What drives people to tweet? Self promotion? Because it’s the thing to do? Because everyone else is? Bored? Unemployed? Day dreaming of self importance?

The smart ones are doing it for Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Let’s look at the numbers.

According to the “Consumer Internet Barometer” from TNS and The Conference Board, 41.6% percent of Internet users who used Twitter did so to keep in touch with their friends. Yet how many of you have 2,000 friends who have time or care when you get a cup of coffee or watch a movie?

In addition, 29.1% used it to update their status, 25.8% to find news and stay updated, 21.7% for work purposes and 9.4% for research.

Women and men both used Twitter primarily to keep in touch with friends. Secondarily, men were interested in finding news and women in updating their status.

Users under age 35 were more interested in broadcasting their status than their senior counterparts. Older users were more likely to use the service for work-related purposes.

The average Twitter user interacted primarily with friends and family.

Next-most-popular were celebrities, bloggers, TV shows, co-workers, brands and journalists.

More women interacted with friends, family and celebrities than men, but men were more likely to follow bloggers.

Older users trailed younger ones in interaction with every Twitter user type except journalists and brands.

While all of this is interesting data, no one really should be using Twitter except for SEM purposes. I am mean come on, anyone with a real job and a normal self esteem with a balanced self perception really has time to play around in Twitter.

I don’t use Twitter for research as some would argue. If you want to do real research, set up a Google Alert and review the content of the things you are interested in once every few days.

Social media can be the biggest time waster for those who don’t perceive themselves as a micro celebrity or are living in small fantasy worlds.   I meet many people who use Twitter  who are living in a small parallel universe having a conversation with a small set of groupies. It’s almost like watching adults who attended the ComicCon in San Diego this past week, all dressed up like a comic book hero, living in a parallel fantasy universe.  Get a life, get a job, get kids, or start a business and you wont have time to be a celebrity figure in your own private Idaho.

I coach my clients to use Twitter and the other social media tools out there as free  web pages to help their business gain SEM rankings in the search engines, be found by users of the social media world and to stay in touch with a small set of peers.( You may want a profile for each of those purposes). Google and Yahoo search engines are scanning Twitter, Facebook, Google Profiles  and Linked in and your firm should have strong keyword based presences in all the social media streams.

If you spend more than 15 minutes a day on Twitter, you may be one of the following:

1. Unemployed
2. Soon to be unemployed ounce your boss figures out how much time you are wasting
3. Living in your own Harry Potter parallel universe
4. Dying to be a micro celebrity
5. All of the above

Micro blogging at 140 characters at a time is just not space to convey a real message. For that, it’s probably better to blog.

Stay connected.

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.

Another sigh of disbelief. Why do so many companies fall for these bad marketing spends and programs?  This week’s Marketing Darwin Award goes to Belle Pelle Laser.

Shopping cart advertising is right up there with bus bench advertising as a horrible investment. This is ego marketing at it’s best.

Lets take a look.

Points of Failure

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

2.       False interrupt – The sexy couple on the beach have nothing to do with smooth skin. This is using sex to sell another product.

3.       Ad is very small – The copy on the ad is hard to read.

4.       No links to social media. One needs to be in multiple streams and let the customer know you are there.

5.       No differentiation – No where in this horrible outdoor display does it teach me how to buy, separate them from their competion?

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 put items in the cart. One loaf of bread from being blocked.

8.       Poor location. – When I am in the store shopping for groceries, I am not looking for laser hair removal, a Realtor or Insurance.

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.

12. Ad selling ad space- This is a huge red flag. If this form of media is working well, there would be a line at the door on a wait list. The simple fact that they are running an ad for buyers should be a giant red flag. Run Forest, run!

Display advertising is a huge waste for the small business. It takes hundreds of thousands of dollars for branding and a shopping cart ad is a complete waste of small business marketing dollars. Belle Pelle laser  should be asking for a refund or looking for someone to help her with marketing in the digital, wireless world.

Be smart. Stay connected.

In the United States we  celebrate Independence day this weekend. Happy Independence day to all!  Make this weekend a wonderful time of celebration of the freedom of not only thought but of action too!  Even with all the challenges our country faces today, freedom is the catalyst for greatness and I wish every human on the planet had freedom.

As I prepare to celebrate independence day with softball,  water fights,  BBQ, root beer floats and fireworks, I think about tapping the spirit of independence in marketing, taking hold of your destiny.

My message today is about independence in your marketing and sales. The world of internet marketing has changed and no longer can you build a website, execute  some nice Search Engine Marketing /Key word  (SEM) work and all the sudden the world comes to you, throwing their money at you.  I don’t know if many readers remember the old IBM commercial that ran in the early days of the internet where a team of co-workers is huddled around a PC monitor to look at a website and they kick it off live and the order counter just starts spinning?  The workers are excited at first as the numbers trickle in and then begin to fret at the order counter starts spinning out of control.  Great commercial, but not reality, not then, and certainly not now.

The reality of today is that your business must still build a great internet presence, must still have strong SEM but you better also be list building, targeting and then hunting down your prospects through automated drip marketing and sophisticated Customer Relationship Marketing. There are over  3 billion people using the internet . Truth be told, there is a customer for everyone and every product. Just doing some SEM is a passive aggressive approach and is not enough.  You better be hunting in the social media streams to find your prospects.

Take control of your destiny and create independence like the patriots did in America 233 years ago by seeking out change, finding your audience, connecting  with them and inviting them into a dialog about becoming your customer for life.  Build an Attention Connection. The founding fathers of the nation would not have broken free if they had taken a passive approach.

Don’t be a pacifist waiting for customers to find you with a bit of SEM, take action and hunt them down.

To get attention, you must pay attention. Happy Marketing Independence day!

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.

I pondered if the should be a Darwin Award winner but quickly decided against it since the business I am referencing has been in business for three decades.  However, with that said, we have recently seen many business like the Rocky Mountain News, one of Denver’s oldest businesses shutter it’s doors 4 months shy of 150 years in business.

Don’t live in the past. If your business is not evolving, you may be one day closer to shutting your doors.

To many of us long for “back in the day”. Human nature is to reflect back with a melancholy view that things were better. Maybe they were, maybe not. One thing for sure, marketing and customer communication has changed.

My almost Darwin winner this week is Papa J’s.

I award them the 1/2 Darwin award for their signage and living in the past. Look at both their website and the signage on the building. The website says they have been in business 32 years, the sign on the front of the building says 31 years in business.  I called to verify and it turns out they have been in business 33 years and nearing their 34th birthday. ( I would never hard code a sign or portion of my website with a date that is expired… marketing 1o1).

Papa J’s has excellent food and good service.  Both of these qualities have weathered the test of time. Yesterday’s success and more than 3 decades is a great achievement but this is no assurance for future success.  Change is here and no longer can we expect to rest on our heals of what worked yesterday.  Dont think for one minute that you will be able to attrack and maintain the attention of your customers for life if you are marketing the way you did just even 12 months ago, let alone, 5, 10 , 20 or 30 years ago (31, 32, 33 or what ever the real number is).

Google and the other also ran search engines, change their algorithms on a regular basis. Twelve months ago, how many in the mainstream had ever heard of Facebook or Twitter? Let’s be honest, not many.

Twitter has been offered over a billion dollars for their company that has been in existence for 3 years.  Why? Because Twitter and the other social medias companies now have the attention of the consumer. This is the method they have chosen to stay connected.

The question for business owners and marketing managers is ” are you keeping up?”

Here are a few recommendations we all should be observing.

1. Be nimble in your approach to marketing. Nothing is constant but change.
2. Stay connected with those who are in the eye of the tornado when it comes to marketing and communications.
3. Get a centralized database and CRM System. – Methods of communication may change, but being able to track your customers and how THEY prefer to communicate is critical. We highly recommend Infusionsoft.
4. Done hard code anything ( check out Papa js’ outdated sign and website).
5. Put yourself out there, be in the streams where the fish are. ( see my posts on grizzlies in the stream.

Everything has changed. Don’t be the next Rocky Mountain News.

To get attention, you must pay attention.

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.

Dogs are pack animals and very social. People are not much different and that is why people and dogs get along so well. Everyone loves a loyal companion.

Our family has a Bassett hound, Tootsie, who just loves attention. With seven people in our home, Toosie has a large pack in her mind. Bassett hounds are great family dogs because they are so gentle, good natured and great with kids.Tootsie is a funny dog and very playful. She will seek you out and either nuzzle up to you for some love or she will  drop at your feet, roll onto her back, with her feet in the air so you can rub her belly.

A lesson  we can learn from the Bassett hound is that if we pay attention to our customers, they will come back to you like Tootsie does to our family members. Even at times when you don’t want love and affection, here comes Tootsie with her sad eyes, big ears and her wagging tail. Ready to love you and get some love in return.

If we don’t pay attention to our customers, they will find another pack. Its that simple. We see this all the time, organization which have gotten so busy finding and winning new customers, that they don’t pay attention to their customer base.  There tools like Infusionsoft marketing automation that make customer contact automatic.  By implementing these systems, you can stay top of mind with your clients without having to remember to do it. Remember, if you are not paying attention to your pack, your customers, someone else will.

Get connected, pay attention.

To get attention, you must pay attention.

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.