B2B Marketers Should Embrace "Tire Kickers"

Should marketers avoid paying for prospects who are early in the buying process and not ready to submit personal information or be contacted by a sales person? Should these "tire kickers" be avoided so that marketers can focus their attention on generating more valuable, sales-ready leads? While this approach may seem logical at first, I believe it is short-sighted and ultimately leaves a lot of money on the table.

Early-buying-phase searchers
One of the biggest challenges I've experienced working with B2B marketers is overcoming their belief that if a searcher doesn't immediately register, sign-up, download, or complete a Contact Us form - then the prospect is not valuable and not worth the effort or the price of the click.
Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. I believe there is huge value in utilizing search marketing to reach prospects early and frequently throughout the entire buying cycle - including the very first stages. Getting in front of prospects early allows you to cost-effectively support your brand, generate a larger volume of high-quality leads, and improve overall marketing ROI.
Understand how business buyers use search engines

According to recent research from Forrester and Enquiro's 2007 B2B Survey, business buyers use search engines most frequently at the beginning of the buying process, during the awareness and research phases. Buyers actually use search engines less frequently when they are ready to negotiate and purchase a high-consideration product or service.

My colleague Jon Miller also supports this premise and recently wrote about buyers using search engines early in the process and long before they are ready to engage with a sales person.
Align your search programs with buyer behavior
Instead of being frustrated by this fact, or ignoring the realities of buyer behavior, B2B marketers should embrace this process and proactively align their marketing programs with the various phases of the buying cycle.

For example, let's look at a search advertising campaign for a company selling database software.

Early-Phase CampaignA successful pay-per-click (PPC) search ad campaign designed to reach early-phase prospects would have the following attributes:

Keywords include general, broad search phrases such as: database application software and database software information.

Ad copy appeals to researchers and fact finders and might include statements such as: database market trends or database application tips and advice.

Landing pages provide general market information and calls-to-action such as: download market trend report or review database application options.

Late-Phase CampaignIn contrast, a late-phase search campaign would look like this.
Keywords are much more specific and include many long-tail phrases such as: web based medical databases.

Ad copy may focus on specific features, product comparisons, and buying tips. For example: Compare database application features or Find the right application for you.
Landing pages offer information and downloadable assets that address specific buying needs such as: Download product and pricing options. View software comparison chart. Request a custom quote, or, yes... Contact Us.

Manage multiple types of programs

To reach the largest number of qualified prospects, marketers must manage multiple types of programs designed to proactively reach prospects at various phases of the buying process.
Understanding this requirement is critical to search marketing success, because the brutal reality is... not everyone who finds your site is a sales-ready lead. Remember, not all conversions are qualified inquiries and not all inquires are qualified leads. A lead scoring and nurturing program is required to fully capitalize on search-generated inquires and to convert web inquiries into bonafied sales leads.

Track prospects' behavior over time

How can you determine if first time clickers later become inquiries, leads, and customers? Marketers should track first-time visitors, and their subsequent visits, and their online actions over time. Segment your web analytics data as needed, but at least identify and separate all visitors, search visitors, and paid search visitors. The idea is to understand prospects' behavior before they become a conversion or a lead.

You will see that over time, a percentage of first time clickers who do not take any desired action (i.e. tire kickers) return to your website and sign-up for email information, download a white paper, or register for a webinar. And eventually, some will request to be contacted by a sales representative -- becoming leads and ultimately customers.

Embrace the buying process

Remember, business buyers go through a process; a process that involves search engines -- especially at the beginning. Very few searchers become qualified sales leads on their first visit. More often, the process takes time and requires multiple searches and visits before a meaningful sales interaction can take place.

Embrace the fact that prospects use search engines early and frequently, and are in control of their own buying process. Get your brand in front of these prospects. Proactively penetrate the market segments you want to pursue. Differentiate yourself from the competition.
Strive to track prospects after the first click and before the conversion event. Measure repeat visits and website actions over time. I think you'll find that tire kickers are a lot more valuable than you originally thought!

Source: Search Engine Land

First Annual Survey of Top Marketing Trends for 2008

Web and Green Marketing are hot, Women, Gen X and Y, and Hispanics Catching Up to Boomers, but Marketing Basics are More Important than Ever

The Marketing Executives Networking Group, an almost 1700 member organization of leading marketers who are at a VP-level or above in their organizations, today issued the results of its first annual survey of Top Marketing Trends for 2008. The survey of MENG members, conducted by Anderson Analytics, focused on top marketing concepts, buzz words, global areas of opportunity, targeted customer demographics, as well as the books that marketers look to for inspiration and growth opportunity.

While the marketers weighed in on many marketing concepts a few key areas emerged. Marketing basics (60% “Very Important”) which include specific concepts such as customer satisfaction, customer retention, segmentation, brand loyalty and ROI were of greatest interest. Interestingly, Search Engine Optimization (42%) had relatively wide appeal, and cut across marketers in all fields. “Green Marketing” (32%) was another important emerging concept and it was identified as the trendiest marketing buzzword.

“Senior marketers are facing an increasingly complex world with new technologies and new market segments rising to the fore” said Chandra Chaterji, a member of the MENG Board of Directors.

In regard to Global Issues, China is viewed as the region with the best future opportunity (52%); India is a distant second (20%). Few marketers saw other regions such as Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Latin America, Brazil, Russia, and Mexico, as comparable opportunities. In terms of another important global issue, Out-Sourcing/Off-Shoring, the majority of marketers (77%) reported that their companies do not off-shore any part of the marketing function. Half of senior marketers are not in favor of off-shoring any part of the marketing function, while just under a quarter view it favorably.

“This finding is not surprising” said Tom H. C. Anderson, Founder & Managing partner of Anderson Analytics “off shoring is not just limited to customer telephone call centers any more. A lot of companies are engaging in ‘knowledge process offshoring’ (KPO) which includes everything from customer data processing to more advanced marketing analytics. For instance in my specific area of marketing, market research, almost all of the larger companies are trying their hand at offshoring while trying to keep it as quiet as possible”.

When asked about the most important customer demographics senior marketing executives rank Baby Boomers highest with 88% ranking them as either very important or somewhat important. What may be surprising is the fact that Gen X (86%), Hispanics (86%), Women (85%) and Gen Y (84%) are catching up to Boomers as customer targets.

Senior-level Marketing Executives read avidly to stay abreast of information and gain insights for their business. The most popular books are not necessarily the most recently published given that Good to Great, The World is Flat, and Blink were the top three most recently read books. In terms of all time favorite business book ever read, three in five executives were eager to make a recommendation to their fellow marketers. Topping the list were: Good to Great, Positioning, and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Richard Guha, Chairman of MENG, in announcing this study, said, “this is the first of a series of studies by MENG which will make a major contribution to the growing effectiveness of marketing.”

The Marketing Trends Survey was fielded by Anderson Analytics among current MENG members between October 19 and November 20 of 2007. Anderson Analytics used text mining software to code open-ended/free form text answers to questions in order to truly understand what issues were top-of-mind among the senior executives. The 607 responses yield overall statistics with a confidence interval of +/-3.98% at the 95% confidence level.

The Marketing Executive Networking Group (MENG) is the premier organization of senior level marketing professionals who have reached at least the VP level in their organization. This 1,600+ member not-for-profit networking community fosters career and personal success by sharing information and relationships for mutual assistance across virtually all industries and marketing specialties. Eighty four percent of the members have Fortune 500 experience and 70% have earned graduate degrees, the majority of which are from top-20 Business Schools. To learn more go to www.MENGonline.com.

Source: Huliq.com

Gut feelings, nothing more than gut feelings

In the recent book Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer makes the case for intuition. Curiously, many assessments of the book took for granted that his arguments, familiar to readers of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, cut against conventional wisdom--that trusting intuition is, in fact, counterintuitive. As one friendly interviewer, casting Gigerenzer as a contrarian, put it: "In modern society, gut thinking has a bad reputation."

Oh, really? Maybe it's true that at some point we all promised our parents that we'd be careful, rational, empirical decision makers, but beyond that, it's not easy to find evidence that ours is a society that frowns on gut thinking. Are the narratives of popular culture dominated by super-rational heroes triumphing over seat-of-the-pants gut-trusting bad guys? Actually, it's just the opposite: From Captain Kirk to Indiana Jones to Rambo to Tony Soprano to the hero of every Western ever made, we're drawn to the character who follows a hunch and wins.

And it's just as true in the business world. Who idolizes the plodding studiers of spreadsheets? Nobody. The most widely celebrated heroes of capitalism are the Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, or Mark Cuban types--the ones who scorn what the focus groups and the gurus say and follow their superior instincts into the highest possible tax bracket. Even corporate honchos whose success has had much to do with number crunching know that the rest of us look up to those who defy the odds, not those who play them. Did Jack Welch call his first book Notes Regarding Efficiency Gains Related to Six Sigma? No. He called it Jack: Straight From the Gut.

Or consider a pop-culture narrative that is partly about business. The heroine of William Gibson's best-selling 2003 novel, Pattern Recognition, is one of the most gut-driven characters ever: Cayce Pollard, a professional cool hunter, hired by corporations because her almost-supernatural instincts for whether, say, a certain logo would catch on in the marketplace trump all data and research. All she has to do is look at it, and she knows.

Amusingly, Pollard has basically become the model for scores of real-life trend spotters who present themselves as golden-gut types--and who seem to have no trouble finding corporate clients who haven't gotten the memo about gut thinking's "bad reputation."

Most of us, then, are quite open to hearing that we should trust our hunches. That's what we do most of the time, anyway. And that's precisely why trust-your-gut arguments are so popular--they're telling us exactly what we want to hear. Exhibit A: Blink, Gladwell's entertaining 2005 best-seller, which draws in part on Gigerenzer's research. Blink is actually pretty careful in its treatment of when gut instincts help us and when they fail us, but it's the bit about trusting your instincts that caught many readers' attention.

After all, like Gigerenzer's book, Blink's arguments were backed by hard data. Now there's the ultimate payoff: rational proof that we can stop worrying about rational proof.

But you're not really surprised to hear that, are you? I bet you knew it all along. I bet you could feel it. In your gut.

Source: FastCompany

Marketers Threaten To Put Majority Of Budget Online

BIG-NAME BRAND MARKETERS ARE FED up with traditional media channels and are threatening to shift the lion's share of their budgets online, according to Nick Brien, worldwide CEO of Universal McCann.

"If this happens for another year, significant clients will want to walk," Brien said at an Interactive Advertising Bureau conference on Monday in reference to a general climate of discontent due to increasing viewer fragmentation, disruptive technologies, and the resulting decrease in ROI.

Without naming any specific clients, Brien added they are "just waiting to increase their online spend to 50% or 60% [of their total budgets]."

According to eMarketer projections, Web advertising as a share of total ad spend will reach 7.4% this year, more than 10% by 2009, and at least 13.3% by the end of 2011.

"Shifts among marketers away from traditional media would make U.S. advertising growth flat-line without the Internet," said David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer.

The increased spending on online ads is coming from a mix of additional allocations and budget shifts from other media, and TV may be in for the largest losses. Among the largest companies, 42.4% of marketing executives recently told BusinessWeek that TV would take the biggest hit in ad budgets in the next few years.

Brien also took a moment to dispute statements made this weekend by Maurice Lévy, chairman and chief executive of Publicis, to the effect that the industry was approaching the kind of hyper-inflated economics that led to the so-called dot-com crash in 2000-01.

"He doesn't give enough credit to the serious ad dollars being redirected to growing audiences online," Brien says of Lévy.

And at the end of the day, a solid brand is still one of the "most valued and most exciting mechanisms" a marketer can possess, according to Brien.

That notion was seconded by Brad Brinegar, chairman and CEO of Havas' McKinney, who described a brand as "that most valuable asset."

Brinegar predicts that over 50% of McKinney's business will be digital in less than two years. "But don't talk about how interactive [digital] is a way to do something cheap," he says.

"To do it right costs money," Brinegar adds. "It's just allocated in different ways."

Source: Mediapost

It's Not About New Media, It's About New Marketing

To Nick Brien, worldwide CEO of Universal McCann, the notion of new media is almost irrelevant. "When clients say, 'Talk to me about new media,' I say, 'No I am not going to talk to you about new media, I am going to talk to you about new marketing,'" he said.

Mr. Brien said the marketing model has fundamentally changed with emerging media, and if marketers don't progress, they will jeopardize their brands.

Avoiding 'legacy' thinking
"If you are not the leader, you are going to lose your market share opportunity to a new competitor who is not encumbered by legacy mentalities or legacy business models or legacy agency relationships," Mr. Brien said in his keynote address Nov. 6 at the interactive marketing conference Ad Tech in New York.

In this new marketing model -- where media enhances personality -- brands have to become experiences and destinations and consumer insight has to be smarter, Mr. Brien said.

"A brand is ultimately a promise ... it is something that is not ownable by a corporation any more," Mr. Brien said.

Helping consumers generate their own content is one of the smartest ways to embrace the new marketing model, Mr. Brien said, noting that marketers need to become experts in understanding the marriage between traditional aspects of persuasion-based marketing and user-generated influence.

He cited a Yahoo case study, which was shown during the online giant's upfront media-buying event last year, in which more than 200 Shakira fan groups were asked to record impersonations of her song "Hips Don't Lie," which ultimately became the No. 1 downloaded song of the summer.

"It was helped to no end that this was about users participating in brand development. And there was no conventional advertising around," Mr. Brien said.

Innovation and collaboration
The new marketing model also calls for innovation and collaboration among media and creative agencies and brands, Mr. Brien said. He cited a campaign executed by Universal McCann and Interpublic Group of Cos. sibling Lowe for Lynx deodorant in Australia. To target young adult males, the campaign used insight that men find air travel sexy and exciting and then created a campaign that centered around a fake airline. Spots were created to promoted the airline, complete with sexy stewardesses dressed in tight yellow dresses and carrying the line "Lynx Jet -- Get on, Get off." According to Mr. Brien, sales of the deodorant increased within four weeks of the campaign's launch.

"The old notion of integrating and being smart players is an absolute must. ... I don't know whether it's going to go back to full bundling in the way that it was, but the plan will come back together," Mr. Brien said.

He also acknowledged that some marketers are still hesitant about embracing the new marketing model, but that agencies must teach them to love new technology and not fear it.

"They always say that the two greatest motivators are love and fear, and I find that many agencies are playing the fear card -- 'The world is collapsing, the sky is falling.' I think it has to be a love thing."

Though the new marketing model may be frightening, it is also an opportunity, Mr. Brien said, "if we have the creative intellectual juice to come up with different approaches.

Source: Ad Age

Green doesn't necessarily mean socially conscious

Just claiming to be green in a tagline or company brochure doesn’t work anymore. Educated consumers are looking for companies that mirror their socially conscious values, per a study just released by BBMG, New York. Chief among these values are health and safety, corporate honesty, eco-friendliness, promoting local producers, and convenience, all of which factor into a consumer’s consideration. On behalf of BBMG, the Global Strategy Group, New York, polled roughly 2,000 adults from Sept. 11-17. They found that while price and quality were still paramount in consumers’ purchasing decisions—with 58% and 66% of respective respondents dubbing those traits “very important”—a growing number are showing concern about issues pertinent to social responsibility. For 41% of respondents, a product’s energy efficiency was a key factor, and 44% said that where a product is manufactured was important, beating out more typical considerations such as convenience, which was only considered very important by 34% of those polled. And for companies that meet those criteria, the payoffs are clear. According to the survey, 90% of consumers are more likely to buy products from a company that manufactures energy-efficient goods, and 88% were more likely to buy products that promote consumer health and safety. If a company supports fair labor and trade practices, or if the company commits to environmentally friendly practices, 87% of consumers said they were more likely to buy goods from that manufacturer. “Trust is perhaps the most important issue between these consumers and marketers; there has to be an alignment between what a company is promising and what it’s doing,” said Mitch Baranowski, founding partner of BBMG. The survey also asked respondents to rank those companies which they felt were the most socially conscious, and not surprisingly it reads as a roster of those who have put their money where their mouth is. Whole Foods Market led the pack with 22%, following by Newman’s Own at 19%, Wal-Mart at 18%, Burt’s Bees at 17% and GE, Johnson & Johnson and Ben & Jerry’s all tying at 16%. “For companies that are engaging this green consumer, it’s less about gaining traction, but about building relationships with these consumers,” Baranowski said.

Source: Brandweek

Study: Marketers must adjust to the gadget generation

The digital age is upon us and marketers need to react accordingly. A new study from IBM, being released today (Nov. 7), shows that changing media consumption patterns are marketers are following suit. The study found that 36% of respondents spent at least four to six hours of personal time on the Internet versus only 23% of respondents who spent that amount of time watching TV. Of the 888 respondents in the U.S. market, 26% spend at over 6 hours online each, versus only 16% watching television. The findings were based on the results of a global survey of 2,400 consumers and roughly 80 advertising executives in Australia, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. Marketing execs are reacting. Those surveyed estimated they would increase their spend on digital initiatives by 22.4% by 2010. This includes mobile, online, interactive TV and in-game ads. Spending on traditional ad media like broadcast, radio, print and outdoor will also increase albeit at a slower rate. Marketers said they will spend 4.4% more on traditional advertising. The study said marketers should be aware of the increasingly diverse digital platforms being used by consumers and effectively use these platforms to communicate impactful branded messages. For the U.S. market, popular digital devices included MP3 players (44% of U.S. consumers own one), game consoles (38%), high definition televisions (26%), media center PCs (26%) and DVR (24%). U.S. respondents also broke out the places where they got most of their entertainment content. The majority of it came from online sources. Social networks ranked the highest at 45%, trailed by user-generated sites like Youtube (29%), music services such as iTunes (24%), premium video content for TV (24%), and online newspaper subscriptions (18%). Understanding this shift is essential, especially when it comes to targeting the coveted 18 to 24 year-old demographic, said Saul Berman, global media and entertainment strategy leader at IBM, Los Angeles. “Today’s generation, when they graduate college, does not have a land line phone, but a mobile phone and the generation following them won’t have cable or satellite subscriptions. They get [their content] from the Internet via various digital devices…So you have to be appealing to all of these different mediums. Marketers have to start thinking about how they’re going to cross channel their communications and reach their consumers in all the different places, through all the different media, where they are.” But the survey’s results also reassure marketers that the revolution hasn’t yet happened. Of the U.S. consumers, 51% still said that major network TV ads were those that most affected their impression of a product or company. This was far greater than cable ads (18%), magazines (8%), newspapers (5%) and radio (4%). Internet ads grabbed only 8% of the vote, and mobile ads garnered 0.2%. “Traditional advertising still continues to be dominant but the ‘gadget generation’ is moving in, and while traditional ads will be the core of your business over the next 3 to 5 years, advertising will increasingly roll into new media,” said Berman. He stressed the need for advertising agencies to incorporate digital arms into their core business. “While digital agencies might start as separate arms, their services will increasingly need to be integrated into the main group. The advertisers are looking for [agencies] that can bring them a cross-platform solution. So, as the market [and consumer media consumption] fragments, the integration of [digital and traditional] capabilities becomes more and more important.”

Source: Brandweek

Lessons in creating brand fans. Chapter 1: Radiohead

No one knows yet if the paradigm shifted, but it sure feels like it: Radiohead's experiment with a PBS-style, pay-what-you-like business model seems to have worked. Now, we watch to see who else follows suit and whether the music industry will be forced to adjust to a post-"In Rainbows” world.

On Oct. 1, Radiohead announced it would sell "In Rainbows,” its first studio release since 2003's "Hail to the Thief,” only through the band's Web site beginning Oct. 10, with a vinyl/compact disc box available in December. Many people characterized this move by the former EMI band as a shot across the bow — a group telling the organized music industry that its services are no longer required, thank you very much, and leading the way for more acts to jump ship.

About 1.2 million people have downloaded "In Rainbows,” and Radiohead's decision to let customers pay as little or as much as they like averaged about $8 per download. Yes, some people did as many naysayers predicted and paid only the 95-cent credit card processing fee, but enough people offset those overly entitled robbers with their fair-mindedness. That average might not sound like much in a $12.99 world, but if $8 sounds like chump change, think again.

Keep in mind that most A-list musicians only retain about $1 from every CD sold. In sharp contrast, Radiohead keeps all the money made from the download-only version of "In Rainbows.”

To reap those kinds of rewards, most musicians working within the traditional music industry would have to move about 10 million units — 'N Sync circa "No Strings Attached” levels of marketplace hysteria.

Since "In Rainbows” launched, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, who recently had been complaining loudly about the industry and extolling his fans to steal NIN's latest disc, "Year Zero,” announced that he has parted ways with longtime label Interscope/Universal. And Madonna, who has been with Warner Bros. since 1983, left the company last week for a reported nine-figure deal with Live Nation that would include CD releasing, touring and merchandise.

The common thread with these acts is that they have all been ongoing concerns for at least 15 years, with established fan bases and thus built-in markets for their new music.

If more acts on this level take the Radiohead route and operate outside the major-label system, then EMI, Warner Music Group, Universal and Sony/BMG will become the province of emerging acts, bands and artists who need a marketing and distribution push. Then, when they become household names, those acts will become their own cottage industries.

Consider this: Fall Out Boy earned its major label contract after it proved it could market itself effectively through MySpace. Now that it has sold millions of records, how long will a band like that stay on Island/Def Jam if it has to split $1 per album between four members?

Source: NewsOK.com

M:Metrics Study: SMS Marketing Reaches 92.5 Million Active SMS Users

NeuStar, Inc. (NYSE: NSR - News) announced today that Common Short Code (CSC)-based messaging campaigns have been cited as an "unprecedented platform for marketing" in a recent report published by mobile media research firm M:Metrics. The M:Metrics report, which can be downloaded for free at the U.S. Common Short Codes website (www.USshortcodes.com), states that CSCs are an effective way to engage and drive consumer response across various media channels.

Accessible to more than 95 percent of mobile users, CSCs are short five- and six-digit numbers with which mobile phone users can send and receive text and multimedia messages using the capabilities that come standard with virtually every handset made. Among the many advantages CSCs provide to advertisers today are the greatest reach to mobile users (versus all other mobile marketing methods); user-generated opt-in; ease of use; very low cost; ease of channel integration; and demonstrated impact across a host of campaign types and objectives.

"In the United States, CSCs represent the only universal way for brands to connect with almost all mobile users," said Evan Neufeld, vice president and senior analyst at M:Metrics. "In August 2007, 92.5 million, or 43 percent, of mobile subscribers actively engaged in text messaging. Of these 92.5 million mobile subscribers, 41 million send text messages almost every day. Not only is this number impressive as a stand-alone figure, but it is exponentially higher than the potential reach of the next available mobile advertising method."

"CSCs create a level of interaction that is unparalleled in any other medium," said Diane Strahan, vice president of mobile at NeuStar. "The M:Metrics study offers detailed proof of what mobile marketing-savvy organizations across many industry verticals have speculated: that CSCs provide brands with the broadest and the most targeted way to reach today's mobile consumer. As texting continues to increase in popularity, advertising agencies and marketers are focusing more and more on CSCs as a preferred mobile medium of choice. These firms are embracing CSCs not only to reach today's on-the-go consumer directly, but also to transform traditional print, broadcast and outdoor advertising into truly interactive touchpoints -- thus building significant loyalty among key audiences."

Eco-Friendly Consumer Protection!

The competition watchdog is to clamp down on marketing schemes that claim all sorts of "green" benefits, including those associated with carbon credits.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission will check the authenticity of several green marketing products after receiving a growing number of complaints.

ACCC commissioner John Martin said the consumer protection provisions of the Trade Practices Act still applied to green marketing claims, irrespective of whether business was promoting "green" motor vehicles, "green" flights or "green" toilet paper.

"In light of the growing number of complaints, the ACCC is taking a closer look at a number of the green claims that are being made at the moment," he said, addressing a conference.

"All businesses need to ensure they are not misleading their customers with such claims."

Mr Martin said many people incorrectly believed green marketing referred solely to the promotion or advertising of products with environmental characteristics.

"Terms like 'phosphate-free', 'recyclable', 'eco-friendly', 'ozone friendly' and 'environmentally friendly' are terms consumers have in the past associated with green marketing," he said.

However, these claims were now being applied to consumer and industrial goods, services, and corporate and government activities.

Mr Martin said with consumers more worried about the environment, businesses that touted their green credentials had a competitive advantage. "If there is a green edge to be found, it will be exploited," he said.

Mr Martin said the latest and trendiest green claims were those such as "carbon neutral", "carbon offset" and "carbon footprint".

A largely unregulated carbon-cutting business had sprung up selling "offsets". These were projects that claimed to compensate for carbon emissions, such as planting trees or fertilising oceans.

"Consumers can carbon neutralise their car, their flight and, most recently, their household."

Mr Martin said it was necessary to query whether these claims were too good to be true and whether they truly delivered what consumers expected. "The ACCC intends to ramp-up its green compliance activities with a combination of business and consumer educative initiatives and targeted enforcement action," he said.

Source: Ad Age

Self SEO

Source: Smart Biz

You've worked hard to get your business found online, what what about *you*? For many small businesses, the owner/founder is the business. So make sure you can be found online.

The Importance of Ego-Surfing -- and Five Tips For Enhancing *Your* Profile Online

You've worked hard to get your business found online, what what about *you*? For many small businesses, the owner/founder is the business. So it's crucial to make sure you can be found online.

What got me started on this post was an item today on Web Worker Daily checking out so-called People Search Engines (more on those below). I went "un-found" in most of them...not particularly surprising but a bit alarming anyway.

As a writer/editor/one-man-shop, I've spent far too many hours producing way too many words in print and on the Web; I've also spent far too few hours actively trying to enhance my online profile.

I'm sure this is a familiar small business/sole-proprietor story: doing work rather than doing networking. But that's no excuse. Building your profile and reputation online is crucial to the success of your small business.

So-called "ego-surfing" may seem just that -- egotistical. But if your small business relies on your good name, and it most certainly does, then there's much to be gained by improving that good name online.

So below are a few tips to get started in improving your online profile. I'll also detail how I fare today when it comes to ego-surfing.

In a few weeks, and after applying some of my own tips, I'll follow up and report if I've been able to improve my rankings. Hopefully I'll score some more tips along the way that I can share.

And by the way: Do *you* have any better ideas or approaches? Please do let me know in the comments section at the end of this story.

Click to the next page to see Tip #1: Google Yourself

1. Google Yourself. It's not fun but necessary. Google your last name. Google your first and last name. How do you fare? Are you on the first page? Is someone competing with your namesake? Best to get an honest view of your starting point.

Click on for Tip #2: Do a People Search

2. Do a people search. These are fairly new engines, but why not get in on the ground floor? Star with Spock, Squidwho, WhoZat? and Wink. As a secondary step, search for yourself in a blog search engine like Technorati or Google Blog Search. See if you get any hits. For both people search and blog search, don't expect much in the way of results unless you are fairly well-known or an active blogger.

Click on for Tip #3: Conduct a personal SEO analysis

3. Conduct a personal SEO analysis. Why are you not getting found online? Is your name too common? Sorry Bob Smith, but you may be out of luck. More likely you are not producing content online, which is important to do even if it isn't your job (like me).

Click on for Tip #4: Start producing content online

4. Start producing content online. This may seem obvious, but it's the first step anyway. Secure your name as a URL. Produce a personal home page or start a blog there. If your small business has a Web site, start a blog there too. Why is blogging so important? Blogs generate the regular content that search engines love. These first two steps will go along way but it's the next step that will help your online profile soar.

Click on for Tip #5: Join the Social Web

5. Join the social Web. Here's the real catch-22: Your content -- and your name -- really needs to proliferate in order for search engines to have something to aggregate back into a search result. So...create a LinkedIn Profile or Facebook page. In addition to blogging, start Twittering out your whereabouts and to-dos. Start a Delicious social bookmark page. Contribute content to your customer and partner community -- not via columns or articles but simply by commenting on blogs or forums that cover your industry. Use your real name and include links back to your blog and/or social profile pages.

Hot: Flexible pets & more

Picture a woman stepping out of her car in Manolo Blahnik shoes as a toy pinscher lounges inside of the Louis Vuitton bag swinging from her shoulder. Once upon a time, you could almost safely assume that she was a member of the economic elite. But today it's possible that this woman is an average member of the middle class only minimally splurging to own the luxuries she's always fantasized about, including the dog--even if that ownership is partial or temporary.

Welcome to a consumer culture that's becoming increasingly comfortable with short-term and partial ownership, and to a world of businesses taking advantage of this booming market.

Changing Perceptions
Auction websites, in part, have fueled the popularity of this type of ownership, says Daniel Nissanoff, author the FutureShop: How the New Auction Culture Will Revolutionize the Way We Buy, Sell, and Get the Things We Really Want. "Markets like eBay have made products more liquid," he says. "We can view [products] as transitory objects that we can buy and sell back as we fall in and out of love with them. There is recognition that you don't have to own something for your entire life--there's a finite life to material possessions."

Nissanoff also says that the internet's auction culture has made buying used objects more acceptable to customers of all economic classes. "Once you purchase a pair of used Manolo Blahnik shoes on eBay, it's not that far of a leap to share everything else," he adds.

That certainly rings true for BagBorroworSteal.com, a website that leases out designer handbags and jewelry and plans to add other fashion luxuries like shoes, gowns and furs. The three-year-old business was highlighted by TLC fashion queen Stacy London on her show Fashion Fanatic, among other media outlets, as a way to afford current designer accessories.

"It's really exploding," says Michael J. Smith, the company's CEO. "Last summer we had a few thousand customers and now we have at least 450,000. Media exposure has been big for us, as well as word of mouth."

Sharing Resources
Businesses specializing in shared and temporary ownership of everything you can imagine--designer handbags, pets, yachts, cars, planes and computers--say they're also experiencing rapid expansion as the efficient use of resources has become popular with people of all economic backgrounds.

"It makes sense from an environmental and economic standpoint when you look at all the resources and assets we have but don't use all the time," says Neil Peterson, founder of Flexcar, which sells a range of membership packages to customers who can reserve a locally parked car over the internet. "Sharing the use of an asset makes sense when instead of paying $600 to $800 a month for access to a car, for example, you can pay $100 to $200."

Though Peterson initially targeted Seattle's residential markets when starting the company in 2000, he soon found that his business attracted everyone from members of the corporate world to those that couldn't afford to buy their own car. Now Flexcar has rapidly expanded to at least 2,000 cars across 15 states since AOL creator Steve Case bought the company in 2004.

Popularity Less Temporary
Flexible forms of ownership have become so popular that some business owners have found they tend to attract media exposure and word-of-mouth promotion with surprising ease.

FlexPetz creator Marlena Cervantes is one of them. Her San Diego-based business, which started setting up pet-sharing memberships to screened customers in March of this year, has already expanded to Los Angeles, New York and, next month, San Francisco.

"We didn't even have the marketing budget to advertise with anything besides our webpage and word-of-mouth, but after local media outlets contacted us, [our marketing campaign] has taken off and created a life of its own," Cervantes says of the exposure the business has gotten from media outlets including the Associated Press and TimeMagazine.

Existing businesses also are finding ways of incorporating this ownership concept, says Nissanoff. He recently reviewed a new proposal from a computer manufacturer to let customers purchase the option to sell their computers back to the manufacturer when they don't want it anymore, much in the same way customers buy warranties up front. This way, customers would know from the beginning that they could recover some of the initial purchase price later on.

For guidance in developing business models, both Peterson and Smith say their businesses looked to older temporary ownership companies, such as those in the timesharing industry. Peterson also says visits to Europe, where shared ownership businesses for a variety of assets are more commonplace, were a huge influence.

U.K.-based Yours2Share.com, for example, offers a free public ad space that operates like a Craigslist for people interested in shared ownership for absolutely anything across the globe. But as a couple searches on their website for U.S. opportunities shows, using a free public forum for shared and partial ownership of assets hasn't quite caught on in America just yet.

Source: Entrepreneur Magazine

Marketing gets me feeling all emotional and stuff

OK, I admit, I'm an emotional kinda guy. I'm not ashamed of it, because I know it's a good thing to be in touch of your emotions before you can expect to understand someone else's emotions. Marketing is basically psychology repackaged for the business world. It's knowing the mind of your audience and what motivates them to buy.

So why does marketing get me to feel all emotional? Because the best advertising campaigns tap deep into a customer's mind to make them take action on an emotional desire (to feel pretty, to feel studly, to feel secure...). If your ad campaign lacks an emotional connection, it's very likely going to work mediocre at best. One of the first things I do before I help a business with their marketing needs is step into their customers shoes and think "what's in it for me?". If their advertising and marketing doesn't address one of my core desires (i.e. Maslow's hierarchy of needs, for example), it's probably not going to stir me to take action. Without a basic grasp of human psychology, and without being in touch with human emotions and needs, your marketing will always fall short of what it could be.

100% organic creative juice with a oneconditional guarantee

The following is from another great post from the Duct Tape Marketing Blog.
Great marketers can turn virtually any element of business into a marketing tool. John Jantsch has creatively tweaked the cliche "unconditional guarantee" into a tool for gathering valuable customer feedback. Voila -- the sometimes costly "unconditional guarantee" business promise is now a valuable marketing tool. Enjoy...

"Guarantees have long served marketing organizations as a way to shift the risk from buyer to seller. By assuring that a prospect can get a 100%, no questions asked, no hassle full refund if not thrilled guarantee, the thinking is that the buyer has nothing to fear if the product doesn’t live up to expectations.

I believe that every company can explore some form of a guarantee as part of their marketing offering. If you think about it you probably offer an implied guarantee of satisfaction to your customers whether you advertise it or not.

There are many examples of simple, straightforward, unconditional guarantees but I think there is one very important condition that you must add to your offer of guarantee to make it a powerful marketing tool.

When you offer a money back guarantee also clearly spell out that the only condition the buyer must meet in order to receive a full refund is that they suggest to you ways that you could make the product or service better or more in line with what they wanted or expected.

I believe that this simple condition does several beneficial things:
1. It helps you get valuable feedback that may indeed allow you build a better service
2. It sends the message right upfront that you care about the experience in the future as much as you do about the sale in the present

There are lots of marketers that offer guarantees simply to get the sale. They figure that they can handle the few who bother to ask for a return.

With a “oneconditional guarantee” you invite participation and conversation - you and your products continually improve - and you will likely win back clients who otherwise would
simply move on to another product and silence, or at least muffle, potential detractors."

Republished from John Jantsch article on Duct Tape Marketing Blog under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial -NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Blog your way past (most) Fortune 500 companies

Word of mouse marketing and web 2.0 are a couple of buzz words that you can't avoid if you spend much time at all on the internet, or if you eves drop on any marketing meetings at big company marketing departments.

Yet, less than 10% of the Fortune 500 companies employ a blog or similar online new media tool.

Says John Janstch of Duct Tape Marketing Blog "...if you don’t tap the power of the Internet in smart, relevant, engaging and community building ways you will become last year’s phone book. See, my daughters - heading squarely into the prime marketing demographic - wouldn’t know what to do with a Yellow Pages directory if you handed one to them, don’t watch much TV (never watch network TV), and don’t really listen to radio - it’s more like they snack on it for about 25 seconds a song."

With the cusp of the prime marketing demographic being raised on new media focused around communities and word of mouth referral through social networking site and peer evaluation sites, businesses should spend as much energy - and possibly as much money on online focused marketing as they do on "traditional" marketing.

Looks like the HSG scooped the WSJ on this story!

If they "didn't get your email" read this

What communication channels do you use to talk with your customers? I was recently posed this question on one of my favorite business networking sites, LinkedIn.com

This is an important question to consider -- many business professionals get stuck in a rut of contacting their customers and prospects in the same manner -- as if everyone prefers the same type of communication that you do. In our digital society we are constantly being introduced to new ways to communicate, so it's becoming even more important to remember that different people may be more receptive to different types of communication.

Some people will only do business face-to-face because they like to see who they're doing business with, and there is the least chance that there will be misunderstanding in the communication.

Some people get nervous about face-to-face and would rather do phone calls.

Some people don't have time for face-to-face, they dislike the phone, and they prefer email because it's recorded communication, they can copy other people on the communication and forward on to other people and file it for future reference.

Some people like snail mail for certain reasons.

Other people like instant messaging, Skype, social networking websites, etc.

If time and money aren't an issue, I'd go with face to face. It's hard to have a strong, meaningful relationship with someone if you never see them.

Regardless of which communication you prefer, it's important to never forget that your preferred method of communication may be someone else's least favorite.

Sell Not Unless It's Boiling Hot

If you're a graduate of marketing 101, this may be an underwhelming concept, but in my experience most businesses miss the importance of selling benefits vs. features. For businesses in dir