EPC CIGAR COMPANY manufactures and distributes cigars that are hand-rolled in the Dominican Republic from Ecuadorean, Nicaraguan and Dominican tobacco. It has been in business since April, although the family that owns it previously ran a successful cigar company that was sold to Swedish Match in 1999.

THE CHALLENGE To develop a cost-effective and efficient marketing strategy to promote the company and its new brand, E. P. Carrillo, while building on the family’s legacy.

THE BACKGROUND EPC Cigar, based in Miami, is owned and operated by the Perez-Carrillo family, whose Cuban-born patriarch, Ernesto Perez-Carrillo, established El Credito Cigars in 1968; its best-known brand was La Gloria Cubana. After Mr. Perez-Carrillo’s death, his son, Ernesto Perez-Carrillo Jr., sold El Credito to Swedish Match in 1999, working there until March 2009. Mr. Perez-Carrillo Jr., 58, remains a big deal in the cigar world.

He was encouraged to start EPC Cigar by his daughter, Lissette, 36, a lawyer based in Miami, and his son, Ernesto Perez-Carrillo III, 28, a management consultant based in New York, both of whom had worked for El Credito while growing up. The three family members run the company, which employs 34 people in Miami and the Dominican Republic.

Its first product was a $13 limited-edition inaugural cigar released in December; it will be followed this spring by the core E. P. Carrillo line, which will be available in five sizes priced from $6 to $8.

Last year, Mr. Perez-Carrillo III, who oversees the company’s marketing, hired an advertising agency, DeVito/Verdi, to develop a logo, labels, packaging and a marketing campaign to introduce the new company and its cigars. Mr. Perez-Carrillo III estimates that EPC Cigar will spend $300,000 on the campaign, which began in April 2009 and will run through December.

THE OPTIONS DeVito/Verdi suggested a range of traditional and new-media marketing strategies.

The traditional options included taxi-top advertising in New York City; commercials on cable channels like Comedy Central, Spike and VH1; radio ads in cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago; and print ads in publications like The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, Yachting, Golf Digest, Wine Spectator and Cigar Aficionado. With the exception of Cigar Aficionado, these promotions would aim at casual cigar smokers and even nonsmokers willing to try the company’s cigars.

The social media options included three Web site concepts: one involved a collage on the company Web site of live, online mentions of the company and Ernesto Perez-Carrillo Jr.; a second featured a world map (from Google Maps) on the Web site that showed the origin of real-time Twitter messages about cigars; and a third would use a Facebook page as the company’s main online presence. In any case, the digital strategy would involve the use of Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

THE DECISION Ultimately, Mr. Perez-Carrillo III decided to take DeVito/Verdi’s advice and emphasize the Internet and social media initiatives. Ellis Verdi, president of the agency, calls social media “a natural place to go when you want to show something real,” adding, “If you say it’s real, people won’t believe you, but the Internet lets you show it.”

Mr. Perez-Carrillo III said his primary objection to traditional media outlets was the expense. “For the first go-around,” he said, “we put them off the table.” The company, according to Mr. Perez-Carrillo III, will spend $40,000 on digital-media initiatives between 2009 and 2010, with the remaining $260,000 of its marketing budget going to trade shows, cigar-enthusiast events, point-of-sale material and some traditional media.

Social media allow the company to communicate directly with cigar buyers, retailers, tobacco growers and others with whom it does business, according to both EPC Cigar and its agency. This is particularly important as the popularity of once-fashionable cigar bars wanes and public smoking bans proliferate.

At the agency’s recommendation, the Perez-Carrillos chose the Web concept based on Google Maps and Twitter. Thus, on the home page, Twitter messages about cigars — regardless of whether they are about EPC Cigar or raise health concerns about cigar smoking — appear on a world map that rotates to show where the messages originated.

The site’s “About Us” section uses another world map to show places where EPC Cigar conducts business or has roots, thus honoring the family’s history. The section also offers photographs and videos, including a vintage, black-and-white snapshot of Mr. Perez-Carrillo Jr. as a child in Cuba and modern videos of a Nicaraguan tobacco farm.

The site lists retailers that sell the company’s cigars, with Google Maps indicating theirlocations, and more than 1,000 places to smoke, with recommendations contributed by visitors and by Cigar Places, a Web site for cigar enthusiasts. DeVito/Verdi is in the process of developing an iPhone application that will feature these cigar-friendly places.

The agency has encouraged Mr. Perez-Carrillo Jr. — and not his son — to use Twitter to build and communicate with the company’s following. It is Mr. Perez-Carrillo Jr., said Tyler DeAngelo, interactive creative director of DeVito/Verdi, who is “the face of the brand.”

While Mr. Perez-Carrillo Jr. posts Twitter messages almost daily, Mr. Perez-Carrillo III maintains the company’s Facebook page, where he posts articles and reviews and encourages fans to comment. There are also links on the page to the company’s Twitter feed, YouTube videos and Flickr photos. Similarly, there is a box that pops up from the home page of its Web site that lets visitors “follow Ernesto” on all four social media channels.

THE RESULTS So far, only about 250 people are following EPC Cigar through Twitter and about 700 are Facebook fans. These numbers notwithstanding, the Perez-Carrillo family and DeVito/Verdi say they are satisfied with the campaign’s impact.

“To have a lot of people talk about the limited-edition cigar after only a few months, in a market that’s challenged, in an industry that’s not really growing, is very exciting,” Mr. Verdi said.

The campaign has “generated a lot of buzz so far,” Mr. Perez-Carrillo III said. “When we talk to retailers, to the end consumer, everyone pretty much knows Ernesto’s gone on his own. They can’t wait for him to come out with the core line.”

One unexpected benefit is that Mr. Perez-Carrillo III has been using Google Analytics to track how many people visit the Web site and where they come from. He has discovered that almost one-third of the visitors do not live in the United States. “I’m talking to foreign distributors far more quickly than I expected I would,” he said.

The 25,000 limited-edition cigars that EPC Cigar has been releasing monthly since December “are selling extremely quickly,” Mr. Perez-Carrillo III said. He projects sales of $1.5 million this year.

–JANE L. LEVERE

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Two significant and closely related trends in enterprise computing this year are the growth of Software-as-a-service (SaaS) and social computing. By most accounts, both are gaining ground quite rapidly while still not being used for core business functions or mission critical applications in most large firms, at least not yet.

The reality is that broader social and cloud computing trends continue to evolve faster than most enterprises are able to absorb. It may be years before many organizations are comfortable with and ready to adopt either of these technologies strategically despite apparent benefits.

However, that doesn’t mean that it’s not important for organizations to closely track both of these leading computing trends (both have solid double digit industry growth) and understand the emergi

ng technologies that are likely to shape their use in key business functions in the near future. In fact, quite the contrary, particularly when it comes to Enterprise 2.0.

The potential overall impact of enterprise social computing (aka Enterprise 2.0) is significant for most organizations, at least in the medium term. The business functions that are likely to be affected and transformed by these new social business models (and its associated delivery model, SaaS) includes general purpose communication and collaboration, product development, customer relationship management,marketing, operations, and business productivity solutions. And certainly, ad hoc use and early adopters have already being doing this for years, but as we’ll see, many Enterprise 2.0 technologies are only now becoming a reality. What then, are the areas to watch and build competency in this year?

Keeping social technology in perspective

In terms of innovation, 2010 is shaping up to be another important one in the early development of social technologies in general. To get a sense of this, you can read my recent exploration of what’s happening this year with the latest consumer-oriented Social Web technologies and standards. Though the enterprise aspects of these are often far behind, that hasn’t stopped the industry from moving quickly ahead in terms of creating actual products and new business-ready solutions based on the latest lessons learned.

For organizations looking to keep current, both good timing and judicious application of new Enterprise 2.0 technologies will be needed as organizations increasingly look at their future in terms of a social computing driven knowledge economy. To do this though, we have to put them in the context of the big picture.

When I encounter a successful E2.0 project, it’s one where the process of managing the changes entailed are equally balanced with the savvy application of technology. It’s the concepts behind social computing and their application to economic activity, aka social business, that are the ultimately driver of success with Enterprise 2.0. A full solution is achieved when these ideas combine well with the technology — which is an enabler and not an end in itself — though it is important not to forget that technology does strongly shape and define the art of the possible when it comes to social computing, both in the consumer space and the enterprise.

However I still encounter tool myopia in many discussions of social computing and Enterprise 2.0. It’s sometimes too easy to focus on the specifics, like social tools and their technologies, instead of more difficult and less tangible concerns like driving usage or measuring ROI. Fortunately, this seems less pronounced than a year ago and the “soft” issues surrounding adoption and long-term success, such as community management and other important practices are now getting their due on equal footing with the often flashier and attention-grabbing social tools and technologies themselves.

Now, on to the latest developments…

Ten strategic technologies for enterprise social computing

Below are ten social computing technologies that I believe will be actively developing or maturing this year and either worth exploring or otherwise watching closely for 2010 and beyond. Note that many of these technologies are not based on standards or for which standards often don’t exist, which will be problematic for some organizations. Many of the technologies listed here are primarily embodied in new product categories and for now are represented primarily by commercial products. It likely won’t be long, however, before open source and open standards enter and play an instrumental role in many of these spaces.

1. Community management tools. One of the signature realizations of the Enterprise 2.0 community in the last year and a half has been theimportance of community management in driving the success of the endeavor. Now, you don’t necessarily need tools to successfully manage an online community, but it can genuinely helps in terms of acquiring good practices as well as automating and scaling the many routine tasks that already harried and frequently overworked community managers are faced with today. The latter is because many enterprises are still learning about social computing requirements and are frequently under-budgeting this essential role. Commercial software is the norm in this space and some of the top solutions include Rollstream, eModeration, Tempero, and Essentia.
2. Open identity. There are many issues swirling around enterprise identity and consumer Web identity at the moment. I’ve postulated in the past that OpenID will actually become a viable vehicle for enterprises to create a single sign-on across the Web for their workers, giving them centralized administration and control of worker identity on the Web and social media (as appropriate), especially in B2B scenarios. But is this actually starting to happen despite folks from large software companies like SAP making the business case? No, not yet, and enterprises are as much as fault as anyone for not demanding better identity integration. Instead, off-premises SaaS and cloud computing offerings are offering basic synchronization with LDAP and other corporate identity repositories. Also becoming more and more important is identity authenticity (which Twitter tried to address with Verified Accounts). Watch for a raft of social identity issues to accumulate and for new enterprise open identity solutions to attempt to address them as our identities on the Social Web increasingly compete and conflict with our enterprise identities.
3. Microblogging. While wikis have been one of the more common Enterprise 2.0 tools, more popular than blogs by quite a bit from my experience, microblogs are now seen as potentially achieving a higher level of overall traction than both their heavier-weight brethren. There’s a lot to like about microblogs in business settings, along with the valuable activity streams that they generate. Gartner went on record recently saying that they believe integrated microblogging will be in 50% of enterprises in two years, though they are much less sanguine about individual, standalone microblogs. I did a detailed round-up of the space a little while back and came away with the finding that microblogs do make enterprise social media both time efficient and focused while still preserving most or all of what makes Enterprise 2.0 special.
4. Social CRM. Applying social computing approaches to customer relationship management is getting quite a bit of attention these days. Services such as GetSatisfaction, Helpstream, Lithium, and many others are aimed at helping enterprises engage with their customers using social tools in new and innovative ways that can reduce support costs and improve customer satisfaction. Along the way Social CRM is also changing the very nature of the relationship that businesses have with their customers and the marketplace, from customer support or contact management processes like they exist today, to one that is more like a long-term partnership of contributing equals. Like so many Enterprise 2.0 subject areas, the big vendors haven’t really arrived in force in this domain and many firms are just opting to use tools like Twitter and Facebook for now to engage with customers while the technologies and products mature. But make no mistake, this space is approaching prime time after a couple of strong years of development and growth.
5. Enterprise platforms gaining a social layer. As we’re seeing withMicrosoft SharePoint and with Salesforce Chatter, enterprise software vendors are starting to incorporate social computing features within their products at the platform level. This has a number of advantages including providing a consistent, integrated social experience in and across existing apps, unifying security and identity, and so on. For many scenarios, close integration can be more useful than standaloneEnterprise 2.0 products which might not be as connected to actual business activities. However there are disadvantages too, in that there’s often little choice in such models in terms of picking and choosing best-of-breed social capabilities. But the stage is set and social features are increasingly perceived as standard fare in modern software. Expect most large software vendors to have Enterprise 2.0 features of some kind across their products lines in the next year or two at most, which will lead to a discussion of the advent of social operating systems. For now, open source is not a real player in this space, but will likely be in the future.
6. Activity streams. The output of most online social interactions is a reverse chronological list of activity, such as status updates, posted photos or videos, or shared links. The result is called an activity stream. It’s what you see when you look at a Twitter feeds, your Facebook news feed, or what your co-workers are doing on your enterprise social network home page. There are now standards developing around activity streams, and this will help the business tap into the value they offer. This includes capturing them, archiving them, and using them to further business objectives using a wide variety of practices including social analytics, community management, and compliance monitoring. Look for activity streams to become increasingly popular in enterprises as communication, learning, and situational awareness tools. I expect that standards support to make them interoperable will be of growing importance. Unfortunately, like so many Social Web developments, there are no specific standards for enterprise activity streams yet, though I do believe they will be created at some point in the near future.
7. Social search, analytics, and filtering. As Enterprise 2.0 makes a much larger volume of actionable information available within organizations, there will be the growing challenge of keeping track of it and finding what you need. While we don’t want to stop this flow of information, we do need to make it manageable and useful. Unfortunately, search, analysis, and filtering tools for social computing environments are still in their infancy and few strong technical solutions exist. But as enterprises realize that employees are going to potentially spend even more time to find the information they need to do their work, some will begin seeking out and applying solutions. For social search, companies such as Coveo and Baynote are starting to offer useful enterprise products. Enterprise social analytics is finally coming in its own and some of the leading offerings include Ingage Networks, Connotate’s Enterprise 2.0 BI and IBM’s new Smart Analytics Cloud.
8. Enterprise social media workflow. Those that use social media know that there’s a general workflow to the activities, from preparing content and publishing it, then promoting it, tracking the results, and participating in all the conversation that ensues. With multiple channels it can become burdensome to do all of this manually, and while consumer social media have had basic workflow automation tools for some time now, such as Ping.fm and tarpipe, only now are we seeing enterprise-class versions of these same tools. These are often getting added to existing content management workflow tools such as those from HP and the workflow and social networking capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint 2010.
9. Automated compliance monitoring. One of the less discussed but more important (and often unstated) objections to Enterprise 2.0, especially for public companies and regulated industries, is ensuring that their use is compliant with all local and foreign laws, rules, and regulations. When any worker can easily disseminate information across an entire organization, or even across the world, some organizations want to be aware of problematic situations before they occur. While social media policy for workers has evolved steadily to provide upfront guidance, many companies still want to ensure they can detect compliance violations as quickly as possible before they become an actual problem. Unfortunately, it’s all too common for FRCP, Sarbanes-Oxley, European Union Privacy Laws, HIPAA, eDiscovery, etc. to be somewhat neglected in E2.0 discussions, where most of the focus initially is on benefit and not potential risk. The good news is that even though most large firms using social media today don’t actively police their users (IBM is a good example of this), I do find that most firms that already have automated compliance tools like CompliantPro are usually covered. However, expect that compliance will become an increasingly important feature of Enterprise 2.0 platforms, and firms like Blogtronix actively advertise their E2.0 apps are compliance-friendly for individual industries, like finance.
10. Next-generation unified communication. Just when enterprise communication was about to get truly unified, social media showed up and fragmented it again. While instant messaging and even SMS is now usually integrated in many enterprises, microblogging, wikis, social networks, and other channels are mostly not, even from leading vendors that get social computing, like Cisco. IBM remains one of the few large vendors that has addressed this and currently supports some Enterprise 2.0 channels in its Lotus SameTime product. Relatively soon, I expect to see a new wave of enterprise unified communication products that include Enterprise 2.0 as a first class citizen. I believe that when this happens, these next-generation unified communications products may actually become a powerful driver of social computing adoption in the enterprise.

While there are certainly other interesting Enterprise 2.0 technologies, in my opinion these seem to be some of the most interesting and/or under-appreciated areas that are worth paying close attention for the near future. While I still find that so much actual Enterprise 2.0 adoption is surprisingly grassroots or otherwise local, the fact that many of these technologies above are just starting to emerge from infancy is also a major reason that social tools are taking longer to appear in the workplace than in the consumer world. Consequently, I do think most of these technologies will genuinely begin to address this disparity.

–Dion Hinchcliffe

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By now you’ve read all the myriad ways to start marketing through social media in Part 1 (In the Game: New Rules for Social Media) and Part 2 (In the Game: New Rules for Social Media Part 2) of our debut In the Gamecolumn.

But with all these ideas comes one fairly sizeable risk: fear of wasting too much time on social networking—in addition to uncertainty over the effectiveness of that networking—has kept many advisors who are interested in using social media on the sidelines. But like anything else, once you know how to use social media efficiently, you will start seeing results. Here, in our final look into the rules of social media under FINRA’s new guidelines we reveal how to avoid the major faux pas of adding social networking into your marketing plan—the time suck.

AVOIDING THE TIME SUCK

To avoid wasting time on social media, advisors should focus on their target market and centers of influence, not just catch up with old college buddies. One way to make sure of this is to see whether your clients are online—and if they are, which sites they’re using. After all, there’s no point in having a Facebook profile if none of your target market uses that site. One tip to keep in mind, however: Women over the age of 60 are the fastest-growing demographic on Facebook right now, says Kristen Luke, principal of Wealth Management Marketing. Surprised?

You can begin to find out if your clients are social networking by simply asking them in their quarterly meetings or by adding a question to your annual client surveys. If you don’t feel comfortable asking clients if they participate, let them take the reins by adding links to your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles to your monthly client newsletter.

Just how long should you be spending on social media? To get started, Allie Herzog, president of Integrate PR, recommends spending an hour each day across all of the sites getting comfortable with the conversations, joining industry groups and trying out the different tools. Once you feel comfortable on each of the sites—this could take a few weeks—spending just three hours a week on social media efforts can provide significant results, Herzog says. That’s not so bad now, is it?

To keep track of the amount of time spent using social media, Luke suggests setting aside an hour one day a week, say every Monday, to read an interesting article and post about it on a LinkedIn group’s discussion board and on Twitter. Luke also recommends using applications like Hoot Tweet, which allows users to schedule all their Tweets for the week.

PATIENCE IS KEY

Like all good marketing plans, results are important. But experts insist on being patient with seeing results from social networking—and to expect opportunities to acquire clients, rather than direct referrals.

“Even those who are great at this say it can take a year to get a client,” Luke says.

That’s how long it took for one of Luke’s clients who has heavily integrated social media into her firm’s marketing plan to acquire a client directly from her efforts. However, thanks to the online presence she built for herself, the client was asked to speak at several industry events and was quoted in various magazine articles—all of which produced a bevy of new clientele. See, patience really is key; all you have to do is stay open to the opportunities that may arise through social media.

Patience was also important for Carl Richards (Movers and Shakers 2010). Richards, founder of planning firm Prasada Capital, is now a staunch believer in the power of social media, which he equates to “going to lunch with 1,000 people any time you want.” Not long ago, Richards emailed The New York Times columnist Ron Leiber and told him he appreciated the work he was doing for the planning industry. After several email exchanges—and a quick look at Richards’ Twitter account (@behaviorgap) and blog,www.BehaviorGap.com, Leiber offered him an opportunity to be a guest expert on the NYT’s “Bucks” blog. Today, Richards is quickly climbing the ranks of the social media universe and is one of the leaders in this space amongst financial planners.

“All you have to do is start saying things you passionately believe in,” Richards says. “I’ve been doing this for five years, pretty heavily for two, and for the first one and a half years it was cricketville—not a word. Then, slowly, one to two people started communicating. It’s amazing what you can accomplish.”

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Right now, somewhere, a potential customer is searching for your products. But, who will they find first – your company or your competitors? Search engine marketing is all about getting in front of prospects at the moment they are searching for your capabilities on Google.

But how do you take full advantage of search engine marketing and outshine your competition? The following tips will put you on the path to search engine marketing success.

Choose the Best Keyword Phrases
The most critical step in search engine marketing is selecting the most important keyword phrases for your company. If you do not perform this step properly, your search engine marketing campaign is destined for failure.

When choosing the best keywords, it is critical to choose phrases that are relevant to your business and searched most often by your customers. Begin by getting inside the heads of your customers and brainstorm about potential terms your customers use when thinking about your products. Ask your salespeople, customer service people and best customers what phrases they think are most important. Then, turn to keyword research tools like Wordtracker or Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool to create a list of highly searched terms that will drive targeted traffic to your Web site.

Make Your Web site Attractive to Google
Now that we know your most important keywords, let’s put them to work. You need to make sure your Web site content and coding is optimized to take advantage of these phrases. Begin with your Web site copy – the information people can read on your site. Make sure you skillfully write your copy to effectively market your company, while using your important keywords in a relevant fashion.

Next, focus on your Web site structure – the code under the hood of your Web site that search engines see when they visit. Use your keyword phrases in page title tags, heading tags, director names, file names, alt tags and meta tags. Please note: while the ‘keywords’ meta tag is no longer relevant, the ‘description’ meta tag is very important. This description will show up in the search results below your link, providing a great opportunity to entice the searcher to visit your Web site.

Attract Quality Links to Your Web site
Link building involves gaining links to your Web site from other relevant and popular Web sites. The more quality inbound links you have, the more popular your Web site is in the eyes of Google. And, these links can have a dramatic effect on your search ranking.

A good place to start is to make your Web site content link-worthy. Good content attracts links, so fill your Web site with enlightening content such as best practices articles or a blog about trends in your industry. Next, get your Web site listed in online directories. Look first to important directories within your industry. Then, focus on general purpose directories like Business.com. You can also garner links from vendors, business partners and trade associations. Finally, leverage online public relations and distribute press releases and articles online. By consistently applying these link building strategies, you will dramatically boost your link popularity and your ranking on Google.

Run a Results-focus Paid Search Campaign
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) in the sponsored links section of the search results offers a compelling ROI-driven marketing opportunity. Unlike traditional advertising, where you ‘pay for exposure’ regardless of the results, with PPC you are not paying to be listed in the search results. You only pay if someone clicks on your ad and visits your Web site, providing a compelling ‘pay for performance’ mode of advertising. To manage an ROI-driven PPC campaign, first, bid on the most relevant keywords. Don’t pick terms based on popularity. Make sure your offering will be of interest to the searcher. Second, tie your bidding strategy to results. Think cost-per-lead and cost-per-sale, instead of just cost-per-click. Finally, include a compelling ‘call to action’ in the ad and send traffic to a relevant landing page tied to the ad. A compelling and relevant offer will help lift response and boost your ROI.

Measure Your Search Engine Marketing Success
As with all marketing activities, you must measure success to judge your past performance, as well as identify strategies to improve your results in the future. Since search engine marketing is all about attracting targeted traffic, begin by leveraging Web analytics to monitor traffic increases from search, as well as the phrases peoples are using to visit your Web site.

To make sure the volume of visitors continues to increase, you should also monitor your ranking in the search results. On a regular basis, check your position in the search engines for your keyword phrases to see that you are trending toward a top 10 ranking. Finally, to measure success of your PPC advertising efforts, harness the measurable nature of the Web to track the cost-per-visit, cost-per-lead, and cost-per-sale for your PPC ads.

–Bob DeStefano

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Building a loyal, satisfied customer base is paramount to any Web site owner or company. Every business owner wants to know what his or her customers are thinking and why they make certain decisions. Most understand that the most effective way to listen to customers is to collect their feedback. But even so, challenges remain: How should they collect the feedback? Where does it all go? What should they do with all the information collected? And most importantly, how do you show your customers that you are acting on their feedback, and in real-time?

Customer satisfaction and loyalty start with listening. Listening and engaging directly with your customers is critical to service, support and brand loyalty. Chances are your customers want to engage with you, but on their own time. Companies can offer multiple forms of contact, live chat and public support forums, but often it can be difficult to respond directly to each customer in a personalized way. You can provide a deeper level of customer service by opening up the channels of communication online.

Eliciting feedback lets businesses tap directly into the minds of customers to improve their Web sites, products or offerings. There are feedback tools and Web analytics platforms that provide you with the “who, what, when and where,” but you are still left guessing about the “why.” Understanding the elusive “why” behind customer behavior is only the first step. The most important step is what you do once you learn why, and how you engage and respond with your customers in real-time.

Before you implement a customer feedback initiative, your first step should be to evaluate your own goals and understand what it is you want to do with your customers. How will you acquire and act on customer feedback? What feedback will you receive? What will you do with the feedback? Once you establish your feedback goals, you can determine how to integrate customer feedback into your daily processes.

Choosing the right tool to organize and manage your feedback is dependent on these goals. Customer feedback can help you increase satisfaction, loyalty, retention and conversion rates so Web site owners should not overlook or invest in improper feedback tools. What tools are available and for whom are they best suited? You may have shopped around, or even experimented with a feedback tool or survey.

With many companies’ longstanding reliance on traditional outreach tools, it’s tempting to gravitate towards those surveys and polls, or even refer to each of these unique approaches as “surveys.” Yet, each accomplishes a different end. Understanding these nuanced differences allows owners the flexibility to implement a tool that produces the feedback they need.

Surveys come in a variety of formats, including e-mail surveys, online pop-ups, survey landing pages and more. Surveys and polls provide a high-level understanding of what is happening on your site, and are based on pre-set questions with a statistical review of answers. You receive answers to the questions you create.

You can use surveys and polls to ask ’site-level’ questions such as: ”Where did you hear about our site?” “What are you looking for?” “Who are you?” The answers to these questions can help you to know your users better, but they will not provide quantitative information on why your customers behave they way they do on your Web site. In addition, your survey and polling data is ultimately reviewed from a statistical analysis view, which may cause the solution to be relevant mainly to large Web sites with a lot of traffic or to a specific group of your customers. This means that not all types of businesses can benefit equally from these tools.

What is important to remember is that you are trying to elicit honest, timely and unique user feedback. Providing an online customer feedback mechanism is one way to open up a managed channel of communications. A feedback button should be visible all the time on each of the site elements you would like to monitor. This will provide you with process-level and Web-site-level high-quality (i.e., specific comments) and actionable data, allowing you to read and manage feedback, as well as respond to users. When visitors or customers come across an issue, they simply click on the feedback icon. Customers then rate their overall impression of your site from a selection of emoticons; select their issue category from a graphical menu; and provide a brief synopsis, giving you insight into their behavior in that instance.

Providing the online feedback channel in critical areas of your site also helps offer a less intrusive user experience and greatly increases the chances a user will give you his or her opinion. When you place a customized feedback form in a certain process in your Web site, such as a shopping cart or checkout area, you can gain critical information about why your users are leaving these areas. Once users provide feedback, you can personally respond and let them know your company cares about their experiences and is available to help. As the feedback form is customized to the specific Web site process, users will be more open to talk with you as you are directly responding to the thoughts they had when they left feedback on your Web site.

Using an online feedback mechanism lets you prioritize your collection efforts so you can choose to actively ask your users to submit feedback in the locations in which you need it the most, using a pop-up mechanism (you might want to use this option in your site’s shopping carts process, for instance, or on your product information process). The ability to choose the location as well as the frequency of this pop-up makes this a non-intrusive approach.

You can manage and analyze your user feedback based on your site preferences, Web analytics or CRM data, to provide a more complete view of your customers. In addition, you can control the look and feel of the feedback form to match your brand and further encourage users to engage with you at this feedback level. After you receive the feedback, you can choose to respond directly to your customers and talk with them about their feedback. This helps to put a human face to your business, as often your customers are skeptical about customer service. Using this approach not only lets you personally respond to a large number of users, but you also can improve your operations and back-office processes based on the trending feedback responses.

Regardless of what you use, the most important aspect of customer engagement is to first listen – really listen –and second, to respond and interact with customers in a timely manner. Too often, companies implement a survey or provide opportunities for customers to offer praise, criticism and feedback, and then the engagement ends. Nothing can hurt your company more than asking your customers for their opinion and then going silent. It’s what you do with the feedback that will show your customers how serious you are about real engagement.

–Ariel Finkelstein

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Web analytics is an integral part of any business intelligence portfolio and cannot be avoided in any decision-making phase. But it is perhaps most discussed among online marketers, who require it in order to make the best sales and marketing decisions.

These are often the same users who face a decision between paying for Web analytics tools and using free ones.

Since the time long ago when the release of the free Google Analytics tool created immense noise, significant differences between paid and free tools have emerged.

The biggest advantage of paid Web analytics solutions is the extensive support offered in terms of training, consultancy, and expert advice in measuring every aspect of your Website. Also, free tools normally just show trends and a summary-based view of the data. With paid analytics, it is possible to have much more graphical information, including a summary of data by date presented in dashboards.

The choice of free or paid depends on the intensity of your business. A personal blog or a nonprofit Website might be easily integrated with free Web analytics tools, such as Google’s or those available from BBClone, FireStats, 4Q, Grape Web Statistics, JAWStats, MochiBot, Piwik,Snoop, Woopra, Yahoo! Web Analytics, to name a few.

Free tools like these may well be sufficient for small and medium-sized businesses. And even for a large enterprise, free tools can act as prototypes to showcase the power and importance of eventually opting for paid Web analytics.

A corporate or enterprise Website, in contrast, may require data that can only be furnished by a paid Web analytics solution, such as those available from Clickstream, Clicky, Coremetrics,Lyris (formerly ClickTracks), Mint, Omniture, Unica, or WebTrends, to name a few.

Paid-for Website analytics from suppliers like these will help firms answer queries like the following:

• Which keyword(s) or referral source is giving me the best sales activity?
• Which geography is giving the best clicks and sales?
• Is organic search working well for me? Or is it the inorganic search giving more leads? (Note: Organic search refers results that appear automatically for free; inorganic search results are linked directly to ads or sponsored links.)
• Which is my best online marketing campaign?
• Who are my visitors in terms of geography, age, browsers, etc.?
• What areas of my Website are visitors most interested in?

These reports aren’t the end of what can be done with Website analytics. All the Web intelligence and insights drawn from these tools fall into the area of business intelligence. To be specific, I would call it Website business intelligence.

Users can create spreadsheets and presentations to showcase Website business intelligence. But suppliers offer help here, too. IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), for example, has partnered with WebTrends to deliver Web analytics through IBM’s WebSphere Portal Software, a corporate BI management and reporting system.

Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) and SAS Institute Inc. are in the Web business intelligence area, too: Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems has added the Sun Web Analytics Solution to Oracle’s kitty. And SAS has its own Web analystics tool.

The growing popularity of Web analytics tools is a clear indication of how important it is for any businesses to extract Web intelligence to optimize the user experience on corporate sites. Only Web analytics can help optimize online marketing campaigns while contributing valuable detail to business intelligence.

–Meer Irfan Ali

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The second of the five “core” conversion marketing patterns is the “Portal” pattern. Last month, I talked about the “brochure” pattern. In future posts I will discuss the “eCommerce” pattern, “considered purchase” pattern and “site as a service” pattern.

My goal with this series is to explore three strategies that are conversion deal-breakers for five categories of web sites. Get these strategies right, and you should be able to optimize your way to higher and higher conversion rates. Get any of these wrong, and you will find yourself struggling to improve.

For this discussion, I assume you are generating reasonably qualified traffic and that your offering has a demand in the marketplace.

The portal pattern

Also known as the “advertising model” and “subscription model,” The portal pattern can be identified by the following characteristics:

• The site itself is the service. Portals are most often content focused.
• The site “monetizes” the content through advertising, with some sort of pay-to-view strategy, or by offering complimentary products and services.
• Consumption is usually spontaneous. Visitors don’t think long about whether or not they are going to consume the content.

Sites built on the portal pattern include news sites, research sites, educational sites, forums and association sites. Most revenue-generating blogs follow the portal pattern.

Overall, the primary goals of a portal are to get people to stick around, to view more pages, and to join or subscribe. Here are the conversion strategies that will impact these goals most.

The home page

Many businesses design their site believing the home page is crucial to conversion. In this case, it is. If designed correctly, the home page will be the primary landing page for the site, though portals are often well suited to bringing search traffic to internal pages. Great content is the best organic search strategy.

I invite you see the home page as a traffic driver for the content. Just as you would advertise on other web sites, you advertise your content on your own home page. In this sense the home page is more akin to a search engine result page, or SERP. It helps a visitor identify which content they will investigate within your area of focus. For the information portal, the home page is like a magazine cover.

The home page must be laid out to quickly route the visitor to items of interest. Specific content should be featured. Many of these sites provide their most important stories on the home page. This is particularly true of the blogosphere, where the most recent articles appear on the home page.

The home page should say little about the company providing the information. If it is important that your company or products be highlighted, you probably should look at the “considered purchase” pattern, which I will discuss in another post.

Navigation

Visitors have different navigation needs. The brothers Eisenberg have a nice way to model this in their book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? where they define four “modes of persuasion,” or whatSitetuners professor Tim Ash would rather call “cognitive styles.” Your readers may favor some of these modes, and this model will help prioritize investments in navigation features.

A visitor in a “competitive” mode may be trying to solve a problem or stay up-to-date on a topic.Site search is critical if you’re attracting such visitors. Make sure your search engine doesn’t return a raft of irrelevant results. These visitors may lose patience quickly if they don’t find what they’re looking for near the top of your search results.

Visitors that in a “methodical” mode want to go deep on a topic. They will appreciate the traditional “drill down” style of navigation that most sites employ. Nested menus and category trees appeal to them. Links to related content on are also appreciated.

Visitors arriving in a “spontaneous” mode may be browsing. They are looking for an excuse to engage. They move on quickly if they don’t find something relevant content. Advertise specific content on the home page for these visitors. Intuitive categorization of the content will also help them find something of interest. They may also be drawn to categories like “Newest” and “most popular.” They’ll respect a site that categorizes content using terms that they are looking for, not just by industry conventions.

A visitor arriving in a “humanist” mode may be relationship-oriented and interested in what others think. Let them explore content on an author-by-author basis.

Site maps and bread crumbs are additional navigation tools that have proven to aid stickiness and conversion rates.

Your internal content pages are your landing pages. Each should offer the reader ways to explore additional content. Consider adding site search, proper categorization, author pages and related content features to these pages in addition to your traditional navigational menus.

Enrollment

What a tragedy it is to entice someone to subscribe to your site with your fine content, only to chase them away with a poor purchase process. It’s easy to rationalize that these visitors weren’t really ready to purchase. However, web site optimization efforts have proven successful in decreasing abandonment rates in shopping carts and registration processes. Maybe you’re the one who’s not ready.

While some abandons are the result of a visitor getting distracted at their computer, many are the result of unanswered questions and poor trust-building in the purchase process. For someone you’ve asked to provide their credit card number, anything your site does that leaves a question in their mind—or places one there—will cause them to reconsider.

Of the three strategies listed here, you might focus on this one first.

The first step is to know what your abandonment rate is. Subtract the number of people who become customers from the number of people who click your “join” button. This is the number of visitors who abandon your process before finishing. Divide this number by the total number of visitors who click “join,” and you get the percentage of people who don’t—or can’t—get through your purchase process.

It stands to reason that, if you have a pay-to-view business model, you’ve got to make it easy for people to sign up. Most visitors have a natural resistance to parting with their money. Any friction generated by your purchase process will increase your abandonment rates and decrease the number of paid readers you have.

Maybe the portal pattern should be called the “obvious” pattern. These strategies are the primary concerns for many web sites. However, this pattern stands as a contrast to the other patterns: Brochure, eCommerce, Considered Purchase and Site as a Service. These patterns have different make-or-break strategies, which I will explore in future installments.

Examples to explore

How well are these portal pattern sites serving their visitors?

• CNN.com
• Oprah.com
• Stratfor.com
• Texas Nurses Association

–Brian Massey

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Promoting content in social media is only half the battle. Once it is in the face of thousands of visitors, there needs to be some sort of emotional and psychological drive to get them to share that content with others. This is key in creating a “snowball effect” that will build perpetual motion to reach a much more pervasive audience.

I covered creating emotional “hooks” to lure people in to viewing content in The Anatomy of Linkbait, but that doesn’t necessarily provide a visitor with the same kind of emotions to want to pass the content along to an individual or mass audience.

Seven types of content sharing motives

To understand how to make content more shareable we must first understand what motivates people to share in the first place.

1. Self-expression

The biggest motivator in social media is self-expression. It’s great that there are so many different ways to do this in social media. When promoting content, use this motivator by providing easy ways for the visitor to express themselves, via social share buttons, comment threading, or some other form of engagement. If a person’s beliefs or interests are related to the content, then they will be glad to share it.

2. Affinity

Everyone wants to feel like they belong and that they’re a part of something. Sharing within communities helps meet that desire. This is an especially dominant motivating factor in niche related verticals or communities.

3. Validation

Confirming or approving something often times feeds the ego for many by making someone feel important. Content that provides personal validation will likely motivate someone to share with a wide audience.

4. Prurience

Obscene or lustful content can be highly shareable. Some people pass the guilt of consuming such content on to others to make themselves feel better about doing so in the first place.

5. Status achievement

Individuals like to be recognized for their efforts, especially publicly. If content or channels feature users who share the content, then they are far more likely to be motivated to do so.

6. Altruism

Benefiting others often times makes people feel better. Content can motivate visitors by giving them the opportunity to do something good for the community. For example, an environmental report to raise awareness can be a motivating factor to share it with others to get the message out.

7. Self-serving interests

Rewarding people for their efforts goes a long way. This can be done in the form of status achievement recognition, financial gain, free or discounted products or services, and so forth. Motivate people who share content by rewarding them if they do.

Sending vs. spreading

Viral sharing can reach many different audiences, hubs, and influencers. There are a few ways (and reasons why) people share content.

One-to-One

This type of viral sharing is most common via direct messaging through social networks, IM, or email. Dan Zarrella did a study on this and found that most people share in a one-to-one scenario due to:

• Personal Relevance (40%)
• Humor (16.4%)
• Utility
• Relationship Building (9.5%)
• Common Interests (7.8%)
• Sole Informant (5.9%)
• Reciprocity (2.4%)

One-to-Many

This type of viral sharing is most common on social networks and social content aggregation sites. Social media has created an outlet for this type of sharing to explode. Also in Dan’s study, he found that most people share to many others due to:

• Audience Relevance (18.6%)
• Increasing Reach (10.7%)
• Increasing Reputation (8.8%)
• Furthering a Message or Cause (8.6%)
• Utility and Usefulness (7.4%)
• Feedback (5.5%)
• Personal Networking (5.25)

Below is a chart showing the most popular social media sites for sharing content. As you can see, Facebook is the furious leader.

Four tips for creating content for viral sharing

1. Value

Trust me, I’m just as sick of hearing “create great content” and “content is king” as you are, but it really is the key to in getting people to share. By creating valuable, resourceful, and compelling content you will seek the approval of the masses.

2. Credibility

Make sure that your domain, brand, and author(s) are always seeking to establish credibility. Often times it comes down to the credibility of the source, not the content or message itself.

3. Usability

Making the content easy to share and driving them to do so with a call-to-action will do wonders.

4. Digestibility

Make it easy for people to consume your content. Whether it’s putting boring statistical data in a visual infographic, formatting the layout of the content, or chunking and segmenting content with headers and other methods, you are providing an easy way for the user to digest the content. If they feel the content and data is easy to digest they’ll feel comfortable sharing it with others.

The takeaway…

While many people might think that viral Internet memes happen on their own, the shocking truth is that most of them don’t. There is a large cycle of creative, development, deployment, and seeding that ensures success. By readying content and campaigns for viral success, you are taking the first steps in the cycle.

–Jordan Kasteler

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Generic website names with descriptive words of products and services deliver significantly higher click-through rates (CTRs) and overall clicks than those with non-generic domain names, according to a UK study conducted by MemorableDomains.co.uk, MarketingCharts reports.

The study was undertaken to test the seemingly intuitive theory that a generic domain name – like TaxPreparation.com or CarNavigation.com – would attract more clicks and perform better in pay-per-click (PPC) ads than a web address with a less intuitive or lesser-known branded company name.

Significantly Higher CTRs and Clicks

To test the theory, Memorable Domains created a Google AdWords PPC campaign using electric bicycles as a test product. For the campaign, it set up identical ads with three domain names:

• ElectricBicycles.co.uk (generic domain name with an exact product match)
• YourBikes.co.uk (an alternative generic domain name)
• InAHurry.co.uk (a non-generic name)

Results of the test showed that ads featuring the generic domain name with an exact match to the product had a CTR that was 15% better than identical ads featuring the alternative generic, and 42% better than ads featuring the non-generic domain.

In the same test, the “ideal” generic ElectricBicycles.co.uk ads produced 45% more clicks than the “reasonable” YourBikes.co.uk ads, and 105% more clicks than the InAHurry.co.uk ads, which did not intuitively explain the product.

Name Choice Also Important

These results indicate that while the use of generic keywords is important, the choice of the domain name itself is also critical, since generic domain names perform particularly strongly where search and domain keywords match closely.

Because of these positive results, Memorable Domains recommends that marketers consider using generic domain names for dedicated PPC search engine campaigns for specific products, services and advertising initiatives. Moreover, businesses might do well to isolate keyword groups within their campaigns, and use an appropriate generic name for each group.

Reasons for Generic Success

Memorable Domains attributes the strong performance of generic domain names to several factors:

• Because a generic domain name describes a product or service using the words people automatically associate with the topic, it encourages them to click more.
• The presence of search terms in the domain name leads to higher organic rankings or a
• better ad quality score in pay-per-click ad ranking algorithms.
• Search engines commonly automatically bold any word in the domain name that matches the search term, drawing attention to the listing.
• There is a potential positive impact of the domain name on ad quality score.

Exceptions to the Rule

The exception to these findings is in cases where the generic name is an established brand or website with a strong awareness and trust factor for the product or service search terms in question. Even in such cases, a generic domain name has potential value in targeting very specific product or service search terms with an appropriate keyword-rich domain. The findings suggest that established brands should consider a generic name for minisites associated with a particular product, service or ad campaign.

About the research: The test campaign used as the basis for the research ran from February 10 to February 22, 2009. The campaign was set up to gauge the overall AdWords performance of each of the three domain names, the comparative AdWords performance of an “ideal” generic name when it closely matches a set of relevant search terms (the “electric bicycles” group), and the comparative AdWords performance of an ideal generic domain name for a set of search terms where other generic domains might be equally appropriate (the “electric bikes” group).

Ads were run on Google Search and search partners only, with the device platform limited to desktop and laptop computers. The targeted language was English and location restricted to the United Kingdom. Ad serving was set to rotate ads more evenly, with no ad scheduling. Memorable Domains points out that this type of test is now no longer possible, since Google recently modified its AdWords policy to state that all ads in any one Ad Group must point to the same domain.

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This is likely one of the most under-utilized marketing tools by most businesses and also one of the most powerful. This is something I just love…To tap another organization’s existing pool of on-target audience in a way that provides a monetary incentive for them is a beautiful thing. Its advertising without the upfront costs, or pay-per-acquisition style advertising. Most small businesses haven’t traditionally used this tool – I suppose either because they aren’t aware of it or they just don’t have enough online traffic to offer as collateral. But with a good Web 2.0 site with recurring traffic it makes perfect sense.

Another benefit to you is the ability to add content to your site that adds more value for your users. You can pick and choose the products or services that you like, that fit your style or philosophy.

One of my favorites is an Amazon Bookshelf.

Not only can you choose any of the books to you like for the bookshelf, but almost any of the inventory listed on Amazon.com can be selected. Typically your referral fee will be about 6% and could go up to 15% depending on the item and volume of sales you produce. And, if you enter your bank info Amazon will direct deposit your referral fees once you reach the threshold.

Jonathan

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