Recent reports by Pew Research Center and Nielsen provide a deepening picture of the evolving digital consumer and their behaviors online.  By now most businesses understand the importance of social media as a branding and marketing tool.  Less clear up until now, has been the importance of social media as a search platform and pathway to purchase.  We talked briefly about this growing trend in a previous post – since then, social media has grown from a leading content gateway to a burgeoning search platform, and is likely to gain more traction in 2012 as mobile, location-based commerce becomes more viable.  This much is clear in 2011: digital consumers increasingly navigate both their online and offline shopping activities through social media.

Nielsen found that 60% of consumers who research products online learned about a specific brand or retailer through social networking sites, and 53% of active adult online social network users follow a brand.  The consumer practices of finding, researching, and vetting brands are accelerating within social media platforms – not to mention the consumer practices which these platforms made popular: expressing brand loyalty or dissatisfaction.  Platforms coming out on top for brand research and vetting are consumer review sites like Yelp and Amazon reviews, where Nielsen found that overall, consumer-generated reviews and product ratings are the most preferred sources of product information among social media users, and 3 out of 5 create their own reviews of products and services.

Among those who share their brand experiences through social media, at least 41% say they do so to receive a discount, 58% say they write product reviews to protect others from bad experiences, and nearly 1 in 4 say they share their negative experiences to “punish companies.” Likewise, 61% of social media users say they share their brand experiences to give “recognition for a job well done,” and these users are more likely to trust the recommendations of their friends and family most.  These findings provide key insights into social media’s growing command on brand visibility, but also its equity in brand ambassadors – the types of customers who tend to provide the most value to companies.

In the mobile realm, search based activities have already moved toward social-search based apps, with Yelp and Foursquare leading the way in how mobile consumers locate businesses offline and on-the-go.  Partnerships between social media platforms and retailers, such as Facebook’s recently announced partnerships with eBay and WalMart, promise to make direct pathways to purchase through social media platforms more common, and new technologies in mobile payments promise to kick social-mobile-purchasing into high gear.

Even with the growth and penetration of social media as a search platform, traditional search and email remain the two top online activities that are nearly universal among adult internet users, with 92% of online adults using them.  This statistic probably won’t change anytime soon – but the classic dichotomy of quantity versus quality will likely play a more distinguished role in search marketing strategies as user search behaviors continue to evolve on social platforms.

In the season one finale (and one of my favorite scenes) of Mad Men, AMC’s cult classic show about Madison Avenue and the 1960’s advertising industry, the show’s protagonist and ad-man-extraordinaire Don Draper delivers a powerful pitch extolling the pernicious and “potent” appeal of nostalgia.  Contextualizing nostalgia as a “twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone,” he describes Kodak’s Carousel product as a “time machine…that takes us to a place where we ache to go again.”

The lesson of course is that brand association is most powerful when it’s personal.  Brands are used as external cues by companies to convey taste, prestige, value, etc., and consumers use brands for much the same reason.  In the case of The Carousel, Draper made the connection for Kodak between the product and how customers would relate to the product on a deeper, emotional level.

Pioneering the advertising industry’s shift to a branding focus, Nike took this concept further in the 80’s and 90’s with its “Just Do It” campaign and celebrity athlete endorsements, creating an enduring association between the brand and sports athletes – and more importantly, consumers who identify themselves as athletes.  Nike’s brand association delivered an easy way for consumers to build and cement their own identity as athletes, in much the same way Apple’s and Levi’s consumers identify as young, hip, and creative.

Creating a sentimental bond between your brand and customers is what all companies hope to do, but few do it as well as the big leaguers like Coca-Cola, Mastercard, Nike, Apple, etc.  Of course, they have the budget to back it up.  But with the digital tools marketers have access to today, cultivating a powerful personal connection and brand association with customers is easier than ever for companies to do.  Marketers no longer need a multimillion dollar ad budget or commercials with caring elephants in them, to do it.  That said, commercials with caring elephants in them do a great job of tugging at the heartstrings.

Running a business is hard. Growing a business is really hard. A business owner has to grow before a business can. That’s the hard part. Understanding the things you do vs. the things you should be doing is an important part of growing into a CEO.

Below are a few things CEOs do and a few things CEOs don’t do. If you want to be a real CEO, just do things that a CEO does. It isn’t that easy, but it is that simple.

Things a CEO does
Hire smart people
Craft marketing strategies
Understand financial condition of company
Create strategic partnerships
Develop new services
Acquire companies
Make investments
Communicate vision
Empower people
Close large sales
Motivate people
Delegate
Raise money
Implement systems

Things a CEO doesn’t do
Design the website
Ship boxes
Manage clients
Create invoices
Take customer support calls
Closing small sales
Write code

So why haven’t I ever indulged in my black hat day dreams? There are ethical reasons, I guess. Junking up the Internet with thousands of pages about bad debt can’t make you feel warm and fuzzy inside. But the bigger reason isn’t altruistic. I just don’t think becoming good at black hat spammer makes you rich over the long run.

Without question, you can make really good money short term. When I say really good money though, I mean hundreds of thousands of dollars over a relatively short period of time. Excuse me while I yawn. Hundreds of thousands of dollars wouldn’t induce involuntary yawning if it were easy or sustainable The problem is, it’s neither. To make hundreds of thousands of dollars using black hat techniques, you have to be awesome. Like anything, to be awesome you have to work hard. You have to research, learn a little programming, network, try stuff, employ creativity and probably even build a team. Hard work is hard.

If you’re building a sustainable business, hard work is justified. Building a business that is inevitably going to get decimated with one keystroke from Mountain View, doesn’t make sense to me. When Matt Cutts brings your spam empire to its knees, then what? You’ve built systems, skill sets and techniques that no longer have value. Some of that brain equity might be transferable to other black hat techniques, but many times it isn’t. So now you start over and try to find the next new hit. Maybe it will come, but maybe it won’t.

All that time could have been spent building a business that doesn’t face inevitable destruction. Google isn’t even the real threat to black hat spammers. Black hatters are battling human evolution. Human nature has an innate desire to evolve. Any business that is based on fighting evolution will lose over the long run. Over time, building a profitable business that benefits society is simply easier.

If you have a black hat technique, I’ll listen with genuine fascination and compliment your creativity, but I’m not about to set up a bunch of hosting accounts with aliases. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a business to build.

For those of you who are interested, here are a couple of black hat SEO videos on building blog networks. It’s fascinating, but it sure does sound like a lot of work:

We started off testing it with fellow entrepreneur friends and, by golly, it worked. But way back in early 2011, it was simple. We had no website, no application, no writers, no dynamic media database and a fraction of the media requests. We got honest feed back from some very smart people. We improved, built things and hired, but we are just getting started.

So what the heck is Bitesize PR? The simplest way to describe it is Small Business PR, but it’s more than that. It’s better than that. Take a look.

A high think/do ratio isn’t worth much. I always chuckle when someone makes me sign a NDA. Ideas without action aren’t worth a damn. You have to do.

But the flip side is also true. My think/do ratio can get too low. I can get hyper focused and ignore other stuff. Then I miss opportunities and ideas. Doing without thinking is dangerous. Thoughtless action leads to dead-end careers, uninspired businesses and robo signing.

I don’t know what the magic number for think/do ratio is, but I know it’s something to think about…er maybe do something about.

If you get your message in front of enough people and if you convert enough of them into sales, you win the numbers game.

Nigerians with internet access and mass marketers play the numbers game. But unless you are spamming people or selling toilet paper, it won’t help you think about how to market effectively. Number’s game thinking leads to running commercials like this over and over.

That’s cute and all, but this approach is irrelevant for most businesses today. So just what sort of game is marketing? It’s a people game. Here is how you play the people game:

1. Reach the people who care most about what you have to say
2. Have something remarkable to say to those people
3. Make sure your message leads to sales somehow

Reaching ten people who care enough about your business to tell ten other people who care, is far more productive than reaching a million who couldn’t care less.

Uno is a numbers game. Marketing is a people game.

When you try something, you don’t sound like an idiot if you don’t master it. After all, you you were just trying it out. When you try something, you know there is a good chance it’s not going to work. If you truly believe something is going to work, you don’t try it, you do it. You don’t try marriage, you get married.

Just trying something gives you the illusion of taking on risk. You are taking action, but you are hedging the risk. You don’t have to beat yourself up or face ridicule if it doesn’t work out. Trying something gives you an easy out.

Just trying something can be worse that not doing anything at all. When you half-ass something and it doesn’t work out, it solidifies your belief that it wasn’t possible to begin with. When you haven’t done something yet, at least you still have the belief that it is possible. Even if just trying something is a success, the results probably don’t represent the true potential of what was possible.

Doing something is different. Saying you are going to do something is a commitment. “I’m going to learn to play the guitar” is a much more powerful statement than “I’m going to try to learn how to play the guitar.” If you fail, you might feel like a bit of a loser. Doing something is risky. Doing something requires motivation, hard work and focus. Doing something gives you confidence to take on other things. The more you do, the less you’ll want to just try.

One reason to have a lot of followers is to impress your grandparents and relatives who live in rural parts of the world.   The other reason you may covet a lot of followers is that you think more followers means more influence.  I hate to break it to you, but it doesn’t work that way.  A group of researchers analyzed over 54 million Twitter accounts and concluded:

popular users who have high indegree [indegree is just fancy talk for number of followers] are not necessarily influential in terms of spawning retweets or mentions

Of course I don’t need to analyze 54 million Twitter accounts to tell you that. Follower count is a potential signal of influence but, by itself, it is a pretty lousy signal. Twitterers with a lot of followers are often hard core spammers or just really aggressive salespeople.  Getting a high follower count is super easy…just follow a lot of people who automatically follow you back. Influence may lead to a lot of followers, but a lot of followers doesn’t lead to influence.

So how do you gain influence on Twitter? You do it the old fashioned way. Do something noteworthy, say smart things, entertain people, be interesting, piss people off or make people laugh. Or you could just be Ashton Kutcher…go figure.

Here at Rand Media Group, we conducted an exhaustive survey of Twitter and found that 27%* of people on Twitter are self-proclaimed marketing gurus. An even more fascinating statistic is that 98%* of people hate self-proclaimed marketing gurus. Why do we hate them so?

It isn’t that people don’t like marketing gurus. Seth Godin has a lot of fans (myself included). The problem is that people don’t trust braggarts, especially marketing braggarts. You can tell someone what you do, but you can’t tell someone how well you do it with much credibility.

In order to gain credibility you have to earn trust. A good marketer figures out how to build trust. Bragging to total strangers about your unsubstantiated awesomeness is not the way to do this. Marketers know this. Marketing gurus know this very well. A true marketing guru doesn’t have to claim the guru title because other people do it for them.

*I made that up and we did no such study.