The Forrester Research report “US Interactive Marketing Forecast 2011 – 2016” states: marketing dollars are shifting away from traditional forms of advertising (TV, radio and print) to various forms of online and interactive venues. Interactive is now cannibalizing traditional media.

Search Marketing leads overall Interactive Spend as more and more companies embrace Search Marketing tools such as PPC (pay per click) Advertising, and SEO (search engine optimization).

Forrester points out that 70% of marketers are already utilizing social media (Facebook) in various forms. Most of these companies have only “dipped” their toe into social media marketing. The next move is to monitor user activity, listen to what consumers are saying, increase engagement, and increase brand loyalty.

Mobile Marketing is gaining considerable momentum. 45% of the adult population has a smartphone or PDA with full browser capability. Apple iPhones and Google Android devices are leading the way as consumers become more comfortable using their PDA’s for practically everything – map directions, couponing, product reviews, and online purchasing.

This is indeed a major challenge for businesses because the marketing strategies they’ve executed on for the last 30 years may be totally redundant within 2 years (if they aren’t already).

The World Cup of Soccer is the largest single sporting event in the world and the opening ceremonies were sponsored by Adidas. What was particularly interesting was that the advertisement displayed on the TV screen as follows:

This was the first time that a major sponsor had used its social media page as the focal point or  marquee. It was a defining point in the advertising world.

This paradigm shift will no doubt create new business opportunities – and a  few casualties along the way.

Danielle K. a grade 8 student at Toronto’s Hodgeson Senior Public School afflicted with Epilepsy wanted to raise awareness and money for a cause she intimately believes in – finding a cure for Epilepsy. Danielle and her grade 8 classmates created a campaign they affectionately called “Purple Palooza” which would do just that – raise money for Epilepsy research. Danielle’s class (and teacher) organized a fundraising campaign that would make Donald Trump of  ”The Apprentice” proud. The students collaborated on a campaign that included several business elements such as: idea brainstorming, strategy, branding, marketing, and tactical execution.

Additional support by teachers, school administrators, and volunteers contributed to the overall  success of the campaign, raising over $1200 in an effort to increase awareness of Epilepsy and to help Epilepsy Canada reach their research goals.

Enabling the power of social media, the students created their own blog to track the progress of the campaign which created incremental visibility beyond the class to include other classes, grades, and parental connections. One of the students indicated that the campaign had stalled midway – but once social media (blogging and Facebook)was utilized – the campaign took on a life of its own resulting in a positive outcome.

Bill Hutchison – CTV’s  news anchor and Honorary Spokesperson for Epilepsy Canada, was there to say a few words and commend the students for their remarkable effort. Gary Collins, Managing Partner of 4Growth and Epilepsy Canada Board Member, was also suitably impressed and accepted the cheque  on behalf of Epilepsy Canada.

The students (and school administrators) all shared in the success of the campaign. Our hats are off to the Purple Palooza team as they are a very “enterprising” group of kids who demonstrated a strong passion and belief in a worthwhile cause.

View some of the snaps from the event below.

You’ve heard it all before. “We can promise you will rank #1 on Google in a week!” or, even better is “If you don’t rank #1 on Google, you don’t pay!”.

What these companies don’t bother to tell you, is that they will get those ranks for keywords you don’t want, don’t need and didn’t ask for. Also, once your website receives those thousands of promised visitors, what will you do with them? Since they were most likely sent to your site via irrelevant or VERY vague keywords, you need to make sure they don’t hightail it.

At the end of the day, conversions are the only thing that matter

I cannot stress this enough. Time and time again, I’ll see a company throw thousands of dollars away on organic SEO or PPC campaigns, drawing all sorts of visitors to their (to put it bluntly) pretty crummy site.

What were they aiming to achieve, besides frustrating their visitors with their cumbersome navigation, poor usability, and complete lack of focus? Was there a goal set in place for the visitors? Probably not.

Converting a website visitor, whether they found your website through organic search, a paid ad, or simply word of mouth, is the most important factor for ANY website. Whether you want a new newsletter subscriber, to sell a product, to have a new member subscribe to a free/paid service, have a contact form filled out and submitted, or if you just want a very specific page to be viewed by as many eyeballs as possible, these are all clear objectives and are what drive a website to succeed.

1. Define The Goal(s) Of Your Website
   Surely you didn’t spend thousands of dollars just to have a page to display your address. Make use of the incredibly useful tool at your disposal and decide what you want out of your visitors and potential customers.
2. Track conversions as they occur, and adjust as necessary.
   This entire process would consist of a lot of wasted effort unless it was tracked effectively. Ensure that tools are put in place to accurately measure conversions, whether it’s done through Google Analytics, Call Tracking, or another service. Has it been a while and you haven’t seen much activity? Perhaps another measurement is in order.
3. Reap the rewards.
   If you begin to use your website as a marketing tool instead of a deadweight, you will begin to realize its potential. You will be able to focus efforts more effectively, while concentrating on what’s most important : your business.

I won’t even get into social media and the unlimited potential it brings to the table once you adopt this attitude. That’s for another week

Social Media is really nothing new. It’s been around as long as there has been something to sell, that’s needed someone to sell it.

Engaging with potential customers and giving them what they want, is much better than simply standing on a cliff yelling down at them, “Buy This! Buy This!”.

So where does television come in? Well, you may not have noticed, but for the many years that you were glued to your tv set watching The Cosby Show or Seinfeld re-runs, you were in fact watching hours upon hours of advertisements. These advertisements were not just thrown into the commercial breaks willy nilly. Market research was conducted, and in a way, aspects of social media were implemented to decide which ads would be shown during which shows, and at what times.

However, over the past few months, many people have slowly started to focus more on alternate means of receiving entertainment, which could mean big problems for television advertisers. This does however, offer huge potential for online, connected social media campaigns. The ability to tell friends what you are watching on your new device, or what you thought of last night’s episode of The Office while sitting on your couch, could give advertisers an incredible amount of data to use in order to deliver relevant, quality ads to viewers.

The alternatives I’m talking about are mainly comprised of what have been dubbed ‘set top boxes’, ‘video boxes’, ‘home media players’, etc. Everyone has no doubt heard of one or more of the devices, some of which are available, some have been announced and are releasing this year. They include, but are not limited to :

Apple TV

This is Apple’s take on online rentals, for your TV. Linking up to Netflix and iTunes is certainly a major plus for many, but with no internal storage, you are limited to renting or streaming. Also, Apple has a tendency for limiting what you are allowed to do with their devices, so unless you are willing to modify the box to accommodate your needs, you might want to look elsewhere. You can however, expect quality hardware and a user-friendly interface.

Boxee Box

The Boxee Box is a physical implentation of their long running media playback software, Boxee. Heavily integrated with the internet, it pulls information down for your media, and links up with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and other social networking accounts. Its interface has proven to be a hit, as well as its compatibility with a range of video/audio formats.

Google TV

Not too much is known about Google TV yet, however the platform has an incredible amount of potential. In a similar fashion to their mobile OS – Android, Google is opting to integrate their software into hardware developed by other companies. The Logitech Revue will debut later this year, which will be powered by Google TV. Google has become a household name now, so it may ride that momentum into a lot of living rooms.

Believe it or not, the XBOX 360 and PlayStation 3

It’s been a long time since gaming machines were used purely for video games. Internet connectivity, media playback, social network integration, and even web browsing (on the PS3) allow users to gulp up as much entertainment as they can on just one device, and allow social media campaigns to engage an entirely new, specific type of audience.

Others include : TiVO Premiere, Roku, WD Live Plus, etc.

Back in July 2009, the ball began to roll on a merger of sorts between Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing search engines. This March the deal became more finalized and a shape began to form for what would become a joint search marketing effort. (Read our own article from January this year.)

What has happened since?  Well, not much really. However, any SEO you talk to will most likely have received countless emails regarding how it’s moving forward, how big things are happening, etc. etc.

In case you haven’t heard, the idea behind this Search Alliance is to allow Bing to power Yahoo’s organic search results, basically replacing Yahoo’s ‘search engine’ with Bing’s. In addition to this, Microsoft’s AdCenter advertising platform will eventually replace Yahoo! Advertising.

What is Yahoo! providing for their end of the deal? They are still the #3 most visited website in north america, which will provide Bing with an enormous playing field for ad impressions. In addition to that, they are providing Microsoft with their own search-technologies (albeit for a 10-year license).

The way that the transition has been handled is very PR heavy, with little effect on the users who rely on the services every day.  We still log in to Yahoo Site Explorer, Microsoft AdCenter, etc. and will continue to do so for months, until the dust settles.

Even the official website itself is not 100% certain when the full transition will take place. As a quote taken directly from the FAQ proclaims :

Our aim is a high quality transition of advertisers and partners in at least the US prior to the 2010 holiday season. However, we may wait until 2011 if we determine this will be more effective.

We will be advancing with a ‘business as usual’ attitude unless there are drastic changes. Will you be changing your SEO approach due to this new alliance? Do you think Google will have some real competition? Leave a comment, or visit us at our Facebook or Twitter pages!

Search engines and SEO in general are changing on what seems like a daily basis. Algorithms are constantly being tweaked, and what worked like a charm 2 months ago, may be falling flat today. This presents an interesting mix of excitement and stress for most marketing companies, and I won’t lie… we are not exempt.

While I could talk all day long about what could help in the short or long term for a website’s online performance, it might be easier to list what NOT to do. We spend a lot of time researching, analyzing and scouring the web, and we’ve seen some questionable things, so here it goes…

What NOT to do with your website

• Make a site entirely comprised of Flash. Search engines don’t need to find your website.
• Rely on Javascript for all links. You should make it as hard as possible for a search engine to crawl your website.
• Ignore social media completely.  Facebook? LinkedIn? Pfft, they’re just fads.
• Stick with newspaper ads instead of a highly targeted PPC campaign. Proven results don’t mean anything.
• Keep content the same…… forever. Why do other companies waste time writing fresh content all the time?  So what if they are constantly ranking higher?
• Ignore analytics. You don’t need to know where visitors come from, or who is converting to a sales lead. That’s where those expensive newspaper ads come in handy…. right?
• If you DO end up optimizing your website, just do it once. 6 months later everything should hopefully be the same anyways.

Once the <sarcasm> HTML tag has been created, this entire list would surely be contained in it, so my apologies.  Also, sorry about the <sarcasm> joke.

Anyways, this is just scratching the service of BAD choices. It was a lot of fun to write surprisingly, so I will definitely be doing it again. In the meantime, have a look at some of our other related articles :

- SEO Rule #3 – It’s Never Too Late To Promote
- SEO Rule #2 – Focus On Website Goals
- SEO Rule #1 – Content Is King

It seems that nearly everyone has a mobile device of some kind, especially ones that have online access able to view content and advertisements.

Why then, do so few people discuss mobile as a viable advertising vehicle? Could it be because of the much smaller viewable area on the device’s screen? Could it be because people are scared of using data on their mobile device, due to the potentially sky-high fees incurred by their mobile carrier? Or could it be that they simply don’t use their mobile devices for viewing media, content or other ad-supported material?

Whatever the case, mobile advertising is growing and is a very large part of the future of companies such as Google and Apple. Approximately $3.8 billion will be spent on mobile ads in one form or another this year, which provides a lot of opportunity for businesses.

This does not include social efforts, such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Local Mobile (organic) searches, Yelp, among other available mobile based services. As these services become more refined and widely used, additional marketing efforts and budgets will need to be allocated in order to capture the growing audience.

Solution : Start small. Make sure your Google Places account is setup.  Make sure you are on Foursquare and Gowalla. Then… setup a Google AdWords – Mobile campaign. Allocate a portion of your existing AdWords budget (you DO have an AdWords account, right??) towards the mobile campaign, and keep a close eye on it.  This shouldn’t be scary, it’s an exciting new way to connect with potential customers!

Here are some other related posts :

- Location Based Advertising, How Could It Go Wrong?
- Twitter Announces Promoted Tweets
- Online Advertising Vs. Print

One of the latest trends in online social activity has been the explosion of location-based search.  Whether it’s through Google search, Foursquare, Yelp, or the myriad other services available through a quick query to your mobile phone’s built-in GPS, tracking a user’s location is proving to be beneficial for both users and businesses.

Security and Privacy

The biggest fear of location based marketing is not a big surprise. Personal data, including the chance of an individual’s location being publicly spread, is highly sensitive and is still a very difficult roadblock for many online businesses to overcome.

A level of paranoia still exists for many people who still believe that “Big Brother” is watching them, and it’s sometimes difficult to prove them otherwise. (See the very highly publicized PleaseRobMe.com) What I try to suggest to these naysayers, is that companies want to know as much about their customers as they can, but they do not necessarily concern themselves with each individual’s activities.

In fact, the largest of all social networking websites, Facebook, is in the process of implementing a service which allows its users to enter their location into their status updates. This could be a boon for businesses as their locations may show up in searches and other friend feeds. Facebook has seen its share of bad press lately though, with a variety of privacy related issues, so this is an update that must be handled carefully.

Imagine searching for ‘Running Shoes’ in your mobile browser, only to be directed to the 5 nearest running shoe stores?

There are other websites, with questionable business models, such as Blippy, who have had some very unfortunate experiences. It’s a service where users can log their credit card purchases and share them with the world.  Why anyone would want to this is beyond me, but… to each his own. User’s credit card numbers were showing up in search results, with obviously detrimental results.

The Benefits

The biggest benefit of location features for users, at least for the near future, is mobile search. Imagine searching for ‘Running Shoes’ in your mobile browser, only to be directed to the 5 nearest running shoe stores? This effect can even be seen on your desktop or laptop browser, with your location being pulled through your IP address.

If carefully executed, location focused activities could create a substantial increase for local businesses. A fantastic example of this, taken from Report On Business magazine, involved an individual searching for a Christmas tree, using the search term ‘Christmas tree, palo alto”.  He was immediately instructed to go to the local Boy Scouts office, who were selling Christmas trees, showing up as  the #1 website in Google’s search results. The Boy Scouts hadn’t spent a penny on billboards or advertising, but due to a mobile location-based search, they were able to reach a customer who was looking for a specific product.

This is one of the millions of stories that have, and will be told in the months and years to come, as the possibilities for retailers and geographically targeted businesses are endless.

Some location based tools include :

• Foursquare
• Gowalla
• Blippy
• Facebook, Twitter and Google have some form of location based marketing either in the works, or in practice, with MANY more to come.

After months of rumours and discussions, Twitter has finally launched their business model. Instead of calling them ‘ads’ or ‘paid tweets’ they will be called ‘Promoted Tweets‘. Many wondered if Twitter could ever actually begin making money, and with the launch of this new model, it’s certainly a possibility.

The way these tweets will be distributed will not, thankfully, be very intrusive. During the initial phase of the roll-out, they will only show in relevant (hopefully!) Twitter searches. Some promoted tweets may start as organic tweets. If promoted tweets do not get retweeted and shared enough, they could get taken down. This will encourage advertisers to offer their customers useful and relevant information.

Promoted Tweets will have the same abilities as organic tweets, which will allow them to be shared easily. Thankfully they do not appear as the typical annoying banner ad, which will make them much more prone to being shared in the first place.

Twitter has provided business with the ability to instantly inform customers with any sort of information, so here’s hoping this new initiative takes off.

UPDATE : It appears promoted tweets are now live.  Go and check it out : search.twitter.com

Over the last few years, SEO (known as Search Engine Optimization) has become a vital component of every website’s arsenal. It has helped propel some existing websites into a higher bracket of search rankings, while helping others discover a demographic they were unaware of and even lower the cost of an advertising campaign. This is done through the use of a variety of techniques, aimed at not just increasing the amount of traffic to a website, but increasing the quality and relevance of traffic.

Will SEO work for your website? What I tell every client is, if done properly, performing certain SEO tasks will do nothing BUT benefit your website, whether it’s helping you optimize your existing content, creating and managing an online ad campaign, or adding something new, such as a blog or social network section (Facebook group, etc.).

If you have any reservations or questions about anything SEO related, please give me a call, I’m always eager to discuss potential solutions for your website.