It’s that time of year again. The kids are going back to school, the summer is winding down and retailers are looking at the looming fourth quarter and wondering how to increase market share to get a bigger slice of the holiday sales pie. You could increase paid advertising, or try and improve natural search positioning in the major engines.  Why not try to generate some buzz in the blogosphere? We know that over 60 million people read blogs. We also know that information on message boards and forums can lead to increased sales. Why not reach this powerful demographic with our network of established professional bloggers? We have been running very successful product reviews and conversation marketing campaigns for our clients for months, and anticipate doing a lot more for fourth quarter 2007. So if you’re looking to cash in on holiday sales this year, contact Triangle Direct Media and we will put together a customized campaign.

I read the other day about the methods you should use for optimizing your site for Google universal search. The advice offered surprised me in its simplicity. Apparently you need to create multimedia content such as blogs, videos and podcasts and then make sure that this content is listed on niche search engines like Technorati. This sounds like what we have been doing for clients for the last 18 months. Except that we have taken it several steps further. We are seeing exponential increases in clients’ traffic, positioning and exposure. We are also seeing tremendous gains in the blogosphere with our site and product review services. Not to mention our highly effective conversation marketing services.

More in a series of articles about the “new Google”….

It has been widely acknowledged for quite some time that due to the vast size of Google, and the fact that it handles such a huge volume of information, that it has a problem returning relevant results. In 2005, Jupiter Research noted that engines needed to be split into verticals, such as blog, images, video etc, in order to return results that actually helped users make buying decisions. Outsell also noted that almost one third of searches resulted in failure by the search engines.

Google and the other engines obviously had to do something to clean up the results. The natural result of this is the new universal search. The big question for retailers is how do you get your site to confirm to the new criteria of relevancy?

Every one has probably heard about efforts by Google, the kings of search to incorporate all of its information from images, videos, blogs etc into one set of universal search results. The official explanation from Google VP of search products is “a seamless integrated experience to get users the best answers”. Sounds great, but what does it mean to retailers who are trying to position their sites for the holidays? Stay tuned to find out what you can do to stay ahead of the competition for this upcoming shopping season.

In a recent report from Media-screen, it appears that broadband internet surfers spend up to 48% of their down time online. This translates to a little over an hour and a half of actual online activity with 27% of that time being devoted to entertainment, 27% to communication such as email,  around 12% for  shopping, and 9% to searches for information.  That is not too surprising, but when the study turned to younger users, an interesting trend came out.

Of those polled, 48% said they learned about new entertainment from social media networks, review and video sites and blogs. In the not so distant future, that figure will also translate to new products. If a retailer is ignoring blogs, video and social media, they are passing up an opportunity to influence an entire generation. The study also mentioned that sending email and using websites for personal reasons is more popular than watching TV.

Time to reallocate your marketing budget.

Some more interesting information came out in regards to the click fraud rates on the major engines. Google and Yahoo have been suggesting over the last year or so that the rate of fraud was somewhere around 2%. Not so, according to a new study done by the Fair Isaac company. Their figure is closer to 10%-15%, and the figures are supported somewhat by the independent studies done by Click Forensics and Click Fraud Network. I am sure this is an argument that will continue as long as search engines display search results, but the bottom line is that if you can avoid pay per click long term, do so. There is enough natural traffic out there, you just need to have good fresh content and back links to get in front of your audience.

I use Mozilla Firefox as my browser of choice. I do this because I like all the plugins and the tabbed browsing. I assume that due to the great functionality and ease of use of Firefox, that a lot of other people also use it, but it turns out I was wrong. In an interesting study of site traffic from Site Pro News, it turns out that Internet Explorer is still king.

Over 58% of internet users use some version of IE. 33% are using Firefox, but this figure may be a little skewed, as most of the people visiting Sitepronews are industry insiders and marketers. If you were to track browsers on a retail site, the proportion using IE would be a lot higher. So if your site resolves really well on Firefox, but not so well on IE, you need to fix it. It could be losing you business.

So when did everyone get their first email address? ‘95? ‘97? Then when did you finally feel comfortable buying something online, giving out your credit card information without fear of getting your life stolen from you? ‘98 maybe? Back then, could you imagine purchasing the majority of what you buy online instead of in stores? If it’s not your reality now, it’s pretty darn close. Now, I bet you have absolutely no problem letting amazon or ebay remember your cc numbers. Simply amazing what can happen in 10 years.

Well, online retail has officially been around for 13 or 14 years, according to shop.org. And it’s not going anywhere anytime soon (obviously). But what’s really interesting is that it’s showing absolutely no signs of saturation whatsoever. In fact, according to Forrester Research, online retail grew 25% last year, and it’s expected to grow 18% this year.

What’s even more interesting is that the study doesn’t take into account buying decisions that are made online but made in brick-and-mortar stores. Buyers are increasing looking to blogs and other social media outlets to help them make decisions. So online retail will officially grow 18% this year, but what percentage of buying decisions will be made online? With the increasing popularity of blogs and video, online retail growth might be more than they expect.

Is it just because I haven’t been paying attention, or is Google showing a bunch of new search options on their search results pages?
I conducted a search on Google today, and noticed that the additional options shown on the home page are now listed in a new column down the left hand side of the page. But it goes a little further than the options on the home page. You can now refine the results down to “groups”, “patents”, “products”, “scholar” and “maps”.

The one I found most interesting was “products”. This refined search gave me product pictures, more options for searching within price ranges, brands, seller ratings and related searches. A shopping comparison channel, right there on Google. Obviously they had some stuff left over from Froogle, and it gives them a chance to re-promote the ailing Google Checkout. Tune in for how retailers can improve rankings in this new space using blog marketing and linking campaigns.

In a recent study by Marketing Sherpa, reproduced in the Marketing Pilgrim, it appears that viral video is taking off, albeit a little slower than expected. Almost 30% of marketers polled reported great results from their viral video campaigns. Only two forms of promotion received a better reception; micro sites developed for a specific product or launch with the “cool factor”, and online games or puzzles. It seems that the downside of this poll is that if you put out a dull video no-one will watch it.

Given that two thirds of the people who responded to this poll reported that they were planning on a video marketing campaign this year, the message is clear. Do an interesting guerrilla video and take advantage of the window of opportunity that video presents.