We are excited to be attending the 2008 Online Marketing Summit in Atlanta on August 12th, which is an educational event for marketing professionals.  This year, the topics include:

• Website Strategy
• Customer Life-Cycle and Loyalty Marketing
• Search Engine Marketing
• Demand Generation
• Email Marketing
• Social Media Strategies

A colleague and I are attending this event in hopes of honing our strategic thinking initiatives. The importance of knowledge-based decision making is critical in today’s economic environment. I think that the sessions offered in this summit will help us greatly with our goals and initiatives when we return.

I’m excited to get involved in the Complete Website Strategy session for a chance to understand user experience and how to improve it.  I am conflicted about whether to attend the Social Media Strategies session or the one one Behavioral Targeting and Technology. The first is geared towards learning how leading companies build online communities and leverage the latest Web 2.0 technologies to proactively engage customers.  The latter focuses on how experience-driven web initiatives can succeed with a combination of online marketing strategies and a technology infrastructure. Please leave comments to suggest which you think would be most beneficial.

This busy day will end with a much needed Happy Hour, with drinks on OMS!  Hopefully I’ll be able to remember the day’s lessons so I can reflect back after we return!

Once again, Yahoo is playing follow the leader with Google.

Google recently announced their capability to read Flash content and Yahoo just announced their ability to do the same. This gives online marketers more freedom to create media rich websites without worrying about creating a separate HTML site. Up until now, Flash developers didn’t need or care about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but that will now change as online marketers evaluate Flash content for SEO initiatives.

#3 player in Search, Microsoft, has not weighed in to date.

You can read further about the news on SEORoundTable.com.

Full coverage of the data in the report can be found at www.SearchEngineWatch.com or on Efficient Frontier’s Blog here.

From an online marketer’s perspective, here are factors that can cause cost-per-click data to fluctuate:

• More advertisers entering the market
• More aggressive bidding to maintain positioning
• Better quality search ads and quality score as determined by the search engine

What do these micro-changes in price reveal to Marketers about current business trends?

In this report, Mortgage advertisers experienced a 12% increase in average cost-per-click which can be interpreted in several different ways:

• Are more mortgage advertisers shifting dollars from other offline tactics like print, TV and Outdoor?
• Is the increase the result of projected increases in real estate activity during summer months?
• Have mortgage leads become more valuable due to lower demand? (Thus causing higher cost-per-click tolerance)

Some of the snags Google is running into include:

• Advertisers are reluctant to put their ads on YouTube due to fear of questionable content of amateur videos. For example, can you imagine a Folgers video ad prior to watching “Coffee causes heart attacks”? Or a Disney family friendly ads displayed before some provocative video of a celebrity?
• Copyright litigation. Viacom Inc. sued Google last year because unauthorized television and movie clips were posted by YouTube users.
• Inefficient sales process. The rapid growth of Google has hindered the sales systems.

Google has launched “Operation Spaghetti” to unclutter the mess that YouTube has been for them. Even if these problems are solved, will advertisers see a benefit to attaching ads to online videos on YouTube? This would be an extremely cumbersome process if we had to evaluate each ad prior to placing a video ad for our clients.

• Will YouTube filter videos for suitable advertisers? Maybe
• Will it rely on the YouTube community? Doubtful!
• Perhaps a combination. We’ll see…

In the meantime, agencies and advertisers running video ads have other options. And knowing Google, they have a plan already in the works to further monetize YouTube. Stay tuned.

Developing a Social Media Marketing Strategy: Where to Begin…

Define your goals. What are the goals of your organization? Do you want to build your brand and increase the number of targeted visitor to your website? Do you want to improve communication among customers, employees and other stakeholders? Do you want to strengthen your relationships and increase profitability? Determining exactly what you want to accomplish through a social media strategy will drive prioritization of your actions.

Define your initiatives. How can you use social media marketing and social networking to improve how a particular function is performed or how the entire organization performs? List appropriate programs, initiatives and projects that rely on social media and social networking and how they relate to your business goals. For example if you

Implement and Evaluate. Once you have begun your social media marketing and networking strategy, you can begin to evaluate how it is meeting your organizations’ goals. Interaction and engagement are key elements of building trust in a brand. The beauty of social media marketing is the opportunity it offers for the interaction and engagement that customers desire today.

Consider the amazing growth of the following:

FaceBook: In 2007, Facebook had an estimated 65 million users, a 120% increase over the previous year. It was the seventh most visited site worldwide with an average of 250,000 new registrations per day. More than half of active users return daily for at least 20 minutes per visit, racking up 65 billion page views per month.

MySpace:More than 300 million users visited MySpace in 2007, an increase of 4% over the previous year. It is the fifth most visited site worldwide, averaging 320,000 new registrations per day.

YouTube:Every day, more than 100 million YouTube videos are played. Approximately 100,000 new videos were added in 2007. It is the second most visited site worldwide.

LinkedIn:The darling of the business community, LinkedIn has more than 18 million users with more than a million new members joining every month. In 2007, LinkedIn experienced a growth rate of a little over 270%.

Not only should you monitor your own social media activities, it is also useful to continually monitor your customers’ and potential customers’ social media activities. Web analytics data, as well as active involvement in key social media sites, will help you collect quantitative and qualitative information in order to understand and adjust to the activities and goals of your customers.

These suggestions assume a “top down” model where the organization’s leaders implement and lead the adoption of blogs, wikis and social networking systems. However, you may experience a “bottom up” adoption model where your employees spontaneously engage in social networking and it rises to the level of an organizational initiative. In this case, a collaborative strategy process that engages employees already taking advantage of social media can provide tremendous insight into ways to use these tools and techniques to reach your business goals.

What’s your experience been with Social Media Marketing? Please comment below.

Leave it to Google to work with Adobe (previously called Macromedia Flash) to read the rich multimedia websites developed in Flash.  Of course, online marketers will still want to ensure the content and links are relevant and score well by the Google algorithm for keyword search on Google.com.  Don’t forget… there are 2 other search engines that Online Marketers will still have to work around for the time being.  No word on when Yahoo and Microsoft may jump on the band wagon.

See Adobe Press Release for more info: Adobe Advances Rich Media Search on the Web

Will you begin optimizing your Flash website for Google, or wait until Microsoft and Yahoo jump on board?

Have an opinion?  Please leave a comment below.

In case you were wondering, The Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) is a global community of business owners, all of whom run companies that exceed $1 Million in revenue.  This year, the Global Leadership Conference brought together 600 chapter leaders from around the globe.

The conference emphasized the idea that as long as there are innovative ideas, there will be entrepreneurial opportunities.  New technology is what spurs new business. 

One of the “hot” areas we at WebsiteBiz believe will continue to grow is around:

• Marketing analytics
• One-to-one marketing, and
• The idea of utilizing the Web as a central hub for measuring integrated tactics

With continued advances in testing capabilities like multivariate testing platforms, there is more focus on website analytics and extraction of the business intelligence that mazimizes performance and return on investment.  Afterall, what marketer wouldn’t want that…?

• View Yahoo’s press release 
• Google’s Blog

• BusinessWeek also commented on the news 

Source: Search Engine Land

The news puts an end to lingering talks involving Microsoft and their intentions to acquire Yahoo…read the Microsoft press release here.

In case you missed it, back in April, Yahoo confirmed that it was running a limited test of Google Inc.’s AdSense for Search service, which delivered relevant Google ads alongside Yahoo!’s own search results. Apparently, the test was successful!

Yahoo’s press release points out revenue projections from the deal, which they expect to generate $250m to $450m during the first 12 months.

Google’s press release makes an interesting point that both companies will work on integrating their instant messaging clients.

For marketers, many expect better performance from Yahoo campaigns resulting in more visitors and higher conversions.

Of course, now the real test begins…stay tuned.

According to the guide, total online retail revenue hit $166 billion in the US in 2007, with the top 500 online retailers accounted for 61% of total online retail revenue.

By the way, total retail growth was only 3.8% last year while online Retail reached 21.8% growth.

So, who were America’s top online retailers in 2007?

1. Amazon: $14.8B
2. Staples: $5.6B
3. Office Depot: $4.9B
4. Dell: $4.2B
5. HP Home & Office Store: $3.4B

Fastest growing categories in 2007 online:

1. Jewelry: 36%
2. Books/other media: 32%
3. Mass merchants/dept. stores: 31%
4. Apparel: 24%  

Slowest growing categories:

1. Health and beauty:11%
2. Flowers/gifts: 11%
3. Food/drugs: 12%
4. Hardware/home improvement: 13%.

In a survey of retailers complementing the guide, Omniture Inc. was the most named ecommerce technology provider across multiple categories in the vendor listings of the Top 500 Guide. Omniture also topped the vendor list with 218 mentions, followed by GSI Commerce Inc., Commission Junction Inc., Google and Coremetrics.

Now, all marketers are not Amazon. But understanding the best practices and how the Top 500 achieved their leadership positions can provide valuable lessons in how to succeed in the fast growing online marketing channel.

What makes this news particularly interesting is that Microsoft has experienced a search query loss of 2.1% from November to December of 2007.  Microsoft Live Search tool bar will now come pre-installed on all HP computers.  According to the press release, “this is the most significant distribution deal for Live Search that Microsoft has ever done.”  This move also marks a smaller-scale and less dominating way to grow as opposed to Microsoft’s previous $44.6 billion hostile take over attempt to buy Yahoo earlier this year.

As online marketers, it means greater search engine inventory and market share, which has traditionally been low.  We will be keeping our eye on Live.com’s search results on our clients’ accounts over the next couple of months.

The ten “googley principles are here and listed below:

1. Focus on people—their lives, their work, their dreams.
2. Every millisecond counts.
3. Simplicity is powerful.
4. Engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Dare to innovate.
6. Design for the world.
7. Plan for today’s and tomorrow’s business.
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Be worthy of people’s trust.
10. Add a human touch.

Does your company’s site convey these principles?
Would adopting or at least considering ways to incorporate these principles improve the user experience of your customer or prospects?

Yes.

For additional insight into the “Googley” philosophy, you can check out Ten things Google has found to be true.

Q1 was rough with consumer spending in the US dropping, hurting both US and global brands, and with stocks in a tailspin every time anyone used the word “recession.”

In March, Forrester asked its CMO Panel how the downturn would affect their budgets. More than one hundred panel members, with an average marketing budget of $83 million, responded that they expect their CFOs to demand an average cut by 3%. They said they would save on branding, advertising, and traditional media, while keeping budgets for loyalty programs, marketing technology, and new media mostly untouched.

Employ agencies that connect with consumers. Traditional agencies excel at above-the-line mass marketing — the line items you want to cut. Forrester believes that the agency of the future will excel at understanding your consumers, involving them in defining the brand and spreading the message, and in making them loyal brand advocates — supporting those budget items you are keeping strong. Some agencies are on the path to connecting with consumers via social networks. Is your agency, or should you switch to a strong partner in these rough times?

Start experimenting with online video. Traditional media is getting into the perfect storm: Consumer attention and trust is at an all-time low, and advertisers are cutting both ad budgets and old media budgets. To survive, they need to target ads and content to individual households and consumers. While Time Warner, Comcast, Disney, and many others will speed up their trials in this field, marketing leaders should get ready for the biggest change since color TV. How? By experimenting with Web video, to understand which processes, content, and customer intelligence you will need when television offers the same functions.

Invest in intelligence. The name of the new marketing game: targeting. Marketing leaders have voted with their wallets to reduce the two large budget items that show the biggest waste. To get the most from their reduced budgets, they need to understand their clients better — their (media) behaviors, attitudes, needs, and social connections.

This requires investments in marketing technology like CRM, in analytics, and in training. We are glad to see that CMOs kept these line items intact.

We believe that these actions are critical for every marketing leader’s success.

Wikipedia defines benchmarking as follows, “…a process used in management and particularly strategic management, in which organizations evaluate various aspects of their processes in relation to best practice, usually within their own sector. This then allows organizations to develop plans on how to adopt such best practice, usually with the aim of increasing some aspect of performance. Benchmarking may be a one-off event, but is often treated as a continuous process in which organizations continually seek to challenge their practices.”

As we are continually faced with more competitive online marketing environments, this information becomes critical in your strategic planning. When future direction is determined by a hunch or a perception the outcome can be negative. The solution lies in the continual use of this information over the long haul. The advantages of using this information enable organizations to see new methods, ideas and tools to improve their effectiveness. The savings over the long haul are significant in reference to both time and money.

So the question becomes…Am I using this information in my strategic planning initiatives?

1. Identify your problem areas
2. Identify other industries that have similar processes
3. Data Collection (Now Available)
   
4. Determine current performance gap
5. Implement new and improved business practices

Remember: “Benchmarking isn’t just about data-culture and circumstances must be taken into account when you view the results.”

Our discussion outlined best practices and marketing options available to businesses in social networks as well as an analysis of the potential legal risks facing companies in this space. As expected, the interesting pairing of marketing innovation and legal perspective…drew a diverse crowd of bankers (event held in uptown Charlotte, NC), entrepreneurs and even a few innovative small business owners. Our panel discussed and shared a collection of definitions, case studies, and a few humorous examples of social networking gone bad (Second Life banking crisis). Overall, the event seemed to satisfy the expectations and curiosity of the audience…there were plenty of “head nods” and notes-taken. Following the event, I eagerly awaited the anticipated growth of my social network from the 120 attendees…through LinkedIn and Facebook requests…which was the final call-to-action from our panel discussion. While, I’m still waiting for the wave of “Friend” requests, I have received a steady stream of feedback (mostly positive) and more importantly, a common theme continues to arise:

How can I explain social networking in 2 minutes or less?

While this question, indicates that our panel may have missed the mark of defining social networking in Plain English… I’ll take the feedback as an opportunity for improvement. In reality, explaining online marketing concepts can be a challenge for busy executives and marketers who need to create vision within their organizations in an ever-changing industry. So, in posing the question to my social network, I stumbled upon an interesting group, Called Common Craft, who takes visual explanation of difficult marketing concepts to a whole new level… Check out the video below, entitled “Social Networking in Plain English.” By the way, The full video of our panel discussion will be available at WCSR.com/WombleTech soon. Enjoy!