Month: September 2012

There are many channels for people like you and me to share information, obtain information, or exchange ideas. We share information such as shopping experience, product reviews, and restaurant reviews. We now rely less on traditional institutions (e.g. calling the company to inquire product information). As a result, we consumers gain more purchasing power from knowing more information. We call this social trend the Groundswell Technology Trend. Today, I want to give examples on two Groundswell Technology–mobile applications and persuasive videos.

Mobile Applications: Smart phones allow customers to obtain and share information at anyplace, at anytime through applications. For example, “Gas Buddy-Find Cheap Gas Prices” , an iPhone app, helps users to save money by permitting users to share where to find cheap gas. Gas Buddy classifies gas stations into different geographical areas (e.g. Richmond, Vancouver, Surrey) and by gas type (e.g Regular, midgrade, premium). You can search by city, state, or zip. It is widely popular because it actually helps people saving people without any hurdles. Customers are empowered by this kind of applications because they can now easily compare gas prices. They can choose to fill up their gas at the possible cheapest price at no searching cost.

Persuasive Videos:  Consumers are also empowered by spreading influence through creating persuasive videos. Online channels such as Youtube enable consumers to cheaply create commentary videos. There are many fashion gurus who frequently post videos about product reviews and shopping hauls to share their opinion. For example, if they had a good shopping experience at Forever 21, they would create videos about their shopping experience and comment on their shopping haul. If consumers hears negative comments about certain brands or companies, these companies will be out of their consideration when they need to buy something.

Persuasive videos also give companies an opportunity to listen to their real customers. For example, if customer A has a dissatisfied shopping experience at Store ABC and shared his/her experience in Youtube channel, companies can improve on their customer service.

Alternatively, companies can create their own videos to provide information to their customers. For example, Bobbi Brown frequently updates its customers of its new products and teaches its customers how to apply these products. This way, customers can have a rough idea about Bobbi Brown’s products before checking them out at physical stores.

Like a typical web browser, I click on the first few links that shows up when I use search engines to look for something–From what I learnt, links are displayed according to relevance and more likely to be useful. The links at the bottom of search results and in page 2 and beyond are usually left behind unless I couldn’t find what I am looking for in the first few links.

Therefore, businesses always want their links at the top to be exposed to Internet users. Most people might already heard of SEO. For those who don’t know any concepts about e-marketing, SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization–The purpose of hiring an SEO is to improve websites and move up the links to the top of the search results. Services provided SEO include: reviewing website content or structure, advising website developments, keyword search, etc.

Another alternative to get your websites at the top of search results is by paying Google. However, keep in mind that there are two sections in search results: organic results and paid advertisements. Personally, I ignore the links that are in the paid advertisements area because I always assume these links are just like any other links that are at the bottom of search results..They only appeared at the top because they paid for it. The fact that the tops links are paid to be at the top might have an adverse effect on Internet users’ behavior, ignoring the links.

I’ve came across an interesting article: Organic vs. Paid Results: Organic wins 94% of Time. The article discusses that people have gauged click-through rates to compare paid advertisement results and organic results. Uh huh, research has shown that younger internet users (ages 34 and younger) are less likely to click on paid ads. This statistical result implied something about consumer behavior and that advertising on Google might not be effective to target young consumers. The research also gauged click-through rates of the top 10 results on Google and Bing. It turns out that links that are most viewed are the top three search results. This result reflects the importance of hiring SEO.

This article also points out an interesting change that Google made. Has anyone noticed that Google now only displays 7 results instead of 10 for brand name searches? It is a win-win solution for end users and businesses.Google has found that end users (us) prefer less irrelevant results and have faster loading time. Eliminating irrelevant site links is also beneficial to businesses. For businesses who have complete ownership over a brand name, Google ensures that the brand name can dominate search results.

Getting exposure is critical for e-business. For businesses that have limited budgets, they need to carefully consider what’s best for them. It seems to me that paid advertisements aren’t as effective as hiring SEO to get your website at the top of search results.