To compete in this new environment, many marketers are finding themselves at square one, revisiting the basic tenets of connecting with consumers. Along with the economic shift, we have also seen a shift in the media landscape and audience media-consumption habits. So the fundamentals of how marketers approach and engage consumers must change as well. Here are a few marketing axioms and a look at how various brands are successfully approaching consumers in the new economic environment.

Connect on a personal level
Create opportunities to connect with consumers on a personal level. Find out what they think, what they dream and what they want. This affords you insight into their perspectives, motivations and needs. In turn, you can leverage this knowledge to benefit your brand as you provide real answers to the needs of your consumers.

Asus and Intel did this with the development of WePC.com. The two partnered with FM Publishing to create a site where users can share their ideas for computer features and uses, thereby giving the technology producers acute insights into consumer motivations. The crowdsourcing experiment has a yield of over 2,138 ideas submitted, 13,566 votes received and 3,944 “dream PCs” described.

This past year, the marketers at Lufthansa Airlines devised a method of connecting travelers with friends and family via MySkyStatus.com. Lufthansa established the site as a social utility to keep travelers connected with their social networks while flying. I had the pleasure of working on this campaign while at Profero NY (Lufthansa’s digital agency) and found that in the course of keeping users connected with each other, the airline successfully kept them connected with their brand.

This year, American Express put a social spin on crowdsourcing with its “Members Project” campaign. Leveraging social-media tools, American Express allocated a portion of its philanthropic spending and energy toward the causes advocated by voters at its site. Not only has the campaign been effective in generating a great deal of media exposure for the brand, but it also provides the team at American Express extensive insight into the values and motivations of its target consumers. This is precisely the type of intelligence brands need to facilitate connections with consumers.

Wear your heart on your sleeve
Develop a set of core values and create opportunities to communicate those values to your consumer audience. The more honest and revealing you are in communicating these values, the greater your brand’s potential to live in the heart of consumers as more than just a name.

As a corollary, join a cause that aligns your brand with a social initiative that reflects its core values. Social-cause marketing is an effective means of communicating that your organization shares a common set of values with your target consumer. Also, create opportunities for your consumers to get involved alongside your brand (either through sponsored events or purchase options that support your given cause financially through a portion of the proceeds).

Yoplait employs this strategy with its “Save to Save Lives,” where it donates $.10 in support of breast cancer research for every lid sent in by consumers (up to $1.5 million) with a guaranteed minimum of $500,000. The project successfully affiliates the brand with an issue that is of great importance to its largely female consumer base.

This year, Puma (in partnership with Fuse Project) is exhibiting this principle with the brand’s “Clever Little Bag” project. In attempt to reduce waste for the sake of sustainability, Puma has re-thought the consumer-packaging experience and reinvented the shoe box into something more eco-friendly. This initiative reaches beyond immediate commercial goals to satisfy larger social initiatives. Clever Little Bag is part of Puma’s corporate sustainability program that intends to cut its water, energy and diesel consumption by more than 60%.

When your brand stands for social progress, consumers will stand with your brand.

Constantly innovate
Innovation is the hallmark of a premium brand. Constant development and improvement distinguishes market leaders from their competitors. The economic performance of brands such as Apple, which has maintained a sales growth rate of 89% over the last three years, demonstrates that consumers recognize this commitment to excellence.

This year, Apple continued its legacy of innovation with the introduction of the iPad. At product launch, Gap was among the first set of marketers to establish a presence on the new device with its “1969 Stream” app. Gap partnered with AKQA to create a multimedia experience full of robust content intended to showcase all that the new platform has to offer. As an early adopter, Gap gained a competitive advantage as one of the few marketers with a presence on the iPad at launch.

This year, Domino’s Pizza communicated a sincere commitment to constant improvement with its “Pizza Turnaround” campaign, created by Crispin Porter & Bogusky. The campaign employed a viral documentary in tandem with a microsite and guerrilla-marketing tactics, all highlighting the company’s proactive response to long-standing criticism. It improved its organization. Its improved its product. And it improved dramatically. So far, the campaign seems to have resonated with consumers, as Domino’s celebrated $1 billion in online sales in February, just over a month after the campaign’s launch.

Remember the love
Probably the most important of steps, remember — or discover — what you love about your product. Remember what your consumers love about your product. And most importantly, remember what you love about your consumers.

ESPN employed this axiom when it teamed up with Wieden & Kennedy to produce the “One Game Changes Everything” campaign in support of the sports network’s FIFA World Cup coverage. The campaign led with a spot featuring a voice-over by U2’s Bono emphasizing the power of sport to unite men in the face of opposing politics, religion or other issues that divide humanity.

Another example of this principle at work is how BMW introduced its new “Efficient Dynamics” engineering, which the company touts as the linchpin for new innovations in its 2010 line. Instead of getting lost in science and tech speak, BMW simply states that “Joy is Future-proof,” reminding us that, beneath it all, it is the same car consumers have relied on for the ultimate driving experience for over 80 years.

In a study out today, Forrester finds that only 4% of U.S. online adults have ever used location-based mobile apps such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt. Only 1% update these services more than once per week. What’s more, 84% of respondents said they are not familiar with such apps, leaving the vast majority of Americans online still in the dark about location-based apps, which have had the marketing world obsessing over them in recent months.

The report could also be a wake-up call for social media on mobile phones, especially when comparing the location services to the last social-media darling, Twitter. The micro-blogging service reports 35% of its 125 million registered users are in the U.S. and only a fraction of that number access Twitter via mobile. In April, Twitter said 37% of its usage comes via mobile clients. Apply that percentage to U.S. tweeters — we must extrapolate because the company does not break out U.S. users via mobile specifically — and the 16 million Americans using Twitter via mobile is about comparable to the location-apps audience in total.

Almost 80% of location-based service users are male. Close to 70% of them are between the ages of 19 and 35, and 70% have college degrees or higher. Forrester also found these location-app users to be influential (the report finds they’re 38% more likely to say friends and family ask their opinions before a purchase) and they are especially receptive to mobile coupons and offers. This set is up to 20% more likely to consult their phones before a purchase, and are far more likely to research products and services and read customer reviews.

This small audience is still attractive to some marketers. Forrester recommends that gaming, consumer electronics and sportswear marketers lead the way with testing these apps. Location apps have already proved they’re not only for male-oriented brands. PepsiCo, Starbucks, Oil of Olay, Bravo and, most recently, Campbell’s Soup have all launched campaigns with location apps.

Forrester analyst Melissa Parrish believes that male-oriented brands should forge the way and other marketers should hang back until these apps get bigger audiences. To date, Foursquare has more than 2 million users; Loopt 4 million and MyTown 2.5 million. Scale could come to the category if digital behemoths such as Facebook, Google and Twitter, which have already made moves toward location services, develop their own products.

That’s one of the conclusions of a six-month analysis of the service’s ubiquitous 140-character messages conducted by digital agency 360i and released today. Despite marketers’ embrace of the medium, brands are finding themselves on the outside of the conversation. Of the 90% of Twitter messages sent by real people — the other 10% come from businesses — only 12% ever mention a brand, and most of those mentions are of Twitter itself.

Further, only 1% of consumer tweets that mention a brand are part of an active conversation with that brand, meaning marketers are, for the most part, conducting one-way conversations — the opposite of the way consumers often use Twitter.

The most mentioned brands on Twitter tend to be there because they are part of a constant daily conversation, not because of anything the brand is or isn’t doing on Twitter. The most mentioned brands on Twitter are, in descending order, Twitter, Apple, Google, YouTube, Microsoft, Blackberry, Amazon, Facebook, Snuggie, eBay and Starbucks.

Embedded in the culture
Snuggie is the surprise brand on the list, but that appears to reflect the brand’s place in the culture, not its own Twitter activity. Official Snuggie profile @OriginalSnuggie has just 591 followers and @WeezerSnuggie, an account set up to promote the once-popular Weezer video, has just 693 followers and has been dormant since November.

After spending six months going over a statistically significant sample of 1,800 tweets, 360i Senior-VP Sarah Hofstetter was struck at just how mundane and personal they were. “They’re mostly doing what people mocked Twitter about in the first place, as in, what I had for lunch.”

The vast majority of real people’s tweets, 94%, are personal in nature. Most tweets, 85%, are original and not re-tweets of other messages. They’re also very often conversational: 43% of tweets begin with an “@” sign, meaning they’re directed at another user, not the sender’s followers at large.

While marketers such as Dell, Comcast, Ford and Starbucks have been, at times, clever participants on Twitter, the majority of marketers use it as a mini press-release service. Only 12% of messages from marketers are directed at individual Twitter users, meaning marketers still see it as a broadcast medium rather than a conversational one.

Showing up isn’t enough
“There is still a misperception that if brands show up, people will listen to them, kind of like Facebook a few years ago,” Ms. Hofstetter said. “Twitter can be used as a promotional RSS feed, but that’s not going to establish a relationship with anybody.”

The study was conducted before Twitter took any advertising, from October 2009 through March 2010. Twitter has since rolled out a series of ad units including promoted tweets and trends. Ms. Hofstetter said the ads are great to help boost things already popular on Twitter. “They are only going to work if they are relevant in the first place,” she said.

Twitter posts are intrinsically navel-gazing, conversational and personal, but they aren’t predominantly self-promotional. Depending on your circle of connections, it can certainly feel, as Wired’s Evan Ratliff noted, that “self-aggrandizement” is “standard fare” on Twitter. But the 360i study found only 2% of tweets were professional updates or career-related.

What do Twitter users talk about? Beyond the 43% of individuals’ tweets that are conversational, 24% are status updates, 12% are links to news or comment on current events, and 3% are seeking or giving advice.

The good news for brands is that when a consumer does mention them on Twitter, they’re usually not complaining about it. Only 7% of tweets mentioning brands indicated negative sentiment, 11% positive and an overwhelmingly 82% neutral.

1. Maintain a good balance of graphics to text in your HTML emails. Many experts recommend you try to maintain a balance of 60% text and 40% graphics.
2. Never send an email that is one big graphic.
3. In addition to the HTML version, always include a text only version. The filters reward those who take the little bit of extra time to create both versions.
4. AVOID HYPE!! Ideally, you would avoid exclamation marks and ALL CAPS and in the subject line and the content or use in moderation.
5. Do not use phrases that seem too good to be true. Yes, there are “once in a lifetime opportunities” but they don’t arrive in your Inbox.
6. The filters don’t like “money back guarantees.”
7. “Urgent!” It is not that urgent if the email ends up in the junk folder.
8. Don’t claim you have made a “breakthrough.”
9. Avoid using unusual fonts, all red type, flashing objects, and other assorted weirdness.
10. Avoid very small fonts.
11. Avoid excessive text about money. Of course, if your topic is money you have to talk about it but try to be economical.
12. Configure a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record in your Domain Name Service (DNS) records for your domain name (yourcompany.com).
13. If you are getting too many spam complaints, then consider putting the unsubscribe link at the top of your email. Many times if people cannot find the unsubscribe button right away, they will default to pressing the complain button or spam button (found on email services provided by AOL, Hotmail, MSN, Yahoo and Google). It is much better to have people unsubscribe than to register an electronic complaint.

Dailey Marketing Group can help you with any of the issues you might be experiencing with your email blasts.  Dailey Marketing Group’s email system is a recognized white listed email system which allows us to provide our clients with the best way possible to get their message to the Inbox of their customers. Call us today to get started. 888.364.6584

Marketers and their agencies have been trying to decode why consumers buy what they do since the 1920s, when N.W. Ayer suggested people would “walk a mile for a Camel.” But lately they’re turning to behavioral economics, a blend of psychology and economics that has until recently been a mostly academic discipline, and could be described most simply as the study of how consumers make economic decisions.

It deviates from traditional economics in that it doesn’t assume consumers behave rationally, like a market (in theory) does, making decisions based solely on facts or logic such as price or quality. Rather, emotions and social psychology affect or dictate decisions and create sometimes predictable “irrational” tendencies. Those tendencies form the tenets of behavioral economics. The health care, finance, and even government policy industries are turning to behavioral economics. The Credit Card Reform Act, for instance, is cited as one big behavioral economics document with ideas such as clearly labeled interest rates and terms and tables of actual spending on credit card bills to “help” consumers make decisions more easily on which card to get or use, how to spend within their means, etc.

President Barack Obama’s administration is rife with behavioral-economic proponents such as Cass Sunstein, head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, who co-wrote “Nudge” with revered behavioral economist Richard Thaler. And while many of the government’s uses for behavioral economics, such as upping nutrition labeling and financial reforms, have been positioned as counter balances to an advertising world that pushes unhealthy food and spending to feel good, marketers themselves are exploring and adopting behavioral economics to do more and smarter product pushing.

Irrational effects
Dan Ariely, author of “Predictably Irrational” and a behavioral economics professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, often works with agencies and marketers, has an ongoing relationship with neighbor ad agency McKinney in Durham, N.C., and has trained and consulted on specific clients. He warns that professional ad people often don’t see what nonprofessionals see — and the irrational effect people’s emotions have on their choices. His research with agencies and marketers is meant to help them understand consumer choices and the forces behind them.

For example, McKinney and Mr. Ariely are working together using behavioral economics in one example they provided, to figure out what makes people go to the gym. Traditional focus group research has found that people will say they would go to the gym if it were closer to their office, or less expensive, or even offered free babysitting. However, gyms have offered all those things without measurable increases in attendance.

Mr. Ariely found through his behavioral research that people are more likely to go to the gym when they have an appointment with a trainer — perhaps because they paid for the extra help in advance, felt ashamed for not showing (and now someone else knows they didn’t go) or felt guilty that they had just wasted another person’s time. Jeff Jones, partner and president of McKinney, said they’re also studying different payment structures that drive behavior, and gave the example that instead of paying via a monthly credit-card deduction for membership, what if consumers didn’t pay at all except if they didn’t go to the gym?

“Who knows what the economic impact would be?” he posited. “But what might it do for the churn rate?”

“Behavioral economics gives Ph.D. credibility and academic rigor to intuition,” Mr. Jones said. “It’s really hard today to make million-dollar decisions based on intuition. This helps clients realize there is data behind the decisions and there is research behind the decisions.”

And indeed financial pressures, ad-agency marginalization and greater availability of sophisticated consumer data are all reasons ad agencies and marketers are increasingly drawn to this formalized process of analyzing consumer spending choices.

DraftFCB, New York, has adopted behavioral economics as a key discipline within its recently launched Institute of Decision Making, which also looks at other emerging areas of study such as neuroscience. It recently pitched a utility company using behavioral economics.

“It’s easy to get people to agree that they should use less energy — 86% of them strongly agreed they should — but they don’t do it,” said Matthew Willcox, who heads the institute as executive director (and continues to serve as director of account planning at DraftFCB, San Francisco). So DraftFCB researched and included specific ideas in the pitch, such as the number of things the utility could ask and people would be willing to do to reduce energy, or the things they would be willing to tell others about saving energy.

One concept of behavioral economics that’s particularly practical for marketers is framing — the way in which an offer is framed or put in context for consumers, along with the bias and experience that each consumer brings to that purchase.

Another concept, called anchoring, refers to the fact that when people are given a number, they tend to use that number as a kind of permanent benchmark for future thinking.

Behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won a Nobel Prize in economics and is considered the “father” of behavioral economics, described anchoring in a McKinsey Quarterly video in May 2008. He said when people are thinking about quantities, the first number that gets mentioned has “enormous impact.” So if he asked people if the tallest tree in the world is more or less than 900 feet, most people would correctly guess that is way too tall and say it’s less. However, he points out, he’s now made you think of very tall trees. The opposite would have been true if he used 100 feet as an “anchor” number.

Behavioral economics is not about whether a person might be into a new brand of coffee or what they think of coffee brands in general, but what coffee a person picks off the shelf, said Joel Rubinson, chief research officer at the Advertising Research Foundation.

Also, as brands have become less powerful today, thanks to a plethora of choices and information, it’s become more important to figure out how and why consumers purchase. “Market research today is studying purchase intent, but not really studying how people make decisions,” said Mr. Rubinson. “When only half of people who say they plan to buy something actually go out and purchase it, and 50% of decisions are made at point of purchase, that’s leaving a lot on the table.”

He adds that marketing does a good job of studying brand equity, a less than perfect job at studying brand activation, and mostly very little in studying how consumers purchase. “Brand equity and purchase intent are fine, just incomplete,” Mr. Rubinson said.

However, even the early adopters and aficionados understand that behavioral economics is not a replacement or panacea, but rather an additive set of tools for marketers — and other industries, for that matter — to use. “It’s not about ‘We used to do it this way and now it’s a wholesale change and we’re doing it this way,’” Mr. Jones said. “These are just new ways of understanding how and why people make decisions. And it’s just smart marketing to understand them and use them.”

Sure it’s a cliché. It seems every book I have read on branding contains that sentence. Yet, the Internet has created an environment that makes that statement truer than at any prior point. The Internet enables incredibly fast access to an enormous amount of information and provides connectivity and community that can empower buyers.

According to a popular branding theory, when marketplace choices increase, buyers tend to have an increased preference for familiar brands, thus, saving them research time and limiting their exposure to risk. The Internet has, without question, increased the amount of choices for business-to-business buyers.

Buyers increased access to information often results in increased expectations. In markets where products and services are largely perceived as commodities, or  strong weight is given to technical  specifications and price, given that all other things are equal (e.g., delivery time, etc.), a strong brand may be the single characteristic that differentiates a product from competitive offerings.

The significance of geography, which had once created advantages for many companies and obstacles to others, has, in many instances, been greatly reduced. Customers can now quickly and easily research product information, detailed specifications, experience computer-based presentations, search competitor offerings, find peers through professional associations or affinity groups where they can ask questions and share experiences, as well as make purchases online.

PROPAGANDA IS OUT. DELIVERING ON PROMISES IS IN.

There’s an old saying in the advertising world: “Nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising.” With the mainstream adoption of the commercial Internet, the time it takes to kill poor or undifferentiated products (for the sake of simplicity, this paper uses the term “products” to describe both products and services) has been shortened considerably. Innovations are quickly imitated by competitors, rarely providing long-term sustainable advantages.

It is clear that the most sustainable advantage any company can have is a strong brand.

In the age of the informed customer, the concept of “image is reality” is dead. The revised formula is: Image + Information + Customer Expectations + Customer Experience (delivery) = Reality.

Customers new found access to seemingly endless amounts of information results in their being more demanding than prior to this access. While image remains significant, the new access to information often results in placing increased weight on specifications, capabilities and price during the buying process. This complex situation may appear to lessen the significance of brands, but, in actuality, it has elevated the significance of the brand.

Great B2B brands have the right technical specifications, connect with customers, deliver on promises that matter, exceed expectations and have a positive buzz within the buying community.

Consider the popular mantra of IT professionals: “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” This is a good example of a brand that stands for quality in the minds of customers and provides them with a shortcut in the buying process that helps them avoid risk.

The ideal brand connects with customers on an emotional level.

Think B2C brands are the only ones that do this? Consider commercial photographers and Kodak; graphic and multimedia designers and Macintosh; business executives and recruiters and Harvard Business School; computer professionals and IBM; and mechanics and Snap-On.

Smart B2B brands use the Internet to deepen emotional bonding between the brand and customer. These marketers will often create places customers can go online that help encourage their bonding where they can find out more information about the brand, communicate with other brand advocates and feel a sense of a community that is connected by the brand. Microsoft is excellent at creating emotional bonds with the developer community through its various developer groups. These groups have their own special sections of the Microsoft Website, training (including some at no cost), special access to information (they can receive advance notification of announcements prior to the general public), membership, online events such as seminars, discounts on Microsoft products (software and books) plus offline meetings and events.

Microsoft understands how to meld the offline and online worlds together for the benefit of its brand.

THE FALLOUT FROM THE “NEW ECONOMY” HYPE

During the dot-com explosion, the Internet became so over-hyped it seemed that many people had lost touch with (or never understood) sound business principles. Huge amounts of cash were spent in a mad rush to be first to create strong brands in “Internet Speed.” Now, long after the Internet bubble has burst, in many instances, there has been a reactionary backlash –a tendency to discount all things related to the Internet.

Either extreme is unwise.

The Internet is certain to play an increasingly significant role in how business is done and the management of brands. Those interested in building and maintaining strong brands need to understand and exploit the Internet’s power, integrating it with offline efforts.

The market is growing: The 2010 Census expected to count a record 50 million Hispanics, or one in every six U.S. residents, meaning the Hispanic population will have increased a stunning 42% from the previous census in 2000. (By comparison, the non-Hispanic population will have edged up just 5% in that decade.) It’s also got scale: Hispanics are now the nation’s second-largest consumer market after white non-Hispanics, who are still the largest group at about 200 million.

But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Hispanics in America is how closely they exemplify our idealized concept of 1950s America. They are young (their median age is about where the whole nation was in 1955) and more often live in large, traditional, married-with-children families with lots of participation from grandparents.

More often than not, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they eat family meals at home, and spend less than average on alcohol. They’re moving to the suburbs, tend to be community-oriented, and have high aspirations for their children. In short, they are the sweet market for consumer goods and services that the entire nation used to be when baby boomers were young.

Hispanic children are overwhelmingly U.S. born. Fully 91% of Hispanic children were born in the U.S., compared to only 47% of Hispanic adults, which has great implications for the demographics’ speed of acculturation. With the Hispanic market at this tipping point, one of the biggest challenges for marketers is reaching young, acculturated bilingual Hispanics who behave differently than their parents who didn’t grow up in the U.S. and don’t spend as much time with Spanish-language media, but still feel a deep sense of Latino identity.

More than 1 in 3 Hispanics in the U.S. (34.3%) are children under 18 years old, as compared to fewer than one in four children (22.5%) that are non-Hispanics. The youthful U.S.-born Hispanic population means that children of immigrants, who typically attend public schools, where they learn English, will acculturate much faster than their parents did. And, in fact, English is making gradual gains as the language U.S. Hispanics are most comfortable speaking. Some 27% are most comfortable in English, with another 17% comfortable in both English and Spanish; meaning that nearly half—44%—of the demographic is at ease in English.

Over the next decade, as millions of bilingual Hispanic teens become young adults, we can expect their consumer behavior to move closer to other non-Hispanic young adults. However, the very large size of this segment suggests that the Hispanic culture is likely to remain strong, even among U.S.-born children.

The major difference between today’s immigrants and those who have come before them is the phenomenon called globalization. Inexpensive air travel, the internet and native-language TV stations featuring content from country of origin all allow this group of immigrants to come to the U.S. and become acculturated but still have close ties to their home countries in ways that past immigrant groups could not. That is having and will continue to have a transformative effect on the U.S. culture, including music, food and sports, as illustrated by this year’s World Cup fervor.

Hispanics will become a major force in U.S. consumer-spending growth over the next decade and beyond. The slowing growth and aging population that characterizes other segments of consumers means that younger and larger Hispanic families will be more vital to future growth in consumer spending than at any time in the past.

The Hispanic population is, on average, more than 10 years younger than the average for non-Hispanics. Their median age is just under 28, which means that 75% of adult Hispanics are age 18-49, compared to 56% of non-Hispanics. The household size of U.S. Hispanic families is the largest of any segment. The average Hispanic family has 4.0 members, compared to 2.9 members in the average white, non-Hispanic family. And only 4% of adult Hispanics live alone, compared to 15% of white non-Hispanics.

Hispanic consumers are the most geographically concentrated of any large consumer segment. The eight states with the most Hispanics are home to 76% of all U.S. Hispanics. About half of Hispanic consumers live in California and Texas. The other six states having more than one million Hispanics are Florida, New York, Illinois, Arizona, New Jersey and Colorado. By contrast, the eight states with the largest concentration of non-Hispanics have just 44% of that consumer segment.

By 2015, millions of baby boomers will have begun retiring, thus reducing their consumer spending. Hispanic consumers will play a major role in replacing those retirees in the consumer marketplace and will contribute to the upsurge of retail spending and economic growth.

And given their growing influence on this country’s culture, perhaps one day we may be saying: “It’s as American as dulce de leche.”

How many of us start construction on our website before we have spent adequate time learning users’ needs first? Information architecture is nothing more than taking the time to understand and then design your site around your user base. It’s also the method of organizing content into meaningful groups to make it intuitive. Additionally, the user navigation and folder structure of your website are also a part of information design. This can be a complex topic with many facets, but I will touch on a couple points to get the gears turning.

Why Is Information Architecture So Important?

Well, a very organized site that’s very easy to navigate will be pleasing to your visitors and help them become customers. From an SEO (define) perspective, a site that’s well thought out from the beginning will likely adhere to SEO best practices. The benefits are usability and a higher ranking. Suffice it to say that taking the time up front to design correctly will serve you well in the long run. To learn more about usability tips, see this article.

A Good Foundation

Let’s start by looking at the foundation. Domain names help to communicate important information to users and to search engines. Picking a domain name that topically fits the theme of your website is foundational. It helps your users feel they have an understanding of what your site is about. It’s good to try and keep it short and to the point which will help make the domain memorable. The key here is starting with a topic in which to build that can contain all of the sections and categories that will come underneath it.

Categories and Keywords

So if domains help set up the foundation, then categories and sections help us set up and frame the site around the theme. For an SEO, this process starts with keyword research to the labeling and navigation process. As you begin laying out the hierarchy of your site, consider starting with your core keywords. Then take those keywords and divide them into groups. Those groups now represent the basic sections of your site. Each section should be optimized around the core keyword chosen.

Below, each of these sections are the category keywords sets you’re targeting, each with pages with more categories. These may have a few or several levels depending on how complex your concept is. By constructing your site this way, it helps to keep things organized and aids in the SEO process.

Pages and Directory Structure

As you start building out each page of your site, it’s good to keep a clean structure and good organized code. Not only does this help out the search spiders, but cleaner code translates to less errors and an easy to follow site for maintenance. One way to help with this is to keep your code compliant with known standards like WC3. From an SEO perspective, using your keywords effectively in file names can help create URL strings that make sense to search spiders as well as users. See this article on site structure for more information.

Accessibility is another consideration that many people miss. Search engines like sites that have correctly labeled images. Remember to label your images with good descriptive alternative text attributes. This is also a good usability practice to aid disabled people so they can properly interpret your site. Here are some tips for making your site universally accessible.

Linking

A well thought-out linking structure will help your users connect to logical flows of information. To aid in the SEO process, good basic linking will help with the flow of page rank. Also, be careful not to have too many links, as this deters your users and the logical flow loses clarity. To learn more about linking, read my two-part article on link building basics.

These are just basic concepts of information architecture. This can be a complex field with fun terms like taxonomy and interpretation sessions that we cannot go into here, but you should know that it exists and plan to incorporate it into your site from the beginning. To learn more about getting started with information architecture, start by checking out the Information Architecture Institute. Without information architecture, you’re likely to build a house for the wrong type of residents.

What do these buzzwords mean? How do we use them to drive value? Where are the best practices?

These often-used terms have connotative and denotative meanings that can be quite different depending on who uses them and how they are used. We continue to see uncertainly about loyalty, engagement, and voice of the customer. Questions about these buzzwords keep coming fast and furiously.

The confusion indicates that in this challenging economic environment, the focus on loyalty and engagement is becoming ever more important. Customers, clients, employers, brands and channel partners believe that voice of the customer, Web 3.0, the Groundswell, etc., can give them a well-needed competitive edge. Yet they don’t know how to execute these initiatives effectively. They’re looking for best practice examples of groups creating engagement, excitement, and commitment to help the answer the overriding question: How?

On one hand, brands and consumer package good companies tell us that they want to re-engage their customers and have more direct communication with them, and that social, mobile and emerging media is helping them to do this. On the other, they want to have better and more actionable data results. They want to see the true 360-degree view of the customer, yet realize that they’re not privy to data from other sources — such as channel partners, merchants, and distribution channels — that allow them to complete this circle.

Getting the true voice of the customer doesn’t just mean using social, emerging, and mobile media. It also means focusing on traditional media channels such as the contact center, direct-mail response, customer loyalty program, surveys, etc.

Merchants, banks, hotels, restaurants, travel, and entertainment companies pose to us a litany of the same questions. These entities want to work together and collaborate in a manner we have not witnessed in quite some time. Capturing a 360-degree view of the customer means knowing what Jack Jones is spending at Applebee’s, on Delta, at JC Penney, and at 53 Bank. They want this level of broad insight because they know it will enable them to make more effective communication decisions and tailor the form, factor, and fashion of these timely communications in order to increase its effectiveness.

But they continue to ask: How?

How do I get this information? How can I create loyalty? How can I create engagement? How can I make the insight I have more actionable? How do I drive the behavior that I need to drive? How do I change the mindset within my organization to be more accommodating and amenable to this new transition?

The answer to each of these is twofold:

(1) Listen.

Listen, not in a lip service fashion, but listen with the belief that there is wisdom in crowds. Listen with the purpose that small is the new big. One blogger, one online community not addressed can have serious impacts on a brand. Being truly committed to listening to and engaging customers requires a corporate mandate guided by a visionary leader who compels the organization to look at their actions and address these questions honestly:

• When companies say they are committed to voice of the customer, yet they are only focused on call center responses, is that a true voice of the customer?
• Or when companies say they are committed to voice of the customer, yet they are only focused on social, mobile and emerging media responses, is that a true voice of the customer?
• Or when companies say they are committed to voice of the customer, yet they only use third party opt-in data, is that a true voice of the customer?

(2) React.

Once you listen you need to react with the purpose to engage and empower the dialogue with your audience. There’s no doubt the pendulum has swung from the brand to the client. For every success story that becomes lore within this new “social community” and “engagement marketing” space, we hear five where the “visionary” that sold them on the new technology that would revolutionize their brand, their company, their product, their offering has failed.

That’s because it comes down to commitment and a realization that the world of marketing is going to be more dynamic now than it has ever been. Customers, clients, employees, brand participants want control. Yet control means engaging in an interactive dialogue with the brand and brand participants. It means making the input for the various channels concise, relevant, interest and actionable.

I was recently at a loyalty conference where one of the speakers purported that we should treat our “best customer” with the best rewards and engagement. I thought to myself, what is your best customer? How do you define that customer and what are the best rewards and engagement for them? There’s no place for this type of old school thinking in this new media market of engagement, loyalty and voice of the customer.

I challenge you to listen — to truly listen — to react, and then to engage.

Other than Facebook and e-mail, searching is one of our primary daily activities online. The search interfaces and results pages we’re constantly interacting with are shaping our every day experiences and website expectations. Being the demanding online creatures we are, we expect this experience to continue being richer and more relevant.

But if your site is like most of those out there, you’re failing significantly at meeting your visitor’s ever-demanding expectations from search engines. What I’m referring to is your internal site search and the quality of the experience it provides. Everything from how easy it is to search, to the relevancy of the results, all the way to the actual display of those results. Google has countless engineers constantly tweaking its algorithm and have long realized that providing 10 blue links on a search results page was just, well…lame!

Whereas it’s unrealistic to expect you to invest the resources Google does into optimizing your in-site search experience, it’s still no excuse to turn a blind eye to the emerging trends and changing behaviors of online searchers.

It was in May of 2007 that Google launched “Universal Search” results to provide a richer experience for its searchers. Have your search results caught up to this change three years later? Now it isn’t just Google that’s setting these expectations. There’s a reason why a website like Amazon.com accounts for over 25 percent of all e-commerce transactions in the U.S.

So, it’s safe to say that there are some lessons to be learned, and here are some of them:

5 Googly Lessons to Consider

1. What did you mean? Did you mean “running shoes” when you searched for “sneakers”? Did you spell it “fouton” instead of “futon”? 

 Too many sites do not accommodate misspelling, phonetics, or synonyms, though there’s no shortage in tools that can help. What can be more frustrating than going to a site that has what you want but won’t let you find it?

2. I’ve got nothing to show you. Signs that the world is coming to an end include false prophets, a major plague, and Google displaying “0 Results Found.” Your site shouldn’t either.

If your in-site search engine is unable to match the visitor’s query with a result, suggest intelligent alternatives (extra emphasis on the intelligent part), or at the very least, offer them a list of your most popular products, best rated, etc., or even a phone number to speak to someone to help them.

A zero results page is just the geeky way of telling your visitors “Go away, I don’t want your money.”

3. KISS: Keep it simple, stupid! Google offers a simple search input box and two buttons – that’s it! Nothing fancy, no advanced search.

The advanced part is all done behind the wizard’s curtain and should stay there. Most people are intimidated by advanced search options and contrary to our hopes, have little or no knowledge of search operator commands. Put them at ease with smart links and navigation that can help drill down to find exactly what they’re looking for.

4. Are you showing enough? Chances are, you’re probably not. Think of all the different options on the new Google search interface. If I search for a black cocktail dress, I can sort my results by anything from latest arrivals, to videos, to what’s nearby.

Google Images gives you an expanded view with details of an image, simply by mousing over it. Do your results give people a “quick look” or do they have to click and move on to other pages to see product details?

5. Keep up or get out. Last and definitely not least, keep an eye out for emerging trends. People’s search behaviors will continue to evolve as they become less patient and more savvy. Be prompt in adjusting and accommodating, or your competitors will.

 So, go back to your sites and check if you’re applying any of these five best practices. If you want to learn more, join me at SES San Francisco for the Beyond the Click: What Shoppers Need Now session, where I’ll be sharing some tips and tricks you can do on the algorithm and cosmetic side of your search results pages to take your customer experience and your conversion rates to the next level.