Are marketers closing the database of human intention and reaching the holy grail of marketing, with 100% transparency of the users, the people they are targeting? This evolution can be traced back to 2001 when Google opened Google Zeitgest and with that we could see and understand better the searcher and use that data to help us get better results. Microsoft opened their MSN AdLab tool and with that the dimension of age and gender was added to the equation.

Then entered the world of social media and the applications and tools that came with it and now with opt in “Check-in” applications so now the gap has been closed from the purchase and onsite analytics, to the query, from there to the social graph like who I am and who I know. From there we have the status update though micro-blogging , what am I doing and now with the help mobile phones “where am I”.

The “Check-in” is a statement of “here I am what do you have to offer?”

According to IBM survey on “television sets are losing ground to the internet”, conducted in 2007, 66 percent responded spent one to four hours in front of the television versus 60 percent on the internet. That was 2007.

So 2009, television is in one corner of the arena and Internet is in the other. Who is going to be the winner?

I personally have not had TV over 5 years, do not miss it or use it. Among the people I know, I am not the only one. Since getting my own place my dear Internet has replaced TV, radio, books, magazines, newspapers and occasionally telephone. The amount of online resources offers every thing from broadcasts, cartoons, radio to any entertainments.

The power behind Internet is the choice of information. What to watch, listen, and read, when or how long as well as freedom to share my opinion about anything that is happening in the world. TV shows, music, news, chatting, working, study, reading, games anything really.

Some people may say they like TV for documentaries well go to Google video. There you can find documentaries two hours long on any thing. If you know where to look, Internet provides so much more than TV, rather than just watch somebody talking, one can actually access real resources.

One other thing, time spend on flicking TV channels with hope to find something interesting to watch is over for me. Watching DVDs or downloaded shows with my friends is just normal, however one day will get 32″ Display monitor.

Welcome to today’s live blogging from the Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference here on OptimizeYourWeb.

We are getting under way right away, as is often the way of things. The welcome speech from Ingvar Hjálmarsson was light and entertaining but now the keynote speaker Rand Fiskin is on stage.

He is starting with something of a summary of methods used in internet marketing: blogging, SEO, PPC and the like. Which of these channels is appropriate for me as a company?

Rand’s personal feeling is that Conversion Rate Optimization is the crème de la crème of internet marketing…despite the fact that he works in SEO. Landing Page Optimization is important in bumping up the conversion rate. In fact, a simple experiment SEOmoz conducted increased the CR from 1.8 to 2.2 – meaning several million dollars extra revenue per year.

On SEO, he says that using the search engine analytical tools allows you to find out the query volume, and their relevance. SEO is fundamentally linked to links – three quarters or more in fact.

Affiliate Marketing is of moderate importance only, because your product simply has to appeal to your affiliates. Affiliates are just looking for the biggest pay outs with the smallest effort, so it’s difficult to get successful there.

Banner ads are great for branding, but much less so for direct click throughs.

Social Media Marketing is great just because most people participate, and getting individuals interested in your community.

The next step is to use web analytics in order to optimise your optimisation. Applying the results to business practice can then be tested with low intensity tests. Although the small scale of the testing is a limit, but Rand loves it because the cost and effort of doing it is tiny – but its results are still an important indicator on what to do with the channel in the future.

The internet is such a trackable medium, the costs and benefits of investments should be easy to keep track of. And that is simply essential. Keep your finger constantly on the pulse of how you are spending money and what it is netting you.

On a similar note, competitor analysis helps too. Are your competitors investing heavily in an area you’re not? Are they stupid, or is it something you should be in? Is there room or is the market full?

In conclusion, Rand is going to make some predictions for the future – despite the fact that he hates doing so!

Firstly check out the Reykjavik Intenret Marketing Conference Expo – Or RIMC next week, 20th of March.

“Russia is the fastest growing search market in Europe but it’s easiest to get you money out of Brazil” Says Andy Atkins Kruger in his presentation. The emerging markets are Brazil, Russia, India and China or BRIC as it’s called. Russia is quite target-able through cities as some are larger than the whole population of countries in Europe.

The conference just started and It looks good, John Brenne of Webcertain Oslo gave a good introduction of things to come and Andy took over and is now talking about the the diffirent language markets focusing on the above BRIC.

India is a market that not so many target, it seams a forgotten market. The growth of Internet usage is great, even though the country only holds only 10% of the Asian Market.

In China Baidu holds some 73% at the expense of Yahoo but Google holds a string position. Andy also says that Google is the largest in the world, yes sir.

So what are the issues managing campaigns and what are the main elements “SEO, Paid Search and Social Networks” – Use UTF-8 (Unicode), this is important across the line, especially when you look at Google and how it uses UTF-8. Then Andy mentions 301′s and SEO localization, Keyword research, Glossary, Translation then Optimize and polish in the end. Remember alternative spellings and words that you might be missing out on.

The France are very dependant on Google correcting them when they search, they leave out parts of words and let Google correct them, and Google does that but not always. Don’t force languages to them that they might not want, make them choose by them selfs.

When Google comes in it Spiders and then check’s the language on the page and that helps then put the search results forward.

At Nordic eMarketing, one of our big goals right now is help even more companies to increase and strengthen their presence on the Scandinavian markets. We are therefore really excited about the latest report on digital media consumer behavior and trends in the Nordic and Baltic countries, from one of Scandinavia’s largest telecom providers, Telia Sonera.

The report divides digital media consumers up into four different categories, “tech parents”, “iToddlers”, “infomaniacs” and “IT high society”. The latest group is defined as the most important and influential one. The report even appoints the “IT high society” as the new “upper class” of digital media consumers.

The common denominator for this group of consumers is that they consider constant access to Internet connectivity through a computer and/or mobile phone as essential for their social life. They consider the time spent online as an investment in nurturing relationships, creating new ones and building a social identity. They see the opportunities of constant connectivity offered by mobile technology as a natural extension of themselves in a social context. Sixty percent use their mobile devices to surf the Internet regularly and seventeen percent goes online with their mobile phone every day. Almost 40 percent even use the mobile phone in bed.

Almost half of the IT high society population read blogs regularly, compared to one third of the population in general.

What differs the IT high society most from all of the other consumer categories in the report is that it is the strive for social connection and communication that drives curiousness for exploring new technology rather than strive for search of information.

The IT high society consists of a fifth of the adult population in the surveyed countries. A majority of them are women (60 percent) and one third are 25 years of age or younger.

Even though the IT high society can still be considered an elite, it is expected to grow in a rapid pace and to have increased considerably in size by the end of 2009. The report also points out that even though this group is ahead in using digital media and the Internet, the remaining parts of the population in the surveyed countries are in no way an “under class” in digital media consumption. It is rather to be considered as a mainstream “middle class” of users with a relatively small but growing knowledge and interest for the social aspects offered by digital technology.

To successfully create a dialogue with this growing group of demanding and fastidious consumers will be a requirement for many companies that target Scandinavia with their Internet marketing. At Nordic eMarketing, we feel confident that our knowledge of Scandinavian market landscapes and our holistic approach to digital marketing makes us well equipped to help companies continue to achieve success in Scandinavia.

Despite trends in former recessions of decreased marketing, there are signs that many companies might keep their marketing efforts unchanged or even increased this time around.

For the airline industry which is traditionally very recession sensitive, this might be particularly true. The flight industry magazine, Airline Business, in its latest issue publishes the results of a survey conducted among 22 top level airline executives. The surveyed focuses on the airlines marketing directions and size of their marketing budgets for 2009. Interestingly, as much as 60 percent of the participating airlines claim that it is important to invest more in marketing during a recession, to stimulate demand.

Compared to last year, only 15 percent of the contributing airlines plan to decrease their marketing budget. 45 percent plan to keep the size of their marketing budgets unchanged while 30 percent of the airlines plan to spend more and 10 percent plans to spend “significantly” more. Birkir Holm Gudnason of Icelandair says in the article that his company intends to spend 10 to 20 percent more on marketing this year, compared to last, adding that Icelandair conducted a similar marketing effort as a direct response to the markets reaction of the 9/11 incidents.

In terms of marketing strategy, 81 percent of the responding airlines viewed the Internet as being very important to their marketing strategies. 57 percent responded that they would spend more money on Internet marketing this year compared to last and a further 29 percent said that they would spend “significantly” more. 75 percent of the airlines recognized optimization of their websites as a “very” important cornerstone of Internet marketing while the remaining 25 percent graded it as “important”. Search engine optimization and focus on achieving high organic search results was graded “important” or “very” important by 75 percent of the airlines.

Among the vast majority of respondents that valued Internet marketing, many mentioned social networking forums such as Facebook as interesting opportunities to look into. Some of the responding airlines are further ahead than others in exploring Internet marketing strategies. One of the Internet marketing front runners among airlines is Icelandair. Its CEO Birkir Holm Gudnason interestingly enough says that they have tried social network marketing in recent years but are going back to focus on visibility through search engine optimization as it has generated the best ROI for them so far.

Although we at Nordic eMarketing are very pleased that more and more companies are realizing the impact and strength of search engine optimization in the long term perspective we are devoted to all types of Internet marketing methods, not the least social networking. We are even happier that we keep hearing about companies and industries which will keep the size of their marketing efforts unchanged and maintain or even strengthen their brand communication during the coming years of recession. We are convinced that the players who spend their money wisely and a large part of it on Internet marketing will come out as the strongest on the other side of the recession.

Sometimes its good to be taken back a few steps and being reminded of the world that is inhabited by “normal” Internet users. Working professionally everyday with the Internet as a sales and marketing channel, easily makes you loose the perspective of those people. The people that are the end receivers of our clients messages and products.

Luckily though, an article in The Mail on Sunday on the 15th of February reminded me of the Internet reality that actually reigns out there outside of our office walls. Entitled “Millions lost by firms who ignore the net”, the article reveals that six out of ten British companies do not use the Internet to sell their products, even though they are quite happy to use the Internet to buy goods and services for their organizations. A survey on small businesses (up to 50 people) showed that four out of five use their website to showcase their goods rather than sell it. Even more surprising, 67 percent believed that they would not find customers online if they were to try. Considering the fact that 20 billion pounds was spent online during 2008, it feels safe to assume that they are wrong and that they are loosing out on considerable earnings by not incorporating the Internet as a serious marketing and sales channel.Our experience, among clients and partners that sell their product online as well as in physical stores, is that an online store usually outperforms physical ones in terms of turnover, distribution and sales volume per store. Likewise, our clients experience that active Internet marketing (rather than passive showcasing of products) such as SEO and online PR, more effectively generates substantially higher (and fully measurable) ROI, visibility and brand attention compared to marketing in traditional medias.

In the article in The Mail on Sunday, Phil McCabe of the UK forum of Private Business conforms this by emphasizing the need for businesses to become more cost effective in the current financial situation. Saying that the Internet is often a simpler and more cost effective way of boosting business.

For a web marketer the reporting in the article are stunning. Twice I had to check the date of the paper in my hand. Does it say the 15:th of February 2005? No, it is 2009. If it wasn’t for the mentioning of the financial crisis and the Obama article in the same issue, I would probably have taken it for a printing error.

From this, I can only conclude that we in the Internet marketing industry are still facing a huge communication challenge concerning what we do and how we can help virtually any company achieve higher ROI on their marketing budget. It is essential that we work to distance ourselves from the “tech geek” image and present ourselves and our knowledge to marketing decision makers as the choice of the future.

More on how we achive this in future postings.

I am starting to see more and more companies out there specializing in online reputation management and ePR. We have been doing this since 2005 inspired by such good people as Greg Jarboe www.seo-pr.com. what we have seen more and more are consultants and programs that tell you that there is a problem but can do little to implement the help needed to deal with the problem or help boost the positive impact out there.

Key questions as what to do if you company is under a brand attack online? How doe deal with that? How do you implement your online crisis management plan or for that matter create it? The list of questions goes on and on. Through Nordic eMarketing services eNews PR we have been working with companies on a multilingual scale creating in cooperation with traditional PR companies and Communication departments strategies dealing with scenarios that have had unforeseen effects on companies and peoples reputation among other.

The site IcelandGourmetGuide.com made it to the „Best New Websites“ section of Web Users, did not get a full house but three out of four stars, not all bad. Little Web 2.0 options such as interaction with each restaurant, external rating options but beside that, three stars. For me the site looks little one dimensional and as stated in the review „Sadly, the restaurant guide to Reykjavik is disappointingly thin and there‘s nowhere for interested visitors to interact“. I am how sure that the site owners will fix this.

couple of other sites on Iceland:

www.dining.is
www.travelnet.is
www.hotels.is
www.nat.is

I was recently speaking at a conference in SMX and one of the topics I talked about was online reputation management, while me and my colleagues where talking afterwards one of the mentioned a story that I am writing about.  A producer at CNN (ex producer now) had his own blog and wrote about pop culture, politics and media, guy was recovering from a surgery and used his dead time to write and as sometimes happens his site became quite popular. Never revealing anything that could connect him to his employer he wrote about topics that where close to his heart but eventually someone found out at CNN and when the guy returned to his job his bossed called him and he was told that opinions had surfaced that had his name pined to it and he was fired. It was against the company handbook to do what he had been doing.
The moral of the story? Read the Company handbook before you start blogging and think before you write.