User-generated Content is Still King

User- generated content continues to power Social Media but it also is critical to driving sales for your business-both online and offline.

More than 80% of Gen Y, the largest consumer group in history is influenced by user-generated content when considering a purchase. In fact, 51% of them actually rate user-generated content more important than the opinions of friends and family!

Think about your own purchasing behavior when its time to buy a new car, book travel, buy electronics or purchase insurance. Do you do research online and read other (user-generated) consumer reviews before you buy? Answer this question honestly and you know how important Social Media is to your business.

If you are looking to boost your business now and the rest of this year, spend more time on your Website, Blogging, Twitter and be sure to try the new kids on the block Pinterest and Google+.

Consider it a gift to know that your own purchasing behavior is a guide to helping you attract more traffic and sales for your business.

Enjoy and prosper!

Steve Emory, co-author DM Deja vu

President, Managing Partner Emory Digital

Quantifying Social Media

Everyday more companies and more consumers are joining the social media fray.  What does the increased noise level mean? Can you actually measure whether the investment has any impact on results?

Extent of Company Social Media Today

In June 2012 a two-day conference was held in New York City to share and discuss the State of Social Media. The conference served as a forum to discuss the results of data produced by a survey conducted by Useful Social Media from 650 participating corporations.

71% of the survey respondents said that they were responsible for developing and executing the company social media activity using a team of between 2 and 4 team staff members on a part-time basis.

Not surprisingly, 90% of respondents use Facebook for their company and 89% have a Twitter presence. These two are the unrivalled leaders for companies – and an incredible proportion of

businesses have taken the plunge and set up accounts on these two sites. YouTube and LinkedIn were also popular with 75% acknowledging regular participation. Also, 49% disclosed that they have created and promote their own blog.

Measuring Return On Investment in Social Media

Less than a third of respondents feel that they are accurately measuring the impact of their social media activity, and only 40% of respondents say they measure social media ROI (with only 23% confident they’re getting this measurement correct). Early measurement shows:

1. Activity/Engagement 14%

2. Conversion to leads or sales of those engaged 6 to 7%

3. Development of recommendations or customer testimonials from evangelists 2%

What is Next in Social Media?

The most popular replies from survey respondents about what to expect next year are:

1. 200% more companies will use social media to develop better products

2. A third more companies will offer customer service delivery through social media

3. 95% more companies expect to use social media for market research in determining future offerings.

What would participants like to be able to measure in the future? The answer is activity, growth in followers, increase in web traffic, translation to leads, and conversion to sales.

 

You can download a free copy of the full survey report @ www.usefulsocialmedia.com

Top Five Small Company Sales Shortcomings and How to Fix Them

The more opportunities I have had to provide freelance help to small owner-operated businesses, the more I recognize the differences in their approach and the similarities in their sales and marketing shortcomings.

1. Disappointing and inconsistent sales performance

*invest more time to manage and participate in your sales effort

*improve the consistency of your sales effort with a modestly priced CRM program like  SalesForce, Eloqua, or NetSuite to formalize your calling, emails, sales calls, tracking and reporting no matter how small your sales staff.

*Change your sales compensation to include commission based incentive.

*Eliminate sales staff members who have nor performed over a twelve month period.

Ninety Percent of All Data Created in the Last Two Years!

An IBM web page describes the company’s big data offerings by stating that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created daily now and as a result 90% of the data in the world has been created in the last two years.

 I never claimed to be a math major but if I understand the data progression correctly, it goes something like this:

1 Byte is made up of 8 bits

1 Kilobyte           KB          10³          (or 1,000 bytes)

1 Megabyte        MB         10⁶

1 Gigabyte           GB          10⁹

1 Terabyte           TB           10¹²

1 Petabyte           PB           10¹⁵

1 Exabyte            EB           10¹⁸

 One Exabyte is equal to one quintillion bytes. To put this staggering amount of storage in some perspective, the world’s technological capacity to store information grew from 2.6 exabytes in 1986 to 15.8 in 1993, over 54.5 in 2000, and to 295 exabytes in 2007. This is equivalent to less than one 730-MB CD-ROM per person in 1986 (539 MB per person), roughly 4 CD-ROM per person in 1993, 12 CD-ROM per person in the year 2000, and almost 61 CD-ROM per person in 2007.

 Another way to begin to grasp the explosion is to realize that we are creating data at a daily rate of all the data that existed in 1986.

10 Quotes to Ponder When Building Your Digital Strategy

In my last post, I mentioned the end of the Mayan calendar this year on December 21, 2012. Most likely this infamous milestone will not affect life as we know it. So now that we have some extra time…let’s review and reflect on some quotes from digital strategists and marketing leaders that clearly show the rest of us how and why we should not worry about our digital strategy. Instead, we should be focused on having a strategy to succeed in a digital world.

• Scott Kelly, digital marketing manager at Ford Motor Co: “You’ll start to see us—and in general
  the industry—move away from just the
  static push advertising to more engaged
  conversations.”

• Oliver Newton, head of emerging platforms at
  Starcom MediaVest: “The ad is yesterday. Content is the future.”

• Rich Nadworny, Digital Strategy Blog: “Is your website about you or your customers?”

• Sergey Brin, co-founder, Google: “Some say Google is God. Others say Google is Satan. But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine.”

• Rupert Murdoch, media mogul: “The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years.“

• Vinton Cerf, US technology guru: “They say a year in the Internet business is like a dog year.. equivalent to seven years in a regular person’s life. In other words, it’s evolving fast and faster.

• Jimmy Wales, founder, Wikipedia: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.”

• Jeff Bezos, founder, Amazon: “It’s hard to find things that won’t sell online.”

• Darren Lewis and Koen van der Wal, MetrixLab: “The web has staged an interactive coup and has handed power firmly to consumers.”

• Clerk at Bed Bath Beyond last week: “If you have a smart phone, send this text message & code now – you’ll get an instant 20% off coupon for us to scan while you are waiting in line.”

Enjoy and Prosper!

Steve Emory, co-author DM Deja vu

President, Managing Partner Emory Digital

10 Important Things I Learned From Yogi Berra

To celebrate his 87^th birthday, I thought I would share 10 important things I learned from New York Yankee catcher and manager, Yogi Berra.

1.  Reciprocity:  “Always go to other people’s funerals; otherwise they won’t go to yours.”

2.  Forward progress:“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

3.  On observation: “You can observe a lot by watching.”

4.  Miscalculation: “Ninety percent of the time the game is half mental.”

5.  Telling it like it is: “If you ask me a question I don’t know, I’m not going to answer.”

Reputation Management-5 Tips to Protect Your Online Brand

One of the worst fears for any business is finding out that you are the victim of an unfair, dishonest smear campaign on the Internet.

As much as the Internet can help your business gain exposure and grow, it also provides a huge microphone to people looking to spread terrible rumors about your business.

You can’t afford to be defined by underhanded competitors or eccentric former customers!

Here are 5 Tips to help you take control of what is being said about you company on the Internet.

1. Browse the web and set up email alerts for your brand to be sure you know what is being said about your business. Go to http://www.google.com/alerts and be informed via email when new occurrences of your brand show up on the Internet.

2. Participate actively in your online community with blogging, email news and group forums to help give your brand a positive image. As you get more involved, the number of positive online reviews will occur.

3. Use Social Media to Your Advantage as many of your customers turn to Facebook, Twitter, Google + and Pinterest as a way of sharing and reviewing their experiences. This is one of the easiest ways to get feedback on your products or services and react to offset any negative press quickly.

4. Promote Customer Reviews to keep information about your company fresh and accurate. Business citation sources such as Google Places will aggregate information from third-party sources that may be old or less than favorable. Ask customers on you Website or in your store to give you a  review of their experience at the point of sale and offer a thank you incentive to do so. Then simply post this great new testimonial content on your Website and Social Profiles.

5. Leverage your positive reviews by asking publishers if you can link from the review to your site. This gives your Website fresh, relevant and positive content for new visitors to see and helps you conform to the new Google “Unnatural Links” algorithm that keeps your rankings from organic search  higher than your competition.

If you have any questions or need help with this topic, contact me at emorydigitalmarketing.

Steve Emory, President, Managing Partner Emory Digital

Related articles

• Google’s Unnatural Link Algorithm May Affect Your Website (dmdejavu.wordpress.com)
• 6 Ways to Boost Your Rankings Using Google Authorship (searchenginewatch.com)
• Maximizing Google+ For Your Business (dreamgrow.com)

Google’s Unnatural Link Algorithm May Affect Your Website

Google’s latest algorithm  simply called “The Unnatural Link” update will have more impact on SEO best practices than any previous change of the last 8 years according to the latest buzz from SEO’ers and Google employees themselves.

Unlike the  most recent “Panda” update  that was designed to reduce visitors to sites deemed by Google as having low quality content, Unnatural Link penalizes sites (and their Organic search listings) based solely on a less than perfect linking strategy which includes just about all websites…

Google actually sent unnatural link notices to over 1 million websites letting them know that their SEO rankings may be adversely affected. So what does Google consider  out of favor as an “unnatural link” and in as a best practice?

Below is a summary of what I was able to cull from all of the the industry press, dialog with clients  and from our own SEO resource partner as a guide to what you should or should not do with your Website  SEO initiatives effective immediately:

OUT for SEO going forward-Commercial link networks like Build My Rank, Diamond Links and others, Agency link networks, sidebar links, overuse of anchor text, and collateral damage from legitimate links on your site that have since been sold and posted to unrelated sites.

IN  SEO  Best Practices-relevant links related to your product, service and industry, Social media, Blogs, online videos, Press releases,  local listings, fresh & relevant content and paid search (why do you think Google is making this change?)

SEO & Search Merge in 2012

Since Google has asked people to clean up their links, now is the time to find and hire a reputable Internet  marketing company who specializes in the integration of SEO with all of the online methods listed above that are IN.

Remember that SEO is a marathon not a sprint,  so any links that you have that got your website ranked high in the organic listings fast are likely to be lost as a result of the unnatural update.

If you have any questions or need help with this topic, contact me at emorydigitalmarketing.com.

President, Managing Partner Emory Digital

Related articles

• Google Employee explains unnatural links and cleaning up
• Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google (searchenginewatch.com)
• Preparing For Google’s Over SEO Algorithm (seroundtable.com)
• Google Webmaster Tools Notice of Detected Unnatural Links (davidnaylor.co.uk)
• Google Algorithm Changes 1998-2012 (Infographic)

Spread the Word with a Customer Referral Program

A good Customer Referral Marketing Program is a structured and systematic process to maximize word of mouth potential. Referral marketing does this by encouraging, informing, promoting and rewarding customers to talk to others about you, your company, and the value and benefit your products and services and to reward them for the introduction.

A study conducted by the Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Pennsylvania, on referral programs and customer value which followed the customer referral program of a German bank that paid customers 25 euro for bringing in a new customer, was released in July 2010. According to Professor Van den Bulte, this is the first ever study published on the financial evaluation of customer referral programs. The study found that referred customers were both more profitable and loyal than normal customers. Referred customers had a higher contribution margin, a higher retention rate and were more valuable in both the short and long run.

On whether customer referral programs are worth the cost, the study says that it records “a positive value differential, both in the short term and long term, between customers acquired through a referral program and other customers. Importantly, this value differential is larger than the referral fee. Hence, referral programs can indeed pay off.”

Video, Social Boost US Mobile Content Consumption

According to eMarketer, new estimates project that by 2016 more than 110 million Americans or one third of the total US population will watch video content on a mobile phone at least once per month.

This year, just under 20% of the population, or 25.2% of US mobile phone users, are expected to watch mobile video monthly.

Are you a phone-video watcher? Does your company have a mobile phone website? Are your advertiser clients prepared to take advantage of this? Weigh in with your thoughts at https://dmdejavu.wordpress.com.

Read the full story and charts from eMarketer at http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008974

Steve Emory,

President, Managing Partner Emory Digital