Technical Articles

In the last few years I have written technical articles on web-based topics like Internet marketing, SEO, social media, and banner ads. Most of the articles were commissioned by DPS Technologies for their site blog, which explores Internet marketing practices.

More Companies Incorporate Social Media into Their Customer Service

Increasingly, companies are feeling the need to manage their reputations and their customers via social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.  Any single customer complaint has the potential through social media sites of reaching a much larger audience than ever before.

“Today the game has changed and any single [negative] service event can become a PR disaster of national proportions,” says Augie Ray of “Social Media Today.”

As word of a negative customer experience spreads, other consumers with similar experiences may also chime in creating a snowball effect that can impact not only sales but stock price.  Last year, a video of rats running around a NYC Taco Bell was circulated to millions via You Tube, and the result was a downward plunge in the stock of Yum Brands, the company that owns Taco Bell.

So, how can companies use social media to manage their customer service relationships and avoid PR disasters?  A large part of the solution involves creating and maintaining a strong social media presence and responding quickly to customer complaints and questions.  The following tips will help:

  1. Make social media marketing a specific part of your overall marketing plan.  Nearly 20% of all marketing dollars are expected to be spent on social media over the next five years according to Duke University's 2010 CMO Survey.

  2. Develop your own social media presence on the main social media sites: Facebook, MySpace, Linked In, Twitter.

  3. Assign a customer service person to monitor customer commend and feedback on your company and products on social media sites, and make a plan on how to respond to your customers comments.

  4. Use your social media marketing sites to promote new products and services and to raise awareness of upcoming deals or sales.

  5. Make sure that people at all levels of your company are aware of your social media presence, and circulate regular reports detailing customer feedback.

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Mobile Advertising an Important Internet Marketing Tool

While there is a lot of talk about social media marketing and SEO and how they can be used to help companies market products and services, relatively little is mentioned about mobile advertising an area that according to JP Morgan’s 2010 Internet Industry Outlook is going to grow 45% to $3.8 billion dollars in 2010.

Both Google and Apple are making big forays into mobile marketing via their respective acquisitions of AdMob and Quattro Wireless.

“Mobile advertising has enormous potential as a marketing medium…” says Susan Wojcicki, Vice President of Product Management at Google in a November, 2009 press release about the acquisition.

The question for business owners, of course, is how they can use mobile advertising in their marketing campaigns.  Fortunately, the rules for mobile marketing are very similar to the rules for e-mail marketing.

“…[al]though mobile is a new-age channel for marketing, the same strategies and optimization used for email campaigns can–and should–be implemented in mobile campaigns as well, “ says Justin Montgomery of Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following are e-mail marketing techniques that can be used for mobile marketing: 

  1. Keep it simple.  Just like with newsletters, which studies show that people skim rather than read, mobile marketing campaigns have to be designed with the knowledge that mobile users have limited attention spans as well as limited space; therefore it is important to make sure that what you say is relevant and on target.

  2. Social media: Just like with any Internet marketing, maintaining a social media presence is important.  Most social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are optimized for mobile devices, so using these services is an easy way for a business owner to incorporate mobile marketing.  Plus social media sites greatly facilitate viral marketing, which is useful in any marketing campaign.
  3. Optimize your tracking: Both e-mail and mobile campaigns can benefit from a unique landing page and/or URL that allows you to track how many users are responding.  This makes it easy to understand which campaigns are working, and which need to be tweaked.

In addition to these tips, it is also important that you have a mobile-friendly website.  Ideally your whole site will be designed so that it can comfortably display on a mobile device, but if that is not possible, you need to make sure that you have a section of your site that is optimized for mobile browsing, and that these are the pages that mobile users are directed to.

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Data.gov Offers Opportunities for Society and Businesses

Encouraged by Aneesh Chopra, chief technology officer of the United States, federal and local governments are making more and more data available to the public.

Data.gov, launched in May 2009, is part of a new Government 2.0 trend that involves making vast sets of data available to the public. The intent, as stated by Vivek Kundra, chief information officer of the United States, is to increase visibility and accountability for the government and to spur people and businesses to come up with new solutions to old problems.

“One example,” says Kundra, “is the National Institute of Health [publishing] the Human Genome Project data online. [That] created an entire revolution in personalized medicine where you ended up having over 500 drugs that were created and that are in the pipeline coming into the FDA. [Another] is what happened…when the defense department decided to release data around satellites: you created this GPS revolution where now you could go to your local car rental company and get a GPS device or your iPhone and get directions.”

Government data can be used by businesses to provide value added information to their customers. For example, real estate companies can download local government statistics about restaurants, business, crime rates, housing values, political districts, and various public facilities and use that data to provide 3-D views of cities and neighborhoods. Tourism websites can utilize the same data to give visitors to their sites a more robust view of cities and districts across the United States.

The Major technology players were quick to involve themselves in the data.gov project. In 2009, Microsoft started their own project to aid in the dissemination of government data—the Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) which is an open-source starter kit designed to help people mine government data sources and publish the results on the web.

“OGDI-based solutions not only provide easy access to government data, but also demonstrate how cloud computing can significantly reduce the cost, complexity and time to market for solutions that consume the data,” said Daniel Kasun, senior director of the U.S. Public Sector Developer Evangelism Group at Microsoft in a press release last May. “Developers will be able to focus solely on solving the business needs of government agencies, resulting in a breadth of new solutions in a very short amount of time.”

Despite the good intentions of the government, there is still considerable work to be done by federal and local agencies to get their data into a format useful by developers.

Sandy Smith, a regular writer for Influence, the Internet and technology strategy zine, said in her September article, “Ideas to Open Government Data,”

"Data.gov has a lot of data, [and] many formats are technically accessible but, in reality, hard to parse for people not using the original SAS applications the datasets were probably built for. While it would not be as 'raw' as initially envisioned, urging as many agencies as possible to produce actual queryable APIs with the data would [create] more possibilities for truly creative visualizations and allowed new participatory applications to be built."

However, the federal government is aware of these issues. On December 8, 2009, President Obama sent a memo directing all federal agencies to release at least three high-value data sets within the next 45 days; he also required that within the next 120 days that they issue a plan on how they plan to improve government transparency.

“My Administration,” said President Obama, “is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trustand establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration.”

Tips For Using Data.gov Data For Your Business

Find the Data

  • Go to Data.gov to check out the available data from the Federal government; keep in mind that federal agencies will be making new data available in the coming months, so if you don’t see data you can use at first, try again over the next two months.
  • Check out your state data bases; go to http://www.usa.gov/Agencies/State_and_Territories.shtml to find a full listings of all state websites.
  • Also be sure to check out city and local municipality websites, which are typically listed on state websites.

See What Others Are Doing

Investigate user groups and publications are that participating in government data initiatives like the W3’s working draft, “Publishing Government Data,” (http://www.w3.org/TR/gov-data/) Microsoft’s Open Government Data Initiative, (http://www.microsoft.com/industry/government/opengovdata/) and the White House.gov technology updates (http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/technology)

Determine Which Data Sets Will Work For You

While government data may not be immediately useful to every kind of business, many companies, particular ones with an online presence can use demographic data to both target their clients and to provide value added information to them. Most of the data is raw, so it can be sliced and diced in any way that works for you. Think of creative ways to use different data sets together. For example, if you were running an NYC tourism site, you could use the restaurant inspections data sets with the local businesses data set to create personalized tours for people with recommendations for hotels, shop, and restaurants. You might be able to leverage your site promotions of these businesses to get discounts for your customers and ad revenue for yourself.

Originally written for the DPS Blog: http://dpsadvantage.wordpress.com

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Small Business Owners Weigh in on ROI in Banner Ads

In 2010, it small businesses will use fewer banner ads in their marketing campaigns, according to a survey released November 17, 2009 by  Vertical Response, a provider of online, direct-marketing campaigns. 

The survey, which was conducted from September to October 2009 and talked to 831 small business owners, indicates that 54.2% of small business owners do not plan to use ad dollars for web banners in 2010.  However, 68.4% of them do plan to increase their use of social media in 2010, and a whopping 96.2% plan to use e-mail marketing.  Nearly one quarter (23.8%) felt that search engine marketing “…was the tool most needed for their business to succeed in 2010.”

This survey seems to reflect a growing dissatisfaction of advertisers with traditional banner ads, a trend that has also been noticed by the websites that serve the ads.  In an Ad Week article from June 2009, (“Thinking Beyond the Online Banner”) a handful of companies talked about the new and different ways they are using banner ads to provide a non-traditional and customized marketing campaigns for their advertisers.

The Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s news reporting and opinion site, has started to integrate banner ads into content.

"[Banners] are small and standard, and have been in exactly the same place for so many years it's an easy user behavior to ignore them," said Caroline Marks, GM, "We felt the need to challenge the existing product set and look for new products to help advertisers leverage the benefits of interactivity."

At Digg.com, the ratings site, users are now permitted to “digg” banner ads in the same way they “digg” other content.

Chas Edwards, the chief revenue officer says, “We need to find ways for brands to borrow the grammar of the [user] experience."

Meebo, the chat site, has begun to use custom banner ads: the ads start out as the traditional 728 x 90 size, but then expand to 900 x 400 when a user clicks the banner.

"With the Web awash in ad impressions, there's a need to stand out in the market," said Martin Green, CIO.

But, it is not all bad news for banner ads: despite the belief by business owners and web providers that banner ads are ineffective, users seem to disagree.  A May 2009 survey of 1575 users commissioned by iProspect, a search engine marketing firm, shows that a significant number of users do notice banner ads even if they do not click them.  A full 49% of users surveyed said that they eventually search for a product or service that they saw advertised in a banner ad, and 38% actually end up going to a related website after performing the search.

Reports like this indicate that the problem is not with the effectiveness of banner ads, but in the way their effectiveness is measured.

Originally published December, 2009 on DPS Blog: http://dpsadvantage.wordpress.com

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Check Mate on Social Media Consumers with Innovative Marketing Strategy

A September 2009 survey of 5,000 moms conducted by The Parenting Group reveals that while 60% of moms have used social media in the last 24 hours, they are four times more likely to purchase through direct referrals, than proposals through social networks.

“When it comes to influencing brand perception and purchase decisions, the data shows that social media still has a long way to go,” said Stephanie Molnar, Work Place Media. “Most of our meaningful recommendations continue to be old-fashioned, word of mouth recommendations from friends, co-workers, and/or family.”

While consumer analysis seems to challenge the effectiveness of social media in internet marketing, businesses continue to invest in this tool, reporting significant gains.

In April 2009, Ford loaned 100 top bloggers their new Fiesta for six months, on one condition–they had to write about their experience driving the car. Comcast, the cable company, has invested in Twitter marketing for the last year, using this social media bigwig to supply their 28K+ consumer base with news updates, while collecting feedback and analyzing their behavior trends. Social media marketing has also been a success for Dell, which reported $3 million+ revenue from consumers who clicked through Dell’s Tweets, funneling purchases.

While only a few businesses have demonstrated a clear ROI on their social media marketing efforts, it would be silly for most to ignore this latest trend: Facebook has 250+ million website users, while Twitter  is up to 40 million consumers. As we approach 2010, social media marketing has proved to be a tremendous asset to businesses who utilize offline promotions to offset internet marketing campaigns, engage consumer audience through service expectations, and create strong business strategy that delivers immediate consumer purchases.

Originally published December, 2009 on DPS Blog: http://dpsadvantage.wordpress.com

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