Digital Expression

How do you communicate with your customers? And how does this compare to how your customers want to communicate with you?  It's being available where your customers are, just like opening a new branch. When Second Life was in its hayday, US based multinationals and banks took to it like moths to a flame and opened virtual branches with transactional capability within second life that used the native currency, Linden dollars.

Today, with over 400 million users, Facebook offers the virtual experience of choice.  With a native currency, Facebook Credits, and full transactional capability, organisations are staking their claim with Fan pages and applications galore.  One example is 1800 Flowers. Another is Pampers, who cleverly used it for a new product launch. How can you get started? Kim Boatman offers a few suggestions over at Inc.com.  Also, there's an Australian based outfit, Moluko, doing good things in this space.

Starbucks keep coming up with intuitive Facebook integrations like their Starbucks Card application.  Useful online management functions have not only been imported into Facebook, but also tailored to fit.  For example, reloading a friends card.

Related Reading: Glenbrook's Model for Social Payments by @GP_Russ_Jones

All up, it looks like an open book that needs to be written.

Cheers, @kunalkripalani

Critical Mass and mainstream are words you could start to associate with social media. The bottom line is:

Your customers are embracing social media, making it an opportunity to build a community around your offering.

It's an opportunity to build rapport, loyalty and warm fuzzy feelings about your brand. Because of the context of the medium, you can afford to, in fact - you have to take a less formal tone than the typically corporate one size fits all corporate approach.

What is the new approach?
It's conversational. It's an opportunity to share what's remarkable about your product with people who are genuinely interested and turn them into evangelists that include their networks in the conversation also.

Engaging in Social Media is also a way to take back some control over your online reputation. For example, if someone leaves negative feedback on Facebook or Twitter, your monitoring and engagement means you can respond to the critisicm then and there.

Key areas of benefit are:

CRM: Communicate with customers through a medium of their choice, be it Twitter, a forum or Facebook. Because it's all public, understand that this is an opportunity to show the world that you genuinely care about your customers.  In the first instance, respond to the issue quickly and in a manner that ensures it does not spiral into a long public debate. Sometimes, when sensitve personal data needs to be shared, it's best to take an issue private using Twitter DMs or even back to email.

Sales: In it's simplest form: consider how can you repackage old marketing tactics?  For example, affiliate programs for lead generation on insurance policies can be made more social & conmmunity friendly.  Instead of a $50 commission to an affiliate marketer, you give that $50 to the favourite charity of your existing customer who gives you a new lead that converts.

Brand Visibility: Your presence on social sites will positively impact your visibility in Google search results, but more importantly, it puts you in front of eyeballs, and at a fraction of the cost of banner ads.

New Product Development Research: What better way is there to get fast and cost-effective feedback on new product ideas? What's working? What needs improving? Even what geographic location you get most interest from can be identified and perhaps used as a launch market.

Ultimately, you have an opportunity to have a conversation with every one of your customers, and win new ones.

Many businesses struggle with online sales due to a poorly constructed sales funnel.  This usually stems from a template website and off-the-shelf shopping cart solution that requires customisation before it becomes effective.

Conversion Optimisation is getting more customers without spending any more money on advertising. It's the art and science of getting visitors on your website to perform a desired action more often.

A conversion optimisation is in essence, an enhancement of your customer's experience. To minimise friction. But there is no out-of-the-box solution and it's not simply a selection of online aesthetic changes. To maximise the benefits, you also need to make business process changes relating to logistics and customer service. Examples include:

• Reducing your delivery times to create a better first impression
• Increasing the length of your returns period from a fortnight to 3 months to reduce buyer anxiety at the point of sale.

Here are 10 easy things you can optimise right away that can take your shopping cart abandonement rate well below the average 59.8% in US (across all industries.) 

Typography: font and typeset.  Is your site easy to read?  Is your font big enough and is it a good sans-serif web font like Arial?

Portability (Referencability)  How easy is it to spread your content to places that alreay have visitors (Rss, api, twitter,facebook,tell a friend)

Site Speed: Does your site load fast? Is it unclutteredm to the point, and easy to understand?  Remove banner advertising from landing pages.Use Google Analytics to see what level of web technology your visitors are using and get a site speed assessment at http://websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Shipping / Delivery:  Consider cost relative to the value of the product and the time to deliver. In order to give a great first impression, ship as quickly as possible and update the customer via email of the delivery timeframe and tracking codes.  I recently shopped at Topink.co.nz  for a digital camera battery and charger.  I ordered the items on a Monday morning and I received them via tracked courier the very next morning.  I will be returning to them for future purchases.

Collecting information:  Are you collecting information from the customer that is not needed to complete the order and therefore making your forms longer than they need to be?

Returns Policy: Try increasing your returns period from the standard fortnight to a month, or even three months.  While you will see a marginal increase in product returns, the implied lower risk to making a purchase decision is more likely to increase overall sales.

Technology: Do your Ajax / jscript implementations add value or are they bells and whistles that slow down load times or distract the prospect? Put another way, does it facilitate the sales process? Or just look cool?

Interaction: ratings / reviews. Do people need to go elsewhere before they can decide on a purchase? People accept the words of their anonymous peers as more credible references than reviews by 'experts' and editors which are perceived as biased.

Navigation: Bread crumb 1 > 2. is > 3. is important. It helps reduce ambiguity during the checkout process by providing a clear roadmap of the buyers stage in the process.

Trust: Trust is a vital factor for browsers who have never seen or heard of you before. The professionalism of your website is paramount, especially so, when it comes to your shopping cart and payment processing.  Include trustmarks like Verisign and use recognisable payment processors. Display a purchase confirmation page and send a confirmation email immediately.  You don't want your new customer to experience buyer remorse. Easy to find contact information and an about us page will lend credibility to your site.  Make good use of white space and have more than an just an out-of-the-box template website. Users distrust sites with any lack of professionalis.

Live Help: Are inquiries common prior to purchase?  Will a good FAQ or IM/Voice chat minimise these human-interactions?  Sometimes purchase decisions are genuinely complex, like with completing a high value purchase, or filling out a loan or insurance application.  In this situation, a live chat / call button can dramatically boost your lead generation rates, by answering any concerns on the spot.

A very useful resource for data collection to help with your Conversion Optimisation is SmartViper Beta

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is improving your website's visibility and ranking on the first page of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs.) This is successfully achieved through:

1. Relevance: determined by contextual keywords, volume of traffic, volume & quality of backlinks from credible (authoritative) websites and internal linking
2. Uniqueness: Original content, with unique meta titles (But don't waste your time on Meta keywords.) Meta description, author, robots etc. are important for human navigation and for search engines to properly index your websites, but they are insignificant when it comes to your rankings.
3. Freshness:  Update your content frequently.

Each of these factors can be addressed with the following tactics:

1. Relevant Keyword List: Identify the top 100 words and phrases related to your offering that people are searching for.  Identify them using tools like Google Insights for Search  and the Adwords Keyword tool, which also identifies the level of competition you have to deal with and how much it will cost. The lower the competition, the higher the chances of appearing high on SERPs.
2. Building backlinks: Get links on authority websites relevant to your niche. Link deep; not just to your homepage, but to many pages on your site.
3. Building internal links - This is as much to cross-promote your content as it is for SEO.
4. Sitemap:  XML for search engines & HTML for Users:  While not impacting your rankings, sitemaps help search engines more easily discover and index the content on your website and therefore boosts your visibility. More indexed pages, means a higher chance that one of them will hit the first page. Use of human readable URLS rather than dynamic query strings and use of robots.txt files fits into this category
5. Images: Images that are tactically named (refer to your top 100 keyword list) to drive traffic. Commonly overlooked, images.google.com can prove to be a significant source of traffic.
6. Video: Submit a video sitemap to help Google with indexing. Include include new tags (content, player, thumbnail location, categories, family-friendly?). If your URL must be less than 60 characters to appear in Google Search and will only show up if it is family-friendly.
6. Local search directory listings: Google maps, Yahoo Local and Bing Local. Submit a KML file to Webmaster Central specifying latitude and longitude.
8. Using Google Webmaster Central and identify what country your website targets.  This is done automatically by IP address, but if your server happens not to be in your target country, then this is a necessary step because one part of Google's personalisation algorithm is to serve up country specific results.

Imagine completely dominating the first page of Google. Social Media offers a frictionless path to building global link popularity - an important search engine algorithm metric because search engines recognise the increased usage of social media for information and content discovery. To increase visibility and build brand recognition in this manner, you can have your blog, Twitter profile, Facebook page, Youtube video and Flickr photos all appear on the first page of a Google SERP for keywords that your prospects are actively using. All of these properties then refer traffic back to your transactional website.

"The truism of the web: people talking about you is far more effective than talking about yourself." - Seth Godin.

Five easy ways to blend SEO with Social Media:

1. You should already have a keyword glossary that defines what search terms you want to use to bring customers to your website.  Use these consistently in your titles, headlines and content to attribute relevance in search engine results.
2. Post regularly.  Frequent updates will get you ranked. Google loves fresh content. Press Releases always rank highly, while static sites are associated with affiliate and spam sites, that Google does not show much love to.
3. Repurpose your content:  Turn your blog post into a slideshare presentation, Flickr slideshow or Youtube video.  You might also use: Facebook pages,scribd documents or create a Squidoo lens to reap healthy search engine visibility.
4. Content Discovery: Use Social Bookmarking sites to seed your content and obtain high value backlinks. Content that gets Dugg, Stumbled Upon or Retweeted by several people will result in timely search engine rankings. Also propagate your content through Linkedin,Twitter,Facebook and your other social media properties as appropriate.
5. Pick popular search terms for titles. Check out Google Insights for Search to find out what these are and then cross reference against the Adwords Keyword Tool to determine those with low competition. Creating content around up and coming keywords pays dividends. Case in point: Blendtec recently blended an iPad:

Another example: if you run a Google search for: "twitter marketing campaign" you will find my Moonfruit Twitter Marketing Campaign Case Study.