This week’s post has an infographic on SEO, a great post on social media optimization and a video on the state of social media in 2010.

This post  originally posted on Mashable outlines some winning strategies for optimizing the way you use social media in your organization.

Many people consider social media to have been a revolution for the marketing industry. This video from Social Media Energy highlights some of the biggest facts about the state of social media usage in 2010.

Despite the fact that social media has had a huge impact on many businesses, it does have its limitations. This presentation created by AdNerds (originally found on litmanlive.co.uk Blog) discusses some of these limitations and helps people who read it become more aware of the risks by looking at past examples of mistakes that have been made.

That's our last post for this week. Hopefully you all have a fun and safe Halloween!

Today's recap post from our webinar, "SEO Basics - Closing the Loop from Design to Build to Marketing"  will cover the questions we didn't have time to answer during the course of the presentation.

If you were unable to attend our presentation today, as always, you can view the webinar on-demand here.

Can you explain the difference between an HTML and a XML sitemap?

An HTML sitemap is a list of all the hyperlinks for different sections and pages of your website and is used to help your visitors navigate your website and find information more easily.

XML sitemap lists the URLs  for your website in a special format which is designed to be read by search engines rather than humans. Submitting a XML sitemap to different search engines helps your website's indexing by making it quicker and more efficient and can help increase your website's visibility in search engines.

Our CMS automatically generates dynamic URLs for our webpages. Are these URLs optimized for search engines?

This depends on the way in which the URLs are generated. If they are automatically generated using the page's keywords then yes, they are optimized, if they are dynamically generated using miscellaneous numbers then they aren't.
 
Is there a way to automate the link building process?

The best way to "automate" your link building is to create content that people want to link to. Now that answer may seem oversimplified, but that's really the best way to receive quality inbound links for your website. This isn't a quick process and it takes a lot of time an effort, but consistently updating your website with fresh, relevant content that appeals to you audience will encourage linking all on its own.

Can you explain what "long tail" search is?

The term long tail was first used by Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, who originally used it as a way to describe how people search for products on big ecommerce websites. This theory was that popular items on these websites (the head) get a high volume of traffic while the niche products (the tail ) get low volume.

Anderson said that as websites develop more products (and by association, grow their long tail) the proportion of business from the many small, niche markets that don’t individually sell well will help rival that popular retail channels.

We hope you all enjoyed today's webinar. You can view the webinar in our resource section and you can register for our next webinar, "9 Social Media Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them," here.

A recent study released in September from the  Aberdeen Group analyzes the relationships between sales and marketing and the ways in which collaboration between these two departments can lead to peak performance.

The study found that sales and marketing alignment is critical for top-line revenue growth and to sustain profitability (which shouldn’t really be a surprise to most organizations). According to the study, the best ways to achieve this alignment is through, “common goal identification, defined responsibilities and established workflows.”

The study goes on to state that:

• Effective sales alignment lead to an average 20% increase in company annual revenue
•  Best-in-class companies had 47% of their sales forecasted pipeline generated by their marketing teams
• The key determinates of effective sales and marketing alignment were using common, well-defined workflows between sales and marketing and ensuring a mutual understanding of lead management activities

The study also says that to achieve the results mentioned above, companies must:

• Use systems and solutions that improve the collaborative collecting and sharing of customer/prospect information
• Include marketing in sales’ prospecting activities and communications
• Marketing regularly meets and communicates with customers through a formalized process

The presentation itself is filled with great information including useful statistics, charts and graphs and is available for download here.

We’ve written about, “Encouraging Sales and Marketing Alignment,” in the past and our tips are certainly related to what they recommend in the report.

In general for companies that are having problems with alignment we recommend:

1. Having a clear and mutual definition of what your organization’s ideal customer looks like.
2. Using a common language to define terms like what a lead really is. 
3. Identify and agree on rules of engagement at key interface points like sales following up with leads or returning leads to marketing. 
4. Operating as a single team by incorporating both teams in joint strategy meetings and encouraging communication between departments. 
5. Measuring what you want to improve.

Image by BrittneyBush on Flickr.

With Halloween swiftly approaching we thought it would be a fun idea to share with you some of the marketing lessons that we’ve learned from years of trick or treating.

1. You need to give things away (and they better be good). When it comes to social media, it’s all about valuable content and what you can provide your target audience with. As kids, we all knew that house on the street that gave away toothbrushes, or pencils or some other unwanted Halloween “treat.” Social media success is usually directly related to the resources, educational information and freebies you give your followers and friends. If you’re giving away things that people don’t want, believe us, they’re going to leave and head to the businesses that have the best “treats.”
2. Take part and people will love you. In general, most people like to see organizations and employees really get into the spirit of social media. Just like Halloween, where everyone loves the people with the best costumes, and most decorated houses, your social media connections like to see people who are passionate and excited about what they’re doing. 
3. If you want people to come to you, give them a reason. Just existing in the social media sphere isn’t going to get you very far. If you want followers to come to you, you need to show them that you’re an active participant in social media. The houses with the best traffic on Halloween are always the ones with the most decorations, the ones with the windows lit and the ones where people can see that the people who live within genuinely want those trick-or-treaters at their door rather than their neighbors'.
4. Show some personality. One of the biggest benefits of social media is that companies that take part are able to show their human side. It’s a much more personal medium than those that have gone before and it allows people to communicate their personality to their friends. Just like a Halloween costume can give you some insight into an individual’s sense of humor, likes or dislikes and general tastes, an effective social media account is personal, and gives your followers something to relate to.

If you want to read some more social media and Halloween related posts, we suggest you check out:

The Social Path's post with 9 social media-theme costume ideas.
Examiner.com  where they have a post with some social media-carved pumpkins.
Inventorspot.com's post with their opinion of the top 10 social media-theme costumes.

We hope you all have a great Halloween!

Image by CleverCupakes on Flickr.

Yesterday’s post, “Does Your Company have a Social Media Parachute?” highlighted the importance of implementing a social media strategy and gave some statistics on the state of social media strategies in companies today.

After telling you how important they are, we thought it would be remiss of us not to give you some tips on how you can implement an effective social media strategy in your business.

First things first, it’s essential when starting out with any new marketing initiative that you ESTABLISH YOUR GOALS. What do you want social media to do for you? Why are you getting involved? What do you want to accomplish? These are questions that need to be asked if you want to be able to produce measurable ROI for your social media investment in the future.

Examples of objectives may be:

• You want to gain a better understanding how you target audience feels about your company.
• You want to become more responsive to your customers. 
• You want to increase your brand awareness through a new medium (assuming your customers’ take part in social media—we’ll discuss that in a moment). 
• You want to build and develop relationships with your current customers. 
• You want to generate more quality sales leads.

Understanding your objectives well in advance of getting started with social media helps you to measure successfully from the get-go as well as manage internal expectations for your social media initiatives. This can also help you get a good idea for how your social media strategy and objectives are going to fit in with the rest of your business’ marketing goals.

Once you’ve decided what you want social media to do for your company, it’s important that you DO THE NECESSARY RESEARCH to determine a) if social media is right for your business b) if your customers/ target audience are using social media c) which areas of social media are best for you to take part in.
Not all social media sites are right for every organization. If, for instance, you do some research and realize that your target audience has nothing to do with Twitter (unlikely, but possible) then maybe Facebook or LinkedIn are better options for your company or a combination of both.

Once you’ve established where your audience is, it’s important to figure out how much time you’re going to need to spend on each platform, and listen to the type of content that’s already present on those sites so you have a good idea of how much time and what kind of resources you’re going to need to be successful.

The key to social media that most people who are just getting started don’t understand is that it’s more about LISTENING than talking. Social media is an excellent tool for facilitating conversations but for those discussions to be effective, you need to know what people are interested in (what they’re already talking about).

There are a ton of great social media tools that can help you monitor conversations so you can contribute relevantly. Using these tools before you dive into the social media mix can help you ensure that you’re communicating effectively from the start.

1. Google Alerts – This is one of the most basic (and easiest) social media monitoring tools to set up and use. By setting up keyword searches for your preferred keywords you can receive updates in your email or RSS feed reader.
2. Twitter Advanced Search   – A pretty simplistic, but also quick and relatively easy search tool to help you monitor conversations that take place on Twitter. Once you’ve set up your search terms you can save your query as an RSS feed so you can continue to be updated on the latest news on your search
3. Boardtracker  – Using this tool is a great way to track information from message boards and forums. 
4. Alltop  – Alltop aggregates the top blog posts from the most popular blogs around the world and divides them up by topic categories. 
5. Addict-o-Matic  - This platform offers you a single dashboard view of all of the matches for a search across blogs, Twitter, Digg, YouTube and more. It’s an easy way to get all of your social media monitoring done in one place.

While these are by no means all of the monitoring tools out there today, these are some of the ones we find easiest to get up and running.
Okay, so you’ve planned your objectives, you’ve done your research and you’re listening to what’s going on in the social media sphere, the next step is to DETERMINE SOCIAL MEDIA OWNERSHIP and start taking part.

There’s one thing we need to make very clear when you’re establishing this part of your strategy. Social media is not a side project. It’s not a job that can be done by a member of your already over-taxed marketing team in his/her spare time or when he/she feels like it and because of this it’s essential that you set aside the time and resources to take part. Understanding which team or department (social media is much more effective when it’s managed collaboratively) is going to own social media and determining exactly what that role entails is going to make your social media use much easier in the future.

It’s important that you find the right people, the people that are determined to engage in relevant conversations, how are great company representatives and who are interested in building an online community. After you’ve found the right people, you need to plan out how you’d like them to engage with your audience and which platforms/tools they’ll be using. One of our favourite tools to use for collaborative social media updates is Hootsuite. It allows multiple users to access and update Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn accounts from one easy to use dashboard and gives you simple, yet useful statistics for engagement.

Alright, now get those people INVOLVED IN THE CONVERSATION. Here’s where social media gets fun people! Get out there and start commenting on blogs, talking to other folks on Twitter, posting to your Facebook Fanpage or any of the other social media tactics you decided were right for you. Start building those relationships that will form the basis of your social media strategies and will hopefully lead to tangible ROI and increased sales for your business!

And finally, MEASURE YOUR RESULTS AND OPTIMIZE. Since you carefully laid out your social media plans and objectives it shouldn’t be too difficult for you to measure your success. While social media success has historically been a difficult metric for marketers to track, we have some tips that should help you get off on the right foot. Here are some of the key performance indicators (KPIs) we think it’s important to be tracking to help you determine if you’re reaching your goals and some of the questions we ask ourselves to help us determine if our social media strategy is effective.

• Quality of customer insights
• Number of repeat visitors
• Quality of new sales leads
• Quantity of new sales leads
• Number of comments 
• Financial - Has revenue or profit increased or costs decreased? Have we improved the promotion responses for our campaigns? Have we reduced spending on other networking areas? 
• Digital – Has the company enhanced its digital assets? Have we increased our seach engine relevance? 
• Brand – Is their increased awareness of our brand? Have consumer opinions about our brand improved? Have we improved word of mouth marketing from our following?

What should you do with these metrics and the answers to these questions? You should use them to optimize your strategy and social media usage so that you’re constantly improving and getting closer to reaching your goals. Just like any other marketing initiative, social media needs to constantly be reviewed and revised for ongoing success.

Setting up a social media strategy in your business can be a long and difficult process, but it will always pay off in the end. Being prepared in advance is crucial in a medium like social media because of its ability to allow two-way communication and the spread of information at high speed. It may seem like too much to handle right now, but we promise, if you develop a strong strategy you will have a much more effective social media experience.

A recent study by New Jersey based, Digital Brand Expressions,is a great source of information on how companies are adopting social media within their organizations.

According to the report,

“In the current marketplace, it’s fairly well established that social media is a channel that businesses must participate in, leaving CEOs with the new challenge of planning and implementing brand aligned initiatives enterprise-wide and gaining control to ensure brand protection as well as network and intellectual property security.”

Some key findings from the report include:

• 78% of respondents said they are using social media, but only 41% say they have a strategic plan in place for social media use.
• 71% of respondents said that their Marketing Department is the group with the primary responsibility for social media. 
• Only 16% of companies are using social media for recruiting purposes and only 26% are using it for customer service purposes. 
• 88% of companies agree that it’s important to have a social media plan (even if they don’t already).

The study has some excellent statistics on social media adoption and is worth taking a look at. We were especially surprised by the statement that only 41% of companies have a social media strategic plan, despite the fact that 88% felt it was important.

Without a strategic social media plan a company leaves itself open to extreme risks, especially because even if they don’t have an official corporate account, most likely the majority of their employees are already taking part. It’s especially important if you’re planning on adopting social media that you have a strong strategic plan prepared. Knowing things like, who’s going to own social media as an initiative, what your organization’s rules are for social media use, where you’re going to be taking part, how you’re going to measure your success and what tools you’re going to use, can help keep your implementation simple, as well as help to mitigate the risks associated with social media.

Image by JustBeadiful on Flickr.

This week’s post has a presentation on the future of content and two different spoofs on one of the most popular social media campaigns of all time.

This presentation by nouve on Slideshare discusses the future of branded content and gives a good overview of the way that communication has changed making it so users are now actively seeking information rather than passively absorbing it.

We're sure that you've all heard of Old Spice's social media campaign and theeffect that it had on Old Spice's online community and presence.Well as with most popular online campaigns, the Old Spice videos have earned some pretty entertaining spoofs, one from the well-loved characters of Sesame Street and one from another popular social media campaigns by BlendTec called, "Will it Blend?"



We hope you all enjoyed today's links and have another great weekend!

When you’re writing your website copy with your SEO strategy at the forefront of your mind, it’s important to take a step back and make sure that you’re still writing with your customers’ needs and wants at heart. When it comes to writing SEO-friendly website copy, you need to make sure you know the difference between well-written optimized copy, and keyword-stuffed garbage. Sometimes it’s important to remember that while you want your website to do well in search engines you should ultimately be writing your copy for your customers, not (search engine) spiders.

Sure, stuffing your content with copious instances of your target keywords may help you rank high in search engine results quickly, but have you thought about what you’re doing to your chance at getting lasting, loyal subscribers? It doesn’t matter if your page ranks well if the visitors that arrive there instantly click away in disgust from your keyword-ridden un-engaging copy.

Sadly, there are still many marketers out there who think that optimizing their site in this manner is a good tactic. Unfortunately, those people seem to have forgotten the fact that getting quality links to this kind of content is virtually impossible (who wants to link to that?) and getting repeat visitors is highly unlikely.
Optimizing your website (or blog) in this manner is a short-term option with few (if any) long-term successes. Remember, if your content doesn’t provide some kind of inherent value to your website visitors then they will have no reason to return in the future, and, having lost a subscriber’s good opinion once, it is extremely difficult to gain it back.

Building a strong SEO strategy that gets results is a long-term, ongoing process. There are no (successful) quick fixes to get your website the rankings you want. The best thing you can do is to ensure that your strategy is built on a strong foundation and this begins with excellent, informative, fresh content. If you write for your visitors (and we’re not talking about the crawling kind) then you start to build a loyal following, which become subscribers and encourage linking, and, hopefully, word of mouth marketing for your brand. 

How can you write copy with your customers in mind?

1. Be careful about overusing your keywords. Like we said above, keyword stuffing is the enemy of the compelling, customer-centric copy. It takes away from the flow and tone of your copy, and makes your optimization efforts look desperate at best.
2. Focus on their pain points. Your copy shouldn’t be all about you. Your website visitors have most likely arrived at your website because they are looking for a solution to a problem. By addressing their difficulties from the get-go you can position your products or services as the best solution. 
3. Write conversationally. People aren’t looking for complicated web copy filled with industry-specific jargon. Your visitors want to feel like you’re speaking to them, in the language and tone they understand. 
4. Keep it short, and to the point. People want to find one their looking for quickly and easily. Every company has enormous amounts of information they CAN share with their audience, but that’s not what their visitors are really looking for. Keeping your copy minimal, skimmable and easy to navigate usually makes for a much better customer experience.

Image by sankax on Flickr.

A recent independent study  performed by JISC, an organization which, “provide[s] world-class leadership in the innovative use of Information and Communications Technology to support education, research and institutional effectiveness,” looks at higher education’s current use of Web 2.0 technologies, the challenges facing Higher Education institutions and how they can be addressed.

While the study was performed on higher education institutions in the UK, after reading it we think that many of the findings hold true for institutions in the rest of the world as well.

Key findings for Web 2.0 use in higher education now:

• Web 2.0 technologies are being deployed across a broad spectrum of university activities in similar ways in the UK and overseas
• Deployment is in no way systematic, and is driven by the professional interest and enthusiasm of individual members of staff
• In both learning and teaching usage is patchy but a considerable work base does exist
• While advice and guidance is available to institutions, there is no blueprint for implementation of web 2.0 technologies and as such, each institution is currently choosing its own path

What critical issues do these findings raise?

These issues were determined by JISC and they feel that addressing these issues is integral to, “capitalizing on the momentum that exists” within institutions.

• The digital divide – This is one of the most important issues that needs to be dealt with and involves ensuring access to technology for all students and the development of practical skills in its use.
• Information literacies – This means ensuring that students possess the, “skills and understanding to search, authenticate and critically evaluate material from the range of appropriate sources, and attribute it as necessary.” The concern here from a student’s perspective is that they feel that institutions need to develop a certain level of web-awareness among students so that they can, “operate as informed users.”

The ongoing drivers to change

• Tradition – There is a change in students’ perceptions of teaching where they are looking for traditional approaches to learning (ie personal contact) in a modern setting (ie web supported).
• Environmental factors – This is the digitization of learning materials and creating a receptive audience of teaching staff and learners
• A richer educational experience – This is developing learning approaches that are active  and undertaken within a community and, “based on individual’s interests,” which are widely thought to be the most effective teaching methods and which Web 2.0 technologies are well-suited to supporting.

Report conclusions

Web 2.0, the social web, has had and is continuing to have enormous implications on student behaviors which has lead to strengthened feelings towards and desires for community in the web space and an impatience and preference for quick answers and a casual approach to evaluating information.
The disconnect which is currently facing higher education institutions is that traditional learning methods have been constructed on, “a wholly different set of norms,” which is causing frustration and difficulty for the learning process and a movement for change led by the students themselves.

This isn’t a comprehensive summary of the report by any means and it is definitely worth taking a look at. You can download a full copy of the report here from the JISC’s website.

Image by  Athena on Flickr

The big mistake.

The purpose of a successful marketing automation system is to help B2B marketers to manage their time and resources more effectively, connect with and gather more leads, align sales and marketing and manage their marketing funnel. Marketing automation can also help you make your marketing teams more effective, and can help you create stronger marketing campaigns that produce tangible ROI.  However, the problem with this is that it makes marketing automation systems seem like a quick and easy fix, when in fact that isn’t the case at all. If your marketing campaigns are built on a weak marketing process, then marketing automation isn’t going to be a one-size-fits-all band aid that will provide an immediate solution to the problem.

If you’re trying to decide whether or not to implement a marketing automation system, the first thing your company needs to do is a comprehensive audit of your current marketing process. Not only will this help you determine if a marketing automation solution can actually solve the problems you’re having (before you waste a lot of time and money) but it can also help you to get a better idea of what you need in your marketing automation solution. With the wide variety of options available, doing an audit can help you navigate the vendor selection process much more easily.

If you have a strong idea of where you want to improve, how a marketing automation system can help, and have set your expectations for where you’d like to end up, your implementation of (and subsequent experience with) a marketing automation platform will be much smoother and more successful.

Performing an audit.

The challenges and difficulties that your company is facing within your marketing process can sabotage your marketing automation system before you see measurable results. You wouldn’t build a house on a faulty foundation, and the same is true for implementing a marketing automation system on a weak marketing process.

A marketing audit should give you a comprehensive view of your company’s marketing objectives, strengths, weaknesses and strategy which can then be compared to your company’s overall marketing goals.

The best option for a comprehensive audit is usually to turn to a marketing agency that has experience critiquing marketing strategies, but if this isn’t a viable option for your organization, here are some questions you should ask that relate directly to issues that a marketing automation system can help solve .

Internal Marketing Environment

1. How is our marketing team organized?
2. How efficient/effective is our marketing team as a whole? 
3. How does our marketing team align with other departments (ex. Sales)? 
4. How effective are we at CRM (customer relationship management)?
5. What is the current state of our marketing process? 
6. What are our current objectives for marketing? 
7. What are our current marketing strategies? How effective are they? 
8. Is our marketing process being controlled effectively? 
9. Are we achieving our marketing objectives? 
10. Are our marketing teams implementing our marketing plan effectively? 
11. Do we have the resources, budget, to accomplish our marketing objectives? 
12. Are the marketing resources we have allocated appropriately to achieve our objectives?

External Marketing Environment

1. What are the buyers needs and how can we satisfy them?
2. What is our audience’s perception of our brand and their loyalty to it?
3. Do we understand the buying process of our target audience? Are we addressing it effectively? 
4. What are the relative strengths and weaknesses of our competition? 
5. What are the marketing plans and strategies of our competition? 

While these are only a few of the questions that need to be answered in a marketing audit, using them might give you a good idea of where your organization stands when it comes to implementing a marketing automation system to help you achieve your organizational goals.

Here at Marqui, we get tons of requests from people who need or want help with their Search Engine Optimization. Some people have a pretty good idea of what they should be doing and just want a little bit of advice on how they can make the appropriate change. On the other hand, we also get a few people who come to us for help who either have very little idea of what they should be doing, or, are doing things actively wrong.

SEO can be tricky if you don’t know where to get started and it seems to be a fairly common issue among many of the people who turn to us for help. There are so many different aspects to an optimized SEO strategy and for many people the concept of developing an SEO process seems daunting to say the least.

While there are many things you can do that will help you get on the right track for better rankings, there are also quite a few things you can do that will almost immediately have a negative effect on them.

Today, instead of going over the things you can do right, we thought it might be helpful to try looking at SEO from another angle and telling you all the things you definitely shouldn't  do. That way, even if you’re confused about what you can to do improve, you can hopefully say with assurance you’re not making any of these mistakes.

So--without further ado--here’s our list of the best ways not  to do SEO.

1. Optimizing your website for the wrong keywords and ignoring long tail opportunities. This is definitely one of the most common mistakes that we see people make when they’re getting started with SEO. If you’re optimizing your website for common (and really popular) keywords, then it’s highly unlikely that you will ever rank for them. Remember, the keywords that you choose are the foundation of your SEO strategy and if they’re weak the chances that your SEO strategy won’t be are pretty slim. The second part of this point is to not ignore the opportunities for long tail search when you’re doing your keyword research. Long tail search is an important aspect of your SEO strategy because it allows you to rank highly for a large volume of highly specific keywords. 


2. Using generic URLs. If you don’t have a CMS that allows you to control and change the URLs that are produced when you create a page, then you need to get one. Your URLs are an important way for search engines to tell what your page is about and they should be dynamic and contain your keywords. 


3. Developing your SEO strategy after your website is already built. For some reason, a lot of people seem to believe that SEO is a process that should begin once a website is already up and running, when this is in fact that opposite of what should really be taking place. Would you go on a trip before you pack? Would you wait until you were sun burnt before applying sunscreen? Well, maybe you would, but I think we can both agree it would be a poor decision. The same goes for SEO. 


4. Repeating, ignoring or not optimizing title tags. You’re Title Tags are one of the most important on-page SEO elements you have when creating a web page. Make sure that you’re choosing unique keyword phrases that are relevant to each page and give a good description of what that specific page is about.  


5. Relying on stale content. This is the easiest and quickest fix for your website’s SEO. People get overwhelmed with the other on-page and off-page SEO factors, but if you want to get your SEO strategy on the way to being optimized fast, the best thing you can do is start creating fresh, unique content on a regular basis. Not only do search engines like new content, but it’s one of the best ways to make your website a popular resource for internet users. 


6. Employ keyword stuffing tactics. While it’s important that you have your targeted keywords in the right places, over-filling your website copy with multiple instances of them to try and rank higher is a bad tactic. Not only does this make your copy read poorly (which won’t encourage repeat visitors) but search engines will also start to actually degrade your content because of the abundance of keywords. 


7. Forgetting about social media. Social media and SEO are very intricately connected, although many people don’t realize to what extent. Social media has an enormous effect on your SEO because it helps drive targeted, relevant traffic to your website and whether you like it or not, it’s going to be around for a while. If your company isn’t currently incorporating social media into its online strategy it may be missing out on a large SEO opportunity.

Image by Archeoastonomia on Flickr

Today’s web marketing digest post is all about slideshare presentations, with one presentation on UI, one on design and one on social media.

This presentation by Jason Putorti tells you 10 things that CEOs need to know about web design from the effects it can have on your business to the process of designing a good website.
This Presentation by Stephen Anderson discusses and shows some minor UI changes can make a big difference.

This presentation by Freddie Laker gives a good perspective on the state of social media today and what it will look like in coming years.

As usual after each of our bi-weekly webinars we write a blog post to recap the most relevant questions we answered during the webinar and to answer the ones we didn’t have time to get to.

1. Is there a best practice for how many times you can use a primary call-to-action in one email? This is going to be fairly subjective based on the content of the email itself. Depending on the length and size of the email you’re sending you may want to have the call-to-action repeated more times than someone who’s sending a shorter email. Having said that, it is usually best for an average length email to use the primary call-to-action 2-3 times and to use it in both button and text hyperlink formats.


2. I’ve head of double opt-in is this more effective than single opt-in for getting subscribers? There are benefits and downsides of using double opt-in subscription, but in general it can be a good way to get you a highly engaged subscriber list. Because your subscribers have to choose twice to subscribe, those that do are generally quite interested in receiving communications from you, however, be careful as sometimes it can be seen as overkill. 


3. Isn’t it better to just have an email that doesn’t need any scrolling at all rather than worrying about keeping your important information above the fold? This is also subjective depending on the purpose of the email. Some emails, like those inviting subscribers to  register for a piece of collateral or a webinar can benefit from being short and to the point, however if you’re asking for something with more of a commitment from the subscriber, like asking them to attend an expensive seminar, they will most likely WANT more information from you, and your conversion rate will benefit from a longer email. No matter how long your email is as long as you have your important information above the fold along with a call-to-action you should be fine. 


4. We use the same landing page for multiple email campaigns, will this reduce its conversion rate? That depends, if the landing page is relevant to each of those email campaigns, then it should still have a strong conversion rate. However, this situation becomes an issue if you’re using one generic landing page for all of your email campaigns, this is not only a bad practice but can have negative effects on overall conversion rate.

Thanks to everyone who attended our webinar. You can register for our next webinar, "SEO Basics: Closing the Loop from Design to Build to Marketing," here.

Here’s another story about a big company and a big social media disaster. For those of you who aren’t aware, early last week Gap unveiled a new logo on its website. The new logo, which is quite a dramatic change from Gap’s previous branding, was met with less than optimistic customer opinion throughout the social sphere.

What happened?

The new logo, which was supposed to, “signify Gap’s transition from classic America design to modern, sexy, cool,”  according to a company spokesperson, wasn’t very well received to say the least.

Within a few hours of being released an enormous flood of negative public opinion was posted across the internet from Twitter  to Facebook  and the usual chaos ensued. In an attempt to stem the tide of angry customers and fans, Gap decided that they would attempt to get the public involved (a little too late) and as a result they published the following post to their Facebook Page:
 


Unsurprisingly, this attempt failed to re-engage the public in a positive way. As two particularly peeved commenters posted,

“For those of you actually posting design alternatives for GAP, i'd [sic] encourage you to visit http://www.no-spec.com/ cheating yourself or another designer out of the fee that a multi-million dollar company like GAP can easily afford is just plain silly. Why [sic] would you give away for a few pairs of khaki's what you could and should earn thousands of dollars for?”

“Asking designers to re-design your logo through this spec work stunt is completely appalling and beyond unethical! You are blatantly devaluing an already devalued profession. I am boycotting Gap and all its affiliates from here on out. You should be truly ashamed of yourself…”

And, of course after this suggestion from Gap several mocking logo creation sites were created including “Make Your Own Gap Logo”  and “Crap Logo Yourself”.

Following the extreme online abuse the new logo was receiving Gap’s North American President Marka Hansen, turned to social media herself by blogging on popular internet blog The Huffington Post, trying to defend Gap’s decision.

What are the end results?

After a mere week of existence, the company will be scrapping the new logo and returning to its classic “blue box.” As stated by Marka Hansen on the company’s website,

“Since we rolled out an updated version of our logo last week on our website, we’ve seen an outpouring of comments from customers and the online community in support of the iconic blue box logo.

“Last week, we moved to address the feedback and began exploring how we could tap into all of the passion. Ultimately, we’ve learned just how much energy there is around our brand. All roads were leading us back to the blue box, so we’ve made the decision not to use the new logo on gap.com any further.

“At Gap brand, our customers have always come first. We’ve been listening to and watching all of the comments this past week. We heard them say over and over again they are passionate about our blue box logo, and they want it back. So we’ve made the decision to do just that – we will bring it back across all channels.
“In the meantime, the website will go back to our iconic blue box logo and, for Holiday, we’ll turn our blue box red for our seasonal campaign.

“We’ve learned a lot in this process. And we are clear that we did not go about this in the right way. We recognize that we missed the opportunity to engage with the online community.  This wasn’t the right project at the right time for crowd sourcing.

“There may be a time to evolve our logo, but if and when that time comes, we’ll handle it in a different way.”

Sadly this statement shows without a shadow of a doubt both the power that online communities do have over brands and the fact that even big brands with a supposed grasp on social media, still just don’t really get it.

Now, there are always going to be people who complain in a situation like this. The die hard Gap fans who have harbored an intense love for the original logo were most likely always going to turn to social media to vent their anger over the change. However, the extreme outpouring that followed the event showed how quickly an entire online community can turn sour when you don’t go about dealing with them in the right way.

As stated by the Gap on their Facebook Page:

Please not the 2010 likes and 556 comments this post received since it was posted on Monday. 

What lessons can Gap and other companies learn from this mistake?

1. If you have taken the time to build an online community, take the time to consult them first. Many big companies make this mistake when they get involved with social media. They jump into the social sphere, creating accounts, building communities and talking to their audiences, but when it comes to decisions that actually affect their customers, they seem to forget that social media is one of the best platforms to gauge customer opinion. If Gap had taken the time to ask their fans about whether or not they should change their logo, this entire disaster could have been averted.
2. Failing to understand your target audience costs you money. Obviously in this case, Gap didn't do the appropriate audience research. Understanding your key customers' wants and needs it essential for making decisions that will have a positive benefit for a company's business strategy. If Gap had understood that their customers were satisfied with the current branding and logo and in fact had a strong affinity for the current design, they might have saved themselves a lot of money.
3. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I don't know how many times we've said this with regards to web design. Whether your redesigning a website, or re-branding your entire business, make sure you're doing it for the right reasons. If there is nothing wrong with your current branding, and it's working for your company (and has worked for decades, as in the case of Gap) why change?
4. Social media is extremely powerful. Don't underestimate the power of word of mouth and the way that social media facilitates it! If you make a mistake, and you participate in social media, then trust us, the world is going to hear about it faster than you thought possible. Ignoring this is one of the biggest mistakes a company can make when dealing with social media.

We’ve written before about how you can combat list fatigue to keep your email list engaged, but often, despite your best efforts, there are subscribers who become inactive, or "emotionally unsubscribed" without actually unsubscribing themselves from your list.. These are the subscribers that receive your emails but don’t open your messages, don’t click-though and essentially don’t interact with your emails in anyway, but—they haven’t unsubscribed. This type of inactive subscriber is a re-engagement opportunity waiting to happen for marketers and shouldn’t be overlooked.

Having a large number of inactive subscribers  is completely normal for most companies' email lists.  Your subscribers are busy people who receive hundreds of emails a day and it isn't unlikely that some of them have just let their interest in your messages slide.  According to a recent study from Merkle Interactive Services, even permission based emails are deleted 55% of the time by recipients without ever having been opened.

Why should you care about inactive subscribers?

1. They make it harder to track your email marketing performance. If your email list is riddled with inactive subscribers it makes it very difficult for you to get a good idea of how successful your campaigns actually are. Metrics like click-through and open rate will be skewed by the users who are inactive (who were never going to open your emails anyways).
2. It costs you money to send unwanted emails. Depending on your email service provider, you may be paying on a per email basis. If that's the case, then you are spending money to send emails to people who are unengaged with your communications and you are wasting money which could be spent on recipients who are interested in receiving your messages.
3. They are an opportunity. If you're using opt-in email tactics (which we highly recommend) then the recipients you have who are inactive would have been engaged enough at some point to give you their contact information. In that case, inactive subscribers are actually an opportunity to re-engage jaded subscribers and potentially renew business relationships. 
   
4. Inactive subscribers can harm overall deliverability. ISPs are beginning to take into consideration whether people are sending emails to recipients who never respond. Inactive email address become associated with dormant accounts and often fall into spam traps. When you then continue to send messages to these accounts you risk getting blocked or labeled as spam.

So—how can you re-engage your inactive subscribers? 

1. Analyze the situation. The first step in addressing your inactive subscribers is to establish who the inactive subscribers actually are.  You can do this by analyzing their subscriber history or profile for certain characteristics like: email activity,  engagement and interaction levels with online content and purchase history.
2. Segment inactive subscribers to adjust campaigns accordingly. Once you've determined who your inactive subscribers are, it should be a simple matter to segment them into separate groups so you can send them specifically targeted re-engagement campaigns (we'll go into more detail about this below). Segmenting these subscribers into separate groups allows you to regulate the frequency of their emails, send them specific campaigns and to monitor and analyze the results of your re-engagement strategies. 
3. Send re-engagement-specific emails. Sending email campaigns specifically targeted to re-engaging inactive subscribers can be an effective way to grab their attention. Email campaigns which features things like surveys requesting feedback and content suggestions, offers for free whitepapers and other collateral and rewards or discounts for re-engaging can be easy to implement with relatively quick results. 
4. Measure these campaigns to determine what works and what doesn’t. Since your segmenting your email list and sending out campaigns targeted towards inactive subscribers, it's essential that you take your campaigns to the next step by measuring them and optimizing them so you can re-engage the most subscribers possible.
5. Monitor inactives so you can catch them early. By regularly monitoring your email list and subscribers over time you will hopefully be able to begin to spot subscribers that are becoming less engaged before they actually become inactive. If you can achieve this, then half of your battle is already won!

There is also the option of simply deleting your inactive subscribers out of your email database to ensure that they don't have any of the negative effects we mentioned above on your email list and deliverability. While this is a quick fix to the situation, it does little to stop the problem from arising again in the future, and potentially costs your company business opportunities with people who were interested in your company at one point in time.

Image by Nathonline-Beta on Flickr.

Econsultancy  has released its 2010 Online Lead Generation Report which is produced in association with Clash-Media, a lead generation specialist. The report, which gives a, “detailed overview on how companies are using the internet to generate leads for their consumer-focused businesses.”

It is a paid report, but the freely available summary is still full of some great statistics and facts on the state of lead generation today.
Some of the highlights of the report include:

• Budgets for online lead generation are increasing (they number of respondents who said that their online lead generation budgets have gone up since last year increased from 59% to 65%)
• 69% of companies perceived the main benefit of online lead generation to be that it is cost-effective while only 64% thought the main benefit was that they could increase their customer base/prospect list
• Specialist online lead generation companies are only used by 5% of advertisers, implying that this is still an, “emerging sector” in the lead generation industry

The report is also full of useful graphs and charts and is definitely worth checking out.

Do any of the findings we’ve mentioned here surprise you? We were amazed that more companies felt the main benefit of online lead generation was cost-effectiveness rather than its ability to increase customer base and prospect lists.

This week’s web marketing digest post has another TED talk video on making connections and an infograph on designing a social business capability.

This video, which features Sebastian Seung, a computational neuroscientist, discusses the ways in which our brain makes connections between events and interactions. The basis of the video explains how personal connections are related to neural connections, and goes on to state that the more you connect with a person, the more impact they have on your lives. It really raises the question of how well you’re relating and connecting with your customers: are you impacting their lives?

This infographic from the Dachis Group shows how you can help to design a social business capability for your organization.

Image by HIjod.Huskona on Flickr

Many companies have stated before that when it comes to social media, the customer is in charge. Well new research from the Aberdeen Group  (as mentioned in a recent eMarketer post)  has found that more than half of the retailers who are currently involved in social media felt like they were “pushed” into it by their target audience. According to retailers, because their audiences were choosing to use social media as a “primary shopping vehicle” and their competition was adopting it quickly for that reason, they felt like they had no choice but to get involved.

While we’re big social media advocates, getting involved in social media based on pressure rather than understanding can be a very risky strategy. We recently published a post on, “9 Social Media Errors to Understand before Jumping In,”and we think that many people overlook issues like these when they feel intense pressure from an outside source to explore a new marketing channel.



A second part of the study showed that while many retailers were getting involved in social media, few of them understood what key performance indicators (KPIs) they should be using or were the most important, making it almost impossible for them to measure their efforts successfully.



While it’s important to stay relevant by ensuring that you’re focusing your marketing efforts on the channels that your target audience uses, you need to make sure you have a clear understanding of the channel itself before you get involved. Misunderstanding how to use social media effectively (a platform which allows public and consumer opinion to spread and travel faster than ever before) can have extremely detrimental effects on your overall brand.

How do you feel about this issue?

Have you seen examples of company’s jumping into social media because of pressure, without really understanding what they should be doing?

One of the best ways for marketing and sales teams to coordinate and optimize the lead management process is to implement a lead scoring strategy. With the increasing availability of strong marketing automation platforms there is really no excuse for B2B organizations to ignore the opportunities available through lead scoring.

What is lead scoring?

Lead scoring is adding probability and weight to a web lead based on predetermined criteria and lead behavior when interacting with your website. Essentially, when you score a lead you are rating how likely it is that you think that lead will purchase your product. 

If you’re new to the concept, or you’re just looking to optimize your current strategy, here are our top 5 tips for a successful lead scoring system:

1. Align sales and marketing. Lead scoring is one of the best ways to help reduce the friction between your sales and marketing teams. Involving sales teams in the lead scoring process from the get-go is an excellent way to ensure that the process is performing to the satisfaction of all the teams involved.
2. Keep it simple. When you set up your process, decide which fields are required and which are optional and keep these minimal and consistent across forms throughout your website to ensure that you’re comparing leads based on the same data. The best way to keep your lead scoring system manageable is to choose lead scoring criteria that can be consistently measured. 
3. Use BANT criteria. If you’re just starting out with lead scoring one of the best things you can do is implement BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) data for your preliminary assessments. This information is often gathered through sales calls and interactions rather than through forms. 
4. Score on both explicit and implicit data. The more information that you have about your leads the more able you are to determine the true value of the lead itself. You can do this by gathering both explicit and implicit data. Explicit data is that which is volunteered when a visitor fills out a web form and interacts with your sales or marketing teams. Implicit data is gathered based on the visitors interactions on your website (click-throughs, email opens, resource downloads etc) It is essential that you evaluate leads based on both types of data so you have a more comprehensive view of the leads' interest. 
5. Remember to score on timing. Don’t forget when your scoring your leads that the frequency of their visits and how recently they’ve interacted with your website is also an important factor in gauging a leads' engagement level.

Bonus tip:
 
Don’t ignore your rules! Once you've implemented your lead scoring strategy it's important that you don't cheat and send leads to sales that don’t meet the criteria you’ve laid out with your sales teams. That will only sabotage all the work you've done to create a successful process. Remember that lead nurturing is a essential aspect of your lead management process and while a lead may not be ready to buy today (or be handed off to sales) nurturing leads is and

Recently Google made their new URL shortener, Goo.gl, freely available to the world, as discussed by Matt Cutts in a recent blog post.

With the enormous range of URL shorteners available today, this doesn’t really sound all that exciting, and maybe some of you are wondering why you should bother checking the service out. Well, we wondered too and that’s the subject of today’s post.

As far as the basics go, Goo.gl works much like any other URL shortener except that you don’t have to set up a new account (unless you’re one of the few who doesn’t already have their own Google Account). If you do have an account, then you just sign in at  http://goo.gl/ and from there it functions the same as other URL shorteners and takes the long URL you enter, like the one for this post:

http://www.marqui.com/blog/google-introduces-googl-is-it-worth-using.aspx

And then shortens it into something like this:

http://goo.gl/9aCA

It has analytics similar to many other URL shorteners and allows you to look at:

• Clicks by country, platform and browser
• Referring sites
• Comprehensive click history over time

After trying Goo.gl out, it doesn’t seem to perform or offer any significant benefits over the other big shorteners (Bit.ly, TinyURL, is.gd etc) and the only downfall is that it doesn’t allow you to create custom shortened URLs that services like Bit.ly do allow. 

Bonus: 

For those of you who aren’t too familiar with the ins and outs of URL shorteners we’ve compiled a short list of our top advantages and disadvantages of using them below. Enjoy! 

Advantages

• Shorten links so they are more manageable
• They allow you to track click data 
• Often the best option for use in popular social media services like Twitter 
• They are easy to share

Disadvantages

• They hide the original URL making them a popular tool for spammers
• They don’t give any information about the link, they are meaningless
• If the URL shortener service you’ve been using goes under, you lose your link. Choose carefully! 
• Depending on the tool you use (like Goo.gl) you may not be able to create URLs with keywords

Image by MrsInman on Flickr

In the social media sphere, there is a constant struggle between building personal and professional brands online. Many employees (unless their job revolves around social media) find it difficult to keep up both a personal and corporate brand effectively. The problem is this: If your personal brand grows successfully, your employer benefits because you are perceived as representing their brand (at least in part), but, if your personal brand grows too larger, or overpowers the popularity of your corporate brand, then it can actually be detrimental to your company. No company wants to hire a star that shines brighter than the company itself, but if employees don’t develop a personal brand to some degree, then they risk fading into obscurity if the company fails, or you end up parting ways.

There are however, several ways that employees can balance successful personal and professional brands that are mutually beneficial to employee and employer.

1. Promote yourself and your company. Nobody has an unlimited amount of time to put towards social media. As a result, ensuring that you are consistently balancing your promotion of yourself personally, and your company, can help to make sure your social media presences’ grow together.
2. Get everyone involved. Social media accounts shouldn’t be the result of one person’s hard work. By getting your entire team involved you can help to mitigate the risks of one person not having the time to maintain their personal and corporate brands to the same degree. It also makes for a smoother transition if your “star” social media presence leaves your organization for whatever reason. 
3. Learn and communicate company guidelines. If you’re going to have everyone involved (or as many employees as you can) then it’s important that they all understand your social media policies, and, if you don’t have one in place, to develop one immediately.

Image by squarewithin on Flickr.

Here’s a quick list of things I wish I had known when setting out to create a business blog:

1. You should write everyday, but writing everyday doesn’t mean publishing everyday. You should constantly be thinking about what you’ll write about, and you should be writing down whatever comes to mind.  Every now and again that might come together into something you can use, often it won’t.  The point isn’t to blog on demand, but to occasionally knock out a post that demands to be read.


2. Just because you posted something to be read doesn’t mean it will be. Post quality isn’t what gets readers, its what retains readers.  I know, I know, it sucks.  If it makes you feel any better, you’re going to look back on the stuff you’re writing now in a few months and want to delete it all.  If you write daily, you will get much, much better.  You have no idea.


3. You need a crank for generating readers. If you can’t turn the crank on demand but rely on events like a once in a lifetime ad buy or something, you don’t have a process, you have pixie dust.  Find a number of effective methods for driving incremental traffic and work the process.  There are some very basic and ways to promote your new blog without spending money, without including topless pictures in your posts, and without trying to out-hack Google’s Search Ranking hackers.


4. Temper your expectations about readership. Your daily blogs about the solar cell you invented that will result in free, renewable energy for all of mankind will get .000001 of the traffic that a post debuting a picture of Britney spears not wearing makeup for the first time will get.  I’m sorry, its not personal, it’s just the internet.  If you’re blogging about a niche topic, be the best blogger in that niche. 


5. Blogging is great because there’s very little barrier to entry.  Blogging is horrible because there’s very little barrier to entry. If your blog only took you 20 minutes to set up, it probably looks like it only took 20 minutes to set up.  Think about how much time you’ll put into writing for and promoting your blog.  You are not just a writer, but also a publisher.  Make it your own.  Be proud of it.  Get comfortable there.  It’s your new office.


6. Other bloggers aren’t your competitors; they’re your partners, your readers, and your sales and marketing channel. The average blog is about 300 words long and takes about 90 seconds to read.  Anybody who went to all of the trouble to find your blog buried in the corner of the WWW isn’t going to read just one little lonely blog post.  People don’t read from just one blog and they wouldn’t need an RSS feed if they did.  You’re not competing for eyeballs against other bloggers, even within the same space.  The blogging audience is hungrier than you can possibly imagine.

These are, by no means, the only things to know about blogging.  There are lists and lists of lists.  But these are some key things that, having known them, I could have saved myself a lot of time and energy.