The week that was!

An "interesting" week in the wide world of the web -

• Sensis (Yellow Pages/ Telstra) concedes defeat dumping it's search engine for Google search results; 
• we sat in on the Australian Broadband Conference and learnt more about the Australian National Broadband Network NBN shamozzle;
• there was a US Presidential Election (smiles) - the first tech savvy President!
• we had our first CLIVE Sales Partner conference and
• we tapped into the Web 2.0 Conference in San Fransisco.

How are the events related?

During the week Internet marketing guru Seth Godin, wrote a piece on "marketing lessons form the 2008 Presidential election."

One of his points "Influencing the Influencers"  

Seth writes,

"G'day Jerry, Bill here, maaaatttee, listen, some bad news, the campaign sucks, people hate it, I'm pulling the plug...it's OK Jerry...don't get upset, look maybe we look at an online video tv show or something like that, I'll get my marketing guys onto it Jerry, Jerry!"

According to Digg - Valley Mag, Microsoft dumped it's anti-Apple campaign ads featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Big Bill just into the second part of the $300m campaign. The Microsoft spin doctors are out there telling everyone it was planned, maybe/ maybe not (I’m writing about it). Bad news spreads like wildfire but blind Freddy can see that the battleground here is not the desktop but a positional play by Microsoft to launch a new mobile Google killer.

If you don’t know the background this was Microsoft's attempt at being cool and funny like the much loved Apple ads.  Who has time to watch something this long ( I stopped after about a minute)?    

It wasn’t! It missed the mark completely – way too long, too high brow, too complicated, too hard (a bit like Vista) and not funny, whatever message was in there was lost.

Online Customer Engagement - building your online brand

This article began with a check for a Technorati ping for my new blog and grew into a checklist to help others build their online brand.

1. What is the customer need?

   Business all begins and ends with the customer or consumer - whether consumption is reading information, subscribing to a feed, creating a contanct, watching a video or purchasing a product or service

   Whether customers know they need your product or service yet is simply matter of time and three things - price, product or service.  From there it is the relationship you have with your customers that counts.
   Your goal, understand what your customer want or will need and reduce their barriers to purchasing.

2. Online Business and marketing plan
   

   1. Is building a business any different than building a house? Any business needs a direction, strong foundations and a blueprint to easily communicate your design objectives to investors, clients, staff, contractors and suppliers.
   2. Your business plan should be focused around servicing a customer need. Understand everybody has different needs and wants and you can't please everyone all the time but there are common characteristics.
      
      1. Segment your products and services into customer needs. Research - search the web, speak to competitors and ask questions of potential customers
      2. Identify the most rewarding target markets. Rewards come in many different shapes and sizes. What is important to you?
      3. Develop your marketing message - don't under or over sell. Create strong value propositions.

3. Web site design implemented incorporating SEO (Search Engine Optiminisation)

   1. Ask these questions of every page - does it Inform, Inspire, Involve, Influence?
   2. Inverted pyramid approach to web design -
      
      1. Broad to specific
      2. Maximum (attempt) three menu layers - use keywords as menu titles
      3. Keep It Simple - people are time poor
      4. Quality - first impression is very important

4. Content creation incorporating SEO

   1. Copy (inverted pyramid approach). Keep it simple at the top layers. Make it easy for your reader. For SEO Keywords into copy and meta tags

   2. Images (consistent style look and feel) - a picture tells a thousand words
      
      

   
   

The old online advertising metrics of CTR (Click Through Rates) and Page Views are dated. New Internet advertising metrics such as user influence or a new term such as "customacy" ranking are required.

For businesses, where do you start?

This article will focus on how businesses can lay a foundation for developing strong, future "user influence" or "customacy" ranking and valuation.

What is Customacy?

Customacy is a combination or mashup of new online "customer engagement" advertising thinking and "technacy" (user technology literacy and influence) and in the future, could be used as a method of financially valuing portals and online businesses.

The highest customacy level, based on degrees of customer engagement, is for people who are highly technology skilled and literate; who are highly internet social (add friends, networks); who blog and create content and can influence trends and other user adoption.