Internet Marketing Archive

Microsoft Advertising at Cannes Lions 2009

Myself and other members of the Microsoft Advertising Community team will be in Cannes in a couple of weeks for the International Advertising Festival which we’re sponsoring.

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Do check out our Cannes Lions 2009 community site which includes blogs, photos, videos and Twitter feeds – as we ramp towards the event we’ll be adding more content and will be streaming Steve Ballmer live from our business forum during the week!

As Steve picks up Media Person of the Year we’d like to ask him some questions from our Twitter audience so follow @MSAdvertising and fire off some things you’d like to hear!

Archivist – Awesome Twitter Search Archive Tool

Any online marketer should be using Twitter to data mine for what’s being said about their brand, product, service or even their competition.

It’s a given!

Twitter Search is great for finding out what’s being said out there and they’ve now integrated the functionality into the tool to make it easier to search and check out trending topics.

Now however, the guys from Mix Online have come up with the Archivist which is a very cool tool for mining for Tweets, saving them and exporting them to Microsoft Excel for reporting purposes!

They point out that Twitter will not keep these nuggets of insight for ever, so it’s crucial you save them somewhere.

imageAs an example – Microsoft adCenter upgraded over the weekend, so I did a search on that found 328 tweets for that keyword.

There are a couple of “views” – the actual Tweets and avatars like above, or a trend line like below where you can see the spike in activity because of the new release.

imageA simple click of “Export To Excel” and you have a .TXT file you can open in Excel and play around with till your heart’s content!

imageNice huh!?

Check out the documentation and download it here!

Multimap Outlook 2007 Calendar Mapping Add-In Tool

Just been given the heads up on a new tool to make it easy to add a map and directions to a meeting request in Outlook 2007!

The guys at Multimap have built a mapping Add-In to Outlook which, with a few clicks, embeds a map into a calendar meetings, contacts and emails which saves time adding links and generates an “easy to access“ map you can view or print plus find directions and transport links. image

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  • When you want to add a map just – you guessed it (!) – click on “Add Map” and a little box pops up.
  • Jot down the address or postcode and click GO.
  • Then – you guessed right again (!) – click “Add Map to Meeting” and that’s it!

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It also let’s you click on the Bird’s Eye view – my favourite feature so you can see exactly where I work! 

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If you have Office 2007 check it out and let us know what you think!

Oh….and before you ask it works in the US too! 🙂

Microsoft adCenter Keyword Research Tool

I’ve not written about this awesome little program on my blog until now.

No reason other than I suppose I forget sometimes that although I write a lot on the adCenter Blog, there are other channels I can talk about the great work our teams at Microsoft do.

In a nutshell the Microsoft adCenter Excel Add In Keyword Research Tool lets you plug in a keyword and assess how many people search using that word in a given time period.

image It will also tell you what other searches contained that term.

So not just “camera” but also “digital camera” “SLR Camera” “Camera Stores in Cardiff” or “my camera oh oh, my camera never lies anymore” (assuming people are looking for Bucks Fizz lyrics!)

keyword researchThe killer app for me is the demographic tool which lets you see which demographic – age and gender – is typing in that keyword more than any other?

Why is it important?

Well never before have you had so much rich data to use when marketing online…..or offline for that matter.

Knowing the different keywords that are associated with your products, services and brand and your competitors brands is important when you’re building out web or PPC keywords, content and ad copy.

But if you know what the audience that is most interested in learning more you can tailor your marketing accordingly.

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Women aged between 18 and 25 are going to require a very different message than the kind you’d use to target a guy aged 50-65 so having a better understanding of who your customers are helps you come up with marketing that will resonate.

So download the Keyword Research Tool now and give it a whirl – you will NOT be disappointed!

We’re piloting the new version which has UK data at the mo so watch out for that on the adCenter Blog!

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