Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Deals, Discounts and Coupons: The Thrill is Gone

It’s President’s Day and you know what that means! Low low prices on mattresses, bedding, jewelry and cars, cars, cars. If George Washington were alive today, he’d be lining up to get a great price on a new Toyota! Honest, says Abe!

Do you remember the days when Washington and Lincoln were respected men of history and not hyperactive, humorous pitch men? Me neither.

But there was a time when people planned for holiday sales because it was the only time of the year you’d get such a great deal. Magazines would publish articles about the best time to buy new sheets or barbeque grills because most of the deep discounts were calendar-based. How does that work now that we get bombarded with great deals every day? From Amazon’s Daily Deals to Groupon’s half price offers, to downloadable and printable coupons for hundreds of products and restaurants, the average person could go broke saving money.

On a daily basis, I get a dozen discount offers in my email box and a few more via Twitter. Even Best Buy now reminds me that I can save if I buy completely unrelated products through the Best Buy rewards program. I love a good deal and I’m known for never paying full price but even I’ve grown weary of the constant stream of deals, discounts and coupons.

The very word “deal,” used to imply that you were getting something special. A reward for shopping at a certain time or for being a loyal customer. Now, when ten mommy bloggers note it on their blog and three people send it to me via Facebook, I don’t feel so special anymore. And can it really be called a discount when the item never actually sells for the full price as is the case with Amazon?

Studies have shown us that people follow brands on Facebook and Twitter in hopes of getting a coupon. Studies also show a huge rise in the number of people using deal sites like Groupon on a regular basis. But at what point will we all begin turning a blind eye on the great deal? How soon before 50% is looked at as hardly worth the effort? It’s 90% off or nothing!

If being different is how a company stands out in a crowd, maybe it’s time someone tried reverse psychology. To honor those men who helped shape our country, we give you the President’s Day Full Price Sale. Nothing discounted, because when it comes to quality and standards, you always get what you pay for.

I’ll bet there are a couple of marketing geniuses out there who could totally make that idea work.

Monday, February 21, 2011

Introducing Marketing Pilgrim Channels: Sponsors Welcome!

We are excited to provide our Marketing Pilgrim readers and sponsors new opportunities.

For our readers we are going to create content channels that make stories about important subject areas easier to find. These channels will include: SEO (search engine optimization), paid search (PPC), social media, Google, Web Site Analytics, Social Media Analytics, Local Internet Marketing (SMB), Mobile and Internet Law. Of course, with a rapidly changing landscape like the Internet marketing world these could just be the start of the channels we start to track.

For our sponsors and advertisers this a great new opportunity to reach our audience of Internet marketing influencers and decision makers.

We are really excited about this new phase in Marketing Pilgrim’s evolution. If you would like to learn more about sponsor opportunities with Marketing Pilgrim Channels contact Frank Reed ( editor AT MarketingPilgrim dot com).

Channels will be coming online in the next few weeks. If you have any suggestions of what you would like to see let us know!

Friday, February 18, 2011

For Bloggers, Now May Be the Time to Start Tweeting

Connect Twitter Google To tweet or not to tweet has been a question bloggers have had to ask themselves pretty much since the dawn of Twitter.

The main question is whether or not the time, effort and energy spent on creating and nurturing a Twitter profile is justified by the benefit one gets out of it. It’s always been a tough question and one where the answer heavily depends on the blogger, their niche and their audience.

Howver, with an update to Google’s “Social Search” feature today, Twitter just received a potential boost in terms of its usefulness. Now Twitter can not only be a way to communicate with your friends, family and readers, but now it might also directly impact your site’s position in Google itself.

Perhaps most interesting of all though is that, at this time, Facebook “likes” are not having the same impact as Twitter, meaning that, for the moment at least, Twitter is the only social network that can directly affect your Google ranking, other than Google’s built-in network.

So, if you haven’t been using Twitter because you didn’t see the point, now there may be one to give you a reason to start.

How it Works

SEO experts have long speculated that tweets affect search engine ranking, something that was confirmed in December of last year, but the impact seemed to be of dubious value, making other factors more vital to focus on.

However, today’s changes to social search have the potential, especially for your followers and their connections, to greatly boost your presence.

The reason is that, for logged in users who have connected their Twitter or other accounts to their Google Account, relevant links that were tweeted by the people they follow will be sprinkled in with the regular results, often bringing sites to the front page that would not have been there otherwise.

This means that, if you blog about microphones and tweet out your links, any follower of yours who searches for information on mics will, very likely, see your page high up in the results with an icon indicating who it is from.

It is also likely, though not confirmed, that these results may also help your Google ranking in broader searches, especially if Google sees that your followers find what they are looking for at your links.

In short, Twitter could become something of a proving ground for new content, letting webmasters show Google that their content is right for the search results and that, in turn, could be a powerful shortcut or boost to Google success.

How to Take Advantage of It

The good news is that, to take advantage of it, you really don’t have to do much of anything. All that you have to do is have a Twitter account, work to grow your presence and tweet out your content.

However, if you want to see results from the people you follow in Google, you have to connect your Google Account to your Twitter account, instructions for which are in the original Google post on the upgrades.

Bear in mind that this is a new Google feature that is being rolled out over time and may not be available until next week, depending on when your account has it activated.

But how big will the impact of this new feature be? That remains to be seen but there are several reasons to be wary abou spending too much time investing in your Twitter presence because of it.

Reasons to be Wary

As great as getting an immediate Google boost for relevant searches sounds, it’s crucial to remember that it only applies for the people who have connected their Twitter (or other relevant account) to their Google account and are following you.

Most likely, even if you have a large number of Twitter followers, that’s going to be a fairly small pool of people. The odds of them searching for content relevant to your links are, in truth, fairly small.

Still, those who do perform such searchers, click your links and find useful may, in turn, give your site a boost across broader Google results. It is unclear if that will happen and the issue of how Google interprets user data into its rankings is hotly contested, but it still seems that getting clicks and lasting visitors from Google is better than being ignored or sending visitors right back to the results page.

In short though, the benefits will likely be limited to a very small subset of your Twitter followers but, it is at least conceivable that it could have an impact across the broader results because of it.

However, it’s still up to individual bloggers to decide if it is worth taking part in, meaning that we are more or less back where we started on the “to tweet or not to tweet” debate.

Bottom Line

Once again, it’s up to bloggers to decide, individually, if it is worthwhile to invest the time and energy in setting up and maintaining a Twitter account. All that has changed is that now there is a new SEO benefit to factor in, even if the announcement back in December probably has a larger in the long run.

What is clear is that the search engines are taking Tweets much more seriously and, if you’re a webmaster interesting in maximizing the SEO potential of their site, then having an active and prominent Twitter account just makes sense.

Still, it is a lot of time and effort and there are many other factors that may be more important. So the decision is up to you, but if you’ve been on the fence about the benefits of tweeting for your site, now may be the best time to start.

Waiter? There’s a Social Media Spammer in my Google SERPs!

I’ve never been a big fan of adding as many “friends” to my social networks as possible. Why add unwanted noise to my socially-connected world?

Well, I’m now even more glad that I’ve been selective with who I friend and follow because Google just shoved everyone into my search results.

First, social search results will now be mixed throughout your results based on their relevance (in the past they only appeared at the bottom). This means you’ll start seeing more from people like co-workers and friends, with annotations below the results they’ve shared or created. So if you’re thinking about climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and your colleague Matt has written a blog post about his own experience, then we’ll bump up that post with a note and a picture:

To be fair, Google’s not just forcing these new social results on me–I have to connect my networks with my Google profile–but if you’ve connected your accounts, and not been selective in your friends, you’re about to see a lot more avatars in your SERPs. And Google’s about to get even more aggressive in getting you to connect your social networks:

In addition, if our algorithms find a public account that might be yours (for example, because the usernames are the same), we may invite you to connect your accounts right on the search results page and in your Google Account settings:

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. If we accept that the days of everyone seeing the same ten blue links are over, and, we accept that spammers are still going to want to try and get their craptent in front of you; what do you think is going to happen? My guess? Spammers are going to do their best to weasel their way into your social network so that they can push their content higher up in your search results?

Of course, Google’s not confirming that “shared” content will be given a boost in its search results:

So is Google using social signals to alter the actual results? Yes and no. In some cases they are, in some cases they’re not, Cassidy says. He declined to get into specifics, noting that it was a part of their special sauce. But he did say that there are several things that the algorithm now takes into account from a social perspective on top of all the other more traditional signals.

Google, Social, and Facebook: One Ring Does Not Rule Them All

Screen shot 2011-02-17 at 11.01.57 AM.png

When I read Google announcements like this one, An update to Google Social Search, I find myself wondering why Google doesn't just come out and say something like this: "We know social search is important, and we're working on it. However, we don't think the solution lies in working only with Facebook, because, to be honest, we think social media is bigger than one company, one platform, or one "social graph." We've got a bigger vision for what social means in the world, and here it is."

Wouldn't that be great?

Because honestly, I think the company does have a bigger vision, and I think it's rooted in the idea of instrumentation and multiples of signals (as in, scores if not thousands of signals understood to be social in nature). In other words, there is not one "ring to rule them all" - there is no one monoculture of what "social" means. For now, it appears that way. Just like it appears that there's one tablet OS. But the world won't shake out that way - we're far too complicated as humans to relegate our identity to a single platform. It will be distributed, nuanced, federated. And it should be instrumented and controlled by the individual. At least, I sure hope it will be.

Google might as well declare this up front and call it a strategy. In that context, it might even make sense to do further Facebook integration in the near term, as one of many signals, of course. Google already uses some limited Facebook data (scroll down), but clearly has decided to not lean in here (or can't come to terms with Facebook around usage policies). Clearly the two companies are wary of working together. But it's my hope that over time, whether or not they do should be a moot issue.

Why? Because I view my Facebook data as, well, mine. Now, that may not really be the case, but if it's mine, I should be able to tell Google to use it in search, or not. That's an instrumentation signal I should be able to choose. Just like I can chose to use my Facebook identity to log into this blog, or any number of other sites and services. It should be my choice, not Facebook's, and not Google's either.

Switch the control point to the customer, and this issue sort of goes away. I have a longer post in me about "social clothing" - came up on a phone call with Doc Searls yesterday - and hopefully when I get to that, this might make a bit more sense....

Thursday, February 17, 2011

SMB’s Optimistic But Still Struggle With Economy and Marketing

SMB’s are an interesting group. Many of these people are just regular folks. Most are not true business people in the sense that they went to business school and have applied rigid business principles to their business. Many don’t have marketing teams, on staff PR people or any of the niceties that make talking about Internet marketing and social media marketing much easier if the audience is a Fortune 500 that has employees that aren’t spending their own money on services.

As a result they rely a lot on relationships, street smarts, networking savvy and a sometimes oversized portion of optimism. I say oversized only because they have to keep hoping that things will get better or else they can lose the will and, quite plainly, not have the resources to keep the doors open.

One of the companies that is tied to these folks, MerchantCircle, has produced its fifth Merchant Confidence Index for Q1 2011 and the results paint a picture that is typical SMB: cold harsh reality living right next store to hope and optimism. Here are some of the results from the survey.

How would you rate today’s economy compared to the past twelve months?

About 62% of those surveyed said the economy is the same or weaker today then it has been over the past 12 months. Enter the SMB Optimist’s Club!

How do you expect sales revenue to change over the next 3 months?

57% feel that their sales will improve somewhat or significantly in the coming months. This is where you have to love the SMB because in one breath they say that conditions in the overall economy are not so hot but they feel that it will break in the coming months.

When it comes to marketing it looks like it won’t be the thing that helps that sales increase happen!

75% of the respondents said that their current level of marketing spend will either remain the same or decline. If you work with SMB’s on a regular basis the ‘news’ that their marketing spend will remain the same is not a good thing. SMB’s tend to spend money on marketing when they have it rather than actually having a budget for it. In this economy, many don’t have it so remaining the same in their spend could be a euphemism for “we aren’t spending much this year either”.

The hope for this group comes in the form of social media which is still perceived as a near no cost option for them to get the word out. That perception holds until the realization that the cost of time, people resources and knowledge are indeed ‘expenses’ can be a bit of a buzz kill but it sure beats spending cold hard cash on Yellow Page ads.

What are the ways that these folks are promoting their businesses? The following list is the percentage of SMB’s who said they will be using these particular outlets to promote their business

Facebook – 70.3%
Google – 66.2%
LinkedIn – 58.2%
Google Places – 51.4%
Yahoo – 49.2%
Yahoo Local – 45%
Twitter – 39.8%
Citysearch – 39.7%
Yellowbook – 39.3%
Superpages.com – 33.3%
Bing – 33.2%
Yelp – 32.2%
Facebook Places – 32.2%
YouTube – 26.8%
YP.com – 25.6%
Ask.com – 19.9%
MySpace – 19.2%
Foursquare – 8.7%
Groupon – 6.6%
LivingSocial – 5%
Gowalla – 3.4%
Bizzy – 2.5%

Aside from the largest players it’s pretty interesting to see that the cooler the service is perceived to be by the Silicon Valley technorati the less it is used by the common man. Is there an Internet reality divide developing where the hip and cool come up with toys for the hip and cool while the masses just look for things that might actually work to help them?

So how do you react to these findings? Do you see it differently? Where are we on the mass adoption scale for location-based services and the like? Is that kind of talk just for the VC crowd to get all hyped up about? Are findings like this something to be concerned about regarding a bubble in the Internet space?

Let’s hear your thoughts and opinions. It’s good because it gives us something to do during a slow news day!

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

TweetDeck: Now With Longer Tweets

Bigger is always better, right? That’s the idea behind Deck.ly, a new service from TweetDeck that allows you to Tweet as long as you like. In the two weeks since the service has been active, 1.35 million extended Tweets have been posted to the program, like the one below from Tony Robbins.

But isn’t allowing you to tweet over the limit, counter to the whole point of Twitter? I get that sometimes you need a few extra characters, but one of their most popular deck.ly Tweets is like the first chapter from a novel. Can this even be considered a Tweet?

TweetDeck reports that many Twitterattis are up in arms over this development. I’m not really sure why. If you don’t like the service, don’t use it but the naysayers may grow in number as TweetDeck moves forward with its plan:

The other motivation behind Deck.ly was to experiment with generating revenue from various types of TweetDeck-specific ad-targeting on the deck.ly landing pages.

Each deck.ly link takes you off Twitter to a page that looks very much like a single post on a blog. Here, you can see all the comments on the post and it’s actually quite nice if you can get past the ugly color scheme. Currently, the pages have a big, empty sidebar which TweetDeck wants to fill with ads. Go for it. Why not? This is another case of people expecting something for nothing. You get the software for free, so buck up and live with a few ads. Click on them sometimes, do your part to keep the service alive.

So far, TweetDeck is showing some nice numbers:

1,350,000 Deck.ly landing pages
1,200,000 visits
850,000 unique visits
1,500,000 page views
1,340,000 unique page views

Some commenters have said that the influx of clicks stem from the fact that people think the deck.ly links are like any other shortened link, so they’re being tricked into clicking. Not really. It clearly says (cont) before the link, so I think people get it. The only problem it may create is that it takes you to another page which, if you’re reading it with a mobile device, can be annoying.

When I first read that TweetDeck was offering a way to write extended Tweets, I thought it was unnecessary and annoying. But, after following the flow of a couple of these Tweets, I’ve changed my mind. What you have here is no different than the blogger who links to her post on her blog and the fact that you can collect comments in one spot is very nice. I think we need to look at this, not as a way of extending the Twitter experience, but as the next step in homogenizing our social media efforts. And the fact that it opens up a new space for advertising is good news for all of us.

What do you think of TweetDeck’s new extended Tweeting program?

Social Media