When You're Old

Social Media Marketing Might Not Be For You…Maybe.

2012-02-10T17:07:00.001+01:00

Social media is for everyone, right? With nearly 850 million people now on Facebook, it is pretty clear that online networking has something to offer anyone who has an Internet connection and a friend.

But that does not mean that social media marketing is for everyone.

For example, you can see a difference in the way that different people use Facebook. The site notes that the median number of friends on Facebook is just 100, but we all know people whose friend-count is several times that number, and even a few whose lists touch four figures. Some people are more sociable than others, more gregarious than others, better at keeping in touch with others — and more enthusiastic about doing so.

These are not judgments; they are personality traits. Some people like to surround themselves with large numbers of acquaintances while others prefer to keep a small group of close friends close.

As individuals, those differences are maybe interesting, but unimportant. When it comes to marketing, they matter.

Sales people have always needed to win the trust of prospects, understand what makes them tick, exhibit empathy, and spell out the particular sales points that are most likely to resonate with these prospects. They need to be good with people, a talent that can only be seen in interviews and in role-playing, in action and on the phone. It does not appear on a resumé — and on social media sites even large follower figures are not conclusive evidence.

Social media is a technological tool, and just as some people are better at maintaining their contact lists than others, so some people are bigger technophiles than others. Someone who has racked up a friend list on Facebook that is several hundred names long is not necessarily more sociable or a better marketer than someone with a smaller list. They could be more familiar with the technological requirements of building an interesting Facebook page, more likely to link to interesting YouTube videos or other online content — or have just left school where they befriended everyone in their final year.

To succeed at social media then, you do not have to be good at sales. You do not have to be good at socializing. You just have to know how to use social media.

Similarly, to succeed at social media marketing, you do have to understand how social media sites work. You have to know what kind of content your followers are most likely to want to read and to click (i.e. take action). You have to know how to build a Facebook page that is inviting and a Twitter background that is revealing. You have to know how to read your stats so that you can see which posts are most likely to be shared (i.e. most interesting) and which followers are most likely to share them.

But in addition to all those technical skills, you also have to be able to express your credibility side. Rule Number One in Social Media Marketing is BUILD CREDIBILITY. Think through how you can do that. Read all about how to do that. Then do it.

In short, to succeed at social media marketing, you have to be a success at sales and marketing. If that is you, the technical stuff should be the easy bit.

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Professional Social Media Takes Time - Choose Carefully

2012-02-03T15:42:00.001+01:00

You knew it was going to happen. You knew that just as you were getting to grips with Google+, becoming familiar with Facebook, and tackling Twitter, a brand new platform would come along and make you start all over again.

Or worse, it would not make you start all over again. It would make you wonder whether you should start at all.

That is the current position for social media marketers in relation to Pinterest. The site, which acts as a kind of public pinboard on which anyone can attach pictures and items, and share them with friends, launched in 2010 but has seen phenomenal growth over the last twelve months or so. In October 2011, it was valued at no less than $200 million.

It looks important. But does it look important enough for you to spend the time and energy building your own board, looking for effective strategies and trying to drum up business with it? Or would your time be better spent writing more Facebook updates and connecting with more people on Twitter?

Certainly, Pinterest’s rapid growth suggests that it cannot be ignored. In September 2011, it was said to receive around 1.68 million unique visitors. By December, that figure had reason to 7.21 million. The site is now believed to have overtaken Google+ (although it still lags behind Yahoo!) as the fifth most popular social networking or forum site driving referral traffic to other websites.

And yet, Pinterest’s demographic — like that of the somewhat geeky Google+ — is relatively limited. The site’s users are predominantly female. One estimate puts the population at about 58 percent women. And those users are largely looking to Pinterest for shopping. Some of the biggest corporate users of Pinterest are not JetBlue, known for its use of Twitter, or Coca Cola, which has an effective Facebook presence. It is retail stores like Nordstrom and West Elm. These are companies that pin pictures of models in beautiful clothes then see those images shared on hundreds of other pinboards.

If you are not in the retail business then, and your demographic is not the kind of people who are looking to buy clothes or improve their home furnishings, then maybe you can give the site a miss — at least for now. And even if you are in those businesses, you might want to give the site a miss too. The site might be driving traffic to particular kinds of stores and sites but there are no figures that suggest that that traffic is converting.

Social media marketers do have to keep their eyes open all the time for the growth of new platforms. They have to know when a new tool can deliver sales to their market better than a current tool. And they choose when the usefulness of that tool is clear enough to begin using it.

At the moment, anyone selling fashion, household items and lifestyle products should be looking at Pinterest, playing with it, and testing to see if it delivers convertible traffic. Sellers who are not in those fields should be checking the statistics on the site and waiting for signs that it might benefit them, too.

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Professional Social Media Use Will (and Should) Cost You

2012-01-27T13:26:00.001+01:00

The death of CoTweet should not have come as a surprise to anyone. The Twitter tool, whose users had included social media paragons JetBlue, was sold in 2010 to ExactTarget, an email marketing firm with revenues of over $100 million. After beginning as a free beta, it was one of the first Twitter tools to appeal to enterprise clients, charging a fee of $1,500 per month for access to functions that included multiple account management, click tracking and monitoring mentions.

ExactTarget will discontinue CoTweet on February 15th, replacing it with SocialEngage, a subscription-only service with a currently opaque pricing structure.

CoTweet’s death gives three warnings to people using social media tools for professional purposes.

First, you are going to have to pay. Although there is no shortage of other companies happy to pick up CoTweet’s disappointed users (Mashable offered a list of seven of them but plenty more popped up in the comments to let reader knows that they are around too), if those services cannot make money, then they are going to die as well.

Second, you are going to have to pay because other companies are willing to pay. ExactTarget is doing away with its free tool because it knows that firms see a value in the sort of functions that their tool provides. JetBlue is certainly big enough to pay $1,500 per month for its dozen-strong “Real Time Recovery Team,” the name it gives to its social media department, to have access to click-tracking, fast monitoring and scheduled tweets.

And third, you are going to have to use tools, even if companies are charging for them.

For now, Twitter only delivers the most basic of statistics and the barest of services. The company has always worked that way, preferring to let the community develop the tools for which it saw a need. That situation will not remain forever though. Some services, such as URL shorteners, have already been embedded into Twitter, killing demand for third party add-ons. Other developers, like Tweetie, TweetDeck and Summize to name just three, have already been bought, leaving rivals to pick over the remains. Twitter is now rolling out new business profiles which will give companies an opportunity to push themselves harder on the site.

But while analytics that track replies, retweets, and clicks, and which even return some demographic information about followers are currently only available to advertisers, there is a good chance that Twitter will also provide access to numbers for all users. There is likely to be a fee for some details, especially the kinds of figures that will help any social media marketer to tweak their strategies most effectively. But the ability to really target your messages and reach readers will make that fee worthwhile.

At the moment, it is just too easy to think of social media as a free ride. It is free to join and free to use. You can upload all the images you want and send as many messages as you want for nothing. But as the demise of free CoTweet shows, you cannot expect to get something for nothing forever, and if that something brings value to a business, you should be getting ready to pay for the value.

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What You Can Learn from Dell's Social Media Principles

2012-01-20T12:45:00.001+01:00

Dell takes social media seriously. It was one of the first big companies to announce that it had managed to make money from Twitter. (More than $6.5 million by the end of 2009, if what the firm told Mashable is true). It is active on platforms that include the Chinese Facebook clone Renren and the country's Twitter site Weibo, as well as Orkut, Flickr, and Slideshare in addition to the more expected Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. It interprets social media broadly to take in forums, blogs and even wikis.

And it encourages its employees to make use of those platforms to build communities and engage with customers.

That sounds like a recipe for disaster. Dell has more than 3,000 employees. Using them as an army of social media-based evangelists may look like a good idea, but it also leaves open the possibility that some of them will say things the company will wish they had not.

So Dell goes out of its way to make sure that its employees are using social media carefully. The company even runs its own Social Media and Communities University (SMaC U) where employees are taught how to tweet, post and comment.

More importantly, Dell issues five principles which it expects its employees to follow on social media, at risk of losing their jobs if they fail to abide by them.

The principles are all fairly sensible. They cover confidentiality to prevent corporate and customer information being made public; transparency and disclosure to ensure that readers know that the person writing works for Dell; the requirement to follow local laws and the company's code of conduct; responsibility, which includes not posting anything the employee would not send to his/her boss's inbox; and, most importantly, a requirement to “be nice, have fun and connect.”

It is that last point that is both the most crucial and the most surprising. Dell has 34 official Facebook pages, representing different divisions of the company and different regional markets. It has numerous Twitter timelines and an untold number of employees posting on the company's behalf. It understands that social media platforms can deliver real, valuable returns.

But while some of its social media accounts, such as its @delloutlets Twitter timeline, are devoted to pushing deals and winning sales, the company also knows that those returns will not come in if its social media users are not enjoying what they do. The company deliberately tells its employees to have conversations rather than push an agenda. It reminds them to connect as the best way to build Dell's brand.

That is something that is too easily forgotten when you are using social media professionally. Like any job, if you do not enjoy it, you will not be very good at it. Dell understands that that is especially true of social media: if you are not enjoying it, not only are you doing something wrong, you will not get the returns. You should be using social media to promote deals. But if you are not also chatting and connecting, you are not pushing the brand.

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How You Should NOT Serve Your Customers

2012-01-15T22:21:00.001+01:00

One of the earliest commercial success stories on Twitter came from Comcast. The company had a reputation for delivering poor customer service. Customers struggled to find agents to speak to and when they did manage to find someone, they often felt that the agent was not listening.

That changed when Frank Eliason, the company’s “Director of Digital Care” opened a Twitter timeline. Whenever anyone complained about Comcast, he shot back a reply asking if he could help.

For Comcast, it was a great thing. Customers began to feel that there was someone listening to them. They felt they could get help easily and Comcast began to rehabilitate its image as a company that could care less.

For other companies though, it has been something of a disaster.

Take a look at the timeline of Dunkin Donuts. Or of Target. Or of Macys. All of those companies have tried to copy Comcast – and come up short. Their timelines are filled with tweets offering email addresses or phone numbers to make a complaint. They read like long lists of apologies for poor service and shoddy products.

They are not bad companies. Dunkin Donuts recently opened its 10,000^th store. But if all you had to go on was the corporate timeline you would have to believe that these were firms that had no idea how to serve customers and had nothing good to give them.

That is not just wrong; it is a waste of an opportunity. A corporate timeline should be used to push deals, make product announcements, engage with influencers and drive sales. If it is dominated by apologies for the bad service of individual staff in far-off outlets, it is not fulfilling that role.

There are a couple of alternative approaches to using the main corporate timeline as a customer service outlet.

The first is just to ignore complaints made on social media.

That is Walmart’s approach. The official timeline lists special offers and links to media initiatives. Complaints about products or service are not answered anywhere. It is a risky approach. A serious complaint that is not addressed could quickly spread across networks. But most issues tend to be fairly minor and Walmart feels big enough to shrug them off.

The alternative approach though is to go back to Comcast. The company operates multiple timelines. Its @comcast account, is relatively inactive. Its @comcastvoices account talks about deals and promotions. And the @comcastcares account is dedicated to dealing with customer complaints and issues. That account is filled with apologies and offers to send technicians. But that is what you would expect to see on a dedicated customer service desk.

However a complaint is addressed, it is picked up and dealt with by @comcastcares, leaving the rest of the social media team free to build the customer base. It is a much smarter system than the one used by Target or Macys, which allows complaints to overwhelm social media promotions.

Usually, you want to make sure that you’re servicing your customers as much as you can. But social media is a public forum and you do not want everyone to see a long line of dissatisfied customers at the front door. There is a reason that retail stores put the complaints department at the back, and there is a reason that smart businesses on social media guide complainants away from their main page.

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Give Away Your Products on Social Media

2012-01-14T22:21:00.001+01:00

Take a look at the video above. Author Neil Gaiman is talking about copyright piracy, and describes the difficulty he had persuading his publisher to make one of his books available for free for a month online.

His reasoning was based entirely on numbers. After his books were pirated in Russia, a place in which he was little known, sales in the country of his next book jumped 300 percent. He compares piracy to book lending, an opportunity that allows readers to try new authors at little risk. They then buy those authors’ books in the future.

It is a controversial topic, and a complex one. Making a sample product available has long been an important part of marketing. Giving away the entire product not so much. It is possible that ebook piracy only works for some authors and only under certain conditions: people will buy when buying is easier than stealing; if Neil Gaiman’s next book had been easy to download, instead of a matter of playing with torrents, then perhaps his sales would have been lower. Other authors, and their publishers, are less happy to endorse piracy.

But Gaiman has more than 1.6 million followers on Twitter. He also writes a regular blog and answers questions on Tumblr. He gets social media and he understands the importance of community.

When he says that giving something valuable to a community brings dividends, he knows what he is talking about.

You can argue that that is also what social media is about. Every tweet you make, every status update you post, and every URL you like should be delivering valuable knowledge to a market that will want to know it, to use it, and to enjoy it. Corporate blogging, after all, is the free distribution of knowledge in the form of articles with the aim of attracting prospects and building a brand. (The SEO benefits came later.)

Those tweets and updates though are small and limited. They are snippets of information, especially when compared to an entire novel. But they do provide a channel through which you can share other, longer-form, pieces of information.

You can use Twitter to distribute your white papers, place a link on Facebook to tell people where they can download a guide to one of your products. Depending on the nature of your product, you might even be able to hand out free samples on Twitter: a free version of software, for example, or a few chapters of a manual.

Ask people to share and retweet what you are giving them, and you can create a viral effect. Your followers will tell their followers and they will pass your product around among themselves. In the process, they will be inviting their friends to try before they buy, giving you more customers for your next release.

It is not a completely new idea. Chris Anderson talked about the value of not charging in Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which he too gave away for a while. But social media has made giving value away much easier and much more powerful. Do not be afraid to use it to hand out your samples.

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Used to Think Marketing Was Simple and Now Think It Is Complicated?

2011-12-23T10:05:00.001+01:00

Social media marketing feels like a universal solution. Sales not strong enough? Create a Facebook page. Engagement not high enough? Write more tweets. Profile not big enough? Run a campaign that targets influencers.

Whatever your business…whatever you are selling, pull the levers in the social media machine and you should find more money rolling out the other end. Right? Well, ahem….

It Ain't Easy

Business is never that easy, and consumers do not all behave in the same way. Beyond, a digital marketing firm, has been working with a number of partners to examine different kinds of social consumers and how they buy. One notable conclusion is that how a customer researches a product — and what leads them to buy it — depends largely on the type of product they are purchasing.

Travel, for example, tends to be booked after looking through a search engine. For cars and electronics, customers are more likely to head straight for the brand’s website. Fashion items will be picked up through online ads. Baby products will be reached through Facebook, music through YouTube, and restaurants through FourSquare.

It is All Intuitive Stuff.

When you are making a big purchase of a complex item — like a car or a digital SLR — you want to know as much about it as possible. You want to use the site’s 360 degree animated images to look the item over as though you were sitting in it or holding it, and you want to examine all the features listed and understand exactly what the product can do.

Travel is a hugely competitive industry with deals that change all the time and provides a range of different ways of delivering the same result through different routes and an assortment of hotels and places to stay. The best way to get the latest and most up-to-date information is by checking search engines.

And when you are looking for something as simple but as important baby products, trust is the most important factor — and that is delivered from the friends and contacts on social media sites.

Who is Social Media Good For?

So does that mean only companies with products with mass appeal and which sell on safety and reliability need to use social media?

Certainly not. Customers do not just look for recommendations for baby products on Facebook. They also look for music on the site, as well as beauty products, fashion items and restaurants. They also review electronics on YouTube, as well as on Twitter, and search for kitchen appliances.

In short, the path from interest to purchase is never straight and includes stops at a number of different stations. A buyer might gather information about a new pushchair from the brand’s site, for example, before asking friends on Facebook whether anyone has used it and can recommend it.

For sellers, that makes understanding customer behavior vital. You need to know what your customers are doing when they reach social media sites, what information they are looking for, and — most importantly — what are the triggers that encourage them to make their final buying decision.

It Used to be Easy, But....

You want to make sure that your sales funnel, even as it crosses media from websites through YouTube to Twitter, delivers all the knowledge the lead needs to give you a sale. Is it possible to discover this path? One of the great characteristics of social media marketing is that it can be analyzed in detail...a great opportunity to spend marketing money judiciously.

I forgot to wish everyone a successful Christmas. Please!

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To Sell the Sizzling, Wendy’s Does Both Sneaky and Explicit on Twitter

2011-12-16T18:36:00.001+01:00

Say this three times: Will there be a repeat or a retreat on the retweet? No prize, however.

Much of the marketing done on Twitter is subtle and unseen. It takes place through regular tweets of interesting news, through retweets of other people’s contributions, and through comments addressed to followers. It’s a process of constant engagement which should keep a market close, informed and likely to buy from you — rather than a competitor — when the time comes to make a purchase.

Some uses of Twitter though are far from subtle. The sponsored placements in trending topics and at the top of timelines are meant to be unobtrusive but they’re always a bit pushy. They get eyeballs, might win clicks and may deliver sales but viewers know they are seeing advertising.

This year, Wendy’s, the fast food chain, took two approaches to marketing on Twitter: one subtle and the other bold.

The subtle campaign, which was run by ad agency the Kaplan Thaler Group, just came to an end. Using an account called @GirlBehindSix, the company ran a Twitter-based game show with prizes that began with $1,000 to six followers who retweeted the rules, then ran through mopeds, sleeping bags, turntables and host of other expensive goodies. The aim was to raise awareness of a new burger that would take sixth place on the chain’s menu.

Within about a month, the timeline had picked up 33,000 followers. In mid-November, it revealed its true identity and has since been trying to shift those followers over to Wendy’s timeline by promising more prizes over in that timeline.

I want you to keep reading, so I am inserting this picture of Wendy herself to keep you interested:

But I digress...

As that stealth campaign was coming to an end, Twitter announced that the chain had won the Golden Tweet Award for the most retweeted post. The tweet? “RT for a good cause. Each retweet sends 50¢ to help kids in foster care. #TreatItFwd”

That was a pretty blatant piece of advertising. It was essentially a bribe offered to Twitter’s community to spread the name of the company across the site. The original tweet was sent on June 15^th, and although Wendy’s has not said how many retweets it received, the campaign has been reported as raising $50,000 for charity which would translate into 100,000 posts.

So that is two different campaigns: one complex and subtle, the other simple and direct. Both had an impact and both worked… at least as far as winning followers and views are concerned.

The real question, of course, is whether those views translated into sales and whether those sales more than made up for the cost of the campaign. $50,000 is not a small sum but not all of those who saw it would have retweeted the post, making the cost per viewer a fraction of 50 cents each. If a typical customer spends $10 in Wendy’s then the company would need that campaign to produce 5,000 extra sales — 5 percent of the 100,000 people who retweeted or perhaps half a percent of all the people who saw Wendy’s name in other people’s timelines and didn’t retweet. That sounds feasible, and it doesn’t include the halo (and the tax deduction) that the company gains from donating money to charity.

The game show campaign may have cost a similar amount in prizes alone. Again, we don’t have figures that show whether it paid its way but not all of @GirlBehindSix’s followers have moved to Wendy’s timeline and some were no doubt put off by the campaign’s stealthy approach.

The campaign was clever and complex — as you would expect from an ad agency — but whether it was more effective than simply bribing Twitter followers with a charitable donation is questionable.

But, then again, I only eat their chili, so what do I know?

Posted via email from Digital Marketing Consultant

Can You Stumble Upon New Customers? Yes! or Maybe?

2011-12-09T11:12:00.001+01:00

StumbleUpon redesign gives the site a fresher, more visual look that is easier to navigate and simpler to use. The introduction of Channels provides a separate space where brands and companies can promote themselves, a less obviously commercial version of the site’s Paid Discovery service which some 60,000 products, publishers and other sellers have already used.

For marketers though, the question is whether they should be using it at all.

StumleUpon recently landed its 20 millionth member. Although that’s only a fraction of the 800 million or so people who regularly use Facebook if those 20 million people include your core buyers, then being active on the site might well be an important part of your social media strategy — or should be.

The site throws up some unique challenges though. It’s a social bookmarking service rather than a fully-fledged social media site. Think of Facebook with only the option to like (and un-like) a site, and those sites thrown up to visitors almost at random so that they “stumble upon” new publishers and firms with content and products that interest them.

It’s the “almost” that makes the difference. Click the Stumble button and StumbleUpon will offer a page based on interests, preferences and friends. The site tries to target pages to its readers, a system that allows for some influence. Recommend pages in the same field as your firm’s, follow other Stumblers and suggest more pages, and there’s a better chance that your own Web pages can win more views. That’s useful if your main goal on social media is to drive traffic to your website.

And that can happen. A recommendation on StumbleUpon can deliver a sudden spike in view numbers. Once that happens, the page can sometimes turn up again, delivering occasional spikes in popularity.

Digg — another social bookmarking site — has been known to deliver even bigger spikes but the site is also known for not delivering sales. Win a high ranking on Digg and the sudden burst of popularity can be enough to crash even mid-sized servers. Companies have found that very few of those new visitors bother to click through or buy.

It all comes down not to functionality but to demographics. StumbleUpon was long thought of as the “everyman” of social bookmarking sites, a place that was simple enough for anyone to use and where the Web pages offered covered a broad range of topics. (On Digg, you can expect to find lots of weird news stories, technology links and raving reviews of Ron Paul.) That title has probably now been taken by Facebook. But StumbleUpon’s users might be more geeky than many thought.

Analysis of StumbleUpon traffic to websites has revealed that the site’s readers are heavy Firefox users, with as many as 93 percent using the open source browser. One site came up with a profile of the typical StumbleUpon user as a 26-year-old, middle class, Firefox-using student with a big screen and a PC.

The question for marketers though is whether those students are likely to be buying our products. You can figure that out by tracking those visitors through Google Analytics to the purchase page.

If you are getting traffic from StumbleUpon — and that traffic is buying — you are going to need to learn more about StumbleUpon’s new design.

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The Death of Google+ is Greatly Exaggerated

2011-12-02T18:00:00.001+01:00

Google’s recent announcement that it is going to be retiring a bunch of its products has got people wondering. If the company is prepared to kill off Wave after less than two years — a tool that Techcrunch described as one of the most ambitious products it had ever seen — will the company one day pull the plug on Google+?

Those banging the drum for the social network’s demise point out that membership has flattened out. After racing to 40 million members in the months since its launch, activity on the site has remained relatively stable. People who use social media rushed to join and see what all the fuss was about, but it does not appear that mainstream users have been tempted by the promise of Circles to abandon Facebook for the Google competitor.

So give it another year or two and we should be waving goodbye to Google+.

But perhaps not! And whether we should celebrate its demise is questionable.

Sure, the thought of having to use yet another social network to market products is unlikely to make many sellers happy. And the idea that markets might be fragmented across different platforms is always going to mean more work for the same results. But Google+ did bring some valuable new tools to the social marketing field.

The ability to build Circles, Google+’s main advantage, is a powerful marketing device. It might have been created with the idea of allowing members to separate the posts they want their friends to see from the posts they want their relatives to read, but it also allows marketers to segment their lists.

That is hugely valuable.

Being able to ensure that particular posts are only read by the people most likely to respond to them will help to ensure maximum conversion rates.

How frequently firms are doing this is hard to say. Companies have not started releasing figures and it may be too early anyway to build enough data to draw conclusions about the strategy’s effectiveness. But while it should yield better conversions, it will mean significantly more effort: organizing the Circles; monitoring activities in each of those Circles; and creating different posts for each of those groups of buyers.

Should Google+ fail and the market stay concentrated solely on Facebook, it could save us all a lot of effort.

But it is unlikely to happen. Not just because Google has so much invested in Google+. And not just because the search company cannot easily do without its own social media platform at a time when Facebook pages are as important as website URLs.

It is unlikely to happen because Facebook has already started copying many of the biggest new features that Google+ brought to social media.

Subscriptions and lists might not be as user-friendly as Circles but they do the same thing: they allow users to read posts from people — and brands — they don’t know; and they allow marketers to send different messages to different groups of people.

And, one more thing: Google is not finished building Google+ and its social media marketing strategies. I think we should look for some positive surprises ahead. What do you think?

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So, I don't like Cadillacs, but then...

2011-11-24T12:18:00.001+01:00

General Motors might be struggling but when it comes to social media, at least, its Cadillac brand seems to know exactly what it is doing. Reach the marque’s Facebook page and the first thing you will see is a beautiful shot of the “All-New Cadillac XTS.”

That is tempting enough but what you will also see is a good example of the range of skills that any social media marketer now has to master.

The area above the fold, on the screen before you have to scroll, looks like a magazine ad. The car is properly photographed, and beneath it are a few lines of copy describing its features.

So we already know that behind this social media page lies the work of a professional photographer and the work of a professional copywriter. But that is not all. You can also see more images of the car, not just by clicking the Photos tab on the left of the page (as you would expect) but by pressing the dots on the image itself.

In addition to the photographer and the copywriter then, you can add a developer because someone has gone to the trouble of creating an app for the company’s Facebook page. And a film-maker because as you shift down the page, you will find a pair of videos that can be chosen by selecting a little screen-like widget.

That is just the landing page. Move across to take a look at the Cadillac ATS, and you get more of the same… with one interesting addition. At the top of the page is a big red banner urging viewers to “Click the Like button to unlock NEW photos of the ATS below.”

That is a cheeky bit of social media marketing. Cadillac relies on the like button to spread its message virally and withholds some of the most tempting goodies until visitors have paid by sharing with their friends.

It is all complicated stuff which is what you would expect from a firm with the kind of advertising budget that is more usually used to pay for national television ads.

But none of these things represent the meat of the Cadillac’s Facebook presence. That happens when you press the first menu item on the left of the page — and reach the Wall. Most of the posts here read like news items from the company’s PR department. One fairly typical post says:

Each of our past and present creations has inspired the chic design and performance of our latest model. Introducing the XTS, Cadillac’s all new luxury sedan

But even those posts are capable of almost a thousand likes and 175 comments each. Where the page really comes alive though — and where it start to build a meaningful connection with its readers — is when the company thanks its “dedicated community” for picking up half a million fans and rewards them with a new album of images.

What you can find on the Cadillac Facebook page then is more than a piece of corporate social media real estate. It is a combination of all the elements that any professional social media presence has to contain, from the professional images, copy and development of the landing page, through the blatant pitching for viral sharing, to the personal gratitude for the engagement.

Some of those skills will be familiar to anyone with hands-on experience of marketing. Others will be learned through management and outsourcing. But they all make a professional Facebook presence that builds a community and keeps it close.

So even I like what Cadillac did. I never thought that could happen.

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Sorry, but I was asking today, What is 4G? Or 3G? Or 1G?

2011-11-16T19:49:00.001+01:00

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Spelling Mistakes in a Business Website Cost Millions

2011-11-12T00:00:00.001+01:00

If you were to record a sales call, how do you think the transcript would read? It probably would not make a great script, would it? There would be lot of "ums" and "ahs," plenty of pauses and repetition, no shortage of topics that did not need to be there and a few things that you wish you would have mentioned but forgot.

It would not look like a record of efficient persuasion.

And that would be a successful call!

When you are talking with a client, mistakes in diction matter little. It is how conversation works. If a sentence does not come out right, we can immediately produce another that corrects it, and the person to whom we are talking forgets the mistake that came before. As long as the point gets across and persuades, the conversation has worked.

Online selling is much less forgiving.

According to a report by the BBC, a single spelling mistake on a page of Web copy can have the effect of halving conversion rates.

"If you project this across the whole of internet retail, then millions of pounds/dollars worth of business is probably being lost each week due to simple spelling mistakes," said Charles Duncombe, director of the Just Say Please group, a network of online retail stores.

There are a few lessons that can be drawn from that report:

The first is the importance of testing. Duncombe was able to claim that spelling errors halved conversions because he corrected an error and watched sales double. That might have been a anecdotal study and not particularly scientific, but it does suggest that a great deal can be learned by making changes and measuring the results.
The second is that while online sales copy matters, it is a tool that can only be used once. You get one shot at persuading a lead to buy. If a single mistake can kill that shot, then you need to make sure that you have enough traffic flowing through the site to make up the numbers.
The last lesson though is perhaps the most important: social media bridges the gap between the rigidity of a static sales page and the flexibility of a one-to-one chat with a lead.

When you use social media, you are still beating objections, promoting sales points and building a brand in written language. You still have to pay attention to typos, spelling mistakes and all of the little errors that can kill a page of sales copy.

But if you do make those mistakes you can correct them. Facebook comments are filled with clarifications and answers to questions posed by prospects unclear about a post. Deleting a tweet you wish you had not made is as simple as clicking… twice.

Using social media to communicate with a group of prospects is not as forgiving as a real chat. Mistakes remain visible if you do not remember to delete them but because social media users write like they talk, they do not have the same trust-destroying effect as an error in a page of sales copy.

When you are selling, you want to be as efficient as possible. But no one is ever 100 percent right all the time. You want to make sure that your static copy is reviewed and edited to eliminate errors, your sales calls are clear and persuasive — and your social media typing is chatty and conversational.

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Oh, and Nokia is still Innovating. Video shows what is coming.

2011-11-11T19:38:00.001+01:00

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Nokia/Microsoft Phone Video. You get a pretty good picture of the phone.

2011-11-11T19:23:00.001+01:00

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Simply Lean Back and Enjoy "On the Brink"

2011-11-04T19:20:00.001+01:00

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How Much is a Twitter Follower Worth? $0.08+

2011-11-04T16:46:00.001+01:00

Some of the best users of social media are the people traditionally thought of as the weakest at marketing. Authors have become experts at using Facebook, and in particular Twitter, to stay in touch with their readers and build their brands. Neil Gaiman, for example, the British author of American Gods, Coraline and the Sandman comic book series, skips Facebook but maintains a blog on Tumblr and an active Twitter account with more than 1.65 million followers.

He uses his stream to talk about books, to interact with his fans and also to promote the events in which he participates with his wife, performer Amanda Palmer.

It would be great if we could put a figure on the value that sort of activity can bring for a business.

Fortunately, we can.

Gaiman recently tweeted that he had been offered $12,500 from a fast food company to tweet a recommendation to their restaurants. That valued his followers at around 7.6 cents each. (He turned the offer down.)

Or rather this offer valued the Twitter contacts as an advertising resource at 7.6 cents each. According to research firm Nielsen, the typical short-term return on an advertising spend is nine cents for every dollar. That fast food company then was expecting Neil Gaiman’s 1.65 million followers to immediately spend at least $13,625 in their restaurants if Gaiman were to endorse them, valuing them at a little over 8 cents each.

Indirect Endorsements Are Lazy Advertising

But celebrity endorsements like these have limited effect. They are what ad man hero Don Draper dismissed in Mad Men once as “lazy advertising.” Neil Gaiman does not tweet about restaurants so the fast chain was hoping that his star power — and most importantly, the trust that his timeline has built with his followers — could translate into some cash.

Presumably if Neil Gaiman were to recommend a book, the result would be far more valuable. And if he were to start talking about one of his own books, a novel that he was about to release, it would be more valuable still.

That is where your business’s online presence kicks in. It is much harder for small or medium-sized business to pick up a following as large as a superstar author’s. And it is harder to build with corporate customers the same level of trust and personal closeness that Neil Gaiman has managed to build with his fans.

But all of that effort — the tweets and the images, the opinion-sharing and the responding — does have a real value.

It is something that is easily forgotten as you are doing all of the social media activity that you are supposed to do to build a business. There’s no immediate return from answering a tweet or posting your opinion about a new product accessory. There is no sudden rush to your website when you write a comment about a conference you’re attending or a colleague you just met with a great idea.

But all of that activity continues to build an asset. It deepens the relationship you have with your followers — and it adds a few numbers to the value of that relationship so that when you’re ready to cash in with a product announcement, you can save more than 8 cents from every follower.

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Twitter for Business? Is It a Waste of Time?

2011-10-28T12:15:00.001+02:00

A new report (shown above) by email marketing firm Constant Contact and researchers Chadwick Martin Bailey has thrown up a bunch of interesting statistics about Twitter and the relationship between brands and customers on the site. Many of those figures, taken from a survey of 1,491 US-based consumers aged over 18, are reason to put a smile on any marketer’s face.

In particular:

60% of people are more likely to recommend a brand to a friend after following it.
50% of people are more likely to buy from a brand after following it.
75% of people who follow brands have never un-followed one.

For businesses that already have long lists of Twitter followers, that’s great news. It means that those lists are rich with both evangelists and customers, and they’re stable — a valuable asset indeed.

But here’s what really stands out from the survey. When it came to the top five reasons that people chose to follow a brand on a site, the breakdown was:

64% — “I am a customer of the company”
61% — “To be the first to know information about the brand”
48% — “To receive discounts and promotions”
36% — “To gain access to exclusive content”
28% — “To receive content/information to re-tweet and share with others”

Just under half of brand followers then were looking for discounts while the top two reasons had nothing to do with anything as solid as saving money on their next purchase. Instead, the biggest factors driving people to follow a brand on Twitter — with all that says about the prospect’s willingness to provide recommendations, purchase and stay loyal — are a more amorphous sense of belonging.

People follow brands on Twitter because they associate themselves with the company and want to feel that they have a special relationship with it. It’s the same reason that Apple fanboys read sites like MacRumors and CultofMac, even though much of the information the sites contain is wrong and the accurate details filter into the mainstream press eventually anyway. They read because they’re already fanboys and keeping tabs on Apple’s rumors is what fanboys do.

Companies that don’t have Apple’s cult appeal will need to work a little harder. If people are following brand streams because they already feel a sense of loyalty, the hard work is being done before they reach the social media site. It’s being done through image, through the company’s story, through all of the branding techniques that marketers have used for years to build loyalty among customers.

It’s a valuable lesson to remember: social media sites like Twitter are invaluable tools for measuring brand loyalty, harnessing brand loyalty, generating referrals, sparking purchases and keeping customers loyal. But they’re not complete replacements for the traditional marketing methods that create that loyalty in the first place.

If we go back to the statistics above about the top five reasons that people chose to follow a brand on a site, I would suggest that the top two statistics are because of the following three. In other words, use Twitter to offer the discounts/special offers and then you will gain more of those who like to be fans.

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Definitely Creative Marketing, Bugs and all

2011-10-25T11:44:00.001+02:00

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What Triggers Buyer Behavior on Twitter?

2011-10-21T22:27:00.001+02:00

If the Internet had been built for marketers, converting your message to sales would have been straightforward. Leads would build up naturally in your contact lists and turning them into customers would take no more effort than posting a tweet with a link or writing an email with a limited-time offer. But it doesn’t work.

It is often said that the Internet was built for information and for entertainment. The commercial applications became clear later, and that means the marketing tools online are blunter, clumsier, and less reliable than the kind of scripts handed out to telemarketers or the training undergone by corporate reps. When it comes to marketing through Twitter, for example, response rates can be low and conversions even lower.

The reason is obvious: How can I trust a stranger?

The conversion rates vary depending on the relationship between the tweeter and the reader. According to one analysis, the highest response rates are from members of communities such as churches, clubs, and organizations who are four times more likely to click a link in a tweet than followers of a business or a consumer site.

Right or wrong: “I trust and know my social crowd.” Prospects following tweets posted by a business will click a link only 2.2% of “reach,” with “reach” defined as the number of a profile’s followers multiplied by the number of tweets posted.

Obviously, an action from a prospect on Twitter isn’t just about the content of the tweet. With just 140 characters — minus the characters for the link — there will be little you can do to persuade someone to click through. The click-through rate will mostly be dictated by the nature of the relationship with the prospect. (And the sales will also depend on the quality of the copy on the other side of the link.)

Think of a “tweet” as a reminder: “Hey, I am here.”

You can think of this as a microcosm of the entire sales process. A sale takes place when a prospect gains trust. Only when a salesperson assures the prospect that his money will deliver exactly what the prospect needs will the prospect make the purchase and walk away from the deal satisfied.

All the presenting of benefits, the overcoming of objections, the attempts to identify stumbling blocks and reassure the prospect that you will deliver a solution to those problems are intended to build that trust.

A link placed in a Twitter timeline can be one attempt to close the deal. But before the deal is closed, you first have to build that relationship of trust.

Social Media Marketing is a technique with the “weakness” that the relationship is built slowly. Twitter is a small part of it, the least important actually. Part of that is because of the way Twitter works. Tweets appear on a timeline and are pushed down the page quickly as new tweets pile in on top. If little more than 2.2% of your followers are clicking your links, it is partly because less than half have seen it.

Repeating your tweets is one option, but a better choice is to make your tweet so valuable that readers click through to read it exclusively.

When your prospects trust your information to that degree, you have a level of trust high enough to feel confident that they will be clicking your links included in the tweet, too.

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Monetizing Facebook for Your Business

2011-10-16T17:20:00.001+02:00

Every Business Can Leverage Facebook Marketing!

Facebook is currently THE most popular social media network online. Market-savvy brands are tapping into their Facebook audience to get instant feedback, find ideas on new product design and seek insights on how to market better. It is a great tool to build brand awareness within your target market. No matter what type of business you are in, you can use Facebook marketing to tap into your social network enhancing positive relationships for your business.

Building Your Facebook Presence
Some Tips for Getting Started

Remember, building and nurturing your network comes before monetisation. So here’s how to get started:

After you’ve made your Facebook fan page, take advantage of the various tools Facebook offers businesses to promote their pages.
You can add your brand logo, any company photos, and as much information and content as you possibly can to build credibility.
Facebook allows you to connect your Twitter profile, your blog, and your website so they are all linked. The activities and interactions you undertake on one network will automatically be posted on all of your other networks.
Facebook also allows you to embed widgets on your website pages so that visitors to your site have the option of connecting to your Facebook page.
To jump start your business page, begin by determining which users and other Facebook groups are the most influential and which ones you should begin interacting with.
Once you start communicating regularly with other users and groups, you'll be surprised to see how quickly the interactions on your business page increase.

Free White Paper: The Facebook Effect - 7 Ways to Monitize Facebook for Your Business.

How to Turn Loyal Fans Into Paying Customers!
Here Are Some More Tips for Monetising Facebook

Facebook's core value proposition is connecting and communicating with friends. While word-of-mouth, or "earned" media, helps brands gain Facebook fans, it can only go so far. Companies also need to contemplate using paid advertising to develop their Facebook fan-base.
Create engaging content. The simplicity of the "like" button means that there may be no actual engagement beyond the fleeting moment of the click. To be successful in this post-"like" phase of Facebook marketing, businesses need to excite their fan-base with compelling posts, interactions that spur a sense of community, and rewards for their ongoing support.
Give people a reason to become fans. Apps are a good way for any business to have engaging interactions with fans. Everyone wants the latest app, and you can place it for download on your page. The process of sharing will increase your business awareness and deliver good returns on your investment.

Use innovative apps to help monetise Facebook fan pages.For example, create apps that enable your business to post coupons for promotional discounts on your Facebook page. After clicking on the promotion, fans are prompted to provide their email addresses before receiving the coupon. Thus, you have not only increased the likelihood of a fan becoming a paying customer, but also gained a potential customer’s email address, which you can use for future marketing endeavours.

Incorporate e-commerce directly into your Facebook page.A Facebook storefront application will enable users to make purchases directly. You can also offer promotional deals to fans, but the storefront app offers the additional advantage of publishing a fan's purchase on the Facebook news feed. This further promotes the item to your fan’s friends who can then make comments about the item.

Attracting new customers to your brand is a great benefit of Facebook fan pages; but if you have not monetised your Facebook page, then you are missing out on an easy way to generate revenue!

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Email Marketing is Just Another Traditional Sales Funnel

2011-10-15T04:54:00.001+02:00

Sales and marketing executives are always looking for better ways to get leads from qualified prospects. Despite the complexities woven into Google Analytics’ new multi-channel sales funnels (see below), a way of tracking all the various origins of leads that come into a website, the dynamic remains the same as it’s always been: deals happen after a large audience is filtered into prospects, those prospects are sorted for leads, and those leads are converted into sales.

The Web delivers that audience, and the various platforms available on it provide companies with the tools to do the filtering, the sorting and even the converting too.

Each platform does that in a different way. A comprehensive online marketing strategy would make use of Facebook’s flexible engagement (see the link below), Twitter’s networking, and content marketing’s message-building to mine different parts of an audience and bring out the leads present in each group.

It’s a process that’s seen most clearly in email marketing.

A website might have thousands of visitors a day, most of whom will click through without leaving anything behind. A small fraction of those visitors though can be tempted to leave behind an email address in return for an offer of a free download or some other benefit. (For example, a platform such as TinyLetter now makes collecting those addresses simple enough for anyone to do.) Depending on the download they choose or the site on which they leave their email address, companies are able to create segmented lists that contain subscribers with a known interest in a particular kind of product.

That’s the first, filtering stage. It captures people who have a certain, though undefined, level of interest in a topic related to the product. The next stage, the process by which those prospects are converted into leads, can happen gradually as the company sends a regular stream of emails that don’t just offer deals, bargains and sales opportunities, but which contain enough usable content to build trust.

Users who are ready to convert will hit the Buy Now button contained in an email marketing letter; the remainder, who will be the majority, should be left with a deeper level of trust that increases the chances that they’ll buy in the future. Eventually, the prospects on the subscriber list should become leads when they click through to a sales page.

That process from audience to prospect to lead to, hopefully, customer is a dynamic that remains true in every sales mechanism, and it’s worth keeping in mind as you’re assessing the various platforms available online. Sites like Facebook might offer a bewildering array of different tools to keep users engaged and to draw in new visitors, from face tagging to video uploads, but they’re all ultimately geared towards pushing a mass that contains some potential buyers through the same funnel. Tagging images of customers in a store, for example, can help a company bring in more potential prospects by putting their name in front of that customer’s friends; announcing on the site that the company is making a limited-time offer will turn those prospects into leads.

It’s a process that should be familiar to any experience sales executive. As you’re wondering how to make best use of the Web, try asking yourself which tools match which parts of your sales funnel.

Free Whitepaper: The Facebook Effect - Seven Ways to Monetize Facebook for Your Business.

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Mobile Marketing Strategy Guide - Learn how your company can leverage mobile marketing. Part Two

2011-10-06T10:10:00.001+02:00

The Current State of Mobile Marketing

Recent statistics indicate that the use of smartphones and tablets is increasing at a rapid rate all over the world. As the mobile world continues to release updated versions of their technologies like the BlackBerry, iPhone or Android phones and tablet PCs like the iPad and BlackBerry Playbook, more and more people are harnessing the power of mobile. The reality is: we live in a fast-paced world where information travels at the speed of light and people are accessing this information on their handheld devices.

According to eMarketer, the amount of Internet traffic coming from mobile devices has increased over the past year. As of June 2011, 5.02% of all Internet traffic worldwide came from a mobile device, a considerable increase over the 2.03% of mobile web traffic received just 1 year prior. Mobile web browsing isn’t going to disappear. The concept of accessing information instantly and straight into the palm of your hands will continue to grow in popularity. And new technologies will continue emerging to accommodate this growing demand.

Therefore, it only makes sense that marketers are finding new opportunities to reach consumers. Worldwide mobile advertising revenues have increased from $1.6 billion to $3.3 billion between 2010 and 2011. Statistics indicate that by 2015, marketers will spend a whopping $20.6 billion on mobile advertising.

Why are marketers leveraging mobile marketing in their businesses? What are some of the benefits of mobile marketing? The pros and cons of mobile marketing will be discussed in the next section, but according to a recent study*, worldwide advertisers stated the following key reasons why they use mobile marketing:

78% said they use mobile because more consumers have access to smartphones
61% said they like the ability to target certain demographics based on devices
42% said they like the attractive ad formats

* Data is from the June 2011 Google and the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) report titled "Global Perspectives: The Smartphone User & The Mobile Marketer" conducted by Ipsos and TNS Infratest.

If other companies out there are using mobile marketing, it might be wise for yours to take a look at this new phenomenon and determine if it’s the right opportunity for you as well.

Tomorrow: Is Mobile Marketing Right for YOU?

If you would like a complete complementary copy of this strategy guide, send me a note.

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Mobile Marketing Strategy Guide - Learn how your company can leverage mobile marketing. Part One

2011-10-05T10:09:00.001+02:00

Introduction

Over the years, marketers have seen a considerable shift in focus in the online realm as the digital world continues to evolve. In the early 90s, the hype was on having a website; everyone wanted be part of the dot-com blitz. Though having an online presence was important, the concept of pay-per-click, search engine optimization and other forms of traditional Internet marketing became critical components to the success of any website.

Not long after traditional Internet marketing reached its peak in popularity, the explosion of social media transformed the face of Internet marketing. With social networking and social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube taking the world by storm, the practice of social media marketing took precedence.

To no one’s surprise, the world of digital media is shifting again. Now the next big contender is mobile marketing. Often times, the term “mobile marketing” is linked to the idea of sending advertising messages to people’s mobile phones. A few years ago, this might have been the case. But mobile marketing encompasses several techniques; it’s more than just text message marketing. Mobile marketing involves services like mobile websites, social location marketing, SMS and MMS marketing and mobile apps – just to name a few. Think of mobile marketing as the umbrella under which these other mobile services lie, all of which have the potential to help companies bring in new customers and create brand loyalty. (We will elaborate further on these terms throughout this guide.)

In staying at the forefront of the digital space, WSI has created a complete guide for companies like yours to stay educated, learn about the various mobile marketing opportunities out there, choose the opportunities that are right for you, develop a strategy in line with your overall marketing goals and measure the success of each campaign. If your company is interested in learning about the mobile marketing space and ready to embark on leveraging some of the opportunities available, picking up this guide is a step in the right direction.

Tomorrow: The Current State of Moble Marketing

If you would like a complete complementary copy of this strategy guide, send me a note.

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Tools to Make Your Website Work on Mobile Platforms

2011-06-15T12:00:00.001+02:00

One thing that I have not mentioned and which may make you decide that you need to go forward with creating a mobile site is the iPad. Remember that it, too, uses a difference rendering.

Having said that, here is a list of great tools to use to validate whether your site old or new renders well on mobile devices:

www.ipadpeek.com – See how your site looks on an iPad. Because flash works on this site, your need to disable the flash plug-in to be fully accurate.

www.iphonetester.com – See how your site looks on an iPhone.

www.iphoney.,com – same as above

http://validator.w3.org/mobile - Shows how mobile-friendly your site is and checks against W3C compliance.

http://www.google.com/gwt/n - Makes the page mobile-web-friendly by rimming the content down to its bare essentials.

http://www.gomez.com/mobile-rediness-instant-test - This mobile readiness test gives you a score between one and five based on an analysis of over thirty proven mobile web development techniques.

I hope you have enjoyed this series. Please let me know if I can help more and let me know if you want more.

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7 Things you Need to Know to Make Your Mobile Phone Platform Work

2011-06-14T12:00:00.001+02:00

Yesterday, you will remember that your need to construct a mobile phone website differently than a full-fledged website for a desktop computer. But the rules are still valid that, if you don’t optimize your mobile website, you have wasted your money.

Here are seven things you need to know:

Because each smart-phone renders websites differently, you can check to see how your will show by using validators (to be listed later)
Follow the “traditional” on-site SEO Best Practices, such as,
- Major keywords in the title tags
- H1 and body text
- Rich keyword Meta Titles and Descriptions
- Keyword-rich anchor text for internal links
Have a dedicated link building campaign for the mobile site.
Mobile search results tend to reflect “local search results.” Your site must be optimized for local type searches.
Submit your business information to local directories making sure your site is verified and included in site like Google’s Local Business Center.
Get the mobile site spidered and indexed by submitting to major search engines: Google Sitemaps and Yahoo! Submit Your Mobile Site
Standard domain names and URLs (m.site.com, mobile.site.com, site.mobi, www.site.com/mobile) should all point to your mobile site. If you can afford only one of these domains, use m.site.com

Tomorrow I will show you some tools you can use to help your site work.

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12 Things You Must Know to Make a Smart-Phone Friendly Website

2011-06-13T17:51:00.001+02:00

Okay, here we go. Here are the basic things you have to know to create a mobile-friendly website.

Auto-Detect mobile Phones - Mobile-friendly websites automatically detect that users are on a mobile device and then display the appropriate version of the site.
Clear Calls to Action – The most important features of the site should be at the top of the page and should include clear calls to action.
Avoid Mobile-Unfriendly elements – The design should avoid mobile-unfriendly elements such as flash, large images, video, and complex layouts.
Fluidity – Design with a fluid layout that will gracefully adapt to a range of typical mobile screen resolutions.
Touch Interface – Touch screens don’t have hover states. It is all about fingers tapping, so don’t build a site that requires users to move their mouse over menus or other elements. Also, make sure links and other clickable elements are big enough to tap with a fingertip.
Scrolling – Limit scrolling to one direction. The site should only scroll vertically. Having to manage a page that scrolls horizontally and vertically is difficult to navigate.
One Window – Avoid pop-ups and new windows. A user’s entire experience should take place in a single window.
Simple Navigation – Simplify your navigation. Typically, a site’s traditional navigation is too complex for a mobile site.
Clean Code – Most desktop webs browsers allow a lot of leeway when rendering HTML and will usually display a site correctly, even if the code has flaws. Mobile browsers usually have less room for error, so there is an added value to having clean, simple code.
Use Alt Tags – Sometimes images won’t load, either because of issues with the mobile browser or because a user’s connection is too slow. Always include descriptive alt tags for images, in case they don’t load.
Label Forms – Some modern websites embed form labels inside the form field. On mobile, it is much more difficult to keep track of the fields, and users often make use of “next/previous” buttons built into the keyboard. Without clear labels alongside the form fields, ti might be impossible to know what information is supposed to be in which field.
Escape Hatch – Sometimes users just need to use your normal site. If possible, always have a link back to the original, full site and from your desktop site to your mobile site.

Number 13 – None of this will work unless you optimize the site correctly. See tomorrow.

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How do you make your website information mobile phone friendly?

2011-06-12T13:00:00.001+02:00

Before we cover how to make your website information mobile phone friendly, you need to decide if you want to spend the time and money to create such informational platforms. Here is a check list to ask yourself:

If your budget allows for a mobile site, build one; your prospects and clients will do better with it.
Use site analytics to determine how much your site is accessed from mobile devices now and this will help to decide whither it's worth building a mobile site and which platform to prioritize.
Build a mobile site if people do small, quick transactions on your site under time pressure.
Build a mobile site if people use your stie to communicate with each other.
Build a mobile site if people come to your site to kill time and browse.
DO NOT build a mobile site if your full website has a shallow information structure and limited functionality (1 to 4 possible tasks).

One basic thing you must understand. Each smartphone has its own way of showing information. So if you decide to have a mobile marketing site constructed, you need to do your homework on point two above to determine which phones are used most to access your main site today.

Tomorrow I will begin listing the attributes that a mobile website must have to be successful.

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How Can Mobile Marketing Influence Your Business?

2011-06-09T14:00:00.001+02:00

How mobile marketing can influence your business, depends on which business you are running. We have mentioned previously that one of the biggest activities on the mobile phone is seeking Information. This includes

finding business hours,
finding store locations,
getting directions,
checking news,
sport information,
movie times.

So how does your business relate to these needs? Do you need prospective customers to find you when you are open? This means you are a retail business, at least. It could be you need prospects to find you for others reasons, like deliveries, pickups, appointments. You might also just want to out-compete someone else.

But maybe you have understood something no one else has discovered. As JK Rowling (author who had to struggle to get anyone to publish her first “Harry Potter” book) said, “The market doesn’t know what it wants until it sees it.”

Yes, there is less competition AND having fewer subjects to filter in mobile may mean you will get a higher Click-Through-Rate in mobile search. But you need to do it right on mobile, meaning that, if you don’t, the user will have all the problems mentioned earlier:

The Small Screen will make it necessary to scroll with awkward input on a poorly designed website which might take much too long time to download.

If you design your message correctly, you will make the user happier and more likely to deal with you.

How do you make your website information mobile phone friendly? That is next.

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Third Message about Why Your Business Needs to know about Mobile Phone Marketing

2011-06-08T12:47:00.001+02:00

A Few Additional Stats You Will Want to Know about Mobile Marketing

Google’s research says…

One in seven searches on Google are performed on a mobile device.
59% of smart-phone users report using the mobile Internet while waiting in line.
48% of smart-phone users report using the mobile Internet while eating.
44% of smart-phone users report using the mobile Internet while shopping

Additionally, you need to realize according to Google…

Local results are more likely in mobile search.

Image search optimization and video SEO often have a low priority in enterprise SEO, but will play a crucial role in Mobile search.

So how does this influence your business mobile marketing? We will get into more detail tomorrow.

But what is important to stress is that low competition in Mobile marketing means big opportunities for your business.

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Continuation of Why Your Business Needs to know about Mobile Phone Marketing

2011-06-07T12:29:00.001+02:00

Yesterday I listed why the Mobile fast growing media platform is interesting in general.

Next, let’s look at the problems mobile phone users face.

Essentially, there are four problems:

Small Screens
Awkward input
Download delays
Poorly designed sites

What are the main Internet activities of mobile phone users?

1. Communication – This includes email, social network sites, forums, using a camera application to send a picture to a friend.

2. Seeking Information – This includes finding business hours, stores, locations, directions, checking news, sport information, movie times.

3. Data handling – This includes uploading a picture, and installing an application.

4. Entertainment – Usually this means watching a video.

5. Transactions – This means shopping and banking.

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Why Your Business Needs to Understand Marketing to Mobile Phones

2011-06-06T13:00:00.001+02:00

I am going to write a series about marketing to Mobile Phones. Why? I will cover that question first. But I will also get the how and the problems involved. It is not so easy as setting up a website and optimizing it for Google. But at present, before the gold rush starts, you have an opportunity to create of powerful marketing.

First some stats you need to know

Ninety percent of mobile users in the US and Western Europe have a web-enable phone.
Mobile web use is growing faster than application use.
The current industries seeing the most growth in mobile searches are business, entertainment, and travel (30% in the restaurant category).
Mobile searchers tend to use the same search engine on their mobile device as they use on their PC.

More tomorrow. Don't miss it.

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How Facebook Can Put Google Out of Business

2011-06-04T19:33:00.001+02:00

From Techcrunch, June 3, 2011

Editor’s note: Guest author Ben Elowitz (@elowitz) is co-founder and CEO of Wetpaint, an online publisher with an audience of 10 million monthly uniques, and author of the Digital Quarters blog. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile, the online retailer of luxury goods. He is an angel investor in media and e-commerce companies.

I was surprised to hear former Google CEO Eric Schmidt publicly lament lost opportunities and missed chances to catch Facebook the other day.

I used to envy Google and the vast digital empire that Schmidt commanded. Google had one of the most intricate monopolies of all time. It had the most impressive dataset the world had ever seen; the most sophisticated algorithm to make sense of it; an audience of a billion users expressing their interest; and more than a million advertisers bidding furiously to reach those consumers at just the right moment.

What’s more, it had captured the ultimate prize: increasing returns to scale. Only Google could spread such huge R&D costs among an even more humongous query volume, all while offering advertisers the chance to reach most of the population with one buy. Google had earned its success.

It competed on being smarter.

It was.

And it won.

Google’s business strength was simply taken for granted; so much so that even deep-pocketed competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft stopped trying to outdo Google’s massive scale and core algorithmic know-how.

And that’s why I used to think that Google was unstoppable.

Until I realized one very important thing: despite the fact that Google goes to great lengths to keep its index fresh by indexing pages that often change every hour, or even every few minutes, and despite its efforts at realtime search (including searching the Twitter firehose), its dominant dataset is dead, while the Web is—each day more so than the last—vibrantly and energetically alive.

Indeed, Google’s revered and unparalleled dataset is increasingly dating itself as an ossified relic akin to the Dead Sea Scrolls—outshined by the freshness of the living, breathing organism that is the social Web.

Like dusty and determined archaeologists, Google’s massive bots crawl the Web looking for the artifacts of digital civilization. And what they find is fossils—in the form of pages and links: the leave-behinds of writers, contributors, and casual end-users who have deposited traces of themselves in the skinny crevices and dark recesses of the Internet. Google analyzes these remains, and yet it has almost no first-hand knowledge of any of the users who created this content—or those who are searching for it.

Enter Facebook.

Since its founding in 2004, Facebook has focused on enabling social connections, not on search. And yet, in the process, Facebook has created a platform that knows more than 600 million people, complete with identity, interests, and activities online. The company’s relentless and organic expansion—from an application to an emergent social operating system—has enabled it to know its users, not only on the Facebook.com domain, but also on other sites, as they travel throughout the Internet.

While Google has amassed an incredible database consisting of the fossilized linkages between most Web pages on the planet, Facebook possesses an asset that’s far more valuable—the realtime linkages between real people and the Web.

What does this mean, and what are the implications here?

Well, in a nutshell, Facebook has stored a treasure trove of distinctive data that, if fully utilized, could put Google out of business.

Yes, put Google out of business.

Here’s why.

Facebook’s data allows it to do more than just guess what its customers might be interested in; the company’s data can help it know with greater certainty what its customers are really interested in. And this key difference could potentially give Facebook a tremendous advantage in search when it eventually decides to move in that direction.

If Google’s business has been built on choosing which Web pages, out of all those in the universe, are most likely to appeal to any given (but anonymous) query string, think about this: Facebook already knows, for the most part, which pages appeal to whom—specifically and directly.

And, even more powerfully, Facebook knows each of our individual and collective behavior patterns well enough to predict what we’ll like even without us expressing our intent.

Think of it: Facebook can apply science that is analogous to what Amazon uses to massively increase purchase likelihood by suggesting and responding to every minute interactive cue. Whereas Amazon relies on aggregate behavior, Facebook adds in the intimate patterns of each individual—along with their friends and the behavioral peers they’ve never met all around the world. And each of them is logged in and identified as a real person.

When Google was born, its advantage stemmed from its ability to collect and analyze superior data. While other publishers looked myopically at each page on the Web as a standalone realm, Google found that the link relationships between those pages held more valuable relevance data than the pages themselves. All of a sudden, the isolated views of players like AltaVista and Yahoo began to look one-dimensional. And ownership of what is now the $20-billion-plus search advertising market was cemented.

In the last several weeks, Google has indicated how important Facebook-like social networks are to its still-vast ambitions. One proof point is the launch of the new +1 product; another is the company’s internal announcement that bonuses will be tied to success on the social Web.

It may seem that this is about capturing a new market opportunity. But, trust me, it’s not. In reality, it’s Google’s recognition that Facebook has the same kind of advantage over Google that Google is used to having over its competitors.

And Google is smart to be scared.

Very smart.

But, if the truth be told, it will take far more than +1 to measure up to the whole new human dimension of the Internet. After all, the human organism is home territory for Facebook and utterly foreign turf for Google’s algorithmic machine.

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Facebook Strategies for Businesses: Learning How To Monetize The Fastest Growing Social Site (10)

2011-06-03T13:00:00.001+02:00

Mobile Phone Use with Facebook

How is Facebook being used on smartphones?

There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products.

Conclusion

The reality is Facebook is not a phase and is here to stay. Businesses need to determine how they can monetize this network if they wish to compete and stay in front of their customers.

Facebook can no longer be seen as the site where college students go to socialize about the latest fashion or party – as statistics show the fastest growing demographics two years ago was those 35 years and older, and today it is woman over 55 (InsiderFacebook.com). In fact, 45% of Facebook’s US audience is now 26 years and older! Businesses need to consider sites like Facebook as part of their marketing mix; otherwise the risks of not being present can actually open the door for competitive or negative brand exposure.

So if you have not already, it’s about time to give your online marketing strategy a facelift by joining Facebook!

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Extremely Advanced Augmented Reality. Just for your edification

2011-06-02T19:18:00.001+02:00

Don't bother with the sound unless you understand Japanese. But here is very advanced Augmented Reality.

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Facebook Strategies for Businesses: Learning How To Monetize The Fastest Growing Social Site (9)

2011-06-02T13:00:00.001+02:00

A Few Tips about Facebook and Business

How do you get your branded name on Facebook?

It is important that you build your Facebook Fan Page with your branded name as www.facebook.com/yourcompany. Once your fan page has over 25 fans and you then can reserve a vanity URL for your business.

How do you maximize your video optimization on Facebook?

First, name the video file with your keyword phrase. This is the method to indicate to the search engines what your video is about. When you upload the video, Facebook will allow you to provide a title and Description of the video. Make sure that both these fields have your keyword phrase.

How do you maximize your ads on Facebook?

Remember that Facebook is push marketing, more traditional, and different from Google Adwords in which people are actually searching for your products or services. However, the ability to narrow down your exact audience provides an opportunity for your to connect to the right people.

Keep in mind...

Visit www.facebook.com/business to get started and to determine if there is a target audience on Facebook for your product or service based on the demographics of your prospects.
Visit http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=861 to learn more about writing optimal ads, character limits, image size and resolutions, and terms and conditions.
Always tag your ads using parameters in the destination URL, so that you can determine through your analytics which ad copy or image is driving the best results.

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Facebook Strategies for Businesses: Learning How To Monetize The Fastest Growing Social Site (8)

2011-06-01T13:04:00.001+02:00

A Few Tips on Using Facebook

How do you get your branded name on Facebook?

How do you maximize your video optimization on Facebook?

How do you maximize your ads on Facebook?

Keep in mind...

Visit www.facebook.com/business to get started and to determine if there is a target audience on Facebook for your product or service based on the demographics of your prospects.
Visit http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=861 to learn more about writing optimal ads, character limits, image size and resolutions, and terms and conditions.
Always tag your ads using parameters in the destination URL, so that you can determine through your analytics which ad copy or image is driving the best results.

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Facebook Strategies for Businesses: Learning How To Monetize The Fastest Growing Social Site (7)

2011-05-31T13:00:00.001+02:00

Get The Word Out!

Now that you have your Facebook Page, how can you let people know about it? Here are some different ways to promote your Facebook Page to your customers and start the interaction.

Send out an email blast to your list letting them know your organization is now on Facebook
Place a logo on your website that lets your current visitors know that they can follow you on Facebook
Run a contest or promotion as an incentive to get people to join
Run a Facebook Ad Campaign targeting your demographics and invite them to join your fan page. Again incentives are great here!

Facebook Events

Another way of leveraging Facebook for business purposes is by posting your events directly on Facebook. Let’s say for instance that you are running an event and you have posted it on your website for people to register. The goal would be to have users complete the form and register for the event, and after doing so, they might receive an auto responder thanking them for reserving their seat.

Take the same scenario and imagine if you had used Facebook to post your event. Remember Facebook was designed to allow information to be passed through easily amongst friends. So this means if a user decides to attend the event on Facebook, a notification will be posted on their wall (page) letting their entire network know they are attending.

So in scenario #1 where you post the event on your website the user gets an email. In scenario #2 the users confirms their attendance but at the same time their entire network now can see this – which might persuade them to attend as well.

From an admin standpoint, the Facebook Events feature allows you to send a direct message to all the guests you had invited, including those who have confirmed their attendance, declined or have not yet decided/responded.

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Facebook Strategies for Businesses: Learning How To Monetize The Fastest Growing Social Site (6)

2011-05-30T13:00:00.001+02:00

Facebook Pages

A Facebook Page will allow you to build a business page for your organization, in which you can promote your products and services, connect with your customers and build your brand. One of the main reasons businesses are afraid to build a page on Facebook is because they do not want to mix their personal lives with their business network.

So for example, pictures of me at a New Year’s party holding 3 beers in my hand might not sit too well or best represent my organization to my business contacts. However, there is a way to completely separate your business page with your personal account. You do need to have a personal account in order to first develop the page, but the privacy setting will then allow you to have control of what information you want users to see and separate your personal and business account.

Once your Facebook Page is created, you can then start to populate it with pictures, images, information, videos that reflect your brand. If you are already on other social networks such as Twitter, YouTube or blogs, there are methods in which you can customize your Facebook Fan Page to automatically pull information from those mediums into the Facebook Page.

Below is a sample of how a blog post is configured to go directly into a Facebook Page.

Not only does configuring your social sites (website, blog, articles, press releases, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) to work with each other save time, it will allow you to get your information out to your valued subscribers no matter which network they are engaged on. Also from a search engine perspective, the more your content gets syndicated, the higher the probability of it appearing directly in the search engine results page.

The image below is from the Budweiser Canada Facebook Page, which shows you can really customize the look and feel of your Facebook Page to reflect your website, landing page, email template or offer.

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Facebook Strategies for Businesses: Learning How To Monetize The Fastest Growing Social Site (5)

2011-05-28T13:00:00.001+02:00

How Can Businesses Promote Themselves On Facebook?

The number one reason why businesses do not adopt a social media strategy is lack of knowledge, according to a survey conducted by MarketingSherpa to small and medium sized businesses in 2009. This is why when it comes to sites like Facebook most businesses do not know where to begin. Depending on the goal of your campaign, below are some of the different strategies on how organizations can make Facebook work for them.

Facebook Advertising

Facebook Ads allow businesses to reach their exact audience and connect with real customers to your business. For instance, if a business were to run an advertisement campaign on a search engine such as Google, they basically can target their audience by telling Google the following:

• If someone searches for this specific phrase (exact, broad, phrase)

• If someone searches for it in this region, radius

However, what if you wanted to narrow your exact audience even further and target those people who are male or female? Married? Divorced? Over a certain age? This is where social networking sites like Facebook shine as they are able to provide marketers the ability to target these demographics whereas search engines such as Google do not have the data of who is actually conducting the search. As an example, if your target reach is men living in the United States that are married and over the age of 50, there are currently 2,260,940 users on Facebook that fit this demographic.

CM Photographic, a full service photography studio providing engagement, family, children and pet portraits leveraged Facebook Ads, which allowed them to target their exact demographic — 24-30 year old women whose relationship status on Facebook indicated that they were engaged. Over 12 months, CM Photographics generated nearly $40,000 in revenue directly from a $600 advertising investment on Facebook.

Of the Facebook users who were directed to CM Photographics' website from the ads, 60% became qualified leads and actively expressed interest for more information.

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Facebook Strategies for Businesses: Learning How To Monetize The Fastest Growing Social Site (4)

2011-05-27T13:00:00.001+02:00

For Optimization Purposes

If Search Engine Optimization (being found on page one for your key phrases) is important to your business, then there is a way to leverage Facebook as well. Apart from having your personal brand name listed on page one of Google using Facebook as previously outlined, you can use the video section inside Facebook to build exposure the same way.

Facebook video is not as popular as YouTube video, but statistics show there are about 260,000 videos uploaded to Facebook each day (Techcrunch). Chuck Bankoff, a WSI Consultant located in Los Angeles, had optimized a video about his services and syndicated the video to various channels such as YouTube, AOL Video, Google Video, Daily Motion and also Facebook.

The video was being optimized for the term Digital Marketing Strategy Los Angeles – a long term phrase but he wanted to see the power of video optimization. In 24 hours, his video was on page one of Google; however, because the root word Digital Marketing Strategy is competitive (26,900,000 competing sites), all the videos were pushed down to page two or three of Google with the exception of the video that he had uploaded to Facebook. The video on Facebook is ranking #1 in Google for the term Digital Marketing Strategy Los Angeles and #2 for the term Marketing Strategy Los Angeles.

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Facebook Strategies for Businesses: Learning How To Monetize The Fastest Growing Social Site (3)

2011-05-26T13:00:00.001+02:00

Connecting With Your Customers

Since we know the average user on Facebook spends more than 55 minutes on the site per day, businesses really have no option but to use this medium as another channel to connect with their customers. Instead of waiting for your clients to come to your website to find out what is new, why not push the information directly to them on channels where they hang out? You can collect feedback, get your products reviewed, receive testimonials, push out promotions, get users to participate in contests, print out coupons; the possibilities are endless.

Take for example Nisim International, a company which is dedicated to solving hair worries, whether you have too much (hair removal products) or have too little (hair growth products). Using Facebook, they were able to grow their fan base to over 1000 fans and start pushing out promo codes in which they can track and measure to see what medium, message, and offer was bringing in the most value. One of their latest promotions was to use the promo code “Haiti” in which users received a 25% discount off their order, and Nisim in turn would have also matched the discount with a donation to the Direct Relief International for Haiti.

Within 12 hours, they received 32 new orders specifically for this promotion.

On a bigger scale, Burger King launched a Facebook campaign called the Whopper Sacrifice. They had developed an application and asked Facebook Users to sacrifice or “de-friend” (delete) 10 of their friends on Facebook and in turn they would receive a free Whopper. The campaign, which had taglines such as “Friendship is strong, but the Whopper is stronger,” went viral quickly as each time someone would delete their friend, the application was built to send out a notification to their entire network that they had done so. However, Facebook stated this was against their terms and asked Burger King to remove the application, which they did - but not before 233,906 friendships had already been sacrificed for a Whopper.

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Facebook Strategies for Businesses: Learning How To Monetize The Fastest Growing Social Site (2)

2011-05-25T13:00:00.001+02:00

Protecting Your Brand on Google

Have you ever searched for a company name, brand name or product in a search engine before you made a purchase or decided to do business with that organization? Your online brand is extremely important to monitor and manage. Having one negative listing in the top 10 results of a search engine could be enough to have prospects steer away, leave your existing customers in a state of panic, and damage your brand to the point where business starts to go south.

Did You Know Facebook Has...

More than 500 million active users
50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day
More than 35 million users update their status each day
More than 60 million status updates posted each day
More than 3 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
More than 5 billion pieces of content (weblinks, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
More than 3.5 million events
More than 3 million active pages on Facebook
More than 1.5 million local businesses have active pages on Facebook

This is where almost any business online regardless of their product, service or target audience can leverage Facebook. Businesses can use Facebook simply as another landing page to tell visitors about their company. The fact that Facebook is a creditable source, has a high page rank, is updated frequently and has millions of pages and links are all reasons for Google to rank a Facebook Business Page on page one of Google. This is very similar to having your business listing on a site like Wikipedia, which also comes up high in the search results.

Every time you obtain a page one ranking in Google, you push down any of your competitors and negative listings that may be impacting your brand. Combining this strategy with other social sites will allow an organization to dominate page one of Google for your branded term. For example, if a user was to search for the phrase MSNBC, which is a cable news channel in the United States, you can see the areas in yellow to the left that outline social media channels such as Wikipedia, Twitter and Blogs that MSNBC is leveraging as well as their Facebook Page in green.

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Facebook Strategies for Businesses: Learning How To Monetize The Fastest Growing Social Site

2011-05-24T18:44:00.001+02:00

Why Businesses Should Promote Themselves On Facebook

With the launch of social sites such as YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006, there was no doubt that these sites were changing the way users interacted online. Businesses began to realize that in order to remain competitive and reach out to their customers, they must start engaging in the tools and networks where their audiences are spending a lot of their time. To date there are more than 1.5 million local businesses that have active pages on Facebook.

What would it mean to an organization if they had customers talking about their products and services to their friends? What would be the value of reaching out to customers to tell them about your new services or promotions? What would be the ROI on having your brand exposed and built on social sites like Facebook? These are the questions that businesses began to ask themselves – the challenge was exactly how can an organization start to monetize Facebook for business purposes.

Facebook is not for every business, and most organizations will use Facebook in different ways. First you need to determine if your target audience, your customers, your clients or prospects are even on Facebook. Whether you are B2B or B2C, Facebook can be a platform, which your organization can leverage. Here are some of the different reasons why most businesses should start to engage themselves on Facebook if they have not already.

Protecting Your Brand on Facebook

One of the biggest fears that organizations have about connecting on Facebook is if people start to talk negatively about them. Why open up a can of worms where people all over the world can have an open conversation, right? The reality is, anyone can create a Facebook Page about your company, or start a blog, or upload a video to YouTube etc. If businesses do not start the conversation, they leave the control up to their customers who might be frustrated, or even competitors that simply want to damage the company’s brand. Have a look below at some of the Facebook Fan Pages dedicated to companies in a negative way.

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Three Trends Causing Huge Changes in Online Retail (Part 4)

2011-05-20T13:00:00.001+02:00

Is This Who I Think It Is?

The personalization of online shopping is being driven both by the ability to act on more in-depth analytics, and the rise of social networking.

From an analytics standpoint, it is easier to track online behavior now, and also to customize the information being presented to a consumer based on that data. That customization can take many forms, from addressing someone by name on a site,to saving a visitor’s shopping preferences, to targeting specific products or discounts to a consumer based on past purchasing trends. In recent research released by Limelight Networks, consumer survey respondents rated personalization features very highly.

The ability of a website to automatically recall billing and shipping information was listed as extremely or very important by 73% of respondents who make personal online purchases more than once a month. Meanwhile 55% of those same respondents said it was extremely or very important that an online shopping site provide product recommendations based on items already purchased or viewed.

Social networking offers a different look into how the shopping experience is becoming more personal. Hitwise Intelligence 2011, found that social networking and community forum sites ranked third as a traffic driver to department stores online behind only search engines and other department store sites. Traffic from social networking sites to the Retail 500 also increased 27% in December of 2010 compared to December of 2009. All this means that conversations taking place online among friends are guiding subsequent shopping behavior.

For retailers, the message here is that online presence must extend beyond traditional branded websites and into the social networking arena. These spheres of personal interaction online are where consumers are forming many of their opinions, and increasingly where they are choosing their shopping site preferences.

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Three Trends Causing Huge Changes in Online Retail (Part 3)

2011-05-19T13:00:00.001+02:00

Online and On the Go

Turning to mobility, the opportunities for online retailers are numerous, but equally, new mobile distribution channels are adding complexity to the retailer/consumer relationship. From mobile sites, to branded apps, to QR codes, and mobile payments, retailers have a wealth of resources to draw on in engaging audiences and building brand loyalty. So far, the percentage of online purchases made from a mobile device are still relatively low. However, that doesn’t mean mobile devices aren’t playing a role in the shopping process.

According to The Google/OTX 2010 Study, 52% of US smartphone users planned to compare prices using their phones during the 2010 holiday season, and 40% planned to use their phones to read product reviews. Meanwhile, Nielsen has found that a majority of connected device owners are receptive to mobile ads if it means being able to access other content for free, and iPad owners specifically are more likely to make a purchase online after viewing an ad than owners of otherdevices. All this means that shoppers are still influenced by the mobile channel even if they’re not yet using it in large numbers to buy items directly.

The QR code phenomenon is also fascinating in its impact on online sales. According to Van Eiseman, Vice President of Creative Technology at Digitas, QR codes have been one of the hottest mobile trends recently among customers. The reason is these 2D barcodes provide a way to activate a brand for consumers when they are already in front of a product and actively seeking more information. Eiseman noted further in a recent panel discussion that many of his customers’ QR codes are linking to mobile video, which neatly combines the video and mobility trends in a single package.

By far the most critical aspect of mobility is compatibility of online sites, apps, and advertising across the wide range of gadgets available. Tablet devices were the big trend at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, and when you include the number of new tablets launching this year with the increasing popularity of smartphones, the mobile landscape is both complex and incredibly varied.

All of these devices act as potential access points to a retailer’s brand, which means how your site, app, or ad plays across the lot of them impacts how consumers perceive your company and its products or services. If the online retail experience isn’t optimized for mobile access—however that mobile access is achieved— consumers are liable to walk away with a negative impression, and customer satisfaction impacts both online and offline sales.

If you did not see yesterday's link, go to yesterday's blog and see what is happening in preparation for mobile shopping.

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Three Trends Causing Huge Changes in Online Retail (Part 2)

2011-05-18T13:00:00.001+02:00

Video Takes Over

The video trend is evident just by looking at some of the largest online retailers today. Amazon, for example, incorporates both manufacturer videos and video reviews from consumers in its product pages, and Overstock has publicly stated its goal of including a video with every product it sells. According to eMarketer, 2010, retailers report higher conversion rates and fewer abandoned shopping carts when they add video to their sites.

There is also evidence that use of video correlates with customer satisfaction. According to recent research by ForeSee Results, etailers making extensive use of video were among the top-rated in customer satisfaction during the 2010 holiday shopping season. Ranked one, two, and three, Amazon, Netflix, and QVC all rely heavily on video to market and sell their wares.

An independent survey commissioned by Limelight Networks supports the idea that video is important to online shoppers. According to survey results, video product demonstrations and video reviews from customers were listed as extremely or very important features by 46% of survey respondents who reported making personal online purchases more than once a month. And of those listing video as important, a significant percentage said they spent more than $300, and up to $1,000 annually in select online shopping categories, with travel, clothing, and electronics generating the highest correlation between video importance and higher annual spend.

Put briefly, video is an important feature to many of the consumers who spend a larger amount of money online. This makes video a useful tool in wooing top shoppers.

After you read the information above, I want you to know that at http://bit.ly/jYxlNZ you will see a forceful example of what is happening with etail.

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Three Trends Causing Important Shifts in Online Retail

2011-05-17T13:01:00.001+02:00

The electronic retail shopping today is nothing like it was five years ago, and it is unrecognizable from ecommerce at ten years ago. Even though many online shoppers have been doing business on the web for years, the types of transactions, expectations of quality, and on-site behaviors have all changed dramatically. Consumers do not go online just to make a purchase. They go online to browse, compare, and explore. In other words, they go shopping.

First a few statistics. During the 2010 holiday season, online shopping reportedly spiked up 13% year-over-year.

That is compared to a 5.7% reported overall increase in shopping, which indicates the growing importance of the online medium. At the same time, a recent Limelight Networks study found that 65% of survey respondents claimed to have been shopping online for more than five years.
This history of on-line shopping appears to show that established online shoppers are doing more of their transactions on the web, even as new online shoppers are only now discovering the web’s advantages. In other words, growth is coming from both a larger sample of consumers. Javelin Strategy and Research predicts the percentage of US consumers shopping online will increase to 78% by 2014—and from greater usage among existing shoppers.
Still, revenue from online shopping is only a fraction of retail revenue overall. In 2010, holiday online sales rang in at $32.6 billion according to comScore, while the National Retail Federation reports that retail as a whole topped out at $462 billion in revenue. That means that there is a lot of room for growth in the online space, and, given current growth rates, it also means we could see a big shift in proportional shopping across the retail landscape. As important as etail is today, its relative impact on the retail sector, including purchases made both online and offline, will increase exponentially in the coming years.

There are three major trends to watch in the growth of online retail:

The use of video in online marketing and sales,
The growing importance of mobility, and
An increasing emphasis on personalized shopping experiences.

With each of these trends, the impact is not just a matter of a particular behavior spreading to a larger group of people. More tomorrow.

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5 Ways To Know If Your B2B Employees are Social Media-Ready - Social Media B2B

2011-05-16T16:15:00.001+02:00

Have you ever thought, "Oh, man, that answer shows that the customer service rep has not read my email question. He/she just sent a standard answer, which I have already read in the FAQ. They are wasting my time and insulting me at the same time."

Customer service continues to be a major social media initiative for B2B companies, but not every customer service rep is ready to represent your company or brand online. Social profiles are usually managed by marketing, public relations, or even an outside agency, and often customer service personnel are charged with responding to product issues and service inquiries.

Studies have shown that people who complain on social channels are already dissatisfied with the response they received through traditional service channels (phone and email). This means that online responses need to be carefully composed to effectively answer the customer. While it is sometimes necessary to take the conversation offline, it can also be important for others to see the details of the situation. Frequently customer service reps are familiar with the customer and their issues, so it is less about solving the problem, and more about discussing it in a public space.

The following five points can help evaluate who in a customer service department can be initially responsible for creating and posting responses on social profiles.

1. They Have a Facebook Profile

Even though over half of the US population is on Facebook and it seems like everyone has a profile, there are still people who don’t. But just having a profile is a start for a customer service rep. Someone who is interacting with customers online needs to understand how people communicate on social networks. There is much less formality and often people post comments to get a reaction. If someone misses the tone of a post, they can respond inappropriately.

2. They Have Strong Writing Skills

Often customer service reps are hired for their people skills, their telephone skills and their ability to follow a script to resolve a situation quickly. Responding to customers in writing, whether in email or online, requires a different set of skills. Reps need the ability to combine standard answers with a customer’s specific problem in a clear and concise way. A simple writing test can determine how someone would respond online.

3. They Have Strong Product Knowledge

A good customer service rep must understand the product to be truly effective in responding to customers. Due to length requirements of online commenting, it is important to be able to write succinctly about product issues. It is much easier to discuss something briefly if you truly understand it. It is also likely that customers discussing products online, especially technical products, may have a deep understanding of product specs and functionality. Reps need to be able to interact at that level.

4. They Understand Public Perception

A good customer service rep understands that every response, whether it is made via phone, email or online, can be shared with the world. This is true in both positive and negative interactions. As that information spreads across other networks, the perception of others is shaped by that information. People who have worked for the company for a long time can sometimes be challenged by this significant change in their world view.

5. They Know They are on the Front Lines

No matter how much content and company messaging your B2B company puts out through traditional and online methods, an interaction with a customer service rep, even responding on a social profile, can completely change a customer’s opinion. If many B2B purchases are about relationships, make sure the customer service team is part of the relationship. Sometimes large companies have dedicated customer service teams to their largest customers, and this supports the relationship. This approach is about more than service. It’s about the relationship with specific people as well. Even in one time interactions, customer service reps are the company.

What are other ways to know if you B2B employees are ready for social media?

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Amazon.com. Brilliant. Frightening. Ingenious.

2011-05-14T14:00:00.001+02:00

If you have any curiosity about Amazon.com or you sell products through Amazon.com, you will want to spend time going through this slide show. It is frighteningly fascinating. I now believe that the trite phrase about being busy should be changed to "Busy as a Bezos."

Amazon.com: the Hidden Empire

View more presentations from faberNovel

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Facebook Marketing is Wonderfully Unreal

2011-05-11T13:00:00.001+02:00

This is a good presentation about how effective Facebook is as a marketing tool and which I have lifted from an accomplice in our industry. If have questions, let me know.

The 5 Key Tools for Effective Facebook Marketing

View more presentations from HubSpot Internet Marketing

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The Wonders of Social Media Marketing

2011-05-10T13:00:00.001+02:00

It is amazing to see how Social Media Marketing has captured everything within its surroundings, making it a necessity for every marketer for promotion of products and services. A few years back it was assumed that marketing was just about creating a product to satisfy customer needs and managing profitable relationships with customers. However, the marketing techniques involved were very simple such as promoting products and services via commercials, ads, billboards, press, ads etc. and other now-questionably effective methods.

The flood of technology and new innovation took over the world and Social Media Marketing became the strong marketing channel. In no time its favorable effects became apparent. Small to large businesses found it useful to meet their marketing goals effectively. Let’s see what makes us say that Social Media Marketing can do wonders:

A Deeper Insight

Social Media Marketing basically offers a preview of the products and services your business offers. Being a marketer you can create differentiation and positioning by specifying the unique features your products and services have to offer without spending an arm and a leg. Apart from building a strong relationship with your customers, you can also generate an online demand which in turn will help your profitability.

Interactive Marketing Strategy

Did you ever think that your customers would be a part of your products and services marketing strategies? With Social Media Marketing this is possible and necessary. How? Existing as well as prospective buyers can participate in discussions on the various social networks and can give their positive or critical feedbacks/comments. Customers know better what they want, how they want products and services, and where they want to attain them. Hence including them in such discussions means a marketer can provide the target audience exactly what they want! Of course this can do wonders for your business and gain customers satisfaction.

Harness target audience with Videos

With Social Media Marketing, marketing is much more than buzzwords and word-of-mouth. Social networks such as YouTube and Facebook can be used to harness your target audience by showing videos demonstrating what your company does, how your products are better than your competitors, or tips and useful techniques for its viewers.

Your Website Content Should be Appealing

Creating an effective website for your business is still important for Social Media Marketing. The content to your website must have conversion architecture. This requires you to have appealing content AND an intuitive site structure. All the present methods of promoting your site is still important, even while drawing attention to your site through Social Media Marketing.

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Facebook – Nothing to lose; All to Gain

2011-05-09T12:14:00.001+02:00

The greatest and the most popular invention of Social Media Marketing is Facebook. Although Facebook was initially used to connect with friends and family, now being a vital part of digital marketing, Facebook and your business strategies must go hand in hand. If you are still wondering whether to include this digital media tool in your business marketing strategies, then get prepared to be left behind by your more savvy competitors who are already sharing their products via social media. In this technology-driven business environment, you should be using Facebook as one of your Internet marketing strategies.

Social Media Marketing, and particularly Facebook, is a low-cost or no-cost solution to stay ahead in this creative and innovative marketing world. Does this pique your interest? Then it is time to become a part of this Facebook world, which involves more than 500 million users. Before you step in, you must keep in mind the effects Facebook should have on your business:

Creating Brand Awareness

Belonging to all demographics, Facebook is known to all! Hence, this makes it the best place to promote your business. If you are a small business, particularly in its development phase, you can easily create brand awareness among your target audience through Facebook.

Interactive Marketing Strategy

Conventional marketing methods didn’t encourage consumers to provide feedback. On the contrary, Social Media Marketing’s main purpose is to keep the consumers interacting through discussions, contests, and events. Moreover, feedback from peoples, current or prospective customers, is a vital part of marketing, regardless of being positive or negative. A list of Facebook applications are being used for communicating and promoting business on Facebook and keeping its users engaged.

Improved Web Traffic

Using Facebook will help divert traffic to your website which if combined with appealing content can convert this traffic into buyers. Facebook also provides the opportunity to enhance your target market and create demand for your products and services among online consumers. It can help you build relationship with your consumers and help retain them and create brand equity. Apps are also available that allow buying directly on Facebook.

Reputation Management

By using Facebook you can see what your consumers think about you, their likes and dislikes, what attracts them, consumer buying behavior and much more. Facebook profiles is now indexed in the search results as well, hence you can see where your business ranks and plan accordingly to get a higher ranking.

There are social media networks that limit their use for promoting your business products and services, where Facebook is continuously polishing its existing applications and inventing new applications to promote your brands in much cooler ways. Using Facebook is not just about pitching and selling your business, however. It’s about connecting to current and potential customers. Take advantage of this Social Media Network and take your business to new heights.

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This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

2011-05-06T20:00:00.001+02:00

By Marshall Kirkpatrick / May 5, 2011 12:25 PM / from ReadWriteWeb

Imagine a web where our browsers connected directly to each other to do voice, video, media sharing and run applications, using P2P and real-time APIs, rather than going through centralized servers that controlled traffic and permissions. That's a potent idea and if implemented properly could future-proof a part of the web from authoritarian crack-downs, disruptions by disasters and more. It could also establish a permanent lawless zone of connected devices with no central place to stop anyone from doing anything in particular.

It just so happens that something like that may now be under development in the most official of venues. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced today the formation of a new Web Real-Time Communications Working Group to define client-side APIs to enable Real-Time Communications in Web browsers, without the need for server-side implementation. The Group is chaired by engineers from Google and Ericsson. It sounds like Opera Unite to me (see video below), but democratized across all browsers. It sounds like it could be a very big deal.

Below: Here's how Opera described its Unite technology at launch two years ago. Opera is always several years ahead of its time.

"These APIs should enable building applications that can be run inside a browser," the new Working Group's charter says, "requiring no extra downloads or plugins, that allow communication between parties using audio, video and supplementary real-time communication, without having to use intervening servers (unless needed for firewall traversal, or for providing intermediary services)."

The working group is focused on the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that devices will use to implement these connections, but is working with an IETF group developing a technical protocol for transmission of the data between browsers. The first indication of this work appeared two months ago with the discovery of a mysterious flag inside Google Chromium.

The W3C's new working group on all this is chaired by Harald Alvestrand of Google and Stefan Håkansson of Ericsson. It plans on meeting regularly through February 2013 and is placing a special emphasis on ensuring users have control over and are aware of what media they might be transmitting from their browsers to others.

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How Can Internet Business Marketing Benefit Your Business?

2011-05-06T12:00:00.001+02:00

There was time when businesses needed to push to create awareness of their products and services. The reason was that competitors weren’t using new technologies and the conventional methods were a hit in themselves. There were pre-specified norms created by businessmen and marketers, and following these pre-determined methods and spending big money, success happened without much difficulty.

With the Internet becoming more and more popular, succeeding with the conventional methods has become more difficult and critical. Hence the need of Internet business marketing was discovered and in no time, it became a necessity. And, it will be an understatement to say that this need was well founded! You can see for yourself how Internet Business Marketing has benefited many businesses:

Utilizing Data Collection

With Internet marketing data collection is key. First off, information regarding your products and services can be easily available and every transaction that takes place recorded. Further, this data collection can be used by business for seeing who loyal customers are and how to segment them. Marketers can use this information for locating which type of customers have been most profitable and for tracking buying habits of consumers.

Creating a Website

Internet business marketing establishes the need for a web site. This has helped in promoting business online and is done, not by having just a beautifully graphic website, but by including appealing content, images, audios, videos, and ease of use. It is the best way to communicate a business’s message without spending an arm and a leg. Having a website does not mean sales success. Without proper optimization and marketing, it is like a truck full of products without gas. So how does one give it gas?

Involving Social Media

Apart from just having a website and using it for Internet business marketing, a business can place ads and banners of products and services on other websites. Other methods which can be used are Email marketing along with the search engine optimization.

The newest tactic of the Internet is the social media. There are many social networks available which will help a business not only promote its business image and cater to customers, but to build strong relationships with them. With involving social media as part of Internet business marketing, the business will have an interactive marketing strategy, where customers will have a say and a real interaction occurs.

Internet business marketing has given fruitful results not just for established businesses, but also for small emerging businesses, because on the Internet no one can tell you are a dog.

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“G” is for Google

2011-05-04T14:30:00.001+02:00

Seeing how Google is flourishing, soon we’ll see parents and teachers teaching their kids “G is for Google.” Google is not just a search engine but has hundreds of applications and services that every one and anyone can use to his/her advantage. Now, if you are running a business and still not aware everything that Google is providing, here is a quick view.

Google Web Search

Google’s web search is receiving and dealing with millions of queries each day. The main purpose of this Google web search engine is to hunt for text and images in the various pages available on the Internet. Google has recently made advancement in its searching technology by introducing Google Caffeine. The main idea behind this is crawling and hunting for text and information more accurately and faster. You can learn how to take advantage of this engine to benefit your company and your sales.

Google Products

“Froogle” became “Google Base” then “Google Product Search” and now is “Google Merchant Center.” This implies that Google has many products with different properties. With its diverse properties Google shopping has been made easier and much more prominent for you to list your products or services. You can set up a feed if your business involves many products.

Google Analytics

This is the tool that can track and analyze your site traffic. It will keep a check on who visits and at what time. You can subscribe for a weekly report via email and get a detailed analysis regarding your information. What is important here is that you learn to understand what all the statistics are trying to tell you about your business. But before the Internet, none of this was possible.

Google AdWords

Google helps you promote and run your ads on the search engine. It will not be wrong to say here that Google AdWords Pay-Per-Click program can be a key revenue generator. If you are unaware of how to use such this program for your business, it will be best to get help from a Google AdWords Advisor. We are very aware of the huge sums that have been wasted on Pay-Per-Click unnecessarily.

Google Places

By using Google Places, you can not only develop a strong local strategy but also promote your products and services in your city and region. By paying a minimal amount, you can establish your Google local identity to include your business information, coupons, videos, and photos to attract your users.

Google Webmaster Central

This will help you see how effective your website pages are. For example, with this tool you can monitor your web conversions. Add a word or two like ‘free shipping’ to your pages and the optimizer on the dashboard will let you know the effect. This technique can really help improve the ratio of traffic conversion and have a powerful impact on the development of your website.

Google Affiliate Network

To be part of the Google Affiliate Network, you will have access the Google’s large pool of publishers who will divert traffic to your site in exchange for some commission.

All the Google tools to help a business have success are too many to describe here. They include Adsense, Checkout, DoubleClick, Apps, Postini Services, Geospatial Solutions, and Google Enterprise Search. It may be a bit overwhelming to try to utilize all of Google’s possibilities, but with expert help, your business can grow.

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In case you are late, it is not too late for Digital Marketing

2011-05-03T12:30:00.001+02:00

Digital Marketing also called Internet Marketing has the purpose to promote your products and services to influence your online customers. Involving Digital Marketing strategies in your business strategies is not enough; to be successful, having smart marketing is even more important. Smart marketing is not just about ranking; it’s about phone calls, mailings, socializing, interacting, and connecting etc. In short, you must have traffic.

To be even more specific, it is about the right type of traffic. Of course, Digital Marketing can provide all such advantages through its digital tools - SEO, Google AdWords, Social Media, email marketing to name a few. Hence, it is true that Digital Marketing can be smart marketing.

Digital Marketing has emerged from the Internet and has had a very profound impact on all businesses. As you have millions of users who are dependent on the Internet, Digital Marketing is the way to get to such a vast crowd without spending an arm and a leg. Digital Marketing focuses on customer relationships, shopping benefits, products, and service information, and almost anything that you can relate to your business. Digital Marketing if made a serious part of your business will lead your business to new levels by generating awareness of your products.

Digital Marketing is a never ending chain. This means that if you are able to positively influence a single customer, he will promote your business to another and the chain goes on. So, are you ready to make Digital Marketing part of your business plan? Then it’s time you should know what Internet Marketing is offering:

Encouraging thousands of people to take interest in your website
Making people aware of your business (products and services that you offer)
Establishing your brand image and your business reputation
Keeping friends updated on the forums of their choice
Capturing free traffic

Hence, to reach a wider demographic and to benefit from all the above-mentioned advantages, you must let the Internet Marketing power work for your business. Why?

Reason 1

Digital Marketing is already successful for many businesses. This means it is a proven strategy which goes beyond personal promotion. More importantly, it is not just for corporate or well-structured businesses, but any size business to take advantage of its unlimited opportunities.

Reason 2

You can have Digital Marketing strategies that your customers are looking for. This means you are providing your current and potential customers with information they need on the forums they want. For example you can know if your website analysis shows that most of your web traffic is diverted from a Social Media network like Facebook, you can market on such forums in the future.

Reason 3

None of your customers need to remain unattended. This is the best thing about Digital Marketing as there are various ways to maintain your target audience and communicate with customers.

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The Death of Osama Bin Laden

2011-05-03T11:08:00.001+02:00

So much is being said about the death of Osama Bin Laden that I wanted to republish a good comment from The New Yorker:

News Desk: Notes On The Death Of Osama Bin Laden : The New Yorker

No doubt there will be time to reflect more deeply about the news announced by President Obama last night. For now, I thought it might be useful to annotate some of the initial headlines.

Abbottabad is essentially a military-cantonment city in Pakistan, in the hills to the north of the capital of Islamabad, in an area where much of the land is controlled or owned by the Pakistani Army and retired Army officers. Although the city is technically in what used to be called the Northwest Frontier Province, it lies on the far eastern side of the province and is as close to Pakistani-held Kashmir as it is to the border city of Peshawar. The city is most notable for housing the Pakistan Military Academy, the Pakistani Army’s premier training college, equivalent to West Point. Looking at maps and satellite photos on the Web last night, I saw the wide expanse of the Academy not far from where the million-dollar, heavily secured mansion where bin Laden lived was constructed in 2005. The maps I looked at had sections of land nearby marked off as “restricted areas,” indicating that they were under military control. It stretches credulity to think that a mansion of that scale could have been built and occupied by bin Laden for six years without its coming to the attention of anyone in the Pakistani Army.

The initial circumstantial evidence suggests that the opposite is more likely—that bin Laden was effectively being housed under Pakistani state control. Pakistan will deny this, it seems safe to predict, and perhaps no convincing evidence will ever surface to prove the case. If I were a prosecutor at the United States Department of Justice, however, I would be tempted to call a grand jury. Who owned the land on which the house was constructed? How was the land acquired, and from whom? Who designed the house, which seems to have been purpose-built to secure bin Laden? Who was the general contractor? Who installed the security systems? Who worked there? Are there witnesses who will now testify as to who visited the house, how often, and for what purpose? These questions are not relevant only to the full realization of justice for the victims of September 11th. They are also relevant to the victims of terrorist attacks conducted or inspired by bin Laden while he lived in the house, and these include many Pakistanis, as well as Afghans, Indians, Jordanians, and Britons. They are rightly subjects of American criminal law.

Outside the Justice Department, other sections of the United States government will probably underplay any evidence of culpability by the Pakistani state or sections of the state, such as its intelligence service, I.S.I., in sheltering bin Laden. As ever, there are many other fish to fry in Islamabad and at the Army headquarters, in nearby Rawalpindi: an exit strategy from Afghanistan, which requires the greatest possible degree of coöperation from Pakistan that can be attained at a reasonable price; nuclear stability; and so on.

Pakistan’s military and intelligence service takes risks that others would not dare take because Pakistan’s generals believe that their nuclear deterrent keeps them safe from regime change of the sort under way in Libya, and because they have discovered over the years that the rest of the world sees them as too big to fail. Unfortunately, they probably are correct in their analysis; some countries, like some investment banks, do pose systemic risks so great that they are too big to fail, and Pakistan is currently the A.I.G. of nation-states. But that should not stop American prosecutors from following the law here as they would whenever any mass killer’s hideout is discovered.

Of course, Mullah Omar and Al Qaeda’s No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, probably also enjoy refuge in Pakistan. The location of Mullah Omar, in particular, is believed by American officials to be well known to some Pakistani military and intelligence officers; Omar, too, they believe, is effectively under Pakistani state control. Perhaps the circumstantial evidence in the bin Laden case is misleading; only a transparent, thorough investigation by Pakistani authorities into how such a fugitive could have lived so long under the military’s nose without detection would establish otherwise. That sort of transparent investigation is unlikely to take place.

On who was living with Bin Laden:

The early reports suggest that he was living with his “youngest wife.” Bin Laden, who was fifty-three years old when he died, had always lived surrounded by family and children, so it is not surprising that he had managed to do so even as a fugitive. He is known to have married at least four times. His first wife was a cousin from Syria. His second and third wives were highly educated Saudi women. His fourth wife was a kind of mail-order teen-age bride from Yemen, whom he married while living in Afghanistan during the nineteen-nineties, according to the account of bin Laden’s former Yemeni bodyguard. Bin Laden’s Syrian and Saudi wives were said to have gone home before or immediately after the September 11th attacks, and the Saudi wives were said to be living in the kingdom, without contact with Osama. When I visited Yemen in 2007, to conduct research on the bin Laden family, Yemeni journalists told me that his youngest wife had returned home and was living in the region either of Tai’zz or of Ibb, significant cities to the south of Sanaa, the capital. It seems that she may have found her way to Pakistan to live with her husband. My own guess had been that bin Laden would have accepted informal divorce from his older wives on the ground of involuntary separation, and would have remarried a local woman or two while in hiding in Pakistan, perhaps a daughter presented by one of his Pathan hosts. That is at least conceivable as well. Apparently, one of his adult sons was killed in the raid. Osama has more than a dozen sons. Some have returned to Saudi Arabia, but others have appeared in videos with their father, vowing to fight alongside him. It is conceivable that one of his sons could make a claim on Al Qaeda leadership in the years ahead.

On what bin Laden’s death means for Al Qaeda:

On the constructive side: The loss of a symbolic, semi-charismatic leader whose own survival burnished his legend is significant. Also, Al Qaeda has never had a leadership succession test. Now it faces one. The organization was founded more than twenty years ago, in the summer of 1988, and at the initial sessions bin Laden was appointed amir and Ayman al-Zawahiri deputy amir. It is remarkable that, for all the No. 3s who have been killed, and for all the ways in which it has been degraded since September 11th, Al Qaeda had retained the same two leaders, continuously, for so long. Zawahiri is famously disputatious and tone-deaf. His relatively recent online “chat” taking questions about Al Qaeda’s violence did not go well. Bin Laden was a gentle and strong communicator, if somewhat incoherent in his thinking. Zawahiri is dogmatic and argumentative, and has a history of alienating colleagues.

On the other hand: Al Qaeda is more than just a centralized organization based in Pakistan. It is also a network of franchised or like-minded organizations, and an ideological movement in which followers sometimes act in isolation from leaders. The best guesstimates are that Al Qaeda has several hundred serious members or adherents in Pakistan, along the Pakistan side of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and perhaps up to a hundred scattered around Afghanistan. Just last week, the German government disrupted a cell near Dusseldorf in which one of the members, of Moroccan origin, had allegedly travelled to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, where he received explosives training from an Al Qaeda contact. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, based in Yemen, appears to be just as potent. Dan Benjamin, the State Department counterterrorism coördinator, gave a speech last week at New America that provided a very good, up-to-date summary of Al Qaeda and its affiliates worldwide, their capabilities and connections to one another.

On the hunt itself:

After President Obama took office, he and the new Central Intelligence Agency director, Leon Panetta, reorganized the team of analysts devoted to finding Osama bin Laden. The team worked out of ground-floor offices at the Langley headquarters. There were at least two-dozen of them. Some were older analysts who had been part of the C.I.A.’s various bin Laden-hunting efforts going back to the late nineteen-nineties. Others were newer recruits, too young to have been professionally active when bin Laden was first indicted as a fugitive from American justice.

As they reset their work, the analysts studied other long-term international fugitive hunts that had ended successfully, such as the operations that led to the death of the Medellín Cartel leader Pablo Escobar, in 1993. The analysts asked, Where did the breakthroughs in these other hunts come from? What were the clues that made the difference and how were the clues discovered? They tried to identify “signatures” of Osama bin Laden’s life style that might lead to such a clue: prescription medications that he might purchase, hobbies or other habits of shopping or movement that might give him away.

The Langley analysts were one headquarters egghead element of the hunt. Similar analytical units, at Central Command, in Tampa, and at the International Security Assistance Force, in Kabul, sorted battlefield and all-source intelligence, designated subjects for additional collection, and conducted pattern analysis of relationships among terrorists, couriers, and raw data collected in the field. Detainee operators in Iraq, in Afghanistan, at Guantanámo, and at secret C.I.A. sites also participated. Apparently, the breakthrough started several years back from detainee interrogations; it’s not clear yet how or by what means the information about the courier who led to the Abbottabad compound was extracted.

Overseas, C.I.A. officers in the Directorate of Operations and the Special Activities Division—intelligence officers who ran sources and collected information, as well as armed paramilitaries—carried out the search for informants from bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Units from the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, which includes the Navy Seals, Delta, and other specialized groups, joined in. Often, Special Operations and the C.I.A. worked in blended task-force teams deployed around Afghanistan, and, more problematically, as the Raymond Davis case indicated, around Pakistan.

These teams searched not only for bin Laden but also for other “high-value targets,” as they are legally and bureaucratically known inside the U.S. government. My understanding is that, as of this spring, there were approximately forty legally designated, fugitive high-value targets at the top of the wanted-list system. If there were forty, I suppose there are now thirty-nine.

Photograph by Farooq Naeem.

Read Jon Lee Anderson, Dexter Filkins, Hendrik Hertzberg, George Packer, David Remnick, Lawrence Wright, and more of our coverage of Osama bin Laden’s death. Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/05/notes-on-the-death-of-osama-bin-laden.html#ixzz1LHHnuerr

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Digital Marketing 101

2011-05-02T14:00:00.001+02:00

Digital Marketing has opened horizons for marketers. It has made it easy for businesses to include online customers as part of their target audience. As we have stepped into the Internet world, marketing has opened doors for new fields and Digital Marketing is one of these.

Seeing its advantages, it is hard to ignore its importance. You must be aware of some of the following Digital Marketing strategies, making sure you include most of these if not all, as your business strategies to cope with the ever increasing competition and stay ahead of the game.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Competent SEO structures your individual web pages as well as the website so that they are easily discovered, analyzed, and indexed by the various search engines. Competent SEO knows the changes in search rules and helps your website stay at top of the various search result pages by anticipating logical algorithms such as most used keywords and other techniques. It lets web crawlers work at the back end and doing their job in the most accurate and automated form.

Advanced Link Building

This is another Digital Marketing strategy which involves getting your content rich with links and is also known as social bookmarking. This requires you to know your audience in order to aware of the site they visit most frequently. Avoid using hidden links and make sure visitors find your links useful.

Online Copywriting

This form of Digital Marketing strategy is the content of your site and your blog. You must make sure your website’s content is not copied and is 100% authentic. It will make your website unique which can be the reason for your improved website traffic.

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing makes the biggest part of the Digital Marketing strategies. It includes the entire Social Media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, and other such forums. Hence, if you want your business to stay ahead of the competitors you will have to keep your audience interacting at such platforms. There are professional consultants who are ready to help you if you are unaware how or don’t have time to use Social Media Marketing efficiently. In fact, competent consultants probably will save you time and money.

Email Marketing

This is another Digital Marketing strategy that businesses have been following. It includes promoting your products and services by sending informational mails to a list of subscribers. Some very advanced systems, such as WSI Digital Marketing Pro, can make sure that your email works efficiently and according to the regulations.

Google AdWords

Google AdWords is a service that is used to create and run ads to promote your business. These ads run along with search engines and you are only required to pay when people click on these ads.

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A Few Tips on Preparing Your Business for Social Media

2011-04-29T14:00:00.001+02:00

There was a time when only a small niche knew what Social Media was. With the Internet becoming omnipresent, Social Media has become the bridge between a business and its success. It is important to note here that Social Media is a wide term, and is not merely limited to buzz words. Social Media, being considered a fickle beast, revolves around the concept of innovation and demands marketers to be updated with the newest marketing strategies. Unlike the traditional marketing methods, such marketing techniques involve blogging, twitter, Facebook and other similar networking forums.

In order to make your business a success, you need to step in the world of Social Media Marketing before it is too late and your competitors eat up a huge market share. To help you use the Social Media Marketing strategies appropriately and attract your target audience, you must know the how it helps businesses achieve its goals more effectively and efficiently.

Creating Awareness

The main focus of marketers is to create brand awareness and this is possible by Social Media Marketing. Promoting your product and services on the various Social Media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. helps create awareness, attract potential customers, and, in turn, helps profitability. Using Social Media correctly means that your brand never leaves your customer’s sight.

Building Relationships

Developing core customer value and loyal customers is only possible by building strong relationships with your current as well as prospective customers. With Social Media this has become easier. Being a marketer using such a platform to promote your products and services by providing the customers valuable as well as reliable information means building trust. No matter your aim for marketing or segmentation, giving value to customers is important to build long-lasting customer relationships.

Improving Brand Image

Social Media has a serious hand in improving your brand image. With thousands of brands, it is crucial for marketers to develop brand image and to maintain it. Social Media has helped marketers establish a brand image which can be supported with appropriate messages and videos etc.

However, this is not all! Social Media has to offer so much more in the most cost effective way. And adopting such a marketing tool can help your business reach to heights.

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A Thought Process for Commercial Use of Linked Data

2011-04-28T18:00:00.001+02:00

Web 3.0 Data Marketing

View more presentations from Scott Brinker

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Social Media Marketing for the Late Adopter

2011-04-28T16:22:00.001+02:00

Social Media as we know it is a whole new subject that has emerged with the Internet, and the thing which we cannot deny is that it never sleeps. It is like a powerhouse that not only helps friends and family stay connected, but has also plays a vital role in the business world. No other form of media other than social media has experienced popularity this fast. In less than a year Facebook spread and became popular among 200 million users while radio took 38 years and television took 13 years to reach just 50 million users.

The question has changed from should businesses use social media to how to use it effectively? Entrepreneurs and marketers became eager to learn more and more about this revolution, and to find out ways to utilize it correctly.

Make the right connection

You must be wondering how to establish the right connection with your customers? Your question is valid and has a simple answer. You must establish a DIRECT connection. This means you must make it easy for your customers to visit your webpage directly from their social media accounts. Facebook ‘like’ button and Twitter ‘Retweet’ button are great examples of staying connected to your customer’s profiles. By using these, you can make your customers aware of the new items and get their feedback in the most effective and time-effective manner.

Hear your customers out!

Social media is the place where you can initiate interesting discussions relevant to your products and services. It is the forum where various conversations occur and the seller understands what the buyers are looking for. Hence, in order to use this media correctly, make sure you listen to your customers needs and encourage them to give their valuable feedback regardless of being positive or negative. Don’t just notice your customers’ responses but make an action plan on how to use them.

Strengthen Loyalty

To gain customer loyalty is not an easy task, but with social media it has become quite easy. Offering your customers free samples before purchase, discount offers, free shipments, credit facilities, giveaways, and other special offers can help strengthen customer loyalty. Providing customers with better quality along with all this can develop life-long brand loyalty as well.

Knowing the importance of social media and ignoring its use can have negative effects on your business.

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How Does Internet Business Marketing Benefit Your Business? A Broad Overview

2011-04-27T14:52:00.001+02:00

With the Internet becoming more and more popular, succeeding with the conventional methods was becoming less and less effective. Hence the need for knowledge of Internet Business Marketing became a necessity. And why was it better?

Data Collection

With Internet Marketing data collection is the key. Information regarding your products and services is easily available and every transaction that takes place is recorded. This data collection can be used by your business for determining who your loyal customers are and how to segment them. Marketers can use this information for locating which set of customers are most profitable and for keeping a track of the buying habits of consumers as never before.

Having a Website

Internet Business Marketing established the need of developing a web site for your business. This helped promote your business online through appealing content, images, audios, videos, and other features. It is the best way to communicate your business’s message without spending an arm and a leg. Having a website meant you could sell your products and services, and hence, it was a great way to promote your business identity and cater to more customers.

Apart from just having a website and using it for Internet Business Marketing, you can place ads and banners of your products and services on other websites. Other on-line marketing methods are Email marketing and search engine marketing.

Involving Social Media

But Internet Marketing is in constant flux and now requires the use Social Media Marketing. There are many social networks available which will help you promote your business as well as build a strong relationship with them.

Internet Business Marketing through the addition of social media marketing has shown good results from established businesses to small emerging businesses. If you have not gotten this far, you are not ready for Mobile Marketing and you are falling further and further behind.

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Some Hints on How to Make your Social Media Marketing Strategy Work

2011-04-26T12:30:00.001+02:00

Here are some facts. Did you know there are almost more than 550 million people on Facebook? There are approx 65 million tweets posted on twitter each day? And around 2 billion videos are watched each day on YouTube?

Looking at such figures, Social Media Marketing has to be made an integral part of your business marketing strategies in order to help make your business a success.

Although many businesses are trying to bring the social media marketing into practice, not everyone is able to make the social media marketing work well for them. The following are some ways to make it work no matter if you are a small or big business:

More Campaigns

The more campaigns you plan the better response you get from your customers. Marketers should focus and come up with different innovative ideas to see which campaigns work best. Trying various ideas allows for corrective action and improvements.

Bigger Audience

Always aim big if you want bigger and more successful results. In social media marketing, it is the audience size that matters the most. However, it is very important that while you are targeting bigger audience that you do not overlook the need for quality. A point to remember, make both quality and quantity work hand-in-hand.

Inspire your Audience

Catering to bigger audiences could be useless if you are unable to convert these visitors into potential buyers. Hence, although you cannot expect instant results, try to make influential people part of your audience through actively responding to comments, and have optimization solutions that can help you see the detailed analysis of your visitors.

Interact with your Audience

It is very important that your audience is honored and feels that their presence is worthwhile. This can be achieved by interacting and communicating with them. Create interesting topics, initiate catchy discussions, and most importantly make the audience part of such discussions. Another tip that you can use here is not to talk much about yourself. Give value to your audience.

Remember to include calls-to-action

Last but not the least, tell your audience what you want them to do! Social media marketing is like any other marketing, and hence, it must include calls-to-action as a compulsory element.

If you have comments, we appreciate hearing from you.

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Extra Intersting Non-boring Newsletter

2011-04-21T14:00:00.001+02:00

I am sneaking in an extra notice in that this link is to WSI's central newletter which I think you will find interesting.

http://bit.ly/i3zF31

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Display Advertizing: The Billboards of the Web. Tenth in a Series.

2011-04-21T13:00:00.001+02:00

PPC vs. Display Advertizing

Paid online advertizing has several benefits over organic search results, but you need to carefully decide which type is suitable for your business. Pay-per-click (PPC) and display advertizing are the most common and preferred form of online advertizing today, but each has their specific advantages.

PPC campaigns can be laser focused to target the exact audience you want. The advertizer can control his campaign with keywords, negative keywords, target demographics, and budget. You can easily modify and track your campaign for increased efficiency at a minimum cost level.

The minimum required budget per day with PPC Google Ads is a just one dollar. You only pay when your ad is clicked and you can even specify how much you are willing to pay.

Display advertizing can also be paid for on a PPC basis, but it is never as focused or targeted like PPC because the display ad can be triggered by any keyword supplied by the advertizer. This is a major drawback as the more related your ad is to the web page content, the more likely it is to reach its target audience and be effective. In most cases, display advertizing is paid for on a cost per impression (CPI or CPM) basis with a set price, and ad placement on some web pages can be expensive. While it’s easy to track and measure a display advertizing campaign, modifications for your banner would involve a lot more time and effort in comparison to the simple text copy of PPC.

An added issue is that many viewers tend to ignore banners due to the abundance of display advertizing on the Internet. This has brought about a slight evolution in the online market. Ads now use Flash animations to gain more attention, and a current trend is the use of interactivity as a focal point. These types of ads gain the viewers’ attention, thus making it easier for the advertizer to get his point across and increase the branding process.

While each medium has its pros and cons, ultimately your decision is dependent on what you want to achieve from your campaign and your product. If you’re aiming for high website traffic and effective branding, then you would benefit from a display advertizing campaign. However, if you are focused on attaining high ROI and highly targeted traffic, then you would be more successful with a PPC campaign.

Conclusion

Although many marketers are under the impression that display advertizing is a dying form, recent studies and its abundance on the web state otherwise. Their visual appeal and versatility can be used for maximum advantage in engaging potential customers and they have a long lasting branding effect on all viewers without the need for clicks. This is a more traditional form of advertizing, but is currently evolving to be more audience centric.

Display advertizing is aimed towards building customer consciousness around a product, service, or brand. This process is highly effective with visuals rather than with text. The biggest benefit of display advertizing is that the “image” of a brand or product is embedded in the viewer’s mind, and results in more chances of the viewer acting on this awareness in the future, thus accelerating sales and goals in the long run.

Please let me know if you liked the series on Display Advertizing.

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Display Advertizing: The Billboards of the Web. Ninth in a Series.

2011-04-20T13:00:00.001+02:00

Steps To Improve Performance of Your Display Ad Campaign (Part Three)

Aim with Psychological Mechanisms

Your objective of the ad campaign can be achievable with the help of psychological mechanisms. For example, sales might be the objective of the ad and the mechanism could be one of the following.

Reminder: This mechanism works well for a well established brand. The ad’s main function is to get the consumer to think of and reach for the brand on their next purchase.

Reinforcement: This works well when the consumer has some level of familiarity with the brand. Take this Kaya Skin Clinic ad as an example. The goal of this ad is to strengthen the brand promise of beauty and healthy skin. The simple iconic imagery of the attractive face and brand mark are an effective way to reinforce this perception.

Reposition: Sometimes brands change their image, logo or slogan. They can achieve this new image successfully with a display ad that is brand persistent, yet conveys the new image or slogan in a way that connects it to the old image.

Introduce: When introducing a new product, brand presence and an effective message are important. If the message is more complicated, consider using higher visibility ad formats with interactivity.

Direct Response: For products sold online, direct response ads can be very profitable since this type of ad is used to generate leads, sell, etc. It involves a call-to-action and clear benefit.

Be Brand Persistent

Brand persistence is the most important factor of a successful display ad. It ensures awareness of the brand at a minimum and at the most, your ad will ensure the key visual message of the brand is absorbed and linked to in the future.

Tomorrow we discuss Pay-per-Click vs. Display Advertizing.

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Display Advertizing: The Billboards of the Web. Eighth in a Series.

2011-04-19T13:00:00.001+02:00

Steps To Improve Performance of Your Display Ad Campaign (Part Two)

Optimization

Optimization lets advertizers know which display ad is preferred by the viewers based on their actions with the ad. The results of each version of the ad are constantly compared and the most effective option is served more. Effectiveness is dependent on the viewer’s response so display ads that are more likely to be clicked on or interacted with are served frequently. This leaves no room for guesswork and no time is wasted during the campaign as even the slightest differences in two ads can generate varied levels of activity or interest.

Retarget Your Viewers

At the first and second exposure to your display ad, viewers are typically in the awareness phase so it’s only after a few more ad views that they become favorable to your product and would have the intent to purchase or make a purchase. If your ads aren’t displayed frequently enough, your viewers will still remain at the first stage, yet over exposure could result in an annoyed viewer.

Online users have highly unpredictable browsing patterns that change constantly, so merely increasing frequency of your ads wouldn’t solve anything. Research shows that users are more likely to click on an ad that they have seen previously and that an average 61% of viewers receive only one exposure over a campaign’s lifetime, but a majority of 82% of viewers received three impressions or less (MediaMind Research StandardBanners - Non-Standard Results).

This is where retargeting comes in handy. Retargeting is a technique that serves your display ad only to those viewers who are underexposed, ensuring that they have the chance to move forward to the next favorable stage and are more likely to convert or purchase.

Be Useful

Provide your viewer a reason to interact with your ad. Interaction with your display ad means they are interacting with your brand and developing a favorable attitude towards it.

A recent study showed that viewers valued incentives the most appealing factor when it comes to engaging with an online ad.

Tomorrow we contiue with the third part of improvements for display ads.

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Display Advertizing: The Billboards of the Web. Seventh in a Series.

2011-04-18T13:01:00.001+02:00

Steps To Improve Performance of Your Display Ad Campaign (Part One)

Publish Your Ad on Web Pages with Specific Content

When a user is browsing a website with specific content, it indicates that he or she has a high level of interest in that particular subject. For example, if a viewer is browsing websites about hotels and hotel rates, he or she is more likely to be looking to book a hotel room. Serving a related ad to users exactly when he or she is showing interest in the product will result in more conversions and sales.

Less Equals to More and Vice Versa

Larger banners have high visibility and grab the viewer’s attention, increasing the chances for a click or conversion after they see the ad. However, your message should be simple and effective. The aim is to attract the viewer’s attention and convey your message without confusion or losing attention.

Consider the Format

The most common display ad formats are banners and ad boxes on web pages of relevant content.

While these are effective, if your brand has a more complicated message like the introduction of a new product or service or even a change of image, consider other formats such as interstitial, gateway, and over the page ads, which allow for narratives.

Interstitial ads serve between pages as a full page ad, which times out after a specified duration before showing the website. Over-the-page ads automatically expand downward pushing the site content down with it. The ad unit then auto collapses into an ad on the page that can be expanded by viewers for additional information.

The peelback ad acts as an over-the-page floater on the top right corner in a collapsed state and on interaction unfolds to reveal the full ad content.

Today’s online market is filled with animated and content rich display ads because viewers have become more demanding and consumer savvy. These various ads not only grab attention because of the presence of motion, interactivity and narratives but enable advertizers more creative freedom.

Tomorrow we continue with part two and optimization of these ads.

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Display Advertizing: The Billboards of the Web. Sixth in a Series.

2011-04-15T15:00:00.001+02:00

Measure Your Campaign

The standard method for measurement is taking the following into consideration.

Clicks: The amount of clicks a display ad received
Impressions: The number of times the display ad has been seen by visitors
CTR: A click-through rate is the ratio between clicks and impressions
Cost per Sale: This is the amount spent per sale and the figure is dependent on the cost of the product or service itself that is advertized.
Conversions: An HTML conversion tag is placed on the website (or landing page) and tracks the amount of conversions that have occurred which could be an action like a registration or a purchase.

Keep in mind that these figures collectively will demonstrate your campaign’s performance. Do not rely solely on the amount of clicks. Research by comScore has shown that two-thirds of Internet users do not click on any display ads over the course of a month and that only 16% of Internet users account for 80% of all clicks. It also showed that the viewers who click tend to be younger and less affluent than the people who don’t.

MediaMind’s recent analysis of more than 100 million conversions from thousands of campaigns worldwide found that only about 20% of conversions are the result of a click, while the majority is the result of viewing the banner without clicking.

Hence, clicks are only a partial measure of the progress and effectiveness of an online advertizing campaign. About 80% of the traffic of viewers that were exposed to the ads is not accounted for when measuring clicks only.

Next we discuss steps to improve performance of display ads.

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Display Advertizing: The Billboards of the Web. Fifth in a Series.

2011-04-14T17:53:00.001+02:00

Publish Your Ad Online

Banner ad exchange program with other websites

You can exchange display ads with another website and for every 2 of their display ads seen on your website; one of yours will be displayed on their website.

The biggest advantage of joining a banner exchange program is that it allows you to post your banner ads for free on different websites. The disadvantages are that you can’t control what ads are going to be on your website and you won’t be able to decide the position of your ads on their website. It’s usually the exchange program that is in charge and you may not like where they put your ads or their choice of ads for your website. Some major banner exchange programs are:

LinkExchange
BannerSwap
SmartClicks
Free Banners
LinkBuddies

Pay publisher sites or banner ad network organizations to post your ads on a variety of websites.

Put simply, banner ad networks act as brokers between advertizers and publishers. Like banner exchange programs, they’re in charge of placing an advertizer's banner ads and tracking all activity related to that ad. But again, the advertizer doesn’t have much control over placement. The advantage is that the extensive services ad networks provide are available at an affordable cost.

With the availability of several banner ad networks, it’s very important to do your research before you choose one. Larger banner networks sell advertizing space from high-traffic publisher sites, which is expensive. Some banner ad networks offer affordable advertizing space on smaller publisher sites, and some networks offer discounted "remainder" advertizing space, also known excess banner inventory.

You can choose to pay websites or organizations by the cost per impression or pay per click method.

Some major impression networks are:

DoubleClick
Flycast
BURST! Media
ContentZone

Some major click-through networks are:

Banner Brokers
ValueClick
BannerSpace
eAds

Approach websites yourself

To place advertizements this way, you have to approach each site individually, and follow their advertizing rules and pricing packages. This method gives you the ability to control your ads better. You can choose websites with relevant content and can even choose your ad’s location. This can be a cheaper alternative of advertizing if you target small websites that don't attract a lot of other advertizers. Larger sites have a set advertizing package with a relatively high price tag.

Most websites sell advertizing space on a CPM basis, with a package of a certain amount of impressions. CPM usually depends on the popularity of the website or its type of audience. High traffic websites will charge more, as will websites of a targeted niche or demographic.

Use a digital agency.

The benefits of using an agency are their expertise. They help you find the best publisher sites for your ad and make best use of your budget by negotiating the price of banner ad space. Advertizing agencies also have a creative team to come up with campaign ideas and artwork.

These agencies usually get better prices for advertizing space because they have a lot of clients and can buy impressions in bulk.

The biggest drawback of this option is that advertizing agencies will only deal with a client or account of a particular size or budget. If you have a limited advertizing budget, you can opt for actual banner ad placement instead of paying for marketing strategies and high-end banner design.

Use an affiliate program

With this method, you pay publishers of your display ad only when you get a specific result like a particular amount of clicks or purchases.

You can pay the publisher a percentage of your profits based on these results. Unlike traditional banner advertizing through a banner network, you don't have to pay based on click-through or impressions in bulk. You pay a small amount for each click, or you pay a percentage of your profit from a referred visitor.

Tomorrow we will discuss control of costs.

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Display Advertizing: The Billboards of the Web. Fourth in a Series.

2011-04-13T15:00:00.001+02:00

Types of Display Ads

Traditional

These ads are usually rectangular in shape, contain text, and have GIF or JPEG images that link to another page or site. They are the most common and popular ads seen online because they load quickly, are easy to design and modify and are easy to embed into a web page.

In-line ads

These ads can be seen in a column on the right or left side of a web page and can be graphical with a link, or just text with hyperlinks highlighted.

Pop-up ads

These ads are generated onscreen when you click a link or button on a web page. When clicked, a separate window opens over the page you are viewing. Some viewers find these ads intrusive because they have to click to remove them and return to the original page.

Ads in any of these categories might be static, animated, or "rich media.” A static ad does not change when you look at it - it is a single image.

An animated ad uses several different images to give the appearance of motion; they are usually in GIF format. A rich media ad consists of audio or video, or involves some programming with Java to create a very interactive ad.

Standard Sizes of Display Ads

Tomorrow we will cover publishing.

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Display Advertizing: The Billboards of the Web. Third in a Series.

2011-04-12T15:00:00.001+02:00

Types of Display Advertizing

Category

Example: You are advertizing a new beauty cream so you would publish your ad on websites that have a largely female audience like fashion or beauty sites.

The Effects of Display Advertizing

You choose to advertize in this category of websites because their visitors are your target audience and your ad is of topical interest to them. This type of advertizing is best for raising brand awareness as it involves a long list of websites for your ad to be published on.

Retargeting

Example: You checked the Groupon website and later on, while you’re surfing online elsewhere, you see Groupon display advertizements. With retargeting in display advertizing, visitors who have already been to the specified website are served the ad when they continue browsing elsewhere on the Internet. This form of advertising is more expensive and targets a smaller audience, but promises a good end result as the viewer has already established an interest in the product or service by visiting the publisher’s website before.

Contextual

Example: Placing display advertizements about the latest Jeep model on a car forum website.

Your display ad matches the content of the web page and is of topical interest to its visitors. This type of advertizing works best combined with category advertizement.

Behavioral

Example: If you have been visiting a list of different real estate websites in search of a new apartment, you will be served an ad for real estate listings.

Behavioral display advertizing targets a specific audience based on their web history with the help of cookies. This form of display advertizing focuses on a smaller audience but provides more solid leads in the end.

A 2010 Display Advertizing Study conducted by Advertizer Perceptions Inc. shows advertizers prefer demographic and behavioral targeting.

Tomorrow, we look at types of Disiplay ads.

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Display Advertizing: The Billboards of the Web. Second in a Series.

2011-04-11T15:00:00.001+02:00

Why Display Advertising?

The online ad market has grown from using static JPG image banners to GIF banners and now Flash banners, which have smooth animation, exciting effects, engaging graphics, and interactivity. Content and smooth animation can be shown all together in today’s animated display ads. They take less space on the web page. You can put more text content and graphics and try different looks on the same web page.

Display ads also load quickly onto a web page unlike video ads. Viewers become impatient when the web page loads slowly and usually leave the page. Display ads make a page load quickly, so users can see the page content and ads without any hassle. Major portals like Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL are using display ads for their own services and their clients, proving that display ads still have high popularity.

Display advertising accounted for around $5 billion in online advertising spend in 2009, which is a good amount (www.emarketer.com). But search advertising on Google alone was roughly 12 billion last year.

These 12 billion dollars were generated on search engine results pages that represent roughly only 5% of the Internet’s page views, which means that 5% of the Internet’s page views generates more than twice the revenue of the rest of the Internet combined.

So what is the differentiating factor? Basically, targeting is the key difference between display and search advertising. Search engine marketing is one-to-one advertising where the user’s purchase intent is the primary focus. If a viewer searches for “Rayban sunglasses,” he will see ads that match this phrase.

But with display advertising, advertisers broadcast their ad on a paid ad space, which is perfect for creating and promoting brand awareness. There is no campaign modification to suit the individual viewer.

However, new technologies and advancements in the industry are set to give us improved targeting.

Also, the introduction of real-time bidding will soon decrease the difference between display advertising and search. Real-time bidding lets advertisers bid on one impression at a time, giving the ability to pick the right impression (viewer) at the right time on the right website just like search engine marketing.

The biggest advantage and most beneficial factor of display advertising is branding. Recent research by comScore confirmed that although it might be a delayed effect, a strong branding process definitely takes into effect when a viewer is exposed to a display ad, even when he or she doesn’t click on the ad.

The research also showed that display advertising has an effect on user behavior even at low click through rates. One hundred and thirty-nine display campaigns were monitored and the results showed that they had extensive effects on traffic, sales, and branding despite a low amount of clicks. The display campaigns gave a 46% increase in websites visits and exposed viewers were 38% more likely to conduct an advertiser related branded keyword search. Twenty-seven percent were more likely to make a purchase online and 17% of viewers were more likely to make a purchase at the advertiser’s retail store.

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World's 1st Computer More Complex Than Originally Thought

2011-04-11T11:50:00.001+02:00

from ReadWriteWeb.com

The Antikythera Mechanism, built in the 2nd century B.C. and recovered in 1900, is the most complex machine to survive from ancient times. Looking like a sophisticated time piece, it turned out to be just that. The device apparently calculated the positions of the moon, sun and known planets. But recent work has revealed an additional element of sophistication: it tracks the sun’s relative speeds at different times of the year.

The Hellenic device, thought by many to have been used as a calculator for religious festivals. is widely considered to be the oldest extant analog computer. It has between 30 and 70 gears and a host of other parts. The two concentric rings on the face contain the Greek zodiac and the Egyptian months.

To describe the relative speed of the sun (based on the elipitical route of the Earth around it), the mechanism’s makers have increased the distance of the zodiac sections on the device to reflect the apparent difference in the sun’s pace across the sky.

Wired quotes University of Puget Sound physics professor James Evans, who led the investigations of the latest team, on why the makers did not gear the difference, as they did the change of the moon’s speed. The difference in the speed of the sun is much more slight than the moon. Gearing such a difference, said Evans, would be exceedingly complex.

“Evans and colleagues suggested a simpler way to make the sun dial appear to change speed: Stretch the zodiac. If the spaces on the front wheel of the mechanism were of different widths, Evans reasoned, then the hand representing the sun would take longer to travel through the part of the year lumped under the zodiac sign of Taurus than through Libra.”

The original find was a corroded lump. Since then, the device has been scanned using a number of technologies, the most recent a 3D x-ray scan. The scans have shown the constituent parts, most of which would have remained unknown otherwise.

This additional element of the Antikythera mechanism does not make the favorite theory of its use any more or less likely to be true. Nor does it answer the questions of where such complex engineering came from and where it went. It does hint that the mechanism may hold additional secrets and that is exciting for its own sake, quite apart from what it might teach us about our past.

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Hey, You Want to Know Something Useless? 2008 World Information Consumption: 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes

2011-04-09T15:49:00.001+02:00

by Kyle Thibaut on April 8, 2011

Back in 2008, the world consumed 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information. If all that digital information were to be printed and stacked up one-by-one, it would easily stretch from Earth to Neptune and back about 20 times.

According to research conducted at UC San Diego, 27 million computer servers processed 9.57 zettabytes of information back in 2008 – it’s safe to assume that today’s consumption is far greater than 9.57 zettabytes since growth is estimated to continue doubling every two years. By 2024, the amount of information processed, if printed, will extend more than 4.37 light-years away from Earth reaching Alpha Centauri.

Although that number is just an estimate, the researchers compiled the estimate with data from extensive interviews, sales figures, industry reports and other sources. While the researchers think the estimate is valid, they also admit that it isn’t complete because they didn’t include data from large companies like Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft.

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Display Advertizing: The Billboards of the Web. First in a Series.

2011-04-08T18:13:00.001+02:00

Introduction

Display advertizing is an online form of advertizing similar to billboards, television ads and print ads.

The ad has a simple concept and instantly provides the viewer with upfront information about the product or service. A display ad is embedded into a web page and consists of images and text. It can include sounds, animation or video to attract more attention, or with the help of some programming, can be highly interactive. HTML code is used to instruct a web server to load the specified website when the display ad is clicked on. Revenue for display advertizing is usually earned on a cost per click (CPC) basis.

The main aim of a display advertisement is to target traffic to the website that is publishing the ad. Like all other forms of advertizing, it also aims at sales of the advertised product or services and creating brand recognition and awareness.

History

Display advertizing has only been around for the past 15 years. The first ever display ad was sold in 1993 by Global Network Navigator (GNN), which now holds the title for the first commercial website in history. But HotWired, the world’s first commercial magazine, changed history by being the first to sell a large amount of display ads to various corporate companies. In 1994, HotWired placed the first display ad on its website. The ad was purchased by AT&T and was 468 x 60 pixels in size. It read, “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will”.

Since then, display advertizing has come a long way. Up until 2004, display ads were measured and sold solely on the number of impressions, but today it also relies on tracking, the amount of clicks received and conversions made.

Monday I will talk about why you should use Display Advertizing.

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Maximise Your PPC Ads with the Right Keywords. Tips to Make Sure You Use the Best Keyword Phrases

2011-04-07T15:00:00.001+02:00

Effective keyword research will ensure that your PPC ads appear on the top slot in the sponsored links of any search engine results page. While having 10 or 20 well-chosen keywords may bring most of the traffic, it does not cover all possible niches.

Here are some tips to make sure you use the best keyword phrases for PPC ads:

Use free keyword research tools. There are special tools on the web that help you find great keywords. Some of the free keyword research tools that work well are Google Keyword Tool, Wordtracker, Metacrawler, Keyword Discovery, Yahoo Search Marketing and SEO Book Keyword Research Tool.
See who is competing for the best keywords. Go to a search engine like Google and do a search for the keywords in your niche. See which other businesses are already dominating that space. If you realize that a search term is far too competitive and may drain your entire PPC ad budget, expand your search term into a long-tail keyword. Keep in mind relevance and the relationship of the word to your business.
Search engine keyword phrases. Combine the best keywords and create search terms. Use different combinations, and use plurals as well as singulars. Make sure the terms are closely related, so you’ll get the desired results. Group top level keywords with other related search terms.
Refine your list. From your shortlist remove any keywords that are not relevant to your website or keywords that you don't have enough content to support. Remember it is always possible to go back and add content and keywords later as well.
Use compound, separated, hyphenated, and merged keywords. Users often search trying multiple variations of words and spellings looking for the right fit. To be sure you are not missing out on any terms or phrases research compound, separated, hyphenated, and merged keywords. Example, ‘lifesize’, ‘life-size’ and ‘life size’.
You can even bid on your own / your company name. Enter a business / brand name into a search engine window. You’ll be surprised at how many organizations other than the one you searched for will show up with PPC ads! Your brand name should be your space on the Internet, so don’t let a competitor get in there by bidding a few cents on a keyword.

Make sure your PPC campaign stays as effective and efficient as possible by tracking keyword and keyphrase successes (and losses); which ads bring in the most traffic (and which don’t) and conversion rates. Contact us to manage your PPC advertising so you use your budget wisely and get the best results (traffic and conversion).

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Pay-Per-Click Advertising: Optimise Search Results; Drive Targeted Traffic

2011-04-06T17:01:00.001+02:00

Pay-per-click (PPC) or Paid Search Marketing is a form of online advertising where you can attract traffic to your website or landing page via ads hosted on a search engine. Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine you choose to advertise with will display your PPC ad when a keyword query matches your keyword list, or when a content site displays relevant content.

Such ads are called sponsored links or sponsored ads. They typically appear adjacent to or above organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a web developer chooses to place them on a content site.

How does PPC benefit your online marketing initiatives?

Immediate Results. Your ad will be visible on the search results page as soon as your PPC campaign with a search engine goes live.
Cost Control. As an advertiser, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, not each time it shows up. You can control your spending on each PPC campaign. This is one way to ensure that your marketing plan for different categories of your products or services achieves targeted results. Not to mention, it is an inexpensive and easy way to get search traffic.
Geographically Targeted. You have the ability to select a particular area or region as the target market by adjusting your PPC campaign settings accordingly.
Seasonal / Time-specific Marketing Approach. You can actually define ad scheduling; choosing to run your campaign only on the precise days and in fact during the hours you want.

If you would like a better understanding of how to do this economically, contact us.

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Toys or Weapons?

2011-04-05T14:00:00.001+02:00

I am getting completely off subject here and I credit John Biggs at Crunchtech for inspiring me to say something. After watching the video embedded here, John Biggs wrote in his column that, as these "copters" get more sophisticated, they will be used as weapon delivery systems for terrorists.

He got many stupid answers as few people are bright enough to see the seriousness of the threat. But I think something could be required to be built into these machines to stop the threat, or do we have to build anti-weapon weapons?

What do you think?

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New Internet Threats. Do You Want to Know More?

2011-04-04T14:02:00.001+02:00

From Wikipedia:

Operation Aurora is a cyber attack which began in mid-2009 and continued through December 2009. The attack was first publicly disclosed by Google on January 12, 2010, in a blog post. In the blog post, Google said the attack originated in China. The attack has been aimed at dozens of other organizations, of which Adobe Systems, Juniper Networks and Rackspace have publicly confirmed that they were targeted. According to media reports, Yahoo, Symantec, Northrop Grumman, Morgan Stanley and Dow Chemical were also among the targets."

From McAfree Labs:

"The news in January of the Operation Aurora/Google incident gave birth to the new category of Advanced Persistent Threat (APT), which has been a hot topic of discussion in the industry and press for much of the year. However, there is much confusion about the true nature of these attacks.

"The generally accepted definition of an APT is one that describes a targeted cyber-espionage or cyber-sabotage attack that is carried out under the sponsorship or direction of a nation-state for something other than a pure financial or criminal reason or political protest. Not all APT attacks are highly advanced and sophisticated, just as not every highly complex and well-executed targeted attack is an APT. The motive of the adversary, not the level of sophistication or impact, is the primary differentiator of an APT attack from a cyber-criminal or hacktivist one."

So now you are quite well informed (for five minutes) until things change again.

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Hacktivists. What Are They? Will They Lead to Revolution? The Future Came True.

2011-04-01T14:00:00.001+02:00

McAfee Labs report continues...

"We expect that social networks will be used more often to bring hacktivism into play next year. Just as cyber-crime has moved from isolated individuals (able to create a piece of malware) to unstructured groups (able to launch a DDoS), we expect to see much more and stronger organization and structure with hacktivist groups in 2011."

Now to something VERY interesting. Did the lab forecast the future or what? This was written BEFORE the Tunisian and Egyptian demonstrations.

"Hacktivism will become the new way to demonstrate your political position in 2011 and beyond. Transitioning from the streets, political organizers will move to the Internet to launch attacks and send messages in broad daylight or Internet time. And as in the physical world, we expect that hacktivist attacks will inspire and foment riots and other real-world demonstrations."

McAfee could not guess that this would all happen in 2010. What the McAfee Labs did not say is that in countries where computers are not commonplace, the cell phone has been used. So all that is said above applies to the phone as well.

I wanted to make an April Fools joke, but the subject is too serious.

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Hacktivists. What Are They? Will They Lead to Cyberwar?

2011-03-31T14:00:00.001+02:00

I am continuing to show you the McAfee Labs report, not because you can do anything about cyberwar and Denial of Service threats, but because you might be interested in knowing about them, especially when they come on the news.

The McAfee Labs report continues, "Attacks motivated by politics are not new, but we encounter them more and more regularly. And they will be far more numerous in 2011. In addition to defacement (the primary activity of Hacktivists) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS, the latest fashionable activity), new kinds of sophisticated attacks will appear.

"Information theft, stolen and then disclosed to discredit political opponents, will certainly increase. More groups will repeat the Wikileaks example, as hackitivism is conducted by people claiming to be independent of any particular government or movement.

"Whether governments drive these manipulations and activities covertly is open to debate, but it is likely enough that states will adopt a privateer model. Hackitivism as a diversion could be the first step in cyberwarfare. Everyone within information security, from journalists to researchers, will have to be vigilant to recognize the difference between hacktivism and the beginning of a cyberwar."

More tomorrow.

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Botnet Battles Affect You

2011-03-30T14:26:00.001+02:00

I wanted to continue commenting on what coming dangers are expected according to the annual report by McAfee. I have to assume that you know what a "botnet" is, but, in case you don't, you can go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet.

What McAfee says is "...botnets continue to be one of the greatest and most sophisticated threats McAfee Labs faces. In the coming years, we expect to see more data exfiltration capabilities. Through this year we have seen cybercriminals engage in a growing number of targeted attacks. We anticipate a greater focus on botnets removing data from targeted machines and compaines, rather than the common use of sending spam. Botnets will also engage in advanced data gathering functionality as well as focus more on targeting and abusing social networking."

And the good news, bad news story?

"Botnets are suffering losses, too. Global law enforcement has recently taken down Maripose, Bredolab, and some Zeus botnets. However, botnets continue to evolve. We predect that the recent merger of Zeus with SpyEye will produce more sophisticated bots because of improvements in bypassing security mechanisms and law enforcement monitoring. Mergers and acquisitions have finally made their way into the malware world."

There is only one thing you can do...MAKE SURE TO UPDATE YOUR ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE. But you also need to be aware that the crooks are working their way into the social networks of Facebook, Twitter, etc. and into cell phones.

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The Growing Popularity of the Internet Marketing Business

2011-03-29T15:00:00.001+02:00

In the rocky economical conditions being experienced presently, multitudes have joined the ranks of Internet Marketing to establish a new career. And others have joined looking for additional income sources to support their lifestyle or plan for retirement. Some are looking for an easy way out.

Contrary to Internet Marketing skeptics, there really are some legitimate and successful ways to create substantial or supplemental income in the business of Internet Marketing.

Internet Marketing offers an individual the opportunity to work from virtually any place one chooses to work. That is the one single-most common reason for many starting the online business. This can also be single-handedly the reason many do not succeed in the business.

Working from home or any other nontraditional workplace requires a certain amount of structure to be successful.

Now if you thought working from home was distracting, add to that the constant distractions associated with the Internet and, without structure, disaster could be waiting at the very next click. Everything on the Internet is trying to get your attention to click on links, and without self discipline, hours can pass while you are riding the waves in the online world.

The Internet offers the opportunity to become a business owner with little overhead and capital expenditure. Internet Marketing businesses are started and maintained on shoestring budgets and a few have all the glitz and glimmer money can buy.

The success of a digital marketing business is dependent upon the sites ability to attract and hold the attention of the target market. Promoting your site, product, and services correctly is an essential element of building your online presence. So is building trust.

Oddly enough, building a successful Internet business is based upon building relationships and creating trust with your market. An Internet Marketing business can respond quickly to the needs and feedback received from the market. Living in a world where getting there faster and eating fast food on the go, we all begin to expect quick response to everything in life.

Online promotional campaigns can be put into place almost instantaneously as compared to traditional offline promotions. Popularity of having a digital marketing business continues to grow for all the same reasons it began. But going into the business because it is easy is the wrong reason.

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Battle for Your Attention among Search Engines, Email, and Social Media

2011-03-28T16:00:00.001+02:00

See the full gallery on Posterous

Which communication best drives traffic for online retailers? Social Media has received a lot of positive reports for driving traffic to online retailers. Is it a valid assumption that social media is effectively driving traffic or is there yet a better way to drive your website traffic?

Recent reports have indicated that social media may not be the most effective method to increase your website traffic. In fact, these same reports indicate that Email promotions produce about 10% of the traffic to retailers online. The highest results were received by search engine results coming in at 13% of online retailer traffic coming from basic search engine results.

Yes, it appears your efforts to obtain best search engine rankings continues to pay off with increased traffic. It is also a good probability that efforts to freshen up your email promotions could be most valuable for the online marketer.

Social media is reported at the lowest for traffic building at a meager 3%. Your efforts to build your brand and to promote your website continue to produce a high volume of visitors. Approximately 46% of site visitors are generated in this manner.

Sixty-two percent of target markets desire to be contacted by way of email. Allowing customers to sign up for email marketing could be beneficial since it is a highly requested method of communication within the market.

Social media takes a back seat to email marketing and search engine ranking efforts for promotional marketing efforts. At the same time, I stress that social media marketing should be added to your email marketing and website optimization.

Social media may be still gaining in popularity as a communication tool among friends and family, and, if your target market is there, social media is important, but website traffic generation is more directed and effective with search engine ranking strategies and email marketingefforts.

Establishing your marketing plan by methods requested by your target market can result in higher conversion rates and more satisfied customers.

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The Future?

2011-03-26T13:00:00.001+01:00

God...I mean, Google will punish me for simply letting you see a great video:

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Want Higher Open Rates? Try a Cartoon.

2011-03-25T14:15:00.001+01:00

Article and cartoons by Stu Heinecke

"Now John Danenbarger is ordering sandwiches. Is anybody writing this down? Let’s hurry up and order our sandwiches first!"

E-mail marketers talk about CRM, conversions, engagement, social media and more, but none of these things matter if recipients aren’t opening and reading what you send. Without a powerful open strategy, newsletters, drip campaigns -- indeed, your entire sales funnel -- can quickly fall flat, so what’s a savvy e-mail marketer to do?

Return to basics. Magazines and newspapers have been conducting readership surveys for decades, so what do they find pulling top marks for readership and retention? Cartoons.

Cartoons are almost always the best read and remembered part of any publication they’re in, so it makes sense they would be just as effective at generating interest, opens and readership in e-mail.

In fact, cartoons can be even more effective in e-mail, because they can easily generate viral pass-along. Years ago, I had a conversation with the founder of Classmates. In those early days, the fledgling company had a rapidly growing database, but no communication with their members. I suggested sending a monthly page themed around a personalized cartoon users could re-personalize and forward. The result was a 130% open rate, stemming from repeated openings and forwards.

While cartoons are not likely to generate a 130% open rate for your e-mail campaign, they can boost open rates and create a high level of engagement across regular deliveries. But you’d better know what you’re doing.

David Ogilvy and other direct marketing experts have long claimed, “Humor doesn’t work,” which in itself is rather funny considering what we know about cartoons, but they did have it partially right. Just like when you tell a joke on-stage, if you don’t know what you’re doing, humor can easily backfire.

Fortunately, I have been putting cartoons to the test for nearly thirty years. The magic they exhibit in magazines and newspaper readily transfers, resulting in a long line of record-breaking campaigns and long-standing controls for many of the world’s biggest, most sophisticated direct marketers. Here are a few simple rules to help you maximize your results.

1. Humor = Truth: If you think about it, humor always reveals truth. When we laugh at something, we often find ourselves thinking, “Huh, but it’s true, it is like that,” or, “I know someone like that,” or, “I’ve been through something just like that.” That’s the magic of humor; it reveals truth, which creates agreement, which makes it highly persuasive. The bonus is how powerfully drawn people are to cartoons. It’s critical to grab their attention quickly, establish rapport and create a powerful point of agreement if you intend to move your audience to respond. It’s also important to be able to step back and understand the psychology of humor, so you can effectively direct the outcome of your campaign.

2. Steer based on the underlying truth: You’ll either be choosing a cartoon from an established image bank or having one created for your campaign. So you’ll need to steer your choice of cartoon based on its underlying truth -- and how that relates to your product, service or offer. The cartoons at the top of this article illustrate the point nicely. The group spying your order of sandwiches would be perfect for a promotion from a deli to surrounding businesses. The message: “if you’re going to have a lunch meeting, the last thing you should have to worry about is the food.” A lot of people feel stuck in their dreary jobs, and they should find the chicken-suit-lady cartoon especially relevant and endearing, which makes it the perfect involvement device for an offer from a staffing company. The sales chart cartoon speaks directly to the business results we all desire from our selling efforts. The sousaphone cartoon makes a great comment about the frustrations we all share when sitting through unproductive meetings. Can you see how it would be a powerful way to start an e-mail offering a solution to the problem?

3. Make it about the recipient, not you: The most common mistake marketers make with personalized cartoons is focusing on their identity rather than the recipient’s. In all of the examples above, there is no mention of brand or offer, just a singular focus on the recipient. And in every record-breaking campaign I’ve ever been involved with that uses cartoons, the focus has always been on the recipient’s identity.

4. The recipient always comes out on top: This is a pretty obvious point -- you don’t want to send thousands of personalized insults via e-mail to your prospect base. The difficulty is, the humor we’re most familiar with -- the type we use with friends is often biting and inappropriate for campaign use. The solution is to make sure the recipient is always paid a backhanded compliment, while one of the characters in the cartoon takes the fall as the butt of the joke. Can you see that in all of the examples above? The committee members are spying on you so they can copy what you do to keep up with anything and everything you do, even if it’s just ordering sandwiches; the chicken-suit-lady is in a frustrating position and looks to you for sage advice; the executive borrowed a symbol of your success to adorn his wall; the committee is about to honk out a song on a set of sousaphones, but before they roll it out, they want your opinion.

5. It’s got to be funny: Another obvious point, but one that is often missed by marketers. Readers are attracted to cartoons because they’re funny. If your cartoon has no gag, you will disappoint your audience, who will in turn, disappoint you. I remember a mailing once sent by a printer, featuring a cartoon-like illustration of a mailman remarking about an exploding mailbox nearby, with the caption, “Looks like another HOT mailing for John Smith!” Hmmm. Do you see anything funny there? Actually, this piece illustrates how, by focusing on their own identity (their mailings are HOT, not yours), the advertiser endowed the cartoon with all of the appeal of a smelly sock left in your mailbox.

E-mail can be such a powerful platform for marketers, but only if your audience is paying attention. You could be using the latest sales automation solution on the back-end along with the best social media strategies for greater visibility and pass-along. But none of it matters if no one is opening and reading your e-mails. With so much attention focused on new-tech solutions, it’s interesting to see how a simple cartoon can elevate a campaign to cult status. Recipients become fans, and fans can become fiercely loyal supporters and clients, much like the enduring readership of The New Yorker, thanks in large part to cartoons. That’s a pretty powerful bonus when all you were looking for was a few more opens.

-----
Stu Heinecke is author of Drawing Attention, a new book that explains how to put the magic of cartoons to work in marketing, advertising and sales promotion. He is also a published cartoonist, Hall of Fame-nominated direct marketer and President and founder of CartoonLink, a marketing service based on the use of cartoons in various media.

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Internet Marketing. Are You Reinventing The Wheel?

2011-03-24T16:25:00.001+01:00

The biggest Internet marketing mistake is the idea that you have to reinvent the wheel. If you have been using up your creative juices to develop or create something that is already in operation, stop now. There are many other creative uses for you to spend your time on.

By focusing your energies on grandeur aspects of your business you can create a unique brand that will be untouchable by the competition.
With the competition on the Internet today, you have to be better than the competition. You can’t afford to just be average or even good; you have to be outstanding and even remarkable.

Spending your time on branding your business above the competition will have great returns in the market place. This can be accomplished by a unique product and your marketing for that product.

There are a lot of things on which you could be spending your time and creativity and other things that could simply be a waste of time. Time in business means money and money is the result a business owner usually is looking for when they start their business. Does anyone want to complain about having some extra time to really build your business success?

Either your marketing or your product will need to be different than everything else like it out there to accomplish success in branding. This will attract customers to your business and your products. You are not like the competition and your prospective customers will recognize this difference.

This will also increase traffic to your website. Unique products, unique contents, and unique marketing efforts can result in ROI for your business.

Being unique doesn’t necessarily mean reinventing the wheel, but it does mean establishing and identifying your uniqueness.

Spend your creativity wisely with building upon your business uniqueness and reap the rewards of branding. You might even want to be sure you save time and money by working side-by-side with a consulting specialist.

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Stop Hurting Your Customers and Friends

2011-03-23T13:01:00.001+01:00

McAfee’s Annual Malware report stresses some extra unnerving information:

“This year we saw an increase in the sophistication of some threats. ‘Signed’ malware that imitates legitimate files will become more prevalent in 2011. This will cause an increase in stolen keys as well as the techniques and tools to forge fake keys to use in these types of attacks.

“’Friendly fire’ in which threats appear to come from friends via social media such as Koobface and VBMania will continue to grow. This will go hand-in-hand with the increased abuse of social networks, which will eventually overtake email as a leading attach vector.

“We also expect to see an increase in “smart bomb” attacks, those designed to trigger under certain conditions but not others. These threats require victims to follow the designated attack path, i.e. thwarting honeypots, crawlers, and security researcher, while greatly impacting designated and vulnerable targets. Such threats will create an even greater need for Global Threat Intelligence to defend against attacks observed under specific circumstances.

“Personalized attacks are about to get a whole lot more personal.”

We have a client (of whom we cannot rid ourselves, as much as we try) who refuses to understand anything about how his computer system can become a danger to everyone else. So until some malware actually jams up his system to the point of not running at all, he merrily continues to spew out bots and malware to each and every customer and friend. This would not even be a problem if he were not so cheap as to spend money on an anti-virus system and then KEEP IT UP TO DATE!

Almost all of the anti-malware systems today are quite good. The competition is huge. I use a professional version of AVG, but I have no preferrence. Everything I read about the competing systems seems positive.

As hopefully you know, most protective systems today are downright automatic if you are willing to pay a small fee. In the meantime, if you don’t, you are hurting everyone to whom you are connected.

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We Take a Break to Watch a Commercial...Tweet! Tweet!

2011-03-22T16:06:00.001+01:00

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Your Business Needs a Mobile Phone Policy. Why?

2011-03-21T14:00:00.001+01:00

I quote McAfee again: "Threats to mobile devices have been a hot topic within the security community for several years. We expect attacks to erupt at any time, yet they never quite seem to happen.

"Nonetheless, McAfee Labs predicts that 2011 will be a turning point for threats to mobile devices. This year we saw many new, but low-prevalence, threats to mobile devices...rootkits for the Android platform, remote jailbreaking exploits for the iPhone, and the arrival of Zeus (a well-known banking Trojan/botnet).

"The widespread adoption of mobile devices into business environments combined with these and other attacks is likely to bring about the explosion that we have long anticipated. Given our historically fragile cellular infratstructure and slow strides toward encryption, user and corporate data may face serious risks."

Wow! Yikes! The traffic of the so-called cyberspace is moving to mobile. Why would not the cybercriminals to the same?

It would not surprise me to learn that most of your company staff have quite advanced mobile phones, including the top executive. And it would not surprise me if no policy is established for the use of these phones.

The number one policy is to establish what programs and apps can an employee have? But then, how can you control that? Any comments?

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Locative Services are Booming and Will Go Boom!

2011-03-20T14:00:00.001+01:00

Okay, I am a sourpuss at the party. I think the locative services like Foursquare are going to backfire in big way. Right now they are a teenage toy, but...well, read this quote from McAfee's annual reporting on malware:

"Locative Service Abuse: More Internet users at all levels are adding global positioning system (GPS) information to their social media updates so that their friends and colleagues can see where they are. Many locative services also offer users badges and rewards to increase their popularity.

"There is no trick to imagining how cybercriminals and scammers can potentially leverage this infromation. With locative services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook Places, you can easily search, track, and plot the whereabouts of friends and strangers. Use Bing's mapping functionality, for example, and plot all the GPS'enabled tweets in an area. It is easy to correlate these by topic or area of interest.

"In just a few clicks cybercriminals can see in real time who is tweeting and where, what they are saying, what their interests are, and the operating systems and applications they are using. It then become child's play to craft a targeted attack based upon what the bad guys have just learned from these services.

"The fact that these services allow ayone to see and track individuals and groups, including their likes and dislikes, affiliations and interests, and then act on them in Internet time, will make this topic a huge focus for cybercriminals and scammers in 2011 and beyond."

So speaking as the party-pooper that I am, I think something has to change soon, or it will be changed after major calamity. Am I wrong?

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Do You Know About Shortened URLs?

2011-03-19T18:04:00.001+01:00

Shortened URL services have been all over the net, supplied from more and more Internet companies vying for your interest in them. The competition is stiff. I, personally, use bit.ly. Why? Because that is the one I started with since it was one of the early suppliers. Not for any other reason even though I have noticed that bit.ly has be bought out and is supplying simpler usage.

At first, I did not understand why I would want to use this service at all. I didn't care if shortening helped Tweeting. But as I have discovered the space it saves everywhere, it has become something I use more often. It is obvious that it is easier to send "http://bit.ly/amyrCl" to someone than to send the same thing as "http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=34738373&invAcpt=245...." Even if that someone is your mother.

I also found that, if I registered, I could customize the shortened link to actually have a meaning rather than just be a jumble of letters and numbers. So I use shortened URLs more and more.

BUT..,.

I just want you to be aware of the other side of the coin. I was reading the McAfee report. I quote:

"Short URL Service Abuse: Short URLs make sense when used in social media as well as in other forms. Short links are easier to paste or type. The trouble, and abuse, follows because users do not know where these shortened links actually lead until they click them. This is a huge opportunity for abuse. Spanners have already latched onto short URLSs to evade traditionl filters. McAfee Labs expects to see short URL abuse invade all other forms of Internet communications. We currently track and analyze, through multiple social media applications and all URL shortining services, more than 3,000 shortened URLs per minute. We see a growing number of these used for spam, scamming, and other malicious purposes. This nominal convenience will have a tremendous impact on the success of cybercriminals and scammers as they leverage the immediacy of social media over email for even greater success."

So does this mean that I, as an Internet Marketing Consultant, should ask prospects to NOT open my shortened URLs? Should I warn people away? I think not.

The answer is, when you see a shortened URL, take into consideration from where it is coming. Be sure it is coming from a reputable source, just as you should with any link. It should not be harder than that.

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Warnings about Malware Concern You

2011-03-16T17:03:00.001+01:00

I hate to say this, but if you are not careful, you will get yourself into trouble with Social Media. McAfee Labs puts out a report each year which tries to forecast what is coming up in the way of trouble...and it ain't pretty. It concerns both the Internet and the cell phone. It concerns the hardware and the software. It concerns Facebook and Twitter.

I will take some of the sections about which you should inform yourself starting with this quote:

“Social media connections will
eventually replace email as the
primary vector for distributing
malicious code and links.”

Further the report says, "The threats landscape has changed considerably in the past year. McAfee Labs has seen marked increases in malware sophistication and targeting as well as a continued increase in the overall volume of daily malware threats. We have also begun to see some very significant changes in the types of threats that aim at Apple iPhones and other mobile devices. But there is good news, too, primarily a significant decrease in the daily amounts of email spam we combat. These ups and downs lead us to wonder how threats are evolving."

Please make sure your family is aware. Follow along. I will report more on this tomorrow.

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