I am not sure who coined the term “content is king” but who ever said it nailed it when it comes to online marketing.

My firm focuses on the small and medium business market (SMB) and there is no bigger hurdle for any of my clients and their online marketing presence than content.

I am sad to report, more SMBs fail online or struggle because of poor content.

Marketing online is more difficult than traditional face to face sales unless your content can; interrupt the buyer, strike up a conversation, walk the website visitor through the sales process, answer all the questions, overcome the objections, educate the buyer and ask for the order.

Sounds easy enough but it isn’t.

The inexperience SMB business owner or online marketer often falls into the trap of seeing successful online businesses and think overnight instant success is awaiting them if they just get their website up and people find it.

Traffic to websites is easy. Targeted traffic of the right buyers is getting easier each day. You can find SEO people lining the streets like vultures to a carcass in the desert. Traffic that converts is more dependent on content and your ability to continually serve up content that educates the buyer to the point of the sale.

I meet business owner after business owner who will spend thousands of dollars attending conferences, peer groups, executive coaching, executive consulting and all kinds of self improvement but wont spend 3 hours with a team of content and copy writers who design effective content. Yet in comparison to effectiveness, the content could out perform all the other executive junkets combined on a ROI basis.

One needs to have converting content for the following:

1.       Prospect outbound communications to include; email, text, direct mail, audio, video and social media communications.

2.       Landing pages/Website

3.       Customer retention communications to include; email, text, direct mail, audio, video and social media communications.

I see too many executives gloss over the importance of content and it’s delivery. They listen to the marketing experts and get wrapped around their brand and a message. For the SMB, brand can be the pet python that strangles them because they spend their money on brand development and not effective communication of the business proposition to the buyer. I have said this before and I will say it again, no one loves your logo more than you!

Poor content and poor delivery of content means your communications will just be noise or the proverbial hay and not the needle.

Invest in great content for your online communications and your business will grow. Invest in tools that will automate the delivery of your content without adding people.

Stay connected and invest in your content.

This week’s Darwin Award goes to Joan Pallone of Metro Brokers for her bus bench advertising.  I cringe when I see small business owners falling trap to this ego based advertising. For the money,  outdoor bus benches are no longer effective. Let’s explore why this is a HUGE waste of money… And this week’s Marketing Darwin Award Winner.

Points of Failure

1.       Not targeted – Some outdoor ad sales person will argue this is low cost advertizing but this is just another form of “pay, spray and pray” broadcast. It’s not targeted to home buyers or sellers

2.       Phone number is spelled in a word -303-466-HOME –  Bad move these days. There are more than 300 different types of  handheld/phone devices on the market  and if you are like the millions of blackberry users ( including me), your phone keypad does not correspond with the 1950’s letter matching to numbers systems. My numbers don’t match (The same holds true for people with phone systems that want you to spell out a name) and I just give up.

3.       No website – Need I say more? Come on, it’s not 1975.

4.       No links to social media. Only one way to connect, the phone. See number three for explanation of that.

5.       No differentiation – No where in this horrible outdoor display does it teach me how to buy, separate Joan from all the other Realtors?

6.       No connecting with the reticular activator - Most people have been trained to ignore this type of advertising. This ad does nothing to pull me out of my “block out the noise comma” and make me pay attention. Just visual noise.

7.       The ad gets blocked when people sit on the bench to wait for the bus.

8.       The bench does not face the line of site for drivers who pass it. The ad  depends on the driver to turn their head to read it.

9.       Poor location. – This bench is on a two lane street  with businesses on one side of the street and homes on the other. The only people who have a great view of this bench are the people who’s homes back up to this street and look out the back windows of their homes. Audience of 4, maybe 5 families and the wonderful people who wait for the bus.

10.    Not trackable – Why on earth would you do any kind of marketing these days that does not have a way to measure effectiveness

11.    This is ego marketing. These ads are sold to puff the ego of the name of the business on the sign.

Outdoor advertising is a huge waste for the small business. It takes hundreds of thousands of dollars for branding and a bus bench is a complete waste of small business marketing dollars. Joan should be asking for a refund or looking for someone to help her with marketing in the digital, wireless world.

Be smart. Stay connected.

As our digital and physical lives blur further, the internet has become the information hub where people spend a majority of their time learning, playing and communicating with others globally. Staying connected is more important than ever. If you are not participating in Social Media, you really need to rethink your strategy.

Sometimes it is easy to lose sight of just how staggering the numbers are of people collaborating, researching, and interacting on the web.

I thought it might be fun to take a step back and look at some interesting/amazing social media, Web 2.0, crowdsourcing and internet statistics.  I tried to find stats that are the most up-to-date as possible at the time of publishing this post.

The numbers presented below should be a close representation of today’s numbers (please correct me in the comments if you find more recent numbers somewhere and I’ll update).

Let’s break them down by section:

Google search stats:

1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) - approximate number of unique URLs in Google’s index (source)

2,000,000,000 (two billion) – very rough number of Google searches daily (source)

$110,000,000 – approximately amount of money lost by Google annually due to the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button (source)

24,400 – number of people employed by Google (December, 2008)

68,000,000 – the average number of times people Googled the word Google each month for the last year (source:  keyword tool)

$39.96 - the average cost per click for the phrase “consolidation of school loans” in AdWords (source:  keyword tool)

1,430,000 - the number of Google results for “Robert Scoble”

136,000 - the number of Google results for “Admiral Ackbar”

Wikipedia stats

2,695,205 - the number of articles in English on Wikipedia

684,000,000 – the number of visitors to Wikipedia in the last year

75,000 - the number of active contributors to Wikipedia

10,000,000 – the number of total articles in Wikipedia in all languages

260 – the number of languages articles have been written in on Wikipedia

(source)

YouTube stats

70,000,000 – number of total videos on YouTube  (March 2008)

200,000 – number of video publishers on YouTube (March 2008)

100,000,000 – number of YouTube videos viewed per day (this stat from 2006 is the most recent I could locate)

112,486,327 – number of views the most viewed video on YouTube has (January, 2009)

2 minutes 46.17 seconds – average length of video

412.3 years – length in time it would take to view all content on YouTube (March 2008)

26.57 - average age of uploader

13 hours – amount of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute

US $1.65 billion in Google stock – amount Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for in October 2006

$1,000,000 – YouTube’s estimated bandwidth costs per day

(sources here, here and here)

Blogosphere stats

133,000,000 – number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002

346,000,000 – number of people globally who read blogs (comScore March 2008)

900,000 – average number of blog posts in a 24 hour period

1,750,000 – number of RSS subscribers to TechCrunch, the most popular Technology blog (January 2009)

77% - percentage of active Internet users who read blogs

55% – percentage of the blogosphere that drinks more than 2 cups of coffee per day (source)

81 - number of languages represented in the blogosphere

59% – percentage of bloggers who have been blogging for at least 2 years

source

Twitter stats

1,111,991,000 – number of Tweets to date (see an up to the minute count here)

9,000,000 – number of Tweets/day(March 2000) (from TechCrunch)

86,078 – number of followers of the most active Twitter user (@kevinrose)

63% – percentage of Twitter users that are male (from Time)

Facebook stats

200,000,000 – number of active users

100,000,000 - number of users who log on to Facebook at least once each day

170 - number of countries/territories that use Facebook

35 - number of different languages used on Facebook

2,600,000,000 – number of minutes global users in aggregate spend on Facebook daily

100 – number of friends the average user has

700,000,000 – number of photos added to Facebook monthly

52,000 – number of applications currently available on Facebook

140 - number of new applications added per day

source

Digg stats

236,000,000 – number of visitors attracted annually by 2008 (according to a Compete survey)

56% - percentage of Digg’s frontpage content allegedly controlled by top 100 users

124,340 - number of stories MrBabyMan, the number one user, has Dugg (see updated number here)

612 - number of stories from Cracked.com that have made page 1 of Digg (see all 41 pages of them here)

36,925 – number of Diggs the most popular story in the last 365 days has received (see story here)

We all need to stay connected.  The numbers are staggering. Maybe now you can see why social media is important for you to be working in.

This post is a reposted from http://thefuturebuzz.com. Used with permission.

The newspapers and media companies forgot what business they were in a long time ago and that is why they are struggling so hard today.

While it’s important to report the news, have great content, blah, blah, blah…, the real business the newspapers and broadcast media are in is the “make the phone ring” or results business.  No business owner buys an ad in the paper because they want to support the paper, they buy ads to make their phone ring and sales grow. Trust me, I have purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of advertising in my local media market, I undertstand fully the love hate realtionship.

The same holds true now for online versions of the media. If the phone is not ringing, no advertiser wants to write the check for the ads.Its a love hate realtionship  with the newspaper or any other media company.

However, the check every business owner is willing to write is a commission check. Commissions means sales took place. This is why affiliate marketing is growing so fast. Bring me buying customers and I will gladly write you a check.

The technology exists today in automated marketing solutions like Infusionsoft, to track your affiliates and the resulting sales. If you examine the math, affiliate marketing is far more profitable than advertising.

Let’s say you have a Internet site that is struggling to monetize through advertising or memberships. Switch to an affiliate marketing model and the world changes. Let’s take a look.

In the advertising model, you sell space. Let’s say for example that a banner ad on your site is $1,500.00.  Nice, you might be able to sell a few banners in a rotation but your space is limited because there is only one banner slot per page. Let’s say you sell 4 of them in a rotation and end up with $6,000.

Now take on the affiliate model and watch the revenue grow.  You still run the banners at a much reduced rate or even free. ( I can hear newspaper or website CEO’s the world over choking on this comment.)

Let’s say your site has a million page views per month. A good conversion rate of 2-3% can be expected off the click through. We will use 2.5% for our math. That results in 25,000 click throughs and lets’ say for example sake that 5% of these click throughs buy or 1250. For our example sake, we will use the Full Strength affiliate model where there is a $5 affiliate fee per sale. The resulting revenue is $6,250.00 for month one.  Full strength is a performance nutrition meal replacement food that helps you lose weight, gain muscle and increase energy. the product is sold as a subscription that the average user stays on the product for 9 months. Now my banner revenue went from $1,500.00 to $56,250.00.  We are not done yet. Hang on to your hat my marketing friends.

Implement a drip system with trip wire or action based marketing and the 25,000 click throughs now result in a much bigger number. Truth is, people buy when they want to buy, not when you want to sell them. So maybe the other 23,750  click throughs just were not ready to buy, they did not have all the information they needed to buy on the spot. Say for example sake that just another 5% buy over a six month process because they were placed in a automated marketing drip systems. In a six month period with 24 touches, they were taught enough to buy. (The automated touches cost 1/5th of  cent per touch so the cost to market to them would be just under 5 cents.)

Now my $1,500.00 banner space results in a $112,500.00 Almost 100 times the revenue of the banner ad. My client Full Strength is elated because of the sales and they did not pay for a banner ad that did not perform.

Results over advertising. It’s now a reality because of technology. If the media companies follow this model, there is no crisis in their industry. There advertisers become partners and everyone wins.

By the way, this does not have to be a media company, social media site or other online property. I can show your organization how to do this with just referral networks of any kind.

Need to know more? Need to know how? Connect with me.

The Attention Connection – “to get attention you must pay attention.”

People use Social media platforms for many reasons. Based on reading posts and being an active social media participant for two plus years, I think some people use social media because it’s “the thing to do”, others are making connections with friends and family, while others are using the technologies for business development.There is also a crowd of folks who feel through social media that they can become micro celebrities or simply to attract attention to themselves.

I use social media for all the above reasons except the last one. My main use of social media id for business development and moving influence on the Internet. If you are in this crowd with me, this is the audience I want to speak to about the use of key words in your social media strategy.

All effective Internet marketing is based on key words, the words and word strings the general public will search on to find your website in the search engines.  If your organization is not using your key words in social media, you are missing out on traffic and valuable SEO.

It was only recently that Google and the other search engines made the decision to crawl the social media sites. If you are a Twitter or Facebook user, run a search on Google on your name. You will now find some of the organic results to be references to your social media profiles. Ah ha, now the message of the day.

Use key words you want you or your company to be found on the Internet in your social profiles and in your stream posts of tweets or wall posts.

Since the search engines are scanning the social media sites, be smart and drive traffic with key words. So many users of social media don’t have a strategy around their posts and it’s evident by reading their streams.

Stay ahead of the pack by using key words to your advantage. Here are a few recommendations:

1. Develop a lexicon of key words – get your SEO expert to help you do a key word analysis on your products and services. Find out what key words are important to traffic, who owns that traffic and then write all your content, including stream posts, using your own lexicon of words.
2. Tweet in the language of your customers – if you sell supplements to treat inflammation of the joints, then you better tweet about sore joints and not the clinical name for the condition. Tweeting in 12 dollar clinical names does not do you any good when you want to reach people with sore joints and all they want is relief.
3. Tweets and wall posts favor the 140 character limit, so always use key words and reference your product name. This takes creativity but you are really working on SEO and traffic.

Social media is fun, engaging and can be a great benefit to your sales if you have a plan and execute on it by leveraging key words.

As always, stay connected by paying attention.

When it comes to Internet and social media marketing, I am always reminded of an old joke about two guys out hunting grizzly bears.  The joke goes like this:

There were two hunters in Alaska out hunting grizzly bears. The first hunter was a sage old hunter who was a professional hunting guide and had seen his share of bear hunts. Along with him was a second hunter, a very inexperienced hunter who was on his first hunt with the guide.

After a few hours out in the brush, the inexperienced hunter kept hearing rustling noises and began to fear that he had probably put himself in harms way by hunting bears. The rustling grew louder and finally the fear got the best of him and he asked the sage old guide “don’t you ever worry about being able to out run the grizzly?”

The guide looked at his fear filled companion and in a dead pan voice replied, “nah, I don’t ever worry about out running the grizzly, I just have to outrun you!”

Can you outrun your competition when it comes to Internet and Social media marketing?

It’s just as important to know what your competition is doing as to what you are doing. Your organization not only needs to pay attention to your own social media, SEO and PPC but your closest competitors.

There are great tools available today to monitor brand and social buzz, along with compare your keywords, tags and SEO with with the keywords of those you compete with.

I highly recommend competitive analysis as a vital first step in social media and your internet presence.

Here is another great video that is worth the 45 seconds. Can you out do the competition?

Funny…

Stay connected.

Most everyone walking the planet over 16 years old has seen the popular late night talk shows.  In nearly every country, people flock to these late night shows. The format is the same and very popular. The shows start with a monologue from the host, normally laced with social commentary laced with humor and wit. After the opening monologue, the show flips to a interview format where a dialogue takes place between the host and guests.

Marketing types should learn from this successful format now that internet and mobile communications now facilitate dialogue better than ever.

The days of monologue marketing, media and communication are gone. We see evidence of this with the global struggle of the newspaper industry and various medias that used to primarily were monologue delivery systems. The papers and media created the content, controlled it’s distribution and basically had control.  There was no two way communication, it was all monologue.

Democratization of content and influence is here. Anyone person or organization can create a groundswell using social media. Now that mobile communications have become affordable for the masses and social media platforms are all the rage, you must provide your prospects access to you in formats that support a dialogue.

Questions to ask your organization:

1. Does your marketing message invite people to be taught, not told?
2. Do you deliver the education to your customers need to buy from you in a manner which can be consumed and not feel like a sales pitch? Does your communication delivery include automated drip systems?
3. Does your website invite communication, not just a a digital brochure? Have you integrated video and chat into your online presence?
4. Are you actively using social media? If so, how effectively?
5. Are you monitoring your brand in social media and responding to what is being said?
6. Do customers, partners and prospects have access to your firm 24/7 in a self service format? Remember, customers buy when they are ready to buy and not when you are ready to sell.

If you are truly going to gain and maintain an Attention Connection with your desired stake holders, you must be relevant and connected. You can not be a stand up talk show host that just delivers a  monologue. You must seek to have dialogue.

What do you think? How do you grade your organization in the delivery and sustaining in a dialogue?

As always, connect with you later.

Until now, most companies have considered their Customer Relationship Management systems  (CRM) as a separate system from their website, Internet marketing, social media and communication with their prospects, customers and partners.

Those days are gone.

Dont have a fence in your organization.

Your CRM strategy and resulting systems should be driving the design of your website, your social media, your Internet marketing and all communications with your stake holders. The overload of information we all receive each day, the result is the attention span of customers is so short these days, your organization needs a database and automated sequences to manage the process of communicating with your customers.

Our world is changing so fast with the tools of communication rapidly evolving (social media,text messaging, lexicon survelance, brand monitoring, etc) that you can not place your bets on any one form of communication medium as “the channel” to reach your clients. You need to segment your clients, refine focus your message and select the tools to delivery that targeted message.

At the heart of all this is your CRM database and the technology exists to integrate every communication into complete customer interaction history that can be tracked. You can drive your sales and marketing blind without the data and facts.

Smart companies who stay ahead of the competition will have their CRM system driving and tracking every communication with your customers.

Some questions to ask your team:

1. Is my website a integrated with my CRM and is this integration two way to both push and pull content?
2. Is my content integrated? Meaning all content is driving customers and partners to a sale, regardless of the medium?
3. Does my current customer database include a field for social media ID’s and addresses? ( Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc)
4. Am I using my CRM system to push communication to and from my social media presence?

If you  are going to attract and maintain the Attention Connection™ of your prospects and make them a customer for life, you will need a CRM system that is driving it all.

Stay connected and have a great weekend! Spring is here.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Those old enough to remember the 1980 famous Stanley Kubrick film from the Stephen King novel The Shining starring Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, remember these were the words the crazed the  frustrated writer Jack typed over and over as he crossed the threshold into madness.

Have I turned into Jack? Am I all work and no play because I prefer less numbers of personal tweets?

Yesterday I posted a blog about sharing personal information as status updates. I referenced Jeremiah Owyang, Internet Analyst who works for Forrester as an example of someone I truly respect and follow but I was not so keen on the detail of some of his personal updates.  In fairness to anyone I would write about (which is rare, as I stick to strategy, process, content and technology), I gave Jeremiah the heads up in an email. With 39,000+ followers on Twitter, a great blog site and a guessed avalanche of email volume, I thought my communication might just be glossed over or missed because of sheer volume Jeremiah gets each day.

Surprising, Jeremiah not only read my email, he commented on my blog and then posted a Tweet and authored a blog about the topic of ” How much should we share?’

The tweets and blogs set off a a great discussion with many followers and readers contributing to conversation. The results were mixed and you can judge by reading both comment sections yourself however, there are trends and interesting observations to be shared for anyone using social media streams.

1. Social media is a powerful medium that is truly undefined. There are no protocol rules.  It was suggested maybe a new protocol of #P be used on Titter to identify personal tweets.
2. Those commenting on both blogs tended to be OK with a balance and blend of business and personal tweets or stream updates
3. It was pointed out that Facebook tends to be used more for personal networks and Twitter for business. I agree.
4. Many suggested using two twitter accounts, one for personal, one for business. Not a bad idea but I hate the thought of managing another focal point of social media.
5. Grouping Tweets would be nice on one account on an outbound basis. this way personal and business could be separated.
6. Social media is swift, powerful and influence can be enormous and impactful. I run a boutique consulting firm based in Denver and my blog is intended for my client base as a library of thoughts to help them when they cross the bridge to implementing an Attention Connection™ System. My normal readership hovers around 225 readers. Thanks to the interactions yesterday, my readership shot to over 1685 for the blog post, I had more than 100 twitter direct messages and I picked up more than 100 followers on Twitter and many  new subscribers to my blog. A powerful connection to an internet person of influence.  A lesson we all can learn from.

A point I forgot to make clear yesterday to Jeremiah is I don’t mind some personal tweets but I don’t want to see true professionals be tuned out because they are now lumped into the same bucket with the attention hounds who call themselves celebrities.

I think its sad state of the world that actors and sports personalities are the top followed people on Twitter and their contribution to the world is so shallow compared to people like Jeremiah, and countless others who are contributing each day. I want to hear their contributions. Not what some shallow fool had for lunch.   I wont even mention their names or link to the attention hounds  as it makes my stomach turn. You know who they are.

When it comes to reading stream posts about what someone ate for lunch, there is only one guy I care to hear about what he ate and that is a client and friend of mine, Shawn Phillips. If you have not met Shawn, you should. He is 45 years old, a body that is ripped as a Greek God and a true expert on nutrition and health. He has authored several books, has the best performance fast food and will be featured in the May 2009 edition of Success Magazine.  Now there is someone who is worth hearing about what he eats and drinks!

Ok, so maybe it’s true, I am all work and no play. So hear it goes… a personal drop.

I spent the evening watching my 10 year old son Beck play basketball last night. I had nothing to eat while doing it and sat by no one interesting other than Joe’s dad.

Ok, that did not hurt too much. Maybe I can try it again tomorrow. Hmmm.

Keep the conversation going, leverage social media to it’s fullest.  Post what you want, be happy and be relevant to some.

Until next time, stay connected.

Our family dog of choice is Tootsie, the Bassett Hound. She is a lovable 18 month old Bassett with a deep bellowing bark. For a dog that is all of 12 inches tall and 35 pounds, her thunderous bark sounds like a dog three times her size.

Tootsie stands at the glass front door and barks at things that are interesting or troublesome to her.  I tell my kids it’s her version of social media. The trouble is, the barking gets to be annoying when it’s just the neighbor’s cat who sits on the fence for hours at a time.  Tootsie’s barking and growling drives us nuts when it’s about nothing.

Last night during family home evening, (our dedicated family time), Tootsie began barking and was disrupting the reading we were doing together. My son Alec looked out the door to see what she was barking at and  a red fox was standing on the front lawn. Wow, Tootsie was barking about something important. Nice. We all enjoyed the sight  of the fox, something we would have missed if Tootsie did not alert us. We almost missed her important communication because we have become desensitized to her barking.

Don’t be a barking dog when it comes to communications to your network.

As a marketing/technologist practitioner who is deep in the tornado of what is happening in our world of technology, media, CRM and the internet, I follow a group of thought leaders from Gartner, Forrester, Seth Godin and others.  I read their blogs, follow their Tweets, and stay up on their insights as to where this world is going. I am trying to stay relevant to those I serve as clients.

One of my favorite internet analysts to follow is Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research. I have read his stuff for a long time. However Jeremiah has become a bit of a barking dog to me. (sorry Jeremiah, I still love you and Tootsie too).

Over the weekend through the use of Twitter, I was informed of places Jeremiah went, what was up with his dog, what he was eating, his review of a movie, etc. While some social media pundits argue we all need to show the human side of participants, the play by play is really just barking and watering down his message. I don’t care.  Feed me more insights on the internet!

I follow Jeremiah because he is an expert. I doubt we will ever be friends and not because Jeremiah is not a swell guy, or that I would not welcome his friendship, its just that life prohibits because of limited cycles me being friends with everyone.  The communication I want from Jeremiah is about the internet.

Thought leadership is gained and maintained often by the things we don’t say. Marketing or for that matter, any communication is not about volume, it’s about the quality.

Jeremiah has a quote I like ” A lot of hay and not many needles”.

I watch Tweets go by on Tweet Deck, wall posts on Facebook and sift through the hay for the needles.

The message I convey today is this; Attention Connection™ is  all about being relevant, timely and concise.  People will pay attention and remain connected to you when your communication is more than barking.

Be relevant in your communications and don’t let your customers, partners and network miss the beautiful red fox you bring them because you have barked too much.

Connect with you later.