess my kid will not be going to Rocky Bayou!!! Look, it is a private school for a reason. I have no problem with diversity but I do have a problem anytime the NAACP gets involved, they are nothing but trouble. There is always the option of public school if parents feel like their child needs diversity. Why does Mr. Mosely feel he has to get the NAACP involved? Wait until enrollment starts going down then see if he changes his tune.

cherylw-

All the NAACP is concerned about when it comes to diversity IS skin color and they know it. How dare Sabu make such a statement. I wonder how Sabu and the other members of the NAACP would feel if a white organization was constantly interfering with black schools and colleges. I can bet you they would raising a frucus.

kindlykritter-

When the Almighty created humanity, He divided it according to race. It’s possible Heaven may be similar.

Paid search and social media are both extremely important marketing channels. But how can brands combine the two distinctly different tactics –- the bid-based, conversion-obsessed, ROI-driven world of paid search and the experimental, brand-building, hard-to-measure world of social –- to drive an overall increase in ROI? Marketers large and small are grappling with the challenge of how to integrate their paid search advertising programs with social media programs on networks like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and viral video sites.

Social and Search Should Work Together

The most important thing to remember when starting a search-and-social integration program is that search and social each provide different benefits to your business, so you should leverage their strengths instead of trying to get them to deliver results that aren’t suited to the medium.

Marketers usually participate in social media to create an active dialogue with consumers around their products and services, with the main goal of building brand value, and a secondary goal of driving sales. On the other hand, marketers use paid search primarily to drive sales, leads, and conversion, and don’t expect the short text of their paid search ads to do much for branding.

But together, the two disciplines can increase the value that each program delivers. By creating social content that attracts an engaged audience, marketers can then craft targeted paid search campaigns to “capture” this audience and turn them into buyers.

As an example of how this works, consider these findings from an October 2009 study conducted by GroupM Search, M80, and ComScore. The report found that consumers exposed to a brand’s social media content are 2.8 times more likely to search on that brand’s terms. What’s more, consumers exposed to social media are more likely to perform deeper searches, going further down the purchase funnel and completing more purchases. Consumers exposed to a brand’s social media are 1.7 times more likely to search with the intention of making a purchase, and, overall, brands reported a 50% lift in click-through rates from consumers exposed to both social media and paid search, according to the study.

What these statistics show is that stronger brand awareness through social media helps drive paid search effectiveness in three ways:

Target audiences are more likely to search (more impressions on your ads)
Target audiences are more likely to click (more clicks on those impressions)
Because of higher clickthrough rates, ads are placed higher on page (higher quality score)
Smart Strategies

There is no silver bullet for integrating search and social, but there are several concrete strategies every marketer can use to start bringing the two disciplines together. Here are a few tips to help you optimize social and paid search programs to work in a complimentary way to boost overall ROI.

Make your social campaigns search-friendly. Make sure your social media programs (Facebook, Twitter, viral video, etc.) are appropriately tagged and indexed, and that metadata for pages includes your top keywords. This will allow people searching for your brand content to not only find your paid search ads and natural search results, but to find your social media content as well. The first step to building brand engagement through social activities is to enable consumers to easily find your content.
Experiment with keyword advertising on social media sites. Facebook and YouTube both allow for keyword targeted advertising, but the way that these ads work is vastly different from how advertising works on Google or the Content Network. Facebook ads allow you to target users based on preferences they list on their profile. For example, a retailer selling DVDs would create ads that target interests such as “action movies,” “horror,” or “funny movies.” YouTube’s advertising system allows you to target specific user queries. However, remember the queries that occur on YouTube are different than those on Google, because users on YouTube are searching for content, not products. For example, people may be trying to find “Avatar trailer” or “car scene from Modern Family,” rather than searching for a particular DVD, so make sure to target your ads to these more specific types of search queries.
Create social media-influenced paid search campaigns. Closely analyze the topics and discussions taking place around your social media campaigns, and then mine these discussions for new keywords you can use in paid search campaigns on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Whatever people are talking about, bid on keywords that reflect these conversations. As always, you should measure the performance of these campaigns to prune non-performing ads and increase investment on terms that are more likely to capture downstream conversions. In addition, consider running controlled experiments with social media advertising turned off and on, so you can measure the impact these campaigns have on your paid search programs by observing changes in your paid search click-through and conversion rates.

By quantifying the uplift that social media delivers to your paid search programs, you can gain insights into your marketing programs that search marketers who limit their view to just one channel do not –- and improve the performance of both your paid search and social programs.

Once you remove the shiny wrapper, there is an incredible amount of depth and value in using social technologies as a way to reach your customers. However, I personally find the word “social” to be a poor descriptor. Terms like community or collaboration tend to be more meaningful. Here are some ways that businesses and tap into the power of online community.

Types of Online Communities
The social web is all about communities, and it’s important to recognize that there are a variety of collaboration solutions available. I typically categorize these into three distinct groups:

Direct Community: These are communities owned and managed by a company typically running proprietary community and enterprise collaboration software solutions. Examples include the National Breast Cancer Foundation’s community website, Starbucks’ blog, or Dell’s support community. The organization is responsible for running and managing the community and benefits from rich data and user profiles created within that community. These also would include private B2B and internal employee-targeted communities.
Managed Community: These are communities started and managed by the organization, but run on consumer-facing social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Examples here include the National Breast Cancer Foundation’s Facebook Page, Starbucks’ Flickr group pool, or Dell’s presence on Twitter. The organization is responsible for running and managing the community, but does not necessarily benefit from the rich data and user profiles created within the community. Typically, the facilitator of the community (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) benefits the most from the underlying data.
Participating Community: These are communities started and managed by individuals or groups of users, typically on consumer-facing social networking sites, but sometimes also with proprietary software. An example here would be a fan site for Microsoft’s Xbox or an independent Porsche enthusiast group. Typically the organization whose products or services are the topic of discussion can participate, but has no authority or access to the data created within the community.
It’s important to recognize a few details here. First, a core theme of the above is who owns the data. Secondly, all three are relevant and important, regardless of who owns the data.

Strategies for Leveraging These Communities
What most businesses desire is a strategy for how to use new technologies to do one of three things –- increase awareness (marketing), increase revenue (sales), or decrease expenses (efficiency and execution). Can community software do this? Absolutely. But it requires a strategy.

What is your objective? If you are running a digital marketing campaign, your strategy is different than if you are running a support solution. The difference in strategy is important for defining what the end goal is and how to use the various tools and technologies to support that strategy. For example, with a digital marketing strategy, you likely care more about authenticity and awareness than question/answer rates. It’s important to clearly understand your objective, because it helps define the technologies used to support it, the measurements to track the objective, and what role social media plays in the strategy.
Who is your audience? If you are trying to reach a new or existing audience, your choice of solutions (direct, managed, or participating community) may vary. In a network strategy, you likely care about the relationships between the members of your communities. In this case, creating both direct and managed communities may be a good solution. The National Breast Cancer Foundation links its managed community (Facebook) to its direct community, for example.
What are you measuring? What most savvy organizations have figured out about community and collaboration technologies is that they provide an abundance of data –- whether it is to feed a CRM system, mine for customer ideas and suggestions, or identify influential users. The real value is the deep insight and analysis that can be gained from the veritable goldmine of customer data found within your community. While some of this mining can be done on consumer networks, it doesn’t compare to the level of analysis that you can do within your own community.

Voting is really about affecting the country around you. From the federal government to your state’s governor’s mansion to your local school board. Top to bottom you and your friends and family can make a difference.

Below are examples of elections that came down to a few votes – the result could have been changed by a handful of voters and consequentially, the policies could have been quite different.

2008 – Alaska State Representative Mike Kelley wins reelection by 1 vote. Any one person, of the 10,000 who voted or of the people who missed the election, could have changed the result.

2004 – Democrat Christine Gregoire wins the Washington’s gubernatorial race by 133 votes out of more than 2.8 million votes cast over Republican Dino Rossi.

2000 – We all know the story of 2000. 537 votes in Florida separate George W. Bush from Al Gore in Florida and gives the Republican the presidency. Out of more than 105 million votes cast in the entire country. Taking the effort to vote doesn’t only change local elections, it can change the biggest one of all

1974 – Republican Louis Wyman beat Democrat John Durkin by 2 votes in a US Senate race in New Hampshire. That is 0.00090% of the vote in that election

1948 – Back before most people knew who Lyndon B. Johnson was, he won his Senate primary by 98 votes. If just 100 more voters had voted for his opponent, history might have been very different.