One of the most important functions of marketing isn’t viral and it isn’t advertising and no, it’s not creative slogans. Rather it’s in the fundamental 4Ps taught in every Marketing 101 class: Product.

In order to win the marketplace, you must wire the marketplace. According to Moore, “For a given target customer and a given application, create a marketplace in which your product is the only reasonable buying proposition. That starts… with targeting markets that have a compelling reason to buy your product. The next step is ensuring that you have a monopoly over fulfilling the reason to buy.”

According to Moore, “Whole product planning is the centerpiece for developing a market domination strategy.” He continues, “Winning the whole product battle means winning the war.”

In the following model, there are only two categories: (1) what’s shipped (the generic product) and (2) what else the customers need in order to achieve their compelling reason to buy. Moore calls this the “marketing promise” made to win the sale. Failure to meet this promise in a B2B marketplace has serious consequence, this isn’t fluff or mumbo jumbo but a promise that must be delivered on.

Unless you have been living under a digital rock, you probably know the increasing importance of social-media marketing to your business both today and in the future. However, it is important to know that social media is not a panacea – it is not a magic bullet that will get you a quick million dollars in sales in return. If it were, then every business would be successful within weeks of creating a Facebook page or Twitter account.

Social media, just like any other strategy or tactic, needs to be executed in the best way – in other words, in the way that is most applicable and beneficial to your specific business. No two businesses – or their websites – are exactly the same.

Here is one example. Back in 2006, Rand Fishkin wrote about how much traffic he received from the social-media network StumbleUpon and offered the graphic at the top of this post. Fishkin’s post six years ago correctly provides an example of how much traffic a social-networking website can deliver, but it is important to keep such numbers in context.

Just because a certain source – whether a social-media network or something else – brings you a lot of traffic does not mean that it is bringing you good traffic. Here are the top ten referring websites for a certain website whose data I am analyzing:

Three of the top-ten referrers (outlined in red), as may be expected, are Facebook, StumbleUpon, and Twitter. Sounds great, right? Well, look more closely at the third, fourth, and last columns (from left to right):

• Facebook: 1.67 average number of pages viewed; 3:13 average time on site; and a bounce rate of 70%
• StumbleUpon: 1.14; 0:12; and 87%
• Twitter: 1.65; 3:15; and 81%

What does this tell you? People coming to this particular site from StumbleUpon view far fewer pages, spend barely any time on the website, and are very likely to leave without clicking anything on the site. I would tell the owner of this website, who wants to prioritize social-media marketing, to focus more on Facebook and Twitter instead.

(Of course, this is data from just one website – your specific results may be vastly different, and your resulting strategy would be different as well.)

The reason is clear: people who are more likely to buy are those who spend more time on the website, view more pages, and take a greater interest in what is being presented. StumbleUpon may have brought 1,700 visits over this time period, but it is unlikely that this website had a lot of sales from many people. The point: Would you rather have 50,000 visitors that buy $1,000 worth of goods in a month or 10,000 visitors who buy $100,000 worth in a month? In most businesses, the best gauge of results is the money – not traffic from a social-media network or any other source in and of itself. Therefore, it makes sense to invest more marketing efforts in the sources that will attract more of the customers who will purchase $100,000 worth of goods.

Late last year, Jeff Bullas (among others) reported that StumbleUpon is delivering more overall online traffic than Facebook. To be honest, I yawned when I read that article. Sure, that social-media network might bring a lot of traffic, but if the average visitor spends only twelve seconds at a website (as in the above example), then what should I care?

Of course, I do not mean to pick on StumbleUpon. I am sure that many businesses and website owners find its traffic to be valuable. (After all, if no one thought the network to be useful, StumbleUpon’s more than 10 years of existence would not have been possible.) The point is that any social-media network – or any other specific source of marketing leads and prospects – is not going to be useful to everyone.

If your business has selected social-media marketing as a strategy, then you need to execute that strategy as efficiently and productively as possible. The website I cited above would probably want to ignore StumbleUpon. You might want to do something different. The key is that not all social-media networks – just like not all types of marketing in general – are created equal for everyone.

What, exactly, will work for your business?

A lot of women, like me, watch the Super Bowl for three main things: The national anthem (sung by Kelly Clarkson this year), the halftime show (Madonna featuring many other pop icons), and of course, the commercials.   Each year, advertisers battle and bid millions of dollars for a 30-second spot to debut their commercials during the football game.

Super Bowl XLVI had a lot of entertaining bits while others fell flat or tried too hard.  The thing that stood out most for me was Chevy’s aggressive digs at Ford. In a commercial portraying the Mayan apocalypse, Chevy drivers survived, leaving the rubble unscathed, while the narrator told us that Ford owners couldn’t survive the destruction.

Continuing with the automobile commercials, Clint Eastwood’s long and boring attempt to persuade viewers to do who knows what with Chrysler cars definitely lacked entertainment value.  Acura teamed up with the always-loveable Jerry Seinfeld, who delivered his comedic act and riffed on several classic “Seinfeld” favorites.

Budweiser presented us with feel-good, classic, vintage commercials that celebrated various great moments throughout American history. Bud’s spots were very product-centered and had nostalgic nods to various decades. Overall, Bud left us happy, feeling good, and wanting to crack open a crisp beer.

On the other hand, Coke brought the bears back. We did not really get what they were doing during the commercials, but the cute polar bears quickly evoked forgiveness!  Coke could have done a much better job showcasing its Cola brand that everyone loves.

Another classic brand that never disappoints was M&M, which introduced its new, female character. The company managed to make a “just my shell” joke (involving a brown M&M) and added an edgy twist by suggesting that the candy was naked.

Overall, with more than 140 million Americans watching the Super Bowl, there was plenty of room for billions of dollars to be made as a result of this sporting event. However, a significant chunk of that number is spent on advertising in an attempt to both entertain and influence consumer buying habits.

As in all elements of marketing and branding, the strategy needs to come before the execution. The creation of an amusing advertisement for the Super Bowl that does not aim to achieve a larger purpose may garner a few media mentions, but it will not add to the bottom line.

After watching yesterday’s commercials, we were left with two questions: What do you think was the strategy behind each commercial, and how well did each company execute that strategy? We welcome your comments below!

If you follow marketing news, you have probably heard of national brands launching large social media campaigns like Kohl’s and Target on Facebook and Radio Shack and Nestle on Twitter. Still, it is very easy to use social media for business even if you just have a local store.

In Boston, where I lived for nine years, one of the most-famous pizzerias is Santarpio’s in the neighborhood of East Boston. If you live in Eastie – as Bostonians call it – and order delivery from somewhere else rather than take-away from Santarpio’s (pictured), your neighbors will think that you are crazy or have bad taste in pizza.

The restaurant has a big-enough brand and following that the owners seem not to be bothering with a social-media strategy. If you go to Santarpio’s website, you will see that they do not have links to their Facebook page and Twitter account. Moreover, there are no posts on the Facebook Wall, and there have been only five tweets and nine followers since August.

Still, social media could surely help them – along with many other local businesses in New England or elsewhere. I recently read a blog post by Hubspot (also in Boston) on local social-media marketing, and the company’s points are sound. I’ll address some of their ideas with my own in the context of how Santarpio’s could use Facebook and Twitter. Whatever your own business happens to be, you can adjust accordingly.

1. Use your Facebook page to get found in Google. As my colleague Daniel Goldstein and I wrote in posts here and here, social-media accounts and posts are increasingly appearing in Google search-results. Santarpio’s could add a search term like “Boston Pizza” to its Facebook page name (“Santarpio’s Boston Pizza”) and customize its Facebook page URL to something like www.facebook.com/santarpiosbostonpizza. The informational tabs could also contain keywords. In addition, regular Wall activity including the occasional use of keywords and links would help. All of these actions help to increase the page’s chance to appear in Google search.

2. Use Twitter search to find local people interested in your product or service. Santarpio’s could create a Twitter list showing all tweets that mention the word “pizza,” “ordering pizza,” “getting takeout,” or something similar. Whenever someone local uses the phrase, Santarpio’s could reply and make a marketing pitch (perhaps something like “$2 off a large pizza just for you, today!”) It would also be important to use one of the search features and available tools to limit the search results to a certain radius around the city.

3. Use mobile and social-media check-ins. This is from Hubspot:

Many local businesses leverage mobile check-ins via networks like Foursquare to encourage foot traffic. But you can also use it to identify potential affiliate opportunities. Where else are your customers checking in? If you know where they spend their time, you also know where you should be making your brand visible with things like guest blogging, paid advertising, referrals, and co-marketing opportunities.

Santarpio’s could also posts signs or ask their servers to encourage people to “check-in” on social-media accounts and mobile phones when they sit at a table. If a certain number of people do so, they could be given a free appetizer or something similar. This way, their friends will see their locations – and might just develop a hankering for a famous slice of cheese and pepperoni themselves.

If Santarpio’s, for example, would engage a lot of people in Boston through social media, then more people would think to go there once they see a lot more people posting on Facebook and Twitter about the famous restaurant. It’s all about brand awareness. Since I moved away from Massachusetts, the pizzeria opened a second location in the northern suburb of Peabody. An effective use of social media would make them even more of a success and possibly lead to even more locations (assuming that Santarpio’s still has popular pizza and satisfied customers!).

And the same is likely true for whatever your local business happens to offer.

After Google unveiled first its +1 social-sharing button and then its Google+ social network last year, my colleague Daniel Goldstein predicted that the changes will eventually influence organic-search results. Google, he argued, will increasingly personalize search results based on what an individual searcher has “+1ed” in the past.

Well, that time has arrived. And if your company does not adapt, you will miss out on a tremendous amount of valuable traffic to your website.

On January 10, Google announced its “Search, plus Your World” revamp of its search-result pages:

Google Search has always been about finding the best results for you. Sometimes that means results from the public web, but sometimes it means your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience…

We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships.

In practical terms, here is what the change means. As an experiment, I searched for “seo” (search-engine optimization) while I was logged into my personal Google account. This is what I saw:

(You may need to click on the image to make it larger and easier to read.) As is probably obvious, the Google+ results were the other Internet marketers whose writings I follow. In the sector in which you work, you will likely see results tailored to your industry.

If you have worked in Internet marketing for a decent length of time, you probably know the importance of what is “above the fold.” (The term comes from print journalism and the idea that the most-important story should be at the top of the page.) In Internet marketing, “above the fold” is place on a website where you want your calls to action, advertisements, and other related items since many people lose interest and never bother to scroll down to the bottom of a web page. Most of the clicks on a search-results page (and on any website) will be on those items that are “above the fold.”

So, when I did a test search for “seo,” what did I see? The top of the page now contains:

• Google pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements
• Personalized results from my past activity on Google+
• Google+ people and pages that Google thinks I might like based on my past activity

And only then, after my eyes had already scrolled past these three items, do the organic results appear. The point should be obvious, but I’ll address it further below.

Years ago, search marketing – at least in organic search and not PPC advertising – consisted of slapping relevant keywords on each page of a website to get the site to rank in Google for those search terms. After black-hat SEO artists began “keyword spamming” pages, Google switched its algorithm to favor backlinks and quality content as the measures of a website’s authority. The more backlinks and original content, the better the website – or so the theory went.

However, these same unscrupulous marketers began spamming forums and blogs, creating article-spinning software, and using sophisticated (though devious) tools to insert links into unsecure websites. So Google needed to develop another way to measure the quality of a website – and that is what likely led the search-engine giant to incorporate social-media signals like Google+ into its results. After all, a “like,” “retweet,” or “+1” from a real person on social-media networks is largely impossible to fake or manipulate.

From the perspective of providing relevant search-results, this change makes perfect sense. However, from a business perspective, there are allegations (from Twitter and others) that Google is violating anti-trust measures by favoring its own social-media network and other internal services in search results (that should, perhaps, be objective). Since I am not a lawyer myself, I will leave this particular issue for the experts to decide. Still, the value for inbound marketers is obvious.

The basic idea in search marketing is to “get found in Google.” Until now, the primary method had been to create and optimize a website while producing quality content and obtaining enough backlinks to “get to the Top 10” in search results. However, even the number-one website in organic search-results will still be below the PPC ads – and now below the personalized Google+ recommendations as well.

If your search-marketing strategy has been only to optimize your website or only to get more backlinks, you are missing out on the bigger picture. As Google becomes more personalized and complex, a quality search-engine marketing (SEM) strategy will need to integrate many or all of the following:

• Search-engine optimization (SEO) – creating a search-engine friendly website
• Quality content to engage both readers and search engines
• Linkbuilding to increase the “authoritativeness” of your website
• Social-media sharing both to increase traffic and to rise in search-engine rankings (especially now with Google+)
• PPC advertising to get to the “top of Google” for as cheaply as possible

If your business has identified Internet marketing as a method to achieve your marketing and business goals, it is crucial to keep abreast of the latest changes. Google’s recent revamp of its search results is just the latest example of why it is important to integrate all of the relevant aspects into a holistic, coherent strategy.

For more background on Google’s new search results, I recommend the articles here, here, here, and here.

If your business would have had a mobile-marketing campaign during the holiday season, your sales may have increased by as much as eighteen percent.

That is the opinion of Razorfish Vice President of Mobile Paul Gelb. “I think the biggest takeaway from 2011 holiday marketing was the emergence of an enormous mobile-marketing gap amongst retailers,” he told Mobile Commerce Daily. “Retailers that are not ready are ceding high ground to their competitors and may have trouble leveling the playing field in the future.”

And Gelb is not alone. Hipcricket CMO Jeff Hasen observed that:

• More advertisers are incorporating mobile into their marketing mixes
• A Budweiser television commercial encouraged customers to scan a code with their mobile devices to win a Super Bowl trip
• Citi and LevelUp garned significant publicity by giving $10 mobile credits for pizza to the people in New York City’s Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

In addition, IOS and Android users downloaded 1.2 billion mobile applications between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, and traffic from mobile devices comprised 18.3 percent of online traffic on Christmas Day.

Since retailers earn roughly forty percent of their annual revenues over the holiday season, the importance of mobile marketing between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day cannot be ignored. Just imagine a stressed-out father running through the mall on Christmas Eve and checking his iPhone for which stores have last-minute coupons because he still needs a few presents. After all, people use mobile search when they need information “on the go” and do not have time to go to their homes or offices to use their computers.

Still, the increasing importance of mobile marketing extends beyond the last five weeks of the year. In general trends:

• 60 percent of tablet owners have booked travel on their mobile devices
• Banking customers who use a mobile applications engage with their banks three times per week while those who use traditional Internet banking access their information twice over the same period of time
• Mobile coupons are expected to reach redemption rates of 8 percent by 2016 (while the redemption rate of traditional coupons has decreased since 1999)

In a prior post, we noted that companies have fewer than two years to “get” mobile marketing. Unfortunately for their profits, it seems that many have not gotten the message. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, only 7.2 percent of mall retailers used QR codes in their mobile-marketing strategies.

As the 2011 holiday season proved, mobile marketing can be a present for your company – but only if you unwrap it quickly.

Most of our previous blog-posts on search-engine marketing (SEM) have focused on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search-engine optimization (SEO). Here, we wanted to address another important aspect: linkbuilding.

As you may know, Google ranks search results based primarily on two factors: relevance and authoritativeness. The first is obvious: If you search for “Christmas gifts,” you do not want the latest Philadelphia Phillies scores to appear. In simplistic SEO terms, on-page optimization is an effort to tell search engines the topic of each page of your website.

The second is more complicated. If you search for “Christmas gifts,” there are hundreds of thousands of web pages that Google will deem to be relevant. But the order in which the pages will appear will be based largely on their authoritativeness. The first page of results will likely have many websites of large companies like this one that many people trust, from which they purchase online, and that has many links from external websites pointing to it.

That last point is crucial to understand: Google’s so-called spider is a machine – it cannot judge the quality of a website in subjective, human terms. So, it judges quality and authoritativeness based, in part, on the number of other websites that refer to it. The principle makes sense: The Sharper Image (the link from above), for example, has incoming links from roughly 35,000 domains. Bob Smith’s shop on a random block in a small town in Iowa may have links from three domains. If you are a person living in Philadelphia who has to choose between these companies, which one would you trust to deliver your presents on time? You would trust The Sharper Image, of course – because the company has a long-established, known, and branded reputation.

Google uses the number of links in the same way. If 35,000 websites link to Sharper Image versus three to Bob Smith’s shop, then the search engine will view The Sharper Image as more authoritative since more people are “endorsing” the website through their links. As a result, a page on the The Sharper Image website mentioning “Christmas gifts” will likely rank more highly than a page on Smith’s site mentioning the same thing. And The Sharper Image will get the vast majority of the search traffic for that keyword.

You don’t need to be The Sharper Image to get the same benefit. Especially if your business operates in a small, niche sector, then a few quality links can go a long marketing way. But what do we mean by “quality”? Here are a few tips:

• Quality is better than quantity. If you spend any amount of time on marketing websites and blogs, you will see countless advertisements offering something like “5,000 links for $50!” Do not use these sites! These are likely scammers who want to steal your money and use sophisticated, though devious, programs in what is termed “black-hat SEO” to get you the links through methods including the spamming of websites, blogs, and forums. A few links from quality websites are better than 5,000 links in blog comments (which Google almost always ignores, anyway).
• Research the thought-leaders in your industry.The predominant view in search marketing is that Google, among other search engines, has identified a handful of websites that are viewed as the most authoritative for a given topic – and links from those sites to sites on the same topic are the most valuable. For example, if you blog about current events, then a link from the New York Times or Fox News will be far more valuable than one from a website about baseball. While it is impossible to know exactly what Google thinks, a little research and common sense can help. If your website focuses on “widgets,” search Google for the top websites in search results about “widgets” and related terms. Then, you can devise strategies to get links from those websites to yours. Eric Ward writes in Search Engine Land that directory links will become less important. We agree – but with one addition. Too many people take hours and hours to submit their websites to any and every online directory under the digital sun. What is more valuable is researching directories and lists that pertain to your topic. Again, if your website focuses on “widgets,” then find sites that are edited by humans who are authorities on “widgets” and try to get links from them. One link from these websites is far more valuable than links from hundreds of generic online directories that are run by machines.

• Use Social Media. We at The Cline Group often write about the need for holistic, integrated marketing, and social media is a crucial example. As we wrote in a prior post, social-media networks need to be used to gain invaluable links – at a time when Google knows about link spamming, a link from a private individual’s Facebook or Twitter is seen as a certifiable, definite “endorsement.” As a result, your website in general – and your content and blog posts specifically – need to have social-media sharing buttons placed as prominently as possible.

We have always written about the need for integrated marketing in today’s world that combines both traditional and online marketing. Linkbuilding is just one more piece of the marketing puzzle that you may need to incorporate into your overall marketing strategy.

The end of the year is a time when many companies review their performances, analyze their numbers, and strategize for the future. Since we often write about the latest trends in marketing, public relations, and communications, we wanted to see which of our articles have been the most popular over the past year – and discuss how they may hint at possible strategies in the future as well.

So, without further ado, here were our most-popular marketing blog-posts of 2011 (in descending order based on the number of external page-views):

1. Toyota: Example of a Crisis Communications Fail – Avi Hein, a member of our Advisory Council, discusses how the Toyota recall was a major communications disaster because they forgot that one essential point of crisis PR – transparency. As the Internet and social media grow even more invasive, there will be fewer and fewer secrets in general. There are no skeletons in the digital closet. What unknown negatives about your company may still be aired? At some point, they surely will. And you need a plan to respond.
2. Marketing Lessons from “Home Improvement”– Hein also notes how the television show “Home Improvement,” late in its run, revealed how a company pursuing a “hard sell” too strongly ended up with fewer sales. In the era of inbound marketing, it is increasingly important to use softer, subtler messages that add direct value to the demographic that is receiving them. Advertising is becoming much more pervasive (since everything like Gmail is free and ad-supported), and people are becoming more cynical as a result. Beating people over their heads with your pitches will only turn them off.
3. You Have Less Than Two Years to Get Mobile Marketing – Our Senior Vice President, Daniel Goldstein, details how the future of marketing lies in mobile – and that it will occur sooner than you probably think. Imagine a time when most people surf the Internet and interact with marketing messages on their iPhones, Androids, and Blackberries – and not on their computers. Both your website and your advertising will need to adapt to the change in mediums.
4. How to Attract Angel Investors with PR and Your Blog– I wrote that while corporate blogs are a great way to create and improve one’s reputation as a “thought leader” in a given industry, the collections of writings are also a good way to secure start-up investments. Small businesses, for example, can post and promote their latest product news and financial disclosures to make it easier for potential investors to learn what they need to know.
5. Creating Brand Ambassadors Like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”– Our Manager of Digital Marketing and Communications, Samuel J. Scott, connects one of his favorite television shows to the elements of good branding. In addition, he discusses how one company is incurring bad branding by revamping the cult television show from the late 1990s more than a decade after it premiered.
6. Non-Profit Marketing Tips for Tight Budgets– Director of Business Development Lisa Fraimow, who has also overseen our non-profit clients, explains why not-for-profit organizations should not cut their marketing budgets in these tough economic times. Stopping outreach creates a downward spiral that often results in even-worse financial situations. As a result, she suggests some cost-effective methods of marketing.
7. 7 Social Media Marketing Lessons from “Mad Men”– Hein relates the lessons that the television drama set in the early 1960s can still teach marketers today. Whether it is understanding how the medium itself affects the message or knowing when and how to embrace new technologies (television then, social media now), the principles of good communications – and business in general – never go out of style.
8. Google +1, Social Media, and the Future of SEO– Most people involved in search-engine marketing know the importance of on-page optimization and backlinks, but Goldstein explains in this post how social media now affects SEO. As more and more black-hat marketers use spam and other unscrupulous methods to get links, search engines are placing more emphasis on the number of social-media links specifically. In the next year, expect to see SEO and social media become even more integrated.
9. Fact-Checking Journalism: The Future of PR?– Vice President of Global Communications David Andrew Goldman suggests a way that public relations will transform journalism as more and more media outlets – particularly newspapers – cut their budgets and staff. Public-relations professionals may be able to help reporters with fact-checking and serving as sources of objective information rather than merely support a particular point of view. Through this method, reporters may come to respect the spokespeople even more.
10. When the Water Company Gets it, You Know Social Has Gone Mainstream– Hein demonstrates how even the most unlikely of companies can find value in marketing through social-media networks – even if you are the Washington, D.C., Water and Sewer Department. In 2012, we project that more and more companies will find their way into social media – but most, unfortunately, will not know how to do so effectively and in a way that contributes to their general marketing and business goals.

We wanted to thank the people who have taken the time to read our thoughts on marketing, public relations, and communications over the past year.

Now, for 2012, we would love to hear what topics you would like us to address in the New Year. Feel free to comment below or send us an e-mail at info (at) theclinegroup.net. Happy Holidays from all of us at The Cline Group!

A lot of business and marketing is impossible to measure quantitatively but still widely regarded as valuable. Take branding, for example. Companies spend millions on logos, product appearance, communications, and guerilla marketing – among countless other tactics – to ensure that consumers think of a desired connotation when they think of a brand. It’s not a cheap endeavor – it can take years to build a solid brand.

Take the Stella Artois beer, a brand that I studied in business school. (See a Harvard Business School case study.) The company spent much time and money in an effort – successful or not, take your pick – to associate the beer brand with luxury. Hence the firm’s mandating (in just one example of many) that bars and restaurants serve the beverage in an ornate glass with a (fake) gold-tipped rim rather than a generic, simple pint glass.

Now, imagine the CEO of Stella Artois asking his VP of Marketing the following question: “What’s the ROI of making sure that the beer is always served in such a glass?” The vice president would not have an answer because the CEO would be missing the point. Say it costs $1 million to manufacture 1 million of the specialty glasses – how much revenue would the company generate through increased sales solely as a result of the style of the glass? Would the glass itself lead to $10 million in increased sales, thereby fostering something like a 900% ROI?

The question is just as impossible to answer as it is absurd to pose in the first place – because branding is not about ROI. It is about using an intangible method that helps to lead – but does not directly lead – to increased sales.

The same is true for social-media marketing (SMM).

SMM, just like branding, is a method (or tool) to achieve a goal. It is not the goal itself. The latter is having a Facebook page just to have one; the former is actually using one to help to execute your business and marketing strategies and increase sales.

The ROI of social-media marketing can be measured in indirect ways in relation to how it makes other business and marketing activities more efficient. Instead of mailing bulky, expensive catalogues, companies can post product information on their Facebook pages. Instead of hiring dozens of customer-service representatives, firms can invite people to post issues on Twitter to which a single individual would respond. And so on. In just these two examples, the cost savings are obvious – and the same idea can be applied to nearly any business function of any organization.

Of course, the end return might be better through the use of catalogues (it is impossible to know unless you research, strategize, and measure results accordingly). And you might not want your customer-service issues to be publically visible on Twitter. Social media, just like any other marketing method, has its benefits and drawbacks. But the point remains that social-media networks can often be used to improve business processes.

The important thing to remember is that the ROI of social media – just as with the creation of a brand over years – is often intangible, indirect, and takes time to be seen. A company will not see any benefit to posting its product line on Facebook or answering customer-service issues on Twitter unless it takes the time (often several months) to build Facebook “likes” and Twitter followers first. While the ROI of specific social-media activities – say, posting calls to action on your Facebook Wall or on Twitter – can be measured later, the intangible ROI that comes from building a social-media following at the beginning cannot. The results come later.

Stella Artois did not see any direct ROI-benefit to lining its glasses with golden rims within the first few weeks of its rebranding. And no company will see the benefits of social-media marketing immediately. But just as Stella Artois’ VP of marketing surely knew, the long-term benefits are (usually) well worth the cost. It just takes patience – and the knowledge to judge items like branding and social-media ROI in the right way.

Related posts: See our prior thoughts on this topic here, here, here, here, and here. Yes, we think it is an important-enough topic to discuss regularly!

In February 2011, Google unveiled the first in a major series of updates collectively termed “Panda” to its search algorithm. The latest Panda update occurred on November 18, and many websites lost search-engine rankings (and thereby traffic) on and after that day. See the comments in this post for just a few examples of the many that we have seen.

What the Panda updates aim to do overall is devalue the rankings of poor-quality websites including content farms, spammers, built-for-advertising sites, and those with little original content or text that was copied (or “scraped”) from elsewhere. The most-egregious offenders sometimes have their sites removed from Google’s index completely. In a nutshell, Panda wants to judge the quality of a website from a human point-of-view rather than that of a machine.

Of course, it is impossible for a person – or probably even thousands of people – to review every single website in the world manually, so Google must simply change and set its algorithm in a way that flags the things that the types of websites described above tend to have. Such a process is not perfect – many quality sites were hit by Panda through no fault of their own – but many of the websites of many people who have worked hard to develop positive online-presences over the years have also been helped. (See a list of websites that were helped and hurt by the new algorithm in the past.)

If you lost a significant amount of website traffic in mid-to-late November and have yet to recover (or even in an earlier Panda update), then it is very likely that your site has serious issues that need to be addressed. Panda is a domain-specific update rather than a page-specific one – so if Google flags a fair number of pages on your website (no one knows the exact number), then most or all of your pages will be penalized.

Here is a checklist of things to examine:

• Do your pages have little original content? The text of every page of your website needs to consist of at least 250 to 300 words of original text that is nowhere else online, not even elsewhere on your site. If you have a template that includes the same block of text, stop using it and place original copy on every page. Google likes – and people like – websites that have high amounts of original content. It’s just one reason why many companies need to have a blog. Pages that have “thin” content (like many “Contact Us” pages) should be set to “no-index” or blocked in the robots.txt file so that they do not hurt the rest of the website. Spammers often “scrape” content from other sites and/or create websites with thousands of pages with a line of text on each one. As a result, Panda penalizes websites that appear to have the same thing.
• Do you have too many advertisements, banners, and similar items? When people think of on-page optimization, they typically think about placing keywords in certain fields and so on. But there is also a design element. Courtesy of Cyrus Shepard, here is an example of what NOT to do:

When you look “above the fold” on this website, you will see that nearly everything is an advertisement, and whatever original content exists (or does not exist) is pushed far down.

Here are two good examples of on-page, SEO-design optimization (again, from Shepard):

As you can see, there is only one advertising banner, and the content first appears far “above the fold” as well. This principle is relevant even if your company or personal website does not carry any external advertising. Google, of course, cannot see what is visually in a banner (unless it is its own AdSense code or something similar) – it only knows that a banner is placed in a given location. As a result, the presence of too many banners, graphics and similar items on a website page generally – and those “above the fold” specifically – will likely incur a penalty. (See an interesting, pre-Panda discussion on the topic.)

Spammers create so-called “made-for-advertising” websites with much advertising and little content. As a result, Panda penalizes websites that appear to have the same thing. If your website looks more like the first image above and not the second, you should consider a redesign.

The general point to remember is that you should always build websites with the human user in mind – not Google or advertisers. As Google improves its algorithm more and more over the months and years to come, it will be that much better at distinguishing quality, human-focused websites from spam and computer-focused ones.

As long as you build and market your website to focus on the end user (or target demographic) that you have in mind, you will likely never fall victim to a Google update like Panda. After all, the point of search-engine optimization (SEO) is not to cheat Google and get traffic – it is to increase the public’s awareness of a quality website naturally.

Here, here, and here are more useful articles on the Panda update, what not to do, and how to fix your website in a post-Panda world. Here is a lengthy list of SEO practices to avoid.