Tongue firmly planted in cheek, we often say that we are convinced that the internet is here to stay.

Need proof? Consider this fact from the 2013-2014 holiday season:

“Amazon.com shipped enough items with Prime this holiday to deliver at least one gift to every household in America.”

For the rest of the figures, check out the full article from Zagg.

With the 2014-2015 holiday season just around the corner, the primary question that small and medium sized businesses have to be asking themselves is “Does my business plan include engaging online buyers in a serious way?”

If not, it is never too late to contact Live Mercury to talk about the system we built that allows small and medium sized businesses to invest in their internet presence. With this, your business can say it is serious about moving a significant portion of its business to where your customers live – online.

You don’t have to be an expert to use Facebook, you just have to be willing to look at the data. Chris Miller wrote a great article for Talkers pinpointing some things to focus on when navigating through Social Media.

“All social platforms are getting more sophisticated about how they determine what their users will see.  Facebook has adjusted their formula that determines what content we all get shown, emphasizing the interesting over the merely silly and self-serving.  Here’s how to help insure that more of your posts get shown to your fan base:

1. Promotion Kills

2. Questions Still Matter

3. Deep, Focused Info

4. Hashtags

5. Watch Your Numbers”

What adjustments do you find yourself making on Facebook?

For the full article, click here.

A lot of businesses have put up a FB page because it’s so easy. But if they don’t actually have a plan to engage their audience on FB, they may be doing more harm than good.

One dilemma that many businesses face is, “How do they keep up with all the changes in Social Media? With Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. it’s impossible to stay on top of it and still run their business!”

Experts like Social Media Examiner make great recommendations:

“The challenge for Facebook marketers is to succeed on an increasingly turbulent channel, while trying to hold the attention of multi-platform users. Under these circumstances, your best bet is to diversify your content marketing strategy and engage with customers not just on Facebook, but also on every other channel where they hang out.”

In order to keep up, you have to be aware of the changes that are occurring in Social Media.

Pew Research has released a brand-new study that provides some very interesting insights into the shifting social media landscape.

1. Facebook is still popular, but is not always the platform of choice.

2. Instagram has an incredible loyal base of users.

3. LinkedIn continues to be dominated by high-income executives.

4. Women are spending more time on all social media, besides Facebook.

To read more about these insights, click here.

Infographics are to the communication of complex data what analogy is to logic. There’s great opportunity to help people understand what it all means, but it’s also possible to horribly mislead.

A picture is worth 1,000 words, so follow this link to Brandsavant and look at the pretty (and plain) infographics to see what we mean.

The number in this quote from “think with Google” is interesting…

“Over 60% of leisure travelers turn to the internet for inspiration, and travelers across segments shop around to secure the best value before booking.”

Let’s think about the trend. Do you think this number will be higher or lower next year for leisure travelers?

Now think about the trend in your industry. Do you think more people will use the internet to search for your service or product next year?

Click here for the details.

Have you noticed the graphs and charts on your organizations “Facebook Insights” page? Have you ever thought it would be nice to know what it means for you?

Social Media Examiner points out that, “As marketers, we’re on a mission to track and measure our efforts and their success.” For Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter the data is available, but it important to know what parts of that data are useful.

Social Media Examiner suggests:

For Facebook: Review the Posts tab on Facebook Insights

For Pinterest: Optimize you Pinterest activity

For Twitter: Use Twitter Tools to expand reach

Click here for the full step by step article on using these reports to improve your marketing efforts is a great resource for beginners. Don’t stumble blindly. Learning isn’t as hard as you think and when you see your Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter audience growing, you’ll be glad you did.

In the article “6 Facebook Marketing Tips for Managing Your Facebook Page,” Social Media Examiner says “There are two basic types of Facebook page admins: Those who post based on hunches as to what motivates engagement, and those who look at Facebook’s Insights to see what actually drives engagement.”

As with any serious marketing effort, taking the time to check results is critical to success. Knowing what works is especially challenging when it comes to Social Media because the rules on who sees what and why seem to change often. The good news is that Facebook provides some excellent tools to measure results and learn.

And knowing their rules is far less important than knowing your results. Here are the six tips Social Media Examiner suggests:

1. Check your wall-posting preferences.

2. Use Insights to determine what is working for your page.

3. Assign Admin roles.

4. Choose your featured likes.

5. Bookmark Facebook’s Page Guidelines and reacquaint yourself with what’s changed recently.

6. Use Facebook as a Page instead of as yourself.

To check out all the details of these tips, click here!

“More than a billion…”

From Isabella Roughol at Linkedin

“Those 150+ million iPhones Apple sold last year may be impressive, they represent just a little over 15 percent of the market. More than a billion smartphones were sold around the world in 2013, according to IDC. That’s roughly a 40 percent increase over 2012.”

That’s a lot of people who might come to your website on a tiny screen. Are you ready? Can people read your website on a 4 or 5 inch screen?

Having a mobile friendly site is no longer an option, it is a necessity.

To read the full article, click here.

Reputation Management is something major corporations have had to make a priority for decades. Small and medium sized businesses have usually not approached Reputation Management with the same urgency, but Social Media is changing that paradigm.

This article from Social Media Examiner gives some great case studies of companies who took action and avoided a damaged reputation.

The article also gives seven steps to defend your company’s reputation. They are:

1. Act Quickly

2. Take Charge

3. Handle Reality

4. Engage the Nay-sayers

5. Spread the Word

6. Encourage Dialogue

7. Deliver on Your Word

To read more details, click here.

There’s lots of information out there about Social Media, but how much of it is reliable?

Live Mercury has had lots of clients ask if Facebook is on the decline because young people are abandoning it just because they don’t like the idea that their parents and grandparents are on Facebook. It sounds plausible, but if it is true then what are the implications for your Facebook strategy?

Tom Webster, a researcher and data skeptic, writes that “brand new research that suggests not only that teens are not abandoning the service in droves, but that their frequency of usage might, in fact, be increasing.”

The numbers speak for themselves:

“If 58% of Americans 12+ have current profiles, and 4% used to but no longer have profiles, that’s a total of 62% of Americans who have ever had a profile. 4% divided by 62% equals a little over 6%–In other words, 6% of Americans 12+ have “quit” on Facebook. For teens, that number is 5% (quitters) divided by 84% (the percentage who have ever had a profile), or a hair under 6%.

In other words, the ratio of quitters to members is actually just slightly lower for teens than it is for the general population.”

For all the details, click here.

Have you been noticing that fewer and fewer people are seeing what you are posting on your business Facebook Pages?

Facebook is indicating that “declining organic distribution in News Feed… is largely due to more competition driven by more sharing…”

“To some, the warning will sound as if Facebook is fessing up to holding Page updates hostage in exchange for ransom in the form of more paid advertisements. This has been an ongoing concern for marketers who’ve noticed that their Facebook updates are reaching a smaller percentage of the people who have opted in to receive them. The company, which is sticking with the provided statements, would presumably counter that any alterations to News Feed are meant to be in the best interest of the Facebook user.”

They say that, “if businesses want to make sure that people see their content, the best strategy is, and always has been, paid advertising.”

For the full article on CNET, click here.

Our clients frequently ask us how often they should blog and the answer is usually “As often as you can, as long as you provide content that is of value to someone in your audience.”

From the Social Media Examiner:

“Every day you have to be communicating; that’s the important thing,” said rock star video blogger Gary Vaynerchuk, when asked what today’s businesses are lacking online. “Long-form blogging was the big thing in years back. Microblogging is now the big thing. It’s changed the dynamics a bit.”

The great news is that technological advances have made it easier than ever to post on a regular basis, especial if it’s a Microblog.

These are the five great ways to microblog from a mobile device as presented by the Social Media Examiner:

1. Mobile Blogging Apps

2. Mobile Blogging by Email

3. Photo Blogging with Flickr

4. Video Blogging via Mobile

5. Event Blogging

For the full article, click here.

Mostly we talk about doing marketing, but sometimes we just like to talk about how anything gets started (because that is usually the hardest part – starting!).

The Social Media Examiner looks into why most people face the struggle between having a good idea and actually acting on it. One of the reasons people don’t start acting on their ideas is because of the doubts and fears associated with them. The author, Michael Stelzner, gives some great tips for overcoming that:

Tip #1: When doubt and fear creep in, creep forward.

Tip #2: Hang with people who’ve overcome their fears.

Tip #3: Celebrate the little wins.

Click here for more of this awesome article and short video about starting new adventures (at work and with your family).

File this under “irony”.  My local PBS station has this great article on how:

“In May, a significant threshold was crossed: In the U.S., 60 percent of global online activity now happens via mobile devices – up 10 percent from the previous year.”

They went on to point out that:

The Financial Times told the World Editors Forum earlier this year that it already had 62 percent of readers accessing news from phones or tablets and only 38 percent using desktop.

Check out this great pull quote:

“Desktop is the new print. It’s static, one-dimensional and it’s slowly becoming more and more marginal to our business,” FT’s head of operations, Lisa McLeod told a WEF board meeting in February. She identified the shift as sudden and dramatic. At the beginning of 2010, ‘It was zero access by mobile. It’s an absolutely phenomenal change.’”

So why is that ironic? I couldn’t read it till I got home because their blog isn’t mobile-friendly.

There’s lots more than mobile-friendly to make a great website with a great ROI, but that’s where you better start.

For the full article, click here.

I had a conversation with a very successful restaurateur from Scranton the other day about SEO. He feels OK about the look and feel of his current site, but wanted to know how to get to the top of search results.

We talked about building SEO organically by providing valuable content that real people want to see, but I also pointed out that he has several non-mobile friendly features on his site that might hurt him.  His site looks good on my desktop and iPad, but is off-brand on my iPhone and some of the “features” are pretty clunky.

Then today, our Chief Strategy Officer shared this “Webmaster alert” with me.

“A common annoyance for web users is when websites require browser technologies that are not supported by their device. When users access such pages, they may see nothing but a blank space or miss out a large portion of the page’s contents.

Starting today, we will indicate to searchers when our algorithms detect pages that may not work on their devices. For example, Adobe Flash is not supported on iOS devices or on Android versions 4.1 and higher, and a page whose contents are mostly Flash may be noted like this:”

Basically Google is saying that they will be warning searchers about non-mobile friendly sites before they even click. So even if you are at the top, if the searcher is using a mobile device (and 60% of web traffic is mobile) you are going to get passed over.

Action item: Since it’s getting more urgent every day that your website be mobile friendly, why not give me a call and lets get it fixed before you lose more visitors.

For the full article, click here.

Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO of MECLAB often says:

“There are no expert marketers; there are only experienced marketers and expert testers.”

EdgeRank Checker claims to be “Using smart tagging to identify the essence of content” and provide insights into how to make Facebook posting more effective.

Click here for the full article.

Have you expertly tested the insights provided by EdgeRank Checker or another service and used them to improve your results?

Sometimes the smallest things can make a big difference.

From Influence At Work’s blog:

“Writing in the Journal of Consumer Research, researchers Maura Scott and Stephen Nowlis show that we’re much more likely to re-engage with a goal if, rather than setting a single, specific numbered goal (e.g. lose 3 pounds a week) we set a goal with a high-low range that averages the same (e.g. lose 2 – 4 pounds a week) instead.”

This relates directly to engaging more in Social Media to grow your business. Instead of defining your goal as posting every single day (too specific) try to make your goal more attainable, such as posting 3-4 times a week.

For the full article click here.

Effective websites have an update strategy. Blogging pros are always coming up with new ideas and ways to engage their readers.

“Keeping up with the latest social media changes is not always easy, and your blogging tactics may need to be refreshed.”

SocialMedia Examiner asked blogging professionals for the best blogging tips and tactics worth doing today.

Click Here for 39 ideas to get your creative juices flowing!

Keeping up with the need for generating fresh content on social media can be overwhelming.

“Medtronic Diabetes, which develops and sells diabetes management products, has been soliciting user-generated content since 2012. Their Share Your Story Facebook app has been so successful that it is driving a 2-to-1 return on investment (ROI) for their entire social media program.”

Click here to see 6 great ideas for allowing your fans to be a part of the process and increasing your ROI in the process.

Fascinating study about the power of allowing your customers the option to “do nothing”.

“For nearly seventy years scientists who study the persuasion process have consistently revealed a simple, yet remarkable truth; when it comes to effectively influencing others, small changes can make a big difference.”

It’s counter-intuitive on one level because wouldn’t giving people option to “do nothing” reduce the number of people who choose to do something?

But it makes perfect sense if you consider the impact of feeling in control when you are doing a complicated task. In our high pressure, hyper-choice society we often feel overwhelmed and “pushed” to make a decision. Choosing freely with no pressure or obligation can actually increase our willingness to follow through because we feel like since we made the choice to act, it must have been a logical choice. As a result, we are more likely to persist when things get rough.

Click here for the full article.

How does this apply to the offers you make in your marketing? Tell us your story in the comment section.

Or not. It’s entirely up to you.

While researching Hyper-Local Marketing, one of our team members shared this article with me from October of last year 2011 (forever ago in online marketing time).

The focus of the article was on geo-targeting mobile devices for advertisements. One statistic jumped off the screen at me that has application to upgrading your current website to be “mobile friendly”:

“By 2015, more people are expected to access the Internet through mobile devices than through the wired Internet.”

If this is true, and my experience and intuition confirm it, then 2014 is the year of the mobile friendly upgrade for every organization that wants to make the Internet a serious part of their business in 2015.

Can you really afford to deliver a bad experience to more than half of the people who come to your website in 2015?

Marketers make content distinctions based on how the media is paid for (or not paid for), but the author of the article makes an important point about what marketers should really focus on.

“To an audience, all media is earned because attention is not free.”

For the rest of this excellent article click here.

How are you using creativity in your marketing to earn the attention of your audience?

Social Media is FREE and EASY…NOT!

If someone tells you marketing isn’t hard, they are either trying to sell you something or they are ignorant. Like any other valuable skill, the art and science of getting the right message in front of the right people is hard.

It’s simple math. With only so much time in a day, your target audience can only pay attention to so many messages. Social Media opens up a new (and very popular) low-cost channel to get your message to the right people, but there are logical rules designed to screen out content people don’t want to see.

“Don’t sell to them. Instead entertain them, tell them a story, give them something to share, and help them along the way. When it comes time for them to purchase, your company will likely be top of mind. “

Learning about how FB uses Edgerank to keep messages OUT of people’s feed means you can also learn how to get messages IN peoples feeds. You can complain about how hard it is, or learn how to use the rules to your competitive advantage. This article is a good starting point.

Click here for the full article.

How are you engaging (and thereby increasing) your FB audience by entertaining them?

Live Mercury has been responding to the needs of our clients and creating solutions that allow them to get started on Social Media cost-effectively. It has been an interesting process as we “…figure out what an audience expects, and then be that thing…”

Tom Webster, a specialist in consumer behavior, shares these following words for content marketers trying to tackle a strategic problem.

“…the question of why people do or do not do anything (from buying your product to reading your content) is the central existential question upon which any communications or content strategy should be based.”

The full article has some great steps on a process to get content marketers to better understand their customers. It is important to know what questions to ask (and NOT ask) as you prepare your content strategy.

Click here to read about the full process.

My friend, Laura Novakowski, recently wrote on 720thinking.com about how our subconscious beliefs may be driving us to take the same action over and over again, yet expect different, better results.

While she is undoubtedly correct, I have a different, supplementary take.

Read More

Are you wasting your best marketing asset by not giving your most satisfied customers the tools and motivation to share their enthusiasm online?

Check out this great article by Janessa Mangone. She points out that,

“Many retailers seem to neglect the importance of making it easy for customers to share.”

Read the whole article here.

How do you make it easy for your “brand advocates” to share?

The hard truth in marketing is that people don’t care about your product or service.

THEY ONLY CARE ABOUT THEMSELVES.

That’s not a complaint or a moral judgement. It’s reality.

“Let’s face it: Consumers don’t have any idea they are part of a ‘campaign’ when they’re interacting with your brand’s digital marketing creative.

They fluidly move between devices, channels, and screens and expect that their experience should be seamless, engaging, and fun. At every moment, any one person is taking in several bits of information and having to assess where they should pay attention. As a marketer, it becomes challenging to break through, make and impact, resonate, and inspire a customer to give you their attention.”

Click here for some examples of great marketing.

Good marketing embraces this truth and figures out how to let your target market see how your product or service will make their lives better. Great marketing accomplished this objective in a really entertaining way that leaves them wanting more.

Randy Milanovic over at Social Media Today makes a nice analogy between remodeling a house and rebuilding a website.

“If you’ve ever been through that process, then you already know it doesn’t happen with the speed you see on TV. Instead, it involves assessing what you have to work with, keeping an eye open for hidden technical challenges, refining design or structural elements, and working away at it until you have something you can live with, or in.”

For the rest of the story, click here.

This article is a great reminder of the importance of strategic thinking when putting together a marketing campaign. So often people try to translate one message into multiple media without thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of that channel, who the audience is and what they expect from that channel.

“…in an era where we are conducting online surveys of customer databases more than ever, why would anyone on that list ever not qualify? You don’t have to look at the data for people that don’t meet some tactical criterion–this time–but if a customer is willing to complete a survey instrument, why ever dump them out of it if they are the wrong age/zip code/smell/blood type/whatever? You might find a use for that data elsewhere. And it’s also another opportunity to thank people for being customers. Just a thought.”

Click here for the full article.

And that’s really the point. Be thoughtful about your marketing.

It’s really important to have fresh content on your website and social media platforms on a regular basis, but it’s also important to think about what you want that content to do.

This Social Media Examiner article looks at 3 purposes for content from the perspective of the sales funnel.

#1: Raise Awareness at the Top of the Funnel

#2: Encourage Consideration in the Middle of the Funnel

#3: Drive Action at the Bottom of the Funnel

Today’s “introspection question”:

What percentage of your online content is oriented to which one of these three?

Want to dig deeper? Click here to see the details.

Perhaps the most important part of Marketing is getting people to respond positively to a call to action. Behavioral Research shows that we tend to respond more positively to others we have something in common with. This article says that effect is enhanced if the attribute is “uncommon”.

“…managers and leaders looking to encourage an atmosphere of cooperation and support among their teams would be advised to take extra time to focus attention on the things that their teams share. On what binds, rather than divides them.”

Click here for the full article.

What “uncommon” attribute can you use in your next marketing piece that will cause your target market to be more likely to respond?

One of the impacts of the internet is the “democratization of marketing.” By that we mean that anyone can become a marketer (or critic) on social media. There are even stories in traditional media that give direction on how to be an online “critic” using a tool like Yelp.

Click here for the full article.

Do you ever leave reviews?

Are you more likely to leave a review for good service or bad service?

Do you rely on social media reviews when shopping online?

Businesses want to know what ROI their Digital Marketing will achieve. To them it’s all about moving an audience to make a purchase decision because that is what pays the bills. It takes planning based on the budget and requires measuring and adapting the message and medium to the feedback of the audience. It takes repetition and time.

In the digital age the steps are essentiality the same but the distance between the steps is shorter.

Look at the findings of this recent study at Acxiom:

“…online ads, when optimized for frequency and volume as detailed below, do indeed drive incremental in-store revenue – and lots of it. Findings indicated that the frequency of exposure should fall somewhere between the range of 10 and 100 impressions and the optimal length of a campaign should be between four to eight weeks in order for behavior to be influenced.

Ultimately, this need for multiple exposures over an extended period of time suggests that ads work incrementally to increase brand awareness. Rather than motivating an immediate response, they improve the odds that the person who saw them will, when the need or opportunity arises, choose the advertiser’s product.”

Click here to see the full article.

How does your online marketing budget take this reality into account?

Lots of practical application in this article, but this observation is profound:

“Look at the services that showed marked year-over-year growth: Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Vine’s debut at 9%. The social networking space is showing signs of being an actual, you know, market, with a wider variety of players all developing significant user bases.”

Click here to read the full article.

How are you using this market to grow your business?

Everyone wants results from their advertising, but what does it cost to get results?

“Budget appropriately, because the very worst thing you can do with an ad is spend too little–it will get you the same results as spending nothing.”

Click here for the rest of Godin’s article.

Janine Gibson, the former U.S. editor of the Guardian, whom the Times unsuccessfully sought to hire, about the transformational nature of the internet on news:

The hardest part for me has been the realization that you don’t automatically get an audience. For someone with a print background, you’re accustomed to the fact that if it makes the editor’s cut—gets into the paper—you’re going to find an audience. It’s entirely the other way around as a digital journalist. The realization that you have to go to find your audience—they’re not going to just come and read it—has been transformative.

Read the whole story about the NYTimes “Innovation Report”.

How is your marketing being transformed by the power of audience choice? How are you giving your audience what they want?