I want to discuss how search and social are becoming imperative elements of a holistic marketing strategy, and how organizations must embrace the concept of marketing as an “in the moment” medium.

When I speak of marketers needing to be “in the moment,” I am not referring specifically to real-time search, social, or the real-time Web.  This refers to becoming fully connected to your audience — directly and indirectly — and even more so, also being present and engaging with your audience in a meaningful way.

While brands are becoming increasingly connected, the aspect of being present and acting “in the moment” most often falls by the wayside. As it stands, most major brands spend two to five years in redesigning their static website; they view social media in a campaign-based, start-and-stop manner, and they are getting swung around by their tails by various networks…

Your marketing strategy is only as good as it is right now, on any given day.  And “today” is measured by all of the past “right now” moments. What you are doing today is also simultaneously setting up for success in the future.  In considering this scenario of acting “in-the-moment,” allow me to paint a picture of the current online landscape:

The changing landscape is not so much about “social networks,” as it is about society being networked.

With the world buzzing 24/7, the surfacing reality is that a brand that is not interacting fluidly, or lacks in-the-moment presence, might as well not exist.  The compilation of many missed moments in this new landscape will be the death of some brands, and this embracing of “right now” will be the ascension of many others.

The entire Web is evolving into a real-time, networked and synaptic environment.

Things are moving so fast online (and will get even faster) that the network is looking more like a living organism every day; one that fires off impulses that cascade throughout its entire being.  Not being a part of it, or present “in the moment” is equivalent to non-relevance and non-existence.  Furthermore, acting with the agility, fluidity and sincerity to ride with these synaptic connections will be the lifeblood of marketing efforts.

“People” aren’t just “searching;” real people are searching for something right now.

In search there is also an entirely new opportunity to connect, if not passively, in a profoundly meaningful way with the person you wish to connect with.  Future marketing strategies will need to go much deeper in connecting via content in a sincere and useful way, one that will facilitate a connection that fits both you and your target audience.  Get past thinking about ranking reports, last click attribution, simple content creation, and even direct response – these are real people who deserve a lot more in what is presented to them in search and content publishing.

It’s time to stop worrying about whether or not search or social will cannibalize each other, because the mindset of the user is entirely different when engaging in each one.  Accept that they are different and begin to strategize holistically.

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To a degree, this is still true. As a marketer, I certainly still preach the importance of a good domain name and counsel my clients to make sure they can get one. Still, it is not the necessity that it once was. In fact, there are plenty of times now when you can succeed without having the best domain name. There are several factors pointing this decreasing importance that you should consider before launching a mega-search for the ideal domain name:

1. Link Shorteners - Thanks mostly to Twitter, but also social media sites as well, link shorteners like Bit.ly or TinyURL.com are making actual URLs almost irrelevant because they mask actual URLs and convert them into short versions that are much better when sharing a link in a place with a 140 character limit.
2. Social Media Homepages – More and more frequently we are starting to see brand direct people to their social networking profile on a site like Facebook as a destination rather than a brand homepage. When people visit a social networking site directly, their first impression doesn’t involve your website (or its URL), and this is increasingly common.
3. Creative spelling - You could fill a book with how many new popular sites there are which feature what might kindly be called “creative spelling” of common words or even made up words. Flickr, Dopplr, and Bing are just a few examples. Either way, there is a much broader creative license to choose a unique name that works than there ever was in the past.
4. Growing consumer sophistication – Another element helping to lessen the importance of getting domain names with certain extensions (such as always getting a .com name) is that consumers are growing increasingly familiar with other versions of domain names. If your primary site is on a .org, .gov, .edu or .net extension – it is much more likely today that consumers will remember and use this instead of just focusing on .com and assuming it is part of your name.
5. Power of search - Continual improvements in search algorithms and usage of search engines means that even if consumers remember just a part of your name, they are far more likely to type that into Google along with your location or anything else they remember to find your site. Certainly having a good domain name can help with search, but there are other ways to make sure your site is search optimized and it doesn’t all hinge on your domain name.
6. Rise of online marketing - As more and more marketing dollars shift online, this also reduces the relative level of importance of your domain name. Having a great easy to remember domain is important if you are putting it on a billboard that people drive by at 65 miles per hour. It is less important if you are using a higher percentage of your promotional budget to drive people to click a link online which will directly take them to a page (usually without ever showing them the URL they are going to until they reach it.
7. QR Codes & Visual URLs – The symbol of the growing popularity of “visual URLs” are QR codes. These are two dimensional bar codes that can be scanned in (usually by a mobile phone or other such device) and it allows you to visit a specific site without ever entering a URL. In the near future, we will likely see other ideas like this to help people navigate their way to online destinations without ever having to share an actual URL on a keyboard.

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The urgency to meet the timely needs of a company’s sales reps, resellers, franchises, and others revenue producers is even more pronounced now in a down economy:

Cracks in the marketing chain could be perceived as deeper trouble within the overall organization. According to a 2008 Forrester survey conducted well in advance of last fall’s meltdown, more than 40 percent of respondents struggled with campaign design, offer management, and customer segmentation. Nearly 60 percent of respondents lacked the ability to both manage marketing processes and resources and coordinate campaign management across channels.

Companies faced with the dilemma of making marketing staff cutbacks, or risking worker overload, can find safe harbor in multichannel campaign management systems, called enterprise marketing platforms (EMPs). In fact, EMPs are one of the fastest growing areas of CRM. Here are three steps to evaluate the right EMP to keep your marketing channels viable…

1. Look for a Total Solution at a Reasonable Price: Look for a complete solution from a company that demonstrates e-marketing prowess, as well as traditional media and analytics competencies.

2. Know that their automation processes work: When evaluating a company that offers EMP services, make sure its systems are reliable and that other known companies are using them. Ask for case studies or contacts of current customers. Once enabled, the automated process should allow flexible multi-wave campaigns and programs to flourish with greater customization in vertical channels, or by product line, for all forms of electronic media and print on demand.

3. Look for hot MDF applications: If everything looks positive in your due diligence for an EMP partner, look hard again at how strong its market development fund (MDF) application really is. The best performers will offer built-in redundancies for error-free execution, making it easier to drive reseller behavior and to fund, track, and manage marketing essentials.

Great outcomes with measurable benefits?You will know that you made the right choice in an EMP partner when you see forward traction in these critical areas:

• Optimizing Reach
• Achieving cost savings and greater visibility

If you have come this far with your recession-proofing measures and have managed to stay viable through the storm, you will have worked the magic available to you when aligning with the right EMP organization. Imagine where you’ll be when the clouds clear.

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Today we have a wide variety of options to support email marketing and service functions for our companies. I typically categorize these email companies into four categories: small business, specialty applications, enterprise solutions and then marketing automation.

The small business applications are the ones you know and love: cheap, easy to use and all available through hosted systems. While they won’t work in a high volume production world and aren’t supported well if you have heavy data or integration needs, they will solve problems for 70% of the marketers in the space.

The specialty applications are those that are designed for niche industries such as not-for-profit and call center support. Their value is predicated on wrapping the email automation functionality in a subset of services that support niche needs: fund-raising, managing ecommerce, managing call center inbound/outbound requests, inbox queing, routing.

The enterprise space is the one most on this distribution list know well. They are set up to support larger organization with heavy data needs, providing high volume sending, advanced personalization and more advanced workflow/production environments. They offer both hosted (Saas models as we like to call them) and on-premise solutions (or licensed software).

The marketing automation space is what is most intriguing to me these days. The emergence of the middleware Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) space is merging to support email operations on both a systematic way (event-driven, lifecycle-driven and workflow-driven), but also opening up their interfaces to support full campaign management controls; cross channels. They are merging into the Interactive space to support the need to rapidly deploy forms and Web pages, manage digital assets and provide campaign control that supports print, mobile and email, along with e many other core functions. These systems rely on heavy data management for targeting and rules-driven programs. They’ve invested heavily in aggregating data from the Web, commerce, retails systems, third party data and providing real-time analysis (modeling) that helps make marketing decisions.

What’s prevented these companies from really making a dent in the enterprise email marketing space is the lack of infrastructures to support deliverability and the lack of a user interface and workflow engine that is intuitive and flexible enough to support a high-production email environment.

Why I get so excited about this space is, these companies are investing in building out these tools and even though they aren’t as efficient to use in a production environment, the value they bring in campaign management (cross channels), access to data and multichannel analysis will bridge this production gap over time.

I’m excited to see some of these advances. The space began as an enterprise CRM world, and then evolved into what I call a world of point solutions, solving disparate business needs with many applications. All the indicators are there that dictate a shift in the market. Not sure if the Microsofts, SAPs, Unicas, Siebels (aka Oracle), Aprimos make the commitment to bridge these gaps or if the Alterians, Eloquas, Neolanes of the world will capitalize to take market share from these enterprise companies, but I do believe it will shift how you look at email tools and platforms in the next few years.

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This list is compiled from my own experience with Internet marketing,  it consists of the top 5 lessons I’ve learned in 3 areas of Internet Marketing that I believe are essential to success.

These areas include:

Mentality/Frame of Mind

Business Direction

and Marketing Technique.

Mentality:

1. Fake it till you make it.

When you start out with Internet Marketing, you WILL be overwhelmed.   The breadth and depth of this field is staggering, and it’s changing every day.  Don’t let this deter you. Trust that you will eventually “get it” , it will come together, and you will begin to see the big picture soon enough.

2. Focus and persistence on one thing leads to success, even if that one thing isn’t the best thing you could be doing.

One of the most common causes of failure in any particular Internet marketing venture is simply giving up too soon.  Pick an idea and stick with it. Put your heart and soul into it, until you succeed, or are 100% sure it is no longer viable.  Failure to follow through and/or constantly jumping from “brilliant” new idea to “brilliant” new idea is one of the biggest reasons people fail in Internet Marketing.

3. Let the hype get you excited, but realize that people lie, A LOT!

Perhaps a success story got you into this business. Images of huge checks from Google, people sitting on their computers on the beach, or images of people watching their bank accounts fill up.   There are a great number of successful Internet marketers  out there that are real, but 99% aren’t bragging about it.  Let the hype get you excited, but don’t buy into anyone or anything that promises to make you rich without a considerable amount of time and effort.

4. If you’re not learning, you’re falling behind.

Massive success happens when you can identify an unexploited opportunity, and exploit it. The only way you will ever be able to identify real opportunity online  is to have a broad scope of Internet Marketing, and to understand the working of the Internet as a whole.  Get yourself involved in several forums, top notch blogs like Seomoz.org and MarketingPilgrim.com , stay abreast on as many aspects of Internet Marketing as you can, including black hat methods.

5. Building your business/brand is your goal, not hits, diggs, rss subscribers, or accolades.

It can be easy to pat yourself on the back when you see quantifiable goals reached.  Getting visitors, diggs, rss subscribers, or accolades from your peers might feel great, but it’s really only of value to you if it helps to make you money or to build your business.  Visitors do not always equal sales, Diggs do not always guarantee links, RSS subscriptions do not always equal an engaged community; Make sure you are thinking about your true goal.

Business Direction:

6. Ecommerce over affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing can be a great way to start when you first begin with Internet Marketing, but don’t be afraid to move beyond it.  E-commerce can provide massively better ROI, if you put in the time to develop your business.  Affiliate Marketing is the renting of the online world, where as E-commerce is purchasing a house.   If you find a great niche, start your own e-commerce store instead of looking for an affiliate program, you’re profit margins will be 30-70% better, no joke.   The reason most don’t do E-commerce, is because they think it is prohibitively difficult to set up.  In reality, it is quite easy.  There are many open source E-commerce platforms you can use for free, and you can hire a programmer to build you a custom site for a very reasonable price. Once you’ve built a site, find a dropshipper within your niche and start marketing.   Not only will you make more money, but every ounce of work you put into your site will be adding value that can be sold later on.

7. Find and exploit niches yourself.

If people are talking about a niche being really great, chances are, its already too saturated.   Do your own research and find your own niche. Take cues from the real world.  Find things that sell well offline, and see if you can help bring them online.

8. Learn all the basics.

Before you attempt anything in Internet Marketing, learn all the basics.  Until you have a firm grasp on the basics from each of the following, do not move forward:

• How search engines work
• Ranking Factors
• Basic HTML/CSS
• Basic Site-Side SEO
• Basic Link-Building Strategy
• Basic PPC understanding
• Confidence in your ability to pick out scams, and identify real opportunity/legit knowledge

9. Crowdsource and outsource everything you can.

Many of your competitors will not be outsourcing or crowdsourcing their work properly.  Spend time learning this skill and it will reward you ten times over.  Develop processes for every aspect of your business, and figure out ways you can hire people overseas to do them for you.  You can find competent full time employees for 2$ an hour. I’m not joking.

10. Learn to program, or find someone who can, that you are willing to pay.

You will soon realize that without the ability to program, or without someone you can pay to program, you won’t be able to accomplish very many of  your goals online.   If this is not your forte, or if you have no desire to learn programming,  get to work finding someone trustworthy and reliable.

Marketing Techniques:

11. Brainstorming before almost anything else

Without a good idea, all the marketing dollars, social media connections, and mounds of traffic will be close to worthless for you.   Spend the required time brainstorming ideas before implementing them. Linkbait and viral marketing will never succeed if the idea is not a good one, so focus your energy there first, then worry about promoting it.

12. Utilize all channels that make sense, but avoid meatball sundaes.

Twitter, facebook, myspace, youtube, digg, reddit, and every other possible marketing channel has value, but doesn’t necessarily have value to every marketer, or every marketing situation.  Don’t try to force your business or project to utilize all of these technologies if they don’t seem to fit, it’s a waste of time.

13. Repurposing already successful content, unique ideas are not always necessary.

The Internet is huge, and there are thousands of great ideas out there that could be modified slightly, or simply done better.   Find these ideas and make them your own.

14. Understand and try to build true virility when link building.

True virility comes when you create something that is shared faster than it is abandoned.   Your goal should be to engage users in a way that encourages or even incentivizes sharing.  When you reach that magical point where more people are sharing your idea than abandoning it,  you will see the true power of the Internet.

15. Get a few Aces in your marketing pocket.

The best marketers online don’t do it alone, they have a few Aces in their back pockets.  Sometimes these are tools or programs, sometimes they are people. Visit  black hat forums often, see what the buzz is about. There is an underground most people don’t know about, try to infiltrate it.

This is an entry to Marketing Pilgrim’s 4th Annual SEM Scholarship contest.

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They make my phone ring a lot, with so many companies struggling to measure their marketing in terms of sales, all because they sell offline.

You see, e-Commerce marketers seemingly have it easy, because the same Web metrics programs, such as Google Analytics, that count visitors and page views can also count actual online sales. So, every move the marketer makes can be tracked and judged on its success and failure. You do more of what works and less of what doesn’t, and suddenly you have a very successful business.

Online marketers that sell offline envy that kind of clarity. They live in a world where they attract more visitors to the site, they show them some information, and then those visitors vanish. We hope that they pop up offline with a phone call or a store visit, or some other way to restart the sales cycle, but often we can’t tell which Web visitors did so and which ones just dropped out.

Our mistake is to treat this situation as though its uncorrectable. It’s not. As I show in the slides, direct marketers pride themselves on the many ways that they connect their marketing activities to sales. The venerable, “Call 800-555-1212 and ask for Alice” is one version of this technique, where “Alice” is a code name for the particular issue of the magazine the ad ran in. By coding each piece of marketing, you can measure which ones worked better than others.

So, how can you tie customers offline activity back to their online activity? Let them press a button to send an e-mail. Let them print a coupon to turn in at the store. It doesn’t matter what the technique is, as long as both your customers and your offline sales folks are willing to do it.

And that’s why my phone keeps ringing, with company after company calling to figure out how to measure the effectiveness of their online marketing activities to offline sales. It’s exciting to see so many marketers taking the leap to measurable outcomes. Once they do, they can start experimenting just like those e-Commerce companies–doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

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Internet marketing has its own version of a fresh 24. Every day you get another 24 hours, a reset if you will, that allows you to do something that will ‘score points’ for your Internet marketing efforts. Like basketball or any game for that matter, more often than not the best results come from doing the fundamentals well. Sure you can have moments of glory and flash but they don’t get it done day in and day out because they can’t easily be repeated day in and day out. Same goes for Internet marketing.

Here are a few fundamentals that have been repeated millions of times over on the Internet for you to consider. One or more of these can be done every fresh 24 you are awarded.

• Optimize title tags – Make sure each critical page of your site has unique title tags that effectively integrate focal keywords of your page’s content and H1 tags. Show unity across these elements and the search engines smile.

• Refresh content - If you haven’t updated your site in a few months then you start to smell like you are rotting. Start the blog already. Get over your fears. Time to move on

• Contact a potential link partner – Find someone who carries some clout in your industry and strike up a conversation that may lead to a mutually beneficial relationship. If a link happens great. If a fantastic networking opportunity occurs then even better.

• Update a social media outlet - I know social media takes a lot of time. That’s only if you let it. Maybe updating your Facebook profile every few days while throwing in a few tweets on Twitter or answering a question on LinkedIn is all you need. Except for a select few, spending too much time on social media is time sucking black hole that can take more than it gives.

• Pick up the phone – Make one of your social media connections actually hear your voice.

You don’t need to do everything every day. It is most likely that you just can’t. Take the fresh 24 you are blessed with every day, however, and do something fundamentally sound for your Internet marketing efforts. You may be surprised one day.

FT Takeaway: Doing one of the basics of Internet marketing on a daily basis is better than trying to do everything in one day. Optimize, update and engage. You may be surprised at the results.

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Shirky is, of course, saying that one effect of a networked world is that people have less faith in the lessons being handed out on Madison Avenue.  Now it’s quite clear that media is still the dominant force in the brand and marketing business, which despite tough times, remains a trillion dollar global industry.  Indeed, the idea of building brands through massive investment in this industry is the reason most marketing folk get up in the morning.  And media metrics such as reach and frequency have been a reliable way to fill marketing directors’ pension funds for a long while.  But that’s not the point of Shirky’s challenge.  His suggestion is to think the unthinkable by, ‘simply looking out of the window’.  So, if people are resisting the Mad Men’s tutorials and the stranglehold of media is loosening, what’s next?  After all, people still want to find good stuff to buy and use, right? The end of media doesn’t mean the end of consumption or indeed of brands.  All of which requires markets.  But if those markets aren’t going to be media-driven, what will keep them moving along? What will make people act upon ‘their own desires’, and in doing so, keep the shekels flowing into our factories, showrooms and shops?  Where do we begin?  How about if we follow the advice of advice of…

…Dee Hock, founder of the Visa credit card association (via Richard Houston) and look to, ‘preserve the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future’.  Or in other words take today’s principles and apply them to tomorrow.  Which would mean the answer is, in Gibson-esque style, already among us, and just waiting to be picked up and polished.

There is something we all do, all of the time.  Every time we ask each other for recommendations and suggestions.  Be it through a web search, a review site, a quick poll among our friends on Facebook or by diving into an expert forum or blog.  We all now use our online community in its many shapes and forms to understand the market and other people’s direct experiences.  Then we act upon that information.  There’s nothing new here of course.  People have been keeping up with the Jones’ forever.  It’s just that now we share-and-compare with the entire networked world.  Not just Margo and Jerry next door. 

So, what if markets are no longer media-driven, but community-driven?  Distributed, dynamic communities, but communities nonetheless.  It’s no longer a massive jump.  Not long ago people who used the term ‘community’ in a marketing perspective (or god forbid a meeting) could expect to be, as with Shirky’s newspaper executives, ‘herded into Innovation Departments’, and ‘ignored en masse’.  Today, however, the term is practically written into the boiler plate of every marketing plan that sees the light of 2009. 

Great, what comes next?  If (and remember we are thinking the unthinkable here) we accept that markets are now community-driven, we would need to know what’s happening and also what’s working in those communities.  What’s the equivalent of media’s reach-and-frequency, whereby you just know if you beat people enough they will eventually comply and buy.  What sells?  Once again, it seems the clues are already here.  Reach and frequency really don’t make a lot of sense in the new online empires.  Facebook’s social graph is definitely seeking world domination in the same way that Time Warner once did.  But its aim is to link the world into submission, not to schedule it to death.

In her recent essay, Danah Boyd, now at the Microsoft Research Labs, writes: ‘Marketers know all about stickiness, but how many of you measure network density? You purchase all sorts of data from Nielsen and comScore that tells you about uniques, but do you know anything about the cluster dynamics of the users? Are you able to see when the network graph is reaching a sustainable point or, more importantly, when things are starting to fracture?’.  Now, while I think Boyd’s a brilliant analyst and network graphs and cluster dynamics may be perfect technical devices, I can’t see many marketing folk using the lingua franca of network engineers.  Yet it’s clear that our new community-driven marketing industry will need new measurement mechanics to fill tomorrow’s pension plans.  Maybe along the lines that Boyd suggests but with a friendly twist.  Let’s call it connection and engagement for the purposes of this modest post. 

And finally, what about the end game?  Today, the marketing industry has the concept of brand equity to dump on the boardroom table.  For mega-brands, it can be a powerful weapon. In fact, Interbrand has built an annual survey around the idea, and last year valued the Coke brand as being worth sixty-seven billion dollars.  A figure from which every chairman can take comfort.  It’s a tricky one.  If the marketing industry’s ambition is not to build brand equity through which premium pricing models can be justified, then what? 

Well, as Shirky suggests, one ‘new experiment’ to try might be giving some love to another commonplace idea.  Namely, goodwill.  Aside from the idea that brands choosing to build goodwill rather than equity just feels good, it has some other advantages.  Firstly, it is already on the books.  In some cases literally.  Goodwill is often cited as an intangible asset that allows companies to charge a premium price for goods or services, because of reputation.  Secondly, goodwill is sometimes related to the notion of social capital.  A long-standing, albeit academic idea, based around the observation that social connections, such as those in a community, have value. 

Great. But what would all this mean in practice?  What would be the means of such unthinkable ends?  What would marketing executives worry about and brainstorm over their lattes and croissants?  In a community-driven, albeit unthinkable, marketing industry on what basis would you execute ideas, to build connections and engagement, that creates boardroom-thumping, shareholder-whooping, levels of goodwill? 

As a starting point I would like to ask, what if instead of investing in networks of media to create equity, we invested in networks of people to create goodwill?  Those networks maybe employees, customers, competitors’ customers, prospects and anyone else who might hold a small chunk of your mega-brand.  They might be very small or very large.  But they would be made up of people, who have the inherent advantage of also being customers. 

But anyway that’s enough unthinkable stuff for one day.  Back to the real world, eh?  Now what was the clickthrough rate on that last banner campaign we did?  Ouch.  Down on last month to just one per cent.  Despite that expensive creative…

I wonder what the problem is?

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