You built out your new ad copy, tested out a bidding strategy, measured web and store sales to measure the online to offline effect; however, in the end you got the worst outcome possible – inconclusive results.

A negative result would have been better; at least you would have known that your hypothesis was wrong or that your strategy was not effective. But an inconclusive result tells you nothing, which can be incredibly frustrating as a marketer.

There are many reasons why a well-designed test might fail. For example, seasonal effects might be ignored, the dataset might be too small or the marketplace might change during the test.

However, a very common error in test design is not accounting for volatility – fluctuations in performance due to unpredictable events in the marketplace.

In this post, I shall delve into the issue of volatility, how it might lead to a test with inconclusive results and finally, how you can mitigate its effect on your test.

To understand the issue better, let us assume that you want to test the hypothesis that online SEM spending leads to offline store sales. To test this hypothesis, you ramp up your online budgets in increments every week.

Your plan is to run the test for 5 weeks, collect the data, do a regression analysis and answer the question, “What does one dollar spent online lead to in offline sales?”.  Now let us, put some real numbers in this thought experiment.

See more at searchengineland.com

This is another post that is back by popular demand, with several changes and additions. In the last two years, content marketing has matured, and many more voices have joined the conversation.

There are a content marketing institute, an Alltop category, and now a content strategy conference, Confab2011. Why is everyone all of a sudden talking and writing about content?

First the definition - content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

Many more interactions with products and services take place online today. Individual and social search are both becoming an important way of finding and filtering relevant information.

When you create content, you need to keep in mind what attracts customers and prospects, and their friends. Educating, informing, and creating with them are all ways to engage people in a conversation with you.

It should therefore not be surprising that the Top Ten reasons why your content marketing strategy fails are: Read more at www.conversationagent.com

Frank Marquardt is director of Content Strategy at The Barbarian Group, a digital services and creation company with an almost radical devotion to Internet culture and nice red Swedish Fish™.

Good, smart, fun and relevant content should be at the core of any social media strategy. Great content should reflect your brand and give people a reason to stay engaged.

These five content strategy techniques will build better relationships and earn your brand better results on the social web.

That’s why it’s critical to build a content strategy into your social media campaign. Without a framework for what you say and a plan for how and when you say it, you risk leaving your audiences, at best, confused. At worst, they’ll ignore you. Who wants that?

1. Know Your Voice

2. Time Your Content

3. Know Your Audience

4. Solve Problems

5. Be True Read more at mashable.com

Social media is crap. Social media is a waste of money and time. Social media can’t be measured so we’re just wasting energy. Social media doesn’t offer lead generation. Blah blah blah.

I’ve seen a ton of criticism about social media and what it can and can’t do. People and companies are quick to jump in and castrate those of us using the medium as charlatans and maggots. Generally the excuse is any one of the reasons above, amongst others.

Most times the biggest complaint is that “social media isn’t working for us”, and because of that, social media is automatically a crap shoot.

But maybe those doing the loudest complaining should take a long hard look in the mirror and ask why it’s not working. Because I’m pretty sure that it’s not because of the reasons given at the start of this post, but a far simpler one – your social media strategy sucks.

And here’s why. Read more at dannybrown.me