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Donations for the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2009 have reached record proportions. According to CNN.com, the amount of money raised for Haiti in the first 48 hours of the disaster was greater than the amount brought in during a similar period after Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami disasters. What’s really amazing is that all of this is happening in the midst of challenging economic times.  

As of January 19th, the American Red Cross has raised the most money so far (1), and donations are still pouring in. Wendy Harman, the director of social media for the Red Cross, has stated that both Facebook and Twitter have played a key role in getting word out about how to make donations to Haiti relief. Nearly two-thirds of donations received by the American Red Cross have been online contributions (2).  

Within hours of the Haiti Crisis, the Red Cross announced that Haiti relief donations could also be made via text messaging “Haiti” to 90999 (these donations are charged back to the the phone user, via their phone network carrier, and shows up on their monthly bill). About 15-20% of the Red Cross donations have been made via text messaging. In fact, the amount raised so far (via text messaging) has surpassed the $4 million that was donated to all charities via mobile texts in ALL of 2009.  

Donations made via text messaging helps to resolve many of the online challenges that mobile phones users face today. Some of these advantages are:  

• No need to navigate through numerous web pages
• No need to enter billing information like addresses, credit card numbers
• No need to hold on the phone “for the next representative”
• No need to have a credit card (payment/billing processed by phone carrier)

Donations via text messaging is a quick and efficient way to donate money. Best of all, it makes it easy for many of those that want to help, but don’t have immediate access to a laptop or desktop computer. Basically it provides a great option for the growing mobile phone generation. 

There’s so much to be learned here as an online marketer. The donation options provided by the Red Cross clearly illustrate that it’s now possible to promote your cause, product or service via a simple Tweet or Facebook page. It also shows that you do not need to refer potential customers to your eCommerce oriented website in order to accept payments. This alone raises all kinds of new possibilities for online marketers.  

Hopefully at some point we’ll see data in terms of how users initially found out about the Red Cross text Messaging campaign. It looks like Twitter and Facebook were first used to promote the text messaging donation option and that it went viral on broadcast media and news outlets after that point. It would be extremely interesting to see just how important the Red Cross web site was in terms of promoting the text messaging option.  

This concept should be raising questions and ideas in terms of how your own business or organization is reaching out to prospective clients and customers. Are you using the most effective communication channels when promoting goods or services? Do you know what devices or platforms people prefer to use when they are searching for solutions? These are the types of questions that you should be asking in today’s social media world.

Most hand-held mobile device users realize how hard it is to search the internet. It’s slow and difficult depending on how many characters you need to use to find what you’re looking for. Yesterday, Google announced a search feature for U.S. mobile device users that will make searches with Google much easier on Android powered devices or iPhones.

With this feature, once you start typing a search term on your mobile device, Google will provide a list of search suggestions that match your entry. Most importantly, these search suggestions will be based on your location. This feature will reduce the amount of time and effort it takes to submit a search to get relevant search results. What they are basically doing is providing optimized search suggestions using your location.

For search marketers that rely on search traffic this is actually a very interesting announcement for a couple of reasons. For one, Google is basically adopting and implementing a business rule that assumes that Google searches on a Android powered device or iPhone should be more focused toward local listings.

Secondly, the impact to search rankings is an unknown at this point if your business is dependent on nationwide search traffic. The question is, how will these search suggestions impact search traffic to your web site? Obviously localized search suggestions will take precedence, but will your listing drop down in the rankings if you are not a local business or organization. 

Using the example in the Google Mobile Blog post about this feature, let’s say that you are a museum in Boston, but the search takes place in San Francisco. If the Google search suggestion feature is emphasizing local search phrases for museums in San Francisco, will it still be easy to find your museum if you’re located in Boston?

It may turn out that localized mobile search has no major impact to national search listings, but it’s still too early to tell. This is obviously something that should be monitored and considered when discussing search engine optimization (SEO) strategies for your company or organization in the near term.

Without much fanfare, on December 4th 2009 Google announced an update to Google Personalized Search. Although this didn’t attract much attention in the business world, it’s an important update that web site owners should be aware of. It’s a further indication of the direction that Google is moving in terms of their online search tools.

What is Personalized Search?
Google Personalized Search was first launched in 2005 (announcement). With Personalized Search, Google search results are more personalized to your specific interests, based on your prior search history. In effect, web sites that you had visited in the past, through a Google search, will show up higher in the rankings for a related search.

Prior to the latest update, personalized search was only available to those that were signed into their Google account. With the most recent update though, everyone’s Google search results will be personalized by default, although you can opt-out of this feature.

How Does Personalized Search Work?
Lets say that you’ve used Google Search in the past to find recipes for dinner. You’ve been able to find some great recipes on much lower ranked web sites, but now you can’t remember what they were. You do a Google Search, and lo and behold, the web sites that you had previously found now show up toward the top of the search results page. In essence, the search results page has been personalized based on your search history and location.

Each and every time that you do an online search with Google, your search keywords and the links that you clicked on are saved as your search history. Future searches on Google will refer to your search history so that your search results are more personalized to your interests.

How Does This Impact Web Site Owners?
Although Personalized Search is great for online users, this is not always the case for web site owners. The reason for this is that web sites are now ranked differently per each person. For example, your web site may show up at #1 for one person, but at #11 for a different person. The search listings will now be dependent on search history, location and more for ALL Google searches.

There’s not a great deal known in terms of what impact the Personalized Search update will have. Some of the early testing done does not show much difference yet. But the cookie that stores search history can keep up to 180 days of data, and so it may take more time to find out what the impact of this will be.

What Should Be Done Next?
In the meantime, there are some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) steps you can take to ensure that your web site is optimized as much as possible. These are a few of the best practices that you can do at this point in time. These are:

1. Ensure that your web site is using page titles that identify the overall topic or content of each web page. Use as few words as possible, but make sure that they are relevant to each web page.
2. Make sure that you are using the description meta tag. The meta description tag does not have an impact on your page ranking, but it does make a difference in terms of getting people to click on your listing in the search engine results page. Basically you want people to click on your listing because it will tell Google that your listing is more relevant than the others for that search term. This description should contain a description of features and benefits relevant to the page content.
3. If you rely on local business, make sure that your web page includes information about your location. This can be something as simple as a brief mention of “Serving the city of…” in the page footer.
4. If you don’t have a Social Media Marketing strategy in place, now would be a great time to get started. Make sure that your have at least a Facebook page for your company. Most importantly though, start creating a strategy to tap into the social networking world.

In addition to the steps above, you’ll want to have an SEO expert review your web site to make sure that your web site architecture, site maps, and other SEO related elements are in place and working correctly.

If you are a web site owner, keep a close eye on future changes to Google Personalized Search. This feature will likely change more often in the future and you’ll want to make sure that your web site is optimized and ranking as high as possible. You don’t want your web site to get lost in the Google Personalized Search results page shuffle.

The topic of “Influencers” has been getting a lot of attention in the Social Media Marketing world. In fact, the marketing firm razorfish has apparently trademarked the term “Social Influence Marketing”, but that’s an entirely different story.

So What are Influencers?
We’ve always had Influencers around us. As toddlers, our parents influenced how we behaved and responded in different social situations. In our teens, we kept a close eye on what our friends were wearing. In essence, our friends would have influence on our clothing styles and brands. As we mature, our buying decisions are formed in many different ways.

When it comes to internet marketing though, Influencers of the virtual type have become an extremely powerful force because they can shape and influence the buying decisions of large numbers of consumers and customers online.

Who are the Online Shopping Influencers
A September 2009 study titled Web Shoppers Trust Customer Reviews Most from Ripple6 and the e-tailing group, found that online shoppers are influenced by both online social networking sites and face-to-face conversations with friends. Most importantly though, this study found that online shoppers put more trust into online product reviews from strangers, rather than the recommendations of their friends.

A December 2009 press release from comScore reports that 28 percent of holiday shoppers said that social media had influenced their holiday purchase decisions. Of the types of social media cited in this story, the most influential were consumer-generated product reviews (13 percent of respondents), followed by expert product reviews (11 percent). Only 6 percent were influenced by a friend’s Facebook status update that referred to a particular product.

Although Social Networking is still relatively new (ca. 2004), it’s becoming apparent that online Influencers are playing an important role in terms of how shopping decisions are made. This is one reason why today’s marketers need to pay closer attention to the discussions that take place online about their products or services.

Steps for Today’s Marketers
Influencers can shape both online and offline perceptions. Online though, Influencers have the most impact because they can impact the buying decisions of a larger audience. So, what can Online and Offline Marketers do to become more engaged with their online Influencers? You may want to start out with the following steps:

1. Search for your product, brand or company name online with a Blog or Group search on Google or Bing. Search Twitter as well using their search feature. Try to find out what sites or platforms people are using when they mention or discuss your products.
2. Start listening to the overall discussions about your product, brand or company. You may need to do this for a week or so until you become more familiar with the overall discussion.
3. Try to locate anyone who frequently talks about your product and determine what type of influence they are having on the buying decisions made online.

If you find an Influencer who likes your products, you may want to reach out to them and simply say “Thanks”. If the Influencer is NOT a fan of your products, try to figure out if anything can be done to remedy the situation and take the appropriate action as soon as possible. Online issues left without a quick resolution could hurt sales because they may show up in the search engines for a very long time.

Conclusion
It’s a new day and age in online marketing and the steps above are only a starting point. Overall, you’ll need to learn how to engage with your Influencers and customers because they may have a significant impact on your sales and the overall perceptions about your brand or product.

One of the big advantages in today’s online world is the ability to easily share a wealth of information with friends and other groups of people. Social networking has grown significantly since 2004 and a proliferation of online social networking sites and blogs are providing the tools and technologies needed to drive this new social revolution.

Although we now have greater opportunities to share information, the downside is that personal information is more likely to be seen by a wider audience, including potential employers and others that we never anticipated. In fact, the reality is that it’s almost impossible to prevent personal information from showing up, for the entire online world to see.

Personal Information That Is Visible Online
Are you curious about how much of your information is visible online? To find out, just do a quick search on Google using your name (in quotes) and a location. You may be surprised to see that not only does your name show up in the Google search results page, it’s likely that additional information such as your friends names, your home address, the year of your high school graduation, your personal email, and much more are there as well. What’s really amazing is to see just how much personal information there is online.

If you’ve registered on social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn or Classmates.com, you may find that much of the personal information provided has now been indexed by search engines like Google and Yahoo. In fact you may discover that a lot of personal information is actually displayed in the search results page itself, whether or not someone has access to your password protected information.

How To Reduce Online Privacy Concerns
What can be done to prevent the display of private information online? Well, there’s no way to guarantee that you’ll be able to completely prevent this information from showing up online. But, there are some steps that you can take that should help reduce the amount of information that can be seen online. The following are a few suggestion to do so:

1. On a monthly basis, search the Internet for your name and location to see if there’s any information about you online. If it is information that you do not want there, contact the website and ask them how to remove this information.
2. Using the same search keywords, setup a Google Alert to notify you any time new information about you shows up in the Google search index.
3. Use one or two social sites (like Facebook or LinkeIn) as your primary source of online personal information. When you are asked for this same information on other social networking sites, try to create a link to the main profile sites so that your information is centralized and more easy to update.
4. Carefully read the Privacy Policy for each web site that you register on. Many will say something like “Privacy is our number one concern…” but then further down the page state something like “your information may appear in the results of searches conducted on Internet search engines.” If you don’t want this to happen, don’t create a profile on that site.
5. If you are using a social networking site like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., double check your privacy settings. Many sites allow you to hide your name, age, email address, etc. Some sites have defaults where all of this information is displayed unless you change the settings.
6. Be aware that any information you place online could be seen by anyone in the present OR in the future.

Although none of these steps are 100% guaranteed to work, if you follow these guidelines you should see results. Just remember that it could take a couple of month for many of these changes to take effect in the search engines.

In earlier times the Town Crier was the primary source of news and information. They would ring a bell to catch everyone’s attention, read their proclamation or announcement, and then post it in a common area for all to see. Do you see any similarities today?

Good question… who are the Town Criers of today’s world of media and technology? Obviously newspapers, radio, and television still play an important role when it comes to keeping many of us informed. Thanks to the internet though, other forms of media have emerged which are providing us with more personalized sources for information.

This morning I attended a breakfast meeting for a local Social Networking group. The primary topic (as always) was the role that social media is playing in today’s online marketing world. One of the groups that presented was an online marketing group with a case study about a product called GoGirl, a “female urination device that allows women to pee while standing up”.

Now, I don’t want you to become too distracted by the thought of this, but GoGirl was definitely a product that caught my attention. What I found so interesting about GoGirl wasn’t so much the product itself, but mostly the presentation which gave social media much of the credit for their success. As it turns out, I think they missed a far more important communication link that played a huge role in the initial success of their product. This missing link is comparable to the modern day version of a Town Crier.

The Town Crier in this case was a local television reporter (Esme Murphy), who after hearing about this product, sent a tweet, ”wow, didn’t know we needed it. what do you think?”. Well, needless-to-say, she has many followers in Twitter and apparently because of the response to this tweet, she decided to run a story about this product on local news.

Not long after the story ran, news about the GoGirl product spread and it was quickly picked up by the national media. Before long, the GoGirl marketing team was making appearances on nationally broadcast talk shows where they introduced this product to even more people. What great PR for a product!

So the question begs to be asked, was more attention brought to this product through Social Media? Or, was it the “Town Crier” (in this case the reporter) who was able to reach out to people via a more mainstream media outlet.

When information about GoGirl was first broadcast on television, it reached a much wider audience than Twitter. Intially Twitter was basically used to gauge interest for this product. But word about this product really reached a more mainstream audience via the Town Crier on television.

Do you know who your primary Town Criers are in today’s world?  It’s an important consideration and one that should not be looked upon too lightly. It’s wise to spend time trying to find out who the Town Criers are for your specific market and audience. If you reach out to them, they could become an invaluable advocate for your product or service through their networking channels.

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Juan Torres, Tacos El Galuzo in East Los Angeles

When it comes to internet marketing, not all businesses are created equally. An internet marketing strategy that works for one business, will likely not work for another. Unfortunately, most businesses aren’t able to think outside of the box when it comes an internet marketing strategy. They’ll assume that if the competition is doing one thing, they need to do the same in order to keep up.

This past weekend, CBS Sunday Morning, did a segment on the growth of street food vendors in Los Angeles. Many of these vendors operate out of a truck and sell mostly tacos or burritos. Street food vendors park their trucks (or carts) at different locations for only an hour or so at a time because many times they are prohibited from parking longer than this at each location.

Now I know what you’re asking at this point. You probably wondering what street vendors have to do with internet marketing?. Well, let’s look into their challenges a bit more to find out.

Let’s assume that you operate a business that is dependent on walk-up traffic, and your business is required (by city law) to change locations every hour or so. How would you generate enough walk-up business to support yourself? Well, historically, the best way do this would be to make sure that you are parked in an area where there are lots of customers that can generate sales for you in a very short period of time.

The challenge with this approach is that from a marketing perspective, a local business that needs to constantly change locations is going to be a challenge to promote. After all, you can’t advertise your address because it’s always changing. It’s also going to be difficult to capture a loyal customer base because they won’t always be able to find you in the same place at the same time. Lastly, you’re always going to bump into competition at the busiest locations.

So how would you promote this type of  business in today’s online world? Well, thanks to Twitter we have our answer. In fact Twitter is responsible for creating a boom for street food vendors. Enter a truck food vendor by the name of Kogi. Kogi began business back in November of 2008 and has become a Twitter phenom (NPR Article).

There were several things that Kogi did differently that make them the success that they are. One was to create branding around their truck with a logo, a clean look AND most importantly, a memorable company name. Next, and more importantly, they started announcing their truck locations and specials via Twitter. Now they were in a position to create a customer base that could find them wherever they were.

Needlesstosay, business is booming for Kogi and now several other street food vendors are following this example. Just check out this list of street food vendors around the country with their Twitter user names. It almost seems as if Twitter were made for this purpose. In retrospect though, this is a classic example of a business that decided NOT to run with the herd, and instead do something completely out-of-the box when it comes to internet marketing.

In my post titled Are You Tweeting? I promised a follow-up if I had seen any indication that Twitter was becoming more of a consumer based platform. Well the jury is out and I can confidently (and sheepishly) say that things are now alive and kicking when it comes to reaching out to consumers via Twitter.

I’m sure you’re asking, ”What changed? Did we suddenly have consumers by the scores setting up Twitter accounts and searching for product promotions?” Well, the answer is “Yes”. In 2009, Twitter became the fastest growing social network.

The real power behind Twitter is the fact that it’s a powerful multi-level networking tool, very similar to many multi-level marketing programs. For example, let’s say I receive a Tweet and decide to pass it on to ten of my friends. Let’s then assume that they pass it on to ten of their friends, etc, etc.  You can see how powerful the multiplying effect can be when trying to generate buzz around a product, promotion or idea.

I’ll cite one example of this phenomenon. It’s based on a press in June 2009 from Dell titled, @DellOutlet Surpasses $2 Million on Twitter. It’s an interesting read because it highlights the fact that much of the sales growth in their Dell Outlet has been the direct result of promotions and communication via Twitter. Since 2007, Dell has been using Twitter “as a way to message out coupons, clearance events and new arrival information to those looking for Dell technology at a discounted price.”.

It’s astounding to see that Dell’s Twitter subscribers (followers) grew six-fold from 100k in March 2009 to 600k by the end of June 2009. Try to replicate that with other online marketing efforts. So, what was the primary reason for this growth? Dell cites the fact that “Our followers responded by re-tweeting @DellOutlet messages to their followers, and our numbers rose even more.” The power behind this simple concept is really amazing when you think about it.

Now, I’m NOT suggesting that every business or association will be as successful (revenue wise) with Twitter as Dell has been this past year. Obviously Dell has found a community of potential customers that are interested in close-out and discontinued product offerings. What I AM suggesting is that the time has now come where, if you are not using Twitter, you should look more closely at your products and services to see if there might some potential to reach new customers or clients via Twitter.

Chip Jones
Founder/Principal
Interactive-Arts.com

by Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

Your web business probably gets product inquiries from potential customers around the globe. Inquiries come via e-mail and your web site, and you try to send information to each hot prospect as quickly as you can. You know that you can drastically increase the likelihood of making a sale by satisfying each person’s need for information quickly!

But, after you’ve delivered that first bit of information to your prospect, do you send him any further information? If you are like most Internet marketers, you don’t.

When you don’t follow that initial message with additional information later on, you let a valuable prospect slip from your grasp! This is a potential customer who may have been very interested in your products, but who lost your contact information, or was too busy to make a purchase when your first message reached him.

Often, a prospect will purposely put off making a purchase, to see if you find him important enough to follow up with later. When he doesn’t receive a follow up message from you, he will take his business elsewhere.

Are you losing profits due to inconsistent and ineffective follow up?

Following up with leads is more than just a process – it’s an art. In order to be effective, you need to design a follow up system, and stick to it, EVERY DAY! If you don’t follow up with your prospects consistently, INDIVIDUALLY, and in a timely fashion, then you might as well forget the whole follow up process.

Consistent follow up gets results!

When I first started marketing and following up with prospects, I used a follow up method that I now call the “List Technique.” I had a large database containing the names and e-mail addresses of people who had specifically requested information about my products and services. These prospects had already received my first letter by the time they requested more information, so I used the company’s latest news as a follow up piece.
I would write follow up newsletters every now and then, and send them, in one mass mailing, to everyone who had previously requested information from me. While this probably did help me win a few additional orders, it wasn’t a very good follow up method. Why isn’t the “List Technique” very effective?

• The List Technique isn’t consistent. Proponents of the List Technique tend to only send out follow up messages when their companies have “big news”.
• List Technique messages don’t give the potential customer any additional information about the product or service in question. He can’t make a more informed buying decision after receiving a newsletter! If someone is wondering whether your company sells the best knick-knacks, what does he care that you’ve just moved your headquarters?
• List Technique messages convey a “big list” mentality to your potential customers. When I used to write follow up messages using the List Technique, I was writing news bulletins to everyone I knew! I should have been sending a personal message to each individual who wanted to know more about my products.

What follow up method really works?

Following up with each lead individually, multiple times, but at set intervals, and with pre-written messages, will dramatically increase sales! Others who use this same technique confirm that they have all at least doubled the sales of various products! In order to set this system up, though, you need to do some planning.

First, you’ll need to develop your follow up messages. If you’ve been marketing on the Internet for any length of time, then you should already have a first informative letter. Your second letter marks the beginning of the follow up process, and should go into more detail than the first letter. Fill this letter with details that you didn’t have the space to add to the first letter. Stress the BENEFITS of your products or services!

Your next 2-3 follow up messages should be rather short. Include lists of the benefits and potential uses of your products and services. Write each letter so that your prospects can skim the contents, and still see the full force of your message.

The next couple of follow up messages should create a sense of urgency in your prospect’s mind. Make a special offer, giving him a reason to order NOW instead of waiting any longer. After reading these follow up messages, your prospect should want to order immediately!

Phrase each of your final 1 or 2 follow up messages in the form of a question. Ask your prospect why he hasn’t yet placed an order? Try to get him to actually respond. Ask if the price is to high, the product isn’t the right color or doesn’t have the right features, or if he is looking for something else entirely. (By this time, it’s unlikely that this person will order from you. However, his feedback can help you modify your follow up letters or products, so that other prospects will order from you.)

The timing of your follow up letters is just as important as their content. You don’t want one prospect to receive a follow up the day after he gets your initial informative letter, while another prospect waits weeks for a follow up!

Always send an initial, informative letter as soon as it is requested, and send the first follow up 24 hours afterwards. You want your hot prospects to have information quickly, so that they can make informed buying decisions!

Send the next 2-3 follow up messages between 1 and 3 days apart. Your prospect is still hot, and is probably still shopping around! Tell him about the benefits of your products and services, as opposed to your competitors’. You will make the sale!

Send the final follow up messages later on. You certainly don’t want to annoy your prospect! Make sure that these last letters are at least 4 days apart.

Following up effectively seems complicated, but it doesn’t have to be! So many potential customers are lost because of poor follow up – don’t you want to be one of the few to get it right?

There is a lot of discussion taking place in terms of what methods consumers use in order to find products and services online. In fact there are so many different viewpoints it’s become more difficult for businesses or organizations to decide upon which direction to go next in their online marketing efforts.

Today I came across a rather interesting article/survey from The Nielsen Company (“Social Media: The Next Great Gateway for Content Discovery?“) which discusses the approaches that consumers are currently using to find information online. Basically it highlights much of what we’ve talked about in our blog about Online Consumer Behavior and how consumers find information based on their habits and behaviors when it comes to doing online research.

This survey shows that over 71% of online users look for information by using either a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.), or by browsing via a portal like Yahoo, AOL, MSN, etc. Currently only 4% use a Social Network like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc., to get more information.

The interesting aspect of this survey is that it highlights the fact that many people feel overwhelmed by the amount of information they see online, so much so that they many turn to their online friends for suggestions and information. This survey asked three groups of people for feedback on the following statement, “There is too much information Online”. 26% of people who identified themselves as “Socializers” found this statement to be true. Only 5% of people identified as “Searchers” found this to be true.

This begs the question that – as an online business/organization – do you know which approach your customers / clients use in order to find information about your products or services online? Are they using a Social Network to ask friends, or are they finding you and your products via Search or a Portal? The answer to this question should have a direct impact on where you focus your online marketing energies.

When you create an online marketing strategy, one of the first steps you should take is research in order to understand the online behavior and habits of your clients/customers. Once you’ve done this, you’ll be in a much better position to reach out to your future customers and clients via the most appropriate online marketing channel or channels.