Companies are benefiting from their Apps in big ways. Here are some important Do’s and Don’ts when deciding to launch an iPhone App…

1. Don’t launch an App for the sake of launching an App.

You want to keep up with your competitors right? Well with the popularity of iPhone Apps at an all time high, some companies are launching Apps with no clear direction. You might say to yourself…”Our competitors have an App so we must have an App… Right now!”  Nope, you would be wrong.  Sure, you definitely want to consider having one but that doesn’t mean you should produce Apps with zero relevancy to your target audience or business in general. Take your time and make it better than your competitor’s.

2. Do think it through.

Don’t jump on the bandwagon just yet. Consider your options and consider your potential users. Ask yourself what kind of App will ….

a) help my target audience.

b) make my business more accessible to my target audience.

c) successfully integrate my business in a beneficial way into my target audiences’ lives.

3. Don’t be afraid to ask your target audience what they think.

It’s not a bad idea to ask your users directly what they want. Pitch an App idea to your current clients and ask them if this is something they would like or find beneficial to their lives. Ask them what they would find useful in an App or what they would find entertaining. After all, they are the ones using it.

4.  Do make it fun!

Phones do so much more than just make calls these days. They do basically anything. They make our lives easier, more practical and bring us more news and entertainment at the touch of a screen. The App should be this way too. A very popular App right now called foursquare is changing the way companies interact with their clients.  With this App, users can “check in” at a particular place, whether that be their favorite pizza place, Starbucks or grocery store and earn rewards and statuses. It’s fun, useful, practical and easy to integrate into daily use.

Making a mobile App work for you is important. It’s highly individualized for every business but can be highly effective when utilized to its fullest potential!

Look how much these people love your website! Thank you web metrics!!

With so many web metrics tools out there, it’s not easy to understand or choose how to measure your web success. If you feel like you need a dictionary to even get started, you’re not alone. Plenty of bloggers and websites out there are saying the same thing.

Successful businesses know their markets and the people who interact with their brand. Learning exactly how people are interacting will better assist you in the marketing of your business.

When considering web metrics, here are 6 key important considerations that should not be overlooked.

1. Know the variety of metrics available to you.

If words like Web Counter, Hits, Browser Platform, Pageviews, Visits, or Operating Systems mean nothing to you, then the time has come for you to learn. Web metrics will help you to understand where your site visitors are coming from, how their search led them to your site and what they are engaging in on your site. There are lots of different ways in which to analyze this information so it is key to know about them all.

2. Choose your key words carefully.

Certain key words in a search will lead high numbers of visitors to your site. But are they the people you want? Most of the time, driving the right people to your site is more important than driving a completely diverse audience to your site.

3.  Get to your Audience to the Point.

Every website has a goal. Make your website easy to navigate. If you are selling a product, then sell the product right away. Don’t make your audience search the page too hard. Usability is key. The trick is to monitor how well your ad copy and website layout work together to make that sale. Web metrics will monitor what’s working and what’s not.

When you know what’s working and what’s not working on your site, you are then prepared to make the right changes to the site. Don’t be afraid to keep making changes until your site is a success.

4. Analyze Audience Behavior

So you are getting the right people to your site. Great. But nothing seems to be happening. It is very important to understand what your audience is doing on your website. If they completely miss the most important part of your website, then not only was their visit unsuccessful, but the odds of them returning to the site go down significantly.

Watch what is happening during their visit. Where do they spend the most time? Where are they not going at all? The answers to these questions are key.

5. If you don’t want to monitor EVERYTHING, make sure you monitor these 7 metrics…

There are a ton of metrics out there and it’s hard to make a website perfect. So make it as perfect as you can and use metrics that cater to what you care about knowing the most. If you want a quick summary of your website success, filter down what you need to know: Bounce Rate, Attention, Conversions, Spend, Errors, Online Search Terms, Bailout Rate.

These metrics will give you the best overall perception of your site.

6. If it aint broke, don’t fix it. But if it is broke, maybe just improve it a little.

So your metrics have told you that no one has clicked through to the most important part of your website. You have already spent lots of time making this particular section of your site perfect. Surely, you thought, this would be the key to boosting business. Well it wasn’t because no one has taken the time to click through to see it.

Now you are left with two options: develop or remove. If you decide this website feature needs to be improved, then brainstorm process begins again. Think about what is missing. Why are people not clicking through? What will it take to encourage click-throughs? Look around on other sites and pay close attention to how it draws you in. Where is your eye drawn to and why? Studying other sites and applying this knowledge to your site will other further enhance your own audiences’ experience on your site.

Or on second thought, maybe you are just thinking that you should delete this non-functioning feature all-together. If what is not working on your site is not worth the effort to fix, then delete it. This won’t necessarily hurt your website because it will only make it easier to navigate. A user-friendly, clean layout is always a good choice. Too much clutter hurts a website’s functionality. Whether the decision is to improve or delete, the important thing here is that a change has been made based on web metrics feedback.

1. Find a large enough group of people to talk to. Marketers are always looking for new segments to penetrate with their products and blogs are a great channel to communicate with them.  For example, if you sell executive suites to small businesses, you will probably want to target prospects based on geography and perhaps service firms. That will give you a large group of people to talk to but this group will probably be composed of several smaller groups with similar interest, so don’t stop there.
2. Learn what is unique about each smaller group. Within that larger segment you should create a variety of content that speaks to what is unique to each one do those smaller groups. Following the example above, it could be interesting to create content that talks about the importance of first impressions, the role of branding in finding new clients, the most successful stock investments strategies or the latest high-end entertainment events in the area.
3. Share with them and build trust. We all know that people like free samples, gifts, give away, free content, free research, extras or free trials. Use those to start building your brand and relationship with them.  Once you have built that trust and created that first impression, it is really hard to lose it – unless you really screw it. When blogging for sales you must honestly want to share knowledge and tips without expecting something back immediately, you must have patience.
4. Be patient and keep sharing. This is key as the game has changed for marketers and sales people, if you go aggressively for the sale without really knowing where the prospect is in the purchasing process, you will create a lot of enemies that could have been clients down the road. More than 95% of your blog’s visitors will not be ready to buy so you must be softer and broader with your message to appeal to a larger group that is most likely looking to simply educate themselves. However, make sure to make it easy for those that are shopping to contact you or purchase online.
5. Embrace your visitors and their networks. As people comment on your posts, bookmark them, share them on social networks and subscribe to your blog, make a task for you to develop each one of those relationships and ideally try to take them offline if appropriate. Don’t try to sell them until they are ready and ask more about your product or services. Developing those relationships will also help you reach a much larger audience than you can reach yourself.
6. Keep improving your sources. The content that you put in your blog is the fuel that will get your lead generation machine going, so make sure to create an editorial calendar and follow it religiously. If you have trouble coming up with your own thoughts or ideas, you can comment on research reports, studies, do book reviews, interview other experts, etc. Don’t ever run out of gas.

Jose Guerra
Principal

Exito

If yes, then call us. If not, then you are just probably finding ways to keep your job and we recommend you to read the 6 tips below and then tell us how they worked for you.

1. Don’t Spend Your Entire Marketing Budget. Costs saving initiatives have been more popular than ever before. If you can manage to not spend your entire marketing budget you will be rewarded. Showing savings is always a good thing these days, and who cares if you hurt your lead generation volume and quality or stall your brand building efforts. What is more important though is to get a tap on your back from your boss for finishing the year strong. Nobody will hunt you down if you don’t continue your efforts to capitalize on the upturn of the economy we will see in 2010, right?
2. Keep Reducing Headcounts. Everyone had been letting people go and most have successfully managed to survive this economic crisis based on these decisions. These types of initiatives are effective and opportune to let go of low performing employees. You can always hire top performers later in the year; although you may not have enough budget. Remember you saved so much money by not spending your entire marketing budget that your boss will probably decide that you could do a great job with a smaller budget in 2010.
3. New Market Segments are Not Worthwhile. Although, trends such as the high broadband Internet penetration, the surge of web 2.0 tools and the social media boom are making it easier and easier to reach out to smaller segments in very cost effective manners, many people would argue that is not enough. Segments based on race, language, gender, age or sexual preferences are not big enough yet to allocate enough resources. No one cares that one of every five young adults today (ages 18 – 34) are Hispanic, which are ONLY about 50 million people. And nobody believes in Forrester estimates that Hispanic disposable income as a group will grow to $1.4 trillion by 2013 from $951 billion in 2008.
4. Search Engine Optimization is Overrated. People justify SEO investment with arguments such as that more than 1 billion people worldwide, ages 15 years and older are Internet users or that more than 74% of the US population uses the Internet. Also that organic search drives 75%+ of all search traffic. What value does all that have? How many people really use the Internet to purchase or influence product purchases? Not many really, the penetration of ecommerce, on product categories such as computer electronics and media (books, music and videos) is ONLY 25%. There are still lots of people that you can reach out to without using the Internet, so why bother reaching out to these demographics, right?
5. Email Marketing is From the Past. Email marketing started in the mid and late 1990’s, which is a long time ago in Internet history. It boomed in the early part of this decade, but as of a couple of years ago many argue it is being replaced by social media marketing and other new media channels. Companies used to BLAST emails because it was easy and cheap, but CAN-SPAM laws, anti-spam software and other tools are allowing people to hide from email marketing messages. Let’s look at some stats again to support this argument. Email open rates are above 30% in many industries and click rates get up to 6% or higher. So if you are a small or medium size business and you have an opted-in list of prospects and customers of let’s say 10,000 emails, you are directly reaching ONLY 3,000 people and building strong relationship via your content or offers with ONLY 600 people… EVERY TIME YOU SEND EMAIL CAMPAIGNS.
6. Social Media is a Fad, Let Your Competitors Go There First. Much has been said about the reach of social media, the engagement capabilities it adds to the mix, that is taking Word-of-Mouth marketing to the next level and that is incredibly more cost effective than other tools. But, it is so new that many marketers feel threatened or not knowledgeable enough to jump into it, so they are waiting for others in the industry to lead the path to figure out how to use it. Let your competitors work with “social media” marketing firms and create some success first before you join. Why take any risks? We still need to survive 2010, right?

We like to share ideas, thoughts, best practices or whatever we feel like writing about in lists of 6. But, you can add to it…so, If you are going to take one risk, make it sharing your thought and believes with others. Feel free to comment, tweet, share or do whatever you want to do with this.

Jose Guerra
Principal

(No corner6labs clients included)

1. Twitter To Go: One Houston Coffee Shop Makes its Mark. Today, he credits Twitter with almost doubling his clientele and with opening his eyes to a whole new way to build Community.
2. Real Estate Consultant & Realtor Danilo Bogdanovic. This small business relied solely on word-of-mouth and personal referrals until three years ago, when it first diversified into the world of social media and quickly found cost-effective marketing success online.
3. myFICO: Online Customer Community Drives Accomplishment of Support, Marketing, and Sales Goals. As a company operating within a heavily regulated industry, FICO is limited in the information it can provide to customers.
4. 5 stories in one. Kogi BBQ, Marsh Cafe, Kogi BBQ, Duke of York’s Cinema, Wiggly Wigglers and Howies
5. Lion Brand Yarn Drives Measurable ROI with Social Media: Lion Brand Yarn was not sure if its customer demographic would be likely to engage in social media but was willing to experiment with.
6. Pink Cake Box is a specialty cake shop in northern New Jersey with 10 employees. They opened for business in 2005.
7. UNLEASH 2009, the Mediasite User Conference: Energizing Users On-site and Online. A campaign to increase conference attendance that resulted in a 15% increase in conference attendees
8. Sweetriot, a small business out of New York City has gotten a lot of buzz over the past several years for their mouth-watering, fair trade dark chocolate. CEO Sarah Endline explains in the short video above (click on the image) on how she engages in the social media space.

1. Successful marketers will be more like Dale Carnegie by listening first. The 4 steps to social media success are 1] Listen 2] Interact 3] React 4] Sell
2. Consumers are looking to peers for recommendations on products, services, health issues, and more via social media. Only companies that produce products and services of great value will be part of these conversations; mediocrity will quickly be eliminated.
3. Social media’s ability to quickly disseminate information among friends and peers helps eliminate different people performing the same tasks (multiple individual redundancies), whether it’s researching the best vacation spot or smart phone. This is a huge benefit to consumers.
4. The old adage that you can only have two of these ‐‐ cheap, quick, or quality ‐‐ doesn’t hold true within social media. It’s possible to have all three.
5. Successful social media marketers will function more like entertainment companies, publishers, or party planners rather than as traditional advertisers.
6. The transparency and speed of information exchanged within social media mitigates casual schizophrenic behavior. Having a “work” personality and having a “party” personality will soon become extinct. People and companies will need to have one essence and be true to that essence.
7. Companies that produce great products and services rather than companies that simply rely on great messaging will be winners in a Socialnomic™ world. The social graph is the world’s largest and most powerful referral program.
8. Making multiple mistakes within social media is far better than doing nothing at all.
9. If you’re a large brand, you can rest assured that there are conversations, pages, and applications constantly being developed around your brand and by the community at large. The social community is “doing” social media even if your company chooses not to.
10. The overall achievement of individuals and companies will be largely dependent on their social media success.

Among the benefits corner6labs brings to its customers is a focus on helping them craft campaigns that effectively combine online advertising, email marketing, social media, mobile and… read the rest of the press release here.

The studies conducted by Citibank with research firm GFK Roper and Internet2Go with small-business networking site MerchantCircle look at different segments of small and medium firms. But as the research from Citibank (probably the most representative of the “average” small business) found out that 86 percent “say they have not used social-networking sites to get business advice or information,” the research from Internet2Go (based on a segment of small businesses that have already made leaps toward trying to become more social-media-savvy) found that 45 percent already operate Facebook pages and 46 percent have either a business or personal presence on Twitter.  So combining these two findings I get to a number around 7% of small business that have used social media to grow the business.

One may question how I got to this number, but the importance of this is that there is still a window of opportunity for those small businesses that are innovative, ambitious and willing to take the risk that leaders do.

Over the next few days and weeks I will take this report and share my thoughts on how these changes and possible scenarios affect small and medium businesses, how they can prepare to maximize the opportunities that these changes will bring. I will do my best to address B2B and B2C scenarios

Stay tuned! I will share them as I post them.

Below is the first one so you can get a glance at what I will be writing about.

From the IBM report: “Consumers are increasingly exercising control of how they view, interact with and filter advertising in a multichannel world, as they continue to shift their attention away from linear TV and adopt ad-skipping, ad-sharing and ad-rating tools. Our survey suggests personal PC time now rivals TV time, with 71 percent of respondents using the Internet more than two hours per day for personal use, versus just 48 percent spending equivalent time watching TV. Among the heaviest users, 19 percent spend six hours or more a day on the PC versus just 9 percent who watch a similar amount of TV.”

So, there are a three interesting thoughts and findings in the previous paragraph: First, people are spending more time online than in front of a TV, second, consumers have new tools to control how they interact with advertising on all channels, and heaviest users spend significant more time on the Internet versus on the TV. This means that TV advertising (perhaps with the exception of product placement) is slowly dying not only due to the penetration of the DVR and the penetration of the Internet, but also due to the sociographic characteristics of the Generation Y (those born from the mid 1970s to early 1990s).

People are watching TV more than ever before, but they do it in a different way. As of March 2009, 30.6 percent of households in Nielsen’s National People Meter Panel have a DVR, and the penetration of the DVR is expected to reach 40% by the end of 2010, which will only hurt the effectiveness of TV ads. In addition to this, radio advertising is also being blocked thanks to satellite radio. Mass broadband Internet penetration is a fact already and the Generation Y has been shaped by instant communication technologies and new media such as social networking websites, which may explain Generation Y’s reputation for being peer-oriented.

So, what does this mean for small and medium companies?

It means that the field is leveling in terms of marketing and branding. Larger firms will eventually not be able to sustain their brand awareness and reputation based only on gigantic marketing budgets. New media is much more affordable for a many reasons; amongst those is the nature of social media which I will cover in a later post in this series. What I want to highlight in this post is that small and medium firms have a window of opportunity to get ahead of their larger competitors in adopting new media. Because smaller firms are more nimble and agile, they should take this opportunity to embrace new media and familiarize themselves with it.

To get started I would recommend the same of what many are saying, so below are some links that I suggest reading before kicking it off. However, I would like to emphasize that new media and in particular social media is about honest marketing and is based on trust, so don’t apply the same old rules of traditional marketing which is based on “interruption”.

Exito.

http://www.li-bs.com/2009/10/social-media-best-practices-getting-started/

http://smartblogs.com/socialmedia/2009/05/05/andys-answers-3-baby-steps-to-get-your-company-started-in-social-media/

http://blog.helpfultechnology.com/2009/01/how-to-get-started-in-social-media/

http://www.clickz.com/3633845

http://www.technotheory.com/how-to-use-social-media-guide/

I think that large organizations have approached it by sourrounding themselves with (hiring) highly  creative people from prestigious ad agencies. This approach makes sense for me because these agencies have the expertise to craft very innovative campaigns, and although one may think that they don’t have the proper knowledge of the client’s culture, product, market, etc. their clients may them humongous amounts of money for the them to research and learn all the need to do to create outstanding campaigns. However, with the proliferation of social media not only as a set of tools and technologies but as a social behavior phenomenon, companies are embracing new sources of ideas such as their own customers. There are many examples of this, one of the latest ones is Unilever.

But, how can small and medium firms compete and leverage new social media practices to effectively compete and win?

They can’t afford paying creative directors from well known ad agencies to spend hundreds of hours researching about their company, culture, products, competitors, customers, etc to then come up with super creative and cool campaigns that they can’t afford to run on the expensive media recommended and with the frequency needed to have an impact.  Small and medium firms must be resourceful and the answer is within themselves. They can leverage all the knowledge, ideas, social and professional networks, and passion that is within their employees, partners, customers, investors and even suppliers to come up with the most creative and innovative campaigns ever.  That is the core of social media and the Web 2.0, it is the collaboration in the creation.

If you are a small or medium firm and your are wondering how to innovate in your marketing programs, you may have the answer sitting next to you.