What happened so absolutely right on Wednesday, January 18th was that a large consensus opinion was conveyed broadly and effectively by the web’s most prominent players; information was disseminated, action was taken, an effect was made. These same tactics are used across the communicative spectrum from marketing and branding to propaganda to entertainment, but rarely does a tenuous and dynamic audience like “the Internet” rally to such a cause, or any cause for that matter, and make a real and immediate change. The difference this time from previous internet based legislation, such as the Communications Decency Act which attempted to regulate obscene images on the internet, is that this would disrupt more than just, ahem, obscene material. This would affect the very core of the internet’s piece de resistance – the uninhibited dissemination of information. It also helped that the some of the most popular sites on the internet came out very strongly against these proposed bills and made the message impossible to miss. Certainly some lessons to learn.

At WebLinc we love a free and open internet. We cut our teeth during the early days of the web, helping to create, evolving with and adapting to emerging technologies, getting through the boom and the bust stronger and more aware of the importance of the freedom to innovate. These ideas are no less important to us now than they were in the past, especially with the emergence of mobile devices and social media interaction as an intrinsic element of our everyday existence. Companies like ours thrive on an ever-changing diet of fresh ideas and new technology, so here’s to hoping we never have to go hungry. Now I think I’m going to get some sopa de fideo con pollo.

Search engines are a long way off from Hammer Pants and the Hammer Dance, and I laughed a little bit when I saw the headline. But once I watched the video, I realized Hammer (whose real name is Stanley Burrell) deserves more credit. People mostly see “search engine” as a synonym for “Google,” but there’s room for competitors, and for new ways of adapting older technology. The test will be in wide-spread adoption, and whether WireDoo, which is currently in “pre-Beta,” will be able to balance advertising, relevance, and depth.

MC Hammer talks WireDoo in this video from the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco earlier this week.

Some recent examples found on the WebLinc blog include:

My personal thoughts on this material are that it’s well-written, intelligent and easy to understand. I appreciate this kind of useful information, especially when it is this good.

There are usually not many web sites with info like this man! Bookmarked!

Oh my goodness! an incredible post dude.

It goes without saying I also love the design of your website, quite fresh. Cheers.

Of course, the devious links are still there, only now they’re consistently found in the commenters’ websites and email addresses, which allude to things like diet pills, fire arms, school loans, and MP3s. Something else I noticed is that the broken-English language that spam employs is becoming more colloquial (dude), making it a little harder to spot. At least we’re getting noticed, even if it is by bots. Guess we should take it as a compliment.

Wal-Mart’s news comes on the heels of a major expansion from online grocery giant Peapod.com, and just a couple of months after Meijer, a Midwest retail chain, announced its plans to sell about 5,000 non-perishable products through their site.

Grocery shopping has long been a necessary evil for many –- one of those chores that comes with long lines, crowded aisles and very little in the way of convenience. Based on all of this recent news, this year could be the year that sees online grocery shopping break out in a big way. (Trader Joe’s, I hope you’re listening.)

What remains to be seen is how some of the mainstays of brick-and-mortar food shopping translates to eCommerce. For instance, will grocers find a way to accept coupons from the Sunday paper? Will they be able to double coupons? How will they prevent coupon fraud if manufacturers’ coupons aren’t collected?

As it turns out, this trend was much bigger than my living room. According to this article in the New York Times, online sales on Thanksgiving Day increased 33 percent over last year to $407 million. That’s a dramatic increase no matter how you slice it, and it could signify a sea change in holiday shopping.

Today is Cyber Monday, the traditional start to the online holiday shopping season. Already today, I’ve received no less than 50 emails touting sales and one-day-only bargains – some of which are truly lackluster compared to the door busters found at brick-and-mortars. I’ve started deleting the emails now without reading them. It’s too much. While online shopping helps consumers avoid crowds, this proliferation of marketing is the online equivalent of a packed mall; it can over-stimulate consumers into complacency.

Learning from what’s already happened this year is the perfect way to prepare for next year. Savvy retailers will start early, and market directly to those shoppers who are taking time away from the turkey to shop online. After all, these are the same people who are spending time with family and friends who they will eventually be buying holiday gifts for. Get to them while the gift ideas are fresh in their minds, and give them an incentive for being a smart, early shopper.

According to a survey taken by ComScore Inc. shoppers are responding to customer submitted product reviews in much higher numbers than in years past. We have seen product reviews getting love here, but seeing it happen market-wide to retailers both large and small just makes it that much more apparent and important. People shopping on the web are becoming more savvy to the limitations of in-store shopping and using the resources offered to make more informed decisions before taking the bait.

A smaller but still significant amount of people are members of company Facebook pages or using their friend’s Facebook recommendations to shop (6% and 7% respectively) while others still are following Twitter for deals and gift ideas.

“I think we are getting our first real glimpse at the impact social media will play on commerce as we enter the next decade.” – comScore chairman, Gian Fulgoni.

There is still a lot of ground to cover but with Twitter opening up the firehose for more 3rd party applications, Google search going real time and Facebook actually starting to generate revenue as ad spending in offline sources like print and television decline, this trend has nowhere to go but up.

Google Goes Real Time

What does that mean for ecommerce, though? First and foremost it means get on Twitter, Facebook and Myspace and use them to your advantage. It means stay abreast of the shopping space you are a part of. It means use Twitter to provide coupons and Facebook to dish out Promo codes. It means create an incentive for customers to not only pay attention (and by proxy lend credibility) to you, but to actively engage your business. You obviously can’t personally reply to every single Facebook message or tweet that mentions you, nor should you, but you can certainly foster a conversation with and among your customers to create and exploit this unprecedented level of interactivity.

“Our users will get the results as they are produced.” – Amit Singhal

Another thing you have to pay attention to is that even though you’re working on getting your copy right and code clean and keywords in place – you may still be trumped when a twitter link scrolls in and takes your bite. This is the flipside of the nearly hypodermic interaction that social media applications create between you and your customer and, if you aren’t careful, can serve to take your business and branding out of the equation. But again, making sure you are an active and positive member of these communities will help to bring in these wandering members of your herd.

In so much as the aforementioned sounds alarming, this next bit should sound quite comforting (hopefully.) If you’re reading this, you’re probably aware of and stay on top of your Twitter account, regularly update your facebook page, check your industry blogs and update your own blog. If that is the case your reward will be top billing on Google, thanks to your adoring fans, in addition to a savvy marketing campaign (and also, how cool is this feature??)

If not, well, there is no time like the present…

Anyway, I just wanted to post a quick aside about the 3 Wolf Tee meme that has made it off the internet and into the mainstream media (BBC, Washington Post) and some of the more interesting and applicable aspects of this phenomenon.

User reviews and creative content made this product a hit.

By all means, the 3 Wolf Tee seems an exception to the rule for most retail descriptions. Nobody is going to openly ridicule their products or allow reviewers to do so with such impunity, regardless of how funny it turns out. But this particular tee’s sales have put the t-shirt maker’s kids through college in a matter of months, and that’s nothing to scoff at.

It’s easy to write these sales off to the 4chan/collegehumor set and watch as the sales ebb and the meme recedes into the waters of the Rickroll and All Your Base Are Belong To Us, which it will inevitably do, but that is shortsighted and counterproductive. User reviews and creative content have made this product a hit. No matter how you look at it, when it comes down to it, people buy products when they like the presentation.

Whether you use informative product descriptions, social networking, creative reviews or capture attention with potent ads; you must engage your online customers. Use humor, be descriptive, use irony, talk directly to your audience, be human; these characteristics don’t only drive sales, they drive loyalty.

Search Engine Optimization isn’t the only reason for site content.

Although search engine optimization is obviously essential to any ecommerce business’s copy; creative and brand-aware content is equally important. Where would Woot be without their amazing descriptions? Why can American Apparel reference church burning humorously? Why does Haband use cliché slogans and sales lines? These sites owe their success to using creative language geared toward their demographic as an intrinsic element of their branding and site content, and do so very well.

Your content doesn’t have to be funny or hip, (Woot and American Apparel are kind of paragons in these categories) and it often won’t make sense to your business plan to be that way, but your content has to speak to your audience. Reading product specs is about as fun as reading the tag of a shirt and consequently makes shopping about that much fun. Make your products unique, differentiate yourself from the competition and I can guarantee that chicks will adore you, the god’s will smite your enemies and all that is righteous and holy will be yours for the taking.

The day before the download was released; we all got an email saying this:

THANK YOU FOR ORDERING ‘IN RAINBOWS’.
THE LINK BELOW IS YOUR UNIQUE DOWNLOAD ACTIVATION CODE.
PLEASE CLICK ON THE LINK OR CUT AND PASTE INTO YOUR BROWSER TO OBTAIN YOUR DOWNLOAD.
IF YOUR LINK APPEARS AS TWO SEPARATE LINES, PLEASE CUT AND PASTE THEM CAREFULLY INTO YOUR BROWSER.
THE ALBUM WILL COME AS A 48.4MB ZIP FILE CONTAINING 10 X 160KBPS DRM FREE MP3s.
MOST COMPUTERS NOW HAVE ZIP SOFTWARE AS PART OF THE OPERATING SYSTEM; IF YOUR COMPUTER DOES NOT,
YOU CAN DOWNLOAD IT HERE
PC: http://www.winzip.com/
MAC: http://www.maczipit.com/
IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS OR PROBLEMS DOWNLOADING YOUR FILE, PLEASE CONTACT OUR DOWNLOAD CUSTOMER SERVICE TEAM: downloadinrainbows@waste.uk.com
WE HOPE YOU ENJOY ‘IN RAINBOWS’.

http://cdn1.inrainbows.co.uk/inrainbows.zip?ON=328520-316855-0&

UN=info@weblinc.com&AC=c43c7b9e87089bf4148f5931c33f01f7

Now, most of the listening public doesn’t care one way or the other about the specifics of download quality, but for sound-sensitive Radiohead fans and tech savvy music downloaders, a download at 160 kbps is extremely sub-par, even for a promo, especially when the rest of their catalog is available at 320 kbps. They did give the option of paying nothing, so I guess the idea that it’s no more than a promotional release for the CD and vinyl shouldn’t be too hard to swallow.

Blogs around the world have been having mixed reactions to the bit rate quality, with most saying they are disappointed in the quality, but happy with the album itself (it really is quite good). Many of us are just going to listen to this download until the discbox comes out when we will get the higher quality sound whilst the majority will wait for the discbox to come out and steal the better rated rip from a torrent site. But in the end, how is this feedback affecting Radiohead as a band?

They have revolutionized the way music is distributed, that’s for sure. But by using the aforementioned shady tactics to get people to use this new system and almost forcing those of us who love the depth and richness of Radiohead to buy the CD, it seems in poor taste to release it for any money at all. As most of us know, nearly every album released is leaked beforehand on torrent sites, so Radiohead is essentially subverting this process and making folks pay a buck for it.

Radiohead knows it is a bankable entity. Their fan base, while being passionate about the sound quality, is even more passionate about the band. So we all got the download and most of us will get the CD. But the bigger factor that affects those outside of the art-rock scene and the crowd that is willing to pay $80 for a band’s release is the manner in which the music was distributed. They created a huge buzz not just for the album, which is their first in 4 years, but mainly for the manner they are selling it in. It really shows the power of a creative online selling strategy coupled with a strong brand. For example, if a small time act tried this, it would pass completely unnoticed but the fact that Radiohead was in this particular place and time (sans label and with a new album to release) and with their particular status among music fans, it was like a perfect storm coming together. They seized an opportunity that presented itself and have pulled it off quite well, even if they somewhat underhandedly “sold” a low quality download as a promo for the real deal later in the year. Just think how much less attention this would have gotten if they hadn’t used the online market to first, create a fervor about an upcoming album, then allowed fans to choose their own price, which no band has ever done before.

So now they are the talk of the music world with more than a million downloads since the 10th, turning the music world on its head by using their remarkable branding power to give notoriously hard to please fans a low quality recording and still getting kudos for it. I’m not sure if it’s just how good the music is, the fact that the disc comes out in December and all the angry fans will just steal it or whether the practice was innovative enough to let it all slide, but there is certainly a lesson about branding and ecommerce here, I’m just too busy dissecting every second of the album to think about it.

So, as the web continued in its participatory trend, marketing practices quickly caught up with social media optimization (SMO). Social media sites were soon adopting many aspects of internet marketing including but not limited to: organic searches, paid searches, banners, newsletters, partnerships, affiliate sites, etc. The list goes on and on.

So after all the shrapnel falls and the dust clears, which scheme works better? Will it be paid ads or grassroots style, get-your-hands-dirty marketing tactics that comes out on top?

The answer lies in a 12 month study conducted by Marketing Experiments meant to challenge the notion that paid ads will produce more traffic and consequently better ROI than blogging and creating solid content. What was discovered was that developing cogent and honest content, posting that content in blogs and other social media outlets and then actually paying attention to the responses and creating a dialogue will garner extremely effective results.

And don’t let the fact that this is an emerging field fool you. SMO practices are fast becoming the standard and waiting on them now will leave your tactics flaccid and banal like a future version of our aforementioned Viagra salesman.

First and foremost, you must know your audience. You must understand what sites they use, what they might want to look at or what they find interesting and then capitalize on it. You’ve got to develop creative content that is both relevant to the site it’s on and applicable to your brand.

The highlighted Social Media Optimization campaigns used witty, clever, inviting and never-underhanded practices to assuage, engage and finally persuade customers with their products and services. This is a key factor in creating an active dialogue between you and your potential customers. It makes you look like a person with a site, not some faceless corporation with an agenda.

Next, you’ve got to make content specifically for broadcast. Whether it’s a video on YouTube or a post on the Fark message boards, you need to softly push your brand. Use subject matter that’s already out there and develop games, videos, blogs or pitches that pique user’s interests. For example, if you’re selling girl’s tees, get a young woman in on the creation of content, whether she’s in the video or behind the keyboard, and let it get pushed around by others.

Remember, the beauty of an SMO campaign is that you seed the content and they distribute it. The only thing is that it must be brand relevant enough to come back to you, but entertaining or informative enough to be distributed throughout a social network. One site used a game where the user was a “paparazzi” shooting celebrities (sadly, it was with a camera.) The better the shot, the more money and the more money, the further along in the game you go. The game was played by more than 2 million users. The campaign was promoting a movie site targeting a younger demographic and, rather ingeniously, used this video game/celebrity culture lampoon to push their brand.

Finally, you’ve got to become an active member of the communities you’re engaging. It will lend you integrity amongst a young and intelligent crowd that can see a transparent attempt at SMO from miles away, yet is open enough to watch or read anything. So post some content of real value to these sites. Put up random funny videos or comment on topics not related to your business and it will do wonders for your credibility and knowledge about your customers.

In the end, the Marketing Experiments study concluded that Social Media Optimization yielded a nearly unbelievable greater ROI than paid ads, 1,427% to be exact. These examples are really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the constantly evolving avenues that could be traversed for SMO. All it takes is a lot of patience, a little creativity and the tenacity to weather a few misses along with your hits and you can cheaply and effectively promote your brand and build a customer base by engaging customers, learning their likes and dislikes and marketing yourself and your product accordingly.