Online Insights: Web Analytics

What Should You Test?

New clients just getting started in A/B and multivariate testing often ask us for advice on what to test on their websites or mobile web initiatives. The answer is: It depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Since you can test pretty much anything about your website, what you should focus on depends largely on the combination of your user’s goals. What are they trying to accomplish with your own marketing goals? What do you want your users to do?

Determining where users spend their time on your site will provide insight for areas to test. You can find this information through web analytics click stream analysis (like Google Analytics reports), with heat maps that show you where users are focusing their attention within each page (like Crazyegg), with survey tools that allow users to explain what they do and don’t like, and various other types of tools. No matter how you get your information, you should be looking for common pathways through which your users are navigating around your site, as these are the areas where testing variations is most likely to affect behavior.

As a marketer, you should also have a clear definition of what your own goals are for the site.

For example, are you interested in selling product, acquiring leads or generating clicks to other sites? Put another way: how do you measure success? The answers to these questions will help you zero in on what you should be measuring to gauge the outcome of each test.

What to Measure
Once you identify the key pathways through your site, refer to the following list for ideas of specific things you might test variations of. Consider making not-so-subtle changes; bold changes produce bold results, whereas tepid changes often produce little or no effect.

Text/copy

• Long vs. short
• Style and tone, such as chatty vs. formal
• Positioning, such as which value propositions, features and benefits work best
• Call-to-action text

Font, color and size

• Think about your target audience. For example, if your audience is older, test larger fonts.
• Roughly 15 percent of men are color blind; consider contrast and colors in text and surrounding areas.

Buttons

• Color
• Location relative to the form or feature
• Copy/text

Navigation

• Sequence of items
• Labels
• In-line text link
• Link style, such as underline or bold

Images

• Content of image, such as including a man vs. a woman vs. a group
• Size and color depth
• Location on the page

Layout

• Location and size of areas or boxes on the page
• Attention focus, such as which layouts help focus vs. create distraction
• Buttons and links, and where to place them

Functionality

• Three-page checkout vs. five-page checkout
• Requiring form fields vs. making them optional
• Adding bells and whistles vs. turning them off

Photograph by Hemera/Thinkstock

In addition to creative elements, you should also consider the effect of added content (like heavy images or scripts) on site speed. In many cases, there is a strong correlation between a site’s speed (the combination of page load and render time) and marketing goals like conversions or bounce rates. In other words, faster sites produce higher conversions.

For example, Mozilla.com, one of the top 50 trafficked websites worldwide, found through testing that by streamlining a landing page, it was able to get the site to render 43 percent faster and as a result, increased conversions by 15.3 percent. This translated to more than 10 million additional downloads per year.

Website testing is a highly effective way to make systematic improvements that boost conversion. Identify what your users are doing (or want to be doing) on your site, clarify your marketing goals, and then try testing variations that are likely to nudge users along through your site’s conversion pathways. And remember that optimization isn’t only about creative; it includes site speed and performance. When users experience a more usable, persuasive and faster site, everyone wins.

Eric J. Hansen is the founder and CEO of Boston-based SiteSpect and the chief architect of the firm’s non-intrusive technology for multivariate testing, behavioral targeting and digital marketing optimization. Follow Hansen on Twitter at @ericjhansen.

July 2010 – Online Strategies: Online Insights

Social Media and SEM: Friends or Foes?

The explosion of social media and the steep growth trajectories of sites such as Twitter, Facebook and, more recently, FourSquare, have created huge opportunities and challenges for marketers in equal measure. According to the SEMPO “State of Search Report 2010,” based on a global survey of nearly 1,500 digital marketers, 59 percent of client-side respondents said social media budgets will increase over the next year compared to only 4 percent who said budgets will be less. Agencies are even more bullish, with 85 percent saying they expect increased client-spend this year.

Although social media marketing budgets are still modest compared to those for search engine optimization and paid search, many companies are starting to take this relatively new channel very seriously.

Social Media’s Impact
Effective social media marketing can help drive website visitors by giving companies and brands more visibility on search engines and social media sites. A good social media strategy can have SEOs licking their lips at the prospect of new links and opportunities for visibility on social media-friendly search engines. Three quarters of agencies surveyed (74 percent) for the SEMPO survey, carried out by Econsultancy, say the rise of social media has had an impact on their clients’ search engine marketing activity.

It should be noted that while social media marketing can help search efforts, the main objectives of social media marketing, and the skill-sets required, are often very different from search.

Although the research found that the primary objectives for search marketing are most likely to be “selling products” (for paid search – see Figure 1) and “generating leads” (for SEO – see Figure 2), the primary objective for social media marketing is most commonly increasing brand awareness and enhancing reputation (see Figure 3).

The skills required for social media marketing, where creativity is paramount, are not the same for paid search marketing, which generally speaking, requires deeper analysis and left-brain thinking. Similarly, the metrics used to measure success are very different.

The primary skills required for a staff member managing SEM, search advertising campaigns include: the ability to stay on top of the latest campaign management and analytics tools, the ability to convert campaign performance data into action plans and the ability to execute exact and different campaign best practices based on the advertising channel.

By contrast, the core skills required for a new staff member to develop and execute effective social media campaigns include: be adept at listening and understanding what your target audience is saying about your company’s product; be able to work with the appropriate social media tracking tools to effectively monitor dialogue and answer questions; know how to drive community conversation; and recognize that successful social media marketing takes time as you work to expand your customer base.

Where SEO and paid search success can be worked out on a more tangible return-on-investment basis, measuring the success of social media campaigns often requires more intricate analysis. The metrics will likely vary based on the objectives.

These differences don’t mean that the same agencies and same people cannot be well equipped to help a company with both search engine and social media marketing. But what should be clear is that social media marketing should be seen as something more than just a search-marketing tactic.

Linus Gregoriadis is research director at Econsultancy, which carried out and published the SEMPO “State of Search Report 2010.” Contact Gregoriadis at linus.gregoriadis@econsultancy.com.

April 2010 – Online Insights: Customer Centricity

The Power of Negative Reviews

Though it may seem counterintuitive at first glance, negative reviews enhance consumers’ shopping experience and boost retailers’ bottom lines by providing credibility and perspective. In this article, we offer some best practices to help retailers take advantage of the value of their negative product reviews.

First, consider the broad-ranging findings: A recent Forrester report noted that 50 percent of online shoppers decided to proceed with a purchase of a product after reading negative reviews on it. And MarketLive Performance discovered that websites with customer reviews earn six percent higher conversion, on average, than those without them. PowerReviews.com client Alpaca Direct experienced a 23-percent sales uplift on products that had customer reviews–including negative ones. Jim Hobart, Alpaca Direct co-founder, sees the critical value in customer reviews, both good and bad, in retaining and acquiring new customers: “Reviews help build that initial trust. They’re key to the long-term success of our company.”

How can you replicate the successes of businesses that have experienced sales uplift and deeper levels of customer engagement from negative customer reviews? How do you eliminate the possibility of irreconcilable differences with your customers? Start with the following relationship rules:

Relationship Rule No. 1: Build Trust
Negative reviews can actually help retailers build trust among their customer communities. According to usability testing conducted by PowerReviews, consumers do not believe the “perfect product” exists; in fact, consumers expect to see negative or constructive feedback in some of the reviews and discount those products that do not have negative reviews.

Consumers often find negative reviews to be the most helpful. Let’s say, for example, that consumers consistently find that a camera underperforms at fast-moving sporting events, but a potential buyer is planning on using the camera primarily for still-life photography. The impact on the potential buyer is that other consumers have taken the time to point out a flaw, but that flaw is not relevant. This increases purchase confidence.

CurrySimple, a supplier of ready-to-heat Thai sauces, has used negative reviews to identify opportunities for product testing and improvement. CEO Mike Moran makes it a practice to respond directly to negative reviews that surface on the site. These types of exchanges have helped to establish more opportunities for customer interaction with the products. The dialogue specifically addressing feedback oftentimes compels customers to make contributions of their own: sharing their food experiences, providing ideas on special uses of spices and helping other customers understand the value of particular products in their own words (as opposed to the company’s). Reviews have not only increased traffic to the company’s site by roughly 25 percent, but CurrySimple has also experienced a steady conversion uplift of 40 to 50 percent within three to four months of adding reviews to the site.

Some tips for building trust:

• Don’t hide negative reviews;
• Respond to negative reviews in a timely manner;
• Identify core problems by gathering specific ideas as to what went wrong;
• Suggest alternatives or provide a solution; and
• Assess the product(s) in question from a merchandising and product-improvement perspective.

Relationship Rule No. 2: Get Engaged
RedCats USA, recognized as a global leader of home and fashion brands, recently reached the one million customer-review mark on its site OneStopPlus.com. VP of E-commerce Jason John affirms that the constructive feedback reviews provide are essential to building engagement: “We believe our overall success is based on creating a two-way dialogue with our customer. We actively and continually encourage our customers to voice their opinions. We intend to continue focusing on customer reviews as a key customer-engagement tool.” Redcats often incorporates customer input (including suggestions for product enhancements and improvements) into future offerings.

Tips for driving deeper levels of customer engagement:

• Invite your customers to write a review via post-purchase e-mail;
• Use order-history links to provide another opportunity to encourage customers to write a review;
• Plug promotional contests or special offers for writing a review;
• Use e-mail campaigns to showcase your top-rated products.
• Remind customers to review products on homepage banners, e-newsletters and other online communications; and
• Use offline touchpoints to solicit reviews: in-store purchase receipts, packaging inserts and in-store signage.

Relationship Rule No. 3: Plan for the Future
Tapping into the insights of a more engaged customer community will provide retailers with countless opportunities to improve the customer experience. Increasing relevance and usefulness for the consumer is central to sustaining trust, growth and deeper levels of engagement with your customer community, ultimately resulting in significant gains in conversion and customer retention. However, what you do with the customer review data beyond enhancements and product improvements is just as critical. Brands and retailers who utilize review feedback to help guide shoppers to products that are well suited to their lifestyles and their intended uses will gain the competitive advantage.

A tool such as social navigation provides a more helpful and relevant user experience for the customers on your site by using customer review data to help shoppers filter their product search results by Pros, Cons, Best Uses and User Personalities. This allows shoppers to narrow their choices by consumer-generated attributes, not just by star ratings.

While still in its nascent stages, the merging of search and social is rising to the top as a trend to watch. The implications of this convergence can yield tremendous value for retailers whose reviews are SEO-friendly at both the product level and category level. Finding smarter tools to make your review technology more robust will help you leverage user-generated content to drive more sales.

Utilizing the insights you gain from positive and negative customer review data will help you stay focused on better customer experience now–and and well into the future.

Pehr Luedtke is CEO of PowerReviews, a provider of review-based solutions to help companies better engage and connect with their customers. He can be reached at pehr@powerreviews.com.

April 2010 – Online Insights: Social Media

Focus on Facebook

By Kevin Ertell

Retailers seem to be struggling to set themselves apart and find that perfect online space where their message and brand will reach the greatest number of shoppers. These days, it seems everyone is talking about social media as that space. But the more people you ask, the more opinions you uncover. Which platforms will best sync with a company”s marketing strategy and aggressively drive sales? How do customers interact with retailers via social media and what value do they hope to gain?

The Survey Says
A recent study undertaken by ForeSee Results–utilizing the proven methodology of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) and based on a survey of nearly 10,000 shoppers on the top 40 retail websites–sought answers to those very questions and uncovered some illuminating results.

Of the 69 percent of online shoppers who say they use social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, more than half (56 percent) choose to proactively interact with companies by “friending” or “following” at least one retailer. Not surprisingly, customers who follow retailers are the best, most engaged and brand-committed customers out there. Sixty-one percent of online shoppers who follow retailers actually follow fewer than five, an indication that they are focused on their favorite retailers. Likewise, retailers should not get caught up in the numbers game. Rather than trying to get the most friends and fans possible, a far better solution is to focus on getting as many of the highest value customers possible. Not only are they the most likely to follow or friend the company, they”re also the most satisfied, the most likely to recommend the retailer to their friends and the most likely to make future purchases.

What Do Social Customers Want?
What do customers hope to gain from this relationship? Although more and more companies employ social media (especially Twitter) as a means of answering their customers” technical questions, our study shows that while technical support is one option essential to the medium, far more people use social networking with retailers to learn about sales and product information. In fact, only five percent use social media primarily for customer support. This is a marketer”s dream come true. Consumers want companies” information, sales and specials–retailers just have to learn how to give it to them effectively.

Facebook is, far and away, the best place to reach shoppers. More than half of everyone who shops online uses Facebook, and of those online shoppers who engage in social media, more than 80 percent use Facebook. Despite all of this vast and untapped potential, an unofficial look at the Facebook pages of the Top 100 online retailers reveals some unexpected surprises. Nearly one-quarter do not have any formal Facebook presence at all. Many more have a Facebook presence, but one that can”t be found by entering the company”s name within Facebook“s own search engines; the URL comes up only through a Google search. If you can”t find a webpage, it might as well not even exist. In other words, half of the top online retailers have a minimal to non-existent presence on the most looked at and utilized social media platform ever invented. And these are the top retailers! Imagine how the Top 500, 1000 or 5000 fare.

Perhaps retailers hold back because they can”t quantify the value of a Facebook page to their business. As a result, they don”t put the time and effort into social media that they might put into established traditional online marketing initiatives that have a more measureable, quantifiable impact. An even bigger obstacle is a lack of clear strategy or the execution of less effective strategies that ultimately lead to poor results. If a customer comes to a company wanting to know about new products and promotions, but the retailer is only providing meaningless polls and trivial status updates, that customer is going to rate that retailer extraordinarily poorly, and worse, take their business elsewhere. Retailers need to ensure they have people dedicated to monitoring and posting compelling, timely promotions and product information. While Facebook isn”t the only social media game in town, it is the undisputed heavy hitter and easily the best place to start as retailers figure out how social media plays into their global brand strategy.

Twitter, despite its hype, barely moved the needle. Billed by social media experts as the ultimate social media tool for communicating rapidly and efficiently with consumers, Twitter“s scores consistently brought up the rear. It was regularly bested by MySpace–increasingly regarded as the ailing vanguard of social media–and other, less- hyped websites. Only 11 percent of online shoppers use Twitter (as opposed to Facebook“s 56 percent), and of shoppers who use social media, only 16 percent use Twitter (as opposed to Facebook“s 81 percent).

One of the study”s most exciting illuminations is that retailers” best customers are following and friending brands in very public arenas. They actually want to hear marketing messages in a forum that, until now, was widely believed to be a personal “no-marketing space.” Retailers need to remember that social media is not a one-to-one equation. Social networks are force multipliers. They operate exponentially. When you satisfy the needs of a customer via social media, your actions are visible to everyone that likewise follows them. Brands should always look for ways to engage their very best customers and give them the tools necessary to spread the word via their own networks.

ForeSee Results” research shows that when retailers provide rewarding social media experiences, customers become even more satisfied and loyal. This is an amazing testament to customer fidelity and interest in social engagement. Shoppers are actually choosing proactively to engage in relationships with retailers on social sites. They are reaching out for information. The question is, are retailers reaching back?

A recognized expert in e-commerce with more than 10 years of executive-level experience, Kevin Ertell is ForeSee Results” vice president of retail strategy. Kevin is a frequent speaker at e-retail conferences and is regularly quoted in major publications. He can be reached at kevin.ertell@foresee results.com.

April 2010 – Cover Story: The Zen of Social Media Marketing

Don’t Be Frustrated By Reports of Those Whose Experiments With Social Media Yielded Little Financial Gain. Do Social Media Right and You Can Rake in Profits and Have Fun–Imagine That!

By Shama Kabani

Like many people, I finished graduate school quite secure in my own knowledge. Having written my master’s thesis on social media (Twitter, specifically) and the reasons people use it, I went out into the world ready to spread the word. Of course, it wasn’t quite as simple as I thought.

I saw quickly that my research (plus years of online networking as a student) had given me a view of the online world that differed sharply from the view that potential employers had about online marketing. They viewed social media (and the Internet as a whole) as just one more tool in their marketing plan–one more way to reach customers with a one-way message. I saw it as a way to connect with people who might, as they heard my stories and I learned theirs, eventually become customers.

I’ve since built my business around the idea that there is a certain Zen to online marketing–especially when it comes to social media marketing. It isn’t always intuitive or obvious for those schooled and experienced in traditional marketing. As Chris Brogan (best-selling co-author of Trust Agents) wrote in the foreword to my book The Zen of Social Media Marketing, “There’s human code out there all about how human you can be, how you can connect with people and what that means for business. I’m flying all over the planet right now, writing new versions of this code for companies, showing them how to be human,” he explains. “The goal is simple: explain to people that, while face to face is just as important as it ever was, now we’ve got all kinds of new tools that let us tighten bonds in between those in-person moments,” he says.

He’s right, as usual. I recently had a kind of epiphany that led me to write a book about a new way of looking at this “human code”–and more importantly, at the links and connections that are left behind as we use social media to connect.

It was about six p.m. and I was heading out the door when an upset client called. It sounded like she was on the verge of tears, so I put down my things and asked how I could help her. Her response was an emotionally charged monologue filled with frustration and disappointment. “They banned my account from Facebook. I don’t even know what I did wrong. I just don’t get social media. I hear about people who are very successful using it, but I don’t know where to start. I have fifteen followers on Twitter; others have thousands! I run a seven-figure business, yet I can’t help but feel like I am missing out on a key component in my marketing!”

Over time, I received more and more calls like that from frustrated marketers who echoed her words. One man summed it up when he said: “It’s like swimming upstream!”

That’s when it clicked. I realized that the main reason people are struggling with social media marketing is that they were attempting to go against the natural order of things. Traditional marketing rules can’t be applied to social media for the simple reason that social media is not a marketer’s platform. It belongs to consumers. Accept that, begin going with the flow, and you will find your way to the Zen state that leads to success in using social media as part of your marketing effort.

The Zen of What?
Yes, I know. Spending hours on social media sites only to be disappointed by a zero return on your investment doesn’t exactly put you in a Zen-like state. But that happens only if you are doing it wrong. If you go with the flow, you can rake in the profits and have fun. Imagine that!

No, I’m not going to tell you to just breathe deeply and use “the force.” Like every good Zen master, you need some tools in your arsenal. When done right, social media marketing works for businesses. And it works, albeit slightly differently, for businesses of all sizes and types. I know this because we have worked with clients at all stages–from start-ups to well-established firms–to leverage social media.

Let me be candid. Social media rarely leads to instant customers. I won’t say that social media marketing doesn’t ever lead directly to customers because it does happen to me and to my clients, but this shouldn’t be your goal. If you want to gain customers fast, there are better tactics to pursue.

Why Bother with Social Media Marketing?
First and foremost, businesses should bother with social media marketing because that’s where the people are. Your customers–over half of them according to most current data–have already made a purchase based on recommendations they received through a social media site. Over 250 million people use Facebook every day. If it were a country, it would be the fourth largest, smaller than the United States but larger than Indonesia. And it costs nothing to join.

People are already talking about you. I get phone calls nearly every week from a business owner or marketing executive who wants to hire my company to “do something” about a negative comment on a consumer-review site like Yelp, stop a rumor that’s spreading around Facebook, or repair the damage to their reputation from a story a customer posted online.

Most companies give only lip service to customer service. And the Internet has given a huge megaphone to every customer who feels they have been treated badly. The customer is no longer reduced to fuming silently or writing a letter to the corporate offices. Today, that customer has a worldwide voice–most likely a Facebook profile, Twitter account or a membership to a consumer-review site like Yelp. And if she doesn’t, she has a friend who does.

The only choices really left to marketers are to become part of the conversation by building a solid social media presence, or wait to react when the conversation involves them.

What Social Media Does Best
Social media is great at turning strangers into consumers. It’s the perfect channel for allowing people to get a taste of your product or service: it’s sampling made easy.

Social media marketing works best as a tool for attracting traffic and attention. It doesn’t work as well for converting strangers into customers. It’s better suited to converting strangers into consumers (e.g., blog readers or newsletter subscribers), if simply because “free” is an easy sell. Free works. And over time, it can and will lead to business.

People, especially strangers, crave social proof. Social proof is the theory that we are more likely to do something when we see others doing it. This applies even more when the “others” in question are similar to us. We often decide what to do (including whether to buy) based on what others are doing. This isn’t the only factor in our decision-making, but it is a major one.

Social media is built on social proof. Because of this, social media is a great way to transform past successes into new attention for your company.

There are two parts to this transformation:

You have to do a good job. If your service or product just doesn’t deliver, you are out of luck. You can’t transform a bad experience into an attraction tool. Let’s say you sell a blender and it breaks. The customer tries to return it, but your overworked employee says you just don’t take returns. Sorry. And good day.

This is not an experience you want amplified. On the other hand, if you do a great job, it makes for the perfect story. One of our clients is K9Cuisine.com. They sell premium dog food online. Not too glamorous, but their customer service is amazing. They go above and beyond just delivering an order. If a client orders regular shipping, they upgrade it for no extra charge. If a customer says his dog didn’t like a specific brand, they swap it out and help him find something that his dog will like. They’re more than just a dog food seller; they’ve become trusted dog nutrition advisors who care about your four-legged friend.

Use your success to attract more success. This goes beyond just regular testimonials. This involves telling your customers’ stories–the stories of what they achieved through your service or product. When K9Cuisine.com receives an e-mail thanking them for helping Jack–the beloved golden retriever–start eating again after a long illness, they ask the customer if they can share their story with others. The story then makes its way onto their Facebook page and into their tweets. Soon, lots of people know about how K9Cuisine.com helped Jack. Next time they think about Fido needing dog food, they will think about K9Cuisine.com. If they have a great experience, they may tell their friends. And so the cycle continues.

So what’s the best tool you have to convert consumers into customers? Your website! There is no getting around this. You shouldn’t be engaging in social media marketing if you don’t have a great website first. But why not simply depend on free social media profiles?

• You own your website. You don’t own your social media profiles. Your profile (and your hard-earned contact list) is owned by the social media site itself. If it goes “poof” tomorrow, then so does your online presence.
• Social media profiles are somewhat limiting. You can convey only so much information on your profile. Although the information may (and should) intrigue someone, it isn’t usually enough to make a sale. As noted above, social media platforms are not selling tools. They are attraction tools.

The Nature of the Fun-Loving Beast
Let’s start by breaking down the phrase “social media marketing”:

• Marketing: Promoting a product or a service to increase sales;
• Social media: Online platforms where people connect and communicate.

Some examples of online platforms are blogs, YouTube and social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Most people abuse social media platforms. They use them to push their message on people and try to dominate the market. Marketers who abuse social media usually do so because they are used to using traditional marketing methods like television. You can’t talk back to the TV. (Well, you can, but it doesn’t get you very far.) With social media, talking back is the whole point; it’s a conversation, not a monologue.

Avoiding the Biggest Social Media Marketing Mistake
Have you ever heard of putting strategy before tactics? A strategy is an overall plan. It is the big picture: what needs to be accomplished and why. Tactics, in contrast, address the when, where and how. Tactics are the way you implement your strategy.

Strategy should always come before tactics. However, most people doing business online go about this backwards. They see the next cool networking site and join, or someone tells them they have to have a blog, so they start one only to abandon it after a month.

I see people constantly chasing the next cool thing online without really knowing specifically what they want to accomplish. They may think, “I want to make money,” but don’t go further than that. And most important, because they don’t know what they want to accomplish, they don’t know how to measure the success of their tactics.

Are you trying to attract? Convert? Transform? Once you decide what your goal is, find a tactic that will help you achieve it. Then you’ll also know how to measure your success. For example, if you know that the ad you are going to put on Google is meant to attract, then you will measure the number of visitors to your site to gauge how successful your investment was. You won’t waste your time being frustrated that it didn’t lead to more direct sales. If you were using a tactic to convert, you would check the number of people who subscribed to your newsletter.

Social media, blogging, search engine optimization and e-mail marketing are powerful ways of developing online leads for most business. However, it’s your company’s website where your prospect makes a buying decision and the sale actually takes place. Each webpage needs to provide prospects with a compelling reason to do business with you, including calls to action that gently direct them down the sales funnel, getting them to “buy now” or contact you. While an unprofessional website will de-rail the best web marketing campaign, a well designed site is a powerful tool that will continually convert high-quality leads.

Kabani’s book is the first “living book” in its category. Readers have access to free updates, new information and new case studies as the book expands and develops.

Social Media Marketing Checklist
Here’s a checklist of the things you must have in place (or be in the process of putting in place) before you start with social media marketing. Remember: social media marketing is only part of the bigger picture:

A good “BOD”- You must have a keen understanding of your brand, outcome and differentiator.

A website - It’s all about “EMS.” Your website must educate, market and sell.

Content - Ideally, your website will include a blog, because a blog makes it easy to update your site regularly with fresh content, but however you update, just make sure you do. Fresh content increases the likelihood visitors will stick around and turn into consumers.

An e-mail capture mechanism - Don’t send people to your website unless you have a way to follow up with them. Ideally, this means collecting their e-mail addresses so you can send them relevant content in the form of a newsletter or bulletin in the future.

Have all four? You’re ready to rock and roll!

Shama Kabani is president of The Marketing Zen Group, a Dallas-based full-service digital marketing agency with clients from Australia to New York City. Her new book, The Zen of Social Media Marketing, is now available in bookstores or online at Amazon.com or the book website, www.zenofsocialmedia.com. Kindle and eBook versions are also available, and the book is the first “living book” in its category that gives readers one year of access to free updates, new information and new case studies as the book is revised, expanded and updated online.

March 2010 – Online Insights: Social Media

The ROI of Social Media

Retailers of all sizes are racing to put up their own Facebook pages, open Twitter accounts, invite customer feedback on their sites, and generally do more online to connect with their customers using social media sites and tools. But in the race to do “all things social,” retail marketers may be putting the cart before the horse; in other words, they may be investing valuable resources in programs without also investing in program measurement.

Social media marketing–the process of engaging with customers in online communities about your brand or products–is undoubtedly one of the most talked-about marketing methods today. And for good reason: participatory social media continues to grow in popularity among consumers–Facebook alone has more than 400 million users–and it presents numerous new, direct opportunities for businesses to learn from their customers and provide both better service and targeted promotions.

However, because social media is relatively new, most marketers are not only still struggling with how to reach this audience, but also with what to say to them–and when. Measurement of social media marketing programs today is usually an afterthought. A 2009 study by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education found that 84 percent of marketing professionals do not even attempt to measure the ROI of their social media marketing programs.

CMOs Want Answers
Blind faith that social media marketing will deliver a positive boost to brand awareness and product sales is increasingly becoming a risky approach. Some 72 percent of CMOs who did not measure the revenue impact of social media initiatives in 2009 will do so in 2010, according to a December 2009 study from Bazaarvoice and the CMO Club. The CMOs surveyed planned a 333-percent increase in tracking revenue, a 174-percent increase in tracking conversion and a 150-percent increase in tracking average order value from their social media programs in 2010.

The good news is social media marketing programs can be measured, analyzed and optimized with similar rigor and insight as display ads, paid search and video ads. In order to do so, however, you will first need to establish the right social media measurement program, strategy, metrics and tools.

What Marketers are Doing Now–and What They Need to Do
For those retail marketers measuring social media effectiveness today, most are focusing on analyzing website traffic; few, however, take the next step to measure whether this socially driven traffic actually impacts conversion, according to eMarketer. Site traffic is a good indicator of whether your social programs are driving engagement, but to get a true ROI number, marketers–and retailers in particular–have to measure whether this traffic actually converts.

In 2010, social media marketers need to implement tools that allow them to measure and track the actual impact of social media programs on all of the following to get an accurate reading on ROI: traffic volumes, engagement, brand notoriety and conversion. While conversion tells you whether your social programs are actually resulting in sales, it’s important to measure both hard metrics (clicks and conversion) and soft metrics (brand recognition, engagement, customer service feedback, etc.). You can assign a dollar value to these soft metrics so they become part of your overall ROI calculation.

Here are some practical steps to putting a measurable social media marketing strategy in place:

Always start by defining overall marketing goals and then connect them to social media programs, not the other way around. Do you want to drive 10 percent of sales through social media? Fifteen? Do you want your brand loyalty to rise 10 percent–or 20?

The next step is defining exactly which metrics to measure. Here are the three main social media Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) all marketers should be measuring:

Volume – Total overall conversation volume by media type (number of blog posts, social network posts, customer feedback, reviews, etc.);

Engagement - Community activity ratios (comments per post or replies per post); and

Sentiment - Online social media brand perception (ratio of positive, negative and neutral feedback trended over time).

Next, you need to select and configure the appropriate set of social media analytics tools to enable the necessary speed, accuracy and automation of data collection that will allow you to produce the KPI metrics most relevant to your social media channel programs. There are many great free or free-to-try tools available on the market, including Alterian Techrigy SM2, trackur and filterbox. Make sure the tool you choose allows you to measure conversion from social media campaigns, as well as the cross-campaign impact between paid media and social media programs.

For more advanced users who are ready to migrate from free measurement tools to more advanced stages of both brand monitoring and social media marketing campaign management, paid tools like Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Meteor Solutions, Visible Technologies and Radian6 all offer specific and detailed configurable dashboards and reporting interfaces that will enable marketing managers to optimize their social media programs on an ongoing basis.

Once you have defined your social media measurement methodology and program, including selecting a short list of KPIs, it’s time to start measuring how your brand is doing online with your target audiences–and whether your social media initiatives are helping. Here are a few key considerations and tips to focus your initial efforts:

Use your social media analytics tools to find out how many visitors arrive at your site via social content versus how many arrive via paid media ads. You may be surprised at the power of social content; several studies show that upward of 20 percent of traffic to brand websites today comes from a shared link, a Twitter update, Facebook post or some other social media initiative.

Second, find out if the people arriving via social content convert at a higher rate than those arriving via a paid ad.

Next, measure which social initiatives are working the best to drive traffic and conversion. Is your Facebook page driving the most visits? Or is it your YouTube video channel, your blog, a recent social contest or your Twitter feed? Which social program is driving the greatest conversion? Analyze traffic and conversion patterns by timeframe and demographic, before and after the launch of a paid media campaign.

Find out exactly where your social content–both the content you create and UGC–is being viewed and shared, and how this sharing is driving traffic and conversion. Is YouTube driving more pass-along of your videos than your outbound e-mail campaigns with embedded links to your videos? Are discussions about your brand’s recent TV commercial on third-party blogs responsible for a surge in site traffic? Analyze traffic patterns across both social media and paid media programs, and figure out how they impact one another.

Armed with consistent metrics, as well as a baseline of your brand’s previous performance, you will be able to optimize all of your social media program activities over time for better return on investment. And that, as savvy marketers know, is almost always the name of the game.

Clay McDaniel is founder and principal of Seattle-based social media marketing agency Spring Creek Group. He can be reached at clay@springcreekgroup.com.

March 2010 – Online Insights: Online Video

Is Your Online Video Engaging Enough?

Have you ever endured one of these common videos? Shots of a guy sitting behind a desk, struggling–painfully, to himself and the viewer–to fill two-and-a-half minutes of airtime with information about his company’s mission and past successes? Obviously, this is anything but a good use of online video. Such efforts don’t cut it anymore with fickle web users who know there’s something better–much better–just a click away.

Still, many companies choose this boring route when developing their online video strategies, opting out of creating exciting, engaging clips and instead wasting time focusing on shows that only serve to drive viewers to tune out milliseconds after clicking “play.”

“Video is more engaging than any other form of communication, both online and offline,” says Diaz Nesamoney, CEO at San Mateo, Calif.-based video technology firm Jivox. “The fact that you can add personality to online videos and make them engaging is exactly why you use the medium in the first place.”

With close to 85 percent of the online audience currently watching videos on the web, Mary Spio, president of Orlando, Fla.-based digital content creation firm Gen2Media, says those firms that take the time to create engaging clips are reaping significant rewards. “We see retailers getting 20-percent increases in web traffic because they’ve ‘humanized’ the online experience through video,” Spio explains.

Those retailers are using video to guide consumers through the different buying cycles, create awareness of products and services, and to even do some hand-holding to help customers research their options and make the best purchase decisions. All of this goes a long way toward creating consumer loyalty, says Spio.

Nesamoney says smart marketers also go beyond the “television mentality,” and use interactive elements to transform online clips into an engaging experience for end users. A utility that allows viewers to download a restaurant menu, or that whisks the user off to a virtual tour of the establishment, for example, can expand the usefulness of a single video, and ensure that consumers do more than just watch for an obligatory two minutes and move along.

You can also add color and excitement to online videos with simple tools like interactive quizzes and coupons, says Nesamoney, who has used these options successfully with numerous clients. A company in the financial planning industry (not exactly considered exciting by the typical consumer), might embed simple quizzes on retirement preparation or wealth management, for example–complete with advice and recommendations–into its online videos.

Once viewers figure out that they will run out of money in 10 years if they don’t start investing wisely now, they’ll call your firm for financial planning advice. These types of interactive video elements “go a long way toward keeping consumers glued to a site and engaged in the content,” says Nesamoney.

Social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter are other great ways to spice up your online videos. By integrating them into your online video strategy, you’ll be able to invoke higher engagement from–and interaction with–your customers. Combine that with an online video component that’s updated regularly, says Spio, and the end result will be a “sticky” site that keeps viewers coming back for more.

“If you give people the tools necessary to share new videos across sites like Facebook and Twitter, you’ll transform your customers into ambassadors for your products and services,” says Spio, who points to troubled Toyota as a company that employed the strategy successfully via an online video campaign for its Scion vehicle. Other companies have used similar strategies. “We helped Coca-Cola with the same approach,” says Spio, “and wound up driving over six million people to an online destination over just three months.”

Companies looking to emulate these results must consider the many different ways that they can engage customers. Understand that some are in a perpetual rush and will never have the time to sit through a 10-minute clip, while others will pore over every last video in search of information and advice. Those with short attention spans will be more apt to “click here” for special offers, hoping to cash in on today’s best deals (or move onto another site), while those with more time on their hands will take a virtual tour of a home offered for sale, or view a product-specific video.

“It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach,” Nesamoney adds. “To get online video right, you have to consider all of the different consumers who are scouring the web for information.” Spio concurs, and says the “short-attention-span consumer” will be most prevalent online. “Keep your videos simple, short and entertaining,” Spio says. “Ignore this rule, and you’ll see dismal results from your efforts.”

The good news is that marketers who create videos that include engaging content, action, movement and multiple calls to action are reaping rewards with minimal financial and time investment. “With online video, you can measure how many people view your shows and whether or not they’re taking the next step to learn more about your products, services and offerings,” says Nesamoney. “That alone is reason enough to take more time conceptualizing and developing your online video in the most engaging manner possible.”

Tim Hawthorne is founder, chairman and executive creative director of Hawthorne Direct, a full-service DRTV and new media ad agency founded in 1986.

January 2010 – Online Insights: Social Media

A Thumbs-Up for Five-Star Ratings

YouTube inspired some social media soul searching last autumn, after a blog post revealed that five stars are the norm for their video ratings. “If the majority of videos are getting five stars, how useful is this system, really?” the post asked. “Would a thumbs up/thumbs down be more effective, or does favoriting do the trick of declaring your love for a video?” Hundreds of commentators on the site and across the web weighed in on how they rate videos, how they use ratings and what works best: five stars, 10 stars, three stars or a more binary “like it/hate it” type of rating.

These are clearly very important questions for YouTube–and the rest of us. From our work with hundreds of advertisers, retailers and media sites, it’s clear that a five-star rating system without related comments would fail YouTube users; you either like a video (five stars) or you don’t (no rating given, or perhaps one star if you really didn’t like it).

FIVE STARS AND PRODUCT RATINGS
However, five-star ratings systems for products remain extremely useful on sites like Amazon.com, BestBuy and thousands of others–even when four- and five-star ratings outnumber the rest. Our analysis across 600 brands shows the average rating to be 4.3 out of five stars. These ratings serve a definite purpose: filtering products and pulling people into a deeper conversation with the brand.

Unlike on YouTube, when you see a star rating on a site like BestBuy or Macy’s, it means the reviewer took the time to evaluate the product’s attributes (price, usability, design, quality), rate it, tag it and write a more detailed review to explain their reasoning. A thumbs up/thumbs down system or a three-star rating system simply don’t give the level of depth that shoppers need to make a purchase decision.

Five-star ratings provide the best way for shoppers to find products they like. When I search for products on a site, I’m much more likely to click through on a product with a rating of three stars or greater. Ratings also give brands a great way to surface and present their best products in a category, on a web page or in an e-mail. In fact, our data shows that simply including top-rated products in an e-mail increases revenue per e-mail by over 40 percent.

Star ratings also play a critical role in driving shoppers to the more helpful content: the review itself. By including five-star ratings in paid search campaigns, Office Depot was able to increase click-through rates by 78.5 percent, conversion by 23.8 percent and revenue by 196.6 percent!

Even Google acknowledges the difference between star ratings for video content and star ratings for products and services. At the same time its YouTube property is questioning its ratings system, Google has introduced consumer-generated star ratings into organic search results after finding that searchers are more likely to click on highly rated links. At least in the products and services realm, the five-star rating should not–and will not–disappear.

Sam Decker is chief marketing officer of Bazaarvoice, the market and technology leader in hosted social commerce applications that drive sales. Bazaarvoice’s SaaS social commerce solutions have served more than 60 billion pieces of customer-generated content on more than 600 websites from brands including BestBuy, Costco, Dell, Macy’s, P&G, Panasonic and QVC.

January 2010 – Cover Story: Rabbi, Professor, Online Marketing Guru

Ice.com’’s Pinny Gniwisch on Digital Marketing Booms and Busts, Emerging Opportunities in Social Media and the Future of E-commerce

By Tom Dellner

Spend a few moments with Pinny Gniwisch–either one-on-one or by attending one of his popular presentations at an industry event–and you”ll never forget him. Warm, blunt, self-deprecating and disarmingly funny, Gniwisch is also one of the industry’’s great thinkers and speakers, and one of its foremost experts in social media.

Gniwisch–together with his three brothers, all rabbis–founded Ice.com (originally buyjewel.com) and is the company’’s executive vice president of marketing. He has led the business to 30 percent year-over-year growth for nearly a decade. A sought-after speaker, Gniwisch has appeared at every industry event worth attending and has been quoted frequently in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Fortune and many other business and financial publications. A consultant to companies like BestBuy, Target and Victoria’’s Secret, Gniwisch is also a professor of e-commerce at Canada’’s renowned McGill University.

Online Strategies recently sat down with Gniwisch for a fascinating–and far-too-short–discussion about e-commerce and social media.

Online Strategies: What initially attracted you to e-commerce? Do those same characteristics of the industry still motivate you today, or have they changed as the online marketing world has evolved?

Pinny Gniwisch: Good question. What initially attracted me to e-commerce was the feeling that we were spearheading the Internet. It was the Wild West and nobody knew where to go or what to do, so we had the freedom to test and experiment and to be on the forefront of history, in a way.

And coming from rabbinical school, to find an opportunity in marketing and in entrepreneurship would have ordinarily been very difficult, given my educational background. But starting in a totally new industry where I was on par with everyone else, I had an opportunity to get in there and see what worked and become as good as–or maybe even better than–many of the people out there.

And these characteristics of the industry are still there for me today. There’’s so much innovation. The industry changes every single day. There are new technologies coming out all the time, and if we can stay on the cusp of these technologies, we can continue to succeed.

OS: You”re a veteran of e-commerce and a keen historian on the topic. From your unique perspective, what are the most significant, watershed moments in digital commerce that have allowed the industry to thrive and that have shaped it into what we see today?

PG: There was a period early on when the industry was out of whack–getting eyeballs to your site was considered important, but little emphasis was placed on conversions. The bursting of the bubble associated with that era was crucial to the growth of the industry; it was a painful, but absolutely necessary lesson that had to be learned.

In Biblical terms, we went from the seven fat years to a period of famine–from doing deals with AOL for $32 million for exclusivity to AOL giving you CPA deals the next week. But it was a correction the industry needed. We had to be reminded that yes, we have to make money, conversions are important and we need to have a viable business model in place.

Another key moment occurred when social media began to play a big part in our business; we went from marketing “one to many” to marketing “many to many.” In other words, we learned the power of harnessing our customer base to spread our message via word of mouth. People have always purchased products based on others” recommendations, but on the web, you can actively listen to the conversation and take steps to enable its growth, to influence it to an extent and to begin to truly harness its power at scale.

OS: Some online marketing platforms emerge out of nowhere and catch fire. Others are discussed at conferences for years, with brilliant experts in the field touting their benefits, yet never really take off or are forgotten as new ones emerge. Can you give us a few examples of online marketing platforms that have surprised you for either reason (unexpected success or failure)?

PG: I am surprised that companies have taken to product reviews to the extent that they have and are now using them to further their business models. A few years ago, one would think that companies might take a closed-door approach to reviews, rather than embracing them. Companies like BazaarVoice have emerged as leaders in this field and have hundreds of clients, which I never would have expected. It’’s all a result of companies realizing and understanding that transparency is a requirement of today’’s marketplace–and that’’s a beautiful surprise.

Second Life’’s failure to take off caught a lot of people by surprise, although that is something that I expected. It had been touted for quite a while and many companies jumped on board. But all the companies that went there are not there any more. There were millions of virtual “dollars” being spent on Second Life to purchase virtual goods, and the thinking was that this would somehow wash over to the real world, but people simply didn”t take that step.

An interesting technology on which the jury is still out is Twitter. Industry experts are touting the technology from a marketing or customer service perspective, but there are still very few success stories (Dell and Pizza Hut are two examples)–certainly not enough yet, in my opinion, to convince me that this platform is truly viable.

OS: How would you counsel a marketer that understands the importance of embracing new technologies (and taking a leadership position in these areas), but who is wary of chasing every new shiny object and wasting money on sexy-sounding new technologies and platforms that may eventually fizzle?

PG: Some new platforms simply can”t be ignored. When you think about Facebook, for example, no one has really figured out exactly how to make money on Facebook. But they have figured out that Facebook fans click through and convert three times better than those on your e-mail list. And when you consider that it’’s at 350 million people and growing every day, this is a platform that can”t be dismissed as a fad. You need to find a way that your company can play in that ballpark.

Gniwisch’’s Ice.com enjoyed 30 percent year-over-year growth for almost a decade.

At Ice.com, we look at the data until we”re confident that if you work a particular platform correctly, you”ll succeed. Then we take away lessons from those who”ve done it correctly, and apply them to our business model. For example, Ford blogs incessantly about green issues and it’’s working for them. The broader lesson is that blogs are an interesting way to help your SEO efforts and to show a different angle of your company. So we created a blog more appropriate for our business model–celebrity fashion was our angle, and we match the jewelry the celebrities wear to products we offer. We”re now getting 30,000 uniques a day, a big boost to our rankings, and we”ve done a few hundred thousand dollars in sales.

It’’s a matter of observing trends, learning from those who are doing it right, and applying the technologies and best practices in a way that’’s appropriate to your particular business model.

OS: On a one-to-10 scale, how mature do you think social media is right now?

PG: I would think that today we are at a three. When you listen to the futurists talk about social media and its potential, you realize that we”re really just crawling right now.

OS: How do you see social media evolving in the next three to five years–and what are the implications for online marketers?

PG: Regarding companies that embrace social media, the organic make-up of their websites and of their businesses as a whole will be far more integrated with social media. People will be going to Facebook and shopping with their friends in real time, on retailers” sites that will exist on Facebook.

Technologies like Google’’s Sidewiki–which allows people to make comments regarding websites and products that subsequent shoppers can read and react to–will continue to develop. So we”re all going to be working as one, so to speak, in our shopping environments. People will be increasingly posting about what they like and what they”ve bought, as they do on Facebook Connect.

But imagine using Facebook Connect and being able to navigate to a retail site and having the ability to purchase a product, all within Facebook Connect. And then while you”re shopping, your shopping-related searches can come up on your Facebook page in real time so that your mother or sister can participate and collaborate. The potential of this sort of social shopping is nearly limitless.

OS: While you”re looking into your crystal ball, are there other developments you envision outside of the area of social media?

PG: I think you”ll see CRM software make big improvements. Little glitches like the one where you type in your order number and then call a company and the first thing they ask you for is your order number–all of these will quickly disappear. Site search and collaborative filtering techniques will continue to improve, as well.

Mobile commerce will certainly undergo dramatic developments–the ability to shop via your smartphone will be greatly enhanced as more and more companies follow industry leaders like Pizza Hut and 1-800-Flowers into m-commerce. Companies that jump into this arena, experiment, test and optimize will be well ahead of the curve when this shift in purchase behavior occurs.

OS: In your opinion, what are a few emerging areas of opportunity for intelligent, enterprising online marketers?

PG: For the last five years, if you were an online entrepreneur and you wanted to make money, you opened up a search agency. I think that field is now covered. I believe social media companies–made up of smart people who are listening carefully to conversations that are occurring online–will emerge, helping brands begin to participate in, and ultimately monetize these conversations. I think that will clearly be an area where we”ll see a lot of action over the next three to four years–agencies looking to connect social media with commerce.

OS: You”re an e-commerce executive, an in-demand speaker and now a professor at an acclaimed university–where do you think you will focus your energies in the coming years?

PG: I would like to write down my ideas regarding the future of e-commerce. As an industry veteran and someone recognized as having a somewhat unique voice, I would like to think that that voice should be heard. So my hope and dream is to write a marketing book on social media and e-commerce over the next six months or so.

It astounds me that e-commerce hasn’t melded into the traditional business world more than it has. For example, the MBA program at McGill–where I am a professor–has just instituted an e-commerce course. It’’s crazy, when you think about it, that an educated marketing person from an outstanding university might not have had an understanding of one of the most crucial aspects of marketing, where the lion’’s share of dollars are going to be spent in the future. The traditional marketer needs to know about the potential of this world and not be so apprehensive about it.

As evidenced by this image, Gniwisch’’s speaking engagements are quite colorful.

OS: As a professor of e-commerce, what are two or three of the most important lessons you hope to convey to aspiring e-commerce professionals?

PG: Transparency will be the mantra of the marketing director. Understanding that is essential to future success. “Target markets,” “hit projections” and other terminology will have to change, and the consumer needs to be on an even playing field with you, as a marketer, in order to create products that they will want to pull, rather than ones you will need to push.

Also, I encourage people to fully utilize the tools that are out there that enable you to test and optimize your online marketing efforts. This will help you understand the levers that really drive your company’’s success, and the crucial data you need to know in order to correctly manipulate these levers.

Finally, I think it’’s crucial to use the valleys in your business’’s performance to develop the techniques and technologies that will propel you at the peaks. And when you”re at a peak, don”t stop testing new ideas.

December 2009 – Feature: Reputation Assaults

Trolls are no longer hiding under bridges. The are actively lurking online–and ready to eat your lunch!

By Mike Hughes

According to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, in Internet parlance a “troll” is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, slanderous, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a discussion forum, chat room or blog. The troll’s primary intent is to provoke emotional responses or otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion. While most webmasters and forum administrators consider trolls to be a scourge on their sites, some websites welcome them as an opportunity for profit.

As a Peabody Award-winning documentary director for NBC in New York, I strongly believe in protecting free speech and have fought actively over my 30 years in the media to defend it. In traditional media, free speech reigns within reasonable legal boundaries and limitations of defamation laws, which require that the truth be told to the public under threat of legal penalties. Tragically, that is not the case with online media and many American businesses are being eaten alive because of it.

Reputation assaults by trolls represent a menacing and growing problem. Their actions encroach on direct-to-consumer commerce and our entire society’s free speech rights. Slanderous and false online postings are being enabled and protected from traditional slander and libel laws because of what amounts to a legal loophole known as the Communications Decency Act (CDA). Reportedly, the CDA was made into law so our legislators could avoid ruling on the political hot potato of community standards regarding pornography. To date, lawmakers have not been motivated to adjust the CDA to also protect and sustain our expectations of truth within free speech and to keep our rights from being trampled on by free-wheeling, online trolls acting with impunity.

The CDA loophole has allowed a few questionable entrepreneurs to create their own perfect storm of disruption and reputation assaults, inciting and hosting the most outrageous kangaroo courts imaginable. They persecute products and services for their own profit motives–and they have blanket protection under current Internet law. In the 1925 literary classic “The Trial,” Franz Kafka tells the story of a man prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his offense confusing to both him and the reader–a disturbing nightmare.

Likewise, a nightmare of confusion is ruling the day online when it comes to products being crippled by anonymous trolls posting false or dubious complaints about products, services and companies. In some cases, individual entrepreneurs can operate as judges by running their own privately owned and operated consumer complaint sites and using them as their own online fiefdoms.

I can only describe these sites and tactics as “questionable” until the CDA is more fully shaped by Congress to cover online defamation. The broad legal strokes of the CDA give questionable site operators absolute power on decisions about reputation assault postings because of their immunity to slander and libel laws. And we all know what happens when any group of individuals has absolute power.

Most people worldwide look in awe at the American judicial system and view it as the gold standard of legal systems. Consumers with legitimate complaints have many means of addressing their needs, including small claims courts, attorney general offices, state and city consumer complaint mediation, as well as the Better Business Bureau, chambers of commerce and the non-profit American Arbitration Association. The latter now offers professional mediation services online.

Unfortunately, online posting sites have become the go-to spot for consumers who do not have a legitimate complaint and wish to blow off steam about their purchase decision with false reputation assaults and, in doing so, become trolls. American law is sadly lagging behind Italian law, which has wisely banned this online conduct.

To infer that every business listed on a questionable site is a rip-off or every product listed is a scam is no more accurate than using an ethnic slur to describe everyone of a certain race. This behavior replaces truth with emotional and broad generalities. This is always a stupid and often an oppressive and evil thing to do.

The biggest problem is that consumer awareness lags far behind this new reality due to the blinding speed of the Internet. Most are unaware that a posting they may be reading is not even in the same universe of credibility as reports from organizations such as the Better Business Bureau or Consumer Reports magazine. A blistering attack on an unregulated reputation site may have been written by a frustrated, underemployed man who kicked his dog and beat his wife before posting a hate rant about someone he saw on TV whose face he didn’t like.

As Seth Godin writes in his bestselling marketing book Purple Cow, “It’s people who have projects that are never criticized who ultimately fail. Will you do some things wrong in your career and be unjustly criticized for being unprepared, sloppy or thoughtless? Sure you will. We often respond to criticism by hiding, avoiding the negative feedback and thus (ironically) guaranteeing we won’t succeed. The only way to avoid criticism is by being boring.”

It is vitally important that products, services and businesses be criticized truthfully and fairly without a troll escalating the criticism to barroom drama that disrupts normal on-topic discussion and kills the enterprise.

The Damage Done

At ReputationMedia.com we have interviewed hundreds of business owners and have discovered the ravages done to perfectly legitimate businesses that now need professional help to tackle these publicity and reputation challenges. The problems only escalate if the business owner files a rebuttal on a questionable site. This action moves the posting up to a higher search-engine ranking and often angers the person posting the complaint to launch further attack.

An unfairly attacked business owner must recognize when he or she is being “worked” by professionals who own these questionable sites and who may wish to leverage the business owner’s fallen status to gain what might be called “protection money” in the form of counter-posting fees.

Business owners today need professional help and publicity advice–in addition to legal reform. Consistently helpful legal recourse for them has not yet been found and may come too late for them to remain in business. When businesses are forced to close their doors because of a troll’s false posting, jobs are lost and more foreclosure signs go up on the houses in our neighborhoods.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas L. Friedman recently commented on Meet the Press, “Online postings should come with the warning, Caution: reading this may be hazardous to your mental health.”

Our advice to business owners is to confront this situation head-on with awareness followed by building a “firewall” of backlinks to positive, “white publicity” stories about your business in advance. Advance backlinking is designed to prevent the first negative comment about a business from rising to the top of Google as fast as a weather balloon. This is one way to protect your marketing investment against trolls who hack into the minds of your prospective customers with mental viruses by posting slanderous or off-topic messages to disrupt normal, on-topic product presentations.

Before launching a new product or ad campaign, ask yourself if it’s wise to build your castle on anything less than a solid foundation. A wise marketer today will consider the precautionary steps of posting hundreds of links every month to positive content about themselves, the product and the company as much in advance as possible to protect his or her investment, assets and good name from a lurking troll. Once an online publicity campaign is launched for only a few thousand dollars, the monthly fee for backlinking to good publicity can be as low as $200 per month.

Winning the War

Trolls and troll sites promoting reputation assaults are unlikely to stop any time soon. On the contrary, they are growing and expanding in scope because unethical marketers now look for the first signs of competitor companies or products impeding their success. Online, success means traffic that can be stolen and more traffic means more business.

It’s simple to divert traffic from its intended destination to a troll’s site by posting a phony online assault sign such as, “Wait! Don’t be scammed–buy our sure-fire humdinger instead.” Sometimes, this is the only way an inferior product can hope to compete with a superior competitor.

The trolls are winning. Every day they become more emboldened and empowered by the growing number of questionable sites which are posing as consumer advocacy sites. They justify reprehensible activities by posing as “the good guys” as they conduct their businesses as wolves in sheep’s clothing. They need to be outed for who they are–the trolls leading the trolls–and they need to be regulated or neutralized in some way.

Questionable sites have empowered trolls with unlimited potential for unethical extortion, which is being used and will likely expand dramatically if not stopped.

Two women recently walked into a Berkeley coffee shop and demanded free coffee, stating that if their demand wasn’t met they would file a slanderous complaint about the small shop on a complaint site.

Business owners are even being threatened with an online slander assault when they simply invoice an individual for a past due account.

Where does it stop?

I believe the following actions are needed:

Increased public awareness through campaigns focused on consumer advocacy fraud.

Direct lobbying efforts toward members of U.S. Congress and to U.S. Senator Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine), a ranking member of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs should call Senator Snowe’s office to ask her to review the Communications Decency Act and to join other professionals in asking Google to end their support of unscrupulous or questionable sites that exploit business owners.

Some sort of plan, executed by an association or organization of Internet properties–including consumer advocacy sites–to promote self-regulation through creating common practices and industry standards, as other association such as the Electronic Retailing Association has done.

The promotion of business owner awareness that a dollar of prevention is worth ten thousand dollars of cure. Using backlinks to accurate, positive content in advance is as vital as computer virus protection.

If you don’t take control, some troll may take control from you–and with it your hard-earned reputation, your income, possibly your health and your hope for continued American small business innovation.

Mike Hughes is a direct marketer, PR consultant and a frequent speaker on Internet publicity. He can be reached at mhughes@reputationmedia.com.