Are you dormant, testing, co-ordinating, optimizing or empowering?

On Smart Insights, Paul Fennemore recently recommended his social media adoption framework which was popular, so I thought I'd alert you to a new approach to review social media maturity. Forrester have released a report that offers a social maturity model to help illustrate the common stages of change that occur as marketers optimize their social activities from dormant to empowered workforce.

Where are you on the 5 stages of social maturity?

Customers and employees are becoming increasingly empowered by social technologies, dramatically changing the way they communicate and collaborate. We know now this isn't a fad - it's a fundamental shift. To succeed in this new world, companies must make fundamental changes to resources, skills, tools, processes, and culture. Forrester calls this process of change 'social maturity', and it consists of five stages: Dormant Testing Coordinating Scaling and optimising Empowering the workforce …

An example of how small changes can have positive impacts

I'm no SEO expert, but I think I've developed a bit of a knack for getting some decent organic search results from blog posts. All I've done is utilised a few basic SEO practices, so I thought I'd share them in the hope that it inspires others to make similar changes. Here's an example for a generic phrase that's important in the market for our company:

Editor's note: We checked with Marie this wasn't influenced by personal customisation in Google search. If you use Google's new Verbatim Search that strips out personalisation based on Web History (there even if you're not signed in), then this term still ranks position 2 or 3.

How did we do this?

This is for an established post, what we did was increase…

Presented to the Internet Retailing Expo conference in Birmingham

The techniques I recommended in this talk are reviewed for a case study company with their permission. Although the recommendations use a retail example, they apply to other types of business also. Here's a preview of the recommendations: 1. Identify Consumer search behaviours NOT just keyword lists 2. Use a gap analysis to drive performance 3. Improve your brand messages: Communicate your OVP for a smooth customer journey 4. Check the relevance of blended search – here Google Places 5. Don’t forget the second biggest search engine… 6. Evaluate paid search YouTube options 7. Obsess about links 8. Obsess more about content 9. Integrate “added value content” 10. You can always re-engineer your title tags more… 11. Even keyword density analysis can help…something you shouldn’t do? 12. Make the most of your home page and high-level utility pages 13. Get the balance right oncategory and sub-category pages 14. Review…

Google Social Analytics - an in-depth review

Value/Importance: [rating=4] Recommended link: Google Analytics Blog summary

Our review of Google’s new Social Analytics features

Avinash Kaushik, now Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist announced this new Google Analytics feature at his keynote at SES New York in March 2012, showing this is a major update that Google want to promote. August 2012 update At the time it was part of a beta referred to as "Social Analytics", but it is is now available to all Google Analytics users and as is shown in grab of the menu on the right it's The majority of the reviews of Social Analytics so far have simply included the screengrabs available from the Google Analytics blog summary, so I thought I would go into a bit more depth and give my view on what’s helpful and what’s not so…

Ideas for increasing your responses by using a more human approach...

What would you say if I was to suggest you take account of your target audience when designing your email program? Actually, you'd probably say nothing... just roll your eyes and find fresh reading material. It's not exactly groundbreaking advice. However, the nature of digital marketing seduces us into thinking of the "audience" as a collection of data or unfeeling robots. So we have segments, samples, cells and clusters...where each email address is a set of numbers, a sequence of letters and a few database fields. Of course, each email address also represents a human being (gasp!). Not a shocking concept, I'll admit, but one we often neglect in the way we design emails and email systems. Yet a recognition of human foibles and limitations helps build better emails for better response. Here are some examples showing…

A tutorial on reviewing consumer search behaviour in the 2nd Largest Search Engine in the World

As you'll know, YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google in many countries. It's the number one ranked entertainment site and 3rd most visited in the UK by Hitwise. Given this and since popular videos are displayed in the "one-box" of blended search results for some queries it's worth investigating how YouTube can be used to reach a wider audience. In this post I'll give a short tutorial on how to find out it's relevance in your market by finding out the number of searches. I'm not suggesting it will give instant results or as Forrester misguidely advised that it's the Easiest Way to a First-page ranking on Google. It may even help you "push back" against colleagues who are asking why you're not doing more work in YouTube. It's an enormous site…

New Boston Consulting Group report on the Economic impact of Internet on retail

Value/Importance: [rating=4] Recommended link: BCG Perspectives March 19th article

A new report on consumer and business use of the Internet in the G-20 countries

If you've been working in online marketing or Ecommerce for a while, it's easy to lose sight of how new digital platforms are, and the opportunity they will still bring in the future. A major new research report by the BCG Group reminds us of the future potential by its review of the size of the opportunity - $4.2 trillion by 2016 they estimate. To put it into a more meaningful perspective, if it were a national economy, the Internet economy would already rank in the world’s top five, behind only the U.S., China, Japan, and India, and ahead of Germany. You can read the full report summary above, here is what stood out for me:

1. UK…

A comparison of the three most popular influencer finding tools: Klout, Kred and Peerindex

As social networks continued to grow rapidly, so has interest in influence. Global companies are realising the importance of targeting high profile bloggers, journalists and celebrities, and have increasingly sought to reach out to these influencers for endorsement and to drive word-of-mouth about the brand. While FMCG brands like Snickers can easily identify popular celebrity bloggers, businesses in other fields can have a harder task to find relevant influencers. To cater for this, a new wave of influencer scoring, based on social media analytics, has emerged, most notably Klout, Kred and PeerIndex. Dan Purvis from the Meltwater Group, explains why these tools are growing in importance: "Identifying who wields influence has lately become a hot topic of considerable proportions in marketing, PR and comms teams the world over. As…

Social Media is still a new and scary world to many people and companies. Its a relatively new tool to the marketing world which is, without doubt, changing the way we work and live. For small businesses, in particular, social media can be a daunting place. We have created this Digital / Social Media reference for our Expert members that helps summarise all the key paid-owned-earned media techniques for the main social networks. This post originally featured a crib-sheet from FlowTown to help small business get to grips with the most popular social networks. Unfortunately this is no longer available. We liked the "learn the lingo" summary, as marketers today, we're often translating the labels and vocabularies of the tools and this gives a neat summary.  …

A tutorial showing how to find the keyword qualifiers that Google prompts searchers with

There are a good set of tools available that aim to make compiling keywords easier; we have documented a range of keyphrase analysis tools, but you still need to filter and refine. We find that, these days, many know about the Google tools and others like Wordtracker or Wordstream, but relatively few know about Übersuggest, so we thought we'd do a separate post to introduce it, with an example, for those who don't know it. The prompt for the alert is an interface update. It helps you understand consumers keyword / keyphrase behaviour so you can ensure you are creating the most relevant content. The difference with Ubersuggest however is that it utilises the Google Autocomplete engine, this means the keywords it delivers…