The update was released last week and seems to only be active part of the time. So I’ve captured a search query with Google’s personal results filter turned on and off to better illustrate what this change means to overall SEO.

Logged In/Show Personal Results

The default setting when you are logged into Google populates personal results all over the page. Viewers receive a list of Google+ profiles from their circles related to the search terms shown above the search results. To the right Google highlights global Google+ people and pages they think are most pertinent to your search terms. Finally, mixed in with the results are posts from your circles that directly relate to the terms searched.

Logged In/Hide Personal Results

Here I am logged in to Google but I have clicked “Hide Personal Results” on the top right. All circle related content is removed from results, but Google’s top people and pages related to the search terms are still shown. These same results are shown when I am not logged in.

As Google remains the most popular search engine to date this in turn now makes Google+ the most visible social network in search. A lot of criticism regarding the fairness of a search engine promoting its own social results has been circulating, but Google is standing by its decision. Marketers have no choice but to follow Google’s lead and get their brands represented as soon as possible to keep up with those already on Google+.

Want help to quickly create and optimize your Google+ brand page? Contact Monkee-Boy to strengthen your Google search coverage!

Share/Bookmark

Make a Discount Game Plan

Ok, so you tackled Black Friday and Cyber Monday with generous price cuts, but you should also create a discount game plan for the next few weeks. In order to harness the holiday rush, consider offering free shipping or another type of discount closer to Christmas. This will attract shoppers who are running out of time to fill up their shopping carts.

Entice Customers to Come Back Even After the Holidays

To ensure delivery is not your last point of contact with the customer, create more ways to connect. For instance, include coupons valid after the holidays with every purchase, add creative marketing materials and packaging to the product, or request customers to sign-up for newsletters at check-out.

Communicate Precise Shipping Cut-off Dates.

Holiday shoppers do not have time to waste looking at products that are not able to arrive by Christmas. Communicating shipping cut-off dates boldly will save them time and help them to make a quick decision. One way to do this is to add a holiday icon to each product that is guaranteed to arrive by Christmas. It’s festive and informative!

Consider Creative, Tasteful Holiday Themes

You don’t need to deck your site out in red and green to promote holiday cheer, but browsers will be responsive to a heightened holiday aesthetic. Simple additions will go a long way and keep your site brand cohesive.

Verify all your accounts are up to date!

If you aren’t great at keeping tabs on the status of accounts like your domain name, hosting, or merchant accounts take a moment to make sure everything is in order before you get knee deep in purchases. Your credibility could be deeply damaged if one of these services goes awry in the midst of the holiday rush.

Great customer service coupled with a solid plan of action will go a long way in keeping spirits bright throughout the season. Keep this list in mind while you prepare for the weeks ahead. Happy Holidays!

Share/Bookmark

Keep Production Simple

Producing content intended to go viral is very different from producing content for television. While the idea behind the latter media is to provide an escape for the viewer from their surroundings, online media is intended to connect with the viewer on a personal level. User experience cannot be heightened if the user is reminded of the production team behind the content. So keep production simple.

Take for instance Samsung’s “Master of Business Card Throwing”, production is straight forward as well as the message — this camcorder can capture cool stuff. Had Samsung chosen to dress the video with elaborate costumes and effects, it would not have been as successful online.

Target A Niche Audience

Internet users are bombarded by new content with every click. In order to make your content go viral you need a strategy for making certain it stands out. If your content is meant to appeal to everyone it will not be personal enough for users to pass it on. But, by igniting a common interest in a niche group, individuals are more likely to pick up the content. Try creating an emotional appeal in order to make content resonate with the target group.

It is also a great idea to research influencers in your target audience. For a better understanding of who influencers are and why they are important check out this great documentary by R+I creative.

Be Honest

As I mentioned in “Part Two”, Internet users are savvy and informed. Not only do they follow what their friends say about online content, but they are also literally seconds away from millions of online resources. This means if you try to fake them out by hiring an advertising firm to create fake content and then deny any relation to this firm the truth will always come to light.

The good news is being honest does not necessarily mean giving all the details. Many companies have accomplished creating an air of mystery by omitting their brand. For example, the new Back to the Future short uploaded this week featuring the original Doc Brown character from the series of films. No brand is mentioned in the short and viewers don’t know who created it or why. They mystery is propelling the video and eliciting buzz from fans of the film series.

Protect Your Brand

Not every stab at a viral marketing campaign will go well so be sure you think through all the possible ways the content could be misconstrued. In the event your campaign does backfire it will likely be a highly visible blunder. By planning ahead for possible disasters you can respond quickly and gracefully without loosing too much credit.

During your campaign make sure you stay on top of buzz so you can act quickly if things start to turn south. There are many tools for setting up alerts every time your company’s name is mentioned online.

Run with Success

There is a fine balance between beating a joke into the ground and keeping it going based on demand. If you have a successful viral campaign you should respond quickly but don’t take the success for granted. Try to bring a fresh angle to the campaign giving it its own identity. That way you keep users engaged with fresh content, but pleased they’re in on the old joke as well.

By following these simple tips for running a viral marketing campaign you ensure you are prepared for whatever kind of buzz the campaign receives. If your first campaign doesn’t take off, don’t get discouraged. Just use these guides to evaluate which areas of your viral marketing campaign need strengthening.

Share/Bookmark

As the authority for business profiles, job posting and professional networking it is surprising more companies don’t implement the website into their online marketing strategies. Until recently marketing on LinkedIn has been nearly unexplored territory only going so far as the company profile and careers pages. Recently, however, several companies have started to delve into the unknown and it turns out marketing on the website may be a bit more covert than its social networking cousins. Companies that have created successful marketing campaigns via LinkedIn have focused less on vamping their profile pages and more on the real asset of LinkedIn: the network.

Easy LinkedIn Network Marketing Strategies:

Word of Mouth–Goshido

In 2010, Irish start-up Goshido raised over $350,000 in 8 days all through LinkedIn. Chairman Frank Hannigan simply contacted 10 people in his network and requested they spread the word. Hannigan saw an opportunity in his network of over 700 people and took a simple approach to marketing his start-up. Word of mouth, especially via a reputable contacts, can be a great way to get information out about your company. Thirty percent of Goshiod’s overall investment ended up stemming from those contacted through LinkedIn.

Niche Groups–Dell

The 2011 Social Marketing Awards was given to Dell this year for their focus on marketing through LinkedIn. Dell chose to target niche groups by focusing on the networking site’s sub-groups feature. The groups targeted IT professionals and organized them by geography and specialty. Managers were assigned to each group to answer member questions quickly and in full. This kind of personal response is ideal for building a positive reputation for your company and the sub-groups are an excellent feature for promoting that reputation to influencers in your company’s speciality area.

While most social marketing campaigns are designed to endorse viewer interaction with a company, sometimes making the first connection is all that is needed to let your network spread the word for you.

Share/Bookmark

Viral Marketing Conquests

Many acknowledged viral marketing campaigns produced content that was simple and inexpensive in production–a factor that often builds trust in viewers. Over-produced content can point to the production team behind the curtain and detract attention away from the campaign’s message. The following are some examples of marketing campaigns that went viral and transcended their media by focusing on one simple, honest angle at a time.

Exposal–Dove Evolution

To date this short has over 13 million views. The video films a model arriving on the set of a photo-shoot with no make up, then shows her being transformed with make-up, lighting, and eventually digital manipulation. What made this video such a success was how it seemed as if Dove was exposing an insiders secret. Digital manipulation of models was something that in 2006 was beginning to come to light, Dove confirmed the suspicion and even took the campaign a step further by creating the Dove Self Esteem Fund–an awareness campaign against the falsification of beauty. Dove took a simple idea and execution and created a seemingly sincere message that audience appreciate and wanted to share with their friends.

Ingenuity–Bike Hero

Bike Hero is an example of how creativity and ingenuity are two driving factors of whether or not content goes viral. The video consists of a bicycle rider recreating the video game Guitar Hero using chalk marks on the road as his screen and his bike as his guitar. He then plays out the song matching the ride perfectly with the route and song. This video captivated an audience of over 2 million views mostly because of its impressive ingenuity. The brand is clear and recognizable without ever being mentioned.

Interactivity–The Old Spice Guy

Unlike the previous examples, Old Spice chose to put their brand all over their viral marketing campaign. They started with a few TV commercials staring a character known as “The Old Spice Guy”, then built a highly interactive online presence for the character through combining Twitter and YouTube accounts. Tweets to @OldSpice were quickly answered by the character in a way of a personal video.

Although these videos and the commercial gained a lot of attention, the campaign did not stop there. Old Spice ran with the popularity of the viral marketing project, creating a the “Old Spice Guy vs Fabio” campaign in late July of 2011. In this series, tweets were answered with videos by both Fabio and the Old Spice Guy via YouTube, as they dueled for the title of New Old Spice Guy. Viewers were requested to follow their preferred contender on twitter. By staying on top of their viral marketing campaign and keeping their brand as part of a long running joke Old Spice was able to keep fans engaged for nearly two years. Overall views on the Old Spice YouTube Channel amount to more than 234 million to date.

Backlash in Viral Marketing

It is important to note that not all viral buzz surrounding a company ends in good exposure. Internet users are quick to make judgements for or against a company and they cannot easily be fooled. Keeping an online presence can include just as much defensive as offensive strategy. The following are examples of failed marketing campaigns or harmful online brand exposure.

Dishonesty–Wal-Mart’s Sponsored Blog

Dishonesty is a major deterrent with online users and the success of your viral marketing campaign. For instance, Wal-Mart hired an advertising agency to create a viral campaign. That campaign ended up entailing a couple traveling in an RV, staying in Wal-Mart parking lots and blogging about products and experiences. While the couple traveling was real, their trip was fully sponsored by Wal-Mart, and they were being paid to do the blogging. Once exposed, real followers felt betrayed and word spread of Wal-Mart’s attempt to trick audiences with a false blog. Read more about the Wal-Mart blog.

Awareness–Domino’s

Being aware of your online presences is just as important as having one. Domino’s Pizza befell a major blow to their brand in 2009 when a couple of employees recorded themselves at work defiling pizzas and posted the video on YouTube. The video went viral and it took the company 48 hours to gain knowledge of the exposure and react–a response time that could have made the difference between a few million to several million viewers. However, the best solution for Domino’s would have been ready for the attack before it happened. There are many tools offered to companies for this purpose such as Google Alerts a free system that alerts you whenever your Company’s name pops-up online. Learn from Domino’s mistake and invest time into protecting your company’s online presence. Read more about Domino’s Blunder

After reviewing the examples of some successful campaigns and a few catastrophes in viral marketing it’s easy to see viral marketing takes a lot of planning. In my next blog I’ll be discussing a few tips for getting a marketing campaign to take off faster than a zombie infestation.

Share/Bookmark

The Fetch as Googlebot Feature is a simple process in which you can submit a single URL or a URL and all its included links. Submission can now be done easily and up to 50 URLs a week.

The following video demonstrates how easy it is too add links to Google with the Fetch as Googlebot feature.

Need to set up a site for use Google Webmaster Tools? Start with this video on how to add a site.

Share/Bookmark

Because the seemingly mythical beast of viral marketing has a lot of aspects to explore, I will be breaking this topic up into three blog posts touching these topics:

1. What is Viral Marketing

2. Who has Viral Marketing worked/not worked for

3. Tips for implementing your own viral marketing strategy.

Part One: Viral Marketing The Beast — In Theory

In the case of viral marketing, the egg came before the monster by the means of individual content on the Internet, such as the home video Charlie Bit My Finger, unintentionally going viral.

This accidental popularity on the Internet created a cultural phenomenon that needed to be identified. In the mid 90′s the term “viral” was coined to refer to any content that gets passed around via the Internet at an exponential rate. This term was chosen because the media’s method of spreading is akin to the method in which a virus passes on from one individual to the next resulting in a pandemic. In this case, it’s a pandemic of content in the form of videos, images and messages.

If harnessed this viral effect could be a marketer’s dream tool — known as viral marketing. The only challenge with adopting it as a reliable marketing campaign tool lay in predicting whether or not Internet users would pick up their content. Early adopters quickly realized the phenomenon can be pretty difficult to replicate.

At first, it seemed going viral happened sporadically and with no explanation. However, over a decade later, success stories seem to keep mystically popping out of no where. Perhaps the beast can be tamed. In my next blog post, I will discuss some successful and some not so successful viral marketing campaigns.

Share/Bookmark

Still recovering from over a week of sleep-deprived days this month, but it was worth it. Attendance was up this year for Interactive, rumors have been flying that perhaps it was up around 30% over last year. There were so many events and panels this year that some even spilled out of the traditional convention center to neighboring hotels, as far as 6+blocks past to the Sheraton. Which as it has also been stated is where the “real” technology panels and talks happened, away from the fray of wild crowds and parties that surrounded the convention center.

Making a broad statement off of all the panels I attended this year. I have to say most were definitely either a hit or miss…none of which fell in-between, often dependent on the quality of the moderator or ability of the moderator to draw out insights and guide the panel, and since SXSW deploys the scalable way of voting up panels to determine who will speak this leads to panels that have popular speakers (but that doesn’t guarantee the best speakers) or topics, perhaps just ones that are deemed mainstream.

One primary example, well based off my experience, that stands out in my mind is the “SXSW panel: Fan to Fanatic: True Blood’s Marketing Hook” I will admit, I am a fan…Why else would I go, right? In short all I have to say is, Alan Ball was missed/needed. I found that for a show with such vision and impact, that has become so well known, and has such a brilliant marketing team behind it, that they couldn’t carry the attention of well… ironically, their audience. Fortunately, given the vast assortment of panels, the opportunity to find certain topics is available, providing you can easily get to the physical location. I did find the SXSWi app with schedule updater so very handy in planning my day-to-day activities and was able to jump topics on certain panels that ended up not capturing my interests for very long.

I found the importance of networking during SXSW and understanding various social networks very useful and almost bordering as a complete necessity. I attended SXSW when Twitter* first launched, yet this year there were no clear rivals or new-kids-on-the-block/breakout technologies. In my opinion it is because there is an over saturation of products, currently–while innovation certainly isn’t stifled the number similar or ‘like’ products is hard to fathom let allow encourage novices to sift through. (*however that being said Twitter is in it’s fifth year, and coined at hitting over 140 million tweets a day, that’s one hell of a network. Happy Birthday Twitter!)

Among some of the coolest tools I found was SMS/app chat, GroupMe (enables intimate discussions with your most immediate circle) and to which admittedly I have been using for over half of a year now and am pleased to note that it keeps my monthly texting costs at bay within my social circle, but it is NOT new to me. However, during SX it was definitly being heavily used and promoted by this so to speak “early adopter crowd”, even the press picked up on this new trend. * Check out Group-Me Panel highlight reel for info

What about mass broadcasting panels and topics to networks like Twitter, Facebook? Well again, I congratulate the developers behind the SXSWi app, as it was not only a fantastic tool for scheduling, but also went a step further to integrate Gowalla’s location check-in and direct topic post to feed through both Twitter and Facebook. I was impressed almost more-so than with the panels I attended.

This brings me to another point. I found my off-line networking experience to be more prominent in providing me with new resources and contacts then I had experienced in quite a while. While I feel that at times some clients express that online networking can seem like a bizarre and mysterious world to traditional ‘offline’ professionals.  That world is moving at such a rapid pace, but my response is you know more than you think. All social networking leads back to you, me and our interrelation. Many social networking users are loosing site of that including myself at times. It very easy to hide behind the screen.

Upon doing a little discovery on this progression, after one of my many social networking events this SXSW I came across a neat study that boils down off-line to on-line networking to a few base principles.  Here are five ways to translate your existing networking skills onto the Internet environment and vise-versa from Pundit’s entrepreneurs a guide for social media.

*Side note, being a member I have to state my excitement, that the AIGA Launched Design for Good this SXSWi, Asking Members to Donate 5% of Their Time to Social and Civic Causes. NOTE: A positive way to promote your company through social networking is to engage your followers!

1.  Never Sell at Networking Meetings (over saturation)
On the web, forums, comments, and social media sites are your ‘networking meetings’.  Leaving shallow comments at every tangentially relevant site and only recommending your own stuff is the online equivalent to that guy working the room with a thousand business cards.  It’s better to make just a few quality contacts who don’t think you’re a jerk.

2.  Perfect Your Pitch
Offline we learn to craft our speech, a 30 second commercial so to speak to get across who we are and what we do.  On this point, the Internet is definitely your friend.  The profile is your online counterpart to this high-speed sales pitch.  The wonderful thing is you have the opportunity to get these first impressions just right and to adjust them over time.

3.  Give Before You Get
The surest way to foster goodwill both online and off is by being generous with your support.  Want more traffic?  Post lots of links.  Need help with your site design?  Give away what you’re good at.  The key is to offer without expectation of reciprocation.  When you make a habit of giving, the help you need seems to show up automatically just when you need it.

4.  Make Appointments to Network
The Internet is 24/7.  There may be some live chats or forums where people agree to attend during the same real time, but for the most part your networking is not going to be done concurrently.  In other words, you’re likely to have conversations over a staggered period of time.  In order to carve out the necessary time to catch up with online contacts, schedule networking on your calendar just as you would the business building breakfast organized by your traditional professional association.

5.  Patience is THE Virtue
It takes time to build up a network, any network.  It can be difficult at first to observe the effects of your diligent networking when you don’t see your new contacts out for drinks or in line at Starbucks.  How will you know you’re making progress?  The truth is networking is an art, not a science.  It’s difficult to measure – online or off – how your efforts are paying off.  But ask anyone who makes networking a regular part of their professional life and you’ll get a handful of anecdotes about the power of schmooze.

Share/Bookmark

In a previous post on mobile web strategy, Joe discussed how to get mobile user data from your site’s analytics.  Most site’s analytics tell a much different story from reports as early as even 6 months ago.  The landscape has changed — and will continue to change as more business mobilize their content, developers push the boundaries of what is possible in the mobile web universe.  Takeaway here though is that users are already viewing yours site on their phones… it is not an uncertainty.

A big question for many businesses is “what is better — a mobile app or the mobile web?”  The answer, of course, is “it depends”… but for us we believe for most businesses the answer is “mobile web”.

In a recent article on the Mobile Commerce Daily called “Four reasons why the mobile Web is key to everything”, Bryce Marshall has summed it up beautifully. Here is an excerpt from the article:

Earlier this spring, comScore released data indicating smartphone users are accessing the Web and applications for content at about the same rate.

That is happening now.

Morgan Stanley’s Internet Trends report, and projections for 2010, estimate that access to the Web via mobile devices will outpace access from traditional desktop/laptop devices sometime in 2013. This is the future of Web access from mobile devices.

This data paints an exciting picture of the present and future of mobile connectivity.

But how smartphone users can make those connections, and what steps marketers take to facilitate them with their brands is unclear.

Applications or the mobile Web browser – what is the best way to experience the best of smartphones, and the best of the Web?

Applications undoubtedly provide compelling and engaging experiences for consumers, which make applications compelling for marketers. But the mobile Web is key to everything mobile for consumers and marketers for four primary reasons.

Flexibility

The mobile Web, leveraged effectively, in coordination with a variety of online (SMS, email, mobile search and banner ads, 2D bar codes) and offline (print, point-of-sale, out-of-home) media, creates differentiated and nuanced Web experiences that both support and improve all aspects of the brand-consumer relationship.

Web-entry points and access to content can be customized, delivering contextually-correct experiences. This can be the difference between a more traditional “home page” experience and deep-linking a consumer to product-specific information.

Flexibility means supporting and responding to consumers’ varying preferences in how they use the mobile Web, whether they are completing an online purchase, or finding a store location to help finalize a purchase decision at retail.

Efficiency

A mobile-savvy developer can produce device-specific, user-friendly Web experiences for the majority of mobile Web users at a fraction of the time and resources it takes to create an application experience for the same users across devices.

Add into the cost the additional oversight and compliance processes baked into app stores, and what it takes to promote the application.

More time and resources go into applications. For most brands and campaigns, the marketing objectives can be met with the Web.

Intuitiveness

To borrow a line from Apple’s iPad commercials, “You already know how to use it.”

Consumers already know how the Web works, so nobody is reinventing the wheel. Today’s consumer is hard-wired to go to the Web for any reason, every reason, and for no reason at all.

The mobile Web simply taps into established consumer habits and expectations. You need information? If you have a browser and an Internet connection, the world is at your fingertips.

The stickiness of applications is appealing, there is no doubt. But accessing applications is a habit that users of some devices have learned, and it can be unlearned. The Web is not about to be unlearned.

Inevitability

The greatest shortcoming of the mobile Web today is not the devices and browsers, it is the sites, pages and the content itself. Jumping onto the Web from a smartphone is still a hit-or-miss proposition – regrettably mostly misses in terms of mobile usability.

But top consumer portals and brands already understand that the traditional heavy, deep, flashy Web sites can be substituted with quick, accessible, bite-size Web experiences through social media and mobile-optimized Web experiences and with great success.

In the next 12-24 months, as more consumers go online via the phone, and mainstream brands adapt with mobile-friendly Web experiences, consumer adoption of the mobile Web will explode.

Will applications be dead in two years? No. Applications deliver fantastic user experiences.

When developed smartly, they can be mind-blowing in terms of elegance, simplicity, usability, and engagement.

Applications are the whispers of an exciting future world where everything is small and easy.

But it is clear that the stickiness applications have in the minds of consumers and marketers alike is manufactured (smartly).

We have been trained to abandon hard-wired habits for learned ones, but only temporarily. The mobile Web, for everything it will deliver in the next 12-24 and months and beyond, is the key to everything mobile.

Bryce Marshall is director of strategic services at Knotice, Akron, OH. Reach him at bmarshall@knotice.com.

Share/Bookmark

• Should my company build a mobile site?
• Are many people using smart phones to conduct online business?
• Are my customers using their phones to view my site?

Well, hopefully you have Google Analytics installed on your web site to help you figure out how your visitors are using your site. If so, I we can help you answer the above questions and more. If you don’t have it installed, you should consider it. It’s free and gives you a lot of very useful information. If you’d like help or advice about getting Google Analytics or another web metrics package installed, give us a shout and we can help.

Back to the topic at hand, up until a few months ago, isolating mobile visits in a Google Analytics report was a bit trickier. However, about six months ago (at the end of 2009) the Google folks rolled out a new set of reports dedicated to tracking mobile visitors to your site. I’ll show you how to run those reports and, more importantly, what you should be looking for.

Let’s get started:

1. Step 1: Login to your Google Analytics account (http://www.google.com/analytics/) with your Google account user name and password. After logging in, you should be on the “dashboard” screen of your web site.
2. Step 2: In the upper right area of the dashboard you’ll see a date range, and to the right of the ending date, you’ll see a small arrow pointing down, click on that arrow and you can change the date range.
3. Step 3: Select a start date of 01/01/2010; an end date of the most recent Saturday and click the “apply” button. You should now have a date range from the beginning of this year through the most recent full week. This should provide us with enough data to help us answer our original questions above.
   

   Select a timeframe of at least five or six months, that will give you a decent trend for growth.

4. Step 4: Immediately below the date range, you can choose whether you want to graph by daily, weekly or monthly segments; select “weekly” to give us the best view of the data for trending. (If you’re reading the blog post some time in 2011 or beyond, you can select “monthly” if you prefer.)
5. Step 5: Now, let’s navigate to the Mobile report. In the upper left corner of the dashboard, you’ll see the main navigation. Click on the “Visitors” link to expand a list of all available visitor reports.
6. Step 6: There should be a link near the bottom of the choices called “Mobile”. Click on that link and you get two sub-reports, click on the one that says “Mobile Devices”.
7. Step 7: This is our report.

This chart shows a 3x increase in mobile visits since the beginning of the year.

What are we looking for?

• Growth – Look at the trend line (chart above) to see how rapidly your audience is adopting mobile technology into their web-viewing habits.
• Percentage of Overall Site Traffic – Growth is great, but if you are experiencing 4x growth by going from one mobile visitor a month to four, you can probably put mobile initiatives behind other site needs.
• Mobile Visitor Activities – Look at your bounce rates, pages per visit, time on site, etc. If these are lower than your site average, it could mean that mobile users don’t fing your site to be as usable on a phone as on a desk top. If you do decide to build a mobile site, use these numbers as a before-and-after benchmark.

Before making any key changes to your web site, look at your analytics. Nine times out of 10, the data is there to help you make the best decision possible.

Share/Bookmark