I’ve written previously about the need to re-evaluate search marketing by attending to how users encounter your BRAND through search as opposed to the dated approach of focusing on where your URL appears.  This week a study emerged from a the search marketing agency Slingshot, showing that the click-through-rates (CTRs) on search result pages (SERPs) are diversifying dramatically such that only 52% of Google users and 26% of Bing users are clicking on anything on page 1.  People use search in multifaceted ways so we have to stop believing in the old alchemy of the magical number 1 slot and the obsession over where our URL ranks.  It’s the total experience of the brand that matters and those who make this transition quickest stand to gain the most from their search marketing efforts.

For years, the thinking has been that the top slots produce the lion’s share of the user activity on SERPs.  Various studies in the mid 2000s indicated that the top three slots got as much as 50-60% percent of the activity.  I’m not sure that the story was ever as dramatic as those stats indicated but the present reality is certainly different.  As Google and Bing have moved to build Universal Search Result pages that include blended results from a  variety of content sources, users have begun exploring the SERPs more readily.

Depending upon their mindset, the SERP gives the user many directions to pursue.  Are you just learning about a certain product or service?  Visit manufacturer sites and read articles on the topic.  Are you narrowing down or comparing options?  Visit review sites, blogs and forums.  Sick of reading and want a simpler overview….look for videos. Need something near you……check out the local listings.  The list of options grows annually and we all benefit from the multiplicity of content that is available.

All this reinforces the idea that brands need a content marketing strategy that contributes to the proliferation of content and conversation about them.  A content marketing strategy focuses on the needs of your audience and the best ways to provide them with useful information.  Useful content leads to greater distribution of content and therefore a wider variety of ways that users can encounter your brand off any specific SERP.  This trend along with the trend towards mobile access of digital content are the two most game defining changes that marketers must embrace in the coming year.  Embrace the change!  It’s a good thing.

As I have had the opportunity to experiment with an increasing number of Facebook ad campaigns, I feel like I’m starting to get a feel for how to use the platform to best effect.  I’m sure that we could get some great input from all of you as well but the approach I’d like to talk about has to do with taking a layered approach that includes fan page enhancements, regular facebook ads and sponsored story ads used in combinations.  I think this layered approach is the best way to address the issues of new fan acquisition, engagement and leveraging a fan base in one concerted effort.1.  Develop a content marketing strategy: This can be as simple or as complex as the project demands but take some time to figure out what you can say and do with your audience(s) that is likely to have value to them while also serving the needs of allowing you to communicate what you need to communicate.

2.  Use fan page enhancements and apps to offer higher levels of engagement to the audience(s): There are wide range of great apps and a variety of price points that can create whole new user experiences for your facebook fan page.  Some of the functionality you can add include contests, coupons, like gates, custom landing pages, sign up forms, galleries, downloads and a whole variety of other experiences.  Don’t just rely on the wall and the like button.  Give people more ways to interact with you.

3.  Use Facebook ads as a fan acquisition tool: Facebook ads suffer from high impressions at low CTRs.  However, they are also not terribly costly so that even at low CTRs you can generate enough impressions to create some activity.  I think this makes them useful for acquiring new fans and building out a base of awareness but read on….

4.  Use Sponsored Stories to leverage fans: Don’t let your facebook advertising stop at fan acquisition.  Sponsored stories based on the actions that the fans take on your newly enhanced fan page is the secret sauce that makes all the rest of this work worthwhile.  In the most basic sense, they offer you the ability to leverage your fans to reach their friends in generally more impactful ways than simple post liking achieves. Here’s a link to a PDF from facebook on the subject.

So how have you been combining these tactics together?  Anyone have any additional thoughts or examples of recent projects that showcase how this all works?

We are moving rapidly toward a version of the internet in which a large portion of the user experiences exist outside the web browser.  A recent article by EMarketer cites research by the Boston Consulting Group suggesting we are on the edge of a big leap forward in tablet purchases.  Most interestingly is that the impetus driving this consumer lust for tablets is its emergence as the platform of choice for consumers when it comes to accessing digital content in all its forms. In the U.S. 34% of the audience surveyed indicated an intent to purchase a tablet device in the coming year while 54% indicated a willingness to purchase within three years.  In reviewing the analytics across the many sites that I manage I can confirm that tablet access of websites has quadrupled since the same time last year.  However what interests me is that websites are not really want consumers want to access on tablets.  According to the study, the driver is that consumers prefer the tablet for consuming content like articles, videos, galleries, audio etc.  We need to understand that the tablet allows us to create non-browser user experiences around this content that elevate it, make it more accessible, more enjoyable, and more engaging.

This does not mean that everyone should race to build an app.  In fact, it opens up many more opportunities than apps alone.  But is an app is on your mind, now may the time to look into the recently released Adobe Digital Publishing Suite that allows for the creation of tablet apps from within Adobe InDesign for CS5.  No programming knowledge outside InDesign is required to create highly immersive experiences and load them into a variety of app stores.

Regardless of what technology you choose, the key is to generate content that is ideally suited to the advantages of the tablet.  Think in terms of experiences that unfold or collapse based on the users input.  Think about rich media.  Think about how people browse publication as opposed to the very self-directed way they use websites.  Create experiences that enrich the content rather than just making at accessible. Very shortly your consumers will be wandering the earth clutching their little storytelling devices and spending hours a day diving into them.  What stories do you want to tell?  What will they want from you?

Spinning off this recent article that lists the Top Eight Social Media Campaign Management Tools I thought I’d add two more that I like and make it an even 10 tools that can really help social media marketers better engage their audiences and track results. There is a always a great deal of movement in the industry as new services launch and existing ones change hands or get acquired. My hope is that this list will still be accurate at least 17 seconds after I publish it.

1. WildFire
Wildfire allows you to create quizzes, contests, coupons, virtual gifts etc and distribute them to social networking sites. It also allows user to send multiple updates to different and multiple social networking sites.

2. Awareness Social marketing software
Awareness Social marketing software is a enterprise class tool which has wider perspective of social media marketing. It integrates all the social networking sites control like updating on multiple account and engaging with people. Further, it also has comprehensive ROI measuring features embedded in the system. It is mainly targeted to bigger enterprise (meaning that is on the more expensive side).

3. Buddy Media
Buddy Media also allows multiple account management from twitter and facebook . In addition, they have included lots of case studies from large brands. They allow users to manage and monitor campaign as well.

4. CoTweet
CoTweet gives more like a dashboard experience where you can view all the updates and schedule tweets. User can even track keywords and monitor the brands. It recently was acquired by ExactTarget so it will be interesting to see how that integration plays out.

5. Hootsuite
Along with CoTweet, Hootsuite is one of the more popular tools for managing accounts from one dashboard. Users can integrate multiple account from different sites (like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin ), view their streams, track their statistics and schedule to multiple accounts. Recently, they have even included the people management part where different person can be given different roles.

6. ObjectiveMarketer
ObjectiveMarketers has the inclusion of almost all the important sites from Twitter to YouTube. It also allows easy status updates to multiple account, branding the landing page, tracking click statistics and managing users role. It has also recently added some brand monitoring part to it. The most interesting feature of it is the ability to brand landing pages using customizable frames. Their tracking goes farther than most at helping to generate ROI statistics.

7. Socialtalk
Similar to all the above services, Socialtalk integrates Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and MoveableType. Allows multiple channel updates and work-flow management, scheduling and other features. SocialTalk is geared towards businesses where there is a matrixed approval process that posting activity has to pass through before it can go live.

8. Buzzom Premium
Buzzom Premium is also one of the most useful tool in social media management. It has comprehensive twitter activity monitoring dashboard, integration of sites like (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Fan Page and MySpace). User can easily schedule messages to these sites and even plan the whole campaign in an excel sheet and just upload. Recently, it has added a brand tracking facility which allows user to track keywords and engage with people. I like their Twitter follower management features that seem better thought out than most others.

9. Involver
Involver offers dozens of off-the-shelf but customizable Facebook apps that can really increase the types of interactions that you can offer through your Facebook fan pages. The have a basic free level and then two additional levels of paid access. I particularly like their photo gallery tool and the app for creating and sharing coupons.

10. ScoutLabs
Scoutlabs is my preferred tool for social media monitoring. The key to Scoutlabs is that it is not trying to do too much but what it does do it actually does very well and it is easy to use. It makes it easy to create searches that weed out all the irrrelevant results. It also has work-flow management tools so that a team of people can collaborate on engaging the online conversation around a brand.

Hope these help you out. Let me know of others that you think belong on this list. 10 does not have to be the magic number.

Social media is a major force not only amongst marketers and their peers who find the topic fascinating but amongst our actual audiences too. Nielsen’s Q1 2010 Consumer Confidence Survey, Q1 2010 @Plan reports and Audience Measurement tools are citing some striking facts that paint an even more dramatic picture of our immersion into social media than we might have thought.  I was particularly surprised by stats such as 21% of U.S. adults own or publish a blog or that 2/3 of global consumers refer to online product reviews when making a purchasing decision.  The complete excerpt is below:

• More than two-thirds of global consumers seek online product reviews, recommendations from discussion forums or social media sites when making a purchase decision.
• 40% of global consumers would not buy Consumer Electronics, 22% would not buy Telecommunications Services and 19% would not buy Gaming Devices without consulting online reviews.
• 21% of U.S. adults online publish or own a blog.
• 55% of U.S. adults online have 1 or more social networking profiles.
• 75% of the active U.S. Internet households visit a social networking site (May 2010). Globally, it’s 74% (April 2010).
• Social media websites had a unique audience in the U.S. of 148.2 million visitors (May 2010).
• U.S. consumers spent an average of 6 hours, 13 minutes a month using social networking websites (May 2010). Globally consumers spend an average of almost 6 hours (April 2010).
• Facebook is the #1 social networking site in the U.S., with a unique audience of 125.2 million visitors (May 2010).
• The average U.S. worker spends nearly 5.5 hours a month visiting social networking sites at the office (May 2010) and much of that time is spent visiting Facebook.
• Twitter has a unique U.S. audience of 19.1 million visitors (May 2010), growing more than 1,520% in the last two years (May 2010 v. May 2008).

Consumers are contributing and sharing online:

• 20% of U.S. adults online provide frequent advice on Movies
• 18% of U.S. adults online provide frequent advice on Television Programs
• 16% of U.S. adults online provide frequent advice on Music
• 14% of U.S. adults online provide frequent advice on Books
• 13% of U.S. adults online provide frequent advice on Websites / Internet Content & Services
• 12% of U.S. adults online provide frequent advice on Household Products (food and beverage)
• 12% of U.S. adults online provide frequent advice on Restaurants or Bars
• 11% of U.S. adults online provide frequent advice on Computer Hardware/Software
• 11% of U.S. adults online provide frequent advice on Electronics
• 9% of U.S. adults online provide frequent advice on Online Shopping
• 8% of U.S. adults online provide frequent advice on Video Games
• 8% of U.S. adults online provide frequent advice on Household Products (non-food)

I am most surprised by the propensity of our consuming audience to contribute to and create content online.  I did not think the numbers would have climbed this substantially over the last time I had seen a similar report.  Which of these observations do you find most interesting?

The concept of marketing to people based on where they are at any given time took a big leap forward as Facebook and Twitter recently announced the introduction of geolocation features to accompany user posting activity on their services.  Combining their efforts with those of the already established players in the space such as Yelp, Foursquare, Latitude, and Gowalla, it seems that 2010 will be a year of great experimentation for this feature.  Time will tell whether marketers and application developers can make this feature useful enough to consumers that they will want to enable it.  However, it seems likely that we will soon see software platforms that allows us to monitor social media for people who are nearing our location and message to them thereby combining real-time search with real-time marketing.

We are only a baby step away from a day when a retail store can monitor the locations of it fans and followers and send them a little announcement of a special they are running today on that brand of running shorts you like to buy from them. Or perhaps your favorite restaurant by the sea can know that you are driving nearby and message you that the sunset looks great tonight and you have to come see it from their deck. Used well, this capability could be appreciated by consumers and could create additional reasons for users to want to fan and follow their favorite businesses.

However, it is not difficult to imagine this capability being over-exploited in intrusive ways such that users will flock to their account settings to turn it off. Not mention the fact that letting the world know where you are at any given point in time has its own drawbacks to our precious anonymity and privacy. I’m intrigued by these new capabilities and will be anxious to see how they impact our digital lives in 2010.

I’d be eager to know your thoughts on geolocation features in social media.

• I have often written that your social media marketing has to focus on the needs of the audience first. However this recent article by Clay MacDaniel cites research by Razorfish and She’sConnected.com are indicating that a primary reason for consumers to fan your company or brand is to receive promotions and discounts.  Let’s take a look at some ways that you can find a balance between social media marketing that attracts the attentions of your audience and social media marketing that pushes sales messages to them.

Nail a need. Make your offers highly targeted.
If you are involved in social media marketing you can use the information that you gain from constantly monitoring and engaging in the online conversation around your brand to generate offers and promotions that are specific to the needs being expressed by your audience. For instance, let’s say you are monitoring the social conversation around your restaurant and you find that the health-conscious portion of your audience often comments favorably about the dietetic options on your brunch menu. You could develop an offer that is specifically designed for them by offering a discount to a local spa or free admission to a local fitness event as part of a package. In fact, if you are monitoring the sites that your health-conscious audience frequents, you can use those sites to help get the word out. The advantages here are many:

• Higher redemption rates of more specific offers with lower overall promotion costs
• Generate fan loyalty in your audiences by speaking directly to their needs
• Generate promotions and discounts that add value to your brand rather than cheapen it.

Test and monitor. Use the channel to refine your offer strategy
The immediate data that you gather from distributing offers online affords a great opportunity to test and tweak different aspects of it. What if you change the value, make it time sensitive, make it referral-based, or make it a contest? You may notice that some promotions generate interest but lower redemption rates whereas others get less click activity but generate better sales.

Keep the balance. Make the largest volume of social media marketing about engagement with your audience’s interests.
This is the tricky part. Your audience wants to be rewarded for their loyalty but they don’t want to be barraged and bored by your endless series of offers. Whats the right balance for you. Is it a deal of the day or of the week? If you have 6 specific audiences that you can monitor online do you make sure you offer at least one promotion to each audience each month? The right fit will become apparent of you continue to track things like your rate of new followers, click-through rates on all your posts, how often your posts get passed along or commented on, and the engagement of your audience off-site. Your primary emphasis should continue to be on creating the force of attraction that draws them into your social media marketing with a generous sprinkling of offers and promotion to keep them active.

Be specific, keep testing and trying, and don;t overdo the promotions and you will find that social media channels can help you get those sales messages out in new, cost-efficient, and effective ways.

OK I know that acronym thinking is trite and that many of us have already heard about the POST methodology until we want to PLOTZ.  But, I have been speaking with many companies lately about their social media plans and I have to admit that this old methodology keeps coming up as the one of the best places to start.  Here’s a quick review of how it works and why it works so well for social media plans in my opinion.First of all POST stands for people, objective, strategies and tactics.  The order is important because it forms the basis of the planning process.

People: Spend time identifying,  finding and listening to your audience.  Where do they go online?  What do they do?  What are they saying?  What kind of online content do they like (articles, reviews, images, video games etc).  Do they like to create things or just watch?  If the web can be thought of as a playground, what toys does your audience like?  How might you best join with them in the play?

Objectives:  What is that you hope to accomplish by joining in the play?  What would you like your audience to do?  Though objectives are often linked to revenue generating activities you would be best served by having some objectives that are not.  The objectives will lead directly to the communications strategy and it needs to be focussed on the audience..not the sale.

Strategies:  This is where you develop a content and communications strategy.  How will you play with the audience.  What will you share.  What will they share with you?  Where will the content come from?  This step gets overlooked a lot.  Much of the time businesses just share their promotional information.  Blah.  No engagement there.  Spend the time planning the content generation and communication strategy and you will find much more success.  Make sure to bear in mind the sustainability of the effort based on whatever internal (staff) and external (agency)  resources you have to use.

Tactics:  All of the thinking in the previous steps should lead to this but it is amazing how frequently this becomes step one for many businesses.  Would this plan be best executed on an existing platform (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, dare I say MySpace etc.)?  Would it be best executed on your own site via a blog, game, widget or some other form of interactivity that you build. Don’t overlook this option. There is no law that says all businesses must be on Facebook or Twitter though it may appear so by the level of discussion about it. Also, this is is the step to develop your plans for tracking and optimization.  You may need to develop some specialized approaches in your web analytics  or you may need to use outside services as well.  What software and services can help you and your team administer this?  Finally, what sorts of training or coaching might you or your teams need to be able to carry this through?

I can’t believe I wrote a post about POST.  It works though.  Build a social media marketing plan and your prospects for success will be much higher than those who jump in by saying “Hey let’s post some special offers on Facebook and see what happens!”

I enjoy the research published by the Pew Internet and American Life Project because it is not motivated by any particular agenda. So it came as a surprise to me to learn that they are reporting that 19% of those recently surveyed use Twitter or “some other form of status update service (not quite sure what they mean by this). This is up from 11% only 1 year ago. I know that Twitter is fast-growing but since Pew generally reports more conservative numbers than other surveys this is impressive.  Additionall, the same survey is showing that the median age for Facebook users is rising:  Up to 33 from 26 only 1 year ago–big jump!
Here’s a link to the full survey but I’ll also list some of the key findings below:

• Tweeters tend to be under 49 and the audience skews slightly female
• Twitter users are still less than half the number of other social network users but they are the fastest growing group
• Mobile users and people with multiple devices are more likely to Tweet

Here’s a chart showing the disparity in the age ranges of Twitter users:

As the demographics of our social media audiences continues to evolve it suggests that we should expect to use different communication strategies across each platform according to what suits not only the functionality of the platform but the different audiences adn modes of use (i.e. mobile versus computer).  How are you adapting?

I don’t know whether looking to the future for clues as to what will be the next big internet phenomenon is useful or whether it is the kiss of death for any ideas that we believe are poised to revolutionize our lives. However it is fun. So onto the discussion of what will be the next Twitter inspired by this article at IMediaConnection.

Mobile Social Networks
There are already more mobile devices in the world than PCs and that trend is only going to continue. In the US, younger urban demographics in particular show much greater propensities to use their mobile devices than computers. As our social network apps migrate to the cell phone, how will they leverage the new capabilities of being GPS-enabled or being able to interact with the physical world around them by tagging the physical world with scan-able codes? (Insert Twilight Zone theme here)

Social Video
The people at IPG Emerging Media Lab feel this is important so I’ll take their word for it. Imagine watching TV with several of your closest chums while all of you are comfortably sinking into your comfy couches. The concept of wrapping social tools around our favorite multi-media habit seems like an obvious extension of social gaming. However, it will have to be executed in a way that still allows us to vegitate in a video stupor without asking us to engage too much. We have our limits.

Digital Out-of-Home Social
This is really all about the concept of augmented reality which is a great term that sounds a bit like something Timothy Leary would advocate. It’s reality plus a digital component that makes it even better than the old reality. I’m looking at you across a cloudy bar and my mobile device is researching our connections across social networks, our shared musical likes and dislikes, our favorite shopping sites and the next thing you know we are having a deeply meaningful conversation that leads to marriage and children. Or maybe you would just like to interact with the running shoes you are considering buying by tapping into your social network for recommendations. It’s reality, but so much more.

Facebook 2.0
Twitter may steal the headlines but Facebook is the serious behemoth in the social space right now. The next step is for it to move away from becoming a destination and continue it’s evolution into becoming a platform that envelopes our whole experience of the web. We already have a rapidly growing number of sites using the Facebook Connect technology to bring your network to them. Facebook could very well become part of the essential fabric of the Internet or the backbone of the entire user experience.

Google
The omni-company of the web will certainly not be left out of the web’s future. Will they create the world’s next web-based OS? Will they create collaboration platforms that bind us all together as workers in the digital hive? Who knows but we will surely be Googling like crazy until they plant us in the ground.

Amazon
Amazon has developed the world’s greatest cloud-computing system (The Amazon S3 Network) and at the same time has beceom the leading ecommerce platform. What will they do to take advantage of these opportunities? How will social commerce change the way we consume and the way marketers reach us?

Gaming
Will game platforms converge with TV or will TV adapt to gamers? However it plays out, gaming is integral to the lives of this generation and is already becoming a profoundly social act. As the rendering capabilities increase we will continue to immerse ourselves in other worlds of increasing complexity and richness.

What is your take on the Twitter of the future?