Photo Credit: Chris Willis

Different content environments generates different consumer perceptions and responsiveness to the content and advertisers.

A recent research A Sense of Place: Why Environments Matter” conducted by Harris Interactive showed some interesting findings on how consumers perceive content in different online environments, and whether these perceptions impact advertising receptivity and consumer response.

The study assessed perceptions and responses in three key online environments:

• Media properties (e.g., NYTimes.com)
• Portal channels (e.g., Yahoo Sports)
• Social networks (e.g. Facebook).

the key findings are:

• Consumers are more likely to trust content on media sites (72%) than portal channels (60%) and social media (23%)
• Audiences on media sites are significantly more likely to believe these sites’ advertisers are high quality and reputable (24%), compared to portal channels (20%) and social media (8%)
• People who recall purchasing from a site’s advertisers are significantly more likely to do so from media sites (8%) than portal channels (5%) or social media (3%)
• Those loyal to media sites are more likely to purchase from advertisers on these sites (15%) than portal loyalists or social media loyalists (8% and 4% respectively)

Now you know you should treat different content sites differently when it comes to deploying your content strategies.

Also read:Who is the Most Popular Social Networking Website in Singapore

Online video is now a very important part of people’s life and it’s especially true in Singapore. Singapore internet users are more addicted to online video than social networking sites.

comScore today released its April 2010 rankings of the top video properties in Singapore based on data from its comScore Video Metrix service. The report found that 87% of Singapore’s Internet population viewed video online in April, with an average viewer consuming 10.5 hours of 130 videos for a period of 4.9 minutes per video on average.

comScore study also found that that users between 25-44 represented the highest percentage of unique video viewers, who spend less time viewing video and watch fewer videos per viewer than the younger and older age segments.

Top Video Properties in Singapore Based on Total Videos Viewed April 2010

Online video marketing is not a popular tactic in Singapore; many marketers are no doubt interested, though. “Cost of video production” is a pretty good excuse to stop most companies.

From comScore study, it’s clear that online video is definitely an important channel for marketers to reach consumers. How to create viral video is the real obstacle than money. Check out this viral video from Tic Tac.

Also read:Are social networking sites good for video marketing?

With the rising awareness of search engine marketing and social media, companies have taken its website more serious than ever. But, what makes a good website?

Search Engine Friendly

When I started building websites years ago with popular open source CMS such as Joomla and wordpress, SEO was not that popular yet. But, creating a search engine friendly (SEF) website became a top priority since.

An SEF website gets more pages indexed in search engines and stands a better chance to attract organic search engine (or keyword driven) traffic. Check out this crash course by Matt Cutts.

Easy to Manage and Collaborate to Publish Content

A great website makes it easy and efficient to publish and organize content, being it newsletter, new products, press release, or content change. Depending on the organization structure, some companies require new or updated content be sent for review before get published. A great website makes it painless and efficient.

Scheduling content to be published sometimes is a very useful feature. Getting prepared early is one advantage; last minute publishing may get interrupted. In addition, different hour of the day or different day of a week could make a big difference for reaching potential customers, especially when your content is synchronized with other channels such as email newsletter, twitter, or facebook page.

Flexible to Produce Landing Page for Online Campaigns

Highly efficient organizations require quick setting up of a landing page for online campaigns, either on search engines, eDM, or social media.

Driving all traffic to homepage is still often seen in markets like Singapore, which is totally wrong. Driving relevant traffic to the most relevant page could not only reduce the bounce rate but also increase the conversation rate. Selecting an existing page is okay; but a serious marketer will always put together a landing page for optimal on-site conversations.

Instead of briefing a web agency for a landing page, a flexible CMS could produce a less clustered and highly concentrated landing page, at least for small scale campaigns.

Simple to Insert Analytics / Javascript Codes

Many digital marketing tracking and analytics tools require placement of a special javascripts in the source code. A good CMS will make this task highly efficient and manageable.

Great Usability

Some of my clients in the past get obsessed with SEO and whenever they change something on the site, they consult me whether it will affect their rankings in the search engines. More often than not, if it’s good for the user, it’s good for search engines. Of course the tricky part is, sometimes it’s hard to tell combining views from different angles whether it’s really good for the user.

What does usability measure? Quality of users’ experience. Ease of learning for new visitors, efficiency of use, and subjective satisfaction. Remember this, the look and feel is not about projection of company ego or anyone’s personal likes or dislikes but about the quality of a user’s experience.

Containing Call-to-actions

A great website must have clearly defined call-to-actions. Depending on the nature of the business, it could be invitation to attend an event, to register an account, to download a whitepaper, to subscribe to newsletter, and etc.

Call-to-actions must be tracked and optimized by using web analytics.

Designed for Different Personas

It’s more advanced usability design for the websites. I’m not an expert in this but I did see improved usability and conversions through persona-based design for some clients in the past.

Persona-based design studies the behavior of current and potential customers by conducting interviews (or analysis under low-budget situations) with them and by analyzing their use of the website for design recommendations.

With High Quality Content and Useful Tools

Many companies try very hard to create content in a way they WANT their potential customers to read regardless of whether it’s useful or not to the visitors.

Take a look at the bounced rate of a web page and you can get a better idea whether the created content only make you feel good or your visitors. If a visitor doesn’t like to read what you published, the time spent will be short with high bounce rate.You can also use heatmap to observe users’ behavior on your site.

Be Interactive

A great website not only provides great content and useful tools to its visitors but also interacts with them. Asking for feedback, making it easy to be reached, allowing comments to be published, …

It may be cool for many people to talk in executive meeting using word like “interactive marketing”; but, it’s a shame if no interactive elements are ever implemented.

Also read:10 Guidelines For Website Credibility

OpenBook is a very simple but useful tool for you to look for conversations about your brand or a topic you’re interested. Simply type in the “topic” and hit search button; you can also filter the results by sex.

Also read:Watch Real Time Conversations on Google

If you monitor online buzz, you’ll definitely hear people talking about you. Even if you have a good product and you are a good company, you can never avoid negative buzz online. Should you ignore it or respond?

Should you just ignore negative comments, complaints, or even abusive online conversations?

Ignoring online negative buzz is your first option. I know many people totally ignore it and we all know it’s not right. But ignoring it is your first option, always. Before you do that, you need to consider the following factors:

• Is it a company issue?
• Is it an isolated situation particular to that individual and not something persistent?
• Is it a credible source?
• Where is the conversation taking place?
• Is it a serious complaint?
• When should you respond?

So, when should you respond to negative buzz?

You need to respond to negative buzz online under the following situations:

• If the negative comment or complaint is on a famous blog, forum, or influential website
• If it’s an influential person such as a well known blogger, a twitter user with thousands or followers, an industry expert…
• If it’s serious. For example, people not liking your ad because they think it demeans the entire class of individuals could be potentially very serious
• If it’s an important issue to your brand’s consumers (check out the infamous, offensive ad from Motrin on YouTube)
• If it’s repeating issue

When you do need to respond, make sure it’s quick and transparent. I’ll cover some of the techniques in another post later.

Guess how much a negative review / comment costs you?

Also read:Guess how much a negative review / comment costs you?

For marketers who created the first Facebook Page for a brand, the question is now what? If social media is about engagement, Facebook Page needs rich and engagement content.

1. Greet your fans.

Depending on demographics of your targeted fans, you want to send your greetings on Facebook Page. Be it simply a “good morning” or “happy father’s day”.

2. Ask questions.

If you don’t have many fans, you don’t want to see too many questions without any response from fans. Closed questions could be a better option. Once you have build up your fan base, “open questions” could get your fans thinking.

3. Upload photos and videos.

People “like” photos and videos; they gets spread faster.

4. Import your blog content into Facebook.

Your latest blog post will auto-post on Facebook Page walls after you import it. Include a photo in your blog post so that a thumbnail will be shown on the wall which is more eye-catching.

5. Post an event

Share your event on Facebook Page to encourage more participation.

The key is to add relevant and quality content to your Facebook Page that add value to your fans. More ideas:

6. Post a special promotion for Facebook Fans
7. Add advanced content to your Page with static FBML

Also read:2 Ways to do Geo-targeting on Facebook Fan pages

The first question a marketer need to ask themselves before launching a Twitter campaign is, how many Twitter followers they should target to build up.

“as many as possible” is one way to answer the question (not true though), but it’s important to understand the impact of the number of Twitter followers, especially for B2C marketers. HuSpot, an internet marketing software company, shared their findings:

When the number of Twitter followers increases to 21-100, the median number of leads grows about 27% to 14. The most significant boost in median lead generation from a B2C corporate Twitter account occurs when a company’s number of Twitter followers enters the 100 to 500 range (jumps 146% to 35).

Remember earlier I said “the more the better” is not true? HubSpot study also confirms this. B2C companies with 501 or more Twitter followers report an 8.6% decrease in median followers to 32.

You can refer to an earlier post for tips on how to build more Twitter followers.

Also read:Could Twitter and mobile have a happy marriage?

If you care, constant real time conversations taking place online are valuable insights into what happened and how people reacted. Twitter has become the number one site for looking into this issues.

Twitter Search Results on "singtel"

So far, the search function on Twitter doesn’t auto-update itself; you need to click on a “refresh” link to see more newer results if any. There are many tools out there that auto-refresh the results; let me just show you one recent tool Google released last week.

Unless you click “pause”, the results will keep updating. Follow the three steps below to get the real time Tweets on your search terms:

1. Search in Google on the topic you are interested
2. Click on search options box (“show options”)
   
3. Click on “Updates” option

In the chart, you can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period to explore any topic people discussed on Twitter. According to Google, you can explore tweets going back to February 11, 2010, and soon you’ll be able to go back as far as the very first tweet on March 21, 2006.

It’s useful tool for any business to zoom into the real time conversation and explore what people discussed about a product, brand, or industry. You can also use it to identify the buzz generated by your marketing campaign during a certain period.

Also read:An Easy Tool to Watch Facebook Conversations about Your Brand

Apple sold 300,000 iPad on launch day. It may not take long for iPad to hit your market and you must make sure your website looks as good on iPad as it does on normal computer.

You can simulate iPad browser agent to get the look and feel; or the simplest way is to visit iPadPeek.com and key in the URL of your website if you don’t have an iPad device on hand.

Also read:Protect your company network with TrendProtect

As you type into the search box on Google, Google Suggest offers searches similar to the one you’re typing.

How is Google Suggest helpful to your marketing? Think about how popular searches to your concerned topic could be helpful and you will find it a valuable tool. Let me share a few examples.

Compare Your Brand Related Searches with Your Competitors'

"Blackberry Storm" v.s. "Blackberry Bold"

"Singapore" V.S. "Hong Kong"

You can find this visualization tool here.

Also read:7 Ways to Use Google Insights for Search

Last week Google rolled out a new feature called remarketing, which any AdWords advertiser can use to reach users via Google Content Network. Remarketing is a simple way to connect with users, based on their past interactions with your website and helpful in raising brand awareness, or driving clicks and sales.

Understanding how “remarketing” works is important for you to customize different interest-based online marketing strategies to suite different needs. Remarketing allows you to reach (and “remember“) users who visited your website and show ads to them as they browse the Web.

Here are five examples of remarketing strategies via Google content network.

1. Reinforce Brand Awareness to All Site Visitors
2. Show more targeted ad copy to each specific category
3. Re-target a specific user group such as log-in users, who abandoned shopping cart, non-converting users, and etc.
4. Upsell / cross-sell to existing (converted) customers
5. Use remarketing with search

Also read:Benefits of Content Network (Marketers’ SEM Guide Part 8)

Click to Enlarge

Some companies are jumping to social media site without having a clear idea what each site can do for them. CMO.com worked with 97th Floor to produce a guide.

Very good summary what each of 10 social media site can do for you; either SEO, brand exposure, driving traffic, and/or customer communications. I recommend you read this.

Also read:Social Media Marketing Articles To Help You Get Started In Social Marketing

I read a very interesting survey paper by Newspaper Association of America last weekend, which revealed the strength of local newspaper websites.

Respondents were asked to identify sites they used most often for specific types of local content. Newspaper sites ranked first as a source ahead of both local television Web sites and online portals for:

• local information (29%)
• local sports (27%)
• local entertainment (26%)
• local classifieds (39%)

Local newspaper Web sites ranked first among all sources for trustworthiness, credibility and being the most informative place to find local content of all types – including news, information, entertainment, sports and classified advertising.

How Are Local News Sites Valuable to Marketers?

Marketers and advertisers would love to know this:

Consumers also consider local newspaper Web sites to be the most trusted source of online advertising, because the advertising on these sites is perceived to be more current, credible, and relevant to them.

It’s good to know but it may not be good enough for you to simply accept the conclusion. It’s always worthy it to test it for your own targeted market.

Whether you are running online display ads or contextual adversiting, make sure you separate the local news sites as one online source in order to track the performance and verify the above findings.

Site Matters Report [PDF]

Also read:10 Guidelines For Website Credibility

A survey conducted by Opinion Research Corporation and sponsored by ARAnet asked consumers the relative importance of 14 information sources when deciding which goods and services to buy.

Guess what’s the most influential information source?

Personal advice from friends and family!

Here is a summary of data showing the percentage of respondents choosing a 4 or 5 out of 5 and the mean summary rating points (online sources are highlighted in bold):

• Personal advice from friends or family members: 59% or 3.6 out of 5
• TV news or other broadcasts: 40% or 3.1
• Search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, or Ask.com: 39% or 3.0
• Ads I see on TV: 36% or 3.0
• Articles I see in newspapers or magazines: 33 % or 3.0
• Ads I see in newspapers or magazines: 31% or 2.9
• Articles I see online: 28% or 2.8
• Radio news or other broadcasts: 25% or 2.7
• Direct mail: 24% or 2.7
• Ads I hear on the radio: 20% or 2.6
• Emails I receive from retailers or manufacturers: 20% or 2.5
• Ads I see online: 19% or 2.5
• Messages or posts on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or MySpace: 18% or 2.3
• Billboards: 15% or 2.3

Another interesting finding from this research is, search engines are preferred by 49% who make $75,000 or more (vs overall 39%).

Online channels help your company not only reach your customers but also influence them. Are you allocating enough budget for online channels? Are you integrating different digital channels? Are you integrating online and off-line media?

But, remember this: presence on digital channels does not mean/guarantee influence; make sure you are making good use of them.

Also read:Where Do People In China Look For Information?

Every company will probably say “yes” if you ask them whether or not they should listen to their customers. However, the right things to do are often not carried out; especially “listening to customers”.

Benefits of Listening to Customers

You need feedback from your customers; that’s why it’s important to listen to them.

Bad customer experience. Analysts from Greenfield Online, Datamonitor/Ovum and Genesys found that more than $300 billion is lost each year around the world because of bad customer experiences with $243 billion then being spent with competing entities.

No companies can make sure all customers are happy; but, what they can do is to listen to them, respond and correct their mistakes.

Ideas from customers. Your customers can tell you how to make your products or service better; they can also be very helpful developing the new product or service. Don’t forget some customers also use your competitors’ product whose feedback is critical in competitive analysis.

Recommended Features of “Listening” Tools

Whether you build one in-house or get external help for listening and collecting feedback and ideas, keep in mind the following features:

Collect ideas from your customers and give them a platform to vote.

Brand integration. You should be able to choose the look and feel of your portal to match your own brand identity.

Real time editing of ideas.

Integration with mobile and social media platforms such as iPhone support, and Twitter/Facebook integration.

Community Interactions. Anyone should be able to leave comments and communicate the status of an idea.

Moderation of ideas and comments. Ideas and comments aren’t displayed on the site until they’ve been approved.

3 Free Tools You Can Try to Start Listening for Feedback and Ideas

1. IdeaScale
2. UserVoice
3. Google Moderator

You may also want to check out four free online survey tools here.

Also read:How Western Digital Let Down A Loyal Customers

Richard Marcinko once said, “Popularity is not leadership.” What many companies are doing in social media may not be the most effective social media tactics.

Social Network Use Comparison

The State of Social Media Marketing, an original research report from MarketingProfs, shows some inside scoop on what the most effective tactics in social media marketing for B2C and B2B marketers (via eMarketer).

Successful Facebook Marketing Tactics

Creating a Facebook application is the most effective tactic used by B2C marketers; creating a survey of fans is the most effective Facebook tactic for B2B companies.

“friending” recent customers with corporate Facebook profile and buying targeted CPC ads are the least effective Facebook marketing tactics for B2C and B2B companies respectively.

Successful Twitter Marketing Tactics

Monitoring Twitter for PR problems is the most successful Twitter marketing tactic used by both B2C and B2B marketers.

Contacting users who posted negative comments about their brand and creating an in-person event using only Twitter invites also appeared to be successful tactics among B2C and B2B companies respectively.

The survey by MarketingProfs definitely showed the growing awareness of utilizing social media in online reputation management; but, the best social media tactics may not be the most effective ones for your business and targeted markets. Do your own “experiment” and analysis and find out what work best for you.

Also read:7 Ways Social Media Influences Purchase

I was searching for a book “The BuyerSphere Project: How Businesses Buy From Businesses in the Digital Marketplace” on Singapore National Library website before breakfast and unfortunately this book is too new to be available. So, I clicked on “Recommend A Book” link on the search results page.

Lesson 1: Make it easy for customers to give feedback.

I filled in a form at “Recommend A Book” page with book title, author, and description information. Shortly after I submitted the form, an email was sent to me to confirm the book recommendation:

It didn’t surprise me to see a confirmation email; but, it ensured me my recommendation was received. And, it did impress me when I see “within 7 days”.

Lesson 2: Send out confirmation email upon receiving feedback and give specific time how soon a reply can be expected.

As I’m reading a book by Jack Trout, it’s okay to wait. However, my recommendation was approved and a notification email was sent to my email when I came back from lunch. It was just a morning!

Again, I have a pretty good idea when I can expect the arrival of the ordered book.

Lesson 3: Respond quickly to the customers’ request / feedback.

Bonus tip: great service generates to great word of mouth.

Also read:Use Online Tools to Listen to Customers for Ideas and Feedback

I find more and more people browsing and updating Facebook and Twitter in the train on my way to the office in the morning. Everyone with a mobile phone turns into a mobile reporter, updating friends about their status and what they experience.

Mobile interaction is on the rise, and consumers are always looking for new things to do with their new mobile toys. Are you ready, marketers? Check out the four initiatives you can make for 2010.

1. Get Your Websites Mobile Ready

More than 2.5 billion consumers will subscribe to 3G worldwide by 2013, according to a Parks Associates report. Parks Associates predicts more than 1 billion of those subscribers will be in Asia alone. The spread of 3G means continued expansion of smartphones and mobile capabilities.

The question will be no longer whether people have one smartphone but how smart the phone is. According to eMarketer, the most commonly used smartphone functions, on average, were the Internet (80% of respondents), camera (74%) and e-mail (73%). Mobile applications especially iphone apps have recently received a lot of attentions. However, for many marketers, preparing a mobile friendly website is a higher priority.

The growth in smartphone ownership means more mobile users will use them to surf the web. Your website should render cleanly on a mobile browser and be easy for mobile users to navigate; having a separate mobile website is another option.

2. Experiment & Integrate SMS Marketing

GfK NOP and Limbo (now Brightkite) estimated that 83% of 18-to-24-year-olds and 85% of 25-to-34-year-olds were sending text messages at the end of 2008. An eROI poll found in 2008 that text messages were the preferred method of communication of high school and college students—topping e-mail, social networking communications and instant messaging.

SMS popularity and consumers’ willingness to interact with brands via SMS indicates an opportunity for marketers. You can start by building a mobile subscriber list, promoting and integrating through other channels such as search engine, online display, eDM (email), social media and/or in-store.

SMS can have an immediate impact on foot traffic and a well-timed SMS promotion can drive traffic in a matter of minutes, allowing you to quickly respond to events.

This is an SMS promotion message I received during Christmas and many friends of mine who subscribed to Singapore Tourism Board also received this message.Free things often come in a hard way; when we arrived at the museum, the queue was very very very long and we had to change our plan.

3. Prepare for More Mobile Sharing

Mobile social networks are not separate marketing channel but an extension of the social networking sites. Make your content (event, promotions, new product launch,…) sharable among consumers and it helps spread your message to other types of users through mobile social networks.

4. Test Mobile Display Advertising

Mobile display advertising has shown the most impact on unaided brand awareness among mobile display, SMS, and mobile video and it’s second to SMS in aided brand awareness and purchase intent.

If mobile display advertising is new to you, start testing with Google AdWords.

Also read:An Introduction to Mobile Marketing

ShareThis shared a social bookmarking study at its blog which explores the social engagement value of sharing.

The study breaks down the stages of sharing into share, clicks, and engage.

According to this ShareThis research, email is still the most popular way (46% of shares) of sharing content online.

The same research showed that 40% of clicks come from Twitter tweets, 35% of clicks from email and other social channels, and 25% of from Facebook.

It’s not surprising; Twitter users love links. Twitter is built to be an information stream; users share shortened links that generate over a billion clicks each month.

What Twitter and Facebook Users Are More Likely to Click

According a user sample released earlier this year by Chitika, Twitter users most frequently clicked links directing to information about current events and news.

• Current events and news: 28.49% of referrals
• Movie-related sites: 22.56%
• Technology sites followed with 13.39%
• Medical sites: 7.98%
• Video games: 4.64%
• Celebrity: 3.94%
• How-to: 2.88%

Facebook users, however, click differently. Facebook users were most likely to click technology sites.

• Technology sites: 30%
• Lifestyle: 18.29%
• News: 18.25%
• How-to: 4.55%
• Movies: 2.96%
• Medical: 2.62%

The same research found that Twitter is the least engaging share platform with users visiting an average of 1.66 pages when they click through to a site, while users coming in off e-mail were the most engaged, visiting 2.95 pages, and Facebook trailing closely behind 2.76 page views.

Also read:Incorporate Social Characteristics into Email

Social media is emerging as an important marketing channel driven by increased consumer adoption of social media technologies and the exponential growth in digital word-of-mouth that is occurring over this medium.

Before deploying the right social media strategy for your business, it’s important to understand first how social media influences people’s purchase:

1. Reading a consumer generated review about a personal online on blogs
2. Reading an expert’s review about a product online (authority bloggers)
3. Special deals on company Facebook Fan page
4. Special deals on Twitter
5. Friends’ interactions at companies’ Facebook Fan page (comment, “likes”, wall posting, contest participation)
6. Friends’ status update about a product on Facebook
7. Tweets about a product on Twitter

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

Also read:Top Social Media Tactics for Facebook and Twitter