Rocky FU

Target Local Newspaper Websites for More Credibility

Rocky Fu — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 08:47:02 +0000

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]

Online Information Sources Influenctial to Buying Decisions

Rocky Fu — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:50:35 +0000

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.

Use Online Tools to Listen to Customers for Ideas and Feedback

Rocky Fu — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 02:23:07 +0000

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

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

Top Social Media Tactics for Facebook and Twitter

Rocky Fu — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 05:10:32 +0000

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.

3 Lessons on Customer Feedback from Singapore National Library

Rocky Fu — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:19:33 +0000

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.

4 Mobile Marketing Initiatives for 2010

Rocky Fu — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 05:12:54 +0000

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.

Social Engagement: Twitter V.S. Facebook V.S. Email

Rocky Fu — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 11:34:05 +0000

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.

7 Ways Social Media Influences Purchase

Rocky Fu — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 06:23:46 +0000

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:

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

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

How to Launch Twitter Campaign to Promote Sale

Rocky Fu — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 07:03:40 +0000

Dell has generated a total of $6.5 million in revenue from their Twitter presence, how are you doing on Twitter to drive sales? Let me share some tips on how to launch Twitter campaign to drive sales.

You need to build tons of followers; depending on the nature of your business, you can launch different campaigns to attract people to follow you on Twitter.

How to Increase Twitter Followers

Be honest about who you are. Don’t hide your ass in a civilian’s suit; a honest about who you are and what followers can benefit from following you. Do fill in the bio in your Twitter account.
Send regular and relevant tweets. But, never ever spam your followers; add value in your tweets.
Use pictures. Pictures are heavily retweeted.
Encourage followers to retweet your links. Sometimes, simply adding “Pls RT” works.
Inform people your presence on Twitter. Put it in your email newsletter, catalog, packaging, website, facebook, business cards…
Use #hashtag in you tweets. It’s a way to get found.
Use Qwitter to receive alert when someone unfollows you after a tweet
Run a Twitter contest to give prizes for followers
Hijack your competitors’ followers.

Tease the Promotion to Build Momentum

Set a date for your promotion and start teasing the promotion one day in advance. Threadless enjoyed the benefit of teaser strategy; here is an sample of their teaser tweets:

5:00 p.m. — “Anyone else getting the feeling that something big is happening on Threadless tomorrow?”
6:30 p.m. — “Srsly, you’re going to wanna stay up LATE tonight to get in on the 999 Threadless fun.”
7:00 p.m. — “5 more hours until 9/9/09 hits @Threadless! (CST, btw, k?)”
9:33 p.m. — “We can’t comment on rumors. Giggle nervously, sure. 2.5 hours and counting til 12am Central Daylight Time. Wait. Is that a comment?!”

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Teaser tweets is a good strategy to build the buzz; but, only do it occasionally for your big sale event.

Encourage Retweets

Now the day of your big sale event has come. How well your teaser tweets did remains unknown until the sale is over. What else can you do?

Send out the sale tweet at the right time. What time is the right time? No one can answer for you but yourself. Make sure you have tested and analyzed tweets from different time to find out the one with highest CTR.

Once your sale message is out on Twitter, encourage your followers to help promote it by retweeting. As “pls RT” doesn’t always work and won’t work on every follower, more “motivation” is needed. Give away chances to win attractive prizes to followers who retweet your message.

Do not wait till the end to announce the winners who retweeted your tweet. Send out the prize announcement through out the one day sale and at the same time encourage more retweets.

Track & Measure the Twitter Campaign

Now the sale campaign is over; how well you did on Twitter is what you need to find out.

The number of retweets
Clicks (you can use URL shortener like bit.ly, which is my favorite). This may be less than the actual number as some users may copy and paste the actual URL from browser to their favorite Twitter platform like TweetDeck. You need to use your web analytics as well.
The number of sale generated from Twitter
Total revenue from Twitter
CPA
ROI

Test it before you launch it; every campaign is also an opportunity to learn and improve.

If you enjoyed this post, hit the second last icon below to retweet it and follow me on Twitter.

Coupon marketing tips and how to prevent coupon scaring away shoppers

Rocky Fu — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:35:47 +0000

Both consumers and marketers love coupons and coupon marketing is widely adopted nowadays, either online or offline. If coupon is not in your marketing mix, you are losing a big opportunity here.

People love the feeling of gaining a bargain and being treated as special; besides, coupon allows them to save money.

Online coupons are becoming more and more popular than offline coupons; you should ask yourself the following questions implementing online coupon marketing:

Does your shopping cart support coupon functionality? It’s a powerful feature to have.
Have you raised your standard prices if your margins are already tight?
Have you offered coupon signup on your site?
Do your coupon codes have expiry dates?
Are you using memorable codes?
Have you submitted to coupon sites?
Have you given out coupon codes to your affiliate partners if you run an affiliate program?

Coupons can be used to offer a cash back on the immediate purchase. And, it can be also used to offer one as a discount on the the next purchase, helping to get repeat customers.

Coupon Codes Scares People

The “enter coupon code” field on your site could scares away shoppers who don’t have coupons as it signals other users are getting a better deal. What can you do to avoid it?

You may not be able to eliminate it completely, but here is a helpful trick: instead of using coupon codes, encode offers in special links (embedded in your email newsletters or affiliate programs) and automatically transfer the coupon to the user’s shopping cart.

Could Twitter and mobile have a happy marriage?

Rocky Fu — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:53:33 +0000

Are Twitter and mobile a good match?

Happy couples share something in common; what does Twitter and mobile share in common? Real time. Mobile marketing delivers quick and immediate real-time “what’s happening”; Twitter is all about real time micro-blogging where each Twitter user delivers real time information to its followers.

Mobile ad subscribers want similar thing as Twitter users – real time information.

What can you do?

Deploy an SMS campaign to ask the subscribers to follow you on Twitter. The key is to show the benefit of following you. I’m not against giving away prizes for gaining followers; but, how long are they going to remain following you if what you tweet is of no interest to them?

Include your twitter account URL in the SMS so that mobile users can click and open it in the mobile internet browser. Maybe one day you can enable your mobile users to follow you on Twitter by directly replying SMS, which has actually been tested.

4INFO, a mobile ad network and text alert service, conducted a test last month to see if they could use mobile advertising to get consumers to start following brands on Twitter. Based on the results, released by the company this week, the trial is being considered a success.

Is there A distinction between offline and online interactions?

Rocky Fu — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 11:33:36 +0000

According to an emarketer survey, only 25.6% of respondents felt all interaction, online and offline interactions, was the same, and about one-half emphasized the convenience of electronic interaction over face-to-face.

A distinction between offline and online interactions still remains; maybe one day it will completely disappear, but until then, let’s not forget the importance of offline interactions though online social interaction is now popular.

How Tackfilm’s viral campaign almost convinced myself of being Sweden’s hero

Rocky Fu — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 11:30:00 +0000

A viral marketing campaign Case Study

We had a good laugh last Saturday afternoon watching the video made at tackfilm website. In two minutes, the video almost convinced myself of being Sweden’s hero.

Staring in a Swedish film, it takes about two minutes and makes you look like a global hero in a professionally made video. All you need to do is to upload a photo or make a photo with your webcam.Then, you would make several stunning appearances in the auto-generated video, being introduced as a hero.

“tack” means thank you in Swedish – this site is thanking Swedish citizens for paying their broadcasting fees. It’s a very good viral marketing; it’s cool, funny, interesting, and most importantly it’s viral and engaging. Tic Tac viral marketing campaign is also very good and viral but not as engaging.

“Tackfilm”campaign also allows easy sharing, which is critical in a viral marketing campaign.

It’ll be great if it integrates YouTube API to allow direct upload to YouTube website.

What makes a good viral marketing campaign? A successful viral marketing campaign makes people feel something (interesting, hatred, love, fun, cool, …); it engages people; and it allows people to share it easily.

Guess how much a negative review / comment costs you?

Rocky Fu — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:50:44 +0000

Convergys Corp conducted an interesting survey that show a negative review or comment on the Twitter, Facebook or Youtube can lose companies as many as 30 customers.

The survey found that a customer review reaches an average audience of 45 people, two-thirds of whom (30 people) would avoid or completely stop doing business with a company they heard bad things about.

The lesson here is that you need to monitor your online reputation in social media.

Are Gmail users the best audience for social marketing campaigns?

Rocky Fu — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:31:54 +0000

RapLeap, a research company, conducted an interesting study of email analysis. They looked at social network memberships of 120,000 AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo users to gauge where they spend time online.

RapLeaf found that AOL and Gmail users tend to favor Facebook, while Hotmail and Yahoo users tend to use Facebook and MySpace equally. Twitter is the third-most popular social network, followed by LinkedIn.

According to the study results, Gmail users are more connected and have more friends on a social network, other webmail users however maintain more social networking profiles. Even if this is true, is it true in APAC market? If it is true, an email campaign to gain Twitter followers would be more efficient if targeting Gmail users (you can do so via Google content network).

You can only test to find out; integrate social media with your email marketing campaigns and sample the same amount of users for each email provider (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo).

2 Ways to do Geo-targeting on Facebook Fan pages

Rocky Fu — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:33:33 +0000

Facebook Page Settings

Depending on the desired markets, online marketers can target geographically at Facebook Page settings on a country level. In addition, depending on the type of customers you want to engage on Facebook, you may want to specify the targeted age group though you don’t have much choice at the moment:

Anyone (13+)
People over 17
People over 18
People over 19
People over 21
Alcohol-Related

At China Internet Watch fan page, we just target anyone worldwide.

If you run a local business in one or several countries, you can use the “country restriction” setting. Should you just target worldwide if you are a well known brand in the world? It depends.

Ask yourself where your customers are and what you want to do with your Facebook page. Being a household brand worldwide, targeting worldwide fans makes sense; but, if the fan page is supposed to be used for customer service/support, it becomes an issue. In the case of CRM use on Facebook, you may want to set up different Fan Pages for different regions being managed by different marketers from different offices.

What you can also do when you target worldwide with occasional local promotions is, use the targeting feature when you post wall messages:

Facebook Page Share Setting

You can set “country” and “languages” to target a specific group of fans. If you wonder why you should take all the trouble here instead of mass updating your Page, don’t forget the importance of user experience.

Maintaining a Facebook Fan page with targeted and exclusive content is what keeps your fans.

Are social networking sites good for video marketing?

Rocky Fu — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:00:19 +0000

Online video sharing websites

YouTube may be your top choice for promoting video ads, but have you thought about social networking sites?

A new report from Nielsen Online finds that, when it comes to actually viewing that online video content, many consumers choose to view in the social space.

Does it make sense to you? You may ask, isn’t YouTube the number one choice for online video? Think about the ease of uploading and sharing through social networking sites. And, when several friends of yours thumbs up on a video, wouldn’t you be curious to find out more about the video?

According to this Nielsen Online report, the time spent by consumers to watch online video clips via social networking sites increased 98% from October 2008 to October 2009; more than 999 minutes of video were viewed during the month with viewers watching more than 240 million streams via a favorite social hub, blog or profile. Facebook is feeding the masses with more than 217 million streams alone.

Social networking sites could give marketers a new avenue to engage the consumer. But, how good is it?

Are Social Networking Sites the best for Videos?

A recent Eyeblaster (a US provider of digital advertising solutions) study also found that, while video ads perform well alongside static, editorial content such as news, sports and finance, they don’t perform well in social networking sites.

Eyeblaster put it down to the amount of time people spend (called by Eyeblaster “dwell time”) on a social network webpage and the study found out: video ads generally increase dwell time on a webpage by around 20% and this was found not to be the case on social networks. Interesting finding, isn’t it?

I’m not indicating you should make a decision of either utilizing social networks for online video or not. After all, “the amount of time spend” is just one metric you could define for video marketing campaigns.

The lesson here is to realize the opportunity of social networking sites for online videos; and, don’t forget the beauty of online marketing: the ability to track, test, and improve.

Create Integrated Video Campaigns with YouTube Direct

Rocky Fu — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:13:40 +0000

Google just launched a tool called “YouTube Direct” targeting media organizations to request, review and rebroadcast YouTube clips directly from YouTube users. Marketing managers can make use of this open source applications to create more integrated online video campaigns.

A Video Campaign without YouTube Direct

While social networking sites and videos are hot, marketers don’t want to miss the opportunities. We are seeing more and more video campaigns asking for participation to upload a video and win an eye-opening prize like a MacBook Pro laptop.

Some companies tried to host the video themselves when problems arise. The biggest problem I see when companies do the video hosting is not about technology but cost and video streaming speed. Especially when a large scale regional campaign is being planned.

Video Campaign from Singapore Government MINDEF

Some organizations ask users to register at YouTube, upload to YouTube, …which is bad user experience and may make some consumers doubt your capability.

Benefit of Using YouTube Direct

YouTube Direct lets third parties enable customized versions of YouTube’s upload platform on their own websites. You can customize it to fit your branding.
Users can upload videos directly into this application, which shows integrity and gives user better experience (usability).
It enables marketing managers to easily review video submissions and select the best ones to broadcast on-air and on their websites.

These videos users upload on your site are also live on YouTube, so users can reach their own audience while also getting broader exposure and editorial validation for the videos they create. You can learn more from the video below:

www.youtube.com/direct

Google Suggest You Add Breadcrumb Navigation to Your Site

Rocky Fu — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:11:33 +0000

Google Site Hierarchies Display (Below Image)

The above image shows two same search engine results page (SERP) listings, with different display URLs: the one on the top is the direct display of the page URL while the one below is what’s happening – site hierarchies display URL.

Google has announced site hierarchies display in the Display URL positions, which replaces the URL in some search results with a hierarchy showing the precise location of the page on the website.

The new hierarchies display provides valuable context and new navigation options. The changes are rolling out now and should be available globally in the next few days. Well optimized sites would have their SERP listings enhanced by showing the hierarchies. Why?

Site hierarchy display URL provides more information to the searchers, making the site stand out. Not to mention the bolded keywords in the display URL if you do it right.

How Does Google Get Site Hierarchies Information for Display?

Breadcrumb Navigation on FT.com

Webmasters frequently show a navigational tool called “breadcrumb” above the main content to help users navigate. By analyzing site breadcrumbs, Google is able to improve the search snippet for a small percentage of search results.

It remains a question mark now whether and what will be replaced with if a page does not have breadcrumb. Should you build breadcrumbs navigation for Google?

Benefits of Breadcrumbs Navigation

No. You should not. But, you should build one for your users.

Breadcrumbs make it easier for users to move around the site
When the main navigation doesn’t quite meet their needs, users turn to breadcrumbs.
Breadcrumbs show people their current location helping them understand where they are
Breadcrumbs never cause problems in user testing
Breadcrumbs take up very little space on the page

Other than the usability benefits, breadcrumbs can boost your search engine rankings, the SEO benefit.

How to Build Good Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are easy to build with a horizontal line that progresses from the highest level (homepage) to the lowest (the current page), one step at a time.

Use a simple text link for each level; it’s best to include keywords in the text. Don’t make it too long, though. And, use a simple, one-character separator between the levels (like “>” or “-”).

Reasons & Facts Why you Should Engage Consumers in Social Media Now

Rocky Fu — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:34:20 +0000

It’s a strange world. Yesterday, someone asked me for social network marketing strategies; and, today another “convincingly” told me (probably convinced by himself) that social networking sites are not for business at all.

Are Consumers Spending A Lot of Time on Social Media?

When it comes to social networking, more consumers are doing it and doing it for longer periods of time. The latest numbers from Nielsen Online indicate that consumers spend 17% of their online time with social networks in August. That is an 11% increase over 2008.

Not convincing enough to you?

A September 2009 study from Retrevo found that among those under age 35, 39% of Twitter users and 27% of Facebook users checked the sites at least 10 times every day.

Do consumers welcome brands on social media?

More than welcome, in fact.

Performics released a study last week and it found that marketers who embrace the medium and communicate relevant messages in consumers’ language and on their terms could gain customers and grow sales. It also found out:

34% of respondents have used a search engine to find information on a product/service/brand after seeing an advertisement on a social networking site
30% of respondents have learned about a NEW product, service or brand from a social networking site
32% of respondents said messages about printable coupons on social sites resonate with them
28% of respondents said messages about sales or special deal notifications resonate with them
46% of respondents say they would talk about or recommend a product on Facebook
44% of Twitter users have recommended a product
36% of YouTube users say that they have gone to an online retailer or ecommerce site after learning about a brand on a social network site

Facts of Social Media Influence

20% of U.S. consumers between the ages of 18 and 24 were influenced by online video when it came to choosing a bank.

29% having commented on a product or brand on a blog and 27% having posted an opinion on a social networking profile.

57% of 18- to 24-year-olds and 48.5% of 25- to 34-year-olds say social media influenced their choice of a hair salon or day spa.

According to a study by GroupM Search and comScore, Internet searchers who use social media are more engaged with brands overall and are more likely to be looking for places to buy and brands to consider. It also found consumers exposed to both a brand’s influenced social media and paid search spent almost three times more time online than the average internet users.

Don’t be shy and do not give up the immense opportunity for engaging with consumers on social networking sites. It’s now not a question of whether or not you should get involved in social media, but how.