Do you remember when we used to have to watch television when it was aired? Before even the age of the VCR and “taping” a show. Viewing habits changed as television could be taped and watched later, then again with time-shifting channels, whole seasons available on DVDs, and then PVRs. In the last few years, I know I have rarely watched any show when it is aired on television; most of it comes to me through online streaming done by the channels themselves. I love watching a couple weeks of my favourite shows at a time.

Chris Neal, vice president of Chadwick Martin Bailey, points out that “industry developments like increasingly fast and ubiquitous broadband access, Netflix’s shift to online movie rentals, TV networks making more shows available on their websites, online video services like Hulu, growth in iTunes video downloads and massive peer-to-peer video sharing through social networks are all helping to break down the mental divide between a TV screen and the internet.”

Gadgets, like the iPad, Android based cell phones, and 3D TV, are still of interest to consumers, which makes sense to me (both as a consumer and a marketing professional), since the point these gadgets is to get us the consumables. It’s a bit of the chicken and the egg scenario, really. Only studies like this one show us which options drive our consumers.

Although looking at these numbers and talking about who is excited about what new technological advances merits its own level of interest, it is also important to remember them when approaching your online marketing strategies. Consumer interests drive all of our markets. We’re all here to catch the attention of our consumers and since the bulk of the interest is in the consumable experience at this time, we need to keep that as our businesses’ guidepost.

The same changes are true when you think about gaming, cell phone usage, and internet activities. We’ve shifted with the available technology, so that we can barely remember how it was before this technology became so popular. Sometimes I find it interesting to look at technology from another point of view: from the consumer end, rather than the marketing end. What are people interested in seeing come onto the market? What technology are people using the most?

Mike Sachoff wrote a quick article entitled “Consumers More Interested In Content Delivery Than Gadgets” about just this topic. He talks about a study done by the market research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey that asked “over 1,200 U.S. consumers ages 18-65 which of the recently hyped technologies they are most excited about. Topping the list was movie rentals via the Internet with 29 percent of consumers being “extremely excited” by this. Having the ability to surf the Internet via TV also came in high at 24 percent.”

Chris Neal, vice president of Chadwick Martin Bailey, points out that “industry developments like increasingly fast and ubiquitous broadband access, Netflix’s shift to online movie rentals, TV networks making more shows available on their websites, online video services like Hulu, growth in iTunes video downloads and massive peer-to-peer video sharing through social networks are all helping to break down the mental divide between a TV screen and the internet.”

Gadgets, like the iPad, Android based cell phones, and 3D TV, are still of interest to consumers, which makes sense to me (both as a consumer and a marketing professional), since the point these gadgets is to get us the consumables. It’s a bit of the chicken and the egg scenario, really. Only studies like this one show us which options drive our consumers.

Although looking at these numbers and talking about who is excited about what new technological advances merits its own level of interest, it is also important to remember them when approaching your online marketing strategies. Consumer interests drive all of our markets. We’re all here to catch the attention of our consumers and since the bulk of the interest is in the consumable experience at this time, we need to keep that as our businesses’ guidepost.

The other day I was using a site and needed to use their search feature. A good search gets you fast, relevant results. What I encountered the other day was not fast and not relevant. I’m persistent, so I tried a second keyword. Still nothing. I clicked away from that site and went elsewhere. We’ve become an audience that doesn’t want to dig around for our information. Gone are the days of searching card catalogs and pestering librarians for our information. We all want it fast and easy.

Businesses need to remember this point. As an article on search solutions by Shaun Ryan points out, “73 percent of visitors will leave an ecommerce site within one to two minutes if they don’t find the products they’re looking for, 36 percent of which won’t ever bother returning to the site.” You don’t want to do a load of work to get customers to your site, and then have 36 percent of them flee forever because your site search was ineffective.

Since there are many options for site search solutions, here are some points from “How To Choose The Right Site Search Solution” to think about:

- Are the results relevant? Google has some of the best relevant search returns on the market, so as a business, you have to strive for similar results. “The best solutions “learn” from visitors’ site search activity by leveraging information about search queries—the keywords used and resulting items that site visitors actually click on.” If your visitors find what they are looking for, they are more likely to stay, purchase, and return.
- Do you have the resources required to run and maintain your site search? Search can require considerable resources. If you don’t have the resources to support your search capabilities efficiently, consider using a search vendor that has a hosted service. Other benefits to hosted search solutions include no installation and training time and no ongoing maintenance.
- Does your site search give you control? Search can be another method of promoting your products, including simple options like how items are positioned within your search results or adding promotional banners to your search pages.
- Can you repurpose data from your search solution? Being able to reuse data can help your business determine key words, narrow down your SEO focus, and even determine which products and services your customers are looking at the most.
- Does your search solution improve over time? Search has changed drastically over the last 2-3 years, and any solution you choose should not remain static either. Be sure that your solution evolves and fits with your unique business requirements.
- Can you measure your site search performance? Analytics can be used to improve your business and your site, so having access to them is key.
Not only can your business improve its site search solution, with customer satisfaction at stake, it should be a focal point on your business improvements list.

Even a year ago, if you had talked about searching on a blog or in an SEO article, you’d have been talking about searching on Google or Yahoo or one of their competitors. Search for information was almost exclusively in the domain of search engines and linking for SEO purposes was done to increase your visibility on those search engines. These days, searching and linking have become more and more prominent on social networking sites, like Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook, and the acknowledgement of this change is becoming apparent through rankings on Google, which are taking some of these social networking links into consideration. Discussions of these features, both as stand alone features and as part of the bigger picture seem to be cropping up all over the place.

Using Facebook likes and Twitter retweets to build awareness of your business will not take the place of traditional linking entirely, but it can be another avenue to explore for SEO purposes. So it is advisable for us to remember to keep an eye on the progress of these features and the link between social media and search. I was especially interested in a discussion between WebProNews and Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz about this issue:

LINK:

More WebProNews Videos

Chris Crum sums it all up succinctly by saying that “the way people are obtaining information online is diversifying…Google’s real competition isn’t coming from other search engines. It’s coming from different avenues of information access.” With social networking playing a far greater role in linking and information in general, it is important to keep in mind that in all of your business endeavours, including SEO, you have to maintain and grow your social connections. While word of mouth was the best advertising for pre-internet business endeavours, social media is filling that spot handily these days. It’s the electronic version of word of mouth! Acquiring likes for your Facebook page, retweets on Twitter and links to get the attention of Google’s search parameters are all about the same thing: exposing your business to customers and potential customers.

Just this morning I was listening to a radio interview about the change in how the news is done on television. They talked about the fact that many of us no longer watch television in the conventional way – the advent of PVRs and online television have paved the way for changing habits – and how television news sees that there is a change, but it seems no one can quite see what the new landscape will look like for news. It reminded me of the change of business on the internet too.

It’s really not been that long since we’ve been able to buy things online. And less time since social media became a huge consideration. A few years ago, the question was not if you had a website, but how big and splashy was your business website. And yet, changes are happening again, because people like Chris Crum are asking if a business does indeed need a website in his article “Is it Becoming Less Critical For Businesses to Have Websites?”.

Before you start letting your brain go into a tailspin over whether or not your business ought to have a website, know that Chris is not saying you shouldn’t have a website. In fact, he claims “having a site gives you a more stable foundation, and still creates more opportunities than if you didn’t have one. When you have a site, you have control.” He also says, “I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have a site, or even that you don’t need one, but I think it’s an interesting discussion.”

Like Chris, I think that it is interesting to discuss how other opportunities online may make a website a little less critical – and thus opening up the possibility for including changes in the internet landscape into your business plan – and other options a little more feasible for building your business. Here are the two main ideas from his article:

- Facebook: Are you surprised? Facebook is a great way to increase your web presence. Some data shows that Facebook can be a bigger traffic source than Google, and Facebook does not demand that you have your own website. Plus, often Facebook pages are found on search engines and rank in the top results. Facebook may be a great place to start gathering a web presence or to enhance your company’s current presence.
- Google’s Place Pages: lists local business results at the top of a search page, making it a great place for your clients to find your business. With increasing functionality for mobility devices, making sure your business is listed in Place Pages is a good bet.

Although you could provide a web presence for your business through these methods and others, without having your own website, the key point to note is that these methods are changing the way we look for information. Clients may not find you just by finding your website, so including the other potential electronic avenues in your business plan is a wise choice for savvy businesses.

News in the world of internet marketing is filled with talk about Google’s latest venture: Google Buzz. Although I’ve heard a few negative remarks about how Google is trying to have their hand in every internet venue imaginable, word on the street is generally a tone that is interested in this development. I’m not surprised at that combination, since we all love to have the things we want to do on our computers and on the internet packaged up nice and neat, but then we tend to complain when one company provides it. Finding a happy medium in that situation is a bit of a quandary.

After reading about the features promised in Buzz, I am eager to try it out and see what I think of the experience it provides. Let’s take a quick look at some of the features of Buzz:

- Runs through Gmail
- Permits users to post status updates, photos, and links to their network
- Allows users to pull in activity from other sites, including Twitter, Flickr and Picasa
- Will have a mobile component, which can combine with wireless operating systems to include features like voice-recognition postings and a GPS-enabled ability to attach the user’s location to posts
- Enables real time comments, weighting the comments by other users similarly to Google’s search engine results in order to sort through them in a similar fashion to your Google search
- Automatically sets the people you email or chat with frequently as your friends

Despite how Buzz seems to be trying to replace some social networking sites, like Facebook and LinkedIn, while integrating other sites, like Twitter, into the usability of their latest brainchild, Google claims that they aren’t trying to edge in on anyone else’s territory and are just trying “to listen to their users”, according to Gmail product managed Todd Jackson. However, there is talk of Buzz being marketed to companies as an interoffice communication tool, which is definitely a competitive move against AOL Instant Messenger service.

Only time will tell if Buzz will be a success and to what degree. The success may hinge not on what Buzz can do at this moment, but on the potential expansions – from updating your status by phone to enabling Twitter updates through your Buzz account to linking Buzz to other emerging Google tools – and the reception Google receives in the social media arena. And the good news is that Google knows they have their work cut out for them. Spokesman Bradley Horowitz said, “We’re not launching this today because we think we’re done. We don’t think that’s how a product like this is built.”

It’s going to be interesting to watch the progress of this tool and see what kind of audience it ends up getting.

In the online marketing world, we talk a fair bit about driving traffic to your business site. Getting people there is the lion’s share of the battle, or so we all assume. But what if you are getting traffic to your site and then they leave right away? How do you get people to stay?

One thing that comes to mind is driving the right traffic to your site. If you are selling books and the people you get coming to your site are looking for vacations, the vast majority of them will not be buying what you are selling. Sure, one or two might find a book on their vacation spot of choice, but if those couple of people are your entire purchasing power out of one hundred people landing on your site, pretty soon your company will be broke. Or at the very least wondering why your website is ineffective at driving sales. So, the trick really is to get the right people coming to your site.

Carrie Hill’s article “Two Simple Rules for Fixing High Bounce Rate Pages” and assures us that with her two rules, “you can address 75% of the issues caused by high bounce rate pages”. Even if your exact number is not as high as 75%, there is a lot of ground to be gained by following her suggestions and taking a few simple steps in evaluating your website. It’s a winning situation for any business.

The first way is to check the organic phrases used to find your web pages. Determine if those phrases are really phrases that will drive your business. If a potential customer is looking for shoes and finds that you have books about shoes, that customer will just leave in a flash. Targeting your traffic will net more business. Misleading queries will only contribute to your bounce rate.

The second way to make sure that potential customers continue to browse your site and shop is making their path clear and easy once they arrive on your site. The harder it is to figure out where to go next or how to buy an item, the easier it will be for people to just go elsewhere. Make it simple, clear, and easy.

There are many ways to test the ease of use on your business’s webpage, from complex tools to hiring experienced web analysts to just having a few friends do a quick and dirty test. Your choice will depend on how web savvy your business is and how much money you have allocated to the task. Hill suggests using either Attention Wizard or Click Tale to determine where the eye and mouse are going on your page.

No matter how you go about decreasing your bounce rate, it is important to take a bit of time and allocate some resources to this aspect of your online marketing plan. The whole point of internet marketing is to get people to your site who will buy your products and services.

If you have followed me in the past month, seen my video(s), you will know that I have gone Twitter crazy. I’m not sure if it’s an obsession yet, maybe I am still in the denial process, but Twitter is a very interesting social media channel that is full of surprises. What I find most interesting about Twitter is the following: it constantly changes. I realize all the other social media sites change and grow to better suite their customers, however, Twitter just never stops surprising me. Ok, so maybe I will admit it now, sounds like I’m hooked!!

I remember a past blog post I had written on Twitter only having used it for a short period of time. I didn’t really understand it completely and I read tons of articles about it, most of them saying the exact same thing. Create an account, follow people, post interesting information that will keep people following you etc. So, taking the advice from the experts, I did exactly that. However, no one really told me to be patient that it will take a long time. When everyone spoke, it was as if this stuff occurred over night, and that it was a no-brainer. Well, it definitely didn’t occur over night, and it definitely wasn’t an easy task. At least not for me.

I remember thinking what on Earth I was doing on Twitter and how would I ever make this work. It was a slow painful process that involved me following people who weren’t as kind to follow me back. My posts felt like they were reaching no one, and that it was all a waste of time. I was about to give up on Twitter, when I wrote a post on Linkedin. I asked professionals there if they thought Twitter was a waste of time or not. The majority said that it wasn’t, and that I should pursue. So, with a little bit of steam left I stuck with it. What changed my views on Twitter were the following occurrences. An elderly lady on Linkedin had told me Twitter was a waste of time. So I asked her why and she pretty much said the same thing that I was thinking although she sounded like she hadn’t really even done the right things, like follow people. So I told her what everyone else had been telling me and I added in my thoughts and that she should be patient. I told her that we should keep each other updated on our progress. She worked with a women’s group, and it wasn’t even a month later she emailed me excitedly telling me that she had more than 200 followers and that she was thrilled with how Twitter was another means for keeping her women’s group connected outside of their usual meetings. I couldn’t believe that an elderly lady had 1. Surpassed me with followers! 2. Made it her own. She inspired me to soldier forth and I must admit I am rather pleased with my results.

For some unknown reason to me, TV shows have their characters on Twitter, posting about either their show or who knows what. The news keeps people updated on the latest news with tweets. Article sites such as Digg have created various accounts for different categories that you would specifically like to keep updated on, for example if you would just like the science section or articles that have been dug 2,000+ times. Companies are using Twitter to promote sales and events. Inspirational quotes are sent out everyday to keep you up-lifted. Politicians are using Twitter to post their speeches and political views. Celebrities are posting their latest events aswell. I am sure there are more amazing accounts out there that I have yet to find, but Twitter definitely does allow ANY business to express themselves in which ever way they please. Twitter even has an array of tools that you can use to enhance your experience such as Twhirl, Tweetdeck, Twellow, Mr. Tweet, Tweetbeep, Tweetminster, Twithority , Twitterfeed etc

So if you take anything from this post, it is that I truly believe any business or person can use Twitter however they wish. You can use it to chat with your customers, post news or events, post pictures, links to your blog, links to any sort of promotion. Twitter does take time and patience, but once the balls starts rolling you won’t regret having spent the time or money on it.