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The Social Media Marketing Industry Report has some very interesting findings on the current status of social media marketing. If you want to find out what’s happening with social media, or you’re just starting out with Social Media and looking to delve deeper, check it out!

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Microsoft is reviving the search engine wars with a new engine called Kumo. It’s currently being tested internally at Microsoft. It seems pretty interesting with a tab based filtering menu on the left hand side, to filter your search results according to related categories. How those categories are determined would be interesting to know, but whether it can compete with Google is to be seen.

I think it’s healthy to have competition. It brings about innovation that results in improvements for the user, with all competitors. Will Microsoft one day be able to lay claim to a verb in context like “Just Kumo it” as Google has become? Who knows, but at least Live Search will be replaced, as it doesn’t seem to inspire confidence with the online crowd.

Change is good. I’ll sure try it out when it’s launched in public Beta.

BTW, some useless information: Kumo means ‘cloud’ or ‘spider’ in Japanese  (not sure how that works, but aparently not an often used term).

Check out a screenshot here.

It might not keep the name Kumo as that’s just their current codename for the project, but lets see how it pans out.

More to come…

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New startup Me2Everyone seems to be buzzing It landed in my inbox a while ago, referred from a friend, and I’m interested to see what the main concept will be when it fully launches.

From their brochure:

“It’s a cool new virtual world where you can meet friends, chat, shop, play, watch videos, create an art gallery, launch your own record label, open a virtual newspaper, plant a tree, buy a virtual house, play the free inworld lottery and makemoney from your own online store!

You and everyone you know make the decisions, shape the world, create real incomes and hare in the profits. There’s nothing to download, and it’s not a game. It’s a new place where you come and interact. Meet new people or invite your friends. Learn new skills or expand your business. Find the love of your life or help the planet.

me2everyone is a place on the web where your ideas will be heard, where you can start a new business and see the real world through new eyes.”

Sounds like a Web 2.0 version of Second Life…

Click here to check it out!

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Certain social business to business platforms are infamous breeding grounds for what I call ‘social media beggars’. There is absolutely no use in adding friends and then trying to flog your services or latest product without building up a relationship with the person first. Furthermore, ask permission first, before blasting off unwanted, unsolicited invites and sales pitches.

The chance of someone taking up your offer will be much better, if you can first add value by either giving advice or just making friendly contact (also not a generic intro email that you send to everyone).

Yes, business to business networks CAN help you generate leads, but you’ll need to learn how to effectively use them to your advantage.

A good entry point is to monitor, who’s asking questions that relate to what you do, and what you offer. Provide some insights, free of charge, and mention that if the person is interested, to contact you for further discussion.

When adding so call friends or contacts, try and write a meaningful message, giving the person an idea of why you want to add them to your network, or where you found their details, so that it adds context to the request.

Most of us are too busy to accept all friend/contact requests and want to know up front what it’s about.

I recently had someone request to be added as a contact, telling me they have a cool new product that might be of interest. Upon further enquiry, he came back to say that it’s still in development, and a secret, so he couldn’t tell me about it. Now what’s the use of that? Make sure you DO have something of value to add, or don’t make the request.

Your tone of message is also very important. It’s so easy to come across as ‘wanting’. The same applies within real life networking events. If you have the attitude of wanting something when you first meet someone, it creates a negative first impression and it’s all downhill from there. SO, be helpful and don’t ask someone ‘what can you do for me’ or ‘what can I do for you’ if you don’t get the impression that they are in need of using your services. Tell them what you do and that if they’re interested, you’ll contact them with more information.

Apply these techniques and let us know if they worked!

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If you want results, it’s time to jump on this bandwagon, because 2009 will be a big year for online video and what it can bring you. There are various techniques in optimising your video content. It’s important to categorise your video content correctly, whether by tagging, titles or keywords and even transcriptions. There are numerous ways to ensure that your video content is indexed correctly and it can possibly bring a huge amount of traffic to your website. Talk to us to find out more!

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The other side of the coin in online marketing is ‘online marketing real estate’. Online marketing companies are constantly looking to find high traffic websites on which they can market their clients’ products and services. Further, if you have a large database of clients/users that have opted in to receive further information, all the better.

So what’s important to take into consideration when looking for advertisers?

Niche

Is the topic/theme of your website conducive to advertising? Do you have a sufficient sized community that regularly visits the website? It’s important to note that if you’ve chosen a popular niche that your website is clearly a cut above the rest in terms of relevance and being up to date. Search engines will award your with traffic if they realise that you’re providing your users with relevant content and that in turns bring traffic which brings me to my next point.

Traffic

Targeted traffic is very important. If you can show potential advertisers that you’re receiving a big load of relevant traffic each month in a specific niche, you have feet to stand on.

Know your users

You’re flying blind if you don’t know who’s using your website. First and foremost ensure that you have proper stats installed (try Google Analytics to start with). Secondly, try and capture some of your market via user registrations and newsletter subscriptions, as that will enable you to better profile your website users. Profile your users according to their preferences as well as age, gender, location and more. Try and find a balance between being overbearing and something your users will feel comfortable in sharing. If you can present a breakdown of your profiles and number of users within those profiles it will help agencies match potential advertisers with your website.

Ensure you can handle ads

Ensure that your website layout has dedicated areas for advertising. Don’t overdo it of course as clutter will cause your users to go blind to your ads. Do you have ad serving software in place? There are small and large scale solutions for serving ads. The simplest is Adsense of course, but if you really want to manage it properly a proper ad serving platform is required. Something like DoubleClick can be of great use and advertisers look out for credible ad serving solutions as part of their decision making processes. These ad serving platforms also provide you with great analytics which you can provide to potential advertisers.

Channels

Your website is not your only media channel, if you have a large subscriber database you can open up revenue opportunities by selling ad space in your newsletters as well. Further you can segment the different sections on your website as high target niches for advertising to better serve advertisers. Develop your channels over time and monetise accordingly!

Talk to potential advertisers

Once you have everything sorted on your website, start targeting potential advertisers. Advertising Agencies are generally a good bet, but online marketing agencies even better as they generally handle online media buying for their clients. Also prepare to pay commissions to agencies that handle their client accounts. Generally they would negotiate a cost per click or per 1000 impressions for placing ads on your website.

It’s not always easy to build up such a successful platform, but it can surely be lucrative once you get to that stage.

Talk to PERONii Solutions if you’re interested in a consulting session on monetising your website or if you’re in need of online marketing specialists to look at promoting your products and services

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With many companies heaving under global economic pressure, it’s important to revise your marketing strategies to reach your markets by the more affordable and measurable means of online marketing.

Online marketing has always been lower priority for many large corporates in their marketing campaigns, but this is set to change as radio, print and television advertising budgets dwindle.

By employing various online media like search, pay per click, email and social networks you can spread out your budgets effectively and with real time stats, executives and marketing managers can quickly change direction to focus on the avenues  that deliver high returns.

PERONii assists companies in developing sound online marketing strategies and to implement these strategies effectively. Our experience in online marketing allows us to make recommendations up front to maximise the efficiency of your online marketing spend. Comprehensive reporting also provide the means for quick decision making by our clients.

We have never recommended that companies entirely forfeit traditional marketing spend for online marketing, but in these times we would recommend at least 30-40% spend of marketing budgets online. In the UK the current figure hovers just under 20% of total marketing budgets being spent online. It’s less than 1% behind press and TV advertising and is said to surpass these within the next year or two.

If you’d like to find out what online marketing can do for your company, kindly fill out a free quote request form.

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Some interesting things are happening on the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) front, especially with Google and how they approach the organic ranking of websites.

2009 is going to see some shifting in how Google works. I don’t think it will be a major ‘flip the switch’ moment, but from what I’ve learned, Google is striving to improve their search results even more.

The ‘voting on search results’ that I recently discussed forms part of Universal Search. Universal Search brings about customised search results, based on many factors. In essence Google tracks what you’ve searched for historically (even when you’re not logged into Google) and this, including your geographic location will ensure biased search results.

If you’ve got a history for example of having an interest in travelling, your search results might serve up more travel flavoured results. What this means is that the user gets more results in line with their interests and historical search trends, therefore Google is serving their needs better.

In 2009 it will also be important to engage your website visitors better. It will be extremely important to track your analytics properly and ensure that you engage the visitor on multiple fronts, like video, flash, audio, images and written text. The reasoning behind this is that Google’s spiders (the little bots that index content from websites) will continually improve on extracting content from these mediums and it might give a slight competitive advantage.

If you engage your visitors better and give them more of what they want, they stay on your site longer, which also means your bounce rates (the percentage of visitors that arrive and leave immediately) will be reduced. All of this is part of the increased number of variables that determine rank for web pages in Google. It’s said that this figure is now hovering around the 200 variable mark. This means there are 200 different factors that come into play in how well your website will rank.

For SEO’s, this will mean some adjustment in the way we approach search engine optimisation. Very importantly though, there is no exact recipe (apart from the obvious standard compliance tweaks) to achieve perfect results for each client. It will be more important to focus on conversion and how well you can get your website traffic to convert (I’ve been preaching this for years!).

If Google sees that your website is converting well, it will probably influence your ranking positively as your website is able to provide visitors with solutions to their search queries. How they measure whether conversion takes place (if you haven’t got Analytics with conversion metrics installed) is still a mystery, but it will be interesting to note.

My suggestion for companies busy looking at their online strategies would be to look into going multimedia (where applicable) and to offer the best possible user experience. It’s not just about trying to get the most possible traffic! This doesn’t mean that you should put ‘Flash all over your website’ or ‘blinking text’ as was the craze when that specific technology first came out, but rather experimenting with all your options and closely monitoring results through your analytics to see what brings about the most quality conversions.

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I’ve recently discovered this social network through a friend that does business coaching in the UK.

Click the banner to join and look me up as a contact! Within an hour of joining I have had several requests to join interest groups and make international business contacts.

This looks like a mixture of Facebook and Linked-In and even though the interface is a bit confusing, I think once you get to know the social network there would be a lot of potential.

Let me know what you think!

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That’s not all, if you’re a signed-in user of Google you can leave comments, all wiki-style.

I’m not sure whether this is going to stay on mainstream search results and what influence this will have, but I’m assuming it’s personalised results and that Google will ‘learn’ your preferences.

I can’t see it influencing general search results as that would open the system up to gaming of all sorts (according to Seth Godin), but there is value in it for Google to show users more of what they want to see.

It’ll be interesting to see how comments will be moderated… Only time will tell!