Earlier I wrote an article on different online business models, I would classify this new strategy as a subset of eCommerce called, Social Commerce.

Although ecommerce and social networking tools have been around for over a decade, the combination of them to the net effect on price adjustments is a relatively new development.  Wikipedia defines Social Commerce as an online media that supports social interaction and user contributions to assist in the online buying and selling of products and services.  I would add that Social Commerce also may affect the cost of online buying and selling through for instance, customer ratings, reviews, user recommendations and referrals, social shopping tools, forums, and others.

This new ecommerce angle utilizes the popularity of a product with the principles of economy of scale, and gives the power to the customer.  Though more safeguards would need to be implemented to protect from abuse, the idea is gaining momentum and is a great way to launch new products and receive feedback.

I have seen smaller companies implement social commerce, but not yet in the more well known brands.  With the marketing budgets supporting many of the big brands, this could really add a boost to a brand’s web presence.

With some great PR, this new model could go mainstream and be the future of ecommerce. Let’s see how long it takes.

If you haven’t yet realized or been convinced of how important it is to take the time to determine your website goals before development or redesign a website, you need to read this case study.I recently attended a project kick-off meeting to discuss the direction and goals of a large corporation’s website redesign project.  Before meeting to go over the company’s background and strategy, the new client was given a questionnaire to extract specific background information.  One of our first questions was about the website’s goals.  The client had decided that their primary goal was to generate new leads, which is commonly the most popular goal for the websites we work on.

The intention of our meeting was to add clear and action oriented terms to turn the client’s goal into a measurable objective.  This way it would be possible to monitor and evaluate the success of the project after its completion.  After listing all the goals and objectives the next step was to put them in priority.  With all the major stakeholders in the same room, we quickly came to the conclusion that they actually didn’t need to attract new clients. Their biggest issue instead had to do with sorting and clarifying the existing confusion among their systems and services.

Not needing to attract new clients is certainly a nice position for a private company to be in.  This particular client practically has a monopoly in the marketplace which is also why their primary focus isn’t lead generation.

Setting proper website objectives is extremely important; it guides the strategy and tactics of the site.  The style, order and grouping of the content, navigation, as well as the amount of space dedicated to different items need to be tailored to achieve a particular goal.  For instance, if lead generation was the number one goal, the content would need to have a more sales-oriented tone with creative elements in place for building credibility and confidence, and the flow of information should direct people to request a quote and make inquires. All these types of elements would take up most of the website’s real-estate to support the purpose of the goal.

A website project with a goal of reducing customer confusion is very different from one with a goal of generating leads – one that calls for an entirely new strategy. One approach to the revised objective is to organize the website to be more support and resource focused. With the significant shift in goals, the content of our new client’s website will now be geared towards assisting customers with their needs and clarifying the how-tos, as well as setting up resources and systems to answer commonly asked questions, providing key support contact information, etc. All efforts will be directed to streamlining and answering customers’ questions via the website in order to reduce the number of incoming calls and email inquires.

If we hadn’t sufficiently probed the client about their goals, the website would have gone down the wrong path – content, structure, and design would have focused on the wrong thing.  Redirection of the objective further down the project’s life would have meant a lot of redoing of the work, likely also project timelines would have to be extended and costs increased.  If the website was completed with the wrong goal in mind, what good would it have done the company?!  The website wouldn’t have helped them grow, plus it would have been a wasted expense.

That is why I can’t stress enough how critical it is to take the time to review the nature of your website project and get consensus internally in order to define clear goals and establish appropriate objectives from the start. Do it right and the results will follow.

Thanks for the birthday present, Google. Feeling more patriotic on Canada Day I went to Google.ca to see what Google’s Canada Day logo looks like and something just felt a little different.

You may have noticed the absence of the “pages from Canada” radio button. Fear not, it has found a new home in the left navigation – after a search query has been input. There is hardly any information regarding this alteration, however it fits in nicely with Google’s recent user interface changes, which were being beta tested back in April. Having gone through posts on the Google Help Forum, similar questions arose from our neighbours across the pond surrounding the absence of the “search within UK”.

If you’re on Google.com you will need to click on “More search tools” and then “Nearby”, which seems to look at your specific location by IP, not just Canada wide, like on Google.ca.

Happy searching and Happy Canada Day!

A recent study may take more of the guess work out of keyphrase selection for SEO purposes. Consider the result from a study conducted by Chitika, an online advertising agency. The company recorded 41,103,579 impressions of organic search traffic coming to their site. 26% of this search traffic came from 3 word searches, 2 word searches lead to 19% traffic,  4 word searches had17% and lastly 1 word searches came in with 14% traffic.

As for pay per click, searches with 4, 5, and 6 long tail keywords were most likely to convert into revenue.

It is no real surprise to Internet marketers who analyze website analytics that people are using more keyphrases in their initial searches to narrow down the results, however, the interesting fact is the magic number of three.  Algorithm advancements of the search engines and the savyness of web users from the early days of the web when searchers would us one or maybe two keywords, have contributed to this changing trend.

Looking forward one may consider the number of keyphrases to continue to increase or perhaps people’s patterns will change to the use of sentences instead.  There have been many new question-type search engines that have come on the market,  Recently one formed by two early Facebook Inc. engineers call Quora allows people to pose or answer questions.

This is not a new idea, but the timing may be just right considering the changes in user behaviour.

Internet marketers will need to keep a close eye on their website analytics to monitor these trends and consider getting in early on the benefits of these question – answer based website services.

Internet marketing is an ever changing environment; a maelstrom of tools and products creating new opportunities. Being successful in your Internet marketing endeavours requires vigilant implementation of industry best practices and constant attention to industry trends.

Our adventures at SMX Advanced Seattle and SES Toronto brought us in touch with several industry trends that will inevitably affect entrepreneurial Internet marketing practices. New and interesting opportunities have materialized for branding your products, attracting new visitors, and encouraging conversions in online sales.

With the introduction of Google’s May Day and Caffeine search engine updates, as well as all sorts of digital media assets in the search engine results pages and real-time search, the Internet marketing game is changing. Thankfully, though, the fundamentals are still essentially the same.

What does this mean for you? It means links are still important, it means your regular SEO and PPC efforts should continue as always; however, it also means the introduction of some new efforts.

Social Media & Search – Where They Meet

Listening first hand to Google representative Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, revealed tidbits of information with massive implications. In truth, you only hear what Google wants you to hear at an event like SES, nevertheless these were valuable gleanings.

Traditionally, Google uses the Internet’s “link graph” to determine site authority and select appropriate pages for promotion to first page, first position search engine results, second place, etc. Using its plethora of search algorithms, Google determines what is relevant and what’s not, based on user queries.

As of late, however, the influx of social media and personalized results has changed the perspective on what a relevant query is to an individual user. Geo-location, user expertise, and most importantly what and whom the user is connected to, does and should affect what rankings appear for their search terms. A 45 year old mother of three, and a 14 year old male in Toronto shouldn’t get the same results for “nice shoes Toronto.” They are looking for different things. (Of course user queries can be more complex, and better examples exist – but you get the point.)

Social Search

Social media, like the traditional linking graph, operates on connections. Social search will look at social connections on the Internet, your “likes” and dislikes, and who your friends are, to determine search result relevancy.

Facebook is a massive social graph, and Google is as well. Subscribing to something in your Google reader or following people on Google Buzz are examples of things that Google will be taking from your social connections in order to personalize your search – a step that promises massive opportunities in the future. Google is still thinking about serendipity and quality and as such, they want to limit the idea to direct connections. Have no doubt though, social search is next.

Recently many entrepreneurs have been asking, “is Social Media Marketing worth business time?” As a business owner, if you are not involved in social media at the moment, it would be a good time to begin investigating an effective way to interact with your customers in that realm. Twitter accounts will work, as will blogs. The most important metric will remain the same though – bringing traffic through to your website. In short, social networks with proper use will not only drive traffic but in the future will also be considered by major search engines in ranking algorithms. So start building your Social Networking profiles, as their history may be considered as a ranking factor as well.

Site Speed & Site Architecture

When Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) introduced site performance as part of their Labs section, we knew something was up. Well the word is out; users are happier and more engaged with faster sites. Increased site speed means increased conversions, and to Google, happy users and good business is important.

Ranking algorithms do, and will continue to take site load speed into consideration when determining ranking position. This is why in GWT you can view “Page Speed Suggestions,” and even have access to a browser application called “Page Speed”, available for download on Firefox. Suggestions like enabling Gzip compression and combining external JavaScript, are provided to reduce server requests on page loading.

Though this is slightly more technical than we would normally address, here is a detailed list of things you can discuss with your web developer when looking at improving page speed and site architecture (care of our resident Website Architect Guru, Ezra Silverton):

1. global CSS + others when in need of files –use this instead of images when possible E.g. gradient, drop shadows (CSS3)
2. Using a Global JavaScript (.js) file
3. Optimize image for web (max. 50k / image)
4. Use CSS Sprites, where possible, minimize HTTP requests
5. Server‐side caching
6. Minimize number of page layouts, use Includes for common content e.g. Header & Footer

By using these techniques to build a faster and smoother website, you will be of benefit to both your visitors and to Google, which means of course better business and even more of it.

User Generated Content & Google’s Caffeine and May Day Updates

The end-user oriented milieus of these trends are wafted by Google’s desire to provide gripping content to its user-base in order to increase user engagement. Hence the Caffeine and May Day updates. Google’s ranking algorithms for determining search engine ranking pages (SERPs) are continually updated in order to improve user experience. These two updates, in particular, help us understand Google’s motivation in cleaning up its ranking pages, and more specifically how the future trends of Internet marketing are tied to these improvements. While the Caffeine update was an internal infrastructure adjustment which did change SERPs, it was done in an effort to speed up the process by which the Google index could be updated a single document at a time. This in turn allowed data centers to update up to 50% quicker and provided more scalability for the search giant. This change has resulted in quicker ranking updates, allowing you to improve your positioning in SERPs as soon as your site has been re-crawled.

May Day, implemented on April 28th 2010, is a rolling update that was introduced to eliminate spam. Long tail search queries (search terms with four or more words e.g. “no fat fettuccini alfredo and tomoto recipe” vs. “alfredo recipe” ) were allowing webmasters to create less than satisfactory content, and face sparse competition in attracting visitors, which obviously degraded the user experience. With May Day, long tail search queries are considered equal in value to “head queries”, meaning that they will endure the same algorithmic rigours as their more competitive and shorter counterparts.

All of this was done on the premise that “content is king,” says Maile Ohye. It is becoming clear that one more way that Google will be able to tell how authoritative your site is about its topic, will be the level of user engagement on your website. This move comes in the form of evaluating a site’s quality and relevancy based on speed, social reach, and engagement. And what better way to measure engagement than looking at user generated content around your site’s topic(s)?

Allowing user responses to your content in the form of blog commenting, forum creation, video submissions, re-tweets, and RSS subscriptions will help encourage your users to engage with your content, and further indicate to Google that your site is relevant. Not to mention that it provides further value to your site visitors. Opening up your content to allow these sorts of interactions is a necessary first step. If you haven’t already considered adding these features to your website, or would like to consult web development professionals to find out what functionality is right for your business, contact us about Social Media Marketing.

The Long and Short (Tail) of It

Social media interactions/reach, site speed, and user engagement, will all likely play larger roles in SERPs of the near future. Yet the biggest concern is, and always will be content, especially where Google is concerned. At the end of the day, it is the quick and accurate results they provide that have made them successful.

Satisfy your user-base with engaging content and couple it with a fast website that provides avenues for user interaction. While the fundamentals remain solidly intact and important, accessibility is gaining in relevance, and having content that users want to read, respond to, question, and/or buy – this is the elemental key to web success.

This article was developed with the never-ending help and guidance of Lead Internet Marketer, Max Trunov, and 9th sphere’s founder Ezra Silverton.

But why would a person visit your site to begin with.  Is it for its design?

Website visitors may browse a website to discover a solution to a problem, learn about a product or service, find a company with good credentials before contacting them, read news, interact with friends or make a purchase.  Among the intentions of most website visitors is the objective to read and acquire information in order to fulfill a need.

So if the primary focus of most website visitors is to read something why then do most website owners put so much focus on the website’s design?

Let’s say you do start with design first. Your creative team will provide a concept without the knowledge of how much content there will be, the priority of content sections and what information is being conveyed.  The design will be based on assumptions, with placeholders for content.  Later you will need to adjust the content to fit within the placeholders inevitably sacrificing its quality, clarity and intention.  More unnecessary time will need to be spent in the design process on making adjustments and revisions to account for the addition of content.

If you’re not seeing it yet – focusing on design first won’t get you the right results.  Determining your website goals and how they can be achieved should be the first step of any website project.  The words on the site – the content, need to be the primary focus.  In relation to your website goals, the content will assist in determining navigation, information flow, and layout.   Finally, design should complement and enhance the content through imagery, clarity, positioning, and colour to evoke a mood and feel for what you’re about.

Even in more agile development websites, content should still be focused on first, followed by architecture, design, technical development, and usability testing.

I have seen budgets and timelines unnecessarily extended simply because priority is not given to website content.  Companies need to work with their website solutions company – as a team – to collaborate and share each others’ industry expertise to accomplish a results oriented website. Not sure how to begin? May want to consider starting with web consulting to get on the right track.

If you want your website to achieve your goals and support company objectives with smart tactics, focus on your content first, and then complement it with great design.

Social networking has many convenient uses, from accommodating social pleasantries to assisting with community participation. Social network websites allow users to share ideas, comments, and thoughts, connect with like minded people, and keep in contact with friends and family.  On a personal and professional growth level, social networking can provide great benefits for elevating your career. As an ultimate source for networking, Social Media Marketing (SMM) puts you in touch with other experts in your field to discuss ideas, challenges, and solutions and really help you build your reputation.

One popular way in which companies market themselves through social networking sites is by generating goodwill in support of a community or cause. Prospecting, sales and technical support are other common business objectives for social networking.

So as a business owner, how do you determine if social networking is a worthwhile pursuit for your company, and how much time should you spend on it?  As always before taking any major initiative you should reference your company goals and objectives. See if SMM falls under the criteria you’ve set out. If so, then look to your target audience and determine which social networking sites are most popular with your demographic.  If your audience is mainly senior citizens who are not Internet savvy, marketing with Twitter may not be your strategy.

If it turns out that SMM is not for you or your business just don’t do it.  There’s nothing wrong with passing up on the trend. Do however keep social media marketing on the back burner for the future. It might not be right for your company today but it may be worth evaluating again.

If social networking makes sense for your company today, the next step is to determine which sites to join and how much time to dedicate to keeping them current.  Look to see how often others post comments on your choice of social networking sites and compare if you have this kind of time to dedicate to maintaining one social website, many, or none. For the sake of your valuable time and resources it’s important to take the time to research the right social website(s) for you. Note that having a fan page on Facebook for instance, where comments are not responded to for weeks can do more harm than good.  On the other hand, posting a few comments and expecting immediate results is just not realistic, it takes continued contributions and patience.

Don’t forget to track and monitor things like the traffic from different website sources, number of followers, members, and comments over a period of time. These will  help to determine the value of your endeavours.  Mind you, some efforts will be harder to evaluate than others and you may very well not see a direct correlation between the time spent on social networking and incoming sales. However social media networking has so many other benefits, as stated earlier, you are sure to find it a worthwhile task.

Overall have fun engaging with your customers, followers, and supporters or even non-supporters.  SMM can be a very powerful medium that will continue to be interwoven into our marketing mix.

As an Ontario or British Columbia business owner you may already be considering the effects of the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) on your company come this summer.  In the broadest of terms, many businesses with supplies, services, and transactions made in Ontario or British Columbia that are currently registered for the 5% GST will be required to collect 13% HST in Ontario ( 8% PST + 5% GST) and 12% HST in B.C. ( 7% PST + 5% GST ), effective July 1, 2010. Though still a few months away, businesses should already be devising their plan of action for the transition.

In order to assist you with your integration process we’ve assembled a basic checklist that should shed some light on aspects to consider:

• Determine if the nature of your business will require you to adjust to the 12% or 13% HST. The government’s website provides a high-level overview of taxable and exempt goods and services.

• Evaluate the impact of the harmonized sales tax on your company’s budgets. Review your projected expenditures, perhaps it’s more beneficial to delay some projects till after June 2010 when you’ll be in a much more advantageous position to recover the provincial component of the tax paid.

• Review on-going and future contracts, agreements, and any promotional material to ensure that your operating-costs are defined to include the combined tax.  New contracts that will extend beyond July 1, 2010 will need to have these modifications in place. Keep this in mind in the early transition period.

• Identify the changes required to convert your accounting and point-of-sale systems to charge or pay HST, i.e. invoices, sales receipts, purchase orders, etc.

• If you have an ecommerce website, update your payment process to charge HST, where applicable.

• Reconfigure billing systems to collect GST and PST, as well as HST early enough in the transition period.

• Give your customers a heads up. A lot of businesses are concerned with the effect HST may have on sales due to the increase in pricing. One of the ways to address your customers’ concerns is by highlighting some of the pertinent benefits of the tax reform.

Probably the most intricate aspect of the transition period will have to do with maintaining accurate bookkeeping for agreements signed before June 30, 2010 but with goods or services delivered after that date. Any service or portion of service performed on or after July 1, 2010 is subject to HST, unless the portion is less than 90% of the service.

Using our company as an example, here’s how the Ontario HST charges would apply. A client signs a contract with us in May 2010 to design and develop a website for them.  The entire project takes 50 hours to complete, 30 hours before June 30/10 and 20 hours after. This means that the 20 hours of design and develop time spent on and after July 1/10 are subject to the 13% HST, regardless of when the contract was signed.  To throw a bit more math into the mix, if less than 5 hours are spent on the project after June 30/10, this time is HST exempt as it is less than 90% of the service.

Like any hefty initiative, it’s best to approach HST integration in small, reflective steps. That’s why we suggest that you start preparing your business early on. There are plenty of resources available including seminars throughout Ontario and B.C. By getting your business HST-ready ahead of time you’re not only more likely to foresee any extraneous circumstance but you’re also more likely to still enjoy some of your summer.

For retailers who manage their own website, this is a can’t miss event. However, for those who did miss it, here is a quick recap of the main topics.

Large US retailers like Best Buy, Lord & Taylor, and the Hard Rock Cafe, to name a few, showcased their websites and discussed elements that are working and some that aren’t.

Many discussions geared to remind Internet retailers about proper usages of navigation and its usability, including shopping cart clarity. This had to do with  really going back to the fundamentals.  These days, customers are more Internet savvy and expect a certain level of familiarity as well as functionality.

Where cost is no longer a major barrier, product reviews and videos are paramount.  The benefits of implementing these types of added features are huge and improve conversion rates drastically.

Even small adjustments to components of a product page and shopping cart with  continually testing have shown results of strong returns to sales growth.

Kurt Peters, Editor in Chief of Internet Retailer, said that mobile will be the future of ecommerce.  Most mobile websites are still in early testing mode, but it’s already evident  that providing customers with information at the time they want it, no matter where they are, is of high importance and advantage.

Many presenters at the Conference talked about new features they focused on during their recent site re-designs. The process ranged on average from 10 to 12 months from beginning to end. Interesting to note is that majority of the retailers teamed with an external web design company or technology provider to help with new implementations.

Lastly addressed were our still early days of social media integrations of Internet retailers with sites like Facebook and Twitter.  Some retailers are providing very timely product announcements and discounts through these social sites while others are building communities around their sites’ topics and themes.

As an owner of a website solutions company, the conference really echoed what I come across every day.  Getting the core fundamentals and best practices properly implemented is key. With a sound foundation in place, the next step is to add one feature at a time while testing and monitoring its effects to website analytics and sales to guide the way.

9th sphere’s ecommerce clients will be receiving a briefing of key statistics and features their categories’ counterparts are undertaking.

Feb 2009:

• Yahoo Enables Video and Other Rich Media in Search Ads

March 2009:

• Canada’s first street view provided by joint effort between British Columbia-based Canpages.ca and San Francisco-based MapJack
• New version of Internet Explorer version 8 released

April 2009:

• Oracle buys Sun

June 2009:

• Microsoft launches Bing, a rebranding of Microsoft’s search engine, Live

June 2009:

• Rogers launched Google’s new mobile operating system – Android – in two HTC phones

July 2009:

• Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Takes on Facebook regarding its non-compliance with Canada’s privacy act – PIPEDA

July 2009:

• 9th sphere launches REF:CODE Analytics, a new way to track phone calls that are referred to from a website

August 2009:

• Yahoo announces new versions of Yahoo! Mail, Messenger and Search

September 2009:

• Google launches Google Wave, their vision of next level of email communication
• Century 21 sues Rogers’s Zoocasa for “scraping” property data from the Century 21 website
• Skype available to Canadian iPhone users

October 2009:

• Yahoo shuts down GeoCities servers, the well known free website hosting service
• Windows 7 released
• Google’s Street View launched in Canada (Calgary, Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec, Toronto and Vancouver) – second available street view
• One Degree stops production of its Canadian focused Internet marketing blog

November 2009:

• Amazon’s Kindle, a platform for reading electronic books, comes to Canada
• The Canada Revenue Agency expands investigation of eBay power sellers and GST collection

December 2009:

• Canadians reported as top users of social networking sites in the world, according to a new survey
• Microsoft loses appeal on an August district court decision that awarded i4i Inc. (Toronto based software company) $200 million and an injunction on selling Word in its current form

Looking back, 2009 saw the expansion of numerous US based products and services into the Canadian market. On our front, we’ve seen fewer Canadian innovations and more legal battles spotlighting the social and ethical parameters of the web.  The Internet continues to make more headways into our daily lives, both personally and professionally.  Remember, the web is still very young, but growing at an accelerated rate.  2010 has the momentum to bring the web to its next level, as we foresee companies continuing to push the envelope. Or should I say the processor.