Asia leads the way in social media usage, with the exception of Japan...
Why widgets don't work ... and the counter-argument ...
Chris Brogan's tips for getting started in social media ...
And food for thought (thanks to Deb Schultz for flagging this up) - Grant McCracken's excellent post on 'just enough' and what it means to small scale entrepreneurs ( I can relate!)
For some time now I've been aware that I never pick up the Yellow Pages. I've never advertised my business in it and I certainly don't use it. I always search the web - and I've heard the same thing from many other people.
But I was surprised to read on Robin Hamman's CyberSoc blog that he never uses Google, or any kind of web search, preferring to ask his contacts via Twitter, Facebook and social bookmarking sites. Is this the next step? Will search ever become as defunct at the Yellow Pages? I can't imagine it happening any time soon, but then again I suppose it's possible, if the social networking phenonemon ever achieves a critical mass.
But what if your friends don't know the answer, nor where to find it? It could be the blind leading the blind. It reminds me of the idea that in the future there will be no 'mass media', that we'll all read our own 'bespoke' newspapers, full of content we've elected to receive and nothing else. Customised, personalised, targeted. Although that sounds good from a marketing standpoint, it leaves me feeling a bit depressed if that's the way all communication is going. No more serendipitous discoveries of things we previously knew nothing about, nothing to challenge our prejudices or ignorance.
Personally I think search is inherent to the web - whether it's using a search engine, searching within a site, searching for likeminds on Twitter, whatever ... we still haven't found what we're looking for.
I really think it's time to drop certain jargon words - take traffic, users and social for example.
More about what I mean in this week's edition of eTips ...
"I'm in online marketing." It's a conversation stopper. Unless you're at a Wired Sussex networking event. It's true that most small businesses these days have a web presence of some sort, and they're aware they need to be doing well on Google. But sometimes that's as far as it goes, especially if they went to a web designer who added 'website promotion' to the service description for another hundred quid.
Fact is, getting the right visitors to your website and converting them into customers now involves a complex set of activities and real strategic thinking. Or, as Lee Odden's suggests in his recent post Recession Proof SEO Tips, "effective SEO in any economic environment means getting more creative, not mundane." Sensibly, small biz clients don't really care about the details, and even less about the jargon that goes with it. They're more bothered with results. How to break that down? Well, you could start with the desired result and work backwards.
Let's say you have a website which sells your goods or services. That means people want what you're selling and are able to buy. That means you have a website that works and a product or service for which there's a demand. If people are even on the website that means they need to have typed in your URL or arrived there from somewhere else. That means they have either heard of your company and URL or they've seen a link to you on the web and followed it. That means you've either done some traditional marketing already or there are links to your site on the web, in places where those potentially interested people were browsing or searching.
Where should those links be? How do we get them? How many do we need? What should they say? How do we know our prospects will see them and follow them? What other forms of promotion do we need to be doing? We've got the visitors - why won't they buy? How can we do all this without spending a fortune? Um... you need the help of an online marketer!
I think so ...
Apparently, the latest release of TV series Futurama paints a grim picture of direct marketers as aliens interested only in fleecing gullible people out of their personal details (I wonder if the bad guys have English accents?)
The public's perception of your average marketer does seem to lie some where between the estate agent and the politician. Even some of my oldest friends express wonder that I could enjoy such a, well, down and dirty profession. Especially if I say I'm in email marketing (ah! you're one of those people who know how to get past the spam filters) or search engine optimisation (ah! the black art of getting Google to place you at the top)
There are certainly times when I'm ashamed to be a marketer, but I stick to my belief that it doesn't have to be that way. If you can't respect your audience you can't expect their respect.
I have a confession to make: ten years ago my introduction to the internet was in the form of an online community for history lovers. We each created our own avatars, took on Roman, Greek or Egyptian family names, and cavorted around the various special interest message boards and chatrooms all day and all night. I made pretend friends and real friends; some I even met IRL (as they say). I learned fluent emoticon-ese, took part in online arguments, role-played, formed some groups, joined others, attended virtual weddings and parties, created banners and avatars for fellow citizens and learnt basic HTML.
It wasn't called social networking back then, but it certainly wasn't Dungeons and Dragons.
Things have come full circle for me now, as this kind of online connection-building (funny how it's not called 'virtual' any more) has been re-invented as the Phenomenon That Is Social Media. This time around it has real commercial possibilities, which is why marketers are so excited about it.
At Eggbox, we don't claim to be at the cutting edge of social media marketing, but we learn new things every day. It's knowledge we're accruing on behalf of our small business clients who want to know about it and be a part of. Not only that, but given my own 'history' in the area of online community (I even used to write academic papers on the subject) it seems like a natural fit. So here we are, getting our feet wet but hopefully our noses not too dirty.
On the face of it there's a lot to learn (not least of all the language of tagging, pinging, digging and pimping...) but I agree with Geoff Livingston when he talks about a social media strategy requiring a blend of PR, traditional marketing and old-fashioned relationship-building networking skills ... in particular, word-of-mouth. Bring it on!
I see that B2B Marketing is holding an event on December 11th entitled 'Is SEO eclipsing pay-per-click for lead generation?'
Yesterday I was at London Metropolitan University giving a workshop on online marketing to a group of women entrepreneurs-to-be, and the subject of SEO and pay per click fascinated them. When searching on Google, the majority claimed never to click on the right hand column, tending instead towards those on the left, even though they weren't all aware of the difference between which were paid for links and which were 'natural' search results.
The idea that your business could appear high up in searches without you having to pay for it was a revelation. If it's free, they wanted to know, why do people bother to pay - especially as more searchers seem to click on the left hand column anyway?
Although there's a stock answer to this, it's still a good question, and clearly one worthy of debate!
"We marketers have room in our heart only for one love - the consumer. Screw everyone else." Those are Mark Ritson's words, in his latest defence of Tesco in Marketing magazine last week.
The ongoing love-in between Ritson and Tesco is puzzling. In this latest article he seems to be saying that if small independent retailers are unable or unwilling to compete with retail giants then they should consider another career. Fair enough. But to suggest that the consumer is better served by one superstore rather than a variety of small independents is odd.
Surely, the one thing that Tesco domination takes away from the consumer is choice.
"The shops that vanish after a Tesco arrives," Ritson goes on, "are, invariably, the ones that overcharged, or offered bad service, or did not provide the best products."
Oh really? Or perhaps just the ones that believed in paying suppliers a fair price rather than driving them to bankruptcy, not polluting the environment with plastic bags and excess packaging, not refusing to engage with and share responsibility for their local communities and not getting up every day with the sole aim of destroying their competitors.
Tesco isn't in the business of serving the consumer. It's in the business of making vast profits.
This banging on about the consumer is king is itself not only hypocritical but it smacks of old-school marketing, the time when nobody cared about things like social responsibility, environmental impact and ethical practices.
Come on Mark, even the CIM has got all shy about putting the word 'profitably' in its definition of marketing. I may be marketer, but I'm also a supplier and a consumer. So please don't preach this kind of stuff in my name, thanks all the same.
Something we've always wondered about here is how best to talk about a company's beliefs, raison d'etre, ethics if you like. It's hard to even talk about it without sounding holier-than-thou. After all, saying 'we're reducing our carbon footprint' or 'we give to charity' or 'we are a green company' can sound dangerously like spin, or jumping on the eco-ethical bandwagon.
That's why I was interested to read at The Wise Marketer about a report by Fletcher Knight, Eight key marketing trends for 2008 and beyond, in which they state that marketers 'must not only be aware of trends but also develop marketing initiatives that genuinely link their 'brand soul' to consumer expectations'.
So perhaps it's OK now to talk about this thing 'brand soul'. A bit of soul searching wouldn't go amiss in the (sometimes) dirty race to win customers and beat the competition. But let's not ignore that little word 'genuine'.
