Economists are predicting a very slow retail holiday, especially with autumn already in a slump. Online retailers stand to weather the storm a bit better, turning to search marketing, site redesign and refinement, and other ecommerce technologies to squeeze every dollar from their limited budgets.

Surveys and predictions for this retail season abound.

• 43% of consumers will spend more time shopping around.
• 95% of online shoppers report that free shipping influences their purchases, preferring to shop at retailers that usually offer free shipping, and 78% report that expensive shipping prevents them from shopping online.
• Nielson reports 35% plan to spend less, 6% more, and 50% the same this year
• 31% of consumers will start holiday shopping before Halloween and 57% will start before Thanksgiving.
• 66% will use coupons and take their time shopping if it means more savings. and spend more time shopping around for bargains.
• 59% will spend less due to economic hardships such as higher food and gasoline prices.
• 26% of consumers plan to spend less, 11% expect to spend more, and 63% about the same
• 60% say they will change where they shop to get the best price.
• 53% will drop brand loyalties to save money.
• Online discounts and sales will influence 83% of web shoppers.
• 52% plan to buy fewer gifts this year.

I think this year will also show that shoppers are becoming “better” at searching so that long-tail, brand specific search campaigns may show gains. Features such as Google suggest may alter the profile of the amateur searcher helping to drive branded searches to more accurate product page landings. People who have set up paid search to match these long-tail searches will be well positioned to reap increases in click through rates and quality score.

On the analytics side, while people are jumping around from comparison engine to website to review page, it may be a challenge to attribute sales to specific ads or search campaigns.

I hope all of you buck the trend and have a great holiday season.

Binoculars photo by raebrune used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License

… the results were fascinating.

* Search engine optimization (36%, 149 Votes)
* Blogging (33%, 134 Votes)
* Pay per click (26%, 107 Votes)
* Email marketing (22%, 89 Votes)
* Social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn) (21%, 86 Votes)
* Blogger relations/blog PR (14%, 56 Votes)
* Microblogging (Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku) (11%, 47 Votes)
* Affiliate marketing (11%, 47 Votes)
* Advertorial (NewsForce, AdFusion) (10%, 40 Votes)
* Video marketing (7%, 29 Votes)
* Corporate Website (7%) (This pattern was echoed here)

Why do so many who call me want to just spend their entire budget on their website but ignore Social Media and blogging? (I’m wondering if my business name needs to change soon) I think a lot of company decision makers are confused about the benefit from trackbacks or RSS subscribers on blogs or the methods needed for effective social media relations, even though marketers seem to be whispering it in their ear more loudly now.  Some know it’s important but are unwilling to take the leap to doing it right.

But that doesn’t hold a candle to the level of confusion out there about SEO. Executing a well-thought out SEO strategy requires an immense amount of education for most clients.

One question I have…Where is testing on this list? Isn’t offer optimization part of marketing? What about post-click analytics and focusing on finding the right offer to roll back into the SEO, Blogging and PPC engine? I think it would have been interesting to learn who, if anyone is doing this with any regularity.

I guess in the minds of the participants testing and optimization are simply part of the activity itself.

As you can see, these guys handled the situation - and took control of the room, leaving anyone willing to read more than the first few posts with a very positive sense that Carbonite has its act together. Mozy, on the other hand, did not participate in the discussion.

First, what’s at stake. As the discussion continued, Google ranked the blog higher and higher in the SERPs for search “carbonite vs. mozy” - not good for Carbonite.

In my opinion, this kind of damage control can only be done when the executives and customer support leaders of an organization stay totally on top of everything being said about their brand. They cannot address every little technical issue being said, but can watch for strongly worded negative posts and comments - to represent their brand and be sure there’s not just misunderstandings being spread around as facts.

It was a textbook case of damage control, so I’ve deconstructed it a bit, color coding the emotional reaction I had, as a potential customer, to what was being said in the conversation. This is not scientific, so feel free to chime in with your own opinions.

Here are the illustrations… enjoy:

PERCEPTION OF CARBONITE

You should read the actual post. My comments are meant to portray the essence of the comments.

Red = Expected Reader Negative Reaction to Carbonite
Green = Expected Reader Positive Reaction to Carbonite
Blue = Neutral/Question

CEO = Carbonite’s CEO, CMS= Carbonite’s Customer Service Manager

PDF version here.

I was impressed with how Carbonite handled this, and thought the emotional coding effect showed an interesting pattern.

The SEMPO study released today offered some good news for Agencies, as 53% of advertisers outsource their organic SEO because it is to hard to stay up-to-date with best practices in-house. 37% say they don’t have the right tools, and 33% say they get more bang for their buck with an outside provider.

But overall, a trend to in-house these efforts is still strong. Forrester research shows least two-thirds of U.S. businesses prefer to keep SEM in-house. In-house training and education efforts will probably continue to improve and drive performance gains.

If you operate an agency, it is clear that conferences such as SMX Advanced, staying in touch with each other online, and participating in groups such as Social Media Club and Sphinn are not only good for networking, but also staying relevant. From the study It is also becoming clear that relationships will become more team-like and less “guru-handoffs” as clients become more savvy and use more advanced in-house tools.

Budget windfalls created by shifting funds in traditional marketing efforts must first pass the scrutiny of decision makers with pressure to develop the SEM function in-house. Agencies must understand these concerns and bring unique propositions and innovation to the table as a part of a team. Development and transfer of skills such as

• Organic SEO Best Practices Proficiency
• Paid Search Campaign Development, Testing
• Analytics and Metrics Mastery
• Experiment Design Proficiency
• CMS and Blog Development Proficiency
• Behavioral Marketing Awareness and Proficiency
• Project Management Skills
• Sociographic, Segmentation, and Engagement driven site execution.
• Copy writing, Link-bait abilities
• Social Media Marketing expertise
• Intimate awareness of Social Bookmarking environments and “culture”
• Link Building Mastery
• Ability to Educate Clients and Departmental Groups (patience)

…will play a major part in the decision process and the way teams are formed.

Agencies will need to plan by mastering skills in unique, innovative ways while working with a growing contingent of in-house talent in the search effort. In this way, we can all share in the strong spending growth - getting the best of both worlds.

Postscript: SEMPO is holding a webinar on in-house vs. agency SEM on June 26 at 12PM ET

• Thirteen percent of Americans age 12 or older (an estimated 33 million people) listened to online radio in the past week.
• Nearly 25% of all Americans age 12 or older have a profile on a social networking Web site such as MySpace, Facebook or Linked-In, nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of online radio do.
• One-third of online radio listeners with a social network profile visit their social networking site nearly every day or several times per day
• The top social networking Web sites among online radio listeners are MySpace and the business professional networking service Linked-In.
• Twenty-eight percent of online radio listeners have a MySpace page.
• Twenty-four percent have a profile on Linked-In.

From an advertiser’s perspective, this means that social media participants, often the sneezers in social media, are listening online. While I’m not advocating interruption marketing strategies, one could make a strong case for participation in talks shows, podcasts, and other web media events held on web radio srouces.

Red emphasis mine.

….There’s a big gap between designers and the majority of users. …. Generally, if you’re a member of a design team, you are not representative of the target audience. I don’t care if you’re the interaction designer, the graphics artist, the information architect, the writer, the programmer, or the marketer. All of these people:

• know too much about the product (be it a website, intranet, application, phone, whatever);
• are too skilled in using computers and the Web in general; and
• care too much about their own baby (so they can’t imaging visitors bouncing after scanning the homepage for 30 seconds — but that’s what outside users do).

- Jakob Nielsen

What I think the post misses, at least when considering web and software design are the potential ways one can use multivariate tests to tease “ideal” designs from data. It requires you leave the ego-centric designer world and trust the information that you’re getting from analytics. I’ve found this to be a tall order, as this attitude spooks those just wanting a website and wanting to impress their boss or peers. They are more apt to choose the designer with a flashy portfolio than the one with the best data-to-design transfer methodology. This is such a shame when it comes to long-term site benefit/profitability.

Many web designers think “Users should be able to…” far too much.

It could just be the designers I know. I’m certain there are some out there with the skills necessary to dig into the user reactions and analytics as one of their design tools.

If you thought it’s easy to get to Google, think again. In our current round of usability research, only 76% of users who expressed a desire to run a Google search were successful. In other words, 1/4 of users who wanted to use Google couldn’t do so. (Instead, they either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine — usually whatever type-in field happened to be at hand.) - Jakob Nielsen

Chew on that for a minute. Google is the simplest website I know of.

If it turns out that 25% cannot, so how well will your flash-embellished, cascading menu website going to work?

Join My Team… it’s #117081.

Folding@home is a distributed computing project, that very simply stated, studies protein folding and misfolding. Protein folding is explained in more detail in the scientific background section.

Folding@home does not rely on powerful supercomputers for its data processing; instead, the primary contributors to the Folding@home project are many hundreds of thousands of personal computer users who have installed a small client program. The client will, at the user’s choice, run in the background, utilizing otherwise unused CPU power, or run as a screensaver only while the user is away. In most modern personal computers, the CPU is rarely used to its full capacity at all times; the Folding@home client takes advantage of this unused processing power.

The Folding@home client periodically connects to a server to retrieve “work units,” which are packets of data upon which to perform calculations. Each completed work unit is then sent back to the server. As data integrity is a major concern for all distributed computing projects, all work units are validated through the use of a 2048 bit digital signature.

Contributors to Folding@home may have user names used to keep track of their contributions. Each user may be running the client on one or more CPUs; for example, a user with two computers could run the client on both of them. Users may also contribute under one or more team names; many different users may join together to form a team. Contributors are assigned a score indicating the number and difficulty of completed work units. Rankings and other statistics are posted to the Folding@home website.

With increased Internet use and widespread broadband connectivity, the shift from old to new media is influencing the way people participate in elections, according to a recent report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Not since John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon debated in front of 70 million new television watchers in 1960 have we seen such a change in political media. A wave of changes brought on by Web sites, blogs and social media is being led by the 18- to 30-year-old demographic and is spreading to reach Americans of all ages and backgrounds.

The number of Americans who received political information using the Internet in 2004 was around 13 percent. In the 2008 survey, that number had doubled. In the same period, younger voters using the TV as a major source dropped from 75 percent to 60 percent, while the percent using the Web soared from 21 percent to 46 percent. Daily newspapers have held steady for most of the population, but those under 30 use them half as much as they did in 2004.

And people are getting more active. The system got a taste of this during Congressman Ron Paul’s 2007 campaign, where the Internet’s power to mobilize grass roots efforts (if not votes) was convincingly demonstrated. A powerful, virally energized operation emerged that may form the template for an entirely new way of campaigning. Competitors scrambled to take note of Congressman Paul’s campaign tactics as he broke single-day fundraising records and went from silence to viable effort in the shortest time ever seen.

As impressive as it was, few think Web-based participatory media such as bloggers will move voters to the polls on their own. But the effect on regional, grassroots campaigning is beginning to show its strength. This “final mile” blogger-to-activist effect uses the Internet for efficiency but eventually depends on old-fashioned campaigning like rallies, petitions and meet-ups to actually affect primaries and elections. As was demonstrated, decentralized and passionate young voters, savvy in use of social networks like MySpace and Facebook, began to reach individuals in their community who pick up signs and knock on doors for the first time in their lives.

The “Big 3″ phenomenon lives on today’s Internet, but with a big twist. The largest election news sites include MSNBC, CNN and Yahoo News, together earning 54 percent of all traffic. Unlike television, however, the remaining 46 percent exist in a “long tail” with hundreds of others, from the Drudge Report to Youtube to individual blogs.

One of the most impressive Web sites to emerge is Political Base a brain-child of CNET co-founder Shelby Bonnie and recently joined by Kentucky political veteran and former BluegrassReport.com blogger Mark Nickolas. “We’re trying to capitalize on an electorate that appears energized to change the system by giving them a place where they can learn the issues, explore multiple viewpoints, engage in debate, and mobilize others around their ideas,” explained Nickolas.

On many sites, participation changes conversations from “one to many” into “many to many,” often keeping controversial issues “alive” long after mainstream media has moved on. Watchdogs spot and post candidate inconsistencies and gaffes before campaign managers have a chance to do anything (and long after they’d rather forget.) Last summer, Senator George Allen, a Virginia Republican, was caught calling a college student of Indian descent a “macaca.” The student, who was videotaping, subsequently placed the tape on Youtube, where it was viewed over 250,000 times and was partially blamed for Senator Allen’s defeat.

“There’s no question that participatory media is where the growth is,” added Nickolas, “While the younger generation has embraced this media more than others, that is changing. They have grown-up — placing a premium on real-time interaction, being part of a conversation, or being entertained. Mainstream media tends to offer little of either. We offer users an unfiltered voice regardless of viewpoint. We are committed to providing a place for everyone to join the community.”

Political Base allows users to extract meaning from mountains of data in clean, personalized formats. Nickolas is quick to stress the importance of such tools. “A democracy can’t function without an informed electorate. … Our site gives people tools to connect the dots between money, media and politics to draw their own conclusions.”

It’s well known that people instinctively distrust marketing messages. So it’s no surprise they seek neutral ground for discussion. In fact, the Pew Study shows only 8 percent of Americans are visiting candidates’ Web sites, no matter how snazzy, choosing “unbiased” forums to get their information (or satire sites!) Sites such as Political Base are quick to fill this gap and provide territory for expression and learning. In fact, Political Base provides a user-editable wiki, presented in fact-sheet format. “Accuracy is critical when it comes to the Wiki,” Nickolas replied. “Submissions get approved by us first, and we’ll do some fact checking if necessary.”

With so few of the American voter visiting the candidate websites, it is a clear situation where non-site social media will pay off.  Having others blog about you, being present on large social networks, and saturating video and podcast sites are a big part of campaigning on the long tail.

While the management of Political Base are Democrats, Nickolas stresses their intent is to give equal footing to all points of view. “You may not agree with us, but we offer you the ability to express that, challenging us and others. …That’s what’s great about America.”

photo by will palmer

It’s fun-cool, and has been done before, but it spooks me out in the world of multivariate testing and conversions optimization.

What’s hot:

Studies have shown that sites get only 50 milliseconds to give an impression to users. This site may help us learn what sites are attractive and appealing in a new way. The trouble is our assessment of any site is based on the context of that site, and how it was found. Personalized search results further refine these buckets of intent so the site is more likely to be found by certain people.

What’s not:

Anyone involved in web marketing knows that only through testing can we achieve the beauty of conversions and success for the site owner. To skim over websites and vote entirely on how they appear free from any other information (e.g. the search, PPC or organic, inbound link, intended audience, etc.) is to miss the point. It’s true, often “ugly” landing pages outconvert snazzy flash-based slot machines 3:1. Why encourage sites that look pretty but may not perform or worse, distract business owners from testable designs? I hate to see ego-designers who spend entire web budgets on snazz before knowing if the approach is right.

iPhone Stirred the Mobile Internet marketplace. While the iPhone earned raves for its interface and sleek styling, it still was designed to operate only on the AT&T/Cingular wireless network, lacked a keyboard and did not operate on 3G broadband networks. Buyers still swooped in after the device, buying one million iPhones in 74 days. The iPhone platform readily integrates a number of Internet technologies that will benefit greatly from the planned 3G version in 2008. Still, it’s worth keeping in mind that the iPhone is still only around 1% of the marketshare. Later it was announced that a 3G iPhone will be available soon.

Merger and Aquisition Madness in the Search Advertising Google acquired Internet Advertising Company Doubleclick for $3.1B, Microsoft bought Ad Agency aQuantive (including Avenue A/Razorfish) for $6B, and Yahoo! bought Right Media creating a potential for conflict of interest in the web search advertising giants that some see as an unfair monopoly.

Google’s Street-Level View Google’s “Street View” solutions for Google maps allows a “virtual drive” of certain cities via 360-degree images captured by specially equipped cars. Privacy advocates quickly found people in compromising positions on some images and Google offered a “blur-out request form” on their website. Microsoft’s version garnered some attention as well, showing scenes through the windows of a race car.

Social Media Meets Instant Messaging Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce and other companies surged in popularity as online social networks began to slice information into 150 character chunks called micropublishing or microsyndication. In short, a new way to connect with people (and brands) was born

Social Networks Get a Common Language Google announced the OpenSocial API which allows developers to write one set of code that taps into the data of any participating social network. Adopters included big players LinkedIn, Salesforce.com, MySpace, and Six Apart among many others.

Campaigning Changes with YouTube, Social Networks Politicians scrambled too exploit participatory media as YouTube’s democratic debates in July and week-by-week campaign spotlighting in 2007 gave Campaign Strategists nightmares. Every candidate misstep became viral content viewed by millions while unaffiliated public endorsements outpaced campaign-sponsored content at times. “It’s (like) the soda fountains of the 50s,” he said. “It’s where young people hang out” political consultant Rod Shealy put it. …if you say so…

The Personal GPS Platform Explodes Inexpensive GPS-based devices have gained huge penetration as prices plummeted. This has spawned investment into new Location-Based Services (LBS) which offer a wealth of tools such as traffic routing, social networks, and better ad delivery.

High Speed Wireless Internet Spectrum Auctions Google, Verizon Wireless, AT&T and other smaller companies committed to bid for chunks of the 700 megahertz spectrum that should bring in around $15 Billion to the US Government early in 2008. The frequencies are expected to be used for high speed wireless broadband Internet services.

Google My Location In November, Google, which gets mapping data from both companies, delivered a version of Google Maps for Mobile that uses cell phone towers’ unique signatures to estimate a users’ location, even without GPS.

Internet Radio and SoundExchange Those producing online radio faced a serious dilemma as SoundExchange, a Washington-based group representing record labels and artists introduced new royalty rates and rules for online performances. Online radio sites were used by over 25% of all Internet users. A broad campaign to fight the changes helped to win reprieves on the royalties for some web radio producers.

Internet Telephony Woes Ebay bought Skype for $4.1B in 2005, but wrote down the value of the Web-based communications platform by $1.4B and may be about to sell it to Google. Vonage suffered serious patent infringement losses and was forced to lay off workers and cut back on feature roll outs.

Viacom Sues YouTube Viacom sued YouTube’s parent company Google for $1-billion in damages as a result of 160,000 unauthorized videos collectively viewed over 1.5 billion times. The suit seeks removal of the videos as well as the monetary damages and an injunction prohibiting Google, which purchased the video-sharing site for $1.76 billion last year, from further infringement on Viacom copyrights. Google promptly adds filtering technology to YouTube.

Newspapers Keep Struggling Jobs were slashed at large newspapers as busy Americans continued a 20-year trend to turn to the Internet, all-news radio and cable television causing newspaper circulation to plunge. Advertisers are wary to spend as much on print but while newspapers race to grow online editions, ad revenues do not compare with previous levels. The Washington Post bought online magazine superpower Slate in an attempt to increase its move online.

Record Labels Get Slapped by RadioHead The popular band RadioHead announced their album In Rainbows online, without a record label, for “whatever listeners want to pay.” The effect was to set a precedent for what some see as the end of the traditional music industry in the next decade. One thing is for sure, it’s changing.

Facebook Passes 50M Users The social media platform passed 50 million subscribers and a valuation of over $15B including a quarter of a billion dollar investment from Microsoft. Developers worldwide applauded the move to open up Facebook to 3rd party developers, and Microsoft immediately got involved with investments and high-powered developer tools such as the Facebook Development Toolkit. Developers (and Advertisers) can build full featured applications and link them to programs with users’ profiles and navigation. Facebook launched its Beacon advertising system, causing an uproar because of its opt-out nature. Later, founder Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the system being too aggressive in showing ads to users.

Amazon Releases Kindle to Mixed Reviews Amazon released its electronic book reader and wireless platform, Kindle, and while the device itself wasn’t universally loved, it could mark the start of a whole new industry for digital ink and collaborative literature.

Microsoft Office Competition Google Released Google Apps Premier and began giving away StarOffice in Google Pack for free, offering a powerful on and offline alternative to Microsoft Office. The new Google programs also include presentation tool Google Presentations, a competitor to Microsoft PowerPoint.