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  • This Infographic Shows What Your Customers Will Be Like Next Year

    Reuven Gorsht recently put out an infographic looking at what an average business customer will look like next year. Spoiler alert: It’s not all that different than what one might look like this year, but the graphic is full of interesting stats that any business would want to take into consideration.

    For example, 63% of smartphone owners in the U.S. don’t go longer than an hour without checking their phone, and 34% have turned to social media to air their feelings about a company. 69% are more likely to buy from a brand that talks publicly about its CSR results. There’s plenty more where that came from:

    As you can see, the data comes from a variety of sources. Read Gorsht’s analysis here.

    Considering that getting new customers is reportedly the top challenge among small businesses, the data presented here should give you some ideas about how to improve your strategy.

    [via MediaBistro]

    Image via Reuven Gorsht

  • 5 Tips For Using Social Media In Your Business

    5 Tips For Using Social Media In Your Business

    A secret to success in today’s communications arena is not just the actual production of content, but incorporating the voices of our social audiences into the content mix by building social collaboration into the strategy. In other words, it’s an exercise in agile engagement, in which the brand listens to what people are talking about in networks, and uses that information to shape and guide content development to serve audience need – and gain their interest. The efforts your brand commits to building social collaboration as part of its strategy will be repaid with an engaged audience that trusts your brand’s content, and is willing to share it with their own social graphs.

    Here are some easy ways to start building social collaboration into your content strategy.

      1. Train your social media teams to interact with your audiences, re-tweeting generously and responding to comments and wall posts. Interaction is the pathway to engagement.

      2. Curation can lead to more than an interesting news channel. People are flattered when others tweet their blog posts and re-post links they’ve shared. And often, curation is a two-way street.

      3. Find the online groups where enthusiasts live, and participate. These plugged-in groups are fantastic sources of intelligence, ideas and influence. Listen to the conversations. Which questions come up over and over? Which complaints never seem to go away? Within these conversations are opportunities for your brand. (Here are some ideas for developing traction within these types of groups: Virtual Focus Groups for Communicators.

      4. Look to your own customer service teams and customer surveys. Mine customer questions and problems, and turn those into content in the form of blog posts about the solutions.

      5. As you get to know members of your online audience, seek their opinions. Interview them for blog posts, invite them to preview content, solicit their opinions. In addition to generating good feedback, you’ll have solidified relationships. These folks are more likely to amplify your messages.

    So what does the output of social collaboration look like? It can be as simple as incorporating relevant tweets or quotes from your audience into a piece of content. On a larger scale, collaboration can steer the direction a particular piece of content takes. And writ very large, social collaboration can lead to significant use of user generated content and crowd-sourced projects.

    All of the resulting content has one important common factor: the voice of the audience comes through, loud and clear; signaling unequivocally that this brand is paying attention. And, as a bonus, using incorporating social collaboration into your strategy will virtually ensure that your audience will be interested in the content your organization publishes.

    At the outset, collaboration with audiences can seem daunting. And there’s no doubt that on a larger scale, communities require resources. However, building social collaboration into your organization’s communications approach gets easier as your team gains experience – and as the audience’s respect is gained – triggering a loop of authentic interaction, and message amplification.

  • Football Fans Prefer To Watch The Super Bowl On TV Instead Of Live

    It’s been said that experiencing the real thing is much better than something fabricated, but in the case of this years Super Bowl, it seems the real thing is just not going to cut it. TechBargains.com released a survey recently in which they probed customers for information regarding the matter in which they would be viewing the game; the results were a bit surprising.

    The survey revealed that 8% of customers want to buy a new television before the Super Bowl. Surprisingly, of those who bought a new TV last year for the game, over half of them plan on buying an even newer television for this year.

    It seems a bigger and better picture quality trumps the actual live game; why chance sitting in the nose bleed section when you can almost be on the field with a high-def TV set? 25% of those surveyed said the size of their TV depended on how pleasurable their viewing experiences would be. According to consumers, high resolution is the most important factor when purchasing a new TV; sound quality even came in second to picture quality. According to Jeff Haynes:

    “Bigger is better. The reason people are spending more is they are upgrading the size of their television. Consumers have moved from wanting televisions around 42 inches to now buying 46 inches to 55 inches, the TV has become the center piece of the American family room and the difference in just a few more inches is noticeable.”

    As online shopping gains momentum, in-store television buying is on the decline. The survey say 67% of people planning to buy a tv before the big game, plan on purchasing theirs online rather than the old fashioned store.

  • The Netflix Exodus Begins As New Prices Take Hold

    The tumultuous 2011 for Netflix appears to be taking its toll as subscribers move away from the movie rental business because of dissatisfaction concerning price and subscription changes, alterations that, when announced, rocked the Internet to its core.

    While Netflix has been preparing for customer turnover, because it’s apparent people want another option in relation to movie rentals, which is something that undoubtedly sounds great to Redbox. Well, that and their dissatisfaction with the Netflix price hikes. It’s becoming apparent that, until Netflix substantially improves its streaming movie catalog–a difficult proposition as long as content providers keep leaving–the choice between DVD rentals and streaming movies isn’t an easy one. Granted, Netflix’s release schedule for DVDs has also been affected by other content providers, so by the time you get a popular new release in your mailbox, it’s not so new anymore.

    With all of that in mind, when Yahoo Finance reports that Netflix expects to lose 600,000 customers in the United States during the month of September, it’s hard to be surprised by this news. It’s also hard to be surprised by the fact that Netflix’s stock to a hit this month as well.

    The question is, can Netflix sustain its current business model? While the immediate reaction may be “Netflix is doomed,” a snippet from Yahoo’s article indicates reports of Netflix’s early demise may have been premature:

    Even with fewer subscribers, Netflix expects to bring in $10 million to $25 million more from its customers than during the July-September period than it did April-June. Emphasis added.

    It stands to reason that some of this revenue will come from customers who forget to change their subscription package, or from the ones who want both streaming and physical DVD delivery, it doesn’t explain the July-to-August periods. Did all that negative press actually help their bottom line?

    However, when you look at the potential exodus numbers now that the price changes have taken hold, the two are not congruent. While subscriptions may have increased during the summer, adding to the Netflix bottom line, the outlook does not remain as positive, especially with the news about Netflix’s expected customer loss. So what does this mean for the home movie rental business? Yahoo has more:

    Many of the people no longer renting DVDs from Netflix will get their discs elsewhere. That could be a boon for Redbox, which rents DVDs for $1 per night through 33,330 kiosks in supermarkets and other retailers, and Blockbuster, which still has 1,500 U.S. stores after emerging from bankruptcy protection under the ownership of Dish Network Corp. Investors are betting Redbox will be the main beneficiary; the shares of Redbox owner Coinstar surged $3.33, or more than 7 percent, to close at $48.55 on Thursday.

    If Amazon can beef up its content on Amazon Instant Video service, it, too could knock Netflix farther down the home movie business totem pole.

    What about you? Will stick by Netflix or are you moving on to Redbox and other services that offer streaming movie options?

  • Can Search Engine Optimization Survive Google?

    The search engine landscape is ever changing. We covered that. However, while there are multiple players involved in facilitating that change, there is one that drives it far more than the rest of the competition. Obviously, we’re talking about Google.

    Is there a point where adapting to Google’s changes becomes impossible? Share your thoughts.

    To a very drastic extent, Google drives how the search engine marketing industry operates. With Google holding such a dominant share of the search market, it’s not hard to figure out why. While some may tell you it’s not the most productive use of your marketing time, businesses who hope to find success in driving people to their website (or even brick and mortar store) often hang on every word Google says and every change Google makes to its search engine and/or search results.

    Liz Gannes with the tech blog GigaOm recently spoke with Google Engineering Director David Glazer about Google’s approach to social for 2010. And we come back to that changing search landscape. Social plays a huge role in it, and Glazer acknowledged just that. Gannes reports:

    In 2010, Google plans to expose and elicit more of the social network built into the tools that many of us already use — Gmail, Google Talk, etc. If you use Google products, the company already knows who your most important contacts are, what your core interests are, and where your default locations are. Glazer said to expect many product and feature launches that start to connect that information in useful ways.

    "Everything is better when it knows who I am," said Glazer, who is responsible for working on developer platforms that include social aspects — a more distributed role than he had at Google in the past, Glazer said, when he was working on social exclusively. That’s an improvement, he said, since social products are no longer siloed within the company.

    What does "social" mean to Google? "Who I am, who do I know, what do I do," said Glazer. (emphasis added)

    Back in October, Google released its experimental Social Search feature, which Google said would help users "find more relevant public content from their broader social circle."

    Relevance of social search has been questioned though. WebProNews recently discussed search trends for 2010 and beyond with comScore‘s "Search Evangelist" Eli Goodman. Believe it or not, social search is counted among these trends, and he mentions such a lack of relevance in social search results.

    The real question is: is SEO going to become less relevant? Before you get all worked up, I will acknowledge that SEO is based on adaptation and changing along with the search engines. In fact, that was essentially the topic of a recent WebProNews article. Hear me out.

    Right now, search engine optimization as we know it is still very relevant for businesses, but as Google learns more about who people are, they’re going to direct them to what they think is right. Social search and personalized search are very closely related.

    Think about Google’s universal search, which aims to deliver results Google thinks you might want. These results draw from a wide variety of different places – Google News, Google’s real-time index, YouTube, etc. Each set of universal results takes more attention away from the regular old organic results. How long until social search (or something like it) becomes a part of this.

    And let’s not forget about mobile. Smartphones are taking the world by storm, and Google is doing everything in its power to take over this market (though it still has work to do). Google knows your location if you let it. Then you have Google Latitude. Google knows your friends’ locations if they let it. Then, what happens when Chrome OS (Google’s Operating System) comes out. It may not catch on as much as Google would like, but then again it may. It starts on netbooks, but how long until that grows into something bigger?

    Google just keeps on releasing more products. More products means more opportunities for the company to encourage use of other Google products. They also keep acquiring more companies by the way, and that includes the recent acquisition of a mobile advertising agency and an attempted acquisition of Yelp (the failure of which, was quickly compensated for to some extent by Google’s release of the "Near me Now" feature).

    As Gannes notes, Google has this month brought on strategists Joseph Smarr and Chris Messina, who she says are "widely known for their advocacy of the open social web." This likely will lead to more social and personalized experiences related to search.

    Chris Brogan, one of the posterboys for social media, read the article too, and makes some pretty good points for businesses. Rather, he asks questions. Questions like:

    – Does your company know how you are?
    – Do they know who you know?
    – Do they know what you do?

    Questions like these are already important for a business looking to establish its identity (not to mention tell its story), but they could become increasingly important in an era of new SEO strategies.

    "People expect a certain level of customer service as table stakes to the game," says Brogan. "In the new, much more wired world, I believe we’re asking for more. I want my airlines to know just how often I fly, which seat I tend to choose, how often I upgrade, and whether I normally check my bag. Think about how helpful they could be if they did something with that information."

    Naturally, privacy plays a big role in the scheme of things, and as Brogan notes, that means opt-in. However, I think people generally trust Google (the search engine), at least to the extent that they will continue using it for the foreseeable future. I am well aware that many people do NOT trust Google, but within the broad spectrum of the general public, people trust it. Google’s search market share is evidence of that.

    So, moving into the future, as Google makes efforts to tailor the user experience to a more social and more personalized one, where does that leave traditional SEO? Can it survive? It’s always been about adaptation and will continue to be, but is there a breaking point where SEO will be trumped by who users know and where they are? Who they are? Can you optimize for every individual customer? That’s where things could get tricky.

    If you have thoughts on the matter, we would love to hear them in the comments.

    Related Articles:

    > Google Launches Social Search Experiment

    > Optimizing for Mixed Media Search Results

    > Succeeding In SEO Requires Change