I was talking to my wife and her sister, who run a local bakery and café here in town. I told them what I was working on for our blog and instead of the usual “oh, that’s nice” that I am used to, I sparked some interest. It’s rare that my line of work shares anything in common with two talented chefs who run a successful small business, but today was different. My sister-in-law immediately reminded me about Boar’s Head. It used to be a highly exclusive brand of meats. Their ads were entirely focused on creating a brand image of exclusive, high quality, and different from what you get at your grocery store. “If I want Boar’s Head ham now, I can just go to the convenience store down the road”, she said. “It used to be a brand that you could only find at high-end delis.” Being in the food industry, she knew what she was talking about. She also pointed out that Green Mountain Coffee has a similar story. The brand used to be associated with specialty brands sold at exclusive coffee shops. Now you can find Green Mountain in your local Mobile on the Run, or McDonald’s (recently, McDonalds switched to Newman’s Own and stopped carrying Green Mountain).

So what does this have to do with online advertising? Well, in these two cases, the companies clearly sacrificed brand image for a wider distribution audience. That’s understandable, but with a brand, once you lose the foundation it is built on, you usually can’t get that back.

In the world of online advertising, attention-getting is absolutely everything. Rarely will you find a banner ad, or email sponsorship, or PPC (pay per click) ad that is focused on brand-building, not direct sales. I suppose this is because the attraction for many marketers to online advertising, is that you can quickly report on effectiveness. You spent X number of dollars on a Google Adwords campaign, now how many sales did that get you? That’s what most online marketers are concerned with. So how do you attract more sales from your PPC ads? Well, price, of course. In a very noticeable way, the rise of online advertising has trained consumers to become price-shoppers. Brand recognition may not always be top of mind when you’re looking at a group of ads on a page, each one promoting a lower price on their widgets.

One of my favorite blogs to read, TheBigFatMarketingBlog, had a clever article recently about the E-Trade “baby” campaigns. I think these television ads are brilliant. They are funny, memorable and highly viral. They also support a brand image that the company is young, hip and uses the latest technology with online and mobile trading tools. However, our friends at BigFat don’t agree. Their argument is that the ads are cute, but do not drive sales. In some ways they’re right, but I believe that way of thinking is short-sided. It gives no consideration to their brand building efforts. The question isn’t, “How many people opened an account after seeing the TV spots?” Rather, the question should be, “Is the TV spot supporting their brand?”

To that last question, I would argue, yes.  In fact, I received a mailer from E-Trade once, and I remember reading through the entire thing. I spent a lot of time with their direct mail piece because I had a positive brand image. If it weren’t for their brand-building marketing efforts I may not have been engaged enough to give that mailer a second thought.

So what is your company doing to build its brand? Do you rely solely on online or email marketing? Are you just trying to get someone to click on your ad? I hope not. If you trust your audience enough to send them a nice branded mailer, or run an integrated campaign including other traditional mediums, you may find that not all consumers are price-driven. You may not have to sacrifice your brand or even your bottom line just to attract more sales.

For nearly a decade Google has ruled the internet. In fact, for at least the past 6 years, Google’s traffic has been more than triple its closest competitor, Yahoo. Google’s popularity, coupled with the introduction of Adwords, Google’s advertising platform, has made them the holy grail of search engine optimizers and marketers. Search engine optimization (SEO) came into its own as a viable business service because of Google. The very same SEO process can be viewed on Social Firestarter homepage, which is helping lawyers understand how they can get more clients. All of the sudden you could pay someone to optimize your website and climb to the top of the search results page. However, with the many legitimate search marketers there were those that were willing to help website owners trick Google into ranking them higher than was warranted.

The term “black hat” SEO refers to techniques that are used on your website in order to trick Google’s algorithm into ranking your site higher for a given search term. However, Google’s algorithm has steadily become more sophisticated which makes these practices less fruitful. Furthermore, Google will not hesitate to ban your site completely if you engage in practices it determines are “black hat”. Being left out of the largest search engine in the world is enough of a deterrent for most website owners.

Last week, New York Times reported that J.C. Penney had been caught by Google employing a “black hat” SEO tactic. According to the article, J.C. Penney was trying to improve their rankings for search terms like;  “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture” and several others. For months jcpenney.com was ranking number one on Google for those highly competitive search terms. Specifically, the method they used was to add links to hundreds of other sites leading back to their site. By adding these thousands (2,015 to be exact) of links (essentially also called Niche Edits), they tricked Google into thinking jcpenney.com was more relevant for these terms than was the case. Once it was discovered, they worked with Google to correct the problem. Google did not release any specifics about what they called “corrective action”, but jcpenney.com went from number one for most of these terms to number 60 or 70, or worse.  It was not an all-out ban, but a pretty damaging blow to their online marketing efforts nonetheless.  A J.C. Penney spokesperson claimed they had no idea who did this, but they quickly fired their search marketing firm.

So how do you stay on Google’s good side while optimizing your website for the best possible rankings? While their search ranking algorithm is a closely guarded secret, like Colonel Sanders’ recipe, there are things you can do that Google openly endorses.

Quality Linking: One of the most influential factors in ranking well are the links inbound to your website. However, quality is the key. If you’re selling furniture and you have a link from a financial services website, Google will not give that any weight. However, if you have a link from one of the major furniture association, Google will interpret that as an endorsement of sorts and give it more weight. Links structure is also important. For example, if the link says “Click here for furniture” it will carry a lower quality score than if the link says ‘Quality Outdoor Furniture”. I could spend countless blog postings discussing the value of links and how to properly use them. However, my goal here is to just make you aware of it. It’s important to talk to the person in charge of your website (even if it’s a marketing agency) and ask them about your linking strategy.

Quality Content: When search engines were in their infancy you only needed to pack your website full of the keywords you wished to rank for and that was it. That was because rudimentary search engines only looked at content and determined value and rank by the quantity of relevant content. This is no longer the case. Your website needs quality content that’s original and updated regularly. In fact, it’s widely believed that Google gives more credibility to sites that are updated on a regular basis.

Quality content comes in many forms. The most common form is the descriptions and blurbs that live right on your main web pages. These need to be well thought out, written statements because that is the first thing the search engines see when they visit your site. Another form of content is the type that is updated frequently, like blogs, articles, and even status updates.  Blogs are great opportunities to post fresh, quality content about your business or industry. Search engines love blogs. Having a repository for any articles you have written is great too. Similar to a blog, an article repository establishes your company as experts in your industry and certainly contributes positively to your online reputation. Lastly, social networking status updates are important too. If your company is on Facebook or Twitter, it’s a good idea and a growing trend to have your updates fed directly on your website. It’s fresh, regularly updated content, and contributes to your social networking efforts.

Those are two of the main contributing factors to your website’s search engine ranking. There are undoubtedly dozens or even hundreds of other factors that go into Google’s algorithm, but if you have a solid foundation of quality content and good inbound links, you have taken a giant leap in the ultimate goal of ranking well.  J.C Penney, or perhaps their agency, tried to take a shortcut. There really are no legitimate shortcuts in the SEO world. You can’t pay someone to rank you high overnight, or even in a month or two, despite the countless solicitations you may receive with contradictory claims.

About four years ago I participated in a lengthy search engine optimization course to be certified as an SEO Expert by SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization.)  The course was very helpful and taught me a lot about how to build traffic on your website organically. Just recently, I was looking over the many pages of notes I took and looking for some ideas for our 2011 web strategy. I was surprised at the way the course discussed the value of social networking sites, as a method for driving traffic, not leads. Furthermore, the core goal of SEO was, again, to simply drive more traffic. There was no mention of leads, conversion rate or ROI.

Four years later (decades in web-time) we know there is more. SEO is not the only consideration when you’re talking about web visibility. SEM (search engine marketing) is the practice of increasing site traffic through paid methods, like pay-per-click advertising, banners and content sponsorship.   There are also social networks to consider.  How important are they? In the past five years search marketing experts have been in a fervor over having a Twitter and Facebook account for your business, getting the maximum number of people to “Like” your company page, getting more “followers”, etc., etc.  All of this with the single goal in mind… traffic.

In recent years we have come to realize that our website’s traffic is not a good indicator of the quantity of quality leads we get. Since we get traffic from all types of sources like design websites, educational institutions, associations, and, of course, social networking sites, our leads vary in quality pretty dramatically. To explore this more we broke down the traffic statistics and compiled them with lead statistics and actual sales.  We were then able to measure the dollar value of a single website visit and a web lead. Now, our main focus is not on increasing traffic per se, but rather, the dollar value of a single visit.

I encourage you to look at the value of a single visit on your website. All you really need is your basic website statistics and knowledge of the lead flow and sales of your company. Once you have that information you can start thinking critically about how you drive traffic to your website. For example, do 1000 additional Twitter followers have the same value as a quality article or whitepaper posted on your website?

Here are some suggestions on how you can begin to increase the value of traffic to your site.

1. If you are running online campaigns, make sure you are targeting the appropriate groups. Most credible advertising services online allow you to target by a variety of demographics. Furthermore, try using services other than search marketing PPC (Google Adwords, Yahoo, Bing), like Linked In or Facebook where you can be very specific about who you target. You may also consider sponsoring industry email newsletters or websites.

2. Create special landing pages on your site for specific campaigns or product lines. This will help filter your traffic to the appropriate areas of your website.

3. On your “request information” form, or whatever call-to-action form you use, add a few simple qualifying questions. There is no need to get too specific and annoy your user, but adding a couple of questions will help make your leads more relevant. For example, you may ask a question asking the prospect’s company size, or even specific goals for using your services.

4. Provide enough information on your website to allow users to determine for themselves if they are an appropriate candidate for your services. Many companies don’t like to provide information like pricing or volume discounts, or whatever, because they fear their competition. However, your website’s objective is to drive relevant leads to your business. Don’t let your concerns about competition hinder your ability to attract new customers.

Hopefully, taking some of these steps will help increase the value of your leads. Try and clear your mind of the natural obsession over number of visits or, number of email subscribers, or Followers, or Likes. That may be the objective for some people or businesses, but your objective should be quality.  We would rather have one relevant Twitter follower reading our updates than a thousand irrelevant followers. Those ego-driven statistics just don’t mean anything to our business.

Google has brought email to its natural next step with the launch of Priority Inbox. Through Google’s email service, Gmail, users are now able to activate Priority Inbox which creates a new folder in their inbox. By using a special algorithm, Gmail is able to prioritize your email for you. As you use Gmail the algorithm gets better and better at identifying which emails are important to you, and which ones are not.

In the BtoB world this may not seem like such a big deal since most companies use a professional email service like MS Exchange. However, Yahoo and Hotmail have already announced plans to offer a similar service, so it’s not going to be long before it’s a plug-in for Outlook or other professional email clients.

What should be concerning for email marketers is the algorithm that Priority Inbox, and the services that spawn from it, use to determine what you consider a priority. How will it know that you like emails from Old Navy, but not Apple?  Or that you prefer emails from your crazy uncle but not the enormous amount of forwards your father in law sends you (hint, hint). As a side note, why is it that every email someone forwards me is almost always completely bogus? You don’t need to watch NatGeo to know that Mars will never appear larger than the moon in the night sky.

So, how is Priority Inbox going to sort this all out? Simple, the algorithm is going to analyze your behavior. It’s going to monitor what emails you read or click on and what emails you never read or always delete. I am sure there’s more to it than that, but like the infamous Disney Vault, we’ll never get a peek inside. However, the technology it utilizes is similar to a service Gmail already uses to deliver relevant ads to your Gmail user interface. It does this by analyzing the subject lines of your emails and displaying ads with similar subjects. Personally, I can’t decide whether the whole thing is a bit too invasive or if it’s pure genius. I suppose a little of both. But the reality of today’s world is that your privacy hinges entirely on a user name and password, and the integrity of the service behind it.

Once Google Priority becomes a general email reality and every email client is doing the same thing, the rules of email marketing are going to change. As emails pour into your new priority inbox, your regular inbox is going to be demoted to some sort of spam-like folder that only houses emails of little importance. Once that happens, only the best email communications are going to make it through. Picture a gatekeeper deciding who gets in to your office and who doesn’t.

This doesn’t mean that all email communications will be stopped at the door. Remember, it’s based on the user’s behavior. The trick will be to make sure that people who receive your emails are expecting them and want them.  It’s sort of ironic because this new technology may make email marketing more difficult, but only as difficult as it already should be. Marketers focused on targeted, personalized and relevant communications will need only to continue their best practices.

I think this change also enforces the need for an integrated marketing approach. Email is cheap and easy, but the effectiveness can also be less than stellar. However, using email in combination with direct mail, or personalized URL’s can produce a highly effective campaign. It may take many months or even a few years for other email clients to adopt this technology, but make no mistake, it is the future of email. So you really need to decide if you want to ride this train all the way to last stop and watch your email ROI dwindle, or jump onto a new track and give your campaigns new life.

As we spiral into, or rather burst into an age where so much is controlled online, a new buzz word has come into mainstream. “Online Reputation” never really had a meaning before Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, but now companies need to pay as much attention to this area of their business as they do their offline public relations efforts.

An interesting example of how online reputations can spin out of control is with Twitter. It’s free to sign up so you’ll find many imposters pretending to be another person or company. Often these fakes can get lots of followers and fool many people. Take for example this fake AT&T account, or this Steve Jobs account. Both fake accounts with thousands of followers and free to post whatever they want in the name of a real person and company.

User forums can be a great way for your customers to interact with your brand and each other. They can provide you great feedback and criticisms to help steer your business, but they can also get a bit ugly. When someone is behind the vale of anonymity that a user forum provides, they are free to say whatever they want without direct consequences. You might not tell an intimidating executive in person that his product stinks, but you probably wouldn’t have a problem with that if you were online and out of reach! It’s important to monitor your user forums to find inappropriate or inaccurate postings and remove them. However, you shouldn’t necessarily sensor or restrict users from expressing their true feelings about your business, even if they aren’t flattering. Instead have an executive in your business respond to the posts with the company’s position.

As an example of dictatorship-like control of a user forum, I once posted on the Apple forums that I was thinking about getting rid of my iPhone and replacing it with a Blackberry. I listed all the reasons and then sought people’s feedback. I never got any feedback from my post because within a minute or two of submitting my post it was deleted. I understand why it was deleted, probably automatically, because I used the word “Blackberry”, but in reality, this should have been valuable feedback for Apple and a chance to keep a customer.

What online reputation really boils down to is what appears when someone searches for your company name. If it’s a bunch of anti-you sites than that is definitely going to be bad. You can’t directly control what appears in the search results, but you can help effect it. Try the following:

1. Be sure your employees have LinkedIn accounts and that they link to your company website.
2. If you don’t have one, create a blog and add relevant and interesting content about your company and especially your industry.
3. Setup active Facebook and Twitter accounts and be sure to maintain them.
4. Create YouTube videos about your product or service and add relevant keywords and links to your company website in the description.

Keep in mind that search engines are increasingly adding live, up-to-date information to their search results pages, so you will start to see your Tweets and YouTube content show up under your company name. This is all good and essentially allows you to control what people are seeing when they search for you.

The online community is a wild untamed landscape, but that doesn’t mean you can’t maintain a polished image. Practice good social networking habits and keep quality up-to-date information on your websites and blogs, and you’ll have as much control over your online reputation as is possible. Resist the temptation to spend tens of thousands of dollars to have an outside firm do this for you, as there are many that would be willing to. Remember, they don’t have anymore control over the web than you do. You’re a willing (or unwilling) participant in this jungle so speak up!

There is no doubt that social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter offer unbelievable business opportunities. However, when businesses rely too much on the emerging medium, still in its infancy, there can be problems.

This week Twitter announced that it will no longer allow third-party applications to advertise in their live tweet streams. But guess what was announced last week? In-stream Twitter advertising platform, Ad.ly, just secured an additional five million dollars of angel funding. There is no word yet on how Ad.ly will deal with this, but it seems pretty bleak for the young startup. There entire business model will be obsolete when Facebook enacts this new restriction next month.

The folks who probably are affected most by sudden regulatory changes from the major social networks are developers. The rules for developers are constantly changing, especially on a major platform like Facebook. For example, Zynga, developers of Farmville and Mafia Wars, two of the most popular third-party apps on Facebook, face this same danger. What if Mark Zuckerberg, 26 year old CEO of Facebook, wakes up tomorrow with an itch in his throat and decides he doesn’t like cute little farm animals and doesn’t want them on his site?

Last year the enormously popular website Tr.im ceased operations. Tr.im was a service that allowed Twitter users to shorten long URLs to preserve space in their 140 character tweets. After offering the company for sale and failing to find a buyer, they had to shut down. A company representative said there was just no way to monetize their site traffic. Isn’t that something they should have thought of sooner? Anyway, all of the millions of people that used their shortened URLs now found them completely useless. Dead links everywhere!

Of course I am not advising that you drop your social networking efforts or cancel your Facebook account. We have seen lots of success driving new people to our brand through Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. But with companies increasing their online spending every year, you have to wonder if some of them are putting all of their eggs in one basket. Smart marketers are finding ways to utilize digital and traditional mediums through highly effective integrated campaigns. These campaigns take advantage of the best of both worlds, which makes a lot of sense given how volatile online networks seem to be.

Regardless of how you feel about Apple products there is no denying they are genius marketers and communicators. They run a very tight ship and heavily control the flow of information from their organization to the public. That’s the only reason why the recent iPhone 4G leak scandal was even a scandal at all. But that’s only part of what makes the folks at Apple geniuses.

When you see their advertisements, whether it be television, web, billboards (yes, there are Apple iPad billboards in Boston), or even those goofy highly-scripted spectacles that Steve Jobs puts on at a convention center every time they have a new product to announce; their marketing just makes you want to buy. Well, I should say “most of us want to buy” to be fair to those non-techy people like my wife who could care less about gadgets.  Apple’s marketing is very consistent. Images always have a clean white background with the product angled in a specific way and a nice reflection going through the top half. Their fonts are always bold, clean and crisp. You get the sense that the product is so special and so advanced it’s worth every penny of its usually high price tag. This could not have been more true for the recent release of the Apple iPad.

I watched the online video on Apple’s website where they take you through the iPad and talk about its functionality. The calm but dramatic voices of their engineers and product managers (the same people that appear on all Apple videos) just make the iPad seem magical. In fact, that’s how they describe the iPad, “magical”. Clearly, the iPad is not magical. It’s a series of wires and processors that form a really cool tablet. But despite the fact I had no practical use for the iPad, I really wanted one.

Later that week my wife and I were out and I asked her if we could take a stroll through Best Buy to checkout what all of the buzz is about regarding the recent iPad launch. She gave me a disapproving look and agreed on the condition that I would not buy anything. “Sure honey”, I agreed, “there is nothing I really need”.

I spent about 3 minutes playing with the demo iPad in the store when it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks. I was disappointed to find that I really didn’t need or want the iPad. Yes, it was cool. Yes, it was slick looking and technologically advanced just like Mr. Jobs said, but I couldn’t find any reason to own one. It was then that I realized I was a victim of the brilliant marketing by Apple. Of course, no one will admit that marketing works on them. But in this case, Apple got me, hook line and sinker. Well, to be more accurate, they got me to the store, but they didn’t get my five hundred bucks.

So, is there a point to all this? Well, perhaps not a very compelling one, but there is a question. How can we as marketers sell our brand the way Apple sells theirs? I don’t mean be a follower or do what they do, because your brand is different. I mean, the kind of marketing that brings you to Best Buy on a typical Saturday afternoon for absolutely no reason.