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A prova é difícil, mas não muito. Quem trabalha todo o dia com o Google Adwords vai saber de cor pelo menos metade das questões, e quem tem um conhecimento um pouco mais profundo na questão de estratégias e marketing (tudo de acordo com o que é aconselhado no Centro de Aprendizagem) vai matar a outra metade. O que complica são alguns problemas de tradução e de estrutura de algumas perguntas, mas isso não é o suficiente pra reprovar alguém. Entre os temas mais importantes, eu destacaria:

- Conhecimento básico sobre os níveis de administração de uma conta de Links Patrocinados
A conta contém campanhas, que contêm grupos de anúncios, que contêm anúncios que são ativados conforme as palavras-chave.

- Estratégias de palavras-chave
Correspondências, quais as melhores escolhas para a campanha de uma empresa do ramo X, quais palavras usar para aumentar visitas ou aumentar impressões. A palavra-chave é a alma do negócio tanto na prática como no exame!

- Faturamentos e pagamentos!
Essas questões foram fáceis porque tive que aprender muito sobre esses detalhes no ano passado. Quais as formas de pagamento disponíveis, quais os dados são configuráveis e onde as alterações podem ser feitas – dê uma olhada na guia “Minha conta”, tudo funciona lá.

- Otimização de campanha
Como saber se sua campanha está dando o retorno esperado e que alterações fazer para atingir seus objetivos – mais visitas, mais vendas em uma região, mais impressões etc. E como deve ser o site que receberá os anúncios

- Conversões
Conhecimentos sobre o que é uma conversão, como medi-la e algumas estratégias de incremento de conversões. Noções sobre ciclo de compras são bem-vindas.

- Relatórios e Indicadores de desempenho
CTR, Índice de qualidade, conversões… pra que servem esses indicadores e como usar os relatórios?

- Novas features
Muito importante: a função do exame é testá-lo mas, também, aproveitar para mostrar como o Google Adwords é um sistema ótimo e que tem tudo o que o anunciante precisa. Por isso, aparecem algumas questões sobre formas de anúncio que são pouco ou nada usadas por aqui ainda (como anúncios em celular). Outra coisa: se você estiver em dúvida entre uma ou outra resposta, veja se uma delas não está queimando o filme do Google e já elimine!

É IMPORTANTE lembrar que uma prova nunca é igual à outra, mas os temas acima certamente vão aparecer entre as intermináveis 110 questões. Talvez apareça uma questão que esqueci de tratar aqui, mas esses tópicos tratam de bastante coisa!

Leitura essencial:
Google Adwords – A Arte da Guerra (LIVRO)
Centro de Aprendizagem Google Adwords (SITE)
Blog do Google Adwords-PT (BLOG)

Pra quem ainda não viu meu TCC: ele é meio chato, comprido e pesado. Mas eu aprendi um horroooor de coisa enquanto escrevia. Thanks to @Suely e @GusFischer.

Recebi por e-mail hoje um convite da AGADI (Associação Gaúcha de Agências Digitais) para essa palestra com Alex Primo e Luli Radfahrer. Deve custar R$ 80, que é o preço deles pra essas palestras (exceto, claro, os faraônicos R$ 400 e tantos pelo Mr. Long Tail).

O trabalho do Alex Primo sobre interação mediada por computador é realmente ótimo, e o Radfahrer… bom, lê o perfil dele no blog que tu entende.

Eu sigo tanto o @alexprimo como o @radfahrer no Twitter. E acho que catei os 2 do Twitter da @raquelrecuero, a Social Media Guru do nosso trópico.

There are a lot of companies that will happily relieve you of your dollars, in exchange for buzz monitoring services. While many large companies will enjoy the peace of mind that comes from having a company track their reputation for them, the rest of us need something a little less expensive–or better yet, free!

We’ve compiled a list of twenty six buzz monitoring tools that are free of charge. Use these tools to keep track of your company reputation or even spy on your competition! Take a look at Trackur.com if you need an all-in-one buzz monitoring tool.

1. Your Industry

If you simply don’t have time to track everything that specifically relates to your company–or your competition–you can still track news that relates to your industry. Moreover and Yahoo are just a couple of resources that offer RSS feeds for aggregated industry news.

2. Mainstream Media News

One of the best ways to track mainstream media mentions of your company is to use Google News. Enter your company name, sort the results by date published and then subscribe to the RSS feed. You’ll get instant RSS updates of any news items that mention your business. Example for “apple“.

3. News Buzz

It’s one thing to track any news that relates to your business, but what if you just want to know about the news that becomes popular? Sites such as Digg and Reddit will let you search for submitted stories that match your company name. Subscribe to the resulting RSS feed and you’ll know about any story on Digg that mentions your company–or your biggest rival.

4. Social Media News

By the time a hot news story gets picked-up by the mainstream media, it could have made the rounds for days in the blogosphere. You can capitalize on positive buzz and put out any reputation fires by tracking social media. Technorati is one of the best options for tracking social media sites. Custom RSS feeds let you get quick updates on any blog that utters your company name.

5. Blog Posts

If a blog happens to “ping” the blogosphere, the chances are that it will get on Google Blog Search. Even if the blog isn’t in Google news, or doesn’t make the main Google index, Google Blog Search might still find that story that mentions your CEO or your recent product launch. Get alerts to matching stories via email or RSS.

6. Blog Comments

Sometimes tracking a blog post doesn’t reveal the full conversation about your business. The blog post might be positive, but those leaving comments could attack your reputation. Services such as co.mments.com track the comments left on blogs. You can search for your brand and subscribe to the RSS feed for instant updates.

7. Blog Conversations

A negative blog post appears on a low-trafficked blog and there are no comments to track. End of story? Not quite, what if a very popular blogger picks up on the story? It could spread very quickly and catch you by surprise. Blogpulse’s conversation tracker will help you track who’s linking to that blog post about your company.

8. Blog Trends

How well is your competitor’s new product launch going? Blogpulse trends lets you track whether a keyword is getting growing blog mentions or not. Apple’s iPhone saw a 1000% jump in blog mentions leading up to its launch.

9. Bookmarks

Remember the days when your customers would bookmark your site in IE and you never knew about it? Thanks to online bookmarking services such as del.icio.us more people are sharing their bookmarks online. RSS feeds make it easy to track whenever someone bookmarks a web page that includes mention of your company.

10. Photos

Did an employee release a top-secret photo of your new products? Did someone snap a photo of your CEO leaving a strip-club? The chances are high that they might upload it to image hosting sites such as Flickr. Luckily, you can subscribe to an RSS feed that will update you on any new image that matches your company name?or the name of your slimy CEO.

11. Videos

So what if your CEO was caught on video having a lap-dance? Ouch! Ok, less damaging, someone releases a video showing a negative product review. Google Video recently switched focus to index videos from many online hosting sites (such as YouTube and MetaCafe). Now you can keep track of videos that include your company.

12. Tags

Wouldn’t it be great if you could enter a keyword and see who used that word as a “tag” How much better would it be if you could see matching tags across more than a dozen sites? Keotag.com does just that, making it easy for you to track if someone tags a page using your company or product name.

13. Forum Posts

Sometimes the most important conversations don’t happen on blogs. Forums and message boards can host conversations about your company and you’d never know about it. Don’t panic! Sites such as Boardtracker.com will keep an eye on popular forums for you and alert you by RSS if your company is mentioned in a thread.

14. Changing Information

Wikipedia is one of the most trusted resources for information on the web. You might be interested in any updates to your company profile or maybe you want to know if your competitor is trying to remove links to your web site. Fortunately you can track change history for any Wikipedia page and have the changes sent to your RSS reader of choice.

15. Job Listings

If your competitor wants to start a new service or launch a new product, the chances are they’ll need to hire new staff to achieve this. Classifieds search engine Oodle scours many online job listings and aggregates the information in a central location. Set up RSS feeds for searches on your biggest competitors and you’ll know whenever they list a vacant position.

16. Financial Filings

You can get a good feel for the financial health of your publicly-traded competitors by keeping a close eye on their SEC filings. Use Edgar Online and you’ll know if they’re subject to an SEC investigation or if their CEO is dumping stock faster than Martha Stewart.

17. Conference Calls

Sticking with public companies, sometimes you can learn some competitive information by listening to the company’s conference calls. But who has time for that? SeekingAlpha lets you subscribe to the RSS feed of conference call transcripts. Open up the transcript and you can quickly get a snapshot of their financial health. You might even learn about a new product launch–one which you might want to think about for your business.

18. Patents

Keeping track of patent filings was notoriously difficult before Google Patent Search came along. Now you can keep any eye on patents filed that relate to your industry. Better yet, keep track of patents that might violate your company held patents.

19. Events

Yahoo’s Upcoming lets you get RSS alerts on any new event that matches your selected keyword. You can keep track of conferences that you might want to attend, or sponsor. In addition, you could keep track of seminars or meeting being held by your competitors.

20. New Products

Let’s say you want to get some ideas of products that might be hot right now. Amazon.com lets you view product “tags” and then review similar tags. You can use this to get an idea of companion products that you might want to launch.

21. Search Query Trends
What search queries are popular at Google right now? Thanks to Google Trends you can get an idea of which keywords are most searched for. You can narrow your research to specific countries or cities–letting you know if a product has global or local appeal.

22. Keyword Referrals
Sure you could probably take an educated guess as to which sites might get the most traffic for a particular keyword, but it’s more fun to actually spy on your competitors. Compete’s Search Analytics allows you to enter a keyword and see which web sites are getting traffic for that keyword.

23. Site Referrals
Ok, so maybe you’re not sure which keywords you should target for your next SEM campaign. Compete’s Search Analytics will also let you enter any domain name and see which keywords are driving traffic to that site. Now you know which keywords your competitors are targeting.

24. Email Updates

If you’re not quite ready for all of that RSS reader nonsense, you can still keep track of the latest buzz via email. Google Alerts let you track web, blogs, news and groups for any phrase you want. Select daily, weekly or “as it happens” updates and you’ll get an email whenever your company name is mentioned.

25. The Untrackable

Some stuff just can’t be tracked that easily. If you want to track changes at a site–even if they don’t offer RSS or email updates–there are many tools that will do it for you. Our favorite is Copernic’s Tracker which, for $50, will let you keep an eye on any web site. Use it to monitor RipOffReport.com, forum threads, or even your competitor’s web site.

26. Anything You Want

You don’t have to be a developer in order to create your own custom buzz monitoring tool. Thanks to Yahoo Pipes, you can quickly set up your own RSS tracking, complete with filters. Want to track Twitter for mentions of your company? Not a problem with Yahoo Pipes.

Over to You
So, that should be enough buzz monitoring tools to get you going. Some are more useful than others, but all are FREE! What are your favorite buzz monitoring tools? Leave a comment or post to your own blog and ping us.

Like this post? Check out our FREE Beginners Guide to Online Reputation Management.

** Join Andy Beal, Om Malik, Biz Stone, Dave Taylor & other experts for 2-days of hands-on social media training. Save $250 with code “FOA” **

Danny’s hoping that I’ll post something on social media optimization marketing and it’s hard to let a soon-to-be-unemployed man down (too soon?). Thus, I give you my version of an introduction to the social media space – what’s important, what’s worth your time and how to go about working the SMO SMM angle.

What Can You do with SMO SMM?

Create pages that provide links back to your site (for both traffic and link popularity)
Create pages that will rank well in the search engines for low-moderately competitive terms/phrases
Build profiles on sites that can attract links, attention and contacts from other members
Contribute to the growth and value of social media sites
What are the Best Strategies?

To my mind, you first need to outline your goals – oftentimes, many of the purposes above will overlap, but you should still focus clearly on what you want to achieve. For many folks, SMM is about pushing a negative link out of the top 10-20 results at the search engines. For others, it’s about getting free, low-hassle backlinks. For many of our clients, visibility itself is the achievement – getting recognized as a company/person who’s consistently participating in the social media world has great benefits. Since the first two goals are fairly obvious, I’ll put a little effort into explaining the visibility argument.

When you have a profile that people recognize on sites like Reddit, Digg, Wikipedia or in a set of industry blogs, you have a significant ability to influence discussion, create content and push visibility for links. My post on Digg’s top users could easily describe Newsvine or Wikipedia. Once you’ve built up a profile that people recognize as a valuable source for information, you become more powerful in that community. Your bookmarks/articles/submissions/etc take on a greater value than the anonymous contributions of newbies. This mirrors the social structure of many web forums – big voices carry greater weight.

The ultimate goal of this visibility is to have the power to influence – once you have a voice, marketing becomes a soft-sell, rather than a hard one. Your SMM strategy may be to build links, rank a page in the engines or simply to generate leads, and all can be better accomplished with a prominent profile.

Assuming you have your goals defined, you’ll need to know where to go to start profile-building, content creating and spamming on the square.

Where to Go SMMing?

The best sites for SMMing (Social Media Marketing) are those that have achieved popularity enough to attract visitors, links and search engine rankings. I’ll give a rundown of the ones I believe are valuable to participate in. I’ve ordered these from most valuable to participate in to least valuable (although there are hundreds below the 25 I’ve listed and probably some that belong on here that I’ve forgotten).

Digg
Del.icio.us
Wikipedia
Flickr
Reddit
Newsvine
StumbleUpon
Technorati
MySpace
Yahoo! Answers
Ma.gnolia
Yahoo! 360
LinkedIn
Squidoo
Wikihow
Ning
Frappr
Furl
Wetpaint
43 Things
Shoutwire
Shadows
YourElevatorPitch
Jotspot
BlinkList

Each of these sites have different foci, unique benefits and demand attention to detail and a sub-strategy that considers the quirks and peculiarities of the userbase. For example, making it to the top of Reddit with a politically focused article is far easier than doing so at Digg (or Del.icio.us/popular). Experience is the best way to learn, so start browsing and playing. The only rule I’d apply to SMMing is to look before you leap. Don’t just start spamming or submitting content to these sites without getting a good grasp on what’s getting popular and receiving attention on them. There’s nothing worse than getting banned from a small-time social media site because you spammed ‘em, only to find out that site is the next Slashdot.

Good luck to all you SMMers out there. A year from now, the list and the tactics will surely be far different from what they are now.

Got any SMMing strategies of your own to share?

UPDATE: I changed the name to SMM – I think it’s a far better decsriptive (thnx, Matt). I’ve also added Wikihow to the list, as I see their content having the ability to achieve great popularity and you can add external links to relevant sites.

UPDATE 2: Jane has written a brilliant piece outlining 30 unique sites worthy of targeting for social media marketing. For anyone interested in the subject, this is a must-read.

Acho que a idéia que dá certo em web 2.0 é criar ações em que tu consiga fazer o público falar a tua língua, adotar a tua causa e ainda ajudar a defendê-la. É multiplicar por mil a tua mensagem, e é por isso que tem que se tomar muito cuidado. Porque uma mensagem errada multiplicada por mil é dose.

A Nike tem uma estratégia super legal, o Nike+ (http://nikeplus.nike.com/nikeplus): é um iPod nano que se conecta com o tênis (pô…), e conta quanto tu correu naquele dia. Quando tu chega em casa, passa esses dados pro teu PC e no site deles, onde pessoas de todos os lugares do mundo também postam quanto correram naquele dia.

São centenas, milhares de pessoas assimilando, aplicando e devolvendo pra mídia a mensagem da marca: o tal do “just do it”, um conceito de esporte, saúde, diversão e bem-estar que tu só tem quando corre usando um Nike e ouvindo um iPod nano.

Outra coisa que combina com web 2.0 é a tal convergência de mídias, é utilizar diversos veículos pra transmitir e reforçar a tua idéia. Eu vejo anúncio do Rio Quente Resorts toda terça-feira no caderno de Viagem da ZH, sempre com a foto da home do site, ou uma parecida.

Para alinhar com a estratégia web, seria interessante utilizar esse espaço que já é cativo e conhecido (eu já tinha uma memória visual do anúncio bem antes de começar a trabalhar aqui, mas não memorizava a empresa) para criar um novo impacto no público.

Eu não conheço bem a Rio Quente, mas acho que é importante trabalhar bem esses conceitos de colaboração para que eles estejam de acordo com os conceitos que a Rio Quente quer passar. Por ser um resort, um espaço que abrange toda a família (e a decisão de compra pode ser influenciada por um dos membros, não necessariamente o pai).

Quando eu penso em web 2.0, eu penso em alternativas criativas e inovadoras, que sejam feitas sob medida para aquela marca e sejam assimiladas e até subvertidas (de forma saudável, é claro), e isso inclui marketing de guerrilha, viral e até ARG. ARG?

ARG (http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game)
A Abril fez uma pesquisa recentemente sobre algumas tendências de comunicação, e indicou os ARGs como a tendência mais completa.

Isso porque o ARG é um jogo que leva o público à marca (que fica em grande exposição), não só transmite como ainda amplia a sua mensagem e, principalmente, cria uma teia de acontecimentos que prende o público e proporciona uma experiência única. O Guaraná Antartica já fez isso: deixou pistas e enigmas em revistas, que levavam o público a um site que contava uma história. O público vira jogador, o que propicia um envolvimento bem maior do que apenas um impacto pela marca.

Sugestões
Veículos
Algumas das redes de relacionamento mais populares lá fora:
http://www.facebook.com, http://twitter.com/ e http://www.myspace.com/

Ações
Idéia parecida com a que o Fabio mandou. Um vídeo que pode ser alterado por quem acessa, pra promover a temporada da série Dexter. Tu escreve uma mensagem e um nome, e eles aparecem no vídeo:
http://www.icetruck.tv/

Espaço 2.0 da Agência Click. Tu pode criar o teu perfil, e fazer uma página pessoal vinculada à página da agência:
http://clickaqui.agenciaclick.com.br/

Case The Last Secret of John Carter: ARG criado para promover uma escola de inglês:
http://www.citrus7.com.br/2007/08/01/the-last-secret-of-john-carter/

Você completa a arte – ação do Masp. A visualização do quadro depende do número de usuários online na hora:
http://www.artfilling.com

Blogs da Comunicação Digital Unisinos:
http://unisinos.br/blog/digital e http://comunicacaodigital.unisinos.br/hiper/

Texto da Folha sobre ARG
http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/informatica/ult124u19645.shtml

Blog sobre propaganda, com ações em web 2.0 e várias outras coisas legais
www.brainstorm9.com.br

“Destroy the Web 2.0 Look” -PowerPoint muito legal que mostra a “estética” da web 2.0, com exemplos
http://www.slideshare.net/elliotjaystocks/fowd-november-2007