Archive for March, 2008

A business-oriented social network is launching, promising to deliver major benefits to companies who embrace a social media marketing strategy and use the site.

WeCanDo.BIZ claims to trump the viral marketing boons of existing social networks by focusing on "promoting the business ahead of the individual" and inviting customers to connect with organisations listed and profiled on site.

Also by integrating tools to help facilitate sales, the site claims to bypass the problems of sifting through the ’social’ side of social networks and allows direct access to business opportunities.

Ian Hendry, founder and director of WeCanDo.BIZ, said: "Facebook, LinkedIn and XING can be used by business people to find new customers, but they are compromised.

"They require that you work them hard to make the right connections and get yourself promoted; and they often involve you sharing information that may not be appropriate or of interest to people who just want to find a specific quality business to deal with."

Businesses can boost their profile on the new network by customers agreeing to endorse a business once they connect with it, allowing a firm to rise up the rankings in the network’s Trusted Business Search.

Google has introduced a new tool on its video streaming site YouTube, allowing search engine marketing (SEM) whizzes and budding marketers to gauge the popularity of published video content.

The new tool, entitled YouTube Insight, will allow people to examine what day of the week, hour of the day, state of the USA and clip length lead to the biggest traffic boosts, providing more complete viewing figures than ever before

In the past, only total views and user ratings were available for judging the popularity and marketing effectiveness of individual clips.

YouTube product manager Tracy Chan said: "Effectively, we’ve become the world’s largest focus group.

"There are so many use cases. This really enables programmers and marketers to optimize their presence on YouTube."

She added that the site would be willing to consider developing the capacity for the tool to measure video traffic for videos displayed on other sites, should this be required of it by users.

Google’s dominance of the ad serving market has been confirmed this week, with new figures suggesting that the search engine handles 69 per cent of the web’s served ads.

The survey from Attributor reviewed the market share of ad servers for over 25 billion web pages, with Google’s recently acquired Double Click seen to account for 35 per cent and Google itself 34 per cent.

European Union concerns over competition in the sector nearly prevented Google from completing its takeover of Double Click, with Attributor’s findings reiterating the collective market dominance that some feared.

Rival search engine Yahoo! came in third by serving 12 per cent of the ad market, while Microsoft was next with 10 per cent.

Should a takeover deal be resurrected and the two companies combine to take on Google, the survey results suggest a major gulf would still separate them from the market leader, whose total was 47 per cent above the combined Microsoft and Yahoo! total.

Search engine marketing (SEM) strategies often revolve around ad placement, with Google establishing itself as the favoured search engine for web surfers and consequently dominating the stakes for ad placement.

A savvy ad placement strategy can complement search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts and ensure a company is not tarred by negative customer comment, experts have claimed.

Using airlines as an example, E-Consultancy claimed that a search engine query for complaints about a specific airline would likely be met with top rankings for comments posted by the airline itself, consequently assuaging risks to its reputation.

The site however warned that potential customers would be unlikely to open a page from the company itself, while reminding firms of the further risks to their reputation that shocking photographic evidence of a poor travel experience could do.

Pictures or videos uploaded onto a Picassa or Flickr account could build up views and then conquer the SEO stakes on a Universal Search, leaving a firm’s reputation on the line.

E-Consultancy advised companies in a customer services fix to consider turning off broad match and serving an ad designed to stake stock of the query and offer positive solutions.

While SEO is an important strand of online PR operations, the travel industry is already expanding fast in other directions, with American Airlines last week launching a Facebook Application that allows users to exchange travel experiences.

Direct marketing is still considered one of the most effective forms of generating business, both on and offline, experts have claimed.

The Institute of Sales and Marketing Management (ISMM) identified direct marketing as one of the most flexible marketing forms, attributing its endurance to its ability to transform itself across different media.

A recent Global Marketing Effectiveness Report from the Fournaise Marketing Group found that direct marketing was ranked the most effective marketing channel in 2007, despite only accounting for 35 per cent of global marketing and communication spend.

Ren Kapur, rector of corporate development at the ISMM, said: "If you go back five years, direct marketing was mostly postal with some telephoning in the background, and then went through a phase of being email-based.

"Direct marketing is so much more flexible, hence why it maintains its edge all the time. In a drastically changing market, direct marketing is able to be so much more flexible and so much more sensitive to customer trends."

The Marketing Trends Survey 2007 from the Chartered Institute of Marketing envisages advertising accounting for just 15 per cent of total marketing spend this year, which for web companies means a greater allocation of resources to landing page optimisation, link building and other strategies.

Etailers could find that 2008 is an ideal year to prime their search engine marketing (SEM) efforts, with more and more consumers said to be scouring the web for bargain deals.

Online retailers were claimed by web shopping consumer guidance group Shopsafe.co.uk to be the most likely to offer discounted products, with the economic downturn leading increasing numbers of consumers to scope out the web for cheap deals.

A recent report from the IMRG Capgemini e-retail sales index found that online sales in February were 46 per cent higher than at the same point last year, with online sales of beer, wine and spirits even up a full 38 per cent.

Simon Crisp, director of Shopsafe.co.uk, said: "Especially in these times of the credit crunch, people are just looking for bargains and for deals and online is the place to get it.

"One of the big trends with online shopping at the moment are these discount codes and vouchers - secret sales if you will -where huge names are giving out codes where you can go and get 10 or fifteen per cent off."

A record was set last year when GBP46.6 billion worth of goods were sold over the internet, constituting some fifteen per cent of 2007’s retail purchases.

It is not worth driving traffic to a site if those attracted are not then likely to convert, a search engine marketing (SEM) expert has claimed.

Citing the growing interacting of web companies with social media, Search Engine Watch’s Chris Boggs said that firms should not get carried away with the need to generate viral interest and links from networks.

Claiming that social media is "still in its relative infancy," the SEM expert indicated that more focus should be placed on landing page optimisation, in order to ensure that those brought to the site are likely to be genuinely interested in the product.

He wrote: "Viral ideas can drive traffic to a site. However, if the same attention isn’t given to preparing what to do with the traffic, the only remaining value is links, many of which are no-followed or otherwise don’t pass link juice."

Mr Boggs compared wise social media operations to planning the perfect party and giving careful consideration to the guest list.

"The links will continue to come for the right content, but the extra special sauce will satisfy a much higher number of visitors, increasing both the chances of better links as well as conversions and referrals," he added.

UK online advertising spend is set to exceed GBP 5 billion by 2012, according to a new report.

E-Marketer has found that online ad spend will not succumb to the global economic slowdown and is instead predicted to grow 27 per cent this year.

Set to reach a total of GBP 3.4 billion, the desire to hone search engine marketing (SEM) strategies, link building and online pr will help propel online ad spend to GBP 4.3 billion by 2010, E-Marketer claimed.

Karin von Abrams, author of the report, said: "While the rate of growth in search-related spending is falling slightly as the market evolves, annual growth is still remarkable."

Growth of the medium is helping it make up ground on much more established advertising channels such as television, which online is set to overtake on overall spend by 2010.

Online ad spend takes a variety of forms, but is often focused on securing paid search slots on the web’s most prominent search engines.

Small business owners may need convincing of the financial advantages to maintaining their websites, an internet expert has suggested.

The British Computer Society’s (BSC) Internet Specialist Group has warned that poorly-run websites and complacency in their upkeep mean they fall by the wayside in terms of visitors.

Howard Gerlis, chairman of the BSC Specialist Group, said: "After the initial excitement, unless it is properly maintained and kept regularly updated, it can languish very quickly."

A recent survey by Netflare Ltd revealed that up to 38 per cent of businesses had not spent money modernising their website. A further 23 per cent had not overhauled their website for approximately four years.

However, up to 23 per cent of small business owners did report successful sales through their website. Some are requesting improvements to their web pages as technical elements, such as search engine optimisation, evolves.

"Though most need convincing that it’s worth the financial investment. Often the most influential catalyst is the competition," added Mr Gerlis.

Many websites are honing their search engine marketing (SEM) strategies and making their multimedia content accessible to Google or Yahoo! web-surfers, but internet service providers (ISPs) are not doing enough to satisfy customers, it was claimed.

Broadband Choices, part of the ConsumerChoices.co.uk Group’s online self-help service, claimed that BBC’s iPlayer success was making downloading and peer-to-peer interaction majority activities, but was placing new demands on ISPs.

A recent customer survey from uSwitch found that the satisfaction gap between the best and worst ISPs has grown from 13 per cent to 21 per cent, hampering the potential for websurfers to enjoy the video services that websites are increasingly providing.

Michael Phillips, product director with Broadband Choices, said: "I think that services like the BBC iPlayer, 4OD and Sky Anytime have taken high-end web behaviour to the masses.

"Previously most people were just doing a little bit of surfing in the evening, whereas downloading and peer-to-peer appeared to be minority activities, whereas now the BBC have made it a mass market."

Providing embedded video content and downloads is often seen as a way for web companies to broaden their SEM scope and generate more user hits.