Multi-screen usage  Stats from our Multi-Screen Marketer report, produced in association with the IAB, show that 65% of the respondents with a tablet in our study said they were likely to be using a second device while watching television. Even most people with only two screens (TV + computer) are more likely to be online while watching than not (52%). Multi-screening can be positive for publishers and advertisers. Those with tablets are significantly more likely (47%) to take an action (voting, purchasing, etc.) in response to what they’re watching than their peers with three screens (37%).  47% of tablet owners have used a mobile device to respond to something on the screen and 28% have downloaded an application that’s related to a show they watch. Chance of using a mobile device to take action from television prompt: Mobile web usage Almost two-thirds of UK smartphone owners (59%) access the mobile internet everyday, according to stats from Google.  85% of UK mobile users seek local information on their smartphone, and 81% take action using the local content. Mobile search has grown 500% in the past two years. Online research and in-store purchases More than a third of Homebase customers research online before going in-store, according to the retailer's Head of Multichannel Andy McWilliams. Reducing online returns rates By using the Shoefitr tool, which helps shoppers to find the best fit for them, US retailer Running Warehouse has reduced fit-related returns by 23%.  The app has enabled Running Warehouse to increase its profit margins by 2.5%.  Previously, around 65% of the retailer returns were due to size related issues, but now 20% of orders come in from customers that have used the app.  Social media and customer service More than a third of UK consumers (36%) have engaged with brands through social media, according to a survey from Fishburn Hedges. 68% of those who have engaged with brands through social media believe that it “allowed them to find their voice”. More than two-thirds (65%) also believe that it is a better way to communicate with companies than call centres. Twitter's mobile users Twitter now has 10m UK users, of which 80% access the site using mobile. This makes the UK Twitter's fourth largest audience behind the US, Brazil and Japan. It has 140m users worldwide.  Tablets One tablet generates as many website visits as four smartphones, according to data from Adobe's Digital Index Report. By the end of Q1 2012 smartphones accounted for 6.1% of site visits compared to 4.3% on tablet (mainly iPad). Within a year of its launch in Q2 2010 the iPad accounted for 1% of total website visits, reaching 4.3% of total visits by the end of 2011. Facebook and customer acquisition More than a third of UK businesses (36%) now use Facebook to attract new customers, according to data from Basekit. This makes it more popular as an advertising tool than local business directories such as Yellow Pages and Thomson, which are used by 27% of the 500 small businesses surveyed. The use of online advertising is now almost as common as print advertising (20% vs. 21%), and Twitter is also quickly gaining popularity (17%). Marketing emails and mobile Research by STEEL finds that 36% of all consumers are already reading marketing emails on a mobile device. This figure rises to 55% for 18-34s.  However, one in four find marketing emails too difficult to read on their mobiles.  The top area of dissatisfaction is too much scrolling (42%), while 29% state that the layout of emails isn't right for their mobile device and 27% feel there is too much content.  Reasons for opening emails on mobile: Shazam and TV ads According to ITV and Shazam, around 50,000 viewers used the Shazam app to tag the Pepsi MAX and Cadbury ads shown during ad breaks in Saturday’s Britain’s Got Talent final. Shazam recently announced a partnership with ITV to provide interactive TV ads. 

1.  Can you COPE? COPE, as in Create Once Publish Everywhere. Originally this phrase was simply a sell for clever publishing software. It’s now become shorthand for planning and creating content that can be published and re-used across many platforms, ideally cutting the cost of creation, production and (especially) translation and localisation. Lately we’ve heard it bandied about a lot in editorial meetings. Obviously if you are going to publish the same content (or elements of the same content) across many platforms, you’ll need to indulge in some pretty sophisticated content planning work first. If your company operates in a series of content silos, with one team ‘doing email’ and another responsible for ‘social’, you’ll struggle to get this off the ground. But if you can join your internal content owners up to develop a truly inclusive content strategy, then COPE may well prove efficient for you. On a practical level, for written content, this will usually mean coming up with highly adaptive modular copy formats that everyone signs off on and subscribes to. Cue stakeholder pistols at dawn…  2. Post-Panda SEO for peanuts? You can’t stuff your content with keywords any more. So what now? Those whose businesses stand or fall on their search results are out there trying to source content that will both keep customers engaged and satisfy a Google algorithm that rewards content quality. But how much are they willing to invest in it really? As far as we can see, the SEO copywriting market has polarised. While we can report a recent large influx of clients prepared to invest in quality copywriting, along with the editorial planning, format work and quality control that requires, we also notice a proliferation of extremely low-cost content providers. There will always be people prepared to churn out repurposed gobbledegook for buttons (£6.50 for 700 words, anyone?) and also those who insist that software could “seriously, like, replace Shakespeare”. But the truth is that anyone who is prepared to write you an on-brand, optimised, customer-facing, usable piece of content, mapped to your business objectives, legally compliant, sub-edited and proofread for a fiver, is either living in a country where that’s a day’s wages, living off a trust fund or has repurposed it from someone else’s work. Really good content costs. Sorry. 3. Micro-content fixes The rise of the copy nudge. The double-dip has forced companies to focus even more on the bottom line. So what content gives the greatest return on investment? Last year we started suggesting that budget-strapped content owners identified quick copy fixes with high ROI. After all, if your conversions increase as a result of your emails, then why not focus on a more compelling email sign-up, or on messages which dissuade customers from unsubscribing? Re-working a key call to action, a button, or split-testing the benefits on a product page is quick to do, requires minimal design input and can produce instant results. The king of all quick copy fixes is the online form. We have case studies showing up to a 35% increase in conversions from fixing the reassurance and instructional text in transactional areas. So maybe instead of that big ambitious content migration, you should simply ‘sweat the small stuff’ instead? 4.  Mobile, tablet and yet more mobile Making content mobile and tablet friendly is definitely what’s keeping content owners up at night. Last year, Jakob Nielsen revealed that content is twice as hard to understand on a mobile device. "When reading from an iPhone-sized screen, comprehension scores for complex web content were 48% of desktop monitor scores," he reported. So what is the answer? In short: write short, clear sentences. What’s the problem? This is very hard to do well, especially when summarising the terms and conditions of a home contents insurance policy. And what about tablet? While we’re still in learning mode as to what works best, certain content issues are already pretty clear. Overly-long lists and menus, information ‘too small to tap’ and serving up splash screens are all out. It appears you do need a distinct content approach for tablet after all… 5. Govern or be damned "Quality is doing it right when no one is looking," said Henry Ford. Unfortunately, all the best editorial set-ups rely on lots of people looking. Looking, editing, checking, and then looking again in fact. While most content teams weren’t initially set up with anything like this kind of QA process in place, we are seeing a rise in demand for content training and guidelines which support governance and help benchmark content quality. For many clients this is ensuring that (a) best-practice samples and execution guidelines exist for each content typeand (b) someone is making sure they actually get followed. For others, this means regular content auditing followed up by training and mentoring. It’s fantastic to finally see the old-school rigour of print publishing being embraced by the digital world. Better content should come of it. 6. Content ideas brainstorm boom The trend to embrace content marketing as a discipline in itself continues apace. But this is primarily an editorial endeavour. And great editorial depends on an ongoing flow of high-quality ideas. When the ideas run out, it’s all over. As original ideas can be hard to find (especially for the more complex B2B brands), the ability to brainstorm clever content ideas, formats and executions has become powerful content-marketing currency. What marketers are after is ‘ideas with legs’, workable series of content that can be replicated week after week without flagging. Content mapped to customer needs and interests that is truly useful, usable and builds long-tail relationships. In his post-Panda blog post  Google fellow Amit Singhal advises content owners to avoid ‘mass produced’ content that is ‘shallow in nature’, and to strive for high-quality ‘original content’. He urges us to produce articles full of ‘interesting information that is beyond obvious’ and remove low-quality content from our websites. And this is the biggest content trend of all: the culling of poor-quality content is finally beginning to happen. And we can’t wait to see the results...  

These things are also a good check at any time as some things aren't always apparent and can inhibit sales. The list is not exhaustive but should provide you with some answers...  1. Was the site down during the weekend? Put in a call to your hosting company, agency or the person managing the site for you to find out if there were any problems.   Customer services is often a good source of information to advise if there were problems or downtime. Check your analytics suite also to see if there was a drop of traffic during a set time frame. 2. Was the payment portal working correctly? Check transaction logs over the period in question and see if there was a lack of orders and during what period.   Analytics should be compared also, if traffic was still being sent to the site yet your conversion rate dropped massively then there may have been a problem with payment methods.   Follow up with payment providers as this may well have been the case. If using a third party security company to vet transactions. Check whether they were over-cautious or if there was a system fail. 3. Was checkout working, postcodes, address, shipping, payment methods? Many sites use automatic postcode lookup, did you run out of credits so the postcodes were not delivering results? If so, make sure you set up automatic billing.   Were your customers able to access PayPal portal? Was the link to the secure cart working correctly? if it was broken over the weekend its likely to still be broken.   It is also worth checking that people can add shipping to the order, I have seen small changes made back-end that have stopped shipping being added to basket, which prevents checkout. A simple but drastic mistake people make. 4. Were categories published correctly? Did you set up a new "Special Offers" category? Did it actually get published? did it have any products assigned to it? Were images used and not products, were the clickthroughs from banners working, or did the code get missed out?   If so, the likelihood is that the category was created, but not actually set live with products. 5. Was search delivering results? Did your search function fail? This is maybe not so bad if you only have a few products on the site, but for sites with hundreds of products this may have stopped people finding the products.   The other consideration here is whether or not the search function was delivering intelligent results. For example, searches for 'shorts' which deliver results for 'shirts' will soon put people off. 6. Were products published as zero stock? It happens... There are two ways of checking this: Was all stock set to "0", especially if manual stock uploads are added to the site? If using manual uploads check the last upload file. If using a till system to upload directly to site then check with IT what was sent by the feed.    It's also worth checking whether individual products had all the sizes added to the database. If key sizes were missed when setting up a product shell then regardless of stock update they wont publish online. 7. Was there stock of key products / best sellers? This is slightly easier and quicker to check. Checking with merchandising or looking at the product history in the till system / CMS will soon make you aware of the shortfalls. 8. Did products have images? Products rarely sell online if they don't have images, as people will struggle to check what you are listing meets their needs without a picture.   It has been seen on many sites where the thumbnail image is missing and there is just a description. Generally, I find this occurs when the publishing team add the product and in a hurry forget to save the image to the CMS. On the other hand, they may have removed the image from the image bank meaning to replace it but forgetting to do so. If using affiliiate feeds, this may also have an impact on referrals from your affiliates. 9. Has something changed on the copy?  Bad reviews? If a product or service has had a bad review listed then this really could affect sales. Customers expect and deserve genuine reviews but if this is the only review of your product then this could cause problems.   If you do get a bad review it's worth checking out the product so you can amend descriptions or rectify faults. It's also worth ensuring reviews and queued before publishing. 10. Has a competitor changed pricing of key products? Competitor analysis of key products can often identify pricing issues online. For example, has Amazon now listed the product £10 cheaper than yours? Has a major retailer launched a sale? It can be hard to reduce prices dependant on business margins and pricing, especially if you're a multichannel retailer.  You may not be able to immediately reduce products due to policy, but you can let the buying and merchandisers know so they can act if they feel they should. 11. Have affililates stopped sending visitors? Have one of your key affiliates stopped sending you traffic? Check your affilate program dashboard to monitor sales and look for unexpected dips. If you can identify a drop in sales from an affiliate its worth just checking their site is still active or giving them a call to see what's happened.   You could find it's a simple feed issue to their site or that they are being offered better commission from competitors.  12. Do your landing pages have incorrect products or prices? Have they lost search engine position? Its worth checking key landing pages are still listed in the search engines. Also, when opening the landing page check whether the information is correct and showing relevant products.   I have often found that people assign incorrect products to the page.   13. Was traffic down or consistent on the site? By checking your analytics package you can easily identify if there was a massive drop in traffic to the site.   If there was then it's worth looking at the visitors and campaign sections to see where the shortfall was. Being a bit more technical, you could break down the analytics to see if it was device or browser specific.  14. Did a planned email send fail to deliver? Unfortunately, this does happen with the best planned campaigns.   15. Were last year's sales impacted due to a specific reason? So Alexander McQueen died in 2010, sales spiked in one day and we had almost sold out of every item of stock showing sales of 300% sales increase for the same week last year.   That looks good on the stats for that week and for the rest of this year but next year this will distort the figures, as the 300% increase will be budgeted into the forecast. Always record key events on the sales figures where spikes happen, things like Easter holidays, Black Friday, Mega Monday, etc all effect like for like week trading. 16. Have customer services received any logged issues about site performance? The best point of call for identifying many issues on the site. They are normally emailed or called about issues, whether it be pricing, postage, checkout, site down, stock outs or even bad publicity. A quick call can save a lot of time. 17. Has a social network group started an anti campaign? In our ever-changing social world negative publicity, like the United Airlines broke my guitar campaign, can hit sales. This is more likely to affect the larger retailer but can affect anyone. 18. Promotional codes Promotional codes make the world go around online, and everyone looks for a bargain, so check out your promo codes if sales are lower than expected.  If a new code has not worked then check whether it was case specific. Perhaps it was due to complex, confusing key characters, or published as live but with an expiry date in the past.     If an existing code has suddenly failed, it often comes down to either being unpublished, expired or deleted in error.   The key message here is that every member of the team can help to identify a problem...

In courting businesses and individuals, many of the Davids have some compelling selling points: they cost little to nothing to get started with, are easy to set up and use, and provide a refreshingly higher level of customer service.But Square, one of the most prominent and heavily-funded new players on the payment scene, is learning the hard way that you can't please everybody in the payment processing space. According to one Square customer, Jason Gullickson, a chargeback situation turned into a customer service nightmare that sounds an awful lot like the customer service nightmare stories you have probably read about involving larger, more established players. Gullickson's post, which details his experience, has attracted the attention of Hacker News readers, landing it on the Hacker News front page. All payment providers are facing challenges Whether he's 'right' or 'wrong' (or neither), Gullickson's blog post highlights the challenges facing payment firms -- established players and upstarts alike -- as individuals gain access to a wider availability of payment processing services.Here, it's fairly evident that Gullickson had a limited knowledge of the chargeback process, which is something providers like Square have little flexibility to change because of the rules that govern credit card transactions. Could Square have provided a more responsive customer service experience to Gullickson? Perhaps, but the type of hand-holding he seems to have expected is time-consuming (and therefore costly) to provide. When you're processing billions of dollars in transactions, the $200 chargeback that may matter a lot to a single individual is probably just one of hundreds or thousands of similar chargebacks being handled at any given time. Payment options will continue to grow At the end of the day, there's little doubt that the rapid pace of evolution in the payment space will continue to grow the number of payment processing options in the hands of businesses and individuals alike. That's a good thing, and it's creating huge opportunities for entrenched players and startups. But upstarts like Square, some of which are trying to compete, in part, by creating the belief that they're a friendlier alternative to supposedly less-friendly corporations like VeriFone and PayPal, may find that avoiding the type of criticism frequently leveled at their battle-scarred competitors is simply not possible.

Econsultancy’s Internet Statistics Compendium is a collection of the most recent statistics and market data publicly available on online marketing, e-commerce, the internet and related digital media.  The compendium is available as eight main reports, split across different geographical regions: Asia Australia and New Zealand Europe  Global / International  Latin America  Middle East and North Africa  North America  United Kingdom Updated monthly, each document is a comprehensive compilation of internet, statistics and online market research with data, facts, charts and figures.The reports have been collated from information available to the public, which we have aggregated together in one place to help you quickly find the internet statistics you need, to help make your pitch or internal report up to date. There are all sorts of internet statistics which you can slot into your next presentation, report or client pitch. Those looking for B2B-specific data should consult our B2B Internet Statistics Compendium. Areas covered in the main compendium include: Affiliate Marketing  Customer Experience Demographics E-commerce Email Marketing Internet Advertising Mobile Search Marketing Social Media Technology Adoption Web Analytics

Some consumers who spent $4.99 purchasing EA's Rock Band game for iOS are learning that the hard way after the giant game maker announced that it would be shuttering the game on May 31. Players of the game, which was launched in late 2009, received the following in-app message: Dear Rockers, On May 31, ROCK BAND will no longer be playable on your device. Thanks for rocking out with us! As TouchArcade's Jared Nelson observes:  Servers being shut down and dropping support for games isn’t a new phenomenon, but in the increasingly more digital age of video games you’ll just have to keep in mind that the experience might be finite unlike physical copies of games which will last for eternity as long as you have the hardware to play it. Needless to say, it appears that many owners of the Rock Band iOS app were caught off guard by EA's announcement and not surprisingly, many are not happy. Comments posted by those claiming to own the game indicate that Apple may be receiving a flurry of refund requests as Rock Band purchasers seek compensation for their loss. Others are clamoring for a class-action lawsuit against EA. While it's not clear whether EA is acting in a legally questionable manner here (this would obviously hinge on the terms of purchase and service), the incident does serve as a reminder to companies offering products that feature a cloud angle: maintaining supporting for those products in perpetuity may be crucial to establishing and maintaining customer trust. That, of course, is a tall order because supporting something forever isn't always easy to do. Sometimes it's an operational burden; other times it's financially impractical. The lesson here: for all of the cloud's benefits, sometimes there's nothing like the simplicity of selling a product that isn't tethered to the cloud.

With social CRM events in Frankfurt, Brussels and Paris looming, we've set out to pre-empt the "traditional vs social" question by publishing our answer in advance in infographic form (below).  Inevitably, this is a simplistic representation of a complex issue, but it's also a good starting point for organisations seeking to integrate social media into their customer and stakeholder management processes. Within the four uses of social CRM we've highlighted, Marketing, Sales, Feedback and Service & Support, the shift in thinking and approach required to capitalise on recent developments in customer behaviour (and expectations) is marked. That said, best practices are emerging. American Airlines has a highly developed social CRM strategy and is implementing it effectively both for marketing and customer service. I've also seen excellent case studies from VistaPrint, Peugeot, Everything Everywhere, Citibank and SNCF.  Examples like these are deepening our collective knowledge and encouraging more brands to shift from traditional to social CRM. We hope the image below helps in this process and, possibly, also saves us 30 mins of pre-discussion at our next events.

What prompted you to establish the Dachis Group? What was missing in the marketing ecosystem before you launched? When I co-founded Razorfish in the 90s, I did so because I saw the profound impact that digital was going to have on every aspect of business and the marketing ecosystem.  History, of course, has proven that to be true.  In 2006, I became convinced that social media was going to have an even more profound impact on business; I founded Dachis Group in 2008 to help transform the world's largest businesses into Social Businesses. The marketing ecosystem, and in particular brand marketers, spend an enormous amount of time and money trying to drive authentic brand engagement with their markets.  Previously, brands could either get scale (e.g. buy a Super Bowl ad) or deep engagement (i.e. street teams and events).  I believe social represents the key to brand marketers achieving engagement at scale.   Last week you launched Content Insight and integrated Facebook Insights API into your social analytics. How will this integration help real ROI measurement for big brands? One of the hardest problems to solve in social performance measurement is how specific social programs and activities affect brand based business outcomes like awareness, brand love, or mindshare.  While the rest of our Social Performance Monitor provides the other necessary components, Content Insight provides the critical, correlative link between activities a brand is executing in social (such as Facebook posts, tweets, new YouTube videos, etc) and movement in the metrics that drive those brand outcomes.  It clearly lays out a brand’s content strategy and provides deep insight into how that content performed.  In addition, that real-time insight allows brands to course correct mid campaign so they can optimize their performance.   How has your relationship with Facebook grown? Dachis Group has been a close partner since the early days.  We represented 3 of the original 7 Preferred Developer Partners that Facebook began to partner with to help brands succeed.  Since that time, we've developed and delivered over 500 Facebook experiences and have created and managed brand pages with tens of millions of fans.   As Facebook has matured, so has our relationship. We were recently included in three of Facebook's four new Preferred Marketing Developer programs, one of only 6 companies to receive such an honor.   Why is it important for brands to have more in depth analytics? Social holds the promise for brand marketers to finally be able to quantify the benefits they receive from their investments.  Beyond robust return on marketing investment analysis, the real-time nature of social analysis means that brands can optimize their engagement at scale in flight to provide juice returns and influence brand strategy before widespread damage from missteps can occur.   How does your new Content Insight work and how will brands be able to leverage their Facebook pages using it? Content Insight analyzes the content a brand shares in social, analyzes and reports the engagement and performance of that content over time, and then correlates it to lift in brand based outcomes (like brand awareness, mindshare, brand love, and advocacy) as well as shifts in conversation and topical sentiment.  Brands leverage it to optimize the content that they create, make real time adjustments in campaigns, and understand how their conversation and content is influencing opinion and sentiment of their audience around a topic.   What should businesses look to do with their Facebook campaigns?  Businesses need to be explicit about the goals of their campaigns, determine a measurement strategy, track their progress against those goals to make course corrections, and then use those quantitative outcomes to inform their future social marketing investments. Beyond measuring social performance, businesses need to more tightly tie their Facebook campaigns to their traditional media as well as to their community management strategy.   As a company working with big data, why is big data such a big deal and how did it get that way? There are two answers to that.  First, it’s about the advances in technology. We've always had big data.  The problem was that there wasn't a lot you could do with it.  Today, technologies like Hadoop, Mahout, Cassandra, and others, coupled with the cloud, allow the world to do advanced analytics like natural language processing, machine learning, semantic analysis, and cluster analysis on big data. Second, social created some really interesting big data to which we can apply that technology.  The value that can be unlocked is amazing.  The two things happening essentially at the same time has created the buzz around big data that we see right now.   How is the era of big data changing the practice of digital marketing? Digital marketing gained prominence through measurability.  Digital lead to the explosion of performance marketing that we see today.  Big data plus social is allowing brand marketing to join the digital marketing party with similar measurability for brand based business outcomes.  That's a big deal.   What implications will digital marketers face with this big data trend? It’s all about scale.  Big data in social unlocks engagement at scale.  Digital marketers will have to learn to work through others to drive brand engagement. Advocates, employees, partners, experts...marketers will have to hone their influence skills.   How can marketers leverage big data without being overwhelmed by it?  Three words.  Purpose, Context, Altitude. Purpose: Our big data analytics platform analyzes 300 trillion permutations of our data.  While most marketers' foray into big data might not be quite that extreme, it is still daunting.  If you don't have a purpose, you'll never find valuable insights.   Think about your business goal and then determine how to formulate a "question" you can ask of the data.  We organize those around performance insights and audience insights.  That gives the marketers the ability to get to something valuable in seconds. Context: Most companies operate at large scale...dozens to hundreds of countries, dozens to hundreds of stores or channels, dozens to hundreds of social accounts, dozens to hundreds of brands.  Marketers need to organize their big data so they can easily filter and organize their data by these contexts.  When the CMO asks, "how did the advocacy campaign for brand x that we ran in Germany on Facebook do?" the marketer better be able to get into that context quickly. Altitude: When you look at the social business intelligence space, you see two common approaches, both of which cause issues for marketers who are trying to deal with the "bigness" of big data.  In the listening space, you commonly see keyword queries that return thousands and thousands of individual tweets, comments, and posts.   While the detail is helpful, there is typically no way to understand what it means or to measure it outside of less than useful "mention counts".  In the measurement space, you typically see need columns of numbers with intriguing labels like "engagement" or "virality".  On their own, they rarely provide enough detail to gain insight from the numbers.  Who is engaging?  Why did that post go viral?   We try to strike a balance between the two by organizing our big data analytics at the highest altitude and then letting the marketer drill down further and further, in context, with a specific purpose, all the way down to the individual Facebook comment or reply on RenRen.  This gives the marketer the data they are looking for while also providing the insight in the "why" behind the numbers.   How important is integrated marketing and how can brands move into integrating their on and off line strategy? In industries like retail, entertainment, media, and hospitality, integrating social, in-store / on-premise, and mobile tactics is arguably the most effective tactic for driving commerce and loyalty.   I was recently reviewing the analytic data for a large hotel chain.  We drilled into metrics around new hotel openings and noticed a dig in satisfaction a week after launch.  Drilling into that metric, and then filtering the conversations by negative sentiment, I saw the topic of most conversations was around the hotel restaurant opening.  Drilling into a conversation at random, I saw a lady who was incredibly disappointed that the restaurant had run out of snow peas.   If the hotel manager would have seen that when I did and provided the guest with an apology, gift, or other acknowledgement, the hotel could have cemented the loyalty of that guest and probably created an advocate in social channels whose value would have been thousands of times that of the cost of a few hundred loyalty points.   As for engagement, what are your top five tips for brands to engage online? Get measurement in place.  Engagement is great, but you need to be able to measure it, and understand the return you are getting from your investment in your audience. Understand your scale and use your social team wisely.  There are probably less than a dozen members on your team.  You have an audience in the tens or hundreds of millions.  There is very little engagement they can drive on their own. Mobilize your advocates.  They are better marketers than you are.  Identify them, engage them, reward them, and measure their impact. Integrate your employees.  They are your most knowledgeable, passionate advocates, and the easiest to organize. Coordinate your partners.  Your distribution ecosystem and key brand partners have aligned interest.  The more coordinated you are at the intersection of alignment the greater amplification of engagement you will receive.  

You've recently come out with your first book, Optimize. Why did you decide to write it and why now? I've resisted writing a book as I have a popular blog. We've been around 8 years and have 50,000 subscribers and it was achieving the kind of objectives that a book would have. But then I started to think a bit more about the process. I already had a channel with my blog but after talking to other authors, I thought writing a book would focus and challenge me to not only be factual but educational and entertaining at the same time. Really it was the right time and the right moment. I was at the BlogWorld conference and saw that Wiley was publishing all the good books on marketing. After a year of talking to me about writing a book for them, I decided to go for it. There is something about having that tangible book. I think I'm a little bit smarter by going through the writing process. It has helped me organize my thoughts in a different way and it has given me another platform to bring together my experience of 15 years in marketing. But what has really blown my mind is the number of people who have wanted to help promote it. They're coming to me in fact. Your book is about integrating SEO, social media and content marketing. Why do you think businesses aren't already doing this?  The integration angle has a couple of different perspectives. First of all, why are all these three elements not being used together in a marketing context? Well, the disciplines are divergent. In SEO, they've jumped on the content marketing bandwagon in response to the changes that came with the Penguin and Panda updates that Google put in place to bring good content to the forefront. But their approach is about the practicalities, such as adding more web pages that have more than 200 words. But content creators use content to guide readers through the sales cycle so the content is a lot more intentional. It's not just a hook in the water but it's a tour guide.  As for social media, SEO thinks social is a great distribution channel that will help to get more links while those in social media want to grow the network and build communities. This aspect of cross purposes is why integration may not be happening yet.  Some of it also has to do who is putting the money in. Content is often treated as just a subordinate to marketing and PR. But why wouldn't I in marketing have a process where I understand customers and be aware of what they need (to create better content for them) and keep them as a customer and maybe even turn them into an evangelist? We have to consider to what extent will search bring our target customers to our content. To what extent will social do that? More and more companies will go to this integrated approach in time.  Right now SEO is about rankings and traffic. Content folks think about press releases and blog posts, and how to get them out. Social is thinking about engagement. The main departments that produce content are often seen as HR, PR, marketing/sales and customer service. If we thought about SEO across content, we could get our social content seeded further or we could optimize job listings to further help HR find suitable candidates. One of the main content areas often neglected is customer service. A customer will probably first type an error into Google. So you should make sure support information is available through search or social using those key words. These are not revenue generators. But in the case of customer service, you are making the self serve option easier instead of tying up call centers. In the long view, this will save your company money. People search for all sorts of reasons and if you apply this holistically in your organization and make it part of content production, then you can extend your reach. Every piece of content is now a hook in the water. A job listing may not be a sale but it can help increase your search rankings overall. It's a pretty valuable thing. I think social shares and links are like electricity. The more that are happening, it's like adding more electricity to your site. It makes it shine for the search engines and for people in social networks and beyond. What are the first steps to starting the integration process? You first have to have a sense of what you want to achieve. What are your objectives? Sometimes people don't know what is possible. So you need to research. First start with an audit and competitive research. Look at search readiness, content and what your competition is doing to create a baseline. Further to auditing your company, also do research into your target audience and what their needs are. One of the first things to find out is the sense of what your customers want. You'll find out what the universe of the customer base is but then also look at how to segment them. What is the context that they would need your product? How would they use it, when would they want it, what would they get out of it? By answering those questions, you'll have an unbelievable content strategy. By understanding customer pain points and goals, you can define content. When content is defined, everything else can follow. It's also important to identify who the ideal customers are and who aren't. You don't want to optimize for those who will cost more money to get. By understanding customers, you can understand what is possible. What are some of the common mistakes companies make when developing an integration strategy? The main one is leading with SEO and tactics as opposed to leading with how you answer the question why. People tell stories about how they use specific tools or how they are planning on using it and have tactical questions about best practice. But once you start peeling back the onion, companies often realize they don't know why they want to use those tactics or tools. I'm all for experimentation. If you have a visually focused business (fabric or shoes, for example), it may make sense for you to try Pinterest. But you have to to know the difference between the tactical and the stuff you're just experimenting with. By not answering that why and understanding the connection between tactics and how that moves you toward your wider business goals, this will lead to costly mistakes.  One challenge organizations have is getting buy in. How can those teams in charge of social and search integrate themselves across the organization? This is one of the most common and important questions. People tend to see things in terms of what they already know. If an executive has a way in which to consume content or metrics, this is what they use to determine what works. So align an integrated initiative that affects those metrics and do things that will motivate them. If that senior staff member is all about revenue, work with sales and uncover low hanging fruit that can dramatically effect sales conversation. You could then get a lot more buy in to extend that approach. Emotions are also really powerful. Fear or embarrassment are not my favorites to use. But if you go in and say "Look at this gap, it's embarrassing and here is a plan to change that gap," it can be effective. I much prefer using opportunity: "Oh look what the competition are missing out on. Here is an opportunity for us." What are the metrics of success and how should teams measure this integrated approach? The main metrics are determined by key performance indicators (KPIs) and business outcomes. Business outcomes will be common across all the areas but KPIs have to be different.  SEO will most likely look at rankings, visits, and traffic from links while social look at engagement, links, citations, network size, and the rate of network growth. Content will look at syndication, propagation, and assigning value to content. A great benchmark measurement takes, for instance, the number of pages, the conversion rate from them and traffic. You can then calculate a measurement of what each new page will give depending on the type of content it contains. This will then enable you to do forecasting which is key.  You can overlay KPIs relevant to the different tactics you are using on top of key business outcomes over time. As these are all content producing areas that have different metrics and different audiences, this approach will help you improve the  effectiveness of what you are already doing. What's your top tip for search, social and content teams to apply? There is a lot of competition for people's time. It's not just companies that are vying for your customers attention but you're also competing against user generated content. Most of all you need empathy with customers and how they interact with content. I usually think of this happening in three steps: 1) Discovery: Understanding how your customers understand and interact with content  2) Consumption: Knowing what their preferences for content consumption are 3) Sharing: Comprehend what will lead them to action (i.e. to purchase or to share) and build your system to allow for this. One person who engages with your content may not be a purchaser but it could be shared with someone who does what to buy.   Further info: As the CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, Odden has had 14 years of internet marketing under his belt specializing in the implementation of content, search, email and social media marketing. When not blogging on TopRank, he writes a column called “Social Media Smarts” for ClickZ.  If you are interested in reading more about how Lee Odden thinks we should integrate SEO, social media, and content, you can go to OptimizeBook.com for details on his new book.

Qantas is just one company that learned a hard lesson about how easily social media campaigns can backfire. Encouraging users to use the hashtag #qantasluxury while planes were grounded due to industrial action was the recipe for a PR disaster.  Meanwhile, a viral video of a careless FedEx delivery man dented the company’s image (along with the customer’s package). Entrepreneur Warren Buffet once said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think like that, you’ll do things differently.”  This is even more true today, in an age of instant communication and social media.At the same time, customers are becoming smarter and more tech-savvy.  More of us check online reviews before making a purchase, whether that’s a car, a camera or a holiday. The same stufy mentioned above shows that 67% check the company behind a product name, and believe it’s a sign of quality assurance.Of course, thinking twice before sending a tweet or an angry email should go without saying. But tracking your company’s reputation across the internet can be a lot harder -especially when you operate in different countries and across different languages. Fortunately there are a number of tools and strategies that can make it easier. Use multilingual tools A first step is to monitor mentions of your brand name and keywords across different languages. Google and Yahoo Alerts are basic tools which provides email updates as frequently as you choose. If you’re working in international markets, you’ll need to keep an eye on other search engines such as China’s Baidu and Russia’s Yandex.  Most of these have similar tools that can inform you by email or RSS feed.  monitorThis and Keotag are particularly useful, as they can track your track your keywords across multiple languages and search engines. Be careful on social media Rapper Chris Brown and car brand Chrysler both discovered how an ill thought-out tweet can cause a storm of negative publicity. It’s easy to be lulled into a false sense of security by the informality and immediacy of Twitter and Facebook. But it’s essential to have clear guidelines for company Twitter use to prevent an embarrassing faux pas. It’s just as important to monitor what people are saying about you. While most companies view social media as a key part of their marketing strategies, many fail when it comes to interacting with followers. Not answering tweets or ignoring questions sends a strong message to customers that you don’t care. Google’s Social Mention can track your brand across different social media networks.  Of course, if you come across critical tweets, try to take the conversation off the social network and respond by email. Don’t forget blogs, forums and boards The web has created a wealth of opportunities for people to share their thoughts and views. It’s impossible to check every single forum related to your industry, or monitor the millions of worldwide blogs. Fortunately, services such as Boardtracker and Blogpulse can do the legwork for you. Of course, if you don’t understand the language this can be a trickier task. If you’re on a tight budget, free tools such as Google Translate can help you understand what’s being said. But it’s best to use native-speaking translators to make sure your responses don’t get lost in translation. Encourage online reviews With smartphone use soaring, more people are searching for online reviews while out and about. Encouraging customers to leave reviews on your website is a good way to build trust and get feedback. You could even offer an incentive, such as a prize or loyalty points, but make sure you treat all reviewers equally.If you do find negative reviews, take time to respond to them. Even the best companies make mistakes, but replying promptly and listening to concerns can go a long way to putting things right. If you find factual errors correct them. If reviews are inappropriate or offensive, then you can ask a moderator to remove them.Of course one pitfall to avoid is the temptation to fake reviews. Belkin was left with a red face after it advertised for writers to create positive reviews. To make things worse, it was only offering a pitiful $0.65 a time!As in the offline world, building your online reputation can be a long, slow uphill climb. But it’s much better to take a proactive approach than resort to damage control if things go wrong. And as social media and word-of-mouth marketing become more important, it's certainly worth the effort.