Last week, Coremetrics, Omniture and WebTrends announced features that allow their respective users to measure certain aspects of Facebook.  My review of these announcements, so far, indicates a parallel product from these companies.

Omniture announced a partnership with Facebook that will allow customers to refine their Facebook ad campaigns. Utilizing their Search Tool “Search Center Plus”, Omniture customers will be able to compare Facebook ad campaign metrics alongside other media channels and increase their ad spend on the social network.

Coremetrics announced that they have been able to partner with Facebook to utilize their Impression Attribution tool,  which can record something as passive as an ad impression on the Facebook site and, utilizing cookies,  tie it back to the customer activity on your website.  As well the data is set against your other ad campaigns so that you can compare and contrast.

Finally Webtrends’ announced (technically Webtrends’ announcement was the week prior to the others) that they have a way to “scrape” data from Facebook, Twitter etc, using an API and can tie the data against other ad campaign data.

Sounds a little redundant doesn’t it?  That’s because for the most part it is the same thing.  The key here is that Facebook has finally opened itself up to these companies to allow the respective API code into their system.  My understanding is that this API has been working for Twitter measurement for some time now.  The ability to do the same type of tracking that you can tie into your main analytics program is a big step forward in Social Media measurement.

Its important that Facebook is allowing these partnerships.  It’s too bad that they didn’t make the announcement themselves.  Not that Web Analytics needs validation from social media (I’d say Web Analytics is more commonly accepted as a company need than social media in most businesses today, but that might not be the case tomorrow!)  It is important that all three companies have announced a product that will help with social media measurement and that the product is fairly similar.

I’m interested to know how analysts will use these tools to analyze their respective clients’ social media engagement.  These announcements show that social media tracking is an important piece of web analytics and should be an important piece of your social media campaign.  I’m glad that the big boys in the web analytics world are taking social media metrics seriously.  My only concern is that the analysis stops here.

Engagement is only once piece of social media measurement but it is a big piece and right now seems to be the most tangible aspect of SM tracking.

My hope is to follow up to this article with a side by side comparison of the Social Media dashboard / report for each vendor’s system.

Would love to hear from anyone utilizing any of these three companies’ social media tracking tools on what you like and don’t like about the tool.

Been trying to get a post up all day and not liking what I’ve written.  So I’ll say this: Who Dat Gonna Beat Dem Saints on Sunday?  Not the Colts.  Maybe Peyton Manning’s commercials.  However more than likely, I hope that Social Media has a big win on Sunday.  Many major advertiser have opted to invest in Social Media campaigns that aren’t necessarily taking place on this Sunday, but in general the money that might have gone to pay for a 30 second TV spot is now going toward brand awareness in a different aspect and social media in general.  For example, most of you have heard about Pepsi devoting it’s former Superbowl budget to it’s Project Refresh and increasing the social aspect of it’s brand.  It’s using Social media to advertise the fact that Pepsi is not entirely about getting every dollar out of you to put into their pockets but instead has a significant social awareness policy that they’d like you to know about.

The questions I have are these: will the companies that have been in Superbowl commercials in the past be missed?  Will the audience continue the viral campaign that’s out there about the fact that these companies are not spending money on the commercial and instead trying a different approach?  Will these companies feel any negative effect by NOT advertising during the Superbowl?  Will they focus on a social media campaign during the Superbowl and will it be effective? What will YOU do on Super Sunday?  Will you browse Twitter and Facebook during the game?  Will you see if there’s any social activity during a commercial break?  Will you tweet or update your status during the game?  Will you check in on Foursquare prior to arriving at your party or bar?  Will brands engage you after the Superbowl with specific reference to the game or to commercials?

On the company/brand aspect, I think an effective strategy would have been to engage your Facebook fans and Twitter followers in the weeks leading up to the Superbowl to either have a ‘sign up for texts during the Superbowl to win something” or follow us and look for tweets during the commercial break for a special announcement.  This could be a huge win for a company and more so than paying for a commercial slot.  If you can take the eyes of the customer off the tv for 10 seconds, you steal the advertising away from whoever paid for a commercial?  You can’t do that if you pay for a commercial yourself, you only compete to be the most memorable commercial of the Superbowl.  I also think if you utilized something like “tweet to predict the quarterly and half time scores for a chance to win xx” could be a good way to engage your followers.  Maybe bars could have utilized Foursquare to have the “mayor” host a private party at their bar?

I’m sure the talking head of these companies have their strategies in place already.  I definitely think it will be hard to utilize an effective social campaign during the Superbowl without paying for some advertising space.  The NBA All star game and the finals tried to do some social media advertising campaigns with companies, but I don’t know if they were very effective. 

As an end user, I do think that Twitter will be a great forum for me to chat back and forth about the game, maybe broadcast stuff like, “Next play – 40 yard screen pass to Reggie, callin it now!”  It’s really no different than sending a text during the game, which I’ve done in years past, except it could be more effective since I can send the tweet out to a larger audience.  Had a brand engaged me prior to the Superbowl I might have opened Ubertwitter duringa commerical break and perused to see what said brand had to say about the game or whatever their shpiel was.  I don’t really follow a lot of brands though, so I probably won’t do this.  I probably will check in on Foursquare and I’ll probably become the mayor of my friends house since I don’t think he’s ever checked in on Foursquare at his house.  Sweet, I’ll finally be a mayor!

What are your thoughts on the Social Superbowl?  Is this a big challenge this weekend, or does it really not matter and Monday will be like any other Monday for Brands and their social media strategies?

Branding.

It’s been the big buzzword whether you are talking about branding through social media or traditional media.  Your image is who you are right?  We ALL thought that about Tiger, and it turns out we thought wrong.  But that’s the power of branding. (I’m not slighting him, just using his image and branding as an example.)  But what does branding do for your company?  Or for yourself (if you are a public entity)?

In many ways branding is who you or who your company is.  For instance, Microsoft might be the more successful company, but Apple’s brand sentiment is stronger, especially in the social arena: (article).  Nike relies on its branding of the world’s most recognizable athletes wearing its shoes to dominate the saturated shoe market.  Geico uses about 18 different marketing campaigns to build their brand yet somehow, they are one of the most recognizable insurance companies.  So, branding builds a perception of what you think about a company.  For the longest time, traditional media was the only way to brand and build your perception.

In 2009 we saw corporations such as Gatorade, Radio Shack and Kentucky Fried Chicken continue to utilize traditional media to incorporate their new branding scheme. 

Gatorade failed miserably early on during the NFL playoffs when it began running commercials stating, “What’s G?”.  While the commercial was engaging and the viewer wanted to know, it failed to convey the message that G was the new Gatorade name.  Further, it took weeks for them to post search links to their site explaining the meaning behind “What’s G?”  Thus when a viewer Googled this question, the answer wasn’t  there.  A week after the first airing, finally someone had written a blog explaining his theory on it and it turns out his theory was right.  It wasn’t until about 2 weeks after the commercials started to air that Gatorade finally showed up in search results for “What’s G commercial”.  So while they attempted a great viral campaign they failed to deliver on the feasibility of delivering the customer into an actionable answer. (read more about this fiasco)

Radio Shack just flat out aired commercials stating that they were now to be called The Shack.  Easy breezy right?  Except for the fact that Shaquille O’Neal might have something to say about who is, “The Shack”.  He is of course @THE_REAL_SHAQ on Twitter.  Surprisingly, to my knowledge, he never did anything with it.  (too bad for both of them, could have been a fun little sparring campaign)  It’s not surprising that Radio Shack is changing their name, since radio is an outdated technology and implies that you can only get things for radio at said store.  The fact is Radio Shack today does a decent amount of business with wireless phones and other electronics.  Unfortunately for Radio Shack, both pieces of their name have a negative connotation.  We’ve discussed why radio is bad, but a shack is not really a place I want to go to buy electronics.  I want to go to a store.  Now all I can do is go to “The Shack” if I want to buy some crappy electronics that are overpriced (IMO).  I’m actually surprised Radio Shack has weathered the storm; they seem like one of those companies that should have faded out after 2000 or at least during the economic downturn of 2008/09.

Finally, there’s Kentucky Fried Chicken, or as they are trying to be known, Kentucky Grilled Chicken, ok technically they are still just KFC but they’ve definitely made a great attempt at rebranding who they are and what they sell.  I ask you, who seriously ever went to KFC because they wanted healthy food?  Not me.  So why the change?  Probably their numbers were dropping so they opted to go with the healthy fast food craze of the last few years (Subway, McDonalds, etc have all overly marketed fresh, healthy food recently).  I’ll admit, I’m on the bandwagon of healthy food.  If I go to a fast food place I look at the calorie chart and my decision is influenced by how many calories the Double Bacon Cheeseburger has.    The difference between a Subway/McDonald’s and KFC is that they have not had to change their name to convey their healthy connotation.  Subway found Jared and McDonald’s just bombarded us with their advertising.  I have to ask though, if companies continue to do this “healthy branding” trend, what’s a company like Burger King gonna do?  They’re screwed name wise.

On the flip side in 2009 we saw other corporations grasp at social media outlets to work on their brand (not necessarily trying to change their brand but to gain some market share and / or build their brand).

Skittles tried to grasp at social media branding when the term was young and hot in late spring early summer with their Twitter and Facebook page takeover of their site. The problem was that the Twitter takeover for Skittles backfired as the community started lots of negative tweets about Skittles.  Quickly Skittles changed the takeover to a Facebook takeover which eased the negativity.  Still the site was barely interactive and really didn’t do a whole lot to improve the Skittles brand.  Jack in the Box did a good job of utilizing traditional media to garner attention to their attempt at a social media brand.  Again though the site was fairly lame and didn’t do much to build their brand… seriously, a “dying CEO” campaign?  Might have been one of Jack’s worst ideas last year.

In contrast, Target used social media to increase brand awareness about their giving / donations and actually used social media to let their fans choose who to donate to (Bullseye Gives campaign).  As gruesome and morbid as this might be, Michael Jackson’s death might have turned out the biggest social media win of the year for TMZ and maybe for MJ himself.  TMZ earned a new reputation as “the first to break the story” and MJ’s legacy soared through Twitter, Blip.fm, imeem, Facebook, etc.  MJ was the top tweeted person of the year and his popularity possibly doubled through his death and resulting buzz.   Interestingly, Tiger made the list at #8, though his name probably popped up on Twitter during any of the major tournaments during the year and well before his “accident”.

Finally, and this stems into 2010, Pepsi announced that they would NOT air Superbowl Commercials during this year’s Superbowl.  Pepsi will instead utilize the money for its Project Refresh online cause marketing campaign. (article)  This is a huge coup for online / social media since the Superbowl has been the main stage for traditional media for the last 15-20 years.  As far as branding goes, it will be very interesting.  Pepsi has been one of the key participants in Superbowl ads so there will be buzz when their commercials are missed.  Hopefully they prep for this and utilize search links to their cause campaign and explain why they are devoted to this campaign over Superbowl ads.  They could become known as the company who changed how we advertise and brand ourselves. 

Social media has proven that it can definitely help or hurt your brand awareness, so use it wisely.  Traditional media is still the main outlet for getting viewership, but is definitely losing traction.  So whether you are building your personal brand or whether you are building your company’s brand, you will have to choose which outlet is more effective for you.  My best advice is that if you think your idea is “cute” you might want to rethink it.  Traditional media allows for cute since it’s much harder to have backlash against it (though not as hard as it used to be).  “Cute” will get you killed in social media if not done properly.  If you are building your brand, decide what you want to bring to the forefront.  Is it your causes; is it your workers; is it your product; are you better than your competition at something?  Figure it out, flesh it out, test it on a small group, re-do it, test again, perfect it, then go for it!

Typically Mom & Pop shops, or rather the one-off boutiques / local stores have a very high brand loyalty. They generally build a very close knit small community of shoppers, and typically provide that good old fashioned customer service that we’ve all grown to love.   However, it seems like every day another one of these small shops goes out of business.

Why? Many times they are too specialized, and thus they are a one-off experience, or maybe a once in a while type of experience.  Thus return / repeat business is seldom.  Second, while the community may be a strong one, it’s not necessarily a large community so the traffic funnel much smaller.  As well, these stores often rely on word of mouth marketing as their main source of generating traffic and orders. Thus, the well sometimes runs dry for any number of reasons.  (note: No, I don’t live in the 90′s. I know that many small businesses have websites and advertise through multiple channels. However, typically their ‘best’ customer base comes from word of mouth, and as well many these ‘websites’ are not ecommerce enabled)

Twitter and Facebook are very much a bunch of micro-communities where word of mouth is golden.  Thus, these forums are a golden opportunity for them to build their word of mouth marketing. Twitter and Facebook don’t drive a ton of traffic to major websites right now (although this rapidly changing, and I imagine that they will soon be great referral websites), however smaller sites typically deal with a lower amount of traffic. So, if you can generate 50-100 visitors a day to your website, you might double your exposure online.

Your contention might be that, as I’ve already stated, many of these boutiques do not have an ecommerce enabled site, so what’s the point?  Twitter and Facebook’s primary function isn’t creating orders right now, so ecommerce enablement is not entirely necessary for them to be helpful.  You can market your unique product; bullet point your company philosophy or maybe your lenient return policy; or even list some client testimonials.  All of these will be well accepted via Twitter and Facebook visitors.

At the very least, the small businesses can create a Facebook/Twitter page for their business.  I’m not an SEO professional, but it is my understanding that if, by chance the small business website only has contact information, and maybe an about us, these pages typically aren’t weighted as high as other web pages might be.  Twitter and Facebook pages seem to garner a lot of attention from crawlers. Thus, the small business’ Facebook or Twitter page might be more likely to be found in search than their own website (make sure you link to your site from Twitter/Facebook though).

More importantly is the power of the crowd to influence their peer group to take notice of said small company’s Twitter / Facebook page. They can tweet about happenings and will be retweeted by their followers and as well, their followers will mention them and this will be retweeted (and with Facebook, Fans will update status about their experience at small business, and or comment on Fan page of business).

My point is that these specialty boutiques rely upon a community for their business and social media is an ever expanding arena for marketing to new customers and at the very least getting the word out about your company. As well, users are using these forums to find out about unique places like these boutiques that they can visit or find out more about.  So, Social Media sites like Twitter and Facebook, can not only service a branding and customer service perspective for large businesses, but they can also serve a more tangible need in driving highly qualified traffic into the small businesses and Mom and Pop can stay in business a little longer.

Social Media is this year’s buzz word by far. Every body’s doing it and every company is getting into it. The nice thing about social media is that it’s mostly free. The bad thing about social media is that it’s mostly free. Thus, there are resounding questions of whether social media is monetizeable. Facebook is trying to make money, MySpace too. Twitter is far behind, and most other sites all fall in the same boat. (Please correct me if I’m wrong)

I don’t have the answer to whether social media is monetizeable, but I do have some thoughts on why it might not EVER be monetizeable.

It starts with tracking and measurement. Currently, most companies control their marketing links directed toward their sites and as such they ‘encrypt’ them with a tracking key which tells their analytics provider referring site, date/time, specific link clicked amongst other things. With Social Media, companies have less control over links directed towards their site. Thus tracking is much more difficult. Yes, you can simply look at your referring site list and get a lump sum of traffic from Facebook, Twitter, Meebo, etc but this is fairly imperfect. I highly advocate that your company ensures that at the very least the links that they are blogging/tweeting/updating have the proper tracking codes in the URL so that your analytics program can tie the data back to them.

Second, we hear it quite often that Social Media is a conversation. As such, the current thought is that the only measurable KPI’s are branding KPI’s: mentions/buzz, brand index vs. top 100 (for example), and influencers. While I think these are great KPI’s to track, they are again, not easily quantifiable. The bigger problem is this: if companies accept that these are the KPI’s that analysts should monitor, then we’ll only continue to hinder the possibility of Social Media being able to monetize itself. If the only thing that companies care about with social media is ‘buzz’, instead of traffic/conversion/orders/sales, they’ll be less apt to pay the social media sites for anything.  (Traffic seems to be a luke-warm metric in relation to these ‘branding metrics’ for SM)

Other questions out there are: if social media begins charging companies for the right to use their accounts, will that lessen the trust that users have in said accounts? Will that cause less of a conversation because companies are charged on a per X basis? Additionally, what if social media sites begin charging even nominal fees to users. Will traffic to these sites die because of this?  Would you continue using social media sites if there were a fee?

A final note is this: if I were to set up metrics to measure, I would want to know the following: my index to benchmark on major social media sites; mentions/rate on major social sites; top influencers by site/account; traffic referred to my site; and orders placed. These metrics are ranked in descending order, thus I would place less emphasis on traffic and even less on orders placed, but I would not discount them.

I was joking with someone the other day that Web 2.0 or social web could be a modern version of the Greek god/goddess system. Before you laugh this off, think about how much we revere certain websites. Granted there’s probably not a 100% consensus on which site equates to which god(dess), here’s my stab at it.

I will address two major points first: I include Google in social web, simply because a) one uses Google search to find something that goes into a blog/post/tweet/etc; b) iGoogle, Google reader; c) Google in many ways has molded so many Web 2.0 sites and in many ways is a Web 2.0 site; d) with Google profiles coming out a few weeks ago, Google could soon be a dominant social site (profiles plus search info = major marketing for someone wanting to market to a social site, also better targeted marketing could come on Google’s social site).

Second, my rationale for choosing: I used a combined system of Web 2.0 website rankings (http://tinyurl.com/ywf5w3) and general knowledge of perceived popularity of said sites.  i.e. – certain sites might seem more popular but in fact get less traffic than one would think.  I tried not to let my personal interests in particular sites sway my placements.  I also tried to choose the most logical god/godess for sites.  Finally I had a little fun with some of the sites as you’ll see.

Thus, I give you, my hierarchy of Web 2.0 / Social web sites:

Actual Greek god/goddess hierarchy taken from (http://tinyurl.com/qytps3)

At the top of the hierarchy of the Web 2.0 / social web era sat Google (Zeus), the spiritual father of all websites, and man. His wife was YouTube (Hera), Queen of Heaven and guardian of the Sanctity of marriage. Associated with them as the chief divinities of Heaven were Facebook (Athena), the virgin goddess of wisdom and war, preeminent as a civic goddess; Myspace (Hephaestus), god of fire and the patron of metal workers; Twitter (Apollo), deity of light, poetry, and music, and his sister Wikipedia (Artemis), goddess of wildlife and, later, of the moon; LinkedIn (Ares), god of war, and his consort, Ebay (Aphrodite), goddess of love; Yahoo (Hermes), the divine messenger, later, god of the hearth.

Around these greater gods and goddesses were grouped a host of lesser deities, some of whom enjoyed particular distinction in certain localities. Among them were Flickr (Helios), the sun; Friendster (Selene), the moon (antedating Artemis); the attendants of the Olympians, such as the Graces – LiveJournal, Skype, Mebo, Hi5; the Muses – Bebo, Blip, Pandora; Reddit (Iris), godess of the rainbow; del.ic.ous (Hebe), goddes of youth and cupbearer of the gods; and Flixster (Ganymede), the male counter part of Hebe.
The sea was ruled Digg (Poseidon), the worship of whom was often accompanied by worship of his wife, Technorati (Amphitrite). The chief Chthonic deities were MSN (Hades), ruler of the underworld, and his wife Fox News (Persephone), the daughter of Demeter (NY Times).

Finally there were Woot! (Dionysus), god of the grape and wine; Ning (Gaea), the earth mother; Netflix (Asclepius), the god of healing; and Zillow (Pan), the great Arcadian god of flocks, pastures, and forests.

I would love to hear back from you on your thoughts!  As I’m sure there could be lots of good debate about where a site should be placed and who best represents.

Last week Google launched a new product entitled Google Me.  It is billed as a way to help you to control what people can see if they type your name into Google.  Really though, as referenced in this article, it’s mostly just another way for Google to harvest personal information.  I’d like to expand upon this article: now they will be able to meld your personal life and interests in with what you do and search on in Google.   I actually began to fill out the Google Me form but felt very naked during the process, so I abandoned before completing and saving.

If you are fortunate enough to have a unique name and if you are active online you can typically occupy at least the first page of results.  With the emergence of Facebook, Twitter and just about any other social network, you’ll probably find links to those sources as top listings for your name.  Of course, this also assumes that you have no enemies looking to smear your name.  If you are more active and have a blog, or blogs, or write for a website, you’ll most likely see those links show up as top links for your name. I have a unique name (with the exception of within my family) and occupy the top 30 or so links in the organic listings for a search on my name.  Carlos (del Rio), on the other hand, competes with a great multitude of people with the same name, thus he only occupies 10 or so of the top 30 natural search links (still not bad at all!)

The underlying issue is being able to protect what is being said about you.  I agree highly with this.  There is one random website with a profile for me that shows up in my top 10 or so.  I did not create this profile nor do I wish for it to be there, but even after repeated cease and desist emails it remains.  Fortunately it’s not anything crazy; just a job research website.  However, there is a very valid point to the issue of being able to control what is posted about you.   I guess really you should just keep your nose clean and you won’t have to worry about anything negative being posted about you.

The Google Me profile product would be better if it were guaranteed to be at the top of the results page.  But from what I’ve read, it will more likely show up at the bottom of the search results page. I’m all for not censoring search results, but the flip side to this is that you do run the risk of having negative documentation out there about you.  Fortunately, if you have the resources to do so, you can utilize your own blog, or social profile to combat anything negative that might be out there.  I strongly advise that you Google yourself on a regular basis to see what is there.   Two years ago, I only had a couple links to some articles I write for my college newspaper.  Now every social site that I belong to is listed along with my blogs and etc.  Our lives are going to continue to become more and more transparent as the internet continues to grow and try out new things.

Carlos and I were discussing qualitative data last week.  Specifically using qualitative data to determine where you rate amongst your vertical.  My opinion is this: I love and trust data, I do not love and trust polling thus I am quite skeptical of a good portion of qualitative data.  Yes there are many different types of qualitative companies where you can get good info to back up your data.   I just particularly have beef with the companies that use polling answers to give you qualitative feedback.  Not that I don’t trust the polling company (ok maybe there is a little distrust), but I feel that there are several inherent flaws in obtaining a truly good understanding of where you rank.

My first issue is: the pollee often doesn’t really have a real answer so they make something up.  For instance, if there was a question of “What are the top 5 apparel stores that you shop?”  The pollee could answer this many different ways.   She could answer with the last 5 stores that she shopped at, or she could answer with the 5 best stores that she sometimes shops at, or etc.

The second issue with polling is locale.  I don’t trust that many polling companies can really collect enough information for a true representation of a nationwide or even less so a world wide audience.  As well, what if you are predominantly a West Coast Company, or an East Coast Company, but your vertical is mostly the opposite? This can probably be adjusted for, so maybe this isn’t a real problem, but you get my point.

The final issue is demographics. Unless you pay your qualitative company to poll your specific type of customer demographic, you will not truly have a good understanding of what your type of customer is really doing.  Unfortunately there’s also a huge conflict of interest with paying your qualitative company to poll people (because you want them to be completely unbiased, right?).

Regardless, the polling company takes any answer from anywhere from any demographic as hard truth and uses it as feedback about what the top shopped sites are in your vertical (or whatever qualitative data that you are trying to find out, departures, conversion, etc).  This to me is just way too loose of a way to determine where your site ranks amongst the competition.

The definition of qualitative data is this:  ‘Soft’ data that approximates but does not measure the attributes, characteristics, properties, etc., of a thing or phenomenon. Qualitative data describes whereas quantitative data defines. (According to www.businessdictionary.com)  Still, I don’t think that qualitative data should just be about how some random person feels at a specific point in time.

I know that there is some information being collected from Social Media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.   In fact, I see more and more paid advertising from companies that I either talk about, or am a fan of, or etc showing up on my Facebook page.  So clearly these social media forums are collecting this type of data and utilizing it.  Maybe Social Media will be the new way to get qualitative data about your customers preferences.

Please don’t misunderstand me.  I love qualitative data and think that it is valuable information when collected and distributed properly.  The qualitative data that I am talking about is more of the indirect, site wide data and not so much the opinion/feedback data that you should also be collecting and analyzing for your site.  Then again, there is a lingering question that I often of “Do we cater to one person’s feedback or do we stick with our gut and keep our site as is?”  So even this type of direct qualitative data can be questioned.

What are your thoughts on qualitative data?

We live in an age where we can type an email, IM a friend, tweet about our latest goings on, update our Facebook status, and (still) text/call someone all from our cell phone. Could we do this four years ago? We barely texted on our cell phone four years ago. However, I’m not going to repeat what’s already been well documented about the advancements of our technology. Check out this video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8
This blog is more focused on corporate responsibility to social media. Companies owe it to themselves to not only invest marketing dollars in today’s social media platforms, but they also need to have a paid staff member that is thinking up the next new thing or at least working on making her company one of the initial participants in said new social media forum. For decades now companies have talked about thinking outside the box, yet how is it that the small companies always seem to be the most innovative and cutting edge?
The internet and what you can do with it, or on it, is growing at an exponential pace. The problem with most of Corporate America is that it does not accelerate or adapt that fast. It’s changes come measured and weighed and only implemented when deemed a good idea; typically a low risk, medium reward type of strategy.
I won’t say that there is anything wrong with this (yet). It’s worked for them for many decades now*. However, with the way that things are changing and the rate at which these things are changing all businesses need to take note and keep up with the Joneses. (*Note: I find it humbling to think about how fast things have progressed in the past 10 years or so, when you compare to how long ago the Industrial Revolution began)
How do they do this? For starters, I think corporations should embrace some sort of a business version of a Myspace/Facebook more fully. Sure many companies have a Myspace/Facebook page, but what if there were a site specific for business, set up similarly to the yellow pages, where individuals could go on and become a fan of all of their favorite businesses and could write reviews about their favorite items, or shopping experiences, etc. Myspace is actually working with Citysearch on a site just like this.
I also still think that forums such as Second Life will be a great way to have customers experience your site in a completely different fashion. It may be a few years off still but I do think that more and more people will enjoy a VR experience of shopping much more than the current ‘flat’ web experience.
Finally, having online events that mirror events offline can create great buzz and lead to great new lead generation etc. For instance if you are having a new store opening in Denver, why not have a live video feed as well has have users be able to upload a cell phone pick with their comments about it? This last technology is currently available through a website called http://www.blahgnow.com/ for one.
Regardless of what a company does, I think that to some extent, you can afford to mess up a time or two and still rebound just fine when it comes to social media. As long as the campaign itself does not take on a negative form, anyone can survive any hiccups.

Planned obsolescence has made many people rich. Computers, cars, and television in particular are things that we all happily update on a regular basis. We just know that something better is coming out; it is only a matter of time. The same for the Internet. New design styles (a move from shiny to grunge), new services (a move from Facebook to Twitter), or new goals (making house payments to finding a member of AIG and punching them in the eyeball) are common. New and better are so ingrained in our vocabulary that “new” actually means better– well close enough.

Even Google puts weight on recency in assigning value. So, updating your content can be the first step in improving your results from search and your results from visitors. High return visitor rates mean you have a great opportunity to expand your relationship with the visitors.

Many years ago manufacturing came to a cross-roads there were two paths: one was to be big and pump out one thing really well all the time (most US manufacturing) the other was to be small and modular to reduce to cost of changing product (most of Japanese manufacturing). When planned obsolescence became the norm an unexpected side-effect occurred– no barrier to entry. Because manufactured goods have shorter lifespans and new became equivalent to better people have less resistance to changing their suppliers. This allowed every company that could add features and drop out-dated products to have an advantage.

What people are looking for, how people are looking, and what they expect to see are going to be changing. How can your website compete? Plan to be obsolete. A 6-12 month cycle that replaces all of your main content should be part of your plan. Incrementally you should be changing your presentation, because seeming new is as good as being new, the content on your site, and the offering that you put forward. The environment is changing and you do not want your customers leaving over a need that you are capable of serving.

Changes in presentation and content give people a feeling that you are paying attention and reacting to them. The information that you have on your site is not a perishable commodity, so you can continue to leverage old content by properly archiving it, and you have nothing to lose by assuming that every 6 – 12 months there will be a better way to present the information to your users. Regular updates communicate to both humans and search engines that you are paying attention.

As many businesses continue to struggle start investing in your marketing and brand. Start to position your business for the new needs that have been created, and make a plan for how you will make your website react to it’s users.