To highlight this point, the folks at Brafton have produced a fantastic infographic on the matter. The stats should open even the reluctant marketers’ eyes to the value of generating quality content. Businesses pay attention – “content is king!”

Still not creating content on your website? Can’t create content on your website? Not sure how, please investigate our Web Development, Search Engine Optimization, or Writing Services or  call us at 1-877-817-4443 or email us today.

Today I logged into SlideShare.net for the first time in a while with my Facebook account and within seconds, my Twitter feed was blowing up with “hey, why did you add me on SlideShare?” And, “I just got an email that you followed me on SlideShare, I didn’t know I had an account.”  Hmmm… I don’t recall this happening the last time I logged in, nor do I remember seeing an “auto-follow” option in any of my account settings. Looks like another forced opt-out “feature” to force “socializing” amongst users.

Lately, Facebook has received a lot of negative press for its opt-out only “feature upgrades”, yet here is another example that I’d like to discuss. Not that I have any personally revealing info on SlideShare.com, nor do I intend to, but I had no option, that I recall, to avoid blasting my friends/fans/followers list with email notifications that I was now following them. As a user of the service it left a sour taste in my mouth and leads me to think about my customers and if any of them are doing anything similar that might turn off their customers.

In this case, SlideShare offers a service that I require and I am invested in the ecosystem. Much like Facebook users, who are similarly (if not more so) invested in that ecosystem, getting upset is not going to make much of a difference and I’m sure there is a setting somewhere to disallow this “feature”.

Now, if I were evaluating a service for the first time, and not just a socially networked one like SlideShare, I may give consideration to how I intend on using the service, who I will be sharing my content with, what info I want to make available to the vendor/provider, what information I want my clients to provide and how others generally feel toward online privacy. If my first experience is “how/why did you add me/follow me” I might not come back at all. The old adage “it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission” is not cool when it comes to online privacy issues.

In fairness, most of my clients aren’t nearly as comfortable with the socially connected world I live in and would likely cease using such a service if they had a similar experience. As online marketers, we have to recognize that we are typically on the bleeding (or at least cutting) edge and most of those around us are not. As you’ve transitioned from traditional to online marketing, have you put up potential roadblocks to engagement? Have you built up walls that you can justify scaling but your typical customer might consider too much trouble? Are you facilitating engagement and by allowing customers to opt-in or are you trying to capture them with opt-out techniques that may cause them to disengage?

As you can see, the data for “Yellow Pages” and “Print Directories” is conglomerate.  Looking specifically at print YP usage, search has a 2% advantage over the course of the year and almost 20% in the past month alone.  When the data is broken down by age things get more interesting:

All demographic groups seemingly ignore internet yellow pages, search engines are the preferred channel for ages 18-54 and even the 55-64 group is at a statistical parity between search and print yellow pages (+1% YP).  At 15% penetration in the 65+ group it should be noted that even seniors can no longer be ignored on the Web. 

Small businesses, listen up – you can’t say that your customers aren’t online any more.  With 78% of Americans on the Web (Internet World Stats), and the majority using the search engines to research and contact local businesses you can’t afford to:

 a) Not have a company website
 b) Have one that doesn’t show up in local search

Remember, even if you have a diehard core customer base and even if business is currently healthy you are being shopped, you are being researched, you are being evaluated locally and your potential customers are looking for what you do not just your name. 

Go ahead and Google your products and/or services for your city, then check 5-10 of your surrounding cities and towns (assuming you aren’t marketing nationally).  Now let’s do a quick ROI calculation for this exercise – How many yellow pages ads would you need to cover 11 markets (your primary location and 10 secondary/supporting markets)?  At what cost?  $400/mo, $500/mo… each?  Perhaps more?

Based on our own customer’s research, they’re seeing website-generated local leads exceeding YP leads by 80% (case study coming soon).  Every market is different but the evidence is clear, what used to work in the yellow pages is less effective than what works online. Move that spend (or a proportionate percentage of that spend) into local search engine optimization – It’s clear your customers are looking, can they find you?

Lead sponsor of the law from the city Board of Supervisors, David Chiu, states: “We carefully crafted our legislation to withstand a legal challenge from the industry whose mass over-distribution of Yellow Pages has degraded our environment and blighted our neighborhoods.”

The Local Search Association (formerly the “Yellow Pages Association”), the trade group that represents the commercial phone book industry, has already threatened a legal challenge stating “we cannot stand idly by as our members’ constitutional rights are trampled by a city once known for its tolerance and protection of civil rights.”  (Read Rachel Gordon’s article from the San Francisco Chronicle here)

Violating the phone book industry’s civil rights?  Really?  It sounds more like shady business practices to me.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a landline phone, haven’t for years, yet I still get a new phone book every year.  Where does it end up?  Yep, the recycling bin.  That phone book was counted in the distribution numbers, yet I never opened it.  Not once.  Heck, my 7 year old son knows how to Google what he wants but has never looked anything up in a phone book.

So what is a business owner to do?  The phone book bases its rates on distribution (about 250k in my market) yet only a minute fraction of that distribution is actually “delivered”.  Heck, in my neighborhood they drive around in a pickup truck throwing phone books off the back, regardless of my customer status with the phone company or my desire to ever have a phone book!

To be fair, the yellow pages were the one-to-one directory that connected prospects (with high intent) to your business.  Today, that one-to-one marketing is done online in real time.  Your website is infinitely updatable and allows you to communicate your entire “value proposition” to your prospective customers.  Where your website is dynamic, the Yellow Pages are static; once your ad is posted it cannot change until the next printing. Not ideal for actively marketing anything!  Also unique to the Web is the lack of limitation on search criteria.  The Yellow Pages restricts you to set categories, I hope you’re not in a unique niche or offer multiple services across multiple categories – it can get quite pricey!  With the Web, you can optimize your website for anything you offer based on your customers’ criteria.  Offer door knobs to your local market? No longer are you relegated to “hardware stores” only, you can be found for “[city] door knobs”, “[city] door handles”, “[city] door opening devices”, or any other slew of terms that may be relevant to your bottom line!

Not sure how to make the transition from the Yellow Pages to the Web?  Already out there with no measurable results?  Contact our SEO department today for a free analysis!

Greg Satell very effectively connects social media’s current state of affairs with the “Gartner Hype Cycle,” noting that as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have risen to the forefront of the social media landscape, social media itself has passed its “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and has entered into a “Trough of Disillusionment.”

This echoes what I was saying in my own, previous blog “2011 – the Year to ‘Processitize“: the hype curve for social media was being propped up by very vocal social media marketers who really didn’t understand marketing or social networks and often equated a large personal following on (insert social channel here) to a viable business model.  What I call “me-toos” have really dug up some bad press for social media marketing lately, and rightfully so. Sadly, where I thought the flurry of me-toos was ending, it looks to be picking up steam and turning off more and more businesses to the real value of social media as a channel.

I’ve spoken about our NetCentered concepts in many of my blog posts and how no one marketing silo should be over-, or under-considered for a business’s marketing mix. Going back to December 2010′s “MySpace is Dead… and Other Fallacies,” where I share what happened to me when a local business chose not to project up-to-date information on the Web, this latest discussion is no different: you need to go where your customers are, engage them (with a sound business case), and measure your effectiveness. Where social media struggles is in effectively converting the conversation into business. Typically, when the actual costs of a large-scale social media marketing campaign are compiled, the campaign is found to be prohibitively expensive – virtually all overhead; you must have someone tweaking, posting, etc., for your company, in your voice. And if you don’t have a solid strategy in place to track effectiveness, you may very well be spending disproportionately, perhaps seeing no return on your investment – or even experiencing a loss.

My opinion differs from the original article in that I believe social media marketing is far from dead. I also find dubious the proclamation that Social Network Marketing is becoming the focus of a future plateaued social marketing landscape. As the Hype Curve shows, social media marketing will end up on its “plateau of productivity,” and for many businesses and legitimate agencies it is already there. ROI can certainly be calculated with the proper analytic tools (and the  knowledge/experience to use them) as part of a contiguous (NetCentered) marketing strategy. Satell clarifies his position later in the comments area and states that it is possible but very difficult to effectively track SM ROI. He also points out that, in practice, most or the “ROI cases” he’s seen are an “absolute joke” – the me-toos strike again.

As for social network marketing, as technology makes the (frighteningly) large amount of personal social data more available to marketers, it will surely trickle into the hands of small businesses. I believe, however, it will have its own independent Hype Curve and relinquish itself to the realm of big business budgets for quite some time. In the end, maximizing your effort is about determining your goals for any outreach program. Social Media Marketing is just one piece of a larger puzzle. It can be cost-effective in helping small-to-midsized businesses build buzz and generate sales. Or it can be a total waste of effort.

Getting the results you want won’t be easy; social media marketing doesn’t magically work on its own. It’s up to you to take the first steps. Study real-world cases of social media  successes and failures, then start small by listening and observing what your competition is doing. Get to know your customer base within the context of each social channel and start engaging them with quality content. Don’t over-think your posts, but at the same time, don’t make light of your effort – time is money, and wasted time is … just wasted. Build your brand and your fan base. Get help setting up the metrics and analytics you need to determine your effectiveness. Learn how to isolate your traffic streams. And, above all, make sure you have a strong Web presence to drive traffic back to you for both informational purposes and conversion.

In short: Don’t believe the hype, make your own.

See additional Social Media Marketing blog posts and additional information on our Social Media Consulting Services.

Compete.com recently blogged about Facebook’s high rate of “likes” in the month of January. Using Compete.com data, Facebook saw approximately 127.5M unique visitors in the month of January and over 75M liked at least one page. To play the percentage game, if almost 60% of the Facebook audience is engaging business, promotional, and other marketed pages then you can’t possibly ignore the medium as a viable opportunity to get your message heard. Let’s say you have a hundred fans on your business page, and they have an average of 130 friends each (facebook average).  That’s potentially 13,000 eyeballs on your message.  Let’s say just 1% of your fans friends choose to re-like your content…  You see where I’m heading with this.

Now you and I both know that Facebook usage stats are far from 100% accurate and I’m a staunch realist who is wary of statistics thrown around on the Web so take these numbers with a grain of salt. But you also have to factor in the unseen benefits of active Facebook posting as well.  “Bing powered search” (Yahoo! and Bing) publish facebook posts in its results which can vastly improve your visibility in Search.  And now facebook users who comment on your brand or products may be quoted as a sponsored message (don’t get me started on this one) and advertise and endorsed message for you with no intervention. So ask yourself this:  “is spending a few minutes of my time using social media worth it?” Well, Can you afford not to? Find out more about our social media and online marketing programs or call us at 1-877-817-4442 today.

I am so glad the “experts” were so accurate in their 2010 predictions. “What accurate predictions?” you may ask. Well, as we should all remember, 2010 was the year that traditional media died, the Web died, and Social Media went mainstream. OK, so 1 out of three ain’t bad, right? WRONG.

What I saw in 2010 was a lot of me-toos and self-professed experts out preaching an Answer to all that ails marketing. As many businesses found out, there was little ROI at the end of the rainbow. Much like in the infancy of the Web, businesses still showed reluctance to jump onboard with SEO and Social Media and failed at actively marketing their businesses online. They merely dipped their toes in the water, put little-to-no effort into it, and got little-to-no result. The problem isn’t that Social Media, or AdWords, or SEO, or any other online medium doesn’t work – the problem is, there is no Answer to marketing, no silver bullet, no easy out.

In the early days of the Web, businesses often threw up a webpage with an “under construction” image and a waiving flag .gif and said they were “done”. In 2010, many businesses did much the same thing in the socialsphere – and saw nothing from their keeping-up-with-the-Jones’s approach to online marketing (social or otherwise). Sadly, too many me-toos and experts preyed on this naivety. They did so by professing they had “lead generation superpowers” and promising they could show companies how to “make gobs of revenue” by tweeting or keep their doors open simply by making their Facebook pages “awesome.” Nonsense!

Take a look around. How are you reading this post? Right: via the Web – in some way, shape, or form. What about the TV in the other room? Are there commercials running on it? Yep. So, as it turns out, not only did the traditional Web not die last year, it flourished. Same with traditional media: stocks of the major traditional media companies (Viacom, CBS, Time Warner, News Corp) are up from 3%-46%. “Come on!” you say, “what about national ad agencies? Surely, they’re feeling the sting of this new economy.” Again, stocks from companies such as Interpublic, WPP, Publicis Group, and Omnicon are up from 17%-44% (source: Digital Tonto).

So, what should you make of this? Well, hold on a minute. Before I give my thoughts, please understand there won’t be any Answer in it per se. You’ll have to draw your own conclusions. With that out of the way, I believe businesses that will see the greatest success from their marketing efforts (on and off line) and the highest ROIs in 2011 will be the ones who stop thinking about singular marketing silos (“Answers”) and start looking at strategic Processes to determine where to spend their valuable time, money, and effort.

If you’ve tried Social Media or other methods of online outreach and failed, don’t be discouraged by poor past performance. It may simply have been a matter of not having enough experience. Then, too, maybe you didn’t invest enough in the effort. Or maybe you invested too much in a particular “solution” that proved to be a silo. Whatever the reason, marketing didn’t magically change in 2010 – it evolved. We saw the mainstreaming of new channels to engage your customers, not old channels going away. More and more of your customers, to one degree or another, are embracing these new channels. Are you?

As you develop and execute your online marketing strategy for 2011, the challenge becomes effectively segmenting your target audience into its constituent subsets and validating which channels your customers designate as their “preferred engagement paths”. Ask yourself, “What if..?” What if you don’t engage with them on this or that channel? What if you do? And most importantly, ask yourself how you will measure the success of each engagement and how to combine your efforts to maximize your efficiencies.

Much like with your website, if you build it, tweet it, post it they will not come. You must actually engage with your customers if you want them to engage with you. Don’t simply retweet the same news stories on your website and post them back on a twitter feed widget expecting any ROI. Similarly, don’t hire a full time employee to tweet, blog, post to Facebook, etc ., with no plan for conversion, no focus to the message, and no analytics to track your results. If your customers are watching more TV, listening to radio, reading the (dare I say it) newspaper, then you need to engage them there as well. Use your website as the “anchor” or “hub” to all your marketing and outreach, on- and offline – remember, you can’t effectively deliver your whole “pitch” in a 15- or 30-second ad, let alone a 140-character tweet. Drive these channels back to your website, and track each campaign to determine where you’re being most effective. If you don’t engage with your customer, someone else will. But, since you can’t be all things to all people and can’t be everywhere at once, you must choose which basket or baskets to put your eggs in and reinforce success. So my advice is to start looking for the Process and stop looking for the answer.” If you’re not sure where to start, Cirrus ABS offers a full range of consulting services and strategic website development programs. If nothing else, sit down and take a fresh look at what you’re trying to accomplish and plan from there. It may seem daunting, but effort in planning will pay dividends later.

InformationWeek released some startling new statistics for the shear volume of both search AND traffic that Facebook has achieved over the past year.  According to InformationWeek, Facebook accounts for 4 of the top 10 most searched terms in 2010 and 3.48% of the top 50 terms.  “Facebook”, “Facebook login”, “Facebook.com”,and “www.facebook.com”  were the 4 terms listed in the top 10.  Experian Hitwise also reports that Facebook’s search volume is up 207% over 2009!

As for traffic, Facebook overtook Google in the “most visited sites” category  while Yahoo! maintained a good showing wiht 3 sites (mail.yahoo.com, www.yahoo.com, and search.yahoo.com) in the top 10.

What does this mean for your business?  Well, the top 10 most visited sites account for 33% of all websites visted within the survey period.  If you’re not taking advantage of Facebook tremendous growth of “the social network” you are likely missing out.  Not being found on Google?  Again, missing out on not just traffic but the opportunity to acquire new business, manage and grow relationships with existing business, and manage your business’ online reputation unlike ever before.

Ready to get off the bench?  Contact Cirrus ABS for a free needs analysis.

Compete.com recently released its top 50 websites, by unique visitors, for the month of October. Not surprisingly, Google reigned supreme with over 146M unique visitors. For those keeping score, that’s unique visitors – not repeat visitors. Wow. So how did the rest of the Web-world fare, and what does that mean to your business? Let’s take a closer look.

Facebook.com came in third with 133M unique visitors, about 26% of its current members used the website at least once in October, and it will likely overtake Yahoo for the #2 spot if it keeps up its current growth. MySpace is still number 14 with just about 58M unique visitors – yes, folks, the 14th most visited site is MySpace. Bing came in at number 6, showing double-digit gains and moving up fast. Further down the list we see Twitter at 30th with over 25M visits. And nowhere to be found are any of the “yellow pages” websites.

So why the need to share this information, and how does it relate to you?  Simple, as a business, you must decide where to bring your resources to bear so you maximize your efforts and minimize your spend. Right now, there is a lot of confusion with the onset of social media and search engine optimization getting so much attention. What are you to do?

Well, ask yourself where you go when you’re on the Web at work, at home, on your mobile device. Ask yourself how you search for products, services, and information. With all media outlets vying for your hard-earned dollar, the name of the game is going where the people are and where the greatest intent is. When I go to Google, I don’t search “just for fun,” and the few times I’ve needed to use a phonebook site like yellowpages.com it was because I couldn’t find a business phone number or address on Google. Heck, I can’t even remember the last time I looked up a personal home phone number.

If your business wants to make itself visible for the people looking for it, you must  take some basic steps. First, what is your target demographic and what sites might they be frequenting? I don’t care if you make “pink and purple widgets,” your customers are on Facebook, they are googling your products and services, and they probably aren’t looking for you in the phonebook. If you’re targeting a younger crowd or have a product or service related to the music industry, MySpace is still a player and should be considered for your marketing mix.

Top 50 Websites for October 2010

For a final word on the search engines, let me share an experience I had earlier this year. I had an appointment with a specialist at a hospital yesterday and wrote the address wrong in my calendar – a common mistake. I’m in the wrong lobby and the customer service desk is busy, so I googled the doctor’s name on my Android phone and came up with the practice’s old address – a 3-year-old address and no website to be found. The customer service desk was still busy, so I searched the practice name: same results. Frustrated, I pulled up the hospital’s website, searched the doctor’s name,  and viola! I was only 2 entrances away. So in the span of a minute or so, I had to hunt for a simple address because this medical practice didn’t have its own website and was not current in Google locals.

Please heed this warning - in my scenario I was visiting the only specialist of its type in the region. I had no choice but to hunt. If you expect your customers to be so devoted, you may be mistaken. Look at your marketing spend, and if you aren’t regularly devoting time to your website to aid its search position, aren’t out in the social sphere creating a buzz, or spending money with a professional to help you, then you are missing the boat. There is a river of opportunity asking for you - all you have to do is get in the boat.

For more information on how to get in the boat, please attend one of our free upcoming seminars, view our services, or get in touch with us today.

If You Build It They Will Not Come.

Another common driver of change is current customers’ comments and feedback on the look, feel, and functionality of a website. While this is crucial to the design process, it is too easy to focus solely on your existing customer base and lose sight entirely of growing that base. In most cases, you don’t know what you don’t know;  while you may see an increase in site conversions, you won’t see an increase in traffic by making it look pretty. This initial bump is often caused by excitement and buzz about the “new” site, yet the buzz (and business) quickly fade back to previous levels.

The Seeds of Change

All of a sudden (or seemingly so) we’re noticing more businesses inquiring about optimizing their existing websites themselves or paying a firm like ours to optimize it for them (rather than redesigning it first). Somehow, it seems as if a collective conscious awakening has occurred and businesses are recognizing that driving new site traffic from search will lead to more business. The problem here, again, is, you don’t know what you don’t know. These sites are often years old (many times built by inexperienced “developers” or agencies more focused on looks than results), have no backlinks or PageRank built up over time, have no mechanism for getting fresh content onto the website let alone a CMS. Also, in many instances, a company’s expectation of SEO is way off base – expecting to score well for competitive terms in a very short timeframe. What gets me is how people make the assumption that by merely saying they are engaging in SEO they’ll displace hundreds or even thousands of websites for particular keywords or phrases is possible because they essentially “willed it to be so.”  As with so much in life, you need to have the right tools, the right content, and the right level of ongoing attention (SEO is never past tense) and WORK – remember, SEO revolves around content and building authority both of which require resources. Of course, this all starts with a strategy to get from where you are today to where you want to be, bringing the right resources to bear (time/money/effort), and executing the plan.  Once there is a plan in place, then look at what visitors experience when they arrive at the website (imagery, look, feel) and focus on improvements – not the other way around.

If you’re on the fence about what direction to take your Web presence, ask yourself (or your team) what the difference between H1, H2, H3, etc., tags means to search engine placement – or not. Ask them what Caffeine did for your Google search engine results. You trust an expert to do your broadcast marketing, print work (in many cases your invoices and letterhead), maybe even your on-hold message, so why would you not trust a professional to work in a space that you are inherently not familiar with? Give us a call, and let’s have a frank and open conversation about your Web presence and what it’ll take to achieve your goals. Now, what you do with that information…