Essentially, this graphic actually details the social graph and the effect that one strategic action can have all over the social landscape.  Online marketing folks take note. You are being watched, by your own will, that is. No big brother here. Welcome to the new age of marketing without boundaries.

In marketing strategy, it is easier to attack a market leader indirectly rather than head on. Dell in its early days focused on a unique delivery mechanism and used the same to dominate the B2B market. Rather than fight HP and Compaq for shelf space in big box electronic retailers, it concentrated on direct sales. That part worked then.

Dell later unraveled when the consumer market which it had neglected entirely was serviced by HP and Sony. It was a clear case of Carly Fiorina’s long-term strategy coming into fruition (with the expected lag time between strategy implementation and the availability of tangible results) something which the stock market and the inept HP board of directors did not take into consideration before they fired her.

In any case, I digress. In positioning, Al Ries and Jack Trout warn against a positioned brand diluting a clear `value proposition or value position’ by meaningless line extensions. Think laundry – so many variations. Think motor oil – so many variations.

The concept of ‘Positioning’ was a break from Rossier Reeve’s 1950s Unique Selling Proposition (USP), which focused on benefits of the product itself. Today, the emotional concept of branding is popular, along with the idea of interactive connections with consumers. The problem with Positioning is that singular product differences are often too small to matter, suspicion about claims is high, the ability of advertising to achieve effective reach and frequency is enormously expensive nowadays and many products are bought on emotion rather than rationale. Still, positioning can work well if you are first to market, the unqualified best, the biggest, or the only one in a market. The concept is also useful as a way of thinking about a product and market and inserting your product in a certain slot in your market segments.

To help you determine your product’s positioning, the book asks some (rather general) questions:

1. What position do you own?
2. What position do you want to own?
3. Whom must you outgun?
4: Do you have enough money?
5. Can you stick it out?
6. Do you match your position?

Of strong interest is the discussion of line extension, and how it dilutes, rather than strengthens, a company’s position in the marketplace. In very basic terms, the authors explain the importance of offering something that appeals to the buyer, not to the seller, creator, or manufacturer. The product is positioned relative to the consumer, and his/her needs and values. For that, you must get into the mind of your consumer, and position your product accordingly.

When Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote this book ages ago, the positioning strategies they propagated were in response to a competitive marketplace quite different from the one present today. Nonetheless, effective positioning is critical today. Also, bear in mind that whatever you offer for sale, make certain that you fully understand customer expectations first before deciding how to manage customer perceptions. Those perceptions are within a frame-of-reference which changes constantly. A positioning plan should be strategic in that, it is able to understand the various frame of references within the customer segment in play and adapt accordingly.

One disappointing aspect however, was the absence of a detailed process on how to create a positioning strategy.  The six questions above were helpful, but do not constitute a rigorous method to create a position. A technique that could be used to create positioning for a product, or to test a company’s current positioning would have been more useful than the tons of examples of  positioning failures. I’m on a Jack Trout roll for now and will be reviewing more of his books including Repositioning. It’ll be a lot of fun.

Then, the CEO asks you. “How are you going to implement this?” Either you have a series of next-level tactics on hand or you fumble about how different members of your team will keep working hard to make this happen.

The meeting ends with no financing approved. What went wrong?

Here’s what happened : You did not have a series of tactics thought out on how you would implement your strategy. Even worse, you did not have an operational plan for execution. Let’s understand how tactics fit into the work-flow.

Tactics sit somewhere between strategy and day-to-day operations. You break down your overall strategy into digestible executable pieces – those are tactics. Next, you break down those tactics into operational goals to be achieved in a certain amount of time. After that, you have your day-to-day operational activities.

The steps are simple. Once again :

Strategy- > Tactics -> Operational goals -> Day-to-day steps to execute to achieve goals.

Let’s take an example. Suppose your business strategy requires that you launch 2 new products every year to increase penetration.

Tactical Question : What is the optimal mode or route to launch this?

- Do you wait for a competitor to work out a concept, go through the initial pain and leap-frog them? In this case, you would lose your first mover advantage.
- Or, you try testing 100 new ideas hoping one would work? This means that you have to innovate and test new products.
- Or, do you make small, minor improvements in an existing product and launch a variant ?
- Or, do you come out with something totally new?

What next? You’ll have to set tactical goals in place to leverage each function that will contribute to the success of any of the courses of action above.

Next, the operational part. Resource allocations will need to be done, you’ll have to create and maintain a process for the next several quarters (and tactically implementing them one by one). Your sales force will need to use messaging to keep your customers engaged and informed about what you’re planning to deliver to the market in terms of a new product or offering.

Then, finally the execution plan which has time-lines right to the last detail. If you plan to go to market in six months, transition to actual production, before that part testing the prototype, before that the prototype needs to be ready, before that the idea has to be translated into a physical design and so on. This breakdown of tactics into operational goals and a time-line will tell you if the business idea is practical or a waste of time.

Finally, the numbers. How does the revenue model work? Is the revenue model based on some assumption of “we’ll go after ABC market segments and assume that this many people will buy the product”? And, if that is all you have, you might as well hang up your boots. Optimism is a good thing, but in the end it does not pay the bills of a business or contribute to cash flow.

Do your analysis. Have the segments clearly mapped out and understood. If you don’t have this part, the tactics cannot be worked out. Have you done any test marketing? A specific example would be launching a software product aimed at an online retailer. If that category of retailers is a commoditized or generic part of the Internet, how will you acheive penetration? Will you offer a full-fledged service or will just sell the product for in-house use? How will the product be marketed? Will you do it on your own or co-market with another software provider? How will you target the specific segments of large/medium/small customers? For small buyers, how will you price the product? If it is expensive, will you just let them have the product and charge a monthly fee for using it or want a one time, large fee? For large buyers, how would you enter and target the final decision maker for making a purchase? And finally, have any of these been tested in a limited setting or are riding only on assumptions?

Work out these aspects before approaching anyone for funding. Period.

Some key elements to test :

- Revenue model
- Cash flow (will they survive till things take off)
- Profitability (what are the key determinants/assumptions and associated risks and “plan B”)
- Execution time-lines
If you have the above, things will go much better than expected. The executive team or a Vc will be impressed by the level of preparation and your project will be greenlit.

Naturally, after reading all of it, I was inspired by all the authoritative minds and penned this post about what really matters while SEOing your website to make sure it’s in line with what the search engines are looking for. Here’s what you should focus on :

Keywords/Content (This section relate to search term usage in determining the rank of a page i.e. how many times is someone out there in the whole wide world using a keyword specific to your business to search for a service or product specific to your industry)

• Keyword use in Title Tag – this one is simple. If you want a page to show up in the search results of a search query initiated by potential customers, place the targeted search keyword/phrase in the title tag of the webpage’s HTML header.

• Keyword use in Body – Man, this one is simpler. All you have to do is place the targeted keyword in the visible HTML content of the page, but don’t place it in such a way that you spam your own site. According to industry experts, typical keyword density should be 2-3 times per 100 words.

• Meta Content – Yeah, I know. Everyone says it doesn’t matter, but better safe than sorry. And, as far as I know, Yahoo and Bing still give credence to meta content.
• Content – This, as always, is King. No ambiguity about that. Content builds with strong SEO influences will help your brand’s cause on the Internet.
  

Nature of Inbound Links (This is a big one. Essentially, this category is about the credibility of folks on the Internet who are linking to your site so, the more popular they are on the Internet and the more relevant they are within their business spaces, the more weight you get from the search engines for being endorsed by them link wise. So, if the external links pointing back to your page get an A+ from the search engines, you’re in business! Note that we’re talking about active or dofollow links here – passive or nofollow links do not count.)

• Anchor Text of Inbound Link – This is a key attribute. What do your inbound link partners reference you as? What the other site name you while linking back to you matters to the search engines. If they just call you link1 or another generic name, that wont hold well with Google. Now, if you were a travel company selling trips to Cancun and a partner site linked to your web page advertising Cancun Vacations using the anchor text ‘ Cancun Vacation Packages’, the search engines would give you a thumbs up. If the partner just used ‘Vacations’  or ‘Trips’ as the anchor text, you would not get as many points.
  

• Global Link Popularity of Linking site – This is about where the linking site stands on the web as compared to all other websites. So, if it’s not ranked too highly don’t expect to get too many points from Google when they index your page and find an inbound dofollow link from a link-farm based in Timbuktu.

• Topical Connection – This refers to how closely related are the backlink’s content to yours. It’s that simple. If you get a link from a office furniture company to your tropical vacations website, don’t gasp in disappointment if after a few weeks you’ve actually fallen in Google’s rankings than risen.

Domain Attributes (What matters to search engines about your domain. This, like the keyword piece above is an intrinsic quality)

• Global Link Popularity – This is relevant. Where do you stand with regards to link authority on the web as compared to all other websites? If you’re not too high, start implementing a grassroots SEO strategy to get you inching to the top, slowly but surely.

• Age of Site – This is determined by when the website’s content was indexed by the search engines – Note that this is not the date of original registration of the domain.

• Topical relevance of inbound links to your site – This is essentially a correlation between the sites linking to your target pages’ content and your target page keywords.
  

• Popularity of your website within your peers – How highly are you ranked among your peers in your industry on the web? This is important for you to know especially since the web has become an extremely competitive forum
  

Page Attributes (This is about how search engines understand your webpage independent of keywords)

• Internal link popularity – This is another key ingredient as it’s based on the site’s design & structure. So, a good web architecture does matter when designing a website. Additionally, how often are top pages on your website referenced by your internal pages and what anchor text is used to reference them. All this is important.
  

This sums up the article. I’m hoping to have a visual depiction of the same and will post it soon to give folks better clarity on what factors play a role in dtermining how your website gets ranked by the search engines.

The question that most marketers have is what kind of telephone number works the best. Is it an alphanumeric  telephone number like 1-800-FLOWERS or a regular number like 1-800-856-6967?

How does something like this affect call rate?

Using an 800-number in an alphanumeric format where numbers are aligned with an easy to remember word or phrase is called a “cipher”, and they’ve been used for years to generally positive effect.  It is easier for most people to remember a word or phrase than a new numeric stream of numbers. However, at times, there may also be a negative perception in some segments.  It all depends on what products you are trying to promote and the nature of your target audience.

- An older audience may not necessarily like the alphanumeric format and may have problems trying to find the corresponding numbers on their phones, but they would still not think it strange as they would be used to the format.

- On the contrary, a younger audience would find an alphanumeric call-to-action rather funny given that they use alphabets more frequently than numbers thanks to texting and IM. Also, bear in mind that many PDAs and smartphones do not have numbers and alphabets together like the phones of old.

- Non native English speakers might have problems remembering the right spelling or just wont feel the impact of the ad.

That being said, for your PPC ads, try out two different formats to see which one has the most impact. Keep in mind that in terms of remembering (and recalling at a later time)  the alphanumeric phone numbers are best. For e.g. in a PPC ad or a radio spot.

However, if these numbers are appearing in print (For example a newspaper ad or DRTV spot) it’s best to show them both ways – alphanumeric and regular numbers. This is to avoid frustrating folks who wish to dial right away, because it is harder to dial an alphanumeric phone number as opposed to a simple numeric number. In the end, it should be common sense that drives this tactic and not a catchy number. A catchy number is good for brand building, but if you want to get sales or leads then have a normal number for people to call.

Naturally, Seth Godin who loves online buzzwords must’ve gotten real excited with the title itself and given it a “two thumbs up” on that basis. In any case, here are my thoughts on this book…

So, what is a “Trust Agent”? According to the book, “Trust agents have established themselves as being non-sales-oriented, non-high pressure marketers. Instead, they are digital natives using the web to be genuine and to humanize their business.”

OK. “Digital natives”, “humanize their business”, “permission marketing”??? Keep the catch phrases coming.

In any case, the premise of this tome is that cultivating “trust” will enable you and your business to succeed. Brogan talks about creating this trust using social networks and online media.

If a person/business is a trust agent, people will gravitate towards that trust agent when they need something, and then trust that agent with their information and leads. There’s theoretical stuff in here too and some of Brogan’s success stories along with other relevant examples and actionable suggestions. Unfortunately, the book is not as strong as would expect in terms of defining a clear step-by-step process to developing a ‘trust agent’ to harness and leverage the unlimited bounds of the Internet’s social world.

Essentially, Trust Agents is about online communication manners and creating online social capital.The lessons of creating value-add experiences for anyone who will interact with you online through a website, social network, blog, IM etc etc are well known to most trundlers (like myself) in the social space. This is however, a good book for someone seeking to understand the dynamics of the social web.

Brogan details six necessary characteristics of Trust Agents which I’ve summarized as follows:

1. Make your own game.

Try new ways of doing things. Stand out from the crowd. First movers have a distinct advantage but it’s also important to identify the right time to step into a market. What is the right time? It differs by industry, market, consumer interests, economic environments etc etc. A quote from Warren Buffet is educating but not necessarily informative: “Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.”

2. Be one of us.

The lesson here is to be part of the community. Do not be the self-promotional member of the community who is continually handing out business cards and asking for business. Businesses have learned this lesson well. Whole Foods on its Twitter and Facebook platforms is the consummate social player in this game. The idea is to contribute to the community and be an active member. American Airlines and JetBlue use their social media platforms to solve customer problems and keep their brands active and alive in the online social world.

Don’t just create a profile and sit on it. Give if you want to receive. Give good stuff whether its information, promos, help tips etc. Become a value-added community member. Define yourself as a community member bait – so that folks realize that you provide value and will want to connect with you. Twitter seems like a good place to make friends as it keeps growing – see Nielson’s fastest member communities report.

3. Use the Archimedes Effect.

Archimedes propositioned that if he had a long enough lever and a fulcrum on which to place it, he could move the world. Here the idea is to use your messaging to best effect to influence people. Couldn’t this point just have been titled “Influence people well”? Hmm.

4. Try to be Agent Zero.

Cultivate your personal networks and recognize their value. Connect with good people. Connect between different groups. The connection element in this message is overwhelming. Connect as much as possible but connect in meaningful ways. Don’t just friend all and sundry on Facebook – Connect with folks who matter in your space.

5. Become a Human Artist.

This principle is about learning how to work well with people and help empower people. You need to learn the etiquette and start off by listening to the community before you burst in with a full head of steam.  Observe, assimilate and then act. See another article, I wrote on how to do this using stealth principles by SunTzu – It’s very applicable in social media marketing.

6. Build an Army. You can’t do it alone. You need to find people who are willing to collaborate with you. The above points will lead to this final objective of having an army of willing “innovators” or “early adopters”.

The book is so-so. Brogan’s got a lot of experience and it shows. Personally a book with more detailed processes on how to do this and achieve success in addition to an explanation of the X factor of luck involved would be interesting.

1. Optimize your website: Ensure that your website has all the necessary interest triggers to keep customers interested in browsing your site (sturdy architecture, good content, easy navigation paths ). Make sure that you also have strong conversion triggers to convert traffic to leads (this depends on your business model and what you defeine as a lead). So, this could be a newsletter signup, a free report download, a request for more information about your products etc. Try to have capture capabilities at every conversion point, perferably in the form of a simple form. The aim of this exercise: To leverage your high ranking to build a community of users that you can communicate with on a regular basis.

2. Fill SEO gaps: There’s always something you have to do. Sure, your content is outstanding, you have all your meta content covered, all your redirects are taken care of, but check other areas too. Dont forget your anchor tags, check your images – rename them appropriately and make sure that their alt tags are complete. Make sure that you create an xml sitemap and submit it to Google webmaster. Don’t forget to recheck your keywords and capture some relevant longtail phrases.

3. Do SEM: Carrying on from the previous point, test keyword groups and lists, especially any relevant longtail keyword phrases. If you rank well for the common terms in your industry, chances are that you’ll rank well for the long-tail terms too. If not, then use PPC and have some long tail campaigns in play. This wont cost you much and you’ll get visitors who are in an advanced stage of the buying process, which means that your conversaion rate from PPc will be higher than usual.

Use wordtracker to identify key long tail phrases and test them on your site. Think about A/B testing to see which version gets you the most conversions – Let’s be honest here – we’re not being altruistic. Business is business – all the above efforts mean zip if we dont have strong conversion numbers. And always have something on tap to capture information should anyone be willing to offer it.

4. Spreading the word, socially: Have a social network strategy in place. Connect with folks on social networks, build trust and talk about your product or service offering help or solutions. Place backlinks to yourself on social bookmarking sites like del.ico.us and misterwong, digg, furl and reddit. Also, be creative, visit blogs that dicsuss your products and comment on them with a backlink to your site.

5. Web PR: Build press releases which contain your key search phrases (hyperlinked back to your site) and release them through Internet Press Release distribution services such as Transworld News or PR Newswire. Note that these services may sometimes charge a fee. Try newsvine too. Should this work, you just use an organic inexpensive tool for driving traffic, doing better outside SEO and spreading the word for your business on the web.

6. Email Marketing: Use this customer contact tool delicately. Send promotional messages from time-to-time to your opt-in list, make sure that your message is creative, concise and adequate. Do not overdo it.

7. Build a blog: Dynamic content is key to remind the search engines that your website is alive and kicking. For a blog, you can get some neat wordpress templates for free. It’s very simple. Get a domain name from Godaddy.com, get a hosting provider like dreamhost to host your website and then visit one of the many wordpress forums, select the template that best matches your business and design sensibilities and you’re good to go. Make sure that you consistently enter content into your blog and build another community in there. You can always get feedback from your community about your products, your services and ideas on how you can improve your services to your customers.
So, this in short is what you need to do when you’re done SEOing your site and have acheived your SEO target of #1 or 2 or 3.

The problem is that people have yet to “get” it. SMM is just one of the many channels in marketing, and each one of these channels does have a point of diminishing return. SSM strength lies in having conversation with your client base.

If all you want to to is converse with your customers to understand how your product is performing or to understand consumer behavior, then SMM is a great way of doing this. Otherwise, you need to have another engagement plan if your primary goal is sales or business leads.

Here are some thoughts on infiltration and intelligence gathering from the master strategist, Sun Tzu:

With advance information, costly mistakes can be avoided, destruction averted, and the way to lasting victory made clear. Subtly, very subtly, do not neglect the use of intelligence.

The five types of spies:

Wise rulers and capable commanders win because they have advance information abut the enemy.

1. Local intelligence uses natives to show the way

2. Inside intelligence uses officials in the enemy court

3. Counterintelligence uses bought-out enemy spies

4. Deadly Intelligence working to deceive outwardly and knowingly directs the spy to pass deceitful information to the enemy

5. Secure intelligence spy is one who returns safely to make a report to the king.

When all five types of intelligence occur together and none know what method’s being used, then this is called the divine intelligence, a valuable asset to any ruler.

None is more trustworthy than the intelligence force. None should be better rewarded than the spies and those who can work in great secrecy. Intelligence cannot be employed without enlightenment and intuition nor can it be used without humanity and generosity. The work of intelligence cannot succeed without subtlety and ingenuity. Therefore, the use of intelligence must not be neglected.

SMM is efficient only if all you wish to do is engage in light interaction and gather information about your firm, products, services and reputation. You cant just use SMM as an out-of-the-box tool.

Small companies can use SMM with relatively low cost as described in Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. There are however, certain costs and commitments necessary for executing SSM.

One big problem with SMM is that it is NOT scalable.  For mass message distribution, TV is still king, though online banners does have the ability to deliver to niche demographics and psychographics. Seeding SSM takes time and can be expensive depending how fast your want your community to grow. furthermore, the audience that may be willing to be a part of such a community is small, unless you bribe them and that might not be the best way to do it.

SSM is scalable and efficient in only starting a conversation with a brand audience for those who are willing. Treat this audience as your scouts/recon party they can provide good information. They are not your main army group and will not drive new markets expansion strategies or new product development. They will provide your market research team some great insights into their behavior, their purchasing rationale, their expectations and usage.

Unfortunately, while today’s web developers focus on creating a fully functional website, SEO is not part of what they do. By this, I don’t mean that they should be writing content or optimizing the website for SEO, but what they can do is follow some basic common-sense steps to prepare the way for the SEO folks to take over. This makes the process more collaborative and interactive and neither task is done on isolation.

Here are 5 quick tips to help web developers with some front-end SEO:

1. Use practical coding techniques

Ensure that semantic code is used when you’re building the site. Use descriptive tags to structure your pages as this will help the search engines to get a better understanding of your content.

2. Do not use Flash or Ajax in abundance

This is not a new tip. Almost all and sundry are shouting from the rooftops about how NOT to use Flash as a navigational element on the website. As tempting as it is to have some nifty drop down effects for your site’s navigation using flash, don’t do it. Search engines cannot execute flash files and cannot index the content within them. this means that any links that you may have within this content will not be followed and thus indexed.

Ditto with Ajax. Ajax is great for enhancing the user experience, but content generated with Ajax is yet another locked door for the search engines.  Use it sparingly perhaps as a feedback light box or a front-page form fill box, but nothing more.

3. Insert SEO friendly keywords in your links

Ask your SEO expert for a list of the top 20 keywords. As you insert the title of the page when you create it, make sure that the page is named accordingly. Do not just create a product102.php or some generic url like that. Use the keyword as part of the name you assign to the url. e.g. If one of the strongest keywords on your site is financial planner, name the url with that keyword phrase in it. (www.fidelityinvestments.com/401k-financial-planner-boston.php)

4. Optimize Images

Name the images according to the business intent of the page and in line with the SEO keyword list. Ask your SEO expert to name the images in like with good SEO practices and only then insert these images as part of the content. Also, ensure that the alt attribute of an image is used to properly describe it.

5. Create an xml sitemap

Site maps are essential for a website with a lof of content as they act as doorways for search engines to follow all the content on the site and garner all possible information that they can for indexing purposes. Make sure that you create the sitemap on site but also create an xml sitemap using xml sitemaps and submit the same to Google and the other search engines.

According to the IAB, the US advertising spend was $300 billion in 2008 with 25% of that expenditure going into direct mail. Let me try to figure out Google’s spend:

Breakdown for costs of a single mailing (Note that these are approximate figures) :
$ 0.30 in postage
$ 0.10 in printing and paper (Assuming a monthly mailing average of 20000 pieces per month)
$ 0.05 for direct mail sorting, address verification services, staff time
$ 0.05 for additional expenses

Total cost of a single glossy postcard mailer = $0.50 (I did get a recommendation that $0.40 was par for the course as a baseline, but I’m still going to plug in a slightly higher estimate).

Now, according to the US Small Business Administration, In 2004, there were an estimated 23,974,500 businesses in the U.S. Of the 5,683,700 firms with employees, 5,666,600 were small firms.

Assuming that Google wants to focus on businesses with 5-9, 10-19 and 20-99 employees, then they would send mailer to 2.2 million businesses. If they just want to focus on the firms that employ 100-499 employees than, they be sending mailers to 90000 firms. Assuming Google will employ an 80-20 rule and market to 20% of the small business segment that will avail of Google’s services and give them 80% of the revenue from that segment, then they’d probably mail to firms employing 20-99 folks (525,000 firms) and those employing 100-499 folks (90000 firms). That would be a total of 615,000 firms.

With the above cost breakdown, we could guesstimate that Google spends about $308K approximately.

If they decide to go for something more snazzy and send in a full-fledged mailer (envelope, inserts, magnet etc), assume a cost of $2 per mailer, we’re looking at $1.2 million direct mail spend by Google on small businesses.

I bet very few folks actually know that Google does direct mail since the assumption is that they would just leverage their reach online. Hope the above helped…