Online marketing news and resources.

Rumours that Google is looking to go into broadcasting have been leaking through online over the last few months, with Autumn set for the first appearance of Google TV-powered devices. The exciting crossover opportunities for businesses of all sizes and how website design and online marketing will be transformed, lies tantalisingly just weeks ahead.

According to the world’s No.1 search engine, Google TV will be an “open platform”, aiming to unite search and browse capabilities, integrating web search results and TV content, side by side. Google TV will support Flash and make the “full internet” available through set-top boxes and “integrated” TV screens.

Formatting website accessibility for the new channel could be an issue – the TV browser is Chrome – although Google TV is intended to work with existing TV screens but either TV or the set-top box will require an HDMI input or output, respectively.

Google TV ( GTV) will be built and remote controlled on the Android platform, not Chrome OS, and will run Android apps. Users will not require a cable TV subscription, although they will need WiFi in their home to access GTV and for those who simply wish to use Google TV to get internet content and web video as an alternative to paying for a cable subscription.

The present arrangements for advertising from traditional TV sources or existing internet sources/publishers/networks will continue but the likelihood of new and specific GTV ad formats to eventually be produced.

According to Google, there will be the same privacy options and controls as available for Chrome online and an indication that there will be tracking and data collection.

Partner companies involved, in addition to Adobe, will include amongst others, Intel (chip), Sony (TV) and Logitech (set-top box), Logitech says its box will have a remote which also integrates a keyboard. Google have yet to give any indication of pricing.

As and when Google TV finally hits a viewing screen, and we enter the next era of integrated online and broadcast interactive content, the possibilities for marketing strategies and optimising brand identity presence across the new interchangeable platform could be very attractive indeed!

Have you checked in to Foursquare yet? The likelihood is that you’ve come across the term on the web recently, understood it’s some kind of game but not quite sure what it’s all about and why you should bother with it. Two million have bothered and business users are finding Foursquare a new online marketing opportunity.

Foursquare is a location-based game, which allows you to tell your friends and colleagues where you are at any given time and also gives you the option to share this through social media messaging networks, Facebook and Twitter. You also do have the option to keep your whereabouts secret but still play the game to win points.

Starting the game on a clean slate, each time you check in at a venue, you are awarded points and compete throughout the week with other users in your city or just amongst friends to see who can accumulate the most points and collect unique badges for completing different tasks. A user can become the Mayor of a city if they have more check-ins over a 60 day period than anyone else.

Foursquare is one of the new location-based applications, which offers a powerful brand identity awareness opportunity to a company looking to increase their presence in the real world and on the web by combining offline customer activity directly with online social engagement.

Established just over 12 months ago, Foursquare is currently being embraced by hotels and restaurants, who have been quick to see the advantages of incorporating the application within their marketing strategies. Thus, latest offers and special deals are available to those who check in. In addition, user generated content means you can obtain tips and latest info from your social network.

The rapidly increasing use of mobile internet with mobile apps means that eCommerce business owners can use Foursquare to engage with their increasingly ‘mobile’ customers offering Foursquare “Specials,” which are discounts and prizes offered to loyal customers when they check in on Foursquare at their venue.

A free analytics programme will provide participating businesses valuable, detailed information on who is checking-in to their locations. This gives them the ability to communicate with visitors to deal with all manner of visitor feedback, and to help with providing a better customer experience. Customers love to be rewarded for simply frequenting their favourite places and businesses who aim to recognise their “regulars” can engage and encourage them to come again.

An established venue on Foursquare can check its real time stats on key visitor traffic, including, most recent and frequent visitors, the time of day people check in, total number of unique visitors, gender breakdown of customers and percentage Foursquare check-ins are broadcast to Twitter and Facebook.

Some businesses still think that social media is just another selling tool! The ‘old skool’ proposition of really believing that by tweeting dozens of product messages at everyone on more platforms and channels everyday, they will increase enquiries! They don’t get social media, how to use it and what to expect from it!

There is a difference between marketing online and online marketing! Being online defines your activities rather than the other way around. The way to build brand identity and establish eCommerce viability through social media networking channels is to form credible, transparent and interactive relationships with your market audience niche.

Social media is a radically different proposition from other communication channels. Successful social engagement is essentially an outcome of what you do and say. It’s the quality and intrinsic value of the message content which drives an audience response, visitor growth, and propels conversation.

The key to successful social media engagement – is exactly that, engagement! Simples ! Become involved, enter into and develop trusted relationships.

Building a brand loyal audience is an outcome of thoughtful, useful, and interesting multimedia content, conversation, and meaningful offers. The authenticity and value of that content is related directly to its relevance to the consumer’s lifestyle desires. Social media is a way to engage potential consumers based on what the consumers care about, not what the vendor wants to sell!

By better understanding the abiding interest and concerns of their core consumers, it is possible to create soft marketing strategies in the form of real opportunities for both parties to engage and exchange meaningful feedback and conversation, leading to a real-need service supply.

A ‘follower’ community builds as a result of providing daily content which is consistently engaging and entertaining. Using a variety of multi-media tools from writing content which is info-rich for blogs, articles, Twitter /Facebook updates, videos, newsletters and customer forums.

Confidence to respond is more likely to occur when community followers are purposefully drawn into the conversation, questions asked and deliberately seeking their views, ideas, and opinions. Consumers want and expect quick responses to their questions. Speed matters, and being responsive is part of the assessment of how well a brand is perceived to perform – and ultimately survive – in the social media space.

For those businesses who view social media as little more than just a cheap, additional ‘sales and marketing’ avenue, to be measured in simplistic time/cost ROI formulas is to be stuck in the 1980s. The enterprises who truly understand and integrate social media platforms into their company’s total brand communication presence will be sustained online and see the fruits of their long term investment.

It’s been said before – online marketing tools complement, not compete with each other! Reports always announce that one or the other is in the ascendency but in fact, social marketing helps draw attention to a company profile or product, whereas sales are likely to be generated when information is received by email!

Another report – based on a survey of over 1,400 so-called ‘representative’ consumers, – has just announced that email still beats social networks when it comes to marketing for eCommerce. Apparently, over a third of consumers are not using a social networking site, and online brand identity ‘fans’ are still in the minority!

Depending on the market niche a business occupies, email marketing can definitely be the more important way to contact people over a longer period of time, because, as a rule, almost everyone reads email. Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, or LinkedIn will invariably update to an email account anyway!

As we  all should know by now, because a variety of media platforms are available, every user will adopt the channel they feel is best for them, even though, as the long established workhorse, email continues to be the desired channel for many types of commercial communication. (more…)

It is fairly common knowledge amongst many of the website design and marketing agencies, there have been recent changes to Google’s algorithm, influencing optimised content, link building, and ultimately, visitor search results. In short, Google looks at site pages for signals of human activity in the form of regular, fresh content of relevance, influence and authority.

After two decades, the web resembles Mount Everest. Countless explorers have visited, leaving behind a detritus littered landscape. There are simply thousands upon thousands of dead or automated websites left unattended or simply not being looked after and updated on a regular basis.

This begs the question of how much – or how little – online marketing the site owner companies are actually doing? What would be the incentive, value and interest for a return visit? Aside from an eCommerce business alerting their database via an email marketing newsletter to a few price changes, the content remains unaltered, and means visitors will not be staying at the site to engage further. In other words, a brand identity is formed of a price–driven attitude, which offers potential customers nothing further in terms of added content value.

Google is always changing, and some important changes are now more evident than ever before. Relevant back linking from niche market sites is now more important and valuable, even if the sites are lower ranked. It had always been assumed that the top ranking factor voted by Google was always keyword-focused, anchor text from external links. (more…)

It really does seem that the case for implementing subscription internet, or Web 3.0, gets stronger everyday! Email intrays and blog comment forums are clogged up with over 85 per cent spam. News that Twitter crime has risen as usage has increased is only as expected!

Website hackers, PC jackers, password pirates, zombies, trojans, and worms threaten to totally crash civilisation online at any given moment. Firewalls, AntiMalware, PC Defenders and Spyware Terminators – endless security software is needed to simply try and guard you from the ceaseless hordes of cyber barbarians trying to find a way past your precious portals!

So who are we engaging with on the web anyway? Where do our online marketing messages and social media connections really end up? Deleted or destined for a darker place?

According to latest analysis of more than 25 million Twitter accounts, as users become more active, the malicious activity also increases. True Twitter Users are tweeting more often but the survey reveals that worryingly, only 28.87 per cent of Twitter users are actual True Twitter Users!

Twitter has 105,779,710 registered users!

Further statistics from April 2010 claim that Twitter has 300,000 new users signing up with 600 million search queries every single day, and receives 180 million unique visitors per month!

But the report finds that half of Twitter users tweet less than once a day, and only one in 10 users tweet five or more times a day. 30 per cent of Twitter accounts have never tweeted.

Whilst one in every eight Twitter users has at least 10 times more followers than they are following, only one in 10 users is following more than 100 users, and almost half are following less than five!

Yet, the Twitter Crime Rate for the first half of 2010 stands at 1.67 per cent. Based on the above figures, there appears to be an alarming large number of microblog imposters marauding the social networks.

Does this mean the optimisation of website accessibility for social media messaging, network engagement and tsunami waves of mobile applications are opening up your system to total takeover by malevolent forces, more than ever before?

In the end, is there a bitter twist if you Twitter this?

Nope!

Seems the message has not been getting through! A new 2010 study finds that nearly half of the UK’s SME websites contain little or no SEO, are not indexed with search engines and thus, fail to make any visible impact on driving visitor traffic, whatsoever!

According to a recent State of UK Business Websites Study, of a sample 1,000 SME websites analysed, around 47 per cent contained little or no SEO content.

It beggars belief that nearly twenty years since the start of the web, in today’s highly sophisticated online marketing environment, fast forwarding into mobile internet and social media led customer engagement, a staggering half of business websites defeat the purpose of their existence in the first place.

Why bother having a website if you are not prepared to invest in it’s growth and development? Learn to understand how it should properly function to enable it to perform properly so your business brand identity stands a chance of succeeding online? (more…)

In today’s crossover world where business, social and personal can often mingle, traditional CRM is not necessarily eclipsed by Social Media connections, but informs the new platforms and channels, which are bringing to business and their customers, alike, opportunities and rewards not possible just months ago!

Great claims are made for the dizzying array of social networking forums and messaging mediums buzzing incessantly around today’s web 2.0 space. But for many companies, just getting to grips with the idea of a blog, or a Twitter account, when they are perfectly happy with their original website design announcing ‘Welcome’ to their visitors, and simply using email, the whole social media thing is starting to gnaw!

Business owners perfectly understand traditional CRM as ‘customer relationship management’, which helps them by collecting different sales and customer information from the various areas of their company. They are able to get a close up profile of individual customers or companies which directly feeds into ongoing and future sales drives to best serve customer requirements.

Social Media takes the CRM model and builds an online marketing concept to utilise the social web and kickstart the conversations. Potential customers expect online interaction and closer engagement. Now different parts of a company, from customer services and sales/marketing teams can either listen in or enter customer conversations, bringing added value information in real time.

Business owners should recognise the intrinsic value of being seen to be actively engaged in customer engagement in a social media context. Providing daily fresh content via blog, Twitterfeed or Facebook update will require optimising for greater website accessibility, which actively embraces closer customer contact and ultimately drives increased, repeat traffic.

Social CRM gives real, key benefits: (more…)

While it’s true that some businesses will always take a ‘wait and see’ attitude to changes resulting from emerging technology, there are many who readily see the online marketing opportunities for taking a competitive lead in their particular niche.

Of course, all the high profile publicity given to the teething problems of Apple iPhone4 have not helped! In any event, some business owners will a take the view that most technological changes are no more than a passing fad, citing that they can’t see how social media would work to make money for their particular business.

The development of the mobile internet may not be so easily dismissed as recent research seems to suggest that more businesses have embraced the possibilities of mobile, and of those with dedicated mobile sites, 39 per cent highlighted the benefits as being ‘sales from a new channel’.

In fact, two thirds of respondents went as far as saying that mobile was seen as important or essential for making their brand identity visible. As a consequence, they felt they were able to provide a more quicker, easier and efficient way of communicating with their customer base. Moreover, their mobile sites also enabled positive feedback to be received and gave flexible opportunity for two-way interaction with 83 per cent stating results met or exceeded expectations. (more…)

A ‘Third Screen’ wave is underway, transforming online marketing and offline interaction; mobile access is anywhere, anytime, when you want. But beyond the early adopters, will business be now savvy enough to recognise opportunity or wait too long to see if mobile apps can play a long term marketing role before investing?

The professional website design and marketing practitioners are often best placed to quickly evaluate the viability of emerging web technologies and software platforms. It is their job to inform and advise their clients how to formulate best practice marketing strategies to engage niche market audiences.

The rapid emergence of both mobile and tablet technologies is creating a new communication potential, but is also throwing up once again, a big challenge to business on working out how they can properly measure metrics, decipher analytics, understand new audience types and engagement methods.

The confusion lies in the fact in that to use mobile marketing for delivering basic text message alerts or customised, interactive content is to use mobile as an individual distribution channel, which can produce a variety of customer response patterns, positive or otherwise.

The key attraction for eCommerce business is that mobile devices are almost certainly now a constant ‘life’ companion with which we rely upon to carry out an ever increasing number of minute by minute ‘work, social and personal’ activities. This fact alone is unique to mobile and should shape the messages. To be effective they need to be seen as highly relevant or highly important that best serves both parties, rather than annoying and intrusive. (more…)