my name is james vanderzee and I am a digital marketeer

The opportunity for bricks & mortar businesses online

Ebay's recently published Online Business Index Autumn 2009 report has revealed that 79% of small high street retailers believed the introduction of online trade had helped save their business.

Their OBI report suggests that small high street retail businesses are able to match and even beat the performance of other online firms when they set up on the internet and that shops perform at least as strongly as other online businesses on sales, prices and profit margins.

The report’s findings show that, far from being threatened by the rise of online shopping, high street shops are able to compete on a level playing field if they branch out online.

Far from undermining the high street, the online economy is increasingly propping up struggling bricks & mortar businesses.

Entrepreneurial high street retailers are joining savvy online entrepreneurs by setting up their businesses online to support their offline income. In fact half of all online businesses also have a bricks & mortar presence, with 80% seeing an online presence as making their offline business more sustainable.

So what are the opportunities for you?

The opportunity online is for retail and service-based businesses alike.

1. Reach new customers

Having a traditional bricks & mortar shop can limit your customer base to a particular geographic location.
Going online escapes all the usual confines of location and allows retailers and service providers to attract customers in other towns, counties and even countries!

2. Reach & engage with your existing client base online

Your existing customers are online.

This means that they are susceptible to your competitors in that space, including online-only competition as well as bricks & mortar operators.
By engaging with your customers via digital channels including a website, email and social networks such as Facebook you can build your brand and ensure that you are front of mind when they are looking to buy.

In these uncertain times when better than now to explore the online opportunity?

The digital channels can quickly and easily help you to engage with existing customers while attracting new customers and it's being proven again and again every day.

To take your business to the next level, contact the online marketing strategists via www.viedigital.com.

Got customers? Get social.

A recent study by LexisNexis has revealed that, with the rise of social networking, people are more likely to share negative feelings than they would even a year ago!

Two-thirds of respondents said that when they had shared bad feedback about a company online, they had not had a response from the company in question.

The consumer is evidently changing and this researhc highlights why every company should have a social media strategy in place.

Read more at
http://www.revolutionmagazine.com/DigitalPM/News/969874/Social-networks-making-people-likely-complain-online/?DCMP=EMC-Media-PM-Bulletin

Luxury brands doing better online

I've just finished reading a very interesting study relating to how digital marketing is a must for luxury brands.

Scott Galloway of Luxury Lab (http://luxurylab.org/) has published a fascinating study looking at how some of the world's best-known luxury brands are using SEO, translating their brand online, leveraging the digital medium as a whole and, of course, using social media.

The more obvious tech and automotive brands (Apple, Sony, BMW, Audi, etc.) dominate the top positions but what's interesting is how some of the big fashion brands including Louis Vuitton, Ralph Lauren and Gucci are hot on their heels.

Fashion brands doing well incorporate on-site e-commerce, offer engaging content and striking imagery, tweet about new collections, and utilise Facebook and YouTube to inform, educate and stimulate.

Have a read now at http://luxurylab.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Digital-IQ-Index_2009_hyperlinks4.pdf.

Oops a daisy, but still good news for digital!

According to recent reports, the IAB & PWC may have been slightly out in their online ad spend figures for the first half of 2009 that suggested that the Internet had overtaken TV to become the UK's biggest advertising medium.

How much was this oversight I hear you ask? Well, only £50 million out!

The topline figures however do remain unaffected, with the revised figures revealing a 3.6 per cent decline for classified advertising to £335.8m. The total online ad spend figure for the first half of 2009 remains unchanged at £1.75bn.

That's of course still great news for us digital marketers, particularly as we start (I hope) to be coming out of a recession.

Guardian goes local

The Guardian is launching a new "Guardian Local" service next year in Leeds, Cardiff and Edinburgh and are looking to hire qualified bloggers who could cover community news and report on local developments.

While they're not the first, they're certainly one of the highest profile entrants.

Does this suggest a shift for national media into regional offerings, where smaller areas are served with community and user generated content?

WWW adspend leapfrogs TV at last

Recent reports from the IAB indicate that Internet ad spend has overtaken TV for the first time with online now has accounting for 23.5% compared to TV's 21.9%.

Big news in itself, but it also appears that total UK spend fell by £1.5bn in the first half of 2009, compared with the same period last year...

It's likely that advertisers as a whole are looking for quicker and more accountable ways to spend their budgets but it's unlikely that this alone will have had such a marked effect.

What's likely is that rather than the larger advertisers reducing TV spend, this sway is in fact down to the huge number of small businesses who would never spend ad budget on TV venturing into online advertising through Google and Facebook's CPC programs.

While as a digital marketer I couldn't be happier, does this mean that TV programmes are going to get worse?

Google's first wave

Google has finally opened up its in-development tool combining email, instant messaging and wiki-style editing to 100,000 people today.

There have been suggestions that Google Wave could revolutionise the way people communicate, but some of us still remember how long it took for email to catch on!

Sadly I'm not one of the chosen ones but I look forward to hearing all the feedback...

How much????

Having recently secured $100m (£62.4m) in funding, Twitter has recently been valued at a whopping $1bn!

Er... no comment.

www.twitter.com

small business execs ahead of the big guns in the social media

according to a brand republic article back in may, smaller companies are demonstrating more social networking nous than the top ftse 100 firms.

linkedin is of course a popular one - for many their only social media marketing channel of choice - but others are having great success using a combination of facebook, blogs, twitter, plaxo and xing to promote their companies.

as one executive points out, "there's a generation of consumers growing up with social media, and unless you truly understand the culture there's a real danger of losing touch with them.""

read more at http://www.brandrepublic.com/DigitalAM/News/908249/Smaller-companies-demonstrate-social-networking-nous/?DCMP=EMC-Digital-AM-Bulletin

Thoughts on "Outliers: The Story of Success" by Malcolm Gladwell

So what is the secret of success?

Malcolm Gladwell in his informative, thoroughly enjoyable and easy-to-digest book suggests that success is not simply down to IQ in the traditional sense - it's also very much about practical intelligence, i.e. an individual's ability to spot and capitalise on an opportunity.

Drawing on a variety of statistics and analysis he argues that, as long as you do enough to get by (i.e. into college), having a high vs a higher IQ really doesn't make that much difference to your success.

Luck also plays a big part of success. When you were born, both during AND even within a year can determine the age you are at when particular opportunities arise as a result of social, cultural, technological and political changes.

How you were brought up and even by your inherited socio-cultural background also make a big difference. A lot of this can be influenced by an individual's social class but, for instance, can come down to how comfortable a person is around authority, how well they manage certain situations, whether or not they are 'trained' to look for and recognise opportunities and also how easily they can affect changes in their environment to suit their needs.

No surprises to many but hard work and effort is also a big factor in success. Gladwell suggests the 'magic number' of 10,000 hours or 10 years is about how much time you need to spend in a particular field to become an expert in whatever it is you want to be successful in.

In essence success is a gift, but it requires opportunity, the ability to recognise opportunity and having the strength and presence of mind to seize them.

A great book and I thoroughly recommend a read.

great woolies news

a former client of mine, woolworths has been reborn as a purely online retailer.

new parent company shop direct group (owner of littlewoods among others) has opted to include a "click 'n mix" (a sticky fingers-free version of one of my favourite childhood pastimes) as well as toys, CDs, DVDs and partyware.

i'm off to http://www.woolworthsparty.co.uk/Pick_N_Mix/

getting to the top of google: lessons learned

here is a recap of my lessons learned while on my quest to get to the top of google for my name, james vanderzee.

so what have I learned?

first google's own must-dos:

• focus on what’s best for the visitors to my website
• use unique, accurate page titles across my website
• make good use of the description meta tags
• use “friendlier” page URLs
• make your site easy to navigate
• offer quality content and services
• write better anchor text
• use heading tags appropriately
• make effective use of robots.txt
• be aware of rel="nofollow" for links
• take advantage of web analytics services
• make use of free webmaster tools - definitely worth checking back on
• optimize use of images - I could do with some images in the first place! one for later.
• promote your website in the right ways - one for later.

some thoughts based on lessons learned:

> seo is extremely hand-on. to put it simply: you can't leave things to run themselves when it comes to seo!

> seo takes a VERY long time indeed.

> if you want google to take you seriously you MUST ensure that your on-site 'housekeeping' is in order - on a daily basis! so... use google's webmaster tools and submit an xml sitemap (or more). at least the tools here will let you know where you may be going wrong!

> keep updating your website content. while you may see some benefit of the doubt from google for having a new site, if you don't keep your website content regularly updated you're likely to be punished for it. blogs, news, rss and so on are an effective and easy-to-manage way to do this - but avoid plagiarising!

> include keywords in your domain, page titles, descriptions, links and image alt text as well as across the editorial of site: no real surprises here, but google loves keywords and the higher up your website's heirarchy you put them (and the more places you include them) the better. nb try not to over-include keywords or you risk being perceived as a keyword spammer which will give you the opposite result.

> create a google profile: for now google may be being inconsistent for now with whether or not they actually appear, but there is no doubt that in time these will be important should you want your name on page 1 of any search.

> having multiple profiles across a range of different websites is certainly beneficial from a personal seo point of view but they are very time-consuming to maintain, particularly as you need to try to avoid replicating content across them.

> keep your blog regularly updated, and I mean at least once a week: google expects blogs to be regularly updated, so neglect yours at your peril! if you know you're going away, schedule in some posts for while you are away, even if it's a simple 'wish you were here'.

> keep on tweeting! channels such as twitter are designed to be updated regularly and as such, for now at least, google expects you to use them accordingly.

good news from the states?

according to emarketer, the future of online retail isn't looking too bad.

refreshing news after 6 months of a wider economic slowdown, and it's apparent that people are even more keen than ever to bag a bargain - often turning to the WWW instead of the high street.

the fact remains that the online channels continue to offer highly effective, easily manageable and highly trackable sales opportunities - when done correctly of course!

fingers crossed!

read more at http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007142.

habitats online marketing going twits up?

according to recent editorial following on from habitat's recent twitter blunder,
the furnishings giant has now sought to rest the blame firmly on the shoulders of an "overenthusiastic intern".

what i'm wondering is whether or not a well-established consumer brand like habitat is well advised to leave their (very public) consumer communications in the hands of a work experience kid?

read more at http://www.brandrepublic.com/DigitalAM/News/915903/Habitat-blames-Twitter-faux-pas-intern/?DCMP=EMC-Digital-AM-Bulletin

some recent twitter success for businesses (in the us)

datamonitor's report 'The Rise of Social Networking and Emerging Channels in Customer Service' provides concrete examples of how some companies have been successful in using social media including magic curry kart (@magiccurrykart), mountain view police department in california (@MountainViewPD), whole foods (@WholeFoods), virgin america (@VirginAmerica) and comcast (@Comcastcares).

so, what are they using twitter for?

> primarily as an inexpensive yet evidently effective outbound comms channel
> keeping an eye-out for mentions of their brand
> handling customer service issues, immediately, personably and informally
> managing a local presence despite being a global player
> pushing new products & services
> promoting offers, events and other relevant information

there’s bound to be something applicable to your business among these, as long as your audience is on there of course!

read more at http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/912484/Examples-companies-successfully-using-social-media/?DCMP=ILC-SEARCH
follow me on twitter @jamesvanderzee

linkedin the main choice among business execs

according to digital agency bigmouthmedia, 25% of ftse100 senior executives use social networking to promote their business, compared to 85% of the executives recently named in the sunday times fast track 100.

linkedin is the most poular, and often the only social media channel used by executives.

other channels proving popular for businesses to promote themselves include facebook, twitter, plaxo and xing.

more at http://www.brandrepublic.com/DigitalAM/News/908249/Smaller-companies-demonstrate-social-networking-nous/?DCMP=EMC-Digital-AM-Bulletin/D5F869F4B4BB36F577D687D2E78BB1B0/

copy & paste (among other things) now available on the iphone

at last I hear me (and others) cry!

new features great for business include:

• Cut, Copy & Paste
• Landscape Keyboard
• MMS
• Spotlight Search
• Improved Calendar
• Internet Tethering

don't forget to download your update today...

http://www.apple.com/iphone/softwareupdate/

facebook vanity urls went live this weekend

facebook's much-anticipated vanity urls, which went live this weekend at http://www.facebook.com/username/ and are free to users, will enable users to personalize their facebook link, making it easier to distribute to others and self-promote.

a vanity url it is also better for search engine optimization purposes: when a person searches your name on google, it's likely your vanity url-infused facebook page will be among the top results .

companies with trademarked or otherwise protected names have been asked to contact the facebook team in order to avoid transitional issues via http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=username_rights

more at http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=90316352130

have you got yours yet?

more

communicate & collaborate with google wave

google wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later in 2009.

it combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client, giving a range of uses within both business and social circles.

there's a really good write up of the key features at mashable and you can see a full demo and sign up for updates at http://wave.google.com/.

bing hot on the trail of google

msn's latest search engine "bing" was launched last week and, do you know what, I like it!

run a search for james vanderzee and while I am yet to beat wikipedia from an seo point of view, I'm there on page 1, in both 2nd and 3rd positions.

nice.

aside from the vanity trip of course, I'm also really keen on the way that this engine enables users to preview the content of the target site without leaving the page.

from an seo point of view it also seems to like pages with links on.

in terms of ppc marketing, bing offers a range of search terms related to your original key words which is great for helping refine user searches. not only is this great for the user, it should also mean better response rates for advertisers as users are steadily qualified as their terms become progressively 'long tail'.

could this be a serious rival to google's domination of the ppc market?

mp announces resignation via twitter

tom watson, minister for digital engagement and the first MP to blog has resigned, first breaking the news to his followers on twitter.

although embroiled in the recent mp expenses scandal, allegedly using his parliamentary allowance to furnish a shared flat in london, this was not cited as his reason.

social media marketing: it's not about advertising, it's about interacting.

an interview with scott monty, head of social media at ford about their approach to social media.