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.

Why Unpaid Internships Should Be Banned

A recent post on Craigslist read:

“Film company has one opening for an editor. Must be creative, dependable, and have personality. Great opportunity for college student or graduate. This is an INTERNSHIP, please do not ask for or expect compensation.”

 In 2012 there appear to be three types of internship options for companies and college students:

internships for no compensation, internships for college credit in lieu of pay and Internships that provide modest compensation.

Is This the End of the Movie Theater?

On Monday, May 20, 2012 a Chinese conglomerate announced it will buy major U.S. cinema chain, AMC Entertainment Holdings, for $2.6 billion in China’s biggest takeover of an American company to date. Dalian Wanda Group Co.’s purchase will create the world’s biggest movie theater operator. The Beijing-based company said it will invest an additional $500 million to fund AMC’s development. AMC operates 346 cinemas, mostly in the United States and Canada, and says it has 23 of the 50 highest-grossing U.S. outlets.

 “We support AMC becoming bigger, not only in the United States but in the global market,” said Wanda chairman Wang Jianlin at a signing ceremony for the acquisition. Wanda said AMC’s American management will remain in place and the headquarters will stay in the Kansas City area. It said staff numbers were not expected to be affected. The company employs some 18,500 people. AMC has reported losses for the past three years.

Back in 1959, Mary Pickford, who was a Hollywood star and also cofounded studio giant United Artists and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science), claimed that cable TV would kill theaters. Then, of course, Jack Valenti famously said the VCR would be the “Boston strangler” to the movie business.

Yet, now, with home theaters, video on demand, streaming services and infringement, the theaters are once again insisting that this time theaters are really in trouble.

We want to talk. How should we contact you?

Once upon a time you were able to reach your customers and targeted prospects with direct mail, newspaper ads, outbound phone calls, email blasts and even enhanced yellow page listings.

If you are using the same channels to reach your audience that you employed ten years ago, you are finding it more and more difficult to deliver the same message.

While targeted and personalized messages in the mail can still be effective, response rates to offers are down 30% to 40%. Newspaper advertising, as I documented in a previous blog is 40% less effective than it was in the 80’s and 90’s and just as costly. And of course, telemarketing took a 50% hit in usefulness with the advent of the do not call list. In the last decade, the phone book has gotten smaller and smaller and barely qualifies as a decent kids booster chair anymore. The most important thing to know about email is that large generically addressed blasts don’t work anymore either. To maintain any effective return your email messages need to have a very targeted single message and be personalized for each individual.

Fire A Client Today!

I took me a good ten years in business to muster the courage to fire my first client.

Since I am not Donald Trump, my early reluctance was based on a modest bank account, coupled with the lack of confidence that I would be able to replace them with a better client.

I am quite sure if you examine your customer list you can identify a few who are exceptionally demanding of your time, are very slow to pay for your service, who undervalue your contribution and are constantly looking for a discount. I have found that 10% of my worst clients (call them the bottom feeders) take up to 50% of my time and provide me with less than 2% of my professional satisfaction or sense of accomplishment.

It’s Not SEO Anymore, It’s Marketing

When the topic of online marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) is discussed in meetings every day and even at marketing conferences, unfortunately SEO is often viewed as a silo of  it’s own, separate and distinct from all other forms of marketing.

The Comscore January 2012 report says that the average American user spent a record 36 hours online in the month-that’s a full time job’s worth of time!

If you are a marketing decsi0n maker responsible for driving more leads and sales growth for your company-and you want to achieve your goals in 2o12, you better start believing that SEO is at the hub of all marketing.

The question no longer is where do you spend your ad dollars, its how do you spend your budget online?

SEO today is at the hub of all marketing!

Take this  quiz to confirm it’s not SEO anymore, it’s marketing!

1. At your desktop or laptop PC when you Google the word or words that best describe your product or service e.g. “widgets” (not your brand or company name), does your web site appear on page 1 of the natural or non-sponsored listings?

2. Same question as above,  only with your blackberry, iphone or other PDA?

3. Have you reduced or eliminated entirely your Paid search spend as a result of gaining more page 1 organic listings from your most relevant, high-volume search keywords?

4. Have you integrated your website with external social media by linking and bookmarking from their profile pages to your site?

5. Have you experienced a significant gain in organic search as a % of all sources of traffic to your website?

If you answered yes to  3 or more of these questions, you will have confirmed for yourself that it’s not SEO anymore, it’s marketing. If you scored 1 or 2 yes’s, you need to get busy talking with an SEO pro…

Steve Emory, co-author DM Deja vu

President, Managing Partner Emory Digital

Top 5 Digital Marketing Trends in 2012

1. Reputation-90% of people trust online reviews. Regularly review and post  comments about your company, its products or services. Leverage social media assets like Facebook, YouTube and blogs. Ask  clients, vendors and peers to contribute. 78% search a company online before buying.

2. Lead Nurturing-50% of online leads are not ready to buy and 90% or more visitors to your site do nothing. Include a CRM program in your budget and commit all employees to get permission from prospects to email and/or phone to stay in touch. Be sure to test or expand re-marketing as part of your display advertising to bring people back to your site that visited previously.

3. Mobile-Expect mobile to produce leads and sales for you this year. At a minimum be sure you create and deploy a mobile version of your web site. 90% of mobile searches result in action; 53% purchase due to mobile search and 71% of users search after seeing a mobile ad.

4. Local Search–Google now deems local search important and that means you should too. Last year there were over 4 billion local searches on Google each month. 20% of all searches are local; 61% of all local searches result in a purchase; 55% of consumers with mobile phones use them to buy local products or services.

SEO & Social are Merging

5. Social and SEO Merge-Google  has accelerated this inevitable change with 70 million Google + users since June 2011, and then there is Facebook approaching 1 billion members, Twitter, YouTube (owned by Google) and others. Any effective SEO campaign already uses social profiles and their content plus social bookmarks and links to make its companion Website more popular for search engines. If you don’t have both SEO and Social media cooking in 2012-you will quickly begin to lag behind your online competition  for search leads and sales.

In summary, 2012 may be the end of the Mayan calendar, but it will also mark the coming of age and necessity for true end-end digital marketing.

Steve Emory, co-author DM Deja vu

President, Managing Partner Emory Digital

Credits: National Positions our SEO partner; Nielson  Report, Cone Communications, Hubspot, Google Smartphone User study, BIA Kelsey, eMarketer