Obama For America 2012 and Google Analytics: Changing the World $3 at a Time

Though not a traditional e-commerce retailer, the Obama-Biden 2012 campaign is the most successful uses of Google Analytics (GA) in the history of politics. Though the campaign did offer a delightful online store with well-designed and clever merchandise (I still own a “cup of Joe” mug with Vice President Biden’s photo on it), the real product for sale was the Obama for America (OFA) brand.  In the course of the 2012 election, the Obama campaign raised $733M in donations from 4.4M individual donors, the majority of whom donated $200 or less to the campaign—a stark contrast to the Romney campaign that raised $479M from 1.1M donors, the majority of whom donated $2000 or more (Washington Post, 2012). Through a sophisticated use of both data analytics and digital analytics – the campaign had two separate analytics branches in the organization focused on different uses of data – voters were targeted with specifically crafted email messages asking for small amounts of money, often “just $3,” to not only fundraise but to earn the allegiance of their visitors (Engage Research, 2013). For a relatively small personal donation, the campaign’s consumers could feel fully engaged with the Obama brand. This engagement would translate into brand loyalty and consequent votes on election day. Using both traditional product marketing strategies and unconventional applications of e-commerce techniques, the OFA team created a dynamic and responsive marketing campaign for a winning political platform.

To cover the entire breakdown of the Obama 2012 analytics techniques is far beyond the scope of this blog post, however, the OFA campaign’s use of GA to enhance their digital analytics, and particularly their real-time responsiveness ans optimization is a masterful ecommerce strategy that could be replicated by any fundraising or highly visible enterprise to continuously engage customers.

Hey.

If you in any way aligned yourself with the Democratic National Committee, or the Obama campaign, you were added to the OFA email list. Jon Stewart may have poked fun on The Daily Show about the voluminous quantity of email sent on a daily basis from the campaign but these emails were not simply designed to wear down a contributor’s resistance. They were also the result of a complex A/B testing process and GA event tracking to determine which subject lines prompted opening the emails and clicking through to the website. According to Amelia Showalter, OFA Director of Digital Analytics, “We did extensive testing not just on the subject lines and the amount of money we would ask people for but on the messages themselves and even the formatting.”  The campaign would test as many as 18 variations before selecting a version to send to its massive email list.

The most popular subject line? “Hey.” The casual and familiar tone encouraged recipients to open the email. Additionally, staffers reported that their instincts were practically useless when designing email blasts. “We were so bad at predicting what would win that it only reinforced the need to constantly keep testing. Every time something really ugly won, it would shock me: giant-size fonts for links, plain-text links vs. pretty ‘Donate’ buttons. Eventually we got to thinking, ‘How could we make things even less attractive?’ That’s how we arrived at the ugly yellow highlighting on the sections we wanted to draw people’s eye to,” according to Showalter. A/B testing proved to be the reliable measure of potential success. The extrapolated monetary difference between versions could add up to millions of dollars from a single email blast (Green, 2012).

Secondary Calls to Action and Ease of Re-Donating

After an initial signup, the digital analytics team used GA Advanced Segmentation and Flow Visualization features to determine the best way to reengage their audience and craft messaging for these segments. The digital analytics team used these tools to test the efficacy of sharing on social media as well as measuring what messages resonated with particular audiences. The result was continuous optimization in response to the content that proved most resonant with existing subscribers (Google Analytics, 2013).

Additionally, the digital analytics team continually tested the efficacy of their donation pages. By observing donor behavior and bounce rates, the campaign was able to reformat the donation pages, conduct A/B tests and raise their conversion rates by 49%. Additionally, by merely increasing the load speed of the donation pages by 60%, the team saw a 14% increase in donations. By simply monitoring user behavior on pages and noting where users dropped off in the funnel results, the team enabled the campaign to maximize supporter donations (Engage Research, 2013).

Binders Full of Women

The OFA campaign anticipated that a significant majority (64%) of viewers utilize the internet to fact check statements made during presidential and vice-presidential debates. Though the digital analytics team anticipated many of the potential searches, not all of them could be foreseen. Many quotable moments are created during the course of a broadcast, so the digital analytics team generated real-time reports in GA to a) identify new organic search terms, and b) create and place relevant ads in the search results for these terms. During the second presidential debate Governor Mitt Romney uttered this unfortunate statement:

“And I—and I went to my staff, and I said, ‘How come all the people for these jobs are—are all men.’ They said: ‘Well, these are the people that have the qualifications.’ And I said: ‘Well, gosh, can't we—can't we find some—some women that are also qualified?’ And—and so we—we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet. I went to a number of women's groups and said: ‘Can you help us find folks,’ and they brought us whole binders full of women,”

In response, the OFA campaign was able to create immediate targeted keyword advertising focusing on the President’s achievements in equal rights legislation running alongside the search results for “binders full of women” (Google Analytics, 2013).

Get Out the Vote

One of the most innovative uses of GA during the campaign was the Get Out the Vote effort as election day drew near. OFA used GA to allow the entire team to view the results of advertising and website data to empower rapid decision-making in the final days of the campaign. The team utilized the Google Analytics API and scripts to automate their reporting of marketing efforts in various channels, with a specific emphasis on geo-targeting accuracy. A very useful features of the OFA site in both the desktop and mobile versions was the polling place lookup feature. By customizing the GA reports, the digital analytics team could determine whether voters were being directed accurately, and specifically whether their location was in a high priority area for the campaign. If the lookup feature wasn’t performing as expected or desired, it could be adjusted on the fly for more precise results (Google Analytics, 2013). Additionally, the campaign spent millions on Get Out the Vote election ads on mobile devices, targeting down to a neighborhood level young, female, and Hispanic voters to ensure that the OFA campaign was maximizing voter turnout (Heine, 2012).

In Summary

Everyone knows how the story ends, but not the analytics that contributed to making that ending a reality. By engaging voters to be part of the solution through responsiveness and real-time optimization driven by advanced GA features, the OFA digital analytics team was able to better understand their consumer/voter and provide the appropriate opportunities and incentives to engage with the campaign brand.

References

Engage Research. (2013). Inside the Cave: An In-Depth Look at the Digital, Technology, and Analytics Operations of Obama for America. Alexandria, VA: Engage Research.

Google Analytics. (2013). Obama for America uses Google Analytics to democratize rapid, data-driven decision making. Mountain View, CA: Google Analytics.

Green, J. (2012, Nov 29). The Science Behind Those Obama Campaign Emails. Retrieved Dec 7, 2014, from Bloomberg Businessweek: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-29/the-science-behind-those-obama-campaign-e-mails

Heine, C. (2012, Dec 18). Here's One Advertiser Who Swears Mobile Ads Work: Obama. Retrieved Dec 7, 2014, from AdWeek: http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/heres-one-advertiser-who-swears-mobile-ads-work-obama-146044

Washington Post. (2012, Dec 7). 2012 Presidential Campaign Finance Explorer. Retrieved Dec 8, 2014, from Washington Post: Campaign 2012: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/campaign-finance/ 

Evil or Just Reckless? Google's Disregard for Personal Data Protections Still Proves to be a Cash Cow

Google is huge -- monopoly-level huge. The company’s original motto, “Don’t be evil,” has been a cornerstone of the company philosophy or years, built on the premise of using its immense power as the premier search engine of the internet for the purpose of good instead of evil. Users have long been charmed by the simple inviting logo (modified on holidays and significant dates with engaging google doodles), drooled over the google glass demos and self-driving cars, and we’ve all enjoyed a shared photo of an unfortunate moment (i.e. nudity and/or alcohol-related mishaps) captured by the global google mapping project Street View.

Regardless of how well-intentioned a corporate philosophy is, however, becoming a global worldwide multichannel conglomerate of all media services everywhere can inevitably lead to some conflicts of interest. It’s obvious that this has been top of mind in the public consciousness lately -- when current CEO Larry Page stated in early November that the company may need to move away from its original mission statement, (which, by the way is “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,”) the intertubes practically exploded with articles asking whether Google was now deciding to officially and publicly “be evil” (Newman, 2014)

This knee-jerk that spawned a thousand retractions demonstrates the anxious attitude that the tech community holds toward the information giant. Though Google’s motivations may originate from the simple desire to gather as much data as possible, the company has stepped over the line countless times, and either been sued or sanctioned in countries where the violation occurred. Examples of some of Google’s more egregious privacy violations follow.

The European Union and Google Search

In February of 2010, the European Commission launched an antitrust investigation into allegations that Google was using its dominant market position in Europe to manipulate search results. This is a particularly unfavorable situation for Google as, unlike their counterparts in the United States, antitrust regulators in Europe can impose penalties without first winning a court order. A company can appeal to a court but usually must comply in the interim (Kantner, 2012).

By May of 2012, the European Commission had determined that Google was in violation of Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), Article 102, with regard to the following four issues:

• Deceptive display results of its own vertical search services, such as Google shopping, YouTube and Google Maps versus that of its competitors
• Unauthorized content scraping of content from competing vertical search services and reuse
• De facto exclusivity in advertising agreements with partners
• Portability of ad campaign data from its AdWords platform to the platforms of competitors (fairsearch.org, 2012)

The antitrust chief for the European Union, Joaquin Alumnia, has attempted to negotiate a settlement between Google and the complainants (mainly EU content publishers), but four years since the launch of the original investigation the case is is being reopened due to an inability on both sides to reach resolution. Additionally, a separate antitrust case may now be added due to privacy violations stemming from Google’s Android mobile operating system and the implied monopoly created by the restricted ability to use only Google services on Android devices (Arthur, 2014).

US Antitrust Investigation into Google

Around the same time in the new world, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was launching a full-scale antitrust investigation into Google’s search dominance. Beginning in 2011, the FTC began examining Google’s practices based on claims that the company was selling adwords to illegal businesses.

In another claim, the FTC found that Google violated its own consumer privacy policies with the launch of Google Buzz, a microblogging and sharing site introduced as a competitor to Facebook and Twitter, incorporated into the Gmail platform. From its introduction, Buzz would allow public sharing of personal information from Gmail by default, and quickly gained criticism from users who preferred to not have the content of their email publicly exposed (Helft, 2010).

Additionally, in 2012, the FTC in combination with a number of State Attorneys General opened investigations based on the Google search engine bypassing user privacy settings when used within Apple’s Safari web browser, and eventually collected a $17M from Google for privacy violations (ftc.gov, 2012). Considering Google’s advertising revenues alone in 2012 topped $46B (Google.com, 2012), the Safari boondoggle likely paid for itself many times over.

Other Investigations

Investigations into Google’s practices exist worldwide – India, Brazil, Argentina and even South Korea currently have claims against the Information giant –– due to their anticompetitive stance regarding search results.

In January of this year, another privacy case was filed regarding a Google plan called Emerald Sea, which existed on Android phones in 2010 and would enable google apps to share information between one another and across platforms. As this was a clear violation of the individual privacy policies associated with each of the products at the time, Google chose to pull all public information related to Emerald Sea and in March of 2012 implemented a universal privacy policy covering all of Google’s products.

As innocuous as this might seem initially, Google’s eventual goal was to create a “Digital Dossier” of its users “exceeding even Facebook’s granularity of detail” in order to maximize ad revenues. Google can now associate your information from your gmail, your searches, your maps, your google+ profile, your blog, your phone and even your chromecast all in one place (Rosenblatt, 2014). Google probably knows exactly what you’d like to see, even if it’s not exactly what you asked for in your Google search.

Summary     

In Google’s defense, the company has long created new “embryonic” concept products and released them to the public through their Google Labs project, presuming that consumers are the best test subjects and can help modify the product into a valuable commodity. However, when you are the largest search engine company in the world whose profits are largely derived from targeted advertising to your loyal users, you can’t legitimately rely on a defense of ignorance to shield you from consumer rancor over continually committing the same offense.

For example, when the Google Street View cars started capturing every street in the world back in 2007, not only were the camera cars collecting photographs, but MAC addresses and Network SSIDs, as well as intercepting WiFi traffic (including passwords and email content) of unlocked networks in association with the location information -- a strict violation of several countries’ wiretap regulations (epic.org, 2010). By 2010, Google was forced to admit their wrongdoing; but according to their own blog it was still attributed to a “mistake in the code,” rather than intentional data collection (Eustace, 2010).
Google behaves like the internet is the wild west until they are caught by tradtional antitrust or privacy laws, then they pay a fine and modify their business practices; never failing to turn a profit with every piece of the business in the meantime. Google is constantly pushing their boundaries, both in their creative offerings and their legal obligations, but as long as they keep us entertained with new tools and features and upgrades, we as a society are too distracted by shiny objects to realize the company is warehousing every detail about us.

References

Arthur, C. (2014, Sep 08). European commission reopens Google antitrust investigation. Retrieved Nov 30, 2014, from The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/08/european-commission-reopens-google-antitrust-investigation-after-political-storm-over-proposed-settlement

epic.org. (2010, Jun 18). Investigations of Google Street View. Retrieved Nov 30, 2014, from Electronic Privacy Information Center: https://epic.org/privacy/streetview/

Eustace, A. (2010, May 10). WiFi data collection: an update. Retrieved Nov 2014, from Google Blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html

fairsearch.org. (2012). Global Scrutiny: Law Enforcement Agencies Around the World are Investigating Google. fairsearch.org.

ftc.gov. (2012, Aug 9). Google Will Pay $22.5 Million to Settle FTC Charges it Misrepresented Privacy Assurances to Users of Apple's Safari Internet Browser. Retrieved Nov 30, 2014, from Federal Trade Commission: http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2012/08/google-will-pay-225-million-settle-ftc-charges-it-misrepresented

Google.com. (2012). 2012 Google 10-K. San Jose: Google.

Helft, M. (2010, Feb 12). Critics Say Google Invades Privacy With New Service . Retrieved Nov 30, 20014, from NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/technology/internet/13google.html?_r=0

Kantner, J. (2012, Apr 24). Change of Tone Could Help Google in European Antitrust Case. Retrieved Nov 30, 2014, from NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/technology/change-of-tone-could-help-google-in-european-antitrust-case.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Newman, L. H. (2014, Nov 3). Google is Moving Away from Its Original Mission Statement. Retrieved Nov 30, 2014, from Slate: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/11/03/larry_page_says_that_google_needs_to_move_on_from_its_don_t_be_evil_mission.html

Rosenblatt, J. (2014, Jan 17). Google Accused in Suit Again of Violating Privacy Policy. Retrieved Nov 30, 2014, from Bloomberg: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-17/google-violated-privacy-policy-users-say-in-new-complaint-1-.html

Clicky and Google Analytics – Friends or bitter enemies?

After spending some time getting to know Google Analytics, I signed up for a free Clicky account. The clock is a full-featured analytics suite with a simple, easy-to-use dashboard interface. For the first 21 days, Clicky provides their premium plan for up to three sites as a free trial. After that, Clicky will downgrade to the free plan, which provides analytics without charge for one site with under 3000 daily page views (clicky.com, 2014). Until this little blog takes off, Clicky can provide an analogue to the Google Analytics interface that gives me some additional in-depth information about my visitors and what they are doing on my site – all at no charge.

Some of the most significant features of Clicky are as follows:

Real-time Data

One of the most frustrating things about Google Analytics is that the stats is the delay in seeing information from your site (usually 24 hours) The main distinguishing feature of Clicky from Google Analytics is its real-time data feature, data appears as it happens rather than with the one-day delay common with GA. The setup is straightforward – copy and paste a tracking code into the blogger template – and almost immediately the data begins to flow in.

The dashboard is far more intuitive than Google Analytics, as most of the common data used is shown right up front in modules and can be adjusted to display what the user considers most important. Rather than having to navigate the site for visitor information, keywords and links, it’s all presented in a graceful one-page summary, and can be clicked for a deeper analysis of the data

Additionally, there is an automatic comparison with data for the previous period. Red or green percentage numbers appear to the right of each widget, giving an instant assessment of any change in the data. This can alert the user immediately to what is of note in the data. (Hall, 2014)

With real-time information, campaigns can be closely monitored and popular content can be observed and promoted in a more responsive manner. When trends are observed on a website, the user can optimize content on-the-fly and promote it in additional ways based on content searches.

Detailed Visitor Information

From the dashboard, Clicky allows you to view information about how many people are on your site, where they come from, the searches they made to arrive there, their referral sites and their search path through your site’s content. Additionally, Clicky can tell you what your ranking in google on your keywords was when someone clicked through to your website. This is not a unique service, but it is nice to have it within the analytics package.

Bounce Rate

Clicky’s bounce rate differs from other packages in its measurement, which is very blog-friendly. If a visitor spends five minutes on one page, it should not legitimately be called a bounce, particularly if it’s a link from a referring site (i.e. a blog post shared on Facebook). For those measuring traffic on blogs, where someone may look at a single article and then go away, this makes sense.

The Bounce definition according to the Clicky website:

“A visitor who has only one pageview, and who is on your site for less than 30 seconds is what we now consider a bounce. So any visitor who has more than one pageview, or any visitor who has only one pageview but is on your site for at least 30 seconds, is now what we consider "engaged" / not a bounce.

“Since Clicky now sends pings, we can measure how long each visitor is actually online. This is a much more accurate representation of how many of these visitors actually "bounced" from your site, versus how many actually stayed online long enough to read what you had to say. Because of this, we think we now have the best bounce rate metric in the industry (clicky.com, 2014).”

On-site heat maps

One of Clicky's standout features is its heat-mapping capabilities, which shows users an overall view of what visitors are doing and whether the website traffic is where is should be. The heat-map shows where visitors are clicking on pages, and can be segmented by other data like target audiences to see if visitors are seeing what you want them to see. They can operate in real time, directly on the page being viewed (Angeles, 2014). It’s a convenience to not have to go outside the analytics package to engage a heat map service.

The Onsite Analytics Widget

Once you’ve signed up for Clicky they’ll give you a short code to add to your site and you’ll begin to see a button like this:

The icon is only visible to you when you’re logged in to Clicky -- no one else can see it but you won’t have to go to another website in order to see a bunch of your statistics. You can click from inside the site to show the heat map, select the date range, as well as a direct link to the Clicky dashboard.

Additional Features

In addition to these standouts, Clicky offers alerts for special events based on triggers like new visitors, goals, campaigns and referrals, it’s mobile-friendly, and offers analytics for external social sites such as YouTube and Twitter. Once again, these are not as robust of analytics as the sites themselves offer, but the amalgam of the data in one place is highly beneficial for an overview.

This tool is great because it allows you to see where people are arriving from in real time (unlike Google) so you can monitor any news stories or big new mentions that you’ve had around the web. It’s always nice to know what’s going on so you can go and interact, respond, etc.

In Summary

Clicky seems to be more well suited to smaller sites. With larger websites there is a lot more data to analyze for broader trends that would simply overwhelm the Clicky analytics. Its easy-to-use interface and well-labeled features, however, make it accessible right from the start, unlike Google Analytics. With it’s filters and reports and dashboards, and their subsequent menus and submenus it’s easy to get lost without feeling as though you are harnessing all of its potential.

Choosing Clicky as an addition to Google Analytics, (especially for a blog) is a fast way to learn about the potential for an analytics package and discover more about what you should observe on your site.

For a full rundown of how Clicky compares with google analytics, you can read a feature-by-feature comparison here: clicky.com/compare/google

Should a company adopt a single social media platform as its primary channel?

The answer to this question (as is to most complicated questions) is a definitive “maybe.” To pursue multiple social channels successfully requires dedicated attention to each channel, repeating your messages on multiple platforms at the very least, but ideally customizing them for the specific audience that has chosen to follow you on that particular platform. Additionally, many companies choose to use different social platforms and even different accounts across the same social platform for distinctly different business purposes. The analytics collected across these multiple platforms and accounts can have very significant results when interpreted within an appropriate audience context; however, if analyzed as a representation of the entire marketing effort they can lose all significance whatsoever. The importance of observing which channels reach which of your consumers cannot be understated. Therefore, when making the decision of which channel(s) to pursue, the first clarifying question to ask may be “which audience am I trying to reach?”

Know Your Audience(s)

Understanding which audiences you are targeting demographically, geographically, psychographically whether they are your B2B or B2C consumers, etc. through your traditional methods can help to clarify who you are targeting, prior to speaking to them on social media. For instance, if your company is an upscale toy brand whose value proposition is offering a child’s doll that resembles its owner (similar to the American Girl concept), the first key decision when engaging on social would be to decide whether your primary audience is your B2B customer (the toy retailer), your B2C customer (the toy purchaser, aka “grandparents”), or the end user of the doll, the child (IBISWorld, 2011). By determining how the overall marketing strategy addresses each of these segments, the marketer can then make a conscientious decision about how to create the social strategy. It may be judicious to create a seamless flow from the traditional to the digital marketing efforts; however, the conversational aspects of social could provide specific opportunities to speak to consumers and leverage the brand image in far more advantageous ways that traditional advertising (Novak, 2010). In the doll scenario, the marketer could choose to create a Facebook page or an Instagram account specifically the focused on reposting photos and stories about the dolls submitted by the purchasers and end-users.

Community, not just Content

By providing a community platform for like-minded users to engage with the brand accompanied by the enticement of having their kids’ photos selected for reposting, the company Is promoting an interactivity with the product that goes far beyond the initial purchase, and provides a word-of-mouth campaign for potential purchasers. Users sharing the happiness that the purchase has brought them and their child is far more effective than any traditional advertising can provide. However, the choice of  social platform is essential when deciding who you are speaking to, as well as discerning what that group would be interested in hearing from your company or brand.

An excellent example of choosing the appropriate platform as a medium for user-driven content is the marketing of the GoPro camera. By selecting YouTube as the main social channel, users can upload their creations with the product, hoping to be selected and promoted by the GoPro staff. The videos are stunning, infinitely sharable, and serve as the best sales tool for the product itself. Though GoPro has a large social presence beyond YouTube, maintaining presences on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram as well, it’s their YouTube page that ultimately drives the interactivity and consumer interest (Landau, 2014).

Leverage Available Resources

Another consideration for a company developing their social strategy is to assess the amount of dedicated resources available for a social effort.

If your company currently has adequate resources to pursue one audience on one channel, then that channel should be chosen wisely to reflect both the most important content to be communicated, as well as the broadest audience reach to make best use of the marketing spend. It’s possible to technically have a “presence” on several social media platforms, but if that content isn’t curated regularly it can do more harm than good, by making it appear that your company isn’t invested in the upkeep of its marketing efforts (Greenberhg, 2009).

Choosing one channel and curating it well not only sends a clearer marketing message, but It can also operate as a test balloon or initial investment for social efforts, to investigate whether there is an audience seeking more conversation from your company. Simply linking news stories from a corporate blog to a Facebook page, as well as posting additional relevant content from related sites including industry publications, can be a low-impact, low-investment way to test the value-add of social in your marketing mix.

Continually Evaluate Results

If your company is well beyond this entry level point, however, maintaining multiple platforms each with their own following, it may be worthwhile to occasionally reevaluate that strategy to ensure that the messaging is cohesive and serving a purpose greater than simply offering another way to theoretically “connect” with your brand. If a user connects to you, only to find an ill-maintained platform, it can do more harm than good. One way to approach this is to use an inbound marketing platform such as HubSpot, which will assist in blogwriting and dissemination to various social platforms, or a social media aggregator, such as HootSuite , which provides an overview of all the activity transpiring on every social channel, and allows scheduling and cross-pollination of social efforts.

Ensuring that each channel has an important role in the overall marketing effort is invaluable to running a successful social campaign. A small following on a channel that speaks to your most loyal brand devotees could be far more valuable that a large following on a platform with a broad audience, but the key is knowing your audience(s) and understanding what content on what platform speaks to them. Though what will draw your followers initially is the promise of content, what will keep them is the conversation that keeps them engaged as well as informed.

References

Greenberg, M. (2009, Oct 20). Content is King in Social Media. Retrieved Nov 10, 20104, from MultiChannel Merchant: http://multichannelmerchant.com/social-media/content-is-king-o…IBISWorld. (2011). Toy Doll and Game Manufacturing in the US. IBISWorld.Landau, J. (2014, July 22). GoPro's viral video marketing campaign turns it into top YouTube brand in the world . Retrieved Nov 10, 2014, from 2014Daily News: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/gopro-marketing-turns-top-youtube-brand-article-1.1875573Novak, C. (2010). Why Conversation not Content is King. Retrieved Nov 10, 2014, from Social Media Today: socialmediatoday.com