David Weinberger an graduate in psychology from the University of Toronto, a book author, a professor and fellow at Harvard Law School at the center for Internet and Society has recently shared his opinion on the positive effects of the messiness of information on trendhunter.com. I listend to his interesting thoughts and wanted to share it with you immediatly!

To put it into a nutshell David Weinberger discusses the effects of miscellaneous ideas.

Everything has lots of different attributes, but people only pay focus to certain attributes depending on what is trying to be achieved. In order to illustrate the basic idea of his concept he lists some attributes of „simple“ strawberries (= colour, weight, size, taste, history, generic information). But only attributes that are important for what a person is planning to use strawberries for really matter. „Let’s say we want to cook – taste matters most; if we want to use them for decoration, colour and size might play a more important role.“ David Weinberger explaines his example. Due to the information overload problem in the 90ies, companies tried to come up with a solution. The solution was in fact to generate even more information and more mata data. As a result, there is messiness, but the good thing is that there is information in messiness, and businesses need this chaos to succeed and be creative. Efficient companies that are structuring and organizing information well are not very smart because they loose a lot of information by being (too) efficient. The reason is that such companies risk to eliminate creative messy intersections where innovative ideas are most likely to occur.

Moreover does a tremendous amount of information come from users, customers and employees. In order to collect most of this (free) data, companies should try to give them a platform in order to gather and collect their information which gives companies a broader source of data to retrieve information from. Consequently, by mining through this shared information, a hugh potential to find new products or markets can be set free.

Another interesting aspect David Weinberger mentioned in his video is that even “unfinished” information together with meta information about the primary information such as medical studies and a note explaining that it is still work in progress is of tremendous value as other users might start working on or adding to that “unfinished” first bit of information.

This was an outline of the points that I found really interesting and worth spending a second thought on. If you want to dig deeper into the unlimited world of information and it’s impact on science and business, check out this video: http://www.trendhunter.com/keynote/david-weinberger!

According to SEOmoz inbound links still account for up to 42% of a website’s ability to rank, far more than any other factor. Therefore I think it’s worth dedicating a blog entry and taking a closer look on the best and most promising ways to connect your website with others. An underlying key to all linking strategies is to create great content on your page that adds value for your consumers and other websites. The most natural way to do link building is also the thoughest one: the holistic approach. This inculdes the creation of lots of high quality, viral, educational and/or entertaining content on a regular basis. In this way a website has more opportunities to capture inbound links. Additionally to Content Marketing, I want to draw your attention to other tools that contribute to a higher page rank.

But instead of listing 10 or more tips, I did some research and want to share the top 2 that are mentioned on “every” website that claims to know how to build inbound links.

Networking is not only important in the offline business world but also online in the form of partnerships. Try to find strategic partners with similar companies or at least in the same industry and share links and content. In order to make it easier for potentially interested partners, try to add a snippet of code they can paste into the “partners” section of their website that will display your logo and a link back to your site every time you send out a new customer email. A more prudent and „personal“ approach is to ask clients for links and establish a „Client & Vendor“- Relationship. It is often helpful to offer to be a testimonial for a vendors website in order to increase inbound links from suppliers. As you see, the give-and-take-basis also prevails online!

The internet is a perfect tool to engage with others and encourage participation. By inviting others and allowing guest blog posts on your own blog, you are practically guaranteed inbound links, as guest bloggers are very likely to promote their original content (published on your blog) to others in social media and on their web properties. Of course, this also works the other way round – so try to actively seek out opportunities to guest post on others’ blogs and link back to your own website. Moreover you should not only try to get involved with other bloggers but also in communities and forums that mention keywords and phrases that are relevant for your company. But keep in mind not to get too aggressive 😉

Having pointed out the importance and power of video marketing in earlier blog entries, I would like to focus on how to optimize video for search engines today. Due to the fact that Youtube is the most famous video website and a lot of companies have already established their own Youtube channel I will focus on SEO for Youtube. As with any other website SEO starts with identifying the right keywords. So always keep in mind that keyword research is a crucial step when it comes to SEO!

A video’s title should contain the keywords or keyword phrase chosen for which your business wants to get found. A good example provided by Mitchell Harper, co-founder of BigCommerce to illustrate how to design a good and effective “SEO-title” is the following: “Let’s say your company sells shoes and you just recorded and uploaded a video about “casual sneakers.” You want to use the phrase in the title twice to maximize SEO impact –- once at the front and once at the end, like this: “Casual Sneakers — How to Choose Casual Sneakers 101.”

The next point is the description that can comprise 2-3 sentences including the keywords or variations of keywords. It is also smart to include a link to your website in order to drive traffic back to your website. Make sure that CTA is on the page the link drives traffic to in order to reinforce desired conversions.

When we talk about SEO, tags always play an important role and SEO for Youtube is no exeption. It is most effective to add at least 5 keywords ad tags for your video that will help to associate your video with other tagged videos. As a result your video will be shown as a „related video“ and users that were originally watching a similar video might also click on your video resulting in additional views.

The other night I went out with friends and as always they order Red Bull and as always I said: „I can’t understand why you love that sweet drink so much – I don’t like it“. After trying to convince me how „effective“ Red Bull is and that it is what coffee is during the day, one of my friends closed his arguments with:“Even if you don’t like the taste, you gotta love this brand because of it’s spirit – just check out their facebook-fan page!“ So I did. And I have to admit, that it is indeed a pretty impressive fan page, where even non-Red Bull-fans like to spend sometime and experience the Red Bull adventures.

After doing some research on different company’s facebook fanpages, I came across this former fanpage approach by Red Bull, which I personally think is a good way to get people involved and a perfect example for CTA (call to action).

On the other hand it would have kept people like me from being able to enjoy Red Bull’s videos and other interesting material posted on the wall which consequently would have kept me from reassessing my opinion about the brand and the values that come with it. Apart form that Red Bull still gets interested users to interact with the company and other users by launching games like the new Red Bull Timeline Timewrap. Some serious prizes are at stake – if this makes you curious, here is the link and GOOD LUCK! 😉

In case you are now thinking the same as I did after having taken a look at a B2C fanpages – „so, yeah… it’s easy to set up an successful B2C fanpage but what about companies that opperate only with other businesses?!“ – let’s have a look at Neenah Paper’s fanpage.

Neenah Paper does a great job engaging with it’s users. In order to create a link between their online and offline appearance they have an event section on their fan page which lists all of their upcoming events. Apart from that you can also browse through and have a look at the variety of colours and textures they offer and find the right paper for you job.

Something (unlike many other companies) Neenah Paper choses not to have is a Twitter, YouTube or Flickr account associated with their facebook page. Below you see how other companies like cisco have their other social network accounts associated with their facebook fanpage.

Here is a very informative slideshow on what to pay attention to concerning B2B fanpages – check it out!

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Click here and watch: You Oughta Know Inbound Marketing

Traditional or outbound marketing focuses on finding customers, whereas Inbound Marketing is marketing focused on getting found by customers.

Techniques used in outbound are rather poorly targeted and that interrupt (potential) customers. Examples for outbound marketing are cold-calling, print advertising, T.V. advertising, junk mail, spam, and trade shows.

Technologies like Caller ID, TiVo, spam filters and tools like RSS are making these outbound techniques less and less effective. Admittedly, companies using traditional marketing only are still able to get their message out via these channels, but print and display advertising just cost more.

It is therefore much more efficient to create ways and tools of marketing like videos and blogs that people WANT to see or read rather than interrupting people with television ads or using hugh amounts of the marketing budget for buying display ads in print publications.

I think this quote (by Rick Burnes) best illustrates the idea of indbound marketing in contrast to outbound marketing: “Instead of driving their message into a crowd over and over again like a sledgehammer, they attract highly qualified customers to their business like a magnet.“

Although we have all seen this coming, it will be the year 2012 when – for the first time – online ad spending will exceed the total amount spent on newspapers and print magazines, according to eMarketer. By the end of this year, online ad spending will increase up to almost $40 billion, while total print spending will be $33.8 billion. eMarketer even predicts online ad spending to grow over the next five years and reach $62 billion. In the same period of time print advertising will remain stagnant or might even slightly decrease to $32.3 billion by 2016. Market watcher Forrester Research sees online advertising in an even more prosperous light and estimates total online ad spending to be $77 billion by 2016, comprising 35% of overall ad spending.

But don’t worry, we don’t have to be concerned about the future of television advertising. Although the gap between television advertising and online advertising will shrink significantly over the next couple of years, television ad spending (in the U.S.) will continue to grow on a moderate level.

We can currently not only observe a shift from print to online marketing but also a shift within online advertising. Mobile ads is expected to overtake all kind of other online marketing channels this year and will take 15 percent of global online ad spend by 2016, according to research firm Berg Insight.

Berg pointed out that companies are now willing to launch full campaigns on mobile – increasingly integrating mobile advertising in their media mix – whereas they have been applying mobile ads in a more experimental way until now.

If one wants to make sure, that a trend is industry changig, one only has to look at what big marketing spenders do – so let’s have a look at Coca-Cola! Coca-Cola spent more than $2.9 billion on advertising in 2010 AND Coca-Cola invests more in mobile and social media as they go hand in hand and Coca Cola is constantly using both to further engage with their customers. In order to have them interact even more with their brand, they ran a banner ad via Hallmark’s Ultimate Holiday iPhone application last year, offering users a chance to win a Playstation prize.

As marketer also want to reach us, consumers while we are on our mobile phones and tablets and my feeling that we are caring less and less about where content comes from, television channels and Internet content may blur in the near future!

In my last blog entry I was talking about the evolution of email accounts and the convenience of the Priority Inbox for users and the opportunities for marketers. In order to better explain how this works, I added a link to an Gmail-video. After realizing how much impact that video had on me and how I could picture myself coming home from a smartphone-free weekend not having to wear my suit of armour while checking my emails, I thought about the tremendous emotional influence videos can have – especially the ones that are recommended by friends. “The use of video as the central organizing element for social interaction and storytelling online“ is referred to as ‘Social Video’ Marketing (Definition by Advertising Age in 2009).

According to a recently conducted study by Decipher Research, viewers are far more likely to recall a brand name and engage with an ad’s message if a branded video has been recommended to them by a peer. This made me think of the most striking advertisments I remember – have a look and tell me what you think about them and if you have enjoyed them watching as much as I did.

Snickers Football Game

Old Spice Guy

Evian Baby Rollers

and my all-time favourite Heineken Fridge

Apart from the fact that I think that they are hilarious, they have three more things in common. Although those videos are the ones that come to my mind whenever I think about successful advertising, I have never ever seen one of them on television but they were all – without exception – recommended by friends or posted on their walls on various social networks. Exactly this phenomenon was proven by the survey. Social video recommendations have a direct impact on traditional brand metrics and ad enjoyment.

Here are some striking results:

• Brand recall and brand association rose 7 percent among viewers who had peers recommend the videos versus viewers who found it by browsing
• 73 percent of respondents who viewed a peer-recommended video recalled the brand when prompted versus 68 percent of viewers who had browsed to the video directly;
• People who enjoyed a video were 97 percent more likely to purchase the product featured in the video.

Although I’m in possession of a smartphone and sometimes even in obsession with it, I occasionally leave my phone at home when I go away for the weekend and spend a couple of days without constantly checking socialnetworks or my emails. Although a „weekend off“ can be relaxing, the first time back in „real life“ isn’t so much – 53 new emails to be looked through on a Monday morning is not exactly how I like to start a week.

Gmail and Hotmail presented a new tool called Priority Inbox. This feature automatically identifies important emails and separates them from other received emails in order to help users to focus on the content that matters to them most. This feature operates on a complex set of algorithms that can analyse a user’s email behaviour. In addition, you can also mark certain senders as priority by teaching Google to interpret your mail properly by clicking either the “mark as important” or “mark as not important” buttons.To get a first insight into this advanced email delivery, check out this video!

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But what does this mean for emarketers? How will the future of email marketing be affected by the Priority inbox?

Just like the Spamfilters, the Priority inbox does not ultimately represent a danger to email marketing but – correctly addressed- can also represent a challenge and opportunity for companies using email marketing. Mailers that might suffer from this new development are those that send generic mails en masse and do not emphasize on personalized content. But in my opinion, this is just another advantage about the Priority Inbox! Just as any other form of communication, emails to your subscribers should be relevant, welcome and of interest for your companies customer. I personally only engage with emails if they are part of an ongoing conversation or interaction. One way of starting a – in the best case scenario – long lasting customer relationship is to implement a double opt-in sign-up form. This process requires the potential customer to sign up via an opt-in form and then confirm via e-mail and ensures that marketers only address „engaged“ users in the future. To open the first e-mail and click the confirmation link is probably the biggest barrier to overcome and best way of making sure to land into the „right“ inbox.

Although I think that spamfilters are the best invention after the email itself, I’m sometimes happy to receive marketing campaigns and discover offers that I didn’t even know I was interested in – so, I guess Steve jobs was definately right, when he said that „ A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.“

Therefore having personalized, tailored marketing emails be allowed in my priority box (so I can make sure not to miss a great but only temporary offer on Groupon or SocialLiving) is a smart tool for me!

If you (just as I am) are one out of three mobile phone users, you probably read this on your smartphone!? A recently conducted study by Nielson revealed that over 43% of all US mobile phone owners have a smartphone as of October 2011 and that even 62% of the so-called „Generation App“ (people aging 25-34 years) own Smartphones.

Nowadays we are not only looking for local information, companies, news, services and deals on our PCs while we are at home, but rather on our smartphones or our tablets while we are on the go. Greg Sterling, senior analyst with San Francisco-based consultancy Opus Research says SoLoMo „[…] is about getting nearby information on demand, wherever you may be.”

Although I would consider myself rather as being part oft he Late Majority (regarding to The Everett Rogers Diffusion of innovations theory), one of my friends is an “E-Fan” or let’s say Early Adopter, in order to stick to technical terms ;). She has just recently brought my attention to a great app Starbucks offers. Starbucks uses geo-location tactics, in order to facilitate life for shoppers craving a cup of nice coffee by showing the closest store to the consumer’s current location as a result of using the app. Here I have a video for you to show how easy such applications are to use.

Moreover companies like DDR Corp., which owns hundreds of U.S. shopping centers, take it to the next level and incorporate a so-called geofencing technology. DDR Corp. does not only offer information as the customer „pulls“ but also „pushes“ information (by texting deals from retail tenants within those malls) on their smartphones as soon as the customer enters a mall’s border. For those of you who are concerned about protection of data privacy, geofencing – similar to Canada’s anti-spam legislation (CASL) – takes a Consumer opt-in approach. So, only those shoppers who enter a mall’s border and who additionally have opted-in to the service receive text messages about sales, special offers and promotions happening in real time.

SoMoLo makes it possible for companies to offer consumers a highly-personalized shopping experience — and I think not only the technology is ready now, but so are we!

Facebook, Ebay, XBox Live, Starbucks, Nike, FourSquare, Linkedin, Hallmark and many more big companies have done it successfully – Gamifying their websites in order to increase the time spent on their website and return visits and as a result foster customer engagement and loyalty which often turns into higher sales.

In 2010 67% of U.S. households played video games and the average gamer spent 8 hours a week playing video games. The number of online shoppers is constantly increasing, amounting to 87,5% in 2011 in the U.S. Looking at those numbers, I think it was only a matter of time that marketers find a way of combining those activities and provide an unique online experience to internet users and specifically their company’s customers.

Gabe Zichermann, the author of the new book Gamification by Design defines Gamification as „the process of using game thinking and game mechanics to engage audiences and solve problems“. It is important to add the 3 Fs (Feedback, Friends, Fun) to a customer online experience in order to keep customers engaged, motivated and coming back to a company’s website.

In this context Feedback is the process of providing users information on how they are doing. I personally think it is a great and motivating way to be shown collected points, a progress bar or popup notifications that make you want to „work“ even harder! Another way of engaging community members is to offer real-world rewards and perks. But it is not only motivating to receive (positive) feedback but also to share achievements with your friends via social networks. It is also fun to invite friends for a specific activity as part of the gameplay and share the experience, joy and exitement of playing or „running online“ as it is the case with NikeiD! Another way of connecting with people (or sporty fellows ;)) online is via User Generated Content like uploading pictures, video or posting comments on the webpage. All this is part of viral marketing and represents a powerfull tool to increase brandawareness.

Regarding Gamification from a marketers point of view, the challenge is to find a balance between providing unexpected delight to customers and long-term, results-oriented fun because – I think that is something we all can agree on – games and fun in general is a powerful force for behavior change.

In case you haven’t already been confrontated, overwhelmed or have even become addicted by some „gamified websites“, take a look at 5 brands with winning gamification strategies – I’m sure you will enjoy it!