I recently wrote a post on State of Search about the Integration of Marketing Channels - Here is a shorter version for you to read over.

With the technology changing by the minute, consumers today have a wide range of options when it comes to gaining information and purchasing the products and services that they need. No doubt the Internet is the latest and at present the most popular and convenient medium for marketing, advertising and even purchasing products. From placing an order for food from a restaurant to booking an airline ticket, there are multifarious products and services that are bought online every day. At the same time there are customers who still prefer more conventional methods when it comes to their purchases. They may prefer to call a company or simply visit a brick and mortar store to buy products. To connect with these characteristically ‘offline customers’ a business may have to use channels such as TV, newspapers, Yellow Pages and direct mail for advertising and marketing.

Business organizations need to ensure that their customers enjoy a flexibility to interact with their brands through any channel. Deploying a successful multi channel marketing strategy calls for strategic focus and a commitment to gauge the correct results of value generated.

The efficacy of different marketing channels can be enhanced by unifying customer data collected at every possible interaction with the customers. The business should also ensure that buyer experience is consistent across all channels. It needs to develop a strong understanding of how the customers move through the buying cycle. The business using multiple channels for marketing must also maintain the same customer policies across all channels that cover different customers.

Integrated multi channel marketing is not a mere technological issue. It is a strategic, evolutionary path that businesses, especially the retailers should follow to maintain their competitiveness in the market. By following integrated multi channel marketing approach, businesses can enjoy long terms and cordial bonds with their customers and also enhance their prospects for growth.

Filter Bubble is a concept developed by Internet activist Eli Pariser in his book by the same name. This was used to describe the phenomenon in which websites use algorithms to selectively guess what information a particular user might like to see based on the information pertaining to the user such as location, past click behavior, and search history.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s

Facebook displays things you ‘Like’ or prefer to read on friends’ pages, Google personally tailors your search queries, and Yahoo News and Google News customize the news for you.As per Pariser, users are less exposed to conflicting viewpoints and are isolated intellectually in their own information bubble. Pariser related an example in which one user searched Google for “BP” and got investment news about British Petroleum while search by another user revealed Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Interestingly, the two search results pages were strikingly different.

The filter bubble seems to be a comfortable place and by definition, it is populated by the things that compel you the most to click. But it is also a real problem: the set of things that users are likely to click on (sports, music and things that are highly personally relevant) are not the same as the set of things that they need to know.

The rush to build the filter bubble is typically driven by commercial interests. It has become quite evident that the organizations that want lots of people to use their website, must provide web users with personally relevant information, and if they want to reap monetary benefits through ads, they need to provide them with ‘relevant’ ads. This has resulted in a personal information gold rush, in which major companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo among others are competing to create the most comprehensive portrait of web users to drive personalized products. There is also an entire “behavior market” opening up in which every action users take online – each mouse click on the Internet, each form entry – can be sold as a commodity.

So what is the Internet actually hiding from its users?

As per Google engineer Jonathan McPhie, it is (obviously) different for every individual – and indeed, even Google does not quite know how it plays out at personal levels. At an aggregate level, they have noticed that people need to click more. But they cannot predict how each web user’s information environment gets changed.

In general, the things that are most likely to get edited out are the things users are least likely to click on. At certain times, this can be a real service – if a user does not read articles about sports, why would a newspaper put a football story on its front page for them? But if the same logic is applied to say, stories about foreign policy, a problem starts to emerge. Some things, like homelessness or genocide, are not quite ‘clickable’ but are highly important – it is these that get missed out due to information bubble.

In one form or another, nearly all major websites use personalization but the one that matters the most is Google. If two people search for the same thing using the exact keywords on Google, they may get very different results. Google tracks individual search history, the kind of computer or mobile device that we use and even the average time gap between our clicks – all such information is used to tailor results.

Even if users are not logged in to Google, there are 57 signals that the site uses to figure out who they are: whether they are on a Mac or PC or iPad, and where they are located while ‘Googling’. And in the near future, it will also be possible to “fingerprint” unique devices, so that sites can tell which individual computer an individual is using. This is why erasing all browser cookies is at best a partial solution—it only partially limits the information available to personalizing algorithms.

What Internet users actually require is for the online brands to take some responsibility for the immense power that they have – the power to decide what we see, what we do not see, what we know and what we do not know. They should make sure that users do have access to public discourse and things that matter to majority. A world based exclusively on the things that we prefer (or ‘Like’ in Facebook terminology) is rather an incomplete world.

Just checked a recent survey conducted by Hubspot for over 4000 companies!  The results from a marketing perspective make quite a compelling case that more is better when it comes to creation of content for websites. We know that blogs, landing pages and indexed pages are critical pieces of inbound marketing methodologies and Hubspot data shows that the online pages with more content generated more leads and traffic back in return.

Some interesting revelations of the data include these facts:

• Businesses that blogged 20 or more times in a month got the maximum return in traffic and leads
• Businesses with more than 400 indexed pages generated the most traffic and leads
• Businesses with more than 31 landing pages generated the most leads

The obvious conclusion that ‘more is better’ can cause some organizations to think that they should pad up their websites, start splintering the pages and post small blogs 4 times a day! But this notion should be counter balanced by the brawny inbound theory that content has to be unique and valuable to visitors to be truly effective. The ‘return in traffic and leads’ would only be possible for websites that have content worthy of being read. And what does the ‘splinter strategy’ bring for your website? Only some sparse descriptions, inconclusive arguments and vague lead conversion paths!

So how does a business climb uphill for bigger blog, indexed page and landing page totals while also ascertaining that content is fresh, interesting and adequately productive? Let’s check a few points that can be taken care of:

Write about every angle of your business

The topics that are crucial to your business and industry should be talked about as much as possible. The need for a product/service, its uses and advantages, the tips for selecting a certain product or service, latest news and trends in the industry, posts with encouraging questions and comments make your page interesting and provide informative content fodder to the readers. Even the negative angles of your business offerings make an interesting read for some of the online visitors. But why would you include that in your blog? Obviously, to prove the criticism wrong! So write about the perceptible ‘disadvantages of your products/services’ and then subtly spin the content back in your favor with a conclusion that strongly supports their worth and advantages. You can double your blogging output without being trapped in the ‘writers block’.

And remember – do not go for tricky short cuts in order to beef up your content pool. Use of article spinners and duplicating the content will not help. It might also be tempting to split exiting posts into multiple blogs but all you will get in the end is a poor quality, parched website that does not deliver productive user experience.

Use multiple landing pages to let more customers reach you

You do need to have more landing pages to generate more leads – probably a different one for each set of target audience and more landing pages imply that your business has more to offer. The landing pages look livelier when they have meaningful offers for the page visitors. Here are a few tips that can be used to create and add oomph to landing pages:

• Set the purpose of each landing page before actually developing it. Decide what you want the visitor to do when he/she visits the page
• Send the user to the pages that load quickly – do not use many pop-ups and do not link to pages that were disabled. Do not make your page visitors wait for too long!
• On each landing page, highlight the specific benefits that your products/services offer
• While designing web landing pages, try to enter your prospects’ mind and answer the questions that could be asked by them.

All it takes is to just examine your keywords and adgroups to determine what the user (who uses those search terms) really wants. Then deliver them to the offer page as seamlessly and with as few steps as possible

Sending all the traffic in a campaign to the same landing page is always a big mistake. The keywords that the users employ for a search already describe their aims. Each step in the landing page process can make you lose customers if you do not directly send them to the destination they are searching for. Why bother your customers through a complete website maze when they can take a detour to land on the exact spot?

Get more pages of your website indexed by search engines

Do you have different web pages for all regions, cities, or states that you service or work in? If they are in any way different, shouldn’t they ideally have separate web pages? You do comprehend the significance of product differentiation for marketing success in various areas. A quick audit can help you to discover some opportunities that you may be missing in the online scenario. For increasing your site’s number of indexed pages, take a few minutes to establish an inventory of what you already possess.

To increase the number of your indexed pages, aim for higher PageRanks and for this, have the right blend of features for your SEO. If you can get a little higher PageRank for your most important content, by taking some away from less important content, you might be able to get more of your pages into search engine’s index. The businesses that have a large website, with a lots of sitewide links to “overhead” pages sometimes have a hard time getting their deeper pages indexed. In this scenario, changes to the website structure can make a big difference in how many pages get indexed.

One tactic to increase the number of indexed pages is to bookmark the new pages at social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Reddit and StumpleUpon. As these are frequently updated and search engines are aware of this, they crawl and follow your bookmarks, links, very quickly.

Being a member of online forums, groups and networks can also spread the news of your web pages via links and these in turn attract search engine crawlers.

To sum up, when more traffic and leads are on your mind – get back to the basics. Augment your content, develop more landing pages and get them indexed. More content does work for your website!

Every media company knows that if they are not appearing on page 1 of search engine results for their news specific keywords, they are likely to be missing out on thousands of targeted visitors and potential ad revenue, whilst competitors benefit.

However, research from Majestic SEO highlight that some of Iceland’s top media organisations are failing to market themselves online, restricting their online brand reputation and visibility.

(Buzz table below is updated daily)

Only 6 out of the 8 major media organisations tested currently appear in the Majestic Million, a Buzz table, of internet sites which ranks the top million global websites according to their connections from other sites.

When I talked to my friend Dixon Jones, who serves as the Marketing Director of Majestic SEO he commented, “The table is updated every day so as an international metric of who’s talking to and about you, it’s out there on its own. It provides a benchmark of how your site is performing and a comparative measure against your competitors.” – In this case I used Icelandic Media sites as a sample.

In the digital age, media companies need to be investing in online marketing in order to compete for viewers’ attention. Organisations that fail to focus on their search engine positioning will soon start to lose out to those already focusing on making themselves more visible to the web.”

Majestic Millions is a new way to rank websites based on how other sites see them. Based on Majestic SEO’s link analysis engine, the site explorer tracks and ranks the top 1 million websites based on how many sites link to them.

Bottom line: Majestic’s index is now the largest commercially available Link Intelligence map on the planet including the Moon and Mars :-)

Sometimes you see strangest things on Google,like the screen shots I am showing here. When searching Iceland news on Google I found some good sites but in the advertising column Google was as they often do suggesting related results. In this case some material on Japan, the similarity between Iceland and Japan is however not much. We both like Whale meat and both countries are Islands.

We are used to Google confusing Iceland to Ireland, but Japan (personally I love the country) that is a stretch.

I will be speaking at the ‘Multilingual International Internet Marketing and Comms’ session as part of the Gulltaggen 2011 Internet Marketing conference, to be held between 12th and 14th April.

Gulltaggen is the Nordic countries’ and Norway’s most important event for digital marketing, communication, innovation, leadership and creativity, and is by far the best arena for sharing competence, knowledge and networking.

During my session, I will talk about online marketing and public relations in a multilingual environment and illustrate my points using case studies, site audits and best practices based on my 10 years’ consulting experience.

Approaching foreign markets is not as easy as ABC and understanding that your target markets have different cultures and ways of looking at web sites make it so a general approach is not likely to get you full impact of your online campaign.

Also speaking at the session will be Nils M. Apeland. Apeland will speak about the benefits and importance of building and maintaining a strong reputation. He will address how corporate reputations are built, protected and restored online and offline – and illustrate that the one dimension does not exclude the other. Corporate actions and words have never been scrutinized more closely than today and reputation management is more important than ever.

I hope you see some of you there!

The final session of the day in hall 2 is one of case studies in the arena of social media. We start off with Li Evans speaking about what LiBeck does when it goes in and helps a company.

The biggest first point is making sure the company has the will and the resources to do what you want it to do.

Viral isn’t everything. A video can still work even if it doesn’t go viral. Just having a video can provide a 30% sales increase over pictures alone.

Research where your audience is and what they do. Think beyond one channel, plan a strategy, understand your goals and plan to expand. Then analyse results!

Next up are Jonathan Baker and Russell Harmon from eNewsPR who are talking about content managing. Content management is the creation and distribution of source information to throw stories out there yourself without waiting for third party pickup.

eNewsPR uses its own media to push its stories, including several websites which they use to push positive messages for customers.

The aim is for this unique content to be picked up by third parties – which it usually is. The content should not be blatant promotion, but rather educate, inform and inspire. Make it relevant to the reader and target it to the localities, ages groups and genders you want.

Close a gap. This means that your content should fill a gap by answering a question or problem; although it must also be well-written. A poorly written piece can actually hinder a customer’s campaign. Next, make sure it is relevant to your company and that you provide proof or backup for what you are saying.

The final speaker of the day is Alex Jónsson from Hvíta Húsið. Alex is here to speak about two case studies from online promotions the company has been working on. One social media project gave runners in the Reykjavik marathon personal profiles through which to fundraise. The profiles linked to email and Facebook and resulted in over three times more donations to charities than in 2009.

The second example is what the company used in creating Iceland’s most successful ever banner ad. It wasn’t flashy, but it was placed in very good positions on news websites and looked like part of them. Less is more. Location, location, location.

And with that, the floor was opened to questions and the formal programme came to a close. The cocktail party and informal networking session follows in the exhibition hall.

The RIMC internet marketing expo will be in the Smáralind exhibition hall all weekend. So come along if you are in Reykjavík!

Online crisis management is the name of the next session in hall 2. The first speaker in this session is Nils Apelund from First House. After two humorous anecdotes from the real world involving Canada, grapefruits and a quick-thinking boy, Nils goes on to apply the real world of crisis management to the online world.

Reputation is a great base to start from because it is an automatic draw in many ways and will bring goodwill and money all by itself. A good reputation is also a great cushion in times of crisis, buying you goodwill and extra time.

Reputation is a reflection of your identity. It is the part of your identity that the world sees and that it remembers – even when you’re not in the room. Reputation starts at home with your actual actions. Doing good things is the best way to improve reputation.

Identify your stakeholders. Find out what they are saying about you already. Ask what is important to them. Compare that to what you are already communicating about. And finally harmonise these factors.

Over-delivering on your promises is a great reputation builder – even if it means you need to under-promise.

When a crisis hits, Nils says it is the test of a reputation. Monitor the crisis, find out the facts and limit the crisis. An example was the recent grounding of Eimskip’s Goðafoss container ship off Norway which leaked oil. Eimskip did the best possible thing in the situation and that was to say sorry early and promise to sort the mess. It also helped that the spill was not as bad as feared. If you don’t apologise, another strategy is to fight the crisis. The third option is to fix the problem and over-deliver in making it right.

As great as communicating with the press is, don’t forget your own media. Your website, your Facebook and Twitter are extremely valuable during crises. The next thing to do is clean up after the crisis and get rid of its presence online.

Next up to the podium is Guðmundur Gunnlaugsson from Clara who speaks about the process of crisis management within closed communities. Clara specialises in text mining to allow businesses to electronically tag what people are saying about them online.

Guðmundur says that major corporate crisis of image spread rapidly and action in the first 24 hours is critical. A case study is Iceland’s CCP (maker of EVE Online) and the wave of protest that came when it was realised that the company wanted to change over to a microtransaction model that would allow people to buy vanity items in the game and pay to revamp their characters. CCP quickly convened its player council to decide what to do, as well as monitoring the massive online buzz. In the end they decided to cancel the character upgrades while allowing the introduction of vanity items. The result was moderately favourable and the crisis was largely averted.

What was different about this crisis to other ones? Mostly that it occurred in their own backyard among their own players who they know a lot about and who they can communicate with effectively. This is very different to a global viral campaign against BP or Dell, for example.
Text mining is important these days because of the speed, its wide coverage, its good general overview and the fact that more text is published than anyone could ever read. Text mining allows you to profile likely trouble starters beforehand and work out how to interact with them before any crisis even begins.

Text mining can help you guess people’s age, sex, personality type, education level and more – just by the way they write. This puts you in a powerful position in dealing with them.

Next on stage is Mikkel deMib, Ninja SEO, whose first point is that although we have the right to free speech, if we can promote the positive things said about us and suppress the negative, then we should.

Keywords are the key to search engine management. Find the best keywords and be more specific than you would be with marketing. Focus on impact rather than quantity.

You can then rate the top 10-30 URLs in search on their positivity or negativity and end up with a concrete number to describe your reputation.

So what to do about it? One thing is to promote the positive at the expense of the negative. Another is simply to find out who is saying the statements against you if they are illegal and in your jurisdiction. But never call your lawyer as a first step because they do not help online reputation.

You can’t expect to outrank negative websites; but you can use a wide variety of different outlets to try and push bad ones down and beat them with positive. If one prominent website has a positive and a negative story about you, you can link build heavily to the positive one, thereby promoting it more in Google.

Staying within the law of governments and culture, remember that financial enticements are considered fine in many places and that negative websites can often simply be bought.

Now, switching over to the Search and Display track in hall 4, Cederic Chambaz is explaining the ethos behind Bing.

Microsoft’s latest foray into the search market in opposition to Google, Cederic explains how Bing is not trying to replicate Google, but rather offer something completely different.

Every day Bing has a beautiful new photo homepage and the site’s visual search is so much more than just an image search. Visual search allows you to narrow down your search using pictures and without typing a single word. For example, luxury holidays in May in France.

Bing is already the best search engine for conversions. Google is great for driving through traffic volume, but Bing is better at converting to custom. A UK Bing user is 49% more likely to purchase from a site than average.

But with such a tiny market share, how is Bing expanding? The first thing is the Bingification of Microsoft: Hotmail, MSN, Microsoft.com all powered by Bing. Even Facebook and Yahoo! are Bing partners now. Then there is also traditional advertising striving to raise awareness on TV and the like.

The Bing/Yahoo! link up is bringing Bing into some 40 markets and a global audience of 600+ million searchers. In short, it is an aggressive programme.

Next on stage is Mikkel DeMib, search evangelist. Mikkel has come to share his theory predicting what search engines are going to do in the future. The core of his argument is “do not optimise for search engines” – adding “optimise for web users”!

What has changed most about search is partly that algorithms have changed so much and are now so complicated they cannot be revere engineered easily. Spam protection is now much more advanced and harder to trick – but still not impossible. Although spams and cheats are quick to disappear.

Why not optimise for search engines any more? Well, for a start, the search engines these days are developing themselves to provide exactly what the user wants; so optimising for the user has sort of become optimising for the search engines too.

In the afternnon keynote presentation, Search and Display Focus – Alain Heureux, President & CEO IAB Europe covers the vital topic of data protection online and the ways to regulate and protect the use of informaion online in a way that protects privacy at the same time as allowing freedom for the individual user as well as the advertiser.

Street ma4, 4Square, Facebook and the good old cookie are all under attack from the EU and other regulators in their quest to protect web users. When the cookie law comes in later this year, it is up to each individual EU country to decide whether cookies should be opt-in or opt-out. Alain makes a passionate argument that cookies should be opt-out. In other words, people should not need to specifically ask webistes to remember their passwords and language of chouce, for example.

But what about the future of online marketing? Well, today it is poorly targeted, poorly explained and far too cheap. We can boost demand and quality by making the process of online marketing simpler and therefore more mainstream.

Following this highly interesting keynote speech, the floor opened to questions from the audience.