The ten “googley principles are here and listed below:

1. Focus on people—their lives, their work, their dreams.
2. Every millisecond counts.
3. Simplicity is powerful.
4. Engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Dare to innovate.
6. Design for the world.
7. Plan for today’s and tomorrow’s business.
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Be worthy of people’s trust.
10. Add a human touch.

Does your company’s site convey these principles?
Would adopting or at least considering ways to incorporate these principles improve the user experience of your customer or prospects?

Yes.

For additional insight into the “Googley” philosophy, you can check out Ten things Google has found to be true.

Q1 was rough with consumer spending in the US dropping, hurting both US and global brands, and with stocks in a tailspin every time anyone used the word “recession.”

In March, Forrester asked its CMO Panel how the downturn would affect their budgets. More than one hundred panel members, with an average marketing budget of $83 million, responded that they expect their CFOs to demand an average cut by 3%. They said they would save on branding, advertising, and traditional media, while keeping budgets for loyalty programs, marketing technology, and new media mostly untouched.

Employ agencies that connect with consumers. Traditional agencies excel at above-the-line mass marketing — the line items you want to cut. Forrester believes that the agency of the future will excel at understanding your consumers, involving them in defining the brand and spreading the message, and in making them loyal brand advocates — supporting those budget items you are keeping strong. Some agencies are on the path to connecting with consumers via social networks. Is your agency, or should you switch to a strong partner in these rough times?

Start experimenting with online video. Traditional media is getting into the perfect storm: Consumer attention and trust is at an all-time low, and advertisers are cutting both ad budgets and old media budgets. To survive, they need to target ads and content to individual households and consumers. While Time Warner, Comcast, Disney, and many others will speed up their trials in this field, marketing leaders should get ready for the biggest change since color TV. How? By experimenting with Web video, to understand which processes, content, and customer intelligence you will need when television offers the same functions.

Invest in intelligence. The name of the new marketing game: targeting. Marketing leaders have voted with their wallets to reduce the two large budget items that show the biggest waste. To get the most from their reduced budgets, they need to understand their clients better — their (media) behaviors, attitudes, needs, and social connections.

This requires investments in marketing technology like CRM, in analytics, and in training. We are glad to see that CMOs kept these line items intact.

We believe that these actions are critical for every marketing leader’s success.

Wikipedia defines benchmarking as follows, “…a process used in management and particularly strategic management, in which organizations evaluate various aspects of their processes in relation to best practice, usually within their own sector. This then allows organizations to develop plans on how to adopt such best practice, usually with the aim of increasing some aspect of performance. Benchmarking may be a one-off event, but is often treated as a continuous process in which organizations continually seek to challenge their practices.”

As we are continually faced with more competitive online marketing environments, this information becomes critical in your strategic planning. When future direction is determined by a hunch or a perception the outcome can be negative. The solution lies in the continual use of this information over the long haul. The advantages of using this information enable organizations to see new methods, ideas and tools to improve their effectiveness. The savings over the long haul are significant in reference to both time and money.

So the question becomes…Am I using this information in my strategic planning initiatives?

1. Identify your problem areas
2. Identify other industries that have similar processes
3. Data Collection (Now Available)
   
4. Determine current performance gap
5. Implement new and improved business practices

Remember: “Benchmarking isn’t just about data-culture and circumstances must be taken into account when you view the results.”

Our discussion outlined best practices and marketing options available to businesses in social networks as well as an analysis of the potential legal risks facing companies in this space. As expected, the interesting pairing of marketing innovation and legal perspective…drew a diverse crowd of bankers (event held in uptown Charlotte, NC), entrepreneurs and even a few innovative small business owners. Our panel discussed and shared a collection of definitions, case studies, and a few humorous examples of social networking gone bad (Second Life banking crisis). Overall, the event seemed to satisfy the expectations and curiosity of the audience…there were plenty of “head nods” and notes-taken. Following the event, I eagerly awaited the anticipated growth of my social network from the 120 attendees…through LinkedIn and Facebook requests…which was the final call-to-action from our panel discussion. While, I’m still waiting for the wave of “Friend” requests, I have received a steady stream of feedback (mostly positive) and more importantly, a common theme continues to arise:

How can I explain social networking in 2 minutes or less?

While this question, indicates that our panel may have missed the mark of defining social networking in Plain English… I’ll take the feedback as an opportunity for improvement. In reality, explaining online marketing concepts can be a challenge for busy executives and marketers who need to create vision within their organizations in an ever-changing industry. So, in posing the question to my social network, I stumbled upon an interesting group, Called Common Craft, who takes visual explanation of difficult marketing concepts to a whole new level… Check out the video below, entitled “Social Networking in Plain English.” By the way, The full video of our panel discussion will be available at WCSR.com/WombleTech soon. Enjoy!

Most CEO’s and CFO’s are focused on driving efficiency and scale to acheive revenue growth. But when it comes to marketing, they need to be able to make a connection between the work ($) that is being done and the revenue that will be produce as a result.

Bottom line.

With studies suggesting that merely 2/3 of all marketers include metrics in their marketing plans…a need for more standard measurement is very necessary. So, what do you track? The ultimate answer is Everything…but realistically, try focusing on things that will move the needle and provide leading indicators of revenue. (Stuff that C-Levels discuss).

Here are a 10 tactical examples that you might not be considering when establishing metrics for your online marketing campaigns:

1. Brand impact (i.e., increased brand awareness, intent or favorability)
2. Number of impressions
3. Position of paid listing
4. Number of clicks
5. Ratio of new to returning visitors
6. Amount of increased website traffic
7. Duration of website visits
8. Amount of increased traffic to physical store
9. Amount of increased volume to call center
10. Number of leads generated for products sold online
11. Number of leads generated for products sold offline
12. Number of immediate sales generated for products sold online

Collecting this data will create trends and insight that will translate across most organizations.

 As we help our clients focus on achieving measurable online objectives and goals, we as online marketers want to ensure that any tactic we employ or test aligns and contributes to meeting goals.  The challenge is that the web analytic standards that we are use to tracking campaign performance are different for Social Media marketing.

Metrics that are more important when measuring social media marketing include:

• RSS subscribers
• Email newsletter subscribers
• Activity of comments added to your blog - BTW, would you please leave a comment?
• Monitoring blogs and forums that reference you
• Monitoring referring links
• Measuing brand saturation
• Monitoring engagement of visitors

As Social Media continues to mature, it’s important for marketers to be in the know and include Social Media Marketing in the mix.

 The ASK as I end my post today, is will you take a minute to leave your comments?  Is Social Media on your radar?  Are you already employing it?

37% of the US adult Internet population used online social networking at least once a month. That figure will rise to 49% in 2011. (Source: eMarketer)

Will Social Networking be a tactic that marketers flock? Well, perhaps for some, others not so much- not to say it’s not driving advertising revenue today and is projected to grow:

eMarketer projects that worldwide online social network ad spending will grow from $1.2 billion in 2007 to $2.2 billion in 2008, 82%. Worldwide spending will top $4 billion in 2011.

Today it is more prevalent amongst Millenials, but is being adopted by Gen Xer’s and Baby Boomers more and more. As targeting capabilities continue to evolve on Social Networking platforms, marketers will not be able to ignore; especially if social network marketing delivers on its promise of peer recommendations.

In the news recently, MySpace and Facebook have unveiled behavioral ad platforms aimed at mining the voluminous personal data users provide through profile pages and other site activities for the benefit of advertisers.

We evaluate social networking for our clients and help align with their objectives and goals.

Invite me to join your LinkedIn Network today. Eric Dudley’s LinkedIn page.

Is this surprising? Read on…

This is not especially surprising to me; however it depends on your own perspective. TV can be a extremely effective media to drive visitors online although many aren’t effectively “linking” the two. Why? The separation between traditional and online agencies although converging is still significant. Sophisticated marketers will continue to measure the impact of TV to online and ensure a strong call to action.

Check out Kyle’s blog entry on how to get CEO’s on board.

As reported in a recent survey by Lenskold Group, a vast majority of companies measuring financial returns on indicate that profits can increase if measurements are put in place to capture marketing’s contribution to sales.

Although the gap in funding of analyics and measurements continues to close, few have achieved a leadership in this emerging discipline, but the trend is clearly on the upswing:

Other findings from the Lenskold study that I found interesting:

* Marketers have improved their ability to measure the financial impact of marketing, including an increase in those able to link brand measures to incremental sales and profits.

* The early adopters achieving success in their measurements of financial returns are still in the minority (16%), but there is a solid base of the early majority (42%) who consider their ability to be somewhat short of where it could be.

* Marketers with the discipline to measure financial returns are using measurement methodologies (pre-post analysis, market testing, marketing mix modeling, and quantitative research) at much higher rates than those not measuring financial returns.

* The profit potential that can come from improved marketing measurements continues to be significant and is critical for strengthening marketing’s role in retaining and growing financial contribution.

* Along with the increased use of financial metrics, non-marketing executives have increased confidence that marketing investments are profitable. Marketing credibility clearly grows with increased accountability.

At WebsiteBiz, we constantly reinforce the value of measurement and analytics in all of our campaigns.

Check Us Out!

Yes, we actually had to convince corporate management that search engine marketing was a “real” and viable channel for lead generation and customer acquisition.

To me, the idea of questioning the value of search engine marketing is a a bit unbeliveable. With Internet ad spending and Google’s stock on the rise…the market is exploding!

But, if you need some help in convincing your management…there are hundreds of articles and several good tips on how to justify a search marketing budget.

Of course, I appreciate that any new marketing endeavor will require a proposal and budget approval. I also see the potential and results of our clients who test new channels and are able track ROI and consistently exceed their marketing goals through search engine marketing.

And believe me…the bottom-line results are hard for sophisticated marketers to ignore.

According to eMarketer, $1.2 billion is expected to be spent this year alone on behavioral targeting.

According to senior marketing executives, types of data used to target include:

-> Demographics
-> Geography
-> Past purchase history
-> Past contact history
-> Web data usage
-> Primary research attitudes
-> Channel preference

Our company, WebsiteBiz, utilizes behavioral target for the Biltmore Estate.

“Basically, when a customer clicks on a Google ad, Google could handle any payments they make at the advertiser’s site. Google takes a cut of the purchase instead of money for the first click-through. Bang, no more click fraud.”

We’ll see if this rumor holds up better than the Google PC!

Why?

Advertisers care more about what works; online advertising is quantifiable, and reduces risk.

The Pay-per-click models continue to attract advertisers as the cost is only in the click, not the impression. And with the new forms of user driven content centric advertising online, a sustaining and profitable platform will evolve.

The facts speak for themselves; this new study from Outsell reinforces the trend…

For example if you know that for every $5 in click costs for keyword A, you can generate $10 in margin for an ecommerce transaction that would be important to know. Identifying keywords that perform well and meet performance thresholds will enable marketers to leverage and maximize SEO campaign performance.

Many marketers will make assumptions when selecting keywords for an SEO campaign that can take several months before there is an understanding of conversion analysis. Meanwhile an opportunity is lost and expense is incurred that could have been avoided.

Smart marketers will want to leverage the performance of a paid search campaign that can easily test keywords before selecting keywords to optimize for an SEO campaign.

Do you agree? Why or why not? And what are best practices when you don’t have campaign performance from a paid search campaign? I will blog on this one another day.

Google has opened up bidding for print ads via AdWords, and advertisers can now, during a test phase, bid for full-page, half-page and quarter-page ads in various lifestyle and technology magazines, reports ClickZ. Google provides circulation and readership data, including proportion of males and females, percentage of those who are college educated, average age and average household income. Publications include “Car and Driver,” “Women’s Health and Fitness,” and “Martha Stewart Kids.”

Here is an early look at one of the test ads that ran in the Chicago Sun Times