Recession? Choose Not to Participate in 2009!

Posted by sswaney on December 31, 2008 at 02:53 PM

Wake up! There is a 32 car pile-up on America's economic super highway. What to do: think positive and find solutions.

The first and foremost thing that you can do about the weakening economy is to develop a mindset of success that will see you through these tough times. Smart organizations recognize a downturn as a chance to gain market share. Companies that continue to implement targeted online communication plans, while their competitors cut back, build very strong brand identity and web presence that they can then capitalize on.

Plan, plan, and then plan some more. Preparation will be the key to your success in 2009. Now more than ever, budgeting your marketing dollars is a critical aspect of the planning process. With online marketing playing an increasingly important role in the allocation of those marketing dollars, your online marketing plan should, at its core, include paid search, search engine optimization, online media buying and e-mail marketing.

Research shows that companies that maintain or increase their marketing budgets during an economic downturn come out of it better than those that don't.

Although your 2009 marketing budget is probably completed by this time, here are some aspects that need attention:

Identify threats.
Identifying any threats to your strategy should be highlighted but not magnified. It is important to understand what may impede your success in 2009, and prepare contingency plans for when problems arise.

Learn from past failures.
Review your 2008 campaigns and prepare data on the campaigns or tests that underperformed. You can learn more from failure than you ever could from success. So answer questions about why certain tactics failed and what you learned from the experience.

Integrate your plan for critical mass.
Complementary tactics improve results. For example, search marketing and online media combined yields higher returns when integrated successfully.

Landing pages will support your conversion funnel.
A landing page is the first page a visitor to your site sees. What do you want the visitor to do? Landing pages should be optimized with the purpose of directing the user to a definable action. If there are other dependencies to driving sales, ensure that those parts of the funnel are held accountable to their target conversion rates.

Carve out a percentage of your search budget for testing.
This point cannot be stressed enough. The key to surviving tough times is improving your marketing efficiency, and this is accomplished by thoroughly and exhaustively testing all aspects of your online campaigns.

While it is not a magic ROI machine, the web is a proven marketing medium that can generate phenomenal returns. Successful online marketing campaigns take time, effort, and creativity; however, these efforts can certainly provide a substantial ROI when compared to pricey traditional campaigns.

Although the economic analysts are downgrading their forecasts, online advertising is still trending upwards. Some publishers are seeing less revenue than they hoped, and because of this they are lowering their CPMs, which gives you leverage in negotiating online media buys. Some of your competition may be pulling back their marketing budget, which provides you an opportunity to gain market share.

Rising above the current economic climate will take strategic thinking and analysis. With careful planning and execution, 2009 will be your year to flourish - and to put the economic alarmists back to bed!

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Recession
Market Share
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Oneupweb Reviews : iPhone Apps

Posted by chip on December 29, 2008 at 04:37 PM

As another year of mobile updates draws to a close and there's so much innovation to reflect on, I can't think of a better way to wrap up the year than by highlighting the undeniable leader in mobile applications, the iPhone.

With countless iPhone apps hitting the market there's no shortage of things to talk about. So let's just get right into a sampling of some of my personal favorites.

Midomi
You've certainly heard of the Shazam app by now, well Midomi takes this idea a step further by allowing you to identify songs by singing or even humming them yourself. It still works from the radio like Shazam but it will also help when you're wondering "what's that song that goes like..."?

Remote
More than just fun, Remote is a very useful app that allows you to use your iPhone as a remote for iTunes, Apple TV and AirTunes. A good friend of mine has his computer hooked up through his home stereo which suddenly makes this app very cool.

SaveBenjis
An app designed to help with comparison shopping, SaveBenjis allows you to search many ecommerce sites for the best price on the product of your desire.

Pandora Radio
Since Pandora Radio is one of my favorites things on my laptop, I'd be remiss not to mention the Pandora app which allows you to use the music service from your iPhone.

ShoZu
ShoZu connects your iPhone (as well as other mobile devices) to several online services allowing you to take photos with the built in camera and easily upload them directly to Facebook, your blog, Flickr and more.

Jott
As someone that quickly fell in love with the convenience of the voice recording feature of my first cell phone, I couldn't overlook Jott. Since this is the iPhone that we're talking about, the Jott app takes this idea a step further by transcribing your voice memos into text for future reference.

Native Podcast
Despite the fact that Apple has barred Native Podcast from its App Store, stating that it duplicated the functionality of iTunes, I feel that it deserves mention here. This app allows you to subscribe, manage, stream and download podcasts directly to your iPhone. However you will need to jailbreak your device and purchase the app directly from creator in order to start enjoying this service.

Instapaper
Have you ever run across an article or a blog that interested you but you just didn't have the time to read it right them? Do you typically bookmark these and hope that you remember to come back and read them when you have time? But when you finally have the time it seems like you're not in a place to conveniently access it, or you don't remember it at all.

Enter Instapaper. This app lets you send articles that you find online directly to your iPhone so you can access them whenever you find yourself with a little time and your iPhone.

Fliq
Talk about social networking made easy, Fliq allows you to quickly send photos or contacts to friends, family or colleagues on the same Wi-Fi network with practically the flick of a finger.

iBeer
Let's not make all of these apps useful. Among the host of optical illusion related apps coming out for the iPhone, my personal favorite has to be iBeer. Working with the sensors on the iPhone, this app looks and acts like a real glass of beer. And best of all, its sole purpose is to entertain.

Of course I can't touch on every cool iPhone app so if I've left out one of your favorites feel free to give it some props in a comment.

Editor's Note: You can read more Oneupweb Reviews on StraightUpSearch, social media-related reviews on our sister blog StraightUpSocial, and product-focused Oneupweb Reviews on Epinions.

Image: Sweet Sweet iPhone by Miss Karen

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iPhone
Mobile Applications
iPhone Apps
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Getting More With Less - Planning Your '09 PPC Strategy

Posted by steve on December 24, 2008 at 09:22 AM

Regardless of your industry, it's likely that your business has been directly or indirectly affected by the recessionary economy.

Given the economic downturn, digital marketing tactics are shifting and businesses are being forced to take a hard look at which channels should be a part of their 2009 marketing plan, and to what extent.

According to a study put out by Marketing Sherpa last month, only Web 2.0 (social network marketing) and email marketing are expected to become a larger part of digital marketing plans moving into '09, while paid search marketing (PPC), display advertising, mobile marketing, and other forms of digital advertising will be phased out to a certain extent.

marketing sherpa chart

Marketing Sherpa goes on to explain that various channels may still experience overall growth as the study accounts for those that will receive more or less attention, but NOT the budget which will be allocated toward or away from that channel.

For example, about 1/3 of companies are expected to reduce PPC spending; however, it is estimated that their reduction in spend will be trumped by the amount of increased spend of the 27% of companies that plan to ramp up their PPC efforts in '09.

Regardless, though, of whether your marketing budget is increasing, being slashed or remaining static, given the times, every dollar spent in the coming year will likely come under much more scrutiny. While tactics may be shifted across the board, I want to talk briefly about paid search marketing given the inherent flexibility of this channel.

If you're a part of one of the 33% of companies planning to cut your PPC budget, you or your agency may be in the midst of some serious analysis. What's working? What's not working? How do we best shift budget?

Many companies will no longer have the luxury of prospecting as much in this channel. Strategies will need to be more targeted to reduce wasted spend. If brand awareness was previously at the forefront, it may take a back seat to ROI moving forward. And while trial and error will still represent the foundation for campaign performance and efficiency, there may be fewer trials and less room for error.

More than ever, it's going to be important to take a close look at every keyword and every ad, figure out what deserves the most attention, and how best to reach your audience.

For some, long tail will become a bigger part of their overall keyword strategy. For others, top-level keywords will still be an important part of their branding efforts. Rather than reaching your audience in all phases of their shopping experience, maybe you can only afford to try and capture those that have done the research and are ready to purchase.

The extent to which strategies need to be refined will vary from company to company; however, a commonality between all PPC marketers will be the need to adjust performance metrics on the fly. Despite whether or not your budget is changing, the factors driving the purchasing decisions of your target market likely are changing, and they need to be taken into account when formulating strategy and setting expectations.

Paid search represents an ideal marketing channel to exploit in order to prove much-needed value in today's economy. The challenge moving forward, however, is figuring out how to get more with less.

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Paid Search
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YouTube Is Bad For U.S. Economy

Posted by vern on December 23, 2008 at 10:21 AM

News Flash - The U.S. economy is in recession. OK, so it's not breaking news, but I believe a major underlying cause of the economic downturn has finally been identified.

No, it's not the subprime mortgage mess or credit default swaps or the price of oil in July. Sure, all of these factors contributed to the recession we find ourselves struggling with.

But the real culprit is YouTube.

Follow along, dear reader, as I connect the dots.

We've been in recession for about a year. Recently, productivity gains of past months have slowed dramatically. YouTube gained critical mass in 2007. Most of the jobs in the U.S. economy are service-oriented with many of us looking at computer screens from 8 to 5 every day. See where this is heading?

Just last week, Nielsen Online released its Topline VideoCensus Data for October 2008. The report details online video viewing habits during various time frames.

Nielsen's research concludes that 65% of online video viewers stream content during business hours. 65% are watching online videos at some point between 8:00am to 5:00pm, Monday through Friday! The top 3 sources of online video were identified as YouTube, FOX Interactive and Hulu. YouTube traffic dwarfed the other networks in the study.

No big deal you say. YouTube videos aren't that long, you say. Let's run the numbers.

According to Nielsen, the average viewer spent 172 minutes watching online videos during business hours in October. The number of streams/viewer was 74 for the same timeframe. From a productivity perspective this is huge. But wait, there's more!

There were 23 work days in October. Take 74 video streams and divide by 23. That equals 3.2 streams per day. Per day! Now add to this the 2 minutes per stream of water cooler discussion/online sharing that's sure to follow.

That's over 5 hours of lost productivity per viewer for the month of October thanks to YouTube.

What about eBay? Twitter? MySpace, FaceBook, the freakin' Internet for goodness sake. Oops! Wait a second. I make my living on the Internet - never mind.

Hey, have you seen the Santa surfing video on YouTube?

Aloha and Happy Holidays!

Editor's Note: Before you say anything, we're not blaming the recession on YouTube. It's a little jest to lighten the holiday spirit. But then again, Vern may be on to something...

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Recession
YouTube
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