Why Blog

This week I was asked why blog? We I first started blogging on health issues a few year ago due to a personal crisis to express my feelings about what was happening to me and also not bore people with email updates since they could just go to my John Daus blog on live.com. After my recovery I was able to connect with folks about Triathlon training tips via the blog. A connection which never would have happened if it was for the blog.

So I finally got motivated to integrte a blog into my DigiFutures site this year. Now that we are expanding our service offering into social media it is even more important that we eat our own dog food. But besides those selfserving interest there are actual business benefits to be derived from a business blog. This week's article on "How Blogs Drive More Sales Than Social Media Sites" by Heidi Cohen makes a good case for driving sales via blogs. Also, the Harnessing the Power of Blogs provides the statistical data to back up the arguments with data from a JupiterResearch study of over 2000 participates. If you want to learn how to leverage these tactics give us a call.


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22 Ways to Socialize Online

It has been a crazy week. Half a dozen new clients knocking on the door. For some reason everyone wants to finally learn about search engine marketing. End of the year most folks go into Holiday mode and start planning for next year, but I think the word is finally getting out about the ROI from the web and some of the great stories about leveraging social media for businesses. An excellent summary by Peter Kim on all the options for social media marketing tactics can be found on Mashable.

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More Reasons For Social Media Strategy

Based on the latest survey from emarketer you are really missing the boat if you marketing team hasn't developed a social media strategy yet. The results are pretty much in line with previous surveys showing that at least a third of online retailers have Facebook fan pages.

We are still exploring options to economically integration of video into our sites and leverage the potential referral traffic. I am getting a portable video cam and may even try video blogging like my fellow internet traveler Daniel Odio. Watch out road ways in Northern Virgina if you thought talking on a cell phone was distracting I can't wait to see how many pile ups are attributed to video blogging.


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Link Equity

Link equity is a term you hear thrown around by may industry pundits as referenced in Mike Grehan, latest article on ClickZ titled, Why You Don't Rank on Search Engines. Bottom line is you need to have a lot of links ( by my estimates at least 1000) validating you are who you say you are on the web otherwise you will never show up for the keyword terms you trying to brand your site. Here is a 101 Tips on Link Building from the authoritative SEOBook. Finally here is an excellent tool we use to measure clients links and keyword competitive rankings from Compete.com.
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Why Blog & Tweet

My good friend Daniel Odio summed it up the best in his latest blog entries on why to blog and tweet from a social perspective. I thought I would add the why from a business perspective. Just like the advent of email in the 80s where you could instantly send a communication in a one to many fashion you can now communicate 1 to the world your ideas and activites. So who cares? Well that is the real question. If someone is interested in your industry and keeping up with the latest trends or news they can keep track your blog post via an RSS feed or follow your tweets on Twitter.

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Interact2008 in WashDC

This months training conference was Interact 2008 which was based on the theme of merging creativity with technology. So of Madison Ave's biggest firms including Oglivy, Saatchi&Saatchi, sent their creative types to share some of their award winning works with us in DC.  Some of the most impressive work was by Jacob Trollback. His theme of focusing on the tribe your marketing to with effective story telling was right on target. Another significant take away was from  Techinsights Paul Miller's presentation on Interactive Marketing What When & How. We really should focus on story boarding the web experience to ensure process flow is efficient for the consumer. Some notable creative works on  include QuickSilver's  Youtube video and Snobile.com.cn and Qwikker.com.

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Social Media Momentum

Social Media is now the buzz in internet marketing so it is about time we created an offering. So for those interested we are looking for a few beta customers to help us model a packaged offering and will do the preliminary work at cost. Here are some ideas we have uncovered while doing research into the topic and how to best position the offering. Ad Age this week has so tips for those do it yourself types.

The hardest part will be defining exactly what to include in a packaged offering. Including social networking sites and blogs is a no brainer, but should we experiment with Twitter to see if there is really business value there. Or is it just another technology where people are trying to figure out the business value while the company tries to figure out a business model? Since most of the research shows that social media is reaching the tipping point where about 30-40% of large coporations are implementing some form of social media strategy in 2008. The next two years it will reach mainstream so we want to be ready to launch something for the late majority in 2009. In the meantime follow my update on Twitter;)

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August ADTECH

After taking most of the summer to enjoy life with the kids it was time to get serious about event marketing and networking. So for my birthday I decided to go to chicago and attend ADTech. It is about time to summarize my takeaways from the event. It was actually hotter inChicago than DC over the two days so lugging a backpack around for my48 hour visit was a pain but I brought my new MacBook Air to takenotes. I had a lot of interesting comments, but forgot to save the document so the two pages of commentary are lost, but you probably would want all the nitty gritty details.

The biggest lesson from the event was that search is so 1990s and social media is where the action is at. So we are developing anoffering for "Social Influence Marketing:. For those of you not up onthe social networking crazy I am not talking about the cocktail partiesof 1960 era. This is about electronic networking and connecting with communities online, as well as, creating content for thosecommunities. The business aspects is that your consumers are involved and if you not at least monitoring the buzz on the net you are missing opportunities for sales and improved customer service.

Two examples of the positive and negative impact of social media can have on business. They came from the Conversational Branding session. First a conference attendee told the story of how Comcast actuallymonitors blogs and found an unhappy customer, his mother, and the company reached out to her resolved the problem. While Dell continuesto have customer service issues with the same attendees who asked aquestion he has blogged about the issue and wondered why they don'tproactively resolve issue like comcast. We believe it or not the head of Dell's Digital Media group said we just have to agree to disagreeabout how issues are handled. I think he is an idiot for making that kind of comment infront of an audience of 1000 people at AD Tech.

Our goal will be to show companies how to improve customer service andmake more sales leveraging social media. There is an great article forward to me by our friends up north at R2i which provides several data sources for justification of social media. Check out Aaron Uhrmacher's story on Mashable.



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Web Marketing Return On Investment

Working on a startup is fun since you have to create everything. We are continuing to work on our Return On Investment (ROI) model for DigiFutures web marketing campaigns. Specifically we are trying to show cost justification of internet advertsing campaigns like Search Engine Marketing (SEO)and Paid Per Click (PPC) to novice internet advertisers. It is obvious to us , but trying to make the case to those folks still stuck in the traditional media model is a challenge. We have come up with a model and a chart which nets it out to two pieces of data:

1- how much did one spend on a medium Web verse Traditional
2-total revenue from repeat customers aquired by each channel

The bottom line is dramatic. The ROI from the internet as a marketing channel is over 600% ROI which is almost twice the ROI numbers from direct media. Which would you invest in? We are creating a data sheet to publish for those intereseted in seein the details.
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Online vs OffLine Results

As we start building the business within the small to medium business sector it amazes me the amount of opportunites that exist. Today we had a call with an electrical contractor which is spending millions on traditional media yet has no optimization efforts or paid internet marketing other than ad ons to yellow pages. For example for one services company we get a hand full of calls a week or about 20 a month at a cost of $2000 per month so our cost per call is $100 per call. While on the web with an online ad provider Paid Per Click (PPC) Campaigns our cost per call is only $17 per call. It makes you wonder why organizations continue to pour money into less effiecient advertising programs.
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Welcome to DigiFutures' Blog.


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