Web Marketing Strategies, SEO, Web 2.0, Social Media, Trends & Tips

Web Marketing and Social Media strategies with practical, actionable tips for marketers.
Dec 26
We are the Web
icon1 Bernie | icon2 Blogging, Web 2.0 | icon4 12 26th, 2007| icon3No Comments »

All our clients want to be search engine optimized for Google.  I understand why.  Google is the #1 search engine. 

But, Web 2.0 has been rapidly expanding the web’s ability to deliver customers to our doorstep (or website).  Customers = relationships.  Relationships start with some “link” to your business or to people in and around your business. Where are those people located?

In the world of Web 2.0 the answer is not limited to Google.

Check out this thought provoking video from Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University on this concept. 

It may just change your thinking of the web.

Dec 19

B2B Marketing Budgets To Go Up In 2008 In Online, Events and Direct

Source: Center for Media Research

According to BtoB’s “2008 Marketing Priorities and Plans” survey, 60.1% of marketers plan to increase their overall marketing budgets next year predominantly in online, events and direct, despite the softness in the overall economy. 29.6% plan to keep budgets flat, and 10.3% plan budget decreases.

Last year, in the BtoB 2007 survey, 62.6% of respondents said they planned to increase their marketing budgets in 2007; 29.4% said budgets would be flat, and 8.0% said they planned to decrease their marketing budgets.

In 2008 the primary marketing goal is customer acquisition, cited by 62.4% of respondents, followed by:

Brand awareness (19.3%)
Customer retention (11.7%)
Other objectives (6.6%)

Among the online areas that will see increases next year are:

Web site development (cited by 74.0% of marketers)
E-mail (70.1%)
Search engine marketing (64.3%)
Video (39.5%)
Webcasting (39.1%)
Banners (36.4%)
Sponsorships (29.6%)
Social media (26.2%)

Read the full story here.

Dec 11
 
icon for podpress  Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1921)

Show Notes from Tampa Bay CEO Magazine Power Player Breakfast:
Dec. 4th, 2007 Tampa, FL USA
Attendees: 120 CEO and business executives
Guest Speaker: Bernie Borges

Bernie’s Background:20 years in U.S. corporate America. 1980’s PC software. 1990’s enterprise software In 2000 transitioned to the Internet. In 2002 founded Internet marketing company: rebranded to Find and Convert in 2006. Find and Convert is focused on helping B2B companies find and convert leads on the web through Internet marketing services.

Audience poll:
Services: about 50%
Product: about 10%
B2B: about 50%
B2C: not sure
Geographic:
US/Canada about 50%
Global: about 20%  Regional: about 70%Topical comfort level of audience:
New to Web 2.0: less than 50%
Some knowledge of Web 2.0: about 10%
Advanced: 2 people Social media is all about people communicating and collaborating on the web.  It’s also known as Web 2.0. This is an “un presentation” giving people the freedom to add comments anytime.  Two people with microphones are available for comments/questions. Introduction:  Web 2.0 is making Web 1.0 obsolete.  It’s not just all about being #1 in Google anymore.  Web 1.0 is “read only” and Web 2.0 is “read write.”What’s driving web 2.0? Technology – RSS
High availability of internet access.
Social culture of communication – communities are formed, the collective intelligence of these communities, we need to be aware of these communities and embrace them.Benefits of web 2.0Quick and inexpensive implementation of initiatives. 
Build trust and loyalty. 
Viral potential of marketing, for people to find you in other places beyond Google.
SEO value – links get produced organically and will produce traffic. Blogs - The single largest form of Web 2.0 properties.  Over 100M blogs.  Blogs have been exploding in growth.  BusinessWeek cover story May 2005: all businesses need a blog.  Blogs provide a place for chronological and topical conversation. Blogs are link centric and links are very good for search engine optimization (SEO).  You can add tags and others can submit your blog content to social bookmarking websites. Blog types:
Product or technical
Thought leadership
Tips/best practices
Opinions
Marketing/PRBlogs offer:
Information
Build relationships
Knowledge Management resourceRSS example: Valpak.com – people can subscribe to the most recent coupons thorough an RSS subscription.

Micro Blogs – a form of blogging. You can type short messages to a group of people you select. You tell them what you’re doing right now. I attended a conference where people communicated through Twitter (micro-blogging) about the sessions they attended. Micro blogging is still young technology. Keep an eye on it. Google has acquired (micro-blogging tool) Jaiku and will probably announce plans soon. There are a lot of potentials for micro blogging applications in B2B. See: http://www.findandconvert.com/blog/2007/micro-blogging/.  

Blog Marketing
Blogs are very friendly to search engines.  Blog content is updated frequently. Search engines like updated content.  Blogs are therefore powerful SEO tools.
Blog URLs are called Permalinks. The Permalink can be named using keywords. Blogs are link centric.
Blogrolls: a list of other blogs you think are relevant.
Blog content can be submitted to social bookmarking sites like DIGG.com.  Blog search engine: Technorati is #1 search engine for blogs.
Social bookmarks offer another avenue for your blog content to be propagated across the internet.  

Social networking: Informal audience poll: LinkedIn profile 50% of audience. Facebook: about 10%.
Social networking sites are Web properities comprised of communities. It’s similar to networking in physical networking. Microsoft recently invested in Facebook. Facebook is rapidly being embraced by the business community. We can create our own individual profile in Facebook. We can also create a profile for our business. Facebook has 56M subscribers and adding 250,000 new subscribers each day. Fastest growing segment is over 25 (age). About 40% of their base is now over 25. You can look for “groups” and join groups.  Groups have conversations about topics. Visit groups of interest to see what conversations are taking place. Participate in conversations.  WSJ article about Facebook allowing application developers to write applications.  70,000 developers worldwide have developed over 2000 applications.  More ways to use Facebook to communicate, network, build relationships, evangelize your company, ourselves, propagate our content across the internet. 

Watch for vertical social networking sites.  Not many of them now. Look for social networking sites that target a specific group of people.

Social networking case study: Information Builders, Inc.
www.ittoolbox.com.  A social networking site for IT professional. A great site for IT people to collaborate and find information. IBI identified this social networking site as a target rich site. They visited the site for one year to study the members and their issues. They identified topics for a white paper strategy. They identified the marketing opportunities available within this social networking site. They promoted their new white papers through email and the site’s white paper marketing vehicles. They exceeded their goals by 42% and closed new sales delivering a 750% ROI.

Podcasting: a digital media file available through the Internet through a subscription.

Podcasting Strategies:
Identify the content you have available for a podcast, e.g., tips, trends, best practices.  Research in 2006: business podcast listeners complain of a lack of podcast content. Consider the podcasting format: interview, mono presentation.  Produce text show notes for search engines. Track subscriptions. Build loyalty. Offer them some call to action. Recent podcast from Find and Convert has over 600 downloads. Statistics: Most popular podcast is the most recent podcast telling me the topic is popular. Most listeners have subscribed to my podcasts and listened to the other shows. iTunes search for “web 2.0” I’m ranked #2.

Wiki – a software application that allows you to link web pages together for knowledge sharing.  Wikipedia is best known as the encyclopedia on the web. 50% of corporations will use wikis by 2009 according Gartner.  Wikis are popular in customer service, sales, human resources.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is the next generation of web based software applications using web 2.0 collaboration features.

Video: allows anyone to upload to Web 2.0 properties like YouTube.  Videos can be tagged. Google search results display video content. Video is a fantastic way to propagate content and drive search rankings.  Great example is “Shift Happens” video in YouTube.

Web 2.0 statistics: survey summer 2007.  Which type of web 2.0 medium have B2B marketers used in marketing in past year?
Blogs 70%
RSS 57%
Podcast 52%
Social Network 40%
Wikis 22%

Actionable items for Web 2.0 on your current website:
Provide RSS feed to your content on your website.
Allow people to post comments on your blog.
Allow people to update your wiki.
Allow people to upload content into your website.
Any button that allows people to subscribe to something you offer is a form of Web 2.0.

Final recommendations: Do something!
Start blogging, join conversations, make friends, build relationships.
Visit social networking sites – Facebook. Look for vertical industry social networking sites.
Join groups in social networking sites.
Launch a blog but plan the strategy first.
Establish a corporate policy with do’s and don’ts for social media.
Consider podcasting to propagate content.
Redesign your website with web 2.0 attributes.

Closing thought:
Web 2.0 allows you to open the door for conversation with your customers, prospects, employees and future employees.

Q&A
How do you convert and monetize usage of social networking media?
Study the audience, Find out what’s important to them. Understand how we can market to them following the “rules of engagement.”Vertical industry social networking sites offer more marketing vehicles.

Are opt in pages viable?
Only if the social networking site makes it available. 

Blog how do you keep a blog from getting out of control?
Develop corporate guidelines. Don’t be afraid of criticism.  Embrace criticism and commit to making it right. Your community watches how you respond to it.

Many blogs seem to use Google Adsense.  What’s the future of PPC?
Click fraud is not as big as you may hear.  PPC is not going anyway anytime soon.  Content sites are more risky than search engines for paid advertising. Web 2.0 offers marketers more diversity of advertising platforms.

What are the measures of success to web marketing in 2.0? 
How you measure success, depends on the industry.  Measuring activities on the Internet, e.g., leads, sources of leads. 

How much budget do we allocate to Web 2.0? 
Often it starts with an experiment and grow it from there based on the results.

End of Presentation

Dec 4

I gave a presentation at the Tampa Bay CEO Magazine Power Player breakfast in Tampa.  The presentation is entitled: What B2B Marketers Need to Know about Web 2.0.  I’m sharing the slides from my presentation in this link to a really useful Web 2.0 social site called Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/bernbay/tampa-bay-ceo-breakfast-web-20/.

Hope you find it useful…

Dec 1

Have you heard about micro-blogging yet?  It’s being talked about and written about in mainstream pubs like Time Magazine.  The two best known micro blogging players are Twitter and Jaiku.  Here’s how it works.  You sign onto a micro-blogging social site and connect with your friends and you talk about what you’re doing right now.  Yes – right now!  Ok, so the first couple of hundred thousand users are mostly people with too much time on their hands. 

But, recently I was at a conference attended by my industry peers, and I noticed people blogging to each other in real time about the sessions they were attending (and making lunch plans).   They called it “Twittering.” 

As Web 2.0 services continue to unfold (every day) a pattern has emerged.  The first batch of users is usually people who spend a lot of time online doing seemingly unimportant things.  I’m referring to consumers who are entertaining themselves as early adopters of the technology.  Then, as more and more people catch on (and fast) we’ve seen business professionals adopting social sites to create groups and networks for collaboration, conversations, knowledge management – real productive stuff! 

So, how will micro blogging become productive to business users?  Well, Google has already purchased Jaiku.  Apparently since there were only two major players in this space and Google is moving into the mobile communications space I’m guessing that Jaiku has very strong features in mobile communications. 

So, here’s one potential scenario in my crystal ball.  A sales and marketing team for a services or product company is dispersed througout a geographic region.  I can see how members of teams comprised of sales reps, engineers, specialists, product managers and line managers back at HQ would use micro blogging to discuss details about a sales situation RIGHT NOW!  In fact, I’ve been in meetings where the prospect asks a question and the team on site doesn’t have the answer right now (“we’ll get back to you on that.”)  But, with a quick micro-blogged note to someone on the extended team (to their cell phone if necessary) we can get the answer on the spot and probably within seconds.  Boy, I sure could’ve used that a few times in my career. 

Does this crystal ball application idea give you any practical ideas for micro blogging? 

I’m sure glad there are people who embrace new Web 2.0 technologies and give us ideas about ways to implement them in productive ways in our businesses.  I can hardly wait to hear about Google’s plans for Jaiku.  They’ve been quiet about it.  But, just wait and see.